Aleksandr Rodchenko. “Read Novyi Lef. Subscribe.” Advertising Leaﬂet for Novyi Lef

Home , LEF (journal)

Aleksandr Rodchenko. “Read Novyi lef. Subscribe.” Advertising leaﬂet for Novyi lef. 1927. Art © Estate of Aleksandr Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York. All images courtesy Merrill C. Berman.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph*

LEAH DICKERMAN

In 1927, two years after the dissolution of Lef [Left], the journal’s reconsti- tuted editorial board successfully petitioned for permission to begin publication of a new journal, Novyi lef [New Left]. The “new” in the title referred not only to the journal’s reincarnation, but also to a significant shift in theory and practice. The design of a poster promoting the serial could already be read as a kind of Kremlinological map of this transformation. On the top row, admitted alongside photographic portraits of the three leading stalwarts of Lef—Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Nikolai Aseev—were the writer Sergei Tret’iakov, who would become the foremost champion of a “literature of fact” in the pages of the magazine, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Constructivist artist and photographer, who had designed the earlier journal but had played a more marginal role in develop- ing its content. Pictures of Boris Kushner, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, Semen Kirsanov, P. Neznamov, Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyii, Boris Pasternak, Viktor Persov, Sergei Eisenstein, Anton Lavinskii, and Viktor Shklovsky line the three other sides, and define the loose association of figures that coalesced around the journal. The significance of Rodchenko’s position within the top tier of this hierar- chy is reinforced by the appearance of two of his photographs, each drawn from key series and placed in tight juxtaposition with the words in the poster’s center: one, a closely cropped deadpan portrait of Mayakovsky, and the other, the balcony of his apartment building shot obliquely from below. Photography’s position was indeed central: for in contrast to Lef, in which camera images rarely appeared, Novyi lef was illustrated exclusively with photographs. During the journal’s two-year run, photographs (usually by Rodchenko himself) appeared on the covers of all but three of its twenty-two issues, and four pages of photomechanical reproductions of photographic images and film stills were inserted into the bindings of each.

* With many thanks to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rachel Churner, Devin Fore, Hal Foster, Maria Gough, Stephen Kotkin, Richard Meyer, Annette Michelson, Matthew S. Witkovsky, and Alastair Wright for their helpful suggestions and comments on this essay at various stages of its development, and with particular gratitude to Merrill C. Berman for his generosity in sharing his collection over many years.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 134 OCTOBER

Rodchenko served not only as the magazine’s designer but also as photo-editor. The latter role was new in publishing, the functional incarnation of an emergent media culture, made possible by improved technologies of reproduction that allowed for the broad dissemination of photographic material and, increasingly, for the printing of text and photo-image on the same page. Redefining the artist as a media worker in both his theoretical proclamations and practice, Rod- chenko stood as an avatar of the information age. But Rodchenko’s ascendancy derived from something more fun- damental than the simple fore- grounding of a new mode of visual illustration. For not only did Novyi lef champion the camera genres of photography and film as the forms of visual practice most suitable for the postrevolutionary moment, but Rodchenko. Cover of Novyi lef, no. 1 (1928). photography—especially as defined and practiced by Rodchenko—also served as the theoretical model for the group’s new program for literature: a type of short, nonfictional, journalistic writing called factography. Sergei Tret’iakov offered a triumphal declaration of this transformation in the first issue: “Lef’s distinct uncompromising focus on the literature of fact and the photograph has been added to our assets.”1 That factography was understood by its champions to be an explicitly photographic mode of writing is suggested by the neologism itself, which proposes an analogy between the light-writing of photography and the inscription of fact in this new type of prose production. “The fixation and montage of fact”2—a repeated call that served as the journal’s overarching mandate for work in different media—had emerged in earlier theoretical descriptions of photography. In an

1. Sergei Tret’iakov, “S novym godom. S ‘Novym lefom’!,” Novyi lef, no. 1 (1928), p. 1; trans. as “Happy New Year! Happy New Lef !,” in Russian Formalism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 265. 2. See, for example, Osip Brik, “Blizhe k faktu,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1927), p. 34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 135

unsigned article that appeared in Lef in 1924, praising Rodchenko’s work, the author (probably Osip Brik) underscores the significance of photography’s character as a physical trace of reality—that is, as an index: “What this replacement [of graphic media in photomontage] means is that the photographic snapshot is not the sketching of a visual fact, but its precise fixation.”3 And certainly part of the impetus for factography also came from the work of Lef-associated filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Vertov picked up the term “fact”—further reinforcing its connection with the camera image—in a manifesto published in Pravda calling for an archive of documentary film footage with an associated “film laboratory” charged with producing a cinema of non-acted images: “We must form,” he declared, “a FILM FACTORY OF FACTS. . . . Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with facts. Propaganda with facts. Fists made of facts.”4 Yet despite what might seem a claim to transparency embedded in its name, the model of factography has remained rather elusive.5 This essay explores the question of how we might understand this photographic mode of writing and its historical imperatives.

