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The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. By Nina Gurianova. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. - 345 pp.

The conceptual crux of Nina Gurianova's monograph is the claim that the early Russian avant-garde (1910-1918) succeeded in elaborating a specific aesthetic ideology that she calls "the aesthetics of anarchy." This ideology, in Gurianova's view, was philosophically aligned with the anarchist political theory developed by Mikhail Bakunin and his followers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was based on the principles of "creative destruction" and individual freedom, and featured a vision of a future society that allowed non-statist, polyphonic development. Dostoevsky's anti-utopian, anti-utilitarian, and anti-deterministic views, polemically presented in Notes from Underground as well as in Tolstoy's discourse on art also contributed to the formation of the attitudes of rebellion against established cultural values manifested in the Russian avant-garde prior to 1917. The shift in the socio-political paradigm that occurred after the October Revolution inevitably led to a clash between the "aesthetics of anarchy" and the state-sponsored Utopian ideology of the Bolsheviks with its program of organized artistic production yoked to the revolutionary cause. Although some critics may argue that the connection between the avant-garde and anarchism is a familiar enough feature in the history of radical artistic movements of the early twentieth century, to my knowledge no one before Gurianova has traced this relationship in such a theoretically cogent fashion as the author has done in her focus on the Russian avant-garde. Without stating this explicitly, Gurianova posits a boundary between the early Russian avant-garde and its Bolshevik or Soviet version. In doing so, Gurianova is challenging what she calls the "whiggish" scholarly tradition of viewing the Russian avant-garde as an aesthetic component of the revolutionary political culture that flourished only after 1917, along with recent theories that have gone so far as to consider the avant-garde as a major ideological contributor to Stalinism. In terms of political history, Gurianova's perspective also represents a

427 de facto rejection of attempts to see the Soviet period as an organic outgrowth of Russian prerevolutionary political culture. When addressing the chief difference between the "pre" and "post" 1917 avant-garde, Gurianova stresses the early period's "anti-teleological desire for freedom of the artistic conscience," one unrestrained "by any pragmatic political, social, or aesthetic goals"(2) - a position that would become significantly more pronounced in the later period. This desire, according to the author, was related to the avant-garde's understanding of "the aesthetics of anarchy" as based on "new interpretation of art and human creativity: art without rules"(2). Here Gurianova applies Reiner Schurmann's philosophical concept of anarchy to aesthetics, arguing that the early phase of the Russian avant-garde was "ontologically anarchist," akin in spirit to Zurich and to the American avant-garde of the 1950s with its "postmodernist Situationism and radical Conceptualism," which "challenged all the rules" in a similar fashion. Thus, Gurianova argues, the early Russian avant-garde's "variant of anarchism" was inspired not "by notion of social Utopia, which inevitably calls for temporal, epochal 'closure,' but by another by-product of philosophical anarchism, namely dystopia, with its paradoxical mixture of nihilism and 'openness"'(7). Gurianova argues that "the crucial difference between the early 'anarchic' and the late 'statist' periods of the Russian avant-garde" is determined by the "rejection of Utopia," a position that fuels the "anti- teleological drive in early avant-garde culture"(8). The author calls for a thorough reevaluation of the early phase, which, in her belief, has not received the critical attention that it deserves, and challenges some prevailing ("whiggish") theories of general avant-garde development. Among the works being disputed are treatises by Theodore Adorno and Peter Burger, which "attribute changes in aesthetic thought directly to social or political causes" as well as the more recent contribution to the theme of "art and politics" in Russia by Boris Groys in his The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. The other "prevailing approaches" are not directly specified in the narrative, but it is obvious that Gurianova's goal is to provide a counter- balance to the critical works on art and cultural history that give primary attention to the developments of the 1920s, when art "directly merges

