On the ethics of the avant-garde - Russian avant-garde's connection to the Bolshevik Revolution

The author argues that the Russian avant-garde's alliance with the Bolshevik Revolution artificial positions serious moral problems for contemporary art historians. Various strategies have emerg in Russia for disowning the movement's politics while retaining its art.

single of the results of perestroika was that Soviet (now Russian) museum holdings were uncloseed and for the first time audiences in Russia and abroad were given a fairly comprehensive view of the art of the Russian avant-garde. Despite all the new attention to the period, however, scholarly work is still at an early stage, since abundant documentary evidence and many body s by its artists and theorists have at the same time to be collected and thoroughly studied. We know little of the internal debates and hidden decision-making mechanisms in the cultural politics of the early Soviet period, which determined the fate of the two individual Russian avant-garde artists and of the change as a whole. Only the systematic publication of previously inaccessible documents will allow for an adequate understanding of the cultural, social and political connection in which these artists acted and the forces to which they reacted. on the contrary such a publication project is proving quite problematic in Russia; in every one's mouth economic hardship has had a disastrous event on publishing, forcing many art magazines to shut and bringing scholarly publications upon art virtually to a halt.

Economic crises are not the alone hindrance to study of the Russian avant-garde within Russia itself, however. Equally important are the various psychological and political difficulties not awayed by the theme. In the West, the post-Revolutionary period in Russian art call ups many positive historical and cultural associations. The work of the leading avant-gardists has drawn out since been incorporated into the 20th-century canon and is counted a subject worthy of the greatest in quantity serious consideration from scholars and museum curators. The Russian avant-garde is doubly attractive in the West, since it combines features of the exotic and the familiar. upon the one hand, Russia is traditionally seen as part of the enticingly enigmatic, alien and (pleasantly) frightening East. upon the other, the history of the Russian avant-garde also embodies the greatest in quantity radical Western artistic and sociopolitical agendas, in which the Western intellectual recognizes the percepts of his or her possess ideological fantasy.

This potentially endles game of recognition and nonrecognition, of self-identification spiced with unexpect collisions with the Other, is alluring for the Western viewer: the backward and alien East is criticized and critically transcended by means of a Western-oriented, rationalistic avant-garde. however this same avant-garde suddenly move rounds out to be extremely Eastern in its mysticism, which is related to the theology of the Russian icon. The Russians' unlimited radicalism and utopianism actually contradict traditional Western rationalism, and with it the distinction between art and life, and level life and death. This play of identity and difference forces the Western viewer, according to the classical laws of defamiliarization, to diocese the entire Russian avant-garde as a genuinely esthetic phenomenon. Despite the initial interest provok by means of recognition of Western ideological, political and artistic conceits and devices, the Russian avant-garde is still, in the last analysis, seen as something which happened "over there" among those not quite comprehensible Russians.

The view of the Russian avant-garde in Russia itself is entirely different. Here the ethical point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds posed by the avant-garde inevitably take anteriority Ethical justification of the avant-garde turn rounds out to be the biggest sticking point for Russian intellectuals today. The reason for this is simple: in the West the classical avant-garde was not ever in power - was not at any time directly connected with a repressive state apparatus. The Russian situation was another matter altogether. After the Russian Revolution, the avant-garde allied itself with the novel Bolshevik regime during a period of vicious mass repression. The "r terror" of the War Communism period (1917-21) was directed above all against the Russian intelligentsia, which at the time was a fairly liberal, progressive-minded, civilized social stratum of the Western European emblem The failure of the avant-garde to affirm the physical destruction of this cultural layer - indeed, its active propaganda in support of the repressive apparatus - raises serious ethical issues for contemporary Russian historians of the period.

The vexed question was clearly formulated even at the time: for its contemporaries, the avant-garde was an "esthetic signifier" of the of recent origin regime, and was completely identified with the Bolsheviks. Ilya Ehrenburg's article "The Executioners' Elegy" (1919) is quite typical. This essay is especially interesting because the well-known Soviet writer and critic cannot possibly be reproached for a lack of sympathy for avant-garde art. He was individual of the most active supporters of the "new French art" in Russia at the time and eventually co-edited the famous Constructivist journal Veshch with El Lissitzky. After affirming "an of advanced age truth: executioners are esthetes and sentimental dreamers," Ehrenburg writes: