It is time to move on, time to conceive of

criticality in non-utopian terms, time to

stop mistaking an angel for a prophet
(angelos means messenger). And it is
time to rewrite the art-historical narrative

01/11
respecting, not inverting, the logic of the
facts.
Thierry de Duve1

In Orientalism (1978), Palestinian-American critic

Edward Said showed how the Orient came to be
constructed in Western culture as an Other onto
which the West projected its fantasies. The book
was a milestone in the development of
Noemi Smolik postcolonial studies, and since its publication
the deconstruction of such projections has
The Russian become a key concern of the discipline. With the
emergence of many hitherto unknown
documents relating to the so-called Russian
Avant-Garde: A avant-garde, interpretations of this movement
are changing, and these changes raise the
Projection question: Could it be that the standard narrative
about the origin and significance of this
movement is also a result of Western utopian
Screen for thinking, guided by a faith in the universality and
superiority of Western modernism?
Modern Utopian According to this narrative, the movement is
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

rooted in modern thinking that originated in

Thinking? Western Europe thinking characterized by
paradigms such as rationalism, materialism,
secularism, and the concept of history as
progress. Modern thinking, and especially the
October Revolution of 1917 as an implementation
of this thinking, is viewed as a precondition for
the eruption of a movement that achieved
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

groundbreaking innovations not only in fine art

but also in poetry, music, theater, and science.
But can this interpretation resist a critical
approach in nonutopian terms terms which, as
Thierry de Duve puts it, respect the logic of the
facts rather than inverting it? The contents of the
new documents send a clear message: they say
no.
One of the key works of the Russian
movement of the early twentieth century is the
picture of a black square on a white background
by Kazimir Malevich. It was first shown in 1915
during the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings
0,10, in what was then Petrograd, hung across
the corner of one of the exhibitions rooms. This
was how peasants hung the icons in their
houses. As well as the black square listed in
the catalogue simply as Square Malevich also
showed his picture of a red square entitled
Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two
Dimensions. What is astonishing here, however,
is that Malevich relates these nonfigurative
pictures, now considered to be among the high
points of secular modernism, to the premodern

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

 02/11

A selection of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich shown at theLast Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10,Petrograd, 1915. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

icon and to Russian peasants living in the the 60s generation, had grown up in the
Orthodox tradition. How is this contradiction to countryside in a deeply religious tradition, and
be understood? their encounter with the positivist-materialist
To begin with, we must go back to 1861, the thinking being taught at the universities
year that Russias peasants were released from triggered an identity crisis to which they
serfdom and granted extensive self- responded by rejecting their roots. In such

03/11
administration. Rather than becoming private circles, this rejection was symbolized by the
property, the land was to be managed widespread gesture of throwing icons brought
collectively by communities that joined together from home out of the window in the company of
in peasant councils known as Mir. As a result, like-minded students.
ways of life and forms of knowledge that were This 1860s generation formed the core of
shaped by the Old Russian Orthodox tradition the group of educated and semi-educated
came to public attention. They were individuals who would later go down in history as
diametrically opposed to the knowledge of the the Russian intelligentsia. Its members
educated urban elites, a knowledge acquired at advocated Darwinist rationalism and militant
the universities, referred to by Michel Foucault atheism with something akin to religious fervor.
as institutions of discipline and the transmission This is not surprising, as many of them were the
of Western knowledge. This knowledge was sons of the clergy. Many also adopted the
rational, geared toward the thinking of the aristocrats megalomania and taste for violence:
natural sciences, skeptical toward religion, Within the intelligentsias circles it was deemed
driven by a belief in progress. It was a modern a matter of good taste to sympathize with the
knowledge. By contrast, the knowledge of the terrorists and many wealthy citizens donated
peasants reflected a premodern understanding large sums of money to them.6
of the world. It found visual expression in the The spiritual father of the intelligentsia was
icon, which doesnt depict a reality, because it is Nikolay Chernyshevsky, author of What Is To Be
a conceptual vision of an alternative to lived Done? (1863). In what Indian cultural critic
reality. It was a firmly established part of Pankaj Mishra calls probably the worst Russian
everyday life. novel of the nineteenth century (and the most
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

