 Thank you so much. I'm going to talk for about an hour, and then we have a few minutes for questions then. And I'm going to be talking today about the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, and thank you all of you for coming, and thank you to Ali for inviting me. You know, this is material that I totally love. There's this incredible flowering of the human imagination in this period in the 1920s. A flower that unfortunately where the blossom would be absolutely crushed under the heel of Stalin in the 1930s, and I feel like it's a time that is sort of very emotionally inspiring to see what people were dreaming of in the way that they could reimagine their world in this period. So I'm going to tell you the stories of individuals and share with you some of their work to give you a taste. First, poets, then visual artists, musicians, and then finally novelists. There's just so many fantastic creators with incredible stories from this period, and I just want to give you at least an idea of the riches that there are in this fascinating decade in the USSR in its first years. And there is an annotated bibliography that I handed out. I'm not sure that there were enough for everyone. There weren't? Okay, so write to Grace if you didn't get one, and I'm not going to supply her with one. I just want you to really bug Grace instead of me. But yeah, so Grace can send it to you if you do not have one and would like one. This is a bibliography just to kind of like, if you want to do sort of further reading on your own, this gives some suggestions. I also have books over there that I brought if you want to take a look at some of the things that are being discussed today. All right, so why am I telling this story? Why am I bothering to tell this story? And I feel like there are a few reasons. Number one, there's just incredible music, art and writing that deserves to be heard or to be seen or to be read in this period. And number two, I feel like if this movement had not been crushed in the way that it was so brutally, we would see the whole history of culture in the 20th century differently. We would see the birth of modernism happening in Russia every bit as much as we do see it in the abstract expressionists in New York City or that kind of thing. It would change the story we told about the 20th century. Third, I feel like this is an example of how deeply important the arts are to a society's understanding of itself, to any society's understanding of itself, how deeply important. Number four, there's an urgency about this work. This work is written in extreme circumstances and is about the kind of the deepest parts of us as human animals. And that kind of urgency is really missing, I feel like, from the American conversation right now and in a way we need to understand the extremity that people go through sometimes. And finally, we're in a situation now where we look at Russia and say what is Russia about? Why is Russia doing what it's doing? And I think a lot of the answers reach back well back into the 20th century. So it's strange that Russia was one of the birthplaces of the modern sense on the eve of the revolution. It was incredibly backward. The literacy rate was awful. I mean, most of the population was illiterate, which is not surprising if you think about the vastness of the Russian Empire on the eve of the revolution. I mean, when I say Russia just before the revolution, we kind of immediately picture St. Petersburg, which is this very European-style city. Pushkin, the poet, even called it like the window on the west. And we picture this sort of like the Tolstoyan idea of St. Petersburg, this city with balls and people in black tie and blah blah blah. But remember that actually most of Russia is just hundreds of thousands of miles of step. It is Kazakh nomads who have literally never heard the name of the Tsar that rules over them. It is villages that are using medieval farming techniques. So one of the writers I'll talk about today, Boris Pulnyak, writes about what it's like in a small village which is being collectivized. And, you know, when this Marxist guy arrives there, they still are doing the first plowing of the season, having a naked widow pull the plow with two virgins walking behind her because that will ensure the fertility of the fields. So that's, so the communists, yeah, well, yeah, so get working ladies. So the communists decided that they were going to, for better or for worse, yank Russia, pull Russia, kicking and screaming into a new century. In the two revolutions of 1917, that is to say the February and October revolution, those were set to change all of this to project it into the future. So it was a very heady and exciting time. Here is Lenin on the subject of the art and it's a kind of a beautiful sentiment. He writes, art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the broad masses of the workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their feelings, thoughts and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority when the massive workers and peasants still lack black bread so that art may come to the people and the people to art, we must first of all raise the general level of education and culture. So it's a really great sentiment. Of course, his actual approach to the arts was somewhat more complicated than that. But that's the kind of sentiment that people were drunk on in this period. That's what they were being fed as the idea of this is the government's notion of the arts. In the days before the revolution, starting around 1910, revolutionary artists were already talking about throwing away the culture of the feudal past and the bourgeois past and the creation of something new, something entirely new. So here, for example, is the, sorry, I think that we established that the clicker isn't working, right? Yeah. So I'm going to have to come over here to do this. Here is the futurist, the futurist, Velimir Klebnikov's 1916 declaration called a slap in the face of public taste. And he declares that he has, quote, the right to everything, including the Milky Way, noise of ages, get out of the way, long rule the sound of discontinuous epochs. All who are closer to death than to birth must surrender. They will drop dead in the war of epochs when we assault like savages. We are calling you to a country where the trees speak, where scientific unions resemble the waves, a country of springtime armies of love, where time blossoms like a bird cherry tree and moves like a piston, where a man in a carpenter's apron saws epochs into boards and like a lathe operator treats his own tomorrow. We are going to that country and suddenly someone dead, some skeleton grabs us and tries to stop us from shedding the feathers