I

Innovation, Revolution,
and the Russian Avant-garde

The term “avant-garde” originally implied both innovation and revolution.¹ Around 1830 it began to connote not the military advance guard of an army, but an estranged elite of artists living on the fringe of bourgeois society. The avant-garde artist was advanced with respect to the wider public not only by his novel approaches to a particular art form, but also by his political radicalism. Saint-Simon used the term as early as 1825 to predict the leading role artists would play in his “New Christianity,” a secular religion of the future, where they would “spread new ideas among men” and fulfill a “truly priestly function.” Karl Marx also used the metaphor to characterize the communist party with respect to the proletariat. By the 1880s the original meaning gave way to separate connotations of artistic novelty and political radicalism: an avant-garde artist no longer needed to be a revolutionary artist, but only an artistic revolutionary, an artist committed to a revolution did not need to be innovative.

The art associated with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 shared the original avant-garde conjunction of artistic innovation and revolutionary involvement. At one extreme, the period exhibited shocking novelty and innovation in the arts, from the Paris ballet seasons of Diaghilev, through the abstract painting of Larionov and Goncharova, to the constructions of Gabo and Rozanova. Yet many innovative artists were not directly involved in the Russian Revolution at all and ended their lives as émigrés in Western Europe or the United States. At the other extreme, the years from 1905 through the mid-1920s also produced an art of revolutionary commitment, from the satirical journals of 1905, through the posters of the Civil War, to the agitational theater and films of the 1920s. Many revolutionary artists, of course, were often aesthetically retrograde, returning to the nineteenth-century realism of the Wanderers or transforming their art into little more than revolutionary propaganda. Yet there were also individuals who tried to fuse artistic innovation and revolutionary involvement in their work; these are the artists who form the subject of this book.

We are concerned, then, with the intersection of innovative and revolutionary art, of aesthetic novelty and political art. The artists considered reflect a tradition going back to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in Europe, where the avant-garde was both artistically ahead of middle-class taste and politically or socially estranged from middle-class life. What made these artists famous was not their artistic innovation or political commitment alone, but their fusion of the two into a single art that reflected the revolutionary times around them. The artists who immortalized the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in their art were a transitional generation between the aestheticism of the fin de siècle and the revolutionary constructivism of the 1920s. They shared a tension between the personal need for an artistic reputation through innovation and the wider involvement in a social and political upheaval. And they also shared a concern with immortality as artists and activists, which lent their work a peculiar intensity and ultimately brought them the fame they so demanded through revolution and its art.

I

Russian revolutionary artists of the avant-garde were not always as Russian, as revolutionary, or as innovative as these terms suggest. Citizens of the Russian Empire, they were receptive to a continuous flow of ideas and artistic influences from the West. Few were deeply committed to political activity for any length of time. Innovation within their art sometimes mattered less than their association with the revolution at a crucial moment in their lives. Yet all three of these variables have often been used to explain the emergence of a Russian avant-garde after 1905.

Initially, Russian revolutionary art appeared to be a product of the revolution itself. In the 1920s many Western intellectuals who visited Russia anticipating a “New Age” found what they had expected long before World War I. The American writer Max Eastman characterized the Bolsheviks as “Nietzschean free spirits”; other visitors also assumed that Soviet Russia had fulfilled the cultural prophecies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, bringing about a rebirth of Greek antiquity where the arts were again a festive religion that integrated man with nature and society, purifying him through periodic drama and spectacle. The dancer Isadora Duncan greeted early Soviet art as a great “wave of liberation” in the spirit of her own idealized resurrection of the Greek dance. The English drama critic Huntley Carter, a contributor to A. R. Orage’s Edwardian literary journal The New Age and various theosophical magazines, found on the Soviet stage a revival of “popular theater” from ancient Greece, which he considered only part of a “world-wide spiritual unrest amounting to a revolution.” To envious bohemians from the West who visited Soviet Russia in the 1920s, the Russian Revolution had created a new world of cosmic significance in art, which now lay open to the creative genius of twentieth-century Leonardos and Rembrandts. Only gradually did most of them realize that Lenin’s revolution was not their own.²

The Hungarian writer René Fueloep-Miller emphasized the role of the Bolshevik Revolution in the artistic and cultural upheaval of the period in his book The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, published in 1926. Fueloep-Miller had studied psychology in Paris and Vienna, had fought in the Austrian army during World War I, and had come to Russia in the early 1920s in search of Dostoevsky manuscripts. To him the central feature of art and culture in early Soviet Russia was the quasi-religious nature of Bolshevism and its suppression of the individual in the name of the mass man. He compared the Bolsheviks with the Jesuits and with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Like the Russian émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Fueloep-Miller viewed Bolshevism as a disguised or inverted form of traditional Russian Christianity. He thought the new Bolshevik religion had a negative effect on the arts. He found the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold to be “one of the few in Soviet Russia whose artistic talent and productive power are unquestionable” and the maker of a “quite new revolutionary style” in the theater. But most artists were propagandists for the new regime who had simply applied artistic techniques learned before the war in Europe. The “machine art” of Vladimir Tatlin reminded him of the theories of the architect Gottfried Semper; the Commissar of Public Enlightment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, he felt, had “never been able to suppress entirely a secret leaning towards the culture of the old world.” In sum, Fueloep-Miller considered early Soviet art more revolutionary than innovative. “Western Europe,” he concluded, “has long been acquainted with all these ideas put forward by the Russians as completely new and subversive, and even got beyond some of them many years ago.”³

Not all Russian artists who lived through the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917, however, were directly involved in the revolution. Students of the period soon realized that while the Bolshevik Revolution created propitious conditions for artistic experimentation for a few years, it failed to convert many members of the Russian intelligentsia and avant-garde artists to its side. Observers therefore began to distinguish the cultural upheaval of these years from the political and social revolutions, and to seek deeper Russian cultural traditions which affected the art of the revolution.

