Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin by Merridale Catherine

Author:Merridale, Catherine [Merridale, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-11-12T06:00:00+00:00

9

Acropolis

Conservatism was not the only cultural news in Nicholas II’s Russia. An urgent, vigorous demand for change had also found its voice during the nineteenth century. The outside world woke to the signals of this rather late. It even took its time to notice how creative the effects of restless energy could be. In May 1913, as every textbook lovingly records, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring opened in Paris, designed and performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s brilliant Ballets Russes. As sinuous woodwind solos drew them into a scene of abduction and sacrifice, an audience that included Maurice Ravel and Gertrude Stein, to say nothing of the dance critics of every newspaper from the New York Times to Le Figaro, recoiled in shock. Some later praised the pagan wildness on the stage, but many chose to be affronted by a spectacle of barbarism.1 If they had known their Vasnetsov, or studied recent Russian art, the critics might have been a little less surprised. Today, the production, though innovative as ballet, resembles nothing quite so much as a late-nineteenth-century essay in folklore and archaism.2 The menace it implied, moreover, was symptomatic of many other public debates in Russia, where conflicts were developing that would last far longer than the dance-writers’ outburst in the cultural press. In politics as in the arts, the empire had reached breaking-point.

An exhibition that opened in February 1914 brought some of the tensions to the surface, at least as far as painting was concerned. The Society of Lovers of the Arts on Bolshaya Dmitrovka had been decked out with jaunty yellow flags for the occasion, and although visitors were sparse, the artists themselves were enthusiastic. Several members of the group involved, which called itself the Knave of Diamonds, had worked in France, and one of them had persuaded Picasso to send a canvas to the show. There were also contributions by Georges Braque and Henri Le Fauconnier, but the bulk of the display was local work. Bright colours filled the air like unexpected music; Aristarkh Lentulov’s canvas of St Basil’s Cathedral, for instance, managed to be even more effervescent than the building itself, and his cubist Moscow positively blazed. Still, many critics failed to pick up on the vigour of it all. They noted that the group had a strong taste for nature morte (‘there are a lot of apples’), but complained that its more ambitious paintings failed the naturalism test. Some works really did defy all reason. One canvas, for instance, was covered with some greenish geometric shapes, in the centre of which the artist had added a lifelike lotto ticket. On checking the catalogue, it turned out that the subject was meant to be A Lady in a Tram.3 Its artist, Kasimir Malevich, was a man who upset fellow-painters, let alone critics. ‘Creation,’ he was soon to write, ‘is present in pictures only where there is form which borrows nothing already created in nature.’4

Moscow rediscovered its vigorous imagination in the age of the avant-garde. The

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