8

The Russian Avant-garde
and the Victory over Death

The Russian avant-garde demanded the eternal but was confined by the transitional: such was its agony. As a segment of the Russian intelligentsia, it shared the long-standing transition from a Russian childhood to a Western education. Born and raised in the provinces, its members migrated to the expanding cities of Russia during a period of rapid industrial growth, which followed the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. As children of a growing Russian middle-class intelligentsia, they were drawn into artistic and political rebellion against the very society that had nurtured them, especially by the events of 1905. Westernization, urbanization, and revolution all helped form a Russian avant-garde; aging intensified their sense of the moment and the transitional. Aspiring in art to permanent youth and to the immortality of successful innovation, the Russian avant-garde waged war against artistic failure, poverty, aging, and death.

I

The Russian avant-garde was a movement of enormous diversity, given unity only by subsequent critics. Here we have looked closely at the lives, as well as the works, of eight Russian artists who shared in different ways a desire for artistic innovation and political involvement. In so doing, we have discovered rich diversity, for they were all very different kinds of people. Only one was actually Russian by ethnic background; the rest were Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Jewish, and Cossack—a potpourri of nationalities, characteristic of the Russian Empire. In age, they differed by nearly a quarter of a century. They received their education in private studios, at home, abroad, or at the Academy of Arts or the Moscow School. They worked in varied media: literature, graphics, theater, painting, poetry, and film. Some married, others did not. In their politics they ranged from a Bolshevik party leader to passive observers who hid in doorways or dodged gunfire in 1905 and 1917. Although they generally shared the conjunction of artistic innovation and political commitment suggested by the term “avant-garde,” they were otherwise quite distinct. Yet they did share many common experiences.

Westernization had traditionally facilitated innovation in Russia. Since the eighteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia was defined, both in its education and in its critical stance toward Russian society and reality, by a position on the margin of Russia and the West. Western tutors, books, travels, and study were the most common sources of Western ideas inside Russia, where they were a novelty. Such ideas did not necessarily create any enthusiasm for imitation of the West. In fact, European ideas often provided Russians with the very language (philosophical and political) with which to assert their superiority over the West, from the “Russian soul” of Gogol and Dostoevsky (drawn from German romanticism) to the transformed Marxism of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Western ideas often helped define Russian advantages. When the Russian avant-garde emerged around 1905, in part as a reaction against the westernism of the World of Art movement, it sought an art of the abstract and the spiritual, whose value could not be clearly measured by the technical standards of the West and the Academy. Many Russian artists left for Europe (especially Munich and Paris) to study technique and method; they often returned home with the more radical ideas of their Western counterparts. In this way the Russian avant-garde was a European phenomenon which demanded and proclaimed a victory of Russian youth over Western senility. In so doing it articulated a traditional motif of the Russian intelligentsia.

Urbanization was equally important to the emergence of a Russian avant-garde. A vast migration from province to city characterized Imperial Russia in the decades before World War I. For young artists who joined this migration, the city became a magnet for their skills and future careers, a market for their art, a school for their further development, and an opportunity to absorb contemporary artistic trends, many from the West. The artists of the Russian avant-garde grew up in the rapidly expanding provincial towns of the southern and western borderlands: Novgorod, Riga, Kharkov, Poltava, Kiev, and Novocherkassk, in the cases studied here. As adolescents they moved on to the capital cities, especially Moscow, for their education. They then had to prove their talent in the competitive arena of the metropolis. Failing in the more accepted routes of artistic training, they found in Western sources an opportunity for innovation that turned failure into success.

An artistic relationship between province and city was not unique to Russia during this period. Kenneth Clark has observed that, in general, “the history of European art has been, to a large extent, the history of a series of centres, from each of which radiated a style. For a shorter or longer period that style dominated the art of the time, became in fact an international style, which was metropolitan at its center, and became more and more provincial as it reached the periphery.”² We have seen how advanced artistic trends in Paris and Munich in fact achieved such an effect in Russia. Yet here artistic influences did not simply radiate outward from city to province, but also inward from province to city. The formation of the Blue Rose circle in Saratov, or of the Hylean poets and Russian futurism at the Burliuks’ Crimean home, indicated that inside Russia, art was inspired not only at the center, but also on the periphery. Malevich observed that in an artist’s own development, “the first stage is the village, and the last stages are the metropolises”; he went on to argue that as the artist “gradually gets nearer to the metropolis his coloring will change and eventually assume a dark shade,” in contrast to the bright colors of his native village or town.³ However fanciful this formulation, migration from province to city (Russian or European) and continual artistic traffic between them was a widespread phenomenon among the Russian avant-garde before World War I.