The most ambitious attempt to trace Russian revolutionary art back to long-standing Russian cultural traditions is James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe (1966). Billington characterizes the period from 1905 to 1925 in terms of a musical metaphor—a “crescendo” and three dominant themes: Prometheanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism. “The entire emphasis on the nonliterary, suprarational arts is a throwback to the culture of Old Muscovy, with its emphasis on sights, sounds, and smells,” he concludes. Within this broad historical tradition, Tatlin, Lunacharsky, and the painter Kazimir Malevich all emerge as “Prome- theans”; Malevich in addition appears as a “kind of artistic prophet of the space age.” Tatlin too “reflected this Promethean urge to move out and master that space.” Billington characterizes the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky as the “ultimate romantic,” Sergei Eisenstein’s film Potemkin as an icon of the revolution analogous to that of John the Baptist on the iconostasis, and Meyerhold as a director who placed “fresh emphasis on the use of the gesture and the grotesque.”⁴ In Billington’s survey, Russian culture provides a kind of vague causal explanation for the art of the revolution without a detailed examination of its nature and sources.

Other historians have emphasized the peculiarity of Russia’s condition, rather than her cultural traditions. In describing the advances in Russian linguistics during the revolutionary period, Roman Jakobson noted that “the academic tribunals were far away, the fear of criticism weaker, and so greater possibilities were open for pioneering audacity.” By this argument Russia’s distance from Western Europe encouraged artistic innovation, even if Russian culture did not determine its nature. Other scholars have described Russia in the early twentieth century as an “international meeting ground of ideas,” a place where the “ascendancy of politics over culture collapsed,” and where the patronage of a “new class of rich industrialists” made possible the emergence of a Russian avant-garde, that is, a “domestic organic movement” in painting and the other arts. The English critic John Berger has observed regarding the Russians that “their backwardness has become the very condition in their seizing a future far in advance of the rest of Europe. They could transcend the European present, the present of the dehumanized bourgeoisie. . . It was the conjunction of the cubist example and the revolutionary possibilities in Russia that made the art of this period umque. ”⁵

The historian has difficulty proving or disproving such sweeping statements about Russian culture or the Russian condition of backwardness as causal explanations of the emergence of a Russian avant-garde. In Karl Popper’s terms, they are “non-falsifiable,” and therefore not very useful as explanations of historical reality. Few critics have tested such generalizations against individual cases. Among the artists in this book, Mayakovsky was the only ethnic Russian, and he spent much of his life demolishing icons with his antireligious poetic axe, not in worshiping them. Other Russian artists were thoroughly westernized by their years in Paris or Munich during Russia’s “Silver Age” and can hardly be considered “backward.” The interpretation of the art of the Russian Revolution in terms of peculiar Russian traditions and conditions thus tells us little more than the earlier interpretation based on the dramatic events of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath.

In recent years scholarly emphasis has shifted to the Russian avant- garde as a “lost” movement in the arts which combined both artistic innovation and political revolution. This approach is not entirely new. As early as 1924 Trotsky, in his book Literature and Revolution, had coined the term “fellow-travelers” to describe those artists and writers left over from the prewar bourgeois avant-garde, whom the Bolsheviks merely tolerated as a necessary expedient. The artists of the 1920s were not really revolutionary at all, Trotsky argued, but middle-aged and westernized products of their social class, the bourgeoisie, and the residue of its artistic fringe, bohemia.⁶ The westernism and middle-class origin of most Russian avant-garde artists of the period have embarrassed or limited later Soviet scholars. This has not prevented them from writing biographies of men and women who might be considered members of the avant-garde, or serious monographs on modernist art before and after 1917.⁷ But such works often ignore or downgrade the social background of the artists, their contacts with the West, and their religious concerns.

In the past decade the Russian avant-garde has enjoyed considerable attention in the West. Major exhibits have made the work of Malevich, El Lissitzky, and the “constructivist” artists of the 1920s familar to a broad art public in both Europe and the United States.⁸ Scholarly monographs on Russian modernism have proliferated. The late Renato Poggioli led the way in viewing the avant-garde as a useful concept which described the nexus of political rebellion and artistic radicalism in both Europe and Russia before and after 1917. For Poggioli, for example, Russian futurism in poetry and the visual arts “prophesied the coming revolution and joined hands with it.” He also pointed out that the avant-garde was a pan-European phenomenon in which Russia was intimately involved, a dynamic movement of artists united by their activism, their antagonism toward bourgeois society, their nihilism in the face of accepted values, and their agonism—the acceptance of their own ultimate ruin and demise. The avant-garde artists exalted youth, the primitive, and the childlike and attacked the Academy, the establishment, and bourgeois society in general, while proclaiming themselves a new aristocracy.

