The Futurists crashed onto the literary stage in 1912, with a manifesto called ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’, which joyfully abused and rejected all previous Russian literature. They were a group of art students turned rock-star poets – swaggering, glamorous, publicity-hungry, their every pose designed for maximum shock value. In their firmly materialist world view there was one attitude which amounted almost to a religion – a belief in the power of art not just to depict, but to transform. The avant-garde’s answer to the problems of Russia was Art itself, with its capacity to unite mankind and to transmute the base metals of our flawed world. Their creations were their contribution to the Revolution; by imagining the future they were performing the alchemy that would transform the present.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, probably the most famous of the Futurists, poured his poetic genius into the direct, funny, vulgar language of the streets. Cocky barrow boy crossed with tragic poet, he made himself the hero of his poetry and his life – a supersized ‘handsome twenty-two-year-old’ with ‘no senile tenderness’, who straddled the universe – chatted to the sun, man to man, walked a tiny Napoleon on a leash and marched up to heaven to threaten a mouldering old God (who, of course, was nowhere to be found). He was, his poetry suggested, a representative of a Promethean new breed of men, typical of the age, who with modern technology would crush nature and build Utopia.
If Mayakovsky was the pin-up of the group, the gentle, ascetic Velimir Khlebnikov was considered by his contemporaries to be the most brilliant. At a Futurist carnival in Petrograd in 1917 he was borne through the streets on a throne with the inscription ‘Chairman of the World’. His ‘transrational’ poetry is a kaleidoscope of neologisms, arcane words and esoteric references – his own attempt at ‘the language of the birds’, an ancient, ideal language that was capable of expressing the pure essence of meaning.
While a political Revolution was still remote, nihilism was the literary avant-garde’s default position. As Mayakovsky later summed up in his first long poem, the idea was: ‘Down with your Love! Down with your Art! Down with your system! Down with your religion!’ Yet before 1917, apart from the brawls that often concluded their readings, the Futurists’ idea of bringing down the system was entirely artistic and performative. They talked of fusing Art and Life, dragging the artist out of his garret and placing him in the midst of people’s ordinary working lives; but at this stage little more than token gestures were possible – dressing eccentrically, for example, in a yellow blouse instead of a jacket and tie, wearing spoons or radishes in their buttonholes, and painting on unframed panels rather than old-fashioned canvases.
And then came 1917. The Tsarist regime fell in March, but it was the Bolshevik coup in October that swept away the entire bourgeois system. The avant-garde was jubilant: its demands had been granted with incredible speed and thoroughness, and anti-Establishment artists and writers had all at once become the mouthpiece of the new state. One can only wonder at how extraordinary this must have felt, although with typical brass-nosery they affected no surprise. Anything, suddenly, was possible. In art as in politics, all the talk might have dwelt ad nauseam on rationality, utility and a scientific approach – but beneath all that lay a limitless utopia, released from pragmatism by the dreamlike chaos of the moment.
The Futurists had long since changed their name: in the visual arts, the ‘Last Futurist Exhibition’ had taken place back in January 1916, after which it was partially succeeded by Suprematism, and in 1917 by Constructivism, which rejected painting altogether for production art – art with a social meaning and a practical purpose. Nonetheless, under the banner of Constructivist ‘labour’, extraordinary works of utopian art were conceived, even if they were never built, nor the necessary technology ever developed. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20, is perhaps its emblematic creation: a magical object conceived by a soaring, original imagination that aimed to enlighten and transform the world around it not by representation or depiction, but by the simple fact of its existence… even though it did not and could not exist, because the very essence of its transformative power (materials, technology, organisation) was unavailable or had not yet been invented. In this alchemical spirit, the students of Vkhutemas created their extraordinary designs for flying, floating and dangling buildings, and El Lissitzky produced his prounen, architectonic drawings that hovered somewhere between the second and third dimension. ‘This was one of those epochs,’ the writer Darko Suvin later commented, ‘when new Heavens touch the old Earth, when the future actively overpowers the present.’ The inspirations of the avant-garde were as much guidelines to future creators as designs in themselves.
The Party’s dream had many of the features of the hyper-controlled, draconian utopias otherwise confined to SF novels – although, fortunately enough, its political and administrative weakness prevented too thorough an implementation. War Communism, the system adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, was at least partially conceived as a prefigurative stage on the route to Communism. The most striking move was perhaps Trotsky’s unilateral declaration of peace, which was followed the next day by a German invasion along the entire defenceless Russian border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Internal policy was equally radical. All private enterprise was banned, industries and banks were nationalised and rations were distributed according to class, with workers, the Red Army and Party members being awarded the best rations, while ‘former people’ were given, in Trotsky’s unpleasant phrase, ‘only just enough bread so that they don’t forget the smell of it’. Obligatory labour was introduced as well as conscription, in a ferocious version of the workers’ paradise, while the ‘old world’ of the villages was treated ruthlessly. Under this system, even Party members and their loyal supporters could barely keep body and materialist soul together. The artist Olga Rozanova died of diphtheria in 1918; Khlebnikov, weakened by malnourishment, in 1922.
Despite these hardships the avant-garde pushed ahead as far as they could with the task of remaking the world. The Old was ritually cleansed with new street names and new, hurriedly built monuments; the walls of the Moscow Manège, for example, were painted with a list of Great People of History – Spartacus, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg. Mass theatrical events were organised to celebrate Revolutionary anniversaries, including a vast re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace with a cast of more than eight thousand. Avant-garde agitprop posters were displayed throughout Bolshevik-held areas. Mayakovsky’s plan to paint the trees outside the Kremlin red was typical of their witty conceptual approach to uniting art and life in one almost destitute but Revolutionary reality.
By 1921 War Communism had more or less brought the Bolshevik state to a standstill. Industrial production was minimal, the cities were half empty, starvation and disease were widespread. Lenin had no alternative but to reintroduce a certain level of market economics, the New Economic Policy, into the system, upon which his endlessly resourceful compatriots immediately set to work rebuilding their country.
For the next eight years or so Russians enjoyed something of a respite from the depredations of the State, and the avant-garde were able to carry themes from the pre-Revolutionary period to their conclusions. Despite their victory over the old order, the nihilistic tendency still persisted. The monochrome replaced colour, silence replaced music, nudity replaced fashion (the ‘Evenings of the Denuded Body’ which Pasha anachronistically wished he could attend, took place in 1922, with marches and the occupation of trolley buses), and a universal monosyllabic language called ‘Ao’ was proposed. The nichevoki, Russian Dadaists, made a single vow: ‘to read nothing, write nothing, publish nothing’. There were even darker negations too, unsurprising perhaps after seven years of war: robotism, antiverbalism, suicidalism.