Freud, Tatlin, and the Tower: How Soviet Psychoanalysts Might Have Interpreted the Monument to the Third International

Abstract

The first translations of Sigmund Freud's texts into Russian appeared in the early 1900s, and by the 1920s all important works were available; in Soviet Russia they stimulated wide discussion of various medical, pedagogical, and social problems as well as of developments in creative art. Alexei Kurbanovsky argues that “Freudianism” would have seemed very tempting to those early Soviet theorists who believed that they must appropriate the relevant discoveries of western psychology and adopt them for their own revolutionary ends: creating the “new communist man.” The application of Freudian techniques to the analysis of some classical Russian writers as well as painters is documented in writings from the 1920s by Ivan Ermakov; the artistic tendencies of the Russian avant-garde were quite often viewed as reflecting the latest achievements of science and technology. So aspiring Soviet critics might well have attempted psychoanalytical “readings“ of innovatory artifacts. Vladimir Tatlin stands as one of their possible model cases. Kurbanovsky argues that Tatlin's famous spiral tower could be psychoanalytically interpreted in reference to the Oedipal “refutation of father-figures.” Such an interpretation seems in tune with the general cultural climate where other phenomena (such as the October revolution) were seen as having a “hidden, Freudian aspect.” Examining the psychoanalytical underpinnings of the theory of Soviet avant-garde allows us to more fully appreciate its historical and cultural significance.