Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat

396

splendid sports hall of VKhUTEMAS. Writers and actors came to these evenings, 

Lunacharskii came. 

I remember one evening, when a broad front of “left” poets performed. One after 

another, they left the tribune to the whistling of the audience. Mayakovsky stood 

up last, with less sureness than usual, and was received stormily, actively and 

enthusiastically. Among the leftists and the “leftists,” Vladimir Vladimirovich was 

a counterbalance to those who made a show of the extravagance of inherently 

empty form; he told us of the vital and necessary. 

He was a person with a surprisingly accurate grasp of the most typical and the 

necessary. He found the form of a word just for today, and years later, it unre-

lentingly resounds, and how it resounds! The orientation to class, to the masses 

helped him and gave power even to his experimental quests to fill [his works] with 

living and fighting content. 

Mayakovsky is diff icult to illustrate. The failure of the majority of illustrations is 

probably explained by our primitive understanding of illustration: snatch a chunk 

of text and try to retell it completely in images. It seems that the illustration of 

Mayakovsky should rest upon the entire mass of images that saturate his poetry. 

Disappointingly, few have illustrated him. This rests upon the conscience of artists 

like an unpaid debt.  

It is wild to expect a special tenderness towards courteous museum art from a 

person who repeats:

 I 

abhor

                           every kind of deathliness!

 I 

adore

                           every kind of life!

2

From a person, creating a new literary epoch, which

with the rough tongue

                                           of his posters, 

has licked away consumptives’ spittle

3

 

He looked at me and the artist Nisskii with such unconcealed disgust and with 

such compassion, when we decorated with roses a silk armchair in the style of 

“Loius XIV” in the theater prop workshop. 

However, it is unfortunate that the “leftists” who came out against fine art did so 

with reference to Mayakovsky. Even if his direct utterances about the “Amnesty 

of Rembrandt” were forgotten, knowing how he loved art, the plastic taste he 

possessed, how realistically he represented life, you see the illegitimate nature of 

these references. 

Mayakovsky understood better than all that you cannot replace painting with 

photography, and he fought for the poster, for the sharp magazine drawing. An 

enemy of eclecticism, always finding new solutions, he was a leader in the estab-

lishment of a new, Soviet revolutionary form of poster, of the satirical drawing, of 

the art of new things. The opposition of other leftists and their disparaging treat-

ment of “handicraft forms of figuration”—of drawing and caricature—were alien 

to Vladimir Vladimirovich. In our joint work on the magazines 

Smena and Daesh’, 

he with his laconic comments did not once suggest to me a correct figurative 

solution.

Mayakovsky felt the coming day especially sharply. It is no coincidence that he 

supported me in an argument with one of the leftists who had become attached 

to him, who insisted upon the hegemony of the photo, when I stated that it is only 

possible to photograph an already completed building, but that it is impossible to 

represent a future quarter with a Leica. 

* * *

In 1921 at the circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard, preparations were made for the pro-

duction of 

Mystery-Bouff e, conceived for a broad public with the participation of 

the audience itself. Along with other comrades, I hung out posters in the foyer 

and corridors according to the plan of Mayakovsky. As far back as then he spoke 

with us, with students, about future art, about such forms of spectacle wherein all 

forms of art—from acting to architecture to painting—would create an eff ective, 

organic, solid spectacle. 

Later he wrote short advertising quatrains for posters on commercial kiosks, 

dreaming of the creation of an ensemble of architecture with the powerful “orna-

ment” of slogans. Mayakovsky was inseparable from the city. He loved the lively 

workers’ city. He aff irmed the first beginnings of the new socialist everyday life, 

the birth of new things, their connections and synthesis. 

* * *

He pursued his aims with wonderful persistence. At a single mention of his name, 

many literally became bitchy. At the opening of his anniversary exhibition 

20 

Years of Work, the galaxy of leading literary figures was brightly absent. In the first 

hour this somewhat dismayed the modest, in essence, poetic tribune, but it was 

compensated for a hundredfold that same evening, when he appeared before the 

youth, arriving to stormily honor their beloved poet. In opposition to Parnassus, 

Mayakovsky himself built a magazine, thoroughly investigated the technicalities 

of book production to the fine points, sat in the print shop and set type. He was 

one of the great artist-printers. His collected works 

13 Years of Work was printed 

in the VKhUTEMAS print shop. 

