The (dis)integrating city Vkhutemas and Russian literary modernism: original presentation in russian

Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that one way of distinguishing between literary genres is by recognising their dominant 'chronotope', that is the particular space-time relations through which a narrative unfolds. For the discussion of the relationship between architecture and literature this is a tantalising proposition. If one of the features of modernity is the desire to bring order and reason to a world in which all social, spatial and temporal relations are being torn apart and rebuilt at ever increasing speed, it is natural that this should be reflected in modern architecture and literature, no where more so than in the development of the modern Russian novel that experiments with space-time relations in terms of narrative structure and form, and in the quest of the avant garde in Vkhutemas to find a new 'architectural chronotope' appropriate to a rapidly changing society.