Avant-Garde Museology
e-flux Classics
Avant-Garde Museology
Arseny Zhilyaev, Editor
Distributed by the University
of Minnesota Press
Published in collaboration with
V-A-C Foundation
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Arseny Zhilyaev
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Introduction
Avant-Garde Museology: Toward a History
of a Pilot Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Arseny Zhilyaev
I
Museum as Common Task
The Museum, its Meaning and Mission
(c. 1880s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Nikolai Fedorov
The Art of Resemblances (of False Artistic
Regeneration) and the Art of Reality (of Real
Resurrection): Ptolemaic and Copernican Art
(c. 1890s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Nikolai Fedorov
The Voronezh Museum in 1998 (1898) . . . . . . . . 149
Nikolai Fedorov
Contents
the Catherine the Great Exhibition
at the Voronezh Regional Museum
(1896) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Nikolai Fedorov and Nikolai Peterson
On the Cathedral of the Resurrecting
Museum (1921) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Vasiliy Chekrygin
The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of
the Arts (1918) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Pavel Florensky
On the Creation of a Pantheon in the
USSR: A Proposal (1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Vladimir Bekhterev
Materials on the Institute of
Biography (1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Nikolai Rybnikov
“ The Revolution Memorial Reservation,”
an excerpt from the novel Chevengur
(1926 –28) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Andrey Platonov
The Astronomical Observatory at the
Perm Regional Museum (1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
V. I. Karmilov
Contents
II
The Museum of Avant-Gardism
“ The Museum of Art, ” an excerpt from
the novel Red Star (1908) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Aleksandr Bogdanov
On the Museum (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Kazimir Malevich
The Museum Newspaper: Suggestions for
Regional Museums and Community Centers
(1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
V. Karpov
Avalanche Exhibitions: The Experience
of the Leningrad Organization of Worker-Artists
(1933) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Leonid Chetyrkin
On the Question of Museums: Record of
the Discussion of Problems and Objectives of
Fine Art Museums at the Art and Industry Board
(1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
Moscow Department of Museum Affairs
The Museum and Proletarian Culture:
Speech at the Meeting of the First All-Russian
Museum Commission (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Osip Brik
Contents
On the Results of the Museum
Conference (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Nikolai Punin
On the Museum Bureau (1920 –21) . . . . . . . . . . 299
Aleksandr Rodchenko
The Museum of Painting Culture at
Rozhdestvenka Street, 11 (1926) . . . . . . . . . . . 307
From Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow
III
The Materialistic Museum
Lenin’s attitude Toward Museums
(1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Dialectical Materialism and the
construction of the Museum (1931) . . . . . . . 319
Ivan Luppol
Marxist Exhibition Methods for
Natural Science Museums (1931) . . . . . . . . . . 341
Boris Zavadovsky
The Permanent Exhibitions of Fine
Art Museums: Joint Report (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov
Contents
An Experiment in Marxist ExhibitionMaking at the State Tretyakov
Gallery (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
Natalya Kovalenskaya
Everyday Life of the Working Class
from 1900 to 1930 Exhibition:
History and Everyday Life Department of the
State Russian Museum (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Valentin Kholtsov
On a Museum of Industry and Art
(1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
David Arkin
A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical
Performance? (1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
N. A. Shneerson
On the Question of the Principles
of Exhibition: Central Park of Culture and
Leisure Exhibitions (1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
I. M. Zykov
—
Plates
—
Contents
IV
The Museum Outside
of the Museum
Museums in Industrial Enterprises
(1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
K. I. Vorobyov
The Experience of Developing Mobile
Exhibitions (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
Yuri Samarin
Museum in the Street (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
P. N. Khrapov
Bringing the Agitprop-Truck to the
Service of Cultural Construction
(1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
M. S. Ilkovsky
The Mobile Model of the Instructive
Laboratory van and its Operation
(1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
I. F. Sheremet
Contents
V
Museum of the History
of the Revolution
Marxism-Leninism in Exhibitions
in the Museums of Revolution (1931) . . . . . . 499
Andrey Shestakov
Museums of the Revolution (1931) . . . . . . . . . 509
Nikolai Druzhinin
A New Exhibition at the Leningrad
Museum of the Revolution (1931) . . . . . . . . . . 533
Vera Leykina
The Museum as a Weapon of Class
Struggle: Here and Abroad (1934) . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
Roza Frumkina
VI
The Atheists’ Museum
An Exhibition and Panorama of the
Moscow Crematorium (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
A. F. Levitsky
Contents
The Question of Exhibitions in
Antireligious Museums (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557
S. P. Lebedyansky
The Museum on the Frontlines of the
War on Religion (1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569
Yuriy Kogan
Antireligious Work at the Kliment
Timiryazev Biomuseum: Supplementary
Report (1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581
Vorontsovsky
Church Painting and its History as an
Object of Antireligious Propaganda
(1932) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587
Ivan Skulenko
Authors’ Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605
Notes on the Original Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615
Acknowledgments
I couldn’t visit the museums of revolution in Soviet times.
But luckily, and paradoxically, Soviet history museums fully
conserved their exhibitions following the end of the Eighties.
The revolution—even the word is basically forbidden and
marked as pure evil in contemporary Russia—has continued
its quiet life in glass cases in the hidden but still beating heart
of our present ideological constructs.
We must admit that this duplicity is not radically new.
From the beginning of the 1930s, Soviet museums hardly
allowed any open discussion of the revolution outside the
canon upheld by Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union. But something very deep, something connected
to the very physical organization of exhibitions—namely, the
very idea of the Museum of the Revolution—continued to
access the avant-garde impulse that museologists shared
with the artists of the Great October Socialist Revolution,
with the Bolsheviks, and with the people who believed that
the miracle of the proletarian revolution was possible. It’s
probably similar to the way minerals hidden in the depths of
the Earth, helping to sustain life on the planet, testify to the
Earth’s origin and its future.
This publication is a result of five years of research. Its
goal is to direct attention to incredible but nearly unknown
material on the exhibition experiments and radical rethinking of museums that occurred in Russia and the USSR at
the end of the nineteenth century and during the first
third of the twentieth. These various projects may, at first
glance, seem isolated from each other, but in fact they have
13
Arseny Zhilyaev
deep-rooted commonalities in their fostering of what I call
avant-garde museology.
Born of my own artistic interest, this exploration of the
exhibition and museum projects carried out by the Russian
Cosmists, avant-garde artists, and Marxist museologists is
more literary than academic in its selection and organization
of works, a number of which are fragments of longer texts
excerpted and translated here for their relevance to the topic.
It is important to note that this publication doesn’t pretend
to fully cover this subject or circumscribe it on a theoretical level. The untranslatability of many Russian terms alone
renders many nuances of their meaning inaccessible. But
this doesn’t negate my hope that the subject of avant-garde
museology will garner public interest as well as the interest
of discourses surrounding current artistic production.
I would like to heartily thank Teresa Mavica, Anton
Vidokle, and Kadist Art Foundation for their limitless trust
in the project; Dmitry Potemkin for his comprehensive support for the idea of this publication from the very beginning and for helping to organize the material included in it;
Anastasia Gacheva, Maria Chehonadskih, and Vlad Sofronov
for their valuable advice and commentary; Boris Groys and
Claire Bishop for their support of this book, and those without whom Avant-Garde Museology would never have seen
the light.
— Arseny Zhilyaev
Avant-garde Museology
14
Preface
Avant-Garde Museology is the first title to be released in e-flux
classics, a new book series aiming to open the story of art to
the full complexity and paradoxicality of artistic thought.
The contemporary museum might be the most advanced
recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage
of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic
experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But a museum
can also be the very tomb where these projects are declared
dead and laid to rest—joining other elements of the past:
despotic kings and their belongings, an old order stretching
back centuries, perfectly preserved. This is why many artists
of the early Russian avant-garde in the years surrounding
the 1917 October Revolution called for the destruction of
museums—as fortresses of history, they could only hinder
the creation of an entirely new culture. Life, in all its vitality,
must supersede art.
But artists were not the only ones who realized something had to be done with the museum. Around the same
time in Russia, a number of others joined artists such as
Malevich in realizing that the meaning and purpose of the
museum had to be reinvented. For artist Arseny Zhilyaev,
these were the avant-garde museologists—a disparate group
of state officials, art historians, writers, philosophers, and
amateur scientists who identified the museum as a crucial
site to be placed in the service of the collective production
of life. While some of these thinkers are little known or completely unknown, both to readers today and to each other in
their own time, their placement in Avant-Garde Museology
15
Preface
alongside the encompassing influence of Vladimir Lenin,
Kazimir Malevich, and Nikolai Fedorov distinguishes for the
first time a mature line of thinking running through early
Soviet society.
For Zhilyaev, the avant-garde museologists can be said
to have exceeded the magnitude and imaginative scope of
the early artistic avant-gardes themselves. They internalized
the critique of the museum voiced by artists and sought to
advance its pedagogical function accordingly. If Malevich
himself called for a museum of life to replace the incinerated
remains of the backwards past, the avant-garde museologists
further asked how such a museum of life would be realized,
whether through museology and curation or philosophically
and temporally.
In fact, for Nikolai Fedorov, the eccentric philosopher
who laid the foundation for Russian Cosmism, the museum
was the very site where the border between life and death
could be negotiated, precisely because it is the crematorium
for the epochal dead described by Malevich. But the function of Fedorov’s museum of the future had to be turned
not only to serving life, but also to conquering death itself in
the service of immortality for all people. Other figures such
as the neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev sought to preserve
human intelligence through a “pantheon of the brain,” while
Aleksandr Bogdanov, first an ally and later a rival of Lenin in
the early Bolshevik days, created the world’s first Institute
of Blood Transfusion. Many avant-garde museologists also
sought to rethink existing museums and the role of pedagogy and material preservation according Marxist dialectics,
writing in the pages of journals such as Soviet Museum from
the perspective of a state official or museum worker.
Russia is only one part of the world among many where
the period of modernity marked a passage through an era
Avant-garde Museology
16
Julieta Aranda, brian Kuan Wood, anton Vidokle
of contradictions that arose when ideas of progress came
into contact with brute historical realities. And yet, the richness and character of the art and thinking that grew from
a confrontation with these very contradictions is often flattened under the weight of grand historical or art historical
narratives applied to explain them from a distance. The early
Russian avant-gardes, for instance, have been mainly understood in the English-speaking art historical and museum
fields in formalist terms as abstract geometric experimentation, or subjected to analysis through a Cold War political lens
fetishizing the otherness of communism. A collection such as
Avant-Garde Museology should hopefully inspire a reader to
forget all that immediately before reading further.
Still, it is important to bear in mind that the history written by that very English-language art history and museum
complex remains a primary source for our knowledge and
awareness of not only the early Russian avant-gardes, but
of art history in general in the period of contemporary art.
While many rich histories of art exist, language barriers
have limited their availability to audiences beyond the contexts where they originated. Which is to say that this historical canon has already shown itself to be irrelevant at the
same time as it is being upheld as the only de facto historical
record available.
e-flux classics would like to take this as a historical contradiction of our own time by asking what an artistic canon
for the period of contemporary art might be. Rather than
resurrect the old order or invent a new king, the approach
might be more similar to what Zhilyaev proposes: to rewind
the tape to resurrect in memory all that deserves life.
— Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
17
Dedicated to the sweet memory
of my beloved grandmother
Anna Kirsanovna Golysheva
Introduction
Avant-garde Museology:
Toward a History of a Pilot Experiment
Arseny Zhilyaev
Avant-garde Museology
Translated by Serge Levchin
Contemporary art’s angel of history is famously turned
toward the past. And all he sees is a pile of catastrophes.
Perhaps the angel would like to remain there, to resurrect the
dead, but he cannot. The winds of progress propel him inexorably forward. His only hope is an angelic video recorder
that can document the losses wrought in this struggle for the
future. Perhaps when the storm dies down at last, he will be
able to review the tape and create a happy paradise of contemporaneity that can accommodate all the aspirations of
innocently slaughtered artistic hopes.
But what exactly is this recording device? The answer
is simple: the museum of contemporary art. Naturally, the
museum as we know it today will not do. Its scope is incomplete, and the unspoken rules dictated by its format do not
allow it the same degree of freedom that drives the winds
of artistic progress, desperately gunning for salvation. But
sooner or later its turn will come, and then the freedom of the
artist will be equal to the freedom of the curator, who chooses
the angle of perspective and rewinds the tape to resurrect in
memory all that deserves life.
If we closely examine the history of this particular struggle for freedom, we will find many courageous experiments
in bringing the project of the avant-garde museum to life.
Moreover, we will see that these experiments yielded positive
results. But the laboratory where these experiments were
staged was destroyed before the truth about the art of the
future could be made public. All that was left were ruins and
scraps of notes in a laboratory journal, on the cover of which
we can just barely make out the title, effaced by the passage
of time: “Avant-Garde Museology.”
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Arseny Zhilyaev
*
*
*
The idea of the museum as a staging ground for transcending
the social and physical limitations imposed on mankind can
be traced back to the works of Nikolai Fedorov, one of the
most prominent exponents of religious philosophy, originator of the philosophy of the “common task,” and founding
father of the Russian cosmism movement, which in large
part inspired the Soviet space program. The idea of space
colonization was a natural consequence of Fedorov’s conception of man as a transformative force in the universe—a kind
of universal artist.
The designation of such a role necessitates certain regulations on nature and the cosmos.
One of the key aspects of Fedorov’s conception of mankind’s place in the cosmos was the resurrection of the dead
and the subsequent resettlement of newly resurrected generations on other planets. After all, if the physical act of resurrection were to take place on a singular planet, the sudden
superimposition of the dead on the world of the living would
lead to acute overpopulation.
Space exploration, however, was not a principal tenet
of Fedorov’s teachings. His “common task” was premised,
first of all, on the need to assume direct control over the
mechanisms of evolution and to conquer death. At the same
time, mere immortality would not suffice: the generation
destined to triumph over death would stand on the graves
of all those who gave their lives in the service of the grand
ideal. Thus the blessed brotherhood of the Sons would
be forever indebted to the Fathers. Accordingly, the resurrection of the dead is at the core of the philosophy of the
“common task.”
Introduction
23
Avant-garde Museology
The ethical radicalism of the idea of indebtedness became
the driving force behind Fedorov’s futuristic constructs. The
creative transformation of the universe and its planets by
means of space travel, the regulation of natural phenomena
on Earth and beyond, the transcendence of humanity—
presently the pinnacle of evolution, but subject to improvement—these are but some of the more striking corollaries of
the idea that mankind must assume an active position with
respect to the debt it owes its forebears. One of the central
places in this activist agenda is occupied by the museum,
understood in the broadest sense of the word as an institution that can subsume virtually all of man’s activities in the
service of the “common task.”
Needless to say, the museum as it existed toward the end
of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries
could not accommodate such an ambitious project. With an
ideal institution of the future in mind, Fedorov thus mounts
a strident critique of traditional museum practices. He notes
that the museum had often been used to enshrine mankind’s
poverty, strife, and misconceptions concerning its own destiny. The museum of the future, on the other hand, must be
construed as a place of reconciliation—an institution that,
like the church, will register every new life and every new
death. The church, which proffers an important—but so far
illusory—vision of immortality (one that, moreover, does not
extend to the physical body and is withheld from the sinner),
must be supplemented by the museum, and reimagined, in
turn, as a research facility for the preservation and resurrection of every individual in his physical and mental totality.
Hence Fedorov espouses the need to combine the museum
with a scientific laboratory, library, and church-school.
At the same time, Fedorov denounces the functional organization of the museum, which has effectively turned it into
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Arseny Zhilyaev
a “dead archive.” The situation demands a radical reconsideration of the very conception of man’s creative life. To this
end, Fedorov introduces the distinction between Ptolemaic
and Copernican art. The former entails the creation of “false
likenesses,” and thus refers to virtually all of mimetic art, or
more broadly, to art as a distinct practice, constrained by
institutional boundaries, that must, moreover, be content
with merely imaginary solutions to the conflicts it purports to
address. Copernican art implies an active, creative transformation of reality, aimed, ultimately, at physical resurrection:
The transition from the art of resemblance to the art
of reality, from Ptolemaic art to Copernican art, must
be served by the museum of all sciences, unified in
astronomy. This museum should have a tower, and be
connected to a church-school—the tower would serve
for observing the falling stars, that is, for observing
the continuous construction and disintegration of
the world, and likewise for meteorological observation, which transitions to experiment, to action;
through transformation of military art into the art of
natural sciences.1
The call for an art that transcended its own boundaries
resonated with the ideas put forward in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries by Russian religious philosophers such as V. S. Solovyev and N. A. Berdyaev, as well as
the Symbolist poets, and also prefigured the pathos of the
avant-garde aspirations of Marxist-leaning artists. But in
contrast to the Soviet Constructivists-Industrialists—whose
1. Nikolai Fedorov, “The Art of Resemblance (of False Artistic
Regeneration) and the Art of Reality (of Real Resurrection),” written
c. 1890s. Reproduced on pages 143–147 of this volume.
Introduction
25
Avant-garde Museology
idea of bringing art into life amounted to little more than
propaganda for the new way of being under conditions of
socialistic construction and an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the contradictions between mechanical and artistic
labor—Fedorov goes further, calling for the elimination, by
way of the museum, of the most deep-seated personal affects
of death and sexual desire. The latter he construed as a delusional attempt to assuage one’s fear of death.
Needless to say, although many progressive institutions
for the contemporary arts have subsequently realized some
of Fedorov’s intuitive insights, his project as a whole seems
unfeasible even today. It is all the more astonishing then to
consider that it originated in the late nineteenth century. It
is commonly believed that Fedorov counterposed museums
and exhibitions. This, however, is only true of certain kinds
of museums and certain kinds of exhibitions. His critique
was directed specifically at the industrial exposition on
account of its glorification of unbridled capitalist consumption and its promulgation of false values.2 At the same time
he wholeheartedly welcomed museum projects stemming
from other premises. Accordingly, in an article written in
1897 advocating for the unification of the library and the
museum, he makes the following analogy: “If a repository
may be compared to a grave, then reading, or more precisely
research, is a kind of exhumation, while an exhibition is, as
it were, a resurrection.”3
2. Nikolai Fedorov, “Vsemirnaya vystavka 1899 goda” (The
Universal Exhibition of 1899) in Sobraniya sochineniy (Collected
Works with Commentary by A.G. Gacheva and S. G. Semenova) vol. 1
(Moscow: Tradition, 1995–2005), 442–459.
3. Nikolai Fedorov, “Dolg avtorskiy i pravo muzeya-biblioteky”
(The Authorial Debt and the Bylaws of the Museum-Library) in
Sobraniya sochineniy (Collected Works) vol. 3 (Moscow: Tradition,
1995–2005), 235.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
In the second half of the 1890s, Fedorov traveled regularly
to Voronezh to visit with his friend and former pupil Nikolai
Peterson. There he became acquainted with the founder of
the Voronezh Regional Museum, S. E. Zverev, a priest and
regional ethnographer, and was subsequently instrumental
in organizing several of the Museum’s exhibitions:
Since 1896, at Fedorov’s initiative, the Museum
has mounted a number of theme-based exhibitions
devoted to the most significant events of the year,
which practice later became a tradition. Between
1896 and 1899 we organized six such exhibitions: on
the subject of the Coronation (May 1896) and on the
rule of Catherine (November 1896); an exhibition
of engravings bearing religious themes (May 1897);
an exhibition devoted to St. Mitrophan of Voronezh
(Nov.–Dec. 1897); an exhibition commemorating
one hundred years of the printing trade in Voronezh
(May 1898); and an exhibition titled The Nativity of
Jesus Christ and Conciliation (Dec. 1898–Jan. 1899).
Fedorov was directly involved in each case: he chose
the theme and participated in the selection of materials, some of which were either brought to Voronezh
by him personally or delivered from Moscow at his
request. He also wrote the introductory articles for
three of the exhibitions: (on Catherine, on the printing trade and on the Nativity).4
Voronezh also became the site of the first incarnation of
the Resurrecting Museum, created by the local artist and
4. Nikolai Fedorov, Sobraniya sochineniy (Collected Works) vol. 3
(Moscow: Tradition, 1995–2005), 235.
Introduction
27
Avant-garde Museology
disciple of Fedorov, Lev Solovyev. A widower, Solovyev was
determined to resurrect the memory of his lost wife by turning his home and garden into a prototype of the museum of
the future. To this end he created several studies for murals
that would decorate the walls of the Resurrecting Museum;
he also opened a free painting school. Fedorov highly valued
the project, devoting several articles to it and including his
literary description of the museum of the future in an article
titled “The Voronezh Museum in 1998” (Don no. 64, June 14,
1898 — reproduced on pages 149 –163 of this volume).
The second attempt to realize the Resurrecting Museum
project was made in the early 1920s by the avant-garde artist Vasiliy Chekrygin. Chekrygin was twenty-three when
he first encountered Fedorov’s ideas. By that time he had
already served on the front lines of World War I (albeit not
by choice), had befriended Vladimir Mayakovsky, and was
instrumental in founding the artistic movement “Makovets.”
The philosophical doctrine of the “common task” had so
impressed the young artist that he devoted the final years
of his all-too-brief life to making sketches for the monumental fresco that would grace the walls of the Resurrecting
Museum, and to writing a long prose poem of the same name.
The poem was completed, but Chekrygin’s artistic vision
was never realized. The surviving correspondence between
Chekrygin and Nikolai Punin (one of the theorists of Left
Art, closely associated with Futurism) contains a discussion
of the idea of synthetic art and the Resurrecting Museum
project.5 Unfortunately these two leaders of the Cultural
5. “… we must direct our efforts toward the creation of the first
Cathedral of the Resurrecting Museum, which shall be an event
unprecedented in history, the first attempt to lay the cornerstone of
the Cathedral that would bestow consciousness upon history and selfknowledge upon nature.” From a letter of V. N. Chekrygin to N. N.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
Revolution were unable to reconcile their ideas: in 1922,
Chekrygin was killed in a train accident. He was twenty-five.
His Resurrecting Museum remained confined to paper.
Toward the end of the 1920s, another version of the avantgarde museum appeared in the writings of one of the greatest Soviet authors, Andrey Platonov. The novel Chevengur,
unpublished in the author’s lifetime, became a critical reflection on the fate of mankind’s dreams of social transformation as they collide with reality. The novel is set in the small
Russian town of Chevengur during the Civil War, in the years
1917–21. Despite the war and the ongoing struggle for control of the territory, the local residents believe that communism has already come, and consequently all the aspirations
of a liberated mankind must be realized in everyday life. The
world described by Platonov sheds light on the ambivalent
challenges facing Soviet society in the immediate aftermath
of the first years after the revolution. At the close of the novel
the communist commune is attacked and destroyed.
To a certain extent the isolation of Chevengur and its
residents from the realities of life under civil war transforms the town into a kind of open-air museum. Indeed, the
citizens of Chevengur embody in their manner of life and
physical presence a unique—if somewhat grotesque—social
formation, hurtling toward collapse. Moreover, one could
argue that Platonov’s novel also presents an allegory of the
art museum. The residents of Chevengur not only collect
things, but also create or re-create them collectively. The
tragic image of the open-air museum as a metaphor for the
establishment of communism in a single society is made concrete in “The Revolution Memorial Reservation” (translated
Punin, February 7, 1922, in N. F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra: Antologia,
vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Hristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2004), 489.
Introduction
29
Avant-garde Museology
in this volume by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga
Meerson). Platonov describes an “amateur” reservation created by a madman, Comrade Pashintsev, “in Honor of World
Communism.” Its objective is to preserve the revolutionary
spirit of all who are fighting for mankind’s bright future. We
soon learn, however, that the museum supplants rather than
sustains life, making a grotesque parody of the principles of
justice and equality that it purports to preserve.
Platonov’s work is said to have been influenced directly
by the philosophy of the “common task.”6 Several of his works
make reference to the need for scientific resurrection, evince a
fascination with space exploration, and lay special emphasis
on the relationship between “fathers” and “sons.” Platonov
also shares with Fedorov a special affinity for science. Early in
his life, the future author of Chevengur worked as an engineer
and independently designed mechanisms aimed at transforming life by bringing it closer to the socialist and Cosmist
ideal of rational control over nature. By the 1930s the social
optimism of Platonov’s youth gave way to more somber tones
in his descriptions of actual realized projects and their consequences. In that sense, the reservation-museum can be interpreted as Fedorov’s Resurrecting Museum turned inside out:
instead of a staging ground for the affirmation of life, it is a
place where life decays and eventually disappears.
A unique perspective on the union of museum and church,
albeit one consistent with Fedorov’s ideas, is to be found in
Pavel Florensky’s “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the
Arts.” Florensky is said to belong to the tradition of Russian
religious philosophy. At the same time, his works exhibit a
6. Scholars point to the fact that Platonov’s personal library contained several works by N.F. Fedorov. See S. G. Semenova, Nikolai
Fedorov. Tvorchestvo zhizni (N. F. Fedorov: Life’s Work) (Moscow: Sov.
Pisatel, 1990), 364.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
truly encyclopedic scope: among them is a study of optical
perspective, a scientific paper on the methods of extracting
iodine, and one on construction techniques in permafrost
conditions (the latter due in part to his arrest and exile to
Siberia). Despite his status as a priest, Florensky continued to
lecture widely in the early years of rabidly anticlerical Soviet
rule, and was involved in some of the most important artistic
debates in the years of the historical avant-garde. His texts
on church ritual were delivered before a commission for the
preservation of artistic and historical monuments. Its immediate goal was to preserve a unique cultural institution—the
Trinity-Sergius Lavra—from distortion and possible destruction. Florensky points to the frequently overlooked artistic
aspects of the church ritual, which lose their meaning and
cultural significance as soon as they go through the process of
museification. In contemporary terms, we may see this text as
one of the first attempts to critique the museum as a secularizing institution, incapable of fulfilling its mission without a
forcible decontextualization of its subject matter. At the same
time, Florensky’s report was part of the unfolding debate on
the role of the cultural heritage of religion in the USSR.
Another project that may be considered alongside
Fedorov’s ideas on the museum is the “Pantheon of the
USSR.” The project belongs to the renowned Soviet neuropathologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev, one of the
pioneers of reflexology. In the final years of his life, Bekhterev
became convinced of the need to create an institution that
would study the brains of leading Soviet citizens with the
aim of finding connections between the physiological features of the cerebral cortex and the individual’s mental abilities. Bekhterev called for a special legislative act requiring
the brains of all prominent Soviet citizens to be extracted
at their deaths and delivered by a special commission to the
Introduction
31
Avant-garde Museology
institution in question. In addition to its research activities,
the Pantheon of the USSR would also house an exhibition
hall, showcasing actual brain specimens, plaster casts, and
molds, as well as products of the individuals’ creative activities, biographical information, and psychological profiles
based on (questionable) data from close relatives and associates of the deceased.
A similar project had been conceived earlier, between
1918­­and 19. The psychiatrist Nikolai Rybnikov proposed
the establishment of a “Biographical Institute,” whose
mission would be to collect, archive, and study the biographies of every single Soviet citizen (and eventually every
human being). Rybnikov did not possess the administrative resources necessary for such a project, and it never
advanced beyond a few generalized thematic studies.
Bekhterev, on the other hand, was a prominent figure, occupying the influential position of Director of the Leningrad
Institute for Reflexology, and his proposals received far
greater attention at the highest level. Bekhterev’s remarks
calling for the creation of the Pantheon of the USSR were
printed in Izvestiya, one of the most widely read papers of
the time. The launch of the project was timed, moreover, to
mark the ten-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
But before his plans could be realized, Bekhterev died unexpectedly under circumstances that remain unclear to this
day. A special commission then ceded the project’s mission
to the already existing Institute for the Study of the Brain,
which at that point already possessed Lenin’s brain and
would soon receive Bekhterev’s own brain and remains as
well. This marks the beginning of the history of the successor project to the Pantheon, which continues to this day. We
know that the collection of the Institute for the Study of the
Brain was significantly enlarged in the 1920s–30s, receiving,
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Arseny Zhilyaev
among others, the brains of the following citizens: the poet
Andrei Bely; prominent party activist, scientist, and writer
Aleksandr Bogdanov; psychologist and Marxist philosopher
Lev Vygotsky; writer Maksim Gorky; Nadezhda Krupskaya,
fellow revolutionary and wife of Lenin; prominent party
and cultural leader Anatoly Lunacharsky; poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky; physiologist Ivan Pavlov; leader of the international communist movement, Clara Zetkin; and, finally,
one of the founding fathers of the Soviet space program,
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.7
Although Fedorov’s philosophical legacy was never published in systematic form during his lifetime,8 the ideas of
cosmism lived on in the works of his pupils and disciples.
The foundations of the Soviet space program laid out by
Tsiolkovsky, the writings of the Proletkult poets under
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s guidance, and the general awareness
of momentous social changes all contributed to making the
theme of space exploration one of the major components of
Soviet cultural production. Accordingly, without any overt
reference to the “common task” or the role it ascribed to
the museum, Soviet museums began organizing observatories for astronomical observation and measurement. At the
same time, the idea of the rational exploitation of natural
resources and agriculture became an integral component of
exhibitions-laboratories that traveled to distant villages to
spread scientific knowledge.
7. For more on Bekhterev’s project, see Monika Spivak, Mozg
otpravte po adresu … (Deliver the Brain to the Following Address … )
(Moscow: Astrel, 2010).
8. Only two volumes appeared in print, the first in 1906, the second
in 1913; a third volume, prepared by Fedorov’s pupils, was never published. An edition of complete works, including correspondence and
commentary, appeared only in the late Nineties, thanks to the efforts
of A. G. Gacheva and S. G. Semenova.
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33
Avant-garde Museology
*
*
*
Contemporary life has invented crematoria for the
dead, but each dead man is more alive than a weakly
painted portrait. In burning a corpse we obtain one
gram of powder: accordingly, thousands of graveyards
could be accommodated on one chemist’s shelf.9
So wrote Kazimir Malevich in his article “On the Museum”
(1919). The article was printed in the Russian paper Art of
the Commune (then well-nigh the official media outlet of the
avant-garde art movement), in the issue preceding the first
major museological conference to take place after the revolution. Malevich was unequivocal: the museum is a relic of a
dusty past, and must be destroyed. Others expressed similar
opinions. The majority of artists associated with the historical avant-garde were sharply critical of the museum as an
institution. Those who did not clamor for the incineration of
the past in the crematoria of the present nevertheless spoke
of the need to take control of the institution and reorganize it
with a view of creating conditions that would be more favorable for the new art. If the museum were to survive in a postrevolutionary future, it had to become highly mobile; it had
to be made to keep pace with the transformations of reality as it sped toward socialism. “Collections in art museums
are archives that can be be freely used by anyone,” insisted
one of the contributors to The Art of the Commune, Nikolai
Punin. “Let the paintings be hung and rehung without any
9. Kazimir Malevich, “On the Museum,” originally published
in 1919; in Kazimir Malevich, Essays on Art, vol. 1 (New York:
George Wittenborn, 1971), 68–72. Reproduced on pages 267–273
of this volume.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
interruption. Ideally, the museum must be made entirely of
moving parts. Any tendency toward the stasis of the church
icon must be eradicated.”10 In a related statement, he opined:
“The contemporary museum is a scholarly institute. To produce contemporary European art museums from any kind
of kunstkammer or cabinet of curiosities is to produce the
modern state directly out of the feudal order.”11 In essence,
the idea was to create a museum that could answer to the professional demands of pioneering artists, i.e. a museum of the
avant-garde. The demands, however, focused principally on
access to exhibition facilities and changes in the purchasing
policy that would benefit innovative art. There was no talk
of transforming the very role of the museum beyond a more
active approach to exhibition and a greater emphasis on the
museum’s undoubtedly important educational function.
At its core, this thinking was inspired by the Marxist
interpretation of artistic creation under the conditions of
capitalist production and its potential transformations once
the latter was eradicated under socialism. On that account,
following the proletarian revolution, the emphasis on the
artistic creation of a liberated mankind must gradually
shift from the museum to life and production. This interpretation of art received its most coherent expression in the
writings of Boris Arvatov, the theorist of Productionism,
and in the activities of the Constructivist artists. If society
has overcome the social contradictions associated with
class struggle and inequality, then the artist, as a distinct
10. Nikolai Punin, “On the Results of the Museum Conference”
Art of the Commune no. 12 (February 23, 1919): 1. Reproduced on
pages 293–297 of this volume.
11. Osip Brik, “Speech at the meeting of the First Soviet Museum
Commission,” archival material, 1919. Reproduced on pages 289–292
of this volume.
Introduction
35
Avant-garde Museology
professional occupation, must gradually give way to the
engineer—be it an engineer of industrial machines or social
interactions. At the same time, this state of affairs could not
be brought about under the dictatorship of the proletariat,
with its ongoing struggle against enemy classes (and, in the
case of the Soviet Union, its struggle for the formation of an
industrial proletariat as such). Arvatov was aware of this,
pointing to the need for a gradual transition to an industrial
art that presupposes the total convergence of art and life in
labor. Accordingly, one could not expect an instantaneous
reconciliation of mechanical and artistic labor under the
conditions of accelerated industrialization. Therefore the
work of Productionist artists principally amounted to the
production of artistic prototypes for industry, rather than
in collaborating directly with mechanical laborers in creatively reimagining their labor. Moreover, Arvatov believed
that there would still be a place for traditional media even
in a highly advanced communist society. After all, even
after the social contradictions are resolved, man will be
left with the indelible remainder of reality: the materiality
of his body and its principal affects—death and love.12 In
this way Arvatov was theorizing the potential boundaries
of the avant-garde interpretation of postrevolutionary art,
drawing them precisely at the point where the museum of
Fedorov and his disciples was to begin.
A literary account of the museum in communist society first appeared in the 1908 science-fiction novel Red Star
by Aleksandr Bogdanov. “I imagined there would be no
12. See Boris Arvatov, Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo (Art and Industry),
(Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1927).
13. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984). A chapter of the
novel is reproduced on pages 255–266 of this volume.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
museums in a developed communist society,”13 exclaims
Bogdanov’s astonished protagonist upon his arrival on Mars,
home to a highly advanced communist civilization. As it happens, the museum has survived. Its function, however, has
been modified. In the communist future, art and the museum
have shed their role of being a bourgeois ghetto, the repository of all the delusional hopes for the resolution of social
contradictions. These are resolved by the liberating force of
proletarian revolution and the ensuing dissolution of class
divisions as such. Accordingly, art, once an autonomous professional sphere, is integrated into the everyday life and work
of humanity liberated with respect to its artistic formation.
What role could the museum play in such a society? “The
museum showcases distinct specimens of art conducive to
the upbringing of new generations,” replies the Martian communist in a rather platonic fashion. The model described by
Bogdanov—one of the closest associates, and subsequently
fiercest opponents, of Lenin—sets out a basic outline of the
attitudes toward the museum held by the then-contemporary
Marxist avant-garde. Later, when internal party divisions
forced the author of Red Star to move from politics into
science and cultural activities, his theories would inspire
autodidact artists of the Proletkult to invent their own less
conventional variations on the museum exhibition, such as
“avalanche exhibitions,” i.e. worker-organized and continually augmented exhibitions at factories—a variation on the
“museum of moving parts” described by Punin in 1919.14 An
extension of the idea of the materialist-dialectical museum
would appear in the 1930s in the form of the museum newspaper, where the image-based exhibition changed daily in
14. See the chapter “Avalanche Exhibitions: The Experience of the
Leningrad Organization of Worker-Artists” by Leonid Chetyrkin on
pages 279–280 of this volume.
Introduction
37
Avant-garde Museology
response to current events.15 But all these are examples of
“amateur” variations on the avant-garde museum.
A professional version appeared in Moscow in 1919
in the form of the Museum of Painting Culture. A guide
to Moscow’s museums from 1926 describes its mission as
follows: “to demonstrate the chief preoccupations of new
Russian painting. With this theoretical foundation, all exhibited materials can be divided into two groups: volumetric and
planar.”16 The museum lasted for ten years, and in that time
it functioned as a collection of works by left-leaning artists,
arranged in accordance with certain theoretical conceptions
of the evolution of artistic form. In his polemical remarks
“On the Museum Bureau” the avant-garde artist Aleksandr
Rodchenko proposed fundamental changes to exhibition
strategies espoused by the old-guard museum:
Above all, the space and the wall are seen as a technical means to show the picture. Given this approach
to the question [of installation], the question of
economy in utilizing a given wall no longer arises.
The carpet approach to covering the wall is undoubtedly rejected. The wall does not play a self-contained
role, and the work doesn’t adjust to the wall; the work
becomes an active agent.17
15. See the chapter “The Museum Newspaper: Suggestions for
Regional Museums and Community Centers,” by V. Karpov on
pages 275–277 of this volume.
16. “The Museum of Painting Culture atRozhdestvenka Street, 11”
from the guide Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow. Reproduced
on pages 307–312 of this volume.
17. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “On the Museum Bureau,” trans. Jamey
Gambrell, from Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future,
Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 2004), 115. Reproduced on pages 299–306 of
this volume.
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Arseny Zhilyaev
The professional museum created by and for avant-garde
artists did not survive long. But its torch was taken up by
museums of modern art outside the Soviet Union—institutions that told the story of a rupture in the history of art,
whose mission was to demonstrate its independence within
the space allotted to it by the capitalist means of production. Inside the USSR the museum of modern art had no
place. The presence of the industrial avant-garde and the
materialist-dialectical museum made its existence impossible. An equivalent of the modernist museum was perhaps
the museum of the revolution, an institution that told the
story of a rupture in social history.
*
*
*
“Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] was no lover of museums,” wrote
Nadezhda Krupskaya in her article “Lenin’s Attitude Toward
Museums.”18 It was not so much that the leader of the international proletariat, like the avant-garde artists, wanted to
incinerate all the achievements of past history in a crematorium. Krupskaya recalls that Lenin was simply bored by the
unsystematic collections of armor and other useless accouterments of the ruling classes. At the same time, an exhibition
at a biological museum that showed the comparative stages
of development of man and the hominid ape fascinated him.
So did the Museum of the French Revolution, which offered
practical value for a future liberation struggle.
But what was wrong with the old-guard museum? And
what had to happen before it could inspire real-life interest in a practicing revolutionary such as Lenin? To answer
18. Reproduced on pages 315–317 of this volume.
Introduction
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Avant-garde Museology
this question we have to reconstruct the institution of the
museum from the perspective of an adherent to a materialist doctrine, whose work, moreover, is revolutionary struggle: i.e. we must imagine the kind of museum that conforms
to Marxist method and philosophy. What method and what
philosophy are these? Once, when Lenin was asked if there
was a particular work that summed up the principles of
Marxist philosophy, he replied, just as Engels had before
him: Capital, suggesting that Marxism is not a philosophical dogma that could be packaged into an instruction
manual. Marxism is a method that allows one to analyze
and act in any new situation without recourse to previously
imposed guidelines or metaphysical categories. Lenin
called dialectical materialism the backbone of Marxist
method. Moreover, Lenin advised that anyone who wished
to get at the core of this method would do well to familiarize
himself intimately with Hegel’s Logic and Phenomenology
of Spirit, which described the dialectic as a special mode
of reasoning, and only then proceed to Marxist analysis,
which purged from Hegelian constructs such unnecessary
idealistic elements as the world spirit, and which added economic analysis, i.e. analysis of social relations, which form
the necessary materialist basis of the dialectic development
of history. Accordingly, the materialist dialectic of Marx was
a distinct form of logic, different from formal logic: it was
the logic of human reasoning that allowed one to analyze
the historical development and formation of various social
forms as a result of interactions within the framework of
materialist industrial relations.
Let us get back to the museum. What does this institution represent in its most general form? The museum is an
expedient collection of elements, extracted from reality and
arranged in a particular manner, presupposing the exposition
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Arseny Zhilyaev
of said collection for the general public. If we remove from
this definition its final term concerning exhibition, we will be
left with a definition of the archive, or even more broadly, of
any repository, such as a library, warehouse, information center, server, and even, to a certain extent, a prison and a hospital. Consequently, the specific nature of the museum, which
distinguishes it from the rest of these institutions, is first and
foremost its exhibitional or manner of constructing exhibitions. This reveals the specific character of the museum, transforming its collection into an utterance.
Every exhibition is composed of discrete elements, i.e.
museum exhibits, drawn from the collection of a given
museum, or of other museums, or from everyday life.
Moreover, an important characteristic of the museum
exhibit is its partial abstraction or idealization. This has to
do with its being necessarily severed from its natural interconnections in reality and placed in the abstract context
of interaction within the museum exhibition. Even in the
case of a fragment of reality, it too has been in some way
selected, differentiated, and thus bears the stamp of rational activity. Accordingly, the elements of a museum always
contain some aspect of artificiality: none belongs to primary
reality in its pure form, which we encounter in everyday life.
This can be readily ascertained in the case of the visual arts
museum, which gathers artistic expressions, images of reality, arranged in a particular manner.
But it would not be enough simply to extract certain elements from reality to produce an exhibition. These elements
must also be arranged in space with respect to one another.
Typically, such an arrangement reflects the development
and transformation of the principal subject of the exhibition, as represented by the exhibits. For example, the subject may be the succession of styles or artistic movements in
Introduction
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Avant-garde Museology
history (as it is often still the case today in museums of the
visual arts) or the development of some distinct art form
(as it was in the museum of the avant-garde). Accordingly, a
museum exhibition can be defined as a spatial arrangement
of elements of reality, processed and modified by human
reason and creative activity, which expresses certain ideas
about the development of the immediate subject of the exhibition. In other words, the museum, in the very method of its
organization, tends toward materialist-dialectical construction, since it presupposes a conceptualization of elements
extracted from reality and presented according to the stages
of their development.
As a Marxist thinker, Lenin could not reject the museum
as a material, spatial expression of the idea of the development of some aspect of reality, but he could reject a particular way of thinking that the museum expressed. As an
adherent of a materialist dialectic, Lenin could not accept
the vulgar materialist museum—at the very least he would
consider inadequate any exhibition that asked the viewer to
dispense with thought, limiting him- or herself to the strictly
material basis of the exhibition, the strictly material characteristics of its exhibits—i.e. a grossly materialist exhibition.
Nor could he accept the idealist museum, a mere inversion of
the materialist museum, expressing an idealistic, abstractly
metaphysical worldview, be it a solipsistic vulgar idealist private museum or one arguing (even if dialectically) for the primacy of abstract categories over the reality of life. But after
the triumph of the proletarian revolution, the museum could
finally ascend to the proper level of thinking, i.e. could finally
stand upon a dialectically materialist foundation.
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*
*
*
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, a certain consensus
emerged in the Soviet Union concerning the role of the
museum in a society bound for communism. This took the
form of a series of resolutions passed by members of the First
National Museological Congress, as well as the establishment of the journal Soviet Museum, the official publication
of Soviet museologists, wherein these resolutions were elaborated. Accordingly, dialectical materialism was named the
principal method of museum activity. In general, this meant
that, in contrast to the bourgeois museum of the past, its
Soviet counterpart must treat natural history, social history,
and the cultural sphere not as alienated and antagonistic
to man, but as products of his conscious effort. The kunstkammer, i.e. the vulgar materialist or idealistic museum so
despised by museologists, would be replaced by the museum
as an integral aspect of the artistic transformation of life.
Passivity, neutrality, the pseudo-positivist or metaphysical stance of the museum with respect to the phenomena
within its purview would become a thing of the past. Political
engagement, partisanship, direct participation in industrial
processes in the ongoing class struggle, critique of ideological superstitions, critique of fetishism—these were the new
guiding principles and slogans of Soviet museology in the
Twenties and Thirties.
The First National Museological Congress was an important milestone in the drive toward the achievements and
ideals of new museology. However, there was no tried-andtrue procedure whereby the museum was expected to put
the principles of dialectic materialism into practice. This,
in turn, opened the doors for experimental ideas. One
Introduction
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Avant-garde Museology
such idea came from the future editor-in-chief of Soviet
Museum, Ivan Luppol, a Marxist philosopher, who proposed
dividing the museum network into two types: the base
(economic museums) and the superstructure (museum of
everyday life, visual arts museums, and so forth); this idea,
however, was never realized.
The possibility of extending the methods of dialectical
materialism to natural processes and sciences was actively
debated throughout the 1920s. In terms of museum organization, this took the form of proposals to create specially
organized museums of natural history, curated by Boris
Zavadovsky. However, one of the most serious and most
discussed proposals was for a new Marxist approach to the
organization of visual arts museums, put forward by the
director of the department of new art at the State Tretyakov
Gallery, Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov.
Fedorov-Davydov was an exponent of so-called sociological aesthetics, pioneered in the Soviet Union by Vladimir
Friche. Sociological aesthetics argued that various aspects
of a work of art were conditioned by the artist’s position
within wider social relations. This largely accurate assumption was often put into questionable practice. Thus an analysis of this sort often amounted to little more than scouring
the artwork for expressions of revolutionary struggle or to
the drawing of rather reductive parallels between a formal
analysis of the artwork and a social analysis of the artist’s
class background. Consequently, anyone could be declared
a reactionary on account of one’s non-proletarian roots, or
vice versa.
By the time he delivered his report to the Museological
Congress, Fedorov-Davydov had already defended a dissertation on the art of urban capitalism, where he was able
to demonstrate that an artist working in such conditions
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must invariably enter into commercial relations and eventually become a petit-bourgeois, and that consequently
capitalism leaves virtually no room for the formation of a
truly free art, since it will inevitably be taken over by commodity fetishism.
The Soviet Union of the 1930s was free from the capitalist commodity fetishism of the art market, but most of
the art production of the past nevertheless bore its stamp.
The Experimental Complex Marxist Exhibition proposed
by Fedorov-Davydov at the Congress and subsequently
mounted at the State Tretyakov Gallery was supposed to
invent a new method of exhibition that applied the dialectically materialist approach to visual arts museums.