Not all artists of the period fused artistic innovation and political involvement in their work. Some were radical innovators who took little part in events around them. The composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev burst upon the musical scene in St. Petersburg before World War I, but then emigrated to Europe or America in the 1920s. Neither was politically involved in the revolution. Other artists, such as the film director Sergei Eisenstein, were little known until they committed themselves and their art to the revolution. But most avant-garde artists of the period involved themselves at times in both art and politics. The painters Vasily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall achieved their artistic reputations in Munich and Paris before 1914; returning to Russia, they participated in the revolution for a brief, if exciting, period before emigrating once more in 1922. Other artists influenced revolutionary art through their students, as in the case of the painter of battles F. A. Rubot, who worked in Munich and Petersburg before World War I and whose student, B. D. Grekov, immortalized the conflicts of the Russian Civil War in his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. Still others turned to propaganda, creating posters or films needed by the new government.

Historians of the avant-garde are studying a social group whose membership is not clearly defined: artists who proclaim themselves to be in advance of accepted styles and tastes and outside of accepted social and political behavior. Despite his suggestive analysis and his erudition, Poggioli never applies his definition of the avant-garde to any single individual who might or might not fit such a definition.⁹ The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the long-standing traditions or conditions of Russian culture and society, and the emergence of an artistically and politically radical avant-garde all certainly helped characterize the period under consideration. But how? No single cause suffices to explain the great wave of artistic innovation and revolutionary commitment that typifies Russian art from about 1905 to 1925. For example, among the artists considered in this book only A. V. Lunacharsky was a revolutionary for any length of time, only Mayakovsky was an ethnic Russian (and he was raised in Georgia), and only Kazimir Malevich appears consistently in the historical literature on the Russian avant-garde. Most statements about the revolution, Russian tradition, or the avant-garde turn out either to be unverifiable or to provide a mosaic of selected evidence whose tiles can be rearranged at will. Here we shall consider more concrete aspects of the period in the lives and work of individual artists: their provincial background, their education, Western influences, patronage, and generational change. All of these factors played a role in shaping the careers of avant-garde artists prior to a moment of innovation when they achieved an artistic reputation or lent their art to the revolution.

II

The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 provided new opportunities previously denied to many artists: the non-Russian, the provincial, the young, and women. They also helped the mediocre become famous by making their art political. In Peter Gay’s terms, Russian revolutionary art, like Weimar culture in the 1920s, was in part “the erection of outsiders, propelled by history into the inside, for a short, dizzying, fragile moment.”¹⁰ Revolution bred innovation. For a time all barriers were down, all ways open, anything possible. The breaking of rules became legitimate. In this environment previously unsuccessful artists could overcome backwardness through borrowing, finding novel and unknown sources for artistic innovation in the West. Innovation in turn allowed some mature artists, psychologically renewed and artistically revitalized, to become the leaders of the young. The Russian avant-garde was in part the product of previously unsuccessful non-Russian artists from the provincial towns who surmounted the cultural competition of urban centers, both in Russia and in Europe, by successful innovation.

The Russian avant-garde also included a generation suspended between art and politics, innovation and revolution. That is, there was a particularly volatile group of artists born in the 1880s and early 1890s whose emergence into adulthood coincided with the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. This “futurist” generation was transitional between a generation we shall call “aesthetes,” who reached maturity at the turn of the century, and a later generation of “constructivists,” who were more deeply involved in the Soviet experiment of the early 1920s. The aesthetes emphasized artistic innovation; the constructivists, revolutionary commitment; and the futurists, a mixture of both in revolt against bourgeois society. We shall use these generational terms as ideal types on occasion; they do not completely define any individual artist, nor should they be confused with specific art movements (futurism or constructivism) associated with that generation. But they will provide a useful framework within which we can examine in detail the lives and works of individual artists associated with the concept of a Russian avant- garde.

The generation of the aesthetes had reached maturity by the time of the 1905 Revolution. Like Lenin and Trotsky, they were born in the 1870s, grew up during the period of repressive and russification policies of Alexander III (1881-1894), and were educated in the turbulent 1890s. In terms of social origin, the aesthetes usually came from the newly emerging Russian middle-class professional intelligentsia; their fathers were merchants, businessmen, professors, army officers, and public officials. They received a good education, often in St. Petersburg at the university or the Academy of Arts. Their intellectual world divided itself between politics and art, Marxism and idealism, the traditional critical thinking of the intelligentsia and the new European movements of symbolism and art-for-art’s-sake. While many students found Marxism a scientific doctrine of the class struggle relevant to the Russia of Sergei Witte’s industrialization program, others turned to a more general revolt against bourgeois society: their teachers were Nietzsche, Wagner, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde. The aesthetes of the fin de siècle sought to transcend society and its banality through new values and new perceptions of truth, and to create an art that would enable a select few to see behind the veil of apparent material reality. Style and form mattered as much as content. Many artists studied abroad, particularly in Munich; several helped create the New Artists’ League (Neue Künstler-Vereinigung) in 1909 and the Blue Rider exhibit of 1912. In St. Petersburg they attended the exhibits of Sergei Diaghilev’s World of Art society (Mir iskusstva), which sought to unite Russian and Western modernism, and the associated “Evenings of Contemporary Music.” The aesthetes helped bring Western art to Russia at the turn of the century, were radicalized or terrified by the events of 1905, and were then divided between the sanctuary of Parisian exile and the turbulence of 1917. The Revolution of 1905 found them in their early thirties; by 1925 they were in their fifties.

