Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde 9780520951730, 9780520268760

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The Aesthetics of Anarchy

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The Aesthetics of Anarchy Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde

Nina Gurianova

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgement section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gur’ianova, N. A. The aesthetics of anarchy : art and ideology in the early Russian avant-garde / Nina Gurianova. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-520–26876–0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Arts, Russian—20th century. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Russia—History—20th century. 3. Anarchism and art—Russia. I. Title. II. Title: Art and ideology in the early Russian avant-garde. NX556.A1G87 2012 700.947'09041—dc23 2011035057

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

To Dmitri Sarabianov

Contents

Acknowledgments Russian Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Anarchy

ix

Introduction. The

1

PART ONE. MOVEMENTS AND IDEAS 1.

The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Definitions

17

2.

Ideas: Bakunin, Tolstoy, and the Russian Anarchists

39

3.

Movements: Futurisms and the Principle of Freedom

59

PART TWO. POETICS 4.

A Game in Hell: The Poetics of Chance and Play

87

5.

Victory over the Sun and the Theater of Alogism

112

6.

Deconstructing the Canon: Russian Futurist Books

132

PART THREE. LOCATING THE AVANT-GARDE’S SOCIAL STANCE 7.

The “Social Test”: The Avant-Garde and the Great War

161

8.

The Suprematist Party

187

PART FOUR. POLITICS

Art, Creativity, and Anarkhiia

211

10.

The Last Revolt: Politics of the Left Federation

232

11.

The Avant-Garde and Ideology

253

9.

The Historical Paradigm: The Avant-Gardes and Revolution

276

Notes List of Illustrations Index

281 325 329

Conclusion.

Acknowledgments

My research for this book was generously supported by the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, the William F. Milton Fund award, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. The unique intellectual environment provided by the Society of Fellows helped to lay the foundation for this book, while my sabbatical at the National Humanities Center was instrumental in bringing it to completion. These residential fellowships gave me the true luxury of sharing my ideas with others, and the ongoing discussions with William Todd, Dan Aaron, Mark Antliff, Bernard Bailyn, Svetlana Boym, James Dawes, Michelle Facos, Walter Gilbert, Patricia Leighten, Lei Liang, Barry Mazur, Ellen Scary, Amartya Sen, Isabelle Wunsche, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis enriched my initial approach and inspired me to expand and sharpen my argument. I am deeply grateful to Jack Flam and Charlene Woodcock who encouraged me to move forward and helped to shape this project from its inception. I also thank especially Boris Gasparov, Robert Belknap, John Malmstad, William Todd, John Bowlt, Clare Cavanagh, Catherine Ciepela, Gary Saul Morson, Bernice Rosenthal, Justin Weir, and Andrew Wachtel, who took upon themselves the labor of reading all or parts of the manuscript’s drafts and offered many thoughtful comments. Allan Antliff and Nancy Perloff were among the book’s first readers and brought it to life. Stephanie Fay and Eric Schmidt, with great forbearance, have seen this book through the press. To Charles Rougle I am inix

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Acknowledgments

debted for his editorial guidance, and invaluable help with the translation of many of the original citations, and I also would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Kimberly Croswell and Peter Dreyer, who improved the readability of my manuscript through their expert editing. My book would not have been possible without the warm and unyielding support of my work by Alevtina Shechter, John Krummel, Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, Diana Morse, Elena Murina, Carol Selle, Nela Ichin, Nikolai Firtich, Elena Basner, John Milner, Irina Karasik, Michelle Facos, Willem Weststein, Ilya Kukui, Alla Rosenfeld, Jane and Bill Taubman, Fiona Deutsch, David Thaler, Sergei Kudriavtsev, Murray Murr, and Brother Muzius. Research was conducted in many different museums, libraries, and archives. I would like to express my endless gratitude to Geurt Imanse, Chief Curator for Research and Documentation, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Foundation Cultural Center Khardzhiev-Chaga; Harvey Shipley Miller of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York; Evgeniia N. Petrova, Deputy Director of the Russian Museum; Deborah Wye of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Andrei Krusanov of the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, the staffs at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Aleksandr Lavrentiev and Vladimir Poliakov for their incredible generosity and gracious help in obtaining the unpublished materials, rare documents, and visual images for my research. I also thank Dan Zellner and the Digital Collections Department at Northwestern University for providing me with the high-quality digital images for my book. The writing of this book was generously supported by Northwestern University. I am indebted to many of my colleagues and students at Northwestern for their assistance.

Introduction

The Russian Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Anarchy

This book offers a new scholarly perspective that differs from previous interpretations of the Russian avant-garde in art and literature and goes against the predetermined axioms of whiggish theory. I look at the early Russian avant-garde of 1910–18 as an autonomous development, complete with an aesthetic ideology of its own, which I call the aesthetics of anarchy. This ideology in turn shaped the unique style, technique, methodology, and philosophy of the movement. Current literature traditionally defines this period as a preliminary stage leading directly to the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), the Constructivism of the 1920s, and sometimes even to Socialist Realism.1 In contrast, I argue that the early Russian avant-garde was an autonomous stage with distinct features and its own aesthetics, which did not necessarily have to lead to the art and literary movements of the Soviet period. This revision does not deny from the outset historical and aesthetic connections between the prerevolutionary stage of development and the early Soviet period. One can always find links in the history of culture—not only “traditions of continuity” but “traditions of discontinuity” as well.2 However, continuities between the early aesthetics of anarchy and the successive politicized and Marxist-inspired reconfigurations have been overstated in most treatments: I seek to tell a different story. The early Russian avant-garde created an aesthetics attuned both to Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist theory of “creative destruction” and to the anti-utopian philosophy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.3 1

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A powerful wave of Russian anti-Benthamism pivoted on Dostoevsky’s work, which provoked many anarchist discussions. The underground man’s rebellion against utilitarianism and determinism captivated contemporaries and had a crucial impact on intellectual and aesthetic ideas in Russia. For the early Russian avant-garde, the “poetics of the underground” opposed the creation of any fixed or immutable ideas or absolutes in both social and aesthetic philosophies. Although shock value played a role in the early Russian avant-garde, that was not the primary aim of its anarchic anti-canonicity, whose purpose was, rather, consciously to expand artistic space by deconstructing the aesthetic clichés of “the ideal” and “beauty.” The ideological aspirations and aesthetic tendencies of the early avant-garde are reflected in the non-uniformity of its artistic and literary movements, and in the diversity of groups and tendencies that coexisted within it and spurred one another on, Neoprimitivism, Cubo-Futurism, Ego-Futurism, Rayism, Organicism, and Suprematism among them. This multiplicity of artistic practices and theoretical concepts, compressed into less than a decade, presents a challenge to scholars of the Russian avant-garde. There is only one feature that can be applied equally to all of them: an anti-teleological desire for freedom of artistic conscience, not limited by any pragmatic political, social, or aesthetic goals. As soon as methodological or epistemological closure occurred, this essence of the movement was lost, I argue. Paradoxically, then, important features of early avant-garde poetics have gone unrecognized in the historical literature because they do not fit into any of the methodological schemes that prioritize totalizing definitions of style over the philosophy of artistic practice. The aesthetics of anarchy, as I see it, is based on a new interpretation of art and human creativity: an art without rules. These aesthetics are revealed in the creative energy of the artists as they transformed literary, theatrical, and performance practices, eroding the traditional boundaries of the visual arts and challenging the conventions of their day. This study focuses on the theoretical issues, concepts, and poetics of the Russian avant-garde between 1910 and 1918. My central concern is the interrelation of aesthetics and the politics of the art world, art, and ideology. I don’t interpret ideology in purely Marxist terms, but rather see it as any abstracting “system of ideas.”4 Ideology in art is the idea system that arises when art defines itself as creative human activity in relation to the social, philosophical, and political aspects of reality, and consequently to the audience that assimilates this art.

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The interaction between painter and viewer, poet and audience, has always been a particularly acute issue in Russian culture, and this was also the case with the Russian avant-garde. Posed in forceful and uncompromising terms, it served as a kind of litmus test by which various groups identified themselves. The predominantly Symbolist and decadent milieu’s insistence on art for art’s sake thus gave way to calls for “art for life and life for art” on the part of early Futurism and Neoprimitivism, concerned as they were, partly under Tolstoyan influence, with a “mutual infection” between aesthetic and social modes of existence. Futurists and Neoprimitivists were struggling to overcome whatever boundaries had been thought to define art, and to bridge the traditional gap between an artist and his or her audience by reinventing the ethics and philosophy of art. In this, they differed from the postrevolutionary avant-garde, which dedicated itself to seeking how art can be utilized in everyday life and what the position of the artist in the new social hierarchy should be. Constructivists, Productionists, and the LEF advocated the material implementation of art “into life,” meaning a practical “union of the artist and the factory,” according to Osip Brik, the leading theoretician of these movements.5 The original aspiration of Russian avant-garde currents of the 1910s to unify artistic philosophy and praxis was directed at “erasing boundaries” across all possible cultural, social, and political levels, and the avant-garde’s aesthetic “gesture” was extended as a provocation to the status quo of Western civilization, which by the early twentieth century was understood to have rigidly partitioned and limited the various areas of human activity. In investigating the shaping of ideology behind the constantly changing aesthetic criteria, my primary sources and material, are, first and foremost, the writings of artists and poets and select visual or poetic works, including manifestos. I also consider polemical criticism, theoretical texts, and correspondence. It is not my intent in this book to treat the literary and artistic avantgarde of the Soviet 1920s, and I refer to some artworks and concepts from that period solely for the purpose of comparison. Since the majority of studies devoted to the Russian avant-garde focus on the Soviet period, when communist cultural hegemony was in the ascendant, the period I am examining is still not treated with the critical rigor it merits.6 This gap distorts our interpretation and understanding of the Russian avant-garde, because aspects usually configured as generic were actually not present during the early period. They developed later, in the 1920s. In fact, the early Russian avant-garde’s artistic practice was essentially

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based on an anti-teleological ideology manifested, for example, in the rejection of evaluative absolutes in art and “the principle of free creation.”7 If we search for comparisons, it is much closer to the anarchic Dada movement than to the Marxist didacticism and production-oriented aesthetics of Constructivism and the late Futurism of the LEF.8 Narrative that configured the progressive development of Russian art and literature as a predetermined march toward the Bolshevik October revolution was in the first instance facilitated and reinforced by the statist cultural policies of the late 1920s and early 1930s. At that juncture, the history of the Russian avant-garde was rewritten in an extremely questionable version. The avant-garde movements of the pre-Soviet period were said to have been slowly “purified” and “perfected,” evolving naturally into the “mature stage” of the LEF, Constructivism, and other politically engaged art groups that had configured themselves around Marxist values in the Soviet context. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a few other Futurists, and members of the LEF contributed to this revisionist history. First, faced with the growing harassment of everything connected with the prerevolutionary avant-garde, they were forced to reinvent themselves, and in doing so to “justify” an artistic past that was incompatible with the new hegemonic ideology. Second, the false pretense of a linear historical continuity in the Futurist movement, which right from the start had been resolutely ahistorical, offered an illusion of “academic” legitimacy that served strategic ends in the Futurists’ bitter fights for survival with influential newly established Marxist groupings such as the RAPP (Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers) and the AKhRR (Association of the Artists of Revolutionary Russia). In fact, the ideological goals, aesthetic conceptions, and formal devices of postrevolutionary avant-garde tendencies , including the LEF, no longer had much in common with those of early Futurism, and often were diametrically opposed to them. The multidisciplinary nature of my subject has defined the way this book is organized. Its four parts address the thinking that shaped the early Russian avant-garde movement; its poetics; the emerging social role of avant-garde artists; and the political impact on the art world in revolutionary Russia. I begin with an epistemological investigation of the early Russian avant-garde, and the philosophical foundations of its aesthetics in part I, “Movements and Ideas.” Some necessary definitions are supplied in the introductory chapter, along with a conceptual overview of the ideas that shaped the aesthetics of anarchy. If we regard anarchy as an active dialectical process, we can assume that any creative process

Introduction

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5

is at root anarchic, since it intensely transforms the “formal matter” of an object, its “thingly” nature, in an attempt to reveal its essence. This transformation becomes the theoretical principle in certain historical “moments” of the avant-garde when the interaction of words, objects, and actions can no longer be organized into any common scheme. Thus, whereas the turn-of-the-century Symbolists had sought to reconstruct life as a work of art, the Futurists turned toward the process of life “as such,” submitting their art to the laws of the limitless, evasive movement of matter and time. This worldview led to the use of aesthetic devices that deploy unconscious, intuitive cognitive elements, along with rational and analytic reconstitutions of reality in the work of art: the poetics of play, the absurd, and alogism (Kazimir Malevich),9 the acceptance of chance in the creation of art (Voldem1rs Matvejs, Nikolai Burliuk), and the valorization of fragmentariness and “unexpectedness” (Aleksei Kruchenykh). Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s transrational poetry, or zaum,10 which aims to emphasize the poietic qualities of language over its receptive or communicative functions, shows this fascination with dissonance and deliberate and accidental errors. Discussion of these issues serves as a bridge to part II of the book, “Poetics,” where I examine the ideological and theoretical foundations of prewar avant-garde practices that changed the interrelationship between the artist and his or her audience. Futurist books and theater and other synthetic “borderline” phenomena are studied in detail. The notion of “world backwards,” invented in the Futurist book of that title (Mirskontsa in the original Russian) by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov in 1912, is, I argue, an anarchic strategy for deconstructing the conception of linear time and the rational perception of the world as an ordered structure. This new interpretation of temporality, which accorded a heightened relevance to cultural memory, became an important feature of early twentieth-century aesthetic and philosophical theories in Russia. At the same time, it gave rise to the negation of the Eurocentrism in Russian culture, and to the avant-garde concept of “everythingness” theorized by Mikhail Le Dantu, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Ilya Zdanevich.11 This concept asserted the relativity of established aesthetic values. Hence, its advocates encouraged the free choice of any historical, folk, or national tradition from Neolithic art to Chinese calligraphy to Italian Futurism, pronouncing both philosophical and stylistic eclecticism to be an expression of the “total freedom of art” and a “regenerative source,” as Larionov put it. They insisted that anything could serve as material for art, be it naïve children’s drawings or obscene

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Introduction

fence graffiti. The anarchic aesthetics of the early avant-garde’s openness and everythingness can be fully defined only by approaching it hermetically, from within its own discourse, and through close readings and attentive interpretations. Scholars of literature and art have traditionally paid little attention to the theme of the Great War in Russian modernism and the Russian avantgarde. This is surprising, given the attention issues related to the war have generated among scholars of Anglo-American or Italian modernism from the 1920s on. However, in the Russian context, the war has been largely considered a prelude to the revolution. In part III, “Locating the Avant-Garde’s Social Stance,” I reframe this trajectory. World War I and its outcome gave rise to serious reconsideration of the function of art, its proper sphere of influence, and the artist’s role in society. In part IV, “Politics,” I explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between social, political, and aesthetic ideas during the revolutionary era: the February 1917 revolution, which led to the abdication of the tsar, was followed by the Bolshevik October revolution that same year.12 These upheavals mark the transition from the early history of the Russian avant-garde to its later stage, when art directly merged with politics, from the aesthetics of anarchy to a politicized “struggle for utopia.” The collaboration of some avant-gardists in the anarchist daily newspaper Anarkhiia (1917–18) and the “last revolt” of the anarchist avantgardists’ labor union against state control over the arts, I argue, conclude the early period of the Russian avant-garde. The book’s final chapter,“The Avant-Garde and Ideology,” returns to issues first raised here in the Introduction, and examines historical models of coexistence between the artistic ideology of the avant-garde and the dominant political ideology of the state. Anatolii Lunacharsky, the first Bolshevik commissar of education, called this process “adaptation of art,” asserting that “the Revolution not only was able to influence art, but also needed art. Art is a powerful weapon of agitation, and the Revolution aspired to adapt art to its agitational objectives.”13 My analysis tracks the internal and external processes at work in the relationship between the ideological systems of avant-gardism and the Marxist state, which, in 1920s Russia, resulted in a “politicization of aesthetics” akin to Walter Benjamin’s concept of that phenomenon.14 My study is interdisciplinary in nature, and it thus intersects with a variety of methodological and historical issues. I consider the Russian avant-garde to be an important wing of the larger European avant-garde

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movement, and one of my goals is to engage with approaches to other examples of avant-garde formation. The Russian avant-garde provides a window on theoretical issues generic to other radical art movements. During the course of developing this book, my scope has broadened from a focus on the pivotal works and dramatis personae of the Russian avantgarde to encompass theoretical problems that inform cultural movements beyond Russia. A strong sense of national identity and cultural autonomy did not prevent the early Russian avant-gardists from recognizing themselves as a part of an international avant-garde tendency in Europe.15 Thus we can regard the early Russian avant-garde as firmly within a general European context. I invite readers to compare the major theoretical and critical issues of the early Russian avant-garde with those informing such European movements as French Cubism, Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, and British Vorticism. In some respects, the early Russian avant-garde period was like that of Zurich Dada or the American avant-garde of the 1950s, an era when all the rules were challenged. The aesthetics of anarchy in the early Russian avant-garde are, I would argue, also closely related to some aspects of postmodernist Situationist practice and radical Conceptualism (e.g., Process Art, the work of John Cage, and groups such as Fluxus).16 The early phase of the Russian avant-garde was ontologically anarchist.17 This variant of anarchism was inspired not by a notion of social utopia, which inevitably calls for temporal, epochal “closure,” but rather by another by-product of philosophical anarchism, namely dystopia, with its paradoxical mixture of nihilism and “openness.” The interrelationship between concepts of culture and politics, and between aesthetics and anarchy, has undergone an extremely complex and interesting development over the past century. The first applications of the term “avant-garde” in relation to culture were quite direct and politically charged (it was originally, after all, a military term), but by the twentieth century, it had acquired a new, stable autonomous meaning, without direct reference to political movements. (Ironically, the term “anarchy” underwent a similar metamorphosis as applied to art.) Donald Egbert finds that “the application of the term ‘avant-garde’ to artists as well as to leaders of a social movement first occurred within early French socialism.”18 Even though the terms “avant-garde” and “modernism” are often taken as synonyms, the Russian and European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century were not just more aggressive and radical versions of modernism.19 Unlike modernism, according to most recent critical interpretations, they presuppose historical awareness of the future.

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Antoine Compagnon points out that there are “two contradictory elements in any avant-garde: destruction and construction, negation and affirmation, nihilism and Futurism.”20 Paradoxically, this structural antinomy is mirrored in the “creativedestructive” nature of anarchism. The aspiration to harmony, utopian in its essence, became a distinctive feature in the particular vein of modernist aesthetics, interested in constructive principles. Another line developed in quite a different direction, striving for disharmony, dissonance, and the absurd. The dystopian and nihilistic traits it cultivated left their mark in decadence, and in such “nonconstructive” movements of the early avant-garde as Futurism and Dada. Considering the immense influence of Nietzsche on Russian culture of this period, and on modernism in general, it is tempting to define these two tendencies as Apollonian and Dionysian, but doing so would lead to oversimplification and confusion, since in artistic practice they are never clearly defined and not in opposition to each other.21 They coexist, sometimes in the theory of the same group or individual artist or poet—Mayakovsky and Malevich are good examples—and one tendency can prevail over the other in certain periods. The main ideological criterion separating them is their relation to social, political, and aesthetic utopianism, and, consequently, the chosen model of interconnection and mutual responsibility between artist and audience. This rejection of utopia determines the anti-teleological drive in early avant-garde culture, and this, I suggest, is the crucial difference between the early “anarchic” and late “statist” periods of the Russian avant-garde. From this perspective, it seems too simplistic to argue, as do some critics (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Peter Bürger), that the radical status of the cultural avant-garde was directly dependent on politics, and to attribute changes in aesthetic thought directly to social or political causes.22 The pattern of the relationship between art and politics is much deeper, more abstract and complex. At the same time, it is difficult not to agree with Matei C3linescu’s critique of the notion of “the divorce of the two [political and aesthetic] avant-gardes” that according to Renato Poggioli took place in the 1880s.23 C3linescu argues that “the historical avantgarde” was more than once politically inspired, and “if the movements that represented it never entirely succeeded in joining up with the more or less parallel radical movements in politics, it would be inaccurate to say that the two avant-gardes were separated by an unbridgeable gap.”24 Herbert Read was one of the critical authors, interested in these issues, who switched focus from the general picture to the particular intercon-

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nection between modernist and avant-garde art and the political philosophy of anarchism. Numerous books touch upon the relationship between aesthetics and anarchism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western Europe, including such classics as Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1958), Donald Drew Egbert’s Social Radicalism and the Arts (1970), and André Reszler’s L’esthétique anarchiste (1973).25 These studies have been valuable sources for subsequent research by such scholars as Richard D. Sonn, Mark Antliff, Gerald Bruns, Patricia Leighten, Alexander Varias, David Weir, and others. Reszler’s work, which traces several decades of radical avant-garde practice, is particularly important for anarchist studies, since he was the first to develop a methodology that regards avant-garde aesthetics as “anarchist,” in opposition to Marxist tendencies in art. One of his recent critics, Ali Nematollahy, emphasizes that Reszler’s interpretation “circumvents the problematics of Marxist criticism, forever divided between art for art’s sake versus political or committed art.”26 Allan Antliff expands this framework into the field of American studies and defines “anarchist modernism” as a selfconstituting entity.27 In a revisionist study, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation (2006), Jesse S. Cohn readdresses the issue of the academic interpretation—or misinterpretation—of anarchism in aesthetics, and offers his theoretical perspective on aesthetics and anarchism.28 According to most scholars of European modernism in art and literature, the radical political and social philosophy of anarchism in finde-siècle France penetrated practically all spheres of human activity and became a commonplace in the cultural narrative of the period. Some recent researchers, however, warn that “this notion of anarchism as an artistic fashion should not be exaggerated.”29 Thus, C3linescu is convinced that many writers and artists in Europe were involved with anarchist groups, but as a rule tended gradually to overcome direct political involvement and transfer anarchist ideas into their more familiar aesthetic domain: “This transference did not involve the artists’ submission to a narrow political philosophy or their turning into mere propagandists. Propaganda, to be efficient, has to resort to the most traditional, schematic, and even simplistic forms of discourse. But what the artists of the new avant-garde were interested in doing—no matter how sympathetic [or unsympathetic] towards radical politics they were—was to overthrow all the binding formal traditions of art and to enjoy the exhilarating freedom of exploring completely new, previously forbidden, horizons of creativity.”30 Unfortunately, none of these works treats the anarchist tendencies of

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Russian material, aside from a general chapter in Egbert’s Social Radicalism and the Arts on the period after 1917 and two insightful chapters on the visual art of the Russian avant-garde in Allan Antliff’s Anarchy and Art (2007).31 The political and social ideas of prerevolutionary Russian avant-garde circles were extremely eclectic, making it impossible to say much about their actual political orientation. Their views could be rather summarized as “the politics of the unpolitical,” a wide-ranging phenomenon wittily formulated by Herbert Read in his critiques of contemporary culture.32 Not surprisingly, before the revolution none of the Russian avantgardists were directly involved in politics, aside from Mayakovsky and Vasilii Kamensky, who as teenagers had connections with radical revolutionary groups.33 This does not mean, however, that early avant-garde culture in Russia was completely apolitical, or that poets and artists were not concerned with social questions. There exists a long-standing tradition of a tight interconnection between aesthetics and ethics in Russian civil society, and the avant-garde could not but be part of it. There was, moreover, a historical connection between practitioners of ontological anarchy and political anarchism, anarcho-individualism, in particular. In 1918, Aleksei Gan, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, and others, who at the time called themselves Anarcho-Futurists, regularly published articles on art and literature in Anarkhiia, the weekly newspaper of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups. This was a short-lived phase (by July 1918, when the government conducted a vicious campaign of repression against all anarchist fractions, Anarkhiia had been shut down by the Bolsheviks) but nonetheless extremely productive; retrospectively, it can be said to mark the eclipse of the avantgarde’s aesthetic anarchism. The October revolution and the following consolidation of political power in the hands of Lenin’s party in 1918 were key to the marginalization of the early avant-garde’s anarchist principles of autonomy and innate “resistance” that opposed ideological or aesthetic totalization. Artistic ideology and political ideology are not synonymous: even if we assume that art has its ideological dimension, this does not mean that creativity is invariably politicized. But in the postrevolutionary historical context, “the social imagination” of the newborn Soviet state identified political ideology with aesthetic utopianism.34 The “politicization” of art became paramount, and the avant-garde was now subjected to the ideological temptation of a political power that aspired to subordinate art to Marxist conceptions of objective social dependence and aesthetic utilitari-

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anism aiming “to carry out those mass art creations that the state now needs.”35 What was the “ideology of the avant-garde”? What did it encompass? And how did aesthetic and political ideas and views interact within it? On the basis of the widespread definition of ideology in the humanities as a “system of ideas and views,” the evolution of aesthetic ideology must be seen in the context, not only of the development of various stylistic devices and methodologies, but of gradations of interrelationship and mutual influence between art and society and art and life. Important here is whether the artist accepts or rejects his or her positioning—or role—in society and the role that is allotted to art in life. Every literary or artistic movement begins to develop its ideological identity by defining subject-object relations, that is, the fundamental principles determining the relationship of artistic activity to reality, particularly the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Jacques Rancière rightly traces the currently topical issue of the “overturning of aesthetics into ethics” to modernism and the avant-garde: The simplistic opposition of the modern and the postmodern . . . makes one forget that modernism itself has only ever been a long contradiction between two opposed aesthetic politics. However, these two opposed politics originate from a common core, in which the autonomy of art is linked to the anticipation of a community to come, therefore linking this autonomy to the promise of its own suppression. The very word avant-garde designated the two opposing forms tying together the autonomy of art and the promise of emancipation that was included in it, sometimes in a more or less confused way, at other times in a way that more clearly showed their antagonism. On the one hand, the avant-garde had been the movement aiming to transform the forms of art, making them identical to the forms of the construction of a new world where art no longer exists as a separate reality. On the other hand, it had also been the movement preserving the autonomy of the artistic sphere from any form of compromise with the practices of power and of political struggle, or from any compromise with forms of the aestheticisation of life in the capitalistic world.36

Within the Russian avant-garde, this interconnection of “art” and “life” became sharply dialectical and grew into the axis around which the historical narrative of the avant-garde, or the “avant-garde myth,” was generated and revolved. This duality of artistic text and the social context of reception within which the avant-garde existed, was extremely dynamic, mutable, and anti-canonical. On the one hand, “changeability” and the inevitable transformation of philosophical and aesthetic views within the movement itself were built into the avant-garde’s sense of his-

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Introduction

toricity from the outset, and this could not help but influence the formation of various facets of the social environment; on the other hand, these internal changes also resulted from the external influence of social, cultural, and political changes. The internal and external factors comprising the interrelationship of art and life have been exhaustively defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as the “dialogic” or “intonationally whole” context: The text—printed, written, or orally recorded—is not equal to the work as a whole (or to the “aesthetic object”). The work also includes its necessary extratextual context. The work, as it were, is enveloped in the music of the intonational-evaluative context in which it is understood and evaluated (of course, this context changes in the various epochs in which it is perceived, which creates a new resonance in the work).37

It seems that the term “intonational-evaluative context,” which for Bakhtin also includes the “social (extraverbal) conditioning of the work” implies what might here be called the ideological stratum (literary or visual in equal measure) of the work and its reception.38 A necessary condition of freedom of choice is, of course, the ability to take conscious action, which is not only the mark of the sovereign individual but also invariably implies personal responsibility. It is the ideological stance of the artist or writer that determines his or her choice of the “means” of existence in reality. In other words, it is what pushes artists toward an understanding of the place and role of their art in life. Although Bakhtin does not use the word “ideology,” I think that in his 1919 essay “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’ ” (translated as “Art and Answerability,” but a literal rendering is “Art and Responsibility”), Bakhtin senses that this is a very important element in the “co-existence” of art and life. This earliest known publication by Bakhtin is echoed in his last essay, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences” (1974), and it addresses the key problem of art in society: The three domains of human culture—science, art, and life—gain unity only in the individual person who integrates them into his own unity. This union, however, may become mechanical, external. . . . But what guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person? Only the unity of answerability [i.e., responsibility]. I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life. But answerability entails guilt, or liability to blame. It is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame.39

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Let’s not forget that Bakhtin, who was twenty-four at the time his essay was published, belonged to the same generation as the youngest Futurists and Formalists, and that he lived in Petrograd and Vitebsk, both centers of avant-garde activities from 1917 to 1923, where Malevich’s role was very noticeable, if not instrumental. Bakhtin was never particularly close to any avant-gardist formations, though one may logically assume that the “extra-textual context” of his early essay on art was highly relevant to the clash of aesthetic and political issues discussed in this introduction. Developing this framework of the interaction between author and society and artist and spectator in a later draft, Bakhtin underscores the “complexity of the two-sided act of cognition-insight”: “The activity of cognizing [the other] and the activity of revealing oneself (dialogicity). The ability to cognize and the ability to express oneself. We have to do here with expression and the cognition (comprehension) of expression. The complex dialectics of external and internal.”40 Bakhtin emphasizes the responsibility of the artist not only as a criterion but also as the necessary guarantee of such interaction: “Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability.”41 “Answerability,” in this context, implies nothing other than responsibility for one’s personal choice—acknowledgment of one’s own ideological position. Referring to one of the most important aspects of his aesthetic philosophy, namely, the “dialogicity” of the subject-object relationship between art and life, summarizing the methodological foundation of the human sciences in his last essay Bakhtin accentuates the criterion of the responsibility of the artist-author. To resolve the questions posed in the present study, however, I propose to concentrate on the “two-sidedness” of the creative act by analyzing the degree of responsibility that the avant-garde allots, not only to the author, but also to what Bakhtin calls “the man of everyday life,”42 by which is meant simply “the audience”—the receiving and cognizing viewer, listener, or reader.

PART ONE

Movements and Ideas

1

The Aesthetics of Anarchy Definitions

The years 1910–18 in Russian avant-garde culture stand out for their remarkable intensity and concentration, especially in regard to the visual arts. In less than a decade, Russian painting expanded stylistically from Impressionism and Symbolism to Neoprimitivism, Cubism, and Futurism (and Cubo-Futurism as well), and aspired toward new developments in nonrepresentational art such as Suprematism. “No country at the early stage of the avant-garde movement produced such a wide array of personalities who differed from one another in significant ways,” Dmitri Sarabianov, a prominent scholar of Russian art, emphasizes.“It’s enough to mention several ‘inventors’ of non-representational art, such as Kandinsky, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, and Matiushin, in order to see that each and every one of them is absolutely autonomous, independent, and unique.”1 Russian poetry followed a similar path: from Symbolism to all the possible brands of Futurism, toward zaum, the visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. The sharp, pronounced break with previous European cultural traditions in an attempt to create a new selfidentity, and to see the world anew, as if for the first time, as “other,” distinguishes the ideology of the Russian avant-garde from that of earlier “Westernized” modernist movements. Although the words “anarchy” and “anarchic” are to be found in the vocabularies of the artists and poets of this period, neither the avantgardists nor their critics directly treated them as aesthetic terms. Vasilii 17

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Kandinsky, Nikolai Kulbin, and Voldem1rs Matvejs (best known by his Russian pen name, Vladimir Markov) used them more persistently than others in their theoretical writings to valorize the new aesthetic system.2 In 1912, the Russian composer Thomas von Hartmann, a friend and follower of Kandinsky’s and a member of the Blaue Reiter group, tried to justify the principle of anarchy in art as a new methodology, revising widespread interpretations of Bergsonian ideas founded on the primacy of intuition and the unconscious in creative work: To me, the engagement of the conscious element seems to be necessary, absolutely necessary, but only to enrich creative methods; i.e., only if this conscious element provides new possibilities, discovers new worlds. Herein lies the great hope for future musical theory, as well as for the other arts; a theory that does not want to promulgate the tedious “one can” or “one cannot,” but does say, “In this case one can use this, or that, or yet another method.” These methods will perhaps be related to earlier ones, but they will possibly reveal much more efficient possibilities than those that are made available to us by the unconscious feeling only. The principle of anarchy in art should be welcomed. Only this principle can lead us to a glorious future, to a new Renaissance. But this theory should also not turn its back on other courageous pathfinders. By discovering the new laws, art should rather lead to an even greater, more conscious freedom— to different new possibilities.3

In the context of the early Russian avant-garde, we can see this “principle of anarchy” as an essential feature of an open and diverse aesthetic phenomenon that those involved did not even articulate until that brief period came to an end. This indicates a paradoxical contradiction in the movement, which was unwilling to build a dominant school or style controlled by one leading aesthetic system. Different trends, that the critical literature often joins together under the vague and historically motivated terminological umbrella of the “Futurist movement” constituted the most noticeable element of the early avant-garde in Russia, and the most important for our discussion. Due to its stark difference from the Italian movement of the same name, the application of this term in the Russian context is often confusing, particularly in relation to the so-called CuboFuturist branch, which enlisted most of the avant-garde artists and poets.4 Kazimir Malevich named a series of his 1913 works “Cubo-Futurist Realism” and was certainly one of the first artists to use this term, which he continued to reference in his brochures in 1915–16.5 Sarabianov suggests that the naming itself testifies to the “odd mixes” that took place and cites the well-known mutual opposition between

FIGURE 1. The Union of Youth (“Cubists”) exhibition in St. Petersburg. Ogonek, no. 1 (January 1913), editorial page, reproducing paintings by Kazimir Malevich (Portrait of Ivan Vasilievich Kliunkov, In the Fields, and The Peasant Funeral); Eduard Spandikov, lower left (Lady with Guitar); and Olga Rozanova, lower right (Portrait of A. V. Rozanova). Photographs by K. K. Bulla.

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French Cubism and Italian Futurism. He adds that in Russia, “the term ‘Cubo-Futurism’ was very convenient, since it embraced Futurist poets as well as Cubist painters. The Cubo-Futurist group also included painters who did not practice Cubism and were closer to Expressionism.”6 Nikolai Khardzhiev, the authority on the subject, argues that this was “a generalizing term that turned up on the pages of critical articles,” explaining this circumstance by the fact that “the Futurist poets appeared publicly in close contact with the Cubist artists.”7 The impact of the visual arts on Futurist poetry was indeed a crucial ingredient in the development of the avant-garde. It led to the methodological phenomena defined by Roman Jakobson as “visualization of metaphor”: a unique mark of Russian Futurism. Whether in painting, prose, or criticism, artists and poets such as Kandinsky, Guro, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Rozanova started from a visualization, and immediate visual reminiscences always dominated over abstract logical schemes. In poetry, Cubo-Futurism applied to the “Hylaeans,” Elena Guro, Velimir Khlebnikov, the brothers David and Nikolai Burliuk, Vasilii Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Benedikt Livshits. “We found even the term ‘Futurism’ odious,” Livshits later confessed.8 Nor were they particularly attached to the term “Cubo-Futurism,” however, to which they did not attribute any special significance.9 Instead of calling themselves Cubo-Futurists, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh coined the neologism budetliane (from budetlianin, a noun etymologically linked to the future tense of the Russian verb “to be,” and sometimes translated into English as “Futurian”), which was immediately picked up by their fellow poets and artists. In this discussion, we shouldn’t forget that the specifics distinguishing Futurism as a cultural tendency were its fragmentation and heterogeneity, which were already noted by its contemporaries: “Futurism is not an aesthetic school but above all a moral watchword or motto confronting all contemporary culture,” Genrikh Tasteven wrote.10 In Russia, it included many different artistic and literary groups, which at times were allied, or in competition and even at odds with one another. Visual and literary production, often described by different scholars as “Futurist,” stylistically was very diverse and often eclectic; thus the terminology just doesn’t hold up if we define Futurism strictly by stylistic and formal categories. It makes much more sense for us rather to interpret Futurism as an aesthetic philosophy that saw itself as a “radical revolution” in art and life, and to take this ideology into account. This latter perspective corresponds to the opinion expressed by many Russian

FIGURE 2. Hylaean poets, Moscow, 1913: Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Burliuk, and Benedikt Livshits.

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avant-gardists: Goncharova, for example, wrote that Futurism’s main purpose was “to offer renewal and a new point of view on every sphere of human activity.”11 The aesthetic and ideological autonomy of each poet or painter transcended any school. Thus, the persistent unwillingness to create a dominant style typifies the uniqueness of the early Russian avant-garde, as the “Futurian” painter Aleksandr Shevchenko proclaimed: “We are free, and in this lies our progress and our happiness. Any attachment to a school, to a theory, already means stagnation, [which] is already what in society is customarily designated by the word ‘academi[ci]sm.’ ”12 In 1918–19, the unique and brief period when the Russian avant-garde first came into direct contact with political anarchism, the artist Varvara Stepanova reflected on Russian art in her diaries: “Russian painting is as anarchic in its principles as Russia in her spiritual movement. We don’t have [stylistic] schools and every artist is a creator, every one is original and radically individualistic. . . . Of course this is more obvious in the case of the leftist artists: there are not so many of them, but each individual is precious, each has made a valuable contribution, but all in their own way.”13 Similarly anarchic overtones, expressed poetically, beautifully fulfill Khlebnikov’s manifesto “An Appeal by the Presidents of Planet Earth”(1917), which is directed against the concept of the national state predominance, arguing indeed that the “black banner of unrule was raised by the hand of man and has been already snatched by the hand of the universe. Who will tear down these black suns?”14 ANARCHY AND ART

The motivating idea and spirit of the early period reveal themselves in the aesthetics of ontological anarchy. The early Russian avant-garde always remained socially aware, but not politically engaged or linked to any party. I would argue that political anarchism, which seeks to replace one temporal power structure of authority with another (of rationality), has little in common with the idea of ontological anarchy. To provide some methodological and terminological grounds for my definition of the aesthetics of anarchy, I rely in part on the theoretical framework developed by Reiner Schürmann.15 Since the nineteenth century, the term “anarchism,” always a politically and socially charged term in both Russian and Western culture, had signified a political movement and a certain political philosophy that rejected the authority of the state.16 Nonetheless, it has been recently argued

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that “anarchism” could supersede its traditional definition: “the loosely defined tendency in contemporary thought known as ‘post modernism’ may be thought suggestive from an anarchist point of view. Michel Foucault’s technique of undermining dominant value systems by laying bare the contingent and power-seeking genealogies underlying them implies a kind of liberation for those people previously controlled or marginalized by such systems.”17 I analyze the terms “anarchy” and “anarchism” in their relation to their root, arch;. The meaning of “anarchy” as an equivalent to “anarchism” (“no government,” “no rule”) does not seem to be the only possible interpretation. On the contrary, the word “anarchy” has acquired a more abstract significance that is not bound to a strictly political or social sphere. Thus, the negatively charged “disorder” cannot be substituted for “anarchy,” and “order” and “anarchy” are not binary oppositions, as some critics suggest.18 Arch; has multiple meanings, and if we limit it to only one,“order,” we violate the concept and oversimplify. Initially, arch; signified beginning, or origin: that which was in the beginning; primal. Among the Ionian philosophers, it denoted the first substance or primordial element, the origin and divine source out of which the world was generated. For the Pythagoreans, who tried to dissociate the term from anything physical, it referred to the origin of the number series. In Aristotle, arch; refers both to principles of action and principles of demonstration: according to his doctrine, all sciences and all scientific knowledge are founded on basic principles (archai) of matter and form. However, the meaning of arch; increasingly changed to accommodate related issues, raised by the idea of origin: ideas of foundations and principles. As a result, the meaning shifted in practical usage from “first power” to “method of government,” “realm,” “political authority.” In philosophical discussions it became associated with newly evolved systematic concepts: “principle of knowledge,”“ground of being,”“cause of motion” or “source of action.”19 Etymologically and conceptually, “anarchy” is defined through negation (an-arch;) and is derivative from arch;. But does that mean that anarchy equates to chaos? Not exactly; I suggest that anarchy should be interpreted as the next step after chaos and order. One of the earliest definitions of chaos, found in Hesiod, is the unformed primordial mass of primal existence. An imposition of an order on chaos produced the cosmos. In Genesis 1, it is the earth “without form and void.” In these interpretations chaos is a primary notion that exists before order: while order and chaos are opposed, arch; means an ordered universe, a chaos trans-

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formed. If chaos precedes arch;, arch; in its turn precedes anarchy. Following this framework, anarchy is neither order nor chaos, although it contains of elements of both, and may be defined as an action that connects them, a permanent strife produced between the constructing and deconstructing of origins. Reiner Schürmann, an American philosopher and Heidegger scholar, offers an insightful definition of arch; and “anarchy” in relation to action, assuming that theories of action “reproduce the attributive-participative schema as if it were a pattern.” He argues that this schema, when accepted and indoctrinated as practice, “results in the ordering of acts to one focal point”: This focal point is continuously displaced throughout history: ideal city, heavenly kingdom, the happiness of the greatest number, noumenal and legislative freedom, “transcendental pragmatic consensus” (Apel), etc. But none of these transferences destroys the attributive, participative, and therefore normative, pattern itself. The arch; always functions in relation to action as substance functions in relation to its accidents, imparting to them sense and telos. In the epoch of closure, on the other hand, the regularity of the principles that have reigned over action can be laid out.20

According to Schürmann, with “the closure of the metaphysical era,” the epochal principles that “have ordered thoughts and actions in each age of our history are withering away.”21 “The age of the turning,” which follows the closure, can be expressed through the Heideggerian “anarchy principle.”22 Schürmann points to this oxymoron as indicative of a “discourse of transition,” which he identifies with the deconstruction: Needless to say, here it will not be a question of anarchy in the sense of Proudhon, Bakunin, and their disciples. What these masters sought was to displace the origin, to substitute the rational power, principium, for the power of authority, princeps—as metaphysical an operation as has ever been. They sought to replace one focal point with another. The anarchy that will be at issue here is the name of a history affecting the ground or foundation of action, a history where the bedrock yields and where it becomes obvious that the principle of cohesion, be it authoritarian or “rational,” is no longer anything more than a blank space deprived of legislative, normative, power. Anarchy expresses a destiny of decline, the decay of the standards to which Westerners since Plato have related their acts and deeds in order to anchor them there and to withdraw them from change and doubt.23

In Russian modernity, however, ontological anarchy expressed as well a return, the turning point away from Eurocentric values established by two centuries of Westernization, and toward the cautious revision of the

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beginnings of Russian religious and intellectual thought, shaped by Byzantine and Eastern philosophies, and embedded in pre-Petrine culture. From this perspective, anarchy may well be interpreted as a deconstruction of order. Anarchy is not an “origin,” but it signifies this active process toward “origin,” the strife produced between chaos and order that may be identified with the Heideggerian notion of beginning, which “always contains the undisclosed abundance of the awesome, which means that it also contains strife with the familiar and ordinary.”24 That is why the necessary element for anarchy is an element of destruction that precedes new creation, not for the sake of destruction, but rather for deconstruction, reinterpretation, rereading, and so on. Chaos, on the other hand, does not have this element. The notion of anarchy I have discussed here overlaps with art, and is based on the Heideggerian idea of aesthetics and a new ontology. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger writes, “Whenever art happens—that is, whenever there is a beginning—a thrust enters history; history either begins or starts over again.”25 Art, according to the phenomenological interpretation, may be understood as a beginning, an opening, an origin without a telos; or, defined by Hans-Georg Gadamer as the project by which “something new comes forth as true,” as an origin that is always other and always emerging, which defies the technoscientific complex born from telic rationality.26 This transformation becomes transparent in particular movements, such as Zurich Dada or its predecessor, early Russian Futurism of 1910–14. THE AVANT-GARDE AS A CULTURE OF CRISIS

In Europe and Russia the beginning of the avant-garde movement was determined by and coincided with an aroused historical consciousness and an awareness of historical transition beyond nationality. The German artist Franz Marc, a member and organizer with Kandinsky of the Blaue Reiter artistic movement and journal, who was close to cultural developments in Russia, expressed this historical consciousness as “the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion—a period in which great and traditional ideas died and new and unexpected ones took their place. . . . The first works of a new era are tremendously difficult to define.”27 We can follow this line of thought, arguing that anarchy also restarts

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history, and is a discourse of epochal transformation and historical “openness.” Gadamer’s observation that this new epoch “has no more room for the intimate and favors instead the transparency and openness of every space” is very important for us in this context. “[W]ith World War I a genuine epochal awareness emerged that welded the nineteenth century into a unit of the past,” Gadamer writes. “This is true not only in the sense that a bourgeois age, which had united faith in technical progress with the confident expectation of a secured freedom and a civilizing perfectionism, had come to an end. This end is not merely an awareness of leaving an epoch, but above all the conscious withdrawal from it, indeed, the sharpest rejection of it.”28 This reflective knowledge was the preliminary preparation not only for creating art, but for the becoming of art. From this perspective, a more dialectical approach is the recent definition of modernist art developed by Arthur Danto, who views a work of art against a theoretical contextual background that Danto calls the “art world”: “the nature of an art theory, which is so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things.”29 Danto argues that modernism begins after “mimetic” theory can no longer be sustained, and is characterized by the attempt to offer a new theory of what art is: “The ‘aesthetic object’ is not some eternally fixed Platonic entity, a joy forever beyond time, space, and history, eternally there for the rapt appreciation of connoisseurs. It is not just that appreciation is a function of the cognitive location of the aesthete, but that the aesthetic qualities of the work are a function of their own historical identity.”30 The withdrawal from the preceding epoch reveals not just a new style (or rather an anti-style in this case) in the pure sense, but a new aesthetic philosophy, one that emerged during the nineteenth century and took shape in the twentieth, based on a new definition of art. In 1917, Nikolai Berdyaev, one of the leading Russian intellectuals of the era, wrote: “We are witnessing a general crisis in art that is shaking it to its thousand-year foundations. The old idea of classical beauty has dimmed forever, and one senses that there is no returning to its images. Art is convulsively trying to escape from its boundaries. . . . Never before has the problem of the relationship between art and life been so critical; never before has there been such a hunger to shift from a creation of works of art to the creation of life itself—a new life.”31 Describing avant-garde as a “culture of crisis,” Matei C3linescu asserts provocatively: “Insofar as anarchism as an attitude implies a veritable mystique of crisis (the deeper

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the crisis the closer the Revolution), I think that this trend confirms the validity of the more general equation between the cultural avant-garde and the culture of crisis.”32 Some critics argue against the “negative connotation” of this equation, pointing out that in the culture of avant-garde, negation sometimes goes hand in hand with the creative impulse—a striking dualistic view of the world, the modernist paradox. This is “the paradox which dominates the whole of the modernist period, from the fin de siècle to the avant-garde,” Walter Gobbers writes.33 In the historical trajectory of the early Russian avant-garde the aesthetics of anarchy represents a constant de-construction (dis-konstruktsiia, as the Russian futurist poet, artist, and theoretician David Burliuk put it in 1913) of the established canon, rather than a pure demolition of it. Disharmony is the opposite of harmony. dissymmetry is the opposite of symmetry. deconstruction is the opposite of construction. a canon can be constructive. a canon can be deconstructive. construction can be shifted or displaced The canon of displaced construction.34

This apathetic sequence of opposites leads to affirmation through negation, and makes it clear to the reader that Burliuk’s “deconstruction” (or rather, in the most precise translation, “dis-construction”) does not exist on its own, but follows “construction” and is etymologically and semantically secondary to it. Burliuk’s notion of “deconstruction,” which he applied to aesthetics, differs greatly from the modern philosophical concept. However, there are some points at which they overlap in a very general way, for example, in the deconstruction of the origin, or canon. The strong element of negation in this aesthetic “projects” itself onto contemporary criticism and influences its language. It gave birth to numerous vague critical definitions founded on the acknowledgment of the same “negative passion” of the avant-garde, as “anti-art,” usually associated with the transgression of cultural boundaries (a term coined by Zurich Dadaists), or an “anti-style” accepted by contemporary criticism.35 THE EARLY RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE: CONCEPTS

The anarchic tendency of the early Russian avant-garde manifests itself most clearly in the notion of “art for life” and “life for art,” which developed into the theoretical concept of the movement: “The course of art

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and a love of life have been our guides. . . . After the long isolation of artists, we have loudly summoned life and life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life.”36 This concept of a mutual “invasion” of art and life, which merged the very different—often opposing—philosophical ideas of Nietzsche and Tolstoy, is as far removed from the pragmatic materialism of the later Constructivist and Productionist urge to employ “art into life” as it is from the decadent and aestheticist ideal of “art for art’s sake.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was the first to approach science from the point of view of the artist, and art from the perspective of lifebeing. According to Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche,“cites the following declaration of faith by Nietzsche, which flatly contradicts the Aristotelian declarations: ‘Goalness as such is the principle of our faith.’ ”37 As a result of this “twist,” Nietzsche’s nihilistic overtone, which Maurice Blanchot calls “the very sense of his thought,” paradoxically acquires a new, positive character. Blanchot suggests that here “nihilism is an event accomplished in history that is like a shedding of history—the moment when history turns and that is indicated by a negative trait: that values no longer have values in themselves. There is also a positive trait: for the first time the horizon is infinitely open to knowledge, ‘Everything is permitted.’ ”38 Adopted by the early avantgarde culture, this nihilistic intonation becomes a leap defining freedom to create, and an open aesthetic consciousness, which strives toward a new epistemology. In Russian philosophy, a similar stance was taken by Nikolai Berdyaev, who was particularly interested in the investigation of the meaning of “freedom” and “creativity”: “Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world’s necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.”39 The fundamental Nietzschean idea of the “will to power” and the concept of “eternal return” have never been limited to the biological or organic domain (a vulgar interpretation of this idea popular in the beginning of the century), and refer to the universal force, the energy (energeia) of the very essence of being. This energy, at once creative and destructive, which determines the flow of being, is beyond the human realm, and therefore beyond “good and evil.” It follows that the eternal return is nothing but the concordance of the creative power and of this energy, the “letting-be,” the all-embracing acceptance of being with its joy and suffer-

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ing, being as a united whole, indivisible into the binary oppositions of “good” and “evil,” “beautiful” and “ugly,” “art” and “life,” and so on. Nietzsche calls it amor fati, the acceptance of one’s earthly fate and faithfulness to every minute of one’s life. “And what else is left? To accept the world, humbly accept the world with all its seemingly senseless, insignificant details. . . . The process of life—one should believe in it,” Elena Guro wrote in her diary in 1912– 13.40 Acceptance of life “as such”—as a given, as a gift—hides the dramatic heroic stance of the early avant-garde. It brings with it the recognition of the finitude of human presence as well, death, understood as the highest revelation of “presencing-in-the-world.”“Death to Art!” the Russian Ego-Futurist Ivan Ignatiev proclaims.“Authorial tone? A threat? No. Terror? Hardly. Perhaps a Joy? Yes, it happens when a long-drawn-out crisis is pronounced at its end. Joy creates a Poem. There is a Nothingness in the End, but this end initiates the Beginning of Joy, the Joy of a Creator.”41 Ignatiev’s words find an unlikely parallel in Cornelian tragedy, whose triumph of the heroic Maurice Blanchot interprets as the “naïve avowal of death”: “The meaning of the death called heroic is its escape from death; its truth is its making of death a fine line. Where are you leading him?—To death—To glory.”42 It is no exaggeration to say that this “Hafizian” acceptance of life (Khlebnikov) or, as Guro puts it, “gay creativity” (a clear reference to Nietzsche’s “gay science”), became one of the foundations of the philosophy of the early Russian avant-garde. This early avant-garde concept, where the notions of art and life are intertwined, differs from the preceding Symbolist sensibility, which still prioritized fixed ideas over the process of creation, even in Viacheslav Ivanov and the second generation of Symbolists’ notion of “life-creating” (zhiznetvorchestvo).43 If the Symbolists, involved in “life-creation,” tried to reconstruct life around them as a work of art, the Futurists submitted their art to the evasive flux of life “as such” instead. The dramatist and stage director Nikolai Evreinov, who was the first to develop the notion of “theatricality” in Russian culture, once praised his friend the Futurist poet and aviator Vasilii Kamensky for utterly merging his public image, life and art, comparing him to Leo Tolstoy as the only other example of such completeness. Evreinov dedicated his brochure on theatricalization of life (1922) to Kamensky, and placed in parenthesis the subtitle “Poet who theatricalized life.”44 For the Symbolists, both art and life are always perceived through the mediation of a symbol, a sign, which becomes an absolute model

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David Burliuk, Portrait of the Futurist Poet Vasilii Kamensky. 1917. Oil on canvas, 104 × 104 cm. Around the head runs the inscription: “King of Poets, the Songsmith Futurist Vasilii Vasilievich Kamensky 1917. The Russian Republic.” The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

FIGURE 3.

that controls reality. Symbolism’s teleological philosophy presupposes a perception of the world, founded on the traditional division between practical experience and theoretical knowledge. This dichotomy between thought and action, “the ancient procession and legitimation of praxis from theoria,” became a central problem of twentieth-century philosophy after Nietzsche and led to a crisis of metaphysics.45 In their attempt to resolve this crisis, the Russian Futurists retreated to the anarchic action, where contemplation and cognition precede the traditional formulation of inspiration and are equated with creative action. The final goal of being is being itself: the priority of telos is dissolved in the presencing in the world, where the very process of life ini-

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tially posseses its potency of cognizing. C3linescu made a very important distinction in his general discussion on the theory of international modernism and the avant-garde, pointing out that “the crisis of ideology is reflected in another highly significant phenomenon characteristic of a great deal of avant-garde art, both older and newer: its‘anti-teleological’ drive.”46 (However, it is not a new feature in the history of art or philosophy: the concept of “integral knowledge” was present in non-Western philosophy, as well as early Christianity, and developed by medieval mystics like Meister Eckhardt.)47 Life is understood here as a process of being, without a goal,“without why”: “We are enthralled by new themes: superfluousness, meaninglessness, and the secret of powerful insignificance are celebrated by us.”48 These words of the collective Futurist manifesto, which are used to valorize the new aesthetics, reflect an underlying set of new criteria. The process of artistic creation placed on the same footing as the creative presencing-in-the-world, a spiritual action (odukhotvorennoe delanie), became a goal of their art: “pure creativity is much more profound than the way it is understood in the everyday life of artists and painters. The essential moment of creation does not happen in the course of physical action, it happens in the course of contemplation. . . . And it is so terribly easy to interrupt, to frighten off the contemplation following the prejudice of the necessity of action.”49 Thought and contemplation are equated with action (“We join contemplation with action and fling ourselves into the crowd”),50 and knowledge is bound up with the process of thinking, of becoming. Consequently, the process of creation, involving material work as much as the elusive moment of cognizing, becomes more important than production and fabrication, which recognizes the accomplished work of art as the final result. This intellectual position entertained by the early avant-garde appears to have a very contemporary resonance: thus, speaking about the issue of materiality in contemporary art, Arthur Danto suggests that when works of art become self-conscious “to such a degree that it is difficult to know how much of the material correlate must be reckoned in as part of the artwork . . . they almost exemplify a Hegelian ideal in which matter is transfigured into spirit.”51 Expanding the aesthetic ideology of Russian Futurism into a philosophical discourse in 1917, in a lecture that was published under the title Krizis iskusstva (The Crisis of Art), Berdyaev wrote: “We must get through futurism and overcome it in life as well as in art. It can be overcome by delving more deeply into it, moving it into another dimension, a dimension of depth rather than that of a plane, through knowledge—

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not abstract but knowledge based on life experience, knowledge as being.”52 Berdyaev’s approach to “overcoming” Futurism, although removed from the attitudes of the avant-garde milieu, was perhaps provoked by Kruchenykh’s statement made three years earlier: “Previously the painters’ world had only two dimensions: length and width; now it has acquired depth and relief, movement and weight, the coloration of time, etc., etc. We started seeing the here and the there. The irrational (transrational) is conveyed to us as directly as the rational. We do not need intermediaries—the symbol, the thought—we convey our own new truth, and do not serve as the reflection of some sort of sun.”53 There is a hidden response to Berdyaev’s essay in Olga Rozanova’s “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism,” written in 1917. Rozanova was just as unequivocally committed to the idea of the continuous renewal and regeneration of artistic process. In the course of analyzing the significance of the Futurist period in Russian art, she wrote that: “In force and acuity Futurism provided art with a unique expression—the fusion of two worlds,-the subjective and the objective.—Maybe this event is destined never to be repeated. . . . Futurism expressed the character of our contemporaneity, and it did so with complete acumen.”54 For Berdyaev, who thought of creativity as something “inseparable from freedom,” which “derives from nothing which precedes it,”55 Futurism gave the “tired” art of the preceding centuries that vitally necessary injection of novelty and “regenerative barbarism without which the world would have irretrievably perished”: “Out of the dark abyss, not yet transformed by culture, barbarism of spirit, and barbarism of flesh and blood, drawing its strength from the deepest sources of being, must sweep over declining civilization in a mighty wave. . . . Futurism is this new barbarism at the pinnacle of culture. It has barbaric crudity, barbaric wholeness, and barbaric ignorance.”56 A closer reading of the texts of the early Russian avant-garde and consideration of the wide-ranging and extensive interests in such participants of this movement as Elena Guro, Voldem1rs Matvejs (Vladimir Markov), Olga Rozanova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Velimir Khlebnikov, as well as many others, gives the lie to the facile notion of “the barbaric ignorance” of Russian Futurism. Ironically, it was first suggested by the Futurists themselves and was later strongly imposed on them by critics. For a while, Larionov’s group called themselves “The Donkey’s Tail,” the title of the exhibition they put together in Moscow in 1912. This unusual name no doubt referred to the infamous “Boronali hoax”: in 1910, a painting purportedly

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by a Genoese named Joachim-Raphael Boronali was exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, but in fact “Boronali” was a Paris donkey called Lolo, which had made the painting with a brush tied to its tail. The profanity and mocking laughter of the Russian Futurists, who put on their notorious “donkey’s ears” to provoke their critics, has a strong element of aesthetic “aggressiveness” in it.57 But it is very important to remember that the unique nature of this “aggressiveness” has little in common with political or social violence. In one of his early articles, Kruchenykh emphasized the crucial differences between Italian and Russian Futurism in this way: “In art there can be discordant sounds (dissonances), but there cannot be coarseness, cynicism, and impudence (which is what the Italian Futurists preach), because it is impossible to mix war and fighting with creative work. We are serious and solemn, not destructive and coarse.”58 Overemphasizing violence and the aggressive gesture in both politics and aesthetics, Italian Futurists regarded anarchism as synonymous with intense, violent energy.59 In their manifestoes Italians used the same linguaggio—the same vocabulary and style—as in anarchist publications, such as La Rivolta, La Barricata, and others. The word “anarchist” became a metaphor at that time, the avant-garde slogan for artists (a 1912 article in La Barricata, “Anarchy and Futurism,” concluded that “anarchists are Futurists”).60 Influenced by Nietzsche and Max Stirner, Italian Futurists shared anarchist political sentiments, and regularly published their writings in anarchist journals. Marinetti actively participated in the 1909 general election in Italy, publishing his first political manifesto. Soon his Futurist group introduced a form of the artistic and poetic manifesto as a weapon to express its radicalism. As Donald Egbert notes, “Marinetti had obviously adopted the manifesto as a time-honored weapon of political agitation.”61 In Marjorie Perloff’s outstanding study The Futurist Moment, this argument acquires a new depth and a new dimension: she not only discusses the political attributes of the genre, but defines the manifesto as an art form.62 At odds with such political ambitions, the major explorations of the prewar Russian avant-garde were persistently apolitical. Indeed, this seems to have been a conscious choice on their part. Instead, Russian Futurists focused on epistemological issues and explored the nihilist idea of “primordial ignorance” as a potential impulse toward the continuous process of cognition, an idea that gave priority to“experience” over“notion.”They were not interested in changing the world temporarily through revolution or political representation, but were searching for a new ontology.The“De-

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claration of the Word as Such” proclaimed: “The artist has seen the world in a new way and, like Adam, proceeds to give things his own names.”63 This epistemology of “ignorance” is an essentially anarchic idea, which propels the revolutionized cognitive process and unbound interpretation of the creative act. It also parallels Stirner’s idea of knowledge that must “die”—return to a state of flux, and stimulate the process of endless questioning, new interpretations, new understanding.64 The epistemological “ignorance” of the early Russian avant-garde in a sense harks back to the theological tradition of docta ignorantia, “learned ignorance,” which has its place in medieval Europe. The notorious “Donkey’s Tail” can be seen, not only as a reflection of the recent scandal in the Paris Salon, but also as an allusion to the medieval Feast of the Ass, one of the carnivalesque manifestations of “learned ignorance” (implying a possible reference to Thus Spoke Zarathustra).“Besides carnivals proper, with their long and complex pageants and processions, there was the ‘feast of fools’ (festa stultorum) and the ‘feast of the ass’; there was a special free ‘Easter laughter’ (risus paschalis), consecrated by tradition,” Bakhtin writes in his wellknown study of carnival culture. “All these forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter and consecrated by tradition existed in all the countries of medieval Europe; they were sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials. They offered a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations.”65 The Russian Futurists gave priority to play over dogma , chance over choice, imagination over skill and intensity of the individual experience over the lifeless structure of “isms.”They explored the irrational mechanics of the unconscious in the creation of images, metaphors, and associations irrespective of craftsmanship, as well as of the imposed individual and rationalized effort. They repeatedly mentioned that the unexplainable should not be explained, and the unconscious should not be transferred into the realm of consciousness. “All that is beautiful is random (see the philosophy of chance),” as Nikolai Burliuk wrote in his article on poetic principles.66 In all of these “random events,” the category of aesthetic value accepted as a norm in a particular epoch is displaced, and art acquires a new significance outside of aesthetic definition. NEW TEMPORALITY

In the early Russian avant-garde, the prevailing category is a category of temporariness, of time, perceived as a process of action in flux. Futurism

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destroyed dogmatic conceptions of time and space in much the same way as occurred in contemporary science. In his aspiration to discover “laws of time,” Khlebnikov, who was a scientist by training, invented a new concept of metabiosis derived from the idea of symbiosis, which played an important role in Peter Kropotkin’s view of the role of mutual aid in evolution.67 But Khlebnikov based his concept not on spatial relations (as in symbiosis) but on temporal ones, speaking in terms of generations, and proclaiming the “shift of space and time” in its qualities. As Kropotkin did earlier, Khlebnikov also projected his biological theory of metabiosis onto the social sphere, claiming that “the credo of militaristic panGermanism entails relations of metabiosis between the Slavic and the German worlds.”68 For Khlebnikov, this notion of metabiosis, drafted in a short article early in 1910, was an organicist concept, anarchic in its essence, proving the unity of the world in its fragmentation, interconnecting the particular and the whole, individuals and generations, the lowest and the highest types of life, in a cycle: “Metabiosis unites the generations of corals within an atoll, and the generations of people within a nation. The death of higher organisms, including even homo sapiens, makes them, through metabiosis, connected with the lower ones.”69 Later, he transformed this notion in his aesthetic theories, creating his own mythology of generations, a mythology of time. For Russian artists, Futurism became a training ground in different modes of cognition and a lesson in the transcendence of “linear” time on the levels of both form and subject. It is no coincidence that clocks appear so frequently in paintings of the 1910s, for the clock is a kind of image of time or “symbol of faith,” and the Futurists dismantle and anatomize its mechanism. In their artworks, the object is “animated” (as in a children’s game) and individualized. In this respect, the avant-gardists are rather like savages who know how to invoke, worship, and play with objects. For them, to draw something means to possess and control it and create it anew. For example, the clock mechanism in Rozanova’s Metronome (1914) is transformed into a prototype of both the eternal and the momentary— the perpetuum mobile of historical time and a symbol of its finitude. Gerald Bruns sharply calls the similar phenomenon of the “movement of time” in international avant-garde writing “anarchic temporality.”70 This anarchic temporality typified early twentieth-century aesthetic and philosophical theories. It informs Nikolai Fedorov’s dream of “resurrecting” the dead generations, P. D. Ouspensky’s idea of supratemporal reality, Velimir Khlebnikov’s concept of time as unity of past, present,

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Velimir Khlebnikov with a skull, St. Petersburg, 1909. A. Vasiliev Archive, Paris. Courtesy Vladimir Poliakov, Moscow.

FIGURE 4.

and future, and the hypotheses of many others.71 The Neoprimitivists and Futurists continued this line of “achronic” consciousness, which led to innovation along with archaization—retrospectivism in the broadest sense— as a reinvention of language, and the free choice of tradition. The avant-gardists’ paradoxical commitment to the restoration as well as to the “creative destruction” of tradition relied on their principle of everythingness, mentioned in the Introduction. In Russian, this odd word, vsechestvo, rhymes with, and is morphologically akin to, tvorchestvo (creativity) and otchestvo, which means “patronym,”“patronymic.” The semantic contrast between these words alludes to the invented selfidentity of an artist, who is free to choose and redefine his or her origins,

FIGURE 5. Olga Rozanova, Metronome, 1914–15. Oil on canvas, 46 × 33 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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and so unbound from any traditional, national, or filial ties to “forefathers.” In many respects, the principle of everythingness responds to the anarchic nature of the early avant-garde movement, and defines the major points of its ideology. The national and ethnic sensibility of the early avant-garde, in particular the pluralist aesthetics of Neoprimitivism, was by no means a sectarian bond to a single culture.72 The creative interpretation of foreign influences still remained among the distinguishing national features of Russian art, but it rarely spilled over into direct stylization or the external imitation of form. As the Neoprimitivist artist Aleksandr Grishchenko put it, “When the Russians took over Western forms, they introduced into them their own distinctive national spirit.”73 The devotion to the Russian or, as in the case of Khlebnikov, the “Eurasian” idea, did not contradict interest in German or French culture. The invented word “everythingness” exemplified the free choice of traditions proclaimed by Larionov: “We acknowledge all styles as suitable for the expression of our art, styles existing both yesterday and today.”74 This pluralist expansiveness represented the breaking of “taboos” in all areas of life, from the everyday to art to thought and language. The Russian avant-garde introduced a paradigm shift, a complete switch of reference points: “The most amazing, the most modern doctrine of Futurism can be transferred to Assyria or Babylon, while Assyria . . . can be brought to what is called our age. . . . The Futurist movement can only be regarded as an extratemporal phenomenon.”75 In practice, poets and artists tried to reinvent and to reveal this floating movement of time, this very process of transformation, anarchic in its essence.

2

Ideas Bakunin, Tolstoy, and the Russian Anarchists

The influence on early avant-garde theories of art not only of Bakunin’s political philosophy, but of Tolstoy’s exploration of social and ethical issues in the field of aesthetics, has been overlooked. For decades the interconnection between social issues and aesthetics inspired many Russian writers and artists, from the socialist populist philosopher, writer, and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and from the nineteenth-century band of rebels against the St. Petersburg Academy of Art who called themselves the “Wanderers” to Malevich, Khlebnikov, and other avant-gardists in their personal quest for the answer to the question “What is art?”1 Anarchist theories also influenced the avant-garde’s approach to art. David Weir suggests that if Bakunin’s creative-destructive ideology of anarchism is “converted into an aesthetic, it accommodates completely the work of Lautréamont and, later, the dadaists as well. In fact, Bakunin’s nihilist anarchism is much easier to reconcile with modernist aesthetics than Kropotkin’s communist anarchism.”2 However, Allan Antliff, with whom I tend to agree here, warns that Kropotkin “counted artists as key players in the social revolution,” and his influence should not be underestimated.3 Revealingly enough, it was Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s political and philosophical ideas, and not so much their scattered prescriptions for the development of “anarchist art ,” that had the greatest impact on several generations of Russian and European artists and writers. Unlike Western anarchists at the turn of the century, who generally thought 39

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of anarchy as a “pragmatic revolt,” most Russians in sympathy with anarchy were irrationalists who denounced the utility of scientific, rational systems, and regarded such reasoning as the “intellectual arrogance” of positivism.4 Kropotkin made this explicit in one of his notes, saying: “In the name of utility I have no right to condemn the man whose act of revolt would do even direct harm to anarchism.” He refused “to award laurels in the name of the same utility.” Instead, he would “judge the act of every man, private or public, on its intrinsic merits—never on its utility.”5

BAKUNIN’S CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AND ANARCHIST AESTHETICS

Bakunin concluded his essay “The Reaction in Germany,” published in 1842, with the famous declaration: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”6 This valorizing language and its underlying values are paralleled in many avant-garde manifestos and concepts. “A great destruction with an objective effect is also a song of praise, complete and separate in its sound, just like a hymn to new creation that follows the destruction,”Vasilii Kandinsky asserted, for example.7 He envisioned the artist as a symbolic rider on the path between two worlds, as the intermediary able to bridge this antithesis. Bakunin’s aphorism has been so often repeated and quoted that it has practically lost its meaning. To understand it, it is important to remember that it was aimed at the positivism current in the early 1840s in politics, philosophy, and history.“The Reaction in Germany,” which employs Hegelian philosophic language, was criticized by Bakunin’s political friends for being too abstract, but it contains the seeds of the future themes of Russian culture: the prediction of nihilism and the path of negation; eschatological consciousness; freedom praised as a religious act and “spiritual feat”; anarchism as the “only true Christianity,” which generated an independent trend of Russian Christian anarchists, Tolstoy among them; contempt for and distrust of “intellectual arrogance”; and the principle of action.8 The following passage from “The Reaction in Germany” reads like a Symbolist manifesto and could have been written at the beginning of the twentieth century: We must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom, of which the one true expression is justice and love. . . . And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand! To the Positivists we say: “Open the eyes of your mind; let the dead bury the dead, and convince yourselves at last that the Spirit, ever young, ever

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FIGURE 6. Vasilii Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 20, 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.5 × 108 cm. State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Photo credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

newborn, is not to be sought in fallen ruins!” And we exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear, which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit, which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!9

According to the scholar of anarchism Sam Dolgoff, “Freedom is the keystone of Bakunin’s thought. The goal of history is the realization of freedom, and its driving force is the instinct of revolt.”10 Bakunin’s early theory of revolution, which was influenced by the Hegelian principle of logical negation, betrays obvious overtones of Romanticism. Later, in 1871, Bakunin distinguishes between two elements of freedom—the materialistic conception of liberty, which is positivistic; and the second, negative

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element, “the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective and individual authority.”11 The prominent historian of Russian anarchism Paul Avrich argues: Bakunin did not wish to shed the fictions of religion and metaphysics merely to replace them with what he considered the new fictions of pseudo-scientific sociology. He therefore proclaimed a “revolt of life against science, or rather against the rule of science.” The mission of science was not to govern men but to rescue them from superstition, drudgery, and disease.“In a word,” Bakunin declared, “Science is the guiding compass of life, but not life itself.”12

A similar sentiment is also present in Dostoevsky’s anti-teleological poetics of “the underground,” a concept that turned out to be immensely influential on the early avant-garde’s ideology. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), which many contemporary critics consider a proto-existentialist work, had an immense impact on twentieth-century philosophy and writing. Dostoevsky’s hero “from the underground” is a defiant “paradoxical writer” who confesses to, exposes, and denounces his readers at the same time: I have after all only carried to an extreme things that you don’t have the courage to do even in half measure, and what’s more you have taken your cowardice to be good sense, and thereby comfort yourselves by deceiving yourselves. And so I’ll most likely prove to be more “alive” than you. . . . After all, we don’t even know where this life is at the moment, or what it is, what it is called.13

It was precisely this aspect of ontological resistance, the rejection of rational dogma and fixed ideas, the “negative element of freedom,” that had a crucial impact on both anarcho-individualist thought and modernist aesthetics in Russia. In Europe and Russia, political anarchists promoted “social art” (Proudhon) to inspire and appeal to the masses in a simple, direct manner that transcends the limits of pure propaganda and enlightens the public. “It is not correct to represent the recent acts of anarchists as acts of propaganda,” argued Kropotkin, generalizing the issue.“Not one act has been made for propaganda. All were acts of revolt against the hated force. . . . How each man will act when his mind has been penetrated with certain ideas is not our duty to determine. We cannot. It must be every individual’s own appreciation.14 While neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin recognized utility as a criterion, Proudhon’s utilitarian ideas on art, disseminated in print only after 1865, enormously influenced Tolstoy, who visited him in 1861. According to Egbert, Proudhon considered himself to be an “anti-academic realist of

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a social kind,”15 but as Richard D. Sonn points out, “Proudhon’s ethic of truth and rationality failed to lay groundwork for a distinctly anarchist aesthetic.”16 In short, Proudhon saw art and literature as an “expression of society,” a “revolutionary” and “moralizing” instrument contributing “to the development of our dignity, to the perfectioning of our being,” and, finally, to the achievement of a better society, made up of morally and intellectually perfected individuals.17 John Ruskin and William Morris, who promoted anarchist and socialist ideas in their aesthetics, were undoubtedly two other sources of Tolstoy’s art theory: both argued against separation (narrow specialization) in arts, against consumerism, and emphasized the social meaning of art. It is important here not to draw a parallel between social agenda and propaganda: Egbert argues that Proudhon “never succumbed to the idea that art should first and foremost be a form of partisan propaganda, a social weapon—the view that was to dominate so much of the art produced in, or under the direct influence of, Stalinist Russia.”18 In case of the prerevolutionary avant-garde, its new aesthetic perception may well reflect some social and philosophical anarchist ideas, but nonetheless refused purely ideological engagement. Tolstoy’s aesthetics, which for the sake of clarity I’d rather call his antiaesthetics, is based on transgressing traditional aesthetic norms. If we follow the classical understanding that aesthetics is the science of beauty, Tolstoy’s approach turns its very foundation upside down. He argues that “since 1750, when Baumgarten founded aesthetics, the question of what beauty is remains completely open, and each new work on aesthetics resolves it in a new way.”19 There is nothing new in the argument itself.20 What makes it revolutionary is the fact that Tolstoy not only dismisses beauty from the justification and definition of art, but to pursue his goal of divorcing art from the concept of beauty, he rejects beauty as a value criterion, and literally exorcises it from his treatise. An extremist and a moralist, Tolstoy insists, “The concept of beauty not only doesn’t coincide with the good, but is rather the opposite of it, because the good for the most part coincides with the triumph over our predilections, while beauty is the basis of all our predilections.”21 Paradoxically, here Tolstoy the Christian moralist is very much in keeping with the most radical atheist tradition of Russian culture, from Chernyshevsky’s The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855) and Dmitry Pisarev’s “Destruction of Aesthetics” (1865) to Kropotkin’s anarchist concept of culture and the aesthetic nihilism of the early Futur-

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ists. Furthermore, Tolstoy, who followed totally different moral imperatives in his quest, also prefigures some postmodernist issues. Speaking of postmodernism, Arthur C. Danto, a philosopher of art and founder of institutional art theory, distinguishes purging beauty of moral authority in contemporary art as the real conceptual revolution: “The real conceptual revolution, in truth, is not purging the concept of art of aesthetic qualities so much as purging the concept of beauty of the moral authority one feels it must have possessed in order that possessing beauty should have come to be taken as morally questionable.”22 Danto argues that this “removal” of beauty in the definition of art was the result of political determination more than anything else. It is significant in Tolstoy’s case as well. Opposed by the followers of art pour l’art theories, Tolstoy felt the political necessity of divorcing the categories of goodness and beauty: “People will understand the meaning of art only when they cease to regard beauty—that is, pleasure—as the aim of this activity. To recognize beauty, or the certain kind of pleasure to be derived from art, as the aim of art, not only doesn’t contribute to defining what art is, but, on the contrary, by transferring the question to a realm quite alien to art.”23 Of course, Tolstoy and the postmodernists have a different target: through expelling beauty as an artistic criterion, Tolstoy is seeking to establish the authority of the moral absolute over art, while postmodernism is looking to purge the moral imperative as a purpose of art completely. TOLSTOY’S “SPIRITUAL CREATIVITY”

“There are a lot of Futurist presentiments in Tolstoy,”Aleksei Kruchenykh observed.24 This may sound like oxymoron, and it was probably intended that way, but in several respects, Tolstoy was a precursor to the kind of thinking characteristic of the early avant-garde. Both Tolstoy and the early Russian avant-garde artists and poets sought, not only to make art new, but also to bring about the radical liberation of the human spirit. Despite their differing aesthetic positions, they shared a common historical and social context, which, according to Bakhtinian theory, constitutes an inseparable “extratextual” part of the aesthetic object in the contemporary world.25 The artists and writers were searching for a new ideology and a new ethics of artistic practice, and they rooted it in the anarchist concept of creativity. As already noted, Tolstoy’s radical refutation of the concept of beauty as a major aesthetic criterion directly influenced the new, expanded no-

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tion of an art that transcended the traditional boundaries between the arts and crafts, and between different genres and artistic mediums. One can make “genuine art” without being a professional artist, Tolstoy argues, dismissing the academic separation between professionalism and dilettantism. This offers a new interpretation of folk, children’s, and naïve art. A completely new framework for defining art emerges. In What Is Art? Tolstoy concentrates on a purely philosophical interpretation of art, rather than on a simple technical definition: “What is art? Why even ask such a question? . . . What, then, is a sign of a work of art? It is exactly the same in sculpture, and in music, and in poetry. Art in all its forms borders, on the one hand, on the practically useful, and on the other, on unsuccessful attempts at art. How to separate art from the one and the other?”26 By formulating this question, Tolstoy strikes at the very heart of a problem contemporary philosophers of art also faced.27 According to Roger Fry, who emphasized that in his youth “all speculation on aesthetic had revolved with wearisome persistence around the question of the nature of beauty,” it was “Tolstoy’s genius that delivered us from this impasse.” He continues: “one may date from the appearance of What is Art? the beginning of fruitful speculation in aesthetics.”28 Following his own explorations and aesthetic universalist perspective, Tolstoy created different criteria of valorization, such as “sincerity,” and “infectiousness,” by opposing feeling to form. He gives priority to the expression of feeling and response to it over taste or form. In other words, the universal philosophical problem of making art or becoming art, which is a focal point of the most avant-garde theories, is for Tolstoy also much more important than the material, technical side of it that deals with norms, rules, genres, or certain styles that regulate the creation of aesthetic objects, or works of art. Tolstoy found his answers in his own, quite unorthodox, approach to the expression theory of art deriving from the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, which treats art as the expression of emotion. He theorized art as a different kind of knowledge, which doesn’t involve rational intellect but is achieved only through a shared emotion, of feeling into (Einfuhlung).29 Tolstoy’s reasoning is: “Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.”30 Even though Tolstoy never openly acknowledged his indebtedness to Romanticism, his views on art appear to be strongly influenced by the German Romantic

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philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel.31 As Tolstoy would later, Schlegel insists on the expression of “genuine,”“natural feelings,” which should not be generalized but instead should be “drawn from individual conceptions.”32 Schlegel sees “intellectual vanity” as a main reason for the “breaking up of the spiritual strength” of art, and stresses the separation between “all the intellectual and imitative productions of our time” and true art, art inspired by “deep and genuine feeling” he calls religious.33 This argument undoubtedly influenced Tolstoy’s understanding of art’s purpose.34 Clearly, Schlegel does not reject the criterion of beauty, which is what makes Tolstoy’s argument so unique. Yet by defining art from an ethical, rather than an aesthetic perspective, Schlegel questions the priority of the traditional aesthetic valorization of art: In what, then, does this exalted beauty consist? It is of the first importance to analyze the good and evil tendency of all theories of art. . . . The true object of the art should be, instead of resting in externals, to lead the mind upwards into a more exalted region and a spiritual world. While false-mannered artists, content with the empty glitter of a pleasing imitation, soar no higher.35

These definitions are clearly recognizable in Tolstoy’s characterizations of “bad,” or “counterfeit” art as art prone to borrowing, imitation, and diversion. Caryl Emerson gives a detailed reading of Tolstoy’s terminology and these concepts, which I summarize here in brief.36 Tolstoy speaks of art as an infection that has an unmatched potency to impact the audience positively or negatively. He divides all art into “true” (created out of “our own inner necessity”) and impotent “counterfeit” production. True art being defined by the “particularity of the feeling,”“clarity,” and “sincerity,” Tolstoy concludes by separating all “true” art into “good” and “bad,” according to the moral intentions of the creator.37 Another crucial contribution of Tolstoy’s treatise on art highlights the opposition between the art of “guilds and academies” as a professional activity, aimed at the material production of aesthetic objects or forms, and creativity, which encompasses the essence of any art, the process of becoming art, and their place in life. From the time of its introduction, this opposition between art and creativity played a major role in avantgarde theories, particularly Kazimir Malevich’s theory of Suprematism (discussed in a separate chapter), and it still remains a key issue in contemporary cultural theories. In essays written in 1918 for the newspaper Anarkhiia (Anarchy), Malevich follows Tolstoy in prioritizing the creative intuition of the dilettante over the rationalized skill of the profes-

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sional, and advances the interests of the associated group over the “temptation of the personal.” The connection between Tolstoy’s philosophy and avant-garde theories of art can be found in the diaries, manifestos, and other documents of key figures that shaped the critical thought of the early Russian avant-garde movement, from Elena Guro, Mikhail Matiushin, Voldem1rs Matvejs, and Aleksei Kruchenykh to Vasilii Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. In the history of the Russian avant-garde, the artist and writer Elena Guro seems to be least suited for the role of the ideologue, ingeniously framing and defining the new systems of art. Guro’s own art and literary work attempted to undermine dogma, artistic clichés, and stereotypes, whether of the Academy or the avant-garde. The essence of her late works, which critics described as “organic” or “synthetic,” is apparent in the “mobility” or receptivity of her individual style, which borders on eclecticism. Her irrationalist and Neoromantic sensibility could be expressed only in an open, nonconstructive form, as if mirroring the intuitive process of creating. Most of her subjects belong to the natural world, from crystals, rocks, and lakes to plants and animals. Guro produced mostly sketches and fragmentary notes; her short stories and poetry possess a strong improvisational mode and run counter to any ossified textual structure. However, her correspondence frequently references the intellectual and philosophical context of the time; she comments on the aesthetic views of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, and her ideas, personality, and subtle apprehension of art greatly influenced Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and Malevich. In 1909–10, together with Matiushin, Guro became a founding member of the Union of Youth avant-gardist society of artists and poets, the first in Russia. Guro’s aesthetic and social views come together in the most telling way in her correspondence with her friend and longtime partner, Mikhail Matiushin, the musician, composer, artist, and publisher of several important avant-garde editions. Passionately discussing Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” in one of these letters, Guro argues with Matiushin, who was a “Tolstoyan” at the time: I am reading Tolstoy and some things are rather unpleasant to read because of his biased views, because of the arrogant outbursts towards art, which he considers to be “aristocratic,” for example. . . . And what about Levitan, Edelfeld, Beethoven? What about Wagner with his Lohengrin—supposedly he is also deprived of the religious feeling, of the ideal? And after that he [Tolstoy] is mixing all together the Renaissance artists, so Michelangelo and Rembrandt also turned out to lack real profundity.

