Shevelenko, Irina Modernizm kak arkhaizm. Natsionalizm i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 549 Shevelenko,Irina.Modernizmkakarkhaizm.Natsionalizmipoiskimodernistskoi estetiki v Rossii. Nauchnaia biblioteka, 163. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2017. 334 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. R450.00. ‘ModernismasArchaism:NationalismandtheQuestforaModernistAesthetic in Russia’ is the product of more than ten years’ concentrated study and takes into account not only Russian primary sources but also much American and some English, German, French and Scandinavian scholarly considerations of various aspects of the subject; or, perhaps, as the title and subtitle suggest, the subjects, for it is ‘nationalism’, as it was variously understood in the early twentieth century, which dominates much of this book. Irina Shevelenko sets the scene with a detailed picture of the increasing importance of the concept of the nation state and, later, of the imperial ethos, throughout Europe during the period preceding the turn of the century and the run-up to the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 which is the main focus of her study. From this, she proceeds to a meticulous overview of modernist debate from the rejection of governmentsponsored populist nationalism (narodnost´) which, in the World of Art group, for instance, coexisted and sometimes overlapped with interest in the largely merchant-class and Old Believer sponsored patronage of folk art and crafts and nostalgia for the splendour of the ‘Westernized’ culture of the St Petersburg eighteenth century. Inevitably, the aesthetic and political debate touches on the religious (Orthodox) roots of pre-Petrine culture, although the element of Russian Nietzscheanism, the cult of the Superman and ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, so important for later interest in the archaic, is not taken into consideration. This omission somewhat undermines the introduction of Viacheslav Ivanov’s Solov´evian synthesis of the two cultures and ideal of the artist as healer of the social divide, a creator of myth who returns to ancient roots. It was, after all, Ivanov who introduced, albeit theoretically, the idea of a choral, cathartic art which would viscerally involve the reader or audience. Shevelenko, however, chooses to trace his direct influence on the poet Gorodetskii and Aleksei Remizov, writer of unique and learnedly archaic fairy tales, and to demonstrate, most interestingly, a direct link between these less well-known figures and, on the one hand, the futurists (notably Khlebnikov) with their strange combination of ethnography and neologism and, on the other, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Stravinskii and Prokof´ev, Larionov and Goncharova. Here, we see also the explosion of the pan-Slavic and Scythian ideas which provided an alternative, more exotic and gloriously barbaric past to the folklore and artefacts of Kievan and Muscovite Rus´. In the last chapter, Shevelenko returns to the visual arts, the consideration of which began with the art and craft revival and the heavy ‘old Russia’ stylizations of Vasnetsov, and gives an interesting account of the rediscovery of the medieval Russian icon as high art, culminating in the Moscow Exhibition of 1913, welcomed at SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 550 the time as pre-Petrine Russia’s entrance ticket to the club of civilized medieval and pre-Renaissance Europe. These rich and complex developments are mapped out with admirable clarity through literary polemics, manifestoes, critical articles and surveys. For once the summary in English at the end of the book (pp. 328–33), usually an embellishment any academic Russian publication could well do without, is admirably cogent and faultlessly expressed. Indeed, one of the few reservations I have about this book is the number of transliterated Anglo-American words which make it heavy reading in the Russian. Exchange and loanwords are, of course, endemic to the growth and flexibility of language, but I would have preferred fewer of these: ‘instiutsional´no’. ‘idiosinkraticheskii’, ‘subordinirovannaia pozitsia’, ‘intentsia’, ‘reinkarnatsia’, ‘transformatsiia’ — to cite but a few — which all sit uneasily in the Slavonic context. This contributes to a sense of disappointment more difficult to formulate: the research is impeccable but the excitement and beauty of the rediscovery of an archaic modernist aesthetic is not conveyed. The profoundly poetic and universal idea that the many may speak for the one, that the individual can embody the people, so essential to ‘choir’ and ‘myth’, does not mix happily with the kind of discourse appropriate to the discussion...