The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy 9781793615749, 9781793615756, 1793615748

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The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

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The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy Edited by Slav N. Gratchev

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-1574-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-1575-6 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Slav N. Gratchev 1  A  bstraction and Estrangement across the Arts in the Russian Avant-garde 9 Norbert Francis 2  L  . P. Yakubinsky and M. M. Bakhtin: A Brief History of a “Dialogue” That Never Really Was Michael Eskin

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3  “ Strong, Manly and Bold”: The Russian Avant-Garde and Its Masculine Mantra Tim Harte

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4  F  lying Too Close to the Sun: Impersonations of Duncan in Russia Mark Konecny 5  R  ole of the Newspaper Art of the Commune in the Establishment of Proletarian Art Natalia Murray

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6  M  alevich’s “Ule Elye Lel”: A Suprematist’s Avant-garde Poetic Experimentations 87 Margarita Marinova

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Contents

 7  T  he Ecological Avant-garde: Arkady Fiedler’s The River of Singing Fish 115 Ida Day  8  S  cience Fiction in the Russian Avant-garde Cinema of the 1920s and Anarchism Olga Burenina-Petrova

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 9  M  oscow Conceptualism, Post-Suprematism, and Beyond: Reimagining the Russian Avant-garde Mary A. Nicholas

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10  T  he Bauhaus and the Children: An Almost Forgotten History of Avant-garde Children’s Literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

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11  T  he Problems of Translation and Popularization of Russian Avant-garde Texts in the West Irina Evdokimova

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12  A  Radical Emigré: Naum Gabo and the Legacy of the October Revolution Christina Lodder

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Index 227 About the Contributors

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List of Figures

3.1  Ilya Mashkov, Self-Portrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky, 1910. Oil on canvas, 208 × 270 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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3.2  Kazimir Malevich, Futurist Strongman. Costume design for the opera Victory over the Sun after A. Kruchenykh, 1913. Found in the collection of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 53 4.1  C  aricature of Ikar. from Theater and Art, 1911, No. 12, 267. Photograph by Mark Konecny.

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4.2  M  . Slepian, Imitation of Duncan’s Dance—Mr. Ikar from Theater and Art, No. 27, 1907, 473. Photograph by Mark Konecny.

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4.3  A  leksandr Galinskii in Geisha Costume, Artist and Stage, Moscow, 3, 1912, 22. Photograph by Mark Konecny.

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5.1  T  he front page of the first issue of the newspaper Art of the Commune © N. Murray collection.

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7.1  Arkady Fiedler. With permission from Marek Fiedler.

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7.2  E  ntrance to Fiedler House/Museum, Puszczykowo. Photograph by Dan Day.

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7.3  A  rkady Fiedler’s Museum and Literary Atelier in Puszczykowo. Photograph by Frank Day.

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7.4  T  he Garden of Cultures and Tolerance, Puszczykowo. Photograph by Dan Day.

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List of Figures

 7.5  C  ollection of Fiedler’s published works, Fiedler Museum. Photograph by Ida Day.

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 7.6  A  rkady Fiedler’s resting place, Puszczykowo, Wielkopolski National Park. Photograph by Eugene Zeb Kozlowski.

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 9.1  D  onskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Hatching a Spirit” (Vysizhivanie dukha), 1975. Installation view. Courtesy of Victor Skersis. 154  9.2  D  onskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Pump the Red Pump!” (Kachaite Krasnyi Nasos), 1975. Oil on fiberboard, two pumps, 175 × 120. Courtesy of Victor Skersis.

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 9.3  D  onskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Iron Curtain” (Zheleznyi zanaves), 1976. Oil on iron sheet, 102.5 × 100. Courtesy of Victor Skersis.

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 9.4  V  adim Zakharov, “Shteinberg, You’re Nothing but a Powdered Malevich. Realize That Please,” from the series “I’ve Made Enemies” (Ia nazhil sebe vragov), 1983. Documentation of action. Black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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 9.5  N  ataliia Abalakhova and Anatolii Zhigalov, “Black Square” (Chernyi kvadrat), 1982. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists. 159  9.6  V  ictor Skersis and Vadim Zakharov, “Here!” (Vot!) from the Inscriptions (Nadpisi) series, 1980. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists.

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 9.7  N  ataliia Abalakhov and Anatolii Zhigalov, “Kitchen Art, or the Kitchen of Russian Art” (Kitchen art, ili Kukhnia russkogo iskusstva), 1983. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists.

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 9.8  N  ikita Alexeev, “A Short History of Contemporary Art, or the Life and Death of the Black Square” (Kratkaia istoriia sovremennogo iskusstva, ili zhizn’ i smert’ chernogo kvadrata), Frame 1, 1986. Paper scroll, 100 × 3600. Courtesy of Vadim Zakharov.

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 9.9  Y  uri Albert, “Visual Culture #2” (Vizual’naia kul’tura No. 2), 1989. Enamel and wood on fiberboard, 120 × 200. Courtesy of the artist.

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9.10  V  ictor Skersis. “Freudism’s Hand in Marxism’s Pocket” (Ruka freidizma v shtanakh marksizma) 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 210 × 210. Courtesy of the artist.

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List of Figures ix

10.1   Cover of Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: Peregrin-Verlag, 1923.

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10.2   Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: Peregrin-Verlag, 1923.

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10.3   Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: Peregrin-Verlag, 1923.

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10.4   Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: Peregrin-Verlag, 1923.

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10.5   C  over of the Die Wunderfahrt with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns Verlag, 1929 (reprint by Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig, 2002; used by permission of Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung).

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10.6   I llustration from Die Wunderfahrt, with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns, 1929 (reprint Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2002; used with permission by Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung).

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10.7   I llustration from Die Wunderfahrt, with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns, 1929 (reprint Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2002; used by permission of Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung). 184 10.8   Cover of Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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10.9   Illustration from Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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10.10  Illustration from Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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Acknowledgments

I want to express sincere gratitude to the friendly and highly professional staff of Mayakovsky State Museum Moscow, Russia, especially its director Alexey Lobov, as well as to Yulia Sadovnikova, Dmitry Karpov, and Ekaterina Snegireva. They kindly provided the unique image of the avant-garde painting that we placed on the cover of the book: Ivan Klyun, “The Portrait of Alexei Kruchenykh, 1920s.”

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Introduction Slav N. Gratchev

This book is unique in many ways: The Poetics of the Avant-­garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a wide range of essays written by the international group of scholars coming from the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Switzerland. The topics discussed here include abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “Masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-­garde, the transformation of the barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-­garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-­garde, the science-­fiction in the Russian avant-­garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-­garde children’s literature and culture in Germany. Perhaps for the first time, these essays drawn from many different disciplines (such as literature, arts, theatre, and philosophy) try to demonstrate the international ambitions of the avant-­garde artists. Together these essays further explore the multidisciplinary nature of the historic avant-­garde and show that all many avant-­garde artists were active in various disciplines often tightly interwoven into their purely artistic quests. Much has been written about the avant-­garde, and this book, from the angle of a many different perspectives, aims to open a new critical discourse about the avant-­garde movement in Europe, and to widen and possibly reshape our understanding of it. In chapter 1, Norbert Francis suggests that the turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern painting and sculpture accompanied by new experimentation and research in literature, a movement that has yet to recede in our time. Russian artists and writers found themselves at the very center of a historic moment. The February Revolution of 1917 propelled this development forward in Russia into the late 1920s. Notably, modern 1

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and experimental currents in the plastic arts maintained close contact with the verbal arts, this interaction being the topic of the present chapter. The mutual influences came to be so important that broader over­arching aesthetic principles may have been revealed as students of the various art forms under each category stepped back to consider this possibility. Therefore, Francis argues that, first of all, the different branches of modern art and literature laid bare principles and devices that in fact were not new, at a higher level of generality, to modernism; and secondly, the early twentieth-century critics and theorists were the first to launch an explicit research program focused on foundational underpinnings, one that would try to study art from a scientific point of view. In chapter 2, Michal Eskin argues that dialogue was a key preoccupation of some of scholars—like L. P. Yakubinsky and M. M. Bakthin—who came into their own as thinkers and critics amid the socio­political and aesthetic upheavals of the avant-­garde as it played out in Russia in particular. Yakubinsky and Bakthin were the two most influential thinkers of dialogue as a real-­life phenomenon and philosophical problem. Yakubinsky, who cofounded Russian Formalism in 1916 and was thus a central force in the Russian avant-­garde who wrote, in 1923, the first-­ever linguistic-­psychological study on dialogic speech. Bakhtin, in turn, who was never officially considered part of the avant-­garde, can be said to have represented a counter-­avant-­garde of sorts in focusing on the nexus of art, ethics, and life. Even though Bakhtin obviously relied on Yakubinsky for his own development of dialogue as a critical tool and motif, he never engaged in dialogue with his contemporary. In this essay, Eskin explores this momentous (non-)dialogue between Bakhtin and Yakubinsky by tracing its presences and absences with particular attention to both author’s engagement with, respectively, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as exemplars of the artistic performance of dialogue. Timothy Harte, in chapter 3, explores the underappreciated code of strength and masculinity that prevailed in Russian avant-­garde art of the 1910s and 1920s. “Powerful men of the future,” Vladimir Mayakovsky exclaimed in 1914, “have been born. Futurian strongmen are now appearing.” Harte believes that in the period’s manifestos, poems, paintings, and seminal avant-­garde works such as the futurist opera Victory over the Sun, unabashed virility predominated. Before the 1917 Revolution and then into the early Soviet period, the Russian futurists and cubo-­futurists fostered a machismo derived in good part from Western culture’s turn-­of-­the-­century embrace of modern masculinity, be it notions of athletic manliness in the United States (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt) or the bellicose chauvinism of Italian futurism. Harte further suggests that, although not as explicitly misogynistic as the Italian futurists, the Russian avant-­garde’s emphasis on strength aimed to

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Introduction 3

overthrow the status quo and to transform everyday reality through their art. Whereas the so-­called Amazons of the Russian avant-­garde (Goncharova, Popova, Stepanova, etc.) represented a progressive, feminist orientation among the era’s artistic vanguard, the hyper-­masculine cult of the futurists provided a countervailing virility. Mark Konecny, in chapter 4, explores Ikar and his transformation of expressive dance in Russian popular culture of the 1910s as an emblematic of the avant-­garde movement in general. Frist of all, Konecny briefly examines the Russian intimate theater that, as he argues, was very different from its European cousin: it was reflective of the national character and the psychology of the “Russian soul.” Russian cabaret acted as the experimental theatrical counterpart to the art of the avant-­garde, provoking audiences with outrageous, iconoclastic pieces and performances. While scandalous at times, the cabaret brought unexpected nuances that were missing in European counterparts. For instance, as a response to the popularity of barefoot dancing, the Crooked Mirror in St. Petersburg hired the dancer Ikar, Nikolai Barabanov to parody Duncanism in drag. While it was clear that the intention of the director was that Ikar was to perform a brutal burlesque of the dainty steps of the woodland nymphs, something rather unexpected happened: he was good and his interpretations were, in their own way, as beautiful as that which he imitated. His subtle combination of femininity in style and masculinity in technique brought an expressive power to Duncanism which was, perhaps, lacking. In his essay, Konecny argues that Russian audiences began to appreciate his dance as a unique form unto itself, and that in the context of the theater of parody, Ikar’s gender, dance technique, and experimentation created a new conception of the body on stage. In chapter 5, Natalia Murray draws on research conducted in the course of writing her own latest book Art for the Workers: Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd, 1917–1920 (Leiden-­Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018). Her new essay examines the role of the Futurist newspaper Art of the Commune in the formation of the new identity of the proletarian art in Russia in the first years after the October Revolution. It also examines the fate of Futurism in Bolshevik Russia in the first years after the October Revolution and raises the question of how effective Futurist artists could be in the political education of a largely illiterate people. Murray argues that the establishment of the new values of the new society became the main aim of art after the revolution and Art of the Commune was a major player in this process. Margarita Marinova, in chapter 6, engages in the study of Malevich’s poetry. Today, Malevich’s art can be found in all the best art museums

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around the world. The importance of his ground­breaking artistic vision and philosophical interpretations of our “being-­in-­the-­world” is recognized and studied by scores of art critics on both sides of the Atlantic. However, until very recently, argues Marinova, this active investigation of the artist’s work both in Russia and abroad, did not include one of its main constitutive parts: Malevich’s creative writing. She see two major reasons for this unfortunate omission: first, Malevich’s collected works were published in Russia only in 2000; and secondly, his poetry has not been translated into English yet, which limits the possibility for a more global engagement with the specific achievement of his creative output. Marinova’s present essay hopes to begin the process of rectifying the situation. Rather than analyzing the vast body of Malevich’s poetic writing in its totality, she focuses on selected poems, excerpts from letters, and theoretical essays, in order to outline the trajectory of his development as a poet and theorist of poetic discourse in general. Furthermore, she focuses on the following key questions: how are we to judge Malevich’s poetic contributions to the Russian avant-­garde movement from the beginning of the twentieth century? And, in the paranoid words of the artist himself, was his verbal art a “wooden bicycle” amidst masterpieces, and how is one to tell? Ida Day, in chapter 7, explores the work of Arkady Fiedler (1894–1985), a leading figure in Polish travel reportage demonstrating how his representation of a nature as a “living organism” was always exposed to the dynamism and constant transformations of the avant-­garde. Day believes that Fiedler’s eclectic style of writing (a mixture of journalism and memoir, poetic prose, and collage) reflects the characteristics of the avant-­garde; however, his work has not been studied in this context yet. Therefore, her essay focuses on The River of Singing Fish (1935), a product of the author’s travel to the Amazon, which made a major contribution to literary and environmental studies. Exploring his book as an example of a pluralistic avant-­garde text which transcends a demarcation between science and literature, the essay also demonstrates how the book not only resonated the tendencies of its era, but also pioneered new ideas, and how Fiedler’s European perspective on the South American continent stimulated a transatlantic dialogue in the field of ecocriticism. Additionally, the Fiedler’s work is analyzed from the ecocritical perspective: during the communist era The River of Singing Fish was heavily criticized for “concentrating too much on the natural world instead of human beings,” the book exhibits a strong eco-­centric worldview where the nature acquires its own “voice.” Similar to Jose Ortega y Gasset who in his foundational avant-­garde work “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925) questioned the

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Introduction 5

anthropocentrism of the art of the nineteenth century, Fiedler, argues Day, reevaluated the human position in ecological framework and expressed a more holistic view of the natural world where the human life is a part of the ecosystem, thus demonstrating the ecological sensibility and environmental ethic developed by the avant-­garde movement. Olga Burenina-­Petrova, in chapter 8, puts forward the idea that by creating an existential recombination of objects, and by deforming accepted standards of a conventional art, the science fiction during an era of an avant-­garde became nothing less than a shock of all bases of existing order, the “inversion of urgent knowledge of human nature.” Not only in literature, but also in the cinema of the 1920s the concept of the “fantastic” is far beyond only one process of imagination; therefore, it breaks creative and receptive “experience of borders.” She argues that the science-fiction of the Russian avant-­garde is related to anarchism. The “fantastic”—the sphere of maximum freedom of creative imagination—is a special world, in which, with the help of the power of imagination, one intrudes into time and space, into the real and unreal, the past and the future, the human and the divine. Her essay examines the Science-­fiction in the Russian avant-­garde cinema of the 1920s; it focuses on films such as Aero NT-54 (1925) by Nikolay Petrov, Death Beam (1925) by Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, An Iron Heel (1919) and Steel Cranes (1924) by Vladimir Gardin, and Interplanetary Revolution (1924) by Nikolay Khodataev. Additionally, the essay discusses the futurology of novels by H. G. Wells, Ivan Morskoy, Alexander Bogdanov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and others, and the anarchist skepticism in relation to the state. Mary A. Nicholas, in chapter 9, explores and problematizes the compelling reanimation of Russian avant-­garde art in the late-­Soviet and post-­Soviet eras. As a metaphor for this process, Alexander Yulikov’s description of his 1960s discovery of the avant-­garde is irresistible. A student prank allowed him access to the closed archives of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, where he unexpectedly found stacks of work by early modernists still hidden from the Soviet public. Perusing the unfamiliar canvases in amazement, he noticed an unusual thumbtack on a painting by avant-­garde artist Pavel Filonov and spirited the thumbtack out of the museum, a visual reminder of this rich but unsanctioned heritage. As we all know now, the emergence of avant-­garde art in pre­revolutionary Russia was followed ironically by its repression and disappearance from public view. The essay makes clear, the paradigm-­shattering avant-­garde played an underappreciated but significant role in influencing late-­Soviet unofficial art and its post-­Soviet iterations.

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Nicholas’s essay explores the fascinating story of the clandestine narratives that enlivened unofficial Russian art, vying audaciously with authorized art history. Close attention is given to the historically rich reimagining of work by Malevich, Tatlin, and other avant-­garde artists who revealed to us how the avant-­garde tradition continues to influence the art and performance in Russia today. Bettina Kümmerling-­Meibauer, in chapter 10, highlights the fact that the Bauhaus celebrates its hundredth birthday with exhibitions all over Germany this year. Scholarly books, exhibition catalogues, and academic articles praise the achievements of this exceptional avant-­garde art school that has shaped modern architecture, design, and the arts to this date. The author analyses the impact of the Bauhaus on children’s literature and culture during the interwar period and beyond and examines the exceptional role the Bauhaus played in relation to avant-­garde children’s books of the 1930s and after. The author brings to our attention how this avant-­garde project came to a full stop after the Nazi regime officially closed the Bauhaus in 1933 as many Bauhaus artists emigrated to different non-­European countries, leaving behind book drafts and artistic projects that are stored in the Bauhaus archive to date. However, argues Kümmerling-­ Meibauer, the aesthetic program of the Bauhaus continued to live in children’s literature in the 1950s and beyond, and the heritage of the Bauhaus presents a blind spot in academia despite its significance for the development of avant-­garde children’s literature and culture until today. By a thorough analysis of the artworks created by artists and designers such as Sandor Bortnyik, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feiniger, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Paul Klee, Lou Scheper-­Berkenkamp, and Alma Siedhoff-­Buscher, the chapter demonstrates the significance of the Bauhaus aesthetics for the modernization of children’s literature and culture since the 1920s. Irina Evdokimova, in her chapter 11, discusses the unique project of professor Victor Duvakin that was undertaken in 1967–1982 in Moscow, Russia: when in 1967 Duvakin was dismissed from his post for refusing to testify against his student who, like Boris Pasternak, published his book in the West, he did not know that life opened for him another door. The next fifteen years Duvakin was walking around Moscow, with a tape recorder, talking with people directly involved in the avant-­garde movement of the 1920s–1930s, and were able to tell the facts that have never been published nor discussed previously due to the severe Soviet censorship. Today when the interest to avant-­garde is, perhaps, at its peak, such memories of the survivors are priceless.

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Introduction 7

Therefore, the essay discusses the unique collection of oral interviews, as well the methodology of how these interviews have been translated into English. The author examines and interrogates a concept of “enlightening commentaries” and argues that this new type of commentaries developed by the editorial team (Slav Gratchev, Margarita Marinova, and Irina Evdokimova) opens new horizons for Cultural and History Studies. Finally, in chapter 12, Christina Lodder turns our attention to the fact that there has been a strong tendency among both Russian and Western scholars to see émigré artists and other creative figures as politically reactionary and anti-­Soviet. In this context, argues the author, the repercussions of any experience of the October Revolution that these figures might have had is usually seen in negative terms. Their subsequent careers are frequently viewed as embodying elements of reaction against the Revolution and the ideology that it promoted, although they might sometimes express a nostalgia for the Russia of the past. Such generalizations are inevitably erroneous. In this chapter, Lodder focuses on one creative figure—the sculptor Naum Gabo, who has himself been the victim of such judgments. It has been customary for American and Russian art historians to view him as an anti-­Soviet, right-­wing reactionary. The essay wants to contest this view by examining several aspects of Gabo’s relationship with Soviet Power and Soviet officialdom, as well as his attitude toward the Revolution. Lodder argues that he had radical political inclinations, embraced the Revolution and that his lifetime commitment to public sculpture was indebted to his experience of living in Moscow 1917–1922. This is the book that we would like now to offer to your attention.

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Chapter One

Abstraction and Estrangement across the Arts in the Russian Avant-garde Norbert Francis

The turn of the nineteenth century marked an inflection point in modern painting and sculpture accompanied by new experimentation and research in literature, a movement that has yet to recede in our time. Russian artists and writers found themselves at the very center of a historic moment. The February Revolution of 1917 propelled this development forward in Russia into the second half of the 1920s. Notably, modern and experimental currents in the plastic arts maintained close contact with the verbal arts, this interaction being the topic of the present chapter. The mutual influences came to be so important that broader overarching aesthetic principles may have been revealed as students of the various art forms under each category stepped back to consider this possibility. The argument will be made that the different branches of modern art and literature laid bare principles and devices that in fact were not new to modernism. But it was the early twentieth-century critics and theorists who were the first to launch an explicit research program focused on foundational underpinnings, one that would try to study art from a scientific point of view. This initiative was associated most notably with the early period of Futurism. The nonobjective world came to the attention of modern artists and brought recognition to the concepts of abstract representation in a way what was thoughtful and explicit. Representative works and theories rapidly swept across the cultures of all continents. Importantly, premodern artists knew about abstraction as a visit to any major museum of anthropology confirms.1 Thus, in actual creative work it was not an innovation of modernism nor of its immediate precursors of the nineteenth century. As this claim has been well understood for many years, the study of abstraction incorporates observations and analysis starting with the artistic tradition of ancient times. The exact same circumstances apply to the concept of estrangement. The innovation of 9

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Norbert Francis

the modern era was to lay the groundwork for future research and empirically based theoretical work on these problems of aesthetic perception. The questions about perception lead to questions that are just as interesting for creative expression, both for professional artists and for spontaneous artistic creation in everyday life. TWO CONTRASTING PERSPECTIVES Futurism was not the only grouping of modern art and literature of the prerevolutionary and post-1917 period. But internal divisions, reflecting debates that can be traced to the emergence of modernism of the previous century, brought attention to bear on conceptions and understandings that remain unsettled today. At the same time, gravitating around the Futurists were currents that made contact with like-minded creators and scholars, internationally, to become part of a cultural and artistic movement that today remains ascendant. This is no more evident than in the almost universal acceptance of, and preference for, the genres born at the turn of nineteenth century in the realm of the visual arts. To a greater degree, the unsettled controversies weigh upon the literary arts. In previous discussions of Futurism regarding the internal controversies and debates, I neglected to elaborate more fully on its darker side (for lack of a better term), mentioning only in passing the dismissive stance of many of its leading figures toward traditional and so-called conventional styles.2 This section is an attempt to correct the oversight on my part. On the one hand there emerged a current of experimentation in search of new directions; one that sought to test the limits, vigorously exploring the boundaries and hybrid regions within and around each art form. Some of the cases of true provocation, even today, would be taken as a challenge to sensibilities and standards of acceptability (for example, some of the submissions to absurdist literature that ended up circulating in Samizdat). The call to shatter the traditional genres and cast them into the river was understood, by this current, as a figure; and importantly the domain to which the breaking up referred was art and literature, point of view that rapidly became the minority. In the visual arts this idea of an autonomous avant-garde was associated with the writings of Malevich, and in literature, among the early Futurists (many of them aligned at the same time with proposals of OPOYAZ): Jakobson, Shklovsky, Pasternak, and Kruchenykh, to mention a few. For Malevich it may be more accurate, historically, to point out that his views evolved toward the resulting controversial position he came to hold by the mid-1920s. In addition, it’s important to clarify, thinking about how things

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Abstraction and Estrangement across the Arts in the Russian Avant-garde 11

turned out, that the posture of radically starting again with a clean slate, at “zero,” was also seriously overstating things, on all sides. In the plastic arts, the movement that would fully implement nonobjective representation would in fact benefit from the study of the prehistoric tradition, and then of their nineteenth-century precursors in Late Impressionism, the Fauves, and among other modern pioneers. On a related note, it was also necessary to recognize how exactly the colloquial distinction between “vulgar” and “fine” was not always helpful. Here, the term “primitive” refers to different notions: the one that is relevant to aesthetics (as well as to other fields) is in reference to first principles and to primary. In literature, important discoveries of the twentieth century were still to be made in the study of preliterate (“folk”) verbal art and popular literature of past historical periods.3 On the other hand, a second current committed to deep-going social change (Brik, Mayakovsky, and other leading figures of Lef ) had more in common with the Futurist manifestos of Filippo Martinetti, even as they soon split away from his faction for ideological reasons, the political rift with time leading to sharp differences.4 The current of maximalism, total cultural overthrow and reconstruction within this tendency of Futurism turned the shared impulse of iconoclasm (shared with Malevich and the like-minded experimental poets) toward a missionary vision of a different kind. Its vanguardist commitment explicitly incorporated domains far beyond art and literature. Not only did traditional and conventional genres need to be replaced for aesthetic reasons (as a matter of historical necessity), but also because they stood in the way of the new art that would play a central role in transforming society along with human understanding, feeling, and motivation.5 The “autonomous” current of the avant-garde among writers and painters pushed back against this view: it rejected the obligation of artists to serve a program for rebuilding institutions or the duty to participate in practical application—for publicity, reeducation, political decoration, and design of consumer products.6 In contrast, the “social commission” current, deliberately strove to orient artists toward this service and away from individualistic preoccupations, a task commensurate with the visionary and totalizing project of how they conceived of Futurism: a movement to re-create society for a new human nature. While the tone of their erstwhile Italian co-thinkers far outdid them in ferocity, it captured a kindred spirit of inspired voluntarism and protagonism: Nous allons assistir à la naissance du Centaure . . . La poésie doit être un assaut violent contre les forces inconnues, pour les sommer de se coucher devant l’homme . . . le geste destructeur des anarchists . . .

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C’est en Italie que nous lançons ce manifeste de violence culbutante et incendiaire lequel nous fondons aujourd’hui le Futurisme . . . Musées, cimetiéres! . . . [We will witness the birth of Centaurus . . . Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces, to summon them to lie down before man . . . [in] the destructive struggle of the anarchists. . . . It is in Italy where we proclaim this manifesto of tumultuous and incendiary violence upon which today we have founded Futurism. . . . Museums, cemeteries!]7

Reflecting on the debates of the postrevolutionary years perhaps, just prior to his arrest and interrogation, Malevich argued for the principles of what had become by then (mid-1920s) the minority view in the avant-garde: Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things.” 8

In contrast to the “artists of the third category,” content with copying nature: An artist who creates rather than imitates expresses himself; his works are not reflections of nature but, instead, new realities, which are no less significant than realities of nature itself (“Persons of [this] category call themselves free people,” p. 21). . . . The depicting of the events of daily life, in the manner of . . . reflected images, falls to the lot of those who lack the capacity for new creation. . . . Those who succumb to the regimenting power are advanced as loyal . . . while those who preserve their subjective consciousness and individual point of view are looked upon and treated as dangerous and unreliable.9

Kandinsky (1977[1914]) looked to music for the alternative model that Malevich alluded to: how can artists liberate their work from the commitment to “the reproduction of natural forms”?10 We will return to the idea of musical perception as homologous with poetic sensibility and what this shared root implies for poetics as a field of study. For now, we can suggest the following: one property of music in particular that lends itself to relevant comparison with verbal art, and by extension to other aesthetic domains, is abstraction, being the art form that naturally and most completely has resisted the copying of nature or the need (by the 1930s, the official obligation) to transmit messages, correct or otherwise.11 Kandinsky remarked: How miserably music fails when attempting to express material appearances is proved by the affected absurdity of programme music. . . . [In] serious music such attempts are merely warning against any imitation of nature. . . . The Stimmung of nature can be imparted by every art, not however, by imitation, but by the artistic divination of its inner spirit.12

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But five years later, the credo of the New Culture was suggesting that individuals themselves could be remade because the new social order would remold them, an idea based on the theory of the blank-slate. Human nature was the white unlined paper, absent of any constraint or predisposition not already imprinted upon it by socialization and instruction. Years later, the idea was popularized among a new generation of idealists in a widely celebrated cultural manifesto: . . . [Juegan] un gran papel la juventud y el Partido. Particularmente importante es la primera, por ser arecilla malleable con que se puede construir al hombre nuevo sin ninguna de las taras anteriores. [Young people and the Party play a significant role. Particularly important is the former, for being malleable clay with which one can build the new man without any of the preceding defects.]13

Predictably, the very same lines of division were drawn among the Futurists and other avant-garde creators in the field of literature. The reader will take note that this observation, if shown to be correct, is consistent with the theme of this chapter (the “broader overarching principles” that might apply in some way across forms and genres). The evolution of the Futurist-oriented Lef (Left Front of the Arts), along with the debate with the competing writers organizations, is closely parallel to the developments among visual artists. While much of the fierce polemic of the time was surely driven by the competition for more mundane resources (i.e., recognition and patronage), there was no doubt that the leading voices in Lef were sincere in their conviction. They were convinced in their hearts that Futurist poetry and fiction narrative, led by the art vanguard of the revolution against traditional forms, would indeed remold an emerging new human thought, reason why among the most relentless activists, Lef’s idea of casting Anna Karenina overboard was not metaphor. But to put the debates in context, the historical accounts actually present a picture of confusing factionalism among the many artist collectives difficult today to untangle and clearly evaluate.14 The messianic project, stunning in the scope of the envisioned psychological engineering, from the beginning in fact, was too much even for both Narkompros and the Central Party leadership. Looking back, there is one way, among others, to avoid falling into the same polarized confusion of the 1920s. To begin to approach the problem of how abstraction and estrangement are related, and to be able to objectively evaluate the representative works of experimental artists of the time, we can strictly set aside the ideological motivation and content of their work. For most artists and writers, allegiances were not based on exhaustive analysis

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and evidence-based understanding, much less conscious participation in one or another party or faction. Even in unambiguous cases of full knowledge and active complicity with regimes, for example, we study the work of Pound and Mayakovsky for their aesthetic merits if our purpose is to better understand their work. We recognize why in the case of literature making such a delineation is difficult, sometimes almost impossible. But it is the only way to keep the discussion focused. Considering the hypothetical discovery in the South American library archives of a Nobel laureate’s “Oda a Mussolini,” we would not veto the analytic assessment of the poem by his literary biographers. This traditional approach to analysis deserves mentioning because it has again become controversial in recent years. MODELS FOR EXPERIMENTATION FROM THE VISUAL ARTS Thus, among the Constructivist painters the interesting comparisons require us to mentally set aside embedded inscriptions and slogans in selecting for study the core artistic production for each individual creator within each genre. Untitled, for Rosa Luxemburg (1919), Study for Globetrotter (1920), and Proun G7 (1922) of Lissitzky are masterpieces produced from the same onset of innovation as Suprematist Composition (1916) of Malevich, despite the theoretical disagreement between the artists within and between the Suprematist and Constructivist currents themselves.15 The same can be said of constructivist Lyubov Popova, a trailblazer of Cubo-Futurism before she abandoned easel painting. Birsk (1916) for example displays the presence of actual space, a landscape, and object-like forms in three dimensions. While Kandinsky came to not be identified with any of the organized movements in Russia, in self-exile from 1922, his work clearly belongs to the same broader movement. While stylistically his paintings are clearly distinguishable from the Suprematist and Constructivist compositions, to imply a fundamental aesthetic divergence would be an overstatement. Taylor presents an example of a recurring design feature of early Kandinsky in the (almost) fully abstract composition Cossacks (1911) in which natural spatial schemes or “scale effects” are preserved. Shapes and what may appear as figures (of larger dimension) at the lower edge are perceived as actually closer to a ground level and proximate to the observer in contrast to the sensation of distance at the upper edge. Within the center there might emerge a perceived motion.16 Taking the surface variations among the avant-garde painters into account, what is in fact undeniable is the coherence of the different strands forming a unified genre.

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Then on another level, at the Vitebsk School, the rivalry between protosurrealist Chagall and Malevich reflected a true division within modern art at that moment; and in this instance all evidence points to the controversy and its outcome as being fundamentally principled. As a backdrop to the feverish developments in Russia, to put everything into proper perspective, it’s important to recognize the immediate antecedents to abstraction in Fauvism and Cubism from Western Europe, reflected in the work of native Expressionists. The decades of the nineteenth century moved quickly toward absolute nonobjectivity and pure abstraction. Pioneering works such as James Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket (1875) announced fully fledged artistic currents already in ferment. Denounced by critics of the time for having no didactic purpose or extrinsic function, for not telling a story or imparting moral teaching, and for lacking clarity, artists pleaded guilty as charged. Nocturne is obscure and vague. Lines of separation are blurred with the illuminated spaces off-balance (or out of place). Figures appear as spare and gauze-like upon a dark and steamy background. The artist seemed to be more interested in the effects of method than in a depiction. Cézanne was a central part of the actual transition toward Cubism, experimenting with optical effects and new models of perspective and point of view. For objects, simplification sought out essential geometric features as in Montagnes en Provence (1890) as just one example.17 The stage was now set for the flood gate to be flung wide open. A study by Van den Oever on the defining properties of estrangement brings together key concepts for making the connection to abstraction. Its reference point, from the field of film studies, to the historical period which saw the confluence of cinema, modern painting and Futurist literature allows for this integration. A review here of the arguments will help move us forward on the discussion of the theme of this chapter. During the prerevolutionary years, early cinema helped transform how all of visual art was experienced, coming at the same time as the publication of the core theoretical documents of OPOYAZ. Also coincidentally, and to great benefit, it was the primitive technology of filmmaking that spurred the revolutionary impact on perception of works of art. Only with subsequent advances would cinematography have the technical capacity to return to the experience, in this art form, of mimetism. The first movie-goers may have even sought out the experience of the new medium more so than to watch a story.18 The impact was both exciting and disquieting: the movement and the sound amazed, but animate figures were mute, moving across two-dimensions in spirit-like black, white, and gray. Natural scenes and beings lost their color but acquired strange angles

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of perspective, unnatural movement, reversal across time, fluctuation in size that was surprisingly abnormal. The new kinds of decomposition19 must have been difficult to process, all of this linking the familiar and the bizarre. Such was the alien, and alienating, quality of a night at the movies. The Futurists, according to Van den Oever, closely followed these developments with an eye on the innovative kinds of dislocation and on the margins of independence from the traditional attention to theme and interpretation that were now being made visible. In parallel, they paid attention to the breakthrough in new theories in poetics, from study circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, toward better understanding perception and sensation, away from what literary language communicates toward what it evokes. Film as technique was what the creative writer now needed to study as a model because general principles of art were being revealed at the cinema, new ways of looking at the world, no less. If the idea of constrained ungrammaticality and incoherence could be compared to images taken as vague, disconcerting and disjointed, then making strange could be found everywhere. What does artistic estranged perception have in common with the similar experience from time to time in the prosaic world; and more importantly, what do they each have that is not in common? Unconscious human affective response may be one of the factors, question that modern day cognitive and evolutionary scientists have asked. This last observation by Van den Oever about current research on aesthetic sensation is the topic of the concluding section. THE PERCEPTION OF ARTISTIC PATTERN The place to begin our follow-up to the comparison between film and verbal art is to return to Kandinsky’s insight regarding abstraction in music. He took note of a possibly more general, shared, principle spanning across the different art forms. In this case understanding musical creation and perception will suggest lines of research in poetics because of distinguishing features that music and poetry share: rhythmic organization in particular. In summary terms: song is poem performed melodically, verses that are set to a tonal pitch space—a scale—(or set to an atonal row of pitches in the case of nontonal music). Thus, the relationship between abstraction and estrangement that might apply to the rhythmic organization of music will also apply to poetry in an important way (if the music-poetry hypothesis is correct). Futurist poetry of the early years, for example of Mayakovsky, often appeared on the surface to depart from musical patterns, toward styles of vernacular declamation and even conversational prosody—Struve compares it to similar design features (“prosaisms”) implemented by Pasternak.20 But rather than this shift being

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taken as a negation of the music-poetry relationship, it can be understood as a departure from traditional melodic styles. The analogy then may be about a shift toward unfamiliar syntax and rhythmic organization (in Mayakovsky’s verse), parallel to the avant-garde musical genres of the time that were radically undermining tonality and regular meter. An example of the latter is the twelve-tone technique in music. To this divergence from predictable verse patterns, the contrary-to-expectation response, varying from faint to palpable, among audiences may also have accounted for his wide popularity. The way that abstraction and estrangement are related to aesthetic sensation or aesthetic appreciation, it will be argued, derives in large measure from affective response. As Jackendoff and Lerdahl point out, “affect” is a broader and more useful category for our purposes in this section than “emotion.” The following discussion is based on their (2006) paper that appeared in the journal Cognition. Flowing from the idea that music, by its very nature, is the most abstract among the art forms, the patterns of sensation and apperception received by listeners are also the least concrete, the least able to communicate or portray concepts, propositions, messages, arguments, and images. A musical passage may come to be associated in memory with a concept or a likeness, but this is a different matter altogether. Despite the occasional attempt by theorists to assign “meaning” to musical passages, the comparison to the communicative function of language, in this regard, is fundamentally misguided. In addition, the range of affective responses to music is varied, and the responses themselves are often highly abstract, in addition to being generally below awareness. At the beginning of the twentieth century a parallel idea was being considered: at first, the method of the avant-garde was to no longer focus primarily on the semantic content itself in the wording of poems, but rather on how patterns, of all kinds, induce affect/sensation. Readers will recall that it was the aspect of poetic language independent of concrete and worldly meaning that was one of the puzzles that the Futurist zaum experiment tried to explore. Taking up the parallel with musical structure, the sound patterns of poetry should provoke similar types of affective response (a key factor that underlies aesthetic perception, according to the above proposal). Here, for the moment, we are considering the sound patterns of poetry, as such, apart from affective responses related to word meanings. The two, abstract sensation from musically linked patterns and understandings of word meaning, are obviously interactive and are brought together and integrated in the actual composition of poems, and are then received by the listener integrally (holistically). What is important to note is that the tensions and resolutions of poetic sound patterns are, again, highly abstract; this might turn out to be one of the keys to understanding what aesthetic sensation consists of. While important research

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was conducted on narrative, we can see now why the Formalists concentrated their main efforts on the poetic function of language.21 Estrangement guides poetic sensibility on two levels: globally, the perception of the listener22 from the moment that he or she identifies the genre as nonprosaic, and as art (verbal), is linked to the overall experience of alternative discourse, one that will depart from the conventions of typical nonaesthetic language use. The poem, as a composition in its entirety, contravenes the patterns of prose and everyday face-to-face conversation. Then at the level of phrase, line, and stanza, the very expectations of poetic pattern themselves are interrupted by irregularity (as the “accidental” in music)—points of irregularity introduced by the poet-performer. Jackendoff and Lerdahl offer an explanation for how the perception of made-strange can be maintained under conditions of familiarity (with repeated performance), thus preserving this aspect of the affective/aesthetic sensation. Our schema, or “mental grammar,” of conventional structures is still active online as we listen to a piece of music or a poem that has become familiar to us, allowing for the “accidental” syncopation or enjambment to result in a perception that we still experience as artful—“expected” from previous listening, but still “unexpected” by the unconscious schema.23 The rhythmic organization of music, shared with poetry, consists of structures of grouping and metrical grid pattern (the temporal framework of beats). It is typically regular in music and poetry in a way that is not in typical speech because in the case of the latter communicating meaningful messages takes priority. Unlike prose and conversation, in most traditional and vernacular poetry there is an approximate alignment between the metrical grid and the stress grid. In poems that disrupt this expectation by misaligning the patterns of stress and meter the effect that is created is similar to that of syncopation in music.24 Other rhythmical devices for expressivity that make use of irregularity can manipulate tempo and timing, parallel structures and repetition, and how all these interact with intonational contour. Radical departure and misalignment result, for example, in affect that we call surprise, an impression that we might actually notice. On the other hand, the more subtle types of “accidental” induce affective responses that we can’t exactly put our finger on. Thus, we could say that estrangement favors abstraction in two ways: overall, at the level of the poem in its entirety (holistically), it undermines conventional language use and subverts clarity of meaning. At the phraselevel, the unexpected sensations and impressions that artistic devices produce are far from specific and concrete even when they are noticeable at all. What could the “meaning” of different kinds of impression be that we categorize as surprise? And “surprise” is only one among others.

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This question of how aesthetic sensibility and affect are related is still a hard research problem. To their credit, the Formalists addressed it; but as Gleb Struve remarked,25 there was still a “gap in the theory” regarding explanations centered on novelty and overcoming automatism. To conclude on the related, and important, problem regarding the question of poetic language and “emotion,” we should recognize that it too was left unfinished by the work of OPOYAZ. The discussion was on the right track; Eichenbaum (citing Jakobson) called attention to a misleading identification: that a central distinguishing feature of poetic language could be reduced to the features of “emotional speech.” To the contrary, the two systems are functionally independent, even though a poet might make use of this mode of expression, in the same way that a narrator of prose might.26 At the same time, Formalist theorizing (tentative and speculative as it was) studied the scientific literature of the time on the effects of the sound patterns of language on sensation and emotive response (such as we just reviewed). Onomatopoeic effects, for example, would have been a minor or secondary aspect of the relationship (this question apparently being one of the points of controversy). Future investigations will be able to evaluate the claims about abstraction and estrangement with new methods and research models. This concluding section presents a working hypothesis. Thus, we need to be open to both falsifying evidence and the possibility that there are other, more important, factors that the avant-garde did not foresee, factors that may still be eluding us today. To reiterate the question that was asked during the first years of the twentieth century: what are the properties of art that distinguish it, that set it apart as exceptional? It’s still a good idea to take each genre and art form in turn, on its own, and then consider common features and general principles of aesthetics that might be shared across modalities and art forms. Some features may be shared only between closely related art forms because they are more specialized, while one or two general principles might apply broadly, at some level, to all. NOTES 1.  The emergence of Cubism followed in part from the study of non-European historical practices and current styles of the time that reflected ancient artistic traditions, according to de Zayas in “Cubism?” Arts and Decoration 6, 6 (1918): 284–6. The modern and the traditional currents, both, attend to “natural laws” that incorporate formal properties of design and composition that are consciously nonrepresentational. 2. Francis, Norbert, Bilingual and Multicultural Perspectives on Poetry, Music and Narrative: The Narrative of Art (2017): 42.

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3. Among the Formalists associated with Futurism, analysis of the traditional literature, including from the distant historical past, also held the keys to understanding literary language. Shklovsky’s analysis of (eighteenth century) Tristram Shandy, in Theory of Prose. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991, is only one example of the research on the distinctive features, in this case, of art narrative. The comparison between Sterne’s roman étrange and conventional narrative is analogous to that between Futurist and conventional poetry (p. 147). The genre to which belongs Tristram Shandy was a precursor to the unconventional and dystopic novels of Zamyatin, and subsequently the work of absurdist-Futurist provocateur Daniil Kharms, springing forth from transrational poetry. Kharms went on to violate every expectation of story for adults and children, crossing the limit into the chaos of his nightmare fantasies barely appropriate at any time of the day or night for the latter (Tumanov, Vladimir and Tumanov Larissa “The Child and the Child-Like in Daniil Charms.” Russian Literature 34 (1993): 241–69. Struve, Gleb in Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971, provides a comprehensive survey of the period. 4.  Noteworthy is the study by Christina Brungardt in On the Fringe of Italian Fascism: An Examination of the Relationship between Vinicio Paladini and the Soviet Avant-Garde. Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 2015, of the curious career of graphic artist Vinicio Paladini, describing how a number of Futuristinspired artists were able to work within the (shifting, but also parallel) parameters of both the Italian and Soviet governments of the 1920s and 1930s. Paladini’s commitments were curious, but apparently not unique. 5.  Together with the exaltation of the machine, the social reconstruction tendency of Futurism was a front of action and confrontation (Hernández, Clara, “Marinetti y el Modelo del Artista Moderno,” Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 28 (2016): 601–621). 6. Schröder, Klaus and Petrova, Evgenia, Chagall to Malevich: The Russian Avantgardes. Vienna: Kahn Galleries, 2016. 7.  Marinetti, Filippo, “Manifeste du Futurism,” Le Figaro (February 20, 1909). 8. Malevich, Kazimir, The Non-Objective World. Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959[1927], 74. 9. Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 21. 10.  Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover, 1977 [1914], 20. 11.  Livshits, Benedict, “The Liberation of the Word.” In Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 78–81. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988[1913]. 12. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 20. 13.  Guevara, Ernesto Che, El Socialismo y el Hombre Nuevo. México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1979, 14. 14. Ermolaev, Herman. Soviet Literary Theories 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. New York: Octagon, 1977; and Lawton, Anna, Introduction to Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 1–48. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. As a historical footnote to this section, it is interesting to take note that the very same confrontation between

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these two visions of art has been carried forward to the present day from its origin during the early years of modernism. See Yeh, Michelle, “Light a Lamp in a Rock: Experimental Poetry in Contemporary China.” Modern China 18 (1992): 379–409. for a current example. 15.  Regarding the divergence between Malevich and Lissitzky we can take note of a possible irony: while Lissitzky strongly sided with the utilitarian and propagandistic tendency within UNOVIS, an exemplar being his memorable Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920), over time and taking the work of each artist as a whole, his nonobjective works (readers may disagree) surpassed those of Malevich in both total production and qualitatively, in terms of development of the style, considering greater diversity of spatial elements and their relations of interaction, for example. On the other hand, this assessment might be unfair given that Malevich was the target of official persecution, imprisonment, banning, and confiscation, beginning in the late 1920s. A related problem appears here: the need to distinguish between the work of fine art and the poster (the latter commissioned to support the “war effort” or other campaign of national mobilization). Artists in all societies participate in both genres, themselves often keeping the two separate in their own thinking. 16.  Nevertheless, the question of what precisely the objective underpinning was of the criticism of Kandinsky’s compositions by leading Constructivists (i.e., petty rivalry aside) could maybe one day be clarified. Judging from Brandon Taylor’s portrayal (in “Kandinsky and Contemporary Painting.” Tate Papers 6, 2006), the critiques are difficult to follow, from today’s perspective: about considerations of “economy,” or that Constructivism calls for “the theoretical analysis of the basic elements of a work of art” not the “psychology of aesthetic perception,” citing Rodchenko in 1921. It’s not clear what the criticism of the Constructivists was really about. 17. Arnason, H. H. and Elizabeth Mansfield, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2010. 18.  van den Oever, Annie, “Ostrannenie, The Montage of Attractions and Early Cinema’s Properly Irreducible Alien Quality.” In Ostrannenie: On “Strangeness” and the Moving Image: The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept, edited by Annie van den Oever, 33–60. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. 19. In his classic study “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood,” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42 (2004[1930]): 7–89, Lev Vygotsky saw in spontaneous creation the impulse to dissociate natural entities and then to recombine them as one of the foundations of abstract thinking in general. 20. Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 182. 21.  For the students of literary language at the time poetry was: “that domain of literature where the material itself was most unquestionably palpable” (Eagle, Herbert, “Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism.” Afterword to Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 281–304. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, 284. 22.  Historically (and evolutionarily), listening to poetry, recited, is primary; reading poetry published in a book or displayed on a screen, is secondary. The same primary-secondary relationship applies to human development, how poetic sensibility arises spontaneously across the life span.

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23.  Jackendoff, Ray, “Parallels and Nonparallels between Language and Music.” Music Perception 26 (2009): 195–204. 24.  Jackendoff, Ray, and Fred Lerdahl, “The Capacity for Music: What Is It and What’s Special about It?” Cognition 100 (2006): 33–72. 25. Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 207–208. 26.  Eichenbaum, Boris, “La Teoría del Método Formal.” In Teoría de la Literatura de los Formalistas Rusos, edited by T. Todorov, 21–54. México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1970[1926].

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnason, H. H., and Elizabeth Mansfield. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2010. Brungardt, Christina. On the Fringe of Italian Fascism: An Examination of the Relationship between Vinicio Paladini and the Soviet Avant-Garde. Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 2015. de Zayas, Marius. “Cubism?” Arts and Decoration 6, 6 (1918): 284–86. Eagle, Herbert. “Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism.” Afterword to Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 281–304. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Eichenbaum, Boris. “La Teoría del Método Formal.” In Teoría de la Literatura de los Formalistas Rusos, edited by T. Todorov, 21–54. México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1970[1926]. Ermolaev, Herman. Soviet Literary Theories 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. New York: Octagon, 1977. Francis, Norbert. Bilingual and Multicultural Perspectives on Poetry, Music and Narrative: The Science of Art. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Guevara, Ernesto Che. El Socialismo y el Hombre Nuevo. México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1979. Hernández, Clara. “Marinetti y el Modelo del Artista Moderno.” Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 28 (2016): 601–621. Jackendoff, Ray. “Parallels and Nonparallels between Language and Music.” Music Perception 26 (2009): 195–204. Jackendoff, Ray, and Fred Lerdahl. “The Capacity for Music: What Is It and What’s Special about It?” Cognition 100 (2006): 33–72. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover, 1977[1914]. Lawton, Anna. Introduction to Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912– 1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 1–48. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Livshits, Benedict. “The Liberation of the Word.” In Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, 78–81. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988[1913]. Malevich, Kazimir. The Non-Objective World. Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959[1927].

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “Manifeste du Futurism.” Le Figaro, February 20 (1909): 1. Schröder, Klaus Albrecht, and Petrova, Evgenia. Chagall to Malevich: The Russian Avantgardes (exhibit presentation). Vienna: Kahn Galleries, 2016. Shklovsky, Victor. Theory of Prose. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991. Struve, Gleb. Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Taylor, Brandon. “Kandinsky and Contemporary Painting.” Tate Papers 6 (2006): https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/06/kandinsky-and-con temporary-painting Tumanov, Vladimir, and Larissa Tumanov. “The Child and the Child-Like in Daniil Charms.” Russian Literature 34 (1993): 241–69. van den Oever, Annie. “Ostrannenie, The Montage of Attractions and Early Cinema’s Properly Irreducible Alien Quality.” In Ostrannenie: On “Strangeness” and the Moving Image: The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept, edited by Annie van den Oever, 33–60. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Vygotsky, Lev. “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood.” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42 (2004[1930]): 7–89. Yeh, Michelle. “Light a Lamp in a Rock: Experimental Poetry in Contemporary China.” Modern China 18 (1992): 379–409.

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Chapter Two

L. P. Yakubinsky and M. M. Bakhtin A Brief History of a “Dialogue” That Never Really Was Michael Eskin When we think of the avant-garde—that early twentieth-century cultural tidal wave that washed over Europe—we think of destruction, clash, innovation, revolution, and polemic. We think of teeming, restless metropolises, disillusioned youth revolting against their elders, trenches strewn with maimed bodies, and shell-shocked veteran poets. We think of the repudiation of custom, mores, and tradition—aesthetic, scientific, social, and political—in the name of all-encompassing innovation, propelled by an inveterate fascination with and faith in the future of humanity in a different key. We think of Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Brancusi, Sassoon, Remarque, Einstein, Lenin, Döblin, Bely, Benn, Mandelstam, Stravinsky, Woolf, the Ballets Russes, Eisenstein, Eliot, the Bloomsbury Group, and so many others, all of whom were intent, more or less explicitly, on “ruin[ing] the sacred truths”1 of the past; all of whom contributed to the intellectual, aesthetic, and sociopolitical fermentation of the period in the name of a different vision of the world of the future; and many of whom lived to witness, arguably, the most devastating epoch in modern European, if not global, history, marked as it was by economic disaster, bloody revolution, the rise of modern totalitarianism, and the depredations of two world wars that culminated in the Shoah. The avant-garde was certainly no peace academy, no Christian summer camp, no team-building retreat where trust falls and campfire singing would make for a better world through improved communication in the name of a cozy togetherness suffused with a benign spirit of whatever color or creed. And yet, amid this culture of universal strife and contention, there were voices that proclaimed and stood for something quite different. Not conservative voices representing custom and tradition, but voices that were very 25

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much part of the avant-garde, yet, for one reason or another, did not join in its cacophonous concert. I would like to take a listen to two such voices in this essay—that of Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky and philosophical anthropologist and literary critic M. M. Bakhtin, neither of whom is typically associated with the avant-garde, or thought of as a specifically modernist fixture, both of whom, however, were very much swept up in the avant-garde momentum—by choice in Yakubinsky’s and by historical coincidence, as it were, in Bakhtin’s cases—and both of whom can be said to have, each in his own way and more or less explicitly, explored and pursued a different kind of “avant-garde,” a different course for humanity’s future, than their more bellicose and radical antitraditionalist and antiestablishment peers.2 No doubt, when it comes to the avant-garde, three countries stand out as its most vociferous standard-bearers: Russia, France, and Germany, with Italy as a close second. Russia, in particular, can be said to have taken the avant-garde momentum, quite literally, to its historical-logical extreme in translating its residual military aspect ­(“avant-garde” was originally a military term referring to a battalion’s vanguard, as opposed to its rearguard) into political action leading to the birth and consolidation of the Soviet Union through revolution and civil war. And it is amid these war-ridden cultural-historical upheavals and sea changes that redefined humankind that we find Bakhtin and Yakubinsky “preaching a gospel” quite different from the plethora of clamorous, self-absorbed, antagonistic, self-righteous factions of the “mainstream” avant-garde: the one homing in on otvetsvennost—typically translated both as “responsibility” and “answerability”—as the key to a unitary, morally justifiable human existence; the other devoting his energies, among other things, to the question of human communication and dialogue. YAKUBINSKY AND BAKHTIN Why Yakubinsky and Bakhtin? What connects these two Russian authors? Born, respectively, in 1892 and 1895, Yakubinsky and Bakhtin belonged to the same generation, with Bakhtin, who died in 1975, outliving Yakubinsky by thirty years. Both studied at Petersburg University where they overlapped for one year in 1914/1915 (and may well have known each other). Both were firsthand witnesses to the birth of one of the most globally far-reaching and influential avant-garde phenomena, Russian Formalism—Yakubinsky as one of its cofounders, Bakhtin somewhat from a distance.3 Both pioneered the exploration and emphasized the necessity of human communication as an

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open-ended responsive activity, that is, as genuine dialogue, in a cultural environment that was far from conducive and amenable to such openness. The publications of both historically intersected—albeit like two ships passing each other in the night—most notably and importantly in the present context, in 1919: the year in which Bakhtin published his very first piece—“Iskusstvoe i Otvetstvennost” (Art and Answerability)—in the provincial newsletter Den’ Iskusstva, thereby setting the overall thematic course for his entire subsequent intellectual career; and the year also in which Yakubinsky republished—in the third and final OPOYAZ collection Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka—his two seminal essays on poetic language, which had co-initiated Russian Formalism, before eventually moving away from poetics in favor of the study of dialogue and language as a lived phenomenon more generally.4 The work of both, finally, would resurface as culturally hyper-relevant in the late twentieth century with the rise of cultural and postcolonial studies, among other academic fields concerned with the workings of language and the power structures at play in any and all forms of meaning formation and communication: Bakhtin’s on an overtly global scale—you will hardly find a scholarly work in the academic fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, cultural and postcolonial studies, and modern languages written, say, from the mid-1990s onward that does not reference Bakhtin one way or another—and Yakubinsky’s in a somewhat more indirect and subdued, yet no less palpable, fashion for that matter, filtered, precisely, as I argue, through Bakhtin.5 Which brings me to this essay’s main—and utterly understudied— topic: the “dialogue” between Yakubinsky and Bakhtin.6 Let me begin by saying that even though we do find occasional references to Yakubinsky in the writings of the Bakhtin circle (most notably in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by V. N. Voloshinov, who happened to be Yakubinsky’s colleague at the Institute for the Comparative History of Eastern and Western Literatures and Languages), Bakhtin himself, to the best of my knowledge, appears not to have advertised his intimate knowledge of and engagement with his contemporary in the bulk of his work.7 The absence of recourse to Yakubinsky on Bakhtin’s part is particularly striking since, as I endeavor to document in the remainder of this essay, Yakubinsky’s insights into the pragmatics and psychology of human communication can be said to anticipate and provide the very matrix for Bakhtin’s own lifelong inquiry into the workings of language and speech as an essentially dialogic phenomenon both in life and art. In no way, however, do I aim to diminish Bakhtin’s philosophical-anthropological achievement. My only goal in this essay is to contribute to filling the conceptual-historical lacuna of Bakhtin’s relation to Yakubinsky.

