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

PAGE 77. Detail of CAT. 197

Aleksandr Deineka

In the Shower 

(After the Battle), 1937–42

Oil on canvas, 170 x 233 cm

Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery

grew progressively more organized according to the 

rules of modern technological rationality.

Jünger employs the term “individuelles Erlebnis” 

to denote individual experience; this term recalls a 

general notion of life, since 

Erlebnis 

stems from the 

word 

Leben

, or life. In his text, Jünger argues that tra-

ditional bourgeois ideology holds individual life to be 

precious precisely because of its supposed singular-

ity. For this reason liberals consider the protection 

of individual life as the highest moral and legal ob-

ligation. Now, Jünger argues that the notion of such 

experience is neither valid nor valuable in the world 

of modern technology. However, Jünger does not 

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80

Illustrated page in the book 

Rabochaia Krestianskaia 

Krasnaia Armiia [Workers and 

Peasants Red Army], 1934

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 215]

Aleksandr Deineka

Sevastopol. ‘Dinamo’ Water 

Sports Complex, 1934

Tempera, 62.4 x 43.6 cm

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Moscow

themselves to the same experience no matter who 

their audience might be. Going to the cinema, un-

like going to see live actors perform in the theater, no 

longer off ers an experience of the singular, unique 

event. Modern technologies have something else to 

off er: the promise of immortality, a promise which is 

guaranteed through replicability and reproducibility 

and which is then internalized by the modern indi-

vidual when he serializes his own inner life.

The technological and serial nature of modern 

experience has a certain eff ect on human subjectiv-

ity (which is itself a sum of those experiences); it ren-

ders the human subject exchangeable and replica-

ble. Jünger insists that only such substitutable sub-

jects conditioned by technology have any relevance 

or value in our time; the term he uses to denote this 

type of being is “Gestalt des Arbeiters,” the figure of 

the worker. In order to survive in a technological civi-

lization the individual human being must mimic the 

machine—even the war machine that destroys him. 

Indeed it is this technique of mimicry which func-

tions as a technology of immortality. The machine 

actually exists between life and death; although it is 

dead, it moves and acts as if it were alive. As a result, 

the machine signifies immortality. It is highly symp-

tomatic, for example, that Andy Warhol—much later 

than Jünger, of course—also desired to “become a 

machine,” that he also chose the serial and the re-

producible as routes to immortality. Although the 

prospect of becoming a machine might seem dys-

to have been influenced by Vladimir Tatlin’s so-called 

Maschinenkunst

 (Machine Art), an artistic program 

that was introduced to Germany by both Berlin Da-

daists and Russian constructivist avant-garde figures 

such as El Lissitzky and Il’ia Erenburg. The diff erence 

that distinguishes Jünger’s aesthetic from that of 

the constructivists is really only perceptible at one 

point: Jünger combines constructivist slogans with 

admiration for all archaic and classical cultural forms, 

provided that they also demonstrate a high degree 

of seriality and regularity. He is fascinated not only 

by the world of the military uniform, but also by the 

symbolic universes of medieval Catholicism and 

Greek architecture, for all three of these traditions 

are characterized by their commitment to regularity 

and seriality.

Here the project of immortality is understood not 

as a plan of indefinitely prolonged survival or life after 

death. Rather, to be immortal means to experience in 

the middle of life something impersonal, something 

transcending the borders of one’s own individual 

existence—something that has the status of eternal 

repetition of the same. Already Plato related the con-

cept of immortality to the study of mathematics, es-

pecially geometry. Squares and triangles are immor-

tal because they are repetitive—and our soul touches 

immortality when it contemplates them. However, 

these Platonic technologies of spiritual immortal-

ity can be easily replaced by the analogous tech-

nologies of corporeal immortality. Sport operates

topic or even nightmarish to most, for Jünger, as for 

Warhol, this “becoming-a-machine” was the last and 

only chance to overcome individual death. In this re-

spect, Jünger’s relationship to institutions of cultural 

memory such as the museum and the library is es-

pecially relevant, since, in the context of modernity, 

these institutions are the traditional promises of cor-

poreal immortality. But Jünger is prepared to destroy 

all museums and libraries, or at least to allow their de-

struction. Because of their role in preserving one-of-

a-kind objects which exist beyond the limits of serial 

reproduction, these institutions have in his eyes no 

value for the technological world.