Urbanization helped define the avant-garde in Europe, as well as in Russia. The leaders of Italian futurism were generally born in the 1880s in provincial towns (Brescia, Piedmont, Turin, and Milan), and they created their movement in 1909 in Paris, when most of them were in their late twenties or thirties. The Dresden artists of Die Brücke came from the outlying towns of southern and northern Germany, and were in their twenties when the group organized around 1905. Within Russia, one might point to the Wanderers of the 1870s as a group of young artists from the provinces who migrated to Petersburg, and then often on to Rome, Paris, or Munich. As a youth movement of provincial artists in the big cities, the emerging Russian avant-garde thus had its predecessors and counterparts in both Europe and Russia. This may partly explain the appeal of urbanist themes in the art of the prewar period, where the city itself was the source of constant novelty.

Revolution, too, created a sense of transition that inspired innovation. The Revolution of 1905 was the formative political event of their youth for most members of the Russian avant-garde, although few actually joined political parties or participated in street demonstrations. Involved or not, most artists shared the sense of impending cataclysm, of a sharp transition from an old to a new society, however ill defined. Some, like Dobuzhinsky, found that they could introduce political themes into art and thereby gain a measure of notoriety and fame. Others found that the revolution opened new doors for innovation, as in the case of Meyerhold and the Studio Theater of 1905. In general, 1905 was important to the Russian avant-garde because it provided them with a brief glimpse into a revolutionary future, of which they could claim to be a vanguard.

The 1905 Revolution also resulted in a lifting of the worst restrictions of church and state censorship. Thus, within months Russia was inundated by previously suppressed and subversive Western literature and art, now available in numerous translations and editions. Much of the new art and literature, as we have seen, was openly democratic, religious, or proletarian in content. The symbolist plays of Maeterlinck with their religious implications—The Death of Tintagiles, Monna Vanna, and The Blue Bird—all appeared in numerous Russian translations and performances between 1905 and 1925, along with Verhaeren’s urbanist and revolutionary The Dawn and its Christian imagery. Joseph Dietzgen’s essays on socialism as a form of religion also appeared in several Russian editions after 1905. Between 1907 and 1922 Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass went through six editions of 67,000 copies. In addition, by 1915 a number of works of a theosophical and mystical nature—Steiner’s lecture cycles, the writings of Blavatsky and Besant, Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, and Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension— were available in Russian translations.⁴ Such literature was itself innovative in a society where for centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had been the keeper of religious truth and the censor of blasphemy.

Revolution thus facilitated westernization and innovation. More precisely, the new freedoms after 1905 made possible a literature of openly religious concern in Russia, devoted to the occult, the mystical, and even the atheistic, and persistently intrigued by the problem of death and the possibility of immortality. Lunacharsky discovered the theme of immortality through collective memory before 1905; other Russians had to wait until the writings of Dietzgen and Mach became available in translation. Similarly, only after 1905 could Meyerhold bring to the Russian stage the veiled religious moods of Maeterlinck or the Dionysian transcendence of Georg Fuchs without the burden of harsh church censorship. The theosophical literature that inspired Malevich was also unavailable in Russia until after 1905; even then, the blasphemy trial of Anna Kamenskaia witnessed the continual subversive effect of unorthodox religious speculation on the church. Whitman’s writings encouraged a search for ultimate answers through pantheism or atheism, which were anathema in Russia. All these writings facilitated the innovative art of the Russian avant-garde. They also provided a language of the eternal with which to claim its transcendence of the difficult transitions of westernization, urbanization, and revolution.

Urbanization and revolution, in sum, accelerated a process of westernization and innovation that was traditional among the Russian intelligentsia. The transitions from province to city in adolescence, and from Russia to Munich or Paris in early adulthood, provided many artists with new sources of innovation outside the confining walls of the Academy. The drama of the 1905 Revolution, in turn, opened new routes of access to Western ideas and artistic trends for many young Russian artists. The city and the revolution provided the background for the Russian avant-garde in its search for success and fame. But they do not completely explain its persistent quest for the eternal and the immortal.

II

“We are witnesses of the greatest Moment of summing-up in history,” wrote Sergei Diaghilev in 1905, “in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away.”⁵ This anticipation of impending cultural revolution, coupled with ultimate self-destruction, was central to the agony of the Russian avant-garde. Its goal was the eternal, even at the risk of its own demise. Suspended between past and future, youth and old age, the avant- garde sought the transcendent permanence of successful innovation, at the same time anticipating that in another generation such innovation would itself have become a tradition to be destroyed. As young artists, they risked all in a momentary gamble to anticipate the future.