of this imbecilic today. How is that fair? Keep your skeletal hands off yesterday. So this is a movement of youth, of the future, of fantasy, of science fiction, of destruction of the past. On the walls of the Prolet Cult building, the big propaganda building, was written the words, in the name of our tomorrow, burn Raphael to ashes, destroy museums, trample down the flowers of art. The futurist poet, Vladimir Myakovsky, whoops, wrote, the streets are our brushes, the squares are our pallets. Drag the pianos out onto the streets, spit on rhymes and arias and the rose bush and other such mockishness from the arsenal of the arts. Give us new forms. So this was actually literally true. The pianos of the bourgeoisie were actually being dragged out onto the streets. They were being loaded into flatbed trucks, driven to factories where people were playing concerts. For factory workers, there is this idea, we're going to bring the arts to everyone. Tremendously exciting. This was a period also of street performances very much, in fact, like bread and puppet. Things where, like I've seen photographs, you have these sort of like people playing capitalists with sort of giant paper mache heads, like stomping around, or like, or feudalists, you know, stomping around. And then, then there comes along a parade of all the vegetables grown in the Ukraine or something. So there are a lot of these kind of public drama spectacles and that kind of thing. Literally, as Myakovsky said, making the streets into the canvases. Myakovsky is, in fact, kind of the poster child for the revolutionary avant-garde at first. By age 12, he was stealing rifles for the Bolsheviks. He very quickly moved on. He became, he was very handsome. He was very loud. He was very seductive. In memoirs of the futurists, they have him at parties and performances wearing this sort of top hat, with modernist face paint in sort of like cubist designs on his face, absurdist costumes. And he became weirdly the kind of the spokesperson for Soviet art. In 1914 and 1915, before the revolution, he wrote one of his most famous poems, which is called A Cloud in Trousers. The plot, which is kind of irrelevant, is that he's waiting for a somewhat indifferent woman that he's in love with in a hotel lobby. And while he bickers with her, he gradually assumes the role of a futurist messiah and then kills God. So I guess it's a bad date. But the original name of the four sections of the poem were down with your love, down with your art, down with your regime, and down with your religion. So you can feel the kind of the youthful burning anger of this. And remember though that the arts had been the province of the ruling class. So when you're looking at this and thinking it sounds kind of horrifically aggressive, this idea of destruction of art, remember that it's being said by people who've only seen art through windows. You know, they've only seen art in houses where they are serving or in houses where they are working in the fields. So the idea is this kind of like class anger, which I think is very, very real. Now here are a few excerpts from this poem chosen. It's a reasonably long poem, but these are just a few short excerpts to give you a sense of what the cloud in trousers is like. And you'll see for him the revolutionary movement is very tied up with his own youth and vigor. There is no grandfatherly fondness in me. There are no gray hairs in my soul. Shaking the world with my voice and grinning, I pass you by, handsome 22-year-old. Glorify me. The great ones are no match for me. Upon everything that's been done, I stamp the word not. As of now, I have no desire to read novels, so what? This is how books are made, I used to think. Along comes a poet and opens his lips with ease. Inspired, the fool simply begins to sing, oh please. From all of you who soaked in love for plain fun, who spilled tears in the centuries while you cried, all walk away and place the monocle of the sun into my gaping wide open eye. I'll wear colorful clothes, the most outlandish and roam the earth, to please and scorch the public. And in front of me on a metal leash, Napoleon will run like a little puppy. Like a woman quivering, the earth will lie down, wanting to give in. She will slowly slump. Things will come alive, and from all around, their lips will lisp. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. So once again, you have this theme likened the political writing of the period of the destruction of the old, and you have the politics of obviously being very bound up with an attack of youth on age. There are pretty strong hints of what will become a major instability in Mayakovsky's work and life, which is that his view of the revolution is incredibly bound up with his own egotism and narcissism, which is kind of a contradiction if you're talking about a collective society, right? But you also can start to hear, and I know I only read a small portion of it, you can start to hear some of the elements of poetry that become central to the poetic movement in the 1920s. So the use of this kind of broken, new, bold language, there's a use of slang in the original. There are echoes of street grammar rather than sort of good poetic grammar. There's the use of slogans and brand names and headlines. There are extravagant wild dreamlike metaphors, like using the sun as a monocle or walking Napoleon on a leash. These kinds of things will be hallmarks of a lot of the new Soviet writing revolution. So the idea was art is no longer for museums and palaces, it's now for use. So there's an emphasis, for example, on poster art, where the kind of the cubist forms that are at the cutting edge of art right around 1920 suddenly become illustration, you know, the building blocks of illustration for this sort of this public art that is hung on walls, everyone can use it, that kind of thing. Here, for example, is one of Mayakovsky's own posters. He wrote the text, Rodchenko did the illustration, and this is an advertisement for pacifiers. What this says is, no better pacifiers, never have been, you'll suck on them till you're old. And, but what I think is interesting is, like, you know, the baby's hands look more like pistol shots than they do like hands. The pacifiers themselves really look a lot like, more like hand grenades where someone's pulling out the pin before throwing it. So there could, there is nothing pacifistic about these pacifiers. Yeah, this is also a period when children's books were written by the greatest writers, illustrated by the greatest painters, because there was an idea that that these, this is how you should engage with the public as an artist. And in fact, so I brought a book called Inside the Rainbow. If you're interested, you