Elena Guro, Cats (ca. 1910). Ink on paper, 49 × 34.4 cm. Courtesy Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow.

FIGURE 7.

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And all this reasoning based on the idea that all their works are incomprehensible for our unfortunate backward people? But next to these pages there are very beautiful ones, which makes the book worth reading, for example: “There is nothing older or more hackneyed than pleasure; and there is nothing newer than the feelings that emerge from the religious consciousness of a particular time.” Of course, pleasure here is understood in the very narrow sense of physical pleasure, and then it makes sense; although even sensual pleasure is probably different in different epochs. I rather don’t know if any [concept of] pleasure could exist without the impact of a particular ideology, I mean here spiritual creativity. This whole page is very good and profound. . . . But again— I disagree with his definition of beauty—I think it is too narrow-minded and produces a lot of confusion. Generally speaking, he [Tolstoy] is very confused, and does not provide enough proof for his fundamental concept. . . . But his other idea is so right, that one cannot but agree with him: art should not serve as the source of pleasure, it should have much deeper meaning.38

Tolstoy defines beauty as a kind of sensual pleasure, which is exclusively material and physical in nature. He not only divorces beauty from its association with goodness, he insists on the unprecedented opposition of the categories of beauty and good. Likewise, Tolstoy’s definition of art is founded on aesthetic values that judge art on the basis of its utility in service of morality and universal religious ideals.39 Tolstoy’s teleological approach to art aroused Guro’s opposition, and in an outburst of indignation, prompted by her own ethics, she calls him “a blind mole who in his subterranean burrow has forgotten the sunlight.”40 She emphatically rejects his logic: he “does not provide enough proof for his fundamental concept.” In her unfinished tale “The Poor Knight” (1913), Guro proclaims: “Woe unto them who forget beauty, for they are close to cruelty.”41 Her perception of beauty is less radical than Tolstoy’s—for Guro, beauty is self-sufficient and has its own spiritual value beyond aesthetic or ethical meaning. At first glance it is rather surprising to find that Guro—intentionally or not—is in many respects criticizing the weakest points of Tolstoy’s theory from Nietzschean positions.42 She regards Tolstoy and Nietzsche as alternative extremes influencing social and political thought. In his book on Tolstoy and Nietzsche, which appeared in 1900, soon after Tolstoy’s last work, Lev Shestov contrasts the approaches of the two great thinkers, arguing that Tolstoy’s treatise on art “has only one object—to oppose Nietzsche and his doctrine.”43 Nietzschean “aristocratic” individualist morality was perceived by the Russian intelligentsia as a cure for Tolstoyan sentimental humanitarianism and the socialist egalitarian ideal.44

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FIGURE 8. Elena Guro and Mikhail Matiushin. St. Petersburg, ca. 1910. On the wall behind them is David Burliuk’s painting Pots and a White Dog (1909; now in the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).

However, Tolstoy’s controversial iconoclastic position on art does not relegate him to the role of anti-modernist, as some of his contemporary critics imply.45 In writing his famous essay, Tolstoy joined a chorus of aesthetes and thinkers who also believed there was a conflict between art’s autonomy and social morality. This attitude encouraged individuals to

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burn or destroy certain works of art as instruments of sensual pleasure and symbols of an immoral and unjust society.46 For example, in 1872 John Ruskin burnt, “with all due ceremony,” a fine set of Goya Capricios.47 Ruskin also attacked Whistler for his “lack of noble subject matter and sincerity.”48 In January 1913 Abram Balashov, a psychiatric patient, slashed with a knife the well-known painting Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son by Ilya Repin, an image celebrated for its bloodiness and sensationalism and painted in a realistic style. Nonetheless, many newspapers didn’t hesitate to accuse Russian Futurists for inspiring such vandalism, and despite having nothing to do with this incident, Futurists like Khlebnikov reacted provocatively by glorifying Balashov’s act. Tolstoy concludes that it’s better to destroy all art than to allow “bad art” to exist, only to contradict himself a few pages later by pronouncing that art exists in a spiritual category and cannot be destroyed.49 This contradiction is the result of his outspoken artistic anti-traditionalism, which corresponds—albeit with a sense of ironic play in the avant-garde’s case— to a similar passion in Futurist provocation, such as the infamous rhetoric of their manifestos that urges one “to destroy museums,”“to throw from the ship of modernity” idolized cultural icons and figures, and so on. The point that reconciles these opposite approaches to art, as Guro puts it, is a concept of art that “should not serve as the source of pleasure,” but “should have much deeper meaning.” One may argue the major avant-garde theoretical concepts of spiritual “inner necessity” (Kandinsky),“artlessness” (Larionov and Kruchenykh), and the “objective notion” of the “creative law” (Malevich) are rooted in Tolstoyan concepts of art production based on “an irrepressible inner need,” rather than on any pragmatic goal that drives a “professional” who is forced to make a living from his or her art. Tolstoy’s condition of the “total freedom of the artist from any sort of preconceived demands” liberates the artist from the demands of taste and the tyranny of the art market.50 These new categories of valorization, first pronounced in What Is Art? found significant practical and theoretical release in the avant-garde’s interest in the issue of dilettantism, treated as a broad category of “nonprofessional” or naïve art, rather than as the private hobby of amateurs. The early avant-garde perceived dilettantism as a manifestation of unbounded creativity freed from regulations and professional requirements, which prioritized intuition and imagination over trained ability. For Futurists, this “complete artlessness” (quite in accordance with one of Tolstoy’s major anti-aesthetic ideas) made it possible to surpass “the banality of mastery” by expanding the boundaries of genre, style, and devices.51

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The most radical and productive feature of Tolstoy’s essay was his evaluation of children’s drawings, folk and naïve art, such as Yakut ornaments or Vogul ritualistic performance, and the art of African and Oriental cultures as on a par with any object of classical or contemporary European art. One can argue that such interest in folk and primitive art had already existed in previous art movements, such as Romanticism. However, both Tolstoy and the avant-gardists treat these works as art works, stripping them of the cultural labels identifying them as “exoticisms” and anthropological “curiosities” of mostly ethnographic value. Larionov liked to include in his group exhibits children’s drawings, multiethnic folk art, such as lubok (broadside folk prints), and works of naïve artists, the best-known of them being the self-taught Georgian Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani).52 Pirosmani made his living as a shop-sign painter in Tiflis and was “discovered” by the young Zdanevich brothers, Ilya and Kirill. They brought some of his oilcloths to Moscow, and the Neoprimitivists were immediately taken with his art. Alla Povelikhina and Evgenii Kovtun emphasize that Pirosmani’s art differed significantly from that of Russian sign-painters: “By comparison, Pirosmani seems to be an individualist, with his own themes, subject matter, and compositions, all of which existed outside of the accepted tradition. In terms of his vision of reality and free choice of subjects, Pirosmani is closest to Henri Rousseau, except that Pirosmani relied on the heritage of Georgian and Persian art.”53 Larionov commissioned Ilya Zdanevich to write an article on the Georgian artist, and asked for some paintings for a show by “the charming and remarkable Niko Pirosmani (we’ve come to love them so much), along with some of his wonderful signs.”54 In 1913, Pirosmani’s Portrait of Ilya Zdanevich (1913) was included along with other works of his in the “Target” exhibition and catalogue, organized by Larionov’s group. The avant-gardists’ intention was to erode the contrived borders between the “high” and “low” art, and to explode from within established models of perception. In the cases of both Tolstoy’s philosophy of art and avant-gardist artistic practice, the anarchic refutation of the conventional demands of modern styles, tastes, and “professionalism” may appear to be an aesthetic provocation, but it conceals something much more significant: a new cognitive experience, a new epistemology, the conscious annihilation of the aesthetic clichés of the“ideal”and“beauty.”In all of these“marginal events” of art, the category of aesthetic value accepted as a norm in a particular epoch is displaced, and art acquires a new significance outside of its current aesthetic definition. The fascination with dissonance, deliberate and

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FIGURE 9. Niko Pirosmanashvili, Portrait of Ilya Zdanevich, 1913. Oil on cardboard, 150 × 120 cm. Private collection, St. Petersburg.

accidental errors, and random chance is reflected in many documents of the early Russian avant-garde. According to the Tolstoy scholar Gary Saul Morson, Tolstoy pursues the same goal to address the process of creating, rather than closure, in the structure of his great novels.55 In his philosophy of art, nonetheless, Tolstoy is much more controversial and divided. He starts by denouncing all the rules, resulting in a desperate search for new, universal valorization criteria, which he strives to establish into new absolute rules. Futurists reached different conclusions: first, they

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saw their task as stripping the notion of art of all the veils of sacralization, and then sought to defend its autonomous status and its epistemological value. “Art is not an entertainment and not a temple right in the middle of the marketplace, but a new understanding of the world phenomenon [novyi smysl mirovykh iavlenii],”56 Matiushin wrote, as if in critical response to Tolstoy’s affirmation: “Until the sellers are driven out of the temple, the temple of art will not be a temple. The art of the future will drive them out.”57 Tolstoy’s challenge to aesthetics prompted Futurists’ and Neoprimitivists’ “everythingness,” a new methodology of artistic practices influenced by the avant-garde’s discovery of children’s drawings and folk art. The fascination with children’s world perception is evident in Kandinsky’s theoretical writing; children’s creative psyches inspired most of Elena Guro’s oeuvre and induced Kruchenykh to collect and publish Sobstvennye rasskazy i risunki detei (Children’s Own Stories and Drawings; 1914). The Futurist artist’s books draw ideas from the same unorthodox sources. Thus, Filonov’s lithographs to a poem by Khlebnikov, “Night in Galicia,” are inspired by the poetic visions, redolent of pagan Slavic mythology and visual archetypes embedded in folk art. The new “anti-aesthetic” was based on a new epistemology and a new philosophy of beauty underlying all the formal innovations of the early Russian avant-garde. This is exemplified in the joint editorial preface to the last issue of Union of Youth, where Cubo-Futurist artists and Hylaean poets indicate their goals, including “defining a philosophy of beauty,” “expanding the appreciation of beauty beyond the limits of consciousness—principle of relativity,” and accepting “epistemology as a criterion” for the new aesthetics.58 In the early avant-garde, making art was perceived as neither a process of rational and logical reconstitution of present reality nor an instrumental way of achieving social utopian ideals, such as the “brotherhood of man” in Tolstoy’s books. Thus, for Elena Guro, art exists to extol and “humanize” the world around us and art itself as a part of this world: “The poet is a giver, not a taker, of life.”59 Her perspective differentiates her critique of Tolstoy’s definition of beauty from the approach undertaken by the Symbolists. Guro disputes not only Tolstoy’s idea, but also the opposite position of the partisans of “l’art pour l’art.” In spite of her ironic reaction to Tolstoy’s axiom that there are only two worthwhile kinds of art—religious art, conveying “positive feelings,” and a “good universal everyday art,” which Guro does not take very seriously—she

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FIGURE 10. Pavel Filonov, book design for Velimir Khlebnikov, Izbornik (Selection) (St. Petersburg: EUY, 1914). Lithograph, 19.2 × 14.3 cm. Courtesy Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow.

does not reject a third truth, which responds to the concept of being “infected” by art, when the “sincerity” of artistic emotion becomes its main quality. Nonetheless, Tolstoy’s criterion of sincerity became a disturbing issue for some Futurists, and it provoked different responses. Voldem1rs Matvejs, for example , warns against the “ridiculous” demands “to be sincere and individual in any special sense of the word.”60 He even goes so far as to say that “there is no art without plagiarism, and even the freest art is based on plagiarism.”61 Nonetheless, like Kandinsky and Ilya Zdanevich, Guro was taken by the Tolstoyan idea of infection through art. But for an avant-garde artist like Guro, it was not an instrumental category for achieving a lofty utilitarian goal, but rather the essence of art, the goal in itself.62 “Many call the present state of painting anarchy,” Kandinsky argues in “The Question of Form.” “The same word is also used occasionally to describe the present state of music. It is thought, incorrectly, to mean unplanned upheaval and disorder. But anarchy is regularity and order created not by an external and ultimately powerless force, but by the feeling for the good.”63

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT: “MYSTICAL ANARCHISTS” AND OTHERS

An anarcho-individualist sensibility, which emerged in Russia during the first Russian revolution of 1905–7, under the influence of the writings of Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, and not least Nietzsche,64 provided a powerful motivation for the next generation of modernists and avantgardists. The last and strongest wave of anarchist revival in Russia began in 1917 and chronologically coincided with the critical stage of the Russian avant-garde movement. There were three waves in the history of Russian political anarchism: the 1870s, 1905–7, and 1917, the last two being interconnected.65 After the first wave of anarchism, in the 1870s, which was connected with the Populists, anarchism as a political current practically ceased to exist in the country until the revival of anarchist organizations in 1905–7. There is no connection between these two historically and ideologically distinct periods of anarchism: most anarchist literature was banned in Russia, and only very few individuals had access to it. What fragmentary knowledge existed on the subject came from secondary sources, usually written in foreign languages, and disseminated among a narrow circle of intellectuals.66 This situation at the beginning of the century helped to promote different forms of anarcho-individualism, rather than anarchosyndicalism or anarcho-communism. Individualist anarchism was not widespread in Russia on a national scale, but was limited to small circles of writers and artists among the “intelligentsia” in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. Some of the anarcho-syndicalists, the most Westernoriented group in the Russian anarchist movement, were greatly interested in aesthetic problems, which brought them close to the cultural stance of the anarcho-individualists. Toward 1907 there were several branches of political anarchism in Russia and among émigrés. The most influential was the Geneva group Khleb i volia, which published a newspaper of the same name very similar in spirit to the French anarchist journal La Révolte. Khleb i volia was initially close to the syndicalists but its members later became followers of Kropotkin and his “all-Russian anarcho-communism.” The anarchoterrorist groups Chernoe znamia, Beznachalie, and a few others constituted the most radical, extreme, violent, and destructive current. These were oriented toward the lumpenproletariat and were organized in small groups, often lacking any connection with one another. In his presentation of Russian anarchist tendencies at the International

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Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, the anarcho-communist Fedorov-Zabrezhnev singled out for mention among anarcho-individualist groups not only “Christian anarchists” (mostly adherents of Tolstoy, who were interested in Russian religious sects and published the journal Svobodnoe slovo), but also the literary Symbolist group of mystical anarchists. It is worth mentioning here that Fedorov-Zabrezhnev, being a purely political figure, complained that the Russian intelligentsia and writers had no knowledge or understanding of anarchism as an integral philosophy. While anarcho-communist ideas were spread mostly among factory workers and revolutionary youth, the liberal intelligentsia, “which tried to keep away from revolution, naturally preferred Stirner’s ideas and contradictory theory, which allowed any arbitrary conclusions . . . anarcho-individualists, Mystical Anarchists, decadents and . . . sexual perverts grow out of Stirner’s ideas.”67 Such annoyance can be easily explained: anarcho-individualists did not directly participate in the “revolutionary struggle.”68 The anarchoindividualists denounced socialist ideas, which in their interpretation turn the individual into a “blind instrument of society” (or, to follow Dostoevsky’s famous metaphor, a “piano key”). Instead, they advocated the development of individual freedom, “the complete, absolute, fully recognized potential of individual creativity, the full and unlimited autonomy of the individual.”69 Writing about the general transformation “from politics to culture” in fin-de-siècle Europe, David Weir points out: “This does not mean that modernist art directs us towards anarchist society the way socialist realism urges the proletarian revolution onward; rather, the politics of anarchism takes aesthetic form with modernism. Ideas particular to anarchism were adapted by poets and novelists in such a way that the outcome of those ideas was aesthetic rather than political.”70 Not quite. Social and political reality can affect neither the inner laws of aesthetic development nor the formal categories of poetic language, but it does shape the ideological views of the poet or artist. Weir’s perspective should not be generalized, even though it contains some elements of truth in regards to particular trends and groups, such as the Russian mystical anarchists, for one example. The doctrine of mystical anarchism originated in 1906 among St. Petersburg’s Symbolists. Georgii Chulkov, who is considered to be a leader of this group, edited three issues of Fakely (1906–8) and the collection Belye nochi (1907). In his programmatic article on mystical anarchism “The Paths of Freedom,” Chulkov summarizes his idea as “the doctrine

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of the paths of ultimate liberation, which include the ultimate affirmation of the personality as an absolute principle.”71 The contradictory and incoherent nature of Chulkov’s theory, which he attempts to structure very rationalistically, despite his denial of reason and “positivism,” is clear from his essay, and especially his appeal to “logical anarchists.”72 Kropotkin’s, Tolstoy’s, and Soloviev’s utopian overtones appear throughout the basic mystical anarchist concept of “community.” Chulkov claims that mystical anarchists don’t share the ideas of utopian anarchism, based on positivism, but he utilizes the same teleological language as the utopians, referring to the “absolute” in concepts such as “absolute principle,” “absolute ideal,” “ultimate affirmation,” “Eternal Wisdom,”“Eternal Harmony,”“World Beauty,”“Man-Messiah,”and so forth.73 Although his rhetoric is eschatological rather than positivistic, this does not prevent him from expressing his violent and thoroughly utopian “quasi-political” views: “The social revolution, which Europe must experience in the near future, is merely a minor prelude to the beautiful, worldwide fire in which the old world will burn up. The old bourgeois order will necessarily be destroyed in order to clear the field for the final battle: there, in the free socialist society, the mutinous spirit of the great Man-Messiah will rise up in order to lead mankind from mechanical arrangements to the miraculous embodiment of Eternal Wisdom.”74 This perspective evolved under the strong influence of the religious philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov, one of the most revered personalities among the Symbolists. Due to the popularity of his writings, the concept of anarchy in art became a very important part of modernist discourse after 1906, and led to the initiation of the short-lived mystical anarchists phenomenon.75 Meanwhile, Ivanov’s own views on anarchy (a recurring topic in his writings) evolved so drastically that in 1914, when the ideas of Stirner, Nietzsche, and Walt Whitman gradually become more and more noticeable in the avant-garde texts, he was the first to call the Russian Futurists, and not his fellow Symbolists, “the sole true Russian anarchists.”76 Indeed, in contrast with the utopian idea of mystical anarchism,77 Russian Futurists around 1910 leaned upon unbounded nihilism. At this time, Ivanov played a certain role in the transformation of anarchist aesthetics into the aesthetic of anarchy in Russia. He was the first to suggest the possibility of applying the idea of anarchism and anarchy outside the political and social sphere in “spiritual” as well as aesthetic terms: “If it does not want to be perverted, anarchy must define itself as a fact in the spiritual plane. It is anarchy’s destiny to suffer persecution, but it itself must be free from persecution and violence.”78

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Given the bewildering variety of Futurist groups and short-lived intertwined subgroups in the prerevolutionary decade, it is important to focus on a few of the most significant formations to gain a thorough understanding of the artistic ideology characteristic of the “anarchic period” of the Russian avant-garde. The Union of Youth (1910–14) was one such formation. The Union played a significant role in the Russian art world because it was the first successful attempt to organize a social and artistic structure that would unite avant-garde artists and poets on such a grand scale, “not limited by parochialism or dogma.”1 Its lifespan was short, but during its four very intense years of existence, this collective managed to put together seven shows, to publish three issues of its journal, to organize quite a few public lectures and debates, and to subsidize and print several books, including a Russian translation of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du cubisme (1912). The Union of Youth was instrumental in staging the first Futurist performances, and another ambitious project, creating a museum of modern art, was under way.2 Contemporaries applied the term “Futurism” to the work of the Hylaean poets, the artists of Larionov’s group in Moscow, and the Union of Youth in St. Petersburg, as well as to some other groups, but the real influence of Italian Futurism in Russia is a rather complicated question, especially if the aesthetic positions and work of many Futurist associations are taken into account. 59

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THE SPECIFICS OF RUSSIAN FUTURISM

When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti visited St. Petersburg and Moscow in February 1914, the leader of Italian Futurism could not fail to note both the originality of Russian painting and the fact that the similarity between some inner aspirations of Russian Cubo-Futurism and Italian Futurism was greater in theory than in poetics. The ideas and manifestos of Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, and Luigi Russolo (known in Russia primarily from the 1911 French edition Le Futurisme) fell on fertile soil. Interest on the part of the Union of Youth is evident from its publication, in the journal of the same name (issue 2, 1912) of a Russian translation of the Italian Futurist manifesto “Gli espositori al publico.” Russians not only could relate to many of the Italians’ theoretical propositions, published in their “Manifesto dei pittori Futuristi,” but also seemed to use them as the basis for the principal manifesto of the Union of Youth (1913), written by Olga Rozanova and adopted by other members at a special meeting.3 It is this shared ideology that permits us to speak of her text as the only manifesto of Russian painters directly connected with the documents of Italian Futurism. The “universal dynamism” proclaimed by the Italians corresponds to Rozanova’s statements on the “impetuous rush of time” and “continuous renewal.”The Italian Futurist call to “free the eye of the scales of atavism and culture” is reflected in her summons to “view the world opened wide.” Rozanova expressed the major collective idea of the Union of Youth by positing creative freedom as the principal condition for any artistic activity, which allows the spontaneous rendition of spiritual sensibility and “states of mind” in art. In Moscow, Marinetti became acquainted with the art of Mikhail Larionov’s group; in St. Petersburg’s art world, his guide was Nikolai Kulbin. We can judge his reaction from the enthusiasm and energy with which he immediately conceived of two parallel exhibitions, one of Italian art in Moscow, the other of Russian painting in Italy. He wanted to exhibit Russian art at the Futurists’ gallery in Rome and recruited Kulbin for the task of assembling paintings by his comrades in the Union of Youth (which by early 1914 had already disintegrated), as well as art by his Moscow colleagues.4 Unfortunately, this show never materialized, evidently because of prewar political conditions and the disorganized Russian artists, many of whom worked at day jobs to survive and could not afford to send their art to Italy at their own expense. Nevertheless, in 1914, a small, temporary “Russian section” opened at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome

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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti after his first lecture in St. Petersburg, February 1, 1914. Marinetti is sitting in the center, with a cigarette; on his right: Nikolai Kulbin; seated on his left: the composer Artur Lurie and the poet Benedikt Livshits; standing behind Kulbin in the second row: Nikolai Burliuk and Olga Rozanova, among other members of the Union of Youth. FIGURE 11.

as part of the “Prima Exposizione Libera Futurista Internazionale.” This exhibit also featured English, Belgian, and North American sculptors and painters. Besides Kulbin, participating Russians included Aleksandra Exter, Olga Rozanova, and Alexander Archipenko. Marinetti’s sojourn in Moscow and St. Petersburg was accompanied by lectures and a party in honor of the “master” in the famous St. Petersburg artists’ cabaret the Stray Dog, and a flurry of newspaper reviews appeared, ranging from derogatory to shocking to rapturous. The principal goal of the “first Futurist,” however, was to make the acquaintance of the Russian public, who in its overwhelming majority had no idea what Futurism was (but nonetheless greeted the charismatic Italian with fanatical enthusiasm), as much as to meet Russian Futurists, or “Futurians,” as they called themselves to underline their difference. The encounter caused irritation on both sides and mutual accusations of nostalgia for the past (passéisme). In a letter dated February 1914, the seventeen-year-old Roman Jakob-

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son summoned Kruchenykh, telling him: “Marinetti, by the way, craves a meeting with you Futurians and a debate, even if through the medium of a translator. Smash him and his junk and trash to bits—you’re so good at it! And it’s most important.”5 Marinetti accused the Russians of a lack of Futuristic aspirations and a devotion to the restoration of tradition instead—he sharply characterized them as longing for the archaic past; as people who thought they lived in the past perfect tense (plusquamperfectum, to use Marinetti’s own word).6 Marinetti had a point: the ancient name “Hylaea,” to give one example, reverberates with nostalgia for myth-making. If Italians were eager to “destroy museums” to be liberated from their own grand classical past, and redefine the national aesthetic idea and identity, Russians, on the other hand, had to excavate their own history, in order to get rid of the most recent aesthetic dogma and the “Westernized” self-identity that had been imposed on them. Russian Futurists returned the favor by charging Marinetti with “betrayal” of his own ideals and contemptuously rejecting his “fairy tales about Russian imitators.”7 Furiously defending the authenticity of the Russian avant-garde movement, Larionov announced: “We are arranging a gala reception for him. Everyone for whom Futurism is precious, as the principle of perpetual advancement, will appear at the lecture and we will pelt this renegade with rotten eggs. . . . Let him know even if Italy does not, Russia at least takes vengeance on traitors.”8 In the Italians’ obsession with technology and the machine world, they discern naïve devotion, not to the true future, but to the technological illusions of the present, to the “cheap junk” of what they thought as a philistine “utopian romanticism” that could just be glimpsed through his “Futurist armor.” The Russian Futurists’ anti-technological tendency is often complemented by their striking anti-urbanism, and is represented by a new mythologem—the revolt of things. Unlike the Italian Futurists, the Russian Futurians’s attitude toward the city and machine is cautious, but they poeticize it as endowed with an unintelligible, dangerous allure. The best illustration of this is Malevich’s lithograph of an airplane crashed into a train, which the artist signed and inscribed on the bottom: “the simultaneous death of a man in an airplane and on a railway.”9 It is difficult to spot any significant objects of technological innovation or new machines, such as cars, or electric lanterns, in Russian Futurist compositions. Instead, there are familiar traditional objects, often rural—such as bicycles, knife grinders, sewing machines, samovars, sickles, and saws—that are normally associated with domesticity, or the backward life of the agri-

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cultural societies.10 The typical nod toward the fact that in the beginning of the century Russia was an agrarian rather than industrial country seems superficial. First, at the time, Italy wasn’t among the most “futuristic” and advanced industrial powers either. Second, the Russian avant-garde art world existed practically exclusively in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where such twentieth-century innovations as electricity, cars, and so on were not unusual. I think the reason for such a marked rejection of technological “subjects” is much deeper and reflects the ideological difference between Russian and Italian Futurisms. While Italians chose to be the utopians in their purely futuristic ambitions, Russians never rejected the past, and indeed “internalized,” and deconstructed archaic myth, making a clear argument in their poetics for primitivism against all the attractions of civilized modernity. The “traditional” subjects of Malevich’s self-proclaimed “Cubo-Futurist” compositions are, first of all, the Neoprimitivist subjects, focused on the ritualized works and days of peasant life. Without doubt, Russian avant-gardists understood that they had a great deal in common with Italians, and the impudence of the first Marinetti manifestos, which immediately became well known in Russia, inspired their own mode of expression in “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” by David Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Khlebnikov; “Manifesto of Rayists and Futurians” by Larionov’s group; Kruchenykh’s “Declaration of the Word as Such”; and a great many essays proclaiming contemporaneity as “the only source for new art” by the Burliuks, Kulbin, Mayakovsky, and Livshits. Common to all of these were a nihilistic concept of confirmation through negation, and the call to “purge the old” and declare war against “common sense” and “good taste” in art and poetry; hatred of “ossified” language and the proclamation of a new free rhythm, the “phonic characteristics” of the word; “disrupted” syntax and the destruction of punctuation. Differences included the Russians’ aesthetic pluralism, strong antitechnological mood, the active exploration of tradition, ideological tolerance, contrary to the greatly politicized Futurist movement in Italy, and a persistent refusal to build any political program along with the aesthetic one. The latter property is very important, and reflects the strong heterogeneity, which is a primary assertion of anarchism, of the Russian movement on many structural levels. Nonetheless, the national and conceptual differences underscored the new nonmimetic and nonpsychological character of art and poetry, striving toward abstraction, and proved that the “Futurist moments” of the

FIGURE 12. Kazimir Malevich, Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Airplane and on a Railway, for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Vzorval’ (Explodity) (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913). 2nd edition: 450. Lithograph, 11.8 × 17.5 cm. Courtesy Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow.

FIGURE 13. Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913. Oil on canvas, 79 × 105 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph: Roman Beniaminson. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

Nikolai Kulbin, Portrait of Aleksei Kruchenykh, for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Vzorval’ (Explodity), 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913). Lithograph, 17.4 × 11.8 cm. Edition: 350. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (64.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 14.

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twentieth century shared generic features and were capable of “extending” national boundaries.11 As Mayakovsky, along with two Ego-Futurist poets, Konstantin Bolshakov and Vadim Shershenevich, declared in a letter commenting on Marinetti’s arrival in Russia to the editor of the newspaper Virgin Soil: “Denying any borrowing from the Italian Futurists, let us note a literary parallelism: Futurism is a social current born of the big city, which itself destroys all national distinctions. The poetry of the future is cosmopolitan.”12 Naturally, the meeting confirmed that both the Italians and the Russians had their independent paths, and that the latter in no way fitted into the modest niche of epigones of Italian Futurism that Marinetti (before his trip to Russia) had reserved for them. Summarizing these many differences in one example, Kazimir Malevich once subtly noted that “the alpha of futurism was, is, and will be Marinetti. The alpha of zaum was, is, and will be Kruchenykh.”13 THE UNION OF YOUTH

Around 1909–10, Elena Guro and Mikhail Matiushin came up with the idea of putting together a new association for independently minded young artists who were as yet unrecognized and without adequate financial means of support. Earlier attempts to create something of the sort had been made by Kulbin and his group, including August Ballier, Eduard Spandikov, Iosif Shkolnik, Evgenii Sagaidachnyi, and others, all of whom participated in the “Impressionists’ ” 1909 exhibition in St. Petersburg and later joined the Union of Youth.14 As Matiushin reminisces, as early as the end of 1909, “a split developed between [parts of] Kulbin’s group and the more active members. We decided to form another circle so as to mount [our own] exhibitions, so we called a general meeting at our place and thus organized the Union of Youth society of artists.”15 Guro and Matiushin wanted to create a new type of working association capable of funding and organizing exhibitions and publishing activities for its members, while maintaining an affordable collective workspace for a nominal fee. But the most important element of their vision was a shared ideology motivating the entire agenda. In Guro’s writing one of the most important concepts of the new art and philosophy was realized: the essential quest of joining art and life together. “Life is a very serious matter and can be fruitful apart from success in art for us as well . . . it is possible to create not through your book or exhibition, but through life itself.”16 They both viewed their Union of Youth as an association of like-minded participants joined by their sense of contemporaneity, loy-

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alty to artistic and social experiment, aesthetic pluralism, and receptivity to the “youthful spirit of the Futurist mentality.”17 (Repeated endlessly in the numerous essays published on or around the Union of Youth at the time, this formula would soon become the trademark of the early avantgarde movement. Almost a decade later, in 1917, the most radical avantgarde structures still chose to call themselves the “young federation” or “young group,” with the term “young” in this instance, conceptually interchangeable with “left.”) In the draft declaration, written in the fall of 1912, Khlebnikov speaks for the “younger generation” of “Russia tomorrow,” explaining that this highly influential mythologem of “youth” produced a certain “cult” in the avant-garde’s poetics.“We accuse the older generations of giving the younger ones the cup of life already poisoned,” he declared. “This is a revolt of the youth.”18 Moreover, this association was meant to be an idealistic commune of individuals, managed“together” on collective principles, rather than by another bureaucratic structure, administered by an elected and paid management. Such a social stance, their integrity, and the synthetic nature of their aesthetic quest was likely inspired by the experience of the poets’ and artists’ commune called the Abbaye de Créteil, organized by French Cubists in 1906–8.19 Around 1906, the painter Albert Gleizes, along with the poets Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, Alexandre Mercereau, and a few others, rented some buildings near the village of Créteil, not far from Paris, and organized a semianarchist, semisocialist artistic commune later known as the Abbaye. The utopian goal of this community of young men, which was small, but influential in modernist circles, was to regenerate society through art. Under the strong influence of William Morris (and some Tolstoyan ideas as well), they attempted to balance their communal spirit and the individual artistic ego by promoting an “organic” interrelationship of the arts.20 They brought artists and writers together by holding joint exhibitions, and printing artists’ books. “We had decided to support the idea of work by a trade in harmony with our arts,” Gleizes later reminisced. “The common ground was discovered in a printery, the printing art. The writers and poets were interested in that logically, the painters themselves were no strangers to it.”21 This passage reveals a striking parallel with the ideology of the Union of Youth, which in 1913 merged with the poetic Hylae. The founding member, Elena Guro, designed most of her own books. The same year they published a special issue of their journal, in which the aesthetics of word and image intertwined. There were also other similarities, expressed in the collective spirit of the association, and in the interest of its members in expanding

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their art “for life.” Thus, many of the Union’s artists did not shy away from pure “artisanship” and became involved in the production of shop signs, for example.22 The Abbaye lasted for a couple of years, until 1908, when it failed financially, although most ex-members continued their meetings and discussions on art. Their gatherings shaped the theory of “unanimism” in art.23 Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Archipenko, Brancusi, Juan Gris, and Marinetti were frequent visitors, although not actually members of the group. Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger— who taught Nadezhda Udaltsova, Liubov Popova, and quite a few other Russian artists in Paris—also visited the Abbaye. In their book Du cubisme (1912), which was almost immediately translated into Russian by Ekaterina Nizen, Guro’s sister, with Olga Rozanova’s help, Gleizes and Metzinger interpreted painting as an “organism,” and Gleizes “declared the Cubist style an organic and thus ‘natural’ embodiment of the élan vital.” According to Mark Antliff, Bergson (or rather the Bergsonians, with their far-reaching interpretation of organicist and vitalist doctrines) influenced not only Cubist theory, but also the processes by which political concepts were aestheticized in twentiethcentury modernism. However, after reading Metzinger’s “Cubisme et tradition” in 1911, Bergson was quite critical of the author, saying that while theory now commonly “precedes creation . . . it was the contrary formerly” and that he preferred genius to theory in the arts, because “from intuition one can pass to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition.”24 Bergson’s critique of “Cubist reason” is strikingly similar to some of the Russian avant-gardists’ critiques of Cubism. Intuition was highly esteemed in the poetics of the early Russian avant-garde, although its value was often drawn from sources other than Bergson. Goncharova, for example, doesn’t mention Bergson’s writings much, yet she repeats the similar argument for “artistic genius” in her polemics on Cubism. In spite of the claims made by Gleizes and Metzinger, who considered Cubism the most organic form of art, Cubism combined an irrational utopian ideal with the rational principle. Bergson’s original theory was built on the opposition of the rational and the intuitive; organic form (which continuously renews and changes) and mechanical form (which is predetermined, frozen). He interpreted creativity as a manifestation of the cosmic creative process of élan vital, in which individual creativity does not just produce, but is also a product. It was not the artist, but the élan vital, according to Bergson, that was the source of all creativity. “This correlation between creativity and

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novelty and identification of aesthetic vanguardism with revolutionary change is a paradigm that pervades Cubist-related art criticism,” Mark Antliff argues.25 Bergson’s influence on the early Russian avant-garde was not widespread, although his theory of creativity had an enduring influence on Russian philosophy after the translation into Russian in 1909 of his book L’Evolution créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution).26 Matiushin, who was very interested in the theoretical postulates of Cubism, often cited P. D. Ouspensky’s esoteric Tertium Organum (1912), in which he found an unlikely parallel to many Cubist doctrines. Significantly, he did not make any references to Bergson in his comments on Du Cubisme, published in one of the issues of The Union of Youth journal. This might be because the concept of organicist criticism had been introduced in Russia long before Bergson, in an 1858 article by literary critic Apollon Grigoriev titled “On the Present State of Art Criticism.” Grigoriev, a friend of Dostoevsky’s, and a great proponent of Stirner’s philosophy, was also affiliated with the Pochvennichestvo (men of the soil) political and literary movement, and applied his theory to both social and aesthetic spheres. His organicist criticism, influential in Russia in its own right, differs from Bergsonian theory, but nonetheless, some Russian scholars of Stirner and Bergson see a typological connection with Grigoriev.27 Grigoriev suggested that art should be regarded as a synthetic, integral, spontaneous comprehension of life determined by intuition, as opposed to analytic, rational cognition founded on scientific knowledge. A Russian poet and literary critic who considered himself a follower of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling, Grigoriev applied the metaphors of organic “growth” to the process of creating, as well as to the process of thinking. His most important contribution to critical theory was the foundation of a new epistemology, based on intuitive knowledge, favoring a process of creation independent of the individual creator, which instead “grew”out of“art”itself. He illustrates this source of art within art by comparing the springing up of folk song to that of plants arising from the soil.28 The early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde revived the antiutilitarian ideals of nineteenth-century organicism. The defining features of early Russian avant-garde art included a continuous spiritual and intellectual quest and consistent formal experimentation, which may be why it defies all attempts to schematize it, or to enclose the individual artist or poet within the limitations of any single tendency or group. Most of their careers reflect the evolution of this movement, which was motivated by an inexorable thirst for perpetual self-

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reinvention through creative exploration, rather than by set achievements. This is especially true in the case of Pavel Filonov. Certain elements of the aesthetics of anarchy are present in his extreme ideological eclecticism, which includes a mixture of mysticism, organicism, rationalism, and utopianism, transformed into his own aesthetic goal of transforming the world through a “re-evolution”—a portmanteau word combining “revolution” and (organic) “evolution”—created by the energy of the artist. “For we know that what is of most value in the painting or drawing is man’s mighty work on the object wherein he reveals both himself and his immortal soul. We are concordant with all the achievements of art, but we detest its exploiters and parasites. . . . We do not divide the world into two regions, East and West, but stand in the center of the global life of art, in the center of a tiny but avant-garde handful of persistent workers, the conquerors of painting and drawing,” Filonov writes in his manifesto “Made Paintings”(1914), cosigned by D. N. Kakabadze, A. M. Kirillova, and E. A. Lasson-Spirova, the members of his own small group Intimate Studio, organized right after the Union disbanded.29 Artistic energy is preserved in “made” paintings and drawings that demand “long, persistent work” from the artist, according to Filonov. Although the aesthetics and style of his works are very different from the pointillism of Neo-impressionists such as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac, the philosophical concept behind Filonov’s works partially corresponds with Signac’s anarchist ideals. Filonov compares his compositions with a growing organism, consisting of numerous fragments, or units. Every such detail, according to Filonov, should be autonomous; the aim is to create “paintings and drawings that are equal to the stone churches of Southeast and West Russia in their superhuman tension of will.” “They will decide your destiny on the Day of Judgement of art, and know that this day is nigh.”30 This intensity of artistic will permeates his most enigmatic work, The Flight into Egypt (1918), a visualized palimpsest, that bridges languages and epochs, and brings together Native American warrior and Russian peasant Madonna in an iconic primordial landscape. (The given date of this painting I find highly questionable, it must have been done much earlier, around 1914–15, since Filonov selected a sketch of this composition for the cover of his visionary poem Propeven’ o prorosli mirovoi, published in 1915.) Filonov’s original idea of “madeness,” which requires from the artist a persistent process of hard labor to “conquer the reevaluations and mysteries of art,” is similar to the alchemical concept of the opus contra naturam. This surprising orientation toward natural philosophy and or-

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Pavel Filonov, The Flight into Egypt (The Refugees),1918 [?]. Oil on canvas, 71.4 × 89.2 cm. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937) AC 2001.21.

FIGURE 15.

ganicism, which is present in some of Guro’s, Kulbin’s, and Matiushin’s works as well, is justified by idealistic—among them some anarchist— tendencies in the philosophical foundations of the avant-garde movement. Grigoriev’s “organicist criticism” and Bergsonian theory had a certain influence on the conceptualization of Organic art, conceived by Guro and developed by Matiushin into an artistic school in the 1920s. For the Russian Futurists, the conception of man, nature, and society as a growing, interchanging “living organism” was much more appealing than a “machine” model. In this respect, Matiushin’s self-portrait as a crystal is an iconic image of Organic art.31 At the very beginning of 1910, before the first Union of Youth exhibition opened in February, Guro and Matiushin suddenly withdrew from the association for no apparent reason. They realized that lacking serious funding, their ideal communal model could hardly be achieved, and the Union was rapidly turning into a bloated organization with a chairperson, and an executive board, controlled by twenty-nine-year-old

FIGURE 16. Mikhail Matiushin, Self-Portrait “Crystal,” 1917. Oil on canvas, 70 × 37.3 cm. Private collection.

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Levkii Zheverzheev. He was the major, and on most occasions the only, sponsor of the group. As Matiushin explained the move: A studio was found on Karpovskaia St[reet] and everything seemed under control, but when we began to examine the material on hand, it proved to be very feeble—we couldn’t start off with things like that. Several of the Unionists shared our plans only in a formal sense, not fundamentally. . . . Guro and I handed in our written resignation[s], entrusting the entire organization to a person who really wanted to help those who remained behind, i.e., the art patron Levkii Zheverzheev, (who had been invited into the Union by Shkolnik and Savelii Shleifer).32

When the infuriated Zheverzheev withdrew his financial support in the very end of 1913, following a scandal Kruchenykh provoked during the premiere of Victory over the Sun (Kruchenykh publicly accused the sponsor of fraud for not paying the agreed honorariums to the authors and performers), the Union of Youth simply ceased to exist as an organization. However, before the Union of Youth disbanded, it merged with Hylae earlier in 1913, the most intense year of its existence. The collaboration between the two groups, as well as with Larionov’s team, who were often invited to participate despite some conceptual disagreements, led to a flurry of public activity by their members. That year, they hosted joint debates, lectures, and discussions. They published an expanded third issue of the Union of Youth journal and a bunch of Futurist books— limited Futurist editions of criticism and poetry designed by the avantgardists—as well as successfully staging of the first two Futurist plays in Petersburg. At the very beginning of 1913, Matiushin, who rejoined the association that January, was elected to the executive board of the Union of Youth, along with Rozanova, Matvejs, and Zheverzheev. Guro had been gravely ill with leukemia, and she died the same year. After her death, Rozanova competed with Matvejs in defining a theoretical framework of the new art. Her essay “The Foundations of the New Art and Why It Is Not Understood” (1913) served as the groundwork for the Union of Youth’s manifesto, in spite of Matvejs’s harsh criticism. Acknowledging the essential place of art in life, Rozanova emphasizes the role of contemporaneity, which required a new philosophical approach to art. Rozanova founds her aesthetic philosophy on two major principles: first, the artist’s creative freedom and autonomy from outside regulation, whether by art salons or by academic or avant-garde structures; and, second, the primacy of intuitive and spiritual components over material or pragmatic goals in making and interpreting art. At the same time, Rozanova does not regard her own clearly idealistic and Neoromantic

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Olga Rozanova, Self-Portrait, 1912. Oil on canvas, 52 × 62 cm. Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Ivanovo.

FIGURE 17.

position, which she shared with Guro, as a mandate to denounce “reality” in art. Instead, she suggests a new valorizing criterion: the “beauty of the real,” which she treats not only as an aesthetic, but also as an ethical category. Rozanova’s oeuvre cannot be accommodated easily within the sole categories of Cubo-Futurism or Suprematism, or any other school, for her paintings, drawings, and designs show a strength and originality that pushes them far beyond conventional conceptual boundaries. While working in the most diverse directions and styles, Rozanova always retained her artistic individuality, and the exploration of color became the distinguishing feature of her entire artistic process. Rozanova’s work seems to exist within a compressed time, as a single, compact entity; and this is nowhere more manifest than in her conscious reliance upon color correlations as the fundamental element in composition. From the very beginning of her career, Rozanova tended mostly toward abstract composition based on dynamics and discordant rhythm. She passed quickly

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from Neoprimitivist still lifes and portraits toward a new Futurist rhythmic displacement that she identified with the dissonance of the industrial city. Her Fire in the City (1914) indicates that Rozanova’s primary artistic purpose was to convey movement—if not external and visible, then internal and spiritual. The Union manifesto reflected the foundational ideas of the early avant-garde movement, which circulated among the Hylaeans, Neoprimitivists, and many others. It was the first, along with the collective “Manifesto of the Rayists and Futurians,” in the series of declarations, published in 1913, which marked a different period in the evolution of the avant-garde, which was turning toward abstraction. They defined art by its creative process as such, in reaction to the overall political and social agenda imposed on Russian art in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, they were not interested in isolating themselves from society, or claiming an “ivory tower.” On the contrary, by proclaiming the principle of “art for life and life for art,” the early Russian avant-gardists attempted to erode the regulated social separation between artist and audience. Art is no longer assigned the role of “an easy chair,” using Matisse’s popular metaphor, in which the public can dream of beauty and relax from mental and physical fatigue; rather, art becomes action, responsibility, a constant struggle, and spiritual feat. Marginalized and autonomous in the art world, the avant-gardists resisted social and cultural inertia. Artists and poets were searching for a new language with which to comprehend the very notion of art, and the theoretical works of the early avant-garde were a necessary and integral part of their artistic production. ARTISTS AND THEIR TEXTS

The space of art and poetry extends beyond “pure” painting and “pure” literature; in their critical works, the leaders of the poetical and artistic avant-garde did not seek to appropriate the role of critic and intrude upon another genre. They aspired toward producing the opposite effect: to dissolve such boundaries and organically broaden the definition of art in their search for new forms and models of interactions between artist and audience. The artists’ critical notes and manifestos, their selected correspondence, and diaries reveal another cornerstone for the interpretation and reconstruction of the whole “text” of avant-garde culture in Russia, firmly placed within the general European context. Their self-reflexive theoretical and critical meditations on the nature of art are an indispensable component of the “text” in the poetics of the early avant-garde. In

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their ontological approach, the object is a phenomenon, a truth in itself, expressed as the “thing as such,” or a “word as such” in Futurist poetry. As Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it: Two new philosophical catchwords confronted the Neo-Kantian preoccupation with methodology. One was the irrationality of life, and of historical life in particular. In connection with this notion, one could refer to Nietzsche and Bergson. . . . The other catchword was Existenz. . . . Just as Kierkegaard had criticized Hegel as the philosopher of reflection who had forgotten existence, so now the complacent system-building of Neo-Kantian methodologism, which had placed philosophy entirely in the service of establishing scientific cognition, came under critical attack. . . . Heidegger’s new philosophical effort also joined in the battle cry of phenomenology, “To the things themselves.”33

Heidegger displaced the systematic priority of scientific cognition in his aesthetic. According to his theory, a work of art must not be reduced to a sign that refers to a certain meaning; rather, it presents itself in its own being “as such.” Werner Hofmann delineates this general issue of the twentieth-century avant-garde using a Heideggerian metaphor of the bridge and the dam: What Heidegger said about the bridge and the dam sheds light on a new consciousness. Reflection is not merely a bridge spanning the work of art; in its own way, accessible to it alone, it tries to possess the work. . . . The raw material of this process—the work of art, the finished product—is its interpretation, which also becomes a work: the result of intellectual labor. . . . Its creator cannot renounce this reflecting world, but must be prepared to discuss and to enter into it.34

Many theoretical and critical writings of the early Russian avant-garde can be read as literary, poetic works. Explicitly written to convey the aesthetics of the movement—Futurism, Neoprimitivism, or Suprematism (but never expressed in the form of a specific agenda)—these works communicate instead the ideological mentality of the movement, with the intensity of perception and reflection distinguishing avant-garde poetics. As Kulbin put it: “The poetry of art is the theory of art.”35 Kandinsky’s fluent, metaphorical prose, Malevich’s ecstatic style, and Kruchenykh’s paradox-ridden critical works are illustrative examples that reflect an intense quest for new structures by which the very concept of art could be understood. For Russian avant-garde artists, it was the process of creation that was the final goal and result. Set in this environment, many poets’ and artists’ critical notes are a reflective analysis of contemporary artistic phenomena, which they approach as the context of their own art in all their hypostases as painters, poets, and critics.

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Among the generic features of the early avant-garde, manifested in the artists’ writings, was the will to autonomous consciousness, the desire to create a free and tolerant space for multiple trends and concepts to coexist without one dominant school or style. While the poetics of the early Russian avant-garde have several important tendencies and features, they should not be regarded as binding or normative. These tendencies were transformed during the first two decades of the twentieth century, at times foregrounding the cultural discourse, then disappearing entirely at other times. These same shifts also mark the creative methods of various artists’ and poets’ artistic development. The aesthetics of the early avant-garde aimed at achieving artistic freedom and sought new forms. It was diametrically opposed to the ossification of methods and devices, and the dissolution of dynamism into stasis. Matei Calinescu’s notion that “self-consciousness—or the illusion of self-consciousness—is absolutely crucial to the definition of the more recent avant-garde” could be successfully applied to the early avant-garde as well.36 Russian avant-garde artists and poets rejected fixed ideas, developing their individual voices to find their own “third truth” instead. Their writings on art contain in embryo the potential to break down artistic clichés and stereotypes, whether of the academic or the avant-garde variety. Writing as critics and theorists, nevertheless they remained poets who were organically incapable, as Pushkin’s Salieri put it, of “dissecting music like a corpse.”37 In their view, art was produced to aggrandize, to recreate anew the surrounding world, with art itself as a part of this world. THE PRINCIPLE OF FREEDOM

Most of the early Russian avant-garde’s theoretical texts, manifestos, and literary and visual works share the important theme of unbounded freedom, understood as freedom from metaphysical rationality. It is a concept that extends back to Kandinsky’s celebrated essay “The Spiritual in Art,” which emphasizes freedom to act and create. Kandinsky exerted an immense influence on young artists and literati in both Russia and Europe. Thus, in his reminiscences of Kandinsky, the Dadaist Hugo Ball noted that “The idea of freedom is quite marked in Kandinsky, carried over into the domain of art. What he says about anarchy is reminiscent of sentences in Bakunin and Kropotkin, only that he applies the concept of freedom very spiritually to the aesthetic.”38 And according to the British art historian Herbert Read’s theoretical suggestion, similar priorities are

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found in the anarcho-individualist concept of freedom, in which “the philosophy of freedom is an activist philosophy—the philosophy of those who create—whether as artists, as co-operators or as personalities.”39 Like his other essays, Voldem1rs Matvejs’s “The Principles of the New Art” (1912), which enunciated the major concepts, or “principles,” of the early Russian avant-garde’s theory and poetics, contributing to recognition of its autonomy, was published under his pen name, Vladimir Markov. Energetic, knowledgeable, and extensively trained in philosophy, Matvejs was instrumental in the Union of Youth’s activities and initiatives.40 A lesser artist, he proved to be a brilliant theoretician in the movement, if unable to fully apply his ideas in his own artistic practice. His activities propelled the Union to initiate printed collections, arrange debates and lectures, and start on the ambitious idea of a new art museum. The Museum of Modern and Primitive Art was to remain an unrealized project, although some aspects of this proposal were partially applied in the conceptualization of the short-lived Museum of Painterly Culture and Museum of Artistic Culture during the early revolutionary years 1917–19, when they were organized by the avant-gardists, among them Malevich and Tatlin, ex-members of the Union of Youth. In 1912, Matvejs wrote a book on Chinese poetry and worked on a project related to Siberian art and shamans. He also traveled through Europe, buying primitive sculptures for the Union of Youth museum and acquiring research for a groundbreaking theoretical book on African art that was written in 1913–14, a year before the well-known Carl Einstein monograph, but published posthumously, in 1919.41 Instead of a neocolonialist perspective of valorizing African art according to common ethnographic methodologies for the treatment of such subjects at the time, Matvejs recognizes the artistic qualities of the works, highly praising their difference from the Eurocentric aesthetic tradition. Matvejs’s priorities are apparent in a letter he wrote to Zheverzheev from Paris on 26 July 1912: “What wonderful Polynesian or African sculpture one can buy here for 50–100 francs! I can only buy rubbish—works by the Futurists and Picasso— rubbish compared with the sculptures. But I can’t not buy Picasso—they’d kill me [for it] in Petersburg. . . . So I’ve reserved eight Picassos at 4 francs each.”42 Among the major concepts of “The Principles of the New Art,” the principle of free creation is not only self-reflective, but manifests when the fragile balance between “all that exists” and the “own I” is achieved, and in the “free relation toward all that exists and surrounds us, this attraction and gracious relation toward the manifestation of our own I.”43

FIGURE 18.

Voldema-rs Matvejs in 1907.

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Thus,“free creation” neither isolates individuality from society nor serves as an applied dogma. Indeed, it enables the “liberated” artist to generate other principles that are derived from it. Free art is art from which “chasing or processing is absent—elements that completely destroy the initial mirage and in which the artist has already ceased to be a creator.”44 Matvejs defends the artist’s inner freedom as a necessary initial condition for creativity, writing,“From time immemorial, free creation has been art for itself; the spectator, the public has been for it a completely fortuitous phenomenon. In olden times, music and singing were like this, and only subsequently did they become a means of gathering and entertaining an audience. If in his attitude to art the artist becomes like the savage, then, like him, he will think only of himself.”45 Unlike Elena Guro, he denounces the modernist concept of “originality,” warning against “ridiculous” demands “to be sincere and individual in any special sense of the word,” and even goes so far as to say that “there is no art without plagiarism, and even the freest art is based on plagiarism.”46 Taking another genetic modernist idea of the repudiation of Eurocentrism as a point of departure, Matvejs introduces his parallel concept of nonconstructiveness (as nonrationalized, nonpragmatic, antiteleological elements) of some cultures. He accuses modern Europe of lacking the ability to “understand the beauty of the naïve and the illogical,” and, hindered by strict aesthetic dogma, unable to “reconcile itself to the disintegration of our existing world view,” and “imbue itself with the anarchism that ridicules our own elaborate rules, and escape into a nonconstructive world.”47 This aspiration to distance oneself from Western tradition was an attempt to build cultural and intellectual autonomy and redefine Russian identity, an interest common to many Russians around the turn of the century. The Russian art historian Pavel Muratov defined the quest of the whole generation when he questioned the imposed authority of Eurocentric values for emerging Russian modernism: Our painting is already part of the general European current. . . . But there one finds cold analysis and the work of an inquisitive, observant mind, whereas here there is delicate lyricism, the confessional song of the soul. . . . It is difficult, almost impossible, for us to compare ourselves with the highly cultivated Denises, Guerins, and Vuillards. And why should we have to?48

The move to dismiss cultural Eurocentrism was common to the general tendencies of Western modernism, which sought inspiration in African (Picasso) or Polynesian (Gauguin) art, but in Russia, it was an especially

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complex and sensitive issue. For over two centuries, ever since Peter the Great had commissioned European artists en masse to work and teach in Russia, and to introduce Russian society to the concept of secular painting, which had not existed there before, professional Russian art had been consciously oriented toward the West. This imposed Eurocentrism had become “official” aesthetic dogma, replacing the Russian iconic canon, even in religious art. The philosophical and aesthetic orientation of the early Russian avant-garde was expanding “in time,” rather than “in space,” and instead of geographically exploring the “found” traditions of primitive cultures (as was happening with Picasso or Gauguin), Russian Neoprimitivists and Futurists were drilling through the layers of time, returning to the semi-forgotten roots of their own past, particularly of their archaic Eastern origins (Scythian or Byzantine, for example). This direction was to a great extent determined by Goncharova’s turn to national art and her predilection for the oriental tradition as a counterweight to the Eurocentric orientation of Russian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.49 As she notes in the foreword to her 1913 exhibition, “I have studied all that the West could give me, but in fact, my country has created everything that derives from the West. Now I shake the dust from my feet and leave the West, considering its vulgarizing significance trivial and insignificant— my path is toward the source of all arts, the East.”50 Goncharova, like Larionov, was capable of firmly renouncing her own achievements, that is, “old ground” that risked becoming “devices” or clichés, in favor of the experimental. Participants in Larionov’s exhibitions—Aleksei Morgunov, Malevich, Le Dantu, and others—shared the same Neoprimitivist attitude peppered with irony. Most of them, apart from Goncharova, who belonged to the old aristocracy, were of humble origin, came from small towns, and were deeply connected to the Russian provinces. They kept alive the memory of folk art aesthetics with its archaic pagan elements, as well as the Christian Orthodox ideals of the pre-schism Old Russian and Byzantine icons and manuscripts. These traditions were neglected from the eighteenth century onward, often oppressed as “heretical,” and considered “barbaric” and “low” by the cultural and theological dogma of the institutionalized Russian Church. Many Greek and Old Russian icons were irretrievably destroyed, and it was not until the 1910s that the revival and first exhibitions of medieval icons began. The only social groups that internalized and preserved the tradition were the Old Believers, still treated as religious heretics by the Synod, and it comes as no surprise that Mikhail Larionov’s family belonged to one of the strongest and most interesting

Natalia Goncharova, Religious Composition: Archangel Michael, 1910. Oil on canvas; unframed: 129.5 × 101.6 cm. Purchased with funds provided by George Cukor (M.88.22). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Digital image © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY. FIGURE 19.

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branches of this movement, the Pomors, who had a significant community in Moscow at the time. Simultaneously, like their European counterparts, the Russian avantgardists were interested in primitive and traditional art of various historical periods and cultures. They were known for studying and meticulously sketching objects in the ethnographic museums of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including Scythian stone images and statuettes of Tungusian shamans, wooden Enisei and North American idols, fragments of Buddhist icons, and Egyptian motifs. The drive toward an archaic past is distinctive in works by Kandinsky, the “Westerner” among Russian artists, so called because he spent most of his artistic life in Germany. He participated in Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophical group and pursued an interest in shamanism and Russian mysticism. Kandinsky was one of the few, if not the only, Russian avant-gardists who had directly associated his art with anarchism as early as 1910. “Anarchistic thought especially supported Kandinsky’s abhorrence of artificial rules and his commitment to free choice as a way to enlightenment and as a means of over coming the limitations of the present age,” Rose Washton-Long argues.51 Kandinsky cultivated this interest in artistic sources “outside” of conventional doctrines, turning his attention to folk, medieval and primitive art.52 Matvejs argues that contemporary “civilized” man has lost his faculty of immediate perception of beauty. This argument allows him to revise the criterion of beauty by expanding the concept beyond the purely aesthetic context. He insists on a radical change in valorizing priorities, refusing to submit to a given norm, or any established aesthetic regulations. Instead, Matvejs doesn’t hesitate to elevate chance over choice in his new system: Can chance be beauty? Yes, and a beauty that you will not reveal, find or grasp by constructive thought. . . . For Europe, chance is a means of stimulation, a departure point for logical thought, whereas for Asia, it is the first step in a whole series of subsequent, nonconstructive works of beauty. So, essentially the principle of chance is not the result of rational processes consciously oriented towards a certain aim and is not even a game played by a hand ungoverned by the apparatus of thought. . . . . The source [of it] can be found not only in blind, extrinsic, purely external factors, but also in the inmost recesses of man’s very soul. . . . It is on this faculty of man’s spirit . . . that the principal of free creation is built.53

Matvejs expands the idea of beauty to include it in the instant, in the transient, and in dissonance, “often in objects seemingly absurd and coarse, there lies a wealth of inner beauty . . . that you will not encounter

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in objects constructed by the mind on principles of pure proportions and practical truth.”54 This new “nonconstructive” aesthetic was founded on a new epistemology and a new philosophy of beauty underlying all the formal innovations of the early Russian avant-garde. It emerges in the reaction against the establishment of any domineering canon in the arts. As a result of their philosophical perspectivism, the early Russian avant-garde recognized many different coexisting aesthetic systems developing simultaneously. First of all, the aesthetics of anarchy in the early avant-garde is revealed in the nonuniformity of this artistic movement itself, in its social and aesthetic diversity. The powerful presence of leading women artists and poets, who worked alongside men on equal ground, and the significant social and ethnic heterogeneity of participants are a striking difference from previous cultural formations. Any attempt to present the Russian avantgarde as a united homogeneous movement of subsumed groups will inevitably fail. Secondly, this is reflected in the attentive interest of new art in fields and genres that seem to erode the traditional boundaries of art and deconstruct the Eurocentric tradition and its accepted classical ideal of beauty. This interest gave rise to the concept of “everythingness,” and a deliberate element of eclecticism in the Russian avant-garde.“We stand up for the total freedom of art and for the advantages of eclecticism as a reviving source,” Aleksandr Shevchenko asserts.55 Having addressed the central idea, the historical and social background, and some major theoretical issues of the early avant-garde movement in Russia, let us now turn to an analysis of some captivating avantgardist visual and literary texts, together with such important genres as the avant-garde book and theater.

PART TWO

Poetics

4

A Game in Hell The Poetics of Chance and Play

Velimir Khlebnikov’s short poem “To Alyosha Kruchenykh” (1920), whose first line has acquired great symbolic importance in retrospect, may be the key to understanding the major quest behind the poetics of the early Russian avant-garde: A Game in Hell, hard work in heaven— our first lessons were pretty good ones together, remember? We nibbled like mice at turbid time— In hoc signo vinces!1

The allusion is to the lithographed Futurist book Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), a poem that Khlebnikov co-authored with Kruchenykh, originally published in 1912. Here the proverbial “Futurist devil,” seen through the lens of dark irony and lubok grotesquerie, appears for the first time, playing with a sinner who has bet his soul in a card game. Many years later Kruchenykh recalled this work in his memoirs: In Khlebnikov’s room, untidy and bare as that of a student, I pulled out of my calico notebook two sheets, some 40–50 lines of a draft of my first poem, A Game in Hell. I humbly showed it to him. Suddenly, to my surprise, Velimir sat down and began adding his own lines above, below, and around my text. That was typical of him—he was ignited by the tiniest spark. He showed me the pages filled with his minute handwriting. Together we read them, argued, revised. That was how we unexpectedly and involuntarily became co-authors.2

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In her design for this book ridiculing the “archaic devil,” Natalia Goncharova adhered to the centuries-old lubok tradition—the popular print style. However, the language, metaphors, and general intonation of the poem could not be more contemporary: in the Futurists’ own critical interpretation, it mocked “the modern” vision of hell, which “is ruled by greediness and chance, and is ruined, in the end, by boredom.”3 This Futurist—but not the least futuristic—hell appears to be suspiciously similar to Dostoevsky’s sarcastic and anti-utopian vision of the “perfect” future society in Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky envisions a future sterilized of the slightest trace of individual creative will or unpredictable chance intervening in the absolute perfection of the closed system, where man turns into an automaton and will be “nothing more than something in the nature of a piano key.” All human action will automatically be computed . . . mathematically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory; or still better there will appear various loyal publications, like our contemporary encyclopedias, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world. . . . Of course, you will think up all sorts of things out of boredom! Indeed, gold pins get stuck into people out of boredom, but all this would not matter.4

Behind the tortured loser of the Futurist poem, who signs the diabolic deal with his own bloodied finger and bets his soul in hell (“the one who lost greedily sucking his broken finger; this loser and creator of accurate systems is begging for a coin”),5 one recognizes Dostoevsky’s sarcastic critique of a positivist and utilitarian theorist, who prides himself on acting “for the happiness of the human race.” Chance, a notion that encompasses the unpredictable nature of individual will and creative desire, is important in Dostoevsky’s poetics. And in the Russian avant-garde context, chance is rooted in the philosophy of freedom, fundamental to anarchism. It appears as the poem’s refrain, in which chance is “sought after as a treasure,” becoming both a metaphor and formal device widely acknowledged in Futurist poetics: “by correcting, thinking over, polishing, we banish chance from art . . . by banishing chance we deprive our works of that which is most valuable.”6 An irrepressible game ensues, based on the refutation of the primacy of pragmatic logic and determinism in art. It is designed to break the framework of the mechanical perception of so-called common sense, and taps into readers’ intuition and the unconscious instead. Its set of rules— or rather lack thereof— are the artistic principles of its players. There is a momentous self-portraying image of the gamblers in the Game in Hell

Natalia Goncharova, Demon with the Cards and a Jaguar. for Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (Moscow: n.p., 1912). Edition: 300. Lithograph, 18.3 × 14.6 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (31.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

FIGURE 20.

