Utopian Reality Russian History and Culture

Editors-in-Chief Jeffrey P. Brooks The Johns Hopkins University Christina Lodder University of Kent

VOLUME 14

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc Utopian Reality

Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond

Edited by Christina Lodder Maria Kokkori and Maria Mileeva

Leiden • boston 2013 Cover illustration: Staircase in the residential building for members of the Cheka (the Secret Police), Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), 1929–1936, designed by Ivan Antonov, Veniamin Sokolov and Arsenii Tumbasov. Photograph Richard Pare. © Richard Pare.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Utopian reality : reconstructing culture in revolutionary Russia and beyond / edited by Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori and Maria Mileeva. pages cm. — (Russian history and culture, ISSN 1877-7791; volume 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-26320-8 (hardback : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-90-04-26322-2 (e-book) 1. Soviet Union—Intellectual life—1917–1970. 2. Utopias—Soviet Union—History. 3. Utopias in literature. 4. Utopias in art. 5. Arts, Soviet—History. 6. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Soviet Union—History. 7. Cultural pluralism—Soviet Union—History. 8. Visual communication— Soviet Union—History. 9. Politics and culture—Soviet Union—History 10. Soviet Union— Politics and government—1917–1936. I. Lodder, Christina, 1948– II. Kokkori, Maria. III. Mileeva, Maria.

DK266.4.U86 2013 947.084–dc23

2013034913

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ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978-90-04-26320-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26322-2 (e-book)

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vii Notes on Contributors ...... xvii Acknowledgements ...... xxiii

Introduction. Utopia and Dystopia: The Impulse of History Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori and Maria Mileeva ...... 1

1. dreaming of the City: Mikhail Larionov’s Provincial Dandy . 1907 ...... 9 . John Milner

2.. Utopian Sex: The Metamorphosis of Androgynous Imagery in . Russian Art of the Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Period ...... 25 . Natalia Budanova

3. the Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the nightmare of Free Fall ...... 43 . Maria Tsantsanoglou

4. theo van Doesburg and Russia: Utopia Thwarted ...... 57 . Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita

5.. Fighting for a Utopian Childhood: Militarism in Children’s . Periodicals of the Early Soviet Union ...... 79 . Maria Starkova-Vindman

6. spectral Geographies in Russian Émigré Prose: The Cases of . Petr Krasnov and Georgii Peskov ...... 99 . Muireann Maguire

7. twice Removed: Pavel Filonov and Nikolai . Glebov-Putilovskii ...... 113 . Nicoletta Misler

8.. Exhibiting Malevich under Stalin ...... 133 . Maria Kokkori vi contents

9. solomon Nikritin: The Old and the New ...... 153 . John E. Bowlt

10. the Ghost in the Machine: The Modernist Architectural Utopia . under Stalin ...... 169 . Christina Lodder

11. socialist Realism and Stasis ...... 193 . Evgeny Dobrenko

12.. Utopia in Retreat: The Closure of the State Museum of New . Western Art in 1948 ...... 203 Maria Mileeva

13. the Art of Cybernetic Communism ...... 219 David Crowley

14.. Geometry after Utopia ...... 239 Brandon Taylor

Index ...... 255 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

John Milner

1.1. Mikhail Larionov, Provincial Dandy, 1907, oil on canvas, . 100 × 89 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 10 1.2. Mikhail Larionov, Walk in a Provincial Town, 1907, oil on . canvas, 47 × 91 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 11 1.3. Édouard Manet, La Viennoise: Portrait d’Irma Brunner, 1882, . pastel on paper, 53.5 × 44.1 cm., Musée d’Orsay, Paris ...... 15 1.4. Mikhail Larionov, Spring, 1912–13, oil on canvas, 86.5 × . 68.2 cm., Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges . Pompidou, Paris ...... 17 1.5 natalia Goncharova with painted face and profile, Moscow . 1913. This photograph was first reproduced in the journal . Teatr v karikaturakh (Moscow), no. 3 (9 September 1913), . p. 9. Photograph courtesy of A Legacy Regained: Nikolai . Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St Petersburg: . Palace Editions, 2002), p. 104 ...... 19 1.6 natalia Goncharova, Linen, 1913, oil on canvas, 89 × 70 cm., tate, London ...... 19 1.7 David Burliuk posing for a photograph in New York, 1920s. . Collection of Mary Holt Burliuk. Courtesy of The Ukrainian Museum, New York ...... 23

Natalia Budanova

2.1. Prospectus, after George Barbier poster, Clotilde & Alexandre Sakharoff, 1921. Reproduced courtesy of Franc-Manuel Peter . and Rainer Stamm, eds., Die Sacharoffs: Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters: Two Dancers within the Blaue . Reiter Circle (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2002) ...... 34 2.2 El Lissitzky, Russian Exhibition, Zurich, 1929, lithograph . poster, 127 × 90 cm...... 37 2.3. Vera Mukhina, model for The Male Worker and Female . Collective Farmer, 1937, bronze, 158 × 113 × 110 cm., State tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 41 viii list of illustrations

Maria Tsantsanoglou

3.1 Vladimir Tatlin, Sketch plan of Letatlin, 1929–32, pencil on paper, A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow ...... 44 3.2 natalia Goncharova, Angels and Aeroplanes, lithograph, 32.7 × 24 cm., from the portfolio of 14 lithographs Mystical Images of War (Moscow, 1914) ...... 49 3.3 Kazimir Malevich, Aeroplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas, 57.3 × 47.3 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York ...... 50 3.4 Konstantin Iuon, People of the Future, 1929, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 66.5 × 100 cm., Tver Regional Art Gallery, Tver ...... 50 3.5 Aleksandr Deineka, Nikitka The First Russian Flyer, 1940, oil on canvas, 397 × 294 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 52 3.6 Gelii Korzhev, Egorka the Flyer, 1976–1980, oil on canvas, 200 × 280 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 55

Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita

4.1a theo van Doesburg, A study for the painting Rhythm of a Russian Dance, c.1918, pencil, pen and ink on paper, 7.6 × 5.3 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA Florence ...... 62 4.1b theo van Doesburg, A study for the painting Rhythm of a Russian Dance, c.1918, pencil, pen and ink on paper, 8.0 × 6.4 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA Florence ...... 62 4.2 theo van Doesburg, Rhythm of a Russian Dance, c.1918, oil on canvas, 135.9 × 51.6 cm., Museum of Modern Art, new York. © Photo SCALA Florence ...... 63 4.3 theo van Doesburg’s Rhythm of a Russian Dance with an unknown figure, date unknown, De Stijl archive of the RKD, den Haag ...... 63 4.4 Cover for De Stijl, vol. V, no. 9 (September 1922) ...... 68 list of illustrations ix

4.5 A page from Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 6, no. 3 (February 1929), p. 50. The illustrations include Moisei Ginzburg’s apartment block for the State Insurance organisation (Gosstrakh) and illustrations of standard types of apartments for workers ...... 74 4.6 Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 5, no. 20 (September 1928) p. 396. the illustrations include Vladimir Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International, El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel project and the Lenin Tribune, Kazimir Malevich’s Architecton Alpha, and Ivan Leonidov’s design for the Lenin Institute ...... 74

Maria Starkova-Vindman

5.1 Cover of Murzilka, no. 11 (November 1925). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow ...... 85 5.2 Cover of Murzilka, no. 4–5 (April–May 1931). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow ...... 91 5.3 Cover of Ezh, no. 2 (1928). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow ...... 91 5.4 Cover of Pioneer, no. 8 (1939). Courtesy of the Russian state Library, Moscow ...... 92 5.5 Cover of Chizh, no. 6 (1930). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow ...... 93 5.6 samuil Adlivankin, The Red Army is Unbeatable, illustrated in Tvorchestvo, no. 9 (1934). Courtesy of the Russian state Library, Moscow ...... 95

Nicoletta Misler

7.1 Evdokiia Glebova (Pavel Filonov’s sister) and her husband nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, c.1922, Petrograd. Author’s archive ...... 113 7.2 Opening of the exhibition Pavel Filonov at the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, 1988 (from left to right in foreground: Vladimir Gusev, Nicoletta Misler, and Evgeniia Petrova). Author’s archive ...... 115 x list of illustrations

7.3. Pavel Filonov, Tractor Shop at the Putilovskii Ironworks, . 1931–32, oil on paper mounted on plywood, 71 × 96 cm., state Russian Museum, St Petersburg ...... 117 7.4a. Pavel Filonov, Portrait of Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, 1923–29, . watercolour on paper, 59 × 49 cm., State Russian Museum, st Petersburg ...... 123 7.4b. Pavel Filonov, Portrait of Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, . 1935–36, watercolour, ink and pencil on paper, 59 × 46 cm., state Russian Museum, St Petersburg ...... 123 7.5. Pavel Filonov, Conqueror of the City, 1914–15, watercolour, . ink and pencil on cardboard, 42.1 × 34.2 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg ...... 125 7.6. Pavel Filonov, Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat, 1920–21, . oil on canvas, 154 × 117 cm., State Russian Museum, st Petersburg ...... 127 7.7. Pavel Filonov, The Last Supper, late 1920s, watercolour and . ink on paper, 116 × 49.1 cm., State Russian Museum, st Petersburg...... 129 7.8. Liudmila Ivanova, Untitled, late 1920s, pencil and ink on . paper, 13 × 14.7 cm., private collection ...... 129

Maria Kokkori

8.1. Experimental Comprehensive Exhibition of the Art of the . Capitalist Era, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, november 1931–February 1932. Courtesy of the State tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 142 8.2. Experimental Comprehensive Exhibition of the Art of the . Capitalist Era, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, november 1931–February 1932. Courtesy of the State tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 143 8.3. Russian Art of the Imperialist Era, State Russian Museum, . Leningrad, 1931–32. Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, st Petersburg ...... 144 8.4. Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the . Proletarian Revolution, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, november 1932–February 1933. Courtesy of the State tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 145 list of illustrations xi

8.5. ‘We are creating the great art of the working class—the . art of socialism’, Leningradskaia Pravda (1932). Author’s . archive ...... 149 8.6 the Kazimir Malevich room at the exhibition Fifteen . Years of Artists of the RSFSR, State Russian Museum, st Petersburg, 1932. Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, st Petersburg ...... 149

. John E. Bowlt

9.1 solomon Nikritin, The Old and the New, 1935, oil on canvas, . 178.5 × 216 cm., Savitskii Museum of Visual Arts, Nukus, . Karakalpak Republic, Uzbekistan ...... 154 9.2 solomon Nikritin, Man and Cloud, late 1920s, oil on . cardboard mounted on canvas, 142.3 × 142.3 cm., The George . Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, thessaloniki ...... 155 9.3. Solomon Nikritin, study for the War series, 1922–24, ink on . paper, 18.4 × 16 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State . Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki ...... 155 9.4 solomon Nikritin, Journey around the World, mid-1920s, oil . on plywood, 47.7 × 59.7 cm., I. Dychenko Collection, . Kiev ...... 156 9.5 solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, c.1930, . graphite on paper, 6.7 × 8.1 cm., The George Costakis . Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki ...... 158 9.6 solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, 1934, . watercolour and graphite on paper, 20.5 × 24.4 cm., The George . Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, thessaloniki ...... 158 9.7 solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, oil on . canvas, 39.2 × 49.4 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State . Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki ...... 159 9.8 solomon Nikritin, People’s Court, 1934, oil on canvas, . 143 × 142 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ...... 161 xii list of illustrations

Christina Lodder

10.1. Boris Iofan, Vladimir Gelfreikh, and Vladimir Shchuko, . and sculptor S. Merkulov, Approved Design for the Palace . of Soviets, 1934, ink and collage on paper, 96 × 102.7 cm., shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow ...... 172 10.2. Vladimir Tatlin standing in front of his Model for a . Monument to the Third International on display in the . Mosaics Studio of the former Academy of Arts, Petrograd, November 1920. Reproduced in Nikolai Punin, Tatlin . (Protiv kubizma) (Moscow, 1921) ...... 172 10.3 the building of the Council for Labour and Defence, . Moscow, by Arkadii Langman, 1932–1935. Photograph . courtesy of Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze, . Architecture of the Stalin Era (New York, 1992) ...... 175 10.4 the Narkomfin building, Moscow, 1928–1932, designed by . Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis. Photograph courtesy . of S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Moisei Ginzburg . (Moscow, 2007) ...... 178 10.5 the Soviet Pavilion for the Exposition internationale des . arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris, 1937, designed . by Boris Iofan, topped by figures of The Male Worker and . Female Collective Farmer by Vera Mukhina. Photograph . courtesy of the V. Rakitin Collection ...... 179 10.6 nikolai Suetin, Model of the grand staircase of the Soviet . Pavilion at the Exposition internationale des arts et . techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris, 1937, plaster, lost. . Photograph courtesy of the V. Rakitin Collection ...... 179 10.7 dneiper Hydroelectric Dam and Buildings [DneproGES], . Zaporozhe, Ukraine, 1927–1932, designed by Aleksandr . Vesnin, Viktor Vesnin, Nikolai Kolli, Georgii Orlov, and sergei Andrievskii. Photograph Richard Pare. . © Richard Pare ...... 182 10.8. Palace of Culture of the Proletarskii District of Moscow, . (subsequently the Palace of Culture attached to the . Likhachev Automobile Plant), Moscow, 1931–1937, designed . by Aleksandr, Leonid and Viktor Vesnin. Photograph . Richard Pare. © Richard Pare ...... 184 list of illustrations xiii

10.9. Entrance to The Red Gates Metro Station, 1934–4, . designed by Nikolai Ladovskii. Photograph courtesy of S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (ratsio—arkhitektura). . “Formalizm” (Moscow, 2007) ...... 185 10.10 the State Production Trust [Gosprom] complex, Kharkov, Ukraine, 1925–1929, designed by Sergei Serafimov, . Mark Felger, and Samuil Kravets, to house the Soviet . government’s administrative offices. Photograph . Richard Pare. © Richard Pare ...... 187 10.11. Frunze Military Academy, Moscow, 1932–1937, designed by . Lev Rudnev and V. Munts. Photograph courtesy of Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze, Architecture of the Stalin . Era (New York, 1992) ...... 189 10.12. Lenin’s Mausoleum, Moscow, 1929–1930, designed by . Aleksei Shchusev, Isador Frantsuz and G.K. Yakovlev. . Made of marble, porphyry, granite and other stones. . Photograph Richard Pare. © Richard Pare ...... 190

Evgeny Dobrenko

11.1. One of the submissions to the competition for the . Pantheon of the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War . (The Second World War) in 1942–43 ...... 196 11.2. Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis), The Reality of our . Programme—it’s Real People. It’s—We are with You, 1931, . lithograph, poster, c. 146 × 105 cm...... 198 11.3. Fedor Shurpin, Morning of Our Motherland, 1946–48, oil . on canvas, 167 × 232 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow . 198 11.4. Boris Efimov, The Captain of the Soviet Union Leads us . from Victory to Victory, on the cover of Ogonek, no. 23 . (5 November 1933) ...... 199

Maria Mileeva

12.1 installation photograph of the exhibition Style of the . Industrial Bourgeoisie in GMNZI, 1930. Courtesy of the . Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of . Fine Arts, Moscow ...... 210 xiv list of illustrations

12.2 installation photograph of the Post-war Formalist French . Art Room, GMNZI, 1933–1938. Courtesy of the . Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of . Fine Arts, Moscow ...... 211 12.3 installation photograph of the Expressionism Room, . GMNZI, 1933–1938. Courtesy of the Manuscript department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, . Moscow ...... 211 12.4. Krokodil, no. 33 (30 November 1948). Author’s archive ...... 216 12.5. Krokodil, no. 27 (30 September 1949). Author’s archive ...... 216

David Crowley

13.1. Publicity for the 1960 DEFA film Der Schweigende Stern .(The Silent Star), private collection ...... 222 13.2. Galaxy, a sculpture by Francisco Infante in The Exhibition . of Scientific Creative Works of Young People, Moscow 1967. . Photograph courtesy of Lew Nussberg und Die Gruppe . Bewegung Moskau 1962–1977 (1978) ...... 227 13.3. Model of the Cybertheatre by Lev Nussberg, Soviet Union, . 1967. Photograph courtesy of Lew Nussberg und Die Gruppe . Bewegung Moskau 1962–1977 (1978) ...... 228 13.4. Cover of the first edition of Stanisław Lem’s Summa . Technologiae, 1964, designed by Daniel Mróz, private . collection ...... 231 13.5. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal Instrument (1969), Muzeum sztuki, Łódź ...... 234 13.6 Heliopolis scheme by VAL (Voies et Aspectes du . Lendemain—Alex Mlynarčik and architects Ľudovít . Kupkovič and Viera Mecková), 1968–70. Courtesy of the . artists ...... 236

Brandon Taylor

14.1 dan Flavin, ‘monument’ for V.Tatlin, 1968, fluorescent . lights, 244 cm. high. Courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation, new York ...... 241 14.2. Peter Halley, Soul Control, 1991, acrylic, Day-Glo Acrylic . and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 90 × 93 ins. (228.6 × 236.2 cm.). Courtesy of the artist ...... 244 list of illustrations xv

14.3. Leonid Lamm, Organisation of Space with the Help of . Volumes and Flatnesses (Nostalgia of Perspective), 1955, . watercolour, coloured pencil on paper, 17 1/4 × 12 3/4 ins. . (44.5 × 33 cm.). The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, new Jersey. Courtesy of the artist ...... 247 14.4. Model of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction. Courtesy of . the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, dortmund ...... 250 14.5 Bernard Frize, Aran, 1992, acrylic and resin on canvas, . 180 × 180 cm., KiCo Collection, Bonn. Courtesy of Galerie Schwarzwälder, Vienna ...... 250 14.6. Katie Pratt, Sascheckewan, 2007, oil on canvas, . 200 × 205 cm. Courtesy of the artist ...... 251 14.7. Jane Harris, Set to Rise, 2010, oil on canvas, 127 × 203 cm. dr William Conn Collection, UK and France ...... 252

Notes on Contributors

John E. Bowlt is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he is also director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture. He has written extensively on Russian visual culture, especially on the art of Symbolism and the avant- garde, one of his latest books being Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900–1920: Art and Culture of the Russian Silver Age (New York, 2008). Dr Bowlt has also curated or co-curated exhibitions of Russian art, including A Feast of Wonders. Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the Nouveau Musée de Monte Carlo, Monaco, and the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow (2009–10); and El Cosmos de la vanguardia rusa at the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, Santander, and the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2010). He is now preparing an exhibition entitled L’Avanguardia russa, la Siberia e l’Oriente. Kandinsky, Malevič, Filonov, Gončarova for the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, for 2013. In September, 2010, he received the Order of Friendship from the Russian Federation for his promotion of Russian culture in the USA.

Natalia Budanova, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, is a member of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) advisory board. Currently, she is completing her PhD thesis, which explores works by Rus- sian women artists produced during the First World War, with reference to the opportunities and restrictions that shaped women artists’ professional life in wartime Russia. She contributed to the exhibition Diaghi- lev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909–1929 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2010) with a translation of documents from the Ekstrom Collection. Her essay ‘Women at Work’ was published in the exhibition catalogue Rodchenko and His Circle: Constructing the Future through Pho- tography (Art Sensus, London, 2011). In March 2013 she co-organised an International conference on ‘The Russian Avant-garde in the European Cultural Context’ at the Art History Department, Moscow State Univer- sity. She is currently working on a project that aims at researching and popularising the collections of Russian art in British museums and private collections.

David Crowley is a Professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal Col- lege of Art, London, where he runs the Critical Writing in Art & Design xviii notes on contributors

MA. He has a specialist interest in the art and design histories of Eastern Europe under communist rule. He is the author of various books including National Style and Nation-State. Design in Poland (1992), Warsaw (2003) and editor—with Susan Reid—of three edited volumes: Socialism and Style. Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe (2000); Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (2003); and Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (2010). He writes regularly for the art and design press. Crowley also curates exhibitions, including Cold War Mod- ern (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2008–9); The Power of Fantasy. Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland (BOZAR, Brussels, 2011); and Sounding the Body Electric. Experimental Art and Music in Eastern Europe (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012).

Evgeny Dobrenko is Professor and Head of the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than twenty books, including Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (2008); Political Economy of Socialist Realism (2007); Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories (2005); The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (2001); The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (1997); and others.

Maria Kokkori is a research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the Russian avant-garde. She received her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 where her thesis focused on the examination of paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova c. 1905–1925. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute with a focus on Russian Constructivist works by Aleksandr Rodchenko. During 2009–2011 she was a research fellow of the Malevich Society in New York. Her project investigated Kazimir Malevich’s teaching activities at the Vitebsk Art School in Belarus between 1919 and 1923. She is the author of various articles on the art and design of Russian avant-garde artists.

Christina Lodder is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a vice- president of the Malevich Society, New York. Among her publications are numerous articles and several books, including Russian Constructivism notes on contributors xix

(1983), Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (co- author, with Martin Hammer, 2000), Gabo on Gabo (co-editor, with Martin Hammer, 2000), Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005) and Rethink- ing Malevich (co-editor, with Charlotte Douglas, 2007). She has also been involved with various exhibitions such as Modernism (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2006) and From Russia (Royal Academy, London 2008). She is currently writing a book on Kazimir Malevich’s involvement with Architecture.

Muireann Maguire is author of a study on Soviet Socialist Realism and the Gothic-fantastic tradition, Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature, which appeared in 2012. She has also translated and edited a collection of eleven, twentieth-century Russian tales of the supernatural, Red Spectres (Angel Classics, 2012). Currently, she is working on two projects: a monograph on the representation and cultural reception of science and scientists in Russian and Soviet literature and cinema, and a study of childbirth in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Dr Maguire is Career Development Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at Wadham Col- lege, Oxford.

Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita is a doctoral candidate at The Courtauld Insti- tute of Art, London, working on early Soviet architecture and its narratives in both East and West. He prepared (with Marie Collier) the catalogue for the 2011 Royal Academy exhibition Building the Revolution (also shown in Barcelona, Madrid and Berlin). He prepared the architectural section of the exhibition Rodchenko and his Circle at Art Sensus in 2011. His article ‘Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoschka and the Prometheus Triptych’ was published in The Burlington Magazine in 2009. He received a first degree in modern history from Oxford and had a long business career before entering the Courtauld Institute.

Maria Mileeva is an Early Career Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her doctoral thesis examined exhibitions of Western art in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with a particular focus on the history of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI), Moscow. Previously, she read Art History at Jesus College, Cambridge. Maria has also worked as an Assistant Curator of Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970, held at the Vic- toria and Albert Museum, London in autumn 2008. Her research interests include cultural exchange between Russia and the West over the course xx notes on contributors of the twentieth century, with particular focus on the politics of international exhibition design and the construction of art-historical narratives as a means of defining national identity and cultural policy. Her latest research project explores the discourse of centre and periphery in Soviet cultural and institutional history by looking at a network of regional art museums in the peripheral outposts of Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Kiev, Kharkov, Saratov and Kazan. She is the administrator of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC).

John Milner is Professor of Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art and has been engaged with Russian art since completing his PhD in the 1970s. His book on the constructivist Vladimir Tatlin opened up the poetic and speculative aspects of Tatlin’s work and personality. John Milner has also written on Malevich, on Rodchenko and various other Russian themes, and has also curated a major display of work by El Lissitzky (Ste- delijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). In 2010 he curated an exhibition of Rodchenko and his Circle (Art Sensus, London), focussing on Rodchenko’s photography in the context of contemporary, professionally trained pho- tographer-journalists who worked for Novosti and other Soviet agencies. He published various essays in 2012–13 including a catalogue essay on Władysław Strzemiński for the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, and an ‘Interview with Lissitzky’ for the catalogue of the exhibition Lissitzky/Kabakov at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. He has for a number of years taught research students in Russian art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and in 2011 together with Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley of the Department of Art History at Cambridge Univer- sity, he founded the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) to encourage collaboration on the study of Russian art through conferences, including Art in Exile as well as Utopia I, II and III in 2011–12, which have attracted many scholars from Russia, Europe and the United States. CCRAC also encourages contacts with Russian scholars and curators, through mutual study visits facilitating research in this field. A joint conference with Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU) took place in March 2013 as the first step in annually alternating conferences facilitated by CCRAC, the next joint conference with MGU is booked for March 2014 in Cambridge and at The Courtauld Institute in London.

Nicoletta Misler, Professor of Russian and East European Art at the Uni- versità di Napoli “L’ Orientale”, Italy, retired, is a specialist in the visual culture of Russian Modernism. Her academic interests range from the notes on contributors xxi artists of the avant-garde such as Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and Wassily Kandinsky to the philosophers of the time, especially Pavel Flo- rensky (Pavel Florensky: Beyond Vision—Essays on the Perception of Art; Reaktion Books, London, 2002). Among her publications are monographs on Filonov, Francisco Infante, Solomon Nikritin, Aleksandr Ponomarev, and Kandinsky. She has also written extensively on Soviet architects such as Yakov Chernikhov and Ivan Leonidov. In addition, Dr Misler has curated or co-curated numerous museum exhibitions, together with their catalogues, including Kazimir Malevich (Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 1993), Kandinsky tra Oriente e Occidente (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1993) and Marc Chagall. Les années russes, 1907–1922 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1995). She has also served as academic consultant for museum exhibitions, for example, Filonov und seine Schule (Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1990) and Pavel Filonov: Seer of the Invisible (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 2006). At the moment Dr Misler’s principal avenue of enquiry is the evolution of free dance in early Soviet Rus- sia, and she has organised major exhibitions in Rome (In principio era il corpo . . . L’Arte del movimento a Mosca negli anni ’20 at the Acquario Romano, 1999) and in Moscow (Bakhrushin Museum, 2000).

Maria Starkova-Vindman specialises in Russian twentieth-century culture and Italian Renaissance art history. Previously she worked as a curator at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and assisted in teaching an MA course on politics in contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She has been giving lectures on twentieth-century Russian art in London during the past six years. Having received her MA as a Kilfinan Scholar from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD from Moscow State University in Italian Renaissance art history, she is currently working on her new research project at The Courtauld Institute which explores the representation of children as pioneer citizens of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s.

Brandon Taylor is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton and also teaches at the University of Oxford. In 2000 he was a visiting scholar at the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, Yale University, and in 2001 and 2002 at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sci- ences, Prague, and at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava. His books include Art of Today (1995), Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public (1999), Collage: The Making of Modern Art (2004), and Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (edited 2005). Recent projects include a monographic xxii notes on contributors essay for the retrospective exhibition of the Russian artist Leonid Lamm at the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (2009), and curating an exhibition on new baroque painting entitled Against Grids at the RIBA Gallery, Liverpool (2010). He is currently completing a book on the consequences and legacies of Constructivism.

Maria Tsantsanoglou received her PhD, ‘Russian Futurism: Criticism and Reception’ from the Lomonosov Moscow State University, where she also taught the history of art (1997–2002). She was a Member of the Greek State Committee for the reception of the George Costakis Collection (1998) and has been teaching nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian Art at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki) since 2002. She has organised many major exhibitions in Greece, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, as well as having produced numerous publications on the Rus- sian avant-garde, the synthesis of the arts, art and politics, and art in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Since 2002 she has worked with the Costakis Collection at the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, first as curator and from 2006 as director of the Museum. In 2007 she directed and co-curated the First Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Acknowledgements

The contents of this volume are based on papers that were originally delivered at two conferences—‘Utopia I: Russian Art and Culture, 1900–1930’ and ‘Utopia II: Russian Art and Culture, 1930–1989’—which were held at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in May and November 2011, under the auspices of the recently established Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). The editors are extremely grateful to the The Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, Professor John Milner, and all those contributors who agreed to publish their papers in this collection, for their patience in dealing with endless queries and their diligence in meeting deadlines. In addition, the editors would like to express particular gratitude to Richard Pare for his generosity in allowing the editors to use his wonderful photographs, and to Professors Jeffrey Brooks and Janet Ken- nedy for their invaluable advice and suggestions. All the scholars involved in this publication would also like to take this opportunity to express their gratitude to the staff of the following archives who gave them assistance and advice in the course of their research: The De Stijl Archive of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), Den Haag; The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva—RGALI), Moscow; The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Rossi- iskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’noi i politicheskoi istorii—RGASPI), Moscow; The State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstven- nyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii—GARF); Alexander Lavrentiev and The Rodchenko-Stepanova Archive, Moscow; The Manuscript Department of the State Russian Museum (Otdel rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia—OR GRM) St Petersburg; The Manuscript Department of the State Tretiakov Gallery (Otdel rukopisei Gosudarstvennoi Tretiakovskoi galerei—RO GTG), Moscow; and The Manuscript Department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Otdel rukopisei, Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina—GMII), Moscow. Finally, the editors would like to thank the staff at Brill, especially Ivo Romein and Thalien Colenbrander, for their help and support in realising this publication, as well as family and friends for being there when things got tough. A big thank you to you all!

Introduction

Utopia and Dystopia: The Impulse of History

Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori and Maria Mileeva

The papers published here were, for the most part, originally delivered at two conferences—‘Utopia I: Russian Art and Culture, 1900–1930’ and ‘Utopia II: Russian Art and Culture, 1930–1989’—which were held at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in May and November 2011 under the auspices of the recently established Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). The conferences were conceived as broad interdisci- plinary projects, dealing particularly with Russian notions of utopia and dystopia, along with their social, artistic, literary and ideological ramifications. The focus was not the historical or philosophical examination of utopia, but rather the exploration of its visual and cultural aspects. Schol- ars responded creatively to this remit, and their illuminating contributions ranged far and wide, extending beyond the geographical boundaries of Russia to embrace the wider world. Some of these texts are published elsewhere, so this volume does not represent the entire proceedings of the two conferences, but merely a portion of the papers delivered and discussed. Often the essays pursue a single theme over several decades, while a few actually cover the whole period from 1900 right up to the fall of Communism and even into the present century. Naturally, the conference was based on established concepts of utopia and its intellectual history, which for the modern world inevitably started with the saint and statesman Sir Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia in the sixteenth century to describe his ideal republic based on the island of that name. He took the word utopia from the Greek ου (no) and τóπος (place), which implies ‘no place’, while eutopia, the English homophone is derived from the Greek ευ (good or well) and τόπος (place), and so means a ‘good place’ (eutopos). This ambiguity in English means that the word implies both a good place where problems are solved and a place that doesn’t exist but is imagined.1 This generates an interplay

1 See, for instance, John Carey, ed., The Faber Book of Utopias (London, Faber and Faber, 1999), p. xi. 2 christina lodder, maria kokkori and maria mileeva between nothing and perfection, the not-yet and the possible, while also acknowledging utopia’s geographical or spatial aspect.2 On More’s island of Utopia, which had been deliberately separated from the mainland by its inhabitants, society was rationally organised, there were no laws, no private property, no military conflict and no war.3 Of course, Moore’s vision is related to Plato’s Republic and the work of other philosophers who had conceived and written about a perfect society, in which the ills and problems that beset life in the present would be eradicated.4 But if the drawbacks of the here and now were the constant problem, the solutions proposed were highly diverse. At one extreme was the appli- ance of science. The first thinker to suggest that a perfect society could be attained simply by using science and technology to satisfy all of humanity’s material needs was Sir Francis Bacon in New Atlantis (1627), in which he described a rational society ruled by scientists.5 From this standpoint and given technological progress, attaining utopia seemed to be merely a question of time.6 By the early twentieth century, improved methods of manufacture made the possibility of material plenty for all not merely a pipe dream but a potential reality. Mechanisation was revolutionising all aspects of life. Goods could be manufactured more cheaply and in larger quantities than ever before. America led the way, possessing the technological expertise to which Europe and Soviet Russia aspired. Fred- erick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion studies sought to apply scientific methods to improve the efficiency and productivity of human beings and factories, while Henry Ford’s greater innovation of introducing conveyor- belt production into his Highland Park plant in Detroit, made the motor car relatively inexpensive and available to everyone. In principle, pre- fabrication and the industrial manufacture of building materials also allowed for cheap and efficient construction. It could be argued that utopias of the early twentieth century were founded on the real potentials of the modern world. At the opposite end of the utopian spectrum was the call for a return to nature; the notion that a better world would emerge not from improv-

2 Leena Petersen, ‘Reconsidering Utopia: On the Entanglement of Mind and History’, Studies in Social and Political Thought (Falmer, Brighton), vol. 18 (Winter 2010), pp. 14–28. 3 Thomas More, De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia (London, 1516). 4 Plato, The Republic, 360BC. 5 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis with Sylva Sylarum; or, A Naturall Historie (London, 1627). 6 See Krishnan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Black well Ltd, 1987), p. 30. introduction 3 ing the external accessories of life or through the application of new technologies, but rather from restoring the inner world of emotional and spiritual values. This tradition was the strongest inheritance from the late nineteenth century. Thus William Morris depicted an agrarian idyll in News from Nowhere (1890), reacting against the horrors of mechanised production and the problems of social dislocation associated with industrialisation in Britain during the nineteenth century.7 His vision fed the hopes and dreams of those associated with the Arts and Crafts movement throughout Europe, and also fostered the Garden City idea, which gained support in Russia, and subsequently in the late 1920s evolved into Mikhail Okhitovich’s radical concept of disurbanisation.8 Just as Morris had envisaged an escape from the realities of the present into a pre-industrial past, certain Russian émigré authors of the 1920s and 1930s, cut off from their homeland and their cultural roots, looked back to an agrarian Russia, a kind of pre-lapsarian utopia.9 In between these two polarities was a vast range of utopian visions, embracing all aspects of life: social, technological, medical, political, intellectual, cultural, spiritual, economic, religious and sexual. A large number of such utopian ideas, as Richard Stites has so admirably demonstrated, found fertile soil in Russia in the first three decades of the twentieth century.10 Even before this, in the nineteenth century, Russian philosophy had been profoundly concerned with concepts relating to social and political utopias and dystopias, exploring notions of continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony, faith and reason, teleology and eschatology. The utopian tradition was manifest in various movements and publications, notably in the Slavophiles’ retrospective utopianism, Petr Chaa- daev’s Philosophical Letters (1829), the Petrashevskii circle’s enthusiasm for French utopian socialism in the late 1840s, Aleksandr Herzen’s From The Other Shore (1855), Vladimir Odoevskii’s dystopian fantasy Russian Nights (1844), Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel of the early 1860s What is to be done?, Aleksandr Bogdanov’s science fiction novel Red Star (1908), and Lenin’s treatises Two Utopias (1912) and State and Revolution (1917). By the early twentieth century a residual utopianism had been replaced

7 William Morris, ‘News from Nowhere’, The Commonweal (London) January–October 1890, subsequently published as News from Nowhere (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891). 8 See Hugh D. Hudson Jr., ‘Terror in Soviet Architecture: The Murder of Mikhail Okhi tovich’, Slavic Review, vol. 51, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 448–467. 9 See Chapter Six below. 10 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Rus sian Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 christina lodder, maria kokkori and maria mileeva by a focus on living in the present. Writers engaged utopia as part of a historical and cultural dialogue in which they made, or responded to, claims about how to achieve a better society in which human beings might live a more fulfilling life and realise their full potential.11 The rapid process of industrialisation and urbanisation in Russia during the nineteenth century had undermined social and political stability and had laid the groundwork for the success of the October Revolution of 1917, which destroyed the old order and encouraged everyone to formulate and, more importantly, implement their own utopian versions of the new. Those versions are highly diverse, although Vladimir Sviatlovskii, in The Russian Utopian Novel of 1922 was convinced that Russian utopias, unlike More’s, did not set themselves the task of devising new forms of society, but set rules for the proper conduct of existing society by showing how each of its members should behave.12 Not surprisingly, manifestations of utopia in the Soviet Union have tended to be considered within the context of the political and social objectives of socialism. Marxism was clearly utopian in proposing that a political revolution would lead to a centralised structure and an improve- ment in human behaviour, which in turn would reverberate throughout society, resulting in the achievement of socialism and the ultimate with- ering away of the coercive state apparatus.13 Nevertheless, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had fought hard to disassociate communism from any hint of utopianism (which they regarded as impractical day-dreaming), and the Soviet regime could hardly have done more than it did to discour- age and destroy all experiments that it could not control.14 The end of

11 For a further discussion, see Leonid Heller and Michel Niqueux, Histoire de l’ uto pia en Russie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), translated into Russian as Leonid Geller, Mishel’ Nike, Utopiia v Rossii (St Petersburg: Giperion, 2003); B.F. Egorov, Rossiskie utopii. Istoricheskii putevoditel’ (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2007); Gary M. Hamburg and Randall Allen Poole eds., A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defence of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1979). 12 Vladimir Sviatlovskii, Russkii utopicheskii roman (Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1922), p. 26. 13 See Gregory Claeys, ‘Socialism and Utopia’ in Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: New York Public Library; and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 223–224. 14 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848); Eng lish translation, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. David Harvey, (Lon don: Pluto Press, 2008); and Robert N. Berki, Insight and Vision: The Problem of Communism in Marx’s Thought (London: J. M. Dent, 1983). introduction 5 the Civil War and the so-called heroic period of the Revolution witnessed measures like the militarisation of labour, the crushing of the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions, the suppression of anarchism, and the removal of avant-garde artists from positions of influence in running artistic affairs within the Commissariat of Enlightenment. The New Economic Policy (NEP), implemented in March 1921 to resuscitate the economy, allowed small-scale private enterprises to coexist alongside state-run heavy industry, representing a compromise with capitalism and entrepreneurial elements within Soviet society. While such policies seemed to end the heady idealism generated by the Revolution, they also gave rise to a brief period of cultural pluralism, in which utopian aspirations could flourish before being finally eroded under Stalin. Indeed, during the Stalinist years, the Soviet Union became a paradigm of dystopia—a totalitarian regime of unspeakable ruthlessness, which used terror, arbitrary arrest and impris- onment, summary executions, forced labour, and concentration camps to control its population.15 Yet, from Stalin’s perspective, his regime might also be considered to be a totalitarian utopia. Certainly, it could be argued that he was intent on implementing his own version of utopia. Such observations highlight the general problem of utopian programmes in the twentieth century and specifically as they are associated with Russia—the relationship between the utopian and dystopian is never quite as straightforward as it might seem. Dystopia is not simply the mirror image of utopia; dystopia can actually be generated from within utopia and, indeed, by the implementation of the utopian vision itself. Ultimately, utopian visions and programmes are highly subjective and personal—one person’s utopia may be another’s dystopia. Generations of scholars have tried to explore and explain how and why the utopian aspirations within Russian society turned into the dystopian nightmare of Stalinism. Some of those mechanisms as they relate to visual and literary culture are examined here. The two conferences produced a multi-facetted, nuanced and fluctuating picture of utopia and dystopia in Russia, embracing a wide assortment of issues, although the main focus was on various artistic media and a range of visual and literary artefacts. To some extent, the papers complemented the idea of utopia developed by the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, and presented in his books, The Spirit of Utopia (written in 1915–16,

15 Like ‘utopia’, ‘dystopia’ also comes from the Greek, but in this instance, topos is pre ceded by δυσ-, meaning ‘bad’ or ‘hard’. It was apparently first used by John Stuart Mill in 1868. See Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 6 christina lodder, maria kokkori and maria mileeva but published 1918)16 and the later, more extensive The Principle of Hope (1954).17 In these, he argued that when humanity acts on the basis of its hopes and dreams, it is implicitly criticising existing reality and expressing a utopian aspiration. In other words a utopian impulse could cover a wide range of activities and phenomena, as Fredric Jameson explains: ‘Bloch posits a utopian impulse governing everything future-oriented in life and culture—and encompassing everything from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious.’18 Unfortunately, the studies published in this volume do not always seem to express a sense of optimism or ‘the principle of hope’, concerning the amelioration of the human condition, that was important to Bloch, they do, however, sometimes appear to tie in with the philosopher’s idea of the ‘not yet’ in the form of the ‘concrete utopia’ or ‘a utopia mediated with process’ which ‘is concerned to deliver the forms and contents which have already developed in the womb of present society’.19 For Bloch, this type of utopia was no longer an abstract entity but rather ‘a realistic anticipation of what is good’, creating a space in which a better reality could and can be created.20 Bloch argued that reality is essentially unfinished, and so concrete utopia is important precisely because it represents a possible future or a range of possible futures, which are located within the real. Concrete utopia is not only anticipated subjectively in utopian thinking, but also posseses an objective reality because it represents something that has not yet come into being, but which could exist and is therefore a real future possibility. The validity of this standpoint is perhaps reinforced by the reverberations of those utopian aspirations of the 1920s in Russian and Eastern-European art of the 1960s and Western art today.21 Bloch’s concept of utopia as a process, which is based on a relatively realistic appraisal of existing potentials, seems a particularly apt description of

16 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1918); English trans lation, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 17 Ernst Bloch, Das Printsip Hoffnung, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1954–1959); English translation, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1986). 18 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Sci ence Fiction (London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 1–9. 19 Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 623, cited by Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations’ in Schaer, Claeys and Sargent, eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, p. 15. 20 Ibid. 21 See chapters 13 and 14 below. introduction 7 most of the activities analysed in this volume. It is, therefore, in the spirit of Bloch that we have called this volume ‘Utopian Reality’. Of course, this title provocatively combines two elements that can never meet in history— the normative (utopian) and the empirical (realistic). In this volume, ‘Uto- pian reality’ refers more to the artistic attitudes examined than to any futurological interpretation, or to theories concerned with explanation and prediction. Yet the term is appropriately fluid, and does not neces- sarily imply a contradiction between utopian aspirations and ideological containment or a condition of historical negotiation, but rather embraces the idea that utopia is a driving force of history. The authors are not dealing with ‘utopias’ as grand schemes, but with limited actions undertaken with the hope of ameliorating one or more aspects of existing reality. Of course, instead of embracing Bloch’s more optimistic view, it is possible that the reader will end up agreeing with the pessimistic observation made by Aleksandr Bogdanov’s hero Engineer Menni that ‘Utopias are an expression of aspirations that cannot be realised and of efforts that are not equal to the resistance they encounter.’22 Certainly that seems to have been the dominant fate of the attempts to implement such ideas in the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet experiment failed, and the utopian programmes associated with it were unable to come to fruition, utopian impulses continue to exist within human society and are even undergoing a revival at the present time.23 Ultimately, perhaps Oscar Wilde presents the most attractive vision of utopia: ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of utopias.’24

City Names

Reflecting the troubled history of Russia is the changing name for the city Peter the Great, founded as St Petersburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it

22 See Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, eds. Loren Graham and Richard Stites, trans. Charles Rougle (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 204; cited by Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 252. 23 See, for instance, Richard Noble, ed., Utopias: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery; and Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2009). 24 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Boston: John W. Luce, 1910), cited in Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allan, 1990), p. 5. 8 christina lodder, maria kokkori and maria mileeva was renamed the more patriotic sounding Petrograd. When Lenin died ten years later the city became Leningrad in his honour, and that is how it was known for over seventy years. Only with the fall of communism in 1990 did it revert to its pre-1914 name of St Petersburg. In this book, the city is called by the name current at the time about which the author is writing. This practice has been adopted throughout the text in relation to the names of other cities, which were also changed in the wake of the Revolu- tion, although the change has frequently been reversed since the demise of communism. Whenever these cities are mentioned, the present name is given in brackets.

The Calendar

On 31 January 1918 Russia caught up with the rest of Europe and adopted the Gregorian calendar. Before this, dates in Russia were still established on the basis of the Julian calendar, which, by the twentieth century was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar and so was called ‘Old Style’. Hence the Bolshevik uprising took place on 25 October 1917 according to the Rus- sian calendar, but on 7 November according to Western usage. This is why it is called the October Revolution, but its anniversary is celebrated on 7 November. In this text, the ‘New Style’ of dating is used throughout, even for events that occurred prior to the calendar change.

System of Transliteration

The system of transliteration used in this text is the Modified Library of Congress System, with the alteration that single or double diacritical marks denoting the Russian hard and soft signs have been omitted from people’s names and surnames when they occur in the main body of the text. Individuals’ names have usually been rendered according to this system, except where particular variants have become well established in Western usage, for example, Wassily Kandinsky, not Vasilii Kandinskii; El Lissitzky, not Lazar Lisitskii, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, not Vladimir Maiakovskii. chapter one

dreaming of the city: Mikhail Larionov’s Provincial Dandy 1907

John Milner

In the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, there is a painting by Mikhail Larionov called Provincial Dandy—a strange title that offers some clues to the work’s meaning (Fig. 1.1). The Dandy, according to Charles Baudelaire’s celebrated essay of 1863, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, is an urban creature of refined sensibility, at the same time an observer of city life as well as an active participant within it. He is aesthetically sensitive, and in Baudelaire’s case, of course, not only a reporter, but also a poet and essayist.1 Applying Baudelaire’s definition to Larionov’s Provincial Dandy produces revealing results—not least because Baudelaire’s dandy was cosmopolitan, while Larionov’s dandy is provincial.2 Larionov’s Russian title for his painting was Provintsial’nyi frant. The word frant is distinct from dendi (dandy). Although frant is commonly translated as dandy in English, the two words have distinct connotations in Russian. A frant does not have any self-confidence without the ‘correct’ attire and he dresses to impress. A dandy, on the other hand, is naturally elegant and stylish, and considers himself above fashion, which he creates rather than follows. He can pull anything off, while the frant is the ‘poor’ follower of fashion, who must dress well to gain self-respect and move up in society and, therefore, is someone who spends too much time thinking about dress and dressing too well.3 This precisely describes the stocky figure painted by Larionov. He has one hand behind his back, wears a top hat, an elegant necktie, and a coat with only the top buttons fastened.

1 See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life [1863] in Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, introduction and trans. P.E. Charvet (Harmonds worth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 390–435. 2 The term provintsiia (province) in the time of Peter the Great signified ‘a large admin istrative or territorial area’, but later ‘it serves less as a geographic area than as a qualitative judgment’. See Evgeniia Kirichenko and Elena Shcheboleva, Russkaia provintsiia (Moscow, 1997), pp. 46–48. 3 See V.I. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, vol. 4 (St Petersburg, 1863– 1866); and L.P. Krysin, Tolkovyi slovar’ inoiazychnykh slov (Moskva: Eksmo, 2008), p. 944. 10 john milner

Fig. 1.1 Mikhail Larionov, Provincial Dandy, 1907, oil on canvas, 100 × 89 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. dreaming of the city 11

Fig. 1.2 Mikhail Larionov, Walk in a Provincial Town, 1907, oil on canvas, 47 × 91 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

He is a man of some pretensions, wearing fairly high-heeled shoes, posing proudly in the street, and standing alone in the painting. Behind him is a shop sign advertising women’s hats. In this painting, Larionov has clearly not depicted a French boulevard scene. This is not a cosmopolitan painting in that sense. It shows a small street with no vehicular traffic. It is probably set in the south of Russia or the Ukraine, near Odessa, or Tiraspol, where Larionov lived, but this is not the capital or a busy city community. In Larionov’s painting the figure is smartly dressed, but this elegance might seem out of place. In Gogol’s words ‘everything seemed to have written on it: No, this is not the provinces, this is a capital, this is Paris itself ’.4 The same may be said of his companion painting of a single female figure Provincial Female Dandy (Provintsial’naia frantikha, 1907, Tatarstan State Museum of Fine Arts, Kazan). Both of these figures reappear in the horizontal canvas A Walk in a Provincial Town 1907 (Fig. 1.2), which represents several figures walking along a small-town street, which is almost a country lane.5 There are two ladies in their finery—women with

4 Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 167. See Anne Lounsbery, ‘ “No, this is not the provinces!” Pro vincialism, Authenticity, and Russianness in Gogol’s Day’, Russian Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 259–280. 5 These three works were exhibited together at the Zolotoe Runo (Golden Fleece) exhi bition in Moscow in 1908. See Zolotoe runo (Moscow, 1908), pp. 5–6. 12 john milner pretensions to style and fashion. To the right, the stocky figure reappears, although his top hat has been replaced by a soft hat. Otherwise, his pose is exactly the same. At the far left, as a counterpoint, is a man wearing a frockcoat or long jacket and he now has the top hat. He carries a walking stick under his arm. He is a stylish man, heading off to some social event. In between, two women are going towards the hat shop. At the centre left, is a small café where a figure is preparing food. A small awning shields a table from the bright light. There is a little fence, and a waiter in atten- dance. This evokes the life of the street, but what is especially startling, and what is certainly not present, for instance, in Édouard Manet’s painting Musique aux Tuileries (1862, National Gallery, London) is the fact that there is a pig walking confidently down the road, among these people in their fine clothes. We are in the provinces: there are two men who might be dandies, but their claims to metropolitan sophistication ring false in this setting. This is the sort of place where pigs are at home in the street. The posture and apparel of the man in the top hat closely resemble the beautifully painted shop signs of elegant outfitters that were familiar on the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow, in the years before the First World War. A sign advertising F. Kuzmin’s tailor’s shop shows, in a stylised way, smart urban clothing for gentlemen.6 Despite its remoteness in time and space, this almost universal apparel remains comparable with the clothing worn by the men in Manet’s Musique aux Tuileries. There is an air of pretension about all this, as clothes are sensitive indi- cators of wealth and status. It also raises the question of the way in which Larionov’s figure can be seen as provincial. Is he simply from the provinces, or does it mean that he is not an urban sophisticate, as Manet’s figures were? It can be shown that Larionov was, indeed, thinking of Manet, as much as he was thinking about shop signs in the streets of big cities, when he devised this composition within a provincial framework. By the time that he painted Provincial Dandy in 1907, Larionov was already an experienced artist, who had produced numerous Impression- ist, Symbolist and Post-Impressionist works. He was a young painter, fully aware of these trends in French art, but he was also working in Rus- sia. These fairly early compositions were not academic, but they could

6 The artist was Vasilii Stepanov. See Alla Povelikhina and Yevgeny Kovtun, Russian Painted Shop Signs, trans. Thomas Crane and Margarita Latsinova (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1991), p. 52, illus. 69. dreaming of the city 13 certainly be seen to be paying a certain kind of homage to Manet, Claude Monet, and very soon to Henri Matisse. What made this possible were the great collections in Moscow, acquired and displayed by the merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, who opened their collections to painters on a regular basis. In Moscow, therefore, Russian artists could easily gain access to the latest works, perhaps more easily than they might even have managed in Paris. Furthermore, in 1906, the year before Larionov painted Provincial Dandy, he travelled to Paris with his friend, the painter Pavel Kuznetsov, to assist Sergei Diaghilev with his great display of Russian art at the Salon d’Automne, only one year after the French Fauve painters had made their vital impact there, and Matisse had seized the opportunity for notoriety, success and sales. It was the Russian merchants, in fact, who for several years afterwards were Matisse’s most important source of income. In 1906, therefore, Larionov was in a good position to survey a wide range of Parisian art, and it is not surprising that it should resonate in his own works. But there is another important point to be made here. While the merchants were taking French art home to Moscow, Diaghi- lev’s project was moving the other way, asserting the importance of Rus- sian art and presenting it in Paris. Larionov was placed at the cusp of this exchange. This was reflected in his paintings, for Larionov did not accept French art uncritically. He transposed and transformed it to make it Rus- sian. This is fundamental to much of Larionov’s painting up to 1913 and also to the work of his partner, Natalia Goncharova. In Provincial Dandy, Larionov deliberately emphasised the crudity of the Russian street, especially when compared with the elegance of the Tuileries Garden in Paris. This context provides an insight into his attitude and his strategy towards Manet. There are some similarities. For example, Larionov makes clear the differences between the masculinity of suits, top hats, frockcoats, and urban outfits, and the contrasting feminine elegance of the women in hats, frills, lace, and a different sense of style. The gender issue at work in this painting contrasts the femininity of fine clothes for women with the military bearing of men in sharp, smart apparel. Hats, fashion and gender are significant. It was precisely this theme of fashion, elegance, and cosmetic beauty that Baudelaire addressed in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. He devoted a whole section to cosmetics, a subject that re-appears in Larionov’s work, for example, in his illustrations for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s collection of poems Pomada (Cosmetics), Mos- cow, 1913. Baudelaire had argued that cosmetics are a sign of civilisation. 14 john milner

Women, he said, should be praised for their civilising influence, and for their understanding that, for urban beauty, they should adjust their appearance. In broad terms, for Baudelaire, artifice is urban, civilised, and sophisticated, in contrast to what nature itself provides. The feminine feature of the painting A Walk in a Provincial Town centres on the ladies walking along the street, but it also involves the shop sign. The women have come into town to shop. Parisian fashion retains its great status even here, wherever they are, in the South of Russia or Ukraine. This is confirmed by the sign, which has a specific Parisian source. The pig in Larionov’s painting is as nature intended—there are no fancy clothes, no make-up, and no elegance. The animal is part of the rural and provincial aspect of this subtle painting. In this way, Larionov introduced doubts and ideas about the issue of Russia as part of Europe, whether Russia should follow the French example, whether its culture should be independent of Paris, or whether, in fact, it should be committed to an immensely intricate cultural exchange. In Provincial Dandy, the pink and black sign is inscribed shliapy (hats). In the multi-figure Walk in a Provincial City, the lettering is omitted, and the shop sign acts as a painting within the painting. Larionov inserted here a miniature copy of Manet’s La Viennoise: Portrait d’Irma Brenner (Fig. 1.3), as an indicator of French art and French fashion. He was acknowledging French art, and indicating his determination to respond by transposing it thoroughly into its alien Russian context.7 Despite the appearance of crudeness, this is a skilful and sophisticated strategic achievement—not least because Larionov had recognised, in the process, Manet’s own fascination with femininity, fashion, cosmetics, the street, and urban beauty. Manet has a place in Larionov’s painting. Neo-Primitivism is also in there, as are the life of the city and issues of national identity. They are all reference points in Larionov’s painting. In the period 1910–13, Larionov and Goncharova did not insist upon a single, consistent style of painting. Alongside their Neo-Primitivist works, they made distinctly Futurist paintings in which the shattered imagery of repeated limbs and wheels asserted that urban life is dynamic, and both artists used frankly Italian Futurist techniques to do this. Yet here, too, lettering and shop signs often appear. In Goncharova’s Cyclist of 1913 (Russian Museum, St Petersburg), a pointing hand at the top left indicates the way to a bar selling beer, and at

7 Like Gogol, Larionov wryly characterised human behaviour in the Russian provinces, but he went further: while acknowledging Manet, Larionov adopted a rough and painterly insolence to achieve this, perhaps recalling Manet’s own robust variations on Titian. dreaming of the city 15

Fig. 1.3 Édouard Manet, La Viennoise: Portrait d’Irma Brunner, 1882, pastel on paper, 53.5 × 44.1 cm., Musée d’Orsay, Paris. right there is another sign for hats, and fragments of the words shelk (silk) and shliapy (hats), for silk top hats. There are overlapping themes of shop signs and their popular imagery among the actions of the street. As in Larionov’s Boulevard Venus (1913, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Goncharova’s Cyclist, there is a dynamic that is different from that of Provincial Dandy. At the same time, it is possible to find other references to Manet and his contemporaries. The cover of Kruchenykh and Larionov’s Futurist book Pomada has a sheet of gold leaf to which is attached a small lithograph depicting a very crude image of a woman singing. She has a décolleté dress, and her hand is raised as she sings. Larionov has drawn the notes flying like birds from her mouth. This image is directly inspired by Edgar Degas’s Singer in Green, (c.1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Stephen C. Clarke 1960, formerly Riabushinskii Collection), as the Russian art historian Ilia 16 john milner

Doronchenkov has observed.8 The woman in Larionov’s lithograph has her hand folded back in a distinctive way, which repeats precisely the pose of Degas’s singer. Artificial light, glamour, entertainment, theatre, and the urban vitality of far-off Paris are recalled and transformed by Larionov into something cruder and rougher. Paradoxically, this also reveals that Larionov possessed a sophisticated knowledge of Degas. Larionov’s strategy is to translate Degas’s individual aesthetic touch into something brutal and crude, so that it might appear incompetent or untutored, when, in fact, it is not. In this respect, it resembles Provincial Dandy. By 1913, this shift from fine painting to crude work is fundamental to the approach of Larionov, Goncharova, and their followers. Inconsistent styles were encouraged, and one of these was Neo-Primitivism. It signified the independence and vitality of intrinsic Russian art. This does not mean, however, that the dialogue with French painting ceased. As Maria Gough has shown, some of Larionov’s soldier paintings with their crude swear words, awkward postures and muddy colour tones undoubtedly refer to the grand Matisse paintings including La Musique, which Sergei Shchukin bought for the staircase of his Moscow house. Here we have an interesting dialogue between Russian and French art.9 In 1912–13, Larionov became preoccupied with a series of paintings of the seasons, for which he adopted a stylised, deliberately crude painting technique. An associated, but separate, painting of spring was executed almost entirely in black, brown, grey, and white (Fig. 1.4). ‘Spring 1912’ (Vesna 1912’) is inscribed across the lower part of the face of a large, brutal-looking woman with her hair plastered down, seen against a brown landscape of leafless trees, brown water, and a wandering black pig. The Russian spring is muddy, and this hefty woman is a translation of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera of 1482 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) into its opposite. This great fat woman has all the confident and frontal assertiveness of a shop-sign, although, if it were a shop-sign, then the dubious, erotic enter- tainments that it might promote would not be elegant. This work may actually be a reversal of Manet’s deliberately beautiful, fresh and elegant

8 Mikhail Larionov, Singer, 1913, illustration to Aleksei Kruchenykh collection of poems Pomada (Cosmetics), lithograph mounted on gold paper. Professor Ilia Dorontchenkov, of the European University, St Petersburg, raised this issue in an unpublished lecture at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 26 November 2009. 9 Professor Maria Gough first alerted me to such inverted signs of respect for French art in her unpublished lecture on Larionov and Matisse (‘Encountering Matisse chez Shchukin: Mikhail Larionov and the Defacement of Painting’), at the ‘Journée d’ Études Autour des Modernes’, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 30 January 2010. dreaming of the city 17

Fig. 1.4 Mikhail Larionov, Spring, 1912–13, oil on canvas, 86.5 × 68.2 cm., Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. portrait of a young woman, which he called Spring ( Jeanne de Marcy) (1881, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). Its inviting freshness is the exact opposite of Larionov’s Spring. Provincial Dandy is, therefore, sophisticated in its way, but it is also provincial and inelegant. It acts out the whole issue of how does a well- educated, sensitive, subtle, and above all energetic and vigorous young Russian artist assert his independence of the great city of Paris, far to the West. This incidentally indicates that the Russian Futurist is not like the Ital- ian Futurist, for whom this provincial quality would be anathema. The Russian Futurist is preoccupied with the past as much as the future, and the dandyism adopted by Larionov, Goncharova and their friends in the Donkey’s Tail group in Russia, is a provocative kind of dandyism. It is as if the dandyism of Oscar Wilde were pushed five steps too far, so that the outrageous flower in the button-hole has become a wooden spoon, 18 john milner and painting the face has moved from cosmetics to war paint, with artists beginning to paint directly onto each other, while Larionov sported the pigtail of the Don Cossack region. The image of the fat pomaded Spring appears on the shoulder of a woman in the Donkey’s Tail group, and Lari- onov painted a profile of Goncharova across her own face, as a primitive warrior of a new culture (Fig. 1.5). In Moscow, Larionov, Goncharova, Ilia Zdanevich, and Mikhail Le- Dantiu, all members of the Donkey’s Tail group, provoked the public with exhibitions and performances in the fashionable street of Kuznetskii Most, in Moscow. The impression created by their elegant clothes was contra- dicted by their offensive and rowdy behaviour. As in Provincial Dandy and in Walk in a Provincial Town, the women wear lace and large hats, while the men have painted faces and formal suits. Sartorial conventions confront the wildness of the Russian Futurists. Out of this synthesis emerges the Futurist Dandy, who is both provincial and cosmopolitan. Goncharova’ painting Linen (1913, Fig. 1.6) subtly embodies this depiction of gender issues. It effectively portrays Larionov and Goncharova in terms of their evening wear. In Linen, the laundry is being ironed. There is a flatiron and ironed dress shirts, carefully folded. Detachable col- lars and sleeves characteristic of the period are on the left of the painting, displayed as if in a shop window. To the right is female attire with lace and a collar, carefully prepared for the evening out—perhaps to Kuznetskii Most, an outrageous evening in a café, visit to the theatre, or a stroll in the street. The female clothes belong to Goncharova, whose initials ‘NG’ appear in Cyrillic on the flatiron. We see Larionov’s smart male clothes and Goncharova’s dress, so this canvas can be seen as a double portrait—but with Goncharova’s additional assertion that she is his equal as an artist, although she is also doing the ironing. This makes an interesting and intelligent comment on the way that Larionov and Goncharova worked together. She is every bit his equal, and here she is making it clear. She was wearing these or similar clothes in a photograph taken at the Donkey’s Tail exhibition of 1912. The photograph itself has a posed quality, which recalls Henri Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix (1864, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) depicting Baudelaire, Manet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and other brilliant dandies. In the Donkey’s Tail exhibition photograph, there are the same references to dandyism, but pushed further by the Futurists. These elegant people also paint pigs in the provinces. Face painting led to modified clothes, which became increasingly exotic. The painter-poet David Burliuk, for instance, would wear a top dreaming of the city 19

Fig. 1.5 Natalia Goncharova with painted face and profile, Moscow 1913. This photograph was first reproduced in the journal Teatr v karikaturakh (Mos- cow), no. 3 (9 September 1913), p. 9. Photograph courtesy of A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2002), p. 104.

Fig. 1.6 Natalia Goncharova, Linen, 1913, oil on canvas, 89 × 70 cm., Tate, London. 20 john milner hat, an elaborate and colourful waistcoat, and would often paint a little bird on his face, while sporting a wooden spoon in his button-hole, touches of make-up on his face, and a Cossack earring. He always looked serious—with all of the self-confidence and disdain that James Abbott McNeill Whistler, for example, could conjure up when recognised in the street. In Moscow, the top hat and formal dress of the dandy found a new lease of life in the years before the First World War. David Burliuk’s clothes are conventional, but his dandyism is taken to extremes. This anonymous uniform was radically individualised. This urban figure signified a wrecker of cultural conventions. The painter-poet Vladimir Mayako- vsky joined the Futurists at this point, wearing his yellow waistcoat. These Futurists assumed the dignity and respectability of solicitors or doctors, but behaved wildly. In 1913, Goncharova announced that Russian art should look to the East and Asia to revive Russian culture, but this, too, was always part of a dialogue within the splintering groups of Russian Futurists between 1910 and the First World War.10 In fact, in 1915, Goncharova moved to the West to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Switzerland, later moving to Paris. Before the First World War, it seemed that spring in Russia was different, that Futurists in Russia might define themselves as ‘savages’, that an interest in cosmetics led to painted faces, that fine linen was used in events to outrage the public. By making a scene, these Futurists were bringing theatre into the street, and blending art and life in anarchic events in St Peters- burg and Moscow. In December 1913, Velimir Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matiushin and Kazimir Malevich collaborated on the staging of the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, which was twinned with Maya- kovsky’s autobiographical play Mayakovsky—A Tragedy, for which Pavel Filonov and Iosif Shkolnik produced extraordinary costumes. The Russian Futurist dandy was central to these events. Photographs of the time document various Futurist groups combining, splintering and changing as Mayakovsky posed with David Burliuk and Kruchenykh, or Malevich with Kruchenykh and Filonov. Other artists

10 Goncharova expressed this view in the catalogue of her second solo exhibition in 1913. See Vystavka kartin Natalii Sergeevny Goncharovoi 1900–1913 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennyi Salon, 29 September—5 November 1913), pp. 1–4; English translation in John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, 2nd ed.), pp. 55–60. dreaming of the city 21 belonged to these Futurist circles, including Olga Rozanova, whose poster for Victory over the Sun and Mayakovsky—A Tragedy is a colourful and menacing lithograph, depicting a top-hatted ferocious face and a great belly with ‘Futurist theatre’ scrawled across it, thrust close to the viewer.11 This is clearly David Burliuk, the embodiment of the Futurist dandy, determined to launch into the future, and yet encompassing ancient time. The Russian Futurists were not preoccupied with the machinery of the modern age, but had their own distinctive interests. Malevich’s mysterious and celebrated painting The Englishman in Moscow (1914, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) probably depicts Burliuk. The title may refer to English tailoring visible in many European capitals. The painting also includes military references (the sabre and bayo- net), street signs, and religious images (the small church, the fish, and candle). These images, which suggest the coming war, follow one upon another, sometimes overlapping, like a sequence of visual stimuli experienced by the Futurist as he walks through the street, with a red spoon in his pocket. This extends the image of the dandy—though he is a part of the urban environment, he is increasingly caught up in the atmosphere of war. The costumes that Malevich designed for the opera Victory over the Sun include figures who bury the sun to liberate planet Earth from the sun’s daily demands, and so make the Earth a vehicle in time and space. These funeral directors have square black tunics and black top hats. A drawing for one of these figures has one eye covered, as does the painting The Eng- lishman in Moscow, and David Burliuk himself had only one eye. The Italian futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti visited St Peters- burg and Moscow in 1914 to perform and to try to recruit the Russian Futurists for an international Futurist project. Some were sympathetic, but others were not. Burliuk, Mayakovsky, and the poet Vasilii Kamenskii deliberately set off South on a long tour of performances, spreading their message, and demonstrating, too, that they did not need the Italian Futur- ist’s advice. The figure in The Englishman in Moscow is still a dandy, and still tenu- ously linked to Baudelaire’s man of the crowd, but he is also now a funereal,

11 Olga Rozanova, Union of Youth: World’s First Productions of the Theatre of the Futur ists, 2,3,4,5 December 1913, 1913, colour lithographic poster, 91 × 65.5 cm., Collection Nina and Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky. 22 john milner political activist. Futurist events marked a disjuncture in urban life—a shock in the city street. While the whole story of Victory over the Sun has its visionary and mystical side, it could also be seen as a kind of burlesque, or puppet show. This whole linking of painting, music, theatre, and life has something of the country fair about it, in addition to all these other connotations. The February and October Revolutions of 1917 first encouraged inventive and even anarchic individuality, but soon creativity had to be appropriate to the new regime. The vast array of inventive new techniques devised by the Suprematists, Constructivists, and others, after the Bolshe- vik Revolution of 1917, show how these anarchic groups of Futurists survived. It is just possible to trace at least one revolutionary dandy through all this. When Malevich moved to Vitebsk in 1919, he became a key figure in turning the local People’s Art School (Narodnaia khudozhestvennaia shkola) into a centre of Suprematist painting. It was here that he worked with El Lissitzky, who had been a close follower of Marc Chagall. Once Lis- sitzky adopted and developed this geometric technique of painting, new Futurist possibilities emerged, including a revival of Victory over the Sun as a puppet show. This strange opera was re-staged with a new meaning in Vitebsk after the Revolution. Lissitzky, observing this, designed his own puppet figures for the opera, including the Futurist Gravediggers who stand on the edge of a black circle where the sun has been captured, as sentinels who have locked up the past. Only through them can the new dispensation be revealed. Lissitzky’s Poet or Announcer, in these designs, is now the Futurist Mayakovsky who looks out across time and space to the dynamic New Man who emerges fully formed with a red square at his heart and a red star in his head.12 The outbreak of war on 1 August 1914 stranded some Futurists in the West, while others left Russia after the Bolshevik takeover of 1917. Those who remained had to demonstrate their political commitment. Malevich maintained a degree of ambiguity, but Lissitzky was assertively parti- san. It was David Burliuk, one of the inventors of Russian Futurism, who remained a dandy to the end (Fig. 1.7). Having fled eastwards from the Revolution, he formed a Futurist group in Vladivostok, before moving to

12 El Lissitzky, Schaumachinerie, 1923, from Figurinen, die plastiche Gestaltung der ele ktro-mechanischen Schau ‘Sieg uber die Sonne’ (Hannover: Leunis & Chapman, 1923). dreaming of the city 23

Fig. 1.7 David Burliuk posing for a photograph in New York, 1920s. Collection of Mary Holt Burliuk. Courtesy of The Ukrainian Museum, New York.

