In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected "elitist" mediums and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life.

Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies--the "engineer" and "bricoleur"--illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement's margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of...