Soviet Avant-Garde Research Articles

Composition Methods of the Soviet Architectural Avant-Garde

This paper explores the composition logic of the creativity of the Avant-garde masters and to identify the principles of the composition language of the architecture of modernism.To characterize the composition language of Avant-garde architecture, systemic, historical-genetic and semiotic methods of research are used. Architectural composition is interpreted as an activity that has its own semantic, morphological and syntactic features. In the example of Svoboda Square (the former Dzerzhinsky Square) in Kharkiv, the logical methods of artistic activity and thinking of the architects of the Soviet Avant-garde of the 1920-1930s are studied.At the beginning of the 20th century avant-garde movements were created artificially, consciously, by an act of will, and they strove to dictate their ideas, concepts and principles as universal and general. The architectural language of the Avant-garde is normative, ascetic and rigidly organized. Distinctive features of the artistic movements of the Avant-garde are the deep analyticity of thinking and the normativity of the declared requirements, abstract concepts and symbols. The logical principles of composition are often repeated thanks to stable semantic associations and are reflected in geometric structures and forms. Thus, the methods of compositional thinking of the Avant-garde form a monological system, i.e. they are internally holistic and normative, not allowing alternatives. It was possible to identify and show that the Avant-garde, as a monological language system, is characterized by the following features: internal integrity, self-sufficiency, normativity; stability of figurative language devices; restriction of freedom of artistic expression with the help of a concept, declaration, slogan, clear conceptual system.Researchers and designers should treat the phenomenon under study not as a “closed”, stylistically defined object, but see it as a complex historical process of structure formation based on an even more complex process of development of thinking and activity of architects and builders of a particular period.

СОЦИАЛИСТИЧЕСКИЙ БЫТ В РУКОПИСИ О.А. ВУТКЕ

The architecture of the Soviet avant-garde was one of the main tools of the social engineering. By the end of 1929, several points of view had formed on the problem of organizing a new socialist way of life in a young revolutionary state. This question had been widely discussed by the government representatives, by the society and, first of all, by the specialists, destined to realize in practice the concepts of a new way of life. Among them, the architects played one of the leading roles. The article expands the research understanding of how Soviet specialists of the 1920s understood the idea of a new everyday life and what did they think about the possibility of its implementation. The article also introduces for the first time the manuscript of O.A. Wutke, one of the representatives of the Soviet architectural avant-garde.

Vinicio Paladini and the First Studies of the Soviet Avant-Garde Architecture in the Early 20th Century in Italy

The architecture of the Soviet Avant-garde represents an important part in the history of the world’s architecture. It has become and continues to be a subject of interest for numerous researchers all over the world since the second half of the 20th century. However, was it well-known before, and who was the first to spread that knowledge? This article aims to study the critical legacy of Italian artist and architect Vinicio Paladini and his role as the first disseminator of the ideas of Soviet Avant-garde architecture in Italy in the 1920s with his article “Lo spirito moderno e la nuova architettura nell’U.R.S.S.” This article provides an in-depth analysis of chosen projects and architects as well as attribution of illustrative material alongside the archival research. It establishes the origins of Paladini’s interest in the art and architecture of the USSR, surfaces his perception of the characteristics of Soviet architecture, and highlights the importance of his role in promoting Russian modernism in Italy.

Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Reviewed by: Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman Emily Wilcox Edward Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 353 pp. Hardcover ($140.00), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. In Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture, Edward Tyerman examines works of Soviet literature, performing arts, and film that, in his words, "mediated" China to Soviet audiences during the 1920s. He focuses on the period between 1924 and 1927, a high point of Comintern engagement in Chinese domestic politics before Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist purge in April 1927. Through this material, Tyerman successfully explores larger questions about the history of socialist internationalism and how cross-cultural solidarity is pursued through aesthetic choices in artistic production. The central figure in Tyerman's narrative is Sergei Tretyakov, once a Futurist and a founding member of Left Front of Arts, who "from 1923…emerged as a central figure in the left avant-garde in Moscow" (22) and became one of the leading voices on China in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Tretyakov first visited China in 1920 while fleeing the Japanese occupation of Vladivostok on his way to Siberia. From early 1924, Tretyakov spent 18 months teaching Russian at Peking University, during which time he began writing extensively on China for Soviet readers, publishing more than 130 articles on China over the next four years. After returning to Moscow in 1925, Tretyakov also engaged in creative projects in a variety of other media that sought to bring "new knowledge of China" (23) to the Soviet masses. Works by Tretyakov form the core of Tyerman's analysis, placed in conversation with closely related projects that either present contrasting approaches or contextualize Tretyakov's work within larger discourses. Part of what makes Tretyakov interesting as a central figure in this study is that his work complicates understandings of Soviet representations of China in the 1920s as Orientalist. Discussing two essays by Tretyakov—"Whence and Whither" (1923) and "Loving China" (1925)—in the introduction, Tyerman explains that Tretyakov's self-stated aim was to promote "a new sense of the world" through "the overcoming of exoticism" in representations of China (23–24). Tretyakov openly critiqued stereotyped and fantastical views of China, which he analyzed as a form of commodity fetishism and reification. Tyerman shows how Tretyakov's work employed avant-garde aesthetics to develop an alternative to Orientalist perception: what Tyerman calls an "internationalist aesthetics" of solidarity, equality, and commensurability. According to Tyerman, this internationalist aesthetics also had "a specific political function: connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present" (21; emphasis original). This new approach to China, Tyerman shows, was part of a larger critique of cultural Eurocentrism, which some Soviet writers described as a barrier to the globalization of revolution. It was also, Tyerman demonstrates, part of a new prioritization of the senses and direct bodily experience among the Soviet avant-garde. Building on Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible" (20), Tyerman argues that Tretyakov used an avant-garde emphasis on bodily knowing and the senses—particularly sight and sound—to portray China as a dynamic, contemporary society. Internationalist Aesthetics thus contributes to recent conversations about the senses in literary and cultural studies. [End Page E-9] Internationalist Aesthetics is primarily a work of literary and cultural criticism, and it will appeal most to readers interested in early Soviet literature, performance, and film studies, as well as those interested in China's international representations, Sino-Soviet relations, the global avant-garde, and the politics and aesthetics of socialist internationalism. What I found most stimulating was Tyerman's readings of diverse approaches to internationalist aesthetics. In chapter 1, Tyerman contrasts firsthand accounts of China by two traveling Soviet writers, Tretyakov and Boris Pilnyak, who both espoused internationalism and used "experiments with observation, aural experience, and translation as methods for producing knowledge about China" (71), but with differing results. In Tretyakov's poem "Roar China" (1924), whose vivid blend of "factographic" writing and affective sonic imagery forms a high point of the chapter, we find a rousing acoustic portrayal of China on the...

АЛЬТ В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОМ МУЗЫКАЛЬНОМ ИСКУССТВЕ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ ХХ ВЕКА: СОЧИНЕНИЯ КОМПОЗИТОРОВ МОСКОВСКОГО АВАНГАРДА

In the Russian musical art of the second half of the XX century, compositions for viola were a reflection of the cultural processes of modern society and its thinking practices, a radical turn towards previously unexplored artistic territories. The formation of a new sound environment and its aesthetic settings significantly influenced the formation of traditional and experimental facets of the viola repertoire. Each of them has its own emotional color and a range of images, vividly and powerfully embodied by the technical arsenal of the viola and the variety of its timbre means. Due to the unprecedented rise of the performing arts, the appearance of a whole galaxy of outstanding performers, in the second half of the XX century. There is great interest in the instrument among innovative composers, bright representatives of the Soviet avant-garde. This trend turns out to be, in many ways, a succession. Starting with the music of N.A. Roslavets, continuing in the works of A.M. Volkonsky and further, S.A. Gubaidulina, E.V. Denisov, A.G. Schnittke («Moscow Troika”), asserts the solo status of the viola and its ability to convey subtle nuances of psychological states, the depth of creative intent, to accumulate a space of high mental tension around itself. In concert and symphonic genres, in chamber music, real discoveries occur, which have become symbols of the epoch, its landmark events. Thus, an organic relationship of the composer's generations is established, which is not interrupted to the present day.

Eisenstein's Two Concepts of Montage and the Evolution of the Soviet Avant-Garde in the 1920s-1930s

