Introduction

The Russian avant-garde perished at the hands of the revolutionary army it claimed to lead into battle. Bom out of the Revolution of 1905, it antagonized both the old society it helped attack and the new society it helped legitimize. Unlike its nineteenth-century European precursors—artists estranged both artistically and politically from middle-class society—the Russian avant-garde emerged during an actual revolutionary situation and therefore needed fewer surrogate battles of its own. Unlike earlier upheavals in 1848, 1871, or 1905, when the Revolution of 1917 triumphed, it found that its rebellious artistic offspring were often unnecessary and sometimes dangerous for their politically revolutionary parents. For a time the Russian avant-garde (or that segment of it which did not seek refuge abroad) helped legitimize the revolution through its artistic innovation and its political propaganda. But in the end it fell victim to that revolution.

The term “Russian avant-garde” is an invention of subsequent critics, not a phrase used contemporaneously with the sociological phenomenon it purports to define. No artist, to my knowledge, described himself as a member of a group called the “Russian avant-garde” during the period 1905-1925. Yet many artists did share a strong desire for recognized artistic innovation and opposition to accepted social and political behavior implied by the concept. Moreover, the term “Russian avant-garde” is conceptually useful, as long as the historian accepts it as a heuristic device. We shall explore that concept at some length before we begin to use it to characterize the artists whose life and work we shall examine in detail.

This book will suggest that the term “Russian avant-garde” characterizes, however imprecisely, a social, artistic, and political movement in Russia from about 1905 to the mid-1920s. In particular, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 facilitated, but did not initiate, the importing of innovative elements in Western art by those Russian artists whose provincial (and often nonRussian) background pushed them toward European modernism and Russian political involvement as a means to personal artistic success. Born in the late nineteenth century, the Russian avant-garde may be viewed as a series of three generations of artists in transition between province and city, Russia and Europe, art and politics, and youth and middle age. Urbanization, Westernization, politicization, and aging provided the matrix for the emergence of a Russian avant-garde.

The concept of “immortality,” which implies an external existence and permanence not possible in a world of change, time, and death, had particular relevance for the Russian avant-garde in a number of ways. The Russian Orthodox Church had traditionally emphasized the resurrection and immortality of Christ, celebrated every Easter, and Christian themes are prominent in the work of Russian artists, even those who satirize religion. Both Russian and Western thinkers at the turn of the century were concerned with death and the possibility of immortality in an increasingly secular and scientific world devoid, they felt, of traditional religious faith. Artists, too, shared the Promethean desires of Nietzsche’s Übermensch to make themselves gods through their creative acts and to achieve a kind of immortality through their art. The European revolutionary tradition also emphasized the resurrection of a Golden Age or the permanence of a New Age at the end of history; Claude Saint-Simon’s New Christianity entailed a future “revolution régénératrice” or “definitive regeneration” of all mankind, and his disciples nominated two “popes” of the movement on Christmas Day 1829.¹ Finally, many artists in their late twenties and thirties naturally became increasingly conscious of their own death as an imminent possibility.

Few Russian avant-garde artists believed literally in immortality as the life of the soul after the death of the body. But in their art and life they were drawn to the metaphor of immortality to express needs no longer satisfied by traditional beliefs. In this they were not unique. Between 1905 and 1925 there was widespread concern with death and religious questions among the Russian intelligentsia. For the emerging avant-garde, however, death was not so much the brooding fate of symbolists and decadents of the fin de siècle, as a challenge to be overcome. The term “agony,” as Renato Poggioli has pointed out, originally carried a double meaning of torment and striving, anguish and contest. The Greeks often used the word to suggest a death struggle, symbolized more recently by the chess game between the knight and Death in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. Poggioli ascribes to the concept of an avant-garde a quality of agonism, or agony, which entails “sacrifice and consecration,” the “immolation of the self to the art of the future,” and “self-sacrifice not to posthumous glory but to the glory of posterity.”² “The agonistic attitude,” he writes, “is not a passive state of mind, exclusively dominated by a sense of imminent catastrophe; on the contrary, it strives to transform the catastrophe into a miracle.”³ We shall see that precisely those artists who exhibited the greatest interest in the theme of death and immortality come closest to fitting Poggioli’s definition of an avant- garde in other ways as well.

