Author Archives: Augustus Gilchrist '20

Komar and Melamid

What happens to a symbol when it is forcefully detached from its original meaning? Does it float off into semiotic oblivion, subordinated to whatever new context it has been placed in? Does it retain any of its previous separate power?

Komar and Melamid’s work is interesting on a few levels. The socio-political satire is, of course, biting and inventive: The Origin of Socialist Realism depicts Stalin, statuesque and incongruous in a poorly-lit semi-classical setting, visited by the Muse. Stalin and the Muses shows Stalin accepting a book from the Muses, radiating a dark light, in front of his desk (yet is it ‘his’? Once more, he is a statue). In Lenin Lived, Lives, and Will Live, the revolutionary may as well be some slain Danaan, weeped for by a shrouded women. These statements are clever, but do they move?

SOTS Art provides an interesting counterpart to Western pop art: the ubiquitous images of consumerism replaced with the ubiquitous images of totalitarianism. The Campbell’s Soup Can, however, is really only interesting because it has been placed into the new context (Warhol’s pop art). There it is!, we say- the things we buy, speaking back to us in technicolor.

A dictator speaks back a little louder. But does he always say the same thing? When Stalin is collaged into one of Komar and Melamid’s works, is he still ‘Stalin’? After we appreciate the parody, the ‘artistic statement,’ the polemic on socialist realism, does his image still conjure terror, awe, love, confusion? (I speak here about a Russian audience-the image of the dictator, any dictator, conjures up for most American students only a sort of amused, negative-reverent ‘oh yes, him.’ How many of us have seen this blog? http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/)

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote that

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”

These images of Stalin (and Lenin) are not photographs, but they are ‘photographic’- they pin down the ‘man’ (made larger than life) in time and space. Work like Komar and Melamid’s unfastens the image from propagandic contexts, but, to me, it seems that Stalin doesn’t really stop being Stalin, that is to say, the parody might be, inadvertently, a parody of itself too. The Archetypal Dictator is made ridiculous, yet he is still present, a ‘Big Other’ poked at but looking back mutely, fixedly. In her work Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alekseevich interviews a young man who tells an archetypal story about Stalin: at his dacha, a portrait of him hung. Stalin would point to the picture, addressing his children: “That is Stalin.” Then to himself – “This is not Stalin.” We must ask ourselves: are the re-contextualized figures in Komar and Melamid’s “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” still ‘themselves’?

 

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Because You’re Mine/I Walk the Line

And so, draped in red, the pendulum swings back again. We have often discussed the semi-cyclical (ovulalular? Parabolic? Any shape that implies recurrence will do) nature of cultural change (and, hence, its representation in cultural production) in Russia and the Soviet Union. We read Gladkov’s Cement, in which Gleb arrives home from the front to find everything (especially relations with his wife) radically altered. Gleb struggles to comprehend the new, radical gender relations of the (albeit heavily idealized) Soviet world- his wife operates outside the home, holds responsibilities. He is not the center of her world, and he bristles at his loss of authority.

Then comes Stalin, and the dynamism of the early Soviet gender ideal is locked behind the iron facade of towering, epistemologically stable gender monoliths. Enter ‘red traditionalism’- man as warrior, man as worker, woman as mother. Mother calling for revenge, raising pioneers, etc.

So what to make of the gender roles portrayed in Moscow Does Not Believe in
Tears? This is a big topic, so I will say just a few words here. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears appears to be a sort of synthesis of the two previous models for gender relations (and their portrayal) in Soviet works. Ekaterina is the director of her factory. This is portrayed as an achievement (she is complimented, remarked upon), but essentially normalized: her life story remains within the realm of the possible. It is just unusual enough to be a source of dramatic tension with Gosha-this dramatic tension is not employed in the movie to ‘prove’ Gosha ‘wrong’, or to ‘prove’ his patriarchal views ‘right’ (at least explicitly.) Rather, it lets these views be showcased, and also normalized. ‘Red traditionalism’ is given a platform, and is left unquestioned. When Gosha is a ‘strong father,’ the results are shown as positive, and when he asserts patriarchal control, Ekaterina acquiesces. He leaves, upset, when he finds out about her position, but returns with the ‘problem’ left unresolved: drunken comradeship and zakuski, deus ex machina that they are, do not change that Ekaterina is still the director of her factory. The ending is touching, but has a note of ambiguity-Soviet gender relations continue to toe the line between progressivism and traditionalism.

But everyone seems happy. And it really is a beautiful movie.

Where’s Dad?

