New books about the Russian avant-garde – Weekend
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Sarah Pankenier Veld “The Speechlessness of the Avant-Garde. Aesthetics of infantilism in the Russian avant-garde”
Publishing house Academic Studies Press – Bibliorossika
Translation Irina Znaesheva
The child – along with the savage, the animal, the machine – was one of the main imaginary figures of the avant-garde. A bearer of a different vision and a different speech, renewing and nullifying, allowing the reinvention of all art on new grounds (it was not for nothing that Malevich called his “Black Square” a “royal baby”), the child is a being outside the system and outside morality, living on the border of language and speechlessness, ignorant and therefore, it knows much more than is available to adults. This fantasy inspired poets, artists, critics and philosophers at the beginning of the last century. In her monograph, American Slavist Sarah Pankenier Veld explores the infantile aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde from its inception to its decline. Her narrative is built around four pillar figures. This is Mikhail Larionov – the leader of Russian primitivism, who collected naive children’s drawings and was inspired by them in his work, the inventor of zaumi Alexei Kruchenykh, who actively collaborated with children, the theorist of formalism Viktor Shklovsky, who also turned to children’s vision in his search for defamiliarization, and, finally, Daniil Kharms , for whom the illogic of children’s consciousness was a source of catastrophic criticism of the world – including the avant-garde utopia.
Mikhail Biryukov “Mstera Ark. From the history of artistic life of the 1920s”
Publishing house MSI “Garage”
The book by art historian Mikhail Biryukov is a story about one curious and almost forgotten episode of early Soviet artistic life. The setting here is Mstera, a town in the Vladimir region, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was the largest center of icon painting, and in Soviet times was famous for the traditions of various kinds of folk crafts – lacquer miniatures, lace embroidery, etc. However, between both, there was a decade-long a revolutionary experiment – the Mstera art commune, sometimes called the “rural academy” – an educational institution in which the ideas and practices of the avant-garde were synthesized with ancient traditions. Its founder and main ideologist was Fyodor Modorov, a man of seemingly rather conservative tastes, a member of the AHRR, but Olga Rozanova, Nikolai Punin, Alexander Rodchenko and other leaders of the early Soviet avant-garde took an active part in the life of Mstera. Biryukov carefully reconstructs all aspects of the life of the commune: economic, political and artistic itself, and traces in detail the biographies of its teachers and students. Overall, The Ark of Mstera is a solid, slightly old-fashioned study with lots of wonderful illustrations.
Cornelia Ichin “The Shimmering Worlds of Alexander Vvedensky”
European University Press
In the history of the Russian poetic avant-garde, Alexander Vvedensky is probably the main final figure. It has always been difficult for researchers to understand how to work with it. Vvedensky, with his radical criticism of poetic language, resists literary methods; any stylistic or semantic analysis bounces off his poems. Serbian philologist Cornelia Icin is among the few authors who take up this challenge. Her “Shimmering Worlds” is a book of heterogeneous composition. This is a monograph compiled from articles from different years and different genres: analyzes of individual texts and cross-cutting themes of Vvedensky, an excursion into his children’s creativity and a review of the animated film adaptation of the poem “Potets”. However, Ichin has an attitude that unites these disparate texts. She interprets Vvedensky as a poet-philosopher who develops large concepts: death, meaning, event, body, God. Accordingly, Wittgenstein and Einstein, Aristotle and Pavel Florensky are useful in analysis. In many ways, this approach works, but something still eludes. Vvedensky was as much an anti-thinker as he was an anti-poet. To grasp his thought, one must go through nonsense, and a completely deep, but too rational analysis is often lost along the way.
Pavel Arsenyev “Literature of fact and the project of literary positivism in the Soviet Union of the 1920s”
New Literary Review
The study of the poet and philologist Pavel Arsenyev differs from typical books on avant-garde art in its theoretical ambition. This massive volume in itself is part of a larger project that Arsenyev calls “the scientific and technical history of literature.” The task here is to rewrite it as a history not of authors, styles, techniques, but as a history of writing techniques in their direct connection with extraliterary techniques: the camera, telescope, movie camera, etc. – techniques of seeing, recording and transforming the visible world. The main character is a poet, playwright, writer and theorist Sergei Tretyakov. Until now, he remained a little in the shadow of his more charismatic friends in the Left Front of the Arts. Here Tretyakov becomes the central figure of the avant-garde media revolution, the inventor of a new unit of cultural action – fact. This category is much deeper than it seems: a fact is not just documentation, but the act of translating social reality into literature, the act of their mutual influence on each other. Around Tretyakov there are many interlocutors, inspirers and hidden students: Shklovsky, Brik, Benjamin, Brecht and – the most unexpected of the characters in the book – Varlam Shalamov, whose camp prose Arsenyev analyzes as a catastrophic postscript to the avant-garde model of the writer-gatherer of facts.
“Poems by Golubchik-Gostov”
Publishing house Babel
The poet, who wrote under the curious pseudonym Golubchik-Gostov, published two small collections in 1922 and 1924. These books went unnoticed, except for one anonymous, devastating review, after which their author disappeared forever from the world of Soviet culture. Literary historians knew nothing about him until a couple of years ago, thanks to relatives, it turned out that his name was Lev Mikhailovich Goldenov (at birth – Leiba Khaimovich Goldinov), that he was from Constantinograd, was shell-shocked in the First World War, spent some time in German captivity Having returned, he studied in Saratov, and then in Petrograd, during the 1930s he chaotically changed jobs and died during the blockade. Apparently, he no longer studied literature. This book is the first commented edition of Golubchik-Gostov’s small legacy. It is worth saying: this is not an act of archival fetishism, as happens with the publications of forgotten third-tier writers. Golubchik-Gostov is indeed an interesting poet. His belonging to the revolutionary avant-garde is obvious both in aesthetics and in themes (popular unrest, rallies, dedications to leaders, promises of communism), and in direct greetings to Mayakovsky and Gastev. But from this completely eccentric line, Golubchik-Gostov deviates towards even greater eccentricity. His poems are like uncontrollable convulsions of language, strange explosions of meaning and sound. The slight awkwardness and naivety in them cannot be distinguished from a subtle parody of the work of older avant-garde artists. He tastes dozens of techniques and immediately discards them. Therefore, his texts contain a lot of promises, including poetics that would appear much later – the Oberiuts, the late Mandelstam, the Lianozovites (its compiler, poet and philologist Evgeniy Soshkin writes about this in the preface to the collection). What his writing lacks is a thoughtful style, system, position. There is a talent with which its owner, it seems, does not quite understand what to do, and therefore, apparently, quickly gives up this activity.
“There’s no point in calculating! / And I hear, calculate, / Two women are talking / In their sanity. / Poppy dots on red… / They need to calculate, / How to make a feeling. / Why should I / Calculate? / Can someone like that be sensitive? / I didn’t finish. / Nothing has changed. / Has the / Golden herd of horses changed / That rushed by, tramping and looking back / At the thoughts in me?”
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