The parallel development of these two influential), Chernyshevsky describes a love

forms of knowledge was the result of a process story involving the revolutionary Rakhmetov, who
of modernization that began with the founding of bends his emotional life to the needs of the
St. Petersburg, that window on the West, by revolutionary struggle.7 The novel is intended as
Peter the Great in 1703. But because a prologue to a revolution that will be borne not
participation in modernization was restricted to by the working class, which did not yet exist in
a small group of privileged individuals, it led to a Russia at the time, but by the peasants. In order
split in Russian society. It was, as Fyodor to become revolutionaries, however, the
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

Dostoyevsky put it, the first beginning of the peasants must be subjected, by force if
epoch when our leading people brutally necessary, to a process of modernization and
separated into two parties and then entered into enlightenment. Tragically, this approach is hardly
a furious civil war.2 Before Dostoyevsky, different from that of the tsarist regime which,
Alexander Herzen had spoken of two Russias, as Groys notes, also justified the brutality of its
meaning the official one and the peasant one.3 rule over the peasants by claiming a superior
And Russian philosopher Boris Groys speaks of a level of enlightenment compared to the still
Europeanized upper class that often spoke unenlightened Russian masses so that the
better French than Russian, and of a peasantry Enlightenment was often associated in Russia
arrested in its cultural tradition.4 In the words of with political violence and mechanisms of
historian Orlando Figes, for those belonging to power.8 The influence of Chernyshevskys novel
the official Russia, the Russia of the peasants was huge. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin called it
was as exotic and alien as the natives of the banner of Russias youth, who, having read
Africa were to their distant colonial rulers.5 it, went into the countryside in droves to make
With the entry of peasant representatives the peasants fit for revolution. The historian
into public life and the arrival of peasants in the Figes even claims that this dreadful novel
cities, the gulf between the two Russias became converted more people to the cause of revolution
apparent. This in turn raised the question of how than all the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich
to deal with this divide. And for the generation Engels put together (he also writes that Marx
that began studying after 1863, when non- learned Russian specifically in order to read this
aristocrats were first admitted to the book).9
universities, the answer to the rural-urban divide In the realm of art, the role played in the
was to subject peasant traditions to a process of revolutionary movement by Chernyshevskys
radical modernization. These students, known as novel was played by his treatise The Aesthetic

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

 Kazimir Malevich, The Feeling of
Danger, 193233. Oil
oncanvas.George Pompidou Art
Centre, Paris.

Photo of the so-called triumvirate ofMaximGorky, VladimirStasov, and IlyaRepin (1905). In the early1900s, the three were themost influential figures
ofofficial Russian culture.

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

Relations of Art to Reality, published in 1855. The attitude. Reports about filthy poverty, primitive
author described the aims of the treatise as violence, intolerable alcoholism, and shameful
follows: Defense of reality as against fantasy, backwardness appeared in the press including
the attempt to prove that works of art cannot supposedly authentic descriptions by the city-
possibly stand comparison with living reality raised writer Maxim Gorky.
such is the essence of this essay.10 With At this point, having previously held the