can look at it afterwards about children's book art during this period. And then also Barbara brought a book from this period about Baba Yaga that illustrates exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about if you want to take a look afterwards. Oh, Mayakovsky did some children's books. Here he is appearing in his own children's book, of course, in the same way that he put on a play called Mayakovsky starring Mayakovsky with Mayakovsky as the main character. This book is perhaps a little more acceptable to modern audiences than his classic Let Us Take the New Rifles, another picture book for kids. I don't know if you can see, but over here it appears that it really is only fun until someone loses an eye. So, this is a fantastic period for Russian art as great futurist artists experimented with new erupted forms, these things that are geometrical and abstract. And as they often applied themselves to items for use, like these children's books or like textiles, like ceramics, like housewares, like architecture. And is it Sally Smith? Yes, Sally Smith actually brought a book about Melnikov, who was one of the great experimental Soviet architects. And so once again, if you want to come over and take a look at that afterwards, you can see the sort of the excitement of this thing about like only a generation ago we were building palaces with columns. Now, look at this, you know, there's this kind of this revolutionary sense to it all. And the idea is that art had to be useful to the people, no longer locked away in those coral palaces. And the people would rise to be excited by these new artistic forms of the future, these splintered forms and cubist re-imaginings of space. So, there were all these movements that swirled around, actually quite hard to distinguish now, called things like suprematism and rayonism. Here's a few examples. Electricity by Natalia Goncharova, as always, anything that smacks in the modernity like electricity, which most people in Russia did not have yet, though frankly to be fair, most people in Vermont did not have either at this period. So, anyway, there's that real ethos there. Or one of my favorites is this artist, El Lisitsky, who does all of these kind of geometrical abstractions. This is called Fight the White with the Red Wedge. So, this is a civil war poster. The idea is the whites are the people who are still supporting the old government of the Tsar. The reds are the Bolsheviks. And here is the red, literally plunging into the heart of whiteness. So, that as geometry fights it out, as color fights it out, also the political forces are fighting all over the country. And El Lisitsky also did children's books. They're very, very wonderful and strange. Here you see, actually, the alphabet, the words themselves become the illustration. The line between text and art actually has dissolved. And the line also between text and geometry. Suddenly letters are their own geometrical forms. So, all of it is seen as one. It's a very, very kind of exciting, bold, strange, if you imagine that just, you know, 10 or 15 years before, like Ilya Repin and like the great, like, realist painters are painting, suddenly you have this explosion of this kind of thing. It's very exciting. Also in the visual field, one of the most exciting things was this guy, Zevolod Mehrhold, who was a theater producer. And he was hiring all these modernist writers and modernist painters to do his sets and to write his plays. So, Mayakovsky wrote plays for him. He had these bizarre modernist sets. And keep in mind, this is the same period that Stanislavsky of the Stanislavsky method. You know, the idea that you're supposed to kind of like, you know, a Stanislavsky show would be one where the idea is if it takes place in a country house, the set looks exactly like a room in a country house. And all the people who are playing servants but who never speak have been told they need to make up a backstory about their character so that they can still have depth as a servant standing at attention throughout the scene. And in, you know, in contradiction to that, here is Mehrhold, who is like, none of the sets look like everything. They look like abstract geometrical shapes, like on these posters, like in this art. None of the people, the people are all very flattened. For example, when Mehrhold put on Chekhov's plays, he decided that people fainted a lot in those plays. So he actually cut out everything but the fainting. He called the play 33 Swoons, and he just had people swoon and then someone played on the piano a little fanfare for each character who swooned. He had cars running around on stage. Remember, cars are like mind blowing at this period. Walls moved or they were made out of swaying bamboo stalks, or he had slogans projected on the back by Lenin and Marx and the Association of Chemical Defense. The writer Bulgakov, who wrote Master and Margarita, he once joked that he thought that Mehrhold was so experimental that he was eventually going to die, crushed under a pile of naked thespians. His most famous play was probably The Bedbug, which is a kind of post, which is a dystopian story about a guy who wakes up, who's frozen and wakes up in a very bleak future. This was actually undertaken by the kind of dream team of modernism. So here is Mehrhold, the director. Here is Mayakovsky, who wrote the play. Here is Rodchenko, who did the sets. And here is a very young Dimitri Shostakovich, who wrote the music as a teenager. And he was actually living with Mehrhold and Mehrhold's wife, the actress Zaneta Rake, and leaves us a kind of a very funny testament of what it was living among the futurists, which was basically Mehrhold and his wife Zaneta saying to each other, darling, you were wonderful. No, you're the wonderful one. You're a genius. No, you're the genius. So Shostakovich is kind of like it's sort of difficult living with a bunch of geniuses. So this is a period of the fashionability of experiment, bringing the style of the avant garde to the public. There's a lot of interdisciplinary experimentation, as with say like Picasso and the surrealists in Paris. It's the theater that is self-consciously theater of the future. Here are some of the costumes for the bed bug. And you can see the influence of the visual art, obviously, on all this kind of thing. It all works together. So the final artist I'll just touch on is Kazimera Malevich, who was a kind of a Russian cubist, in a sense, an abstract cubist. He did paint a self-portrait, so we do know what he looked like. So he wrote, the thunder of the October cannons helped us to become innovative. We have come to burn the brain clean of the mildew of the past. So once again, remember, he's coming from this world where