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Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. by Nina Gurianova

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Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde. by Nina Gurianova * * * 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 Dada 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 Vladimir Mayakovsky 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 Victory Over the Sun (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 Kazimir Malevich, 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 Surrealism (117). "The Theatre of Alogism," thus prefigures
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