The second generation was that of the “futurists.” Born in the 1880s and early 1890s, they reached maturity between two revolutions, a transitional generation, more politically involved than the aesthetes but less so than the Soviet constructivist generation to follow. In 1905 they were in their twenties or younger, and often still in school. Members of the futurist generation came increasingly from the provinces of southern and western Russia, and they found their way not to St. Petersburg and the Academy of Arts but more often to Moscow and its School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, or the Stroganov School of Applied Arts. Both in Moscow and in Kiev they launched a series of independently financed art exhibits such as “Blue Rose,” “Garland,” and “Link”; in the winter of 1910-1911 various currents merged at the “Jack of Diamonds” exhibit in Moscow. But their confluence was short-lived. Many moved on to St. Petersburg, where the “Hylea” poets created a Russian “futurism.” Futurist painters showed their works in 1915 at the “0.10” and “Tramway V” exhibits. Others left for Paris, where they joined the growing international artists’ colony at La Ruche. Generally, the radicalism of these artists was more in form than in political action; they broke the rules of poetic rhythm and rhyme, or of visual line and color, but rarely of society. They threw tea at audiences, read nonsense poems, and paraded on street corners with spoons in their buttonholes; but they did not throw bombs or join the Bolsheviks. For them art was revolution, and Paris was its center. Many settled there, while friends stayed on in Russia. In 1917, members of the futurist generation were in their thirties; the revolution exacerbated the tension between participation and emigration, political commitment and artistic innovation.

The generation of “constructivists” contributed an element of youth to the art of the new Soviet Russia. The Bolshevik leaders themselves were generally from the generation of 1905, the aesthetes, and the rank- and-file Old Bolsheviks from that of the futurists. But the Bolshevik success of 1917 swelled party ranks with younger members. Bom in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, the constructivist generation constituted a kind of youth movement in early Soviet Russia. Many of the future constructivists came from lower-class origins and found their way to Moscow or Petrograd amid the turmoil of war, revolution, and civil war between 1914 and 1921. They grew up in a world of death and violence, and they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the revolution in art and life. Their vision of a cultural or artistic revolution was not elitist but popular; they believed that art should be created not only for, but also by, the proletariat. Some members of the constructivist generation were veterans of World War I or the Civil War; others were too young to have participated in these events, or in the 1917 Revolution itself. The aim of the constructivists was the construction of utopia. Unlike the aesthete and futurist generations, this generation, by and large, lacked direct contact with the West because of the isolation brought on by World War I.

By the early 1920s these three generations were coexistent but distinct. The aesthetes were now in their late forties and fifties, and their participation in the revolution was minimal. Some stayed on to work under the new regime, but many never returned from their post1905 European wanderings; others returned for a few years and then emigrated once more. The futurists were more involved in the revolution than the aesthetes, but as their own revolution, not Lenin’s; their newspapers, paintings, and street banners for revolutionary holidays were often more avant-garde than socialist. In the early 1920s members of the futurist generation were in their late thirties and forties. They had survived war and revolution. As they sought to extend the revolution in art, if not in politics, their innovative rebellion soon conflicted with revolutionary unity. Of the three generations, the constructivists were most involved in the new revolutionary Russia, and least knowledgeable about the West. For them the revolution brought frequent opportunities at a remarkably young age, despite (or perhaps because of ) their lower-class provincial background.

Each generation meant something quite different by innovation in their art. The aesthetes sought a new style akin to Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, decorative and delicate, sensuous and stylized, suitable for the new market provided by the well-to-do. The futurists attacked that style and attracted public attention by their revolt against the rules of form, color, and harmony. They criticized bourgeois society and the Academy but also sought a new market and audience for abstract painting, nonsense poetry, and atonal music. The constructivists rejected the art market entirely, and sought a state-subsidized mass art which would break down the barriers between art and labor, elite and masses, form and function, and artist and worker.

The revolutionary experiences of the three generations were also distinct. The aesthetes were either radicalized or traumatized by the events of 1905. The futurists substituted their own cultural radicalism for political activity during the more quiescent period before the war and were overtaken by the national disaster of World War I and the 1917 Revolution. The constructivists reached maturity only after the end of the Civil War in 1921, when the task was no longer the destruction of the old society but the celebration and construction of the new one. ^Ill

III

The three generations also stamped their own specific concerns on the art of the period. The aesthetes were preoccupied with the symbolic and the religious, even the mystical, in art and in life. The futurists shared an enthusiasm for the modern and the novel that expressed itself in urbanism, the cult of the city. Finally, the constructivists added their own element of collectivism, forged in revolution, the subordination of the individual to the proletarian whole. Each of these themes emerges in the culture of the period.

