Modernism as Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic in Russia

This book is devoted to an area of Russian cultural history that began to attract scholarly attention relatively recently. In the past quarter of a century, a number of works have appeared that have demonstrated the relevance of nationalism to the artistic quest of Russian modernism and the prominence of archaistic aesthetics as a privileged medium for expressing national sentiments. Existing studies, however, usually focus on only one artistic medium; moreover, they do not engage with either a methodological or a factual framework that studies by historians of nationalism in general and of the late Russian empire in particular can offer. This limits the opportunity for scholars of the arts and literature to situate aesthetic debates and artistic practices of the time within the relevant, if extra-aesthetic, context.

Meanwhile, a number of recent studies in Russian history have demonstrated how reconciliation of old, imperial, and new, national, loyalties became central to the agendas of various groups of the Russian elite in the late imperial period. One obvious consequence of this process was a growing interest in pre-modern and folk culture, hitherto largely alien to the educated class in Russia, which associated its cultural lineage with the westernization initiated in the early eighteenth century. The growing prominence of the discourse of the nation and the national in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after the start of the Great Reforms in 1861, has been the subject of a few recent studies.

This book focuses on the time period that inherited the fruits of both Reform-era nationalism and its permutations in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It treats the encounter and the interaction of experimental aesthetic agendas in Russian arts, literature, music, and performance with the discourse of the nation and other manifestations of national awareness in Russia in the early twentieth century. Employing as a conceptual framework studies by historians of nationalism and empire, I approach the proliferation of archaistic aesthetics in modernist artistic media as a fact of Russian cultural and intellectual history. “Archaism,” a term broadly used in critical discourse at that time, is understood in this study as a stylistic principle that takes pre-modern, marginalized, or exotic traditions as points of aesthetic reference. Using aesthetic phenomena as points of departure, I focus primarily on discursive strategies employed in criticism as well as in declarative and analytical statements by artists and writers that endeavored to construct “archaism” as a tool for expressing the national.

I argue that the cultural milieu in Russia, where the “new art” movement began as an extension of western trends at the end of the nineteenth century, was impacted from early on by the ongoing process of national(ist) indoctrination. The effect of the latter on the modernist aesthetic agenda increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1905, when aesthetic ideology and artistic practice began to complement one another in asserting Russia’s “national artistic independence” (to use David Burliuk’s statement from 1913) and turned to marginalized traditions of folk or pre-modern origin as points of reference. Even though archaism was a prolific trend in Western modernism, the role of local “indigenous” traditions as points of reference within it was both more limited and functionally dissimilar. What distinguished Russian modernism in this regard was the tendency to rhetorically set “indigenous” traditions not against “modern” ones but against “westernized” ones, i. e., those associated with western influence, whose formative impact on modern Russian culture became a source of tension in the “age of nationalism.” Thus, various versions of an archaistic aesthetic in a national key came to be regarded as a means of constructing an alternative modern aesthetic paradigm that would not appear dependent on an “alien” cultural heritage, i. e., on the Russian westernized tradition of the imperial period. These acts of cultural constructivism played a major role in shaping the artistic and the intellectual history of late imperial Russia. The scope of material analyzed in this book attests to the scale of the phenomenon, contributing to our understanding of the cultural dynamic of the period and to the role experimental art played in it.