he's trained to do figure drawing and things, and suddenly here's his most famous painting. It's called Black Square. It is a painting that doesn't well shine its promises. And now the interesting thing is when I first was looking at his work, I assumed that it was very anti-human. I assumed that it was very much like very cold, and like humans are somehow geometrical and are somehow machines. The interesting thing is, with a lot of these artists, there's this interesting tension. For Malevich, it was actually, this painting in particular, was incredibly spiritual. This is a really important surprising point. You have, on the one hand, this futurist sense of the human being like a machine, but on the other hand, a very Russian sense that all of this eruption of form was very modern, but very mystical too. So it's about the energies of God himself. From Malevich, the Black Square was not a negation of the human, but a mystical approach to something even more potently supernatural. And this makes sense if you actually see the Black Square where it was originally shown, where it is put in the corner, which is this is the position that would normally be occupied in a Russian house by a Greek, by a Russian Orthodox icon. So this is, for him, an icon that reveals a tremendous kind of spirituality of a kind of hidden, hidden blankness that leads you onwards to a greater spiritual fulfillment. And this is very much like Kandinsky, who once again, you have this kind of abstract geometrical painting, but he himself wrote literally a treatise called On the Spiritual and Art. He doesn't see this as being dehumanized. He sees it as being deeply, deeply fundamentally religious. And on the bibliography I passed out, you can go read him for free online. Oh, we've got more copies too if you want them. Yeah, great, thank you. So, and Kandinsky I should mention was also the head of the art section at the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, which was bringing a lot of this art to the public. So this is a subsumed disagreement that would eventually cause a collision. Is the revolution about the human as a soul or about the human as a cog? Stalin would later actually call faithful communist workers cogs. He wrote that writers and artists should be engineers of the human soul. There is this kind of Marxist materialist idea of society as a machine. For example, as you probably know, they were undergoing the destruction of churches, of mosques, of synagogues, the destruction of church bells in town squares, which come up in a lot of this work. There's this tension between the spiritual and the materialist in the avant garde. And this is true in the visual arts, but also in writing and music. And I'm going to show you my favorite or play for you my favorite example from music, which is by a composer named Nikolai Abukhov. Now Abukhov on the face of it is very similar to the to the sort of experimental artists we've looked at. He's experimenting with kind of atonal 12 tone composition of a certain kind. It's very angular and it's abstract in the same way that the visual art is. But it's actually according to him deeply spiritual. He was a musical mystic. He was Catholic. He in fact went by the alias Nikola L'Extasy, Nicholas of the Ecstasy. He supposedly wrote the bar numbers of his music in his own blood. And performance indications for the performers include things like with an unknown perfume, with an enigmatic delirium. They're all in French too, with a divine splendor. With clairvoyance. Play this with clairvoyance. Or to his singers, regretting with a horse voice. Convincing with an insane smile. With malignancy or suffering furiously. So I'm going to attempt now to actually to play one minute of his of his music. Let's see if this works. Okay and so this is from a set of pieces called Revelation. And you'll hear that they have the same kind of crystalline feeling as the art of the period. It's not playing off of this. It's playing off your speakers. So you get an idea. The, sorry that we can't do anything about the, we can't do anything about the volume. I apologize. But anyway, so he, what you hear there, I mean it has this kind of feeling of a kind of a, whoo, yeah. So it is, it has a kind of a crystalline feeling very much like the paintings. It's a sort of, it's a kind of abstract geometry that is floating in white space. You literally have kind of periods of silence that are as important to set off the shapes that have been played on the piano as the, the sound. So it is literally like those L. Lasitzky paintings. And once again, like some of those people like Kandinsky, like Malevich, he sees this as being a deeply spiritual piece. Every piece in this set revelations is about a different spiritual element. He is best known perhaps for a piece that never was performed, which was to be called The Book of Life. It was supposed to be performed only in a temple built by Natalia Goncharova, the futurist. And the performance of it was going to bring the Tsar back from the dead and put him back in power. So it was, you know, a piece that the Soviet authorities weren't super into. So Obukhov found it necessary to flee the Soviet Union and he left, he, you know, lived the rest of his life in the West. So other Soviet futurist music focuses on mechanism and machinery and speed. There are pieces called things like the electrification rag, suicide by airplane, rails, communist youth are the boss of electrification, and iron foundry, the last of which is by this guy, Alexander Mosulov. And so for my other musical piece, I'm going to play just about a minute of Mosulov's Iron Foundry. And this is a ballet that depicts an iron foundry, and you should know that if you could see the orchestra actually playing, at one point the percussionists just take out a giant piece of sheet metal and start beating the crap out of it. So once again, there's a, there's a kind of an incredible joy in rhythm here, but an aggressive joy, a brutalist joy, parallel musically to the in-your-face declarations of the death of the past by Mayakovsky and Klebnikov. But this music was incredibly popular, in fact, in Russia in the period. So a piece that I mentioned called Rails, which was an avocation of a train, was played for a factory audience who supposedly liked it better than Beethoven. A report said that they found that it aroused contagious emotions among the audience, proletarian masses for whom machine oil is mother's milk, have a right to demand music consonant with our era, not the music of the bourgeois salon, which belongs to the time of the early locomotive. Now we often forget that Sergei Prokofiev, who we all think of as kind of a master of wit and charm, who had fled to Paris by this