Religious concerns were widespread among the aesthetes, who often thought of themselves as seers in touch with a world beyond ordinary vision. The painter Vasily Kandinsky, in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912 ), prophesied a new religious abstract art that would someday raise the cultural consciousness of the masses to a higher level; the composer Scriabin articulated similar views. The painter Malevich, the poet Andrei Belyi, and the patron of the Russian futurists Nikolai Kulbin, all shared the aesthetes’ interest in theosophy, occultism, anthroposophy, and other religious movements as central to their special vision of an elite truth. The artist was a kind of priest communicating innovative perceptions of reality to an elite of viewers or listeners capable of advanced understanding. Expressing the interior soul or spirit was more important to these artists than portraying reality on the material level. The religious dimension introduced by the aesthetes persisted in the art of the postrevolutionary period, where it gave rise to a mythology of revolution that would ultimately help justify Stalinist theocracy and the destruction of artistic autonomy. But religious concerns were most respectable among the artists of the turn of the century and less so among their followers.

The futurists discovered urbanism. In part, the cult of the city was simply a logical extension of the eighteenth-century vision of the ultimate perfectibility of man and the nineteenth-century cult of progress. But it emerged most distinctly before World War I in the city poems of Alexander Blok, the graphics of M. V. Dobuzhinsky, and the painting and poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky. The city, the skyscraper, and the machine became new symbols of the modern. Mayakovsky extolled the virtues of New York and Chicago, while Vsevolod Meyerhold placed motorcycles and automobiles on the stage. In 1914 the literary critic Genrikh Tasteven, in his book Futurism: On the Way to a New Symbolism, predicted a coming cultural revolution based upon the modern city and Italian futurist visions, a “great movement for the resurrection of cultural values, the creation of a new idealism, and a new acceptance of the world.”¹¹ The futurist generation welcomed the noise, the bustle, the smoke and traffic of modernity, and brought it into their art. There were always exceptions, of course, as in the peasant poetry of Sergei Esenin or the fine-lined surrealism of A. G. Tyshler. But urbanism was a dominant theme.

The constructivists espoused collectivism. The artist could no longer exist as a member of an elite on the fringe of bourgeois society, however advanced. Art must serve the people. The idea of sobornost’, a collective community of Christian believers, was traditional in Russian Orthodoxy; in the nineteenth century it was overtaken by the romantic nostalgia of the Slavophiles and the peasant-centered narodnichestvo of the Populists. The collectivism of the revolutionary period was more dramatic. Artistically, it meant the disappearance of the individual from the work of art in favor of abstraction and non-objectivity; politically it meant the cult of the masses and the demise of the individual as a legacy of bourgeois society. In the constructivist era of the 1920s conductorless orchestras performed in Moscow, Meyerhold transformed the ancient Greek chorus into gymnasts dressed in workers’ coveralls, and Eisenstein’s films made the masses themselves into a new collective hero. The individual would ultimately die; the collective was immortal and eternal.

The three generations also emphasized different techniques and forms in their art. The aesthetes were fascinated by art as myth. Inspired by Nietzsche’s resurrection of Greek tragedy and Wagner’s festivals at Bayreuth, they sought to transform art into ritual. The synaesthetic unity of color, sound, and smell became the basis of Scriabin’s tone poems, evocative of the ecstatic and the Promethean. The Diaghilev ballet in Paris turned to Russian myth: the primitivism of Roerich and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; the Muscovite nostalgia of Chaliapin’s Boris Godunov; the carnival atmosphere of St. Petersburg embodied in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. The futurists went on to mythologize themselves, proclaiming futurism, cubo-futurism, Suprematism, and other movements for their critics and buyers. Finally, in the early Soviet period myth was utilized to legitimize the revolution through monuments, mass outdoor spectacles such as the reenacted storming of the Winter Palace in 1920, May Day parades, and films. The aesthetes sought a usable myth of the Russian past, associated with Petersburg or Moscow; the futurists immortalized themselves through lectures, exhibits, and street-corner readings or demonstrations; the constructivists mythologized the Russian Revolution, an event witnessed directly by few, and the meaning and consequences of which were still unclear to many.

The futurists introduced the technique of antagonism, the sharp juxtaposition of two objects in tension. Artistically, this meant the placement of two related but not contiguous scenes or items on canvas as in Marc Chagall’s juxtaposed visions of Vitebsk and Paris, or the futurist poets’ notion of word and object “displacement” (sdvig), or the formalist literary critics’ theory that a familiar object should be made strange and new to the reader (otstranenie). Visual logic was no more necessary than the logic of cause and effect. Politically, antagonism could be used to great effect by juxtaposing symbols of good and evil, we and they, in a work of art. After 1917 the antagonism of futurist collages gave way to posters contrasting the muscular and heroic figures of the worker or Red Army soldier with the bloated, sinister, or ridiculous cartoon characters of Lloyd George, General Wrangel, or a kulak or priest. In any case, the purpose of antagonism was to shock the viewer into attention (or purchase) through innovation, contrast.

The constructivists added to myth and antagonism a third technique, agitation. The transformation of art into revolutionary propaganda by many constructivists led to the repetition of a single idea or slogan for political effect. Posters run off by the thousands exhorted the recalcitrant to volunteer for the army, or learn to read, or feed the hungry, or contribute their labor on Sunday. The ROSTA windows of the Russian Telegraph Agency were cartoons intended for mass consumption, a visual newspaper for the illiterate. Meyerhold utilized his “biomechanics” exercises on stage as a kind of gymnastics to demonstrate motor efficiency to workers in the spirit of the Taylor System. Agitation meant that art should call forth action on the part of the viewer or listener; the viewer’s response was an essential part of the work. In the context of the early Soviet period, agitation was the means by which art ceased to serve the bourgeois market and began to serve the masses.