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YAKUBINSKY As a coinitiator of Russian Formalism, Yakubinsky found himself at the very heart of the Russian avant-garde. However, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, he gradually moved away from his Formalist beginnings, aligning himself with the new Communist regime, which condemned the Formalists’ disregard for the political-ideological co-option of literature and art in the service of the new, Soviet society.8 Among Yakubinsky’s “post-Formalist” scholarly output, O dialogicheskoy rechi—On Dialogic Speech—published in 1923, is the single most important work in the present context. The firstever study devoted entirely to the “forms of utterance” (“formakh rechevogo vyskazyvaniya”) in their concrete, social and intersubjective manifestations, it is also the first study to address the linguistic, psycho-physiological, pragmatic, semantic, and sociopolitical aspects of dialogue and dialogic interaction—both oral and written—which Yakubinsky implicitly aligns with the weakening of authority and power, as opposed to the natural “alliance that monologue has with authority.”9 In this section, I would like to sketch what I take to be the contextually most pertinent lines of argument of On Dialogic Speech with a view to then linking them to some of the major themes in Bakhtin’s œuvre. Yakubinsky’s most basic and most general proposition concerns the very nature of dialogue: “Dialogue is natural, monologue is artificial . . . as the exchange of action and reaction [dialogue] corresponds to the most nearly biological (psycho-physiological) aspects of social interaction”; and because it is more natural for us to communicate and interact in the form of dialogue rather than monologue, that is, because simply listening to another person talk uninterruptedly to or at us does not come naturally to us, “one only listens,” Yakubinsky observes, “to those who have power or authority, or, generally, when compelled to listen.”10 This is how Yakubinsky describes the concrete workings of dialogue in action: Dialogue is characterized by alternating rejoinders. An interlocutor’s utterance is succeeded by another’s (or others’) utterance(s). Although a certain order may underlie this succession, it is sufficiently common, especially in emotional dialogue, for interruptions to dictate the course. One might say that to a certain extent mutual interruption is characteristic of dialogue in general. This assertion, borne out by experience, is all the more justified insofar as dialogue can be said to be constituted and determined by the very possibility of interruption. Our participation in dialogue implies our expectation of being interrupted, our awareness that an interlocutor is preparing to respond, our fear that we might not be able to say all that we want to say. Hence, the pace of dialogue tends to be faster than that of monologue. Furthermore, dialogue can be called interrupt-

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ible insofar as each participant intends to continue and complete his as-of-yetincomplete or unfinished “train of utterance” after each of his interlocutor’s rejoinders. Each interruption of our utterance by our interlocutor’s rejoinders only lasts until we resume speaking. And although each of our rejoinders, in turn, constitutes a distinctive unit with regard to our interlocutor’s corresponding rejoinder, it also forms part of our overall utterance. We may thus describe the alternation of utterances in dialogue more precisely as follows: While one interlocutor is not done yet, the other is already continuing—which also contributes to the relatively fast pace of dialogue.11

This constant interactive agon or “struggle” (bor’ba) for the “right” to continue one’s utterance and not let it be “finalized” or “completed” by our given interlocutor(s) is made possible, in large part, by our capacity to prepare the thread or continuation of our utterance as we receive our interlocutor’s rejoinder: “During an interval between our own utterances we must listen to and understand our interlocutor’s words and simultaneously prepare our response thematically and linguistically.”12 And this capacity in turn is a function of the fact that our interlocutors’ rejoinders never fall on pristine or virgin soil but on the heavily saturated loam of what Yakubinsky calls the “apperceptive mass” of our unitary and total, verbal and nonverbal, psychic-emotionalexistential state at any given moment: . . . our reception and understanding of another’s speech (and our perception in general) are apperceptive—that is, they are determined not only (and frequently not so much) by our actual momentary stimulation by another’s words but also by the entire range of our antecedent internal and external experiences and ultimately by the entire contents of our psyche at the moment of listening. These mental contents constitute an individual’s “apperceptive mass,” which assimilates any external stimuli.13

Our “apperceptive mass,” now, is both context—or situation-dependent and -independent, that is, it consists of what Yakubinsky refers to as “permanent” and “temporary” elements: Our individual apperceptive mass determines our perception. It consists of two groups of elements: permanent and stable elements, which owe their existence to our continuous exposure to a familiar environment (or environments), and temporary elements, which emerge under particular, momentary conditions. The former are undoubtedly determinant; the latter arise against the backdrop of the former, modifying and complicating them . . . a speaker’s permanent apperceptive mass is complemented by momentary apperceptive factors, such as an awareness of the conversational setting, the interlocutor(s) and a more or less concrete idea of the topic of conversation.14

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Thus, the more “mediated,” complex, abstract, or general a dialogue, the less immediately context- or situation-dependent it will be, whereas the more “unmediated,” concrete and actual reality-driven a conversation is, the more context- or situation-dependent it will be.15 Yakubinsky povides an entertaining example by way of illustration: Everyone will be familiar with the following dialogue between two old crones, one of whom is deaf: “Good day!”—“I was at the market.”—“Are you deaf?”—“I bought a chicken.”—“Have a good day!”—“I paid half a ruble.” This dialogue parodies the “off-the-mark” responses of the deaf. However, the deaf woman’s reply evince a consistency and “correctness” of their own—not in regard to her interlocutor’s questions, though, but in regard to a specific everyday situation: the chance encounter of two acquaintances and the ensuing cookie-cutter exchange.16

Yakubinsky’s distinction between more or less context- or situation-dependent utterances is accompanied by the distinction between written and oral communication, whereby written communication—especially complex (for instance, scientific or literary) written interaction—will, by definition, be far less context- or situation-dependent than, say, an instruction manual, shopping list, or informational exchange pertaining to a given imminent action or plan to be executed, such as “a concrete question in a concrete context. . . . ‘Are you going to take a walk?’ ‘Yes (I am going to take a walk)’ or ‘Maybe (I am going to take a walk).’”17 But there is another aspect to human interaction and communication, Yakubinsky notes, that we need to take into account if we wish to fully understand how dialogue works, namely, all of the not strictly linguistic or verbal accoutrements of speech, such as facial expression, gesticulation, intonation, timbre: Our visual and auditory perception of our interlocutor, which is absent in mediated interaction and always present in regular dialogue, is one of the key factors determining our understanding of what the other is saying. Being face to face with our interlocutor allows us to see his facial expressions, gestures and other bodily movements. The latter sometimes suffice to establish communication and mutual understanding. The possibility of “communication at a distance” is based on the crucial communicative function of facial expression and gesticulation, both constituting a “language” of their own. . . . In face-to-face dialogue, facial expressions and gestures sometimes make responding with words unnecessary. . . . On the other hand, facial expressions and gestures frequently function in the same way as intonation in inflecting or modifying the meaning of words. Just as a phrase may acquire different meanings depending on its intonation, so our facial expressions and gestures may impart unusual semantic overtones to

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what we say, which may contradict its actual “meaning.” We may call this facial, pantomimic and gestural “intonation.” Facial expression and gesticulation. . . . Unmediated interaction is always coupled with facial expression and gesticulation. . . . Our interlocutor’s facial expression . . . fundamentally determines the intensity of our utterance . . . it determines the degree of our own eloquence. . . . The tone of our words, their “temperature,” depends on our interlocutor’s facial expression. When the latter appears to listen attentively, our speech flows more easily. . . . It is hardly necessary to emphasize the importance of our interlocutor’s audibility in unmediated interaction . . . [t]he crucial communicative function of voice, intonation and timbre for understanding another’s speech is. . . . In mediated, written communication these factors play hardly any role at all. I am not talking about those aspects of voice, intonation and timbre that are part of a language’s universal vocal patterns and that may be reproduced in writing through signs (such as going up with our voice before a comma or question mark). I am here talking about those aspects of intonation that introduce personal overtones, of both meaning and feeling, into an utterance, thus acquiring unprecedented communicative significance in revealing the speaker’s emotional and mental state more fully than the words’ meanings themselves.18

In order to palpably illustrate the difference in purview and significance of voice, timbre, intonation, facial expression, and gesticulation in “unmediated” and “mediated” communication, respectively, Yakubinsky quotes, among others, a passage from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer for 1873 (from the chapter entitled “Small Pictures”), which pivots on the enunciation of “a single ‘unprintable noun’” (—the irony of adducing a written, literary, that is, most highly mediated and complex form of utterance to illustrate the communicative power of unmediated voice, timbre, intonation, etc., will hardly escape the reader!): Late one Sunday night, I happened to be walking next to a bunch of drunk artisans . . . and it was there and then that I realized that all thoughts and feelings could be expressed by merely using a single noun—a particular noun of utmost simplicity. . . . This is what happened: First, one of the bunch utters this noun in a shrill, emphatic voice, as if to deny a point of general contention made earlier in the conversation. Then another picks up that very same noun in response to the first, but in a very different tone of voice, as though to categorically contradict him. A third one now gets angry at the first, abruptly joining the fray and tauntingly throwing that very same noun back at him. The second one in turn gets angry at the third for being rude to the first, and cuts him off by merely uttering that same time-honored noun for a certain body part, as though saying: “What the hell do you think you’re doing butting in like this?! Me and Filka were having a nice quiet chat and just like that you come along and start cussing him out!” . . . Whereupon, out of the blue—and as though he had just stumbled upon the solution to the entire problem—a fourth chap who had remained silent

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until now ecstatically shouts that very same unprintable noun, just that one single word alone. . . . Finally, the oldest in the bunch, a surly character, who apparently didn’t think his friend’s enthusiasm appropriate, turns on him and repeats, in a gruff and expostulatory bass—yes, you guessed it—that very same noun, whose usage is forbidden in the company of ladies. . . . And so, without uttering a single additional word, they all repeated just this one, obviously beloved, little noun of theirs, understanding each other perfectly.19

This summary breakdown of Yakubinsky’s seminal essay shall suffice to prime the reader for my next move: revisiting Bakthin’s oeuvre in light of Yakubinsky’s On Dialogic Speech. BAKHTIN Unlike Yakubinsky’s, Bakhtin’s explicit participation in the avant-garde can be said to have been marginal at best and limited to a single intervention: his already mentioned maiden publication “Art and Answerability”—and not on account of its main argument, which, in its moral emphasis on the necessity of the individual’s assumption of a total responsibility encompassing all creative-productive areas of existence, was anything but avant-garde in the above-elaborated multifarious sense, so much as on account of its formal garb, namely, its manifesto character.20 In other words, Bakhtin’s avant-gardism can be said to have begun and concluded with his one and only manifesto. To the extent, however, that, as I shall presently document, his subsequent writings are deeply indebted to and unfold in tacit dialogue with Yakubinsky’s On Dialogic Speech, Bakhtin may well be considered—historically (if not necessarily thematically) speaking, insofar was Yakubinsky himself had clearly distanced himself from the avant-garde by the time he wrote “On Dialogic Speech”—an avant-gardist twice removed. Eschewing a comprehensive discussion of Bakhtin’s complex philosophical-anthropological legacy, I wish to throw into relief only some—albeit central—aspects of what has come to be known as Bakhtin’s dialogism, that is, his fundamental metaphysical view of human existence, in light of Yakubinsky’s pioneering work. I should note that I do not approach Bakhtin’s oeuvre diachronically, that is, in terms of the external and internal evolution of Bakhtin’s thought, contending myself instead, for the purposes of this essay, with a squarely synchronic-conceptual take on it.21 Which is also why I abstain from explicitly mentioning specific works by Bakhtin and their dates of composition and publication in the main body of my essay, relegating all historical-chronological details to the bibliography and footnotes. Finally, I

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should also point out that all of Bakhtin’s (and the Bakhtin circle’s) writings I engage with were created and/or completed and published after Yakubinsky’s On Dialogic Speech. Let me begin, then, with Bakhtin’s arguably most pithy and fundamental ontological pronouncement: “Dostoevsky discovered the dialogic nature of social life, of human life” (Dostoevsky raskryl dialogicheskuyu prirodu obshchestvennoy zhizni, zhizni cheloveka).22 Leaving aside, for the moment, the historical question of whether Dostoevsky did or did not “discover” the “dialogic nature of social life, of human life”—what is important here, above all, is Bakhtin’s actual ontological claim that social and human life in general are dialogic by nature (a claim, by the way, that Dostoevsky himself never made): Human and, thus, social life—since, in line with Aristotle, humans are conceived of as social beings—is dialogic. Dialogue, Bakhtin reiterates, is “a universal phenomenon that permeates all human life.”23 This means that any other form of life that aims to actively suppress or otherwise stifle or stymie dialogue must necessarily be not natural or artificial, with the diametrical opposite of dialogue, that is, monologue being supremely so. Bakhtin’s signal pronouncement, the discovery of whose conceptual core is attributed to Dostoevsky, ought to be viewed, first and foremost, in its historical emplacement, which is to say—especially, in light of my antecedent discussion of On Dialogic Speech—as an unacknowledged appropriation and endorsement of Yakubinsky’s pioneering, qua historically unprecedented, proposition that “[d]ialogue is natural,” while “monologue is artificial,” and that “as the exchange of action and reaction dialogue corresponds to the most nearly biological (psycho-physiological) aspects of social interaction.” Yakubinsky himself, by the way, was very much aware of the unprecedented nature of his claim, insofar as it expanded his teacher Lev V. Shcherba’s strictly linguistic observation that “monologue is a highly artificial form of language and that dialogue reveals its true essence” to cover human life qua social life as a whole. In fact, Yakubinsky even went so far as to gently vituperate Shcherba for employing “terms like ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ . . . without further clarification”—something he intended to remedy by functionally linking the ostensible naturalness of dialogue to, and implicitly grounding it in, the workings of human physiology.24 Closely related to Bakhtin’s master claim as to “dialogic nature of social life, of human life” is the notion that dialogue and monologue, respectively, are associated with different sociopolitical settings and structures: “Authoritarian [read: monologic] speech demands unconditional recognition rather than free [read: dialogic] appropriation and assimilation . . . it has inseverably

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melded with authority—be it political, institutional, or personal. . . . Authoritarian speech may embody a variety of contents: authoritarianism as such, authoritativeness, tradition, convention, ‘officialness,’ and so on.”25 Here, too, we cannot but hear Yakubinsky’s voice resonating through Bakhtin’s words: One listens to those who have power or authority or, generally, when compelled to listen; under these conditions, the listeners are passive or sympathetic, their reactions reduced to conciliatory responses. It is important to stress the alliance that monologue has with authority, ritual, ceremony and so on. Within the framework of authoritative influence, this alliance enables oral monologic speech to affect speech in general, and dialogic speech in particular.26

What authoritarian, monologic interaction fundamentally accomplishes, then, according to Bakhtin, is the foreclosure of the openness and open-endedness and unpredictability of free, that is, precisely, dialogical mutual engagement. The authoritatively addressed audience, which ceases being a true interlocutor, is not allowed to transgress or transcend the boundaries and limitations set by the instance of monologic authority (political, institutional, personal). These reflections dovetail with Bakhtin’s observations on the aesthetic— understood literally as perceptional—nature of human interaction, whereby the monologic foreclosure of “free appropriation and assimilation” of another’s thought and speech and its continuous dialogic disruption are conceived of in terms of the interface between “completeness” (zavershennost’) and “incompleteness” (nezavershennost’): While the other person wishes to complete me, in the sense of seeing and conceiving of me as—and thus freeze-framing into—a fully understood, manipulable whole, I desire to ever break the thus imposed mold, to ever remain unpredictably open-ended and incomplete, to continue telling my part of the given situation’s life-storyin-progress. With every attempt on the part of the other to complete, that is, conclusively get or grasp me, and vice versa, I continuously succeed in escaping his or her grasp and proceeding to push dialogue forward. True dialogue is nothing else but this kind of continuous “struggle” (bor’ba) between zavershennost’ and nezavershennost.’27 It is hard not to be reminded here of Yakubinsky’s detailed description of the workings of dialogue in On Dialogic Speech: Dialogue is characterized by alternating rejoinders. . . . Our participation in dialogue implies our expectation of being interrupted, our awareness that an interlocutor is preparing to respond, our fear that we might not be able to say all that we want to say. . . . Furthermore, dialogue can be called interruptible insofar as each participant intends to continue and complete his as-of-yet-incomplete or

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unfinished “train of utterance” after each of his interlocutor’s rejoinders. Each interruption of our utterance by our interlocutor’s rejoinders only lasts until we resume speaking. . . . We may thus describe the alternation of utterances in dialogue more precisely as follows: While one interlocutor is not done yet, the other is already continuing. . . .28

It is both authors’ recourse to the agonistic interface or struggle between completeness and incompleteness, in particular, that presents a remarkable instance of conceptual appropriation and displacement: Whereas Yakubinsky emphasizes each interlocutor’s desire to complete his or her own utterance in the face of being constantly interrupted by the other, Bakhtin—using the same dual conceptual pair (that is, completeness vs. incompleteness)—turns it on its head in arguing that it is precisely the opposite that each interlocutor in a truly unfolding dialogue desires, namely, not to reach a point of completion—be it the completion of one’s own “train of-utterance”—but, rather, to ever remain open-ended. But this dialogic struggle does not only happen between the actual, active participants in any given exchange or dialogue. It also, and most essentially, constantly unfolds inside each of them, insofar as, according to Bakhtin, our psyche and consciousness are verbally semiotically constituted, and insofar as our internal semiotic make-up articulates a “battle inside us for hegemony of diverse verbal-ideological points of view.”29 In other words, our mind is always already crammed with the words, voices, and worldviews of others. In fact, whatever it is that we (think) we are—as this concrete and unique individual with a clear-cut singular consciousness—is always already multiple or, as Bakhtin puts it, “polyphonic,” made up of an infinite congeries of histories, experiences, discourses, worldviews, etc.30 It is this kind of consciousness that we bring to our interaction, our dialogue with the other, and that cannot fail to impact and determine how we engage and understand any given interlocutor. One cannot help discerning, beneath the cloak of Bakhtin’s polyphonic mind or consciousness, the not-so-distant contours of Yakubinsky’s “apperceptive mass,” which “determines our perception” and which is defined as “the entire range of our antecedent internal and external experiences and ultimately . . . the entire [verbal and non-verbal] contents of our psyche at the moment of listening.”31 It is at this point that we ought to attend to Bakhtin’s overall approach to the workings of language as dialogue not as a purely linguistic phenomenon, but as a squarely pragmatic event, that is, in terms of language’s or dialogue’s unfolding as a continuous concatenation of internal and external utterances among and between persons both in life and art. After all, as a I mentioned

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above, according to Bakhtin dialogue is a “universal phenomenon that permeates all human speech and relationships and manifestations of human life.”32 Bakhtin calls the study of utterances “metalinguistics” in the sense that its subject matter—precisely, “dialogue as a universal phenomenon”—exceeds or goes beyond the remit of linguistics proper.33 And the most basic distinction informing metalinguistics is the one between what Bakhtin calls “primary (simple) and secondary (complex) speech genres” (pervichnye [prostye] i vtorichnye [slozhnye] rechevye zhanry), that is, “typical forms of utterance” that we invariably use when we communicate: “We always speak in specific speech genres, all of our utterances are characterized by . . . typical forms of construction.”34 Now, primary or simple speech genres are those that unfold in “unmediated speech communication,” being “closely dependent on all the factors of the [immediate] extra-verbal context” for being received and properly understood.35 Secondary or complex speech genres, conversely—such as “novels, dramas, [and] scientific studies of various kinds”—are those that do not necessarily depend on the immediate context of their production for being received and properly understood; secondary, “mostly written” speech genres “incorporate and transform various primary speech genres . . . which thus forfeit their immediate or unmediated relation to real life and others’ utterances.”36 With Yakubinsky’s pioneering inquiry into human communication in mind, we cannot fail to observe that Bakhtin’s metalinguistics, including its master binary—the distinction between primary and secondary speech genres—can be traced back to Yakubinsky’s detailed analyses of the “functional diversity speech” as it unfolds in different “forms of utterance,” which Yakubinsky specifies, most generally, in terms of, “unmediated” and “mediated interaction.”37 The latter Yakubinsky applies to “written communication” in particular, noting that the more mediated communication is, the less immediately context- or situation-dependent it tends to be; the former, conversely, covers most forms of oral communication in concrete real-life contexts, as Yakubinsky’s above-cited example of the dialogue “between two old crones” demonstrates.38 The towering presence of Yakubinsky in Bakhtin’s thinking equally comes to the fore—and this shall be the final point of intersection between the two I wish to highlight in this essay—in both authors’ recourse to Dostoevsky. Which is not at all to say that Dostoesvky figures equally prominently in the works of both. Far from it: While Yakubinsky illustrates most of his theoretical observations and claims throughout On Dialogic Speech with passages from the writings of Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, mostly), Bakhtin, famously, avails himself of the writings of Dostoevsky above all to elaborate and il-

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lustrate the workings of dialogism (even though he does occasionally quote Tolstoy as well). In one crucial instance, however, namely, in his reflections on the signal role of facial expression, gesticulation, intonation, and timbre in mediated and unmediated communication, respectively, Yakubinsky does cite Dostoevsky at great length: a passage from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer for 1873, which revolves around “a single ‘unprintable noun’” and which I already quoted above.39 And as it happens, the same passage from Dostoevsky appears in its entirety in at least one of the works of the Bakhtin circle in the context of a discussion of the significance of “expressive intonation” in “spoken or written” communication.40 In fact, the author cavalierly calls it the “classical case of applying intonation to living speech” (klassichesky sluchay primeneniya intonacii k zhiznennoy rechi), thus glossing over and obfuscating the fact that it was Yakubinsky who, to the best of my knowledge, first adduced the Dostoevsky passage in question as the crown witness to the irreducible significance of the “communicative function of voice, intonation and timbre for understanding another’s speech” in On Dialogic Speech, where his successor in turn most likely encountered it.41 What is even more significant, though, than this remarkable thematic coincidence, is the fact that Yakubinsky’s treatment of and attention to “voice, intonation and timbre” as rife with “personal overtones” and revelatory of a “the speaker’s emotional and mental state more fully than the words’ meanings themselves” obliquely resurfaces in Bakhtin’s concept of the so-called stylistic visage (stilistichesky oblik), which emphatically articulates and expresses—precisely, among other things, through “voice, intonation, and timbre”—the real or fictional person’s stylistic individuality and unicity as a participant in social polyphony.42 CONCLUSION As stated above, it has not in any way been my aim to detract from Bakhtin’s intellectual achievement, which firmly stands on its own, but, rather, to contribute to filling what I take to have been an intellectual-historical lacuna. What I hope to have outlined is just how fertile a soil Yakubinsky’s pioneering inquiry into the forms of utterance has provided for Bakhtin’s sprawling and multifarious oeuvre. Given the indisputable moorings that will forever tie Bakhtin to the dock of Yakubinsky’s On Dialogic Speech, though, it might seem surprising—or perhaps not at all—that Bakhtin would choose to give his contemporary so little overt, dialogic credit or recognition.

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NOTES 1.  Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Throughout this essay, all unidentified translations are my own. 2. On Bakhtin’s self-perception as a philosophical anthropologist, see: M. M. Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskye stat’i, edited by Sergey G. Bocharov and Vadim V. Kozhinov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 523; Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, edited by Sergey G. Bocharov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 351. 3. On Yakubinsky’s role as a cofounder of Russian Formalism, see: Michael Eskin, “Thinking in Images, Differently: Shklovsky, Yakubinsky, and the Power of Evidence,” in: Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage, edited by Slav Gratchev and Howard Mancing (Lanham: Lexington Book, 2019), 1–26. 4.  Den’ Isskustva was the newsletter of the Nevel’ Union of Workers of Art (see: Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mihkail Bakhtin [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 241); I am referring to Yakubinsky’s essays “O zvukakh stikhotvornogo yazyka” and “Skoplenie,” which were first published in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka I and II, respectively (St. Peterburg, 1916/1917); for Yakubinsky’s post-OPOYAZ career and publications, see: Michael Eskin, “Introduction: The Forgotten Formalist,” in: L. P. Yakubinsky, On Language & Poetry: Three Essays, translated by Michael Eskin (New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2018), 19–20. 5.  See: Michael Eskin, “Translator’s Introduction to L. P. Yakubinsky’s on ‘Dialogic Speech,’” PMLA 112.2 (March 1997), 244. 6. While Yakubinsky has been mentioned in secondary literature on Bakhtin (e.g., by Ken Hirschkop, Caryl Emerson, and Michael Holquist), to the best of my knowledge, there has only been one study explicitly devoted to the two thinkers in conjunction (see: Maria da Conceição Diniz Pereira de Lyra and Robson de Oliveira). 7. V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929; Moscow: Labirint, 1993), 126, 128, 158; for a cursory commentary on Bakhtin’s and the Bakhtin circle’s contacts with and overt recourse to Yakubinsky, see also: Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123, 166. 8.  See: Eskin, “Introduction: The Forgotten Formalist,” 14–19. 9.  L. P. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech, translated from the Russian by Michael Eskin (New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2018), 29, 49 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” in: L. P. Yakubinsky, Izbrannye raboty: Yazyk i ego funktsionirovanie, edited by A. A. Leont’ev (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1986), 25, 34 (originally published in: Russkaya rech’: Sborniki statey, edited by L. V. Schcherba [Petragrad: Izdanie foneticheskogo instituta prakticheskogo izycheniya yazykov, 1923], 96–194). 10.  Ibid., 43–50 / 31–34. 11.  Ibid., 51–52 / 35 (trans. modified; my emphases). 12.  Ibid., 53–54, 71 / 36, 50. 13.  Ibid., 57–58 / 38–39.

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14.  Ibid., 58, 66 / 39, 45 15.  Ibid., 33–42 / 27–31. 16.  Ibid., 69–70 / 45–46. 17.  Ibid., 54 / 36. 18.  Ibid., 33–38 / 27–28. 19.  Ibid., 39–40 / 29. 20.  On the manifesto as the exemplary avant-garde literary form, see: Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 21.  For a detailed elaboration of the evolution of Bakhtin’s thinking with particular attention to its continuities, see: Michael Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 66–112. 22.  M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki/tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (1929/1963), edited by Oleg V. Garun (Kiev: Next, 1994), 198. 23.  Ibid., 248. 24. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech, 43–50 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 31–34. 25.  M. M. Bakhtin, Slovo v romane (1934–35), in: M. M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki: issledovaniia raznykh let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 156–157. 26. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech, 49 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 33–34. 27.  M. M. Bakhtin, Avtor i geroy v esteticheskoy deyatel’nosti (mid-1920s), in: M. M. Bakhtin Raboty 1920-x godov, edited by Dmitry A. Tatarnikov (Kiev: Next, 1994), 74, 91, 96–97, 139, 158, 164, 173, 196, 222–223. 28. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech 51–52 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 35 (trans. modified; my emphasis). 29. Bakhtin, Slovo v romane, 158; see also: Voloshinov, Marksizm, 15, 93. 30. Bakhtin, Problemy, 26, 31, 122, 184, 220, 226, 238–242. On the intricacies of Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony as a literary-aesthetic category, see also: Eskin, Ethics, 102–103. 31. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech, 57–58 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 38–39. 32. Bakhtin, Problemy, 248. 33.  Ibid., 395. 34. Bakhtin, Problema rechevykh zhanrov (1952–1953), in: M. M. Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 430, 448 (see also: Voloshinov, Marksizm, 109–159). 35.  Ibid., 430; see also: V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, translated by I. R. Titunik (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 106. 36. Bakhtin, Problema rechevykh zhanrov, 430. 37. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 17, 25. 38.  Ibid., 33–42, 69–70 / 27–31, 45–46. 39.  Ibid., 39 / 29. 40. Voloshinov, Marksizm, 114–115. 41. Yakubinsky, On Dialogic Speech, 38 / “O dialogicheskoy rechi,” 28. 42.  Ibid.; Bakhtin, Slovo v romane, 85.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva. Edited by Sergey G. Bocharov. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979. ———. “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost.’” Den’ iskusstva (September 13, 1919). ———. Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i. Edited by Sergey G. Bocharov and Vadim V. Kozhinov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986. ———. Problema rechevykh zhanrov (1952–53), in: Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 428–472. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Problemy poetiki/tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (1929/1963). Edited by Oleg V. Garun. Kiev: Next, 1994. ———. Avtor i geroy v esteticheskoy deyatel’nosti (mid-1920s), in: Raboty 1920-x godov. Edited by Dmitry A. Tatarnikov. Kiev: Next, 1994. ———. Slovo v romane (1934–35), in: Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 72–233. ———. Voprosy literatury i estetiki: issledovaniia raznykh let. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975. Bloom, Harold. Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Da Conceição Diniz Pereira de Lyra, Maria, and Robson Santos de Oliveira. “Yakubinsky and the Circle of Bakhtin: Convergences.” Paidéia 22.52 (May/Aug. 2012; http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-863X2012000200012). Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mihkail Bakhtin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Eskin, Michael. “Acting Philosophy: Bakhtin, Jollien, and the Art of Answerability.” Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability. Edited by Slav Gratchev and Howard Mancing. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018, 199–218. ———. Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “Introduction: The Forgotten Formalist,” in: L. P. Yakubinsky, On Language & Poetry: Three Essays. Translated by Michael Eskin. New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2018. ———. “Thinking in Images, Differently: Shklovsky, Yakubinsky, and the Power of Evidence.” Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage. Edited by Slav Gratchev and Howard Mancing. Lanham: Lexington Book, 2019, 11–26. ———. “Translator’s Introduction to L. P. Yakubinsky’s on ‘Dialogic Speech.’” PMLA 112.2 (March 1997): 243–248. Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London/New York: Routledge, 1990. Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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Voloshinov, Valentin N. Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Translated by I. R. Titunik (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973). ———. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1973. ———. Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929). Moscow: Labirint, 1993. Yakubinsky, Lev P. Izbrannye raboty: Yazyk i ego funktsionirovanie. Edited by A. A. Leont’ev. Moscow: “Nauka,” 1986. ———. “O dialogicheskoy rechi.” Russkaya rech’: Sborniki statey. Edited by L. V. Schcherba. Petragrad: Izdanie foneticheskogo instituta prakticheskogo izycheniya yazykov, 1923, 96–194. In: Yakubinsky, Izbrannye raboty, 17–82. ———. On Dialogic Speech. Translated from the Russian by Michael Eskin. New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2018. ———. On Language and Poetry: Three Essays. Translated from the Russian by Michael Eskin. New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2018. ———. “On the Sounds in Poetic Language.” In: Yakubinsky, On Language and Poetry, 31–53. ———. “O zvukakh stikhotvornogo yazyka.” Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka I. St. Peterburg: 18-aya gosudarstvennaya tipographia, 1916, 6–30. In: Yakubinsky, Izbrannye raboty, 163–175. ———. “Skoplenie odinakovykh plavnykh v prakticheskom i poeticheskom yazykakh.” Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka II. St. Peterburg: 18-aya gosudarstvennaya tipographia, 1917, 15–23. In: Yakubinsky, Izbrannye raboty, 176–182.

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Chapter Three

“Strong, Manly and Bold” The Russian Avant-Garde and Its Masculine Mantra Tim Harte When it comes to Russian Futurism, scholarly attention has generally homed in on the movement’s rebellious iconoclasm and stated desire to “toss Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., from the Ship of modernity,” as the Russian futurists—David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov—put it in 1912 in their famous first manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (“Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu”).1 Often ignored, however, is the loud machismo of its members; in “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” it was not only a sudden slap and an insubordinate toss that overturned Russian literary tradition, but also the aggressive virility that the nation’s avant-garde poets and painters championed. Dismissing the Symbolist poetry of “perfumed” predecessors such as Konstantin Balmont, Russia’s founding Futurists accentuated their own up-to-date manifestation of masculinity: “Who, trustingly, would turn his last love toward Balmont’s perfumed lechery? Is this the reflection of today’s virile soul?”2 Rather than adhere to the decadent and implicitly effeminate practices of Russian Symbolists and other artistic forerunners, the Russian Futurists promulgated a new ethos of artistic manliness through their public pronouncements and through their art. Drawing upon popular notions of masculinity that spread throughout Western culture at the turn into the twentieth century, the Russian Futurists infused their public personae as well as much of their art with a modern machismo that had profound ramifications for Russian avant-garde culture as a whole and, I would further contend, the movement’s ties to the 1917 Revolution and early Soviet culture. This virility was not exactly homegrown. Be it the “muscular Christianity” that emerged in England in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the athletics-inspired manliness that arose in America through such figures as Teddy Roosevelt and the then 43

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world-famous writer Jack London, or the bellicose bravado and misogyny of the Italian Futurists in the 1910s, the Russian futurists synthesized disparate models of masculinity to formulate their own “manly” ethos. As I will discuss in this essay, the Russian avant-garde’s emphasis on strength facilitated their overthrow of the status quo and aided them as they vigorously strove to transform everyday reality through their art. And whereas their female counterparts, the so-called Amazons of the Russian avant-garde (Natalya Goncharova, Lyubov’ Popova, Varvara Stepanova, etc.), represented a progressive, feminist orientation among the era’s artistic vanguard, the male founders of Russia’s Left art mined the hypermasculine cult of the era to establish a countervailing—yet also collaborative—virility. Not merely precursors to the “New Men” of the Soviet era, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, and others would take their masculine mindset in highly creative, original directions that profoundly informed the development of Russian and early Soviet artistic culture. Modern notions of masculinity, it seems safe to say, initially arose in Great Britain’s stratified Victorian society. During the long reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901, British society and culture underwent a sudden transformation, as sports and other vigorous activities closely linked to notions of bravery and virility became available to not merely the upper class but also the broad public. What arose in British society and culture at this time, particularly in the country’s elite “public” (i.e., private) schools (such as the famous Rugby School that came under the transformative direction of headmaster Thomas Arnold), was the doctrine of “Muscular Christianity,” which stressed manliness, morality, teamwork, and an active, athletic approach to life, all of which pushed British young men toward a masculine ideal.3 As Thomas Carlyle, providing the ethical basis for Muscular Christianity, wrote in 1841, “A man shall and must be valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a man.”4 Spiritual growth through muscular activities such as boxing, soccer (i.e., football), rugby, and a wide range of less-competitive yet similarly rugged activities soon became a desired goal for young men and an essential aspect of daily existence at British schools and universities. Writers and painters quickly seized upon British society’s embrace of masculine athleticism at the start of the nineteenth century and onward.5 Even prior to the establishment of “Muscular Christianity,” literary nods to virile forms of fighting can be found in the Romantic poetry of George Gordon (Lord) Byron, to give one prominent example. Having taken up boxing soon after completing his education at Cambridge in 1806, Byron practiced the sport for a time under former English boxing champion and “professor of pugilism” John Jackson. Trainer to an impressive group of young, aristocratic men in England, Jackson would even earn himself a brief mention in

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Byron’s 1811 poem “Hints from Horace”: “And men unpracticed in exchanging knocks / Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.” Jackson is also cited in an authorial note to Byron’s long satiric poem Don Juan, which features a healthy dose of raw pugilism amidst its “epic” account of sexual and physical conquest. In such a way, the manliness of boxing seeped into the era’s artistic ethos. “Writers and artists,” Kasia Boddy argues, “found in pugilism not only a subject-matter, but the basis for a method.”6 Meanwhile, among the painters who depicted boxing in the Romantic era was Théodore Géricault, an anglophile French painter who marveled at the boxing matches and displays of masculine strength that transpired in the rough and tumble world of working-class England. And jumping ahead almost a century, there was the poetry of Housman, who did not embrace boxing per se but did infuse his poetry (e.g., “To an Athlete Dying Young,” 1896) with an appreciation for the tenets of Muscular Christianity that by the end of the century had permeated much of British society. Across the ocean in the United States, where masculine ideals proliferated not only in the White House of President Theodore Roosevelt but also through burgeoning athletic culture on college campuses, artists likewise heard the era’s machoistic tenor. Take, for instance, the boxing paintings of George Bellows. Undoubtedly influenced by his fellow American painter Thomas Eakins (whose 1899 painting Wrestlers he in particular admired), Bellows produced a variety of realist works devoted to groups of men fervently—and violently—engaged as either participants or spectators in boxing and football. It was, in fact, three striking paintings devoted to boxing matches in a private New York City athletic club that garnered Bellows his early fame: Club Night (1907), Stag at Sharkey’s (1908), and Both Members of the Club (1909). In Stag at Sharkey’s, the most well-known of Bellows’s boxing paintings, two semi-naked boxers trade blows, their straining muscles on vivid display. A referee leans in to get a read on the quick punches while a crowd of enraptured onlookers, boasting Goya-esque expressions of glee, grotesquely interacts with the intense action. Here Bellows underscores the all-male audience’s perspective: what the audience sees are two powerful boxers entangled in furious combat, the angled positioning of their bodies exuding all the muscular force and brutishness that informs this aggressive sport. The faces of the two boxers seem to disappear amidst the flurry of fists and knocking of heads in Bellows’s semi-realistic, expressionist work that privileges raw emotion over verisimilitude (“I don’t know anything about boxing,” Bellows remarked, “I’m just painting two men trying to kill each other”).7 The virtually naked fighters, so glaringly exposed on the boxing stage, provide semi-illicit thrills for the spectators and, implicitly, the viewers of the painting.

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At the same time Bellows was painting his gripping scenes of semi-legal boxing matches at Sharkey’s, a young Jack London had already begun reporting on popular boxing matches for news outlets and fictionalizing what he witnessed at these bouts. Through virile themes such as competitive athletics and adventure, London expanded the scope of American fiction, particularly the genre of the short story. Coming into his own as a writer in an age when such “manliness” had begun to reach a wide audience via popular work by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, London creatively delved into the masculine persona of the modern male in ways that set the stage for subsequent fictional treatments of masculine competitiveness in the prose work of Ernest Hemingway. As an author of short stories and novels that boasted a mass appeal rivaling—and in many ways suiting—that of boxing and wrestling at the turn into the twentieth century, London transformed the drama of man-to-man competition and the bravery of athletic fighters into compelling popular fiction, while he also lent a socialist orientation to such depictions of manliness. “Many of [London’s] heroes,” Jonathan Berliner writes, “are Nietzschean supermen whose actions incline thematically toward socialism rather than individualism.”8 Nietzschean ideals (and also Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism), providing a philosophical foundation for so much of the masculinity and athletic competitiveness at the turn into the twentieth century, would indeed inform much of London’s popular fiction.9 London’s international appeal and unabashed machismo were mainstays of Western culture that the Russian futurists could hardly ignore, especially given the revolutionary, socialist tenor of London’s work, an anti-capitalist sensibility that ensured its popularity well into Soviet era. Mayakovsky, in fact, would make direct mention of London in his famous 1915 long poem A Cloud in Trousers (Oblako v shtanakh): “‘Dzhek London, / den’gi, / liubov,’ / strast’’” (“Jack London, / money, / love, / passion”). Moreover, Mayakovsky not only wrote the screenplay for Nikandr Turkin’s Creation Can’t Be Bought (Ne dlia deneg rodivshiisia, 1918), a post-1917 silent film based on London’s then-popular 1909 novel Martin Eden, but also performed the lead role of poet Ivan Nov, the film’s Eden-inspired hero who rises out of his humble beginnings by educating himself and becoming the toast of the town before growing disenchanted with fame and riches. The manly atmosphere in pre-Revolutionary Russia, however, emanated as much from groundbreaking Western European art as it did from popular American literature. The Italian Futurists, championing a cult of speed through a variety of artistic media, promoted their own speed-infused form of masculinity—and misogyny—as a crucial component of the modern world and the movement’s art. In the Italian Futurists’ first manifesto from 1909, the

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poet and Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti conjured up a distinctive virility in the declaration’s first three guiding principles: Manifesto of Futurism 1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.10

Masculine aggression and “audacity,” Marinetti’s words make clear, would be fundamentally linked to the Futurist aesthetic of speed, a manly orientation also reflected in the writings of the Italian Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, who wrote in his diary about the need to seek out a “virility composed of a precise and exact positivism.”11 A misogynistic tone, meanwhile, simultaneously permeated the pronouncements of the Italian Futurists, as Marinetti also added in his first manifesto that, in addition to fighting feminism, he and his colleagues aimed to “glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.”12 Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian futurists superimposed on many of their public pronouncements an overt hypermasculinity. “A person of the future,” Mayakovsky stated in 1914, “must be strong, manly, and bold so as to be a master, not a slave, of life.”13 The masculine bravado underlying the Futurists’ enthusiastic, “bold” approach to everyday life offered Mayakovsky and other Left, avant-garde artists “of the future” a useful theme— and a useful ethos—for shaping Russia’s prerevolutionary artistic discourse and distinguishing futurist art from existing artistic movements in Russia. Mayakovsky, cultivating a “manly” persona that came across as both circus strongman and revolutionary rabble-rouser, stated in “Futurians (The Birth of the Futurians),” his manifesto-like piece printed in December of 1914 in the newspaper Nov’ (Virgin Soil), that “the human basis of Russia has changed” and that “powerful people of the future have been born.”14 The poet and his fellow “futurians” (budetliane) were just those “powerful” new people of the era destined to replace the weak, sickly people of the past: “Take note: under the gray coat of the average man instead of a puny body, dissipated and spent, ripen the powerful muscles of a Hercules!”15 Aspiring toward Herculean-type muscularity, Mayakovsky rebelled against staid convention while glorifying the “New Man”: “And now, fighting with the constraints of the past, with the dull power of outdated authorities,—I reverentially tip my cap before the

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new man who has commenced today.”16 Such revolutionary sentiments bolstered what would be a fruitful merging of machismo and avant-garde art that reached its pinnacle in the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution. Other Futurists joined Mayakovsky in their condemnation of Russia’s artistic past and its weak, effeminate, and implicitly sterile ways. In “New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism),” Kruchenykh, stated, “everything was done to suffocate the primordial feeling of our native language, to husk the fertile seed from the word, to emasculate it and send it out to roam the world as ‘the clear clean honest euphonic Russian language’ although this was no longer language, but a pathetic eunuch unable to give anything to the world.”17 In opposition to the emasculated Russian found in traditional Russian literature, Kruchenykh stated that the Futurists’ goal was “to underscore the great significance for art of all strident elements, discordant sounds (dissonances) and purely primitive roughness.”18 Embracing a primitive masculinity and linking their work to “wild free language,” Kruchenykh and his fellow Russian Futurists channeled their stated masculinity to break with the stagnant, conventional past and stride, with their chests puffed out, into the future.19 Futurist poetry, in addition to Futurist art, would facilitate such boldness. In the 1913 poem “Dyr bul shchyl,” one of Kruchenykh’s most famous examples of what he, Khlebnikov, and other Russian Futurists labeled zaum’— or, in English, “transrational”—verse, the complete lack of any discernable syntax or recognizable words allows the poet to evoke an overtly primitive, masculine tone. Kruchenykh’s five-line poem proves a burst of nonsensical, manly grunt-like sounds:

Kruchenykh’s short guttural sounds and nonsensical lines generate a raw ferocity. Although the primordial grumbling of “Dyr bul shchyl” afford Kruchenykh’s work a course, unrefined quality, the transrational five-line poem resonates as a modern creation through its forceful, masculine spirit and combative rejection of fixed meaning.

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The virile, primitivist streak of Russian Futurism can likewise be found in early Russian avant-garde attention to circus wrestling, an extremely popular sport at the time that, like boxing, fused the modern with raw, primitive aggression. In Goncharova’s 1908–1809 painting Wrestlers (Bortsy) one of several nearly identical paintings from 1909 of the same name, the coarse, masculine nature of two imposing athletes is front and center.20 Although painted by a woman, Wrestlers exudes an overtly masculine aura. Here Goncharova, providing a spectatorial perspective on the two huge competitors locked in a combative embrace, celebrates the crude physicality of the sport and its practitioners. The wrestler on the left wears a red mask (circus wrestlers at the time often competed in hoods or masks), whereby the color of the athlete’s head and upper-body sports attire allow him to blend in with the reddish ground (presumably that combination of sand and sawdust used at the time for circus wrestling in Russia) on which he wrestles, while the white and green brushstrokes used to depict his opponent further accentuate the painting’s coarse, semi-mimetic essence. There is nothing delicate or refined in Wrestlers, as the massive bodies of the two competitors dominate the space of the canvas. The primal power integral to weightlifting, an activity closely related to wrestling and similarly fashionable at the time, provided a comparable dose of virility to avant-garde work by Goncharova’s lifelong partner and fellow painter, Mikhail Larionov. In Larionov’s 1910 Portrait of Vladimir Burliuk (Portret Vladimira Burliuka), the physically imposing artist Vladimir Burliuk grasps a barbell in his lowered left hand.21 Sporting only a long open-neck shirt that helps highlight his impressive muscular physique, Burliuk flaunts his bare, bulging thighs and, more broadly, his manliness. Sometimes referred to as Portrait of an Athlete (Portret atleta), Larionov’s painting features a crude yet colorful Fauvist-inspired background, before which the muscular Burliuk, depicted in suitably rough strokes, appears a more primitive strongman than avant-garde painter. Through its content and form Larionov’s painting, like Goncharova’s Wrestlers, conveys the coarse, virile essence of weightlifting (tiazhelaia atletika). Vladimir Burliuk (brother of the Futurist David Burliuk) was, in fact, an avid proponent of physical fitness, as were other painters at the time—for instance, Ivan Myasoedov, Ilya Mashkov (who after the Revolution hung a sign in his studio that declared, “In my studio there is room only for the healthy and strong”), Petr Konchalovsky, and Vladimir Tatlin (an enthusiastic boxer who would be featured bare-chested in Larionov’s 1913 Portrait of Tatlin [Portret V. E. Tatlina]).22 As Larionov and other Left painters in Russia looked to the peasant past but also to the future, masculine strength—whether in real life or in the creative sphere—merged with evolving avant-garde aesthetics as well as the Russian Futurists’ revolutionary ambitions. They were increasingly eager to defy convention in aggressive, virile ways.

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Figure 3.1.  Ilya Mashkov, Self-Portrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky, 1910. Oil on canvas, 208 × 270 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Muscle size and raw, masculine strength likewise underscore Mashkov’s semi-scandalous painting Self-Portrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky (Avtoportret i portret Konchalovskogo, figure 3.2). First exhibited in December 1910 at the Jack of Diamonds (Bubnovyi valet) show in Moscow, where other avant-garde artists such as Goncharova, Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, and David Burliuk displayed their work, Mashkov’s canvas captures in arresting fashion the radical potency of virile avant-garde artists. Another clear manifestation of the Left’s growing fascination with the male body and its strength, this iconoclastic painting depicts the painter and his Jack of Diamonds colleague Konchalovsky as impressive bodybuilders displaying their pronounced musculature before a gaudy backdrop of bourgeois artistic culture. Arguably homoerotic in spirit and appropriately large (208 × 270 cm), the painting highlights the unabashed masculinity of the two artists, who preen before spectators in nothing but bodybuilder shorts. Mashkov sits on the left with a violin cradled in his bulky arms and a phallic bow in his right hand while next to him Konchalovsky sits holding a sheet of music between his massive legs. The two men, moreover, are surrounded by elements of conventional (i.e., effeminate) art: on the left is a piano (on which stands a sheet of music with a bullfighting illustration), in the background are two still lifes with flowers (which were originally going to be portraits of the

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two painters’ wives), and on a background shelf is a row of books ranging from the Bible to volumes on art and Cezanne.23 In both a metaphorical and physical manner, Mashkov and Konchalovsky have muscled aside these surrounding remnants of conventional artistic culture. No other painting at the time conveys so boldly the notion that physical fitness represented a powerful means to overturn the staid status quo. Mashkov and Konchalovsky were hardly the effete artists of yesteryear. Through their rebellious preening and impressive physiques, the two strongmen painters appear as artistic forerunners of a male-dominated world. The Russian Futurists’ vision of a male-dominated world would culminate in the famous Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem) by Mikhail Matyushin, Kruchenykh, and Khlebnikov, staged alongside Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy (Vladimir Maiakovskii. Tragediia) in December 1913 at St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theater. According to the actor K. Tomashevsky, who performed in both the Victory over the Sun and Vladimir Mayakovsky productions in 1913 and subsequently wrote about the experience, a good deal of the inspiration for the performance at the Luna Park Theater had come from the Greco-Roman wrestling matches previously officiated there by the famous wrestler and wrestling impresario Ivan (“Uncle Vanya”) Lebedev in an outdoor arena.24 In accordance with the venue, a circus-like and overtly machoistic atmosphere featuring strongmen and athletes prevails throughout Victory over the Sun. Given the art historical ramifications of the production and its groundbreaking designs, it is easy to discount the masculine spirit of Victory over the Sun, but raw masculinity indeed proved central to the opera’s libretto and iconoclastic spirit. The semi-logical plot of Victory over the Sun consists, at its transrational core, of two “futurian strongmen” (budetlianskie silachi) leading a violent conquest of the sun, all in a defiant attempt to establish an ideal world of fantastical, cosmic dimensions. Boasting groundbreaking, abstract stage and costume designs by Kazimir Malevich, a transrational introduction and libretto by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, respectively, and an atonal score by the composer and painter Matyushin, the chaotic opera celebrated the revolutionary, anarchical action of these strongmen, an aviator, and a raucous chorus of athletes. As the artistic radicalism of Victory over the Sun accentuated, the era’s ethos of virility contributed not only to the opera’s unprecedented language and art but also to the implicit rise of a new, maledominated world. The whole production, be it the libretto, the music, or the costume designs, championed a revolution and new world that corresponded directly to the era’s masculine Zeitgeist. The language and plot of Victory over the Sun, for one thing, underscored the revolutionary dawn of a new masculine reality, albeit one somewhat dystopian at its sunless core. In Khlebnikov’s Prologue, a “Futurian” (Bude-

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tlianin) declares through neologistic language that “the strongone will replace the punyone” (Sileben zamenit khileben), while Kruchenykh’s first “act” (deimo) opens with the two futurian strongmen tearing down the stage curtain, almost a literal breaking of the fourth wall that underlined the inherent spectacle of the production and its aggressive, rebellious intent.25 Synthesizing the ultramasculine ethos of wrestling with the misogyny that characterized so much of Italian Futurism at the time, the strongmen declare their intention of using their “cannon-like bodies” (pushechnye tela) to lock “fat female beauties” away in a house (Tolstykh krasavits / My zaperli v dom).26 The second strongman, meanwhile, boasts that they will similarly lock the sun away in “a concrete house” (betonnyi dom). A circus-like farce ensues, as a Roman Nero-Caligula figure, along with an airplane-flying traveler, a “bully” (zabiaka), and “an ill-intentioned one” play out the chaotic, semi-logical action. In the second scene (kartina) of the first act, singing athletes (sportsmeny) join the strongmen in their metaphysical—and very violent—rebellion (mention is even made of Port Arthur, the Chinese harbor that Russia and Japan fought over in 1904, leading indirectly to revolutionary events a year later in Russia).27 By the end of the fourth act, the sun—less a heat-providing star and more a symbol of order and convention—has been captured: “We are free, the sun is smashed, hail darkness!” (My vol’nye / Razbitoe solntse . . . / Zdravstvuet t’ma!), the triumphant sportsmen sing.28 In the second act of Victory, “New Ones” (Novye), who in Malevich’s costume designs closely resemble the futurian strongmen, have come to inhabit a transformed world—a “tenth country” (Desiatyi stran)—and they claim to have “shot the past” (my vystrelili vproshloe). Representatives of this past world appear, but only as “coward” (truslivye) and a bourgeois “Fat Man” (tolstiak), who complains that “his head is two steps behind [his] body” (golova na 2 shaga szadi).29 They are no match for the “New Ones” or for the strongmen, athletes, and traveling aviator. By the end of the Cubo-Futurists’ short opera, a plane has crashed, as the aviator walks away alive and the strongmen sing a variation on their opening refrain, declaring “all’s well that / begins well / and does not have an end / the world will perish but we have no / end” (vse khorosho, chto / khorosho nachinaetsia / i ne imeet kontsa / mir pogibnet a nam net / kontsa).30 The machoistic insurrection will go on and on. In addition to Kruchenykh’s transrational language for Victory and its powerful purposes, the opera boasted Malevich’s radical stage designs and costumes, which melded a new, muscular modernist aesthetic with the physical might of wrestlers, weightlifters, and other athletes. If Victory, as Anthony Parton argues, “expressed its revolutionary message through an equally revolutionary stagecraft that opposed point for point the theater of the bourgeoisie and by implication bourgeois culture as a whole,” then surely the robust costumes for the sportsmen and strongmen (figure 3.3) were essential for this

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Figure 3.2.  Kazimir Malevich, Futurist Strongman. Costume design for the opera Victory over the Sun after A. Kruchenykh, 1913. Found in the collection of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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overturning of conventional culture.31 Anticipating Malevich’s subsequent Suprematist work that would come two years later, these stage designs featured semi-abstract geometrical shapes alongside a recognizable section of an airplane.32 Malevich’s costume designs for the production, meanwhile, presented the athletic protagonists as enormous, powerful automatons. According to Kruchenykh, the armor-like costumes devised by Malevich restricted the movement of actors, allowing them only to move their arms upward in a mechanical fashion that suggested a proto-Constructivist merging of muscular man and modern machine.33 And Matyushin, elaborating on the “joyful feeling of strength” the opera afforded its audience, remarked that “the scenery and Future [Strong] Man appeared so powerfully and threateningly in a way never seen anywhere before.”34 Moreover, Kruchenkykh remarked in an essay on the show, “The artist Malevich put in a great deal of work on the costumes and stage sets for my opera. Although the posters advertised one female role, even that was dropped in the course of rehearsal. I believe that makes it the only opera in the world without a single female role! It was all done in an attempt to pave the way for a male epoch, to replace the effeminate Apollonians and slatternly Aphrodites.”35 As Kruchenykh suggests, masculinity and revolution had emphatically merged, pervading virtually all the multiple components of Victory, as the era’s virility facilitated the era’s groundbreaking, rebellious art. Russian avant-garde innovation would proceed apace following the iconoclastic splash of Victory over the Sun, as Left art’s revolutionary impulses continued to draw on the manly trends within the country. In addition to the Muscular Christianity, American machismo, and male-only bravado of Italian Futurism, nineteenth-century Russian culture likewise came to play a role in the Futurist merging of physicality, revolution, and “New Man” virility that resonated well into the Soviet era. Midway through the nineteenth century, Russian thinkers had begun linking manly physical pursuits to revolutionary activity, for instance in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s highly influential novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863), which featured the subtitle From the Tales About the New People (Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh). Among Chernyshevsky’s “new people” from What Is to Be Done? was the radical Rakhmetov, who bolstered his revolutionary beliefs through hardnosed physical activity. Rakhmetov, Chernyshevsky wrote, “carried water, chopped and hauled firewood, felled trees, cut stone, dug earth, and forged iron. He tried many different kinds of work and changed jobs frequently because with each job and every change, different muscles were being developed. He put himself on a boxer’s diet. He began to nourish himself (precisely!) only on those things reputed to build physical strength—beefsteak most of all, almost raw.”36 A manly, physical lifestyle and orientation would feed not only Ra-

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khmetov’s revolutionary activity in 1861, but also the Russian avant-garde urge to fuse art and revolution.37 Following 1917, Constructivism reigned, as avant-garde artists championed a “New way of life” that may have been specific to the Soviet 1920s but had its roots in the muscular, revolutionary tenets of Russian Futurism. Although a feminine noun in Russian, revolution—or revoliutsiia—became a resoundingly masculine concept for the Russian Futurists and subsequent avant-garde artists, as they creatively participated in the overthrow of the status quo and strode confidently into the new postRevolutionary era, poised to present themselves as New Men of a new era. NOTES 1. David Burliuk, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vladimer Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov, “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes 1912–1928, eds. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988), 3. 2.  Ibid., 3. 3.  J. A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie, “The Other Side of the Coin: Victorian Masculinity, Field Sports and English Elite Education,” in Making European Masculinities: Sport, Europe, Gender, ed. J. A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 65. 4.  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 43. 5.  Some of what ensues here, particularly the discussion of art’s incorporation of sports at the time, comes from a forthcoming book of mine, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). 6.  Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 56. 7.  E. A. Carmean, Jr., “Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” in E. A. Carmean, Jr., John Wilmerding, Linda Ayres, and Deborah Chotner, eds., Bellows: The Boxing Pictures (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 30. 8.  Jonathan Berliner, “Jack London’s Socialistic Social Darwinism,” American Literary Realism, 41, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 41. 9. Probing the nineteenth-century origins of the early Soviet concept of zakal or steeliness, Catriona Kelly notes the Nietzschean “strength of will and masculine physiology” that was crucial to European culture as a whole and to “a cult of ‘manly resolve’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia.” Catriona Kelly, “The Education of the Will: Advice Literature, Zakal, and Manliness in Early-TwentiethCentury Russia,” in Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, eds. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 134, 145. 10.  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio and trans. Robert Brain et al. (Boston: MFA, 2001), 21. 11.  Cited in Umbro Apollonio, Introduction, in Futurist Manifestos, 15.

