New Russian Modernist Studies

Leonid Livak’s and Irina Shevelenko’s books reflect a growing interest in, and need for, new theoretical reassessments of Russian modernism and its post-Soviet theorizations made possible by the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Anglo-American studies of modernism are an intellectual growth industry, a collective hothouse of innovative approaches and ideas, research on the issue is still marginalized in Russian studies in the West and in international modernist studies.¹ Russian modernist topics feature but rarely in the programs of annual conferences of The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) or of The Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conferences.

Leonid Livak, in particular, reflects on circumstances that have led to the conceptual “belatedness” of studies of Russian modernism and avowedly aims to synchronize their theoretical basis with that of their more up-to-date Western counterparts. If anti-modernist Soviet ideology created a special form of cultural disruption, late- and post-Soviet efforts to reclaim the modernist “lost time,” along with their unquestionable empirical accomplishments, have often uncritically espoused the value system and fixed canon self-servingly codified by specific literary figures. Aiming to de-ideologize the field, Livak’s book includes a revision of a range of entrenched assumptions of the “old” Western studies of modernism, associated with “the New Criticism and the Marxist tradition running from Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt school to Fredric Jameson” (4). Livak draws inspiration for this two-fold revisionist task from “new modernist studies” which emerged in Anglo-American literary scholarship in the 1990s and are embodied in its flagship journal, Modernism/modernity. He accepts the major theoretical assumption on modernism as a range of ambivalent responses to the challenges of modernity and reconsiders the concept epistemologically. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s understanding of culture as a mechanism for organizing information and Virgil Nemoianu’s studies of Romanticism, Livak proposes to consider “modernism”² not as a fixed number of canonical works but as “culture” or a “cultural process,” i. e. “an evolving system of values, ideas, practices, and conventions . . . suffusing human experience with meaning” (7). This cultural synthesizing approach results in major reconsiderations of Russian modernism’s taxonomy, chronology, and geography, as well as of their interrelationships. No less important is Livak’s engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the field of cultural production, which yields important insights in regard to the socio-economic evolvement of Russian modernism.

Taking as his main working metaphor the notion of cartography, Livak exposes distortions and blind spots in previous “maps” of cultural communities of modernity and proposes more accurate delineations. The titles of the book chapters reflect this cartographical metaphorics. The first three chapters propose a careful rethinking of the entrenched methodological premises (or distorted “maps”) concerning Russian and, by extension, international modernism. The fourth and fifth chapters propose two new “maps” of Russian modernism, demonstrating the possibilities of more inclusive research, involving extra-aesthetic phenomena, primarily social and economic. In chapter 1, “The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture,” Livak deliberately downplays various aesthetic lines of demarcation among multiple segments of modernist culture, viewing them as expressing the intrinsic modernist predilection for collective/ group self-definitions rather than as signifiers of any essential significance. Livak questions the universalization of general terms and definitions that were used at the turn of the century through the end of the 1920s by actors and contemporary observers of various artistic enterprises to define the evolving cultural and literary processes and self-organization. While this “intense onomastic activity” (40) was then substantialized by scholars, Livak stresses its functional and situational character in constant literary feuds and fights for artistic self-legitimization. Undermining the essentialist character of such concepts as Symbolism, Decadence, novoe iskusstvo (new art), Acmeism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, LEF, RAPP, and others, Livak, however, considers “modernism” as “the least bad option for a generic umbrella term denoting, in shorthand, a Russian cultural formation that existed from the turn of...