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

334

We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of widespread artistic plenitude, but these 

diff icult times are coming to an end. My predictions in this article of the revolution’s 

increased influence on art, the revolution’s increased demands on artists, and the 

increased coordination between the two will shortly begin to be justified.

For biography see p. 331.

The first half of this text, “Revoliutsiia i iskusstvo,” was written in October 1920 and pub-

lished in 

Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie; the second half was the result of an inter-

view given in Petrograd on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution 

and was published in 

Krasnaia gazeta. The text, of course, reflects certain topical events, 

not least the enactment of Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda (based substantially 

on the measures of the revolutionary government in France in the early 1790s—hence 

the reference to the French Revolution) and the renewal of the private art market in 1921. 

Lunacharskii’s personal artistic tastes are also evident in the text, e.g., his love of music and 

the theater.

— JB

1.   General Military Instruction (Vsevobuch) was an inclusive title for all bodies concerned with military training of 

workers. By a decree of 1918, all Soviet citizens, from schoolchildren to the middle-aged, were to receive military 

instruction.

2.   The Second Congress of the Third International opened in Petrograd on June 19, 1920, and June 27 was declared 

a public holiday in honor of it; a parade and procession with representatives of Vsevobuch took place in Moscow.

3.   On June 19, 1920, a mass dramatization, 

Toward the World Commune, took place at the former Stock Exchange in 

Petrograd; Natan Al’tman was the artistic designer.

4.  

The Twelve, written in 1918, was perhaps Aleksandr Blok’s greatest poetic achievement. Ostensibly it was a de-

scription of the revolutionary force represented by twelve Red Guards.

5.   Lunacharskii was present at Vladimir Mayakovsky’s first private reading of the play 

Misteriia-buff  on September 27, 

1918. He was impressed with the work and promoted its production at the Theater of Musical Drama in November 

of that year. It was taken off  after three days and was revived only with Vselovod Meierkhol’d’s production of it in 

May 1921.

6.   The New Economic Policy (NEP) period (1921

–28) was marked by a partial return to a capitalist economic system.

7.   This simple yet spacious monument in Petrograd to the victims of the February Revolution was designed by Lev 

Rudnev in 1917

–19 and was landscaped later by Ivan Fomin.

8.   In the early 1920s several designs were submitted for a Moscow Palace of Labor—among them one by the Vesnin 

brothers—but none was executed.

First part originally published in Russian as “Revoliutsiia i iskusstvo,” 

Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie 1 (Moscow, 

1920): 9; second part in 

Krasnaia gazeta 252 (Moscow, November 5, 1922). Both pieces appeared in a collection of 

Lunacharskii’s articles on art, 

Iskusstvo i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1924), 33–40, from which this translation is made. They 

are reprinted in Anatolii Lunacharskii, 

Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, ed. I. Anisimov et al. (Moscow, 1963–67), 

vol. 7, 294–99. 

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Revolution and Art,” in 

Russian Art 

of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: 

Thames and Hudson, 1988), 190–96. 

Our Task

1920

D15

David Shterenberg

The artistic culture of Soviet Russia is developing in breadth and depth despite 

the diff icult conditions of the present time. The dead Academy of Art, which both 

during tsarism and in the subsequent Kerenskii

1

 period consisted of talentless art 

off icials, remained apart from artistic life and neither reflected nor influenced our 

country’s art. Despite the vast reserves of creative strength inherent in the Russian 

people, art education in Russia and the connected development of artistic industry 

were benumbed by this handful of individuals who took advantage of the Acad-

emy’s celebrated name. And for Russian art to be emancipated, it required only 

the removal of prestige and power from this group of people. This was done by the 

decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars at the beginning of the revolution, and 

the business of art education rapidly moved forward.

2

 In the field of art, the slogan 

of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was equality of all artistic trends. 

The elimination of all forms of coercion in art at the time of the revolution was the 

best possible decision, and now we can already see a definite result. Western art 

had experienced this process long ago and, despite the existence there of off icial 

and dead academies, had embarked on a new life, thanks to public support. It is 

characteristic that the off icial museums of Paris do not have such valuable col-

lections of Western art as our Shchukin and Morozov museums

3

 or similar collec-

tions in Germany. The same thing happened with us: the best young artists and the 

young Russian art were valued abroad, whereas our museum workers recognized 

them only after their death, living artists not being represented in museums.

New ideas in the field of school teaching also remained outside the off icial aca-

demic schools and found refuge in the private schools of certain young artists. 

Paris owes its extremely rich development in the arts mainly to such schools, a 

development that made it the only city in Europe that virtually dictates new laws 

to the whole of Europe and exerts an immense influence on the art of all nations. 

