Ivanov, Gorodetsky, and especially Velimir Khlebnikov, I demonstrate how radical linguistic experiment becomes conceptualized as a means of reviving the “national.” Nineteenth-century Panslavism as an ideological movement emphasized a common “spiritual descent” of all Slavic peoples: a common faith and written language, received from the hands of Saints Cyril and Methodius, defined for Panslavists the shared heritage of Slavdom. It was precisely the idea of the revival of an “all- Slavonic” language on the basis of modern Russian that allowed young Khlebnikov to interpret linguistic innovations as a “return to the sources.” A destabilization of the linguistic system of modern Russian appeared in this perspective as an instrument of the return to Slavonic linguistic unity, in which all lexical, morphological, and other riches of all contemporary Slavic languages could come together. Ivanov’s “myth-creation” and Khlebnikov’s “word-creation” laid the groundwork for the “national” project within Russian modernism that made all but impossible a distinction between a “return to the sources” and radical innovation, archaisms and neologisms, and which discursively constructed artistic experiment as a path toward the authentically national.
Chapter Four has a circular composition: its first and, partially, fourth (final) sections are devoted to the story of an unrealized ballet by Sergei Prokofiev, Ala and Lollii (1915), the libretto for which was written by Gorodetsky. Initially commissioned from Prokofiev by Diaghilev in 1914 and later rejected by him as “international music,” this ballet was soon reworked by Prokofiev into a suite that acquired the name Scythian Suite. One of the reviews of its first performance in 1916, written by Andrei Rimsky- Korsakov (the composer’s son), directly – and disapprovingly – linked this piece with the Parisian fascination with the “Russian primitive,” thus insisting on its dependence on Diaghilev’s concept of the “national.” In order to explain how the two mutually exclusive interpretations of Prokofiev’s music became possible, in the second and third sections of this chapter I trace the formation of the aesthetic ideology of Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” in Europe and the reception of the “national” aesthetic, as manifested in its select productions, in Russian art, music, and theatre criticism. On the one hand, I analyze declarative statements by such contributors to these productions as Leon Bakst, Nikolai Roerich, Alexander Benois, Igor Stravinsky, and Diaghilev himself, which allow me to speculate about the creative and ideological intentions each of the participants brought into the project. On the other, I discuss the critical response in Russia to some of these productions, specifically turning in section four to Stravinsky’s early ballets, as responsible for attributing a range of meanings to archaistic experimentations in music – from declaring “Russian archaism” as a new, authentically “national” artistic style (Yakov Tugendhold) to exposing Stravinsky’s evolution from “fairytale through lubok to the primitive” as a story of a “dramatic rupture with the traditions of Russian music” (Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov). Within this range, the discursive equation of the experimental with the “barbarian,” and of the latter with the “(pseudo)national,” allowed critics to qualify pieces like Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite as manifestations of the newest brand of “musical nationalism,” even in the absence of inherent folkloric substrate. At the close of the chapter, using music as example, I touch upon the issue of the interaction between expert knowledge of the indigenous Russian traditions, projects of their revival, and forms of their actualization in experimental art.
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См. об этом: Knight N. Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855 // Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire / Ed. by J. Burbank and D. L. Ransel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. P. 108–141.
См. об этом: Азадовский М. К. История русской фольклористики: В 2 т. 2-е изд. М.: Изд-во РГГУ, 2013. Т. II. С. 603–684, passim.