Japan, and finally to the United States, settling on Long Island, New York, where he launched Radio Futurism. Photographs show him with the same earring, top hat, and fancy clothes, maintaining the mysterious and theatrical persona of the dandy to the end of his life.

CHAPTER TWO

Utopian Sex: The Metamorphosis of Androgynous Imagery in Russian Art of the Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Period

Natalia Budanova

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Russian visions of a utopian future inevitably included an improved or new human being, conceived as a necessary prerequisite and natural outcome of a just and happy society. Although the term, novyi chelovek (new human being) is masculine in Russian, it can be applied to people of either sex, introducing the notion of an inter-gendered identity, i.e. androgyny. In this respect, Russia was like many other European cultures where preoccupations with androgyny emerged at this time. Value crises and the process of reviewing major economic, social and cultural concepts generated wide-ranging debates about gender relationships and identities.1 The androgynous ideal offered an attractive alternative to the polarisation of male and female roles in patriarchal society. Subsequently, a complex concept of androgyny emerged as a progressive model in Russian culture during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It was hoped that by promoting a harmonious fusion of male and female, such a model would

1 Starting from the 1860s the idea of gender equality and women’s emancipation became an important part of the reformist campaign for radical renewal of all major aspects of Russian social and political life. Consequently, the role of women in Russian history and culture—both past and present—attracted the special attention from Russian historians, ethnographers, journalists and early feminist campaigners, including D.L. Mordovtzev, V.I. Mikhnevich, A.V. Amfiteatrov, N.A. Kotliarevskii, N.A. Belozerskaia, E.N. Shchepkina, A.M. Kollontai and many others. Various aspects of gender relationships and identities inspired several important literary works including Nikolai Chernishevskii’s hugely influential novel Chto Delat’? [What is to be Done?] (1863), Nikolai Nekrasov’s poems Sasha (1855), Moroz—Кrasnyi Nos [Father Frost—Red Nose] (1863) and Russkie Zhenshchiny [Russian Women] (1872–1873), Ivan Turgenev’s novels Rudin (1856), Nakanune [On the Eve] (1860) and Оttsy i deti [Fathers and Sons] (1862), as well as the highly controversial Кreitzerova Sonata [The Kreutzer Sonata] (1889) by Leo Tolstoy. For more information see, Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Linda Edmondson, Women and Society in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Linda Edmondson, ed., Gender in Russian History and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); and Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, eds., Russia—Women—Culture (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1996). 26 natalia budanova enable humanity to overcome centuries of antagonism between the sexes. This ideal survived the Revolution before being gradually eradicated from Soviet ideology in the late 1930s. This article addresses some aspects of this intense fascination with the motif of androgyny in Russia’s visual arts before 1917, and maps out the metamorphosis of this utopian vision within the new cultural idiom of Socialist Realism.

1. The Pre-Revolutionary Period: Searching for the Ideal Human Being

During the Silver Age of Russian culture, the concept of androgyny was explicitly connected with dreams of a better, more just and unspoiled world. Russian philosophers and writers of an idealistic orientation regarded androgyny as a source of harmony, love, and creativity. The transcendental union of male and female was a major theme in Vladimir Soloviev’s writings, while Nikolai Berdiaev advocated androgyny as an essential pre-requisite for the flowering of human creativity.2 Symbolist writers were equally interested in the concept. Zinaida Gippius adopted a masculine persona in her poems, and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s novel Leonardo Da Vinci is substantially based on the subject of androgyny. Androgynous innuendoes also feature in the novels of Fedor Sologub and Andrei Bely.3 The first Russian artist to explore the motif of androgyny in painting was Mikhail Vrubel. His Demon Seated (1890, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow) was partly inspired by Mikhail Lermontov’s poem The Demon (1829–1839), but it also expressed ideas that had haunted the artist for a long time. According to Nikolai Prakhov, Vrubel’s first biographer, the artist’s demon was not the devil or an evil spirit, but it actually ‘means the soul and it incarnates the eternal struggle of the mutinous human spirit seeking the reconciliation of its stormy passions with knowledge of life;

2 See Vladimir Soloviev, Smysl liubvi (1892); English translation Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, trans. Thomas R. Beyer (Herndon, VA.: Lindisfarne Press, 1995); and Nikolai Berdiaev, Smysl tvorchestva: Оpyt opravdaniia cheloveka (completed 1914, pub lished in 1916); English translation Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (San Rafael CA.: Semantron Press, 2009). 3 See, for example the novels Fedor Sologub, Мelkii Bes [The Little Demon] (1907); and Andrei Bely, Petersburg (1916). utopian sex 27 but it finds no answer either on earth or in heaven. To give life to such a concept of the demon by means of painting became Vrubel’s goal’.4 Vrubel clearly conceived his motif to be androgynous, in contrast to Lermontov’s text, where the Demon is male and falls in love with the beautiful princess Tamara. According to the artist’s father, Vrubel envisaged his Demon as ‘the spirit conjoining within itself the masculine and the feminine genders. A spirit not so much evil as suffering and mournful, but, for all that, a lofty . . . sovereign spirit’.5 Vrubel’s Demon Seated is a monumental image imbued with a heroic spirit, but it demonstrates the essential difficulty of harmoniously fusing male and female polarities in the real world, where it is destined to remain no more than an alluring utopian ideal. Vrubel’s androgyn is a tragic, powerless figure, confined to eternal solitude in a strangely menacing space, where even the flowers seem to have turned to stone. Perhaps not surprisingly, Vrubel’s representation of androgyny, which is highly unusual for the Russian fin de siècle both in its formal qualities and its subject matter, met with hostility and incomprehension. The artist’s father, who saw the work in the first stage of its development, commented: ‘At first glance . . . this Demon appeared to me as a sen- sual . . . repulsive . . . elderly woman’.6 Vrubel’s final representation differed considerably from the initial image, but even a sympathetic patron like the industrialist and collector Savva Mamontov found the painting too embarrassing to display in his Moscow house, so confined it to his studio for many years, while Vladimir Stasov, the most influential art critic of the time, wrote indignantly: ‘Vrubel in his Demons has given us the most appalling examples of an unbecoming and repulsive decadence’.7 Vrubel’s life-long struggle to find an appropriate visual expression for the androgynous human soul indicates the complex problems inherent in androgyny as an artistic motif. While transcendence of the masculine-feminine polarity, as Berdiaev and Soloviev envisaged it, might well represent a desirable philosophical model of human perfection, a visual

4 Nikolai Prakhov, Stranitsi proshlogo. Ocherki-vospominaniia o khudozhnikakh (Kiev, 1958); English translation in Aline Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910) (Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 94. 5 Aleksandr Vrubel, letter to Anna Vrubel, February 1885, in A. Ivanov and A. Vrubel, eds., M.A. Vrubel. Pis’ma k sestre. Vospominaniia o khudozhnike. Otryvki iz pis’em otsa khu dozhnika (Leningrad, 1929); English translation in Isdebsky-Pritchard, The Art of Mikhail Vrubel, p. 58. 6 Ibid., p. 58. 7 Vladimir Stasov, Sobraniie sochinenii (St Petersburg, 1906), vol. 4, p. 181. 28 natalia budanova representation often suggested sexual ambiguity rather than fusion and unity. The last of Vrubel’s demon paintings, The Demon Downcast (1902, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), in which the figure is broken in pieces, provides a tragic ‘finale’ for this alluring utopian ideal. Despite the hostile response to this first representation of androgyny in Russian art, interest in the motif did not disappear. During the first two decades of the twentieth century it appealed to artists of both sexes and various creative approaches, and became especially popular in por- traiture (including self-portraits). Unlike Vrubel, however, most artists of Russia’s Silver Age conveyed androgyny as a delicate flavour lent to a male or female character rather than as a radical transformation of the individual. One such example is Mikhail Nesterov’s portrait of his daughter Olga, The Amazon (1906, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), which embodies a subtle play with androgynous allusions. The horsewhip in Olga’s hand and her easy self-assurance convey authority and control, accentuated by the fashionable ‘masculine’ details of her costume. The title also has androgynous connotations: amazon in Russian describes both the mythical women-warriors, as well as the special type of female riding suit that Olga is wearing. A fascination with transvestism and masquerade as a means of tran- scending the traditional boundaries of gender identity and behaviour became one of the distinct features of this period. Prince Felix Yusupov, an influential aristocrat, fabulously rich dandy, and the future murderer of Grigorii Rasputin, was well known for his transvestism. Dressed as a young lady, he would accompany his brother to restaurants and flirt with strangers. In his Portrait of Prince Yusupov (1903, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), Valentin Serov emphasised the potentially dangerous mixture of feminine and masculine traits in his sitter: Yusupov’s slender body, delicate face, and the graciousness of his pose contrast with his ruthless, direct gaze, his cold self-assurance and the authoritative gesture with which he controls his pet dog. The allure of cross-dressing also appealed to women. Leon Bakst’s well- known representation of the poet Zinaida Gippius (1906, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow) portrays a stylish woman wearing an elegant male outfit reminiscent of late-eighteenth-century court fashion. The scornful expression on her face and the distinctly masculine pose of her sprawled body, sanctioned by the male dress, serve to emphasise Gippius’ fiercely independent attitude and her defiance of accepted codes of gender behaviour. The artist brilliantly captured both the convoluted theatricality and utopian sex 29 intrinsic androgyny of his sitter, whose appearance combined the dangerous magnetism of a mermaid with the sharp angularity of a young male. Gippius signed her shrewd and quick-witted articles with male pen names such as Anton Krainii or Lev Pushchin. Transgressing established conventions, she and Merezhkovskii consciously decided that their marriage should remain ‘white’, that is, unconsummated—a move that was meant to promote a new type of union between man and wife, based on intellectual equality, rather than sexual attraction and gender submission. Motifs of transvestism, masquerade and theatrical performance were frequently combined with commedia dell’ arte settings in paintings by the World of Art group.8 Allusions to the theatre, or to a masked ball, helped to play down the troublesome aspects of androgynous themes, including the infringement of socially accepted gender roles or the controversy of the hermaphrodite. Inherently risqué subjects were presented as amusing games of gallantry, set in a world of artistic fantasy. Konstantin Somov’s Pierrot and the Lady (1910, Museum of Fine Arts, Odessa), for example, depicts a curious reversal of sexual roles where the active masculine attitude of the Lady confronts the playful and sensuous abandonment of the effeminate Pierrot. The mask or disguise of Pierrot was particularly popular and often featured in portraits and self-portraits of men and women. The archetypal qualities that were ascribed to the mask in Russian symbolist literature—a suffering lover, a poet enchanted by the Ideal of Beauty and averse to the ruthless vulgarity of the material world—made it easily adaptable to androgynous associations in the case of male subjects. At the same time, allusions to masquerade infused the Pierrot motif with the playful spirit of mischievous transgression and flirtation when adopted by women. Although Zinaida Serebriakova in her Self-Portrait as Pierrot (1911, Museum of Fine Arts, Odessa) wears the masquerade costume of a male character, it serves only to highlight her feminine attractions. Another adaptation

8 The Ballets Russes, organised by Sergei Diaghilev, was one of most renowned and internationally acclaimed enterprises of the World of Art, and introduced overt sensu ality allied to sexual ambivalence in some of its performances, including Schéhérazade, The Spectre de la Rose and L’Après-midi d’un Faune. This is a rich topic in itself, distinct from the current discussion of androgynous motifs in Russian fine art. For more informa tion, see John E. Bowlt, Zelfira Tregulova, and Nathalie Rosticher Giordano, eds., A Feast of Wonders: Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes (Milan: Skira, 2009); Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999); and Mary E. Davis, Ballets Russes Style: Diaghi lev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion (London: Reaction Books, 2010). 30 natalia budanova of this strand of imagery was provided by Aleksandr Iakovlev and Vasilii Shukhaev who subverted the established iconography of the effeminate Pierrot and the masculine Harlequin in their double Self-Portraits: Harle- quin and Pierrot (1914, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). Shukhaev, as Pierrot, looks massive and manly, while Iakovlev’s Harlequin is slim and graceful, his femininity emphasised by heavy make-up. Russian artists’ fascination with the subject of androgyny, however, was not limited to an exclusively light-hearted and playful approach. Marianne Werefkin’s Self Portrait (c.1908–10, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich) is perhaps the closest in spirit to the philosophical quest for an ideal human form, akin to Vrubel’s dramatic visions. Werefkin, a prominent member of the Russian artistic group in Munich (along with Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky) and the host of an important art salon, presents in her self-portrait a striking mixture of the masculine and feminine aspects of her own personality. The hat adorned with a flower, the fashionable hairstyle and the décolleté dress are clearly feminine, but the fiercely direct gaze and powerful neck are decidedly masculine. The duality of the artist’s physical appearance is further accentuated by the work’s formal qualities: the bold juxtaposition of red and green hues has been applied with brush-stokes that are both expressive and controlled. Werefkin’s writings also indicate that she perceived herself as being endowed with a dual gender identity, in which ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements coexisted alongside an acute artistic sensitivity. In her Lettres à un Inconnu, a sort of personal journal, written in French between 1901 and 1905 and addressed to an imaginary ‘Unique Beloved’, Werefkin reflected on the androgynous nature of self-identity in connection with artistic creativity: ‘I am not a coward and I keep my word. I am faithful to myself, ferocious to myself and indulgent to others. That is I, the man. I love the song of love—that is I, the woman. I consciously create for myself illu- sions and dreams, that is I, the artist . . . I am neither man nor woman— I am I.’9 The self-identification with the ideal of androgyny, which emerges in Werefkin’s personal journal, reveals the influence of the writings of Vladimir Soloviev, the major Russian religious philosopher and mystic of the fin de siècle, who based his cosmological theories on the idea of

9 Marianne Werefkin, entry for 30 October 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, vol. III, cited by Shulamith Behr, ‘Veiling Venus: Gender and Painterly Abstraction in early German Mod ernism’, in Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, eds., Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 132. utopian sex 31 the re-union of the masculine and feminine elements within the same gender-neutral individual, i.e., an androgyn. According to Soloviev’s theory of evolution, which unconventionally amalgamated Charles Darwin’s positivist scientific theory with Christian eschatology, only a transfigured new human being—an androgynous youth-maiden—would be able to put an end to the vicious cycle of birth and death, thus ultimately acquiring immortality.10 Soloviev’s utopian ideas, which postulated a direct connection between gender transfiguration and the advent of a new Golden age of humanity, were further developed by Nikolai Berdiaev in his seminal work The Meaning of the Creative Act. Interestingly, Berdiaev in his work, written ten years after Werefkin’s journal, also discussed the strong link between creativity and androgyny. In Chapter VIII, entitled ‘Creativity and Sex: Male and Female: Race and Personality’, Berdiaev envisaged the advent of a new absolute and androgynous human being, the creative androgyn, the embodiment of a new, transfigured immortal sex and the major prerequisite for the new creative world-epoch. At the same time, Berdiaev considered his own time to be the potential beginning for this forthcoming era of gender-transfiguration. He wrote: ‘Never before have there been such widespread deviations from the ‘natural’, birth-given sex; never before has there been such a feeling and recognition of man’s bi-sexuality. The ‘natural’ boundaries between female and male are being blurred and confused’.11 The close parallels between Werefkin’s private records and Berdiaev’s philosophical treatise underscore once more how widespread and influential the androgynous mythology was in Russian culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. Marianne Werefkin’s fascination with the concept of androgyny inspired a series of gouache drawings in her small-scale sketchbooks. For instance, one gouache drawing of 1908–09 represents a nude androgyn sitting on high and visibly enjoying the worship offered by kneeling male and female figures dressed in contemporary fashionable clothes (Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Ascona). Another drawing, inscribed ‘Androgin’ in Russian, features a naked androgynous creature being adored by an old, poor peasant woman and a middle-aged,

10 For an extensive discussion of Soloviev’s views on androgyny and its impact on Rus sian literature and philosophy see Ol’ga Matich, Eroticheskaia utopia. Novoe religioznoe soznanie i fin de siècle v Rosii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008). 11 Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 199. 32 natalia budanova bourgeois man (Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Ascona). In her search for an effective image of androgyny, Werefkin, like Vru- bel, was faced with a complex iconographic problem: how to represent a harmonious fusion of male and female in one ideal human being, while avoiding the ambiguous connotations of the hermaphrodite. Despite her interest in the theme, Werefkin never produced a finished painting inspired by the subject. In her preliminary drawings, the androgyn’s naked body has no sexual characteristics at all. In its explicit asexuality, the subject of androgyny becomes a locus of Werefkin’s own puritanical attitude to sex. In her writings, she described physical love as a monster. In the imperfect material world, she believed, only artists had the ability to be the true custodians of pure love, unspoiled by ‘the monster’ of sexual attraction. ‘We who love art and who defend it against the public’,— she wrote proudly—‘we will defend love against this filth . . . sanctify the chaste love, the illusory love of the artists.’12 In Werefkin’s drawings, however, the androgyn’s facial features distinctly resemble the face of Alexander Sakharoff.13 A Russian Jewish dancer, who also studied painting at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris, Sakharoff belonged to the same Russian artistic group in Munich and was closely acquainted with Werefkin and Jawlensky. Sakharoff was a talented performer, who explored expressive dance, mixing elements of classical ballet and acrobatics. From the beginning of his career, he appeared on stage wearing both male and female clothing. These experiments with cross-gender dressing sparked public controversy. One account of Sakharoff ’s performance published in 1913 in a German newspaper described how his ‘blue velvet robe with its swelling intimation of a hoop skirt under a sharply contoured waistline and the strong naked legs mix both male and female characteristics, just as the dances ingeniously combined supple feminine grace with male strength’.14 For this writer, Sakharoff ’s dance ‘had a fairy-tale-like charm’, and the combination of male and female characteristics in the performance was welcome, but another critic considered Sakharoff ’s performance no more than a repulsive deviation from gender norms, complaining that

12 Werefkine, Lettres, vol. I, p. 24; Behr, ‘Veiling Venus’, p. 138. 13 Sakharoff is sometimes spelled as Sakharov or Sacharoff. 14 ‘Ein Festrheinisher Kunstfreunde’, Kölnische Zeitung (18 June 1913); English trans lation cited in Franc-Manuel Peter and Rainer Stamm, eds., Die Sacharoffs: Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters: Two Dancers within the Blaue Reiter Circle (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2002), pp. 38–39. utopian sex 33

‘His clothing was not very tasteful, it seemed unbecoming for a man and effeminate.’15 In any case, Sakharoff, handsome and exotic, became a much sought- after model for painters, who were fascinated by this explosive mixture of artistic talent and sexual ambiguity. For some, like Werefkin, he might have seemed an incarnation of the androgynous ideal. Yet, Werefkin and Jawlensky’s portraits of Sakharoff, both executed in 1909 (M. Werefkin, The Dancer Sacharoff, Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Ascona; and A. Jawlensky, Portrait of the Dancer Alex- ander Sacharoff, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich) evoke a decadent ‘femme fatale’, radiating a dangerous and cold eroticism—a far cry both from the principle of ‘chaste love’ upheld by Werefkin and the ideal androgyn advocated by Russia’s religious philosophers. Yet, Sakharoff ’s artistic evolution suggests that the utopian ideal of androgyny might be feasible, at least in the arts. His career achieved its apex after 1913 when he joined the female dancer Clotilde von der Planitz (Klothilde von Derp),16 who became his wife and life-long partner.17 A Georges Barbier poster of 1921, advertising their performance, pictures the couple united in dance, as if exemplifying a harmonious fusion of male and female identities into a kind of mutually complementary androgynous couple, joined together in the act of artistic creation (Fig. 2.1). Sig- nificantly, the androgynous associations of Sakharoff ’s solo performances were transferred to the critical appraisal of the couple, this time, however, without accusations of decadence and tastelessness. In 1924, the German critic Fritz Giese wrote: There is a type of dancer, male or female, that can be termed androgynous in the sense of the Romantic and Greek tradition. Sacharoff is by no means a masculine type. Many say: feminine. But on the other hand, Klothilde von Derp was never expressly feminine [. . .] She always seemed like a young girl [. . .] Dance developed on this basis can and must be sexless, neutral and seem decidedly androgynous [. . .] These androgynous dancers combine the beauty of the male body with inconspicuous and simple female characteristics.18

15 ‘ef.’, Leipzier Abendzeitung, no. 265 (13 November 1913), p. 2; English translation in Peter and Stamm, Die Sacharoffs, p. 120. 16 Clotilde von der Planitz was her maiden name, although she is more often called by her stage-name Clotilde (Klothilde in German sources) von Derp. 17 The Sakharoffs’ marriage was celibate, like that of their close friends, Merezhkovskii and Gippius. 18 Fritz Giese, Körperseele. Gedanken über persönliche Gestaltung, (Munich, 1924), p. 180; cited in Peter and Stamm, Die Sacharoffs, p. 123. 34 natalia budanova

Fig. 2.1 Prospectus, after George Barbier poster, Clotilde & Alexandre Sakharoff, 1921. Reproduced courtesy of Franc-Manuel Peter and Rainer Stamm, eds., Die Sacharoffs: Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters: Two Dancers within the Blaue Reiter Circle (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2002).

This kind of androgynous rhetoric, applied not to a single individual but to a man and woman united in an act of creation, was perfectly compati- ble with the egalitarian spirit of the Russian avant-garde, which abounded in ‘heterosexual’ couples engaged in mutual projects. The close alliance of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova characterised by strong personal and artistic loyalty to each other was well documented by several contemporary sources,19 while the marriage of Nadezhda Udaltsova and Aleksandr Drevin in 1919 also inaugurated a mutually significant, profound and devoted artistic collaboration. Of particular interest is the short-lived but prolific partnership of the zaum’ (transrational or beyond-sense) poet Aleksei Kruchenykh and the innovative artist Olga Rozanova. Kruchenykh considered their artistic and personal union to be a radical project, which would establish a completely new type of artist-author whom he envisaged as ‘bi-subjective’ (uniting artistic object and subject) and androgynous.20 The results of the couple’s collaboration are impressive—in just five years, from 1913 until Rozanova’s premature death in 1918, they created numerous

19 See, for example, Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘Natalia Goncharova. (Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo)’, Volia Rossii (Prague), nos. v–ix (1929); and Benedikt Livshits, Polutoroglazyi strelets (Len- ingrad, 1933). 20 See Ekaterina Degot’, Russkoe iskusstvo ХХ veka (Moscow: Trilistnik, 2002), pp. 30–34. utopian sex 35

Futurist books and developed their own version of non-figurative art, parallel to Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism.

2. Shift from Spiritual to Ideological: Androgynous Iconology in Early-Soviet Art

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, many Russian artists, including members of the avant-garde, engaged in the creation of proletarian art as part of the new gigantic project of social and political transformation, based on communist doctrine and a strictly materialist approach to the world. Despite this radical shift, the motif of androgyny, inherently utopian and idealistic, maintained its appeal in Russian visual art during the first two decades after the October Revolution. This circumstance was due not least to the fact that the pre-revolutionary utopian visions of the imminent creative world-epoch based on a transformed sexual being resonated, to some degree, with the post-revolutionary Bolshevik rhetoric of the ‘New Person’ as the main driving force and main outcome of the revolutionary transformation of Russia. In 1919–1921, Varvara Stepanova produced a major series of easel and graphic works commonly called Figures, using flat geometrical shapes to represent androgynous human beings engaged in various creative activities, such as music, dance or sport. It is significant that, even when these extremely simplified forms can be perceived as males and females, as, for instance, in Dancing Figures on White (c.1920, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), gender distinctions appear as secondary and, indeed, insignifi- cant with regard to the figures’ activity. In these representations, there is no gendered hierarchy, rather male and female protagonists are depicted as equals in their rhythmic dynamism. In this sense, Stepanova’s moving figures remind one of Sakharoffs’ androgynous dance, or, indeed, of the egalitarian spirit and mutually beneficial cooperation of Russian avant- garde couples.21 By the end of the 1920s, however, the emerging totalitarian regime of Stalin became engaged in establishing its own system of values as the

21 Like many of her collegues, Varvara Stepanova also formed a creative team with her husband Aleksandr Rodchenko. ‘Stepanova cannot be understood without Rodchenko and vice versa’, wrote their grandson. See Alexander Lavrentiev, ‘Varvara Stepanova’, in John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, eds., Amazons of the Avant-Garde (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), p. 242. 36 natalia budanova only accepted worldview for Soviet citizens. Based on the rationality of so-called ‘scientific socialist theory’, those values of utilitarianism, organisation and iron discipline became emblematic of the overpoweringly masculine nature of the new Soviet ideology. At the same time, the new Soviet ethos also included a declaration of sexual equality, which in practical terms meant that men and women of the Soviet state were expected to contribute in equal measure to the construction of the new socialist society. The conflicting dichotomy of the gendered aspects of Soviet reality, that is, the coexistence of the emphatic masculinity of its value system with the proclaimed gender equality of its social organisation, had a serious impact on representations of the androgynous motif in early Soviet art. El Lissitzky’s poster for the Russian Exhibition in Zurich in 1929 (Fig. 2.2) marks both the climax and turning point in the history of visual representations of ideal androgyny in Russia’s visual arts. On the one hand, Lissitzky’s gigantic androgyn, whose face literary fuses male and female elements into one indivisible whole, comes across as a powerful metaphor for the young male-female of the new creative era, thus harking back to the idealistic spiritualism of Russia’s religious philosophers and their utopian visions of harmonious androgyny. On the other hand, ‘this three- eyed monster, in which the distinction between man and woman has been completely erased’,22 personifies the ideological concept of the ‘New Soviet Man’, who, freed from any kind of individuality, including gender, is totally committed to the construction of the Soviet state. In Lissitzky’s poster, this emblematic shift from those spiritual implications previously attached to the idea of androgyny to ideological ones is made explicit by the bright-red inscription ‘USSR’ running across the Soviet androgyn’s wide forehead. To produce this symbolic embodiment of Soviet collective identity, Lissitzky used the experimental method of the photogram, which con- sists of manipulating photographic images by incorporating new elements in successive exposures. In this way, the final image, although skilfully reworked and highly personalised, retained the tangible quality of photographed reality, so that even the most utopian ideas, such as the Soviet androgyn, could appear as facts of everyday life. The use of the photogram and photomontage by many Constructivist artists during the second half of the 1920s also reflected important changes in the artistic

22 Degot’, Russkoe iskusstvo, p. 117. utopian sex 37

Fig. 2.2 El Lissitzky, Russian Exhibition, Zurich, 1929, lithograph poster, 127 × 90 cm. 38 natalia budanova environment, defined, as it were, by the forceful re-emergence of figurative art, and in particular realism as the main style of Soviet art.23 In the 1930s, variations of the androgynous iconographic motifs, however numerous, shared one important characteristic: they all portrayed the every-day activities of Soviet people of both sexes as a common endeavour, infused with optimism and purposefulness, in accordance with the main aims of the emerging ideology of Socialist Realism. Pavel Kuznets- ov’s Pushball (1931, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), for instance, depicts a dynamic group of youngsters of both sexes playing a game. Identical sports-wear obscures any sexual differences, so that the group appears essentially androgynous, composed of socially equal individuals, united in the same healthy and modern activity. In a similar spirit, The Mili- tary Komsomol by Aleksandr Samokhvalov (1932, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) represents young Komsomol members shooting. In this instance, sexual differences are indicated by the clothing—trousers for boys and skirts for girls. Nevertheless, the overall impression is of a group of androgynous individuals. Apart from the dress, the figures look identical in their attitudes and abilities: the girls appear as confident as the boys in the traditional male activity of shooting. Samokhvalov’s work, however, exemplifies a process of revision regarding the iconography of the ‘New Soviet Man’ in the 1930s. While Lissitzky’s poster seemed to proclaim the final stage in a long-awaited fusion of the sexes, the advent of the Stalinist ‘Grand Style’, defined by the doctrine of Socialist Realism, led to a clear demarcation between male and female subjects in Soviet art works. More important still, at a time when political power in the USSR was appropriated by ‘the ultra-masculine volitional nub of anti-religious totalitarianism’,24 qualities associated with the feminine principle, such as compassion, tolerance or forgiveness, came to be seen as disagreeable at best, or suspicious at worst. In terms of visual art, it meant that the requirement to show both sexes as dedicated

23 For an extensive discussion of changes in Russian artistic environment in the sec ond-half of 1920s and the influence of re-emerging figuration and realism on the artistic practice of Russian avant-garde, see Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983); Margarita Tupitsyn, with contributions by Mat thew Drutt and Ulrich Pohimann, El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet: Photography, Design, Collaboration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999); and Christina Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA., and London: The MIT Press, 2005). 24 Ivan Ilyin, ‘O vechno-zhenstvennom i vechno-muzhestvennom v russkoi dushe’ first given as a lecture in Zurich in 1938. See Ivan Ilyin, Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh (Mos cow: Russkaia kniga, 1997), vol. 6, book 3, p. 193. utopian sex 39 constructors of the bright communist future and heroic fighters against the class enemy authorised a certain degree of masculinisation in representations of exemplary Soviet women, but it allowed no feminisation in depicting the perfect Soviet man.25 A typical example of this new trend is Boris Ioganson’s painting The Interrogation of the Communists (1933, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), which represents two heroic Bolsheviks, a man and woman, taken prison- ers by the White Army during the Civil War. At first glance, the gender identity of the two main protagonists, who confront the vicious enemy shoulder-to-shoulder, appears masculine. To the attentive viewer, however, it soon becomes clear that the figure in male peasant clothing is actually a woman: her soft facial features and pose betray the fair sex. Ioganson applied the motif of androgyny to the woman alone, so that her gender identity becomes engulfed by the intrinsic masculinity of the implied ideological message: exemplary female communists are as strong and intrepid as their male comrades. Ultimately, Ioganson’s painting visualises an important development in Soviet ethics and culture of this period, characterised by an apparent contradiction in the politics of gender: on the one hand, Soviet propaganda promoted an image of true communists, who were ready to suffer and die for their beliefs, regardless of their biological sex; on the other hand, the ultra-masculine essence of Stalin’s totalitarianism could not allow any gender ambiguity in its subjects. Consequently, the concept of the ‘New Soviet Man’ did not entail at all the fusion of male and female modalities within the same transformed creative individual, but the explicit promotion of heroic masculinity as a desirable model to be adopted not only by men, but also by women. In Soviet art of the 1930s, the subordination of the feminine to the masculine was conveyed both visually and conceptually. For instance, in Iogan- son’s painting, the male and female communists are of the same height and are represented as a close-knit pair, mutually supportive and devoted. Yet, the woman, wearing light ochre clothing, is positioned just behind her male companion, as if to constitute a kind of human background to the man’s muscular body in a black commissar’s uniform. In addition, she is disguised as a peasant—a social class, which within the Soviet social hierarchy was considered as the support for the revolutionary hegemony

25 This trend even found its way into the Russian language. The term ‘tovarishch’ (comrade), which was commonly used in the USSR to address people of both sexes, is masculine. 40 natalia budanova of the proletariat.26 The same subtle subordination of a female subject to a male-leader is present in Serafima Riangina’s painting Higher and Higher (1934, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev). It depicts two fearless young riggers, a man and a woman, wearing identical overalls and climbing a high-volt- age tower. The man leads the way, while the smiling woman follows in his footsteps, looking up admiringly at her companion. Vera Mukhina’s celebrated sculpture The Male Worker and Female Col- lective Farmer (1937, All-Russian Exhibition Centre, Moscow, Fig. 2.3) is the most famous example of the same conceptual approach, which radically modified the iconography of the androgynous ideal in Soviet art of the 1930s. Mukhina’s sculptural group was intended to convey the indissolu- ble union of Soviet workers in industry and agriculture, depicted as a man and a woman, unified by triumphant communist ideology and advancing together towards the bright, shining future. The figures’ idealised, neo- classical bodies represent no gender ambiguity. As in the case of Iogan- son’s painting, however, the female figure symbolises the peasants, who are now collective farmers—an important, but secondary class in relation to revolutionary consciousness, when compared to the proletariat. That being so, Mukhina’s sculpture not only used ‘gender differences to convey the hierarchical relationship between the worker (male) and peasant (female)’,27 but it also reconfirmed the old patriarchal order within the new Soviet context by representing the man as a worker, and the woman as a peasant. On another level, the female collective farmer in Mukhina’s sculpture also represents the forces of nature, successfully transformed and controlled by the new socialist reality. Mukhina’s sculpture marks the last stage in the metamorphosis of Androgynous Utopia in early Soviet Art, as the advent of Stalin’s totalitarianism brought into existence a completely new type of ideal human being. From the late 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953, this role was assigned first of all to the supreme power in the Soviet Union, i.e. to the leader of the Soviet Communist Party himself. Stalin’s idealised image, explicitly masculine and heroic, was canonised in thousands of paintings and sculptures, while Mukhina’s masterpiece, after its success at the World’s

26 On the gendered asymmetry in visual representations of workers and collective farmers in Soviet society, see ‘Introduction’ in Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lenoux, eds., Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture (DeKalb IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). 27 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Sta lin (Berkley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 122. utopian sex 41

Fig. 2.3 Vera Mukhina, model for The Male Worker and Female Collective Farmer, 1937, bronze, 158 × 113 × 110 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Fair in Paris, was confined to the outskirts of Moscow, where it stood in the grounds of the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements (Vystavka dostizhenii narodnogo khoziaistva—VDNKh).28 In one of his works of 1937, Nikolai Berdiaev drew a line under the utopian dreams of ‘a new and transformed androgyn’. Living in exile in Paris, he wrote: ‘The mysterious birth of the new life has failed to happen. The old Adam has remained and continues to operate under a new disguise’.29

28 In June 1992, it was renamed The All-Russian Exhibition Centre (Vserossiiskii vysta vochnyi tsentr—VVC). 29 Nikolai Berdiaev, Istoki i smysl Russkogo kommunizma (1937; and Moscow: Nauka, 1990), p. 190; English translation, Nicholas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937).

chapter three

The Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the Nightmare of Free Fall

Maria Tsantsanoglou

The replica of a fascinating and grandiose design stood in the courtyard of London’s Academy of Arts from October 2011 until January 2012, during the exhibition Building the Revolution—Soviet Art and Architecture 1915–1935. It was the Model for the Monument to the Third International, by the artist Vladimir Tatlin, or, as it is more widely known, Tatlin’s Tower. The original design, dating from 1920, existed only in the form of drawings and models— it was never actually constructed. The idea was based on a synthesis of diverse elements from architecture, sculpture and painting, with carefully designed rotating forms of metal and glass, electric elevators, heating and projection systems, and telephone and radio transmitters. Naturally the question was asked: is this art? The critic, Nikolai Punin hastened to its defence, claiming that it was indeed a work of art—a form created ‘on the basis of the organic synthesis of those principles that govern painting, sculpture and architecture, and offering a new type of monumental construction—one that would combine creative form with utility’.1 Ten years later, during the period 1929–1932, Vladimir Tatlin set up a workshop in Moscow’s Novodevichii Monastery and worked—with the help of students from the Moscow VKhUTEMAS (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie—The Higher Artistic and Techni- cal Workshops)—on one of the most bizarre, utopian, and daring of all his projects: the construction of a flying machine, an air-bicycle, which he called the Letatlin (a compound of the artist’s own surname and the Russian verb ‘letat ’ ’—to fly (Fig. 3.1). What Tatlin sought to create was a machine driven solely by human power. His air-bicycle was to free man from the bonds of gravity and give him the sense of flight as enjoyed by

1 N. Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Petrograd: Otdel IZO Narkompros, 1920); reprinted in N. Punin, O Tatline, eds. I.N. Punina and V.I. Rakitin (Moscow: RA, 1994), p. 18; English translation in Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova, ed., Tatlin, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 344–346. 44 maria tsantsanoglou

Fig. 3.1 Vladimir Tatlin, Sketch plan of Letatlin, 1929–32, pencil on paper, A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow. birds. In its construction, Tatlin laid more emphasis on its organic nature than on technology, using such materials as wood, cork, silk, leather and steel thread. Progress in the field of aviation, various studies on the laws of flight, his own research into the ‘culture of materials’, and a profound study of natural forms and structures—all these played their part in shaping Tatlin’s work. He produced at least three models of the Letatlin. Yet, despite all its creator’s efforts, the Letatlin never flew more than a few metres. It is important to remember that the Letatlin was conceived at a time when people were already regularly flying in aeroplanes and Zeppelins, and the first gliders of the nineteenth century were already a part of aviation history. Why, then, was Tatlin so interested in constructing a flying machine—when aircraft had already been in production for almost three decades? This is another key question, like that concerning the artistic value of the Model for a Monument to the Third International. In his diary, Punin recorded that he met Tatlin in 1924 and that the artist had talked about his plans to create a flying machine.2 This indicates that Tatlin had started designing such a device much earlier than 1929, when he started working on the actual construction. In the booklet, which was published for the catalogue of the Exhibition of the Works of the Operative Vladimir Tatlin at the Pushkin Museum in

2 See Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, eds., The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904–1953 (Austin: University of Texas, 1999), p. 128. the soviet icarus 45

Moscow in 1932 and where three versions of the Letatlin were exhibited, Tatlin himself explained the reasons for his interest in constructing such a machine:

1. i have selected the flying machine as an object for artistic composition, since it is the most complicated dynamic form that can become an everyday object for the Soviet masses, as an ordinary item of use. 2. I have proceeded from material constructions of simple forms to more complicated: clothes, articles of utility in the environment—as far as an architectural work to the honour of the Comintern. The flying machine is the most complicated form in my present phase of work. It corresponds to the need of the moment for human mastery of space. 3. As a consequence of this work, I have drawn the conclusion that the artist’s approach to technology can and will lend new life to their stag- nating methods, which are often in contradiction with the functions of the epoch of reconstruction. 4. my apparatus is built on the principle of utilising living, organic forms. The observation of these forms led me to the conclusion that the most aesthetic forms are the most economic. Art is: work with the shaping of the material, in this respect.3

He also stated that he had carried out extensive research into the organic function of his flying machine, and had studied the movements of birds. Yet even this was nothing new. From the plans of Leonardo da Vinci for flying machines, in the late fifteenth century, to the first gliders built by Otto Lilienthal at the end of the nineteenth century, improving on the earlier designs of Sir George Cayley, the study of the aerodynamics of birds’ wings was well-established. The fact that Tatlin’s project was completed and abandoned in 1932— the same year that independent artistic organisations were abolished as a prelude to the introduction of Socialist Realism, which in 1934 was enshrined in law as the only approved aesthetic method for the arts— gives the Letatlin and its pursuit of the freedom of flight a symbolic importance as the last major design of the avant-garde period. At the same time, in November 1931, Igor Sikorsky’s ‘flying boat’, piloted by the American Charles Lindbergh, completed its first passenger flight

3 Vystavka rabot zasluzhennogo deiatelia iskusstv V.E. Tatlina (Moscow, Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1932), p. 8. 46 maria tsantsanoglou from North to South America. Four years earlier, it had made the first transatlantic flight. Sikorsky’s backer was another Russian expatriate, the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Sikorsky relates how when he entered the smoking area of the plane, feeling the sense of suspended motion, he saw the aisle with the little blue lights, the wooden inclined partition, the door at the rear, and felt that he remembered the scene from a dream that he had had thirty years before.4 The history of flight in Russia is deeply rooted in philosophy. Space travel in particular had its origins in the strange views of the eccentric librarian and philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who inspired Leo Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevskii, and others at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with what he called the ‘philosophy of the common task’. Fedorov was convinced that men have a specific reason for existence, of which they are unaware, and this makes them stumble among various metaphysical and ontological questions, missing their real ‘objective’. He believed that if all men could dedicate a few hours a day to a shared objective, or common task, each employing his own individual knowledge and skills, then through this systematic, collective endeavour they would arrive much sooner at that point where humanity could ascend to a higher stage. For Fedorov, the ultimate aim of the common task was to achieve the resurrection of the dead—using science, rather than faith or mysticism.5 One of Fedorov’s disciples was the young engineer Konstantin Tsiolk- ovskii. Tsiolkovskii was very impressed by his teacher’s observation that when resurrection became a practical possibility, there would not be enough room for the population of the Earth and that mankind would have to explore the possibilities of colonising other planets. He went on to lay the foundations for the design and construction of the first space rockets, and is now regarded as the father of space science, having lent his name to the State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga (Gosudarstvennyi muzei istorii kosmonavtiki imeni K.E. Tsiolkovskogo). The Russians welcomed and embraced Western theories and inven- tions relating to human flight, but assimilated them into their own, dis- tinctively Russian, way of thinking, endowing them with philosophical ramifications. Faith in the ability to transcend human limitations made the Russians approach the question of human flight by balancing physics

4 See Igor Sikorsky, The Story of the Winged-S: Late Developments and Recent Photo graphs of the Helicopter, an Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938). 5 N.F. Fedorov, Filosofia obshchego dela, vol. 1 (Vernyi, 1906), vol. 2 (Moscow, 1913). the soviet icarus 47 and metaphysics, science and philosophy, technology and faith. Perhaps the Russian need to align the physical with the metaphysical, or the astro- logical with the astronomical, is ultimately what stimulated Tsiolkovskii’s fascination with rocket technology and space stations—which he called ‘ethereal colonies’.6 So, in 1929, when Tatlin began planning the Letatlin, not only was aviation technology fairly advanced, but the foundations had also been laid for space flight, since both Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and Fridrikh Tsander, had already produced designs for space rockets, and the focus had moved from the Earth into the realms of space, while a new space architecture was generating fantastic images of colonies on other planets, and science fiction was producing a whole range of books and films.7 It is worth mentioning that Tatlin was not the first avant-garde artist to be inspired by space and to construct a flying machine. Petr Miturich, who had been a pilot during the First World War, had begun designing and building small models of flying machines that were supposed to fly without an engine, using only human power in 1921. As Tim Harte has explained, Miturich’s flying device called the Letun (The Flyer) consisted of three pairs of broad-spanned wings that a pilot could operate manually from a central sitting position, by means of a variety of levers. The main source of propulsion was to be what Miturich called ‘wave-like motion’ (volnovoe dvizhenie) or ‘oscillating motion’ (kolebatel’noe dvizhenie) generated by the movement of the large wings. This ‘wavelike motion’ was the result of Miturich’s experimentation with metal balls on curved and straight paths, which demonstrated how a curved trajectory produces higher speeds than a straight trajectory.8 Petr Miturich had used the term ‘Letun’, one of Khlebnikov’s neologisms along with ‘let’ba’, which derived from the verb ‘letat’ ’ (to fly) and were used in his Futurist poems. Since the early years of the Russian avant-garde, the aeroplane had been linked to a vision of the future, the pilot becoming a symbol of the new man—the man who transcends the constraints of his own time and acquires greater freedoms than ordinary mortals. In fact, the Futurist poet

6 Konstantin Tsiolkovskii used the term ‘ethereal colonies’ (efirnye poseleniia) in many of his books, such as Vne Zemli [Beyond the Earth] (Kaluga, 1920) and Volia Vselennoi. Neizvestnye razumnye sily [The Will of the Universe: The Unknown Intelligence] (Kaluga, 1928). 7 Science-fiction writers from this period include Aleksandr Beliaev, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Ivan Eefremov and Aleksei Tolstoi. 8 Tim Harte, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-garde Culture 1910–1930 (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 173–4, 270. 48 maria tsantsanoglou

Vasilii Kamenskii was one of Russia’s very first pilots. Painters strove to capture the excitement of flight, and comparisons were drawn between this new form of transport and the train. The latter was the traditional means of transport for ordinary Russians, and since the nineteenth century it had been a source of inspiration, with railway lines spreading out across the huge expanses of the motherland. Some images combined these two forms of transport to evoke the dynamism of contemporary reality, as in Natalia Goncharova’s Plane over the Train (1913, Museum of Fine Arts of Tatarstan, Kazan) and Kazimir Malevich’s The Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railroad of 1913, which was produced as a lithograph for Aleksei Kruchenykh’s book Explodity (Vzor- val). The adventure of flight also featured in depictions of war, with the aeroplane represented as a source of terror, dispensing inescapable death to the people below, as in Goncharova’s Angels and Aeroplanes, from her series of fourteen lithographs entitled Mystical Images of War (Moscow, 1914, Fig. 3.2) and Olga Rozanova’s collage Aeroplanes over the City, which was composed from a lino-cut and paper for the book War, which she produced with Kruchenykh and which was published in Petrograd in 1916. Two abstract paintings, both called Aeroplane Flying were devoted to the new means of transport: one by Malevich (1915, Fig. 3.3) and the other by Rozanova (1915–16, Samara Art Museum, Samara). Neither work represents flight itself, but rather evokes a realm in which the organisation of the dynamics of flight can overturn conventional relationships and the force of gravity. Between 1923 and 1926, Aleksandr Rodchenko produced a series of joyful images of aeroplanes for the logo and advertisements of the Russian Society of the Volunteer Air Fleet (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo dobrovol’nogo vozdushnogo flota—Dobrolet). Later, in 1929 and 1930, while Tatlin was working on his Letatlin, Konstantin Iuon was painting airmen of the future (People of the Future, 1929, Fig. 3.4) while Solomon Nikritin produced a sequence of difficult symbolic compositions featuring aeroplanes for his Monument series.9 We should also take into account the fact that the 1966 film Andrei Rublev, directed by Andrei Tarkovskii, begins with the story of a monk who was supposed to be the first Russian Icarus. Actually, a Russian monk, Furvin Kriakutnoi, was believed to be the first man to become airborne in

9 Natalia Adaskina, John E. Bowlt, Nicoletta Misler and Maria Tsantsanoglou, eds., Solo mon Nikritin. Spheres of Light: Stations of Darkness (Thessaloniki: State Museum of Con temporary Art, 2004). the soviet icarus 49

Fig. 3.2 Natalia Goncharova, Angels and Aeroplanes, lithograph, 32.7 × 24 cm., from the portfolio of 14 lithographs Mystical Images of War (Moscow 1914). 50 maria tsantsanoglou

Fig. 3.3 Kazimir Malevich, Aeroplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas, 57.3 × 47.3 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 3.4 Konstantin Iuon, People of the Future, 1929, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 66.5 × 100 cm., Tver Regional Art Gallery, Tver. the soviet icarus 51 the city of Riazan in 1731. The story of Kriakutnoi had first been published in 1901, and was often repeated, but in 1958 was proved to be completely untrue.10 Another popular Russian legend relating to the theme of human flight was the story of the young, flying serf, Nikitka, who during the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the fifteenth century announced that he had built a flying machine with which he could take to the air. He ascended a bell tower, leapt into the air, and luckily, made a safe landing. When Ivan learnt about his feat, he sentenced him to a cruel death, on the grounds that ‘man is not a bird; anyone attaching wooden wings to his body is defying nature and flouting the will of God—therefore he deserves the most severe of punishments’.11 Another story features a very different reaction from another Tsar, Peter the Great. On 30 April 1695, a peasant, Emelian Ivanov, announced that his flying machine would take to the skies from Moscow’s Red Square. When the attempt failed, Ivanov blamed the weight of his construction, and the Tsar offered him money to build a lighter model. When the second attempt at flying also failed, the Tsar put a lien on the peasant’s property to ensure that he returned the money he had been given.12 In 1940, Aleksandr Deineka painted Nikitka The First Russian Flyer (Fig. 3.5 and explained: Our age is characterised by a love of flying, a love for men with a genius for design, with the courage and persistence of the pilot Chkalov,13 who have provided painters with unusual subjects like flying gliders and young aero- modellers and parachutists who make such remarkable demonstrations of their skills and abilities. It is this which led me to the story of Nikitka, the first Russian pilot. Modern times have given us in Nikitka an exemplar of Russian ability, courage and determination. In the painting of the past there

10 V.F. Pokrovskaia discovered that the original manuscript (which was supposedly discovered in the 1820s by the historian Aleksandr Ivanovich Sulakadzev), was a forgery, which had probably been made by Sulakadzev himself. See V.F. Pokrovskaia, ‘Esche ob odnoi rukopisi A.I. Sulakadzeva. K voprosu o popravkakh v rukopisnykh tekstakh’ in Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, vol. XIV (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1958), pp. 634–636; and Dmitrii S. Likhachev, Tekstologia. Chast’ VII. Issledovanie avtorskogo teksta. Poddelki (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2001), p. 345. 11 N. Borozdin, Zavoevanie vozdushnoi stikhii (Warsaw, 1909), p. 6; cited in Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4. 12 For the young, flying serf Nikitka, the peasant Emelian Ivanov, and other Russian popular legends of human flight, see Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, pp. 4–6. 13 Valerii Chkalov was a famous test pilot, and a Hero of the Soviet Union, who flew from Moscow to Vancouver over the North Pole (1937). 52 maria tsantsanoglou

Fig. 3.5 Aleksandr Deineka, Nikitka The First Russian Flyer, 1940, oil on canvas, 397 × 294 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. the soviet icarus 53

were few artists who depicted the brave actions of ordinary people. There are popular legends telling of magic carpets, and old chronicles which make passing reference to anonymous, but daring serfs who built themselves wings to take to the air. I am surprised that none of the great painters of the past interested themselves in the story of Nikitka . . . I have painted him at the moment of flight, the moment of maximum muscular tension, the moment, let us say, at which we see most clearly his determination to fly. The composition is vertically structured with a low horizon leaving much of the canvas representing the sky. I extended the bell tower to the very top of the canvas in order to show the highest point of the city at that moment, setting it on the bank of the river. Nikitka is placed in the foreground. This shift in the foreground towards the upper part of the picture gives it a particular dynamic, generating a sense of unease in the spectator. It also allowed me to represent the crowd watching Nikitka, with their faces turned towards us as we view the painting. I wanted to depict the range of emotions of the crowd as they watched the attempted flight, so extraordinary at that time: the hate and fear of some of the crowd, the antipathy of some, the sympathy and admiration of others . . .14 In 1943, Deineka painted The Shot Down Ace (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), which has the same dimensions and vertical orientation as Nikitka The First Russian Flyer, although the subject, being hurled into space, is a Nazi pilot whose parachute has failed to open. It is worth comparing the two pictures: the bell tower has been replaced by the smoke from the burning aeroplane crashing to earth, while in the place of the crowd watching the attempted flight we see scattered pieces of metal on which the German pilot will be impaled. Deineka sought to glorify Soviet Man and the achievements of socialism, including feats of aviation. After the death of Stalin, from the late 1950s to the 1970s, artists conspicuously avoided embodying political ideology, socialist or otherwise, in their work. The prevailing atmosphere in the post-war period and after Stalin’s death in 1953 made itself felt in the work of most Soviet artists, whose heroes now tended to be more awkward and weary. Known as the ‘austere style’ (surovyi stil’), this approach is seen in artists like Tahir Salahov and Pavel Nikonov, who in their images of Soviet citizens were not afraid to show the misery of everyday existence, and people’s anxieties about life and death—whether the individual depicted was a labourer from the Arctic, a working mother, a peasant from Central Asia, or the artist himself—the intellectual looking forward to the future of humanity.

14 See Aleksandr Deineka, Iz moei rabochei praktiki (Moscow: Akademiia Khudozhestv SSSR, 1961). For the quote about Nikitka, see http://www.deineka.ru/work-nikitka.php. 54 maria tsantsanoglou

In his painting Egorka The Flyer (1976, Fig. 3.6), the artist Gelii Kor- zhev revived the myth of Icarus and described the moment following that depicted by Deineka. He reminds us of the mercilessness of Ivan the Ter- rible, and the punishment of the young Nikitka (or the young Egorka— there is a phonetic similarity between Egor and Icarus) seems terrible to the spectator. In his de-mystification of superhuman, individual endeavour, the painter has also de-mystified the vision of the Russian avant-garde. Man’s attempts to transcend his natural powers are an example of hubris, and he who defies the laws of nature is abruptly brought back to earth. In 1991, the artist Boris Orlov presented the moment of Icarus’s crash to earth in an installation called The Twilight of the Gods (State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow) which evokes connotations of the collapse of the Soviet Union. On 12 April 1961, the first manned rocket to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and fly through space took off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The astronaut on board was Yurii Gagarin, and this first manned space flight orbited the earth in one hour and forty-eight minutes. But in that short time it completely changed man’s view of the earth and the universe. In Russia, the idea of human flight became, once again, a source of inspiration and excitement for artists. In 1961, the Soviet Union was enjoying a period of optimism under Nikita Khrushchev, who had de-Stalinised the country, renounced the cult of personality, and allowed a revival of innovative art. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Russian artists were inspired by the now real possibility of human exploration of space, some of them offering in their works representations of cosmic matter, using both scientific and imaginary elements. Francisco Infante, for example, who was fascinated by the infinite and mysterious nature of the universe, created kinetic installations and paintings, which depicted infinite vistas through unexplored space, in obscure worlds between the Earth and the heavens. In parallel, Ilya Kabakov created the airman Komarov, one of his ten characters.15 Komarov lives in a city where everything is just as we know it, with one difference: men are able to fly. They do not have wings, nor are they attached to machines—these pictures remind us of the floating figures in the paintings of Marc Chagall of 1914–1918. In 1984, Kabakov designed and constructed the installation, The Man Who Flew into Space, which invites the viewer to inspect the traces left behind by a man who has launched himself, alone, from his apartment into space. The small, monastic room, full of objects and images relating

15 Between 1972 and 1976, the artist Ilya Kabakov created fifty-five albums for his series Ten Characters (ink, watercolour, and coloured pencils on paper). the soviet icarus 55

Fig. 3.6 Gelii Korzhev, Egorka the Flyer, 1976–1980, oil on canvas, 200 × 280 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. to Soviet life, is linked to the collective Soviet project for the conquest of space, and the propaganda associated with that project. The ceiling with a hole in it, the rudimentary launching pad, and the room itself—all demonstrate the contrast between the dream of space, a key component in Soviet policy, and the everyday life of the average Soviet citizen. At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the Mit’ki art movement in Leningrad/Petersburg (Vladimir Shinkarev, Dmitrii Shagin, and Aleksandr Florenskii), with their Russian spiritual, yet ironic, approach, created the character of ‘poor Ikarushka’ and used the myth of Icarus as a symbol of the inevitable failure of any sublime, romantic, human aspiration.16 In the 1980s, the Soviet Union witnessed a keen interest in the study of the Russian avant-garde. It was not only scholars who were fascinated by this hitherto ‘forbidden’ aesthetic phenomenon, but also artists, who

16 In 1984 Dmitrii Shagin wrote the poem ‘Poor Ikarushka’ based on the painting Land scape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally attributed to Pieter Breugel the Elder (1560s, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels): ‘Poor Ikarushka!/ Forgotten by all of his brothers/ Only pale legs stick out/ Of the cold green water.”(A u Ikarushki bednogo,/Vsemi bratkami zabytogo,/odni tol’ko belye nozhki torchat,/Iz kholodnoi zelenoi vody.) Dmitrii Shagin, ‘Bednyi Ikarushka’, Dyk! (St Petersburg: Krasnyi Matros, 2006). 56 maria tsantsanoglou sought to engage with an artistic movement that had come to such a sudden end. The conceptual artist Erik Bulatov recalls, in the late 1950s, ‘everything suddenly began to come alive, the word Formalism, which had been used in a dismissive sense, and in the early ‘50s had even had connotations of intellectual criminality, now began to arouse interest again, eventually earning respect and finally becoming a desideratum that was used as a benchmark of quality in the visual arts.’17 Leonid Sokov, who emigrated to the USA in 1980, revived the Letatlin project in a variety of ways: reconstructing one of the few surviving original parts of the wing (which is now in the Costakis Collection at the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, and which he had seen in the 1970s, in George Costakis’ apartment in Moscow), and presenting it as a work of art in its own right. Sokov returned to the theme in the 1990s and the following decade, with the Letatlin flying, but with cells in the place of man, or a wooden bear to symbolise Russia. Where Tatlin sought, through his flying machine, to transcend the limits of human powers, the much younger Russian artist, Oleg Kulik, a rep- resentative of contemporary Moscow Actionism, has taken the idea even further, subjecting himself to extreme ordeals in a series of performances. In one of these, he attempted to emulate a bird, and actually fly, overcoming a fear of heights and subjecting himself to the psychological experience of free flight (Kulik is a Bird, September 1995). This performance is reminiscent of the well-known image of Yves Klein’s earlier performance in Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, in October 1960. My original question—Why did Tatlin design the Letatlin at a time when technology had already conquered the air?—remains unanswered. Perhaps it can only be answered in conjunction with that other, much more general question: What is the nature of the artist? Even though the Letatlin never took to the air, a vision of freedom had been born. The universal human values of the Renaissance are deeply rooted in the process of creating The Monument to the Third International, in which Tatlin wished to speak of humanity’s development through technology, and radio’s electromagnetic waves, transmitting to the whole planet from a height of 400 metres. It is also present in the Letatlin, where he focused on the solitary man flying free, borne aloft only by his own individual wings.

17 ‘Falk—Favorskii—Fonvizin’, in Irina Alapova, ed., Drugoe iskusstvo. Moskva 1956–1988 (Moscow: National Centre of Contemporary Art, Galart, 2005), pp. 10–11. For an earlier edi tion of this text, see Leonid Talashkin and Irina Alapova, eds., Drugoe iskusstvo. Moskva 1956–1988 (Moscow: Moskovskaia Galereia, 1991). Chapter four

Theo van Doesburg and Russia: Utopia Thwarted1

Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita

October 1917 witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, while in Hol- land the journal De Stijl was launched by the painter, designer, critic, essayist and poet, Theo van Doesburg.2 This paper will consider the impact of the unfolding Revolution on van Doesburg’s evolving project. It will suggest that, beneath the artist’s apparently shifting views, he displayed a consistent commitment to the need for art and architecture to relate to the social realm. I will examine these underlying attitudes in relation to his initial engagement with the ideas of the Revolution, subsequently in his strong commitment to the Russian art that emerged from the revolutionary climate, and finally in his eventual denunciation of the politics and the art associated with the Russian Revolution.

Prelude. Peace, Spirituality and the Frontiers of Holland

Shortly after the beginning of the First World War, van Doesburg published a long essay, ‘Meditations on the Frontier’.3 In a short fable-like introduction he described his visit to the Dutch border, and his surprise that it was only marked by a sentry and a flag at an apparently peaceful spot in the forest. This trifling barrier was all that separated the trenches

1 I would like to thank Professor John Milner for his constant support throughout the preparation of this paper. Jane Beckett, Maria Mileeva and Andrey Shabanov kindly com mented on early versions. Thanks also to Mathias Noell, Jacobien de Boer, Willem Jan Renders, and Nina Gülicher. Wietse Coppes at the De Stijl archive of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), Den Haag, patiently answered many questions. Translations are by the author unless otherwise specified. References in this paper to van Doesburg’s works use the numbering in Els Hoek ed., Theo van Doesburg: Oeuvre Catalogue (Utrecht: Centraal Museum; and Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 2000). 2 In this paper, De Stijl denotes the journal published 1917–1931 and edited by van Does burg, rather the group of artists or the artistic tendencies associated with it. 3 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Meditaties aan de grenzen’, Eenheid. Published in six parts between 3 March 1915 and 3 July 1915. Re-published slightly later in the journal De Avond post. Van Doesburg had been conscripted into the Dutch army in August 1914 and served for two years on the Dutch-Belgian border. 58 nicholas bueno de mesquita of the war zone from the peace of neutral Holland. He could even hear the sounds of war on the other side of the frontier: ‘a dull pounding . . . the thumping step of the thief of life’. The writer encountered the fugitive personification of Peace, ‘living in the forest like a solitary penitent’.4 Van Doesburg’s essay went on to analyse Europe’s descent into war, which he blamed on the dominance of the physical aspect of the human personality and the weakening of the benign aspects of humanity’s spiritual attributes. He connected the dominance of the physical with ‘the development of civilization in its violent physical forms of militarism, punishment, sports, commerce, industry etc.’ He also blamed some harmful aspects of the spiritual, in particular organised religion. These malign forces had created the conditions for the escalation of conflict from the level of man-to-man combat to wars involving entire continents.5 Van Doesburg stated that the purpose of art was to imbue man with those positive spiritual qualities that were needed in order to overcome the dominance of the physical and create the conditions for putting an end to wars.6 In an enthusiastic essay on Wassily Kandinsky he had written about the dialogue between the artist and the viewer, and the role of art as ‘the educator of our inner life, the educator of our hearts and minds’.7 Van Doesburg subsequently adopted the view that the spiritual in man is nurtured specifically by abstract art, which he later described as ‘pure thought, which does not signify a concept derived from natural phenomena but which is contained in numbers, measures, relationships, and abstract lines’.8 In his response to Piet Mondrian’s Composition 10, van Doesburg linked peace and the spiritual to a non-representational work of art, asserting that ‘It produces a most spiritual impression . . . the impression of repose: the repose of the soul.’9 Van Doesburg’s essay also suggested that the path towards peace would have to be promoted by international communication between different peoples, and that these contacts would make human beings conscious of

4 Doesburg, ‘Meditaties I’, Eenheid (3 March 1915). 5 Doesburg, ‘Meditaties V’, Eenheid (29 June 1915). 6 Doesburg, ‘Meditaties VI’, Eenheid (15 July 1915). 7 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Over moderne kunst’, Eenheid (6 December 1913). He greatly admired Kandinsky. The article refers to the Russian artist’s recently published book Con cerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). 8 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Denken—Aanschauwen—Beelden’, De Stijl, II/2 (December 1918), pp. 23–4; English translation, ‘Thought—Vision—Creation’, in Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg (London: Studio Vista, 1974), pp. 108–10. 9 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Kunst Kritiek’, Eenheid (6 November 1915). Mondrian’s Composi tion 10 of 1915 is now in the State Museum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo. utopia thwarted 59 their commonality. He wrote of his hopes for a period when such international links would produce a release of ‘world energy’, which would operate in favour of the spiritual. He admitted that the precise nature of this release of energy and its effects would only become clear when it occurred.10 During the years of the First World War, van Doesburg’s project, which was merely hinted at in ‘Meditations on the Frontier’, evolved and acquired practical dimensions, culminating in the launch of De Stijl in 1917. Van Doesburg met the principal avant-garde visual artists in Holland who were experimenting with non-representational art, and whose work formed the initial focus of the journal: Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, Bart van der Leck and the avant-garde architects J.J.P. Oud and Jan Wils. Van Doesburg came to realise that, by developing his ideas for the international dimension of the journal’s activities, he might help to trigger the release of ‘world energy’. The first manifesto of De Stijl, therefore, appealed to those working for ‘international unity’ and encouraged the translation of its materials into other languages.11 Van Doesburg certainly came to understand that his international project for art and peace would gain prestige from having its origins in a country regarded as a unique haven of peace through its non-participation in the First World War.12 The first issue of De Stijl appeared in October 1917, around the time that Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party seized power in Russia. The development of the Soviet utopian programme would lead to important revisions of van Doesburg’s own utopian project.

