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 attracti...