3. “Foto-montazh,” Lef, no. 4 (dated 1923, but appeared in 1924), pp. 43–44; trans. as [Gustav Klutsis?], “Photomontage,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), p. 211. Brik, rather than Klutsis, is the likely author of this text, often considered the ﬁrst published essay on photomontage in the Soviet Union. Brik was often responsible, fully or in part, for the unsigned editorials that appeared in Lef, and he championed Rodchenko’s work as a paradigm for revolutionary practice. Moreover, the idea of the photograph as a “precise record” of “visual fact” becomes a hallmark of Brik’s writing. Klutsis had little association with either Lef or Rodchenko, who is singled out among Soviet photomonteurs for praise in the text. 4. D[ziga] Vertov, “Fabrika faktov (V poriadke predlozheniia),” Pravda, July 24, 1926, p. 6; trans. as “The Factory of Facts,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 59. 5. The term “factography” has often been equated with a shift toward political instrumentalism and didacticism that breaks with an avant-garde model of practice—an assumption that simultaneous- ly underplays the ideological formation of earlier Soviet avant-garde work and factography’s resistance to models of didactic realism that emerged within a contemporary contest of realisms. Brandon Taylor writes, “Tret’iakov was a determined utilitarian and advocate of ‘factography,’ and a zealot of proletari- anization in the arts by any and every means.” Taylor, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, vol. 2, Authority and Revolution, 1924–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 107. Anna Lawton’s more temperate evaluation nonetheless belies her assumptions: “Notwithstanding the emphasis on the ‘literature of the fact,’ the editors of Novyi lef managed to publish interesting and stimulating material.” Lawton, “Introduction,” in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism, p. 47. Halina Stephan writes, “In New Lef, experimentation with form became clearly subservient to the higher goal of shaping the social experience through literature that now responded to ‘social commission.’ With this development the original Futurism came to an end.” Halina Stephan, “Lef” and the Lef Front of the Arts (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1981), p. xi. More sustained efforts to deﬁne the model of factography are rare; two inaugural efforts in the field of Russian literature include Vahan Barooshian, “Russian Futurism in the Late 1920s: Literature of Fact,” Slavic and East European Journal 15, no. 1 (1971), pp. 38–46, and Natasha Kolchevska, “Toward a ‘Hybrid’ Literature: Theory and Praxis of the Faktoviki,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 4 (1983), pp. 452–62. The most important discussion of factography within the literature of art history is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s essay “From Faktura to Factography,” published in October 30 (Fall 1984), pp. 82–119.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 136 OCTOBER

“Militant Passéism”

Factography was defined against important shifts in the cultural field that followed the 1925 Party Resolution on Literature, which provided a precedent for Party intervention in aesthetic policy and set the terms for literary and artistic debate in the next three years. The text was a compromise document drafted by Nikolai Bukharin, mediating between support for the so-called “proletarian” groups and general tolerance on the cultural front. Such groups—most promi- nently the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), which called for a legible, formally conservative realism in the service of the Party—had been vora- cious in their claim to cultural hegemony over the last few years; its members were not so much proletarian by class origin—few writers were truly working class per se—but claimed a position of radical cultural anti-elitism and political instrumentalism. Abandoning the Party’s former reluctance to favor officially any one of the rival artistic groups, the 1925 text now asserted in principle that “the proletariat should be offered a forward position” and extended the so-called proletarian groups “material and ideological support” from the Party. At the same time, it urged tolerance for all those groups “that can and will join the proletariat.” Warning the proletarians against “Communist conceit,” the resolution declined for the time being to intervene directly to designate one to speak in the Party’s name, arguing that such dominance would have to be earned.6 This balancing act reflected a “soft line” in cultural policy that gave way in 1928 to the hardened rhetoric of class warfare accompanying the First Five-Year Plan.7 While the Party never explicitly addressed the Lef group (or the Futurists, as they were still often called) in the 1925 Resolution, it took an anti-iconoclastic position, calling for an art that would “take advantage of all the technical achieve- ments of old mastery to work out a proper form understandable by millions”—an implicit repudiation of Lef’s avant-garde experimentalism. The text dealt only with literature, but was nonetheless seen as a statement of policy for all the arts, and the “proletarian” Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR)— VAPP’s counterpart in the visual arts—also enjoyed a spectacular rise in prestige and official support to become the dominant artistic organization in the twenties.8 Lef found itself arguing from a more marginal position than in the first

6. “On the Policy of the Party in the Field of Belles Lettres: Resolution of the TSK-RKP(b), July 1, 1925,” originally published in Pravda on that date; trans. as Appendix A in Edward Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 235–40. 7. My description follows Sheila Fitzpatrick’s analysis in “The ‘Soft’ Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy 1922–1927,” Slavic Review, no. 2 (1974), pp. 267–87. See also Brown’s discussion in The Proletarian Episode, pp. 44–45, and that of Brandon Taylor in Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, vol. 2, pp. 31–46. 8. The rise of AKhRR and its organizational history are dealt with in detail by Brandon Taylor in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1922, ed. Matthew Cullerne Brown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 51–72. I discuss the model of history painting developed by AKhRR artists such as Isaak Brodskii—the counterparadigm to

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 137

years after the revolution when many of its members, reaping the rewards of being among the first intellectuals to side with the Bolsheviks, served various roles in Narkompros, the ministry of culture. This more recent loss of standing was suggested by Viktor Pertsov’s comment in the first issue of Novyi lef that “Lef doesn’t want to be hegemonic in art; it wants to be equal in the army of builders.”9 Despite the rise of the proletarian groups and the declining authority of Lef, the cultural field remained fluid and complex, with Lef still a significant con- tender. After all, Gosizdat, the publishing arm of the Party Central Committee, once again saw fit at the end of 1926 to allow Lef to publish a journal, following a proposal put forth by Mayakovsky—a proposal in which the poet openly promised to fight “against the ‘restoration’ of old art and petty bourgeois tendencies.”10 In journal articles following the 1925 Resolution, members of Lef made it quite clear that they had no intention of ceding the terrain. Tret’iakov, referring to both the stridency and the retrograde quality of proletarian realism, wrote on behalf of Lef: “Militant passéism—that is the first and principal enemy.”11 Sparing no venom, the group articulated the terms of their hostility to this rival. Above all, they rejected the anachronism of the model, arguing that main- taining the structure of prerevolutionary cultural forms reproduced both the work’s institutional basis and its construction of subjectivity—that is, they insisted that form itself was ideological. Tret’iakov ridiculed the fantasy of a “red Tolstoy,” declaring that a “proletarian novel” made no more sense than a “proletarian church or a proletarian czar.”12 Tret’iakov focused particular scorn on the didactic authorial voice, which acted as an interpretative authority and produced a passive reader and subject. “The writer taught one how to live,” he wrote with palpable sarcasm. He “judged society through the eyes of his heroes, set up problems and resolved them, worked through life’s riddles. He collected disciples around his great ‘canvas,’ and they treated his book like a bible.”13 Viktor Shklovsky objected to the persistence of an individual fictional protagonist rather than the creation of a collective subject: “The old form—the form of individual destiny, events strung together around a contrived hero—is now unnecessary.”14 But the reflection model of realism at the heart of the proletarian mandate, presupposing a stable and transhistorical concept of truth—“It is [revolutionary] content,”