More generally, the three generational experiences indicate a shift in art from an expression of individual autonomy to the fulfillment of social need. In this sense too there was a movement from innovation toward revolution, from the novel in art to the new in life. Not that art could not be both useful and innovative. In the 1920s Tatlin’s reliefs, Rodchenko’s mobiles, and Kuleshov’s montage all certainly maintained the innovative spirit. But many felt that the artist should now become an artisan, builder, or engineer. The “productivists” carried this to an extreme, designing clothing, reading rooms, and stoves for the proletariat in the spirit of the prewar Werkbund and the postwar Bauhaus in Germany. Many of their schemes never got beyond the blueprint stage, as, for example, El Lissitzky’s Prouns or Ivan Leonidov’s architectural designs; only in the late 1920s were architects able to find the money and materials to realize some of their utopian projects: massive skyscrapers, parking garages, and communal apartments.¹² At the same time, they found their autonomy severely curtailed by the regime they helped legitimize.

IV

The idea of immortality provided a powerful metaphor or paradigm for the avant-garde. Artistically, the process of innovation itself may lead to a kind of immortality: an artist establishes a new style or trend which provides a reputation that will live on after the artist’s death; the work of art itself is an object that will endure, whatever its perception by the critics. Innovation also makes possible periodic regeneration or rebirth by initiating another phase of artistic development within the artist’s lifetime. At the painter Paul Klee wrote in 1914, “one deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one’s activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible.”¹³ Such a world of total affirmation is beyond the real world and beyond death.

Revolution also provides a vehicle for immortality. The avant-garde artist seeks to create a new work of art which will endure, bringing him permanent fame. The revolutionary seeks to create a new society that is perfect, a heaven on earth that marks an end to historical time; he may risk death in the service of that ideal, but his memory will survive and even be memorialized in the postrevolutionary generation. Participation in the exhilarating events of the revolution may also provide a sense of regeneration, of starting anew, finding a self one had not known. The avant-garde artist who combines innovative and revolutionary impulses will be doubly drawn to employ the metaphor of immortality and rebirth.

One may distinguish three views of immortality. According to the first view, derived from classical Greek and Christian thought, the world exists on two levels : on one level our life ends with the death of the body, while on the other a soul remains in another world, of which we have only intimations. A second, more secular, view of immortality is that we live on after death in the memory of others, whether or not we believe in actual immortality. Finally, there is the view that any sort of immortality is impossible, and that the greatest hope in a scientific age is longevity, the prolonging of life to its maximum span through medicine and good health. These three views coincide with the differing concerns of the three generations of Russian artists we have identified.

The traditional view of immortality in Western thought began with the Greeks. Both Pythagoras and Plato believed in the immortality of the soul, and even in the possibility of its transmigration into another body. Christianity added the more literal belief in resurrection in the timeless world of Heaven, or at least the ascension of the soul. In the nineteenth century this tradition was given new impetus by romanticism, with its emphasis on the slumbering unconscious accessible through hypnosis or the dream, a deeper level of reality beneath the waking life. The Greeks had explained death as a punishment inflicted by Zeus upon Prometheus and all mankind for the sin of disobedience; in the nineteenth century Prometheus became the symbol of creative defiance of the gods and of the urge to transcend this life. By the end of the century the cult of science had produced new countermovements of the spiritual and the occult, belief systems that provided secret doctrines revealing the spiritual world beyond death, the world of the other side. In his famous essay on Human Immortality ( 1898), William James admitted that modern science had not disposed of the will to believe in a world beyond this one and that “life may still continue when the brain itself is dead.”¹⁴ Scientism and the erosion of traditional religion spawned a new concern with death and immortality around 1900. After decades of relative silence on the subject, philosophers like James, Henri Bergson, and George Simmel were producing what one historian has called a “reaction against the exclusion of death from philosophical reflection.”¹⁵

The second view was that man’s perfectibility constituted his immortality. Bound to this earth, he could at least improve life in some way and leave behind what he had done. “A man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone,” wrote Spinoza, “is not led by fear of death but directly desires the good.”¹⁶ The eighteenth century welcomed this secular view of immortality. “Why may man not one day be immortal?” asked William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet also portrayed man’s inevitable rise through ten stages of history to perfectibility in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). Among the benefits of that perfection would be the indefinite increase of the human life span through the progress of science and medicine. What Malthus by way of pessimistic rejoinder called Godwin’s and Condorcet’s “very curious instance of the soul’s longing after immortality” was actually a substitution of secular perfection for Christian salvation.¹⁷

The European revolutionary tradition shared this secular concern with immortality through perfection. The philosophes devised their own version of immortality, summarized by Carl Becker in 1931 as “the hope of living in the memory of future generations.” In the words of Diderot, “Posterity is for the Philosopher what the other world is for the religious.” This faith in a collective immortality of the individual through surviving memory and reputation enabled Madame Roland to announce: “Roland will never die in posterity, and I also, I shall have some measure of existence in future generations.”¹⁸ The French Revolution provided for the immortality of its heroes through hymns, holidays, monuments, and the religion of the Goddess Liberty. In the nineteenth century this optimistic faith in man’s perfectibility survived in Auguste Comte’s “positivist science” and its “religion of humanity.” Science itself bore witness to man’s unlimited power over nature. In the Comtean vision, “in Humanity, individuals are able to enjoy, in very truth, the immortality for which they long” and “as to the dead, they live on in the remembrance of other generations.”¹⁹