Dans Russe

‘I congratulate you—on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution’,13 van Doesburg wrote to his friend Anthony Kok on 7 November 1919.14 At this

10 Doesburg, ‘Meditaties V’, Eenheid (29 June 1916). 11 See ‘Manifest 1 van ‘de stijl’, De Stijl, II/1 (November 1918), pp. 3–5. 12 The European countries not involved in the First World War were Holland, Switzer land, Spain and the Scandinavian countries. Italy entered the war in 1915. 13 Alied Ottevanger, ed., ‘De Stijl overal absolute leiding’. De briefwisseling tussen Theo van Doesburg en Anthony Kok (Bussum: Thoth, 2008), pp. 274–5. Kok did not support the Bolsheviks, and the comment reflects van Doesburg’s own support for them. The revolu tion occurred on 25 October 1917 (old style) but 7 November (new style), the date of Van Doesburg’s letter. 14 Dutch newspapers provided regular and detailed reports about developments in Russia at this time. See, for instance, H.J. Stoelinga, Russische Revolutie en vredesverwachin gen in de Nederlandse pers, maart 1917–maart 1918 (Bussum, 1967), pp. 118–141. 60 nicholas bueno de mesquita time, van Doesburg clearly entertained hopes that revolution would also erupt in Western Europe. He expressed his disappointment when an international general strike in July 1919 failed to provoke revolution in Holland and other western countries.15 He wrote: ‘I see everything in black, rotten. This has a cause—the failure of the communist gathering of the world proletariat of 21 July. . . That attempt to assess the solidarity of the international proletariat failed completely. Was this not to have been the underpinning of the great revolution?’16 Earlier in 1919, van Doesburg had written to Kok expressing support for Lenin’s advocacy of violent proletarian revolution, I agree thoroughly with this great man from the east again, the old state machine must first be radically broken, to create a new and improved one . . . I consider it utopian to think that peace can come from parliamentary solutions. The real, radical abolition of soldiers and police implies the abolition of private capital; it naturally means that the workers would only be able to acquire power and abolish social classes—by taking up weapons and destroying the old state relations.17 During 1919, van Doesburg even seems to have thought that a revolutionary government would inaugurate a new era in the arts. In April 1919, De Stijl published information about the programme of the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia—Narkompros), which proposed to engage the masses in the arts.18 Undoubtedly, van Doesburg would have been reassured by Kandinsky’s particpation in this project. In May 1919, van Doesburg tried to make contact with Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment.19 Even so, van Doesburg seems to have had doubts about the possibility of a fruitful relationship

15 On 21 July 1919, a much anticipated international general strike was held, but made little impact. July 1919 also saw the collapse of Béla Kun’s communist regime in Hungary, which was the only Marxist regime outside Russia. 16 See Theo van Doesburg, letter to Chris Beekman, 31 July 1919; reprinted in Lieske Tibbe, Een revolutie gaat aan gekijf ten onder: De Stijl en de ‘Russische Kwuestie’ najaar 1919, electronic publication, Radboud Repository, Radboud University, Nijmegen 2006, p. 20. This valuable analysis of the contemporary political background and its impact on the group around van Doesburg is available only electronically at http://repository.ubn.ru.nl/ handle/2066/27565. Consulted 20/10/11. 17 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 18 May 1919; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 263. 18 This text, initially published in Das Kunstblatt, was reprinted in German in De Stijl, II/6 (April 1919), pp. 68–9 in the news column (‘Rondblik’). 19 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Chris Beekman, 12 May 1919; Tibbe, Een Revolutie, p. 10. utopia thwarted 61 between artists and the proletarian state, asking ‘What place will we have in the taking of power by the working class?’20 Nonetheless, it is clear that during 1919, van Doesburg hoped for a violent proletarian revolt against the social establishment. His ultimate objective was still peace and ‘the abolition of soldiers’, but he was now praising the workers for using weapons, which he had previously denounced as tools of a malign physicality. His advocacy of violence and belief in the proletariat indicates that, under the influence of the Revolution, he had rejected many of the beliefs that he had expressed when writing his ‘Medi- tations on the Frontier’ articles. At the time when van Doesburg was enthusiastic about the Bolshevik triumph in Russia, he informed Kok that he was working on a painting which he called Dans Russe (mixing Dutch and French), now known as Rhythm of a Russian Dance.21 Van Doesburg clearly attached great importance to this work. As many as thirteen preliminary sketches for the composition seem to have survived—more than for any other work of this period (Fig. 4.1a, 4.1b).22 At 1.36 metres high and 0.62 metres wide, the painting is also one of the largest that he ever completed (Fig. 4.2, 4.3). The preliminary sketches show a dancer in loose costume with thighs and arms lifted parallel to the ground and hands raised. The pose probably came from contemporary representations of traditional Cossack dances, often labelled ‘Russian’ or ‘Ukrainian’. Troupes of Cossack dancers had visited Paris during the Russophilia of the 1890s and also formed part of the Russian contribution to the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Edgar Degas had portrayed the characteristic leaping action of these dancers in 1899–1900.23 They were also shown in motion in two films by the Lumière

20 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 18 May 1919; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 263. 21 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 22 June 1918; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 232. This is generally accepted as the first reference to the painting, which was first exhibited at the end of 1920 as Rytme d’une danse russe—1918. Van Doesburg subsequently gave the work other titles (see text). I use the first title Dans Russe throughout. See Hoek, Catalogue, no. 593. 22 Hoek, Catalogue, no. 592. Thirteen sketches are listed as exhibits in Theo van Does burg, 1883–1931 (Eindhoven: Stedlijk von Abbemuseum; Den Haag: Gemeentemuseum; and Basel: Kunsthalle, 1968–9), nos. A57a—m. They were then owned by Nellie van Doesburg, the artist’s widow. Seven sketches are now in MoMA, New York. The whereabouts of the other six sketches is unknown. 23 Richard Kendall and Jill DeVonyar, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement (Lon don: Royal Academy, 2011), pp. 226–240. 62 nicholas bueno de mesquita

Fig. 4.1a Theo van Doesburg, A study for the painting Rhythm of a Russian Dance, c.1918, pencil, pen and ink on paper, 7.6 × 5.3 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA Florence.

Fig. 4.1b Theo van Doesburg, A study for the painting Rhythm of a Russian Dance, c.1918, pencil, pen and ink on paper, 8.0 × 6.4 cm., Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA Florence. utopia thwarted 63

Fig. 4.2 Theo van Doesburg, Rhythm of a Rus Fig. 4.3 Theo van Doesburg’s Rhythm sian Dance, c.1918, oil on canvas, 135.9 × 51.6 cm., of a Russian Dance with an unknown Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo figure, date unknown, De Stijl archive of SCALA Florence. the RKD, Den Haag. 64 nicholas bueno de mesquita

Brothers, a film by Paul Nadar, all of the mid 1890s,24 and were illustrated in Félicien de Ménil’s popular, 1905 history of world dance.25 The sketches and final painting convey the violent energy of the Cos- sack dance. In the sketches, van Doesburg used clashing diagonals and figures in precarious poses to evoke sensations of vitality and dynamism. In the painting, the open structure suggests flowing movements. A rest- less, jostling effect is created by thin strips of colour of varying lengths and orientations. The dancer’s jagged torso and limbs are outlined in white against grey. Dancing figures had first appeared in van Doesburg’s work in 1916–17, but with Dans Russe, their emotional significance changed. His earlier dancers can be linked, through the preparatory sketches, to Hindu myth- ological figures, and hence to the spiritual.26 In 1916, the artist described Hindu art as abandoning representation and rising to the level of the spiritual.27 The compositions are unruffled and balanced, reflecting van Doesburg’s earlier tranquil spirituality. De Ménil referred to Javanese dancers as ‘calmes et sereines, presque langoureuses’.28 With Dans Russe, the dance becomes forceful and frenzied, perhaps to indicate a proletarian origin. Van Doesburg’s works relating to the Tarantella and to Ragtime (produced in 1918–19) also reflect the transformation of the dance into something energetic and powerful. The attributes of van Doesburg’s dancers have shifted from serene to violent, as his utopianism changed from the peaceful spiritual to the revolutionary.29

24 Lisa R. Bixenstine, ‘Edgar Degas’s ‘Russian Dancers’ Series (1897–99). Their Dating, Pastel Techniques and their Content within His Late Period 1885–1908’ (Ph.D dissertation, Ohio State University, 1987), pp. 123–9. On the films of Russian dancers, see Kendall and DeVonyar, Degas, pp. 226–7. 25 F. de Ménil, Histoire de la danse à travers les ages (Paris: Picard et Kaan, 1905), p. 74. There was no equivalent work on dance in the Dutch language at this time. 26 For the triptych Dancers, see Hoek, Catalogue, no. 505. The stained glass works, described by van Doesburg as ‘Danseuse’ or ‘Dancing Figure’ are listed in Hoek Catalogue as Dance 1 and Dance 2 (nos. 506.1 and 506.2.b). Hoek dates all these works to 1916 or early 1917. Preparatory works include sketches of flute-playing Krishnas (Hoek, Catalogue, nos. 503/4) and a dancing Shiva (Hoek, Catalogue, no. 502). In 1916, van Doesburg moved to Leiden, the site of the National Museum for Ethnography, which displayed artefacts from the Dutch colonies including the Hindu cultures of the Dutch East Indies. 27 Theo van Doesburg, “De expressionisten en kubisten. Zweite Ausstellung von ‘Der Sturm’ ’’, Eenheid (8 April 1916), p. 305. 28 De Ménil, Histoire, p. 26. 29 Dans Russe has been linked to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. See, for instance, Juliet Bellow, Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 7–8. Yet van Doesburg’s other references to dance seem to be generic, utopia thwarted 65

Van Doesburg was secretive about his revolutionary zeal, whether articulated in Dans Russe or in support for the new Soviet regime. He only expressed his approval of the October Revolution in letters to his close friend, Anthony Kok and the artist Chris Beekman, who was also sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Similarly, Danse Russe remained private for some considerable time. Van Doesburg did not show it, although he contributed to numerous exhibitions in Holland during 1918–1920.30 The painting was first exhibited in distant Geneva in 1920 as Rytme d’une danse russe [sic]—a title that encouraged the viewer to look at the painting as an experiment in the evocation of movement, rather than as a comment on Russian events. The artist continued to exhibit it outside Holland, possibly in Rome in 1921 and in Weimar in 1923–4. At the latter show, it appeared as Offene Komposition, a title that severed its links to Russia completely. There were other examples of van Doesburg’s discretion about his admiration for Bolshevik Russia. He failed to use his international contacts to gather support for a petition to the Dutch Parliament for the re- instatement of postal links between Holland and Russia, although he had been asked to do so.31 He resisted the demands of Beekman, Robert van’t Hoff and Peter Alma that De Stijl be harnessed to political objectives, with the result that they left the journal.32 Van Doesburg’s reluctance to express public support for Bolshevik Russia at this time probably reflected his desire to maintain relations with important partners and contributors to De Stijl, who had remained aloof from revolutionary enthusiasms, especially Piet Mondrian and the architect J.J.P Oud. Moreover by 1921, Van Doesburg’s support for Lenin, his sympathy for the October Revolution and his belief in the possibility of a fruitful collaboration between the Soviet state and art had evaporated. In a new De Stijl Manifesto, published in 1921 he wrote, The first, second and third Socialist Internationals constituted ridiculous nonsense: they were merely words. The International of the Mind is an inner experience, which cannot be translated into words. It does not consist of a rather than alluding to specific images or examples. This is also probably the case for Dans Russe. I am grateful to Pamela Crawford for her help on this point. 30 Van Doesburg contributed to ten exhibitions in Holland between 1918 and 1920 (See Hoek, Catalogue, p. 796). Catalogues exist for five of these shows, but they do not refer to Danse Russe, nor do any other documents or materials relating to these exhibitions. 31 See, for example, Ger Harmsen, ‘De Stijl and the Russian Revolution’, in Mildred Friedman, ed., De Stijl 1917–1931: Visions of Utopia (Oxford: Phaidon 1982), p. 46. 32 See Tibbe, Een Revolutie, pp. 15–22. 66 nicholas bueno de mesquita

torrent of words, but of plastic creative acts and inner or intellectual force, which thus creates a newly shaped world. The creators of the new mental- ity do not found sects, churches or schools . . . but are linked by a common ‘inner life’.33 Van Doesburg’s condemnation of political systems was, however, very even- handed. He asserted, ‘Capitalists are deceivers and so are Socialists.’34 Van Doesburg’s new opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution must have stemmed, in part, from a growing understanding that the attitudes of revolutionary regimes towards the new art were at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic. In December 1919, he wrote to Kok, criticising the left-wing De Tribune newspaper for writing about ‘art being subordinate to mass-production’.35 In September 1922, he told Kok about his meeting with the Hungarian avant-garde designer, Sándor Bortnyk, who had reported that in Hungary the ‘main opposition to modern artists comes from the communist leaders, who are promoting the old art with its humanistic tendencies.’36 During 1918–1919, van Doesburg’s Bolshevist sympathies had affected his earlier utopian visions and had led him to consider new political ideas, such as the role of the proletariat and the possibility of violent social change. This was reflected in his private writings about Russia and was developed in parallel in Dans Russe. Nevertheless, he retained reserva- tions about the relationship of art to revolution, and his eventual disil- lusion with political Bolshevism was, to some degree, associated with an increasing awareness that political forces of the far left did not favour advanced ideas in the arts. By early 1922, van Doesburg had still not seen any significant post-1914 Russian art. His direct engagement with this work led to further developments in his views of relations between the Revolution and the arts.

33 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Manifesto III. Vers une nouvelle formation du monde’, De Stijl IV/8 (August 1921), pp. 125–6; English translation in Baljeu, Van Doesburg, pp. 113–4. 34 Van Doesburg, ‘Manifesto III’, pp. 125–6; Baljeu, Van Doesburg, pp. 113–4. 35 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 9 December 1919; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 277. 36 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 18 September 1922; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 402. Bortnyk had worked on the progressive Hungarian journal Ma and was at the time a student at the Bauhaus. utopia thwarted 67

Doesburg and the Russian Square

The First World War and the subsequent blockade had hidden creative developments in post-1914 Russia from western eyes, but in February 1922, van Doesburg met El Lissitzky, who was living in Germany and they attended a series of international avant-garde conferences together.37 Van Doesburg responded positively. He wrote to Kok, ‘With the Russians we have tremendous support. Lissitzky who recently arrived from Moscow is a wonderful guy, very consistent’.38 At The First International Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf in May 1922, van Doesburg and Lissitzky emerged as joint signatories with Hans Richter of the declaration of the International Faction of Constructivists. This affirmed that ‘Art is as much a method of organising ordinary life as science and technology’.39 In June 1922, van Doesburg wrote about possibly visiting Russia.40 In October that year, he was in Berlin for the Erste russische Kunstausstellung, the first post-war exhibition in Western Europe to feature recent and contemporary Russian work.41 Even before the exhibition of Russian art in Berlin, van Doesburg had initiated a vigorous promotion of Kazimir Malevich and his Supre- matist followers. It was the first time that van Doesburg had given sustained and deep coverage in De Stijl to a group of non-Dutch artists. The June 1922 issue opened with an image from Lissitzky’s Proun series and his article announcing ‘Proun, not World Visions but World Reality’.42 The leading article for the September 1922 issue also discussed contemporary Russian art and illustrated Malevich’s Black Square, harmoniously inserted into De Stijl’s customary frontispiece (Fig. 4.4).

37 The conferences included ‘The First International Congress of Progressive Artists’ (Düsseldorf, May 1922), and ‘The Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists’ (Weimar, Sep tember 1922). 38 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Anthony Kok, 6 June 1922; Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 390. 39 Published under the title ‘Erklärung’, De Stijl, V/4 (April 1922), pp. 61–4; English trans lation in Hans L.C. Jaffé, De Stijl (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), pp. 171–7. 40 In May 1922, van Doesburg wrote that he had contacted Kandinsky for advice about a possible lecture tour to Russia. See Theo van Doesburg’s letter to C.R. de Boer, 24 May 1922, cited in Alan Doig, Theo van Doesburg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 134–5. For a discussion between van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters about a visit to Russia, see Schwitters, letter to van Doesburg, 22 April 1925, in K. Schippers, Holland Dada (Amster dam: Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1974), pp. 149–50. Van Doesburg never got to Russia. 41 On van Doesburg’s presence in Berlin at the time of this exhibition, see Ottevanger, De Stijl overal, p. 408, fn. 5. 42 ‘Proun’ De Stijl, V/6 (June 1922), pp. 81–5. 68 nicholas bueno de mesquita

Fig. 4.4 Cover for De Stijl, vol. V, no. 9 (September 1922).

In addition, there were reproductions of paintings by Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko and reliefs by Ivan Puni. In 1922, also, a Dutch version of Lissitzky’s Tale of Two Squares was published as a special issue of the journal.43 Van Doesburg praised the formal qualities of Malevich’s Suprematism, its denial of illusionistic space through the successive detachment of the ‘white emptiness’ of the painting surround from the wall and of the square from the white void. He regarded Lissitzky’s Prouns as extending Malevich’s innovations by elaborating the Suprematist language of the plane.44 In De Stijl, the date ‘1913’ is prominently displayed against Malevich’s Black Square. This represented the year of the first appearance of a black square in Malevich’s work, rather than the date of the actual painting, but 1913 was also close to the date of Mondrian’s first break with representation in 1912–1913. By publishing this early date for Malevich’s Black Square,

43 De Stijl, 1922, V. Published in November 1922. 44 For the discussion of Malevich and Lissitzky, see Theo van Doesburg, ‘Balans V het nieuwe’, De Stijl, V/9 (September 1922), pp. 129–35. utopia thwarted 69 van Doesburg was acknowledging that the development of a spiritual abstract art in Russia was contemporaneous with, but independent of, developments of a similar art in Holland—hence he was indicating that the emergence of such abstraction was a ‘supra-national’ development.45 By 1922, however, van Doesburg had become disillusioned with the Bol- sheviks and no longer believed in their willingness to reform the arts. He suggested that the Russian works he had reproduced were direct reflections of popular consciousness and the realities of the time and that these artworks and the revolution emerged in parallel from these same conditions. He wrote: One of the main manifestations of a like-minded, non-individualistic striv- ing is to be seen in the artistic development of Russia, during and after the war, during and after the revolution. Here, life was difficult for a certain time . . . Here, art was for the first time a strong means of expressing an equally powerful popular consciousness. No nation recognised so profoundly that the new art is the result of an inner ripening of mankind. This process is supra national. Art is a symptom of this inner evolution, which at any given time is determined by the living realities of circumstance. This is transformed into action. And the action, the revolt is turned into art. 46 Revolt may re-form art—and art may also foment revolt. In a letter written in the summer of 1922, van Doesburg recounted—as a parable—the impact of the square in Russia: One of the most modern Russians Malewitz [sic] lectured on Cubism in 1918. At the end he produced a red square which he brandished above his head shouting ‘And that is the task of the future’. He was promptly arrested and on asking why, he was told: because you proclaimed the revolution. And, indeed, the revolution did break out on the very next day. Odd isn’t it that what we regard here as a sign of a totally new image of the world was the same for the most modern Russians. As I said to Mondrian, at the time, what the cross was to early Christians, the square is to us. . . . At any rate, the

45 Malevich first used a black square in 1913 as an element in his designs for the opera Victory over the Sun and in his Cubo-Futurist works. His painting The Quadrilateral (also known as The Black Square) was shown at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero-Ten) in December 1915–January 1916. Lissitzky also dated Malevich’s Black Square to 1913 in his 1925 article ‘Kunst und Pangeometrie’, in Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim, eds., Europa-Almanach (Potsdam, 1925); English translation in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helen Aldwinkle (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 350. 46 Van Doesburg, ‘Balans’, p. 130. 70 nicholas bueno de mesquita

square expresses everything that we and mankind are searching for today: absolute harmony, the unity of all duality. And formlessness.47 While van Doesburg had rapidly abandoned his political allegiance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he did not abandon his belief in a Bolshevism of the Spirit’.48 He continued to associate violent revolution with progress towards a higher form of visual art. Such an art emanated from a revolutionary atmosphere, but also inspired revolutionary forces.

Launching into Russia

‘I am very happy that our first manifesto has arrived in Russia. I am eager to know how it will be received’.49 Van Doesburg’s letter to Beekman of September 1919 heralded his attempts to inform Russian artists, previously isolated by the war, about developments in Holland. Peter Alma, who was a contributor to De Stijl, visited Moscow for the Congress of the Third International in June–July 1921, meeting Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin and other artists. Alma published an illustrated article on contemporary Dutch art in the journal Creative Work (Tvorchestvo) and probably delivered some information and materials to his Russian colleagues.50 Malevich’s response, ‘Letter to the Dutch Artists’, drafted in September 1921, revealed some knowledge of recent developments in avant-garde Dutch art.51

47 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Evert Rinsema, 22 June 1922; quoted in Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg: Constructor of the New Life (Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 1994), pp. 23–4. 48 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Dada’, De Nieuwe Amsterdammer (8 May 1920). 49 Theo van Doesburg, letter to Chris Beekman, September 1919 quoted in Harmsen, ‘De Stijl and the Russian Revolution’. It is not known whether this particular dispatch actually arrived in Russia. 50 P. Alma, ‘Zametki o sovremennom iskusstve gollandii’, Tvorchestvo, no. 4–6 (1921). Alma became an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Union. For his connections with the USSR after 1920, see L.C. Aleshina and N.V. Iavorskaia, eds., Iz istorii khudozhestven noi zhizni SSSR. Internatsional’nie svyazi v oblasti izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva, 1917–1940. Materialy i dokumenty (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), pp. 47–49. 51 Malevich referred only to the receipt of ‘a letter’ and copies of De Tribune—the left- wing Amsterdam newspaper. His limited references to what he had received may reflect his caution; not only did all letters sent abroad have to be submitted to the censor, but he had been arrested by the Vitebsk Cheka on 5 August 1921, perhaps because he had received communications from abroad. He was rapidly released. See Alexandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 217–220. Malevich’s letter is reprinted in I.A. Vakar and T.N. Mikhienko, utopia thwarted 71

From 1922, the flow of information accelerated. Van Doesburg’s article ‘Monumental Architecture’ was published in Ilya Ehrenburg and Lissitz- ky’s journal Object (Veshch’—Objet—Gegenstand) in May 1922, together with van Doesburg’s responses to a questionnaire about contemporary art.52 The leading Russian architect, Moisei Ginzburg, the leader of The Association of Contemporary Architects (Ob’edinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov—OSA), wrote about information obtained from a range of journals including the Czech magazine Construction (Stavba) and the Polish Block (Blok), as well as De Stijl.53 The list of subscribers to De Stijl includes OSA and its journal, Contemporary Architecture (Sovremennaia arkhitektura—SA).54 Van Doesburg was sufficiently well recognised to be one of the western architects invited to participate in the 1927 First Exhibition of Modern Architecture in Moscow.55 Malevich’s ‘Letter to the Dutch Artists’ proclaimed his own adherence to ‘non-objective art’, while asserting that ‘Your letter shows that you are in sympathy with my work’. He concluded by describing his Unovis (Utver- diteli novogo iskusstva—Champions of the New Art) group at the Vitebsk art school, ‘[it] accepts into its membership all those who vote for the new art . . . Greetings to non-objective Holland and all the innovators living there.’56 Malevich seems to have retained his admiration for van Doesburg.

eds., Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika (Moscow: RA, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 143–7; English translation in K.S. Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915–1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copen hagen: Borgen Verlag, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 183–7. 52 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Monumental’noe iskusstvo’, Veshch’, no. 1–2 (1922), pp. 14–15. This article had originally been published in De Stijl, II/1 (November 1918), pp. 10–12. His short reply to the questionnaire is one of a number of responses in ‘K ankete’, Veshch’, no. 1–2 (1922), p. 20. 53 See Moisei Ginzburg, ‘Tvorcheskie otchety’, Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 3, (1935), pp. 8–10. Articles by van Doesburg began to be published in the Hungarian magazine Ma (Today) from 1922, and in Stavba and Blok from 1924 onwards. 54 The list includes the address of a Leningrad bookseller. The handwritten circulation lists are in the van Doesburg section of the De Stijl archive at RKD, Den Haag. 55 OSA invited van Doesburg to contribute to the exhibition and proposed exchanging issues of De Stijl and SA; see Aleksandr Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg, letter to Theo van Doesburg, 30 November 1926. An official invitation was also sent; see G. Orloff of the Com mittee for the Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture (Komitet vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury), letter to van Doesburg, 15 March 1927, in van Doesburg Archive, folders 266 and 232. Nevertheless, van Doesburg is not listed in the exhibition catalogue; see K. Paul Zygas, ‘OSA’s 1927 Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture: Russia and the West meet in Moscow’, in G.H. Roman and V.H. Marquardt eds., Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910–1930 (Gainesville, Fl.: University of Florida Press, 1992), pp. 102–121. 56 Malevich, Essays on Art, vol. 1, p. 187. 72 nicholas bueno de mesquita

When making his didactic charts in 1927 to explain his view of artistic developments, he reproduced van Doesburg’s 1925 Counter-Composition alongside his own work.57 Malevich’s architectons (arkhitektony) of the mid 1920s were plaster maquettes, which embody his engagement with three-dimensional design, possessing potential architectural applications, and they seem to owe much to similar artefacts published in De Stijl.58 It is impossible to say whether Malevich had seen these illustrations or whether this was another parallel ‘supra-national’ development.59 Despite this, most Russian critics writing in the early 1920s adopted the standpoint that van Doesburg and De Stijl were merely forerunners of an authentic Russian Constructivism, which alone truly responded to the needs of the a new social and political order. From this Soviet perspective, western forerunners were fatally undermined by the fact that they had emerged from within capitalist societies and were therefore detached from social issues. Alma’s article in Creative Work had already observed that Mondrian’s work is ‘without content’ and that there is no painting in Holland that ‘fulfills its work in close cooperation with the masses’.60 In 1922, Aleksei Gan acknowledged that the journals De Stijl and L’Esprit Nouveau were aligned with the Russian Constructivists’ interest in issues of materials and geometry in the creation of three-dimensional artefacts.61 Nevertheless, Gan considered that while these issues inevitably arise from the industrialisation of societies, the approach to Construc- tivism embraced by these journals was undermined by ‘its fraternisation

57 Malevich linked the two works under the theme ‘diagonal plane’. See Linda S. Boersma, ‘Malevich, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg and De Stijl’, in Charlotte Douglas and Christina Lodder, eds., Rethinking Malevich: Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth (London: Pindar Press, 2007), pp. 223–36. Malevich probably saw van Doesburg’s Counter-Composition VIII in De Stijl, VII/78 (1927), p. 92. 58 Van Doesburg in turn published one of Malevich’s architectons. See Fig. 4.6. 59 Robert van’t Hoff’s newel post design had been published in De Stijl, I/6 (April 1918), p. 71. Two similar artefacts by Georges Vantongerloo had been published as Twee Plaskieken in 1919, see De Stijl, III/2 (November 1919), p. 22. Van Doesburg’s similar design for the mon ument for Leeuwarden had been exhibited in Düsseldorf (28 May–3 July 1922) and then at van Doesburg’s Weimar retrospective in December 1923. See Hoek, Catalogue, no. 558. See also Christina Lodder, ‘Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Architecture,’ in Η τέχνη του 20ού αιώvα. Іστορία—Θεωρία—Εμπειρία, Γ Συνέδριο Ιστορίας της Τέχνης (Thessaloniki: ΑΠΘ, 2009), pp. 687–697. [20th-Century Art: History—Theory—Experience. Third Conference in History of Art (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2009), pp. 687–697]. 60 Alma also praised the young architects who were following Henrik Petrus Berlage, whom he described as a communist architect, indicating that he was concerned about the social impact of architecture. 61 Aleksei Gan, Konstruktivizm (Tver’: Tverskoe izdatel’stvo, 1922), p. 69. utopia thwarted 73 with art’.62 For Gan, it was only Russian Constructivism with its aspiration towards production that was consistent with communism. Similarly, in a broad consideration of western antecedents for Russian architectural Constructivism, Ginzburg attacked van Doesburg’s ‘artistic dualism’, which combined an emphasis on the function of the building—of which Ginzburg approved—with an excessive preoccupation with proportional- ity and pure geometry.63 A more nuanced account of van Doesburg was provided by Ivan Matsa (János Mácza), a Marxist critic of Hungarian origin. In the first comprehensive account of European contemporary art to be published in Russia after the Revolution, he placed van Doesburg among other predecessors of Constructivism, which principally comprised Cubism, Purism, and Paul Scheerbart’s ‘Glass Architecture’. He also detected a degree of social engagement in van Doesburg’s move away from focussing on subjective expression and individualistic enjoyment of the arts towards using art to improve life.64

Attacking Russia In 1923, van Doesburg moved to Paris, where he actively promoted his work and that of the artists and architects associated with De Stijl, particularly through exhibitions of architectural work.65 The artists around De Stijl became the focus of intense interest among the Parisian avant-garde and featured prominently at this time in Parisian avant-garde publications. After 1925, however, the focus of the Parisian avant-garde press shifted away from Holland, and became directed towards the Soviet Union. New Soviet architecture and design was first shown in Paris at the 1925 Exposition international des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. The

62 Ibid., p. 70. 63 See Moisei Ginzburg, ‘Itogi i perspektivy’, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 4–5 (1927), pp. 112–118; and ‘Konstruktivizm v arkhitekture’ Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 5 (1928), pp. 143–5, Ginzburg’s address to OSA’s first congress. In the same article Ginzburg acknowledges Malevich as a precious source of experimental work, but ‘from a method ological point of view . . . detached from the purposes of our days and therefore absolutely mistaken and entirely alien to our architectonic orientation.’ 64 I.L. Matsa, Iskusstvo sovremennoi Evropy (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1926), pp. 80–7, especially pp. 86–7. Van Doesburg also appears in Matsa’s book through the reproduction of a poem by J.K. Bonset (a pen name of Van Doesburg), which Matsa cites as an example of Dadaism, a movement that he criticises as ‘the ultimate individualism’. See ibid., pp. 74–75. 65 Especially the exhibition Les architects du groupe ‘De Stijl’ at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Paris, October–November, 1923. 74 nicholas bueno de mesquita

Fig. 4.5 A page from Het Bouwbed Fig. 4.6 Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 5, no. 20 (September rijf, vol. 6, no. 3 (February 1929), p. 50. 1928) p. 396. The illustrations include Vladimir The illustrations include Moisei Gin- Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third Interna zburg’s apartment block for the State tional, El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel project and the Insurance organisation (Gosstrakh) Lenin Tribune, Kazimir Malevich’s Architecton Alpha, and illustrations of standard types of and Ivan Leonidov’s design for the Lenin Institute. apartments for workers.

striking Soviet pavilion by Konstantin Melnikov was received with particular enthusiasm. Avant-garde architects and artists who were inclined to the left politically became interested in the relationship between the Soviet social experiment and the country’s artistic output. The impact of avant-garde Soviet art and architecture, which had first been introduced to Western Europe by van Doesburg, through De Stijl, now rivalled that of the Dutch. This element of competition may have added venom to van Doesburg’s attacks on Russian work which began in 1926. His relations with Lissitzky ceased around the middle of 1924.66 His main platform for attacking Russian work was the Dutch building magazine The Construction Business (Het Bouwbedrijf, Fig. 4.5, 4.6).67 In some fifty articles, van Doesburg assessed the progress of modern architecture in Europe. He praised new architecture that grew from social reality, from the ‘needs of life’ or from a ‘modern life-function’, although

66 Linda S. Boersma, ‘Malevich’, p. 231. She quotes Lissitzky’s last letter to van Doesburg, of July 1924 in which the Russian reproaches van Doesburg for allowing their friendship to be damaged by artistic disagreements. Van Doesburg does not seem to have replied. 67 The journal’s sub-title was ‘Technical and Commercial Monthly for Contractors, Architects, Manufacturers and Dealers.’ utopia thwarted 75 he criticised excessively rigid functionalism for failing to meet spiritual needs. He also expressed admiration for architecture that arose from constructional logic. Conversely he condemned architecture that was unre- lated to social or constructional realities, attacking ‘intentionally applied decorations . . . of preconceived artistic effect’ and architecture that was influenced by painting—he felt that the two art forms needed to be kept entirely distinct.68 Van Doesburg first attacked Russian architecture in 1926 for failing to reflect the needs of life, and he concentrated especially on the confusion between painting and architecture in Russian ‘paper architecture’. Designs of the early 1920s, a period when Russia lacked the material resources for implementing construction projects, were displayed at the 1925 Paris exhibition. He dismissed such work as ‘decorative-aesthetic speculations . . . like Jugendstil or Biedermeier’. In the following paragraph, he praised Dutch architects for avoiding these excesses, continuing, . . . . The Russians . . . loved to toy with modern construction ‘on paper’ for mostly unexecutable designs (think of Lissitzky’s so-called orator’s platform . . . the spiral shaped baroque monument for the third Interna- tional by Tatlin, or the small childlike and helplessly piled up blocks and boards by the Polish Malevich, called ‘blind architecture’ by him).69 In a set of three articles of 1928–9, van Doesburg again suggested that Russian avant-garde architecture did not reflect the realities of the Soviet situation, accusing Ginzburg and the OSA group of imitating progressive Western European architects.70 This group had, indeed, engaged closely with a broad range of contemporary avant-garde architects working in the West, such as Le Corbusier and those associated with the Bauhaus. Van Doesburg stressed that OSA’s ‘Employment of glass facades, reduction of support points to the minimum, the shifting of pillars inwards, flat roof coverings, did not belong to the architectural tradition, but were

68 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Vernieuwingspogingen in de Fransche architectuur’, Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 1, no. 6 (December 1924), pp. 260–67; English translation in Theo van Doesburg, On European Architecture, trans. Charlotte and Arthur Loeb (Basel, Berlin, and Boston: Birkhaüser, 1990), pp. 24–30. 69 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Architectuurvernieuwingen in het buitenland’, Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 3, no. 13 (October 1926), pp. 424–7; English translation in van Doesburg, On European Architecture, pp. 119–127. 70 The three articles are, Theo van Doesburg, ‘Kunst en Architectuurvernieuwingen in Sovjet-Rusland’, Het Bouwbedrijf, vol. 5 no. 20 (September 1928), pp. 395–400 (i); ibid., vol. 5, no. 22 (October 1922) pp. 436–441 (ii); and ibid., vol. 6, no. 3 (February 1929), pp. 49–53 (iii). Translations in van Doesburg, On European Architecture, pp. 185–209. 76 nicholas bueno de mesquita imported from the West’.71 He considered Ginzburg’s design for standard workers’ housing to be strongly reminiscent of the Paris-based Gabriel Guévrékian’s design for the Hotel Relais Automobile. For van Doesburg, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s workers’ club or reading room, which was part of the Soviet exhibit at the 1925 Paris Exhibition, did not differ substantially from similar structures in the Dutch provinces. He dismissed Ginzburg’s 1927 housing block for the State Insurance organisation (Gosudarstvennoe strakhovanie—Gosstrakh), remarking, ‘We cannot say that it opens new technical perspectives or architectural forms’. Van Doesburg criticised the design’s evident debt to Le Corbusier and the inappropriateness of a Cor- busian roof garden for the Moscow climate, observing that the residents would certainly contract bronchial ailments (see Figs. 4.4 and 4.5).72 In the same series of articles, van Doesburg attacked the work of Malevich and Lissitzky for being derivative. In a clear reference to Lis- sitzky, he wrote: Why did all ‘revolutionary’ creative people leave their beloved Russia? In order to import the new from Russia into foreign counties? No . . . in order to learn what is new there and to import it . . . into Russia. Would they make us believe that Russia has completely autonomously (for instance like ‘little’ Holland) produced a new architecture from the highly praised ‘proletarian culture’, an architecture in keeping with the needs of the working class? Forget it.73 He also revised (somewhat erroneously) his dating of Suprematism to the post-revolutionary period. He noted Lissitzky’s claim that it had developed before the Revolution of 1917—and observed that Lissitzky had recently dated it as early as 1913. Van Doesburg added ‘In reality this movement originated during the revolution’.74 At the same time, van Doesburg’s view of this revolution and its impact on art had changed enormously since the early 1920s, when he had regarded the vigour of Russian art as an emanation of proletarian energy. Now, his view was gloomy and rather prescient, suggesting that avant-garde art in the Soviet Union would prove unsustainable given the bourgeois

71 Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (ii), p. 437. 72 Comments on Ginzburg and on Rodchenko from Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (ii), pp. 440–1. Van Doesburg called Ginzburg’s block of flats, which was built on Malaia Bronnaia Street, Moscow, 1926–7, a building for Gostrach [sic.] (See Fig. 4.5). Guévrékian’s 1923 Hotel Relais Automobile was a design for a motel (unbuilt). 73 Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (i), pp. 395–6. 74 Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (i), pp. 395–6, fn. utopia thwarted 77 tastes of the leadership and of the proletariat, whose determining role in artistic matters was promoted by the state’s Marxist ideology. He considered that this would lead to artistic production being confined to a strict focus on objects of utility combined with a due respect for aesthetic tradition, as expressed in Lenin’s conservative view ‘we must not turn our backs on what is beautiful even if it is old’—a bourgeois opinion, which van Doesburg considered would also be adopted by the working class.75 By now, van Doesburg seems to have lost confidence in the Russian proletariat, suggesting they really wanted the kind of bourgeois decor provided by the designs of Aleksei Shchusev and Ivan Zholtovskii. Some- time around the end of the 1920s, van Doesburg allowed the painting Dans Russe to be photographed horizontally, with a figure peering around it and a mirror in front. The work has apparently been deployed as part of a formal experiment—the energetic Russian dancer has disappeared (Fig. 4.3). In a discussion of the Russian national character, van Does- burg suggested that ‘the exquisite wood constructions’ of the countryside were its true reflection and that for the moment Russia and avant-garde architecture were totally incompatible. He declared, ‘the Russian national character and the latest [international] efforts in architecture cannot be brought into line with one another’.76

Conclusion

Against the background of the First World War, Theo van Doesburg had formulated an international utopian project, which would be led from Holland, would deploy the arts in favour of spirituality and peace, and in which artists would cooperate to develop a spiritual art that would act directly on man’s inner life—a project that would evolve to form the basis of the foundation of De Stijl. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, however, van Doesburg embraced the idea of a violent, proletarian uprising, expressing his support during 1918 and 1919 in private writings and apparently through an important work, Dans Russe. He published the Bolshevik government’s proposals to engage the proletariat in the arts through the work of a

75 Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (i), pp. 396–7. Van Doesburg’s source for Lenin’s aesthetic views was probably the interview with Lenin in Clara Zetkin’s Erinnerungen an Lenin (Vienna: Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1929). 76 Van Doesburg, ‘. . . Rusland’, (ii), p. 437. 78 nicholas bueno de mesquita government agency, Narkompros. He may, at least briefly, have believed that the revolutionary government would generate a cultural life that would encompass both the proletariat and avant-garde art. When van Doesburg finally encountered avant-garde Russian work in 1922, he saw it as the product of a symbiosis of the artists and the proletariat, explaining that the art had emerged from a revolutionary atmosphere, but had also been responsible for fomenting that atmosphere. By this time, however, his belief in the contribution of government towards achieving the desired objectives had evaporated, and he had come to consider the relationship between the arts and the proletariat as being spontaneous. Van Doesburg also honoured developments in modern architecture that reflected the ‘needs of life’, functionality, and the social realm directly. Yet when he came to write about Russian architecture in the second half of the 1920s, he criticised it heavily for being based either on ideas from the domain of art or from the architecture of Western Europe, and thus for being cut off from the social reality that it needed to reflect. He now regarded the Bolshevik regime as a barrier to the development of an avant-garde in Russia, where its masquerade of developing ‘proletarian art’ would lead to the old bourgeois art that the avant-garde had sought to replace. In Russia itself, where van Doesburg’s promotional activities ensured a degree of recognition for his work and views, most commentators dismissed his vision for being fatally flawed by the absence of social engagement. This view of van Doesburg as an artist who was detached from social realities has been endorsed by much of modern scholarship, although this view is now subject to revision.77 In fact, his passionate interest in Russia was, in part, a reflection of his new interest in the relationship between art and the social realm.

77 For a review of the scholarly treatment of van Doesburg and De Stijl artists, see Michael White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1–11. chapter five

Fighting for a Utopian Childhood: Militarism in Children’s Periodicals of the Early Soviet Union

Maria Starkova-Vindman

Tired fighters will be replaced By the strong young army. . . These scarlet letters We will carve in our hearts: ‘With honest vigour, we are young, We will seize the world for ourselves. These were the words of a marching song published in the magazine Young Communist (Iunyi Kommunist) in 1919.1 It’s a typical post- revolutionary amateur poem, lacking style, but it is a fine example of how, at this time, the metaphor of youth, used in a militaristic march, was associated with hope and the aspiration towards a bright, communist future. Children’s journals appropriated this new symbolism of youth and its revolutionary militarism. The result was an intriguing mix of fiction, fantasy and what was presented as actuality during the building of socialism. More than a hundred children’s journals and newspapers were launched during the years of the New Economic Policy (Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika—NEP, 1921–1928) along with a large number of periodicals intended for adults. All these publications shared similar aims—to provide entertainment, but most importantly, to educate the masses ‘in the spirit of socialism’ and to promote support for Soviet power. Magazines for children aspired to achieve these objectives through the prism of a changed definition of childhood resulting from the 1917 October Revolu- tion, and by projecting an idealised image of Soviet childhood, as a way of promoting key postulates of the new ideology.2 Images of childhood

1 D. Blagoveshchenskii, ‘Pesnia iunogo kommunista’, Iunyi kommunist (Moscow), no. 11 (1919), p. 11. All translations are the author’s own. 2 On the history of Soviet and Russian childhood see, above all: Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (London and New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001); Tat’iana Smirnova, ‘Deti Sovetskoi Rossii 1921-1924 gg’, Sotsial’naia istoriia 2001/2002 (2002), pp. 486–528; E. Kuleshov and I. Antipova, eds., Detskii 80 maria starkova-vindman inevitably reflected the latest cultural notions and perceptions of the nation’s collective future, while helping to shape a new Soviet identity for children and adults. This paper will focus on how the theme of militarism and military ‘preparedness’ was integrated into officially disseminated images of a happy Soviet childhood in early Soviet periodicals. Children were the first Soviet generation. Presented in early Soviet political posters as the nation’s future, children came to symbolise the bright future of communism.3 Unfortunately, because of the First World War, Civil War, famines, and epidemics, Soviet children were actually in a desperate state and were very far from epitomising this bright ideal. Consequently, the theme of children facing war was presented in Soviet rhetoric as an unjust and horrific result of the past, and was contrasted with the utopian ideal of the Communist future. At the same time, the exceedingly militaristic ethos of the early revolutionary regime presented the New Soviet Person as a ‘relentless fighter’ for socialism and an eternal warrior of World Revolution. The New Soviet Child, as an archetype of the New Soviet Person, was inevitably presented in this way too. This image was reinforced by the creation in 1922, of the All-Union Pioneer Organisation which in 1924 was named after Lenin (Vsesoiuznaia pionerskaia organizatsiia imeni V.I. Lenina). The new body was formed on the basis of those existing Scout organisations that had supported the Bolshevik revolution. Otherwise, scouting, which originated in Britain,

sbornik (Moscow: OGI, 2003); Evgenii M. Balashov, Shkola v Rossiiskom obshchestve, 1917– 1927 gg: Stanovlenie ‘Novogo cheloveka’ (St Petersburg: Nauka RAN, 2003); Alla Sal’nikova, Rossiiskoe detstvo v XX veke. Istoriia, praktika i issledovaniia tekstov (Kazan’: KGU, 2007); Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890–1991 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Ibid.,‘Defending Children’s Rights “In Defense of Peace” ’, in György Péteri, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 59–86; and Ibid., ‘A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones’, in Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Petri fied Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, (London: Anthem Press, 2009), pp. 3–18. 3 The slogan ‘Children are our future!’ (‘Deti—nashe budushchee!’) was announced by the Bolsheviks shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, when the protection of children and maternity was proclaimed as one of the principal areas of social reform. See, for example, the following posters issued to promote ‘Children’s Week’, organised by the government in 1920: Anon, Children Are the Future of Soviet Russia (Deti—budushchee Sovetskoi Rosii), Saratov, 1920; and I. Simakov, Children’s Week. Children Are Our Future (Nedelia rebenka: Deti-nashe budushchee), St Petersburg, 1920. For a discussion of social reforms in relation to Soviet posters and other visual propaganda of the time, see Aleksandr Shkliaruk, Materinstvo i detstvo v russkom plakate (Moscow: Kontakt-Kul’tura, 2006), p. 6; Kelly, ‘Children’s World’, pp. 61–92; and Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletcult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 180–1. fighting for a utopian childhood 81 was condemned as ‘bourgeois’ and banned, so that the Pioneer movement became the only permitted organisation and model for children aged approximately 10 to 15 years old. The Pioneer organisation was under the overall direction of the Communist Party and was closely adminis- tered by the Komsomol (Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi—Young Communist League). While the main aim of the Pioneer movement was to recruit members and raise them as exemplary Soviet citizens, it also served to create and disseminate an idealised image of Soviet actuality, which would be capable of effectively influencing that reality, and thus perform the same role that Socialist Realism would play a decade later in the arts. The idealised image of the Soviet child as a revolutionary warrior was promoted by the Pioneer organisation through its journals and newspapers, which were specifically targeted at a young audience, as well as through its official announcements and appeals, delivered at conferences of the Komsomol. In April 1923, the initial issue of the first pioneers’ periodical—The Drum (Baraban)—illustrated barefoot boys, who were marching in formation towards the viewer, with a factory in the background. The accompanying article defined the pioneers as ‘relief for exhausted warriors’ and explained that ‘when the time comes they [the Pioneers] will have to replace the current warriors of the revolution’.4 After the world revolution, ‘the workers of the world will shrug off the yoke of capitalism and create the happiest life for people on Earth; there will be no hard labour, no wars, no quarrels, and no stealing, as everything will belong to everyone’.5 To achieve this happy state of peace or ‘no war’, Pioneers were expected to engage in a great war with the bourgeoisie. This message was reinforced by officials who gave talks at Pioneer rallies, the texts of which were printed in the Pioneers’ magazines. For instance, in May 1926, The Drum reprinted the speech that Nikolai Bukharin (theoretician and member of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Com- munist Party of the Soviet Union) gave when the Pioneer Organisation was renamed in Lenin’s honour in May 1924.6 Bukharin had stressed that Pioneers were expected to fight: ‘All of you will have to participate in the struggle, which will probably be even greater than those battles fought by

4 M. Stremiakov, ‘Iunye pionery—griadushchaia smena ustavshikh boitsov’, Baraban, no. 1 (April 1923), pp. 4–5. 5 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 6 N. Bukharin, ‘Iunym lenintsam’, Baraban, no. 10 (May 1926), p. 1. 82 maria starkova-vindman the older generation’.7 In this context, the Pioneers’ motto ‘Be prepared— Always Prepared!, which had been borrowed from the Scout movement, alluded to military preparedness, associated with the fight for the world, proletarian revolution.8 Although the Soviet press criticised the so-called ‘bourgeois’ militarisation of children during and after the First World War in the West, Soviet imagery of the post-war years employed the iconography of the virtuous child fighter and other methods, which were similar to those used in Western war propaganda—a strategy that was comparable (despite its different ideological content) to the cult of youth and physical power adopted slightly later by Fascist Italy and Germany.9 A drawing by an unknown artist on the cover of The Drum (no. 17–18) in 1925 exemplifies this approach, combining a romanticised view of world revolution with the military involvement of children. It shows a male Young Pioneer running with a red banner and pointing high in the air, calling out ‘Forwards to World October!’ (Vpered k mirovomu oktiabriu!). The silhouette of army forces carrying red banners in the background and the curved surface of the Earth signify the global scale of the socialist revolution. The composition, despite its rather emblematic and poster- like character, evokes the central grouping (including the boy carrying the banner) in Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830, Musée du Louvre, Paris). This compositional format was used in many other Soviet propaganda publications. As Afanasii Selishchev observed in 1928, the word ‘communard’ often denoted ‘Soviet communist’ in post- revolutionary Russia.10 In a similar way, the romanticised revolutionary ideal and references to the French Revolution were integrated into the

7 Ibid., p. 1. 8 Lev Kamenev’s 1924 appeal to the Pioneers typifies the militaristic ethos of the Pio neer movement in the early 1920s: ‘Listen, Pioneer! The banner of Leninists is now hover ing above you. But it may still be attacked, so be prepared! . . . Be prepared to replace your elder brothers in their struggle for victory!’ See Lev Kamenev, ‘Slushai, pioner!’, Pioner, no. 4, (1924), p. 1. 9 For a discussion of the Western-European image of children during the First World War, see Guillaume de Syon, ‘The Child and the Flying Machine: Childhood and Aviation in the First World War’, in James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 116–33. On Western war propaganda aimed at children, see Celia Malone Kingsbury, For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 169–217. On the later Fascist propaganda targeting youth, see: Alexander J. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule (London and New York: Rout ledge, 1995), pp. 66–8. 10 Afanasii Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi [1928], (Moscow: Librokom, 2010), pp. 193–4. fighting for a utopian childhood 83 early Soviet ethos and mythology. Sometimes, as in this drawing, they were transformed into the celebration of specifically Soviet achievements (i.e. the spread of the October Revolution).11 Moreover, the representation of children on the barricades vigorously supporting the French Revolu- tion, as portrayed by Delacroix or Victor Hugo, exploited the Romantic view of children’s innocence and conveyed the essentially righteous character of the revolutionary struggle.12 The theme therefore became popular in Soviet publications and educational stories for children, inculcating the concept of the social and moral duty for sacrifice through celebrated ‘historical’ (often fictitious) exemplars.13 Because of its strong didactic qualities, this concept was often employed during the Five-Year Plans, despite increasing official disapproval of potential comparisons between the French and Russian revolutions.14 In 1930, a drawing by the Leningrad graphic artist, Sergei Mochalov, showing a child with a rifle, standing alongside an adult worker and a soldier on the barricades, was reproduced on the cover of Ezh (Hedgehog, but it is also the abbreviation for Ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal—Monthly journal). The drawing’s caption emphasised the self-sacrifice of the protagonists: ‘They don’t even think of retreating. They will fight till the last drop of blood.’15 Such images alluded to a romanticised view of historical battles and children’s heroic deeds, as well as their adventurous spirit, while the accompanying text provided an additional instructive context. Such connotations equally applied to images of child fighters from recent history, including the revolutionary struggle of 1917. These events with their

11 On the Bolshevik use of the imagery of the French revolution see: Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘The Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions’, Russian History, vol. 16, no. 1 (1989), pp. 31–54. See also Beryl Williams, ‘The Impact of the French Revolutionary Tradition on the Propaganda of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1918–1921’, in Ian Germani and Robin Swales, Symbols, Myths and Images of the French Revolution: Essays in Honour of James A. Leith (Regina: University of Regina Publications, 1998), pp. 297–306. 12 Victor Hugo’s writings were favoured by Stalin, were popularised by Proletkult, and had been popular in nineteenth-century Russia. See respectively Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1967), p. 1; Mally, Culture of the Future, p. 132; and Marina Balina, ‘Crafting the Self: Narratives of Pre-revolutionary Childhood in Soviet Literature’ in Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, eds., Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 2008), p. 93. 13 The story ‘Child Revolutionaries’, about the heroic death of a child defending the revolutionary cause, is typical. See Zinaida Lilina (wife of Grigorii Zinoviev), ‘Deti— revoliutsionery’, Novyi Robinzon [New Robinson] no. 12, (1924), pp. 1–5, illustrated by Vasilii Vladimirov. 14 Margaret Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism: Russian Writers and the Soviet Past (Columbia, SC.: Camden House, 1998), p. 59. 15 Ezh, no. 5, (1930), inner front cover. 84 maria starkova-vindman successful and glorious outcome were re-enacted and considered to be superior to the French Revolution (since a ‘proletarian’ revolution was superior to a ‘bourgeois’ revolution). In this context, the image of a fighting child signified the hope and strength of the proletariat—a positive association, which replaced the negative emphasis on the injustice of bourgeois society. This is evidently the role played by the child in Sergei Eisenstein’s film October (Oktiabr’) of 1927. Subsequently, the child’s image was widely reproduced in the children’s press and appeared on the cover of Pioneer (no. 19, 1928). The film was produced to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution by re-enacting events. In Eisenstein’s two other films dedicated to the revolutionary struggle before 1917, Strike (Stachka, 1925) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925) the action culminates in pivotal scenes of dying children. Children were above all victims in the pre-revolutionary fight. October, however, featured a totally new image of the child, born with the revolution—victorious, ardent and cheerful. The young boy in October is shown energetically participating in the storming of the Winter Palace, then celebrating victory, laughing and impishly lolling on the Emperor’s throne, and, finally, peacefully sleeping on it. Eisenstein’s biographer Marie Seton has suggested that this might be a concealed self-portrait.16 The similarity to Eisenstein’s clowning (which is noted by his biographers), does not detract from the allegorical function of this child protagonist.17 First and foremost he refers to the nation’s nascent identity, its decisive victory and promising future. He reinforces what Guillaume de Syon called ‘the infantilisation of war’ and violence, which replaced the real problems of war with the suggestion of an easy victory.18 Official promotion of the child’s image focused on the first scene of the military raid, which showed the boy holding a revolver and calling out for action—as in the centre of the official poster for the film by an unknown artist (1928), or on the aforementioned cover of Pioneer. This image of the boy participating in the storming of the Winter Pal- ace epitomises the ideal Pioneer of the time—a new kind of a child, an active fighter rather than a passive victim who would be dependent on adult protection in wartime. Children’s periodicals actively propagated

16 Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography [1952] (London: Dobson, 1978), p. 96. See also Murray Sperber, ‘Eisenstein’s October’, Jump Cut, no. 14 (1977), pp. 15–22; Alexander Zholkovsky, ‘Eisenstein’s Poetics: Dialogical or Totalitarian?’, in John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experi ment (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 253. 17 Zholkovsky, ‘Eisenstein’s Poetics’, p. 252. 18 De Syon, ‘The Child and the Flying Machine’, pp. 116–33. fighting for a utopian childhood 85

Fig. 5.1 Cover of Murzilka, no. 11 (November 1925). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow. this new child. In 1925, the cover of The Drum (no. 3) portrayed a Red Army child soldier sternly approaching the viewer in the midst of an attack, apparently having witnessed, or perhaps even participated in, the killing of a White Guard soldier shown lying in the background. Child soldiers, behaving like adults, also appeared in images aimed at younger children—the so-called Little Octobrists (Oktiabriata, 7–9 years old)— whose most popular magazine was Moscow’s Murzilka (named after a fictional character). In 1925 the cover of Murzilka (no. 11) shows ranks of marching toddlers, armed, smiling and calling out to join older Pioneers (Fig. 5.1). At first glance, this image recalls First-World-War postcards, popular both in Europe and Russia, which portrayed sweet-looking little children in adult military situations. In these, the children often stood in allegorically for adults, resulting in sentimental or even humorous renderings of war themes.19 In contrast, the Soviet imagery suggested

19 Mark Levitch, ‘Young Blood: Parisian Schoolgirls’ Transformation of France’s Great War Poster’, in Pearl James, ed., Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), p. 161; and George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1991), pp. 126–44. 86 maria starkova-vindman the possibility that the child might actually perform the action shown. This shift from infantilising brutal reality in a humorous image to adding seriousness and sternness to the infantile is well illustrated by Aleksei Pakhomov’s poster To Children About the Revolution (1930, Detiam o revo liutsii). Here, an heroic image of a stern child-soldier participating in military action like an adult is represented as historical reality, intended to inspire its young audience to a similar level of endeavour and sacrifice.20 De Syon noted that during the circumstances of total war, evident in the 1914–1918 conflict, ‘the perceived divide between adulthood and childhood’ disappeared.21 The blurring of this divide characterised early images of the Pioneers, which emphasised the similarities between children and adults confronting the complete reconstruction of society. Although the general assumption was that the new world was being constructed for the sake of children, Pioneers were not represented as wholly dependent on adults, but, rather, as active fighters themselves. Because the motif of military struggle encompassed the idea of a total renewal of society, it also became utilised in relation to such themes as rapid industrialisation, the ‘labour front’, and the class struggle, especially after the end of NEP and the implementation of the Five-Year Plans in 1928. Pioneers were often depicted as exemplary and ruthless fighters against the old, appealing to adults to take action against Nepmen (private entrepreneurs), kulaks (affluent peasants) and other enemies of the state.22 In the mid-1920s, the theme of the forthcoming war (including, its infantilisation and the notion of a victorious outcome) and the military role of Soviet children was presented as possessing a dual nature. On the one hand, war was described as completely undesirable and provoked

20 Arkadii Gaidar (Golikov), who at fourteen had fought for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, produced realistic accounts of children as war heroes and introduced violence as an ordinary occurance in his stories, such as ‘RVS’ [Revoliutsionnyi voennyi sovet], ‘The Revo lutionary War Council’ of 1926, and ‘School’ (Shkola, 1929–1930), originally published in October (Oktiabr’) as ‘An Ordinary Biography’ (‘Obyknovennaia biografiia’). For a discussion of Gaidar’s writings as a reflection of a ‘social traumatic neurosis’ affecting Soviet society as a whole, see Evgenii Dobrenko, ‘The School Tale in Children’s Literature of Socialist Real ism’ in Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, eds., Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 43–66. 21 De Syon, ‘The Child and the Flying Machine’, pp. 116–133. 22 The myth of Pavlik Morozov, a Pioneer martyr who denounced his father and was killed by kulaks, embodied this symbolism of the fight with the old. Yet the myth had very little in common with the actual life of the murdered Pavel. See Yuri Druzhnikov, Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Publishers, 1997); and Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta, 2005). fighting for a utopian childhood 87 by ‘bourgeois countries’ in the war-scares of 1923, 1924 and 1926–7.23 On the other, it acquired a symbolic significance and was presented as an essential, and therefore desirable, step towards the total renewal of society. In April 1923, The Drum asserted that ‘one can only achieve happiness through struggle’.24 War was compared to the ‘great bonfire of the Proletarian World Revolution’, which would cleanse the world as a prelude to establishing a socialist paradise.25 Fire was a central element of the Pioneers’ emblems and coat of arms: the five logs burning with three flames symbolised the five continents of the earth, burning with revolutionary fire under the Third International. Pioneers’ bonfires symbolised the sacred cleansing fire of the new order. In 1924, Murzilka featured Pio- neers burning icons with the following command: ‘Pioneers, build your bonfires, and burn gods on them, you are free and strong!’26 Similarly, in 1929, at the First All-Union Pioneer Rally, the Pioneers were exhorted to become ‘instigators of the world revolution buglers of the world fire’.27 The eschatological character of the future military struggle was incorporated into the early images of Pioneers. In particular, a Pioneer blowing a bugle, one of the most emblematic images of the 1920s, effectively synthesised associations with military duty (the bugle was widely used during the Civil War), socialist agitation, and apocalyptical, Christian symbolism. Overall, a Pioneer playing a bugle signified—or literally announced—the new order, which would permeate every aspect of reality. ‘The era of bright, happy years is coming!’ promised the Pioneers’ official anthem, written by Aleksandr Zharov in 1922 and frequently sung at rallies, marches and celebrations, to the accompaniment of the bugle. Images of these ‘announcers of the new’ could be regarded as resounding calls for mass mobilisation and appeals for everyone to join in the construction of the new order,

23 In 1923, a caption to an image of a tank described the future war as being prepared by the bourgeoisie. See Baraban, no. 5 (1923), unpaginated. In 1926, Lenin was reported as having ended the First World War for Russia with the words, ‘Russia will fight no more’. See M. Lidov, ‘Kak vypravliaetsia nashe khoziaistvo’, Baraban, no. 10 (1926), p. 9. For a discussion of war scares, see Adam Ulam, Expansion and Co-Existence: The His tory of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–67 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), pp. 164–167; and David R. Stone, Hammer and Rifle: The Militarisation of the Soviet Union (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 43–3; Olga Velikanova, Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s: Disenchantment of the Dreamers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), chapters 2, 3. 24 M. Stremiakov, ‘Iunye pionery’, Baraban, no. 1 (April 1923), p. 5. 25 Ibid., p. 5. 26 Murzilka, No. 5 (1924), unpaginated. For an image of a bonfire ritual, see the cover of Koster [Bonfire], no. 1 (February, 1924). 27 See. ‘Bud’te gotovy’, Pioner, no. 17 (1929) p. 13. 88 maria starkova-vindman or destruction of the old. They also served as reminders of collective duty and the individual (self-) sacrifice necessary to achieve socialism. Appropriately, one of the Pioneers’ regulations from the 1920s described the Pioneer as ‘a selfless fighter (samootverzhennyi borets) for socialism’.28 The idealisation of the Pioneers’ image as an ardent warrior is also evident in the first theoretical postulates of the organisation, approved by the Central Committee of the Komsomol in the course of 1923.29 Written in the present tense, the texts describe a Pioneer as an already existing ideal, rather than as an individual approaching that ideal or expected to approach that ideal in the future.30 In addition, the Pioneers’ rules were labelled as ‘laws and customs’ (zakony i obychai) thus presenting the regulations not as a guide to behaviour, but as an account of something already existing and ‘customary’. Characteristically, the version of ‘the Pio- neers’ laws and customs’ from 27 September 1923 included the following description: A pioneer is healthy, capable of great endurance [vynosliv] and never loses spirit. [Law No. 6]. Pioneers do everything by themselves. They can work under all circumstances, and find ways out of all difficult situations. [Custom No. 5]. A pioneer has an alert eye [zorkii glaz], and acute hearing [tonkii slukh]. He is observant, listens attentively, and records accurately. [Custom No. 12].31 Custom No. 12 alluded to the Pioneers’ military ‘alertness’ and their ability to inform on ‘enemies of the state’. It also attributed to them exceptional physical qualities, such as enormous physical strength and excellent health, which were expected from the New Soviet person and were reflected in the visual representations of Pioneers at the time. For instance, Vladimir Konashevich’s poster We are Young Leninists of 1925, promoting the Pio- neer movement, shows a Pioneer boy, who is unnaturally muscular for his young age. These characteristics correspond vividly to the abilities ascribed to the new positive revolutionary hero propagated in Bolshevik

28 Cited in Deti v iskusstve. Katalog vystavki zhivopisi, risunka, kino-foto, poligrafii i skulp tury na temu: zhizn’ i byt detei Sovetskogo soiuza (Moscow: Glaviskusstvo, 1929), p. 12. 29 See Papers of the Central Committee Bureau of the Russian Komsomol (Rossiskii Kommunisticheskii Soiuz Molodezhi—RKSM), 28 August 1923, 27 September 1923 and 6 December 1923, cited in A.V. Fedulova ed., Vseosoiuznaia pionerskaia organizatsiia imeni V.I. Lenina. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1981), pp. 24–5. 30 See also Svetlana Leont’eva, ‘Pioner—vsem rebiatam primer’, Otechestvennye zapiski, (Moscow), no. 3 (2004), pp. 249–59, here p. 251. 31 Cited in Fedulova, Vseosoiuznaia pionerskaia organizatsiia, pp. 24–5. fighting for a utopian childhood 89 rhetoric and literature, which Katerina Clark has convincingly related to the qualities of the Russian fairy-tale hero bogatyr’ (knight-errant).32 The eschatological quality of the Pioneers’ image indicated that the Pioneers realised that the construction of the new life would inevitably be accompanied by violence and the destruction of the old. Texts in Pio- neers’ journals emphasised the horror and bloodshed of the war and revolution, which the Pioneers’ fathers and older brothers in the Komsomol had had to endure and which justified the need for violence.33 The Pio- neers’ neckerchief was red to symbolise that it was ‘soaked with the blood of hundreds and thousands of fighters’ and that Pioneers were willing ‘to die, to bear sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of . . . Bolshevism’.34 A certain sadistic discourse was even present in magazines aimed at the Little Octobrists. One illustrated story entitled ‘Little Sparrows’ showed how a ‘collective’ of little birds can ruthlessly and effectively attack their biggest enemy—a cat.35 Another image from 1924, features death cap mushrooms on their way to fight the bourgeoisie. The illustration was placed on the magazine’s inner cover and was only accompanied by a short rhyme: ‘We are going, we are going, we will destroy all the bourgeois’. The original folk tale, The War of the Mushrooms, described the hierarchy of mushrooms, in which the most valued edible mushroom variety was compared to those brave warriors ready to fight in a war. The representation of poisonous mushrooms in their place literally inverted this hierarchy (‘those who were nothing, shall be everything!’), but also resulted in a rather ambiguous comparison of the fierce lowest class with something traditionally seen as vile and unpleasant. While alluding to military preparedness, the illustration also evokes the notion of chemical warfare, which often appeared in publications for children, and was integrated into the representation as something both to be feared from the enemy, and celebrated if directed against that enemy.

