Модернизм как архаизм. Национализм и поиски модернистской эстетики в России

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.