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who choose the different “path of strife and struggle, path of the broken Book,” and “kingdom of uncanny dreams.” They are contemporary “underground men” who persistently choose a marginal position in relation to the ruling social or aesthetic ideology, voluntary outsiders, with “enough space in their pockets for both worlds—for love and misery.” The Futurist metaphor of hell has yet another function: it marks the beginning of an early avant-garde wariness of the contemporary city, which “connects through fights, no friendship,” and where “everybody just wants to win” and “songs are squeals.” This paradoxical Futurist anti-urbanism is very characteristic of the early Russian avant-garde and distinguishes Russian Futurism from the urbanist and technological utopia of the Italians. In Mayakovsky’s play Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (1913), the anti-urban mythologem is sharply at variance with the cult of the city and machine civilization in the works of the Italian Futurists. Even in his early poetry, which can be characterized as obsessed with the city, there is no hint of utopian “positivism.” A similar thread can be found in works such as Guro’s early urbanist prose book Sharmanka (The Hurdy-Gurdy, 1909) and Kamensky’s “anti-urbanistic” novel Zemlyanka (The Mud Hut, 1910),7 and in paintings by Malevich, Filonov, Larionov, and Goncharova. “It is distressing in the city, amidst hourly killing,” Guro wrote in her diary. “Perhaps in the teeming city we fluids of the intelligentsia will be given credit for front-line duty. New people. They wear out quickly here.”8 It is not very surprising that this anxious mood is repeated in Mayakovsky’s poetic vision of the city in “Night” (Noch’ 1912), which he himself considered the “first professional, my first published poem.”9 Bloody red and white are crumpled and thrashed Onto green they were throwing handfuls of ducats And to the black palms of the windows gathering in a rush They handed the burning yellowish playing cards.10

Mayakovsky’s city is personified and turns out to be a gambler. His poem opens with an imaginary scene of gambling projected onto the cityscape, in which darkened windows are depicted as palms holding playing cards of yellowish electric light.11 Red and white are the colors of discarded cards; green designates the surface of the gambling table. In Mayakovsky’s later poetry, this transformation becomes a characteristic trope, and the metamorphosis that turns the poet’s world into a gamble is visualized in some of his painterly works, such as Roulette (1915). Personification is one essence of poetic play and myth-making. This

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FIGURE 21. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Roulette, 1915. Oil on canvas, paper, and collage, 79 × 54 cm. State Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

animated, though hostile, city is inseparably tied to the poet as his evil double, his prison, his curse. In his painting Yellow Blouse (1918, private collection, Moscow), which also figures as Mayakovsky’s self-portrait, his lyrical persona (an abstracted human silhouette recognizable by his striped yellow blouse) is faceless and melts into the streets of the city to

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become one with it. The poet does not emerge from the city; quite the contrary, he is devoured by it, is disappearing in it, becoming it. The intense rhythm and tempo of Mayakovsky’s poetic speech is impetuous, dictated by the visionary image interjected into poetic narration. In comparing the Symbolist vision of the city in Valery Briusov’s poetry with Mayakovsky’s futuristic image, Kruchenykh emphasizes, “There is not even any superficially descriptive side, but only the inner life of the city, which is not contemplated, but experienced (Futurism in full swing!). And so the city disappears, and what reigns instead is a kind of hell.”12 “A Game in Hell” and “hard work in heaven” are phrases that describe the first creative lessons for all Russian “Futurians,” poets and painters alike, who learned to prefer riddles and paradoxes and ignore utilitarian pragmatism in life and art. They refrained from sinking into predictability to avoid becoming part of it, and although they existed in the “hell” of the quotidian, they refused to belong to it. Early Russian Futurism was one of the most “resistant” movements of the avant-garde: resistant to tradition and to any ideological or aesthetic compromise. They believed that one could break through to this experience only by means of “work” and “a game”—in other words, by making art as if it were a game. The open space for this “game” was a new kind of art. And the fundamental condition for its existence was the coming together of creative activity and unbounded joy in the element of play (“play” and “game” are the same word—igra—in Russian), with its vital energy and spontaneity. The poetics of play and chance, as well as the early concept of “deconstruction,” or the Futurist shift, manifest as the anarchic method of making art regardless of any aesthetic system. These ideas were reflected in the second, revised and augmented edition of Game in Hell, in which Kruchenykh noted, “This time the devil was painted by K. Malevich and O. Rozanova.”13 Malevich did three drawings and the cover, but Rozanova, who accounted for most of the illustrations—over twenty compositions and illuminations—set the tone of the work. Differences from the first edition included changes in the text and in the distribution of design accents, dictated by the improvised nature of the marginalia. The result was an entirely new book, and this tendency toward constant rewriting and rereading gives a postmodern, antiteleological character to the work that strives to establish the right to “incompleteness” in order to presume perpetual interpretations. The “archaic devil” Goncharova mocked in her lithographs for the

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Kazimir Malevich, Front and back covers for the second edition of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1914). Edition: 800. Lithograph, 18.1 × 13.3 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (46.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 22.

first edition was supplanted in the second edition by Rozanova’s phantasmagorical, parodic array of odd demons—devils with bird beaks, seductive witches, and entertainingly scary werewolves, joined together in a card-playing scene. These devils fill the margins and unceremoniously creep in among the lines of text sprawled headlong across the page. Thus, they have nothing in common with Goncharova’s static and rigid characters, who solemnly confront the viewer as parody substitutions for the iconic saints. Such substitutions were rather common in popular carnival culture and the lubok tradition that Goncharova’s art directly drew upon. In contrast, Rozanova’s figures are entirely dominated by the dynamics of the Futurist shift and appear to dash from page to page in an effort to stay ahead of the reader turning the pages of the book. Goncharova, conversely, draws a boundary between pictures and the text, which is written in Kruchenykh’s hand and slightly stylized in the ornamental manner of Old Slavic manuscripts. This is marked by the con-

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trast of lines of poetry on the white page and the blackened background she creates to frame her images. Such an approach is entirely consistent with the Neoprimitivist style Goncharova adopted in the 1912 version of Game in Hell. Rozanova and Malevich follow these prescriptions in a number of compositions, but in their best ones, they break up the composition and fracture the traditional architectonics of the page. “THE FUTURIST IS PUSHKIN”: THE ROMANTIC TRADITION

In the spirit of the early avant-garde acceptance of “everything,” Rozanova and Malevich adopted the tradition of marginalia. More precisely, their drawings resemble those that poets sometimes “doodle” on their draft manuscripts. This avant-garde ironic quality has a touch of nineteenthcentury Romantic parody in it, and develops into a brilliant, sparkling buffoonery resembling the phantasmagorias of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. This is especially apparent in Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s Game in Hell, inspired, presumably, by Gogol’s story “The Lost Letter” and Pushkin’s unfinished “Infernal Poem.”14 However, the center of the Futurist drama is concentrated around the play itself, its rhythm, its unpredictability; not on the hero, who is always anonymous or absent, and whose presence is often insignificant, unlike in the Romantic model, where the subjectivity of the individual drama of the main hero is always crucial. Its Romantic tone is perhaps better suited to the poem itself. As the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was close to Futurist circles at the time, has noted, “Russian Futurism . . . is much closer to Romanticism [than is Symbolism]. It contains all the features of a national poetic revival, in particular, its reworking of the national treasury of language and its conscious concern over poetic heritage—both indicative of its ties to Romanticism.”15 In his sophisticated comparative analysis of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s poem and the verbal and graphic motifs of Pushkin’s unfinished “Infernal Poem,” Roman Jakobson perceived a connection that provides a new key to deciphering the visual design of the second edition of Game in Hell. Jakobson underscores the “derisive depiction of devils” in both works, noting that Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s poem has points in common with Pushkin’s “infernal drawings . . . even in motifs which have no parallels in Pushkin’s fragments.”16 An analogy—paradoxical and at first glance inconceivable for Russian Futurism—arises with the draw-

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ings of Pushkin, whom the Futurists proposed to “throw overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”17 Like Malevich, Rozanova was not only familiar with Pushkin’s ink drawings on the draft of his unfinished “Infernal Poem,” but also drew upon recurring motifs and images from them. These include the devil, who sees a woman’s elegant profile in his daydreams, and the locks of hair that his imagination weaves out of a rising column of smoke. This motif is quoted almost exactly in one of Rozanova’s lithographs, which depicts a devil playing cards with a half-naked woman, who seems to be hovering behind him. Other images include the devils with bird beaks, absent from Goncharova but found in Pushkin’s drawings, and the figure of a witch on a broom that can be glimpsed in his manuscripts. Rozanova devotes a separate page to this heroine, using the notorious Futurist shift, or “displacement,” in her mischievous, cunning drawing to mix the bodies of the devil and the witch in order to create an ambiguous illusion that could be that of either flight or falling.“Olga Rozanova knows how to introduce feminine guile into all the ‘horrors of Cubism,’” Kruchenykh once remarked, “And this is so startling that many are confused by it.”18 The erotic motifs discernible in this poem are full of this subtle, ironic, provocative cunning. Pushkin’s drawings are distinguished by precise movements and expressive silhouettes executed in simple outline. Their principal quality is of a lapidary simplicity, while their dynamics of action and gesture invite Jakobson’s unexpected analogy with Picasso’s sketches.19 These works contain the dash, irony, and buoyancy of the “playful” Pushkin, the blasphemous Pushkin, as well as the sagacity of Pushkin the researcher, who destroyed ossified canonical verbal and artistic forms and created a new language belonging to the future. It is no oddity that the Futurists should address Pushkin, the most daring and profound Russian Romantic poet of the nineteenth century and reformer of poetic language, for the avant-garde movement of the 1910s had deeply hidden Romantic roots. This is especially obvious if a break with the old and discovery of the new is considered the principal criterion. “The Romantics are often described as explorers of man’s spiritual realm, and poets of emotional experience, but as a matter of fact the contemporaries of the Romantics thought of the movement exclusively in terms of its formal innovations,” Roman Jakobson noted in 1919.20 If one agrees with the notion that in Russia there was no continuity of tradition but rather a tradition of “the break,” then we can understand why Khlebnikov wrote what he did in Zheverzheev’s guest album in 1915:

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FIGURE 23. Olga Rozanova, composition for the second edition of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1914). Edition: 800. Lithograph, 18.1 × 13.3 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (46.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The Futurist is Pushkin in the light of the World War, in the coat of the new century, teaching our age the right to laugh at the Pushkin of the nineteenth century. And in 1913 the dead Pushkin was defended by the Dantes who murdered Pushkin in 18XX [1837]. [Pushkin’s poem] Ruslan and Liudmila was called a peasant in bast sandals who came to a gathering of the nobility. The murderer of the living Pushkin, who spilled his blood on the winter snow, hypocritically donned the mask of the defender of his glory (the glory of his corpse), to repeat an abstract shot at the rise of the new century’s herd of young Pushkins.21

This statement, by one of the authors of the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” is important for the understanding of the early avant-garde’s attitude to tradition and history. Khlebnikov implies that Futurists indeed saw themselves as true heirs of Pushkin, and took the same stance challenging the established aesthetic tradition and everyday philistine truths, as Pushkin had done a century earlier. They aspired to restore the “living” image of the rebellious poet by attacking the “academic” Pushkin, whose ossified and distorted memory was adopted and protected by officialdom. By comparing the courtier and aristocrat Dantes, who had not hesitated to shoot Russia’s greatest national poet in a duel, with contemporary critics anxious ‘to defend” Pushkin from the Futur-

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ists and ready to obliterate any new genius, Khlebnikov emphasized that Pushkin and they shared the same enemies. It was neither a blatant destruction nor a total negation of the past for the sake of a utopian notion of the future, despite the way it was often interpreted in contemporary criticism. Instead, demonstrating they were aware of their historical role, the Futurists performed a complex act of cultural “archeology” to question and deconstruct tradition, another aesthetic aspect of Futurist paradigm. The dynamics of the Futurist shift—temporal, spatial, and semantic displacement, the dislocation of form, rhythm, and time—shaped the early avant-garde’s “estranged” sense of aesthetics. PLAY AS SELF-PRESENTATION

“Oh, for a pack of cards!” pleads Vladimir Mayakovsky in his brilliant early poem “The Backbone Flute”(1915).22 The motif of playing cards— whether explicit or just subtly implied—eventually turned out to be one of the most significant elements in the avant-garde’s symbology. The symbolism of the “playing cards”—and of the game itself—was rooted in the Russian culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the Russian semiotician and cultural historian Mikhail Lotman, in the nineteenth century, the structure of the card game developed the trait of being a “universal model” projected onto life.23 Certainly, the Russian avant-garde drew heavily upon the Romantic fascination with this theme (and everything associated with it in the Russian social and cultural context). However, the avant-garde also gave this subject a new meaning. Taken as a thematic subject, cards were synonymous with the notion of play, and functioned as an epitome of the Futurist “principle of chance.” Initially, Mikhail Larionov and the Neoprimitivists seemed to be attracted by the phenomenon of playing cards as a requisite component of contemporary urban folklore. This subject was not only reflected in many popular prints, such as the widespread Soldier and the Devil series, but was a fascinating aspect of lubok culture understood in the most general sense: as a popular urban culture. The fact that cards remained a familiar element of everyday life is important: after all, twelve million packs of cards a year were manufactured in Russia in the 1910s, and playingcard symbols continued to grace dream books, picture postcards, and the newest fortune-telling books. The same symbols were also used in designs for wrapping materials, cups and saucers, even furniture. Phrases from the card-playing lexicon became firmly entrenched in the conver-

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sational idiom of the society. Traces of these clichés can be found in journals, newspapers, and cheesy political cartoons, where the face cards became common metaphors. Larionov was the first among avant-gardists to draw upon all these connotations when, in 1910, he scandalized the conservative public by dubbing his group’s first exhibition “Jack of Diamonds.” John Bowlt explains this phenomenon as an artistic methodology, rather than a device for provoking mockery and confusion. “The primary members of the Russian avant-garde took an active part in the desanctification of high art by superimposing scandalous images, imbuing ‘inartistic’ objects with an ‘artistic’ sense (e.g., telephones and postcards), placing a work of art within a profane environment, and applying ‘absurd’ or misleading titles to their art exhibitions,” Bowlt writes.24 In his book on the “Jack of Diamonds” group of artists, Gleb Pospelov outlines the history of playing-card nomenclature, connecting it with popular translated adventure novels of the period such as Pierre-Alexis de Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole: Le Club des valets de coeur and La Jeunesse du roi Henri, which everybody—from servants to artists—was reading. Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole series reportedly had such a broad appeal that journalists christened one of Moscow’s criminal trials of the 1870s the “Jack of Hearts” trial, the inference being that “Jack of Hearts” meant a swindler or a cheat.25 Before he left the country in 1915, Larionov was perhaps Russian art’s most restless, radical genius. “We all went through Larionov’s school,” Mayakovsky said. The roots of any Russian avant-garde artist, including Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, who started his or her career around 1908 go back to Neoprimitivism, of which Larionov was the recognized leader.26 In 1912, Larionov developed his own theory of abstract art, Rayism (luchizm, sometimes also translated into English as Rayonism), and formulated it in his book Luchizm (Rayism, 1913) and a few essays. His theory was based on the interaction of the radiating and emanating rays from any object, thus Rayism is “concerned with spatial forms that can arise from the intersection of the reflected rays of different objects, forms chosen by the artist’s will.”27 Larionov emphasized independence and the “anarchic” quality of his invention by choosing lines from Walt Whitman’s poetry as an epigraph for his book on Rayism: How they are provided for upon the earth (appearing at intervals), How dear and dreadful they are to the earth, How they inure to themselves as much as to any—what a paradox appears their age,

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How people respond to them, yet know them not, How there is something relentless in their fate all times . . . 28

Although Larionov had begun his artistic career with dizzying success as a Postimpressionist, he rejected achieved professional recognition and stability in favor of different aesthetic explorations and further reinventions, which became a kind of “evolving” model for most of the avantgarde artists. He wrote, “my task is not to assert the new art, since after that it would cease to be new, but to attempt as much as possible to move it forward. In a word, to do what life itself does as it every second gives birth to new people and creates new ways of life, out of which new possibilities are continually born.”29 Between 1913 and 1915, elements of happenings and performance art, fully open to stylistic pluralism, appeared in Larionov’s work. In 1915, he made one of the first Russian avant-garde kinetic installations, using a woman’s (Goncharova’s) long hair, cut and partially glued to a wall, in a collage with an electric fan playing on it, creating constant movement.30 His provocative ideas tested the limits and anticipated the postmodernist mentality in their “everythingness” and deliberate aesthetic eclecticism. He even rejected the major modernist stipulation of authenticity and originality, arguing that there is no difference between a copy and an original.31 Larionov could not tolerate any idea of an established aesthetic or social hierarchy or structure. When Ilya Mashkov and Petr Konchalovsky, two leading participants of the 1910 exhibition, decided to establish a Jack of Diamonds artists’ association, officially registered with the Moscow governor’s office and subject to rules and regulations, Larionov immediately broke off all ties with them. Together with his unregulated “gypsy” camp of followers and friends, such as Goncharova, Aleksei Morgunov, Mikhail Le Dantu, Aleksandr Shevchenko, and Ilya Zdanevich, he moved farther on, to the new experimental exhibitions. “The Jack of Diamonds” (1910) was the first of them, followed by “Donkey’s Tail” (1912),“Target” (1913), and, finally,“Number 4: Rayists, Futurians, Primitive” (1914). Each exhibition marked a period of development in the avant-garde aesthetic and presented a different approach, challenging not only the spectators, but also the participants, most of whom differed from show to show. Olga Rozanova was another artist who brought the playing card subject into her art, making a move to one of the most fanciful creations in her oeuvre, the series of eleven paintings entitled Playing Cards (ca. 1915).32 In the series, the players and the card figures in their hands are

FIGURE 24. Mikhail Larionov, Rayist Composition (Lady at the Table). From Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov (Moscow: n.p., 1912). Edition: 220. Lithograph, 18.6 × 15 cm. Courtesy Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow.

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FIGURE 25. Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov working on stage designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s 1914 Ballets Russes production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel).

curiously reversible. Rozanova, in her witty inspiration, unites eleven compositions to create a formal “portrait gallery” of playing-card queens, kings, and jacks in the spirit of Malevich’s alogisms, Alfred Jarry’s absurd, and Lewis Carroll’s paradoxes. In these paintings of playing-card figures, the viewer is stunned by the sharp contrast of bright colors with the black-gray grisaille of the “half-alive” characters’ faces and hands. Raised to meta-representation in Rozanova’s parody of the portrait-genre, the playing-card clichés become not only the representation of the representation of a mass stereotype, but begin to acquire their own significance. The process whereby playing cards turn into “people” directly counterbalances the reverse transfiguration that occurs when real, historical personages are equated with playing-card figures, as in the special editions of “historical” decks of cards; or in Ponson du Terrail’s novel, the characters in which are named after playing-card figures. Nowhere else in Rozanova’s oeuvre is the theatrical element so acute as in this cycle, a quality that parallels a few of Malevich’s grotesque and dramatic designs for Victory over the Sun (1913). And in his later renderings of the costumes for the Strongman, the Warrior, and the Turkish Warrior in the 1920s, when another staging of this opera was contemplated,

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Olga Rozanova, Queen of Spades, 1915. From the series Playing Cards. Oil on canvas, 77.5 × 61.5 cm. Regional Art Museum, Ulianovsk.

FIGURE 26.

Malevich incorporated card symbols in place of heads to characterize the particular dramatis personae.33 From the very beginning, the early Russian avant-gardists associated card play with tricks, imps, and adventurousness that challenged accepted norms as yet another “slap in the face of public taste.” They preferred the lubok devil, and the sly Gogolian Cossack from “The Lost Letter”

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who tries to swindle him in cards, to the tragically obsessed Hermann of Pushkin’s well-known story “The Queen of Spades.” Futurists enjoyed the element of Romantic challenge, but through the lens of irony and grotesque, which they employed as a device of negative affirmation, rather than of “high tragedy.” Betting on this provocative aspect, Larionov deliberately injected the established art world with the “low” tradition of the urban primitive. This action was not aimed so much to shock as to create a new aesthetic system with different points of reference, a system in which the contrived borders between the “high” and “low” in art would be eroded. Larionov’s soldiers playing cards, or Dancing Soldiers, painted around 1909, was a good fit for his gallery of rosy-cheeked prostitutes, menacing provincial hairdressers, and toylike young soldiers. Larionov’s simple-minded gamblers play cards furiously, and the tense physical awkwardness of their contrived poses makes them look frozen in the middle of a rowdy dance. Two soldiers cling to their cards while uttering obscenities, which literally fill the space and stick to the walls of their barracks. Meanwhile, another soldier is singing and playing his accordion.The“hellish” game and the crude phrases of Larionov’s soldiers, recorded all over the painterly surface in a comic-book-like manner, are not random details, but chosen to challenge the viewer. The avant-garde artists chose to represent subjects considered risky or vulgar, such as gambling. Suffice it to recall, for instance, that tri listika, translated below as “three leaves,” refers to “three cards,” a game likely related to three-card monte. It was banned at the time, but very popular among card sharps, and appears in Mayakovsky’s fragment “As a Boy” from his long poem “I Love” (1922): I was gifted in measure with love. Since childhood, people have been drilled to labor. But I fled to the banks of the Rion and knocked about there, doing absolutely nothing. Mamma chided me angrily: “Good for nothing!” Papa threatened to belt me. But I, laying my hands on a false three-ruble note Played at “three leaves” with soldiers under the fence.34

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FIGURE 27. Mikhail Larionov, Dancing Soldiers, 1909–10. Oil on canvas, unspecified; 87.95 × 102.08 cm. Purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection, Mr. and Mrs. John C. Best, and Friends of the Museum, Charles Feldman, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kantor (80.3). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Digital image © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

Mayakovsky’s game “with the soldiers under the fence,” so reminiscent of Larionov’s images, is a metaphor for his freedom and his provocative nonconformity with the “folks”“drilled to labor.”This self-identification of the poet as a gambler who challenges the laws of society and “runs risks” playing “for high stakes” is manifested in Mayakovsky’s early poem “Welcoming Words to Some Vices” (Teploe slovo koe-kakim porokam: pochti gimn, 1915): You who are working so hard (just to shine your boots) Accountant if a man, or accountant’s assistant if a woman Your face is all worried and to tears bored And crumpled, and green as a three-ruble note. Let’s take a tailor: For whose sake, why did you make all these pants?

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You don’t have an American uncle, and if you do He is poor, still kicking and doesn’t live in the U.S. I am telling you, me, well-read and clever, Pushkin, or Shchepkin, or Vrubel’ Neither line, nor pose, nor color whatsoever They believed—but believed in the ruble. You live to iron, you are wounded by scissors Look, there is gray woven in your beard But did you ever see an orange Growing and growing for its own sake on the tree? Sweating and laboring, laboring and sweating You will calve babies and they will sprout, these kiddies The boys—accountants, the girls—accountant’s assistants, These and those will be sweating like their mammies and daddies And me, never fucked over or being pushed around Just like this, ay Cashed in gambling on my sixth hand Thirty-two hundred yesterday. It’s okay if they mock me in whispers, gossiping That I helped myself in a game That I have in my pack this and that ace Softly marked by my fingernail Gambler’s eyes in the night Shine like two pieces of gold I was unloading somebody as a meticulous worker Would unload a ship hold. Long live the first who got it right Who without laboring and scheming cleans out and empties thy neighbor’s pockets In a manner good and hygienic And when they preach hard work to me, and more, and more As if grating horseradish on a rusty grater I gently ask, tapping someone’s shoulder— Do you like to take risks when you gamble?35

In terms of style and form, this satirical poem is far from Mayakovsky’s best, but its content and context open the possibility to understand the poetics and politics of the game on different semantic levels. The central refrain is explicit: game (or play) versus work, freedom of choice and liberated will versus determinism, chance versus routine and habit, and “gambler” versus “accountant.” In short, this poem becomes a metaphorical “boxing match” where

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game theory wins over labor theory. It has an ironic subtitle, “Almost a Hymn,” and belongs to the series of “hymns” that Mayakovsky composed for the popular satirical journal New Satirikon that year. They share the same polemical force of satirical discourse and playful authorial intonation, and serve as a provocative and aggressive rhetorical gesture directly addressed to the audience. He does not simply challenge the “routine world” of “labor and sweat,” but exposes it in accordance with the radical socialist and anarchist ideas of Paul Lafargue, who claimed,“Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed.” Lafargue’s celebrated book Le droit à la paresse: Réfutation du droit au travail, de 1848 (1883) was translated into Russian soon after its original publication. This book was much read in cultural circles inclined toward anarcho-individualism. Apart from Mayakovsky, and possibly Kamensky, this work greatly influenced Malevich’s essay “Sloth—The Real Truth of Humanity” (1921), where he brings forward his own concept of “socialist” creativity, quite different from the boosted production of the “socialist objects” avowed by the Constructivists and Productionists at the time.36 Lafargue could not but appeal in his philosophy to Neoprimitivist thought as well, Matvejs’s in particular, by valorizing “the primitive,” the innate goodness of the primordial communal ways of cultural and social existence: “The happy Polynesians may then love as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of European moralists.”37 Although Lafargue concluded his political career as a Marxist, his earlier inclination toward Proudhonian ideas shaped the main argument of his book, where he looks at the “right to work” as a disastrous dogma: If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly resolution. . . . 38

And he passionately concludes his appeal: Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men, the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O

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Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!39

Mayakovsky’s “Welcoming Words” is written in the first person and, by assuming the mask of a gambler, and a tricky one at that—possibly a swindler and cheat—the poet emphasizes his own alienation from the laws and customs of common life. His tactical choice to teach us his social lesson is witty and quite unusual. Pushing Lafargue’s idea to its logical extreme, he throws in the “vice” of risky “gambling” to prove the lie of the “virtue” of “laboring.” The poetic metaphor of card playing becomes a mythologem. The main quality of any play is the quality of freedom, Mayakovsky is telling his readers. Play cannot be forced, because then it ceases to be play or turns into something different. Play is never a duty or obligation. By advocating play over labor, Mayakovsky advocates freedom and unpredictability, and the ultimate fulfillment of life without “special purpose,” “without why” (but did you ever see an orange . . . ). In this he follows Dostoevsky’s underground man: “Man need one thing only: independent desire, whatever that independence costs and wherever it may lead him. But the devil only knows what desire. . . . ”40 Mayakovsky directs his social critique at the discrepancy between natural fruition, and the beauty of growth, and the lifeless mechanical repetition of imposed labor, which has wasted whole generations. This refutation of utilitarian means and ends is also framed as an aesthetic manifesto, which targets literary “forefathers,” Symbolists and Realists,“guilty” of labor and “sweat.”According to the Futurists,“Through instantaneous writing a given feeling is expressed in fullness. Otherwise labor rather than creation, many stones and no whole, and it smells of sweat and [the contemporary Symbolist writer Valery] Briusov. Writing and reading must be instantaneous!” “The ungifted and the apprentices like to labor . . . the same can be said of the reader.”41 Mayakovsky’s poem is full of semidisguised intertextual references that map for us the literary world of his playing poet: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Khlebnikov. Some of the most obvious references include a fun allusion to “Evgenii Onegin” (you don’t have an uncle . . . ), and the figure of the “accountant” with “face all worried and bored to tears,” has attributes akin to the “loser” and the Dostoevsky-inspired “creator of perfect systems” from Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s Game in Hell. The tailor is another type Mayakovsky treats harshly. Often regarded as the agents who implement the ideals of “public taste” and the whims of short-lived “fashions,” “tailors” also appear in the first Futurist manifesto, “Slap in

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the Face of Public Taste,” “all those Gorkys, Kuprins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.”42 The “principle of play” combines fantastic and real elements, by incorporating strange details into an everyday context. The texture of this poem is a mixture of hyperbole, grotesque and self-irony. Here, perhaps, we can find the source of the myth of the “apache” in poetry, which pursued young Mayakovsky. With the striking perceptivity of a poet, Tsvetaeva once noticed that Mayakovsky’s poetic image “started by showing himself off to the world.” This lyrical persona assumed by Mayakovsky responds less to the complete theatricalization of life, becoming the dramatic model of the free and spontaneous game. Commenting on Mayakovsky’s dramatic performance of his “Tragedy,”Viktor Shklovsky writes,“The poet deals himself upon the stage, holds himself in his hands like a player holds cards. It was Mayakovsky, the two, the three, the Jack, the King.”43 Indeed, in the Russian literary tradition, card playing was often viewed as a kind of active meditation, a unique possibility provided by chance to come face to face with the anarchic essence of the universe, beyond the human power of control or manipulation. It is the process of the game, with its temporality, its unpredictable yet repetitive rhythm, that rules the player. In his discussion of Dostoevsky’s characters, who are often obsessed with gambling, Gary Saul Morson suggests, “The desire to reach a moment of ecstasy—of ‘standing outside’ the temporal flow—fatally attracts Dostoevsky characters. . . . This is a kind of addiction to which Dostoevsky himself was subject. It is expressed as well in Dostoevsky’s compulsive gambling, in his desire to risk everything on an intensified moment.” As for Dostoevsky’s Gambler, Morson continues, “What does matter is the metaphysical jolt he experiences when (as he feels) he overcomes the laws of nature and society with a win against all odds.”44 The Futurists, in their turn, expressed a fascination with temporality that was reflected in physical movement, in what they called the “live” rhythm: “We shattered rhythms. Khlebnikov gave status to the poetic meter of the living conversational word. We stopped looking for meters in textbooks; every motion generates for the poet a new, free rhythm.”45 In the aesthetics of the early Russian avant-garde, this rhythm of the game, of art and of life itself, overlapped and intertwined, fast and intense as a heartbeat, as irregular and repetitive as Mayakovsky’s “ladder” verse (lesenka). It is this “incarnation” of the physical rhythm, the vigorous

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movement, and the physical drive and vivacity of the game that distinguishes Larionov’s card-playing soldiers, for example, from the silent ambiance of Cézanne’s motionless and solid Card Players, where the game is just another visual sign of the metaphysical reality of being. The same ritual of physical participation through the movement, rhythm, and tempo of card playing is one of the crucial points in Kruchenykh’s poetical performance of card playing, when “the tricky rhythm” of the game should become the intuitive property of the player: Having played till dawn I got everything straight, to the uttermost tree-stump I blew up the ragged brain. Night—tattered . . . To dream on the couch of roses, But—my open eyes are burning . . . Gambler! Internalize the tricky rhythm— it is your turn, run risks destroy the tired world Railroad, roulette and all this jazz— there Dostoevsky lost his trousers pair, and there Polina— love-affair . . . Forget your monastery cell! Or—everything will break Or—by a crafty card by a witch you would be crushed. In Hell she’ll strangle you as a deserter— The Queen of Spades, saltpeter,

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sulfur,— farewell . . . You found your path at once, were walking straight, and never seduced by trifles. You broke the bank. Play high! Stakes all they’ll take! In full swing—ah! The eyes and fingers, hearts and spades, clubs—all ablaze. . . . 46

Kruchenykh’s late poem “Gambler. The Poem of Play,” written in 1945 and dedicated to Mayakovsky, retrospectively sums up the themes and visions I have analyzed: the game in hell, the poet-player challenging the “tired world” and his desire to risk everything on chance and on an intensified moment of play. The unpredictability of card playing is hidden in the tension of its irregular rhythm. The inner swing of the play, the infinite present of existence and the physical rhythm of the player’s “eyes and fingers” transcend the temporal flow. The dynamics of the game, in which long hours are measured by the movements of the players’ hands, and the weary immobility (or emptiness?) of the “poker face,” becomes an endless meditation, and an initiation freed from obsession. Here the ultimate goal, the bank, the gold, passes through the alchemical fire (all ablaze) of an intensified moment, the highest point and reward: a moment of enlightenment, of knowledge (having played till dawn / I got everything straight). Kruchenykh provokes spellbound readers into looking into the depths of their unconscious, their irrational visions, and sensuality to produce allusions and associations beyond the boundaries of the intellect (blew up the ragged brain). Kruchenykh and Mayakovsky were famous as ardent card players in their private lives, and Kruchenykh, who remained the most faithful to the poetics of play, once wrote in a letter to his friend,“There were a lot of strange, and unexpectedly tragic, etc. things in my life. Perhaps, it influenced my work and my subsequent existence. . . . Maybe that was exactly what I needed—to look deep into play I solve and overcome it finally! The fate of man is incomprehensible! Especially—the fate of the poet.”47

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Through “words as such” the reader is forced to turn to “life as such,” to its unpredictable and irrational essence existing outside all canons. Kruchenykh is not appealing in his zaum to his readers’ logic and their ability to solve verbal rebuses, nor to their book knowledge. Transrational poetry may be compared with the unconscious, the core hidden behind the “poker face” of the poet—who is the trickster, the bluffer, the creator of the unspoken enigma. The motif of the card game in Futurist poetics became not only a representational motif but also a means of selfcognizance, self–presentation.

5

Victory over the Sun and the Theater of Alogism

Kruchenykh’s theory of transrational language, zaum or “beyonsense,” coincided with the emergence of alogism in the visual arts, a concept introduced by Malevich and quickly adopted by other Futurists.“The alogical juxtaposition of the two forms ‘violin and cow’ as an element of the struggle against logic, naturalism, philistine meaning, and prejudice,” Malevich inscribed on the back of his painting Cow and Violin (1913),1 juxtaposing two things that correspond like “apples and oranges.” Consistent with the spirit of alogism, Khlebnikov’s and Kruchenykh’s theater of 1913–15 was marked by paradox and dissonance. Just as Malevich managed to “rhyme” “cow“ and “violin,” Kruchenykh provoked bursts of laughter at a public lecture by saying: “Here are two rich rhymes for you: cow and theater!”2 ALOGISM IN PAINTING

Indeed, the semantic links between Kruchenykh’s dramatic characters and their actions are in essence the same as those between objects in Malevich’s and other avant-garde artists’ alogical paintings of 1913 and 1914. Playful irony and the “theatrical instinct,” a term coined at approximately the same time by Nikolai Evreinov, became pivotal elements in alogism. “The instinct of theatricalization which I claim the honor to have discovered may be best described as the desire to be ‘different,’ to do something that is ‘different,’ to imagine oneself in surroundings that are ‘different’ 112

FIGURE 28. Kazimir Malevich, Cow and Violin, 1913. Oil on wood, 48.8 × 25.8 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo credit: SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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from the commonplace surroundings of our everyday life. . . . We are all born with this feeling in our soul, we are all essentially theatrical beings,” Evreinov writes.3 Elena Basner characterizes these Cubo-Futurist works as “multi-significant and polysemantic, puzzling and shocking the credulous viewer with such manoeuvres as affixing a cigarette to the lips of Mona Lisa.”4 In Cow and Violin (1913), Englishman in Moscow (1914), and Aviator (1914), there is a “riddle” within the painterly composition made up of what at first seem to be naïvely represented random objects and fragments offered to the viewer as a kind of game.5 In this game, however, there is no “prize,” no single winning answer, since the alogical riddle is not amenable to any rational mechanism. Like words in transrational poetry, objects in these visual compositions can accumulate an entire spectrum of meanings, from everyday details to metaphysical symbols. Their meaning is fluid and ambivalent; they slip away and change depending on the context actively improvised by the viewer. Kruchenykh regarded this ambivalence as the crucial component of zaum. “The transrational word always contains parts of various words (concepts, images) that produce a new ‘transrational’ (not precisely defined) image,” he said.6 Similarly, in the alogist painting, abstract geometric planes serve as a background to random objects or details that have been torn out of the web of ordinary semantic connections.“Within” the painted construction is a kind of speculative “picture” resembling a traditional rebus made up of different arbitrary objects and fragments, including the “torn-off” sign, signboard sections, and fragments of words that became requisite attributes of many of these compositions. For example, in Malevich’s Aviator (1914), the playing card takes the central place in the composition and is among the elements of this “rebus,” which creates the alogical tone. In alogism objects exist as such, and the artist deprives them of an everyday context as though to restore to them their phenomenological essence represented by the pure physical features of texture, form, and color. On the verso of Aviator, Malevich wrote, “(this is not a symbolism) a card and a fish signify nothing except themselves.”7 Nonetheless, Malevich left us endless hints as to the symbolic interpretation that the artist himself warned against. The Aviator holds the ace of clubs, which is transformed into an empty signifier, creating a pure system of language (in this case, visual language) around a “hypertext” that combines verbal and nonverbal cues. We have before us a perfect example of the Barthesian “galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds”: “it has no beginning, it is reversible; we gain access

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to it by several entrances, none of which can authoritatively be declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable.”8 Thus, an ace of clubs, which in fortune-telling may signify a prison, barracks, or even military service, can be read as a tune to set the mood for the entire picture. It is especially significant in the historical context of World War I, when the greatest pilots were also called aces. The principle of play, founded on the merging of the imagined and the real, with the insertion of fantastic detail, contains an active element of irony. For example, the white outline of the fish spans the Aviator’s body as though it were honorable regalia or a folded wing. The jagged outline of the white fish is visually “rhymed” with the serrated saw; the arrow points to the “0” on the hat, and the semantic connection between these objects is open, resting on all possible associations and the personal intuition and reminiscences of the viewer. Malevich insisted in his inscription that in the “estranged” space of alogism, it is impossible and unnecessary to explain the inexplicable or to bring the unconscious into the sphere of consciousness and the rational logic of “recognition.” All these details, or torn-off signs, seem to be acting out a “play” called “Aviator.” The combination of the Cubo-Futurist “rupture” or shift of forms with their random “realistically” depicted details produces the necessary alogical dissonance, which Shklovsky would soon define as the artistic device of “estrangement” or “defamiliarization” (ostranenie), inspired by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s practice and theory of transrational language. Another example is Rozanova’s The “Modern” Movie Theatre (1915, Regional Museum Slobodskoi), which is reduced to a painterly construction consisting of geometrical color forms that serve as the background for the many overlapping objects and accidental details as if caught by the eye of a passerby. The fragmentariness of the visual structure matches the broken inscriptions, included in the composition in the upper right corner, which read like lines from a transrational poem. The Cubo-Futurist inflection, which stresses dynamism and simultaneity of the moment, is no longer present in these pieces. “The alogic style was not as spontaneous as Malevich infers in his commentaries, nor was it solely the character of the objects that determined the way they were combined on the canvas,” according to Troels Andersen.9 In his celebrated essay “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” (1915), Malevich noted that in Cubo-Futurism, objects “contain a mass of temporal moments. Their forms are diverse, and consequently, the ways in which they are painted are diverse. All these temporal aspects of things

Kazimir Malevich, The Aviator, 1914. Oil on canvas, 125 × 65 cm. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo credit: SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 29.

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and their anatomy (the rings of a tree) have become more important than their essence and meaning. And these new situations were adopted by the cubists [sic] as a means of constructing pictures. Moreover, these means were constructed so that the unexpected confrontation of two forms would produce a dissonance of maximum force and tension.”10 The next step in the development of this painterly construction is the transformation of the “anatomical structures” of things into abstract shapes. This process was already happening in Malevich’s stage designs and costumes for Kruchenykh’s Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. These costumes were derived from geometric forms, which were made of cardboard and seem to have been huge, according to contemporaries’ reminiscences and some newspaper photographs.11 By abstracting the very concept of the thing in 1913–14, and stripping it of its traditional context and logical raison d’être in his designs, as well as in painterly compositions, Malevich came to replace the thing with color forms in his Suprematist abstractions of 1915, as Rozanova did in her paper paste-ons approximately at the same time. Indeed, in alogist works there is a “projection” of all possible future directions of the early Russian avant-garde. There are elements of Suprematism in the autonomy of planar color forms that generally constitute the background in these painterly compositions. And in the recoding of the object, or thing, set in an unexpected context and stripped of its mundane meaning, there is a foreshadowing of Dada and Surrealism. This duality lends a special charm to the novel and unpredictable quality of painting during this transitional period, the stage of alogism, which dramatically balances elements of the representational and the abstract, the narrative and the absurd. The humorous side of this “balancing act” had been recorded in the series of staged photographs produced by Carl Bulla, one of the bestknown St. Petersburg photographers of the prerevolutionary era. Malevich, Kruchenykh, and Matiushin (in some pictures they are joined by Pavel Filonov, who designed Mayakovsky’s Tragedy), all in black ties and looking gravely serious (except Kruchenykh, of course), deliberately pose with a grand piano hanging over their heads. The trick is that the piano is painted on a backdrop, which is suspended upside down. John Bowlt finds this pure Dadaistic gesture of “deep symbolic significance.”12 The alogical universe is as spontaneous as the nature of play. For Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Matiushin, and Malevich, the process of play—whether in theater, poetry, or their everyday routine—can be compared to a cognitive process, as a means to investigate the rationally unknowable. Speaking

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FIGURE 30. Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin’s Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, act 2, scene 2. Photograph from Rannee utro (St. Petersburg) 12 December 1913.

of the role and essence of play in society, Hans-Georg Gadamer notes that the attraction of play or a game is that it literally masters the players, not the other way around. According to him, play and art are similar, since both the game and the work of art possess their own essence, independent of the consciousness of the players. “Inasmuch as nature is without purpose or intention, just as it is without exertion, it is a constantly self-renewing play, and can therefore appear as a model for art,” Gadamer writes.13 The process of play, and by analogy, the creative process, directs the action of the artist-player. Play grows into a dynamic and unforeseeable model of existence, or mode of life.“Despite all of its ‘senselessness,’

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Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Kazimir Malevich, St. Petersburg, 1913. Photograph by K. K. Bulla.

FIGURE 31.

the world of the artist is more rational and real than the world of the philistine, even in the philistine sense,” wrote Kruchenykh in Let’s Grumble.14 The point is that the very “logic” (or rather the alogism) of play, like that of any creative process, is the logic of the absurd, of dreams and the unconscious. If the basis of any creative process is a desire to incarnate or materialize the unconscious and break free of the burden of the deeply concealed “shadows” of the self by exorcising and driving them out of one’s being, then that process can be regarded as a ritual. In early Russian Futurism, this aspect of creating—whether action or meditation, event or experience—is more important than the work or final product of experience in its fixed and immutable “thingness.” FUTURIST THEATER

In July 1913, Matiushin invited his Union of Youth comrades Malevich and Kruchenykh to his summer home in Uusikirkko, where they declared the gathering to be the First All-Russian Congress of Futurists. (Khleb-

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nikov was also supposed to participate but could not come.) They immediately advertised their project by publishing a manifesto in a St. Petersburg weekly announcing the founding of the Budetlianin (Futurian) theater, based on “new principles of the word, drawing, and music.”15 Among the future productions mentioned were Kruchenykh’s drama Victory over the Sun (an opera), Mayakovsky’s Railroad, and Khlebnikov’s Christmas Tale. “The Union of Youth Society, aware of the dominance of the theatrical elders and taking into account the unusual impact of our evenings, has decided to arrange things on a grand scale and show the world the first Futurist theater,” Kruchenykh wrote.16 However, this theater had been preceded by another theatrical experiment—the staging of “chamber plays” (khoromnye deistva) by the Union of Youth in 1911. The performance, which was presented on three platforms in the middle of the auditorium, consisted of three parts: a folk-style tragedy in two acts about “Tsar Maksimilian and His Disobedient Son Adolf,” followed by “chamber play caprices with the audience” that involved the active participation of the spectators in a ring dance, with cannon fire. The third part consisted of various vocal and dance numbers and, judging by the reactions of the critics, was reminiscent of a cabaret program. The entire production was inspired by the synthetic action of the balagan (puppet booth at public fairs), where boundaries are minimal between the performers and the audience, reality and play, comic and tragic.17 Toward the end of 1913, two productions were staged at the Luna Park (formerly Komissarzhevskaya) theater in St. Petersburg. The first, on 2 and 4 December, was Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, designed by Filonov and Shkolnik. The second play was Victory over the Sun, with a text by Kruchenykh, a prologue by Khlebnikov, music by Matiushin, and sets, costumes, and props by Malevich, presented on 3 and 5 December. Mayakovsky’s monodramatic work, in which he played the main protagonist, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, has a lot to do with his lyric poetry and is set in a city familiar from his poems. According to Kruchenykh, his tragedy portrays, on the one hand, a Futurist poet and, “on the other, all sorts of philistines, ‘poor rats’ frightened by the urban tempo and ‘revolt of the things.’ ”18 Filonov’s design was based on the contrast between the lively persona of the handsome young Mayakovsky dressed in an everyday suit, and the static two-dimensionality of the bizarre phantom figures surrounding him, which Filonov had painted on canvases

Olga Rozanova, Futurist Theater poster, 1913. Lithograph in three colors on paper., 98 × 68 cm. Courtesy State Literary Museum, Moscow.

FIGURE 32.

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stretched on shields in the shape of a human figure moved by actors in white uniforms. Mayakovsky’s monodrama is focused on the states of mind of the hero-narrator, and all the characters around him seem to be ghosts, reflecting on different sides of his poetic persona. In contrast to Vladimir Mayakovsky, Victory over the Sun cannot be compared to a lyric poem written for concert performance. The Futurist opera relied from the outset on the dynamics of play, and theatrical effects were expected and designated. Between 1913 and 1916, Aleksei Kruchenykh wrote several plays and short dramatic pieces, including Victory and the unfinished Voennaia opera (Military Opera), ambitiously conceived, also together with Khlebnikov, Malevich, and Matiushin, in 1914. Kruchenykh’s short play Most (Bridge) was written around the turn of 1913–14, after Victory and before Voennaia opera, according to the author himself.19 In addition, there is a one-page drama in one act (Deimo) from his book Let’s Grumble and Gly-Gly, an unfinished play about Futurism and Futurists (1915–16).20 All of these dramas are written in the key of early Futurist poetics of zaum and alogism. This body of work marks Kruchenykh’s theater as an independent phenomenon, which has unfortunately hardly been addressed in the literature dealing with Futurist theater. If Kruchenykh is mentioned at all, it is only in connection with Victory, which is sometimes incorrectly regarded as a more or less incidental experiment in the dramatic genre. Judging by Kruchenykh’s memoirs and the reminiscences of his contemporaries, he showed a consistent and professional interest in the theater—in particular, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s experiments—since he was a student. At that time, he regularly published theater reviews in a local newspaper. Later, Kruchenykh became known for his outstanding histrionic talent. He had the striking voice of a professional actor and received many compliments on his masterful performance of poetry reading. In addition to writing Victory over the Sun, Kruchenykh also directed, and played two roles in it: A Malevolent Person (Nekii Zlonamerennyi) and the Reader (Chtets). Judging from the memoirs and archival documents, the first staging of Victory was comparable to Italian Futurist and Zurich Dada performances. The characters’ lines were written as a “score,” emphasized by Kruchenykh’s stage directions: “sings,”“shouts,”“squeaks,”“crash,” and so on, which outlined every tonality, rhythm, and tempo of the action. Kruchenykh divided his plays into “mute” works for publication, and those to be performed on stage, or “for sound.”21 Much as Malevich’s Suprematism of 1915–20 is related in retrospect to the staging of Victory over the Sun in 1913, Kruchenykh’s “theater

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FIGURE 33. Kazimir Malevich, The Reader, 1913. Watercolor, Indian ink, and crayon on paper, 27.2 × 21.4 cm (outlined). The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo credit: SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

of alogism” lives on in the later stages of the avant-garde. Kruchenykh’s initial fusion of a unique “linguistic instinct” and his own sense of drama directly influenced both Ilya Zdanevich’s concept of “transrational theater” and Daniil Kharms’s surrealistic phantasmagorias, particularly his early plays.22 What distinguished Kruchenykh’s “theatrical vision” from other avant-

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garde or earlier modernist tendencies (for example, that of Alfred Jarry or Nikolai Evreinov) was its novel approach to language, which was reflected in his stage direction and Malevich’s design.23 In Kruchenykh’s drama, language is intentionally transformed into the principal “artistic event,” serving as the subject of art more than a means of communication or an instrument for characterization. Sometimes the sound texture becomes phonic noise background for the pantomime on stage, and sometimes the characters resort to pure sound poetry, while at other times they speak a “disconnected” language of zaum, based on semantic shifts, tragiccomic contrasts, and dissonance. But it is the phonic texture of the language in its free play that comes to the fore in his drama in the incorporation of a chorus and glossolalia, devices that subsequently became distinguishing features of twentiethcentury sound poetry, and experimental theater. Not coincidentally, this aspect of Kruchenykh’s theater antecedes the later tendencies in Surrealist theater and the postwar theater of the absurd, or “theater of derision,” as Eugene Ionesco preferred to call it. This comparison is justified by Ionesco’s belief that the themes of the absurd “can be found throughout the history of the theatre.”24 The same principles dominate the “theater of cruelty” of Antonin Artaud, which undermines the utilitarian approach to language (as pure means of communication) and attempts to use speech like a magic spell to restore its ability to shock physically.25 From the very beginning, Victory over the Sun presented its audience with a “Futurist trick” of which Kruchenykh was a grand master. Victory usually comes after a war, and war was semantically complex—a metaphor more than a subject—in the early Russian avant-garde. Paraphrasing one of Mayakovsky’s metaphors, Kruchenykh wrote his drama “by means of war” (by analogy with ink), using war not as a subject but as a medium and metaphor for Futurist creativity. If Marinetti strove to “kill the moonlight,” Kruchenykh and Malevich forged an attack on the sun. In an interview with the St. Petersburg daily newspaper Den’ (Day), Matiushin and Malevich explained Victory over the Sun further, saying: The meaning of the opera has to do with the overthrow of one of the great artistic values—in this particular case, the sun. . . . The Futurists want to free themselves from this ordered quality of the world, from the connections thought to exist in it. They want to transform the world into chaos, to smash the established values to pieces and from these pieces create new values by making new generalizations and discovering new,

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unexpected, and invisible connections. Take the sun—this is a former value— it therefore constrains them, and they want to overthrow it.26

Charlotte Douglas suggests that Malevich and Kruchenykh’s intention was to manipulate spotlights from the stage projectors in order to make the backdrops look three-dimensional: “The ambiguity of the spatial relationship, especially in the perception of depth, undoubtedly was increased by the ‘tunnel effect’ created by the receding centers of the backdrops. . . . This effect can be visualized quite clearly, for example, in the design, which appeared on the cover of the libretto. The section of an airplane occupies the entire height of the extreme left, with the large schematic sun just behind it. . . . The viewer, while confined by the sides of the ‘box,’ faces an opening into endless space.”27 This metaphor of infinity in the opera embodies the quest to destroy the old for the sake of creating anew, which “inspired shock in some minds and liberated others.” Reader: I am still trying to say—think of the past Heavy with grief and mistakes . . . of posing and of bending the knees . . . let us remember and compare it with the present . . . such fun: free from the heaviness of universal gravitation we are elaborately arranging our things, as if a rich kingdom is in transition. (scene 5)28

This drama is a contemporary anti-utopia about the collapse of human civilization, which ends by proclaiming that there is no end: “the world will fall but there is no end for us.”29 The very title of Kruchenykh’s play reveals something that is beyond the human world, turning upside down the notion of progress. In a certain sense, this anti-teleological concept corresponds to the Heideggerian notion of “dehumanization”: “To think against values is not to maintain that everything interpreted as a ‘value’—‘culture,’ ‘art,’ ‘science,’ ‘human dignity,’ ‘world,’ and ‘God’—is valueless. Rather, it is important finally to realize that precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. . . . Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It doesn’t let beings: be.”30 In Victory the sense of absurdity resists the persistent routine of aesthetic, social and ideological dogmas and values by means of parody, of dissonance, of the philosophical “openness” of nihilism.

FIGURE 34. Kazimir Malevich, cover for Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913). Edition: 1,000. Letterpress, 24.4 × 17 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (48.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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PARODY AND PROVOCATION

Kruchenykh’s work is not a typical drama or libretto. It simply transcends genre definitions. Silvija Jestrovic uses the term “theatre of estrangement” (as related to Formalist “estrangement” or “defamiliarization”) in a very interesting book on Brechtian theater, treating Russian avant-garde modes and models as earlier examples.31 The alogism suggests a complete disintegration of idea, text, and traditional rules of staging. It may be assumed that such transformation leads to a complete dissolution of narrative: but it is only a partial disintegration, and on its basis emerges a new idea of the absurd, estranged text. In the deliberate transcendence of genre and eclectic theatricality of Victory, there is a touch of variety theater, the circuslike, buffoonish grotesque, and, to take a precise example, the “theater of parody” of Kozma Prutkov (a mystification, a fictional nineteenth-century author, famous for his larger-than-life aphorisms, created by the writers Aleksei K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers), which Kruchenykh much admired. There was also Nikolai Evreinov’s theater of literary and artistic parody, the Crooked Mirror, which successfully staged short plays, usually three or four in an evening, in 1913. Among them were A Solemn Public Meeting in Memory of Kozma Prutkov and the famous opera spoof Vampuka. On 29 January 1914, less than two months after the Futurist performances in the Luna Park theater, the Crooked Mirror included in one of its programs A Butterfly Sausage, a hilarious parody of Futurist theater by N. G. Smirnov and S. S. Shcherbakov, well-known parodists who collaborated with Evreinov. The aspiration to exist outside genre boundaries, and a tendency toward the “minor format,” suddenly became common in those years, evidenced by the enormous popularity of cabarets, including the Bat (Letuchaia Mysh’; 1908–22) and the Stray Dog (Brodiachaia Sobaka; 1911–15), which caught the attention of the Futurists, who used to spend a lot of time there.32 The genre of parody, however, was regarded in avant-garde circles as an artistic form that facilitated unmasking, singling out, and simplifying to the point of absurdity—the distillation of new stylistic elements and devices.33 In the early 1910s, the crisis of classic and conventional theater was painfully obvious to all—a situation that was reflected in various theoretical and practical attempts to create a new conception of the theater and theatrical performance. These included Meyerhold and his experimental “stylized” theater; Viacheslav Ivanov’s vision of mystical

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theater; Evreinov’s “theater as such” or total theater; and finally the “fourth wall” of Stanislavsky’s ultra-naturalistic Moscow Art Theater. Incidentally, the Futurists’ attitude toward the latter was unambiguously expressed by Kruchenykh in a laconic foreword to his short drama fragment published in Let’s Grumble, stating, “I haven’t been to the theater for quite some while; the last time I was there I sprained my arm fleeing from a venerable haven of vulgarity—the tinseled Art Theater (Moscow). The new theater gets on the nerves of habit and offers our new revelations in all the arts!”34 In his memoirs, Kruchenykh mentioned that he was trying to create “public theater” in order to directly address, provoke, and involve the audience; a theater that would evoke the “theatrical instinct” of its audience and go beyond the usual entertainment or moralistic preaching. Evreinov proclaimed theses on “the impotence of language in the matter of final definitions” in order to justify the pre-aesthetic essence of theater free from literature and aesthetics, contra beauty for beauty’s sake and pro acting for acting’s sake, “Theatricality is pre-aesthetic, that is to say, more primitive and more fundamental than our aesthetic feeling, or feelings. It would be ridiculous to speak of the aestheticism of a savage. Indeed, who will conceive the felicitous idea of endowing him with the capacity of enjoying ‘beauty for beauty’s sake’? But the sense of theatricality he certainly does possess.”35 His ideas could not but appeal to the Futurists, and a few of them—Kulbin and Kamensky in particular—enjoyed close friendship with Evreinov. The early Futurist literary manifestos in some respects parallel Evreinov’s ideas on theater and theatricality.36 For example, his notion that in art, form becomes content, not vice versa, is similar to Kruchenykh’s thesis that “new form creates new content,” and Evreinov’s “theater as such” recalls the Futurists’ “word as such.” The contemporaries of the Crooked Mirror, which started its existence as a cabaret, perceived the main current in theater to be a synthetic scenic miniature combining text, music, and dance without any classification into genres. Kruchenykh’s play traces a new tradition of self-reflective metaparody regenerated in Balaganchik (A Puppet Show), written by Blok and staged by Meyerhold in 1906, where Aleksandr Blok highlighted all the Symbolist clichés. Victory may well possess some elements of a metaphorical and witty self-parody of Futurism. Specifically, a few characters in the play—Reader, Aviator, and Time-Traveler—speak the language of Kruchenykh’s Futurist manifestos and assume a strong self-referential aspect. This manner of ironic provocation in the mini-drama Bridge, for

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example,is even stronger than in Victory. The name of the main character, Krivliaka (Twister), hints at Kruchenykh’s own name, which relates to the Russian verbs for “twist,”“twirl,”“roll,” and “whirl.” He was well known for playing on the semantics and etymology of his surname, creating endless variations, such as Kruch, Kruchina, Krucheny, and so on. The genealogy of this dramatis persona is complex: the easily recognizable “playing” Nietzschean poet? Blok’s Pierrot, the way it was personified by Meyerhold in Balaganchik? Or Evreinov’s Harlequin, with his twisting affectation, mirrored in his love for “over the top” theatrical props, and the sense of total “theatricality”?37 The story line of Bridge, in which Krivliaka accidentally destroys the bridge, can also be discerned in the fabula of Victory, and, in this respect, has its roots in the “heroes of the new,” the Time-Traveler and the Aviator. In Victory, the Aviator destroys the bridge by “falling from an airplane.” He himself is not hurt, but, significantly, he kills a woman: “Z . . . Z . . . bang bang . . . woman smashed . . . he knocked over a bridge” (scene 6).38 Perhaps the airplane’s symbolism represented freedom and the permission “to know it all,” in a blatant attempt to overcome gravity and transgress the traditional limits of space and time. “We learned how to look at the world backward, we enjoy this reverse motion . . . we can change objects’ weight (the eternal force of gravity), we see buildings hanging in the air and the weight of sounds. In this way, we present the word with new content,” Kruchenykh wrote.39 At the same time, it echoes the Italian Futurist heroics of the “manly” Golden Age that, on the metaphorical level, conquers the passive “effeminacy” and “lunar beauty” of the Silver Age of Symbolism.40 In the context of the opera, the attack is directed against cultural banalities and social stereotypes, applied to gender, rather than against gender itself. Similarly, the leitmotiv of the first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun, was described by Matiushin as a sneer “at the old romanticism and empty verbosity” and a “victory” over the old conventional notions of “beauty” and the idea of “art for art’s sake,” behind which “nothing living” is visible.41 Futurists were hostile to the preponderance of melodramas and plays about “the power of sex,” “the secrets of love,” and adultery in the years 1907–17. The uncompromising poetry and dramaturgy of the early avant-garde introduced “new content” by categorically rejecting the sentimental element and the notion of character psychological development— in Artaud’s phrase, the entire “psychological and human stagnation” of early twentieth-century theater.42 Aviator destroys “the bridge” along with the laws of gravity and linear

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time, the bridge as the connecting link between past and future. Without realizing it, this character breaks established connections, and, in the purity of his behavior, he literally “burns his bridges” behind him. Death turns into a ritualistic sacrifice, and the nihilistic pose of denial-destructiondissonance in Kruchenykh’s plays barely conceals the major theme of the emergence—or birth—of the new reality, and creates the overturned world, or a world without end, “worldbackwards.”43 The opera’s final lines almost literally repeat its first ones, coming together in a perfect—endless—circular structure: First Strongman: All’s well that starts well! Second Strongman: And ends? First Strongman: It never ends!44

THE THEATER OF ALOGISM AND THE THEATER OF DERISION

As in the theater of the absurd, the spectator’s lack of identification with the characters in Kruchenykh’s alogical theater does not allow any emotional empathy with the heroes of the play, but instead heightens the experience with the process of the action, sharpening the effect of its all-subsuming reality, its super- (or sur-) reality.45 This reality of presence unfolding in the space of the performance or play is connected to the “play principle,” with its dry irony, common to both the theater of alogism and the theater of the absurd. In his numerous essays and interviews, Ionesco rejected the term “theater of the absurd”; he preferred “theater of derision,” which actively parodies bourgeois theater and struggles with so-called traditional, realistic theater. According to Samuel Beckett, “to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”46 Futurists seem to envision a quite similar form of social pathos. The absurd can be abstract, cold, and self-sufficient, while parody and mockery, as a kind of paradoxical social critique, always challenge the public and bring with them an active, almost violent relationship between the artist and his audience. Rather than embodying a total theatricality of life or “theater as such,” Kruchenykh’s theater—unlike that of his contemporary Evreinov—is a model of free and spontaneous “play as such,” in this case, “play theater.” In the syncretic performance of Kruchenykh’s alogical play—which includes elements of drama, lyrical poetry, melodeclamation, singing, pantomime, and abstract scenic effects—theatrical reality, like the reality of transrational words, shifts the usual set of rules, where the com-

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municative, utilitarian function is always primary. Here the “theatricality” of acting not only prevails but becomes a self-sufficient narrating device. The unexpectedness of the zaum and phonic noises interspersed in “correct” language shock the spectators (or readers) into a desired state of anxious indefiniteness, evoking uncertainty as to their notions about reality. In so doing, Kruchenykh infused the fantastic element into reality, generating a new, alogical context. The shock produced by the destruction of the usual “order of things” puts the spectator into a state of logical “weightlessness,” like one of Kruchenykh’s “bourgeois” characters, A Fat Man. The linguistic and semantic layers of Kruchenykh’s play are extremely complex and include multiple hidden quotations from Plato, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and so on (some from Kruchenykh’s own works and Futurist manifestos), pseudo-proverbs, contemporary slang, and neologisms juxtaposed with anachronisms. This element of the incomprehensible, of “beyonsense,” alarms and shocks the audience. It is present not only in the absence of a developed plot, psychology, motivation, and character development in the traditional sense, but also in the disharmony of glossolalia and cacophony that Kruchenykh deliberately counts upon for this effect. Martin Esslin, who first proposed the term “absurd” for the new current in postwar theater, underscores that the original meaning of the word “absurd” is the disharmony, or absence of harmony, in music.47 Kruchenykh’s sense of alogism—or the absurd—transcends not only the boundaries of modern aesthetic doctrines but also the structure of binary oppositions—“thesis–antithesis,”“plus–minus,”“black–white,” “ugly–beautiful,” and so forth—that have traditionally been considered the basis of balance or harmony. Directed by Kruchenykh, Victory over the Sun began with a defiant action, well suited to transmitting his ideas and purely anarchist in its vehemence: a white curtain, adorned with Cubo-Futurist portraits of its creators, Malevich, Matiushin, and Kruchenykh, was ripped from bottom to top by two characters. “A curtain was torn, and at the same time, it tore up the wail of an old brain’s consciousness, opening the mob’s eyes to new paths thrust out into the earth and into the sky,” Malevich wrote.48

6

Deconstructing the Canon Russian Futurist Books

At the core of early Russian Futurist aesthetics are the poetics of alogism, of dissonance, of the absurd. As in the Futurist theater of alogism, Futurist books dismiss the boundaries of formal categories and rules, and a new projection develops; as Kruchenykh explains,“our verbal creativity is generated by a new deepening of the spirit, and it throws new light on everything. Its genuine novelty does not depend on new themes (objects).”1 In their transrational poetry, or zaum, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh appealed not to logic, but to intuition, the unconscious knowledge that exists beyond any linguistic structures. This emphasis sheds some light on the epistemology of the early avant-garde. The subject of transrational speech becomes speech itself, and the creative process takes precedence over end results. In this case, the Futurist vision of the world reversed, the “world backwards,” is also an anarchic principle: the reversal of the “World as a Book” archetype that perceives the whole universe, in its unalterable monumentality, as a text, as a structure, as arch;. The concept of the Futurist book emerged as a strong reaction against the creation of a mechanical model, against any perception of art as an ordered, homogeneous system. It represents a constant deconstruction of the established traditions. “Cubism, Futurism and other isms gave a scheme, a structure, a blueprint, the blueprint came from the devil and the hell smoke of the blueprint (remember the color scheme of the Cubists) is going to choke us soon”2—in these striking words by Kruchenykh, there 132

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is an element of warning, a fear of the new stereotype imposed on art. When inviting Guro, for example, to design one of his books, Kruchenykh emphasized, as a unique quality of her talent, her ability to bring forth the presence of life, to reveal being: “Technique and artificiality are not important, but life is.”3 The plurality of artistic practices and theoretical concepts compressed into one historical decade reflected the heterogeneity of the early avantgarde movement in Russia. This was not so much a history of schools and movements as of personalities such as Kruchenykh. In 1912, he inspired the first lithographic books, which served as a creative laboratory for the avant-garde movement.4 As David Burliuk noted in 1920, Kruchenykh conceptualized an experimental field in which “entire models of the new style”5 were made. He encouraged artists to participate in book production by placing them on the same footing as authors, redefining their position as coauthors and partners in the creative process—not as simply intermediaries or illustrators. In this collaboration Kruchenykh enlisted the most significant players of the artistic avant-garde from the Union of Youth in St. Petersburg and from Larionov’s group in Moscow, including Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich, Rozanova, Kulbin, Filonov, and others. They shaped the visual image of the Futurist poetry of the Hylaeans: Khlebnikov, Kamensky, David Burliuk, Mayakovsky. Let’s not forget that the experience of visual arts was an important ingredient in the activity of the Futurist poets, many of whom—including Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and David Burliuk—were also trained as artists. Larionov and Goncharova, the first designers of Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s poetry, offered the visual conception of lithographic publications from which all subsequent ones derived. From 1913 onward, Rozanova designed most of Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s books, and she contributed a strong injection of color and the introduction of rare printing techniques, such as hectography, to the genre. In 1913–14, Malevich participated in several editions and had an impact on the development of the Futurist book toward abstraction in its visual appearance, as well as in poetry. Kamensky was another daring artist who combated the monotony of ordinary typography on a white page by printing books on commercial samples of flashy wallpaper and experimenting with different fonts. The brilliant improvisations these artists and poets brought to the book form drew from the most disparate of sources, from neolithic sculptures, cliff drawings, and Chinese calligraphy to medieval illuminated manuscripts and richly visual lubki. They were equally inspired by rudi-

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FIGURE 35. Mikhail Larionov, Winter, 1912. From the series Seasons. Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 122.3 cm. Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

mentary and obscene “fence graffiti” copied from the walls of soldiers’ barracks, and by the refined calligraphy of poetic manuscripts that crystallized in the works of the French Symbolists. Following the Neoprimitivist experience in painting, for example, Larionov’s Winter, in Russian Futurist books, a letter, a word were to be perceived as a painterly theme (word-image), and each page was accorded the status of a unique artwork. The Futurist poets’ principle of incompleteness, leaving things merely implied, imparted ambiguity to the work and made possible various interpretations of it. Nikolai Burliuk once compared a word to a “living organism,” and the same may be said of lithographic books. The model developed by the Russian Futurists in 1910–16 may be regarded as the prototype of a new modification of the artist’s book, or book-object, which found its parallels in the Western avant-garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and later in Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s.

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THE WORD AS SUCH

In Futurist books, the word becomes the main “event of art,” serving as an object of creation more than a means of communication. Roman Jakobson points out this major achievement and contribution of Russian poetic Futurism, writing, “It is precisely the Russian Futurists who invented a poetry of the ‘self-developing, self-valuing word,’ as the established and clearly visible material of poetry.”6 When he was creating his theory of the new poetic language of zaum with Khlebnikov between 1912 and 1915, Kruchenykh took a deep interest in scientific studies of the unconscious and intuition—particularly Sigmund Freud’s study of the pathology of dreams and his theory of language and the unconscious.7 He also studied the latest research on the “speaking in tongues” of the most radical religious sects, such as the Khlysty.8 Gradually, Kruchenykh rejected the “bookish” canon of frozen and “correct” language and turned to the volatile nature of speech, and its reflection in handwriting, with all the objective properties and physicality of phonic—and visual—aspects. The turn to the ancient roots of the Slavic languages in Khlebnikov’s poetics is inseparably connected with his study of Slavic myths, folktales, popular beliefs, and apocrypha, and this “magical” aspect of zaum has colored many themes and motifs of his multilayered “transrational” poetry. Khlebnikov always builds a semiotic chain of signs, symbols, and meanings, which seem to be organically growing into one another in his poetry. Kruchenykh, in contrast, is a minimalist in his zaum. He starts with complex concepts and allusions, but reduces them as he works to the most rudimentary, primary elements. Anything that would allow the reader to puzzle out the initial context is excised. All that remains is the “stripped” nucleus of a concept. This notion of the autonomous and self-sufficient word—“the word as such”—was the foundation upon which all of Russian poetic Futurism grew, and this is what defined its original texture and gave it a distinct national coloring. In his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912), Marinetti proclaimed the dawning of a new age calling for a new language, but, despite all his innovations, the novelty of theme still predominated over the novelty of method, for Marinetti did not go beyond introducing unexpected analogies and grammatical irregularities. The Russian Futurists’ goal was to effect a profound renewal of poetic language on the level of structure. Khlebnikov’s and

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Kruchenykh’s principal idea was that “the work of art is the art of the word.” Since words are disseminated by books, Russian Futurists were faced with the necessity of creating a new model of the book that could accommodate their poetic and visual aspirations by projecting this idea of “the word as such” onto the notion of the book. They conceived of the book as an art object that embodies the wholeness of a living, not mechanically finalized, entity. Kruchenykh argued: “I really don’t like endless works and big books—they can’t be read at a single sitting, and they do not give you any sense of wholeness. Books should be small, but contain no lies; everything is its own, belongs to that book, down to the last ink stain.”9 Such a concept inevitably led to an open aesthetic system that takes into account spontaneous change and randomness: this fascination with deliberate Futurist “shifts” and accidental errors is reflected in the Russian Futurist books of 1912–17. These books exist outside of any established genre, at the crossroads of painting and poetry, and contain in embryo an enormous potential for breaking down any aesthetic stereotypes. And if we follow Jakobson’s formalist notion of poetry as “language in its aesthetic function,” then we can define the Futurist book as nothing less than a book in its aesthetic function: a book that loses its instrumental “usefulness”—its communicative function—and acquires the self-sufficiency of an autonomous work of art. The Futurists not only devised an absolutely new aesthetic concept of the artist’s book, but in so doing they also broke all ties with conventional book production. First, they did not have publishers in the strict sense of the word: most of the books were produced by the artists and poets themselves (Burliuk, Kamensky, Kruchenykh’s press “EUY,” Matiushin’s “Zhuravl’,” and so on), sometimes with the modest financial support of friends, who did not censor or control the work, nor expect any profits. Several lithographed books were published in this way with the monetary assistance of Kuzmin and Dolinskii, young aviators and friends of Mayakovsky’s. Kruchenykh’s albums War (with linocuts by Rozanova) and Universal War were fully sponsored by Andrei Shemshurin. Of course, the productions themselves were incredibly cheap. In his memoirs, Kruchenykh described this process: So much work went into those first appearances in print! Needless to say, they were done on our own resources, which were anything but ample. To put it more simply, we didn’t have a kopeck. Both Game in Hell and my other (also irreverent) little book Old-Fashioned Love I copied myself in lithographic

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pencil. . . . Natalia Goncharova’s and Mikhail Larionov’s drawings, of course, were a friendly gratis favor. We were forced to scour Moscow for the threeruble down payment to the printer. . . . I was in a hurry, fearing that the printer would change his mind and the whole business would collapse. . . . It cost me nearly the same effort to publish my subsequent “EUY” [the name of Kruchenykh’s press] works (1912–14). The books published by “Hylaea” were done on David Burliuk’s modest means. The burden of A Trap for Judges I and II was shouldered by Elena Guro and Mikhail Matiushin.10

A similar experience is related by Lev Zhegin, who recollected the story behind Mayakovsky’s first lithographed book, Ia! (I!) (1913): One day Chekrygin announced to me that Maiakovsky wanted to publish the first collection of his poems as lithographs and needed help: the best thing would be to work in my room. Maiakovsky brought the lithograph paper and ink and proceeded to dictate his needs to Chekrygin. The latter wrote in his characteristic Slavonic style and produced several beautiful drawings, reminiscent of [medieval religious] Novgorod frescoes but having nothing to do with Maiakovsky’s text. “There you go again, Vasia,” grumbled Maiakovsky. “There is another angel you have drawn—why not draw a fly, you haven’t done any of them for a long time?” Still, he didn’t object all that much. The text of Maiakovsky’s book Ya! and the drawings were whisked off to a little lithographer’s workshop . . . and printed in an edition of 300.11

By working in the most economical way, the Futurists achieved total artistic control over the final product, which allowed them to create an artist’s book independent of the whims of publishing enterprises or the ruling art-world fashion. It also enabled them to avoid dealing with expensive and often imperfect reproduction machinery. Ironically, in “the age of mechanical reproduction,” the most extreme innovators, Kruchenykh and Rozanova, freed themselves from any technological process involving expensive machinery and often stressed the unusual hand-made quality of their publications as an important artistic device that could fully reflect their aesthetic philosophy. Andrei Shemshurin, a scholar of Old Russian manuscripts and a generous supporter of many Futurist publications, remarked upon this tendency in a letter to Kruchenykh: Concerning the practical development of your publications . . . you took another step forward (even farther?). In books designed by Goncharova, the Futurist poet depends on the lithographer . . . Rozanova got rid of any kind of typography [in the portfolio of linocuts War], but a mechanical approach is still present, since she sets paint on one and the same stencil. But you [in pasteons for Universal War] had only one mechanical device—a scissors.12

FIGURE 36. Vladimir Mayakovsky, cover for his own poetry collection la! (I!) (Moscow: G. L. Kuzmin and S. D. Dolinskii, 1913). Other illustrations by Vasilii Chekrygin and Lev Shekhtel. Edition: 300. Lithograph, 23.9 × 17.6 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (Boris Kerdimun Archive), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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The primacy of the visual over the literary seems key in the development of zaum. In 1919, Malevich summarized his earlier thoughts on abstraction in poetry and painting in his essay “On Poetry,” the principal concepts of which are based on the thesis that there is a generic similarity between certain abstract categories—such as rhythm and tempo—in painting, poetry, and music: “There is poetry in which pure rhythm and tempo remain as movement and time; here the rhythm and tempo rest on letters, which, like signs contain this or that sound. . . . It is the same in painting and music.”13 One cannot just read a Futurist book; to experience it, one should “see, listen to and feel it,” as the Russian modernist writer and calligrapher Aleksei Remizov put it.14 In 1917, Kruchenykh reworked his “Declaration of the Word as Such,” adding two new points: one proclaimed the “highest universality and economy [eko-khud]” of transrational poetry, while in the other he attempted to formulate the process of the creative act, as “in music—the sound, in painting—color, in poetry—the letter (thought = vision + sound + line + color).”15 A crucial part of the phenomenology of Futurist books is their tactile, physical quality: they are small, almost palm-size, and made of cheap, rough paper, but with rich texture and particular color tones. The authenticity of these book-objects was closely related to their “thingly” nature, their material body and texture. The Russian Futurists assigned particular importance to handwriting and the handcrafted quality of their books; they believed that only an original manuscript in the poet’s or artist’s own hand is capable of fully conveying the music, texture, and rhythm of the verse. It is a generic feature of Russian Futurism that a letter must be perceived as a visual sign, a word as an object. What the Italian Futurists wanted to achieve in dramatic phonic declamations of their poetry, the Russians sought to achieve in inimitable visual images of the word: There are two propositions: 1. That mood changes one’s longhand during the process of writing. 2. That the longhand peculiarly modified by one’s mood conveys that mood to the reader, independently of the words. Also, one has to pose the question of graphic signs, visual signs, or simply tactile signs as if felt by the hand of a blind man. Of course, it is not mandatory that the wordwright be also the copyist of a handwritten book: indeed, it would be better if the wordwright entrusted this job to an artist.16

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If words can be perceived as objects, they can become painterly themes. The unity of the page, produced by lithography, approaches an organic synthesis of design and text in which one flows out of the other and the “pictorial” nature of the letter and handwritten text is embedded in the drawing. In all of the Futurists’ poetic declarations, this visuality of the word is emphasized, and the new concept of the “word-image” emerges in response to the aspiration to synthesis of poetry and painting. The specific essence of the self-sufficient “word-image” of Futurist books becomes apparent when it is compared with the Italian tavole parolibere.17 The first experiments in this direction appeared in 1912, in Marinetti’s parolibere in Italy and in Kruchenykh’s first lithographed books in Russia. They were followed the next year by Marinetti’s manifesto L’imaginazione senza file e le parole in libertà and Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s Word as Such. Marinetti declared that the Italian Futurists had liberated not only meter and rhythm but also syntax, and introduced a new orthography and means of deforming words, thus attaining a new level of graphic plurality. In L’imaginazione senza file e parole in libertà, he generally took the machine as his ally, which produced a suprapersonal, extra-individual result, a kind of deus ex machina. (Fortunato Depero even introduced the concept of the “mechanical book,” or libro macchina.) Underlying Italian Futurist “freewords” (parolibere) was the all-encompassing idea of Italian futurist poetry, namely, onomatopoeia, which was to be expressed visually in a “typographic revolution.” By contrast, Kruchenykh entrusted his books, not to the typographer, but to the artist, who restored the pictorial quality of writing, thereby transforming the poetic word into a work of art. This presence of the artist’s hand is what erases the boundary between the two forms of creative activity. Even in the handwritten Italian tavole parolibere of 1914 and 1915 and later, none of the authors (Marinetti, Balla, Buzzi, Carrado Govoni, and Francesco Canguillo) permitted themselves such a bold fusion of the poetic and painterly canons. After all, the manuscript of the poet— even if he is experimenting with the potential of the graphic shape of the word—still belongs first to the autonomous poetical tradition rather than the painterly one. If we compare the makeup of tavole parolibere published in the February 15, 1915, edition of Lacerba and Rozanova’s 1914 composition dedicated to the memory of the poet Ivan Ignatiev and executed to Khlebnikov’s verses, their difference becomes immediately obvious. In the first

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FIGURE 37. F. T. Marinetti, cover design for Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914). Letterpress, 20.4 × 13.5 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (Boris Kerdimun Archive), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2011 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

case, the author’s drawing or compositional fragmentation of words functions like a kind of graphic “text,” or mime of an actor illustrating his speech with movements and gestures. For example, in Canguillo’s parolibere “Le Coriste,” the pictographic human figures seem to be the mirror reflection of letters and compositionally distributed chains or lines. As also in Govoni’s “Il Palombaro,” and in many other works, the drawing

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presumes that the reader will subject it to a logical and adequate process of“reading.”What we evidently have to deal with here is a visual analog of onomatopoeia in poetry. In Rozanova and Khlebnikov’s 1914 composition dedicated to the memory of the poet Ivan Ignatiev, there is a reverse metamorphosis, in which the poetic text appears with the immediacy of an image, initially perceived as a drawing and subject to the laws of painting. This graphic sheet was executed using a two-tone (black and blue) hectographic printing technique, which gives each impression a very individual texture close to that of watercolors.18 The synthesis of color and sound, the painterly and the poetic, became complete in Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s Te li le,19 created with the same hectographic technique using seven colors. It was in this edition that Rozanova (Kulbin was her co-illustrator of Khlebnikov’s verses) brought her art to a culmination. Kruchenykh wrote of this work: Many have already noticed that the genius of external beauty is highest of all, so that if anyone likes best of all the way, say, Te li le is written (from the painterly aspect) but not its meaning (toothless meaning, of which, by the way, there is none in zaum) and not the practical aspect (of which there is none in zaum’ either), then it seems that such a reader is right and not a ruffian at all. The word (letter), of course, has undergone a great change here; perhaps it has even been replaced by painting, but what does a “drunkard of paradise” care about all this prose? And I have already met persons who bought Te li le without understanding anything about dyr-bul-shchyl but who admired its painting. On the matter of instantaneous writing: 1. The first impression (by correcting it 10 times we lose it and perhaps therefore lose everything). 2. By correcting, thinking over, polishing, we banish chance from art that in momentary art of course occupies an honored place; by banishing chance we deprive our works of that which is most valuable, for we leave only that which has been experienced and thoroughly acquired, and all of the life of the unconscious goes to pot!20

In Te li le (published in an edition of fifty copies), Kruchenykh included his own and Khlebnikov’s poetry from their earlier books. They had widely exploited the potential of the “irregularities” of zaum and the rich possibilities for creating the laconicism of “implied meaning” that Guro claimed “forces one to decode the book and ask of it a new, partially revealed potential.”21 In some respects, Kruchenykh’s instantaneous “autowriting” (what he called samopis’mo) anticipates the method of automatic

Olga Rozanova, In Memoriam I. V. I[gnatie]v. Graphic design for Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem of that title, 1914. Hectograph in two colors, 24 × 18 cm. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow.

FIGURE 38.

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Olga Rozanova, uncut sheet for Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Te Ii Ie. (St. Petersburg: n.p.,1914). Color hectograph, 37.2 × 45.1 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (202.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. FIGURE 39.

writing developed by the French Surrealists, while Rozanova’s experiments in “colored poetry” coincided with Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s explorations of simultaneous painting and poetry in a unique book format.22 In Rozanova’s and Kruchenykh’s visual poetry, the “hieroglyphic” quality of the word-image is intensified, and its ornamental nature eclipses the meaning contained in it. The poetic word is transformed into image and is perceived visually as an inimitable, enigmatic picture. The word is viewed rather than read, and its semantic meaning gives way to its graphic, visual sense, which is apprehended momentarily (as though its meaning is unintelligible or unknown). Writing and reading must be instantaneous!... Wordwrights should write on the cover of their books: once you’ve read it—tear it up!23

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THE BOOK AS A POETIC TROPE

In advertisements for new Futurist editions, often printed on the back covers or the last pages of their preceding publications, books do not “come out” or get “published”—instead they “take off” and “fly out.”A dynamic aspiration to overcome the laws of gravity is expressed in this instant “airborne” metaphor, a striving for new dimensions, for the metaphysical victory “over the earth” that Ilya Zdanevich cited, a symbolic “earth” that Malevich called an all-too-human “green world of flesh and bone.” This trope of “flying books” with pages as wings had been envisioned by Mallarmé, and might also have been introduced into the poetics of Russian Futurism from yet another source. There is a particular commentary on the Russian word for “book”—kniga—in the most authoritative Russian dictionary, edited by the scholar and populist Vladimir Dal’ (whose work both Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov held in high esteem), and widely known since the end of the nineteenth century as the Dal’ Dictionary. Among other meanings of this word, Dal’ mentioned that kniga is a word for “bird” in a certain dialect of the Czech language. As a matter of fact, the etymology of the word kniga still remains ambiguous, and there are several versions of its origin. Futurists, with their cult of the word, did not miss an opportunity to flirt with this ambiguity. Their witty imagination created one metamorphosis after another, and in their provocative artistic space, a book becomes a bird (“new books fly out” from a Futurist advertisement), a bomb (Vzorval’—“Explodity”), a nest (Duck’s Nest of Bad Words), and a parasite (Transrational Boog, in Russian Zaumnaia gniga, fusing the words kniga [book] and gnida [nit]). Kruchenykh insinuates a break or abrupt shift in the very title of his book Vzorval’ (Explodity; 1913). Rozanova notes in a letter to her sister that the Futurist neologism vzorval’ means “bomb.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, following Nietzsche and Mallarmé, comparing books to bombs became a key metaphor in modernist discourse.24 It stood for the strife produced by art, the aggressive collision of two realities. “My writing is a bomb that I throw; life outside myself is a bomb thrown at me: one bomb striking another bomb in a shower of shrapnel, two sets of intersecting sequences. The shrapnel fragments of my writing are the forms of art,” Andrei Bely declares.25 When Kulbin was designing a simple black-and-white cover for the first edition of Vzorval’, he must have been thinking of the infamous public Futurist debates, which were happening simultaneously at the Polytech Museum in Moscow. There is a sharp lightning bolt frozen above the scene, as if it were a naïve sign

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of a cathartic moment; and the lonely figure of a fierce orator on the podium, caught in the middle of throwing a bomb—or maybe it was a book of Futurist poetry?—into his rioting audience. The lithograph, conceived with a great deal of humor, looks like a quick pencil sketch drawn by a child. Kruchenykh goes one step further in his wordplay by simply titling his book “Explodity,” rather than comparing it with a bomb. Doing so projects a rhetorical device into artistic reality, turning a poetic trope into a real object, a book. To name something is an intentional act of creation, which in Futurist poetics becomes a “magical” act, that transforms a poet into a primordial man, a demigod, who, “like Adam, proceeds to give things his own names.”26 One of the main poetic principles in Vzorval’—composing verse using disharmonious, alliterative cacophony—merges with the split visual appearance of the book. Sheets with words printed in rubber stamps are mixed with pages handwritten in lithograph pencil and interspersed with equally intense lithographs in which, as in a dream, recognizable details disappear into an infinity of abstraction based on splitting, shifting, and even “exploding” forms parallel to the “wild tempo” of the poetry. Kruchenykh recalled later, in the 1920s: My ideal in 1912–13 was a mad tempo, which is why the poetry and prose was [were] structured entirely on syntactical and other shifts, the models for which are in my books Let’s Grumble! Explodity, and others. I think that there will be a return to this sometime in the future—this is the source of our Futurism and sharp emphasis on expression. . . . Very significantly, in Explodity and Worldbackwards there was a tremor, an explosion that was expressed not only in the structure of phrases and lines, but in the exploded script as well.27

Rozanova designed the second edition of this book, and following the technique initially used by Larionov in Pomada (1913), Rozanova and Kruchenykh painted some of the copies by hand in watercolor over lithographs. The rich visual texture mirrors various poetic devices— deformations, shifts, plays on the noncoincidence of a unit of meaning and a word—paralleling deliberate coloration in painting (free-flowing color, as seen in lubok) that ignores and goes beyond the outline of the depicted object. The artist has the same recourse as the poet to conveying dissonance and an intonation that the Futurists called zloglas (cacophony). The increasing tempo of Kruchenykh’s poetic speech is impetuous, structured on the principle of “incorrectness” he cultivated, by which his abstract zaum is interjected into more conventional narration.

