Vaingurt, Julia Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 333 Polonist and anti-Catholic motivation (p. 192), and secures Ippolit Kirillovich’s ‘Roman preference for civilization’ (p. 193). Reading The Brothers Karamazov in the light of Blake’s study offers a completely new adventure in interpreting Dostoevskii’s work. Slawisches Institut H.-J. Gerigk Heidelberg University Vaingurt, Julia. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. StudiesinRussianLiteratureandTheory.Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. xii + 308 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Ever since Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism first appeared in 1988, the Soviet avant-garde has been implicated in the Stalinization of Russian society. Totalitarianism, according to Groys, was a logical, almost inevitable consequence of the utopian change demanded by radical artists. Now while the Red Queen has her Stalinist side, no-one has ever contended that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a formula for aesthetic dictatorship. Carroll’s final lines suggest that the role of creative invention is self-perpetuation, not social change; Alice’s imaginative gifts will in turn inspire her children ‘with the dream of Wonderland’. Julia Vaingurt’s innovative and exhaustively researched monograph effectively sets out to reclaim Wonderland on behalf of the Russian avant-garde. It enriches current scholarly investigation (by Anindita Banerjee and Katarina Clark, among others) of the unexpected diversity and internationalism of early Soviet culture. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde contends, countering Groys, that Soviet avant-garde aesthetic production of the 1920s was concerned with inspiring wonder for its own sake, or in Vaingurt’s words, with ‘contemplative rather than constructive aims’ (p. 13). Vaingurt uses the Aristotelian concept of techne (craftsmanship as self-sufficient good) to disassociate technology from instrumentality, inventiveness from use-value. Without denying that many artists (for example, most Constructivists) enthusiastically supported cultural engineering, she stresses the mysterious lack of pragmatism or utility in many major 1920s ideas, whether celebrated or obscure, from Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to the floating apartment buildings designed by a Vkhutemas student in 1928. These draft projects were not blueprints for the socialist future: they were, Vaingurt argues, challenges aimed at the transitional present. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde is organized in three sections, each exploring a different aspect of technology. ‘Homo Faber, Home Ludens’ examines physical technology — self-engineering — in the biomechanical SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 334 philosophies of the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev and the director Vsevolod Meierkhol´d. Although the work of both Gastev and Meierkhol´d appeared to uphold Soviet hierarchies of mechanization and rationality, Vaingurt shows how both men blundered into cognitive quandaries of the kind constructed by other, less conformist artists. Gastev propounded psychological ‘selfcolonization ’, where individuals exchanged personal and national identity for a state of trans-national super-being. But this state of being, Vaingurt points out, was by definition too international to remain truly Soviet, making Gastev’s brand of utopia ultimately unacceptable in Stalin’s Russia. A similar paradox problematized Meierkhol´d’s 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold; here, the play’s form contravened its content. Biomechanics required conscious control over physical action and emotion, yet the titular cuckold’s attempt to dominate his wife’s body backfires ludicrously. Meierkhol´d’s staging of the play, Vaingurt argues, thus became a case study in the futility of power, querying both the philosophy behind biomechanics, and utopian Soviet hopes to rationalize physiology and psychology. The book’s central, and most convincing, section on ‘Alternative Technologies’ introduces flawed, unreal and dangerous machines. Here, Vaingurt re-interprets the critiques of utopian politics in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We and Iurii Olesha’s Envy; she examines the subtle privileging of unrealizable structures in the architectural fantasies of Tatlin and Velimir Khlebnikov, and their gradual rejection of machine technology (Tatlin’s glider Letatlin, for instance, evokes the organic shape of a bird’s wings). The final section, ‘The Homeland of Technology’ returns to an earlier theme of American culture as the focus of Russian desire. In two intriguing and informative chapters, Vaingurt analyses American travelogues by Soviet writers from Gor´kii and Maiakovskii to Il´f and Petrov, followed by a fresh look at popular fiction and cinema with...