The exhibition was structured around class-based interpretations of artworks and was comprehensive insofar as it
comprised a selection of characteristic artworks that reconstructed the hypothetical living spaces of their commissioner
or potential buyer. In addition to old-guard artworks, admitted by the bourgeois museum, the exhibition also introduced
works that were not granted such status, including folk art,
street design, political slogans, and banners. Finally, the exhibition included economic information, diagrams, eyewitness
accounts, literary fragments, and so on, meant to substantiate the various aesthetic interpretations of the artworks on
display. Those amateur viewers who were interested specifically in the historical development of a particular art form
were invited to visit a special study room, where they could
familiarize themselves with historical materials tracing this
development in a manner similar to the presentation at the
Museum of Painting Culture.
The principles of dialectical materialism were to be
adopted not only by all types of existing museums, but by
new types of museums as well. As an example of museological
Introduction
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Avant-garde Museology
innovation, we can point to the industrial museum project,
presented before the Congress by David Arkin. The project
largely echoed the ideas of the industrial avant-garde, developed by Boris Arvatov, but implemented them at the institutional rather than individual level. The industrial museum
is a laboratory-museum, tasked with preserving and developing creative prototypes for subsequent implementation
in production. The scope of this project concerned first of
all handcrafts and design-based industries such as textiles,
ceramics, and so forth.
An area of particular interest to the new museum, built
on the dialectical materialist principle, was everyday life.
Naturally, this concerned first and foremost the living conditions of the social classes previously excluded from official
historical and museological practices. Exhibitions of the living conditions of the working class constituted a new form
of creative museology. One example of this may be seen in
the works of another contributor to Soviet Museum, Valentin
Kholtsov. New types of exhibitions, the complexity of the
historical period, and the need to continuously maintain
the balance between the exhibits and the logic of their interpretation, i.e. to apply the Marxist method, demanded from
Soviet museologists the highest level of professionalism. In
this they were not always successful, especially if we consider
that former industrial workers were then actively recruited
into museum work. The pages of Soviet Museum bristle with
critical reviews, including a series of remarks on the characteristic excesses of artistic expressivity in articles written by
I. M. Zykov and N. A. Shneerson.
An important innovation of Soviet museology was the
museums of the Revolution, the very idea of which seems
contradictory in and of itself. Indeed, the Revolution is an
event that, in its scale, transcends any traditional methods of
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representation or archiving. And yet the works in the museums of the Revolution became one of the most important
artistic discoveries of twentieth-century museology.
And if the museum of the avant-garde, effectively the
prototype of the museum of modern and contemporary art,
was a museum of the ongoing rupture in the history of art,
the museum of the Revolution served the same function
with respect to social history, and in doing so it often pushed
the boundaries of traditional media even further than the
most radical artists of the times. The very structure of the
exhibition in a revolutionary museum is a collage of varying
types of artistic media and auxiliary nonartistic information,
facilitating their analysis. It may be said that such a museum
was built on principles closely related to those elaborated in
the realism of Bertolt Brecht, aimed at the “estrangement”
of the literary narrative. In the Soviet museum, the critique
of spectacle through estrangement was meant to awaken in
the viewer a conscious stance, grounded in the understanding of historical processes. This was the principal distinction
between the Soviet and the fascist museum, which used similar means to achieve opposite ends.
One of the outcomes of the dialectical approach to the
museum was the apparent need to bring the institution
into everyday life, i.e. for the museum to transcend its own
boundaries. In this respect, Soviet museologists were very
much in accord with avant-garde artists. At the same time,
their engagement with respect to industrial production
and agriculture had a more systemic character and was,
moreover, materially supported by the state. In the pages
of Soviet Museum we find numerous reviews of so-called
“mobile exhibitions” that traveled to locations far beyond
the reaches of traditional institutions. Museum agit-trucks
and mobile museums housed inside vehicles were organized
Introduction
47
Avant-garde Museology
as part of the campaign aimed at the successful completion
of the Five-Year Plan.
One of the more striking examples of this practice was
the “mobile laboratory van” i.e. a combination of an exhibition and a small agricultural laboratory, mounted on wheels.
These mobile museums used experimental exhibitions to
persuade farmers to adapt new strains of crops. There were
experiments of other kinds as well, such as partnerships
between museums and schools and other educational facilities to create exhibitions of living plants, as described in
P. N. Khrapov’s project “Museum in the Street.” Another
logical extension was the workplace museum. Museums
located directly on factory premises were meant to be used
as research centers for the development of new technological solutions, as well as to instruct newly hired workers in the
history and organization of the industrial process.
Finally, a peculiar variation on the dialectical-materialist
museum was the atheist museum. The original materialist
critique of religion as a refuge for irreconcilable social contradictions belongs to Ludwig Feuerbach. In the visual arts,
however, one had to wait for the iconoclastic impulse of the
historical avant-garde to mount an artistic critique of religion
as a kind of camouflage for exploitation and social inequality.
The Soviet years saw the rise of the Union of Militant Atheists,
numbering several million members at one point. Many of
the major church compounds were expropriated for the use
of various kinds of antireligious institutions. Modest museums of atheism were organized in schools and workplaces.
The fervor of antireligious propaganda often matched that of
any religious fanaticism.
The opposing tendencies—on the one hand, calling for
the preservation and study of religious art (be it iconic painting or the church ritual as a whole, a “synthetic work of art,”
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to borrow Pavel Florensky’s term), and on the other, for the
total rejection of an alien and dangerous ideological delusion—determined the specific character of antireligious
museums and, at the same time, served as the driving force
of their development in the Soviet Union. Thus, oftentimes
the critical aspect of an exhibit differed considerably from
what is generally thought of as the more temperate museum
presentation within the context of a functioning house of
worship, which treats religious attributes strictly as cultural
artifacts. Indeed, to be persuasive, exhibitions and expositions in the atheist museum had to transcend the effect of a
typical church ritual, while at the same time “estranging” it
by providing analytical information that lay bare the inner
workings of its mechanisms.
*
*
*
But the dialectical-materialist museum in its avant-garde
form was not fated to last long. Beginning in the 1930s,
alongside the intensifying political crackdowns directed
against museum workers, among many others, we witness a
reorientation of dialectical materialism from Lenin’s original
conception to a new interpretation promulgated by Stalin.
The new Soviet leader had evidently personally written the
text on philosophical method for the introductory course on
Bolshevism. At the time, mounting political persecutions
precluded virtually any possibility of a polemic against the
highest authorities. Accordingly, despite the fact that the official name of the philosophical method—essentially the official philosophy of the USSR—did not change (both before
and after the mid-1930s dialectical materialism remained
the intellectual mainstream, admitting no alternatives),
Introduction
49
Avant-garde Museology
seemingly minor differences in the interpretation of one
and the same method led to a gradual transformation of the
revolutionary method into a dogmatic semblance of a philosophical religion.19
The origin of the philosophical conceptions that
became the basis of the subsequently canonized variant
of dialectical materialism can be traced back to the work
of G. V. Plekhanov, subsequently elaborated by his pupils.
Immediately after the revolution, these people assumed the
leading posts in academia, despite the fact that they initially
belonged to the opposition Menshevik party. Lenin was well
aware of the political and the philosophical differences that
existed between him and Plekhanov’s disciples. This did not,
however, prevent him from supporting their advancements
to influential academic posts as a tactical expediency of the
moment, especially given the dearth of adequately trained
professional philosophers.
Without delving too deeply into the disputes of the time,
we can point out the main tenets of Plekhanovite dialectical materialism that came to be adopted by the victorious
Stalinist Bolshevist party line. From Plekhanov, the future
official philosophy of the USSR inherited the conception of
the dialectic as a theory of progress, driven by the struggle
and synthesis of opposites—the transformation of quantity
into quality and the negation of the negation. Certain new
ideas were introduced in the intervening years. Thus, among
other postulates, emerged the principle of partisanship. The
key difference in the Plekhanovite understanding of the dialectic, which essentially rendered it a dogma, was the conception of dialectic principles not as the logic of the historical
19. See S. Mareev, Iz istorii sovetskoi filosofii: Lukacs-Vigotkiy-Ilienkov
(From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukacs-Vigotskiy-Ilienkov)
(Moscow: Progress, 2008).
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Arseny Zhilyaev
progress of the forces of production and of historical consciousness expressed in human thought, but as the laws of
the progress of matter and nature in and of themselves, with
their subsequent realization in human activity, including
production and philosophy. Accordingly, in the Soviet version of dialectical materialism, the dialectic acquired a metaphysical quality and began to resemble an abstract science,
whose principles governed all other natural sciences and, in
their application to the laws of social progress, engendered
their own doppelganger, i.e. historical materialism. This
interpretation effectively rejected Marxist analysis, which
derives the materialist dialectic from the economic analysis
of the dialectical progress of the spirit as posited by Hegel,
and reduced materialism to its pre-Marxist mechanistic,
reductive interpretations. Accordingly, the establishment
of the official philosophical Marxist doctrine transformed
Soviet dialectical materialism into an ontology, and dialectics proper into abstract principles, typically superimposed
over the phenomena under consideration.
The outcome for experimental museologists was that,
beginning in the mid-Thirties, they were subject to virulent
criticism for erroneous interpretations of dialectical materialism. For many, these attacks spelled the end of their professional career; for many others, it amounted to an arrest
warrant or a death sentence. Built on the application of
Marxist critical rhetoric, Stalinism did not and could not
accept the dialectical-materialist museum in its MarxistLeninist form. And so the museum, which had begun dialectically to overflow its banks, was forcibly re-confined within
its narrow course, to remain there as a kind of doppelgänger
of the church, touting the illusory triumph of the revolutionary idea and the ultimate coming of communism.
Introduction
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Avant-garde Museology
*
*
*
Had Nikolai Fedorov’s resurrection project ever come to life,
Krupskaya might have posted her quip that “Lenin was no
lover of museums” to Facebook and Twitter. The trouble was
not that the leader of the international proletariat, like the
conservatively minded realist artists of the post-Soviet academies, despised everything “Western” and modern. Lenin
was equally bored by the conveyor belt of artistic innovation,
with its vulgar materialist obsession with object fetishism,
and the giant factories for knowledge production, with their
faith in reason as the ultimate aim of mankind’s development. But he would be absolutely fascinated by exhibitions
of Conceptualist art. He would find there much useful material for ruminations on revolutionary practice under the conditions of late-stage capitalism. And while these specimens
still fell short of progressive dialectical materialism, Lenin
found in them that essential quality that pointed the way to
the future progress of art and museology.
What was so special about Conceptualist practices? To
answer this question we would have to reconstruct the mindset of a practicing revolutionary and Marxist thinker with
respect to the practices of contemporary art. Conceptualism
was built around the analysis of the conditions of art production, the analysis of the medium that serves as the vehicle for
artistic utterance, and consequently presupposed the examination of objective material relations underlying all forms of
the aesthetic experience.
At the same time, its groundwork was laid a short while
beforehand by the theorist of medium-specific art Clement
Greenberg. This former radical Left Trotskyite defined all
avant-garde art as the artistic reflection of elements of reality
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Arseny Zhilyaev
that had previously been processed by art—as art, for art,
and about art. In this he came close to the Soviet museum
in its use of the method of dialectical materialism, as in the
experiments of Fedorov-Davydov. But unlike the latter,
Greenberg was more of a Hegelian, inasmuch as he was able
to give a faithful account of the development of the art of the
past and outline its potential future, but failed to take note
of the materialist basis of this development, subordinating
it to the abstract idea of medium-specific art for art’s sake. It
fell to the Conceptualists to take the next step in the history
of contemporary art.
In other words, conceptualism was an example of
materialist analysis. Moreover, like the Soviet museum,
Conceptualist artworks transcended the naive attachment to
one particular medium, characteristic of Greenberg and the
postwar American avant-garde. In contrast to the museums,
however, Conceptualist art could become dialectical only in
the context of a curatorial installation, which estranged its
subversive potential by inscribing it into the social framework
of bourgeois democracy.20 The Soviet dialectical-materialist
museum, on the other hand, was a form of conceptualism in
its movement, its self-evolution, aimed at its own dialectical
sublation without any limitations. Perhaps this was what the
Soviet post-avant-garde artists dreamt about in the Twenties
when they tried to invent a special conceptual form of realism,
capable of transcending the stasis of the materialist (albeit
analytical) image. And had they been able to get hold of the
journal titled Avant-Garde Museology, history might have followed a different course.21
20. See Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux journal no. 2
(January 2009).
21. See Arseny Zhilyaev, “Conceptual Realism: The Vulgar Freedom of
Avant-Garde Museum Work,” e-flux journal no. 60 (December 2014).
Introduction
53
Avant-garde Museology
*
*
*
As we know, no such journal and no such term ever existed.
Avant-garde museology is a paradox, made up of seemingly
contradictory, mutually exclusive principles. Indeed, generally speaking, the avant-garde presupposes art’s transcendence of its institutional boundaries, which are typically
understood to be the museum. No wonder then that the
majority of artists associated with the historical avant-garde
took such a stridently negative view of the museum. But
the mass of ideas and practices that comprised avant-garde
museology was hardly limited to the activities of the artists
who strove to break through museum boundaries. Rather,
it may be argued that the avant-garde museum of the new
art, with its emphasis on the pedagogical function, had itself
become no more than a phase in the evolution of the project that had transcended it historically and artistically. At
the same time, it must be acknowledged that, in their basic
aspirations, the theories and practices of Russian and Soviet
museologists in the late nineteenth century and first third
of the twentieth echo and in some aspects even exceed the
impulse of the historical avant-garde. In the museological
projects of the time we find the tendency, typical for radical artists, toward transcendence of institutional (i.e. the
museum’s own) boundaries, and a reconsideration of the
role of art as an integral part of the collective production of
life—one that, moreover, aspires to freedom from social contradictions and, ultimately, from individual death and the
physical affects associated with it. They also contain a radical critique consistent in its tone with the negation expressed
in the emblematic works of the avant-garde, with the difference that the critique mounted by the avant-garde museum
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Arseny Zhilyaev
was always reflexive with respect to its own foundations and
was directed against the possible fetishization of the critical
method as such.
Although the museological projects that emerged in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not
coalesce into a uniform whole—indeed, they were often in
conflict, supplementing and critiquing one another—we
can nevertheless argue that they embodied a common tendency. On the one hand, all expressed dissatisfaction with
the old-guard museum, i.e. an institution that enshrined a
“non-brotherly,” “exploitative,” “ethically erroneous” state
of affairs that sustained the perception of art and culture as
“alienated” from human life; on the other hand, all displayed
a tendency toward a conception of the museum as a progressive institution, progressing through self-development
toward the sublation of alienation and convergence with life
and human artistic activity in the broadest sense of the word.
If the historical avant-garde artists’ struggle against the old,
alienated, vulgar materialist or vulgar idealistic museum
could be construed as a first-order critique, then the experiments of the late Twenties and early Thirties aimed at creating a museum consistent with the Marxist method, one that
took the next step by proposing a series of practical solutions
to the problem of the reorganization and reinterpretation
of the museum as an inalienable part of the development of
human cultural production—namely, as a museum progressing in its dialectical development toward the transcendence
of it own boundaries and, simultaneously, of class contradictions. Finally, the ultimate horizon in the evolution of the
museum was set out in Fedorov’s project, which added to the
sublation of social contradictions the transformation of man
by means of a museum, which will eventually bring about the
artistic transformation of the universe.
Introduction
55
Avant-garde Museology
The creators and theorists of avant-garde museological
projects did not, as a rule, consider themselves to be artists
in the traditional sense of the word, and did not refer to what
they were doing as art. In that respect they once more resembled the exponents of the industrial avant-garde, who also
rejected the attachment to art, at least in its traditional form.
Accordingly, the problem of the attribution of the work of
Soviet museologists, as well as of the industrial avant-garde,
cannot be resolved within the context of the existing social
and aesthetic precepts. The history of contemporary art,
which traces its origins to the modernist and emancipatory
projects of the late nineteenth century, despite the long list
of its artistic innovations, cannot by definition transcend its
boundaries without formally abandoning its subject. Still,
based on our analysis of the potential future genealogy of
the avant-garde museology project (which seems reasonable, considering that we are speaking of a phenomenon
that presumably runs ahead of its time), we can at the very
least retrospectively position this project alongside related
artistic practices similar to it in their formal and substantive
tenets. That means that Stalinist purges and the branding of
the museological experiments of the Twenties and Thirties
as “leftist errors” were not able to destroy it entirely. The
discoveries, made at one time in the laboratories of avantgarde museologists, reappear in Conceptualist and postConceptualist art, in the practices of institutional critique,
in artistic gestures that construe the exhibition and the
museum as a distinct medium of artistic expression, as well
as in innovative curatorial practices and experimental institutions. If the journal with the title Avant-Garde Museology
never existed, then perhaps we ought to create it. After all, if
one believes the imaginary history of the future of this ambitious project, we still have a great deal of work ahead of us.
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I
Museum
as Common Task
The Museum, its Meaning
and Mission
Nikolai Fedorov
The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
Written in the mid-1880s, and first published in 1906
Translated by Stephen P. Van Trees
Our age is proud and self-loving (i.e. “civilized” and
“cultured”)—when it wishes to express disdain for some
work, it knows no more disdainful an expression than “put it
in an archive, in a museum …” By this alone one can judge the
sincerity of the gratitude of posterity, for example, to genius
inventors, and generally to ancestors, to whom contemporaries are often so cruel. In any case, the respect expressed in
“museum-quality,” in the contemporary sense of this phrase,
is not devoid of hypocrisy and contains an ambiguity. Thus
the museum, in the sense of disdain, and the museum, in
the sense of respect, is such a contradiction that it requires
a resolution.1
One must, however, remark that disdain for the archives
is completely baseless, and originates from the fact that our
age is completely incapable of recognizing its own defects.
If it were not deprived of this capability, then of course it
would recognize not as disgraceful, but as truly honorable, a
1. In a similar self-contradiction is the Kremlin, from which the
museum will arise, and into which it will itself transform. The Kremlin
falls into an outrageous contradiction when, while defending itself
from those most like it, from those who as verbal creatures are created
for agreement, it does not defend itself against a dissimilar force, with
which verbal agreement is impossible. But the contradiction becomes
even more terrible when people, not realizing it, become instruments
of a blind lethal force and do not only destroy one another, but also
annihilate ancestors’ ashes preserved by fortresses, instead of, after
having recognized their mutual guilt, uniting in order to transform
that lethal force into a life-giving one by way of returning life to those
killed by it. These are the contradictions that contain the question of
unbrotherhood, of hostility to fathers, and of means of restoring universal kinship. It is necessary that the all-peoples’ museums, having
become all-science museums, transform the blind force of destruction
into a re-creative force.
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Nikolai Fedorov
donation to the museum of, for example, the first steamship,
which, until this donation, was perhaps used for transporting Africans or for transporting manufactured junk and then
became useless for this purpose. And is it possible to think
of any use for this steamship, or generally for any other creation besides this steamship, the forced cessation of which
would cause regret? Such use would be undoubtedly higher,
and not lower, than inactivity, which is the fate of everything
that is donated to a museum! The transportation or earning
of bread, for example! But bread is transported from the village to the city; it is the trade of the city with the village—it
is not a brotherly exchange, service to which would be honorable. Just as the transport of an army is not a brotherly
task! … Nonetheless, if a museum is just a depository, even
in a respectable sense, then donations to the museum, as
with donations to the grave, cannot contain anything good,
even if accompanied by artistic or “learned,” i.e. dead, rehabilitation. And in this case the destructive meaning that is
ascribed to it has a basis. But if a donation to the archive, as
if to a depository, is worthy of disdain as dead resurrection
and does not satisfy living beings, then leaving the donation
in life as it is is also not respectable. Rest and death, eternal
discord and struggle, are equally evil. Hypocrisy is inevitable
as long as the museum is only a depository—only dead rehabilitation—and life is only struggle.
In the meantime the scope of preservation grows larger
and larger as the struggle becomes more energetic. The
intensification of the struggle is beyond doubt. It is understood that an age that calls itself progressive will be as abundant, as rich in its donations to the museum, as it is true to its
name as the age of progress. Progress, or, more accurately,
struggle offering so many sacrifices to the museum, saving
what is donated to it from unbrotherly activity, could not be
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as Common Task
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The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
considered as causing pain and being deadly, if each work
did not have its author-creator and if progress were not
crowding out the living. But progress is precisely the production of dead things, accompanied by the extrusion of living
people. Progress can be called a true, real hell, whereas the
museum, if it be paradise, is only in planning, because now it
is collecting, under the guise of old tatters, the departed souls
of the dead. But these souls reveal themselves only to those
who have a soul. For the museum, man is infinitely higher
than an object; for the installation, for factory civilization
and culture, the object is higher than man. The museum is
the last remnant of the cult of ancestors; it is a special type of
that cult, which while being expelled from religion, as we see
with Protestants, is reestablished in the form of the museum.
The only thing that is higher than the old tatters preserved
in museums is the very dust itself, the very remains of the
dead; just as the only thing higher than the museum would
be the grave, unless the museum itself does not become the
transposition of the dust to the city, or the transformation of
a cemetery into a museum.
Our age deeply reveres progress and its full expression—
the exhibition, i.e. the struggle, the extrusion—and of course
would wish eternal existence for this extrusion, which it calls
progress, this perfecting, which will become so perfected as
to annihilate that pain which necessarily accompanies this
perfecting, as it does all struggle. And our age in no way
dares to imagine that progress itself would ever become
the achievement of history, and this grave, this museum,
becomes the reconstruction of all of progress’s victims at
the time when struggle will be supplanted by accord, and
unity in the purpose of reconstruction, only in which parties
of progressives and conservatives can be reconciled—parties
that have been warring since the beginning of history.
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Nikolai Fedorov
The second contradiction of the contemporary museum
is the fact that the age that values only what is useful ends
up collecting and preserving what is useless. Museums serve
as justification for the nineteenth century; their existence
in our iron age demonstrates that conscience has not completely disappeared. Otherwise it is impossible to understand preservation in our crudely utilitarian world where
everything is for sale, just as it is impossible to understand
the high sales value of objects that are useless and outdated.
By preserving things despite its exploitative tendencies, our
age, in spite of self-contradiction, still serves the unknown
God.2 But will this respect for monuments of the past be
preserved during further progress, during an increase in
artificial needs, deemed necessary at the time of intensified
concern for the present? Egyptians entombed the mummies
of their ancestors out of need, despite the fact that according
to their beliefs, such entombing was equal to worsening their
fate; our time, with future progress, can completely abandon
everything related to our ancestors, all monuments to them;
but at the same time man, having lost the very sense and concept of kinship, already ceases to be a moral being, i.e. will
attain complete Buddhist impassivity; for him there will be
nothing dear, and society will truly become an anthill, which,
however, is also capable of “progress!”
However, one cannot annihilate the museum; like a
shadow, it accompanies life, like a grave, it is behind all the
2. Those who fancy seeming fresh call things that go out of use “a
rag,” forgetting that if what goes out of use becames a rag, it’s only
because during use, it was already in tatters to begin with. The only
thing that will not be in tatters is that which has the power to withstand the transformation into rags and rot, and at the same time also
has the ability, i.e. a power arising from the mind, to always restore
freshness. Only restoration contains within itself the power to counteract destruction; while progress only provides splendor to decay …
Museum
as Common Task
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The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
living. Each man bears a museum within himself, bears it
even against his personal wish, as a dead appendage, as a
corpse, as reproaches of conscience; for conservation is a
basic law, preceding man, having been in force before him.
Conservation is a characteristic not only of organic, but of
inorganic nature; and especially of human nature. People
lived, i.e. ate, drank, judged, decided cases, and put those
that were settled into the archives,3 not even thinking at the
time of death and losses; in reality it turned out that putting
matters into the archive and transferring all the remains
of life to the museum was a transfer to a higher order, to a
domain of investigation, to the hands of descendants, to one
or several generations, depending on the position and the
state in which the investigation is found, also depending on
how widespread this investigation has become. Its highest
degree will be attained when those who settle affairs are also
their investigators, i.e. make themselves members of the
museum; in other words, when investigation becomes selfstudy and in this way leads to the point at which resurrection
immediately follows death. This level is not a court, for everything that is deposited in a museum is there for rehabilitating
and redeeming life, not for judging everyone. The museum
is the collection of everything outlived, dead, unsuitable for
use; but precisely because of this it is the hope of the century,
for the existence of a museum shows that there are no finished matters. That is why the museum provides consolation
to everyone who is afflicted, because it is the highest level of
development for judicial-economic society. For the museum,
death itself is not the end but only the beginning; an underground kingdom that was considered hell is even a special
3. Or the remnants of life, of activity, themselves become the content of museums, for example, like kitchen scraps from prehistoric
times that end up in museums.
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Nikolai Fedorov
department within the museum. For the museum, there is
nothing hopeless, “sung out,” i.e. something that is impossible to revive and resurrect. Only those who wish revenge
will find no consolation in it, for it is not a power, and containing a reconstructing force within itself, it is powerless to punish—for only life can resurrect, not death, not deprivation
of life, not murder! The museum is the highest instantiation
that can and must return life, not take it.
The Kremlin, transformed into a museum, is the expression of the whole soul, the completeness and agreement of
all capabilities, the absence of internal discord, the expression of unity, of spiritual peace and happiness, i.e. of all that
is lacking in our progressive era; a museum is indeed the
“higher world.” When the museum was a temple, i.e. a regulatory force, supporting the life of ancestors (at least in people’s understanding), then will, expressed in this (i.e. in the
temple), even if it was an imaginary action, was in agreement
with reason that justified it and acknowledged this imaginary
action as real. At that time reason too was not separated from
memory, and the act of commemoration, nowadays just a ceremony, had a real meaning; at that time memory was not just
preservation, but a restoration, even though only imaginary
and conceptual, of course, but all the same serving as a real
guarantee of preserving the fatherland, the common origin,
brotherhood. When reason is separated from the memory of
the fathers, it becomes an abstract exploration of causes of
phenomena, i.e. philosophy. When not separated from the
memory of the departed, it is not the seeking-out of abstract
principles, but of fathers; reason, directed in this way,
becomes the project of resurrection. Linguistic investigation
supports this original unity of capabilities: one and the same
root appears in words (of Aryan, or perhaps other languages
too) that express memory (moreover, memory specifically
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as Common Task
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The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission
of fathers, of the dead) and reason, and soul in general, and
finally the human as a whole. Psychological investigation of
the positivists also supports the unity of memory and reason,
attributing the processes of knowledge to the law of memory,
of association, turning will into the regulator of action. And
thus we can say that muses and museums were born from
memory, i.e. from the whole man. In other words, linguistic
as well as psychological investigation convinces us that museums and the muse are contemporary with man himself, they
were born together with his consciousness. Consequently,
the purpose of the museum can be nothing other than the
purpose of the circle dance and the ancestral temple, into
which the round dance was transformed, i.e. the sun-path,
returning the sun for the summer, awakening life in all that
had faded in winter. The difference here is only in the means of
action that had no real power in the round dance and temple;
the action of a museum must have power that really returns,
gives. This will be, when the museum returns to ashes itself
and creates tools that regulate the destructive lethal forces of
nature that control it.
We would not exaggerate, of course, if we said that the
museum, as an expression of the entire soul, will return to us
spiritual peace, internal accord, will give us happiness like the
father feels upon the return of his prodigal son. The sickness
of the age consists exactly in the renunciation of the past, the
renunciation of a common purpose for all generations. This
sickness has deprived our life of meaning and purpose, and
in literature has created Fausts, Don Juans, Cains, and generally restive types, while in philosophy it has created subjectivism and solipsism. When there was no discord between
capabilities, there was no separation between religion (as the
cult of ancestors) and science and art (being celestial and terrestrial, as well as subterranean). As man himself was then
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a complete, healthy being, there was no separation between
the spheres of knowledge and action. There was no fencing
off of these spheres from each other, they were not limited to
only the present tense, satisfying only animal lust, as is done
nowadays, thanks to the separation of these spheres from
religion, which is done out of enmity toward the latter. The
first sages (not yet philosophers) were astronomers, adherents, probably, of the muse Uranus. They were not only natural experimenters, in the present sense of the word, but also
anthropologists and theologians. So “sages” and “astronomers” were equivalent words, and wisdom was in astronomy,
which embraced all that is divine and human, celestial and
terrestrial, dying and living, and was not just abstract knowledge, but learning and, at the same time, veneration of the
father-ancestors. The question of the death of man, of the
end or destruction of the world, is a question that is theoand cosmo-anthropological, or what is the same, a question of astronomy. It could not proceed from idle curiosity,
because at that time there were no people yet who lived solely
by knowledge of being a library scholar. Neither could this
question arise from idle curiosity because knowledge then
was not yet separated from action, even imaginary action, the
limits of which they did not yet perceive, because they could
not yet separate their own action from the action of nature.
Ionian sages questioned only the means of action, the reality
of mythical actions, which, as it was then considered, transformed heaven into the habitat of the dead, and therefore
they searched not only for that element to which everything
returns, from which everything arises, but also that force that
binds everything together and directs all. However, even contemporary science does not have a right to live for itself, and
it must consider itself the means or investigation of the true
nature of real action, instead of the mythical, the artistic, but
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it has no right to consider itself knowledge for knowledge’s
sake and to free itself from the obligation to serve a common
purpose. Even though such a demand, such an encroachment on the freedom of the individual, would seem shocking
to a contemporary man, this comes from a habit of thinking
that the freedom of an individual is absolute, in a century
that does not accept anything as absolute. The right to such
freedom is only the right to live according to one’s whims,
turning life into the trivial and empty, and then in despair
asking, “Life, why were you given to me?”
This is why, based on the unity of knowledge and action,
astronomy specialists have no right to avoid an obligation
to serve, a duty given to man at birth; likewise, all naturalscience investigators do not have that right either, whose science is only a split-off from the celestial science, a diversion
from the science of the Universe. Based on the same principle, the observatory is the same kind of necessary feature
of an all-science museum as external senses—the organs
of perception—are necessary to every man for his internal feeling and memory. By “observatory” we mean not an
agency of abstract science, but of physical astronomy, of a
chemical science of every substance, organic and inorganic,
vegetable, animal, and human, such that humanity (which
can constitute a museum only in its entirety) observes the
whole Universe from the observatory—from the outside,
and observes man himself from the anthropological side. An
observatory observes the world that, one might say, is merged
with the memory of the dead, of the past. The past is the subject of history. The beginning of the observatory was the gnomon, the invention of which we credit to the Ionian sages.
Primordial man probably told time using his own shadow;
in later times, in urban life, the gnomon replaced this way of
telling time; it was an instrument for measuring one’s actions
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and one’s life experience; that is why clocks (predominantly
hourglasses) became an attribute of death. With the help of
the gnomon, man also created a calendar in which he marked
off not only the times of nature’s rebirth (holidays) and fading, but also the days of the passing of fathers, i.e. the days
of commemorating ancestors. That is why a museum, as a
formation of memory of the fathers and of everything that is
connected with them and with the past, is inseparable from
the observatory.4 Astronomical calendars were thermal,
optic, and generally physical and chemical, for the forces
of nature—especially the biological, organic force—change
according to the time of day and the time of year.
The educational significance of observatories as schools
demands that idle gazing be turned into obligatory observation, so that the sky has as many observers as there are
stars in it. Platonizing Christianity tried to hold thought “on
high,” but to prevent thought from falling “down low,” one
must raise one’s eyes to the sky, one must turn contemplation into observation.
Thus, the observatory is related to the museum as the
external senses (the aggregate of which, i.e. of all means of
observation and organs of perception, is actually an observatory) are related to reason, but to reason in the widest,
or more accurately, in its actual, real meaning and significance: to reason that cannot be separated from the memory of the fathers, and contains within it one indivisible
whole; to such reason that only the son of man possesses,
4. A tower, as the simplest, original observatory, is a necessary, natural accessory of a museum, because the museum is the creation of a
being that has assumed the vertical position, turned toward heaven,
which hostility and unbrotherhood turned into the position of a
guard, a position that is detached from heaven, awaiting attack from
one’s neighbors, and asking deliverance from heaven.
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elevated to the state of a criterion for humanity, in mental
and moral respects.
The museum, then, unifying the sons of man for the universal investigation of the sky or Universe, is related to the
observatory not as a depository of mere chronicles and photographic snapshots of the sky and stars and generally of
natural-historical observations; for an astronomical observatory there is no past, as there is no past for the movement
of the solar system, which is not a past, but a continuous
event, revealed by the changing position of the stars, which
is why it is necessary for astronomers to remember, to hold,
so to speak, within themselves, the positions of the stars,
entered in the very earliest of catalogues. Thus, here memory
is merged with reason, and the past with the present to such
an extent that the death of the observers appears only as a
changing of the guards who organize the regulation of the
world and, at the very least, open the way for the establishment of control over the world. The powerlessness to establish control has deprived man of the opportunity to hold and
restore life. Likewise, there is no past for natural science, as
it is itself only a human representation of nature, or (which
is the same), a project for controlling it, enacted in the shape
of a museum by the whole human race. The museum, thus,
is an historical enterprise not only in the sense of knowledge, but of action: as natural science, it is astronomy with
the physical sciences contained within it; on the other hand,
natural science itself is the same as history, it is the project
of control, enacted.
However, a museum with just an observatory, which provides only reconnaissance, still remains an organism without
active organs, without hands and feet. Because humanity on
the whole is yet incapable not only of action but of movement, unless we accept as such the movement of the Earth,
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happening independently of man. This organism (a museum
with an observatory) will remain without hands if the city
and the village remain separated, in which case the naturalhistorical museum will remain outside of the natural process
of nature, will not be its reason, those memories preserved
in the museum will not be a true, material resurrection, nor
will they be a regulator of nature. It is due to this separation
of city and village, and to this concentration of all mental life
in the former, that nature seems elusive to us; while we blame
nature for hiding from us. Wouldn’t it be fair to say that we do
not discover it for lack of time, occupied with manufacturing
and everything connected with it? Due to our busyness we
cannot prepare observers and investigators, because from
childhood we enslave them in the factory in order to satisfy
our most trivial desires. It is equally unfair to say that nature
gives us no way, and having attached us to Earth, makes us
powerless to establish control. All of these complaints are
equally justified, as would be an earlier complaint that nature
deprived us of the opportunity to sail across the oceans, until
Columbus managed it. And at present, in, for example, photographic images of the Sun, we have, one must suppose,
everything that we need to grasp the concept of what the Sun
is, and it is our fault that up to this point we have not used all
this available data and have not interpreted it.
Astronomy, once it has reunited with the sciences which
have been unnaturally detached and unlawfully separated
from it, which have forgotten their origin, like physics and
the chemistry of inorganic and organic substances (for
there can be a physics and a chemistry of the Earth or planets, suns, interplanetary or intersolar spaces, but the only
people who can defend the independence and separation of
these sciences are those who do not acknowledge the common task of the human race), astronomy will be transformed
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into astrocontrol, and the human race will become the
astronomer-controller, which is its natural vocation.
Not only physics and chemistry and natural sciences
in general, but philosophy as well—all have been detached
from astronomy. The first philosophers or sages were astronomers, the temple was the first portrayal of the world, and
the Earth was considered a foundation and the first element
of being.5 But for a philosopher, who is not a sage, but only
an amateur, a virtuoso of wisdom, for a philosopher in the
literal sense of the word, Earth is no longer a foundation, an
element. For Anaximander, for example, it was a meteor and
remained immobile as a result of its equal distance from the
edges of the Universe. Thus the Copernican worldview began
to be constructed; the sky was not just the height, but also
the depth; it embraced the Earth. Theoretically, the search
for reason, and practically, the search for a foundation, for
support, was the necessary manifestation of a being that
assumed an unstable, vertical position. The same problem
of a foundation relates to the whole Earth. If we recall that
throughout history there has been the uninterrupted fear
of the destructibility of Earth, of the end of the world, then
it becomes understandable why this question of a foundation, of a reason for the world, has always remained open.
What a great shift must have occurred in worldviews when
Anaximander, in place of a firm foundation, of a base, or even
of a liquid as Thales considered it, left Earth at the center
without any tangible support, having unified the concept of
the bottom with the circumference of the world, unified the
5. It is not possible for man to not create resemblances; resemblances are necessary for analyzing the idea and partially for proof;
and if a secularized and secularizing church is a museum, then the
armillary spheres, the globes (states), were also the beginning of the
museum.
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concept of the top with the center of the Earth; it became
necessary to create a whole new physics, a new concept of
falling bodies. Anaximenes considered air as the foundation
of the world and as its first element, which he considered
the soul of the cosmos and of man. Pythagoras had already
become the Copernicus of the ancient world, but in this
world the triumph was left for Ptolemy’s system. However,
the Copernican system will not hold in the new worldview,
unless it acquires practical value.
The detachment of philosophy from astronomy rendered incomprehensible the very problem of basis, foundation, reason. Philosophy, searching for the meaning of
everything, did not know its own origin, its raison d’etre,
and lost the meaning of its existence. The fear of the destruction of the world, doubts about its stability, caused the
appearance of a new science of the conditions of Earth’s
stability, its preservation, and its reconstruction from the
primary element. Astronomy sought the indestructible, from
which everything could be reconstructed. But astronomy
itself was born from the decline of religion, which always
considers itself the possessor of the means for the preservation and reconstruction of the world. In the question of
maintenance and reconstruction, physics, chemistry, and
philosophy itself became understandable.
Constant discord gave the question of the world and society a primary place, and overshadowed the fundamental,
universal question. History, having as its subject the eternal
discords, separated into an individual science; but as long as
it speaks of man as creator of discord, as long as it looks at
the life of the human race as it is now, only as a fact, not asking the question of what it must be, i.e. a project of future life,
humanity will not discover either in astronomy, or in cosmic
art, or in world regulation, its common purpose.
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In order to have internal peace and spiritual accord,
without which external peace is impossible, we must not be
enemies to our ancestors, but really be their grateful descendants; it is not sufficient to limit ourselves to only internal
commemoration—merely a cult of the dead—it is necessary
that all the living, having united as brothers in the temple
of ancestors, or the museum, which has as its elements not
just the observatory, but also the astronomical regulator, this
would transform the blind force of nature into one that is
directed by reason. Then the insensible would not prevail,
it would not take the life of the sentient, then all that is sentient would be restored, and all worlds would be united in
resurrected generations, and an infinite area would open for
their conjunctive activity, and this alone would make internal
discord unnecessary and impossible.
Astronomy, taken separately from physics and the natural sciences, can have application only in defining places on
Earth, especially in the art of navigation. Separately, physics has application in industry, in a synthetic task. And only
physics in a meteorological sense, as the physics of planet
Earth and other heavenly worlds, i.e. astronomical physics
and physical astronomy, can have practical application to
meteorological regulation. One can, of course, unite natural
science with physics as well, as the knowledge of nature, of
what was born, but such a unification would be a complete
renunciation of any application of natural science to practical life. In such a case, natural science would come to serve
only to increase pleasure and, consequently, not only would
it not serve universal good and everyone, for it would exclude
the dead, but it would not even embrace all the living, in that,
in increasing material pleasures, it at the same time would
intensify internal sufferings and would bring a deep discord
to life. Natural science in the form of astronomy cannot be
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applicable to selfish goals, neither for the majority nor for
the minority, it can only be a regulator of falling, i.e. can only
become the foundation of the world. Instead of being an
external support and scaffolding, it can become an internal
regulator, counteracting disintegration and destruction, it
can become a link, i.e. it can introduce the interrelationship
of heavenly worlds and thus restore life, for cosmic dissociation alone is the root cause of death, of the change of generations. Only simultaneously can two goals begin, in essence
composing one purpose: on the one hand, natural sciences
must unite in the form of astronomy so that their common
investigation becomes the revelation of the means and the
plan of world regulation; on the other hand, we must begin
the collection of all forces of all people for the realization of
the plan of regulation, we must begin the transformation of
urban conscription intended for struggle against one’s own
kin into a village that has the task of transforming the lethal
force of nature into a life-giving one.
The museum as the ancients meant it (from whom we
have borrowed this enterprise) is a congregation (sobor)
of the learned; its task is investigation. But in this definition, the powerlessness of the museum is apparent; by this
definition it set itself limits for expansion. Thus the museum
in the Christian world too remained pagan: it likewise limited itself in scope and content, such that the investigation
became abstract, scholastic, and the museum-congregation
itself remained a closed school, a social class. The museumcongregation will be filled and collecting will become
universal only when self-consciousness is not simply investigation, but the study of reasons for the disunion between
scholars and non-scholars, the precise reason that all are
not members of museums, which, of course, falls under the
question of universal kinship. Then knowledge will be just
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as limitless as universal collecting, i.e. the communion will
be truly universal, and knowledge at its highest level will
annihilate the disunion of worlds through the restoration
of all past generations.
The museum is not an aggregate of objects, but a congregation of persons; its activity consists not in accumulating dead
things, but in restoring life to the remains of the dead, in reestablishing the dead through their works, via living agents.
Abstract knowledge cannot be a universal obligation, knowledge of what makes us enemies cannot be but a duty for all,
in that it cannot remain only knowledge, but must become
a purpose, a religion reconciled with science. Dissociation
and disintegration is a fact not only of human, but of physical nature; and disintegration in the latter is completely
understandable, inevitable, necessary, if dissociation exists
in the former. Disintegration is determined by the blindness
of natural force and is explained by laziness, the inactivity
of rational beings who, due to some misconception, exist
in blindness. However, dissociation cannot be absolute and
omnipotent merely because we already feel in ourselves
the urge and force of communication, collecting, restoring.
Religion, science, art, all of these are collecting forces, but
taken separately they are powerless, while in the present
they exist only in separation! Religion assumed the parting
prayer, the sign of the cross, presumed to take place before
a purpose, as the actual purpose; but the prayer, intended
to be the expression of all religion, not being supported by
the common purpose, transformed from a prayer emanating from the heart, from the whole soul, into a prayer pronounced by the lips alone. The heart, troubled by the present,
the concerns of the day, became far from God, and would not
approach Him, until the purpose itself became the purpose
of God, the universal, the investigation and elimination of
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reasons for the unbrotherly state, i.e. of those same reasons
that force us to abandon the purpose of the fatherland, the
goal of the Heavenly Father. Only the goal gives religion life,
soul, otherwise it will be word only, and moreover, a vain
word, and not God’s goal. One must pay attention to why
religion, producing an uplift of the spirit, can never retain
people at the height to which it raised them.
Science, investigation, in its turn, wishes to live either
for itself or only for the present. But what right does it have
to refuse the human goal, being itself the goal of the people,
or to narrow, limit its activity to only the present, when it
itself is not just the goal of the living? Can such a position be
called normal, one in which investigation, quality, and the
directing of reason are made the domain of one class, and
not of all rational beings? What right have we, for the sake
of the well-being of production, satisfying not our needs but
only our whims, to cease the instruction of the great majority at the age when reason has just come into force? Do we
have the right to leave the museum, according to the ancient
definition, as a congregation of only the learned, a feast only
for famous people of the whole Earth—as it was described
by the author of the life of Oedipus Tryannus—instead of
being a universal Eucharist of knowledge? According to
Christianity, a museum, obviously, is not a congregation only
of the learned, but a communion of all; the vocation of the
museum is to be the “catcher of men.” Investigation, i.e. science, can no longer remain just abstract knowledge; it must
become the investigation of reasons which prevent all of us
from being members of the museum, investigators, and from
uniting as one in the purpose of the fatherland. Christianity
has not yet touched the museum, the universal collective
has not yet been accepted as its obligation. The museum in
its present state is not even related to human nature, which
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makes reason a common characteristic of all people, while
investigation is still considered a domain of only one class,
the intelligentsia, while the majority are left only with a
lower power—reasoning, guile, of which not even animals
are bereft. Presently, the museum is not even a congregation of scholars, for societies of scholars constitute different
agencies, or at least their dissociation from the museum is
not yet considered a necessity. Museums do not constitute
even one Museum, they have not attained unity even in this
regard, even though this unity is necessary for the museum,
in order not to contradict its essence, for present museums
as collections of only material objects are only random collections. What significance can the transfer of things have,
the handover of finished affairs, the construction of monuments, if all this takes place not according to a concrete
plan, not as a way to achieve a concrete goal, but according
to some law of fate, which was disregarded, apparently, by
human reason, and which, after all, it did not even make a
subject of investigation or knowledge? Human thought has
not created a project of collecting, in terms of attaining its
completeness, in order to rescue future generations from the
necessity of looking for what must have been preserved, and
what, however, disappeared, even though we feel the difficulty of these searches daily. It’s still a mystery why one thing
is preserved and another thing disappears, although in blind
nature itself there is, apparently, an urge for preservation.
Museums are mostly born, rather than created, for there is
hardly an awareness of what governs the creation of museums. Thus, museums in their nature are random, not ubiquitous; the growth of each of them is nonlinear, inconsistent,
not discontinuous, and the internal arrangement of objects
in them represents more a random pile than orderly collecting. So the definition that one can give of the present-day
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museum would be more ideal than corresponding to reality,
although this ideal definition as well is far from corresponding to what the museum must be.
The passive museum, the museum as representation, as
a likeness of imaginary resurrection, as only a depository, is
an ideal museum only in the sense that for it, perfection is
impossible. On the one hand, the museum is an image of the
world, the Universe visible and invisible, dying and yet living, past and present, natural, produced by blind force, and
likewise artificial, produced by the half-conscious power of
the people. On the other hand, the museum is a creation of
the learned classes, the intelligentsia, of mental labor with
the help of the physical labor of the people. This labor, however, is not history itself, but only its likeness. The present
museum, ideally represented, can be called a book, a library,
illustrated by picture and sculpture galleries and generally by
any physical work of art from the Eolithic period to ours, the
new iron or steel age, we could call it. The present museum is
like a book, explained by demonstrations of physics offices
and chemical laboratories, expanded to whole special institutes.6 The zoological and botanical gardens, as the image
of the flora and fauna of the whole Earth, with idealized
6. Painting and sculpture galleries are the same thing to libraries as
are pictures appended to the end of a book, for the same thing that is
expressed in a book—the work of a thinker, in abstract formulas—is
expressed for an artist in pictorial and sculptural images. The unification of the library with artistic collections expresses not just simple
neighborly relation, but serves as an expression of the connection that
exists between the abstract formulas of thinkers and works by artists.
