composer Arthur Lourie, twenty-six. Lisping but eloquent Punin (who also had a facial tic) and, in contrast, the outwardly calm, ironic, and exquisitely dressed Lourie were part of the innovative milieu in post-revolutionary Petrograd. They had come for permission to use the Hermitage Theater, which adjoined the Winter Palace, for the production of
It’s quite possible that the planned presentation of Khlebnikov’s eccentric play (one of his best works) was merely a pretext for Punin and Lourie to meet with Lunacharsky. In any case, the conversation quickly moved on to more lofty issues—the creation of a new communist culture and the participation in it of the intelligentsia. The situation here was very unfavorable for the Bolsheviks.
The three main directions in Russian arts had formed before the revolution. The traditionalists were in the right wing: the Imperial Academy of Arts and the society of “Wanderers,” realistic painters who had once fought against academic art but later joined it, setting up a profitable conveyor belt for producing popular genre paintings “from Russian folk life” and undemanding landscapes.
The center was held by the moderately eclectic and passeist Mir Iskusstva, headed by Benois, the first Russian artistic association to be oriented toward the West but with strong overtones of traditional Russian ideas of “art serving the people.” By the time the monarchy fell, Mir Iskusstva, which had criticized academic culture and the Wanderers as being old-fashioned, had itself turned into a respectable brand name, whose leaders were probably the most influential trendsetters for current mainstream tastes.
The new players began to appear in 1910, ambitious groups of so-called left art, which for many years was labeled “Futurist” in Russia: such associations as the Knave of Diamonds, Union of Youth, and Donkey’s Tail. Petr Konchalovsky, Ilya Mashkov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and other innovators and visionaries subsequently became famous in the West as the Russian avant-garde, stunned the world, and today attract the greatest interest among Western art historians.
But in 1917 the artistic merits of their works were rather questionable to the majority of people. Most, even members of the educated intelligentsia, regarded the innovators with a snigger, if not outright hostility. The Bolsheviks were no exception in this case. Their leader Lenin, while a political radical, had extremely conservative tastes in culture.
Lunacharsky’s views on art were much more tolerant than Lenin’s, but even he could, for example, in 1911 refer to Vassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, as a man “obviously in the final stage of psychic degeneration.”1 Contrary to later legends about Lunacharsky as a connoisseur and fervent proponent of avant-garde art, he was sincerely baffled by Kandinsky’s work: “He scrawls, he scrawls some lines with the first paints that come to hand and signs them, the wretch—‘Moscow,’ ‘Winter,’ and even ‘St. George.’ Why do they permit him to exhibit, really?”2
When the Bolsheviks seized power, they encountered sabotage everywhere. Lunacharsky, arriving at the Ministry of National Education to take over the job, was not met by a single official, only guards and messengers. Recalling how the major cultural figures had reacted to the Soviet regime, Lunacharsky wrote in 1927: “Many of them fled abroad and others felt like fish out of water for quite some time.”3
The Bolsheviks themselves would have preferred to deal with the established big names. But the luminaries were in no hurry to meet the Bolsheviks halfway. Even the “stormy petrel of the revolution” Gorky, who at one time was a friend of Lenin, attacked him in the opposition newspaper
Gorky knew very well that the Bolsheviks’ plans for culture were rather vague: it was supposed to become “proletarian” and accessible to everyone. But that was for the future, and in the meantime they had to organize the protection of palaces and museums from looting by the revolutionary masses. The Bolsheviks got several important experts from Mir Iskusstva involved, particularly Benois, who found a common language with Lunacharsky, whom he sarcastically called St. Anatoly Chrysostom.
Remaining Commissar of Education until 1929, Lunacharsky played an extraordinary role in the formation of Soviet culture of the Lenin period. He looked like a typical member of the intelligentsia (soft beard and ever-present pince-nez); he had received a doctorate from Zurich University and as a young man had even worked part-time at the Louvre as a guide for Russian tourists. After the revolution he started wearing a military green jacket, but he never lost his geniality and relish for playing the role of the arts patron.
Lunacharsky was a prolific cultural journalist, publishing 122 books with a total of more than a million copies, between 1905 and 1925. Most importantly, Lenin trusted him, assuming that Lunacharsky “knows how to persuade people,” as long as you keep him under control. And even though a strict Lenin kept his often over-enthusiastic cultural tsar on a short leash, he did not accept his resignations when Lunacharsky tried to protest some of Lenin’s harshest decisions.
However, even that “good-natured child”(as cynically inclined literary critic Kornei Chukovsky called him) grew impatient dealing with the endlessly vacillating Benois and his friends from Mir Iskusstva, who in typical centrist fashion wanted “to retain their innocence and still make money”—obtain cultural power through the Bolsheviks but run things from backstage, taking on no real responsibility. Benois, as can be seen from his diary for 1917–1918, was unpleasantly surprised by the fact that the role of favorite to “Queen Lunacharsky” was suddenly played by the Futurists: the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his henchman, Osip Brik.5
That should not have been a surprise to Benois: yes, after a brief hesitation (which did take place, even though they tried to deny it later), the Russian avant-gardists decided to collaborate openly and actively with the new regime, since it gave them a unique opportunity to be in charge, and the Bolsheviks, holding their noses, accepted this arrangement out of purely pragmatic considerations. This was a classic marriage of convenience.
As a result, in 1918–1919, the previously marginal avant-garde suddenly was omnipresent. Even without enumerating titles and posts in the ever-changing bureaucratic and cultural structures and institutions that the “left wing” occupied, it was clear that the reins for once belonged to them. Punin and Lourie, after their meeting with Lunacharsky, took leading positions in the cultural departments of the People’s Commissariat of Education.
Futurists, being socially engaged in their desire to modernize not only all aspects of culture, but also of everyday life, were the most visible. But other avant-garde sects became involved. Stocky and with a pockmarked face, Kazimir Malevich created the famous