England, Germany and America, despite the high standard of their material cul-

ture, hardly possess their own art in the broad sense of the word. But Russia, thanks 

to the peculiar position it occupies in relation to the East and thanks to all the un-

tapped resources of its culture, as yet in an embryonic state, has its own definite 

path on which it has only just embarked. That is why the new art schools, the state 

free studios and the art institutes that draw most of their students from among the 

workers and peasants, have developed with extraordinary speed. The new artistic 

forces that introduced new methods of teaching into schools have yielded quite 

distinctive results that will now—at the end of the civil war and at the beginning of 

our life of labor and communist construction—provide us with new instructors and 

new artists for our artistic-industry schools and enterprises.

Of the fifty schools in our section, almost half are working very well, despite the 

cold and hunger and neediness of the students; if our transport and Russia’s gen-

eral economic situation can right themselves even just for a while, then our schools 

will very shortly be in a splendid position. At the same time the new body of Russian 

artists will diff er significantly from the old one because—and there is no use hiding 

it—nowhere is competition so developed as among artists; there are substantial 

grounds to assume that the state free studios will provide us with new artists linked 

together by greater solidarity—which significantly lightens the task of the cultural 

construction of the arts. The students’ trying position during the civil war cleared 

their ranks of untalented groups. Only those remained who live for art and who can-

not exist without it, such as the students of the First and Second State Free Studios 

in Moscow: during the present fuel crisis they used to go on foot into the woods, 

chop down firewood, and bring it back themselves on sledges so as to heat the stu-

dios where they could devote themselves to artistic work. These hardened work-

ers are already serving the provinces now—in fact, the demands of various local 

Soviets and cultural organizations are growing, and we are having to take the best 

students out of our schools in order to send them to diff erent places as instructors. 

At present the section’s task consists mainly of putting the social security of our 

schools on a proper footing. From towns everywhere we receive letters from young 

artists, almost always talented (judging by models and drawings), with requests to 

be sent to our art schools, but not being able to provide for their subsistence, the 

section has to advise them to wait a little longer. I think that our present task is to 

give food allowances to all students, not only of art schools, but also of all schools 

of higher education throughout the Republic. This is essential, as essential as it was 

to create the Red Army. It must not be postponed because it will be the same Red 

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Army—of Culture. Similarly, specialists who work with them in schools of higher 

education should be given food allowances; only in this way will we rehabilitate 

our industry by enriching it with the cultural element of the workers and peasants.

These new forces will give us the chance to carry out those mass art creations that 

the state now needs. Objectives of an agitational and decorative nature (it is essen-

tial to transform the whole face of our cities and the furnishings of our buildings) 

are creating that basis without which no art can exist. 

The old art (museum art) is dying. The new art is being born from the new forms of 

our social reality. 

We must create it and will create it.

David Shterenberg: Born Zhitomir, 1881; died Moscow, 1948. 1903: entered the Bundist Par-

ty; 1906: went to Paris; 1912: began to exhibit regularly at the Salon d’Automne; contact with 

Guillaume Apollinaire and many others of the French avant-garde, especially of the Café 

Rotonde; 1917: returned to Russia; 1918–21: head of the Visual Arts Section of the People’s 

Commissariat of Enlightenment (IZO Narkompros); held special responsibility for the pres-

ervation and restoration of works of art in Moscow and Petrograd; 1919: leading member of 

Komfut; 1920: professor at the Higher Arts and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS); 1921: head 

of the Art Department in the Chief Administration for Professional Education (Glavprofobr) 

within Narkompros; 1922: helped to organize the Russian art exhibition in Berlin at the Van 

Diemen Gallery;

4

 1925: founding member of the Society of Easel Painters (OST); 1927: one-

man show in Moscow;

5

 1930 and after: active as a book illustrator, especially of children’s 

literature.

The text of this piece, “Nasha zadacha,” is from 

Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’. This journal 

was published by the Art Section of Narkompros. Like many other expatriates who returned 

from Western Europe to Russia in 1917, Shterenberg welcomed the revolution enthusiasti-

cally and felt that, among other things, it would make art education universally accessible. 

As an artist and an art teacher in his own right, Shterenberg was particularly interested in 

the problems of art instruction and was closely involved in the reorganization of the coun-

try’s art schools. His conception of the “new art” was, however, a very indefinite one, and 

like many of his colleagues he failed to determine what a “proletarian art” should stand for 

or even whether it should exist.

Shterenberg’s own painting was representational, although influenced by cubism—a 

fact that did not detract from its originality—and his agit-decorations for Petrograd in 1918 

were highly successful. In the 1920s Shterenberg was particularly interested in “object-

ness,” or the essential matter of each separate object, and hence painted isolated objects 

on a single plane, often resorting to primitive forms and emphatic colors. But there was, of 

course, little sociopolitical significance in such aesthetic works. Lunacharskii thought very 

highly of Shterenberg both as an artist and as an administrator, and their friendship, which 

had begun in the Paris days, ended only with Lunacharskii’s death.

— JB

1.   Aleksandr Kerenskii was head of the provisional government during the revolutionary period from July to Novem-

ber 1917. His moderate socialism did not satisfy the demands of the Bolsheviks, and he emigrated when they came 

to power.

2.   In the summer of 1918, the Petrograd Academy was abolished, and its teaching faculty was dismissed; on October 

10, Pegoskhum was opened and was replaced in turn by Svomas in 1919; on February 2, 1921, the Academy was 

reinstated.

3.   In 1918, both collections were nationalized and became the First and Second Museums of New Western Painting; 

in 1923 both were amalgamated into a single Museum of New Western Painting; in the early 1930s many of the 

museum’s works were transferred to the Hermitage in Leningrad, and in 1948 all the holdings were distributed 

between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The idea of establishing a museum of modern paint-

ing was not new in Russia: as early as 1909, a group of artists and critics including Ivan Bilibin, Nikolai Rerikh and 

Vselovod Meierkhol’d had favored such a proposal. See Filippov, “Galleriia sovremennykh russkikh khudozhnikov” 

[A Gallery of Modern Russian Artists] in V mire iskusstv no. 4/6 (Kiev, 1909): 45; the Union of Youth had also sup-

ported the idea—see Shkolnik, “Muzei sovremennoi russkoi zhivopisi” [A Museum of Modern Russian Painting] in 

Soiuz molodezhi (Union of Youth) exh. cat. no. 1 (Saint Petersburg, Riga and Moscow, 1912), 18–20.

4.   See 

Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, with an introduction by David Shterenberg (Berlin: Galerie van Diemen, 

1922); David Shterenberg, “Die künstlerischen Situation im Russland,” 

Das Kunstblatt 11 (Berlin, November 1922): 

485–92.

5.  

D.P. Shterenberg. Vystavka kartin, exh. cat. (Moscow, 1927).

Originally published in Russian as David Shterenberg, “Nasha zadacha,” 

Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ 2 (January-Feb-

ruary 1920): 5–6.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Our Task,” in 

Russian Art of the 

Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Thames 

and Hudson, 1988), 186–90. 

The Radio of the Future 

1921

D16

Velimir Khlebnikov

1

The Radio of the Future—the central tree of our consciousness—will inaugurate 

new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind.

2

The main Radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like 

strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and 

the familiar word “Danger,” since the least disruption of Radio operations would 

produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of conscious-

ness.

Radio is becoming the spiritual sun of the country, a great wizard and sorcerer.

Let us try to imagine Radio’s main station: in the air a spider’s web of lines, a storm 

cloud of lightning bolts, some subsiding, some flaring up anew, crisscrossing the 

building from one end to the other. A bright blue ball of spherical lightning hanging 

in midair like a timid bird, guy wires stretched out at a slant.

From this point on Planet Earth, every day, like the flight of birds in springtime, a 

flock of news departs, news from the life of the spirit.

In this stream of lightning birds the spirit will prevail over force, good counsel over 

threats.

The activities of artists who work with the pen and brush, the discoveries of art-

ists who work with ideas (Mechnikov, Einstein) will instantly transport mankind to 

unknown shores.

Advice on day-to-day matters will alternate with lectures by those who dwell upon 

the snowy heights of the human spirit. The crests of waves in the sea of human 

knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local Radio station, to be 

projected that very day as letters onto the dark pages of enormous books, higher 

than houses, that stand in the center of each town, slowly turning their own pages.

Radio Reading-Walls

These books of the streets will be known as Radio Reading-Walls! Their giant dimen-

sions frame the settlements and carry out the tasks of all mankind.

Radio has solved a problem that the church itself was unable to solve and has thus 

become as necessary to each settlement as a school is, or a library.

The problem of celebrating the communion of humanity’s one soul, one daily spiri-

tual wave that washes over the entire country every twenty-four hours, saturating 

it with a flood of scientific and artistic news—that problem has been solved by 

Radio using lightning as its tool. On the great illuminated books in each town Radio 

today has printed a story by a favorite writer, an essay on the fractional exponents 

of space, a description of airplane flights, and news about neighboring countries. 

