Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917

3. Love in the Time of Cholera: Russian Art and the Real War, 1915–1916

3. Love in the Time of Cholera Russian Art and the Real War, 1915–1916 Imagining the unimaginable became a necessity for artists in Russia as they struggled to redefine their lives and their work amid the intellectual and material disturbances of the Great War. Public culture had changed, and modern war’s existential challenges posed great paradoxes to artists whowantedtoupholdtheideaofartasarepresentationofrealityandthe artist’s role as the creator of culture in modern society. How could art be relevanttomodernlifewhenmodernitymeantdestruction,notcreation? Whatwastheroleoftheartistwhentheartworldseemedtrivialandarti- ficial compared to the great human suffering of war? How could an artist remainautonomousduringdaysthatdemandedpersonalsacrifice,commoncause ,anddependenceonartbuyerswithbadtaste?Ashiftingpublic environment for art against the background of tremendous death and sufferingledmanytodespairthattheirworkhadmeaningintimeofwar. “When blood is flowing on the fields of battle, who feels like art?” wrote one young painter.1 Some aesthetic modernists began to leave aside prewaraestheticprincipleswhenfacedwithsuchquestions ,andtheirsearch forprofessionalandpersonalstabilityledtomorefigurative,narrative,or traditionalstylesamidthenewpublicstructuresofwar.Withsomeguilt, perhaps,DmitriiMerezhkovskiinotedtheproblematicpositionoftheartistduringtheGreatWar :“Twolinesofawarbulletinaremoreimportant than the works of Goethe and Pushkin. Culture in the time of war is love in the time of cholera.”2 ScholarshavenotedhowEuropeanartchangedduringtheFirstWorld War, but the causes of these changes remain unclear. On the one hand, WorldWarIseemstohavebeenanincubatorofmodernart,aneventthat encouraged,validated,andintensifiedtheirony,fragmentation,andiconoclasm inherent within modernism.3 Kenneth Silver has challenged this long-held view by showing how the Parisian avant-garde “capitulated” to the“forcesof‘order’andreaction”intheintenseatmosphereofpatriotism, right-wing political pressure, and public antimodernism that emerged after August 1914.4 Cubists in France, he demonstrates, abandoned their cosmopolitan values, iconoclastic culture, and revolutionary sentiments to adopt patriotic or nationalist imagery and more conventional forms, changes that helped make cubism a conservative force in the art world after the war. Jay Winter has argued that World War I increased the appeal of traditional art, not modernism, as a way for people to comprehend mass grief and suffering.5 Richard Cork, for his part, suggests that changes in art form during the war were linked to aesthetic challenges. TheEuropeanavant-gardeattemptedtopaintthewar,hewrites,but“advanced modernist abstraction soon proved an inadequate starting-point for developing a viable approach to the conflict.”6 The Imperial Russian case suggests that these divergent interpretations exist because each exposes a different facet of the war’s more general effects on the artistic environment . The common denominator that underlay such changes was the role that a mobilized public culture played in aligning audience and artistic activity, a totalizing culture of war that, paradoxically, touched different individuals in different ways. In wartime Russia modern artists used the content and form of their paintingstodefine,stabilize,andreinvigoratetheirpersonalandprofessionallivesinatimeof fluxanduncertainty.Modernistsdidnotabandon their fundamental aesthetics, philosophies, or art styles. Instead, the demandsofthemassmedia ,artmarket,andtheindividualpsycheallencouraged the production of more figurative art as artists attempted to reach a 86 | Love in the Time of Cholera differentaudienceortouseartinadifferentwaythantheyhadbeforethe war. When the futurist poet Benedikt Livshits looked back at the avantgarde ’sreaction,hecouldonlywonderhowpaintersandpoetscouldhave bidden “farewell to abstract form, to shattered syntax, to zaum [transrational or alogical poetry]—and without regret?”7 Vladimir Makovskii, a memberoftheItinerants,waspositivelygleefulashetrackedanantimodernistbacklashamongthepublicinAugust1915 :“Itisfuntoreadattacks ondecadents,futurists,andsoon.Itistoomuchtothinkthatartfindsitself on the right path in this nightmarish time.”8 But conservative critics and artists who celebrated the end of modernism could not point to the successofaestheticrealismasthesourceofculturalrebirth,forrealistartiststhemselvesfailedto findinspirationingreatevents,turningtosatisfy the tastes of the art world instead of educating the Russian people about the great conflict through their art. If aesthetic modernism, to some, appeared defeated during the war, aesthetic realism did not emerge victorious . The problem of how to represent reality when reality seemed unrepresentable remained intractable in Russia’s mainstream art world. A Great Retreat? The Continuation of Mobilization in Russian Public Culture Inmid-1915theGreatWarwasnolongeranaturaldisasterthathadstruck quickly and left behind a time of reconstruction and consolidation. In April the Germans forced Russian armies into a humiliating Great Retreat from Poland, and prospects for a short, victorious war dimmed. As thewar’snoveltyworeoff,theinitialwaveofexcitementandpublicpatriotism subsided, but war did not disappear from public culture. Mobilization had installed new institutions, social needs, and habits into daily life, and the necessity to find a way to live in wartime, to comprehend the warandcopewithitseconomic,social,andpoliticalproblems,persisted. Civic activism in public institutions to support the war effort continued and even increased in some areas of the public sphere, including the art Russian Art and the Real War | 87 world. Engagement with the war did not cease in 1915; its public contours andexpressionsshiftedasRussiansrefocusedtheireffortsawayfrompublicpatriotismtowardcopingwithwarasapermanentprobleminlife .People settled down to a long conflict. The war became routine.9 Thesublimeheroism,colorfulpatriotism,andloudbravadooftheearly patrioticcultureseemedridiculousandfalseaspeoplelearnedaboutmass defeatsandhorridconditionsatthefront.Russianstooklaterdifficulties so hard, wrote one journalist, because newspapers, especially the boulevardpress...