**Preface to "Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition"**

This Special Issue of *Arts*: "Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition" is focused on researching interactions of art and literature, of philosophy and visual poetry, and generally on theoretical aspects of cultural analysis. Despite the absence of an all-encompassing theoretical manifesto, a certain "Modernist urge" displayed several consistent aesthetic principles and methods of creation that resulted in a fundamental revision of the universal values that had been previously culturally dominant. Modernism permanently struggled with tradition. How do we define "tradition" as applied to Eastern European cultural subjects? How do we define "experimental visuality"? What are some of the intriguing case studies Eastern Europe can offer in this respect? Our Special Issue explores how tradition coexisted with various modernist visualities, how innovation combatted archaicism, how powerful art institutions along with political regimes shaped this entire scene of visual and literary action over the last two and half centuries, up until the present day. We adopt Jurgen Habermas view of modernity and Modernism as a fundamentally unfinished project. ¨ Initiated by the combatant philosophy of Enlightenment (starting from 18th century), "the project of modernity" offers a form of permanent progress and constant change, the everlasting state of evolvement that cherishes art's autonomous status which answers to its intrinsic immanent logic of "total representation".

> **Dennis Ioffe** *Editor*
