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Modernism/Modernity in the Post-Revolutionary Diaspora

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Modernism/Modernity in the Post-Revolutionary Diaspora GRETA N. SLOBIN (Santa Cruz, CA, USA) MODERNISM/MODERNITY IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY DIASPORA "Nikogda nichei ia ne byl sovremennik" Osip Mandel'shtam In its last decades, the twentieth century occasioned passionate debates in the west about its beginning - about modernism, its definition, esthetics, and politics. The importance of a stocktaking of the modernist legacy acquired new urgency in the swiftly approaching turn of the twenty-first century. As Marshall Berman noted in his seminal book on modernism, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), "we don't know how to use modernism."' Berman's explicit purpose was to restore the memory of modernism and its promise: "This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead."2 This work, concerned with the relation between modernity and revo- lution, was one of the first that included an extended discussion of the Rus- sian contribution and its distinct history in the context of European moder- nisms. Modernism for Berman is revolutionary in its break with the past artistic traditions. His main concern is to reveal "the dialectics of modernization and modernism" in the interwar period.3 In a subsequent discussion of Berman's book, Perry Anderson provides a useful clarification of terms: "Between the two lies the key middle term of "modernity" - neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediating one to the other."4 The question Anderson asks is one that has great relevance for the Russian expe- rience: "What constitutes the nature of the linkage between them?"5 He then singles out development as "the central concept of the book and the source of 1. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1983), p. 24. ' 2. Ibid., p. 36. ' 3. Ibid., p. 18. 4. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultu- re, ed. with an intro. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL and Chicago: Univ. Of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 318. I would like to thank Tyrus Miller for this reference and good conversation. , 5. Ibid. most of its paradoxes." In the context of the postmodern critique, Andreas Huyssen questions the belief in "the relationship of modernism to the matrix of modernization which gave birth to it and nurtured it through its various stages."6 _ The terms modernism, modernity, and development, debated in Russia since the early twentieth century, became crucial after the October Revolu- tion in the passionate polemics concerning the shape and role of Russian lite- rature in the young Soviet Union. A direct relation of art to social transforma- tion, tied to development, was vital for the Soviet avant-garde, for whom this was an opportunity for a fusion of revolutionary politics and aesthetics. However, as Sheila Fitzpatrick points out, "... within the creative intelligent- sia ... there were profound splits between avant-gardists, traditionalists, pre- servationists, realists, symbolists, Marxists, and those who either were or we- re not prepared to be 'fellow travelers' of Soviet power."7 Those writers and intellectuals who were part of the pre-revolutionary modernism and found themeselves in exile, outside the USSR and "outside of history," faced a dif- ferent set of challenges in the conditions of life abroad. For them, the connec- tion between the esthetic experiment of modernism, its social implications, and the matrix of modernity and modernization was particularly complex. This article examines how the diaspora considered its role in the culture debates, where modernism and modernity were the disputed terms, unders- tood as distinct by some and as conjoined by others in the years following the revolution. The Russian example represents a special case history in the study of cultural politics of a divided nation. Understanding the use of key terms and the attitudes they engendered holds further implications for understan- ding Russian modernism as it continued well beyond the revolution at home and in the diaspora.8 The diaspora stance on these issues was inevitably am- bivalent, since, as Paul Gilroy affirms, "consciousness of diaspora affiliation stands opposed to the distinctively modern structures and modes of power or- chestrated by the institutional complexities of nation-states."9 At the same time, the situation in the homeland provided a context for cri- tical positions in the diaspora, where people from different sides of the politi- cal spectrum debated the events in Soviet Russia, set on an evolving platform 6. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Moderrtism. Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 55-56. 7. The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), p. 4. , 8. For the notion of the continuity of Russian modernism beyond the revolution, see Mark Lipovetsky, ed. by Eliot Borenstein, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (Ar- monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 7. 9. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambrid- ge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), p. 124. .
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