428 with politics" and moves "from the aesthetics of anarchy to a politicized 'struggle for Utopia'" (6). The emphasis on the "revolutionary- utopian" phase has been largely encouraged, as Gurianova shows, by a number of the key avant-garde figures themselves, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and and other members of LEF, who in the 1920s busied themselves with producing the revised, "extremely questionable"(4) version of Russian avant-garde history. As a result, Gurianova argues, the early avant-garde's spirit of anarchic "creative destruction" was written out of avant-garde's story, replaced by the period of '"politicization of aesthetics' akin to Walter Benjamin's concept of that phenomenon"(6). The book consists of four thematic parts that address 1) the aesthetic and ideological backgrounds of the early Russian avant-garde; 2) the principal creative output dating from the most radically groundbreaking years of the movement; 3) the avant-garde's social position during the Great War; and 4) the political views of the leading representatives of the movement in the face of the emerging authoritarian ideology in the post-1917 period. Part One, titled "Movements and Ideas," presents the concept of the aesthetics of anarchy, and a discussion of the ideas of Bakunin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in relation to this theoretical construct. Gurianova's interpretation of anarchy as the "deconstruction of order" that signifies an "active process towards 'origin'" (25) helps us understand the seemingly paradoxical predilection of the early Russian futurists for archaic, prehistoric art as representative of pure artistic vision unspoiled by civilization, and their concurrent skepticism towards industrial, urban civilization, a position sharply at odds with that held by their Italian and other West European counterparts. Their treatment of time was "anarchic in essence" (38) in that it simultaneously led in two opposite directions (a feature, I would add, that was also manifested in the early avant-garde's concept of worldbackwards). The aethetics of anarchism was, as the author argues, to a certain degree influenced by distrust of the '"intellectual arrogance' of positivism"(40) and by the "rejection of rational dogma and fixed ideas"(42) exhibited in works by Bakunin and Dostoevsky, as well as by Tolstoy's attempt to philosophically define true, or real art, in opposition to materialist-

429 inspired artistic products. Gurianova's discussion of Tolstoy's contributions to the "aesthetics of anarchy" could be further contextualized by a reference to Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, when contemplating the ideas of Friedrich Schlegel (just as Tolstoy did much later), addressed the problem of "beauty vs. goodness" in relation to art in such tales as Nevsky Prospect (1833) and The Portrait (1835), where he debunked the utilitarian, materialistic approach to art as counterfeit and emphasized the spiritual mission of the artist, as opposed to the superficial imitation of physical beauty. The Gogolian connection in the above context is quite plausible given the fact that Gogol's aesthetically radical, proto-modernist prose was held in very high esteem by Russian avant-garde artists. Part Two, "Poetics," is focused on the futurist opera (1913) in terms of the development of "alogism" in the Russian avant-garde and its connection to the anarchical spirit of the movement. By giving attention to a series of paintings by , representative of the new movement of "alogism" (they were created during and immediately following the painter's collaboration with the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh in the staging of Victory Over the Sun), Gurianova provides a crucial context for the emergence of what she terms "The Theatre of Alogism." This designation intentionally evokes the definition "The Theatre of the Absurd" applied by Martin Esslin to the plays of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Gurianova sees Malevich's enigmatic Aviator (1914) as a "perfect example of Barthesian 'galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds,'" which are, in essence, "indeterminable"(114-115). The author interprets the various and seemingly disconnected details of the painting as "torn-off signs," or as actors in a " 'play' called'Aviator,"'(115) thus stressing the theatrical aspect of the painting. Alogism, an aesthetic movement that involved challenging logic, reason, and common sense as guiding principles of art must be recognized, Gurianova argues, as the most original and radical current within the early Russian avant-garde. Alogism, in the author's view, contains a "projection" of all "possible future directions" of the Russian avant-garde and the avant-garde in general, foreshadowing Dada and (117). "The Theatre of Alogism," thus prefigures "The

430 Theatre of the Absurd," with Victory Over the Sun being the most striking example of this current, pioneered as it was by the Russian avant- garde's most consistently radical and anarchic poet, artist and theorist, Aleksei Kruchenykh. Gurianova defines the opera as "a contemporary anti-utopia about the collapse of human civilization," with its absurdity presenting an open challenge to "the persistent routine of aesthetic, social and ideological dogmas and values"(125). Taking Gurianova's point even further, it could be argued that one of these conventional values, debunked by Kruchenykh, is war itself, mocked by the author as one of humanity's most trivial and predictable self-expressions. Part Three, "Locating the Avant-Garde's Social Stance," is focused on the Russian avant-garde's attitudes towards and on the creative interpretations by proponents of the avant-garde of the war's impact on humanity. Such works as 's and Aleksei Kruchenykh's unfinished War Opera, Nataliia Goncharova's series of lithographs, Mystical Images of War, and Aleksei Kruchenykh's linocut portfolio War, and Aleksey Kruchenykh's album of collages Universal War, all produced between 1914-1916, are described by the author as some "of the most profound artistic responses to the war"(170). Gurianova foregrounds the visual contributions of Goncharova and Rozanova, two leading female artists of the early Russian avant-garde period, which reflect differing views of the military conflict. Goncharova, according to the author, "creates her own mythology of war" combining Biblical, folkloric and epic imagery with "contemporary urban primitive," in order to transform the "historical fact into archetypal symbol" of the "ultimate, apocalyptic war"(172). The artist constructs, in Gurianova words, "a palpitating, living textual fabric - the war as a kind of universal theater, a miracle play performed in front of one's eyes"(172). In contrast to that, Rozanova's linocuts and Kruchenykh's poetry show that, "war not only spells disaster and destruction, but also represents the agonizing birth of an unknown, violent new epoch"(176) by drawing inspiration directly from documentary evidence such as newspaper accounts that enter the visual texture of the portfolio. In Rozanova's visualizations, the author suggests, "the eschatological 'spiritual battle' and the historical chronology of contemporary war never merge into one... modernity

