Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
Download 4.48 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- The Biography of the Moon
- The Union “Freedom for Art,” An Appeal
|
The Museum, its Meaning and Purpose 1913
D2 Nikolai Fedorov Our century, proud and egotistical (that is, “civilized” and “cultured”), when wish- ing to express disdain towards a work of art does not know another, more contemp- tuous expression than “send it to the archive, to the museum . . . ” . . . If archiving for storage merits contempt and if deathly renewal does not satisfy the living, then life should remain as it is, not honorable: quiet and death, eternal discord and struggle are identical evils. So long as the museum is only a store- house, thus only a deathly renewal, and life is only struggle, hypocrisy is inevitable. Meanwhile, the larger the storage grows, the more energetic the struggle be- comes, and this increase is beyond all doubt. It is understood that a century that calls itself progressive will be all the more abundant, all the richer with “deposits” to the museum, so that it can be true to its name as a century of progress. Progress, more correctly, the struggle that delivers so many victims to the museum, rob- bing the items put into it of unfraternal activity, could be considered as carrying pain and death, as if every work of art does not have its own author-creator and as if progress does not supplant the living. Yet progress is in fact the creation of inanimate objects, accompanied by the replacement of living people. If progress could be called a real, actual hell, then the museum, if it is a paradise, is still only in the planning stages, since it is a collection in the guise of old things (junk) of the souls of the departed, the dead. But these souls are open only to those who have souls. For a museum, the person is undoubtedly a higher thing, but for industrial civilization and culture, the thing is higher than the person. The museum is the last remnant of the cult of ancestors; it is a very special cult, which, having been banished from religion (as we see among the protestants), is reestablished in the form of the museum. Beyond the junk that is preserved in museums, there is only dust itself, the very remains of the dead, and in the same way beyond the museum there is only the grave, if the museum itself will not transfer the dust into the town or transform the cemetery into the museum. Our century profoundly venerates progress and its full expression in the exhibition, in other words, the struggle and displacement, and, of course, it wishes the eter- nal existence of the displacement that it calls progress. This existence, of course, never becomes suff iciently real to abolish the pain that accompanies the existence of every struggle. Our century could not dare to imagine that progress itself will become at some point the property of history and that this grave, the museum, will become the renewal of the victims of progress at that time when struggle is replaced by agreement. In this century, united by the spirit of renewal, the parties of progressives and conservatives, who have struggled from the start of history, may reconcile. The second contradiction of the contemporary museum consists in the fact that the century, which values only the useful, gathers and stores the useless. Museums function as justification for the nineteenth century; their very existence in this iron age proves that conscience has not yet entirely disappeared. Otherwise, it is just as diff icult to comprehend the preservation in the current materialistic, coarsely utilitarian age, as it is to comprehend the high-value of useless, obsolete things. In preserving things despite their lack of utility, our century, in contradiction to itself, still serves an unknown deity . . . . . . The museum is a collection of all that is obsolete, dead, and useless; but this is the very reason why it is the hope of the century, because its very existence shows that there are no finished matters. This is why the museum consoles all suff erers. The museum is the highest authority for juridical-economic society. For the muse- um, death is not the end but only the beginning; the underground kingdom, which was considered hell, is even a special department of the museum. For the museum there is nothing hopeless, irreparable, i.e., nothing that is impossible to revive and resurrect. The deceased have even been brought to the museum from cemeteries, even from pre-historic ones; but it not only sings and prays like a church, it also works for all that struggle, not just for the dead! Only for those seeking revenge is there no consolation in a museum, as it is not an authority with the power of resur- rection it is powerless to punish—because only life may be resurrected, not death, not taking someone’s life, not murder! The museum is the highest authority that should and may give life back, but not take it away . . . Fundación Juan March 322 . . . it is not enough to confine oneself only to inward remembrance, to the cult of dead. It is necessary that all the living, fraternally united in the ancestral temple or in the museum, turn the blind force of nature into one governed by thought. The living, who are not only the agents of observation, are also an astronomic regular. Only then the unfeeling will not reign, the feeling ones will not be deprived of life, then everything that is felt will be restored. These resurrected generations will re- unite all the worlds and will open an unlimited field for their allied work, and only it will render the inner dissonance needless and impossible . . . The museum is not a collection of things, but a temple of people, whose function is not to gather dead things but to bring life back to the remnants of the past, to resurrect the dead through their works and to serve living agents. Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) sought to obliterate any traces of his own biography, so very little is known about his origins and the first decades of his life. He was probably born in a village to the north of Tambov province in May 1829 (the exact date is unknown) as the extra-marital son of a certain Count Gagarin. When he was christened he was given a pater- nal name and a family name based on his father’s forename (‘Fedor’). Fedorov went to primary school in Shack and secondary school in Tambov. He then studied business at the renowned Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa. He abandoned his studies in 1852 and lived an ascetic, modest life from that point onwards. From 1854 to 1868 he taught history and geography at provincial schools in central Russia. It was supposedly during this period that he developed the basic ideas of his philosophy. In 1868 Fedorov went to Moscow, where he initially survived on occasional employ- ment until he found a post as an assistant at the Chertkov library in 1869. From 1874 to 1898 he served as duty clerk in the reading room and catalogue room at the library of the public Rumiantsev Museum, the largest library in Moscow. He came to be admired there as the “ideal librarian” and “the Socrates of Moscow,” and met a number of leading intellectual figures. Lev Tolstoi, Vladimir Solov’ev, Afanasii Fet and later also Valerii Briusov all took part in Fedorov’s philosophical symposia, which were held regularly at his place of work in the library. After his retirement Fedorov worked at the library of the foreign off ice archives in Moscow. He died in Moscow on December 15, 1903. Fedorov was a believing and entirely selfless Christian. Since he rejected the idea of prop- erty—both material and intellectual—he only owned the most basic necessities. He despised money and gave anything he did not need of his modest salary to the poor. Lev Tolstoi, being a frequent visitor to the Rumiantsev library in the 1880s and 1890s, was an ardent admirer, though Fedorov held the rich and vain count for a hypocrite; he preached brotherly love and the virtues of the simple life while wearing silk underwear beneath his peasants’ garb. Fedorov often changed his place of residence but usually lived in tiny, unfurnished box rooms that were like monks’ cells. His clothing and eating habits were similarly ascetic: he rarely took hot meals. He suppressed his sexual urges and even shunned sleep. If he got tired he would lie down on a chest or a wooden bed with a stack of newspapers for a pillow. He noted down his thoughts in the margins of newspapers and on scraps of paper. The majority of Fedorov’s philosophical writings can probably be dated to the 1890s. Particularly productive periods were spent on a number of long visits to Ashgabat in Turk- menistan, where one of his close confidants, Nikolai Peterson, worked as the district judge. Fedorov published very little of any significance while he was alive, and even then anony- mously or under a pseudonym. It was only after his death that Peterson and the philosopher Vladimir Kozhevnikov gathered together and deciphered his dispersed and partly frag- mentary manuscripts, publishing them under the title Filosofiia obshchego dela (The Phi- losophy of Communal Work) in 1906 and 1913 as a short print run of two extensive volumes that were given to interested parties free of charge. In the 1920s and 1930s a small group of dedicated admirers sought to introduce Fe- dorov’s ideas into public discourse, initially in Moscow, then from Manchurian Harbin. Among those who came to know and study Fedorov’s work were Maxim Gorky, Andrei Pla- tonov and Boris Pasternak. The émigré religious philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov took interest in Fedorov’s work, but so too did the leftist “Eurasians.” Fedorov was rediscovered in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Though initially considered a materialist, he is now projected as the representative of an “active evolutionary, noospheric Christianity” (Svetlana Semenova) and the founder of “Russian cosmism.” His works are available in an annotated five-volume edition (Moscow, 1995–2000). — MH
Originally published in Russian as Nikolai Fedorov, “Muzei, ego smyl i naznacheniie,” in Filosofiia obshego dela. Stat’i, mysli, i pis’ma N.F. Fedorova [The Philosophy of the Common Task. The Essays, Ideas, and Letters of N. F. Fedorov] (Moscow: N.P. Peterson, 1913), vol. 2, pp. 398–473. For a German translation see Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 68–69, 127–232. The version here has been translated by Erika Wolf from Nikolai Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh [Collected Works in Four Volumes] (Moscow: Progress, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 370–430, 491–493. Fragments selected by Michael Hagemeister. The biographical note has been translated by Jonathan Blower from Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 68–69. The Biography of the Moon 1916
D3 Aleksei Kruchenykh The Moon, 1 that antiquated enchantress, which illuminated Paris when he abduct- ed Helen, and which made languorous our young grannies with a Turgenev opus in hands—that moon the new idolaters just cannot forget. One thousand centuries of poetry look at us from the moon! 2 Here it is—an age-old subject for dreamers, pining loners and those hopelessly in love. Here is their blue bare rose. 3 The old liar, tricked them! And she laughed at them as never before! Because there never had been so languorous and drooping a people. Because there appeared decadents 4 with watery legs; people who are world germs 5 from the bottom of the sea and from Petrograd’s morasses—cold incubi and mermaids, lonely virgins and eternal cadavers with fixed, recumbent and laughing stares on their cold faces. And they all together began to yearn after the moon—yes, of course—up to a sore throat, a frog-in-the-throat, catarrh and tears, and up to losing consciousness. Brothers! Sisters!