In the 1920s, montage became one of the most characteristic strategies of avant-garde art, which was based on the understanding of the art work as a complex whole. It suggested the possibility of a recombination of relatively autonomous elements which was based on a rethinking of the general concept of artistic creativity and, in particular, the rejection of the traditional opposition of artistic labour to industrial, “alienated” labour. Sergei Eisenstein’s theory and practice of film editing were vivid manifestations of this approach. Thus, the scene “Kerensky in the Winter Palace” from the film October (1927) can be regarded as a thematization of his concept of montage and its ideological implications: dispersing the single image of the emperor and God, Eisenstein put the heterogeneity and discreteness of signifiers in place of totality. Such a model of montage can be called inductive: the movement proceeds from a particular representation to a general meaning by comparing this representation with others, particular and "non-correlative". At the turn of the 1930s, the concept was criticised within the anti-formalist campaign . However, in 1938, Eisenstein undertook a revision of his theory based on a deductive approach rather than inductive one. Now montage was carried out in the perspective of the initially given signifier: it appeared as a choice of a limited number of signifiers from a potentially infinite set for the best disclosure of the topic - to create its comprehensive representation". Eisenstein found examples of the use of this strategy in all forms of art, including painting and literature: everywhere, the image formation means the selection and comparison of a small number of components and the achievement of the effect of the identity of the particular and the general. At the same time, Eisenstein used the concept of the image (obraz), which played a key role in the aesthetic discussions of the 1930s; he understood the image as montage and extended the montage principle to all types of art, both temporal and spatial. His article “Montage 1938” contains one of the most convincing and articulate theories of the image in the history of aesthetic thought. By undertaking to rehabilitate montage, Eisenstein exceeded the level of the task at hand and defined this strategy as the universal basis of any artistic practice, rooted in the functioning of human consciousness itself.

Musofun: Joseph Schillinger’s Musical Game between American Music, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and Combinatorics

Musofun: Joseph Schillinger’s Musical Game between American Music, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and Combinatorics

КРЕМАТОРИУМ-ХРАМ, ИЛИ КРЕМАЦИЯ В СОВЕТСКОМ ПОХОРОННОМ ОБРЯДЕ 1920-х ГОДОВ

The article discusses the history of the introduction of cremation in the USSR in the context of funeral culture secularization processes. In the Western European context, as in Russia before the revolution, the legalization and spread of cremation was significantly limited by the enormous influence of the Church, which traditionally opposed this new type of burial. In the USSR, after the Decree on the separation of the church from the state, a unique situation developed in which all decisions regarding the disposal of dead bodies were made directly by the civil authorities, based mainly on considerations of sanitation and hygiene in large cities. However, as it turned out when building the first crematorium in Petrograd, the main focus when choosing a project and place of construction was “creating the necessary spiritual mood among the masses,” and the building itself was called the Crematorium-Church. Thus, despite the radical change in the “control over dead bodies” (Walter) and the transition of the monopoly on burial from the Church to a deliberately secular state, the ideologists of cremation in the Soviet Russia continued to tend to a quasi-religious design for the new funeral practice. However, by the second half of the 1920s, when the Donskoy crematorium was being built in Moscow, the attitude to cremation as a technology turned out to be much more important, and the crematorium no longer fit into the quasi-religious, but into the technological framework. References Bartel, G. 1925. Krematsiia [Cremation]. Moscow: MKH. Beliakova, E. 2004. Tserkovnyi sud i problemy ttserkovnoi zhizni [Church Court and the Problems of Church Life]. Moscow: Kul’turnyi tsentr «Dukhovnaia literatura». Black, M. 2015. Smert’ v Berline. Ot Veimarskoi respubliki do razdelennoii Germanii [Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany]. Moscow: NLO. Bremborg, A. 2006. Professionalization without Dead Bodies: The Case of Swedish Funeral Directors. Mortality 11 (3): 270–285. Chukovskii, K.I. 1991. Dnevniki (1901–1929) [Diaries (1901–1929)]. Мoscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Goody, J., and C. Poppi. 1994. Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo and Italian Cemeteries. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36: 146–175. Jupp, P.C. 2006. From Dust to Ashes: Cremation and the British Way of Death. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan-Magomedov, S. 1996–2001. Arhitektura sovetskogo avangarda [Architecture of the Soviet Avantgarde], 2 vols. Moscow: Stroiizdat. Laderman, G. 2003. Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Merridale, C. 2002. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. New York: Viking Penguin Books. Prothero, S.R. 2001. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Shkarovskii, M. 2006. Stroitel’stvo Petrogradskogo (Leningradskogo) krematoriia kak sredstvo bor’by s religiei [Construction of the Petrograd (Leningrad) Crematorium as a Means of Struggling Against Religion]. Klio 3: 158–159. Sloane, D. 1991. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sokolova, A.D. 2018. Novyi mir i staraia smert’: sud’ba kladbishh v sovetskih gorodah 1920–1930-h godov [New World and Old Death: The Fate of Cemeteries in Soviet Cities of the 1920-1930s]. Neprikosnovennyj zapas 1 (117): 74–94. Suzuki, H. 2000. The Price of Death, the Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trompette, P. 2011. Political Exchanges in the French Funeral Market. Management & Organizational History 6 (1): 13–35. Trompette, P. 2013. The Politics of Value in French Funeral Arrangements. Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (4): 373–374. Walter, T. 2005. Three Ways to Arrange a Funeral: Mortuary Variation in the Modern West. Mortality 10 (3): 173–192. Walter, T. 2012. Why Different Countries Manage Death Differently: A Comparative Analysis of Modern Urban Societies. The British Journal of Sociology 63 (1): 123–145. Zudin, I.I., K. Malkovskii, and P. Shalashov. 1929. Melochi zhizni [Little Things of Life]. Leningrad.