Looking at the Stalin-era propaganda posters, the personified, female Motherland (Rodina-Mat’) appears again and again. She is portrayed in a more or less uniform manner-she is swathed in a red approximation of village female dress, and she occupies the center of the poster, either calling upon the viewer directly, or looking up and leftwards towards a hostile ‘other’ (it is up for debate whether the figure in the V.S. Ivanov poster is the Rodina-Mat’ ‘simplified,’ or a different figure, an archetypal Soviet all-mother.

The personified Motherland demands two things: action from the viewer, or damnation upon the other-enemy. This action is tied with issues of war, betrayal, revenge- this action requires either violence or self-discipline as ‘verbal violence’ (nye boltai!). The viewer is expected to do something, to placate this figure, to prove themselves a real Soviet citizen (though, keeping Freud in mind, this mother-invocation to go fight and save the motherland might have slightly different implications for young Soviet men…). The Rodina-Mat’ is the ‘mother’ to all citizens, the home front conscience who spurs them on. She will harvest the grain, clutch the child, but none of this will be possible if the viewer does not act.

So, where’s dad? The figure that is missing from these posters is, of course, Stalin himself. This does not mean that he is absent from Soviet propaganda posters- the difference, rather, seems to be in his role. A cursory search reveals that, in Stalin-era propaganda posters, the role of Stalin himself is, compared to the Rodina-Mat’, markedly less aggressive and action based: he is an object of adulation, a benevolent guarantor of the future. When he is ‘doing’ something, he is portrayed as insulated from the viewer’s gaze: they will see how he acts, but he does not explicitly call upon them to act.

Why is this? I posit that, in the Stalinist symbolic universe, Stalin-as-image and the Rodina-Mat’ are two components of a symbolic ‘pair,’ a semi-parental function with a dialectic relationship both to each other and to the viewer. As an image that represents, to a certain degree, a ‘real’ figure, Stalin-as-image cannot be too intimately tied to the world of direct action: as people disappear in black cars at night, and gossip from the front varies in its positivity, this image might not be as convincing. The Rodina-Mat’, however, is doubly useful: she simultaneously does not ‘exist,’ yet, as a reimagining of the ‘eternal mother/feminine’ figure, exists everywhere, and retains real power to motivate. These two figures, hers and that of Stalin, need each other to comprise a full symbolic universe: she to demand love in the form of action, he to receive love as the result of implied action.

 

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Narrative Knapsack

One of the major themes that comes up again and again in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry the conflict between the narrator’s ‘two selves’: there is the self that he physically presents to the Red Army fighters around him, that of a bespeckled Odessa Jew, and there is the self of his ideation, the craved self, the self that would ‘wear’ Savitsky’s envied “steely strength and youthful complexion.” My First Goose is the tidiest encapsulation of this struggle, and has been discussed through this lense elsewhere.

I would like, rather, to focus on how Babel uses ‘object vignette’ to explore this theme within the structural constraints of the dispatch-story form. The Rabbi’s Son is short, coming in at barely three pages. The narration flits from memory to present, from descriptive prose to epistle. An economy of space is needed: every object counts, every object must be drenched in meaning.

At the risk of oversimplification, Elijah as a character is more of a collection of objects that tell a story than anything else. His belongings do not merely add color to the narrative: they are a secondary narrative, of Jewishness versus ‘Red manhood,’ of the spiritual versus the physical. Maimonides the religious philosopher is juxtaposed with Lenin the materialist, Lenin’s skull is iron, Maimonides’ portrait is the dull silk of religious vestments. Agitprop leaflets are annotated in ancient Hebrew verse, and the narrator is rained on by the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges alike. The messages inscribed in Elijah’s body and possessions extend to images of physical decay and eros: his sexual organs are “the stunted, curly-covered virility of a wasted Semite.” The Rabbi’s Son is the last story in the Red Cavalry cycle: the narrator has run out of room, and tripartite transformations such as in My First Goose are made impossible. All of his contradictions and pain and double-selving must come out concisely, tumble out of a dying man’s kit, a biography in mixed-message paraphernalia. The contradictions, however, are two large to be contained in the ‘object vignette’: the narrator can “scarce contain the tempests of [his] imagination,” his body is aged, and death brings brotherhood more quickly than can be reconciled.

Postscript: Red Cavalry might be my favorite work of Soviet literature ever. I recommend the whole collection wholeheartedly! The Odessa Tales are great too.

Light Breathing, Heavy Essence

In examining Ivan Bunin’s short story ‘Light Breathing,’ I break down the work into three ‘images’ of Olga, located at the beginning, middle, and end of the piece. These three images give a certain aesthetic symmetry to the piece, as well as characterize the object (Olga herself) of the narrative.

