L’héritage de la révolution d’Octobre et la crise de l’avant-garde à la fin des années 1920 et au début des années 1930

During the 1st five-year plan, the Soviet avant-garde lost its connection to contemporary political and cultural life. “My keys do not open the doors of my time,” Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1931. The similar discrepancy between the experimental aesthetics and the new Soviet ideological neoclassical culture became a source of creative frustration for many representatives of the Left artistic movement and protagonists of the history of the October Revolution. I will describe this cultural shift as an experience of the younger generation of the Soviet avant-garde that began its artistic career in the beginning of the formation of the utopian society in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. On the one hand, izoram (the Art Studio of Proletarian Youth) and writers Gennady Gor and Lidija Ginzburg were dedicated followers of Futurism and Constructivism. On the other one, however, they sought involvement in the new Soviet life where the culture was transformed into an ideological activity and into an element in the construction of the new Socialist society. How did they combine aesthetic experiments with ideology, whilst avoiding agit prop and primitive illustrations of political mythologies? If we find an answer to this question it will help us to achieve a better understanding of so-called early Soviet conformism that cannot be reduced to a self-identification with ideology nor to a flirtation with ideology. In collaboration with the Soviet system the young avant-gardists found an opportunity for the coexistence of aesthetic experimentation with the utopia under construction. I will analyze several practices of interaction between the post-Futurist movement and the Socialist values. Gennady Gor, who was a disciple of the oberiu leaders, used ideology as a rhetoric that can imply a non-ideological content. Izoram elaborated proletarian design within the framework of the post-Cubist tradition. Lydija Ginzburg, who belonged to the 2nd generation of the Formalism school, invented an experimental fragmentary writing, trying to create a social anthropology of Soviet experience.