Anatoly Rykov

Anatoly Rykov is a Russian art and political theorist, art historian, and professor at the Saint Petersburg State University.[1] In his numerous writings Professor Rykov argues that leftist projects in art and culture often employ repressive and totalitarian concepts and metaphors. He introduced the notion of “radical conservatism” in order to explain this phenomenon in the theoretical matrix of the avant-garde and its postmodern interpretation. An expert on both Russian and Western art history and theory, he has written on a range of subjects in the Renaissance, 18th, 19th and 20th Century art. In his award-winning book, Postmodernism as radical conservatism (2007), he analyses the connotations of right-wing politics and philosophy in the work of eminent representatives of American art theory. His other publications include Marxism and Loneliness (On the “Political Unconscious” of the Contemporary Humanities in the West, Foundations of Art Theory (2007), Origins of the avant-garde (2016), and Formalism: Sociology of art (2016). His current research project Russian Art Theory: between Fascism and Shamanism concerns the issues of convergence between different political and sacral discourses in Russian twentieth-century theories of art.[2]