Everyone can read whatever he chooses. This one book, identical across the entire 

country, stands in the center of every small town, always surrounded by a ring of 

readers, a carefully composed silent Reading-Wall in every settlement.

But now in black type, news of an enormous scientific discovery appears on the 

screens; a certain chemist, famous within the narrow circle of his followers, has 

discovered a method for producing meat and bread out of widely available types 

of clay.

A crowd gathers, wondering what will happen next.

Earthquakes, fires, disasters, the events of each twenty-four-hour period will be 

printed out on the Radio books. The whole country will be covered with Radio 

stations.

Radioauditoriums

Surges of lightning are picked up and transmitted to the metal mouth of an au-

to-speaker, which converts them into amplified sound, into singing and human 

speech.

The entire settlement has gathered around to listen. The metal trumpet mouth 

loudly carries the news of the day, the activities of the government, weather infor-

mation, events from the exciting life of the capital cities.

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336

The eff ect will be like a giant of some kind reading a gigantic journal out loud. But 

it is only this metal town crier, only the metal mouth of the auto-speaker; gravely 

and distinctly it announces the morning news, beamed to this settlement from the 

signal tower of the main Radio station.

But now what follows? Where has this great stream of sound come from, this inun-

dation of the whole country in supernatural singing, in the sound of beating wings, 

this broad silver stream full of whistlings and clangor and marvelous mad bells 

surging from somewhere we are not, mingling with children’s voices singing and 

the sound of wings?

Over the center of every town in the country these voices pour down, a silver show-

er of sound. Amazing silver bells mixed with whistlings surge down from above. 

Are these perhaps the voices of heaven, spirits flying low over the farmhouse roof?

No . . .  

The Mussorgsky of the future is giving a coast-to-coast concert of his work, using 

the Radio apparatus to create a vast concert hall stretching from Vladivostok to the 

Baltic, beneath the blue dome of the heavens.

On this one evening he bewitches the people, sharing with them the communion 

of his soul, and on the following day he is only an ordinary mortal again. The artist 

has cast a spell over his land; he has given his country the singing of the sea and the 

whistling of the wind. The poorest house in the smallest town is filled with divine 

whistlings and all the sweet delights of sound.

Radio and Art Exhibits

In a small town far away, a crowd of people gathers today in front of the great illu-

minated Radio screens, which rise up like giant books. Why? Because today Radio 

is using its apparatus to transmit images in color, to allow every little town in the 

entire country to take part in an exhibit of paintings being held in the capital city. 

This exhibit is transmitted by means of light impulses repeated in thousands of 

mirrors at every Radio station. If Radio previously acted as the universal ear, now 

it has become a pair of eyes that annihilate distance. The main Radio signal tower 

emits its rays, and from Moscow an exhibit of the best painters bursts into flower 

on the reading walls of every small town in this enormous country, on loan to every 

inhabited spot on the map.

Radio Clubs

Let’s move up closer. Majestic skyscrapers wrapped in clouds, a game of chess be-

tween two people located at opposite ends of Planet Earth, an animated conversa-

tion between someone in America and someone in Europe. Now the reading-walls 

grow dark; suddenly the sound of a distant voice is heard singing, the metallic 

throat of Radio beams the rays of the song to its many metallic singers: metal sings! 

And its words, brought forth in silence and solitude, and their welling springs, be-

come a communion shared by the entire country.

More obedient than strings beneath the violinist’s hand, the metallic apparatus of 

Radio will talk and sing, obeying every marked pulse of the song.

Every settlement will have listening devices and metallic voices to serve one sense, 

metallic eyes to serve the other.

The Great Sorcerer

Finally we will have learned to transmit the sense of taste—and every simple, plain 

but healthful meal can be transformed by means of taste-dreams carried by Radio 

rays, creating the illusion of a totally diff erent taste sensation.

People will drink water, and imagine it to be wine. A simple, ample meal will wear 

the guise of a luxurious feast. And thus will Radio acquire an even greater power 

over the minds of the nation.

In the future, even odors will obey the will of Radio: in the dead of winter the honey 

scent of linden trees will mingle with the odor of snow, a true gift of Radio to the 

nation.

Doctors today can treat patients long-distance, through hypnotic suggestion. 

Radio in the future will be able to act also as a doctor, healing patients without 

medicine.

And even more:

It is a known fact that certain notes like “la” and “ti” are able to increase muscular 

capacity, sometimes as much as sixty-four times, since they thicken the muscle for 

a certain length of time. During periods of intense hard work like summer harvest 

time, or during the construction of great buildings, these sounds can be broadcast 

by Radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously.