3

 Instead of main-

taining the museum as a space of private aesthetic 

experience, Jünger wants the public to reorient 

its gaze and contemplate the entire technological 

world as an artwork. Like the Russian constructivists 

of the 1920s, Jünger understands the new purpose 

of art as identical with that of technology, namely to 

aesthetically transform the whole world, the whole 

planet according to a single technical, aesthetic and 

political plan. The radical Russian avant-garde artists 

also required the elimination of the traditional muse-

um as a privileged site of art contemplation; together 

with this demand they issued the imperative that the 

industrial be seen as the only relevant art form of the 

time. Jünger may well have been directly influenced 

by this radical aesthetic. In his treatise, he frequently 

makes aff irmative references to the politics of the 

Soviet workers’ state, but he seems at the same time 

Fundación Juan March

Illustrated pages in 

Spartakiada URSS, 1928

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 189]

Double-page fold-out in 

SSSR na stroike

no. 7–8, 1934

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 201]

through the mathematization of the human body. 

Every movement of a professional athlete is math-

ematically simulated—and then literally repeated 

by his or her body. In this sense the athletic bodies 

on Deineka’s paintings can be seen as substitutes of 

the squares and triangles as they were seen on the 

paintings of the Russian avant-garde. In both cases 

the “personal experience” is erased and substituted 

by impersonal mathematics of forms and move-

ments. Sport is interpreted by Deineka as a way to 

transcend the opposition between human body and 

machine. Of course, one can ask oneself—as Jünger 

already did—why one still needs art when sport has 

de facto substituted it. But the art museum can be 

seen not only as a place for the preservation of the 

historical past but also as a collection of projects for 

the future—of bodies and objects that were unique 

in the past and remain unique in the present but can 

and should be serialized in the future. Such an under-

standing of the museum as a collection of models for 

future serialization was developed in Russia already 

before the October Revolution and influenced many 

writers and artists of the late 1920s and early 1930s, 

by giving them the possibility of re-using the past to 

construct the future.

In this respect, the interpretation of the museum 

in the framework of the so-called “philosophy of the 

common task” that was developed by Nikolai Fedo-

rov in the late nineteenth century is especially inter-

esting. This philosophical project may have met with 

little public attention during Fedorov’s lifetime, but it 

had illustrious readers such as Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dos-

toevsky and Vladimir Solov’ev, who were fascinated 

and influenced by Fedorov’s ideas. After the philoso-

pher’s death in 1903 his work gained ever increasing 

currency, although in essence it remained limited to a 

Russian readership. The project of the common task, 

in summary, consists in the creation of the techno-

logical, social and political conditions under which 

it would be possible to resurrect by technological, 

artificial means all the people who have ever lived. As 

Fedorov understood his project it represented a con-

tinuation of the Christian promise of resurrection of 

all the dead at the end of time. The only diff erence is 

that Fedorov no longer believed in the immortality of 

the soul independently of the body, or at least such a 

“bloodless,” “abstract” immortality was not suff icient 

for him. Moreover Fedorov no longer wanted to wait 

passively for the Second Coming of Christ. Despite 

his somewhat archaic language Fedorov was entirely 

FIG. 1. Loriossusanis 

dolupta sperum sinvella 

nonsent velecest 

vidus. Loriossusanis 

dolupta sperum sinvella 

nonsent velecest vidus. 

Loriossusanis dolupta 

sperum sinvella nonsent 

velecest vidus. 