FIGURE 40. Nikolai Kulbin, cover for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Vzorval’ (Explodity) (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913). 1st edition: 350.. Lithograph, 17.5 × 11.8 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (56.2001), Museum of Modem Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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This brings to mind an oral tradition that contrasted with the written canon, namely, the ritual language of the Khlyst flagellant sect. In this discourse all the usual coordinates of “practical speech” have been lost, and the intellect does not have time to grasp a word submerged in the alogical context. This greatly intensifies the hidden potentialities of language, and as a result the texture, color, and rhythm of each page convey more than an “exploded” logical meaning. The entire book reads like a single poetic theme, played out with a vital, indomitable, irrational energy of creation—that very “joy of creation” that produces art. In February 1914, Roman Jakobson wrote Kruchenykh: You know, poetry up to now was a stained-glass window . . . and like the sun’s rays passing through its panes, romantic demonism imparted picturesqueness to it. But here is victory over sun and the f-ray (from your own works). The glass is blown up, from the fragments . . . we create designs for the sake of liberation. From demonism, from null, we create any convention whatsoever, and in its intensity, its force, is the pledge of aristocratism in poetry.28

The anarchist concept of “creative destruction” was linked not so much to the notion of destruction as to resistance, not to the fight with, but for. This approach was deconstructive in the way it shattered old poetic and artistic canons to be recycled as building materials for the creation of the new collage—the designs from fragments. With the publication of Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) in 1912, this became one of the main artistic devices in Futurist books. The dynamics of the Futurist shift—temporal, spatial, and semantic displacement, the dislocation of form, rhythm, and time—shape the unique image of the book. Its title, “Worldbackwards,” expresses the refutation of linear physical time, and in appearance the book was no less unusual than its title. Its design united the Neoprimitivist style with the early abstractions of Rayism invented by Larionov: a scattering of laconic lines seem to suggest only a drawing, and, in the spectator’s eye, they seem ready to rearrange themselves in ever-new patterns, like the shapes in a kaleidoscope. Later, a similar perception inspired Kruchenykh’s “swirling letters” in his minimalist reduction of the Tiflis (Tbilisi) editions. He explained the orchestration of the visual appearance of his poetry in his letter to Kirill Zdanevich, who designed Kruchenykh’s book Learn Artists! (1917): “I want the letters and words to follow the attached model–swirling letters—i.e., the drawing inside the letters, the letters in the frame of the drawing and intersected by the drawing.”29

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THE BOOK AS AN IDEOLOGICAL OBJECT

For the Futurists, a book was first and foremost a perfect laboratory for their formal experiments. However, it also paved the way for their independent place in the art world, and played a very important role in Futurist politics at a moment when the “shocking” challenge of the aesthetic message was being substituted for the criterion of quality. From the very start, Futurist books were intentionally turned against everything in the Symbolist’s livre d’artiste—in a sense, they were conceived and advertised by their authors as anti-livres d’artiste. Kruchenykh wrote in Three: Editions of Grif, Musaget, Scorpio [Symbolist publishing houses]. Huge white pages . . . Gray letters . . . Should like to wrap a nice pickled herring in it . . . and a cold blood is running in these books . . . 30

Unlike the expensive and elevated art books, Futurist books were small, rough, loud inside and out, and cheap. They were produced in limited quantities: usually no more than a thousand copies, and in many cases the editions ran fifty to three hundred books. Most of the lithographed editions cost thirty to seventy kopeks. The only cheaper books were the popular series aimed at the lowest social classes. Among other modernist editions, one issue of the literary and artistic Symbolist journal Apollon in 1913 cost one ruble and seventy-five kopeks, approximately four times more than most of the Futurist productions. A typical livre d’artiste such as Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, with facsimile illustrations by the renowned Alexandre Benois, cost ten rubles, while the special numbered edition for connoisseurs of the same book cost thirty-five rubles, making it fifty times more expensive than hand-colored copies of Vzorval’, for example. By putting such low prices on their work, Futurists were able to create an audience, not a wide one, but loyal and curious, mostly of students.“Aleksei Kruchenykh and I have illustrated some books together which are selling very well, so we should clear quite a bit on them,” Rozanova informed her sister in 1913.31 But the situation was not always the same. “In Moscow no one knows of the existence of your new books”—Roman Jakobson wrote to Kruchenykh in February 1914. “I pointed this out to the clerk . . . [in the bookstore], asked him to put them in the window. He answers: ‘Thank God no one knows!’ ”32 The reaction of the bewildered clerk marks an important quality of the Futurist book: its provocative nature. It was an intense, aggressive

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artistic gesture. Retrospectively, Kruchenykh stressed that “Futurist scandals” had nothing to do with common public debauches or antisocial behavior. In 1913–14, “Futurist debates” usually sold out. Such public appearances, which would follow publications of new editions, allowed them to broaden their still “cult”-like audience. These performances, along with the Futurist books, were the most effective advertising strategy, the fastest way to market a new aesthetic ideology and enable the movement to succeed. Russian Futurism started as a literary movement with such a strategic episode. Matiushin relates in his memoirs a case of artistic provocation involving the first edition of the Trap for Judges (1910), which was aimed against the Symbolists, in this case, members of Viacheslav Ivanov’s inner circle: “This book fell like a bomb among the mystics at Viacheslav Ivanov’s. The Burliuks came to him very piously, and Ivanov welcomed them cordially. Then, as they were leaving, these ‘scoundrels’ stuffed every pocket of all the coats and cloaks of those present with a copy of Trap. Remizov, Blok, Kuzmin, Gorodetsky and others got their copies that way.”33 In a sense, Russian Futurists were anarchists in their art, but anarchists throwing books as if they were bombs. This anarchic anti-canonicity of the early Russian avant-garde was not so much an attempt to épater le bourgeois as a method of cognition, or new epistemology, a conscious expansion of artistic space through the deconstructing of aesthetic cliché (even inside the avant-garde movement itself). In their manifesto “Word as Such,” Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov write, “They ask us about the ideal, about pathos? It’s not a question of hooliganism, or of heroic deeds, or of being a fanatic or a monk. All Talmuds are equally destructive to the wordwright (slovotvortsa), what constantly remains with him is only the word as (such) itself.”34 Alexandre Benois, who sarcastically called the first Futurist books “buffoonish little albums,” was actually not so wrong. He responded to the provocative, performance-like nature of these Futurist creations, with their ambivalence toward genre and canon, their vitality of farce and spectacle, where reality and play merge, and art is made without rules. The infamous opening line of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, consisting of a single portmanteau word fusing merde (shit) with meurtre (murder)—“Merdre”—is of the same nature as the inflammatory gesture in Kruchenykh’s Vzorval’, with its final word, “shish” (the taboo equivalent of “prick” in English slang), spread all over the last page. For the “First Free International Futurist Exhibition” in Rome in the spring of 1914, Marinetti selected Kruchenykh’s Duck’s Nest of Bad

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Words, a book in lithographic pencil, hand-watercolored by Rozanova, published in December 1913. Here Rozanova created a unique model of the artistic dramaturgy of the book. Its precisely calculated alternation of illustrations and Kruchenykh’s penciled verses resembles a sequence of frozen movie frames containing a succession of various planes, unity of action and authorial intonation, climax and depiction of the lyrical hero (or rather antihero). With respect to its tone, this book is the most self-reflective piece written by Kruchenykh during this period. Its confessional quality is of a special kind; it is a poetic narrative in which the poet creates a myth about himself out of shards of reality, absurd dreams, allusions, and anxieties. It responds to the mask of the “bogeyman of Russian literature” that stuck to Kruchenykh his entire life and still, in the view of many, takes over his image as an artist. The book opens with the poet’s ravings, taking the place of a foreword addressed to the reader: A slush of obscenities my professed cries don’t need an introduction —I am all too good even when rude

The page is designed as an abstract composition with the dynamic rhythm of sharp corners, and anguished lines. Another page is taken up entirely by a picture, or more precisely, a “portrait” of the city, which is not only the setting of the action but also one of the book’s main “personae.” Rozanova depicts it as through a lens, so that everything—buildings, trees, and so on—becomes rounded, deformed, and indistinct. This dissonance grows in the following pages and poems dedicated to the technological self-destruction of the modern city. The Futurists’ aspiration to broaden the limits of the book by driving it toward performance is reflected in the “explosure” and annihilation of its canonic form. “Destroy completely the book in art (an inert form of conveying words by means of paper and typeface), and turn directly to the art of life, putting poetry and thoughts on fences, walls, houses, factories, roofs, on the wings of airplanes, on the decks of ships, on sails, with electric projectors in the sky, on clothing,” Vasilii Kamensky urged his fellow Futurists.35 In Tango with Cows (1914), he started by mapping his visual “ferro-concrete poems” on brightly printed wallpaper. Being an airplane pilot himself, and fascinated with technology, Kamensky was practically the only Russian Futurist of this early period who followed

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FIGURE 41. Vasilii Kamensky, “Shchukin Palace,” from Tango s korovami. Zhelezobetonnye poemy (Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems) (Moscow: D. D. Burliuk, 1914). Edition: 300. Letterpress cover and spreads on verso of wallpaper, 18.9 × 19.2. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (73.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

the Italians in their experimentation exclusively with typography and the letterpress rather than handwriting: “The underscoring of emphasized words and letters, the incorporation (in boldface) of numbers and various mathematical signs and lines into verses, make the work appear dynamic and easier to remember.”36 Most of the poems in his book are conceived as blueprints, describing and visually depicting a fragmented space with an “entrance” and “exit” to the text, in which scattered events of the poet’s memory—an excursion to the Shchukin art gallery, a walk in Constantinople, even the flight of an airplane—are precisely recorded in succession each on a single page. Thus, the visual construction of the poem “Shchukin Museum”consisted of a big square divided into several segmentsrooms, separated by lines, with words and names of artists inside of each.

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One had Matisse, another Monet and the defiant exclamation “No!” next to it, another Picasso, and so on. The arrangement follows the display of paintings in the Shchukin gallery exactly, room by room, as if it were a parody of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Kamensky energetically involves his reader in a dialogue, an interaction, as if inviting him or her to come along. What is interesting, however, is that the author does not force his reader/spectator to take a prescribed route, he does not guide the reader in one direction, but allows the latter to wander, to get through the poem and make sense of it in his own way. A Futurist author always avoids closure, leaving an open space for endless interpretations, enabling his reader-spectator to become a companion, a coauthor, a co-creator. PERFORMING BOOKS: SOUND AND IMAGE

While Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and Kamensky were concentrating on the visual texture of their books, Ilya Zdanevich was developing his “polyphonic, polycorporeal creation” of “multi-poetry” to convey “our manyfaced and split existence.” In his search, Zdanevich concentrated on the category of sound, but later, during his Tiflis (Tbilisi) period, he found a unique visual form, structured almost like a musical score, to reflect the polysemous chords of the truly “symphonic” sound of his poetry: “Correcting our defective mouths, we have come to orchestral poetry, speaking in crowds and everything different, we have come to a harbor patched with the husk of encounters, to the marketplace of handcraft to trade in nets for capturing days. And multi-poetry, which you cannot read silently . . . runs flushed onto the stage to take the trenches by storm.”37 The Cubo-Futurists’ challenging behavior at many public debates and lectures on poetry, art, and culture in 1912–14 was an important mechanism in building their sensational reputation. They were confronted with the problem of limited editions that rarely were disseminated outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. In an attempt to win new audiences, Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, and Kamensky toured Russia from December 1913 through March 1914, performing and debating their poetry on stage, often in extravagant costumes (Mayakovsky’s infamous “yellow blouse,” for example) and with their faces painted. On some occasions, they shared the stage with Igor’ Severianin, who inspired Ego-Futurism, which arose around 1911, and more than any other Futurist trend was influenced by decadence.

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FIGURE 42. Ilya Zdanevich, spread from Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi. Fantasticheskii kabachek (To Sofia Georgievna Melnikova: The Fantastic Tavern) (Tiflis (Tbilisi): 41°, 1919). Edition: 180. Letterpress collage, 16.8 × 12.7 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (136.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

In early 1913, Ivan Ignatiev reorganized the Intuitive Association of Ego-Futurism and declared himself the chairman of its “Areopagus,” which also included Vasilisk Gnedov, Shirokov, and Dmitrii Kriuchkov. He used wordplay to name the group, in allusion to the most recent psychoanalytic concept of “ego,” and after Max Stirner’s individualist hero of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), a book that had an immense influence on Russian culture, from Apollon Grigoriev and Dostoevsky to the Futurists.38 Ignatiev and Gnedov made direct references to anarcho-individualist ideas in their writings, for example, in Ignatiev’s manifesto “Ego-Futurism,” he praises Ego-Futurism as egovyi anarchism. As the name of the group suggests, Ego-Futurism emphasized the “I” of artistic personality, and it arose in contrast with the rather “communal” spirit of Hylaea. They sympathized with decadent poetics, particularly the work of Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and its idea of de-

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viation from the “natural” norm. Richard Sonn, in regards to the anarchic character of the decadent work, writes that “its principle fragmentariness, where every page, every word strive to be independent of the whole, and as a result there is no whole, and no unity,” may also apply to Futurist ideas of the “word as such.”39 Sonn argues that cultivation of the artificial and the absurd entered into the avant-garde’s discourse with the decadent movement40 and the aesthetics of decadence inherited Max Stirner’s anarchist tendencies toward individual freedom and autonomy, by developing it to an extreme that in some cases was a form of nihilism. Oscar Wilde, who was in favor of anarchist ideas, was the greatest supporter of the theory of “art for art’s sake,” and proclaimed art as “the supreme manifestation of individualism.”41 With all the differences considered, it is possible to establish a certain typological kinship between the early avant-garde and the radical forms of decadent culture that appeared as avant-gardists mastered the public personae and decadent artistic “gestures” already discussed. The aspiration to broaden the borders of the permissible in poetry is reflected in Ignatiev’s works. He attempts this in his poem “The Third Entrance,” where verbal fragments are accompanied by musical notes, and the poet explains that “to the reader (this term sounds strange here, for the reader must also be a spectator, and a listener, and most of all, an intuitive) is given: word, color, melody, and a schema of rhythm (movements) noted down at the left.”42 Another Ego-Futurist, Vasilisk Gnedov, who often took part in lectures and debates on the side of the Hylaeans, offered the most radical poetic performance of the era. Gnedov’s collection Death to Art contains fifteen poems. The final one, “Poem of the End,” consists only of the title and a blank page, anticipating the theoretical position of Conceptual art on the limits of writing in the latter half of the twentieth century.“Poem of the End” exists not only as a visual text—reduced to its zero form—but also as a gesture, as a pure conceptual performance. V. V. Markov mentions that Ignatiev gives a description of Gnedov’s recitation of the poem: “He read with a rhythmic movement. The hand was drawing a line: from left to right and vice versa (the second one cancelled the first, as plus and minus result in minus). ‘Poem of the End’ is actually ‘Poem of Nothing,’ a zero, as it is drawn graphically.”43 No less provocative was a book that Kruchenykh prepared in 1914, Transrational Boog. His co-author this time was Jakobson, who wrote under the pseudonym Aliagrov: “Kruchenykh and I published Zaumnaia gniga (gniga—he was irritated if anyone referred to it as kniga). Incidentally, it is not correct that it came out in 1916. Kruchenykh put that

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Mikhail Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves: Futurist Manifesto,” Argus 12 (St. Petersburg), December 1913, 116–18. Zdanevich and Larionov, p. 116, and Natalia Goncharova, p. 117, with faces painted with Rayist designs by Larionov.

FIGURE 43.

date so that it would be a book of the future. But it came out earlier. In any case, everything was sent in 1914.”44 Rozanova used color linocuts from her “playing cards” series of 1914 in her design for this book of sound poetry, printed in ink with rubber stamps. In the dramatic final version of the cover, the blazing heart, cut from glossy red paper, as if “tattooed” on the cover, was “pinned” by a men’s underwear button pasted onto the heart. The irony and alogism of this collage with a real button—now it seems a timid predecessor of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade”—was an ideal visual counterpart to Kruchenykh’s and Aliagrov’s transrational poetry. The introductory imperative “I forbid you to read this while of sound mind!” questioned the very essence of everything usually associated with the notion of a book. Here the object of transrational discourse becomes the discourse itself, and the creative process is abstracted and ritualized. Present in this extreme broadening of the space of poetry is the danger that poetry will self-destruct and “dissolve” its own structure. Gerald Janecek argues in his book Zaum that zaum can be and has been considered an equivalent in language to abstractionism, and a zaum poem by Kruchenykh an equivalent to Malevich’s “Black Square.” In addition, zaum can be said to exist at the limits of language, and therefore the examination of it is one way of getting at the roots (and lim-

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FIGURE 44. Olga Rozanova, cover of Zaumnaia gniga (Transrational Boog) by Aliagrov [Roman Jakobson] and Aleksei Kruchenykh (Moscow: n.p., 1915). Edition: 140. Letterpress collage of glossy red paper and button, 22 × 18.8 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (66.2001.), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

its) of human language itself. . . . What might seem to be a minor episode in Russian Avant-garde poetry has very broad implications and a historical scope that ranges from Plato to current theories of language and literature (e.g., Deconstructionism).45

One of the first theoreticians of transrational language, the formalist Viktor Shklovsky, reminisced about this in the 1980s:

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What do I think now, seventy years later, about transrational language? I think that we never did manage to figure it out completely. . . . Above all, it is not meaningless language. Even when it was deliberately stripped of meaning, it was a form of negating the world. In this sense it is somehow close to the “theater of the absurd.” Transrational language is a language of pre-inspiration, the rustling chaos of poetry, pre-book, pre-word chaos out of which everything is born and into which everything disappears.46

In the syncretic spectacle of the Futurist book, the visual reality of transrational words is deprived of any communicative, utilitarian function and becomes not only dominant but self-sufficient. A Futurist book became a true paradox: a material form to capture chaotic flux, immediacy, spontaneity—all the immaterial, ephemeral elements of life.

PART THREE

Locating the Avant-Garde’s Social Stance

7

The “Social Test” The Avant-Garde and the Great War

As the previous chapters show, Russian culture in 1910–18 was engaged in an active process of self-definition and “self-cognition.” Neither the war nor any other external event could substantially alter or directly influence the inner artistic process, but history was variously refracted in the worldview of the artist, in particular having an immense power on shaping his or her social position: Mayakovsky defined the Great War as a first “social test” of the avant-garde. Scholars of art and literature paid little attention to the Great War’s role in the early Russian avantgarde.1 Nonetheless, a deeper understanding of avant-garde poetics and culture—on social, political, and aesthetic levels—appears when contextualized in relation to World War I. According to the artist and theoretician Ivan Kliun, the Russian avantgarde was mainly concerned in 1910–14 with the creation of a “completely real language to express new feelings and concepts.”2 The fierceness and energy of the movement, the “destructive” side of the aesthetics of anarchy, came into its own when faced with war. One may justify the obsessive aestheticization of military subjects by the same aesthetic “inner necessity” that Kandinsky considered the principal criterion of art. The metaphor of war in the prewar avant-garde, often confused with the notion of violence in modernist culture, was paradigmatic to the concept of innovation and directly linked to the symbolic destruction of previous achievements. Bakunin’s meta-religious “spirit, the eternal source of life,” is reflected 161

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in many modernist and early avant-garde writings, but especially in Kandinsky’s theoretical works. In his discussion of contemporary art, Kandinsky once called it “truly anarchistic” in that it “embodies the spirit as a materializing force, ripe for revelation.”3 This concept of force complements the idea of the intensity and symbolic “violence” of creation. While explored as a subject, the entire war “narrative,” evolving before the war, could be seen as a derivation of the worldview that was widespread in the beginning of the century. The historical decade between the two Russian revolutions, a time swept by a “flood of premonitions,” was particularly sensitive toward these problems. The prominent eschatological consciousness of this period defined war as a metaphysical confrontation, a turning point, a crisis, a catastrophe, followed by a catharsis. In Aleksandr Blok’s Symbolist poetics and Andrei Bely’s 1914 “Voina” (War), dating from 1914, for example, the highest revelation, open to man only at the moment of the fragile borderline between being and death, is presented as an intense, overwhelming subjective experience, a total conversion. WAR AS METAPHOR

But the avant-garde movement produced a different perspective. They did not perceive modern history metaphysically, as a fundamental essence. Nor did they interpret it as arch;, when the whole “text” of world history is read as nothing more than the pure reflection of ecclesiastical “text,” although eschatological allusions are still occasionally present in the discourse of the avant-garde during the war years. For the leaders of this movement, the metaphor of war was linked to the concept of unbounded creativity. In other words, destroy the old aesthetics in order to give birth to the new. Even the discussions and debates between Russian Symbolism and Futurism were associated with the metaphor of war, and military epithets such as “soldiers of the new,” “Futurist battles,” and so on. In their routine attacks on the traditional values and the art of the Academy, Russian avant-garde artists underscored this parallel with terms such as “word-shots,”“revolution,” and “combat.”All these qualities were not unique to Russian avant-garde culture, for the avant-garde movements and formations were explicitly interconnected. Writing on Western perceptions of World War I, Milton A. Cohen points out that “beyond merely anticipating or even welcoming a new war, avant-garde artists across Europe drew upon war in its multiple meanings—war as

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metaphor and as actuality, war as language, as imagery, as models of both an organizing and destructive power.”4 Kandinsky was one of the first to identify the artist with the warrior. During the first war year, he often refers to the figure of St. George, a warrior from another world, in the eternal battle of good and evil. And before the war, in 1913, Kandinsky created his famous Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), which was soon interpreted as a prophecy about the Great War. But the artist himself wrote that he had a premonition, not of this concrete war, but of a terrible battle in the spiritual realm. According to Kandinsky, that intuition compelled him to create the picture. The notion of war as a spiritual activity, as an overcoming of the ego, the human self, was also developed in the prewar poetry of Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Kruchenykh. The 1913 performance of Victory over the Sun was the culmination of this idea. After the Great War started, Kruchenykh commented on a curious suggestion in a newspaper article by the popular journalist K. Barantsevich: “Be indignant: even the enemies of the Russian Futurists give them credit for their feats,” and on the last page of the 1915–16 Futurist text Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians), he even reprinted a lengthy passage from it: Our Futurists seriously and perhaps not without reason claim the role of prophets in the present war . . . in their prophesy Wilhelm II himself in the opera is the main abductor of the sun. . . . It would not be bad if the Futurists would perform their opera again so that the public could see first-hand how raving . . . can suddenly find analogous echoes and colors in our contemporary bloody and nightmarish reality.5

Over and above its political impact on Russian avant-garde artists and poets, of course, World War I marked a historical shift of epochs, traditions, and cultures. The world suddenly came to seem alien, frightening, and irrational. The avant-gardists, especially the Futurists, were “tuned” to the modern reality of war, however, unlike the Russian Symbolists, who although they “claimed to be initiates with a special feeling for the future,” demonstrated a “fatal lack of perceptiveness about one of humankind’s crucial modern experiences.”6 Since it followed the Balkan wars of 1912–13, which Marinetti had covered as a correspondent, the Great War was not an entirely unexpected event for the Futurists. However, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 marked the beginning of a new era for many people, and many artists retrospectively wanted to connect their works created before 1913 with World War I.

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Vasilii Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 1913. Oil on canvas, 111 × 111.3 cm. Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, 1931.511. Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

FIGURE 45.

Ideas about the interconnection between life and art, and war and art, were suddenly becoming major topics of discussion among the leaders of avant-garde art and poetry. In October 1914, David Burliuk and Kamensky lectured on war and art in Moscow. According to the poster advertising his lecture “War and Creativity,” Burliuk discussed: “Contemporary war. Literary premonitions of our days . . . Idea of united Slavs. Wars of the past and their reflections in art . . . Senkevich, Garshin, Tolstoy, Marinetti. Our attitude toward the monuments of art. We protest Teutonic vandalism. [The shelling of] Rheims Cathedral.” Russian military success at the beginning of World War I inspired a wave of politically engaged mainstream art, patriotic postcards, posters, brochures, and albums, all reflecting the subject of war. In turn, Mayakovsky,

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Kazimir Malevich, patriotic propaganda postcards, with verses by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Moscow: Segodniashnii lubok, 1914). Top, left to right: “We quickly occupied Galich,” “What a Boom, what a blast,” “An Austrian went to Radziwill.” Bottom, left to right: “Oh, beloved town of Lublin,” “Look, oh, look, near the Vistula,” “We had just passed the Bast Forest.” Lithographed, 14.1 × 9.2 cm each. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation(1128.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. FIGURE 46.

Malevich, Aristarkh Lentulov, Chekrygin, and Larionov made a shortlived attempt to revive a folk tradition of “military” lubok in the now widely known Segodniashnii lubok series of cheerful, flashy propaganda posters and postcards, commissioned by M. Sabashnikova’s publishing house.7 But in most cases, the theme of war in avant-garde poetics was not politicized and had little in common with official propaganda. The historical experience of the Great War afforded the avant-garde an immediate opportunity to infuse a social content into their formal artistic experiments, and the creation of new forms was harnessed to the

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search for an expressive language in which to portray social cataclysms. The disquieting self-consciousness of twentieth-century society introduced a change to this program, however, which is echoed in Goncharova’s bitter remark: In the age of the flowering of individualism, I destroy this holy of holies and refuge of the hidebound as being inappropriate to our contemporary and future way of life. For art, individual perception can play an auxiliary role—but for mankind, it can play none at all. If I clash with society, this occurs only because the latter fails to understand the bases of art and not because of my individual peculiarities, which nobody is obliged to understand.8

It was a question of the purpose of art, its proper sphere of influence, and the traditional problem of the interrelationship between artist and his or her audience, between the artist and contemporary society. For contemporaries, premonitions of a “spiritual battle” cruelly clashed with the reality of World War I, with its new technology used on a gigantic scale, creating a new, dehumanized image of war, beyond human pain and passions, where individual life did not count. In one of his earliest articles about the war, Mayakovsky wrote some terrifying, daringly simple words: “As a Russian, I hold sacred every effort of the soldier to wrench a piece of territory away from the enemy; as a man of art, however, I am obliged to think that perhaps the entire war was invented merely so that someone could write a single good poem.”9 In Mayakovsky’s “war” articles of 1914–15, it is possible to follow his ideological evolution from patriotic pride and enthusiasm to disenchantment and humiliating despair: “Well, go ahead and take your most pompous idea, your and the Vereshchagins’ and Tolstoys’ very favorite idea—thou shalt not kill—take it out into the street in today’s Russia, and the mob, the magnificent mob, will rub your little gray beards off on the cobblestones.”10 This not only points to the shared context and genealogical cohesiveness of the Russian avant-garde “text,” but also says something about the emotional atmosphere in which avant-garde works were created. The late Vassily Vereshchagin, a Realist painter of battle scenes who exposed the evil and terror of the wars “of all times and peoples,” serves as a symbolic scapegoat, along with the pacifist Tolstoy, both in Mayakovsky’s article and in Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s War Opera. In the eyes of the younger generation of Futurists, Vereshchagin and Tolstoy personified the Realist “elders” who rejected Neoromantic ideals of heroism and saw in any war nothing but a bloodbath. In its first months,

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the Great War did not yet manifest itself as the primitive global slaughter it would later become, with “the idleness, the boredom, the vulgarity” that Blok noted.11 Inasmuch as the Futurists treated the war as an almost abstract “spiritual” event in the beginning, the subsequent disillusionment of an entire generation was all the stronger and harsher. It is no accident that in the eyes of many, World War I was not simply a war against a specific enemy, but also a long-awaited boundary, a harbinger of the death of an epoch that would usher in a new, as yet unknown era. “Everyone is waiting for the moment when the present will finally do away with itself and open up the lands of the men of the future [budetliane],” Kruchenykh wrote in early 1914.12 By October 1914, while absorbed in a search for the laws governing the fate of the world and an attempt to conquer war by puzzling out its magical number, Khlebnikov confessed in a letter, “I must break with the past and find something new for myself.”13 THE EPICS OF WAR

The avant-garde artists, who represented a number of groups and movements, reflected different, sometimes even opposite aspects of war in their works. The prominent Russian art critic Iakov Tugendkhold, who published a study on art and war in 1916, speaks of the “two-facedness” of war throughout his book: the binary opposition of its common prose, and the lyric, “poetic” side of it.14 Khlebnikov does not fit into this binary scheme. He prefers heroic epics: Once Planet Earth goes up in flames, Cools off and asks: “Who am I really?”— Then we will create The Igor Tale— Or something a lot like it.15

It is this dominant epic intonation—Khlebnikov’s “presence”—that is palpable in the unfinished War Opera, co-authored with Kruchenykh.16 It distinguishes the poetics of the work from the earlier Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun, in which the tragicomic grotesque of Kruchenykh’s “voice” predominates. Underscoring the epic element of Khlebnikov’s works, including his minor and unfinished pieces, the Formalist critic Iurii Tynianov noted: Khlebnikov[’s] was a new way of seeing. The new vision falls simultaneously on various objects. This is not only how one “lives by poetry,” in Pasternak’s remarkable phrase, but also how one lives by the epic. And Khlebnikov is our one and only twentieth-century epic poet. His minor lyrical pieces are the same

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signature of the butterfly: sudden “infinite” notes continued into the distance, observations—either they themselves or their kin—that will be included in an epic.17

War Opera was intended as another ambitious theatrical attempt at collaboration between Matiushin, Malevich, and two poets. And even unrealized, this work remains one of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s most significant joint projects, deeply connected to major literary and visual texts of the war period. Perhaps its very incompleteness makes the text of War Opera so intense and saturated with allusions. “But now the valiant Khlebnikov has challenged war itself—to the barricades!” Kruchenykh concludes his foreword to Khlebnikov’s booklet Bitvy 1915–1917 (Battles of 1915–17: A New Theory of War), and these words are just as relevant to Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s War Opera, written at the same time.18 Willem Weststeijn interprets “New Theory” as the work of an author who was more interested in the accuracy of his abstract calculations of the “laws of time” than in immediate emotional reactions to military operations on Russia’s western borders.19 However, in the effort to transform the “here and now” of the current war into epic action, Khlebnikov drew from the psychological and emotional strain of the war in the writing of Opera. As befits a theater of war, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s dramatic action opens abruptly. Dead and wounded soldiers suddenly rush on stage from all directions to the cacophonous accompaniment of whistling bullets and clacking train wheels. The stage undergoes continuous transformations from tavern to battlefield to the dreary reality of the underworld, and we gradually come to the understanding that the drama begins and ends in the tavern of the dead, into which sounds and images of other worlds and “dimensions” alternately burst. Meanwhile, throughout the play, a huge crucifix, envisioned by Malevich in his set design, towers over the stage.20 The unorthodox allusions to biblical themes are obvious in the text as well, and they combine various Gospel, apocryphal, pagan, and sacrilegious ritualistic elements. By mingling various levels of discourse, Opera introduces an element of necessary grotesque and dissonance, consistent with the Futurist principle of displacement, but it becomes much darker. During the play, the rhythm of action changes constantly in accordance with the chain of seemingly “extra-plot” episodes presented to the spectator. Thus, the next scene opens with an absurd dialogue between two characters, The Skull and The Young Man, a brilliant and somewhat par-

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odic allusion to Hamlet. War Opera may be distinguished from Victory over the Sun by its greater developed scenography and extensive alogical play with various prompts. Unlike a diachronic narrative structured on the metonymical principle, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s alogical narrative is linked to a chain of metaphorical associations. The first stage direction, addressed to the future producer of the opera, says, “Often when some object is named, it appears in someone’s hands.” By defining the function of the object on stage, Kruchenykh performs the “magic” of materializations, which operates as the primary dramatic device. Throughout the first act, the scene changes repeatedly through this device alone, without any other set changes. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm, one of the principal antiheroes of the Opera, has “lost his head” and is assisted by compassionate Retainers, who have “found” his head and “put it on a stick.”Things appear and disappear“suddenly,”with no motivation, as if in a dream: the muzzles of cannon become the trunks of toy elephants, Kaiser Wilhelm’s steed turns into a child’s little toy horse, and The Enemy “pulls several machine-gun muzzles out of his throat” to stop choking. This transforming of poetic metaphors into stage props is another good example of the visualization and realization of metaphor discussed in the previous chapter. In the set directions for one of the central episodes, a tiny toy house, which appears on an empty stage, indicates Wilhelm’s headquarters. Another act opens with a landscape of “a bare island, a stream, and a dry tree,” visualizing on stage the poetics and logic of dreams, a surreal image of the world beyond Lethe, the “river of death.” This image is partly explained in Khlebnikov’s “Ka”: “And taking part in a new feast of insanity . . . shamefully donning clothes after bathing in the river of death,—I made a vow—the last thing I could do with a child’s coffin instead of a heart that once knew how to beat.”21 The metaphor of the “coffin instead of a heart” provides further evidence of the intimate connection between these two texts. It is a phrase that Khlebnikov first used in one of The Dreamer’s lines in Opera: “I wander here with a coffin instead of a heart within my ribs.” Finally, the key to a decoding symbol of the “naked island,” yet another of Khlebnikov’s tropes, is to be found in the caustically antimilitaristic pamphlet “Proposals,” written a year later, in 1915, which encourages, “Set aside a special uninhabited island, such as Iceland, for a never-ending war between anybody from any country who wants to fight now. (For people who want to die like heroes.)”22 From the start, Kruchenykh had been nauseated by manifestations of enthusiasm for the war, in contrast to the Khlebnikov of 1914, who dis-

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covered in it the beauty and power of metaphor, inherent in folk songs and epics, and was, in Kruchenykh’s words, “extremely bellicose.”23 Kruchenykh consistently took an antimilitaristic position, and from the beginning of Russia’s military operations, he actively avoided the draft. In War Opera, Kruchenykh expresses his view through a tangled web of sarcasm and despair, interweaving ominous reminiscences of death with the grotesque, deliberately vulgarized and fragmented noise of propaganda and philistine truths. Khlebnikov, on the other hand, heroicizes war as the perpetual battle between the soldier and the poet, The Conqueror and The Dreamer, in his written scenes. Paradoxically, these two opposed attitudes toward the war complement each other perfectly in aesthetic space. But how did Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov present other aspects of war in their War Opera? And was it the Great War they are alluding to? In fact, in August 1914, the aesthetic reality of war became a social reality, and it was meddling with personal lives and aspirations. The death of thousands of Russian soldiers in the first months of war made it ethically impossible to continue to exploit the derisive mood that shaped Victory over the Sun, forcing the authors to seek new epic tonality. War Opera emerges in the light of one of the most tragic episodes of the Great War, the destruction of General Aleksandr Samsonov’s army in August 1914, known to Russians as the “Tannenberg catastrophe.”24 (One of Khlebnikov’s rare war poems, “Smert’ v ozere” [Death in the Lake (1914)], deals with the same event.) Despite all the symbolic aspects of the war narrative in the early Russian avant-garde, War Opera injected the immediate history into the Futurist art world, and this brought along a new ideological context. In this context, beneath the grotesque “alogical riddle” of Futurist drama, a national and human tragedy is revealed: the opera reads as a requiem for the dead soldiers, as the contemporary narrative of this and all other wars, where metamorphoses of place, time, and language replace the classic unities of place, time, and action. THE IMAGES OF WAR

Natalia Goncharova’s series of lithographs Mystical Images of War (1914), Filonov’s Propeven’ o prorosli mirovoi (1915), Rozanova’s portfolio War, and Kruchenykh’s album of collages Universal War (the last two both published in 1916) were among the most profound artistic responses to the war. These unique works represent three different artistic

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explorations of the theme, as reflected in Neoprimitivist, Futurist, and Suprematist aesthetics. Goncharova, in her Neoprimitivist Mystical Images, and Filonov, in his painting German War and his book Propoven’ o prorosli mirovoi (1915), undoubtedly shared many features of the Expressionist aesthetic. The Expressionist movement produced many artistic works inspired by war. Among them are graphics by the Germans Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Pechstein, and Barlach, and the French artist Georges Rouault’s cycle Miserere. Being receptive to the religious idea of sacrifice and spiritual disharmony, Expressionists were drawn to the metaphysical vision of war “within” the human soul, as seen through the eyes of a tortured, suffering individual. In this respect, however, Russian art works are different, and the artists’ intent to avoid any individual, purely psychological accents sets their work apart. Similarly, their artworks cannot be aligned with the Italian Futurist response to the Great War, as nothing could be farther from Goncharova’s pathos in Mystical Images than glorification of a technological utopia and war, perceived as “the only world hygiene.” Like Khlebnikov, Filonov and Goncharova eschew the “prose” and “quotidian” realia of war, creating a fascinating amalgam of the traditional and modern, the universal and the particular. A similar treatment of the subject can be found in Russian medieval manuscripts and seventeenthcentury religious lubok. The miniatures of the Zadonshchina, dedicated to the historical victory over Mongols, are peppered with pictorial quotations from The Book of Revelation, whereas Vassily Koren’s seventeenthcentury apocalyptic lubki, which were quite topical at the time, depict the forces of the Antichrist dressed in the contemporary garb of the enemies of Russia. In Mystical Images, Goncharova combines innovation with a solid foundation in the national tradition, particularly the religious lubok, to evoke the sense of a ritual performance. However, her series has nothing in common with the adopted pseudo-folk style and propaganda spirit of the Segodniashnii lubok (fig. 46) mentioned above. In her mystical visions there is no place for mockery of the “enemy image” or trivial glorification of imperial power. Goncharova’s keen awareness of history emerges through visual allusions and allegories. The artist creates her own mythology of war, combining in a single visual text the animate heraldic creatures of the Russian coat of arms (“White Eagle”), symbols of Britain and France (“British Lion” and “Gallic Cockerel”), and apocalyptic im-

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ages (“Woman upon the Beast,”“Doomed City,” and “Pale Horse”). The Book of Revelations, Christian myth, classical folklore and epics, and the imagery of contemporary urban primitive, with its memory of the recent, blend with the recognizable details of the “immediate” present—military uniforms, factory smokestacks, and airplanes. This creates a palpitating, living textual fabric—the war as a kind of universal theater, a miracle play performed in front of one’s eyes. Goncharova managed to disengage herself from the mainstream ideological clichés of nationalism, while at the same time utilizing the distinct national imagery. In his review of the series, the poet Sergei Bobrov, a contemporary of Goncharova’s, remarked, “Here for the first time we see the war through the eyes of a Russian artist.”25 Nonetheless, Mystical Images is a very eclectic work in its aesthetics. Paradoxically, it is precisely this quality that makes it so original. By 1914, Neoprimitivism was already passé for Goncharova. Indeed, by this time, she had created several Futurist works, was quite experienced in Rayist style, developed by Larionov, and had begun to experiment with abstraction. What made her to return to the aesthetics of folk art, to the inspiration of Russian icons, as well as to her own earlier works on religious subjects? One of the answers could be that Goncharova always had an ambition to reinvent and to revitalize the grand tradition of Russian and Byzantine religious art, and the subject of war offered an ideal opportunity to turn anew to the eschatological narrative of her painterly series Harvest (1911) and Gathering Grapes (1911). Several among her images of war—Lion, The Woman on the Beast, and The Doomed City—refer directly to the iconography she developed in these earlier painterly series. Goncharova creates her images in black-and-white lithography, a technique she had favored since her work on the Futurist editions of 1912–14. The first sheet, St. George, sets a solemn mood for the dramatic misteria about to unfold, with a greater emphasis on the “mystical” imagery than the military aspect. Goncharova consistently avoids combat scenes, or any reference to individual heroism and individual suffering. She is not interested in the everyday reality of this war, and we are not going to recognize portraits of the glorious generals or familiar names of important battlefields. Instead, the main characters in her military drama are St. George, St. Michael, and St. Aleksandr Nevsky. Goncharova’s theme is the ultimate war, the apocalyptic war, where human individuality is inconsequential. Her interpretation transcends temporal boundaries and transforms historical fact into archetypal symbol, dangerously balancing on the edge of falling into cliché. Her war is

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bold, masterfully naïve, simple, but in no way superficial in its luboklike visual narrative. The culmination of the cycle reveals an allegory of war in the central image of Michael the Archangel blowing a trumpet to call the world to Judgment Day, amid tongues of flame. However, in the following two compositions, The Vision and The Christian Host, Goncharova shifts the mood and plays with subtle irony on the awkward military “invasion” right into the visionary reality of the next world through the overt theatricality of the scene; even the background in these compositions looks like a backdrop. Goncharova does not simply present an insight into war; she mimics the mass reaction to war, as reflected in the religious symbolism that saturated contemporary Russian newspapers, journals, and postcards. Such an approach inevitably leads to a certain distancing, if not outright self-parody. Thus, in Angels and Airplanes, the wings of angels and airplanes intertwine in the sky as heavenly and earthly forces. The hieroglyphic figures of pilots in their machines appear as fragile toys that cannot last long in the hands of immortal angels. Their connection is strange, gentle, and ironic, as if the angels were fascinated by human intrusion and are protecting them from falling. Her airplanes are animated, admired, not as powerful machinery, but as new, winged mythological creatures, which she wittily compares to angels. This interpretation merges with the purely Russian Futurist theme of the humanized machine in the dehumanized world of modernity. Goncharova blends futuristic objects such as airplanes into the traditional iconography of her series so naturally that it evokes the pantheistic cosmology of a Primitive artist, much like the trains, steamships, and airplanes in the pictures of Henri Rousseau and the Georgian Niko Pirosmani. In The Doomed City, the next image in the series, the roles are reversed. The angels, with their fashionable hair and little moustaches, are “bombing” the city with stones, and they look suspiciously like World War I pilots on a military mission. But Goncharova’s perishing city is empty of people, and in spite of the factory smokestacks in the cityscape background, it is yet another transformation of doomed Babylon. WAR AS MEDIUM

Goncharova’s mystical visions are not as subjective and elusive as the poetics of Rozanova’s portfolio of color linocuts War, accompanying Kruchenykh’s poems. Impacted by Futurism, Rozanova’s images might be compared to those of Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà in Italy, and to Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist art in Britain.26

FIGURE 47. Natalia Goncharova, Angels and Airplanes. From Misticheskie obrazy voiny (Mystical Images of War), a portfolio of fourteen lithographs (Moscow: V. N. Kashin, 1914). Lithograph, 32.8 × 24.7 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (193.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

Natalia Goncharova, Doomed City. From Misticheskie obrazy voiny (Mystical Images of War), a portfolio of fourteen lithographs (Moscow: V. N. Kashin, 1914). Lithograph, 32.8 × 24.7 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (193.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

FIGURE 48.

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The dynamics, rhythm, and “mass gesture” of combat play a considerable role in the visual language of Futurism. The impetuous rush of time that so occupied the Italians is rightfully associated with the concept of battle, which can be perceived as the most powerful manifestation of dynamism and simultaneity. The Italian Futurists, unlike the Russians, proposed not only an aesthetic but also a political program advocating war, “The World’s Only Hygiene,” as the path to national regeneration. Because of their glorification of war in the manifestos and artistic discourse, many of their contemporaries, especially among Russian Futurists, saw them, not so much as prophets of war, but as its heralds. In his essay on Futurism and war, Viktor Khovin, a Russian journalist close to the Ego-Futurists, wrote bitterly: It is no coincidence that the ideologues of the German invasion, i.e., the literary and scientific elite of Germany, following Marinetti, speak of the “idea of renewal” and a “new culture,” the bearer of which this time is the incendiary Prussian soldier. . . . At the risk of sounding naïve, it seems to me that Marinetti, the herald of Italian Futurism, can be accused of having played a fateful role in the world war, which has enveloped Europe in the smoke of “venerable” cities and “venerable” museums. . . . Not so long ago marinettism was strewing Europe with its clamorous manifestos demanding war—world war.27

Nikolai Berdyaev pointed out this distinction between Russian Futurism’s artistic ideology and that of the Italians in his treatise on new trends in art, writing, “We Russians are the least Futuristic in this war.”28 In Rozanova’s linocuts and Kruchenykh’s poetry, war not only spells disaster and destruction, but also represents the agonizing birth of an unknown, violent new epoch. Rozanova draws inspiration directly from the present. In her series, she combines the stringent documentary quality of newspaper chronicles, as in Fragments from Newspaper Reports, with an element of the romantic grotesque and the tragic, exemplified in Airplane over the City. Her subtle knowledge of Suprematist principles is evidenced in her collages for the cover of the portfolio. The laconicism of the composition and the solemn simplicity of the colors (white, blue, black) and shapes (triangle, square, circle, and rectangle) compare with Malevich’s best Suprematist works at the “0–10” exhibition (1915). At the same time, the portfolio War is not directed at the universal narratives of past traditions, but speaks of the yet unknown. In Rozanova’s visualization, the eschatological “spiritual battle” and the historical chronology of contemporary war never merge into one. In the portfolio, modernity is treated as an entity that possesses an unknown

Olga Rozanova, cover for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s portfolio Voina (War), Petrograd: [A. A. Shemshurin], 1916. Edition: 130. Linocut and collage on brown paper, 41.2 × 30.6 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (368.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. FIGURE 49.

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and unparalleled historical myth of its own. Rozanova draws strength and inspiration directly from the present, not retreating a step from her basic idea of art: Creation is a great act of contempt toward all that is within and outside us, toward the obvious, and a great act of attention toward that which is just beginning to take shape. . . . To produce a work of genius the artist must possess an acute awareness of reality and extraordinary will power to be able to renounce the past and avoid confusing its false, decrepit image with emerging newness.29

The artist expresses her premonition of the future of Russia, which, according to Blok, “rushed out of one revolution to look greedily into the face of another that is perhaps even more terrible.”30 Her symbolism is subjective and elusive, free of superfluous allegorical content. Like a testimony, brought to the level of artistic event, Rozanova’s and Kruchenykh’s War strikingly conveys a sense of the author’s active participation by means of original metaphors without exaltation and patriotic drumbeats. Their antimilitaristic position is subtle. On the folios of War, as in “war” poetry by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, and especially Mayakovsky in his poem “War and Peace,” there are iconographic evangelical motifs, such as the Crucifixion; however, they don’t determine the work’s character. Two compositions from Rozanova’s War portfolio, Fragments from Newspaper Reports, are inspired by lines taken directly from newspapers. What takes on visual form here is not poetry, but the deliberately impersonal, nameless, laconic documentary discourse of the chronicle. The word made visual freezes a composition shot through with dynamics and rhythm, thereby introducing a sense of the eternal and nontransitory into the general context. Taken out of their usual context, these newspaper excerpts compel the viewer to listen to the genuineness of a tragedy that has been restored to the line. In an image reconstructing the execution of peaceful civilians, Rozanova creates an almost cinematic montage of two simultaneously depicted planes, and the path of a bullet fired from a rifle emphasizes the halted eternity of the moment. In her work there is an intense inner drama that negates linear, absolute, real time. It is expressed in the juxtaposition of the documented and the imaginary, each of which possesses its own reality and unreality. Thus, a sparsely worded passage from a newspaper report grows into a visible tragedy viewed in horror, and a scene of death is transformed into one of immortality. The reports on executions of unidentified victims, which with time become an ordinary narrative of any military chronicle,

Olga Rozanova, Fragment from Newspaper Reports, for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s portfolio Voina (War), Petrograd: [A. A. Shemshurin], 1916. Edition: 130. Linocut, 41.2 × 30.6 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (368.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 50.

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are never ordinary, and should never become ordinary events in essence. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful, dramatic, and simple artistic embodiment of this truth. The theme of the victim and the sacrifice is a central one in Rozanova’s War linocuts, and it appears on one of the first pages in Airplanes over the City. The symbolism or image of the airplane attracted many twentieth-century artists and poets, especially the Futurists. But if Italian Futurists poeticized the awesome perfection and functional power of the machine, for Russians an airplane signified freedom of innovation, the blatant attempt to overcome gravity and transgress the traditional limits of space and time. In Man Leaping from Airplane, a flattened hieroglyphic-like human figure oddly repeats the outline of the airplane in scarlet, cross-shaped. This symbolic image reappears in the sheets Fragment from Newspaper Reports, Battle in the City, and Duel, the last of which is among the most precise and lyrical compositions in the album War. In Fragment, it becomes the image of “crucified by the Germans,” and a soldier is plunging a bayonet that looks like an ancient spear into his crucified victim. Rozanova operates with a dual reflection of reality: the immediate statement of the fact in the newspaper text and her own subjective, emotionally open reading or revelation of the text. It resembles Kruchenykh’s “eyewitness testimony,” which transforms a newspaper report of an execution by a firing squad into poetic metaphor: With closed eyes I see the bullet It silently steals toward a kiss

Although she bases the composition on documentary texts, Rozanova’s work avoids becoming a documentary itself, and successfully resists the allure and false reverence for the topical experienced by artists who turn to facts and history for their material. In the “open eyes” of the newspapers Rozanova, reads a new myth of modernity. She needs no distant associations, for the newspaper becomes the new urtext, new history, new Bible. The daring and confessional nature of her experimental style here resembles that of the war poetry of Mayakovsky, who doesn’t hesitate to insert newspaper reports into poetic visions such as “Mama i ubityi nemtsami vecher” (Mama and the Night Killed by Germans), “Ia i Napoleon” (Napoleon and I), and “Voina ob’iavlena” (War Declared), all from 1914. Rozanova was likely familiar with Cubist and Italian Futurist painterly collages in which real newspaper clippings are part of the

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composition and provide an aura of contemporaneity and social involvement, as in Picasso’s case, for example.31 In her linocuts for War, Rozanova does not follow this technique directly, but carves both the texts and the images by hand. The effect is very different, because she turns a banal, much-reprinted newspaper report into a text she has read and rewritten, experienced, and suffered through, much as the Futurist poets aspired to restore to the word “as such” its purity and power, and to restore its autonomous valence to each sound in their works. The script and the composition of the text in Rozanova’s linocut bear a resemblance to the handmade quality of old woodcuts rather than machine typography. Her interpretation of the lubok was probably influenced by Kandinsky’s graphics. In “On the Question of Form,” Kandinsky identifies the engraving with lyrical poetry, speaking of the comparability between color and music, line and rhythm, and object and word.32 The issue of Kandinsky’s impact on Rozanova’s style in War is rather complex, demonstrable with some of his Klänge (1913) woodcuts. Rozanova turns to the Klänge series, in which Kandinsky develops the archetypical motifs of the rider, in her Battle and Duel. The intensity of the moment is expressed in hard, broken contours and erratic rhythm in the symbolic Duel, with its abstract triangular arc of rainbows over two riders in confrontation. In the portfolio, the spirit of war is embodied in battle, paralleled by the theme of the city. Rozanova’s war-torn, dehumanized city becomes an iron mousetrap for its human inhabitants. Empty, fantastic, and gloomy, her city, or rather her vision of the urban Moloch, acquires the autonomy of a living organism. The city is sometimes covertly hostile, while at other times, as in Destruction of the City, it seems to be a suffering, frightened creature. In one of her own poems, she treats the subject as follows: Like a stiffened corpse’s dead eye of the windows Looks blindly. The snake slate-colored steed has covered the land with its black mane.

In her composition, the death of the city is as tragic and self-destructive as human death. The viewer cannot immediately distinguish the cannon in the composition, for they seem to be a part of the city organism— the unstoppable, fateful pagan force of a rebellious machine. Here, there

Olga Rozanova, Airplanes over the City, for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s portfolio Voina (War), Petrograd: [A. A. Shemshurin], 1916. Edition: 130. Linocut and collage on gray paper, 41.2 × 30.6 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (368.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 51.

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is no place for human beings, only for projectiles exhaled by the cannon and sunken buildings. It is a battle of machines, of iron, of elemental forces, conveyed in Kruchenykh’s verses, which this image illustrates, through an alliterative series of the Russian consonant sounds zh, z, and s, reminiscent of grinding metal: The steel jingles, the steel whistles Let it exist.

Rozanova had a strong feeling for the color red and its nuances, and it has an especially varied texture in the portfolio depending on how thickly the paint is applied. It assumes the dark tone of clotted blood in Airplanes over the City, while in Battle in the City it takes on a transparent, elevated, solemn tonality. In this latter work, three colors—red, green, and black—are combined in a carefully orchestrated crescendo. The composition is divided into three triangular color zones, and each possesses a marked emotional nuance as its symbolic nature comes to the fore in the dissonance of three themes. First, there is the oppressive violent power of the cavalry, conveyed through the repeated staccato rhythm of bristling bayonets and teeming horsemen. Next, the theme of the citizens heroically resisting the overbearing attack is rendered in an elevated, erratic rhythm of green lines, and there is a red triangle rising up in a mass of flaming buildings. Red is used as a leitmotiv evoking associations of blood, fire, and regenerative force. Rozanova also finds other formal means of realizing and recreating her subjective vision in her two collages for this portfolio. These Suprematist collages served as the prototype for Kruchenykh’s album Universal War, published in 1916. In the foreword to Universal War, Kruchenykh noted: These collages were born of the same source as transrational language—the liberation of creation from unnecessary conveniences (through nonobjectness). Transrational painting is becoming predominant. Olga Rozanova produced some examples of it earlier; now several more artists are working on it, including Malevich, Pougny, and others, under the rather uninformative name of “suprematism.” But I am glad for the triumph of painting as such. . . . Transrational language, of which I am the first representative, holds out its hand to transrational painting.33

Kruchenykh interpreted Suprematism in accordance with his own ideas on “transrational painting” based on Malevich’s notion that “the new

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painterly realism” made every painted surface “more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a smile protrude”: “Each form is a world.”34 Form, which is inseparably linked to the structure of the material, functions like the self-sufficient word (samovitoe slovo) in transrational poetry. The structure of Kruchenykh’s album is quite unlike that of the Futurist books discussed earlier. Perhaps all they share is an explicit impression of “madeness,” of being handwritten or handmade, which lends credence to the notion that everything touched by the hand of the artist is a work of art. The unity of word and image is embodied in their parallel implementation as equivalent systems that are subject to the same rhythm and combined within the same covers. The transrational word and the sound contained in it seek out an exact equivalent in the abstract geometrical shape, in color, and in the correspondence of units of construction, so that the color form is structured on an analogy to the phoneme. Elaborating on the overall idea of the album, Kruchenykh stated in a letter, “I was not writing about a union of transrational painting and poetry, but about their generic similarity.”35 Nonetheless, some of the collages, despite their generally abstract expression, still allow certain allegorical associations with some sort of object, image, or phenomenon. Their principal expressive details are the contours and outlines of the color plane, resembling human beings or recognizable outlines of the different things, such as a crown, for example. Compositionally these collages are the least stylistically precise and monolithic. Three of the most narrative examples include images of the “future world and interplanetary wars” found in the last compositions of the album with contemporary themes: Zealous Germany, Germany in Ashes, and Military State. As Kruchenykh describes it, “The Military State, that is, Germany, is depicted conventionally as a spiked brass helmet and its shadow, which resembles a black panther. Germany in Ashes and Zealous Germany are shown in a primitive style as an angular soldier with a head like a wooden block. First he danced aggressively, then he fell on his face and was crushed by a shrapnel shell from above.”36 Here Kruchenykh creates a totally abstract anti-utopian model of the “Universal war of 1985,” as he proclaims in his introduction, utilizing pure rhythm, form and color. One of the outstanding merits of this album, is its successful implementation of the concept of collage as an artistic metaphor for the “discordant concordance” of the epoch. It appeared

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Aleksei Kruchenykh, Military State. From Vselenskaia voina (Universal War), Petrograd: [A. A. Shemshurin], 1916. Edition: 100. Colored tissue paper, blue construction paper, and collage, 22.7 × 32.5 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (197.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 52.

at the same time as Hans Arp’s first Dadaist collages, and thirty years before Matisse’s celebrated Jazz series. This was a time when Russia was experiencing the chaos of a war that “erased all the boundaries,” and when the first rumblings of the unsystematic aesthetic rebellion soon to be dubbed “Dada” were “in the air.” Ever since creating Victory over Sun, the anarchic features of Kruchenykh’s poetics—the intensity of the nihilist artistic gesture, the poetics of absurdism, dehumanization, and resistance to all common values— foreshadow the problematics of Dadaism. In a sense, Universal War is a continuation of theVictory theme, dedicated to the “death of modernity” or, rather, the death of the modern myth. The social and cultural discourse of that time was determined by disillusionment. Born out of dystopia and the experience of war, it is summarized by Georges Bataille, who declared, “I myself am war.” The avant-garde movements seek to become an event equal in meaning to the war, but in the cultural field.

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Universal War is nothing but a verdict on the historical past and World War I as a part of this past. In the early Russian avant-garde, the concept of war was associated with resistance more than with destruction, with the fight not against but for. The same anarchic inspiration that drives Kruchenykh to the language of “beyonsense,” was at the roots of Suprematist nihilism, as found in Malevich’s aesthetic theory of the “void.” Suprematism was as much an outcome of the Great War as the Dadaist anti-aesthetic mentality; both were inspired by philosophical nihilism. Notwithstanding modern progress in science and the resulting conveniences of technology, intellectuals and artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced looming existential nothingness. The Great War shockingly proved that modernization not only was destructive of life on various fronts but also failed to provide any true replacement for what was wiped out in the sphere of “belief.” Maurice Blanchot interprets the first and earliest approach to nihilism as it was reflected in philosophical and aesthetic thought at the beginning of the twentieth century.37 This reading of nihilism as the permission to know everything seems to correspond most closely to Malevich’s conception of nothingness.

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The Suprematist Party

Kazimir Malevich introduced Suprematism to the public in December 1915 at the “0.10” The Last Futurist Painting exhibition in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed in 1914). In his brochure From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, printed for the opening of the show, he described Suprematism as a “nonobjective” (better translated as “objectless”) art, an art freed from any representation of objects and based on the purity of abstract geometric forms. This was the first publication to announce the new movement. Malevich originally considered his style to be synthetic and universal: in his grandiose vision, Suprematism was to be applied to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, theater, and book design. These aspirations were supposed to be partly realized in his journal Supremus. The philosophy of Suprematism contained the element of the great illusion of creating “beyond zero”: “creating from nothing,” as Berdyaev ironically and aptly defined its spirit, writing, “Brand-new currents such as Suprematism are incisively formulating the long-since-matured need to free the purely creative act once and for all from the power of the natural objective world. . . . This is not only the liberation of art from figurative and narrative qualities, but a liberation, based on creation from nothing, from the entire created world.”1 Berdyaev was in fact wrong on this point. Paradoxically, the very “realization” of “nothingness” in Malevich’s painting is material. It is realized in the pronounced “hand-made” quality and the unique material 187

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FIGURE 53. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm. Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

texture of his paintings: this particular, tactile painterly surface, where every brushstroke is distinct, and every straight line is slightly uneven, distinguishes Malevich’s abstractions from Mondrian’s, for example, or from later artistic production that originated in Moscow Constructivist workshops or at the German Bauhaus. In spite of all of Malevich’s proclamations of dehumanization, man is still present in his works— no longer as a representation, but through the physical touch and creative will of the author, and through his provocative challenge, always to be found behind any abstraction in the early avant-garde. However paradoxical it may seem, in the midst of his “nonobjective” world Malevich still sees the presence of the artist-creator. In his Suprematist “manifesto” he writes:

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Here is the Divine ordering crystals to assume another form of existence. Here is a miracle . . . There should be a miracle in the creation of art, as well.2

SUPREMATISM’S AESTHETIC PROGRAM

From the start, the Suprematist aesthetic program was contradictory. In the “absolute” ideology of Suprematism, the anti-teleological drive of the early avant-garde was already displaced, while at the same time, despite its obvious traits of utopianism, Suprematism offered as a final goal “nothing,”“zero.” Malevich’s regal “zero” dismissed the “green” human world of “bones and flesh.” His abstract color-forms, floating in the airless space of the white background, could serve as a perfect illustration of the later concept of the death of God, or the death of myth, as expressed by Georges Bataille, “in the white and incongruous void of absence”: The fact that a universe without myth is the ruin of the universe—reduced to the nothingness of things—in the process of depriving us equates deprivation with the revelation of the universe. If by abolishing the mythic universe we have lost the universe, the action of a revealing loss is itself connected to the death of myth.3

But “the absence of myth is also a myth”; the death of god is modernity’s greatest myth. Malevich’s theory of Suprematism presents another paradoxical symbiosis of Nietzschean and Tolstoyan ideas in the early Russian avantgarde. Suprematism marks a new stage in the evolution of the avantgarde, in which the anarchic anti-utopia is replaced by a quest for an objective universal law, the assertion of the universal, and the resistance to what Fredric Jameson calls the logic of consumer capitalism. Consequently, it inescapably becomes a utopian concept of art. The artistic ideology of Suprematism was reflected in the unpublished issue of the journal Supremus, in its orientation toward the philosophy of art over aesthetic or purely stylistic and technical issues, “Suprematism is to all previously existing painting as philosophy is to journalism,”4 and in its emphasis on the priority of “collective work” over individual art, it complements Tolstoy’s approach to art and creativity. In his compositions Malevich tried to dismiss not only centuries of tradition behind the notion of Renaissance perspective, but the very sensation of gravity. He considered his paintings to have neither top nor bottom, left nor right, suggesting they be hung in any orientation.

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To a considerable extent, Malevich carried to the limit the anarchist aspiration of the Cubo-Futurists to “liberate” art from the pragmatic materiality of the “world of things”: Art freed itself in order to become the apotheosis, to be the ultimate in perfection of everything that could be done over the centuries by religion or Government. The efforts of technology to turn man into a bird are of no use for “man-the-airplane” or “man-the-car” will not achieve happiness any faster than the man on foot or the seated man. Thousands of engineers with the help of millions of workers and peasants could not achieve what painters achieved with the help of a simple bristle brush.5

However, the main purpose of the letter to Kurt Schwitters (1927) cited above, was a critique of Constructivism, a competitive movement, which defied the “objective world.” Conditions within the Russian art world of 1915–16 were conducive to a summing up of the avant-garde’s brief past history, and the consequent struggle to establish a new leadership. The Union of Youth, the most significant early avant-garde group in St. Petersburg, had ceased to exist in 1914, and it soon become clear—after Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, the leading figures of the Moscow art world, left Russia—that a certain period in the history of the Russian avant-garde was over. These events charged politics within the avant-garde and provoked an atmosphere in which closure occurred simultaneously with the development of new aesthetic theories, directed toward abstraction in art. In 1914–15, Vladimir Tatlin created his first counterreliefs, three-dimensional combinations of different materials (like wood, metal, and glass) and objects or their details (bottles, for example, or wooden board). Although these works are often interpreted as a presentiment of Constructivism, they differ from the sterile and pure Constructivist products of the 1920s, which Malevich denounced in observing “first and foremost the automaton, not the man in whom various sensations are alive”: “A Constructivist is a man entranced by the movement of the automaton, in which he has seen a mechanical device, but has failed to see man himself.”6 These early counterreliefs exhibit certain playful elements of alogism, and an almost Dadaist sensibility of assemblage, of ready-made objects, rather than the Constructivist economy in mechanical precision. According to Sarabianov, Tatlin combined in his works and in his personality “a dreamer and an engineer, anarchic challenge and rationality.”7 Tatlin’s painterly reliefs and counterreliefs were displayed in the “Exhibition of the Art of 1915” alongside assemblages by David Burliuk, Mayakovsky, and Kamensky, who demonstrated their rejection of painting as a discipline.

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Two dominant schools emerged, organized around the two opposing poles of nonobjective art, Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. Each school hoped to monopolize the avant-garde movement. The internal leadership struggle that accompanied the exhibition “0.10” was not a simple one, and relationships among the members were complicated by personal ambitions, and evidently strained. In letters to Kruchenykh, Olga Rozanova conveyed the tense atmosphere in which this exhibition was prepared: The most disgusting thing about this whole exhibition and the artists is that everything is done underhandedly, and if before everyone “only worried about themselves,” now everyone is mostly concerned with how at any price to harm someone else. That’s why Pougny, who promised to make me some frames, deliberately did not, so that my pictures would look ragged. They have distorted the catalogue and done so many other petty things that even Malevich was forced to admit it is disgusting. . . . Malevich is like a lackey with them, and the stability of the organization hangs on whether he will remain satisfied with his “position.”8

The conflict began even before the exhibition opened, when the other participants, led by Ivan Puni (who later in France adopted the name Jean Pougny) and Ksenia Boguslavskaia, who provided the financial backing for the show and considered themselves its true organizers, flatly refused to use the term “Suprematism” in the catalogue. In response, Malevich made a clever tactical move by writing From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (see above), which was printed by Mikhail Matiushin for the opening as a counterpart to the catalogue “censored” by Puni. “It has become crucial at any price to issue this little brochure about my work and christen it and thereby announce in advance my copyright,” he wrote to Matiushin.9 In preparation for the exhibition, Malevich carefully concealed his new ideas from his rivals, especially Ivan Puni, but he shared them with old friends who had been tried and tested in collaboration. Among his friends, Malevich counted Aleksei Kruchenykh, who spent the summer of 1915 working in a room he rented from Malevich at his dacha in Kuntsevo, and Ivan Kliun, who occasionally visited them there. The idea of “going beyond zero” was partially reflected in Malevich, Kliun, and Kruchenykh’s collection of essays Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians), which came out that summer in Moscow, but was dated a year later, 1916, to mark their orientation toward the future. Kruchenykh was influenced by his conversations with Malevich (which are partially reflected in their correspondence of 1915 to 1917, devoted to the quest for structural parallels between poetry and painting) and

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their collaboration on the book. His own thesis on the “nonobjective” in poetry developed parallel to Suprematist geometrical abstraction in painting. All of this is reflected in his essay “Sleepy Whistlers” in Tainye, and in his daring proposal for Universal War, a unique album combining transrational poetry and abstract visual forms. In the summer of 1915, the very air seemed to be charged with Malevich’s profound energy. The idea of “moving beyond zero” was partially realized already in the declarations by Malevich, Kliun, and Kruchenykh in Tainye: Because they are unnecessary I reject the soul and intuition. At a public lecture on 19 February 1914 I rejected reason. I warn of the danger—now reason has locked art into a four-walled box of dimensions. (K. Malevich) Taking as our starting point the straight line, we have arrived at the ideally simple form: straight and round planes (in verbal art—sound and letter). The simplicity of the form also depends upon the profundity and complexity of our tasks. (I. Kliun) Man already sees that the words existing before him have died, so he tries to refurbish them, turn them inside out, patch them . . . Poetry has reached an impasse, and the only honorable way out is not to use worn out images, epithets and words—to switch to transrational language. (A. Kruchenykh)10

By early fall, Malevich had come up with the final name for the new movement, inventing the term “Suprematism,” which in his interpretation symbolized the supremacy of the new philosophy of nonobjective art: “Suprematism is the most appropriate name, for it signifies supremacy,” he wrote to Matiushin.11 Thus was determined the name of the new group and, with it, that of the journal they were planning, Supremus.12 All of Malevich’s Suprematist compositions are founded on his thesis that art is the ability to create a pure painterly construction that arises from the ongoing interaction between form, color, weight, speed, and direction of movement. Counter to Tatlin’s dismissal of a painterly form for the sake of the texture and materiality of the object, Malevich acknowledged the dominant role of “painterly form as such.”According to his theory, the concrete materiality of pigment is the principal means of expression (together with form and line), or the “instrument” of the artist. In his system, these means are transformed and become the subjects or “components” of his painting. For example, three colors figure in Malevich’s Suprematist painting Flight of an Airplane: red, yellow, and black on a white background that symbolizes the “nothingness” of outer space. Cor-

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Installation of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings in the “Last Futurist Exhibition, 0.10,” Petrograd, 1915. Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

FIGURE 54.

responding to these are variations of three forms hovering in this space— a rectangle, a square, and a narrow strip stretched almost into a line. In other artists’ Suprematist compositions, particularly Rozanova’s, color, on the contrary, achieves an almost impossible penetrating acuteness, creating a physical sensation of overcoming the inertness of matter in a kind of spiritual act. Her Suprematism (1916), one of her most atectonic but rhythmically tense and expressive works, might be called an example of“romantic”Suprematism. By means of colored hyperbolic combinations of vivid bright and dull dark tones, she introduces a qualitatively new dimension into the geometry of Suprematism. This surmounting, equally significant in early avant-garde painting and poetry, was identified as a qualitatively new feature of abstract art in Matiushin’s article for Supremus “On the Old and New in Music,” in which he writes, “The soul of the creator turns everything near and visible upside down and with its transformative power hurls it into infinity, where enormous layers of crude matter shine as stars and the perception

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of ‘noises’ makes us mighty, carried away, forces us to believe in the beauty of reality.”13 In Malevich’s view of art as a “created construction,” there is a contradiction between a rational and an intuitively utopian, mystical approach, which Malevich himself aptly defined as the “intuitive reason” (of Suprematism). And this is what connects Suprematism to the earlier avant-garde work and separates it from the later work. However, in spite of his publicly announced “rejection of reason”14 and the rebellious pose of the anti-intellectual, the theory and practice of Malevich’s Suprematism were determined to a greater degree by rational and deeply intellectual constructs.

THE POLITICS OF SUPREMUS

The Suprematists’ journal was announced to the press in the fall of 1916, and its list of participants was the same as that of the “0.10” exhibition. The well-recognized art journal Apollon ran an advertisement (in nos. 9–10) declaring the launching of “the monthly journal Supremus, which will come out in Moscow in December or January and will be devoted to painting, decorative art, music, and literature. Principal organizers and contributors include Malevich, Rozanova, Puni, [Alexandra] Exter, Kliun, [Mikhail] Menkov.” Malevich wrote about the journal in more detail in a letter to Matiushin, stating, “I’ve already arranged everything. Materials are being collected, we’re all set with the typography. Send articles on new directions. The first issue is on Cubism, I’ll go on from there. I won’t appear until issue 3.”15 However, in Malevich’s handwritten draft of an advertisement for the journal, which states that the second issue would appear in January 1917, he is listed among the contributors: Contributors to Supremus will be those who have turned aside the rays of yesterday’s sun from their faces. Kazimir Malevich, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Liubov Popova, Mikhail Menkov, Ivan Puni, Ksenia Boguslavskaia, Aleksei Kruchenykh, . . . [Vera] Pestel, . . . Yurkevich, Nikolai Roslavets, Mikhail Matiushin, Natalia Davydova. Owing to limited quantities of the issue, subscriptions are being accepted for Supremus no. 2. It will appear on January 1.

There is a note in the margin: “write Roslavets and ask which of several editions of his music should be put in the chronicle,” and, after a row of dots: “No. 2 will include K. Malevich’s articles ‘A Response to the Old Day’ and ‘The Fool’s Cap of Philistine Logic.’ ”16

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Malevich’s inclusion of Puni and Boguslavskaia in this list was motivated by purely practical considerations related to the financing of the journal. However, Puni’s pretensions toward assuming a leading role led to an unavoidable break with Malevich, and, without sponsorship, publication of the journal was delayed. By 1916, the nucleus of his competitor Tatlin’s group of proto-Constructivists had taken definite shape and Malevich’s own group appeared vulnerable: few of the members were well known, his own activity significantly outweighed the contributions of the other participants, and, moreover, the ambivalence of some members, who tended toward a more independent artistic position, was alarming. In 1916, Rozanova wrote to Kruchenykh: I recently got a verbose letter from Kliunkov [Kliun]. Flattering and alarming. They are afraid that the group of [Lev] Bruni, Tatlin, and others will be significantly larger and have more success with the public than the Suprematists. He’s appealing to me. He says that the Suprematists should work closely and harmoniously and so on, calls me a “rare” artist, etc.17

The social and political situation in the spring of 1917, when the first issue of Supremus was finally on the horizon after the initial delay, could not but affect Malevich’s ideological strategy and the program of his journal. Malevich first mentioned the idea of a new journal in May 1915, long before he had invented the term “Suprematism.” (At this time, the title of the journal was to be Nul’, or Zero.) Back then, Malevich shared his idea for a new journal with Matiushin and asked for his support in reuniting the old Futurist “trio” of Malevich, Matiushin, and Kruchenykh: We are planning to put out a journal and have begun to discuss the how and what of it. Since in it we intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it Nul’. Afterward we ourselves will go beyond zero. It would be good if you could also offer some useful advice. We’re pooling our resources to publish it, i.e., 10 rubles apiece, and at first it will be 2 printer’s sheets—not much, but good. It would also be good if you could come here—there’s a room for you and it’s quiet. . . . Then things would get going even better.18

“That which was done unconsciously is now bearing extraordinary fruit,” Malevich wrote Matiushin, referring to his notorious drawing for the curtain of the opera Victory over the Sun (1913) and retrospectively rationalizing it as a prototype of Suprematism, an anticipation of Black Square.19 The revolution of February 1917, followed by the Bolshevik October

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FIGURE 55. Olga Rozanova, Suprematism, 1916. Oil on canvas, 102 × 94 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinburg.

revolution later that year, had a complex impact on the social, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas of the avant-garde, and this was reflected in Supremus. Power in the new institutionalized art world became a central issue: Mass meetings have been organized in the artistic everyday of “free Russia.” The leaders of the meeting are the same anointed autocrats of the Academies. It was not a pretty sight: these ungrateful [artists] who have fed themselves on crumbs from their beloved monarch, painted millions of portraits of him, raised monuments to the hangmen, now crowing over the corpse of the lord, singing out their baseness.