Howl and bay at the moon!.. (F. Sologub) 6 Or, in another place: . . . You will not understand that I live not in vain, That my doggy exploit is worth something. Since at midnight no one else will bay at the moon So dolefully and passionately as me. March 1914 (F. Sologub) 7 Not without reason, in some provinces the verb sologubit’ means exactly to be engaged in self-fornication. 8 Love and longing—up to mental anguish, to agonizing canine howling, to sa- dism—this is all in order to stop yearning. He grabs a shoe or a hat (Hamsun 9 or Kuzmin)—and begins chewing and kissing it and howling. And then something unusual and unprecedented happened: the immaculate milky visage of Diana 10 —
Swaddled, I lie submissively For a very long time. And a crescent—pitch black— Looks at me through the window. (Z. Gippius) 11 Of course—it turned black and shriveled because of illness. Young and beautiful And hopelessly ill The moon looks down on earth Clearly and nonchalantly. (F. Sologub) 12 Its days are counted and lo—it is now accomplished. The Sickly Moon, the book of the futurians, has been published. 13 There are songs in it about a miserable bloodless louse crawling through the worn-out lining of skies. But even this was for the last time! The moon is pegged out— 14 And from now on it is rejected and scrapped from the poetic use as a useless thing, as a rubbed away toothbrush! Le-liun’, sliun’, pliun’. 15 Fundación Juan March 1. The sun and the moon have been key motifs for poets of all nations down the ages. Thus, for Kruchenykh and his fellow futurist subvertors, these two sources of inspiration for all other poets became the main object of dethronement. He had done with the sun in 1913 in The Victory over the Sun, and now it was the moon’s turn. He was not the first: Marinetti titled his first manifesto (1909) in this fashion: “Uccidiamo il chiaro di Luna” (Let’s Kill the Moonlight!). Even earlier Jules Laforgue compared the moon with the bladder. The Russian futurists pitched in with the book Dokhlaia Luna [The Sickly Moon] (Moscow: Gileia, 1913). The following year, in the book The Roaring Parnassus (Saint Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1914) David Burliuk used such poetic expressions as “The moon begs like an old woman” and “The moon scrawls like a louse through the lining of the skies,” or “Selena, your corpse is float- ing in the blue.” The gist of the futurists’ attitude to the moon was well expressed by Victor Shklovskii in the book about Mayakovsky: “He saw the moon not as a shining path on the surface of the sea. He saw the lunar herring and thought that it would be good to have some bread with this moon.” Thus the moon was supposed to be thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity alongside the sun and Pushkin (“the sun of Russian poetry”) [ES]. 2. An allusion to Napoleon’s words before the battle in Egypt (July 21, 1798): “Soldats, du haut de ces pyramides, quarante siecles vous contemplent” (Soldiers, from the summit of yonder pyramids forty centuries look down upon you) [ES]. 3. The Blue Rose (Golubaia Rosa) was the name of the group of the symbolist artists and sculptors (P. Kuznetsov, N. Sapunov, N. Krymov, M. Sar’ian, A. Matveev et al.) who organized an exhibition under this name in 1907 in Moscow. The group dissolved in 1910. By using “blue bare” (or “bluish naked”— golubaia golaia) Kruchenykh tried to make fun of the refined symbolist aesthetes [ES]. 4. This refers to Russian early symbolists of the 1890s (particularly V. Briusov, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, D. Merezhkovskii and others) who shaped the early modern period in Russia under the label of “Decadents,” an epithet that they connoted positively (see A. H.-L., Der Russische Symbolismus, vol. 1) [AH-L]. 5. This alludes to Pavel Filonov’s book Propeven’ o prorosli mirovoi [Cantata of the World Germs] (Petrograd: Zhuravl’, 1915) [ES]. 6. From the poem “Vysoka Luna Gospodnia” [The God’s Moon is High] in F. Sologub’s Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, 145 [AH-L]. 7.
returning motif of the dog. For more on the “dog” theme, see also Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (Vienna, Leipzig 1903); Russian translation 1909; and by the same author, On Last Things (1904, Vienna 1980). On “author- ship and a dog’s life,” see the explanations by F. Ph. Ingold in Im Namen des Autors [In the Name of the Author], 39–82; on the dog as the preferred subject of animal experiments in early Soviet times see Torsten Rüting, Pavlov
und der neuen Mensch. Diskurse über Disziplinierung in Sowjetrussland [Pavlov and the New Human. Discourses on Discipline in Soviet Russia], Munich 2002, 207ff .: Pavlov’s dog was famously parodied in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Heart of a Dog (written 1925; German translation by Neuwied 1971) [AH-L]. 8. Here Kruchenych evidently knows better than all Russian lexicographers: the word sologubit’ is not present in most detailed Russian vocabularies. Not a single mention is found in the internet either [ES]. 9. An allusion to Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn from Pan (1894) where the protagonist killed his beloved dog [ES]. 10. “The visage of Diana” (or “Dian’s visage” in Ch. Johnston’s translation—Rus. lik Diany) metonymically refers to the moon in Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (I, XLVII) [ES]. 11. From the poem “Cherny serp” [The Black Crescent], 1908. In Z. Gippius, Stikhotvoreniia, 175 [AH-L]. 12. See Fedor Sologub, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 7, 14 [AH-L]. 13.