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12.  Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” 22. 13.  These sentiments, a paraphrasing of a 1914 lecture by Mayakovsky on Futurism, were first reported in the Kishinev newspaper. See Vasily Kamensky, Zhizn’ s Maiakovskim (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974), 103. 14.  Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Budetliane (Rozhdenie budetlian),” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khud. literatura, 1955), 332. 15.  Ibid., 329. 16.  Ibid., 332. 17.  Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism),” in Lawton and Eagle, eds., 70. This essay appeared in the 1913 futurist book The Three (Troe), which featured on its cover the drawing of a strongman similar in appearance to the Futurist Strongman figures produced by Malevich for Victory over the Sun. 18.  Ibid., 75. 19.  David Burliuk, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov, “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Lawton and Eagle, 3. 20.  Goncharova’s 1909 Les Lutteurs (Bortsy) belongs to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, while the 1908–1909 Wrestlers, discussed here, belongs to the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. 21. Vladimir Burliuk’s rare strength and athletic ways are noted in Benedikt Livshits, One-Eyed Archer, trans. John Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 42–43. 22.  In 1912, Myasoedov published his “Manifesto of Nudity” (“Manifest o nagote”) in Nikolai Evreinov’s Nudity on the Stage (Nagota na stsene), which in addition to Miasoedov’s manifesto included a photograph of a scantily clad, muscular Miasoedov, along with another photograph of a hooded wrestler displaying his impressive musculature. For more on Ivan Miasoedov’s obsession with body building, see John E. Bowlt, “Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 46. Mashkov’s studio sign, along with another one warning, “Those working in my studio are strictly forbidden to be sick,” and a third one listing “health” and “physical strength” as two of the ten qualities required for those wanting to work in the studio, are mentioned in I. S. Bolotina, Il’ia Mashkov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1977), 422, 424. Other Russian Futurists who promoted their physical strength include Vasily Kamensky and Vladimir Gol’tsshmidt. 23.  According to Bolotina, Konchalovsky’s wife insisted that her small portrait be removed from the painting. Bolotina, Il’ia Mashkov, 46. 24.  K. Tomashevskii, “Vladimir Mayakovskii,” Teatr, no. 4, 1938: 139. 25.  Velimir Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, in Poeziia russkogo futurizma, ed. A. S. Kushner (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentsvo “Akademicheskii proekt,” 1999), 213. 26.  Ibid., 214. Feminine grammatical endings have generally been removed in the libretto. For more on the opera’s misogynistic underpinnings, see John Malmstad, “Wrestling with Representation: Reforging Images of the Artist and Art in the Russian

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Avant-Garde,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 162. 27.  Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 219. 28.  Ibid., 221. 29.  Ibid., 223. 30.  Ibid., 228. 31.  Parton, “Killing the Moonlight and Conquering the Sun,” in A. Kruchenykh, K. Malevich, and M. Matyushin, A Victory over the Sun, ed. Patricia Railing (London: Artists Bookworks, 2009), 2:140. 32.  Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 44–45. 33.  Aleksey Kruchenykh, “The First Futurist Shows in the World,” translated by Alan Meyers and reprinted in Kruchenykh, Malevich, and Matyushin, A Victory over the Sun Album, 1:140. 34.  Mikhail Matyushin, “Futurism in St. Petersburg: Performances on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of December, 1913,” trans. Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby in Drama Review 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1971): 104. This short piece by Matyushin, also included in A Victory over the Sun Album, first appeared in Futuristy: pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov, nos. 1–2 (Moscow, January 1914). 35.  Kruchenykh, “The First Futurist Shows in the World,” 131. 36.  Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael Katz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 279. 37.  In the 1860s, Irina Paperno argues in her study of Chernyshevsky, “literature was almost universally regarded as an all-encompassing ‘guide to life’ (Chernyshevsky’s term),” prompting not only “a wide expansion of art into life,” but also the emergence of rational “New” men of action, such as that found in What Is to Be Done? Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 11–12.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. Translated by Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall. Boston: MFA Publications, 2001. Berliner, Jonathan. “Jack London’s Socialistic Social Darwinism.” American Literary Realism, 41, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 52–78. Boddy, Kasia. Boxing: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Bolotina, I. S. Il’ia Mashkov. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1977. Bowlt, John E., and Olga Matich, eds. Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian AvantGarde and Cultural Experiment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Eds. David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Carmean, E. A., John Wilmerding, Linda Ayres, and Deborah Chotner, eds. Bellows: The Boxing Pictures. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1982.

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Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. What Is to Be Done? Trans. Michael Katz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Clements, Barbara Evans, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, eds. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Douglas, Charlotte. Swans of Other Worlds. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980. Harte, Tim. “‘Transforming Defeat into Victory’: Jack London and Vladimir Nabokov’s Glory.” Nabokov Online Journal, Vols. 10–11 (2016–17). Housman, A. E. The Poems of A. E. Housman. Edited by Archie Burnett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Kamenskii, Vasilii. Zhizn’ s Maiakovskim. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974. Kruchenykh, Aleksei. Stikhotvoreniia, poemy, romany, opera. St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentsvo “Akademicheskii proekt,” 2001. ———, K. Malevich, and M. Matyushin, A Victory over the Sun Album. Edited by Patricia Railing. 2 vols. London: Artists. Bookworks, 2009. Lawton, Anna, and Herbert Eagle, eds. Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Livshits, Benedikt. One-Eyed Archer. Trans. John Bowlt. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977. Mangan, J. A., ed. Making European Masculinities: Sport, Europe, Gender. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Matyushin, Mikhail. “Futurism in St. Petersburg: Performances on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of December, 1913.” Trans. Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby. Drama Review 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1971): 102–144. Maiakovskii, Vladimir. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 13 vols. Moscow: Khud. literatura, 1955. Paperno, Irina. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Ryan, Judith, and Alfred Thomas, eds. Cultures of Forgeries: Making Nations, Making Selves. New York: Routledge, 2003. Tomashevskii, K. “Vladimir Maiakovskii,” Teatr, no. 4, 1938: 137–50.

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Chapter Four

Flying Too Close to the Sun Impersonations of Duncan in Russia Mark Konecny

On 2 June 1922, Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini presented Ballo meccanico futurista in Rome, at Bragaglia’s “Circolo delle Cronache d’Attualità” in Via degli Avignonesi.1 The work, which according to some sources, was choreographed by Valentin Parnakh2 featured dancers who performed as proletarian workers who had merged with machines. Parnakh was later to revisit this theme in his choreography for the film R.U.R. which melded jazz and robots in a science fiction. The ballet juxtaposed the conceptions of Paladini with the mechanical costumes of Pannaggi resulting in “a humanized marionette costume: the two dancers they improvised spatial surprises moving into all the directions, accompanied by a rhythmic polyphony of engines obtained by orchestrating two motorcycles and lights of white and colored projectors.”3 Accounts say that the cardboard costumes were rather unwieldy but the dancers gave a reasonable representation of a merged man and machine. While the identity of one dancer, Ivanov, is lost to history,4 the other dancer had been a well-known figure in a cabaret in St. Petersburg before the revolution presenting comic ballets dressed as Isadora Duncan. Just as he was able to transform himself into an otherworldly futuristic man/machine, the dancer, Nikolai Fedorovich Barabanov who performed under the name Ikar, was adept at transforming and reconfiguring himself. A dozen years before he performed barefoot dance in drag at the Crooked Mirror cabaret in St. Petersburg, and he was able to fully inhabit the role and transport the audience with his dance. I would argue that Ikar’s transformation, first into a nymph from classical Greece and then as a stiffly mechanistic proletarian worker actually came from the same impulse: to fully express and transform the human body through dance. At first glance, this topic, a female impersonator dancing in the prerevolutionary Russia, seems to be a rather straightforward proposition; the crudely 59

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Figure 4.1.  Caricature of Ikar from Theater and Art, 1911, No. 12. 267.

comic cavorting of a man dressed as a woman was a staple of vaudeville. Ikar, “Icarus” in Russian, took a job at the Crooked Mirror cabaret at the height of Isadora-mania in Russia. Surprisingly, Ikar was able to perform barefoot dance with expressive alacrity and nuance; it is only slightly more remarkable that he did so dressed as a woman. There are three elements to this story which I think are important. First, Ikar’s biography is unique, and his talents as a dancer and comedian have been undeservedly neglected. Second, Ikar and his evolution provide a

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glimpse into the world of Modernist dance and its reception by contemporary audiences. Third, barefoot dance and the free form style of “duncanism” has been erased from the history of Russian dance and only recently reclaimed by a new generation of choreographers and dancers.

Figure 4.2.  M. Slepian, Imitation of Duncan’s Dance—Mr. Ikar from Theater and Art, No. 27, 1907, 473.

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In order to understand what the significance of this particular performer in prerevolutionary Russian culture, we must look at dance and its importance in context. Classical ballet with its rigid grace was considered the ultimate expression of artistic theatricality. After the liberalization of governmental control of theaters in the wake of the Revolution of 1905, theatrical experimentation blossomed, most particularly in dance. Vsevolod Meyerhold staged Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde in 1909, using expressive free form dance in the opera. In “Toward a Staging of Tristan and Isolde at the Mariinskii Theater” Meyerhold outlined his vision of the synthetic theater in Wagnerian terms: “Dance for our body is the same as music for our emotions. . . . The harmonies of dance are the basis for the modern symphony.”5 Breaking down the traditional barriers of classical “high” art, Meyerhold opened the door to new, unsettling theatrical presentations. The union of dance, opera, and symphony took on a bodily significance for Meyerhold: the arts were linked to re-creation of the body on stage. The first cabarets were founded in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1908, partly as a result of the growing recognition that theater was a growing influence in the culture, expanding beyond the traditional confines of the Imperial theaters and conservative repertoire of the provincial touring companies. The committee chairman, Prince N. V. Shakhovskoi impressed upon the committee the importance of their duties: Theater in this country is growing by leaps and bounds. While formerly only the largest provincial cities (besides the capitals) had permanent theaters, today there is hardly a provincial city without one. Theater has begun to be a necessity for society, and as this happened, its importance for and influence on the public has grown. It is attempting to penetrate the widest possible circles of society, to become available at a cost everyone can afford. . . . [T]he questions and tendencies stirring contemporary life that are reflected in stage productions can produce unusual social animation. . . .6

Prince Shakhovskoi also darkly predicted the future of theater as “pornographic farces” imported from Europe, and advocated censorship as a means of protecting “the public . . . from operettas, comic ditties, satirical songs, and the light productions that develop bad taste and corrupt manners.”7 As Aleksandr Kugel (Homo Novus), one of the earliest proponents of cabaret in Russia, noted in his article, “The Theater of Miniatures” “Cabaret,” already has a long history in Europe, especially in France, so much so that they can now be pronounced to be artistic endeavors, and have always, as far as I know, intermixed humor with the lyrical. It is essentially and precisely this mixture which is the root of the artistry of the cabaret. Something of this sort, obviously, was what the founders of the Strand, as the cabaret was named, had in mind when they gathered together the artists and writers who performed there. But this group strayed from this in the realization of their designs—

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instead of a lyrical presentation, they presented something terrifying. . . . Of course, from the horrific, it is a short trip not to comedy, but to the overblown sentimentality we find in melodrama. However, the cabaret which followed, the Crooked Mirror, was envisioned as a specifically comic venue, which interspersed music and high art with skits and divertissements. . . . In light of this, there are two alternatives available to cabaret—the first as a reflection of our lives and our sensibilities, a kind of Apollonian temple with dancing girls, and the second, a collection of theatrical miniatures. In the Russian environment, the Western European cabaretic costume cannot be cut to fit, our style is much more expansive and sensitive to the spirit, a spirituality which is so strong that the confines of the Western model is too constraining.8

Kugel, editor of Theater and Art and one of the founders of the cabaret, Crooked Mirror, is emphatic that Russian cabaret is separate from its Western roots. Unlike the French or German theaters, this incarnation is intrinsically theatrical with aspirations to high culture. In his view, the Russian theater of miniatures encompasses both the comic and serious; it is Russia’s cultural dilemma writ small—how to bring together the psychological, political, and artistic elements of the Russian soul and show them to the world. Here can also be detected the perennial themes of fear of inferiority to the West, Slavophilia, and the unique destiny of Russian culture. It is no wonder that the ambitious agenda of the impresarios of the cabaret would assimilate the achievements of Art Nouveau, Modernism, and the avant-garde in their design and content in an attempt to promote the new theater as ultimate expression of culture. But as with the above-mentioned art movements, cabaret was simultaneously forward looking but firmly rooted in the traditions and styles of the past—partly, I would contend, as a reaction to the success of Ballets Russes stylized nostalgia in Paris in 1909. Perhaps the most sensational (and for many, scandalous) appearance and the one that transformed the Russian conception of dance was Isadora Duncan and her barefoot dance. Isadora’s appearance in Russia (who debuted in 1904 at the Hall of Nobles with Anna Pavlova, Marius Petipa, Michel Fokine, and Sergei Diaghilev in attendance), prompted an avalanche of interest in modern dance in Russia; during the weeks of her tours every journal and newspaper breathlessly reported on her every movement and remark. In order to understand the young dancer’s obsession with barefoot dancing, a detour should be made here to discuss the significance of Isadora Duncan in the artistic culture of Russia at the time. Tamara Karsavina described the sensation of Duncan arrival in Russia in her memoir, Theater Street: Isadora had rapidly conquered the Petersburg theatrical world. There were of course, always the reactionary balletomanes, to whom the idea of a barefoot dancer seemed to deny the first principles of what they held to be sacred in art. . . . Certainly the stories of Isadora’s private life, and the fact that she wore Greek costume in private life played no small part in her success. . . . In her

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strictures on ballet, which she termed a “false and artificial art,” Duncan blindly attacked the essential element of all stage art—artificiality.9

Russia saw its share of unusual acts—the notorious Aleister Crowley toured Moscow an all-girl jazz band, the Ragged Ragtime Girls in 1913.10 There were female impersonators as well—perhaps Ikar had been inspired by John Lind, the Swedish female impersonator who toured Russia in 1900, and danced as Anna Pavlova, La Belle Otero, and Isadora Duncan during his long career.11 It seems, however, that Russian female impersonators were rare; an extensive survey of prerevolutionary Russian theatrical trade magazines and uncovered only one other impersonator: Aleksander Galinskii, who, like Ikar, was both a dancer and a singer, was the only one that was advertised as such; it is likely that Ikar and Galinskii were the rarified elite of their profession accepted by society for their artistry and originality.12

Figure 4.3.  Aleksandr Galinskii in Geisha Costume, Artist and Stage, Moscow, 3, 1912, 22.

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While it is likely that there were others who simply did not appear in printed accounts, it does not seem to be a widespread practice. Ikar’s gender, dance technique, and experimentation created a new conception of the body on stage. The theatrical critic and publisher Ivan Ignat’ev succinctly analyzed Duncan’s appeal and style: The great Isadora Duncan long ago opened a new door for us in “the Cathedral of Art.” The Door was named the Beauty of the Naked Body: the cult of the Renaissance of classicism. And now there are a thousand imitators springing up on all sides—Miss Maude Allen,13 Olga Desmond. . . .14 The “New Word” has changed, weaving in and out and combining in thousands of new ways. The bas relief style now defines our expressive dancing with poses taken from antiquity and dances emulating the Greeks. And yet the innovation is all the same and unchanging, “from an ancient sarcophagus,” “from a vase,” “arabesque.”15

A writer for Kugel’s journal Theater and Art exclaimed: “The enchanting dance of the bare leg—in its liveliness. . . . The bare leg has the mimicking ability to express just as the bare arm does.”16 The flowing movements and simplicity of the dance, along with the trappings of primitivism and classicism, caused many to rethink the basic precepts of dance in Russia. Isadora Duncan’s dance was more than merely a method of dance; she founded schools in England, Germany, and in Moscow. Often her performances were not on a stage, but took place in a meadow or in a summer amphitheater with the minimum of staging. Dance became the art of free expression. This new conception of dance as a form of expression was the creation of a new genre outside of the traditional form of ballet. The blatant sexuality of the dance revealed a new dimension of reality for the viewer, breaking out of the traditional roles of audience and performer. However, despite the predictable consternation of the Russian press, Isadora Duncan was wildly popular in Russia and her followers re-created the idea of expression using the body as language. Protest against the mixing of art in theater! Until now theater has been only a place for staging plays, give us authentic theater! —Pantomime drama!—they scream at me in one ear. —Ballet! Choreography! Barefoot dancing!—they hiss in the other. To hell with you, idiots,—neither one nor the other. Our theatrical art will be the loudest yell, the most resonant, in it there will not be the repulsive grimace of an ancient Greek maiden, risen from the grave and named Duncan.17

The open sexuality of barefoot dance was celebrated by the literary elite of Russian society. Elizabeth Souritz, noted scholar on the history of dance pointed out that:

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[the] first important article describing her dance had been published in May of that year in the newspaper Rus (Russia). Its author, Maximilian Voloshin, was no ordinary newspaper reviewer, but a well-known poet and artist who had seen Isadora dance in Paris at the Trocadero.18

While the intelligentsia admired the risqué presentation of a woman’s body as a work of art, the general population saw barefoot dance as thinly disguised pornography. Aleksandr Kugel and Zinaida Kholmskaia hoped to capitalize on the controversy by hiring a parodist to perform dance entr’acte at the cabaret. The intent was to undercut the intrinsic threat of the woman’s body in theatrical space by replacing her with a clumsy brute.19 In general, cabaret presented short form experimental material to an elite audience in an intimate space; however, often the humor came at the expense of the more avant-garde performers. Futurist poets, tango dancers, and abstract audience were often the targets of sketches and set pieces in these theaters, and the humor often upheld the decidedly middle-class tastes of the bourgeoisie. From a contemporary perspective, Isadora Duncan and her style seem to spring organically from the tumult of experimentation. In Russia at the time, this new dance based on idealized classicism and new theories of movement propounded by Jacques Dalcroze and Rudolf Laban was anything but a part of the accepted canon. There was vociferous criticism in the press and from the fastidious purists of the Bolshoi and Imperial Ballets. Ikar, who began to perform in the immediate aftermath of Duncan’s tour in St. Petersburg in 1907–1908, was swept up in the mania of barefoot dance which spread through the capital. Before joining the Crooked Mirror cabaret, Nikolai Barabanov (Ikar) was not a dancer nor had he been trained as one. He was, rather, a petty bureaucrat in the Ministry of Land Management and Agriculture. Duncan’s performance of Chopin’s Mazurkas had such a profound effect on him that he immediately went home and began to study her style—enlisting the help of his sister, a concert pianist—he imitated her dance obsessively, practicing for hours until he could imitate her movements with uncanny precision. At the time, this was simply a private source of amusement—a way of understanding a new and radical transformation of dance. Evreinov is characteristically cryptic about his motivations for doing this: “all [Ikar’s] thoughts were concentrated on exploring the essential features of the dance and expressivity of the famous American. Yet, how does one discover something new in that medium or at the very least to gain a deeper understanding of this new art without the visceral experience of performing the moves himself.”20 While one could see this as a reasonable explanation of how Nikolai Barabanov came to begin to dress in a toga in his living room endlessly practicing barefoot dancing to the accompaniment of his sister’s rendition of Chopin on the piano, the motivations for his obsession with Duncan and

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the barefoot dance, most notably his need to perform the female role in free dance goes unexplained. The impressive devotion to training himself to move as a dancer without previous training (if we are to believe the accounts left by Aleksander Kugel and Nikolai Evreinov, though one would suspect that mystification and promotion of a savant dancer would make this a much better story than a more quotidian explanation) especially in isolation and without a teacher seems almost impossible. Isadora Duncan created a new style not only in dance but in the theater. Her flowing, seemingly unplanned, dance in imitation of ancient rituals was a revelation to the theatrical world of Russia. The expressive movements and simplicity of the dance, along with the trappings of primitivism and classicism, caused many to rethink the basic precepts of dance in Russia. The blatant sexuality of the dance revealed a new dimension of reality for the viewer, breaking out of the traditional roles of audience and performer. In his memoir of his time in the Crooked Mirror cabaret, In the School of Wit, Evreinov gave a short description of how Ikar came to be part of the troupe. “Nikolai Fedorovich Ikar belonged to one of those Russian families of the intelligentsia, in which every single event of artistic importance had a profound effect on everyone in the family. . . . It was hardly, then, surprising that Duncan’s performances in St. Petersburg had a profound effect on Ikar’s entire family.”21 By the time of her return to St. Petersburg in late 1907 with the intention of founding a dance school, Ikar’s interest in Duncan was consuming; he attended her performances and lectures in 1907/1908 and paid close attention to her detailed discussion of her technique. Understandably, the Barabanov family kept this rather idiosyncratic amusement as a private matter through most of 1908. As fate would have it, Nikolai’s sister was in charge of organizing the Christmas festival for the Society of Esperantists and needed to find amateur variety acts for the evening. She convinced Nikolai to perform his imitation of Duncan as a parody under the stage name of Ikar. The newly minted performer ordered silk stockings, a woman’s wig, and a woolen tunic “a la Duncan.” In the tradition of the burlesque show and amateur theater where cross dressing was a comedic tradition, Ikar’s skit was not out of place or unseemly—what was unusual was the audience reception of his performance. It was clear from Ikar’s performance that this was no mere farce; he was able to function both as a dancer with a nuanced understanding of the form and as a comedian with a knowledge of the role of absurdity and timing. The audience was in awe of his mastery of this esoteric and avant-garde form. One member of the society was the poet and playwright, Vladimir Mazurkevich who worked for the Crooked Mirror cabaret who immediately recognized the potential of this act for the new variety theater which had so recently opened. The name of the theater was taken from the folk saying epigraph of

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Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor—“don’t blame the mirror if your mug is crooked” [На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива]. The next day Mazurkevich went to see the director of the theater, Aleksandr Kugel (who published in the journal, Theater and Art, under the pseudonym Homo Novus) with a report on the debut performance of this remarkable young man. Kugel saw the potential for such an act—having the elements which mark a successful entr’acte—a daring premise, a contemporary topicality, a thematic lightness, and a minimum expenditure on costumes and sets. Ikar auditioned for Zinaida Kholmskaia and Kugel and was offered a contract. It was clear from the outset that this was a serious subject for Ikar and that his parody was as much homage as imitation. His barefoot dance was done with attention to detail and authenticity; however, it was not played as a novelty—that is, simply a man in drag clumsily approximating the stereotypical movements of dance on stage. Ikar carefully choreographed his dance with comedic elements; his keen eye for absurdity was vital to the success of his dance—for instance—mixing a dancer’s jumps with a ballerina’s flourish, giving both an air of sentimentality and the right note of parody to undercut his completely serious rendition. He was able to use his decidedly unfeminine hands for effect when holding a rose or a vase, breaking through the illusion that he had worked so hard to create. According to contemporary sources, most notably Evereinov, it was Ikar’s innate ability and respect for his subject which set him apart from other parodic acts. I think that it is analogous to Charlie Chaplin’s tender portrayal of the little tramp which combined comedy with maudlin sentimentality. As a response to the novelty and popularity of barefoot dancing, the Crooked Mirror hired the dancer Ikar to parody Duncanism in drag. While it was clear from the beginning that Ikar was intended to be a brutal burlesque of the dainty steps of the woodland nymphs, something rather unexpected happened: he was good and his interpretations were, in their own way, as beautiful as that which he imitated. His subtle combination of femininity in style and masculinity in technique brought an expressive power to duncanism which was, perhaps, lacking. Russian audiences began to appreciate his dance as a unique form unto itself. In the context of the theater of parody, Ikar’s gender, dance technique, and experimentation created a new conception of the body on stage. During his tenure at the Crooked Mirror, he stayed fairly consistent in his act as a man dressed as a woman performing on stage. Even in the meticulously documented archive of Maria Iarotskaia which noted participants in every single season of the Crooked Mirror, I have found no mentions in archives or memoirs of him acting in the various numbers except in drag with one notable exception which I will discuss in a moment.22 However, it

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seems unlikely that such a cultured man would have had a singular fixation on one aspect of performance, and I assume with further investigation his other interests will become known. In 1908, he performed only as an imitator of Duncan, but in subsequent season his repertoire expanded—he performed as Maud Allen, Loie Fuller, Sara Bernhardt, and Tamara Karsavina, as well as devising standard roles—the chanson singer, the tightrope walker, and the prima ballerina. It is important to note that he was one of the most popular acts in the Crooked Mirror and was often written into plays to give him more stage time. The constant in his act was the interplay between his masculine and feminine personas creating a creative tension by breaking character at a crucial point to destroy the illusion of femininity. Bouncing between the illusion of the stage and the reality of his true self, Ikar was able to occupy the transgressive space which is the soul of comedy. It is little wonder that Kugel saw Ikar as a perfect fit for his new cabaret—his act was the embodiment of the crooked mirror of parody, bending perceptions and perspectives while giving a reflection of the latest artistic trends in the capital. The Crooked Mirror is perhaps best known for its production of Vampuka, The African Bride, a parody of Aida and the histrionic overproductions of the opera that were prevalent at the time—often elephants and other animals were paraded on the stage in lavish opulence. Vampuka, with music and libretto by Vladimir Erenberg was based on a short sketch by Mantsenilov (the nom de plume of Mikhail Volkonsky), a sensation so popular that it was performed each season to sold out audiences. Ikar was designated to play the role of the prima ballerina in an entr’acte pantomime. Ikar was given some freedom in the design of the dance. He came up with the idea to make a sly reference to the recent incident at the Mariinskii in which Tamara Karsavina had a costume malfunction during her performance—her tights were rather loose and during the pas de deux, they actually slipped down to her knees: Karsavina, it was reported, was a consummate professional and was able to continue with a minimum of embarrassment despite the incident. Ikar rigged his tights to bag and fall during his pantomime allowing him to struggle to maintain dignity. Karsavina would attend performances of the Crooked Mirror and was present during this episode on occasions. Evreinov remarked that “Ikar recognized her in the audience and as his tights slid down, looked willfully and purposefully at her directly in the eyes.” Karsavina’s reaction was not recorded, nor does she mention either episode in her memoir, Theater Street, but one would guess that she handled it with aplomb and good humor in front of her adoring public. One might also deduce from the tenor of her memoirs that she privately seethed at the affront. However, the effect of his performance was electric—he gave the work a physicality and dynamism which served as an antipode to the static scenes of operatic parody.

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The single exception to his performing as a female impersonator was perhaps his most serious and significant role. In 1912, Ikar also participated in the production of Evreinov’s production of Max Reinhardt’s Sumurun for the Crooked Mirror dancing the role of the Hunchback beggar. Together with Michel Fokine, he prepared the new star of the troupe, Evgeniia Khovanskaia for her role as Yannaia. It is interesting to note that he chose a role that took enormous physical ability as a hunchback who had to convey both deformity and enormous grace at the same time. In a sense this role was much the same as his others—a rejection of the self and the immersion in a different body. In 1915, Ikar left the Crooked Mirror in a dispute over salary. Kholmskaia and Kugel were notoriously cheap, economizing on every aspect of the cabaret by this point—relying on old repertoire to keep from having to pay for rehearsal time and new sets and costumes. Ikar asked for a modest 100 ruble raise. Kugel reportedly replied, “I would give it to you, but you know how cheap Zina is.” He then directly asked Kholmskaia and she said, “Of course, but Sasha is so cheap, he will never agree.” Ikar left shortly after the exchange.23 Ikar performed in a short film for the director Pavel Chardynin that he wrote the script for, Fateful Talent (the criminal bohemian) in 1916.24 His other endeavors after the Crooked Mirror have been lost to history. The war and revolution have erased any trace of his activities. Ikar, however, had a second act in his life and popped up in Rome in the 1920s. In November 1921, he signed with Arkadii Boitler, filmmaker and proprietor of the Taverna Russa in Rome, to do a series of performances. These robotic dances were seen as some of the seminal theatrical experiments of the movement and were, apparently, also influenced by an early science fiction movie, L’Uomo Meccanico, Andre Deed, 1921. It is interesting to note that Ikar again plays a role that entails a transformation of his body as a dancer. Like many of the talented artists and actors of the prerevolutionary era, Ikar was erased from history in the communist zeal to rid the past of the uncomfortable inconsistencies in a narrative that was not so much a march toward the future, but a wildly diverse group of people working in the tumult of creative unrest. Like Charlie Chaplin, Ikar was able to inhabit the liminal space reserved for comedians, able to transgress and express ideas that “serious” artists could never broach. He gained the respect and admiration of Russian society for both his nuanced understanding of dance and for his ability to perform comedy in an art form that rarely allows anything but serious devotion to craft. NOTES 1.  Katia Pizzi, “Of Men and Machines: Pannaggi, Paladini, and the ‘Manifesto of Mechanical Art,’” The Italianist 28, no. 2 (2008), 221.

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2. Antonella d’Amelia “Russko-ital’ianskii khudozhnik na ital’ianskoi stsene: Vinicio Paladini” in “Bespokoinye Muzy:” K istorii russko-ital’ianskikh otnoshenii XVII-XX vv, in ed. Antonella d’Amelia (Salerno, Italy: Europa Orientalis, Dipartmento di Studi Umanistici, Università di Salerno, 2011), 233. 3.  Franca Angelini, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento (Rome‑Bari: Laterza, 1996), 134. The Italian reads: “Collaborava all’ideazione del balletto anche Vinicio Paladini, che aveva contrapposto al costume meccanico di Pannaggi un costume da marionetta umanizzata: i due danzatoriimprovvisavano sorprese spaziali spostandosi in tutte le direzioni, accompagnati da una polifonia ritmica di motori ottenuta orchestrando due motociclette e da luci di proiettori bianchi e colorati.” 4.  It is possible that this is Vasili Ivanov who studied at the Studio Iurieva-Svoboda at the time, but no source verifies this. 5.  Vsevolod Meyerhold “K postanovke Tristana i Izoldy na Mariinskom teatre” in Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), 148. 6.  Gary Thurston, The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 174–175. 7.  Gary Thurston, The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919, 175. 8.  Aleksander Kugel, “Teatr miniatiur,” Teatr i iskusstvo, 48 (1908), 854–855. 9.  Tamara Karsavina, Theatre Street: The Reminiscences of Tamara Karsavina (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1931), 208–209. 10.  Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012), 262. 11.  Roger Baker and Peter Burton, Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1994), 93. 12.  Aleksandr Galinsky wrote a series of articles for Artist i stsena in 1912 about his experiences in Japan as a female dance impersonator. Serialized in Artist i stsena, Moscow, 3 (1912), 22–24, 4–5 (1912), 25–26. 13.  Maud Allan (Beulah Maude Durrant) (1873–1956) was born in Canada, but trained in Berlin, where in 1895 she enrolled in the Hochschule für Musik. In 1906 her production “Vision of Salomé” debuted in Vienna. 14. Olga Desmond (Sellin) (1891–1964) was known as the “heroine of living pictures” and began her career in Berlin. She was one of the first to perform nude on the stage in St. Petersburg. Olga Desmond’s piquant Evenings of Beauty became a sensation and led to her arrest. 15.  Ivan Ignat’ev [Kazanskii], Razvorochennye cherepa (Saint Petersburg: Peterburgskii glashatai, 1913), 1. 16.  Z. B. “Noveishiia techeniia v tantsakh” Teatr i iskusstvo 41 (Oct. 11, 1909), 703. 17.  Vadim Shershenevich, Zelenaia ulitsa: stat’i i zametki ob iskusstve (Moscow: Pleiady, 1916), 57. 18.  Elizabeth Souritz, “Isadora Duncan’s Influence on Dance in Russia.” Dance Chronicle 18, no. 2 (1995), 282. 19. Nikolai Evreinov, V shkole ostroumiia: vospominaniia o teatre “Krivoe zerkalo” (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1998), 69–70. 20.  Nikolai Evreinov, V shkole ostroumiia, 74.

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21.  Nikolai Evreinov, V shkole ostroumiia, 67. 22. Maria Kasparovna Iarotskaia, Manuscript of “Letopis’ teatra “Krivoe zerkalo”—podborka materialov o teatre (1959). Fond 2353, op. 1 1884–1960 gg. Antimonov, Sergei, Ivanovich (1880–1954) RGALI, Moscow. 23.  A. A. Lopatin, “Ikar – derzkii polet v parodiinyi tanets,” in Strannitsy istorii baleta: novye issledovanii i materialy ed. N. L. Dunaeva (Saint Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2009), 210. 24.  A. A. Lopatin, “Ikar – derzkii polet v parodiinyi tanets,” 213–214.

BIBLIOGRAPHY d’Amelia, Antonella “Russko-ital’ianskii khudozhnik na ital’ianskoi stsene: Vinicio Paladini,” in “Bespokoinye Muzy:” K istorii russko-ital’ianskikh otnoshenii XVIIXX vv. Edited by Antonella d’Amelia. Salerno, Italy: Europa Orientalis, Dipartmento di Studi Umanistici, Università di Salerno, 2011. Angelini, Franca. Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento. Rome Bari: Laterza, 2004. Baker, Roger, and Peter Burton. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1994. Evreinov, Nikolai. V shkole ostroumiia: vospominaniia o teatre “Krivoe zerkalo.” Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1998. Galinsky, Aleksandr. “Transformator i pervyi damskii imitator nastoiashchikh iaponskikh Geish,” Artist i stsena, Moscow, 3 (1912): 22–24, 4–5 (1912): 25–26. Iarotskaia, Maria Kasparovna. Manuscript of “Letopis’ teatra “Krivoe zerkalo”— podborka materialov o teatre (1959). Fond 2353, op. 1 1884–1960 gg. Antimonov, Sergei, Ivanovich (1880–1954) RGALI, Moscow. Ignat’ev, [Kazanskii] Ivan. Razvorochennye cherepa. Saint Petersburg: Peterburgskii glashatai, 1913. Karsavina, Tamara. Theatre Street: The Reminiscences of Tamara Karsavina. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1931. Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012. Kugel, Aleksander. “Teatr miniatiur,” Teatr i iskusstvo, 48 (1908), 854–855. Lopatin, Aleksandr. “Ikar – derzkii polet v parodiinyi tanets.” Strannitsy istorii baleta: novye issledovanii i materialy Ed. N. L. Dunaeva. Saint Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2009. Pizzi, Katia. “Of Men and Machines: Pannaggi, Paladini, and the ‘Manifesto of Mechanical Art.’” The Italianist 28, no. 2 (2008): 217–226. Shershenevich, Vadim. Zelenaia ulitsa: stat’i i zametki ob iskusstve. Moscow: Pleiady, 1916. Souritz, Elizabeth. “Isadora Duncan’s Influence on Dance in Russia.” Dance Chronicle 18, no. 2 (1995): 281–291. Thurston, Gary. The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Z. B. “Noveishiia techeniia v tantsakh.” Teatr i iskusstvo 41 (1909): 703.

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Chapter Five

Role of the Newspaper Art of the Commune in the Establishment of Proletarian Art Natalia Murray

“The revolution is most wonderful for its lack of logic,”—wrote the art critic Nikolai Punin in his diary in November 1919.1 In this challenging year in the history of Russia, the art critic still believed that art (and especially left art) was to play a crucial role in the definition and advancement of the new Bolshevik society, despite the lack of public understanding and diminishing support from the government. This thorny subject, the definition of the new proletarian art (at the heart of Bogdanov’s work, and that of Lunarcharsky and Narkompros) and subsequently its organization, was taken up by Punin in the first months after the October Revolution and taken to yet another level at the end of 1918.2 From his position as the head of the Petrograd branch of IZO (following Shterenberg’s move to Moscow), Punin set about cajoling the new Bolshevik government to support avant-garde artists in Petrograd as well as in Moscow. Punin was so successful that the avant-garde could not only survive, but promote their radical views in the newly emerged media, and even publish books at a time of catastrophic paper shortage. In December 1918, a new weekly newspaper was launched, mainly expressing the views of the left artists, and edited by Punin. Called Art of the Commune [Iskusstvo Kommuny], it probably drew its name from the avantgarde society, Commune des Arts, which arose during the French Revolution. Financed by IZO, the new weekly journal aimed to reduce the gap between the Futurists and the average Soviet citizen, but soon it was declared to be “a haven for the avant-garde rather than a service to the revolution.”3 The publication ran from December 7, 1918 to April 13, 1919. In this brief period, only nineteen issues of this brave newspaper appeared, but despite its short life, Art of the Commune survives as a valuable document 73

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in the history of Russian futurism. The Soviet writer Kornei Zelinsky remarked about this Futurist medium after it closed down: “Its format was small, its contents astonishing.”4 The first issue on December 5, 1918 contained articles by the writer Brik, editor and critic Punin and painter Malevich, together with poet Mayakovsky’s poem “Orders for the Army of Art” [Prikaz po Armii Iskusstv]. At a meeting of the Committee for Visual Arts on December 5, 1918, Punin had said that the first issue of this journal had been prepared within a week, and ten thousand copies would already have been printed. He remarked that it had to be published “as a matter of urgency.”5 So, on December 7, 1918, the first issue of the Art of the Commune appeared. It was the best medium for writers, artists, and art critics to express their views and observations on new art and on all the processes in it, as well as to announce all the exhibitions of new artists. Being part of the IZO Narkompros, Art of the Commune mainly focused on visual arts, becoming more and more a propagator of primarily Futurist aesthetics, but due to the involvement of Mayakovsky, the newspaper also had a section for literature (though dominated by the Futurists as well). So, when Mayakovsky proclaimed in one of the issues of the journal that “the streets

Figure 5.1.  The front page of the first issue of the newspaper Art of the Commune © N. Murray collection.

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are our brushes, the squares our palettes,” by “our” he meant nobody else but Futurists. Chagall, Brik, Kushner, Malevich, Altman, and Puni would publish their articles alongside the official statements from Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, Head of IZO Shterenberg and the agenda for the meetings of IZO. At the time, Iskusstvo Kommuny was a weekly reporting witness to the art of postrevolutionary Russia. Its first issue proclaimed: “Our paper is for everyone interested in the creation of the coming (future) art.” In this issue Punin published his article “To the Outcome of the October Celebrations” [K itogam oktiabr’skikh torzhestv] focusing on the criticism of the celebrations of the first anniversary of October Revolution. He declared: “In our times there is nothing that is not important—even the smallest movement and the least significant word has historical significance. Now it is unacceptable to do anything just half-way.”6 Punin wrote that instead of decorating old buildings, the new proletarian artists had to build new ones; instead of producing mediocre old-fashioned posters, they had to make avant-garde placards.7 In his next article “Attempts of Restoration” [Popytki Restavratsii] published in the same issue of the Art of the Commune, Punin proclaimed: Revolution does not just break old forms of public and social structure—but it also destroys outmoded culture, old outlook, old ideology. Since art is the expression of this culture and spiritual values—there is revolution and reaction in it as well.8

In words later echoed by the German Bauhaus, Punin stated that creative work should be functional rather than decorative, producing objects for living and working, rather than art for the sake of pure enjoyment. Punin asserted that the goal of “autonomous proletarian art . . . is not a matter of decoration but of the creation of new artistic objects.” In particular, he felt that Tatlin, whom he admired more than any other Russian artist, and his use of materials provided “the only creative force free enough to lead art out of the trenches of its old positions.”9 Tatlin was striving to “combine purely artistic forms with utilitarian goals”10 and many ideas that were later developed by the Constructivists were first articulated within the pages of Art of the Commune.11 As Viktor Pertsov observed in 1925, “the theory of production art was developed in 1918–19 and formulated in the pages of the newspaper Art of the Commune.”12 In his article “A Drain for Art” [Drenazh Iskysstv] Brik proclaimed: “Do not disturb, but create . . . art is like any other means of production . . . not ideas, but a real object is the aim of all true creativity.”13 He declared that the existing division between art and production was a relic from the past and that proletarian art should combine industrial production with art.

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The theory of production art found further development in a small collection of essays entitled Art in Production, written in 1920 and published by the Art and Production section of Narkompros in 1921.14 Here Shterenberg stressed the important role of art in improvement of the quality of factorymade objects. However already in May 1922, a member of Moscow Proletkult, Pertsov, published an article, in which he rejected the link between art and production and stressed that art should not be abolished or suppressed by industrial production.15 Back in 1918, the first issue of Art of the Commune also contained a full report of discussions on the role of art in the new proletarian society and the nature of the new art. These discussions were held at the Palace of Arts (the renamed Winter Palace). It was the first account of these debates ever published in Russia. By then four meetings had taken place: the first three, at the former Academy of Arts, were aimed mainly at students; but the fourth meeting on November 24, 1918 held at the Armorial Hall of the former Winter Palace was sought to attract “the wide working masses.” Its theme was “Temple or Factory” [Khram ili Zavod]. The debate was opened by the editor of the Art of the Commune himself, Punin, who remarked in his speech: Bourgeois art is for those who can observe it calmly and passively. [. . .] When the bourgeoisie started treating art as a temple, the artistic activity became . . . a sacred act. [. . .] The Proletariat . . . does not share such a point of view on art. It is hungry, and it cannot just calmly contemplate art.16

Punin admitted that proletarian art did not exist yet, but would be soon created by the proletariat, who create material things every day, and know the very essence of their creations. He finished his speech by saying that: “Art for the proletariat is not a temple, where everyone contemplates lazily, but labour, the factory, which produces artistic works for everyone.”17 In the newspaper, Punin’s passionate speech was followed by Brik’s article, in which he urged the proletariat to take over posts currently occupied by members of the bourgeoisie in order to change the whole life around them. He suggested that workers should take over the apartments and houses of the bourgeoisie and fill them up with the spirit of the Revolution. The final word in this discussion was given to Mayakovsky, who proclaimed that “art should concentrate not in dead temple-museums, but everywhere—on the streets, trams, factories, workshops and workers’ flats.”18 It is unclear from the report of this meeting published in the Art of the Commune whether members of the general public were given a chance to express their opinion. But the prime importance of this subject was evident

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judging by the numerous articles on proletarian art in all the subsequent issues of the newspaper. The second issue discussed ten days later on the pages of the Art of the Commune was the conflict between the leaders of Petrosovet (The Petrograd Soviet), Zinoviev and Ionov and IZO Narkompros. For the second issue of the newspaper, published on December 15, 1918, Brik wrote an article on the subject “artist-proletariat,” once again asserting that the old art was dead, and proclaiming: “Art of the future—is proletarian art. Art will be proletarian or it won’t exist at all.”19 Following this bold statement, Brik explained that such organizations as Proletkult wrongly believed that the new art should be constructed by members of the proletariat itself, assuming that everything that is produced by workers automatically becomes proletarian art, since talent is universal and is given to everyone. He stated that: Proletarian art—is the art created by proletarian artists. The proletarian artist— is the person, who combines both creative gift and proletarian consciousness. [. . .] His talent belongs to the collective. He creates in order to fulfil his public duty. He does not care about his own benefit, he does not try to ingratiate himself with the crowd; instead he fights its indolence and leads it along the path of continuously moving forward art. He always creates new art, fulfilling his social purpose.20

For Bogdanov, the founder of Proletkult, proletarian creation had to arise from the labor process and express the workers’ collective ethos; it had to serve as a means to organize and articulate the proletariat’s unique vision of the world. But these principles offered few guidelines for either form or content. On the front page of the second issue of Art of the Commune, Mayakovsky published his poem “Too Early to Rejoice” [Radovat’sia Rano], in which the poet criticized people for holding onto old values in the name of art. This poem was followed by Lunacharsky’s comments, which aimed at mellowing Mayakovsky’s Futurist rejection of Pushkin’s poetry, Raphael’s paintings and Rastrelli’s architecture. But the Futurists refused to compromise, and Punin became their loyal ambassador. In the second issue of Art of the Commune, Punin published an article “Bomb-Throwing and Organisation” [Bombometanie i Organizatsiia], in which he called the Futurists “heralds of the new culture and professional innovators” and stated that “for the healthy and well thought-out Futurist outlook, demolition of the old times is just a method of fighting for existence,” although in the same article he stressed that ‘artistic terror’ should not be the only method of fighting for new art. Perhaps in contradiction of his Futurist

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stance, Punin said that new art should organize old values and forms, rather than deny them completely.21 He finished his article by concluding that: To insist on artistic terrorism as the only means of struggle now—means to confirm the stagnant deadliness of your consciousness, and thus leave the path of truly creative youth. New times give new life, new consciousness and new methods. Bomb throwing is old and mouldy, we do not need it: we are looking for more organised methods.22

This article was probably Punin’s reply to the earlier allegations by Rodchenko published in the Anarchy [Anarkhiia] newspaper23 in April 1918: Enough! The art patrons oppressed us, they forced us to fulfil 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. [. . .] I address you, oppressed proletarians of the brush: come to the battle from your undergrounds and lofts! Let us unite the “Free association of oppressed artists-painters”!24

Apart from Rodchenko, there were also extremists in Proletkult who strove to reject the accumulated knowledge of prerevolutionary society. “In the name of our tomorrow we will burn the Raphaels, destroy the museums, and trample on the flowers of art,” wrote Vladimir Kirillov in We, the most famous poem associated with Proletkult. However, this mood of destruction did not capture the movement’s agenda as a whole. Bogdanov urged the workers to study their cultural heritage in order to discover what was important to them and what was not. The programs he helped to structure in Capri, Bologna, and later in Proletkult had substantial historical components designed to introduce students to cultural tradition and criticism.25 The same issue of Art of the Commune also contained an article by the party bureaucrat, Alexander Mushtakov, who tried to inspire the workers to participate in disputes about the new art and to support left artists: “The proletariat needs art born out of the noise of factories, industrial plants, streets; which in its spirit should be the thunderous art of struggle. Such art already exists. It is called Futurism.”26 According to Mushtakov, only the working class could put futurism into life, and prove to “the rotten intelligentsia” that it has every right to exist. In the third issue on December 22, 1918, Punin published his article “Left-Right” [Levye-Pravye], in which he supported the dictatorship by the

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creative minority, the artists-Bolsheviks, over the old-fashioned artists. He proclaimed: “Only those artists whose creative forces equal the strength of the working class can remain with the proletariat. . . . The ones who create— live, others can die.”27 In this article, Punin opposed the artificial division into left and right art: For us it was clear, and always will be clear, that art cannot be divided into left and right, rather that there are artists in art—masters, creators of new values, inventors of new methods and new ways, and there are craftsmen, imitators, expropriators, exploiters and so on and so forth—the army of slackers, who use art only as their means of existence. Since the October Revolution gave us the opportunity to select true creators out of the artistic masses, we do not any longer need this old-fashioned terminology. Furthermore, the very division into left and right gives one an impression of the existence of some sort of Constituent Assembly. No, we do not want it and we would not allow it to come into being.28

In another article in the same issue of the newspaper, “Our Aims and the Professional Unions of Artists” [Nashi Zadachi i Professional’nye Souzy Khudozhnikov], Punin described the new artist as a maker of useful objects, and concluded that the new communist state should provide such artists with everything they need. However, the conflict between the left wing of IZO and the Petrograd Bolshevik Party had reached its peak, and in the same third issue of the Art of the Commune, Brik had to admit that both workers and their proletarian leaders were “aesthetically undeveloped” and unable to relate to Left art.29 In the fourth issue, dated December 29, 1918, Brik sounded negative, but Mayakovsky went much further in his poem, which proclaimed that the Futurists were ready to set fire to all old art and use it for street illumination.30 In the same issue of the newspaper, Punin denied that futurism was trying to take over power in Russia. He declared in his article “Futurism—the State Art” [“Futurism—Gosudarstvennoe Iskusstvo”] that futurism does not depend upon the state: “Futurism has not become the state art, but the hour of the triumph of the new ideas has come.”31 Punin’s claims that futurism was “the only right way” for the development of the new art was soon criticized in the Proletkult newspaper Future [Griadushchee], which castigated the Futurists as members of the intelligentsia, not the working class, concluding that even on their own terms they could not possibly build the art of the new Russia: “We should not allow Futurists to dress up the body of the working culture into the Futurists’ cloth.”32 Initially supportive of Art of the Commune, Lunacharsky criticized the paper for speaking simultaneously in the name of a particular school (Futurism)

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and in the name of the state, as well as the paper’s destructive tendencies in relation to the past.33 However, the right-hand of Lunacharsky and a member of IZO Narkompros, Punin, remained convinced that they were fighting for a new culture that would ultimately be beyond social class. Addressing a meeting dedicated to new and old art, reported in the fifth issue of Art of the Commune, Punin explained that “young artists are fighting against old art not because it is bad or cannot be used as historic material, but because it is still trying to impose its influence on new art.” He appealed to all those who would like to create a new proletarian culture “to renounce the favoured attitude to the monuments of the past and give young artists the chance to create, together with the proletariat, the great artistic culture of the future.” He wrote: “We want new life and new culture. . . . We are the polar opposite of the whole old world. We came in order not to renew it, but to destroy it, in order to create our new world.”34 Disputes about the new art continued at the Palace of Arts, and Art of the Commune covered them all. On December 22 and 29, 1918, two more meetings debated the question “Proletariat and Art” at the Palace of Arts, and a full report of these meetings appeared in the fourth (December 29, 1918) and fifth (January 5, 1919) issues of Art of the Commune. At the time of these debates and articles, artists were still considered members of the bourgeoisie, which significantly reduced their bread ration and could be a matter of life and death. On November 21, 1918, Sovnarkom had forbidden all private food trade, and put into operation a rationed distribution of food in accordance with a person’s class. The first category consisted of workers and officials, who were allowed half a pound of bread per day; the second category—public servants—a quarter pound of bread; the third—bourgeoisie—one-eighth of a pound of bread; and the last, fourth category of dependents—only half of this per day.35 Artists were selling their works, were considered to be small businessmen, and so qualified as the third category of bourgeoisie. In the fourth issue of Art of the Commune, Brik published an article called “Artists of the 3rd Category” [Khudozhniki Tret’ei Kategorii], in which he called on artists to start working for the state, become members of the proletariat, and so more than double the amount of bread they would be getting. By January 1919, conflict was developing between the left artists under the banner of futurism and the Bolshevik authorities. In issue six of the newspaper, Punin published “Revolutionary Wisdom” [Revolutsionnaia Mudrost], an article full of despair: . . . we know that everything that is said at these meetings, conferences, in these books, articles and words—is so incompetent, so creatively weak. Enough

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doubts and politicising! As long as the revolution is not dead, we won’t be dead as well—we, its children. And if it dies, we may as well die with it!36

Feeling that the earth was rapidly disappearing from under their feet, Punin and Brik continued to promote futurism despite the growing opposition from the government. In the sixteenth issue of the Art of the Commune, dated March 23, 1919, Punin proclaimed: “To destroy means to create, since we overcome our past by destroying it.”37 But after losing one of its most influential supporters, Lunacharsky, in spring 1919, Art of the Commune, the voice of Russian Futurism, was suddenly discontinued in April 1919. In spite of its great popularity and the fact that “one had to hunt for every issue” of it, attacks from the right in government and from Proletkult encouraged the closure of this outspoken newspaper after nineteen issues. Fear that Art of the Commune “proclaims slogans of modern art” and “Futurism wants to conquer the country”38 silenced this loud voice of the Russian avant-garde. Such criticism, as in the article “At Last,” written by O. Oleniev and published in issue no. 1 of the weekly Factory Whistle [Gudki] in January 1919, marked the dawn of the slow strangulation of left art in Socialist Russia. In this self-righteous newspaper, Oleniev proclaimed: We are convinced that the Great Revolution, while destroying the foundations of the bourgeois system, would have eliminated futurism, which is an act of the ultimate decomposition of that system, but for the fact that the People’s Commissar for Education [A. Lunacharsky] gathered the rotten straws of Futurist imposition in the first days of the October Revolution and tried to weave from them a life belt of revolutionary art. [. . .] The Futurists, with the practical sense characteristic of them, used that false step of the Commissar to their advantage and flocked to occupy all responsible positions in the art departments. . . . Directing the section for the Visual Arts as Punin and Tatlin did, defining the line of literary tastes as Mayakovsky, Ivniev, and Mariengof [Marienhof], heading the literary publishing department for the military like the “excellent” Vassili Kamensky, swelling their ranks with obviously talentless people and less obvious cheats, Messrs Futurists exploit the organs of Soviet authority to recommend their rotten bourgeois art as proletarian art. There is no room here for ideological discussion. The Futurists, who are mechanically attached to the proletarian revolution, must just as mechanically be driven away from the warm places they now occupy. . . .39

But Punin would not give up. The last issue of the Art of the Commune, published on 13 April 1919 to coincide with the opening of the First State Free Exhibition of Works of Art, organized (not surprisingly) by the commissar of the Hermitage Museum himself, Punin, in the beautiful rooms of the Palace

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of Arts. Punin’s gigantic exhibition included 1,826 works of art from 359 contributors, and it became Punin’s next attempt (after Art of the Commune) in his efforts to educate workers in art. Less than six months later, however, the former Winter Palace was occupied by the exponents of another new entity, the Museum of the Revolution. NOTES 1.  The Diaries of Nikolai Punin: 1904–1953, ed. by Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, trans. by Jennifer Greene Kupala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), diary entry of November 14, 1919, p. 61. 2.  This chapter was originally published in Natalia Murray, Art for the Workers: Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd, 1917–1920 (Leiden-Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018). This chapter has been revised and specifically prepared for this volume. 3. Williams: Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-garde, 1905– 1925, p. 139. 4. Quoted in W. Woroszylski: The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. from Polish by Boleslaw Taborski (London: Viktor Gollancz Ltd., 1972), p. 246. 5.  Ibid., p. 245. 6.  N. Punin, “K itogam oktiabr’skikh torzhestv,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 2. 7.  See N. Punin, “Vstrecha ob iskusstve,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 18, p. 4. 8. N. Punin, “Popytki Restavratsii,” Iskusstvo Kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 3. Quotation in Russian reads: “Революция не ломает только формы общественного и социального строя—но разрушает также отжившую культуру, старый дух, старую идеологию. Поскольку искусство является выразителем этой культуры и того духа—для него также существует и революция, и реакция.” 9.  See H. Gassner, “The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization,” The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 1992), pp. 305–306. 10.  Quoted in Christina Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914–1937 (London: The Pindar Press, 2005), p. 304. 11.  Ibid., p. 302. 12.  Viktor Pertsov: For the New Art [Za novoe iskusstvo] (Moscow, Vserossiiskii proletkul’t, 1925), quoted in Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art, p. 302. 13. Osip Brik: “Drenazh Iskusstv” in Iskusstvo Kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 1, quoted in Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art, p. 302. 14.  See Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914–1937, p. 303. 15. Viktor Pertsov: “At the Junction of Art and Production,” quoted in Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower, p. 128.

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16. “Miting ob iskusstve”: Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, pp. 3–4. Quotation in Russian reads: “Буржуазное искусство рассчитано для тех, кто может его спокойно и пассивно созерцать. [. . .] Буржуазия стала считать искусство храмом, художественное творчество стало . . . священнодействоем. [. . .] Пролетариат . . . не может иметь такой точки зрения на искусство. Голодному, ему не было дано спокойно созерцать произведения искусства.” 17.  Ibid. Quotation in Russian reads: “Искусство для пролетариата не храм, где лениво только созерцают, а труд, завод, который выпускает всем художественные предметы.” 18.  Ibid. Quotation in Russian reads: “Искусство должно быть сосредоточено не в мёртвых храмах-музеях, а повсюду—на улицах, в трамваях, на фабриках, в мастерских и в рабочих квартирах.” 19.  O. Brik, “Khudozhnik-Proletarii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2, December 15, 1918, p. 2. Quotation in Russian reads: “Искусство будущего—пролетарское искусство. Искусство будет пролетарским, или его не будет вовсе.” 20.  Ibid. Quotation in Russian reads: “Пролетарское искусство—это искусство художников-пролетариев. Художник-пролетарий—это человек, в котором сочетается воедино: творческий дар и пролетарское сознание. [. . .] Его талант принадлежит коллективу. Он творит, чтобы выполнить общественно важное дело. Он не знает личной выгоды, не заискивает перед толпой, а борется с её косностью и ведёт её за собой путями непрерывно движущегося вперёд искусства. Он всегда творит новое, ибо в этом его общественное назначение.” 21. N. Punin, “Bombometanie i organizatsiia” in Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2, December 15, 1918. Quotation in Russian reads: “вестники новой культуры и профессиональные новаторы”; “. . . для здорового и продуманного футуристического мировоззрения разрушение старины только метод борьбы за свое существование.” 22.  Ibid. Quotation in Russian reads: “Настаивать теперь как на единственном средстве борьбы на художественном терроре–значит обнаружить косную мертвенность своего сознания, и таким образом покинуть путь истинно творческой молодости. Новые времена дают новую жизнь, новое сознание и новые методы. Бомбометание устарело и покрылось плесенью, нам оно не нужно: мы ищем методов организующих.” 23.  The daily newspaper of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups published from September 1917 until July 1918 by the brothers Aba and Zeev Gordin. Its major contributors were Malevich and Rodchenko (who also used the pen names Anti and Alexander). Rodchenko published about twenty articles in Anarchy; Malevich contributed to more than twenty issues and supported the paper financially. 24. Alexander Rodchenko, “Khudozhnikam-Proletariiam,” trans. fr. Russian by Nina Gurianova in The Aethetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 223–224. 25.  See Mally, Culture of the Future, p. 131. 26.  A. Mushtakov, “‘Oktiabr’ v ‘Iskusstve,’” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2, December 15, 1918, pp. 1–2. Quotation in Russian reads: “Пролетариату нужно искусство,

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которое родилось из шума фабрик, заводов, улиц, которое по своему духу должно быть громовым искусством борьбы. Оно есть. Это футуризм.” 27.  N. Punin, “Levye-Pravye,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 3, December 22, 1918, p. 1. 28. Ibid. 29.  See O. Brik, “Vy pravy, tovarishch Mushtakov!,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 3, December 22, 1918, p. 2. 30.  See V. Mayakovsky, “Po tu storonu,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 3. 31.  N. Punin, “Futurizm—Gosudarstvennoe Iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 2. 32. P. Bessal’ko, “Futurizm i Proletarskaia Kul’tura,” Griadushchee, no. 10, 1918, pp. 10–12. Quotation in Russian reads: “Ни в коем случае нельзя позволить футуристам тело рабочей культуры одеть в футуристическую одежду.” 33.  See A. Lunacharsky, “Lozhka protivoiadiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 2. 34.  N. Punin, “Staroe i Novoe Iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 5, January 5, 1919, p. 2. 35. See “O poriadke vydachi khleba i produktov po khlebnym kategoriinym kartochkam,” Petrogradskaia pravda, no. 230, October 20, 1918, p. 3, quoted in O. Dedinkin, p. 29. 36.  N. Punin, “Revolutsionnaia Mudrost,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 6, January 12, 1919, p. 2. 37.  N. Punin, Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 16, March 23, 1919, p. 1. Quotation in Russian reads: “Разрушать это и значит создавать, ибо, разрушая, мы преодолеваем свое прошлое.” 38.  Viktor Shklovsky, quoted in W. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. from Polish by Boleslaw Taborski (London, Viktor Gollancz Ltd., 1972), p. 247. 39.  Ibid., p. 259.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bessal’ko, P. “Futurizm i Proletarskaia Kul’tura,” Griadushchee, no. 10, 1918, pp. 10–12. Brik, Osip. “Khudozhnik-Proletarii,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2, December 15, 1918, p. 2. Brik, Osip. “Vy pravy, tovarishch Mushtakov!,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 3, December 22, 1918, p. 2. Gassner, H. “The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization,” The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932. New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 1992, pp. 305–306. Lodder, Christina. Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914–1937. London: The Pindar Press, 2005. Mayakovsky, V. “Po tu storonu,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 3. “Miting ob iskusstve,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, pp. 3–4.

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Monas, Sidney and Greene Krupala, Jennifer, eds. The Diaries of Nikolai Punin: 1904–1953. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999 Murray, Natalia. Art for the workers. Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd. 1917–1920. Leiden-Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018 Lunacharsky, Anatoly. “Lozhka protivoiadiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 2. Punin, Nikolai. “K itogam oktiabr’skikh torzhestv,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 2. Punin, Nikolai. “Popytki Restavratsii,” Iskusstvo Kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 3. Punin, Nikolai. “Vstrecha ob iskusstve,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1, December 7, 1918, p. 4. Punin, Nikolai. “Bombometanie i organizatsiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 2, December 15, 1918. Punin, Nikolai. “Levye-Pravye,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 3, December 22, 1918, p. 1. Punin, Nikolai. “Futurizm—Gosudarstvennoe Iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo kommuny , no. 4, December 29, 1918, p. 2. Punin, Nikolai. “Staroe i Novoe Iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 5, January 5, 1919, p. 2. Punin, Nikolai. “Revolutsionnaia Mudrost,” Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 6, January 12, 1919, p. 2. Rodchenko, Alexander. “Khudozhnikam-Proletariiam,” trans. fr. Russian by Nina Gurianova in The Aethetics of Anarchy. Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, pp. 223–224. Woroszylski, W. The Life of Mayakovsky, trans. from Polish by Boleslaw Taborski. London, Viktor Gollancz Ltd., 1972.

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Chapter Six

Malevich’s “Ule Elye Lel” A Suprematist’s Avant-garde Poetic Experimentations Margarita Marinova After years of relative obscurity Malevich’s oeuvre in its totality finally is receiving the appreciation it rightfully deserves. His paintings have found their way into the best art museums around the world. His groundbreaking artistic vision and philosophical explorations of the meaning of existence are appreciated and studied by scholars at home and abroad. Malevich’s creative writing has been less fortunate. Although somewhat late, his poetic experimentations were finally collected and published as a book in Russia in 2000.1 While their startling originality has been acknowledged by a handful of Russian and Western academics, there are still no comprehensive academic studies of Malevich’s poetic output, and those works remain largely unknown to readers outside of Russia. The problem is mostly linguistic: to date, the majority of the poems have not been translated into other languages. But even those who can read the original Russian are often baffled and put off by the semantic, syntactic, and prosodic experimentations Malevich undertakes in his creative writing. The author himself seems to have anticipated such difficulties in the reception of his work and expressed deep anxiety about the success of his poetic endeavors to friends on several occasions. For example, in a letter to Gershenzon, the well-known scholar of literature and Russian history, from November 18, 1919, he shares that he always “strove to be clear and talked only about the heart of the matter,” but the more precise his thought became, the less comprehensible it appeared to be to his audience: “chem tochnee, tem temnee.”2 A year later, in another letter to the same recipient from November 24, 1920, Malevich still continues to fret about the quality of his writing: “What I am missing, though, is the most important thing: I don’t have a mirror in which I could see myself; to this moment I don’t know what I am writing, if it is any good, if there is anything in it, or it all happens to be a wooden bicycle against the background of masterpieces”3 [dereviannyi 87

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velosiped na fone shedevrov].4 The striking image of a “wooden bicycle against a background of masterpieces” the artist chooses to employ here, points to a general concern with the tension between the physical and ephemeral aspects of language, and reveals his misgivings about language’s ability to convey meaning at all, which are reflected in all of his philosophical treatises from the same period. The fear of linguistic inadequacy (understood as a personal challenge and a characteristic of the artistic medium he is working with) is nowhere more pronounced than in his theory of poetic discourse, first developed during 1918 and 1919, and detailed in the essay “O poezii” [On poetry].5 As will be discussed presently, this article was supposed to do for poetry what his 1916 piece, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” had set out to achieve for painting: reveal its true “nature,” outline its past and present developments as clearly and concisely as possible, and, even more importantly, establish its goals for the future (for painting, it was to be Suprematism, for poetry—zaum). Read side by side, the two essays announce an intrinsic connection between visual Suprematism and verbal zaum, an important point, which merits further discussion. “O poezii” ends with Malevich’s own example of the language of the true budetliane6 [men of the future]: ULE ELE LEL LI KON SI AN ONON KORI RI KOASAMBI MOENA LEZH SABNO ORATR TULOZH KOALIBI BLESTORE TIVO ORENE ALIZH

This short poem is the only one to be published during his lifetime. Yet Malevich returned to writing poetry on a regular basis—certainly from 1909 to the mid-1920s, as attested by the most complete collection of his poems to date, Kazimir Malevich, Poeziia (Moscow 2000).7 Kruchenykh, another famous experimental writer and a personal friend, thought highly enough of Malevich’s poetic talent to include him among the eight primary practitioners of zaum in his 1918 “eulogy to zaum.”8 So why did Malevich choose not to pursue more public exposure for this part of his oeuvre? And, even more importantly, now that we have access to them in Russian, how are we to evaluate his contributions to the Russian avant-garde poetic movement from the beginning of the twentieth century as such? Was Malevich’s verbal art, as he himself feared, a lowly “wooden bicycle” against a background of celestial masterpieces, and why should that even matter to us today? The rest of the present essay will offer answers to these questions through the analyses of representative poems and philosophical writings produced by the artist at different moments in his creative career.

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MALEVICH AS A THEORETICIAN OF POETIC DISCOURSE In his excellent essay “Kazimir Malevich and the Energy of Language,” John Bowlt makes the following remark: “The pictures he painted are conspicuously absent in his written texts. Nor does a reading of the essays clarify the meaning of the paintings. It is as if the essays were written in spite of, or counter to, the visual works.”9 With one notable exception (the article “On Poetry” mentioned above), the statement would still be true if we were to replace “pictures” with “poems”: Malevich’s poems, as we are about to demonstrate, rarely comply with the zaumnyi ideal projected in the theoretical essays. At the same time, one can argue that even if the essays do not help much in uncovering the hidden “meaning” of the paintings/poems (in terms of their conceptual message), they prove to be invaluable as far as the peculiar treatment of the medium is concerned. To put it differently, it is somewhat unfair to expect that Malevich, the prophet of nonrepresentational art, should be concerned with looking for meaning in objective reality or explaining his message referentially. After all, according to his credo, the medium is the message. Thus, before we can proceed with the exegesis of his writing, we have to address the crucial issue of the “medium”—its nature, past utilization, and future potential. The medium of poetry, of course, is language. But which one? The question was paramount for the Russian avant-garde during the teens of the twentieth century. The object-grounded, referential words of the old masters (Malevich would call them “technicians”) were deemed incapable of expressing the raw emotions and spiritual aspirations of the new revolutionaries in art. As Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov proclaimed in their 1913 manifesto Slovo kak takovoe [The Word as Such], language “should first of all be language; and if it is to remind one of anything, let it remind us of a saw or a poisoned arrow of a savage.”10 The problem with the old school of poetry was found to be that there had been too much preoccupation with “finish and polish” and not enough with “the word as such.”11 The mission of the Futurist poet, by contrast, was to liberate the word from any connections with the objective world, which weigh it down and prevent it from soaring up to the universe of transrational experience. Zaum,12 the language of the budetlianskie rechetvortsy [Futurist speech-makers] was deemed the only proper medium of artistic creation. Malevich agreed completely with his new friends (he met Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov during that same fateful year, 1913). In fact, he had already used the word zaum to describe his own experimentations in painting. In the catalog for the fourth Union of Youth exhibition, which took part at the end of 1912,

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he had referred to his own works as zaumnyi realizm [transrational realism].13 His choice of words is certainly very interesting for several reasons. To begin with, it shows that he was familiar with the currently fashionable theoretical discourse. Secondly—and much more importantly—it proves that he was already trying to blur the boundaries separating painting and poetry, at least in the way people perceived and talked about them.14 Two years later, in 1914, paintings such as “An Englishman in Moscow” (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), “Composition with Mona Lisa” (private collection, St. Petersburg), and “Lady at the Advertising Column” (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) attempted something even more complex: the blending of mediums—the pictorial and the verbal—into one inseparable (if not necessarily coherent) whole. As Juliette Stapanian has noted, “except for its development by Kazimir Malevich into an aesthetics of Suprematism, pictorial zaum has been little studied.”15 If this manifestation of Malevich’s utilization of zaum has been discussed at all, it has been in terms of its role in specific paintings, thus privileging its pictorial connections. It is possible, however, to view it also as an example of the artist’s poetic experimentations with zaum—an approach that would allow us to include his “alogical” paintings among the poetic creations from the same period. I shall return to this point later. For now, let me go back to the phrase he used to describe his work in 1912, “zaumnyi realizm,” in order to point out the implications that its second constituent member, realizm, has for a discussion of Malevich’s art in all of its manifestations. Critics have suggested that rather than the product of bezumnyi [illogical] sound combinations, zaum is “an art of abstraction that actively engages the idioms of traditional realism in a vigorous polemic or dialectic from which a new realism emerges.”16 Whereas Symbolism had seen the word as less than its referent, and Acmeism had proposed a new system of correspondences, the Futurist zaum demanded that the word “straddle traditional semantic boundaries.”17 Malevich was correct, therefore, to present his own “alogical” paintings as examples of a new form of realism—radically innovative, but transrational nevertheless. The same holds true of his poetic creations from this period: as diverse as the poetry he produced during the 1910s and 1920s was, it always complied with such an understanding of zaum as “dynamic objectivism or realism of its own.”18 The similarity between his treatment of the two arts (that of painting and poetry), which, as I already suggested, is the product of Malevich’s overall concern with the creative activity of the New Artist as a collective image, becomes obvious if we read his essays “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism. The New Realism in Painting” [1916]19 and “On Poetry” [1919] side by side.

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When reviewing the essay “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” most Western critics (notably Simon Pugh and John Golding) agree that Malevich shares with Hegel a dialectical understanding of the origins and subsequent history of artistic practices. All too easily, those critics translate Hegelian terminology into the language of the Suprematist thinker. For example, Hegel’s three historical stages in the development of art (i.e., the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic periods20) are equated with the Suprematist’s Savage/Collective Art, Classical/Aesthetic Art, and Intuitive Art. However, even if Malevich’s theory of the evolution of artistic creation is certainly grounded in “historical dialectics,” upon closer examination the comparison between the two thinkers fails to exhibit unproblematic similarities. Although Malevich does share with Hegel a mistrust of the phenomena of nature, and thus also condemns imitative representation from the moment of its emergence at the earliest stage in the history of art (i.e., Malevich’s Collective Art indeed can be viewed as coinciding with Symbolic Art), the two philosophers’ thought-paths diverge in their understanding of the second stage of artistic development. Whereas Hegel considers Classical Art to be superior to everything else because of its alleged ability to re-create the (self-)conscious harmony between form and content in the three-dimensional (sculptural) depiction of the human body, Malevich actually denounces the achievement of the highly aestheticized forms of Greek and Roman realism. The masters of Rome and Greece, Malevich claims “byli zadavleny esteticheskim vkusom, i realizm ikh byl opomazhen, opudren vkusom estetizma [were pressured by aesthetic sense, and their realism was pomaded and powdered by aesthetic sense].”21 The art products of the Renaissance and Romantic periods are just as flawed because of their heavy-handed “ornamentation and idealization” that always lead to the ultimate “downfall of real art.” Hegel’s concern with the search for an art form with fewer and fewer material constraints (which, he claims, has been achieved in Romantic poetry, painting, and music) therefore becomes prominent—and potentially viable—for Malevich only with the advent of Futurist and, somewhat counterintuitively, Utilitarian art.22 There is really no equivalent in Hegel’s scheme to Malevich’s Intuitive art.23 It is here that the Suprematist’s theory of art is at its most original: Интуитивное, мне кажется, должно выявится там, где формы бессознательны и без ответа. Я думаю, что интуитивное в исскустве нужно было подразумевать в цели чувства искания предметов. И оно шло чисто сознательным путем, определенно, разрывало свою дорогу в художнику. Образуется как бы два сознания, борющихся между собой.

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[The intuitive, it seems to me, should reveal itself in form without response. I consider that it was necessary to understand the intuitive in a feeling toward objects. And it followed a purely conscious path through the artist. It appears as two levels of consciousness fighting between themselves.]24

The passage is fascinating (if somewhat confusing) for two reasons. First, it defines intuitive art in relation to the material world and claims that its development was always actively “conscious,” while at the same time professing its connection with the “unconscious” and its tendency toward monologic discourse which desires “no response.” Second, it underscores the intrinsic tension between the “two levels of consciousness,” which find its expression in the creative, intuitive impulse.25 Intuition, then, is to be understood as the major prerequisite for artistic creation. As such, it has to be cultivated and studied by any serious practitioner of the new art in its various manifestations. Accordingly, the “intuitive” and its realization in literary forms and practices become the main focus of Malevich’s article “On Poetry.” Before discussing the ideas offered in the text, it is worth noting their peculiar stylization, as the vexed codification of human thoughts and feelings is at the center not only of this, but of many other of Malevich’s treatises on the nature of language. Throughout the essay the author draws attention to the artificiality of the linguistic material, underscoring its ultimate inability to transmit unequivocal information. His preferred trope is the spatial metaphor—e.g., poems are like “museums,” “exhibit halls,” “bars,” “churches,” and “pawn shops where neatly folded waistcoats, and cushions, carpets, trinkets, rings and silks, petticoats and carriages are packed away in rows of drawers, all according to a known order, law and basis”26—whose attempt to “ground” the comparison in neatly ordered lists only underscores the breach between signifier and signified in any semiotic system. Thus, I would like to claim, along with Roman Jakobson27 and, more recently, Alexandra Shatskikh,28 that Malevich’s critical essay offers an example of “metaphoric discourse” or poetic prose. In his analysis of Malevich’s style, Marcadé offers the opposite view. The Suprematist’s literary style, he claims, is “essentially metonymic, there is a perpetual substitution of terms designating cause and effect, the elements on the whole, the signifier and the signified.”29 Without a doubt, Malevich makes ample use of metonymy, synecdoche in particular, in his essays and letters. However, it is the abundance of original metaphors that marks all of the texts under discussion. Powerful vehicles of poetic expression, Malevich’s manylayered, often openly self-referential metaphors manage to achieve the effect of ostranenie [estrangement] which the Formalists so adamantly promoted, and thus to draw attention to the artificiality of the formal textual fabric of every piece of writing. As a theorist of literary discourse, Malevich always underscores language’s inability to express genuine sensations even partially

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(or metonymically, if you will) grounded in “reality.” The Suprematist’s choice of metaphor as his preferred trope of linguistic sdvig, therefore, is consistent with his larger theoretical project. The effect of defamiliarization is sought after from the very beginning of “On Poetry.” The essay opens with two alternative definitions of poetic discourse which immediately foreground the impossibility of providing stable criteria for its discussion:30 1. Поэзия, нечто строящееся на ритме и темпе, или же темп и ритм подбуждают поэта к композиции форм реального вида. 2. Поэзия—выраженная форма, полученная от видимых форм природы, их лучей—подбудителей нашей творческой силы, подчиненная ритму и темпу.31 [1. Poetry is something which builds upon rhythm and tempo, or rather it is tempo and rhythm which induce the poet to compose forms of a real appearance. 2. Poetry is the expression of form, subject to rhythm and tempo, and derived from the visible forms of nature and their emanations, which awaken our creative strength.]32

Deliberately confusing, repetitious, and vague as the definitions may be, their focus on the relationship between the art of poetry (i.e., its formal features) and the material world clearly announces the major concern for the following theoretical discussion. Much like the earlier essay, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” in “On Poetry” Malevich approaches his subject in a diachronically delineated manner.33 Just as in the former his intention is to present a dialectical history of the development of art through the centuries, so in the latter he sets out to narrate briefly the peculiar story of the birth, nature, and goal of poetry through the ages. The teleological end of art, he claimed in “The New Realism in Painting,” is announced by and realized in the objectlessness of Suprematist painting. Similarly, the goal of poetry is the destruction of any remnants of “realistic” poetic discourse, be it seen as “naturally derived” from the objective world, or necessarily expressed in the aestheticized, formal organization of the linguistic material. The three basic kinds of poetry34 which Malevich isolates in the essay, then, are both the result of a historical progression, and coexisting, ideologically loaded formats for the poet to choose from: Есть поэзия, где поэт описывает клочок природы, подгоняя его под загоревшийся в нем ритм, есть поэзия, где ритм идет в угоду формы вещей. Есть поэзия, где ради ритма уничтожает поэт предметы, оставляя разорванные клочки неожиданных сопостовлений форм.

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Есть поэзия, где остается чистый ритм и темп как движение и время; здесь ритм и темп опираются на буквы как знаки, заключающие в себе тот или иной звук.35 [There is poetry in which the poet describes a natural fragment, pursuing it to the rhythm burning inside; there is poetry, in which the rhythm submits to the form of things. There is poetry in which the poet destroys objects for the sake of rhythm, leaving tattered scraps of form in unexpected confrontation. 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.]36

A year earlier, Malevich had come to similar conclusions in his “Zametki o poezii, dukhe, dushe, ritme, tempe” [Notes on poetry, spirit, soul, rhythm and tempo (1918)].37 This very little known essay is extremely helpful as a companion piece to “On Poetry” because of its much clearer elucidation of the same ideas, its consistency in the terminology used, and the explicit connections it makes between painting and poetry. In “Zametki,” for instance, Malevich differentiates between Descriptive Academism (rhythm is imposed on the objects); Peredvizhnichestvo (the objects dominate the rhythm); Cubism (poetry that does away with the object for the sake of rhythm); Futurism (poetry is “chistyi ritm kak massa opiraiushchaiasia na bukvy, osvobozhdennye ot veshchi [pure rhythm as a mass dependent on letters which are free of any links to objective reality]”); and, finally, Suprematism as the highest achievement of Futurist poetry.38 In order to be able to reach the highest state of art, the poet “has to liberate himself, take reason apart and understand its order of things, feel the rhythm of the spirit [neobkhodimo razkrepostit’ sebia, razorvat’ razum i posmotret’ v nem ego uklad veshchei i pochuiat’ v dukhe ego ritm].”39 Unfortunately, many artists are incapable of such revolutionary actions. Instead, they fall prey to the constricting demands of the old enemy of true creativity–technique, which is always “crude and mediocre.”40 Using completely unsuitable methods, the poet “falls into despair, and poems have become almost a rarity in which the poet does not weep, does not grieve over the impossibility of communicating what he wanted to say about nature, for he wanted to speak about nature and has instead spoken in the poem . . . through the clothes about clothes.”41 The pathological existence of the “poet-tailor” of the past and present, Malevich claims, affects equally his work and his body, metamorphosizing him into “a terrible creature” with a “black throat” from which “word-things crawl: a stool, fragrant roses, women, graves and storm-clouds. It is like some kind of lizard, spewing things and swallowing them indiscriminately.”42

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What then is the alternative to this creature that seems to have crawled out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch? Malevich’s answer is to be found in the figure of the “new poet,” or what he calls “the new Man-Form.” There is one big difference between the melancholic43 poet-tailor and the “Man-Form” of the future: whereas the first can never transmit his feelings adequately through the conventional, highly formalized linguistic medium, the second manages to find the means of articulating his sorrow semiotically. Thus, the successful poetic act consists of expressing oneself in sighs, screams, and other recognizable sounds of suffering. Finally, Malevich is ready to share his highly poeticized vision of the true artist: Поэт есть особа, которая не знает себе подобной, не знает мастерства или не знает как повернется его Бог. Он сам внутри себя, какая буря возникает и исчезает, какого ритма и темпа она будет. Разве можно в минуты, когда великий пожар возникает в нем, думать о шлифовании, оттачивании и описании. . . . Человек-форма такой же знак, как нота, буква, и только.44 [A poet is a person who owns no like, knows no craft, nor does he know which way his God will turn. He is within himself, no matter what storm arises and disappears, whatever rhythm and tempo it may bear. How can he think of polishing, sharpening and describing at the moment when the great fire arises in him? . . . The man-form is the same kind of sign as a note or letter, and no more.]45

This Man-Form is like a “super-terrestrial” who looks “into another world.”46 He, too, transforms himself into something different—a church, a priest—and by his actions “he awakens the spirit attendant on him in others; the awakening is successive, and the succession is mysterious and unfathomable, but real” (80). The mad liturgy that erupts out of that “body-sign” is markedly monologic. It preaches in the single voice of the initiated, never requiring or even expecting a response from the other. Interestingly enough, the monologic speech of the mad poet renders him into an Other as well: his words are just as inaccessible to him (i.e., to his brain) as they are to his audience. Thus the body-temple of the poet takes precedence over his mind—it is the passive yet necessary transmitter of the inspired language of the Spirit to whose meaning the poet has no rational access: Самое высшее считаю моменты служения духа и поэта, говор без слов, когда через рот бегут безумные слова; безумные ни умом, ни разумом непосигаемы.47 [I consider the highest moment in the poet’s service of the spirit to be that of his wordless dialect, when demented words rush from his mouth, mad words accessible neither to the mind, nor to reason.]48

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It is with the picture of the demented, Dionysian Man-Form that Malevich chooses to end his essay on poetry. Once again, the visual and the audioverbal come together in an attempt to create a powerful, poetic image of poetic practice itself. The poet’s body takes on a life of its own, divorces its movements from consciousness—“When the flame within the poet flares up, he stands, raises his arms, and bends his body, producing that form which to the beholder will represent the real, new and living church”49—and begins to recite the subconscious, craftless poetry of the future: “Ule Elye Lel. . . .”50 It should have become clear by now that for Malevich art was a synthesis of sound, color, and rhythm. His is an overarching, all-inclusive theory of art, which remains consistently applied to whatever subject dominates his philosophical elaborations at a given moment in time: e.g., painting (as in 1915–16), or poetry (during 1918–1919). Let us proceed, then, from the phylogeny of the poetic Man-Form according to Malevich-the-theoreticianof-modern-art, to the peculiar ontogeny of Malevich-the-poet, in order to explore the continuities and discrepancies between the two in practice. THE ICON AND THE AXE REVISITED: MALEVICH’S POETRY Much like his paintings, at first glance Malevich’s surviving poems seem to follow the evolution of his ideas about the development and function of art: they, too, appear to shed gradually the constraints of “primitive realism” in all of its manifestations (including Symbolism, Cubism and even Futurism) in order to achieve the objectless, weightless world of the Suprematist “Ule Elye Lel.” However, just as it is difficult to date precisely some of the surviving paintings (because of Malevich’s purposeful disregard for “historical” time), so it is doubtful whether we can ever study his poems in the exact chronological order in which they were created. If anything, the known dates for a number of texts suggest that the artist was able to produce thematically and formally diverse works during a very short time period. For example, the programmatic, philosophical poems of the “Liturgy Cycle” were written concurrently with the essay “On Poetry” and the zaumnoe “Ule Elye Lel.” The proper periodization of his poetry is further complicated by the question of including certain painterly compositions among his poetic works. As was already suggested, it is often impossible to discuss Malevich’s verbal creations in isolation from his other artistic experiments (especially his paintings and drawings). In some cases, the boundary between the two arts is blurred to an extent that makes it viable to treat certain pictures as poems and vice versa. That said, one can still differentiate three main periods (more or less in chronological order) within Malevich’s poetic oeuvre, which comprise

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subgroups of thematically or linguistically comparable works. I have chosen to discuss them under three titles, taken from Malevich’s own theory of art: Descriptive, Cubist, and Zaumnyi realizm. THE “DESCRIPTIVE” POETIC WORKS The first recorded samples of Malevich’s poetic work come from a period which covers roughly six years, 1906–1912. Those texts—“Vsiakii vecher ugasnut luchi Solntsa . . .” [Every evening the Sun’s rays will die out . . .], and a few others—have been named by Alexandra Shatskikh “textual primitives.”51 The term clearly gestures toward the visual primitives the artist created at the beginning of his career under the influence of Larionov and Goncharova. And indeed, the connection between Malevich’s poetic practices and his painterly investigations is obvious from the very start. Much like paintings such as Otdykh. Obshchestvo v tsilindrakh [Relaxing: High Society in Top Hats, 1908] (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg), and Pornograficheskoe obshchestvo v tsilindrakh [Pornographic High Society in Top Hats, 1907] (the Ludwig Museum, Kioln), his textual primitives consist of free, decorative verse whose “descriptive” quality is counterbalanced by a playful, often sarcastic attitude toward the subject matter. A brief comparison between Otdykh. Obshchestvo v tsilindrakh and “Vsiakii vecher . . .” should demonstrate the affinity between the themes and methods of representation utilized in the two works. Всякий вечеръ угаснутъ лучи Солнца Всякий вечеръ прислуги покроютъ коврами зеленый бугорь . . . Всякiй вечеръ с кубками приветсвуютъ темноту . . . Десят вечеров прощальных отдали они лету.52 [Every evening the Sun’s rays will die out Every evening the servants will cover the green knoll with carpets . . . Every evening goblets are raised to the darkness . . . Ten evenings of farewell they devoted to the summer.]

In the painting, Malevich represents the cartoon-like, repetitive (in terms of color and form) figures of intoxicated aristocrats, randomly strewn against the background of a monochromatic green lawn, punctuated by equally cartoon-like flowers. Not just a “commentary on luxury and indolence”53 but

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also a witty announcement of the inevitable “dying out” of a whole human breed, the painting provides a glimpse of a world of decadence in which people and objects have only decorative (or at best irrigating, if we are to judge by the urinating gentleman in the top left corner) value. The poem deals with the same subject in a strikingly similar manner. The repetition of the phrase “Всякiй вечеръ” signals the boredom and repetitiveness of life at an old landowner’s estate. As in the painting, in the poem all nouns (animate and inanimate) are treated similarly, moving between the positions of subjects and objects with an ease that suggests an intrinsic connection and essentially interchangeable utility. Gentlemen, ladies, and flowers decorate the lawn in Otdykh. Obshchestvo v tsilindrakh in equal measure. Similarly, carpets, glasses, women, and men dot the landscape in the “idyllic” picture of an evening picnic in the poem. Time seems to stand still in both works—the same rituals of drinking, flirting, and coupling are rehearsed over and over again without relief on the level of semantics and imagery. On the level of grammar, however, “Vsiakii vecher . . .” goes even further than the painting in its implied sentence on the Russian petit bourgeois: the idea that their time has passed is embodied beautifully in the shift from the future, to the present, and, finally, to the past tense of the verbs. “CUBIST” POETIC EXPERIMENTS Malevich’s serious poetic experimentations begin in 1913, when his collaboration with poets like Khlebnikov and Khruchenykh leads to the birth of his absurdist poetry (e.g., “Skuchno papuasy . . .” [Boring Papuans . . .], etc.). The importance of this fateful year for Russian Futurism in general, and Malevich’s artistic development in particular, cannot be overstressed. In July of the “annus mirabilis”54 Matyushin invited Malevich to participate in the production of the first truly Futurist opera for the St. Petersburg Union of Youth. For three days, July 18–20 (July 31–August 2), the composer, the artist, and their friend, the poet Kruchenykh, worked together at Matyushin’s dacha in Uusikirkko, Finland, on the creation of what was to be known as the opera Victory over the Sun. Their meeting, which they referred to as the “First All-Russian Congress of the Poets of the Future,” also resulted in a manifesto that announced their intention to revolutionize the last “stronghold of artistic weakness,” the Russian theater, as a synthesis of all arts. The manifesto is the first published Futurist document that bears Malevich’s signature. Malevich designed the sets and the costumes for the opera in a pure abstract style which was praised for its ability to reach a true transrational effect—something that certain perceptive spectators felt Kruchenykh failed to achieve in the text.55 However, even if the artist’s “zaum of painting . . . had

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maximum organization of material, tension, will-power, nothing fortuitous,” his poetry from the same time shares a lot of the problems of Kruchenykh’s libretto: it, too, seems to be marked by “chaos, lack of discipline, caprice, epileptic convulsions.”56 Absurdist (rather than transrational) works such a “Skuchno papuasy” impose rhythm on collections of loosely linked nouns (all of which are in the nominative case) in a wordplay based on skillful sound and root alterations and repetitions. As Shatskikh notes in her introduction to Kazimir Malevich. Poeziia, the text of the poem “Skuchno papuasy . . .” is “bezsmyslennyi [illogical],” but “udivitel’nym obrazom ‘predmetnyi’ i ‘peizazhnyi”’ [surprisingly ‘objective’ and ‘scenic’].”57 And if such descriptive qualities relate the poem to the earlier comic subplots of works like “Vsiakii vecher,” certain motifs (“Bilet 2go klasa Par [Second Class Ticket Steam]”; “aeroplan lovi poselok [airplane catch settlement]”; “nul’ dva raza [zero two times]”58) also connect it with Cubo-Futurist paintings such as Stantsia bez ostanovki [Through Station, 1913] (State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), lithographs like Smert cheloveka odnovremenno na aeroplane i zheleznoi doroge [Death of a Man Simultaneously in an Aeroplane and on a Railway] from Kruchenykh’s book Vzorval [Explosion, 1913], and drawings like Dva nulia [Two Zeros, 1913]. “ZAUMNYI REALIZM” AND MALEVICH’S POETRY The third period (1914–1919) of Malevich’s poetic experimentation is by far the most complex and interesting. There are two, very different, groups of works which were created at the same time. The first group comprises a) textual zaum included in paintings such as An Englishman in Moscow, 1914 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Composition with Mona Lisa, 1914 (Private Collection, St. Petersburg), Lady at the Advertising Column, 1914 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam); b) “prografachniki”; and c) zaum poetry proper (e.g., “И ю мане торь рети кость теону, 1914, “Кор ре режми не кон,” 1914, “Ule Elye Lel,” 1919). The second group consists of the poems from the socalled “Nature Cycle” and “Liturgy Cycle,” and the rhythmical prose of the articles published in the newspaper Anarkhiia [Anarchy] during March and April of 1918. The space of this paper does not allow me to give these works the appropriate critical attention each one of them deserves. I will therefore focus briefly only on one representative example from each subgroup, with the hope that, even if limited, my illustrations will provide enough information to sustain the factual and theoretical framework I have delineated here. The mixed—linguistic and painterly—medium of works such as An Englishman in Moscow, Aviator, Composition with Mona Lisa, and Lady at the Advertising Column has been discussed by many art critics on both sides of the

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ocean. Several scholars have commented on the apparent relationship between these paintings and the poetic theory and practice of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. For example, Charlotte Douglas points out the “curious coincidence of Kruchenykh’s terms and Malevich’s images” in Kruchenykh’s vision of language as “a saw or the poisoned arrow of a savage.” She continues: “There is also little or no narrative cohesion in a work; unrelated and incongruous images simply turn the mind back on itself until interpretation is abandoned.”59 Although such an approach to the paintings is quite adequate if one is to look for “narrative cohesion” in them, it is not the only possible way of exploring the intricacies of the individual works. As Simmons has suggested, with paintings such as An Englishman in Moscow and Aviator, Malevich tried to go beyond the limits of synthetic Cubism in order to “find the higher laws,” and “to submit to deeper analysis the psychological structures of the archetype of wholeness, the image of God.”60 The peculiar logic behind such philosophical investigations and the methods of their artistic representation have much in common with the abstract flights of thought behind zaumnyi realism. As we already discussed, the shifts and conflations of different interpretative scenarios carried by the transrational work of art answer to a logic of their own, but a logic nevertheless. Let us explore at some length the example of An Englishman in Moscow in order to address the question of the possibility of establishing meaningful correlations between words and images, language, and painting. The painting presents a bisected image of a man in a top hat (the “Englishman”) depicted among numerous objects of various sizes and spaceorientation. The “portrait” immediately establishes connections with earlier works. As in the Aviator, center stage is occupied by a human head and torso, with a white sturgeon (a traditional symbol of Christ in the Russian Orthodox religion) concealing the left half of the man’s face. The right eye is left uncovered, staring intently at the viewer without any intention of disclosing the hidden secrets behind its surface. A correlation with the Portrait of Ivan Kliun, 1913 (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg) underscores this particular formal feature of the painting: in the earlier work, the left eye of the figure is removed completely, while the right is replaced by an opening in the skull that reveals the inner workings of the brain. The “Englishman” offers no such access to the internal images accompanying the psychic process. Instead, it externalizes human perception, underscoring by the clutter of objects and words around the human figure the impossibility of judging their interconnectedness and value according to standard conscious logic. The visual signs, then, comply with an alogical system of values which remains outside the laws of a single perspectival space. The array of images is striking in its apparent randomness and disorder: a lit candle placed in front of the fish and the left side of the face illuminates

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and bathes them in white and yellow tones; a church dangles over a ladder whose lower part connects it with three bayonets; a sword cuts the painting diagonally; open scissors appear in the right side of the picture under a huge saw; and a little higher and to the left, a big red spoon (the famous symbol of the Russian Futurists) dangles in the air. Yet, slowly, an inner rhythm begins to emerge, organizing the objects in meaningful (even if unstable) combinations. The painting appears to be divided—both vertically and horizontally— into halves comprised of repeated motifs that often carry inverted values. The iconic symbols (the sturgeon, the lit candle, the church, the ladder) in the left section imply a structural organization that on one level stages the surface interactions as a struggle between Christ and Antichrist. (The divided nature of the human soul is a favorite topic for Malevich in the poems of the “Liturgy Cycle” that he was creating during the same period.) The painting does not resolve the tensions but simply brings them to the surface. The process is most evident in the formal repetitions that link incongruent imagery: the flanks of the fish are echoed in the curves of the man’s mouth and the teeth of the saw; the sword aiming upward and to the left is mirrored by the red arrow pointing downward and to the right; the contours of the candle coincide with the shape of the wooden spoon (the similarity between the two further strengthened by the yellow rays of light appearing behind the red spoon); the cross is suggested several times (in the crossed images of the sword and the candle, the sword and the ladder, the sword and the fish). The play between the painterly images could be continued for quite a while before the interpretive possibilities would be exhausted completely. An icon of modern man, a portrait of an artist, a god-like figure, a symbol of the Antichrist, a local poet carrying a wooden spoon as a sword, and a foreign, disoriented intruder into the native culture—all of these interpretations exist simultaneously, equally valid, unfinalizable. The confusion of painterly associations is enhanced even further by the presence of phrases, words, and letters broken into segments and strewn over the canvas’s surface in a manner that connects them with the handmade poetic collections of Futurist writers like Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and others. Starting from the top, the painted zaum poem reads as follows:      ЗА ТМЕНIЕ      СКАКОВОЕ      ОБЩЕСТВО             ЧАC ТИЧ             НОЕ

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     ZA TMENIE      SKAKOVOE      OBSHESTVO CHAS            TICH          NOE

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There is no obvious, referential correspondence between the words and the images. Yet a connection between them exists in terms of their function within the work as a whole. Consider, for example, Malevich’s play with the possible meanings of the inscribed semantic units—both in their totality and as fragments—in relation to the painting’s central thematic concerns rehearsed by the presented imagery. Thus, the usual understanding of ZA/ TMENIE as “eclipse” is undermined by the division in the word into two parts, which suggests the idea that it can be read as being “for/darkness.” SKAKOVOE OBSHCHESTVO [a racing society] cuts through the logically connected “eclipse” and “partial” [CHASTICHNOE], thus verbally repeating the implied function of the painted sword. As with its painterly equivalent, the phrase “racing society” bonds not only with the image of the fashionable “Englishman” and his “elegant” lifestyle, but also with contemporary fascination with speed—an acceleration of human movement and experiences that is definitely positive from a Futurist point of view. The preoccupation with time and its modern value is continued in the first of the three segments of the broken word CHAS/TICH/NOE [partial]: “chas” means “hour,” a unit of time measurement. Simultaneously, the “T” at the beginning of the next syllable, TICH, is repeated and aggrandized in the outline of the crossed sword and the candle, thus turning the previous word portion, “CHAS” into “CHAST” [part]. The idea of a part of a whole is next expanded by the notion of “possession,” when that same pictorial “T” is used to combine “CHAS” with “NOE” into “CHASTNOE” [private]—a possibility underscored also by the same color, black, used to draw the last and the first letter of the displaced syllables. The motif of “privateness” once again relates the text to the idea of the bourgeois Englishman’s lifestyle, while at the same time suggesting a very different commentary on the act of perceiving as an implied judgment on impressions and feelings that are essentially private and sacred. The zaum poems of Malevich’s “alogical” paintings find their flipside in the experimental works from the second subgroup under the heading of “zaumnyi realizm”: the so-called “prografachniki.”61 These mixed-media drawings such as Деревня [Village],62 БУРМ. . .ОЛОС, Полеты Перу [Flights for Peru], and Кошелек вытащили в трамвае [A Wallet Was Stolen in the Tram]63 challenge the mimetic function of representation in even more strikingly innovative, minimalist forms of expression than the paintings. Just as the introduction of letters/words into the paintings combats the solely visual perception of the painted canvas as a “window on reality,” thus allowing for a new, textual interpretation of their flat surfaces, so do the imposed frames on his prografachniki open up the possibility for the visual (painterly) experience and critical investigation of the poems. In this sense, they present a much more interesting example of Malevich’s struggle to overcome the

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traditional constraints of both the visual and the verbal arts than his imitative “zaum” proper. Poems such as “И ю мане торь рети кость теону,” “Кор ре режми не кон,” and “Ule Elye Lel” do not go beyond the linguistic experiments of the master-budetliane Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. Concurrently with the creation of the works from the first major group of writing from the 1914–1919 period, Malevich produced two poetic “cycles”—namely, the so-called Nature cycle (“Priroda” [Nature], “Drova privezli” [The Firewood Is Here], “Pochemu iz sklepa srediny moei” [Why from the crypt of my center]; and the Liturgical cycle64 (“Ia nachalo vsego” [I am the beginning of everything], “Mir neobiatnaia tselostnost”’ [The World is a vast wholeness], “Usta Zemli i Khudozhnik” [The Earth’s Mouth and the Artist], “Khudozhnik” [The Artist]65)–whose originality lies not so much in the surface experimentation with linguistic and/or painterly material, but in the fascinating depth of the explored philosophical ideas. The influence of their rhythmical, mystical poetic language (which has borrowed much from the rhetoric of the Old and the New Testament) is so overpowering that it spills over into Malevich’s contemporaneous critical prose, as can be gleaned not only from analysis of essays such as “On Poetry,” but also from reading the series of articles for Anarkhiia (e.g., “K novoi grani” [Toward a New Limit], “Ia prishel” [I came], “Otvechaia staromu dniu” [Responding to the old days], etc.).66 Let us consider briefly an example from each of the “cycles”: “Drova privezli,” from the Nature cycle, and “Usta Zemli i Khudozhnik,” from the Liturgical series. The theme of the poem “Drova privezli”67 is a familiar one: Man versus Nature. It has been present in the Russian poetic tradition from the very first odes of Lomonosov and Derzhavin. It had certainly dominated the works of the Romantics, and had been revisited by the Symbolists. So how is Malevich’s approach to an old topic different, or even interesting? The poem’s beginning announces a state of war: men go to the woods armed with their best weapons. The first of many operative oppositions has been put in motion; that much is clear. In fact, one soon realizes, the poem as a whole is based on a number of binary oppositions (semantic, grammatical), whose members keep shifting, changing allegiances, so to speak. The lack of stable reference to a clear “positive” term in the pairs deliberately confuses the reader, destabilizing his/her sense of “knowing” or “understanding” what the poem is about. At first the fairly straightforward, almost prosaic narration clearly delineates the two fighting camps: men (civilization) and the forest (Nature): Взяли пилы, и пошли войною На леса. Вошли одетые подпоясанные, И распоясались и разделись размеряли тело леса.68

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[They took saws, axes and ropes, and went to fight The woods. They came, their clothes fastened most tightly, Then, once there, let loose and undressed and measured the forest’s body.]

In a dramatic, mythical turn of the story (a typical sdvig), a single representative is “elected” on both sides: the threatening advent of a solitary man to his victim is mirrored by the individuation of the lonely, yet “naturally” powerful tree. Here the textual camera provides us with a close-up of the anthropomorphic tree (it has a body, fingers; it is capable of feelings and thought), developing an account of its past and present feelings and hopes over the following nine lines. The change in mood is reflected also in the aspectual verbal shift: whereas so far the narration has been carried on with predominantly perfective verb forms, now that the focus is on the prolonged suffering of the tree, the aspect turns to imperfective. The point of view is unquestionably that of a victim, whose cruel fate we are invited to commiserate with: Молча переносило дерево боль свою, и смотрело в синий простор. Оно имело надежду на свои сучья и и корни. Оно думало, что никто не вырвет его с земли. И стихийным бурям противостанут ветвы, и защитят ствол его. Для этого с каждым годом рождало все новые и новые сучья. . . . Ждало бури, а потому глубоко вошли его корни. [Silently, the tree bore Its pain and stared in the blue space. . . . It kept expecting storms, and in preparation, its roots had sunk deeply.]

Then, again, the tone of the narration drastically changes, and we are forced to shake off the Romantic stupor that has paralyzed our critical judgment of the situation so far: the tree turns out to be much more use to mankind in its new, utilized forms as shelter, fire, and field nourishment. Not surprisingly for the man who coauthored the Futuristic opera Victory over the Sun, the “victory over the tree” is hailed as a sign of progress and greeted with optimistic cheer. Much like the reader, the lyrical hero is awakened from his Wordsworthian reminiscences by the loud cry of the victorious Future: “The Firewood Is Here!” He quickly joins in the celebration by taking over the axe, and continuing with the destruction of the object-symbol of Nature: Взял топор колун и эти куски дробил, куски еще боролись держало крепко тело свое не хотели без боя сдавать ни куска.

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[I grabbed the axe and began hacking up the pieces, which put up a fight Held on to their body, did not want to surrender a single piece without a battle.]

The man’s response is fierce (Но руки мои вгоняли все больше и дальше/ железо-колун и распалось в щепы полено [But my hands drove in harder and further/The iron axe and the log burst into splinters]), and he emerges victorious from the battle: Так гордый с победой вошел в жилище свое нагретое деревом. [So proud of my victory I entered my house Warmed up by the tree.]

This is what the Suprematist artist’s manifestoes had argued for: the ultimate erasure of all subject-object relationships. In a world of “objectlessness,” all signs become divorced from their signifiers, undergo a process of self-mutilation and fragmentation. In a brilliant move, Malevich signals the final disintegration of all the parties involved: the tree unwillingly bursts into splinters, while the man’s body shrinks to the broken metonymic representation of two hands holding an iron axe. The Promethean nature of the artist cum axe69—a destroyer of old, and creator of new forms of expression—is clearly signaled by the last image offered by the text: the tree has been turned into a warming fire, and successfully utilized for the good of mankind. The theme of the role of the artist in the creation of modernity is prevalent in all of the poems from the Liturgical cycle. Essentially, they present the ideas we are already familiar with from Malevich’s theoretical writings, in a new, lyrical form. As such, they should be studied alongside the texts of articles such as “On Poetry” and “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism.” For example, in “Usta Zemli i Khudozhnik”70 the author begins with the usual survey of the past history of art forms, critiques their “pagan” nature, and finally offers his enlightened Futurist alternative. His final appeal to his fellow budetliane demands that they utilize the liberating power of color and numbers in order to win the final victory over the secretive Earth (echoes from Khlebnikov’s theory of the importance of numbers for understanding history become clearly audible): “будьте только вооружены числом и цветом и победа за вами” [be armed only with numbers and colors and the victory will be yours].71 As in “Drova privezli,” the poet disappears in the end—along with his “word” [slovo]—as the world of Suprematist objectlessness imposes its main constituent elements, color, numbers, and sound, on everything:

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В этом нашем уходе мы увидим мельком надгробный памятник поэту на труп его сядет слово и оба изчезнут. Цвет и числа и звук правят миром. [In our retreat we’ll see fleetingly the tombstone of the poet on his corpse the word will sit and both will disappear. Color and numbers and sound rule the world.]

This is the final goal of artistic creativity as the Suprematist thinker understood it: a participation in the silent wisdom of the cosmos. Having reached the ultimate creative expression, the poet-Man-Form willingly lapses into the supreme economy of silence that expects and demands no response. Significantly, Malevich’s last existing poem (mid-1920s) encodes this idea with the minimalist beauty of a Futurist haiku: цель музыки молчание.72 [music’s goal is silence]

In his essay, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” Malevich boasted that he had “overcome the impossible and formed gulfs with [his] breathing,” and urged us to “Hurry!/For tomorrow you will not recognize us!”73 The artist’s self-confidence certainly seems to be well deserved: he succeeded in transmitting his fantastic, Suprematist vision not only through his paintings, but also through his poetic works. Malevich’s earlier concern about the value of his art (and especially his verbal creations) has proven to be unwarranted. Without a doubt, his poetry stands out against any background. And if it were to take the shape of a “wooden bicycle” at all, it would do that with the pride and power of a zaumnyi red spoon thrown in the face of public taste as a weapon in anticipation of total victory. NOTES 1. Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia. Ed. Alexandra Shatskikh (Moskva: Epifania, 2000). 2. Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh. Ed. Alexandra Shatskikh (Moskva: Gileia, 1995), Volume 3:332. Other factors might have contributed to Malevich’s anxiety about the quality of his writing, such as the fact that Russian was not his first language. He was born in Kiev, and his parents were of Polish descent,

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which meant that he learned Ukrainian and Polish first. In addition, his formal education was very limited, and his disregard for traditional syntax and grammar made him the recipient of harsh criticism from better-educated readers (Andersen, “Preface” in Malevich, Kazimir, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933. Vol. 1. Ed. Troels Andersen. Trans. Xenia Glowacky-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Gorgen, 1968), 7. 3. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. An earlier version on this paper was printed in Slavic and East European Journal, 48, 2 (Winter 2004): 567–93. 4. Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 345. 5.  This article was first printed in the journal Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo [Painting] No. 1, Petrograd, 1919. 6.  The term “budeteliane” was coined by the “father” of Russian zaum, Velemir Khlebnikov, who was a good friend of Malevich’s. In “Truba Marsian” [The Martian’s Trumpet], Khlebnikov describes the actions of this new race in the following way: “a transman [zachelovek] wearing a carpenter’s apron saws time into boards and handles his tomorrow in the manner of a lathe operator [in Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 304]. 7.  Some of the poems included in this book were first translated into English by Xenia Hoffmann in The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913– 1933/ K. S. Malevich. Ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978). 8.  John Bowlt. “Malevich and the Energy of Language” in Jeane D’Andrea, Ed. Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935 (Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, 1990): 185. 9. Bowlt, Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935, 181. 10.  Quoted in Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, 130. 11. Ibid. 12.  Kruchenykh is credited with the introduction of zaum with the three short poems that opened his 1913 book Pomada [Pomade]. The book, illustrated by Larionov, became the classic example of a Futurist publication. 13.  Jeane D’Andrea, Ed., Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935 (Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, 1990), 8. The exhibited works display “metallic,” cone-shaped, denaturalized forms. 14.  Of course, Malevich was not alone in this “linguistic-pictorial game” (John Bowlt, “Malevich and the Energy of Language,” in D’Andrea, Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935, 182). Other artists—notably Goncharova, Rozanova, Kruchenykh, and Zdanevich–had already publicized their experimentations with zvukopis’ [soundpainting]. Yet they were coming from the opposite direction: they were trying to use sounds to create a verbal painting. Malevich, on the other hand, used painting to create poetry. 15.  Juliette Stapanian, “Universal War ‘Ъ’ and the Development of Zaum’: Abstraction Toward a New Pictorial and Literary Realism.” Slavic and East European Journal 29 (Spring 1985), 19. 16.  Ibid., 18, emphases added. 17.  Ibid., 20.