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82

a child of his time, a product of the late nineteenth 

century. Accordingly, he did not believe in the soul 

but in the body. In his view, physical, material exis-

tence is the only possible form of existence. And 

Fedorov believed just as unshakably in technology: 

because everything is material, physical, everything 

is feasible, technically manipulable. Above all, how-

ever, Fedorov believed in the power of social orga-

nization: in that sense he was a socialist through and 

through. For Fedorov, immortality was also a matter 

of finding the right technology and the right social 

organization. All that was required, in his view, to 

commit oneself to the project of the artificial resur-

rection of the dead was simply the decision to do 

so. Once that goal had been established, the means 

would reveal themselves on their own, so to speak.

This project can all too easily be dismissed as uto-

pian or even fantastic. But in this plan Fedorov explic-

itly articulates a question whose answer is still topical 

in our own day. The question is: How can one con-

ceive and develop his or her own immortality if one 

knows with certainty that one is just one ephemeral 

body among other ephemeral bodies, and nothing 

more? Or to put it another way: How can one be im-

mortal if there is no ontological guarantee of immor-

tality? The simplest and most common answer to this 

question recommends that we simply abandon the 

pursuit of immortality, be content with the finiteness 

of our own existence and accept individual death. 

This answer has a fundamental flaw, however: name-

ly, it leaves much about our civilization unexplained. 

For Fedorov, one such unexplained phenomenon is 

the institution of the museum. As Fedorov correctly 

writes, the very existence of the museum contra-

dicts the universally utilitarian, pragmatic spirit of 

the nineteenth century.

4 

That is because the museum 

preserves with great care precisely the useless, su-

perfluous things of the past that no longer have any 

Illustrated page in 

Spartakiada URSS, 1928

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 189]

Aleksandr Deineka

Relay Race, 1947

Bronze, 56 x 99 x 16 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery

Moscow

Aleksandr Deineka

The Race, 1932–33

State Russian Museum 

Saint Petersburg [cat. 196]

practical use “in real life.” The museum does not ac-

cept the death and decline of these things as they 

are accepted “in real life.” Thus the museum is fun-

damentally at odds with progress. Progress consists 

in replacing old things completely with new things. 

The museum, by contrast, is a machine for making 

things last, making them immortal. Because each 

human being is also one body among other bodies, 

one thing among other things, humans can also be 

blessed with the immortality of the museum. For Fe-

dorov, immortality is not a paradise for human souls 

but a museum for living human bodies. The Christian 

immortality of the soul is replaced by the immortality 

of things or of the body in the museum. And Divine 

Grace is replaced by curatorial decisions and the 

technology of museum preservation.

The technical side of the museum played a cru-

cial role for Fedorov, who saw nineteenth-century 

technology as internally divided. In his view modern 

technology served primarily fashion and war—that is, 

finite, mortal life. It is above all in relation to this tech-

nology that one can speak of progress, because it 

changes constantly with time. It also divides human 

generations: every generation has its own technol-

ogy and despises that of its parents. But technology 

also functions as art. Fedorov understands art not 

as a matter of taste or aesthetics. The technology 

of art for Fedorov is the technology of the preserva-

tion or revival of the past. There is no progress in art. 

Art does not wait for a better society of the future—it 

immortalizes the here and now. Art consists in a dif-

ferent technology or rather a diff erent use of tech-

nology that no longer serves finite life but infinite, 

immortal life. In doing so, however, art does not usu-

ally work with the things themselves but with images 

of things. The preserving, redemptive, reviving task 

of art thus ultimately remains unfulfilled. Hence art 

must be understood and used diff erently: it must be 

applied to human beings so that they achieve per-

fection. All of the people who have ever lived must 

rise from the dead as artworks and be preserved in 

museums. Technology as a whole must become the 

technology of art. And the state must become the 

museum of its population. Just as the museum’s ad-

ministration is responsible not only for the general 

holdings of the museum’s collection but also for the 

intact state of every work of art, making certain that 

the individual artworks are subjected to conservation 

when they threaten to decay, the state should bear 

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Aleksandr Deineka

Football Players, 1955

Copper, 225 x 175 cm

State Tretyakov Gallery

Moscow

Double-page fold-out in

SSSR na stroike

no. 7–8, 1934

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 201]

