It seems incongruous to write a conventional review of a book that deliberately “tinkers with certainty” (about the meanings of Russian Revolution, but not only), that purposefully disrupts our “customary experience” (“of time,” but not only), that eschews a cohesive narrative in favor of an immersive experience filled with “exhilaration,” “anxiety,” and “perplexity.” This is a catalogue, in the form of a day-by-day calendar, for an exhibit at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art. Even the calendar form is undermined: instead of the conventional “this-happened-on-this-day-in-history” approach to historical daily calendars, days and months are given texts and images with a less obvious logic; and we are not encouraged to tear off pages as dates pass (perhaps a symbolic gesture against cultural destructiveness, against loss, against forgetting—all themes in the book.)

Time, appropriately, is a dominant theme in this calendar-catalogue. But time here, as in history, is convoluted, unsteady, non-linear, hopeful, disappointing. To be sure, there is something of the familiar historical narrative and argument about the years in focus, 1917 into the early years of World War II: an early spirit of experimentation and possibility giving way to great conservatism and authoritarianism. Yet chronology here is rarely straight-forward, nor is the argument. This calendar wanders back and forth in time, including into the present, with questions.

It is expected that a scholarly reviewer reads a book page by page. So I did, and you may want to. But this is not the only way to appreciate this book, as the book's “user's guide” also notes. Perhaps the better path is to wander, pause, reflect, and be taken by surprise.

A name index helps guide untethered wanderings across time and topic. You could choose a particular artist to hear and see (Aleksandr Deineka, Gustav Klutsis, Aleksandr Rodchenko, or Dziga Vertov, but also less well-known artists); you could follow a history of posters—often covered with words, which are carefully translated; you could follow the diaries of artists whose thoughts as well as works are woven through this text (Valentina Kulagina and Nina Lugovskaia stand out); you could listen to ideologists or political figures (Vladimir Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai, or Iosif Stalin, for example); you could ponder faces and bodies, or slogans. The editors offer useful reflections about many of the texts and images—and their scattered essays are indexed so following these could be another way to explore the book and its themes. Of course, you could read cover to cover, or pick a month at random to read, and feel the cacophony of the unfolding everyday, the temporal and thematic back-and-forth, and be surprised: including by frequent encounters with the contemporary. Indeed, at times, the weight of the past in the present, the grip of the contemporary on reading the past, and the unresolved problems of the here and now, are overwhelming. This is a book about “Revolution Every Day,” not “once upon a time.”

The index, unfortunately, does not identify themes—so you will need to chance upon these. Among the leitmotifs are gender and sexuality, marriage and family, production and consumption, working and playing, bodies and things, truth and lies, emotion and belief, and other sites of revolution (and of time, the ubiquitous theme) in everyday life. The editors want us to be immersed in the unstable everydayness of history, but also in the extraordinary that can shape and interrupt the everyday, in the intersections of new and old, in life radically unsettled and failing to change. Every small question, as often in reality, connects to larger ones: communism, capitalism, culture, art, poetics, gender, patriarchy, beauty, love, happiness, power, technology, race and ethnicity, liberation and slavery, war and peace, life and death, public and private, and, through it all, history and time.

The book could reside on the proverbial coffee table and be pleasurably flipped through randomly—savoring moments, thoughts, language, and images, and their many intersections. But one might try reading this with students, suggesting to them about how to explore a text impressionistically, non-linearly, in search of themes to think about. This catalogue-calendar, like the revolution it reflects, calls on us to break with convention, to disrupt expectations, to feel unsettled, troubled, curious. For such a work, the authors deserve praise. And readers.