32 For instance, Gleb Korotkov, the hero of Fedor Gladkov’s novel Cement (1925), knows ‘everyone and everything’ and finds his way around all obstacles. See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2000, 3rd ed.), pp. 73–7. 33 For an example of this rhetoric, see Stremiakov, ‘Iunye pionery’, Baraban, no. 1 (April 1923), pp. 4–5; and Bukharin, ‘Iunym lenintsam’, Baraban, no. 10 (May 1926), p. 1. 34 Cited respectively in Pionerskaia simvolika (Vytegra, 1937), p. 4, and ‘Bud’te gotovy!’, Pioner, no. 17 (1929), p. 13. For other examples of the sadistic discourse in post- revolutionary children’s literature, see Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revo lutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books, trans. Jane Ann Miller (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999), pp. 81–4. 35 Murzilka, no. 3 (1924), unpaginated. 90 maria starkova-vindman

The motif of militaristic play, central to children’s imagery and the Pioneers’ periodicals, contributed to the need of the new revolutionary culture to make violence appear pleasing and acceptable. A photograph of a pre-school-age boy aiming a rifle was reproduced in the magazine Pioneer in 1925, as a humorous image to encourage children to subscribe to the periodical.36 Another version of the same scene, published in 1925 in Murzilka, was accompanied by a poem, which encouraged children to behave rather cruelly towards animals in anticipation of joining the Red Army and receiving ‘a real rifle’—despite the fact that cruelty towards animals, outside the militaristic context, was generally censured in texts for children.37 The notion that games must be educational became more prominent in 1927 with the advent of the Union of Societies of Assistance to the Defence and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR (Soiuz obshchestv sodeistviia oborone i aviatsionno-khimicheskomu stroitel’stvu SSSR—OSOAVIAKhIM), which was intended to prepare reserves for the armed forces. As a result, war games—a traditional pastime for many children—were used by the state as part of an extensive campaign to organise physical and military training for children, especially Pioneers. Images of children shooting, taking aim, or wearing gas masks promoted such training, rather than actual games (Fig. 5.2). On the other hand, real war games played by younger children were presented as a new aspect of Soviet life and were firmly integrated into mythologised accounts of Red Army victories during the Civil War. Children were expected to re-enact the Red Army’s battles against the Whites, and were given guidelines and pseudo-historical accounts in magazines in order to enable them to do this.38 Such games did not merely re-enact the past, they also envisioned the future, and so children were encouraged to play as if they were both historic fighters, as well as potential real ones (Fig. 5.3). Girls, too, were regarded as future fighters, and were often shown enjoying military games and training alongside boys. A 1939 cover of Pioneer (no. 8) designed by Iuvenalii Korovin, then a student of Vladimir Favorskii

36 The photograph was posed, but was cited as an example of photo-journalism in Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1926), p. 71. 37 Bobka is still shooting from a wooden rifle At Sharik’s nose and at sparrows; But once you are in the Red Army You will need a real rifle For the power of workers and peasants. Murzilka, no. 7 (1925), p. 5. 38 A detailed scenario for a ‘mass Pioneers’ game’, entitled ‘The Fight with Makhno’, was published in 1925. See ‘Bor’ba s Makhno’, Vozhatyi, no. 12 (1925), pp. 24–5. See also a cartoon illustrating such games, in Pioner, no. 4 (1928), inner cover. fighting for a utopian childhood 91

Fig. 5.2 Cover of Murzilka, no. 4–5 (April–May 1931). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow.

Fig. 5.3 Cover of Ezh, no. 2 (1928). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow. 92 maria starkova-vindman

Fig. 5.4 Cover of Pioneer, no. 8 (1939). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow. and Konstantin Istomin, portrayed such an ideal new Soviet girl (Fig. 5.4). Holding a rifle, she is looking down on the viewer and appears firm and self-assured, as if aware of her power. The title of the painting—A Young Voroshilov Sharpshooter (Iunyi voroshilovskii strelok)—refers to the award for shooting given since 1932, but it is in the masculine gender, revealing the very male nature of this ideal. This theme also occasionally produced images of rather unnatural combinations of idealised girls and military motifs, such as the plump female toddler in a pretty dress playing with a rifle in Vladimir Lebedev’s watercolour design for a 1930 (no. 6) cover of Chizh (Siskin, but also an abbreviation for Chresvychaino interestnyi zhurnal-Extraordinarily interesting journal, Fig. 5.5). Equally bizarre is the photograph of tentatively smiling peasant girls taking aim, reproduced in 1938 on the cover of The Soviet Photograph (Sovetskoe foto, no. 5–6). The threat of foreign invasion became a major concern and was reflected in Soviet periodicals of the late 1930s. Alarming photographs showing the armed children of fascist organisations, such as the Italian Balilla, as well as members of the alleged anti-Soviet Boy Scout organisation, were represented as a negative model and used to mobilise Soviet children, encouraging them to learn how to fight and prepare themselves for fighting for a utopian childhood 93

Fig. 5.5 Cover of Chizh, no. 6 (1930). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow. 94 maria starkova-vindman war. The theme of surveillance included suspicion towards internal enemies—an area in which children were represented as exemplary fighters who were capable of exposing masked saboteurs, as shown in Sergei Tre- tiakov’s children’s book The Harvest Patrol (Dozornye urozhaia) of 1934.39 By the end of the First Five-Year Plan, children’s periodicals were emphasising the need to overcome individual anxieties and fears in order to serve the collective cause, and were beginning once again to promote the absolute fearlessness of Pioneers.40 A poem on the back cover of Chizh in 1932 combined a fearsome subject with a jolly manifestation of bravery: The enemy will cover us in gas, But their gas does not scare us Immediately we turn ourselves To our machinery and masks.41 While the literary material in children’s magazines often stressed the exemplary Soviet child’s willingness to die for the USSR, images of children also had to show them joyful and happy, even when confronted by war. In the early and mid 1920s, Pioneers were described as always happy and ‘never losing their spirit’, while by the mid to late 1930s, nearly all Soviet children were expected to join the Pioneer organisation and therefore to possess the positive qualities of exemplary Soviet heroes. Images of Soviet children, therefore, had to combine expressions of joy and happiness with visual indications that they were willing to die for the Soviet cause. A sculpture of a boy with a rifle by Zinovii Vilenskii, entitled A Future Warrior (1938), was criticised for not expressing ‘enough health and happiness, characteristic of [Soviet] children’.42 Children began to be identified as the New Soviet citizens, who were already experiencing socialism and enjoying a happy childhood, which had been secured for them by the government. This corresponded with Stalin’s proclamation of the successful reconstruction of Soviet society at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, known as the ‘Congress of the Victors’, and held in Moscow in 1934. It also complemented the tenets of Socialist Realism, enunciated at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, also 1934) and conceived to reflect these positive changes.

39 Sergei Tret’iakov, Dozornye urozhaia (Moscow: Detizdat, 1934). 40 An appeal for Pioneers to participate in work expeditions for the Five-Year Plans, published in a 1932 issue of The Journal for Collective Farm Children described Pioneers as being not afraid of anything in ‘the struggle for the victory of socialism’. See V. Gubarev, ‘Iunye razvedchiki piatiletki’, Zhurnal kolkhoznykh rebiat, no. 14 (1932), p. 7. 41 Anon., ‘Gotovy k oborone’, Chizh, nos. 9–10, (1932), back cover. 42 Anon., ‘Po masterskim khudozhnikov’, Tvorchestvo, no. 6 (1938), p. 3. fighting for a utopian childhood 95

Fig. 5.6 Samuil Adlivankin, The Red Army is Unbeatable, illustrated in Tvorchestvo, no. 9 (1934). Courtesy of the Russian State Library, Moscow.

Such an optimistic view of the future presumed that the Soviet Union would win the forthcoming war, and this was also reflected in children’s games, as a manifestation of ‘military preparedness’ and the power of the Red Army.43 For instance, a text in the art journal Creative Work (Tvorchestvo) in 1934, concerning toys, rather bizarrely praised a set of toy soldiers for reflecting the concept of military preparedness in the right way, so that ‘in every second [of the game] the Red Army can be prepared for military action’.44 Children’s ‘military preparedness’ became a frequent image in the propaganda to join OSOAVIAKhIM, in which the New Soviet child was often employed as an example to adults.45 In contrast to earlier representations of children teaching adults, images from the 1930s no longer alluded to the prospect of a bright and happy future, but focused on preserving the present under the looming threat of war. The early revolutionary ethos had concentrated on the ability of adults (as well as the entire world) to be reborn through the revolution and to become ‘younger’. In the 1930s, however, children were often reminded that they would become older and join adults in their military duty. Characteristically, when describing the concept of his painting entitled The Red Army is Unbeatable (1932, Fig. 5.6), the artist Samuil Adlivankin noted that, despite the central presence of a child in the work, he should not be considered ‘an artist of

43 The apogee of this idealised view of readiness and invincibility of the Soviet army was reached in Efim Dzigan’s film If War Comes Tomorrow (Esli zavtra voina) of 1938. 44 D.T. ‘Khudozhnik i igrushka’, Tvorchestvo, no. 9 (1934), unpaginated. 45 See, for instance, Innokentii Zhukov’s sculpture of a girl, entitled I am Already an OSO Aviakhim Member. And What About You? reproduced in Zhenskii zhurnal, no. 2 (1929), p. 1. 96 maria starkova-vindman children’ (detskii khudozhnik).46 He explained: ‘the child in my work is a potential member of the army of labour and defence’, ‘the guarantor of its invincibility’.47 This corresponded well with Stalin’s ideal of a total unity (smychka) between the populace and the army that would ensure military invincibility.48 Images of children welcoming adult soldiers or tanks illustrated this slogan.49 By the late 1930s, the ultimate source of youth for the Soviet person was now associated with Stalin himself, rather than with the Revolution. This is evident from a letter purporting to be by a female collective farm worker, published in Red Siberian Woman (Krasnaia Sibiriachka) in 1937 (but probably composed by a professional contributor since it adhered completely to the formulaic ‘master plot’ of Socialist Realism).50 The letter was entitled ‘The Damned Past’ and described the harsh living conditions that the woman had endured before the revolution. ‘My new, real life, full of joy and content, began again in 1930 when I joined the collective farm (kolkhoz)’ she asserted, omitting entirely the first thirteen post- revolutionary years from her story. The letter described how she worked full-time with her husband on the kolkhoz, named appropriately ‘On the Way to Socialism’, and how she was also responsible for taking care of her household, looking after ‘a cow, a heifer, pigs, sheep and chickens’ and raising her five children. She emphasised that ‘with great joy, [she] had sent her elder son to serve in the Red Army, asking him strictly to defend our socialist motherland with vigilance’. The letter concluded with the statement ‘I am 42 years old, but I feel young and cheerful. This youthful- ness and cheerfulness are instilled by our dearly beloved leader of the people, comrade Stalin, who, just like a mother cares for her child, cares for us collective farm workers.’51 By the late 1930s, the early post-revolutionary image of the country’s new young citizen as a vigorous, confident and apparently parentless young person (ready to seize ‘the entire world for oneself’ as stated in the

46 A.L.G., ‘Khudozhniki i deti’, Tvorchestvo, no. 9 (1934), unpaginated. The painting was renamed by the Soviet exhibition committee as A Visit to the Tank Drivers, to which the artist objected, as quoted in the article. 47 A.L.G., ‘Khudozhniki i deti’, Tvorchestvo, no. 9 (1934), unpaginated. 48 I.V. Stalin, ‘O trekh osobennostiakh krasnoi armii’ in I.V. Stalin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1946), vol. 11, p. 22. 49 See, for instance, Ekaterina Zernova’s painting, Collective Farmers Greeting a Tank (1927); and cover Murzilka, no. 2 (1938). 50 Ekaterina Pavlovna Iarmonova, ‘O prokliatom proshlom’, Krasnaia sibiriachka, no. 19–20, (October 1937), p. 21. 51 Ibid., p. 21. fighting for a utopian childhood 97 afore-cited poem of 1919), had been replaced by the image of a dutiful and obedient child, now fully under the authority of the ‘father of the Soviet people’. The militaristic theme had also lost its initial metaphorical association with the total transformation of society and the utopian future, and had become the embodiment of the country’s collective duty in the present, as it confronted the prospect of a real war.52

52 For details of how the Second World War actually affected children, see Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially chapter 1.

Chapter six

Spectral Geographies in Russian Émigré Prose: The Cases of Petr Krasnov and Georgii Peskov

Muireann Maguire

The first wave of émigré writers to leave Russia after the 1917 Revolution invented a spectral geography of their nation—a map assembled from the wistfully utopian, occasionally dystopian, world of memory.1 Exiled writers of all nationalities often choose to fictionalise themselves, re- inscribing their own identity in order to assimilate within their adopted homeland. Yet the writers of the first wave of the Russian emigration rarely altered their own pasts; indeed, the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, Gaito Gazdanov and others almost obsessively re-iterates the semi-autobiographical adventures of insubstantially differentiated alter egos.2 Rather than rewriting self, these authors fictionalised their homeland, memorial- ising past experience while subtly, inevitably, and not always consciously transforming it. The émigré writer’s effort to re-imagine his or her lost homeland functions, of course, as an allegory for any diegetic excursion; similarly, the act of emigration is a trope for our common human transition from life to afterlife. The neatly arranged and perfectly unusable items that Sergei Dovlatov packed in his eponymous suitcase, as related in The Suitcase (Chemodan, 1986), just before emigrating from Soviet Rus- sia to New York, recall scale-model grave-goods arrayed on the shelves of Ancient Egyptian tombs. Exile, ironically enough, is irresistibly unheimlich (uncanny). There are numerous studies devoted to exile in literature; it has become ‘a privileged trope migrating through the Western cultural

1 The first wave of Russian emigration occurred between approximately 1917 and 1925. It included such well-known authors as Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Tolstoi, Ivan Shmelev and eventually Maxim Gorky, as well as the then-unknown Gaito Gazdanov and Vladimir Nabokov. 2 According to Leonid Livak, where self-fictionalisation occurred, it tended to concern exiles’ depiction of their overseas existence as more culturally isolated or economically deprived than it actually was. He lists numerous agonised ‘émigré Hamlets’ whose ‘claims to artistic isolation’ are riddled with contradictions. See Leonid Livak, How It Was Done In Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (Madison, WS.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 43. 100 muireann maguire imaginary’.3 In the following pages, I will borrow Svetlana Boym’s categories of restorative and reflective nostalgia to discuss fiction by two relatively neglected Russian émigré authors, Petr Krasnov and Georgii Peskov, in order to argue my own point—that the nostalgic reflection of homeland in exile literature creates neither utopia nor dystopia, but a haunted, spectral geography that undermines both. Boym’s double categorisation of nostalgia (evolved from her earlier dichotomy of utopian and ironic nostalgia)4 is based upon Russian twentieth-century experience of exile, homesickness, and return. Restor- ative nostalgia, the successor to utopian nostalgia and the would-be successor to utopia itself, ‘proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total recon- structions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and time’.5 Since restorative nostalgia concentrates upon the rediscovery of origins and the reconstruction of interrupted tradition, it can be distorted by political interests to create fanaticism and prejudice, or be manipulated by association with an invented heritage. Thus, while claiming to ‘restore’ what was lost, this variety of nostalgia actually provides a sub- stitute, a cuckoo in the nest of memory. In the process of reconstruction, the original memory—and thus the imaginary topography of home—is profoundly transformed and distorted. My exemplar of restorative nostalgia at work in Russian émigré fiction is Petr Nikolaevich Krasnov’s novel Beyond the Thistle (Za chertopolokhom, Berlin, 1922),6 a vision of post- revolutionary Russia, reinvented in an authentically nineteenth-century spirit of monarchist nationalism. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, is a much more passive affair: rather than recreating an idealised past in the indefinite future, it provides a simulacrum of the irrevocably forsaken. As such, it foregrounds ‘longing

3 Barbara Straumann, Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov (Edinburgh: Edin burgh University Press, 2008), p. 17. See also Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagi nation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). 4 Boym suggests that utopian nostalgia ‘puts the emphasis on the return to that mythi cal place’, and is therefore typically ideological and collective; whereas ironic nostalgia ‘acknowledges the displacement of the mythical place without trying to rebuild it’. See Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 284. These categories map onto her later concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia respectively. 5 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41. 6 All dates are for first publication in Russian, where applicable. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 101 and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’;7 it is the primary type of nostalgia expressed in such novels as Nabokov’s Mary (Mashen’ka, 1926), Bunin’s Dark Avenues (Temnye allei, 1937–46), Shmelev’s The Sun of the Dead (Sol’ntse mertvykh, 1923), Gazdanov’s An Evening with Claire (Vecher u Kler, 1930) or his The Ghost of Aleksandr Volf (Prizrak Aleksandra Vol’fa, 1947). Naturally, over-indulgence in such reflective evocations of Russia’s imperial idyll risk becoming twee and insubstantial, as Nabokov liked to demonstrate satirically. The latter’s eponymous, melancholic Pnin (Pnin, 1957), when stranded in Paris after the Revolution, is forced to endure the eloquence of ubiquitous ‘young émigré poets, who had left Russia in their pale, unpampered pubescence, [who] chanted nostalgic elegies dedicated to a country that could be little more to them than a sad stylised toy, a bauble found in the attic, a crystal globe which you shake to make a soft luminous snowstorm inside over a minuscule fir tree and a log cabin of papier mâché’.8 Nabokov’s naked contempt for the supposed sterility of reflective nostalgia, as expressed in this and similar passages, explains why so many of his novels, following Mary and particularly after he began writing in English, became deliberate exercises in restorative memory. Examples include the totalitarian parody of Bend Sinister (1947), the entire extended metaphor of Pale Fire’s ‘Zembla’ (1962), the steam punk-ish retropia of Ada, or Ardour (1969),9 and the exile’s cautious return in Look at the Harlequins! (1974).10 Yet Nabokov underestimated the power of reflective nostalgia to challenge and even condemn the homeland it ideally evoked; Georgii Peskov’s short stories, discussed below, demonstrate the subtly destructive power of this type of nostalgic literature.

7 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 4. 8 Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 45. 9 I owe the term ‘retropia’ to A.N. Shushpanov, ‘A.V. Chaianov i utopia 1920-kh godov: problema zhanra’ in V.N. Makogoniuk, ed., Potaennaia literature . . . Issledovaniia i mate rialy. Prilozhenie k vypusku 2 (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2000), pp. 74–80, (p. 77). 10 In debunking as ‘obvious’ any description of Pnin as ‘a gradual, visionary restoration of the past’, Barabtarlo argues that Nabokov defined time as merely ‘a powerful paradigm of mind outside of which mind can retain its sanity no more than a compass its purpose at the pole’. Nabokov’s novels offer their readers the ‘exquisite pleasure’ of being able to ‘check the accuracy of a character’s memory and study its aberrations’. In other words, novels that purportedly offer portraits of nostalgia are really designed as miniature studies in mis-remembering. See Gene Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin (Ann Arbor, MI.: Ardis, 1989), pp. 26–7. 102 muireann maguire

Krasnov’s Restored Russian Imperium

Ataman Petr Nikolaevich Krasnov was a firebrand Slav nationalist and Cossack general who emigrated from Russia in 1919, only to return at the head of the Wehrmacht’s Cossack division during the Second World War (his hatred of Bolshevism having overridden any distrust of Nazism). In 1945, he was captured by the British forces in Austria, handed back to the Soviets for sentencing, and finally hanged as a traitor in Moscow in 1947. Krasnov spent the inter-war years in France and Berlin, making a respect- able living from his novels, mostly historical works glorifying the Russian Empire. He became well known for his wish-fulfilment blockbusters about the fall of communist rule and the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, of which the most fantastic—and the most successful—was Beyond the Thistle (Za chertopolokhom, 1922). Krasnov’s intention with this book was both declamatory and denunciatory: he tried to extol the vitality of the Russian imperial ethos by rebuilding utopia on the ruins of the Bolshevik experiment. Yet even Krasnov’s utopia was undermined by its spectral contradictions. Beyond the Thistle describes a second-generation émigré’s return, forty years after the First World War, to an irretrievably altered homeland. The novel was begun at the beginning of the Civil War, in parallel with his realist epic From The Two-Headed Eagle to The Red Flag (Ot dvuglavogo orla k krasnomu znameni, 1921).11 In 1946, Krasnov admitted to his interrogators that in this latter novel, ‘I slandered Lenin, the leader of the revolution, and the Soviet writer Gorky’.12 Krasnov could certainly not have disguised or denied the anti-Bolshevik attitude maintained throughout Beyond the Thistle. The book’s historical premise is based upon the utter failure of the Revolution and the subsequent decimation of the Russian population by famine, disease and strife. Forty years after 1917, maps of the world show Russia as an uninhabited blot. The country’s borders are blocked by an impenetrable hedge of tall thistles. Other European nations assume that only desolation lies ‘beyond the thistle’. Peter Korenev, a young artist born to Russian émigrés in Germany, sees a strange and wonderful vision one night in Potsdam. A beautiful dark-haired, white-robed girl floats into

11 B. Galenin, ‘Zhizn’, tvorchestvo, smert’ i bessmertie. Biograficheskoe predislovie’ in Petr Nikolaevich Krasnov, Za chertopolokhom: roman—fentezi (Moscow: Fabor-XXI, 2002), pp. 5–57 (p. 52). 12 Cited by Aleksandr Smirnov, Ataman Krasnov (St Petersburg: AST, 2003), p. 198. All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise indicated. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 103 view on a cloud, then disappears, leaving Korenev in a state of transcendent joy and considerable confusion: ‘The joy did not leave him. “Why this joy?” Korenev thought to himself, and answered: “This is Russia . . . I have seen Russia” ’.13 When she appears again, she addresses him by the Rus- sian version of his first name, and Peter convinces himself: Oh! Whatever she might be—a ghost, a dream, even death itself, he knew that she was Russia, that she came from Russia. He would ask her how and what life was like there, and she would speak the enchanted word to him, she would tell him, that he too had a Motherland . . .14 Finally, a mysterious note in a feminine hand materialises on his bedside table, with the words, ‘I am waiting’.15 Peter hesitates no longer. Aided by his former professor (a confirmed Slavophil), Peter’s German girlfriend, Elsa, and several nostalgic, second-generation émigrés, he leads an expedition ‘beyond the thistle’. Here, an enormous surprise awaits them. As in another utopian novel written during the early Bolshevik period, Alek- sandr Chaianov’s Journey of My Brother Aleksei into the Land of Peasant Utopia (Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest’ianskoi utopii, 1920), Russia has transformed itself into a utopia of a peculiar type—a retropia, or a return to the past. In Krasnov’s rewritten history of Russia, during the Bolshevik revolution, the fifteen-year-old Romanov heir took refuge in northern China, where Tibetan mystics instructed him in supernatural mysteries. Once the revolutionary chaos had subsided, the crown prince returned to Rus- sia, escorted by loyal troops, to initiate a benign autocracy, founded upon the triad of conservative, authoritarian nineteenth-century values inaugurated under Nicholas I: religious orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost’ (national consciousness). Russia thus re-emerged as a feudal paradise with an agricultural economy. Forgotten by the rest of the world, she freely found her own path. The only major technical innovations made were in broadcasting (used for propaganda), transport (by aeroplane), and thought-reading (used by judicial courts to convict criminals). The arrival of Korenev’s group from Western Europe stimulates Russia’s return to international prominence. Krasnov’s hopeful implication is that Russia will once again influence events and perhaps inspire other countries to

13 Pavel Nikolaevich Krasnov, Za chertopolokhom. Fantasticheskii roman (Berlin: Diakov, 1922), p. 13. 14 Ibid., p. 16. 15 Ibid., p. 19. 104 muireann maguire become benevolent autocracies. Korenev’s beautiful phantom turns out to be a living girl, Crown Princess Radost’ Mikhailovna, who exploited Oriental mystic techniques to project her image into Berlin and lure him to Russia. Although they fall in love, the princess is obliged to renounce marriage to him, or to any other man. She is consecrated to her role as an unchangingly beautiful, virginal symbol of Russia. In this sense, she really is a phantom: an untouchable ‘living icon’ epitomising in her own body Russia’s unchanging tradition. Like several other fantastically predicated émigré novels of the same period, Krasnov’s novel is ‘a dream of the losers’,16 of those permanently exiled by the Revolution. It blatantly places the recreation of past culture above the Soviets’ radical utopianism: even Korenev’s surname implies the importance of roots (from the Russian word for root koren’). When Korenev and his companions return to their Russian homeland, expecting to find devastation, they discover that Russia’s renaissance has occurred without their help. The nation has returned to its own idealised origins— yet this pre-lapsarian state is clearly unsustainable. In fact, as Krasnov’s biographer notes, the tsarist retropia is very close to becoming a ‘devilish parody’ of a dictatorship such as Stalin’s Russia.17 It is clear that Krasnov identified personally with the authoritarian hierarchy of his invented Rus- sia. His favourite phrase was, reportedly, ‘I am a tsarist general’.18 Nor did the historical contradictions of Beyond the Thistle deter readers—it was the most popular of all Krasnov’s novels.19 The fictional Tsar’s strategies for enlightened autocracy—mind-reading, thought projection, the ideological indoctrination of schoolchildren, and strict censorship—oddly parallel the policies of Stalin’s totalitarian regime, which Krasnov supposedly intended to defy. In fact, this restored Russian utopia—over which both Krasnov and his characters wax nostalgic—is implicitly rendered by its uncanny and fantastic qualities into dystopia, the mirror of its opposite.

16 See, for example, Pavel Perov, Bratstvo Viia (The Brotherhood of Vii, 1925), another anti-Bolshevik fantasy. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 187. 17 Galenin, ‘Zhizn’, tvorchestvo, smert’ i bessmertie’, p. 56. 18 Ibid., p. 48. 19 Ibid., p. 52. For a discussion of Za chertopolokhom and its influence on other émigré writers, especially Eduard Limonov, see Andrei Rogatchevski, A Biographical and Criti cal Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press, 2003), pp. 53–72. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 105

Reflective Nostalgia and Georgii Peskov

Georgii Peskov, whose fiction forms my literary model for reflective nostalgia, was the pseudonym of Elena Al’bertovna Deisha, née Repman (1885–1977), a Moscow-born author of short fiction who emigrated in 1924 and spent the rest of her long life in Paris. Peskov, who published regularly in prestigious Russian-language émigré journals like The Link (Zveno) and Contemporary Notes (Sovremennye zapiski) wrote numerous stories combining a realistic, usually immediately pre- or post-revolutionary Russian setting with supernatural, quasi-Hoffmannesque themes.20 Where Kras- nov’s Beyond the Thistle portrays an ideal future, Peskov’s tales, written between 1925 and the outbreak of the Second World War, are simultaneously more realistic and more explicitly spectral. The only extended Eng- lish-language study of her fiction quotes the Russian critic Gleb Struve’s judgement that Peskov was an early exponent of ‘magical realism’.21 Three stories from Peskov’s early (and most supernaturally inclined) period provide an effective ‘map’ of her spectral geography. All are set in provincial Russia, between 1914 and the mid-1920s. In each case, the plot relies on a journey effected outside the narrative frame. Chronologically, ‘The Mes- senger’ (‘Gonets’, 1925), one of Peskov’s first published stories, is the earliest of the three, followed by ‘The Woman with no Nose’ (‘Kurnosaia’, 1927) and ‘The Best Friend’ (‘Kum’, 1929).22 ‘The Messenger’, which received the fiction prize of the Russian émigré journal The Link in 1925, describes an elderly couple living in

20 To put Peskov’s publications in context, consider Marc Raeff’s comment that Contemporary Notes (Sovremennye zapiski) was ‘clearly the most significant and respected thick journal of Russia Abroad’, while the less intellectual, more socially orientated Illustrated Russia (Illustrirovannaia Rossiia, to which she also frequently contributed) ‘was widely read, and although overtly non-political, displayed sympathy for the monarchical past’. See Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 86 and 90. 21 Margaret Dalton, ‘The Art of Georgij Peskov’, in T. Beer and N.W. Ingham eds., Mnemozina (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974), pp. 78–87. This article provides an excel lent overview of Peskov’s only novel and two short-story collections, including commen taries on ‘The Messenger’ and ‘The Woman with no Nose’. For the most comprehensive account of Peskov/Deisha’s life, see the entry in. L. Mnukhin, M. Avril, and V. Losskaia, eds., Rossiiskoe zarubezh’e vo Frantsii 1919–2000. Biograficheskii slovar’, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 2008), p. 467. 22 For the texts of ‘The Messenger’ and ‘The Woman with no Nose’ used here, see Georgii Peskov, Pamiati tvoei (Paris: Sovremennye zapiski’, 1930), pp. 27–36 and 61–69 respectively. The text of ‘Kum’ is from O.R. Demidova, ed., My. Zhenskaia proza russkoi emigratsii (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2003), pp. 402–413. 106 muireann maguire isolation and poverty on the remnant of their provincial estate. The setting is familiar from Shmelev and Boris Zaitsev’s fiction of the same period. The old couple’s son was last heard of fighting for the Whites in the Civil War; their sole remaining friend is the local Orthodox priest. In spite of the latter’s admonitions, the two old people regularly experiment with automatic writing, using a planchette to communicate with deceased relatives and neighbours. The narrator-heroine, Maria Stepanovna, is emotionally reliant upon the often garbled messages they receive, experiencing both comfort and suspense because their son Gleb has never communicated with them by this means. Then one night a spirit identifying itself as a ‘messenger’ and a ‘blessing’ tells them that they will soon have good news about ‘Glebushka’. Later that same night, they receive a visit from a young man in the uniform of a White-Army lieutenant, who identifies himself as Serikov, claiming to have served in the same regiment as their son. The young lieutenant appears unnaturally pale and emaciated, but he refuses their hospitality. He looked dreadful, just as if he hadn’t eaten for days. Where his cheeks should have been were hollows; the skin clung to his jawbone. His nose and his long-unshaven chin were bluish-grey. His eyes seemed to have fallen in, and they stared motionlessly at a single point. ‘You don’t look well at all.’ ‘I have typhus,’ he said indifferently. ‘What? Typhus! Good Lord, how did they ever let you go?’ ‘I was sent,’ he corrected me. ‘This is terrible! You must rest straightaway, and I’ll try to fetch the doctor.’ ‘There’s no need. What are you thinking of? The doctor can’t help, and I certainly can’t stay. Allow me to pass on what I was sent to tell, and I’ll be off.’ ‘There’s no way I’m letting you leave!’ ‘It stands to reason, it’s impossible,’ Aleksandr Glebovich supported me. ‘At least stay until morning. Apart from anything else, you need to be cautious. I’m amazed how you managed, in that uniform . . .’ ‘Now I can travel in any uniform I wish.’ ‘You’re mistaken. If you came from that place . . .’ ‘That’s precisely why I can.’ ‘They’ll arrest you immediately. It’s strange they haven’t arrested you yet.’ ‘Let them try!’ He laughed contemptuously, but with a note of bitterness. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 107

‘We must unpick those epaulettes,’ Aleksandr Glebovich persisted. Our guest made an impatient gesture. ‘Trust me, it won’t matter.’23 This exchange is almost comic for the reader: Peskov ironically contrasts well-worn spectral motifs (the guest’s indifference to his own health, his impatience, and ambiguous statements) with the naïve literality of the elderly couple. The misunderstanding centres on the phrase ‘from that place’ (ottuda); Aleksandr Glebovich uses this expression to refer ellip- tically to some distant White Army barracks (and hence the possibility that Serikov will be shot on sight if captured in uniform), while Serikov, exploiting the ambiguity, uses the same phrase to mean the after-life he has already entered. Similarly, the old couple assume he has been ‘sent’ by military superiors, whereas Serikov clearly has in mind unnamed noume- nal powers. The ‘messenger’ fulfils his task by passing on the good news that Gleb is safe and well, recently evacuated from Simferopol during the White Army retreat; he then abruptly takes his leave. Maria Stepanovna later writes to a nurse whose name Serikov mentioned, receiving a rather puzzled response. By combining the nurse’s story with Serikov’s, Maria Stepanovna re-assembles the pieces of a love triangle. Both her son and Serikov had loved the nurse; the men had quarrelled; although the nurse preferred Gleb, her sense of duty made her refuse the chance of flee- ing Russia with him for safety abroad. Instead, she remained behind in Simferopol to nurse the fever-stricken Serikov. The letter adds, ‘But as for what you write about Lieutenant Serikov, there is plainly some misunderstanding. Lieutenant Serikov died of typhoid fever in my hospital on the very same night that our forces left’.24 Peskov raises this short story from the merely generic through the use of ironic contrast. Of the three main living characters (the old couple and the priest), Maria Stepanovna represents the ‘ideal’ spectator of the spectral; she retrospectively interprets and believes the signs of a ghostly visitation. The two men, however, are aggressively sceptical. They become convinced that the visitor was either a White-Army deserter or a Bolshevik spy—or possibly both—sent to discover information about Gleb’s whereabouts or his family’s political sympathies. Paradoxically, they use the very signs of Serikov’s spectrality (the impossibility of his journey

23 Peskov, ‘Gonets’, in Pamiati tvoei, pp. 31–2. This translation was first published as ‘The Messenger’ in Red Spectres: Russian Twentieth-century Gothic-fantastic Tales, ed. and trans. Muireann Maguire (London: Angel Classics, 2012), pp. 191–2. 24 Peskov, ‘Gonets’, p. 35; ‘The Messenger’, in Red Spectres, p. 194. 108 muireann maguire on a winter’s night, the lack of footprints on the snow, his ambiguous, elusive speech, the proof of his death in Simferopol) as evidence that he was in fact a very real impostor. Both typhoid fever and the theme of flight from the Bolsheviks recur in ‘The Woman with no Nose’, where the hero, Andrei, although already infected with typhus, is attempting to escape southwards on the last train to the Crimea. He constantly sees, or hallucinates, a hideous female face resembling a ‘noseless woman’ from his childhood nightmares.25 As he makes his plans to leave—assembling money, passport, and ticket—his visions of the woman become more detailed and more intimate, until—as he is actually boarding the train—he imagines that he is taking part in a wedding ceremony with her. Every time I see her I feel much worse. And a sort of dread comes over me, that she might see me too. It’s not at all like delirium—how could I be delirious when other people see her too? An old woman beside me threw a glance after her and spat in disgust: ‘Ugghhh, a woman with no nose!’ Truly, her face is dreadful! Even apart from her lack of a nose, her eyelids are crooked. But she has curls on her brow, deliberately trained around a hairpin: this is peculiarly vile, as if she hadn’t noticed that her nose had rotted away. Her cheeks are blue with powder, her lips painted red. As she walks by she smiles at the men she passes. There’s something especially hor- rible about that. It makes it twice as bad for me. I don’t know why.26 Andrei succeeds in concealing his symptoms for long enough to take his seat (under military supervision) in the overcrowded carriage, but as the train pulls out, his fellow passengers are already commenting on his condition and debating whether to throw him off. Their conversation becomes entwined with Andrei’s delirious dialogue with his noseless bride, who now openly embodies Death. Andrei’s flight from—with, towards—his terrible mate parallels the flight of the train passengers from Bolshevik rule and, on a still larger scale, Old Russia’s desperate flight from its Red future. Once again, as in ‘The Messenger’, Peskov uses an obtrusively hackneyed supernatural frame to stress that the real world is much more terrible than the imagined; the natural is far stranger than the supernatural.

25 The Russian word ‘kurnosaia’ normally translates as ‘snub-nosed’, but Peskov clearly intends the meaning ‘noseless’. 26 Peskov, ‘Kurnosaia’, in Pamiati tvoei, p. 62. This translation was first published as ‘The Woman with no Nose’ in Maguire, Red Spectres, p. 198. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 109

‘The Best Friend’, the latest of the three stories, is exceptional among Peskov’s fictions by its lack of reference to the Civil War or its social consequences. It begins shortly before the First World War with the marriage of the heroine, a village peasant called Praskovia, to her sweetheart Savel. Soon afterwards, Savel is called up. Months become years; Praskovia has almost given up hope of her husband’s return when she receives an unex- pected visit from an unfamiliar soldier. His unearthly aspect and sinister behaviour inevitably recall Lieutenant Serikov; like the latter, he refuses food and is evasive about his identity and history: The soldier stood by the door. He was painfully ugly; even his face was hard to look at. He was as white as chalk, as if plastered with flour, but his nose was red and sharp. God forgive me, his face was just like one of the masks the children wear at Lenten festivals. His eyes were half-shut, blinking all the while.27 Like Serikov, too, the soldier professes to bring good news. He and Savel were both taken prisoner and spent months in captivity, going their separate ways when released. Although he claims to be Savel’s best friend (kum), thus justifying an unsettling familiarity with Praskovia, the stranger will give no more information; except that before leaving, he asks her to mention to her husband ‘a little debt to be returned. He knows already’.28 Of course, when Savel returns, he angrily refuses to listen to Praskovia’s story about the visit (‘What damned friend is this? . . . I don’t have any best friend!’).29 Savel is like a different man; he no longer works hard, goes to church or crosses himself. He threatens Praskovia with a knife after she refers to crimes committed by robbers on the highway. Meanwhile, she has strange dreams in which her husband’s kum asks her for a drink of milk, and returns the pail full of blood. That winter, Savel goes into decline and dies. When Praskovia is dressing his corpse, she finds and hides a packet of foreign money on her husband’s breast. Even after Savel’s funeral, the nightmares (now erotic) about the kum continue, until Praskovia is driven to confide in the village wise woman. The latter advises her to fumigate her house and burn the money; once this is done, the haunting ends. The story’s core plot of theft, murder, and revenge is

27 Peskov, ‘Kum’ in Demidova, My. Zhenskaia proza russkoi emigratsii, pp. 402–413 (p. 406). 28 Peskov, ‘Kum’, p. 408. 29 Peskov, ‘Kum’, p. 410. 110 muireann maguire left implicit for the reader to decipher; it is not quite clear whether the naïve Praskovia ever does so. In her attention to the banality of everyday life (in Russian, byt), Peskov prefigures George Orwell’s atmosphere of ordinary dystopia (as in 1984). Her eye for detail recalls Shmelev’s ghastly re-creation of the last days of middle-class life in the Crimea: but Peskov’s ghosts, travelling across the highways and byways of Russia, with their unfulfilled hopes and vampiric hunger for the living, transport contemporary reality to another, spectral dimension. Peskov was not the only émigré writer to use spectral dystopias to expose the perceived disaster of Bolshevik rule. Boris Zaitsev employed the same tactic in his short story ‘Avdotia the Death’ (‘Avdotia-smert’ ’, 1927), as did Pavel Perov in ‘The Brotherhood of Vii’ (Bratstvo Viia, 1925), both of which feature ghosts haunting Russian provincial settings in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Conclusion

Spectral geography is a trope of émigré literature in which the imagined homeland is haunted by ghosts (more or less materialised, as in Peskov’s fiction) or by a generally uncanny atmosphere (evoked by Peskov, Kras- nov, and others). There are numerous examples of such spectrality in the work of better-known émigré authors, such as Nabokov or Gazdanov. For instance, in Nabokov’s short story ‘A Visit to the Museum’ (‘Poseshchenie muzeia’, 1938), a visitor to a French provincial museum finds himself mys- teriously teleported to the urban wilds of Communist Russia. Similarly, the hero of Gazdanov’s The Ghost of Aleksandr Volf is haunted decades later by his uncanny double, Aleksandr Volf—the man he failed to kill when they were fighting on opposite sides in the Russian Civil War. At its most extreme, spectral geography renounces not only the fulfillment of yearning—by acknowledging the phantom nature of all recollection— but the power of memory itself. Nabokov’s ‘excess of memory’ frequently evokes ‘aporia’ at the ‘vanishing point’ of his topographical descriptions.30 Émigré literature contains a profusion of spaces that are not so much haunted as decentred: liminal places, lacking any unifying location. This is most explicit in Nabokov’s early novel Glory (Podvig, 1932), in which the

30 Straumann, Figurations of Exile, pp. 37–8. spectral geographies in russian émigré prose 111 narrator is haunted all his life by the image of a forest path. Such aporic landscapes also occur in other early novels by Nabokov, including The Gift (Dar, 1938). In Glory, the hero actually disappears while stealing his way across the Latvian border into the trackless forests of Soviet Russia; in The Gift, the hero’s father, a famous entomologist and explorer of Central Asia, is presumed dead during his last expedition through what his son imagines to be unlimitedly vast, far-off forests. Nabokov, having lost his own Russia, re-creates the country in his fiction as a place where every traveller is lost, a trackless wilderness never quite converging with reality. Why is the uncanny, not to mention the downright supernatural, so frequently a trope of both restorative and reflective nostalgia? Let us turn to Boym’s interpretation of Freud’s original concept of the unheimlich hiding within the heimlich: ‘At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, while nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted’.31 In other words, because of his or her fixation on home, the émigré writer’s gaze inevitably exposes the fear lurking inside that original utopia. Spectral geography represents a deliberate recognition and exploitation of the uncanniness inherent in both kinds of nostalgia, an acknowledgement that every memory is ultimately a phantom, and that every homeland is haunted.

31 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 251.

chapter seven

Twice Removed: Pavel Filonov and Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii

Nicoletta Misler

In 1973, during my first trip to Soviet Russia, I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of the sister of the artist Pavel Filonov in Leningrad— Evdokiia Nikolaevna Glebova (Fig. 7.1). In her single room in a communal flat (kommunal’ka) on Nevskii Prospect, she had preserved many of her brother’s works ever since his death in 1941. Fascinated by this artist, who at that time was virtually unknown in the West, I returned to Russia in 1977 with the intention of studying his art and writings in detail. By then, Evdokiia Nikolaevna had relocated to a House for Retired Theatre Work- ers (by profession she had been an opera singer) in a Leningrad suburb, after depositing the greater part of Filonov’s legacy in the storerooms of the State Russian Museum.

Fig. 7.1 Evdokiia Glebova (Pavel Filonov’s sister) and her husband Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, c.1922, Petrograd. Author’s archive. 114 nicoletta misler

Somewhat ingenuously, I was encouraged by the fact that the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Akademiia nauk SSSR), the Soviet partner in our Italian scholarly exchange program, had granted me permission to visit Russia. In my application I had requested access to Filonov’s works in the Russian Museum, or at least those that Evdokiia Nikolaevna had sent there, and she, in turn, asked the then director, Larisa Novozhilova, to let me inspect them. Mrs. Novozhilova, however, refused to see me, day after day postponing our meeting, even though I waited patiently for the appointment an entire week, languishing on that unwelcoming divan in the director’s antechamber—which, no doubt, many scholars of Russian art working at that time remember. I apologise for this personal digression, but it is important for my argument, because, in looking back at that episode, I recognise therein all the modalities of marginalisation, which the Soviet dissidents knew so well and which go right back to the Bolshevik Revolution. In this text, I shall try to shed light on the lives and destinies of two individuals, who are virtual reflections of the same mirror image—the artist and theoretician Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov (1883–1941) and Nikolai Nikolaevich Glebov-Putilovskii (1883–1948),1 who was a professional revolutionary and the husband of Evdokiia Nikolaevna, i.e. two individuals who held each other in very high regard and who were both victims of an inexorable and cruel expulsion and emigration. For Filonov, Glebov represented an inspiring role model, who exerted a deep influence on his life and work; for Glebov, on the other hand, Filonov’s art merited the highest respect, representing, at least in the early years, a mysterious vision, a veritable abracadabra. In fact, this recalls the jocular title that Glebov gave to his three pages of literary fiction called ‘Brakadabra’,2 which, evidently, was a response to Filonov’s dramatic poem, A Chant of Universal Flowering of 1915,3 an anti-Chant, if you like. Written shortly after Gle- bov met Filonov and Evdokiia Nikolaevna (in the autumn of 1918), the

1 For a short biography of Glebov, see Anon, ‘Osnovnye daty zhizni i deiatel’nosti N.N.Glebova-Putilovskogo (Stepana Golubiia)’ undated typescript, Manuscript Department of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (Otdel rukopisei Gosudarstvennogo russkogo muzeia—henceforth OR GRM), fond 156 (Filonov), ed. khr. 197. See also Evgeniia Petrova, ‘Glebov-Putilovskii v zhizni i tvorchestve P.N. Filonova’, in Anna Laks, ed., Pavel Filonov k 125 letiu so dnia rozhdeniia. Sbornik statei nauchnoi konferentsii (1883–1935). Sbornik statei (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007), pp. 75–91. 2 Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, ‘Brakadabra’, 1 October 1918, typescript, OR GRM, fond. 156, ed. khr.1. 3 Pavel Filonov, Propoven’ o prorosli mirovoi (Petrograd: Mirovoi rastsvet, 1915). twice removed 115

Fig. 7.2 Opening of the exhibition Pavel Filonov at the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, 1988 (from left to right in foreground: Vladimir Gusev, Nicoletta Misler, and Evgeniia Petrova). Author’s archive. transrational text of ‘Brakadabra’ is an immediate allusion to the oblique formulae of Filonov’s own painting. But let us move forward once again to the 1970s. In those days, public access to the avant-garde in museum store-rooms, including Filonov’s pictures, was blocked, and scholars and researchers were denied the opportunity to examine works at firsthand. Even then, it was easy to foresee the future consequences of that absurd prohibition, which was reinforced by three fundamental circumstances: 1) the absence of a systematic catalogue of Filonov’s works; 2) the inaccurate inventory of his oeuvre, which subsequently facilitated theft and falsification; 3) the attitude towards con- serving those works, i.e. works labelled ‘prohibited’ simply did not merit conservation or restoration, so that they lay unattended in the bowels of the store-rooms—and the consequences of such long neglect were certainly manifest at the first Filonov retrospective exhibition, held in 1988 at the Russian Museum. Incidentally, that juncture also marked my own ‘rehabilitation’ inasmuch as I was invited to speak at the opening of the Filonov exhibition in 1988 (Fig. 7.2.). Indeed, that was Filonov’s first real retrospective, because his one-man show of 1928–29,4 also at the Russian

4 On the history of this non-exhibition, see Nicoletta Misler and John Bowlt, eds., Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate: Collected Writings on Art and Revolution, 1914–1940 (Austin, TX.: Silvergirl, 1983), pp. 39–42; and Galina Marushina, ‘Eshche raz o neotkryvsheisia personal’noi vystavke proizvedenii Filonova v Russkom Muzee’, Eksperiment, no. XI (2005), pp. 160–94. 116 nicoletta misler

Museum, had never opened, having been censured for its ‘alienation from the proletarian worldview and its saturation with bourgeois tendencies’;5 in other words, it had been a non-exhibition. Actually, the problems of conservation and cataloguing Filonov’s oeuvre had been raised long before by Glebov himself, and in very dramatic circumstances. In a letter to his wife, which he wrote from prison camp in July 1945, Glebov enquired about the fate of Filonov’s pictures which, by a miracle, she had rescued during the Leningrad blockade, asking expressly about the ones that had been deposited with the Russian Museum: How are [Filonov’s] paintings, drawings and all his works faring in the Rus- sian Museum, the fruit of such grandiose labour over so many years? My dear, did you make enquiries? Did you manage to go by the Museum? Could it be that this priceless treasure has just been chucked into the damp corner of a cellar totally unsuited to the preservation of such works? Did the time of the blockade leave its mark? Do they [the museum workers] acknowledge your ‘right’ to tend to Pavel’s legacy, and so on? In this respect your word is law!6 Glebov was born in Khristopole,7 near Kazan, hailing from a working- class family, and as a young man he had made his living as a common factory worker in Russia and Europe. As a member of the proletariat, he also assumed the role of a professional political activist, both before and after the October Revolution, especially in the Putilovskii Ironworks in St Petersburg/Petrograd where he earned an almost legendary reputation— hence his double-barrelled surname, Glebov-Putilovskii. Indeed, during the difficult time of the early 1930s when the Filonovs were living in penury and increasing isolation, this special position enabled Glebov to invite the artist to paint an interior view of the factory (Fig 7.3), which is, incidentally, one of Filonov’s very few Socialist Realist works. A tireless revolutionary, Glebov was arrested several times and experienced both Tsarist and European prisons: in 1903 he was confined for eighteen months in Nizhnii-Novgorod, in 1905 he spent two months

5 Sergei Isakov, introduction to the catalogue, Filonov (Leningrad: State Russian Museum, 1929 [published 1930]), p. 20. 6 Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, letter to Evdokiia Glebova, 20 June 1945, OR GRM, f. 156, ed. khr.194; cited in Petrova, ‘Glebov-Putilovskii v zhizni i tvorchestve P.N. Filonova’, p. 90. 7 The biography of Glebov-Putilovskii, written by his friend and political comrade Ivan Knizhnik-Vetrov, contains details on the dramatic events of his life. See Ivan Knizhnik- Vetrov, ‘Zhizn’ N.N. Glebova-Putilovskogo—Stepan “Golub” ’, undated typescript, OR GRM, f. 156, ed. khr.198. twice removed 117 P etersburg. S t M useum, R ussian S tate 71 × 96 cm., Tractor Shop at the Putilovskii Ironworks , 1931–32, oil on paper mounted on plywood, Fig. 7.3 P avel Filonov, 118 nicoletta misler imprisoned in the Ukraine, in 1906 several days in St Petersburg (whence he escaped in Houdini-like fashion), and, finally, one month in La Santé prison in Paris in 1910. Paradoxically, these periods of incarceration gave Glebov the opportunity to advance his own self-education and reinforce his literary and artistic inclinations, avid reader that he was. His activities as a journalist, creative writer and cultural worker developed in tandem with his political career—he even took singing lessons in Geneva in 1906! Such a multifarious personality could not fail to attract the notice of Maxim Gorky (with whom Glebov stayed for nine months on Capri), the Finnish Symbolist painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela whom Glebov met together with Lenin in Finland, and, unfortunately, Leon Trotsky who, after breaking with Stalin, tried to win Glebov over to his side—but to no avail, Glebov rejected his advances out of hand. Extremely active in the Putilovskii Ironworks in Petrograd right after the October Revolution, Glebov organised his own political party, i.e. the United Workers’ Party, which, at one time, boasted 200 registered members, and dreamed of overcoming the conflicts between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In promoting his own Party line, however, he incurred the wrath of Lenin, was briefly arrested and then, at Lenin’s instiga- tion, liberated and reinstated, his United Workers’ Party joining the Bolshevik Party in 1921. In fact, on Lenin’s invitation, Glebov assumed directorship of the Petrograd District Cinema Committee between 1919 and 1921, which brought him the commission to photograph the Second Congress of the Communist International on 19 July 1920, the Congress of Peoples of the East in Baku in 1920, and the Third Congress of the Com- munist International in 1921. Alas, the photographs that Glebov made of Leon Trotsky during the First and Second Congresses, and which he preserved together with all the others (perhaps an unconscious sign of his own good faith!), constituted fundamental evidence for the Trotsky- ite accusations that were levelled against him in the 1930s, leading to his removal from political life. Among Glebov’s many talents, therefore, we discern not only a mastery of creative writing, but also a gift for photography and cinematography (an interest that connected him closely with Lenin and also with Filonov, Filonov’s wife, Ekaterina Serebriakova, and his own wife Evdokiia Niko- laevna, all of whom were movie buffs). Undoubtedly, Glebov’s political activism (for example, his long and detailed discussions of the Party line with the rank and file at the Len- ingrad Hydraulic Plant in 1927–37), left its imprint upon the subject- twice removed 119 matter of Filonov’s pictures. It was also Glebov who arranged a prestigious commission for Filonov with the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (Gosudarstvennaia komissiia po elektrifikatsii Rossii—GOELRO) which resulted in the sketch GOELRO (January–April 1930, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) and possibly the related painting, Lenin and Elec- trification, GOELRO (1931, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg).8 From 1935 until 1937, Glebov was deputy-director for education at the All- Russian Academy of Arts (Vserossiiskaia Akademiia khudozhestv)—that same academy, incidentally, against which Filonov had conducted such a violent campaign in 1925–29. These are just a few flashes from the rich, chequered and romantic life of a professional revolutionary, which must have so fascinated and cap- tivated Filonov’s sister, Evdokiia Nikolaevna. No doubt, the couple sang duets together, sharing their love of bel canto, and remaining faithful to each other, even during the terrible years of Glebov’s internment and exile in the Ural prison camps. Arrested in June, 1938, Glebov died of dystrophy in July 1948. He was rehabilitated ten years later. An important thread running through Glebov’s biography is his petition to became a formal member of the Communist Party, a struggle that presents close analogies with the history of Filonov’s non-exhibition at the Russian Museum in 1928. Unswerving in his communist faith and confident of his impeccable curriculum vitae, Glebov began to solicit Party membership after Lenin’s death in 1924. Without dwelling on details, I have synthesised the salient moments of this story in an appendix to this article. To put it briefly, for over a decade, Glebov’s petition was footballed back and forth from local committee to central committee, his enquiries often remaining unanswered, and the eventual rejection and, therefore, enforced ‘exile’ in 1935 (notwithstanding the full support of workers and old Bolsheviks) prefìgured his arrest three years later. What I would like to underline here is the fact that we are dealing with circumstances that are very similar to those surrounding Filonov’s non- exhibition of 1928, which was installed and on view for almost five years, but never officially opened. Hitherto, we have not been able to locate rel- evant photographs of the display, even in the archives of the State Russian Museum—an embarrassing omission for the institution, which itself had countenanced Glebov’s defence of the exhibition. Indeed, on the occasion

8 For reproductions, see Evgeniia Petrova, ed., Pavel Filonov. Ochevidets nezrimogo (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2006), pp. 276–277, figs. 309 and 310. 120 nicoletta misler of the violent debate for and against the opening of the show, Glebov continued to voice his opinion in the newspaper The Red Gazette (Kras- naia gazeta) of which he was deputy-director and editor-in-chief of the book review section. In 1931 (three years after the non-opening of the exhibition), Filonov wrote bitterly, but still combatively (in the third person singular, as was his wont): The Filonov Exhibition at the Russian Museum has still not opened. Still trying to get it opened, Filonov has not yet removed his works from the Museum (even if as early as November 1930 he was told by the deputy director that he should have to remove them from the walls). The articles in the evening issue of The Red Gazette for the winter of 1930–31 at first defended the exhibition, but then came out against it and against Filonov himself.9 That is how Filonov felt, although, it is certainly difficult to think that ordinary workers would have given a particularly warm welcome to his pictures, especially those from before the Revolution, his terrifying heads, or his cosmic images. As a matter of fact, the first public inspection of the non-exhibition took place at the end of 1929, and the group of workers who conducted the review argued for the opening, asserting: ‘No, I don’t understand it, but I would like to. The exhibition should be opened’ or ‘Anyone who was in the German War [First World War] will understand this’.10 A second inspection took place on 26 December 1930, but this time it was more biased against the exhibition than on the previous occasion. During those very same years, Glebov was also compelled to prove his worth, undergoing gruelling, ideological examinations and evaluations. Even though, on many occasions, old and new comrades often allied with him against his enemies, the fact that he was now on trial and being sentenced was, in itself, humiliating. Nevertheless and perhaps because of that precarious predicament, he hastened to defend his brother-in-law against accusations of ‘formalism’ and ‘hostility to the people’. In this

9 Pavel Filonov, ‘Filonov’s Exhibition at the Russian Museum (1931)’ in Misler and Bowlt, Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate, p. 263. This quotation is from an untitled manu script by Filonov, dated 20 May 1931 (RGALI, f. 2348, op. 12, ed. khr. 23). A copy, originally in the possession of Filonov’s sister Evdokiia Nikolaevna Glebova, carries the inscription ‘Letter from Filonov to the Russian Museum’. It is not known, however, if he actually sent this letter of complaint. 10 Tatiana Glebova, ‘Souvenirs sur Filonov’, Cahiers du Musée national d’Art Moderne (Paris), no. 11 (1983), p. 37. twice removed 121 same year, 1929, Filonov completed his first portrait of Glebov which he had begun in 1923 (Fig. 4a). Glebov was rumoured to have proposed sending all the Apollo Belve- deres, Venuses de Milo, Michelangelos and Raphaels to hell, chucking them into the rubbish bin so as to surrender the space to Filonov’s works. True, Glebov denied using such extreme language as he explained in an open letter to the editor of The Red Gazette on 7 January 1931: ‘I feel it essential to state that such a meaning was foreign to my words. I was pointing out that, together with the artists of the past, the distinguished artists of today should also be given space.’11 Nevertheless, in spite of Glebov’s strong support during the second, more negative inspection of Filonov’s exhibition, most of those present were against it, describing Filonov’s paintings as being ‘covered in a secret veil of mysticism . . . They do not reflect our life nor what excites the working masses.’12 Certainly, paintings such as Those Who Have Nothing to Lose (1911–12, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) or even The Propagandist (1924–25, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) were remote from the conventions of the new Heroic Realism, which was accessible, comfort- able and much appreciated by the masses. Curiously enough, among those who argued for the opening of Filonov’s exhibition was Isaak Brodskii (later Stalin’s court painter), a leading member of the Association of Artists of the Revolution (Assotsiatsiia khudozh nikov revoliutsii—AKhR), who had been a colleague of Filonov at the Academy of Arts before the Revolution and who, in November 1930, went so far as to publish a letter of support in The Red Gazette: ‘The exhibition, installed and ready in two halls of the Museum, has been up forever! It is unforgivable that the directorate of the Museum has delayed so long, depriving artists . . . of the chance to see and study the works of such a rare master as Filonov.’13 Although Brodskii practised an artistic style that was very different from that of Filonov, he always admired Filonov. Brodskii was also acquainted with Glebov, and used the latter’s press photographs to make his celebrated propaganda pictures of Lenin. In fact, according to Ivan

11 Glebov-Putilovskii, ‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu’, Krasnaia gazeta [evening issue] (Leningrad), no. 273 (7 January 1931), p. 3. 12 Cited in B. Rod, ‘Spory o Filonove’, Krasnaia gazeta [evening issue] (Leningrad), no. 308 (30 December 1930), p. 4. 13 Isaak Brodskii, ‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu’, Krasnaia gazeta [evening issue] (Leningrad), no. 278, (25 November 1930), p. 4. 122 nicoletta misler

Knizhnik-Vetrov, Glebov’s close friend and biographer, Glebov ‘recorded the moment when Lenin was listening to the papers presented by the delegates at the Third Congress of the Comintern’14—which Brodskii then used for his 1930 picture entitled Lenin at Smol’nyi (State Tretiakov Gal- lery, Moscow). Knizhnik-Vetrov supplied this and other valuable information in his unpublished monograph called ‘Glebov, the Kommunist’, the typescript of which is in the Department of Manuscripts at the Russian Museum. In 1961, he submitted the biography for publication, but, as you might expect, the main publishing house for political literature (Glavpolitizdat) returned the manuscript in 1962, explaining that for the time being such a biography did not match publication plans—one more example of an everlasting administrative postponement and exclusion. As for the rapport between Filonov, the artist, and Glebov, the revolutionary, here the political momentum is of the essence. Filonov painted at least two portraits of his brother-in-law, very similar in position and expression, but of different dimensions (Fig. 7.4a, 7.4b). Inasmuch as Filonov completed the first just when he was conducting his desperate battle against the Academy of Arts and the Leningrad artistic establishment, and painted the second in 1935–36 (just as Glebov was being exiled from political life), we might speak of a single, ‘long’ portrait, diluted through time, demonstrating the evolution and constancy of their friendship and collegiality. In any case, long before the non-exhibition, Glebov had supported Filonov and his art, publishing a long and positive article on Filonov’s contribution to the V Exhibition of the Community of Artists in 1922, for example, and incorporating two of Filonov’s works into the design of his book, La Santė: The Story of an Emigré (Dom zdorov’ia. Rasskaz emigranta) a reference to his experience at La Santé prison in Paris), published in Leningrad in 1930.15 The images he used were Conqueror of the City (Fig. 7.5) for the front cover, and Convict (1926, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) for the back cover, although—as he later wrote to his wife, Evdokiia Nikolaevna—‘Filonov remains deeply incomprehensible’, in normal circumstances.16

14 Knizhnik-Vetrov, ‘Zhizn’ N.N. Glebova-Putilovskogo’, p. 33. 15 Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, Dom zdorov’ia. Rasskaz emigranta (Leningrad: Krasnaia gazeta, 1930). 16 Nikolai Glebov, letter to Evdokiia Nikolaevna, 30 September 1940; cited in E.N. Petrova, ‘N.N. Glebov-Putilovskii v zhizni i tvorchesve P.N. Filonova’, p. 87. twice removed 123

Fig. 7.4a Pavel Filonov, Portrait of Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, 1923–29, watercolour on paper, 59 × 49 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Fig. 7.4b Pavel Filonov, Portrait of Nikolai Glebov-Putilovskii, 1935–36, watercolour, ink and pencil on paper, 59 × 46 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. 124 nicoletta misler

True, the ‘shadow play’ of Filonov’s pictures with their bewildering subject- matter had attracted attention at various avant-garde exhibitions in the 1910s and 1920s, often as a succès de scandale. They frequently annoyed the public, and not only the unsophisticated masses, but also sensitive critics, such as the critic Nikolai Punin who, in 1924, branded Filonov ‘an inventor lacking culture’.17 Perhaps the only contemporary person capable of fathoming the ‘meaning’ of Filonov’s art was the poet Veli- mir Khlebnikov, who appreciated and evidently managed to decipher the most abtruse aspects of his painting. For example, at the opening of the new gallery of modern art in Astrakhan in 1918, Khlebnikov wished the museum every good fortune, recommending the ‘wonderful Filonov, unfamiliar singer of urban suffering’,18 thereby specifying the distinguish- ing ‘urban’ or, more precisely, St Petersburgian, characteristic of Filonov’s art.19 Glebov, too, worker, agitator, clandestine propagandist, and auto- didactic, if voracious, intellectual, had need of the city as his theatre of action, especially St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad and the Putilovskii and Hydraulic factories. Although born in Moscow, Filonov, the artist, was organically linked to his adopted city, where he lived and worked. He interpreted his city as a locus of chaos, misery, anxiety and unhappiness, wherein its hum- ble protagonists—‘those who have nothing to lose’—inhabit a teeming ambience of claustrophobia and suffocation. In some of the paintings, the city is itself a generic protagonist as in Con- struction of the City of 1913 (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), while in other urban scenes the citizen occupies centre stage as, for example, in Conqueror of the City of 1914–15 (Fig. 7.5)—the prophetic picture that Filonov would recycle for his cover of Glebov’s autobiographical reminis- cence of La Santé. Conqueror of the City presents us with a disturbing, deformed and double portrait against an urban background, an amalgam which is both finely frontal and in distorted profile, with the hand neither clenched nor making the combative fist of a true revolutionary, but with the hand half closed, questioning and introspective.