05/11
reference to Hegel, Chernyshevsky strictly same views as the 1860s generation,
rejected fantasy as misleading and the aesthetic Dostoyevsky began to have doubts about what
category of beauty as harmful, concluding by was happening in the countryside: Do you
declaring art to be superfluous. Only if it makes remember why the young Dostoyevsky was given
itself useful, he argued, can it attain legitimacy. the death sentence? asked Nadezhda
Art must show society which phenomena of Tolokonnikova of the punk band Pussy Riot at her
reality are good and useful for it, calling for trial: All he had done was to get carried away
support and perpetuation, and which are too with socialist theories At one of the last
difficult and damaging, calling for them to be meetings, he read out Belinskys letter to Gogol,
banned or at least toned down to render them which was packed, according to the court, and,
useful.11 please note, with childish utterances against the
Chernyshevskys utilitarian view of art was Orthodox Church and the supreme
shared by a group of literary critics led by Nikolay authorities.13 Dostoyevsky was sentenced to
Dobrolyubov and Vissarion Belinsky. Their death, but as he stood before the firing squad he
supporters loved to shock the francophone was pardoned and sent into exile, where his
salons of the big cities with slogans like Boots encounters with peasant life changed his
are higher than Shakespeare and by judging attitude.
Tolstoys novel Anna Karenina as a trifle whose In 1861, having returned from his
value, if it has any, is purely gynecological. banishment, Dostoyevsky founded the magazine
Chernyshevskys followers also included a group Vremja (Time). As Michel Eltchaninoff has
of painters. They called themselves Peredvizhniki stressed, his goal was to look for alternatives to
(Wanderers) on account of their habit of taking the failed modernization measures of the
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

their pictures painted in the style of Western intelligentsia.14 He began by publishing his
realism to villages to convert the peasants (who novella Notes from the House of the Dead, an
they depicted in typically French landscapes angry reckoning with Chernyshevskys purely
dressed in Western clothes) into revolutionaries. rational and materialistic legitimation of human
The groups most prominent member was Ilya action. This prompted an essay by the critic
Repin, who referred to himself as one of the Dobrolyubov who, with reference to
1860s generation. The group was supported by Chernyshevsky, once again vilified traditional
Vladimir Stasov, the art critic at the influential peasant culture as primitive, stupid, and an
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

St. Petersburg business newspaper Novosti i obstacle to progress. Dostoyevsky was furious,
birevaja gazeta (News and Stock Exchange attacking Chernyshevskys aesthetic theory in a
Paper). This may sound surprising, but in fact it language of unprecedented severity as a
corresponds precisely to the interests of a boundless stupidity which, if not stopped,
rapidly growing economy that depended on a would have calamitous effects on the further
constant influx of new enlightened workers development of Russian culture as a whole. It is
from rural areas. While the Peredvizhniki were absurd to say, he writes, because this may be
enjoying considerable success in the two major the opinion of some bookish scholar, that all
cities, they were not especially well received in these aspirations of the Russian spirit are
the countryside; their struggle for knowledge useless, foolish, and unlawful. And: You cannot
frequently ended in brawls. As the artist Naum possibly satisfy a man who has a certain need for
Gabo, who grew up in the countryside, recalls, something by telling him Oh no, I dont want you
the peasants rejected the pictures of the to do that, I want you to live like this and not like
Peredvizhniki from the outset because they saw that.15
them as exclusive and confined to the world of Dostoyevsky once again spoke in favor of
the ruling class.12 the imagination, saying that even everyday life
Like the Peredvizhniki, most bringers of cannot be successfully tackled without it. And
enlightenment were met with bitter resistance since art arises from everyday life, art without
from the peasants who rightly saw their rigorous imagination is inconceivable just as life, and
rationalism and militant atheism as a threat to with it art, are inconceivable without beauty,
the very structures on which their lives were which he defended with words that became the
based. Disappointed, the urban youth withdrew motto of an entire generation after 1900: Art is
from the villages and their initial, blinding as much a necessity for man as eating and
enthusiasm turned into a deeply contemptuous drinking Man craves it, finds and accepts

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

 Ilya Repin, Portrait of Emperor
Nicholas II,1895. Oil on
canvas,210 107 cm. The State
Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg. Photo: Wikimedia
Commons.Repin was an official
portrait painter of the tsar.

Kasimir Malevich, Lady at the

Poster Column, 1914. Oil on
canvas.

