movie industry, this film was simply an average bawdy day in the life of the futurists. Its actors were the artists themselves-the Burliuk brothers, Maiakovsky, and Larionov- behaving in particularly shocking ways as they satirized the movie industry, the society that patronized it, the world itself, and the entire subject of sex, through which one senseless generation leads on to another.
By late 1913, sensualism was giving way to Prometheanism, and the subjective side of futurism ('ego- futurism') to a more dispassionate and formal 'cubo-futurism.' Malevich was the harbinger of the new, designing cubistic sets and costumes in December, 1913, for the futurist opera with the appropriately Promethean title, Victory over the Sun. People were transformed into 'moving machines' by costumes of cardboard and wire. Some actors spoke only with vowels, others only with consonants, while blinding lights and ear-splitting sounds rocked through the theater in an effort to give man 'victory over the sun': freedom from all dependence on the traditional order of the world.89 Freud, too, make his impact on the new art; and plays were written in which the various roles did not represent different people but different levels and aspects of one person.90
In the manifesto that accompanied his first Suprematist exhibition in December, 1915, Malevich insisted:
Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure-painting composition.91
Shameless nudes had, however, not altogether vanished from Russian culture. They dominated the literary debut late in 1916 of one of Russia's great storytellers of this century, Isaac Babel.92 His description of a seduction in the manner of the French naturalists, whom he admired, attracted the wrath of the government authorities, who transferred to the inventive young writer from Odessa the puritanical denunciations and threats that could no longer be visited upon the absent Larionov. Yet nowhere was sensualism more in evidence than in the inner circles of the imperial government itself. The imperial family was under the sway of the notorious Rasputin, and the rival court figures who succeeded in killing this 'holy devil' in December of 1916 were if anything even more corrupt than the remarkable peasant holy man from Siberia. Protopopov, the minister of the interior who was Rasputin's friend and protege, was a sensualist thought by many to be a practitioner of necrophilia. Prince Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitry (the high aristocrats who carried out the poisoning, shooting, and drowning of the rugged Rasputin) were widely renowned for their sexual exploits and intrigues.93
Within a year, however, all these figures had been swept aside by the winds of change. First came the gust from the progressive bloc of liberal reformers in the Duma, then the unexpected hurricane of March, 1917, which ended the autocracy, and finally the swirling winds of civil war set in motion by the Bolshevik coup of November.
Revolution and civil war turned the attention of Russian writers from the private to the public arena, and made apocalypticism, the third ideological current of the age, suddenly seem the most relevant of all. Blok, who had already felt himself 'drawn into the whirlpool' by 'the lilac world of the first revolution,' now tended to see in the erotic and mystical 'unknown lady' of his earlier poems only the mother of harlots spoken of in the Book of Revelation.94 Sensual desire was cauterized with the fire of revolution and civil war, and zealously repressed by the puritanical Bolsheviks once power was consolidated.
Nonetheless, sensualism-like other attitudes of the late imperial period-did not vanish immediately under the new regime. One writer likened the experience of revolution to that of a 'voluptuous shudder.'95 A remarkable Soviet novel of the early twenties tells of an aristocratic girl
who, by becoming head of a local secret police, converts her sexual appetite into state-sanctioned sadism, proudly proclaiming that 'the revolution is all permeated with sex for me.'90 Another tale tells of a deacon who leaves his religious calling ostensibly to join the Revolutionary forces, but actually to live freely with the prostitute Marfa. 'Underneath all his Marxism rank Marfism was hidden,' the author wryly observes.97 Most memorable of all is the picaresque sensuality and ironic spirit in Babel's tales of the revolutionary era, Red Cavalry, of 1926, and in his Odessa Tales of the following year dealing with the Odessa underworld.
There was an engagingly straightforward irrationalism about the bohemian sensualism of the 'Imaginist' school of poetry, which was formed in 1919. Seeking to 'smash' grammar and return to primitive roots and suggestive images, they produced such remarkable works as Vadim Shershenevich's 2x2=5 and Anatoly Marienhofs / Fornicate with Inspiration.9* Before the group collapsed in 1924 and Shershenevich settled down to the prosaic task of becoming Upton Sinclair's Russian translator, this leader of the group wrote a number of poems exalting the anti-progressive sensualism that was still widespread among the intelligentsia:
Women, make haste to love us, For we sing of wonders still, And we are the last thin cracks That progress has yet to fill!99
Sensualism was, however, not entirely without its official patrons in the early years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, the Revolution was in a very real sense 'permeated with sex' for Alexandra Kollontai, the gifted daughter of a Ukrainian general and first commissar of public welfare in the new Bolshevik regime. Between the publication of her New Morality and the Working Class in 1919 and her collection Free Love in 1925, she campaigned incessantly for free love in the new society. She argued, however, for sublimating the physical side of love ('wingless eros') to a socially creative love, with wings, which seeks a kind of spiritual union with the new proletarian society.100 Thus, just as Bogdanov saw the proletariat as God, Kollontai saw it as a kind of cosmic sex partner. She favored (to cite the title of one of her stories) 'the love of worker bees,' with women as queen bees, producing children from semi- anonymous fathers whose true love lies in productive labor. In a famous metaphor one of her fiotional female creations insisted that sexual intercourse in itself had no greater significance than the simple act of drinking a glass of water.101
Although she favored monogamy for purely practical reasons, she was an ardent apologist for the liberalized divorce laws that were promulgated
early in the Soviet era. Both she and her wealthy Finnish mother were divorcees. Her own supreme love affair was clearly the one she enjoyed with the working class. A wealthy intellectual, she identified herself with the most ruggedly proletarian faction of Bolshevism, the so-called Workers' Opposition, which vainly sought to combat the growing power of the new state bureaucracy with a system of decentralized trade union control. Unlike others in the movement, she was not disbarred from further positions of authority after its repudiation in 1921. She spent the entire period from 1923-45 in high diplomatic posts, most of them in the Scandinavian regions that she knew so well (involving herself in such colorful episodes as her attempt to negotiate an end to the Russo-Finnish War together with another militant Bolshevik feminist, the Esthonian-born playwright Hella Wuolijoki, whose most famous work, the Loretta Young movie The Farmer's Daughter, deals with that enduring popular symbol of promiscuity).102 Kollontai's advocacy of sexual liberation can be said to represent in some ways a curious and short-lived introduction of Scandinavian perspectives into the gloomy puritanical picture of Russian Bolshevism. The fact that she was the only important opposition leader within the Bolshevik Party to survive the purges of the thirties could testify to some vestigial nostalgia among old Revolutionaries for her image of the Revolution as 'eros with wings.'
There was little room for eros in the Bolshevik ethos, however. The last great festival of public passion may well have been the remarkable production of the play Carmencita and the Soldier, at the Moscow Art Theater in 1923. This 'lyric tragedy' was an original reworking of Bizet's Carmen designed to focus attention exclusively on the savage, love-hate relationship between man and woman. The chorus of older tragedies was reintroduced, and the
