Imagining the Unimaginable studies in war, society, and the military General Editors Peter Maslowski University of Nebraska–Lincoln David Graff Kansas State University Reina Pennington Norwich University Editorial Board D’Ann Campbell Director of Government and Foundation Relations, U.S. Coast Guard Foundation Mark A. Clodfelter National War College Brooks D. Simpson Arizona State University Roger J. Spiller George C. Marshall Professor of Military History U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (retired) Timothy H. E. Travers University of Calgary Arthur Waldron Lauder Professor of International Relations University of Pennsylvania ImagInIng the UnImagInable World War, Modern art, & the Politics of Public culture in russia, 1914–1917 | Aaron J. Cohen ImagInIng the UnImagInable university of nebraska press • lincoln and london Some images have been masked due to copyright limitations. Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 5 previously appeared as “The Dress Rehearsal? Russian Realism and Modernism through War and Revolution” in Rethink- ing the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05: A Centennial Perspective, vol. 1, ed. Rotem Kowner (Folkstone: Global Oriental, 2007); portions of chapter 5 previously appeared as “Making Modern Art Russian: Artists, Politics, and the Tret’iakov Gallery during the First World War” in Journal of the History of Collections 14, no. 2 (2002): 271–81. ¶ © 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska ¶ All rights reserved ¶ Manufactured in the United States of America ¶ ¶ Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data ¶ Cohen, Aaron J. ¶ Imagining the unimagina- ble : World War, modern art, and the politics of public culture in Russia, 1914-1917 / Aaron J. Cohen. ¶ p. cm. — (Studies in war, society, and the military) ¶ Includes bibliographical references and index. ¶ isbn- 13: 978-0-8032-1547-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ¶ 1. Art, Russian — 20th cen- tury. ¶ 2. World War, 1914–1918 — Art and the war. ¶ 3. Art and soci- ety — Russia — History — 20th century. ¶ 4. Modernism (Art) — Russia. I. Title. ¶ n6988.c65 2008 ¶ 709.47|09041 — dc22 ¶ 2007047098 ¶ Set in StonePrint by Kim Essman. ¶ Designed by R. W. Boeche. For Stanley Contents List of Illustrations . viii Acknowledgments . xi Introduction . 1 1. The Wars against Tradition The Culture of the Art Profession in Russia, 1863–1914. 13 2. In the Storm Reshaping the Public and the Art World, 1914–1915 . 51 3. Love in the Time of Cholera Russian Art and the Real War, 1915–1916. 85 4. Masters of the Material World World War I, the Avant-Garde, and the Origins of Non-Objective Art . 115 5. The Revolver and the Brush The Political Mobilization of Russian Artists through War and Revolution, 1916–1917. 149 Conclusion . 181 Appendix . 189 Notes. 195 Selected Bibliography. .225 Index. .229 Illustrations Artworks 1. K. S. Malevich, Black Square, 1915 . 5 2. V. K. Sazonov, Execution by the French of Russian Patriots in Moscow in 1812, 1813. 24 3. I. E. Repin, Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870–73. 26 4. V. M. Vasnetsov, After Prince Igor’s Battle with the Polovtsy, 1880. 27 5. E. E. Lansere, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna at Tsarskoe Selo, 1905 . 34 6. M. V. Dobuzhinskii, October Idyll, 1905. 37 7. V. E. Tatlin, Fishmonger, 1911 . 44 8. N. S. Goncharova, Cats (Rayist Percep.[tion] in Rose, Black, and Yellow), 1913. 45 9. K. S. Malevich, Englishman in Moscow, 1914 . 46 10. K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, Bathing a Red Horse, 1912. 47 11. V. V. Vereshchagin, Apotheosis of War, 1871. 57 12. Popular print, Battle at Przemysl, 1914. 66 13. N. S. Samokish, postcard, n.d.. 77 14. I. A. Vladimirov, News from the War, 1914. 79 15. G. I. Narbut, Commander-in-Chief Grand Prince Nicholas Nikolaevich, 1914 or 1915 . .80 16. N. K. Rerikh, Enemy of the Human Race, 1914. 82 17. How They Fight, 1914. 83 18. M. Chagall, Wounded Soldier, 1914. 103 19. W. Kandinsky, Moscow I, 1916 . 104 20. K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, On the Line, 1915–16. 105 21. V. E. Tatlin, Corner Counter-Relief, 1915. 116 22. K. S. Malevich, The Austrian Went to Radziwillow, 1914 or 1915 . 129 23. G. I. Narbut, cover (censored) of Lukomor’e magazine, 1915. 145 24. N. Kolli, Red Wedge, 1918. 