Lot’s Wife and the Venus of Milo: Conflicting Attitudes to the Cultural Heritage in Modern Russia

Professor Thompson’s subject is the uneasy position of art within Marxist ideology: what part can the arts of the past play in the new society? On the one hand there was the sense of a continuing cultural tradition, more or less independent of ideological change symbolized in the image of the Venus of Milo, and on the other, the iconoclastic demands for a complete break with the past in all its forms made by revolutionary artists, who found in the myth of Lot’s wife a symbol of the attractions of the past. Originally published in 1978, the book discusses the problems and paradoxes involved from a general theoretical point of view and in the work of individual artists. Professor Thompson suggests that the power inherent in art to resist social and ideological changes undermines all rationalistic theories of art, those of the Marxists and those fashionable in the West.