Abstract
The revolutions of 1917 tore through the established coordinates of cultural life as thoroughly as they tore through every aspect of social life. While aestheticism had made the content of works of art its own distance from the ‘means-end rationality of the bourgeois everyday’, revolution now ripped apart the bourgeois everyday itself. The end of this life-praxis, which aestheticism had rejected, now appeared to present the possibility of what Peter Bürger calls a Hegelian sublation of art, its transferral ‘to the praxis of life, where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form’. Art could become a base for ‘an attempt to organize a new life-praxis from a basis in art’.1 Just as the events of 1905 had shaken the mystical complacency of the Symbolist Movement, turning several towards an activist aesthetic, 1917 transformed the most radical elements of the cultural scene into workers for the artistic transformation of the social world. The strategy involved an iconoclastic attack on Croce’s ‘aristocratic club’, art as an autonomous realm, and an affirmation of art as the conscious fashioning of all of social life. As Mayakovsky declared at the end of 1918: ‘we do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshipped, but a living factory of the human spirit — in the streets, in the tramways, in the factories, workshops and workers’ homes.’2
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Notes
Quoted in Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, revised edition (Thames & Hudson, London, 1986), p. 219.
Michel Acouturier, ‘Theatricality as a Category in Twentieth Century Russian Culture’, in Kleberg and Nilsson, eds., Theater and Literature in Russia 1900–1930 (Almquist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1984), pp. 18–19.
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 7.
Y. Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic, ed. and trans. Ginsburg (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1970), p. 108.
On this see Barbara Lonnquist, ‘Xlebnikov’s Plays and the Folk Theatre Tradition’, in Velimir Chlebnikov: A Stockholm Symposium, ed. Nilsson (Almquist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1985), pp. 85–121.
Joan Neuberger, ‘Culture Besieged: Hooliganism and Futurism’, in S.P. Frank and M.D. Steinberg, eds., Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 185–99, 191, 202.
A. Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes 1912–1928 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY & London, 1988), pp. 75, 57.
Barbara Lonnquist, Xlebnikov and Carnival (Almquist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1979), p. 19.
S. Smith, Red Petrograd (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), p. 56.
On this see Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St Petersburg 1900–1914, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), chapter 5.
Quoted in Bengt Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky and Futurism 1917–1921 (Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm, 1976), p. 57, my translation.
Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford, 1989), p. 85.
Quoted in J. von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals 1917–1920, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), p. 104.
von Geldern, Festivals of the Revolution 1917–20, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brown University, Providence, RI, 1987, pp. 43–4.
C. Lane, The Rites of Rulers (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981), p. 164.
N. Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), p. 30.
Quoted in K. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, trans. Permar (Thames & Hudson, London, 1988), pp. 63, 64.
An excellent account and assessment of the debate is Lars Kleberg, ‘The Nature of the Soviet Audience’, in R. Russell and A. Barratt, eds., Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 172–95.
B. Brecht, Brecht On Theatre, ed. Willett (Methuen, London, 1974), p. 60.
Quoted in B. Kagarlitksy, The Thinking Reed, trans. Pearce (Verso, London, 1989), p. 119.
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© 1996 Craig Brandist
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Brandist, C. (1996). Revolutionizing Social Life from a Base in Art: The Avant-Garde and Mass Culture, 1917–28. In: Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25120-9_3
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