time, he was also, by this point, writing this kind of music. It's not often played, but this is what he was writing at this period. It's loud, it's mechanistic, it's almost gleefully monstrous. Though we hear ballets like Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella all the time, we don't really think of his 1926 ballet, pas d'assier, like a pas de deux, but a step of steel. It's a ballet about a factory. And, but even so, he thought that that would put him in good with the Soviet authorities, but when he had it performed in the Soviet Union, the dancers complained. They couldn't tell whether the workers were communist workers or capitalist workers. So they weren't really, like, I guess if they were drawing a wage, they danced differently or something. I don't know. Anyway, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians said, the orchestra must become like a factory. And there were, in fact, symphonies written just for factories. That is to say, you would have timings for things like the factory whistles being pulled, a machine starting up, another machine starting up so that they would be in kind of rhythmic displacement. So that kind of experiment was happening. Now, writers were also fascinated by the new mechanical world. We've talked about, or prose writers. We've talked about poets. We've talked about visual artists. We've talked about musicians. But prose writers as well, we're writing about this kind of thing. Yuri Oleshia, who is the one in the middle, this by the way is Bulgakov, who wrote Mastering Margarita. But Yuri Oleshia wrote a wonderful novel called Envy, which is a Cubist novel about the new world supplanting the sad sack corrupt old world. It's an insane comedy about a never-do-well parasite jockeying to stay at a powerful man's house, but hating all the clean young things who seem so full of promise around him. And it also has an inventor walking around claiming that he has created an elusive automaton named Ophelia, who is going to transform the world. And Yuri Oleshia is a great example of how the avant-garde movement played out in prose. The subject matter is concerned with modernity in the future, but it's written almost in the mode of a fantasy or a fairy tale. There's a strong absurdist touch, which kind of grows out of the tradition of Gogol. Stories like The Nose by Gogol, or The Overcoat, if you've read those. Nabokov, I think it was, said once that we all crawled out of Gogol's Overcoat, which I guess he couldn't really say, we all crawled out of Gogol's nose. Right, exactly. So anyway, but there's a kind of a blankness of character or a flatness of character, like a fairy tale. There's an emphasis on the grotesque in this kind of writing. There are inclusions of snippets of newspaper advertisements and headlines, that kind of thing. That composer, Alexander Mosulov, actually his song cycles are advertisements set to music as if they were poetry. These books include official speech, and also there's very clipped sentences. There's a lack of emphasis on cause and effect, but there's also this anarchic rebelliousness. So oddly enough, in Olesha's envy, it is the people who long for the old world of the deep Russian soul who are both corrupt and yet who are the real revolutionaries, the ones seen as dangerous by the party. The rest of the world is about youth and success and order and materialism, whereas the characters who are trapped in the ways of the old world, who he's weirdly sympathetic to, they can only dream of being machines. One of them says, I want to be a machine. I want to be proud of my work, proud of the fact that I'm working. To be indifferent to everything but work. I've begun to envy machines. That's what it is. Am I not as good as a machine? So these deeply corrupt souls unable to perform as cogs in the Soviet machine are Olesha's antiheroes. So it's a fantastic example of a Soviet fantasy that isn't fantasy. This feels like this is going on and off. The mic. Yeah, no? Okay. The most famous example of this fairytale dream style, though, almost like Shagall's painting in words, is Bulgakov's Master in Margarita, which some of you have probably read. It's a story of a devil coming to Moscow with a giant cat in tow. So a good crystallization of these techniques, one of the most absurd of the Russians is this guy, Daniel Harms, and our very own Didi Robinson has in fact illustrated Daniel Harms. You can look at her book version of one of his tales. And in fact, she has brought the originals of the art, if you want to take a look at that afterwards. So Harms was not very well known in his life as a writer. Most of his writings had to be circulated in secret. He was mainly known as a children's book writer. And I'm just going to read two of his very short stories for you right now. Blue notebook number 10. There was a redheaded man who had no ears or eyes. He didn't have hair either. So he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn't have a nose either. He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach. He had no back, no spine. He didn't have any insides at all. There was nothing. So we don't even know who we're talking about. We better not talk about him anymore. Here's another one called tumbling old women. Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who'd shattered, but out of excessive curiosity, also tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. Then a third old woman tumbled from her window and a fourth and a fifth. When the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked over to Maltsev Market where they say a blind man had been given a knit shawl. So you can see this. Once again, there's a kind of grotesqueness. It's absolute absurdity. There's a kind of meaninglessness. Life is cheap. It can end at any time. Their death means nothing, which is frankly appropriate for this period. In the case of that second story, literally like if you watch someone else's downfall, it will be your downfall. So there is this kind of dark sense to these things. There's this extreme senseless absurdist violence that can erupt at any moment. The grammar itself downplays cause and effect by being so simplistic. The psychology of the characters is minimalized to a fable like sketchiness. Writing was absurdist because life itself was full of absurd logic. Death was arbitrary and impossible bureaucracy loomed over everyone and threatened everyone. So the final person I want to talk about is a wonderful experimental writer from this period. I would really recommend who is Boris Pilniak who wrote short novels, and I would kind of say that he is more in the tradition of Tolstoy than of Gogol. He is kind of like a Cubist Tolstoy in that he is focusing, he's very lyrical