Axes, blades, potsherds of prehistoric times, the explosives of chemical laboratories, the tools of physics labs, and so forth, have a relation
not just to books of purely archaeological content, or to physics books,
or chemistry books, but to the most abstract metaphysical systems, for
chemical and physics tools have the same influence on the thought of
the newest philosophers as the invention of the most ancient instruments had on the thought of the ancients.
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geological cross sections, are also vivid objects, without
which the book is incomprehensible, as these objects themselves are incomprehensible without a book. This, however,
does not mean that for zoological and other gardens you
need only zoological writings, this means that zoological
gardens and writings constitute only part of the history of
the knowledge and action of humankind. Astronomical and
meteorological observatories, combining everything within
themselves, complete the clarification of the book. This book
is history itself, but this means that one must not see in the
book just personal, subjective opinions; in it, the author himself is expressed, behind the book stands the one who wrote
it, i.e. humankind. He who does not see the author behind
the book, whose thought does not transition from the work
to the one who produced it, he does not act normally in
either the mental or moral sense, he does not act in a filial
way. From the material side, a museum too (the aggregate of
persons) is humanity itself as it is expressed through books
and other objects, i.e. a museum is the congregation of living sons with scholars at the helm, collecting works of dead
people, fathers. The purpose of the museum is, naturally, the
restoration of the latter by means of the former.7
7. Journalism, in contrast to the museum as a “communion,”
must be called “discord,” because journalism fractures the academic
class, dispersing it among organs (journals) of unbrotherly, hostile
conditions. Thus the academic class, instead of unification, turns to
disunion; scholars peddle their services to different unbrotherly conditions that need bullshitters, and therefore, this class, to the extent
that it participates in journalism, can be nothing other than “reptilian.” Journalism is a product of a trading center, the city, it is the handmaiden of women; if a journal puts fashion pictures only at the end,
or doesn’t include them at all, this doesn’t mean (as at an exhibition)
that a woman occupies a primary position. If one surveys all journalism as one journal, then specialized fashion journals for both sexes
and all ages, for furniture, for wallpaper, and so on, would have to
occupy the first place.
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It is necessary to mention that the museum can place only
historical emphasis on new books, and the museum itself
cannot be truth or the expression of it, but only the transition toward it. Preserving the old and collecting the new,
the museum will possess completeness only when it is not
just all-science, all-arts, polytechnic, not just a collection of
everything that remains from the past, but also of everything
that is produced today, and not only according to one branch
of knowledge, and not just in one region, but in all branches
and everywhere. The museum that remains a depository not
only cannot attain ideal completeness; it also will correspond
less to the ideal notion of a museum the more life develops.
And this is understandable! The further man moves on the
path of present industrial progress, the more objects he
will donate to museums, and the more space, strength, and
means for preservation will be necessary; while at the same
time, less of it will be donated to museums.8 Not accepting
something, destroying something, even if just a store sign, an
8. It’s well known that neither the British Museum nor the
Bibliothèque nationale de France can for all their efforts attain comprehensiveness even when it comes to books, i.e. they cannot receive
all books in print; they could not attain this even if the ruling powers
paid better attention to complaints by curators, and didn’t consider
donating to a museum as something of least importance. Of course,
memory in man is more tightly connected with the organs of activity
and knowledge than a museum (which corresponds to memory in a
social organism) is connected to the organs of activity of this organism; but just as reason doesn’t pay attention to everything, so memory
doesn’t receive everything from what was even in the mind, and even
less from what was perceived by external senses; besides, much of
what’s perceived by memory is registered in rather vague and pale outlines, and the social organism only exaggerates these defects of man.
However, for contemporary man, the existence of social memory, of a
museum, is rather difficult to understand, and we can be amazed that
museum have not been turned into stores for toiletries, for example.
The mind of contemporary man is no longer occupied with education; there is too much “of a real thing,” and moreover, according to
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announcement, an advertisement,9 would mean renouncing
the most essential characteristic of the museum, namely, to
contemporary self-perception, perfecting himself every day, becoming accomplished in selflessness and loving thy neighbor, contemporary man has no need to recover old things, to remember a time when
he himself and people in general were, of course, much worse. Friends
of humanity assure contemporary man that progress occurs when
man does not even think about it; they assure him of this, worried,
of course, that man will channel all his energy into this task; assuring
him of this, these friends of humanity point to nature, which doesn’t
think at all, while at the same time seems to be approaching perfection. Man is heading toward the same perfection as nature, making
lace and other similar things that he does not perceive as luxuries;
but as a result of this perfecting, many consider the museum a luxury,
i.e. an unnecessary thing, as well. However, if the museum wishes
to become a true representation of the age (which is the only thing
demanded of the museum), it must seem to the original itself to be a
useless double, an unnecessary luxury; if it is only a depository, then
neither our century, nor any other, will consider the preservation of
its image, of its shadow, for the future as being of great importance.
Achilles would rather have been a slave on Earth than a tsar in the
kingdom of shadows; and Achilles would think the same thing of
depositing things in a museum, but this does not mean that slavery is
good, it just means that the kingdom of shadows is even worse. And
our generation would rather “live” than have the honor of ending up
in a museum (or what’s worse, in a school textbook). Ecclesiastes said
that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion, i.e. better to live like
a dog than enjoy any honors after death!
9. Our age created a new literary genre known as advertising. The
output of this sort of literature is amazing, and no other type of literature has such a wide range of readers. The nineteenth century takes
pride in not composing obsequious odes to people of high statue, as
happened in previous eras, but then it writes odes to objects. Being
a total lie in their content, these odes-advertisements serve as a
real expression of the nineteenth century, and if this type of lyrical
outpouring has not yet received a proper place in literary theories,
that is because the nineteenth century has not yet reached full selfawareness. When history happens for this century, there will appear a
proper evaluation of this characteristic feature of our times. Political
economy, the predominant science of the nineteenth century, which
has supplanted religious economy, the economy of salvation, even if
it evaluates this type of literature, it does so only one-sidedly … The
nineteenth century is represented not only by advertisements: similar
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be the expression of the spirit of the time—not to mention
that accepting only noteworthy things would mean attributing to oneself the right to judge and the privilege of knowing
the truth, and by one’s arbitrary judgment, give immortality
to some things and deny it to others. But what right does
the museum have to refuse to house, for example, even the
most outdated outfits, which change not only with the time
of year, but even with the time of day? For the museum to
refuse to keep outfits would be equivalent to an ornithological museum refusing to conserve birds in their plumage; it
would be the same as only keeping plucked birds, i.e. birds
without feathers. This would be still more incomprehensible, since for a person who acknowledges enjoyment as the
sole goal in life, outfits are the ultimate goal of contemporary life.10 If the museum is going to preserve all of this, then,
to advertisements in literature, in painting and sculpture, store signs,
and in architecture, the architecture of stores and small shops, represent new branches in art created by this century. The purpose of
the artist in these new types of art is not easy: with his work, he has to
attract, to draw attention, attention that is both very sparse and very
focused; he has to captivate, to draw people, so to say, to the store.
Crude forgetting, prevalent in the Orient, and partially here, turns
into peddling that is more refined and much more powerful. A store
sign follows you everywhere, is an eyesore, as they say. Bright colors,
gilding, size, symbolism, weight, even live pictures, lives signs, even
live performance posters all have to be employed by the artist of the
present day to achieve his purpose. This art is the “–cratia,” i.e. the
power, that rules the contemporary world. Those who think that the
nineteenth century did not produce its own original artwork are, of
course, mistaken: art did not die, it just transformed, i.e. became perverted into the literature of advertisements and the art of store signs.
10. If industrialism, with the help of its humblest handmaided, science, brings labor to a minimum and leisure to a maximum, then the
whole society will use what is now accessible only to those who are
free from labor, who have leisure. The Paris beau monde that is imitated by capitals and provincial cities of the so-called civilized world
can serve as an example of what the current society wants to achieve,
of that which can be called the kingdom of this world. Based on the
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even having turned all producers into curators, the museum
would not be able to hold all the products of this sad manufacture, of this disgrace of humanity.
On the impossibility of unity for a museum of resemblance,
a museum of ideals, a museum of knowledge, and not of activity. The museum has an even smaller opportunity to bring
its collection into order, to give it unity. If it is a true representation of the past and the present, the museum will be
a depiction not of unity, but of discord. A strict classification is impossible in the museum for the same reason that it
is impossible in science, both natural as well as social—it’s
impossible because of the lack in the world (more accurately, because of the loss) of rational unity, of unity in which
peace (мир) is not different from the world (мiр), in the sense
of the Universe.11 And mankind would really be one race,
brotherhood, and kin, and moreover, the psychic classification would be more easily understood the more intensively
description of this beau monde, we can make a calendar, both yearly
and daily. Years and days are divided not into tending and harvesting periods, but take their division from changes in dress. Changing
one’s dress is also armor that captivates and takes prisoner, if not the
internal senses then the external ones. Days and years are divided into
changes in dress, for one type of clothing is worn in Paris, another in
the country, at the sanatorium, at the seaside, in Italy, another during
morning walks, and at dinners. The ideal of this society is the type of
plant that blooms year round. This is a new stage for theology, anthropology, zoology; it is phytology. Those who don’t see in female beauty
a divine gift, and in the art of dressing the highest of the free arts, are
frivolous (folâtre), says a Parisian philosopher, or something along
these lines. And he is right, in the sense that treating art, the art of
dressing, with disdain is very frivolous, for this evil is so entrenched
in and connected with the whole contemporary worldview that the
philosopher does not even see any evil in it.
11. In prerevolutionary orthography in Russia, there were two
words—мир, meaning peace, and мiр, meaning world. After the
revolution and the language reforms, there was only мир left, which
meant both things. —Trans.
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it were felt. Unity must be given, and not sought where it
does not exist; exactly like predictions must be replaced by
action, because we can only correctly predict what we can do
ourselves (so, for us it would be easier, more possible to construct meteorological regulation than to predict the weather
with perfect confidence).
Discord also exists in the world of thought, in the domain
of science; and even though the reason for hostility is not in
thought, nor in books, they, however, cannot be considered
completely innocent of proliferating hostility. In any case,
reconciliation can only begin in the world of ideas. Books are
not peaceful beings, and they are just as alien, just as hostile
to one another as our secular and clerical, military and civil,
economic and bureaucratic systems. And therefore, a library,
as a collection of books, is a domain not of peace, but of
struggle and polemics, and the subdivisions or sections of its
catalogue correspond to all the aforementioned subdivisions
of society itself. By reading, one absorbs hostility; fighters
are raised and created according to every unbrotherly condition of society, to every unbrotherly section of the library, to
every section of its catalogue, for the classification of books
is based on the same principle of hostility according to which
society also disintegrates into unbrotherly conditions or
classes; in books we see expressed the generally unbrotherly relations of all people to one another. Corresponding to
the sections of the library or sections of the catalogue, there
are journals of different tendencies and specialties, scholarly societies, departments, and other specialized scholarly
departments (the latter negate the unity of knowledge, not
acknowledging the university as the unity or completeness of
knowledge; in the meantime, the universities too represent
only an imaginary unity, a unity not of knowledge, but only of
administration). The museum, as a faithful representation of
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the contemporary world, is the image of discord and hostility; but the very creation of a museum, the very collecting of
objects of hostility, already indicates the necessity of accord,
already indicates the goal of unification.
The museum cannot be a congregation of only scholars
and artists; it does not exclude itself from the Kingdom of
God—on the contrary, it is the instrument of God’s law. What
Christianity produced internally, ideally, spiritually, the
museum will produce physically. Museum knowledge is the
investigation of reasons for the unbrotherly condition, reasons near as well as far, secondary and fundamental, social
and natural, i.e. the museum contains all the science of man
and nature, as an expression of God’s will and as a realization of the project of fatherland and brotherhood. Thus, the
museum does not curtail the limits of knowledge, but only
abolishes the gap between knowledge for knowledge’s sake,
as it now is, and morality, which is limited at the present
time to being a personal and temporal goal. Investigating
reasons for the unbrotherly condition is indeed the discovery of reasons for the suffering and death that prevent
people of different classes and nations from comprising a
museum-congregation. This is the investigation of reasons
for the separation between the “specialists”—experts—and
the people, i.e. between scholars and the uneducated. This
is not sociology, not social mechanics or physics; this is the
science of the unbrotherly condition as fact; the task of the
Universe is to collect by means of investigating reasons for
the unbrotherly condition; and this is also not sociology, but
the brotherly goal, not res publica, but res fratria, the realization of brotherhood.
Scientific collection, according to which science does
not separate itself from morality, i.e. collecting by means of
investigating reasons for the unbrotherly condition, is the
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simplest, the natural, and the only possible path to the realization of brotherhood, the path which to this point has not
even been attempted, while faith in the realization of brotherhood, no matter how strange it is, has somehow been lost.
Even though we are born brothers, for the preservation and
still more for the restoration of brotherhood, for the elimination of reasons that destroy the brotherly feeling, what is
necessary is knowledge, the directing of the natural, birthing
force; what is necessary is mutual knowledge. Brotherhood,
like life, is a gift of birth, but for the restoration, as for the
preservation, of both, work is necessary, such that brotherhood
and immortality can only be the result of work. It is known how
easily brotherly love transforms into brotherly hatred, and
the latter can be even stronger than the former. The most brutal wars are waged between peoples most closely related by
blood, and internecine wars are the cruelest. Upon hearing
sermons on brotherhood, people are enraptured, weep, and
meanwhile continue to live as before; some give away their
goods, offer themselves up for punishment, and many others
are prepared to do the same; but meanwhile, the same order,
the same discord, continues to dominate. How do we not ask
about the reasons for such phenomena? … Humanity, one
might say, constantly mourns its discord, and meanwhile not
one sect has lived even a couple of days in brotherly accord;
even the very preachers of brotherhood cannot refrain from
disputes.12 For the realization of brotherhood, all science is
12. As long as the unbrotherly condition exists, there will appear
prophets of brotherhood, and they will tempt many. And thus, some
think, brotherhood will finally be established: officers will retire, judges
will leave their chambers, and so on. But so that others do not appear
in the places of those leaving their posts, we must suppose that there
will be people who wish to consciously destroy the order; we must suppose that habits, acquired through the centuries, would be instantly
abandoned! … However, just pointing out this difficulty would be
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necessary, i.e. the organized entirety of the mental efforts of all
people. Brotherhood consists not just only in a brotherly feeling,
but in brotherly knowing (mutual knowledge) and in brotherly
action-resurrection. Making investigations into reasons for the
unbrotherly condition the subject of the knowledge of humankind; making the restoration of brotherhood the goal of art is to
create a goal for all life.
Investigating reasons for this discord makes unnecessary
the assemblies that were created for arguments over reconciliation. Dogmatic and ritual disputes, if they could lead to
peace, would only make a kind of peace that excludes neither
hostility, nor war between co-religionist nations, and consequently, that would have no meaning. In these arguments,
what is especially clearly expressed is the necessity for investigating to true, real reasons for hostility, for the topics of
exclusively “religious arguments” (e.g. on the origin of the
Holy Spirit, on crossing oneself, and so on) in themselves
do not explain the hostility. The contemporary mind has so
matured, apparently, that it becomes hard to understand
how there can still continue arguments between philosophical schools, between, for example, spiritualists and materialists, between idealists and empiricists. It would not be hard,
apparently, to agree that each of these schools has its reasons
to exist. We can say the same about political arguments, for
example, between the aristocratic and democratic party: the
considered a crime in the eyes of the enthusiasts; just as afterward,
when the fascination passes, any reminder of brotherhood will be considered a crime. But where would the officers go after they leave military service? Into the civil or trade service … ? But can there possibly
be brotherhood in civil service and in trade activities?! If they go to
the village, then villagers will be brothers only after they fulfill the filial
duty, while they associate knowledge and action with centers of resurrection—fatherly science that investigates not reasons for events, but
reasons for the unbrotherly condition that leads to suffering and death.
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arguments between them might continue in perpetuity, in
that each of them has its reasons for existing and not one
of them contains the full good, as not one of the philosophical schools contains the whole truth. Only kinship (brotherhood) excludes both aristocratism and democracy, and
resurrection (fatherland) unites spiritualism and idealism
with empiricism and materialism. Parties of all kinds lack the
historical grounding to understand their false position. The
museum, as a creation of history, and moreover history, for
which the fact of struggle is not holy, not an idol, for which,
on the contrary, the reconciliation of the fighters is the aim
and project—such a museum corresponds to the demands
of all possible parties, which consists in being able to understand one’s false position, reconcile, and thus eliminate the
separation into parties, cease the discord and struggle which
lead to suffering and death.
Faith in and hope for the possibility of like-mindedness
and unanimity is long lost in humankind; the impossibility of
unity is considered an indisputable truth, while in the meantime its necessity becomes more obvious with every passing
day, the demand for it is felt ever more strongly. However, in
spite of this, there has not been the slightest attempt to realize unity through the path of knowledge, through the path
of investigating reasons for discord; moreover, measures
are even taken to encourage dissidence. In order to have the
right to despair, one would have had to try all possible means
of attainting unity, while in reality, all attempts at attaining
it have been limited to the realm of feeling, i.e. to religious
attempts. Reason and its incarnation—science—consider as
their goal the comprehending of unity, and only abstractly,
not the accomplishing of it; education, equally, does not
approach it seriously, while art does not even set such a
goal. The museum is the first scientific and artistic attempt at
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communion or education in unity, and thus this attempt is a
religious, holy task; this is a call to serve the fatherland, a universal call, to all without exception, beginning in childhood;
the examination of those called is transformed into a multiyear course of investigation, connected with education in
the Kremlin as in the original museum, reestablished and
equipped for the education of those called to take part not
in the struggle with one’s neighbors, which is the last resort,
but chiefly in the reconciliation of the two halves of the world,
the continental and the oceanic. There exist different specialized educational institutions—military, commercial, and so
forth—but does there also exist a common educational institution, which would unify the specialized institutions, which
would be higher relative to them? For common education it is
considered sufficient to just have secondary schools, while in
order to maintain unity after completing this course of study
it is not deemed necessary to offer some kind of higher education institute. It is only for certain specializations that it is
considered necessary to have a higher degree; for universal
unity no sort of higher degree is proposed.
*
*
*
The city is the agglomeration of unbrotherly conditions, contained by unbrotherly ties. The progress of the city or the urban
organism consists in the constant increase of the number of
unbrotherly conditions (new aspects of industrialism, and
so on). In so-called learned, i.e. unbrotherly language, this is
called differentiation of activity. Along with it, unbrotherly
relations are differentiated, as are anti-brotherly relations;
new means of theft, counterfeit, and so on are devised. To
“integration” (according to the terminology of the same
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science) that separates moral from intellectual, we must add
the intensification of surveillance (the police are like the nervous system of the city). A city is a civilian-police organism,
and not a union of persons considered brothers. The city is the
way it is because it does not have the purpose of the fatherland; its memory is a depository (museum) that has neither
unity nor completeness. That which should be a museum is
replaced by special institutions, which don’t even suspect the
possibility of, or more accurately, the necessity of, unity.
Agricultural life, known to us today only insofar as it has
been changed by the influence of the city, also cannot be
called brotherly. Even though agricultural life does continue
to serve fathers, it does not do so in actuality, because it does
not have the means of a museum, the tools of memory, by
which to understand both the means of communication and
generally all tools of action, besides those that create discord
and that cannot be repurposed. Knowing the village only to
the extent to which it has been changed—only in its ignorant form—we don’t at all know the village as a revelation of
knowledge and, first of all, natural science.
The problem of external reasons for hostility, consequently, amounts to the problem of the transformation of
nomad and urban conditions into an agricultural condition, i.e. the one that is necessary for the completion of the
purpose of the fatherland, for natural science combined
with agriculture becomes resurrection. The annihilation of
external reasons for hostility and the restoration of internal
accord leads to one and the same purpose. The question of
the city, in spite of the fact that the city is the root of evil, is not
yet fully understood, and not yet put in the proper way. Even
that country that is obviously worn out, and is already conscious that the reason it is growing thin is urban life, has not
decided to address the urban problem in all its significance.
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In this country, various measures are proposed for minimizing the influx of village populations into cities, but they dare
not doubt the dignity of city life, of its ideal: maximum luxury
and minimum labor, or in a word: “otium cum dignitate.”13
France knows that the temptations of city life are on the one
side, and on the other—phyloxera, drought, flood, spring
frosts that kill first flowers on the trees, which force the village populations into the cities; and nonetheless France
does not acknowledge the temptations of the city as evil,
and droughts, floods, and so forth—all this fundamental evil
that threatens the destruction not only of villages, but of the
city itself—are not considered serious enough to make these
agricultural plagues a problem for, at least, natural science,
not to mention the obligation of the city to feel the trouble
of the village to its full extent, to make it the subject of all
its thoughts, of all knowledge, and not only of natural science, for the death of the village, undoubtedly, will be the
death of the city as well. And what would the efforts of one or
two botanists or one or two entomologists who are currently
dispatched from the city to investigate villages mean before
such evil!14 Transforming natural science, at least, from
13. If by leisure we mean the time that remains after the satisfaction
of basic needs, and satisfaction that is well-equipped, then humankind has not had such leisure. Just the possibility of a poor harvest
proves that there has never been a complete provision of necessities;
therefore, there could not have been leisure, lawful leisure, which
we could have used to produce something useless. We are not even
talking about the insecurities of life in general and of the existence
of death, even though we have no right to limit security to just having
enough harvest and to assuring ourselves of the impossibility of security against death in order to occupy ourselves with something useless.
14. Recently, the appearance of the Hessian fly forced the city to
pay attention to the village, by sending several botanists and zoologists there; and now the attack of locusts from the same steppe that
at one time sent the nomadic hordes, and the exodus of the village
population—reminding us of the Great Migration Period—has turned
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urban to rural—the city by that alone would reduce the temptations of urban life, which are supported by artificial applications of urban natural science. The problem of the city would
be understood if it were only acknowledged that knowledge
can serve not just as temptation; for at present, all reason, all
mental forces attracted to the city, serve only as temptations,
while the village remains defenseless. The transportation of
reason to the village would save the city from the temptation
created by manufacturing industry. The city, purged of this
industry, would become a village, and the village, instead of
imaginary means for defense against trouble, would receive
real means for it. The city, having made the village the subject of its thought; the city, which even from its present museums (if only they were true representations of the past and
present) could learn of its origin in the village, and of all the
injustices it has committed against the village, could become
a sort of commission, a communion, described above under
the name “museum,” that combined all natural science into
the knowledge of the whole Earth as a planet, without separating flora and fauna from the general process of Earth. The
process under which meteorology, for example, does not
have as its purpose the prediction of weather, but makes it a
tool to regulate showers, droughts, and other events that create disasters today, while the forces that cause them remain
the attention of the city to the village. The army and the very highest
district authorities took part in the defense of the land from the terrible invasion of locusts, while science did not falter in its modesty
and stayed on the sidelines. It is necessary to remark that using the
army in situations such as the eradication of locusts, and in similar
situations, will give the army another mission besides war, and if this
latter exceeds the former, then this will be an indication that the army
is capable of transitioning from fighting its neighbors, from the condition of antibrotherhood, to truly brotherly conditions, to fighting the
forces that threaten the human race with hunger, illnesses, and death.
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uncontrollable. But if a Western city can discover its rural origins from its museums, then we, from our museums, will discover that our cities are not built from natural necessity, but
are created artificially and even violently, and moreover, they
are of very recent origin; around here, the urban problem, one
may say, is almost united with the problem of seasonal work.
Although there are the same reasons for our city problem as
there are in the West, and here the same reasons drive villagers into the cities (in other words, temptations on one side
and natural disasters on the other), our peasants are not yet
becoming permanent dwellers of the city, and only constitute
a temporary population, and the problem of seasonal work
would be congruent with the problem of the city if the temporary population did not turn into a permanent one.
Thus, when the city begins to realize its guilt before the
village and to reduce the production of temptations, no longer devoting its whole life to present-day concerns, then
the creation of a true museum or a unification of existing
ones begins, i.e. the restoration of ancestors that are common to both the city and the village. When the thought of
the city turns to those natural disasters from which the village suffers, and which generally are the reason for death,
then the museum of natural science too will be unified with
the historical museum in all the comprehensiveness of the
former. When the principles of the unbrotherly condition are
revealed through investigation, then the city too will become
brotherhood itself, and personal habitats will be turned into
services of the museum.
Investigation is not a new matter, while the realization of
the unbrotherly condition of the world is even older; in their
unification, both of these terms acquire a completely specific
meaning. Investigation, when it is focused on reasons for the
unbrotherly condition, ceases to be indictment; it calls no
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one to judgment, it is the complete opposite of the investigation that created reformation and revolution; it is opposite
to it in the impulse that creates it, in its means and its goal;
it is distinct from it in its very essence, because it is not an
abstract investigation, but one armed with all the museum’s
tools of memory, not separable from reason; moreover, this
investigation cannot be personal, solitary, it is realizable
only through the collective efforts of men, in other words:
the investigation of the principles of the unbrotherly condition
can only be brotherly. It arises from repentance, from the consciousness of the schism between men, the break in mind, in
feeling, in action—in a word, in the soul, as a consequence of
which we do not form a society for all-encompassing knowledge, acting according to a single plan.
*
*
*
Investigation, as something universal, is a refocusing to a single, higher religious and moral goal, of those thoughts, ideas,
and dreams about exclusively personal minutiae that are
common to every man, and without which no man can manage, but which lack a stated purpose, and therefore remain
merely a fruitless and useless waste of energy. Investigation
gives sacred direction to human thought and sets a goal of
congregating all people in a common house of the fatherland, in a museum, in a home of the Heavenly Father, the God
of all earthly fathers, in a house which, being a museum, is
at the same time a temple. A museum, as we have seen, cannot only be a depository; it must also be investigation; this
is the communion of all learned societies. On the other hand,
the museum can be neither a reading room nor a spectacle;
it must not serve degraded, so-called “popular” education.
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In this manner, the museum comes between scholars, those
producing constant systematic work by investigation, and all
scholarly enterprises; by means of these it collects everything
unscholarly and the whole younger generation, in order to
introduce them to the domain of investigation produced by
scholars. To put it another way, the museum is investigation,
produced by the younger generation under the guidance of
the older one.15 It can be revealed for all only be means of
learning; access to it passes through institutions of learning,
only through which can the congregation be produced, for
education is congregation itself. If a museum is not the highest,
final institution for all primary and secondary institutions,
and the common institution for all specialized institutions
(specialized educational institutions in themselves, due to
their insulation, cannot be considered the culmination of primary and secondary educational institutions), it will belong
neither to the fatherland, nor to the public; it will remain
“closed.” And thus the museum, conscious of its closed
nature, isolation, and separation, is not indifferent to the
narrow paths that lead to it. On the other hand, even specialists, conscious of their disconnection while at the same time
striving to communicate, to achieve completeness, cannot be
indifferent to the condition of the museum. Each profession
has its own higher educational institute; why should common unity not have a higher institute? Here’s the extent to
15. The museum cannot be the site of debates, arguments, polemics between religious sects, political and economic parties, and philosophical schools; in this it differs from parliaments, demonstrations,
and even church assemblies, for investigation consists in the discovery of reasons for arguments, which does not exclude, however,
arguments whose causes are rooted in the theoretical, and not the
practical, domain; and since reasons for arguments are rooted in the
latter, then they too will cease as soon as the common purpose has
been found; they will cease to be, at least relative to the most essential.
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which unification has been considered unnecessary, restrictive for individuality, for personal freedom!16
*
*
*
The museum resolves that contradiction of present-day life
under which the final level of education that the majority
receives is not even on the secondary, but on the elementary level. As a consequence, the mental development of the
majority halts or completely ceases at the time when reason has barely awoken. But if the elementary becomes the
advanced, then the advanced level becomes specialized, specific, and not the common purpose. Primary education institutions now give advanced education because the factory
needs child labor. And since the factory and the city, in general, also need production specialists, specialists in supervision, then advanced education cannot become universal.
*
*
*
But in what way can a museum become a real unity for specialized educational institutions? And can these latter become
instruments of unification, of congregation? They could, if
these same specialized institutions did not represent such
16. In essence, “common” not only does not have a higher agency,
it has no lower or middle one. This common does not exist at all, for
what is presently called common contains an outrageous contradiction within itself: between the Scripture and all secular subjects there
exists such an utter contradiction, as there is between the secular and
the spiritual in general. What kind of educational significance can the
teaching of subjects have when ones says something completely different from the other? (This has been pointed out multiple times before.)
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unbrotherly enterprises, like those conditions and classes for
which they are preparatory institutions; if these unbrotherly
conditions themselves do not at all feel the need to transition to the brotherly, then the museum too will not be unity
and fatherland. Nonetheless, as long as family exists, it is not
possible to not feel this demand.17 While it exists, there exist,
more or less, fatherly and brotherly relations; therefore, as
long as it exists, there will exist the contradiction between
the position of a man within a family and his position outside of it (i.e. in civil, political, and economic society), and
such a contradiction will demand a solution. In reciting “Our
Father” (i.e. God of our fathers, of the dead, and our God, i.e.
us, the living) we ask for the coming of exactly this Kingdom
of God, of the common family. The church too will become this
kingdom, if it acknowledges investigation, i.e. if it does not
reject reason for the purpose of reconstructing brotherhood. The
museum too will become this kingdom, if it sets fatherland
and brotherhood as the goal of its investigation.
Since presently there is no solution provided, there is
no path open to brotherhood, then one cannot blame those
classes, those estates which have wholly devoted themselves
to their specific, special, unbrotherly matters. In order to be
museum members-investigators, one must have some preparation; present educational institutions cannot provide this,
because they do not have this goal in sight (however, they in
general don’t devote themselves to any goal, which explains
the low level at which they remain). The requisite preparation
17. Family and kinship have an enemy that grows with each day, this
enemy is socialism, which can be called the last word and an unavoidable conclusion of the West; and this last word is the denial of the
family. The only means of escape from this rejection of kinship is a
true admission of kinship, i.e. acceptance, participation in solving the
question of unkinship and of the means of restoring kinship.
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will be possible when investigating reasons for the unbrotherly condition and the attainment of brotherhood will be set
as the universal goal of all people, i.e. not just of students, but
of all people of all callings and professions, of all presently
unbrotherly conditions. Only by establishing this goal will the
contradiction between the position of man inside the family and
his position outside the family be resolved, between his striving
for brotherhood and the unbrotherly condition of the world.
If the museum consists of people from all callings and professions (for now just the intelligentsia) who, as members of the
museum, will investigate, from the point of view of family,
the same things they are compelled and obligated to do outside the museum, i.e. if they collectively search, based on the
data received from their experience, for reasons that stimulate unbrotherly actions, for example: being a judge of one’s
brothers, being merchants and haggling with your own kin,
and so on—in this case the museum will satisfy this natural
need of any man who realizes the abnormality of his unbrotherly condition and wants to leave it. The museum even provides a way out of this contradiction, one that was not created
by it, but rather has always existed and constantly intensifies
more and more. Is it not natural for the convicted, or for the
one who is forced to always convict, to wish to leave this state,
to find a real solution where you do not have to transfer this
unbrotherly task to anyone else, but where the whole need
in this convitction and punishment is diminished? The plan
of eliminating reasons that produce the necessity of judicial
relations is not only holy in the moral respect, but it is also
deep and wide in the mental respect, in the sphere of knowledge. The court has a crude, immediate relationship to events
of reality, taken individually; while the aforementioned plan
embraces individual events in their totality, on a wide scale in
time and space, accessing the deepest reasons for events of a
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judicial, unbrotherly nature. When the plan is implemented,
the contradiction between what is in a museum and what is
outside of it will be annihilated …
Instead of trying to forget the realization of this abnormal
condition—faintly felt more or less by all—by playing cards
or other games, by trying to drown it in wine, in morphine,
or even in art, in dialogue with books (which is likewise
not a real occupation), isn’t it better to have a goal in mind,
namely, the elimination of all this abnormality? The latter
could be resolved only by annihilating the family (socialism)
or by the complete restoration of kinship. The donation of
any matter to a museum constitutes its survey in a fatherly
and brotherly spirit, in its final instance. The museum is a
church, but one that offers no peace from the disturbances
of life, as Platonizing Christianity does, and not Nirvana, as
Buddhism does, but makes everyone a participant in reconciliation. If a museum, on the one hand, accepts people of all
responsibilities and professions of the intelligentsia, and on
the other hand scholars of the museum accept responsibilities and professions corresponding to their sciences—in that
case the museum will come into a new relation with society,
and the intelligentsia, concentrated on this, will cease to be only
a thinking class; it will become a teaching and leading social
class, and not just self-professed, but by right.
The museum, as a transfer of the city to the village. When
scholars become an active, serving social class, and servants of all degrees become investigators, then the goal of
the museum will become a state goal, or more accurately, the
goal of transforming the state into a fatherland. When public
figures together with scholars become investigators of the
state as an unbrotherly society, and the “scholarly” investigators together with the public figures become investigators
of the project of brotherhood, then the museum will become
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a common place for the investigation of the state, for now
it is unbrotherly and unfatherly; the state will begin implementing the project of brotherhood, will start becoming a
fatherland, i.e. what it is called at present, but of which it has
no features. The content of the goal will be the solution of the
all-encompassing question of transitioning from the city to
the village. What was said about the city in general is what
the museums of the whole system of cities are doing, both
district cities under the control of the provincial ones, and
the latter ones under the control of the central ones. Inspired
by the unanimous wish to eliminate urban and manufacture
temptations, and wishing for liberation from natural disasters, these cities, museums, or the single museum, enter into
a union of agriculturists-natural experimenters, of sons. A
museum, indivisible from a temple, is the force transforming
society from the judicial and economic regime to the kin and
moral regime. Transforming the forces wasted in the civiceconomic struggle into the common purpose, and from
remnants saved from this struggle, reconstructing models
of what was lost in it, a museum reproduces the dead physically, in reality, by way of regulating nature.18
18. Easter is not a holiday, but the purpose of a museum, its work, its,
one might say, outset, function, sacred activity. But this is not the kind
of work which we would want to diminish, for it is what only exists
as a thought in the current holiday, but realized in action. This is not
a holiday, and not quotidian work; it is a transferal from the urban
purpose to the village purpose, and by calling this purpose Easter,
we translate, we propose this word, not as a “transition” where there
is the concept of unconscious movement, but “transferal,” signifying
conscious activity. (Transition relates to transferral, as resurrecting to
resurrection.) We call this transferal of the urban purpose to the village purpose “Easter” because our holiday of Easter, as opposed to
the Jewish Pesach, consists in returning from the capital, and the city
in general, to the village, to working the fields, to the graves of our
ancestors, because this holiday is the holiday of kinship, fatherland,
brotherhood, which has to replace the judicial-economic state.
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In essence, this is not new, for even now scientists transform into public figures, and public figures write investigations, but such phenomena are not universal and are
random; they are performed completed separately,19 and
yet even the investigators themselves do not achieve the
required depth; the investigated phenomena (judicial and
economic) are not seen as products of unbrotherly discord,
and this is because public figures and scholars have neither
a common place for activity, nor a common plan; the patriarchal house (museum) gives us that place, and the goal of
fatherland, demanding brotherhood, gives us a project of
investigation and a plan of action.
If the city is a combination of unbrotherly relations
and conditions, if it uses reason to destroy brotherhood,
and the village, feeding the city and giving it extra power,
could not use reason for the preservation of brotherhood
and fatherland, then obviously the question of reasons for
the unbrotherly condition is identified as the question of
the origin of the city, and the restoration of brotherhood is
a question of reconciling the city with the village in the purpose of the fatherland. The museum, in the aforementioned
sense, i.e. in connection to it being the temple, as a force,
transforming the world from an unbrotherly condition
into the opposite, brotherly state, is history itself, which
is transforming from an unconscious flow into conscious
activity; this is the transition of humankind into maturity,
and thus it is impossible to stop this movement, one could
19. Actually this transferal or transition signifies the transformation
of that which is done randomly, i.e. somewhere, sometime, by someone,
into what is obligatory for all actors and for all scholars. For the former
it makes investigation obligatory, and for the latter, activity is obligatory, and the one and the other are required to converge with the
requirements of the unscholars, i.e. what is demanded is investigation
not of cases generally, but of causes of unbrotherly phenomena.
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maybe only delay it, slow it down. The expansion of investigation (science, criticism) necessarily leads to maturity,
because it calls for complete self-investigation. The gap
between the completion of an event and its investigation
will be more and more decreased and, finally, investigation
will follow immediately after the completion of the event,
i.e. the history of what has occurred will follow immediately
after its completion, i.e. public figures themselves will also
be investigators. This is a necessary route to take so that
history does not happen after the event, but the event follows
a thought of it, so that thought is a projection of an event;
in this lies a necessary way to the fact that history, as an
event, determined by conditions that are independent of us,
would turn into a willed and planned action. The transition
to complete self-investigation must also happen even in
journalism, even though nowadays it is only criticism, but
it is journalism that must make itself into a powerful tool
for collecting for a museum.
Immaturity is manifested in the fact that the presently undeveloped mankind, subjected to external influence, forms into a blind organism; entry into maturity
can be manifested only in self-consciousness or complete selfinvestigation and in self-direction or the collection of forces
by means of investigating the principles of discord. Means
of communication already give humankind the possibility of coming to consciousness of itself as a single whole.
Even though there is still no permanent agency of selfconsciousness, there is not even a pan-science congress,
but only congresses of specialists in different, isolated sciences; but within specialties the realization of this isolation
can no longer be discreet, this abstraction of every one of
them from the others, and at the same time their necessity
of unification in one, all-specialty, scientific congress cannot
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be unrealized.20 In truth, specialized congresses, of which
exhibitions are a necessary accessory, are still wandering,
are still searching for an abode, a center, for only there can
they become the permanent, all-scientific congregation of
all exhibitions. But precisely because of this the constant
communion cannot not turn into a museum in the form of
material collections, cannot not acquire various, corresponding needs, agencies from observatories to archeological collections; and just as congresses, even today, are no longer
international, so the museum will be the concentration of
all peoples. But an All-Peoples Museum cannot remain only
knowledge, neither can it be an arbitration court for resolving international disputes, for the same can be said of judges
in international courts, as it can be said of judges in general;
they must be members of the museum to investigate reasons
for international arguments and international discord and
therefore, the museum, being, not only by necessity but by
its essence, the investigation of reasons for the unbrotherly
condition, will also be an action, essentially connected with
investigation, i.e. members of the museum must become
20. Although in specialist congresses there could and even should
appear the realization of unilateralism, as in congresses of local investigators and actors, the realization of separation, of being torn from
the center, is insufficient for unification in the all-science, all-nation,
constant communion, or the museum. Only military conscription, a
constant expectation of war, arousing or intensifying the realization
of morality, can serve as a sufficient stimulus for universal unification
into a communion on the question of causes of war. Uniting scholars, teachers, and actors of state and economic life as members of a
museum, we propose first of all that all of them without exception bear
a lifetime military conscription, i.e. be prepared each day and hour to
step out and march, and therefore, realize themselves as more mortal
than citizens. Those who constantly wait for war and, therefore, do
not forget their mortality, must constitute congresses and museums,
especially the international ones, the chief purpose of which is the
question of the causes of wars among peoples.
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international public figures, as the latter must become members of the museum. Thus the International Museum in its
composition, besides scholars, taking on themselves this or
that activity, will include (a) all diplomatic agents, having
become investigators, (b) merchants of international trade,
whom education must turn into investigators and whose
research interests will unite in a museum, and (c) military,
whose transition into a museum should be through a congress on the problem of introducing meteorological observations and experiments in artillery fire, especially cannon fire.
In its collection of objects, the museum is (a) a trade cabinet,
filled according to the progress of investigation, with items
that were considered harmful because of their luxury, (b) an
archive of international diplomacy, i.e. an archive of all ministers of foreign affairs as expressions of the greatest unbrotherhood, and (c) a military arsenal (an international armory),
the purpose of which is the application of military weapons
to the problem of regulating the common force of nature and
the donation to the museum of those weapons which are not
capable of such primary application or of dual use.
The museum, in an international sense, is the transition
from a legal order, which is inseparable from the international and universal-trade discord, into brotherly agreement.
Turning the forces wasted in wars and international trade
struggle toward a common purpose of the fatherland, and,
based on remnants of all weapons (trophies) of struggle,
mentally reconstructing images of the fallen, the museum
will reconstruct the fallen corporeally, really, by the path of
the regulation of nature.
The immediate problem of universal communion and
an all-science museum is the question of the transition or
transferal of urban and nomad conditions into agricultural
existence; this is the problem of the unifying Byzantium, the
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center of agricultural and civilized people, and Pamir, the
center of nomads. Byzantium and Pamir are two points; from
the first, the oceanic force can inflict a blow on the continental, and from the second, the continental can threaten the
oceanic dominion, and thus the problem of the international
museum will be the resolution of the Eastern problem for the
West and the Western problem for the East, the Southern
problem for Christianity and the Northern problem for
Islam; put another way, this is the resolution of a problem
of the central city, i.e. the liberation of Constantinople. And
really there can be no other fate for Constantinople than to
be either the subject of universal discord or to become the
facilitator of universal peace, in the name of fatherland and
brotherhood, i.e. to become an international, and not just
judicial, museum. Without such mediation it is impossible
for the East (Russia) to turn to even a peaceful agriculture,
enabled by universal regulation; such agriculture is impossible if Islam remains militant based on everyday life necessity and religious conviction; the West too will remain armed
for expansion and the defense of its trade profits, the development and expansion of which it sees as the unique and
universal goal of the world.
The International Museum is international not just based
on its staff, but also based on the nature of its activity. Besides
the aforementioned purposes or occupations, it, as historical,
is the investigation of common origin or kinship, of reasons
for the break, or for forgetting kinship; as linguistic, it has as
the subject of its investigations the unification in language;
as natural, it creates the agricultural and meteorological
regulator, the tool for keeping the peace. The question of
international peace is, of course, not new; in feeling it is universal, it’s no coincidence that besides religious sermons and
besides the “League of Peace” there even exists a Congress
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of International Law! … One needs to say that this law is less
unbrotherly than all the others, because it, having no external military force, cannot be called judicial in the sense of law
alone; it is an illusion.
*
*
*
Journalism, if it wishes to be the fifth great estate, must transform from international abuse, igniting hostility between the
peoples (what journalism is today), to explaining the conditions of universal peace or creating a project for the transformation of Constantinople and Pamir (that is, Constantinople
in connection with Pamir) into an international museum. In
conjunction with this, journalism must transform from interclass abuse, igniting class hostility, which is what journalism
does today in the agencies of the red, black, and gold “international,” preaching under the guise of international peace
a war between the people (a revolution)—journalism needs
to turn itself into a project of the people’s museum. The goal
and sacred duty of journalism is to unite in the common goal
of the fatherland; in the meantime, today each journal would
rather be a large capitalist in isolation, or even be an tool
of large capitalism, than together be a great estate, even an
estate over estates. They suppose that it is better to be a chief
of a sect or a social class in isolation, than together be the soul
of the whole human race.
Interclass peace is just as impossible without international peace as is the reconciliation of nations without the
reconciliation of classes. Human brotherhood will be actualized only when there are no unbrotherly conditions. Until the
triumph of one nation over another, one class over another,
that delights our century, is not substituted with a universal
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triumph of people over nature in the task of installing regulation, until then “peace on Earth” and “good will” between
people (“among men”) is impossible.
Fatherland and brotherhood, and the museum along
with them, have no need for either a special international
agency, nor for national agencies, for as soon as human
thought turns away from criticism as condemnation, abuse
(expression of childhood), to self-investigation, to the clarification of principles of unfraterity, then, by force of this
alone, its subject will become fatherland and brotherhood;
and then this thought will penetrate even the “internationalist” agencies, no matter how deeply journalism generally has
renounced fatherland and brotherhood; the more this idea
is refuted, the clearer the truth of the fatherly and brotherly
goal will be to the refuters themselves.
*
*
*
The museum is an interpretive force, or to put it better, a
subtracting, taking, removing from use of that which produces discord, serves hostility (we mean things that produce
discord and serve as tools of hostility), not waiting for the
point when all these become unfit for use (we mean a voluntary donation of things, and not their going out of use).
In other words, enemy forces themselves extract from their
surroundings the sources of hostility and through this action
cease to be enemies, unbrotherly, transition themselves
and transform everyone with them from a judicial and economic construct into a kind and moral one, replacing urban
manufacturing with village-handcraft industrialization.
The museum is literally a transferal force, because there is
a substantive difference between transferal and transition;
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transition, completed all on its own, belongs to the period of
the childhood of man, of unconscious history, whereas transferal is an expression of maturity, of history as activity; this
is not yet the fulfillment of God’s Law. This transition is an
historical law, according to which, despite human will, i.e.
due to discord and the inactivity of the will of the entirety of
humankind, and not, of course, by Divine design, but due to
personal imperfection, all things, all agencies become unsatisfactory, unfit for use, and thus are either abandoned (due
to human carelessness) or destroyed (due to human malice),
even if they are then preserved (due to inactivity of thought)
without any initial plan. This transition, fatal and blind, is
accompanied by pain, to the regret of some (the older generation) and the happiness of others (the younger generation),
and they call it progress. Transition refers not just to things,
but to people; it is the extolment and the expulsion of the old
by the young, it is unconscious birth and death, in a word, it
is glorified contemporary “progress.” Birth, while it exists,
cannot but be accompanied by pain, but never have the pains
of giving birth to the new and the pains of the old been as
sharp as they are in our time. Even though progress does follow
some laws, at any rate, it is done unconsciously and irrationally.