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

beauty without any conditions, just because it is With this critique, which anticipates postcolonial
beauty.16 Twelve years later, in 1873, he visited attacks on the hegemonic striving of modernity,
an exhibition of work by the Peredvizhniki and Solovyov contested the legitimacy of the project
found all that he had been warning against of the Russian intelligentsia in enlightening the
realized. This style of painting, he wrote, was peasantry.
hollow, stupid, superficial, and above all Four years later, he gave a lecture at St.

07/11
hypocritical, its tendentious interpretation of Petersburg University in which he attempted to
reality coming at the cost of any search for unite socialism and its Western-atheist
artistic truthfulness and human honesty. In orientation with the social teachings of the
Dostoyevskys view, anyone who has learned to Russian Orthodox Church, thus opening up a
shed tears over feigned suffering will be route to social equality that would be compatible
heedless of real suffering.17 This hypocritical with Russias specific sociocultural conditions. It
realism of the Peredvizhniki is countered with a caused a sensation: close to a thousand people
higher realism that he claims to find in the were in the hall, including the writers Tolstoy and
icons, songs, fairy tales, and legends of peasant Dostoyevsky. It is said to be the only time the two
tradition: With full realism, to find the man in a of them were in the same room. But resistance
man. This is primarily a Russian trait, and in this was soon fomented by representatives of the
sense I am, of course, of the people. He then intelligentsia. In an unprecedented press
refers to himself as a realist in the higher campaign, Solovyov was declared mentally ill
sense.18 and his lectures were disrupted by organized
For the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky railed student mobs. Under this pressure, Solovyov
against the widespread view of the Russian resigned from his post as professor of
people as a tabula rasa just waiting to be philosophy.
reshaped into rational atheists based on the He continued working on his concept of a
Western model, and he dreamed of Moscow as a new knowledge that sets itself the task of uniting
third Rome that would have the power to resist recent Western philosophy in its logical
the modernizing mania coming from Western perfection with the form of faith and spiritual
Europe. As Mishra writes, Dostoyevsky was contemplation via the great theological
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

among the latecomers to political and economic teachings of the East. In Russian, he used the
modernity who sensed acutely both its term duchovnoe, meaning the spiritual. In
irresistible temptation and its dangers.19 1884, he published a text outlining the concept
Dostoyevsky was supported by Vladimir under the title Duchovnye osnovy izni (The
Solovyov, a zealous materialist who had Spiritual Fundaments of Life). In it, he predicts a
previously thrown the icon out of his window. new era when philosophy will reach out to
When he began to doubt his convictions, he religion, which he calls the epoch of the
enrolled at the seminar for Orthodox clergy at the spiritual.
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

Monastery of St. Sergius to study theology. In By this time, however, no one was listening
1874, aged twenty-one, he submitted his to Solovyov anymore; by a kind of self-imposed
dissertation to St. Petersburg University: entitled censorship, his thinking, like Dostoyevskys
The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the warnings, had been squeezed out of the public
Positivists, it made him famous overnight. In it, debate. The cultural life of the two big cities was
Solovyov first accuses Western thinking of failing dominated by a kind of mimetic appropriation of
metaphysics: rather than trusting in an all- Western culture, as represented by Repin as
permeating spirit, it looks for pseudo-rational president of the St. Petersburg Art Academy, the
explanations. Western thinking also fails newspaper critic Stasov, and the writer Gorky.
epistemology because it emphasizes reason The latter in particular advocated a radical turn
while ignoring the subconscious, by which toward the West because he doubted the value of
Solovyov meant faith, dreams, the imagination, Russias own traditions: The East will destroy
and creativity. In ethics, too, development had Russia, the West is its only salvation
led Western philosophy to believe Meanwhile, Im convinced of the greatness,
beauty, and usefulness of all that the intellect of
that the ultimate goal and supreme Western Europe has brought forth.21
happiness were to be sought in a But now a new generation began to make
community created by force through a itself heard. Its mouthpiece was the magazine
worldwide process forming a single unity, Mir iskusstva (The World of Art) published by
destroying the self-assertions of both Sergei Diaghilev, a loveable twenty-six-year-old
individual persons and separate spiritual eccentric who openly lived his homosexuality.
communities, subsuming all into a Later he would become world famous as the
community subject to the absolute spirit.20 director of the Ballets Russes. In the first issue
of Mir iskusstva, Diaghilev immediately spelled

