Soviet Salvage by Walworth Catherine

Author:Walworth, Catherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

67 Esfir Shub, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Aleksei Gan, and Varvara Stepanova in Stepanova and Rodchenko’s house, 1924. Image © A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow.

68 Aleksandr Rodchenko with Aleksei Gan (behind him), Evgenia Zhemchuzhnaia, Olga Rodchenko, Esfir Shub, and Stepanova, 1926. Courtesy of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Image © A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow.

If political and social awakening shaped Shub’s adult path, so, too, did the artistic heritage of Moscow, which students absorbed outside their regular courses. Shub and her peers were rapacious “drop ins” at concerts, literary evenings at the Polytechnical Museum, and exhibitions.17 They frequented the Tretiakov Gallery; the Museum of Aleksandr III (soon to become the Pushkin Museum); the Tsvetkov painting gallery (a small gallery of Russian drawings and paintings absorbed by the Tretiakov after the October Revolution); the Kremlin palaces, cathedrals, and Armory; and the yearly Mir iskusstva exhibitions.

Just as avant-garde painters such as Tatlin and Popova, and even dressmaker Lamanova, were doing, Shub and her friends visited Sergei Shchukin’s private painting collection, where the collector was their personal guide. According to her memoir, Shub not only found Picasso’s work confusing, but Shchukin also proved to be a strange enigma. He was, on the one hand, a capitalist who had gratuitously amassed enough wealth to build a magnificent art collection. Yet, on the other hand, he focused chiefly on the leftist trends in art.18 His ability to passionately discuss progressive movements such as Impressionism and Expressionism, as well as the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, was an ideological contradiction for Shub.19 This wealthy bourgeois gentleman did not fit the stereotypical mold, so useful to propaganda, in which enemies were portrayed as uncomplex, and therefore unsympathetic. As a student, she troubled over Shchukin and his challenging art collection, but later on, in full service to the revolution, Shub would produce strictly one-dimensional cinematic portraits of the Romanov government and its bureaucrats.

If her political mode of action was still as yet unnamed, so, too, was her career path. Shub completed her coursework, and all that remained was to choose her diploma theme. She realized with frustration that she was not ideally suited to the literary field she studied—she was admittedly neither a poet, nor a theorist, nor a critic.20 Although not particularly interested in the theater before, she learned that the Teatralnyi otdel (TEO), the theater section of Narkompros that had just relocated to Moscow, needed workers to fill its offices. She took a post as assistant to the experimental director Vsevolod Meierkhold.

TEO was headquartered in a requisitioned mansion facing the Kremlin wall and Alexander Gardens. A large table in one of the spacious living areas was covered with a green cloth and turned into a reception hall for visitors. From here, one door led to Lunacharskii’s Moscow office, and another to the information bureau. “In these three rooms I spent nearly three years,” Shub recalled.21 She worked at TEO

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