system of training actors that he called “biomechanics”—a complex mixture of gymnastics and acrobatics that helped the actor control his body’s movements precisely and naturally, an “anti-Stanislavsky Method” of sorts.
In the 1920s, Meyerhold’s fame reached its peak: he was adored by progressive youth, he was copied, envied, showered with awards (after the then-rare title of People’s Artist, which he received even before Stanislavsky, Meyerhold became honorary Red Soldier of the Moscow Garrison, honorary Red Sailor, Miner, and so on), and—the truest sign of popularity—parodied. Mikhail Bulgakov predicted acidly that Meyerhold would die when the trapezes with naked boyars in an “experimental” production of Pushkin’s
Meyerhold’s influence extended to the fledgling Soviet film world, where one of his students was the up-and-coming Sergei Eisenstein, whose revolutionary masterpiece
Meyerhold’s radicalism seemed excessive in the new political landscape, which had changed noticeably. In 1921, after winning the Civil War against the White Army, the Communists once again faced the threat of counterrevolutionary revolt from within. The severe revolutionary order they had instituted was not working. The country lay in ruins.
The Soviet regime kept clinging to the disastrous market-free economy. The cultural avant-garde wholeheartedly supported this policy, for it suited their artistic ideals. But the workers and peasants grumbled. More than 20,000 seamen rebelled in March 1921 at Russia’s largest naval base, Kronstadt near Petrograd, bringing the city to a siege situation. Anti-Bolshevik peasant riots spread in the provinces.
Gathering their last strength, the Bolsheviks cruelly suppressed the Kronstadt Rebellion and the peasant Vendee. Switching to carrot-and-stick policies, Lenin decided to make some concessions. In May 1921, overcoming the resistance of the majority of his party comrades, he proclaimed the New Economic Policy (NEP). Small private trade was permitted again, small private factories and crafts shops opened, kiosks selling trifles appeared on the corners and intersections of Moscow and Petrograd, and were gradually joined by shops, cafes, delis, patisseries, and bakeries. Workmen tore down old boards from the windows of closed shops and installed new panes, and soon displays showed luxurious still lifes forgotten over the hungry years of revolution and war: bread, cheese, pastry, bagels and rolls of every size and shape, heavy hams, a variety of sausages and cheese, and even such exotic fruit as grapes, oranges, and bananas.
Private initiative created the economic miracle that had eluded the Bolsheviks, and collapse was averted. Hunger and misery dissipated, and so did the dreams of the avant-garde artists for hegemony in culture. Not so long ago, they had been instituting utopian projects on a planetary scale: Meyerhold intended to open the Theater of International Proletarian Culture in Moscow in 1920, and Kandinsky wanted to convene an International Congress of Art. But once “normal” life was reestablished, it turned out that the masses did not need avant-garde art.
The innovators were being replaced in their executive cultural posts by traditionalists, who had previously taken a wait-and-see position regarding the Bolsheviks. The Soviet leaders were eager to form an alliance with the “realists,” because the majority of the Bolsheviks had very conservative tastes. And so, the patriarch of the Art Theater, Nemirovich-Danchenko, came out of an audience at the Kremlin and announced with pleasure that “the attitude toward theaters has changed strongly: Meyerholdism has lost not only its prestige, but all interest.”30
With growing confidence, the Bolsheviks were pushing aside the Futurists, especially their loudest representative, the loyal Mayakovsky, whom Lenin viewed “with suspicion and even irritation,” according to Maxim Gorky. “He yells, he makes up these crooked words.”31 Lenin’s patience broke when Mayakovsky published his new narrative poem
A note sent by Lenin to Lunacharsky during a government meeting on May 6, 1921, has been preserved: “Aren’t you ashamed to vote for publishing Mayakovsky’s
With Lenin’s support and even direct participation, an attack began on the avant-garde in the state art education system, where they had previously held command positions. In an appeal addressed to Lenin on June 13, 1921, the adherents of realism expressed their indignation that for the last three and a half years the “Futurists ruthlessly suppressed all the other movements in art, creating a privileged financial situation for themselves and placing artists of a different creed into a hopeless situation.”33 The traditionalists presented a long list of grievances against the avant-garde: “They strive via pure force to cultivate Futurist and abstract art…. They shamelessly turn students into grimacing ‘innovators.’…The country is in danger of being left without seriously trained artists.”34
The Bolsheviks continued to play cultural games with the administrative dexterity they had demonstrated from the first days of the revolution, but there was only one aim of all those complicated bureaucratic maneuvers, the endless denunciations, counterdenunciations, government and party resolutions, decrees, and ukases (many of which were Lenin’s): to disavow the avant-garde as the official cultural course.
The avant-garde artists were the first to realize it. They fought back desperately, calling their aesthetic opponents anti-Soviet and swearing fealty to the authorities at every step. But some of them, under various pretexts, began drifting to the West. Kandinsky, who had been, among other things, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Artistic Studies, went to Germany in 1921, ostensibly to create an international branch of the Academy. He became one of the leaders of the avant-garde Bauhaus school of art and design and found world recognition as the father of abstract painting and predecessor of the American Abstract Expressionists of the late twentieth century.
The colorful Jewish primitivist Marc Chagall, who had been “plenipotentiary in charge of art affairs of the city of Vitebsk” in Russia and who had festooned the city for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, moved to Moscow (pushed out of Vitebsk by the more radical Malevich), and from there in the summer of 1922 to Berlin, and then to Paris. (Many critics believe that the best works of both Chagall and Kandinsky belong to their early period.) The Constructivist sculptors Naum Gabo and Natan Pevsner (who were brothers) had worked actively in Moscow but also ended up in Western Europe. One of the “Amazons of the Russian avant-garde,” Alexandra Exter, left for Venice in 1924 to take part in the organization of the Soviet pavilion for the international art exhibition; like Chagall, she settled in Paris. These people lived through the most difficult years in Russia. Their emigration signaled the beginning of the end of the Russian avant-garde as a national phenomenon.
Exter’s departure in particular meant the complete collapse of the unofficial group of “Amazons” that had formed in Russian innovative culture before the revolution. They were called Amazons by friends and foes—the latter mockingly, the former with delight and awe, stressing their uniqueness not only for Russia but for the world. In fact, it is impossible to name another similar group of such powerful, vivid, and innovative women artists.