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

out the agenda as follows: We are a generation before and after Diaghilev. All of our notions
that thirsts for beauty.22 There was also a clear about art, how we thought about it, were
reference to Dostoyevsky in his opposition to the changed. It was like a light being switched on,
condemnation of icons: recalls Sergey Makovsky, who in 1909 founded
the magazine Apollon, which became the
This is a fateful error and as long as mouthpiece of the artists Natalia Goncharova,

08/11
deliberately constructed harmony, regal Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tatlin, and Malevich.
simplicity, and unique beauty of colors are With his magazine, Diaghilev succeeded in
not seen in Russias national art, there will making Solovyovs concept of the spiritual so
no true art in our country. Just look at our popular that his generation was derided by its
true pride, the old times of Novgorod and enemies as the generation of the spiritual.
Suzdal. What could be nobler and more At the same time as Diaghilev, Sergei
harmonious?23 Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev, both Marxists
unsettled by their experience in the countryside,
And like Dostoyevsky, he accused the also discovered Solovyov, becoming active
Peredvizhniki of being lackeys of the advocates of his thinking. As professor of
Europeanized elite. The itinerant painters political economy at Moscow University, one of
became hate figures for Diaghilevs generation, a Bulgakovs students had been Kandinsky, who
reputation so enduring that in his account of left Moscow in 1889 to study the administrative
tendencies in Russian art for The Blue Rider structures of peasant communities in the
Almanac published in Munich by Wassily Vologda region. On his return, he wrote against
Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1912, David the negative reports: After the emancipation of
Burliuk, a contemporary of Malevichs, wrote: It the serfs in Russia, the government gave them
is known that the term Wanderer is now used as control of their own economy, which to the
invective.24 surprise of many people made the peasants
In texts by poet Andrei Bely, the magazine politically mature.28 It was these experiences of
also introduced its readers to Solovyovs critique rural life that prompted Kandinsky to abandon
of rationalism and the hegemonic claims of academia and become an artist. In 1912, he
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

modernism, and to his concept of the spiritual. published On The Spiritual in Art in Munich, a
Bely also brought Friedrich Nietzsche into the continuation of Solovyovs philosophy, heralding
discussion, getting Lev Shestovs essay a new epoch, the age of the spiritual. At the
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche published in the same time, while preparing The Blaue Reiter
magazine in 1900.25 In additon to such Almanac, he tried to secure a contribution from
theoretical writings, Diaghilev published pictures Bulgakov as a representative of the Russian
of old Russian art objects alongside images of religious movement. In 1903, Bulgakov had
modern works, presenting them as equals. This published From Marxism to Idealism, in which he
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

broke with the hitherto unshakeable view in declared materialism obsolete and argued in
Russia that the old Russian traditions were favor of a socialism based on Orthodox
embarrassingly inferior to modern works. In the teachings. This essay, which went through
second issue, Diaghilev included reproductions several editions due to great demand, marked a
of pictures by the painter Mikhail Vrubel, reversal in the discussion carried on since
declaring him the most important contemporary Chernyshevsky concerning the paths taken by
artist. Vrubel was the first painter to abandon Russian culture.
Western realism and develop a style borrowing Around this time, after 1912, things start
elements such as the construction of space from happening very fast. Young people were going to
icon painting. But when he tried to show his the countryside again, this time to learn for
pictures at the industry fair in Nizhny Novgorod themselves: At present, there are also other
in 1896, he provoked an uproar in the press led signs of a cultural resurrection, wrote the critic
by Gorky. From then on, it was alleged, speaking Georgy Chulkov, as young artists are passionate
his name aloud was enough to cause French- to learn from folk artists: uniting the individual
speaking ladies to faint. work and the creative work of the people in a
The shock Diaghilev caused with his common cause, they are looking for a new
magazine was huge. Repin writes that it first realism.29 Diaghilev travelled the country in
rendered him speechless, before he began to search of icons. The poets Bely and Blok began to
fear for Russias reputation as a modern nation.26 collect folk sayings and incantations, publishing
Stasov spoke of intellectual paupers and an them in an anthology. The poet Velimir
orgy of debauchery and madness.27 For many in Khlebnikov experimented with words, turns of
the younger generation, by contrast, Diaghilevs phrase, and rhythms that he found in the rural
publication came as a revelation: There is no idiom. The composer Igor Stravinsky collected
other way of putting it: my life split into two parts folk songs. Goncharova walked through Moscow