431 is treated as an entity that possesses an unknown and unparalleled historical myth of its own"(176-177). Kruchenykh's collage album, Universal War, compounds the sense of "a verdict on the historical past and World War I as part of this past"(186). "In the early Russian avant- garde," Gurianova concludes, "the concept of war was associated with resistance more than with destruction, with the fight not against but fof\ 186). Here the author appears to imply that Russian futurists in general, and Kruchenykh in particular, struggled with past and present conventional values and dogmas for a future free of wars. It is clear that the artists of the early Russian avant-garde rejected the very concept of war on philosophical grounds, perceiving it as a crisis of the myth of modern progress, one that intensified the sense of spiritual "void" and, as Gurianova puts it, deepened the sensation of "looming existential nothingness"(186). This conclusion, which echoes William Barrett's definition of the existential crisis of modernity in Irrational Man (1958), leads to Gurianova's view of Kazimir Malevich's as a reaction to the Great War in terms of its nihilistic inspiration. The concept of nililism here is (in accordance with Maurice Blanchot's interpretation) "the permission to know everything", which formed the artist's initial "conception of nothingness"(186). By 1918, however, as Gurianova stresses, "this equation of 'nothing' with 'everything'" will be replaced by a "shift in emphasis from the extreme nihilism of 'zero' to Utopian supreme domination" of Malevich's "Suprematism," which marked "a new stage in the evolution of the avant-garde"(197). Thus, "the anarchic nihilism of alogism, yielded to a quest for the assertion of the universal... and, consequently, an inescapably Utopian concept of art"(197). The last part of the book, titled "Politics" sheds light on the avant- garde proponents' attempts to counteract encroaching state control over the arts and art education. Gurianova demonstrates how the dividing line between those who, although from different positions, argued for the political independence of art, including Malevich, Rozanova, Rodchenko and others, and their opponents, such as Mayakovsky, Punin, Al'tman and Brik, who "readily allowed their aesthetics to be politicized"(237) corresponded to the divide that separated the anarchist all-embracing ideology of self-government and their opponents' support

432 for a policy of ideological state control. The artists most committed to the culture of free aesthetics found a welcoming platform in the anarchist newspaper Anarkhiia, where they could express their views most freely, but with the forced closing of this periodical by the authorities and the subsequent crushing of anarchists as a political force, this free expression came to an end. The annihilation of anarchism, as Gurianova argues in the conclusion of her study, corresponded to the end of the most creative and aesthetically challenging period of the Russian avant- garde movement. This "historical displacement," the author concludes, "caused the ideas and forms of the early avant-garde to mutate, and eventually it was followed by the creation of an entirely new and powerful ideological model of a socialist avant-garde, subjected to a people's state"(277). Gurianova's claim is supported by documentary material taken from Anarkhia articles published in 1918 and featuring criticism of the Bolshevik regime for its increasingly tyrannical policies. As Gurianova shows, the contributing artists were "especially critical of the statist approached to the arts" and published numerous statements denouncing various specific measures taken by the new establishment in order to "control culture through a centralized ministry, commissariats, and other state institutions"(223). Simultaneously Gurianova notes that "Malevich's attempt to turn the Suprematist idea into a structured ideology, and consequently, to establish Suprematism as an institution, marks another breaking point between the early Russian avant-garde's aesthetic of anarchy and the utopianism adopted by many at a time when political anarchism was crushed..."(230) Thus, the author suggests, some of the leading figures of the early avant-garde contributed - directly or indirectly - to the end of the period that had been marked by "the anarchic nihilism of Cubo- and alogism." The shift was to "artistic,universalism and a new 'great' style"(230) to which Malevich turned after 1918. Gurianova caps her study with an elegant theoretical vignette designed to conceptualize the two ("pre" and "post" 1917) Russian avant-garde models that emerge from her narrative. She proposes that Viktor Shklovsky's estrangement, and Sergei Eisenstein's montage of attractions represent two ideological principles: "the method of

