“The Soviet woman is a construct that came to life and went” – Weekend – Kommersant

The publishing house of the Garage Museum publishes a book by art critic Nadezhda Plungyan, The Birth of a Soviet Woman, about the representation of the feminine in the art of the 1920s–1930s. Igor Gulin spoke with Nadezhda Plungyan about the connection between art history and gender history, Soviet surrealism and the new gender era that is opening today.

There is a cliché in art history: the early Soviet period is the era of forced defeminization; male roles are imposed on women, and female roles are taken away from them. Where did this myth come from?

Russian art history is still largely determined by the late Soviet and post-Soviet outlook, in which the longing for the pre-revolutionary era, some imaginary normality of the late 19th century, gradually grew. Hence the indignation at “leveling”, the mixing of male and female roles, etc. On the other hand, there is the view of Western authors – and it strangely rhymes with the late Soviet one. This is a kind of tourist fetishization of the Soviet: what strange strong women, these half-humans, half-robots! I think it’s time to start discussing revolutionary processes in more complex categories, including the study of various gender strategies, their transformations and mixtures.

In your method of analysis, you combine gender theory and traditional art criticism. How is this union organized?

I think that gender is also a form. It is both a form of social existence and a plastic form that is visible in the modes of representation. We can say that gender is an interface, that set of visual and behavioral strategies that a person generalizes based on the experience of his family, historical and social experience. It is precisely because of the visual nature of gender that art is a very valuable source of information about these strategies. In general, Soviet gender games have long been described in science rather one-sidedly. Everyone was interested in exposure, the desire to find something that the Soviet person hides about himself – social origin, nationality, religious or political views. This is a bright postmodernist attitude – to “deal” with modernism in all its manifestations, but we see that its nerve is now lost. Why should a modern person prove the imperfection of the 20th century or laugh at the “uncouthness” of proletarian art, at the poverty of the early industrial era? Gender theory is not a weapon of the Cold War, but one of the analytical tools necessary for a three-dimensional, diverse view of society. In every decade of Soviet history, there is a large palette of identities, far surpassing the image of the “man-robot”. And it’s interesting to understand.

Can you briefly describe this palette?

Everyone knows that in the 1920s the main plot was the construction of a new man and three female incarnations came to the fore: a revolutionary, a peasant woman, a worker. A little later, they are replaced by a hardworking shock mother, in the past a pilot or a party activist. People like to call the NEP the golden age of Soviet equality, but I’m more interested in the topic of urban gender in the 1930s, the private life of people in the post-constructivist era. It was in the 1930s that, in addition to the ceremonial types of shock girls, deep, almost documentary images of hard female labor appeared. For example, the painting by Vasily Kostyanitsyn “Bricklaying Striker” (1932) or the poetic self-portrait of the “collective farmer” Praskovya Important (1930). Next to them, the ranks of “superfluous” women of the early Soviet era are growing – from satire on midwives to self-portraits of Gulag prisoners and types of “walking” women of the social bottom, which Fyodor Bogorodsky wrote. Finally, one cannot help but recall the presence of the “former”: these are female identities that were considered archaic, as they were preserved from the time of Russian modernity. In this row, the famous painting by Pavel Korin “Schemohegumenya” (1935) and self-portraits of the “Amazon of the Silver Age” Elizaveta Kruglikova, known for her elegant men’s suits. Kruglikova is known as the mistress of the largest European salon of the beginning of the century and then as a silhouette master, teacher and founder of the Leningrad monotype school. But it is not customary in art history to describe the relationship between her artistic work and a very bold (for the 1930s–1940s) gender performance, similar to the strategies of the symbolists who remained in the USSR, for example, those close to her, Mikhail Kuzmin or Andrei Bely. All of them, without a doubt, were Soviet queers, that is, people whose gender strategy openly questioned the norms of their time, fell out of them, went against them. And these are not isolated “episodes”, but a significant part of the social picture of the thirties.

Can this search for new gender roles in early Soviet art be linked to the history of the Soviet women’s movement?

I trace the relationship between art and, let’s say, Soviet feminism through the main women’s magazines – Rabotnitsa and Krestyanka. The idea of ​​​​how the main characters of Soviet society should look like changed depending on the fluctuations in the political course (the opening and closing of women’s departments, and so on). But parallel to poster representations, one can always trace the development of living life in more intimate works. In this sense, I’m not so much interested in Soviet feminism in the 1930s – I think this is the work of sociologists and its history as a whole has been written – but the view of gender reform from the perspective of art. My book is about the history of the birth and self-knowledge of a new subject, the Soviet woman. After all, she, like Venus from sea foam, was born from the Marxist doctrine. This is a construct that came to life and went, began to realize itself.

How does this process of self-knowledge of a woman in the painting of the 1930s work?