The first image is of Olga’s gravesite, marked by a cross of oak- “strong, heavy, and smooth,” marked by a ‘solidity’ and permanence that the living Olga evaded, smooth in that all the transgressive ‘bumps’ of the living character (as narrative component) are no longer present. The wreath at the foot of the cross is not made up of living flowers-it is, rather, a porcelain wreath, a substance as ‘pure’ in content as it is ‘dead’ in form. An image of Olga herself is set behind glass: her ‘life’ is put behind a physical barrier (as she is beyond the ‘barrier’ created by death), cast into inanimate representation.

The middle image is of ‘living’ Olga: she is portrayed as both curiously one-sided (as a ‘young girl in flower’ device, a tragic-romantic symbol in which the piece can strike its tone) and as ‘modern,’ living and vital in that, through the form of her discovered diary, she has a voice: Olga-as-life-force is a narrative moment that escapes the moment: her voice is discovered, carving a new structure into the work (found-document cuts into narrated-event). Both of these ‘faces’ for the character are alike in that they are alive, full of an energy stands in contrast to the images on either side of it.

The last image is, once more, of the gravesite. Olga, as a character, has lost the narrative ‘voice’ given by the found diary, and is once more a poetic object (this time for the schoolmistress). While the specific imagery contrasts with the first image (her breathing is light, the oak cross is heavy), notions of ‘purity’ and ‘inanimacy’ remain. The schoolmistress struggles to reconcile this symbolic transformation with the idea of ‘living’ character: “The wreath, the mound, the oaken cross! Could it really be that beneath the cross lay the one whose eyes shone so immortally from the medallion above?” Olga’s “light breathing” (lyogkoye dykhanie), once she has crossed the barrier into death, becomes a (Miltonian-angelic) vapor, ‘pure’ of other elements, dispelled into a world that moves without it. ‘Olga’ as character has become ‘vapor’ as essence, and the transformation evoked at the beginning, from transgressive individual into ‘stable matter,’ is completed.

Back Towards the Future: Prophetic Rumblings and Temporal Tumblings

Many of Alexander Blok’s lyric poems are heavy-laden with prophecy: Russia (both as Rus’ and Rossiya), feminized and untouchable, is threatened with seduction and collapse, a lone voice rises from the chorus, warning of the ‘cold and gloom’ of the days to come (O, esli b znali, deti, vy, holod i mrak gradushchikh dnei!). Despite a constant ‘dark’ tone in the prophetic language of the various works (no matter which volume of Blok’s complete works you lock someone in a room with, they’d still come out babbling about the end of days or an unobtainable ‘Fair Lady’), I hope to show that, by comparing two ‘prophetic’ poems, one written in 1900 and the other in 1916, differences between both imagery used and notions of ‘prophecy’ from poem to poem will become clear.

In ‘A Red Glow in the Sky,’ the prophesied future [a ‘city’] is ‘distant and unknowable’ (dalyokii, nevedomiy). That there is something to be prophesied about is clear: the future is made both ‘rumor’ and clear ‘talk’ (molva) in one semantic movement, and the heavy row of houses is distinguished by a ‘you’ (ty), whether the reader or a prophecy-receiving reader-as-blank-spot (Ty razlichish domov tizhyolyi ryad). The future, however, while ‘visible’ in its entirety, cannot be penetrated by the gaze: its essence is hidden behind barriers and boundaries, darkened and stern in their impenetrability. While the inquisitive mind can make ready for the revival of the roar of slain cities (pytlivyi um gotovit k vozrozhdeniyu/zabityi gul pogibshikh gorodov), the cities remain closed in their content: as ‘being’ makes a return-movement (vozvratnoye dvizheniye), the future clouds what this ‘being’ will be.

The ‘Kite’, written sixteen years later, presents a prophecy which, while more explicitly bleak in content, is ‘safe’ and predictable, a tragedy erased and reborn in a never-ending cycle. Above an empty meadow the kite inscribes circle after circle (chertya za krugom plavnyi krug), and in the hut the mother’s voice inscribes another circle, of predictable life-patterns, of nurture, grown, and socialization (na xleba, na, na grud’, sosi/rasti, pokorstvuyi, krest nesti). Centuries go on, war makes its noise, villages burn and social disorder arises, yet all of this is foretold, in that it is endless: the country remains the same, in ancient and tear-stained beauty (v krasye zaplakannoi i drevnei). How long must the mother wail? How long must the kite wheel? The question is left unanswered, yet the content of the ‘prophecy’ is made known: the mother does wail, and the kite does circle. The future, bloody and full of grief, does not loom out of the darkness: it rolls along, spinning ever-back into clarity.