17 See Nikolai Punin, Mir svetel liubov’iu. Dnevniki. Pis’ma, ed. Leonid Zykov (St Peters burg: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr, 2000), p. 229. 18 Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘Otkrytie khudozhestvennoi galerei’ [late December 1918], cited in M. Poliakov, et al., eds., Velemir Khlebnikov. Tvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), p. 618. 19 Nicoletta Misler, ‘Pavel Filonov e San Pietroburgo’, in M. Boehmig, ed., Le capitali nei Paesi dell’Europa Centrale e Orientale. Centri politici e laboratori culturali (Naples: M.D’Auria, 2007), pp. 379–87. twice removed 125

Fig. 7.5 Pavel Filonov, Conqueror of the City, 1914–15, watercolour, ink and pencil on cardboard, 42.1 × 34.2 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. 126 nicoletta misler

The portrait with the city in the background and houses and towers on the point of collapse remind us of Filonov’s invented renderings of St Petersburg, a synthetic vision which finds its most logical culmination in his Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat of 1920–21 (Fig. 7.6). In this pronounced vertical vision, Filonov has transformed the buildings into façade-less parallelepipeds, with pink and blue walls piled up higgledy- piggledy, one upon the other in a kind of mediaeval anti-St Petersburg. The city is somehow a lugubrious background, although in the upper centre it is transfigured by an azure and spiritual light whence emanates the figure of the ‘ideal’ proletarian. With this ‘moral’, conceptual image of the proletariat superimposed upon raw reality, Filonov constructed an icon of the proletarian hero. Here—in Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat—is the ascetic, suffering and sober worker, surely a reference to Glebov. Glebov’s encouragement and support became especially important for Filonov after the campaign against his one-man exhibition, even if Gle- bov, himself in big trouble, was relentlessly being removed from the cultural and political scene. In the early 1930s, he managed to secure several commissions for Filonov, including Tractor Machine Shop at the Putilovskii Ironworks (1931, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Fig. 7.3). and the Portrait of Stalin (1936, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) as well as GOELRO, which I mentioned above, a rare stroke of luck during those difficult years. Also in 1931, and thanks to his connections in high places, Glebov obtained the prestigious commission for Filonov’s Collective of Artists of Analytical Art (Filonov’s private school) to illustrate the Soviet edition of the Finnish epos Kalevala (published in 1933). By 1931, the Collective, which at its most propitious moment numbered forty members, had been much involved in anti-religious propaganda, and the fact that in 1932 Glebov became director of the Anti-Religious Museum20 indicates a sincere like-mindedness of activist and artist, rather than merely an opportunistic acceptance of Stalin’s political edicts. It is true that before the Revolution Filonov had painted a number of religious works, albeit cryptic and heterodox as, for example, Mother and Child of 1916 or Three at Table of 1914–15 (both at the State Russian Museum, St

20 Evidentally, the Museum of the History of Religion (Muzei istorii religii), which later became the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, was informally called the Anti-Religious Museum. Biographical notes on Glebov state: ‘April 1933–August 1935 direc tor of the State Anti-religious Museum and House of Anti-Religious Propaganda (House of Atheism) [Gosudarstvennyi antireligioznyi muzei i dom antireligioznoi propagandy (Dom bezbozhiia)]. See ‘Osnovnye daty zhizni i deiatel’nosti N.N. Gelbova-Putilovskogo’, OR GRM, fond 156 (Filonov) ed. khr. 197, l. 7. twice removed 127

Fig. 7.6 Pavel Filonov, Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat, 1920–21, oil on canvas, 154 × 117 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. 128 nicoletta misler

Petersburg), and even an Orthodox icon of Saint Catherine faithful to the iconographic canon (1908–10, Private Collection, Paris).21 Now, however, he and his Collective depicted rough and ready anti-religious themes, as, for example, parodies called The Last Supper (Fig. 7.7 and Fig. 7.8), produced by Filonov in one version and by Vsevolod Sulimo-Samuilo, one of his students, in a different version. Among other exponents of this Filon- ovian, anti-religious tendency was his student Liudmila Ivanova, who approached the subject of a Crucifixion in a similar way. During the 1930s, and following in the wake of Glebov, Filonov invested the Collective with a strong ideological orientation, which was expressed in its aggressive, anti-religious stance. Nonetheless, such powerful actions did not serve to alleviate the political, social and cultural predicament of either Filonov or Glebov, although, until 1935, the latter supervised the anti-religious Museum, turning it into a popular educational and cultural space. On the contrary, it was Gle- bov’s management of the Museum that led to legal proceedings against him. Moreover, Ekaterina Serebriakova’s two sons by her first marriage, Pavel and Petr, as well as Filonov’s students all became victims of the same wave of repression (one of them, Vasilii Kuptsov, committed suicide as a result). Filonov himself was spared, which may be explained by his ‘abnormal- ity’ and ‘insanity’ or by the long tradition of the village idiot (iurodivyi), who in Old Russia was even allowed to speak against the Tsar! At the same time, Filonov, like Glebov, still belonged to the wrong camp; he was an honest, uncorrupted idealist, and as such was bound to be cast into emigration, sent into limbo, and excluded mercilessly from Soviet history. Both men became internal exiles in their homeland, prophets in the wilderness, joining the vast domestic emigration of Russia’s artistic and intellectual luminaries.

21 Nicoletta Misler and John E. Bowlt discovered the icon with Filonov’s relatives who had emigrated to France. See Nicoletta Misler, ‘Von der Ikonenmalerei zum Fotorealis mus’, in Jürgen Harten and Evgeniia Petrova, eds., Filonov und seine Schule (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1990), pp. 36–49. twice removed 129

Fig. 7.7 Pavel Filonov, The Last Supper, late 1920s, watercolour and ink on paper, 116 × 49.1 cm., State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Fig. 7.8 Liudmila Ivanova, Untitled, late 1920s, pencil and ink on paper, 13 × 14.7 cm., private collection. Appendix

A synthetic chronology of N. Glebov-Putilovskii’s (GP) attempts to be recognised as a member of the Communist Party

1921: during a Party purge, GP is expelled for not having paid his Party dues and for not possessing valid Party membership. 1924: after Lenin’s death, GP sends a petition to the City Committee, asking to be reinstated. Sends the same request to the Central Committee in 1927. 1928, 10 February: Party Decree from the Central Control Commission instructs that ‘Leningrad’s request that GP be inducted into the Com- munist Party (Bolsheviks) via the workers’ cell should be considered correct’ and asks that the Leningrad Regional Committee ‘assist him in this procedure’. 1928, October: the Party Collective of the Hydraulic Plant resolves to support his membership and provides him with local Party documents. 1928, October: the Moscow-Narva Regional Communist Party confirms that it had passed on the request to the Regional Committee for ratification. The request goes unanswered. Other requests follow until 1930, but also go unanswered. Virtually every day the communists at the Hydraulic Plant ask: ‘Has GP been accepted for Party membership or not?’ 1931, 18 January: Hydraulic Communist Party members resolve to ask the Regional Committee to confirm GP’s Party membership, emphasising the quality of his political work. 1932, October: the Hydraulic Collective dispatches a claim to the All- Union Regional Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the Smol’nyi Region asking that GP be appointed to membership forthwith. The City Committee ratifies this action. 1932: as a result of the second Party purge the process is halted. 1932, 2 August: The Hydraulic Plant acknowledges GP to be a primary candidate and, after a brilliant speech which he delivers to the Plant, to have passed their local review process with flying colours. 1933, 16 February: first ferocious attack against GP’s activities at the Anti- Religious Museum. GP is accused of being an enemy of the Party. twice removed 131

1933, 11 March: GP removed from directorship of the Museum and expelled from local Party membership of the Regional Committee of Smolensk Region (which holds jurisdiction over the Museum). 1933, 29 March: GP lodges a formal protest against his antagonists, forwarding a report to the City Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and attaching recommendations from the Commission of the Central Committee of the Hydraulic Plant, which indicate that there are no grounds for dismissing him from the Museum. 1935: in a report to the City Committee enemies report that GP is a Troskyite. 1937, 25 March: GP writes a letter to Stalin (which remains unanswered), complaining of the incorrect attitude towards him on the part of the City Committee and the Regional Committee. 1937, 3 August: the Secretariat of the Leningrad City Committee confirms GP’s expulsion from the local Party. 1938, 22 February: GP asks Andrei Zhdanov, then secretary of the Central Committee, to examine and clarify the defamation campaign against him (his request remains unanswered).

chapter eight

Exhibiting Malevich under Stalin

Maria Kokkori

For both social and ideological reasons, museological policy was a highly sensitive matter for the Bolshevik government. At the Third Congress of the Soviets in January 1918, it was decreed that museums had to educate the wider public, not just specialists, and should facilitate the working class’s access to art and culture. Anatolii Lunacharskii, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, described the development of proletarian culture as a means of heightening proletarian class consciousness and promoting enthusiasm for the achievement of class aims.1 At the conference on the ‘museum question’, organised by the Department of Fine Arts within the Commissariat for Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia—IZO Narkompros), at the Winter Palace, renamed the Palace of Arts, in Petrograd in February 1919,2 Lunacharskii stressed once again that ‘it must be remembered that the museum exists neither for scholars nor for artists, but first and foremost for the people.’3 In the early 1920s, the role and function of the new Soviet museums were extensively discussed by curators, art critics and artists. Kazimir Malevich, in an article published in the journal Art of the Commune (Iskusstvo kom muny) in 1919, proposed ‘laboratories’ instead of traditional museums. He wrote, Instead of collecting all kinds of old stuff, we must organise laboratories of a worldwide, creative, building apparatus, and from its axes will emerge artists of living forms, not of dead representations of objects. Let the conserva-

1 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Educa tion and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 110–129. 2 ‘Deklaratsiia otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv i khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti po voprosu o printsipakh muzeevedeniia, priniataia kollegiei otdela v zasedanii 7 fevralia 1919 g.’, Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919), p. 1. All translations are the author’s own, unless indicated otherwise. 3 Anatolii Lunacharskii, ‘Rech’ A.V. Lunacharskogo’ in ‘Konferentsiia po delam muzeev’, Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 11 (16 February 1919), p. 3. 134 maria kokkori

tives go to the provinces with their dead baggage, with the lecherous cupids of the bygone debauched houses of Rubens and the Greeks. We will bring I-beams, electricity and the fires of colours.4 In contrast, Wassily Kandinsky, in an essay published in 1920, envisaged the museum as an institution devoted to the history of painting from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including European art. He rejected a chronological, historicised presentation of artworks, proposing instead a model in which the ‘inner meaning’ of art’s historical development might be systematically explained.5 For Aleksandr Rodchenko, also, the museum should not perform an archival or historicising function, and works should be grouped and sequenced according to their respec- tive stages in the development of a particular form or method, regardless of their author or date of execution.6 In a diary entry of 1920, Rodchenko, like Malevich, described a museum as a laboratory, a ‘Museum of Experi- mental Techniques.’7 Although Russian avant-garde artists suggested and explored alternative models of curatorial practices, which to a considerable extent were realised in the aftermath of the October Revolution, the late 1920s and early 1930s saw radical changes in display policies. The new Soviet museum had to undergo a drastic transformation in order to accomplish its vision and socialist mission: to educate the working masses, to promote a Marxist understanding of history, and to support the rapid collectivisation and industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan. A 1928 decree ‘On the Con- struction of Museums in the RSFSR’ promoted the idea that a museum should now play an agitational role, and its exhibitions should show clear ‘evidence of the nation-forming process and of national politics and national culture in the Soviet period and in the period immediately pre-

4 Kazimir Malevich, ‘O muzee’, Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 12 (23 February 1919), p. 3. 5 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury’, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’, no. 12 (January–February 1920), p. 18. 6 Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘O Muzeinom Biuro: Doklad na konferentsii zaveduiushchikh Gubsektsiiami IZO’, in O.V. Mel’nikov and V.I. Shchennikov, eds., Aleksandr Rodchenko, Opyty dlia budushchego. Dnevniki. Stat’i, Pis’ma. Zapiski (Moscow: Grant, 1996), pp. 98–101. English translation, ‘On the Museum Bureau. Report at the Conference of Directors’ in Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters and Other Writ ings, ed. Alexander Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), pp. 115–117. 7 Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘O muzee eksperimentalnoi tekhniki’, in Opyty dlia budush chego, p. 84; Experiments for the Future, p. 101. exhibiting malevich under stalin 135 ceding the revolution.’8 Within this framework, I shall examine selected exhibitions of Kazimir Malevich’s works at the Tretiakov Gallery in Mos- cow and the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, where new display policies were adapted and implemented, which had a major impact on changing the perception of avant-garde art in Soviet society. In 1929, Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, a young Marxist sociologist, in his article ‘The Principles of Building Art Museums’ published in Press and Revolution (Pechat’ i revoliutsiia), criticised Soviet galleries and museums for their ‘fetishism of objects’ (veshchevoi fetishizm) and formulated guidelines for transforming them into educational institutions that would serve the needs of a socialist society.9 He strongly disapproved of contemporary practices of display, which were dominated by easel painting and the ‘decadent ideology of “art for art’s sake” ’. As an alternative to the ‘bourgeois’ approach to museology, Fedorov-Davydov suggested that displays should not concern ‘things but processes; the history of styles stretched into a single straight line of evolution.’10 He wrote, ‘We have already eliminated prejudices; we know that this single line exists because every piece of the historical process is a complex intersection, a dialectical struggle between conflicting forces and heterogeneous tendencies.’11 Fedorov-Davydov’s concept of the ‘functional exhibition’ or ‘dialectical Marxist exhibition,’ which involved presenting artworks as historical documents and demonstrations of art’s class nature, dominated Soviet museum policy between 1929 and 1932. Marxist displays had to show, in a clear and comprehensible way, the socio-historical context of art. To work effectively, this tactic involved what was called the ‘comprehensive display’ (kompleksnaia ekspozitsia), i.e. a well-designed ensemble in which painting, decorative art, photography, texts, political slogans, and quotes came together to produce a synthetic portrait of the class origins of art. Fedorov-Davydov explained: The greatest struggle has focused on the principle of the ‘comprehensive display,’ i.e. the combined display of various kinds of art . . . First and foremost the comprehensive display was . . . the only way we could

8 Irina Shangina, Russkii fond ethnograficheskikh muzeev Moskvy i Sankt Peterburga. Istoriia i problemy komplektovaniia, 1867–1930gg (St Peterburg: Rossiskii etnograficheskii muzei, 1994), p. 75. 9 A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, ‘Printsipy stroitel’stva khudozhestvennykh muzeev’, Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no. 4 (April 1929), pp. 63–79. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 136 maria kokkori

reveal and convincingly show the unity of a class’s artistic ideology at a given stage in the class struggle, to show at times the very essence of a style . . . Without it we cannot show whether a style is monumental or intimate, whether it tends towards synthesis or differentiation, we cannot fully reveal whether it is far removed from life or whether it is dominated by the goal of serving everyday purposes . . . Only in the comprehensive display can the art of the ‘lower social classes’ be shown and compared with the art of the ruling classes . . .12 In order to introduce a broader audience to art, these Marxist displays were accompanied by lectures, guided tours, brochures, and other educational materials. These experimental museum displays were instrumental in displacing avant-garde art, which was presented as belonging to the past and being a remnant of passé, bourgeois culture. Russian avant- garde works were reduced to historical illustrations, used to demonstrate the necessity for a new Marxist and truly Soviet art of the future. Malevich, in a rather optimistic letter sent to his wife in January 1929, commented on the ideological shifts in cultural politics: ‘Here, AKhR [the Association of Artists of the Revolution] has launched a fresh campaign against new trends, but the trouble is that now my approach is taking over, so that everything that they are trying to do will be for nothing.’13 A few months later he was more pessimistic: ‘Until now I have been ordered to work at the same place, a great favour from the Marxists, but I don’t know for how long.’ He also commented ironically on the new display practices: ‘I have heard that, at the Tretiakov, a new department of New Art has been opened, and that art is hung like washing, according to colour: i.e., whites and colours separately. Until now, they cannot think of a right way to hang [art], they are using the laundry method.’14 Malevich was probably referring to Fedorov-Davydov and Boris Ender’s experiments with display, which involved studying the ‘formal aspects’ of the artworks, such as colour and its perception. Boris Ender, avant-garde artist and employee at the Tretiakov Gallery, was asked to head a special laboratory which studied the interactions of framed and unframed paintings with their exhibition surroundings.

12 Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei (Moscow: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933), p. 68; English translation from Wendy Salmond, ‘Some Notes on the Experimental Marxist Exhibition’, X-tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, (2003), pp. 15–16. 13 Irina Vakar and Tatiana Mikhienko, eds., Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty. Vospominaniia. Kritika, vol. 1, (Moscow: RA, 2004), p. 258. 14 Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 1, p. 205. exhibiting malevich under stalin 137

In January 1929, Fedorov-Davydov was appointed head of the Depart- ment of Twentieth-Century Russian art at the Tretiakov Gallery. His duties included reorganising the entire permanent collection, according to the Marxist-Leninist understanding of art, and he soon developed and implemented radically new museum policies and methods of display. In November 1929, he curated Malevich’s retrospective exhibition. Malevich initially planned to present abstract and figurative paintings, followed by drawings and his three-dimensional ‘architectons’ (arkhitektony). Not all these works were shown in Moscow, but they were exhibited in Kiev, where the show opened in spring 1930. In Moscow, forty-eight paintings were displayed, the great majority of which were figurative, with only eight Suprematist pieces on show. In her study of the event, Irina Vakar listed the exhibits, and on the basis of archival documents, concluded that the main body of Malevich’s ‘Post-Suprematist’ works were painted especially for the exhibition, just before the show opened.15 Malevich backdated them to between 1910 and 1916, so that they overlapped chronologically with his Neo-Primitivist, Cubo-Futurist and Suprematist works. Boris Ender, who was initially in charge of organising the exhibition, seems to have been the only person who understood the fictional nature of the works’ chronology: ‘Malevich showed some works in his exhibition I did not expect . . . He was terribly deceptive in this exhibition. I can guess which works he made anew and which works could not have been made before, but he dated everything 1915, 1916 and other early years.’16 Malevich clearly attempted to present a comprehensive picture of the evolution of his work from Impressionism to Suprematism, but his focus on the figurative works may demonstrate his engagement with current artistic developments and contemporary debates about the nature of Soviet art.17 Fedorov-Davydov’s short introduction in the exhibition catalogue describes the formal evolution of the artist’s work, relying entirely on

15 Irina Vakar, ‘The Kazimir Malevich Exhibition at the Tretiakov Gallery in 1929’, in The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St Petersburg: Palace Edi tions, 2001), pp. 121–137. 16 See Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva—RGALI), fond 2973, op. 1; cited in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 2, p. 273. 17 Malevich’s return to painting in general, and figurative painting in particular, in 1927 is the subject of much scholarly debate, and it was clearly stimulated by several factors, including the practical one that he had left about seventy of his paintings (many of them abstract Suprematist compositions) in Berlin on show at the Grosse Berliner Kunstauss tellung, and therefore needed to reconstruct a considerable section of his oeuvre for his Tretiakov retrospective. 138 maria kokkori the chronology that Malevich himself provided and, as a result, did not comment on the artist’s selection of paintings or the issue of backdating. Fedorov-Davydov’s text alternates between appreciation for Malevich’s skill and criticism of Malevich’s art as bourgeois. He presented Malevich as a ‘subjectivist, a philosopher-dreamer,’ and described his work as ‘ideologically alien’ to Soviet society and characteristic of the era of Russian industrialism and capitalism. He further explained that, under capitalism, bourgeois art served the aesthetic and commercial needs of the ruling class, resulting in its separation from production and socialist ideology. At the same time, he emphasised the importance of Malevich’s creative legacy for the new generation of artists and Soviet viewers: ‘On the one hand, this era [the first quarter of the twentieth century] reached its climax with the whole system engendered by the isolation of bourgeois culture of art from life, on the other, it constructed the germs of those new forms of art that are now growing in front of our eyes.’18 He pointed out that, although the development of industrialism had led to the loss of representational art, it had contributed to significant developments in art’s materiality and formal aspects. He explained, ‘Advances in science and technology are reflected in art through the pursuit of scientific objectivity and experiment. Artists transformed their workshops into laboratories . . . Their art became different and detached from the real things of the world, but ideally it has sought to achieve the same exact fixation, like a formula that, although it does not resemble the phenomena, at the same time expresses them, for example, a mathematical or chemical formula.’19 Fedorov-Davydov placed non-objective, ‘laboratory’ art in the context of bourgeois industrial culture, but at the same time suggested that it provides the foundations for art in socialist society: ‘Without it, it would not have been possible to have modern architecture, furniture, fabrics, poster, book and newspaper design, and, finally, the modern achievements of the new ‘industrial’ art: the cinema. Meanwhile, only on the basis of the industrial arts, as well as on the basis of capitalist industry as a whole, can we build the culture and the art of socialist society.’20 Hence Malevich’s planits (planity) and architectons (arkhitektony) were described as ‘expressive forms,’ products of a rich imagination, which could provide ‘a wealth of advanced materials for future architectural practice.’ Fedorov-Davydov

18 A. Fedorov-Davydov, Iskusstvo K. S. Malevicha (Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery, 1929); reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 2, pp. 546–548. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. exhibiting malevich under stalin 139 concluded that the value of displaying Malevich’s art at the Tretiakov lay in his works’ potential to function as an example of ‘leftist’ art of the first years of the Revolution—an art that is capable of influencing the working youth of today. Surprisingly, Malevich’s retrospective at the Tretiakov was barely mentioned in the press. Malevich gave a lecture to the museum’s curators a few days before the exhibition opened and seemed to be pleased with the display. He wrote, ‘The exhibition does not look half bad. I received many congratulations.’21 Lazar Rosental, head of the Tretiakov’s education department, later observed that Malevich’s retrospective was organised at an extremely unfortunate time when ‘all zaum’ (transrational) in art was increasingly looked at askance.’22 He recalled that Malevich did not complain about his paintings being hung upside down, but ‘calm, though with a hint of sadness, the artist insisted with confidence in the correct- ness of his chosen path.’ Finally, he repeated Malevich’s ironic comment about the meaning and future application of his architectons: ‘Kazimir Severinovich diligently and patiently explained that the architecton was merely a composition of stereometric figures; but he does not object if it is used as decoration for a room or, if appropriately enlarged, stands in the middle of a square. It can also serve as a pedestal for a statue or monument and, if birds defecate on its top, he will have no objection.’23 The reform of Soviet museums and the objectives guiding the new format for installations were consolidated at the First All-Russian Museum Congress (Pervyi Vserossiiskii muzeinyi s’ezd), in Moscow in December 1930. Practically all of the forty presentations at the congress focused on the issue of ‘applying the principles of dialectical materialism to museum practice’. The conference decided that curators had to develop ‘such forms of exhibitions in which clearly identified targets would be illuminated through the prism of Marx’s theory of class struggle and dialectical materialism, and aligned to the interests of the Five-Year Plan in all its aspects.’24 Ivan Luppol, head of the scientific sector of Narkompros, explained that a new ‘museum language’ has to be developed since all material objects are interconnected and it is vital to indicate these relationships in displaying

21 Vakar, ‘The Kazimir Malevich Exhibition,’ p. 124. 22 Lazar’ Rosental’, Neprimechatel’nye dostovernosti (St Petersburg: Minuvshee, 1998), pp. 95–96; reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 2, pp. 404–405. 23 Ibid., p. 405. 24 I. Luppol, ed., Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo muzeinogo s’ezda, Protokoly plenarnykh zasedanii 1–5 dekabria 1930 (Moscow: Uchgiz-Narkompros, 1931), vol. 1, p. 241. 140 maria kokkori them. He added, ‘Whether we like it or not, we will definitely be part of the class struggle, which forms the background of all political phenomena and comes into our museums . . . We have shown passive and active resistance to the reorganisation of our museums. Therefore, we cannot avoid the active reorganisation or surgical operation in this constructive work.’25 Most presentations at the Congress promoting dialectical materialism suggested exhibiting meaningful ensembles, which combined artworks with illustrations and texts. In relation to this method, Fedorov-Davydov proposed expressing the battle of artistic styles in the galleries by incorporating indoctrination materials such as tables and charts into the arrange- ments of artworks. He elaborated his approach to applying Marxist art theory to museum practice in his book The Soviet Art Museum, published in 1933.26 In this, he described the transition in art galleries from showing the history of great artists and the history of styles, to displaying the history of social classes, which was the next essential step in the evolution of museum display. To accomplish this aim, museums adopted experimental approaches, which involved displaying works of art united visually and conceptually through the use of didactic texts on the walls, quotations, and political slogans. The curator had to act as a social reformer and educator, while the new ‘self-explanatory’ (samogovoriashchie) museum displays had to direct the viewer’s understanding of art and culture, in an authoritative, scientific, and concise way, by providing a social and political context that clearly demonstrated class ideology and class interests.27 An example of the new Marxist exhibition was The Experimen tal Comprehensive Exhibition of the Art of the Capitalist Era, which opened at the Tretiakov Gallery in 1931, curated by Fedorov-Davy- dov.28 The show included paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Alek- sandr Rodchenko, Wassily Kandinsky, Ivan Kliun, and others, all from the 1910s, which were presented as characteristic examples of

25 Ibid., p. 17. 26 A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei (Moscow: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933). 27 For a discussion of the ‘self-explanatory’ museum displays see Adam Jolles, ‘Stalin’s Talking Museums’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 3 (2005), pp. 429–455; Konstantin Akin sha and Adam Jolles, ‘On the Third Front: The Soviet Museum and Its Public during the Cultural Revolution’ in Wendy Salmond and Anne Odom, eds., Treasures into Tractors: The Selling of Russia’s Cultural Heritage, 1918–1938 (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2009), pp. 167–181. 28 The title of the exhibition coincided with the renaming of the Department of the Newest Painting at the Tretiakov, which became the Department of Capitalism. exhibiting malevich under stalin 141 capitalist and bourgeois ideology. Fedorov-Davydov clustered the works in a square pattern; the end of easel painting and sculpture was explained by a text, written in large block letters, montaged between the works: ‘Bour- geois art in the blind alley of formalism and self-negation’ (Fig. 8.1). The early avant-garde was presented as a remnant of old bourgeois aesthetics and society, yet it also had to be shown as an example of a transitional period, which contributed to the development of the new proletarian art and the building of socialist society. The decline and dead-end that Russian avant-garde art typified was reinforced by the installation in an adjacent gallery, where Malevich’s Haymaking (1928–29) was displayed alongside Tatlin’s Fishmonger (1911), Vasilii Rozhdestvenskii’s Still Life (1913), Nadezhda Udaltsova’s Self Portrait with Palette (1915), and Georgii Stenberg’s Spiral (1920). The works were grouped in an irregular pattern, and a wall text accused them of bourgeois individualism: ‘Any attempt to objectify the artistic method is doomed to failure, as bourgeois art is individualistic through and through’ (Fig. 8.2). This kind of ‘scientific’ and authoritative assessment placed Malevich’s works in a new political context, and encouraged viewers to question the works’ ideological validity. Despite the denunciation of avant-garde art, it was still considered and exhibited as part of Russia’s cultural legacy and historical development. Russian Art of the Imperialist Era opened in June 1931 at the State Rus- sian Museum in Leningrad, featuring a selection of pre-revolutionary works, dating from between 1908 and 1916. The chronological boundaries corresponded to the period of imperialism (the highest stage of capitalism) as described in Lenin’s account of Russian history. The exhibition was organised by a body of curators led by Nikolai Punin from the Depart- ment of Modern Art Trends, and its methods of display were similar to those used by Fedorov-Davydov in Moscow. Russian avant-garde art was presented as a product of capitalism, and avant-garde paintings were displayed surrounded by polemical texts condemning their bourgeois origins. The works were grouped according to artistic movements and displayed chronologically in a rather theatrical way. The ideological tone of the exhibition was set in the first room with a banner quoting Lenin: ‘As a worldview, anarchism is bourgeois ideology turned inside out’ (Fig. 8.3). Quotes by artists and writers were integrated into the display to further undermine the works’ aesthetic validity. For example, Malevich’s Sports men was paired with a text from the artist’s writings: ‘May “debunking of the old world” be engraved on your palms,’ and Vladimir Mayakovsky was presented as a caricatured effigy, with a line from his poem Cloud in 142 maria kokkori

Fig. 8.1 Experimental Comprehensive Exhibition of the Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–February 1932. Courtesy of the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. exhibiting malevich under stalin 143

Fig. 8.2 Experimental Comprehensive Exhibition of the Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–February 1932. Courtesy of the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. 144 maria kokkori

Fig. 8.3 Russian Art of the Imperialist Era, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, 1931–32. Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. exhibiting malevich under stalin 145

Fig. 8.4 Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1932–February 1933. Courtesy of the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. a) on the wall: ‘bourgeois formalism and objectivism/cubism turns into a self-serving game of formal-aesthetic artistic means’; b) above the doorway: ‘Degenerating capitalism has driven art into the blind alley of formalism and non-objectivity. The victorious October Revolution leads artists out of this dead end into a new blossoming of art.’ 146 maria kokkori

Trousers printed on the sleeve of his raised arm: ‘Hey you, heaven, take off your hat, I am coming.’ The emphasis on anarchism and individualism as the main characteristics of the avant-garde was intended to guide the viewer towards understanding avant-garde art as an example of nihilism, egocentrism, and social isolation. A few months later, in November 1932, another exhibition curated by Fedorov-Davydov, Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution, opened at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow (Fig. 8.4). Like his previous displays, this exhibition featured avant-garde works and didactic texts, stressing the bourgeois roots of the Russian avant-garde. In all these thematic exhibitions and permanent displays, Malevich’s art was denounced socially and politically, and presented as a vehicle through which visitors could realise the ideological decadence of the past and create new narratives for the future of Soviet art and culture. In December 1932, Malevich wrote to Kliun, commenting ironically about the way his art was being treated: Someone told me that Fedorov-Davydov, or as the Hunter’s Row [Okhotnyi Riad] crew in Moscow call him, ‘Orekhov-Zuev’,29 has changed a lot in his way of thinking, barks at [Aleksei Ivanovich] Mikhailov with everything he’s got and veritably confesses before the square, such people should be hung from the smokestacks instead of weather vanes, to determine the direction of the wind, since in them the working of the brain depends on which way the wind blows.30 Russian Art of the Imperialist Era was followed by the retrospective exhibition Fifteen Years of Artists of the RSFSR, which opened in November 1932, at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad. The exhibition provided a sub- stantial survey of all existing trends in various media and demonstrated the vast range of Soviet cultural and artistic achievements, while presenting the avant-garde art as an isolated and incongruous element. The exhibition committee was headed by Igor Grabar, an Impressionist painter and former director of the Tretiakov Gallery. The committee included

29 ‘Orekhov-Zuev’ seems to be an ironic word play with the critic’s surname, Fedorov- Davydov, which operates on several levels. Orekhovo-Zuevo is an industrial city east of Moscow, created in 1917 when three villages were merged. It is also where Fedorov- Davydov had a dacha. Malevich might have been ironically alluding to the critic’s social status, ambitions, or cultural level. I am indebted to Professor John E. Bowlt, Professor Ilia Kukulin, and Professor Nina Gourianova for this information and interpretation. 30 Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 1, p. 236, translated by Antonina Bouis. exhibiting malevich under stalin 147 representatives from the Tretiakov as well as from the Russian Museum, the Museum of the Revolution, the Central Museum of the Soviet Army, and the Artists’ Union. Nikolai Punin played an important role in the selection of the works and their installation at the Russian Museum.31 Initially, the plan was to present the history of Soviet art in three chronological sections: war communism, the rehabilitation period of NEP, and the era of reconstruction, including the transition to the Second Five-Year Plan. The final format was slightly different: the room devoted to war communism was replaced by an introductory room, followed by three large galleries showing paintings by members of the Society of Easel Painters (Obshchestvo stankovistov—OST). This display was juxtaposed to works by artists formerly associated with the groups, the ‘World of Art’ and ‘Four Arts’. Some galleries contained paintings influenced by Western developments, while a large cluster of rooms showed realist paintings by the Association of Artists of the Revolution (Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsii—AKhR). The final gallery featured works illustrating the achievements of Soviet industrialisation. In all, 2,640 works were on display (1,050 paintings, 1,500 graphic works, and 90 sculptures), created by 423 artists.32 Large banners with agitational slogans decorated the museum’s staircase. The first room was dedicated to Lenin and the initial period of electrification and industrialisation, while the final room was dedicated to Stalin and presented the great achievements of the First Five-Year Plan. In each gallery, different artistic groups were presented in dialectic opposition, leading to a synthesis representing the next stage of artistic development. The logic of this historical survey allowed the organisers to provide a clear ideological trajectory of Soviet artistic developments and draw similar conclusions to those presented in previous Marxist installations, but without having to include documentary or textual materials. The display established a genealogy that placed all works in a socialist narrative and presented artistic trends dialectically. The importance of the avant-garde was minimised, and figurative painting on Soviet themes was presented as the future of Soviet art (Fig. 8.5). There were only two rooms devoted to the avant-garde, where works by Malevich, Pavel Filonov and a few of

31 The Exhibition Committee was originally headed by Ivan Matsa (János Mácza), a Hungarian Marxist and theoretican of Soviet art, who was affiliated with the Acad- emy. Committee members included David Arkin, Nikolai Punin, Frida Roginskaia, Fedorov-Davydov and other well-established curators. See A. Morozov, ‘K istorii vystavki “Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let” ’, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie, no. 1 (1982), pp. 120–167. 32 Ibid. 148 maria kokkori their students were hung (Fig. 8.6). These exhibits were shown as isolated examples of the distant bourgeois past, lying outside the main development of Soviet art. Malevich, in a letter to Kliun, described this situation as ‘a blockade all around,’33 and called Grabar a ‘dictator.’34 The exhibition moved to Moscow in 1933. There, it was reduced to only 1,042 paintings, and clearly reflected the changed political situation: it emphasised anti-formalism and focused on the future of ‘socialist realism’. ‘Formalist’ works were shown in two small rooms. One of these included twenty-eight works by Malevich, Filonov, Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Tatlin, Kliun and others. Shortly after the opening, several critical articles appeared, focusing on Malevich’s work. One text, published in the journal of the Union of Art Workers, stated that faktura, material technology and abstraction created an art that naturally ‘terminated in an artistic dead-end, Malevich’s Black Square’.35 The art historian and critic Abram Efros was equally negative: ‘The small room, where examples of the experiments and achievements of Tatlin, Malevich, Kliun, Filonov, and their rare descendants and followers of today are collected, is one of the most memorable in its, so to speak, curious tragedy. These people thought, invented and worked, but they caused a centrifugal force in their art, which led them nowhere, and into nothingness.’36 Even more polemi- cally, Grabar stated, ‘Those currents that invaded this country in the post- October period, coming straight from the shops of picture dealers in Paris and Berlin, were in no way the long-wished-for proletarian art, as was claimed by their sponsors . . . Nonsense, sheer nonsense!’ He continued, quoting from Lenin: ‘I am unable to consider the works of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism and of the other ‘isms’ as the supreme manifestations of human genius . . .’37 Lenin’s words were stencilled onto the walls of the room where the avant-garde works were on display.

33 Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 1, p. 235. 34 Ibid., p. 233. 35 L. Varshavskii, ‘Smotr Sovetskogo iskusstva. Dve vystavki’, Rabis, no. 5–6 (1933), pp. 5–9. 36 Abram Efros, ‘Vchera, segodnia, zavtra’, Iskusstvo, no. 6 (1933), p. 40. 37 Igor Grabar, ‘Soviet Art for Fifteen Years’, Soviet Culture Review, vol. 3 (1933), pp. 40–43. exhibiting malevich under stalin 149

Fig. 8.5 ‘We are creating the great art of the working class—the art of socialism’, Leningradskaia Pravda (1932). Author’s archive.

Fig. 8.6 The Kazimir Malevich room at the exhibition Fifteen Years of Artists of the RSFSR, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 1932. Courtesy of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. 150 maria kokkori

Their historical displacement and isolation were obvious to the avant- garde artists. Malevich observed bitterly: ‘At the exhibition we were isolated, as barbaric formalists, as enemies . . . My Black Square is mentioned in the newspapers . . . All remembrance, of course, is reduced to a brutal persecution: “Bourgeois life, deprived of meaning and content, is brilliantly expressed in the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. This is the blind alley of bourgeois art and the death of art” . . . Yes, I’m a true hero, a revolutionary who brought bourgeois art to a dead-end faster than the Bolsheviks and socialists . . . The Black Square is real life.’ He continued: ‘If Bukharin and, forgive me for the expression, the artist Katsman think alike and are convinced that with the Black Square I succeeded in brilliantly expressing a bourgeois content, then why don’t we say that a circle expresses Socialist reality?’38 These kinds of experimental displays at the Tretiakov Gallery continued until 1933. Fedorov-Davydov’s dialectical-materialist displays gradually generated a growing number of opponents to museum reforms, who advocated a return to traditional, de-contextualised displays, which focused on masterpieces. The montage techniques and textual commentary were so heavily criticised that in February 1933 Andrei Bubnov, the Commissar of Enlightenment, told the gallery’s new director Aleksei Volter: ‘Remove all wall texts and revolving labels. Leave only the glass inscriptions above the doors. Lock up the wall texts and revolving labels (these can be left in the office of A. A. Fedorov–Davydov, and do not show them to anyone). Free the showcases and walls from littering materials. Display the masterpieces. Group the leading artists together. The best works should hang in the best places. All work is to be finished by the end of the day.’39 Fedorov- Davydov was fired in 1934. Malevich continued to insist on the importance of art until the end of his life, despite the political powers ranged against him. In one of their last meetings, Malevich said to Kliun, ‘Perhaps, we will not see each other again . . . Tell Kristi40 in Moscow that I think the Black

38 Vakar and Mikhienko, Malevich o sebe, vol. 1, pp. 239–241. 39 See ‘Materialy po reekspozitsii GTG’, Manuscript Department of the State Tretiakov Gallery (Otdel rukopisei Gosudarstvennoi Tretiakovskoi galerei—RO GTG), fond 8, op. II, d. 504, l. 3; cited in Irina Lebedeva, ‘Avant-Garde Art in the Permanent Exhibition of the Tretiakov Gallery in the 1920s and 1930s’, in The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2001), pp. 139–147. 40 Mikhail Kristi was director of the Tretiakov Gallery (1928–1932 and 1934–1937). From 1932 to 1934 Aleksei Volter replaced him as director. exhibiting malevich under stalin 151

Square is the best work in the Tretiakov Gallery.’41 Malevich died in 1935. A year later, in 1936, the Tretiakov Gallery was instructed to remove all avant-garde works from its permanent display and place them in storage where they remained for the following fifty years.42

41 I.V. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve, eds. Andrei Sarabianov and Vasilii Rakitin (Moscow: RA, 1999), p. 113. 42 Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’noi i politicheskoi istorii—RGASPI), fond 17, op. 163, d. 1108, ll. 125–126; cited in Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Andrei Artizon, Oleg Naumon, and Marian Schwartz, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 241–242.

chapter nine

Solomon Nikritin: The Old and the New

John E. Bowlt

The focus of this essay, within the context of the utopian or post-utopian resonance of the Russian avant-garde, is on a single work, i.e. the painting, The Old and the New. A Group Portrait, by Solomon Borisovich Nikri- tin (1898–1965).1 Painted in 1935 and measuring 178.5 × 216 cm., The Old and the New (Fig. 9.1, Savitskii Museum of Visual Arts in Nukus, Karakal- pak Republic, Uzbekistan) tells the story of the early Soviet engagement and disengagement with the utopian model of Socialist Realism. Indeed, the date of the completed work, spring 1935, is of particular importance, coming less than a year after the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei), at which the commandments of Socialist Realism had been declared and codified. Nikritin is one of the most original and mysterious artists of Russia’s second avant-garde. Trained in Kiev and Moscow in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Nikritin achieved recognition for his highly experimental compositions, including abstract paintings and graphic schemes, concerned with the cosmos or, rather, with its underlying geometric harmony, which he identified with figures and landscapes, the earth and the heavens—much in the occult spirit of John Graham, Pavel Tchelitchew, and the late work of Sergei Konenkov. Although he was an extremely recondite theoretician, Nikritin also created, in the 1920s and 1930s, searing, apocalyptic visions such as Man and Cloud (Fig. 9.2);2 audacious satires such as Snowwoman (sic. i.e. not Snowman) and Lenin; forays into violence and perdition such as his War series of 1922–24 (Fig. 9.3); and even an endless, Kharmsian

1 A shorter version of this essay was published in English and Greek in Natalia Adaskina, John E. Bowlt, Nicoletta Misler and Maria Tsantsanoglou, eds., Solomon Nikritin. Spheres of Light: Stations of Darkness (Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), pp. 375–80. This catalogue is the most comprehensive source of information on Nikritin’s life and work. For reproductions of versions of, and studies for, The Old and the New, see ibid., pp. 312–19. 2 Unless stated otherwise, works cited are in the collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 154 john e. bowlt M useum of R epublic, Uzbekistan. K arakalpak N ew , 1935, oil on canvas, 178.5 × 216 cm., Savitskii N ukus, A rts, The Old and the Visual N ikritin, Fig. 9.1 Solomon solomon nikritin: the old and the new 155

Fig. 9.2 Solomon Nikritin, Man and Cloud, late 1920s, oil on cardboard mounted on canvas, 142.3 × 142.3 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

Fig. 9.3 Solomon Nikritin, study for the War series, 1922–24, ink on paper, 18.4 × 16 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 156 john e. bowlt

Fig. 9.4 Solomon Nikritin, Journey around the World, mid-1920s, oil on plywood, 47.7 × 59.7 cm., I. Dychenko Collection, Kiev.

Journey around the World in 1920 (Fig. 9.4). After the October Revolution of 1917, Nikritin assumed many professional roles, directing the Experi- mental Cabinet at Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei zhivopisnoi kul’tury), contributing to the Projectionist Group, working on stage and film designs, elaborating an extremely recondite theory based on a concept called Satio (an undeciphered occult and perhaps Oriental term, which Nikritin used assiduously, but never explained), teaching at various institutions, and even entering into correspondence with Leon Trotsky. In other words, Nikritin was an artist of many assets, and the scale of his achievements has yet to be recognised—and perhaps this examination of one of his masterpieces will help to increase his stature in the Pantheon of modern Russian art. The Old and the New (Fig. 9.1) engages our attention for several reasons. Not only is it topical and enigmatic, but it is also one of the few nonconformist paintings of the 1930s that was the subject of heated debate, censure, and censorship, the proceedings of which were published in 1937 solomon nikritin: the old and the new 157 by the American communist, Kurt London, in a book about Soviet culture, and then republished in the New York magazine, Art News, in 1953.3 After being discussed and rejected by the members of the Art Commission of the All-Russian Cooperative Association of Artists (Vserossiiskii koperativnyi soiuz khudozhnikov—Vsekokhudozhnik) on 10 April 1935, in the presence of Nikritin, the painting returned to his studio. The details of the occasion for Nikritin’s presentation of The Old and the New to the Art Commission of Vsekokhudozhnik are not known, although we may presume that he was hoping to transfer it to a museum. Responsible for art commisions, exhibitions and museum acquisitions, Vsekokhudozhnik—at that time— was a powerful and prestigious organisation, and its rejection of Nikritin’s picture was of visible and lasting detriment to his reputation. In any case, The Old and the New languished in Nikritin’s studio until 1976, when it was acquired by Igor Savitskii, director of the Museum of Visual Arts in Nukus. Since then, the painting has never travelled. Nikritin made numerous sketches, studies, and designs for The Old and the New (Figs. 9.5, 9.6, 9.7), some of which seem to go back as far as 1930, when he was still exploring non-figurative painting (Fig. 9.5). Many of the versions are now preserved in the George Costakis Collection at the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, which organised a comprehensive exhibition of his work in 2004, and they constitute the creative laboratory in which Nikritin concocted his composition. The sheer inten- sity and dedication with which Nikritin investigated the theme remind us of the fanaticism of Aleksandr Ivanov with his Appearance of Christ to the People (1833–53, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow), a failed utopia with a similar messianic vision, bolstered also by countless preliminary cartoons. The galvanic charge with which Nikritin tried to imbue his magnum opus may also remind us of other Russian artists who also tried to record uncanny visions, such as Vasilii Chekrygin, Pavel Filonov, and Mikhail Vrubel. Close inspection of The Old and the New (Fig. 9.1) reveals its main narratives, which, undoubtedly, were informed by Nikritin’s concurrent elaboration of his theory of Polyrealism. According to this system, the new realism was to present the results of ‘observing the dynamism of class

3 Kurt London, The Seven Soviet Arts (London: Faber, 1937), pp. 223–29. London’s description was republished as ‘The Artist and the Soviets’, Art News (New York), no. 37 (September 1953), pp. 37, 80–83. The same text, with minor changes, is reprinted in Adaskina et al., Solomon Nikritin, pp. 381–84. 158 john e. bowlt

Fig. 9.5 Solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, c.1930, graphite on paper, 6.7 × 8.1 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contem- porary Art, Thessaloniki.

Fig. 9.6 Solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, 1934, watercolour and graphite on paper, 20.5 × 24.4 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. solomon nikritin: the old and the new 159

Fig. 9.7 Solomon Nikritin, study for The Old and the New, oil on canvas, 39.2 × 49.4 cm., The George Costakis Collection, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

contradictions, of the acute class struggle of contemporary society’.4 The Old and the New, which Nikritin also identified as ‘an historical portrait’,5 contains references to the class struggle, imbedded in the four icons of the past and the present—the Venus statue on the left and the invalid on the right representing the past, and the komsomolets (male member of the Communist Union of Youth—Komunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi— the komsomol) with the ball6 and the female metro-worker representing the new Socialist order in the centre. Nikritin explained the derivation of

4 S. Nikritin, ‘Tezisy polirealizma’, manuscript, undated, Russian State Archive of Litera ture and Art, Moscow (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva—RGALI), fond 2727, op. 1, ed. kh. 27; cited in Adaskina et al., Solomon Nikritin, p. 210. 5 London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 224; and Adaskina, et al, Solomon Nikritin, p. 381. 6 Although in preceding remarks Nikritin mentioned the komsomolets in The Old and the New, he omitted the word from his explanation to the Vsekokhudozhnik Art Commis sion. Vladimir Kostin, art critic and friend of Nikritin, did, however, refer to the ‘komso molets . . . with bent arms holding a globe in his hands’ (V. Kostin: untitled presentation at the Commemorative Evening for S.B. Nikritin, 17 April, 1969, Moscow, Stenogram, RGALI, 160 john e. bowlt the composition: ‘The old man was painted at the Yaroslav Market . . . the young man and the young woman are friends of mine, workers on the metro. The Venus is well known.’7 On one level, the theme is simple, conventional, and entirely consonant with the code of opposites that was motivating and molding Soviet culture, especially during the pre-war period—Capitalism versus Communism, the West versus the USSR, the individual versus the collective, degeneracy versus health, utopia versus dystopia. The four icons are readily identifiable, even if their combined forces produce a certain ambivalence, and relate immediately to actual innovations and fresh conventions in Soviet cultural life of the time, such as the establishment of the All-Russian Academy of Arts (Vserossiiskaia akademiia khudozhestv) in Leningrad in 1933 with its retention of the Classical values of beauty (Venus), the building of the Mos- cow metro, the militaristic cult of sports and gymnastics, and the recurrent Party quandary over what to do about the unsightly veterans from the First World War, the Revolution, and the Civil War, who were still inhabiting the streets and squares of the main cities. Despite its apparent relevance to political and social actuality, The Old and the New, at first glance, produces a lacklustre impression: with its dull grey, black, brown, and tawny palette, muted and uninspiring colours and contrived, even cumbersome placement of the figures. The ultimate intention and meaning of The Old and the New also remain enigmatic, and the more Nikritin himself developed his explanations, the less comprehensible they became—not only to the members of the Vsekokhudoznik commission, who included Osip Beskin, Olga Bubnova, Aleksandr Deineka, Aleksandr Gerasimov, Aleksandr Grigorev, and Fedor Lekht, but also to later Soviet sympathisers such as Vladimir Kostin.8 Is The Old and the New merely another reflection of ‘Modern Antiquity’ (to cite the title of a recent exhibition organised by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles9 and the Musée Picasso in Antibes) and, therefore, in the same genre as the classicising modernism of Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Francis

fond 2717, op. 1, d. 116, p. 11). Kostin is mistaken in dating Nikritin’s encounter with the Art Commission to 1934. 7 This and following statements by Nikritin regarding The Old and the New are taken from London’s report. 8 See V. Kostin, Sredi khudozhnikov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1986), p. 64. 9 The exhibition, Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia, was on view at the Getty Villa, Los Angeles, between November 2011 and January 2012. A catalogue, with the same title, written by Christopher Green and Jens M. Dachner, was also published by the Getty Museum. solomon nikritin: the old and the new 161

Fig. 9.8 Solomon Nikritin, People’s Court, 1934, oil on canvas, 143 × 142 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Picabia, or, as the Art Commission indicated in its criticism, a gesture to Italian Fascist art (and, one might add, to German Neue Sachlichkeit and French Surrealism)? Is the painting Nikritin’s spontaneous response to the imposition of Socialist Realism, and was Nikritin’s interrogation by the Art Commission an ominous enactment of his own painting, The People’s Court (1934, Fig. 9.8)? Nikritin himself had much to say about the rationale, the meaning, and the destination of The Old and the New: The world of the old and the new is seen from within. The old is appre- hended not by its external features, but by its deepest, innermost, socio- ethical idea of non-union, of detachment from the world. Thus there grew up within me the Venus and the old man, against whom life has set the new Venus, such as she is reproduced here, and the young man, full of endeavor, energy, discipline and general intuition.10

10 London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 214. 162 john e. bowlt

On the one hand, The Old and the New can be viewed as an earnest exercise in the kind of ideological adjustment that many members of the second-generation avant-garde were attempting at this time. If artists such as Deineka, Nikritin, and Yurii Pimenov had been open to the innovations of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin in the 1920s, the formulation of Socialist Realism, the founding of the Moscow Organi- sation of the Union of Artists of the USSR (Soiuz khudozhnikov SSSR, of which Nikritin was a member), and the establishment of Vsekokhudoz- hnik now prompted them to curtail their fantasy and focus on ‘reality in its revolutionary development’.11 There are many celebrated examples of this aesthetic compromise. Deineka’s Future Flyers (1937, State Tretia- kov Gallery, Moscow) is one of the more obvious—it emphasises the virtues of social equality, athletic health, and technological prowess, while disregarding earlier lessons in Suprematism, Constructivism or German Expressionism. The theme of the old and the new was already an established part of Nikritin’s pictorial lexicon, and many of his series or cycles (e.g. War and Peace) function on the basis of social and political division, such as the capitalist in the top hat and the common workers in the Revolution series, although the tension is often mitigated by elements of paradox and satire. The Old and the New, however, is not ironic, is not part of a cycle, and, as Nikritin’s largest extant painting, it seems more appropriate as a fresco than as a studio painting or political illustration. After all, it was in the 1930s that Nikritin was working extensively on public art, including didactic installations and interior designs for the Polytechnical Museum (Politekhnicheskii muzei) in Moscow and then on propaganda panels for the Mechanisation and Moldavia Pavilions at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (Vsesoiuznaia selsko-khoziaistvennaia vystavka) in Moscow, which was later renamed the Exhibition of National Economic Achieve- ments (Vystavka dostizhenii narodnogo khoziaistva—VDNKh). If the basic message of The Old and the New—to replace the values of tradition with the new canon of Socialism—is apparent, there are still associations and insinuations that cloud the issue, generating an intricate context for any interpretation of the five major components in the picture: Venus, the komsomolets, the ball, the metro-worker, and the invalid. The inclusion of the Venus, for example, maintains the campaigns for and

11 N. Matveeva, ed., Materialy Pervogo Vsesoiuznogo s’ezda sovetskikh khudozhnikov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1958), p. 331. solomon nikritin: the old and the new 163 against the Venus as a traditional symbol of beauty (whether the Venus de Milo or other variations) conducted by Russian artists before the October Revolution. Students analysed and copied the Greek originals, Roman copies or plaster casts that every reputable art school or museum possessed and, as a young man, Nikritin himself was inspired by the gypsum calques at the Aleksandr III Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (Muzei iziashchnykh iskusstv imeni Imperatora Aleksandra III).12 True, the Russian evocation of Venus was contaminated by the cults of the Russian krasavitsa (beauty), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia, shades of which can be traced in the work of numerous modernists, including Boris Kustodiev, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Zinaida Serebriakova, and Sergei Sudeikin, even if the classical versions remained the accepted icon of classical beauty for painters and sculptors alike. The icon of the Venus, however, was so canonical and so visible that the more raucous members of the Russian avant-garde also saw it as a target for both academic and public abuse: Mikhail Larionov had produced an entire cycle of ‘anti-Venus’ paintings; Ilia Zdanevich, in a public lecture of March 1913, had argued that a pair of shoes was more beautiful than Venus; and Malevich had referred to the Venus de Milo as a ‘graphic example of decline’.13 Perhaps by 1935 these negative associations had been lost from view, but, even so, by combining the Venus with the invalid and relegating them both to a moribund tradition, Nikritin was repeating a well-established strategy. His Venus points to her partner in the past, the invalid or war veteran, who, as the victim and relic of military violence, symbolises the inhumanity of the Capitalist or Imperial system. As a matter of fact, one of the early sketches shows skyscrapers in the background, indicating that the invalid was an ill of American, rather than Russian, society. Nevertheless, the wounded and maimed, like the bezprizorniki (street children), the prostitutes, and the hawkers, were graphic reminders of the tragic cost of war and revolution. In the 1920s, they were a constant presence on Russian streets— and a frequent motif in art and literature. Pimenov’s War Veterans (1926, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), for example, paid painful homage to the unsung heroes of military action. Like George Grosz, Nikritin was

12 This is now the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina). 13 K. Malevich, Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu. Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm (Moscow, 1916); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), vol. 1, p. 39. 164 john e. bowlt fascinated by these outcasts, reproducing them in drawings and paintings such as the War and Revolution series. By the early 1930s, many of these sorrowful components had been replaced by Stalin’s ‘men of steel’, a new generation exuding health, cleanliness, strength, and efficiency—and Nikritin was painting The Old and the New, therefore, just as these primary, Soviet virtues were being promoted. Even in art criticism, the notions of health and disease assumed ideological dimensions. Paul Cézanne, for example, was regarded as pernicious, while Greek statuary, especially from the era of Pericles, was lauded as a major source of artistic wellbeing.14 That Nikritin placed his rendering of the Roman copy of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite in such a ‘sickly’ environment was an unfortunate gesture and must have irritated the Vsekokhudozhnik Art Commission. Indeed, one of the review members, Beskin, perhaps the severest critic of The Old and the New, argued that, unlike Nikritin, the genuine Soviet artist was ‘advancing towards the affir- mation of a healthy art’.15 Although the members of Nikritin’s review committee consisted of practising artists, art historians, and administrators, all their assumptions were pre-ordained by the concurrent, ardent debates on the consistency of Soviet culture. The harshness of the criticism meted out to Nikritin and his picture was part of the general campaign that the Party was waging, especially in Pravda and Izvestiia, against all artistic, literary, and artistic experimentation, so when Lekht asserted, ‘Comrades, here we have a sample of the works about which Pravda has warned us’,16 he was making an explicit reference to this conjunction. Just a few months later, in Janu- ary 1936, Pravda initiated another kind of ‘people’s court’ when it condemned Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District for its pornographic content, an allegation that the awkward positioning of the ball in The Old and the New also elicited. The particular response of the Vsekokhudozhnik Art Commission to The Old and the New, therefore, should be regarded as part of the general, monolithic reaction to any aesthetic system that deviated from the norms of Socialist Realism, including Nikritin’s Polyrealism which, of course, was too fluid to fit the ideological canon. By 1935, it was clear that,

14 In the mid-1930s, the critic, Sergei Dinamov, wrote about the need for Soviet art to return to the Classical forms of the Periclean era. See E. Andreeva: ‘Sovetskoe iskusstvo 1930-kh-nachala 1980-kh godov’, Iskusstvo (Moscow) no. 10 (1988), p. 86. 15 O. Beskin, Formalizm v zhivopisi (Moscow: Vsekokhudozhnik, 1933), p. 9. 16 London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 228. solomon nikritin: the old and the new 165 if culture was the superstructure above the economic base, then Soviet creativity had to be more progressive, more wholesome, and more distinctive than any other and to bear symbols that could identify it immediately as being ‘revolutionary’ and ‘proletarian’. The champions of Socialist Real- ism and Stalin’s court painters such as Aleksandr Gerasimov were now presented as the equivalents of Diego Rodríquez de Silva y Velázquez and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,17 whereas Pablo Picasso and other bourgeois artists were producing ‘sadistically perverted forms’.18 As we can see from the statements of the Nikritin commission, this centrifugal criticism, like the Soviet Union’s centralised government, was incapable of aesthetic dislocation or interchange, so that entire movements such as the avant- garde were discounted or lambasted, and any manifestation of parallels with the West were discouraged. Hence Beskin identified The Old and the New with a ‘tendency that is absolutely flooding Europe and which is found with particular frequency in America’.19 The history of art was now being tailored to political dictates, even if that meant distorting or condemning stylistic development, sequence, and coincidence—a procedure identifiable with Pavel Sokolov-Skalia comparing The Old and the New to Italian Fascist art.20 The parallel is certainly there (the metro girl, who in early sketches is nude, even recalls the ample female figures painted by Giorgio de Chirico). The Venus and the veteran are joined not only by their unity as aesthetic poles (beauty and ugliness), but also by their common inactiv- ity or, rather, poise, inasmuch as the picture is all about gesture. Indeed, the controlled poses and restrained gestures of all four figures remind us that Nikritin had worked at Aleksei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour (Tsentral’nyi institut truda- TsIT) in 1923–26, exploring time and motion studies and Taylorism to formulate the ideal, most efficient, and economi- cal physiological movement. In any case, it is the ‘new’ that occupies the centre of The Old and the New, i.e. the komsomolets catching the flying ball and the metro girl motioning with confidence and authority, a resolution that Nikritin himself explained: ‘[The metro girl] stood on top of a sand pile in the very pose in which she appears in this picture. She was directing the drawers of sand, looking along the street from top to bottom,

17 Interview with Igor Golomstock, Los Angeles, 13 March 1989. 18 A. Gerasimov, Za sotsialisticheskii realizm (Moscow: Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR, 1952), p. 83. 19 London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 227. 20 Ibid., p. 226. 166 john e. bowlt at the people, the cars’.21 Even if a few of the preliminary studies in the Thessaloniki and Nukus collections show the girl holding a pole in her left hand and not ‘directing the drawers of sand’, her essential, frontal pose is constant throughout the preliminary phases. For the Art Commission, the peculiar configuration of the komsomo lets and the ball, sphere, or globe constituted a major bone of contention, leading Lekht to ask, ‘What is [the young man] doing and on what is he leaning?’ and Deineka to enquire, ‘How is it that the ball is in such an odd position?’ Nikritin countered these questions with his own explanation: This youth and his comrades often visited me. And once . . . he quickly turned and began to look for a city on the globe. I felt that in this gesture there lay a genuine expression of the character of contemporary youth. That is how the figure of the young man came into being. I wanted to make him ‘flying’.22 Actually, Nikritin’s matter-of-fact commentary hides an entire philosophical dimension connected with the essential structure of Polyrealism, i.e., what Nikritin described as the ‘force of circular rotation, of circular life’, his idea being that reality, the earth, the cosmos, God, artistic inspiration, time, space, and the elements were circular and the globe or disc, present in many of his pictures, including The Old and the New, symbolises this force. While there is no need to question Nikritin’s sentiments, it should be noted that the movement of a figure inclining from left to right and counterbalanced by an object was a motif that he explored in many other works. In any case, preliminary versions of The Old and the New present the young man reclining and holding the globe close to his right knee or thigh (Fig. 9.6). Whether or not Nikritin reversed the position of the young man and the globe because of the real life episode that he observed or because he felt that, formally, the vertical of the girl needed to be countered by a diagonal, or because, for all his apparent innocence, he was evoking the masculine drive to partake of the apple (after all, Venus is the Goddess of Love), the result is perplexing, uncomfortable, and, as Kurt London observed, ‘a stroke of bad luck’.23 Of course, the komsomolets bears a close resemblance to a football player or, rather, a goalkeeper, who, with his lunge, seems to be about to catch the ball and, as it were, save the world, establishing the ‘global rhythm

21 Ibid., p. 224. The original translation is retained. 22 Ibid., p. 225. 23 London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 230. solomon nikritin: the old and the new 167 for a single world action’ that Nikritin himself sought so passionately.24 The frozen diagonal of the komsomolets culminating in the anticipated catch of the globe brings to mind many similar poses in Soviet visual art of the 1920s and 1930s, including Deineka’s Goalkeeper (1934, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow). Indeed, suddenly, globes and spheres were everywhere, from Pavel Kuznetsov’s Pushball (1931, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow) to Georgii Bibikov’s The Stratosphere Balloon ‘Freedom’ (1935, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). In any case, we can assume that, Nikritin (with his fixation on circles and curves, his mission to ‘implement the circle of human feeling within the circle of materials’ and his identification of his philosophical concept of Satio with circular movement),25 was simply applying his ‘circular’ formulae to The Old and the New. One of the preliminary studies, for example (State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thes- saloniki), is basically an exercise in concentric circles that converge on the central globe being caught by the komsomolets. In this sense, however much it deviates from previous styles, the picture retains an organic connection with the earlier cycles such as the variants of Journey around the World (Fig. 9.4) in which the travellers, (themselves holding and riding globes), are circumventing the globe. The globe in The Old and the New elicits associations with the Neo- Classical perception of the globe as a geometric metaphor for divine perfection. Actually, Nikritin used to carry a ball-bearing in his pocket so as to demonstrate that ‘in this ball lay art, this was the centre of the universe, it reflected everything. It absorbed everything within itself, and so the artist had to be a ball to absorb the world within himself.’26 Still, Nikritin would seem to be more engaged with a remoter past because, in some of his preliminary sketches, the ball resembles a discus and the young man the Discobolus of Myron, which art students copied from plaster casts and which, like the Venus, was a standard assignment in anatomy classes. The metro girl in The Old and the New is as robust and as fertile as Vera Mukhina’s peasant woman in the celebrated statue atop the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris (Figs. 2.3, 10.5) or, for that matter, the buxom women of

24 S. Nikritin, ‘Dnevnikovye zapisi’ (5 August 1919[?]), RGALI, fond 2717, op. 1, ed. khr. 7, l. 68 ob. 25 S. Nikritin: ‘Stantsii zhivopisnogo sversheniia Satio’ (1921), manuscript, Manuscript Department, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow (Otdel rukopisei, Gosudarstvennaia Tretia kovskaia gallereia), fond 141, d. 50. 26 Comment by Sokolov-Skalia in ‘The Artist and the Soviets’. 168 john e. bowlt

Italian Fascist iconography. Nikritin’s metro girl opposes the grace and modesty of the nude Venus, challenging the Greek goddess with a new vitality, plenitude, and kinesis. With her javelin-like gesture, her flowing hair and jumpsuit, the metro girl might just as well be one of Picasso’s heavy nymphs dancing across the drop curtain for Le Train Bleu of 1924 or one of Sergei Merkurov’s statues for the Moscow metro—muscular, sport- ive, and confident of victory.27 For all these equivocations, The Old and the New was politically correct at least in one respect: the axial new has driven the old to the periphery. In spite of this easy reading and Nikritin’s sincerity, the painting generated such censure that it was threatened with destruction.28 What went wrong? The answer lies not only in the myopia of a state bureaucracy, but also in the artistic psychology of Nikritin himself: just as impending doom threatens the heroes of his previous masterpieces such as Man and Cloud (Fig. 9.2), so The Old and the New elicits uncertainty and mystery. The Venus, the veteran, the komsomolets, and the metro girl may be identified with a particular social and ideological status, but they are lost in the swirling mists of a political wilderness. Instead of a festive new Soviet city, they inhabit a no man’s land, more akin to Salvador Dali’s waste- lands than to the floridity of Socialist Realism. Wrapped in the clouds of uncertainty, in the top left is another ominous symbol—what seems to be a huge bird of prey—hovering in this apocalyptic limbo, this desert of scorched earth and brooding tempests. To officialdom, Nikritin’s Polyreal- ism was neither multiple, nor actual, and his denial of the old in the name of an anxious new, his substitution of a luminous future with a forebod- ing present was unforgivable—due reason for immediate dismissal and redress. Dream had turned into nightmare, old into new, new into old, and utopia into dystopia.