I made a cover for him. It turned out as an ordinary cover in a red border with 

marginal scenes. Vladimir Vladimirovich examined and rejected it. He said that he 

needed a cover that was possible to see and clearly read from far away. He made 

it himself. Three words stood laconically on a bright smooth ground. The strong 

type, composition and scale created the desired eff ect. This was a lesson for me, 

from which visually flowed that the beauty of a cover should be contained in the 

very type, and not in the frilly bits surrounding it. I sought to use this lesson in my 

paintings, I strove to leave in them only the most essential; I sought a simple and 

clear form, rejecting a heap of details. 

* * *

Mayakovsky passed through Europe and America like a person of a new forma-

tion, like a representative of the Land of the Soviets. Everywhere he was the same 

as in Moscow. Wandering along the streets of New York he met people, who re-

membered and loved him. Listening to the poetry of an American worker, who 

recited under a loud pseudonym with the prefix de, he advised him in a com-

radely way to recite under his own last name and not to forget that he was first 

and foremost a worker.

4

 

Mayakovsky was a harmonically whole person of exceptional integrity and the 

most charming modesty and sensitivity. Not once did I witness him embarrassed 

by human tactlessness. 

A humble acting extra told me with excitement about how on the day of his birth-

day, awkward and clearing his throat, Vladimir Vladimirovich delivered flowers 

and congratulated him. To our shame, in the midst of our aff airs we seldom find 

time for such personal displays of attention. 

Although for him, his aff airs were not small. He was able to organize his work and 

distinguished himself with purely American eff iciency. He was the master of his 

word. When he said he would—that meant he would, when he said he would do 

something—that meant he did it precisely and at the appointed time. 

It was very good to work with him. His preciseness and discipline helped, he al-

lotted much attention to the organization of matters. Appointing someone to a 

designated area of work, he trusted them to complete it. Often he showed the 

most sensitivity to and faith in the most inconspicuous member of a collective. 

Debating and sharply arguing, he, like few others, considered criticism from out-

side, amplifying it with nagging self-criticism. He honestly confessed to his mis-

takes. 

I remember a happy incident. Students in the balconied dormitory at Miasnitskaia 

Street 21 made plans to wait for Vladimir Vladimirovich, who often dropped in to 

visit his friend Aseev. 

Just as the large figure of Mayakovsky stooped to pass through the gate and start-

ed walking on the asphalt, from a dozen balconies [the following] burst forth to 

the tune of “Iablochka”:

5

 

A hundred and forty suns in one sunset blazed,

and summer rolled into July . . . 

6

The flabbergasted Mayakovsky dove into Aseev’s apartment: the day before he 

had maintained that his things were impossible to set to a catchy tune. He himself 

merrily remembered this occasion. 

I saw Mayakovsky for the first time in 1920—twenty years ago. Now this is already 

history. Young people learn about these years in books and museums. 

* * *

As if it were now, I remember the dormitory, the cold, the works of abstractionists 

on the walls and suddenly the news: “Lenin has arrived.”

We could not all fit into the room with Vladimir Il’ich. Even I wasn’t able to el-

bow my way through, but the discussion was passed from one to the other in 

the neighboring corridors. To Vladimir Il’ich’s question “What do you read?” we 

declaimed the poetry of Mayakovsky, we proved how splendid a poet he was. 

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1.  This is an excerpt from Mayakovsky’s poem “At the Top of My Voice,” which was written shortly before his suicide 

in 1930. This translation is by George Reavey from Vladimir Mayakovsky, 

The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, ed. 

Patirica Blake (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960): 233. 

2.  These are the final lines of Mayakovsky’s poem “Jubliee” (1924), which marked the 125th anniversary of the birth 

of the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. This translation is by Herbert Marshall from 

Mayakovsky (London: Dennis 

Dobson, 1965): 247 [Trans.].

3.  This repeats part of the excerpt from Mayakovsky’s poem “At the Top of My Voice” that appears at the very start of 

this essay [Trans.]. 

4.  The poet had evidently adopted a French aristocratic pseudonym that went against his working class identity 

[Trans.].

5.  “Iablochka” [The Little Apple] is a lively Russian folk tune from the period of the Russian civil war that is often 

performed with balalaika and to which popular verses were commonly adapted [Trans.]. 

6.  These are the opening lines from the poem “ An Extraordinary Adventure which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a 

Summer Cottage” (1920). Translation here by George Reavey, ibid, 137 [Trans.].

Originally published in Russian as Aleksandr Deineka, “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” 

Iskusstvo 3 (1940), 50–52. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Art and Sport 

1946

D60

In the spring, when grass begins to sprout in the thawed meadows of parks, the 

trees become heavy from end to end, covering themselves with lacquered leaves, 

and angled formations of geese stretch northward in the heavenly expanses, I 

once again see the Earth young and new.