Human development consists in, as it is clear for every adult,
making everything that has been happening today by itself happen consciously and independently. Historical, unconscious
transition is accompanied by a break, destruction, whereas
the transferal of judicial and economic life to the archive, to
the museum, consists not only in preservation, but also in
reconstruction based on the object as a work of art, even if
the makers of those objects, their authors, are hostile.
Transferal creates a museum of objects, but transferal is
at the same time the congregation of scholars, having become
teachers, and teachers, having become investigators. By this
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word (“transferal”) we also mean the transformation of the
actors of judicial and economic society into investigators,
and lecturers and scholars into actors of this society; so that
transferal is investigation too, completed by the younger generation under the direction of the older inside the museum,
and a realization, completed outside of the museum by the
sons (i.e. the younger generation) under the direction of the
fathers (i.e. the same older generation). Inside, the museum
is a project, and outside, it is its realization, the project of exodus and the changing of a thinking city into an active village,
the transforming of a lethal force into a life-giving one. Thus,
transferal is the complete opposite of progress, under which the
young eliminate the old (when the student considers himself
above the professor, when boldness becomes the highest virtue and the leader begins to fear his subordinates.) Transferal
is return, the transferring force is a unifying and resurrecting
force. Transferal or Easter is the common triumph, the triumph
of triumphs over nature, instead of the triumph of classes over
classes, peoples over peoples.
The museum-temple is a force, which leads from the judicial and economic urban discord to village, moral, and kin
harmony, a force that turns energy lost in struggle into the
purpose of fatherland. The natural path toward this transition consists in a city realizing the artificiality of its existence,
the unlawfulness of its origin, in realizing that at its basis
lie imaginary, false, artificial (even if they’ve become second
nature) desires, and not real needs; in realizing that from
these imaginary desires arise unbrotherly production and
unbrotherly distribution, creating all the urban discord,
and this discord explains the necessity of supervision, and
of courts, and of the military; a state is a cluster of cities. To
eradicate imaginary desires it would be enough to just be
conscious of their imaginary nature, if only real desires were
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given proper satisfaction. By real desires we mean not only
the satisfaction of necessary material needs, supporting the
forces of the body and the vitality of the spirit, but also the
satisfaction of mental and spiritual needs, i.e. the need for a
museum, as a society “for one’s soul,” for realizing the purpose of the fatherland.
*
*
*
The museum of physical objects will be created when intelligent society, pursuing a real goal and satisfying serious needs,
becomes, on the one hand, conscious of the infantile, effeminate nature of its urban life, and on the other, sees under
this external, imaginary beauty that arises from a childish
and sensual aspiration all the hostility and squalor of the
majority. In this way, the museum of objects will be created
from velvet and other rags and tatters, while the production
of luxury objects will be transformed into the production of
necessary objects; in place of weapons of struggle will be created weapons of investigation and even regulation. Prisons
and guard booths, these necessary accessories of luxury and
tools of external, sentry surveillance, will turn into monuments and will be replaced by self-observation. The present
tools of exchange will form the last period of the numismatic
phase, being replaced by the mutual knowledge of needs. In
a word, all material expressions of the unbrotherly city will
transform into the creation (a composition, so to speak) of
a museum; moreover, this production will not only be the
representation of the city and its life, but will be a negation
of non-brotherhood, and will be the project of brotherhood.
The present passive museum of study aids, taken even in
an ideal sense (as the likeness of the whole Universe) is based
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on a false theory, even though aesthetics considers it an absolute truth that a work of art is only a depiction of its time.
This is the kind of false idea on which we base the museum.
However, the present museum is only urban: it is only a faithful depiction of urban difference and discord, taken as a normal condition, and thus unnoticed, while the rest of the world
is represented here as the city sees it. One only has to open the
systematic catalogue of any library to see that in its categories and subcategories it reflects the division of society into
unbrotherly classes and conditions, the division into parties
and sects, in such a way that the catalogue is a real representation or resemblance of the world disunited and disintegrated.
But these dissociations and separations, this absence of unity,
this break, do not produce an impression of pain; we do not
notice them, because of course the transformation from
something living and kindred to something dead-civic does
not seem either abnormal or difficult to us; meanwhile, if a
museum gave such an impression it would not be a simple
depiction of a disintegrating world but would already contain
in itself, even in an embryonic state, the project of the unification of the world. Regrettably, the present age, living in a
world of disintegration and being used to it, does not demand
unity from a whole slew of scientific and artistic works (libraries, art galleries, and from the whole museum, in general); this
unity is just as unnecessary in this regard to our century, just
as unimportant, as there is no need for (already having higher
specialized institutions for separate sciences) a higher educational institution for general education, for teaching unity.
Our age, even though it experiences an inconvenience from
disintegration, does not realize the source of these inconveniences, from where they arise.
Thus, according to contemporary aesthetic theory, the
museum is only a representation; however, the great works of
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art on which this theory is presumably based, while depicting the world, have tried to give it their own image; thus,
reflecting the world in themselves, these artworks deny it.
There is no real work of art that does not produce some sort
of action, some change in life; in great epic poems there is a
plan for such change, or better yet, a work of art is a project
of new life. In Homer’s epic poems there was a project for the
unification of Greece, and only because the epics correctly
reflected the disagreements between the Greeks; there was
even a project for the unity of East and West, as represented
by the Athenians and the Trojans! A true admirer of Homer,
Alexander, also wished to realize this project, but met with
opposition from his insincere admirers, the Macedonians,
the Greeks, and especially philosophers. In Dante’s poem
there is a project for the unification of Western Europe, just
as in the works of Goethe and other German writers there
is a project for a great separation between Christianity and
paganism, between the spiritual and the secular, between
Medieval Europe and New Europe, the new, as the imitator
of the ancient but not the Homeric, not the truly Classical,
for the truly classical contained nothing contradictory to
Christianity because it lamented discord and therefore
strove for reconciliation. If in antiquity they perceived the
blind forces of nature as immortal in the form of gods, they
acknowledged them with regret. Christianity, the Gospels,
even though modern scholars consider it only a work of literature, is in reality, in essence, a project of reconciliation.21
21. The French “encyclopedie” of the last century, in the special
attention it paid to craft, might be called the project of an industrial
museum, the project of tolerance, the projects of those reforms which
Catherine, Friedrich, and others introduced, and especially the project
of creating or strengthening the third order of people and the demotion of people of the first two orders. In the works of Rousseau, one
might say, the project of Deism is contained—this unnatural religion,
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German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century outlined the theory of the museum of that time, which
collected artifacts of language, beliefs, and law; in comparing them they revealed the unity of the origin of languages,
beliefs, and so forth. But this museum was not a project for
the internal unification of even its own peoples; it was, in
essence, even a strengthening of the disunion between the
artificial and the natural, between reason and will, between
theory and practice, between past and present. The museum
gave not to the people, but to the intelligentsia class of all
Germany, not common saints, as happens in religious congregation, but common poets and philosophers. Rejecting
the French poets, Germany became closer to England,
absorbing Shakespeare. Germany treated the latter not critically but with adoration; Shakespeare was placed outside
of history; for the Germans he was not a product of time and
age, as were other poets. German science and philosophy
distinguished artificial works of literature from national,
natural works, as you would distinguish national language
from literary language, as they distinguished natural law
(according to kinship) from artificial lawmaking. But such
a distinction, even though it really exists, is not as absolute
as German scholars suppose, who have not paid attention
to the other side of the issue, i.e. to similarity. If national
epic poems are the products of the whole nation, then each
nation also consists of individuals; it is a collection of individuals, with the difference that in this collection there is
presenting itself as natural, and the project of artificial virtue, realized by Robespierre, and especially the project of a return to nature,
whose burden Rousseau, as a city dweller, never felt. There could also
never be a real feeling with Rousseau; there was only sentimentality,
i.e. simulated feeling, according to which city dwellers were allowed to
envy the peasants, imagining them as shepherdesses and paysannes.
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much more unity than in the social classes of writers and
scholars. On the other hand, each of the artificial works can
no longer be called a work of one person; undoubtedly, the
German and non-German learned and literatti know very
well of this participation of the many in their works and,
nonetheless, such multi-author works are signed with one
name. It is self-evident that the authors themselves, no matter how much they would like, cannot list all their collaborators, and thus they generally refer to the Zeitgeist, which
speaks through them; but this Zeitgeist also spoke through
those creators of epic poems, whom German scholars do not
now wish to acknowledge as authors. Why do they assume
authorial rights for works in which the Zeitgeist is also
expressed?22 A whole science, the history of literature, has as
its subject the restoration of anonymous collaborators, who
observe this Zeitgeist in us, although it’s impossible to judicially prove the participation of these anonymous collaborators.23 The very law that recognizes literary property cannot
remain consistently true to this principle and so allows
exceptions; by allowing quotations from other works, the
22. German aesthetics, which discovered the distinction between
artificial literature and natural or folk literature, chose to disregard
the similarities between the two. Praising folk literature, German literature remains with its defects, and does not perceive as necessary
the unification of individual efforts for the creation of a common purpose, and this is so because nowhere has there been such a contradiction between knowledge and action as in Germany. German literature
did not recognize a divine meaning in its works, and even based on its
content it was not divine; on the contrary, it was the rejection of everything holy. Germany (and Western Europe in general), while preaching socialism in the production of objects, dealt only briefly with word
production, with works of art.
23. Not only the history of literature, but the history of all physical
works of art has as its subject the revelation and restoration of those
producing, laboring, and working on it—in the majority of cases, of
course, anonymously.
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law itself allows a violation of what it itself recognizes as literary property. In any case, it is a moral obligation to search
for a solution to this abnormal position, and this solution,
one might say, reveals itself: if a nation creates one work,
and even if between two works of the most distant nations
there are similarities, then this proves that all humankind
is one kin; and if it had greater means for preservation, better memory, better strength than it has at present, in this
case it would have one poem, lamenting its disintegration
in time and space. And if humankind, before its disintegration, had the same means of communication as we have now,
then perhaps it would not have disintegrated, at least not in
space, and its unity would not have been what it is now.
People live an urban life; the forefather tells his children
about their ancestors, without demanding an honorarium
for this of course; the descendants continue to carry the
tradition—an epic—so that its authors will be sons speaking about fathers and feeling, recognizing themselves as
brothers. Such literature is a sacred task, kinship by content
and by authors, and the transformation of such a system
into property would, of course, be sacrilege. All sciences, all
works of literature, were formed as a result of the disintegration of this epic, because people themselves disintegrated;
forgetting their kinship, they became citizens, and formed
all the unbrotherly conditions, all the professions.24 But now
these unbrotherly conditions, these professions, have their
dedicated agencies and journals, the absence of which for
a different good goal was the reason for disintegration. It is
possible to have such agencies, and it is even our primary
24. Secular literature is only a distortion, a perversion, and a disintegration of the literature of the people. The literary expression of
unbrotherhood and the oblivion of the fathers are preceded by the
real unbrotherhood: citizenship.
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responsibility to preserve unity as soon as it is restored.
Actually, journals are more capable of restoring unity than
of preserving it.
*
*
*
The unification of specialists, i.e. of experts on all unbrotherly conditions, of all without exception—their unification
in the library, including all data, all documents, and substantial evidence relating to the matter of the unbrotherly condition, such a unification will create a museum that has the
goal of creating a project of unification within a common,
brotherly union. A museum, speaking today’s language, is
a commission, and according to previous terminology, is a
congregation investigating the matter of the uprising of sons
against fathers, a universal and basic matter, a matter for the
“young” of all countries, which serves as a sign of the end
of the world, of the fall, disintegration—in a word, destruction. The concept of the end of the world is already contained
in the phrase “rebellion of the sons against the fathers”; the
words “end of the world” and “rebellion of the sons against
the fathers” are equivalent expressions, synonyms.
A museum is a congregation on the matter of the unbrotherly condition, which in the course of eighteen centuries has
not only not moved a step, but has reached the point where
not only does brother go against brother, but sons go against
fathers, to such a degree that in a museum, in this graveyard,
the bones of the fathers shudder. A museum is not some kind
of a separate attempt, but the combination of all the forces
and means for solving the universal question of unbrotherhood. Thus the museum is universal both in its personal and
material content. And therefore if the project created by such
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a commission cannot be artificial, cannot just be an agreement of personal opinions, even if numerous, but rather will
be a conclusion drawn from all facts and opinions relevant to
this, a conclusion produced by the younger generation under
the direction of the older, then the realization of this projectconclusion will have nothing in common with how judicial
and civil law is executed. The creators of the brotherhood
project are not only investigators of the past, but are also
investigators and observers of the present, i.e. they are not
only scholars, but also actors, they are not only theoreticians,
but also practitioners, and only by this path will we eliminate
the gap between theory and practice. On the other hand, making the younger generation participants in this conclusionproject will give this matter historical consistency; and then
the younger generation will not be in opposition to the older
generation, and will act in accord with them, without struggle; they will continue working on this matter.
*
*
*
Thus, a museum, as was mentioned, is a commission on the
matter of the uprising of sons against fathers, on the matter of the unbrotherly condition of the world; it consists
too of scholars who’ve become actors and teachers, and of
actors who’ve transformed into investigators and teachers,
and also of teachers who must also make themselves actors
and investigators. In other words, in a museum, all these three
functions are united: investigation, teaching, and acting, and
thus those defects that originate from their separateness,
which are completely unnatural, are annihilated. Can there
be anything more unnatural than the separation of science,
i.e. thought, from action, or the separation of teaching from
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science and action, which makes teachers teach, not knowing
why, because they take no part in investigation—makes them
teach without knowing what for, because they likewise do
not participate in the reality for which they prepare? Because
it’s unnatural, the separation of these three functions occurs
either accidentally, unconsciously, and elementally—as popular faith, and so on, was created—or arbitrarily—like the
palaces of deputies, various present-day commissions, and
so forth; and thus even if a museum can be called a commission, a congregation, as defined above, then it’s only that sort
of commission, that sort of congregation, at the creation of
which randomness and arbitrariness are eliminated; moreover, the elimination of both is necessary not only in the case
of staff, but also in the case of the main subject, goal, path. A
museum is created by a natural force and not by a blind one,
by one that has arrived at consciousness. If we allow ourselves
to curtail the fields of study of a museum, to limit its staff,
to generally allow ourselves arbitrariness upon its creation,
the museum will turn into a legislative body or something
similar. Similarly, if we were to eliminate all the arbitrariness
and randomness from legislative bodies, councils, and parliaments, then such councils and communions would turn
into museums. Even lawyers, notaries, and representatives of
the commercial-industrial classes, of whom legislative bodies are primarily composed, could form a museum, but only
on the condition that they acknowledge the temporality of
all their professions and strive to make them short-lived. In
the meantime, legislative bodies will legalize the existence
of these professions and parties, and with them the debates
themselves, so that judging by the belligerency of the latter, we can see the severity of the hostility that is tearing up
the people that are supposedly represented by such assemblies. Thus, legislative bodies lead in a completely opposite
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direction to the one that could lead them to a museum. They
can get to it only when they set as their goal the investigation
of reasons why they themselves have split into parties; in this
case the parties could reconcile, form a real union, and not a
random congregation of people, differing from each other in
almost everything. However, couldn’t members of legislative
bodies, after violent arguments in a palace, having gathered
in a museum, discuss these questions philosophically—we
would say, if these philosophers did not belong to these same
parties—or discuss them scientifically, if science had not elevated chance and blind development into law? And thus we
must say: members of legislative bodies can, after arguing
in a palace, discuss these same questions in a museum not
philosophically, not scientifically, but from the point of view of
universal humanity, for which there can be no parties. How to
realize this, how to come to such a union, that’s the question
that needs a solution.
The history of all legislative bodies, from the ancient to
the newest (American), despite the historian’s wish to diminish their hideousness, indicates (and cannot but indicate, for
their hideousness is not in the fact that they are the extreme,
but that they are a normal state of things), that all these chambers would become empty if only there appeared a new way
for arranging human affairs, which human souls crave , strive
for, finding it even in otherworldly existence, like Plato and
contemporary spiritualists. Plato and the spiritualists were
seeking in the other world what this world should have
provided; a museum is indeed a path to the realization of a
worldwide idea in the present world. Anyone who is capable
of self-accusation can become a member of a museum, anyone who is capable of doubting their worth, anyone who can
evaluate their actions from the point of view of brotherhood,
which is the essence of the world. A call to this communion,
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which can be heard in the New Testament, comes from inner
consciousness, from the depth of conscience, from dissatisfaction that is felt, even if faintly, by every human being who
performs or has to perform an unbrotherly task of a judicial
or economic nature.
The scholarly class and journalism. Firstly, this is a question
of unifying journals, and secondly, of liberating journalism
from the yoke of capital, which subordinates mental tasks to
the laws of factory production, i.e. to produce competition
and work falsification, which in turn corrupts journalism, a
mental task. This is the question of transforming journalism
from immaturity, from discord, to maturity, to unity, from
secular to religious, Christian.
If each social class, in each separate location, had an
agency, then the unification of journals would be the unification of kin; but journalism is an agency of cities and of city
classes, which live in discord. That is why, in journalism, there
is both external and internal discord. The lowest stratum of
the human race, the village, which doesn’t read or write,
which speaks differently, but which thinks almost the same
way, but which does not have a common purpose of fatherland, even though it honors its fathers as one—the village
class has no means of expressing its thoughts, its thoughts of
fathers as One Father. Only after unifying itself, and unifying
the quarreling classes of the city, can journalism become an
agency for and a leader of the village class, in other words,
of all humankind. Current journalism, while infiltrating the
village with its advertisements, can only be an agent of urban
temptation and a portent of unkinly and unbrotherly relations; it can only destroy kinship and set sons against fathers.
Journalism could be a new type of missionary work, a
new stage or phase of unification, if only it could unite itself.
Unification is the goal of the press, of print; it is its religion. As a
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result of expanding literacy, there opens a possibility for even the
most distant regions to hear what is said in the center of faith and
knowledge; literacy, so understood, so posited, is the new means
of unification, through the fulfillment of the command “go, and
teach”; in this sense it has a moral-religious meaning.
Our time, in a certain sense, is much more receptive to
the purpose of fatherland, to unification, than it was eighteen centuries ago, when the question of brotherhood was
first raised. Christianity in our time can deal not just with
individuals but with classes, or unbrotherly conditions, with
whole classes of individuals who have their own agencies in
the form of journals and newspapers. To convert one journal
to Christianity, i.e. to repentance for discord, to preparedness for
unification in the common purpose of fatherland, this does not
yet mean, of course, to convert a whole class that is served
by this journal as an agency, it is not to convert it from an
unbrotherly to a brotherly state; but this already means to
attain the mission. Journalism has a missionary meaning for
the museum as well, for through journals one can create a
museum, though journals the class of scholars can turn into
a commission or communion on the question of immaturity.
Journalism is the voice, speaking in all languages of the world,
preaching to all tribes and peoples of all the ends of the Earth.
Journalism has been called the expression of social opinion;
it would be more correct to call it the expression of opinions
of different unbrotherly conditions, of which society is composed, or of parties, also unbrotherly, into which society is
split. Journalism is also called the leader of public opinion;
this means that journalism is not only an agency of reason,
forming opinion, but also an agency of will, of action (not of
all of society, but of separate parties and classes); reason, in
its essence, demands unity, and cannot stop at an opinion
or at opinions, and the same must be said of the will: in it,
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too, there is a demand for union, therefore it follows that the
goal of journalism too is to attain unity and, instead of opinion,
to establish truth, instead of class advantage and party interest, to establish a common good. Expressing the opinion of the
unbrotherly condition, leading the unbrotherly task, can be
excusable for a head (i.e. for a journal) that receives its sustenance from the body that is materially dependent on the
unbrotherly class, the manifestation of which is this journal,
and which itself cannot escape its unbrotherly condition,
because it can only realize it in its head, i.e. in a journal, in
which is concentrated (at least the journal serves as such
a concentration) the intelligentsia of the class. If the head
gains some independence from the body, as it must, i.e. if
the head guides and directs it, not corrupts it with perverted
taste, then the transition from opinions to truth will be possible, from class interest to universal good; then the difference
of opinions, imposed by class differences, will disappear, and
the very obstacles to reconciliation, to the unification of the
journal, will disappear.25
25. Present-day journalism can be considered as one part of a disintegrated museum, whereas from journalism that has been liberated
from the influence of hostile classes and even controls them, can be
created a museum, or a universal editorial board of a journal, which
would be a museum. We can say that a museum preexisted in those
communities where there was no distinction between thought and
action, between thinkers, actors, and teachers, where every father
and every grown son were teachers of a younger generation. But in
such a community a museum existed in an original, embryonic state,
and not as it is supposed to exist, when created by a mind and conscious human action. Present-day journalism is in opposition to the
museum: journalism, while constituting a greater force, is wasted on
present-day issues, when a real, all-national museum having as its
foundation an all-national purpose remains neglected due to its powerlessness, due to journalism wasting these powers on a matter that is
foreign to the fatherland, or to the true good. When journalism realizes its defects there will appear a project for a museum, a roadmap
for it, because, as was mentioned, journalism itself can be viewed as
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But in reality, instead of investigating causes for the
unbrotherly condition, journalism still intensifies hostility, occupies itself with exposures, with “public disclosure,”
and its whole activity is limited to creating ephemeral creatures which, having appeared in the morning, and having
stung, disappear in the evening, and on the next day preserve
themselves in a museum. However, even though the activity of journalism is ephemeral, the hostility that it creates
leaves deep marks.26 Journalism is more harmful the more it
pulls in and practically absorbs literature, and subordinates
science and art to its influence. Journalism is supported by
painting with its pictures, by theaters with their productions,
and even by music in the feelings it arouses, so journalism
operates with all artistic means. Journalism is a force, and a
great force, but it is wasted on ephemeral tasks—on front-page
articles in which the spirit of the parties is expressed, on the
communicating of piquant news and sensational rumors
which arouse worry and sometimes terror, and often on types
of speculation, on gossip plus advertisement, and most of all
on chatter (“feuilleton”). Being the complete opposite of the
museum, journalism is the fullest expression of our age; and
those who treat small cities with disdain, where there is no
censure of gossip, at the same time admire large cities, where
bigger gossip has full freedom. The intense struggle between
part of a disintegrated museum, even though it considers and makes
itself a complete, independent being. In a museum, the older generation supervises research performed by the younger generation when
journalism assumes the role of a teacher of the older generation; and
that is because educational organizations, elementary and secondary
as well as specialized, without having a higher-level course, which can
only be provided by a museum, produce ignoramuses that are easily
susceptible to journalists’ control.
26. True journalism produces not just hostility, but also love. But
what kind? Sexual, of course, with its novels, tales, and such things.
Arousal of such love also leaves traces.
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the parties, not shy to use any means, enraptures the same
kind of people who treat the same struggle in a small city
with disdain. Why, however, is one and the same phenomenon ugly on a small scale, but appears majestic in a large?
Journalism is an unbrotherly task precisely because it is unfatherly; it only knows the present, only deals with issues of the day
and forgets the past. When literature too turns into journalism, then it too produces only ephemeral, short-lived works.
Journalism is the expression of “men of the hour”; what else could
it produce other than ephemeral, one-day wonders? Literature,
becoming feuilleton, is not more long-lived than leaves, withered, fallen, and carried off by the wind. A museum does the
same service to the literature of day-laborers as it does to
newspapers, that the public does not remember and uses as
wrappers, if not for something even less dignified. And science
becomes journalism, serves the ephemeral, when it is preoccupied
with applying industry to military.
Journal literature, the literature of personal and ephemeral writing, is a product of the same mind, the same soul
that produced agriculture, the natural agricultural religion
connected to it, and national epics, even though they were
created in the course of many centuries and by many generations, but nonetheless preserved unity, in the form of
one poem. And in the city, the same mind, having forgotten its origin, became the denial of agricultural religion, not
the denial of what is unreal, imaginary in it, but the whole
goal of it, the obligation of every general to live for all. The
agricultural, kindred, communal life was the basis of such
unity, whereas in the city, where existence depends on separate, personal, quotidian efforts, even literature could not
maintain unity. Only habit prevents us from seeing all the
unnaturalness of this literary disintegration, in which not
only do the works of separate persons strive to differentiate
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themselves from one another, as though they do not work
for one and the same purpose (by the way, they do not even
wish to acknowledge the existence of such a purpose), but
each separate man also produces in the course of his life a
multitude of works, among which there is, apparently, nothing common, in which the author himself does not find unity,
and doesn’t even consider it necessary. The height of such
disintegration is the feuilletonist who converses every day
on topics that have no mutual connection, and he does not
even think about establishing one; it doesn’t even occur to
him, for he writes only to forget himself what he has written.
Truly, this is the literature of ephemeral trivia!
*
*
*
If in folk poems individuality was lost and unity was preserved, then in urban works unity is lost and individuality is
preserved; however, it is preserved only insofar as unity was
preserved in folk poems, for there was no real unity in them
either. The realization that all the discord between parties
and classes and the separation of literary intellectual forces
arises from the conditions of urban life—this is the realization that will lead to the return to village life, if mind and
conscience still have any value in life and if the conditions of
material existence do not impede it.
But will journalism deal with the problem of the conditions for disunity and the reasons for unification? Connected
with all sides of life, with the religious and the secular, with
the civic and the military, and especially with universal military conscription, the question of unification cannot but
demand attention. Just the realization of the reasons and
conditions of disunion will bring unity into the thinking
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and writing of the scientific and literary class, will give it a
common purpose and theme for a common work, and this
subject is so vast, the problem is so great, that more than
one generation is necessary for its realization. The problem
consists in the unification of unbrotherly conditions (classes,
parties) of the city and in the transferal from the city to the
village, or in their reconciliation; the project of the unification of the unbrotherly conditions of the city with the village
for a common filial purpose is possible only for a union of
journals, and not for each journal separately. For disunited
journalism, it was only possible to create a project of constitutional government, of which this journalism itself would
be a necessary member; through it, parliamentary hostility
would become, so to speak, the hostility of the entire state.
It is hard to say whether it is the struggle between parties
that is reflected in journalism or the other way around. In
any case, disunion is not an accidental characteristic, and
discords are not random phenomena; they are just as necessary an accessory of present-day journalism as opposition is
to parliament. The foundation for the union of journals could
only be the realization that political passions and debates
that originate in them cannot create anything durable, cannot create a really human, brotherly society, and that the
foundation for a brotherly society can only be a fatherly goal.
Journals, like all industrial enterprises, defend their right
to exist,27 but producing only ephemeral beings, they cannot
be immortal, for they lack the first necessary condition for
immortality: agreement. After being donated to museums,
journals begin an after-death existence; they are subjected
27. In fact, editorial boards of many journals are not just industrial
enterprises, but Pharisee-industrial, because they, under the guise of
serving a common goal, under the guise of disinterest, protect only
their own interests, often not stopping short any tactic whatsoever.
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to investigation; an author is defined by his work, an editorial
board is defined by its journal. In order to evaluate itself in
the present time, the journal must imagine itself being in a
museum, i.e. must not leave the work of investigation to our
descendants, not even to the immediate generation. If a journal leaves it to the descendants to investigate, then it cannot
count on fame in the future, which is easy to determine if you
imagine journals in the state they are in now, participating in
commercial deception with advertisements, entertaining the
public with feuilleton chatter, jesting, and fooling, while in
front-page articles expressing hostility that rips classes and
people apart. Generally one can say: that which presently
gives notoriety and furnishes the journal with cash will not
serve its honor in the future; self-investigation does not, must
not, and cannot furnish cash, but it gives a stable existence. If
a journal steps on the road of self-investigation, it will make
itself a museum, i.e. a commission on the question of immaturity, the project for which can be created through reconciling the journals. Thus the museum would be open for all,
inviting all to common action, and only then would reconciliation begin and journalism start transforming into a great estate.
Present-day journalism consists of agencies of hostile people, hostile classes, parties, and sects, and even the hostility expressed
by the journals is stronger than the hostility felt by people,
classes, and sects, whose agencies the journals are. And this
means that journalism has no unity, that in this great nation,
as it incorrectly calls itself, there is no capital, no general editor; and it has no right to be called either great, or to be called
a nation, i.e. a force, for only a unified nation is great; only it will
be greater than all nations, the nation of nations.
Self-investigation will make journalism international,
and interclass, and intersectoral, for self-investigation, i.e.
the exposure of reasons for hostility, leads from discord to
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reconciliation. With self-investigation, journalism will transform from an inflamer of hostility into a peace-builder, or
at the very least a museum that is developing the project of
a peace-building agency. Until journals have matured, i.e.
reached self-investigation, they deserve reproach, directed
at book scholars, Pharisees, and Sadducees, for they have
taken the “key of understanding” and themselves do not
enter the kingdom of self-investigation, the international,
interclass, intersectarian kingdom, or simply the Orthodox
kingdom; they should lead, but they don’t even enter themselves! The museum, where journalistic works are delivered,
stands before the creators of these works, before their eyes,
but this work that they could complete themselves they
impose on the shoulders of our descendants; unfaithful to
the past, they are hostile to the future, for awaiting the arrival
of history and not to be self-historians means to slow the course
of history. The museum’s investigation is not only harmless,
it is not nonjudgmental and solely restorative. A museum is
an expression of our duty to the fathers, our dutiful obligation, which we aren’t even paying off; we are even increasing
our debt. In present-day journals, as enemy-mongers, there
is neither goodness, nor truth, nor anything beautiful, for
the beautiful without truth is only deception. This unification
of those who express different unbrotherly conditions and
different aspects of unbrotherly relations must occur in the
common effort of congregation, in creating a project for the
Kingdom of God, of an epic poem of exodus from the kingdom of discord and common destruction. And as soon as
this natural goal is established, literature will cease to be the
depiction of disparate events, of separate types; it will lose
its episodic, random character and out of works of literature
there will be born on God’s Earth one epic poem, one drama,
unified in direction, uniting authors of different locations as
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if it were one, not interrupted by the changing generations,
whose main purpose will be congregating into a universal,
all-human, multi-unity. Now each journal represents a direction hostile to every other journal, and the more every section
of the journal is seeped in and permeated by this direction,
the better armed, according to the present day, it is, and the
better it fulfills its purpose, the truer it is to itself. To call journals unpeaceful, militaristic, hostile, is no metaphor, for the
polemic created by this or that trend is resolved by real wars,
external or internal, or by revolutions.
There actually exist two trends that divide our journals;
some of them consider it an ideal or, more accurately, create a program for judicial-economic society according to
Western models, with bourgeois or socialistic characteristics; this trend, in essence, is urban. The other trend denies
Western models and apparently does not consider judicialeconomic ideals satisfactory in general; however, this model
does not define the essence of the moral ideal itself, and does
not engage in explaining how to realize it. In any case, this
trend, in contrast to the first, can be called rural, the superstitiously rural; this party is mystical and denies knowledge,
and even though it would never confess to this, it is not ready
to abandon industry, even at its most extreme, and therefore it does not just acknowledge practical knowledge, but
respects it, despite the fact that it is in this, practical knowledge, dependent on manufacture, that evil so ruinous to
the village. Both parties are bitterly critical, but not at all
self-critical; they have never asked themselves the question: why are we enemies? They have never even considered
such a question necessary! And how could they confess to
their defects when they base everything on the realization of
their personal dignity? Moral greatness is too alien to them
to turn to self-criticism, to self-investigation; meanwhile, it
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does not just contain moral greatness, but a new world for
the mind. Denying freedom only to personal opinion, only to
personal activity, freedom of the individual, denying all because
of the absence in such individuals of brotherhood, we will find
in brotherly union an action plan of such vastness that each
individual, having renounced the right to live according to his
whims, will become a universal-historical actor. And it is such
a world that will open for those who have defended the freedom
of the individual, if they consider their system critically; this is
what self-criticism is, self-accusation, repentance—words that
are unbearable for our century to hear, but which are salvific!
Those who have defended the congregation, the choral principle emanating from the peoples’ instinct, will agree with
those demanding a rational plan instead of instinctive strivings and indefinite dreaming. And if the first trend acknowledges evil in all unbrotherly conditions—the ensemble of
which constitutes the city—and acknowledges the necessity
of unity and completeness through unilateralism, then the
second trend will agree with it, because in its demand for
completeness, unity, and fullness, the first trend will contain
what the second trend desires only vaguely.
Addendum to the “Museum” Article
The antagonism between labor and capital will end only
when the object of production will not be luxury, but the satisfaction only of necessary needs, and not artificial desires.
The question of real and imaginary, artificial needs is the
question of sanitation and provisions that solve the problem
of physical and mental needs. To this also relates the question of labor that medicine knows in the form of postprandial
walks, exercises—this false, imitative labor (which, of course,
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is necessary for those who don’t perform real, agricultural
labor). This demonstrates that medicine is an urban science
and, in its strictest sense, is not social; for even though there
is social hygiene, it is subservient to the city and, acknowledging that the urban lifestyle does not adhere to hygienic
requirements, does not dare to advise the urban class based
on truth and what is really good for humankind. Instead,
it is inventive only in creating ways for alleviating diseases
that arise from urban living conditions and which demand,
therefore, for their treatment, a change in peoples’ lifestyle,
a transformation of a city into a village, or more precisely, the
reconciliation of the city and the village. Medicine is neither
true, nor moral in essence; it is not religious, and is not spiritual, because it serves not for redemption, not God, but only
the whims of the city.
The silence of the grave, the stillness of a cemetery, is the
main feature of the present-day museum, which is the total
opposite of the lively, production-trade city, where it is generally located. The archeological dissociation of a museum,
with its fragments, its objects covered in rust, and its skulls
and bones in the anthropology department—these descendants from the grave—is also a cemetery, but with open
graves. A museum, we could say, is a cemetery that has been
transported and placed in the center of the city, if a museum
was not one step above the cemetery, for here we see a kind of
protest against death, a struggle against destructive forces,
and as long as museums exist, the victory of death is not yet
fully decided.28 That’s why a museum is not just a cemetery,
because it holds not only decayed bodies, but also souls!
For the curator of a museum library, the museum is a book
28. A museum is above and below a cemetery; if brotherhood were
not the foal of a museum, then touching the ashes of the dead would
be sacrilege.
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depository, while for a reader the museum also becomes
a soul depository, for while reading, it is impossible not to
envision the author; a reader unwillingly paints in his imagination the author’s portrait, hears his voice, enters his feelings and thoughts; but he does not do all this on purpose,
independent of will, only because he cannot not do it, even
though reading is not yet action. It is necessary, following
an involuntary impulse, to purposefully restore, through the
work, the book, its creator, its author, and then it will no longer be reading, but analysis, investigation. Criticism is not
yet investigation, for criticism, even accepting the dead as
the living, does to them what is against the law of brotherhood to do to the living—it judges and punishes them, when
the task should be restoration. Criticism as judgment is an
abomination. And investigation—a judicial term—responds
with barbarity to the living, which is already completely
unacceptable to do to the dead: to strike the dead, to tie
them to the whipping post, as poet-denunciators say—these
expressions give the century in which they are used a lowly
position. Essentially, investigation is a holy task of restoration, which has not yet begun and which only approaches
what has passed. For prehistoric times, history is just the
beginning, while for the recently dead, restoration, i.e. history, should have begun immediately upon their death, their
passing. And if restoration were not only mental, then after
death there would follow a return to life; for those who, during their lifetime, become their own historians, there would
be no death at all.
Reading, as a pastime, as entertainment, is a profanation of the book, and the library does not perform its function when it becomes only a reading room and is guilty of
the same sin as its readers. Reading rooms commit the sin
of selling holy objects; this is, of course, a sin common to
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our time, which turns everything into an object of trade.
Any rational being, upon entering the museum and seeing
books and other works, asks: who wrote these books, who
produced, painted, sculpted, and so on, all these works? This
is what a muse, or a choir of muses, tells or answers to its real
admirers, i.e. to the restorer-sons; moreover, a full answer
will be given not to each researcher separately, but only to all
of them together, for truth can only be given to a brotherhood.
With investigation, the unwilling imagining, while reading
a work, of the face of the author turns into a consistent and
systematic action of restoring life (lives, biographies) from
all the works resulting from the previous activity of humankind.29 This act of restoration is based on the basic quality
of the mind, on its essence, which is knowledge, the search
for reasons—reasons that are alive and personal, unless the
mind is separated from feeling and other abilities, if the
researcher himself is alive and complete. And religion, as a
live force, demands that the believer and the one who prays
do not stop at the work, at the image, at the book—which is
also an image—but turn to the original, although not of what
is depicted (the original of what is depicted can be ugly),
but to the one who depicted it, to the author, to the painter,
extracting these from impure decay, for a museum accepts
everything that is dead, decaying, or decayed—in it, objects
are not “sowed for honor,” but resurrected in glory.
Investigation as restoration requires preparation; it is
clear why reviewing essays is of such importance in school.
However, review, analysis, decomposition would be without purpose and completely unclear if from the analysis of
the work there did not arise the restoration of the life of the
29. Libraries and books can probably give images of only those generations for which, as for foggy places, you need strong tools in order
to arrange them into separate individuals.
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author. Formal education, in which literature plays such an
important part,30 will remain without application unless
there is included in the purpose of life work on constructing
libraries, on turning them into collections of biographies.
Essay review that is limited to analysis without any connection to the life of the author has only formal meaning, and
only works on developing the mind, separated from other
abilities; but it could acquire a real meaning, could develop
a person as a whole, if it were supplemented with synthesis,
with compiling an image of the author from his works. In
this case, a library, which is not a collection of books that
don’t agree in their content, that are alien and hostile to one
another, would become a single book about internal accord,
for alienation and hostility is not contained in books themselves, not in the creators of those books, but in external
necessity. In order to change this part of teaching, we need
to put a person in a totally different position in relation to
books, as well as to a painting and other works of art. A person is first and foremost an actor, while reading and writing
are only means; but even reading needs to be taught through
writing, i.e. writing should precede reading, as drawing
should be preferred to studying through painting; generally,
something active should be preferred to something passive,
because a museum is neither a reading room nor a spectacle: a museum creates a project and prepares its executors.
A word is an expression of faith, writing is an expression of
investigation, and if reading becomes investigation, it will
be reflected in writing; investigation is the transition toward
action. Writing cannot be a purpose; it is only a means for
action according to a common plan.
30. Literature cannot be acknowledged as its own science, for doing
so would separate word from deed.
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When writing becomes a purpose, then it becomes a
work of art, an illusion. Writing is a remedy for oblivion and a
manual for creating an action plan of restoration. What cannot
be expressed in this plan in writing has to be supplemented
with a sketch, a drawing (painting in its current sense is an
illusion). Where a sketch or drawing is not enough, a model
should be added. The whole of literature and art is just a
means for creating a plan of resurrection. But for the plan of
resurrection, neither models—as stereometrical images, as
mere skeletons—nor any means of literature and art in general are enough; physical and chemical experiments are also
supplementary means, materials for the creation of the plan
of resurrection. Art for art’s sake and science for science’s
sake, manias, latrias, bibliomania, and bibliolatria.
Until now writing has served an amoral, ungodly purpose, for only with the help of a pen could the current judicial-economic system have been created. Using writing to
build a Godly Kingdom means making it a moral weapon.
Literacy, in its active form, in writing perceived as an aid to
memory in its obligation to the fathers, as an aid to the mind
in fulfilling this obligation, is the complete, concrete question. Notes, like fortresses, once served, as they do now, as
a means against oblivion; they were left behind by our forebearers in their obligation to us; like a testament, a note is
a guarantee against our own weaknesses, and the whole
church-museum, with its departments, is the architectural,
all-artistic expression of our obligation to our fathers; that
is why the museum, with its departments, cannot just be
limited to being a church; there has to be outside-of-church,
outside-of-museum action.
Wouldn’t this restoration be the privilege of the few,
wouldn’t it only be the fate of those whose works made it
into the museum? And would restoration as an action be the
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responsibility of all? In order to answer these questions we
need to, firstly, not forget that under “museum” we understand the aggregate of all local and church museums, which
are united in a central communion-museum—for which
churches serve as the origin, as a foundation, so that nothing human, no born and mortal being, will pass unnoticed,
for every human being has to pass through school in order to
get to the museum, the function of which is restoration. And
that is why it is necessary that schools are everywhere where
people are born, and that museums are where people die.
Moreover, the possibility of self-restoration is contained in the
restoration of others: the more energy from his soul that the
restorer dedicates to the subject, to the work of restoration,
the more he is expressed in this work, so that there is more
kinship between a restorer and the restored than between a
father and son. We can even ask: what better reflects, what
better reproduces, your own individuality—an autobiography or the biography of another? In the latter case, wouldn’t
intellectual, scientific demands agree with moral demands,
which, of course, give preference to the biography of another,
or more precisely, patrobiography over autobiography? Every
biography, illustrated by painting and all other museum tools,
elevates, glorifies an individual, but not to the detriment of the
universal. A Universal Museum will be an aggregate not only
of local church museums, but also of personal museums that
are deeply united not so much in a central museum, as in their
general reciprocity. This reciprocity would be the realization
of the Holy Trinity—of the fatherland and brotherhood.
A museum as a congregation of investigators, using a
museum as a collection of books with extensive illustrations,
recreates from every work their creators and at the same time
makes copies—written, pictorial (portraits), and many others—from originals that go back generations, recruiting for
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this task light waves (photography) and sound waves (phonograph).31 Every generation, being a savior of lives, being
an artist that creates the image of his father, will itself be
the original for its sons, for the next generation. Every son,
applying his whole soul to the task of resurrecting the father,
willingly and freely, will unwittingly preserve his own soul.
Who wants to save others, saves himself: in a biography of
another, i.e. in patrobiography, is contained an autopbiography of the son, which will be extracted from the former by
the next generation.
However, this copying, this reproducing of an image, is
not just the salvation or preservation of what happened in
reality, but needs to become redemption, a restoration of the
one depicted to the way he would have been had the pressure
of external forces, of fate, of that which the ancients called
fatum, been removed—to the way the one being depicted,
clearly or faintly realizing it, would himself like to have been
depicted. It is to this restoration that the son will apply the
better part of his soul and hearth, feeling in himself those
defects that are found in the originals being depicted—in the
originals of parents, of whom he is the living resemblance.
The purpose of the son includes the demands of the real
and the ideal. Every person will have his own book, his life’s
work, where his soul will be transferred, and then at death,
human bodies will be transferred to the cemetery while their
souls, in the shape of these tomes, books, and pamphlets
will return to the museum, where the deceased had his
education, for a museum is heaven for these soul-books. 32
31. We need to mention that not only ancient poems were works of
not just one author, but our new books are works of many and even
sometimes of whole generations.
32. Pamphlets, what people used to call “little souls” (souls of the
departed, which were depicted as newborns), seem a sentimental
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However, they will return to the museum not to remain on
the shelves, but in order to be accepted into the souls of the
living and to be returned, restored bodies, for the essence
of the museum is activity and the action of restoration; the
cessation of this activity is the fall and death. The historical
museum is a restoration only in memory, a simple remembrance, if it is not united with the natural science museum,
the purpose of which is material restoration, a real resurrection. If there can be no brotherhood without restoration,
which is the purpose of the sons, then there can be no restoration without brotherhood.
The subject of discord between the bourgeoisie and
the workers, between the liberal and socialist parties, even
though it does not have a real name, is urban luxury. This
luxury, the production of which is considered to be a task
worthy of humans, prevents the party that is called agrarian
to understand its real position; it keeps all sciences separate
and makes them work for the whims of the city. When the
great purpose of the fatherland reveals itself to the thought
that has understood the reasons for discord, the thought
in which all sciences can be united, and not artificially but
naturally, then the sciences that are forcefully separated one
from another and enslaved by the city will be freed from that
slavery and will return part for part to their own strength.
All sciences that have recognized in all their special agencies
that they serve the unbrotherly purpose will represent a picture of the reunification of all sciences and the reunification
of all their members, i.e. of scholars into one congregation.
And this is what will constitute the all-science museum.
expression to us, even though the expression belongs to the people,
which stand above the suspicion of sentimentality; “little souls” is an
expression of love toward the dead and of the realization of the incompleteness of their life; it is not souls, but precisely just “little souls.”
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Thought that investigates discord within the means of
unification for a common purpose will unite artists of all
movements, of all places, into one poem, illustrated, dramatized, never-ending, even with the death of the whole
generation, in such a way that the work of one generation
will just be one act of a drama. Thought that uses all artistic
means, not disassociated by space, not torn by time, acting
educationally, will unite art and will collect all artists into one
congregation. And this will be an all-artistic congregationmuseum. Drama, as a result of the investigation of reasons
for dissociation in space and time, as a result of the investigation of reasons that prevent it from becoming a unified
action across all locations and many generations, will unite
all our movements into a single human action. It is impossible to not have unity if the work emanates from writers, artists, and editorial boards that have come to an agreement; it
is impossible to not have unity when it, this work, is the result
of their communal creativity. The three notorious unities of
drama, which were demanded by classical antiquity and
which were rejected by the Romantics, could be accepted by
the former and the latter if at their base were the unity of reality itself; because the unity of location—despite the expanse
of space—embraced by action, will happen in reality if local
forces act in accord with central ones. There will be unity of
time if the works of subsequent generations are a continuation of the works of previous generations, so that no matter
how enduring the time that embraces the action is, the unity
cannot disappear as a result of it. So, this will be a museum
of three unities: unity of action will be expressed by the unified direction; unity of space will be expressed by the unity
of all locations in the center; finally, the unity of time will be
expressed by a succession in which younger generations act
under the leadership of older generations.