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Yesterday they tossed out rebellious young new truth, today they bow down to freedom and wear red ribbons in their buttonholes. Interesting as well was the liberated “youth” that elected the “wretched” chairmen. The Suprematists were watching and marveling at the suppleness of the reincarnation.20

Under these circumstances, Malevich was the first to realize that the publication of an art journal, strictly controlled by one group, was not only an ideological, but a strategic necessity. He conceived his journal as an attempt to create a social context for his art, to establish a basis for the new movement, “to form [his] own environment.”21 According to Malevich’s vision, Supremus, apart from being a vehicle for his own artistic ambitions and assuring his leading role in the art world, was to become an original forum for experiment and discussion, something between a virtual laboratory and a fortress (he referred to his journal as a dom-laboratoria, or “home laboratory”) for the new philosophy and theory of nonobjective art. The innovative form and artistic ideology of this journal, which Rozanova, in a letter to Matiushin, called “strictly partisan,” its proclamation of Suprematism “in everything,” its orientation toward the group, and its emphasis in numerous articles on the priority of “collective work” over individual art, served to enforce Suprematist doctrine. On the handwritten draft of a title page for the journal, marked “1918” as a preliminary date for the issue, the title “Supremus” is centered on top in bigger letters, and the list of participants is given in smaller letters below on the right: “K. Malevich, O. Rozanova, N. Udaltsova, Roslavets, I. Kliun, Yurkevich, A. Kruchenykh et al.” Malevich could not resist the temptation of adding in pencil: “A cockerel that will be heard far and wide.”22 The title’s metamorphosis from Zero (Nul’) to Supremus is symbolic. While both titles convey the anarchic idea of creating the world out of “nothing” and the equation of “nothing” with “everything,” the shift in emphasis from the extreme nihilism of “zero” to utopian supreme domination (“Suprematism”denoted“supremacy”for Malevich) marked a new stage in the evolution of the avant-garde. The anarchic nihilism of alogism yielded to a quest for the assertion of the universal (Matiushin incisively noted “academic allusions” in the term “Suprematism”),23 and, consequently, an inescapably utopian concept of art. His strategy also changed: But who of us will remain to take down our youthfulness from the attic and show it to our young offspring? Who will pass on the new book of new laws from our tablets? You see, we do not yet have a book. But it is necessary, indispensable. The book is a little history of our art . . . the sum of our days, the key locking our thoughts within us.24

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This historicism and the attempt to register the genealogy of Suprematism seem very far-flung from the earlier Futuristic maximalism of Malevich and his comrades, but it is indeed the main leitmotif of the journal, in many respects inspired by the desire to reflect or recreate the extratextual context of the movement. To some degree, Supremus itself has become a fragment of the historical and artistic context, without which the “aesthetic object” of the cultural legacy can no longer exist. By the middle of 1917, Puni, Boguslavskaia, Popova, and Exter were no longer members of the Suprematist group, and Malevich, Rozanova, Udaltsova, Roslavets, Kliun, Yurkevich, and Kruchenykh, among others, were announced as the principal contributors to the journal. The original structure of the journal had also changed. Malevich had asserted himself as editor in chief. Instead of waiting to appear in the third issue, he wrote several articles for the first issue: “Cubism,” “Futurism,” “Architecture as a Slap at Ferro-Concrete,” and “Theater,” which together were to make up the ideological core of the publication and define the “strictly partisan” character noted by Rozanova. It is worth mentioning that quite a few of Malevich’s essays prepared for the unfortunate Supremus were published a year later, in the politically oriented newspaper Anarkhiia. T. J. Clark’s suggestion that Malevich published “orthodox” anarchist texts thus rings very true.25 By 1917, Supremus’s program and contents were well defined. Rozanova described the journal in a letter to Matiushin that May, writing, “A periodical. Strictly partisan in nature. Its program: Suprematism (in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, the new theater, and so on). Articles, a chronicle, letters, aphorisms, poetry, reproductions of Suprematist pictures, and applied art,” and inviting contributions in the shape of popular scholarly nonfiction articles.26 In a letter to Andrei Shemshurin at the end of May, Rozanova wrote that the journal was in the process of being published and the first issue had already been composed.27 Unfortunately, it never did appear, despite the fact that all the materials for the first, and partly even for the second, issue were ready by June 1917. Judging by the editorial notes preserved in the Khardzhiev archive, the first issue of the journal was to be divided into four main sections: 1. Painting; 2. Literature; 3. Music; 4. Theater. Critical reviews, art news, and correspondence were placed at the end of the issue. The literary section was to begin with Kruchenykh’s “The Declaration of the Word as Such,” originally published in 1913 and reworked in 1917 especially for Supremus. In the text that was to open the journal,“Greeting to the Suprematists,” Malevich wrote:

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Thus many years have turned into decades and we, as before, have remained loyal to our spirit. We move tirelessly, burning in the new and in freshly acquired materials. Or, like stoves, we smelt new resolutions and form new conclusions. I am delighted with our encounter [here] on the pages of the Supremus home laboratory. More than once have we met at on the common road of workbenches, and where we met, campfires burned, raising the flame of the mountain. The “Jack of Diamonds,” “Donkey’s Tail,” “Target,” “Union of Youth,” “Tramway V,” “0.10,” “Shop.” These are the sites of the burned-out campfires from our past days.28

The Supremus project is so significant in that Malevich aspired to make the journal into a virtual commune of artists, poets, musicians, and critics who shared the same ideology. More than a journal, Supremus was the only attempt to create such a nucleus inside the early avantgarde movement since the collapse of the Union of Youth. Malevich’s extra-individual “home laboratory” manifested itself not only at the level of content (where each article touches, in one way or another, on the problematic relationship of the individual to the school and urges artists to overcome individuality in “collective creation”), but also in the very unusual unity of such different artistic voices (Rozanova, Matiushin, Udaltsova, Roslavets), orchestrated by Malevich. Initially, it seems, plans for the issue included a brief joint declaration by the Suprematists,“Our Consciousness.” The declaration outlined the journal’s goal and ideological position, establishing Suprematism as a new “basis for creativity,” a universal synthetic style encompassing all spheres of artistic activity. They wrote, “In our journal Supremus, we have set out to provide the contours of the idea of Suprematism, which bears within it a new idea of the artistic, musical, and poetic perception of nature and our life.”29 The rhetoric of this text alludes to early Cubo-Futurist manifestos, and is rooted in the myth of the new art as the only means of breaking out of “the ring of yesterday into the new day.” In Malevich’s “genealogy” of Suprematism, it is Cubism that plays the most important conceptual role. While a strong sense of national identity did not prevent the Suprematists from recognizing themselves as part of the international European avantgarde, Cubism was to be present in Supremus only as a general concept (no names, even those of Braque and Picasso, are mentioned in any of the articles) to be reinvented by Suprematists as the origin of the avant-garde tradition—a tradition that was nonetheless revolutionary. Although Cubism remained a theme throughout, the accent shifted to the formation of a universal theory of nonobjectivity in painting, literature, music, ar-

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chitecture, sculpture, and theater, and in no small measure to its philosophical rather than practical basis. This was a new methodological approach, based on historical self-reflection by the avant-garde.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CREATIVITY

The founding of Supremus was the first attempt to establish the Russian avant-garde as an artistic entity within its own historical development, as a dynamically evolving, self-regenerating movement. Malevich wrote in “Futurism” that “the new value of Futurism—speed—must not be finalized,” and named the principal shortcoming of the Futurists to be their “academism,” the fact that they had “stopped and tried to use old means of expression to convey the new.” Instead, in Malevich’s close to postmodern sensibility, he projected the Suprematist perception onto Cubism, much as in the 1920s he would “deconstruct” and reinvent Impressionism, or rather the concept or “formula” of Impressionism, which had little in common with the actual movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The aesthetics and practice of Cubism, already exhausted by Russian artists by 1915, were of no interest to the Suprematists. Cubism was to appear in Supremus exclusively on the conceptual level of an idea, a form. Malevich wrote in “Futurism”: Cubism and Futurism are the revolutionary banners of art. They are of value to museums, like the relics of the Social Revolution. Relics to which monuments should be erected in public squares. I propose creating in squares monuments to Cubism and Futurism as the weapons that defeated the old art of repetition and brought us to spontaneous creation.30

Malevich praised the destruction of things in Cubism, which he believed had completely changed the reference points of art, singling out and leading to the dominance of painterly language “as such” and the study of the formal qualities of painting. “Considering Cubism the brilliant solution to our problems, being liberated from objectness, we emerge into space, color, and time. It is with these three worlds that we will explore our new tasks in following issues of Supremus,” he wrote in “Mouth of the Earth and the Artist.”31 According to Malevich, the Suprematists took the next step in this direction by abstracting the primary elements of painterly structure, particularly color and form, asserting that “through Cubism and Futurism, the artist burst with a convulsive movement into the freedom of pure creativity, into the study of pure painting—color. Painting is only color and form.”While color was not really a major issue

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in Cubism, it became the fundamental principle of painting for the Suprematists. In Rozanova’s “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” and Malevich’s articles for Supremus, the new concept of tsvetopis (color-painting) was introduced.32 As Malevich wrote in “Greeting to the Suprematists”: “After transforming ourselves into the changing speeds of the racetracks of the horizon, we leaped beyond the zero of repetition and confronted color, face to face. Color and color alone is what our creative center is all about.”33 By concentrating exclusively on the formal categories of painting, the artist could exceed its limitations. Already in 1915, Rozanova had professed that “objectness and non-objectness (in painting) are not two different tendencies within a single art, but two different arts—I even think it sensible to substitute projections on a screen for paint in nonobject art.”34 Contained within the very notion of nonobjective art was the possibility of going beyond the bounds of easel painting. As Yurkevich wrote in his untitled manuscript for Supremus, “Perhaps the New Painting is not at all for easel pictures or for exhibitions. The old methods of reproducing and of viewing art are probably not suitable now. New wine demands new wineskins. This is the next urgent question.”35 All these materials reveal the point where the development of abstract art in Russia bifurcated in the following decade. It marks the gap dividing the utilitarian approach in Constructivism, toward the materiality of thingness, from the Suprematist philosophy of nothingness. The extant articles written for Supremus indicate that Malevich originally considered his theory as synthetic and universal, and not bound by the borders of one or another genre or form of art. Thus, under the direct influence of Malevich, Kruchenykh became interested in the notion of soundless poetry, which was not intended for reading and declamation but for purely visual perception. In his revised “Declaration of the Word as Such,” Kruchenykh theorizes the mutually complementary, but not interchangeable, nature of abstract visual and auditory elements in the process of intuitive cognition: “sound in music, color in painting, and the letter in poetry (thought = insight + sound + outline + color).”36 This new epistemology of the nonobjective, which Kruchenykh only touched upon, is another core theme in the Supremus texts, especially those by Malevich and Nikolai Roslavets. In his article “On Nonobjective Art,” Roslavets discusses the basis of the philosophy of nonobjective creation, in which he perceives a return from the individualistic philosophy of the particular to Platonic universals that exist independently of things.

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Within a particular interpretation, the notion of the “nonobjective” can be reduced to a simple rejection of the dependency of the artist on the necessity to represent the object and on subordination to canons that require the artist to copy “nature,” to render as accurate as possible a reproduction of visible nature and surrounding objects. If, however, in the interpretation of our term one goes back to a universal, the artist’s striving toward “nonobjectiveness” in art can be raised to a profound basic principle of creativity.37

Citing Schopenhauer’s conception, Roslavets singled out the notions of “will” and “intellect”: The power of the thing, of the object, is the power of the form, the idea; consequently, it is a state of the intellect enslaved by the will, and, as Schopenhauer correctly observes, only the intellect liberated from the will, the pure intellect, is capable of rising to the heights of the intuitive insight upon which creative genius exclusively depends. Our will is a symbol of the connection between our spirit (pure intellect) and matter, the earth, our personal subjective interests. The will is therefore opposed to all activity of the intellect directed toward anything but its goals— . . . the purely practical . . . relationship [to things and phenomena]. Only the artist, through contemplation and intuition, is capable of liberating himself from the will that binds all human acts and understanding the essence of pure creative will in its objective (ideas). The liberated artist replaces the “common sense” of naturalistic dogmatism with faith in the inexhaustible wealth of primary forms-ideas (in the Platonic sense) that are concealed in his soul, from which he draws upon at moments of creative inspiration to be intuitively embodied in his art. Intuition he understands to be the highest stage of cognition, when rationality must yield to “faith.”38

Roslavets perceives the origin of the principle of nonobjectiveness in art to lie in the rejection of positivist rationalism, of a utilitarian attitude toward art: “The contemporary artist has now matured to a consciousness of the necessity to separate completely the will from the intellect in the creative process.”39 In his essay “The Mouth . . . ,” following Plato’s dialectic, Malevich describes two opposing methodological principles. The essence of the first, which he considers a dead end, was to proceed downward from the most universal notions to the particular in an attempt “to find out the secret” through an object or thing contained within the boundaries of the material, “created” world: “through spirit they have tried to penetrate into the little cracks in the orifices of things . . . through the word they have searched for themselves and for the mystery . . . through color they have wanted to know the essence and the synthesis and the soul of things.”40 The other path was toward synthesis, proceeding upward on the steps of generalized notions from the particular to the universal:

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But those who have gone back out of things, out of the center of the earth, out of the marrow of its creative exertions—they have striven toward space. Those who have cracked the shell of the egg of creation of nature and emerged from it with no thought to the pieces of its scattered armor. Those who have come out of the color of things to color. . . . Let us proceed out of the labyrinth of the earth into boundless space with numbers and color and let us husk the grain of consciousness.41

The notion of intuition and inspiration in the metapoetics of Supremus can, I think, be interpreted as synonymous with Malevich’s understanding of “creativity.” Like Roslavets, Malevich prioritizes creative intuition over rational consciousness and what Matiushin called the “temptation of the personal.” In “On the New and the Old in Music,” Matiushin described this individualism as creeping “everywhere like mold,” and continued, “Our new body must be a powerful trampoline at the moment of brilliant flight, not a heavy clay of all sorts of lascivious slush.”42 Malevich, Matiushin, and Roslavets all used the same metaphor of earth to refer to the world of the purely material, the world revolving around all that is “human, all too human,” in Nietzsche’s formula; only the absolute creative will is capable of bursting out of the bounds of this world and approaching a knowledge of being. As Malevich wrote in “Cubism”: “A great and mighty creative power has been shackled by the power of consciousness.” In this overcoming of human dimensions, the rejection of the European “humanist” world, in which everything “human” is the center of the universe dating back to the Renaissance, Suprematist poetics of dehumanization resembles the notion set forth by Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism.” In the ontology of Suprematism, knowledge of the phenomenal world and reflection of life-being, rather than the expression of humanistic centrism, are the tasks of the artist: all his activity is compared to philosophy in its aspiration to define the “creative will.” Suprematism is projected as a revolution, an anarchic revolt against the authority of both the practice and philosophy behind the “artisan guilds.” Malevich raises his voice for creativity against the utilitarian approach to “art as a means,” in which the aesthetic, utilitarian, ideological (political, propagandistic) functions transform art into a means. Only nonobjective art, owing to its abstraction from “the hurly-burly of the personal, family, and governmental life of protocols, is capable of rejecting these functions.”43 Analysis of these two concepts—creativity and art— is complicated by the fact that the definitions provided are very vague and often contradictory, but in all interpretations art is always secondary to creativity; creativity can embrace art, but not vice versa.

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Kliun begins his essay on nonobjective art with a general definition of art and a reference to “the confusion of two notions of art”: representational art and the art of abstract form. He divided the entire history of art into two stages, defining the first stage as the period of representational art, extending from “the awakening of the savage” artistic consciousness to the art of the Cubists and the Futurists. In the second, most recent phase, he writes, art has ceased to be a means and has become an end in itself: “Finally, in our time, on the eve of the triumph of the free people, we arrived at the new idea of art, an art liberated from every kind of alien influence, free as the people itself will be.” He concludes: “Art became itself, began to speak for itself, on its own terms.”44 This rejection of “reason” (or the “old reason”) in favor of the creative principle is also present in Malevich’s and Kruchenykh’s rhetoric: “Thought and speech cannot keep up with the experience of inspiration,” Kruchenykh writes in “The Declaration of the Word as Such.”45 The principles of dissonance, disharmony, and “shifts” become the devices by which the old reason and traditional aesthetic values are overcome—“through the storm, a crack, a break, brightness, the blows of the steps from the enormous step of a race, a break and displacement,” as Malevich puts it in “Greeting to the Suprematists.”46 Here he introduces the dissonant poetic metaphor of the angle, symbolizing the rejection of aesthetic criteria of beauty in nonobjective art, stating, “Lowering the idea of Suprematism to the shells of simplicity, we safeguard its vitality. Our first step will be the new path, the path of the protruding, spreading angle.”47 The Suprematists aspired to define the nonobjective in terms of a universal idea, presumably free from the individual psychology and emotions of the artist, liberating the spirit through creativity. In “On the New and the Old in Music,” Matiushin wrote: The gifted and brilliant individuals of the past did not notice that seeping from everywhere into their originally pure creative flood were trickles of their little personal “I,” which, as they merged, muddied and completely perverted their precious gift. The strongest were obliged to savagely force their poor spiritual and corporeal nature in order to preserve the flame bearing them into the heavens free from the tasty burden of their little “I.”48

Nadezhda Udaltsova interprets feeling and taste as the whim of the artist, a negative manifestation of individuality. She wrote: “The creation of epochs is [according to the law and therefore] greater than the creation of the individual soul.”49 Matiushin proposed that the recipe for

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overcoming the individual in creation, specifically in the new music, lay in the “furious protest of real, healthy dissonance.”50 Matiushin introduces Suprematism as a revolutionary source that has led to the triumph of creativity—or the creative will—over “varnished art”: “We needed a revolution and to rise up against the chain of things and against the Old Reason of past culture which hung upon us.”51 Moreover, he promoted his nonobjectivity theory as a theory of unbound “creativity” (as opposed to the limited notion of professionally trained “art”) capable of penetrating beyond the boundaries of artistic activity to encompass the most diverse spheres of human life. Suprematists strike another parallel with Tolstoy when they contrast the idea of “creative will” to art. In their journal, they regard art as synonymous with craft, a polished professional mastery, thereby attributing a utilitarian nature to this concept. The unions and guilds of painters that have arisen in connection with the great Russian Revolution eloquently express artisan principles. This is the road of classifying people according to their guild. But there is something in art that is not amenable to any classification or guild. This something is present in the first steps of an idea, in the first discovered forms, and it ends where the reworking, ceases its work and becomes a utilitarian product . . . producing things for the use of the majority.52

What Caryl Emerson defined as Tolstoy’s dismissal of the entire historical aspect of art as a developing guild consciousness, Malevich further discusses via Suprematism as a revolution, a revolt against the “artisan guilds.”53 Creativity is regarded as a gift, whereas art is a trained ability, a skill. Echoing Tolstoy’s admiration for simplicity, Malevich called for “crudeness” in art. “Refined culture has burned up its artistic reason,” he claimed. “Socialism illuminated freedom to the world, and Art fell before the face of Creation.”54 Roslavets continues the same thought: “And with the liberation of art will come crashing down all the fortresses of scholastic dogmatism erected by the bustling labor of the so-called ‘science of beauty’—aesthetics—because it is the object from which all its tenets were derived and upon which it was built.”55 Opposed to the subjective criterion of beauty, the Suprematists advanced the objective notion of creative law, unlike the early Futurists: “Beauty, taste, the ideal are terribly subjective,” Malevich asserted. “Everyone will agree that a square has four corners and that 2 × 2 = 4. . . . Is 2 × 2 = 4 beautiful or ugly? The same obtains in the art of painting, in particular, and in general there is a law in art that spares us this word.”56

FIGURE 56. Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Order” installation at the retrospective GINKHUK (State Research Institute of Artistic Culture) exhibition in Leningrad, 1926. Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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This idea of the objective law is expressed in Malevich’s new formula: “The artist must do not what he wants, but what must be done.”57 Malevich’s “must” in art and the responsibility of the artist parallels Tolstoy’s obsession with how precisely a thing is supposed to be done. Malevich’s “must” presupposes the necessity of universal creative law, ruled by the collective, rather than individual, and founded on the grounds of rejecting and overcoming the ego, the artist’s earthly self. Following this is the deliberate tendency among Suprematists toward the extra-individual— a metamorphosis in avant-garde self-imaging from individual consciousness to collective creativity. The crucial difference between Malevich and Tolstoy is that Malevich contrasts creativity to the negative notion of “art as a means”: aesthetic, utilitarian, ideological (political, propagandistic) functions transform art into a means. On the contrary, Tolstoy’s social and moral agenda determines his utilitarian approach to art. Paradoxically, Tolstoy manages to combine the latter with an aesthetic pluralism. Malevich’s concept of Suprematism represents more than a new method in painting; it contained a new epistemology of art, an ideology. He expanded his ideas beyond the boundaries of painting; in articles on poetry and music, in brochures, and even in letters, he agonizingly searches for a new critical language to express the weight of his ideas. Little remained in his writings of the romantic pathos of Futurist manifestos or the absurd paradoxes and irony of alogism. Malevich’s literary style is the key to understanding the essence of his theories, and it is no accident that his work blended so beautifully with the general poetics of the anarchist newspaper, where in 1918 he published most of the essays originally written for the unpublished Supremus. His language is categorical and imperative. The ecstatic tone of his essays is reminiscent of a passionate, fanatical sermon. In this furious attitude toward art and the word, there is something religious, or more exactly, heretical. Malevich’s theories must above all be “believed in.” Similarly, his notion of the school or group far exceeded the boundaries of the purely professional definition of a guild. As he understood it, the Suprematist school was a “home laboratory,” a political party, a religion: “Christ revealed heaven on earth, set an end to space, established two boundaries, two poles. . . . As for us, we’ll pass thousands of poles.”58

PART FOUR

Politics

9

Art, Creativity, and Anarkhiia

The February revolution of 1917 sharply politicized the Russian literary and art world, and the Bolshevik October revolution made this politicization total. Within a year, from 1917 to 1918, the social and aesthetic questions that concerned the avant-garde were brought into sharp relief. The delicate balance between the avant-garde’s social awareness and its intention to distance itself from political ideology was shattered. Around 1917, the literary and artistic avant-garde had divided into several currents. The most radical core of avant-garde painters, Tatlin’s group, as well as the Suprematists led by Malevich, remained in the capital cities of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd by this time) and Moscow. Together with the young Aleksandr Rodchenko and Aleksei Gan and the Ego-Futurist poets Riurik Ivnev (the pseudonym of Mikhail Kovalev) and Vladimir Sidorov (also known as Vadim Baian and by the pen name BaianPlamen’), they very soon reacted against Bolshevist authoritarianism and started collaborating on the political newspaper Anarkhiia (Anarchy; 1917–18). This political collaboration marked the conclusion of the early avant-garde period in Russia. Meanwhile, the most radical left tendency in literary Futurism (Kruchenykh, Ilya Zdanevich, and others) relocated to the Caucasus and settled in Tbilisi (named Tiflis by this time). For a couple of years these “anarchists of the spirit” had in fact escaped the Bolshevik regime and were living in Georgia, where a democratic Menshevik government had declared its independence from Russia. They deliberately remained neutral 211

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in their political declarations, and actively continued their formal experiments in poetry, prose, and the theater.1 In Moscow, the other group, led by Mayakovsky, who after October 1917 called himself a “Bolshevik of art” in a public lecture, concentrated on bringing political ideology into Futurism, and Futurism “to the masses.”The former Hylaeans David Burliuk and Vasilii Kamensky, both at the time close to anarcho-communist circles, joined Mayakovsky in this passionate attempt to turn Futurism into a means of agitating and transforming society. After a brief anarchist period, marked by activity in Moscow’s Poets’ Café and the first issue of the Gazeta futuristov (Futurists’ Newspaper), Mayakovsky chose to support Bolshevik cultural politics and to collaborate on the newspaper Iskusstvo Kommuny (Art of the Commune), edited by art critic Nikolai Punin, and organized under the auspices of the People’s Commissariat of Education (often translated into English as the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment) and Anatolii Lunacharsky.2 By 1920, when the proclaimed “Father of Russian Futurism” David Burliuk moved, first, to Japan and soon thereafter to New York, a few newcomers, such as the politically savvy Osip Brik and the founder of “Communist Futurism” (Komfut) Boris Kushner allied themselves with Mayakovsky. This alliance determined the politics and major directions of the future Left Front of Arts (LEF). In the Caucasus, the leaders of the multiethnic Futurist movement were Ilya Zdanevich, of Polish and Georgian origins, born in Tbilisi and educated in St. Petersburg, and Aleksei Kruchenykh, the most apolitical poet of the early avant-garde, who arrived in Georgia in the spring of 1916 to avoid the draft. They created the nucleus of the Syndicate of Futurists, which also included artist Kirill Zdanevich, Ilya’s brother (the Zdanevich brothers had returned to the Caucasus from St. Petersburg right after the Bolshevik revolution), Nikolau Cherniavsky, the Polish painter Ziga (Zigmund) Valishevsky, the Armenian poet and journalist Kara-Dervish (the pseudonym of the anarcho-individualist A. M. Gendzhian), and the Georgian artist Vladimir (Lado) Gudiashvili. This free association of artists and poets advocated a mutual anarchist sensibility, and shared a common interest in folklore and the primitive, and a strong belief in the affinity of word and image. The Syndicate of Futurists disbanded in early 1918, to be replaced in February by the more stable and significant Company 41° (named after the latitude of Georgia). The group’s principal figures were Kruchenykh, Cherniavsky, Ilya Zdanevich, and Igor Terentiev. Kruchenykh’s chief

FIGURE 57.

Ilya Zdanevich, ca. 1914.

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theoretical work of the period is Malakholiia v kapote (1919), in which he presents a newly revised theory of shift (or displacement), deeply influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.3 The group’s brief manifesto declared: “Company 41°unifies left-wing Futurism, and affirms transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art. The task of 41° is to make use of all the great discoveries of its contributors, and to place the world on a new axis. This newspaper will be a haven for happenings in the life of the company as well as a cause of constant trouble. Let’s roll up our sleeves.”4 “FREEDOM TO ART”

Soon after the February 1917 revolution overthrew the monarchy, Kerensky’s Provisional Government unilaterally decided to found the Ministry of the Arts to function as a new power structure in the administration. The organization of the ministry was entrusted to the renowned artist, critic, and connoisseur Alexandre Benois, who willingly offered his services to the new regime. Benois, whose activities as an art critic had provided him a foothold within the tsarist Academy of the Arts, was considered a rather conservative authority. The critic who could make or break the reputation of an individual artist or an entire school, he most often adopted the narrowly partisan positions of his own World of Art group, which shared his personal tastes and interests. News of Benois’s leadership of the proposed cultural ministry sparked a veritable furor. From conservatives to ultra-leftists, the entire cultural intelligentsia grew indignant over the backroom manner of his appointment, which had been made without public discussion. On 11 March 1917, the major newspapers published an appeal addressed to the intelligentsia and employees of the cultural sphere. Written by the newly organized group Freedom for Art, this manifesto was created specifically to counteract Benois’s power grab and was signed by, among others, the young Petrograd avant-gardists Ilya Zdanevich, Vladimir Denisov, Natan Altman, Nikolai Punin, Ivan Puni, and Artur Lurie. Mayakovsky joined them later. On the following day, 12 March, a spontaneous mass meeting of over 1,500 art workers gathered to protest the proposed Ministry of Arts and the seizure of power by individual groups, and to enthusiastically approve Zdanevich’s resolution to establish a new society, the Union of Art Workers, on the basis of “universal, equal, direct, and secret balloting based on gender equality.”5 Their subsequent charter, written by Vladimir Denisov, a close ally of Zdanevich’s, stressed

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the union’s primary goal to provide “the conditions ensuring freedom for creative arts, freedom of opinion and expression, and free art education,” based on the principle of decentralization and the rejection of government “tutelage” over art: “The great Russian Revolution calls us to act. Unite, fight for the freedom of art. Fight for the right of selfdetermination and autonomy. The Revolution creates freedom. Without freedom there is no art. Only in a free democratic republic is democratic art possible.”6 They introduced a mechanism for preventing the “governmentalization” of culture, consisting in the right to “legislative initiative and the mandatory supervision of governmental and social measures and undertakings in the matters of culture.”7 Zdanevich, the driving force behind this initiative, returned to Petrograd in the fall of 1916, after two years as a war correspondent for the daily Rech’ (Speech). In 1917, he became actively involved in the movement for free “democratic art.” Elisabeth Valkenier characterizes his small, but energetic group as “vociferous proponents of the view that art could flourish only when completely liberated from state supervision”: “Opposed both to the Academy and the projected Ministry of Arts as entrenched bureaucracies, they proposed to bring about genuine emancipation through a thorough-going decentralization that would hand over a running of schools, museums and libraries to municipal self-government in which local artists would have a voice.”8 They made several important proposals, which included the abolition of the Ministry of the Arts, and all other state control over the arts, and a proposal to organize an all-Russian association of artists, which would have the authority to distribute fellowships and grants. In one of the debates, entitled “Revolution. War. Art,” the speakers, who included Ilya Zdanevich, Mayakovsky, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, drew analogies between the “essence of art” and revolution, which were common amongst the intelligentsia after the February revolution. However, when soon after the October events Commissar Lunacharsky addressed the Union of Art Workers in Petrograd, seeking their collaboration with the new government, the association responded that it did not recognize state control over the arts and refused any further contact with him. Mayakovsky was one of only two members who voted for collaboration.9 By May 1917, the leaders of Freedom for Art in Petrograd merged with other groups to form a Left Bloc within the Union of Art Workers. A few months earlier, Boris Kushner had published a brochure titled Demokratizatsiia iskusstvu (Democratization of Art), in which he proposed an explicit radical strategy for the Left Bloc.10 The Union was di-

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vided into a conservative right and a neutral center, who were apprehensive of the leftists and formed a so-called practical coalition to “advance organized and productive work on the basis of the common platform,” but in truth intended to undermine Left Bloc. As a result, the leftists distanced themselves from the association and sought different outlets for their ambitions. (It should be noted that by this time, Ilya Zdanevich, who had inspired the original concept of the association, was already in Tbilisi (Tiflis), from where he later emigrated to Paris and joined the Surrealists.) FROM THE FUTURISTS’ NEWSPAPER TO ART OF THE COMMUNE

In Moscow, Mayakovsky, Kamensky, and David Burliuk continued their prewar tradition of poetry readings and debates and participated in joint appearances at the Poets’ Café, which Kamensky had set up together with Futurist ally performer Vladimir Goltschmidt. The Poets’ Café was closed in April 1918. By then, they had already published the first (and only) issue of the Gazeta futuristov (Futurists’ Newspaper), edited by David Burliuk, Mayakovsky, and Kamensky. The paper contained poems, articles, and manifestos by the editors and Vasilisk Gnedov. The most important contributions were “Decree No. 1 on the Democratization of the Arts,” “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists” (both signed by all three), and Mayakovsky’s “Open Letter to the Workers.”11 In the “Manifesto” and Mayakovsky’s “Open Letter,” the leitmotiv of strife with the past, which goes back to “A Slap,” is contextualized through ongoing political and social transformations and acquires a new quality of artistic political manifesto: Three great whales hold the Old Order on their backs: Political slavery, social slavery, spiritual slavery. The February revolution destroyed political slavery. . . . October hurled the bomb of social revolution. . . . And only the third unshakable whale of a principle remains standing— enslavement of the Spirit. He is still breathing and spouting stinking water, called old art.12

The authors of the manifesto proposed a revolutionary explosion, but beneath was the same old refrain of revolution of the spirit: “We the proletarians of art summon the proletarians of the factories and fields to a third, bloodless, but cruel revolution—the revolution of the Spirit.” Maya-

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kovsky repeats in “Open Letter”: “Only the blast of the Revolution of the Spirit will rid us of the rags of the old art.”13 Although the “Manifesto” explicitly called for the “separation of art from the state” and elimination of all control over arts, the Gazeta futuristov was nevertheless attacked by other Futurist groups for what they viewed as direct collaboration with the new regime. Viktor Khovin, former editor of the Ego-Futurist journal Ocharovannyi strannik (Enchanted Wanderer), published in 1913–16, was particularly upset over the stance taken by Burliuk and Mayakovsky, and angrily asked: “Why do the people calling themselves Futurists make such haste to associate their name with this new ‘master’ . . . and dawdle about so much in the Moscow anteroom of Bolshevism?”14 Aleksandr Rodchenko’s reaction was very similar. Along with Malevich, Rozanova, Udaltsova, and others united around the newspaper Anarkhiia, he expressed solidarity with political anarchism against Bolshevism at that time (1917–19). In an article addressed to the Gazeta futuristov, he wrote: Flying Futurist Federation [Letuchaia federatsiia futuristov], Decrees, Association of Social Art, Association of the Futurist Federation . . . but there are only three of them: Mayakovsky, Burliuk, and Kamensky, and Burliuk praises Mayakovsky, and Mayakovsky praises Burliuk. But there are people who are more than just Futurists—Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Rozanova, Malevich,Tatlin, Morgunov, Udaltsova, Popova, and others. The Futurist Newspaper is a newspaper of three Futurist dictators. Associations, Federations, Collegiums of three are ridiculous. Bolsheviks of Futurism! Bureaucrats of Futurism! Trotskys of Futurism! So go ahead and publish the second issue in which you will sign a treaty with bourgeois aesthetics. Print a Decree to shoot the “anarcho-rebels,” more daring innovators than you are.15

Rodchenko’s reaction, probably stimulated by his extreme professional competitiveness, was responded to by Suprematist and former “Donkey’s Tail” participant Aleksei Morgunov, who suggested that reconciliation with his former fellow Futurists might be in the offing: The yellow press is excited: the Futurists are being attacked by their own comrades. Don’t gloat, neurotics, lackeys of your Master, Capital! . . . If we criticize Futurism, it is only because we have digested it, but if you are given just a gram, you will kick the bucket. And you should know that in our struggle against your kitsch, we will stick together, and the Futurists will be closest to us.”16

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However, the ex-Hylaeans’ collaboration turned out to be short-lived. In April 1918, David Burliuk left Moscow for an extensive Siberian tour through the cities of the Urals and beyond until 1919. In 1919, while in Tomsk, Burliuk tried to revive the Gazeta futuristov by securing the participation of Mayakovsky and Kamensky, but without much success. A few years later Burliuk and his wife emigrated to the United States, where he continued publishing radical Futurist-oriented magazines and collections and added “Soviet” to his unofficial title, calling himself the “Father of Russian-Soviet Futurism.” In the fall of 1918, Mayakovsky and the self-proclaimed “Voltaireterrorists”—the art critic Nikolai Punin, the artist Natan Altman, and the composer Artur Lurie (who in the 1920s were to become the ideologues of the new model of the “governmentalized” avant-garde)—found a new outlet in collaboration with Lunacharsky’s People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros). This move was in direct conflict with the fundamental principle of the Union of Art Workers, who asserted that art should be separate from the state, and prompted a negative response from the Moscow avant-gardists, especially Malevich and Rodchenko. This new phase in Mayakovsky’s biography is notable by his active participation on the board of the newspaper Iskusstvo Kommuny (Art of the Commune), which was launched in December 1918 and continued till March 1919. There he published quite a few polemical poems, including the well-known “Prikaz po armii iskusstva” (Order on the Army of Art). Once again he took up the struggle against the influence of the past (the “classics”) and called for the creation of a new culture. Leon Trotsky, who was interested in utilizing Futurism, welcomed Mayakovsky’s desire to collaborate with the communist regime.17 Mayakovsky embarked on an attempt to reform a politically committed Futurism, not to produce anything new in the area of poetics, but to influence topics that had become politicized and rethink Futurism’s social function in an effort to create a state aesthetics. The editors organized a discussion section on Communism and Futurism, and Shklovsky sent the most pivotal response, “On Art and Revolution”: in the most amicable manner, he, nonetheless, rigorously attacked the newspaper for aggressive politicization of Futurism and distorting its idea, and for violating the integrity of creative freedom.18 Several years hence, the Iskusstvo Kommuny ideology, which in practice lost its relation to early Russian avant-garde aesthetics, and marked its decline, would result in the founding of LEF.

FIGURE 58. David Burliuk’s Gazeta futuristov, no. 1 (Tomsk: Fakel, 1919), with contributions by David Burliuk, Vasilii Kamensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others. Drawings by David Burliuk. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (1118.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF ANARKHIIA

Inasmuch as the early avant-garde’s aesthetics were increasingly “incompatible with the communist psychology,”19 some artists and poets undoubtedly shared aspects of the Moscow anarchists’ political views. The anarchist movement in Russia in 1917 took up from where it had left off in 1907. Thus, for example, the poet and theoretician Andrei Bely, one of the Russian cultural icons associated with Symbolism, who was an ardent opponent of mystical anarchism and in 1911 considered that “the polemic on the subject belongs to the past,” nonetheless returned to the issue of anarchy in 1917.20 The Futurists’ and Suprematists’ sympathy for anarchism, especially with anarcho-individualism,21 is quite clear. The link between political anarchism and the Russian avant-garde is shown by the latter’s numerous contributions around 1918 to the daily newspaper of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, Anarkhiia (Anarchy), which, like many other Russian publications of the time, devoted considerable space to literary and cultural news and issues. Anarkhiia’s masthead bore the slogans “No Gods, No Masters!” and “Anarchy Is the Mother of Order!” It was edited and published in Moscow from September 1917 until July 1918, first as a weekly and then as a daily, by the brothers Aba and Zeev Gordin, who often signed their editorials “Br. Gordin.”22 Beginning in early 1918, a “Creativity” (Tvorchestvo) section specializing in art and literature was included in almost every issue of Anarkhiia. By the spring of 1918, its major contributors were Malevich and Rodchenko (who also used the pen names Anti and Aleksandr). Rodchenko’s involvement with anarchism was very strong, although later he tried not to publicize this fact, for obvious political reasons. He published about twenty articles in Anarkhiia.23 Malevich contributed to more than twenty issues and supported the paper financially.24 The demobilized Aleksei Gan, who was actively interested in proletarian theater, and was to become one of the leaders of the Constructivist movement in the 1920s, was the first contributor to Anarkhiia’s art section.25 Other participants included Aleksei Morgunov, a member of Larionov’s group and later an adherent of Malevich’s Suprematism, and the painters Ivan Kliun, Olga Rozanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. The contributions made by avant-garde artists and poets in the “Creativity” section of Anarkhiia were significant, considering that they had never participated in a political forum before. Their involvement in an

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“No to Death Penalty!” Editorial in Anarkhiia, no. 81 (Moscow, 9 June 1918).

exclusively anarchist platform indicates they not only perceived the revolution through the prism of anarchist aesthetics, as a path “to the new limit,” but also chose to associate with a political movement persecuted by the Bolshevik state: We are revealing new pages of art in anarchy’s new dawns . . . We are the first to come to the new limit of creation, and we shall uncover a new alarm in the field of the lacquered arts . . . The powerful storm of revolution has borne off the garret, and we, like clouds in the firmament, have sailed to our freedom. The ensign of anarchy is the ensign of our “ego,” and our spirit like a free wind will make our creative work flutter in the broad spaces of the soul. You who are bold and young, make haste to remove the fragments of the disintegrating rudder. Wash off the touch of the dominating authorities. And, clean, meet and build the world in awareness of your day.26

However, such a perception of revolutionary events as anarcho-communistic was not unique at that time: a similar attitude was displayed by the younger generation of Russian Symbolists, and the French Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, who was one of the founders of the anarchic artist commune Abbaye de Créteil, and published a celebratory article welcoming the revolution in Russia.27

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The most important figures among the anarcho-individualists who came into direct contact with avant-garde artistic circles in 1917–18 were Aleksei Borovoi and Lev Chernyi (Pavel Turchaninov), the author of the concept of associative anarchism (assotsiatsionnyi anarchism), or association of free individuals.28 Borovoi was one of the few anarcho-individualists who devoted themselves to the publication and translation of anarchist literature, and probably one of the most original and solid anarcho-individualist thinkers of this era.29 A professor at Moscow University, a newspaper editor, and a respected scholar of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dostoevsky, he was the most suitable candidate to transmit and popularize anarchist philosophy among artists and literati. His career confirms David Weir’s suggestion that “a great many anarchists, faced with their obvious isolation from politics at large, were driven towards culture as the only available means of disseminating their ideology.”30 By 1917–18, Borovoi was a member of the editorial boards of some influential mainstream newspapers, such as Nov and Zhizn, and a journal Pereval, which undoubtedly impacted the development and future politicization of the avant-garde during these crucial years of modern Russian history. Unsurprisingly, Borovoi was a strong opponent of anarcho-communism, which he considered the most radical realization of the socialist ideal. After 1907, he came to the conclusion that “anarchism and social life are two irreconcilable opposites,” predicting that if the revolution succeeded, an “anarcho-communist state” would follow, envisioned as “a socialist regime, with its constant nightmare of economic dealings with liberals and their governments, and its inquisitorial moral censorship, was inevitable.”31 In his last work, Borovoi presents a critique of a strain of anarchism he labels traditional, which he regards as the dominant thread in contemporary anarchist and communist movements, represented by Kropotkin, Grave, and Malatesta.32 In his philosophical perspective on anarcho-individualism, Borovoi linked anarchist aesthetics with the ideology of politicized anarchofuturism of 1917. The prominent member of the Moscow Federation of anarchist groups, Borovoi still remained a lonely figure. One of the first Bergsonians in Russia, he was a passionate critic of rationalism and utopianism, common aspects of most anarchist thought. His works are distinguished by a poetic, rather than academic, style combined with a strong analytical grasp. Borovoi argued that the cult of reason and rationality has severe, terrifying consequences: reason grants social liberties, but with it brings an inner unfreedom imposed by laws, scientific theories, and the

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necessity of ideas produced by that same reason. In opposition to this tyranny of utilitarian reason and rationality, Borovoi identified intuition as the inherent principle of freedom and a necessary element in the development of the free activity of consciousness, allowing one to perceive anarchist acts as artistic. It comes as no surprise that his major theme is freedom: “Human freedom is a primordial and uncompromising rivalry, an eternal duel between society and the individual, who is persistently struggling for the sacred right of complete and unlimited realization of the full potential of his or her creative spirit. Any historical form of society, from oriental despotism to the anarchist commune, inexorably manufactures its norms and obligations.”33

GAN, MALEVICH, AND RODCHENKO IN ANARKHIIA

Paul Avrich briefly mentions Anarkhiia in his comprehensive study of Russian anarchism, but says nothing about the arts section or the relationship between political anarchism and the avant-gardists. He emphasizes the fact that by March 1918, Moscow (where there had been fewer than one hundred anarchists before 1917) had become the center of the anarchist movement, and that the anarcho-communist organ Burevestnik “soon took a back place to Anarkhiia (Anarchy), the daily newspaper of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups.”34 The headquarters of the federation were in the former Merchants’ Club of Moscow, which was rechristened the House of Anarchy. Later, after the Bolsheviks laid siege to the House of Anarchy, the newspaper moved to Nastatasiinskii pereulok, where the Poets’ Cafe had previously been located. In all of Anarkhiia’s articles, including those in the “Creativity” section, the Bolshevik regime was severely criticized and referred to as tyrannical. Contributing artists were especially critical of the statist approach to the arts and opposed attempts to control culture through a centralized ministry, commissariats, and other state institutions: Enough! The art patrons oppressed us, they forced us to fulfill their whims, the authorities, the critics did the same; now the political parties are oppressing us. The new rulers put on us new chains: the Ministry of Art, Commissars of Art, Art Sections [as parts of Lunacharsky’s People’s Commissariat of Education]. Again the unmissable bureaucratic commissars of art and their attendants are everywhere.

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And again, like pariahs, we are doomed to extinction from hunger, because we gave everything to the Ministries, Commissars and Sections. It should not happen! We will organize ourselves and rise powerfully to defend our right to life and creativity! I address you, oppressed proletarians of the brush: come to the battle from your undergrounds and lofts! Let us unite into the “Free association of oppressed artist-painters”! Forward! Let’s build a new life!35

In April 1918, Anarkhiia was temporarily banned by the Bolshevik regime, along with other leading anarchist periodicals, after a series of armed raids on anarchist centers in Moscow, which claimed victims, something that enraged Anarkhiia’s artists and poets even more than its banning. The newspaper resumed publication two weeks after the attacks, but it was permanently closed down a few months later. The crushing of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups and the shooting up of Anarkhiia House had a significant impact on cultural activities, but it did not stop avant-gardists’ creative drive. In his public speech, printed in Anarkhiia on 7 June, Aleksei Gan reported: Lacking both space and financial support . . . the courageous rebels have not changed and again they rush into action. At the end of this month, the first collection Anarkhiia—Tvorchestvo [Anarchy—Creativity], will be published. Besides that, we have decided to participate more in meetings with workers and to share with them our ideas about creating anarcho-proletarian art and new culture. I gave a presentation on art and creativity at our meeting on 7 June. Lately, we have had a lot of requests from comrade workers, who themselves want to take part in this process. They turn to anarchists, because they understand the major factor of our work: we neither impose any dogmas nor narrow down or restrict the creative potential of the individual; instead, we broaden his horizons to no limit. . . . Already seven years ago, our Futurists presented the “slap in the face of public taste.” These defiant souls started a great rebellion against the bourgeois order in art, against the old rationality of the arrogant bourgeois reign. The old generals of art had a good reason to meet them with indignance. But why are Messrs. “Marxists” and other “Socialists” now screaming so loudly against the Futurists and other rebellious innovators? Isn’t there hypocrisy hidden behind their screams? Yes, it is hidden. That’s why we, anarchist artists, bravely penetrate this wretched manyheaded snake of belated educators and, together with the Futurists and Suprematists, destroy these new prisons of the rotten ideas in the Sections of their Jesuit Education. We counterpose our contemporary creativity against old art.36

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In this polemical article, participants in the “Creativity” section were for the first time referred to as a specific group of“anarchist artists.”Aleksei Gan, Baian Plamen’ (Vladimir Sidorov), Boris Komarov, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and A. Sviatogor (A. F. Agienko) were planning to publish a collection entitled Anarkhiia—Tvorchestvo, a project destined to never be realized: Our newspaper cannot afford to offer more space to the problems of art and creativity. We have decided to publish a collection [of articles] dealing exclusively with the problems of destructive and creative innovation of today in our building a culture. The book is divided into three parts: Part one will be agitation; part two, dynamite and form; part three— information. Going over dealers’, critics’, and other party bosses’ heads . . . we have decided, like destructive dynamite, to rise and fall with our forms of creative innovativeness into the very thick of the masses.37

Articles on the arts in Anarkhiia covered a wide range of problems concerning the leading theme of freedom of art and involved highly heterogeneous, varied, and contradictory attitudes and interpretations of this issue. These ranged from articles dealing with problems of the art market and art education to essays propagating the decadent point of view on art,38 to aesthetic discussions of rhythm.39 It seems that all positions were welcomed by the editors, who allowed their authors complete freedom of opinion. A utopian attitude co-existed with an anti-utopian tone,40 which in a sense reflects the transition from one phase in the history of the Russian avant-garde to the next, from the aesthetic of anarchy to the struggle for utopia. This latest tendency was propagated by Tatlin and Gan, later by Rodchenko, and would soon become the cornerstone of Constructivism’s desire to move art from “the temple” to “the workshop,” a notion that had been a preoccupation of utilitarian ethics in the arts going back to the nihilism of such literary characters as Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, and to the rationalism of such literary critics as N. G. Chernyshevsky and Pisarev.41 As David Burliuk retrospectively put it in his memoirs: “We were brought up in the school of ‘Russian rationalists’—Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov. This ferment in us is so powerful that the work of the World of Art group and [those] whom Andrei Bely led in the footsteps of Vladimir Soloviev . . . is merely a thin crust from under which the reminiscences of youth shine forth rather clearly and steadily.”42 Burliuk mentions “rationalists,” but uses the term idiosyncratically in order to define the populist spirit of Russian materialists in the mid-nineteenth century and to emphasize their principal difference from the idealistic and mys-

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tical philosophy of the following generations of idealists and Symbolists. These underlying neopopulist tendencies of Russian Futurism were already noticed by some critics, when the movement was perceived as a catalyst for utopian impulses during the revolution.43 Of all those who wrote for Anarkhiia, Rodchenko, the youngest among the avant-gardists, and as yet little known, adopted the most radical and polemical personal stance. Rodchenko zealously defended his anarchist views against anybody. His writing style at that time bears obvious traces of influence by Nietzsche and, especially, Stirner, as Allan Antliff has demonstrated.44 Here it has come—the genuine revolution, the genuine liberating freedom brought by you, the anarchists! That’s why we are coming to you, we, exhausted, half-suffocated spiritually and materially. We, the Futurian artists, the artists of the Great Revolt, appalled by the Philistine order of the past. . . . You know, dear comrades, how badly anything new, young, and rebellious in art was despised and abused, how oppressed a lot of artists were by physical, material deprivation. From being free and independent, they were turned into submissive retainers of capital. And wandering alone or in small groups, unable to defend ourselves from the attacks of the bourgeois order, we, the proletarians of art, worn out, mocked, unrecognized, and rejected, as hard workers as you are, we created our rebellious works in the cruel struggle for survival. In dark, damp, cramped chambers we martyrs of art created our works; but we did not give up, and there is no force that could extract and destroy the rebellious fire in the heart of the anarcho-artist. . . . And in these sacred great days of rising anarchy, the days of the coming triumph of the Great Revolt,—in these days the rebellious hearts of the Futurian artists quivered with new faith, new strength! And we are coming to you, dear comrade anarchists, instinctually recognizing in you our friends, whom we did not know before! In the pages of your newspaper one can recognize the names of artists and poets who for a very long time were harassed and maligned by the bourgeois critics. Even the best of these critics grant the right to innovation only to foreigners, thinking that our artist-rebels are just a mob. Nowadays—the days of a euphoric sense of freedom,—these critics can say nothing against your words in Anarkhiia except just some yellow press reports on vulgar “Café” and “Cabaret.” . . . The present belong to the artists—the anarchists in their art. . . . The present belong to us, the courageous rebels, the rebels of pen and brush!45

Nothing was beyond criticism in Anarkhiia, including Futurism. Baian Plamen’ polemicized against some aspects of Futurism, provoking major

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responses and helping Rodchenko, Malevich, and Tatlin to define their political, social, and aesthetic positions. After rhetorically praising the Futurists as the only true anarchists in art, Baian Plamen’ goes on to advocate what he calls “revolutionary anarcho-futurism.” The Ego-Futurists (he alludes to Igor Severianin’s poetry) and Poets’ Cafe members (i.e., Mayakovsky and Burliuk, although no names are named) are denounced as bourgeois renegades: As is the case with any revolution and rebellion, the first attempts of revolt in art were mercilessly condemned by the forces of the spiritual and cultural counterrevolution, the partisans of obsolete theories and programs and of philistine ideas of harmony. The first revolutionary outbreak in the world of art, initiated by the first public appearances of our Futurists was ridiculed and derided by these executioners of the new art. . . . But as is always the case, the revolution in art emerged from the underground and began to expand ever more . . . and finally we see before us a newly recognized and widely known trend in the history of world art—Futurism. [Futurism] is a revolt in art, a revolution in the world of artistic creativity: anarchy in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, in tragedy. . . . Ugly beauty and beautiful ugliness, grandiose beauty, nonsense and infinite wisdom, lightheartedness and solemn tragedy—Futurism is all these things. Revolt. Revolution. Anarchy in art. This is how we understood it before. This is how we understand it now. Futurism is everything that is revolutionary, mutinous, cheeky, courageous and wild. No power, no authority, no influence from anywhere, nowhere and never! . . . Meanwhile, back in the time of monarchist reaction, the Futurists vaguely began to attract, instead of revolutionary forces and rebellious souls, rather philistine, petit-bourgeois types of the counterrevolutionary intelligentsia, who had absolutely nothing to do with anarchy, but who at the same time began to praise creative anarchy, and developed a superficial interest in it. They began to pay tribute to Futurism, forgetting all the while that it was this very same anarchy in art that they had formerly crucified, spat at, and ridiculed.46

This roughly written, and strikingly naïve, essay is extremely valuable because the author seems to be one of the first to introduce some Marxist social and political framework into a Futurist context, and to evaluate Futurism as an art movement on the basis of its relevance to bourgeois culture. However, unlike most communist critics, who judged anarchism negatively, Baian Plamen’ doesn’t condemn all Futurists. Instead he separates “the sheep from the goats,” suggesting an ideological division inside the avant-garde movement: That is why there is Futurism and there is Futurism. There exists a futurism that sings its songs in the fragrant shade of velvet, silk, and exotic flowers delighting the senses of debauchees, these priests of black reaction. . . . And there

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exists a revolutionary anarcho-futurism—the futurism of the black banners and bloody barricades . . . the path of revolution and rebellion. I call on all true anarcho-futurist poets to shake off the dust of the bourgeois salons and cafés, to reject with disgust the blood money, and to condemn and destroy in their Futurist performances everything contemporary for the sake of the art of the future.47

Significantly, the same issue carried an “Open Letter to Comrade Lunacharsky” by Mikhail Samoylov, who introduces himself to Lunacharsky as a “communist and poet-Futurist,” and brief commentary by M. Ziks on “Proletarian and Bourgeois Art.” Samoylov’s letter echoes Baian Plamen’, with one difference—he actually names Severianin as a reactionary and praises Mayakovsky and Kamensky. “For how much longer do we continue to appeal to authority? The ‘Open Letter,’ published in issue 27, is nothing else but such an appeal,” Morgunov angrily retorts in his reply “To Hell with It!” He admits that he himself appreciates Mayakovsky’s and Kamensky’s poetry and doesn’t care much for Severianin’s work, but is repelled by “an appeal to the political authority to intervene in the questions of art.” “You don’t impose creativity ‘from above,’ by way of publications, commissioned by the state; you have to go into the masses and together create new values.”48 Tatlin was the most concise in his appeal “to all the people of my profession to go through the gates of overthrowing the past in order to let the spirit be anarchic”: “I look forward to an arts depot, where the artist’s psychic machine can be repaired properly.”49 Malevich, in turn, published as a response a programmatic article expressing his anarcho-individualist position, probably for the first time in such a clear and complete manner: Seeing in Futurism a revolt, we see nothing more and welcome it as a revolt; we welcome revolution, but by this demand that everything and all the foundations of the old be destroyed, lest things and states may rise from the ashes. Social revolutions will be fine when all the fragments of the old setup are removed from the organism of social structures. I, as a member of the Suprematists group of artists or perceivers of color, declare that coming out onto the cleansed square we purified ourselves of all the fragments of the smashed kingdom and dispersed their dust in the depths of the earth. We consciously dug into the heart of the earth, for we had rejected the earth in ourselves. . . . Above all we acknowledge our supreme “ego.” . . . Our creative work exalts neither palaces nor hovels, neither velvets nor coarse clothes, neither song nor word. Neither grief nor joy. We, like a new planet on the blue dome of the sunken sun, we are the limit of an absolutely new world, and declare all things to be groundless.50

FIGURE 60. David Burliuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Futurist Café in Moscow. Photograph from Nikandr Turkin’s (Alatrov) 1918 film Ne dlia deneg rodivshisia (Not for Money Was He Born), screenplay by Mayakovsky, loosely based on Jack London’s novel Martin Eden.

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Malevich considered Suprematism in all its depth and breadth, not only as a new method in painting, but as a new philosophy capable of competing with the upcoming raw materiality of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, as a spiritual quest for a new beginning. This brazen attempt was his own direct artistic reflection of anarchist ideology, an ideology to which he adhered during this period.51 Malevich’s search for new forms took him far beyond painting as his theory of abstract art developed. In essays on poetry and music, Suprematist brochures and personal letters, he painfully seeks a new critical language capable of expressing the weight of his ideas. At this juncture, there is not a trace of the Romantic passion of Futurist manifestos or the style of absurd paradoxes and self-parody that characterized his alogism, the Russian foreshadowing of Dada. In a sense, Malevich’s attempt to turn the Suprematist idea into a structured ideology, and, consequently, to establish Suprematism as an institution, a universal school of art, marks another breaking point between the early Russian avant-garde’s aesthetic of anarchy and the utopianism adopted by many at a time when political anarchism was crushed, a utopianism we usually associate with the statist avant-garde of the 1920s. Malevich’s ambitious and dogmatic utopian vision was partially realized in the Vitebsk commune, a social and artistic experiment, which lies beyond the scope of this study, though I will address some aspects of it.52 The anarchic nihilism of Cubo-Futurism and alogism, which had said no to any absolute value, was reversed in Suprematism, while the lingering utopian nostalgia of modernity for artistic universalism and a new “great” style was renewed with a vengeance by Malevich after 1918. This paradigmatic shift first took place in the cultural and political activities of UNOVIS (Founders of the New Art), a group of revolutionary artists formed in 1920–22 in Vitebsk, where Malevich had gone to teach at the local art school in 1919. Among the members of UNOVIS were Ilya Chashnik, Vera Ermolaeva, and El Lissitzky. They taught at the same school, which was soon transformed into a new kind of art institution combining a school, research institute, and workshops engaged in fulfilling practical commissions. The utilitarian approach to art making and art education led members of UNOVIS to produce a table of Suprematist symbols that could be used for decorating streets or designing posters, books, textiles, porcelain, and other objects. A UNOVIS leaflet of 1919 proclaimed: “Wear the black square as a mark of the world economy. Draw the red square in your workshops as a mark of the world revolution in the arts.”The Revolution affected both the social and aesthetic program of UNOVIS, provoking a transition in the avant-garde’s self-

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image from loosely associated individuals pursuing freedom of consciousness to artists engaged in collective creativity and production. What was the impact of anarchism on Russian avant-garde aesthetics in 1917–18, if we follow George Woodcock, one of the contemporary scholars of anarchism, in defining anarchism as a social philosophy, and not just a political movement?53 What are the most important concepts successfully “implanted” from the social and philosophical domain into an aesthetics that transformed the poetical features of the avant-garde? First, both the political and cultural movements placed great value on individual freedom and sought to realize the utmost possible creative freedom. The rejection of the contemporary social order, and the prevailing tradition or cultural memory, is another distinct feature of anarchism that leads to the perception of a future through the deconstructed past, and the fusion of a more ancient and often primitive past (the concept of a noble savage) with the futuristic vision: “They reject the present, but they reject it in the name of a future of austere liberty that will resurrect the lost virtues of a more natural past, a future in which struggle will not be ended, but merely transformed within the dynamic equilibrium of a society that rejects utopia and knows neither absolutes nor perfections.”54 Another important feature of twentieth-century anarchism is diversity and eclecticism, the lack of any single leading style or school. Woodcock’s observation that “anarchist philosophy has taken many forms, none of which can be defined as orthodoxy, and its exponents have deliberately cultivated the idea that it is an open and mutable doctrine”55 can be directly applied to the plurality, diversity, and ideological eclecticism of early Russian avant-garde aesthetics.

10

The Last Revolt The Politics of the Left Federation

The formation of the Union of Art Workers in Petrograd was followed in April 1917 by the founding of the Labor Union of Artist-Painters of Moscow (cited below as the Artists’ Union), whose general purpose echoed that of the Petrograd organization: to strengthen “the true freedoms of painting” and “affirm the independence of cultural life from all pressures on the part of government regulations, institutions, and agencies.”1 There was a substantial difference between these two unions, however. Unlike the Union of Art Workers, whose eight subsections (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, theater, art history, and decorative and applied arts) made it excessively large and unruly, the Moscow Artists’ Union was modeled as a professional trade union, whose structure was more dynamic and better integrated on the basis of shared economic and social interests. Thus its tasks and objectives included arranging an annual exhibition, providing discounted art supplies, founding a journal, organizing auctions, and establishing so-called palaces or houses of art, something between an educational center, museum, and club, open not only to members, but to the general public as well. The avant-garde’s typical affinity for “life-building”tragically coincided with a revolutionary situation, which was turning increasingly authoritarian at the hands of the Bolshevik government, and became yet another of the new art’s “great illusions.” Olga Rozanova, one of the active organizers of the labor union, provides a lively picture of life in Moscow at the time. In a bitterly ironical letter to Andrei Shemshurin, she noted: 232

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. . . from the beginning of the revolution every day has been packed with muddled impressions, surprises, and amusingly important matters. Of course, if (besides the fact that I have a job) I were to tell you over the telephone that I am: a member of the Labor Union Club a member of the Cooperative a Supremus delegate and the secretary of the journal by the same name that will be coming out any time now, etc., you would yawn and hang up. But what’s it like for me? As soon as I get home from work I have to go to one meeting or another, and from 7 to 1 in the morning listen to people talking nonsense. The whole time the only intelligent things I heard were from David Burliuk and Mayakovsky. Some artists really are awful. It is an interesting time, but somehow I haven’t noticed any real rebirth in any of them. They go on spluttering away as before. . . . All in all, of course, it’s an interesting time, but these wretches have reduced everything to a bureaucracy.2

On 24 May 1917, a general meeting of artists adopted a draft of their union’s structure developed by an organizational committee that included the avant-gardists Tatlin, Georgii Yakulov, Sofiia Dymshits-Tolstaia, Udaltsova, and Rozanova. This proposed structure was to be based on a division into autonomous “senior,” “central,” and “young” federations. The avant-gardists defined it as “the only form capable of ensuring the free development of all artistic currents included in the federations.”3 Calling the most radical, leftist federation “young” was deeply symbolic, and in my view underscores its continuity with the ideals of the Union of Youth (which unsuccessfully attempted to make a comeback in 1917). Compared with the failed communal idea of the Union of Youth, and the intentionally marginal and “narrowly partisan” concept of the Supremus group, the new social ambitions and conceptions underlying the Artists’ Union were a real step forward. The notion of an equal, sovereign, autonomous association mobilizing, not just a small group of the like-minded, but a great number of artists representing all currents was new and important. It was an attempt to take control of the art world, and to shape the art market independently of both post-Tsarist state-run institutions and some old economic structures still in operation. The organizers addressed all artists: Built to last, like a reinforced concrete bridge firmly planted on solid supporting piers, the Professional Union of Artists-Painters is to play an enormous role in the cultural life of the capital city. The Union regulates creative forces . . . as it powerfully, legitimately, and fully incorporates them: henceforth, let the rule be a new creative principle of division into natural associations of artists,

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rather than into a multitude of haphazard exhibition conglomerates, resulting from enmity and abnormal artistic conditions. . . . We will strengthen not persons, not names, not federations, but the life and the idea of the Union through persons, names, and federations.4

Two points in this text merit special attention. First of all, its metaphors, particularly, the reference to a “reinforced concrete bridge”: these hint that Malevich was directly involved in writing the document, whose vocabulary is entirely consistent with the style of his Anarkhiia articles of 1918, specifically “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Ferro-Concrete,” where he wrote: “Each age runs faster than its predecessor and takes on itself a greater burden, forging for itself roads from ferro-concrete bodies” (emphasis added).5 Second, it is remarkable that the founders should have chosen to base the organization on the model of a labor union (profsoiuz) rather than on the traditional formations known in Russia as “unions” (soiuz), meaning society or group (the names of the Union of Youth and the Union of Russian Artists are two examples of the latter usage). Labor unions became a very popular organizational form among industrial workers in Russia during 1917–19, but they were an anarcho-syndicalist rather than a Bolshevik concept. Originally, the labor union represented a new model of socialist organization consisting of autonomous, self-governing units outside any political party. The expert on anarcho-syndicalism Vadim Damier notes that Kropotkin was among the first to advocate that anarchists work with trade unions, stressing that such organizations shared the major anarchist principles of self-organization and self-government.6 Kropotkin describes the labor union as an instrument for asserting collective economic demands within the framework of existing society: “They cannot accomplish the social revolution, but the labor unions would bring together 1,000,000 men ready to proclaim their right to well-being and the means of obtaining it; [this] would do something that simple propaganda cannot achieve. . . . We must not forget that anarchism is not a party but must tend to embrace all manifestations of the human mind.”7 Contemporaries of Kropotkin’s such as Amédée Dunois, Errico Malatesta, and Rudolf Rocker regarded unions as the potential foundation for “labor anarchism” and contrasted union-based organizing with the abstract, utopian, and theoretical concepts of “pure anarchism.”Thus Rocker, who was sympathetic to syndicalism, portrayed the labor union as the embryo of social anarchism:

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For the Anarcho-Syndicalists the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the Socialist society of the future, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs, which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence.8

The anarchist model of union organizing, transparent governance, and the independence of the minority from the tyranny of the majority, ensured through equal representation within autonomously governed local and regional factions, allows various ideological positions to co-exist within a single organization dedicated to the freedom of every member. And all these principles held sway in the Moscow Artists Union. The Artists’ Union’s left faction, most active from the start, was represented on the constituent board by Tatlin, Malevich, Rozanova, and others. At the same time, as one of Rozanova’s letters to Matiushin reveals, conservative factions and residents of other cities could join the union and gain representation: “Our union is expanding . . . even Benois has expressed a desire to join, since he’s dissatisfied with the Petrograd organizations. It will be an all-Russian union. Work is proceeding according to plan. There will be a general meeting in the fall. Sixty members will be elected to the board, since at present it’s only a provisional one with fifteen members.”9 Not only Benois was dissatisfied with the existing organizations; from the Muscovites’ point of view, by spring 1918, the Petrograd Union of Art Workers had shown itself incapable of consolidating and organizing the art world: “The Union of Art Workers has conclusively lost all social significance and degenerated into an ordinary literary-artistic circle or club. At the beginning of the revolution, the artistic milieu, it seemed, pinned great hopes on it, and called upon it to unite all art professionals in the defense of common artistic, economic, and legal interests.”10 The term “circle” hints at a clannishness and favoritism toward members of a clique; in other words, covert considerations were affecting the selection of members and leaders of the organization. In fact, leftist forces had already been completely repulsed by April 1918, when an appeal from the provisional committee of the Union of Art Workers appeared in the

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FIGURE 61. Kazimir Malevich, wraparound cover for the program S’ezd komitetov derevenskoi bednoty (Congress of Peasant Poverty Committees), Petrograd, 1918. Lithograph, page: 49 x 32.5 cm. Prints: various dimensions. Edition: 10–12. Gift of the Lauder Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

newspapers, declaring: “Just as a year ago, the art of Russia is in danger. It is no longer a rebellious mob but now our comrades who are threatening it. In words they are for the freedom of art, in deeds they demand freedom only for themselves . . . they are the ‘leftists’ in art. . . . They divide art into bourgeois and proletarian.”11 In their turn, the editors of the “Creativity” section of Anarkhiia constantly harped on the inadequacy of this bloated association, calling attention to the fact that only twenty to thirty persons usually attended a meeting meant for five hundred delegates, and that ten months after its founding, the final bylaws had still not been worked out. From their point of view, the artistic life of Russia was deadlocked: the two most influential organizations for managing cultural activity—the democratic Union of Art Workers and the Bolshevik-controlled Visual Arts Section (IZO) of the People’s Commissariat for Education—were in complete opposition to each other. Moreover, neither institution was acceptable to the most active and radical avant-gardists united around Anarkhiia: the former

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owing to its passivity, disorganization, and distrust of the leftists, and the latter for ideological reasons. If Petrograd avant-gardists, led by Punin, Altman, and Brik, embraced the new communist ideology, readily allowed their aesthetics to be politicized, and subordinated their activity to state structures, the Muscovites remained true to anarcho-individualism as reflected by their support of “limitless creative freedom” and their uncompromising rejection of state control. The situation in Moscow was conducive to this position, for between the spring of 1917 and the final suppression of the city’s anarchist factions in early July 1918, the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG) was a substantive force in the political arena, unlike the numerically insignificant and isolated Petrograd groups. In the words of Jan Peters, a Bolshevik functionary at that time, the Moscow anarchists constituted a “second” political power, a threat to the communist regime.12 Anarkhhia’s “Creativity” section, which had started as a column, took up almost the entire fourth page of the newspaper by 1918. It had become the mouthpiece of the left artists’ faction, and published daily accounts of their exhibitions, resolutions, meetings, and surveys. Responding to the crisis in artistic politics, the avant-gardists generated a series of polemical articles promoting a new organizational structure that could unite artists and assert the social functioning of art in the current political situation.According to Tatlin, Rodchenko, Malevich, Rozanova, Udaltsova, and other correspondents, this development necessitated the reorganization and renewal of the Artists’ Union in Moscow (which, they felt, was well on the way to becoming a toothless amorphous circle like the Union of Art Workers). It seems only logical, then, that Malevich published his “Declaration of Artist’s Rights” in Anarkhhia by way of contributing to this campaign. The first part of this amazing document, entitled “The Life of the Artist,” proclaimed “the inviolability of the home and workshop” and the sovereignty of every individual’s life and freedom over all ideological or state structures and laws, a position consistent with his nonviolent anarchism. Malevich was not alone in asserting these principles. Beginning in March 1918, as the Bolshevik Cheka began conducting summary arrests, seizures, and executions on the streets of the city at the behest of Trotsky and the persecution of anarchists intensified, demands to abolish the “Red terror” and the death penalty had become frequent in the editorial pages of Anarkhiia as well: “No one and no laws, even at a time when death threatens the state, the fatherland, the nation, should have the right

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to commit violence against the life of a person or to rule over him without his expressed consent.” The second part of Malevich’s “Declaration” addressed “the economic position of the artist in capitalist society.” Two points are particularly important. First, the demand that artists be given complete control over their works, specifically over financial transactions, and that the violations of an artist’s rights be subject to legal prosecution (“no transactions on the part of the state or private persons may be concluded without the knowledge of the author”). Second, the prerogative of the state to buy works of art is recognized, but only for “people’s galleries and museums,” that is, public institutions with an educational or popularizing function. Accordingly, the state “is obligated to undertake the immediate organization of museums throughout all provinces, districts, and major towns, maximizing the dissemination of the arts of all existing movements.”13 This part of the “Declaration” was undoubtedly intended as the basis for shaping the economic strategy of the Artists’ Union. It is no coincidence that it was written immediately before the constituent meeting of the union, and its publication was closely connected with the position articulated in preparatory materials drafted by the leftists on the eve of the convention, which took place on June 26, 1918. The fact that the “Declaration of Artist’s Rights” was published in the Moscow Federation’s newspaper is significant. In the first place, it suggests that Anarkhiia had a readership in avant-garde circles, rising above strictly partisan political interests. Second, it indicates the newspaper was a basic source of information regarding the cultural activities of the most radical avant-garde wing in the country. The “Creativity” section was not limited to purely aesthetic issues and art chronicle (which covered discussions of painting, literature, and the theater): it also addressed the economic and social concerns of artists. Malevich’s arguments concerning the economic position of the artist can be fully understood only in the context of related debates, beginning with Aleksandr Struve’s article “Art and the Market.” Reflecting the literary activities of the author, the piece was concerned more with the book market than the art market, but it did touch on the economics of the visual arts and served as a point of departure for the series of essays that followed. Struve regards the established market as a free arena for the artificial implantation of various artistic value systems and the manipulation of the artist producer, not by the masses, buyers or consumers, but by an “intermediary”—critics and patrons who attempt to control not only the art market, but also the artist’s ideas.

