Модернизм как архаизм. Национализм и поиски модернистской эстетики в России

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.