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A real museum is a museum of all three abilities of the
soul, united in memory, i.e. it is the expression of accord and
spiritual completeness, for it is a mind that not only understands but feels loss, and not one that only feels, i.e. only
mourns, but also one that acts in order to return, in order to
resurrect those who have been lost. A museum does not allow
divergence from the common good either for knowledge, or
for truth, or for art, i.e. beauty; but only memory makes good
universal. If we extract the origin of morality from the mind
or knowledge, the knowledge will serve sensuality, will create
production and will become subservient to it, i.e. as a result of
this extraction of morality from the mind the city will be born,
an industrial fair. If knowledge is dissociated from morality, it
cannot remain pure, i.e. indifferent to sensuality; while the city
without pure knowledge is the ideal of the fourth estate, which
accepts only appendices, and does not value pure knowledge.
If knowledge is dissociated from art, it is dead knowledge.
For its part, art dissociated from morality also turns into production, into manufacturing, into a manufacturing-artistic
museum. Art dissociated from morality cannot even be art
for art’s sake. Beauty dissociated from morality is only sensual
beauty that creates a society of sexual selection that lives only
for the present and forgets the past. If you dissociate truth
from beauty, then you will have deception. Good that is dissociated from beauty will be suffering and not bliss; it cannot
even be dead, soulless ascetism in this case. Good without
knowledge is illiterate good and either turns into personal,
egotistical virtue that is powerless to destroy evil, or into civil
virtue that is composed either of passive suffering, or does
real evil to some under the pretense of it being an imaginary
good to others. Morality, goodness, truth, and beauty became
abstract concepts, when they should be necessary features of
life and should constitute the nature of a person.
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The feeling of beauty, an aesthetic feeling, is only possible
for the rational and moral being, and the object of an aesthetic feeling can only be something animate, i.e. something
that is also a rational and moral being; for even if one finds
beauty, one does so only after ascribing it a soul, a feeling.
If there is beauty in works of art it is only because one sees
something animate in them. Only society can be beautiful,
i.e. the union of animate beings. To ascribe beauty only to
society does not mean to limit beauty, for art is a reminder,
and resurrection as a realization of what was stored in memory is the expansion of society throughout all generations,
which becomes the soul creation; i.e. nature, when it is ruled
by the mind, becomes an expression of human thought and
feeling and becomes, therefore, really beautiful.
These three qualities of God and man—good, truth, and
beauty—are indivisible; they are also inseparable from the
one to whom they belong. They cannot become features of
individual classes—truth cannot belong to scholars, and
beauty to artists. Beauty cannot belong to things without a
soul, not even to persons taken in their hostility or submission. All these qualities belong only to a triune God and to a
multiune human.
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The Art of Resemblances
(of False Artistic Regeneration)
AND THE ART OF REALITY
(of Real Resurrection): Ptolemaic
and Copernican Art
Nikolai Fedorov
The Art of Resemblances
Written circa 1890s
Translated by Stephen P. Van Trees
Art as resemblance—the resemblance of all that is in heaven
and on Earth—is the reproduction of the world as it appears
to the external senses. It is the reproduction of heaven and
Earth, not of heaven and Earth as the expression of the
divine will, but as the activity of the blind forces of nature. It
is not just as if the blind forces are uncontrollable by rational
beings, but rather as if they are acknowledged by men as gods
(Uranus, Cronus). The art of resemblance is the depiction
of heaven that deprives us of life, and of Earth that devours
the living. That is why this art is indeed denounced by divine
commandment as paganism, as idol-worship or idolatry (that
is, the worshipping of idols that represent the blind forces,
rather than controlling them) and ideolatry (worshipping the
thought that does not become deed; worshipping knowledge
that is without goal, without soul, without deed; worshipping
the knowledge of scholars). The reproduction of the world
as it appears to the external senses and which is either interpreted by the internal senses of the sons of man who have
preserved their love for their fathers, or by the internal senses
of the sons who have forgotten their fathers, prodigal sons—
is in both cases an art of resemblances; but in the former case
it will be a holy, religious art, while in the latter case it will be
a worldly, secular art. Sacred art is the reproduction of the
world in the form of the temple, which unites in itself all arts.
Moreover, the temple as a work of architecture, painting, and
sculpture becomes a depiction of Earth, yielding up all its
dead, and of heaven (the vault of the temple and iconostasis),
populated by the resurrected generations; and as the place
of singing, or more precisely of requiem, the temple is the
voice with whose sounds the ashes are resurrected from the
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cemetery that is Earth, and heaven becomes the dwelling of
the resurrected.
By singing, or the requiem mass, we understand the
whole of divine service; it is liturgy as the work of God,
accomplished through the sons of man; it is the vigil for the
dead or for their depictions, with corresponding wailing,
calling for resurrection; and then, the diurnal union (unification) and teaching (preaching), preparation of the faithful
for liturgy, fathers faithful to God, which is the liturgy of the
transformation of bread and wine, which have come from the
dust of the Earth, into the living body and blood.
The art of sons who have forgotten the fathers will be a
reproduction of the world in the form of a universal exhibition, in which industry is united with all arts. The exhibition
itself is an image of a woman, to whose service the men who
have forgotten their fathers wish to focus all the forces of
nature on, in order to intensify the charm of sexual attraction, and they presume to find life in this attraction, but only
find instead death and the hope of returning to life through
their children.
Sacred art only violates the commandment when the
image is mistaken for reality, for real resurrection, and when
singing—that is, the temple liturgy—is mistaken for the
extra-temple act of ressurrecting. Secular art in the form
of the universal exhibition violates all ten commandments
and, committing sin against the faith, sins even more against
reason in that it subordinates it to the blind force of nature,
forcing one to serve it rather than control it.
In its proper definition, art is neither separated from science, nor from morality and religion, and is represented as it
is in the real life of the human race, in history. Beginning with
man’s first standing, or his vertical position, the pain of losing the creatures that were closest to him made man bearing
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The Art of Resemblances
the loss lift his face, and turn all his being to heaven; and
such a position is already an expression of religious feeling
and awakened thought, impressed by art. (Orthodoxy, which
demands standing and permits sitting only as condescension, is by this external expression—that is, standing—most
substantially distinguished from Catholicism and especially
from Protestantism.)
The transition from the art of resemblance to the art
of reality, from Ptolemaic art to Copernican art, must be
served by the museum of all sciences, unified in astronomy.
This museum should have a tower, and be connected to a
church-school—the tower would serve for observing the
falling stars, that is, for observing the continuous construction and disintegration of the world, and likewise for meteorological observation, which transitions to experiment, to
action; through transformation of military art into the art
of natural science.
Aesthetics is the science of re-creating all those rational
beings who have been on this little Earth (this drop of water
which reflected itself in the whole Universe, and reflected the
whole Universe in itself) for their vivification (and control) of
all the huge heavenly worlds that have no rational beings. In
this re-creation is the beginning of eternal bliss.
The manifestation of power in powerlessness is the law of
terrestrial and extraterrestrial history, and also the essence of
Christianity as opposed to Buddhism and as salvation from
it. The Earth is a cemetery, and in its possession of history
it contains greater content than all the worlds that have no
such history. Heretofore, consciousness, reason, and morality were localized on planet Earth. Through resurrecting all
the generations that have lived on Earth, consciousness will
be spread to all the worlds of the Universe. Resurrection is
the transformation of the Universe from the chaos toward
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which it is heading, into cosmos, that is, the splendor of
incorruptibility and indestructibility.
In nothing else is the depth and wealth of wisdom so
expressed as in the salvation of the limitless Universe, in
the salvation that comes from such a negligible mote as the
Earth. The habitability of one Earth and the inhabitability of
other worlds is the demand of the highest moral law. If the
world is not the product of blind chance, then between the
multitude of dead generations and the plurality of worlds
a possible rational relation exists, where all the inhabitants
of all the worlds were created from earthly dust alone, from
blood alone. But even if the world were a product of chance,
then a rational and sensate being could not but employ the
plurality of forces to revive the many generations deprived of
life. On Earth itself we have the resemblance of localization
in negligible space and then the expansion of that localization throughout the Earth. Palestine and Hellas are examples
of such a localization: arts and sciences in Greece, and religion in Palestine, whence it then expanded throughout the
whole Earth. But only with the unification of religion and
science is the further expansion of the influence of rational
beings beyond our Earth possible. Palestine and Hellas are
the representations of East and West, the struggle between
which constitutes history.
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
(1798 – 1998)
Nikolai Fedorov
The Voronezh Museum in 1998
First published in 1898
Translated by Stephen P. Van Trees
As far back as 1898, when the jubilee of the printing trade
was celebrated, it was acknowledged that the foundation
of the Voronezh Museum was laid at the same time as the
beginning of book printing in Voronezh; therefore, in 1998
they celebrated the jubilee of not just the printing trade
as a specific part, but the whole museum. Comparing the
museum of 1998 and the museum of one hundred years ago,
it turned out that the science of the nineteenth century was
a deduction produced at some place, some time, by someone, while the science of the twentieth century had become
a deduction from observations produced everywhere,
always, by everyone. The goal set for the museum back in
the nineteenth century—“the study of the Voronezh region
in the past and present in all respects”—was fully realized
at the end of the twentieth century: the central museum of
the Voronezh region has branches in all populated areas of
the region, for (local) museums are already everywhere that
there are people dying (and they still die in the twentieth
century, although with incomparably greater hope of revolt,
than in the unfortunate nineteenth century), just as there
are schools everywhere there are people being born. In the
twentieth century, everyone became learners and all became
the object of knowledge; and something else occurred that
no one would have believed in the nineteenth century: crude
peasant plowmen proved much more capable of fruitful
knowledge than did the perverted city folk, possessors of
the serpent’s wisdom. It turned out—an amazing feat—that
no special leisure was required for knowledge in the villages.
In the villages, the work itself turned into an investigation of
nature, such that every agricultural year is a new experiment,
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an experiment to ascertain under which meteorological and
even solar conditions the most reliable harvest might be
retained. It must be noted that no one talks about the largest
yield from the earth any longer. The trade and mercantile
(commercial) view of the earth has disappeared: now one
does not look at the earth as goods, as capital, but rather
as something sacred; and the view of agriculture as a specific enterprise would be considered immoral in the highest
degree at the end of the twentieth century. In the cities at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the division of labor
had progressed to the point that for factory workers, reason
became a luxury and their head a cap, which they put on only
on holidays. True, the shortening of the workday to eight
hours would seem to have given the workers the possibility
and right to put that cap on even on weekdays; but almost
no one took advantage of this right, because even after just
one eight-hour day of amazingly monotonous labor, in which
only one part of the body is occupied, all effort is devoted to
maintaining all the other parts of the body in inactivity. After
such labor one must reset the parts of one’s body; there have
to be amusements and orgies, not mental activities. In urban
leisure there is nothing that would make this leisure transform into knowledge, and not into something else, whereas
village work itself requires knowledge, knowledge that is all
the more profound, and all the more extensive, knowledge
that is definitive and all-encompassing, knowledge of the
Earth and all that determines the condition and existence of
plants, animals, and man himself, knowledge of metrological, solar, and so on, condition. Man himself, as he was taken
from the Earth, and so he goes down to the Earth again, having given, or better yet, having passed on life to his children,
as souls bound by an inherited vow, and being able to be
resurrected from the Earth, does not exit the wide circle of
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
provincial knowledge, so that the village cast turns out to be
the one in which all branches of knowledge find their application. Perhaps someone from the nineteenth century, hearing
that all men have become knowers, will think that peasants
too have become contemplatives? But that would be a huge
mistake … But what have the peasant farmers become?! …
For the progressives of the nineteenth century it would, of
course, be strange to hear what a big step peasants have made
toward the end of the twentieth century. All people have
formed in universal mobilization against that force which
strikes the wheat with a bad harvest, with a terrible yield of
sickening (pathogenic) lethal microbes. The military task has
come to be identical to the “peasant” task. All armies, i.e. all
peoples, have become participants in one all-lands experiment of regulation, implemented per the common plan, that
is, the direction of the meteorological process, in order to
receive our daily bread. The prayer for daily bread, accompanied by labor that provides this bread to us, i.e. not to me, not
to just one, but to all, and on only this day (“give us this day”),
i.e. it is not about surplus, but only this very day—under regulations there will be no need to create a surplus—this prayer
accompanied by labor is indeed the divine task, performed
by the hands of men. Here’s what militarism, which so terrified the nineteenth century, has turned into at the end of the
twentieth century. It’s as well too that this terror did not lead
to the abolition of military obligation …
The movement leading to the above-adduced results
began in a noticeable manner in 1932, when, near the day of
the Most Holy Trinity, the descendants fulfilled their ancestors’ vow, given one hundred years before this, to establish a
temple to St. Mitrofan and in it build a museum on the island,
where buildings from the time of Peter are still preserved.
This vow was fulfilled also to redeem the sin of those who
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built an amusement park instead of the promised temple and
museum on the island destined for it. In fact, Voronezh had
this sin—the construction of amusement parks—in common
with others cites, i.e. fortresses.
At one time, the whole Russian land stood constantly on
guard against the attacks of steppe nomads; in almost every
village there was a guard station; in every small city, a bastion; and in cities, stone fortresses. The Ivan the Great Bell
Tower was itself a guard tower.
When disarmament started, the fortresses’ earthen
approaches, watered with the blood of the ancestors, were
turned into leisure walkways, into boulevards, and the
guard towers were turned into belvederes. Historians of the
nineteenth century and previous centuries saw an obvious
improvement in such clear malfeasance—the transformation of the military into the civil, into something peaceful.
But being a son (filitude) is higher than citizenship. For the
sons of man, for truly intelligent descendants, the places
watered with the blood of the ancestors must be transformed, of course, but into memorials to the fathers, into
sacred museums. Generally, disarmament was premature,
not to mention the fact that the enemy was only contained,
not destroyed. We still have enemies: Central Asia doesn’t
just launch hordes on us, but also drying winds, which inflict
even greater damage than the hordes themselves; and the
West constantly threatens us with floods—thus disarmament was premature. The ubiquitous construction of museums is the reestablishment of the fortresses, and bastions,
and guard stations, as an expression of the guard position,
but not versus our own kind, but rather against the blind
force which engenders both too much rain, and drought, the
failure of the wheat harvest, and the yield of the sickening
microbe. This reestablishment shows that what is necessary
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
is not the destruction but only the transformation of the
military-guardian into the peace-guardian stance.
It should be noted, however, that the museum and the
temple for the fifty-year jubilee of the revelation of the relics
of St. Mitrofan (1932) were built not on the island, as was
earlier proposed, but in another, more appropriate place,
corresponding to the wide dimensions in which it was realized. The very first beginning of the Voronezh Museum in
its renovated form was laid in 1922, the year of the celebration of the five-hundred-year jubilee of the revelation of the
relics of Most Holy Sergei, which preceded by ten years the
celebration of the centenary jubilee of the revelation of the
relics of St. Mitrofan (1932). It became known that someone
named S. S., even before the five-hundred-year anniversary
of the death of Most Holy Sergei (1892), made a proposal to
construct on the ancient Russian example a temple in one
day, like the one that was built by Most Holy Sergei with his
brother (Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News], September
13, 1892, no. 254). The idea of constructing the one-day
temple, which is usually erected in days of national calamity, penetrated the people. And at that time there was a great
plague in Voronezh. The people gathered and decided as a
whole community, with the blessing of the spiritual and the
permission of the secular powers that be, to build a temple
for the fifty-year anniversary day. Due to a lack of wood, they
decided to use old railroad ties for the construction of the
temple (“Dobry pochin,” [Good Initiative], Russkoe slovo
[Russian Word], 1895, no. 62); at that time they were replacing iron ties with steel ones on the railroad, so there was no
lack of material (i.e. old railroad ties). The construction of
the temple began on Friday evening, i.e. on the day of His
suffering, and turning the day of rest, the Sabbath, into one
of labor, finished it on Sunday, so that this temple could be
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called both one-day and three-day. On August 7, on the day
of the memory of St. Mitrofan, the Don newspaper printed
an excerpt of a letter from Metropolitan Filaret, in which it
said that Most Holy Sergei and St. Mitrofan had appeared to
some English woman in a dream; this appearance occurred
at a time in England when there was a certain urge to converge with the Orthodox church, and the saints of ancient
and modern Russian had blessed this convergence. When
the excerpt from this letter was printed in Don at the same
time as there were peace negotiations between Russia and
England, and news about a union between her, Russia, and
both Britains, the English and the American, who were at
that time considered the rulers of the sea, while Russia, having penetrated into Tibet, and in union with China threatening Calcutta itself, which compelled England to peace, can
be considered, although not yet in the direct sense, to be the
ruler on land. The English expected the Russians from the
direction of Pamir, from the northwest; the Russians, making
an amazing transition, appeared from the northeast, from
Chinese Tibet; this forced England to cease the struggle. In
Voronezh they also remembered the vow to construct the
temple to St. Mitrofan with its museum and decided, having turned the railroad-tie temple into an altar, for the hundred-year jubilee of the revelation of the relics of St. Mitrofan
(1932), to raise above it a temple to the Most Holy Trinity,
a temple to the God of the fathers, with two wings, to Most
Holy Sergei and St. Mitrofan. They decided to join to the
temple a museum with archives and all facilities for research
and teaching, i.e. with libraries, picture and sculpture galleries, all kinds of laboratories and observatories, and also with
all scholastic appurtenances, through which alone a fruitful
entrance into the museum is possible; the scholarly appurtenances, architecturally, per their layout, are set as entrances
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
into the temple-museum. The museum, understood in this
sense, is intended to unite the people (narod) with the intelligentsia, in that the museum to this end is first of all a temple, in which all church antiquities preserved in Voronezh
churches are collected, all the archives of the spiritual hierarchy are collected, and a special society is established for the
study of church archaeology and church history.
Then all secular archive memorials as well, i.e. the
archives of the civil and military hierarchy, are collected
at the temple-museum, and such a unification of the spiritual and secular makes the museum both local government
(guberniya) and diocesan. Which it was, in fact, at its very
beginning, for in the very beginning the Voronezh Museum
contained both icons, church instruments, and objects from
secular-civil and military everyday life. For studying everything collected in the temple-museum, an archive commission is established, or a unification of all the workers who
work on the study of archive matters. The goal of studying
the source of the juridico-economic archives is not theoretical, but rather purely practical: to study the conditions
under which on a year-to-year basis we will see a decrease in
crimes and all misunderstandings which require judicial and
administrative handling, and this study would lead to a significant decrease in cases in the 1998 jubilee year; so that at
the present time, neither on the judicial nor the administrative enterprise does there any longer lie the curse to eternally
judge, eternally sort things out and never reason things out,
never to close one’s case. There is still the hope that there
will, finally, come a time when the pugnacious citizens will be
transformed into sons, united not only by common origin,
but in common service to the God of the fathers in a templemuseum hallowed to him, and more, there will be no need of
surveillance, nor of threats of punishment. The participation
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of all in the paternal task, in the task of knowledge and the
direction of the blind force of nature, serves, as all are now
convinced, as the very first and most necessary condition of
universal peacemaking.
Everything is educational to the highest degree in the
temple-museum, where under the roof of the God of the
father there is both a museum of the fathers and a school
of the sons. The internal and external inscriptions on the
temple are so full of content that explaining them would
take up a large book. The plan of this temple, as it is proposed, was illustrated by L. G. Solovyev, an artist well known
in Voronezh. But the external form of this building, amazing in its grandeur, has in view not just beauty, but follows
educational goals, such that in the museum itself the plan
of the top area, or roof, occupied by the observatory, where
the students under the leadership of the teachers recognize
the visible movement of the heavenly spheres, is transformed
into a mosaic map view of Voronezh. The place of the middle
area, where meteorological and astronomical observatories
are produced, is transformed into a mosaic map view of the
Voronezh region, and the courtyard itself of the museum,
embedded with stones, presents a mosaic map view of all
Russia, and all these maps are the work of the students
under the guidance of the teachers. The shapes of the hall
on which the whole building is built are transformed into
geological crosscut views of the length of all Russia, from the
year-round [non-freezing] port at Murmansk, on the border
of two oceans, to the year-round port on the Pacific Ocean,
at the Yellow Sea. Around it is arranged a botanical and zoological garden for the visual, practical study of botany and
zoology … The museum became a common asset for all institutes, both spiritual and secular, civil and military, male and
female, for the study of local history, i.e. the role of the region
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
in all Russian and universal history, as well as for the study of
the local flora and fauna of the region in the form of its participation in the task of directing the earthly planet by blind
force, insofar as this was accessible to people of the end of
the twentieth century, and also in the forms of further movement in this direction. The museum became thus a common
resource, became, one may say, a book, illustrated by picture and sculpture galleries, explained and confirmed by all
sorts of experiments and observations, and it attained this
through the labors of the teachers and students themselves
and the contributions of local residents, who realized that
they could not find a better use of their assets, and especially
of their different sorts of collections (such as Parenai, Belaev,
Bakhonov, and so on), than to give them to the museum.
There’s a collection of icon and landscape examples of
especially well-known Voronezh masters that’s remarkable
to the highest degree. The museum received it from L. G.
Solovyev, who was a historian in these matters. L. G. Solovyev
was known in Voronezh not only as an artist, but also as
an incisive pedagogue, a man of rare altruism, transforming holidays from days of rest and ease into days of unpaid
labor, dedicating them to the service of the drawing school in
Voronezh. Any traveler from the Voronezh region (and traveling has nowadays become the necessary culmination of
education and upbringing), going around Russia and overseas, considered it a sacred duty—for himself, for his journey,
and for the good of the students—to get copies of paintings
of famous artists, photographs of works of sculptures, views
of different places they visited, and so forth. There’s an especially fine collection, collected in the north, in Sweden, in
Norway, in Finland, and chiefly in Murmansk, where, later
at this year-round port, there arose a polar capital, or more
accurately, a residence for the time of the ultimate struggle
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with the universal naval empire, after which, as they say,
an alliance is concluded with it, directed no longer against
ones like ourselves, but against the enemy, who must also be
called only a temporary enemy, but an eternal friend, against
nature, a lethal force, on the eve, perhaps, of transforming it
into a life-giving force. The traveler who amassed this collection was a native of the next province over; he held a prominent government service position in Voronezh for a long
time. The Voronezh steamship from the volunteer fleet also
considered it its duty as its eponym to give the museum of the
city, along with Paschal and New Year’s greetings, some especially characteristic objects to acquaint the students with the
Far East, which grows ever closer to us. And in the museum
we see the depiction of the steamship itself, which was of the
cruiser class, and portraits of all active and past duty officer
and men on it.
The museum became, of course, and first of all, a unification of teachers of all educational institutions in the form
of teaching circles in all branches of knowledge; it attracts
amateurs too, especially from young people who have just
finished their courses, so that the knowledge they acquired
did not remain sterile, and so that the provinces eliminated
the imprecation that in the provinces they just forget what
has been invented in capitals and university towns like it was
in the twentieth century.
Having collected as many depictions of the workers of
the old times as it could, the museum collected in-house the
portraits of all those serving at the time of its establishment
in its new form (i.e. in 1932); and there was no innovation
in this, because at the exhibition as far back as one hundred
years ago, in 1898, there was a portrait of a staff printer, distinguished only in that he had served forty-five years; from
that point, i.e. from 1932, a portrait of each person coming
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
on board for service in Voronezh was placed in the museum
at the time of his entry into service. But what’s especially
important: this was an introduction of portraits not only of
the workers themselves but of their wives and children; this
shows the decisive dominance of kin over the judicial beginning at the time, and at the exhibition of 1998 many people
found in the museum depictions not only of their grandfathers and fathers, but of their mothers, with autographs,
with a review of their lives and generally with anything that
the love of sons and daughters for dead fathers and mothers
could conceive.
In this manner the museum is the creation of the love of
sons and daughters for fathers and mothers, a love intensified by their deaths. On the other hand, the museum, in that
it contains teaching and education units, is the expression
of the love of parents, acting as one man, which increases
the museum, minimizing their personal dwellings, such
that these latter present architecturally as “servers” of the
museum, and those living in them really bring voluntary service to the museum.
The museum is the living likeness of the Most Holy
Trinity, the likeness of the love of the Son and the Holy Spirit
for the Heavenly Father, and the love of the Father for the Son
and the Holy Spirit. Of course, the likeness would be complete only in such case as the love of the sons and daughters
for the dead father attained the returning of life to them, and
the love of the fathers for the sons attained to their elimination of death. The growth of the museum is conditional
on not only the reduction of the luxury of personal dwellings. The museum will expand all the more, the more court
cases and all sorts of discord are reduced; the museum is the
product of those forces which in the nineteenth century were
wasted on mutual struggle in its various forms, and in this
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respect the museum comprises the likeness of the Triune
God as the model of unanimity and agreement.
The alliance with China, concluded at the time of the
last struggle with England, became a holy union, a spiritual
union, and not just the kind which is based on a commonality of interests. The West from that time lost its authoritative
significance, and Russia in the twentieth century became,
finally, the true Rus, became itself, and the fifth estate, the
peasantry of all the world’s countries, turned out everywhere
Russian in spirit, like to the Chinese, and the name of China
became a synonym for “living” and “great.” Europe’s fear
that she would be inundated by legendarily cheap Chinese
workers turned out to be groundless—Chinese immigration
was directed to the tropics, to the equator, to warm climates,
where Europeans aren’t fit for any work at all.
Nationalism was a dream in the nineteenth century, but
in the twentieth century it became a reality. The spirit of kinship crowded out all the opposite forces—everything judicial
and economic. In China, where every family has its ancestral
temple (museum), all science, in all its fullness, came into
the service of the fathers—the service of the fathers, as one
father, and not to each one’s father in isolation. History was
transformed into commemoration, and all natural science
became the path to resurrecting the fathers. The science of
the nineteenth century, having detected that “everywhere in
nature a ceaseless struggle persists, which always culminates
in the destruction of the weaker,” and bowing before the fact,
has elevated this fact to Law and engraved on the pediment
of its temple: “Death to the weak, to the adapted! Hail the
unceasing bloody struggle!” Now, at the end of the twentieth century, they think that nature does not set the rules
for man, they think that man does not have to obey nature,
but nature ought to serve man. Psychology has revealed the
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The Voronezh Museum in 1998
interrelationship between external and internal characteristics, has revealed the internal relation and, having laid it as
the foundation of society, has eliminated what in the nineteenth century was called sociology: in the twentieth century,
the very word fell into disuse, being replaced by “fratropology,” or more accurately, “delphiturgy” (brother-creation);
psychocracy, the same thing as brother-creation, became the
applied science of psychology. Souls ceased to be darknesses,
and exteriors ceased to be deceptions; mutual knowledge
[vzaimoznanie, intersubjectivity] was laid as the base of society, which was no longer maintained by external law, not by
surveillance, and not by threats of punishments, unlike those
judicial societies from which feeling is expelled and the soul
is torn out. Classical and foreign languages in general have
been replaced by the science of the roots of all languages,
having revealed the kinship of all nations, and promising in
the near future a common natural language, not an artificial
one, like Volapük. Everything related to religion and agriculture, i.e. to regulation, to the task common to all, even now,
at the end of the twentieth century, bears one and the same
name over all the Earth. The twentieth century is the age of
museums, i.e. places not for the commemoration of the dead,
but rather for their enlivenment, via the path of the investigation of the lethal forces of nature. In this, the meaning of life
and the goal of knowledge is revealed to the sons of the dead
father, whereas the nineteenth century was the age of critical
philosophy, having lost both the meaning of life and the goal
of knowledge. The loss of the meaning of life and the goal of
knowledge was noted already in the last quarter of the previous, i.e. nineteenth, century by the writer Zola, who was then
enjoying great glory. And this confers great honor on Zola,
which, however, is reduced in that, having noted the fact, he
bowed before it, acknowledging that this was how it must be.
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Such a relation to the fundamental question—of the meaning of life and the goal of knowledge, on the resolution of
which the very stimulus of life depends—by a writer who was
then recognized as famous, to whose voice many listened,
attests to the moral depth to which people at the end of the
nineteenth century had fallen.
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The Catherine the Great
Exhibition at the Voronezh
Regional Museum
Nikolai Fedorov
and Nikolai Peterson
The Catherine The Great Exhibition
First published in 1896
Translated by Stephen P. Van Trees
In the article “On the Question of the Karazin Meteorological
Station in Moscow” published in Nauka i Zhizn’ magazine
(Science and life, issue no. 44, November 6, 1893), which
includes a proposal for constructing a meteorological station
at the Moscow Rumyantsev Museum in memory of Karazin,
it is mentioned in passing that “a museum is fundamentally
a book depository,” and it is suggested that everything that
is collected in a museum is merely supplementary material,
necessary for the study of what is written in books, although
the material only visually represents what is expressed in
books with words. Developing this idea, one may say that
a museum without books, without a library, is absurd, and
a library without a museum is an incomplete enterprise,
one that is highly insufficient. The relationship of a library
to a museum is like the relationship between a soul and a
body—the separation of these enterprises is death for the
museum. A museum cannot completely exist without books,
and while this is not a total loss (it is well known that libraries without museums exist), what kind of life would this be?
… In any case, even those who do not agree with the idea
expressed above will not deny that libraries and museums
are of the same genus, and thus their structures should have
a lot in common. As proof to justify this idea, we will allow
ourselves to mention the Voronezh Museum, which has
organized two particularly interesting exhibitions: in May
of this year, the Coronation, and in November, the Catherine
Exhibition. Concerning the organization of public libraries, there is a belief that they should be arranged in calendar order. Similar to how a church daily commemorates
and presents its saints who participated in its creation, the
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agencies of science should remember the workers of knowledge, inviting people to not just read their works, but also
to study the creators themselves. To “study” does not mean
to reproach or to praise, but to restore life … such a study is
possible only in libraries that are open to all. The library in its
present organization, where only a small collection of books
is in circulation, while the majority of the books remain constantly in their places and collect dust, must be called a closed
book. The only library that can be called an open book is one
that is arranged in calendar order, by the days of writers’
deaths, because inherent in calendar order is the demand
for commemoration, i.e. the rehabilitation of the author
himself through his works. With this form of organization,
the library will not be a simple depository of books—not a
single book in the library will remain forgotten. With this
form of organization, there will come a turn for every book—
a time for study will be assigned, assigned for the very calendar day of the author’s death. The Voronezh Museum has
proven with its two exhibitions that for museums too and the
arrangement of objects contained therein—the remnants of
the past—that calendar order is the most animated way of
organizing the museum, “animated” in the actual sense of
the word, because this form of organization leads to study,
i.e. to the restoration of life, in agreement with the definition
mentioned above. From November 6th to the 10th, during
the Coronation exhibition, we saw the museum overflowing
with visitors who looked at the displayed objects, for which
the caretaker of the museum, I. Uspensky, provided the most
interesting explanations. This exhibition also increased the
influx of donations to the museum.
One must note with special gratitude that the Voronezh
Museum was not limited to exhibiting solely the objects
from the museum collection alone. Everything related to the
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The Catherine The Great Exhibition
Catherine era that could possibly be found in the Voronezh
region was collected: thus for the duration of the exhibition
they borrowed from the Voronezh Nobility Assembly the
charter of the nobility from April 21, 1785, the velvet-bound
on the genealogy of the nobility from the period of Catherine
the Great (six parts); from the city administration we have
the book, The Foundations of Governing the Province, from
1775, in a velvet binding with a silver edge, and a small silver
bell, both sent for the inauguration of the city’s administration based on the aforementioned foundations; the seminary
provided an autograph from Saint Tikhon, Catherine’s contemporary (an autograph from a letter); the public library
lent busts of Catherine II, Peter III, and Paul I, and statues of
the order of St. George and St. Vladimir.
And private collectors who are involved in collecting
antiques exhibited their own collections in the museum
for the duration of the exhibition. K. I. Bukhonov exhibited
around 150 coins of Catherine II, and a significant collection of medals and tokens from her reign. M. P. Parenago
exhibited books and engravings, among them a portrait of
Catherine engraved by Utkin; an engraving of a painting
titled Reverie dedicated to Catherine, “Le paralitique, servi
par ses enfants” from 1767; an engraving depicting Voltaire
leaning on his cane (Paris, 1778); P. G. Belyaev exhibited
manuscripts, books, and icons in casings from the period of
Catherine the Great; by the way, among the books there are:
Prayers, which was carried by a sixty-seven-year-old (Count
Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin) when he was under arrest (on
February 14, 1758), and Grace of the same Count BestuzhevRyumin on the occasion of his release from prison and reinstatement at court on July 3, 1762. This book is accompanied
by a foreword by Count Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and at the end of
the book a decree from August 31, 1762, is attached which
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reinstated Count Bestuzhev-Ryumin in his rank, honors, and
pension. M. I. Uspensky exhibited textbooks on arithmetic
and geography from the time, and a well-known encyclopedia from the eighteenth century as well.
Thus the Voronezh Museum is not just a collection and
depository of anachronistic remnants, but rather a living
agency, uniting those who study the past. And museums
should not solely be depositories of objects remaining of
life of the past as libraries should not only be depositories
for books; libraries should not serve for amusement and for
light reading, just as museums should not serve to satisfy
idle curiosity. Museums and libraries are schools for adults,
i.e. higher schools, and ought to be centers of research,
obligatory for every rational being—everything must be the
object of knowledge, and everyone must be a learner. However,
research should not be directed toward the destruction of
faith, but toward its affirmation, and not just in words, but
in action, the action of restoring life. Only such research can
be the goal of constructing libraries and museums, the need
for widespread construction of which is felt so acutely. The
most natural thing, of course, would be to make it obligatory to open libraries in every church, and in every church
a museum would also be created as the necessary condition
of enlightenment, because a museum is only the clarification,
by all possible means, of the book, of the library. The creation of
a library and a museum in every church would only be the
realization of the church’s mission, of its obligation to teach.
We hope that the Voronezh Museum does not limit itself
to these two exhibitions. The museum honored Catherine II
with the exhibition, even though she doesn’t have any special connection to Voronezh, the museum is just obliged
to organize an exhibition in memory of Peter the Great,
whose actions enabled Voronezh, two hundred years ago,
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The Catherine The Great Exhibition
to acquire the status that it has today. The museum should
also organize exhibitions for Saint Mitrofan of Voronezh
and Saint Tikhon Zadonsk; and these exhibitions must have
special significance as well. They must show the appropriate
direction for research, must show the kind of science that
leaves a great many people in complete darkness and does
attempt to become the property of all, that does not connect the expansion of enlightenment with the expansion of
knowledge itself, that allows neither students nor teachers to
participate in the expansion of the domain of knowledge (as
described in the article “On the Question of the V. N. Karazin
Monument,” Nauka i Zhizn’ [Science and Life], no. 15 –16,
1894)—such a science is not the true light, enlightening
every man coming into the world. Science can become this
only through the union with the church, upon which also
lies, per the duty of discipleship, the duty of enlightenment.
Therefore only the church can and must connect investigation and observation with primordial national enlightenment through hands-on instruction in all national school,
those are the church schools and the regional schools, the
strange and regrettable separation of which is, apparently,
the result of secular fanaticism. Let us hope that this separation is not permanent, for there should be no antagonism
between secular and religious, regional administration and
church (cf. “Chteniya imperatorskogo obshchestva istorii
i drevnosti” [“Working Papers of the Imperial Society of
History and Antiquity”], 1893, no. 3, foreword to the tale of
the construction of the every-day church in Vologda). Thus,
let the exhibitions on Saint Mitrofan and Saint Tikhon at the
Voronezh Regional Museum serve to eliminate this antagonism, for even though the museum is a secular institution, it
is no stranger to the sacred.
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On the Cathedral*
of the Resurrecting Museum
* The concept of sobornost is central to this text, as well as to Fedorov’s
works, and in this title is translated with the word “cathedral.” On the
term’s significance, see for example George M. Young: “For Fedorov
and most of the religious Cosmists ... Orthodoxy [stands for] sobornost, the synthesis of freedom and unity, wholeness, communality,
spiritual consensus.” George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The
Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 33. —Ed.
Vasiliy Chekrygin
On The Cathedral of the resurrecting museum
Written in 1921
Translated by Ian Dreiblatt
(Of the art of the future: music, painting, sculpture,
architecture, and the written word)
I dedicate this book with reverence to the memory of
the great sage and teacher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov,
whose wisdom created it.
Gathering
(The Creating of the Temple)
“Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, in behalf
of all and for all!”
—The Eucharist
By rising up on his feet, man was created—a weak victory
over the death of the world, over its downfall, its terrestrial
pressure, its torpid law of gravity—and the first thinker was
formed, the first artist.
Man is the expression of a vital conjunction of the arts in
architecture. His head is an image of the living combination
of the arts, the word giving birth.1 A man’s brow is the organ
of his mind, an altar to his fathers. The resurrecting museum
is a conjunction. His eyes are a directorate. His ears hear harmony and dissonance. His lips, resorbing fathers, create the
disincarnate word, the perfection of the arts.
Weeping for his dead fathers in the temple of himself,
a man builds outside of himself a temple of the dead’s
1.
The totality of the arts in their indivisibility.
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Vasiliy Chekrygin
redemption, an unmoving likeness of his being,2 a way of
resurrecting the dead.
Man unites with man for the struggle with dead strength
and its unenlightened bearers; the son has learned the religion of action, interconnection, seeing in unity a salvation
from death.
In building unity, man perceives the brotherhood of all
bloodlines.
In the rational, brotherly union of sons, cemeteries
become communal; graves and tombstones made in the likenesses of resurrected fathers are united.
And together mourning the connection to their fathers
that death has ruined, sons have mentally resurrected their
fathers in the name of universal salvation, in images resembling the dead.
In performing the funeral mass, the temple has found its
voice, its quickening music (which stirs the ashes of the dead
like music from the future), imagining fathers and their forebears coexisting (an icon), the notional uplift of the fathers
(iconostasis) into the heavenly fatherland, devising a plan
for victory over the unmoving strength of death through the
sum total of all living arts.
So the mind created the sacrament of the Eucharist, the
map of the Exodus, of the resurrection of dead fathers, serving in ash as man’s sustenance, completing the construction
of a temple in their own image.
Like the gathering and the unity, man now sees beauty
and force and follows their covenant into a pure gathering.
But he sees that beauty today has become incomplete,
and shines only in sparse flashes of all men’s future unity.
2. In this way the temple is created, by which I mean the way of the
being-son who resurrects his father.
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On The Cathedral of the resurrecting museum
Truly, the temple is a plan for unity, a school of its making,
a keeper of the images of our fathers (images from a future
gathering3), a teacher of the resurrecting museum, the true
theater of the hero-resurrector.
Reason has a single teacher, for reason is a knowledge of
causation, of the Fathers, for the mind’s nature is the resurrection and binding together of the disparate.
The true plan: gatherings of the arts, of their recondite
meanings.
The true plan: defeating time and space, abolishing the
Universe’s law of gravity and falling bodies. The plan of the
world’s transfiguration and liberation from death.
*
*
*
However, it is not in reality, only in thought, that the temple
now overcomes time and space; its architecture is not live but
constrained, and inside it illusory arts are imprisoned (revealed
in a stagnant materiality, an artificially created environment).
The temple is the only likeness of future reality that the
contemporary arts have created.
“The temple as a work of architecture, painting, and
sculpture becomes a depiction of Earth, giving away all its
dead, and of heaven (the vault of the temple and iconostasis), populated by the resurrected generations.”4 In appearance, that is, but not really. In reality,5 the temple takes the
3. Every image, whether of a constellation or a flower, a horse or a man,
bird or beetle—each of these is an intimation of perfection.
4. N. F. Fedorov. The Ptolemaic model of the Universe, forged in the
belief that the sky is the limit of upward motion and the Earth that of
downward motion, that man was placed at the center of the Universe.
5. The Copernican model, cognizant that there exists only the sky
and the Earth, but no limits of motion upward nor downward.
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form of a school in the performance of the Eucharist outside
the temple.
“From a technical perspective, the temple offers a supplement to terrestrial mechanics, the distilled effect of which
is the constraint of bodies from falling.” The earthly architecture of both temple and man is a resistance to falling, an
elevation, a maintenance, a kind of triumph over the falling
of bodies, supporting them, building on the law of gravity.
Not perfectly alive is the temple, and yet not dead; it is,
and is not; it exists and it does not; bounded by time and
space, riven by stale force. An image of the Universe’s majesty, it is lower than the Universe, though higher in meaning.
“Its meaning resides in its being a project of the Universe
bustling with all who have perished, and in which those who
bustle have turned to an awareness and stewardship of existence, no longer blind.”
Exodus
“But think of it: there is no road to immortality but
the limitation imposed by the grave.”
—Filaret
“In pondering the relationship between rational
beings and the irrational senselessness of nature,
man, or the son of man, must devote himself wholly
and freely to physical toil. He must be a laborer—
neither slave nor master, a mere duplicator, and neither Creator nor Maker.”
—N. F. Fedorov
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“We know that which we have created.”
—Kant
“We cannot create, but only recreate.”
—N. F. Fedorov
“Work is a religion”—the ascent of the man who falls and is
scattered into death.
In laboring, a man creates himself, readies himself for the
renewal of the Universe.
A religion that does not consist of labor is doomed to perish, the vile delusion of a licentious spirit.
A man’s intellect is his builder. Building himself, he seeks
to recreate his own house.
The intellect knows he aspires to a revelation in consubstantiality, but for man there is no path to true knowledge
but the labor of constructing himself, in his own household.
In the labor of Resurrection, Life is the work of reconstructing the dead.
From the depths of the conscious artist-son there rises a
holy purpose.
Now the man is called to be a worker—a divine masterresurrector, a great architect of the sky, a keeper of the
Universe.
*
*
*
Seeking the cause-connection of his own phenomenon,
man discovered that his father was the cause; rational, he
listened, touched, looked in the Father, and began work on
an encounter with the dead, coming into reason, never imagining solitary happiness.
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He learned to trample with his own feet the dust of rotten fathers, that beyond his own borders were legions of the
dead, and that their death had come from the blind world.
Maturing, he noticed time moving to renew the Sun, to
build a new heaven, impervious.
He saw souls dwindle like moisture in the gyre of matter, bearing the imprimatur of muteness, and that the best
destroyed death, a good canceling the living.
Constructing his mind, he learned that energy untransmitted is deadly, devouring the living, and that extreme cold
destroys perfection.
He saw that the savage will of the vortex—the evil and
stillness of air—runs to pestilence and plague.
He saw that the lights of heaven like fruit wither in their
ripeness, doubling the Earth.
He learned that man burns out in the vortex of his race
preserved in time like a pillar of flame, and that kingdoms go
limp in the turmoil.
*
*
*
Exhausting themselves in savage meaninglessness, man’s
arts today are a play of dreams; he who is awake looks with a
shudder on the art of a mind indulged with wandering, the
fruit of a lifeless imagination.
The individual, rational artist today is a son of man, compassionate toward the dead, who wanders artists’ studios, is
terrified of the savagery in creating images of man and the
dying world,6 is ignorant of art’s elevation, its significance,
goes drunk on images.
6.
Of the simulations of art.
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But he knows that artists infuse a secret coexistence with
nature into the meaning of rising up, and of the gathering
of the world, they scent the secret nature of form (the plan
of resurrection) and are sensitive to the silent portent of a
liberation in progress.
A teacher calls the artist-scholars with the force of the
united arts to be fathers’ fathers, to be architects, to erect the
past in an ineffable today, to pacify the spirit in eternal fullness, in ungaping death.
The meaning and purpose of a rational man-son’s labor
is the summoning of a Cathedral, resurrecting the museum,
and becoming an artist-astronomer-regulator who never
cleaves science from art or true religion, from reverence for
the fathers.7
The Resurrecting Museum—a temple, an organ that perceives the ongoing structure of the world, and at the same
time its downfall, its demise—draws the strength of an earthly
army into a heavenly one—an instrument of the museumregulator’s actions (a meteoric and cosmic process).
Having come into sense, man unifies his spiritual forces,
joining them in Brotherhood. Creating the implements and
trying the actions of bodies’ tension in a single experience,
a labor-knowledge, he establishes, with the first case of universal labor, the abolition of discord, storms, the thunder
of creation, shapeless forces erupting into the material of
a new architecture,8 uniting the living with the primordial,
constructing bodies out of flaming kernels,9 for the purpose
of the man’s arts is the restoration in the authentic of history
in perfection.
7. This will be a transition from the simulated arts (the Ptolemaic
model of the Universe) to actual art (the Copernican model).
8. Copernican: it holds the celestial bodies from falling.
9. Atoms, electrons.
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*
*
*
The time has passed for man to live in chaotic dreams; the
artist-man-son is called to create not dreams but interrelations of bodies—a vital world. With the museum, man frees
great constraining forces; with the cathedral that gathers
many races into a single one for the real creation of a model
of perfection and a total organic state, bringing the world to
its highest level through the unified will of the museum, collecting the fading light.
Dividing the work of knowing the tenseness of bodies
into forms that occupy the daytime and the night, building under an unexpendable sentry, an instrument of reason, observing the tension of solar energy in darkness and
light; going, in the unified plan of a shared concern, toward
the domestication of raging heavenly elements, defanging
thunderstorms with the unification of science and art, the
Resurrecting Museum—the artist—inflicts a secret stroke of
death, seizing the progress of forces.
So it is not in somnolent dreams but actually in shared
labor that the son-man, having learned what forces are subject to Brotherhood, unifies the arts in the matter of creating
a living, heavenly architecture, establishing, like every true
artist, reality as the goal of his labor.
And so men, having become thinkers in earnest, stand
before one another as the workers of divine mystery, preparing the way toward a meeting with the dead, resurrecting
them into the flames of life.
Embodying the divine image of matter’s enlightenment.
The Resurrecting Museum establishes peace in the world,
turning down the unrestricted forces of chaos and inexhaustible power, introducing consciousness into nature as
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a regulator of acts (of will), perishing in internecine conflict,
and recreating flesh, pure, eternally bright, and immortal.
The Resurrecting Museum’s goal, as an organ of the
muses, is a true circle dance, a genuine sundance (clockwise),
with the strength to take control of the motions of Earth and
heavenly bodies alike, to return life to the dead.