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

dressed as a peasant woman and announced: ripening within us that can, in comparison
with that we have rejected, be called zaum
I shake the dust from my feet and leave the and that also constitutes laws and
West, considering its vulgarizing possesses meaning. Only when we have
significance trivial and insignificant my realized this can our works be founded on a
path is toward the source of all arts, the truly new, transrational law.34

09/11
East. The art of my country is incomparably
more profound and important than Malevich also made paintings he referred to as
anything I have known in the West.30 zaum pictures: Lady at the Poster Column (1914),
for example, shows, alongside figurative
And in 1913, Apollon published an essay by the elements, two monochrome squares. It was
critic Nikolay Punin, a friend of Malevich and these zaum pictures that immediately preceded
Tatlin, entitled Puti sovremennovo iskusstva i The Black Square shown at the Last Futurist
russkaja ikonopis (The Paths of Modern Art and Exhibition of 1915, a painting accompanied by a
Russian Icons), in which he subjects icon manifesto entitled From Cubism to Suprematism,
painting to a formal analysis because he believes an allusion to Berdyaevs From Marxism to
that the icons, in their grandiose and living Idealism, as Malevichs book, too, proclaimed not
beauty, will lead contemporary art to just a new direction, but a paradigm shift, as the
achievements that will differ critically from those painter never tired of stressing.
experienced by European art in recent From all of these facts assuming one
decades.31 People were euphoric, talking about accepts them it follows that the Russian
a renaissance of Russian culture, with movement must be viewed as an attempt to face
Dostoyevsky and Solovyov considered as its the divide that had been steadily deepening
prophets. since Peter the Great between the Western-
Conversely, increasing numbers of young educated elite and the peasants the millions of
people were coming into the cities, including peasants who Chernyshevsky and his followers
Tatlin, a trained icon painter, and Malevich, who sought to persuade, as Mishra puts it, to
had grown up with icons in rural areas. renounce, and often to scorn, a world of the
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

Malevichs first encounter with a realistically past in order to become modern people.35 It
painted picture in Kiev came as a shock to him. is commonly said, Malevich writes,
He realized that there was a difference between
art in Kiev, this art of the aristocrats but also of that Tsar Peter deservedly came to be
revolutionary minded people, and the art of the called the Great because he smashed a
peasants. And he decided to remain on the side hole into the non-objective cube towards
of peasant art.32 Around 1910, Malevich began the West, throwing open a window to the
painting peasants, borrowing from icon painting light. I on the contrary accuse him of having
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

