Boris Iofan's award-winning design for the Palace of the Soviets (1934).
akg-images / picturedesk.com
The idea that poets speak in metaphors is so natural and deeply embedded that we may miss the rare occasions when they mean exactly what they say. The experience of the revolutionary storm from October 1917 in Russia was marked by a—short-lived and paradoxical—“victory of the literal.”
In a 1919 article, Kazimir Malevich, an artist born in Kyiv to Polish parents, who became one of the most important representatives of the Soviet avant-garde, proposed that the cities of the future were to be completely destroyed and then rebuilt from scratch every ten years. The idea sounds so utterly absurd and wasteful that it can only to be understood as a metaphor. One does not want to imagine that Malevich was serious, any more that one would take Vladimir Mayakovsky, perhaps the greatest poet at the time, at his word when he said that “we should pepper the museum with bullets” (“It’s Too Early to Rejoice,” 1918). Surely, this was a poetic exaggeration, just as the provocative gesture of another poet, Vladimir Kirillov, who declared that “in the name of our Tomorrow, we will burn Raphael/destroy the museums and trample the flowers of art” (“We,” 1918).
Contemporary scholars have gone to great lengths to insist that what the Soviet avant-garde meant was not “destruction, but […] redefinition, renewal, and transformation.” Not surprisingly, the Soviet avant-garde features regularly in studies on utopian thought, while the iconoclastic rhetoric of the Futurists in particular is frequently perceived as an expression of “playful hooliganism.” What all these interpretations share is that they shy away from literal meanings—they refuse to take the avant-garde at its word.
Here is the first paradox: a literal understanding of the avant-garde project is much richer and more profound than the possible metaphorical readings. Truth lies on the surface in this case and Malevich meant exactly what he said. Destroying all the art and culture of the past was, in fact, quite consistent with the Soviet avant-garde’s vision of creating a completely new, free art for the future. Tradition, by its very existence, was an obstacle so long as it entailed, however tentatively, the evolution of an artistic canon with the appearance of a masterpiece to serve as a model. Incidentally, the focus on Raphael—Mayakovsky called for “putting Raphael against the wall”—was not accidental: more than any others, the works by the Italian artist had acquired the status of masterpieces. This rhetoric can also be seen in Italian Futurism, as well as the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, who had an important following in the late Russian empire, and the anti-intellectualism of the Nihilists. It makes some connections to contemporary cancel culture as well.
What made the case of the Soviet avant-garde different was the October Revolution. Before 1917, this talk had an element of posturing and an obvious desire to shock. The 1912 Futurist Manifesto of Mayakovski and the group around him—under the revealing title A Slap in the Face of Public Taste—that declared its authors’ intention of “throwing Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. off the steamboat of modernity,” could be understood along these lines. After October 1917, these statements were made and understood in a completely different spirit, because the revolution had made them appear actually possible. So, the role of speech itself, of the word (in Russian, slovo), was utterly different. The short period of a few years after the revolution, especially until 1921 with certain features persisting into the early 1930s, marked what we could call a “victory of the literal.” When the Futurists said in their manifesto of 1912 that “from the skyscrapers we gaze” at the “nothingness” of the great Russian classics, the skyscrapers did not exist and were a figment of the imagination. The Palace of the Soviets (Dvorets Sovetov), the gigantic architectural project of the new regime, similarly did not exist and, in fact, never came into being—but one would not know that by reading the many references to it at the time. In a way that is quite amazing to readers outside this milieu, article after article described the palace as an actually existing structure. Images of the building were pervasive since it featured in films and was exhibited at World Fairs.
Contemporary scholars have paid attention to the project for the Palace of the Soviets largely because of the competition in which some of the most internationally renowned architects—such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mosei I. Ginzburg—submitted designs. What is most fascinating, however, is that speech created reality, as the revolution had made anything possible. This was the message conveyed by the journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture, fl. 1926), in which authors expressed the conviction that even if not a single new building were put up, the “new Soviet architecture” would be an organic part of the Soviet environment.
That progress is much more akin to a storm than a stage in a linear unfolding of history is one of the great insights of Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). This is how the avant-garde must have experienced the revolution: as a storm that descended upon them, promising to sweep all of history in its way. Therein lies the second paradox, which was insoluble and, therefore, an instance of tragic irony. If radical originality depended on total extinction, on eradicating all tradition and all cultural heritage, so that the artistic genius could start creating from level zero, quite soon the artistic genius too would be swept away in the storm of obliteration.
Once Malevich’s works ended up in the museum and acquired the status of masterpiece, they were themselves caught up to the same logic. The problem was not that one artistic fashion had followed another and that Malevich had replaced Raphael. The issue was that Malevich and his collaborators had overturned the very institution of the museum and had destabilized the notion of art. Staring at his paintings hanging on the walls of museums, the artist must have felt at least something of the “sense of doom, so sustained and vivid, that it became insupportable” that Roman Jakobson speaks of as characterizing the avant-garde in the Soviet period.
The third paradox is also a bad joke: Raphael was saved by Stalin. Cultural policy under Stalinism put categorically an end to the avant-garde experiment and placed anew the classical heritage and the Russian cultural tradition center stage. Pushkin and Tolstoy were back in a big way. Malevich’s Suprematist works no longer had any place. In fact, they would not even fall into the category of a picture (kartina), since the latter became a term of Socialist Realism, which described almost exclusively realist, narrative painting.
For a short time, particularly during the period of War Communism, which ended with the New Economic Policy in 1922, the avant-garde was in the ascent in a way that was unparalleled in any country in the West. Practically all the major figures were on board with the revolution and held government positions. The end of the short-lived romance between the regime and the avant-garde artists spelled the end of “the victory of the literal.” In many cases, under Stalinism, deciphering an obscure language meant the difference between life and death. And this deciphering, fretful and anxious, took place in whispers—as among the people in the queue before the Leningrad prison, where the poet Anna Akhmatova found herself in the mid-1930s, waiting to see her imprisoned son (Preface to “Requiem”). The world of the gulag had rendered literal speech not just dangerous but also, in some sense, impossible and obscene.
Buchlon, B. et al., (eds.), Art since 1900, (London, 2004), p.286.
Clemena Antonova is an art historian and research director of the programme The World in Pieces at the IWM.