I love the new landscapes with green rectangular football grounds, with black and 

red running tracks, with the semicircular and stately majesty of the facades of our 

stadiums. I love the bright colors of t-shirts, which have strict antique simplicity 

and very contemporary plasticity. 

My work in art is quite broad in form and subject, but at every stage I discover in it 

a craving for sport, health, plasticity. This little note is a meditation on sport in art.

Sport is an enthralling spectacle. The word “indiff erent” is inapplicable to it. I take 

pleasure in the beauty of free movement, the impetuosity of runners, the elastic-

ity of divers, the picturesque nature of the blue sky and the green field . . . 

How ringing and noisy the quiet forest becomes as a pack of runners jogs through 

a glade! I love the spaces of winter with cold snows, wintry expanses, and the 

figures of gliding skiers. When divers are spread above it, water begins to boil, 

throwing high into the air thousands of rainbow sprinkles. The Moscow streets 

become absolutely extraordinary on the day of a relay race. Sport contains within 

itself all shades of sensation. It is lyrical, in the major key. In it there is much op-

timism. In it is the start of the heroic. In 1942 I saw love for life and youth, when 

kids played hockey on a small Moscow pond, amid the bombed out buildings. 

This love was among my friends when they prowled on skis at the enemy’s rear. 

Sport has one fabulous ability; it fits into the diverse framework of art. It is inex-

haustible as a theme, because it is democratic and popular. Sport fits into the 

monumental forms of fresco as easily as into the page of a magazine. 

Park sculptures on the theme of sport are the most plastic. But even a small table-

top statuette gladdens us. The other day I fired in a kiln the sculpture of a boxer 

in majolica. The luster of the glaze unexpectedly gave a deep sweaty eff ect to the 

body tone, and I once again saw that for my art, sport harbors heaps of success, 

beautiful possibilities, just as it reveals in each new match, competitions for mil-

lions of participants and viewers of all ages. I am happy that I live in a time when 

the novelty of things and events gives birth to new forms, entirely necessary for 

the artist. 

Originally published in Russian as Aleksandr Deineka, “Iskusstvo i sport,” 

Ogonek 28 (1946).

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

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398

About Modernity in Art 

1956

D61

The civil war, mud trenches, transports with those dying of typhus could not kill 

the love for art in the people. On the blizzard-stricken squares a wind blew the 

first panels set up as monuments to the workers, scientists, to the ideas of labor 

and freedom. Famine. People under horrible stress fight for their rights and for 

their lives. 

1920. It is cold in the Moscow art studios. They [students] eat millet and dried 

fish. Youth debates over the destiny of the art of tomorrow. They accept the most 

astounding “isms” on faith. In classes, they sprinkle sawdust and sand on colored 

canvases, paint squares and circles, bend shapes of rusty iron of various sizes, 

which convey nothing and are not good for anything. A paradox? The painted 

portraits of ladies in ball gowns, the lyric poetry of lordly mansions were the para-

dox of that time. Artists also drew posters, designed spectacles and people’s festi-

vals, and illustrated new books. Art found a general language with the revolution. 

This language gave it the feeling of modernity, of fresh originality. The tempo and 

forms found a unity. The people wanted a new life. That is why in the most diff icult 

periods of my life I tried to dream about better times, to paint pictures with the 

sun. There was never enough sun in those years. Even then we understood that 

real art is not a pleasure but a necessity. I remember those far away years, think-

ing about the connection of art with the history of the land that gave birth to it, 

because art does not exist outside of its time, even if it interprets an event of the 

past. A number of great pictures were born in Soviet reality, but it is impossible 

to feel them without a connection to this reality. Soviet painting has traversed a 

great path. This was the path in the struggle for the realist picture. A number of 

pictures became persuasive landmarks in the establishment of this method. For 

the artists with group convictions, the meaning of such pictures could be con-

tentious, but in the plan of art of our time we could not manage without them, 

just as French art could not expunge Courbet, Manet and Matisse. Traditions are 

very steadfast, therefore several of our artists stayed, perhaps more than neces-

sary, with the painting traditions of Konstantin Korovin, Vladimir Makovskii, just 

as in the West several still dwell in the captivity of cubism and the influence of 

Cézanne. On the other hand, the great painters Ivanov and Surikov, unfortunately, 

did not suff iciently inspire the new generation of painters. Realism by its very 

nature is social. It is not necessary to reflect for long in order to understand with 

whom Repin sympathized when he created his 

Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a 

Letter to the Turkish Sultan. We see the sympathies of the artist Ioganson when 

we see his picture 

At an Old Urals Factory. Are there not similar examples among 

the Americans Thomas Hart Benton and Jack London? Realism defines an active 

attitude towards art. 

