The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia Or ‘The Milky Way of Inventors’1

Chapter 4 The Path of Empirical Criticism in Russia or ‘The Milky Way of Inventors’1

Alexander Bouras

The Russian Avant-Garde inherited from Symbolism a complete rejection of naturalism (a by-product of nineteenth-century positivism), as well as the defining philosophical concepts of fin-de siècle European and Russian culture. Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had developed a critical approach to reason and science, through their ‘dancing in the misty divine’ as Aleksei Kruchenykh put it.2 For them, human existence and the uni- verse could not be understood by reason alone, but could only be fully com- prehended if irrational approaches, such as intuition, were also employed. In response to this philosophical position, thinkers like Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius began to reconsider positivism, and developed what has been called a second positivism, also known as empirio-criticism, empirical criticism, or Machism. They argued that scientific knowledge is not absolute, but relative: science is not able to produce a completely true image of the world, but is only able to convey its sensations, signs and symbols. Empirical criticism posed the question of the connection between science and philosophy and this ensured its popularity among thinkers in both camps, influ- encing the thinking of Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, Heinrich Rickert, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Wilhelm Ostwald, Rudolf Steiner, Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, and others. In Russia, empirical criticism became ‘an intellectual fashion’ amongst the younger generation. Promoted by popular and specialist journals alike, it became ‘the new paradigm of a completely scientific and moral outlook’, able to overcome the current ‘crisis’ and restore a belief in science and progress.3 Empirical criticism’s influence on the art world was mainly chan- nelled through the journal Questions Concerning the Theory and Psychology

1 Velimir Khlebnikov, Truba marsian (Moscow: Liren’, 1916). 2 Aleksei Кruchenykh, Apokalipsis v russkoi literature (Moscow: MAF, 1922 [cover gives 1923]), 29. 3 Daniela Steila, Nauka i revoliutsiia. Retseptsiia empiriokritsizma v russkoi literature (1877-1910) (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2013), 122.

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_006 82 Bouras of Creativity [Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva], edited and published by Boris Lezin in Kharkov (1907-1923). The journal became the main mouthpiece for the followers of the philosophy and linguistics of Аleksandr Potebnia, ad- dressing issues concerning the psychology of creativity and the creative process, all of which brought it close to Machism. Among the journal’s contribu- tors were Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Petr Engelmeier, Boris Lezin, Evgenii Anchikov, Аrkadii Gornfeld, Aleksandr Pogodin, Ivan Lapshin, Semyon Frank, Timofei Rainov, Henri Poincaré, Vladimir Korolenko and Mikhail Gershen- zon. The publication first appeared in 1907, when the Russian intelligentsia was still confronting the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. Social conscious- ness was becoming democratised, people were beginning to recognise the in- evitability of revolutionary action, and numerous professional, cultural and educational organisations were being set up throughout the country. In this situation, social and artistic creativity became a central issue for intellectuals thinking about radically reconstructing social life. Empirical criticism became the subject of heated discussions among the political left. But the growing popularity of the new philosophical trend also determined its fate. In his strug- gle with fellow Party members, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Leonid Krasin, Anatolii Lunacharskii and others, Lenin wrote his only philosophical work, Material- ism and Empirio-Criticism [Materializm i empiriokrititsizm], 1909, in which he characterised empirical criticism as ‘a path into the quagmire’,4 and accused its followers of being reactionaries, idealists, agnostics, and scholastics. Naturally, after the Bolsheviks came to power, Mach’s followers hid their philosophical roots for fear of being persecuted as ideological enemies. This essay will focus on the influence that Lezin’s literary and psychological empiricism, in tandem with Engelmeier’s technical and philosophical empirical criticism, exerted on Russian avant-garde ideas in general and on Supre- matism in particular. I will mainly focus on examining the way in which these ideas affected the development of the formulations and principles of artistic culture, a process in which Kazimir Malevich played a leading role, especially as regards the notions of invention and experimentation and the role of intuition and logic in the creative process.

The Philosophy of Technology and the Work of Petr Engelmeier

Petr Klimentevich Engelmeier (1855-1942), was a multi-talented individual: he was an engineer and mechanic who promoted the motor car in Russia,

4 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1968), XVIII: 262; English translation http://marxistphilosophy.org/LenEmpCrit1.pdf.