Victory Over The Sun ─ The World's First Futurist Opera

In 1913, the year in which the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary, the premieres of two revolutionary theatrical events brought Russian artists to the forefront of the European avant-garde. With its nonsensical 'trans-sense' libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, experimental score by Mikhail Matiushin and pioneering abstract sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich, the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun may be compared in terms of its radical assault on artistic convention to Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together a distinguished team of international scholars to discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making anti-opera', which is now recognised as a key event of avant-garde cultural production, and a turning point in stage history.

The book offers new insight into the theatre practice and history of Russian Futurist performance, which, to date, has received little attention from theatre scholars despite its influence on the development of European drama in the twentieth century,

Rosamund Bartlett is Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, London, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Music Department at King's College London. She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia (1995), Shostakovich in Context (2000) and biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Sarah Dadswell is a cultural historian specialising in performance and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Drama at Exeter. Her doctoral thesis on the emergence and development of Russian Futurist performance 1910-1914 (University of Sheffield) formed part of an AHRB project, entitled 'Russian Visual Arts, 1863-1913: Documents from the British Library Collection'.

Rosamund Bartlett is Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, London, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Music Department at King's College London. She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia (1995), Shostakovich in Context (2000) and biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov.
Sarah Dadswell is a cultural historian specialising in performance and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Drama at Exeter. Her doctoral thesis on the emergence and development of Russian Futurist performance 1910-1914 (University of Sheffield) formed part of an AHRB project, entitled `Russian Visual Arts, 1863-1913: Documents from the British Library Collection'.