El Lissitzky (1890–1941) counts among the twentieth century’s most gifted polymaths. Few individuals made such a substantial contribution to so many fields: painting, typography, architecture, photography, exhibition design, and the graphic arts, to name but a few. Yet the writing that underpinned and connected the many dimensions of his career is not well understood. Lissitzky’s engagement with protagonists ranging from Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin to Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier produced lucid and iconoclastic prose that reveals the history of modern art and architecture from a unique, international perspective. This book attends to the wit and precision of texts originally written in Yiddish, Russian, and German throughout the 1920s and 1930s. What emerges is the profile of an unfamiliar figure who has hitherto stood in the shadows of his other personae: El Lissitzky, writer and critic.

Richard Anderson is professor and personal chair of architectural history and theory at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays (Columbia University, 2012; fourth print edition 2019); Russia: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2015); and Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect (MIT Press, 2024). Anderson's research has been supported by the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Department of Education, the Getty Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study, among others. He served as cochair for the European Architectural History Network’s sixth international conference in 2021.