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.
In the first section of Chapter Three I make a digression to discuss an alternative vision of the early twentieth century as the age of the decline of nations and the rise of empires offered by Valery Briusov. The introduction of this perspective makes it possible to demonstrate, on the one hand, how aesthetic programs reflect ideological visions in the camp of “imperialists” as much as in that of the “nationalists” to which this book is largely devoted. On the other hand, it provides material that can be juxtoposed with other case studies in subsequent sections of this chapter to highlight the points of convergence between “imperialist” and “nationalist” visions of Russian modernist authors. At the center of the second section is the impact of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) in shaping the discourse of nationalism in modernist publications such as the journals Novyi put’, Voprosy zhizni, and Vesy. I demonstrate here how military defeats and the events of the first Russian revolution (1905) unfolding against the background of these defeats not only triggered the crisis of loyalty to Russian imperial statehood among modernist intellectuals but also undermined, in their own eyes, the value of their European, westernized identity. This prompted the turn to theorizing the “national” as divorced from modern statehood, with increased emphasis on its pre-modern, indigenous foundations. Hence the influence Viacheslav Ivanov’s ideas acquire in the second half of the 1900s, which is the subject of the third section. Against the background of the crisis of political institutions, Ivanov develops his vision of the role of an artist as an agent of social consolidation. On the one hand, Ivanov’s artist discovers and resurrects the national (indigenous) myth, which encapsulates the shared “national” past of all the estates; on the other, the artist seeks to transform the realm of aesthetic production itself by removing the divide between creators and spectators, i.e., by making them join forces in an artistic creation. The new aesthetic idiom that consciously evokes the “national archaic” and new forms of art’s institutionalization are both markers, in Ivanov’s terms, of the overcoming of modern “individualism” and of the approach of a new epoch of the vsenarodnoe (“all-people’s,” “universal”) art. Finally, setting the ideals of statehood and nationhood against one another, Ivanov, like other Russian thinkers of that time, theorizes religious confession (Orthodoxy) as an important vehicle of social (national) transformation, the declared goals of which make us recall Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of “free theocracy.” In the fourth section my attention shifts to adaptations of Ivanov’s ideas in the broader literary-critical discourse of the second half of the 1900s, and to the discussion of the twofold role of this discourse: on the one hand it boosts “archaistic” tendencies in literature of the time, while on the other it conceptually deforms them by imposing a singular interpretative frame on a variety of practices (with most examples coming from reviews of books by Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky, and Ivanov himself). Finally, in the fifth section of this chapter I discuss the use of the Panslavic matrix in radicalizing the “national” aesthetic project of Russian modernism. Interpreting programmatic statements by 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
