Utopian Visions: Week 20 Conclusions

Utopian Visions: Week 20

Outline (1) Ground we covered: panorama (2) 1917: dis/continuity? (3) Status of culture, esp. literature, in Russia (4) Status of the artist: accommodation vs. resistance? (5) Periodisation: Thaw? Stagnation? (6) Avantgarde (7) Socialist Realism (8) Sotsart, Moscow Conceptualism (9) Intertextuality, intra-Soviet cultural references (10) One gap: Mikhail Bulgakov

The Wanderers: Social Criticism Vasilii Vere- shcha- gin, Apotheo- sis of War (1871)

Constructivism Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

Lengiz publishing house poster, 1928

Socialist Realism: How did we get there? From here… Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, 1928

Socialist Realism: How did we get there? to here Moscow State University

(1) ‘Accessibility’ (dostupnost') Kirov’s multivalent finger

(2) Cases of Opening to the Wider World Cont‘d Guitar poetry, e.g. Bulat Okudzhava (1924-1997) a ‘sixties type’ (shesti- desiatnik)

(4) Case Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), 1945-53 in Gulag, 1970 Nobel Prize for literature, Gulag Archipelago published in 1973, exiled in 1974, return to Russia in 1994

(2) 1917: dis/continuity? 1917 was not absolute break or a big bang of signs. But it did prompt a recombination of old and new signs that resulted in new art, provided that ‘new’ implies novelty in which the old is still present, rather than absolute novelty.

(3) Status of culture, esp. literature, in Russia Culture, esp. literature, more esp. poetry=quasi-sacred; writers=quasi-saints Myth of ‘deep Russian literature’ and, by extension, ‘deep Russians’ End of this status with end of Soviet Union?

(4) Status of the artist: accommodation vs. resistance? Binaries (accommodation vs. resistance, pro vs. con, state vs. society) not very useful And yet: examples of Gerasimov, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko, Komar & Melamid, Schnittke, KibirovChukovskii

(4) Status of the artist Judge: And what is your profession in general? Brodsky: Poet translator. Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets? Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study this? Brodsky: This? Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach? Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school. Judge: How then? Brodsky: I think that it . . . comes from God.

(5) Periodisation: Thaw? Stagnation? Thaw. But what about the Freezes (Neizvestny and 1962 Manezh exhibition)? Stagnation. But what about the dynamism (Vysotsky, samzidat, sotsart, Moscow conceptualism, underground rock)?

(6) Avantgarde

(7) Socialist Realism

(8) Sotsart, Moscow Conceptualism http://www.melamid.com/newertestament/introduction.html

(9) Intertextuality, intra-Soviet cultural references Ex. Akhmatova’s poem Requiem and the line at the prison in the film Repentance Ex. Meyerhold’s anti-Stanislavskian theatre and Muratova’s approach to acting

(9) Intertextuality, intra-Soviet cultural references Anna Akhmatova, Requiem: Instead of a Preface (1957) ‘In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman standing behind me, blue with cold, who of course had never heard my name, woke from that trance characteristic of us all and asked in my ear (there, everyone spoke in whispers): – Ah, can you describe this? And I said: I can. Then something like a tormented smile passed over what had once been her face’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VtzdKcuXzE at 1:12

(9) Intertextuality, intra-Soviet cultural references http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdjIGQaieRM

(10) One Gap: Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), playwright and novelist

(10) One Gap: Mikhail Bulgakov Best-known novels: Heart of a Dog (1925, officially published in 1987) The Master and Margarita (written 1928-40, officially published in 1967)

(10) One Gap: Mikhail Bulgakov Heart of a Dog 1988 film version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-2pOQcbFx4

(10) One Gap: Mikhail Bulgakov Cult novel The Master and Margarita Two parallel, yet related plots of a writer in 1930s Moscow and Pontius Pilate’s trial of Yeshua (Jesus) in Jerusalem ‘manuscripts don’t burn’ Numerous stage and film adaptions, often quoted (music: Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, Franz Ferdinand etc.)

What I hope you got out of this course Aesthetic pleasure from Soviet cultural products Some factual knowledge about Russian history New ways of interdisciplinary enquiry Value of enquiry in general and a sense of its open-endedness Are utopian visions useful in our own time?