Читаем Natasha's Dance полностью

The Constructivists were in the forefront of this movement to bring art into union with life. In their founding manifestos, written during 1921, they detached themselves from the history of art, rejecting easel painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the new society; as 'constructors' and 'technicians', they declared their commitment, by contrast, to the design and production of practical objects which they believed could transform social life.³⁰ To this end, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin designed workers' clothes and uniforms. Stepanova's designs, which were strongly geometric and impersonal, broke down the divisions between male and female clothes. Tatlin's designs subordinated the artistic element to functionality. A man's spring coat, for example, was designed to be light yet retain heat, but it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design.³¹ Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis used photomontage to smuggle agitation into commercial advertisements and even packaging. El Lissitzky (a late convert to the production art of the Constructivists) designed simple, lightweight furniture capable of being mass produced for standard use. It was versatile and movable, as necessitated by the ever-changing circumstances of the communal house. His folding bed was a good example of the Constructivist philosophy. It was highly practical, a real space-saver in the cramped Soviet apartments, and at the same time, insofar as it enabled the single person to change his sleeping place and sleeping partner, it was designed to be instrumental in the communistic movement to break down the conjugal relations of the bourgeois family.³²

The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. 'A new science, art, literature, and morality', wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918, 'is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs.'³³ The roots of the movement went back to the 1900s when the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky)

had set up schools in Italy for workers smuggled out of Russia. The object was to educate a tier of 'conscious proletarian socialists', a sort of working-class intelligentsia, who would then spread their knowledge to other workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. In the Vperedists' view the organic development of a working-class culture was an essential prerequisite for the success of a socialist and democratic revolution, because knowledge was the key to power and, until the masses controlled it, they would be dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin, who was dismissive of the workers' potential as an independent cultural force, but after 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the civil war, cultural policy was left largely in their hands. Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the Proletkult movement. At its peak, in 1920, Proletkult claimed over 400,000 members in its factory clubs and theatres, artists' workshops and creative writing groups, brass bands and choirs, organized into some 300 branches spread across the Soviet territory. There was even a Proletarian University in Moscow and a Socialist Encyclopaedia, whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot's Encyclopedic had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.³⁴ As one might expect in such a broad movement, there was a great diversity of views on the proper content of this revolutionary culture. The main ideological division concerned the relationship between the new and old, the Soviet and the Russian, in the proletarian civilization. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult there was a strong iconoclastic trend that revelled in the destruction of the old world. 'It's time for bullets to pepper museums', declared Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, a loose association of Futurists and Constructivists which sought to link the avant-garde with Proletkult and the Soviet state. He dismissed the classics as 'old aesthetic junk' and punned that Rastrelli, the great palace-builder of St Petersburg, should be put against the wall (rasstreliat' in Russian means to execute). Much of this was intellectual swagger, like these lines from the poem 'We' by Vladimir Kirillov, the Proletkult poet:

In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, Destroy the museum, and trample over Art.³⁵