Lef’s approach—in “Camera Obscura: Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography,” October 93 (Summer 2000), pp. 139–53. 9. Viktor Pertsov, “Graﬁk sovremennogo Lefa,” Novyi lef, no. 1 (1927), p. 16. 10. Published in Osip Brik, “Mayakovsky and the Literary Movements of 1917–1930,” Screen 15, no. 3 (Fall 1974), p. 76. 11. Italics in original. Tret’iakov, “S ‘Novym Lefom’!,” p. 1; trans. in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Formalism, p. 265. 12. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Novyi Lev Tolstoi,” Novyi lef, no. 1 (January 1927), pp. 34–35; trans. as “The New Leo Tolstoy,” trans. Kristin Romberg, in this issue, p. 45–50. 13. Tret’iakov, “The New Leo Tolstoy,” p. 47. 14. Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pistatelei, 1928), p. 109.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 138 OCTOBER

declared one AKhRR manifesto, “that we consider a sign of truth in art”—was also frequent fodder for Lef’s contempt. Such attacks were in part Lef’s response to the aggressiveness of the proletarian factions, who, promised inheritance but told to wait, vented their impatience by excoriating other artistic groups. But while proletarian writing became the model against which Novyi lef authors explicitly distinguished themselves, realism became the ground of their new self-definition. Expressing this priority, Tret’iakov wrote: “The problem of the fixation of fact: raising the interest in reality of those most active, asserting the primacy of the real over fiction, the commentator on public affairs over the belletrist—this is what in Lef is now most burning and immediate.”15 At stake for Lef was a claim to defining the territory of realism. Today, when the legacy of modern totalitarian culture is still keenly felt, realism remains something of a bugaboo for our critical expectations of the avant- garde. It is seen as modernism’s rival, its mode of representation quickly associated with the privileging of message and the aspiration to transparency. In the subtext of many scholarly essays, it serves as evidence of a final departure from the rigors of avant-garde asceticism and reflexivity. But, as the model of factography suggests, the relationship between modernism and realism in the young Soviet state was far more complex. Factography was defined by its theorists—they called themselves faktoviki (literally, factists)—as a contemporary countermodel to an emergent model of socialist realism.16 They saw the fact neither in terms of ideological stability nor immanence, but as a specific concept of document grounded in the reality of contemporary Soviet life.

The Fact of Factography

The term “fact” itself signals the journal’s afﬁliation with Russian Formalism. Shklovsky was a leader of the Formalist OPOIaZ (Obshchestvo po izucheniiu poetich- eskogo iazyka [The Society for the Study of Poetic Language]) group, with which Osip Brik was also associated, while Boris Kushner was a member of the other Formalist association, the Moscow Linguistic Circle; other Formalist theorists con- tributed texts on an occasional basis. Through the Formalist theorists in their midst, Lef writers had at their disposal a sophisticated semiotic model, and the journal can be understood as a self-conscious effort to assimilate Marxist concepts and Formalist method.17 Its writers were among the ﬁrst interpreters of Marx, along with Georg Lukács, to focus on Marx’s writings about a historically constituted subjectivity—on

15. Tret’iakov, “Chto novogo?,” Novyi lef, no. 9 (1928), p. 4; trans. as “What’s New?,” in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Formalism, p. 270. Translation modiﬁed. 16. Socialist Realism emerged as an aesthetic model in the the mid-twenties and was canonized as an ofﬁcial policy in 1934. 17. For a longer discussion of Lef’s synthesis of Formalist and Marxist theory, see my dissertation, “Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera Eye” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), pp. 24–68.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 139

ideas of alienation, fetishism, and the emancipatory potential of praxis.18 From this potent theoretical brew, two key and consistent principles resulted: 1) that ideology does not exist outside its representation; and 2) that subjectivity was constituted within the labor of both creative production and interpretation. Prior to its emergence as the keystone of the factographic model, “the fact” had acquired specific connotations in Formalist usage. In an important article published in Lef in 1924, dedicated to Shklovsky and entitled “On the Literary Fact,” Formalist Iurii Tynianov described a new theory of literary evolution. Rejecting traditional evolutionary models—attempts to construct a historical genealogy or to attach the work to biography—Tynianov proposed a nonlinear model based on the continual replacement of ossified, canonical literary forms with mass cultural forms more responsive to audience demands: “It is not as if in the center of literature a single continuous current evolves and new phenomena only flow in laterally,” he wrote. “No, these phenomena themselves move into the center, and the center is shifted to the periphery.”19 The concept of “fact” marked Tynianov’s view of literary history as precisely that of phenomena—discrete textual occurrences rather than stages in a larger telos. The term characterized the Formalist project as above all a descriptive (rather than genealogical or hermeneuti- cal) one: the literary fact was the specific work examined in synchronic perspective, as a structural system at a given point in term. Like its theoretical antecedent, factography, too, would privilege synchronic description over developmental analysis. Embracing “low, topical journalistic forms,”20 Novyi lef implicitly called for the actualization of Tynianov’s paradigm. In the group’s usage, the “fact” implied in the first instance a genre shift from fiction to nonfiction forms: “To the easel painting, which supposedly functions a ‘mirror of reality,’ Lef opposes the photograph—a more accurate, rapid and objective means of fixing the fact. . . . In literature, to belles lettres and the related claim to ‘reflection,’ Lef opposes reportage, literature of fact, which breaks with literary traditions and moves entirely into the field of journalism to serve the newspaper and the journal.”21

18. Gado Petrovich writes that concepts such as alienation and de-alienation had been neglected in all interpretations of Marx in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Lukács dis- cusses aspects of alienation under the term “reification” in History and Class Consciousness, which appeared in 1923, the same year Lef began publication. Petrovich, “Alienation,” in The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edition, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), p. 13. The pioneering quality of Lef’s theoretical synthesis is particularly striking if we keep in mind that the texts by Marx we now associ- ate most closely with these concepts of historically constituted subjectivity were not yet available at the time: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were first published in 1932, Grundrisse in 1938, and neither was widely accessible until their republication in 1953. Lef’s own focus therefore shows close attention to those moments in Capital in which fetishism, alienation, and praxis are discussed. 19. Iurii Tynianov, “O literaturnom fakte,” Lef, no. 6 (1924), p. 103; trans. as “The Literary Fact,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), pp. 29–49. Translation modified. 20. Tret’iakov, “B’em trevogu,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1927), p. 4. 21. Unsigned manifesto, “My ishchem,” Novyi lef, no. 11–12 (1927), p. 1; trans. as “We are Searching,” in Screen 12, no. 4 (1971–72), p. 67.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 140 OCTOBER

While photography and ﬁlm were the preferred visual media, the new prose took up diaristic and journalistic forms. Brik advocated “memoirs, biographies, reminiscences, diaries,”22 while Tret’iakov listed “the memoir, travel notes, the sketch, articles, feuilletons, reportage, investigations, documentary montage.”23 Dziga Vertov framed his cinematic enterprise in factographic terms, adding to his famous 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera the subtitle “Excerpt from the Diary of a Cameraman.” On the issue of literary genres, Rodchenko, too, took a ﬁrm factographic line: responding to a questionnaire issued by the literary organ of the “proletarian” group VAPP, Na literaturnom postu [On Literary Guard], the artist wrote: “I read with pleasure newspapers, journals of the type of Ogonek [Spark]. I read such things as My Discovery of America by Mayakovsky, Chzhungo by S. Tret’iakov. I read memoirs, reminiscences, notes, travel writing. I don’t read novels, stories, and especially not verses.”24 Indeed, within this general consensus, it was the fate of poetry and the degree of cinematic dramatization that provoked dissension among members of the Lef group. A growing hostility to verse form provides one reason for Mayakovsky’s less visible polemical presence in the journal’s second run. Yet, even he lent support to the prose platform, taking issue only with the exclusivity, not the desirability, of the factographic genres. Most members of the Lef group made some sort of attempt at factographic writing: at Tret’iakov’s urging, Rodchenko published his letters to his wife Varvara Stepanova from Paris, written during his work on the Soviet pavilion for the Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in 1925.25 Rodchenko’s correspondence found its way into Chuzhak’s list of exemplary texts published in his article “Literatura zhiznestroeniia” [The Literature of Life-Construction]—a combina- tion of new publications by Lef writers and found factographic texts: John Reed’s monograph on the revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World; . . . the planned economic construction of a trip by B[oris] Kushner, 103 Days in the West; . . . the historico-atheist factomontage by M. Gorev, The Last Saint; the documentary montage work of V. Veresaev, Pushkin in Life, and V. Feider’s A. P. Chekhov; Tret’iakov’s work about a living person (without quotation marks) Den Shi-Khua; . . . the human documents of Rodchenko, “Letters from Paris”; . . . the remarkable memoirs of the late O. Aptekman, V. Figner, N. Morozov [all revolutionaries]; . . .

22. Osip Brik, “Fiksatsiia fakta,” Novyi lef, nos. 11–12 (1927), p. 48. 23. Tret’iakov, “Chto novogo,” p. 4; trans. in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Formalism, p. 270. 24. Rodchenko, “Otvet na anketu zhurnala Na literaturnom postu (1928).” Typescript, Rodchenko/ Stepanova Archive. The ﬁnal line seems to slight Mayakovsky and may reﬂect the increasing closeness of Rodchenko’s association with Tret’iakov. The artist’s grandson Aleksandr Lavrent’ev has written, “If Lef was embodied for Rodchenko above all in the personality of Mayakovsky, then the period of Novyi lef was most of all associated with Tret’iakov.” Lavrent’ev, Rakursy: Rodchenko (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), p. 64. 25. “Rodchenko v Parizhe,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1927), pp. 9–21. See Christina Kiaer’s important discussion of these letters in “Rodchenko in Paris,” October 75 (Winter 1996), pp. 3–35.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 141

[Vladimir] Arsen’ev’s In the Wild of the Ussuriiskii Frontier; . . . Maya- kovsky’s How I Wrote Esenin; . . . Tret’iakov’s Chzhungo; . . . Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey; . . . and many, many others, not to mention the best factographic work of the leaders of the revolution and the Party.26 As Chuzhak’s list suggests, most factographic works were first-person accounts told from the position of an eyewitness. Rejecting the mediation of a sec- ondary interpretative voice, such as the omniscient narrator or traditional biographer, factography was a literature of primary documents—of direct speech “without quotation marks,” to use Chuzhak’s description of Tret’iakov’s “bio-interview” with the Chinese student Den Shi-Khua. (In his diaries of his trip to Russia in these years, something of a factographic text in itself, Alfred Barr recounts the Lef author describing this work as “the most realistic and most intimate account of life in China.”27) Such texts, as the linguist Emile Benveniste has argued, operate with a wholly different verbal system from the purportedly objective narration of past events— planes of utterance that he distinguishes as those of discourse and of history.28 Discourse includes “correspondence, memoirs, plays, didactic works, in short, all the genres in which someone addresses himself to someone, proclaims himself the speaker, and organizes what he says in the category of person.”29 Employing the pronouns “I/you,” it embeds the speaker within the text, while marking a listener outside of it, binding the two in a relationship. Mobile signifiers—demonstratives and adverbial forms such as “this,” “that,” “here,” “now,” “today,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow”—mark his or her position on a spatial and temporal plane, defining the present instance. The first person perfect, “the autobiographical form par excellence,”30 dominates, conveying the immediacy of experience and a keen sense of the present. “The perfect,” Benveniste writes, “creates a living connection between the past event and the present in which its evocation takes place.”31 As such, discourse stands in contrast to the historical, in which events are presented without the invention of the speaker and are grounded in the past. In their demand for firsthand accounts, factography’s champions proposed a new literature firmly aligned with this discursive mode. The limited point of view of the eyewitness, its specificity in time and place, was precisely its value for the faktoviki; the “fact” pursued was historically constituted

26. Nikolai Chuzhak, “Literatura zhiznestroeniia,” Novyi lef, no. 11 (1928), p. 16. The name of the Chinese student who is the subject of Tret’iakov’s text is spelled differently in the various places in which it was originally published. I have spelled it as “Den Shi-Khua” consistently in the body of my text. 27. Alfred Barr, “Russian Diary, 1927–28,” October 7 (Winter 1978), p. 14. 28. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), particularly “The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” pp. 205–15. 29. Benveniste, “The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” p. 209. 30. Ibid., p. 210. 31. Ibid.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 142 OCTOBER

speech, and they insisted that subjectivity was always constructed in perspective. “A person cannot not transcribe facts from his own distinctive point of view,” wrote Brik.32 Rodchenko took pains to define his narrative position in a note published with his letters from Paris. “Everything is true,” he wrote under the caption “A Reminder to the Reader,” “if one keeps in mind that it was written in Paris, at the center of ‘Europe,’ where I was for the first time, that is to say, ‘a first impression of it.’”33 The relativism implicit—the possibility of other perspectives—is characteris- tic, and many works claimed for factography contain multiple voices within the body of the text, at times taking highly self-conscious forms: in Shklovsky’s memoirs of the civil war period, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917–1922 (1923), the Formalist author defines two narrative personae, reflecting his dual vocations—that of the trained soldier working in armored car units during the civil war period that followed the Bolshevik coup, and that of the writer.34 The work’s structure is grounded in the tension that exists between the voice of the technician occupied with the immediate tasks of war, and the writer, working within—and against—the tradition of war narrative (and literary tradition more broadly, as the title’s nod to Laurence Sterne suggests). Chuzhak proposed several found administrative genres for factography that would juxtapose a variety of perspectives, including “reports about court meetings, including the social struggle around the trial” and “notes of gatherings and meetings, where the interests of different social groups, classes, and individuals intersect stormily.”35 In Novyi lef, transcripts of editorial board discussions of film and literary policy, all of which resulted in a certain amount of disagreement, were published alongside other texts as a factographic genre in themselves. What was important for the faktoviki was not the ideological correctness of a particular perspective, but rather the specific, historically constituted perception of the real. Chuzhak wrote of the literature of fact that “Defects—systemic, ideological, and others—don’t matter here.”36 And though he was perhaps the Lef member who most closely identified with the Party, Chuzhak found it possible to embrace Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey, placing it in his factographic canon, despite the fact that the author-narrator identifies with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, an early rival to the Bolsheviks—Shklovsky himself had participated in anti- Red underground activities—and speaks ambivalently at best of the latter: “Russia thought up the Bolsheviks as a dream, as a motivation for flight and plunder. The Bolsheviks aren’t to be blamed if they were dreamed.”37

32. Osip Brik, “Protiv ‘tvorcheskoi’ lichnosti,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1928), p. 12. 33. Rodchenko, “Rodchenko v Parizhe,” p. 17. 34. Viktor Shklovsky, Sentimental’noe puteshestvie: vospominaniia, 1917–1922 (Moscow: Gelikon, 1923). For more about Shklovsky’s wartime biography, see Richard Sheldon, “Introduction,” and Sidney Monas, “Historical Introduction,” in Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917–1922, trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1907), pp. ix–xxv and xxvii–xlvii. 35. Chuzhak, “Literatura zhiznestroeniia,” p. 15. 36. Ibid., p. 17. 37. Shklovsky, Sentimental’noe puteshestvie, pp. 83–84.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 143

Minutiae assumed primacy of place; the faktoviki demanded an abundance— even superfluity—of detail, without undue attention to thematic relevance. Brik called for the “collection of the largest possible quantity of real facts and details,” labeling “tendentious selection” a “methodological shortcoming.”38 Tret’iakov meanwhile praised the explorer Vladimir Arsen’ev’s account of life in Siberia (In the Wild of the Ussuriiskii Frontier) for the thoroughness of its “inventory.”39 (A few years later, Shklovsky would characterize this preoccupation with “intensive detail” as “baroque.”)40 But the focus on detail signaled a mandate for emphasis on the particular, rather than the grand, synthetic, and heroic, in a kind of dogged anti- monumentalism. The subject of Tret’iakov’s “bio-interview,” the Chinese student Den Shi-Khua, described a Buddhist religious ritual, the protocol involved in an execution, the intricacies of the communal borrowing system, his family structure, and the details of his mother’s funeral. Rodchenko’s letters from Paris noted the small surprises occasioned by the cost of stamps, traffic patterns, the prevalence of Russian taxi drivers, the disturbing sensuality of French women, and Parisian building methods. Factography offered a form of empirical textuality, the perception of difference. Its privileging of a descriptive mode over narrative exegesis—of protokol [report] over proklamatsiia [proclamation]41—produced a certain disaggregation in the work of art with both narrator and plot wielding diminished power as cen- tralizing forces. Brik celebrates this structural transformation in his factographic manifesto “The Fixation of Fact,” writing at first about film: More and more often [cinematic] dramatizations appear bearing the character of obozrenie [surveying, viewing]. In place of unity of action, unity of intrigue, we have a succession of separate scenes often barely connected with each other. The central heroes, connecting these separate scenes, are transformed into obozrevateli [observers], and the interest of the viewer is not focused on them. How is this breakdown in structure—which is in fact not limited to film, but more general—to be explained? It is explained by the interest in individual facts, individual details, which create a necessary unity in their accumulation.42 Organic unity is transformed into a succession of facts, and the pedagogue becomes a witness. Such fragmentation in the work of art produced a corollary