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Many scholars have noted the democratic character of the Russian avant-garde, and not only with respect to aesthetic ideology, but referring to its social roots: the majority of the artists and poets were of very humble origins, many came from the provinces, and they did not belong to the aristocratic or intellectual elite (in contrast, for example, to Russian Symbolists). Having come to St. Petersburg or Moscow to study and then to pursue an artistic or literary career, they were often obliged to support themselves through occasional jobs, and they lived very modestly. With rare exceptions, their social and economic position in prerevolutionary Russia was marginal; hence, no significant avant-garde undertaking was possible without sponsorship, ideally from friends who understood the need for artistic autonomy, but sometimes from patrons of the arts or collectors who tried to impose their own conditions. (Let us not forget the instructive experience of the Union of Youth, which collapsed when Levkii Zheverzheev became dissatisfied with its performance and withdrew his support.) Owing to all these factors, the question of the artist’s position in the new postrevolutionary society was a matter not of prosperity but simply of survival. Moreover, this novel historical situation held out a unique opportunity to reshape the art world from the bottom up, creating new models to guide relationships between the artist and the art market, and between the artist and his or her audience. In fact, Struve’s position had already been conceptualized by Malevich’s Suprematist declarations (treated in the preceding chapter). Similar arguments also appeared in Mayakovsky’s, Kamensky’s, and Burliuk’s Gazeta futuristov (Futurists’ Newspaper), which proposed that “left” art represented a revolutionary “art of the spirit” that was alien to the narrowly pragmatic concerns of the “guild”: “Any form of art is a creation of the human spirit above all . . . and in its essence artistic activity is an area that is diametrically opposed to purely materialistic human interests and their implementation.”14 Nevertheless, Struve’s theses, which spring from a more general consideration of the arts, are much more interesting, since he eschews sweeping rhetoric and attempts to formulate a practical course of action. With respect to the book-publishing industry, Struve concluded that advertising campaigns and orchestrated criticism often funded by a “patron”-publisher promoted “certain tastes among readers, so that not only periodicals but also writers who want to see their works appear in these publications quite naturally conform to these tastes.”Thus reader demand was painstakingly manipulated, and because the book-publishing market was limited (“except for the classics,” he stresses, “there is little in-

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terest in pure literature”), bids for economic dominance inevitably escalated into ideological rivalry.15 The patron in the scheme proposed by Struve is the “center of the market,” surrounded by “the struggle among artistic groups, writers, etc.,” while critics are “a tool of the market,” and an instrument in the battle with competitors: If so much is being said about the emancipation of man in the economic sphere, it is necessary to shout as loud about the emancipation of his spiritual side, specifically, about the liberation of the artist-creator from the depersonalizing, suffocating violence of the market, the masses, and their obedient tools and servants. Today we need new avenues, which enable human creativity to manifest in all areas: the artist must be liberated from the yoke of capital, from the violence done to him by the market and the suppression of his creativity.16

The pivotal article “The Goals of Art and the Role of Those Who Strangle Art,” signed by Gan, Malevich, and his Suprematist ideological comrade Morgunov, and published in the next issue of Anarkhiia, adopts very much the same analyses. Here the “oppressors” are identified by name: “the critic kings Benois, Tugendkol’d, & Co.”: Before, not a single work of art could be granted official recognition and the niceties of praise in life without the “stamp of approval” of Benois and his gang. That’s how it was with Vrubel’, Musatov, P. Kuznetsov, and Goncharova, whom, after slinging mud at them for a long time, they acknowledged. But how many have yet to be recognized! . . . There was no hope that anyone would buy their works without the recommendation of the “oppressors.” Yet selling pictures was the only means of survival for artists, who had to feed themselves and pay the rent. The position of art was chancy and depended on the critics and collectors. The Tretyakov Gallery, after all, came about by chance. All of the private collections were likewise picked up from art exhibitions on the whim of the owner. And all those artists who couldn’t get their work accepted for the privileged and prestigious shows were left behind.17

The attack was not a new one—Burliuk had published his first pamphlet, “Apropos of Benois’s ‘Artistic Letters,’ ” as early as 1910 and his “Benois Brawlers” in 1913.18 Now, however, it was unleashed in a new and highly charged context. Criticism no longer focused on aesthetics; it now dealt with social and political issues. Articles the avant-gardists published in Anarkhiia19 ad-

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dress the institutions of art criticism, private sponsorship, and dealers, condemning them as authoritarian formations that had acquired a monopoly license to evaluate art. With the abolition of the Academy of the Arts in mid-April 1918 as the leading state establishment and the formation of new democratic organizational models such as the Union of Art Workers and the Moscow Artists’ Union, the political struggle in artistic circles intensified. In contrast to the situation in 1913, the leftists believed that they had a real chance to sweep away all oppressive forces: “At this moment life calls upon us innovators to open the dungeon and release the prisoners.”20 To put the matter somewhat less emotionally, it might be said that in1918 the avant-gardists were seeking to eliminate social intermediaries and enter into direct economic and social contact with their audiences in an attempt to navigate the difficult course between the Scylla of market pressure and the Charybdis of ideological control on the part of the state. Thus in “The Vicious Circle,” Aleksei Morgunov notes: Dealers, critics, and connoisseurs were killing the creative spirit of the artist. The artist innovator remained scared of the buyers, disdainful of the critics, and indifferent to the connoisseurs. Before, the bourgeois was the buyer. Now we have a new buyer—democracy. . . . In reality the artist, the creator of life, is forced to go hungry, work in an office, or make book jackets or posters to order and earn a salary. . . . Art is not the third course in a dinner—it’s the main course! We anarchist artists will fight commonplace vulgarity to the bitter end, wherever it comes from, whether the bourgeoisie or democracy. We will break free from these chains and break the vicious circle.21

Udaltsova echoed him: “We do not want patrons. . . . We want equality and freedom in art . . . the right to creative labor.”22 At this juncture, anarchist ideology seemed to many to be the only suitable philosophical basis for remodeling the conditions under which art existed. Commenting on the situation in the course of discussing yet another state-controlled Art Commission in Moscow, Rodchenko noted: “The critics have nothing to say now, during these days of enthusiasm for freedom, they have nothing to counter our statements in Anarkhiia. . . . The present in art belongs to the anarchist artists—the revolutionaries who are rejected . . . by the ‘decent’ exhibitions!”23 The basic ideological position among the artists and poets gathered around Anarkhiia is illustrated by the unsigned article “Anarchism, Art, and the Patron.” Here the anarchist concept of the freedom of the individual is refracted through an aesthetic prism:

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Personal freedom, the complete liberation of the spiritual and physical individual from all forms of coercion—that is the motto of all anarchist currents, regardless of coloring. . . . Let us see how applicable this motto is in aesthetics. . . . Clearly, the true creator in art is the person (genius) who creates a new, hitherto nonexistent formula of the beautiful. . . . It does not matter whether [by] an individual or a collective—the people create such criteria. These very creators of new criteria and new “truths” have propelled every flourishing epoch of art. To create such a new truth, however, the artist must be free from all previously existing standards and dictatorial aesthetic norms. But to be free from these norms does not at all mean to be entirely ignorant of their existence. . . . In Stirner’s terminology, one must appropriate the culture of past ages to master it and overcome it, thereby inwardly liberating oneself to become a free creator of new values.24

The last sentence sheds light on the attitude toward tradition fueling the 1917–18 debates about Ivan Morozov’s mansion and private gallery in Moscow, nationalized but initially neglected by the Bolsheviks and open to looters. Lack of security led to theft and a few acts of vandalism, and Bolsheviks did not hesitate for a moment to accuse anarchists of these crimes. These accusations, however, inspired specific actions on the part of anarchist artists, who had spent long hours studying Morozov’s collection while art students, to organize and to preserve cultural treasures.25 This essentially positive outlook toward past cultures was not, however, extended to the patron, whose posturing as the unselfish guardian of artistic heritage the author of “Anarchism, Art, and the Patron” roundly rebukes: “A priori by virtue of his instinct for self-preservation the patron is a pillar of the old society, which is bound by unbreakable ties to the past and its former ‘truths,’ that is, untruths.” From this viewpoint, the patron is an authoritarian figure who is both psychologically and economically dependent on his ideology, and it is this conservative inertia of his that corrupts the artist. Only “a strongly expressed hostility to all authority, to all coercion,” can provide “fertile ground” for the “creative individuality” of art.26 In any event, rhetoric aside, we may ask how the innovators proposed to replace the patron. What new economic model would allow artists to preserve their autonomy and at the same time help them regulate the art market? Returning to Malevich’s “Declaration of Artist Rights,” the model he proposed consisted of an extensive network of museums—or “houses”—

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of contemporary art to be organized on a public rather than private basis. This idea figures in Anarkhiia as early as 27 March in “A House of Contemporary Art,” a notice attributed to Malevich but signed by the Action Group of the Free Association of Artists (Initsiativnaia gruppa svobodnoi assotsiatsii khudozhnikov—In. gr. svob. assots.khud.), organized in connection with the “Creativity” section by Gan, Malevich, Morgunov, and Rodchenko. Today the forms of life are changing, and attitudes toward art must also change. It is time to put a stop to serving art for dessert. . . . But this will come about when the people get rid of all kinds of managers and tear art from the private and ignorant hands of art collectors. Then valuable artworks will no longer be hidden in the salons of patrons, who wall them in for years on end and only posthumously graciously will [them] to the people—the people’s own property. . . . It is necessary to build a great many public museums of contemporary art, using an entirely new approach.27

The text shares themes and metaphors spread in other articles in the newspaper (for example, a rhetorical gesture to liken art to dessert in Morgunov’s “The Vicious Circle”), and it supports the view that these publications should be regarded as part of the dialogue, shot through with polyphonic narratives, that emerged in 1918 around Anarkhiia. Thus, when Malevich refers to “new ways,” he undoubtedly had in mind the nationalization of the collections, which indeed took place after the October revolution. With respect to the problem of financing these new public museums of contemporary art, the picture is not so clear. Granting the state the prerogative to purchase art from artists in the declaration comes close to raising the dangerous theme of state subsidies. This is risky from the perspective of Malevich’s own ideology: as he had previously proclaimed in “The Answer,” all states are prisons, regardless of their structure. He was convinced that “there should be no state in art,” as he says in his essay “In the State of the Arts.”28 Giving the artist total control over any transactions, including those undertaken by the government, and simultaneously granting the state exclusive purchasing rights was shaky ground indeed. The distance is not so very great between purchases by the state and commissions from the state, which in turn gives the state control over art. Evidently apprehensive of this loss of independence for the artist, Malevich finds it necessary in the fourth and final point of the “Declaration” to add a qualification: “I enjoy neither free studios nor housing nor the organization of exhibitions, unless these are supported by the state’s educational program.”29

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Keeping a distance from the state and state control was especially sensitive for the Moscow leftists, particularly Malevich and Rodchenko, who in 1918 were actively developing their own models for how art was to function and openly criticizing the “art commissariats,” that is, Lunacharsky’s commissions and other state-run art administration agencies. Their polemics in Anarkhiia against the“Voltaire-terrorist”Nikolai Punin, who from the very beginning of the revolution had advocated “governmentalizing” art, is very telling in this regard. But perhaps the most precise and laconic characterization of the danger of this new snare was made by the railroad depot worker Vladimir Shokin in “The Time Has Come,” a note addressed to “Comrade Futurists” in the Arts section: “The only thing Friche’s articles and the decrees of the people’s commissars are shouting about is the fact that art ‘for the bourgeoisie’ has been remodeled as art ‘for the proletariat,’ and instead of bourgeois patrons there will be a ‘state’ patron.”30 A few years later, after the anarchist movement in Russia had been crushed, there was no place left for any anarchist social structures. Ironically, only when Malevich, Rodchenko, and Tatlin had publicly forgotten their anarchist past and assumed posts within Narkompros were they able to partially implement some projects from the Anarkhiia period: for example, the short-lived contemporary Museums of Artistic Culture and Painterly Culture in Moscow and Petrograd.31 In the spring of 1918, however, the creation of an autonomous social organization for art still seemed a real possibility. The anarcho-syndicalist labor union was regarded as the only structure capable of guaranteeing the independence of the artist by striking a complex balance between the commercial art market and the dictatorship of the state. A union was needed to get rid of the art intermediary: it offered workers a measure of collective control over the market and a means of organizing exhibitions free from the political supervision of the state, while its autonomous federations ensured uniform representation and the ability to prevent the tyranny of majority decision-making in artistic endeavors. Thanks to the perseverance of the left federation, all of these principles were implemented in the first and only show of the Artists’ Union in Moscow, which opened on 26 May 1918, a month before its general convention. Organized without a jury, it attracted the participation of more than 180 artists of diverse tendencies and featured hundreds of works arranged in three divisions on the basis of membership in the senior, central, or left federations. That same day an announcement in Anarkhiia advertised this “Show for the Masses”:

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The Labor Union of Artist-Painters of Moscow welcomes you to the opening of its show . . . it will run for 2 months. Comrades! Come to this exhibition. The artists are showing their works. To understand the true value of creative daring, it is necessary to see more and listen less to the intermediaries and dealers.32

Right up until the paper was shut down in July, Anarkhiia published critical essays on the exhibition, which praised the left (young) faction, while criticizing the two other federations. A short essay written by Rodchenko (and signed “Anti”),“Put on Your Hats and . . . ” (Anarkhiia 71), mocked the current art critics’ inadequate reaction to the abstract and most radical of the paintings in the exhibition. Rozanova, whom Rodchenko, not without reason, called “an anarchist of creativity,” published two other polemical articles in Anarkhiia: “Suprematism and the Critics” and “ArtOnly in Independence and Unlimited Freedom!”33 Malevich wrote a few responses as well. The emerging conflict between the central and left federations became noticeable while the exhibition was being organized. First, Anarkhiia published a seemingly neutral communication, noting that on April 4 the general meeting of the central federation had decided to arrange the exhibition in the former private Mikhailova Art Salon on Bolshaia Dmitrovka: “Proceeding on the premise that only artists can be critics of their pictures, the exhibition will be arranged without any jury. It is assumed that all members of the Artists’ Union, from the far right to the Futurists, will participate. It has been decided to set the lowest possible entrance fee, to arrange lectures, and to organize visits to the exhibition by entire groups of workers under the supervision of artists.”34 A reaction on the part of the left federation was not long in coming. In their collective statement in response, the leftists explained that the ideas of the central federation were actually theirs and had been lifted wholesale from proposals presented at a general meeting of the labor union. “It is clear from the minutes that the left federation has been insisting on an exhibition for the past seven months, and that this entire time the central federation has blocked the issue,” the leftists emphasized.35 (For the sake of objectivity, it should be noted that the program originally adopted when the union was formed included a point on arranging an annual exhibition.) In his article “So Rise Up!” in the same issue, Rodchenko, adopting a very personal note, reiterated the same theme: Everything is steadily moving forward, but we—again!—elect a chosen few and form a central control and authority.

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Here we have a labor union, and we are at the bottom of it, at the feet of the bureaucrats we ourselves elected. . . . Here are the art commissions, and their Commissars [have] flattened us like wounded birds. Look! Here is a fishbowl, and inside there are elected artists swimming ceremoniously, but a thick glass separates us. . . . Put on your best rags and be merry: the chosen—one of us—became a real authority. We dread such a victory and such a joy! To Hell with it! . . . No, there is no true triumph of creators and inventors! There is none. . . . But I am waiting for this day, the celebration of oppressed! So cast off the tinsel of all authorities! So rise up!36

It is interesting to note that in his polemics Rodchenko repeatedly appropriates Khlebnikov’s metaphorical opposition of “inventors” (izobretateli) and “consumers” (priobretateli), a formula entirely in keeping with the overarching anarchist context of this debate. Yet another notice by Rodchenko, bristling with exclamation marks and sounding very much like a manifesto, “To the Leftists of the Exhibitions of the Artists’ Union,” was published in Anarkhiia 75, and issue no. 86 featured Rozanova’s article “Suprematism and the Critics,” which continued to lament the inadequacies of the old art critics and insisted on the necessity of a new kind of criticism. Finally, Malevich’s article “The Exhibition of the Artists Union: The Left Federation” was an extensive critical review of the leftist exhibit, which repeated points raised in an earlier published article signed by “Paltusov.”37 All of these articles were clearly part of a public campaign organized by the avant-gardists to lay the groundwork for a radical reorganization of the union. To this end, one of the June issues carried the Moscow anarcho-avant-gardists’ draft “Theses on the Federations in Anticipation of the General Constituent Meeting of the Artists Labor Union.” Rodchenko signed this document. The draft was to be read out at the coming general meeting of the Artists’ Union on June 26, 1918, as part of the declaration of the left federation. It included the following points: 1. Each federation, as an equal and autonomous group within the union, has the right to act on its own in the name of the federation and independently of the other federations on questions of principle and in artistic and social issues. 2. All resolutions and decisions approved by the union concerning questions of principle, artistic and social issues, and matters of general interest must be approved by all three federations. If one federation

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objects, said resolutions are considered to be the resolutions of two federations, and not of the entire union. 3. ll delegations, commissions, etc., in which the union as a whole participates must include representatives from all three federations. Violation of this principle, which is the basis on which the union was founded, renders the delegations, commissions, etc., illegal and arbitrary. 4. Each federation is entitled to a seal bearing its name.38

The general secretary of the Artists’ Union was to be elected for a twoyear term of office by each federation in turn, while representatives would serve only for one year; the admission of members was to be adjudicated by representatives of the federation in which the individual was seeking membership. Each federation had the right to demand that the charter be reviewed, amended, and supplemented at the general meeting.39 This program essentially followed the basic organizational principles of any anarchist autonomous structure. Rodchenko’s draft charter, approved by the left federation of the Artists’ Union, is strikingly similar to that of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG), suggesting that the Artists’ Union was the first attempt to create a functioning model for the social management of the art world based exclusively on anarchist principles.40 MFAG declared that its ultimate goal was “a free commune of cities and villages gradually united from the bottom up.”Weapons in the struggle included“propaganda, revolutionary syndicalism, and armed uprising,” while “arbitrary seizures, robberies, murders, and all forms of extortion” were categorically repudiated. The published documents proclaimed that groups in the MFAG were completely autonomous and freely federating: “MFAG is an organization uniting representatives of all currents of anarchist thought and granting full autonomy to each group or individual in the federation.”41 The mechanism of autonomy, it must be noted, was more radical in Rodchenko’s draft charter. He, for example, opposed depositing the revenues of each federation into a common treasury and demanded that each federation have its own seal, while MFAG had a single common treasury and seal. In both organizations, members were admitted, not by a majority vote, but by “the representatives of the federation in which the artist is seeking membership,” in Rodchenko’s proposal, and “only on the recommendation of members of the appropriate group” in the MFAG charter. This was in accordance with the principles of autonomy and ensured noninterference in the internal policies of the federations or groups.

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FIGURE 62.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Moscow, 1916–17. Courtesy Aleksandr Lavrentiev,

Moscow.

As it turned out, serious disagreements on matters of autonomy and membership caused a final split at the next general meeting of the Artists’ Union on 26 June, where none of the proposals of the left federation were adopted. Delivered by Udaltsova—who, like, Rodchenko was a left delegate—prior to voting on the left proposals, the presentation gives a clear sense of the overall situation, including the leftists’ anxiety and concerns. She starts with the reference to the Union of Art Workers: “April of

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last year saw the formation of a union of ‘art authorities.’ The left artists invited to join such an association discovered that it offered no possibility of a genuine and free existence for their art.”42 She then briefly mentions the aims of the new Moscow Artists’ Union: A [new] organizing committee was formed . . . and determined that art can develop in an environment attuned to its vital concerns. Something else became clear: all divisions based on narrow partisanship and aesthetic criteria are no longer in step with life, and it is necessary to find a different form of union for artists that is broader and capable of accommodating currents that are different in form but similar in spirit.43

Insisting on the autonomy of each federation as the cornerstone of the Artists’ Union, Udaltsova pointed to the development of hierarchical abuses in the admission process: The issue of admitting new members, which was done on an autonomous basis all winter, has suddenly become urgent . . . the central union proposed to the union that the board admit members for all three federations. Viewing this proposal as a violation of autonomy, the left federation refused to participate in the admission of members to the other federations.44

As the leftists saw it, the advantage of a federative organization was that it allowed broad access to the organization to all artists representing various movements, and offered a means of evading the “imposed censorship” of specific tastes, or ideological bias on the part of a majority. The central point of Udaltsova’s presentation was the danger of such bias: the anarcho-avant-gardists perceived in it a threat to the principles of freedom and responsibility, which were inseparable for the left. Udaltsova emphasizes that the Artists’ Union was degenerating into a bloated bureaucracy: We are being told now that the union simply registers. . . . But each member federation is responsible for the decisions and resolutions of the union. Hence it is clear that the majority must not crush the minority. The rights of the minority must be protected. We are not encroaching upon the union and do not wish to usurp its right as such. We do not demand that our federation be granted the rights of the union. We say to the senior and central federations: be free in your sphere, and we demand the same freedom for ourselves. All those who are for the free development of art, for the freedom of the artist’s life, raise your hands for a free union and the autonomy of the federation.45

This historic moment is, in my opinion, one of the key events in the trajectory of the Russian avant-garde, and its significance deserves to be

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acknowledged. The attempt to create a new anarcho-syndicalist social model for art was defeated: the charter was voted down by the majority, and the entire left federation demonstratively withdrew from the organization. Rodchenko discussed this failure in his article “The Schism” in the aftermath of the general meeting. “This was of course bound to happen,” he wrote. “How else could the cultural bureaucracy that managed freely to enter the central federation react?”46 In her comments on the event, Rozanova noted,“The right and central federations, which had 500 members behind them, constantly attempted to violate the charter and interpret it to their own advantage: slowly but systematically applying pressure, they have reduced to naught the principle of autonomy for each federation established by union vote at the preceding constituent meeting of 27 May.” She bitterly continues: “So much the better for us, so much the worse for the union. The left federation, which is essentially creative, will build a new life that corresponds to its principles.”47 These words, however, were not to prove prophetic. The Artists’ Union adopted a more passive profile, emulating the Union of Art Workers. As for the leftists, they formed their own labor union of artist-painters on the basis of the left federation and attempted to introduce into its charter the principles of federalism and autonomy for each artistic group applying for admission. Within a year, however, both unions—old and new—ceased to exist: they were merged into the newly established centralized AllRussian Artists Union (Vserabis). By that time, a majority of the avantgardists had pragmatically taken up posts in the many state commissions and institutes within Narkompros in an attempt to remain a force in the new society, even if their anarchist values could not be fully realized in that context. Henceforth the politicized avant-garde begins to be dominated by authoritarian principles that radically changed its purpose and goals. In a certain sense, the rejection of autonomy for the federations and the dissolution of the Artists’ Union can be regarded as the first step in a series of partly conformist, partly coerced decisions adopted by the “majority” of the art community, which ultimately resulted in state-dominated art and the essentially powerless and Party-controlled Union of Soviet Artists (which, incidentally, carefully avoided the words“labor union”in its name). Returning now to the events of 1918, after the general meeting, the left federation published a final resolution, signed by its chairman, Tatlin, and secretary, Rodchenko. Defending the integrity of the contract, the leftists insisted on introducing new points into the charter in an attempt to

Vladimir Tatlin (second from left) in front of his Model of the Monument to the Third International, on exhibition in Petrograd, 1920. From N. N. Punin, Tatlin: Protiv kubizma (Peterburg [sic]: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1921). Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 63.

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preserve the initial concept of the union based on Anarcho-Syndicalist principles. 1. Considering that a labor union [of artists] is an organization that protects the legal and material position of the artist and that the viability of the union is based upon division into autonomous federations, the left federation regards the proposal of the central federation to abandon this division as fatal to the life of the labor union. 2. The left federation declares itself to be the only remaining artistic and social nucleus uniting all existing groups of left artists and those who share their life. 3. The left federation is being forced to leave a labor union that has destroyed the federative principle.48

In its last issue, on 2 July 1918, Anarkhiia published Rozanova’s article “The Destruction of the Tripartite Federative Structure of the Union as the Cause of the Secession of the Left Federation.” The demise of the anarchist Artists’ Union occurred the same week the Bolsheviks shut down Anarkhiia for good. The years 1917–18, then, became a new “point of departure.” As is well known, the innovators welcomed the February and then the October revolutions, believing long-awaited real action uniting the cultural spaces of art and life might become possible. Their initial euphoria soon dissipated, however. The inner sense of freedom of these “Futurists of the spirit” came into increasingly severe conflict with a social reality rigidly structured by Marxist political attitudes that were strikingly different from the anarchist ideals inspiring the creators-inventors of the new life.

11

The Avant-Garde and Ideology

The ethical criterion of art based on the interconnection and mutual responsibility between subject and object, and between artist and audience, is crucial to the evolution of two leading autonomous models within the Russian avant-garde and their two seemingly incompatible myths. The Introduction touched on this issue, but I would like to make it a major focus of this concluding chapter. The mechanism of these mutual relationships holds the key to understanding the qualitative changes that took place in avant-garde ideology from the 1910s to the late 1920s, and the transition from the early avant-garde’s aesthetics of anarchy to the statist poetics of Constructivism and the Left Front of the Arts (LEF). THE THEORY OF ESTRANGEMENT AND THE THEATER OF ATTRACTIONS

Two related aesthetic theories summarize and regulate the subjectiveobjective two-sidedness of the artistic process within Russian avant-garde models. They are based on methodological devices that sought to develop a new mechanics of interaction with the viewer, listener, or reader. These are the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s estrangement (1917) concept, which grew out of the early Futurist aesthetics of anarchy, and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage of attractions.1 Although Shklovsky and Eisenstein, who was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of Constructivism at the time, belonged to the same generation, appreciated each other, and at 253

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times collaborated, ideologically they belonged to different epochs of the avant-garde. Their understanding of just what the mechanism of interaction should be and consequently their choice of artistic means for achieving it were conceptually incompatible. Despite common roots, these strategies reflected the emergence of two different tendencies within the avant-garde. As ideological concepts that determined the differences between the poetics and politics of estrangement and the montage of attractions, I propose two principles, referred to henceforth as the method of provocation and the method of manipulation, respectively. Both avant-garde models utilize aggressive formal gestures in the form of unexpected aesthetic “devices” intended as a kind of “bait” to arrest the audience’s attention. In the early avant-garde, such mechanisms serve as a conduit for provoking, stimulating, and liberating the viewer’s or reader’s perception by making him or her a co-participant in the creative process of cognition. In the second model, in contrast, this initial provocation to stimulate the perception of the subject pursues a different agenda, namely, a premeditated manipulation of the audience. This represents a qualitative change, in which the spectator’s consciousness is subjugated to elicit a straightforward ideological reflex that is precisely calculated in advance by the author. The contradictory aesthetic politics that Jacques Rancière identifies in the general culture of the avant-garde2 do not necessarily constitute two opposed characteristics within the one and only avant-garde model—or movement—but may coexist in parallel as different aesthetic currents, or models, each with its own distinct mechanics that shape the social functioning of art. These are two different kinds, two fundamental ways of construing reception. In short, it is a difference that goes to the heart of ethics in literary and art history: the decision whether to enable (encourage) the freedom to your audience is key. The early avant-garde’s provocative approach to the audience took the form of a frontal attack that widely employed elements of épatage— unexpected, aggressive artistic gestures—that challenged societal linguistic and behavioral norms: “gauntlets” were cast, faces were “slapped” (as in Khlebnikov’s Ryav! Perchatki [Roar! The Gauntlets, 1914] and infamous collective Slap in the Face of Public Taste [1912]). Most scholars have failed to notice the all-embracing methodological principle behind this essentially ironic application of the Romantic duel cliché, which impacts the aesthetic ideology of the avant-garde on all levels. This principle, which I propose to call provocation, is an appeal or incitement to action, a basically anarchical tendency to test laws and established rules.3

FIGURE 64. Nikolai Kulbin, Self-Portrait, 1913. Lithographic pencil on paper, 34.9 × 26 cm. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow.

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Provocation in art, in my view, is a special kind of communication between author and audience in which the author prefers open-ended questions to unambiguous, specific answers and does not usurp responsibility for judgment—and consequently freedom of interpretation—but delegates it to the audience on equal terms. Dominant in such a position is not so much the aesthetic as the moral or ethical aspect, an aspect that has been brilliantly outlined by Carlo Ginzburg in his essay on estrangement: “Moral self-education requires, as a preliminary step, the effacement of wrong imaginations, of assumptions taken for granted, of recognitions made dull and repetitive by our perceptual habits. In order to see things, we must first look at them as though they were meaningless—as seemingly meaningless as a riddle.”4 Provocation begins with an aggressive intrusion into someone else’s space; its object, however, is not to subjugate, but to lead the individual consciousness out of the untruth and unfreedom of ideologically programmed automatic reactions and to incite and shock the audience into perceiving the world and seeing things anew, thus overcoming the prejudices of convention. What provocation presumes is an active (often unpredictable) reaction on the part of the person being provoked, who is thereby inescapably drawn into a space of action shaped by the provoker. Rancière’s definition of art as an unpredictable explosion, which cannot and must not be anticipated, is appropriate in this context,5 for more often than not artistic provocation has no specific goal, or, more precisely, always has the same goal: to upset balance and to create a chaotic situation in which traditional notions, institutions, and systems are called into question in the mind of the receiver. One of the avant-garde’s favorite provocative devices—dissonance in rhythm, narrative, plot, and so on— was once compared by the clinical psychologist and early avant-garde theoretician Nikolai Kulbin to the ancient Greek experience of catharsis. PROVOCATION AND MANIPULATION IN TWO MODELS OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

Owing to the strong political subtext of the word “provocation” in Russian, it is often regarded as synonymous with manipulation. This is not quite accurate, however. Manipulation presumes a great deal of control over the other; it presumes that the will of the manipulated is usurped to some degree and that his or her consciousness is being acted upon to facilitate the acquisition of some predetermined concrete result that is generally of benefit to the manipulator. Thus manipulation—in the aesthetic

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sphere as well—is always focused on using someone to attain some hidden agenda, some utilitarian end that determines and justifies the means. The difference between provocation and manipulation is the same as between a slap (“in the face of public taste”) and an order (“to the army of the arts”): in the nineteenth-century officer’s code of honor, a slap in the face was a challenge to a duel to an equal with whom the insulted party was not ashamed to fight. Orders, on the other hand, are not subject to discussion because they presume from the outset subordination, hierarchy, and an authoritarian model of communication. Or, to use a classic example, the conceptual difference between provocation and manipulation resembles the gulf between the philosophy behind the modus operandi of Dostoevsky’s underground man and the ideology of the Grand Inquisitor. Shklovsky perceived the answer to the questions “Who is the Grand Inquisitor? What is his system?” to lie in “relieving the individual of responsibility for his morality,” which he considered a “transfer of responsibility” to the will of another.6 I want to clarify that I am not constructing a system of binary oppositions. First, I don’t rule out the possibility of coexistence within other models of avant-garde engagement.The fact that these models may oppose each other in matters of cultural policy does not at all mean that they are mutually exclusive. The interactive dynamics between them is rather complex, and in certain periods they may coexist in the artistic activity of the same group or even in the artistic trajectory of a single artist: the poetics of the early and late Mayakovsky or Malevich are good examples. Ideologically, however, these two tendencies will always be heterogeneous because they differ fundamentally with respect to the goal of art and how it strikes its viewers. Where these tendencies part ways is in the organization of relations between subject and object, artist and audience. In the ideology of the early avant-garde, freedom served as the basic category determining the equality and the dialogical nature of these relations. The concept encompassed not only artistic freedom but also freedom of choice, in which the audience is regarded as a free agent and is delegated a share of responsibility (or answerability) equal to that of the author. Most of the avant-garde trends of the 1920s, in contrast, built their relationship with the spectator on usurpation and the manipulation of the audience’s consciousness: “formalist aesthetics, which talk about art as an activity that generates a particular kind of feeling (the aesthetic suspension of disbelief), must be replaced by the study of art as a means of emotion-organizing action on the psyche, in connection with the prob-

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lem of class struggle,” Sergei Tretyakov, one of the LEF’s founding members, wrote of Futurism’s perspectives in 1923.7 THE THEORY OF ESTRANGEMENT AND THE POETICS OF THE EARLY AVANT-GARDE

Aesthetic principles focused on understanding the language and autonomous laws of arts derived from the artistic practices of avant-garde movements in the 1910s, which found their theoretical (and to some degree terminological) embodiment somewhat later in the theory of estrangement. Viktor Shklovsky began developing his theory while still a student observer of Futurist debates. By late 1913, he had become a participant.8 His 1914 essay “The Resurrection of the Word” reproduces almost verbatim some of the programmatic points in the criticism and essays of the Hylaeans, in particular Kruchenykh’s contributions, but it also contains a qualitatively new element. In this text, Shklovsky approaches the theoretical conceptualization of estrangement head-on, but he has not yet found a precise name for it. In 1917 he did find it, and the term “estrangement” appears in the context of a new theory of art, interpreted as the all-embracing device: And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “estranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.9

As Shklovsky sees it, the device is both the goal and the means, the only key to the creative process and its interpretation. Thus estrangement is regarded primarily as a method or ideology, and not merely a technical means for accomplishing a given artistic purpose. Here I am disagreeing with traditional positivist and Marxist approaches to Formalism that regard it as a theory exclusively concerned with problems of form and the internal laws of artistic language. I think that Shklovsky’s terse yet comprehensive definition, which includes criteria such as perception and the perceptual process in art, contains not only a psychological element, but also a social element and necessarily anticipates a response, an active interrelationship between artist and audience. I contend that Shklovsky’s theory of aesthetics is a kind of reception

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theory, and that it approaches art, not only as an abstracted and self-enclosed device, but as a channel created by the human consciousness in order to connect, to experience, to comprehend, and to hypostatize things, and through this process make an impact on the surrounding world. Following the practice of the early avant-garde, Formalism always rejected the utilitarian function of art as a means, although it did acknowledge its epistemological role. This fact alone casts doubt on the charge of nihilism leveled at the Formalists by Marxist ideologues.10 True, the Formalists were obviously antipositivist,11 but that does not amount to nihilism. All the more problematic, then, that Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, which he thought of as a comprehensive theory of art, continues to be interpreted exclusively in relation to the later stages of Formalism and Structuralism, and is for the most part rigidly associated with the cultural environment of the 1920s, when Marxism dominated the critical discourse. Significantly, Shklovsky formulates his theory as a general principle characteristic of various literary and artistic forms and genres: he deliberately focuses on it very generally and retrospectively by taking his examples, not from zaum, which would have been obvious, but from Tolstoy’s renowned prose (“for purely practical considerations,” he adds), and he concedes that “the device of estrangement is not peculiar to Tolstoy.”12 Carlo Ginzburg argues persuasively that Shklovsky’s theory follows the epistemological strand in the history of art.13 To me it seems indisputable that this strand is far removed from the utopian didacticism and utilitarian aesthetics of the 1920s, but it does reflect and encapsulate many aspects of the early Russian avant-garde and parallel Western tendencies in “anti-aesthetics.” The device of estrangement, which essentially deconstructs the aesthetic “order,” is apparent, not only in Khlebnikov’s and Kruchenykh’s zaum, but also in Gnedov’s Ego-Futurist gesture of the “Poem of the End,” in the coloring of the faces by Futurists and Neoprimitivists, in the alogism of Malevich and his circle, and last, but not least, it exemplifies the turn toward abstraction in poetry and art. The accent here is on active cognition rather than leisurely consumption. The absence of didacticism, the priority of the creative process itself over the result or product of the process, and the acknowledgment of art as an epistemological criterion are all features that define a qualitatively different interrelationship between artist and audience, one of co-creation. Shklovsky’s estrangement necessarily recognizes the specificity and autonomy of poetic language, which is the opposite of positing the “economy of creative effort” as the teleological principle and purpose of art.14

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Because the metaphorical, pragmatically uncontrollable nature of poetic language will always resist any aesthetic, social, or political systematization or generalization, it will also defy simplification. According to Shklovsky, the purpose of art is to complicate and encumber the reception of the work of art, not to simplify it.15 Thus one of the main aims of estrangement is to impede the communicative function of any language or sign system. The device of estrangement is essentially a direct provocation intended to draw the spectator or reader outside the established frame of communication of a given social or aesthetic system. In this sense, it acts like silence in a telephone conversation, when a pause breaks the rhythm of the traditional communicative chain. This, I think, is what Shklovsky means by sudden interruption, or “disruption of rhythm,”16 which echoes Kruchenykh’s provocative declaration that language must be a “saw” or the “poisoned arrow of a savage.”17 As Shklovsky acknowledges toward the end of his essay, there is no doubt that the early Futurists’ poetics and their theory of transrational language acted as catalysts in the development of the theory of estrangement.18 An extremely important point is that the complication or impeding of artistic language, what Shklovsky calls a device, inhibits active politicization and the blunt intrusion of a dominant political ideology of power striving for hegemony. The concept of “the objective social dependence and utility of art” (Trotsky) is thus inapplicable to Shklovsky’s approach. It comes as no surprise, then, that this approach was criticized by Trotsky, whose interests lay with the politicized model of Futurism, which could be easily controlled by the dominant ideology of the state. Such a model was in fact successfully generated in the 1920s: Futurists in the LEF and Constructivists emphasized simplicity and economy of artistic language, and prioritized its communicative function as one of the basic goals of their art. Thus, for example, in the 1923 manifesto “Constructivism,” Olga Chichagova, who was known for her talented and innovative educational children’s books, explicitly equates the Constructivist ideology with that of the state: “Constructivism is not an art movement, as many think. In essence, Constructivism denounces art as a product of bourgeois culture. Constructivism is an ideology that emerged in proletarian Russia during the revolution, and like any ideology, Constructivism can be viable and not built on sand only when it creates for itself a consumer. The goal of Constructivism, therefore, is to organize communist everyday life by creating the constructive individual.”19

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Walter Benjamin contrasts the dissipated effect of art addressed to the mass consumer with art that appeals to the viewer’s individuality and challenges his intellect and ability to concentrate: “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting.”20 The physical and intellectual process of seeing and cognizing—which goes along with estrangement—demands individual effort and concentration of each viewer or reader. Unlike a superficiality of immediate identifying and recognizing—passive consumption with only one eye or ear open, so to speak—it is a temporal process focused on “the removal of objects from the sphere of automatized perception.” If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously—automatically. If someone were to compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand or speaking a foreign tongue for the very first time with the sensation of performing this same operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us. . . . The ideal expression of this process may be said to take place in algebra, where objects are replaced by symbols. . . . By means of this algebraic method of thinking, objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged. We know that it exists because of its position in space, but we see only its surface. Gradually, under the influence of this generalizing perception, the object fades away. This is as true of our perception of the object in action as of mere perception itself.21

According to Shklovsky, perception, that is, seeing, or, to use his own terminology, vision, is not only the result of art and its influence, but also the cause or impulse that gives rise to the work of art. It is a stage that precedes creation proper: In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, . . . we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized perception. It is “artificially” created by an artist in such a way that the perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text. This is when the literary work attains its greatest and most long-lasting impact. The object is perceived not spatially but, as it were, in its temporal continuity.22

Thus the device of estrangement is aimed primarily against the automatization of the creative process and automatized perception and counteracts the mechanical status quo between artist and audience. Beneath the crudeness and ignorance of early Futurism’s positioning

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as a clownish outlaw of established culture taunting spectators and critics alike, is the rejection of imposed, but not experienced, knowledge of the order of things. It is this philosophical position that sparked the impulse toward processes of new experiencing, learning, knowing, and freely transforming the world. This allowed Olga Rozanova, for example, to promulgate art “only in independence and unlimited freedom.”23 Anticanonicity in such a context can be viewed, not as an instrument of épatage, but as a means of comprehending reality. Russian avant-gardists saw it as their chief task to explode the clichés of the academic and other taken-for-granted frameworks of perception from within in order to expand the territory of art. By widening the boundaries of art, the artist encroaches upon the space of the audience. Despite countless provocative declarations that “when we create new values we do not think about the crowd,” such a model of interacting is inconceivable without an involved audience, and the active factor here is the degree of violence that the artist adapts to his or her purposes: “To be the master [in one’s art] means to be violent—we willingly accept that label. Not until you acknowledge this will you understand us and our goal.”24 This remark by the young Ilya Zdanevich is strongly colored by the “the poet versus the crowd” opposition, but it conceals a new nuance. It expresses not only a rhetorical challenge to the bourgeois mode in which art exists and is consumed, but also a readiness to intervene actively. The rhetoric of the early avant-garde does not exist outside this aggressive gesture or act, but its goal is to awaken an audience’s perception and to stimulate its unconstrained response, not to usurp the will of the audience or produce a predictable reflex reaction. Despite the aggressiveness (and in many respects because) of this approach, from the very first theoretical essays and provocative debates, the early avant-garde regarded interaction with the audience as an integral part of an artistic process that frames the spectator as an active participant in this process. In 1910, Nikolai Kulbin emphasized three component parts in his theory of art: the psychology of the artist, of the picture, and of the viewer. In his model, these components (which he directly links to the ideology of art) embrace three spheres that are interconnected yet subordinate to autonomous laws: (1) the author’s consciousness, which generates the process of creating the work—the author’s action or effort of will (Kunstwollen); (2) the work of art as such—the end result of this process; and, finally, (3) the concluding stage, which is the process of the viewer’s re-

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ception of the initial creative impulse as he or she contemplates a specific work of art.25 “What the artist provides is not a portrayal in the exact sense, but something that stimulates the creative imagination of the viewer,” Kulbin maintains in defining the essence of the artistic illusion in his treatise on the psychology of the artist. And he concludes that “the viewer completes the picture.”26 Kulbin’s writings, which were criticized at the time as inconsistent and amateurish, were in reality foundational for the aesthetics of anarchy and exerted considerable influence on the social strategies of the New Art, especially on the formation and organization of the Union of Youth. In Rozanova’s “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why It Is Misunderstood,” one of the programmatic texts of the Union, it is perception, intuitive Anschauung—“vision”—that Rozanova identifies as the stage immediately preceding creation: “In order to reflect, it is necessary to perceive. In order to perceive, it is necessary to touch, to see. Only the Intuitive Principle introduces us to the World.”27 She proceeds from this thesis to define “order in the creative process”: (1) the “Intuitive Principle”; (2) the “Individual transformation of the visible”; and (3) the act of “Abstract creation.” Rozanova insists that these principles are “united organically, not mechanically” and constitute a new creative psychology evoking a new system of the artist’s interrelations with the public and the critics, which requires an active effort and the creative participation of all parties involved.28 According to this theory, the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl’s “will to art” (Kunstwollen) remains imperative when engaged in creating a work, but at the same time the process of intuitive perception acquires an exclusive role as a necessary prologue to action. Thus, the focus is on process rather than result, the traditional gap between perception and action is bridged by equating the two, which potentially enables the viewer and the critic both to become co-participants in the creative process and assume the active role previously reserved exclusively for the author.29 This anarchic dynamics of mutuality erases the modern and predominantly Western subject-object model of artist-audience interaction. The Futurists’ interest in archaic and traditional cultures, in which artistic activity (as well as the result of such activity) is in various ways connected with the life of the entire community, was inspired by their determination to find more in art than the utilitarian value. “It is in our interest to reestablish the lost interconnection between viewer and artist that once existed and that still exists today among certain peoples such as the Japanese, the Chinese, the Persians, the Abyssinians, etc., with a highly devel-

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oped visual culture,” Shevchenko wrote in his Principles of Cubism (1913).30 This position motivates the avant-garde’s rejection of a contemporary consumerist relationship that subordinates art to the utilitarian needs of the market or society. The criterion of usefulness in art does not disappear entirely, but it now recedes into the background. As Ilya Zdanevich remarks in an essay on the phenomena that regulate the evolution of art: “One more question—is art useful? Yes and no. Art is free, and since it is, it can cultivate any emotion, socially useful as well as socially harmful ones. . . . But there are many areas within it that cannot at all be viewed from the perspective of usefulness.31 The early avant-garde regarded the artist’s responsibility to lie in “endlessly disturbing the sleep of the lazy” (Rozanova), “awakening” the creative principle in the viewer,“rattling the nerves” (Kruchenykh), or “flinging oneself into the crowd” (Zdanevich, Larionov). The public in turn is delegated the responsibility of “fostering within itself” what Kulbin calls “empathy,” by which he means rejecting the easy automatism of recognition and the notion that art is a means. “Not everyone has the talent to become an artist, but anyone can develop a conscious attitude to works created by others.”32 In this model of art, the role of the viewer as cocreator becomes crucial: “For the majority of the public nurtured by pseudo-artists on copies of nature, the conception of beauty rests on the terms ‘familiar’ and ‘intelligible.’ So when an art created on new principles forces the public to awaken from its stagnant sleepy attitudes, crystallized once and for all, the transition to a different state incites protest and hostility since the public is unprepared for it.”33 The avant-garde realizes this “transition to a different state” through artistic devices that provoke the public: dissonance, shifts, the absurd, or alogism are the starting points for a poetics that displaces the boundaries of modernist aesthetic doctrines. All of these techniques aim to upset the comfortable treatment of art and mechanical modes of perception, which leads to the banalization of any sphere of human existence, and unconscious stereotyping and automatization. As Shklovsky puts it, familiarity “eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives and at our fear of war. . . . After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’ An object appears before us. We know it’s there, but we do not see it.”34 The formal “shift” that Malevich identified in the “supplemental element” of early Futurism is present in one or another guise throughout the avant-garde genres and activities. This is the impeding anti-canonical device that introduces an element of accident, unexpectedness, or error

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into the artistic structure of the work. I think that it is this Futurist device that Shklovsky has in mind when he speaks of “disruptions” of artistic rhythm: “There is indeed such a thing as ‘order’ in art, but not a single column of a Greek temple fulfills its order perfectly, and artistic rhythm may be said to exist in the rhythm of prose disrupted.”35 Thus, the riddle in alogism—both visual and literary—becomes an important component of disruption.36 It is this recoding of the object or thing placed in an unusual context that generates the element of alogism, absurdity, or if you will, estrangement, especially through what Shklovsky describes as a “way of seeing things out of their usual context.”37 When Constructivists later attempted, as though they were working on an engineering project, to process and organize the incommensurability between life and the principles of social utopia, calibrated by means of “a compass, ruler, and stencil,” they were attempting to instrumentalize art to dominate their audiences. The anarchist Futurists, on the other hand, turned directly to the laws governing the fluid movement of matter and time and rejected the notion of art as a means to manipulate: “aesthetic, utilitarian, ideological (political, propagandistic) functions make art into a means, and only non-representational art is able owing to its abstraction from the ‘bustle of personal, private, and official protocols’ to jettison these functions.”38 THE “MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS” AND THE IDEOLOGICAL MODEL OF THE 1920S AVANT-GARDE

In contrast to Shklovsky’s historicism (paradoxical though it may well seem),39 Sergei Eisenstein, in his essay “Montage of Attractions” (1923), projects his theory into the future without even mentioning the names of his predecessors and contemporaries such as Lev Kuleshov and his work on montage. He does refer in passing to George Grosz’s “rough sketches,” Rodchenko’s “elements of photo-montage,” and the “lyric effect of certain [Charlie] Chaplin scenes” as illustrations of his theory—but only “on the formal level.”40 Eisenstein’s text is much more programmatic than Shklovsky’s extensive article, and reads almost like a manifesto. Of course, Shklovsky is first of all a literary scholar and needs to establish the objectivity of his overall theory in order to justify its raison d’ être, whereas Eisenstein is an artist who is anxious to establish the supremacy and originality of his authorial patent, but more than that is at work here. It must not be forgotten that both claim that they are not only publicizing a new device, but also creating a new universal theory

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applicable to various genres and forms of art. Retrospectively, explaining in his later notes what the attractions theory was about, Eisenstein repeatedly complained that critics reduced his theory to “the analysis of a specific, isolated area” of art and did not take into account the “basic and principal” factor in his formal experiments: “For the multiplicity of all different forms of art there should be a single set of laws from which the specific features that sparkle within each art in particular radiate into various forms.”41 He proved correct in his assumption, and his theory is as relevant for understanding literature of the statist period of avant-garde (especially that of the Constructivists and LEF) and the visual arts as it is for the critical treatment of theater and cinematography. “The Montage of Attractions” was published in the third issue of the journal LEF in 1923 as the theoretical background to Eisenstein’s theatrical staging of agit-buffonade based on a play by the nineteenth-century Realist dramatist Aleksandr Ostrovskii. Work on this theory, however, had begun much earlier, and was influenced by the Kuleshov effect and Dziga Vertov’s politically accented montaged cine-chronicles, and by the crudely expressive simplicity of Mayakovsky’s posters for ROSTA (Russian State Telegraph Authority) windows. Eisenstein could be inspired by Rodchenko’s photo-montages, in which the reality of documented political or social facts was brilliantly manipulated by the artist to convey a particular ideological context. This groundbreaking theory of the montage evolved in relation to the first manifestos of the Working Group of Constructivists (Rodchenko, Gan, Stepanova), in dialogue with Rodchenko, and the artists and writers of LEF. Later, in his 1928 Novyi LEF article “Warning!” Rodchenko adapts the basic principle of Eisenstein’s ideological montage in his attack on the formal aesthetics of the impersonal and objectified documentation of facts: LEF, as the avant-garde of Communist culture, is obligated to show how and what needs to be photographed. What to shoot—is something every photo group knows, but how to shoot— only a few know . . . To put it simply, we must find, we are seeking, and we will find a new (don’t be afraid!) aesthetic, enthusiasm, and emotional tone for the photographic expression of our new social facts. For us, a photo of a reconstructed factory is not just a photo of a building. The new factory in the photo is not a simple fact but a fact that is the pride and joy of the industrialization of the Land of Soviets, and we have to figure out “how to photograph” this.42

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The montage of attractions achieves its purposes through a complex engineering calculation of the appropriateness and effectiveness of all elements within the unity of the construction, but the author’s main concern was to veil and conceal from the viewer the artistic process of constructing and create an illusion of ease and simplicity. The final product appeared out of thin air, as it were, not unlike the legerdemain of a circus magician who expends considerable effort distracting the attention of the audience from his manipulations.“Words like ‘attraction’ and ‘trick’ are becoming the catchwords of the time,” writes Lissitzky.43 Eisenstein’s obsession with the circus, to which we shall return, inspired many of his theory’s premises. If Shklovsky speaks of estrangement as a phenomenon present in all art, Eisenstein practically assumes the role of a conjurer or great inventor who has revealed to the world his magical secret of effective art production. This stance underscores two important points: he is not only emphatically proclaiming the uniqueness of his own authorship and innovation, but also presenting his theory as a practical technique—a methodology and guide to action. The epistemological element is of no interest to Eisenstein: his theory is the product of a new stage in the history of Russian avant-garde—the stage of the Constructivists and Productivists, for whom art no longer means a path of cognition but rather an instrument of agitation. Hence the debased relationship between the producer (author, ideologue)and the consumer (the masses).44 Hence, too, the new authoritarian lexicon—specifically the deletion of the word “freedom” that was so typical of the early avant-garde’s manifestos, and the appearance of the term “the masses,” which was widespread in the 1920s but is exceptionally rare in the discourse of the prerevolutionary avant-garde.45 Thus, the LEF declaration signed by Nikolai Aseev, Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Mayakovsky, Tretiakov, and Nikolai Chuzhak reads: “Lef will agitate the masses with our art, fashioning the organized force within them.”46 Elaborating his argument in defense of this mass action of the avantgarde, Walter Benjamin points to film as the epitome of mass art: The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator.47

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This factor, he maintains, consists in replacing the criterion of concentration with the criterion of distraction, which puts the public in the position of the critic. He immediately qualifies this statement, however, noting, “This position requires no attention.”“The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”48 Benjamin’s argument is consistent with the logic of a binary system: he opposes art as distraction (or dissipation) to art as concentration, but does not take into account other possible models for experiencing art. Art as a didactic lesson, for example, which was the most widespread model in the statist avant-garde, could both entertain or distract and demand concentration, but it in no way presumes an independent evaluation of the material on the part of the audience.49 By following the narrative of ideological positions set forth by the author, the absent-minded consumer risks being directly manipulated. José Ortega y Gasset develops this notion of the masses in a philosophical context: “The mass is all that which sets no value on itself— good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself ‘just like everybody,’ and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.”50 “Feeling like everybody else” creates mass-man, and hence, the mass is an ideal object of manipulation. According to Eisenstein, in the early 1920s, he was led to implement “sniper sight,” a new methodological quest for the “unit for measuring the effect” of art, by the aspiration “to express by some new means, in some new way everything that is seething in the collective breast of the young class that for the first time has triumphantly entered the historical arena”: The enthusiasm of our epoch generates creation upon creation despite the banished term “creating,” which has been supplanted by the word “producing”; in spite of “construction,” which would like to strangle “image” with its bony extremities, and in the face of declarations about the death of art! . . . Both tasks—the temporary social utilization and the prearranged liquidation of art—make the same demands. They demand that it be produced as precisely and economically as possible (with the “least expenditure of energy,” we might say in the everyday jargon of those years), maximally calibrated mathematically, maximally precise and rigorously constructed with respect to the “sniper sight” of the work of art once it has been selected.51

Eisenstein refers to“producing”as opposed to“creating,”a word tinged with anarchism, but refuses outright to abandon the“image,”realizing that representational imagery will always be integral for artistic manipulation. The “Kuleshov effect” had already proved this: an image that is to some

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degree recognizable or familiar to the viewer, has much greater impact in the eyes and the hearts of the audience rather than an emasculated abstract construction. This imparted to any mimetic image the persuasiveness of something true, something as if seen with one’s own eyes, while in reality it is a fabrication, a counterfeit truth.52 It is this sort of image, crafted and constructed to manipulate the viewer’s mind, that constitutes an “attraction,” which, according to Eisenstein, is the elemental unit with which to measure an impact in art. Eisenstein’s focus on the image-attraction, however, does not lead him to reject construction. For him construction is not a building block of the material, but rather a structuring principle, a process of montage that organizes the material to ensure maximum yield (in terms of its agitation of the audience) with the least possible production cost. Although Eisenstein proclaims the spectator to be “the basic material” of the theater (and of art as a whole), the individual participation of that spectator is reduced to a minimum. According to his essay “Magic of Art,” the mass consciousness of his audience is the main focus of the artist’s premeditation,53 and of direct manipulation.54 No one is issuing spectators a challenge to transform themselves into co-creators. On the contrary, according to Constructivist and LEF manifestos, the viewer is “processed,” “organized,” “agitated,” “educated,” and “subjugated.”55 In this model of influence, the criterion of the viewer’s freedom and consequently responsibility/answerability is destroyed, and the author assumes the position of authority in the communication. Eisenstein and the Constructivists had plenty of predecessors in this, including the Italian Futurists. Eager to realize his political ambitions, along with his artistic ones, Marinetti was one of the first avant-gardists to draw on the influential sociological research of Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (1895). It is rather peculiar that early Russian Futurists, deeply interested in sociological issues of art, and obviously familiar with Le Bon’s book (it was translated into Russian the year after its original publication and widely read), took a different path, more in accordance with their anarchic aesthetic ideology and lack of goal-oriented political aspirations. Christine Poggi, a scholar of Italian Futurism, convincingly shows how Marinetti further exploited Le Bon’s argument that the mental unity characteristic of a crowd was due to its susceptibility to suggestion, intolerance of differing views, and desired hierarchical relations between the leader and the masses.56 When Eisenstein calls the spectator the “material of art,” he thereby takes the final step toward a new model of artist-audience interaction and proclaims the instrumental role of art, transforming it into an ideo-

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logical instrument of subjugation and manipulation. Individuals, who consume art, delegate their freedom of choice—and responsibility—to the author and are thus stripped of their sovereignty and transformed into the human masses. In his retrospective assessment of the development of his theory and the term “montage of attractions,” Eisenstein underscored his engineering and scientific training, focusing on a rational, positivist approach to social usage of art: “An approach becomes scientific in the proper sense the moment the area of research acquires a unit of measurement”: So let us find the unit of impact in art! Science is familiar with “ions,” “electrons,” “neutrons.” Let art have “attractions”!57

Eisenstein’s conceptualizing stands in stark contrast to complex artistic language and the laborious “impeded” effect described in the theory of estrangement, and the aim is different as well. Expressions such as “simplification” and the economy of “sniper sight” describe not only recognition, but an instant, reflective recognition, the opposite of the Formalist category of vision. El Lissitzky’s famous poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920), which uses abstract Suprematist forms to present the political slogan of the day, might stand in as a figural comparison. Attempting to achieve an ideological impact similar to what Eisenstein later dubbed the “montage of attractions,” Lissitzky completely failed at his political task and—consciously or unconsciously—produced the diametrically opposite effect. His unexpected use of geometrical abstraction in the context of a political discourse worked on a formal level as an artistic shock that surprised viewers and arrested their attention. As a didactic means of communication, however, the device was not effective, since his formal abstraction in no way facilitates rational (let alone reflexive) recognition, and it dulls the bite of the ideological exhortation. Lissitzky inadvertently abstracted or estranged his political message (support the Red Army against the counterrevolutionary White forces) by compelling the viewer to see and apprehend it in the new light of abstract visualization. What the Constructivists later called “the maximum exploitation of subject”58 was not achieved in this project. Contrast Lissitzky’s work with the first covers of LEF (1923) designed by Rodchenko, in which the didactic force of the message is accomplished perfectly with minimum loss. The Constructivist design of the lettering in red and black blocks on the cover of the first issue is completely subordinated to the intensified potency of the message itself, specifically the

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FIGURE 65. El (Eleazar) Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1920. Poster, commissioned by the Political Department of the Western Front. 48.5 x 69.2 cm. Photo credit: Suark / Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY.

accentuated words “Left Front.”The second issue features a photo-montage that presents easily recognizable iconic portraits and clichés of the bourgeois world that are X-ed out with the editor’s blue pencil. This composition could serve as an excellent illustration to Eisenstein’s article on the montage of attractions published in the third issue of the journal: “a free montage with arbitrarily chosen independent (of both the particular composition and any thematic connection with the actors) effects (attractions), but with the precise aim of a specific final thematic effect— the montage of attractions.”59 The cover of the issue in which Eisenstein’s essay appears is yet another Rodchenko photomontage that contrasts the impotence of the past with the exuberant innovative power—and sharp pen—of the future. The composition is on a diagonal with an airplane at its uppermost point launching, as it would a bomb, an enormous fountain pen that threatens to spear a stone-age man at the bottom of the diagonal who is attempting to attack the plane with a primitive arrow.

FIGURE 66. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Cover of LEF: Journal of the Left Front of the Arts, no. 3, ed. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Moscow–Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1923). Letterpress, printed in color, 22.8 × 15 cm. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation (309.2001), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © VAGA, NY.

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Aleksandr Rodchenko, Poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Lithograph, 71.7 × 107.9 cm. Rodchenko Archive, Moscow. Photo credit: SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © VAGA, NY.

FIGURE 67.

If the anarchistic avant-garde sought to influence audiences by mastering material and form (by way of distilling the inner language and elements of art), through a process in which the spectator actively co-participates with the artist, then the statist avant-garde of the 1920s seeks to master the audience’s consciousness as the material of art. And, if following Shklovsky’s thought, we consider art as a device, then I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the device of the montage of attractions dominates all avant-garde genres during the 1920s, from LEF’s literature of fact and Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s films to production art and Constructivist posters and books. In fact, Rodchenko visualized Eisenstein’s radical metaphor of a sniper sight in a brilliant poster for the latter’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), probably Rodchenko’s best work in this genre, in which he turns one of the Potemkin’s guns right on the viewer, anybody who would stop in front of a poster. This new aesthetics, deliberately placed in the service of high-minded social mission, bring art’s didactic and communicative functions to the fore. According to Lissitzky, “During the period of the Revolution a latent energy accumulated in our young generation of artists, which merely awaited the great mandate from the people for it to be released and de-

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ployed. It is the masses, the semi-literate masses, who have become the audience. The Revolution in our country accomplished an enormous educational and propagandistic task.”60 In like fashion, Eisenstein designates interaction between artist and audience as the principal element in the montage of attractions, implemented in a purely utilitarian spirit: Theater’s basic material derives from the audience: the moulding of the audience in a desired direction (or mood) is the task of every utilitarian theater (agitation, advertising, health education, etc.). The instrument of this process consists of all the parts that constitute the apparatus of theater . . . despite their differences, they all lead to one thing—which their presence legitimates— to their common quality of attraction.61

He goes on to summarize the essence of an attraction as manipulative: An attraction (in our diagnosis of theater) is any aggressive moment in theater, i.e., any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion.62

The attraction has nothing in common with the stunt, we are told, because “the stunt, or more accurately, the trick . . . is absolute and complete within itself, it means the direct opposite of the attraction, which is based exclusively on something relative, the reactions of the audience.”63 We should be attentive to Eisenstein’s terminology, because in circus vocabulary manipulation is the basis of the illusionist’s sleight of hand, or “prestige” (from the Latin praestEgia, trick, deceit, illusion), and refers to an elaborate system of operations designed to distract the spectator’s attention from the magician’s main activity, which must remain unnoticed lest the secret of the illusion be revealed. The principal point is that manipulation is a “diversionary maneuver”; what is crucial is not the technological apparatus but the manipulator’s dexterity and precision (the “sniper sight,” to use Eisenstein’s terminology), which are calculated to make the audience trust the trap set for it by the magician. A year before his death in 1947, Eisenstein wrote “The Magic of Art,” notes that were not published until recently, in which the attraction’s purpose is spelled out: My aim was and is very much a vestige of the earliest use of the precursors of art—the ritual. That is: To subjugate—by subjecting to influence—to dominate, bend to one’s will.

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There (and then)—nature and the forces of nature. Here—the psychology (and emotions) of the audience and, by modifying them, to subjugate their ideology to my propagandist ideology (my idea, my conception, my view of things).64

Significantly, in other remarks, he compares his theory with Ivan Pavlov’s clinical research in physiology,65 and draws a direct parallel between the two: Now, retrospectively, it is interesting to see the degree to which this statement was in the spirit of the age. Especially in the sense that from a different direction it was approaching reflexology, which at the time fascinated everyone, who were also seduced by its mechanical quality. Had I known more about Pavlov back then I would have called the theory of the montage of attractions “the theory of artistic stimuli.”66

The basic device and methodological mechanism of his theory of the attraction rests on this principle of artistic stimuli, which are precisely calculated and used to reinforce and process various reflexes of the mass spectators. By whatever eloquent name, the artistic reflex will always be a generic model of stereotyped perception. In contrast to the device of estrangement, which insists on a lengthy process of seeing and experiencing the object, the montage of attractions was based on immediate identification, a kind of spectator reflex. There is no place here for the indeterminacy of zaum or abstraction. The mission of the artist, now likened to both an engineer and a scientist, is to issue exact and instantaneously received emotional commands to the masses. The spectators’ autonomy is devalued and coerced into a mediated mass perception, and they are gradually led to adopt imposed ideas as natural, as their own.

Conclusion

The Historical Paradigm The Avant-Gardes and Revolution

It is always difficult (and sometimes impossible) to point out the precise moment of a cultural paradigm shift or draw an exact chronological boundary between two periods in the development of art. Moreover, the two ideological models of the Russian avant-garde that have been discussed coexisted for some time, often within the same movement or group, and even in individual artistic evolution. In my view, the important features characteristic of the second phase had appeared as early as 1917, became predominant the next year, and solidified by 1923. The October revolution marked the beginning of the successive alienation of early avant-garde artistic ideology, with its anarchic principles based on the philosophy of freedom and sovereignty, of innate resistance to ideological or aesthetic totalization. As artists rallied to the state, the tension that existed from 1917 into the early 1920s between the avant-garde’s two polar problems—the social and political role of the artist in society, and the autonomy of the artistic process and personal creativity—dissolved. By 1923, with the emergence of the LEF and the final elaboration of the interdisciplinary theory of Constructivism, the new model of the governmentalized (or statist) avantgarde was fully established. It was now under ideological pressure from the state, which aspired to subordinate it (especially the Futurists) to “our Marxist conception of the objective social dependence and social utility of art.”1 More clearly than many, the talented ideologue Leon Trotsky articulated this line in his book Literature and Revolution (1924), where he demonstrated the 276

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break between the two historical stages of avant-garde culture and dismissed the Futurists as out of step with the Bolsheviks, although still “reformable”: The October Revolution appeared to the intelligentsia, including its literary left wing, as a complete destruction of its known world, of that very world from which it broke away from time to time, for the purpose of creating new schools, and to which it invariably returned. To us, on the contrary, the Revolution appeared as the embodiment of a familiar tradition, internally digested. From a world that we rejected theoretically, and that we undermined practically, we entered into a world, that was already familiar to us, as a tradition and a vision. Here lies the incompatibility of psychologic type between the communist, who is a political revolutionist, and the Futurist, who is a revolutionary innovator of form. This is the source of the misunderstandings between them. The trouble is not that Futurism “denies” the holy traditions of the intelligentsia. On the contrary, it lies in the fact that it does not feel itself to be part of the revolutionary tradition. We stepped into the Revolution while Futurism fell into it. But the situation is not at all hopeless. Futurism will not go back “to its circles” because these circles do not exist any longer. And this not insignificant circumstance gives Futurism the possibility of a rebirth, of entering into the new art, not as an all determining current, but as an important component part.2

The entire cultural sphere was not politicized all at once, of course, but from the outset, the process Slavoj Žižek calls “metaphoric condensation,”3 in the form of intense shocks, eventually crystallized in the concept of cultural revolution. This revolutionary intrusion of political events into the cultural space of the avant-garde was comparable to the Futurists’ formal “shift,” only it projected into a geopolitical space rather than a page of a book of transrational poetry that galvanized readers to realize their own freedom. This historical displacement caused the ideas and forms of the early avant-garde to mutate, and, eventually, it was followed by the creation of an entirely new and powerful ideological model of a socialist avant-garde, subjected to a people’s state. Analyzing the aesthetic and political development of the different trends in the European avant-garde, Raymond Williams concludes,“The quite new political crisis of the post-1917 world produced a diversity different in kind from the mobile and competitive diversity of the years before 1914.”4 He chooses the Russian example to illustrate his thesis: Thus, the Russian Modernists and avant-gardists were in the country which had passed through revolution and civil war. . . . Mayakovsky could move from the liberated detachment of A Cloud in Trousers (1915) to Mystery Buffo

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Paintings by Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich on display at the “Art in the Age of Imperialism” exhibition at the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, 1931–32, under Lenin’s dictum “Anarchism as a worldview is the bourgeois view turned inside out.” Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

FIGURE 68.

(1918), acclaiming the revolution, and later, after the official rejection of Modernist and avant-garde art, to the satirical observation of the supposed new world in The Bedbug (1929). These are examples among many, in the turbulence of those years, when the relation between politics and art was no longer a matter of manifesto but of difficult and often dangerous practice.5

The revolutionary and political “shift” of 1917 polarized art and invigorated the political and social aspirations of the avant-garde. As I have demonstrated, avant-gardists were initially driven by a unique opportunity to manifest their social will and reorganize the state institutions in control of artistic life such as the Academy of Arts. At this juncture, the more radical among them demanded freedom of “artistic conscience” and the separation of art from the state: The first and most necessary condition for art to develop is freedom of artistic creation, complete freedom from all pressures from any quarter whatever. . . . The artistic conscience is similar to the religious and scientific conscience. . . . Now to Russian democracy has fallen the honor of beginning a new struggle— for the freedom of art, for freedom from state tutelage over art.6

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After October 1917, however, when the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Communist Party took over and crushed its political competitors (anarchists were first in line), it became obvious that the revolution had reached a point from which there was no turning back. By 1919–20, many had yielded to the temptation of power proffered by the grandiose utopian project of socialism and the opportunity to occupy the real political space vacated by the defunct old hierarchies. These avant-gardists dominated the newly organized Arts Section (IZO) attached to the Bolshevik People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) as well as the leadership of numerous commissions and committees such as the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd and the Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow. They established their own mechanisms for administering art in conformity with the new state and its political ideology. The rhetorical tone of the young Constructivists Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo’s “Realistic Manifesto” (1920) conveys the idealistic zeal of their political ambitions: “The distracted world of the Cubists, broken in shreds by their logical anarchy, cannot satisfy us who have already accomplished the revolution or who are already constructing and building up anew.”7 Like litmus paper, this revealed the fundamental difference between two models of avant-gardism: the early autonomous currents of the 1910s associated with the aesthetics of anarchy on the one hand, and the universalizing statist avant-garde movements of the 1920s on the other. The new political system fundamentally changed the social function of art, influencing how artists defined their goals and priorities, and, consequently, changed aesthetic ideologies. The balance of forces within art, and the positions artists assumed vis-à-vis the state, shifted. New social and political institutions intervened in art policy and generated new conditions of art production (state contracts and commissions instead of the free market). But were these changes reflected in the style, methodology, or language of art? Of course. What provided the essential distinction of this model from the anarchic avant-garde and determined its new formal poetics and narrative contents was an intellectual, emotional, and psychological dependence on a hegemonic ideology of social utopia in which art was allotted by the state the important functional and utilitarian role. When aesthetic choices become instrumentalized, aesthetic models are inevitably transformed: Walter Benjamin’s “politicization of art” comes to the fore.8

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. See, e.g., Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2. Dmitri Sarabianov introduces the “tradition of discontinuity” as the concept particularly characteristic of the Russian cultural trajectory in “K svoeobraziiu zhivopisi russkogo avangarda nachala XX veka,” in id., Russkaia zhivopis’. Probuzhdenie pamiati (Moscow: Iskusstvoznanie, 1998), 277, 278. 3. For a general discussion, see John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky (1974; New York: Routledge, 2010). 4. In current philosophical and political science terminology, the concept of “ideology” is broadly defined as any system of ideas and views that, first, underlies the perception and evaluation of the individual’s relationship to reality, and, second, articulates possible courses of action intended to reinforce, develop, or change that relationship. For example, Karl Mannheim, defining the concept of ideology in his influential study Ideologie und Utopie, first published in 1929, argues: “In order to understand the present situation of thought, it is necessary to start with the problem of ‘ideology.’ For most people, the term ‘ideology’ is closely bound up with Marxism, and their reactions to the term are largely determined by the association. It is therefore first necessary to state that although Marxism contributed a great deal to the original statement of the problem, both the word and its meaning go farther back in history than Marxism, and ever since its time new meanings of the word have emerged, which have taken shape independently of it” (Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils [New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1966], 55).

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5. “There is no place for the easel picture in this consciousness. Its force and meaning lie in its extrautilitarianism, in the fact that it serves no other aim than delighting, ‘caressing,’ the eye” (Osip Brik, “From Pictures to Textile Prints” [1924], in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John Bowlt [New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988], 249, 245). 6. Christine Lodder’s Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) has already became a classic of its sort, but there is plenty of recently published solid research on this later period; see, e.g., Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Maria Gough, Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 7. This major concept, annunciated by Voldem1rs Matvejs (Vladimir Markov) in his theoretical essay “The Principles of the New Art” (1912), is discussed in more detail in chapter 1. 8. In his essay “The Cow and the Violin: Toward a History of Russian Dada,” John Bowlt suggests that “many of the gestures of the Russian avant-garde merit the epithet ‘Dada.’ In fact to a striking degree, they parallel the aspirations, antics, and attainments of the Dada phenomenon as it manifested itself in Zurich, Hannover, New York, and other western centers during and after World War I” (The Eastern Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan, ed. Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka [New York: G. K. Hall, 1998], 137). On Russian avant-garde and Dada, see also Zaumnyi futurizm i dadaizm v russkoi kul’ture, ed. Luigi Magarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, and Daniella Rizzi (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 9. In 1913, Kazimir Malevich introduced his concept of alogism in art, which refutes logic and common sense in order to engage intuition and the unconscious, and broadly corresponds to the play of dissonance and displacement (or the Futurist shift, as defined by Aleksei Kruchenykh in 1912). 10. The Russian term zaum “has been variously translated as ‘trans-mental,’ ‘transrational,’ ‘trans-sense,’ ‘metalogical,’ or ‘nonsense’ language. Perhaps the cleverest and best rendering is Paul Schmidt’s beyonsense” (Gerald Janecek, Zaum [San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1996], 1). 11. See Mikhail Le Dantiu, “The Painting of the Everythingists” (ca. 1914), in Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, 1890s to Mid-1930s, ed. Ilia Dorontchenkov and Nina Gurianova, trans. Charles Rougle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 180–84. The term “everythingness” derives from the Russian neologism vsechestvo, presumably invented by Zdanevich; it is sometimes also translated into English as “everythingism.” 12. There is a discrepancy between Russian and Western chronology: according to the Julian calendar, which was officially used in Russia until 1918, the Bolshevik revolution took place on October 25, which is November 7 in the Gregorian calendar. 13. Anatolii Lunacharsky, “Revolution and Art,” in Russian Art of the AvantGarde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 194. 14. Benjamin’s terminology is in reference to postrevolutionary Russian art

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in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 1968]). 15. On these issues, see the first-rate research by Jane Ashton Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow AvantGarde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16. For related discussion on these postmodern movements in Western art, see André Reszler, L’esthétique anarchiste (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973), 87–100. 17. I am applying to aesthetics the philosophical concept of ontological anarchy developed by Reiner Schürmann in his original interpretation of Heideggerian ideas in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), discussed in more detail in chapter 1. 18. Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe (New York: Knopf, 1970), 61, 62. Matei C3linescu confirms Egbert’s account that “the cultural notion of the avant-garde” had been introduced in 1825, under the influence of the utopian philosophy of Henri de Saint-Simon. C3linescu is convinced that although the word developed “a figurative meaning at least as early as the Renaissance,”“the metaphor” of the avant-garde—“expressing a selfconsciously advanced position in politics, literature, and art, religion, etc. —was not employed with any consistency before the nineteenth century” (C3linescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987], 97). 19. See related discussion throughout Raymond Williams,“The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” in id., The Politics of Modernism: Against New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 49–63. 20. Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 32. 21. For Nietzsche’s influence on Russian culture of this period, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2002), § 1,“The Seed-Time: The Russification of Nietzsche, 1890–1917.” 22. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), and Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Thedor Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977). 23. See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 24. C3linescu, Five Faces, 113. 25. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918. Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958); Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts; Reszler, L’esthétique anarchiste. 26.“While Marxism seeks to politicize art, Reszler claimed, anarchism by contrast succeeds in overcoming the dichotomy of aesthetics and politics by affirming the artwork of the unique individual. It underlines revolt, rupture and sin-

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gularity rather than the political commitment of the writer or his work” (Ali Nematollahy, “Proudhon, from Aesthetics to Politics,” Anarchist Studies 13, no. 1 [2005]: 47–60; quotation, 48). 27. Allan Antliff argues that anarchist politics “infused” the artistic movement, which “upended the cultural hegemony of the academy system through alternative exhibitions, new teaching methodologies, and artistic experimentation,” thus creating “a modernism that fulfills the original meaning of avant-garde—the conjunction of revolutionary social and political tendencies with artistic goals” (Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-garde [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 2). 28. Jesse S. Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006). 29. “While it is true that many regarded anarchism not as a political cause but as a cultural commodity, it is also true that a majority of Jean Grave’s [editor of Kropotkin’s newspaper La Révolte] readers were workers and artisans who can hardly be charged with the sin of political slumming” (David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997], 123). 30. C3linescu, Five Faces, 112. 31. Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007). 32. Herbert Read, “The Politics of the Unpolitical,” in id., To Hell with Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 37–47. 33. Retrospectively, however, some of them tried to establish a bond between themselves and revolutionary movements. For related discussion, see my essay “Za sem’iu pechatiami slova,” in Pamiat’ teper’ mnogoe razvorachivaet: Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Nina Gurianova (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1999), 311–39. 34. “The interplay of ideology and utopia appears as an interplay of the two fundamental directions of the social imagination. The first tends toward integration, repetition and a mirroring of the given order. The second tends to disintegration because it is eccentric. But the one cannot work without the other” (Paul Ricoeur,“Ideology and Utopia,” in id., From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991], 323). 35. David Shterenberg,“Our Task” (1920), in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 189. 36. Jacques Rancière,“The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” trans. JeanPhilippe Deranty, Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 16. 37. M. M. Bakhtin,“Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences” (1974), in id., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 166–67. 38. The first chapter of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, published in 1928 by Pavel Medvedev, a literary scholar from Bakhtin’s circle in Vitebsk, is devoted entirely to the study of ideologies. In the opinion of many scholars, the basic text and certain ideas of this book belong to Bakhtin and his concept

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of “material aesthetics.” The two notions of particular importance to the present context are the “work of art” and the “ideological environment,” which are a logical continuation of Bakhtin’s 1919 essay “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’ ” (Art and Answerability): The work of art, like every other ideological product, is an object of intercourse. . . . The poet’s audience, the readers of a novel, those in a concert hall—these are collective organizations of a special type, sociologically distinctive and exceptionally important. Without these distinctive forms of social intercourse there are no poems, no odes, no novels, no symphonies. Definite forms of social intercourse are constituent to the meaning of the works of arts themselves. (P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 11)

This interactive sphere is regarded as the “ideological environment”: The ideological environment is the environment of consciousness. . . . The ideological environment is constantly in the active dialectical process of generation. Contradictions are always present, constantly being overcome and reborn. But for each given collective in each given epoch of its historical development this environment is a unique and complete concrete whole, uniting science, art, ethics, and other ideologies in a living and immediate synthesis. (ibid., 14)

39. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” in id., Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press: 1990), 1. 40. Bakhtin, “K philosophskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk” (Toward the Philosophical Foundations of the Human Sciences; ca. early 1940s), cited in M. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 409–10. 41. Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” 2. 42. “The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitfulness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life” (ibid.).

1. THE AESTHETICS OF ANARCHY

1. Sarabianov, “K svoeobraziiu zhivopisi russkogo avangarda nachala XX veka,” in id., Russkaia zhivopis’, 284–85. 2. The Futurist artist Vladimir Markov (Voldem1rs Matvejs [1877–1914], born in Riga, Latvia) should not to be confused with his namesake Vladimir Fedorovich Markov (b. 1920), the prominent scholar of Russian Futurism in poetry, cited below as V. F. Markov. 3. Thomas von Hartmann,“On Anarchy in Music,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, new documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 118. In “A History of the Almanac” (ibid., 42), Lankheit writes that this essay of von Hartmann’s was the result of an intensive exchange of ideas with Kandinsky. 4. The French critic Marcel Boulanger originally introduced the term “Cubo-

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Futurism” in 1912 in connection with French and Italian painting. See Giovanni Lista,“Futurisme et CuboFuturisme,” in Cahiers du Musée nationale d’Art moderne 5 (1980): 459. The earliest appearance of the term “Cubo-Futurism” in the Russian context was in Kornei Chukovsky’s 1913 article “Ego-Futurists and Cubo-Futurists,” according to V. F. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 119. 5. See the catalogue of the Union of Youth exhibition, Soiuz Molodezhi: Katalog vystavki kartin (St. Petersburg, 1913). A few years later, Malevich traced the origins of the Russian avant-garde movement to Cubism, which he linked to Suprematism in various essays of 1915–19. For further discussion, see the most comprehensive study on Malevich to date, Andrei Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 4 vols. (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Lund Humphries, 2010). 6. Dmitri V. Sarabianov, Russian Art from Neoclassicism to the Avant-Garde, 1800–1917 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 269. Nikolai Khardzhiev is more categorical in his assessment, stating: “In Russia there was really no such thing as Futurist painting, if we discount the occasional experiments of Malevich (The Knife Grinder), Goncharova (Airplane above a Train, Cyclist, Dynamo Machine), Larionov (City, Out Walking), Rozanova (Fire in the City). Cubism, on the other hand, exercised a direct influence on young Russian artists” (Khardzhiev, “Cubo-Futurism,” in A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-garde, ed. Evgeniia Petrova, John E. Bowlt, and Mark Konecny, trans. Alan Myers, James Frank Goodwin, and Irina Menchova [St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum, 2002], 81). This statement was proved to be not quite correct, however, by the convincing centennial exhibit of Italian and Russian Futurism curated by Gabriella Belli and Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, which brought forth a lot of new research material. See the catalogue Centinario del movimento artistico, Futurismo: Rivoluzione radicale Italia–Russia (Moscow: Krasnaya Ploshchad, 2008). 7. Nikolai Khardzhiev, Ot Mayakovskogo do Kruchenykh. Izbrannye raboty o russkom futurizme, ed. Sergei Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Gileia, 2006), 37. “It is true that both Burliuks were at that time going through a cubist phase in their painting, and the Hylaeans as a group were allies of the largely cubist Union of Youth. There was much discussion of cubism in Russia in 1913,” V. F. Markov confirms (Russian Futurism, 118). Alexander Shevchenko, a member of the Donkey’s Tail group, published Printsipy kubizma (Principles of Cubism) that year, and two translations into Russian of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du cubisme (1912) appeared. 8. Benedikt Livshits, The One and A Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 87. Hylaea banded together in 1912 in the wake of visits by Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Larionov, Livshits, and others to Chernianka in the Crimea, where David, Vladimir, and Nikolai Burliuk’s father was the steward on Count Mordvinov’s estate. Herodotus in his Histories, bk. 4, assigns the name Hylaea—Woodlands—to territory northeast of the Crimean peninsula anciently ruled by the Scythians. The Burliuk brothers took part in archaeological excavations there in the early twentieth century, and according to the poet Benedikt Livshits, the whole atmosphere there stimulated the projection of the past onto the present and the use of archaic imagery

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in their collective self-identification: “Hylaea, the ancient Hylaea, trodden by our feet, was acquiring a symbolic meaning, it was to become an omen. Even later strata were exposed. After Hesiod came Homer” (ibid., 44). 9. In their manifesto “Go to Hell” (January 1914), they discarded the name “Cubo-Futurism,” and they simply called themselves “Futurists” in the titles of their publications. 10. Genrikh Tasteven, “Futurism: Toward a New Symbolism” (1914), in Russian and Soviet Views, ed. Dorontchenkov, 160. Tasteven viewed Futurism as a “common ideological platform” (ibid.). 11. Natalia Goncharova,“Futurism” (1914), in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., 214. 12. Aleksandr Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievement,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 47. 13. Varvara Stepanova,“Dnevnik N° 1,” in Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda (Letters, Poetry, Diaries), ed. V. A. Rodchenko and A. N. Lavrentiev (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), 73. 14. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 3 vols., ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–97), 1: 334. 15. See Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); id., Heidegger on Being and Acting. 16. George Woodcock indicates that the first use of “anarchism” as a positive philosophical term appears to have been by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in making “his historic proclamation of anarchist faith” in Qu’est-ce-que la propriété? (1840). Proudhon was the first writer to call himself an anarchist, but Woodcock names Gerrard Winstanley (1609–ca. 1660) and William Godwin (1756–1836) as predecessors. See Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004), 98, 100. 17. George Crowder,“Anarchism,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1998), 247. This revised definition of anarchism is becoming quite common. See also the theory of poststructuralist anarchism, developed by Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 18. Matthew Arnold, for example, in his Culture and Anarchy (a series of essays first published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1867–68 and collected as a book in 1869). 19. P. Diamandopoulos, “Arche,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 145. 20. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 5. 21. Ibid. “Anarchy in this sense does not become operative as a concept until the moment when the great sheet of constellations that fix presencing in constant presence folds up, closes in upon itself.” 22. Ibid., 6: “Action appears without principle in the age of the turning, when presence as ultimate identity turns into presencing as irreducible difference. . . . The most adequate expression to cover the whole of these premises could be ‘anarchy principle.’ ” 23. Ibid., 6, 7. I would like to add to this argument that when Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s political ideas were transferred into the realm of aesthetics, they

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underwent a qualitative transformation and lost their immediate focality (as in politics). 24. “A genuine beginning, as a leap, is always a head start, in which everything to come is already leaped over, even if as something still veiled. The beginning already contains the end latent within itself. A genuine beginning, however, has nothing of the neophyte character of the primitive. The primitive, because it lacks the bestowing, grounding leap and head start, is always futureless. It is not capable of releasing anything more from itself because it contains nothing more than that in which it is caught” (Martin Heidegger,“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993], 201). 25. Ibid. 26. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 228, as discussed by Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 1–12. 27. Franz Marc, “Two Pictures,” in Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Lankheit, 69. 28. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 108. 29. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 135. 30. Ibid., 111. 31. Nikolai Berdyaev, excerpts from “The Crisis in Art” (1917), in Russian and Soviet Views, ed. Dorontchenkov, 162. 32. C3linescu, Five Faces, 129. 33. Walter Gobbers, “Modernism, Modernity, Avant-Garde,” in The Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts, ed. Christian Berg, Frank Durieux, and Geert Lernout (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 9, states: The phenomenon of (artistic) modernism must be viewed in its wider social-cultural context, notably that of high- and late-capitalist society, dominated and propelled by industrialization, massification and technological progress, but also soon to be shaken by debacles such as the First World War and upheavals such as the October Revolution. Although the phrase “culture of crisis” may be a striking epitome of the situation, it does have a rather negative connotation which, perhaps somewhat one-sidedly, suggests chaos, uncertainty and absurdity, and these are exactly the arguments which opponents like Lukács wield in order to condemn modernism as an undermining force. In fact, the spiritual climate surrounding the modernist artist is ambivalent: it is above all exhilarating and exalting, because of the momentum that mankind seemed to be gaining and because of the endless prospects that seemed to open up, but at the same time it is also frustrating, frightening and alienating, because of the discrepancy which is more and more acutely felt to exist between (spiritual) man and (technological) civilization.