remnants to which Fedorov and many of his followers 

still clung. For Murav’ev the human being was simply 

a specific mixture of particular chemical elements—

just like every other thing in the world. For that reason 

Murav’ev hoped to eliminate the gender diff erence in 

the future and create a non-gendered, purely artificial 

method for producing human beings. The humans 

of the future would thus feel no guilt with respect to 

their dead ancestors: they would owe their existence 

to the same technologically organized state that 

guaranteed the duration of their existence, their im-

mortality. The concept of the museum is united here 

with the promise of replication and serialization.

Of course, Deineka was not a theoretician and 

he never exposed himself as a follower of this or that 

specific teaching of secular immortality. He was ob-

viously not interested in theoretical discourses—and 

he was also too cautious to get involved in theoreti-

cal arguments and polemics. That saved him from 

the role of victim of the ideologically motivated 

campaigns that repeatedly rolled over Soviet art 

during Stalin’s time. However, his work manifests a 

certain analogy with the writings of, let say, Andrei 

Platonov—a famous Russian author of the 1920s and 

1930s who was interested in the impersonal mystics 

of the proletarian body and deeply influenced by Fe-

dorov. In any case, the athletic bodies on Deineka’s 

paintings serve primarily as a promise of their fur-

ther serialization in the communist future—through 

continuous work and training. Here art is seen as a 

project for future, transhistorical, eternal life—in the 

best traditions of the Russian avant-garde and Soviet 

socialist realism.

1. Ernst 

Jünger, 

Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cot-

ta, 1982).

2. Ibid., 

133.

3. Ibid., 

206ff .

4.  See Nikolai Fedorov, “The Museum, its Meaning and Purpose,“ in 

What 

Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task: Selected 

Works, transl. and abrid. Elisabeth Koutaissoff  and Marilyn Minto (Lon-

don: Honeyglen, 1990), reproduced on p. 321 of this volume. Originally 

published in Russian as “Muzei, ego smysl i naznachenie,” in 

Filosofiia 

obshchego dela. Stat’i, mysli i pis’ma N.F. Fedorova, 2 vols., ed. Vladimir 

A. Kozhenikov and Nikolai P. Peterson (Moscow, 1913), 398–473. 

5.  See Walter Benjamin, 

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Re-

producibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap 

Press of Harvard University Press, 2008) [Ed.].

6.  See Valerian Murav’ev, “Die Beherrschung der Zeit als Grundaufgabe der 

Arbeitsorganisation“ [Mastering Time as the Fundamental Goal of the 

Organization of Labor], in

 Die Neue Menschheit, Biopolitische Utopien 

in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts [New Mankind, Biopolitical 

Utopias in Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century], ed. Michael 

Hagemeister and Boris Groys (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 

2005), 425–81. The English version on p. 354 of this volume was trans-

lated from the original Russian published as 

Ovladenie vremenem kak 

osnovaia zadacha organizatsii truda (Moscow: izdanie avtora, 1924).

responsibility for the resurrection and continued life 

of every individual person. The state can no longer 

aff ord to allow individuals to die privately or the dead 

to rest peacefully in their graves. Death’s limits must 

be overcome by the state. 

This totality is achieved by equating art and poli-

tics, life and technology, and state and museum. Fe-

dorov, on the contrary, sought to unite living space 

with museum space, to overcome their heterogene-

ity, which he took to be ideologically motivated rath-

er than anchored ontologically. This sort of overcom-

ing of the boundaries between life and death is not a 

matter of introducing art into life but is rather a radi-

cal museumification of life—a life that can and should 

attain the privilege of immortality in a museum. By 

means of this unification of living space and museum 

space, biopower develops into infinity: it becomes 

the organized technology of eternal life, a technol-

ogy that no longer admits individual death nor re-

signs itself to accept it as its “natural” limit. Such a 

power is, of course, no longer “democratic”: no one 

expects the artworks that are preserved in a museum 

collection to elect democratically the museum cura-

tor who will care for them. As soon as human beings 

become radically modern—that is, as soon as they 

are understood as a body among bodies, a thing 

among things—they have to accept that state-orga-

nized technology will treat them accordingly. This 

acceptance has a crucial precondition, however: the 

explicit goal for a new power must be eternal life here 

on Earth for everyone. 