187 Graphs and Tables in the Appendix Graph 1. Number of art groups in Russia, 1863–1932 Graph 2. Number of art groups in Russia, 1900–1924 Graph 3. Visitors to regular annual Union of Russian Artists exhibitions, 1905–1923 Table 1. Regular annual exhibition sales, Petersburg/Petrograd, 1911–1918 Table 2. Visitors at regular annual exhibitions, Petersburg/Petrograd, 1911–1918 Table 3. Regular annual exhibition sales, Moscow, 1911–1918 Table 4. Visitors at regular annual exhibitions, Moscow, 1911–1918 Table 5. Regular annual exhibition sales, Petersburg/Petrograd, 1914–1917 Table 6. Regular annual exhibition sales, Moscow, 1914–1917 Table 7. Inflation, selected items Acknowledgments I have many people to thank. My family encouraged and supported me in the most difficult times. Jeffrey Brooks, my doctoral adviser at The Johns Hopkins University, read several versions of the dissertation that later be- came this book and has been very supportive through the years. I would also like to thank the rest of that dissertation committee—Vernon Lidtke, Jane A. Sharp, Brigid Doherty, and Dan Todes—for their time and advice, as well as the anonymous readers who gave advice on the manuscript. Orig- inal support for this research came from The Johns Hopkins University Department of History, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the International Research and Exchanges Board. Special thanks to Elizabeth Demers and Heather Lundine, editors at the University of Nebraska Press, for taking on this project. The expert reader in art history should be ready for some oversimplifi- cation, which I have found necessary to make the material more compact and more accessible to historians and general readers. It has been difficult to navigate around the mines in the no-man’s-land between academic fields where there are many experts and opinions; all factual mistakes and inad- vertent omissions are mine. Note that I use the Library of Congress trans- literation system with some exceptions. In the text, soft signs are dropped in proper nouns (e.g., Igor Grabar, Tretiakov) to improve readability, and if a person or place is known by a Latinized name I retain that usage (e.g., Alexandre Benois). Dates before February 1918 are Old Style. All artworks are reproduced with the permission of copyright owners. xii | Acknowledgments This book has been shaped by an unexpected tragedy in my own life, much as the personal tragedy of war shaped the lives of so many individu- als whose experience I describe. This event has affected how I have struc- tured the narrative, especially its emphasis on the agency of impersonal forces, the contingency and uncertainty of our lives on earth, and the ways that existential challenges can structure art and life. Introduction War has been no stranger to Russian life in modern times. Three violent cataclysmic events—World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Rus- sian Civil War—devastated the country in the early twentieth century, and Russian people suffered incredible hardships during the horrific years of World War II. In the Soviet Union, military culture, values, and imagery came to pervade official public language, while countless novels, paint- ings, and films extolled Soviet military deeds. This militarized culture stood in stark contrast to pre-revolutionary Russian traditions, for war played only a minor role in the achievements of the artists and intellec- tuals who made Imperial Russia a center of European culture before 1917. Military conflict was something that happened long ago or far away for most people in the Russian Empire, and warfare, on the whole, was not a prominent theme in the country’s intellectual life. The great exception was World War I (1914–18), which forced artists in Russia to grapple with the consequences of modern war, transformed the way they understood the artist’s place in society, and patterned the invention of one of the most important Russian contributions to modern culture: the non-objective art of Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and other avant-garde artists. War was more important in Russian cultural life during the Great War than at any other time in the half century before 1914, and World War I, in im- portant ways, had a more profound influence on the politics and aesthet- ics of Russian visual culture than even the revolution. | Introduction One reason for this book is to help restore the Russian ordeal of the First World War to Russian and European history. For modern historical mem- ory, as Pierre Nora has pointed out, is not what individual people remem- ber; rather, it consists of sites of memory, those public symbols about the past that focus collective identity: the people and events, monuments and buildings, institutions and concepts, and books and works of art that rep- resent the past in everyday social, cultural, and political life.1 After 1917 the Bolsheviks determined the public memory of the Russian past and set the agenda, both explicitly and implicitly, for the study of Russian history.2 So- viet leaders thus memorialized their conception of their history, a vision based on the thoughts and lives of Marx and Lenin, the Russian and Eu- ropean revolutionary traditions, and the revolutionary leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and they celebrated their military victories over their en- emies in the revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. With no positive place in the Bolshevik understanding of the revolution, World War I, for the most part, “sank into silence” after 1917.3 There were no public monu- ments to the war, no great cemeteries for its fallen, and no Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in the Soviet Union.