27 Nikritin was well aware of the statuary for Gorky Park since he had been work ing there as a designer from 1928 (then called the Central Park of Culture and Rest— Tsentral’nyi park kul’tury i otdykha). 28 Olga Bubnova: ‘I am not anxious about the picture, which can be destroyed’, from London, The Seven Soviet Arts, p. 228. chapter ten

The Ghost in the Machine: The Modernist Architectural Utopia under Stalin

Christina Lodder

It is sometimes suggested that the avant-garde utopia finally died in April 1932 when the Party abolished all independent creative groups and subsequently formulated and imposed Socialist Realism.1 Yet this judgement is as optimistic—or as pessimistic—depending on your point of view—as assuming that the October Revolution of 1917 immediately saw the establishment of a socialist society. While the mechanisms of government control, such as the various official unions, were established in the wake of the 1932 decree and, in theory, were given the power to impose the new aesthetic—that aesthetic was far from being fully formulated. The various definitions put forward in 1934 at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei) were fairly vague and so allowed a variety of interpretation, especially in architecture.2 The formulation ‘realist in form, socialist in content’ or Andrei Zhdanov’s admonitions to writers to ‘depict reality in its revolutionary development’ were difficult to apply to architecture, although his belief that writers should be ‘engineers of the human soul’ dovetailed with avant-garde architects’ conviction concerning the transformative nature of modernist design.3 In 1933, the journal Architecture of the USSR (Arkhitektura SSSR) admon- ished, ‘In its search for an appropriate style, Soviet architecture must strive for realistic criteria—for clarity and precision in its images, which must be easily comprehensible by and accessible to the masses’.4 The

1 ‘O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii’, Pravda (24 April 1932), passed 23 April 1932; English translation in John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1932 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 288–90. 2 See Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977). 3 Andrei Zhdanov, ‘Soviet Literature—The Richest in Ideas, The Most Advanced Litera ture’ in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, pp. 15–16. 4 Editorial, Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 1 (1933), p. 1; English translation from Alexei Tarkha nov and Sergei Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture, trans. Robin and Julia Whitby and James Paver (London: Laurence King, 1992), p. 49. 170 christina lodder emphasis on architecture’s comprehensibility and accessibility indicated that architects needed to take into account, and appeal to, the taste of ordinary citizens. Despite this fundamental premise, such formulations as ‘realistic criteria’ were vague and difficult to interpret in terms of actual building design. Clearly, the specific aesthetic features of Socialist Realism in architecture required elaboration, and this process took time.5 As the All-Union Creative Conference of Architects in 1934 admitted, ‘Our task is the struggle to embody in the language of architecture the great slogans of our epoch’.6 ‘Struggle’ here is the operative word. The inevitable lack of clarity and precision in defining exactly what architectural language was appropriate in order to achieve this aim gave modernists a certain leeway, allowing their approaches, ideas, and utopian visions to operate within certain restricted parameters. Of course, by this time, modernism’s position was not very secure. In 1930, the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Architects (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo proletarskikh arkhitektorov—VOPRA) had orchestrated a virulent campaign against formalism in general and Ivan Leonidov in particular.7 They disliked the austerity and uniformity of the Inter- national Style and modernist architects’ contempt for the architectural heritage. Similarly, in June 1931 the Party’s resolution on urban renewal had emphatically rejected the more extreme and iconoclastic ideas of avant-garde architects and had advocated a comprise with traditional approaches.8 On the basis of such evidence, it has been asserted that ‘by 1934 . . . the political defeat of the modernists was a fait accompli’.9 Yet, when the Union of Soviet Architects (Soiuz sovetskikh arkhitektorov) was formed in July 1932, the Constructivist Viktor Vesnin became its first president. Naturally, he ensured that his modernist colleagues were well represented within the organisation, although the doctrinaire VOPRA stalwart Karo Alabian became the Union’s vice-president, representing, with his

5 According to Ivan Mikhailovich Gronskii (editor of Izvestiia and Novyi mir at the time), Stalin coined the term in conversation with him on 23 April 1932. See I.M. Gronskii, Iz proshlogo . . . Vospominaniia (Moscow: Izvestiia, 1991), pp. 334–335. 6 Cited in Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, The Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (New York and London: Overlook Duckworth, 2011), p. 266. 7 See, for example, A. Mordvinov, ‘Leonidovshchina i ego vred’, Iskusstvo v massy, no. 12 (1933), pp. 12–15. 8 Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiiu Moskvy (Moscow: Mosgubispolkom, 1931). 9 Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture, p. 16. the ghost in the machine 171 entourage, a strong anti-modernist element.10 This may have been an uneasy partnership—but it certainly does not represent the total eclipse of modernism or its exponents. In fact, Vesnin maintained this position until 1939 when he then became the first president of the Soviet Union’s Academy of Architecture (Akademiia arkhitektury SSSR), remaining in place until 1949. In addition to these official responsibilities, he became chief architect of the People’s Commissariat for the Construction of Heavy Industry (Narodnyi komissariat tiazheloi promyshlennosti—Narkomtiazh prom). In these capacities, he continued to work in accordance with the Constructivist method. Indeed, as I hope to show, modernist utopian visions continued to function (albeit in a limited way) under Stalin during the 1930s—and to an even more restricted degree, modernism was embraced by Stalinism itself. In pursuing this idea, I am not adopting Boris Groys’s argument that Stalinism was the embodiment of avant- garde utopia, but I am concerned to show the continuities of a specifically modernist vision of utopia (as expressed in modernist architectural theory and practice) within the framework of Soviet architectural activity of the 1930s.11 The beginning of a Socialist Realist style of architecture is often dated to the Palace of the Soviets’ Competition of 1929–33, and the ultimate version of the winning design (by Boris Iofan, Vladimir Gelfreikh and Vladimir Shchuko, 1934, Fig. 10.1), is often considered a paradigm of the new style. It was conceived as a monumental building, consciously utilising traditional elements such as figurative sculpture, along with Roman and Greek details. Despite its strong traditional and classical qualities, it possesses certain features in common with Vladimir Tatlin’s Model for a Monument to the Third International (Fig. 10.2), produced fourteen years earlier, which epitomises modernist aspirations. Both were realised in model form only, and neither was built. Both structures defied gravity and reached for the stars. Both were utopian—one a monument to world revolution—the other a cathedral to socialism and a celebration of the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Both were to be situ- ated in the middle of cities, leading to the destruction and reorganisa-

10 See Izvestiia (18 July 1932); reprinted in V. Khazanova, ed., Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitek tury 1926–1932. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), p. 163. For a discussion of the formation of the Union and related developments, see Hugh H. Hudson, Jr., Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture 1917–1937 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 144ff. 11 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 172 christina lodder

Fig. 10.1 Boris Iofan, Vladimir Gelfreikh, and Vladimir Shchuko, and sculptor S. Merkulov, Approved Design for the Palace of Soviets, 1934, ink and collage on paper, 96 × 102.7 cm., Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow.

Fig. 10.2 Vladimir Tatlin standing in front of his Model for a Monument to the Third International on display in the Mosaics Studio of the former Academy of Arts, Petrograd, November 1920. Reproduced in Nikolai Punin, Tatlin (Protiv kubizma) (Moscow, 1921). the ghost in the machine 173 tion of the immediate environment. In this respect, both modernism and Stalinism embraced utopian visions. They shared an aspiration to create a new material environment and a new type of social space that would help to inculcate socialist values, to affect how people thought and acted, and thus help to produce the new man. Essentially, both considered architecture in its widest sense to be a way of radically transforming human psychology and behaviour.12 Even so, while Tatlin in his open forms was celebrating technology as well as the Collective, and vaguely socialist values, Iofan and his team were using closed forms and solid masses to celebrate power, the personality of Lenin and Stalin and the specific ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Therefore, although the two projects possessed features in common, they also differed fundamentally in the nature of the utopia that they were expressing and the ‘architectural form’ or ‘style’ that was to effect the transformation of Russian society. In 1932, there was no real evidence that the winning entry to the Pal- ace of the Soviets competition represented the style that would become Socialist Realism, although it gave a strong indication of government pref- erences and the direction in which Stalin wanted Soviet architecture to develop, i.e. broadly towards a style that assimilated the architectural heritage and the traditional values of classicism.13 The winning entry certainly shattered the assumption (shared by avant-garde Russian and European architects alike) that modernism was the style of the new state. Cornelis van Eesteren and Sigfried Giedion on behalf of CIAM (Congrès Interna- tional d’Architecture Moderne) wrote directly to Stalin, condemning the choice as ‘an insult to the spirit of the Revolution and the realisation of the Five-Year Plan’.14 Stalin himself had identified Iofan’s design as the best entry, but had proposed certain important changes, which included

12 The Bolsheviks viewed the reorganisation of Soviet space as vital to the inculcation of socialist values, changing people’s behaviour and psychological disposition and there fore fundamental to the creation of a socialist society. See David Crowley and Susan Reid, ‘Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc’, in Crowley and Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 11. 13 For a fuller discussion of these and other issues relating to the competition and the Stalinisation of architecture, see Vladimir Paperny, Kul’tura Dva (Ann Arbor MI.: Ardis, 1985); Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 2002; 2011); Dmitrii Khmel’nitskii, Stalin i arkhitektura. Psikhologiia i stil’ (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2007); and Dmitrii Khmel’nitskii, Zodchii Stalin. Ocherki vizual’nosti (Moscow: NLO, 2007). 14 Cornelis van Eesteren and Sigfried Giedion, letter to Iosif Stalin, 20 April 1932; reprinted in Martin Steinman, ed., CIAM: Dokumente 1928–1939 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1979), pp. 124–5. They were complaining about the prize awarded to Iofan in the intial phases of the competition. 174 christina lodder

transforming the main tower into a column that was as tall as the Eiffel Tower (or even taller), crowning it with a brightly lit hammer and sickle, and placing monuments to Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in front of the building.15 Yet the group of architects that he chose to work on the project included prominent modernists.16 Subsequently architectural workshops were set up in Moscow, which were run by the same mixture of architects—modernists and traditionalists. Of course, the Palace of the Soviets was just one aspect of Stalin’s vision for a new Mos- cow, acting as a capital for the international proletariat, but although the site was cleared, and construction eventually began, it was never built; the Second World War intervened, and the steel structure already in place was removed and recycled for military use. In 1945, the plan was resusci- tated and the design improved, but never implemented. In fact, it was only after the war that the architecture that we usually identify as Stalinist or Socialist Realist really emerged in all its splendour, in a period (1941–1954), that, for Andrei Ikonnikov, was characterised by ‘the absolute dominance and dogmatism of the utopia of “eternal values” ’.17 The similarity between the 1932 winning entry and the towers built in Moscow after the war, such as Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet im. M.V. Lomonosova) has produced the mistaken impression that this was the dominant style of Soviet architecture for the whole time that Stalin was in power. The situation, however, was more fluid—there was no single imposed architectural idiom, despite official encouragement for more historically resonant buildings. As Alessandro De Magistris has observed, there were a multitude of architectural realisms at this time, and ‘the evolution of Soviet architecture in the 1930s and 1940s depended neither on preconceived academic formulae nor on a universally delineated relation between policies and power.’18 There was definitely no established ‘Stalinist’ style of architecture in 1934, when Aleksandr Vesnin, a Construc- tivist architect who believed that form should follow function and that the

15 Iosif Stalin, letter to Lazar Kaganovich, 7 August 1932; reprinted in O.B. Khlebniuk, ed., Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska 1931–1936 gg. (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsik lopediia, 2001), p. 269. 16 Inevitably, the list included traditionalists, like Ivan Zholtovskii, Aleksei Shchusev, Ivan Fomin, Boris Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko,—but also practising Constructivists and mod ernists, like Ilia Golosov, Panteleimon Golosov, Nikolai Kolli, Konstantin Melnikov, Viktor Vesnin, Moisei Ginzburg and Nikolai Ladovskii. 17 See A. V. Ikonnikov, Utopicheskoe myshlenie i arkhitektura (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2004), p. 286. 18 Alessandro De Magistris, ‘Realisms in Soviet Architecture from the 1930s to the 1950s’ in Socialist Realisms: Soviet Painting 1920–1970 (Milan: Skira, 2012), p. 175. the ghost in the machine 175

Fig. 10.3 The building of the Council for Labour and Defence, Moscow, by Arkadii Langman, 1932–1935. Photograph courtesy of Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze, Architecture of the Stalin Era (New York, 1992). organisation of the internal spaces of a building should be expressed on their exterior, deplored the rather eclectic state of current Soviet design: Architecture has moved rather too quickly from having as its slogan ‘not permitted’ to having ‘anything goes’. The switch from extreme rationality to extreme irrationality has been too abrupt, and in my opinion the majority of architects have followed a path of unrestrained decoration. Call this Shchusism from [Aleksei] Shchusev, and it is, I believe, an extremely dangerous phenomenon, perhaps even more dangerous than historicism (retrospectivism).19 Unfortunately, as in Western Art Deco, modernism in the Soviet Union was acquiring a certain decorative quality, while geometrical purity, functional severity and formal austerity were disappearing. This eclecticism is typified by Arkadii Langman’s building for the Council for Labour and Defence (Sovet truda i oborony) in Moscow (1932–1935, Fig. 10.3). It is a

19 Aleksandr Vesnin, ‘Problemy sovremennoi arkhitektury’, Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 2 (1934). 176 christina lodder relatively modest structure, with strong vertical detailing, which gives it a certain monumentality and emphatic classical resonance. The style seems to pay some tribute to American Art Deco, which combined certain features of modernism with a penchant for decoration and, like many New York buildings of the time, it required expensive stone and metal finishes (Karelian granite, marble from the Urals, and Protopopov limestone from the Oka River region). Langman was the director of the Engineering and Construction Department of the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del SSSR—The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR, a forerunner of the KGB), so presumably neither expense nor official approval was a problem. The building is long and narrow. The street façade of 160 metres is punctuated by a stepped-back central element, which is twelve storeys high, while the wings are two storeys lower. The classical features, such as the vertical orchestration, the tri-partite organisation of the façade, the three-storeys-high central portal, the symmetrical ground plan, and the presence of the sculpted Soviet insignia in the pedi- ment, are offset by modernist aspects like the building’s essential simplicity and the fact that the internal organisation—a central corridor with offices either side and three stairwells—is reflected in the exterior. Complementing such buildings were more overtly classical designs by the pre-revolutionary architect, Ivan Zholtovskii, who produced a highly decorated block of flats on Mokhovaia ulitsa, Moscow in 1934, which was based on Andrea Palladio’s design for the Palazzo del Capitaniato (also known as the Loggia del Capitanio) in Vicenza. Monumental three-quarter columns, with composite capitals, frame extensive fenestration and are surmounted by a cornice and an attic storey with an elaborate balustrade. Zholtovskii’s equally Italianate earlier design for the State Bank of the USSR (Gosudarstvennyi bank SSSR—Gosbank) on Moscow’s Neglinnaia ulitsa had prompted Aleksandr Vesnin to comment caustically: Zholtovskii’s ambition, which is to foist the principles of the Italian Renais- sance and outdated fifteenth- and sixteenth-century forms onto contemporary Soviet architecture, is . . . destructive. Something like Zholtovskii’s Gosbank is most damaging to our society because it seeks to justify its total separation from our time by a philosophy of ‘imperishable form’ and by its undoubtedly high technical quality. But it is still a replica’.20 Of course, Soviet architectural eclecticism of the 1930s also included modernism or strands of modernism. The normal time lag between conception

20 A. Vesnin, ‘Kak ne nado stroit’, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1928), p. 43. the ghost in the machine 177 and execution of a building was exacerbated in the USSR by other factors: the shortage of construction materials during the early 1920s, the time taken for the economy to recover from the devastation of the Civil War, the state’s implementation of the New Economic Policy (Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika—NEP) in 1921, which permitted small-scale industrial enterprises to co-exist alongside state-run industries, and the state’s focus on re-building heavy industry. This situation meant that many modernist designs, which were fully formulated at the end of the 1920s and accepted by officialdom prior to the imposition of a more stringent government controls, were only completed by the mid-1930s. In a very concrete way, these buildings represented a direct element of continuity with earlier avant-garde visions, spanning this period of crucial change in cultural politics. Among these permanent reminders of modernism is Le Corbusier’s design for the building of the Central Union of Consumer Societies (Tsentral’nyi soiuz potrebitel’skikh obshchestv— Tsentrosoiuz) in Moscow, of 1929–1934, which was executed with the help of Nikolai Kolli.21 Although some of the more radical aspects of Le Corbusier’s conception had been mitigated and the use of poor quality Soviet materials had impaired the execution of his principles, the building itself stood as a constant reminder of the ideals of the International Style.22 Similarly, the residential building for the People’s Commissariat of Finance (Narodnyi komissariat finansov—Narkomfin), which was designed in 1928, according to the functional method of the leading Con- structivist architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis, was only finished four years later in 1932 (Fig. 10.4). With its use of pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, and roof garden, it incorporated many of Le Corbusier’s ideas, but presented them within a building that was organised according to strictly functional principles and epitomised a new concept of collective housing.23 Similarly spanning this transitional period is the Red Banner Textile Factory (Trikotazhnaia fabrika ‘Kras- noe Znamia’), of 1926–1937, constructed in Leningrad. The initial design was by the celebrated German architect Erich Mendelsohn, but this was later altered by S.O. Ovsiannikov, E.A. Tretiakov, and Hyppolit Pretreaus

21 Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow 1928–1936 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 22 For photographs of the building today, see Richard Pare, The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture, 1922–1932 (New York: Monacelli Press, 2007), pp. 110–115. 23 For photographs revealing the dilapidated state of the building today, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 78–89. 178 christina lodder

Fig. 10.4 The Narkomfin building, Moscow, 1928–1932, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis. Photograph courtesy of S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Moisei Ginzburg (Moscow, 2007).

(the senior architect of the project). Despite their modifications, the structure is highly reminiscent of Mendelsohn’s other designs of the 1920s–1930s, with its asymmetrical organisation, simple window apertures, streamlined design emphasised by the horizontal stringing, ribbon windows, flat roofs, and use of contrasting volumes (two curved elements and the long low horizontal component).24 Alongside such examples of delayed modernism, there were certain specific areas in which modernist styles and approaches continued to influence architectural design. One of these included Soviet pavilions for international exhibitions and fairs, where a progressive architectural idiom was deemed desirable in order to reinforce the general image of progress that the USSR wanted to project to the rest of the world and the message that the Soviet Union rejected capitalism and tradition. Iofan’s design for the 1937 Soviet pavilion for the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris quotes certain elements from his 1933 design for the Palace of the Soviets, especially in the formulation of the main tower (Fig. 10.5). Although it might appear to be fairly

24 See Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 290–295. the ghost in the machine 179

Fig. 10.5 The Soviet Pavilion for the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris, 1937, designed by Boris Iofan, topped by figures of The Male Worker and Female Collective Farmer by Vera Mukhina. Photograph courtesy of the V. Rakitin Collection.

Fig. 10.6 Nikolai Suetin, Model of the grand staircase of the Soviet Pavilion at the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris, 1937, plaster, lost. Photograph courtesy of the V. Rakitin Collection. 180 christina lodder

monumental and static when compared with Konstantin Melnikov’s innovative design for the 1925 exhibition, the repetition of geometric forms on the side façade is less redolent of any historicism and more associated with a decorative modernism, as epitomised by Western Art Deco. The reitera- tion of the shapes suggests dynamism and movement (which was emphasised by the presence of Vera Mukhina’s sculpture of the Male Worker and Female Collective Farmer striding towards the future, heads held high and holding aloft the hammer and sickle), while the huge expanse of glazing recalls the extensive fenestration in Le Corbusier’s Tsentrosoiuz building.25 This continuity with modernism is even more evident in the interiors, which are free of bombastic historicist decoration and were designed by Nikolai Suetin. Indeed, the geometric configuration of the slender pillars on the staircase suggest continuities with Kazimir Malevich’s utopian architectons (arkhitektony), the architectural plaster models that he made from 1923 onwards as part of his vision of a new world, constructed in accordance with Suprematist principles (Fig. 10.6). Suetin was a student of Malevich’s in Vitebsk, a member of Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva—Champions of the New Art), and clearly shared Malevich’s aspirations to recreate the world in a Suprematist idiom. The modernism (albeit muted) of the pavilion was, of course, for foreign consumption, because it was precisely modernism’s utopian connotations that Soviet officialdom wanted to harness and exploit. It presented a vision of the USSR as a progressive and ‘uniquely vital and youthful’ society in contrast to both the innately conservative European countries tied to tradition and the industrially advanced but socially unjust capitalist America.26 Such resonances were especially valued in Paris, where the pavilion confronted Albert Speer’s structure celebrating the Third Reich. Even so, in 1939, Iofan diluted any modernist presence further in his design for the Soviet pavilion at New York World’s Fair. Once again, the forms are repeated to create a rhythm, but they now possess a more pronounced classical articulation. This more traditional approach was also evident in the interior, although this was not in an excessively ornamental style and retained a slight modernist tinge.

25 Danilo Udovički-Selb, ‘Facing Hitler’s Pavilion: The Uses of Modernity in the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 47, no. 1 (January 2012), pp. 13–47. 26 See Catriona Kelly, ‘Introduction’ in Catriona Kelly, ed., Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905–1940 (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. xx. the ghost in the machine 181

At home, modernism became the language of choice for industrial complexes. Nikolai Miliutin, a communist official (the Commissar for Finance, 1924–1929), trained architect, and the editor of Soviet Architec- ture (Sovetskaia arkhitektura) 1931–1934, declared: Of course we must learn from and make use of the achievements of classical architecture. But to draw on them for our chief inspiration in the design of hydro-electric power stations, palaces of culture, gigantic metal works, communal housing, state farms and kindergartens—that would be like equip- ping the Red Army with the weapons of the ancient Greeks.27 In buildings devoted to scientific innovation and industrial manufacture, in which engineers worked alongside architects, the aspirations of the regime to appear contemporary and in possession of the latest technology actually dovetailed with modernist design practice. The modernism of these designs did not simply reflect the fact that these buildings were not considered important as architectural symbols of Soviet power, but that their efficacy as symbols of that power was to a very large extent tied up with the fact that they were ‘modernist’ in conception. In other words, their ideological function was expressed through a functionally determined architecture. Modernism was the language of choice precisely because of its inherent functionality and efficiency, and because of its effective expression of that functionality and efficiency. Yet this choice was also eminently pragmatic. During the demanding years of the Five-Year Plans, Constructivism was particularly valued for its functional design method, its scientific basis, and its emphasis on technology and economy. Hence the eminent Constructivists, Viktor Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg, as ‘bourgeois specialists’ worked for Narkomtiazhprom, which was in charge of constructing large-scale manufacturing complexes and thus spearheading official plans for transforming the Soviet Union into a major industrial power. Consequently, the buildings of the Hydroelectric Dam on the Dnieper River, Ukraine (the DneproGES Dam, 1927–1932, Fig. 10.7) were designed by a team of modernist architects that included Aleksandr Vesnin, Viktor Vesnin, Nikolai Kolli, Georgii Orlov, and Sergei Andrievskii. The design is characterised by extensive fenestration, and an asymmetrical organisation of spaces, while the external volumes reflect the functional flow of the

27 N. Miliutin, ‘Vazhneishie zadachi sovremennogo etapa sovetskoi arkhitektury’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura, no. 2–3 (1932); cited in Iu.P. Bocharov and S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Nikolai Miliutin (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), pp. 70–71. 182 christina lodder P are. A leksandr Vesnin, R ichard P are. © R ichard U kraine, 1927–1932, designed by P hotograph A ndrievskii. S ergei O rlov, and D am and Buildings [ D neproG ES ], Zaporozhe, N ikolai Kolli, Georgii H ydroelectric Viktor Vesnin, Fig. 10.7 D neiper the ghost in the machine 183 interior spaces. The window frames are minimal and are set into the wall without decorative surrounds. It is the very modernism of the project that is celebrated.28 It could be argued that modernist architects chose to work on such projects (distant from the capital, remote from official scrutiny, and free from official demands for an architectural rhetoric of power) as a survival strategy, which would ensure long-term employment and wages, while giving them an important role within the Soviet Union’s industrialisation programme and therefore a secure ideological status within the architectural community. Yet such an explanation, which may possess some truth, also obscures the fact that these projects epitomised values that modernist architects held dear—they represented a continuation of modernism’s agenda—they enhanced technology and contributed to technological progress, while being strictly functional and in line with modernist architects’ value for efficiency and the machine. As Miliutin had stressed, a modernist idiom was also initially regarded as the appropriate language for other buildings such as the workers’ clubs and palaces of culture. These buildings, like the Rusakov Club in Moscow, designed by Melnikov, had been valuable areas for experimental architecture in the mid to late 1920s and to a certain extent this continued into the early 1930s. Such clubs were usually commissioned by trades unions, which enjoyed a certain degree of financial independence, despite their official status. The Palace of Culture for the Proletarskii district of Mos- cow, 1931–1937, designed by Aleksandr, Leonid and Viktor Vesnin, demonstrates the survival of modernist features into the Stalinist era within this particular building type (Fig. 10.8).29 The various club activities were massed asymmetrically, and the organisation of the functionally determined spaces was clearly expressed in plan and on the exterior elevations. The small auditorium, for instance, was denoted on the exterior by a bay window. The architects also employed other features of the International Style such as ribbon windows, unadorned surfaces, cantilevering (as in the entrance to the library wing), and pilotis. Aleksandr Vesnin explained:

28 For more images of this complex, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 252–259. 29 For more images, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 134–137 and Selim Omarovich Khan-Magomedov, Aleksandr Vesnin i konstruktivizm. Zhivopis’. Teatr. Arkhitektura. Risunok. Khnizhnaia grafika. Oformlenie prazdnikov (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), pp. 301–321. 184 christina lodder

Fig. 10.8 Palace of Culture of the Proletarskii District of Moscow, (subsequently the Palace of Culture attached to of the Likhachev Autombile Plant), Moscow, 1931–1937, designed by Aleksandr, Leonid and Viktor Vesnin. Photograph Richard Pare. © Richard Pare. the ghost in the machine 185

Fig. 10.9 Entrance to The Red Gates Metro Station, 1934–4, designed by Nikolai Ladovskii. Photograph courtesy of S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (ratsio— arkhitektura). “Formalizm” (Moscow, 2007).

We strove to find the image of the proletarian Palace of Culture, and to create simple and clear-cut forms, noble relationships of the masses, volumes, flat surfaces, apertures, a unity of the parts and the whole, and a unity of internal space and external shape. The foyers of the small and the large the- atres followed the principle of flowing space, providing a great variety of impressions due to the ever-changing perspectives and volumes.30 Similarly modernist features could be discerned in the early station buildings for the Moscow Metro designed and constructed in the 1930s.31 The rationalist architect Nikolai Ladovskii, who stressed the role of the human perception of form in design, was responsible for the pavilion entrance of the Krasnye Vorota (Red Gates, 1934–1935, Fig. 10.9) station, in which expanding circular forms reiterate the circular shape of the tunnels below, suggesting distance and inviting passengers to enter and embark on a journey, while also expanding out into the street and providing some shelter

30 Aleksandr Vesnin, cited in Andrei Ikonnikov, Russian Architecture of the Soviet Period, trans. Lev Lyapin (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), p. 158. 31 See V. Chudakov, Moskovskoe Metro (Mocow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1980). 186 christina lodder from inclement weather conditions. Ladovskii used a similar scheme for the platform at Dzerzhinskii Station (1934–1935), where the same circular forms in grey and white marble emphasise the shape of the train tunnel.32 In both instances, the circular forms are bold and unadorned, giving visual emphasis to the vanishing point and thus suggesting distance and travel. Continuities with the modernist project were also evident in areas that were fairly distant from Moscow. For instance, in Kazan (Tatarstan), the House of the Press (Dom pechati), designed by Semyon Pan (1933–1937) was an International Style building, combining extensive glazing, with bold rectangular and curved massing.33 Likewise, in Sverdlovsk (today Ekaterinburg), which emerged as an important industrial centre during the 1930s, a residential building for members of the secret police or Cheka (Cherezvychainaia komissiia—Emergency Commission), designed by Ivan Antonov, Veniamin Sokolov and Arsenii Tumbasov displayed distinctive modernist features, despite the fact that the plan symbolically denoted a hammer and sickle.34 In Ukraine, too, attitudes to more innovative approaches could also be more tolerant than in Moscow, especially given the special circumstances surrounding certain conurbations, such as Kharkov (Kharkiv), which had become the capital of the Ukrainian Republic when the latter was set up in 1922, but lacked many essential facilities. A large proportion of the resulting buildings were constructed in a modernist idiom, precisely because of the economy and speed of construction that such building practices embodied. The State Industrial complex (Gosprom— Dom Gosudarsvennoi promyshlennosti, known as Derzhprom in Ukrainian), of 1925–1929, designed by the Leningrad architects Sergei Serafimov, Mark Felger, and Samuil Kravets, to house the Soviet government’s administrative offices is a prime example (Fig. 10.10).35 In accordance with modernist tenets, the interior organisation is reflected on the exterior. The building’s three parts are interconnected with sky- ways at different levels, from the fourth floor to the eighth (perhaps inspired by the skyway of the Wrigley Building, Chicago). The highest of the interlinked ‘skyscrapers’ reaches twelve storeys. For Rayner Banham, it was one of the important achievements of the modern movement of the

32 S.O. Khan-Magomedov, Nikolai Ladovskii. Kumiry avangarda (Moscow: S.E. Gordeev, 2011), pp. 252–255. 33 See Ikonnikov, Russian Architecture of the Soviet Period, pp. 208–209. 34 See Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 174–177; and the cover image of the present volume. 35 For more images, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 204–211. the ghost in the machine 187 S ergei P hoto - U kraine, 1925–1929, designed by P are. R ichard S oviet government’s administrative offices. P are. © R ichard graph T rust [Gosprom] complex, Kharkov, S amuil Kravets, to house the P roduction S tate S erafimov, Mark Felger, and Fig. 10.10 T he 188 christina lodder

1920s.36 Four extensions to this basic core, built in the 1930s, continued this modernist style, with some slight modifications. The ensemble possesses symmetry and a central entrance. Nevertheless, this is broken up by the glazing, the varying levels, and the way that the complex follows the curved line of the square. Alongside these modernist designs, some buildings, initially conceived in a Constructivist style, were altered to display a desirable ‘classical’ gloss favoured by the regime. The Moscow Hotel (Gostinitsa Moskva, 1935– 1938), for example, was originally envisaged as a hotel for the Moscow Soviet, designed by Leonid Savelev and Oleg Stapran (initiated 1932), but it was subsequently adapted by Aleksei Shchusev.37 He gave it a symmetrical massing and added simplified classical details such as the tripartite organisation of the façade with matching wings and a colonnaded portico. The asymmetrical treatment of the façade, noticeable particularly in the wings, seems to have been accidental. Apparently, Shchusev prepared two variants and placed them on one sheet with a thin line between them. Stalin placed his initials in the middle, so the two variants were built together, out of fear of official reprisals.38 There were even continuities with modernism within the emerging style of Socialist Realist architecture, in buildings like the Frunze Military Acad- emy, Moscow, 1932–1937, which was designed by Lev Rudnev with Viktor Munts to express ‘the might and power of the Red Army’ (Fig. 10.11).39 In this, modernist elements, such as the functional ground plan, the use of pure geometric forms (including the cuboid teaching block), the bands of fenestration with their simple rectilinear framing, the cantilevering, and the asymmetrical massing, coexist with traditional features such as the use of sculpture and decorative reliefs, the choice of materials like the black, labradorite columns, the horizontal emphasis of the continuous base of the colonnade (the stylobate), treatment of the facades, the use of symbolism, and the sense of solidity. The incorporation of the tank sculpture provides a dramatic and dynamic element; it emphasises the

36 Rayner Baham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1972), p. 297. 37 The hotel was demolished in 2004, but replaced with a replica, which now has more modern facilities, including underground parking. 38 The anecdote was related by Paperny, Kul’tura Dva, pp. 111, 307; and repeated by Golomstock, Totalitarian Art, p. 267; and Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture, p. 65. 39 Competition brief, quoted by Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture, p. 60. the ghost in the machine 189

Fig. 10.11 Frunze Military Academy, Moscow, 1932–1937, designed by Lev Rudnev and V. Munts. Photograph courtesy of Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze, Architecture of the Stalin Era (New York, 1992). invincibility of the Red Army and performs an ornamental role, but its technological character also reinforces the building’s modernist features. Some architects, like Aleksei Shchusev, known for his revivalist projects like Moscow’s Kazan Railway Station (1913–1940, a mixture of Art Nouveau, and the Kremlin towers), bent with the wind and strove to accommodate the desires of the new official client. This stylistic flexibility is evident in the mausoleum that he built on Red Square to house the embalmed body of Lenin (1924), which blends old and new. It is perhaps appropriate, because of the utopian dreams and visions that the leader inspired (though never encouraged), that Lenin lies in a building that possesses qualities that ally it with a modernist vision: a ziggurat or stepped pyrami- dal structure constructed from plain blocks of marble, porphyry, labradorite and granite with a strong rectangular quality (Fig. 10.12).40 Despite its symbolism, symmetry, monumentality, and strongly coloured stonework, this structure with its bold and unadorned series of geometric forms is tinged with Constructivism, and retains a modernist association. From the time of its completion in 1930, it gave the millions of visitors who passed through its portals a small taste of the modernist utopian vision

40 For more images, including interior shots, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 330–335. 190 christina lodder P are. R ichard P are. © I sador Frantsuz and G.K. Yakovlev. Made of marble, R ichard S hchusev, A leksei P hotograph porphyry, granite and other stones. Fig. 10.12 L enin’s Mausoleum, Moscow, 1929–1930, designed by the ghost in the machine 191 that inspired young Soviet architects in the wake of the Revolution and continued to influence design in the 1930s. Underlying such continuities were also the realities of architectural training. Many of the experimental, abstract exercises in form, space and composition, which had been developed by avant-garde architects during the 1920s at Moscow’s Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie—VKhUTEMAS) as part of the grounding for future architects, actually continued to be used as an essential part of the curriculum in architectural institutions. In fact, from the 1930s until 1970s, Vladimir Krinskii, Ivan Lamtsov and Mikhail Turkus all taught at the Moscow Architectural Institute (Moskovskii arkhitekturnyi institut—MARKhI, established in 1933), basing their teaching on the exercises that they had developed earlier at the VKhUTEMAS, and eventually publishing the results in a text book, The Elements of Architec- tural and Spatial Composition in 1934.41 Both their teaching and the text book continued to be used throughout the Stalin years, and even today influences the architectural education provided by MARKhI.42 Such continuities in method and personnel are striking, and serve to highlight the fact that, under Stalin, the design method could remain avant-garde, while the external styling might display a more historicist and ornate treatment. Although this seems to have been an acceptable strategy, one cannot help thinking that maintaining this approach, especially during the Purges, must have been somewhat hazardous. Hugh Hudson has argued that Soviet modernists fought bravely against Stalinism in architecture as long as they could and should not be branded as ‘Stalinism with a pseudo-human face’.43 Indeed, there is little doubt that, through their teaching and by persistently continuing to employ the methods that they had evolved for creating a better world through architecture, Russia’s avant-garde architects displayed incredible courage and commitment in their fight to keep a small flame of modernism burning and to ensure that traces of those utopian visions and dreams of a modernist utopia did not entirely fade from view.

41 V.F. Krinskii, I.V. Lamtsov, and M.A. Turkus, Elementy arkhitekturno-prostranstvennoi kompozitsii (Moscow, 1934; reprinted 1968). 42 See Dmitrii Melodinskii, ‘Krinskii—Lamtsov—Turkus’, Arkhitektura. Stroitel’stvo. Dizain (Moscow), no. 4 (2010). 43 Hudson, Blueprints and Blood, p. 216.

chapter eleven

Socialist Realism and Stasis

Evgeny Dobrenko

When speaking of revolutionary culture, one usually refers to its dynamism, futurism and utopianism. According to a well-known binary scheme, this ‘Culture One’ is opposed to Stalinist Culture or ‘Culture Two’, which is static and devoid of a utopian dimension.1 Yet if we examine the characteristics that Vladimir Paperny ascribes to ‘Culture Two’—hardening, ending, immobility, verticality, and hierarchy—we find that they can all be reduced to the quality of stasis, which is a common denominator for all of them and, therefore, can be considered the main feature of Socialist Realism and high Stalinist aesthetics as a whole. Everything, however, is relative—in the 1930s, Soviet culture appeared dynamic in contrast to that of the Nazis. I would like to look beyond these scholastic patterns and draw attention to the problem of dynamics and statics within Stalinist culture itself. The dynamic, revolutionary utopia stalled in the era of the Stalinist revolution and completely froze in late Stalinism. In this paper, I should like to focus on the stylistic forms of this unique stasis and its manifestations in poetry, cinema, architecture, poster design, and painting. Of course, Stalinism itself was not historically static. For a quarter of a century, this regime and its culture underwent some profound changes and transformations. I will concentrate on late Stalinist culture. Of course, after the revolutionary dynamism of the 1920s, after industrialisation, collectivisation, and the dreadful paroxysms of state terror in the 1930s, and against the background of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’, late Stalinism looks like an immobile, solidified lava that somehow ossified during the war. The peculiarity of late Stalinism, in my view, lies in the fact that the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Soviet historiogra- phy), while leaving the party-state power monopoly unchanged, radically altered its status. For the first time, the regime did not have to prove its

1 See Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 2011). 194 evgeny dobrenko legitimacy. The need for legitimacy (among other factors) can explain the collisions of the 1920s and the tragedies of the 1930s. What the terror of the 1930s had failed to achieve was achieved by the war—the legitimisation of the Stalinist regime. This is linked to a radical change in the cultural vectors: in practically all forms of representation—from literature and cinema to history textbooks and propaganda posters—the cult of the revolution was replaced by the cult of victory, which became the new foundation for the regime’s legitimacy. During the war, the power structure not only proved to be durable, it actually grew stronger, and questions of historical succession, both in the context of Party history itself and in the ‘broader’ history of Russia, were now ‘finally and irrevocably’ solved, as the Stalinist terminology of the time proclaimed. The romantic sublimation of heroics was aimed at affirming the new locus of legitimacy, which did not reside in the traumatic experience of the war, nor in the tragic memory of it, but in Soviet history, the culmination of which was the greatness of victory and the triumphs of Stalin’s genius. By the late 1920s, the revolutionary discourse of utopia had run its course. The Stalin era was a time of already-triumphant utopia, and the orientation towards the future of the revolutionary era was replaced by the apologetics of already-present reality—‘Socialism in One Country’. One of the most difficult problems to solve in the materialisation of utopia becomes that of the topos as a physical location. In Stalinism, however, utopia was proclaimed as already having been built, the future had already arrived, and the only thing that remained was to experience utopia and equip the world for new and even greater prosperity. This made the mystification of reality even more important, a reality replete with what Sheila Fitzpatrick called ‘previews of the coming attractions of socialism’,2 but what Stalin called ‘the miracles of the new achievements’.3 It is amaz- ing to see how the projects aimed at rebuilding Moscow in the 1930s transformed the Soviet capital into precisely this kind of utopian locus. Numerous descriptions of the reconstruction plans and architectural solutions took precedence over the process of construction itself: in fact, most of the contemplated plans for rebuilding Moscow were never realised. Nonetheless, in the form of scale models of the new Utopia, exhibited for all to see in Moscow’s shop windows, Soviet architecture fulfilled the

2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 262. 3 I. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma (Moscow: Politizdat, 1946, 11th edition), pp. 507–513. socialist realism and stasis 195

function of a visual narrative about a bright future that was already coming, while not hinting at any timetables whatsoever for its arrival. The realisation of this ‘paper architecture’ came in the era of late Stalinism. Yet why is it that Stalinist classicism, while remaining unchanged in its essence, nevertheless expanded beyond its limits of ‘noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur,’ and acquired overtly baroque overtones and exuberance in the post-war decade? Everything in this culture led towards concealed expression and the exaltation of form—perhaps not even noticed by its authors—towards an array of spires and phials, energetically piercing the sky, toward the hypertrophy of decor, and, finally, the ‘flamboyant empire’ of the Moscow skyscrapers such as Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet imeni M.V. Lomonosova—MGU) or The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition of 1954 (Vsesoiznaia sel’sko-khoziastvennaia vystavka). Images of speed, modernisation, dynamism and utopianism were inte- gral to avant-garde activity, but were also very popular in early Stalinism (during the First Five-Year Plan). Late Stalinism harked back to folklore and the epic canon, in which not only its ontological irrationality but also its genealogy are manifested. Its references to the land, fertility, blood and soil reveal the peasant origin of what is imagined by the new proletari- anised urban masses, who, although they had been urbanised, continued to see themselves in a specifically folkloric context. One need only look at the post-war stations of the Moscow Metro such as Kiev (Kievskaia), Smolensk (Smolenskaia), Belorussia (Belorusskaia), the Arbat (Arbatskaia) and many others in order to glimpse the development of ‘tsarist accom- modations’ (tsarskie khoromy). These forms and stylizations evoked the patriarchal imaginary, and embodied the archetypal ideal dwelling of yes- terday’s peasant. Late Stalinism, in particular, expected history to look upon its achievements with the same eyes as those through which Stalinism itself looked upon the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman past. For the Soviet people to deserve the attentive gaze of history, it had to embody itself in a great architecture of remembrance (Fig. 11.1). If we look at the projects produced for the Pantheon of the Heroes of War (the competition took place in stages between the late 1940s and the early 1950s), we see not only direct appeals to the Egyptian, Roman and Old Russian architectural heritage, but the realisation of a most noble task: in order to preserve themselves in the eloquent stones of eternal communism based on the foundations of the greatest victories of all, Soviet individuals had to be in a position to declare themselves as eternal and, therefore, to look at themselves as 196 evgeny dobrenko

Fig. 11.1 One of the submissions to the competition for the Pantheon of the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War (The Second World War) in 1942–43. artists, with eyes from beyond the tomb. It was in this respect that Stalin- ism confirmed—despite its denials—that it was a perfect realisation of ‘art for art’s sake’.4 The war and especially victory were perceived as a point of arrival, for restoring the calm and radiant vision of the eternal communist future, which lay as a dream at the heart of the Marxist project. Post-war Moscow skyscrapers as well as celebrations of the 800th anniversary of Moscow in 1947 were, therefore, designed to produce a sublime petrification of the present. They were not just a synchronisation of the centuries-old architectural landscape of the sacral centre of power, but also a synchronisation of temporalities: the future was marching with the past, in the eternal present of the great Soviet state, leading towards the immobility of stone. Time seemed to come to a halt and to be converted into space. The fact that photographs of existing buildings were shown alongside the models of the projected designs conveyed a very simple message: what had already

4 The same is true for Nazi aesthetics. See Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Ger many, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004). socialist realism and stasis 197 been accomplished coexisted with what would be realised in the future. Space had absorbed history, establishing a purified present. The present always had to be visibly surpassed in advance, ahead of itself, in order to demonstrate that the promised eternity was not a matter of vain words, but a reality that was already present. This desire to extend the present infinitely, as if to enter eternity, could find a semblance of satisfaction only through an obsessive demonstration of boundless Soviet space (as in Fedor Shurpin’s painting Morning of Our Motherland, 1946–1948, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, Fig. 11.3). This development can be clearly seen in visual material. Photomontages by Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis) of the early 1930s show Stalin in motion (Fig. 11.2), sometimes merging with the masses, sometimes towering over them, appealing to them, and gesticulating actively. Similarly, in posters of the late 1930s, such as Boris Efimov’s Captain of the Country of the Sovi ets Leads us from Victory to Victory (Fig. 11.4), the leader is in motion. In contrast, post-war posters and paintings show Stalin reading and writing, self-absorbed, and contemplative as in Viktor Ivanov’s Great Stalin, the Light of Communism of 1949 and Shurpin’s Morning of Our Motherland (Fig. 11.3). What is striking in these ceremonial posters is Stalin’s gaze, which appears as if it is directed inwards, but also towards some lofty ideal space. This sublimated ideological emptiness is contagious. Socialist Realism gained momentum at the precise moment when the utopian project ceased to be a project and was declared real. At that moment, it acquired a new modality, a perfective aspect; ‘utopian socialism’ became ‘scientific communism’. One fine day it was declared that everything had already been attained, so that the only task and the most important one was to defend this beautiful new world. The triumph of utopia became its death, because the breach between what is and what ought to be, characteristic of utopia itself, was eliminated. The petrifac- tion of utopia was its demise. Socialist Realism transformed utopia into ‘post-utopia’, uniting ‘realism’ with ‘romanticism’. Utopianism replaced the choice between two variants of reality with the choice between reality and the ideal. Socialist Realism went even further in alienating reality from this opposition and creating a world in which the ideal dissolved itself in reality, and vice versa. Socialist Realist culture did not build utopia, it lived in it. It matured in this ‘second’ coming, when history became eternity. In post-war posters, Stalin’s gaze is fixed on the ideological emptiness of the ideal. It is not even clear where the source of this magic light is located. This light usually comes from above. A dynamic picture—even if it is a ceremonial portrait—cannot concentrate on this fixed look that can 198 evgeny dobrenko

Fig. 11.2 Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis), The Reality of our Programme—it’s Real People. It’s—We are with You, 1931, lithograph, poster, c. 146 × 105 cm.

Fig. 11.3 Fedor Shurpin, Morning of Our Motherland, 1946–48, oil on canvas, 167 × 232 cm., State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. socialist realism and stasis 199

Fig. 11.4 Boris Efimov, The Captain of the Soviet Union Leads us from Victory to Victory, on the cover of Ogonek, no. 23 (5 November 1933). be seen in Boris Brezovskii’s 1952 poster Study the Great Path of the Party of Lenin and Stalin. Most of the well-known painted portraits of Stalin from the 1930s are full of movement. Their function is very different to that of posters, but the dynamic style is clearly manifest. The pure and continuing present was a realisation of the desire to replace a dynamic and revolutionary space with a static and extremely ordered space, which would bring about a switch from change to constancy and eventually immobility. This is precisely what we see in paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s: huge panoramic canvases, epitomes of stasis. This is what Mikhail Ryklin called the ‘spaces of exultation.’5 Any movement is simply impossible here. All eyes are directed towards the leader, but the leader’s eyes are directed towards the sublime, or to the icon corner, in the case of

5 Mikhail Riklin, Prostranstva likovanniia (Moscow: Logos, 2002). 200 evgeny dobrenko

Aleksandr Laktionov’s painting, The New Apartment. Moreover, it seems that the image of this invisible icon is reflected in the portrait of Stalin held by the schoolboy, which implies that he is not holding a portrait, but a mirror—an ideological mirror, of course.6 As is well known, the Marx- ist version of history was presented both in revolutionary culture and in early Stalinism as a structure that constantly anticipated its own end, that is, the realisation of its historical mission—the construction of a classless society. This is why it would be wrong to regard Stalinism’s constant use of religious vocabulary as merely a simple and cynical exploitation of a ready-made, Christian fund of words and images. At a deeper level, late Stalinism seems to have repeated the same link between faith and sight that is central to Christianity, within the same structure of anticipation as that constituted by Christian eschatology. What we see in Fedor Shurpin’s Morning of Our Motherland (1946–1948, Fig. 11.3) is the presence of salvation imagery. Telling no story, it stands in contrast to narrative images in the same way that eternity stands in contrast to history. It seems endowed with the power to extend the present indefinitely. I have chosen to concentrate on representations of Stalin primarily because the iconography of the leader was best developed in all genres and art forms. This stasis is, for instance, particularly evident in films, precisely because they involve moving images. In films of the 1930s, such as Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October (1937) or Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Great Glow (1938), Stalin is seen to be intensely communicating with Lenin, with his comrades, and with the masses. In the post-war films, we see only Stalin the great military leader. He walks slowly along an incredibly large table in his office, and speaks ponderously, in measured tones. He is His- tory itself. It is no wonder that he eventually turns into a walking manikin, which stops moving on the screen. Instead, the camera moves, creating some sense of dynamism on the screen, as in the final scene of Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin (1949). The Soviet ‘Grand Style’ is primarily associated with the ‘grand’ genre forms. In painting, this means ceremonial portraits and battle scenes; in music, it means opera, oratorios, cantatas, and symphonies; in city planning, impressive architectural ensembles; in prose, novels; and in poetry, the epic poem. As a sort of narrative in verse, the epic poem, like operas and programmatic music, was narrative in form, and the connection to

6 For a detailed analysis of Laktionov’s The New Appartment (1952), see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythology of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 5–11. socialist realism and stasis 201 the heroic style made it the embodiment of ‘epic thinking’, and made it especially close to the Socialist Realist aesthetic. Nowhere did the conservative utopia of Stalin’s ‘socialist modernisation’ manifest itself so obviously, nor was the ‘Russification of Marxism’ expressed so explicitly, as in collectivisation, with its reliance on the patriarchal Russian commune. The collective farm poem or kolkhoz poem, which emerged during collectivisation and flourished during late Stalin- ism, fulfilled the function of representing communal agrarian socialism as a realisation of Marxism’s modernisation project and the mode of the patriarchal commune as contemporary collective agriculture. If the kolk hoz poem was, in this sense, national in content and socialist in form, then the kolkhoz system that it ‘reflected’ was itself a national form of a socialist content. There is a complex symbiosis of revolutionary-socialist utopian Marxist fantasising and a thousand-year-old communal tradition that had a profoundly patriarchal form; imposed on this form was an ideologically alien but socially akin form of socialist economy. The kolkhoz poem was supposed to accommodate a communal, essentially feudal structure with its lubok aesthetics, and Marxist ideology. But since political-ideological representation and aesthetic ‘packaging’ were so much more important in Stalinism than reality itself, the kolkhoz poem was given a high status against the backdrop of the most perilous Stalinist economic project. The kolkhoz poem was used to domesticate the kolkhoz utopia. In fact, it reduced the kolkhoz to its real national and historical equivalent—the patriarchal commune—and thereby transformed it into a ‘comfort zone’. The transformation of the ‘peasant’ into a collective farmer (kolkhoznik) required a transformation of the latter from an object of narrative to its subject, which led to the inevitable lubok-style levelling of the literary tradition, and to a radical stylistic and genre reshaping of the tradition. As a genre, the kolkhoz poem, which became the incarnation of official Soviet populism, was born from the hybridisation of literary tradition with raek (the ‘little paradise’ of lewd fairground peep shows). In this sense, raek communism was not only the product of a domesticated utopia, but also mocked the very reality that was abrogated in Stalinism. When it began to speak with the voice of the ‘peasant’ made happy by Soviet power, the kolkhoz poem supplied perhaps the most joyous pages in the book of Soviet communism.7

7 For a detailed analysis of the kolkhoz poem, see Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘Utopian Natu ralism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness’, in Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009), pp. 19–52. 202 evgeny dobrenko

In the first kolkhoz poems of the 1930s, the main hero, a peasant, roams the country in search of happiness (like the characters of Nikolai Nekra- sov’s poem ‘Who is Happy in Russia?’ of 1863–1876), moving from one place to another, as in the archetypal 1930s kolkhoz poem Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s ‘The Muravia Country’. But in the post-war poems all motion stops. A happy life has arrived and it is taking place here and now. Ivan Pyrev’s films provide visual examples of such kolkhoz stasis. In his films of the 1930s, such as The Rich Bride, Tractor Drivers, and The Swineherd and the Shepherd, the heroes move around the country, seeking and fighting each other—on trains, planes, and even on bicycles—but in his post-war kolkhoz comedies all motion stops. I would like to end with the final scene of his Kuban Cossacks (1949), where the stasis finds its complete expression, not only visually but also verbally. The figures sing: ‘A promised land we sought, a promised land we found. Our happiness marches with us. No longer do we need to seek it.’ chapter twelve

Utopia in Retreat: The Closure of the State Museum of New Western Art in 1948

Maria Mileeva

On 10 February 1948, The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a decree ‘On the Opera A Great Friendship by Vano Muradeli’. The opera (Velikaia druzhba in Russian) by a young Geor- gian composer, produced by the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to mark the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution, was described as ‘an inartis- tic work, faulty both musically and as regards to its subject matter’.1 Its shortcomings were rooted in its music which was inexpressive and poor. Muradeli was denounced for embarking on a ‘faulty formalistic path, fatal to the work of a Soviet composer’. This criticism was not seen as an isolated event, but was connected to ‘the unhappy state of contemporary Soviet music, the spread of a formalistic trend among Soviet composers’.2 Muradeli’s failure was linked back to the 1936 attacks against ‘formalism’ in Soviet music, literature and art, which was sparked off by Dmitrii Shos- takovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. In 1948, Aleksandr Gerasimov, a leading Soviet painter and the new president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR),3 chose precisely this example—‘the historical decision of the

1 The Central Committee’s decree of 10 February 1948, ‘On Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship’, translated by Nicolas Slominsky, ed., Music Since 1900, 5th ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1994), pp. 1055–1057. Originally published as ‘Postanovlenie TsK VKP (b) Ob opere “Velikaia druzhba” V. Muradeli’, 10 February 1948, Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii—RGASPI), fond. 17, op. 3, delo 1069, l. 12, 42–49. Published in Pravda, 11 Febru ary 1948. Reproduced in Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov eds., Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b), VChK—OGPU—NKVD o kul’turnoi poli tike, 1917–1953 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1999), pp. 630–634. For more information on the events surrounding the attack on Muradeli’s opera, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers: 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 122–141. 2 Other composers who were attacked were Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitrii Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian amongst others. 3 Aleksandr Gerasimov was the president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR from 1947 to 1957. 204 maria mileeva

Central Committee of our Communist Party on the opera’—to illustrate the Academy’s position on art education.4 Gerasimov spoke of Soviet composers as ‘compatriots in our struggle’ and the events in Soviet music as close to the heart of Soviet painters. He repeated the postulates of the post-war denunciation of ‘formalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in all spheres of Soviet art and culture, which was directed against all foreign influence. Composers, directors, poets, critics and artists, all came under public attack orchestrated by the Committee on Art Affairs (Komitet po delam iskusstv)5 headed by Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Com- mittee and the leading spokesman on cultural issues in the 1940s.6 The Academy was itself renamed and restructured in September 1947 by a decree of the Council of Ministers to incorporate the national art institutes and schools of all the Soviet Republics. The following year, it was transferred from its original eighteenth-century building in Leningrad to Moscow.7 Speaking at the first session of the Academy in 1947, the newly appointed Gerasimov reminded his audience that the success of Soviet art was achieved in the struggle against bourgeois artistic influence, against formalism and naturalism, and that for as long as capitalism continued to exist as a global economic system there was a definite danger that formalism could influence Soviet art. He continued, ‘The Central Committee stated that the worship of decadent capitalist art is incompatible with the high status of the Soviet painter, that it contradicts Soviet patriotism’.8

4 Aleksandr Gerasimov, ‘Zadachi akademii khudozhestv SSSR v dele khudozhestven nogo obrazovaniia’, Iskusstvo, no. 2 (1950). Originally the article was delivered as a speech at the Second Session of the Academy of Arts of the USSR in 1948; reprinted in Aleksandr Gerasimov, Za sotsialisticheskii realizm. Sbornik statei i dokladov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Khudozhestv SSSR, 1952), pp. 247–266. 5 The resolution ‘On the Organisation of an All-Union Committee on Art Affairs’ was passed by the Politburo on 16 December 1935. The committee unified the leadership of all arts affairs, including theatre, film, music, painting, sculpture, and photography. See RGASPI, fond 17, op. 3, delo 973, l. 3; cited in Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 229. 6 The postwar denunciation of formalism erupted in 1946, when Zhdanov delivered a speech on the ideological failings of the magazines Star (Zvezda) and Leningrad, which featured works by the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. 7 The Academy of Arts of the USSR existed between 1947 and 1992. Previously, known as the Imperial Academy of Arts (1764–1918), the State Free Art Workshops/Petrograd State Art Workshops (1918–1930), Leningrad Institute of Workers’ Fine Arts (1930–1932) and the All-Russian Academy of Arts (1932–1947). 8 Aleksandr Gerasimov, ‘Sovetskoe izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo i zadachi akademii khudo zhestv SSSR’, Iskusstvo, no. 1 (1948). It was first delivered as a speech at the first session of the Academy in Leningrad in 1947. Reprinted in Gerasimov, Za sotsialisticheskii realizm, pp. 237–238. utopia in retreat 205

As the president of the Academy and the mouthpiece for party politics in art, Gerasimov used this opportunity to denounce those who failed to live up to its ideals. Abram Efros, Nikolai Punin, Osip Beskin and other Soviet art critics and theorists were criticised for systematically attempting to discredit the achievements of Soviet art. Nikolai Punin, an art critic and lecturer at the Academy of Arts, and his followers were described as ‘enemies of Soviet realist art . . . lifting as their shield Cézanne, Matisse and other progenitors of decadent bourgeois art’.9 Abram Efros, a successful art critic before and after the October Revolution, who specialised in twentieth-century Western art was labelled a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and ‘vulgar bourgeois aesthete’, who has provided ‘a defamatory version of the ‘provincial’ character of Russian classical and contemporary art’.10 Gerasi- mov stressed that educating young painters was the Academy’s most significant task and that the Academy, therefore should act as the bastion of Soviet art, with the main objective of preventing any decadent influence from the contemporary capitalist West infiltrating its thick walls. Framed by the rhetoric of nationalism and isolationism in the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War, modern and contemporary Western art became an object of systematic denunciation. On 11 March 1948, the final and most decisive attack on modern West- ern art was delivered in a decree of the Committee on Art Affairs of the Council of Ministers bearing the signature of Joseph Stalin. It announced the closure of the State Museum of New Western Art (Gosudarstvennyi muzei novogo zapadnogo iskusstva—GMNZI), the main state repository of modern and contemporary Western art in the Soviet Union. The decree described the resolution of the Council of Ministers, signed on 6 March 1948: The USSR Council of Ministers believes that the collections of the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow primarily contain anti-national, formalist works of Western-European bourgeois art that is lacking in ideology, and devoid of any progressive educational value for a Soviet audience. The formalist collections that belong to the State Museum of New Western art bought in the countries of Western Europe by Moscow capitalists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, have turned out to be breeding grounds for formalist tendencies and servility before the

9 Ibid., p. 245. Nikolai Punin was dismissed from the Academy in 1946. See Natalia Murray, The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 261–286. 10 Aleksandr Gerasimov, ‘Za sovetskii patriotizm v iskusstve’, Pravda, no. 41 (1949); reprinted in Gerasimov, Za sotsialisticheskii realizm, pp. 130–137. 206 maria mileeva

decadent bourgeois culture of the epoch of imperialism and have caused great harm to the development of Russian and Soviet art. The display of the museum collection to the wide public masses is politically harmful and contributes to the spread of foreign formalist tendencies in Soviet art.11 The history of the ‘formalist collections’ of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI) reveals the problematic position held by modern Western art in Soviet art history. During the thirty years that GMNZI existed, Western art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defined and described in many different ways. This paper will explore the role and position of Western art from the onset of the First Five-Year Plan (1928) through to the period of late Stalinism, by focusing on the history of GMNZI. By turning to the history of the state collection of Western art and its display during the late 1920s and 1930s, this paper will look at how masterpieces of Western art history became regarded as harmful ‘breeding grounds for formalist tendencies’. The way Soviet cultural policy concerning Western modern art changed during this period will form the main focus of investigation, revealing the policy of public denunciation and ridicule, which led to the subsequent closure of the museum.12 The State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI)—set up on the foundations of two private collections of the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov—was one of the first state museums of modern and contemporary art in the world alongside the Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei Zhivopisnoi Kul’tury—MZhK) in Moscow, which was founded in 1919 and opened to the public in 1920.13 Following the October Revolution,

11 ‘Resolution no. 672 of the Council of Ministers of the USSR’, 6 March 1948, Mos cow, Kremlin, State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii—GARF), fond 5446, op. 1, ed. khr. 327. The Council of Ministers was previ ously called the Council of People’s Commissars. It was renamed in 1946. The resolution was followed on 11 March 1948 by decree no. 104 of the Committee on Art Affairs of the Council of Ministers, which announced the resolution of the Council of Ministers from 6 March 1948 to liquidate the State Museum of New Western Art. For decree no. 104, see Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i isksstva—RGALI), fond 962, op. 3, ed. khr. 1742. 12 The problematic relationship between Western modern art and Soviet state institu tions and art criticism during the early formative period of the 1920s–1930s, and the period of late Stalinism remains underexplored. For an excellent study on the changing role of Impressionism in Soviet art, see Alison Hilton, ‘Holiday on the Kolkhoz: Socialist Realism’s Dialogue with Impressionism’, in Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts (Dekalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), pp. 195–217. 13 For more information on the Museums of Painterly Culture, a network of museums of contemporary art set up in Moscow, Petrograd and regional towns, see Maria Gough, ‘Futurist Museology’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 327–348; Svetlana utopia in retreat 207 the collections of French art were among the first to be nationalised by the state in 1918, which indicated the value that the Bolshevik Party placed on contemporary French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 With public ownership, the Shchukin and Morozov man- sions were renamed as the First and Second Museum of New Western Art and opened to the public in spring 1919. In 1923, they were placed under a single administration and in 1928 the two collections were merged and housed in the pre-revolutionary mansion previously owned by Ivan Moro- zov. Even after the revolution, the collection of French art at GMNZI was renowned worldwide for its size and quality.15 In 1928, when the two collections were merged, the museum owned forty-eight works by Henri Matisse and fifty-three by Pablo Picasso.16 One of the tasks of the museum was to expand the collection both chronologically and geographically, by adding a permanent display of German and Italian art. During the 1920s, GMNZI organised a number of important exhibitions of contemporary Western European art, such as the Exhibition of German

Dzhafarova, ‘The Creation of the Museums of Painterly Culture’, in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), pp. 474–481. 14 The Shchukin collection was nationalised by a decree of the People’s Soviet of Com missars (Sovnarkom RSFSR) on 10 November 1918, and the Morozov collection followed on 19 December 1918. The most extensive history of the museum was written by one of its curators, Nina Iavorskaia and was published posthumously to mark the centenary of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which inherited the GMNZI archive and part of its collection after its closure. See Nina Iavorskaia, Istoriia Gosudarstvennogo muzeia novogo zapadnogo iskusstva (Moskva) 1918–1948 (Moscow: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 2012). See also Margarita Aksenenko, ‘Istoriia Gosudarstvennogo muzeia novogo zapad nogo iskusstva’ in Muzei 3: Khudozhestvennye sobraniia SSSR. (70 let Gosudarstvennomu muzeiu izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1982), pp. 191–192; and Iz arkhiva GMII: K istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia Novogo Zapadnogo Iskusstva (1922–1939). Vypusk 2 (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozh nik, 1978). For existing scholarship in English, see Beverley Whitney Kean, French Painters, Russian Collectors: Shchukin, Morozov and Modern French Art 1890–1914 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994); Morozov, Shchukin: The Collectors: Monet to Picasso: 120 Masterpieces from the Hermitage, St Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Cologne: Dumont, 1993); From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008); and Albert Kostenevich, French Art Treasures at the Hermitage: Splendid Masterpieces, New Discoveries (New York: Abrams, 1999). 15 Boris Ternovets, the director, made great efforts to publicise the GMNZI abroad. The first article on the museum appeared in Paris, see B. Ternovietz [Ternovets], ‘Le Musée d’Art Moderne de Moscou’, L’amour de l’art, no. 12 (1925); and Ternovietz, ‘Lettres de Russie. Le développement du Musée d’Art Moderne de Moscou’, Formes, no. 3 (1930). 16 The collection also contained works by Claude Monet (19 works); Pierre-Auguste Renoir (11); Paul Gauguin (29); Paul Cézanne (26); Vincent van Gogh (10); Edgar Degas (9); and Albert Marquet (15). 208 maria mileeva

Art of the Last Fifty Years (1925), Exhibition of Contemporary British Prints and Lithography (1926), an exhibition of new acquisitions in 1927, which included contemporary Italian art, and the Exhibition of Contemporary French Art in 1928.17 The history, role, and legacy of these exhibitions and the permanent collection of GMNZI has not been explored in detail, but can play an important role in understanding the formative period of Soviet art and art history and its relationship to art produced under a different social and political system. During one-and-a-half months in the autumn 1928 when the Exhibi tion of Contemporary French Art was open to the public it attracted 20, 000 visitors, which was an unprecedented number and filled the limited capacity of the museum to the maximum.18 The exhibition of 250 works of art was widely reviewed in the daily and specialist press. Although the exhibition was a huge success in terms of its visitor numbers, the critics were not at all favourable. To the acute disappointment of the Moscow art establishment, there were no new works by Picasso, Matisse or Georges Braque. Instead, the show introduced the Soviet public to many international (non-French) artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Constantin Brancusi and Tsugouharu Foujita, as well as new work by Russian émigré artists living in France. Soviet critics highlighted trends like ‘neo-romanticism’ and ‘expressionism’ in the work of Maurice Vlaminck, Portrait de jeune fille (n. d.) and Amedeo Modigliani’s La jeune Suédoise (n. d.), and the return to classicism in the work of André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, and Gino Severini. During the 1920s, the term ‘expressionism’ was applied interchangeably to French and German art on display at GMNZI, and it acquired negative connotations as the harbinger of bourgeois crisis and capitalist decay. Writing in Art to the Masses (Iskusstvo v massy), the journal of the mili- tant Association of Artists of the Revolution (Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsii—AKhR), Frida Roginskaia, a young authoritative ideologist and a prominent art critic, produced a virulent attack on French art. In her 1930 article ‘Against the Cult of the French’, Roginskaia argued that expressionism was the correct term to apply to contemporary bourgeois art of the West:

17 For more information and a list of exhibitions of foreign art, design and architecture in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, see Maria Mileeva, ‘Import and Reception of Western Art in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s: Selected Exhibitions and Their Role’, PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2011. 18 RGALI, fond 941, op. 15, ed. khr. 102, l. 68; and GARF, fond 5446, op. 10a, ed. khr. 460, ll. 5–6. utopia in retreat 209

Expressionism—is a characteristic development of post-war Europe . . . To dismiss expressionism is even more difficult, as particularly in the last years it has overtaken some of our own areas. Whole groups of our artistic youth [molodniak], gripped by a feeling of lethargy, are in their artistic representation expressionists (the graphic youth of ‘4 Arts’, and specific parts of ROST, OST and OKhO). Even the last exhibition of artists who went to industrial centres confirms the unfortunate resilience of expressionism (for example, works by Tyshler and Kozlov). This extremely dangerous tendency for the healthy development of our proletarian art warrants the most careful and guarded relations. To dismiss it scornfully is a big mistake.19 Expressionism was perceived as harmful, with its roots in post-war West- ern Europe. During the late 1920s, under the aegis of new Marxist critics and journals, Western art began to be seen as the embodiment of decadence, decay and illness, associated with the vices of the capitalist West. Roginskaia, like Gerasimov, was concerned with the harmful influence that ‘formalistic foreign art’ might have on the development of a new and healthy proletarian art. Interpreted as an illness, contemporary French and German artistic tendencies were pilloried in the Soviet press. In museums in general and in GMNZI in particular, this turn in cultural policy towards vilification was revealed in the organisation of thematic exhibitions based on the interrelationship between style and class, regardless of nationality. Such exhibitions included the Anti-Alcohol Exhibition organised with the State Tretiakov Gallery and The Life and Work of Work ers and Peasants in Western European Art, arranged in collaboration with the State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, both held in 1929. The visual manifestation of this cultural policy was the construction of art-historical narratives on the walls of the museum, as can be seen from the installation photograph of the Style of the Industrial Bourgeoisie exhibition, held at GMNZI in 1930 (Fig. 12.1). Here the room was organised along the ‘constructive’ principle, which reflected developments in architecture, art and design, with works by Picasso, Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Similarly, two installation photographs taken between 1933 and 1938 at GMNZI, of two rooms—entitled ‘Post-war Formalist French Art’ and ‘Expressionism’—reduced artistic developments to two groups of purely formal phenomena (Figs. 12.2, 12.3). Post-war Formalist French Art contained the work of Fernand Léger, Ozenfant, André Lhote and Léopold

19 When speaking about Russian groups under the influence of expressionism, Rogin skaia referred to the Society of Easel Painters (Obshchestvo stankovistov—OST) and the Society of Public Artists (Obshchestvo khudozhnikov obshchestvennikov—OKhO). See F. Roginskaia, ‘Protiv kul’ta frantsuzov’, Iskusstvo v massy, no. 4 (1930), p. 28. 210 maria mileeva

Fig. 12.1 Installation photograph of the exhibition Style of the Industrial Bour geoisie in GMNZI, 1930. Courtesy of the Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Survage, while the Expressionist room included André Favory’s Female Figure (c.1924) and Yves Alix’s Court Scene (1928). The broad expressionist label was applied to work by both French and German artists and did not draw any national distinctions. The changing installations at GMNZI reveal the role that art criticism played in the construction of an art- historical discourse through the creation of a visual narrative. The reception of contemporary Western art in the Soviet Union further reflected the broader transformation of Soviet museums during the Cultural Revolution (1928–1931), when art’s function changed: its task of aesthetic education was replaced by its potential to act as an effective weapon of ideological struggle.20 In 1930, in response to the ideologically- driven museum reform, a brigade of peasant and workers from the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia—

20 For more information on Soviet museum reforms, see Adam Jolles and Konstantin Akinsha, ‘On the Third Front: The Soviet Museum and Its Public during the Cultural Revo lution’, in Anne Odom and Wendy Salmond, eds., Treasures into Tractors: The Selling of Russia’s Cultural Heritage, 1917–37 (Washington, D.C.: Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gar dens; and Seattle, WA.: The University of Washington Press, 2009), pp. 167–181. utopia in retreat 211

Fig. 12.2 Installation photograph of the Post-war Formalist French Art Room, GMNZI, 1933–1938. Courtesy of the Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Fig. 12.3 Installation photograph of the Expressionism Room, GMNZI, 1933– 1938. Courtesy of the Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 212 maria mileeva

Narkompros) visited the State Museum of New Western Art. Focusing on the form and content of display, this Worker-Peasant Inspection used the following questionnaire to assess the number and the range of works of art in the museum collection. The questionnaire set out to calculate in percentage terms the exact number of works of art that:

1) are non-objective and unintelligible to a mass audience (even if [they] depict a particular subject); 2) intelligible but do not reflect social problems (still-lifes, landscape paintings without people, without work, or people without any evident class reference); 3) depict wage labour and the pre-revolutionary workers’ struggle: a) revolutionary activist works, agitating in the right direction; b) reac- tionary activist works that diminish class consciousness (to mark those that can be useful after political explanation); c) neutral, passive documents and portraits; 4) depict the pre-revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie and their struggle (peasants, craftsmen, old army men, students, petty clerks). This group should be assigned to the previous one; 5) show hidden aims of the classes hostile to the proletariat (their inner interests, morals, heroics, mystical and religious plots); . . . 8) should the museum be kept? How should it be changed?21

Nina Iavorskaia, a keeper and head of academic work at GMNZI, recalled the absurd nature of the inspection in her posthumously published monograph on the museum. ‘When the brigade examined the exposition, the artist at the head of the inspection, a member of the Association of Art- ists of the Revolution, V.V. Zhuravlev was valuing the paintings on a five point system’, she wrote.22 According to this system of assessment, Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral received a two out of five, because it depicted a religious building. Picasso, on the other hand, secured a higher score, because when the workers were asked if they understood the works in the room, they replied, ‘What is there not to understand?’ This anecdote perfectly demonstrates the functioning mechanism of the state-driven

21 Manuscript Department, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Otdel rukopisei, Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A.S. Pushkina—GMII), fond 13, op. 1, ed. khr., 260, ll. 1–1 ob. 22 Iavorskaia, Istoriia, p. 171. utopia in retreat 213 museum reform, exposing the absurdity of the decision-making process at the level of workers and peasants. The transformation of the museum was a gradual process, which ran parallel to the changing identity of the museum public and the newly emerging Soviet society more broadly. The results of this inspection contained some revealing answers that actually determined the future form and content of the GMNZI collection. It noted the high qualifications of the staff, their expertise in the collection, and the fact that GMNZI was the first museum to publish a full catalogue of its collection. Finally however, the report claimed that:

1) the number of paintings with working-class themes amounts to 2.18%, with only 9 works on display; 2) the MNZI [Museum of New Western Art] exposition was organised to show the main formalistic tendencies of Western Europe art in its evolutionary development; 3) the reason that the MNZI museum has so many drawbacks is the absence of a department of Enlightenment and Education [Prosvetbiuro]; 4) purchasing is accidental, not pre-planned and relies upon taste; 5) cubism (Léger, Metzinger), Constructivism (Survage), Purism (Ozen- fant), Surrealism (Miró) are not contemporary tendencies anymore. Only aesthetes and gourmets admire them; 6) the museum has no clear ideological system.23

The harsh results of the Worker-Peasant Inspection in 1930 foreshadow the decree on the liquidation of the museum in 1948, which would give the same reasons for the closure of the museum. In both cases, the collection of GMNZI was described as bourgeois, formalist and lacking in ideology. It was in light of this report and broader ideological shifts that the GMNZI exhibition policy was restructured in its content, form and choice of exhibition venue. The exhibitions’ programme of the 1930s reflected a growing focus on contemporary Western art that possessed a revolutionary content. Tendentious labels and excursions were introduced to assist the viewing process, by controlling and directing the intended message for the non-specialist audience.