in terms of his construction of space and his use destroyed unity by letting in a destructive
of lines, color, and light. In fact, Malevich painted culture, opening the window to a highly
peasants throughout his life, without scholars dubious and suspicious light.36
ever asking why.
Scholars have similarly ignored the This movement, which led to nonfigurative
contents of the manifestos written between 1910 paintings, should thus be viewed not as the
and 1913 by Khlebnikov and the poet Aleksei consequence of a westernizing process of
Kruchenykh, in which Malevich also had a hand. modernization, but as a sign of rebellion against
They all testify to the shaping influence of that process and its hegemonic claims. Naum
Dostoyevsky and Solovyov on the thinking of Gabo also saw it as a rebellion:
these artists. The zaum movement, proclaimed
in a manifesto written in 1913 by Khlebnikov, The non-objective ideology proclaimed by
Kruchenykh, and Malevich entitled O the Suprematists in 1915 is the
chudoenstvenych proizvedenijach (About consequence of the rejection of Cubist
Artistic Works), can also be traced back to these experiments, but an art historian will not
two thinkers. The word zaum translates as fail to see the real and complete influence
beyond reason, referring to Dostoyevskys that the concept of the Russian of the
assertion that a work of high art always icons as well as of Vrubel had on the
develops in the absence of reason, and to mentality and conscious vision of that
Solovyovs notion of cognition expanded to group of artists in Russia.37
include the subconscious:33 We have now
come to reject reason, writes Malevich. And Malevich is clearer still: Historical
materialism must be just as firmly rejected as
We have rejected it because another is subject matter in art!38 In the 1920s, he wrote

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

the following dedication in a copy of his 1920 Noemi Smolik is a critic based in Bonn, Germany.
essay God Is Not Cast Down for the absurdist
poet Daniil Kharms: Go and stop progress.
Lenin, an admirer of Chernyshevsky, who
wrote a 1902 book with the same title as
Chernyshevskys notorious novel, was alarmed,

10/11
and in 1915 he commissioned Gorky to found the
magazine Letopis (Yearbook). In the very first
issue, Gorky declared the entire cultural
development of the past fifteen years, whose
beginning coincided for him with the
inauspicious arrival of Diaghilev on the scene, to
have been a disgraceful demise of Russian
culture as a whole, a development that must be
countered at last with a return to heroic art.
And the second issue showed what he meant by
this: it was devoted to the painter Repin. Two
years later came the October Revolution and in
December 1920 the newspaper Pravda published
a letter from the Central Committee of the
Communist Party condemning the artists of this
movement as decadents, supportive of an
idealistic philosophy hostile to Marxism.39 In
1925, the critic Punin, a companion of Malevich
and Tatlin, wrote in his journal: How we were all
ruined, will it ever be understood?40
According to Berdyaev, the October
Revolution became
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

a sign of the nihilist enlightenment of

materialism, utilitarianism, and atheism.
Solovyov was entirely overshadowed by
Chernyshevsky. The typical divide in
Russian history that had been opening up
throughout the nineteenth century between
the intellectual cultural class and the
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

broader, less formally educated masses, a

divide which continued to deepen, meant
that the Russian cultural renaissance
plunged itself into this chasm.41

This fall heralded the end of a movement which

with hindsight, in a view sharpened by
postcolonial theorists like Said and Mishra, must
be viewed as an emancipatory one. It was one of
the first to dare to challenge the hegemonic
claims of modernity. The fact that it was the
October Revolution that put an end to it is among
the great absurdities in the history of the
twentieth century.

Translated from the German byNicholas Grindell.

10.05.17 / 17:03:15 EDT

1 Here, too, the authors refer
Thierry de Duve, Dont Shoot 19 directly to Dostoyevsky.
the Messenger, Artforum, Mishra, Age of Anger, 68.
November 2013, 265. 34
20 Letter to Matyushin, 1913, in
2 Vladimir Solovyov, The Crisis of Sieg ber die Sonne, exhibition
Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, The Western Philosophy: Against the catalogue (Berlin 1983), 39.
Age of Anger (New York: Farrar, Positivists (Hudson, NY:
Straus and Giroux, 2017), 143. Lindisfarne Books, 1996), 149. 35