1917-1927: Films russes entre l’ancien et le nouveau : genres, récits et corps

There are different forms of continuity and shifts in the Russian film after the October Revolution. On the one hand, films by Alexander Panteleev, Vladimir Gardin, and Czeslaw Sabinski adapted the new post-revolutionary reality to the established genres and narratives of the Russian prerevolutionary cinema, and the stylistic tradition of the Russian film school was continued not only between 1917 and 1924 but also afterward. The new generation of filmmakers, the Soviet Avant-Garde (Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin), was looking for different canon of representation. The article shows the interplay between the tradition and the shifts which could be discovered in common gestural behavior and the mode of its representation produced on the screen between 1924 and 1927.

In Search of <em>Hieroglyphs</em>: Iakov Druskin's Bach ‘Lexicon’ in the Aesthetic Context of the Russian and Soviet Avant-garde

In Search of <em>Hieroglyphs</em>: Iakov Druskin's Bach ‘Lexicon’ in the Aesthetic Context of the Russian and Soviet Avant-garde

Šta se dogodilo sa estetikom i umetnošću u prethodnih 100 godina? - Protivrečnosti i antagonizmi - ratovi teorija!

The subject of my paper is the dynamic and transformational relations between aesthetics and art from 1919 to 2019. The first problem to be discussed will be the relationship between art and politics at the Bauhaus and art institutes of the Soviet avant-garde. Next, I will point to differences in Marxist concepts of socialist realism and critical theory on modern culture and art. I will analyse the relationship between the concept of the autonomy of art, especially painting and minimal art. A comparison will be derived between anti-art (Dada, NEO-Dada) and anti-philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan). I will highlight approaches from analytical meta-aesthetics to the interpretation of Duchamp's readymade, deriving a theory of art in conceptual art. Special attention will be paid to the "theoretical conflicts" between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as poststructuralism. I will conclude my discussion by identifying the "aesthetic condition" in relation to "contemporary art" (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, and appropriative art). The aim of my discussion will be to highlight the character of modern and contemporary aesthetics in relation to art theory, by way of diagrammatic reflection on the binaries, differences, and reconstructions of dialectics.

Tectology of Alexander Bogdanov and Rationality of Architecture of Soviet Avant-Garde

Tectology of Alexander Bogdanov and Rationality of Architecture of Soviet Avant-Garde

Rationalism and Decorativeness in a Search for Social Foundation of Soviet Avant-Garde Architecture

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Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde

From the Space Program to Soviet Video Art: The Film Experiments of Bulat Galeev

The aim of this paper is to highlight the close ties between experiments in Soviet science and art; between the official and the unofficial in Soviet art and culture in the 1960s. I focus on the work of the physicist and filmmaker Bulat Galeev (1940–2009) and the cinematic experiments he conducted under the auspices of the radiomechanics laboratory at the Aviation Institute in Kazan. Inspired by the writings of Aleksandr Skriabin on music, light and synesthesia, Galeev founded the Special Construction Bureau (SKB) Prometei in 1962, where his team engaged in research and experimentation with recorded light and sound, producing films intended officially for Soviet astronauts. I look at Galeev’s early films and his publications on art and science, especially his writing on the early Russian and Soviet Avant-garde, to trace the conceptual and institutional connections that inspired and promoted his work at Prometei. I also look at interviews with Galeev and his later publications to draw attention to the larger community of scientists who created artistic work under the umbrella of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

O rosto do ator: da expressão fotogênica ao reflexo externo

Os usos e as teorias em torno da composição em primeiro plano, que coloca em destaque o rosto do ator: da ideia de fotogenia e da emoção facilmente visível na face atoral, defendida por Louis Delluc e Jean Epstein, passando pelos conceitos de rosto-máscara e rosto-máquina de Lev Kulechov e Mikhail Iampolski, ligados às vanguardas soviéticas dos anos 1920, até a proposta de Jacques Aumont para analisar os closes das atrizes do cinema clássico e moderno, que se dividem em rosto-alma e rosto-tela.

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

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...

The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s, written by Philip Cavendish

The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s, written by Philip Cavendish

Philip Cavendish: The Men with the Movie Camera. The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s

Philip Cavendish: <i>The Men with the Movie Camera. The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s</i>