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18.  Ibid., 23. 19.  The article “Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm” [From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting] was published as a separate booklet in Moscow in 1916. Basically, it was an expanded version of the manifesto Ot kubizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm [From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting], which was issued at the time of the “Last Futurist Exhibit 0.10” (1915). Matyushin had sponsored this earlier publication. Malevich continued to revise and expand his ideas about the history and development of art throughout his life. In 1919, right after his relocation to Vitebsk, he returned to the 1916 article with the result being a book called On New Systems in Art. It remains, as Troels Andersen puts it, his “main work from the period” (“Malevich on New Art,” in Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 9). 20.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): 635–38, 660–63, 684–85, 778–98. 21. Malevich, Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 22. 22.  It is helpful here to note, along with Jean-Claude Marcadé, in “An Approach to the Writings of Malevich.” Soviet Union/Union Sovietique 5 (1978), 231, that Malevich uses the word “utilitarian” in two opposing senses: a negative one, which designates the work and philosophy of his productionist adversaries (i.e., Tatlin and Rodchenko), and a positive one, which denotes the “purely utilitarian perfection of Suprematism” that helps “the being appear.” It is in the second meaning that the term appears in Malevich’s interpretation of Classical/Aesthetic Art. 23.  As Troels Andersen notes in “Malevich on New Art,” the artist’s treatment of “intuition” is probably derived from the Italian Futurist Boccioni’s ideas on its role in artistic creation. The painting, Boccioni claimed, “becomes an architectonic of construction, irradiating, in which the artist, and not the object, forms the central core” (in Malevich, Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 12). Thus, it is the intuitive work of the artist that assists the emergence of true Futurist creation. Malevich took this viewpoint to its absolute limits, turning it into yet another attack upon conventional logic. 24. Malevich, Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 31; emphasis added. 25.  It is worth noting here that in his understanding of the creative process as a struggle between “two levels of consciousness,” Malevich was once again very much ahead of his time. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, with the advent of Lacanian psychoanalysis and French post-structuralist theoretical constructs such as those formulated by Julia Kristeva, that the struggle between the subconscious semiotic and the conscious symbolic drives was identified as being at the heart of the artistic process. 26. Malevich, Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 77. 27. See, for example, Roman Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (Paris: Mouton, 1971): 239–60. 28.  See Shatskikh’s introduction in Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 9–21. 29.  Marcadé, “An Approach to the Writings of Malevich,” 239. 30.  Malevich’s permanent tendency toward shifts of meaning and play with preexisting artistic models is especially clear when we compare the opening of “On

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Poetry” to the beginning of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s manifesto The Word as Such (for which Malevich had contributed a number of illustrations). The earlier text, let us recall, had begun by underscoring the dual nature of poetic discourse, which resulted in two types of poetry: the first was to “be written and perceived in the twinkling of an eye! (singing, splashing, dancing, scattering of clumsy constructions, oblivion, unlearning”; the second was characterized as being “written tightly and read tightly, more uncomfortable than blacked boots or a truck in the living room” [in Anna Lawton, Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 57]. Malevich borrows the organization principle of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s primary division but proceeds to translate it into the transrational logic of his own two definitions. 31. Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 142. 32. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 73. 33.  As Charlotte Douglas has noted, in his dialectical history of art forms Malevich comes closest to the Cubo-Futurists (and A. Kruchenykh in particular, as the latter’s manifesto New Ways of the Word testifies to), who argued that “the evolution of the psyche over time accounted for the succession of styles in art, especially the newest painting styles” [Douglas, “Malevich and Western European Art Theory.” In Douglas et al. Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion 1991), 58]. 34.  By the time of the essay’s publication, Malevich had already been thinking about possible classifications of poetry for several years. For instance, in a letter to Matyushin from June 1916 he offers the following, strikingly similar, categorization: 1. thoughts about objects: “the poet strung together letters in order to form words which signified this or that object.” This poetry he calls “descriptive” (Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 116). 2. new struggle with thoughts: the new poets “tried to bring the letter closer to the idea of the sound (not music) [pytalis’ bukvu priblizit’ k idee zvuka (ne muzyki)]” (ibid.) This kind of poetry is related to religious ecstasy, the nervous system, Khlysty [Flagellants]. The “word as such has to be transformed into something else [slovo kak takovoe dolzhno byt’ perevoplashcheno vo chto to],” but it will remain “dark” (ibid.). “Rational or transrational—it doesn’t matter. They are close to one another, equally strong—they are two poles. But the task of the poetry-letter is to leave those two poles behind, and find itself” (ibid.). His solution is the “note-letter” (which, he insists, is not the same as the musical note). 3. The third case has “the mass of the note-letters distributed in space as in Suprematism [raspredelenie bukvenykh zvukovykh mass v prostranstve podobno zhivopisnomu suprematizmu]” (Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 117). 35. Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 143. 36. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 73. 37.  “Zametki o poezii, dukhe, dushe, ritme, tempe” was published for the first time in Malevich, 2000, 118–24. The text of the article is based on manuscript notes held in the Khardzhiev Archive, Chagi, Amsterdam.

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38. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 118. 39.  Ibid., 122. 40. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 76. 41.  Ibid., 75. 42.  Ibid., 75. 43.  Here, once again, Malevich’s “medical” examinations of the pathology of the creative process appear to be a striking precursor of Julia Kristeva’s ideas about the nature and psychological effects of artistic practice, developed most fully in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Language’s failure to “symbolize” objective reality in any meaningful way for the poet, Malevich and Kristeva argue in accord, threatens the very existence of individual subjectivity. Melancholia, and its temporary version, depression, entail a destabilization of the symbolic “I” with its preprogrammed use of signs: for the affected, melancholic artist, language can never be “natural,” “maternal,” but is always going to be “foreign,” turning the speaking subject himself into a “foreign,” monster-like creature in the process. 44. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 145. 45. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 76–77. 46. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 78. 47. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 149. 48. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 81. 49.  Ibid., 81–82. 50.  Ibid., 82. 51. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 10. 52.  Ibid., 64. The original of “Vsiakii vecher” is kept in a private archive in Moscow. 53.  Rainer Crone and David Moos, Kazimir Malevich. The Climax of Disclosure (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 59. 54.  Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism. A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 132. 55.  For a discussion of the Luna Park Theater productions of Victory over the Sun, see Benedikt Lifshits, The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer. Trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 160–64. 56. Lifshits, The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer, 164. 57. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 11. 58.  Ibid., 66. 59.  Charlotte Douglas, “Views for the New World. A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich: Theory and Painting.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (Spring 1975): 363–64. 60.  William Sherwin Simmons, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square and the Genesis of Suprematism, 1907–1915. Ph.D. diss. Johns Hopkins University, 1979 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1980), 168–69. 61.  The term—one of many striking neologisms coined by Malevich himself—is singled out and used in relation to the artist’s mixed-media creations from that period (1912–1914) by Shatskikh in her introduction to Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 16–20. 62. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 19. 63.  Ibid., 16.

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64.  The name “Liturgical cycle” is offered by Shatskikh in her introduction to Poezia. Another possible phrase to describe the poetry from this particular subgroup could be borrowed from El Lissitzky, who cataloged these poems under the heading “intuitivnaia zapis’ [intuitive writing]” in 1919 (Malevich, 2000, 21). I prefer Shatskikh’s terminology to Lissitzky’s, because of its obvious reference to the thematic concerns, and the biblical orchestration of the linguistic material typical of these texts. 65. Although written later (1919–1920 in Vitebsk), thematically and stylistically the poem “Khudozhnik” belongs with the rest of the works from the Liturgy cycle. It deserves to be noted that it was perhaps the only one of his poetical works to be read out loud by the author at an evening of UNOVIS (Affirmation of the New Art) which took place on Sept. 17, 1921 (Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 24). 66. They were reprinted in 1919 in Iskusstvo kommuny [Art of the Commune], Petrograd, on the initiative of Narkompros [People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment], and with Mayakovsky’s support. 67.  The text of this poem was published for the first time in Kazimir Malevich. Poezia and is based on a copy from a private collection. The poem was most likely written in 1917. 68. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 81. 69.  For the significance of the image of the “axe” in Russian culture, see James Billington, The Icon and the Axe (New York: Vintage, 1970), especially 26–37. Malevich’s treatment of the axe as a symbol of necessary destruction and progress is very similar to Walt Whitman’s interpretation of the same topic in his poem “Song of the Broad-Axe.” Although we cannot be sure of it, it is possible that Malevich had read this work (Whitman’s translated verse was extremely popular with the Futurists), and had been influenced by it in one way or another. 70.  The poem “Usta Zemli i Khudozhnik” is also printed for the first time in Kazimir Malevich. Poezia. Its text is based upon a manuscript kept in the Khardzhiev Archive at Chagi, Amsterdam. There is evidence that it was intended for publication in Supremus; unfortunately, the journal never saw print. The poem was most likely written in 1916–1917. 71. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 77. 72. Malevich, Kazimir Malevich. Poezia, 112. 73. Malevich, K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933, 19.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andersen, Troels, Ed. “Malevich on New Art.” Preface. K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933. Vol. 1. By Kazimir Malevich. Trans. Xenia Glowacky-Prus and Arnold McMillin. Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968. Billington, James. The Icon and the Axe. New York: Vintage, 1970. Bowlt, John. “Malevich and the Energy of Language,” in Kazimir Malevich, 1878– 1935. Edited by Jeane D’Andrea. London: Reaktion Books, 1991: 179–87.

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Crone, Rainer, and David Moos. Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. D’Andrea, Jeane, Ed. Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935. Los Angeles: The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, 1990. Douglas, Charlotte. “Views for the New World. A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich: Theory and Painting.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (Spring 1975): 352–70. ———. “Malevich and Western European Art Theory.” In Douglas et al. Malevich: Artist and Theoretician. Paris: Flammarion 1991, 56–60. Golding, John. Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gray, Camilla. The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 2. Paris: Mouton, 1971: 239–60. ———. Language in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987. Khardzhiev, Nikolai. Literatura posle zhivopisi. Ezik: Uchebnye zapiski ezikogo istoriko- kraevedcheskogo muzeia, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ———. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lawton, Anna, ed. Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Lifshits, Benedikt. The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer. Trans. John E. Bowlt. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977. Lunev, E. (pseud. Kruchenykh). I. Terentiev, A. Kruchenykh grandiozar. Tiflis: Kuranty, 1919. Malevich, Kazimir. K. S. Malevich. Essays on Art 1915–1933. Vol. 1. Ed. by Troels Andersen. Trans. Xenia Glowacky-Prus and Arnold McMillin. Copenhagen: Gorgen, 1968. ———. The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism. Unpublished Writings 1913–1933/K. S. Malevich. Ed. Troels Andersen. Trans. Xenia Hoffmann. Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978. ———. Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh. Tom 1 and 3. Ed. Alexandra Shatskikh. Moscow: Gileia, 1995. ———. Kazimir Malevich. Poezia. Ed. by Alexandra Shatskikh. Moscow: Epifania, 2000. Marcadé, Jean-Claude. “An Approach to the Writings of Malevich.” Soviet Union/ Union Sovietique 5 (1978): 225–40. Markov, Vladimir. Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Men’shova, I. A. “K. S. Malevich. Pis’mo k Gershenzonu (1920). Eksperiment.” Iz arkhiva Nikolaia Ivanovicha Khardzhieva. Tom 5. Los Angeles: Charles Schlacks, Jr., 1999: 128–30.

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Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu. Moskva: G. L. Kuz’min: 1912. Pugh, Simon. “Minimal Art II.” Studio International 183 (March 1972): 102–6. Simmons, William Sherwin. Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square and the Genesis of Suprematism, 1907–1915. Ph.D. diss. Johns Hopkins University, 1979. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1980. Stapanian, Juliette R. “Universal War ‘Ъ’ and the Development of Zaum’: Abstraction Toward a New Pictorial and Literary Realism.” Slavic and East European Journal 29 (Spring 1985): 18–38. Whitman, Walt. The Works of Walt Whitman. Vol. 1: The Collected Poetry. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968.

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Chapter Seven

The Ecological Avant-garde Arkady Fiedler’s The River of Singing Fish Ida Day

Even among his extraordinary generation of Polish avant-garde literary and artistic figures, Arkady Fiedler (1894–1985) stands out as one of the most original and creative authors. His travel reportage from the experimental interwar period of the 1920s and 1930 is an example of an avant-garde production—ahead of its time, eclectic, and exploring new ideas. As avantgarde is a very broad term referring to a variety of experimental literary and artistic techniques, I focus on Fiedler’s innovative and ethical approach to the natural world. This essay explores how the historical changes of the early twentieth century, affecting literature, theater, and art, also transformed the way in which the natural environment was perceived. Fiedler was a pioneer of this biocentric and holistic orientation toward nature, which gradually became more and more influential in literary and cultural studies. I revisit Fiedler’s work as a source of the growing discipline of environmental ethics, and by doing so, I propose to revive the field and the canon of the ecological avant-garde. It is important to note that an ethical approach to the natural world and awareness of the environmental impact of modernity were not common attitudes in the first decades of the twentieth century. As Joshua Schuster observed in The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and AvantGarde Poetics (2015), all the global events of the era, such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the breakup of colonial empires, were “rarely, if ever, considered in relation to the major ecological changes that they themselves effect.”1 Even though the environmental domination was one of the central issues of the period, there was no focus on preserving ecosystems from distress of development: the cultural production was “keenly attentive to environs but ambivalent about environmentalism.”2 Fiedler did not follow this trend. His work undeniably offered a reflection on the impact of 115

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environmental changes and global transformations of the era. Józef Ratajczak proposed Fiedler as “the patron saint” of ecology in Poland since the goal of his work was: “ukazać wielkie sacrum natury niszczone przez bezmyślych morderców i wściekłe roboty cywilizacji” (“to show the sacredness of nature destroyed by thoughtless murderers and the mad projects of civilization”; my trans.).3 I propose to demonstrate Fiedler’s work as an ecological and cultural avant-garde—opposed to mainstream values of the 1920s and 1930s and promoting radical change. I focus on Fiedler’s iconic, poetically entitled book, The River of Singing Fish (1935), a product of the author’s travel to the Amazon (the Ucayali River region in Peru), which was translated into fifteen languages and initiated his career as an international writer. I examine it as an example of a pluralistic text, which transcends a demarcation between science and literature. Also, I demonstrate how the book not only responded to certain tendencies of the epoch in which it was written, but also pioneered new ideas, and influenced new generations of authors. Fiedler’s vision of natural world as a living organism resonated in later environmental discourses, such as Gaia hypothesis in 1970s, and contemporary environmental ethics, especially a biocentric outlook, according to which “we share with other species a common relationship to the Earth.”4 Anna Szumna

Figure 7.1.  Arkady Fiedler. With permission from Marek Fiedler.

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reflected in Awangarda Środkowej i Wschodniej Europy—innowacja czy naśladownictwo?: “Awangarda już dawno uległa pewnemu oswojeniu—teraz uczymy się ją czytać jako jeden z wielu poważnych pomysłów na uczestnictwo we współczesności” (“The avant-garde had become familiarized a long time ago—now we are learning to read it as one of the many essential concepts of contemporaneity”; my trans.).5 Following this line of thought, the goal of my essay is to examine the continuity between the avant-garde and the present. I study Fiedler’s cutting-edge ideas in new contexts and emphasize his contribution to contemporary cultural debates. Even though travel writing has been a marginalized genre in the academic literary studies, and has received very little critical attention, I consider it crucial in the context of an ecocritical study of Fiedler’s work.6 Travel and nature, which had been the author’s fascinations since the early childhood, shaped his artistic vision, contributed to his ideas and worldview, and formulated his ecological sensibility. Arkady Fiedler was born in 1894, in Poznań, Poland. The most influential figure in the author’s life was his father, who inspired him with a passion for literature, adventure, and the natural world. During their walks in the old oak forest, young Arkady started dreaming about more distant forests and more exotic nature. He recalled in his book, Mój ojciec i dęby (1973) (My Father and the Oaks): Las: jak dogłębnie, wszystkimi zmysłami go odczuwałem [. . .] W tym uroczym lesie tkwiła potężna magia, bo za każdym razem, gdy tędy przechodziliśmy, chłopięca wyobraźnia ponosiła mnie i zjawiały się te same indiańskie widziadła. A były to prorocze majaki i później niejeden raz przeżywałem podobne sceny, ale już na jawie z żywymi Indianami w Kanadzie, Meksyku czy w Brazylii. The forest: how profoundly I felt it, with all my senses [. . .] In this charming forest there was intense magic, because, every time we walked through it, my boyish imagination carried me away and created Indian visions. They were prophetic dreams, and later I lived similar scenes, but with real Indians in Canada, Mexico or Brazil (my trans.).7

Fiedler’s first three books were not received with great applause. One of the reasons was the lack of prestige for the travel reportage in the literary taste of the time. However, Fiedler soon demonstrated that his work was not simply a novelistic travelogue or a conventional account of adventures, but an artistic, emotional, and insightful exploration of human and nonhuman life. When The River of Singing Fish was first published, in 1935, the praise of Fiedler’s talent and originality was spread in all literary circles: “W rodzinie poetów przyrody Fiedler jest indiwidualnością do nikogo nie podobną, natomiast jego współżycie z przyrodą ma coś zmysłowego, że odnosi się wrażenie, iż pisarz przekracza tu granice, które dzieliły nawet Kiplinga od świata roślin i

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zwierząt” (“Among the poets of nature, Fiedler is an individual that cannot be compared to anyone else, and there is something sensual in his relationship with nature, so that it gives an impression that the writer crosses the borders that were separating even Kipling from the realm of plants and animals”; my trans.).8 The book also crossed other borders, those between the literary genres, demonstrating an eclectic mix of styles: journalism, memoir, poetic prose, science, and textual collage. Using reportage, a nonfiction genre developed in Poland in the interwar period, Fiedler experimented with new forms. In a nonchronological, mosaic style, he assembled events that he had witnessed, and then reflected on them. This genre manifested the inventiveness and dynamism of the era, and the spirit of the avant-garde, which was defined by Beret Strong as “a creative process rather than a product.”9 The appreciation of Fiedler’s work must be seen in a context of Polish and European history. His style was inspired by the tendencies of the avant-garde movements on the artistic scene in Warsaw during the 1920s and 1930s, specifically the “Skamandrites.” This was a group of experimental poets founded in a literary café, “Under the Picador,” in Warsaw, in 1918. They were the first generation of a liberated Poland, which had been erased from the map of Europe by neighboring powers for over a century, and then regained independence following the First World War. In contrast to previous generations of Polish writers, the “Skamandrites” were free from national ideology and conventional patriotism. Literature, which before had to play a role of a guardian of the language and memory, could finally be spontaneous and innovative. One of those poets, Jan Lechoń, expressed the essence of their spirit in the following verse: “And in the spring let me see spring, not Poland.”10 Unlike other avant-garde movements, such as the Krakow avant-garde (inspired by Futurism), the “Skamandrites” valued emotions, common people, and nature–all forms of life, including the biological/organic aspect. Even though they promoted original and new ideas, their productions continued the Polish Romantic tradition (its focus on sentiment, folklore, and poetic form). At the same time, they were very cosmopolitan, and inspired by Russian and French tendencies.11 Fiedler’s travel reportage reflects many aspects of the “Skamander” group—the lack of political ideology, emphasis on emotions, nature, and poetic expression, as well as cosmopolitism and a fascination with the world. During the Second World War, Fiedler’s interests shifted from travel writing to active engagement in the conflict, and he wrote his most popular book about a legendary Polish air force unit, Squadron 303 (1942)—the highest-scoring Allied fighter squadron in the Battle of Britain. The book was published in England, and circulated clandestinely in the German-occupied Poland, boosting morale and inspiring the fight for freedom. After the war, Fiedler was encouraged by the communist government to return to Poland

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to be an advocate and a literary publicist for the country newly liberated from the Nazi oppression. In 1948, he settled with his family in a villa in Puszczykówko, from where he continued to travel and write. However, soon the communist authorities started to enforce the obedience to the ideology of social realism, and to apply restrictions toward artists and writers. Fiedler was not allowed to travel, and his work was censured due to cosmopoliticism, exoticism, and the lack of ideology: “Minęły czasy świetności egzotyzmu. Przestaliśmy spoglądać na dalekie kraje oczami Fiedlera, tego Fiedlera, któremu ryby śpiewały w Ukajali” (“The glory of exoticism has passed. We no longer look at faraway lands with Fiedler’s eyes, that Fiedler for whom the fish sang in Ucayali”; my trans.).12 In the 1950s, The River of Singing Fish was censured by the communist authorities because it “koncentruje się na otaczającym świecie przyrody, a sprawa człowieka jest dlań rzadko kiedy zagadnieniem pierwszoplanowym” (“concentrated on the natural world, and human concerns were rarely a priority”; my trans.).13 The title of the book itself communicates this eco-centric perspective, in which nonhuman nature has a “voice.” Fiedler dedicated entire chapters of his book to the fauna and flora of the Ucayali region, such as ants, parrots, spiders, lizards, and orchids. In a chapter, “An animal’s souls

Figure 7.2.  Entrance to Fiedler House/Museum, Puszczykowo. Photograph by Dan Day.

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revealed,” he discovered “the unplumbed depths of feeling which lurks in wild animals.”14 He found human qualities in all creatures of the tropical forest, reflecting, for example, on the Mygale spider as “a very tactful sort of robber” that was distinguished by “modesty and moderation.”15 Further, he reflected on the “cleverness and the unusual sense of solidarity” of parrots and their pure, disinterested friendship—“a rare enough trait even among human beings.”16 Also, the author described his experience with capturing a lizard, and then releasing it because of the animal’s “penetrating,” “steely,” and “eloquent” gaze that expressed “reproach as though reluctant to relinquish the power of its accusation.”17 Fiedler revealed to the reader how his pleasure of conquest vanished, and how the lizard’s gaze impacted him: “It was a reproach of all Nature against oppression by man. Or was it that I saw only the reflection of my own soul?”18 The author’s metaphysical reflection calls for a new ecological model, which expands the scope of scientific ecology with an ethical dimension. Fiedler has integrated animal ethics with environmental studies and nature writing. His exploration of rich emotional life of animals resonates in contemporary environmental, philosophical, and scientific studies, such as the most recent Frans de Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (2019), which claims: “Emotions are like organs [. . .] and we share them all with other mammals.”19 The author, a primatologist, explores the emotional continuity between humans and other species, using the example of a dying chimpanzee that recognizes and embraces her old friend—a Dutch biologist. De Waal demonstrates how modern science has finally recognized that animals are intelligent and emotional beings: “Today we dare speak of animal mental life only after a century of experiments on symbolic communication, mirror self-recognition, tool use, planning for the future, and adoption of another’s viewpoint. These studies have blown big drafty holes in the wall that supposedly separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.”20 The author argues that underestimating the emotions of animals has its roots in the theory of behaviorism, developed by B. F. Skinner in 1930s. According to this theory, all behavior is caused by external stimuli; therefore, animals are driven by instincts rather than internal mental states or consciousness. De Waal further elaborates that recognizing animals’ emotional intelligence has moral and ethical implications as it affects the way we treat them (he refers to industrial farms, habitat loss, and the use of animals in research). These attitudes toward animal life have contributed significantly to current ecological debates to decenter the human position in the natural world, in the context of biodiversity loss and climate emergency.21 Fiedler was one of the pioneers of these ideas, as he questioned human emotional superiority and exceptionalism in the world of nature. His chal-

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lenge of behaviorism was an avant-garde approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. He observed animals and wrote about their intentions, emotions, and intelligence—issues that have been ignored in the field of science until recently. In one of his reflections about animal instinct, he described a situation when the Papilionidae butterflies came to visit the passion flowers on a clearing, recently abandoned by hummingbirds. In the previous days, the hummingbirds had driven off all the enemies from the clearing and made the area safe for themselves. Driven by instinctive mimicry, the butterflies came flying in numbers, imitating the swift movements of the hummingbirds, as they knew that their predators were gone for a while. Fiedler calls their instinct “mysterious,” and poses a question: “What powerful force, at work with this stupendous jungle, had enticed them to the clearing? Who was it who gave them the finest possible, the most appropriate instruction?”22 The author recognizes that it was instinct that had driven the butterflies, however he also invites the reader to contemplate other possibilities, such as a certain degree of mental activity, consciousness, or awareness. It is important to mention that Fiedler’s perspective was not just that of a writer and journalist, but also a scientist. His university studies in the field of

Figure 7.3.  Arkady Fiedler’s Museum and Literary Atelier in Puszczykowo. Photograph by Frank Day.

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natural sciences were interrupted by the first world war, but later he continued his research, collecting and studying animal species for natural history museums. A significant ornithological collection from Fiedler’s expedition to Brazil of 1928/1929 has been preserved at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.23 Years later, in The River of Singing Fish, Fiedler reflected upon collecting zoological specimen for scientific research as an activity that “inflicted a terrible wrong, depriving [animals] of liberty, and often bringing them death.”24 He expanded the scientific approach to nature with an ethical dimension—a new attitude toward animal life, questioning strictly humancentered views on the environment. One of the chapters of The River of Singing Fish is dedicated to hunting and collecting hummingbirds for the Warsaw Museum. It contains a distressing description of the killing of a very brave hummingbird that had won “an absurdly unequal fight” with a hawk, and then was captured by the author and his companion, Dolores.25 The girl skillfully suffocated the bird, and its “fearless heart ceased to beat.”26 Fiedler’s reflection on this event is self-critical: “Despite its courage [the bird] had to be included in my collection.”27 Even though Fiedler led this expedition, he questioned the human pleasure of hunting. The chapter also includes passages expressing the author’s admiration for hummingbirds—“these courageous little fairies of the jungle [which] deserve their world renown.”28 He tells Dolores that the Indians refer to them as “living sunbeams,” and when she challenges the idea of sunbeams being alive, he affirms: “Yes, these are alive! Dolores, are you sure that sunbeams, I mean real sunbeams, are not living things?”29 Such an attitude toward nature was an avant-garde and transgressive perspective at the time when the book was written, as it pushed the boundaries of what was accepted as the norm. Fiedler refers to the Amerindian cosmology, which, in contrast to Western worldview, postulates animism—a belief system that attributes to nonhuman entities a spiritual essence, and therefore a perspective, or agency. Animated phenomena and creatures, such as living sunbeams and singing fish, inhabit the spirited nature represented in Fiedler’s book: “Everything multiplied and lived, lived with full, indominable spirit.”30 As Ratajczak observed, “Czytając książki Fiedlera, jesteśmy zaiste w zaczarowanym, a jednocześnie realnym świecie” (“While reading Fiedler’s books, we are indeed in an enchanted and yet real world,” my trans.).31 Fiedler describes the Amazon forest not only as a living organic body, but also an enchanted space: “its vastness began to obsess our nerves and minds, and assumed a blurred force of menacing mystery.”32 When his young travel companion, Chicinho, compares the Amazon to God, Fiedler comments that “he could not have guessed how much truth lay in his naïve words” since the Amazon is “vast, unfathomable, and almighty; it gives these people life, and it brings them

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death.”33 This vision of God’s immanence, or the divine manifested in nature, represents indigenous spirituality, which emphasizes an intimate interdependence between physical and spiritual aspects of life, as well as human and nonhuman worlds. According to this holistic and ecological perspective of the universe, all the phenomena—material and divine—complement each other, and there is no separation between human beings, their natural environment, and the spiritual world. The indigenous perspective is opposed to the Christian religion, which disregards the sacred nature of organic life, separates the human from the divine, and conceives the earthly life as a transitory step to heaven. According to this worldview, one that contradicts an ecological vision of the cosmos, human beings are masters of nature and can transform it as they wish. Fiedler recuperates indigenous worldviews, emphasizing the unity of spirit and matter, “świętość przyrody, równouprawnienie wszystkich żyjących stworzeń” (“the sacredness of nature and equality of all beings,” my trans.).34 By reenchanting and revering nature, the author revitalizes the indigenous religious system and promotes ecological awareness. Fiedler had been inspired by the Amerindian traditions since his childhood, when he was reading about them and then imagined adventures in the forest. This fascination continued throughout his life. When the communist authorities in Poland censored his literary work and prohibited his travels, the author lectured in schools on native American knowledge and practices. His historic family residence in Puszczykówko, operating as Museum and Literary Atelier since 1974, reflects Fiedler lifelong passion for indigenous histories and traditions. Apart from photographs and books, the museum contains an exhibition of exotic artefacts and ritual masks. Outside, in the Garden of Cultures and Tolerance, there is a collection of monuments of Aztec gods and Native American chiefs, a copy of a statue from the Eastern Island, and an actual size replica of Columbus’s ship, Santa Maria. It is interesting to note that the replica is not integrated with other exhibits, which all share certain spiritual, ceremonial, and artistic value. It stands rather isolated, in the back of the garden, as a technological oddity and a symbol of colonial power. The River of Singing Fish also contains descriptions of indigenous customs and lifestyles, which reflects the avant-garde attraction to the primitive, the exotic, and the “other” as an alternative to Western world order. In one chapter, dedicated to the Chama Indian tribe, Fiedler questions the idea of European superiority over the indigenous people: “We of the white race are proud of the fact that we have conquered the whole world by our intelligence, strength of character, and perfect organization, and because we have invented profound philosophic systems and highly effective guns. True, we pay polite tribute to the philosophy of the Brahmins and to Chinese culture, but there it all ends. A completely different situation arises when a white man

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Figure 7.4.  The Garden of Cultures and Tolerance, Puszczykowo. Photograph by Dan Day.

visits the River Ucayali, where the Chama Indian tribe lives.”35 He further elaborates on the perception that the indigenous people have of Europeans–as “handicaps” and “nitwits” since they completely lack ecological and practical knowledge.36 Fiedler suggests that the practical knowledge of Chama (using a canoe) is as valid as modern science (a steamboat) because it works better in local environments. This perception was not a common attitude at the time, as the first decades of the twentieth century glorified the scientific and technological progress. Rather, it belonged to the literary initiatives of the avantgarde that questioned Western civilization—“its smug self-conceptions, its cultural pieties, its racial prejudices, and its sense of historic exceptionalism.”37 Today, there is a growing number of authors who emphasize the importance of revitalizing local/indigenous beliefs and practices. For example, Raymond Pierotti, in Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology (2011), proposes to reevaluate the indigenous knowledge and to stimulate its dialogue with modern science in order to solve ecological problems. The author claims that, in contrast with scientific knowledge, the indigenous approach to the environment is “personal rather than abstract,” embedded deeply in their everyday life.38 In current ecological debate, this small-scale and intimate approach offers a valid alternative to the Western scientific/

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technological paradigm, which is failing to provide sustainability for our planet. The indigenous knowledge and traditions, which Fiedler honored in his research and writings, have served as influential sources in the field of contemporary environmental ethics, spiritual ecology, and ecocritical studies. Other examples of theories in which the indigenous vision of the environment has been used to enrich Western environmental thought include Aldo Leopold’s biocentric ethics. His foundational essay, “Land Ethic,” published posthumously in 1949, calls for respect for the land and “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”39 Like the indigenous worldview, Leopold questions Western postulations about humanity’s independent condition from nature. His concept of “biotic community” includes all members of an ecosystem, and consequently reflects the first law of ecology that “everything is connected to everything else.”40 Another parallel between indigenous ethics and modern ecology is Gaia hypothesis, formulated by James Lovelock, in 1971, which regards the Earth as superorganism, a living planet, and a complex interacting system. Also, in recent decades, many authors have revived native traditions and knowledge, expanding the scope of scientific ecology with a spiritual dimension.41 The concept of ecology has been redefined as a “fundamentally holistic” knowledge that “cannot truly be reduced.”42 Fiedler’s work opened ways toward refection on these ideas and helped to translate indigenous worldviews to Western sensibilities, as nature-based worldview was not a widely accepted environmental representation in 1930s. The literary representation of nature in the interwar period was dominated by poetic tropes, such as industrial pollution, toxicity, and wasteland. As Beret Strong stated, in The Poetic Avant-Garde, the period between the wars was “rife with fear, especially the fear of extinction loomed in the future,” and the artists were attracted to anarchy, abstraction, and irony.43 It was also a period of immense environmental transformations resulting from modernization— the rise of new technologies, rapid urbanization and industrialization, and the spread of mass communication. The new avant-garde movements, like futurism, glorified innovation, technology, and progress. Joshua Schuster observed that “the avant-garde sought to escape from nature and hitch its fate to the attention-grabbing of machines and mass media.”44 The nineteenth-century sublime and aesthetically appealing landscapes were replaced with the imagery of “urban grime, smokestacks, and industrial waste.”45 The first decades of the twentieth century was also a period of the rise of ecology as a scientific field, which had a profound impact on the representation of the natural world in art and literature. Schuster describes how the avant-garde styles broke from earlier sentimental narratives of romanticized landscapes and introduced the idea of “nature as a dynamic space”—“the world in motion, ever-exposed

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to change and disturbance, the appearance and disappearance of life.”46 As a result of the rise of natural sciences, biology and organic form became issues of interest for artists an writers. Fiedler embraced this aspect of the avant-garde, describing the dynamics of the Amazon forest: the instinct of self-preservation, copulation and proliferation of insects, symbiotic relationships between organisms, and omnipresent death. The River of Singing Fish focused on representing ecological conditions in Ucayali; however, it also included an awareness of the environmental impact of modernity and a desire to preserve the Amazon forest—“the most perfect form of vegetable life.”47 Fiedler admired the exuberant vitality of the jungle, still protected from the rapidly approaching modern progress: “although it sounds improbable in these days of wireless, radar, and aeroplanes, all this tremendous tract of country has so far largely resisted the march of civilization.”48 The book also promotes a spiritual awareness of biodiversity and a moral responsibility to the natural world, which were absent from the work of the author’s contemporaries. In a radio program, in 1974, Fiedler summarized his attitude toward nature in the following words: “Do przyrody podchodzę przede wszystkim uczuciowo i z sercem. Kochając słońce nie zamykam oczu na cienie, chociaż wiem, że w życiu jest więcej słońca niż cieni. O tym właśnie piszę w moich książkach” (“I approach nature primarily with emotions and heart. While loving the sun I do not close my eyes for shadows, even though, I know, that there is more sun light than shadow in life. This is what I write about in my books”; my trans.).49 This emotional and positive outlook of the author is intimately linked to the Polish avant-garde “Skamander” group, whose manifesto, published in 1920, read: “we do not wish to pretend that evil is nonexistent, but our love is stronger than all evil.”50 This manifesto “consisted in a programmatic denial of any program”—“programowa bezprogramowość,” and focused on exploring life in all its forms.51 Avoiding lofty and patriotic themes, the Skamandrites were interested in common people and everyday existence. Fiedler also demonstrated these tendencies, as he was more engaged in exploring the natural world and the depths of human/animal nature than promoting political views: “Ani w głowie było mu mieszać sie do polityki, żył sam na sam z puszczą” (“It did not occur to him to get involved in politics, he lived one-on-one with the forest”; my trans.).52 Even though Fiedler was not focused on promoting any ideology or program, his writings have offered new insights into ecological thinking, and explored a broad range of critical questions, such as the human position in the natural environment and our relationship with nature. By examining The River of Singing Fish and other representations of nature of the period, it is readily apprehended that Fiedler’s biocentric perspective was a departure from the established norms; however, at the same

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Figure 7.5.  Collection of Fiedler’s published works, Fiedler Museum. Photograph by Ida Day.

time, it brought into dialogue the environmental ideas not only of the author’s contemporaries but also the predecessors. Inspired by the art of Paul Gauguin (Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal first published in 1903), who rebelled against urban culture and focused on detailing life in exotic places characterized by sensual and simple living, Fiedler once confessed: “mnie interesuje prymityw [. . .]. Prości ludzie to mój żywioł” (“I am interested in the primitive. Simple people are my passion,” my trans.).53 In this respect, the author’s fascination was a continuation of the romantic and modernist tradition in their anti-rationalist tendencies and impulses toward a more genuine expression of human nature. He admired Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden (1854), on spiritual discovery and contemplation of nature in a cabin in the woods, became for Fiedler one of the most influential works: “dzieło to stanowiło dla niego swoistą Biblię, do której ciągle wracał” (“this masterpiece was for him a special Bible, to which he would always return,” my trans.).54 Also,

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Fiedler’s perspective that grants consciousness to nonhuman life was influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck’s nature essay, The Intelligence of Flowers, published in 1907, to which he paid tribute in the following words: “Jeśli w późniejszych latach wędrówek dostrzegałem w przyrodzie wiele piękna [. . .] w znacznej mierze zawdzięczałem to książce belgijskiego maga” (“In my later years of globetrotting, if I found beauty in nature [. . .] I owed it to the book by the Belgian marvel,” my trans.).55 One chapter of The River of Singing Fish is dedicated to the beauty and sensuality of orchids “as though they had a living, forceful personality,” which reflects Fiedler’s fascination with these flowers inspired by Maeterlinck.56 Considering all these influences, it is important to note that Fiedler’s innovative views were not developed in isolation, but in a simultaneous interaction with other environmental discourses.57 As Strong observed, “no work is completely avant-garde because every work necessarily relies on existing values.”58 Fiedler’s themes, perspective, and style are a manifestation of the dynamism of the avant-garde era and its celebration of change. To conclude, Arkady Fiedler’s The River of Singing Fish is an example of ecological and cultural avant-garde as it has prefigured the changes in human attitudes toward the natural world and expanded the environmental concerns

Figure 7.6.  Arkady Fiedler’s resting place, Puszczykowo, Wielkopolski National Park. Photograph by Eugene Zeb Kozlowski.

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of the time. Firstly, Fiedler developed an ethical orientation toward nature and a more holistic/biocentric worldview in which human life is part of the ecosystem. He fostered a dialogue between the early twentieth-century scientific ecological thinking and the current, much broader, ecological concerns, such as animal ethics. Secondly, the author attracted attention to the environmental consequences of modernity. The impact of the global transformations is visible in his innovative and vibrant travel reportage from the experimental interwar period, when environmental concerns and ecological awareness were not traditional themes of literature. Considering the cultural representation of nature and the environmental knowledge available at the time, Fiedler’s views were progressive since they promoted a reverence for the natural world in the era of science and industrialization. Finally, Fiedler revived the indigenous attitudes toward the environment, and by doing so, he anticipated many themes in contemporary ecocritical studies, such as spiritual ecology and Gaia theory. This essay has demonstrated how Fiedler’s work contributed to formulation of contemporary environmental ethics and helped to incorporate indigenous spiritualities into Western worldviews, which traditionally disregarded the sacred nature of organic life, and thus brought about current ecological crisis. Fiedler’s reenchantment of nature, spiritual awareness of the environment, and attribution of mental qualities to nonhuman beings are examples of his innovative outlook, which reevaluates the human position in ecological frameworks and has influenced the succeeding generations of authors. NOTES 1. Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 4. 2. Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism, 3. 3.  Józef Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali (Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS, 1994), 50. 4.  Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect to Nature,” in Environmental Ethics, eds. David Schmidt and Elizabeth Willott (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 87. See also James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). 5. Anna Szumna, Awangardia Środkowej i Wschodniej Europy—innowacja czy naśladownictwo? (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2014), 11. 6.  Travel literature as a genre credited with little critical attention has been discussed by Kimberly J. Healey in The Modernist Traveler (2003). The author points out that travel literature “may exist on the margins of the literary canon [. . .] yet the experience of travel was instrumental in shaping the way the world and self were understood and depicted in the twentieth century” (140). 7.  Arkady Fiedler, Mój ojciec i dęby (Warszawa, 1973), 29.

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8. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 8. Even though the critics compared Fiedler to Rudyard Kipling, Józef Ratajczak observed that Fiedler’s travels did not have a colonial or imperial component characteristic of the English writer. Fiedler felt connected to nature since the early childhood, and, for him, the tropical forests were objects of “exploration rather than exploitation” (43). 9.  Beret Strong, Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 1. 10.  Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), 385. 11.  Miłosz, in The History of Polish Literature compares the “Skamandrites” to the Russian Acmeists, since both favored the form and clarity over the vagueness of other avant-garde tendencies. 12.  Tomasz Kempiński, “Egzotyczny świat Arkadego Fiedlera,” Argumenta Historica Czasopismo Naukowo-Dydaktyczne 3 (2016): 51. 13. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 102. 14.  Arkady Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish (London: Readers Union with Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), 75. 15.  Ibid., 54. 16. Ibid.,189. 17.  Ibid., 110. 18.  Ibid., 110. 19.  Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (Waterville, Maine: Thorndike Press, 2019), 165. 20.  de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug, 9. 21.  For contemporary animal ethics see Peter Wohlleben’s The Inner Life of Animals (2017), and Aysha Akhtar’s Our Symphony with Animals (2019). These works demonstrate that animals are highly developed, intelligent, and compassionate creatures, and changing attitudes toward them is the next step in our moral evolution. 22. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 135. 23.  Fiedler’s contribution to the field of ornithology is studied by Christoph Hinkelmann and Jürgen Fiebig in “An Early Contribution to the Avifauna of Paraná, Brazil. The Arkady Fiedler’s Expedition of 1928/29” (2001). 24. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 77. 25. Ibid., 132. 26. Ibid., 133. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Ibid., 131. 29. Ibid., 143. 30.  Ibid., 47. 31. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 8. 32. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 17. 33.  Ibid., 17. 34. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 49. 35. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 118. 36.  Ibid., 118.

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37. David LeHardy Sweet, Avant-garde Orientalism: The Eastern ‘Other’ in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 6. 38.  Raymond Pierotti, Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology (New York, London: Routledge, 2011), 23. 39.  Aldo Leopold, “Land Ethic,” in Environmental Ethics Environmental Ethics, eds. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28. 40.  For Barry Commoner’s Laws of Ecology see The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (1971). 41.  See John A. Grim’s Indigenous Traditions and Ecology (2001). 42. John E. Carrol, Sustainability and Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 11. 43. Strong, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton, 26. 44. Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and AvantGarde Poetics, 7. 45.  Ibid., 2. 46.  Ibid., x. 47. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 18. 48.  Ibid., 18. 49. Karolina Chojnacka, “Sztafeta polskich reporterów: dwudziestolecie międzywojenne,” Nowy Folder (December 2018): n.p. 50.  Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 385. 51.  Ibid., 401. 52. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 43. 53.  Ibid., 45. 54.  Kempiński, “Egzotyczny świat Arkadego Fiedlera,” Argumenta Historica. Czasopismo Naukowo-Dydaktyczne 3 (2016): 43. 55. Ratajczak, Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali, 31. 56. Fiedler, The River of Singing Fish, 70. 57. For more information on plants as animate beings see Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira’s The Language of Plants (2017) and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2018). The authors bring up the ideas of Erasmus Darwin, an eighteenth–century naturalist and grandfather of Charles Darwin, who attributed to plants “sensation, movement, and certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence” (xi). 58. Strong, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton, 23.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Akhtar, Aysha. Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies. New York, London: Pegasus Books, 2019. Carrol, John E. Sustainability and Spirituality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

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Chojnacka, Karolina. “Sztafeta polskich reporterów: dwudziestolecie międzywojenne.” Nowy Folder. December 28, 2018. Accessed September 1, 2019. https://www .nowyfolder.com/sztafeta-polskich-reporterow-dwudziestolecie-miedzywojenne/. Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. Fiedler, Arkady. Mój ojciec i dęby. Warszawa, 1973. ———. The River of Singing Fish. London: Readers Union with Hodder and Stoughton, 1951. Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira, eds. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. New York: Dover Books, 1985. Grim, John A. Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. Healey, Kimberly J. The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900–1930. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Hinkelmann, Christoph, and Jürgen Fiebig. “An Early Contribution to the Avifauna of Paraná, Brazil. The Arkady Fiedler’s Expedition of 1928/29.” Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 121 (2001): 116–127. Kempiński, Tomasz. “Egzotyczny świat Arkadego Fiedlera.” Argumenta Historica. Czasopismo Naukowo-Dydaktyczne 3 (2016): 42–59. LeHardy Sweet, David. Avant-garde Orientalism: The Eastern ‘Other’ in TwentiethCentury Travel Narrative and Poetry. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017. Leopold, Aldo. “Land Ethic.” In Environmental Ethics Environmental Ethics, Edited by David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, 27–32. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Intelligence of Flowers. Translated by Philip Mosley. New York: State University of New York: 2007. Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983. Pierotti, Raymond. Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology. New York, London: Routledge, 2011. de Poncins, Gontran. Kabloona. In collaboration with Lewis Galantière. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941. Ratajczak, Józef. Gdy Warta wpadała do Ukajali. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS, 1994. Schuster, Joshua. The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and AvantGarde Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Strong, Beret E. The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Szumna, Anna. “Wstęp.” Kmiecik, Michalina and Małgorzata Szumna, eds. Awangarda Środkowej i Wschodniej Europy—innowacja czy naśladownictwo? Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwerstytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2014.

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Taylor, Paul W. “The Ethics of Respect to Nature.” In Environmental Ethics, Edited by David Schmidt and Elizabeth Willott, 83–95. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. AMS Press: New York, 1968. de Waal, Frans. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves. Waterville, Maine: Thorndike Press, 2019. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver, Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2018. ———. The Inner Life of Animals: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. New York: Random House, 2017.

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Chapter Eight

Science Fiction in the Russian Avant-garde Cinema of the 1920s and Anarchism Olga Burenina-Petrova

Tsvetan Todorov defined the fantastic as creative-receptive “experience of limits.”1 As Todorov states that the fantasic “represents the quintessence of literature insofar as the questioning the limit between real and unreal, proper to all literature, is its explicit center,”2 he essentially admits priority of this genre over all others. Author of a fantastic text becomes a carrier of a social, “transcendent” power, modeling a dual world where both real and unreal exhibit various types of relationships. In fantastic literature, the imaginary possesses unlimited freedom. As JeanPaul Sartre wrote in his “François Mauriac et la liberté,” the reader’s task is to transform the imagination into а “thick substance” (“Do you want your characters to be live? See it to it that they are free”).3 In his essay “What is literature?” Sartre defines an artist’s task as capturing the “dreams” in nature, transposing them “to canvasor in writing” and passing to the others. Art for Sartre is a ceremony of the gift-bringing—where an illusion “caught in flight” and reflected upon by the author, becomes a gift to the reader.4 An unlimited freedom of imagination, discussed by Sartre who used the examples of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed, is especially clearly expressed in the fantastic literature. Following Sartre’s definition, the fantastic also can be seen as a ceremony of gift-bringing, in which, however, the gift includes not only illusion but also reality itself. Considering Arthur Danto’s ideas of the symmetry of philosophical and literary discourses, and on necessity of imagination in both literature and philosophy,5 we can talk about the fantastic as both a literary and philosophical genre.6 Lev Shestov emphasized this close relationship between philosophy and the fantastic in one of the fragments of his All Things Are Possible (1905) where he presents philosophy as the art of fantastic illusions, a special form of the imaginary: 135

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Philosophy must have nothing in common with logic; philosophy is an art which aims at breaking the logical continuity of argument and bringing man out on the shoreless sea of imagination, the fantastic tides where everything is equally possible and impossible.7

Another thinker, Nikolay Lossky, defining the essence of philosophy, stated that the goal of this discipline is to comprehend the absolute (which is essentially the same as the goal of literature as defined by Sartre). However, being a form of comprehension of the absolute, philosophy, while embracing the immanent, attempts to use imagination in order also to reach outside of reality: The goal of philosophy is to embrace the world as a whole, including the supercosmic principle.8

The difference is that in a fantastic text, the embrace always becomes a capture: the fantastic genre is expansive and aggressive in literature and philosophy at the same time. As a sphere of the maximal freedom of creative imagination, the fantastic has a goal to capture the world as a whole through the play of the imaginative—space and time, real and unreal, past and present, expanding into literature, philosophy, and the media.9 Renate Lachmann, exploring the genesis of the fantastic and its semantics in the texts of various genres and various periods, notes the “ours vs. theirs” opposition as a feature of the fantastic discourse.10 In my opinion, a more characteristic feature here is the removal of this opposition through expropriation: “theirs” is assimilated and becomes “our.” Being an aggressive genre, the fantastic holds a “strong position” in both literature and philosophy since gift-bringing and sacrifice always reveal the sacral. As it creates a time-space recombination of objects and changes the accepted norms of artistic conventions (Yuri Lotman),11 the fantastic, understood as “shaking the foundations of the existing order” or “inversion of the actual knowledge about human nature” (Renate Lachmann),12 appears to be typologically closest to the philosophy of anarchism. This connection probably can be best seen in the definition of the fantastic by Roger Caillois: The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality, rather than a total replacement of the reality by a world that has nothing but miracles.13

The invasion of the inadmissible into human life breaks the hierarchy of the daily rhythm, establishing random connections, and a result all values

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become relative, and the reality becomes unstable, flexible, and lacking the centralized power. The anarchist theory has been established and popularized within the framework of fantastic literature. Leonid Geller observed that actualization of the fantastic genre falls on specific literary epochs, amоng which he listed the classical antiquity, Middle Ages, Romanticism, and Symbolism. One has to agree with Geller’s comment that the theoreticians of the Symbolism, who treated “the surrounding world as a reflection of higher reality,” created the “ideal environment” for the fantastic literature.14 I think, however, that generalization of the fantastic became characteristic not only of the Symbolism, but for the Modernism as a whole due to the general trend of this epoch to break with all tradition, and therefore its affinity to various anarchist philosophies. At the same time, many artists attempted to present anarchism as a unique philosophical project in the history of culture. The avant-garde, and mainly the revolutionary cinema avant-garde assigned a special role to the fantastic genre, largely due to its closeness to the anarchism. Along with the anarchist philosophy, the fantastic genre became part of the world outlook that united many artists of the avant-garde epoch. The avant-garde artists were especially interested in science fiction due to the claim of the avant-garde being both modern art and the art of the future, which must follow the new methods of understanding both the real and the imagined worlds. Science fiction, coming close to the anarchist philosophy, becomes a Utopian project of the avant-garde, including in particular the early Soviet cinema.15 Expansive nature of the fantastic genre becomes even more aggressive in the science-fiction avant-garde film: much more fantastic than in any period in the past, its imagination attempts to embrace the entire world, space and time, real and unreal, past and present. The avant-garde fantastic cinema did not tolerate any supernatural. While in early, prerevolutionary Russian cinema most fantastic films were based on fairytales and classical literature with elements of mysticism,16 the Soviet avant-garde cinema was almost entirely occupied by science fiction, constantly appealing to scientific knowledge. Appropriating the scientific methodology, postrevolutionary avant-garde cinema claimed that the film text should be interpreted as a scientific text. The image of victorious science, and the technological progress based on it, dominated the science fiction of the early Soviet avant-garde cinema. According to the avant-garde thinking, science will help the humankind to conquer space, time, and the entire universe, so all the culture of the past will yield to a new culture, based on electricity and machines. The relationship between avant-garde cinema and science developed in the direction of the cinema conquering science. The orientation toward scientific progress was necessary for

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avant-garde cinema to legitimize its nihilist position toward any government and its support of the anarchist society model. One of the important themes of science-fiction avant-garde cinema was electrification. The revolutionary humankind was to direct the energy of its machines toward reshaping matter. One of the most significant versions of this idea was the concept of transmitting energy through the atmosphere and focusing it for various purposes, including transmission of electricity over large distances. In other words, this was the idea of Alexey Tolstoy’s “hyperboloid” or a Death Ray that reflects real-life projects of Nikola Tesla and Mikhail Filippov. One of the earliest literary sources of this idea is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), where invisible heat rays used by the Martians burn down all the organic and inorganic matter. The avant-garde cinema follows the anarchist pathos of The War of the Worlds, futurology of Wells’s “science romances” and his skeptical, anarchist view toward any state: the alien invasion violates all established boundaries on Earth. In addition, avant-garde cinema was influenced by futurology of some Russian science-fiction authors such as Ivan Morskoy, Alexander Bogdanov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, etc. In science-fiction avant-garde cinema, a constant theme, equated to a war or a catastrophe, is an anarchist act that destroys an aesthetic object through its deforming energy. Often, the hero of science-fiction film is a scientist armed by a handgun. An armed scientist is a cinematic metaphor of free-thinking that confronts any compulsory force and power of a single person over another (or many others). For avant-garde cinema, science presented an opportunity to replace the political power that maintains privilege for a few by a voluntary and interested cooperation. The objectivity of scientific approach becomes a priority for the artistic work of the Russian avant-garde cinema directors. They work out theoretical concepts and categories, attempting to establish fundamental laws of cinema, create theories in order to explain all kinds of facts Ilya Erenburg in his Materialization of the Fantastic (1917) wrote that In cinema, it is hard to separate the technique from the art. Every new image here gives birth to aesthetic theories.17

According to Erenburg, the science-like component of the cinema is what unleashes fantasy. The early avant-garde cinema was seriously engaged in searching for scientific interpretations of the effects of color, shape and motion on the viewer, in creating the film time and space. These investigations resulted in Lev Kuleshov’s “effect of non-existent space,” Sergey Eisenstein’s “montage of the attractions,” the theory of eccentric farces of Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Science, in its turn, was represented by cinema as the universal way

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of cooperation among free individuals and collectives. For the avant-garde cinema, practical necessity of science was overshadowed by its potential of bringing together the ideas of freedom and social justice. The first person to declare, at the theoretical level, that cinema is science was Lev Kuleshov, in his first article “Iskusstvo svetotvorchestva” [“The Art of Creation by Light”]. In his 1922 article titled “Iskustvo, sovremennaia zhizn’ i kinematografiia” [“Art, Contemporary Life, and Cinema”], as Kuleshov stated that the modern art was in a “hopeless dead-end,” he went further and declared the scientific method as the criterion of truth.18The laws of cinema, according to Kuleshov, qualify it as a field of science: Modern art, in the shape in which it now exists, should either completely disappear or take new forms. I cannot say what will happen to it. However, it is clear that all the energy, all the means, all the knowledge of the laws of time and space that are applied to art, should take direction that most naturally relevant to the life in our times. A plan of work: 1. Precision in time. 2. Precision in space. 3. Reality of the material. 4. Precision in organization (Cohesion between the elements and their distribution). What is it? It is the cinema.19

Kuleshov’s theoretical works can be considered not only the first Russian manifests of the cinema theory20 but also an attempt to describe the cinema as an artistic anarchy where, due to the rejection of structural principle of text organization and combination of phenomena and issues of various levels, an absolute equivalency between nonequivalent phenomena is achieved. We can see that Kuleshov’s plan of cinema work lacked centralized power controlling film images: their “cohesion” and “distribution” appeared to happen by mutual agreement. The Soviet cinema theory would be further developed by Sergey Eisenstein and Valentin Turkin; however, Lev Kuleshov remains the pioneering figure in this field. Kuleshov directed his first independent, experimеntal film in 1918, working in the Khanzhonkov studio. It was Proekt inzhenera Praita [The Project of Engineer Pright],21 the very first film of early Soviet avant-garde.22 The screenplay, which had the same title, was written by Kuleshov’s older brother, Boris. Interestingly, Boris Kuleshov was not a professional writer but an engineer who worked at an electric power station. The idea of the film belonged to

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him. The film was made as a contrast to the salon melodramas of that timeand was based on real industrial events. It elaborated the hydraulic method of peat mining invented in 1912 by Robert Klasson, a Russian engineer. Klasson built a unique electric power station fueled by peat instead of a very expensive oil. This station, named Elektroperedacha (today’s GRES-3 in Noginsk), was built in 1914, surrounded by settlement housing electric energy workers. Klasson’s methods were further developed in the 1920s when he actively participated in the GOELRO state electrification plan. In 1926, after making an emotional presentation about electrification at the meeting of the Supreme Council of National Economy, Klasson died from a heart attack. Kuleshov’s enthusiastic image of Engineer Pright was full of allusions to Robert Klasson, up to a certain facial resemblance. In 1924, after his return from emigration, Yakov Protazanov filmed Aelita: the Queen of Mars, a screen version of Alexey Tolstoy’s science fiction novel, Aelita (1923). There, Protazanov followed up on Kuleshov’s image of a scientist armed with a handgun. Screen versions of literary works always had a central place in Protazanov’s work. Already in 1912, he made a film based on Leonid Andreev’s play Anfisa; and a year later, another film based on Anastasiya Verbitskaia’s Kliuchi Schastia [Keys to Happiness]. In 1915, together with Vladimir Gardin, Protazanov filmed Leo Tolstoy’s Voina i Mir [War and Peace], and later, by himself, Nikolay Stavrogin, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Besy [The Possessed]. In 1916, his screen version of Pushkin’s Pikovaia Dama [The Queen of Spades] appears, and in 1918, Otets Sergii [Father Sergius] based on Leo Tolstoy’s short novel. As noticed before, the early cinema avant-garde rarely created films based on works of literature since it tried to demonstrate its independence from the tradition and the literary discourse that expressed this tradition. In his screen version of Aelita, Protazanov clearly ignores the connection to the original novel as well as to the space-faring tradition of science fiction which goes back to Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde ou les états et empires de la Lune (1657), H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), and in the case of Aelita, especially to the Martian series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (from 1912). The plot of Alexey Tolstoy’s novel revolved around the travel of Earth people to Mars. Mstislav Los’, an engineer who built the interplanetary spaceship, and his companion, a discharged Red Army soldier Alexey Gusev, arrive on Mars where they find a humanoid civilization. Aelita, daughter of Tuskub, the Chief of the Martian High Council, falls in love with Los’. After the failed attempt at a Martian revolution, Los’ has to leave his beloved behind and returns to Earth together with Gusev. Unlike Alexey Tolstoy, Protazanov was more interested in the earthly life of his characters. His scenes set in Moscow are filmed with a great fondness. Also, Protazanov’s Aelita shows

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a certain resemblance to Lev Kuleshov’s The Project of Engineer Pright; the somewhat complex plot of Protazanov’s film seems to be largely based on that of Kuleshov’s. In the latter, the plot involves an inventor, Engineer Pright, and his electric power station. In Aelita, a complex intrigue revolves around Engineer Los’ and his incredible invention, an “interplanet one f” spaceship. The action begins in the radio lab where Los’ and his colleagues receive a signal from space that reads “ANTA . . . ODELI . . . UTA.” In the same way, the key action in Kuleshov’s film begins in Pright’s study. Just like The Project of Engineer Pright, Protazanov’s Aelita was an adventure film with fights, chases, and a distinct criminal subplot. In Protazanov’s film, it is Engineer Los’ who wields a handgun, while in Alexei Tolstoy’s original novel the gun is used by Gusev, a soldier: They ran, stumbling, toward the spaceship. The creature near it moved away, hopped among the cactuses, leapt high, spread its long webby wings, shot into the air with a crackling noise, and, describing, a circle over their heads, soared into the blue. It was the creature they had taken for a bird. Gusev aimed his revolver at it, but Los’ knocked the gun out of his hand. “You’re mad!” he cried. “Can’t you see it’s a Martian?” Gusev stared open-mouthed at the strange creature circling above them in the deep-blue sky. Los’ pulled out his handkerchief and waved. “Take care,” said Gusev. “He may plug us from up there.” “Put your revolver away, I tell you.” The large bird descended. Now they saw that it was a man-like being seated in the saddle of a flying-machine. Two curved mobile wings flapped on either side, at the level of his shoulders. A disc whirred a little below the wings—a propeller apparently. Behind the saddle hung a tail with levers protruding from it. The machine was as mobile and pliant as a living being. It dived and glided over the field with one wing up and the other down. Finally, they saw the Martian’s head in an egg-shaped helmet with a tall peak. He wore goggles, and his long face was brick-red, wizened and sharp-nosed. He opened his mouth and squeaked. Then he flapped his wings rapidly, landed, ran a few steps and jumped out of his saddle some thirty paces away from the travellers. The Martian resembled a man of medium height. He was clad in a loose yellow jacket, and his spindle legs were bound tightly above the knees. He pointed angrily at the fallen cactuses, but when Los and Gusev made a step in his direction, he jumped back into his saddle, shook his long finger at them, took off almost without a run, then landed again, shouting in a thin, squeaking voice and pointing at the broken plants.23

In the film version of Aelita, the armed protagonist commits a crime. Returning from a business trip, Los’ sees kissing shadows on a wall, one of which belongs to Erlikh, an adventurer who lived in Los’s apartment.