34. David Burliuk,“Cubism,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 76. 35. “The avant-garde does not announce one style or another; it is in itself a style, or better, an antistyle” (C3linescu, Five Faces, 119). Early Futurism was probably the first realization of this anti-aesthetics. Apollinaire, who published his manifesto L’antitradition futuriste in 1913, was an anarchist. Goncharova called herself an “anti-artist” (Sharp, Russian Modernism, 221).

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36. Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Larionov, “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto, 1913,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 81. 37. “The ‘goal’ as such, Heidegger comments, would signify ‘meaning’ which, in turn, is understood by Nietzsche as ‘value’. Therefore, this is a nihilist declaration of faith intending to affirm, to will, that the world have neither meaning nor value.” (Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 259–60). 38. Maurice Blanchot,“Reflection on Nihilism,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 144, 145. 39. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (London: Gollancz, 1955), 145. 40. Elena Guro—Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Nils Ake Nilsson and Anna Ljunggren, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 25 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988), 54. 41. Ivan Ignatiev, “Preslovie k knige Gnedova Smert’ iskusstvu,” preface to Vasilisk Gnedov’s 1913 book Smert’ iskusstvu (Death to Art), in Gnedov, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. N. Khardzhiev and M. Marzaduri (Trent: Università di Trento, 1992), 128. 42. Blanchot, “Reflection on Nihilism,” 374. 43. See Viacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003). In the editor’s introduction to this volume, Michael Wachtel explains the Symbolist term “life-creation” as “a creativity that expressed (or ‘reflected,’ to use a Goethean image that Ivanov particularly admired) divine will” (ibid., xiv). Irina Paperno provides a further definition: Symbolism offers a unity of artlifehood. . . . The opposition between “word” and “thing” is resolved by advancing a concept of “symbol,” a total equivalent of the “essence” it connotes, that is constructed by analogy with divine Logos. . . . Viewed in this context, “life-creation” in daily life means much more than organizing life aesthetically, as if it were a literary text. . . . “Life-creation” appears as a manifestation of utopianism inspired by the atmosphere of apocalyptic forebodings and nurtured by the amalgamation of mysticism and positivism in turn-of-the-century culture. (Irina Paperno, “The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. id. and Joan Delaney Grossman [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 22, 23)

44. See Nikolai Evreinov, Teatralizatsiia zhizni [Poet, teatralizuiushchii zhizn’] (Moscow: Vremia, 1922), 5. In his English edition, Evreinov explains “the instinct of theatricalization” as the pre-aesthetic desire to be “different” (Nicolas Evreinoff, The Theatre in Life [New York: Brentano, 1927], 23). 45. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 4. 46. C3linescu, Five Faces, 132. The term “anti-teleological” is borrowed from Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 47. “Thinking and poetry corrode teleocracy as rust from a gentle rain corrodes iron. Again, it is Meister Eckhart who dared translate such corrosion into a discourse on action: ‘The just man seeks nothing in his works. Those are serfs

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and hirelings who seek anything in their works and who act for the sake of some ‘why’ ” (Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 280). 48. Untitled manifesto from A Trap for Judges, 2, in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 54. 49. Elena Guro, Selected Writings from the Archives, ed. Anna Ljunggren and Nina Gourianova (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1995), 98. 50. Zdanevich and Larionov, “Why We Paint Ourselves,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 81. 51. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 111. 52. Nikolai Berdyaev, Krizis iskusstva (Moscow: G. A. Leman and S. I. Sakharov, 1918), 23. 53.Aleksei Kruchenykh,“New Ways of the Word,”in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 75. 54. Olga Rozanova, “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism” (1915–16), trans. John. E. Bowlt, in Nina Gurianova, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1918 (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000), 195. 55. Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, 144. 56. Berdyaev, Krizis iskusstva, 25. 57. On Boronali, see Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 149–51. 58.Aleksei Kruchenykh,“New Ways of the Word,”in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 76. 59. In his exhaustive study of the politics of Italian Futurism, Günter Berghaus writes that Marinetti was repeatedly invited to speak at anarchist meetings because “his exultation of violence concurred with the anarchists’ revolutionary sentiments,” and further reports: “He quotes the example of the French Revolution to show that violence is the prime agent to achieve liberty, equality, and justice” (Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 [Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996], 56, 57). 60. See Alberto Ciampi, Futuristi e anarchici—quali rapporti? (Pistoia: Archivio Famiglia Berneri, 1989). By 1910, the Futurists had a strong alliance with anarcho-syndicalist groups. Nonetheless, Berghaus points out that the anarchist journals, which published articles on Futurism, “judged that, despite its cultural value, Futurism has to be rejected, mainly because its patriotic and bellicose attitude was contrary to the interests of working class” (Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 59). 61. Egbert, Social Radicalism, 274. 62. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For related discussion, see also Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 63. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 67. 64. This early avant-garde tendency toward the active involvement of the reader

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or spectator goes along with some of the formulations offered to define contemporary anarchist literary theory. According to Jesse Cohn, the anarchist movement has produced “a form of literary theory—a critical aesthetics and epistemology grounded in its emancipatory ethics,” and for anarchists “the act of interpretation is also a creative act” (Cohn,“What Is Anarchist Literary Theory?” in Anarchist Studies 15, no. 2 [Autumn–Winter 2007]: 115). 65. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 5, 6. 66. Nikolai Burliuk,“Poetic Principles,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 84. 67. In his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Peter Kropotkin criticized Malthusian ideas of the “struggle for life” and some Social Darwinist theories that branched out of these ideas. Kropotkin offered his own revisionist interpretation of natural selection and the Darwinian theory of evolution to show “the importance of sociability and habits of mutual aid in the evolution of both the animal world and the human race” (Kropotkin, “The Theory of Evolution and Mutual Aid,” in id., Evolution and Environment [Montréal: Black Rose Books], 117). Kropotkin argued that “Darwin himself, in the Descent of Man, recognized the dominating value of sociability and ‘sympathetic’ feelings for the preservation of species,” but many biologists “cannot reconcile this assertion with the part that Darwin and Wallace assigned to the individual Malthusian struggle for individual advantages in their theory of Natural Selection” (ibid.). While recognizing this contradiction, Kropotkin offers a solution by shifting the accent from the individual struggle to the “associated struggle” of any group of species: the “struggle for life cannot possibly have the aspect of an acute inner war within each tribe and group. It cannot be a struggle for individual advantages. It must be an associated struggle of the group against its common enemies and the hostile agencies of environment. Natural selection in this case also takes a quite different aspect” (ibid., 118). 68. Velimir Khlebnikov, “An Attempt to Formulate a Concept in the Natural Sciences,” in id., Collected Works, 1: 224. 69. Ibid. 70. “The movement of time (that is, clock-time) cannot traverse the interval of being because, as Blanchot says, time in this event is no longer dialectical. It is a time ‘without negation.’ This means (among other things) that it is outside the order of conceptual determination in which a merely natural thing is transformed into something essential—an object of consciousness, a thing of the spirit, an identity or universal: an object in the full sense of objectivity (pour soi)” (Gerald L. Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006]). 71. See Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task, trans. Elisabeth Koutaisoff and Marilyn Minto (Lausanne: Honeyglen Publishing / L’Age d’Homme, 1990), and P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and the author (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). 72. Jane Ashton Sharp looks at vsechestvo as an international, modernist project that “inverted the priorities of art criticism and cultural discourse that

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fetishized originality, authorship, and period style” (Sharp, Russian Modernism, 260). 73. Aleksandr Grishchenko, O sviaziakh russkoi zhivopisi s Vizantiei i Zapadom, XIII–XX veka (Moscow: A. Grishchenko, 1913), 12. 74. Mikhail Larionov, “Predislovie k katalogu vystavki lubka,” in Pervaia vystavka lubka, organizovannaia N. D. Vinogradovym (exhibition catalogue, Moscow, 19–24 February 1913). 75. Ibid. 2. IDEAS

1. The acute social awareness and anti-authoritarian essence of the early avantgarde may suggest certain similarities between the Futurists’ ideological drive and the “revolt of fourteen” artists, led by Ivan Kramskoy, who seceded from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art in 1863. The late Camilla Gray, who took “the revolt of fourteen” as the chronological starting point for her study The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), was the first to recognize these parallels. Later, this group, who were close to the populists, developed into the Wanderers. Paradoxically, avant-gardists always positioned themselves against the reformed generation of the Wanderers. The latter’s artistic association had become a powerhouse of the art world’s establishment by the beginning of the twentieth century, but they forfeited their values and initial intensity. 2. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 40. 3. Antliff, Anarchy and Art, 11. 4. “Most Russian anarchists harbored a deep-seated distrust of rational systems and of the intellectuals who constructed them” (Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists [Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005], 91). Avrich generalizes this tendency as “anti-intellectualism,” which seems a bit far-fetched, considering the significant involvement of Russian intellectuals in different anarchist fractions. 5. See “Some Unpublished Notes by Kropotkin,” in Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 260. 6. See Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 57; emphasis added. 7. This is part of the authorial description of Kandinsky’s “Komposition 6,” in the exhibition catalogue Kandinsky, 1901–1913 (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913), xxxviii. 8. Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Dolgoff, 55–56. 9. Ibid., 56, 57. These key themes led Georgii Chulkov to draw the attention of mystical anarchists to Bakunin, “who at one time was, after all, not only a Hegelian, but also a mystic” (Georgii Chulkov, “The Paths of Freedom,” in A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1918, ed. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal [Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1982], 184). 10. Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Dolgoff, 57. 11. Ibid., 238.

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12. Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 93. 13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Jane Kentish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123. 14. “Some Unpublished Notes by Kropotkin,” in Miller, Kropotkin, 260. 15. Egbert, Social Radicalism, 199. 16. Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 144–45. 17. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (Paris, 1865), quoted in Egbert, Social Radicalism, 199. See also Nematollahy, “Proudhon, from Aesthetics to Politics.” 18. Egbert, Social Radicalism, 200. 19. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 13. 20. See, e.g., Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, s.v.“Beau, Beauté” (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 64, where an unnamed “philosophe” concludes tritely, on discovering a play thought beautiful in France to be tedious in England, that “le beau est très relatif” (the beautiful is very relative); thus “il s’epargna la peine de composer un long traité sur le beau” (he spared himself the trouble of having to compose a long treatise on the beautiful). 21. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 52. 22. Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 28. 23. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 35. 24. Andrei Krusanov, “A. E. Kruchenykh letters to A. A. Shemshurin (1915– 1917),” Russian Literature 65, no. 1–3 (2009): 133. 25. Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in id., Speech Genres, trans. McGee, 166. 26. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 10. 27. “It took the energy of the artistic avant-garde to open a rift between art and beauty that would previously have been unthinkable—that, as we shall see, remained unthinkable long after it was opened, largely because the connection between art and beauty was taken to have the power of an a priori necessity” (Danto, Abuse of Beauty, 30). 28. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), 292. Tolstoy’s influence on Collingwood’s and Croce’s aesthetic theories deserve a separate investigation. 29. Later this idea was developed into a theory of empathy in aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87) and by Tolstoy’s contemporary Theodor Lipps (1851–1914). 30. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 40. 31. “Schlegel recognizes moral and philosophical art as inseparable from aesthetic art,” Tolstoy writes (ibid., 22). Schlegel rejected the privileging of the mimetic theory of the ancients (mimesis) over modern art by defining the distinctive character of his historical period. Later, he came to regard the true source of art as “feeling”: “It is feeling which reveals to us true ideas and correct intentions, and gives that indefinable charm” (Friedrich Schlegel, “From Descrip-

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tion of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands in the Years 1802–04,” in Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood [Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993], 932–33). 32. Schlegel, “From Description of Paintings,” in Art in Theory, ed. Harrison and Wood, 931, 933. 33. Ibid., 931. 34. Moreover, Schlegel passionately promoted the concept of the genius of the art rooted in a “system of Christian philosophy founded on religion”: “Every effort will be fruitless, unless the painter be endowed with earnest religious feeling, genuine devotion, and immortal faith. Fancy sporting with the symbols of Catholicism, uninspired by that love which is stronger than death, will never attain exalted Christian beauty” (ibid., 932). 35. Ibid., 932–33. 36. Caryl Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 237–51. 37. For a very interesting comparison of Tolstoy and Collingwood, in particular, the latter’s distinction between “fabrication” and “creation,” see T. J. Diffey, Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 38. Elena Guro,“Excerpts from Correspondence with Mikhail Matiushin,1902– 1907,” in Elena Guro: Selected Writings, ed. Ljunggren and Gourianova, 99. 39. Ecumenical religious ideas propagated by Tolstoy were considered heretical by the Russian Orthodox Church, and he was expelled. 40. On second thought, Guro crossed out these lines in her letter. 41. Elena Guro—Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Nilsson and Ljunggren, 134. 42. For more detailed discussion, see my “Tolstoy i Nietzsche v tvorchestve duxa Eleny Guro,” Europa Orientalis 13, no. 1 (1994): 63–76. 43. Lev Shestov, “The Good in the Teachings of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching,” in id., Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 26 .“It was beyond doubt for everyone: Count Tolstoy and Nietzsche mutually excluded each other. Furthermore, each of these masters regarded the other as his antipode” (ibid.). 44. There is no factual evidence to support the suggestion that Guro’s perspective was influenced, not only by the “aristocratic” ethos propounded by Nietzsche and Bergson, but by the circle of anarcho-individualist artists and writers associated with the “aristocracy” doctrine in France. This seems possible, however, considering some of the major themes that, according to Mark Antliff, pervade this concept: valorization of artistic creativity above all, the definition of life as “an unending” creation, and beauty as a necessary part of it, which must exist outside of any classifications or rules. Antliff traces the evolution of this doctrine, first propounded in 1906, in his article “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism: The ‘Aestheticism’ of the Action d’art Group, 1906–1920,”Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 99–120. 45. See the first double issue of the journal on art and aesthetics Mir iskusstva (World of Art) 1–2 (1899), published under the auspices of the art group of the same name, organized by Sergei Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois, and Dmitri Filosofov. This whole volume, in particular, Diaghilev’s essay “Slozhnye voprosy” (Com-

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plex Questions), turned into a polemical discussion of Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (which had come out just a year earlier). Albeit with some reservations, the founders of Mir iskusstva supported the ideology of “art for art’s sake,” “the religion of beauty,” and aestheticism, and became the groundbreakers for Russian Art Nouveau and Symbolism. 46. “Art historians have also drawn relations between twentieth-century radical artistic developments and elements from the intellectual history of iconoclasm and iconomachy. Horst Brederkamp sees an affiliation between the fifteenthcentury artists who threw their own works into Savonarola’s pyres and ‘anti-art,’ while Werner Hofmann compared the Reformers’ criticism of relics with the ‘art of artlessness,’ and especially Duchamp’s ‘nominalist’ Readymades” (Dario Gambino, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution [London: Reaktion Books, 1997], 260). 47. Ibid., 148–49. 48. Ibid., 257–58. 49. The tendency to use religious symbolism in discussions of art, and to draw a parallel between art and spiritual values, was generally typical of Kandinsky, Matiushin, and later particularly so of Malevich. Cf., e.g., Matiushin’s remark that “in the cause of art, as in the cause of Christ, whoever is not with me is against me, whoever is not interested in the new art is harmful to it,” quoted in Guro’s diary (Elena Guro—Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Nilsson and Ljunggren, 58). What is evidently meant are Matiushin’s views of art and his peculiar moral code of artistic self-discipline, formed during his period of absorption in the ideas of John Ruskin, which had a strong impact on Tolstoy as well. 50. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 153. 51. Kruchenykh to Guro, 25 February 1913, in Elena Guro: Selected Writings, ed. Ljunggren and Gourianova, 91. 52. See, e.g., Oslinyi khvost i Mishen (Donkey’s Tail and Target), a miscellany published by Larionov’s group (Moscow, 1913). 53. Alla Povelikhina and Evgenii Kovtun, Russian Painted Shop Signs and Avant-Garde Artists, trans. Thomas Crane (Leningrad: Aurora, 1991), 75. 54. Kirill Zdanevich, Niko Pirosmanashvili (Moscow: Iskusstvo,1964), 30. 55. “ ‘I strove only so that each part of the work would have an independent interest’ Tolstoy maintained. And then he wrote and struck out the following remarkable words: ‘which would consist not in the development of events, but in development [itself].’ Development itself—that is what aperture is designed to convey. It requires unpredetermined futurity, which means an escape from all ways in which an end of structure can be already given. One may put it this way: Tolstoy’s war on foreshadowing, structure, and closure was ultimately an attempt to present a written artifact as an artifact still being written, and so closer to lived experience” (Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994], 171). This notion of “futurity” and the perception of a work as the sum of independent parts “as such,” each with its own interest, may have been what led Kruchenykh once to pronounce Tolstoy “the first futurist.” 56. [Mikhail Matiushin?], review of Sadok sudei 2 (St. Petersburg: Nash vek, 1913), in Soiuz molodezhi (St. Petersburg) 3 (1913): 83.

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57. Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, 154. 58. Soiuz molodezhi 3 (1913): 5. 59. Elena Guro, Nebesnye verbliuzhata (St. Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1914), 14. 60. Vladimir Markov,“The Principles of New Art,” in Russian Art of the AvantGarde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 23–40. 61. Ibid., 35. 62. Zara Mints points out this crucial opposition between Guro’s “spiritual pathos and way of seeing the world, and the pathos and style of Tolstoy” (Mints, “Futurizm i neoromantizm,” in Poetika russkogo simvolizma [St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2004], 317–26). 63. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Blaue Reiter Almanach, ed. id. and Marc, 157. 64. Many Russian intellectuals read German fluently. Nevertheless, the first Russian translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeared in Novyi zhurnal inostrannoi literatury 5–12 (1898), and it was published in book form just the following year. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (in N. N. Polilov’s translation) was also published in St. Petersburg in 1899. The first volume of his collected works appeared in 1900. One of the founders of Mir iskusstva (The World of Art) was Sergei Diaghilev, a passionate follower of Nietzsche’s, who published extensively about him. From Nietzsche, they inherited the desire for a complete overturn of all values accepted by bourgeois society—political, moral and cultural. . . . they demanded the total liberation of the human personality from the fetters of organized society. In their view, even the voluntary communes of Peter Kropotkin might limit the freedom of the individual. A number of Anarchist-Individualists found the ultimate expression of their social alienation in violence and crime, others attached themselves to avant-garde literary and artistic circles, but the majority remained “philosophical” anarchists who conducted animated parlor discussions and elaborated their individualist theories in ponderous journals and books. (Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 56)

65. See Woodcock, Anarchism, 335–51. 66. In 1882, new strict press regulations were issued by the government, followed by a list of books proscribed for libraries. Soon after that Minister of Education Delianov issued an infamous regulation forbidding the matriculation of the children of the lower classes in secondary schools. This was mockingly referred to as the “scullery maids’ son regulation.” 67. See Anarkhisty. Dokumenty i materialy, 1883–1916, ed. V. V. Kriven’kii (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 430. 68. See Igor Smirnov, “Mirskaia eres’. (Psikhologicheskie zamechaniia o filosofii anarkhizma),” in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 41 (1996): 75–91. 69. N. Otverzhennyi, “Glavnye techeniia v anarkhicheskoi literature XX veka,” in Mikhailu Bakuninu 1876–1926, ed. Aleksei Borovoi (Moscow: Golos truda, 1926), 331. 70. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 161. 71. Georgii Chulkov, “On Mystical Anarchism,” trans. Marian Schwartz, in Revolution of the Spirit, ed. Bohachevsky-Chomiak and Rosenthal, 183. 72. “The logical anarchist must deny not only any state, but also the world itself, inasmuch as it is chaotic, pluralist, and mortal” (ibid., 185).

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73. Chulkov, “On the Affirmation of the Personality,” in Revolution of the Spirit, ed. Bohachevsky-Chomiak and Rosenthal, 187–93. 74. Ibid., 191. 75. “Indeed, the very vagueness of mystical anarchism, while a fault from the philosophical point of view, was probably an asset, for it enabled audiences to construct their personal fantasies of a utopia of sensual gratification. . . . Lunacharskii conceded in 1906 the great interest in anarchism and in 1908 contributed an essay to Chulkov’s anthology Teatr in which he argued for socialism as the liberator of the individual person. A. Smirnov, also recognizing in 1906 the popularity of anarchism, attributed this popularity to the ‘unbearable conditions of life’ which make ‘emotional anarchism’ (which would seem to include mystical anarchism) a natural even inevitable fact” (Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal,“The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905,” Slavic Review 36, no. 4 [1977]: 626). 76. Roman Jakobson recollects in a letter to Kruchenykh: “Viacheslav Ivanov delivered a lecture, supposedly on [the Lithuanian painter and composer M. K.] Ciurlionis, but actually on the Futurians. . . . Here’s the approximate content of part of it: the most sympathetic of youths, irrational tramps, prodigal sons who, after abandoning the paternal home, remain solitary on a tall mountain top, rejecting harmony. We shouldn’t poke fun at them, but erect a monument to their madly bold feat; nevertheless, let us raise a hymn to the divine harmony, etc., etc. No one is a prophet in his own land, but they won’t find themselves a fatherland or a refuge anywhere; they are the sole true Russian anarchists” (Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Stephen Rudy [New York: Marsilio, 1992], 104). 77. S. Gorodetskii, I. Davydov, Viacheslav Ivanov, A. Meier, S. Rafalovich, P. Soloviev, Lev Shestov, and K. Erberg considered themselves mystical anarchists; some of their ideas were shared by M. Gofman, D. Merezhkovskii, Z. Gippius, and D. Filosofov. See Rosenthal, New Myth, New World, 33–68. 78. Viacheslav Ivanov,“Krizis individualizma,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., ed. Dmitri Ivanov and O. Deshart (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1971–79), 1: 839. 3. MOVEMENTS

1. Jeremy Howard, The Union of Youth: An Artists’ Society of the Russian AvantGarde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 1. In his assessment of the Union of Youth, Howard emphasizes: “Their diversity hints at a certain synthesism, which became apparent in their attempts to unite the visual, musical, and literary arts. They welcomed contact with all artists concerned with renewal in the arts and frequently took steps to broaden their spheres of activity—both creatively and geographically. Thus the Union of Youth held talks with German and Nordic artists and took its exhibitions to Riga and Moscow and planned to take them farther afield (to Baku, Berlin, and Helsinki).” 2. This museum of modern art was never created, because in December 1913, the major sponsor had withdrawn its support, and as a result the Union of Youth dissolved; see ibid., 223–24.

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3. The one-page Union of Youth manifesto was printed in St. Petersburg on 23 March 1913. Cited here and below from Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 185–87. 4. This is evident from his letter of February 1914 to Aristarkh Lentulov, one of the founding members of the Jack of Diamonds artists’ society: “A permanent gallery in Rome . . . according to Marinetti is the citadel of Futurism. Marinetti wants the Russian section ‘to be large and of enormous importance to Italy.’ Marinetti visited Russia on my invitation. Before he met with me, I warned him of the basic differences between the views of the Russian and Italian schools and of the possibilities of unpleasant complications . . . he is willing to accommodate all of our wishes and proposes ‘parallel presentations’ in which the complete freedom and independence of the Russian artists will be preserved” (Nikolai Kulbin to Lentulov, cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 26–27). 5. Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 104–5. 6. Cesare G. De Michelis, Il futurismo italiano in Russia, 1909–1929 (Bari: De Donato, 1973), 34–35. See also id., L’avanguardia trasversale. Il futurismo in Italia e in Russia (Venice: Marsilio, 2009). 7. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Babushkam akademii” (To Academic Grandmas), in id., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols., ed. V. A. Katanian (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955–61), 1: 367. In the notes to his public lecture entitled “Dostizheniia futurizma” (The Achievements of Futurism), he wrote: “Marinetti. The thick novel. Sound imitation. The autonomy of Russian Futurism. People of the fist and fighting, our contempt of them” (ibid., 367). 8.“K priezdu Marinetti,” Vechernie izvestiia (Moscow), 24 January 1914, no. 381: 2, trans. in Anthony Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 73. 9. Malevich’s lithograph was included in A. Kruchenykh, Vzorval’, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Svet, [1913]). 10. See Goncharova’s Cyclist; Malevich’s peasant series and his The Knife Grinder: Principle of Glittering (1912–13, Yale University Art Gallery), Samovar (1913, Rostov Kremlin museum); and Nadezhda Udaltsova’s Seamstress (1912– 13, State Tretyakov Gallery). 11. On the international nature of the Futurist movement, see Perloff, Futurist Moment. 12. Konstantin Bolshakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vadim Shershenevich, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu gazety Nov’,” in Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie, 1: 369. 13. Kazimir Malevich, “V[elimir] Khlebnikov,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova, ed. V. V. Ivanov, Z. S. Paperny, A. E. Parnis (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 183. There is an English translation of a different version of this text: Malevich,“About ‘Zangezi,’ ” in id., Essays on Art, vol. 4, Malevich: The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings, 1913–1933, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978), 93–98. 14. On the comprehensive history of this association, see Howard, Union of Youth. 15. Mikhail Matiushin, “The Russian Cubo-Futurists,” in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., 175. 16. Elena Guro— Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Nilsson and Ljunggren, 53.

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17. The same rhetoric and cultivation of “youth” are to be found in Marinetti’s declarations. See Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 57. 18. V. Khlebnikov, Neizdannye proizvedeniia, ed. Nikolai Khardzhiev (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), 335. 19. See Albert Gleizes,“The Abbey of Creteil, a Communistic Experiment Carried Out by the Unanimists and Described by One of Their Number,” Modern School Magazine 5 (October 1918): 300–315. In this account in a New York anarchist journal, Gleizes says that the Abbaye was inspired by the 1905 Russian Revolution. “The Abbaye was to be a model for the society of the future, where art would be integrated into communal living, where productive associations were formed by free spirits” (Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 36). 20. William Morris, who was a socialist and connected with Proudhon, Marx, and Ruskin, criticized both the fragmentation of the arts and consumerism (in “The Lesser Arts of Life,” an address first published in 1878, and the lecture “Art under Plutocracy,” first delivered at Oxford in 1883). “The socialist vision that inspired the members of this artists’ commune was principally derived from Proudhon and Tolstoy,” Günter Berghaus points out (Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 36). 21. Gleizes, “Abbey of Creteil,” 303. 22. See Kovtun and Povelikhina, Russian Painted Shop Signs, trans. Crane. 23. Allan Antliff explains that “unanimism” “was [Jules] Romains’s term for a theory of collective consciousness he first codified in 1905, a unanime being ‘the collective spirit or soul, which animates and unifies any human group.’ . . . In La vie unanime (1908) he painted a vivid picture of collectivism in a modern urban setting in which the poet was animated by the same shifting élan as the bustling city-dwellers through which he moved” (Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 169). For more on the Abbaye, see Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). 24. “When asked . . . to assess the relation of Cubism to his philosophy, Bergson returned to this dichotomy to condemn the movement for analyzing artistic practice instead of intuitively performing it. Bergson deemed the Cubists’ attempt to move from analysis to artistic creativity an impossible one . . . Cubism was seen as yet another example of the invasion of intellectual modes of thought into a field conducive of intuition alone” (Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avante-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3). 25. Mark Antliff, “Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,” 104. 26. On Bergsonian influence in Russia, see Hillary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 27. A. P. Grossman and N. Otverzhennyi both suggest that Grigoriev’s theory in some features preceded Bergsonian intuitivism (Grossman, “Osnovatel’ novoi kritiki,” Russkaia mysl’ 11, no. 19 [1914]; Otverzhennyi, Shtirner i Dostoevskii [Moscow: Golos truda, 1925], 73). 28. There are plenty of primary and secondary sources on Grigoriev in Russian, but the only source available in English is Apollon Grigoryev, My Literary and Moral Wanderings and Other Autobiographical Material, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Dutton, 1962). See also Andrzei Walicki, A History of Rus-

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sian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 215–20. 29. Pavel Filonov, “Made Paintings,” in Pavel Filonov: A Hero and his Fate, ed. and trans. Nicoletta Misler and John Bowlt (Austin: Institute of Modern Russian Culture, 1983), 135. 30. Ibid. 31. On Organic art, see Organica: The Non-Objective World of Nature in the Russian Avant-Garde of the 20th Century, ed. Alla Povelikhina (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1999). 32. Matiushin, “Russian Cubo-Futurists,” 175. 33. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutic, 215. 34. Werner Hofmann, Die Grundlagen der Modernen Kunst. Eine Einführung in ihre symbolischen Formen (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1966), 41–42. Hofmann is referring here to the metaphor, used in Heidegger’s article “Die Frage nach der Technik,” where he juxtaposes the previous epoch and modernity, the epoch of technical progress, comparing one with a wooden bridge and the other with a hydroelectric dam. See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in id., Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 321. 35. Nikolai Kulbin,“Free Art as the Basis of Life: Harmony and Dissonance,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 14. 36. C3linescu, Five Faces, 100. 37. Aleksandr Pushkin,“Mozart and Salieri,” in id., The Little Tragedies, trans. Nancy K. Anderson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 56. 38. Hugo Ball, Die Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 45, cited and translated in Carol Vanderveer Hamilton, “Anarchy as Modernist Aesthetic,” in Turn of the Century, ed. Berg et al., 86. 39. Herbert Read, Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism: Chains of Freedom (London: Freedom Press, 1949), 29. 40. On Matvejs, see Voldemar Matvei i Soiuz Molodezhi, ed. Georgii Kovalenko (Moscow: Nauka, 2005). 41. Vladimir Markov [Voldem1rs Matvejs], Iskusstvo Negrov (Petrograd: IZO Narkompros, 1919). Matvejs died on 5 May 1914. 42. Cited in Howard, Union of Youth, 134. 43. Markov, “Principles of the New Art,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 31. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Ibid., 38. 46. Ibid., 35. 47. Ibid., 27–28. 48. Pavel Muratov, “O zhivopisi,” Pereval 5 (May 1907): 40. 49. For related discussion, see Sharp, Russian Modernism. 50. Natalia Goncharova, preface to solo exhibition catalogue, 1913, in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 55. 51. Rose Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future,” in Drunken Boat, ed. Max Blechman (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), 125.

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52. Many examples of such works are reproduced in the Blaue Reiter almanach Kandinsky edited. 53. Markov, “Principles of the New Art,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 28, 30. 54. Ibid., 37. 55. Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivism,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 52. 4. A GAME IN HELL

1.“To Alyosha Kruchonykh,” in Khlebnikov, Collected Works, trans. Schmidt, 3:79. 2. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod. K istorii russkogo futurizma,” in Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Gurianova, 56. On Russian Futurist books, see Evgenii Kovtun, Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga (Moscow: Kniga, 1989); Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Susanne Compton, World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books, 1912–1916 (London: British Library, 1978); Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Vladimir Poliakov, Knigi russkogo futurizma (Moscow: Gileia, 1998); and the comprehensive catalogue The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 3. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, Igra v adu (Moscow: V. Rikhter, [1912]). The first edition of Game in Hell was solely designed by Goncharova, who created sixteen compositions (including front and back cover), except textual parts, handwritten by Kruchenykh in lithographic pencil. 4. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 26. 5. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, Igra v adu, 4. 6. Krusanov, “A. E. Kruchenykh letters to A. A. Shemshurin,” 118. 7. “The Mud Hut is an antiurbanistic work, and the first chapters are devoted to depicting the city as the reign of death. The protagonist abandons the tragic chaos of city life and returns to mother earth. In fact, for the author, the novel was an ambitious undertaking, something terribly significant, a kind of Divine Comedy with the hero going through the hell of city life, then cleansing himself in solitary communion with nature. . . . At the end of the novel, he does reveal, however, that he follows Leo Tolstoy” (V. F. Markov, Russian Futurism, 30). On Guro, see K. Bjornager Jensen, Russian Futurism, Urbanism and Elena Guro (Århus, Denmark: Arkona, 1977). 8. Elena Guro—Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Nilsson and Ljunggren, 30. 9. Mayakovsky, “Ia sam,” in id., Polnoe sobranie, 1: 20. 10. Translation by the author. 11. Juliette R. Stapanian gives a lively and sharp analysis of this poem in her book Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1986). 12. A. Kruchenykh, Stikhi Maiakovskogo (Moscow: EUY, 1914), 23.

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13. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 56. The second enlarged edition, A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, Igra v adu (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1914), consisted of twenty-three lithographed compositions by Rozanova and three by Malevich, who also designed the cover, with text handwritten by Kruchenykh. 14. On the connection between Pushkin’s “Adskaia poema” and Gogol’s story “Propavshaia gramota,” see Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Aleksei Kruchenykh,” in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 131. See also Roman Jakobson, “Igra v adu u Pushkina i Khlebnikova,” in Sravnitel’noe izuchenie literatur (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), 35–36. 15. Osip Mandelstam,“Storm and Stress,” in id., The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), 171. 16. Jakobson,“Igra v adu u Pushkina i Khlebnikova,” in Sravnitel’noe izuchenie, 36. Pushkin’s drawings were reproduced in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. S. A. Vengerov (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1908–15). 17. D. Burliuk et al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 51. 18. A. Kruchenykh,“Zametki ob iskusstve,” in V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, and E. Guro, Troe (St. Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1913), 40. 19. “The impetuous, condensed, feverish phantasmagoria of Pushkin’s daring graphics . . . full of cunning humor and at times sarcastic, frivolous, blasphemous notes, has a close counterpart in the technique and theme of Khlebnikov’s Game in Hell and at the same time unexpectedly echoes Picasso’s sketches of bullfights. ” (Jakobson,“Igra v adu u Pushkina i Khlebnikova,” 36–37). 20. Jakobson, “The Newest Russian Poetry: V. Xlebnikov [sic],” in id., My Futurist Years, 180. 21. The album (1915) is in the State Theater Museum, Manuscript Division, St. Petersburg. “Dantes” = Baron Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès (1812–1895), who killed Pushkin in a duel in 1837. 22. Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 115. 23. Iu. M. Lotman, “Tema kart i kartochnoi igry v russkoi literature nachala XIX veka,” in Uchenye zapiski Tartusskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta (Tartu, Estonia: Tartusskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1975), 132. 24. John Bowlt, “A Brazen Can-Can in the Temple of Art: The Russian AvantGarde and Popular Culture,” in High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 143. 25. Gleb Pospelov, Bubnovyi valet (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990), 98. 26. For further discussion on Larionov and Neoprimitivism, see Parton, Mikhail Larionov, and Gleb Pospelov, Larionov (Moscow: Galart, 2005). 27. Mikhail Larionov,“Rayonist Painting,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 93. 28. John Bowlt has pointed out that the Whitman extracts are from Leaves of Grass: the first from “Beginners,” in Inscriptions; the second from “I Hear It Was Charged against Me,” in Calamus: “Whitman was known and respected in Russia particularly among the symbolists and futurists, and his Leaves of Grass

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had become popular through Konstantin Balmont’s masterful translation (Moscow, 1911)” (Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 302). 29. Varsonofii Parkin [Mikhail Larionov], “Oslinyi khvost i Mishen’,” in Oslinyi khvost i Mishen’ (Moscow: C. A. Munster, 1913), 53. 30. Andrei Shemshurin recollects this installation in “Notes on My Correspondents”; see Shemshurin, “Zapiski o moikh korrespondentakh,” in Neizvestnyi russkii avangard, ed. Andrei Sarabianov (Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1992), 134. 31. Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova, “Rayonists and Futurists, A Manifesto” (1913), in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 90. 32. This series includes Simultaneous Representation of Four Aces (State Russian Museum), Simultaneous Representation of the Queen of Spades and the Queen of Hearts (location unknown); Simultaneous Representation of the King of Hearts and the King of Diamonds (Astrakhan Picture Gallery); The King of Spades (location unknown); King of Clubs (Regional Museum Slobodskoi); Queen of Spades (Ulianovsk Art Museum); Queen of Hearts (location unknown); Queen of Diamonds (Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum); Jack of Hearts (Regional Museum Slobodskoi); Jack of Diamonds (location unknown); and Jack of Clubs (Ivanovo-Voznesensk Art Museum). 33. Malevich’s watercolors are in the collection of the State Russian Museum. Another latter example, which comes to mind, is Stravinsky’s famous ballet Jeu de cartes (A Card Game), “A Ballet in Three Deals,” written in 1936. According to Stephen Walsh, “The card-playing idea had been entirely his own . . . in one sense Jeu de cartes remains abstract, since the dramatis personae are playing cards and the plot is a game of poker” (Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 54). 34. Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. Hayward and Reavey, 151–52. 35. My translation. I thank Chantal Wright for her advice. 36. This essay was first published in English translation in Malevich, Essays on Art, 4: 73–85. The original manuscript was published for the first time in 1994, with an illuminating essay by Philip Ingold: Kazimir Malevich, Len’ kak dejstvitel’naia istina chelovechestva (Moscow: Gileia, 1994). 37. Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Stories, trans. Charles H. Kerr (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1883), 49. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Ibid., 56, 57. 40. Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground, 27. 41. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, “From The Word as Such,” in Russian Futurist Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 61. 42. Burliuk et al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 51. 43. Viktor Shklovsky, O Maiakovskom (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1940), 97. 44. Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 202–3. 45. Untitled manifesto “From A Trap for Judges, 2,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 54. 46. Kruchenykh, “Igrok. Poema igry. Maiakovskomu” (1945), published in

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Russian in Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. Gurianova, 265–66. My translation. I thank John Bowlt for his advice. 47. Krusanov, “A. E. Kruchenykh letters to A. A. Shemshurin,” 134. 5. VICTORY OVER THE SUN AND THE THEATER OF ALOGISM

This chapter is an expanded and revised version of my “Let’s Rhyme Cow and Theater! Language, Alogism, and Kruchenykh’s ‘Theatrical Instinct,’ ” in From Gogol to “Victory over the Sun”: Trajectories of Russian Avant-Garde, ed. Alexis Klimoff, Nikolai Firtich, and Dan Ungurianu, special issue of Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA 35 (2009): 37–54. 1. Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum (exhibition catalogue), ed. Evgeniia Petrova (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 320. Malevich himself always called this composition Cow “on” Violin (see Elena Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings in the Collection of the Russian Museum: The Matter of the Artist’s Creative Evolution,” ibid., 18). 2. The episode with Kruchenykh is described in K. Barantsevich, “Korova i teatr (lektsiia Kruchenykh),” Birzhevye vedomosti, 26 November 1913 (evening edition). 3. Evreinoff, Theatre in Life, 23. 4. Basner, “Malevich’s Paintings,” 19. Malevich’s student Anna Leporskaya recalled the Mona Lisa with a cigarette. 5. Compare this with Kruchenykh’s revelations on zaum: “The riddle . . . A reader, who is first of all curious, is sure that the transrational has some meaning, some logical sense. So that he is caught by a ‘bait’—on the riddle, mystery. To say ‘I love’ creates obligations; it is very definite, and a man never wants it. He is secretive, he is avaricious, he is creating the enigma. . . . Whether an artist is hiding in the soul of the transrational intentionally—I do not know” (Krusanov, “A. E. Kruchenykh letters to A. A. Shemshurin,” 153). 6. A. Kruchenykh, “Otkuda i kak poshli zaumniki,” in Aleksei Kruchenykh, K istorii russkogo futurizma. Vospominaniia i dokumenty, ed. Nina Gurianova (Moscow: Gileia, 2006), 303. 7. See Kazimir Malevich in the Russian Museum, 321. 8. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), 5. 9. Malevich: Catalogue raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition [of] 1927, ed. Troels Andersen (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), 26. 10. Kazimir Malevich,“From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism (1915),” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. Bowlt, 131. 11. For more on costumes and stage design, see John Milner, “Malevich’s Victory over the Sun,” in Victory over the Sun, ed. Patricia Railing (London: Artists Bookworks, 2009), 2: 83–98; this edition includes a new translation, some documentary materials, and articles on Futurist opera. See also Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980). 12. John Bowlt links the logic of this photographs with the concept of “Vic-

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tory”: “This parody of high opera displaced or reversed the conventional functions and expectations of theatre through its informality of language, absurdity of plot, and hyperbole of action” (Bowlt, “The Cow and the Violin,” in Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka, 145). 13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), 94. Gadamer’s hermeneutic methodology seems to be quite applicable to the anarchic aesthetics of the early avant-garde. Play theory can be considered from positions that are opposite to classical aesthetics. 14. A. Kruchenykh, Vozropshchem (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913), 9. 15. Za 7 dnei (St. Petersburg) 28 (15 August 1913): 605–6. 16. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 73. 17. See Howard, Union of Youth, 72–86. 18. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 78–79. 19. For more on Kruchenykh’s play Most (Bridge), see Nina Gurianova,“Nevdannyi most, ili teatr alogizma Alekseia Kruchenykh,” in Terentievskii Sbornik 2, ed. Sergei Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Gileia, 1997), 324–45. 20. After a hiatus, Kruchenykh once again turned to dramaturgy in the late 1920s, writing and publishing several plays and a few sketches for drama and screenplays. These late works lie beyond this book’s thematic and chronological framework. 21. In a letter from Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to the poet Sergei Gorodetskii, in which he may be referring to both Gly-Gly (which Kruchenykh tentatively intended to publish in the never-realized journal Supremus) and Most, Kruchenykh notes: “I have some plays here—one for publication, and another for performance” (Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Gurianova, 205). 22. For Kruchenykh’s influence on Kharms, see the Swiss scholar JeanPhilippe Jaccard’s monograph Daniil Harms et la fin de l’avant-garde russe (Bern: P. Lang, 1991), here cited from Russian translation: id., Daniil Kharms i konets russkogo avangarda (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1995). “Kruchenykh mentions recitation (‘the texture of recitation’), meaning declamation, singing, the chorus, orchestra, and so on. This is also very important for Kharms” (ibid., 20). 23. For a more general context on international avant-garde theater and performance, see Günter Berghaus, Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avantgarde (New York: Macmillan, 2005). 24. Claude Bonnefoy, Conversations with Eugene Ionesco (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 121. 25. See Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 26. S. Patraskin, “Bayachi budetliane” (The Futurist Bards), Den’, 8 December 1913. 27. Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 44–45. 28. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Pobeda nad Solntsem,” in id., Stikhotvoreniia, poemy, romany, opera, ed. S. R. Krasitskii (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskiii proekt, 2001), 399. From here on, all excerpts from the opera are my translations. 29. Ibid., 405.

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Notes to Pages 125–132

30. Martin Heidegger,“Letter on Humanism,” in id., Basic Writings, 250, 251. 31. Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 32. See Liudmila Tikhvinskaya, Kabare i teatry miniatiur v Rossii, 1908–1917 (Moscow: Kul’tura, 1995). 33. On this subject, see the very informative publication of the archival materials by Rashit Yangirov, “Futurizm i futuristy v teatral’nykh parodiiakh 1910x godov,” in Kharmsizdat predstavliaet: avangardnoe povedenie (St. Petersburg: Kharmsizdat, 1998), 77–96. 34. Kruchenykh, Vozropshem, 3. 35. Evreinoff, Theatre in Life, 23. 36. See Silvija Jestrovic, “Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life in the Russian Avant-Garde,” SubStance 31, nos. 98–99 (2002): 42–56. 37. See Nicolas Evreinoff, “A Merry Death,” New Age 18, no. 14 (1915). 38. Kruchenykh, “Pobeda nad Solntsem,” 404. 39. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word,” 76. 40.“Because of a foul contempt for women and children in our language there will be only the masculine gender” (Kruchenykh, Vzorval [Explodity], in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 66.) 41. Matiushin, “Russian Cubo-Futurists,” 180. 42. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 243. 43. Many scholars have identified this tendency in early Russian Futurism. Jaccard, for example, considers it to be one of Futurism’s principal themes: “It is the principle of denial, which all too often serves to characterize Kruchenykh’s art, that is the main error in appraisal of this poet, who is very difficult to academicize. On the contrary, in his poetics, as in the poetics of everyone who to any degree belongs to his tradition and in particular in that of Kharms, it is the idea of creation that dominates” (id., Daniil Kharms, 22). 44. Kruchenykh, “Pobeda nad Solntsem,” 386. 45. André Breton defined Surrealism as a kind of “absolute” reality. 46. “Interviews with Beckett: Tom Driver in Columbia University Forum,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 219. 47. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 23. 48. Kazimir Malevich, “Teatr,” in id., Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gileia, 2004), 5: 79. 6. DECONSTRUCTING THE CANON

This chapter is a considerably expanded and revised version of my essay “A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven: Deconstructing Canon in Russian Futurist Books,” in The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 24–32. 1. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 77.

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2. Kruchenykh to Guro, 7 March 1913, in Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Gurianova, 190, 191. 3. Ibid. 4. For further discussion on Futurist books, see the sources cited in chapter 4, n. 1. 5. Cited in the collection Zhiv Kruchenykh! (Moscow: Vserossiiskii Soiuz Poetov, 1925), 18. 6. Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 177. 7. Jacques Lacan’s hypothesis that the substance of the unconscious in many respects resembles the typological structure of language sheds a new light on the theory of zaum, particularly in this context. 8. The correspondence of Kruchenykh with Shemshurin, a scholar and a bibliophile, is very informative in this respect, because Kruchenykh constantly refers to books or ideas he was studying. Kruchenykh’s interests were truly encyclopedic—in a few months, he read up on Francois Villon, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, along with the diverse scholarship on language and linguistics, and interested himself in the latest translations of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Havelock Ellis. See Russian Literature 65, 1–3, special issue: A. E. Krucenych (January–1 April 2009). 9. A. Kruchenykh, V. Khlebnikov, and E. Guro, Troe (St. Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1913), 13. 10. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 56. 11. Lev Zhegin, “Remembering Vasilii Chekrygin,” in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., 195. 12. Shemshurin to Kruchenykh, 1916, cited in Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. Gurianova, 394. In his reference to scissors, Shemshurin is lauding Kruchenykh’s album of collages Universal War (Vselenskaia voina, 1916). 13. Kazimir Malevich, “On Poetry,” in id., Essays on Art, 4 vols., 1: 73, 74. Kazimir Malevich, “O Poezii,” first published in Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo 1 (1919). 14. Aleksei Remizov to Kruchenykh, 26 August 1917, in Nina Gurianova, “Remizov i budetliane,” Aleksei Remizov: Issledovaniia i materialy, ed. Alla Gracheva (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Dom, 1994), 143. 15. Aleksei (Aleksandr) Kruchenykh,“Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo,” cited in Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. Gurianova, 203–4. Another copy of this document is in the Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. A third copy known to me is in the Archives of the State Tretyakov Gallery. 16. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, “The Letter as Such,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 63–64. 17. For the works of Italian Futurism enumerated herein, see Tavole parolibere futuriste (1912–1944), 2 vols., ed. Luciano Caruso and Stelio Maria Martini (Naples: Liguori, 1977). 18. Practically abandoned nowadays, this technique uses a duplicating machine that operates by transferring ink from the original to a slab of gelatin treated with glycerin, from which prints are made. Usually fewer than one hundred copies can be printed.

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Notes to Pages 142–154

19. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, Te li le (St. Petersburg: EUY, 1913). 20. Krusanov, “A. E. Kruchenykh letters to A. A. Shemshurin,” 118. 21. Guro to Kruchenykh, 1913, in Elena Guro: Selected Writings, ed. Ljunggren and Gourianova, 92. 22. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes nouveaux, 1913). Cendrars’s poem was printed on a single, large, folded sheet so that it could be viewed all at once. Its design alluded to a geographic map, emphasizing the temporality and continuity of train travel. Delaunay-Terk created an abstract handcolored background for the text, which was printed typographically in script of various sizes. When opened, it resembled a decorative panneau. 23. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “From The Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 61, 62. 24. For further discussion of the bomb metaphor in modernism, see Carol Vanderveer Hamilton, “Anarchy as Modernist Aesthetic,” in Turn of Century, ed. Berg, 77–87. 25. Andrei Bely, “Arabeski,” in Andrei Bely: Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2: 200. 26. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 67. 27. Kruchenykh to A. Ostrovskii, in R. Ziegler, “Briefe von A. E. Krucenyx an A. G. Ostrovskij,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 1 (1978): 5. 28. Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 104. 29. Kruchenykh to Kirill Zdanevich, 1917, archives of the Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, folder 177. 30. Kruchenykh et al., Troe, 13. 31. Olga Rozanova to Anna Rozanova, 1913, archive of Chaga-Khardzhiev Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 150. 32. Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 105. 33. Mikhail Matiushin, “Nashi pervye disputy,” Literaturnyi Leningrad, October 20, 1934. 34. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Word as Such,” 56. 35. Vasilii Kamenskii, Ego-moia biografiia velikogo futurista (Moscow: Kitovras, 1918), 6. 36. Ibid. See also Tim Harte, “Vasily Kamensky’s Tango with Cows: A Modernist Map of Moscow,” Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 4 (2004): 545–66. 37. Zdanevich, “Mnogovaia poeziia” (MS, 1913), Archives of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 177.22. 38. See, e.g., N. Otverzhennyi, Shtirner i Dostoevskii (Moscow: Golos Truda, 1925). In 1906–10, six different translations of Stirner’s book were published in Russia, and his anarchist philosophy was obviously popular, especially among avant-gardists. Allan Antliff gives a detailed analysis of Stirnerian impact on such artists as Rodchenko and Malevich; see his Anarchy and Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 71–96.

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39. Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in fin de siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 294. 40. “A further linkage of both decadence and anarchy to modernity results in the identification of the decadent, anarchic style as the appropriate means of representing both the uncertain, dissociated experience of modernity and the egoistic, autonomous response to that experience” (Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 186). 41. According to Donald Egbert, the anarchist journalist Jean Grave, who was close to the Neo-impressionists, wrote at the time in La Révolte that he totally agreed with Wilde’s statement. Egbert even suggests that Oscar Wilde’s theory of individualism, which was based on voluntary cooperation in production and distribution, could have influenced Kropotkin’s later theories (Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, 248). 42. Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 128. 43. V. F. Markov, Russian Futurism, 80. 44. Jakobson, My Futurist Years, 20. 45. Janecek, Zaum, 3. 46. Viktor Shklovsky, “O zaumnom iazyke. 70 let spustia,” in Russkii literaturnyi avangard. Dokumenty i issledovaniia, ed. M. Marzaduri, D. Rizzi, and M. Evzlin (Trent: Università di Trento, 1990), 304. 7. THE “SOCIAL TEST”

1. It seems to have become a commonplace notion that “the Russian poets simply never got close enough to the war to write about it” (A. D. Harvey, A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War [London: Hambledon Press 1998], 100). Fortunately, this perspective was proven wrong by the recent publication of Aaron J. Cohen’s Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914–1917 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 2. Ivan Kliun, “Primitives of the Twentieth Century,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 137. 3. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Blaue Reiter Almanach, ed. id. and Marc, 158. 4. Milton A. Cohen, “Fatal Symbiosis: Modernism and World War I,” in War, Literature and the Arts 7, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 1996): 35. See also his comprehensive study Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910– 1914 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 5. Newspaper article by K. Barashevich reproduced in Aleksei Kruchenykh, Kazimir Malevich, and Ivan Kliun, Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians) (Moscow: n.p., 1915; dated 1916 on the cover). 6. See Ben Hellmann, Poets of Hope and Despair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution, 1914–1918 (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1995). 7. See Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); see also Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). 8. Goncharova, preface to solo exhibition catalogue, 1913, in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 58.

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Notes to Pages 166–176

9. Vladimir Mayakovsky,“Shtatskaia shrapnel” (Civilian Shrapnel), in id., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1: 304. 10. Ibid., 309. 11. A. A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1962), 322. 12. A. Kruchenykh, Stikhi Maiakovskogo. Vypyt (Moscow: EUY, 1914). 13. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–97), 1: 92. 14. Ia. A. Tugendkhold, Problema voiny v mirovom iskusstvie (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1916). 15. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, trans. Schmidt, 3: 54 16. See Nina Gurianova, “Voennaia opera A. Kruchenykh i V. Khlebnikova,” Russian Literature 65, no. 1–3 (2009): 183–236. 17. Iu. Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in Mir Khlebnikova. Stat’i i issledovaniia 1911–1998, ed. A. E. Parnis (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kuk’tury, 2000), 218. 18. A. Kruchenykh, foreword in V. Khlebnikov, Bitvy 1915–1917 gg. Novoe uchenie o voine (Petrograd: Zhuravl’, 1914; dated 1915 on the cover), cited in V. V. Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. R. V. Duganov (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005), 6: 388. 19. Willem G. Weststeijn, “Chlebnikov and the First World War,” in Velemir Chlebnikov, 1885–1985, ed. J. Holthusen, J. R. Döring-Smirnov et al. (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1986), 187–211. 20. These drawings are currently in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 21. V. V. Khlebnikov,“Ka 2” (1915), in id., Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, 5: (2004): 160. 22. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Proposals,” in Collected Works, ed. Douglas, trans. Schmidt, 1: 358. 23. Kruchenykh, foreword in Khlebnikov, Bitvy 1915–1917, in Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. Duganov, 6: 388. 24. In August 1914, General Aleksandr Samsonov’s Second Russian Donskaya Army was ordered to attack the overwhelming German forces in East Prussia. Samsonov’s army was hurled into this sacrificial mission to accomplish an important strategic objective: to force the Germans to transfer part of their forces away from the offensive against France, which in the first days of the war insistently begged Russia to advance on the eastern front to save the French army from total collapse. Russians, mostly Don Cossacks, to whom Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh allude in War Opera with references to the “quiet Don” and “blue Don,” were surrounded. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed in the bloody Tannenberg battle, and even more were wounded or taken prisoner in fighting in the forest (“Teutonic forest” in War Opera). Samsonov committed suicide. 25. Sergei Bobrov, “O Novoi Illiustratsii,” in Vertogradari nad lozami (Moscow: Lirika, 1913), 156. 26. See Blast (the Vorticist magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis in London), nos. 1–2 (1914–15). 27. Viktor Khovin, “Futurizm i voina,” in Ocharovannyi strannik 6 (1914). 28. Nikolai Berdyaev, Krizis iskusstva (Moscow: Leman & Sacharov,1918), 9.

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29. Rozanova, “Suprematism and the Critics,” trans. Charles Rougle, in Gurianova, Exploring Color, 201. 30. Aleksandr Blok, in his essay “Plamen’” (The Flame) first published in the newspaper Den’, 28 October 1913. 31. Patricia Leighten, in her Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), shows convincingly that Picasso’s prewar collages were indeed his response to the social and political environment, and, in particular, reveal his reaction to the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. 32. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. id. and Marc, 147–87. 33. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vselenskaia voina (Petrograd: Svet, 1916). I thank Charles Rougle for the translation provided. 34. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 133–34. 35. Kruchenykh, from correspondence with A. A. Shemshurin, 1915–17, in Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Gurianova, 199. 36. Kruchenykh, “O voine,” in Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Gurianova, 214. 37. See Blanchot, “Reflection on Nihilism,” in Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson, 145. 8. THE SUPREMATIST PARTY

Parts of this chapter were included in my essay “The Supremus ‘Home Laboratory’: Reconstruction of an Avant-Garde Journal,” in Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (exhibition catalogue), ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 44–59. 1. Berdyaev, Krizis iskusstva, 15. 2. Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 128. 3. Georges Bataille,“The Absence of Myth,” in id., The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 48. 4. [Mstislav?] Yurkevich, untitled MS (1917), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 5. Kazimir Malevich, “Letter to Schwitters” (1927), in id., Essays on Art, 4: 161. 6. Ibid., 161–62. 7. Dmitrii Sarabianov, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva kontsa XIX—nachala XX veka (Moscow: Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1993), 234. 8. Olga Rozanova to Aleksei Kruchenykh, (December 1915). Cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 161. 9. Kazimir Malevich to Mikhail Matiushin, 25 September 1915, cited in Evgenii Kovtun, “K. S. Malevich. Pis’ma k M. V. Matiushinu,” in Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 180–81. I thank Charles Rougle for the English translation of the original letters provided in this chapter.

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Notes to Pages 192–199

10. Kruchenykh, Malevich, and Kliun, Tainye poroki akademikov, 31. 11. Malevich to Matiushin, 24 September 1915, in Ezhegodnik, 187. 12. It is interesting to note that Malevich emphasized the Latin etymology of this word: in his manuscripts, it rarely occurs in Cyrillic and for the most part is written in Latin letters. 13. Mikhail Matiushin, “O Starom i Novom v muzyke” (March 20, 1916), authorized typescript, State Museum of V. V. Mayakovsky, Moscow, Manuscript Division, no. 11865. Supremus was never realized, but Malevich managed to publish a slightly different version of this text in the collection of essays Unovis (Vitebsk, 1920), which he edited. See Tatiana Goriacheva, “Stat’ia Mikhaila Matiushina ‘O staroi i novoi muzyke’ v al’manakhe ‘Unovis,’ ” Iskustvoznanie 2003, no. 1: 494–507. 14. In a letter to Kruchenykh in the summer of 1915, Rozanova writes: “Of Malevich I would say ‘he wants to seem educated and talks about unintelligible things.’ Moreover, in his art there is more calculation and clever posing than anywhere else. For someone else that is not a vice, but for a man who ‘rejected reason at a public lecture’ it doesn’t seem quite ‘it’ ” (cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 90). 15. Malevich to Matiushin, 27 October 1916, in Ezhegodnik, 186. This explains the 1916 dating of some of the extant Supremus manuscripts, particularly Matiushin’s, which was not sent until 1917, but was probably begun in 1916 and then laid aside. 16. Kazimir Malevich, untitled MS (1916), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 17. Rozanova to Kruchenykh (1916), cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 165. 18. Malevich to Matiushin, 29 May 1915, in Ezhegodnik, 186. 19. Ibid., 185–86. 20. Kazimir Malevich, “Chto proiskhodilo v fevrale 1917 goda i v marte” (What Happened in February and March 1917), MS (1917), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. This text was published in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v 5 tomakh, ed. A. Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 2004), 5: 72–73. It is cited here from the original document because of differences in interpreting Malevich’s handwriting. 21. Kazimir Malevich, “Chelovek est’ pechat . . . ” (A Man Is a Seal . . . ), MS, n.d., Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 22. Kazimir Malevich, draft title page, MS (1917), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 23. See E. F. Kovtun’s commentaries in Ezhegodnik, 180. 24. Malevich to Matiushin, 23 June 1916, Ezhegodnik, 195. 25. Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 435. 26. Olga Rozanova to Matiushin (May 1917), cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 168. 27. Cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 171. 28. Kazimir Malevich, “Greeting to Suprematists” (1 May 1917), in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 231–32.

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29. Kazimir Malevich, “Nashe soznanie . . . ” (1917), published under the title “Supremus” in Experiment 5 (1999): 90–92; cited here from the original document because of editorial omissions and differences in interpreting Malevich’s handwriting. 30. Kazimir Malevich, “Futurizm” (1917), originally published in Anarkhiia 57 (12 May 1918); reprinted in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 1: 91–93. 31. Kazimir Malevich,“Usta zemli i khudozhnik” (1916–17), MS, KhardzhievChaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Published in Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 432–36; cited here from the original document because of differences in interpreting Malevich’s handwriting. 32. For a detailed discussion of Rozanova’s contribution to the theory of color in Suprematism and color-painting, see Gurianova, Exploring Color. 33. Kazimir Malevich, “Greeting to Suprematists,” in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 232. 34. Rozanova to Kruchenykh (summer 1915), cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 156. 35. Yurkevich, untitled MS (1917), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 36. Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. Gurianova, 204. 37. Nikolai Roslavets,“O bespredmetnom iskusstve” (1917), MS, KhardzhievChaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Malevich, “Usta zemli i khudozhnik” (1916–17), MS, Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 41. Ibid. 42. Matiushin, “O Starom i Novom v muzyke.” 43. Malevich, “Futurizm.” 44. Ivan Kliun, “Cultured People” (1916), in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 242–43. 45. Kruchenykh,“Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Iz literaturnogo naslediia, ed. Gurianova. 46. Malevich,“Greeting to the Suprematists,”in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 232. 47. Ibid., 233 48. Matiushin, “O Starom i Novom v muzyke.” 49. Nadezhda Udaltsova, untitled MS (1917), Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 50. Matiushin, “O Starom i Novom v muzyke.” 51. Malevich,“Greeting to the Suprematists,” in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 232. 52. Malevich, “Futurizm.” 53. Emerson, “Tolstoy’s aesthetics,” in Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Orwin, 237–51 54. Malevich, “Declaration of the Suprematists” (1918), in Legacy Regained, ed. Petrova et al., trans. Myers et al., 234.

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55. Roslavets, “O bespredmetnom iskusstve” (1917), MS, Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 56. Kazimir Malevich, “Kubizm” (1917), published in Experiment 5 (1999): 94–97, but cited here from the original MS because of differences in interpreting Malevich’s handwriting. 57. Malevich, “Usta zemli i khudozhnik” (1916–17), MS, Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 58. Malevich to Matiushin, 23 June 1916, in Ezhegodnik, 195. 9. ART, CREATIVITY, AND ANARKHIIA

1. For more on this subject, see Eastern Dada Orbit, ed. Janecek and Omuka; Tatiana Nikolskaia, Fantasticheskii gorod. Russkaia kulturnaia zhizn’ v Tbilisi, 1917–1921 (Moscow: Piataia strana, 2000), and id., Avangard i okrestnosti (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2001). 2. See Christina Lodder’s illuminating essay “Art of the Commune: Politics and Art in Soviet Journals, 1917–20,” Art Journal 52, no. 1(Spring 1993): 24–33. 3. On the popularity of Freudian theory in Russia, see Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. I. Zdanevich et al., “Manifesto of the ‘41°,’ ” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 177. To realize these aims, the group organized a variety of activities: there was a publishing house of the same name, books were published, art exhibitions were organized, and a Futurist theater was planned. The Futurist University (futurvseuchbish) where Kruchenykh and his friends lectured operated on the premises of the Fantastic Tavern poetry café in Tiflis (Tbilisi). 5. V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu (Moscow; Sovetskii khudozhnik,1983), 333–35. 6. Ibid., 334. 7. D. Ia. Severiukhin and O. L. Leikind, Zolotoi vek khudozhestvennykh ob’edinenii v Rossii i SSSR, 1820–1932 (St. Petersburg: Chernyshev, 1992), 272–73. 8. Elisabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977), 143. 9. V. Katanian, Maiakovskii. Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 96. 10. Boris Kushner, Demokratizatsiia iskusstvu. Tezisy (Petrograd: Aventura, 1917). 11. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Otkrytoe pis’mo rabochim,” Gazeta futuristov 1 (15 March 1918), reprinted in Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12: 8–9. 12. Mayakovsky et al., “Manifest Letuchei Federatsii Futuristov,” Gazeta Futuristov 1 (15 March 1918). My translation. 13. Mayakovsky, “Otkrytoe pis’mo,” in id., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12: 8. 14. Viktor Khovin, Segodniashnemu dniu (Petrograd: Ocharovannyi strannik, 1918), 5. 15. Aleksandr Rodchenko,“Gazete futuristov,” Anarkhiia 31 (30 March 1918). This didn’t prevent Rodchenko, however, from becoming a member of LEF and

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working closely with Mayakovsky a few years later. Olga Burenina offered a very interesting perspective on Rodchenko’s and Varvara Stepanova’s anarchist position in the context of power plays in revolutionary artworld in her presentation “Anarkhiia i vlast’ v iskusstve (Varvara Stepanova i Aleksandr Rodchenko)” at the “Sémiologie et technologie du pouvoir en Russie et en URSS” conference, Paris, 15–18 November 2003. 16. Aleksei Morgunov,“Zloradstvuiut” (Schadenfreude), Anarkhiia 35 (4 April 1918). 17. See Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky, ed. William Keach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 127–35. 18.V. Shklovsky,“Ob iskusstve i revoliutsii,”Iskusstvo Kommuny 17 (30 March 1919). 19. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 116. 20. The seven anarchist groups that united into the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups on 13 March 1917 numbered only about eighty people. See V. Khudolei, “Anarkhicheskie techeniia nakanune 1917 g,” in Mikhailu Bakuninu, ed. Borovoi, 112. 21. The early avant-garde’s mentality at this particular historical moment can probably be analyzed from the “anarcho-psychological perspective” in cultural history; see Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace, 8. 22. On the connections between the Gordins and artistic modernism, see Leonid Geller, “Voyage au pays de l’anarchie. Un itinèraire: l’utopie,” Cahiers du monde russe 37 (1996). 23. Rodchenko’s contributions to Anarkhiia in 1918 included “Tovarishcham anarkhistam” (29), “Gazete futuristov” (31), “Iskateliam tvortsam” (32), “Khudozhnikoam-proletariiam” (41),“Tak podnimites’ zhe!” (42),“Novyi komissariat (Khudozhestvennaia kollegiia)” (43), “Svetila, metsenaty, novatory” (44), “Dovol’no mertvym, daite zhivym” (44),“Dinamism ploskosti” (49),“Ischeznuvshim anarkhistam” (50), “Prazdnestvo pobeditelei” (52), “O muzee Morozova” (52), “Bud’te tvortsami” (61), and “Odevaite shliapy i . . . ” (71), et al. 24. All of Malevich’s essays for Anarkhiia were reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 5 vols., ed. Andrei Sarabianov and Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), 1: 61–126. English translations of some of these articles can be found in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915–1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968). 25. On Gan, see A. N. Lavrentiev, Aleksei Gan (Moscow: Russian Avantgarde, 2010). 26. Malevich,“To the New Limit,” in Essays on Art, ed. Andersen, 1: 55. Originally published as “K novoi grani,” Anarkhiia 31 (1918). 27. Albert Gleizes,“The Abbaye de Créteil: A Communistic Experiment,” Modern School 5 (October 1918): 300–15. Gleizes draws direct parallels between the Russian revolution and the Cubists’ “communistic experiment” in miniature. 28. See Lev Chernyi, Novoe napravlenie v anarkhizme (Moscow: Russkii trud, 1907). 29. “In early 1921, at the request of the student body of Sverdlov University, Borovoi was scheduled to debate with Bukharin and Lunacharskii on the theme

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of ‘Anarchism versus Marxism,’ but at the last moment the Communists cancelled the meeting” (Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 231). Borovoi was soon dismissed from the faculty and found a job as an economist, while devoting all his free time to publishing. He became the head of “Golos truda,” the leading anarchist press in Russia. In 1929, he was exiled, first to Viatka and then to Vladimir, where he died in 1935. 30. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 4. 31. Aleksei Borovoi, Revoliutsionnoe mirosozertsanie (Moscow: Logos, 1907), 72, 82. 32. See ibid. and Aleksei Borovoi, Anarkhizm (Moscow: Revoliutsiia i kul’tura, 1918). 33. Aleksei Borovoi, “Bakunin,” in Mikhailu Bakuninu, 133. 34. Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 179–80. “The Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups contained a sprinkling of syndicalists and individualists among its predominantly Anarchist-Communist membership. Its foremost members in the spring of 1918, apart from Apollon Karelin and the Gordin brothers (who had moved to Moscow from Petrograd), included German Askarov, the keen polemicist of anti-syndicalism.” Apart from Askarov, Avrich names Aleksei Borovoi, a professor of law at Moscow University “a gifted orator and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and articles”; Vladimir Barmash, “a trained agronomist and a leading participant in the Moscow anarchist movement during the 1905 revolt”; and Lev Chernyi (P. D. Turchaninov), “a well-known poet, the son of an army colonel, and the proponent of a brand of Anarcho-Individualism known as ‘associational anarchism,’ a doctrine derived largely from Stirner and Nietzsche, which called for the free association of independant individuals. Cherny served as a Federation secretary, while Askarov was a principal editor of its organ, Anarkhiia.” 35. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Khudozhnikam-proletariiam,” Anarkhiia 41 (11 April 1918). The beginning of this essay was translated by Jamey Gambrell and published as “To Artists-Proletarians,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. John Bowlt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 82. I start my translation with the last line of the above-mentioned publication. The conclusion of the essay has never been translated or reprinted since its original publication in 1918. 36. Aleksei Gan, “Na obshchestvennom mitinge 7 iunia,” Anarkhiia 85 (15 June 1918). 37. Book advertisement, Anarkhiia 72 (30 May 1918). 38. “Life, which is dull and sluggish, creates only that which is ‘healthy,’ only that which is consistent with its laws of necessity. That which is free only comes out of free human creative activity. That which is free is incompatible with nature” (Konstantin Erberg, “Kalendar’ revoliutsionnogo iskusstva” [Revolutionary Art Calendar], Anarkhiia 19 [16 March 1918]). 39. “Free rhythm is . . . the trajectory of freely created movement, without counting its symmetric details. Rhythm is organism, it is necessity, it is freedom. ‘Anarchy!’ you scream. . . . ‘Individuality, freedom, organicity,’ I respond (Aleksandr Struve, “Ritm” [Rhythm], Anarkhiia 82 [12 June 1918]). 40. “The most mendacious and cowardly souls are those who proclaim

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‘utopia.’ With an air of innocence they promise paradise, freedom, and immortality, under the ‘catch-all’ of utopia. It is they and only they who have castrated the spirit of immortality. It is these wretched beings, who have poisoned the earth with the yoke of slavery and death. They lie without shame. They promise life after death or paradise on earth” (A. Sviatogor,“Utopisty” [Utopians], Anarkhiia 94 [24 June 1918]). 41.“Neither beauty nor grandeur can supplant youth and life. Try to approach it, but do not hope to draw it to the far-off peaks, where the inactive temples of the past, cut off from the present, are to be found” (Aleksei Gan, “Prekrasnoe i interesnoe” [Beautiful and Fascinating], Anarkhiia 18 [15 March 1918]). 42. David Burliuk, Fragmenty iz vospominanii futurista, ed. N. A. Zubkov (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Fond, 1994), 144. 43. As early as 1922, the Marxist cultural historian Y. E. Shapirshtein suggested a link between N. G. Chernyshevsky’s nineteenth-century populism and Futurism, which he calls “neopopulism” in his study of the social aspect of Russian literary Futurism, Ya. E. Shapirshtein-Lers, Obshchestvennyi smysl russkogo literaturnogo futurizma: Neo-narodnichestvo russkoi literatury XX veka (Moscow: Academia, 1922). 44. In 1918, in the catalogue of the art exhibition (see Russian Art of the AvantGarde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 148), Rodchenko used quotations from Walt Whitman and Max Stirner as epigraphs. Allan Antliff offers a fascinating analysis of Stirnerian influence on Rodchenko and Malevich in his Anarchy and Art, 87–89. 45. A. Rodchenko, “Tovarishcham anarkhistam,” Anarkhiia 29 (28 March 1918). 46. Baian Plamen’, “Pis’mo k tovarishcham futuristam. Revoliutsionnyi anarkho-futurizm” (Letter to Comrade Futurists. Revolutionary Anarcho-Futurism), Anarkhiia 27 (26 March 1918). 47. Ibid. 48. Aleksei Morgunov, “K chortu!” (Go to Hell!), Anarkhiia 30 (29 March 1918). 49. V. Tatlin, “Otvechaiu na Pis’mo k futuristam” (My Response to the Letter to Futurists), Anarkhiia 30 (29 March 1918). 50. Malevich, “Reply,” in Essays on Art, ed. Andersen, 1: 53, 54. Originally published as “Otvet,” Anarkhiia 29 (28 March 1918). 51. Malevich,“K novoi grani,” in Malevich: Essays on Art, ed. Andersen, 1: 55. 52. On the avant-garde in Vitebsk, see further Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: A Life of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 53. George Woodcock, “Anarchism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 111. 54. Ibid., 114. 55. Ibid. 10. THE LAST REVOLT

1. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’, 158. 2. Rozanova to Shemshurin, April 1917, cited in Gurianova, Exploring Color, trans. Rougle, 170.

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3. Rogdai (pseud.), “K istorii obrazovaniia soiuza,” Anarkhiia 96 (28 June 1918). 4. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’, 359. 5. Malevich, “Architecture as a Slap in the Face of Ferro-Concrete,” in Essays on Art, ed. Andersen, 60. Originally published as “Arkhitektura kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu,” Anarkhiia 37 (6 April 1918). 6. See Vadim Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism of the 20th Century (Edmonton, Canada: Black Cat Press, 2009). 7. “Some Unpublished Notes by Kropotkin,” in Miller, Kropotkin, 61. 8. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 59. 9. Rozanova to Matiushin, MS 1917. Institute of Russian Literature, Pushkinskii Dom, St. Petersburg, f. 656. 10. “Ot soiuza k klubu (o degradatsii soiuza deiatelei iskusstva)” (From the Union to a Club: On Degradation of the Union of Art Workers), Anarkhhia 21 (19 March 1918). 11. “Iskusstvo v opasnosti!” (Art in Danger!) Vechernie ogni, 3 April 1918, reprinted in Literaturnaia zhizn’ Rossii 1920-x godov, 2 vols., ed. A. Iu. Galushkin (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005), 1: 149. 12. Jan Peters, interview, Izvestiia 71, no. 335 (11 April 1918). 13. Malevich, “Deklaratsiia prav khudozhnika” (Declaration of Artist’s Rights), Anarkhiia 92 (23 June 1918). 14. Gazeta futuristov 1 (15 March 1918). 15. Aleksandr Struve, “Iskusstvo i rynok” (Art and Market), Anarkhiia 24 (22 March 1918). 16. Ibid. 17. Aleksei Gan, Aleksei Morgunov, and Kazimir Malevich,“Zadachi iskusstva i rol’ dushitelei iskusstva,” Anarkhiia 25 (23 March 1918). My translation. See also different translation in Malevich, “The Problems of Art and the Role of Its Suppressors,” in Essays on Art, ed. Andersen, 1: 49. 18. David Burliuk, Po povodu ‘Khudozhestvennykh pisem’ A. Benua (pamphlet, 1910), and “Galdiashchie ‘benua’ i novoe russkoe natsional’noe iskusstvo” (St. Petersburg, 1913). For English translations, see Dorontchenkov, Russian and Soviet Views, 174–75. 19. E.g., Aleksei Morgunov, “Zakoldovannyi krug” (The Vicious Circle), Anarkhiia 35 (4 April 1918); Nadezha Udaltsova,“My khotim” (We Want), ibid., 38 (7 April 1918); Kazimir Malevich, “Gosudearstvenniki ot iskusstva” (To the Statists from Art), ibid., 53 (4 May 1918); Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Odevaite shlapy i . . . ” (Put on Your Hats and . . . ), ibid., 71 (29 May 1918); Olga Rozanova, “Suprematizm i kritika” (Suprematism and the Critics), ibid., 87 (17 June 1918), and Aleksei Gan, “Udar” (The Blow), ibid., 97 (29 June 1918). 20. Malevich, Gan, and Morgunov, “Zadachi iskusstva i rol’ dushitelei.” 21. Morgunov, “Zakoldovannyi krug.” 22. Udal’tsova, “My khotim.” 23. Anti [Aleksandr Rodchenko],“Novyi Komissariat” (New Commissariat), Anarkhiia 43 (21 April, 1918).

