Журнальный клуб Интелрос » НЛО » №167, 2021
Guest Editor: Mikhail Ilchenko
Mikhail Ilchenko’s article “Architecture of the Word: Symbolic Transformations of the Soviet Architectural Avant-Garde in Public Rhetoric” examines symbolic transformations and representations of the Soviet architectural avantgarde in public rhetoric from the 1920s to the present. It shows that initial dependence of the avant-garde architecture on the character of public representation defined its nature and further social development. The author emphasizes that the emergence of new language for describing modernist architecture in general and Soviet avant-garde in particular stems from the fact that today this kind of architecture is increasingly projects onto itself cultural, social and political meanings during public debates about the historical past, national symbols, and identities.
Soviet writers in the 1920s and 1930s were fixated on the American city, imagined as a place of skyscrapers, neon advertisements and mass-production factories. These forms stood for various things in the hands of different writers in a wide-ranging debate — an image of revolution taken seriously in the work of Gastev, satirically for Krzhizhanovsky, an image of capitalism in the work of Maxim Gorky, and an American reality in the travel books of Ilf and Petrov and Mayakovsky. Alongside this, foreign writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, Rene Fulop- Miller and Ernst Toller observed these debates with a more distanced, critical eye, one that had already been trained in the realities of the capitalist west. Owen Hatherley’s article “The Tower Has Been Bolshevised! American Architecture and Soviet Literature, 1919—1935” compares these two approaches to the recurring motif of the American dream in Soviet reality, in a series of vignettes where particular writers and particular forms — tower, advertisement, and finally, suburbia — will be juxtaposed, as the Soviet thinkers try to extract a socialist and utopian core from the objects thrown up by advanced American capitalism.
Mikhail Timofeev’s article “The Anticipation of Utopia: Representations of the City of the Future in the Alexander Chayanov’s Story ‘The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia’ (1920) and in Vl. Fedorov’s Serial The Miracle of the Sinful Pitirim (1925)” examines ways to describe the cities of the future (Moscow and Ivanovo-Voznesensk) in two works from the 1920s, Alexei Chayanov’s story “The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia” (1920) and Vl. Fedorov’s serial The Miracle of the Sinful Pitirim (1925), in the context of disputes of this time over the strategy of social resettlement and city formation. In Chayanov’s story, his ideas of deurbanization are manifested, and Vl. Fedorov’s text, stereotypes about the appearance of the cities of the future are played out. The author’s fantastic buildings are considered in the context of the sociopolitical and artistic practices of the first half of the 1920s.
Architect Nikolai Kuzmin’s design for a communal house in Anzhero-Sudzhensk (1929) is one of the most coherent plans aimed at the socialist reconstruction of society in the contemporary (modern) spirit of constructivist architecture. The article “The Private is Political: The Utopia of the Nikolai Kuzmin’s Communal House and Contemporary Discourse on the Collectivization of Privacy” by Kinga Nędza-Sikoniowska analyzes the design through the prism of the discourse of the early Soviet era, when the living space of Soviet citizens, the relationship between socialist culture and labor, and the image of the new family were the subjects of heated discussions. Kuzmin did not consider his project to be utopian, but in the end, it remained on paper only. As a result, the designed has retained its uncompromising nature, which is one of the most important determinants of utopia as a linguistic fact.
The article “‘The Greatest and the Most Beloved Epic of Our Century’: Designs of Soviet War Monuments, 1941—1945” by Vadim Bass examines Soviet memorial designs of the war period. The paradoxical character of these designs reflected architects’ attempts to come up with a means of expressing and immortalizing the enormous tragedy they were facing. The article discusses the tradition developed by the 1940s, the reasons and means of its transformation, including heroic epic models borrowed from literature. Some peculiarities of the architectural language of memorials and characteristic solutions and motifs are examined, as well as the psychological tools employed by architects for provoking an emotional reaction in the audience.
The Jakub Sadowski’s article “Literature — Architecture — Totalitarian Canon: The Case of Poland” is an attempt to analyze the socialist realist canon of Polish literature and architecture in order to establish common mechanisms of formation of the canons themselves. It traces the mechanisms, typical of totalitarian language, of the filtration of elements of the original semiosphere and the parallel transformation of non-totalitarian signs and texts into totalitarian ones. Educational and specialist literature from the 1950s served as the research material.
Editors: Sergey Zenkin, Vladislav Tretyakov
The section is devoted to Galin Tihanov’s book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). Literary scholars and historians of ideas (Caryl Emerson, Boris Gasparov, Sergey Zenkin, Tatyana Venediktova, Alexander Dmitriev) discuss its hypotheses and arguments, as well as the fortunes of theory itself. The selection of comments to the book concludes with a feedback from Galin Tihanov.
The Susanna Weygandt’s research presented in the article “The Plastic Bodies in the Science of Trofim Lysenko and Aron Zalkind and in the Art of Konstantin Stanislavsky in the Era of Soviet Behaviorism” is located at the intersection of the history of art and the history of science of the early Soviet periods of the late 1910s to the early 1930s. The article focuses on the conceptualization of “plastika” in theater arts and how actors in the Soviet modernist period used it to denote bodily expressiveness. But in the area of Behaviorist science at this time, the term “plastika” had a different, opposing meaning. The concept of “plastic” was used in behaviorist science in relation to the study of primitive human instincts and reflexes, explaining physiological reactions with the help of psychological phenomena. Against the backdrop of behaviorist rhetoric, which was ubiquitous in the 1920s and 1930s, plastic expression in theater arts was a phenomenon particular to the counterculture of the 1920s and 1930s.
