by Special Collections announces the opening of the exhibition Atheist at the Machine: Early Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda Posters at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17, in the second floor gallery of Pius XII Memorial Library. The opening will be accompanied by a curator’s talk and reception.
Produced by Jennifer Lowe with guest curator David Borgmeyer, Ph.D., Director of the Center for International Studies at SLU and a specialist in twentieth-century Russian art, this exhibit was prompted by the rediscovery in our collections of an anti-religious Soviet periodical from 1926 called Bezbozhnik u stanka, or, Atheist at the Machine, and a cache of propaganda posters issued by that publication in the 1920s. The graphically arresting images of these posters vividly reflect the period of official atheism in the newly-created Soviet Union of the 1920s and assertively illustrate Communist anti-religious messages, from anti-Semitic caricatures to images of priests in cassocks machine-gunning unarmed protesters. This extreme and even offensive material has been carefully interpreted in its original historical and aesthetic context in order to provide an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between modern political ideologies and religion, the place of religion in public life, and the role and function of art and propaganda. The exhibition will be on display during regular library hours through Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013.
The Central Slavic Conference has sponsored two more related events, both free and open to the public. A roundtable discussion of the anti-religious propaganda collection, including SLU faculty members Elizabeth Blake (Modern and Classical Languages), Ellen Carnaghan (Political Science), and Daniel Schlafly (History), will be held at The Hilton at the Ballpark on Saturday, November 3, at 1:30pm. That evening, the conference keynote address will be delivered in the second floor gallery of Pius Library by Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock of Wesleyan University; her address is entitled, “‘How Gods Are Born, Live, and Die’: The Battle for Communism and the War Against Religious ‘Survivals.'” It will be followed by a reception. Additional sponsors of these events are the SLU Center for International Studies and the SLU Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies.