In Chapter One I introduce two case studies that help contextualize the rest of the material analyzed in the book by offering a snapshot of the engagement of Russian elites with the project of national indoctrination at the turn of the twentieth century. In the first section of this chapter, the object of my case study is the representation of the Russian Empire at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Existing sources that describe Russian pavilions at the Exposition allow me, on the one hand, to discuss the perspective of several groups in the elite (the Court, the government, and artists) on the Russian “imperial situation” and, on the other hand, to include in the picture alternative perspectives of the observers who wrote about the Exposition. I demonstrate the centrality of empire to the mode of Russia’s representation at the Exposition in general and, at the same time, the prominence given there to Russian popular/folk traditions as the only distinct representations of the national. Exclusion of the cultural traditions of the Russian westernized educated class from representation at the Exposition made all the more noticeable a remarkable symmetry: representation of the culture of imperial borderlands, once conquered or colonized, went side by side with that of the culture of the Russian popular masses. In relation to both, educated elites assumed the perspective of ethnographers, rather than members of the same cultural community. On the other hand, this perspective was complicated by the demonstration of professional artists’ skill in appropriating popular/folk traditions. The material analyzed in this section provides the opportunity to pose a question about the available means and strategies for constructing Russian nationhood in the late imperial period and the place of “aesthetic constructivism” among them. In the second section of this chapter, I analyze the retrospective narrative of a “national turn” in the empire (by which a transition from westernized to popular/indigenous traditions is implied) that was proposed in 1903 by Adrian Prakhov, an art historian and a prominent ideologue of the “nationalization” (Russification) of the empire. This narrative, which presented Alexander III and Nicholas II as principal agents in the revival of Russian “indigenous” aesthetic traditions, serves as an important background for the case studies presented in the following chapters.

Chapter Two is devoted to a detailed analysis of the discussions on nationalism in art among the members of the World of Art group in the first period of its existence (1898–1904). The significant role played by this group in the formation of the aesthetic platform of Russian modernist culture is well known; yet no systematic study has hitherto been done on the connection between competing aesthetic programs within this group and debates on the “choice of tradition,” on the comparative “rights” of the imperial (westernized) vs. pre-Petrine traditions to serve as a foundation for “national” tradition in Russia. Analyzing declarative and analytical statements by Alexander Benois, Igor Grabar, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitrii Filosofov, and Ivan Bilibin, I suggest that the clash between aesthetic “cosmopolitism” and “populism” (narodnichanie), to use Benois’s terms, in the debates inside the World of Art reflected the moment of equilibrium between the two tendencies in early Russian modernism, which would soon give way to the dominance of the latter. Another aspect of the analysis in this chapter concerns the strategies of emancipating the modernist archaistic aesthetic in a nationalist key from associations with “statist tendencies” and “retrograde political stubbornness” (Bilibin), which turn out to be particularly instrumental in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution and during the subsequent decade.

Chapters Three and Four are devoted to the period from the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War (1904) through the middle of the 1910s. The first of these chapters focuses on literature and on aesthetic and ideological discussions in literary circles; the second is devoted to the formation and reception in Russian criticism of new aesthetic ideas and practices, associated with Sergei Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” in Europe. Both chapters together trace the transformation of “archaism” from an amorphous trend into an aesthetic and ideological concept, a tool of the “invention of tradition” and of establishing a new paradigm of the “national” in arts and literature.