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Los’ thinks that Erlikh is seducing his wife Natasha, and shoots her out of jealousy. This gunshot cuts all the connection of Los’ with his past and determines his future. Neither aesthetics nor ethics define the truth for him from this moment. Los’ puts on make-up posing as another engineer, Spiridonov (who left Russia), and starts constructing his “interplanet one f.” In this way, Los’ accepts the symbols of the new faith, directed toward sacralization of scientific knowledge. Also in 1924, another science-fiction film appeared, Stal’nye zhuravli [The Steel Cranes],24 directed by Vladimir Gardin. The film starts in 1912 as Mitya Guy, a worker’s son, dreams as a child about flying, then constructs an airplane, and flies it, not entirely successfully, at a country fair. Ten years later, Mitya becomes a Soviet test pilot. In the first years of NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921–1929), he works on military inventions andcreates a gas called triasin. Shells filled by this gas burn all living matter. Guy is convinced that the “outcome of future wars is decided by the aviator and the chemist.” A gang of robbers steals his blueprints but the armed Guy pursues them; despite being one-eyed, he skillfully wields a handgun and eventually saves his intellectual property. In the end of the film, the world becomes a single mechanical eyepiece. The barrel of a handgun and the inventor’s eye are equivalent to the “cinema eye” (kinoglaz) of Dziga Vertov, which penetrates into the world and decodes it, making new and unexpected discoveries.25 The plot of The Steel Cranes was further used by Semyon Timosheko who directed the film Napoleon-gaz [The Napoleon Gas] (1925). In this film, a propagandist Komsomol girl arrives to a collective farm. She has a dream that the foreign imperialists invented a new kind of chemical weapon. An American air squadrоn, armed with this gas, launches an attack. American workers warn the Soviets, but the attack on Leningrad is commenced, and the American commandos even temporarily seize the suburbs of Leningrad; eventually, the Red Army repels the attack and wins. One can feel the parallel between science fiction and anarchism in this film. The same parallel was first expressed already ten years before Russian Revolution by Ivan Morskoy in his 1907 anti-utopia Anarkhisty budushchego (Moskva cherez 20 let) [The Anarchists of the Future (Moscow in 20 Years)].26 This novel starts from the theater performance in Moscow, staging Leonid Andreev’s play Konets mira [The End of the World], a paraphrase of the title of the real, famous play by Andreev, Zhizn’ cheloveka [The Life of Man] (1907). The performance is attended by various politicians, including the anarchists, who then transfer the play’s fantastic plot into reality. In Morskoy’s novel, in 1927 the Anarchists attempt to seize power in Russia. They build an airship, which shells Moscow leaving the city in ruins, stopping the subway and television. In the anarchist-free Petersburg, the government defends

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itself by building their own military airship, and then an air force. Eventually, the government troops shoot down the anarchist device and restore the control of Moscow and the state. The specificity of science-fiction genre— going back to the futuristic air battles in H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1899)—is enhanced here by its plot dealing with the anarchists. There are parallels in this novel with Petr Tkachev’s article “The Anarchy of Thought” (1875), critical of the anarchist theory of Mikhail Bakunin and his followers. The implementation of the anarchism, Tkachev maintained, will lead to the catastrophe since “the Anarchists want to destroy everything, to burn all the stamp paper.”27 Tkachev talks not just about the anarchist philosophy but about the “anarchy” of entropy and chaos. The anarchists in Morskoy’s novel fit quite well into the image of those representatives of the “anarchy of thought” ridiculed by Tkachev.28 Their actions reflect universal chaos, anarchy, decay of the language and destruction of the harmonious image of the humankind. The ensuing anarchy is shown as the mode of being opposite to the rationalistic systematism, allowing multiple paradoxes and contradictions, a “situation out of control.” Another pretext of Timoshenko’s Napoleon-gaz screenplay is a Utopian novel by Apollon Karelin (1921), Rossiia v 1930 godu [Russia in 1930]. There, Karelin presents in a literary form his ideas of the state, which he at the same time published in his trait Gosudarstvo i anarkhisty [The State and the Anarchists] (1918). Rephrasing Herbert Spencer, who suggested that the state was born from an attack, Karelin concludes that “where there was, and is, no compulsion and violence, there will be no state.”29 An anarchist society of the future, thinks Karelin, will be similar to conflict-free communities of the Australian Aborigines, the Eskimos, the Aleuts, or the American Indians.30 The model of these communities fits the Anarchist ideas about the nature of the state: The state was never a result of the evolution of society. The state is a result of violent coercion by some people over others, and the manifestation of such violence. This is why the Anarchists consider the state to be a harmful institution and work to destroy it. The Anarchist society will not have even a shadow of coercive power.31

In his fantastic Utopian novel Russia in 1930, Karelin depicts a society built on the Anarchist model: it is based on barter of goods and lacks money—and therefore has no crookery and theft; the “country of the victorious Anarchism” has no alcohol since the Anarchists destroyed all wine and liquor factories. Karelin employs fantastic literature and anarchism as two typologically related narrative categories: a story about anarchism is

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possible within the genre of a science-fiction Utopia, while the fantastic content is given with the thematic background of anarchism.32 In 1925, Lev Kuleshov, with the participation of Vsevolod Pudovkin, filmed a science-fiction thriller Luch smerti [The Death Ray]. There, a Soviet engineer Podobed invents a “Death Ray”—a weapon of destruction that can remotely explode combustibles, and is intended to fight the Imperialists. The apparatus is sought by Helium factory workers to destroy their exploiters, and by the factory owners, to fight the rebels in their country. The enemy spies steal the invention, and it is used to put down a workers’ strike. A handgun wielded by one of the spies symbolizes the general concept of the film: the sacral scientific knowledge can be achieved by forceful appropriaton. Eventually, the apparatus falls to the workers who use Podobed’s Death Ray to explode the airplane squadron sent to bomb them, and overthrow the Capitalist government. The idea of a Death Ray was attractive not only to the avant-garde cinema but also to the literature of that time. Also in 1925, Alexey Tolstoy publishes the journal version of the first part of his novel Giperboloid inzhenera Garina [The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin] (Krasnaya nov’, No. 7–9), titled “Ugolnye piramidki” [“The Coal Pyramids”]. The central character of this novel, Engineer Garin, invents a new type of weapon and uses it to seize an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, where he starts mining gold from the Earth’s interior. In the 1920–1930s, Sergey Bobrov published three social science-fiction novels: Vosstanie mizantropov [The Rebellion of Misanthropes] (1922), Spetsifikatsiia Iditola [The Specification of Iditol] (1923) and Nashedshii sokrovishche [One Who Found a Treasure] (1931). In The Specification of Iditol, Bobrov tells about the simultaneous discovery made by three genius scientists in different countries who invent the way of releasing enormous energy by splitting the atom. At the same time, the intertextual allusions to these literary sources were intentionally weakened in Kuleshov’s The Death Ray. The director also does not make a clear reference to the Martian death rays in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. More direct prototypes of Engineer Podobed were most likely real inventors of the devices able to generate a flow of charged particles, such as Nikola Tesla and Mikhail Filippov.33 The theme of a catastrophe was also present in Aero NT-54, a sciencefiction film by Nikolay Petrov, which featured a Soviet engineer who invents a superengine for airplanes, and in Yakov Morin’s film Kommunit (or Russkiigaz [The Russian Gas]), where the Soviet scientists invent an extremely powerful paralyzing gas. Both films, released in 1925, are now lost, and their content is known only from plot descriptions. The avant-garde cinema, rejecting the fictional aspect, insisted that its fantastic images should be taken as real. The phenomenon of the 1920s

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science-fiction films was that they were destined to become a new reality. It is characteristic that space-travel science-fiction films—such as Protazanov’s Aelita or its animation parody Interplanetary Revolution34—present alternative Anarchist/Utopian projects (clearly influenced by science fiction and views of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who advocated human settlement on other planets). The goal of these projects was to liberate not only Earth but all the planets from the state power. NOTES 1.  Tsvetan Тodorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 48 2.  Тodorov, The Fantastic, 168 3.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Francois Mauriac and Freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays. Transl. by Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 7. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? Transl. by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 53. 5. Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1–21. On the genre principle in philosophy, see Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 135–161. 6.  On the role of imagination in philosophy, see: Albert William Levi, Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1962) and Richard Eldridge (Ed.), Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7.  Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1920), 37. 8. Nikolay O. Lossky, Istoriia russkoi filosofii [The History of Russian Philosophy] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), 42 (in Russian). Another difference can be seen if one combines the Formalist definition of literature with philosophical discourse. Both literature and philosophy represent a certain statement: literature is a statement directed at expression, while philosophy is a statement directed at the content, the idea. It is quite clear, however, that any idea in a philosophical text must use imagination to provide any idea with a visible and perceived form. It is not by chance that Plato’s word “idea” is derived from “vision.” 9.  See in detail: Olga Burenina-Petrova, “O russkoi fantasticheskoi filosofii [On Russian fantastic philosophy],” in Intellekt, voobrazhenie, intuitsiia: razmyshleniia o gorizontakh soznaniia (mifologicheskii i khudozhestvennyi opyt) [Intellect, Imagination, Intuition: Thoughts about the Horizons of the Consciousness (Mythological and Artistic Experience)], ed. by Liubov Moreva (Saint Petersburg: Eidos, 2001), 155–169 (in Russian). 10.  Renate Lachmann, Diskursy fantasticheskogo [The Discoures of the Fantastic]. Transl. from German by Renate Lachmann (Moscow: NLO, 2009), 7 (in Russian).

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11.  Yuri M. Lotman, Istoriia i tipologiia russkoikul’tury [The History and Typology of Russian Culture] (Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2002), 200 (in Russian). 12. Lachmann, Diskursy fantasticheskogo, 5. 13. Roger Caillois, V glub’ fantasticheskogo [Into the Depth of the Fantastic]. Transl. by N. Kislova (Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2006), 110–111 (in Russian). 14. Leonid Geller, Vselennaia za predelom dogmy. Sovetskaiia nauchnaiia fantastika. [The Universe Beyond the Dogma: The Soviet Science Fiction] (London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd., 1985), 39 (in Russian). 15. On the meaning of the fantastic in the avant-garde, see in detail: Olga Burenina-Petrova, “O smysle fantasticheskogo v avangarde. [On the meaning of the fantastic in the avant-garde],” in Otavangarda do sots-arta: kul’tura sovetskogo vremeni. Sbornikstatei v chest’ 75-letiia professor Khansa Giuntera [From the Avangarde to Soz-art: the Culture of Soviet Time. A Collection of Works Honoring 75th Birthday of the Professor Hans Günther], ed. Cornelia Ichin and Ilya Kukui (Belgrade: Izdatel’stvo filologicheskogo fakul’teta v Belgrade [Department of Philology, University of Belgrade], 2016), 41–50 (in Russian). 16. Some of the prerevolutionary Russian fantastic films were: V polnoch’ na kladbishche, ili Rokovoe pari) [Midnight at the Graveyard, or The Fateful Wager) by VasilyGoncharov (1910), Tainstvennyi nekto [A Myserious Someone] (1914) by Khanzhonkov studio; Liliya Bel’gii [A Belgian Lily] by Vladislav Starevich (1915), Venchal ikh satana [They Were Married by the Satan] by Vyacheslav Viskovsky (1917), Kobra Kapella, ili Zhenshchina-zmeia) [Cobra Capella, or Snake Woman)], Satana likuiushchii [The Satan Triumphant] by Yakov Protazanov (1917), etc. 17. Ilya Erenburg, Materializatsiia fantastiki [Materialization of the Fantastic] (Moscow-Leningrad: Kinopechat’, 1927), 26 (in Russian). 18.  Kuleshov wrote: “The modern art came to a hopeless dead-end. It is unprofessional, it is produced by utter dilletantes. Go to any exhibition of modern paintings, listen to or read modern poets and writers, go to a theatre—and you will easily find the triumph of the dilettante and the amateur. Only amateurs—without any study of their craft, without mastering their material, without any good instruments, just from sheer brazenness—attempt to create a decent product, a decent artwork. Only amateurs can produce their goods without a scientific study of the laws of their industry. Since an artist must deal with both the material and the methods of overcoming this material, he must carefully study all the features, all the aspects, and all ways to manage it.” See: Lev Kuleshov, “Iskustvo, sovremennaia zhizn’ I kinematografiia” [“Art, Contemporary Life, and Cinema”]. In: Lev Kuleshov. Sobranie sochinenii v tryokh tomakh [Collected Works in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1. Teoriia. Kritika. Pedagogika [Theory. Criticism. Pedagogy] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 88 (in Russian). 19. Kuleshov, Sobranie sochinenii v tryokh tomakh [Collected Works in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1. Teoriia. Kritika. Pedagogika [Theory. Criticism. Pedagogy], 1987, 89 (in Russian). 20. Rostislav Yurenev, “Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov.” In Lev Kuleshov, S’yomka pod obstrelom [Lev Kuleshov: Filming under Shelling]. In Lev Kuleshov: Sobranie sochinenii v tryokh tomakh [Collected Works in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1. Teoriia. Kritika. Pedagogika [Theory. Criticism. Pedagogy](Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 19–54 (in Russian).

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21.  The Project of the Engineer Pright is only partially preserved. A new montage version of the with new subtitles and characters’ names, was created and presented by Nikolay Izvozov in 2001. 22.  On Kuleshov’s experiments, and his new “anthropology of an actor,” see more details in Boris Yampolsky, Yazyk—telo—sluchai: Kinematograf i poiski smysla [Language—Body—Chance: The Cinema in Search of Meaning] (Moscow: NLO, 2004), 152–172 (in Russian). 23.  Alexei Tolstoy, Aelita. Translated from the Russian by Lucy Flaxman (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 35–36. 24. Another title of this film is Chetyre and piat’ [Four and Five]. Its screenplay’s author, Georgy Grebner, graduated from the Marine College in 1915, and in 1918–1922, was a war journalist. 25.  Interestingly, a world-watching eyepiece (an alien spaceship) is a central image of a recent Russian science fiction film by Fyodor Bondarchuk, Attraction (2017). 26. Ivan Morskoy, Anarkhisty budushchego (Moskva cherez 20 let). Fantasticheskii roman [Anarchists of the Future (Moscow in 20 Years). A Fantastic Novel] (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipo-litog. V. Chicherina, 1907) (in Russian). 27.  Petr Tkachev, “Anarkhiia mysli [The Anarchy of Thought].” In Kladezi mudrosti rossiiskikh filosofov. Sbornik statei [The Wells of Wisdom of Russian Philosophers. A Collection of Papers] (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 195 (in Russian). 28.  The subplot of this novel describes a Social Democratic republic established on one of the Atlantic islands, named Karlosia, in honor of Karl Marx. Its elected dark-skinned president, John Beach, is a friend of Maxim Gorky. The story of Karlosia is as important for the novel as the anarchist war story. The future cannot be predicted and, as the author maintains, lacks hierarchical structure; therefore, only an ironic anti-utopia can predict which values will become central for a culture, and which will be pushed to its periphery. Karlosia is perceived in the same paradoxical and apocalyptic way as the events in Moscow that falls to the Anarchists. The name of the republic refers not only to Karl Marx but also to the Marxist idea, to some degree taken from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that the state will “wither” in the future society. Karlosia, in fact, is an invariant of an Anarchist society. 29. Apollon Karelin, Gosudarstvo i anarkhisty [The State and the Anarchists] (Moscow: Buntar’ [The Rebel], 1918), 12 (in Russian). 30. Karelin, Gosudarstvo i anarkhisty, 11. 31. Karelin, Gosudarstvo i anarkhisty, 92. 32.  Karelin refers here to the ideas of Petr Kropotkin, whom he befriended in 1911. This is how Kropotkin described the future society in his “Memoirs of a Revolutionist”: “. . . We saw that a new form of society is germinating in the civilised nations, and must take the place of the old one: a society of equals, who will not be compelled to sell their hands and brains to those who choose to employ them in a haphazard way, but who will be able to apply their knowledge and capacities to production, in an organism so constructed as to combine all the efforts for procuring the greatest sum possible of well-being for all, while full, free scope will be left for every individual initiative. [. . .] There will be full freedom for the development of new forms of production, invention, and organisation; individual initiative will be encouraged, and the tendency toward uniformity and centralization will be discouraged. Moreover, this

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society will not be crystallized into certain unchangeable forms, but will continually modify its aspect, because it will be a living, evolving organism; no need of government will be felt, because free agreement and federation can take its place in all those functions which governments consider as theirs at the present time, and because, the causes of conflict being reduced in number, those conflicts which may still arise can be submitted to arbitration” (Kropotkin, Petr I., Memoirs of a Revolutionist (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1899), 206–207). Interestingly, the Futurist poet Vasily Kamensky in 1925 published a Utopian story “Perm in 1950” (newspaper Zvezda, Perm, 3–4 June 1925) where he tried to show the city in twenty-five years. 33.  Podobed’s image also can be referable to other “death ray” inventors such as Giulio Ulivi who in 1913 offered to the British Admiralty a method of exploding mines by invisible rays; or Harry Grindell Matthews who after the WWI demonstrated some kind of a powerful projector that allegedly beamed energy (Matthews’s Death Rays). 34. In 1924, Vasily Zhuravlev published a screenplay he offered to Goskino, titled Zavoevanie Luny misterom Foksom i misterom Trottom [The Conquest of the Moon by Mr. Fox and Mr. Trott]. The feature film was never made, but the screenplay resulted in Mezhplanetnaya revolutsia [Interplanetary Revolution], one of the first Soviet animation films directed by Nikolay Khodataev, Zenon Komissarenko, and Yuri Merkulov.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Burenina-Petrova, Olga, “O russkoi fantasticheskoi filosofii [On Russian fantastic philosophy].” In Intellekt, voobrazhenie, intuitsiia: razmyshleniia o gorizontakh soznaniia (mifologicheskii i khudozhestvennyi opyt) [Intellect, Imagination, Intuition: Thoughts about the Horizons of the Consciousness (Mythological and Artistic Experience)], edited by Liubov Moreva, 155–169. Saint Petersburg: Eidos, 2001 (in Russian). Burenina-Petrova, Olga, “O smysle fantasticheskogo v avangarde. [On the meaning of the fantastic in the avant-garde].” In Ot avangarda do sots-arta: kul’tura sovetskogo vremeni. Sbornikstatei v chest’ 75-letiia professora Khansa Giuntera [From the Avan-garde to Soz-art: the Culture of Soviet Time. A Collection of Works Honoring 75th Birthday of the Professor Hans Günther], edited by Cornelia Ichin and Ilya Kukui, 41–50. Belgrade: Izdatel’stvo filologicheskogo fakul’teta v Belgrade [Department of Philology, University of Belgrade], 2016 (in Russian). Callois, Roger, V glub’ fantasticheskogo [Into the Depth of the Fantastic]. Translated from French by N. Kislova. Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2006 (in Russian). Danto, Arthur, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Eldridge, Richard (Ed.), Beyond Representation. Philosophy and Poetic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Erenburg, Ilya, Materializatsiia fantastiki [Materialization of the Fantastic]. Moscow-Leningrad: Kinopechat’, 1927 (in Russian).

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Geller, Leonid, Vselennaia za predelom dogmy. Sovetskaiia nauchnaiia fantastika. [The Universe Beyond the Dogma. The Soviet Science Fiction]. London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd., 1985 (in Russian). Karelin, Apollon, Gosudarstvo i anarkhisty [The State and the Anarchists]. Moscow: Buntar’ [The Rebel], 1918 (in Russian). Kropotkin, Petr I., Memoirs of a Revolutionist. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1899. Kuleshov, Lev, “Iskustvo, sovremennaia zhizn’ i kinematografiia” [“Art, Contemporary Life, and Cinema”]. In Lev Kuleshov: Sobranie sochinenii v tryokh tomakh Collected Works in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1. Teoriia. Kritika. Pedagogika [Theory. Criticism. Pedagogy]. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987, 88–90 (in Russian). Lachmann, Renate, Diskursy fantasticheskogo [The Discoures of the Fantastic]. Translated from German by Renate Lachmann. Moscow: NLO, 2009 (in Russian). Levi, Albert William, Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1962 Lossky, Nikolay O., Istoriia russkoi filosofii [The History of Russian Philosophy]. Moscow: Sovetskiipisatel’, 1991 (in Russian). Lotman, Yuri M., Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury [The History and Typology of Russian Culture]. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2002 (in Russian). Morskoy, Ivan, Anarkhisty budushchego (Moskva cherez 20 let). Fantasticheskii roman [Anarchists of the Future (Moscow in 20 Years). A Fantastic Novel]. Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipo-litog. V. Chicherina (in Russian). Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Francois Mauriac and Freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays. Translated from French by Annette Michelson. New York: Collier Books, 1962, 7–25. Sartre, Jean-Paul, What Is Literature? Translated from French by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. Shestov, Lev, All Things are Possible. Translated from Russian by S. S. Koteliansky. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1920. Tkachev, Petr, “Anarkhiia mysli [The Anarchy of Thought].” In Kladezi mudrosti rossiiskikh filosofov. Sbornik statei [The Wells of Wisdom of Russian Philosophers. A Collection of Papers], 175–195. Moscow: Pravda, 1990 (in Russian). Todorov, Tsvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Tolstoy, Alexey, Aelita. Translated from the Russian by Lucy Flaxman. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962. Yampolsky, Boris, Yazyk—telo—sluchai: Kinematograf i poiski smysla [Language— Body—Chance: The Cinema in Search of Meaning] Moscow: NLO, 2004 (in Russian). Yurenev, Rostislav, “Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov.” In Lev Kuleshov, S’yomka pod obstrelom [Lev Kuleshov: Filming under Shelling]. In Lev Kuleshov: Sobranie sochinenii v tryokh tomakh [Collected Works in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1. Teoriia. Kritika. Pedagogika [Theory. Criticism. Pedagogy], 19–54. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987 (in Russian).

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Chapter Nine

Moscow Conceptualism, Post-Suprematism, and Beyond Reimagining the Russian Avant-garde Mary A. Nicholas The dramatic emergence of avant-garde art in prerevolutionary Russia was followed ironically by its repression and disappearance from view, as avantgarde artists lost favor and fell out of the public eye for generations. In a further irony, artists who first found their way to creative discoveries in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century became more widely known in the West than in their homeland, while under the Soviets their history grew dustier and dimmer, all but forgotten for decades. The example of Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich is particularly illustrative: a pioneer of abstraction, hailed in the West as one of the greatest modernists, Malevich became “a non-person” in the Soviet Union, where “museums denied knowing anything about him. No mention was made of him in print; his name was eliminated from art and reference books.”1 Yet allusions to the early avant-garde in the late-Soviet period illustrate just how complicated a path that legacy actually took in those years of seeming oblivion. As the history of Moscow conceptualism, “post-Suprematism,” and other Russian art movements demonstrates, artistic influence is often circuitous rather than direct, stretching across time and space to make creative connections more meaningful than day-to-day encounters of the most direct kind. As we will see in this chapter, the capacity to imagine such new associations—to forge artistic networks bound only by the constraints of the imagination—proved essential for unofficial artists bent on creating a new avant-garde in the late-Soviet era. That imaginative talent continues to be of use in the post-Soviet art world, where a compelling reimagining of Russian avant-garde art continues today. As a metaphor for the process of recognition and reanimation of an avant-garde heritage, an anecdote from abstract artist Alexander Yulikov (b. 1943) would seem to be nearly irresistible. A graduate of Moscow’s famous Stroganov Academy and a respected graphic artist for many years, Yulikov 151

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exhibited ostensibly “post-Suprematist” works at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moskvovskii musei sovremennogo iskusstva) in 2017. The show “Post-Suprematism” featured nearly one hundred of his abstract paintings in the first major retrospective for the artist. Despite his works’ formal resemblance to the early avant-garde, however, Yulikov disliked the exhibition’s title and denied being a “follower of Malevich.”2 His description of his own personal discovery of the avant-garde indicates that the historic avant-garde may serve late-Soviet artists not as direct influence but as proof of the roundabout nature of artistic ties. According to Yulikov, a student prank in the 1960s allowed him one-time unauthorized access to the closed archives of Moscow’s famous Tretyakov Gallery, where he found stacks of work by early modernists still hidden from the Soviet public at the time.3 Perusing the unfamiliar canvases in amazement, he noticed an unusual thumbtack on a painting by avant-garde artist Pavel Filonov and spirited the thumbtack out of the museum, a visual reminder of the rich unsanctioned heritage he now possessed. Rather than direct influence from Filonov, however, the thumbtack served Yulikov as a kind of totem, a reminder of alternative possibilities that graced his studio for many years to follow, as he finished his training and began work as graphic artist by day and unofficial abstract expressionist by night. One of the few nonconformist artists of his generation to pursue pure abstraction as a means of expression, Yulikov used the language of abstract art to express emotions that were otherwise absent from public discourse. As a potent symbol, his stolen thumbtack makes clear that the paradigm-shattering avant-garde played a still misunderstood role in late-Soviet unofficial art and its post-Soviet iterations. Discussion of the avant-garde tradition in the Soviet Union is complicated by a curious dichotomy in its reception by artists outside official channels. On the one hand, as Yulikov’s pilfered thumbtack suggests, the idea of a forbidden artistic tradition represented creative validation for unofficial artists, most of whom were denied access to public exhibition space, careful critical appraisal, and a market. Yet, as Irina Karasik notes, allusions to Malevich’s work in contemporary Russian art frequently involved use of the Suprematist artist as a “symbol” rather than a creative influence.4 Karasik uses the fact that Malevich emerged as a “ready-made image” in late-Soviet art to conclude that contemporary Russian art is “not an art after Malevich, but rather an art about Malevich.” Yet her assertion overlooks an underlying problem many unofficial artists had with Malevich—and the avant-garde in general—in the late-Soviet period: for this group of artists, especially second-generation Moscow conceptualists5 born after Stalin’s death, the avant-garde was tainted by connection to the modernist tradition they associated with monolithic practices of official Soviet culture. According to

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artist Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), late-Soviet society was still “modernist” at the time, founded on the idea of a “single true utterance,”6 which, in spite of everything they knew about the damaging effects of totalitarian language, many alternative artists still hoped to discover in their own work. Boris Groys argues that Moscow conceptualists reacted “most of all against the ascetic, pedagogic, frustrating, and prohibitive/sublimating strategies of Soviet culture,”7 but asceticism and didacticism characterized some of firstgeneration conceptualists’ own work. Prigov alludes to this in his comment that the era in which he began to create was still colored by the outdated “pathos” of a situation in which the poet is understood as a “foundational personality of the universe.”8 The dilemma for younger artists was thus to find a way to escape this tradition while continuing to create. Groys, whose work The Total Art of Stalinism made a case for the unexpectedly totalitarian effects of the avant-garde’s aesthetic project, argues that the prerevolutionary artistic avant-garde advocated for “the total destruction of all the traditions of European and Russian culture,” with the most radical example of this project, Malevich’s “Black Square,” serving as an “open window through which the revolutionary spirits of radical destruction could enter the space of culture and reduce it to ashes.”9 This led to an inevitable paradox: how was the avant-garde—ostensibly the end-stage of artistic development and therefore beyond further evolution—to be reimagined? Change seemed impossible since evolution would mean betrayal of their “supreme” achievement. Yet if art remained the same or repeated itself, it risked losing its status as innovative and revolutionary. And the avant-garde’s commitment to the new was all-encompassing: as art historian Nina Gurianova argues, innovation was perhaps the only feature that united the historic avant-garde, which, despite personal antagonisms and stylistic variety, shared a fierce “anti-teleological desire for freedom of artistic conscience.”10 Groys finds a solution to this obvious conundrum by arguing that Malevich ultimately rejected notions of a final reduction in art, believing instead in what Groys calls “permanent change.” For Malevich, he argues, “Utopia is not a period of time but a moment of acceptance of radical change, of revolution.”11 This elegant resolution of the dilemma—if Malevich did in fact understand it as such—offered little assistance to the avant-garde in postrevolutionary Russia where the political elite was loathe to accept a philosophy of “permanent change” and what Groys calls a readiness to “accept loss,” preferring instead to rid itself of independent artists altogether.12 It would take decades, the death of Stalin, and several generations of artistic experimentation for modernism to play itself out and be replaced by its endlessly repeating, polyphonic offspring, postmodernism. The artificially extended transition of the modernist avant-garde to its next phase makes the Soviet Union a fascinating

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laboratory for studying postmodernism. The repression of artistic modernism, its lopsided critique by subsequent generations of artists, and its gradual reintroduction into the creative vocabulary gives contemporary Russian art some of its most compelling moments, but it took considerable sacrifice before the emergence of that paradigm was finally possible. Key to the eventual reimagining of the avant-garde was the counterintuitive realization that the notion of progress in art is itself faulty. This understanding was crucial to the development of work by first-generation Moscow conceptualists Vitaly Komar (b. 1943) and Alexander Melamid (b. 1945), whose influential Sots-Art13 works from the early 1970s helped an entire second generation of conceptualists to liberate Russian art from its modernist prison. It was that second generation of Moscow conceptualists who were able to set out on the new path of continual experimentation with conditional artistic models that Groys’s “permanent change” describes. As Komar is fond of pointing out, conceptualism was already part of the life of every citizen of the Soviet Empire when he and his fellow artist Alexander Melamid used the regime’s own words to pose a solution to the artistic dilemma that faced would-be artists in the “era of stagnation.”14 Familiar texts on red background were the most visible cultural product in the Soviet Union, part and parcel of “State Sots-conceptualism,” as Komar now calls it, easily identifiable by didactic prescribed texts executed in crisp, white, stenciled capital letters on a formulaic red background.15 The problem for unofficial artists in this environment was how to move out of a predetermined, state-sponsored, Socialist Realist narrative without withdrawing into either the wordlessness of forbidden abstraction or the pathos of a lyricism inevitably stunted by its uneven battle with the repressive state. Komar and Melamid solved this dilemma by using official texts for their own striking ends. Their direct solution was surprisingly effective. By appropriating stategenerated texts and attaching their own names to them, the artists insisted that responsibility for such works be returned to the individual artist. The simple act of signing texts that until that moment had been the product of an invisible state mechanism had the startling effect of assigning responsibility for the slogans to the artists who actually painted them and of forcing both text and artists to the forefront of the unofficial artistic world, thus appropriating official conversations about art from which they were otherwise excluded and moving beyond their circumscribed environment within late-Soviet existence. This was a moment of genuine discovery, an important catalyst, according to their contemporary, artist Boris Orlov (b. 1941), for the “revolution” that took place in the Russian visual arts in the early 1970s.16 The victory was hard won, of course, since it relied on the artists’ willingness to abandon their own hopes of artistic domination. As Komar notes, “when I

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was in art school in Moscow in the 1960s, my friends and I believed naively in the endless procession of progress. [. . .] We dreamt of being heroes of this avant garde, of discovering, founding, and developing yet another movement, a new direction, a new current or a new trend. New, new, new. . . .”17 Komar’s reference to his own youthful naïveté gives the repetitive “new, new, new” an ironic edge and helps explain his statement elsewhere that in work with Melamid “our most important discovery was not Sots-Art, but eclecticism.” Melamid agrees on the significance of that, noting “we changed ideas all the time. We could develop new concepts all the time and change all the time. We always said that set us apart from others.”18 Numerous late-Soviet unofficial artists became full-time practitioners of Sots-Art, but Komar and Melamid moved on to adopt a number of different styles. They had discovered something more important than the latest trend. As one of their artistic descendants, Yuri Albert (b. 1959), commented later, his generation of Moscow conceptualists recognized that by willfully appropriating Soviet slogans, Komar and Melamid had sought not to claim preeminence for their own work, but instead to “cast doubt on all alternatives, any pretension of the artist toward the idea that Truth spoke in his style.”19 For artists ready to hear it, this powerful message was postmodern in its implications. According to Albert, the most significant contribution Komar and Melamid made was to establish that “all the achievements of painting are no better (and also no worse) than a simple Soviet poster.” For artists who understood this, Albert continues, their subsequent creative work reflected an important shift in its “center of weight.” The significance of artistic activity “was no longer in the creation of a work of art but in the creation of a model.”20 Students of Komar and Melamid, artists Gennady Donskoi (b. 1956), Mikhail Roshal’ (1956–2007), and Victor Skersis (b. 1956), made it clear as early as 1975 that their model for artistic creation had changed dramatically into a constantly varying, participatory activity open to all. Their group Gnezdo (Nest) got its name from a 1975 performance piece in the Moscow VDNKh exhibit of unofficial art. The work, “Hatching a Spirit,” was one of the only participatory pieces in the extensive show (figure 9.1). The work involved hatching a spirit from an egg in the large nest the three young artists wove from branches and occupied for most of the exhibition.21 While playing on commonplaces about Russian artistic spirituality, the artists departed from platitudes about art’s sacred mission to focus instead on an egalitarian approach to art. They encouraged spectators to join them, and photographs document the active involvement of exhibit goers, particularly children, who climbed unabashedly into the nest, in independent public activity nearly unheard of in Brezhnev’s Russia. First-generation Moscow

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Figure 9.1.  Donskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Hatching a Spirit” (Vysizhivanie dukha), 1975. Installation view. Courtesy of Victor Skersis.

conceptualist Viktor Pivovarov describes the nest as a “revolution.” Remarking on the innovation such activity represented in late-Soviet life, Pivovarov notes that the nest “was the first installation in Moscow. There wasn’t even a word for it. It was called an environment then. It was revolutionary!”22 These second-generation artists underlined the avant-garde potential for selfdirected creative activity in other participatory works in the show, including their “Communication Tube” (Kommunikatsionnaia truba) and “Pump the Red Pump!” (Kachaite Krasnyi Nasos) (figure 9.2), both from 1975.

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Figure 9.2.  Donskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Pump the Red Pump!” (Kachaite Krasnyi Nasos), 1975. Oil on fiberboard, two pumps, 175 x 120. Courtesy of Victor Skersis.

This new orientation set the Nest apart from their colleagues, not all of whom were ready to face the implications of such discoveries. As Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna comments in her study of the private AptArt exhibitions in the early 1980s, many artists in the Soviet Union from the 1960s and 1970s brought a “pseudo-religious orientation” to art. As she points out, this “mix of ‘shamanistic’ and artistic practices” held little appeal for younger artists, and

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she notes, for example, the “desperate” desire of second-generation Nikita Alexeev (b. 1953) to free himself from such artistic “sectarianism.”23 For that younger generation, dialogue with the West held more interest than engagement with their own poorly documented avant-garde history. As conceptual artist Anatolii Zhigalov (b. 1941) notes, the Sots Art discovery of Komar and Melamid served as “the premise for a dialogue with western art.”24 Thus, 1977 Nest works highlight the universal connections and worldwide scope of artistic activity. In “Pulling the Continents Together: Restoration of Gondwana as a Single Material and Spiritual Field” (Stiagivanie materikov: Vosstanovlenie Gondvany—edinogo material’nogo i dukhovnogo polia), the artists secured a rope on one side of the Moscow Canal before pulling it from the other side in an avant-garde effort to return the hypothesized supercontinent—and its human inhabitants—back to an imagined state of unity. “Let’s Become One Meter Closer!” (Stanem na metr blizhe!) exhorted interested parties around the globe in 1977 to excavate a meter of soil beneath them in order to lessen the distance separating people across ideological borders. The Nest’s own “Black Square,” their 1976 “Iron Curtain” (Zheleznyi zanаves) (figure 9.3), reifies and undercuts ideological divisions, situating them as part of a long-distance conversation about art, the meaning of boundaries, and the need to cross them.

Figure 9.3.  Donskoi, Roshal’, and Skersis, “Iron Curtain” (Zheleznyi zanaves), 1976. Oil on iron sheet, 102.5 x 100. Courtesy of Victor Skersis.

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Such works offered humor and bonhomie in place of the sincerity expected from artists working in a spiritual tradition. As a result, viewers both East and West sometimes found it difficult to appreciate the seriousness of the Nest’s artistic commitment or to follow their development through continually shifting artistic models, media, and styles.25 The geographical divide they imagined overcoming was matched by the generational one, visible again in relationship to Malevich, thanks to a letter first-generation Eduard Shteinberg (1937–2012) wrote and circulated among fellow artists in 1981, expressing his debt to the avant-garde artist.26 Shteinberg’s gesture was followed by a 1983 essay by Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933), in which the artist disparaged the Suprematist heritage, connecting it implicitly to the authoritarian state. Kabakov alluded to Shteinberg’s cri de coeur in passing, commenting that he “didn’t even know what to say about Malevich” before comparing him to a school bigwig, whose approval was needed for any activity by the children under his control. The boss “KNOWS WHO” will be chosen, Kabakov continues in his essay “Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future,” and “people, like children, are divided into three categories: he who chooses; those who are chosen; and those who are not chosen.”27 Kabakov’s description of the role of coercion in the art world offered pointed contrast to Shteinberg’s ardent spirituality, reflecting his focus on unofficial art as a weapon in a heroic, though inevitably unequal battle with the Soviet authorities. For most second-generation Moscow conceptualists, however, clashes with Soviet bureaucrats, focus on state restrictions, and even Malevich himself belonged to an earlier time of little interest. As second-generation artist Vadim Zakharov (b. 1959) pointed out in a work from his 1983 series “I’ve Made Enemies” (figure 9.4), the younger generation saw Shteinberg as nothing more than a “powdered Malevich,” drastically out of step with the times. Zakharov’s challenge was intense and personal. By writing each defiant statement on his own skin, he signaled an artistic commitment both substantial and immediate, intended as a record of a bold new moment in artistic development. This sense of a break with Malevich and the past also characterized the “Black Square” (figure 9.5) that Nataliia Abalakhova (b. 1941) and Anatolii Zhigalov showed at the first AptArt exhibit in 1982. A large plastic bag filled with carbon paper and labeled “Black Square,” the piece was a trenchant comment on the ambivalence they felt toward the avant-garde inheritance. In a description of the crowded group exhibit, Abalakhova and Zhigalov claim the bag was constantly “being kicked under the bed by visitors’ legs like a carefully hidden complex.”28 Yuri Albert advised artists to abandon old habits and cherished illusions to survive in the unfamiliar future that faced them. With Kabakov’s warning as an epigraph for his article “Is There a Future for Our Past?” Albert compares

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Figure 9.4.  Vadim Zakharov, “Shteinberg, You’re Nothing but a Powdered Malevich. Realize That Please,” from the series “I’ve Made Enemies” (Ia nazhil sebe vragov), 1983. Documentation of action. Black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 9.5.  Nataliia Abalakhova and Anatolii Zhigalov, “Black Square” (Chernyi kvadrat), 1982. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists.

artists to fish who must learn to live on land. Albert’s focus is on moving into this uncharted artistic territory, however, rather than on deciding who else is worthy. Although he notes with chagrin that contemporary art looks nothing like the art he dreamt in childhood of creating, he concludes that the artist has no option but “to make do,” “to drag as much of his own past into Our Future as possible.”29 The emphasis on a shared future is telling. Following the 1979 dissolution of the Nest, Skersis and Vadim Zakharov formed a creative partnership the next year and began collaborating on artistic “activity” (deitel’nost’) aimed at expanding the parameters of art to include their daily lives, other artists, spectators, the casual passerby, even stray animals in the urban environment. Here, too, humor and whimsy played a role in their imaginative project to move beyond the borders of the late-twentieth-century Soviet Union. In their 1980 collaboration, “SZ News” (Vestnik SZ), they jokingly report on the “development and production” of art works in “many countries” throughout

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the world aimed at “the use of art in military applications” and “intended for the widest possible audience.” Like their “Parthenon Tank,” which “calmly drives away” from enemy soldiers attempting to scale its Doric columns, these works were intended to avoid conflict. The newsletter details numerous outreach activities or “ways to exchange information” with their expected “wide circle of readers,” including the installation of bird feeders around Moscow for the receipt of letters and the transmission of SZ “products.” SZ offered their intended public special forms for communication, available at various locations around the city, according to the artists, including a telephone booth on Pushkin Street, the newsstand across from the Union of Journalists on Suvorovsky Boulevard, and the public toilet just left of the October Theater on Kalininsky Prospect. This whimsical advertising campaign was particularly striking in 1981, when capitalism was still anathema in the Soviet system and reports from SZ’s supposed “secret correspondent” or their fanciful “search for new channels for the dissemination and collection of new information” might have been misinterpreted by uncomprehending authorities in the most sinister fashion.30 Despite the possibility of misunderstandings, even by fellow unofficial artists, SZ continued their imaginative outreach. They describe their 1980 performance series “Zapolnenie nish” (Filling the Niches) as the installation of “information depositories in the form of milk cartons” at strategic locations around the city. The top half of the carton was intended as a repository for letters, while the bottom served as the most ordinary of bird feeders, like thousands of others in late-Soviet Moscow.31 By engaging spectators directly, the artists sought to return meaning and agency to individual viewers and to facilitate a (partially imagined) conversation with the world that surrounded them. Their 1980s series “Inscriptions” (figure 9.6) left insistent, open calls for communication on various random sites around the city of Moscow, while their series “Self-Defense Course Against Things” (Zashchita i kursy samooborony ot veshchei) from 1982–1983 engaged fellow artists in a set of exercises against the objects of the surrounding world, combining outreach and humor with a clear recognition of the unfriendly reception late-Soviet reality—and even some colleagues—offered to their work.32 Perhaps partly as a reaction to such potential misreadings, the duo tried to expand the small group of unofficial artists in the late Soviet Union by adding, in the 1982–1983 series “Phantoms” (Fantomy), works by imaginary participants to an archive of unsanctioned art work they were compiling. Other attempts to extend their activity and the reach of unofficial art included numerous “co-authorships” with other artists and a traveling art exhibit, the so-called “Fourth Personal SZ Exhibition (Traveling)” from 1984, in which they visited

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Figure 9.6.  Victor Skersis and Vadim Zakharov, “Here!” (Vot!) from the Inscriptions (Nadpisi) series, 1980. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists.

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Figure 9.7.  Nataliia Abalakhov and Anatolii Zhigalov, “Kitchen Art, or the Kitchen of Russian Art” (Kitchen art, ili Kukhnia russkogo iskusstva), 1983. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists.

Yulikov, Alexeev, and others in their homes for personalized collaborative performances of miniature SZ works. Such collective effort also appealed to Abalakhova and Zhigalov, who envisioned all “new art” as a collaborative endeavor in their AptArt installation piece “Kitchen Art, or the Kitchen of Russian Art” from 1983 (figure 9.7). In a reference to the heartfelt conversations in the kitchen for which late-Soviet intellectuals were famous, they described their installation as a “symbolic-realistic image of the Russian (Moscow) avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s, when all new art ‘cooked’ in the kitchen.”33 The work was set in Alexeev’s actual kitchen since his apartment served as the unofficial art gallery for all AptArt exhibits between 1982 and 1984. That prosaic setting served Abalakhova and Zhigalov well in their conscious attempt to strip the inflated spirituality of earlier generations of Russian artists from their own work. The label on the gas stove—dukhovka in Russian—provided the perfect pun for the exaggerated dukhovnost’ (spirituality) of previous generations, particularly when coupled with the label the artists placed over the kitchen sink—the neologism netlenka, or “imperishables”—which they use ironically to refer simultaneously to supposedly immortal works of art and the detritus that ends up in the sink after a meal.34 As with other AptArt

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works, performances, and the high-spirited outreach “activity” of SZ and others, most of the older generation was skeptical of TOTART work, which, in Abalakhova’s words, it felt was “almost a mockery of common sense and the cultural heritage.”35 Perhaps partly as a result of such antipathy, first-generation artist Kabakov declined to participate in Yuri Albert’s early performance series “Household Help” (Pomoshch’ po khoziastvu) from 1979–1981. Intended as a gesture toward making art useful, in “Household Help” Albert shopped for other artists, provided child care, or performed other mundane chores. His emphasis on the ordinary made this an avant-garde artwork of the first order, as quotidian aspects of life had been matters of disdain for committed intellectuals and artists from the very beginning of the Soviet period. For the nonconformist generation of the 1960s and most first-generation conceptualists, quotidian detail served as shorthand for the soullessness and moral bankruptcy of contemporary Soviet existence. Incorporating the petty facts of everyday existence, or byt, as a positive gesture into works of art was thus genuinely shocking. As with the performance piece “Y.F. Albert Gives His Entire Share of Warmth to Others,” which he notes was “almost a diptych”36 to “Household Help,” Albert displays neither the pathos of an alienated artist nor the drama of a general indictment of society. His calm, good-natured, and humble attitude reflects instead the second-generation’s understanding of their own dependence on the language of the larger community and its run-of-the-mill routines for their every gesture. Ekaterina Degot describes performance in the 1960s as “an anti-establishment practice of the lone hero (or a company thereof),”37 but Albert avoids the theatricality of such a stance, substituting insouciant calm, professional reliability, and a marked sense of play for artistic pathos. Toward the end of the Soviet Union, Nikita Alexeev created a long graphic work that purported to describe the “birth and death of the Black Square.” The illustrated narrative, which played out over an impressive thirty-six-meter-long scroll, imagined the square hatching in 1913 from a “beautiful, marble egg” laid by “Leonardo, Raphael, Stasov, Repin, and the Benois brothers” (figure 9.8). In this eclectic pedigree it is possible to hear echoes of the call the prerevolutionary avant-garde had made to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on and so forth from the Steamship of Modernity” in a manifesto to remake the very face of Russian art and literature. But Alexeev’s colorful cartoon illustrations and his dramatic exhibition of the work—stretched across a snowy field in a Moscow park in 1986—serve more to recall Malevich’s work than to replace it, even becoming, for many of the uninitiated viewers of the exhibit, a primer of sorts in long-hidden art history.

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Figure 9.8.  Nikita Alexeev, “A Short History of Contemporary Art, or the Life and Death of the Black Square” (Kratkaia istoriia sovremennogo iskusstva, ili zhizn’ i smert’ chernogo kvadratat), Frame 1, 1986. Paper scroll, 100 x 3600. Courtesy of Vadim Zakharov.

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In his series “Elitist-Democratic Art” from 1987–1989, Yuri Albert also reaches out to the uninitiated, honing his skills with specialized vocabularies to speak about his art to the hearing impaired, blind spectators, sailors, stenographers, and other groups usually left out of the language of high art. This democratic gesture suggests his conviction that art must evolve to include everyone. His work “Visual Culture #2” from 1989 (enamel and wood on fiberboard, 122 × 200 cm) (figure 9.9), like others in a series done in Braille for the blind, suggests an allusion to Malevich’s “Black Square” in its dark, “unreadable” form. But Albert’s work, here and elsewhere, replaces modernist hegemony with an open appeal to new, marginalized, and unfamiliar audiences, revealing this second generation’s willingness to accept their altered role in the new artistic universe while insisting on the value of continual experimentation with creative models. The only truth that makes it into this postmodernist future is the one Albert expresses here: “There is nothing to see in my works but my love of art.” That sentiment—that art remains the only focus of their creative activity—is echoed in the work of Tsar of the Hill, an artistic cooperative (artel’ Tsar’ gory) built on a collaborative approach to investigation of a changing set of artistic questions. One of several such collectives formed in the post-Soviet period by Skersis, Albert, second-generation conceptualist Andrei Filippov (b. 1959), and Paruir Davtian (b. 1976), Tsar of the Hill directly referenced the avant-garde heritage in their 2017 exhibit at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow in their exploration of abstraction in large nonrepresentational canvases.

Figure 9.9.  Yuri Albert, “Visual Culture #2” (Vizual’naia kul’tura No. 2), 1989. Enamel and wood on fiberboard, 120 x 200. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 9.10.  Victor Skersis. “Freudism’s Hand in Marxism’s Pocket” (Ruka freidizma v shtanakh marksizma) 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 210 x 210. Courtesy of the artist.

One of the works in the show even made a conspicuous visual allusion to Malevich’s “Black Square.” At nearly 7 feet square, the work “Freudism’s Hand in Marxism’s Pocket” (figure 9.10) by Skersis looked like it might be capable of the radical cultural destruction Groys had predicted, were it not for its allegorical title suggesting instead that the reshuffling of ideas occurs continually in art and other human endeavors. The artists cite a dizzying set of creative influences for their work, from Karel van Mander and Aleksandr Beideman to Edouard Manet and Victor Vasarely, as the avant-garde tradition combines with allegory, conceptualism, and other movements in monumental proof of the continued need for collaborative experimentation. As this work—and all of art history with it—proves, the avant-garde is not dead. It is merely waiting to be reimagined. NOTES 1.  Charlotte Douglas, “Preface,” Rethinking Malevich: Proceeding of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, Ed.