Appeasement of the Elements:
The Start of an Action Outside the Temple
(Regulation of a Meteorological Process)
“Astronomy will address itself to astroregulation,
and the human race will become one of astronomerregulators, which is its innate purpose. The tools man
has created for mutual destruction will become the
means of salvation from the consequences of the iniquity with which he plunders nature.”
—N. F. Fedorov
Man’s true enemy is not man, but blind force, bearing thunder and storm, coldness in spring, hail and bitter cold, disease, every weakness, and death to all that lives.
Great plagues and droughts bring death to many millions
of children, men, the elderly, and women, blasting lands rich
with color into deserts.
As the sign of a matter that ought to be public, hunger
teaches us to unite into a unified army, a heavenly host,10 to
set aside internal conflicts (an involuntary reflection of the
cosmic war, unconscious of the life of nature), to turn as a
10. “The army that has an ideal for itself, or, more precisely, has a
plan in heaven, will be made heavenly when it implements this plan
on Earth.” — N. F. Fedorov
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unified force against the true enemy: the blind elements that
bring death to man.
The point of an army is to rise up against the enemy, the
enemy of a rational being in irrational nature.
Uniting against oppressive forces, man created society,
which today serves him as an instrument for the eradication
of his own kind, the bearers of reason.
High too is the purpose of his armaments—the defense
and protection of life.
The son of man calls for the protection of life, for the use
of arms to give life to the hungry,11 mastering the course of a
meteorological process, sending rain, calling forth thunder,
setting down a bucket to answer the poverty of lands and
nations, cultivating bread—the ash of fathers—for human
sustenance.
To safeguard the harvest from the tyranny of blind forces,
to feed the hungry on the world—this is man’s duty, replacing what is given with what is earned; demoting solar power
(electricity) from the higher levels of the atmosphere, disarming thunder and storms, finding the key to their path.
So, bringing structure into phenomena, man rids himself
of weakness and disease, revives and gathers his strength for
the highest endeavor, resolving class contradictions: cities
and villages, individuals and communities (states),12 fixing
the exodus from chaos into cosmos, turning the course of
history from unconscious to conscious, rational.
The first true concern for the future man of this new history is meteorology, the apparent labor of the Resurrecting
Museum.
11. “Not for limitations on the supply of food imposed by the whim
of the harvest.” — N. F. Fedorov
12. The regulation of meteorological processes represents a transition to Copernican art.
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It is time for man to learn the wickedness of cities, disordering the course of the meteorological process, the evil of
groupings of factories and industrial plants, exhausting the
Earth’s supply of solar power, razing forests, poisoning and
drying up rivers, and in the process creating hunger, poisoning the air with fetor and rot,13 producing empty things that
augment the charm of sexual attraction.
Time for him to learn the wickedness of armies acting
in blindness to protect markets and the production of
simulacra, decay.
For is it not wickedness, the treatment of the peasant, the
factory slave, wickedness in the cities that divide man-sons
into slave and master (the slaves’ slave)?
It is time to learn the chaos of society and its force
that acts in blindness—the army (slave of the master, the
slaves’ slave).
By means of this shared matter of fathers—art—the
village rids itself of the oppression and violence of the city
(neither reaper nor sower).
Man has only one way out: to transfigure the village that
guards his fathers’ graves, having connected it to the city
(to knowledge).
Coming to his senses, the son is called by his teacher
to the villages, to the work of liberating the land from the
yoke of blind forces; he is the new man of future history, and
has transformed into a museum and school of resurrection
the cities that create instrumentalities, that occlude vision,
sound, and the instrumentalities of movement, inciting the
13. The man of the future will have no need of metals extracted from
inside the Earth through hard labor: metals of meteoric and cosmic
origin will replace them, drawn from the celestial expanse of the regulation of the attractive force of the Earth and processed in cities (as
articles of workmanship).
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mastery of forces that bear bread,14 transforming the somnolent village into an active new village—the Resurrecting
Museum, struggling to regulate the meteorological process—hot, dry winds blowing from the east, and damp currents bringing downpours from the west.
Also, distributing moisture (from the equatorial ring
of thunderstorms to the aurora borealis), controlled by the
arrangement of Lemström devices in polar regions, held to
the correct altitudes by aerostats.
“In outward nature, on planet Earth (and in the solar system) there is no prevailing and productive balance of power.
Thunderstorms and auroras (borealis and polaris) point
to the lack of any regulating force. Lightning rods, which
regulate electrical storms, and Lemström devices, which
regulate auroras, are the early stages in the development of
an apparatus, modeled on the nervous system, that will one
day surely decide the very course of the Earth. All bodies are
endowed with the ability to enter into a condition of tempest: on the Sun, we see this take the form of sunspots, and
on Earth in the form of humid air currents that flow away
from the belts (i.e. from the currents) of thunder and stillness, encircling the entire Earth, accompanied by electrical storms great and small. On these very currents, whose
connection to underground phenomena, as well perhaps as
to cyclones and the gulf stream, is yet unknown, depends
all plant and animal life, that is, all harvest and hunger, the
breeding and diseases of livestock. Within the meteorological process lies the force that brings famine, ulceration, and
death. If the life of the sun consists of storms unceasing and
ubiquitous, though of unequal force, then the Earth itself,
minus the reflections of solar lightning, produces thunder
14. A third militarism.
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and lightning, an unbroken ring of storms, interrupted in
the temperate zones and extending to the aurora borealis
in the cold regions of the globe. All life in the Universe is a
continuous thunderstorm of varying intensity, because the
force of the Universe remains an unregulated one. To study
nature thus means seeking a means of stripping the power
of thunder, converting it from one that destroys to one that
recreates, resurrects.
The Universe is a meteorological process, accompanied
by unceasing thunder and storms. If the force producing this
thunder and these storms is itself a force of thunder, then its
study will amount to a search for ways of taming this destructive force by regulating it, a search for ways of turning it from
a thundering, destructive force into one of re-creation. In the
absence of such treatment, this force, destroying everything,
will ultimately devour itself; the very Sun, and all suns, are
clouds of thunder that collapse with the dispensation of their
final bolts. This force can be controlled only through the collective knowledge and labor of all men.15
The Transfiguration of the World
(Religion of the Cosmic Process)
“In the Transfiguration, Christ was revealed, and two
great figures were united: the organizer of relation
and the controller of nature, Moses and Elijah, who
had been the right and left hands of the Resurrector.”
—N. F. Fedorov
15. N. F. Fedorov
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“Alas! You poor human race, how little you have
grasped in the procession of seven thousand years of
the mystery and purpose of your existence on Earth,
and how little you have progressed toward your
exalted destiny.”
—Filaret of Moscow
Of the destruction of the world, the wringing of cometary
clouds, the showering down of stars, we call for the prevention: disarming the thunderstorm of the Universe with the
unity-force of the Resurrecting Museum-Temple, for salvation lies in the unified case of the man who has reconciled
with his brother.
Salvation to the world in the man who lays down his
arms and his destructive power, salvation to the world
in the man who turns his arms over to the power of the
Resurrecting Museum, the re-creating power of the unity
of the human race.
Time will pass, and the new man of rational history
will seek the living world not in abstraction, in dream, but
beholding the world through clear eyes, as it really is, lying
before him suffering and unenlightened, awaiting the sense
of the matter of the son.
The son of man knows that he is called not to flatten the
world’s ascent, but to assure that it rise up in unthinkable
purity, revealing the colors of the Earth, of all creation, in
perfect new freedom and imperishable light.
Loving what lives—the flower blooming in its fresh skin,
the celestial sphere aglow with flickering, dying light—
undertake the labor of preventing their decline and fall.
Undertake it as elevated, intellectual labor, this loving all
that lives, for are you not the resurrector, the son, curiously
seeking the causes for the hostility of the blindly embattling
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Universe? Are you not the bringer of calm, the worker of the
Resurrecting Museum, the heavenly warrior? In the cathedral, you are the resurrector-artist, having recourse to the
highest powers of divine counsel, a living organ of intellect,
the brightest blossom of the Earth.
Loving what lives, and in deep compassion for the dead
fathers awaiting their son’s intellectual labor, the great artist, having through mighty labor penetrated in his inquisitive
manner the chaos of the blind war of nature, of the ramifying arteries of will, and having, by a grand choral harmony of
forces, vanquished hunger and cured disease, must bring the
forces of the Shining-Sun down to the Earth, arousing and
releasing its tensions and influencing the celestial sphere of
the Earth off the path of its orbit, to set it on a course into interplanetary space—this being the most authentic and greatest
work of art, of secret dance, the beginning of the reconstruction of the human body and the Earth in the perfected form
of the dance of the Resurrected Dead.16 Through the labors of
all sons, the man who has become the primary reason for his
own existence creates immortality for himself in the unified
matter of an art-dance of floating freely in the sky.
By controlling the course of the Earth, man—pilot of
the celestial caravel, celestial warrior of eternal peace, conqueror of the man-beast within himself—becomes a divine
artist, readying himself to gather and reunify the living arts—
voices, movement, joyous color—into a single light, a single
world, into a life.
Admiration drives my heart into a high, beautiful
dance, life-giving,17 reconceiving those who dance and the
16. The contemporary art of dance is an image of the dance of the
Resurrected Dead, a shifting of support beams accomplished through
the museum-reason.
17. The cellular life of plants and animals (biological processes)
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Earth from prime elements, a dance of abolition, of separation, of the change of birth and death, a great dance that grants
immortality, abolishing the blind law of repression and death.
Attracting solar forces, charging the Earth with forces of
attraction and repulsion, bringing the mood of a light summer and laying the way for meteoric flame-trails, immortal
sons arise on nearby planets, dispersing the reason-key, the
structure that controls the celestial spheres’ courses, engulfing the force of storms provoked by the sun on the planetspheres. In the flowing motions they are recreated by the
magnificent dance, new suns ignite in the celestial scatter,
renewing the heavens.
And so the sons avert the end of the Universe, transfiguring the law of blind bodies’ decline18 into a law of love, into
the force that restores and drives worlds.
Oh, how mighty are my children, and brothers, and sisters, liberated in unified labor, on a liberated Earth, dancing the divine dance of the start of transfiguration; they are
creating perfection, not in dream and not in life-devouring
abstraction, but in reality, with love for the living and the
dead, redeeming imperfection with the force of the matter
of love, which is to say, with art.
The sons and daughters of man listen in keen sympathy
to the pulse and quiver of particles, of the swirl on hills and in
lowlands of the ashes of the dead and, as artists penetrating
with sensation the hidden essence of coexistence, establish
the relatedness of living harmonies and discover the unity
of the sonic force of resurrection and the vivid, numerical,
plastic one (Constructivism), having learned that the force of
the arts brings resurrection and that true art is an enactment
exists in apparent dependence on two motions of the Earth: rotation
on its axis, and revolution around the Sun.
18. Binding a man to the mortal Earth.
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of the Eucharist outside the temple, the transformation of
bread and wine into the body and blood of the father, that
art (as an enterprise) is a redemption, the Resurrection of the
Dead Fathers.
Dead are our teachers, beaten with rocks in blindness;
dead is my teacher, and my brothers and friends, and I shall
be dead too, and sustain a son with my body for a high concern. Our bodies will be scattered over sacred ground that
swallows fathers, fills its womb with beauty. But the day will
come when our ashes quake in the dance of Resurrection,
when every particle of our bodies blesses the light of reason,
thirsting for redemption and rebirth, taking in the living
music of choirs of son-resurrectors, venerating the fathers
who gave them life.
The Resurrection of the Dead Fathers
(A Eucharist Outside the Temple)
The synthesis of the living arts is the resurrection of the dead.
“Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, in behalf
of all and for all!”
—The Mystery of the Eucharist
“Consumed, you will be resurrected as that which
consumes.”
—Basil of Caesarea
The dead fathers have gone into the Earth, their bodies in
ash—food for the sons.
And after his death, a father supports and sustains his
son, anticipating from his mind the highest concern.
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Cultivating bread with intellectual labor, a man liberated from the blindness of nature’s warring forces comes to
the father as to truth, bringing life into a connection death
cannot shake.
The Earth is heavy with the dead, but a son begets a son in
darkness, and in darkness the sons live, creating phantoms that
look real, and in the blindness of abuse having forgotten the
father, they die, destroyed by the unrestrained forces of death.
The son sleeps, creating the likeness of a perfect world, as
weak on the images he’s drunk as if they were wine, deceiving
himself with a sheen of strength and peace, beneath which
lurks a terror of the truth of the world, slashed and mortal.
With word and dance glorifying marital conjunction,
intoxication by wine, the flow of time, and the spring, a fleeting celebration of power of birth,19 the son with his eyes wide
open does not see the damnation of the successors to the
imperfect rising up of life.
The new man, having emerged from the chaos of blind
forces, is sober with the memory of the father and the inspiration of the son as his form and breath, in the unity of which
they live, having taken control of the motions of the celestial
spheres and the forces of new suns, kindled by them with
the discourse of reason, and having brought them into new
bodies, glittering like snow in daylight, having attained
through hard labor the power of immortality, not imagining
the oblivion of the dead, for the wise know that man, and the
Universe, and thought, and all mankind’s affairs are all but
the likeness of resurrection, resurrection uncompleted.
Having learned in wisdom that the concern of a man’s
art is the recreation of father-causes, and having invested
the force of the arts into the labor of resurrection, in deep
19. Paganism, a tragic worldview.
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morality and love, in full knowledge to approach the human
race unified in will, feeling, and thought—the cathedral
Resurrecting, in reverence to the miraculous wonder of life,
to the Eucharist performed outside the temple, the force of
the animating arts of music, dance, and shape awakening the
dead from their graves.
The choirs of artist-sons will be heard over the oceans,
and the thunderbolts sent into the depths of the Earth will
make it quake, and water from the Earth will surge forth,
bearing the ashes of the fathers.
The souls and bodies of the living will be heard over the
music, over its heart-rending harmonies, and the perfected
heavenly music of the God-man being born is one with the
image of the fathers,20 woven perfectly by the God-man as
rays of vital, redolent light.
The creator-like force of celestial music rings out, like
a secret essence of living, in tune with the stirring of the
father’s dust particles, by the blessed will of his son the
father’s scattered ashes cycling skyward through a vortex of
uprisings, and the image of the world is fulfilled through the
power of music, and the father shudders and returns to life in
fresh skin, luminous with color, his brow, resurrected, comes
into focus, and the dead arise, returned to the fullness of life,
true beauty, and inexhaustible, immortal force.
And the relation between son and father will be perfect,
for the son will be as a father to the father, and the father as a
son to the son.
And the mystery of man’s redemption and victory
over death will be perfected, his escape from imperfection
through the power of the unified arts into the kingdom of
permanence, immortality, and completeness.
20. A celestial iconostasis.
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Having perfected life’s highest concern—the establishment of a world of purity and unity—man stands self-created
in the image of Divine First Principles; radiant with joy and
unwavering light, man-the-Resurrector is more than human,
the appropriate appellation now being God-man, the master
of reason.
Every twilight creation exults and rejoices, the trees scatter and a higher reason burns in the lower creatures, having become the equal of higher beasts in transfiguring love;
liberated from servitude, from life’s rigid circuit, these wise
brothers are as the high Spirits, various manifestations of the
exalted Father.
The beauty of the world radiates outward, and will not be
muted nor concealed: and the world will be a ringing music,
a living voice, freely penetrating the luminous spirit of the
father-son unified in spirit.
The son-father comes to know unanticipated joy and
the immortal happiness of peace in eternity, beholding that
which is invisible, hearing that which is muted.
The roar of countless oceans raging in storm is drowned
out by song in the renewed sky.
For the clamor, the oceans’ voices, stand before the
music of the animated spheres, in which light and sound
are one, in which colors are a harmony enlacing and burning
with light.
A new ear and new eye that rise to the task of discovering
the voices and light of the world renewed and the perfected
man’s new, God-given faculty of reason accommodate what
does not fit into us, bound by slavery and oppressed by strife.
In this way, the terrible and great mystery of the Eucharist
is enacted, converting the ashes of the fathers—the bread
and wine that serve as nourishment to the man-son—into
the body and blood of the father.21
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The living arts, desolated by blind force, are united in an
immortal image, and death is defeated.
The celestial spheres are animated and inspired—the son’s
debt of wisdom—and the Universe is caught from its fall.
From the Earth, as from the throne of the Universe,
comes the father being resurrected, and behind the father his
father, following the sequence of time (and time is defeated),
and they arise into the heavens to conquer space and stand
in pure contemplation with the fathers’ fathers.
Ascension and Construction
(Copernican Architecture)
“Art is begun on the Earth and completed in the
heavens.”
—N. F. Fedorov
21. In enacting the Eucharist as an authentic synthesis of the arts
rather than a simulated, technical synthesis of the simulations of art,
mere theatrics, authentic action is not taken, and not mere simulation. Emerging onto the scene is not some dissembler in the guise
of a hero, but an authentic hero, an actor (in the sense that he is one
who acts). Theatrics (the synthesis of simulations of art) give rise to
simulated heroes and phenomena, and, being created out of a tragic
worldview, portray the desolation of the world (the tragic death of the
hero felled by fate, by blind forces). In other words, these theatrics
stage the destruction of the Universe, of its architecture, with the collapse of its primary support—man.
In the temple, as in any realization of the world that should
be (any plan for Resurrection), the fallen hero—the supporter of
the world, the deceased in the center of the temple—is resurrected
through the totality of his hard work and prayer.
Resurrection will be the organic synthesis of the living arts. It will
come in the resurrection of the father-cause.
Aesthetics will incorporate ethics, the ideal will become real, what
was transcendent will be made immanent.
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The forces that have been revived and risen up will recoil
from the Earth, soaring into the vastness of the Universe, and
animate the celestial spheres, knocking them from the orbits
set for them in accord with the torpid law of gravitation. In
a divine movement-dance, man remakes his flesh, and the
redolent bodies of the Universe will burn with a new light,
the abode of rational spirits.
Taking control over the celestial worlds, here is man,
like the Sun moving the stars, illuminating silent expanses
of the Universe with the pulse of illuminated life, wielding
blessed forces.
Having become the endeavor of the God-man, the
father-son—founder of heaven, architect of the Universe,
dwelling place of wisdom—creates a single, eternal, living
temple of worlds, without seeking supports, for it is the
perfected love-law that serves as his support. Having conceived the luminous creation of a reinvention alive with
undiminished youth, the perfect mind gives permanent
form to the enlightened flesh of the world, that it may live
in eternity.
Mighty comets are ignited by the father-son and soar
through the sky, rich with sound, reverberating with the
sweetest of all music.
Its play is a part of the structure of the Universe; the gathering comets are sealed into force, as are mighty suns, like
flashes of brilliant color woven from logic (higher than flesh)
and music.
Overcome is time by resurrection, by the sons who have
risen up; overcome is space by their ascent and command
over worlds.
And eternity shall be known by the son in the fullness of
life, the depth of knowledge.
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The falling world will be held up, and the world will exist
in perfect love—the Secret of the Father, the son, and the
spirit, in the duskless morning, the enduring spring.22
Living beauty gathered into force has harnessed and
burns with thousands of sparking rays, pouring the sweetness of life to spirit-sons made one with creation.
The Universe dancing in its circle.23
The milky ways, ignited by the son out of cosmic dust,
the stuff of celestial architecture, of the temple that moves in
eternity, filled beyond holding with the voices of darkness of
the themes that have arisen, enfolding a victorious song to
the sense-carpenter.
Embodying in glory the perfected arts as the Word.
Never hearing the unheard, never seeing the unseen.
The aspiration of my soul brings forth what weakly I can
say of eternity and the perfection of love and of light.
Where in a man abides what he can say of perfection?
My ears knocked awake by the power of the all-pervading
sands of the Word in glory.
Can one even speak of eternity?
If I had a polysyllabic intellect and a thousand mouths
to sing every thought into a single, harmonious whole, still
then I could never address the highest of subjects, eternity.
For man’s tongue is impoverished, bound up by time, man’s
word is weighed down, frail and fatal, igniting not life but its
mere likeness.
My eyes sparkle with joy for the hope of seeing an unextinguished gathering of worlds that swarm with life.
What turmoil it will be, to see indestructible, inspired
suns, to hear the noise of eternity’s flaming wheels.
22. Trinity Sunday.
23. A country dance, clockwise motion, religious processions in the
city—all reflections of Copernican architecture.
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My faculty of speech has been exhausted, and I, heeding
the voices of wisdom, reverently bow my head and bless the
triumph of my spirit, ripping it into perfect love that knows
no fatigue, no death.
All my family—father and mother, brothers, sisters, the
wives and children of my brothers—I await your resurrection
into our eternal coincidence, the revelation of the Word for
perfect Love.
In that Love, our meeting is interpenetratory, giving form
to an eternal glory, all-loving, the pulse of a life welling with
fragrant light.
We will live one inside the other, while celestial forces
reveal the secret of their being and we at last can look upon
the Father face to face.
And the innermost cedars quiver in harmony, revealing
and enlightening the masses of sons of who have risen up,
giving form to the reverence of the Blessed Trinity.
Afterword
“Architecture, Construction, the Harmonization of
worlds—these result not from conscious knowledge,
but only from the mastery of worlds.”
—N. F. Fedorov
The son who has forgotten his fathers will be tormented by
melancholy in his laborious wanderings; he finds no place
under the Sun, seeking to establish his own existence through
murder and in meaninglessness sharpening the scythe for his
own death. He deludes himself with mirages, never seeing
them fade out, never laboring for them to erupt, knowing life
only through dream, but tumbling through reality.
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He is terrified of death, yet remains consigned to it
helplessly.
Living in perplexity, he saps his spirit of strength, and
soon enough despises his own life and the Father who gave it
to him. He hates his brother and his friend. Having forgotten
the father, he damns himself, his heart being as stone.
No comfort to him in the plush colors of today—tomorrow
is coming on like fate.
The slave stirs with tasks into the new morning.
He laughs out. Glances about. He is joyful, but does not
trust his own joy.
Light, he moves like an apparition, burns straw, but
in murders he is first—for he seeks his own strength, his
own gravity.
He loves novelty like a woman, is deceived, and seeks anew.
A transferal from that which is depleted to that which
is empty, altering its form—this is what we have chosen to
call art.
A sensible son, loving the fathers, knows the business
of life: he is simple and gentle as a dove, seeks not happiness but labor, heeding the call to restore man and the
crumbling Universe.
Pure in his simplicity, he reconciles and unites enemies
at a shared table, to create out of persons a resurrecting temple-museum for the societal task before him: to nourish the
hungry by the force of arms turned to the good of life, and to
transform the village that houses a graveyard to a village that
resurrects fathers.
For the wise know that the arts—the mystery of the
Eucharist, the Resurrection of the Dead—are the true task
at hand. And the wise as well pursue truth in the matters of
life, to recreate in the unity of the human race a life renewed
in the renewed heavens.
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The Church Ritual
as a Synthesis of the Arts
Pavel Florensky
The Church Ritual
First published in 1918
Translated by Wendy Salmond
I would like to share with you some thoughts of a rather general nature. Once ideas are taken out of the vital context that
produced them, however, they are easily misinterpreted.
Think of my remarks as “just in case” thoughts—speculation
both theoretical and concrete on what may well be the single
most important living museum of Russian culture in general,
and of Russian art in particular. While on the other hand, we
can only arrive at a systematic solution to the problems which
historical reality has bequeathed to us by properly exposing
their general principles—and most importantly, only after
we have a reached consensus in defining the basic characteristics of cultural, as well as more specifically artistic, activity.
It is absolutely essential that colleagues involved in the same
project develop their practical work hand in hand while paying close attention to theoretical refinement and elaborating
theoretical questions about art on site, at the very heart of
artistic production. It must be admitted, moreover, that in
the area that concerns us—namely, religious art, conceived
as the highest synthesis of heterogeneous artistic activities—
theoretical questions remain virtually untouched. If it were
permissible to leave our immediate tasks aside and allow
our imagination to stray into the realm of possibilities—and
not particularly remote ones—I would have entertained an
idea about the need to create a network of scientific and
educational institutions at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra—an
archetypal monument and a historically existing attempt
to achieve the higher synthesis of arts—which has been the
source of dreams for the new aesthetic for so long.
I imagine the Lavra as a type of experimental center,
a laboratory for the study of fundamental problems in
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contemporary aesthetics, a kind of contemporary Athens,
for example, where the theoretical discussion of the problems of religious art would occur, not in isolation from the
actual realization of these artistic goals, but in the presence
of the very aesthetic phenomenon that controls and nurtures such discourse. In the ensuing discussion it will perhaps become apparent that a museum—to bring my idea to
its conclusion—a museum that functions autonomously is
false and essentially pernicious to art, because even though
the subject matter of art is classified as an object, it is in no
sense merely an object. It is not an immobile, stagnant, dead
mummy of artistic creation/activity. It should be understood
as an unquenchable, eternally beating flow of creativity itself,
as the creator’s living, pulsating activity. Even though it is
removed from the artist in time and space, it remains inseparable from him. It still radiates and plays with the colors of
life, it still flows with the excitement of the spirit.
A work of art is a living entity and requires special conditions in which to live and particularly in which to flourish.
Detached from these concrete conditions of its existence,
specifically its artistic existence, it dies, or at least enters a
state of anabiosis, where it ceases to be perceived, and at
times even ceases to exist as a work of art. And yet the museum’s aim is precisely to isolate the piece of art, which it misrepresents as an object that can be removed or transported
on a whim from place to place and installed anywhere, and
ultimately to destroy it as a living entity (I am taking this
idea to the extreme). Metaphorically speaking, the museum
substitutes a mere outline for the finished painting, and we
can count ourselves lucky if even that is not distorted.
What would we say of an ornithologist who, instead of
observing birds wherever possible in their natural habitat,
concerned himself exclusively with collecting beautiful
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plumage? The natural scientists of our day have clearly understood the importance of studying nature as much as possible
under concrete natural conditions. Wherever feasible, the
actual museums of natural history are being transformed
into zoological and botanical gardens equipped, as far as
possible, with natural living conditions, instead of cages, as
far as this can be achieved. The famous zoological garden
in Hamburg comes to mind here. But for some reason this
same concept, which is of infinitely greater importance for
the study of mankind’s spiritual activity, has hardly been put
into practice by the disciplines in question. A few museum
rags or a shaman’s tambourine are essentially just that—rags
and a tambourine—and have as little value for the study of
shamanism as Napoleon’s spur for modern military history.
The loftier the human activity and the more definitively it
involves an element of value, the more prominent does a
functional method of comprehension and study become
and the more futile the homegrown collecting of rarities and
freaks. These ideas are as incontrovertible as they are rarely
mentioned when the time comes to apply them. I realize that
I am trying your patience with these overly simple truths, but
I feel compelled to do so in view of a far from rare inability or
unwillingness to grapple with them that is encountered all
too frequently—that elementary artistic and archaeological
predatoriness, that rabies museica, that seems prepared to
carve off a piece of a painting, all for the sake of installing it
in one particular building on one particular street, called a
museum. Verily, lucus a non lucendo.
But the Muses cannot be forced to wear flounces. In
the interests of culture a protest should be made against
attempts to tear a few rays from the Sun of creativity, stick
a label on them, and put them under a bell glass. This protest, it must be hoped, will not be without repercussions—if
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not now, then in the future—because museum affairs are
clearly moving in the direction of concretization, of saturating the work of art’s environment with life and the plenitude
of life’s wholeness. In the writings of Pavel Muratov I find
some pages that I am ready to include in a legislative codex
on museum aesthetics. The author of Obrazy Italii (Images of
Italy) writes:
Perhaps it is not in the light of the museums at all
that one must seek the source of a genuine enthusiasm for the ancients. Who would be prepared to claim
that he/she truly appreciated Greece within the four
walls of the British Museum and retained its image in
his/her soul once he/she had gone out into the eternally wet Strand, or down to the dreamy, romantic,
smoky groves of Hyde Park, so typical of the North?
The genius loci of London is clearly alien to the genius
of those places where the marbles of the Parthenon
and of Demeter of Cnidus first saw the light of day;
nor is it any more like the air on which these beings of
the ancient world sustained their invisible life, the air
that each one of us breathes in the spacious courtyard
of the Museo delle Terme, despite its lack of first rate
objects … As he/she inspects the ancient reliefs here,
the visitor can sometimes hear an overripe pear fall to
the ground, or the paw-shaped leaves of a fig tree tapping on the window as it sways in the wind. Among
the old cypress trees in the middle of the yard, a fountain plays, and ivy entwines the sacrificial white bulls.
The abundance of fragments and sarcophagi that
have been placed here are flooded with sunlight that
turns the travertine blue and transparent, the marble
warm and alive. Give me the splendid existence of
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these objects any day, rather than the perfection of
a masterpiece carefully preserved in a stuffy room.
The scattered rose petals that have become lodged
in the folds of a woman’s dress, sculpted who knows
when and by whom, are a far greater adornment than
all the connoisseurs’ opinions and scholars’ arguments. These petals, these shadows cast by leaves and
branches across the marble, these lizards scurrying
among the fragments, are as it were a link between
the ancient world and our own, the only way in which
our heart can come to know it and believe in its life.
Further on, Muratov writes of a superb idea on the part of the
keepers of the National Museum to display part of its ancient
collections out of doors in the sunlight:
A museum is more destructive to antique sculpture than a picture gallery to the paintings of the
Renaissance … Sculpture needs light and shade, the
expanse of the sky and the tonal contrast of vegetation,
perhaps even spots of rain and the movement of life
flowing past nearby. For this form of art the museum
will always be a prison or a cemetery … A profound
emotion grips the traveler in a quiet corner of the
Forum near the spring of Iuturna, where the Dioscuri
watered their horses.
But, we ask ourselves, would the stones from this same
spring be as precious if they were transplanted to the Berlin
Museum and arranged on shelves along the walls, however
well-dried those walls might be?
Is it not the way life goes on around these stones, the functional contemplation of them, that disquiets and ennobles
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our soul? What frightens me most about the activity of our
Commission and all other commissions and societies alike,
regardless of their country of origin, is the potential for
transgressing against life, for sliding onto the oversimplified, easiest path of stifling and soul-destroying collecting.
For isn’t that what happens when an aesthete or archaeologist regards the signs of life in some organism, a functionally
unified whole, as self-sufficient, severed from the living spirit,
outside of their functional relationship to the whole.
In the Inventory of the Lavra sacristy we are already
encountering attempts at such stifling. Thus, in discussing the
famous chalice of reddish-yellow marble donated by Grand
Duke Vasiliy Vasilevich Temnyi, the compiler of the Inventory
has made this note: “And the marble weighs this many pounds
at so much per pound, a total of 3 rubles 50 kopeks.” Let’s not
be deceived by the naive candor of this note: nomine mutato
de te fabula narratur. Even when it appears in a more complex
and refined form, the formula “marble valued at 3 rubles 50
kopeks” may be considered canonical for those who support
the abstract collecting of things that have no, or almost no,
meaning outside the totality of specific conditions of life. In
the words of Pavel Muratov,
We can only dream that some day all the reliefs and
statues that have been found in the Forum and on
the Palatine will be returned here from the museums
of Rome and Naples. Some day we will understand
that, for an ancient, an honorable dying at the hands
of time and nature is better than lethargic slumber
in a museum.
Decentralizing the museums, bringing the museum out
into life and bringing life into the museum, creating a living
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museum for the people that on a daily basis would educate
the masses that streamed about it (and not the collecting of
rarities for art gourmets only); a thorough assimilation of
human creativity into life, for all the people, not for isolated
pockets of one or two specialists, who often have a weaker
understanding of the artistic whole—these are the slogans
of museum reform that should be set against what was worst
in the culture of the past, against what truly deserved the
title “bourgeois.”
But let us return to our theoretical discussion.
In one of his lectures, Yurii Olsuf’ev defines style as the
result of amassing homogeneous artistic perceptions (I
would add to this our own creative reactions) from a given
epoch. “Therefore,” he says, “the pledge of true artistic worth,
that the art of that period is genuine, lies in the harmony
between style and content.” In this way the vitality of art
depends on the degree of unity between impressions and
the means by which they are expressed. True art is a unity of
content and the means of expressing that content, but these
means of expression can easily be understood simplistically,
by excising some single facet from the content-laden function of embodiment. Then just one side of an organic unity,
one side alone, is taken as something self-sufficient, existing in seclusion from the other facets of embodiment, even
though it is really a fiction that has no reality outside of the
whole, just as paint scraped off a painting or the sounds of
an entire symphony played all together are not an aesthetic
reality. And if on the basis of this simplistic insensitivity the
aesthete attempts to sever the threads, or more accurately,
the bloodbearing arteries linking that facet of the work of art
under examination to those other facets which the aesthete
fails to notice, then he destroys the unity between the content and the means of expression, he annihilates the style of
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the art object or distorts it, and in distorting or annihilating
style, in de-styling that work, he thereby deprives it of genuine artistic content.
Let me repeat that a piece of art is artistic precisely by
virtue of the completeness of the conditions essential for its
existence, on the basis of which and in which it was engendered. By removing a part of these conditions, by rejecting
or replacing some of them, the piece of art is deprived of
its vital play, it is distorted and even made anti-artistic. The
traits of heterogeneous styles introduced into a piece with
a specific style are often repulsive, unless a new creative
synthesis is effected. Aphrodite in a farthingale would be
as insupportable as a seventeenth-century marquise in an
airplane. But if the wholeness of a work of art expressed in
this primitive form is generally acknowledged, the general
necessity and the scope of this precondition for artistic content is by no means so clear to everyone. Of course, everyone knows that the aesthetic phenomenon of a painting
or statue needs light, that music needs silence, and architecture space. But not everyone remembers with an equal
degree of clarity that these general conditions should have
in addition several qualitative determinants and that these
determinants in no way constitute a service beyond the call
of duty, or an act of charity on the viewer’s part. Rather,
they become a constitutive part of the actual organism of
the work of art and, having been foreseen by its creator,
they form its continuation, although that too lies beyond
the bounds of what we call, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, the work of art proper.
A painting, for example, should be illuminated by some
specific sort of light, diffuse, white, sufficiently bright,
uniform, and not colored or mottled, etc. Outside of this
required illumination it does not live as a work of art, i.e. as
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an aesthetic phenomenon. If a picture was painted for white
lighting, then illuminating it with red light means killing
the aesthetic phenomenon as such, for the frame, canvas,
and paint are in no way the work of art. Similarly, placing a
piece of architecture in a foggy space or listening to a piece
of music in an auditorium with poor acoustics also means
distorting or destroying the aesthetic phenomenon.
But more than that, there are conditions for perceiving works of art that are, so to speak, negative. One cannot,
for instance, listen to a symphony or look at a painting in
a setting filled with unbearably stinking gases. These negative conditions, if not kept within certain tolerable bounds,
burrow their way into the style of the work, annihilating the
unity of form and content, and thereby destroying the work
as such. For better or worse, the work of art is the center of
an entire cluster of conditions, which alone make possible
its existence as something artistic; outside of its constitutive
conditions it simply does not exist as art. In the case of easel
painting, we choose the frame and background; for a statue,
it is the drapery; for a building, the totality of color patches
and airy spaces; for music, the overall character of the impressions simultaneously experienced with it. The more complex
the conditions in which a particular work lives, the easier it is
to distort its style, to make a wrong move that would imperceptibly lead away from the plane of genuine artistry toward
absence of style.
This general condition applies particularly to religious
art. In the recent past, upholders of aesthetic standards felt
justified in looking down on the Russian icon. Now the eyes
of the aesthetes have been opened to this aspect of religious
art. But this first step, unfortunately, is so far only the first,
and one frequently finds an aesthetic shallowness and insensitivity that perceives the icon as an independent object
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usually found in a church, located by chance in a church, but
capable of being successfully transferred to an auditorium,
museum, salon, or who knows where else. I permit myself
to label as shallowness this isolation of one of the aspects
of religious art from the whole organism of church ritual as
a synthesis of the arts, that artistic environment in which
alone the icon possesses its true artistic meaning and can
be contemplated in its true artistic nature. Even the briefest
analysis of any one of the aspects of religious art will show
that this aspect is connected to others—I am personally convinced, to them all, but for the moment it is enough to point
out just a few interdependent facets of religious art, selected
almost at random.
Let us take, for example, this same icon. Of course, the
way it is lit is by no means irrelevant and, of course, for the
icon’s artistic existence its illumination should be exactly
that under which it was painted. In this instance, the illumination is quite unlike the dispersed light of the artist’s
studio or the museum gallery; rather it is the uneven and
irregular flickering, one might almost say winking, light of
the icon lamp. Calculated to be seen in the play of a flickering flame that moves with every breath of wind, making
allowance ahead of time for the effects of colored reflections
from the bundles of light passing through colored, sometimes faceted glass, the icon can be contemplated as such
only in the presence of this current, only in this flood of
light, fragmenting, uneven, seeming to pulsate, rich in warm
prismatic rays—a light which all perceive as alive, warming
the soul, emitting a warm fragrance. Painted under more
or less the same conditions, in a half-darkened cell with a
narrow window, lit with several kinds of artificial lighting,
the icon comes to life only in corresponding conditions.
Conversely, it grows numb and distorted in conditions
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which, in abstract and general terms, might seem the most
favorable for works of the brush—I am speaking of the
even, calm, cold, and strong lighting of the museum. And
many peculiarities of the icon which tease the sated gaze
of modernity—the exaggeration of certain proportions, the
accentuation of lines, the profusion of gold and gems, the
frame and the haloes, the pendants, the brocade and velvet
veils sewn with pearls and precious stones—all this, seen in
conditions natural to the icon, exists not at all as piquant
exoticism, but as the essential, absolutely unremovable, one
and only means of expressing the spiritual content of the
icon, i.e. as the unity of style and content, in other words—as
authentic artistry. Gold, which by the diffused light of day is
barbaric, heavy, and devoid of content, comes to life in the
flickering light of the icon lamp or candle, for it sparkles
with myriad flashes in every direction, conveying a presentiment of other, unworldly lights, filling a heavenly space.
Gold, which is the conventional attribute of the celestial
world and which in a museum is something contrived and
allegorical, in a church with flickering icon lamps and a multitude of burning candles is a living symbol, it is representation. In exactly the same way the icon’s primitivism, its at
times bright, almost unbearably bright, coloring, its saturation and insistency, are most subtly calculated on the effects
of church lighting. Here, in the church, all of this exaggeration is softened and conveys a power unattainable by ordinary methods of representation. In this church lighting we
can make out the faces of the saints, their countenances,
i.e. heavenly aspects, living phenomena of another world,
proto-phenomena, “Urphiinomena” we would call them,
following Goethe’s example. In a church we stand face to
face with the platonic world of ideas, whereas in a museum
we see not icons but merely caricatures of them.
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But let us go further, and move from the art of fire, an
indispensable component of the synthesis of church ritual,
to the art of smoke, without which once again this synthesis
does not exist. Need we point out that the finest blue veil
of incense dissolved in the air brings to the contemplation
of icons and frescoes a softening and deepening of aerial
perspective, such as the museum neither knows nor can
dream of. Need we recall that, through this constantly moving atmosphere, this materialized atmosphere, this atmosphere visible to the gaze, like some very fine granularity,
absolutely new achievements in the art of air are introduced
into icons and frescoes? They are new, however, only for
secular art that is abstracted and isolated, not for religious
art, whose creators took them into account ahead of time,
and consequently without them their works cannot help
but be distorted.
No one will deny that electric light kills color and destroys
the balance of color masses. If I say that icons should not
be looked at in electric light, with its wealth of dark blue
and violet rays, few people would argue with me. Everyone
knows that, like a burn, electric light also destroys psychic
receptivity. This is an example of a negative condition for
the artistic content of religious art. But if there are negative
conditions, there are even more positive ones, which in their
totality define not only church ritual as something whole,
but also each aspect of it as organically coordinated with
all the others. Style requires that the circle of conditions be
in some degree complete, that the special world that is the
artistic whole be in some sense self-contained. Its infiltration
by alien elements leads to the distortion of both the whole
and the separate parts that have their center and source of
equilibrium in the whole. Generally speaking, in a church
everything is interlinked: church architecture, for example,
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takes into account even so apparently minor an effect as the
ribbons of bluish incense curling across the frescoes and
entwining the pillars of the dome, almost infinitely expanding the architectural spaces of the church with their movement and interlacing, softening the dryness and stiffness of
the lines and investing them with movement and life, as if
melting them.
But we have been talking so far only of a small part of
church ritual, and one that is comparatively very homogeneous. Let us recall the plastic, rhythmic movements of the
officiating priests, as when they swing the censer, the play and
modulation of folds in the precious fabrics, the aroma, the
particular fiery waftings of the atmosphere, ionized by thousands of burning flames. Let us further recall that the synthesis of church ritual is not just confined to the sphere of the
fine arts, but encompasses the art of singing and poetry, all
kinds of poetry, church ritual being itself a musical drama on
the aesthetic plane. Here everything is subservient to a single
goal, to the supreme effect of this musical drama’s catharsis,
and so everything here that is coordinated to everything else
does not exist if taken separately, or at least it exists falsely.
Therefore, leaving aside the mysticism and metaphysics of
the cult and focusing exclusively on the autonomous plane
of art as such, I am nevertheless astonished when I happen
to hear speeches about preserving a monument of high art
such as the Lavra, in which attention is limited to one single
aspect while remaining anti-artistically and anti-culturally
indifferent to another.
If the lover of vocal music started pointing out to me that
in church melodies, so closely linked to the ancient world,
we have high art, and perhaps even the highest vocal art,
comparable in the instrumental realm only with Bach; if in
the name of this cultural value he began demanding that the
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vocal component of the liturgy be preserved, referring particularly to the distinctive local chants preserved by Lavra
tradition, then to be sure I would shake his hand. But I would
find it difficult to refrain from bitterness in reproaching him:
“Is it really all the same to you that the vaults of outstanding architectural achievements are going to ruin, that frescoes are flaking off and that icons are being repainted or
plundered?” Similarly, I could not but contrast to the lover
of singing and also the connoisseur of the fine arts my own
concern about the preservation of works of ancient church
poetry, which up to now has preserved the characteristics
of the ancient chanting manner of singing and ancient
scansion, and about the preservation of manuscripts from
bygone centuries, full of historical significance, which have
brought to perfection the composition of the book as a total
object. I could not help reminding all these connoisseurs of
the arts that have been forgotten or half-forgotten by the
modern world, those arts that are even more auxiliary and
yet are absolutely essential to the organization of this ritual
as an artistic whole: the art of fire, the art of smell, the art of
smoke, the art of dress, and so forth, up to and including the
utterly unique Trinity holy bread [pmifora], with its mysterious and secret recipe, the distinctive choreography that
emerges in the measured movements of the priests as they
come in and out, in the converging and diverging of their
countenances, in their circling around the throne and the
church, and in the church processions. He who has tasted
the charm of antiquity knows well how ancient all this is,
how it lives as an inheritance and the only direct branch of
the ancient world have survived, particularly of the sacred
tragedy of the Hellenes. Even such details as the specific,
light touching of various surfaces, of holy objects made of
various materials, of the icons anointed and saturated with
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oil, fragrances, and incense—and touching besides with the
most sensitive parts of our body, the lips—become part of
this total ritual, as a special art, special artistic spheres, as
for example the art of touch, the art of smell, and so on. In
eliminating them we would deprive ourselves of the fullness
and completeness of the artistic whole.
I will not discuss the occult element that is characteristic
of any work of art in general, and of church ritual in particular. This would take us into a realm that is too complex.
Nor can I talk here about the symbolism that is inevitably
present in any art, particularly the art of organic cultures.
For us, even the external, we might say the superficial, consideration of style as a totality of all means of expression is
enough to speak of the Lavra as an entire artistic and historical monument that is unique anywhere in the world and
that requires infinite attention and care. The Lavra, considered in a cultural and artistic context, should, like a single
entity, be a continuous “museum” without losing a single
drop of the precious liquid of culture that has been gathered here with such style, in the very midst of the stylistic
multiplicity of epochs, throughout the Moscow and Saint
Petersburg periods of our history. As a monument and a
center of high culture, the Lavra is infinitely necessary for
Russia, and in its entirety, what’s more, with its day-to-day
existence, its very special life that has long since disappeared into the realm of the distant past. The whole distinctive organization of this vanished life, this island of the
fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, should be protected
by the state with at the very least no less care than the last
bison were protected in the Belovezh Forest. If an institution for Muslims or Lamas comparable to the Lavra came
within the state’s purview, even if it was alien to our culture and remote from our history, could the state resist the
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idea of supporting and protecting such an institution? How
much more attentive, then, should the state be toward this
embryo and center of our own history, our own culture, both
scholarly and artistic?
For all that, I consider the idea of transferring use of the
Lavra from the monks to parochial societies to be thoroughly
lacking in empathy and aesthetic sensitivity. Anyone who has
thoroughly investigated the incommensurability and qualitative difference between the lifestyle, the psychology, and
finally the liturgical style of monks—even bad monks—and
people who live outside the monastery—even though they be
extremely virtuous—cannot but agree with me that it would
be a great breach of style to grant service in the Lavra to the
white priesthood. Even in terms of color, the patches of color
in the churches or on the grounds of the Lavra, the substitution of black figures, with their distinctive monastic gait, with
any others, whether different in style or entirely lacking in
style, would immediately destroy the totality of the Lavra’s
artistic impression and would transform it from a monument
to life and creativity into a dead storehouse for more or less
random objects.
I could understand a fanatical demand to destroy the
Lavra and leave not a stone standing, made in the name of
the religion of socialism. But I absolutely refuse to understand a Kulturträger who, on the basis of nothing more than
a fortuitous overabundance of specialists in the fine arts in
our day, fervently protects the icons, the frescoes, and the
walls themselves, and remains indifferent to other, no less
valuable achievements of ancient art. But most importantly,
he doesn’t take into account the highest goal of the arts, their
ultimate synthesis, so successfully and distinctively resolved
in the church ritual of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and sought
with such insatiable thirst by the late Skriabin.