Naturally, Fedorov continued to describe his proj-

ect in quasi-Christian terms. But it could be easily 

secularized—and that is precisely what happened to 

it after the October Revolution. The dream of a new, 

technologically based immortality attracted to the 

new Soviet power many theoreticians, writers and 

artists who, in fact, had not shown much sympathy 

for Marxism or socialism. Take, for example, Valeriian 

Murav’ev, converted from being a fierce opponent of 

the Bolshevist revolution to being an advocate the 

moment he believed he had discovered in Soviet 

power a promise of the “power over time,” that is, of 

the artificial production of eternity. He too regard-

ed art as a model for politics. He too saw art as the 

only technology that could overcome time. He too 

called for a departure from a purely “symbolic” art 

in favor of using art to turn the whole of society and 

indeed the entire space of the cosmos and all time 

into objects of design. A global, centralist, unified 

political leadership is an indispensable condition to 

solve such a task—and that is the kind of leadership 

he called for. But, far more radically than most other 

authors, Murav’ev was prepared to view the human 

being as an artwork. Murav’ev understood resurrec-

tion as following logically from the process of copy-

ing; and even earlier than Walter Benjamin,

5

 Murav’ev 

observed that there could be no diff erence between 

the “original human being” and his or her copy un-

der the conditions of technological reproducibility.

6

 

Murav’ev thus sought to purify the concept of the hu-

man by freeing it of the metaphysical and religious 

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Aleksandr Deineka 

or the Processual Logic

of the Soviet System

Fredric Jameson

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everything to its own dominant logic, whether that 

be the reduction of everything to the accumulation 

of money (capital) or to the collective organization of 

production (work). But in either case, the subsump-

tion of everything to the logic of the system is a slow 

process over time, and an uneven one in space; and 

in any case the lives of its individual subjects are only 

fitfully governed by it, even though a system tends in 

the very nature of things toward a total assimilation 

(as well as toward its own survival). This is not a judg-

ment on either system (although such assessments 

are not only possible, they are necessary and indeed 

ultimately constitute what we call politics). Rather, 

the insistence on the totalizing drive of such systems 

(as Sartre termed it) is meant to underscore the ex-

istence within each one of unassimilated pockets 

which we may often call “utopian.”

“Utopia” in this sense is rather diff erent from the 

stereotypical and representational usage according 

to which “utopia” is itself just such a system (and as 

its critics often maintain, an equally totalizing one). I 

will not now argue my own opinion that this idea of 

utopia involves a fundamental misunderstanding of 

something which is neither a political formation nor, 

indeed, a representation at all. What I want to argue, 

however, is that even if utopia is used in this way as a 

political program or a revolutionary structure, there 

is another possible use of the term—pioneered by 

Ernst Bloch—in which utopia is grasped as an im-

pulse which, irresistible yet equally often stifled and 

repressed, attempts over and over again to break 

through a surface social life in isolated and ephem-

eral, discontinuous spots of time and space. Yet its 

he purpose of these 

lines is to situate Alek-

sandr Deineka and 

his oeuvre within the 

cultural, political and 

ideological framework 

of his time: socialism 

in post-revolutionary 

Russia, and specifically 

that which developed 

during the 1920s and 

1930s. Rather than 

make a close reading of Deineka’s work—suff iciently 

explored by the other authors contributing to this 

monograph—it is an attempt to place his output 

within the system that fostered it and from which it 

drew inspiration. To this end, from here on we shall 

be making reference, for comparative purposes, to 

what could be defined as the system model anti-

thetical to the Soviet system model during those de-

cades: North American industrial capitalism, as well 

as one of the artists working within the confines of 

the capitalist milieu.