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Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, London: The Pindar Press, 2007, p. ii. As Christina Lodder notes, Malevich’s Suprematist works were “on display in the Tretiakov Gallery under the disparaging caption ‘bourgeois art at an impasse’” in the 1930s (Lodder, “Malevich Scholarship: A Brief Introduction,” ibid., p. x). 2.  See Yulikov’s comments in Anastasiia Petrakova, “Aleksandr Iulikov: ‘Pervye abstraktsii ia napisal v 14 let,’” http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/4452/ (accessed Jan. 1, 2020), where he notes that he is “not [Nikolai] Suetin, not [Ivan] Kliun after all, not a follower of Malevich.” All translations from Russian are my own. 3.  Comment to the author, March 1, 2011. 4. Irina Karasik, “Extending Malevich in Russian Contemporary Art,” p. 329; emphasis in the original. 5.  The most significant movement in Russian art of the late twentieth century, Moscow conceptualism is customarily divided into first and second generations, corresponding roughly to artists born in the 1930s or 1940s and those born in the 1950s. I have retained the conventional, though imperfect division here. 6.  See Prigov’s comment as part of a longer discussion included in Balabanova, Govorit Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. Moscow: OGI, 2001, p. 116. 7.  Groys, “Text as a Ready-Made Object,” trans. John Meredig, in Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000, p. 35. 8. Balabanova, Govorit, p. 116. 9.  Boris Groys, “The Russian Avant-Garde Revisited,” The Idea of the AvantGarde and What It Means Today, edited by Marc James Leger, Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 168–69. As Jane Sharp notes, Alexandre Benois (Benua) saw Malevich’s work as a “complete zero,” an interpretation he shared with other contemporary critics of the artist (see Sharp, “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua,” The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932, New York, Guggenheim Foundation, 1992, p. 39). 10. Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012, p. 2. 11.  Groys, “The Russian Avant-Garde Revisited,” p. 172. 12. Ibid. 13. Invented in 1972 by Komar and Melamid, Sots-Art combined elements of conceptual art with Soviet Socialist Realism and a Pop Art sensibility. 14.  The era of stagnation during and after Leonid Brezhnev’s regime is customarily dated from 1964 to early 1987. 15.  Komar, “Sots-art i ofitsial’nyi sots-kontseptualizm,” in Pole deistviia; Moskovskaia kontseptual’naia shkola i ee kontekst, 70–80 gody XX veka, edited by Aleksandra Danilova and Elena Kuprina-Liakhovich (Moscow: Fond Kul’tury “Ekaterina,” 2010), p. 137. 16.  Orlov argues that “the studio of Komar and Melamid with their students” was a locus of the artistic “revolution” in Orlov, “O passionarnosti al’ternativnoi kul’tury semidesiatykh (iz razgovora za chashkoi chaia),” in Georgii Kizeval’ter, ed., Eti strannye semidesiatye, ili poteria nevinnosti. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, p. 209. 17.  Vitaly Komar, “Avant Garde, Sots-Art & Conceptual Eclecticism,” The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What It Means Today, edited by Marc James Leger, Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 174; ellipsis in the original.

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18. See Komar’s comment in an interview with Olga Kholmogorova from the Nest catalog (“Interv’iu,” Donskoi, Roshal, Skersis, The Nest/Gnezdo, Moscow: National Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2008, p. 151). For Melamid, see Yurii Al’bert, “Interv’iu s Aleksandrom Melamidom,” Moskovskii kontseptualizm. Nachalo, Nizhnyi Novgorod: Privolzhskii filial Gosudarstvennogo tsentra sovremennogo iskusstva, 2014, p. 115. 19.  Albert, “Sots-art,” in Pole deistviia: Moskovskaia kontseptual’naia shkola i ee kontekst, 70–80 gody XX veka, edited by Aleksandra Danilova and Elena KuprinaLiakhovich, Moscow: Fond Kul’tury “Ekaterina,” 2010, p. 138. 20.  Ibid., and Yurii Al’bert, master class lecture at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, October 5, 2012, http://mdfschool.ru/events/video archive/yury_albert_video/lecture (last accessed October 27, 2012). 21.  The nest was re-created for a 2008 retrospective exhibit at the National Centre of Contemporary Arts in Moscow. The exhibit catalog refers to the work as “Hatch Eggs! (The Nest)” throughout, but, according to Skersis, the original title was “Hatching a Spirit.” 22.  “Interv’iu s Viktorom Pivovarovym and Milenoi Slavitskoi.” In Al’bert, Moskovskii kontseptualizm: Nachalo, Nizhnyi Novgorod, 2014, p. 136. 23.  Masterkova-Tupitsyna, “APTART: Ekspansiia postmodernizma,” Perelomnye vos’midesiatye v neofitsial’nom iskusstve SSSR, Georgii Kizeval’ter, ed., Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014, pp. 360–61. Masterkova-Tupitsyna describes Alexeev and the difficulty certain first-generation artists had with this change in ibid., pp. 366–67. 24.  A. A. Zhigalov, “Izmeneniia v khudozhestvennom soznanii na neofitsial’noi stsene 1970-kh godov,” Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii 1970-kh godov kak sistemnoe tseloe, N. M. Zorkaia et al., eds., Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001, p. 212. Zhigalov and artist Nataliia Abalakhova played an important role in the unofficial Moscow art world, particularly in the AptArt exhibits of the early 1980s. Their ongoing TOTART project builds on numerous aspects of Moscow conceptualism. John Bowlt suggests similarly that the younger generation of artists was more “au courant with international contemporary trends” and were “outgrowing” the “often parochial concerns” of many in the preceding generation (Bowlt, “10 × 10,” in 10 + 10: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters, New York and Leningrad: Harry N. Abrams and Aurora Publishers, 1989, 9–21, p. 12, 19). 25.  See Victor Skersis’s comment in a 2019 interview that some viewers still dismiss Nest works as youthful horseplay rather than art (interview with Sergei Dzikevich, Aesthetica Universalis, forthcoming). 26. According to Masterkova-Tupitsyna, the inclusion of Malevich’s “Black Square” in an exhibit that year at the Pushkin State Museum helped bring the avantgarde artist to mind (Masterkova-Tupitsyna, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 151). 27.  Kabakov’s essay, “Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future” (V budushchee ne vsekh voz’mut) was republished in the journal Iskusstvo, No. 3 (586) 2013. It can be found at http://iskusstvo-info.ru/v-budushhee-vozmut-ne-vseh/ (accessed January 3, 2020), capitalization in the original.

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28.  Abalakova and Zhigalov, TOTART: Russkaia ruletka, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1998, p. 125. Zhigalov’s further engagement with Malevich in the 1981 series “Investigating the Square” (Issledovanie kvadrata) can be seen in Abalakova and Zhigalov, TOTART, pp. 82–83. Abalakhova remembers with a certain exasperation a Western art historian urging Moscow artists in 1988 “not to put out Malevich’s torch,” as though Suprematism and Constructivism were the only usable traditions for younger Russian artists (see Abalakhova, “Iskusstvo prinadlezhit narodu,” http://moscowartmaga zine.com/issue/57/article/1141, No. 51–52, 2003 [accessed January 6, 2020]). 29.  Al’bert, “Est’ li budushchee u nashego proshloe?” Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, No. 7, 1995, http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/73/article/1579 (accessed January 4, 2020), reprinted from the Cologne journal Pastor in 1994, capitalization in the original. See Vadim Zakharov’s contention that fear about joining the future is itself an outdated concern in Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, No. 86–87, 2012, http:// moscowartmagazine.com/issue/11/article/142 (accessed January 3, 2020). Zakharov’s monumental 2003 work “The History of Russian Art,” shown at the 2005 Guggenhiem exhibit of Russian art, relegates the avant-garde to the archive. He claims the avant-garde had “no influence” on him personally (communication to the author). 30.  Gruppa SZ (Victor Skersis and Vadim Zakharov), Sovmestnye raboty, Moscow: ArtKhronika, E.K. ArtBiuro, Fond Khudozhestvennye proekty, 2004, pp. 48–49. 31.  Ibid., p. 58. 32.  After a 1983 performance of their work “Lieblich,” an appropriated repetition of the 1976 “Lieblich” by the art group Collective Actions, they were briefly denounced as “scoundrels” (podonki) by the leader of Collective Actions (communication from Victor Skersis to the author). 33.  See the description in Abalakhova and Zhigalov, TOTART, p. 135. 34.  According to Abalakhova, the artists regularly referred to the “spiritual” with the word for gas range in casual conversation (Abalakhova, “Iskusstvo prinadlezhit narodu”). 35. Ibid. 36.  Email communication to the author, June 23, 2016. 37. Yekaterina Degot, “Theatre of Envy: Commentary to ‘Terrorist Naturalism,’” http://www.c3.hu/ican.artnet.org/ican/text8ee9.html?id_text=18 (accessed July 13, 2016).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abalakhova, Nataliia. “Iskusstvo prinadlezhit narody.” In “Iskusstvo prinadlezhit narodu,” http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/57/article/1141 No. 51–52, 2003 (accessed January 6, 2020). Abalakhova, Nataliia, and Anatolii Zhigalov, TOTART: Russkaia ruletka, Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1998. Al’bert, Yurii. “Sots-art.” In Pole deistviia; Moskovskaia kontseptual’naia shkola i ee kontekst, 70–80 gody XX veka, edited by Aleksandra Danilova and Elena KuprinaLiakhovich, Moscow: Fond Kul’tury “Ekaterina,” 2010, 138.

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Balabanova, Irina. Govorit Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. Moscow: OGI, 2001. Bowlt, John. “10 × 10.” In 10 + 10: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters, New York and Leningrad: Harry N. Abrams and Aurora Publishers, 1989, 9–21. Douglas, Charlotte. “Preface.” In Rethinking Malevich: Proceeding of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, edited by Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder. London: The Pindar Press, 2007, i–vii. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde and the End of the Century. Cambridge, 1996. Groys, Boris. “Text as a Ready-Made Object,” trans. John Meredig, in Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000, 32–45. ———. “The Russian Avant-Garde Revisited.” In The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What it Means Today, edited by Marc James Leger, Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 168–73. Gurianova, Nina. The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Karasik, Irina. “Extending Malevich in Russian Contemporary Art.” In Rethinking Malevi”ch: Proceeding of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, edited by Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder. London: The Pindar Press, 2007, 328–51. Komar, Vitalii. “Interv’iu,” Donskoi, Roshal, Skersis, The Nest/Gnezdo, Moscow: National Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2008, pp. 148–53. ———. “Sots-art i ofitsial’nyi sots-kontseptualizm.” In Pole deistviia; Moskovskaia kontseptual’naia shkola i ee kontekst, 70–80 gody XX veka, edited by Aleksandra Danilova and Elena Kuprina-Liakhovich, Moscow: Fond Kul’tury “Ekaterina,” 2010, 135–37. Komar, Vitaly. “Avant Garde, Sots-Art & Conceptual Eclecticism.” In The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What It Means Today, edited by Marc James Leger, Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 174–75. Lodder, Christina. “Malevich Scholarship: A Brief Introduction,” In Rethinking Malevi”ch: Proceeding of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth, edited by Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder. London: The Pindar Press, 2007, ix–xxii. Masterkova-Tupitsyna, Margarita. “APTART: Ekspansiia postmodernizma.” In Perelomnye vos’midesiatye v neofitsial’nom iskusstve SSSR, edited by Georgii Kizeval’ter, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014, pp. 360–67. ———. Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Melamid, Aleksandr. “Interv’iu.” In Yurii Al’bert, Moskovskii kontseptualizm. Nachalo, Nizhnyi Novgorod: Privolzhskii filial Gosudarstvennogo tsentra sovremennogo iskusstva, 2014, pp. 109–21. Orlov, Boris. “O passionarnosti al’ternativnoi kul’tury semidesiatykh (iz razgovora za chashkoi chaia).” In Georgii Kizeval’ter, ed., Eti strannye semidesiatye, ili poteria nevinnosti. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie: 206–22.

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Petrakova, Anastasiia. “Aleksandr Iulikov: ‘Pervye abstraktsii ia napisal v 14 let,’” http://www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/4452/ (accessed January 1, 2020). Pivovarov, Viktor. “Interv’iu s Viktorom Pivovarovym and Milenoi Slavitskoi.” In Al’bert, Moskovskii kontseptualizm: Nachalo, Nizhnyi Novgorod, 2014, 131–41. Prigov, Dmitrii, and Sergei Shapoval. Portretnaia galereia D. A. P. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003. Sharp, Jane A. “The Critical Reception of the 0.10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua.” In The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932, New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1992, pp. 39–52. Skersis, Victor, and Vadim Zakharov. Gruppa SZ (Victor Skersis and Vadim Zakharov), Sovmestnye raboty, Moscow: ArtKhronika, E.K. ArtBiuro, Fond Khudozhestvennye proekty, 2004. Zakharov, Vadim. “V nastoiashchee voz’mut ne vsekh. Tezisy khudozhnika v depressii,” Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, No. 86–87, 2012, http://moscowartmagazine.com/ issue/11/article/142 (accessed January 6, 2020). Zhigalov, A. A. “Izmeneniia v khudozhestvennom soznanii na neofitsial’noi stsene 1970-kh godov,” Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii 1970-kh godov kak sistemnoe tseloe, N. M. Zorkaia et al., eds., Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001, 208–13.

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Chapter Ten

The Bauhaus and the Children An Almost Forgotten History of Avant-garde Children’s Literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary with exhibitions all over Germany in 2019. Scholarly books, exhibition catalogs and academic articles praised the achievements of this exceptional avantgarde school which has left a mark on modern architecture, design, and the arts to this day. However, the impact of the Bauhaus on children’s literature and culture during the interwar period and beyond does not seem to be on the radar of these events today. While some catalogs point to toys and furniture for children developed by Bauhaus artists, the exhibition creators, just like academics, have not taken notice of the exceptional role which the Bauhaus played in relation to avant-garde children’s books of the 1920s and after. In this respect, the children’s books inspired by Bauhaus aesthetics share the same fate as almost all German avant-garde children’s literature produced in the interwar period: they are virtually nonexistent in scholarly studies, thus falling out of the canon of children’s literature and culture—or even worse, never having been considered as a potential part of this canon—mostly due to their radical aesthetics. In order to demonstrate the significance of vanguard children’s books for the modernization of children’s literature,1 this chapter focuses on children’s books created by artists who studied at or were inspired by the Bauhaus. This chapter first provides a short overview on the aims of the Bauhaus and elaborates on the concept of children’s culture that imbued Bauhaus aesthetics. Next, this chapter introduces three exceptional children’s books drafted by artists who had close relationships to the Bauhaus. The concluding section discusses the significance of the Bauhaus in relation to current debates on the connection between avant-garde literature for children and processes of canonization. 175

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THE BAUHAUS IN GERMANY The groundbreaking contribution of the Bauhaus to modernist architecture, furniture, visual art, and design is indisputable. Nowadays the most prominent Bauhaus products and artworks are showcased in museums all over the world and have become icons that present a modern way of life. Founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, where it established a world-famous art school. In 1932 the Bauhaus had to move to Berlin where it was closed by the Nazis in April 1933 and finally dissolved in August of the same year. The majority of Bauhaus artists emigrated to other European countries and even beyond, to the United States, South America, Israel, or Turkey. From the start, one major aim of the Bauhaus was the return to essential handcrafts, inspired by the medieval artisans’ workshops as well as the British Arts and Crafts movement. For this reason, the Bauhaus art school established different art classes, such as mural painting, bookbindery, carpentry, weaving, photography, and pottery. Famous artists worked as teachers (called “masters”) at the Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger was responsible for the graphic workshop, Johannes Itten for stained glass and metal, Gerhard Marcks for ceramics, Paul Klee for design theory, George Muche for the weaving workshop, Oskar Schlemmer for mural painting and later theater, Wassily Kandinsky for form and color theory, and László Moholy-Nagy for metal (after Itten left the Bauhaus).2 This list of names also shows that art at the Bauhaus was not uniform but included heterogeneous styles. As a result, there is no definite Bauhaus style—although some Bauhaus icons seem to point in this direction. Quite on the contrary, the Bauhaus applied diverse avant-garde styles. This is evident when examining the artworks of some of the aforementioned Bauhaus teachers which show the impact of expressionism (Feininger, Klee), cubism (Feininger), constructivism (Kandinsky, Schlemmer), and New Realism (Schlemmer), among others. The students3 enrolled at the Bauhaus had to audit classes on the theory of colors, theory of form, and architecture. The final goal of art education at the Bauhaus was to dovetail these diverse art forms in order to achieve a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), with architecture as the supreme discipline. The syllabus of the Bauhaus changed in the middle of the 1920s, when Walter Gropius formulated new principles in the manifesto “Grundsätze der Bauhaus-Produktion” (Basics of Bauhaus Production, 1925).4 In this, he called for leaving the ideals of medieval handicrafts behind in favor of industrial design created by machines. Under the auspices of Johannes Itten who had been responsible for the so-called “pre-course,” which was obligatory for all Bauhaus students, the Bauhaus aesthetics picked up ideas developed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Maria Montessori. These pedagogues emphasized the

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child’s creativity and the child’s interest in a clear language of colors and forms.5 Consequently, the concept of creative play dominated the educational discourses and flowed into the different art classes. It was considered that creative play should ignite the students’ imagination, encourage them to discover new methods of construction and to cross boundaries between separate artistic disciplines. Moreover, creative play was considered as a countermodel to the rational and scientific approach in Bauhaus teaching. This attitude went in line with the increasing interest in children’s art and how it influenced the appreciation of illustrated children’s books.6 Since the turn of the century, pedagogues, publishers, and artists collaborated in organizing children’s book exhibitions in order to familiarize the young audience with unusual formats, innovative topics, and aesthetic styles. These exhibitions that were shown in Berlin, Vienna, Florence, and Amsterdam combined children’s books and mural posters with children’s drawings.7 While these exhibitions might be considered as precursors of the successful exhibitions of avant-garde children’s books in Berlin, Bern, Amsterdam, Paris, and London at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, they also attest to a shift in the appreciation of children’s creative potential. BAUHAUS DESIGN FOR CHILDREN This permanent struggle is a significant trait of all avant-garde movements and artworks, as evinced in avant-garde manifestos and programs. Several German authors and philosophers who were interested in the child’s creative capacities, have highlighted the significant role of the child as a source of inspiration for artists. Some have even tried to earnestly involve children into the creation process. This is particularly evident in the Bauhaus where the artists’ children and other children the same age were initially asked about their likes and preferences. Several Bauhaus artists collaborated with children in order to develop suitable artworks and everyday objects for different age groups. In this context the heads of each department commissioned talented students and artists to create art and design for children with the aim of establishing a modern cultural environment for children. Along the lines of the pedagogical concepts of Froebel and Montessori and the interest in children’s art—Paul Klee drew inspiration from his son’s drawings for his own paintings—the Bauhaus artists invited children (whether their own or children living in the neighborhood) to share their ideas. As a result, several engaged Bauhaus members developed designs for furniture, pedagogical toys, clothes, puppets (for children’s theater), and pottery for children, some of which have been realized. Some toys and other products for children were created merely for personal use, for instance, the wooden, hand-carved and painted toy houses by Lyonel Feiniger, the puppets by Paul Klee and Karl

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Peter Röhl, and the carpets by Benita Otte-Koch. Other objects, however, were manufactured for the public, some of which are still produced today. The most often-cited examples of Bauhaus design for children are the famous cradle (1922) by Peter Keler, which aligns ideas of the Bauhaus and De-Stijl, the ship-building-game (1924) by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, the colored gyroscope (1924) by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and the tubular steel furniture for children by Marcel Breuer. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher also designed the children’s bedroom in the “Haus am Horn” in 1923, a show house built for an exhibition organized by the Bauhaus in Weimar. She created a multifunctional play landscape with connectable shelves, boxes, cubes, and a step-stool on wheels. These objects could be transformed and used by children in different ways in order to stimulate their imagination and creative play.8 The creation of Bauhaus toys and furniture for children spans only a short period, from 1920 to 1930. Created by students as well as teachers working at the Bauhaus, these objects are now considered as prime examples of modernist design for children. Not surprisingly, they are showcased in museums all over the world, thus giving testimony to the timeless impact of the Bauhaus. While these Bauhaus objects designed and implemented for children frequently appear in catalogs of exhibitions on avant-garde and modernist artworks and design for children,9 it is little known that some gifted artists turned toward children’s literature, writing texts, and creating illustrations for book projects. While some books never left the early developmental stage, others could be successfully completed to the extent of being published and distributed on the book market. THE BAUHAUS AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE With respect to the impact of the Bauhaus on children’s literature, we can safely say that whatever the story is about and whatever technique the artists have chosen, their children’s books are characterized by a radical aesthetics, whose main features consist in a preference for an abstract design and geometrical forms on the one hand, and a color scheme that is inspired by the color theories of the Bauhaus teachers Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten, on the other hand. While not all children’s books display a radical content or pedagogy, some may be described as “aesthetically radical,” in line with the study by Kimberley Reynolds on leftist publishers and authors in the UK, 1910‒1949.10 The following sections concentrate on three artists who have created texts and illustrations for children’s books: Tom Seidmann-Freud, Sándor Bortnyik, and Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. These three artists had different relationships to the Bauhaus. Tom Seidmann-Freud was acquainted with several Bauhaus artists but never attended any Bauhaus classes, while Sándor Bortnyik, by contrast, lived for almost four years in Weimar, attended lectures at the Bauhaus and maintained closed contacts with the Bauhaus

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teachers. Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, in turn, studied at the Bauhaus and later married the Bauhaus teacher Hinnerk Scheper. These differences, notwithstanding, their children’s book illustrations clearly demonstrate the impact of the Bauhaus aesthetic. TOM SEIDMANN-FREUD: DIE FISCHREISE (1923) Tom Seidmann-Freud (1892‒1930) was a niece of the world-famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. At age fifteen, she changed her first name Martha Gertrude to Tom. She enrolled at a private art school in Berlin in 1911. In 1920 she married the author Jakob Seidmann, with whom she founded the publishing house Peregrin (Berlin). Due to the world economic crisis, the couple’s publishing house went bankrupt. In sheer desperation Jakob Seidmann committed suicide while his wife and their daughter Angela were out of town. Tom Seidmann-Freud could not overcome the death of her husband. She became seriously ill and died of a drug overdose in 1930. Whereas Seidmann-Freud’s earlier children’s books show the influence of the Art Nouveau, her mature children’s books are inspired by the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Bauhaus aesthetics. This comes to the fore in the picture book Die Fischreise (1923; published in English as Peregrin and the Goldfish in 1929, see figure 10.1).11

Figure 10.1.  Cover of Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: PeregrinVerlag, 1923.

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The picture book story centers on the boy Peregrin who undertakes a journey on the back of his goldfish. He disembarks in an edenic country, where children have established a children’s republic. They live in peace together and contribute to the country’s welfare by cultivating vegetables and fruits, building houses, and caring for the youngest. When Peregrin wakes up, he realizes that the exciting adventures he experienced with the goldfish were nothing but a wonderful dream. Inspired by this dream, he decides to play an active part in promoting a better society. This utopian story is complemented by watercolor illustrations that underline the dreamlike atmosphere. The artistic technique, the color scheme with light pastel colors, and the depiction of the figures refer to the Bauhaus drawings by Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. The objects and characters are presented in a rather abstract manner. The outline of the bodies resembles simple geometric forms, while the rigid posture of the child characters reminds one of wooden puppets or marionettes (figure 10.2). One may even presume that Seidmann-Freud was inspired by the puppets by Paul Klee and the figures which Oskar Schlemmer had drawn for his Triadic Ballet. The background usually consists of a uniform light color, thus highlighting the individual objects and figures. This visual strategy creates

Figure 10.2.  Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: PeregrinVerlag, 1923.

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Figure 10.3.  Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: PeregrinVerlag, 1923.

the effect of flatness. As a result, the images do not evoke the impression of central perspective and three-dimensionality (figure 10.3). Quite interestingly, the first spreads differ from the peaceful and harmonious settings in the children’s republic. They show Peregrin in his hometown before he starts his journey on the back of the goldfish. On the first spread he carefully carries a glass bowl with the goldfish in his hands, while walking along a street at night. In the subsequent image, however, the goldfish has grown many times over. From a tiny fish it has grown into a monstrous creature, now three times bigger than the boy. Glass splinters from the shattered bowl cover the ground, while the boy falls down with outstretched arms. The houses in the street seem to sway, the house’s walls show cracks, as if shaken by an earthquake. Even the cat on the roof has arched its back out of sheer fear (figure 10.4). The colors are more intense in comparison to the previous and subsequent images, thus emphasizing the magic of the moment. The skew houses with the closed windows, the deserted street, the color scheme, and the bright moon create a scary atmosphere which interpictorially refer to the Expressionist paintings of Lyonel Feininger. Moreover, the rectangular houses with the saddle roofs and the single chimney recall the wooden toy houses Feininger created for his children while he was a teacher at the Bauhaus.

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Figure 10.4.  Illustration from Die Fischreise by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Berlin: PeregrinVerlag, 1923.

The quasi-hybrid mixture of different artistic styles, which was a significant trait of many Bauhaus artists, infuses Die Fischreise and thus perfectly matches with the storyline which is built on the contrast between two locations (Peregrin’s hometown versus the utopian country) and two different social systems (a society threatened by war and poverty versus a children’s republic). In this regard, this picture book combines social radicalism with aesthetic radicalism, representing a prime example of German vanguard children’s literature in the 1920s. SÁNDOR BORTNYIK: DIE WUNDERFAHRT (1929) Sándor Bortnyik (1883‒1976) was a Hungarian painter who studied at the Art Academy in Budapest. His early artwork was mainly inspired by German Expressionism and French Cubism. In 1922 he moved to Weimar, where he came into close contact with the Bauhaus, particularly with his Hungarian colleagues Marcel Breuer, Farkas Molnár, and László Moholy-Nagy.12 He showed a deep interest in the theater projects of Oskar Schlemmer and participated in several exhibitions. In 1926 he returned to Budapest, where he founded a private school for commercial art, Műhely (Workshop), in 1928.

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In accordance with the principles of the Bauhaus, Bortnyik emphasized functional design, modern typography, and photography.13 After the closure of Műhely in 1938, Bortnyik retired from public life until the end of World War II. In 1949 he was appointed director of the Hungarian Academy of Art, which position he held until 1959. Die Wunderfahrt (The Magical Journey, 1929)14 is Bortnyik’s only book for children. As there are no documents or original artworks, the genesis of the book is difficult to reconstruct. According to the studies undertaken by art historian Samuel Albert, there are three different versions, a Hungarian version entitled Potty és Pötty (Potty and Pötty, no date given), a German version, published in 1929 (figure 10.5), and an American version, published with the title

Figure 10.5.  Cover of the Die Wunderfahrt with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns Verlag, 1929 (reprint by Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig, 2002; used by permission of Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung)

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Tatters and Scraps: Two Paper Dolls in Toyland in 1933.15 It seems likely that the Hungarian book was the first in this line, although no specific date is given in the imprint. The books have the same illustrations in the same order but different texts, whose authors are unknown, with the exception of the German edition. The verses in this version were written by Albert Sixtus (1892‒1960), a prominent children’s book author whose comprehensive oeuvre includes more than forty picture books, ten fairy-tale dramas, three adventure novels, and a few volumes of poetry for children. Die Wunderfahrt thus seems to be a rare example of those picture books where the illustrations came first before an author was asked to write the accompanying text.16 The story tells of a boy and girl who are playing with their kites and are carried off to a magical country. They run aground near a castle, inhabited by a king who invites them to a tea party and a theater performance. Afterward they fly home in an airplane. Above their hometown, they jump from the plane, holding balloons and smoothly landing near their home, where they are welcomed by their mother. While the simple verses by Sixtus are rather dull, the colorful illustrations clearly show the impact of the Bauhaus aesthetics. What catches the eye are the color scheme and the abstract depiction of figures, objects, and the setting. The children’s namelessness and the generic character of the landscape and buildings contribute to the book’s universal character despite some references to European settings and the clothing style of the 1920s. The vibrant colors and the combination of colors on the single spreads show the impact of the color theories of Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky.17 The basic principle of their color theories was the close relationship between colors and geometrical forms—as expressed in the famous formula of “yellow triangle, red square, and blue circle.” The elimination of details, the bold geometric shapes, and the symmetrical arrangement of figures and objects foreshadow Bortnyik’s interest in Constructivist poster art. Although the depiction of the individual objects evokes the impression of flatness, their arrangement on the spread indicate perspective (figure 10.6). Following these ideas, although not in a strict sense, the individual illustrations show a tendency for a symmetrical structure and geometrical forms, with a preference for circles, squares, and triangles.18 Even the bodies of the main characters are adjusted to these forms in a manner that they resemble dolls rather than humans (figure 10.7). As the storyline places emphasis on a fairy-tale-like plot in order to stress the dreamlike atmosphere of the events, the color scheme is dominated by bright colors, such as blue, green, yellow, and red, while dark colors such as

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Figure 10.6.  Illustration from Die Wunderfahrt, with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns, 1929 (reprint Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2002; used with permission by Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung)

brown and black mostly serve as a contrast to the light colors. Seen in this light, the illustrations in Die Wunderfahrt follow a radical aesthetics, which highlights a new way of seeing by drawing figures and objects by means of abstract and geometrical forms.

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Figure 10.7.  Illustration from Die Wunderfahrt, with a text by Albert Sixtus and illustrations by Sandor Bortnyik. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns, 1929 (reprint Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2002; used by permission of Manufactum Verlagsbuchhandlung)

LOU SCHEPER-BERKENKAMP: DIE GESCHICHTEN VON JAN UND JON UND VON IHREM LOTSENFISCH (1948) Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp (1901‒1976) was one of the few female Bauhaus painters. At age nineteen, she started as an apprentice at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she met Hinnerk Scheper whom she married in 1922. When he was appointed head of the faculty of mural painting in 1925, they moved to Dessau. Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp participated in Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus-stage

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project. As a member of the group Junge Maler am Bauhaus (Young Painters at the Bauhaus) she contributed paintings for traveling exhibitions.19 At this time Scheper-Berkenkamp also started writing children’s books, initially for her growing family of three children. Due to the political changes in the early 1930s, none of her book projects was published at that time. Shortly after the end of World War II, the publisher Ernst Wunderlich discovered ScheperBerkenkamp’s drafts and published four of her picture books in 1948.20 The picture book Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch (The Stories of Jan and Jon and Their Pilot Fish, 1948)21 focuses on the adventures of two boys named Jan and Jon (figure 10.8). Guided by a pilot

Figure 10.8.  Cover of Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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fish they set sails and travel across the seven seas. Each sea and its inhabitants, fauna, and vegetation are dominated by a specific color, ranging from white, green, blue, red, and brown to black and yellow. Jan and Jon experience many adventures and overcome dangerous situations until they meet two mermaids in the yellow sea where they live together happily ever after. At first glance, this picture book can be seen as a fantasy story as well as a story of initiation enriched with a dash of social and political criticism. Yet the picture book opens up several questions that cannot be answered without contextualization. Once one takes the historical background as well as the artist’s own personal background into consideration, the picture book starts to unfold its deeper levels of meaning. The plot is dominated by the pictures whose dreamlike character as well as the drawing style evoke the work of Paul Klee, one of Scheper-Berkenkamp’s teachers at the Bauhaus. The shapes of the main characters, Jan and Jon, refer directly to the typical costumes of the Bauhaus-plays, more precisely, to that’s school most famous performance, the Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer.22 Their bodies consist of simplified geometrical forms, whose heads display the letters “a” and “o” in the Sütterlin script (figure 10.9). Even the other figures wear costumes as if they are performing a role on a stage. Indeed, the general style of the illustrations and the composition of the single pages evoke the impression of being performed on a theater-stage. Moreover, the seven colors that dominate the different settings feature Itten and Kandinsky’s color theories. Both artists ascribed each color a specific psychological effect, for instance, green as the color of empathy and passivity, red as the color of love, desire, and war, black as the color of death and darkness, and yellow as the color of inspiration and reason. In this light, the selection and sequence of colors for the different settings in Scheper-Berkenkamp is not accidental. The properties of these settings and their inhabitants are consistent with the meanings of the respective colors. Jan and Jon start their journey in the white sea whose color is correlated with birth and openness according to Kandinsky. The kidnapping by a sea monster, the stay in the cave and the boys’ passive behavior in the green sea matches with Itten’s and Kandinsky’s description of the effect of the color green. Jan’s and Jon’s subsequent residence in the beautiful and silent city in the blue sea (with blue as the color of calmness and spiritualization) points to a short break before they enter the red sea where the boys experience both luxury (as a symbol for desire) and fearful situations that symbolize fight and war. Crossing the brown sea, they enter the black sea whose color is connected with death and loss (figure 10.10). Jan and Jon mature during these experiences and they decide to turn their back to wealth, arms, and misuse of power, which enables them to finally enter the yellow sea as the kingdom of true love and reason.

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Figure 10.9.  Illustration from Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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Figure 10.10.  Illustration from Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch by Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Leipzig: Ernst Wunderlich, 1948.

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These correlations shed light on the multiple semantic levels of the picture book. One might interpret the travels of the main characters as a story of initiation whose different stages are symbolized by the seven seas. The seven colors of the seas represent different life conditions and human behaviors as well as diverse mental states. But the picture book story reveals a second meaning on closer consideration. Neither Kandinsky nor Itten commented on the color brown, but Scheper-Berkenkamp wrote a passage about the meaning of this color in the autobiographical text “Rückschau” (Retrospect, 1971), where she characterizes “das schlimme Braun” (the bad brown) as the color of Nazism.23 Seen from this angle, the picture book can be interpreted as a story about displacement and exile. The motif of displacement runs like a thread through the story. Jan and Jon as well as the pilot fish move from one sea to another, searching for refuge, but they are tolerated for a short time only. The inhabitants of the red as well as the brown sea expel them almost immediately by threatening their lives. The shipwreck in the black sea and the following entrance into the yellow sea symbolize death as well as the arrival in a new homeland. One way or another, this is the final point of a dangerous journey which leads to a happy ending. This picture book is radical in different respects. The story is radical in the sense that it is “opposed to war”—a criterion proposed by Reynolds—and reveals children as socially important. The critical stances are not openly expressed but have to be derived by scrutinizing the references to Itten’s color theory and the political situation in Germany. Moreover, ScheperBerkenkamp’s picture book also shows signs of an aesthetic radicalism, as the illustrations evidently refer to avant-garde art, as an experiment with form and design, thus promoting a new way of seeing—evoked by a fantastical setting and storyline that subliminally refer to the difficult political and social conditions in Germany in the 1930s. THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF AVANT-GARDE LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN The picture books by Bortnyik, Scheper-Berkenkamp, and Seidmann-Freud, like many other German avant-garde children’s books of the interwar period, fell into oblivion, albeit for different reasons. Due to her Jewish descent and the avant-garde style of her picture books, Tom Seidmann-Freud’s artworks were banned by the Nazi regime in 1937. Just a few copies of the German editions survived, while some of her picture books appeared in English and Hebrew translations. Next to nothing is known about the reception of Bortnyik’s Die Wunderfahrt, of which just a few copies can be traced in German libraries.

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Finally, Scheper-Berkenkamp’s picture book did not match the tastes of German postwar society. When an exhibition on children’s literature, entitled Alte und Neue Kinderbücher (Old and New Children’s Books), was arranged at the National Library in Leipzig in 1949, Scheper-Berkenkamp’s picture books were not showcased as the critics and librarians opposed the books’ experimental and vanguard character.24 As a result, the original editions of the three picture books discussed in this chapter are now rare collectibles.25 The children’s books discussed here—and there are others still—show avant-garde children’s literature as one of the driving forces that introduced new topics into the German children’s literature of the interwar period. However, one is led to ask what reasons have hampered the recognition of these and other vanguard artists’ contribution to the renewal of German children’s literature during the Weimar Republic and beyond.26 From the beginning, these books met with reservations from different quarters, as a result of educational, psychological, religious, or aesthetic preconceptions. Furthermore, the political situation in Germany, particularly since the beginning of the 1930s, was not kind to experimental and radical children’s books whose authors were inspired by the Bauhaus. The causes for the marginalization of these picture books are manifold: many critics and scholars show the tendency to focus on the respective artists’ works created for adults. Nevertheless, these avant-garde children’s books impressed contemporary artists and publishers, encouraging them to develop sophisticated children’s books that follow in their footsteps. A case in point is the Swiss illustrator Warja Honegger-Lavater, who studied at the Bauhaus and was a disciple of Johannes Itten. She created abstract retellings of renowned fairy tales starting in the 1950s, paying tribute to the educational and aesthetic program of the Bauhaus. What makes the scholarly debate on avant-garde children’s books created by Bauhaus artists as a forgotten history particularly attractive is the tight interdependency with canonization processes in multiple respects. Within the realm of children’s literature there is a tendency to establish a canon of children’s books, often equated with children’s classics, but avant-garde children’s books are usually excluded from this canon, despite their uncontested impact on the renewal of children’s literature.27 It is a well-known fact that avant-garde artists and theorists contested the traditional canon. Moreover, they attempted to create singular artworks ahead of their time and not subjected to any artistic lines of development. Since these artists advocated the child’s active part in the creation of innovative and vanguard children’s books, they more or less consciously advanced a view that totally contrasted with the traditional position concerning the power relationships between children and adults. Usually children are assigned a merely

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passive role as consumers and readers of books written for them by adults. However, avant-garde authors attacked this lopsided position, thus strengthening the child’s sovereignty and granting children the power to determine the frame conditions of a new and vanguard children’s literature. Some just paid lip service to this project, but it seems to have been provocative. This radical position hampered an appropriate discussion of the impact of the Bauhaus on (German) children’s literature until the present. In any case, these reflections have shown that children’s literature created by avant-garde artists with close relations to the Bauhaus still present a challenge for the study of children’s literature in different respects and might be regarded as a blueprint for a profound reflection on the mutual relationship between the avant-garde and children’s literature. The interconnection of canon studies, avant-garde studies, and children’s literature research carries a significance that is theoretical as well as historical. A cultural history of German avant-garde children’s literature, with an emphasis on the impact of the Bauhaus, still represents a considerable lacuna and requires the mutual effort of children’s literature scholars, art historians and academics working in the realm of childhood studies to be successfully accomplished. NOTES 1. This topic is addressed in Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, eds. Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015). 2.  See Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, eds., Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009); Magdalena Droste. Bauhaus 1919–1933. Reform und Avantgarde (Köln: Taschen, 2006). On the significance of the Bauhaus in relation to other avant-garde movements, see Andrew Webber, The European Avant-garde, 1900‒1940 (Cambridge: Politi Press, 2004). 3. There were no academic requirements for enrollment at the Bauhaus, which implies that talented students from all over the world could apply for a scholarship. The Bauhaus had roughly between 120 and 200 students. About 25 percent came from abroad and more than 50 percent were women, see Carlos Pérez, ed. Infancia y arte moderno (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1998), 302. 4. Walter Gropius, “Grundsätze der Bauhausproduktion.” In Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten, edited by Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925), 5‒8. 5.  Juan Bordes, La infancia de las Vanguardías. Sus profesores desde Rousseau a la Bauhaus (Madrid: Catédra, 2007). 6.  The Free Drawing School in Weimar, which was based on the ideas of Friedrich Wilhelm Bertuch and supported by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, can be considered as a precursor of these tendencies. Established in 1780, this school fostered free instruction in drawing and art, for children and young adults as well as for craftsmen

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and young artists. On the relationship between modern art and children’s drawings, see Jonathan Fineberg. The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 7.  Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. “Childhood and Modernist Art,” Libri & Liberi 2.1 (2013): 11‒28. 8. On Siedhoff-Buscher’s creations for children, see Michael Siebenbrodt, ed., Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. Eine neue Welt für Kinder (Weimar: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik- und Kunstsammlungen, 2004), and Cornelia Will, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. Entwürfe für Kinder am Bauhaus in Weimar (Velbert: Deutsches Schloss- und Beschlägemuseum, 1997). 9.  See, for instance, the exhibition catalogs of Max Hollein and Gunda Luyken, eds., kunst—ein kinderspiel (Frankfurt: Revolver. Archiv für Kunst, 2004); Carlos Pérez, ed., Infancia y arte moderno (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1998), and Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, eds. Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900‒2000 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012). 10.  Kimberley Reynolds. Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910‒1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 11.  Tom Seidmann-Freud, Die Fischreise (Berlin: Peregrin, 1923). 12. Alexander (Sándor) Bortnyik, “Etwas über das Bauhaus.” In Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, edited by Eckard Neumann, 145‒149 (Köln: Dumont, 1985), 146. 13. Hubertus Gaßner, Wechselwirkungen: Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik (Marburg: Jonas-Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 1986), 348‒350. 14.  Albert Sixtus. Die Wunderfahrt. Ill. Sándor Bortynik (Leipzig: Verlag Alfred Hahns, 1929). 15. Samuel Albert, “Sándor Bortnyik and an Interwar Hungarian Children’s Book.” In Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde, edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 65‒88 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015). 16.  Samuel Albert, “Sándor Bortnyik,” 85. 17.  These significant color theories are introduced in Johannes Itten. Kunst der Farbe (Freiburg: Christopherus-Verlag, 2009; first published 1970) and Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern: Benteli-Verlag, 1952; first published 1912). 18.  This aspect in relation to picture books for young children is discussed in Roman Martin Deppner. “Parallel Reception of the Fundamental: Basis Design in Picture books and Modern Art.” In Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 55‒74 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011). 19. Ulrike Müller, ed., Bauhausfrauen. Meisterinnen in Kunst, Handwerk und Design (Munich: Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2019), 92–96; Patrick Rössler and Elizabeth Otto, eds., Frauen am Bauhaus. Wegweisende Künstlerinnen der Moderne (Munich: Knesebeck, 2019), 42‒44. 20. The other three picture books are Puppe Lenchen (Little Lena, the Doll), Knirps, ein kleines Ding (Tiny Tot, a Little Thing), and Tönnchen, Knöpfchen und andere (Little Barrel, Little Button, and Others).

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21.  Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch (Leipzig: Verlag Ernst Wunderlich, 1948). 22.  Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, “Canon and German Avant-garde Children’s Literature: A Paradoxical Relationship.” In Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, 119‒140 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 131. 23.  Lou Scheper, “Rückschau.” In Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, edited by Eckhard Neumann, 175–180 (Köln: Dumont, 1985), 179. 24.  Barbara Murken, “‘Eigentlich sitze ich lieber auf Luftlinien als auf Sesseln.’ . . . Die magische Bilderwelt der Bauhauskünstlerin Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp.” Das Bücherschloss. Mitteilungen aus der Internationalen Jugendbibliothek, München (2010): 83. 25.  The three artists have been rediscovered in recent years. Consequently, publishers have issued reprints of the three picture books discussed in this chapter. The Bauhaus museum in Berlin showcased a special exhibition on Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp in 2012, thus drawing international attention to her unjustifiably forgotten artworks; see Renate Scheper, ed., Phantastiken. Die Bauhäuslerin Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2012). 26.  Historical overviews on German children’s literature do not mention avantgarde picture books inspired by the Bauhaus, see Reiner Wild, ed., Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2012), and Norbert Hopster, ed., Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Weimarer Republik. 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014). 27.  On the complex relationship between canon and the avant-garde, see also Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. “Canon and German Avant-garde Children’s Literature,” 135‒136.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albert, Samuel. “Sándor Bortnyik and an Interwar Hungarian Children’s Book.” In Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde, edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 65–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Bergdoll, Barry, and Leah Dickerman, eds. Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Bordes, Juan. La infancia de las Vanguardías. Sus profesores desde Rousseau a la Bauhaus. Madrid: Catédra, 2007. Bortnyik, Alexander (Sándor). “Etwas über das Bauhaus.” In Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, edited by Eckard Neumann, 145‒149. Köln: Dumont, 1985. Deppner, Roman Martin. “Parallel Reception of the Fundamental: Basic Design in Picture Books and Modern Art.” In Emergent Literacy. Children’s Books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 55‒74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011.

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Droste, Magdalena. Bauhaus 1919‒1933. Reform und Avantgarde. Köln: Taschen, 2006. Druker, Elina, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, eds. Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Fineberg, Jonathan. The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Gaßner, Hubertus. Wechselwirkungen: Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik. Marburg: Jonas-Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 1986. Gropius, Walter. “Grundsätze der Bauhausproduktion.” In Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten, edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925. 5‒8. Hollein, Max, and Gunda Luyken, eds. kunst—ein kinderspiel. Frankfurt: Revolver. Archiv für Kunst, 2004. Hopster, Norbert, ed. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Weimarer Republik. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014. Itten, Johannes. Kunst der Farbe. Freiburg: Christopherus-Verlag, 2009 (first published 1970). Kandinsky, Wassily. Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Bern: Benteli-Verlag, 1952 (first published 1912). Kinchin, Juliet, and Aidan O’Connor, eds. Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900–2000. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. “Childhood and Modernist Art.” Libri & Liberi 2.1 (2013): 11‒28. ———. “Canon and German Avant-garde Children’s Literature: A Paradoxical Relationship.” In Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, 119‒140. New York: Routledge, 2017. Müller, Ulrike, ed. Bauhausfrauen. Meisterinnen in Kunst, Handwerk und Design. Munich: Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2019. Murken, Barbara. “‘Eigentlich sitze ich lieber auf Luftlinien als auf Sesseln.’ . . . Die magische Bilderwelt der Bauhauskünstlerin Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp.” Das Bücherschloss. Mitteilungen aus der Internationalen Jugendbibliothek, München (2010): 77‒84. Pérez, Carlos, ed. Infancia y arte moderno. Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 1998. Reynolds, Kimberley. Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910‒1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Rössler, Patrick, and Elizabeth Otto, eds. Frauen am Bauhaus. Wegweisende Künstlerinnen der Moderne. Munich: Knesebeck, 2019. Scheper, Lou. “Rückschau.” In Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, edited by Eckhard Neumann, 175‒180. Köln: Dumont, 1985. Scheper-Berkenkamp, Lou. Die Geschichten von Jan und Jon und von ihrem Lotsenfisch. Leipzig: Verlag Ernst Wunderlich, 1948 (reprint 2018 by Süddeutsche Zeitung Edition).

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Scheper, Renate, ed. Phantastiken. Die Bauhäuslerin Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp. Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2012. Seidmann-Freud, Tom. Die Fischreise. Berlin: Peregrin, 1923 (reprint 2009 by Edition Progris). Siebenbrodt, Michael, ed. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. Eine neue Welt für Kinder. Weimar: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik- und Kunstsammlungen, 2004. Sixtus, Albert. Die Wunderfahrt. Ill. Sándor Bortynik, Leipzig: Verlag Alfred Hahns, 1929 (reprint 2002 by Manuscriptum Verlagsbuchhandlung). Webber, Andrew. The European Avant-garde, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Politi Press, 2004. Wild, Reiner, ed. Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. 3rd ed. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2012. Will, Cornelia. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. Entwürfe für Kinder am Bauhaus in Weimar. Velbert: Deutsches Schloss- und Beschlägemuseum, 1997.

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Chapter Eleven

The Problems of Translation and Popularization of Russian Avant-garde Texts in the West Irina Evdokimova

A few years ago we were fortunate to discover a hidden treasure in Russia: a series of oral dialogues with dozens of notable Russian people—the survivors—people who were real participants in the Russian avant-garde movement, numerous historical events, exhibitions, presentations, discussions. These were people who were lucky to survive decades of repression and Khrushchev’s “thaw,” a period of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s that let the light breath into a country constrained by fear for decades. That hidden treasure we discovered was a collection of oral interviews conducted by Professor Victor Duvakin of Moscow University in 1960s and 1970s. Scholars know how exciting it is to find something unknown, uncensored, uncut—something totally authentic. The materials had been languishing in the basement of the library at Moscow State University, where Victor Duvakin deposited his entire collection of tapes, since 1982. Duvakin knew that the “great time” of this collection was yet to come: many of these interviews were recorded with the promise that the recording would not be revealed until the twenty-first century. In the 1980s there was apparently no interest in the collection: the Soviet Union was experiencing a major economic breakdown, and it was becoming apparent to many that it would not stand for long. In the 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the effects, both economic and political, meant that it was struggling just to survive. Who could be interested in the memoirs of an old professor? Through all this the collection lay dormant and undiscovered until the “great time” to reveal the treasure trove of original, uncensored dialogues with people like Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Dmitry Shostakovich, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, Victor Shklovsky, and many others. 199

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Once it was discovered, the Duvakin’s collection was retrieved from shelves, and the old bobbins of magnetic tapes were replayed again. The collection was impressive because of its size, with recordings of nearly three hundred people, and its coverage: politics and arts, literature and history, theatre and genetics, math and education. Today, for those who aspire to the historic truth, these memories of the survivors are more precious than diamonds. We can hear voices from the past, the voices of legends. All those people recorded by one single enthusiast with foresight—Professor Victor Duvakin. But how to convey to the Western reader what we feel listening to these interviews? How to help Western readers understand the context and meaning of the historical events the interlocutor and interviewee are talking about? We decided to work directly from the tapes, uncensored and unedited, and pay particular attention to the speaker’s intonation. We decided to translate the dialogues directly so that we would not miss even the slightest nuance, tone modulation, or variation of those invaluable dialogues. We decided that the voice of Bakhtin, or Shklovsky, or Jakobson, or anyone being interviewed, should sound for the Western reader exactly as it sounded for a native speaker. But what method of translation should we choose to use? Which one would be most appropriate for the translation of these dialogues? We found the answer in the lecture of Friedrich Schleiermacher1 that he delivered 150 years ago: the lecture was called “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” [On different methods of translation] (1813) and it was given in front of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. Schleiermacher clearly indicated that there can be only two main methods of translation: domestication and foreignization. According to Schleiermacher, following the method of domestication the translator seeks to reproduce the original as accurately as possible using the means of another language, without resorting to simplifications that would be detrimental to the author’s text. On the other hand, following the method of foreignization the translator makes the writer go forward, so to speak, by simplifying the vocabulary and syntax of the original, by making it sound more contemporary. That is, the translation becomes a more reader-friendly version of the text where all complex elements of a language in which the original is written (and sometimes even the author’s own manner of writing) are neutralized. For translation of the Duvakin dialogues about the avant-garde figures— Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Meyerhold, Tsvetaeva, Babel, Pasternak, and many others—we have chosen the method of foreignization to make sure that our goals are successfully achieved. For us, the voice of the interviewee became the main focus as we needed to understand every detail of what we heard. In

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other words, reading between the lines became for us more important than the mechanical translation process. Another important consideration was the audience. The Western reader is very curious by nature but also very impatient and very demanding. The Western reader does not like to waste time reading a narrative that lacks interesting and valuable information, or when the narrative is written in a dull, colorless language. Our case was even more specific: we had to deal with hours-long discussions that involved (in the most cases) only two people, and it was very important not to lose its zesty liveliness. As with every dialogue, there are slow moments and times when the conversation is not moving forward. Those moments were omitted: translation itself is a complex enough process that requires a maximum concentration of thought and attention, and nothing should interfere with the process of transmitting the meaning and the spirit of a conversation. We would like to point out the difference between written and recorded texts: the written narrative, no matter if it is dialogical or not, exists only in one dimension, on paper. We do not hear the actual voices of the participants of a dialogue, nor their intonation, nor the tone. Alternatively, the recorded dialogue has it all: the participants joke around, chuckle, make references to something (or someone) they both know—and, due to all these factors, the meaning of words, sentences and even utterances is constantly shifting, changing, moving, escaping. Therefore, our task was to catch that meaning and transmit it to the Western reader together with all nuances, sighs, laughs, and sorrows. “We do not read words, we read ideas,” said Mikhail Bakhtin about a hundred years ago, and this is exactly what we kept in mind while translating these dialogues. Thus, we wanted to translate the idea, not just single and seemingly disjointed words. We wanted to preserve the original meaning of the idea, at all cost. But when you deal with an idea, in opposition to a word or statement, every little detail quickly acquires the size of the Tunguska Event2 because each detail, if translated incorrectly or inadequately, could change the entire scenario, the entire idea. Let us illustrate the point. We first met at Brik’s place. When I came, the Briks were playing cards. There were a lot of people, different people, a mixed society (emphasis added)3

If we read this phrase in Russian and then in translated it into English, we would not be able to see the difference in tone, and how these highlighted three words were pronounced by the speaker (Viktor Shklovsky). But we were able to hear the difference, hear the fluctuations in the tone while he was

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slowly pronouncing those words. According to his tone, he wanted to make us aware that at the Briks’s place that night there were many people, that all those people were very different socially, but then he [Shklovsky] added that it was a rather balanced mix of all possible differences, so to speak. All these details were heard, but they would be seen on the paper. Additionally, while working on this translation, we constantly reminded ourselves that we were translating not only from one language to another (from Russian to English) but also from one culture to another (from Russian to Western). We knew that the understanding of the contextual meaning of historical events happening in Russia nearly one hundred years ago had to be facilitated by some kind of adequate system of signs, so to speak. Therefore, we decided to develop a navigation system that will be logically attached to these dialogues: a system of enlightening commentaries that would quickly bring the reader into the author’s circle to help them understand the realities of life of people in a different country. As Bakhtin noted, the “author when creating his work does not intend it for a literary scholar and does not presuppose a specific scholarly understanding. [. . .] He does not invite literary scholars to his banquet table.”4 In other words, people who are involved in the conversation do not intend these dialogues to be read by academics who know the historical context. Because the regular people do not know it, and this is understandable and forgivable. To truly be meaningful this must be facilitated. Consequently, our main intention was to make this book accessible to a wide audience, to people who are interested in the avant-garde movement, Russia’s history, and/or life of people under the Communist regime. We truly believe that “the world has contextual meaning,” and that “each particular phenomenon is submerged in the primordial elements of the origins of existence.”5 We knew that people who come to literature with good intentions to learn and understand can easily be turned away from it by the redundant or insufficient information that does not satisfy their thirst for knowledge. A disappointed audience is the last thing that any author would wish to see. Consequently, we interweaved commentaries into the original dialogues in such a way that they don’t distract the reader from the main text—the dialogue. Our challenge was how to effectively do this. To choose the form and style of commentaries that naturally blend into the dialogues. Professor Slav Gratchev, in his highly unusual and illuminating book The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (2017), developed an interesting idea. That the novel itself creates, and often without the author’s awareness of it, a virtual but active participate in the dialogue, the hypothetical third, as he called it. It is hard to believe but this virtual participant sometimes “changes the entire disposition of all moving forces of the show, [. . .]

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always tends to go beyond the prescribed boundaries and limits through the dialogue with the consciousness of the main hero.”6 In line with this idea, we wanted to create a special type of commentary that would acquire its own meaning and would begin to live its own life within the polyphonic environment of our dialogue/novel. We believed that if our hypothetical participant (the commentary) in the dialogue manages to become a real participant, if this voice behind the screen, so to speak, will be able to acquire its own significance—then the dialogue itself would become fuller, more meaningful, and even more polyphonic, where the “hypothetical third wants to pursue its own inborn significance.”7 As a result of this quest and time-consuming extensive research and experimentation with the language—as in the six-line commentary every word is worth a ounce of gold, so to speak—we decided to make sure that each commentary will never become a mere “pellet of intellection,” nor a “crystallization of thought,” but instead it will become a fully responsible and “answerable” substance within itself. To this point, we had to recall David Hume’s famous critique of the principles of causality where the second event is always understood as a consequence of the first. We agreed with Hume: it is not always the case, especially in the art of literature where each of our commentaries could and should be developed within itself and, consequently, be fully answerable for itself, defend the right for its own existence, and pursue its own significance. Can this commentary become a hostile to the dialogue/novel that it is supposed to support and supplement? Quite the opposite: it can become an integral part of the dialogue, and if it does, then our comment—das Ding [Ger. the thing-in-itself]—would function and act in conjunction with the dialogue, and not against it. These were the basic propositions before we started to work on our commentaries. We established the main rule: the Rule 6.5 which meant that none of the commentaries could exceed 6.5 lines written in Times New Roman, size 10. We calculated that the reader should not spend more than ten seconds reading our commentary. In our opinion, this is a maximum time that we can allow the reader to refocus his/her attention toward another—though related, but still another—topic. As well, we believed that this time is absolutely sufficient to digest the initial information and return to the main text that should never become overshadowed by the commentary. We tested these calculations on various people; students, colleagues, friends, and even relatives and the feedback we received was always the same: no more than ten seconds should be allowed for switching the attention from the main dialogue toward the commentary, or people tended to lose focus and even forget where they left off the dialogue, and what exactly they were reading about.