38. Brik,“Fiksatsiia fakta,” p. 50. 39. Tret’iakov, “Zhivoi ‘zhivoi’ chelovek,” Novyi lef, no. 7 (1928), p. 45. Tret’iakov’s article satirizes the “proletarian” call for psychologically developed “living” heroes, and champions Arsen’ev’s protagonist as a counter-model. Arsen’ev’s narrative, considered a classic text in the Russian canon, ultimately gained an international circulation in the West through Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1975 ﬁlm adaptation Dersu Uzala, a Soviet (Mosﬁlm) production that was shot on location. 40. Shklovsky, Poiski optimizma (Moscow, 1931), p. 115. 41. Osip Brik, “Blizhe k faktu,” p. 32. 42. Brik, “Fiksatsiia fakta,” p. 48.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 144 OCTOBER

transformation in the role of the author. Brik further described the factographic writer as first a collector of “real facts and details,” and then as one who connects “separate facts and details into one spectacular whole.”43 Tretiakov reiterated this bipartite definition in his description of the production of Den Shi-Khua: “Today’s genuine craftsman is the discoverer of new material, the cautious nondistorting form-giver. . . . Den Shi-Khua was the supplier of the raw material of facts [syr’evshchik faktor], and I gave them form [formovshchik].”44 It was a self-consciously restrained role: no longer a creator, the writer became a monteur of facts. Terms such as “aggregation,” “accumulation,” “collection,” and “factomontage” run through Novyi lef texts. In the introduction to his travel notes on China, Tret’iakov recalled Brik’s advice, emphasizing the need for detailed observation: “Show sharpness of perception. Let not one trifle be overlooked. You are on the train: note every stroke of landscape, every conversation. You are at the station: notice everything to the posters washed by the rain.”45 Factography’s model was insistently visual: it was a realism of immanent phenomena, presenting the world as seen. This demand for acute vision registers with the key distinction within Russian Formalism between perception and knowledge. In his famous formula- tion, Shklovsky argues that art’s role is to undo the automaticization of perception produced by habit: “The purpose of art,” he writes in his seminal 1917 “Art as Device” essay, “is to impart the sensation of the thing as it is perceived and not as it is known.” Repetition, in contrast, functions as a process of consolidation, in which “things are replaced by symbols.” And such symbol-making is condemned for rendering the subject both blind and mute: “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it.”46 A decade later, Shklovsky repeated his diagnosis in the inaugural issue of Novyi lef, writing that “people don’t see what surrounds them.”47 The role of the factographic author was to return to a state of first sight—“to see things as they have not been described.”48 His prescription echoes throughout the briefs published in the journal: Tret’iakov, for example, recommends that other authors emulate Arsen’ev’s ability “to see the specific peculiarity of that which is before him, to accumulate a series of facts which others before him did not notice.”49 The factog- rapher was the collector of lost details, and factography a plea for the frank perception of contemporary life.

43. Ibid., p. 50. 44. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-Khua,” Novyi lef, no. 7 (1927), p. 14. 45. Tret’iakov, “Moskva-Pekin (Put’ ﬁl’ma),” Lef, no. 7 (1925), p. 33. 46. Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Iskusstvo, kak priem” is translated as “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marina Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965), pp. 11–13. 47. Viktor Shklovsky, “O pisatele,” Novyi lef, no. 1 (1927), p. 30. 48. Ibid. 49. Tret’iakov, “Zhivoi ‘zhivoi’ chelovek,” p. 45.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 145

There is some sense, especially keen in Tret’iakov’s essay “Through Un- polished Glasses,” that discriminating vision will overcome the blindness of social habit. In an outpouring of revolutionary aspiration mediated by the language of scientific rationality, Tret’iakov argues that if one can see relationally and without prejudice, one will begin to grasp the logic, even beauty, of the changes wrought by revolution, and enter fully as subject into the social process: When we have really sharpened our eyes they will begin to distinguish the difference between communal sowings and those of individual peasant farmers, and they will dictate to the brain the reflex of delight in the composite tracts of state farms, which are replacing the crazy quilts of peasant strip-farming. . . . Then we become able to see not only the biological-termite work of man, but that which socialism will trace anew on the face of the earth’s sphere.50 Such a model was hardly proletarian in pedigree. Elsewhere, Tret’iakov suggests that the acute sight of the factographic author was the product of expertise: “To see that which surrounds one, to scrutinize one’s own life is a skill of high cal- iber. It comes with lots of training—in magazine journalism, newspaper reportage, or even better as an engineer.”51 He claims the role of a spetsialist, a loaded term in Soviet political speech of the 1920s, and the key figure of ambivalence within the “soft” policy of class revolution, which called for making pragmatic use of the pro- fessional classes within the new Soviet order, despite their nonproletarian origins. Tret’iakov’s rhetorical alignment serves perhaps as a defensive buffer against the proletarian groups’ own assaults on the class credentials of Lef writers. But the acuity of observation demanded, the requirement that nothing be lost, evokes nothing so much as the photographic model at the core of the term factography itself—the precise recording of the camera, unhampered by the failings of memory and the imprecisions of habit. Factography was a realism modeled on the idea of the optical unconscious, offering, like the photographic index, a density of detail beyond the intentionality of the maker.52 Its fortuitous landscape, technolog- ical in model, brings forward the repressed details of human consciousness. That factographic writing aspired to the photographic condition can be seen not only in its descriptive density but also in its sense of primary “being-there-ness,” its limited and specific perspective, and the structural openness of the crop, which points outside the work itself. The idea of the artist as collector offers another analogy to photography’s authorial production—that of selection, or taking. (The Russian verb used to describe the photographer’s activity is snimat’—as in English,

50. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” Novyi lef, no. 9 (1928), p. 24. 51. Tret’iakov, “Den Sy-Khua,” p. 14. 52. The term comes from Walter Benjamin’s discussion of photography in “A Small History of Photography” (1931), in One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 243.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 146 OCTOBER

to take.) Lef theorists found in the index a realist counterparadigm to challenge the codiﬁed ﬁgures of a didactic realism being proposed by the proletarian groups. In an editorial board transcript published in Novyi lef, Rodchenko responded defensively to Viacheslav Polonskii’s criticism of the artist’s letters from Paris. To the attack on the way that the French workers described by him failed to function as exemplars, he replied: As for the fact that I saw workers dancing and playing in Paris, Polonskii asks, “What kind of workers are they?” Ordinary ones like our own. They were not like those portrayed in Krasnaia Niva by people like Iuon, Lanser, and Kardovskii, with a sickle in one hand and a ham- mer in the other. That kind of worker does not exist in reality, neither in Paris, nor here.53 The heroic, Rodchenko implies, cannot be seen. Within the contest of realisms that shaped artistic production in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Lef hoped to challenge myth with fact. “If facts destroy theory,” wrote Shklovsky, “then all the better for theory.”54

The Facts of the Past

While photography, especially Rodchenko’s, provided a model for the literature of fact, two often overlooked projects by the designer-photographer reveal an issue at its core: that factography—so preoccupied with details, documents, eyewit- nesses, memoirs, and collection—is entangled with the problem of history itself. After October 1917, as it had been in 1789, history was repudiated. For a period soon afterward, it was dropped from the educational curriculum for its irrelevance to contemporary life, and in rejection of its traditional use in inculcat- ing patriotism and the ideology of the ruling class.55 However, this initial effort at wholesale repression was short-lived: by 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, a vigorous discussion about historical self-construction—centering pri- marily on how the Revolution should be commemorated—flourished in the pages of journals, but its status as a given was fundamentally shaken. Starting with the third issue, among the numerous film stills by a variety of filmmakers and photographs by Rodchenko, Tret’iakov, and others that were reproduced in the journal, Rodchenko published a series of documentary photographs related to the early years of the Soviet Union. The first two, one of which appeared on the cover and one inside, were photographic images of the iconoclastic decapita- tion of the monument to Aleksandr III in the wake of October—a caption noted

53. “Protokol o Polonskom. Vypiska iz stenogrammy zasedaniia sotrudnikov zhurnala Novyi lef ot 5/III 1927 g.,” Novyi lef, no. 3 (1927), p. 43. 54. Viktor Shklovsky, “V zashchitu sotsiologicheskogo metoda,” Novyi lef, no. 3 (1927), p. 21. 55. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 159.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 147

that it came “from the Lef archives.” In subsequent issues appeared a trio of photographs of market stalls, labeled “What the photographer from hungry Moscow saw in the sated Volga”; another of three men and a women clearing snow from the path in front of an urban storefront, labeled “trudpovinnost’” [compulsory labor];56 snapshots of soldiers posed with armored train cars from the civil war period; one of the guard of the Fifth Soviet in Moscow; and an image of Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife, presiding at an outdoor meeting. All of these images—reproduced together for the first time on pages 153–158—were labeled “from the revarkhiv [revolutionary archive] of A. R.” Most of the photographs likely came from a trove that Rodchenko had rescued from the offices of Sovkino, the state cinematic enterprise. Stepanova notes in a 1927 diary entry describing Rodchenko’s studio: “Here also is the photo-archive, purchased from Sovkino last year for six rubles. All this was in a wet cellar, burned through by the lamp toward the end; they were stowed in the dark in sacks. . . . Diverse, very valuable materials.”57 With this small collection, Rodchenko presents himself not as artist or photographer, but as an archivist. Defying what we might hold as expectations of a modernist impulse to iconoclasm, to historical repression—though such expectations are to be sure largely Anglo-American in origin—the rearkhiv insists on mnemonic function, presenting a collective memory bank. Posed, centrally organized, often indistinct: Rodchenko’s found images are formally banal, especially in comparison with the photographer’s own works taken from oblique and tightly cropped viewpoints. But such banality is offset by the power of its proposition in a moment of charged debate about representing the past: that history should be presented in archival form, of history as documents. While this handful of images offers details of dress, military equipment, the look of markets, and snow shovels, more importantly, it contains suggestions of a world that differs from the realm of ideology, a complex image of early Soviet history that encompasses civil war, the uneven distribution of goods, small capitalist trade, and compulsory labor. A collection of accumulated fragments of a recent past already vanished and not yet assimilated, Rodchenko’s archive hints at the way that revolution brings with it an intimation of loss—a gesture of reclamation from water and light and the untidy offices of Sovkino, but also from the threat of historical amnesia, of “tendentious selection,” and of revision. And in doing so it makes clear the degree to which

56. In an email exchange, Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University noted that Soviet penal policy included a little-known category referred to as “prinuditel’nyi trud ” [compulsory labor], which might cover the type of activity seen in the revarkhiv image of the quartet clearing snow. Those impressed into service would not be sent to a camp or colony, but were required to perform compulsory labor at a workplace or another site, and would receive less pay than for nonpunitive labor—thus providing both cheap labor and cheap punishment. But Kotkin also noted that the term in the revarkhiv caption (trudpovinnost’) was often used for feudal labor service to refer to obligations imposed as payment for the right to work land, and that it is possible Rodchenko’s label might be an ironic reference to subbotnik style labor—supposedly vol- unteer Saturday work. With many thanks to Stephen Kotkin. 57. Rodchenko, Stat’i, vospominaniia, avtobiograﬁcheskie zapiski, pis’ma (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozh- nik, 1982), p. 157.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 148 OCTOBER

the factographic project as a whole might be seen as archival: an accumulation of facts, each a singular impression registering the trace of a specific moment in time. A second project further underscores this archival impulse: in the third issue of Novyi lef, Rodchenko reproduced of a pair of images drawn from a series of twenty-five photo-lithographic posters titled “The history of the VKP(b) [All- Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)] in Posters” commissioned by the newly established Museum of the Revolution in 1926, probably in preparation for the tenth-anniversary celebrations to be held the following year.58 Sets of the posters were most likely intended for distribution to regional museums. Each sheet cov- ered a defined temporal segment of the historical period from the founding of

58. An earlier version of this discussion of Rodchenko’s history posters appears in my “The Propagandizing of Things,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 78–80. The artist El Lissitzky com- pleted a similar document-based poster series for the Museum of the Revolution, though I have not been able to ascertain whether the two artists collaborated in any way on the project.

