The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde

338 Pages·2012·7.58 MB·English

by  Nina Gurianova

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The Aesthetics of Anarchy
Art and Ideology in the
Early Russian Avant-Garde
Nina Gurianova
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gur'ianova, N. A.
The aesthetics of anarchy : art and ideology in the early Russian avant-garde / Nina Gurianova.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26876-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Arts, Russian—20th century. 2. Avant-garde
(Aesthetics)—Russia—History—20th century.
3. Anarchism and art—Russia. I. Title. II. Title:
Art and ideology in the early Russian avant-garde.
NX556.AIG87 2012
700.947'09041—dc23 2011035057
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002)
(Permanence of Paper).
To Dmitri Sarabianov
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Russian Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Anarchy
PART ONE. MOVEMENTS AND IDEAS
1. The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Definitions
2. Ideas: Bakunin, Tolstoy, and the Russian Anarchists
3. Movements: Futurisms and the Principle of Freedom
PART TWO. POETICS
4. A Game in Hell: The Poetics of Chance and Play
5. Victory over the Sun and the Theater of Alogism
6. Deconstructing the Canon: Russian Futurist Books
PART THREE. LOCATING THE AVANT-GARDE'S SOCIAL STANCE
7. The “Social Test”: The Avant-Garde and the Great War
8. The Suprematist Party
PART FOUR. POLITICS
9. Art, Creativity, and Anarkhiia
10. The Last Revolt: Politics of the Left Federation
11. The Avant-Garde and Ideology
Conclusion. The Historical Paradigm: The Avant-Gardes and Revolution
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
Acknowledgments
My research for this book was generously supported by the Society of Fellows,
Harvard University, the William F. Milton Fund award, and the National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in
North Carolina. The unique intellectual environment provided by the Society of
Fellows helped to lay the foundation for this book, while my sabbatical at the
National Humanities Center was instrumental in bringing it to completion. These
residential fellowships gave me the true luxury of sharing my ideas with others,
and the ongoing discussions with William Todd, Dan Aaron, Mark Antliff,
Bernard Bailyn, Svetlana Boym, James Dawes, Michelle Facos, Walter Gilbert,
Patricia Leighten, Lei Liang, Barry Mazur, Ellen Scary, Amartya Sen, Isabelle
Wunsche, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis enriched my initial approach and
inspired me to expand and sharpen my argument.
I am deeply grateful to Jack Flam and Charlene Woodcock who encouraged
me to move forward and helped to shape this project from its inception. I also
thank especially Boris Gasparov, Robert Belknap, John Malmstad, William
Todd, John Bowlt, Clare Cavanagh, Catherine Ciepela, Gary Saul Morson,
Bernice Rosenthal, Justin Weir, and Andrew Wachtel, who took upon
themselves the labor of reading all or parts of the manuscript's drafts and offered
many thoughtful comments. Allan Antliff and Nancy Perloff were among the
book's first readers and brought it to life. Stephanie Fay and Eric Schmidt, with
great forbearance, have seen this book through the press. To Charles Rougle I
am indebted for his editorial guidance, and invaluable help with the translation
of many of the original citations, and I also would like to extend my sincere
appreciation to Kimberly Croswell and Peter Dreyer, who improved the
readability of my manuscript through their expert editing.
My book would not have been possible without the warm and unyielding
support of my work by Alevtina Shechter, John Krummel, Ekaterina
Bobrinskaia, Diana Morse, Elena Murina, Carol Selle, Nela Ichin, Nikolai
Firtich, Elena Basner, John Milner, Irina Karasik, Michelle Facos, Willem
Weststein, Ilya Kukui, Alla Rosenfeld, Jane and Bill Taubman, Fiona Deutsch,
David Thaler, Sergei Kudriavtsev, Murray Murr, and Brother Muzius.
Research was conducted in many different museums, libraries, and archives. I
Research was conducted in many different museums, libraries, and archives. I
would like to express my endless gratitude to Geurt Imanse, Chief Curator for
Research and Documentation, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the
Foundation Cultural Center Khardzhiev-Chaga; Harvey Shipley Miller of the
Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York; Evgeniia N. Petrova, Deputy Director
of the Russian Museum; Deborah Wye of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York; Andrei Krusanov of the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, the
staffs at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and the State Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow; Aleksandr Lavrentiev and Vladimir Poliakov for their
incredible generosity and gracious help in obtaining the unpublished materials,
rare documents, and visual images for my research. I also thank Dan Zellner and
