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Art. in Examining Vrubel"S Quest to Illustrate Lermontov's Demon

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Art. in Examining Vrubel tury Russian (and European) art. In examining Vrubel"s quest to illustrate Lermontov's Demon: An Eastern Tale, Kennedy follows the artist in his struggle to conceptualize and place on canvas the demonic image. This was not an easy task, as the figure of the Demon was contradictory, so much so that the general question of "Demonism" was utilized by Vladimir Solov'ev to open up the contemporary discussion of the attributes of the Nietzschean "superman." Demonism, it turns out, came to be an important symbol for the issues of freedom and individualism, and Vrubel"s works, therefore, came to play an important role as philosophical icons for the turn of the century Russian intelligentsia. The question of how Russian-born artists are ultimately designated in the nationalis- tic sense by art historians is an unfortunate byproduct of the intellectual and political turmoil that has plagued the Russian scene. This is particularly true in the case of Vasily Kandinsky, whose Russian influences are examined by Natalie Lee. Lee surveys the Rus- sian artistic tradition and concludes that there were, in fact, more substantial Russian in- fluences on Kandinsky than other art historians are willing to admit. She cites the works of Levitan, the Slavic Romanticism of Nikolai Roerich (particularly identifiable with the Judendstil movement in the West and Kandinsky in particular), the vignettes of Ivan Bili- bin and Leon Bakst and, not surprisingly, the relgious traditions of the icon and fresco. All of these assertions are well documented and while nevertheless remaining somewhat conjectural, bring "us closer to deciphering the messages hidden in a complicated and very personal iconography." The articles in this volume are exceptionally useful for both the general reader and the art history researcher. The shortcomings of the volume lie in a technical fault: while self-contained as an edited series of independent articles, it is also one volume in a larger series and has a format akin to that of a scholarly review. This would not normally be a. great problem and indeed may not be one. However, as several of the articles, including Zenkovsky's on the sixteenth century and Rusakova's on symbolism are presented only in Russian and Lobanov and Jedrinsky's article on Vladimir Jedrinsky is presented only in French, one cannot but feel that an effort to translate these pieces to present a uni- form English text would help make the volume appeal to a wider audience in the art community. Stephen C. Feinstein University of Wisconsin-River Falls I. S. Zil'bershtein and V. A. Samkov, compilers. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo. Mos- cow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1982. 496 pp. Illustrated. Volume 1 of scheduled two volumes. This is the first of two volumes devoted to the literary and epistolatory heritage of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872-1929) compiled and annotated by the Moscow historians Il'ia Zil'bershtein and Vladimir Samkov. The second volume has yet to appear, but it seems judicious to review the first one immediately inasmuch as this is, in many respects, a pioneering study and appreciation of a critic and esthete who for many years was ma- ligned and misrepresented in the Soviet Union. Diaghilev is known in the West as the cofounder of the World of Art group in St. Peters- burg with its journal Mir iskusstva (1898-1904) and its cycle of exhibitions (1899-1906) and as the instigator of the Ballets Russes-the constellation of dancers and designers that conquered Paris and then many other European and American cities from 1909 on- ward. Unfortunately, Western observers have tended to neglect Diaghilev's artistic and creative impetus and have emphasized, often disproportionately, his more illustrious social exploits-his ability to win over a wealthy patron a few hours before a vital performance, to maintain exquisite, total esthetic taste from a ballet production down to a pocket handkerchief, to display remarkable tenacity and patience in the attainment of his goals. But Diaghilev was also a talented critic, reviewer, and polemicist; and, as if to prove this, Zil'bershtein and Samkov have brought together ninety-six articles, reviews, and inter- views by Diaghilev nearly all of which were written for Russian, European, and American magazines and newspapers. Although only a few texts are from archival sources, most of the published material had been forgotten or misattributed, and the compilers are to be con- gratulated on their monumental achievement of organization, explication, and annotation. Sardonic, often conceited, Diaghilev, the critic, had no time for banality and com- promise. He was quick to dismiss the old in favor of the new, not as iconoclastically as the I uturists but just as mercilessly. He always maintained an individual point of view, and even when this clashed with opinions of venerable critics such as Vladimir Stasov, he did not hesitate to pronounce it. Diaghilev's range of interests was broad-from opera to Scandinavian art, from ballet to illustrations to Pushkin's poetry-and, as Zil'bershtein and Samkov write in their introduction, "Diaghilev implemented all his undertakings at his own risk and responsibility, at the price of enormous effort, encountering only opposition...." Of particular interest are the early writings from ca. 1900 when Diaghilev contributed regularly to the St. Petersburg newspapers Birzhevye vedomosti and Novoe vremia and to the journal Mir iskusstva. In these essays Diaghilev demonstrated not only his immediate awareness of new tendencies in art and literature and music, but also the specific impor- tance ofArt Nouveau or the style moderne within the evolution ofmodern art, especially in Russia. Like his colleagues in the World of Art such as Alexandre Benois and Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, Diaghilev believed in the vigor and potential of Russian art and felt that Russian culture as a whole was about to witness a renaissance. As he wrote in an article of 1898: "Over the last few years we have also sensed a movement towards a conscious- ness of national strength in our painting.... By uniting the strength of our own national- ity with the high culture of our neighbors, we might lay the foundation for the creation of a new flowering and, together, soon advance toward the West." Diaghilev expressed similar sentiments on many occasions, not least in his famous speech given at a dinner in Moscow (not in St. Petersburg-as Zil'bershtein and Samkov are quick to point out) just after the opening of his "Exhibition of Historic Russian Portraits" at the Tauride Palace, St. Petersburg, in 1905 : "Do you not feel that the long gallery of portraits ... is but a grand and convincing reckoning of a brilliant but, alas, mortified period of our history? ... we are destined to die in order that a new culture be resurrected...." Some of the material in this volume concerning the ballet is known to the West through the many Western monographs on Diaghilev and the Russian ballet, although, until now, some of Diaghilev's interviews about his ballet productions in Figaro and Vozrozhdenie in the 1920s seem to have escaped the notice of historians. American newspapers from the time of Diaghilev's visit to the U.S. in 1916 also provide important information. Al- though Diaghilev did not temper his condescension toward America, his attitude towards American culture still has relevance: "The time has come for the American people to un- derstand itself. Broadway is a real work of art. It has a tremendous influence on American art, but certain people, sitting in their drawing-rooms, think that it should be condemned. They want to imitate Europe just as we in Russia tried to imitate her for many years." Whatever the subject, Diaghilev was always ready to defend what he considered to be new and vital in art, even when it was labelled "industrial" and "mechanical" as was the case with Prokofiev's Le Pas d Acier in 1927. Zil'bershtein's and Samkov's notes occupy almost half the book. There is the same precision and thoroughness here as in their two-volume Valentin Serov v vospominaniiakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov (Moscow, 1971), in their Konstantin Korovin vspominaet.... (Moscow, 1971) and in Zil'bershtein's and Aleksei Savinov'sAleksandr Benua razmyshliaet.... (Moscow, 1968). Diaghilev never showed his Ballets Russes at .
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