I really love Malevich’s painting “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” in 1934. Many art historians believe that in the 1930s Malevich, like Filonov, tried to adapt to socialist realism. I see it differently. The main characters of his “Second Peasant Cycle” are vulnerable white body-clouds. Many of them hold their hand to their hearts or extend it in a rhetorical gesture – as if they were just born, seeing the world for the first time and want to utter a word, but do not yet know how. Such is this portrait of his wife – no longer a dummy made of iron sheets of Suprematist material, but a new person of the late 1930s, endowed with sadness, surprise, and expectation. That strange colored costume she is dressed in is a bright armor of a social contract, hiding inside a biological and metaphysical subject. You can also see how women artists paint themselves in the 1930s. They, too, can no longer ignore the Soviet gender contract, but most of them were born before the revolution. They are looking for a balance between what they were given initially and what they took from Soviet modernism. Unlike the Soviet ceremonial picture, which has such a quality as installation, completeness, here we see an incomplete image of a Soviet person, an image-reflection, mobile and changeable, somewhere eclectic. I think there is a kind of surreal subject here. The work of the European surrealists of the 1930s also possesses such mobility.

Is it possible to find this surrealism in more mainstream art?

Of course. Here, for example, is a portrait of the tractor driver Pasha Angelina, painted by Ilya Mashkov at one of the major congresses. This is an interesting character: Angelina is an over-the-top tractor driver who did not leave the village, but could no longer resist in the form of an ordinary village woman, collective farmer or peasant woman. There was an incredible amount of gossip about her – like that she was supposedly Stalin’s mistress – and this is directly related to her special social place. It can be said that she entered into marriage with the party, completely – including gender – devoted herself to it and became a kind of mysterious asexual subject. This is exactly how Mashkov portrayed her – as a new person, devoid of gender, a kind of antique statue. City workers looked completely different, remember the beautiful textile workers Dusya and Marusya Vinogradovs.

What happens in the representation of gender after the 1930s?

In short, there is a monumentalization of all processes. In the 1920s and 1930s, the gender reform had a fundamental novelty: a new worker, a peasant, a new child, a new woman of the Soviet world. And in the 1950s, all these images were reaffirmed, but at a more simplified level. If we look at the posters or sculptures of those years, then instead of multidimensionality we will see the very dense binary of male and female that the researchers of late Stalinism love so much – all these erased, plastically oaky park sculptures, generalized types of the “hegemonic class”. In fact, subjectivity is leaving these images, they become unified.

But already in the 1960s, a traumatized, wounded gender of a severe style appeared – Korzhev, Popkov. Is this an innovation?

How to say. Korzhev, Popkov and others – they are also monumental. How can you tell a painting from the 1920s or 1930s from a painting from the 1960s? The first will be a lot of reliable details. In the post-war picture there will be only allegories, types; painting of the 1960s is in many ways an encyclopedia of these types. It is no coincidence that all these artists made frescoes and mosaics. They internalized the idea that the big picture is always a parade of identities and had little interest in documentary portrayals of the Soviet man with his real character. In the 1970s, the form becomes thinner, its variability becomes less important. It can be said that in this era, the gender difference is just a ripple on the surface of a stable, unshakable order, once brutal types turn into eternal boys and girls, a kind of wreath of wild flowers at the foot of the stone coat of arms of the USSR.

What should we do now with the legacy of the Soviet gender?

It seems to me that both dominant branches in the handling of historical material are no longer working – neither neo-modern aestheticization, nor post-modern deconstruction. Both are extremely conservative, completely backwards. But in order to look forward, we still need the Soviet legacy. It can help us understand how our contemporary gender is constructed. After all, many things that we do are unconsciously borrowed from somewhere. The sources of these strategies can be rethought and turned into a political position. This is how something really interesting can begin – the creation of new forms.

Do you think that it is no longer worth focusing on the modernist experience?

Yes, modernism has been exhausted, but if we talk about the past, for me the guiding star is symbolism, since it was the symbolists who stood at the origins of all modernist transformations. Symbolism has not died, it has become an inconspicuous substrate for the modernist twentieth century. Now that the frame has been removed, this substrate is visible and you can work with it.

How do symbolist tactics differ from modernist tactics for you?

Symbolism works with clots – unconscious, mystical, semantic. You can take Petrov-Vodkin, Malevich, Filonov – they all acted as symbolists when they invented their big styles. Schools, ready-made modernist systems, then developed from these styles. If symbolism is the first discovery, then modernism is always a program. Instead of clots and black holes, he works with rhythm, contrast, with distances between forms, between social phenomena. In politics, too, modernism arises in the process of systematizing symbolist achievements: in a sense, Lenin is also a symbolist, he turned the historical board and invented a non-existent and impossible state, and modernists have been building their structures around his cooling body for decades. Now we are entering a situation close to what the Symbolists saw around them: the era has ended – and with it the great style of the twentieth century; modernism has crumbled into pieces, and we need to invent new forms again, because we can no longer build the Soviet metro, paint conceptualist paintings, and even more so be the bearers of these groaning, falling apart gender identities. I think now is the time to rediscover the existential nature of gender, otherwise we won’t get far.

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