as a writer, but he's also focusing on groups of people and how certain things affect like a group of people. So for example, the plot of his book of his novel Mahogany, which is really a novella, all of his books are quite short. Mahogany is one of the stories in this collection. The plot of this is that two antique dealers come to a backwater town to buy people's old Mahogany furniture and it follows different people in the time those brothers are in town. Now why is that interesting? That sounds incredibly uninteresting, Mahogany furniture. It's interesting because imagine what an antique dealer is dealing with in the 1920s in Russia. Emotions are invested in antiques. These are the last vestiges of a family history that has been knowingly broken apart by the government in the last few years. So the last vestiges of family history and family identity, their break with the past is painful. Seeing everything you know become worthless, even dangerous because it can mark you as bourgeois. Families who used to own whole houses are now living with their whole family stuffed in one room. The bells in the village are being destroyed by communist workers. So in a sense, by looking at antique dealers, he gets to look at the whole way that people are dealing with the destruction of the past. Pilniac's prose is not like Harms's. It is not clipped. Instead, it is lyrical and expansive, but still cubist in some ways. And I'll do one sample. Notice how headlong it is, how it charges forward with a disorienting swiveling of focus from thing to thing. And it's also fascinated with the new, especially with cars and transportation. But here is his example of evening, his description of evening falling. If the day of work, fog, queues, reception rooms, solemn quiet of high, sealing to bookkeeping halls, the chirping of the looms and cotton and woolmills, the thunder of hammers and factories and foundries, the whistles of trains departing and in motion, the roar of buses and automobiles, the prattle of streetcar bells, telephone bells, doorbells, the warning of the radio, the day of the city machine of people, men, women, children, old folk, mature people. If we look ahead and replace the labor, the day of labor and business with the evening, as time did, piling the day with twilight, spilling into the streets, the light of street lamps, which in the drizzle look like weeping eyes, destroying the sky. Then in the evening, tens of thousands of people made their way into cinemas, theaters, variety shows, open stages, taverns and beer parlors. There in the places of entertainment, all sorts of things were shown in tangling time, space and countries. They showed Greeks unlike any that have ever existed, Assyrians unlike any that have ever existed, unreal Jews, Americans, Englishmen, Germans, oppressed, unreal Chinese, Russian workers. Furthermore, an ability to speak well or speak poorly was displayed, good or bad, legs, arms and backs and chests were shown. Once again, like see almost like a Cubist painting, the way that the body is sort of disassembled in this headlong description. The ability to dance and sing well or poorly exhibited, and furthermore they showed all aspects of love and various amorous intrigues, such as seldom if ever occurred in everyday life. Dressed in their best, people sat in rows, looked, listened, applauded and streaming down the brightly lit stairs of the theaters into the wet streets, commented hurriedly, always trying to be clever. Then the streets emptied to find rest in the night and at night, past midnight, at the hour when in villages the first roosters crow, in houses, in beds, husbands and wives and lovers, mostly lonely couples, engaged in what animals, birds and insects engage in at dawn and at sunset. So it's a very beautiful lyrical style and he often, for example, it's it's very musical. He literally has refrains that will be repeated through one of these novellas and that kind of thing. I really, really recommend him. That is from a story called The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, which proved to be his undoing. It was a story about a couple of high ups in the government who decide they need to get rid of a particular general who is vying for power. So they arranged for him to have an unnecessary surgical operation where he is then killed. Now the problem with Pilniak writing this story is that that was actually true. Stalin had actually done that. So he tried to conceal Stalin's identity by having the character who clearly is Stalin say, I hate smoking pipes. Thinking that would do it. But unfortunately he gave the guy a mustache and as Shostakovich later remarked, Pilniak might have lived if he had only not put in the mustache. So this story would come back later to destroy Pilniak. So now it's time in closing to turn a corner. Let's come back to earth for a minute from the world of experimentation. The future had not arrived. Soviet industry and agriculture collapsed in the wake of the revolution. The focus on the science fiction future was so important because the fact in fact the present was miserable. World War I, then the revolution, then the Russian civil war meant years of starvation. So even though Vasily Kandinsky was high up in the people's commissariat of enlightenment for example, his infant son or like three or four years old, son still starved to death. Just as Lenin's new economic policy got agricultural and industrial production back to their pre-war levels, ideological and political battles erased that policy and everything collapsed again. Lenin himself was not as fond of the futurists or of the arts at all as he pretended. He called the futurists the so-called intellectuals, the lackeys of capitalism who see themselves as the nation's brain. They are not a brain, they are shit. That is what he said in private about them, though he praised them in public. On music he was coming out of a concert of Beethoven with Maxim Gorky and he said to Gorky, I cannot listen to music often. It affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of people who can create such beauty in this filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people's heads. Today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly. So there's this kind of struggle going on within communism about what is, how are the arts going to be used? On the one hand you have these avant-garde people, on the other you have people who want to have everyone singing massed songs, propaganda songs which of course the workers are not super happy about singing mass propaganda songs. What they want is to be able to dance to western jazz which has been forbidden them by everyone in the government saying that jazz is cheap and capitalist in