Struggle for a socialist theme is typical for Soviet artists. During the Great Patriotic 

War painting acquired a special emphasis in this struggle. In the post-war period, 

especially in the first years, tendencies that did not seem to conduct to the de-

velopment of socialist realism were emphasized, and today it is possible to speak

about them as being minor. The tendency to parade pomposity, in its base elimi-

nated in painting of monumental grandeur and democratic simplicity, did not 

create canvases that were great in spirit, as neither did the lessons of morally 

edifying everyday life-ism of other artists. Not revealing the deep nature of phe-

nomena, such paintings remained under the rubric of the documentation of an 

individual case . . . 

It is diff icult but still necessary to prove  that the paths to realist painting were 

not easy. In the 1920s, the artist Malevich quickly exhausted the possibilities of 

his method, having reached the representation of a black square on a canvas. 

Was suprematism something new in the practice of art? No, geometric décor is a 

phenomenon that is rather widespread among various peoples in various stages 

of their development. It is as though he reminded Le Corbusier about the sim-

plicity of possible architectural forms. The most modern searching in sculpture 

in the West cannot deny kinship with the ancient sculpture of Polynesia . . . The 

revolution was too contemporary and dynamic to use archaic statics and eclectic 

aesthetics. Hence in these years the fighting poster was eff ective in the most var-

ied forms; it was established by the artists Moor, Cheremnykh and Mayakovsky. 

The first attempts on the path to the creation of monumental propaganda ap-

peared, the first sculptures in this plan. During these years the artist Grekov made 

a number of pictures that asserted the truth about the Red Army, the heroics of 

the First Cavalry army. With these pictures, painting found its rightful place in 

the young proletarian-peasant government. Petrov-Vodkin achieved a highpoint 

in painting with his picture 

The Death of the Commissar. Artists persistently seek 

the figurative plasticity of the revolution. In the nation, even old words acquire dif-

ferent meaning. Art acquires a diff erent significance. The pre-revolutionary theme 

in Ioganson’s 

At an Old Urals Factory begins to resonate with our time. In Iablons-

kaia’s 

Bread, the essence of labor finds painterly expression at an enormous scale. 

New landscapes have appeared, in terms of painterly quality and compositional 

exploration, but also in terms of the novelty of the Rybinsk Sea’s very existence.

1

 

Artists strive for painterly simplicity and compositional expressiveness in portraits 

of Soviet people—in Riazhskii’s 

Woman Representative, Nesterov’s The Academic 

I. P. Pavlov and Korin’s Father and Son. These portraits are enough to see the 

diff erence of painterly searches in each instance, the particular methods of dis-

closing the spiritual essence of a person, their relation to complex class conflict. 

Art in various painting forms interprets contemporary social problems, the new 

and progressive in everyday life. S. Gerasimov shows the typical and comprehen-

sible in a free painterly manner in his 

Collective Farm Festival, Pimenov does so in 

his women-workers, the wonderful artist Konchalovskii does it in his magnificent 

still-lives and flowers. My painting 

Mother appeared as the result of broad com-

positional generalization. Despite the individual style of diff erent artists, they are 

linked by something general, which always accompanies a singular goal. 

Contemporary Soviet painting is not only pictures in frames. Soviet society in-

vests much labor into building cities, social buildings and schools. Everywhere 

frescoes and mosaics are being created in conjunction with architecture. Many 

theaters, train stations and metro stations have been painted, the work of Korin, 

myself and many other predominantly young artists, enthusiasts for monumental 

types of painting. As on the paths in search of painterly problems everywhere 

and always, there is much that is weak, but there are genuine successes and it 

is comforting that these successes are being experienced as great art and not 

fashion. 

A person gets to know the world through what is new and through new qualities. 

But in all stages of knowledge he is accompanied by art—the area of human ac-

tivity that answers our demand for the beautiful. And when this beautiful thing is 

accessible to many, then it will be more and more dear to people. A person lives 

by pictorial conceptions—by real fantasy. Without this it would be diff icult to en-

visage our tomorrow, time would become featureless. 