11/11
(Translation altered to reflect the Mishra, Age of Anger, 155.
3 meaning of the original Russian,
Quoted in Orlando Figes, A as reflected in the authors 36
Peoples Tragedy (Penguin: translation into German.) Kazimir Malevich,
London 1996/2017), 54. Suprematismus die
21 gegenstandslose Welt (Cologne
4 Quoted in Geir Kjetsaa, Maxim 1962), 99. (Translated from the
Boris Groys, Die Erfindung Gorki (Hildesheim, 1996), 231. German by NG, as this passage
Russlands (Munich: Hanser, doesnt appear in the published
1995), 25. 22 English version, The Non-
Sergei Diaghilev, Osnovy Objective World: A Manifesto of
5 chudoestvenoj ocenki (The Suprematism.)
Figes, Peoples Tragedy, 89. Foundations for Artistic
Evaluation), Mir iskusstva 1 37
6 (1898): 60. Gabo, Of Diverse Arts, 172.
Ibid., 126.
23 38
7 Ibid., 58ff. Malevich, Suprematismus Die
See Mishra, Age of Anger, 68; gegenstandslose Welt, 98.
and Figes, Peoples Tragedy, 123. 24
David Burliuk, The Savages of 39
8 Russia, in The Blaue Reiter Natalia Murray, The Unsung Hero
Groys, Erfindung Russlands, 26. Almanac (New York: MFA of the Russian Avant-Garde
Publications, 1989), 75. (Boston: Brill, 2012), 124.
9
Figes, Peoples Tragedy, 130. 25 40
Lev Shestov, Dostoevskij i Quoted in ibid., 194.
10 Nitse, Mir iskusstva 7 and 8
Nikolay Chernyshevsky, The (1900). See also Lev Shestov, 41
Aesthetic Relations of Art to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in Nikolay Berdyaev, Vlastni
Reality, in Russian Philosophy Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and ivotopis (Olomouc, 2005), 202.
Volume II, eds. James M. Edie, Nietzsche (Athens, OH: Ohio
James Scanlan, and Mary- University Press, 1969).
Barbara Zeldin (Chicago:
The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?

Quadrangle Books 1965), 27. 26

11
Chernyshevsky, The Aesthetic
Relations of Art to Reality,
quoted here in Geschichte der
russischen Kunst, ed. Nikolai
Maskovcev (Moscow, Dresden,
1975), 257. (This passage is not
in the published English
translation.)
Ilya Repin, Po adresu Mira
iskusstva, reprinted in Mir
iskusstva 10 (1899).
27
Vladimir Stasov, Chudye
duchom, Novosti i birevaja
gazeta, January 1, 1899.
28
Wassily Kandinsky,
e-flux journal #85 october 2017 Noemi Smolik

12 Reminiscences, Complete
Naum Gabo, Of Divers Arts (New Writings on Art (New York: Da
York: Faber, 1962), 147. Capo Press, 1994), 362.

13 29
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Georgy Chulkov, Pokryvalo izidy.
closing statements from trial of Kritieskie oerky (Moscow
August 8, 2012 http://eng-pussy- 1909), 77.
riot.livejo urnal.com/4602.html.
30
14 Natalya Goncharova, Preface to
M. Eltchaninoff, In Putins Kopf. catalogue of one-man exhibition,
Die Philosophie eines 1913, in Russian Art of the
lumpenreinen Demokraten Avant-Garde, Theory and
(Stuttgart, 2016), 119. Criticism, 19021934, ed. John
Bowlt (New York: Thames &
15 Hudson, 1976), 5758.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mr. G.- bov
and the Question of Art, in 31
Occasional Writings (Evanston, Nikolay Punin, Puti
IL: Northwestern University sovremennovo iskusstva i
Press, 1997), 132, 131. russkaja ikonopis, Apollon 10
(1913), 50.
16
Ibid., 124. Italics in original. 32
Kazimira Malevia. Glavy iz
17 avtobiografii chudonika, in
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Propos of Kistorii russkogo avantgarda
the Exhibition, in A Writers (Stockholm 1976), 108, 118.
Diary Vol. 1: 18731876
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern 33
University Press, 1994), 20516. See also Aleksei Kruchenykh,
Ivan Klyun, Kazimir Malevich,
18 Tajnye poroki akademikov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, diary entry (Secret Vices of the
from 1881. Academicians), Moscow 1915.

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