bourgeois. So you have this kind of push and pull going and it gets increasingly disastrous with people accusing each other of being counter-revolutionary because of the words that they write or the music that they write. For example, Nikolai Roslavetz who's called the Schoenberg of Moscow because he's a sort of very experimental composer. He was actually of peasant stock. He taught himself to read, to write and to play the violin by ear. So then he comes across, he creates this own kind of his own experimental style and he's super pissed off that then people attack him and say he's not proletarian enough. So he says I am bourgeois enough to consider the proletariat the rightful heir of all previous culture and entitled to the best of music. But people like him did not survive. Basically the Stalin's five-year plan suddenly forced collectivization of the farms across the country. You had thousands, not thousands but hundreds of uprisings all over the country. You had the starting of the mass starvation in Ukraine which we're still seeing the effects of today in terms of the relations between those countries. Starvation caused by farm collectivization which probably caused the death of roughly, we don't know but probably around three million people through starvation in the course of about two and a half years. In this period therefore saw the rise of socialist realism which was going to crush the avant-garde. Socialist realism I always wondered why it was called realism because the idea is you have to say nice happy things. But here's the thing their argument is you have to talk about the real. We don't want to hear about any more stuff happening in outer space. We don't want to hear any more stuff about like you know sort of these sort of spiritual personal things. We want to hear about reality but remember reality is super happy right now because we're all communist and on the way to a perfect future. So it's this weird dialectic a very deceptive dialectic where you're supposed to write about the truth but the truth has to be positive because of course the truth is positive and you are a traitor if you don't think so. So the early 30s saw the rise of that socialist realism and it also saw the death of experiment. Suddenly you had to watch what you said. Almost everyone I've talked about so far in this talk was arrested, executed or forced to commit suicide in the next 10 years. All of them were silenced in one way or another. In Mayakovsky's words they were quote forced to step on their own song's throat. So Yuri Alesha never wrote another novel after Envy. He complained that he wasn't able to write heroically in this socialist realist style. Nikolai Rostlovitz the Schoenberg of Moscow was forced to issue a retraction of his own music. He began to write in a completely different style casting away all his old experimental notions. Nonetheless the secret police were actually still gathering information for a case against him. When he happened to suffer a stroke that paralyzed him and they decided it wasn't worth it. He died during World War II. Alexander Mosulov was thrown into a work, a labor camp, a gulag for sentenced to eight years for anti-revolutionary activity. When he finally did get out he would introduce himself as the deceased composer Mosulov because he felt he'd been so broken and his music fundamentally changed in its character after that time. Sergei Prokofiev even who had returned in Russia in the 1930s at exactly the wrong time as Shostakovich said like a chicken landing in the soup. He also found it advisable to turn away from the loud angular experiments of the 1920s just like Mosulov and Rostlovitz. He started to consciously depoliticize his music by writing soft fairy tale ballets and pieces for children that no one would pay any attention to like Peter and the Wolf. He hardly protested when his ex-wife Lena was arrested, tortured for several months until she confessed crimes she had not committed and then sentenced to 12 years hard labor. Boris Pilniak the Cubist Tolstoy was also forced to write a retraction of his own work but apparently Stalin never forgot the jab in the tale of the unextinguished moon. On October 28th 1937 Pilniak had several friends over to celebrate his little son's third birthday including in fact Boris Pasternak author of Dr. Gervago. That night NKVD agents burst into his apartment dragged Pilniak away and accused him of absurdly of being a spy for both the Germans and the Japanese. He played guilty and was shot in the back of the head. Mikhail Bulgakov who wrote the author of science fiction fables things like master and margarita. He couldn't publish the book during his lifetime. He had a fatal kidney disease so he said he was going to publish it anyway and his friends said please don't because we're still alive. So it was in fact was not published until decades after his death. Daniel Harms the spinner of absurdist fables and stories for children was arrested about the same time in the late 1930s. For the next couple of decades his wife continued to write to him in prison. No one told her that he had already frozen to death in an insane asylum. Zivalad Mehrholt the Futurist Director of Plays by Vladimir Myakovsky and others spoke out publicly against the persecution of artists and was of course arrested soon after. He was tortured extensively and forced to give false evidence against many of his closest friends in an act of incredible bravery. During a pause in his months of torture he retracted his statement and said they are not guilty I am the only one who is guilty. He was taken down into the basement of the Lubyanka the secret police headquarters and shot. Meanwhile his wife Zineda Rake was lured back to her apartment where thugs broke in stabbed her 27 times gouged out her eyes and then slipped out over the balcony. And Myakovsky himself the wunderkind of the revolution as the self-enointed messiah of futurism he started to spend a lot of time in Paris buying sort of like Parisian shirts silk ties for himself he bought a sports car one of the only cars on the streets of Moscow this obviously was going to eventually make him a target. He had a fling with a white Russian princess. Myakovsky himself only recognized this contradiction between collectivism and his own narcissistic individualism when at the end of the 1920s the Soviet government started to treat him like any other citizen they refused to give him a give him a give him a visa to leave the country like anyone else they also refused to give him any reason he wasn't allowed to leave suddenly he started to see the walls he had helped build clothes around him. His character in the bed bug who wakes up in the future says this what is all this what did we