A miraculous property is granted to art—to resurrect the past, to foretell the fu-

ture. Pictures give a new meaning to our existence, enriching our cultural world. 

Fine art is not only an area of vision. The visible leads us to the area of reflection. 

Something is built in the person, which forces him to respect all that is human in 

art. When surrounded by reflections of his existence, he appears more majestic 

and noble. The fanaticism of the Puritans and Muslims, with which they perse-

cuted images, displays precisely their deep esteem of the power of art. Just as 

a book that is never read, the art that is not seen has no value. One of the most 

frightful catastrophes for a person is social uselessness. One of the tragedies of 

abstract art is that it is carried beyond the frame of human need. It is diff icult to ar-

gue about art, although quarrels go on continuously. Entire discussions sprang up 

at my exhibition. The comment book showed diverse opinions. Alongside words 

of great cordiality was the laconic note: “A horrible artist, a horrible person.” An 

inquisitiveness and interest in the nature of the Soviet person. Once in Paris I 

had the chance to confirm the fact that we know French art very well, but that 

they don’t know ours. Yet we are not easily off ended. In the Museum of Modern 

Art in New York, I was witness to the bewilderment of simple viewers before the 

paintings of the surrealists. The majority of quarrels about “left” painting do not 

grow beyond the limits of professional circles, but the art of Veronese, Velazquez, 

Surikov and Manet has outgrown the borders of its motherland and become an 

international treasure. They contain the beauty that does not require geographic 

understanding. The persuasiveness of this art is proved by time. The mechanism 

of non-objective art does not have contact even with the closest artists. One can 

and should think in real abstractions, but abstract art is far too individual a pursuit. 

Remote from the bounds of the human psyche, it is impossible to understand, to 

feel. It denies all thought, there is no real necessity in it. In America, I saw apart-

ments built in the constructivist style, which were remodeled from old ruins. Here 

style became a fashion. Yet we agree that it is impossible to build belief according 

to a fashion magazine. Commercial artists make fashion, but artists who consider 

themselves pure also make it. Fashion is too ephemeral a phenomenon on which 

to build life foundations. It was never the basis of our art and of the spiritual life of 

the people. Once the futurists walked around in yellow knitted women’s jackets. 

They and their painting, as it seemed to them, shocked the petty bourgeois. Now 

the futurists walk around in elegant suits, they live in trendy apartments, read the 

New York Times, only they don’t know what their painting will be like in a month 

or who will buy it. I felt this especially when a young American woman asked me 

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to paint her portrait. Pointing to a Braque hanging on the wall, I asked her “Some-

thing in this manner?” She answered, “No, simply my face.”

It is diff icult to indicate ultimate boundaries—how an artwork is conceived and 

where it ends its existence. It is hard to explain why one picture becomes great 

and another does not, because the conception of a work is entirely mysterious, 

like the fate of an individual; otherwise it would be possible to create talents and 

masterpieces according to plan, according to precise regulations. The person is 

a social being, and this defines in him a communal sense of rhythm. If he is not 

by all means born for happiness, all the same he has the right to his harmonious 

development, and if he is not flexible, then this feeling is clear to him. If he justi-

fies bad deeds with reason, this does not mean that his conscience will stay in 

harmony. 

Great art is born as a result of great human feeling—it could be joy but it could 

also be anger.

For the feeling of cowardice cannot become the stimulus for a great form. A per-

son has natural immunity to all that is abnormal, sick; however, sometimes he not 

only succumbs to it but even cultivates it. 

Understandably, it is possible to exist throughout life without art, but this would 

be a blind life.

Life comes with prosperity, but the songs of the simple people are more beautiful 

than those of the rich. If a person refuses food, then why should he refuse himself 

art? It is possible to paint a fabric in a dull color for technical reasons, but it is 

impossible to say that this fabric is beautiful. The feeling of color is democratic 

in its nature, for that reason a person loves art in many forms, in great and small 

forms, which touch the best parts of his nature, through which it is easier for him 

to understand both the near and the distant. 

1.  The Rybinsk “Sea” is a manmade reservoir on the Volga River. It was the largest artificial body of water in the world 

at the time of its construction during the 1930s and 1940s [Trans.]. 

Originally published in Russian as Aleksandr Deineka, “O sovremennosti v iskusstve,” 

Zhizn’, iskusstvo, vremia (1956). 

reprinted in V. P. Sysoev, 

Aleksandr Deineka. Zhizn’, iskusstvo, vremia: literaturno-khudozhestvennoe nasledie (Lenin-

grad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1974) 274–77.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.