Galina Mardilovich is Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, USA.Maria Taroutina is Assistant Professor of Art History at Yale–NUS College, Singapore.

• Introduction [Maria Taroutina and Galina Mardilovich]; PART I: Mobile Margins: Artists, Artworks, and Instituions; Chapter One. Blood, Skin, and Paint: Karl Briullov in 1832: Allison Leigh; Chapter Two: Iaroslavna’s Lament and its Echoes in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Art: Alison Hilton; Chapter Three: An Exercise in Close Looking: Ilia Repin’s They Did Not Expect Him: Galina Mardilovich; Chapter Four: "Is disagreement among artists a good thing?": The End of Salon-Type Exhibitions in Russia and Western Europe: Andrey Shabanov; Chapter Five: Blurring Boundaries: Mikhail Vrubel’s Decorative Turn and the Rise of Russian Modernism: Maria Taroutina; Chapter Six: Idiosyncrasy as an Alternative Modernist Narrative: Steven Mansbach PART II: Visualizing Ideology: New systems, Cold War Aesthetics, and Post-Socialist Memory; Chapter Seven: Art in the Age of Binary Inversion: Russian Constructivist Graphic Design and the Interwar Grid: Kristin Romberg; Chapter Eight: The Creative Mistakes of Socialist Realism: Maria Mileeva; Chapter Nine: A Socialist Neo-Avant-Garde? The Case of Postwar Yugoslavia: Nikolas Drosos; Chapter Ten: The Troubled Public Sphere: Understanding the Art Scene in Socialist Hungary: Katalin Cseh-Varga; Chapter Eleven: The Nonidentity Problem in Contemporary Belarusian Art: Tatsiana Zhurauliova; Chapter Twelve: Marking Memories, Mediating Histories in the Work of Deimantas Narkevičius: Ksenia Nouril; Chapter Thirteen: History in the Future Tense: On Recent Installations by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina: Jane A. Sharp

"The chronological and geographical coverage of the present volume from the 1830s to the 2010s and from Russia to Italy and the Baltics to the Balkans is truly remarkable. And while the publication does not pretend to be a general history or epochal outline, it brings to light many previously un-discussed or heavily ideologized issues. Also, taking the key events of politics and art throughout two centuries as historiographical points of rethinking unites the whole collection and contextualizes various new narratives in the historical and cultural perspective."--H-Net Reviews