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It is not to the arts but to Art that our age aspires, to the
very core of Art as a primordial activity. And for our ages it
is no secret, where not only the text but the entire artistic
embodiment of the Prefatory Action is concealed.
—Sergiev-Posad, October 24, 1918
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On the Creation of a Pantheon
in the USSR: A Proposal
Vladimir Bekhterev
On the Creation of a Pantheon
First published in 1927
Translated by Bela Shayevich
Barely any time has passed since Kustodiev died, and shortly
before him, Vasnetsov—both of them great fine artists. It
has not been long since the passing of the poet Esenin, and
before him, the poet Blok. Nor has much time passed since
the death of the great political leader Dzerzhinsky, and
before him, the no less great military specialist Frunze. It
was not long after their passing that prominent scientists,
the scholars Svetlov and Kravkov, passed away, along with
a huge number of other talented specialists in all fields of
study and cultural activity. We have incurred all of these
losses just in the past several years; you could say that they
happened right before our very eyes. We grieve the lost talents that lived among us, honoring the great strides their
work made for the USSR, but at the same time, without even
thinking twice, we bury their creative minds in the dirt, leaving them to be devoured by worms. None of the loved ones
of any of the deceased named above thought to preserve
their brain—that precious organ that makes creative activity
possible—for posterity.
People of science with a closer relationship to the study
of genius and talent grieve over the passing of great or even
simply talented individuals along with everyone else mourning irrevocable losses for our society. At the same time, they
can’t help but lament that when the bodies of great men are
lowered into their graves, with them, future generations lose
all opportunity for studying the precious material that could,
with meticulous study, reveal—in the physical form of the
brain, in its furrows and wrinkles and the structure of its tissues, in the development of its nerve fibers and blood vessels
and the dispatches of its endocrine glands—that mysterious
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sphinx called genius. The science of genius and talent, called
evrology, is making headway in understanding the anatomical foundations of genius and talent—but for so far only on
the basis of chanced-upon research materials.
It has long been established that genius has no direct
correlation with the weight of the brain, since the brains of
extraordinary individuals vary in weight. On the other hand,
the brains of extraordinary individuals demonstrate characteristic developments of small furrows and wrinkles in the
left and right hemispheres, with a predominance in the former. I discovered several other characteristics while studying the brain of the brilliant Mendeleev, which was made
possible by the reasonable mindset of his widow.1
While performing this research, I realized the necessity of
comparing Mendeleev’s brain (which is now in the anatomical museum of the State Institute for Medical Science) with
the brain of the famous composer and musician Rubinstein
(which resides in the collection of the anatomical museum of
the Academy for Military Medicine). I found that the latter’s
brain had a highly developed auditory cortex in the temporal
lobe and the same was true of another brain belonging to a
wonderful singer and musician, which was also in the collection of the same museum.
A contemporaneous anatomical study performed abroad
demonstrated similar characteristics in the brain of the
famous composer Bach. In light of this, we may consider it
an established fact that musical genius is, by all appearances,
physically manifested in the particular development of the
auditory cortex in the temporal lobe (and in the adjacent
Heschl’s gyri) of both hemispheres.
1. The study was published as a brochure in German titled Gehirn
d. Chemiker Mendeleeff.
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On the Creation of a Pantheon
We also know that the brain of brilliant French orator
and politician Gambetti is relatively light. It is characterized
by a particularly developed posterior inferior frontal gyrus in
the left hemisphere, known as Broca’s Area, which contains
the speech center.
Thus, when it comes to musical and verbal talent, we
already know the external characteristics of these gifts as
they are found in the brain. Analogously, we can expect that
in fine artists, we will find a particularly developed visual cortex in the internal surface of the occipital lobe. Furthermore,
I found that in several cases, individuals with athletic talents
demonstrated correspondingly developed frontal lobes, and
other investigators speak to the fact that gourmands have
very developed inferior frontal gyri in their frontal lobes
(in the region of the cortex) which, according to my own
research and as confirmed by other authors, is where the
taste center is located.
It goes without saying that these are merely the preliminary findings in the search for the physical locus of talent.
The question demands careful, meticulous analysis and
detailed investigation of the structures of the cerebral cortex
(the architectonics), the basal ganglia, and the blood vessels
of the brain, as well as the endocrine glands.
But how can we move forward with these investigations
into one of the greatest questions of science when we dispose
of the brains of deceased great people along with their bodies,
lowering them into the dirt to rot and be devoured by worms?
Would it not be more proper for science to have rights over
the brains of great individuals instead of coming up against
the indifference and antagonism of the loved ones standing at
a deceased genius’s graveside, concerned first and foremost
with burial rites and not at all worried about saving the brain
of the great man as a precious relic for science and posterity,
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allowing it to be preserved and analyzed by scientists? As an
example, I will note that the brain of the famous Rubinstein
was preserved for posthumous research and posterity because
an autopsy was performed without his relatives’ knowledge.
Mendeleev’s brain was saved thanks to the efforts of Egorov,
a professor of physics and Mendeleev’s close friend, and the
chemist’s widow’s enlightened position on autopsy. The brain
of L. N. Tolstoy was allowed to be devoured by worms as the
consequence of the criminal attitudes toward the legacy of the
great writer exhibited by his loved ones. I will mention that
my request to perform an autopsy, expressed in a telegram
sent to Yasnaya Polyana addressed to Dr. Makovetsky, who
was inseparable from Tolstoy in the period leading up to the
latter’s death, was left unanswered. As a result, we are bereft
of the opportunity to not only preserve a precious relic—the
brain of the brilliant author of War and Peace—we are also
left unable to address the question of how the brain of a great
Russian writer compares to the brains of other great men.
It is very unfortunate that the precious brains of great
individuals die with them not only because of superstitious
attitudes toward autopsy, but also because their loved ones
don’t realize how precious a relic the preserved brain of a
talented cultural figure is for science and posterity, whether
they be an artist or a scholar; and how honorable it is to have
their brain preserved behind glass in a museum instead of
left in the ground to rot and decompose.
For all who wish to be further convinced, I will point to
the care and attention paid to Mendeleev’s brain, which I dissected and then preserved in the anatomical museum of the
State Institute for Medical Science. The brain sits in a place of
honor in a glass case with a corresponding placard; it is available for study to all interested parties. An enlarged portrait
of Mendeleev hangs next to his brain.
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On the Creation of a Pantheon
The autopsy was performed via the dissection of the hirsute part of the head; the incisions made were invisible after
they were stitched shut and in no way detracted from the
appearance of the head of the deceased—not to speak of
the rest of his body. We are talking about superstitions that
stand in the way of studying the brains of great people that
we must inarguably battle in the name of science. If our laws,
like the laws of most places, toss these superstitions out the
window when it comes to forensic analysis in cases of potentially violent deaths or deaths without known cause, calling
for a compulsory legal autopsy in these cases, why couldn’t
we allow that the autopsy of a great artist, prominent scientist, or a no less important political or cultural figure should
also be compulsory for the purposes of advancing science
and culture?
If this legal basis existed, I can only dream of the valuable materials that would enter the collection of the museum
of the comparative anatomy of the nervous system, the only
museum of its kind, at the State Reflexological Institute for
the Study of the Brain in Leningrad. I can envision the great
contributions to science made possible only by the study
of these brains by the right specialists. A true pantheon
could even be created, its scope covering the entire USSR.
This pantheon would not bear any resemblance to the Paris
Pantheon, which merely contains the decomposed remains
of a handful of great people and has no scientific value.
The pantheon that could be created in Soviet Russia
would be a highly useful resource for scientific institutions
and also for cultural organizations; it would be open to all
interested parties. Our pantheon would be the collection of
the preserved brains of talented individuals from all fields,
and would contain propaganda for a materialistic perspective on the development of creative undertaking. It goes
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without saying that the brains of great figures kept in this
museum and pantheon should be accessible to all interested
parties, displayed in small glass cases with corresponding
scientific illustrations, photographs of the cultural figures,
their signatures, and short descriptions of the characteristics of their brains and their biographies with lists of their
accomplishments. The All-Soviet pantheon will serve as both
a scientifically valuable institution for the advancement of
the study of genius and talent and also a center for education,
especially if it becomes a lecture hall.
In order to create such an institution there needs to be
a decree regarding the creation of a committee that would
have the right to prescribe and perform autopsies and preserve the brains of distinguished figures in the fields of politics, science, art, and society from all over the USSR, with the
aim of eventually creating a science museum and archive of
the brains of these individuals.
The initiative to create this committee, which should
include neurologists from all major Soviet cities, should
be led by the State Reflexology Institute for the Study of
the Brain, which I am the director of, because this institute has all of the necessary conditions for the creation of
a pantheon.
It would be so fantastic if, by the tenth anniversary
of the great October Revolution, this question could be
resolved and with this, the foundations for the future AllSoviet pantheon could be laid. In our turbulent age of furious labor directed toward building the USSR, people burn
out quickly. Almost every month brings news of the death of
one or another prominent cultural figure, the decomposing
remains of whom are buried in the dirt. The time has come
to say to everyone who is close to such individuals, “Let go
of your silly superstitions about dissecting human corpses.”
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On the Creation of a Pantheon
We must tell everyone who stands at the graveside of talented figures that they should be aware that they are committing crimes against science and society when they allow
an acknowledged talent’s creative brain to be tossed into a
grave, to be devoured by worms and putrefactive bacteria.
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Materials on the
Institute of Biography
Nikolai Rybnikov
Materials on the Institute of Biography
First published in 1920
“An Example of An Autobiography” first published in 1930
Translated by Anastasia Skoybedo
Biography, as one form of universal, human literature, was
relatively widespread among ancient peoples. Thus, Egyptian
tomb inscriptions are biographical in nature, listing accomplishments of the deceased, his honors and awards, a pharaoh’s favors, kind deeds, and good qualities. Classical
antiquity, in turn, produced a whole slew of distinguished
biographers, such as Tacitus and Plutarch. The Middle Ages
are particularly rich in biographies of various saints; these
lives of saints were very popular reading in ancient Russia.
Lives of saints gave way to biographies in the common sense
of the word as one of the most important and engaging forms
of historic narrative. Choosing as its object a life that has
some common interest, a biography describes this life, more
or less satisfying the demands of historical science.
In this way, as far as form is concerned, a biography
begins to be subjected to the demands of a scientific method.
It is no longer confined to the simple enumeration of facts
from the life of the person being described; it must create
a whole image of a given person, of his inner and spiritual
sides. Since biography deals with human individuals, it can
be of scientific interest and, from the point of view of content,
can become an object of study for sciences that are studying
this individual.
It is true that a scientific approach to biography is only
beginning to appear; there are initial, timid attempts to have
a human life as an object of study. The complexity and multifaceted nature of the object and his inner spiritual side are
frightening. It is from the area of psychology, which already
studies the spiritual world of an individual, that the first
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Nikolai Rybnikov
attempt at a scientific approach to biographical material
was made. The new biographical method of studying spiritual life is taking shape. For a psychologist, the systematic
study of a large number of biographies will first of all help
to understand the human individual as a whole, because
experimental study generally deals with one separate side
of a given individual. Still, based on the fragmentary data
experimental psychology gains by studying various sides of
the psyche, it remains powerless to re-create the individual,
because in the spiritual world, the whole is not equal to the
sum of its parts. “The aroma of individuality” is lost during
this artificial consolidation of something that needs to be
examined in a particular context, against the backdrop of
the integral experience of a person as a whole. Furthermore,
experienced study of a person deals with only one side of a
given person, in his so-called “dynamic state.” Biographical
material gives us an opportunity to examine this person in
his final, completed state, in his “static” state.
*
*
*
If the study of biography is of such essential importance,
then this study must be given an organized systematic
character. There needs to be an organization which would
assume control as a collector, a systematician of biographical material on a large scale. This type of organization is
envisioned as a special Biographical Institute which will
have to assume two important functions—firstly, the systematic, comprehensive scientific study of human biographies.
In conjunction, the institute must set a goal of preserving
for future generations the biographies of famous people
from the past and the present. To fulfill these two goals,
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Materials on the Institute of Biography
the institute collects various documents pertaining to the
lives of figures in different fields (from the past as well as the
present). These documents could be biographies, autobiographies, diaries, family archives, notes, memoirs, letters,
obituaries, curriculum vitae, photographs, handwriting
samples, phonograms, creative objects, and so on. A comprehensive study of such materials will provide an opportunity to re-create the character of people of the past, and
preserve them for posterity. Most importantly, the scientific
processing of a large amount of collected biographical and
autobiographical material would enrich a large number of
disciplines, with very valuable conclusions pertaining to
human individuals. A discipline that could benefit the most
from such a type of study is the discipline that studies the
spiritual world of a person, in other words, psychology, both
as a general field, and in the numerous fields of special psychology: the study of character, genetic psychology, ethnic
psychology, applied psychology, and the psychology of creativity, and so forth. Together with psychology, the study of
a large number of people from different periods, peoples,
classes, positions can turn out to be of great value to history, economic science, pedagogy, the history of everyday
life, culture, trade, technology, and the history of sciences
in general. In this field one could also find a considerable
amount of instructive material for solving the problem of
inheritance and genius in pathology. The work of the institute could also be of practical importance: studying lives of
various figures in different fields can help to take their life
experience into account for future generations. The preservation of as large a number of biographies as possible will
aid in accumulating this life experience for the future. The
institute should represent a graphic memory of humankind,
passing from generation to generation the accumulated life
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experience and knowledge of all people. In conjunction,
the institute must be an international registry office, where
anyone who has distinguished himself in life in one way or
another would be documented. The Biographical Institute,
if it were successfully created, would be a worthy monument
to eminent people of the past, to those who have made their
“valiant, grateful journey.” Its creation would show that society has begun to appreciate the realization of the necessity
for a more careful, diligent attitude toward human individuality, and would promote the idea that we are not people
of yesterday, that we have a past. The underestimation of
this past, its influence on the present, is characteristic for
us Russians. “We are so positive,” wrote Pushkin, “that the
past does not exist for us. We are on our knees before real
chance, success, but not the charm of antiquity, gratefulness to the past, and respect for moral qualities in us.” The
experience of our time compels us to diligently examine our
past; we are only now beginning to discover our antiquity,
our Russian antiquity. That is why the past years are marked
with a strong interest in memoirs, notes, chronicles, letters,
and so on. All this abundant material can and must be studied from the point of view of different disciplines, for which
it can provide a lot of valuable observations, comparisons,
and so on.
Given that science is interested in the most day-to-day
things, it is no less important to bring to life and preserve the
lives of common people, about whom, as Reskin remarks,
“the world has not thought and has not heard, but who are
now performing most of its tasks and who could better teach
us how to perform them.”
In accordance with the aforementioned goals, the work
of the institute should have a three-fold character:
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Materials on the Institute of Biography
1. registrarial,
2. scientific,
3. educational and enlightening.
The registration department keeps track of all those who
leave this world, and those who are just entering the field of
vision and who have distinguished themselves in some area.
The department creates a flexible biographic repertoire in
which every person is allotted a card, filled out according to
the model created by the institute. Much more detailed material is contained in the documentation repertoire, which collects various graphic expressions pertaining to the life and
work of one or another person (newspaper clippings, speech
stenographs, photographs, and so on).
The scientific department of the institute has as its
goal a systematic, comprehensive study of people’s biographies from the point of view of disciplines that, in one
way or another, pertain to human identity. The board of this
department should be composed of representatives from all
these disciplines.
The educational and enlightenment department has
the goal of acquainting the masses with the most important
results of the systematic study of biographies. This department organizes systematic lectures and exhibitions, and also
a permanent museum which introduces in visual form the
main results and methods of this new field of encyclopedic
knowledge. The museum must have the following departments: biographical and documentary, iconography, graphics, psychological, pedagogical, anthropological, historical
and literary, and the department of heritage.
The biographical and documentary department will present the technology and methodology of collecting and storing biographic material.
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The psychological department will visually present the
technology and methodology of the biographic study of spiritual life (psychograms).
The pedagogical department will visually present how
familiar students of various countries are with the great
people of their motherland; it will also present the most
important results of the study of childhood using the biographic method.
The historical and literary department, and other departments in different fields that pertain in one way or another
to the study of human identity, will also visually present the
most important results of studying biographies.
The institute must have its own library where, in a comprehensive and systematic way, the entirety of biographic
literature, both Russian and foreign, must be presented. The
primary task of the institute should be recording and systematizing all Russian biographical literature. As a result of work
in this direction, a systematic index of biographical literature
should be published. In conjunction with this, the work on
collecting and studying “human documents” has begun. As
this work progresses, the institute plans to publish its work
under the name The Library of the Biographical Institute.1
1. Please direct any questions or comments to the following
address: N. A. Rybnikov, 1 Meshchanskaya Ul, d.14, kv. 11, Moscow.
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An Example of an Autobiography2
Nadezhina Anastasia
I remember myself at the age of seven and find my childhood not right. We lived in Poland, in Vilen district. Our
family had seven people: father, mother, and five children. I
was eldest. Father was a worker for a landowner, made five
roubles a month. We were lacking in everything. I’ve had
enough hunger and cold. I have not seen a child’s life. From
smallest age I was oppressed by work. Dad and mom left for
work, they left from five in morning and until evening. At
this time I, left with four children, had to make some kind of
gruel, to feed children. At lunch I had to bring the small baby
to the field, to Mother, for breast feeding. I take one child and
all the rest run after me. The field is far, we are dead tired, all
of us crying. I am crying because it is hard carry a child. The
rest are crying for me to carry them too. They sit and don’t
go, I start to hit them from anger, they cry even more. And
then I understand: let me carry them each a bit and they
stop crying. I take one child, carry it a little, sit a little, then
other one. I take and carry them all one by one. When I carry
them all, I had positively no strength left. That’s how I lived
my childhood. I remember, how not once and not twice, in
fall, we fell asleep on the street, on pile of dirt by our house,
waiting for mom to come home. Mom and dad came home
at dark. Our hut was big, wet, with low ceiling, with leaking roof. When it rained, in our hut—wet, damp, puddles.
The hut was without floor, floor was from soil. Windows are
small, it is dark in hut and eerie. And then they said that we
have a bogeyman in our hut, and when mom and dad are not
2. From Nikolai Rybnikov, Worker Autobiographies and Their Study
(Moscow: State Publishing House, 1930), 44–47. The orthography
and grammar of the original autobiography is preserved.
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Nikolai Rybnikov
there, he takes children and disappears with them. I never
played with anything. I did not have time. I worked, and I
was really sorry for mom. I prayed to God, cried, and said,
Dear God! When you give us everything, when my mom not
go to work, and stays with children! But God did not hear
my prayer and did not see my tears. My works continued in
same way. I remember, it was fall and there was this drizzle,
mom was at work, picking potatoes in field, it became dark,
it is very eerie in hut and it seems that bogeyman will climb
from behind a stove any minute. I imagined that he was
scary. From fright I hear noise, I am scared, I can’t stay in
hut, I’m afraid, I take the kids and go to the yard. It is cold
there, it drizzles, it is dark.
We had a mound of earth behind house and under this
mound there was pit, they took yellow sand from there for
children, for their sand pies and pastries. This pit looked like a
cave, it was dry and warm there. I take children and put them
there and climb there myself. We settle, how warm were we,
we snuggle, and we are warm. Mom return from work, finds
us in yard, hungry and cold, and starts petting us and curse
her fate and says, My dear children when will you grow up,
my God! Here God abandoned my mom, and hurt her. Two
kids died, one after another. Mom is crying. The landowner’s
wife comes and says: don’t cry, dear, that’s their fate. As long
as God gave them to live, they lived, and secondly, God, loving you took the children to holy will. What will, when we
are barefoot, undressed, hungry and cold, and this will punishes us. I was nine years old, dad was old, sick, and he did
not have any working power, he could not work. Landowner
ordered us to leave, since he takes up room for free—in his
spot there are enough healthy people. We had to leave. We
left to the city. I started work at matchstick factory. Work
was hard: always in smoke, in dust and in heavy air, sulfur,
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paraffin, and other compounds are all in my eyes, it was hard
to breathe: dust, windows and timber did not let me breathe,
all these factory compounds lay on my child body; I worked
for six years and my wage was paid very low. To make 30
kopecks in a day you need to make 3,000 matchstick boxes,
they roped us into piecework so that each worker sat in his
own spot without moving. And really we were as if chained
to our table, without straightening our backs from morning
to evening, without break. This was my childhood. Working
at factory I get a lung disease and I quit. I started treatment,
got better and started work for upstairs, where I still saw no
joy: during the day I made dinner, went to market, cleaned
rooms, and in evening after supper, they made me wash or
iron all night; I was the only servant, the family was twelve
people, had to help all. I spent two years there and then got
married. So, comrades, my wrong childhood served as proof
to every peasant and worker. I will, in fact, prove to them in
my proletariat language and hope that every worker, and
pauper will understand me and will agree with me. In childhood I had lot of desire to learn, but I could not because of
my hopeless state, then I very much envied bourgeois childhood and bourgies that they are so happy and live such good
life, and our pauper worker died from cold and hunger, and
work; worked day and night and died in work. Oh, comrades,
what a wrong darkness it was! Our poor worker saw that his
neighbor died suffering from such hardship. But, thank God,
he died and will now rest in another world, they thought, that
it is bad for pauper here, and the other world would be good.
While for the rich it was good in this world and will be bad in
another. Comrades, let’s not save kindness for other world,
let us save it for everyone in this world. And I hope that life of
pauper be better.
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“THE REVOLUTION MEMORIAL
RESERVATION,” an excerpt from
the novel Chevengur
Andrey Platonov
THE REVOLUTION MEMORIAL RESERVATION
Written between 1926 and 1928
Although excerpts were printed in 1928 and 1929, the full novel
was not published in Russian until 1988.
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and
Olga Meerson
The modest Great-Russian sky shone over the Soviet land
with as much habit and monotony as if the Soviets had
existed since time immemorial and the sky corresponded
to them perfectly. Within Dvanov there had already
taken shape an immaculate conviction: that before the
Revolution, the sky and all other spaces had been different, less dear.
Like an end to the world lay a quiet, distant horizon
where the sky touched the earth and man touched man. The
mounted wanderers were riding into the remote depth of
their motherland. Now and again the road wound round the
top of a ravine and an unhappy village could be seen in a faroff hollow. Dvanov would feel pity for this unknown lonely
settlement and he would want to turn off toward it, so as to
start the happiness of mutual life there without delay, but
Kopyonkin would not agree to this. First of all, he would say,
it was necessary to deal with Chornya Kalitva. After that, they
could return.
The day continued, dismal and unpeopled. The armed
riders did not happen upon a single bandit.
“They’re lying low!” exclaimed Kopyonkin—and felt
inside him a heavy, oppressive force. “In the name of universal security,” he went on, “we would have struck them
hard. They’re hiding away in corners, the bastards, guzzling beef.”
Leading straight onto the road was an alley of birch
trees. It had not yet been felled, but the peasants had been
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thinning it out. It seemed there was a manor house not far
from the road.
At the end of the alley stood two low stone pillars. On one
hung a handwritten newspaper; on the other a tin signboard
with an inscription now half washed away by atmospheric
precipitations: “Comrade Pashintsev’s Revolution Memorial
Reservation in Honor of World Communism. Welcome to
Friends and Death to Enemies.”
Some enemy hand had torn away half of the newspaper,
and what remained was repeatedly being bared by the wind.
Dvanov caught hold of it and read it aloud and in full, so that
Kopyonkin could hear.
The newspaper was called The Good of the Poor, being
the official organ of the Velikoye Mesto Village Soviet and
the Executive District Revolutionary Committee for the
Maintenance of Security in the southeastern zone of the
Pososhansk Region.
All that remained in the newspaper was an article about the
“Tasks of the World Revolution” and half of a note that began,
“Preserve Snow on Fields—Increase the Productivity of the
Harvest of Labor.”1 Halfway through, the note lost track of its
meaning: “Plough the Snow—and we shall have nothing to fear
from thousands of Kronstadts that have overshot the mark.”
What were these overshooting Kronstadts?2 All this troubled Dvanov and set him thinking.
1. The first words of this exhortation are not as senseless as one
might imagine. Rudimentary fences were, in fact often put up on fields
so that the snow would drift against them instead of being blown
away by the wind. This snow would then help to blanket winter crops
against extremes of cold. —Trans.
2. Kronstadt was an important Russian naval base near Petrograd.
The sailors based there had long been firm supporters of the
Bolsheviks, but in March 1921 they rebelled. This rebellion was brutally suppressed by the Red Army. —Trans.
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“All writing is for the sake of fear, for oppression of the
masses,” said Kopyonkin, not bothering with details. “The
letters of the alphabet were also invented for the complication of life. The literate man practices witchcraft with his
mind, and then the man without letters works for him with
his hands.”
Dvanov smiled. “Nonsense, comrade Kopyonkin. The
Revolution is the ABC for the people.”
“Don’t misform me, comrade Dvanov. With us everything is decided by the majority. And, since nearly everyone
is illiterate, the day will come for the illiterate to decree that
the literate should unlearn their letters—in the name of universal equality. All the more so since getting a few people
to unlearn their letters will be light work, a lot easier than
teaching everybody from the very beginning. That would be
the devil’s own job. You’ll teach, teach teach—and it will all
be forgotten.”
“Let’s go and visit comrade Pashintsev,” said Dvanov
after some thought. “I have to send a written report to the
provincial committee. I’ve been a long time now with no idea
what’s going on there.”
“The Revolution’s going on its way. What more’s there
to know?”
They rode for about a mile along the alley. Then, on a high
point, they caught sight of a solemn white manor house, now
so deserted as to seem homeless. The columns before the
main building, in the living form of precise women’s legs,
gravely supported a cross-beam on which rested only the sky.
The building itself stood several yards back from this colonnade, from these giants bowed down in motionless labour.
Kopyonkin did not understand the meaning of the isolated
colonnade and saw it as a remnant of revolutionary accounting with private property.
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Etched into one of the columns was a white engraving—
the name of the landowner, who was also the building’s architect, and his face in profile. Below the engraving, in relief, was
a verse in Latin:
The universe is a running woman.
Her legs make the Earth turn;
Her body trembles in the ether;
In her eyes are the beginnings of stars.
Dvanov sighed sadly amid the silence of feudalism and
examined the colonnade once again: six shapely legs of three
chaste women. Peace and hope entered into him, as they
always did at the sight of art, that distant necessity.
His only regret was that these legs, so full of the tension
of youth, were not a part of his life, but it was good that the
young woman carried by these legs had turned her life into
charm, not into reproduction. She had been nourished by
life, but life for her had been only a raw material, not meaning, and this raw material had been refashioned into some
other thing, where what was living and without form was
turned into something beautiful and without feeling.
Kopyonkin also grew more serious before the columns;
he respected magnificence if it was beautiful and made no
sense. If there was meaning and purpose in something magnificent—as, for example, in a large machine—Kopyonkin
saw it as an instrument for oppression of the masses and
despised it with cruelty of soul. Standing before what was
senseless, like this colonnade, he felt pity for himself and
hatred for tsarism. Kopyonkin considered it the fault of tsarism that he was not excited by these immense women’s legs,
and, but for Dvanov’s sad face, he would not have known that
he too should be feeling sadness.
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“If only,” said Dvanov, “if only we too could build something universal and remarkable, putting the everyday to
one side.”
“You won’t build anything like that in a day,” doubted
Kopyonkin. “Until now the bourgeoisie was blocking off the
whole world from us. Soon we’ll be putting up pillars that are
still taller and more excellent, not shameful legs.”
To the left, like graves in a country churchyard, lay the
remains of outbuildings and small houses. The columns were
standing guard over an empty, buried world. Noble, ornamental trees held up their fine torsos over this level ruin.
“But we’ll do better still,” said Dvanov, “and across the
entire territory of the world, not only in nooks and crannies.” Dvanov gestured at all and everything, but from the
depth inside him he heard “Watch out!” Something incorruptible, something that did not spare itself, was warning
him from within.
“Of course, we’ll build,” Kopyonkin confirmed out of his
own inspired hope. “That’s a slogan and fact on the ground.
Our cause is inexhaustible.”
Kopyonkin then happened on some footprints, left by
huge human feet, and set his horse to follow them.
“What on Earth has the inhabitant of this place got on
his feet?” Kopyonkin kept wondering with surprise. And he
bared his saber: what if some giant guardian of the old order
were to appear? The old landowners, after all, had had some
well-nourished stooges who could, without warning, give you
a clout that would snap your tendons.
Kopyonkin was fond of tendons; he saw them as power
cables and was afraid of tearing them.
The horsemen rode up to a massive eternal door that led
to the half-basement of the destroyed building. The inhuman tracks went that way; it was apparent that the idol had
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stamped up and down there, tormenting the ground into
nakedness.
“Who can it be?” Kopyonkin asked in astonishment. “A
wild and fierce man, no doubt about it. Any minute now he’ll
attack us—be prepared, comrade Dvanov!”
Somehow Kopyonkin now felt more cheerful. He felt
the same agitated delight that children know at night in a
forest; their terror goes halves with a curiosity that is being
answered.
“Comrade Pashintsev!” shouted Dvanov. “Anyone here?”
No one. And the grass, in the absence of wind, was silent.
The day was fading.
“Comrade Pashintsev!”
“Huh!” came a vast and distant sound, echoing from the
earth’s damp entrails.
“Come out here, hermit fellow!” Kopyonkin commanded
loudly.
“Huh!” came the somber, resonant response from the
womb of the basement.
But there was no hint in this sound of either fear or any
wish to come out. It sounded as if the respondent was lying
on his back.
Kopyonkin and Dvanov waited, then felt angered.
“We’re telling you to come out here!” Kopyonkin called
noisily.
“I don’t feel like it,” the unknown man replied slowly. “Go
to the central building. You’ll find there’s bread and moonshine in the kitchen.”
Kopyonkin dismounted and struck the door loudly with
his saber.
“Come out—or I’ll be throwing a grenade!”
The man said nothing, perhaps waiting with interest for
the grenades and what would follow. But then he said, “Come
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on, you bastard—get on with it! I’ve got a whole store of them
here already. The detonation will send you flying back up into
your mother!”
And again he fell silent. Kopyonkin had no grenade.
“Get on with it, reptile!” the unknown man demanded
from his own depths, with peace in his voice. “Let me check
my artillery. My bombs must have got damp and rusty. No
way will they explode, the devils.”
“So-o!” Kopyonkin uttered strangely. “Well, come out
then and receive a missive from comrade Trotsky.”
The man said nothing. He thought for a moment.
“How can he be a comrade to me if he takes command
over everyone? Commanders of the Revolution are no comrades of mine. Why not just throw your bomb? That’ll be
interesting!”
Kopyonkin kicked free a brick that had sunk into the
earth, then hurled it against the door. The door let out an
iron howl and returned to its rest.
“The dumb blockhead!” determined Kopyonkin. “It’s a
dud. The substance in it must have gone numb.”
“Mine are mute too,” gravely replied the unknown man.
“You did pull the pin, did you? What make is it? Let me come
and look.”
Then came a rhythmic sound of swaying metal; someone
truly was approaching with an iron tread. Kopyonkin waited
with his saber sheathed, curiosity in him overcoming prudence. Dvanov remained on horseback.
By now the unknown man was rumbling close by, but he
did not speed up his gradual step, only with difficulty overcoming the weight of his own powers.
The door opened swiftly; it was not bolted.
Kopyonkin was silenced by the spectacle he saw. He
took two steps back. He had been expecting horror or an
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immediate understanding, but here before him a man had
appeared in full while preserving all of his mystery.
Through the gaping door stepped a short man, all
encased in a cuirass and an entire suit of armor, with a helmet
and a heavy sword, wearing powerful metal boots and with
gaiters—each made of three connected bronze pipes—that
crushed the grass to death.
The man’s face, and especially his chin and brow, was
defended by the flaps of the helmet, while on top of everything lay a lowered visor. All this defended the knight against
any blows from an opponent.
But the man himself was short and not especially
terrifying.
“Where’s your grenade?” the apparition asked in a thin
hoarse voice. Only from a distance, reflected by things of
metal and in the emptiness of his dwelling, had his voice possessed resonance; left to itself, the sound was pitiful.
“You swine!” exclaimed Kopyonkin, without anger but
also without respect, watching the knight with interest.
Dvanov laughed openly. He had understood at once
whose oversize outfit this man had appropriated for himself. But what made him laugh was the sight of a Red Army
star, bolted onto the ancient helmet and secured with
a nut.
“So what’s making you scum so happy?” the knight
asked coolly, still looking for the defective grenade. The
knight was unable to bend down. Constantly struggling
with the weight of his coat of mail, he could only part the
grass feebly with his sword.
“Don’t go looking for trouble, pest!” Kopyonkin said
with seriousness, returning to his more standard feelings.
“Show us where we can lie down for the night. Have you got
some hay?”
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The knight’s dwelling was the half-basement of one of the
manor’s outbuildings. There he had one large room, lit by the
half-black light of an oil lamp. In a far corner lay a mountain
of armor and cold steel; in another, more central spot stood
a pyramid of hand grenades. There was also a table in the
room, with a stool beside it. On the table stood a bottle of
some unknown liquid, or maybe poison. Glued to the bottle
by means of moistened bread was a paper on which was written, in indelible ink:
DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE!
“Free me for the night!” asked the knight.
Kopyonkin spent a long time unharnessing him from
his immortal garb, giving much thought to its cleverest
bits. Finally the knight fell apart and from the bronze husk
appeared an ordinary comrade Pashintsev—a brownish fellow about thirty-seven years of age, lacking one intransigent
eye, while the other remained still more attentive.
“Let’s all have a glass!” said Pashintsev.
But vodka, even in the old days, had had no effect on
Kopyonkin. He chose consciously not to drink it, considering it purposeless for one’s feelings.
Dvanov too did not understand drinking, and so
Pashintsev drank alone. He took the bottle with the inscription “DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE!” and poured directly
into his throat.
“Vicious stuff!” he said, emptying the bottle. And he sat
down, a benign look on his face.
“Good?” asked Kopyonkin.
“Beetroot liqueur,” Pashintsev explained. “There’s an
unmarried girl who makes it with her own clean hands. An
immaculate drink, fragrant, a real dear.”
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“But anyway, just who are you?” Kopyonkin inquired
with irritated interest.
“A personal human being,” Pashintsev informed
Kopyonkin. “I passed myself a resolution stating that everything we once had here came to an end in 1919. Yet again it
was armies, authorities, laws of all kinds. And as for the people, it was ‘Fall into rank and obey! Starting next Monday!’
Well I say, to hell with all this.”
Pashintsev concisely formulated the entire current
moment with a single gesture.
Dvanov stopped thinking and listened slowly to the man
reasoning aloud.
“Do you remember 1918 and 1919?” Pashintsev asked
with tears of joy. Those days now lost forever called up ferocious memories in him: in mid-story he was hammering his
fist against the table and threatening the entire milieu of his
basement. “Now nothing’s ever going to happening again,”
Pashintsev said with hatred, wanting to convince Kopyonkin,
who was blinking. “We’ve come to the end of everything. Law
has got going again. Difference has come between people. It’s
as if some devil has been weighing man on scales. Take me,
for example—can you ever know just what breathes here?”
Pashintsev rapped himself on his low skull, where the brain
must be compressed to make room for mind. “Yes, brother,
there is room here for spaces of every kind. And so it is with
everyone else too. And people want to reign over me. Well,
what do you think? Is that a swindle or not?”
“It’s a swindle,” Kopyonkin agreed, with simplicity of soul.
“So here we are,” Pashintsev concluded with satisfaction.
“And now I burn separately, away from the general bonfire.”
Sensing that Kopyonkin was as much an orphan of the
terrestrial globe as he himself, Pashintsev begged him with
heartfelt words to remain forever.
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“What more do you want?” said Pashintsev, forgetting
himself in his joy at sensing a friendly human being. “Live
here. Eat and drink—I’ve marinated five barrels of apples
and dried two sacks of tobacco. We’ll live among the trees as
friends, we’ll sing songs on the grass. People come to me in
their thousands—here in my commune every beggar rejoices.
Where else can they find easy shelter? In the village the Soviets
keep them under observation, the commissars are like watchdogs, the requisitioning committee searches even their bellies
for grain—but officialdom daren’t show its face here.”
“They’re afraid of you,” deduced Kopyonkin. “You go
about all covered in iron. You sleep on a bomb.”
“They certainly are afraid,” Pashintsev agreed. “They
made out like they wanted to be neighborly, to do an inventory of the domain, but I appeared before the commissar in
full harness and brandished one of my bombs: Long live the
commune! And then there was the time they came round to
requisition grain. I say to their commissar: ‘You can eat here
and drink here, you son of a bitch—but if you take anything
more than you should, there’ll be nothing left of you but a
nasty stink.’ The commissar drank a cup of moonshine and
rode off: ‘Thank you, comrade Pashintsev!’ I gave him a handful of sunflower seeds and a prod in the back with that there
iron poker and sent him on his way back to official regions.”
“And now?” asked Kopyonkin.
“Nothing. I live entirely without leadership—and the
result is excellent. I declared this a Revolution Memorial
Reservation so the authorities wouldn’t disapprove, and I preserve the Revolution in its most intact and heroic category.”
Dvanov glimpsed some charcoal inscription on the wall,
traced by a trembling hand unused to writing. Holding
up an oil lamp, he read the wall annals of the Revolution
Memorial Reservation.
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“Read, read away,” Pashintsev encouraged him. “There
are times you don’t say a word. You don’t say a word for so
long you can’t bear it. Then you start talking on the wall.
If I go a long time without seeing anyone, my mind goes
all cloudy.”
Dvanov read the verses on the wall:
No bourgeoisie—but labor’s back again.
The yoke of labor bows the peasant’s neck.
Believe me, plodding peasant laborer—
Flowers in the fields have fatter lives than you.
Let all the soil now bear self-seeded fruit
While you yourself live full and merrily.
Remember you have one, not twenty, lives
To live—and so, with all our holy commune,
Take hold of other strong and honest hands
And sing both loud and clear, so all can hear:
Enough of poverty, enough of sorrow!
Time now to live and feast, to feast and live!
Enough of poor and plodding earthly labor!
The Earth herself will feed us now for free!
Someone knocked on the door with an even, proprietorial
knock.
“Huh?” answered Pashintsev. Having given out all the
fumes of his moonshine, he had fallen silent.
“Maxim Stepanych!” came a voice from outside. “I need
a pole to make into a shaft. Let me look for one in the wood.
Otherwise I’ll be stuck here all winter—the old shaft snapped
when I was halfway back home.”
“Out of the question,” retorted Pashintsev. “How long
must I go on teaching you? I’ve posted a decree on the barn
wall: the Earth is self-made and therefore belongs to no one.
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If you’d taken without asking, then I’d have gladly allowed
you.”
Almost hoarse with joy, the man outside said, “Well then,
thank you! I won’t touch the pole now I’ve gone and asked
for it. I’ll give myself something else as a gift.”
Pashintsev said freely, “Never ask—that’s the psychology
of slaves. Just give yourself gifts. You were born for free. It
wasn’t your own strength that gave birth to you—so live life
without keeping accounts!”
“Certainly, Maxim Stepanych!” confirmed the petitioner
outside the door, with absolute seriousness. “What you seize
without license is what keeps you alive. If it weren’t for the
estate, half our village would be dead by now. This is the fifth
year we’ve been carting off goods—the Bolsheviks are fair
and just! Thank you, Maxim Stepanych!”
This angered Pashintsev: “There you go again—Thank
you! Don’t you go taking anything from here, you grey
devil!”
“What’s got into you, Maxim Stepanych? Why did I shed
blood for three years, in combat on the front line? My mate
and I came with a cart and two horses to pick up an iron tub—
and now you forbid it!”
“O fatherland, fatherland!” Pashintsev said to himself
and to Kopyonkin. Then he addressed the door again: “But
didn’t you say you were after a shaft? And now you tell me
what you want is a tub!”
The petitioner showed no surprise: “Who cares? As long
as I take something! Sometimes all I take is a chicken—and
then I see an iron axle lying about on the road. I can’t carry
it on my own, so the lazy bugger just goes on lying there. No
wonder things are so out of hand everywhere.”
“If you’ve come with a cart and two horses,” Pashintsev
said in conclusion, “then take a woman’s leg with you, from
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out of the white columns. It’s bound to come in handy one
way or another. ”
“All right,” said the now-satisfied petitioner. “We can
tow it back with us easily enough. Then we can hew tiles
from it.”
The petitioner went off to do a preliminary inspection—
so as to make light work of carrying off the leg.
As night began, Dvanov suggested to Pashintsev that,
instead of carting the whole estate to the village, he should
move the village to the estate.
“It would be less labor,” said Dvanov. “And the estate is
high up—the land’s more productive.”
Pashintsev could not agree to this: “Come spring, the
tramps and vagabonds from all over the province gather
here. The very purest proletariat. Where would they all go?
No, I will not accept kulak domination here.”
Dvanov saw that the peasants and the vagabonds would,
indeed, not get on together. But rich earth was being wasted.
The inhabitants of the Revolution Memorial Reservation
were not sowing anything themselves but just living off
the remains of an orchard and whatever was self-seeded by
nature; their cabbage soup, no doubt, was made from nettles
and goosefoot.
“I know,” said Dvanov, hitting the nail on the head, to his
own surprise. “You must swap the estate for the village. Give
the estate to the peasants and set up your memorial reservation in the village. It’ll make no difference to you—what’s
important is not the place but the people. As it is, everyone’s
languishing in the gully—while you live alone on your hill.”
Pashintsev looked at Dvanov with happy astonishment.
“That’s brilliant! I’ll do just that. Tomorrow I’ll go and
mobilize the peasants.”
“Will they come?” asked Kopyonkin.
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“They’ll all be here within a day and a night,” Pashintsev
exclaimed with fierce conviction, his whole body stirred by
impatience. “No,” he continued, with a change of mind. “I’ll
go to the village right now!”
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The Astronomical Observatory
at the Perm Regional Museum
V. I. Karmilov
The Astronomical Observatory
First published in 1935
Translated by Serge Levchin
Museums should deservedly play a significant role in shaping
the scientific worldview of the new man. The achievements
of museums in explicating the history of the development
of our planet, as well as of our society, are well known. Yet
there is one subject where the museum’s principal explicatory tool—visual evidence—remains limited to drawings and
diagrams: the origin and formation of the solar system. At
the same time, whoever has passed through an exhibition on
the history of Earth’s development and familiarized himself
or herself with its scientific facts will naturally want to know:
Where did the Earth come from? What are the size, makeup,
and environmental conditions of the Sun, the Moon, and
the stars? In answering these fundamental questions, the
museum is obliged to shift from its standard of “objectbased” evidence and content itself with illustrations (topographical maps, the nebular hypothesis of Kant-Laplace, and
so forth).
One way for museums to strengthen the role of direct
observation in this field is by building their own astronomical observatory. In this brief note we would like to share our
experiences in organizing and operating such a facility at the
Perm Regional Museum.
The astronomical observatory at the Perm Museum
dates back to 1923. Its initial setup in the converted bell
tower of a defunct church required only minimal effort. We
simply put down sturdy flooring and fencing, ran electrical
cables, and turned one of the landings into an auditorium
capable of accommodating up to forty people. Two studentgrade astronomical telescopes were used for observing the
night sky.
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V. I. Karmilov
The observatory is open on clear nights during the warm
months and staffed by our researchers and students from the
local teachers’ college.
Visitors are first brought into the auditorium, where
with the aid of a slide projector they are familiarized with
the scientific theory of the formation of the solar system.
Emphasis is put on the discrepancies between the scientific and religious explanations; numerous instances of
religious attacks on science are rehearsed; the antisocial
nature of all religious beliefs is demonstrated, and their
origins are revealed. Particular attention is paid to celestial bodies that are most readily observable that night (the
Moon, Jupiter, Saturn). This is the preliminary stage of our
tour. Visitors are then invited to go out onto the observatory to view those celestial bodies that are especially well
positioned for observation.
Observatory attendants (principally students) explain to
the visitors what they are seeing. The more complex questions arising from these observations are resolved back in
the auditorium by the director of the facility.
In twenty-eight working evenings the observatory was
attended by a total of 1,088 visitors. So much for the operational aspect of the astronomical observatory.
We are aware of similar astronomical observatories
that have recently opened at the Sverdlovsk Museum and
in Solikamsk. Supposing that the trend may well extend to
other museums across the Soviet Union, we have compiled
a list of instruments and visual aids required for a observatory's operations:
1. Astronomical telescope. This can be found in any
school that is well supplied with scientific instruments. However, we must advocate for the speedy
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production of low-magnification telescopes by
domestic optics manufacturers.
2. Projector with a selection of astronomical transparencies (obtainable from the Diafoto Factory, Moscow,
40 Kalyaevskaya Street).
3. Celestial globe.
4. Drawings and diagrams (sufficiently large for group
viewing), depicting: (a) The relative sizes of the Sun
and the planets. (b) The Copernican system. (c)
Earth’s movement around the Sun and the seasons.
(d) Phases of the Moon. (e) Lunar and solar eclipses.
(f) How distances to celestial bodies are calculated
(parallax shift). (g) The lunar surface. (h) The solar
surface (sunspots, flares, protuberances). (i) The surface of Mars. (j) A map of the night sky (focusing on
the Milky Way, nebulae, and star clusters). (k) Spiral
nebulae. (l) The Kant-Laplace hypothesis. (m) Planet
formation according to Jeans. (n) The Milky Way.
It is highly desirable to include a display of popular books on
various aspects of astronomy.
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II
The Museum
of Avant-Gardism
“The Museum of Art,”
an excerpt from the novel
Red Star
Aleksandr Bogdanov
The Museum of Art
First published in 1908
Translated by Charles Rougle
“I must say I never even imagined that you might have special museums for works of art,” I said to Enno on our way to
the museum. “I thought that sculpture and picture galleries were peculiar to capitalism, with its ostentatious luxury
and crass ambition to hoard treasures. I assumed that in a
socialist order art would be found disseminated throughout
society so as to enrich life everywhere.”