Dokhlaia luna [The Sickly Moon. The Collected Works of the Only Futurists in the World] (Moscow: Gileia, 1913) [AH-L].
14. “Luna podokhla,” i.e. “The Moon Shrank” —also to be found in the title of the futurist collection Dokhlaia luna [AH-L]. 15. Here Kruchenykh uses his trans-rational language that looks like a mocking (and corrupted) French la lune (pos- sibly he was not good in French genders) and its rhyming counterpart sliun’ (resembles Rus. sliuni, ‘saliva’)—which is cogently followed by pliun’ (‘spit!’ in the imperative mode) [ES]. Originally published in Russian as Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Biografiia luny” in Aleksei Kruchenykh and Ivan Kliun, Tain-
nye poroki akademikov [The Secret Vices of Academics] (Moscow: n. p., 1916). Reprinted in Apokalipsis v russkoi literature (Moscow: MAF, 1923), 29–30. For a German translation see Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 111–12, 140. The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Evgeny Steiner. The notes have been translated by Andrew Davison from Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt a Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 140.
1917
D4 To Arts Workers To artists, poets, writers, musicians, actors, architects, sculptors, critics, archeolo- gists and art historians. AN APPEAL Comrade-citizens. The great Russian revolution calls us to the cause. Join together. Fight for a free art. Do battle for the right to self-determination and self-government. The revolution creates freedom. Without freedom, there is no art. Only in a free democratic republic is democratic art possible. Battle for the immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly, which will estab- lish a democratic republic. Reject the plans to place fetters on freedom. Demand the convocation of an All-Russian Constituent Assembly of Arts Workers based upon universal, equal, direct, secret and proportional voting, without dis- tinction as to sex. The Constituent Assembly of Arts Workers will decide questions about the organization of the artistic life of Russia. The meeting of the Constituent Assembly of Arts Workers is possible only after peace: the majority of comrades are in the trenches. Protest against the establishment of a ministry of arts or another agency, against the seizure of power by individual groups before the convocation of the Constitu- ent Assembly of Arts Workers. Come to an organizational meeting on March 11 at 5:00 (Kazanskii 33, studio), or on Sunday, March 12 at 2:00 in the afternoon, at the Mikhailovskii Theater, to the meeting of workers of the arts. The Union of artistic, theatrical, musical, and poetic societies, exhibitions, publishers, magazines, and newspapers “Freedom for Art.” Information and secretary: V. M. Ermolaeva, Baskov Lane, tel. 54–78. Originally published in Russian as Soiuz ‘Svoboda iskusstvu,’ “Vozzvanie,” Pravda, March 11, 1917. Reprinted in B. Su- ris, “Einige Seiten aus dem künstlerischen Leben Russlands im Jahre 1917,” Iskusstvo 4 (Moscow, 1972), 62–67. For a German translation see Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 40. The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf. Fundación Juan March 324 For Revolution. An Appeal 1917
D5 Comrades! The Petrograd art workers—artists, poets, writers, actors and musicians—have or- ganized the society “For Revolution” with a view to helping revolutionary parties and organizations in the propagation of revolutionary ideas by means of art. Comrades, if you want your manifestations, posters and banners to be noticed, get the assistance of artists. If you want your proclamations and appeals to be louder and more persuasive, get the assistance of poets and writers. Apply for assistance to the society “For Revolution.” The society is divided into party sections. More requests and orders! Work free of charge! Questions and orders by telephone 54–78 (address yourself to comrade Ermolaeva) or 47–41 (comrade Zdanevich, from 11 am to 1 pm). Organizational bureau: O. Brik, L. Bruni, V. Ermolaeva, Il. Zdanevich, Z. Lasson- Spriova, M. Le-Dantiu, A. Lur’e, N. Liobavina, V. Mayakovsky, Vs. Meierkhol’d, V. Tatlin, S. Tolstaia, V. Shklovskii Originally published in Russian as “Na revoliutsiiu,” Russkaia volia, March 28, 1917. Reprinted in B. Suris, “Einige Seiten aus dem künstlerischen Leben Ruβlands im Jahre 1917,” Iskusstvo 4 (Moscow, 1972), 62–67. For a German translation see Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 40–41. The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf. Download 4.48 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|