The Mighty Handful: Themes

The Mighty Handful set before themselves the goal of producing a Russian classical music, a tradition liberated from the mimetic anxiety of European influence. I am not qualified to comment on the music itself: it all sounds ‘good’, but the minutiae of tone and movement are topics best left to others. I would, however, like to examine some of the themes chosen by the Handful for their music, themes that, when considered together, outline the Handful’s Romantic conception of ‘Russianness’.

The ‘Russia’ for which the Mighty Handful aim to forge a classical tradition is at once geographically expansive and culturally consistent. Alexander Borodin’s ‘Russia’ can encompass the steppes of (recently acquired) Central Asia, thus reifying ‘the Orient’ into an object for Russian cultural production. Meanwhile, Mussogorsky’s ‘Russia’ stretches west into a distant and mythologized past: the Great (Golden) Gate of Kiev is suspended between the new Romantic language of the present and the romanticized mists of the Kievan Rus past.  Between these geographical extremes, Russian culture and a ‘Russian tradition’ is expressed almost wholly through the lense of folk culture, or variants upon it. The folktale-uncanny is a source of wonder and inspiration, as shown by Mussogorsky’s ‘Baba Yaga’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ (a narrative of the darkly fantastic, as discussed by John in his post.) Religion is a source of material as well, both in its ‘public’ forms (through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Easter Overture) and in its ‘folk’ forms (through Liadov’s Religious Chant and Carol). In Liadov and Glinka, folk motifs abound, while Balakirev’s choice of theme brings all the strands together: Russia.

In creating a new musical language for the Russian tradition, these composers operate upon a diverse and malleable symbolic language. The ‘Russia’ they evoke can be Oriental or ancient-European, folk-occult or overtly religious. For these composers, Romanticism offers a palette both stylized in content and opaque in meaning.

Youth in Revolt

It is important to note that when Alexander Pushkin wrote “To Chaadaev”, he was all of 19 years old. Ah, 19! What an age! The milksop brutalities of adolescence fight for their right to the body and soul, while, meanwhile, the life of the mind adds signatures to its petition, humbly submitted but forcefully composed. Tonight many of us will see Doctor Chomsky speak, and as we leave the hall the air will crackle with the most mixed of messages-thoughts of power and freedom will mix with a strange energy, a longing…but I digress. I don’t want to project. Rather, I note these things because, in this work of the young Pushkin, we many of these energies channeled into crosscurrents that will provide a ‘hard and fast’ glimpse into what made Romanticism tick.

The first few lines of the poem seem to indicate that earthly cares of youth, placid youth, has faded- “Love, hope, [our] private (or quiet) fame” has been banished, lies and illusions have ceased to pamper the poet and his generation (nedolgo nezhil nas obman). The enjoyments of Youth are replaced by a different sort of passion-that for freedom, escape from under the yoke of repression. The narrative, at first glance, appears simple: the poet abandons (or is abandoned by) the pursuits of careless youth, and the transition from adolescence into adulthood is a process of politicization…

I believe, however, that this interpretation is too simple. Freedom from tyranny and one-man rule (samovlastie) is oddly personal: Pushkin calls not for social revolution, but rather for intellectual and erotic self-actualization. On the ruins of tyranny the poet and his generation will write their names-the end of the old order is the path to the immortality of the self. The fatherland calls to duty, and beckons to the soul. Liberty appears not as the grey maiden, holding scales- she is the unspoken desire, yearned for as a “young lover” waits for the promised meeting (kak zhdyot lyubovnik molodoi minuty vernovo svidaniya). Russia rises from sleep, the national spirit is aroused.

This poem reminded me quite a bit of Wordsworth, another pillar of Romanticism- like Pushkin, the English poet’s youth is permeated by charged crosscurrents-the blossoming into manhood, the promise of the French revolution, etc. For our purposes, Pushkin leads us towards a rudimentary mock-up of ‘Romanticism’-the national-political overlaid onto (and at times, overcome by) the erotic and intellectual energies of the self.

(Peasant) Life and Fate

As the first painter to depict Russian peasant life in fine art, Alexei Venetsianov used certain visual cues to evoke ‘peasantness’-traditional dress, implements of rural labor, and pastoral scenes are all used to evoke a unitary and naturalistic peasant life-world. The semiotic universe of these works is fascinating in and of itself, but I would like to hone in on two paintings in particular- ‘Reapers’ and ‘Fortune-Telling.’ I hope to show that, by doing a brief ‘close reading’ of each of these paintings, it can be shown how themes of fate and human agency are evoked and encoded by the use of peasant motifs.