To illustrate the birth and death of the Russian avant-garde, I have chosen to write a “collective biography” of selected artists in various fields: graphic art, theater, poetry, painting, and film. Few of them fit the model I have constructed of a “Russian avant-garde” in every respect. Yet the individual differences are often as illuminating as the similarities. By “collective biography” I mean neither the statistical prosopography familiar to readers of Lawrence Stone and Sir Lewis Namier, nor a series of full-scale biographies. Rather, I have written a group of biographical essays on some artists of the revolutionary period, from about 1905 to 1925, who embody the avant-garde qualities of artistic innovation and political involvement, for whom there is a reasonable amount of biographical data, and who share common experiences with a larger group of artists. I have organized each chapter around the life story of an individual prior to a “moment of innovation,” when a combination of artistic originality and political commitment brought fame, if not fortune. I have also kept in mind that the term “innovation” may be used variously by an artist who considers his work new and original, by a contemporary public or critic, or by the art historian writing many years later. The term “moment” is also used somewhat metaphorically; innovation may occur suddenly or gradually, in isolation or under the influence of other artists.

All of these artists achieved a reputation for originality well into their adult years, that is, in their late twenties or thirties. They also fused the artistic and the political in their work, and to varying degrees, expressed a persistent concern with the theme of death and immortality in life and in art. They were in general not Russians but non-Russians drawn to Europe, not proletarian but middle-class, not atheists but religiously concerned, not young but adult when they innovated, and they were motivated as much by private emotional need as by public revolutionary commitment. These were the factors which gave to the art of the Russian Revolution its quality of the international, the personal, and even the religious. For the double process of artistic innovation and revolutionary commitment gave many relatively unsuccessful artists an opportunity to begin again, youthful in spirit, if not in fact, and immortal in artistic reputation, if not in body.

Many people helped make this book a reality. The staffs of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California; the Fogg Art Museum Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Sterling Art Gallery Library of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, were all especially helpful. Through the financial generosity of Washington University and the American Council of Learned Societies, I have been able to visit a number of important art museums: the Nicholas Roerich Museum and the Museum of Modem Art in New York; the Neue Pinakothek and Lenbach Gallerie in Munich; the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University; the Stedelijk Museums of Amsterdam and Eindhoven, Holland, with their unusual collections of works by El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich; and museums in Zurich and Basle. Mr. J. M. Joosten of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, was particularly helpful in permitting me to utilize the unpublished Malevich materials in the Van Riesen Archive. Finally, Mr. John B. S. Coats, President of the Theosophical Society, kindly provided me with materials on the Russian section from the archives of the Society in Adyar, Madras, India.

My critics have also helped. At Washington University, Professor Max J. Okenfuss, Judith Willsey, and Ruth Hastie all read the manuscript and provided both intelligent criticism and careful editing. Professor John E. Bowlt read an early essay that foreshadowed this book and made many detailed and constructive comments. Professors S. Frederick Starr, Philip Pomper, Bernice Rosenthal, and Peter Scheibert all read the manuscript in entirety. Linda Henderson and Charlotte Douglas helped clarify some arcane aspects concerning Malevich and the “fourth dimension.” Many improvements in this book are theirs; the remaining blemishes are mine.

In addition, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Russian Research Center of Harvard University, which has continued to provide me with a haven for research and writing. Washington University and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies have also been generous in their support. Like the individuals mentioned above, they too deserve much credit and no blame for the results of their generosity.

Finally, this book is dedicated to Ann—critic, friend, listener, editor, and wife, who made it possible in her own way.

ROBERT C. WILLIAMS
Washington, D.C.
Autumn 1976