Rodchenko. “No. 15: 1917. The February Revolution.” From the series The History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in Posters. 1926. Art © Estate of Aleksandr Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 149

the Party to the present, and displayed a range of documents in photo-mechanical reproduction—photographic images, pamphlets, organizational guidelines, letters, pages from newspapers and journals—splayed across a red and black background, and occasionally interspersed with captions and quotations. One of the posters published in Novyi lef is dedicated to the February Revolution, the first of the two 1917 revolutions, which toppled the Tsar and established a power-sharing structure between the Provisional Government (representing the upper classes) and the Soviets (representing the lower classes). Documents reproduced included photographs of the members of the Provisional government, another taken at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, and the manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. The second poster covers the period between the revolutions of February and October, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and displays a photograph of soldiers firing at a crowd of demonstrators, a card with photographs of the presidium of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, the falsified passport with which Lenin returned from exile, pages from the

Rodchenko. “No. 16: 1917. From February to October.” From the series The History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in Posters. 1926. Art © Estate of Aleksandr Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 150 OCTOBER

newspapers Pravda and Rabochie, a map charting the World War I troop positions of General Krymov in August 1917, and in the center, perhaps as a concession to the political realities of 1926, a photograph of Stalin. Another poster from the series, dedicated to the revolutionary parties during World War I (not published in Novyi lef), shows photographs of soldiers dug into trenches and ﬁghting in the farmlands of Europe. These battle images are overlaid with portrait photographs of the Bolshevik leaders on one side, and the Menshevik leaders and the German Communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on the other. Certain general themes can be discerned: growing worker dissatisfaction with the power-sharing structure amid the increasing casualties of World War I, the pan- icky rule of the Provisional Government, the growing strength of the workers’ parties. Despite some tendency to privilege images of historical victors, such as Lenin and Stalin, Rodchenko generally presents the documents in dialogical oppo- sitions—the Provisional Government and the Soviets, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Sometimes a block of texts lists the basic sequence of events, or a direct quotation is provided, but there is little attempt to mold the documents into an overarching narrative: rather, the array of ephemera offers points marking historical forces in dynamic interrelation, a suggestion of the systemic forces at play.

Rodchenko. “No. 14: The Party in the Years of the Imperialist War, 1914–1916.” From the series The History of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in Posters. 1926. Art © Estate of Aleksandr Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Fact and the Photograph 151

The project seems to have diverged from the expectations of its patrons at the Museum of the Revolution: Rodchenko reported to readers of Novyi lef that the curators would have preferred drawings. One can imagine that this was for precisely the reason that the photograph, as Rosalind Krauss has put it, “disallows the processes of schematization or symbolic intervention that operate within . . . graphic representations.”59 Yet despite the consternation produced, the artist himself seems to have been pleased with the project: at the back of the journal, notes published about current activities of members of the Lef group highlight the project’s factographic credentials, declaring that the commission was “done with photographic means and constructed from genuine documents.”60 The gesture of making the archive public—of “genuine documents” in mechanical reproduction—celebrates access to information, to history itself, as the legacy of the Revolution, and points to what might be most utopian in factography. Here photography functions as a leveler, placing artifacts of various sorts within an image-text system in a history for a new age. Such a presentation, like the factographic collection of eyewitness reports, configures history in a nonlinear way, presenting it in spatialized form. The history of the Communist Party is splayed open, divided into twenty-five chronological cross-sections, with each poster-field putting on view the archaeological remains of a stratum in time. Organic time dissolves into multiple and simultaneous synchronicities, and with this, we witness the birth of a particular temporal experience catalyzed by techno- logical development—of information networks that function continually to produce documents of the present. This, of course, is the time of factography. The crucial ontological distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic lies among Formalism’s key insights. Organic, diachronic structures require the connection of meanings from one moment in lived time with those of another, linking the two in a teleological continuity. The synchronic weakens the authority of other voices—moving away from the world as “known” and toward the world as “perceived.” While much critical writing has focused on the archive as an instrument of social discipline and control, Rodchenko (and the faktoviki more broadly) attempted to tap into its emancipatory potential—as a terrain of images and texts in which meaning is prospective rather than retrospective. In an article that suggests the contemporary potency of the archive as a model for Formalist thinkers and their allies, Boris Eikhenbaum defines history as a series of displacements: We do not apprehend all the facts at once: it isn’t always the same facts we take in and not always the same correlation of facts we need to bring out. . . . The immensity of the past, stored as documents and various kinds of personal papers, finds its way onto the printed page only

59. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977), pp. 68–81. 60. “Tekushchie dela,” Novyi lef, no. 2 (1927), p. 47.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021 152 OCTOBER

piecemeal. . . . History is, in effect, a science of complex analogies, a science of double vision: the facts of the past have meanings for us that differentiate and place them, invariably and inevitably, in a system under the sign of contemporary problems. Thus one set of problems supplants another, one set of facts overshadows another. History in this sense is a special method of studying the present with the aid of the facts of the past.61 History is allegory, suggests Eikhenbaum—a double reading that points to both past and present. The historian seeks meaning in the artifacts of the past, but such readings fluctuate according to the concerns of the present, and significance can never be determinately defined. The mobility of units in the archive allows for re-ordering: new meanings come to supplant old ones. Behind this historical model is a principle of tremendous ideological significance: that the present is no more stable than the past, that the revolution is an ongoing process and not an achieved state.

61. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Literaturny byt,” in Moi vremennik (Leningrad, 1929), pp. 49–58; trans. as “Literary Environment,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystnya Pomorska (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978), p. 56.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.132 by guest on 27 September 2021