Finally, there was the view that immortality could be achieved only in the form of longevity. In the Middle Ages alchemy suggested the power not only to turn base metal into gold, but also to cure all disease through the infinite power of medicine. The idea of prolongation of life embedded in Condorcet’s theory of progress has already been mentioned. By the end of the nineteenth century developments in biology and immunology, fewer deaths in childhood, and an increasing life span suggested that such a dream of prolongation of life was not so far off.

Russians shared these inherited views on immortality. Traditional Russian culture emphasized the cyclical and cosmic process of rebirth characteristic of both agrarian seasonal rituals and Eastern Christianity. In the Russian calendar the resurrection of Christ at Easter was the central event and holiday. In addition, Russian intellectuals inherited the secular traditions of European thought. In the 1790s Alexander Radishchev, the well-known critic of serfdom, wrote that “life extinguished is not annihilation” and that perfection not only is man’s goal on earth but “remains his goal after death as well.”²⁰ Even the older Christian tradition remained alive, if only as a tactical metaphor, in the works of the revolutionary Populists of the 1870s. “Let the worker— Lazarus—leave his tomb forever!” wrote Peter Lavrov in a poem, “Noel” (1870) ; the Russian people were a collective martyr akin to Christ who “will remain crucified, bleeding, as long as he is not conscious that he is God.” But the dominant tradition was that of the Enlightenment and the European revolutionary movement: immortality through the collective memory. In the words of Trotsky in 1924, “Lenin is immortal in his doctrine, his work, his method, his example, which live in us, which live in the Party he created, and in the first Workers’ State of which he was the head and the helmsman.”²¹

The traditional view of immortality dominated the generation of the aesthetes in Russia. In their writings they frequently returned to traditions of Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, the works of the Church Fathers, the Apocalypse and Revelations, and the writings of Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Mysticism flourished. The poet, novelist, and literary critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky fused artistic and political visions of immortality into a single millenarian vision of a religious revolution based on Christian love. Peace on earth was one form of immortality: “to conquer force means to conquer death.” In Merezhkovsky’s novel Julian the Apostate ( 1895), Julian teaches men not to fear death, and propounds the ideal of “the reign of god-like men . . . eternally laughing, like the sun.” Death can somehow be transcended. The true meaning of Christ and of Nietzsche’s Superman is that they can achieve precisely that transcedence. The man who truly understands Christ will also be “fearless of death.” Merezhkovsky also anticipated the later fascination with immortality through an act of creation; the artist too, like Leonardo da Vinci, conquers death by creativity, achieving his own form of immortality through a creative impulse made possible by bisexuality.²² Nor was Merezhkovsky alone in a generation whose intellectual mentors shared the faith of a Tolstoi or the theosophic vision of a Vladimir Soloviev.

The futurist generation was drawn to the more secular tradition of the Enlightenment. Man might become God not literally but by Godlike acts whose memory would live on. The artist himself was a kind of god, or a Prometheus in defiance of the gods. But he was more interested in immortality by reputation than by religion. Around 1904 the writer Maxim Gorky hinted that man might well be immortal through his fusion with the larger collective, which would outlive him and remember his deeds. In his play Children of the Sun Gorky wrote: “We . . . children of the sun, born of the sun, the shining source of life, will conquer the dark fear of death.” In his novel Confession (1908) he described the people as immortal. Gorky was probably the first person to coin the term “god-building” for the new secular religion of humanity that flourished on the left in Russia before World War I. As we shall see, the Enlightenment tradition of immortality by reputation reappeared at the turn of the century in the “monist” and “empiriocritical” writings of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach as an idea that the self lives on in the memory of the collective, the “I” in the “we.” This notion was well received by left-wing Russian intellectuals.²³

Finally, the view of immortality most acceptable to the constructivist generation was that of longevity. Adherents of the scientism and atheism of the 1920s rejected the traditional view and tolerated the secular tradition of immortality by memory, but were most intrigued by the prolongation of life through medicine. The leading Russian proponent of this view was the cell biologist Elie Mechnikov, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Although Mechnikov died before 1917, his views were popular in Russia in the 1920s. Mechnikov won the Nobel Prize in 1908 and wrote widely on popular scientific topics, expressing what he called his optimistic philosophy of man. According to Mechnikov, modern medicine and proper diet might not give man immortality, but they would someday prolong the human life span indefinitely. If immortality were possible, science would provide it: “Death,” he once wrote, “is not necessarily inherent in living organisms.” For Mechnikov, the religion of the future would be based on modern science, whose power would enable man to solve all problems, including death.²⁴

The Russian avant-garde, then, emerged at a time when the Enlightenment tradition of secular immortality was most popular. The religious sensibility still survived; the scientific and atheist enthusiasm for longevity was only then becoming known. For the generation of the aesthetes, the world still existed on two levels, the apparent and the real, the material and the spiritual, linked by symbols; the artist was a seer who could transcend the reality of death by penetrating the secrets behind the veil. For the constructivist generation, the scientism of Mechnikov provided a surrogate immortality through longevity that grew out of the cult of progress. The intermediate futurist generation shared the more transitional view of the “god-builders”: the fear of death, if not death itself, could be conquered, and immortality achieved by fame and reputation preserved in the memory of the collective and of future generations. In this way the Russian avant-garde fused the artistic immortality of successful innovation and the political immortality of remembered revolution.