The search for some kind of permanence and immortality characterizes much of the art and literature of the Russian avant-garde before and after 1917. On the political left, we have seen that it often took the form of a faith that the revolutionary collective would survive the death of the individual revolutionary hero. “The Russian Revolution,” wrote Maxim Gorky in 1906 from America, “if you look at it even from a distance, is a splendid revolution. It has been going on for a long time. You and I shall die some time, but it will go on living. Fact. You’ll see.”⁶ For some artists immortality meant reincarnation; beings do not end or die, but are continually reborn in new forms. The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, describing Meyerhold’s production of Blok’s Balaganchik in 1906, noted that “the world is transparent, dematerialized, and that everything keeps repeating itself; the girl becomes death, the scythe of death changes into the girl’s braid.”⁷ Mayakovsky also expressed the idea that immortality involves the continuous survival and reappearance of the self at other times and in other forms. Few artists would have agreed on any precise definition of immortality as eternal fame, collective remembrance, spiritual survival, or continual transmutation. Yet the metaphor of immortality constituted an important theme for the Russian avant-garde over its own lifetime.

Age was as much the enemy of the avant-garde as death. Age meant stagnation and tradition, while youth meant innovation. “The oldest among us are thirty,” wrote Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto of 1909; “we have, therefore, ten years at least to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others, younger and more valiant, throw us into the waste- paper basket like useless manuscripts.”⁸ Youth was essential to the avant-garde. “I am almost thirty years old,” wrote the Swiss painter Paul Klee in 1909; “this scares me a little.”⁹ From this perspective, the agony of the avant-garde is that it could not make permanent the condition it regarded as its main advantage over a philistine art public and the rest of society—its youth.

Aging was an important process for the Russian avant-garde. Its members having been born generally in the 1880s, it may be viewed as a youth movement that emerged around 1905 and reached its peak on the eve of World War I. Put in a different way, the Russian avant-garde consisted of artists who had finished their artistic schooling but had not yet achieved any real success or fame; their moments of innovation generally came when they were in their thirties. Many were well into middle life by 1914, however effusive they might have been about the youthful nature of their art. Lunacharsky, Dobuzhinsky, Meyerhold, and Malevich were relative elders of the movement, entering their thirties in 1905; Mayakovsky and Eisenstein represented a younger element. But the larger group of artists associated with the great exhibits of the prewar period (the Blue Rose, Garland, Link, Jack of Diamonds, and Tramway V) was made up of men and women in their late twenties or thirties by 1910; the émigré painters of La Ruche in Paris were about ten years younger, and became well known only after 1917. The Russian avant-garde was therefore more youthful in spirit than in age. While carrying on a rebellion against the artistic establishment, it yearned to remain young while achieving an artistic reputation that would endure.

On occasion the Russian avant-garde articulated a crisis common to middle life, a confrontation with the reality of one’s own death to which creative innovation is one way out.¹⁰ Such crises were not unknown in prewar Europe. Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), written at the age of forty, within a year of his father’s death. The German sociologist Max Weber emerged from despair and guilt over his father’s death to write The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904, after several years in a mental institution. The Russian writer Leonid Andreev described his sense of crisis at age thirty-seven in 1908:

For half a year now some sort of crisis has been growing more acute; it is becoming so obvious that I can write nothing serious. I have left the old, and do not know the way to the new. And what the new consists of I don’t know. Undoubtedly it is only that I have somehow suddenly turned from the rejection of life to the affirmation of it, and while I formerly thought that only death exists, now I am beginning to guess that there is only life.¹¹

According to the then popular scientific popularizer, Elie Mechnikov, youth meant pessimism and age brought optimism. This transition often occurred, he argued, after a period of psychological crisis, as in the cases of Goethe and Tolstoi. “It is indubitable,” he wrote in 1903 in The Nature of Man, “that among the instincts of man there is one which loves life and fears death. This instinct develops slowly and progressively with age.”¹² The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, writing in 1913 about his own age of thirty-eight, observed that “the time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation not infrequently occurs.”¹³ This transformation often involves a new concern with immortality in some form.

Few of the artists studied here commented so explicitly on a personal crisis as did Andreev in 1908. But they were all men who, in their thirties, managed to turn past failure into successful artistic innovation, inspired by Western sources and the revolutionary events around them. Several of them also exhibited a concern with immortality often associated with the transition of middle life from ‘youth’ to ‘age.’ Around 1930 Otto Rank noted the “frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation” and argued, in addition, that creative artists might well share a common urge toward personal immortality:

There appears to be a common impulse in all creative types to replace collective immortality—as it is represented biologically in sexual propagation—by the individual immortality of deliberate self-perpetuation.¹⁴

Death was an all too common experience during World War I and the Russian Civil War. One can only guess what effect the death of Lunacharsky’s baby son, or Dobuzhinsky’s brother, or Mayakovsky’s friend Chekrygin had on each of them. Likewise, the fact that many of them had lost their fathers through divorce or death by the time they were adolescents also constitutes an intriguing, but elusive, psychohistorical fact. One may suggest, if not prove conclusively, that a personal confrontation with death heightened a sense of limits already provided by artistic failure and aging, and encouraged a search for victory over death in some way. Intensely aware of death, the Russian avant-garde sought to eternalize its youth through innovation, and achieve a kind of immortality.

