When thinking about the October Revolution we habitually imagine a single event with far-reaching historical consequences. We sometimes forget that history does not follow nature’s laws of causality but rather was an interaction between revolutionary technologies, incremental changes in knowledge, and necessary politicoeconomical development, which themselves have stirred up European societies since Modernity. Furthermore, we are seldom cognisant of the role media has played in the telling, writing, showing and conception thereof. Living in post-historical times, we need to give new meaning to the events and dates we are inheriting from European History (writ large.)

In our conference we want to focus on a radical form of “historical imagination” (Haydn White) as exemplified by the October Revolution. Our aim is to describe how the multi-layered process of historical change was modelled by the classical arts of literature or theatre and by the new media, such as cinema, into a special kind of event. How did it happen that we have come to associate this complex process solely with the storming of the Winter Palace on October 25th in 1917?

We intend to focus on a number of representational techniques, which appeared around 1927 and aided in an epic history with a dramatic event. For instance, after the release of Sergei Eisenstein’s film “October” and Esfir Shub’s chronicle “The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty” great discussions arose on the difference between fact and fiction because re-enactments had been widely used, due to - and as substitute for - the lack of actual documentation. We want to detail how the mythologies of folklore, the poetics of avant-garde art, and the utopia of new media, shaped the figure of the October Revolution. And finally we want to pose the question: Don’t we need to save the date?