Life-size dioramas were key elements in new “Marxist” exhibits at the State Museum of Ethnography in the 1930s. In the Stanislav Petriashin’s article “Life-Size Dioramas in the 1930s Soviet Ethnographic Museum: Ideology, Science and Spectacle,” the characteristic ways they were perceived and how they functioned as guides to Soviet ideology and ethnographic knowledge are examined. Life-size dioramas, as they gave the illusion of contact with the reality on display, hid from viewers the difficulties that arose during their creation and the scientific and ideological burden of these scenes. It was difficult to illustrate Marxist ideas with the museum’s material collections, but with the help of scenes and the mannequins’ body language, the museum staff was able to reconcile the contradictions between them and bring them together in a fascinating presentation.
The Alexander Samarin’s article “‘A Friend of Freedom, Innocent of the Lies and Anger of Our Days’: Sergei Vavilov’s Pushkin Speech in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions” presents an analysis of the speeches made by Academician Sergei Vavilov, the President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which were written on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s birth, examining them as literary texts. It is shown, along with the reproduction of commonly accepted ideological clichos of the era, Vavilov, using quotes and context, managed to show his negative attitude to the sociopolitical situation of the late Stalinism period and to the atmosphere in the scientific community with the aid of “Aesopian language.” To characterize the general situation, he quoted the poem “A.S. Pushkin” by Yakov Polonsky, and to condemn the practice of electing party officials to the Academy of Sciences, he used Pushkin’s epigram about Prince Mikhail Dondukov-Korsakov.
The communism of Chevengur is approached in the Masha Levina-Parker and Misha Levine’s article “Platonov’s Theorem: Research under the Veil of Absurdism (Communism in Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur” as a piece of sociological analysis conducted through artistic means. The characters are good people who commit bad deeds. They are members of the Bolshevik party, but they hold anarchist views. They are part of the Soviet system, yet they create their communism as they see fit. Thus, Platonov’s text can be seen as a thought experiment: What if honest rank-and-file revolutionaries were allowed to build a new social order at the guidance of their conscience? He shows that if guided by their conscience, they would have executed not only their class enemies, but the whole population except those who are best suited for communism. In place of a conscience, the characters have communist ethics.
Guest Editor: Eugenia Samostienko (Eugenia Suslova)
The Ekaterina Zakharkiv’s article “Contemporary Poetry in the Digital Age: A New Function of Pragmatic Markers” examines the formal and functional specifics of the poetic text in the online space and the transformation of the poetic function in connection with the change in the channel of its implementation. In particular, the influence of the environment is manifested in the use of functional units — pragmatic markers, whose new functioning is caused by poetic expression, among other things, distorts or completely changes their conventional use.
The Anna Rodionova’s article “Contemporary Poetry as Information Practice: Toward the Texts of Nika Skandiaka” examines how poetry changes in the contemporary techno-information situation. Questions are raised both about the external — on the position as a specific information practice — and internal — on poetic techniques that have become significant under these conditions. For this, the author turns to the cultural significance of information processes and the idea of noise as a form of communication between spontaneity and control, and also examines Nika Skandiaka’s texts, highlighting the poetic choices that have been actualized by the situation described above: movement from the fragmentary nature of the text towards its discreteness and variability.
The Sabina Busareva’s article “The Search for New Signifiers in the Digital Age” considers the problem of significance from general semiotic positions, particularly linguistic. Emoji signs demonstrate their universality along with graphic primitives and information visualization, acquiring the role of universal signifiers in the digital age. The author analyzes the features of the transformation of writing in everyday and artistic communication, where emojis operate as graphic representatives of artefacts and affects.
Irina Mironova’s article “Neurodiscourses and Poetic Speech” examines a rare phenomenon of neural interactive poetry: very few poetic works use capabilities of the braincomputer interface. In the Russian-speaking context, their number can be counted on one hand. However, remaining on the periphery of contemporary literary processes in terms of quantity, neural interactive poetic texts can tell us a lot about how discourses on vision and knowledge change, what role neuroscience plays in this process, and if there are any limits for surveillance.
In the Eugenia Samostienko’s article “Internal Language Interfaces: Writing as a Cognitive Technology” an attempt is made to examine poetry in the context of new technologies, mainly those that regulate non-verbal aspects of communication. The emergence of digital tools for internal accounting and theories of affect is a sign of the change in the relationship between the categories of state and knowledge, and brings with it the need to revise the categories of aesthetic experience. The article offers a view of poetry as a technology of the self, in accordance with Michel Foucault’s view. Poetry acts as a cultural practice and a cognitive technology, which, in a laboratory mode, transforms the constellations of cognitive functions in different periods in the context of a particular cultural model, which affects discursive principles, that is, the possibility of developing the text as such.
The first part of the section presents the unpublished Yuri Lotman’s article “Poetry and Prose” with foreword by Pavel Glushakov.
The Yury Orlitskiy’s article “Early Russian Free Verse” examines key moments in the history of Russian free verse related to its special rhythmic nature, which as such regularly provoke an ideologically based attitude towards it that is not connected with aesthetics.