23 Manuscript Department, GMII, fond 13, op. 1, ed. khr., 260, ll. 27–29, 31, 33. The docu ment was cited in parts in Margarita Aksenenko, ‘Kak zakryvali Sezanna i Matissa’, Mir Muzeia, no. 6–7 (November–December 1998), pp. 42–48. 214 maria mileeva

In the 1930s, major international exhibitions at GMNZI included the Exhibition of German Industrial Graphic Design (1930), The Bauhaus in Des sau During the Period of Directorship of Hannes Meyer (1928–1930) (1931), Exhibition of American Artists of the John Reed Club (1932), Revolutionary Art in Capitalist Countries (1932), Exhibition of Anti-Imperialist Posters (1931), Exhibition of the Brigade of Revolutionary Artists in Celebration of the Days of Lenin and the XVII Party Congress (1934), and Exhibition of Spanish Revolutionary Posters (1938), amongst others.24 This conceptual shift from aesthetic experimentation to the ‘revolutionary’ development of modern art was founded on the ideological reforms in Soviet cultural policy of the early 1930s and marked the process of realigning museums and exhibitions with broader domestic and economic concerns. The artistic heritage and museum collections were reinterpreted in accordance with the October Revolution—in terms of economic and class relations—where progress was based on the shifts of historical events and world revolutions, as opposed to formal innovation and experiment. Works of art were reinterpreted for their pedagogical and propagandistic function. Ideologically, the First Five-Year Plan was marked by the move to mobilise society behind the proletarian and socialist goals of industrialisation and collectivisation. In the early 1930s, the question of preserving the heritage of bourgeois culture was no longer a question of primary importance, with the Soviet government offering a twenty-five per cent reward to anyone who could find hidden bourgeois treasures. The Soviet state was conducting an ideological attack on non-proletarian culture and organising museum collections along ideological lines, which resulted in changes to the collection and exhibition programme at GMNZI. In spring 1930, seventy-three European ‘bourgeois’ masterpieces, including Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (c.1555), and Rembrandt’s Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655) were transferred from the Hermitage to Moscow for cleaning and restoration, and were then sold to foreign collections.25 In

24 Personal one-man exhibitions at GMNZI included: Théophile Steinlen (1930); Rabindranath Tagore (1930), Frans Masereel (1931); Tarsila do Amaral (1931); Heinrich Ehmsen (1932); Fred Ellis (1933); Erich Borchert (1933); Alex Keil (1933); Albert Abramov ich (1934); Jean Lurçat (1934); Perl Baidner (1935); Ernst Neuschul (1935–1936); and Mitchell Fields (1936). 25 See Odom and Salmond, eds., Treasures into Tractors, p. 11. Following the opening of Russian archives in the 1990s, more work appeared on the subject. See A. Mosiakin ‘Proda zha’, Ogonek, no. 6 (1989), pp. 18–22; no. 7 (1989), pp. 16–21; and no. 8 (1989), pp. 26–29; Nikolai Il’in and Nataliia Semenova, Prodannye sokrovishcha Rossii. Istoriia rasprodazhi natsional’nykh khudozhestvennykh sokrovishch, konfiskovannykh u tsarskoi familii (Moscow: Trilistnik, 2000); B. Piotrovskii, Istoriia Ermitazha. Kratkii ocherk. Materialy i dokumenty (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2000); N. Serapina, ed., Ermitazh, kotoryi my poteriali. Dokumenty utopia in retreat 215

1933, the American collector Stephen Clark secretly purchased several works from the State Museum Fund, including Vincent van Gogh’s Night Café (1888), which is now at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, as well as Paul Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891), Edgar Degas’s Singer in Green (1884), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant (1875) which are now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The sale of these Western masterpieces exemplifies the Soviet government’s lack of regard for the Western heritage. At the same time, the Soviet government continued to support and initiate exhibitions of Western art in the Soviet Union right up until the outbreak of the Sec- ond World War. The secret sales expose the ambiguous nature of the Soviet state as a patron of the arts in the eyes of its diplomatic allies and the internal reality of the bureaucratic system that sold items of national heritage for profit in the name of building socialism. The Second World War marked an ideological shift in Soviet diplomatic and cultural policies—the attack on Western art acquired political urgency and justification. In 1949, the bi-monthly art review Art (Iskusstvo), which became the voice of official party ideology towards the arts, published reproductions of works of art by Henry Moore, Robert Matta, and Pablo Picasso, saying that each of the works was ‘a stark example of the logical conclusion of the disintegration and death of bourgeois art’. The anti-formalism campaign and its visual manifestation not only became more virulent but also extended its popular appeal by publishing caricatures in the satirical weekly journal Crocodile (Krokodil) under titles such as ‘Uncle Sam Paints by Himself (Masterpieces of American Art)’, ‘The Art of Cannibals’, and ‘Art in the House of the Mentally Ill’ (Figs. 12.4, 12.5). In 1949, on the pages of Art (Iskusstvo), the art critic Petr Sysoev asked if works by Moore, Matta and Picasso carried any content or idea? His answer was ‘yes’: Hiding under the mask of ‘apolitical’ art, they try to persuade the audience that human intellect is harmful and unnecessary. Man—beast, man—primitive, this is what the bourgeois artists assert. This type of art is especially useful to the contemporary imperialists: it simplifies their task of cultivat- ing racism and banditism as an expression of their unlawful foreign and domestic policy. The aesthetics of formalism are used in the armament of international reactionaries.26

1920–1930 godov (St Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’, 2002); Elena Osokina, ‘Antikvariat. Ob eksporte khudozhestvennykh tsennostei v gody pervoi piatiletki’, Ekonomicheskaia isto riia: Ezhegodnik, 2002 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2003); and Iurii Zhukov, Stalin. Operatsiia ‘Ermitazh’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005). 26 P. Sysoev, ‘Bor’ba za sotsialisticheskii realizm v sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’, Iskusstvo, no. 1 (1949), p. 16. 216 maria mileeva

Fig. 12.4 Krokodil, no. 33 (30 November 1948). Author’s archive.

Fig. 12.5 Krokodil, no. 27 (30 September 1949). Author’s archive. utopia in retreat 217

This open attack—initiated and supported by the Soviet state—dominated Soviet art criticism and art history right until the 1980s and defied the Western model of modernism as epitomising progress and innovation. Despite the partial lifting of censorship during the Thaw, the late 1960s saw a return to fervent attacks against everything foreign, as is indicated by the following book titles: Oleg Larmin’s Modernism—Against Human ity and Humanism; Igor’ Grabar’s Art in Captivity; and Mikhail Lifshits and L. Reingardt’s Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art.27 Such publications reflected the broader ideological antipodes of the Cold-War antago- nisms that divided the world both politically and culturally between two competing spheres of superpower influence: the Soviet and American Blocs. The State Museum of New Western Art was liquidated in 1948, and its collections were split between the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad.28 Modern and contemporary Western art was hidden away in museum repositories, unseen by the Soviet public until after Stalin’s death. The former mansion of Ivan Morozov was occupied within months of the closure of GMNZI by the Academy of Arts of the USSR, the very institution that was committed to purging Soviet art of harmful Western influence. Envisaged as a utopian bastion of modern international art, GMNZI soon became ‘unwanted’ heritage, and through a carefully orchestrated and manipulated public campaign had begun to represent modern Western art as a symbol of dystopia. In the sphere of art and culture, the legitimacy of Socialist Realism was justified by exposing the ‘ugliness’ of decaying capitalist society.

27 O. Larmin, Modernizm—Protiv cheloveka i chelovechnosti (Moscow: Sovetskii khudo zhnik, 1965); I. Grabar, Iskusstvo v plenu (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1964); and M. Lif shits and L. Reingardt, Krizis bezobraziia. Ot kubizma k pop-art (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968). Other titles include Modernizm. Analiz i kritika osnovnykh napravlenii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969); and A. Kukarkin, Po tu storonu rastsveta. Burzhuaznoe obshchestvo: kul’tura i ideologiia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974). 28 For an eyewitness account of the closure of GMNZI, see Nina Iavorskaia, ‘Rasskaz ochevidtsa o tom, kak byl zakryt Muzei novogo zapadnogo iskusstva’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, no. 7 (1988), pp. 12–13.

chapter thirteen

The Art of Cybernetic Communism1

David Crowley

The future seemed to disappear in Eastern Europe during the years of Soviet rule. Writers, artists and ideologists were, it seems, less and less prepared to offer clear images of the world to come. This might be of little importance, save for the fact that one of the root justifications for Marxist-Leninist rule was that the one-party-state would have the practical means and the superior understanding of the forces of history to bring about a better future, that of ‘full-blown communism’. This, after all, was the utopia just over the horizon for which hardship and struggle in the present were being endured. Over time, the precise nature of this state of perfection grew increasingly hazy in official futurology. This process began in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Stalin conducted a ‘fanta- sectomy’ of the imagination, banning futurological art and literature, in part because science fiction had been a vehicle for expressing early doubts about the possibility of utopia.2 The Prozac aesthetic of Socialist Real- ism offered insipid visions of the world to come: the predictable mises en scène of paintings and novels in the Stalin years were factories and building sites, illuminated by the light of the remote ‘radiant sun’ of communism. What existence might actually be like in this distant future was hardly suggested: perhaps its most vivid expressions were the blueprints for socialist realist urban schemes and plans for leafy parks of culture and rest presented in reconstruction programme across Eastern Europe in the 1940s.3 Rooted in nineteenth-century utopian socialism, this was a thin and rather retrospective form of futurology, particularly when compared to the cosmic dreams of the avant-garde of the 1920s. Kazimir Malevich, for instance, had imagined flying satellite towns moving freely through

1 This is a revised version of an essay which first appeared in Łukasz Ronduda and Alex Farquharson, eds., Star City: The Future under Communism (Warsaw: CSW, 2011). 2 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Rus sian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 235. 3 See David Crowley, ‘Architecture and the Image of the Future in the People’s Republic of Poland’, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 14, no. 1 (February 2009), pp. 67–84. 220 david crowley space and circling the Earth, while Vladimir Tatlin had dedicated many years to designing the Letatlin (1929–32), a fantastic human-powered ‘air bicycle’. The poverty of Stalinist futurology was not much improved when, during the height of the Cold War, ideologists in the Soviet Union and the people’s republics adopted images of modernity furnished by the West. Nikita Khrushchev set dates by which socialism would overtake capitalism. 1980, for instance, was identified at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961 as the red-letter year when Soviet citizens would experience superior living standards to those enjoyed by their counterparts in the USA.4 When the future was measured in terms of refrigerators and cars, Soviet futurology lacked the motivating force that it had once perhaps possessed, even in the misery years of the 1940s. By the 1970s, self-proclaimed modernisers throughout the Eastern Bloc, like Edward Gierek in Poland and János Kádár in Hungary, placed an overweening emphasis on the needs of the present. The communist rhetoric of investment (‘work / fight / study hard today and mankind will reap the benefits tomorrow’) was traded for one of immediate reward (‘consume’). Hilton hotels in Budapest and Holiday Inns in Kraków and elsewhere; licensing deals with Western manufacturers like FIAT and the spread of hard-currency stores selling western goods for hard currency were all signs of disinvestment in the communist future.5 If utopianism was a spent force by the mid 1970s, when, one might wonder, was the last time when it was still an article of faith, particularly for Eastern-European artists, architects, film-makers and writers who had once undertaken to provide images that might hasten its arrival? After the dream-world of communism withered, was it still possible to practice futurology in the Eastern Bloc? If the utopian vision of human happiness through technological progress had faded, what else might dreams of advanced technology be?

4 William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) p. 238. http://www.archive.org/details/DocumentsOfThe22ndCongressOfTheCpsuVolI— accessed January 2010. 5 On this theme see various essays in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2010). the art of cybernetic communism 221

‘Cybernetic Machines are the People of the Future’

The various nations that were corralled into a ‘Bloc’ in the late 1940s have differing histories. Nevertheless, Moscow’s influence had common effects. This was not just a reflex of authoritarian rule: Stalin’s death in 1953 and the revelations of the violence and cruelty of his regime by Khrushchev in his so called ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956 were felt as a common trauma across the Bloc. To exorcise the ghosts of Stalin- ist irrationalism and violence, post-Stalinist authorities turned to science, new technology and other ‘rational’ measures of modernisation. The Scientific-Technological Revolution announced by Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin in July 1956 was, for instance, a programme intended to shape a new Soviet consciousness.6 A scientifically literate and technically expert society would be better able to conduct the Cold-War competition with capitalism that had been declared by First Secretary Khrushchev. The principal symbols of the era—space flight, atomic power and modern telecommunications—broadcast the triumphs of Soviet engineering and science to the world. The Sputnik, launched in October 1957 initiated a series of ‘firsts’ in space exploration, including Yurii Gagarin’s pioneering orbit around the Earth in 1961, and the first probe on Venus, the Verena 3, four years later. Closer to home, the Soviet Union sought other spectacu- lar achievements to renew its claims to be a force of progress. For example, in 1959, the Soviet Ministry of Communications (Ministerstvo sviazi SSSR) commissioned a new television tower to serve the Soviet capital. Moscow’s Ostankino Tower—the hub of the All-Union network, then the world’s largest broadcasting complex—was completed in eight years. A symbol and instrument, it was then the tallest structure in the world. The real achievements of Soviet science and technology were heralded by fantastic images on screen. Science-fiction films, which were not commissioned under Stalin, became a privileged genre again. The first post- war sci-fi movie released in the Soviet Union after Stalinism was not, however, a Soviet creation. Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star) was a 1960 East-German production made by the famous DEFA (Deutsche

6 See Konstantin Ivanov, ‘Science after Stalin: Forging a New Image of Soviet Science’, Science in Context, vol. 15, no. 2 (2002), pp. 317–338. 222 david crowley

Fig. 13.1 Publicity for the 1960 DEFA film Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star), private collection.

Film-Aktiengesellschaft) studios with an international cast (Fig. 13.1).7 It was based on a 1951 story, The Astronauts (Astronauci), by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem. Internationalism was not just a way of harnessing cinematic talent: it was the theme of the film. On the screen, communism has swept the planet, and mankind is enjoying the benefits of nuclear technology and biological engineering. International rivalries are a thing of the past. A threat to this happy utopia comes in the form of a mysterious object, which, when decoded by ‘the world’s largest computer’, seems to threaten the destruction of the Earth. A spaceship is dispatched to Venus, the source of this ‘cosmic document’. There, the international crew finds

7 Sonja Fritzsche, ‘East Germany’s Werkstatt Zukunft: Futurology and the Science Fic tion Films of defa-futurum’, German Studies Review, vol. 29, no. 2 (May 2006), pp. 367–386. See also Marko Dumančić, ‘De-Stalinizing Soviet Science: Rethinking the Moral Implica tions of Scientific Progress in Khrushchev-era Film’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 6, no. 1 (July 2012), pp. 75–91. the art of cybernetic communism 223 the ruins of a warlike civilization, which had already perished in a nuclear civil war. Drenched in pathos, the film’s message was unmistakable. One member of the international crew exploring the surface of Venus for signs of alien life was a French cybernetician, the creator of a chess- playing robot. In 1960, cybernetics represented a new front for post- Stalinist science. Introduced to the world by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in his seminal book Cybernetics: Or Control and Com munication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), this science had been largely prohibited during the Stalin years. Originating in the West, it was presented as an ideological weapon that would deprive mankind of its humanity. The fact that the earliest application of cybernetics by Wiener was a tracking system for US anti-aircraft gunnery lent fuel to its Soviet enemies. It was cast as a zombie science which would replace humans with docile machines. ‘The process of production realised without workers!’ screeched one Soviet critic with the pen name ‘the Materialist’. ‘Only with machines controlled by the gigantic brain of the computer! . . . what an enticing perspective for capitalism!’8 Consequently, this adolescent science went underground with its early adepts camouflaging their interest with specialist jargon. In his 1955 novel about inter-stellar travel, The Clouds of Magellan (Obłok Magellana), Lem substituted the term ‘mechan- ioristics’ (mechaneurystyki) for cybernetics in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid censorship. During the Scientific-Technological Revolution, cybernetics emerged from ‘internal exile’ to be widely promoted as the solution to the problems that dogged the Soviet Union after Stalin.9 Visions of intelligent machines, which might divest man-made systems of human error, and of dynamic, self-correcting communication techniques based on feedback loops—ideas at the heart of the cybernetic project—seemed like a pana- cea for the evils inherited from Stalinism. On the pages of new journals like Problems of Cybernetics (Problemy kibernetiki), the planned economy was envisaged as a dynamic network, managed by intelligent comput- ers: raw materials would arrive in the factories in perfect time to be pro- cessed on automatic assembly lines. The resulting products would match

8 Materialist [pseudonym], ‘Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?’ [1953], trans. Alexander D. Paul, Soviet Cybernetics Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (1974), p. 44; cited in Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 128. 9 After being scorned, Wiener’s work was published in translation in the Soviet Union: N. Viner, Kibernetika ili upravlenie i sviaz’ v zhivotnom i mashine, ed. G.N. Povarov (Mos cow: Sovetskoe radio, 1958). 224 david crowley the precise needs of their consumers. All of this would be delivered by a smooth-running transport network of trains controlled by auto-pilots responding—second-by-second—to updates about conditions on the rails or the traffic ahead. Cybernetics also stimulated new thinking about communications: Mathematics would turn the Babel of different languages and dialects in the socialist world into a common lingua scientia and allow for accurate man-machine interaction. The future seemed limitless. Reflecting, in 1962, on the implications of machines that could outstrip man in their abilities to think, Academician Sergei Sobolev prognosticated ‘In my view cybernetic machines are the people of the future.’10 In an effort to draw material benefits from cybernetics, experimental institutes were established throughout the Soviet Union. Science cities like Akademgorodok were set up in the East by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1957 to explore the potential of cybernetics (and exploit the enormous resources of the ‘Virgin Lands’).11 Populated with brilliant minds having access to the latest international scholarship, Akademgorodok was to be an accelerator of the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Siberia was by no means the only home of the Scientific-Technological Revolu- tion. New computing centres and research institutes like the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Design (Vserossiiskii nauchno- issledovatel’skii institut tekhnicheskoi estetiki—VNIITE), were also established across the Soviet Union. By 1967, VNIITE had fifteen branches and almost two hundred design ‘laboratories’ connected to high-tech industries. Unconstrained by the requirements of Central Planning, their primary task was to supply industry with new prototypes for manufacture. Architecture, too, was to be transformed by the introduction of computing into design. In the 1970s, programmers at the Rostov Civil Engineering Institute (Ros- tovskii inzhenerno-stroitel’nyi institut—RISI) created experimental software with the appropriately utilitarian title ‘Function R1’ (Funktsiia R1) which could determine the best arrangement and architectural forms for an industrial plant, according to functional criteria.12 Here was the promise of an architecture without human limitation or error.

10 Cited in Willis H. Ware and Wade B. Holland, eds., ‘Soviet Cybernetics Technology 1959–1962’ (Rand Corporation report prepared for the US Air Force, June 1963), p. 11. 11 See Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, The Siberian City of Science (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Alexander D’Hooghe, ‘Sibe ria as Analogous Territory: Soviet Planning and the Development of Science Towns’, AA Files, vol. 51 (2004), pp. 14–27. 12 Igor Rafałowicz and Sergiej W. Żak, ‘Automatyzacja projektowania w ZSRR’, Architek tura (November–December 1977), pp. 63–5. the art of cybernetic communism 225

Alongside cybernetics, ergonomics, and behavioural sciences, art played a central role in many of these self-consciously experimental enterprises. Located in research institutes and off the radar of the Soviet art establishment, artist-scientists avoided the attacks on abstraction that periodically featured in official proclamations on culture. Moreover, their official status meant that they enjoyed privileged access to Western specialist publications, where the work of kindred spirits like the artist Nicholas Schöffer was reported. The Dvizhenie (Movement) group, founded in Moscow in the early 1960s by a group of seven young artists including Francisco Infante and Lev Nussberg—produced some of the most compelling attempts to envis- age the art of the future. Jane Sharp has described their kinetic sculptures, cybernetic installations and design projects as being ‘concerned with and derived from the visual arts traditions of avant-garde abstraction’ and at the same time being ‘technically, scientifically informed, attuned to the inventive feats of and ambitions of Soviet engineering.’13 Exhibited in public institutions like the Kurchatov Institute for Atomic Energy (Institut atomnoi energii imeni I V. Kurchatova) and the Institute of High Tem- peratures (Institut vysokikh temperatur) in Moscow in the 1960s, their abstract works could be characterised as research. This was not a matter of rhetorical camouflage: science seemed to be offering novel materials for the production of a new order of synthetic art. Nussberg wrote: The synthesis of different technical means and art forms is [an] important side of our searches. An artist must take all the basic means that exist in nature-light-color, sound, movement (not just in time and space), scents, changing temperatures, gases and liquids, optical effects, electromagnetic fields . . . etc. All depends on the creative fire of the individual.14 This sense of excitement is captured in the group’s early works like Infan- te’s 1963 Space-Movement-Infinity, an exercise in geometry, in which a series of two-dimensional crystal forms are overlaid. Turning in an infinite space, they seem to recede to a luminous red point. It was subtitled ‘Design for a Kinetic Object’, and Infante developed his ‘design’ into a sculpture, fashioned from revolving cubes illuminated with small lights.

13 Jane Sharp, ‘The Personal Visions and Public Spaces of the Movement Group (Dvi zhenie)’, in David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, eds., Cold War Modern (London: V&A Publica tions, 2008), p. 237. 14 Lev Nussberg, untitled manuscript, undated, cited in Vyacheslav F. Koleychuk, ‘The Dvizheniye Group: Toward a Synthetic Kinetic Art’, Leonardo, vol. 27, no. 5 (1994), pp. 433–436. 226 david crowley

What its purpose might be was never made clear. By eschewing questions of application or faktura (texture), Dvizhenie’s art formed a connection back to Malevich’s Suprematism and El Lissitzky’s Prouns (artworks that were hardly accessible in the Soviet Union at the time, but could be seen in the Moscow apartment of pioneering collector George Costakis). Members of the group enjoyed prominent commissions, particularly at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967. Nuss- berg designed a public light-sculpture in Leningrad to mark ‘Fifty Years of Soviet Power’; whilst Infante was commissioned to create a kinetic sculpture in the Exhibition of Scientific Creative Works by Young People in the grounds of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements (Vystavka dostizhenii narodnogo khoziaistva—VDNKh) in Moscow (Fig. 13.2). He installed a three-metre-high crystalline structure entitled Galaxy in front of the gilded Stalin-era pavilions. This kinetic sculpture was made of metal struts and synthetic string (a clothes line). Electric motors animated the heart of the construction, changing its angular forms to the accompaniment of music, and at night Galaxy was illuminated with coloured lights. The piece represents the group’s aspiration to devise new models of public sculpture for the new urban centres being planned across the Soviet Union. On the eve of a visit from senior figures in the Moscow Party hierarchy, Galaxy was the subject of an ‘ideological’ examination. Infante and his colleagues were judged to have gone too far in their enthusiasm for the abstract beauty of geometry, and were required to dismantle the sculpture.15 Although members of Dvizhenie were sometimes the focus of criticism from official quarters, they were not anti-communist. Their philosophy of art combined a ‘politically correct’ enthusiasm for Soviet science with an illicit interest in metaphysics. Space exploration had opened up—at least in the minds of young artists—a perspective on the infinite. The group’s 1965 manifesto, broadcasting their commitment to Kineticism, announced the dawn of a new sensibility: We are pioneers. We unite the WORLD to KINETICISM TODAY’S man is torn apart, sick. ‘Man, are you not tired of destruction?’ TODAY’S child is already the cosmic generation. The stars have come nearer. Then let ART draw people together through the breath of the stars! PEOPLE LET US CREATE A WORLD INSTITUTE OF KINETICISM.16

15 Francisco Infante, in conversation with the author, Moscow, 2007. 16 Lev Nussberg, ‘Manifesto of Russian Kineticists’ (1966); English translation in Igor Golom stock and Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 164. the art of cybernetic communism 227 (1978). the Exhibition of Scientific Creative Works of Young People , I nfante in Lew Nussberg und Die Gruppe Bewegung Moskau 1962–1977 F rancisco P hotograph courtesy of M oscow 1967. F ig. 13.2 Galaxy , a sculpture by 228 david crowley Lew Nussberg und Die Gruppe Bewe P hotograph courtesy of U nion, 1967. S oviet gung Moskau 1962–1977 (1978). N ussberg, Cybertheatre by Lev F ig. 13.3 M odel of the the art of cybernetic communism 229

In space exploration, Dvizhenie deduced not man’s command of science, but his encounter with its mysteries. In 1966–67 Dvizhenie planned a Cybertheatre for Leningrad, an installation that would be populated with towering ‘cyber-creatures’, pulsating lights and concrete sounds, cascading pools of water and vaporous gases (Fig. 13.3). Visitors would follow paths through this wonderful environment, walking through the pools wearing protective clothing and avoiding plumes of steam and gas. All of this was to be programmed to respond to the passage of the visitor. The Cybertheatre presented its audience with a simulation of life on a strange planet (or perhaps on Earth in the future). Nussberg hinted at some kind of troubling shadows in this brave new world: ‘It is of course an aesthetic fantasy, perhaps with prophetic overtones. Is not Man himself creating more and more of his environment on the planet Earth (using matter in the same way as a sculptor uses clay for his sculptures)?17

‘The Mouth Will Disappear’

For one vocal commentator during the post-Stalinist ‘Thaw’, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the fantastic promises of future science were not to be confused with the real challenges of socialism. Once a loyal communist, he became a brave and vocal critic of official policy, damning the fetish then being made of science: We observe . . . the astonishing speed with which the new mythologies dis- place the old ones. In the intellectual life of a society in which the mechanism of traditional faith has become corroded, new myths proliferate with the greatest ease, even though they may originate in technical advances or scientific discoveries. Thousands of people fondly imagine that the friendly inhabitants of other planets will one day solve the problems from which humans cannot extricate themselves. For others, the words ‘cybernetics’ embodies the hope of resolving all social conflicts.18 If one product of de-Stalinisation in the USSR had been the Scientific- Technological Revolution and the formation of experimental institutes across the Bloc, another, in the People’s Republic of Poland, had been doubt. The second half of the 1950s had been traumatic, with artists, film

17 Lev Nussberg, ‘Cybertheater’, Leonardo, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1969), pp. 61–62. 18 Leszek Kołakowski, ‘The Jester and the Priest’ [1959] in Towards a Marxist Humanism (London: Palladin, 1970), p. 57. 230 david crowley makers and writers—including some of the most ardent champions of socialism—demanding autonomy from the interests of ideologues and the operations of the censor. In the years that followed, the Polish intel- ligentsia struck an uneasy peace with the State, sometimes enduring censorship and repression and, at others, enjoying its ‘gifts’ in the form of publishing contracts, commissions and exhibitions. An existential mood prevailed, in which modernist fantasies of the autonomy of the artist and auteurisme combined uncomfortably with a growing sense of the failing modernity of Polish socialism. Kołakowski’s own writing during this period was strongly concerned with discovering the individual—an active figure, conscious of his or her actions and capable of shaping events—in the debris of Stalinism. For this person, scepticism was more valuable than faith; and the needs of the present were more pressing than the challenge of imagining the future. Kołakowski revisited this theme when he reviewed the writings of novelist, futurologist and champion of cybernetics in Eastern Europe, Stanisław Lem. Already a successful novelist (whose story The Astronauts had provided the narrative of Der Schweigende Stern), Lem set out to examine cybernetics in his Dialogues (1957) and the effects of as yet unknown future technologies in Summa Technologiae (The Sum of Technology, 1964) (Fig. 13.4). An influential book in Eastern Europe, Summa Technologiae was translated into Russian in 1968 and appeared in East Germany in the 1970s. Indifferent to the limits set by ideology or by current science, Lem later described Summa Technologiae as ‘an attempt to predict what could not be predicted’.19 In it, he explored the long-term trajectories of technology, including cyborgisation of the body with, for instance, artificial digestive-regulative systems, which would allow humans to adapt to diverse cosmic environments, or the use of radio communication devices as prostheses: ‘If the question of speech has to be solved ‘cosmically’—by the continuous use of radio communication, the mouth will disappear.’20 Fascinated by cybernetic concepts of communication and control, Lem announced the idea of breeding or growing information that would, one day, fill the world like swarming clouds. He also anticipated the future

19 ‘[What] I confronted myself with was like a paradoxon: to predict what could not be predicted. I am an anti-historicist, like Popper who thinks that history is as unforeseeable as the natural evolution of the species. On this, I agree with him’, Stanisław Lem, introduc tion to the German edition of Summa Technologiae, 1978 reproduced on line http://www .fprengel.de/Lem/Summa/preface.html—accessed January 2010. 20 Stanisław Lem, Summa Technologiae (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964), p. 381. the art of cybernetic communism 231

Fig. 13.4 Cover of the first edition of Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae, 1964, designed by Daniel Mróz, private collection. possibility of telepresence, which he called ‘Phantomology’.21 Wired to the phantomat, a person would be able to enjoy any possible sensation by means of neural manipulation. Summa Technologiae presented an image of man dissolved in technology.22 Anticipating post-humanism, Lem sketched worlds that were populated with various types of genetically, and biochemically modified human beings as diverse as ‘the various kinds of ants’. His concept of ‘Phantomology’ disrupted all the conventional metaphysics of humanism: a mind could be stimulated into the perception of being somewhere else,

21 Lem, Summa Technologiae, pp. 364–96. 22 Michael Kandel, ‘Stanislaw Lem on Men and Robots,’ Extrapolation, no. 14 (1972–73), p. 19. 232 david crowley or multiple individuals could be networked to a single brain. In the same spirit, Lem also accused other science-fiction writers and film-makers of anthropocentrism by imagining the cosmos populated with human-like beings and Earth-like landscapes. His 1961 novel Solaris (famously made into a film by Andrei Tarkovskii in 1972) deals with the possibility that other forms of intelligence may be radically alien to the humans who encounter them. Kołakowski wrote a long response to Summa Technologiae.23 Celebrat- ing Lem’s imagination, the philosopher was nevertheless sharply critical. He called the futurologist ‘a leading ideologist of scientific technocracy’ and accused him of trading in fantasies. Adapting Merleau-Ponty’s question ‘What has remained of philosophy in the wake of the encroachments of modern science?’ Kołakowski supplied his own answer—‘nothing’. In other words, Lem was too wired to technology to ask deep questions of existence or, for that matter, immediate ones about the present: ‘I think that consideration of intergalactic transport can be profitable even in our world where real dreams lead us to conjure up actual technologies’, wrote Kołakowski. ‘One day humanity will invent telephones with which you can call Pruszków from Warsaw easily, build an elevator which will work for weeks without breaking down, as well as a glue suitable for gluing, and razors suitable for shaving.’24 These were real problems. Lem was evidently vexed by Kołakowski’s review, responding to it more than thirty years later.25 Active in the same Thaw circles at the time, Lem saw his own writing as a critique of technological determinism, just as Kołakowski had been a thorn in the side of Marxist beliefs in determin- istic historical progress. Moreover, Lem eschewed an interest in application (‘a glue suitable for gluing’) and so was hardly an apologist for the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Kołakowski was not, however, nec- essarily wrong about Lem’s anti-humanism. Summa Technologiae was a disavowal of the central figure of Man, the hero and rallying symbol of the Thaw in Poland, as the introduction made clear: I don’t trust any promise, I don’t believe in assurances based on so called humanism. The only way to deal with a certain technology is another technology. Today, man knows more about his dangerous inclinations than he

23 Leszek Kołakowski, ‘Informacja i utopia’, Twórczość (November 1964), pp. 115–123. 24 Ibid., p. 117. 25 Stanisław Lem, ‘Thirty Years Later’, in Peter Swirski, ed., A Stanislaw Lem Reader (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 68. the art of cybernetic communism 233

knew a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years his knowledge will be even more complete.26 Although perhaps few grasped it at the time, Summa Technologiae had an innoculatory approach to progress: Lem’s hyperfuturism was an inocula- tion against technocracy, whether dressed in Soviet stripes or any other kind. One contemporary who seemed to share a similar viewpoint was the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. At the end of the 1960s, Wodiczko began producing cybernetic artworks, which shared Lem’s critical perspective on technocratic rationalism and anthropocentrism. These artworks—which he called ‘products’—included Personal Instrument (1969), an electronic device worn on the head and hands (Fig. 13.5). Wodiczko made this while working as a designer for Unitra, the main state electronics conglomer- ate in Warsaw. Responding to the movements of the wearer, the Personal Instrument allowed the individual to amplify or diminish the flow of sound from the surrounding environment. A sensor on the glove turned the hand into a microphone. Headphones privatised the experience. While wearing it, the user excluded himself or herself from the collective (in a text accompanying the object when exhibited, Wodiczko specified that the Personal Instrument was ‘for the exclusive use of the artist who created it’). Here was a materialisation of Lem’s vision of the mouth replaced by radio. An allegorical device alluding to surveillance and anomie in the People’s Republic, the Personal Instrument was not anti-modern, but it was critical. In its futuristic qualities, it pointed—perhaps darkly—to a world where the voice was no longer a human faculty.

Negative Utopias

Others saw different promises in technology. At the end of the 1960s, Jerzy Rosołowicz in Wrocław, Poland, promoted his concept of the Neutrdrom. This was to be a 100-metre-high inverted cone set on an open plain, near a large town. Travelling in an elevator at the core of the tower, visitors would shoot through darkness to the dazzling luminosity of the circular platform at the top of the structure. Standing on a mirror, they would be bathed in a cosmic symphony of light. Others could enter a 35-metre- diameter sphere rolling around the foot of the tower. Filled with light and sound, this was to be a closed universe of sensation.

26 Lem, Summa Technologiae, p. 12, author’s translation. 234 david crowley

Fig. 13.5 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal Instrument (1969), Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. the art of cybernetic communism 235

According to Rosołowicz, the Neutrdrom required precisely the kind of socialist coordination that the ‘Scientific-Technological Revolution’ promised to deliver: ‘the programming of the functional interior of the ball requires the co-operation of psychologists, physicists, physiologists, mathematicians, electronic specialists and cybernetic specialists. Its construction—the co-operation of many highly specialised plants and factories and of expert mounting and building teams.’27 Yet this was a high-tech structure without purpose or utility. The Neutrdrom was an exploration into Rosołowicz’s philosophy of ‘neutral action’ in which pur- poselessness was a value in its own right. He described this ethos in 1967 in proto-environmentalist terms as ‘all those activities of man that bring him neither benefit nor harm. It is the opposite of conscious intentional action and, at the same time, its complement.’ A ‘do-no-evil’ approach would redirect Cold-War science to benign ends, releasing its cosmic potential: Due to the contemporary communications media, the range of applications of conscious neutral action is unlimited, as corroborated by the exemplary peak in the domain of space travel and exploration achievements, in which all mankind has indirectly participated. The official and generally unequivo- cal interpretation of these exploits, summing up all the current knowledge and ability of man, allows us to hope that they will not be turned to our destruction—in spite of the fact that they have always, most virulently, been made to do exactly that.28 In the Neutrdrom, the visitor would be ‘a creative man’ (człowiek tworczy) rather than a consumer (człowiek konsument) or user (użytkownik), his destructive counterparts. Piotr Piotrowski has characterised Rosołowicz schemes as “an ironic take on the engineering utopias that are generally created with a certain ‘goal’ in mind”.29 This was, after all, the age of the telecommunications tower and the satellite. But it is not certain that Rosołowicz was forc- ing open the disjunction between expression and meaning that characterises irony. Nor had he given up on the future. The Neutrdrom might be better understood as what Theodor Adorno called a ‘negative utopia’,

27 This text in English features as a caption on Rosołowicz’s original drawing for the scheme. 28 Jerzy Rosołowicz, ‘On Neutral Action’, in Paweł Polit and Piotr Woźniakiewicz, eds., Refleksja konceptualna w sztuce polskiej. Doświadczenia dyskursu 1965–1975 (Warsaw: CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 1998), p. 230. 29 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion, 2009), p. 201. 236 david crowley

Fig. 13.6 Heliopolis scheme by VAL (Voies et Aspectes du Lendemain—Alex Mlynarčik and architects Ľudovít Kupkovič and Viera Mecková), 1968–70. Cour- tesy of the artists. i.e. a condition or experience that resists the foreclosure of the possibility of a completely new way of being.30 As a negative utopia, the Neutrdrom maintained an implacable opposition to the technocratic futurism on offer in the People’s Republic of Poland: application would have been a betrayal. In other words, the Neutrdrom ‘guaranteed’ its utopian status by being unbuildable. Clear intellectual and aesthetic parallels can be drawn between Rosołowicz’s Neutrdrom and the work of the artist Alex Mlynarčik and the architects Ľudovít Kupkovič and Viera Mecková, members of the Slovak group VAL (Voies et Aspectes du Lendemain/Ways and Aspects of Tomor- row), who envisaged a new city, perched like a bird’s nest, on the tops of mountains (Fig. 13.6).31 Their Heliopolis project, a ring-shaped megastruc- ture at 2,150 metres above sea-level, which could house 60,000 people,

30 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 176. 31 Alex Mlynarčik, Ľudovít Kupkovič and Viera Mecková, VAL. Cesty a aspekty zajtrajška (Žilina: 1995), pp. 15–25. the art of cybernetic communism 237 was a mechanism to protect the natural environment from its greatest threat—man. The project took shape when it was proposed to hold the Olympics in the Tatra mountains. Floating high among the peaks on the Polish-Czechoslovak border (which had recently been the entry point for Soviet-led forces suppressing the Prague Spring), the landscape would be left pristine below. In fact, two of the six zones specified by the architects in their scheme were to be left untouched and inaccessible, a natural ‘counter-monument’ to man’s destructive capacities. Like Lissitzky’s Prouns produced in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, this architecture was a gesture of impossible perfection. But the context was very different: utopian architecture, built from the dystopian logic of environmentalism, was particularly provocative in the setting of Eastern Europe in the 1960s, where to question the limits of progress was to issue a challenge to official futurology. Dvizhenie’s Cybertheatre, Rosołowicz’s Neutrdrom and VAL’s Heliopolis seem to point to an early and growing sense of environmental anxiety, one of the factors that motivated anti-communist dissent in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Historically, they were produced at the last moment when utopianism still had a hold on the Eastern-European imagination (even if inflected as negation). Utopianism was about to be swept away in the pervasive culture of irony, which was to absorb much intellectual life in the Bloc during the 1970s. As enthusiasm for the communist project faltered in the face of stagnation, corruption, and the renewed censorship that marked the Leonid Brezhnev years, irony seemed like the only adequate response.32 In fact, utopianism itself was to become the subject of some of the most tart commentaries on communist rule. The parodies of the Stalinist ‘good life’ by Soviet Sots-artists Vitaly Komar and Alexan- der Melamid are well known. At the beginning of their career in the USA, they also created Super Objects—Super Comfort for Super People (1976), a portfolio of thirty-six colour photographs and text panels, describing impossible Soviet consumer products and devices. One product—with the brand ‘Olo’—was a tongue ring ornamented with a pearl. This was less a piece of technology than an exercise in magic. Olo had the function of ensuring that nothing but positive words issued from the mouth of it user: ‘Every word a pearl!’ Like Wodiczko’s Personal Instrument, this mysterious technology passed comment on the ways in which communication—a

32 Anatoly Vishevsky, Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s: The Politics of Irony (Gaines ville, FL.: University of Florida Press, 1993). 238 david crowley core preoccupation of cybernetics—was distorted in the Soviet universe. In the Super Objects series, the two artists also turned the Circle, Square and Triangle—the pure geometry from which the avant-garde dreams of the 1920s had been fashioned—into the objects of an absurd cult: Only objects devoid of the dead weight of utilitarian function soar high aloft above the lowly world of daily life. The forms and dimensions of the figures we offer you are not fortuitous ones. They have been arrived at by mathematical computations that link together the dimensions of the Moon and of the human body . . . Buy the circles, squares and triangles manufactured solely by Renowned Artists of the Twentieth-Century Seventies, Moscow.33 Written just over ten years after Dvizhenie announced the birth of a ‘new cosmic child’, Komar and Melamid’s text ridiculed not only the Construc- tivist avant-garde but also the faith of the preceding generation. But what of Cybernetics? Now at the heart of the Soviet establishment, it was not exempt from the ironic trend in the Eastern Bloc. Aleksandr Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights (1976), a biting satire of life in Leonid Bre- zhnev’s Soviet Union (aka Ibansk which might be translated as Fuckupia), features a long and vivid passage on ‘The Rehabilitation of Cybernetics’. In this novel, smuggled out of the USSR and published in Switzerland, Zinoviev charts the rise and decline of cybernetics: . . . It was only recently that we had five or six cyberneticists and they were all under Secret Police surveillance . . . Last week we had a symposium and more than a thousand specialists turned up. We’re moving into a boom. Things will be blown up beyond all measure. All measures of rabble will gather round trying to get in on the act. People will write theses, collect titles, decorations, prizes. Some will go off on foreign visits—the highest reward for services to our society. And then the boom will begin to blow over. In the meanwhile, any scientists worthy of the name will have been eliminated and crushed. . . . 34 For Zinoviev, the dream of cybernetic communism had become little more than an alibi for failure.

33 Komar and Melamid, cited in Alla Rosenfeld, ‘Stretching the Limits: On Photo- related Works of Art in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection’ in Diane Neumaier, ed., Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-related Works of Art (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 141. 34 Alexander Zinoviev, The Yawning Heights, trans. by Gordon Clough (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1981), p. 519. chapter FOURteen

Geometry after Utopia

Brandon Taylor

I take the phrase ‘utopian geometry’ to refer to any way of organising the elements of a work of art that in the mind of an artist might point towards, or evoke, an ideal state of affairs. For the Moscow Constructiv- ists, geometry became a way of modelling the energies of the social organ- ism in accordance with the commitments of Marxism and Communism. ‘Everything, utterly everything, is being constructed of lines and grids’, Aleksandr Rodchenko wrote with typical enthusiasm in 1922, as if the line and the grid were the true markers of a rational and planned society, formed in the image of the technical. ‘The line, the grid, the point. Rodchenko’s laboratory’.1 In this way, Russian Constructivism offered efficiency and functionality as the gateways to a classless future for mankind. Other European artists of the inter-war period, painters especially, availed themselves of geometries that were intended to appear immutable and transcendent, as if a state of perfection in the picture-plane offered a kind of blueprint for the building and reorganisation of society. For abstract artists generally—International Constructivists, Concrete artists, Abstraction-Création types, and others—geometry could variously mean order, simplicity, cleansing, light and air. Modernising classicists thought they could design a future built upon the ‘balanced’ proportional systems of Greek mathematics, with stability, regulation, and hierarchy as the metaphorical keys. To many of them, lofty ideals could be figured by shapes that are not found in nature, but derive from mathematical laws of formation such as equidistance from a centre (the circle), or shortest-path distance (the straight line) on a flat and carefully proportioned plane. Various kinds of geometry, then, and various kinds of utopia. But why do none of them any longer have any force? The reasons for the ‘decay’

1 A. Rodchenko, ‘Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group’ (c.1922), manu script, Rodchenko-Stepanova archive, Moscow; published in Alexander N. Lavrentiev, ed., Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters and Other Writings, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), pp. 144, 145. 240 brandon taylor of utopian geometry in subsequent modernism are to be located in the decay of the ideological itself, partly; the implausibility of those metaphors, combined with the calamity of a Second World War and eventually the collapse of every kind of utopian vision; but also in ever-shifting artistic priorities, and a series of new conceptualisations of what geometry itself can do. The background to Dan Flavin’s series of ‘monuments’ to V. Tatlin—he made the first in 1964—is both marked by the time of its making, as well as by an impulse to critique the utopian ambitions of the past (Fig. 14.1). Here was a young American artist, more or less devoid of politics, making what he called a ‘pseudo-monument’ to a Constructiv- ist pioneer—made more poignant by the fact (which Flavin well knew) that Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International of 1920 was never actually built. ‘My concern for the thought of Vladimir Tatlin’, Flavin wrote, ‘was prompted by the man’s frustrated, insistent attitude to attempts to combine artistry and engineering . . . My pseudo-monuments, structural designs for clear but temporary cool white fluorescent lights, were to honour the artist ironically’.2 It might be said that Flavin’s irony characterised the playful and mischievous in Minimalism generally, in relation to the ‘finality’ of a world-historical revolution in Russia that had arisen in optimism, but by the 1960s had clearly failed. In fact, Flavin’s attitude to the utopian past is complicated by a broader distinction within Russian Constructivism, between Rodchenko’s insistence on the deployment of the straight line and the grid, and the no less resolute insistence of Tatlin, inspired perhaps by his friend Velimir Khlebnikov, that dynamic and mobile forms can, and should, also belong to a constructive art. Tatlin had toyed with the look of irregular geometrical curves in a few of his corner-reliefs in the years 1915–17; had welcomed irregular textures and forms inasmuch as particular materials seemed to call for them. It is not difficult to locate the dynamic, launch-pad quality of Tatlin’s Monument in the leaning spiral that winds upwards in a tight- ening circle from its base to its very top—a spiral whose cosmic significance arises from hints of infinitude, eternal rotation, and kinetic power. By the time of Tatlin’s experiments with steamed bentwood construction in the later 1920s, his distance from Rodchenko’s orthogonal and linear geometry was unbridgeable. As Christina Lodder has shown us in her

2 Titles for Flavin’s ‘monuments’ were always given in lower case, except for proper names. See D. Flavin, ‘Some Artists’ Remarks’, in ‘Monuments’ for V. Tatlin from Dan Flavin 1964–1982 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989), unpaginated. geometry after utopia 241

Fig. 14.1 Dan Flavin, ‘monument’ for V. Tatlin, 1968, fluorescent lights, 244 cm. high. Courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation, New York. 242 brandon taylor pioneering research, Tatlin declared himself in favour of making useful objects with ‘a series of forms dictated by complex curvatures’.3 He said ‘I loved Rodchenko so much, but he went along a path of geometrical thinking, not understanding me . . . I want to make the machine with art, but not to mechanise art: that is the difference in our understanding’.4 Therefore when the young Dan Flavin made the earliest of his ‘monuments’ to Tatlin with a set of straight, standardised fluorescent tubes, his relation to Constructivism was a double one. Not only was he re-working Tatlin in a geometry that belonged to Tatlin’s rival, but Flavin would repeat the gesture no less than forty-five times between the mid-1960s and 1990. In a further twist, he would vary the geometry of each successive ‘monument’ to V.Tatlin according to a combinatorial logic that characterised Rodchen- ko’s method uniquely during the Constructivist years—that of his Equal Form standing structures, made of simple wooden units in 1920 and 1921. In one sense, of course, Flavin’s irony and objecthood belong to the wider Minimalist logic of anti-composition that rehearsed several of the terms of the ‘composition-construction’ debate that Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Konstantin Medunetskii and the Stenberg brothers (Georgii and Vladimir) conducted in the spring of 1921. Yet Minimalism’s irony looks like the anti-utopian gesture par excellence; at least if we follow Richard Rorty in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity—published in 1989, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Empire—which proposes a distinction between those languages whose main function is to give expression to well formulated questions, programmes and solutions, and those that exist in a condition of permanent self-criticality and doubt. In Rorty’s book, ‘final’ languages are those in whose terms we formulate our most fundamental values, express our deepest hopes, and try to tell the truth of our lives and those of others. Final languages are languages of ‘beauty’, ‘truth’, nation’, ‘destiny’, even ‘utopia’; and they have been used by religions and revolutions. The ironist, by contrast, always has radical doubts about final languages, and is inclined to think that such doubts can never be resolved within the limits of a particular final vocabulary alone. Further, the ironist in this account is one who cannot believe that any final vocabulary can be closer to the reality of the world than any other.

3 V. Tatlin, ‘Iskusstvo v tekhniku’, Brigada Khudozhnikov, no. 6 (1932), pp. 15–6; cited in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 213. 4 A. Begicheva, ‘O Tatline’, manuscript, undated, private archive, Moscow; cited in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 213. geometry after utopia 243

The ironist, says Rorty, ‘sees the choice between vocabularies as one made neither within a neutral and universal meta-vocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old’.5 It is a description that fits Flavin’s ‘monuments’ particularly well, in so far as they answered a beacon of world revolution with a set of light fittings purchased at a local store. Flavin’s ‘new language played off against the old’ was one of consumerist savvy and cynicism, of knowing scepticism, suspicion and doubt. The collapse of Constructivist geometry into various forms of irony and social reference was further exemplified a decade later in America in the writings and paintings of Peter Halley—at a time when quotation, art- historical reference, and anxieties about consumer culture were all in play together, in a city devoted to the success of the capitalist market, New York. The term ‘Neo-Geo’ does little justice to the impact of Halley’s per- suasive and attractive painting style: his works of that period have something of the celebratory vibrancy of Op Art, combined with certain aspects of the geometry of Minimalism in its most austere and shape-conscious form (Fig. 14.2). It seemed right that Halley should remind his viewers and readers that geometric form in the sense of ideal order and proportion could no longer be seriously entertained. First, because the ideals of Pla- tonic geometry had become long since ‘distorted and bent to conform to the bourgeois idealism of generations of academically-minded geometrical classicists’ (he is referring to earlier modernists such as Le Corbusier who believed that social harmony could be figured in the metaphors of proportion alone, and artists like Piet Mondrian and Theo van Does- burg, who before about 1923 shared ideals of ‘balance’ and ‘equilibrium’ between disparate social forces). Halley’s second objection was that ‘it no longer seems possible [Halley is writing in 1984] to empty geometrical form of its signifying function, as the Minimalists proposed’. He suggests very plausibly that the major part of art production in the wake of the Second World War was conducted under the aegis of existentialism and phenomenology, ‘with the situation of the individual as a perceiving and deciding entity’. But he insists that those paradigms withered, around the end of the 1970s, in favour of a practice ‘that substitutes for phenom- enological study a fascination with sociological and political reality’, in his case a dawning awareness that the most basic geometrical forms—the

5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 73. 244 brandon taylor

Fig. 14.2 Peter Halley, Soul Control, 1991, acrylic, Day-Glo Acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 90 × 93 ins. (228.6 × 236.2 cm.). Courtesy of the artist. geometry after utopia 245 line, circle, and square—were exemplified everywhere in the modern city, its architecture, and its channels of supply.6 But Halley also proposed that the moment of market deregulation of the Reagan and Thatcher period had triggered the emergence of a host of new subjectivities, in which attitudes of scepticism and irony were able to hold sway. In such an era, it no longer seemed possible ‘to explore form as form . . . as it did to the Constructivists and Neo-Plasticists’. Nei- ther transcendent signifier nor detached signifier, let alone basic gestalt, geometric form would now have to be conceived in terms of some very different questions. What was the purpose of geometric form in late- modernist culture? Why do we strive, as Halley put it, ‘to build and live in geometric environments of increasing complexity and exclusivity? . . . The crisis of geometry is a crisis of the signified’.7 From the start of his career, Halley saw that certain Minimalists had been aware that geometry could mean more than neutral form: that it could function both as a negation of bourgeois, European ‘composition’, and as a critique of contemporary industry and more especially its modes of material forming, ‘by employing industrial materials and finishes without endorsing them’, as he puts it. He appreciated that in a few cases (notably Robert Morris and Robert Smithson) such non-endorsement had even been raised to the level of conscious critique. In the signification-rich rectangles and linear structures of Halley’s own paintings, then, can be found the usual hard edges, plane surfaces, and orthogonal vectors of Constructivism, but arranged in such a way as to signify what Halley called ‘cells’ and ‘conduits’. Cells and conduits are found wherever automobiles, televisions, offices, streets, homes, gas stations, heating ducts, subways, underpasses, television cables, and plumbing are to be found. Cells are always discrete and confining spaces, specified in both size and function. They are ‘reached through complex networks or corridors and roadways that must be travelled at prescribed speeds and at prescribed times’. Conduits supply electricity, water, gas, and communication lines to the cells. The city plan exemplifies the geometry of the social. It has become a ‘grid without memory’, he says, a mere ‘abstract flow of goods, capital and information’ energised by ‘plug-in’ connections, as well

6 Peter Halley, ‘Nature and Culture’, Arts Magazine (September 1983); reprinted in Peter Halley: Collected Essays (Zurich: Bruno Bischofberger Gallery; and New York: Sonnabend Gallery, 1988), pp. 65, 67. 7 Peter Halley, ‘The Crisis in Geometry’, Arts Magazine (June/Summer 1984); reprinted in Peter Halley: Collected Essays, pp. 75, 76, 81. 246 brandon taylor constituting a certain kind of ‘bundling of the linear’ into ‘parallel systems of circulation . . . that characterises modernity’.8 Meanwhile the Interstate highways criss-cross the American countryside according to a rationally numbered grid, organised as if to erase time and identity. ‘The great networks of transportation give the illusion of tremendous movement and interaction’, he argued. And yet ‘It is only now that geometric art has been discarded [he is writing in 1986] that it can begin to describe the deployment of the geometric’, that is, a social and signifying lexicon of forms.9 It seems that in Russia itself in the 1970s and 1980s the utopian geometries of earlier Constructivism and Suprematism seldom came in for irony in the American style. The most obvious targets of Sots-Art luminaries such as Leonid Sokov and Erik Bulatov were the visual icons and graphic languages of life under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, for fully half a century the fossilised trademarks of the Soviet state. But for a third artist of Sots Art, Leonid Lamm, the geometrical metaphors of Suprematism and Constructivism often became a hunting-ground for parody. Even as a student in the 1950s, Lamm had adopted a parodic attitude to all utopian systems of the past. It happened that Lamm’s father, an engineer and inventor, was a friend of the Constructivist architect Iakov Chernikov; and Lamm relates how, while still a teenager, he was taken by Chernikov to visit the ageing Tatlin, tired and demoralised and living in central Moscow; before beginning to study enthusiastically under Chernikov at Moscow’s Polygraphic Institute. At an early age, so Lamm tells us, he came to feel ‘both delight and doubt’ about Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky and Konstantin Melnikov: ‘The unique schooling in abstract geometry I had received from Chernikov gave me the opportunity . . . to try to formulate my thoughts and feelings within, and toward, our Soviet way of life’. A series of watercolours of 1954–5 show him lampooning the grand ideals of Suprematism concerning ‘the organisation of space’ by means of flat rect- angle and planes alone (Fig. 14.3). ‘For those familiar with the etymology of avant-garde pathos’, Lamm wrote later, ‘it should be clear that in this case my gesture was intended to lower the level of pathos. This reduction

8 Peter Halley, ‘A Response to Barnett Newman’s “The Sublime is Now” ’, Arts Magazine (March 1986); reprinted in Peter Halley: Collected Essays, p. 165; and ‘On Line’, New Observa tions 35 (1985); reprinted in Peter Halley: Collected Essays, p. 154. 9 Peter Halley, ‘The Deployment of the Geometric’, Effects (Winter 1986); reprinted in Peter Halley: Collected Essays, pp. 128, 130. geometry after utopia 247

Fig. 14.3 Leonid Lamm, Organisation of Space with the Help of Volumes and Flat nesses (Nostalgia of Perspective), 1955, watercolour, coloured pencil on paper, 17 1/4 × 12 3/4 ins. (44.5 × 33 cm.). The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey. Courtesy of the artist. 248 brandon taylor emerged . . . from first-hand observation of the tragic fate of those who were filled with optimistic enthusiasm in the 1920s and 1930s’.10 Notwithstanding such cases, the more general rule has been for the critique of Russian versions of the geometric to be a Western rather than an Eastern affair. But in today’s Western art, the impulse to parody has changed, while new discoveries in geometry itself have captured the artistic imagination in ways that seem to reposition the ambitions of utopian Constructivism once more. I refer to the shift in recent practice from line and plane towards data lattices, networks, and self-regulating evolutionary geometries that have successfully re-introduced the term ‘pattern’ into art as a major conceptual and practical datum. Rodchenko’s grid had been a pattern, of course—one of lines. Yet the patterns being uncovered in the newer sciences of biology, meteorology, and cosmology are tending to show geometries of oscillation, recursivity and instability, rather than linear movement or undifferentiated visual array; and artists have begun to take note. Previously inscrutable systems such as weather-patterns, flow-turbulence, the spread of decay of bacteria, even the ups and downs of social trends, including consumption habits, addiction and crime—all these have recently been rendered into diagrams with the help of fine- grained observational tools, combined with powerful computing software to support them. And the questions that these newer geometries are posing to aesthetics are interesting because they are unfamiliar. What kinds of attitudinal change are needed if artists are to make a convincing ‘fit’ between the data of biological or cosmological patterning and the brute material facts of art? How can the standard technologies of paint-on- canvas accommodate them? Can sculpture, the making of objects, accommodate them at all? To what extent should ironic or dialectical postures govern the activities of geometric artists working now? A few examples can illustrate how recent Western artists have extended the intuition of a strong relation between the geometry of art and the geometry of science—that brilliant intuition of Russian Constructivism, which now lies denuded of the promise of utopia. Several of today’s most accomplished artists were already fascinated by the theory of chaotic systems at least a generation ago, when weather-scientists and others first began to come to grips with phenomena like phase-change, climate instability, and scale-similarity. Sculptors of the order of Richard Serra

10 Leonid Lamm, ‘From Utopia to Virtuality’, in Leonid Lamm: From Utopia to Virtuality (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2009), p. 118. geometry after utopia 249 and Richard Deacon recognised early on how the use of non-orthogonal geometries could produce approximations to observations of organic flow and instability that scientists were making. Serra borrowed from the ‘new’ physics of compressed matter to articulate his torqued ellipses that seem to un-fix the body from its secure relation to the ground; while Deacon took what he needed from chaos theory to develop the stable-and-unstable curvatures that typify his most powerful recent work. Among painters, we find pattern-geometries from the micro-worlds of growth, absorption, and energy-transfer impressively entering the lexicon of art. The French painter Bernard Frize, in the early 1990s, re-figured in his paintings the oscillating chemical waves of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, in which molecular change unfolds, not in a linear fashion from one state to another, but in fluctuating and auto-catalytic cycles of amplification and then decay (Figs. 14.4, 14.5). Young British artists have also had antennae tuned to the system-governed irregularities of both the human and natural worlds. Katie Pratt, for instance, has evolved her own painted patterns through a version of nature-mimicry, applying small granules of paint to a prepared surface under the guidance of a number of initial rules of application, some of which may revise or cancel others, but in a process that does not anticipate any particular visual result. The method in her work is that later rules of paint application may intervene upon the first; while yet further rules can accumulate on top of those, with the consequence that what may have seemed like coherence in the initial pattern will very likely collapse, wobble, or fade—and with unpredictable consequences (Fig. 14.6). The outcomes of Pratt’s nature-mimicry seem to evoke such phenomena as the spread of moss across a petrific surface, the growth of a virus, or the unplanned evolution of familiar urban sprawl. As a final example we might take the method of Jane Harris, also nurtured by a loosening of utopian geometries in the form in which her ances- tors in modernist painting used them. Harris’s basic form is the ellipse, that old Pythagorean construction, neither egg-shaped nor oval, which derives from tracing all the positions defined by the sum of the radii ema- nating from two fixed centres. Discovered by the mathematician Johannes Kepler, the ellipse is a special curvature that was held to describe the path of planets around the sun, made more important still when wedded to the observation that a heavenly body travels faster along the flatter parts of the curve than along the tighter (the discovery of the laws of gravity was an immediate result). In fact, Harris elaborates the boundaries of her carefully painted ellipses with micro-ellipses, which fold either inwards or outwards in what looks like an experiment in iteration of the self-similar— 250 brandon taylor

Fig. 14.4 Model of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction. Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, Dortmund.