V

The Russian avant-garde combined artistic innovation and an involvement in political revolution in their art, their politics, and their views on ultimate religious questions, among them death and immortality. They were artists in transition and in tension, ahead of a dominant culture they disliked and predicting a cultural revolution they would lead. Ultimately, by the 1930s, they became the victims of the revolution they had in part supported and helped immortalize in their art. Nadezhda Mandelshtam preferred the term “capitulationists” for those intellectuals who supported the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and noted that “the people between thirty and forty were the most active age group in those days.”²⁵ Not that all artists of the avant-garde were committed revolutionaries, any more than they were successful innovators. But most were, by definition, drawn in both directions. Revolution itself, both in 1905 and 1917, often provided overnight artistic acclaim for unsuccessful artists conscious of their age, as well as idealistic opportunities for rebellious youth. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the avant- garde artists who immortalized the revolution in their works were themselves at a moment in their lives that demanded success and fame to arrest the inevitable slide toward death.

The wave of Western art and culture that inundated Russia between 1905 and 1925 under the relative cultural tolerance of the Duma system and during the early Soviet years reflects the increasing ties between Russia and the West, rather than Russian backwardness. A powerful undercurrent within that wave was the persistent concern with death and immortality by artists and intellectuals after the turn of the century. Western writers then popular in Russia shared this concern. The Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was a spiritualist convinced that the self would survive death in some form. The American poet Walt Whitman filled his poetry with intimations of immortality. Another Belgian writer, Emile Verhaeren, related death and immortality in his plays to the process of revolution and the life of the modern city. Ernst Mach defined the survival of the self through the other, the collective. All of these Western writers were immensely popular in revolutionary Russia and played an important role in the moment of innovation of several artists. For Kandinsky and Malevich, Western theosophy offered a way out of the problem of death through the mysterious world of the fourth dimension, as well as a push in the direction of abstract painting. Throughout the revolutionary period the Russian avant-garde sought and found in the West thinkers and writers who shared their own concern with artistic and personal immortality in a secular age.

The artists considered here held diverse attitudes toward death and immortality in art and life. The graphic artist M. V. Dobuzhinsky and the poster artist D. Moor portrayed death as an evil perpetrated by enemies of the revolution: the Imperial government in 1905 and the White Armies during the Russian Civil War. Their satire helped dehumanize any declared enemy of the artist, subjecting him to ridicule and contempt, thereby making him vulnerable. The director Meyerhold, influenced by the Munich director George Fuchs, suggested to his audience the unreality of death in his staging of Alexander Blok’s play Balaganchik (The Fairground Booth), even as he feared personal death in the streets of Moscow in 1905. Lunacharsky, inspired by Mach, proclaimed socialism a religion of humanity, and found immortality through the memory of the proletarian collective. The film director Eisenstein laughed at death in the manner of Mexico’s Death Day celebrations, and glorified it as revolutionary sacrifice through the sailor Vakulinchuk on the quay at Odessa in Potemkin. Concern with death and immortality became an important theme in the works of all these artists, helping to shape their artistic innovation and providing a metaphor for the revolutionary events around them.

The Russian artists who turned their art to political use must also bear some responsibility for the destruction of art and life by the Russian Revolution in its later years. For their shared belief in artistic and revolutionary immortality helped provide the techniques and the philosophy that would support the right of the revolution to crush its enemies, including themselves. By declaring the revolution a kind of victory over death through secular perfection and collective glorification, and themselves immortal as artistic innovators, they helped make personal death acceptable in a world without religious faith. Personal death in the name of the revolution, they seemed to imply, would assure immortality for the individual. Consciously or not, the Russian avant-garde, insofar as they deified the revolution and its heroes, helped prepare the way for Stalinism through their abortive great artistic experiment. For they declared art a religion, and themselves supreme deities with total power in the artistic universe they inhabited, unlimited by the real or the external. God is dead, they argued, and therefore the artist is free to become God. They often anticipated a leader similar to Christ or to Nietzsche’s artist-Superman; they fell victims to Stalin as free artists, if not as living beings.

The essence of art is the making public of a private vision. This implied individualism flies in the face of political dictatorship, but it may also facilitate it. For the assumption that a single person may create and manipulate a universe in accordance with his or her own will justifies both the nonobjective canvas of abstract painting and the jail cell of totalitarian politics. Once the artist commits his art to the politics of revolution, he assumes too easily that his particular vision will become the universal one. It is equally possible that his vision will become the victim of a quite different vision with an equally dehumanized and abstract goal of its own. The art of the Russian avant- garde from 1905 to 1925 was in part a process of creative innovation often inspired by Western sources which provided new opportunities for artists not yet recognized. But it was also a process of political commitment which immortalized both art and revolution in a manner that would ultimately help destroy the ideals of both artist and revolutionary.