the symbolists.36
Thus, it seems appropriate that much of the initial impulse toward creating a new experimental Russian art in Russia should come from the collective attempt of a small circle of artists to rediscover and recreate the artistic forms and craft techniques of Old Russia near Moscow on the estate of a wealthy railroad baron, Sawa Mamontov.37 In 1882 they began by designing, building, and decorating a small church in the early Novgorod style, and then turned to fashioning stagings for the first private opera company in Russian history, which Mamontov established in Moscow the following year.
Mamontov's activities helped move the center of artistic gravity from St. Petersburg back to Moscow in the 1890's. Even painters like Surikov and Repin, who had been trained in the dominant St. Petersburg traditions of realism and social significance drifted to Moscow and the Mamontov estate, portraying in their masterpieces of the late eighties and nineties early Russian historical subjects on a vast fresco scale and with a richness of color that became characteristic of Muscovite painting. In 1892 a wealthy merchant, P. M. Tret'iakov, donated his vast collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow, where a gallery bearing his name was established-the first ever devoted exclusively to Russian painting. Two other Moscow merchants, Serge Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, subsequently brought to Russia more than 350 French impressionist and postimpressionist paintings: the greatest collection of Western art since Catherine the Great's massive importation of Rembrandts. Moscow became the major center inside Russia for experimental modern artists like Kandinsky, who made the city the subject of a number of his paintings.
Among the young painters in Moscow stimulated to fresh experimentation by the Shchukin and Morozov collections was Casimir Malevich, an artist in many respects even more revolutionary than Kandinsky. Like so many of the avant-garde, Malevich was influenced by a curious combination of primitive Russian art and the newest, most sophisticated art of the West. His development through a bewildering variety of approaches in search of
the basic elements of painting illustrates the peculiar Promethean passion that became characteristic of experimental modern art in Russia. Like Kandinsky, Malevich soon left the world of recognizable people and objects for the fresh start of his 'black square on a white ground' followed by his famous 'white on white' series of 1918.
As Malevich's art became more radical in form, it became more Promethean in purpose; for he sought to free the visual arts from 'the tyranny of easel painting' and impose his new ideal forms on the wallpaper, the buildings, the plates-even the coffins-of the future. In what he called 'my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of the objective world,' he and his followers attempted to found in the year of Scriabin's death, 1915, an 'art of pure sensation,'38 which he called Suprematism and later 'the art of the fifth dimension.'39 The latter phrase, used at a time when Einstein's fourth dimension was still known only to specialists, was no mere figure of speech. As he put it in one typical passage:
. . . man's path lies through space. Suprematism is the semaphore of color. . . . The blue color of clouds is overcome in the Suprematist system, is ruptured and enters white, as the true, real representation of infinity, and is therefore freed from the colored background of the sky.40
Thus even line and color, the last links which Kandinsky's art enjoyed with the real world, are severed in Malevich's doctrine. A reviewer described him as 'a rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence';41 and he himself insisted in a manifesto of 1922 that man
is preparing on the earth to throw his body into infinity-from legs to aeroplanes, further and further into the limits of the atmosphere, and then further to his new orbit, joining up with the rings of movement towards the absolute.42
Malevich stands as a kind of artistic prophet of the space age, practical preparations for which were already being undertaken by Constantine Tsiolkovsky, a sickly, self-taught genius from the Russian interior. As early as 1892, he had written about the scientific feasibility of a journey to the moon, and in 1903 he began a long series of amateur cosmic probes with his own small-scale, jet-propelled ballistic appliances. 'This planet,' he wrote, 'is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend all one's life in a cradle.'43
Space tended to replace for twentieth-century Russia the symbol of the sea with all its symbolic overtones of purification, deliverance from the ordinary, and annihilation of self. The Russian Prometheans spoke no more of an ark of faith or a ship at sea, but of a new craft that would take them
into outer space. After his 'white on white' series of 1918, Malevich did not paint again for nearly a decade, producing instead a series of sketches for what he called an 'idealized architecture': future dwelling places for humanity bearing the name planity, from the Russian word for 'airplane.' Malevich's only serious rival for dominance of the artistic avant-garde in the 1920's, Vladimir Tatlin, was ostensibly far more down to earth with his doctrine of utilitarian 'constructivism' and his demand for a new living art of 'real materials in real space.' But he too reflected this Promethean urge to move out and master that space. Increasingly, his three-dimensional constructions acquired an upward, winged thrust that seems to be tugging at the wires connecting them to earth. Tatlin spent most of the last thirty years of his life designing a bizarre new glider that looked like a giant insect and was called a Letatlin-a fusion of the Russian word 'to fly' and his own name.44
The first thirty years of the twentieth century in Russia was a period in which traditional terms of reference seemed largely irrelevant. As Leo Shestov, the philosopher and future Russian popularizer of Kierkegaard, proclaimed in his Apotheosis of Groundlessness in 1905: 'Only one assertion has or can have objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible.'45 Men believed in an earthly 'world without end,' to cite the title of a Futurist anthology of 1912.46 Followers of Fedorov continued to believe that the resurrection of the dead was now scientifically possible; Mechnikov argued that life could be prolonged indefinitely by a diet centered on yoghurt; and a strange novel of 1933, Youth Restored, by the most popular writer of the 1920's, Michael Zoshchenko, offered a final Promethean reprise on the Faust legend by portraying an old professor who believes that he can restore his youth merely through the exercise of his will.47
Beyond the five dimensions of Malevich's art lay the seven dimensions offered by the philosopher, psychologist, and Oriental traveler P. D. Uspensky. Beginning with his Fourth Dimension of 1909, he provided new vistas for self-transformation: a completely internal 'fourth way' which lies beyond the three past ways to godliness of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. He offered-in the words of two of his later book titles-'a key to the enigmas of the world' and 'a new model for the universe.'48 He insisted that man was capable of a higher inner knowledge that would take him into 'six-dimensional space.' There are three dimensions in time, which are a continuation of the three dimensions of space, and which lead in turn to a 'seventh dimension' of the pure imagination.49
In St. Petersburg, Prometheanism found its most extreme-and historically important-expression in the movement known as 'God-building' (Bogostroitel'stvo). St. Petersburg intellectuals were, predictably, more con-
cerned with social questions than their Moscow counterparts; and, amidst the agitation of the first decade of the new century, a group of Marxist intellectuals struck upon the Promethean idea of simply transferring to the urban proletariat the attributes of God. 'God-building' developed partly in reaction to 'God-seeking,' an earlier movement of St. Petersburg intellectuals who followed Merezhkovsky in turning from aesthetic to religious questions. Their return to philosophic idealism (and in many cases Orthodox Christianity) was celebrated in a variety of publications from the periodicals New Road (1903-4) and Questions of Life (1905-6) to the famous
