Book of the Month: The April Theses

A journey back in time: 100 years ago, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, leader of the revolutionary, Bolshevik party, and better known as Lenin, was able to leave his exile in Switzerland and, within a matter of months, ignite one of the most influential, revolutionary upheavals known to date. Exactly 100 years later, the Italian photographer, Davide Monteleone set out to find traces of that journey. Starting in Zürich, he explored Lenin’s route through Germany, Sweden and Finland all the way to St. Petersburg, bringing back to life the two-week journey of the revolutionary whose activities would change not only Russia, but the whole world.

The photographer has now put the documents and experiences from this exploratory journey together, presenting them in his latest photo book. The title is taken from the appellation of the political programme that Lenin presented in April 1917, immediately after his return from ten years in exile. In search of the original draft of the April Theses, Monteleone explored Russian archives and evaluated literary sources. The photo book presents a combination of archive photographs, travel documents and landscape impressions, as well as completely staged images, where the real and the replicated journeys merge into one, in the part of the project where the photographer slipped into the role of Lenin and portrayed himself in places along the route. The result of the chronology of these two significant weeks is an exciting photo story that not only questions the documentary photography genre, but also reinterprets it in an unusual and individual manner.

Over the last sixteen years, Davide Monteleone has dealt time and again with Russian history. He lived in Moscow from 2001 to 2003, working as a correspondent for the Contrasto Agency. The experiences he collected there were to have a great influence on the work he would do in the following years, giving rise to a series of photo books. The first one, Dusha. Russian Soul, appeared in 2007; two years later came La Linea Inesistente. In 2012 he received the European Publishers Award for Photography for the book Red Thistle, and in 2013 he published the photo book Spasibo. His latest book adds a noteworthy chapter to the examination of the political situation and history of Russia.