433 provocation and the method of manipulation, respectively"(254). The first principle stimulates "the viewer's or reader's perception by making him or her a co-participant in the creative process of cognition" and is instrumental in understanding the anarchic spirit of the early avant- garde stance, while the second promotes "a premeditated manipulation of the audience... in which the spectator's consciousness is subjugated in order to elicit a straightforward ideological reflex that is precisely calculated in advance by the author"(254). This second principle, according to Gurianova, is at the heart of the 1920s avant-garde model with its emphasis on agitation and "shaping the perception of art" expressed in the LEF declaration: "LEF will agitate the masses with our art, fashioning the organized force within them." Gurianova admits that these two models do not have to be mutually exclusive and may "coexist in the artistic activity of the same group or even in the artistic trajectory of a single artist," but she stresses that ideologically "they are always heterogeneous because they differ fundamentally with respect to the goal of art and how it strikes its viewers"(257). Gurianova's assertion, made in the Introduction to her book, concerning the disproportionate lack of critical attention to the pre- 1917 phase of the Russian avant-garde, should no doubt be taken with a considerable grain of salt, in fact like a polemical "avant-garde gesture," for during the last three decades a substantial body of scholarly material has been produced focusing precisely on that period. Aside from the classic works by John Bowlt, Charlotte Douglas, and Gerald Janacek, to name a few, one can mention here more recent contributions by Anthony Parton, John Milner, Jane Ashton Sharp, as well as numerous other monographs, collected and individual essays, in both English and Russian. Gurianova does give credit to some of these studies in her rich reference apparatus, and her goal is not to polemicize with others' views of the avant-garde project, but rather to address what she believes to be a critical lacuna in the theoretical framing of the early Russian avant-garde. It is in Gurianova's eloquent argument for the connection between anarchist theory and the creative/destructive spirit of the pre- 1917 avant-garde that the reader will find the most valuable contribution of this study. Gurianova's study also implies the need for a careful demarcation

434 of an ontological boundary between the revolution in the arts and the political/social revolutions that took place in Russia in 1917. The radical departure from the aesthetic "norms" in the arts, propelled by such visionaries as Picasso, and later by Kandinsky and Malevich, had reached its point of highest tension in 1915 with the latter's Suprematist Black Square. By that time the revolution in art becomes a fait accompli, in this sense signaling the fact that it preceded the political upheavals that would follow. It could therefore be argued that the Soviet political establishment of the post-1917 years was less revolutionary or radical in spirit than the preceding revolt in the arts. It was more rooted in bourgeois mentality, a feature that would eventually become dominant in its late Soviet version. This is already evident in the contrast between the avant-garde statements in the newspaper Anarkhiia that Gurianova cites and the writings on art of the head figures of the new establishment, such as Trotsky and Lenin. In spite of the revolutionary rhetoric, their writings expose a vision of art more in tune with petit bourgeois tastes of the 19th century, preferring to see art as an easily accessible, narrative illustration of revolutionary theses, rather than as an aesthetically independent, challenging, and innovative as the early avant-garde artists envisioned it. Eventually this non-revolutionary and non-anarchic vision of art, complimented by a ideological/didactic component, would triumph in the 1930s, preceded, as Gurianova argues, by the transitional period of the "universalizing statist avant-garde movements of the 1920s," which were already fundamentally different from "the early autonomous currents of the 1910s associated with the aesthetics of anarchy." Nina Gurianova's monograph takes a well-deserved place alongside the best works on the Russian avant-garde produced in the US in recent decades. In terms of breadth of the material engaged, the interdisciplinary nature of analysis, and the energy of argumentation, it compares with some of its classic predecessors. As an endeavor that strives to provide a conceptual expression to the early Russian avant-garde's aesthetic ideology, this study constitutes an outstanding contribution to the field. Nikolai Firtich Vassar College

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