And, finally, the organization of popular education will pass into the hands of Ra-

dio. The Supreme Soviet of Sciences will broadcast lessons and lectures to all the 

schools of the country—higher institutions as well as lower.

The teacher will become merely a monitor while these lectures are in progress. 

The daily transmission of lessons and textbooks through the sky into the country 

schools of the nation, the unification of its consciousness into a single will.

Thus will Radio forge continuous links in the universal soul and mold mankind into 

a single entity.

1.   In 1921, Khlebnikov worked for ROSTA, the “Russian Telegraph Agency” in Piatigorsk. See Khlebnikov’s exclama-

tion at the time: “. . . that Astrakhan is the window to India. This was referring to the time when the institutional 

school journal for the whole globe broadcast by radio the same lessons that are heard over loudspeakers, and 

which are composed by a collection of the best human minds—by the Supreme Soviet, the Intellectual Warrior” 

(V. Khlebnikov “Eröff nung einer Volksuniversität” [The Opening of a People’s University] in 

Works, vol. 2, 268). 

Mayakovsky’s contribution to the medium of propaganda posters for ROSTA is also famed (see Viktor Duvakin, 

Rostafenster. Majakowski als Dichter und bildender Künstler [Rosta Window. Mayakovsky as a Poet and Educa-

tional Artist], Dresden, 1980). On the topic of Mayakovsky and radio, see Yuri Murashov “Radio in the Soviet 

Literature and Culture of the 20s and 30s,” in 

Musen der Macht, Medien in der sowjetischen Kultur der 20er und 

30er Jahre [Muses of Power, Media in the Soviet Culture of the 20s and 30s], ed. Yuri Murashov and Georg Witte, 

Munich 2003, 81–112, here 90ff .).

2.  Typical of Khlebnikov’s “logocentrism,” his fixation on the written medium of the book, associated on his part 

with the pansemiotic idea of world text, is his archaic reinstatement of the new medium of an omnipresent per-

formance in the Guttenberg era (see A. Hansen-Löve, “The Development of the ‘World Text’ Paradigm in Velimir 

Khlebnikov’s Poetry,” 27–88). While Mayakovsky completely integrated the medium of radio in his preference for 

spontaneous spoken language (of literature) (J. Murashov, “The Radio,” 92), Khlebnikov was more interested in 

an archaizing mythification of the new medium: “. . . as [Khlebnikov’s] radio manifesto is spun open, both in its 

motive, narrative and logical thought structure as part of and under the conditions of the book/typography . . 

. Radio is not primarily thought of as those possible phonetic, vocal and acoustic eff ects, but initially as an en-

hancement and reorganization of the influence of the book in order to finally be able to interpret radiofication as 

the recovery and revival of the community-founding influence of the spoken word which is locked in books. The 

radio manifesto’s structure is organized accordingly, covering a range from the radiofied book to the renaissance 

of the magic of the spoken word: ‘radio halls’ . . . ‘Radio clubs’—The great magician” (J. Murashov, “The Radio,” 89).

3.  As well as the archetype arbor mundi growing in the center of Khlebnikov’s archaic utopia, it is also the mystic 

motif of the world soul already developed in Vladimir Solov’ev’s religious philosophy that is picked up on again in 

Khlebnikov’s technology myth (ibid., 87). The religio-philosophical totality fantasies (such as in the 

idée russe as 

an all-inclusive unity symbol for Solov’ev and his followers) are secularized in the avant-garde or—particularly with 

Khlebnikov—“mythified” to be earthy and natural. The omnipresence of the new medium also provoked techno-

logical omnipotence fantasies, although Khlebnikov, as so many of his contemporaries, liked to mix the latest 

technological and scientific findings with hermetic-occult or archaic-magic concepts. The naïve enthusiasm in 

view of the seemingly unlimited possibilities of a universal national education (“radio as an electrical acoustic 

lecture”) is connected with the utopias of biocosmism. For more on radio as part of the media revolution after 

1917 and particularly after 1923, see also Stefan Plaggenborg, 

Revolutionskultur: Menschenbilder und kulturelle 

Praxis in der Sowjetunion zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus [Revolution Culture: Images of Humans 

and Cultural Practice in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution to Stalinism], Cologne, 1996.

— AH-L

Originally published in Russian as Velimir Khlebnikov, “Radio budushchego” (1921) in 

Sobranie proizvedenij, vol. 4., ed. 

Iu. Tynianov and N. Sepanov (Leningrad, 1930), 290–95. For a German translation see 

Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der 

russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 181–87.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “The Radio of the Future,” in 

The King 

of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass. and 

London: Harvard University Press, 1985). 

The notes have been translated by Andrew Davison from 

Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. 

Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 186–87.

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