III

In the end the Russian avant-garde did achieve immortality through its art. In addition to their individual artistic reputations, they helped create a myth of the Russian Revolution. Their art fixed images of transitory historical events, from Rloody Sunday and the Potemkin mutiny of 1905, through the seizure of the Winter Palace in November 1917. In 1905 and after 1917, their art reached the masses, utilizing techniques often borrowed from the West to legitimize the revolution for an often illiterate public. Transformed by the revolution, such art subsequently achieved even greater success in the West, from which it had derived its initial inspiration. Throughout their art, avant-garde artists employed the metaphor of immortality to convey the intense transitions from the old to the new, the traditional to the revolutionary, and the religious to the secular. Such a metaphor fit both the traditionally religious society in which they had grown up, and the revolutionary and personal crises which they survived. It also helped provide a missing dimension to the official Marxist-Leninist ideology which promised a socialist utopia, not personal salvation.

This articulation of a basic human need common to most religions— the need to see death as something other than an end to existence— was a central function of the Russian avant-garde. The destruction of churches and the creation of a League of the Godless in the 1920s did not eliminate Russian religious traditions and needs. Nor could a secular doctrine of industrial growth and socialist distribution of property and wealth deal with the personal riddle of death. Marxism itself generally ignored philosophical and religious concerns as merely class-based delusions of society’s “superstructure.” Lunacharsky and the artists he supported helped articulate those concerns in a language intended to bridge the gap between traditional society and a revolutionary, westernized elite. While Lunacharsky and Rogdanov undoubtedly did not foresee the future Stalinist “cult of personality,” they did properly anticipate the need to replace religious myths with secular counterparts in a revolutionary society. Members of the Russian avant-garde shared that need, for reasons of their own, and often articulated it through their art.

The Russian avant-garde consisted of three rather distinct generations of artists that we have called “aesthetes,” “futurists,” and “constructivists.” The traumatic experiences of their early adulthood were, respectively, the 1905 Revolution, World War I, and the Russian Civil War. By the 1920s the Russian avant-garde thus ranged from the adolescent to the middle-aged, and was no longer the youth movement commonly associated with the period from around 1908 to 1914. Yet all three generations were part of a society in which the agony of Christ and the belief in resurrection and immortality were transformed by the Russian Revolution into public celebrations of the embalmed Lenin, who lives eternally through his surrogate offspring, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the 1920s the fascination with immortality persisted, as in Valerian Muraviev’s book The Mastery of Time (1924); Muraviev shared Fedorov’s belief that science could someday provide the survival of the body after death. The architect Konstantin Melnikov designed a sarcophagus for Lenin with the idea that he was, like the Sleeping Princess, only asleep, to be awakened one day at a signal from the Russian people.¹⁵ For the Russian avant-garde, their cultural upbringing, their transitions from province to city, from Russia to Europe, from youth to middle age, and their survival of personal and revolutionary life-threatening situations all encouraged their search for immortality.

Ultimately, the Russian avant-garde grew old and died. In the early 1920s it was overtaken by a newer generation of constructivists, the youth movement of the October Revolution and Civil War. In film especially, as Sergei Yutkevich observed, “the Revolution made way for the young.” One artist recalled that in the early 1920s “on the one side stood we youth at Vkhutemas, on the other Mayakovsky and his entourage, Inkhuk and LEF.” Trotsky, too, recognized the emergence of a new postrevolutionary generation of artists whose youth coincided with the revolution and Civil War period.¹⁶ The Russian avant-garde was born as a protest against bourgeois prerevolutionary Russian society; it died of old age in the new revolutionary Russia it helped invent.

The Russian avant-garde won its victory over death in art. Its members—if that is the appropriate word for a group that never formally existed—died their own natural and unnatural deaths. Its journals closed down, its art often ended up in museum basements. Mayakovsky, a suicide, and Malevich, who died of cancer, represented in age the outer limits of the avant-garde. In the end the older man outlived the younger, and prepared for death in his own way, decorating a coffin with suprematist symbols and keeping it close at hand as his end approached. As a significant social and artistic phenomenon, the Russian avant-garde had essentially ceased to exist by 1925, the year that Eisenstein accepted state patronage and created his first propaganda film. The thirty-year-old innovators of 1905 were now fifty. Revolution no longer encouraged innovation, but confined the innovator. The Russian avant-garde had experienced the agony of opposition, rebellion, and ultimate defeat; in death it achieved a victory over death in the innovative art it left behind.