fight for why did we shed our blood if I can't dance to my heart's content and I'm supposed to be the leader of the new society these words could be Myakovsky's own one day after he spent the morning as he usually did trying to convince a woman to leave her husband for him he shot himself in the heart Myakovsky was crushed by the contradictions of self and society collective and individual perhaps this is why the experiments of Russian futurism could not survive they were both anarchic and individualistic the outpourings and dreams of eccentric creators it was only the illusion afforded by an anarchic epoch that allowed them to seem briefly like the voice of a nation we of course have our own tensions here between individual and collective but they're very different the soviet avant garde of the 1920s remains one of the most fascinating and creative periods in the history of the arts these works are urgent written in danger out of necessity in this country we have grown complacent about the arts they seem to be a kind of side dish or relish on the main meat of capital acquisition it is important to remember that people have died for the arts as poet Osip Mandelstam famously said nowhere in the world is poetry as important as it is in Russia nowhere else does so many people die of it but just as important we need to remember that the arts saved lives in these places too even as manuscripts were circulated in secret they allowed people to see a way through impossible times this is why the risks were worth it if the arts were not important people would not have given their lives for them the arts gave people's lives shape they taught people the lessons of fortitude of compassion and unbounded creativity they can remind us of those things in our newly dangerous world they can remind us of how the future can change in a day thank you yeah if anyone has any questions i can answer them yeah yeah um if you want to hear about Shostakovich since we're in a capitalist country why don't you go out and buy this book symphony for the city the dead to meet you Shostakovich and the siege of leningrad by mt anderson available at bear upon books thank you sir he's not a plant not a plant yes yeah this place person oh yeah yeah yeah right yes explains everything right yeah and i mean yeah like the um and i think the whole sense of the russian mentality like nadezhda mandelstam the poet mandelstam's wife wrote these beautiful memoirs and one of the things she says and i think this is really important to understanding russia now is she's like you have to understand that for at least a generation the whole idea of compassion was burned out of people like that was compassion was death that meant that you were open to be destroyed and she was she was like um i think that her term is something like it was as forgotten as the woolly mammoth it was extinct and i think you know a whole society can be traumatized as society society can have a post-traumatic you know sort of like uh attitude and that i think explains a lot of um how russia acts now in some ways uh it is a fundamentally traumatized society yes didi yeah right things that he was coming out of a tradition i thought he was just a very unique nutcase yeah he wasn't well no he was a unique nutcase there's no question that saty was yeah i mean that's one of the neat things is that like you can see all of these connections in particular between paris and uh and st petersburg um you know petrograd leningrad in this period totally and just like saty went to um la channeur the black cat there's a cafe in uh st petersburg that was the center of all this called uh the stray dog so you know there you go just a different animal um yes and and sally has a book on melnikov if you want to take a look to see what his yeah very very cool yeah i'm not sure you can really sell people on that but you know good try yeah no no no no i totally i think that he's an amazing figure i love his work absolutely yeah like there are a few things good about the soviet union but maybe this is one of them the um creation of bleacher seating but there is also the fact that they um that they they banned the um the saxophone i think that's one of their other great accomplishments yes oh yeah no totally and i mean in particular because you had these like this beautiful high design work being done where people were taking cubist forms and then turning that into um into cloth and being very proud of the fact that that is cloth that um that a collective had made and that it was not going to be something someone from the west would wear yeah but then but it is totally true that you still had this weird collision that a lot of people are still dressing like it is you know like it's 1920 anyplace else yeah absolutely and uh yeah yes absolutely yeah yeah i mean um super weird local connection there is that um those of you who are from as i am a callus know that the um eastern east callus used to be called muskow and muskow woods and the reason is because they're once they dropped a um uh millstone there and they said it was as loud as the uh as the breaking of a russian bell in muskow and weirdly enough that stuck and that's the reason it's called muskow and muskow mills muskow woods road you know that kind of thing yeah oh and i should also mention like you couldn't hear it unfortunately but that obokhov piece is actually called the bells in the in the great distance so it actually is a new vocation of bells as well yeah um did howard norman have his hand up is that going to go one of them said you know you're indicting us for basing our writing on ancient jewish folktales as if you're basing your sensibilities on um something that isn't realism right but to them it was realism that was history those folktales totally i mean so the lubianca prison ended up to be the greatest library really because everything that was under indictment including solzhenitsyn's work all ended up as forensic evidence and so when when uh uh brezhnev opened it up thousands of scholars from all around the world could go and see original texts that had been destroyed and so forth that's one of the amazing paradoxes of that repressive regime is they actually preserved um work that would not have been otherwise preserved and diaries were in there too diaries you know i said babel's diaries yeah yeah i said babel's diaries interesting one of the one more question just one one of the um great come collections of stuff that made it out of russia during that time um all the way up through the thirties is in the ghetti library in la because a lot of the expats ended up in la and the ghetti has a whole catalog of work especially visual work um that's there in the ghettis well thank you all very much thanks