In the first section of Chapter Three I make a digression to discuss an alternative vision of the early twentieth century as the age of the decline of nations and the rise of empires offered by Valery Briusov. The introduction of this perspective makes it possible to demonstrate, on the one hand, how aesthetic programs reflect ideological visions in the camp of “imperialists” as much as in that of the “nationalists” to which this book is largely devoted. On the other hand, it provides material that can be juxtoposed with other case studies in subsequent sections of this chapter to highlight the points of convergence between “imperialist” and “nationalist” visions of Russian modernist authors. At the center of the second section is the impact of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) in shaping the discourse of nationalism in modernist publications such as the journals Novyi put’, Voprosy zhizni, and Vesy. I demonstrate here how military defeats and the events of the first Russian revolution (1905) unfolding against the background of these defeats not only triggered the crisis of loyalty to Russian imperial statehood among modernist intellectuals but also undermined, in their own eyes, the value of their European, westernized identity. This prompted the turn to theorizing the “national” as divorced from modern statehood, with increased emphasis on its pre-modern, indigenous foundations. Hence the influence Viacheslav Ivanov’s ideas acquire in the second half of the 1900s, which is the subject of the third section. Against the background of the crisis of political institutions, Ivanov develops his vision of the role of an artist as an agent of social consolidation. On the one hand, Ivanov’s artist discovers and resurrects the national (indigenous) myth, which encapsulates the shared “national” past of all the estates; on the other, the artist seeks to transform the realm of aesthetic production itself by removing the divide between creators and spectators, i.e., by making them join forces in an artistic creation. The new aesthetic idiom that consciously evokes the “national archaic” and new forms of art’s institutionalization are both markers, in Ivanov’s terms, of the overcoming of modern “individualism” and of the approach of a new epoch of the vsenarodnoe (“all-people’s,” “universal”) art. Finally, setting the ideals of statehood and nationhood against one another, Ivanov, like other Russian thinkers of that time, theorizes religious confession (Orthodoxy) as an important vehicle of social (national) transformation, the declared goals of which make us recall Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of “free theocracy.” In the fourth section my attention shifts to adaptations of Ivanov’s ideas in the broader literary-critical discourse of the second half of the 1900s, and to the discussion of the twofold role of this discourse: on the one hand it boosts “archaistic” tendencies in literature of the time, while on the other it conceptually deforms them by imposing a singular interpretative frame on a variety of practices (with most examples coming from reviews of books by Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky, and Ivanov himself). Finally, in the fifth section of this chapter I discuss the use of the Panslavic matrix in radicalizing the “national” aesthetic project of Russian modernism. Interpreting programmatic statements by Ivanov, Gorodetsky, and especially Velimir Khlebnikov, I demonstrate how radical linguistic experiment becomes conceptualized as a means of reviving the “national.” Nineteenth-century Panslavism as an ideological movement emphasized a common “spiritual descent” of all Slavic peoples: a common faith and written language, received from the hands of Saints Cyril and Methodius, defined for Panslavists the shared heritage of Slavdom. It was precisely the idea of the revival of an “all-Slavonic” language on the basis of modern Russian that allowed young Khlebnikov to interpret linguistic innovations as a “return to the sources.” A destabilization of the linguistic system of modern Russian appeared in this perspective as an instrument of the return to Slavonic linguistic unity, in which all lexical, morphological, and other riches of all contemporary Slavic languages could come together. Ivanov’s “myth-creation” and Khlebnikov’s “word-creation” laid the groundwork for the “national” project within Russian modernism that made all but impossible a distinction between a “return to the sources” and radical innovation, archaisms and neologisms, and which discursively constructed artistic experiment as a path toward the authentically national.

Chapter Four has a circular composition: its first and, partially, fourth (final) sections are devoted to the story of an unrealized ballet by Sergei Prokofiev, Ala and Lollii (1915), the libretto for which was written by Gorodetsky. Initially commissioned from Prokofiev by Diaghilev in 1914 and later rejected by him as “international music,” this ballet was soon reworked by Prokofiev into a suite that acquired the name Scythian Suite. One of the reviews of its first performance in 1916, written by Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov (the composer’s son), directly – and disapprovingly – linked this piece with the Parisian fascination with the “Russian primitive,” thus insisting on its dependence on Diaghilev’s concept of the “national.” In order to explain how the two mutually exclusive interpretations of Prokofiev’s music became possible, in the second and third sections of this chapter I trace the formation of the aesthetic ideology of Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” in Europe and the reception of the “national” aesthetic, as manifested in its select productions, in Russian art, music, and theatre criticism. On the one hand, I analyze declarative statements by such contributors to these productions as Leon Bakst, Nikolai Roerich, Alexander Benois, Igor Stravinsky, and Diaghilev himself, which allow me to speculate about the creative and ideological intentions each of the participants brought into the project. On the other, I discuss the critical response in Russia to some of these productions, specifically turning in section four to Stravinsky’s early ballets, as responsible for attributing a range of meanings to archaistic experimentations in music – from declaring “Russian archaism” as a new, authentically “national” artistic style (Yakov Tugendhold) to exposing Stravinsky’s evolution from “fairytale through lubok to the primitive” as a story of a “dramatic rupture with the traditions of Russian music” (Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov). Within this range, the discursive equation of the experimental with the “barbarian,” and of the latter with the “(pseudo)national,” allowed critics to qualify pieces like Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite as manifestations of the newest brand of “musical nationalism,” even in the absence of inherent folkloric substrate. At the close of the chapter, using music as example, I touch upon the issue of the interaction between expert knowledge of the indigenous Russian traditions, projects of their revival, and forms of their actualization in experimental art.