the Digital Collections Department at Northwestern University for providing me
with the high-quality digital images for my book. The writing of this book was
generously supported by Northwestern University. I am indebted to many of my
colleagues and students at Northwestern for their assistance.
Introduction
The Russian Avant-Garde and the
Aesthetics of Anarchy
This book offers a new scholarly perspective that differs from previous
interpretations of the Russian avant-garde in art and literature and goes against
the predetermined axioms of whiggish theory. I look at the early Russian avant-
garde of 1910-18 as an autonomous development, complete with an aesthetic
ideology of its own, which I call the aesthetics of anarchy. This ideology in turn
shaped the unique style, technique, methodology, and philosophy of the
movement.
Current literature traditionally defines this period as a preliminary stage
leading directly to the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), the Constructivism of the
1920s, and sometimes even to Socialist Realism.1 In contrast, I argue that the
early Russian avant-garde was an autonomous stage with distinct features and its
own aesthetics, which did not necessarily have to lead to the art and literary
movements of the Soviet period. This revision does not deny from the outset
historical and aesthetic connections between the prerevolutionary stage of
development and the early Soviet period. One can always find links in the
history of culture—not only “traditions of continuity” but “traditions of
discontinuity” as well.2However, continuities between the early aesthetics of
anarchy and the successive politicized and Marxist-inspired reconfigurations
have been overstated in most treatments: I seek to tell a different story.
The early Russian avant-garde created an aesthetics attuned both to Mikhail
Bakunin's anarchist theory of “creative destruction” and to the anti-utopian
philosophy of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.3 A powerful wave of
Russian anti-Benthamism pivoted on Dostoevsky's work, which provoked many
anarchist discussions. The underground man's rebellion against utilitarianism
and determinism captivated contemporaries and had a crucial impact on
intellectual and aesthetic ideas in Russia. For the early Russian avant-garde, the
“poetics of the underground” opposed the creation of any fixed or immutable
ideas or absolutes in both social and aesthetic philosophies.
Although shock value played a role in the early Russian avant-garde, that was
not the primary aim of its anarchic anti-canonicity, whose purpose was, rather,
consciously to expand artistic space by deconstructing the aesthetic clichés of
“the ideal” and “beauty.” The ideological aspirations and aesthetic tendencies of
the early avant-garde are reflected in the non-uniformity of its artistic and
literary movements, and in the diversity of groups and tendencies that coexisted
within it and spurred one another on, Neoprimitivism, Cubo-Futurism, Ego-
Futurism, Rayism, Organicism, and Suprematism among them. This multiplicity
of artistic practices and theoretical concepts, compressed into less than a decade,
presents a challenge to scholars of the Russian avant-garde. There is only one
feature that can be applied equally to all of them: an anti-teleological desire for
freedom of artistic conscience, not limited by any pragmatic political, social, or
aesthetic goals.
As soon as methodological or epistemological closure occurred, this essence
of the movement was lost, I argue. Paradoxically, then, important features of
early avant-garde poetics have gone unrecognized in the historical literature
because they do not fit into any of the methodological schemes that prioritize
totalizing definitions of style over the philosophy of artistic practice. The
aesthetics of anarchy, as I see it, is based on a new interpretation of art and
human creativity: an art without rules. These aesthetics are revealed in the
creative energy of the artists as they transformed literary, theatrical, and
performance practices, eroding the traditional boundaries of the visual arts and
challenging the conventions of their day.
This study focuses on the theoretical issues, concepts, and poetics of the
Russian avant-garde between 1910 and 1918. My central concern is the
interrelation of aesthetics and the politics of the art world, art, and ideology. I
don't interpret ideology in purely Marxist terms, but rather see it as any
abstracting “system of ideas.”4 Ideology in art is the idea system that arises when
art defines itself as creative human activity in relation to the social,
philosophical, and political aspects of reality, and consequently to the audience
that assimilates this art.
The interaction between painter and viewer, poet and audience, has always
been a particularly acute issue in Russian culture, and this was also the case with
the Russian avant-garde. Posed in forceful and uncompromising terms, it served
as a kind of litmus test by which various groups identified themselves. The
predominantly Symbolist and decadent milieu's insistence on art for art's sake