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24. “Anarkhizm, iskusstvo i metsenat” (Anarchism, Art, and the Patron), Anarkhiia 34 (4 April 1918). 25. See Aleksandr Rodchenko, “O muzee Morozova” (On Morozov’s Museum), Anarkhiia 52 (3 May 1918). On Morozov’s collection of modernist art, see also Dorontchenkov, Russian and Soviet Views, 77–111. 26. “Anarkhizm, iskusstvo i metsenat.” 27. “Dom sovremennogo iskusstva,” Anarkhiia 28 (27 March 1918). 28. Kazimir Malevich, “V gosudarstve iskusstv,” Anarkhiia 54 (9 May 1918). 29. Kazimir Malevich, “Deklaratsiia prav khudozhnika,” Anarkhiia 92 (23 June 1918). 30. Vladimir Shokin, “Nastal moment,” Anarkhiia 74 (1 June 1918). 31. For further discussion on the avant-garde Museums of Artistic Culture, see Muzei v muzee: Russkii avangard iz kollektsii muzeia khudozhestvennoi kul’tury, ed. Irina Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998). 32. “Vystavka dlia mass,” Anarkhiia 69 (26 May 1918). 33. Translated by Charles Rougle in Gurianova, Exploring Color, 201–3. In his obituary for Olga Rozanova, who died from illness in November 1918, Rodchenko wrote: “You were one of the few who stood in the avant-garde of the most Leftist Art. You were a constant Revolutionary-Inventor in composition and technique. We were amazed at your imagination. Anarchist of Creativity, You were an indefatigable, eternally new Genius of inventiveness” (“Olga Rozanova— Painter, 1886–1918,” in Experiments for the Future, ed. Bowlt, 84). 34. Anarkhiia 39 (9 April 1918). 35. Anarkhiia 42 (12 April 1918). 36. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Tak podnimites’ zhe!” Anarkhiia 42 (12 April 1918). 37. Kazimir Malevich, “Vystavka khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev. Levaia federatsiia,” Anarkhiia 89 (20 June 1918). 38. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Polozhenie o federatsiiakh . . . ” (Theses on the Federations . . . ), Anarkhiia 86 (16 June 1918). 39. Under the jurisdiction of each federation were: “(a) the election and recall of its delegates, commissions, etc.; (b) the issuance of instructions to its delegates and commissions; (c) the discussion of all legislative proposals concerning the union; (d) the right to pass resolutions on these questions and the right of legislative initiative; (e) the resolution of matters concerning organized actions in the professional sphere; (f) the resolution of conflicts arising among members and institutions of the federation; (g) the organization of exhibitions, competitions, artist clubs, auctions, lectures, etc.” (ibid.). 40. The charter of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG) was published in “On Organizational Issues: The Federative Contract of the Moscow Groups of Anarcho-Communists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, and Other Currents,” Anarkhiia 12 (6 March 1918), and “From the Activities of the Federation of Anarchists,” ibid., 13 (7 March 1918), just a few months before the draft charter of the Moscow Artists’ Union. The MFAG’s stated goal was “the full emancipation of the human individual from all forms of economic exploitation, political oppression, and spiritual slavery. It therefore declares itself the sworn enemy of

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capitalism (including that of the state), all forms of the state (including the socialist state), all forms of ecclesiastical hierarchy, and all forms of church dogmatism.” 41. MFAG charter, ibid. 42. “Doklad Udaltsovoi. Levaia federatsiia,” Anarkhiia 96 (28 June 1918). 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Anti [Aleksandr Rodchenko], “Raskol khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev v Moskve,” Anarkhiia 99 (2 July 1918). 47. Olga Rozanova,“Unichtozhenie trexfederativnoi konstruktsii soiuza, kak prichina vykhoda iz nego levoi federatsii,” Anarkhiia 99 (2 July 1918). 48. Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Rezoliutsiia Levoi federatsii na obshchem sobranii professionalnogo soiuza khudozhnikov-zhivopistsev,” Anarkhiia 95 (27 June 1918). 11. THE AVANT-GARDE AND IDEOLOGY

1. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 29–35. 2. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), and id., “Ethical Turn.” 3. Aleksandar Flaker, “Esteticheskii vyzov i esteticheskaia provokatsiia,” in Russian Literature 23 (1988): 89–100. 4. Carlo Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Representations 56 (1996): 12. 5. Jacques Rancière, Artemy Magun et al.,”You Can’t Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat,” Rethinking Marxism 30, no. 3 (July 2008): 402–12. 6. Viktor Shklovsky, “O teorii prozy. 1982,” in id., O teorii prozy (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1983), 340. 7. Sergei Tretyakov,“From Where to Where? Futurism’s Perspectives,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 211. 8. On Shklovsky’s theory and the poetics of the early avant-garde, particularly zaum, see Medvedev, Formal Method, 60–63. 9. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in id., Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 6. 10. “This negative, nihilistic slant of formalism shows the tendency common to all nihilism to add nothing to reality, but, on the contrary, to diminish, impoverish, and emasculate it, and by doing so attain a new and original impression of reality” (Medvedev, Formal Method, 62). See also The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique, ed. and trans. Christopher Pike and Joe Andrew (London: Ink Links, 1979). 11. “Estrangement seems a good antidote to a risk we all face: that of taking the world and ourselves for granted. The antipositivist implications of this remark will not be missed” (Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” 22). On Formalism, see further Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); Russian Formalism: A Retrospective

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Glance. A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, ed. Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), and Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 12. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 9. 13. Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” 19–20. 14. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 3. 15. “I used the word ‘estrangement.’ Eikhenbaum said, why estrangement; I’d use the word simplification. . . . We shouldn’t simplify like that. You have to see what life has not seen” (Shklovsky, “O teorii prozy, 1982,” 234). 16. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 14. 17. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “From The Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 61. 18. “Finally, a powerful new movement is making its debut with the creation of a new, specialized poetic language. At the head of this school, as is well known, stands Velemir Khlebnikov” (Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 13). 19. Olga Chichagova, “Konstruktivizm,” in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B.Dzhimbinov (Moscow: XXI vek—Soglasie, 2000), 358. 20. Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in id., Illuminations, ed. Arendt, 239. 21. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 4–5. 22. Ibid., 12. 23. Rozanova, “Only in Independence and Unlimited Freedom is There Art!” in Gourianova, Exploring Color, 202, 203. 24. Ilya Zdanevich, “O raskraske litsa” (On Painting the Face) (1914 MS), f. 177.26, Archives of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 25. Nikolai Kulbin, “Svobodnoe iskusstvo kak osnova zhizni,” in Kulbin, 2 vols., ed. Boris Kalaushin (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1995), 2: 7–16. Extracts in English in Kulbin, “Free Art as the Basis of Life: Harmony and Dissonance (On Life, Death, etc.),” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 11–17. 26. Nikolai Kulbin, “Psikhologiia khudozhnika” (Psychology of the Artist) (MS), f. 134.9, Archives of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 27. Olga Rozanova, “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why It Is Misunderstood,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 103. 28. Ibid., 106. 29. “We, however, join contemplation with action and fling ourselves into the crowd” (Zdanevich and Larionov,“Why We Paint Ourselves,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 81). 30. Aleksandr Shevchenko, Printsipy kubizma i drugikh techenii v zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov (St. Petersburg: A. Shevchenko, 1913), 2. 31. Ilya Zdanevich,“Razvitie iskusstva (tezisy)” (Evolution of Art), f. 177. 12, Archives of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 32. Vladimir Denisov, “Tezisy soiuza ‘Svoboda iskusstvu” (“Freedom to Art” Union Proposal), f.177.154,Archives of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 33. Rozanova,“Bases of the New Creation,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 106.

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34. Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 5–6. 35. “Attempts have been made by some to systematize these ‘disruptions.’ . . . We have good reasons to suppose that this systematization will not succeed. This is so because we are dealing here not so much with a more complex rhythm as with a disruption of rhythm itself, a violation, we may add, that can never be predicted. If this violation enters the canon, then it loses its power as a complicating device” (ibid., 14). 36. It is important to remember in this context that Shklovsky regarded estrangement (or defamiliarization) as an inseparable component of all riddles: “But estrangement is not a device limited to the erotic riddle—a euphemism of sorts. It is also the foundation of all riddles” (ibid., 11). 37. Ibid., 9. My emphasis. 38. Malevich, “Futurizm,” 57. 39. With respect to the “historicism” of Formalism and specifically Shklovsky’s theory—a question that is much more complex than it sometimes appears—I find Carlo Ginzburg’s argument to be the most persuasive (Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange,” 20–21). 40. “I regard the attraction as being in normal conditions an independent and primary element in structuring the show, a molecular (i.e., compound) unit of the effectiveness of theatre and of theatre as a whole. It is completely analogous to Grosz’s ‘rough sketches’ or the elements of Rodchenko’s photo-illustrations” (Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor, 30). 41. Sergei Eisenstein,“S zaranee obdumannym namereniem (Montazh attraktsionov),” in id., Metod, ed. Naum Kleiman, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzei Kino, 2002), 60. 42. Aleksander Rodchenko, “Warning!” in Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future, ed. Lavrentiev and Bowlt, 213. 43. El Lissitzky, “Our Book,” in El Lissitzky, Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 357. 44. “And if the maximal program of the Futurists is the integration of art and life, the conscious reorganization of language according to the new forms of life, and the struggle for the emotion training of the producer-consumer’s psyche, then the minimal program of Futurist-speech-producers is to place their linguistic mastery at the service of the practical tasks of the day” (Tretyakov, “From Where to Where,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 215). 45. Thus in the distinctive epigraph to his programmatic text on Constructivism Aleksei Gan draws the following conclusion: “Constructivism is a phenomenon of our age. It arose in 1920 among leftist painters and ideologists of ‘mass action.’ The present publication is an agitational book that opens the Constructivists’ struggle with the advocates of traditional art” (A. Gan, Konstruktivizm [Tver’: n.p., 1922], 1). 46. N. Aseyev et al.,“What Does Lef Fight For?” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Lawton, 194. 47. Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in id., Illuminations, ed. Arendt, 239. 48. Ibid., 241. 49. Ibid.

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50. “Society is always a dynamic unity of two component factors: minorities and masses. The minorities are individuals or groups of individuals which are specially qualified. The mass is the assemblage of persons not specifically qualified. By masses, then, is not to be understood, solely or mainly, ‘the working masses.’ The mass is the average man. In this way what was mere quantity—the multitude—is converted into a qualitative determination: it becomes the common social quality, man as undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in itself a generic type. What have we gained by this conversion of quantity into quality? Simply this: by means of the latter we understand the genesis of the former. It is evident to the verge of platitude that the normal formation of a multitude implies the coincidence of desires, ideas, ways of life, in the individuals who constitute it” (José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses [New York: Norton, 1993], 13–14). 51. Eisenstein, “S zaranee obdumannym namereniem,” in id., Metod, ed. Kleiman, 1: 56. 52. “I alternated the same shot of Mozhukin with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a child’s coffin), and these shots acquired a different meaning. The discovery stunned me—so convinced was I of the enormous power of montage” (Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, ed. and trans. Ronald Levasco [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], 200). 53. Eisenstein, “Magiia iskusstva,” in id., Metod, ed. Kleiman, 1: 46–47. 54. “Art has always presented itself as ‘one means of violence’—always as a tool (weapon) for transforming the world by processing human consciousness” (ibid., 47). 55. The original thesis of the Constructivists in “Who We Are,” the 1922 manifesto of the First Working Group of Constructivists, signed by Rodchenko, Gan, and Stepanova, reads: Artists yesterday constructors today, 1. we processed the human being 2. we organize technology 1. we discovered 2. propagate 3. clean out 4. merge (Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group,” in id., Experiments for the Future, ed. Lavrentiev and Bowlt, 143)

56. Christine Poggi, “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Spring 2001): 709–48. 57. Eisenstein, “S zaranee obdumannym namereniem,” in id., Metod, ed. Kleiman, 1: 56. 58.“The Basic Tenets of Constructivism,” in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 126. 59. Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor, 35.

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60. El Lissitzky, “Our Book,” in El Lissitzky, Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky, 358. 61. Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor, 34. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 34–35. 64. Eisenstein, “Magiia iskusstva,”in id., Metod, ed. Kleiman, 1: 46–47. 65. The celebrated scientist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his new approach to reflexology and the digestive process. He experimented on dogs, and the expression “Pavlov’s dog” soon became idiomatic in Russia, generally referring to any live object, stripped of individuality or will, of scientific experimentation, something like a “guinea pig” in English. 66. Eisenstein, “S zaranee obdumannym namereniem,”in id., Metod, ed. Kleiman, 1: 59. CONCLUSION

1. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Strunsky, ed. Keach, 143. 2. Ibid., 116; emphasis added. 3. “It is upon the unity of these two features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, the revolutionary situation, is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, trans. Jon Barnes [New York: Verso, 1989], 3). 4. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 60. 5. Ibid. 6. Denisov, “Tezisy soiuza ‘Svoboda iskusstvu’ ” (1917 MS). 7. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, “The Realistic Manifesto,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. and trans. Bowlt, 211. 8. Benjamin contrasts different models of interaction between art and life under fascism and communism as “the aestheticization of political life” (in Germany) and the “politicization of art” (in Soviet Russia), which he regards approvingly: “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. . . . This is the situation of politics, which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, 241–42).

Illustrations

1. Paintings from the St. Petersburg Union of Youth (“Cubists”) exhibition / 19 2. Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Burliuk, and Benedikt Livshits in 1913 / 21 3. David Burliuk, Portrait of the Futurist Poet Vasilii Kamensky / 30 4. Velimir Khlebnikov with skull

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6. Vasilii Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 20 7. Elena Guro, Cats

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48

8. Elena Guro and Mikhail Matiushin, ca. 1910

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9. Niko Pirosmanashvili, Portrait of Ilya Zdanevich

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10. Pavel Filonov, book design for Velimir Khlebnikov 11. Filippo Marinetti in St. Petersburg in 1914

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61

12. Kazimir Malevich, Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Airplane and on a Railway / 64 13. Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist

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14. Nikolai Kulbin, Portrait of Aleksei Kruchenykh 15. Pavel Filonov, The Flight into Egypt

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16. Mikhail Matiushin, Self-Portrait “Crystal” 17. Olga Rozanova, Self-Portrait 18. Voldem1rs Matvejs in 1907

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71

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74 79

19. Natalia Goncharova, Religious Composition: Archangel Michael

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20. Natalia Goncharova, Demon with the Cards and a Jaguar 21. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Roulette

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22. Kazimir Malevich, covers for Igra v adu (A Game in Hell)

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23. Olga Rozanova composition for Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) 24. Mikhail Larionov, Rayist Composition

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100

25. Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov working on stage designs for Diaghilev’s 1914 Ballets Russes production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le coq d’or / 101 26. Olga Rozanova, Queen of Spades

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102

27. Mikhail Larionov, Dancing Soldiers

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28. Kazimir Malevich, Cow and Violin 29. Kazimir Malevich, The Aviator

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116

30. Aleksei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin’s Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, act 2, scene 2 / 118 31. Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Kazimir Malevich in 1913 / 119 32. Olga Rozanova, Futurist Theater poster 33. Kazimir Malevich, The Reader

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34. Kazimir Malevich, cover with fragment of set design for Victory over the Sun / 126 35. Mikhail Larionov, Winter

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36. Vladimir Mayakovsky, cover for his poetry collection la! (I!) 37. F. T. Marinetti, cover design for Zang Tumb Tumb 38. Olga Rozanova, In Memoriam I. V. I[gnatie]v 39. Olga Rozanova, uncut sheet for Te Ii Ie 40. Nikolai Kulbin, cover for Vzorval’

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41. Vasilii Kamensky, “Shchukin Palace”

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42. Ilya Zdanevich, spread from Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi

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43. Mikhail Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves” 44. Olga Rozanova, cover for Zaumnaia gniga

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45. Vasilii Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)

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46. Kazimir Malevich, patriotic propaganda postcards, with verses by Vladimir Mayakovsky / 165 47. Natalia Goncharova, Angels and Airplanes 48. Natalia Goncharova, Doomed City

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49. Olga Rozanova, cover for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s portfolio Voina 50. Olga Rozanova, Fragment from Newspaper Reports 51. Olga Rozanova, Airplanes over the City

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52. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Military State

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58. David Burliuk’s Gazeta futuristov, Tomsk, 1919 59. Anarkhiia “No to Death Penalty!” editorial

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60. David Burliuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Futurist Café 61. Kazimir Malevich, portfolio design 62. Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1916–17 63. Vladimir Tatlin in 1920

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56. Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Order” installation 57. Ilya Zdanevich, ca. 1914

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67. Aleksandr Rodchenko, poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin / 273 68. Paintings by Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich on display at the 1932 “Art in the Age of Imperialism” exhibition in Leningrad /

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Index

The transliteration of Russian names and book titles presents special difficulties, as several systems are currently in use. Throughout the text we followed the Library of Congress system but with some exceptions, such as when an author is better known to Anglo-American readers by a different spelling (e.g., Leo Tolstoy). In these cases, the Library of Congress alternative spelling is included in parenthesis. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbaye de Créteil, 67–68, 221, 299n19, 299n23 Adorno, Theodor, 8 airplane, as theme in Russian and Italian Futurism, 62, 64, 125, 129, 151–53, 172, 173, 174, 176, 180, 182, 183, 190, 192–93, 271, 286n6 AKhRR (Association of the Artists of Revolutionary Russia), 4 Aliagrov (pseudonym of Roman Jakobson), 156–57, 157 alogism, 5, 101, 112–19, 122–23, 127, 130–31, 132, 156, 169–70, 190, 197, 207, 230, 259, 264–65, 282n9 Altman, Natan, 214, 237; as “Voltaireterrorist,” 218 anarchism, 8–9, 22–23; and the avantgarde, 8–9, 26–27, 33, 39; in France, 9; in Russia, 7, 8, 10, 22, 220. See

also anarcho-communism; anarchosyndicalism; mystical anarchism and mystical anarchists anarcho-communism and anarchocommunists, 56–57, 212, 221, 222, 223, 319–320n40 anarcho-futurism and anarchofuturists, 10, 227–28 anarcho-individualism and anarchoindividualists, 10, 42, 56–57, 78, 106, 155, 212, 220, 222–23, 228, 237, 294n44, 316n34 anarcho-syndicalism and anarchosyndicalists, 56, 234–35, 244, 250, 252, 290n60, 319–20n40 anarchy, 4–5, 10, 23–26, 39, 77–78, 287n21, 287n22; Ivanov and, 58; and the Russian avant-garde (“aesthetics of anarchy”), 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 17–18, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 55, 70, 77, 84, 161, 221, 225, 226,

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Index

anarchy (continued) 227, 230, 253, 263, 279, 283n17, 308n38, 309n40 Anarkhiia, 220, 221, 223, 243, 316n34, 316n38; and the Artists’ Union, 237–38, 241, 244–47, 319–20n40; and the Bolshevik regime, 10, 211, 223–24, 252; “Creativity” (arts) section of, 220–21, 225, 236, 237, 243; and Gan, 10, 211, 220, 224– 225, 240, 243, 317n41; and Malevich, 10, 46–47, 198, 211, 217, 220, 228, 234, 237–38, 240, 242– 43, 244, 245, 246, 315n24, 318n5, 318n19; and Morgunov, 220, 228, 240–41, 243, 318n19; and Rodchenko, 10, 211, 217, 220, 226, 237, 241, 244, 245–46, 315n23, 318n19; and Rozanova, 10, 217, 220, 237, 245, 246, 252, 318n19; and the Russian avant-garde, 6, 10, 211, 217, 220–21, 224–25, 226– 28, 236–37, 240–46, 252, 315n23, 315n24, 316–17n40, 316n39, 317n41, 318n5, 318n19 Andersen, Troels, 115 Antliff, Allan, 9, 39, 226, 284n27, 299n23, 308n38, 317n44; Anarchy and Art, 9–10 Antliff, Mark, 9, 68–69, 294n44, 299n24 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 68, 288n35 arch;, 23–24, 132, 162 Archipenko, Alexander, 61, 68 Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, 287n18 Arp, Hans, 184–85 art: as agitation (propaganda, “social art”), 6, 9, 42–43, 164–65, 165, 171, 203, 207, 265, 267–75, 271, 272, 273, 322n44 Artaud, Antonin, 129; theater of cruelty of, 124 art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), 9, 28, 155; and Russian culture, 3, 28, 54, 129, 295n45 Artists’ Union (Labor Union of ArtistPainters), 232–52; and Anarkhiia, 234, 237–41, 244–47, 319–20n40;

draft charter of, 246–48, 250–52, 319–20n40, 319n39; exhibition of, 244–45; left (young) federation of, 233, 234, 235–36, 237, 244– 46, 248–49, 250–52; and the Union of Art Workers, 232, 235–36, 237, 241, 248–249, 250 Art Nouveau, Russian, 295n45 Arvatov, Boris, 267 Aseev, Nikolai, 267 Askarov, German, 316n34 avant-garde, 6–7, 8, 25, 35, 39, 134, 162–63, 185, 282n8; as a term, 7–8, 11, 26–27, 283n18, 288n35; theory of, 8, 11–12, 26–27, 31, 76, 77, 115, 155, 253–75, 277–78, 283n18, 288n35, 293n27; anarchic avant-garde, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 22, 27, 70, 84, 161, 230–231, 253, 263, 269, 273, 276–77, 279, 305n13; avant-garde, Russian, early (prerevolutionary), 1–8, 10, 11, 13, 17–18, 20, 22, 27–28, 29, 31, 32, 33–35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 51, 53, 54–55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68– 70, 75, 76–78, 81, 84, 87, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 108–9, 112, 117, 123, 124, 129, 132, 133, 150, 155, 161–62, 163, 165–66, 167, 170, 186, 188, 189, 190–91, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 207, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222, 225, 230, 231, 232, 238, 239, 249–50, 254, 256, 257, 259, 262, 264, 267, 276, 277, 278, 282n8, 286n5, 290–91n64, 305n13, 315n21; provocation and, 32–33, 34, 51, 98, 103, 106, 128– 29, 149–50, 154; statist avant-garde, 1, 6, 7, 8, 218, 230–231, 250, 253, 257–258, 266–67, 268, 273, 276– 77, 279; and Tolstoy, 3, 28–29, 39, 44–45, 46–55, 164, 166, 189, 205, 207, 259, 294n44, 295n55, 296n62, 301n7 Averchenko, Arkady, referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Avrich, Paul, 42, 223, 292n4, 296n64, 315–16n29, 316n34

Index

Baian Plamen’ (Vadim Baian). See Sidorov, Vladimir Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12–13, 34, 44, 284–85n38; “Art and Answerability,” 12–13, 285n38, 285n42; “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” 12 Bakunin, Mikhail, 1, 24, 42, 77; influence of, 39–40, 161–62, 287–88n23, 292n9; “The Reaction in Germany,” 40–42 Balashov, Abram, 51 Balkan Wars, 163, 311n31 Ball, Hugo: on Kandinsky’s concept of freedom, 77 Balla, Giacomo, 60, 140 Ballets Russes, 101 Ballier, August, 66 Balmont, Konstantin, Leaves of Grass translation of, 303n28 Barantsevich, K., 163 Barlach, Ernst, 171 Barmash, Vladimir, 316n34 Basner, Elena, 114 Bataille, Georges, 185, 189 Bat cabaret, 127 Baudelaire, Charles, 155 Bauhaus, 188 Beckett, Samuel, 130 Bely, Andrei (Andrei Belyi), 145, 225; and anarchy, 220; “Voina” (War), 162 Benjamin, Walter, 261, 267–68; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 6, 279, 282–83n14, 324n8 Benois, Alexandre, 149, 214–15, 235, 240, 294n45 Berdyaev, Nikolai (Nikolai Berdiaev), 26; on creativity, 28, 32; The Crisis of Art, 31–32; and Russian Futurism, 31–32, 176; on Suprematism, 187 Berghaus, Günter, 290n59, 290n60 Bergson, Henri, 76, 222; and Cubism, 68–69, 299n24; and Grigoriev, 69, 299n27; influence of, 18, 68–69, 71, 222, 294n44 “beyonsense” (transrational language). See zaum

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Beznachalie, 56 Blanchot, Maurice, 28, 29, 186, 291n70 Blaue Reiter, 18, 25; almanac of, 301n52 Blok, Aleksandr, 108, 128, 129, 150, 162, 178; referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108; on World War I, 167 Bobrov, Sergei, on Goncharova’s Mystical Images of War, 172 Boccioni, Umberto, 60, 173 Boguslavskaia, Ksenia, 191, 194–95, 198 Bolshakov, Konstantin, 66 Borisov-Musatov, Viktor, 240 Borovoi, Aleksei, 222–23, 315–16n29, 316n34 Boulanger, Marcel, 285–286n4 Bowlt, John, 98, 117, 282n8, 302–3n28, 304–5n12 Brancusi, Constantin, 68 Braque, Georges, 199 Brecht, Bertolt, 127 Brederkamp, Horst, 295n96 Breton, André, 306n45 Brik, Osip, 3, 212, 237, 267, 282n5 Briusov, Valery, 92, 107 Bruni, Lev, 195 Bruns, Gerald, 9, 35, 291n70 budetliane (men of the future), 20, 167; theater (Futurian theater), 120 Bukharin, Nikolai, 315–16n29 Bulla, Carl (K. K. Bulla), photographs of, 19, 117, 119, 304–5n12 Bunin, Ivan, referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Bürger, Peter, 8 Burliuk, David, 21, 63, 190, 218, 225– 26, 229, 233; on Benois, 240; and dis-konstruktsiia (dis-construction), 27; and Gazeta futuristov, 216, 217, 218, 219, 239; and Hylaea, 20, 21, 133, 137, 286–287n8, 286n7; on Kruchenykh, 133; and the Poets’ Café (Futurist Café), 227, 229; as promoter of Russian Futurism, 212, 216, 218; as publisher, 136–37, 152, 218; tour of Russia, with Kamensky

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Burliuk, David (continued) and Mayakovsky, 154. Works: Portrait of the Futurist Poet Vasilii Kamensky, 30; Pots and a White Dog, 50; Sadok sudei (A Trap for Judges), 150; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (with Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and Mayakovsky), 63; “War and Creativity” lecture (with Kamensky), 164 Burliuk, Nikolai, 5, 21, 34, 61, 63, 134, 150; and Hylaea, 20, 286–87n8, 286n7 Buzzi, Paolo, 140 Cage, John, 7 C3linescu, Matei, 8, 9, 26–27, 31, 77, 283n18, 288n35 Canguillo, Francesco, 140; “Le Coriste,” 141 Carrà, Carlo, 60, 173 Carroll, Lewis, 101 Cendrars, Blaise, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (with Delaunay-Terk), 308n22 Cézanne, Paul, Card Players, 109 Chashnik, Ilya, 230 Chekrygin, Vasilii, 137–38, 165 Cherniavsky, Nikolai (Nikolai Cherniavskii), 212 Chernoe znamia, 56 Chernyi, Lev (Pavel Turchaninov), 222, 316n34 Chernyshevsky, N. G. (Nikolai Chernyshevskii): The Aesthetic Reflections of Art to Reality, 43–44; influence of, 39, 225, 317n43 Chichagova, Olga, “Constructivism,” 260 Chukovsky, Kornei (Kornei Chukovskii), 286n4 Chulkov, Georgii, 57; and mystical anarchism, 57–58, 292n9, 296n72, 297n75 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 267 hiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas, 297n76 Clark, T. J., 198

Cohen, Milton A., 162–63 Cohn, Jesse, 291n64; Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, 9 Compagnon, Antoine, 8 Company 41°, 212–14. See also Tiflis (Tbilisi) Conceptualism (Conceptual Art), 7, 155 Constructivism and Constructivists, 1, 3, 4, 28, 106, 188, 190, 195, 201, 220, 225, 230, 253, 260, 265, 266, 267, 269–, 270, 271, 273, 276, 279, 282n6, 322n45; manifestos of, 260, 266, 269, 323n55 Crooked Mirror theater, 127–28 Cubism, 7, 20, 315n27; and Bergson, 68–69, 299n24; as described in Du cubisme, 68; influence (reception) of, in Russia, 17, 20, 59, 95, 132– 33, 194, 198, 199–201, 286n5, 286n6, 286n7. See also CuboFuturism Cubo-Futurism and Cubo-Futurists, 2, 17, 20, 54, 60, 63, 74, 114, 115–17, 131, 154, 190, 199, 230, 286n6; as a term, 18–20, 285–286n4, 287n9 Dada, 8, 39, 77, 185; and the Russian avant-garde, 3–4, 7, 25, 27, 117, 122, 134, 185, 186, 190, 230, 282n8 Dal, Vladimir, 145 Damier, Vadim, 234 d’Anthès, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren (Dantes), 96–97, 302n21 Danto, Arthur, 26, 31, 44, 293n27 Darwin, Charles, 291n67 Davydov, I., 297n77 Davydova, Natalia, 194 Delaunay-Terk, Sonya, 144; La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (with Cendrars), 308n22 Denis, Maurice, 80 Denisov, Vladimir, 214–15 Depero, Fortunato, 140 Diaghilev, Sergei, 296n64; Ballets Russes production of, 101; and Mir iskusstva, 294–95n45

Index

Dix, Otto, 171 Dolgoff, Sam, 41 Donkey’s Tail group, 32–33, 34, 217, 286n7 Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Fedor Dostoevskii), 57, 69, 155, 222; influence of, 1–2, 39, 42, 88, 107–109, 131, 257, 307n8; Notes from the Underground, 1–2, 42, 88 Douglas, Charlotte, 125 Duchamp, Marcel, 68, 156, 295n46 Duhamel, Georges, 67 Dunois, Amédée, 234 Dymshits-Tolstaia, Sofiia, 233 Eckhardt, Meister, 31 Egbert, Donald, 7, 33, 42–43, 283n18, 309n41; Social Radicalism and the Arts, 9–10 Ego-Futurism and Ego-Futurists, 2, 29, 66, 154–55, 176, 211, 217, 227, 259 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 321n15 Einstein, Carl, 78 Eisenstein, Sergei (Sergei Eisenshtein): Battleship Potemkin, 273; “The Magic of Art,” 269, 274, 323n54; montage of attractions theory of, 253–54, 265–75, 322n40 Ellis, Havelock, 307n8 Emerson, Caryl, 46, 205 Erberg, Konstantin, 297n77 Ermolaeva, Vera, 230 Esslin, Martin, 131 estrangement, 115, 127, 253–261, 264–265, 267, 270, 273, 275, 320n11, 321n15, 322n36, 322n39 everythingness (vsechestvo), 5–6, 36–38, 54, 84, 94, 99, 282n11, 291–92n72 Evreinov, Nikolai (Nicolas Evreinoff), 29; and the Crooked Mirror, 127; and Kamensky, 29; theories of (“theater as such,” “theatricality,” “theatricalization”), 29, 112–14, 124, 128–30, 289n44 exhibitions: “Donkey’s Tail,” 32, 99, 199, 217; “Exhibition of the Art of 1915,” 190; GINKhUK retrospec-

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tive, 206; “Jack of Diamonds,” 98, 99, 199; “The Last Futurist Exhibition: 0.10,” 187, 193; “Number 4: Rayists, Futurians, Primitive,” 99; “Prima Exposizione Libera Futurista Internazionale” (First Free International Futurist Exhibition), 60–61, 150–151; “Shop,” 199; “Target,” 52, 99, 199; “The First Free Exhibit of the Moscow Artist-Painters’ Union,” 244–245; “Tramway V,” 199; “Union of Youth,” 19, 199 Expressionism, German: and the Russian avant-garde, 7, 20, 171 Exter, Alexandra (Aleksandra Ekster), 61, 194, 198 Fedorov, Nikolai, 35–36 Fedorov-Zabrezhnev, 57 Filonov, Pavel, 54, 70, 90, 117, 133; and “madeness” (“made paintings”), 70–71. Works: The Flight into Egypt (The Refugees): 70, 71; German War: 171; design for Izbornik (Collection), 55; Propeven’ o prorosli mirovoi: 70, 170–171; designs for Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy: 120–122 Filosofov, Dmitri, 294n45, 297n77 Fluxus, 7, 134 Formalism and Formalists (Formalist aesthetics, criticism), 13, 127, 136, 158, 167–68, 253, 259, 270, 320–21n11, 322n39; Marxist approaches to, 257–59, 320n10. See also Shklovsky, Viktor, estrangement theory of Foucault, Michel, 23 Freedom for Art, 214–16 Freud, Sigmund, 135, 214, 307n8 Friche, Vladimir, 244 Fry, Roger, 45 Futurism, Italian, 20, 180–81, 269, 290n59; and anarchism, 33, 290n59, 290n60; and Russian Futurism, 5, 7, 20, 33, 59–66, 90, 122, 129, 139, 140–42, 180; tavole parolibere in, 140–42; and World War I, 171,

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Futurism, Italian (continued) 176. See also Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Futurism, Russian, 1–13, 17, 20–22, 25, 27, 31–38, 59, 119, 122, 128; and anarchism, 7, 8, 10, 22; and Anarkhiia, 6, 10, 211, 217, 220–21, 224–25, 226–28, 236–37, 240–46, 252, 315n23, 315n24, 316–17n40, 316n39, 317n41, 318n5, 318n19; and Dada, 3–4, 7, 25, 27, 117, 122, 134, 185, 186, 190, 230, 282n8; and German Expressionism, 7, 20, 171; and Italian Futurism, 5, 7, 20, 33, 59–66, 90, 122, 129, 139, 140–42, 180; anti-urbanism of, 62–63, 90, 120, 181–83, 301n7; Mandelstam on, 94; manifestos of, 3, 22, 31, 40, 47, 51, 60, 63, 70, 73–74, 75, 77, 96–97, 107–8, 120, 128, 131, 150, 155, 156, 188–89, 199, 207, 214, 216–17, 230, 260, 266–67, 269, 279, 287n9, 298n3, 323n55; opera of, 73, 101–2, 117, 118, 120, 122–25, 123, 126, 127, 128–31, 163, 166–70, 185, 195, 303n33, 304–5n12, 310n24; poetry and poets of, 3, 5, 8, 10, 17–18, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 38, 44, 47, 54, 59, 63–67, 69, 73, 75–77, 84, 87– 88, 90–92, 93–95, 97, 103–111, 114–15, 117, 120–22, 124, 129, 130–31, 132, 133–36, 137, 138, 139–44, 143, 146–48, 150–58, 152, 163–64, 167–68, 170, 172, 173–84, 187, 191–94, 198, 199, 201, 207, 211–12, 216, 218, 220– 21, 224, 226, 227–28, 230, 239, 241, 259, 277, 285n2, 286–287n8, 301n11, 305n21, 306n43, 309n1, 314n14, 321n18; provocation and, 32–33, 34, 51, 98, 103, 106, 128– 29, 149–50, 154; and Pushkin, 94– 97, 104–5, 107, 302n16, 302n19; and Russian Symbolism, 3, 5, 17, 29–31, 54, 58, 92, 94, 107, 128– 29, 149–50, 162–63, 225–26, 239, 302–3n28; shift in, 92, 93–94, 95, 97, 115, 136, 148, 204, 214, 264–

65, 277, 282n9; theater of, 2, 5, 29, 84, 112, 117, 119–31, 121, 132, 168–70, 212, 304–5n12, 314n4; and Tolstoy, 3, 28–29, 39, 44–45, 46–55, 164, 166, 189, 205, 207, 259, 294n44, 295n55, 296n62, 301n7; and tradition, 36–38, 62– 63, 81–83, 88, 92–94, 96–97, 103, 132, 148, 162, 164–65, 171–73, 176, 263–64; word-image (word and image) in, 67, 134, 140–44, 184, 212. See also alogism; Futurist books, Russian; World War I, and the Russian futurism; zaum Futurist books, Russian, 5, 54, 73, 84, 132–58, 184, 277, 301n2; and Delaunay-Terk, 144, 308n22; and Francesco Canguillo, 140– 41; and free rhythm, 63, 108, 316n39; and handwriting, 135, 139–40, 146, 151–53, 184; and Marinetti, 135–36, 140, 141, 150– 51. Works: Ia! (I!), 137, 138; Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), 87–97, 89, 93, 96, 107, 136–37, 301n3, 302n13, 302n16, 302n19; Izbornik (Collection), 55; Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards), 5, 100, 146, 148; Pomada (Pomade), 146; Propeven’ o prorosli mirovoi, 70, 170–71; Sadok sudei (A Trap for Judges), 137, 150; Sharmanka (The Hurdy-Gurdy), 90; Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi, 154; Starinnaia liubov’ (OldFashioned Love), 136–37; Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows), 151, 152; Te li le, 142–44, 144; Troe (Three), 149; Uchites’ khudogi! (Learn Artists!), 148; Utinoe gnezdyshko durnykh slov (Duck’s Nest of Bad Words), 145, 150–51; Voina (War), 136, 137, 170–71, 173–83, 177, 179, 182; Vozropshchem! (Let’s Grumble!), 119, 122, 128, 146; Vselenskaia voina (Universal War), 136, 137, 170– 71, 183–86, 185, 192, 307n12; Vzorval’ (Explodity), 64, 65, 145– 46, 147, 149, 150, 298n9, 306n40;

Index

Zaumnaia gniga (Transrational Boog), 145, 156–57, 157 Gabo, Naum, “Realistic Manifesto” (with Pevsner), 279 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 25, 26, 76, 118, 305n13 Gan, Aleksei: and Anarkhiia, 10, 211, 220, 224–25, 240, 243, 317n41; and Constructivism, 220, 266, 322n45, 323n55 Gauguin, Paul, 80–81 Ginzburg, Carlo, 256, 259, 320n11, 322n39 Gleizes, Albert: and the Abbaye de Créteil, 67, 221, 299n19, 315n27; Du cubisme (with Metzinger), 59, 68–69, 286n7 Gnedov, Vasilisk, 216; and EgoFuturism, 154–56, 259 Gobbers, Walter, 27, 288n33 Godwin, William, 287n16 Gogol, Nikolai, 94; “The Lost Letter,” 94, 102–3, 302n14 Goltschmidt, Vladimir, 216 Goncharova, Natalia, 5, 22, 32, 68, 81, 90, 99, 101, 156, 166, 240, 288n35; as designer of Futurist books, 88, 89, 92–94, 95, 137, 301n3; and Larionov, 99, 101, 133, 190. Works: Airplane above a Train, 286n6; Angels and Airplanes, 173, 174; The Christian Host, 173; Cyclist, 64, 286n6, 298n10; Demon with Cards and a Jaguar, 88, 89; Doomed City, 173; The Doomed City, 172, 175; Dynamo Machine, 286n6; Gathering Grapes, 172; Harvest series, 172; illustrations for Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), 88, 89, 92–95, 301n3; Lion, 172; Mystical Images of War series, 170–73, 174, 175; Religious Composition: Archangel Michael, 82; St. George, 172; The Vision, 173; The Woman on the Beast, 172 Gordin brothers (Aba and Zeev), 316n34

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Gorky, Maxim (Maksim Gorkii), 108; referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Gorodetsky, Sergei (Sergei Gorodetskii), 150, 297n77, 305n21 Govoni, Carrado, 140; “Il Palombaro,” 141–42 Goya, Francisco de, Capricios, 51 Grave, Jean, 222, 284n21, 309n41 Gray, Camilla, 292n1 Grigoriev, Apollon (Apollon Grigoryev), 155, 299–300n28; organicist criticism of, 69, 71, 299n27 Gris, Juan, 68 Grishchenko, Aleksandr, 38 Grosz, George, 265, 322n40 Gudiashvili, Vladimir (Lado), 212 Guro, Elena, 20, 29, 32, 47, 50, 54, 68, 71, 73, 74, 80, 133, 137, 142, 294n40, 296n62; Cats, 48; and Organic Art, 71; Sharmanka (The Hurdy-Gurdy), 90; and Tolstoy, 47–51, 54–55, 294n44; and the Union of Youth, 47, 66–67, 71–73 Hartmann, Thomas von, 18, 285n3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 31, 40, 41, 76, 292n9 Heidegger, Martin, 24–25, 28, 76, 283n17, 289n37; and “dehumanization,” 125; “Die Frage nach der Technik” (The Question Concerning Technology), 300n34; “Letter on Humanism,” 203; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 25, 288n24 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 45 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 94 Hofmann, Werner, 76, 295n46, 300n34 Howard, Jeremy, 297n1 Hylaea (Gileia), 20, 21, 54, 59, 67, 73, 75, 133, 137, 155, 212, 218, 258, 286n7; founding of, 286–87n8; name of, 62, 286–87n8 Ignatiev, Ivan, 29, 156; and EgoFuturism, 154–55; Khlebnikov poem and Rozanova composition dedicated to the memory of, 140–42

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Impressionism, 17, 200 International Anarchist Congress, 56–57 Intuitive Association of Ego-Futurism, 154–55 Ionesco, Eugene: and the theater of the absurd (“theater of derision”), 124, 130 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 29, 127, 150, 289n43, 297n76; influence of, 58; and mystical anarchism, 58, 297n77 Ivnev, Riurik (pseudonym of Mikhail Kovalev), 211 Jaccard, Jean Philippe, 305n22, 306n43 Jack of Diamonds group, 98, 99, 298n4 Jakobson, Roman, 20, 35, 62, 136, 148, 149, 297n76; on A Game in Hell, 94, 95, 302n19; Zaumnaia gniga (Transrational Boog) (with Kruchenykh), 156, 157 Jameson, Fredric, 189 Janecek, Gerald, Zaum, 158, 282n10 Jarry, Alfred, 101, 124; Ubu Roi, 150 Jestrovic, Silvija, 127 journals and newspapers: Anarkhiia, 6, 10, 46–47, 198, 211, 217, 220–21, 221, 223–28, 234, 235–246, 252, 315n23, 315n24, 316n34, 318n19; Apollon, 149, 194; La Barricata, 33; Burevestnik, 223; Cornhill Magazine, 287n18; Den’, 124– 25, 311n30; Fakely, 57; Gazeta futuristov, 212, 216–18, 219, 239; Iskusstvo kommuny, 212, 218; Khleb i volya, 56; Lacerba, 140; LEF, 266, 270–271, 272; Mir iskusstva, 294–95n45, 296n64; Novyi Satirikon, 106; Nov, 66, 222; Novyi LEF, 266; Novyi zhurnal inostrannoi literatury, 296n64; Ocharovannyi strannik, 217; Pereval, 222; Rech’, 215; La Rèvolte, 56, 284n29, 309n41; Soiuz molodezhi, 54, 60, 67, 69; Supremus, 187, 189, 192–203, 207, 305n21, 312n13, 312n15; Svobodnoe slovo, 57; Zhizn’, 222

Kakabadze, David., 70 Kamensky, Vasilii (Vasilii Kamenskii), 10, 106, 136, 151, 153, 191, 228; David Burliuk’s portrait of, 30; and Evreinov, 29, 128; and Gazeta futuristov, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 239; and Hylaea, 20, 133; and the Poets’ Café, 216; tour of Russia, with David Burliuk and Mayakovsky, 154. Works: “Shchukin Palace”; Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows), 151–53, 152; “War and Creativity” lecture (with David Burliuk), 164; Zemlyanka (The Mud Hut), 90, 301n7 Kandinsky, Wassily (Vasilii Kandinskii), 17, 20, 47, 54, 55, 76, 77, 83; and anarchy, 17–18, 40, 55, 83, 162; and Blaue Reiter, 25, 285n3, 301n52; and “inner necessity,” 51, 161, 295n49. Works: Improvisation No. 20, 41; Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 163, 164; Klänge series, 181; “The Question of Form,” 55; “The Spiritual in Art,” 77 Kara-Dervish (pseudonym of A. M. Gendzhian), 212 Karelin, Apollon, 316n34 Kerensky, Alexander (Aleksand Kerenskii), Provisional Government of, 214 Khardzhiev, Nikolai, 20, 286n6 Kharms, Daniil, 123, 305n22, 306n43 Khleb i volia, 56 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor Khlebnikov), 29, 32, 36, 38, 39, 47, 51, 107, 108, 117, 122, 145, 153, 163, 167, 171, 178, 217, 246, 321n18; and budetliane, 20; and Hylaea, 20, 133, 286–87n8; and metabiosis, 35–36; on Pushkin and Russian Futurism, 95–97; and theater, 112; and the Union of Youth, 67; and World War I, 122, 167–70, 310n24; and zaum, 5, 17, 115, 132, 135– 36, 142, 259. Works: “To Alyosha Kruchenykh,” 87; “An Appeal by the Presidents of Planet Earth,” 22; Bitvy 1915–1917, 168; “Death in

Index

the Lake,” 170; “The Declaration of the Word as Such” (with Khruchenykh), 140, 150, 307n15; Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (with Kruchenykh), 87–90, 89, 92–95, 93, 96, 107, 136–37, 301n3, 302n13, 302n19; Izbornik (Collection), 55; “In Memoriam I. V. I[gnatie]v,” 140–42, 143; Mirskonsta (Worldbackwards) (with Kruchenykh), 5, 100; “Night in Galicia,” 54; Riav! Perchatki! (Roar! The Gauntlets!), 254; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (with David Burliuk, Kruchenykh, and Mayakovsky), 63, 96, 254; Te li le (with Kruchenykh), 142, 144; Voennaia opera (Military Opera, War Opera) (with Kruchenykh), 122, 167–70, 310n24 Khlysty, 135, 148 Khovin, Viktor, 176, 217 Kierkegaard, Soren, 76 Kiev, 56 Kirillova, A. M., 70 Kliun, Ivan (Ivan Kliunkov), 161, 191, 204; and Anarkhiia, 220; Malevich’s portrait of, 19; and Supremus: 194–95, 197–98; Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians) (with Kruchenykh and Malevich), 163, 191–92, 309n5 Kollwitz, Käthe, 171 Komarov, Boris, 225 Konchalovsky, Petr, 99 Kovalev, Mikhail (Riurik Ivnev) Kovtun, Evgenii, 52 Kramskoi, Ivan, 292n1 Kriuchkov, Dmitrii, 154 Kropotkin, Petr, 56, 284n29; anarchist theories of, 39–40, 42, 43, 56, 58, 77, 222, 234, 287–88n23, 291n67, 296n64, 309n41; on labor unions, 234 Kruchenykh, Aleksei (Aleksei Kruchonykh), 5, 20, 32–33, 54, 62, 76, 117, 119, 122, 145, 148, 150, 191, 195, 217, 260, 264, 282n9, 297n76, 305n22, 306n43, 307n8, 312n14;

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and budetliane, 20, 167; and “EUY,” 136–37; and Hylaea, 20, 21, 258; and Russian Futurist books, 132–33, 135–37, 140, 148, 149, 153; and Supremus, 194–95, 197, 198, 201, 305n21; in Tiflis, 211–14, 305n21, 314n4; and Tolstoy, 44, 47, 51, 295n55; and World War I, 122, 136, 137, 163, 166–171, 173–83, 177, 179, 182, 310n24; and zaum, 5, 17, 66, 111, 112, 114, 115, 122, 124, 132, 135–36, 142–44, 158, 186, 259, 304n5. Works: Sobstvennye rasskazy I risunki detei (Children’s Own Stories and Drawings), 54; “The Declaration of the Word as Such” (with Khlebnikov), 63, 139, 140, 144, 150, 198, 201, 204, 307n15; “Gambler. The Poem of Play,” 109–10; Germany in Ashes, 184; Gly-Gly, 122, 305n21; Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (with Khlebnikov), 87–97, 89, 93, 96, 107, 136–37, 301n3, 302n13, 302n16, 302n19; Malakholiia v kapote, 214; Military State, 184, 185; Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) (with Khlebnikov), 5, 100; Most (Bridge), 122, 128–29, 305n21; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (with David Burliuk, Khlebnikov, and Mayakovsky), 63, 96; Starinnaia liubov’ (Old-Fashioned Love), 136–37; Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians) (with Kliun and Malevich), 163, 191–92, 309n5; Te li le (with Khlebnikov), 142, 144; Troe (Three), 149; Uchites’ khudogi! (Learn Artists!), 148; Utinoe gnezdyshko durnykh slov (Duck’s Nest of Bad Words), 150–51; Pobeda nad Solntsem (Victory over the Sun), 73, 117, 118, 120, 122–25, 123, 126, 127, 128–31, 163, 167, 169, 170, 185, 195, 303n33, 304–5n12; Voennaia opera (Military Opera, War Opera)

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Kruchenykh, Aleksei (continued) (with Khlebnikov): 122, 166–70, 310n24; Voina (War): 136–37, 170–71, 173–83, 177, 179, 182; Vozropshchem! (Let’s Grumble!), 118–19, 122, 128; Vselenskaia voina (Universal War), 136, 137, 170–71, 183–86, 185, 192, 307n12; Vzorval’ (Explodity), 64, 65, 145– 46, 147, 150, 298n9, 306n40; Zaumnaia gniga (Transrational Boog) (with Aliagrov), 156–57, 157; Zealous Germany, 184 Kulbin, Nikolai, 60–61, 61, 66, 71, 128, 133, 142, 256, 298n4; Portrait of Aleksei Kruchenykh, 65; SelfPortrait, 255; theoretical writings of, 18, 63, 76, 256, 262–64; cover of Vzorval’ (Explodity), 145–146, 147 Kuleshov, Lev, and montage (“Kuleshov effect”), 265, 266, 268–69, 323n52 Kuprin, Alexander, 108; referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Kushner, Boris, 212, 267; Democratization of Art, 215 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 150 Kuznetsov, Pavel, 240 labor unions, 234–35, 244 Lacan, Jacques, 307n7 Lafargue, Paul, 106; La Droite à la parasse, 106–7 Larionov, Mikhail, 17, 32, 51, 81–83, 90, 98, 99, 101, 103, 133, 137, 165, 190, 264, 278, 303n30; and “everythingness,” 5–6, 38; group of, 32–33, 52, 59, 60, 63, 73, 81, 97, 98, 133, 220, 295n52; and Hylaea, 286n8; and Marinetti’s trip to Russia, 60, 62; and Rayism, 98–99, 100, 148, 172, 302–3n28. Works: City, 286n6; Dancing Soldiers, 103–4, 104, 109; “Manifesto of Rayists and Futurians,” 63; Out Walking, 286n6; Pomada (Pomade), 146; Rayist Composition (Lady at

the Table), 100; Seasons series, 134; “Why We Paint Ourselves” (with Ilya Zdanevich), 156, 321n29; Winter, 134, 134 Lasson-Spirova, E. A., 70 Lautréamont, Comte de, 39 Le Bon, Gustave, La Psychologie des foules, 269 Le Dantu, Mikhail, 5, 81, 99 LEF (Left Front of the Arts), 1, 3, 4, 212, 215–16, 218, 253, 258, 260, 266, 273, 276, 314–15n15; declarations (manifestos) of: 267, 269 Le Fauconnier, Henri, 68 Léger, Fernand, 68 Leighten, Patricia, 9, 311n31 Lentulov, Aristarkh, 165, 298n4 Leporskaya, Anna (Anna Leporskaia), 304n4 Lewis, Wyndham, 173, 310n26 Lipps, Theodor, 293n29 Lissitzky, El (Eleazar, Lazar Lissitskii), 230, 267, 273–74; Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 270, 271 Livshits, Benedikt, 21, 61, 63; and Hylaea, 20, 21, 286–87n8 Lodder, Christina, Russian Constructivism, 282n6 lubok, lubki (broadside folk print/s): Segodniashnii lubok series, 165, 165, 171; as source for Russian avant-garde artists, 52, 87–88, 93, 97, 102–3, 133, 146, 171–73, 181 Lukács, Georg, 288n33 Lunacharsky, Anatolii (Anatolii Lunacharskii), 6, 212, 215, 218, 223, 228, 244, 297n75, 315–16n29 Lurie, Artur, 61, 214, 218 Malatesta, Errico, 222, 234 Malevich, Kazimir, 8, 13, 17, 32, 39, 66, 76, 78, 81, 90, 98, 117, 119, 119–20, 168, 190–91, 243, 257, 264, 278, 295n49, 304n4, 312n12, 312n14; and alogism, 5, 101, 112– 15, 259, 282n9; and Anarkhiia, 10, 46–47, 198, 217, 220, 225, 227, 228, 234, 237–38, 240, 242–45, 315n24, 318n19; and the Artists’

Index

Union, 218, 233–34, 235, 237, 246; and Cubo-Futurism, 18, 19, 63, 115–17, 190, 286n6; and “The Last Futurist Exhibition: 0.10,” 176, 187, 191, 193, 194; and Russian Futurist books, 133, 145, 298n9; and Suprematism, 46, 117, 122–23, 183–84, 186–206, 188, 193, 206, 211, 220, 228–31, 238, 286n5; and Supremus, 187, 189, 192, 194–201, 202–4, 207, 312n13; and Tolstoy, 46–47, 51, 189, 205–7; in Vitebsk, 13, 230. Works: “Architecture as a Slap at Ferro-Concrete,” 198, 234; Aviator, 114–15, 116; Black Square, 158, 188, 195; Cow and Violin, 112, 113, 114, 304n1; “Cubism,” 198, 203; “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 115–17, 187, 191; “Declaration of Artists’ Rights,” 237–38, 242–43; Englishman in Moscow, 114; “The Exhibition of the Artists’ Union: The Left Federation,” 246; In the Fields, 19; Flight of an Airplane, 192–93; “Futurism,” 198, 200; “Greeting to the Suprematists,” 198–99, 201; illustrations and covers of Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), 92–94, 93, 95, 302n13; The Knife Grinder, 286n6; “The Mouth of the Earth and the Artist,” 200, 202–3; Peasant Funeral, 19; “On Poetry,” 139; Portrait of Ivan Vasilievich Kliunkov, 19; The Reader; cover of S’ezd komitetov derevenskoi bednoty, 236; Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Airplane and on a Railway, 62, 64; “Sloth—The Real Truth of Humanity,” 106, 303n36; “In the State of the Arts,” 243; Tainye poroki akademikov (Secret Vices of the Academicians) (with Kliun and Kruchenykh), 163, 191–192, 309n5; “Theater,” 198; Victory over the Sun, 101–2, 117, 118, 120, 122–25, 123, 126, 131, 195, 303n33, 304–5n12 Mallarmé, Stephane, 145

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Mandelstam, Osip (Osip Mandelshtam), 94 Mannheim, Karl, Ideologie und Utopie, 281n4 Marc, Franz, 25 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 33, 63, 68, 124, 145, 150–51, 269, 298n7, 299n17; L’imaginazione senza file e le parole in libertà, 145; and “Prima Exposizione Libera Futurista Internazionale” (First Free International Futurist Exhibition), 60–61, 150– 51; “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” 135; trip to Russia of, 60–62, 61, 66, 298n4; and war, 163–64, 176, 290n59; Zang Tumb Tumb, 141 Markov, V. F., 156, 285–86n4, 285n2, 286n7 Markov, Vladimir. See Matvejs Marx, Karl, 299n20 Mashkov, Ilya, 99 Matisse, Henri, 75, 153; Jazz series, 185 Matiushin, Mikhail, 17, 47, 50, 54, 71, 117, 119, 136, 137, 150, 168, 191, 203, 235, 295n49; and Cubism, 69; and the First All-Russian Congress of Futurists, 119–20; “On the Old and the New in Music,” 204–5; and Organic Art, 71; Self-Portrait “Crystal,” 72; and Supremus, 192, 193–94, 195, 197–99, 312n15; and the Union of Youth, 47, 66– 67, 71–73, 119; Victory over the Sun, 118, 120–22, 124–25, 126, 129, 131, 304–5n12 Matvejs, Voldem1rs (Vladimir Markov), 5, 18, 32, 47, 55, 78, 79, 106, 285n2, 300n41; “The Principles of the New Art,” 78–80, 83–84, 282n7; and the Union of Youth, 73, 78 Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Vladimir Maiakovskii), 4, 8, 10, 20, 63, 66, 90–92, 98, 110, 120, 124, 136, 190, 212, 214, 215, 216, 227, 228, 229, 233, 257, 266, 267, 272, 277– 78, 298n7, 315n15; and Gazeta futuristov, 212, 216–17, 218, 219,

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Mayakovsky, Vladimir (continued) 239; and Hylaea, 20, 21, 133, 286–87n8; and Iskusstvo kommuny, 212, 218; and Segodniashnii lubok, 164–165, 165; tour of Russia, with David Burliuk and Kamensky, 154; and World War I, 161, 163–67, 165, 178, 180. Works: “The Backbone Flute,” 97; “A Cloud in Trousers,” 277; Ia! (I!), 137, 138; “I Love,” 103–4; “Mama and the Night Killed by Germans,” 180; Mysteriia-Bouffe, 277; “Napoleon and I,” 180; “Night,” 90; “Open Letter to Workers,” 216– 17; “Order on the Army of Art,” 218; Roulette, 90, 91; poetry for Segodniashnii lubok; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (with David Burliuk, Khlebnikov, and Kruchenykh), 63, 107–8, 216; Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, 90, 108, 117, 120–22; “War and Peace,” 178; “War Declared,” 180; “Welcoming Words to Some Vices,” 104–8; Yellow Blouse, 92 Medvedev, Pavel, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 284–85n38 Meier, A., 297n77 Menkov, Mikhail, 194 Mercereau, Alexandre, 67 Metzinger, Jean, 68; “Cubisme et tradition,” 68; Du cubisme (with Gleizes), 59, 68–69, 286n7 Meyerhold, Vsevolod (Vsevolod Meierkhold), 122, 127, 215; Balaganchik, 128–29 Mints, Zara, 296n62 Mir iskusstva. See World of Art modernism, 9, 26, 57, 68, 80–81, 288n33: and the avant-garde, 6, 7–9, 11, 31, 284n27 Monet, Claude, 153 Morgunov, Aleksei, 81, 99, 217; and Anarkhiia, 220, 228, 240, 241, 243, 318n19 Morozov, Ivan, collection of, 242 Morris, William, 43, 67, 299n20 Morson, Gary Saul, 53, 108

Moscow: and Russian anarchism, 10, 56, 220, 222–24, 237, 238, 246– 47, 315n20, 316n34, 319–20n40; and Russian avant-garde, 32, 52, 59, 60–61, 63, 133, 145, 154, 164, 188, 190, 191, 194, 211, 212, 216, 218, 229, 239, 244, 279. See also Jack of Diamonds group; Neoprimitivism and Neoprimitivists Moscow Art Theater, 128 Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG), 10, 220, 222, 223, 224, 237, 247, 315n20, 316n34, 319–20n40 Muratov, Pavel, 80 Mussorgsky, Modest (Modest Musorgskii), Pictures at an Exhibition, 153 mystical anarchism and mystical anarchists, 57–58, 220, 292n9, 297n75, 297n77 Nematollahy, Ali, 9, 283–284n26 Neo-impressionism and Neoimpressionists, 70, 309n41 Neoprimitivism and Neoprimitivists, 2, 3, 17, 36, 52, 63, 75, 76, 81, 94, 97, 98, 106, 134, 148, 171, 172, 259; and “everythingness,” 38, 54 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, 29, 222, 289n37; The Birth of Tragedy, 28; reception of, 8, 28–30, 33, 34, 47–49, 56, 58, 76, 129, 131, 145, 189, 203, 226, 294n43, 294n44, 296n64, 307n8, 316n34; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 34, 296n64 Nizen, Ekaterina, 68 organicism (organicist criticism and theory), 2, 35, 47, 68–71 Ortega y Gasset, José, 268, 323n50 Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 266 Otverzhennyi, N., 299n27 Ouspensky, P. D. (Petr Uspenskii), 35; Tertium Organum, 69 Pavlov, Ivan, 275, 324n65 Pechstein, Max, 171 People’s Commissariat of Education (People’s Commissariat of Enlight-

Index

enment) (Narkompros), 212, 218; Visual Arts Section (IZO), 223, 236, 279 Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment, 33 Pestel, Vera, 194 Peter I (Peter the Great), 81 Peters, Jan, 237 Petrograd. See St. Petersburg Pevsner, Antoine (Anton Pevzner), “Realistic Manifesto” (with Gabo), 279 Picasso, Pablo, 78, 80–81, 95, 153, 181, 199, 302n19, 311n31 Pirosmanashvili, Niko (Pirosmani), 52, 173; Portrait of Ilya Zdanevich, 52, 53 Pisarev, Dmitry, 225; “Destruction of Aesthetics,” 43–44 Poe, Edgar Allan, 94 Poets’ Café (Futurist Café), 212, 216, 223, 227 Poggi, Christine, 269 Poggioli, Renato, 8 Ponson du Terrail, Pierre-Alexis de, 98, 101 Popova, Liubov, 68, 194, 197, 198 Populism (Pochvennichestvo; men of the soil movement), 56, 69, 292n1, 317n43 Pospelov, Gleb, 98 postmodernism, 23, 44 Pougny, Jean (Ivan Puni), 183, 214; and “The Last Futurist Exhibition: 0.10,” 191; and Supremus, 194–95, 198 Povelikhina, Alla, 52 Process Art, 7 Productionism and Productionists (Production Art), 3, 28, 106, 273 Proudhon, Pierre Paul, 287n16, 299n20; influence of, 24, 42–43, 106, 299n20 Prutkov, Kozma (pseudonym of the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers; Aleksei, Alexander, and Vladimir), 127 Punin, Nikolai, 212, 214, 237; as “Voltaire-terrorist,” 218, 244 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 77, 302n21;

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“Infernal Poem,” as source for A Game in Hell, 94–95, 302n16, 302n19; “The Queen of Spades,” 103, 149; referenced, in Mayakovsky’s “Welcoming Words to Some Vices,” 105, 107; Ruslan and Liudmila, 96; and Russian Futurism, 94–97, 104–5, 107, 302n16, 302n19 Rafalovich, S., 297n77 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 254, 256 RAPP (Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers), 4 Rayism (Rayonism), 2, 98–99, 100, 148, 156, 172; “Manifesto of Rayists and Futurians,” 63, 75 Read, Herbert, 8–9, 10, 77–78 Remizov, Aleksei, 139, 150; referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Repin, Ilya (Ilia Repin): slashing of his Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son, 51 Reszler, André, 283–284n26; L’Esthétique anarchiste, 9 Revolution, Russian: and anarchism, 56–57, 220–21, 222, 226, 227– 28, 284n27, 297n75; Bolshevik October revolution, 4, 6, 10, 162, 195–96, 205, 211, 212, 214, 243, 252, 276, 277, 282n12, 288n33; February Revolution, 6, 195–96, 211, 215, 216, 252; Russian Revolution of 1905, 56, 162, 299n19 Ricoeur, Paul, 284n34 Riegl, Alois, “will to art” (Kunstwollen) theory of, 263 Rocker, Rudolf, 234–35 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 4, 217, 225, 230, 248, 265, 266, 314–15n15, 317n44, 319n33, 322n40, 323n55; and Anarkhiia, 10, 211, 217, 220, 225, 226–27, 230, 241, 243, 244, 245–46, 250, 315n23, 318n19; and the Artists’ Union, 237, 246–248, 250–252. Works: poster for Battleship Potemkin, 273, 273; cover

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Rodchenko, Aleksandr (continued) designs for LEF, 270–71, 272; “To the Leftists of the Exhibitions of the Artists’ Union,” 246; “Put on Your Hats and . . . ,” 245, 318n19; “The Schism,” 250; “So Rise Up!,” 245– 46; “Warning!,” 266 Romains, Jules, 67, 299n23 Romanticism, 41, 45–46, 52, 94–95, 97, 103 Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, 297n75 Roslavets, Nikolai: and Supremus, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201–2, 203, 205 ROSTA (Russian State Telegraph Agency) Windows, posters for, 266 Rouault, Georges, Miserere, 171 Rousseau, Henri, 52, 173 Rozanova, Olga, 20, 32, 61, 61, 68, 74–75, 117, 133, 144, 149, 191, 195, 262, 312n14; and Anarkhiia, 10, 217, 220, 237, 245, 246, 250, 252, 264, 318n19; and the Artists’ Union, 232–33, 235, 237, 250; Rodchenko’s obituary for, 319n33; and Suprematism, 74, 176, 193, 196, 245, 246, 318n19; and Supremus, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201; and the Union of Youth, 60, 73; and World War I, 136, 137, 170–71, 173–183, 177. Works: Airplanes over the City, 176, 180, 182, 183; “Art-Only in Independence and Unlimited Freedom,” 245; “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why It Is Misunderstood,” 263; Battle in the City, 180, 183; “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism,” 32, 201; Destruction of the City, 181–83; “The Destruction of the Tripartite Federative Structure of the Union as the Cause of the Succession of the Left Federation,” 252; Duel, 180; Fire in the City, 75, 286n6; “The Foundations of the New Art and Why It Is Not Understood,” 73–74; Fragment from Newspaper Reports, 176, 178–81, 179; poster for Futurist

Theater, 121; illustrations for Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), 92–94, 95, 96, 302n13; illustrations for Vzorval’ (Explodity), 145, 146; The Jack of Clubs, 303n32; The Jack of Diamonds, 303n32; The Jack of Hearts, 303n32; The King of Clubs, 303n32; The King of Spades, 303n32; Man Leaping from Airplane, 180; In Memoriam I. V. I[gnatie]v, 140– 42, 143; Metronome, 35, 37; The “Modern” Movie Theater, 115; Playing Cards series, 99–101, 303n32; Portrait of A. V. Rozanova, 19; The Queen of Diamonds, 303n32; The Queen of Hearts, 303n32; Queen of Spades, 102, 303n32; Self-Portrait, 74; Simultaneous Representation of Four Aces, 303n32; Simultaneous Representation of the King of Hearts and the King of Diamonds, 303n32; Simultaneous Representation of the Queen of Spades and the Queen of Hearts, 303n32; Suprematism, 193, 196; “Suprematism and the Critics,” 245, 246, 318n19; illustrations for Te li le, 142, 144; illustrations for Utinoe gnezdyshko durnykh slov (Duck’s Nest of Bad Words), 150–51; cover and illustrations of Voina (War), 136, 137, 170–71, 173–83, 177, 179, 182; cover and illustrations of Zaumnaia gniga (Transrational Boog), 156, 157 Ruskin, John, 43, 51, 295n49, 299n20 Russolo, Luigi, 60 Sagaidachnyi, Evgenii, 66 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 283n18 Salon des Indépendants, 33 Samoilov, Mikhail, “Open Letter to Comrade Lunacharsky,” 228 Samsonov, Aleksandr, 170, 310n24 Sarabianov, Dmitri, 17, 18–20, 190, 281n2 Schelling, Friedrich, 69

Index

Schlegel, Friedrich, 46, 293–94n31, 294n34 Schopenhauer, Artur, 202, 307n8 Schürmann, Reiner, 22, 24, 28, 283n17, 287n21, 287n22, 289–90n47, 289n37 Schwitters, Kurt, 190 Segodniashnii lubok series, 165, 165, 171 Seurat, Georges, 70 Severianin, Igor (pseudonym of Igor Lotarev), 154, 227, 228 Severini, Gino, 60, 173 Shapirshtein, Y. E., 317n43 Sharp, Jane Ashton, 288n35, 291–92n72 Shattuck, Roger, 9 Shemshurin, Andrei, 136, 137, 177, 179, 182, 185, 198, 232–33, 303n30, 307n8, 307n12 Shershenevich, Vadim, 66 Shestov, Lev, 49, 294n43, 297n77 Shevchenko, Aleksandr, 22, 84, 99, 286n7; Principles of Cubism, 264, 286n7 Shirokov, Pavel, 154 Shklovsky, Viktor (Viktor Shklovskii), 108, 218; “Art as Device,” 258–61, 264–65, 321n18, 322n35, 322n36; estrangement theory of, 115, 127, 253–261, 264–265, 267, 270, 273, 275, 320n11, 321n15, 322n36, 322n39; and zaum, 115, 158, 259, 321n18 Shkolnik, Iosif, 66, 73, 120 Shleifer, Savelii, 73 Shokin, Vladimir, 244 Sidorov, Vladimir (Vadim Baian, Baian Plamen’): and Anarkhiia, 211, 225, 226–28 Signac, Paul, 70 Situationism, 7 Socialist Realism, 1, 57 Sologub, Fedor, referenced, in “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” 108 Solovyov, Vladimir (Vladimir Soloviev), 58, 225 Sonn, Richard D., 9, 43, 155 Spandikov, Eduard, 66; Lady with Guitar, 19 St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad):

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and Russian avant-garde, 13, 59, 60–61, 63, 66, 120, 133, 154, 187, 190, 193, 211, 212, 214, 215, 237, 239, 244, 279, 298n3. See also Union of Art Workers; Union of Youth Stanislavsky, Konstantin (Konstantin Stanislavskii), 128 Stapanian, Juliette R., 301n11 Stepanova, Varvara, 22, 266, 315n15, 323n15 Stirner, Max: influence of, 33, 34, 56– 57, 58, 69, 155, 226, 242, 308n38, 316n34, 317n44 Stravinsky, Igor, Jeu de cartes, 303n33 Stray Dog cabaret, 127 Struve, Aleksandr, 316n39; “Art and the Market,” 238–240 Suprematism, 2, 17, 74, 76, 117, 183– 84, 186; and Cubism, 194, 199– 201, 286n5; and Malevich, 46, 117, 122–23, 183–84, 186–206, 188, 193, 206, 211, 220, 228–31, 238, 286n5; as philosophy (program), 187–90, 197, 199, 201, 203–7, 228–31 Supremus, 192, 233 Surrealism and Surrealists, 117, 124, 134, 144, 216, 306n45 Sviatogor, A. (A. F. Agienko), 225, 316–17n40 Symbolism, French, 134, 149 Symbolism, Russian, 17, 29–30, 40, 129, 162, 220, 221, 294–95n45; and “life-creation” (zhizhnetvorchestvo), 29, 289n43; and mystical anarchism, 57–58, 297n75; and Russian avant-garde, 3, 5, 17, 29– 31, 54, 58, 92, 94, 107, 128, 129, 149, 150, 162, 163, 225–26, 239, 302–3n28 Syndicate of Futurists, 212 “Tannenberg catastrophe,” 170, 310n24 Tasteven, Genrikh, 20, 287n10 Tatlin, Vladimir, 17, 78, 98, 190, 195, 217, 227, 228, 233, 244; and the Artists’ Union, 233, 235, 237, 250;

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Tatlin, Vladimir (continued) and Constructivism, 195, 225; and Malevich, 191, 192, 195, 211; Monument to the Third International, 251 Tbilisi. See Tiflis Terentiev, Igor, 212 theater of cruelty. See Artaud, Antonin theater of the absurd. See Ionesco, Eugene Tiflis (Tbilisi): and Company 41°, 154 (caption), 212–14, 314n4; and Russian Futurism, 52, 148, 153, 211–12, 216, 305n21, 314n4; and the Syndicate of Futurists, 212 Tolstoy, Aleksei (Aleksei Tolstoi), 127 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Tolstoi), 3, 28, 39, 44–55, 57, 58, 67, 189, 205, 207, 259, 293n27, 293n28, 293n29, 294n37, 294n39, 295n45, 295n55, 301n7; influences on, 40, 42–44, 45–46, 293–294n31, 295n49; and Russian avant-garde, 3, 28, 29, 39, 44–45, 164, 166, 189, 205, 207, 259, 294n44, 295n55, 296n62, 301n7; theory of art of, 28, 43– 55, 294n43; What Is Art?, 45–55, 295n45 transrational poetry. See zaum Tretyakov, Sergei (Sergei Tretiakov), 258, 322n44 Trotsky, Leon (Leon Trotskii), 237; Literature and Revolution, 277–78; and Russian Futurism, 217, 218, 260, 277–78 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 108 Tucker, Benjamin, 56 Tugendkhold, Iakov, 167, 240 Turgenev, Ivan, Fathers and Sons, 225 Turkin, Nikandr, Ne dlia deneg rodivshisia, 229 Tynianov, Iurii, 167–168 Udaltsova, Nadezhda, 68, 204; and Anarkhiia, 217, 220, 318n19; and the Artists’ Union, 237, 241, 248– 249; Seamstress, 298n10; and Supremus, 194, 197, 198, 199

unanimism, 68, 299n23 Union of Art Workers, 214–16; and the Artists’ Union, 232, 235–36, 237, 241, 248–49, 250 Union of Russian Artists, 234 Union of Youth, 19, 47, 59, 60, 61, 66–68, 71–73, 78, 119, 133, 190, 199, 233, 234, 263, 297n1, 297n2; and the Abbaye de Créteil, 67–68; and Hylaea, 67, 73, 286n7; journal, 54, 60, 69; manifesto of, 60, 298n3; theatrical productions of, 120 UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art): and Vitebsk, 13, 230–31 Valishevsky, Ziga (Zigmund Valishevskii), 212 Valkenier, Elizabeth, 215 Varias, Alexander, 9 Vereshchagin, Vasilii, 166 Vertov, Dziga (pseudonim of David Kaufman), 266, 273 Villon, François, 397n8 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 293n29 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 293n20 Vorticism, 7, 173, 310n26 Vrubel, Mikhail, referenced: in Anarkhiia, 240; in Mayakovsky’s “Welcoming Words to Some Vices,” 105 Wallace, Alfred Russel, theories of, 291n67 Wanderers, 39, 292n1 Weir, David, 9, 39, 57, 222, 284n29, 309n40 Weststeijn, Willem, 168 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, Ruskin’s attack on, 51 Whitman, Walt: influence (reception) of, 5, 98–99, 302–3n28, 317n44 Wilde, Oscar, 155, 309n41 Wilhelm II (Kaiser Wilhelm), as character: in Victory over the Sun, 163; in War Opera, 169 Williams, Raymond, 277–278 Winstanley, Gerrard, 287n16

Index

Woodcock, George, 231, 287n16 Working Group of Constructivists, 266, 323n55 World of Art, 214, 225, 294–95n45, 296n64 World War I (the Great War), 26, 162– 63, 288n33; Goncharova’s response to, 166, 170–73, 174, 175; and Italian Futurism, 171, 176; Khlebnikov’s response to, 122, 167–170, 310n24; Khovin’s response to, 176; Kruchenykh’s response to, 136, 137, 170–71, 173–86, 177, 179, 182, 185, 192, 307n12; Malevich’s response to, 165, 165; Mayakovsky’s response to, 161, 164–65, 166, 180; Rozanova’s response to, 136, 137, 170–71, 173, 176–83, 177, 179, 182; and the Russian Futurism, 96, 161– 86, 288n33, 309n1; and Segodniashnii lubok, 164–65, 165, 171 Yakulov, Georgii (Georgii Iakulov), 233 Yurkevich, [Mstislav?]: and Supremus, 194, 197–98, 201

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Zadonshchina, 171 zaum (transrational poetry), 5, 17, 111, 112, 114, 115, 122, 135, 139, 158, 259, 260, 275, 277, 282n10, 307n7; and Khlebnikov, 5, 17, 115, 122, 132, 135, 142, 259; and Kruchenykh, 5, 17, 66, 111, 112, 114, 115, 122, 124, 131, 132, 135, 139, 142, 145, 146, 156–57, 157, 183–84, 192, 259, 304n5; and Shklovsky, 115, 158, 259, 321n18 Zdanevich, Ilya, 5, 55, 99, 123, 145, 153, 214–15, 216, 262, 264, 282n11; in Tiflis, 52, 53, 153, 154, 211–12, 216; Works: Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi, 154; “Why We Paint Ourselves” (with Larionov), 156, 321n29. See also Tiflis (Tbilisi) Zdanevich, Kirill, 52, 148, 212 Zhegin, Lev, 137 Zheverzheev, Levkii, 78, 95–96; and the Union of Youth, 71–73, 239 Ziks, M., 228 Žižek, Slavoj, 277

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