59 59 Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Art & Anarchy 2011.2 Gambling Anarchically: The Early Russian Avant-Garde Nina Gourianova* Abstract This article argues the aesthetics of the early Russian avant-garde of 1910–18 is best understood as autonomous from subsequent de- velopments during the Soviet era. The early Russian avant-garde championed an aesthetic of anarchy which permeates the philosophi- cal outlook of the movement and its artistic productions.I examine an early lithographic Futurist book, A Game in Hell, to showcase the anarchic tenor of the movement. The Russian avant-garde’s pre-revolutionary years (1910–18) stand out for the remarkable intensity, concentration, and plurality of artis- tic practices and theoretical concepts that were compressed into that period. The aesthetics of anarchy was an essential feature of this open and diverse moment, a feature which those involved did not even articulate until the period had come to an end. This retrospec- tive articulation, after the fact, so to speak, is itself indicative of a paradoxical contradiction in the movement, namely the unwilling- ness to build a dominant school or style controlled by one leading aesthetic system. Different trends that the critical literature often joins together under the vague terminological umbrella of the “Futur- ist movement” constituted the most noticeable element of the early avant-garde in Russia.“Russian Futurism” included many different Nina Gourianova, Associate Professor at Northwestern University, has authored * five books on the Russian avant-garde and served as exhibition consultant for the Guggenheim Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her scholarship encom- passes the literary and visual art of Russian and European modernism, with a specific emphasis on aesthetics and politics. Her latest study, The Aesthetics of Anarchy, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. 59 59 60 60 60 Nina Gourianova Figure 1 Hylaean poets, Moscow, 1913: Aleksei Kruchenykh, Da- vid Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Burliuk, and Benedikt Livshits. 60 60 61 61 Gambling Anarchically: The Early Russian Avant-Garde 61 artistic and literary groups, which at times were allied, or in competi- tion and even at odds with one another. In poetry, Futurism applied to the “Hylaeans,” Elena Guro,Velimir Khlebnikov, the brothers David and Nikolai Burliuks, Vasily Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Benedikt Livshits. (Fig. 1) They worked along with the painters Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Olga Rozanova, Kazimir Malevich, to name a few. But the truth is,“Futur- ism” in Russia is not so much a history of schools and movements as of personalities such as Kruchenykh, who inspired the first Futurist lithographic books which served as a creative laboratory for the avant-garde movement. Indeed, the experience of visual arts was an important ingredient in the activity of the poets identified with this term, many of whom — including Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and David Burliuk — were also trained as artists. Visual and literary production, often described by different schol- ars as “Futurist,” was actually very diverse stylistically and often eclectic; thus the terminology just doesn’t hold up if we define this term strictly according to stylistic and formal categories. It makes much more sense to treat Futurism as an aesthetic philosophy re- ferring to “radical revolution” in art and life, and to prioritize this ideological outlook. Certainly the latter perspective corresponds to the opinions of many Russian avant-gardists: Natalia Goncharova, for example, wrote in 1914 that Futurism’s main purpose was “to offer renewal and a new point of view on every sphere of human activity” (Goncharova 2002: 214). Velimir Khlebnikov’s short poem “To Alyosha Kruchenykh” (1920), the first line of which has acquired great symbolic importance in retrospect, is, arguably, key to understanding the major quest behind the poetics of the early Russian avant-garde: A Game in Hell, hard work in heaven — our first lessons were pretty good ones together, remember? We nibbled like mice at turbid time — In hoc signo vinces! (Khlebnikov 1997: 79) The allusion is to the lithographed Futurist book Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), a poem that Khlebnikov co-authored with his fellow Hyleaean Aleksei Kruchenykh, originally published in 1912.