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The following table shows the results obtained from our research: the number of people believing they did NOT lose the focus toward the main text (dialogue) while reading the six-line commentary. The results also showed how drastically numbers dropped when the focus groups were allowed to read longer commentaries for fifteen or twenty seconds. Approximately thirty percent of any focus group were able to keep the focus after twenty seconds, and these results are fairly stable, while the eighty-five percent and higher of people were able to keep the focus after reading the commentary only for ten seconds. Table 11.1.  The first number (3/) shows the number of people who do NOT lose focus to the main text while reading the commentary. Focus Groups Colleagues (20 people) Friends (10 people) Relatives (10 people) Others (8 people) Students (35 people)

10 Seconds

15 Seconds

20 Seconds

19/20 10/10 10/10 6/8 32/35

13/20 6/10 4/10 4/8 23/35

6/20 3/10 3/10 3/8 12/35

The next important consideration, while translating those dialogues and writing commentaries is the way the contemporary generation receives and processes the information is very different form the mid-twentieth-century generation. This new generation has learned to split the big picture into small pieces and perceive it in its parts. This so-called “clip thinking” produced a considerably faster pace of the processing information but, at the same time, created a deficiency in depth of the acquired knowledge. The ability to see small but important details and further analyze them was hindered. It is not surprising, though: by acquiring something new we inevitably lose something old, and whether this replacement is good for us, or harmful—we can find out only with time. To reflect such a change, and to accommodate this new “clip thinking” we developed the Rule 6.5: each commentary that we write must be like a thundering bolt—bright, strong, loud, and attractive. It should send shivers along the spine—true shivers—not just make the reader shrug their shoulders—so what?—and turn away saying indifferently: “same old, same old. . . .” Now, let us read and analyze the specific example about the “historic person” commentary, as we wished to call it—i.e., the historic person who is not widely known to the general audience. Alexander Afanasyev (1821–1876) was a brilliant Russian ethnographer who collected and published more than 600 Russian fairy and folk tales. Shamefully for the Russian Tsarist government, the majority of his tales were prohibited for publication in his homeland, and Afanasyev had to publish them in Switzer-

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land. The largest collection of folk tales, comparable only with that of Brothers Grimm, had to wait for almost 150 years before it returned to Russia. Afanasyev, being such an enthusiast of his work and working non-stop for many years, exhausted himself and died from tuberculosis at the age of 45.8

Regarding the Rule 6.5: in this commentary we have precisely six lines written in the 10 point size. The first and last name of the person, Alexander Afanasyev, are in bold in the original text not only to draw the attention of the reader but also to facilitate the process of memorization: a picture is worth thousand words, isn’t it? We always choose to mention a precise number, six hundred fairy tales, as we believe it serves to impress the reader by the actual amount of work that was done by a single individual. We also prefer to state our opinion—“Shamefully . . .”—as we want to express it openly to establish an atmosphere where the author trusts the reader, and vice versa. We think that if the author tends to stay absolutely impartial to what he/she is writing about, the reader will have the same feeling, and the circle of confidence will be broken. If we think that something was bad—“the majority of his tales were prohibited for publication in his homeland”—we say so without hesitation. People always like to compare something, or someone with what they know well: the Western reader grew up with the name of Brother Grimm, he knows their famous fairy tales—Cinderella, The Snow White, The Sleeping Beauty,—and he/she will be pleasantly surprised that there was a certain “Afanasyev” who did the exact same work as Grimm did: to write fairy tales. The comparison of Afanasyev to Grimm will come as a big surprise but will make the reader to remember this new name for good. We also believe that if we talk about an individual, we must describe his/ her personality, in one or two sentences, but it must be done. Thus, the personality of Afanasyev is described by one but very important fact: he “worked non-stop,” and this is what, possibly, caused his dramatic and premature death: “he died from tuberculosis at the age of 45.” As we have just demonstrated, the commentary was written in full compliance with our Rule 6.5, we used precise numbers, we expressed authors’ opinion, we made comparison with someone well-known, we described the personality, and we talked about his dramatic and premature death. Please note that all of the above was inscribed into six lines of text! Let us analyze another historic person commentary—just to be sure that all established rules are followed. Anna Akhmatova (b. Gorenko) (1889–1966) is considered one of the best Soviet poets. She was not only one of the most eminent poets but also a seminal transla-

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tor and literary critic. She was a woman of incredible willpower: even though both her husbands were arrested and sentenced to death, and her only son, Lev Gumilev, who eventually became a professor of history in Moscow University, spent 10 years in a concentration camp, Akhmatova found moral strength to continue her artistic activity until her very last days. She deservedly became a living legend for all those who love Russian literature.9

The name “Anna Akhmatova” is bolded in the original text as well; the authors’ opinion is expressed openly: “one of the most eminent poets”; some additional important qualities are added: “seminal translator and literary critic.” With regards to the personality traits, we chose to use a strong wording: “she was a woman of incredible willpower.” We also explain why we called Anna Akhmatova a “woman of incredible willpower”: “even though both her husbands were arrested and sentenced to death [. . .] Akhmatova found moral strength to continue her artistic activity until her very last days.” Some additional names that we believe are important for reader to know (Lev Gumilev) are added to the commentary, and the precise number, ten years, is used to describe the dramatism of her life: she suffered a lot, but her son suffered as well, and both suffered for no reason! Another common type of commentary is a “historic event” commentary. We realize how difficult it is to describe a well-known event in just six lines: countless books have been written about these events. What information should be included, what should be omitted, and how to inscribe it into our innovative Rule 6.5 format? For example, Great Purge (1937–1938). Let us see. The Great Purge, or The Great Terror (the term that was coined by the British historian Robert Conquest in 1968) was the period of the most ferocious political repressions in the Soviet Union that started in1937 and lasted until 1938/39. The real reason for the purge is still debated by historians, but there is no doubt that Stalin was the key figure in planning of these repressions. Just to give an idea of the situation: during two years, according to the official documents, that most likely do not reflect the real picture, almost 700,000 people were sentenced to death for “counterrevolutionary” activity, and this is not including many others who were sent to labor camps for 10–20 years.10

Let us analyze the commentary using the same rubrics that we have developed. The main term “The Great Purge” is bolded in the original text; the alternative term “The Great Terror” is also provided—in case the Western reader is more familiar with this one. The dates are precise: 1937–1938/39; the authors’ opinion is expressed clearly: “the most ferocious political repressions”; the real numbers are revealed: “almost 700,000 people were sentenced to death”; it is indicated that no one can guarantee the exact number of victims from Stalin repressions: “according to the official documents, that

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most likely do not reflect the real picture. . . .” The Rule 6.5 is in place. Thus, the enormous amount of information is successfully wrapped into 6.5 lines and, in our opinion, the commentary sounds dramatic enough to leave a big “memory wrinkle” on the reader’s mind and invite him/her to inquire more about this dramatic historic event. The last type of commentary that we want to discuss here is the so-called “famous person” commentary. It is, perhaps, the most difficult type of commentary for various reasons: primarily, because famous people are generally well-known, and the editors often think that this type of commentary is not necessary. We tested this on many people, and what we discovered is: people recognize the famous person by name, but almost no one is able to provide any information about these people. For example: everyone knows who FDR was (a United States president), but almost no one is able to tell when he was struck with polio (at thirty-nine), when he became a president (1933), or what his fireside chats were about, among many other important details. Our conclusion, therefore, was that many of us know famous people by name but know next to nothing about them as individuals. Let us use another example about the legendary opera singer, Fyodor Chaliapin. But before reading the following commentary, please ask yourselves: what do I know about the greatest bass in opera history? Then read this commentary. Fyodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) possessed the deepest and, perhaps, most expressive bass voice in opera history. But he is remembered not only as a genius opera singer but also as an accomplished movie actor (“Don Quixote,” 1933), and talented sculptor. In 1910 Chaliapin bought a beautiful mansion on Novinsky Boulevard in 1910 where he spent many evenings with his friends: Rachmaninov, Gorky, Stanislavsky, Bunin, and many others. The Bolsheviks nationalized his house in 1918 and gave it to ten different families to live in. Chaliapin, deeply offended, left Russia and never returned. Only in 1988 was the house finally acquired back by the Moscow government to become a Museum of Chaliapin.11

Now it is our turn to ask you questions: did you know that Chaliapin had “the deepest bass in opera history”? It is important, isn’t it? Perhaps, you have never heard that, on top of everything, Chaliapin was “an accomplished movie actor and a talented sculptor.” We also believe that other facts, like where and when he owned a beautiful house in Moscow, and that his house was “nationalized” by Bolsheviks are quite important to understand what influenced Chaliapin’s decision to do what he did: “deeply offended,” Chaliapin “left Russia and never returned.”

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The guiding principle behind writing a commentary on a historic figure is that the information provided should not be common place, so to speak. Therefore, we argue that a short properly academic commentary such as “Fyodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) was a world-famous Russian opera singer” is not sufficient because it does not appeal to the readers’ feelings. Thus, our commentary must accomplish three things: • It must interest our readers. • It must make them think. • It must make them want to know more about this historic figure. In conclusion, to summarize the main proposition of this essay: if we want to successfully popularize Russian avant-garde texts in the West, we must focus on our general readership and not just a few academicians. To maintain the interest to these particular texts, the dialogues, we chose the method of “foreignization,” a method that, in our opinion, is better suited to facilitate the process of appropriation of the “foreign” material by the Western reader. Second, great attention was given to the navigation system, or the socalled enlightening commentaries that we voluntarily divided into three major categories: • The “historic person” commentary • The “historic event” commentary, and • The “famous person” commentary Each commentary, as it was shown above, followed the exact same trajectory: bolded first and last names—to attract attention; our evaluation of a person or an event; the use of concrete figures to strengthen the evaluating argument; the use of interesting biographical facts to catch and hold the attention of the reader; the Rule 6.5, or the required number of lines that we calculated and tested on different focus groups. Based on the conducted research we came to the conclusion that the dissemination of Russian avant-garde texts in the West will be more successful if it relies not only on the marketing efforts of the publisher but also be backed up by a solid scholarship. NOTES 1.  Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German philosopher and theologian who all his life was trying to reconcile two irreconcilable ideas: one of Christi-

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anity with that of Enlightenment. A kind and gentle individual, Schleiermacher exercised a great influence on many of his contemporaries, such as Fichte and Schelling. 2.  Tunguska event was a huge explosion that occurred in Russian Siberia in 1908. Up to this day it is unknown what caused it. The explosion by its power was equivalent to approximately fifteen megatons, i.e., it was one thousand times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. 3.  Slav N. Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova, Dialogue with Viktor Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–68 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 47. 4.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 165. 5.  Ibid., 159. 6.  Slav N. Gratchev, The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 6. 7.  Ibid., 6. 8.  This quote comes from the book that has not been published yet. The book titled The Russian Avant-Garde in the Memories of the Survivors: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–1974 is still in the preparation stage. 9.  Slav N. Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova, Dialogue with Viktor Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–68, 13. 10.  Ibid., 87. 11.  Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, eds., Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2019), 267.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Mikhail Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Slav N. Gratchev. The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. Slav N. Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova. Dialogues with Viktor Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–1974. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, Eds. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2019.

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Chapter Twelve

A Radical Emigré Naum Gabo and the Legacy of the October Revolution Christina Lodder There has been a strong tendency among both Russian and Western scholars to see all Russian émigrés–even artists and other creative figures–as politically reactionary and anti-Soviet. In this context, their experience of the October Revolution and any repercussions of that experience that these figures might have had is usually seen in completely negative terms. Although these émigrés might have sometimes expressed a nostalgia for the Russia of the past, their subsequent careers are frequently viewed as embodying profoundly conservative tendencies, as well as elements of reaction against the Revolution and the ideology that it promoted. Such generalisations can frequently be erroneous. In this text, I should like to focus on one creative figure—the sculptor Naum Gabo—who has himself been the victim of such judgements.1 In 1922, he left the Soviet Union and became a permanent émigré, establishing a career in the West. He was born into a Jewish family in Russia in 1890 and grew up in Briansk, within the Pale of Settlement. He received his higher education in Germany (1910–1914), studying science and engineering, and then spent the First World War in Norway (1914–1917), where he emerged as an artist, producing constructed sculptures. He then returned to Russia (1917–1922) and lived through the euphoric days of the Revolution and the hardships of the Civil War. Subsequently, Gabo moved to Berlin (1922–1933), Paris (1933–1936) and Britain (1936–1946), ending his life in the United States of America (1946–1977). Not surprisingly, perhaps, it has been customary for art historians (in both the East and the West) to view him, precisely because of his emigration and rejection of the extreme anti-art stance of Constructivism, as an anti-revolutionary, right-wing reactionary, and “a bourgeois proponent of pure art” 2 Like many of the creative figures of the Russian emigration, he has been regarded as an artist who was opposed to the Revolution, was critical of 211

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Lenin, was virulently anti-Soviet and embraced a politically reactionary position. In fact, as I will show, the reality is very different and far more complex than this scenario suggests. In this text, I shall explore the relationship between Gabo’s creative and ideological commitments, emphasising his espousal of Socialism, his support for the Revolution, and the way in which this influenced the work that he created while he was still living in Moscow, as well as the work that he subsequently produced while living in emigration. GABO’S RADICAL YOUTH In contrast to artists like Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gabo is not immediately associated with the October Revolution of 1917 nor, indeed, with any sort of political radicalism. Nevertheless, there is evidence that, like many people living in Tsarist Russia, Gabo was critical of the autocracy and embraced socialist ideas. During the 1905 Revolution, he had witnessed at first-hand and experienced for himself the full horror of Tsarist repression, when he was caught up in a pogrom in Tomsk. The revolutionary demonstrators were holding a meeting in the local theatre, when the reactionary and virulently anti-Semitic Black Hundreds, composed of clergy and various right-wing political groups barricaded the building and set it alight, killing all those who tried to escape the conflagration. Gabo was absolutely horrified. He later recalled, ‘I heard the cries of the dying, the cries of those imprisoned in the burning theatre . . . I saw how the crowd were shooting those who were standing on the roof and how they were throwing petrol onto the flames . . . I saw a lot that day . . . but I do not know if I can convey in words the horror that oppressed me and seized my soul for many years . . . I was fifteen years old and that day and that night I became a revolutionary.3 Gabo became committed to the notion of overthrowing the Tsarist regime, but there is no evidence that he joined a specific political party. In this respect, he was like many avant-garde artists of the time. This lack of precise affiliation did not seem to hamper his revolutionary activities and, according to his own recollections, he was involved in distributing prohibited political texts. He later recalled: In our youth to be a revolutionary signified courage. For us, the word ‘revolution’ was sacrosanct, an ideal, a dream of love and goodness for which we were ready to sacrifice our lives, without having any conception of what life was or even knowing really what revolution was. . . . We read prohibited books, proclamations printed on a hectograph [duplicating machine], which we also printed ourselves, distributing them in the villages, and using them to teach the peasants

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to read. We read them extracts from the newspapers, in accordance with the directions of those older than us.4

Later, in the 1910s, when he was in his twenties and studying at the University of Munich, Gabo seems to have been involved with a student group, attending several political meetings and at one time listened to a speech by Leon Trotsky. He reminisced: I belonged to a small group of Russian students (socialists). Members of the committee included Comrade Maisky (Ambassador in London during the Second World War) and Karl Adamovich a journalist. They organised lectures by socialists and invited important socialist activists living in Europe. There was Lunacharsky, Martov, and they decided to invite Trotsky. I had the task of finding Trotsky a room, meeting him at the railway station and looking after him during his stay in Munich.5

Gabo was not particularly impressed, however, by Trotsky’s appearance nor by his oratory. The lecture, about ethics and revolution, was unmemorable: “No, I would not have followed him to the barricades that evening, and I shirked from my duty of taking him to the apartment where he was to spend the night . . . I was disappointed. I had expected the former President of the Committee of Workers’ Deputies of the First Russian Revolution, but I met an absent-minded lecturer.”6 Perhaps, not surprisingly, Gabo does not seem to have been persuaded to join either the Socialist Revolutionary Party or the Communist Party. Instead, he appears to have been attracted to anarchism and the ideas of Petr Kropotkin. Among all the left-wing literature which Gabo absorbed during his youth, he confessed that the text that “made a lasting impression” was Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a key statement of “communist anarchism” published in 1902.7 Kropotkin rejected violence and saw the philosophy of anarchism as a practical means of achieving an equitable, just and harmonious society. GABO AND REVOLUTIONARY MOSCOW Obviously, like all Russian citizens who embraced any kind of radical and prorevolutionary sentiments, Gabo wholeheartedly welcomed the revolutions of 1917. Indeed, he only returned to Russia after the February Revolution: I returned to Russia from Norway only because the Revolution had happened. . . . From that peaceful distance the Revolution seemed to me to be some

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kind of heavenly radiance, a token of fate presaging a new life, a new earth, a new people in my homeland . . . nothing except the Revolution could have induced me to interrupt my work . . . I recalled my youth when the image of the Revolution was for me like a golden dream. . . . The Revolution was in Me. How could I stay away from my homeland when there was such rejoicing there?8

Later Gabo stated, “In Moscow, I was one of hundreds of artists, inspired by the idea of a new life.”9 In fact, it was in Moscow that Gabo emerged as a sculptor on the public arena. It was here that he began to formulate his aesthetic ideas more precisely and to develop his sculptural language in a more innovative direction, influenced by the groundbreaking works of other avant-garde artists, whose work he encountered, often for the first time. It was also in Moscow that he displayed his work for the first time as part of a group exhibition, held in the open air, on a bandstand on Tverskoi Boulevard.10 Although he had begun to experiment with constructed sculpture in Norway, he now developed his works away from the figurative subject matter of works like Constructed Head No. 2 of 1915 and Constructed Torso of 1917.11 In these works he had been influenced by Cubism and had built up the forms from discrete elements of material, so that space was fully incorporated into the centre of the object. Under the influence of the completely abstract constructions of Tatlin and the Suprematist works of Kazimir Malevich, Gabo began to experiment with a more abstract language of form, as in Construction in Space C.12 For Gabo, planar and linear constructions, along with the radical use of transparent materials, such as glass and plastic, could convey in metaphorical terms the dynamic, immaterial vision of reality projected by modern science, as well as the light, open-work language of current structural engineering, and the progress of contemporary society toward greater equality. He enunciated these ideas in The Realistic Manifesto, which he published with his artist-brother Antoine Pevsner (Noton Pevsner) in Moscow in August 1920, to accompany the open-air show.13 In actuality, Gabo remained faithful to these essential precepts throughout his creative life, producing sculptures with a strongly machine-age character in the 1920s, and then shifting during the following decade toward a more organic language of form, pursuing more intense effects of transparency to convey the essential continuity of space. In Moscow, however, Gabo was at the very beginning of his career as a sculptor. Neither he nor his constructed works were really known to the Moscow art world until 1920. His brother, Antoine played a more prominent role and took over Malevich’s studio at the State Free Art Studios in November 1919, when the latter moved to Vitebsk. Gabo apparently helped him in the studio, although he had not received any specialist artistic training, either in

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Russia or abroad. Gabo also seems to have worked for a while in the Department within the Commissariat for Enlightenment (IZO, Narkompros), where he was apparently involved in the publication of the newspaper IZO. According to Gabo’s own memoirs, he also helped to design and produce decorations for the revolutionary festivals. Unfortunately, no official evidence of this activity seems to have survived; there is no documentation that relates Gabo to Lenin’s Plan or Monumental Propaganda; and he is not cited in any of the literature on the subject. Despite this, there are several drawings in the artist’s archive which depict the type of agitational and propaganda sculptures that were common at this time, as well as several projects for public sculptures. Some of these projects indicate a close relationship with the type of agitational structures designed by Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis). There are, for instance, strong parallels in the use of circular and rectilinear elements between Gabo’s Design for a Construction, which is inscribed “Serpukhov 1918, Feb[ruary]–March” and Klucis’s Design for a Propaganda Stand of 1922, which contains slogans such as “Workers of the World Unite.”14 Gabo’s design is quite difficult to envisage as a completed structure, although it was clearly intended to project from a wall into the street, while the curvilinear elements may have been intended to rotate and/or display slogans. Klucis and Gabo had exhibited together in August 1920 and the evidence suggests that they were also friends, having probably met in Antoine’s studio. Both men revered Malevich. Gabo stressed that “it is to him [Malevich] and to him alone that Russia owes the credit of opening the new era in her art,” and he would often remark that Suprematism lay the foundations of Constructive art.15 For his part, Klucis had studied with Malevich in Moscow, visited him in Vitebsk, formed part of the Unovis cell at the Moscow Vkhutemas (The Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) and based his Axionometric Painting of c. 1920–1921 on Malevich’s illustrations in Suprematism: 34 Drawings of 1920.16 Despite their mutual admiration for Malevich, it is difficult to imagine that the two men could have been friends if Gabo had not supported the Revolution or been sympathetic to the Bolshevik regime. After all, Klucis was a committed communist, a member of the Bolshevik Party, and he had fought in the Latvian Red Rifles in support of the Revolution. It is clear that the two artists must have shared a political and aesthetic radicalism. Although Gabo was never a member of the party, his ideas at this time were firmly on the side of a revolutionary and progressive ideology, and they evidently remained so. Even in emigration, Gabo seems to have retained some of the idealism of his youth. When he was living in Berlin in the 1920s, he confided his deepest thoughts to his diary. Among observations about artistic and creative developments, he also wrote revealingly about politics:

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Rebel! Every day, like a prayer, the artist must repeat these words. It is intolerable to live amidst the lies and stupidity and meanness of the capitalist world. It is intolerable and painful to listen to the lies, stupidity and vulgarity of one’s milieu. Rebel! Even if this means to be alone.17 The Socialist revolution is a war, the most severe, the longest, and the cruellest of all that humanity can imagine. The bourgeois can compromise . . . but Communism must not. . . .18

Gabo’s radical attitudes clearly lay at the foundation of the construction Column.19 To some extent, the work represents Gabo’s response to Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International, which Gabo saw and criticised for its unnecessary rotating elements, at a famous debate, which took place in Moscow in early 1921.20 Like Tatlin’s Tower, Column possesses architectural and monumental qualities and was based on the very latest achievements of engineering and technology. Tatlin intended using a skeletal framework of girders to support a series of glazed structures that would act as premises for the new Communist International and stand higher than the Eiffel Tower. Gabo’s work is far more modest, although the artist believed that it could be expanded to a height of five to six meters. The essential structure consists of two large intersecting transparent planes with some added elements at the base and at points of intersection. The construction and the circular element rests on a base podium where people could meet and perambulate. In 1975, Gabo was finally able to have Column made at a height of two meters. It was at this point that he told his assistant that he had initially planned to engrave the text of the first Soviet constitution on the four transparent planes.21 This suggests that Gabo may have conceived Column as a potential work for Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda. He also explained that he had intended to place projectors so that they would play onto the sculpture at night, illuminating the engraved writing and producing the impression that the words of the Constitution were floating in space. This use of electric light and transparent materials relate to Gabo’s emphasis on modernity as well as to Soviet reality. Lenin’s Plan for the Electrification of Russia initiated in late 1920 possessed practical as well as ideological associations. As the slogan “Communism equals the Soviets plus the Electrification of the Whole Country” makes clear: on the one hand, electrification was an aspect of modernization and was bringing electricity and electric light to the masses; on the other hand, as Soviet power, it played a vital role in enlightening the masses and was a powerful weapon in securing their ideological and practical loyalty. Similarly, it is possible that in Gabo’s construction, as in Tatlin’s, transparency possessed a special symbolic significance, and helped to convey the idea of the new transparency and openness of the Bolshevik government.22

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In 1922, Gabo left Moscow for Berlin, where he helped David Shterenberg and Natan Altman organize the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung. The role that he played was acknowledged in the official photograph of the show, where Gabo stands alongside Shterenberg, Altman and Friedrich Lutz (the representative of the Van Diemen Gallery on Unter den Linden where the show was held) and D. Marianov, who was a member of the Soviet security services.23 Gabo subsequently settled in Germany, but he remained a Soviet citizen, and retained his Soviet passport for the next thirty years, only relinquishing it in 1952, when he became a naturalized American. PUBLIC SCULPTURE: THE ENDURING LEGACY OF GABO’S EXPERIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION One of the important creative results of Gabo’s experience during the revolutionary period, was his enduring commitment to public sculpture. In 1920, in The Realistic Manifesto, he had asserted for the first time that his ultimate artistic goal was to express collective social values by producing monumental sculpture in public places, where everyone could enjoy them. He wrote: In the squares and on the streets today we proclaim, to You, the people, our Word; we are taking our Work out into the squares and streets, in the conviction that art cannot and must not remain a refuge for the leisured, a consolation for the weary, a justification for the lazy. Art is called upon to accompany man everywhere, wherever his inexhaustible life flows and acts—At the factory bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play; on working days and on holidays, at home and on the road—in order that the burning urge to live may never be extinguished in mankind.24

By 1920, the notion that art should become a part of everyday life and the environment was relatively commonplace among the artistic avant-garde, who had rejected—as a relic of bourgeois society and capitalism—the idea that artworks were commodities for private consumption by a wealthy elite. In December 1918, Vladimir Maiakovskii had famously announced in his “Order to the Army of Art” that “the streets are our brushes, the squares are our palettes.”25 The Working Group of Constructivists set up in March 1921 took the concept of art into life even further. They completely rejected the notion of making works of art, and instead declared their intention to devote their creative skills to producing useful objects and designs as a way of helping to create a better environment and contribute to the work of building communism and a communist society in Russia.26 Gabo shared certain social and political com-

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mitments with the Constructivists, but he rejected their anti-art attitudes. Like them, he was happy to use his skills to produce useful objects and engage in designing a better environment, but he also insisted that he should produce pure art. Later he stressed that “art has its own absolute, independent value and function, which it must fulfil in society, whether that society is capitalist, socialist or communist.”27 Clearly, Gabo did not regard his constructions for public spaces as mere ephemeral agitational or utilitarian structures. He saw his sculptures communicating a radical ideology, but also inspiring people, lifting their spirits and engendering in them a joy for art and for living. It is precisely this kind of idea that lies at the foundation of works like Study for a Construction on a Staircase, which, judging from the clothing and the fact that it is very close in form to several of his constructions of the early 1920s, such as Construction in Space C, was probably produced soon after Gabo arrived in Berlin.28 In this instance, a relief resembling the sculpture, although far more extensive, was set into the walls either side of the steps, which look as though they might have been conceived as part of an underpass. This concept of public sculpture also inspired those sculptures which Gabo designed for specific locations. For instance, Model of a Monument for an Observatory was apparently intended to be executed on a large scale in Petrograd.29 Gabo presumably had in mind the celebrated Pulkovo Observatory, which was state-of-the art when it was opened in St. Petersburg in 1839. It was responsible for producing star catalogues, and by 1923, included both a large Littrow spectrograph to measure light and an astrophysical laboratory. Appropriately, the form of Gabo’s monument loosely evokes both the image and work of a telescope. It is precisely Gabo’s less explicitly ideological concept of public sculpture that continued to inspire his creative work until the end of his life. Although rooted in Gabo’s experiences of the Russian Revolution, such sculpture was conceived as life-enhancing rather than ideologically instructive. In this way, many of the constructions that he created in Germany, France, Britain, and America ultimately possessed a connection with the social aspirations that Gabo embraced in revolutionary Moscow. THE PALACE OF THE SOVIETS COMPETITION Gabo’s essentially radical stance and attachment to the idealism of the early Soviet years is also manifest in his participation in the Palace of the Soviets competition.30 On December 1, 1931, Gabo sent his entry to Moscow from Berlin. It might seem surprising for a sculptor to undertake such a task, especially as during the 1920s he had achieved a measure of international

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recognition for his abstract constructions. Moreover, by this time, Gabo was also, more or less, a permanent émigré, living in Berlin. Why did he decide to participate in the competition? The Palace of the Soviets was no ordinary building. It possessed profound ideological significance. It represented the architectural embodiment of Soviet ideals, the Soviet State, and the Communist government. As the organizers of the competition explained: The Palace of the Soviets building is a major political, technical, economic and architectural event, which must characterize our epoch, and express the will of the workers to build socialism.31

It is difficult to believe that Gabo would have worked on his design so intensively and would have wished to return to Russia if he had not felt a strong sympathy for the Revolution and what the Soviet government was trying to achieve. Entering the competition was not the action of a man who wanted to turn his back on socialism or who totally rejected the society that was trying to implement it. Of course, Gabo did not win. His design was lost and is known only through the documents in the artist’s archive and the drawings that he reproduced in his 1957 monograph.32 There are, however, sketches on the sheets remaining from his drawing boards which indicate that in formulating his he played with symbols of Soviet power—the hammer and sickle, and the star of the Red Army. 33 GABO’S CONTINUED COMMITMENT TO PUBLIC SCULPTURE Linear Construction in Space No. 1 With Hitler’s rise to power, Gabo left Germany and moved to France and then in 1936 to England, where he spent the years of the Second World War, living in Cornwall, a county in the extreme south-west of the country. It was here that his daughter Nina was born. At this time, Gabo was still a Soviet citizen and he went to London to register her birth at the embassy of the USSR. It was during the war that Gabo once again began to think about public sculpture. Around 1942, the British government began to consider how it might develop a better and more egalitarian postwar world. British society was far from being communist, and Gabo’s motives were not free from commercial and financial considerations. Nevertheless, he was ready to be involved in the construction of this new world. He explained to the British

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biologist Julian Huxley that he was anxious “to take my place in society and as a full citizen”34 Linear Construction in Space No. 1 looks like an autonomous, small-scale, abstract work of art, but there are grounds for believing that Gabo actually intended for it to be a large public sculpture, to be placed outside a textile factory.35 Indeed, Gabo conceived it as an abstract symbol of the technical process of cloth production and of the potential of new synthetic materials. The image loosely recalls images of textile manufacturing especially in the stringing, which Gabo used here for the first time, and his use of the new material Nylon. At the same time, Gabo dedicated this sculpture to Russia and the victims of the Leningrad blockade. He had followed the progress of the conflict in detail and had agonized over events in his homeland. In 1943, he wrote in his diary about the liberation of Leningrad and stated, “my construction is in honour of this day.” After quoting a lyrical description of the city by Pushkin, he added “Wonderful Pushkin . . . will my silent strings be worthy of your resonant verse?”36 Gabo may have wished to see Linear Construction No. 1 constructed on a large scale, but unfortunately, like many of Gabo’s projects it remained a small work of art for the delectation of the individual rather than being a large sculpture placed in a public space for the pleasure and edification of the masses. MONUMENT TO THE UNKNOWN POLITICAL PRISONER The same aspirations clearly influenced Gabo’s decision, in 1953, to take part in the international competition for a monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner.”37 Although his model made the final selection, he did not win, but was awarded a second prize along with his brother and a few other sculptors.38 Gabo’s entry was an openwork structure to be made from steel bars.39 In terms of content, Gabo focused on celebrating the heroic qualities of the human spirit, explaining that he felt “compassion” for the suffering of the prisoner, but he also felt “awe and admiration” for those who “stand up and fight” and allow themselves to be imprisoned.40 Gabo wrote: There are two ways to look at this tragic fact of political imprisonment in our times—one is compassion and condolence for the suffering of the imprisoned, and the other is awe and admiration. I did not hesitate for a moment to see that it is the latter feeling which I have for those who let themselves be imprisoned— who stand up and fight and take the consequences, no matter what suffering it entails. “Glory to them who go to the stake and vanquish the pain of torture for

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the sake of their belief.” I wrote it down on my table—banal as it is—in order to have it before me—and that was my guidance.41

THE BIJENKORF CONSTRUCTION, ROTTERDAM One of Gabo’s sculptures that was actually erected in a public place, indeed on the Coolsingel in the center of a reconstructed Rotterdam, was his twentyfive-meter high construction for the Bijenkorf (Beehive) store, which had been designed by Marcel Breuer.42 Gabo’s task was to produce a large structure that would be safe, but also visually and symbolically resonant for the viewer. He explained his response to a Dutch correspondent: When I got the commission from the Bijenkorf, together with the town, I found your town of Rotterdam reborn. I saw the enormous achievement which your town has shown in reconstructing in a very short time, the greatest part of the most important sites which makes the town one of the biggest ports in the world. The vigor of spirit, the energy of your people—I wanted to express in my statue, in the big Construction which, although it does not represent any figure is by itself, when you look at it, an image of a movement toward the heights of optimism and beauty and not of destruction. It is a monument to the energy of the Dutch people.43

As an image, the construction celebrates humanity’s capacities to reconstruct and overcome the forces of destruction. The soaring verticality of the form is an effective and accessible metaphor for spiritual regeneration. GABO’S LAST PUBLIC SCULPTURE: ST. THOMAS’S FOUNTAIN, LONDON Gabo’s last work of public sculpture was a fountain which was installed in the grounds of St. Thomas’s hospital in London (Revolving Torsion: Fountain), on the banks of the River Thames, almost opposite the Houses of Parliament.44 The sculpture consists of a large version of the sculpture Torsion of 1929, with a series of nozzles along the edges, from which water gushes out while the whole structure rotates. Gabo explained: “The rhythm of the water-pressure will be co-ordinated with the turning of the structure by regulating the jets from low pressure to high.”45 The jets of water gather and subside in intensity, on a recurrent ten-minute cycle. Patients and those recovering from operations can relax enjoying the sculpture and the play of light on the moving water.

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CONCLUSION The only public sculptures that Gabo managed to see executed were all produced a long way from revolutionary Moscow, in terms of geography, chronology, and ideology. Nevertheless, the idea that the general public should be able to look at, understand, and appreciate his works remained a fundamental aspect of Gabo’s creative credo, and was closely related to his Russian past and his revolutionary experiences. His artistic theory and practice were born and moulded in Russia and, despite the influence of other ideas and other cultural environments, including the financial, political, and material constraints (and benefits) of working within capitalist societies, Gabo essentially remained true to these ideas, carrying a small element of the revolution with him and in his work throughout his life. During the dark days of the Second World War, he affirmed his belief in the power of art to transform humanity and contribute to producing a better world: I have chosen the absoluteness and exactitude of my lines, shapes and forms in the conviction that they are the most immediate medium for my communication to others of the rhythms and the state of mind I would wish the world to be in. This not only in the material world surrounding us, but also in the mental and spiritual world we carry within us. . . . I think the image my work invokes is the image of good—not of evil; the image of order—not of chaos; the image of life—not of death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.46

NOTES 1.  For a full account of Gabo’s life and work, using extensive archival resources, see Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). See also Steven Nash and Jörn Merkert, Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism (Munich: Prestel Verlag, l985); Natalia Sidlina, Naum Gabo (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), and Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life (St. Ives: Tate St. Ives, 2020). 2.  Hal Foster, “Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism l914–1932 (New York: Rizzoli Publications,1990), 241–253. See also Benjamin Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), 89; and Paul Wood, “The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet AvantGarde 1915–1932 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, l992), 3. 3.  Габо, “Автобиография,” [Autobiography], typescript [1970s], 53–57, Gabo Papers, Tate Gallery Archive, London (hereafter, Tate); and Габо, “Как я стал революционером,” [How I became a Revolutionary], typescript [1970s], 58–71, Tate. 4.  Gabo, “V nashei molodosti . . . ,” [In our Youth], typescript [1970s], 8, Tate. 5.  Gabo, “К мемуарам,” [For my Memoirs], typescript [1970s], 12–13, Tate.

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6.  Gabo, Diary entry for August 23, l940, Tate. 7.  Miriam Gabo, “Biographical Notes,” typescript [1970s], 28, Tate. 8.  Gabo, “Autobiography,” 19, Tate. 9.  Gabo, Diary entry for August 23, 1940, Tate. 10.  See the review of the exhibition Aleksei A. Sidorov, “Iskusstvo i zhizn’: 2. O ‘novom realizme,’” [Art and Life: 2. Concerning the ‘New Realism’], Tvorchestvo (Moscow), no. 5–6 (1920): 2–3. 11.  Colin Sanderson and Christina Lodder, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Constructions and Sculptures of Naum Gabo,” in Nash and Merkert, ed. Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism, No. 4, 6; reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 17, 41. 12.  “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 8. 13.  Н. Габо, “Нотон Певзнер. Реалистический манифест” (Москва, 5 Август 1920) [N. Gabo and Noton Pevzner. The Realistic Manifesto (Moscow, August 5, 1920)]. For English translations by Naum Gabo and Christina Lodder, see Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, eds., Gabo on Gabo (Forest Row, East Sussex, UK: Artists Bookworks, 2000), 21–34. For reproduction, see Nash and Merkert, Gabo, 53. 14.  See Naum Gabo, Design for a Construction, c. 1920–1921, pencil on paper, 40.5 × 27.3 cm, Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, Berlin; reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 94. Klucis’s stand was designed for the 5th Anniversary of the October Revolution, and was to be erected on Revolution Square (Ploshchad Revolutsii) Moscow. See S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Gustav Klutsis (Moscow: RA, 2011), 89. 15.  Gabo, Carbon of letter to James Johnson Sweeney, September 8, 1942, Yale. 16.  See Christina Lodder, “Gustavs Klucis: Stands for the Revolution,” in John Milner and Elena Sudakova, eds., Klucis, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Milner: ReConstructivism (London: GRAD, 2013), 18–28. 17.  Gabo, Diary entry for January 11, 1929, Gabo Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (hereafter Berlin). 18.  Gabo, Diary entry for March 14, 1929, Berlin. 19.  Naum Gabo, Column, conceived c. 1921, this version executed before 1929, glass, painted metal and wood (in 1937 the glass was replaced with Perspex), height 105.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 10.2; reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 140. 20.  Tatlin’s Tower is widely illustrated. See, for instance, Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 62–63. 21.  Charles Wilson, in conversation with Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, 1990. 22.  The significance of transparency in relation to Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower is discussed in Nikolai Punin. Pamiatnik tret’ego internatsionala (Petrograd: Narkompros, 1920). 23.  This photograph is reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 108. 24.  “The Realistic Manifesto,” Gabo on Gabo, 33–34. Italics indicates the emphasis created by different typefaces in the original. 25.  Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Prikaz po armii iskusstva,” [Order to the Army of Art] Iskusstvo kommuny (Petrograd), no. 1 (December 7, 1918): 1.

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26.  For more details, see Lodder, Russian Constructivism. 27.  “Russia and Constructivism: An Interview with Naum Gabo by Abram Lassaw and Ilya Bolotowsky, 1956,” in Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings (London: Lund Humphries; and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 158. 28.  Naum Gabo, Study for a Construction on a Staircase, c. 1921, pencil on paper, 44 × 32 cm, Private Collection; reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 93. 29.  “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 16. 30. See Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow, l931–1933 (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, l993). 31.  “Дело всех творческих сил советской общественности,” [A Work for All the Creative Powers of Soviet Society], Дворец Советов, no. 1 (сентябр 1931): 5. 32. See Gabo: Constructions, plates 47–49. 33.  See Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, “Naum Gabo’s Design for the Palace of Soviets,” Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, 16–33. 34.  Gabo, Carbon of letter to Julian Huxley, November 27 [1942], Yale. 35.  Naum Gabo, Linear Construction in Space No. 1, 1942, Perspex and Nylon monofilament, 45.75 cm high. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA. “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 48.9; reproduced in Hammer and Lodder, Constructing Modernity, 286. See also, Miriam Gabo. “Biographical Notes,” 42, Tate. 36.  Gabo, Diary entry for January 18, 1943, Tate. 37. “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 61. See also, Herbert Read, “Foreword,” The Unknown Political Prisoner Competition (London: Tate Gallery, March 14–April 30, 1953). 38.  The Unknown Political Prisoner Competition. 39.  Gabo, Carbon of statement, sent with letter to A. Kloman at London’s ICA, March 24, 1953, Yale. 40.  Gabo, Letter to Herbert Read, January 4, 1953, Herbert Read Archive, Special Collections, University of British Columbia, Victoria. 41. Ibid. 42.  “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 66 and 67. 43.  Gabo, Carbon of letter to Mr. Bronkhorst [1957], Yale. 44.  “Catalogue Raisonné,” No. 30.7. 45.  Gabo, Carbon of letter to Eugene Rosenberg, July 25, 1973, Yale. 46.  Naum Gabo and Herbert Read, “Constructive Art: An Exchange of Letters,” Horizon (London), vol. 10, no. 55 (July 1944): 60–61.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Buchloh, Benjamin. “Cold War Constructivism.” In Reconstructing Modernism, edited by Serge Guilbaut. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. “Delo vsekh tvorcheskikh sil sovetskoi obshchestvennosti.” [A Work for All the Creative Powers of Soviet Society]. Dvorets Sovetov [Palace of the Soviets] no. 1 (сентябр 1931).

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Foster, Hal. “Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism.” In Art into Life: Russian Constructivism l914–1932, 241–253. New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1990. Gabo, Naum, and Herbert Read. “Constructive Art: An Exchange of Letters.” Horizon (London), vol. 10, no. 55 (July 1944): 60–61. Gabo, Naum and Noton Pevzner. Realisticheskii Manifest [The Realistic Manifesto]. Moscow, August 5, 1920. Gabo, Naum and Noton Pevzner. “The Realistic Manifesto.” In Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews, edited and translated by Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder. 21–34. Forest Row, East Sussex, UK: Artists Bookworks, 2000. Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings. London: Lund Humphries; and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Hammer, Martin, and Christina Lodder. Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “Naum Gabo’s Design for the Palace of Soviets.” In Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow 1931–1933. 16–33. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1993. Khan-Magomedov, S.O. Gustav Klutsis. Moscow: RA, 2011. Lodder, Christina. “Gustavs Klucis: Stands for the Revolution.” In Klucis, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Milner: Re-Constructivism, edited by John Milner and Elena Sudakova. 18–28. London: GRAD, 2013. ———. Russian Constructivism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “Prikaz po armii iskusstva,” [Order to the Army of Art]. Iskusstvo kommuny (Petrograd), no. 1 (December 7, 1918): 1. Nash, Steven, and Jörn Merkert, eds. Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism. Munich: Prestel Verlag, l985. Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life. London: Tate Publishing, 2020. Punin, Nikolai. Pamiatnik tret’ego internatsionala [Monument to the Third International]. Petrograd: Narkompros, 1920. “Russia and Constructivism: An Interview with Naum Gabo by Abram Lassaw and Ilya Bolotowsky, 1956.” In Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings. 156–160. London: Lund Humphries; and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Sanderson, Colin, and Christina Lodder, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Constructions and Sculptures of Naum Gabo.” In Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism, edited by Steven Nash and Jörn Merkert. 193–272. Munich: Prestel Verlag, l985. Sidlina, Natalia. Naum Gabo. London: Tate Publishing, 2012. Sidorov, Aleksei A. “Iskusstvo i zhizn’: 2. O ‘novom realizme.’” [Art and Life: 2. Concerning the ‘New Realism’], Tvorchestvo (Moscow), no. 5–6 (1920): 2–3. The Unknown Political Prisoner Competition. London: Tate Gallery, 1953. Wood, Paul. “The Politics of the Avant-Garde.” In The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932. 1–24. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, l992.

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Index

Acmeism, 100 Aelita: The Queen of Mars, 140 Anarchist philosophy, 137, 143 Anna Karenina, 13, 36 Art Nouveau, 63 Art of the commune, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Bakhtin circle, 27 Bellows, George, 45, 46 Bosch, Hieronymus, 93 Burliuk, Vladimir, 49 Byron, George Gordon, 45 Brothers Karamazov, 135 Bakunin, Mikhail, 143 Bauhaus, The, 175, 176, 177 Bortnyik, Sándor, 182, 183 Bolshevik revolution, 199 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1, 26, 202 Chagall, Mark, 15, 75 Chaliapin, Fyodor, 207, 208 Chama Indian tribe, 124 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 54 Chopin, Fryderyk, 68, 70 Constructivist painters, 14 Crooked Mirror, cabaret, 59, 60, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70

Danto, Arthur, 135 Diary of a Writer, 31, 37 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 33, 36, 135, 140 Dunkan, Isadora, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69 Duvakin, Victor, 200 Eisenstein, Sergey, 138, 139 Erenburg, Ilya, 138 Estrangement, 1 Evreinov, Nikolai, 66, 67 February revolution, 9, 213 Fiedler, Arkady, 115 Filonov, Pavel, 152 Formalists, 18 Futurism, 9, 10, 11, 43, 47, 49, 88, 90 Futurist poetry, 16, 48 Gabo, Naum, 211 Gaia hypothesis, 125, 129 Gardin, Vladimir, 142 Gauguin, Paul, 127 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 87 GOELRO, 140 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 199 Gratchev, Slav, 203 Great Purge, The, 207

227

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Index

Hegel, Georg, 90 Hume, David, 203 Ikar, 60, 64, 68, 70 Intuitive Art, 91 Italian Futurists, 46 IZO, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 215 Jack of Diamonds, 50 Jackson, John, 44 Kabakov, Ilya, 159, 165 Kandinsky, Wassily, 12, 16, 184, 188, 191 Karelin, Apollon, 143 Karsavina, Tamara, 63, 69 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 51, 89, 98, 100, 101 Khrushchev, Nikita, 199 Kipling, Rudyard, 118 Klasson, Robert, 140 Klee, Paul, 177, 178, 180, 188 Komar, Vitaly, 154, 155 Konchalovsky, Petr, 50, 51 Kosintsev, Grigory, 138 Krakow avant-garde, 118 Kropotkin, Petr, 213 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 51, 52, 53, 54, 89, 98, 100, 102 Kugel, Aleksandr, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70 Kuleshov, Lev, 139, 143 Larionov, Mikhail, 49, 97 Latvian Red Rifles, 215 LEF, 11, 13 Left painters, 49 Leopold, Aldo, 125 London, Jack, 44, 46 Lossky, Nikolay, 136 Lotman, Yuri, 136 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 79, 81 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 128 Malamid, Alexander, 154, 155

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Malevich, Kazimir, 10, 11, 12, 15, 51, 52, 53, 54, 74, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99, 103, 105, 151, 159, 214 Marinetti, Filippo, 11, 47 Mashkov, Ilya, 49, 50 Matyshin, Mikhail, 98 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 62 Modernism, 63 Morskoy, Ivan, 142 Museum of Natural History in Berlin, 122 Mushtakov, Alexander, 78 Narkompros, 13, 76, 77, 80, 215 NEP (New Economic Policy), 142 New Culture, 13 October revolution, 73, 75, 211 OPOYAZ, 10, 15, 19, 27 Pasternak, Boris, 16 Pavlova, Anna, 63 Perestroika, 199 Pertsov, Victor, 75, 76 Petipa, Marius, 63 Plan for the Electrification of Russia, 216 Plan of Monumental Propaganda, 215, 216 Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky, The, 203 Popova, Lyubov, 14 Possessed, The, 135 Post-Suprematism, 152 Potazanov, Yakov, 140 Proletkult, 76, 77, 79 Punin, Nikolay, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81 Rakhmetov, 54 Realistic Manifesto, 217 Reinhardt, Max, 70 River of Singing Fish, The, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 125 Rodchenko, Alexander, 212

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Index 229

Roosevelt, Theodore, 43 Rule 6.5, 204, 205, 206, 209 Russian avant-garde, 44 Russian Formalism, 28 Russian Symbolists, 43

Tolstoy, Alexey, 138, 140, 144 Tratyakov Gallery, 152 Trauberg, Leonid, 138 Trotsky, Leon, 213 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 138, 145

Samizdat, 10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 135, 136 Scheper-Berkenkamp, Lou, 186, 188, 191, 192 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 201 Seidmann-Freud, Tom, 179 Shakhovskoi, The Prince, 62 Shcherba, Lev, 33 Shestov, Lev, 135 Skamandrites, 126 Soviet cinema, 137 Suprematism, 88 Symbolism, 90, 105, 106, 137 SZ News, 161, 162

VDNKh, 155 Vertov, Dziga, 142 Victory over the Sun, 51, 104 Vitebsk school, 15

Tatlin, Vladimir, 49, 212, 216 Todorov, Tsvetan, 135

Zaum’, 48, 88, 89 Zelinsky, Kornei, 74

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Wagner, Richard, 62 War of the Worlds, The, 138 Weimar Republic, 192 Wells, H. G., 138, 143 Yakubinsky, Lev, 26 Yulikov, Alexander, 151, 152 Utopian novel, 143

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About the Contributors

Olga Burenina-Petrova is a researcher at the The University of Zurich, at the Institute of Slavonic Studies. She extensively published on the Russian avant-garde, problems of anarchism, history and theory of theater, literary theory, and film aesthetics. She is an editor or author of Absurd i vokrug [Absurd and Around] (2004), Symbolist Absurdity and Its Traditions in Russian Literature and Culture of the First Half of the Twentieth Century (2005; 2015) and Circus in the Space of Culture (2014). Her works have been translated to English, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Croatian. Irina Evdokimova is a lawyer, who has worked as a criminal prosecutor for the Attorney General Office for many years. She loves the Silver Age of Russian poetry and literary criticism and has always dreamed of writing books about that period. She coedited the book Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–1968 (2019), and contributed to the volume Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy (2019). Michael Eskin is an award-winning author, translator, publisher, and cofounder of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. He has taught at Rutgers, Cambridge, and Columbia Universities. His many publications on cultural, literary, and philosophical subjects include: Nabokovs Version of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1994); Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (2000); Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (2008); The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays by Durs Grünbein (as editor; 2010); and The Wisdom of Parenthood: An Essay (2013). His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Sport 40, and World Literature Today, among other venues. 231

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About the Contributors

Ida Day is assistant professor of Spanish at Marshall University. Her interests are ecocriticism and Latin American studies. Her book chapters appear in the Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing (Routledge, 2012), Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America (Lexington Books, 2016), and Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (Routledge, 2019). In addition, she published numerous articles on ecocriticism in the academic journals such as Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, IXQUIC Revista Hispánica Internacional de Análisis Literario y Cultural, and in Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Review. Norbert Francis is professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University and presently visiting researcher in the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at Chengchi University. His current research focuses on problems of language and literacy learning in multilingual contexts from a cognitive science point of view. Recent publications include: “Cross-language poetics in East Asia,” published in Poetics Today (2019) and “Chữ Nôm and the cradle of Vietnamese poetry,” in Journal of Chinese Writing Systems (2019). Slav N. Gratchev is associate professor of Spanish at Marshall University. He is the author/or editor of six books: The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (2017); Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (2017); Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts and Psychology (2018); Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–1968 (2019); Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy (2019), and Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973 (2019). In addition, he has published numerous articles on Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin in various journals including Cervantes, College Literature, The South Atlantic Review, Comparative Literature and Culture, The Russian Review, The Nabokovian. Tim Harte is professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. His first book, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–30 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), explores the modernist “cult of speed” that emerged in Russian avant-garde painting, poetry, and cinema. His recently completed book manuscript, Athletics, Art and Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Russian and Soviet Culture, addresses the emergence of athletics in early twentieth-century Russia and its paramount significance for the arts. He has also published articles on Vladimir Nabokov, Vasily Kamensky, and Osip Mandel’stam as well as on the filmmakers Marlen Khutsiev, Aleksey German, and Aleksandr Sokurov.

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About the Contributors 233

Mark Konecny is associate director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, a unique collection of twentieth-century books, art, and cultural artifacts. His area of expertise is Russian theater and art of the early twentieth century. He is the series editor of Experiment, a scholarly art history journal. He is also the scholarly communications and digital publishing strategist at the University of Cincinnati and active in promotion of digital scholarship and open access publishing. With Evgeniia Petrova and John Bowlt, he was an editor author of the groundbreaking study of Nikolai Khardzhiev, A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-garde. He has published several articles on the Russian avant-garde and theater. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been a guest professor at the University of Växjö/Kalmar, Sweden, and the University of Vienna, Austria. She is the coeditor of two book series: “Children’s Literature, Culture and Cognition” and “Studies in European Children’s and Young Adult Literature.” She is an author or editor of more than fifteen books, as well as she has written more than one hundred articles that appeared in international collections and in peer-reviewed journals, such as International Research in Children’s Literature, Word & Image, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, European Judaism, and Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society. Her most recent book is The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (Routledge, 2018). Christina Lodder is an honorary professor in the history of art at the University of Kent, president of the Malevich Society, and coeditor of Brill’s Russian History and Culture series. She is an expert on Russian art of the early twentieth century and has written numerous articles and several books. Among her most notable publications are Russian Constructivism (1983); Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (coauthor, 2000); Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews (coeditor, 2000); Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005); Rethinking Malevich (coeditor); Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (coeditor, 2013); Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism (translator, editor, author of introduction, 2013); and Celebrating Suprematism: New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich (editor, 2018). She has translated several texts, including S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Georgii Krutikov: The Flying City and Beyond (2015), and has occasionally been involved in the organization of exhibitions as an advisor or curator, most notably with Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2006).

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About the Contributors

Margarita Marinova is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Christopher Newport University, Virginia. She has published three books so far: Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011); Mikhail Bulgakov’s Don Quixote (MLA, 2014); and Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973 (Bucknell University Press, 2019). She has also published articles about Russian and Soviet literature and culture, Cervantes in Russia, contemporary Bulgarian literature, and travel studies in scholarly collections [most recently, Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (Bucknell University Press, 2017); Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability (Lexington Books, 2018)], and journals such as the Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Travel Writing, The Comparatist, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Natalia Murray is associate lecturer of modern and contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a Senior Curator and the author of Art for the Workers: Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd, 1917–1920 (2018); author and editor of the catalog of the exhibition she curated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London Revolution: Russian Art, 1917–1932 (1917); author of The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde: The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (2012 English edition, 2018 Russian translation); editor of A Russian Fairytale: The Art and Craft of Elena Polenova (2014). Her books and articles extend across the wide field of nineteenth- to twentiethcentury Russian art. She has also featured in films dedicated to the Hermitage museum and the Russian revolution and in programs for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Mary A. Nicholas is professor of Russian at Lehigh University. Her research concerns Soviet and post-Soviet culture, particularly literature and the visual arts. An award-winning teacher, Nicholas is the author of monographs Writers at Work: Russian Production Novels and the Construction of Soviet Culture (2010) and Moscow Conceptualism: Words and Deeds of a Radical Art Movement (2020). Her encounter with the AptArt movement in Moscow in the early 1980s led to an interest in the role of text in pictorial arts. Her current focus includes projects on the creative collective “Kupidon” and the role of collaboration in contemporary Russian art.

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