2011 Recipient

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Matthew Jesse Jackson
Title: The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant Gardes (Chicago University Press)

Matthew Jesse Jackson’s book, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant Gardes, is an engaging, beautifully written, and erudite study of unofficial Soviet art. It makes a strong case for Kabakov’s achievements across multiple art forms, and provides brilliant readings of numerous individual drawings, albums, mixed media work, and installations. Moving far beyond his own field of art history, Jackson makes a major statement about Soviet society, culture, and politics as a whole. Without idealizing the late Soviet period in the least, he shows how its norms of cultural conversation, the organization of work and free time, occasional but critical moments of access to Western innovations in the arts, emerging new philosophies of the artistic process, and the important role of viewer (or reader) response all conspired to make possible extraordinary art. Jackson prompts us to recognize the “period of stagnation” as a time of intellectual ferment–with the Soviet citizenry acting as the ultimate “experimental group.” This monumental study of creativity in and after the late Soviet period is a remarkable scholarly achievement.

Honorable Mentions: Paulina Bren and Gabriella Safran and Timothy Snyder and Christina Vatulescu