Fig. 14.5 Bernard Frize, Aran, 1992, acrylic and resin on canvas, 180 × 180 cm., KiCo Collection, Bonn. Courtesy of Galerie Schwarzwälder, Vienna. geometry after utopia 251

Fig. 14.6 Katie Pratt, Sascheckewan, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 × 205 cm. Courtesy of the artist. the property of certain systems that are identical in their shape at many different scales simultaneously (Fig. 14.7). Dubbed ‘rococo’ by some critics, Harris’s painted elliptical forms are in fact better described as occupying the same cognitive and formal space as the diagrams produced by infinite computer iterations of the boundary condition, now known as the fractal set.11 Yet Harris is not a scientist, and her paired ellipses are also keyed to human perceptual dispositions, such as the one that urges us to search anxiously for differences between one half of a naturally occurring

11 For the rococo in Harris’s art, see Barry Schwabsky, ‘Artificial Life Forms’, at www .janeharris.net/essays/artificiallifeforms (accessed 25 July 2012). For Harris’s own words, see Simon Wallis, ‘Interview with Jane Harris’, Recent Paintings by Simon Callery, Jane Har ris, Mandy Ure, Roy Voss (Nottingham: Djanogly Gallery, 2000), unpaginated. 252 brandon taylor

Fig. 14.7 Jane Harris, Set to Rise, 2010, oil on canvas, 127 × 203 cm. Dr William Conn Collection, UK and France. pair and the other—such as between forms presented bi-laterally within the pattern of a human or animal face. For both Pratt and Harris, then, the negotiation between seemingly innate mechanisms of perception and the form-structures of the natural world has required the recognition of geometries whose inner workings are, to both specialist and lay publics, visually compelling but also still somewhat obscure. And those cases suggest that if the new paintings appear distant in their range of geometrical reference from those of earlier Constructivism and inter-war abstract art, premised as they were upon the lines, grids and circles that evoked the pistons and wheels of heavy modernist industry, it is because the post-utopian agenda is one of nature as a part of man, rather than man dominating nature. Let us agree, then, that artists who show an interest in the newly available geometries of the micro- and macro-environments are doing so out of a conviction that that is where the answers to important questions are to be found nowadays—not with a view to designing future harmony for mankind, but as a means of trying to avert environmental or economic disaster before it happens. If that is so, then Charles Baude- laire’s characterisation of the modern as a search for ‘the eternal . . . within the ephemeral, the fleeting, and the contingent’ is better understood as so many dramas unfolding inside the electron microscope, within the geometry after utopia 253

climatologist’s computations or the biologist’s data-sets, or alongside the counter-intuitive hypotheses of particle science and cosmology. And if artistic irony has a place in that process, it is most likely to stem from the fact that contemporary painters and sculptors know that they can only ever ‘represent’ such complexities and patterns at one remove—or at several. The prospect of social utopia having receded, today’s artists are welcoming new geometries in new circumstances. At the same time they may want to use them obliquely, to ‘say without saying, to experiment with possibilities that cannot be fully affirmed’.12

12 This is the ironic mode in the formulation of Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philo sophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 115.

Index

Numbers in italics indicate illustrations All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (Vsesoiuznaia sel’sko khoziaistvennaia Abramovich, Albert 214n24 vystavka, Moscow 1954) 195 abstract art, see objectless art All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers Abstraction-Création art group 239 (Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris 32 Moscow 1932) 94, 169 Académie Julian, Paris 32 All-Union Creative Conference of Academy of Architecture of the Soviet Architects (Vsesoiuznyi tvorcheskii Union (Akademiia arkhitektury SSSR), s’ezd arkhitektorov, Moscow, 1934) 170 Moscow 171 All-Union Pioneer Organisation Academy of Arts of the USSR (Akademiia (Vsesoiuznaia pionerskaia organizatsiia khudozhestv SSSR), Moscow 203, imeni V. I. Lenina) 80 203n3, 204, 204n7, 205, 217, 224 All-Union Scientific Research Institute acrobatics 33 of Industrial Design (Vserossiiskii Actionism, see Moscow Actionism nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut activism 118 tekhnicheskoi estetiki—VNIITE), Adam 41 Moscow 224 Adlivankin, Samuil Iakovlevich 95, 95 Alma, Peter 60, 65, 70, 70n50, 72 Adorno, Theodor 235 Amaral, Tarsila do 214n24 aeroplanes, see aviation America, see United States of America agitation 87, 134 Amsterdam, Netherlands 70n51 agitational slogans 147 analytical art 126 agitator 124 anarchism 5, 141, 146 Akademgorodok 224 Andrievskii, Sergei 181, 182 Akhmatova, Anna 204n6 androgeny 25–41 AKhR, see Association of Artists of the Anti-Alcohol Exhibition (Antialkogol’naia Revolution vystavka, Moscow 1929) 209 Alabian, Karo Semonovich 170 anti-communism 226, 237 Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts (Muzei anti-utopia, see dystopia iziashchnykh iskusstv imeni Imperatora Antonov, Ivan 186 Aleksandra III), Moscow 163 Apollo Belvedere 121 Alix, Yves 210 architectons, see Malevich All-Russian Academy of Arts (Vserossiiskaia Moscow Architectural Institute Akademiia khudozhestv), Leningrad (Moskovskii arkhitekturnyi institut— 119, 121, 122, 147n31, 160 MARKhI, Moscow) 191 All-Russian Association of Proletarian architecture 2, 3, 59, 73–77, 78, 138, Architects (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo 169–176, 181, 183, 188, 191, 193–195, 209, proletarskikh arkhitektorov—VOPRA) 224, 237, 245 170 Architecture of the USSR (Arkhitektura All-Russian Cooperative Association of SSSR, Moscow) 169 Artists (Vserossiiskii koperativnyi soiuz Arkin, David Efimovich 147n31 khudozhnikov—Vsekokhudozhnik) Art (Iskusstvo, Moscow) 215 157 Art Deco 175–176, 180 All-Russian Exhibition Centre (Vserossiiiskii Art News (New York) 157, 157n3 vystavochnyi tsentr—VVTs), Moscow Art Nouveau 75, 189 40, 41 Art of the Commune (Iskusstvo kommuny, All-Union Agricultural Exhibition Petrograd) 133, 133n2, 133n3, 134n (Vsesoiuznaia sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie vystavka, Moscow 1939) 162 on the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution 256 index

(Marksistskaia kompleksnaia blockade of Russia 116 ekspozitsiia. Iskusstvo promyshlennoi bogatyr’ (knight-errant) 89 krupnoi burzhuazii nakanune Bogdanov (Malinovskii), Aleksandr proletarskoi revoliutsii, exhibition, Aleksandrovich 3, 7 Moscow 1932) 145, 146 Bolsheviks 80n3, 86n20, 108, 118, 119, 130, Art to the Masses (Iskusstvo v massy, 131, 150, 173n12 Moscow) 208 Bolshevik Party 59, 118, 171, 173, 207 Arctic 53 see also Communist Party of the Soviet Arts and Crafts movement 3 Union Association of Artists of the Revolution Bolshevik Revolution, see Russian (Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsii— Revolution (October 1917) AKhR) 121, 136, 147, 208, 212 Bolshevism 89, 102 Association of Contemporary Architects Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow 203 (Ob’edinenie sovremennykh Borchert, Erich 214n24 arkhitektorov—OSA) 71, 71n55, 75–76 Bortnyk, Sándor 66 austere style (surovyi stil’) 53–54 Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano Austria 102 di Vanni Filipepi) 16 autocracy 103, 104 bourgeois 32, 76–77, 81, 82, 84, 87, 89, automobile, see car 116, 135, 141, 145, 146, 150, 165, 205, 208, aviation 43–56, 82n9, 90, 103 213–215, 243, 245 bourgeois art 78, 138, 141, 148, 150, Bacon, Sir Francis 2 204–205, 208, 215, 245 Baidner, Perl 214n24 bourgeois culture 136, 138, 206, 214 Baikonur, Kazakhstan 54 bourgeois specialists 181 Bakhrushin, A. A. State Central bourgeoisie 81, 87n23, 89, 145, 146, 209, Theatre Museum (Gosudarstvennyi 210, 212 tsentral’nyi teatral’nyi muzei imeni Boym, Svetlana 100, 100n4, 111, 111n31 A. A. Bakhrushina), Moscow 44 Brancusi, Constantin 208 Bakst, Leon (Lev Samoilovich Rozenberg) Braques, Georges 208 28–29 Breugel (Breughel), Pieter, the Elder Baku, Azerbaijan 118 55n16 ballet 33 Brezhnev, Leonid 237–238 Ballets Russes 29n8, 64n29 Brezovskii, Boris 199 Banham, Rayner 186 Britain 3 Barbier, Georges 33, 34 Brodskii, Isaak Izrailovich 121, 121n13, 122 Baudelaire, Charles 9, 13, 18, 21, 252 Lenin at Smol’nyi 122 Bauhaus in Dessau During the Period of Bubnov, Andrei 150 Directorship of Hannes Meyer 1928–1930 Bubnova, Olga 160, 168n28 (Baukhauz Dessau. Period rukovodstva Budapest, Hungary 220 Gannesa Meiera 1928–1930, exhibition, Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Moscow 1931) 214 Architecture 1915–1935 (exhibition, Bauhaus, Germany 66n36, 75, 214 London, 2011–2012) 43 Beekman, Chris 60, 65, 70 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich 81, 81n6, Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction 249, 250 89n33, 150 Bely, Andrei (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) Bulatov, Erik 56, 246 26 Bulganin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich 221 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich 26, 27, Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich 99n1 31, 41 Dark Avenues 101 Berlin, Germany 67, 100, 102, 103n13, 104, Burliuk, David Davidovich 18–23, 23 137n17, 148 Burliuk, Mary Holt 23 Beskin, Osip 160, 164, 164n15, 165, 205 Bibikov, Georgii 167 calendar 7-8 Biedermeier 75 Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre Bloch, Ernst 5–7 (CCRAC) 1 Block (Blok, Warsaw) 71 car, motor 2, 166 index 257 capitalism 5, 81, 138, 140n28, 141, 145, 160, collectivisation 134, 214 178, 204, 220–221, 223, Comintern (Communist International, or Cayley, Sir George 45 Third International) 45, 122 celibacy 29, 32, 33n18 First Congress of the Communist censorship 104, 156, 217, 223, 230, 237 (Third) International (Kongress Central Asia 53, 111 Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, Central Institute of Labour (Tsentral’nyi Moscow) 70 institut truda- TsIT), Moscow 165 Second Congress of the Communist Central Museum of the Soviet Army International (Kongress (Tsentral’nyi muzei Krasnoi Armii), Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, Moscow 147 Petrograd) 118 Central Union of Consumer Societies Third Congress of the Communist (Tsentral’nyi soiuz potrebitel’skikh International (Kongress obshchestv—Tsentrosoiuz), Moscow Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, 177, 180 Moscow) 87, 118 Cézanne, Paul 164, 205, 207n16, 215 commedia dell’arte 29–30 Chaadaev, Petr Iakovlevich 3 Commissariat of Enlightenment, see Chagall, Marc (Mark Zakharovich Shagal) People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment 22, 54 Committee on Art Affairs (Komitet po Chaianov, Aleksandr 101n9 delam iskusstv) 204, 204n5, 205 Journey of My Brother Aleksei into the communal flat (kommunal’ka) 113 Land of Peasant Utopia (Puteshest- communard 82 vie moego brata Alekseia v stranu communism 4, 35, 77–78, 80, 147, 160, krest’ianskoi utopii) 103 201, 219–220, 222, 239 Cheka (Cherezvychainaia komissiia— Communist Party of the Soviet Union Emergency Commission) 186 (Kommunisticheskaia partiia Chekrygin, Vasilii 157 Sovetskogo Soiuza—KPSS) 40, 81, 94, Chernikhov, Iakov Georgievich 246 119, 130, 131, 171, 173, 203–204, 220, 226 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich 3 Leningrad Regional Committee 130–131 Chiaureli, Mikhail 200 Communist Youth Movement, see Komsomol China 103 ‘composition-construction’ debate 242 Chirico, Giorgio de 160, 160n8, 165, 208 comprehensive display (kompleksnaia Chizh (Chresvychaino interestnyi zhurnal— ekspozitsia) 135, 136 Extraordinarily Interesting Journal, concrete art 239 Leningrad) 92, 93, 94, 94n41 Constructivist Congress (Weimar, 1922) Chkalov, Valerii Pavlovich 51, 51n13 67n37 Christ 87, 157 construction 87, 89, 90, 124, 134 Christianity 69, 200 Construction (Stavba, Prague) 71 church 109 Construction Business, The (Het CIAM (Congrès International Bouwbedrijf, Den Haag) 74–77, 74 d’Architecture Moderne—International constructive art 240 Congress of Modern Archiecture) 173 Constructivism 36–8, 72, 73, 162, 188–189, cinema, see film 213, 245, 248, 252 cinematography 118 Russian Constructivism 72–73, Civil War in Russia 39, 80, 86n20, 87, 90, 239–240, 242, 246, 248 102, 106, 109, 110, 160, 177 International Constructivism 72–73, 239 Clark, Katerina 89, 89n32, 151n42 constructivist method 171, 188, 243 Clark, Stephen C. 15, 215 Constructivists 36–8, 170, 174, 177, 181, classicism 171, 173, 195, 208 238–240, 245 clothing, see fashion Contemporary Architecture (Sovremennaia Cold War 5, 205, 217, 220–221, 235 arkhitektura—SA, Moscow) 71 collective 80, 88, 89, 94, 97, 100n4, 126, Contemporary Notes (Sovremennye zapiski, 128, 130, 160, 173, 233 Paris) 105, 105n20 collective farm 94n40, 96, 201–202 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Édouard collective farmer 40, 96n49 Jeanneret-Gris) 209, 243 collective housing 177 cosmetics 13, 17–18 258 index cosmology 248, 253 iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat cosmopolitanism, see internationalism prosveshcheniia—IZO Narkompros) Cossack 102 133, 133n1, 150 Costakis Collection, see George Costakis Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star, Collection film) 221, 222 Costakis, George (Georgii Dionisovich Derain, André 208 Kostaki) 56, 155, 157, 158, 159, 226 Derp, Klothilde von, see Planitz, Clotilde Council for Labour and Defence (Sovet von der truda i oborony), Moscow 175, 175 design 92, 122, 138, 156, 157, 162, 168n27, Council of Ministers of the USSR (Sovet 169, 175, 224–225 ministrov SSSR) 204–205, 206n11 Detroit, USA 2 Courtauld Institute of Art, The, London 1 Dia Art Foundation, New York 241 CCRAC, see Cambridge Courtauld Russian Diaghilev (Diagilev), Sergei Pavlovich 13, Art Centre 20 Creative Work (Tvorchestvo, Moscow) 70, dialectical materialism 139, 140 72, 95 disurbanisation 3 Crimea, Ukraine 108, 110 Dobrolet (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo Crocodile (Krokodil, Moscow) 215, 216 dobrovol’nogo vozdushnogo flota— Cubism 69, 73, 145, 148, 213, 217 Russian Society of the Volunteer Air Cubo-Futurism 137 Fleet) 48 cybernetic communism 238 Doesburg, Theo van 57–78, 243 cybernetics 223–225, 229–230, 233, 235, Dans Russe 59–66, 62, 63 237 ‘Meditations on the Frontier’ 57–60 ‘On Modern Art’ 58 Dali, Salvador 168 ‘Thought, Vision, Creation’ 58 dance 32–33, 61–65 De Stijl manifestoes 59, 66 cossack dance 61, 64–65 promoting the Russian avant-garde oriental dance 61, 64–65 67–70 dandy 9–23 attacking the Russian avant-garde dandyism 9–23 73–76 Darwin, Charles 31 on the Russian Revolution 57, 59–61, De Stijl 72 65, 66, 76–78 De Stijl (Leiden) 57, 59, 60, 65, 67–68, 71, on art and society 57, 66, 69–70, 72, 73 77–78 Deacon, Richard 249 on politics and art 65–66 decorative art 135 on revolution 60–61, 65–66 Decree ‘On the Construction of Museums Don Cossack Region of Russia 18 in the RSFSR’, 1928 134 Donkey’s Tail group 17, 18 Decree ‘On the Reformation of Literary Donkey’s Tail (Oslinyi khvost, exhibition, and Artistic Organisations’, 1932 169 Moscow, 1912) 18 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) Doronchenko, Ilia 15–16 221 Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich 46 Degas, Edgar 15, 61, 207n16, 215, Dovlatov, Sergei 99 Deineka, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Drevin, Aleksandr Davidovich (Aleksandrs 51–53, 54, 160, 162, 166, 167 Rūdolfs Drēviņš) 34 Nikitka The First Russian Flyer 51–53, Drum, The (Baraban, Moscow) 81, 82, 52 85, 87 The Shot Down Ace 53 Dvizhenie (Movement) group 225–227, Future Flyers 162 237–238 Delacroix, Eugène 18, 82, 83 Cybertheatre 228, 229, 237 demon imagery 26–27 dystopia 1, 5, 99, 100, 104, 110, 160, 168, denunciation 141 217, 237, 242 Department of Fine Arts, Commissariat for Dzerzhinskii Metro Station, Moscow 186 Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh Dzigan, Efim 95n43 index 259

Earth 81,82, 87, 153, 166, 168, 219, 221–222, angliiskaia gravura i litografiia, Moscow, 229, 232 1926) 208 Eastern Bloc 220–221, 229, 237–238 Exhibition of Contemporary French Art Eastern Europe 80n2, 220, 230, 237 (Sovremennoe frantsuzskoe iskusstvo, eclecticism 175–176 Moscow, 1928) 208 Eesteren, Cornelis van 173 Exhibition of German Art of the Last Fifty Efimov, Boris Efimovich 197 Years (Nemetskoe iskusstvo poslednego Captain of the Country of the Soviets piatidesiatiletiia, Moscow, 1925) 208 Leads us from Victory to Victory 197, Exhibition of German Industrial Graphic 199 Design (Vystavka nemetskoi Efros, Abram Markovich 148, 148n36, 205 proizvodstvennoi grafiki, Moscow, 1930) egocentrism 146 214 Egypt 99 Exhibition of Anti-Imperialist Posters Ehmsen, Heinrich 214n24 (Vystavka antiimperialisticheskogo Ehrenburg (Erenburg), Ilya Grigorevich 71 plakata, Moscow, 1931) 214 Eiffel Tower, Paris 174 Exhibition of National Economic Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich 84, Achievements (Vystavka dostizhenii 84n16, 84n17 narodnogo khoziaistva—VDNKh), Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Moscow 162, 226 Potemkin) 84 Exhibition of Scientific Creative Works Strike (Stachka) 84 by Young People (Vystavka nauchno- October (Oktiabr’) 84 tekhnicheskogo tvorchestva molodezhi, Electrification of Russia 119, 147 Moscow, 1967) 226, 227 electromagnetism 56 Exhibition of Spanish Revolutionary Posters Ellis, Fred 214n24 (Vystavka ispanskogo revoliutsionnogo emigration 3, 56, 99, 99n1, 105n20, 114, 128 plakata, Moscow, 1938) 214 émigré artists 99, 99n2, 100–104, 104n19, exile 99–101, 104, 119, 122, 128 105, 110–111, 122, 208 existentialism 243 émigré literature 99n2, 110 Experimental Comprehensive Exhibition of Ender, Boris 136, 137 the Art of the Capitalist Era (Opytnaia Engels, Friedrich 4, 174 kompleksnaia ekspozitsiia iskusstva Engineering and Construction Department epokhi kapitalizma, Moscow, 1931) of the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat 140–143 vnutrennikh del SSSR—The People’s Exposition international des arts décoratifs Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the et industriels modernes (Paris, 1925) USSR, a forerunner of the KGB) 176 73–74, 75, 76, 180 environmentalism 237 Exposition internationale des arts et ergonomics 225 techniques dans la vie moderne (Paris, Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (Berlin, 1937) 167, 178, 179 1922) 118, 138 Expressionism 148, 162, 208, 209n19, Europe 80n2, 82n9, 85, 102, 103, 116, 134, 209–210, 211 165 Ezh (Hedgehog, also abbreviation for Exhibition of American Artists of the John Ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal, Monthly Reed Club (Vystavka amerikanskikh Journal, Leningrad) 83, 83n15, 91 khudozhnikov “Dzhon-Rid klub”, Moscow, 1932) 214 face painting 17–18, 19, 20 Exhibition of the Brigade of Revolutionary factory 81, 116 Artists in Celebration of the Days of Lenin faktura 148, 226 and the XVII Party Congress (Vystavka fantasy 3, 29, 79, 104n16, 162, 229–230, 232 brigady revoliutsionnykh khudozhnikov Fantin-Latour, Henri 18 k prazdnovaniiu Leninskikh dnei i k XVII Fascist Italy 82, 82n9 s’ezdu partii, Moscow, 1934) 214 fascist propaganda 82n9 Exhibition of Contemporary British Prints fashion 11, 14, 18, 20, 118 and Lithography (Sovremennaia Fauve painters 13 260 index

Favorskii, Vladimir Andreevich 90 folk 89 Favory, André 210 Fomin, Ivan 174n16 February Revolution, 1917, see Russian Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Revolution Communale d’Arte Moderna di Ascona, Fedorov, Nikolai Fedorovich 46 Switzerland 31–33 Fedorov-Davydov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Fontenay-aux-Roses, France 56 135–138, 140–141, 146, 147, 150 Ford, Henry 2 Felger, Mark 186, 187 formalism 56, 120, 141, 145, 148, 150, 215 fetishism 135 campaign against 203–204, 204n6 FIAT 220 formalist art 205, 209 fiction 79, 85, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 109, Foujita, Tsugouharu 208 110, 111, 114, 137 Four Arts group 147 Fields, Mitchell 214n24 France 102, 128n21 Fifth Exhibition of the Community of Artists Frantsuz, Isador 190 (Piatoi vystavki obshchiny khudozhnikov, French art 12–14, 16, 207–209, 211 Petrograd 1922) 122 French Revolution 82, 83, 83n11, 84 Fifteen Years of Artists of the RSFSR French Surrealism 161 (Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let, exhibition, fresco 162 Leningrad 1932) 146–150 Freud, Sigmund 111 film 47–48, 61, 64, 84, 95n43, 118, 138, 156, Frize, Bernard 249 200, 202, 204n5, 220–223, 229, 232 Aran 250 Filonov, Pavel Nikolaevich 20, 113–129, Frunze Military Academy, Moscow, 147, 148, 157 1932–1937 188, 189 A Chant of Universal Flowering 114 funeral directors 21 Conqueror of the City 122, 124, 125 Futurism, see also Italian Futurism Construction of the City 124 Futurism in Russia 14, 17–18, 20, 47–48, Convict 122 148 Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat futurology 219–220, 232, 237 126, 127 Lenin and Electrification, GOELRO 119 Gagarin, Yurii Alekseevich 54, 221 Mother and Child 126 Galerie Schwarzwälder, Vienna 250 Portrait of Stalin 126 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli 118 Saint Catherine 128 Gan, Aleksei Mikhailovich 72–73 The Last Supper 128, 129 garden city 3 The Propagandist 121 Gastev, Aleksei 165 Those Who Have Nothing to Lose 121 Gauguin, Paul 207n16 Three at Table 126 Gazdanov, Gaito 99, 101, 110 Tractor Machine Shop at the Putilovskii An Evening with Claire (Vecher u Kler) Ironworks 126 101 First All-Russian Museum Congress (Pervyi Pnin (Pnin) 101, 101n8 Vserossiiskii muzeinyi s’ezd, Moscow, The Ghost of Aleksandr Volf (Prizrak 1930) 139 Aleksandra Vol’fa) 101, 110 First Exhibition of Contemporary Gelfreikh, Vladimir Georgevich 171, 172 Architecture (Pervaia vystavka gender issues 13, 18–19, 25–41, 92 sovremennoi arkhitektury, Moscow, Geneva, Switzerland 65, 118 1927) 71, 71n55 geometry in art 239–240, 242–243, 245, First World War 7, 12, 20, 47, 57–58, 59, 246, 248–249, 252 67, 77, 80, 82, 85, 87n23, 102, 109, 120, 160 George Costakis Collection, The State Fitzpatrick, Sheila 133n1, 194 Museum of Contemporary Art, Five-Year Plans 83, 86, 94, 94n39, 134, Thessaloniki 56, 153n1, 153n2, 155, 157, 139, 147, 173, 181, 195, 206, 214 158, 159 Flavin, Dan 240, 242 Gerasimov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich 160, ‘monuments’ to V. Tatlin 240, 241, 243 165, 203, 203n3, 204–205, 209 Florenskii, Aleksandr 55 German art 208–210 index 261

German Democratic Republic—GDR Groys, Boris 171 (Deutsche Demokratische Republic— Guévrékian, Gabriel 76 DDR) East Germany 230 German Expressionism 162 Halley, Peter 243, 245 Germany 82, 82n9, 102 Soul Control 244 Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA 160 Harlequin 30 Giedion, Sigfried 173 Harris, Jane 249, 251–252 Gierek, Edward 220 Set to Rise 252 Gieze, Fritz 33 Harte, Tim 47 Ginzburg, Moisei Iakovlevich 71, 73, 74, hermaphrodite 29, 32 75–76, 174n16, 177, 181 Herzen, Alexander (Aleksandr Ivanovich Gosstrakh building 74 Gertsen) 3 Narkomfin building 177, 178 Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops, Gippius, Zinaida Nikolaevna 26, 28–29 Moscow, see VKhUTEMAS Glebova, Evdokiia Nikolaevna 113, 113, Hoff, Robert van’t 65, 65n59 116n6, 120 Hudson, Hugh D. 191 Glebov-Putilovskii, Nikolai Nikolaevich Hugo, Victor 83, 83n12 114–116, 118–122, 123, 124–126, 128, 130 Hungary 60n15, 66, 220 ‘Brakadabra’ 114, 115 Huszár, Vilmos 59 La Santė: The Story of an Emigré (Dom Hydraulic Collective 130 zdorov’ia. Rasskaz emigranta) 122 Hydraulic Communist Party 130 gliders, see aviation Hydraulic Plant 118, 130, 131 God 51, 87, 109, 166 Hydroelectric Dam on the Dnieper River, Gogh, Vincent van 207n16, 215, Ukraine (the DneproGES Dam) 181, 182 Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo, exhibition, Moscow, 1908) 11n5 Iakovlev, Aleksandr Evgenevich 30 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich 11 Self-Portraits: Harlequin and Pierrot 30 Golosov, Ilia 174n16 Iavorskaia, Nina 212, 207n14 Golosov, Panteleimon 174n16 Icarus 43, 48, 54, 55 Goncharova, Natalia Sergeevna 13, 14, 15, icon painting 87, 104, 128, 246 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 34, 48–49 ideology 26, 36, 38, 40, 53, 77, 79, 80, 135, Angels and Aeroplanes 48, 49 136, 138, 140, 141, 173, 201, 205, 213, 215, 230 Cyclist 15 Ikonnikov, Andrei 174 Linen 18–19, 19 Illustrated Russia (Illustrirovannaia Rossiia, Mystical Images of War 48, 49 Paris) 105n20 Plane over the Train 48 Imperial Academy of Arts (Imperatorskaia Gorky Park, Moscow 168n27 akademiia khudozhestv), St Petersburg Gorky, Maxim (Aleksei Maksimovich 121, 172, 204n7 Peshkov) 99n1, 102, 118 imperialism 141, 144, 146, 206 Gosstrakh—Gosudarstvennoe Impressionism 137, 206n12 strakhovanie—see State Insurance industry 138, 145, 146 Organisation industrialisation programme 147, 183, Gough, Maria 16 193, 214 Grabar, Igor Emmanuilovich 146, 148, Infante, Francisco 54, 225–226 148n37, 217 Galaxy 226, 227 Graham, John 153 Space-Movement-Infinity 225 Great Patriotic War, see Second World War Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 165 Great War, see First World War Institute of High Temperatures (Institut Greek tradition in art 33, 134, 163, 164, vysokikh temperatur), Moscow 225 168, 171, 195 International Congress of Progressive Grigorev, Aleksandr 160 Artists (Internationale Kongress Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Berlin, fortschrittlicher Kūnstler), Düsseldorf, 1927) 137n17 1922 67 262 index

International Faction of Constructivists Kharkov (Kharkiv), Ukraine 186, 187 (Internationale Fraktion der Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich 153 Konstruktivisten) 67 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor) International Organisations of Workers Vladimirovich 20, 47, 124, 124n18, 240 and Socialists (First and Second Khristopole, Russia 116 Internationals) 65–66 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich 193, International Style 170, 177, 183, 186 220–221 internationalism 222 Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine 40, 137, 153 Iofan, Boris Mikhailovich 171, 172, 173, kineticism 226, 240 173n14, 174n16, 178, 179, 180 Klein, Yves 56 Ioganson, Boris Vladimirovich 39, 40 Kliun, Ivan Vasilevich 140, 146, 148, 150, The Interrogation of the Communists 39 151n41 Istomin, Konstantin Nikolaevich 92 Klucis, Gustavs (Gustav Gustavovich Italian Balilla 92 Klutsis) 197 Italian Fascist art 161, 165 The Reality of our Programme—it’s Real Italian Futurism 14, 17 People. It’s—We are with You 198 Italy 82 Knizhnik-Vetrov, Ivan 116n7, 122 Iuon, Konstantin Fedorovich 48, 50 Kok, Anthony 59, 59 n13, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67 People of the Future 48, 50 Kołakowski, Leszek 229–230, 232 Ivan the Terrible, Tsar 51 kolkhoz, see collective farm Ivanov, Aleksandr 157 kolkhoznik, see collective farmer Ivanov, Emelian 51 Kolli, Nikolai Dzhemsovich 174n16, 177, Ivanov, Viktor 197 181, 182 Ivanova, Liudmila 128, 129 Komar, Vitaly 237–238 Izvestiia (Moscow) 164 kompleksnaia ekspozitsia see comprehensive display Jameson, Frederic 6 Komsomol ((Rossiskii) Kommunisticheskii Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, soiuz molodezhi—(Russian) Association The, New Jersey 247 of Communist Youth) 38, 81, 88, Japan 23 88n28, 89, 159 Jawlensky, Alexej von 30, 32 komsomolets 159, 159n6, 162, 166, 167, 168 Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Konashevich, Vladimir 88 Sakharoff 33 Konenkov, Sergei Timofeevich 153 Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-Édouard, see Le Korenev, Peter 102, 103, 104 Corbusier Korovin, Iuvenalii 90 Jugendstil, see Art Nouveau Korzhev (Korzhev-Chuvelev), Gelii Mikhailovich 54 Kabakov, Ilya Iosifovich 54–55 Egorka The Flyer 54, 55 The Man Who Flew into Space 54–55 Kostin, Vladimir 159n6, 160 Kádár, János 220 Krainii, Anton (pseudonym), see Gippius, Kalevala 126 Zinaida Kaluga, Russia 46 Kraków, Poland 220 Kamenev (Rozenfeld), Lev Borisovich Krasnov, Ataman Petr Nikolaevich 82n8 99–100, 102–105, 110 Kamenskii, Vasilii Vasilevich 21, 47–48 Beyond the Thistle (Za chertopolokhom) Kandinsky, Wassily (Vasilii Vasilevich 100, 102, 103, 104, 105 Kandinskii) 30, 58, 60, 70, 134, 134n5, From The Two-Headed Eagle to The Red 140, 162 Flag (Ot dvuglavogo orla k krasnomu Katsman, Evgenii Aleksandrovich 150 znameni) 102 Kazakhstan 54 Krasnye Vorota (Red Gates) Metro Station, Kazan, Tatarstan 116, 186 Moscow 185, 185 Keil, Alex 214n24 Kravets, Samuil 187 Kepler, Johannes 249 Kremlin, Moscow 189 Khachaturian, Aram Ilich 203n2 Kriakutnoi, Furvin 48–51 index 263

Krinskii, Vladimir Fedorovich 191 Leningrad Hydraulic Plant 118 Kristi, Mikhail 150 Leningrad Regional Committee 130 Kronstadt rebellion 5 Leningrad, Russia 7, 83, 113, 115, 116, Kruchenykh, Aleksei (Aleksandr) Eliseevich 122, 124, 130, 131, 141, 146, 160, 177, 204, 13, 15, 20, 34–35, 48 226–227 War 48 Leningradskaia Pravda (Leningrad) 149 kulak 86, 86n22 Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo di ser Piero Kulik, Oleg 56 da Vinci) 45 Kulik is a Bird 56 Leonidov, Ivan Ilich 74, 170 Kupkovič, Ľudovít 236 Lermontov, Mikhail Iurevich 26 Kurchatov Institute for Atomic Energy L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris) 72 (Institut atomnoi energii imeni I. V. lettering in art 14, 15 Kurchatova), Moscow 225 Lhote, André 209 Kustodiev, Boris Mikhailovich 163 Life and Work of Workers and Peasants in Kuznetskii Most, Moscow 18 Western European Art, The (Byt rabochikh Kuznetsov, Pavel Varfolomeevich 13, 38, i krest’ian v zapadnoevropeiskom iskusstve, 167 exhibition, Moscow 1929) 209 Pushball 38, 167 Lifshits, Mikhail 217 Lilienthal, Otto 45 laboratories 133, 138, 224 Lindbergh, Charles 45 Ladovskii, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich Lisitskii) 174n16, 185, 186 22, 67–68, 71, 74, 75, 76, 246 Laktionov, Aleksandr Ivanovich 200 and gender 36–38 Lamm, Leonid 246 and Theo van Doesburg 67–68, 74 Organisation of Space with the Help of Lenin Tribune 74 Volumes and Flatnesses (Nostalgia Proun series 67, 226, 237 and Perspective) 247 Russian Exhibition poster 36, 37 Lamtsov, Ivan 191 Tale of Two Squares 68 Langman, Arkadii 175, 175, 176 Victory over the Sun 22 Larionov, Mikhail Fedorovich 9–18, 34, Wolkenbügel project 74 163 Little Octobrists (Oktiabriata) 85 Boulevard Venus 15 Livak, Leonid 99n2 Provincial Dandy 9–16, 10 Lodder, Christina 240 Spring 1912 16, 17, 18 Lomonosov Moscow State University Walk in a Provincial Town 11, 11–12, 14 (Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi and Édouard Manet 12–14, 16–17 Universitet im. M.V. Lomonosova), and Edgar Degas 15–16 Moscow 174, 195 Larmin, Oleg 217 London, Kurt 157, 166 Lavrentiev, Alexander 35n21, 134n6, London, UK 43 239n1 Long Island, New York, USA 23 Le Corbusier (Jeanneret-Gris, Charles- lubok 201 Édouard) 75–76, 177, 180 Lumière brothers 61-64 Le-Dantiu, Mikhail Vasilevich 18 Lunacharskii, Anatolii Vasilevich 60, 133 Lebedev, Vladimir Vasilevich 92 Luppol, Ivan 139 Leck, Bart van der 59 Lurçat, Jean 214n24 left art 139 Léger, Fernand 160, 209, 213 Magistris, De Alessandro 174 Lekht, Fedor 160, 164, 166 Maiakovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, see Lem, Stanisław 222–223, 230, 231, 232–233 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich Lenin (Ulianov), Vladimir Ilich 3, 59, 60, Main Administration for Literary and 65, 70, 77, 80, 81, 87, 87n23, 102, 118, 119, Artistic Affairs (Glavnoe upravlenie po 121, 122, 130, 141, 147, 148, 153, 173–174, delam khudozhestvennoi literatury i 189, 246 iskusstva—Glaviskusstvo) 88n28 Lenin Mausoleum 189, 190 Makhovaia ulitsa, Moscow 176 264 index

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich 20, 21, Menil, Félicien de 64 22, 35, 48, 50, 67–70, 71–72, 76, 133–141, Mensheviks 118 146–151, 180, 219, 246 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii Sergeevich 26 Aeroplane Flying 48, 50 Merkulov, Sergei 172 architectons (arkhitektony) 72, 74, Merkurov, Sergei Dmitrievich 168 137–139, 180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 232 Black Square 67–69, 68, 69n45, 148, 150 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Englishman in Moscow 21–22 15, 215 Haymaking 141 Metzinger, Jean 213 planits (planity) 138 Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico The Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Buonarroti Simoni) 121 Aeroplane and on the Railroad 48 Mikhailov, Aleksei Ivanovich 146 Sportsmen 141 Milinis, Ignatii 177, 178 Art of K. S. Malevich (Iskusstvo K. S. military imagery 21 Malevicha, exhibition, Moscow, 1929) militarism 79, 80 137–139 militarisation of labour 5 ‘Letter to the Dutch Artists’ 70, 71 Miliutin, Nikolai 181, 183 Suprematism 35, 67–9, 76, 137, 162, Minimalism 240, 242-243, 245 226, 246 Miró, Joan 213 and Unovis 71 Mit’ki art group 55 Mamontov, Savva Ivanovich 27 Miturich, Petr Vasilevich 47 Manet, Édouard 12–13 Letun 47 La Viennoise: Portrait d’Irma Brenner Mlynarčik, Alex 236 14, 15 Mochalov, Sergei 83 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 21 modernism 160, 169, 170–171, 173, 175–178, visit to Russia 21 180–181, 183, 188, 191, 217, 240, 249 Marquet, Albert 207n16 Modigliani, Amadeo 208 Marx, Karl 4, 139, 174 Mondrian, Piet 58, 59, 65, 68, 69, 72, 243 Marxism 4, 196, 200, 201, 232, 239 Monet, Claude 13, 207n16, 212 Marxist display 135, 136, 136n12, 140, 147 monumentality 171 , 189 Marxism-Leninism 147, 219 monument 100, 139, 171, 174, 237, 240 Masereel, Frans 214n24 Moon 238 masquerade 28, 29 Moore, Henry 215 material in art 138, 139, 148 More, Sir Thomas 1–2, 4 materialism 139, 140 Morozov, Ivan Abramovich 13, 206–207, mathematics 224, 238–239, 249 207n14, 217 Matisse, Henri (Henri-Émile-Benoït) 13, Morozov, Pavlik 86n22 16, 205, 207–208 Morris, Robert 245 Matiushin, Mikhail Vasilevich 20 Morris, William 3 Matsa, Ivan Liudvigovich (János Mácza) Moscow, Russia 12, 13, 20, 27, 43, 51, 56, 73, 147n22 67, 85, 94, 102, 105, 124, 130, 137, 139, Matta, Robert 215 141, 146, 148, 150, 153, 162, 174, 194, 196, Max Planck Institute for Molecular 203–204, 208, 221, 225–226, 246 Physiology, Dortmund 250 Moscow Actionism 56 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich 20, Moscow Hotel (Gostinitsa Moskva) 188 21, 22, 141 Moscow Kazan Railway Station (Kazanskii mechanisation 2 vokzal) 189 Mecková, Viera 236 Moscow Metro 160, 168, 185, 195 Medunetskii, Konstantin Kostantinovich Moscow-Narva Regional Communist Party 242 130 Melamid, Alexander 237–238 Moscow University, see Lomonosov Melnikov, Konstantin Stepanovich Moscow State University 73–74, 174n16, 180, 183, 246 Mróz, Daniel 231 Mendelsohn, Erich 177–178 Mukhina, Vera Ignatevna 40–41, 167, 180 index 265

Male Worker and Female Collective naturalism 204 Farmer 40, 41, 179, 180 nature, return to 2–3 Munich, Germany 30, 32 nature 14, 40, 51, 54, 225, 239, 249, 252 Munts, Viktor 188, 189 Nazis 193 Muradeli, Vano Ilich 203, 203n1 Nazism 102 Murzilka (Moscow) 85, 85, 87, 90, 91, Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseevich 202 96n49 Neo-Geo 243 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 15, 18 Neo-Plasticism 245 Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon 16n9 Neo-primitivism 14 Musée du Louvre, Paris 82 neo-romanticism 208 Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre NEP, see New Economic Policy Georges Pompidou, Paris 15 Nepmen 86 Musée Picasso, Antibes, France 160 Nesterov, Mikhail Vasilevich 28 museology 135 The Amazon 28 Museum of Fine Arts (Muzei Nesterova, Olga Mikhailovna 28 izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv), Odessa 29 Netherlands 57–60, 65 Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New Neue Sachlichkeit, see New Objectivity in York 50, 62, 63 German art Museum of New Western Art (Muzei Neuschul, Ernst 214n24 novogo zapadnogo iskusstva, MNZI), Nevskii Prospect, St Petersburg 113 Moscow, see State Museum of New New Economic Policy (Novaia Western Art (GMNZI) ekonomicheskaia politika—NEP) 5, Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei 79, 86, 147, 177 zhivopisnoi kul’tury—MZhK), New Objectivity in German art 161 Moscow 156, 206, 206n13 new Soviet child 80, 95 Museum of Russian Art (Muzey rosiis’koho new Soviet person 25–26, 35–41, 80, 88, mystetstva), Kiev 40 94, 173 Museum of the History of Religion (Muzei New York, USA 99, 176, 180, 243 istorii religii), St Petersburg 126n20 New York World’s Fair (1939) 180 Museum of the History of Religion and Nicholas I (Nikolai I), Tsar 103 Atheism (Muzei istorii religii i ateizma), nihilism 146 St Petersburg 126n20 Nikandrov, Vasilii Museum of the Revolution (Muzei Nikitka the Monk 51, 54 revoliutsii), Moscow 147 Nikonov, Pavel Fedorovich 53 music 22, 35, 200, 203-204, 204n5, 226 Nikritin, Solomon Borisovich 48, 153-168 Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź 234 Journey around the World 156, 156, 167 mysticism 46, 121 Man and Cloud 153, 155, 168 Revolution series 162, 164 Nabokov, Vladimir 99, 101, 102n10, 110, 111 Snowwoman and Lenin 153 ‘A Visit to the Museum’ 110 The Old and the New: A Group Portrait Glory (Podvig) 110, 111 153, 154, 156–162, 164–165 Ada, or Ardour 101 The People’s Court 161 Bend Sinister 101 War series 153, 155, 164 Look at the Harlequins! 101 War and Peace 162 Mary (Mashen’ka) 101 Nizhnii-Novgorod, Russia 116 Pale Fire’s ‘Zembla’ 101 non-figurative art, see objectless art The Gift (Dar) 111 non-objective art, see objectless art Nadar, Paul 64 nostalgia 100-101, 105, 111, 247 Narkompros, see People’s Commissariat of Novodevichii Monastery, Moscow 43 Enlightenment Novozhilova, Larisa 114 narodnost’ (national consciousness) 103 novyi chelovek, see new Soviet person National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Nussberg, Lev 225-227, 229 USA 17 National Gallery, The, London, UK 12 Object (Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, Berlin) nationalism 100, 205 71 266 index objectless art 58, 67-70, 138, 148, 157, 225, Pericles 164 252 Perov, Pavel 104n16, 110 October Revolution, see Russian Revolution The Brotherhood of Vii (Bratstvo Viia) Odessa, Ukraine 11 104n16, 110 Odessa Museum of Fine Arts, see Museum Peskov, Georgii 99–101, 105–110 of Fine Arts, Odessa ‘The Best Friend’ (‘Kum’) 105, 109 Odoevskii, Vladimir Fedorovich 3 ‘The Messenger’ (‘Gonets’) 105, 108 officialdom 168, 177, 180 ‘The Woman with no Nose’ Oka River 175 (‘Kurnosaia’) 105, 108 Okhitovich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 3 Peter the Great, Tsar 7, 51 Old Russia 108, 128 Peter, Franc-Manuel 34 Olympic games 237 Petrashevskii circle 3 Op Art 243 Petrograd, Russia 7, 48, 116, 118, 124, 133, Oriental 104, 156 206n13 Orlov, Boris Gerasimovich 54 Petrograd District Cinema Committee The Twilight of the Gods 54 118 Orlov, Georgii 181, 182 Petrov-Vodkin, Kuzma Sergeevich 163 Orwell, George 110 petty-bourgeoisie 212 Ostankino Tower, Moscow 221 phenomenology 243 Oud, J. J. P. 59, 65 philosophy 3, 46 Ovsiannikov, S. O. 177 photogram 36 Ozenfant, Amédée 209, 213 photography 36, 118, 135, 204n5 photomontage 36 Pakhomov, Aleksei Fedorovich 86 Picabia, Francis 161 Palace of Arts, Petrograd, see Winter Picasso, Pablo 160, 165, 168, 207–209, Palace 133 212, 215 Palace of Culture, Proletarskii district of Pierrot 29, 30 Moscow 183, 184 pig imagery 12, 14, 16, 18 Palace of the Soviets 172, 174, 178 Pimenov, Iurii (Georgii) Ivanovich 162, Palace of the Soviets competition 171 163 Palladio, Andrea 176 Pioneer movement 80–91, 92, 94 Palazzo del Capitaniato, Vicenza 176 Piotrowski, Piotr 235 Pan, Semyon 186 Planitz, Clotilde von der 33, 34 Pantheon of the Heroes of the Great Plato 2 Patriotic War 195, 196 Platonic geometry 243 Paperny, Vladimir 193 Poland (People’s Republic of Poland) Pare, Richard 182, 184, 187, 190 220, 229, 232, 233, 235 Paris, France 11, 13, 16, 17, 20, 41, 61, 101, 105, Politburo 81 118, 122, 148 politics and art 133–151 peace 57–59, 81 Polygraphic Institute (Moskovskii peasantry 39-40 poligraficheskii institut), Moscow 246 People’s Art School (Narodnaia Polyrealism 157, 164, 166, 168 khudozhestvannaia shkola), Vitebsk Polytechnical Museum (Politekhnicheskii 22, 71 muzei), Moscow 162 People’s Commissariat for the Construction Pop-Art 217 of Heavy Industry (Narodnyi komissariat Popova, Liubov Sergeevna 68, 148 tiazheloi promyshlennosti— posters 80, 80n3, 82, 84, 86, 88, 138 Narkomtiazhprom) 171, 181 post-revolutionary Russia 96, 105 People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment Post-suprematism 137 (Narodnyii komissariat prosveshcheniia— post-utopia 153, 252 Narkompros) 5, 60, 78, 133, 139, 210 Prague Spring 237 People’s Commissariat of Finance Prakhov, Nikolai Adrianovich 26 (Narodnyi komissariat finansov— Pratt, Katie 249 Narkomfin) 177, 178 Sascheckewan 251 index 267

Pravda (Moscow) 164 religion 58, 126n20, 242 Praxiteles 164 religious imagery 21 Press and Revolution (Pechat i revoliutsiia, Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 214 Moscow) 135 Renaissance 56, 176 Pretreaus, Hyppolit 177 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 207n16, 215 Problems of Cybernetics (Problemy restorative nostalgia 100 kibernetiki, Moscow) 223 retropia 101, 103, 104 Projectionist group 156 Revolutionary Art in Capitalist Countries Prokofiev, Sergei 203n2 (Revoliutsionnoe iskusstvo kapitalis- proletarian class 133, 165, 195 ticheskikh stran, exhibition, Moscow proletarian art 35, 78, 133, 141, 148, 186, 1932) 214 209, 214 Riabushinskii Collection 15 proletarian revolution 82 84, 87, 145, 146 Riangina, Serafima Vasilevna 40 proletariat 40, 60–61, 66, 77–78, 84, 116, Higher and Higher 40 126, 127, 174, 212 Riazan, Russia 51 propaganda 39, 55, 80n2, 82, 95, 103, 121, Richter, Hans 67 126, 162, 194, 214 Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische propagandist 121, 124 Dokumentatie (RKD), Den Haag 57n1, provinces in Russia 9n2, 134 63 imagery in art 9–17 rockets 46–47 Puni, Ivan Albertovich (Jean Pougny) 68 Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Punin, Nikolai Nikolaevich 43, 44, 124, 35n21, 48, 68, 76, 134, 140, 148, 239–240, 141, 147, 172, 205, 205n9 242, 248 Purges 191, 194 Designs for Dobrolet 48 Purism 73, 213 Equal Form 242 Pushchin, Lev (pseudonym), see Gippius, Workers’ Club 76 Zinaida Roginskaia, Frida 147n31, 208–209 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Roman tradition in art 163, 164, 171, 195 (Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazite’nykh Romanov dynasty 102, 103 iskusstv imeni A. S. Pushkina), Moscow Romantic tradition 33, 83 44–45, 199, 209, 210, 211, 217 romanticism 197 Putilovskii Ironworks, St Petersburg/ Rome, Italy 65 Petrograd 116, 117, 118, 126 Romm, Mikhail Ilich 200 Pyrev, Ivan 202 Rorty, Richard 242–243 Pythagorean construction 249 Rosental, Lazar 139 Rosołowicz, Jerzy 233, 235–237 Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasilevich 46 Neutrdrom 235, 236, 237 radio 43, 56, 233 Rostov Civil Engineering Institute Radio Futurism 23 (Rostovskii inzhenerno-stroitel’nyi Ragtime 64 institut—RISI), Rostov 224 Rakitin, Vasily 179 Royal Academy of Arts, London 43 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 121 Rozanova, Olga Vladimirovna 21, 34-35 Rasputin, Grigorii Efimovich 28 Aeroplane Flying 48 rationalist architect 185 Aeroplanes over the City 48 Reagan, Ronald 245 War 48 Red Army 85, 90, 90n27, 95, 96, 181, Rozhdestvenskii, Vasilii Vasilevich 141 188–189 Rubens, Peter Paul 134 Red Banner Textile Factory (Trikotazhnaia Rudnev, Lev Vladimirovich 188, 189 fabrika ‘Krasnoe Znamia’), Leningrad 177 Rusakov Workers’ Club, Moscow 183 Red Gazette, The (Krasnaia gazeta, Russia (Imperial Russia) 3–4, 11–12, 14, Leningrad) 120–121 17, 20, 26, 28, 85, 101, 102, 103, 104, 111, 113, Red Siberian Woman (Krasnaia Sibiriachka, 116, 128 Novosibirsk) 96 Russian Art of the Imperialist Era (Russkoe Red Square, Moscow 51, 189 Iskusstvo epokhi imperializma, Reingardt, L. 217 exhibition, Leningrad 1931) 141, 144, 146 268 index

Russian Avant-Garde 5, 34–38, 43–48, 54, kinetic sculpture 225, 226 55–56, 66–78, 134, 141, 146, 153, 163 Second World War 97n52, 102, 105, 174, couples 34–35 193–194, 215, 235, 240, 243 Russian Exhibition (Russische Ausstellung, Selishchev, Afanasii 82 Zurich, 1929) 36, 37 Serafimov, Sergei 186, 187 Russian Museum, St Petersburg, see State Serebriakova, Zinaida Evgenevna 29, 163 Russian Museum, St Petersburg Self-Portrait as Pierrot 29 Russian Orthodox religion 103, 106, 128 Serov, Valentin Aleksandrovich 28 Russian Revolution (February 1917) 22 Serra, Richard 248–249 Russian Revolution (October 1917) 4, Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union 7–8, 22, 35, 57, 59, 65, 77–78, 79, 80n3, Communist Party (XVII s’ezd 83, 84, 116, 118, 134, 145, 156, 163, 169, 173, Vsesoiuznyi kommunisticheskoi partii 191, 203, 205–206, 214, 226 (bol’shevikov) Moscow) 94 Russian Revolution and art 77–78 Severini, Gino 208 Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic Shagin, Dmitrii 55 (RSFSR) 138 Sharp, Jane 225 Russian Society of the Volunteer Air Fleet, Shchukin, Sergei Ivanovich 13, 16, see Dobrolet (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo 206–207, 207n14 dobrovol’nogo vozdushnogo flota) Shchuko, Vladimir Alekseevich 171, 172, Russian State Library, Moscow 85, 91, 92, 174n16 93, 95 Shchusev, Aleksei Viktorovich 77, 174n16, Russophilia 61 175, 188–189, 190 RVS (Revoliutsionnyi voennyi sovet— Shchusev State Museum of Architecture Revolutionary War Committee) 86n20 (Gosudarstvennyi muzei arkhitektury Ryklin, Mikhail 199 im. A. V. Shchuseva), Moscow 172 Shinkarev, Vladimir 55 Sakharoff (Zuckermann), Alexander Shkolnik, Iosif Solomonovich 20 32–34, 34, 35 Shmelev, Ivan 99n1, 101, 106, 110 Salahov, Tahir 53 ‘The Sun of the Dead’ (‘Sol’ntse Salon d’Automne, Paris 13 mertvykh’) 101 Samara Regional Art Museum (Samarskii shop-signs 12, 14, 16 oblastnoi khudozhestvennyi muzei), Shostakovich, Dmitrii Dmitrievich 164, Samara, Russia 48 203, 203n2 samogovoriashchie, see self-explanatory Shukhaev, Vasilii Ivanovich 30 Samokhvalov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich 38 Self-Portraits: Harlequin and Pierrot 30 The Military Komsomol 38 Shurpin, Fedor 197 Satio 156, 167 Morning of Our Motherland 197, 198, Savelev, Leonid 188 200 Savitskii Museum of Visual Arts Siberia 224 (Gosudarstvennyi muzei iskusstv imeni Sikorsky (Sikorskii), Igor I. V. Savitskogo), Nukus, Karakalpak Ivanovich 45–46 Republic, Uzbekistan 153, 154, 157 Silver Age of Russian culture 26–34 Scheerbart, Paul 73 Simferopol, Ukraine 107, 108 Schöffer, Nicholas 225 Slav nationalism 102 School (Shkola, Moscow) 86n20 Slavophiles 3, 103 Schwitters, Kurt 67n40 Smithson, Robert 245 science 2, 46ff, 67, 138, 221, 223, 226–227, Smolensk, Russia 131 230, 232, 253 Sobolev, Sergei Lvovich 224 science fiction 3, 47, 47n7, 219, 221, 232 social class 136, 140 scientific communism 197 social reform 80n3, 140 Scientific-Technological Revolution 221, socialism 79, 80, 88, 94, 96, 149, 162, 171, 223–224, 229, 232 220, 229–230 Scout movement 80, 82, 92 Socialist Realism 26, 38–39, 45, 81, 86n20, sculpture 40, 43, 94, 141, 147, 171, 180, 188, 94, 96, 116, 148, 153, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 204n5, 229, 248 169–171, 173, 188, 193, 197, 219 index 269

Society of Easel Painters (Obshchestvo Stapran, Oleg 188 stankovistov—OST) 147, 209n19 Stasov, Vladimir Vasilevich 27 Society of Public Art (Obshchestvo State Anti-religious Museum and House of khudozhnikov obshchestvennikov— Anti-Religious Propaganda—House of OkhO) 209n19 Atheism (Gosudarstvenii Antireligioznyi sociologist 135 Muzei i Dom antireligioznoi Sokolov, Veniamin 186 propagandy—Dom Bezbozhiia), Sokolov-Skalia, Pavel Petrovich 165, Leningrad 126n20 167n26 State Bank of the USSR (Gosudarstvennyi Sokov, Leonid 56, 246 bank SSSR—Gosbank) 176 Sologub, Fedor (Fedor Kuzmich State Commission for the Electrification of Teternikov) 26 Russia (Gosudarstvennaia komissiia po Soloviev, Vladimir Sergeevich 26, 27, elektrifikatsii Rossii—GOELRO) 119, 30–31 126 Somov, Konstantin Andreevich 29 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Pierrot and Lady 29 214, 217 Sots Art 237 State Industrial complex (Gosprom—Dom Soviet Academy of Sciences (Akademiia Gosudarstvennoi promyshlennosti, also nauk SSSR), Moscow 114, 224 known as Derzhprom in Ukrainian) Soviet Architecture (Sovetskaia arkhitektura, 186, 187 Moscow) 181 State Insurance Organisation Soviet art 136, 137, 140, 146, 147, 148, 164n14 (Gosudarstvennoe strakhovanie— Soviet childhood 79, 80 Gosstrakh) 74, 76 Soviet communist 82, 229 State Museum Fund 215 Soviet culture 39, 157, 160, 164 State Museum of New Western Art Soviet ethics 39 (Gosudarstvennyi muzei novogo Soviet man 38-39 zapadnogo iskusstva - GMNZI), Moscow Soviet Ministry of Communications 205–206, 206n11, 207, 207n14, 207n15, (Ministerstvo sviazi SSSR) 221 208–209, 210, 211, 212–214, 217, 217n28 Soviet museum 133–135, 139 State Russian Museum (Gosudarstvennyi Soviet Photograph, The (Sovetskoe foto, russkii muzei), Leningrad/St Petersburg Moscow) 92 14, 27, 28, 30, 38, 53, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, Soviet Republics, see Soviet Union 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 135, 141, 144, Soviet Union 2, 36, 38, 54, 75, 94–95, 129, 146, 149, 163, 167 160, 165, 177–178, 180, 204, 229, 238, 242 State Tretiakov Gallery (Gosudarstvennaia Soviet woman 38–39 Tretiakovskaia Gallereia), Moscow 9, Soviets 102, 104 10, 11, 26, 27, 28, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 51, 52, space 166, 173, 220, 221, 229 54, 55, 122, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, space travel 46–47, 54–55 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 157, 161, 162, 167, spectral geography 99, 100, 105, 110, 111 197, 198, 209 Speer, Albert 180 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 21 spiritual values in art 26, 46, 58–59, 65–66 Steinlin, Théophile 214n24 Sputnik 221 Stenberg, Georgii Avgustovich 141, 242 St Petersburg, Russia 7, 12, 20, 116, 118, Stenberg, Vladimir Avgustovich 242 124, 126, 135 Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna 35n21, 242 Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Dancing Figures on White 35 Munich 30, 33 stereometric 139 Stalin (Dzhugashvilli) Iosif Vissarionovich Stites, Richard 3 5, 35, 40, 53, 94, 96, 104, 118, 121, 126, 131, street signs 21 133, 147, 164, 165, 171, 173–174, 188, 191, Struve, Gleb 105 197–201, 219, 221, 223, 246 Style of the Industrial Bourgeoisie (Stil’ Stalinism 5, 35–6, 38–39, 171, 173, 191, industrial’noi burzhuazii, exhibition, 193–196, 200–201, 206, 221, 223, 230 Moscow 1930) 209, 210 Stalinist revolution 193, 210 Sudeikin, Sergei Iurevich 163 Stamm, Rainer 34 Suetin, Nikolai Mikhailovich 179, 180 270 index

Suprematism, see Malevich Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi) 46 Surrealism 161, 213 totalitarianism 38, 39 Survage, Léopold 210, 213 transvestism 28, 29 Sverdlovsk (today Ekaterinburg), Russia Tretiakov, E. A. 177 186 Tretiakov Gallery, see State Tretiakov Sviatlovskii, Vladimir 4 Gallery Switzerland 20, 238 Tretiakov, Sergei Mikhailovich 94 Symbolism 29, 79, 86n22, 87, 118 Harvest Patrol, The (Dozornye urozhaia) synthesis of the arts 43, 147, 225 94 Sysoev, Petr 215 Tribune, De (Amsterdam) 66 Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronshtein) Tagore, Rabindranath 214n24 118, 156 Tambov rebellion 5 Tsander, Fridrikh Arturovich (Frīdrīhs Tarantella 64 Canders) 47 Tarkovskii, Andrei Arsenevich 48 Tsar 104, 118 Andrei Rublev 48 Tsiolkovskii, Konstantin Eduardovich Tatarstan State Museum of Fine Arts 46–47 (Gosudarstvennyi muzei Tsiolkovskii State Museum of the History izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv Respubliki of Cosmonautics (Gosudarstvennyi Tatarstan), Kazan, Russia 11, 48 muzei istorii kosmonavtiki imeni K. E. Tate, London 19 Tsiolkovskogo), Kaluga, Russia 46 Tatlin, Vladimir Evgrafovich 43–47, 56, Tumbasov, Arsenii 186 70, 141, 148, 162, 173, 240, 242, 246 Turkus, Mikhail 191 Letatlin 43–47, 44, 56, 220 Tvardovskii, Aleksandr Trifonovich 202 Model for a Monument to the Third Tver Regional Art Gallery (Tverskaia International 43, 44, 56, 74, 171, 172, oblastnaia kartinnaia galereia), Tver, 240 Russia 50 Tatra mountains 237 Tyshler, Aleksandr Grigorevich 209 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 2 Taylorism 165 Udaltsova, Nadezhda Andreevna 141 Tchelitchew, Pavel 153 Uffizi Gallery, Florence 16 technocratic rationalism 233 Ukraine 11, 14, 118 technological determinism 232 Ukrainian Museum, New York 23 technology 2, 43, 46-47, 56, 67, 138, 142, Union of Art Workers (Soiuz rabochikh 220–222, 230, 232–233, 237, 248 iskusstv—Rabis) 148 Ternovets, Boris Nikolaevich 207n15 Union of Artists of the USSR (Soiuz Thatcher, Margaret 245 khudozhnikov SSSR) 162 Thaw, period of 54, 193, 217, 229, 232 Union of Societies of Assistance to the theatre 16, 18, 20–22, 29, 113, 124, 185, 203, Defence and Aviation-Chemical 204n5, 228, 229, 237 Construction of the USSR (Soiuz Theatre in Caricatures (Teatr v karikaturakh, obshchestv sodeistviia oborone i Moscow) 19 aviatsionno-khimicheskomu stroitel’stvu Third Congress of the Soviets (Tretii SSSR—OSOAVIAKhIM) 90 vserossiiskii s’ezd sovetov rabochikh, Union of Soviet Architects (Soiuz soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov, sovetskikh arkhitektorov) 170 Petrograd, 1918) 133 United States of America (USA) 2, 23, 56, Third International, see Comintern 165, 180, 220, 223, 237, 243, 246 Third Reich 180 Universal Exhibition (Exposition Universelle, Tibet 103 Paris 1900) 61 time, concepts of 2, 12, 22, 100, 101n10, Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva— 165, 166 Champions of the New Art), Tiraspol, Moldova 11 Vitebsk 71, 180 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio) 214 Ural region, Russia 119, 176 Tolstoi, Aleksei Nikolaevich 99n1 USA, see United States of America index 271

USSR, see Soviet Union Wehrmacht 102 utopia 1–7, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 111, Weimar, Germany 65 153, 157, 160, 173–174, 191, 193–194, 197, Werefkin, Marianne von (Marianna 219–220, 222, 235, 237, 239, 242, 248 Vladimirovna Verefkina) 30–33 utopia and art 1, 5, 171 Self-Portrait 30 utopian childhood 79 Androgin 31 utopian nostalgia 100 The Dancer Sakharoff 33 utopian socialism 4–5 Western culture 80n1, 82, 113, 160, 165 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 18, 20 Vakar, Irina 137 White Army 39, 106, 107 VAL, Slovak group (Voies et Aspectes White Guard 85 du Lendemain/Ways and Aspects of Wiener, Norbert 223 Tomorrow) 236–237 Wilde, Oscar 7, 17 Heliopolis scheme 236, 237 William Conn Collection, Dr, UK and Velázquez, Diego Rogriguez de Silva y France 252 165 Wils, Jan 59 Venus 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168 Winter Palace, St Petersburg/ Venus (planet) 221–223 Petrograd 84, 133 Venus de Milo 121, 163 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 233, 237 Vesnin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich 174, Personal Instrument 233, 234, 237 176, 181, 182, 183, 184 Worker-Peasant Inspection 211–213 Vesnin, Leonid Aleksandrovich 183, 184 World of Art group 29, 147 Vesnin, Viktor Aleksandrovich 170, 171, World Revolution 80–82, 87, 171, 214, 243 174n16, 181, 182, 183, 184 World War I, see First World War Victory over the Sun, opera (St Petersburg, Wrigley Building, Chicago 186 1913) 20–22 Wrocław, Poland 233 Vicenza, Italy 176 Vilenskii, Zinovii 94 Yakovlev, Aleksandr Evgenevich, see Vitebsk, Belarus 22, 71 Iakovlev, Aleksandr Evgenevich Vitebsk Art School, see People’s Art Yakovlev, G. K. 190 School, Vitebsk Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven VKhUTEMAS (Vysshie khudozhestvenno- 215 tekhnicheskie masterskie–Higher Young Communist (Iunyi kommunist, Artistic and Technical Workshops), Moscow) 79 Moscow 43, 191 Yusupov, Prince Felix 28 Vladivostok, Russia 22 Vlaminck, Maurice 208 Zaitsev, Boris 106, 110 Volter, Aleksei 150 ‘Avdotia the Death’ (‘Avdotia-smert’) 110 Vozhatyi (Moscow) 90n38 zaum’ 34, 139 Vrubel, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 26–28, Zdanevich, Ilia Mikhailovich 18, 163 32, 157 Zepplins, see aviation Demon Seated 26–27 Zharov, Aleksandr 87 Demon Downcast 28 Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich 131, 169, Vsevolod, Sulimo-Samuilo 128 204, 204n6 Zholtovskii, Ivan Vladislavovich 77, war 94–95, 97, 153, 162–164 174n16, 176 war communism 147 Zhuravlev, V. V. 212 war scares 87 Zinoviev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich 238 Warsaw, Poland 232 Zoshchenko, Mihail Mikhailovich 204n6 Washington, National Gallery, see National Zurich, Switzerland 36, 37 Gallery, Washington