The Ethnic Avant-Garde by Steven S. Lee

Author:Steven S. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040, Literary Criticism/American/African American, LIT004240, Literary Criticism/Russian & Former Soviet Union
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

The global crisis, the senseless cataclysm which is shaking the life of the world at the present time, cannot but see the simple reflection of what it has itself brought into being; for it is that crisis which has dislocated and shifted all the cultural strata so as to expose the most ancient layers of folk existence. Yet it is also the force which goes driving forwards, shaping the dynamic of history into completely novel “modernistic” “arch-left” nation-state and socio-economic alignments.

In short, war and revolution could benefit Jewish folk culture. Amid this apparently universal push and pull between ancient and modern, Efros expresses confidence that each group would be able to maintain its uniqueness, that “strange complexities” would emerge “through which sings the national blood and its artistic predilections.” He anticipates that the Soviet Jewish avant-garde would be celebrated for “our ‘modernism,’ our leftishness, youth” as well as for “our ‘populism,’ our tradition, old age.”23

Such visions and hopes should be perfectly legible to us—further instances of an avant-garde reimagining the movement of history and time. Lissitzky recasts revolution as a messianic event, evoking Vladimir Tatlin’s protoconstructivist iteration of the Tower of Babel, that is, a vision of revolution oriented toward both future and past. In the introduction I brought to the fore precisely this notion of the avant-garde through Walter Benjamin’s “now-time” and “dialectical image,” and though I did not emphasize this there—not wishing to confine Benjamin to any single tradition—it seems relevant to discuss here the messianic undercurrent of his thought, which many have linked to his Jewish identity. Thus, for example, his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” describe revolution not just as arrest but also as “messianic arrest,” and now-time as the secularized version of messianic time. Indeed, the theses assert messianism as the crucial ingredient for revolution’s success. As Benjamin writes,

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