In ‘Reapers’, the peasant subjects are placed against a background of wheat, establishing their milieu and ‘natural’ environment as the realm of agriculture, of cyclical growth and production. Cyclicity is further produced by the positioning of the peasants’ sickles: implements of agriculture that enable the peasants to interface with the cycles of the land, the sickles themselves are positioned as to inscribe a circle around the peasant couple, further linking them to the aforementioned cycles. Moving inward from this ring, we arrive at the peasants themselves. It is unclear whether they are a young couple or siblings, but in any case the positioning of their bodies evokes images of reproduction, birth, and regeneration. The male peasant encloses the form of the female with his grasp, delineating the space she occupies. Simultaneously, the female peasant’s head overshadows that of the male-resplendent and elevated in bright colors, the image of the female seems to generate that of the male, ‘birthing’ her counterpart. The circle of life (and of peasant social relations) is inscribed onto the subjects. Finally, we arrive at the two butterflies on the female figure’s hand-evoking a predictable cycle of transformation and rebirth, the butterflies prove the capstone symbol to successive ‘circles’ inscribed around peasant life. 

The imagery used in the 1842 painting ‘Fortune Telling’ is of a drastically different nature. The Russian title of the painting, Gadaniye, implies a process (perhaps futile) of arriving at the future- the ‘fortune’ which is to be ‘told’ is semantically absent. The subjects are placed against a black and indefinite background-although they themselves evoke ‘peasantness’ by their dress, the series of regenerative circles structuring the life-world of the subjects in ‘Reapers’ is missing. Fate is no longer predetermined by the cycles of the natural world, but instead is made uncertain and shrouded. The act of ‘fortune telling’ with cards gives the illusion of a greater agency, but, detached from the cycles and meanings ‘meant’ to structure rural life, this agency is portrayed as vain grasping in the dark.

Thus two different modes of agency are presented. In the first, the peasants are both ‘in’ the land and ‘of’ the cycles of nature, of harvest and growth, birth and rebirth: placed into sharply delineated spatial and symbolic ‘places’, the subjects partake in a form of eternal life. In the second, agency through human means, detached from the life-cycles of the rural sphere, is made meaningless: wrenched from their ‘places’, the peasants are obscured and their ‘fate’ is left uncertain.

I am over my word count. But there is an ideological element here.

 

What Says the Izba?

As we consider Russian folk culture as reflected in Russian high culture, it is important to keep in mind the roots from which this ‘folk culture’ (whether authentic or reworked, presented or constructed) springs. What does the life-world of the Russian peasant look like? From what components is it constructed, and how do these components syncretize into a ‘folk culture’ ? Village culture would, naturally, center to a degree around the izba, the peasant hut. To draw a direct link between spatial features of the izba to the manifestation of folk belief in high culture is too big a jump, but I do think think that elaborating on a few aspects of the izba could be useful here.

Let us begin by looking at two sets of illustrations, that of the ‘signs’ (znaki) inscribed onto Russian peasant houses, and that of the doorway decorations. The znaki are divided into two types: signs of the sun, and signs of the earth. The motive behind decorating peasant houses with such signs can be guessed at: the symbols link the houses (and thus the peasant families living within them) both to pre-Christian beliefs surrounding the sun and earth (remember the Ukrainian Easter egg?), and, more directly, to the agricultural rhythms of village life: without sun, without earth, there is no harvest.

The effect of such symbols upon ‘folk culture’ as such, and its distillation into forms for consumption and reproduction in the form of ‘high culture’, should not be ignored. What does it mean that the lifeways of the Russian peasant are inscribed onto where he lives (which, followingly, is both the space in which he is imagined and the space from which he signifies his ‘essence’)? The izba becomes a multi-layered symbol: a place of residence, yes, but also a piece of ‘folk art’ signifying agricultural ties and a shrouded pre-Christian legacy.

The doorways, the physical entrance point to this ‘signifying’ space, are themselves covered in signs: chickens, the sun-the pre-Christian/agricultural vocabulary stays the same. Entering the izba, the peasant is reminded of the rhythms that structure his life, while the writer or artist passing or imagining the izba is reminded that there are proscribed symbols and rhythms linked with ‘folk life’. ‘Folk culture’ is given architectural unity in the form of the izba, thus creating a building block from which ‘high culture’ can begin to construct the image of the peasant village (and from there incorporate the song, the dance, the peasant himself, into a unity of allusions).izbadecorations3 izbadecorations2