(Fig. 2) Here the proverbial “Futurist devil,” seen through the lens of dark 61 61 62 62 62 Nina Gourianova Figure 2 Velimir Khlebnikov with a skull, St. Petersburg, 1909. irony and lubok (the popular print style) grotesquerie, appears for the first time, playing with a sinner who has bet his soul in a card game. Many years later Kruchenykh recalled this work in his memoirs: In Khlebnikov’s room, untidy and bare as that of a student, I pulled out of my calico notebook two sheets, some 40–50 lines of a draft of my first poem, AGame in Hell.I humbly showed it to him. Suddenly, to my surprise,Velimir sat down and be- gan adding his own lines above, below, and around my text. That was typical of him — he was ignited by the tiniest spark. He showed me the pages filled with his minute handwriting. Together we read them, argued, revised. That was how we un- expectedly and involuntarily became co-authors (Kruchenykh 1999: 56).1 1 On Russian Futurist books, see Evgenii Kovtun, Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga (Moscow: Kniga, 1989); Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Su- sanne Compton, World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books, 1912–1916 (London: British Library, 1978); Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Mod- ern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Vladimir Poliakov, Knigi russkogo futurizma (Moscow: Gileia, 1998), and the comprehensive catalogue The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Whye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 62 62 63 63 Gambling Anarchically: The Early Russian Avant-Garde 63 In their work for this poem ridiculing the “archaic devil,” the first designer of the book, Natalia Goncharova, and later Malevich and Rozanova, who designed the second edition, adhered to the centuries- old folk lubok tradition. However, the language, metaphors, and general intonation of the poem could not be more contemporary: in the Futurists’ own critical interpretation, it mocked “the modern” vision of hell, which “is ruled by greediness and chance, and is ruined, in the end, by boredom” (Kruchenykh 1912).2 (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4) Figure 3 Kazimir Malevich, Front and back covers for the second edition of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Igra v adu (AGame in Hell), (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1914). Edition: 800. Lith- ograph, 18.1×13.3 cm. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation (46.2001), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. 2 My translation. The first edition of Game in Hell was designed solely by Goncharova, who created sixteen compositions (including front and back cover), except for the textual parts handwritten by Kruchenykh in lithographic pencil. The second edition was designed by Olga Rozanova and Kazimir Malevich. 63 63 64 64 64 Nina Gourianova Figure 4 Olga Rozanova, composition for the second edition of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Igra v adu (AGame in Hell), (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1914). Edition: 800. Lithograph, 18.1×13.3 cm. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation (46.2001), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. This Futurist — but not the least futuristic — hell resembles Dos- toevsky’s sarcastic and anti-utopian vision of the “perfect” future society in Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky envisions a fu- ture sterilized of the slightest trace of individual creative will or unpredictable chance intervening in the absolute perfection of the closed system, where man turns into an automaton, “nothing more than something in the nature of a piano key.” All human action will automatically be computed ... mathe- matically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory; or still better there will appear vari- ous loyal publications, like our contemporary encyclopedias, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and des- ignated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world ... Of course, you will think up all sorts of things out of boredom! Indeed, gold pins get stuck into people out of boredom, but all this would not matter. (Dostoevsky 1999: 26) 64 64 65 65 Gambling Anarchically: The Early Russian Avant-Garde 65 Lurking in the background behind the tortured protagonist of A Game in Hell, who signs a diabolic deal with his own bloodied finger and bets his soul in hell (“the one who lost greedily sucking his broken finger; this loser and creator of accurate systems is begging for a coin”), (Kruchenykh 1912) one recognizes Dostoevsky’s critique of a positivist and utilitarian theorist who prides himself on acting “for the happiness of the human race.” Chance, a notion that encompasses the unpredictable nature of individual will and creative desire explored in Dostoevsky’s poet- ics, is also rooted in the philosophy of freedom so fundamental to anarchism. Suitably then, it appears as the poem’s refrain: chance is “sought after as a treasure.” And it is no coincidence that chance is the metaphor and formal device most widely acknowledged in Russian avant-garde poetics:“by correcting, thinking over, polish- ing, we banish chance from art ... by banishing chance we deprive our works of that which is most valuable” (Krusanov 2009:118). An irrepressible game ensues, based on the refutation of the pri- macy of pragmatic logic and determinism in art. The game is de- signed to break the mechanical perception of so-called common sense and tap into the readers’ intuition and the unconscious in- stead.