“Quite correct,” replied Enno. “Most of our works of art
are intended for the public buildings in which we decide matters of common interest, study and do research, and spend
our leisure time. We adorn our factories and plants much
less often. Powerful machines and their precise movements
are aesthetically pleasing to us in and of themselves, and
there are very few works of art which would fully harmonize
with them without somehow weakening or dissipating their
impact. Least decorated of all are our homes, in which most
of us spend very little time. As for our art museums, they are
scientific research institutes, schools at which we study the
development of art or, more precisely, the development of
mankind through artistic activity.”
The museum was located on a little island, in the middle
of a lake, connected to the shore by a narrow bridge. The
building itself, a rectangular structure surrounded by a garden full of fountains and beds of blue, white, black, and green
flowers, was lavishly adorned outside and flooded with light
inside. It contained none of that jumbled accumulation of
statues and paintings that clutters the major museums of
Earth. Several hundred pictures depicted the evolution of the
plastic arts from the first primitive works of the prehistorical period to the technically perfect creations of the previous
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Aleksandr Bogdanov
century. Throughout, one could sense the presence of that
living inner wholeness that people call “genius.” Obviously,
these were the best works from all periods.
In order fully to understand the beauty of another
world, one must be intimately acquainted with life there,
and in order to convey an idea of that beauty to others one
must be an organic part of that life. For that reason I cannot
possibly describe what I saw, but will limit myself to hints
and fragmentary references to that which impressed me
most strongly.
The basic motif of sculpture on both Earth and Mars
is the marvelous human body. Most of the physical differences between us and them are not very great. If we disregard the considerable differences in the size of their eyes,
and thus also to an extent the shape of their skulls, these
distinctions are not greater than those between the various
races on Earth. I am not well versed in anatomy and cannot
give any accurate explanation of the divergencies, but I will
note that my eye easily became accustomed to them and
that they struck me almost immediately as original rather
than ugly.
I noticed that men and women are more alike in build
than is the case among most races on Earth. The women
have relatively broad shoulders, while the narrow pelvis
and a certain tendency to plumpness in the men make their
muscles less prominent and tend to neutralize the physical
differences between the sexes. This, however, is mainly true
of the most recent epoch, the era of free human evolution,
for in the statues dating from as late as the capitalist period,
the distinctions are much more obvious. It is evidently the
enslavement of women in the home and the feverish struggle
for survival on the part of the men which ultimately account
for the physical discrepancies between them.
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I was constantly conscious—now clearly, now more
vaguely—that I was contemplating forms from an alien
world, and this awareness somehow rendered my impressions strange and almost unreal. Even the beautiful female
bodies depicted by the statues and paintings evoked in me
an obscure sensation that was quite unlike the admiring aesthetic attraction I was accustomed to feeling. It resembled
instead the vague premonitions that troubled me long ago
as I crossed the border between childhood and adolescence.
The statues from the early periods were of a single color, as
on Earth, whereas the later ones were natural. This did not
surprise me. I have always thought that deviations from reality cannot be a necessary element of art; they are even antiaesthetic when they impoverish the viewer’s reception of the
work. This is the case with uniformly colored sculpture, as the
concentrated idealization that constitutes the essence of art
is lessened rather than heightened by such a lack of realism.
Like our antique sculpture, the statues and pictures of the
ancient periods were infused with a majestic tranquility, a
serene harmony, an absence of tension. In the intermediate,
transitional epochs, elements of a different order begin to
appear: impulses, passions, an agitated drive which is sometimes mellowed in the form of erotic or religious fantasies but
which sometimes bursts forth under the pressure of the enormous strain generated by an imbalance between spiritual
and corporeal forces. In the socialist epoch the fundamental
nature of art changed once again into harmonious movement, a tranquil and confident manifestation of strength,
action free from morbid exertion, aspiration free from agitation, vigorous activity imbued with an awareness of its wellproportioned unity and invincible rationality.
If the ideal of feminine beauty expressed the infinite
potential of love in the ancient art of Earth, and if the ideal
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beauty of the Middle Ages and Renaissance reflected the
unquenchable thirst for mystical or romantic love, then the
ideal of this other world in advance of our own was Love
incarnate—pure, radiant, all—triumphant Love, serenely
and proudly aware of itself. Like the most ancient Martian
works of art, the most modern ones were characterized by
extreme simplicity and thematic unity. Their heroes were
complex human beings with a rich and harmonious variety
of experiences. The works chose to portray those moments of
the subject’s existence when all of life was concentrated in a
single emotion or aspiration. Favorite contemporary themes
included the ecstasy of creative thought, the ecstasy of love,
and ecstatic delight in nature. Such themes provided a profound insight into the soul of a great people who had learned
to live life in its fullness and intensity and to accept death
consciously and with dignity.
The painting and sculpture section took up half the
museum, while the other half was devoted entirely to architecture. By architecture the Martians mean not only buildings
and great works of engineering but also the artistic designing
of furniture, tools, machines, and all other useful objects and
materials. The immense significance of this art in their lives
may be judged by the particular care and thoroughness with
which this collection was arranged. In the form of pictures,
drawings, models, and especially stereograms viewed in large
steroscopes which reproduced reality in the smallest detail,
the exhibition contained examples of all representative types
of architecture, from the most primitive cave dwellings, with
their crudely embellished utensils, to luxurious apartment
buildings, decorated within by the best artists, to giant factories, with their awesomely beautiful machines, to great
canals, with their granite embankments and suspension
bridges. A special section was devoted to the landscaping of
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gardens, fields, and parks. Although I was unaccustomed to
the vegetation of the planet, I was often pleased by the combinations of colors and forms that had been created by the
collective genius of this large-eyed human race.
As on Earth, in the works of earlier periods elegance was
often achieved at the expense of comfort, and embellishments impaired durability and interfered with the utility of
objects. I detected nothing of the sort in the art of the contemporary period, either in the furniture, the implements,
or the buildings and other structures. I asked Enno whether
modem architecture permitted deviations from functional
perfection for the sake of beauty.
“Never,” he replied. “That would be false beauty, artificiality rather than art.”
In presocialist times the Martians erected monuments
to their great people. Now they dedicate them only to important events, such as the first attempt to reach Earth—which
ended in the death of the explorers—the eradication of a fatal
epidemic, or the discovery of the process of decomposing
and synthesizing chemical elements. There were also monuments on stereograms in the section devoted to graves and
temples (in the past the Martians had also had religion).
One of the most recent works in commemoration of a great
individual was dedicated to the engineer Menni had told
me about. The artist had succeeded in capturing the spiritual power of a man who had led an army of labor to victory
over nature and proudly repudiated the cowardly judgment
morality had passed on his actions. When I paused in involuntary reflection before this panoramic monument, Enno
quietly recited some verses which expressed the essence of
the spiritual tragedy of the hero.
“Who wrote that?” I asked.
“I did,” replied Enno. “I wrote it for Menni.”
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I could not fully appreciate the inherent beauty of
poetry in a language that was still foreign to me, but the
idea in Enno’s verses was lucid, the rhythm was flowing,
and the rhyme rich and sonorous. This suggested a new train
of thought.
“Ah,” I said, “so your poetry still uses strict meter and
rhyme?”
“Of course,” said Enno, slightly surprised. “Do you mean
that you find it ugly?”
“Not at all,” I explained. “It’s just that it is commonly
thought among us that such form was generated by the
tastes of the ruling classes of our society, and that it reflects
their fastidiousness and predilection for conventions
which restrict the freedom of artistic expression. Whence
the conclusion that the poetry of the future, the poetry
of the socialist epoch, should abandon and forget such
inhibiting rules. “
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Enno retorted
vigorously. “Regular rhythmicality seems beautiful to us not
at all because of any liking for conventions, but because it is
in profound harmony with the rhythmical regularity of our
processes of life and thought. As for rhyme, which resolves
a series of dissimilarities in uniform final chords, it is intimately related to that vital bond between people which
crowns their inherent diversity with the unity of the delights
of love, the unity that comes from a rational goal in work, and
the unity of feeling in a work of art. Without rhythm there is
no artistic form at all. If there is no rhythm of sounds, it is all
the more essential that there be a rhythm of images or ideas.
And if rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same
may be said of many other good and beautiful things.”
“But does not rhyme in fact restrict and obstruct the
expression of the poetic idea?”
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“Well, what if it does? Such constraints, after all, arise
from the goal which the artist has freely chosen to set himself. They not only obstruct but also perfect the expression of
the poetic idea, and that is their only raison d’être. The more
complicated the goal, the more difficult the path leading to
it, and, consequently, the more obstacles there are on the
path. If you want to build a beautiful building, just think how
many rules of technology and harmony are going to determine, that is, ‘restrict’ your world. You are free to choose
your goal, and that is the one and only human freedom.
Once you have chosen it, however, you have also selected
the means to attain it.”
We went out into the garden to rest for a moment after all
the new impressions of the day. It was evening already, a clear
and mild spring evening. The flowers were beginning to furl
up their blossoms and leaves for the night. All the plants on
Mars share this feature, for it becomes very cold there after
sunset. I resumed our conversation.
“Tell me, what sort of literature is most popular here?”
“The drama, especially tragedy, and nature poetry,”
replied Enno.
“What are the themes of your tragedy? Where in your
happy, peaceful existence is there any material for it?”
“Happy? Peaceful? Where did you get that impression?
True, peace reigns among men, but there cannot be peace
with the natural elements. Even a victory over such a foe
can pose a new threat. During the most recent period of our
history we have intensified the exploitation of the planet
tenfold, our population is growing, and our needs are
increasing even faster. The danger of exhausting our natural resources and energy has repeatedly confronted various
branches of our industry. Thus far we have overcome it without having to resort to what we regard to be the repugnant
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alternative of shortening the life span of present and coming generations, but at this very moment the struggle has
become particularly acute.”
“I could never have imagined that such dangers were possible, given the power of your technology and science. You
said that such things have already happened?”
“Only seventy years ago, when our coal reserves were
exhausted and the transition to hydroelectric power was still
far from complete, we were forced to destroy a considerable
portion of our beloved forests in order to give us time to redesign our machines. This disfigured the planet and worsened
our climate for decades. Then, when we had recovered from
that crisis, about twenty years ago it was discovered that our
deposits of iron ore were nearly depleted. Intense research was
begun on hard aluminum alloys, and a huge portion of our
available technical resources was diverted to obtaining aluminum from the soil. Now our statisticians reckon that unless
we succeed in developing synthetic proteins from inorganic
matter, in thirty years we will be faced with a food shortage.”
“What of other planets?” I objected. “Surely you can find
something there to replenish the shortage. “
“Where? Venus is obviously still inaccessible. Earth?
Earth is inhabited, and it is otherwise uncertain how much
we would be able to exploit her resources. Each trip there
requires enormous energy, and according to what Menni told
me recently about his latest research project, the Martian
reserves of the radioactive substances necessary for such
voyages are very modest. No, there are considerable difficulties everywhere, and the tighter our humanity closes ranks
to conquer nature, the tighter the elements close theirs to
avenge the victory.”
“But wouldn’t a simple reduction of the birth rate suffice
to rectify the situation?”
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“Check the birth rate? Why, that would be tantamount
to capitulating to the elements. It would mean denying the
unlimited growth of life and would inevitably imply bringing
it to a halt in the very near future. We can triumph as long as
we are on the offensive: but if we do not permit our army to
grow, we will be besieged on all sides by the elements, and
that will in tum weaken faith in our collective strength, in
our great common life. The meaning of each individual life
will vanish together with that faith, because the whole lives in
each and every one of us, in each tiny cell of the great organism, and each of us lives through the whole. Curbing the
birth rate is the last thing we would resort to, and if it should
happen in spite of us, it will herald the beginning of the end.”
“Very well then, I understand that the tragedy of the
whole always exists for you, at least as a potential danger. So
far, however, man has won, and the collective has been able to
shield the individual from this tragedy. Even if the situation
should become really dangerous, the gigantic exertions and
suffering caused by the intense struggle will be distributed
so evenly among countless individuals that such hardships
will not seriously disturb their tranquil happiness. It seems
to me that you have all you need to ensure such happiness.”
“Tranquil happiness! But how can the individual help
being acutely and profoundly aware of the shocks to the life
of the whole in which his beginning and end are immersed?
Consider also that there are contradictions arising from the
simple fact that the individual is so limited in comparison to
the whole; he is powerless fully to fuse with that whole and
can neither entirely dissolve himself in it nor embrace it with
his consciousness. If such contradictions are beyond your
understanding, it is because in your world they are eclipsed
by others which are more direct and obvious. The struggle
between classes, groups, and individuals precludes both the
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idea of the whole and the happiness and suffering implied
by the notion. I have seen your world, and I would not be
able to tolerate a fraction of the insanity in which your fellow
creatures live. For that reason I would not presume to decide
which of us is closer to tranquil happiness: the more perfectly
ordered and harmonious life is, the more painful are its inevitable dissonances … ”
“But tell me now, Enno, aren’t you happy? You have
your youth, your science, your poetry, and doubtless you
have love. What possible experience of yours has been so
severe as to make you speak so passionately about the tragedy of life?”
“How very nicely you put it,” Enno said with a strange
laugh. “You do not know that at one time jolly old Enno had
made up his mind to die. And if Menni had been but a single
day later in sending him an invitation to travel to Earth, I am
afraid your good-natured companion would not be sitting
here talking to you today. Just now, however, I cannot explain
all of this to you. You will see for yourself later that if there is
any happiness among us, then it is not the tranquil bliss you
were talking about.”
I hesitated to pursue this line of questioning any further. We got up and returned to the museum. I was no longer able to examine the exhibits systematically, however,
for my attention strayed and I found it difficult to organize
my thoughts. In the sculpture section I stopped in front of a
statue depicting a beautiful young boy. His face reminded me
of Netti, but I was struck most deeply of all by the skill with
which the artist had managed to infuse incipient genius into
the undeveloped body, the incomplete features, and the anxious, inquisitive gaze of the child. I stood motionless before
the statue for a long while, my mind blank to everything else.
Enno’s voice brought me out of my reverie.
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“This is you,” he said, pointing at the boy. “This is your
world. It will be a marvelous world, but it is still in its infancy.
Look at the hazy dreams and disturbing images troubling his
mind. He is half asleep, but some day he will awaken. I feel it,
I sincerely believe in it!”
The joyous sensation these words evoked in me was mixed
with a strange regret: why was it not Netti who said that!
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On the Museum
Kazimir Malevich
On The Museum
First published in 1919
Translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus and
Arnold McMillin
The center of political life has moved to Russia.
Here has been formed the breast against which the entire
power of the old-established states smashes itself.
Hence goes forth and shines in all corners of the Earth
the new comprehension of the essence of things, and hither
to the center representatives of old culture crawl out of their
cracks and come with their worn-out old teeth to gnaw themselves a piece from the hem of the new coat.
A similar center must be formed for art and creativity.
Here is the rotating creative axis and race, and it is here
that a new contemporary culture must arise, with no room
for alms from the old one.
Hitherto to the new pole of life and excitement all innovators must surely stream in order to take part in creation on a
world scale.
The innovators in contemporary life must create a new
epoch—such that not one rib of it will touch the old one.
We must recognize “short duration” as being the sharp
distinction between our epoch and the past—the moment of
creative impetus, the speedy displacement in forms; there is
no stagnation—only tempestuous movement.
As a result, treasures do not exist in our epoch and nothing is created on the foundation of an age-old fortress.
The stronger the hope, the more hopeless the position
of our will, which in conjunction with time strives to destroy
what reason has for years kept in chains.
We still cannot overcome the Egyptian pyramids. The
baggage of antiquity sticks out in every one like a splinter
of old wisdom, and our anxiety to preserve it is a waste of
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Kazimir Malevich
time and laughable for those who float in the vortex of winds
beyond the clouds in the blue lampshade of the sky.
Our wisdom hastens and strives toward the uncharted
abysses of space, seeking a shelter for the night in its gulfs.
The flexible body of the propeller with difficulty tears
itself from the old Earth’s embraces, and the weight of our
grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ luggage weighs down the
shoulders of its wings.
Do we need Rubens or the Cheops Pyramid? Is a
depraved Venus necessary to the pilot in the heights of our
new comprehension?
Do we need old copies of clay towns, supported on the
crutches of Greek columns?
Do we need the confirmatory signature of the dead old
woman of Greco-Roman architecture, in order to turn contemporary metals and concretes into squat almshouses?
Do we need temples to Christ, when life has long since left
the droning of vaults and candle soot, and when the church
dome is insignificant by comparison with any depot with millions of ferro-concrete beams?
Does he who will break through the blue lampshade and
remain hidden forever on the eternally new path, does he
need the wisdom of our contemporary life?
Is the Roman pope’s cap necessary to a two-six-four
engine racing like lightning over the globe and trying to take
off from its back?
Do we need the wardrobe of braids from the clothes of
ancient times, when new tailors sew contemporary clothes
from metals?
Do we need the wax tapers of the past when on my head
I wear electric lamps and telescopes?
Contemporary life needs nothing other than what belongs
to it; and only that which grows on its shoulders belongs to it.
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On The Museum
Art, both great and wise, representing the episodes and
faces of the wisest now lies buried by contemporary life.
Our contemporary life needs only living and life-giving
energy, it needs flying iron beams and colored signals along
the new path.
It is essential that creative work be built on these foundations, burning the path behind it.
Enough of crawling about the corridors of time past,
enough squandering time in drawing up lists of its possessions, enough pawning the graveyards of Vagankovo,
enough singing requiems—none of this will rise again.
Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy,
one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking
the path to a new conception of the life that is born within us.
Contemporary life has invented crematoria for the dead, but
each dead man is more alive than a weakly painted portrait.
In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly, thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on
one chemist’s shelf.
We can make a concession to the conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and
set up one pharmacy.
The aim will be the same, even if people will examine the
powder from Rubens and all his art—a mass of ideas arise in
people, and are often more alive than actual representation
(and take up less room).
Our contemporary life should have as its slogan: “all that
we have made is made for the crematorium.”
The setting up of a contemporary museum is a collection
of contemporaries’ projects and nothing more; only those
projects which can be adapted to the skeleton of life, or which
will lead to the skeleton of new forms of it, can be preserved
for a time.
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If we take tractors or motor cars to the backward villages,
and set up corresponding schools, then teaching about carts
will hardly be necessary.
If with contemporary techniques we can in the space of
three weeks set up and equip a three-story house, then we
will hardly need to use the old form of building.
The villages will prefer to go for ready-made houses rather
than into the forest or the wood.
Accordingly, it is essential that what is living is inseparably linked with life and with a museum of this sort of art.
A living form of life, when it becomes worn out, reincarnates
itself in another; or else its worn out part is replaced by a
living one.
We could not preserve the old structure of Moscow,
under a glass cap; they drew sketches but life did not wish
things to be that way and continues to build more and more
new skyscrapers, and will continue to build until the roof
joins up with the Moon.
What are Godunov’s hut or Marfa’s chambers, by
comparison?
One could feel more sorry about a screw breaking off
than about the destruction of St. Basil’s Cathedral.
Is it worth worrying about what is dead?
In our contemporary life there are people who are alive
and there are conservatives. Two opposite poles: but although
in nature unlike poles attract, this is not a law for us.
The living must break up this friendship and do what is
best for our creative life; they must be as merciless as time
and life itself.
Life has torn life and what they were not conserving
from the hands of the museum keepers. We can collect it
whilst it is alive and link it directly to life, without giving it
to be conserved.
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On The Museum
What do we need with the Baranovs’ manufactory when
we have Textile, which swallows up, like a crematorium, all
the services and qualities of the old manufactories?
And I am not sure that this generation will lament the
old manufactory.
The path of the arts’ section lies through volume and
color, through the material and the nonmaterial, and both
combinations will compose the life of form.
In the street and in the house, in oneself and on oneself—
this is where the living comes from, and where our living
museum lies.
I see no point in setting up sarcophagi of treasure or
Meccas for worship.
What we need is creativity and the factory to produce the
parts to carry it over the world as rails.
Any hoarding of old things brings harm. I am convinced
that if the Russian style had been done away with in good time,
instead of the almshouse of Kazan station that has been put
up, there would have arisen a truly contemporary structure.
The conservatives worry about what is old, and are not
averse to adapting some old rag to contemporary life, or, in
other words, to adapt the back of today to what is alien.
We must not allow our backs to be platforms for the
old days.
Our job is to always move toward what is new, not to live
in museums. Our path lies in space, and not in the suitcase of
what has been outlived.
And if we do not have collections it will be easier to fly
away with the whirlwind of life.
Our job is not to photograph remains—that is what photographs are for.
Instead of collecting all sorts of old stuff we must form
laboratories of a worldwide creative building apparatus, and
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from its axes will come forth artists of living forms rather
than dead representations of objectivity.
Let the conservatives go to the provinces with their dead
baggage—the depraved cupids of the former debauched
houses of Rubens and the Greeks.
We will bring I-beams, electricity, and the lights of colors.
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The Museum Newspaper:
Suggestions for Regional Museums
and Community Centers
V. Karpov
The Museum Newspaper
First published in 1931
Translated by Jane Bugaeva
The pedagogical role of museums as visual schools is paramount and evident—which is why museums hold their
prominent place in our cultural development. Old-fashioned
museums, like cabinets of curiosities or collections of rarities, have become obsolete. Today’s museums must educate. They must take the form of a book—a picture book that
tangibly illustrates the scientific and technological achievements in various fields. They must fully depict the life and
development of our entire republic or, in the case of regional
museums, that of the corresponding region. Undeniably, this
picture book must be ideologically relevant and profoundly
touch upon the issues of our time. A museum’s collection
must not be frozen in time, it must be continuously replenished with and transformed by the newest materials. Yet
constantly restructuring a museum’s entire, cumbersome
collection to be concurrent with each passing day presents
some technical difficulties. As impossible as it would be to
reprint a book on a daily basis, so too, is the daily reimagining of a museum’s collection.
Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary for museums to
reflect precisely that: each passing day—with its demands
and significant moments—and to properly shed light on
these moments, bringing them to the attention of the masses.
For this reason, in addition to the museum’s role as a picture book, it must also be able to perform the role of a newspaper. In order for this to occur, I think that it is necessary
for museums to have special Museum Newspaper exhibitions, whose images and displays change daily—dynamically
depicting each day in real time.
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V. Karpov
*
*
*
The Museum Newspaper must meet these three criteria:
1. succinctly and clearly depict the most significant
moments of each day;
2. be exceptionally adaptable, not cumbersome, and
completely dynamic; and
3. not be just a newspaper on the wall.
First and foremost, if possible, the Museum Newspaper
should not be text heavy. Rather, it should consist predominantly of images, with the text only serving to clarify each
display. In addition, it is imperative that all photos and diagrams be supplemented with physical exhibits. We must not
forget that physical exhibits, even those that appear to be
mostly decorative, attract attention. They compel audiences
to notice the accompanying text, photos, and diagrams that
serve to emphasize the physical exhibit itself.
Any museum can easily create such exhibits and will find
a multitude of materials already present in their collections
to use as illustrations. Similar Museum Newspaper exhibitions
can be realized in community centers. However, because
these centers have limited material resources at their disposal, their exhibits will consist almost entirely of images.
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Avalanche Exhibitions:
The Experience of the
Leningrad Organization of
Worker-Artists
Leonid Chetyrkin
Avalanche Exhibitions
First published in 1933
Translated by Jane Bugaeva
Amateur art groups were by no means the only type of art production organized by the proletariat masses. In the year 1931,
Leningrad’s endeavor featured some quite unusual amateur
art exhibitions—the so-called Avalanche Exhibitions. These
included hand-drawn wall posters, placards relating to various
industrial departments, caricatures, galleries of outstanding
employees, as well as drawings and paintings by worker-artists.
The exhibitions traveled from factory to factory, plant to plant,
and along the way were replenished with new artwork from
local worker-artists, thus constantly growing and expanding.
These so-called Avalanche Exhibitions became striking
examples of propaganda, using fine arts as a means of highlighting the main goals of socialist construction. Simultaneously,
these exhibitions introduced new groups of industry workers
to the fine arts. The so-called Avalanche Exhibitions model was
devised by the Leningrad Organization of Worker Artists. In
1931, the organization grew to 630 members. Out of them,
95 percent were factory workers and about 50 percent were
members of the Communist Party and the Komsomol [Union
of Communist Youth].
Factions of the Leningrad Organization of Worker Artists
were present at individual plants and factories. These factions
were tied to their plant’s press—both in terms of organization
and artistic production—and were a part of their plant’s organization of worker correspondents. Each faction’s educational
work was geared toward the realization of the state’s financial
and industrial plan and carrying out the current tasks of the
socialist construction. However, neither the methodologies
nor the long-term goals of the Leningrad Organization of
Worker Artists were sufficiently developed, and to this day, the
impact of this organization is not well known.
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On the Question of Museums:
Record of the Discussion of Problems
and Objectives of Fine Art Museums at
the Art and Industry Board
Moscow Department of
Museum Affairs
On the Question of Museums
First published in 1919
Translated by Bela Shayevich
During the January 16th meeting of the collegium on artistic affairs and art production, the question of the objectives
and organization of art museums was discussed. The State
Commissar on Museums and the Preservation of Artistic
Monuments and Antiquity G. S. Yatmanov gave a lengthy
speech. Comrade Yatmanov reported on nearly a year of the
Museum Department’s work, indicating difficulties in the field,
including the shortage of museum personnel with a socialist
worldview, which stands in the way of museum reform.
Having illustrated the state of museums today, the
speaker came to the conclusion that there were many shortcomings in contemporary museology. The spirit of artistic
revolution must usher an entirely new life into the mortified mausoleums that are our museums. The restructured
art museums must be taken out of the hands of professional
museum workers and handed over to artists. Professional
museum workers have created fetishes of the artistic artifacts
of the past; these must be disposed of, and it can only happen
by transferring control over museums to artists. Throwing
the art of the past off the pedestal that it has heretofore stood
on is all the more necessary because it will create the possibility of eliminating its influence on new proletarian art and
definitively liberate new, young art from the eternal burden
of “the art of the past” looming over it. Therefore, past artistic
achievements should neither serve as models nor materials
for creating proletarian art. The art of the past must be put
in its proper place where it may serve its rightful function
of being a primary historical source, and nothing more. In
this sense, the preservation of artistic artifacts will be useful and necessary to the creative work of the proletariat. But
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Moscow Department of Museum Affairs
the proletariat, armed with the accumulated knowledge and
experience of humanity, must regard the artistic past as an
accomplished achievment, as a road already traveled, and
that is why the proletariat will create museums not for the
purpose of bowing down to past masters or otherwise propagandizing this past. In order to meet these demands that
stand before existing museums, a new breed of state museums must be created that would, in their scope and conception, serve these ends.
The Department proposes two kinds of new museums:
1. Central museums that strive after strictly scholarly
aims as well as function for artistic purposes. This
kind of museum must be created in collaboration
with specialized scholarly and educational art institutions. These museums should include well-equipped:
(a) laboratories for studying artworks; these laboratories should include (b) special storage facilities for
artistic artifacts; as well as archives that can guarantee objects’ preservation and also be easily accessible
for researchers; (c) be equipped with large auditoriums for holding lectures on art history and finally,
(d) the collection on display must be a living thing,
constantly changing in pursuit of exclusively artistic
goals. The galleries must always be filled with examples of new artistic achievement.
2. Regional, guberniya, and uyezd museums that function as exhibition spaces in places where there is
large-scale artisan production. These museums
must be centers uniting all artistic production in an
oblast’ or guberniya, and must facilitate artistic mass
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production in the given area. These museums must
house complete and, when possible, exhaustive collections demonstrating objects and related materials
of a given sector of manufacturing, for educational
purposes. They must also have permanent exhibitions
of new art. Networks of such museums will further the
development of the people’s art in our country.
To conclude his speech, the lecturer indicated a series
of measures already implemented by the Department of
Museum Affairs such as, for instance, the museum’s initiative on artistic industry, classes and lectures on art history,
and other efforts.
After Yatmanov, Comrade Punin spoke.
Comrade Punin believes that it is essential to distinguish
between three types of museums according to the nature of
their collections. The first kind would be like warehouses,
stores, storage spaces for paintings where contemporary
artworks are sent immediately after being shown at exhibitions. There, these works are stored for a set period of time,
at the end of which, at the decree of special museum committees, they would be transferred to either state art or art
historical museums. This is the first type of museum: the
museum for viewing.
The second type are state museums for visual culture,
which is defined as the culture of artistic medium, form,
color, method, and so on. Museums of this type are meant
to address purely artistic ends: to create opportunities for
familiarization with the development and methods of art.
The speaker called for the active participation of artists and
artistic societies in the work of this kind of museum.
Finally, the third type are state art museums of a historical bent, that is, museums whose purpose is to present
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strictly scholarly or at least highly systematically developed
materials as visual aids for studying the history of art. This
kind of museum would be under the jurisdiction of specialists and cannot have claim to artistic influence.
Museums of the first as well as of the second kind expand
their collections by acquiring artworks through special
committees, on the one hand, and choosing from already
acquired works collected in stores and storage spaces, on
the other, with the second kind of museum having the right
to the first pick of works, as they are the ones tasked with
the complex and serious duty of presenting artistic culture
to the public.
In his conclusion, the speaker pointed to the necessity of
all museums adjusting how works are displayed, and making
their collections more fluid. Collections in art museums are
archives that can be freely used by anyone. Works should be
arranged and rearranged continuously; the ideal museum
would have all the works on moveable panels; the tendency
toward immobile iconostasis must be rooted out.
The third speaker was the architect Ilin.
Comrade Ilin pointed to a number of defects in contemporary museum culture. He proposed provisional efforts to
ease the burden on the scope of museums’ work; Comrade
Ilin proposed the destruction of museum galleries and making them stricter in terms of their collections of artworks.
Comrade Ilin also pointed to the necessity of greater mobility
in museum collections.
A long and lively exchange of opinions followed these
speeches. In response to Comrade Yatmanov’s report on the
activities of the Museum Department, Comrade Shterenberg
stated that despite the allocated time and resources, almost
nothing had been done in the field of museum construction. The problem was not the legal statutes on museums,
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On the Question of Museums
but the actual state of museum affairs. The state of our
museums could not be considered satisfactory; the existing
kind of museums are clearly outdated; there has yet to be
a solid program for museum reform. Even when it came to
issues that clearly affected artists, the Moscow Department
of Museum Affairs did not wish to have anything to do with
the Department of Visual Art. At the same time, only the
Department of Visual Art could provide a new program
for museum development. Although none of the speeches,
except perhaps some statements form Comrade Ilin, contained concrete proposals that could be set against the
museological programs developed over the past decades,
the Department had already considered and approved the
project for a museum of painting and visual culture. It follows that if we proceeded with the project of this museum
without delay, we could counter the museum administrators’
general program with our specific program.
Comrade Brik said that he was not satisfied with any of
the propositions presented in these speeches. He wanted to
know why Comrade Yatmanov, being the State Commissar
of all museum affairs, had yet to make his good intentions a
reality. From his speech one could conclude that the problem
was the lack of communication between the Department of
Museum Affairs and the Department of Visual Art. But who
was to blame for this? Anyway, the time for conversations
had passed; it was time to really get to work. Comrade Punin
proposed the creation of a new organization, the probationary museum. Again, we’re facing another selection process.
“For me,” Comrade Brik said, “there’s no question that these
so-called ‘unique works’ are examples of a totally bourgeois,
individualistic ideology. We must destroy the deification of
specific works of art. Museums must be organized such that
the paintings can be used like the books of a public library.”
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Comrade Brik was countered by Comrades Shterenberg
and Punin, who said that for an artist, each painting will
always be a unique work of art. Punin also strongly criticized
Comrade Yatmanov’s speech saying that the speaker, despite
his revolutionary phraseology, was deeply conservative when
it came to museum reform. In attempting to renew and revive
museum life, Comrade Yatmanov sought to resurrect the old
art. We don’t need to renew the museums, we need to finish
killing them off and make them strictly the storehouses for
visual aids for the study of the history of art. The main force
behind the crisis in museology was the combination of the
two sides of all artistic activity: the art historical and the creative. If these were separated out, and examples of so-called
visual culture were sent to special museums, we would be
left with collections of high art-historical value that would
be incapable of directly influencing contemporary artistic
production. This is the only task of museology today.
Comrade Yatmanov countered with a response to
Comrades Shterenberg and Punin, saying that if the
Department of Museum Affairs hadn’t accomplished much,
especially in terms of reforming the museums, it is because
the Department had been focusing on collecting and safeguarding artistic artifacts and antiques. He said that the decision to reorganize the museums should only be made after
thoroughly discussing this question at a conference organized especially for this purpose. In this sense, the support
and participation of the Department of Visual Art would be
warmly welcomed, especially in connection with the upcoming conference. If the main points of the speech were acceptable to the collegium, it would be good to come to a decision
on the form that this support should take.
Comrade Shterenberg said that there’s no cooperation and support to speak of for the conference; first of all,
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because the speech did not contain sufficiently concrete
propositions; secondly, because there is no one to support,
seeing as the Department of Museum Affairs did not have
a coherent line; instead, there’s just a permanent conflict.
There could only be support insofar as the Department
would be willing to take on the specific collaborative project of creating a new kind of museum of visual culture with
the Department of Visual Art. In light of this, Comrade
Shterenberg voiced a proposition to create such a museum
together with the Department of Museum Affairs. The proposition was approved unanimously.
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The Museum and
Proletarian Culture:
Speech at the Meeting
of the First All-Russian Museum
Commission
Osip Brik
The Museum and Proletarian Culture
First published in 1919
Translated by Alexandra Tatarsky
(with Matvei Yankelevich)
The proletarian revolution has brought all issues to the fore.
I am going to talk about cultural issues related to museum
activities. The main issue is that of a unified state fund.
Simple rule by decree will never change anything. Moscow
thinks it can deal with this issue rationally. It declares everything to be nonexistent, and combines it all into one mass.
However, one must not assume that all institutional formations are the same. The value of any collection is determined
by the organizing principle laid down at its starting point.
It is necessary to ascertain what each collection presents
itself as, and the extent to which its organizing idea has a
right to exist. Announcing the principle of a unified fund, we
place on each museum curator the obligation to prove that
his collection should be preserved. A special agency should
investigate individual collections and decide whether they
should be dissolved or preserved. Objects might have to be
carried out of palaces, vestries, and churches. We will never
tackle the issue if we do not lay down other criteria besides
those of the everyday (if the palace is unthinkable without
its objects, then it is unthinkable without its sovereign). No
collections of everyday artifacts can be eligible for preservation. As regards private collections, they must be considered
in terms of their scientific character. How to determine the
genuine scientific worth of a collection? A collection has scientific worth to the extent that the scientific principles by
which it was assembled are still valid. Pseudoscientific collections should not exist. Thus, the unified state fund must
be decreed as a founding principle, and every individual collection must prove its right to preservation. The question of
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growing the collection is not the purview of the museum, but
should be decided by the state. There is talk here of the museum’s initiative, about a loan for purchasing—these are old
habits. Under the new state system, the problem of allocation is dealt with in accordance with centralization, to which
museums must adapt, since they cannot conduct their own
housekeeping within the larger state economy.
Turning to the question of the cultural role of museums,
the orator notes that there is often talk of popularization,
of the need to convince people that the museum has good
things. The people understand this themselves; we need not
add cultural-educational work to the museum’s responsibilities. Let the museums concern themselves with scientific
work; this will not alienate the proletariat. It is evident that
there is no struggle between museum and artist, but this is
not a bad thing. [The painter] Repin said that what’s good
about the academy is that there’s always someone to argue
with. Artistic work flows beyond the walls of the museum, but
the old canons are alive in the museum. If you go along with
the Muscovites who say that past and present are acceptable,
this is aestheticism. We are convinced that contemporary art
should dominate, but people must be prepared for it; they
must start with the alphabet, but not with Adam. You cannot
assume that The Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) are less sophisticated than the Impressionists. You must not think that by
gaining insight into one movement, you can understand
another. The museum can play a negative role in terms of preparing the masses for the comprehension of contemporary
art. It is the exhibit that educates, and not the museum, which
is only the place of scholarship. From museums people form
false aesthetic views, and therefore see no need to rebuild the
museums. Museums are needed for the purposes of demonstration; people tour factories but one would not rebuild the
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The Museum and Proletarian Culture
factory in order to make the techniques of production or the
work process more easily apprehended by visitors. All educational responsibilities should be transferred to the creators
of contemporary art; museums should remain for research
purposes. Initially, museums of different kinds should be
preserved—as many kinds as there are approaches. In the
end, a unified science of art and culture will be found and
we will have a scientific institution where cultural issues are
studied by one specific method. Thus, control over all education and aesthetic impact must be transferred to the artists,
while the museum will be a scientific institution created to
further the study of art and culture.
Theses: (a) the proletarian revolution demands a radical
reorganization of all forms of cultural life and cannot be limited to piecemeal reforms or simple popularizing of existing
foundations; (b) two main issues in museum affairs are still
waiting to be addressed: the unification of all museum valuables into a single state fund and the question of the cultural
role of museums; (c) the unified state fund should be decreed
as a principle; no casual, everyday, amateur, and other such
collections can claim immunity; scientific collections can be
preserved according to the viability of their organizational
idea; (d) the work of cultural enlightenment and artistic
instruction should be removed from museum jurisdiction
and entirely handed over to the creators of contemporary
art; it is not the museum that educates but the gallery exhibition and this guarantees the unimpeded development of art;
(e) the museum must become a scholarly institution, building a unified study of art.
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On the Results of
the Museum Conference
Nikolai Punin
On the Results of the museum conference
First published in 1919
Translated by Alexandra Tatarksy
(with Matvei Yankelevich)
The question of the educational role of museums was rather
minutely unpacked at the close of the February 18th museum
conference, but the papers given on this topic were as feeble
and timid as the discussions. Childish prattle.
First and foremost, the question was raised in the most
ridiculous manner. Neither museum workers nor scholars
could turn away from the widespread fallacy that the masses
(they went on at all times about the masses, and not the proletariat—and this is already significant) cannot at present
become collaborators in the great work of the arts and sciences, but need first to acquaint themselves with the arts
and sciences through the purgatory of workshops and dilettantism. In this vein, much was said at the conference about
model exhibitions at museums, explanatory lectures, and so
on. What nonsense!
In the first place, this kind of chatter is no longer justified historically. We know this from the Ruskin Museum in
Sheffield and other folk museums of Western Europe, which
showed that the common masses are just as likely to yawn,
or even to sleep, in this kind of specialized museum as in the
larger, authentically scientific museums.
Secondly, the very thought of constructing a specialized museum and isolating the business of public education
always flows from the following entirely unproven notions
which fall apart under the slightest scrutiny: the people are
children, and we the scientists, the bourgeoisie, are adults;
thus it follows that we ought to teach them, if it so happens that they want to be taught. Wrong. The masses, especially the proletariat, are not children, but rather they are
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exceedingly adult, for the very reason that they have internalized an economic theory that surpasses all the economic
“sciences” of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian is not a rioter
and not a usurper of power, and he will come to demonstrate
his cultural superiority; there is nothing to teach him for it is
he who shall teach. That being said, if in actuality the “common masses” are uneducated and crude, well, after all, they
are the “common masses.”
The masses are always the masses, and there is still a
ways to go before they get out from under their own economic oppression and rise to at least an average level of culture, but it is for this reason, first and foremost, that we must
overcome this economic oppression. Change the material
conditions of existence, but don’t concern yourself with that
bourgeois utopian philanthropy à la Saint-Simon or Ruskin.
That’s number two. And third of all, it is entirely unproven
that the advanced part of the proletariat (not the masses) is
not in a state to be able to perceive the latest achievements
of science and art. Of course if we demand from them a history of art starting with Adam or a point-by-point inventory
of all the errors of science, starting with Chaldean astronomy, or medieval botany, then we might not get very far.
But I am convinced that to the intelligent and, more importantly, interested worker, it is entirely unnecessary to know
Rafael in order to understand contemporary artistic work
or Linnaean systems in order to grasp contemporary mathematics. What’s more, science and especially art should
finally stop serving the consumer; they should become a
part of the general creative process and should serve the producer—in fact, they have already begun to do so. The time
has long since passed to throw away any judgments about
what’s yours and what’s ours. Already rotten, even dead, is
the notion that science and art are here, in the temple, and
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out there is a drove of swine with crumbs from the master’s
brunch. We don’t want more masters, be they scientists or
artists. Incidentally, the scientists and artists themselves no
longer lay claim to mastery.
The desire to propagate quasi-science and art at any
cost, by way of popularization and any other means, came
into conflict with those aspirations and views which on this
occasion were found among the more serious and competent part of the conference. The best scientists in Petersburg
have always pointed out the professional character of science and its self-sustaining economic value. Any kind of
demagogic slogans, whatever philanthropic motives they
may come from, were not met sympathetically. And this is
understandable, since we were dealing here with scientists
and their long-standing heroic tradition. However, the fact
that some members of communist culture did not share the
same opinion was a surprise. For some of them, the popularity level of this or that museum is nearly the only reason for
its existence. Without a doubt, the cultural intensity of this
or that country may be measured by the amount of museum
attendees but it doesn’t follow from this that artificial popularization guarantees the growth of culture. Indeed, this
would mean deceit and self-deception—using decorations to
cover up an internal emptiness. This is exactly the behavior
of any bourgeoisie, past and future, for what is the bourgeoisie in terms of culture if not a total decoration? There’s no
reason for us to follow in its footsteps. The contemporary
museum is a scholarly institute. To produce contemporary
European museums from any kind of kunstkammer or cabinet of curiosities is to produce the modern state directly out
of the feudal order. Once, museums were cabinets of curiosities but they long ago acquired a different character—that of
a supporting scholarly apparatus.
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In a similar way, we should examine the contemporary
museum. This would not only be correct from the perspective of science and the museums themselves, but would also
be consistent with the viewpoint of communist culture,
which recognizes a professional and scientifically organized
authenticity at the foundation of all human enterprise.
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On the Museum Bureau
Aleksandr Rodchenko
On The Museum Bureau
Written in 1920 –21
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
The Museum Bureau is implementing the assignments of the
Department of Visual Art in the area of building museums
and collecting artistic works in the center and the regions.
The concept of “artistic works” includes:
Painting and its divisions according to materials—oil,
tempera, pastel, and watercolor.
Sculpture and spatial forms.
All types of graphic work: etchings, engravings, and
lithographs.
Drawings.
The Department of Visual Art is pursuing the following goals
in museum building:
1. To serve the State Art Studios with factual material,
i.e. an educational goal, by organizing collections
under the aegis of the Studios according to the principles of the Museum of Painting Culture.
2. Cultural-educational work, which is implemented
by adding to already existing museums or organizations in the regions; where there are none, according
to the principle of the history of the development of
artistic form.
Both of these types of building are equally necessary, the
first as it will facilitate the development of cultural producers
capable of absorbing and understanding artistic production
of all types and tendencies.
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Aleksandr Rodchenko
The Department of Visual Art’s principles of museum
building are based on a scientific, professional-material
approach to art.
The new museum building is based on the principle of a
museum showing the stages of development of artistic form,
and not on the creation of a museum of a historical nature,
which has evolved in its particularly static forms under the
capitalist system.
The historic museum of the past is an ARCHIVE; it is
a museum that preserves works, and not a museum as a
cultural factor.
It is built for serving the ethnographer, the specialist, and
the amateur.
According to its purpose, even the building technology of
old historical museums differs sharply from the principles of
the new museum technology.
In a historical museum, the selection of works occurs by
chance; the criteria are the subjectively aesthetic recognition
of each individual master’s history, without any analysis of
his goals and achievements.
The overloading of museum walls with works of one and
the same master is not taken into account, since the final
task of the historical museum is the desire to take everything without considered evaluation and differentiation
among works.
The new museum is being built, above all, of works, and
not of artists.
The product of production stands in first place. The
selection criteria are the presence of movement or the painterly achievement of the work, on the one hand, and skill on
the other.
The first of these criteria might be termed the issue of
inventiveness.
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It is the dynamic principle that moves art ahead, that prevents it from decomposing and stagnating, which cultivates
feeble imitations.
The concepts of inviolable DOGMAS and classical
CANONS are exploded by this issue, and the existence of
ETERNAL BEAUTY in art is killed.
Everything lives in time and space, and so does the work
of art. Dying off, it clears the path and becomes the soil for
the next achievements.
The new museum, as a creative principle, is being built of
LIVlNG works that do not yet possess the quality of “historical treasures” (in the narrow sense of the word).
The second issue—the issue of skill—places the work of
art on a scientifically professional level.
It limits that bacchanalia of groundless evaluations
based on subjective taste, which makes the work kin to a
spiritual delicacy, thereby developing a refined connoisseurship in the consumer, who demands only the satisfaction of
his desires.
The museum, as an organized form of art’s exposure, i.e.
its promulgation, should be constructed according to the
development of artistic form and skill.
We have dealt with the system of selection for the old and
new museum, but one other important technical issue of
museum building remains—the INSTALLATION of the works.
In museums truest to the historical method, the installation, no less than the selection, of the paintings emphasizes
the museum’s characteristic profile—that of an ARCHIVE.
Starting with the principle of individually evaluating the
master, the installation of works was resolved very simply—
the most recognized artist was placed in the most advantageous location, while the proximity of another artist was
defined by historical logic.
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Hence the gaps and jumps on the wall that do not allow
[one to follow] the developmental path of art’s methods.
Maintaining the character of an ARCHIVE quite precisely,
the historical museum created the habit of carpeting the entire
wall from top to bottom with paintings. Even the physiological
impossibility of seeing the artwork wasn’t reckoned with.
Those works that were considered secondary ended up
high or in the darkest areas of the space.
Economy of space was given priority. The possibility
of seeing the work was dependent on the utilization of the
space’s walls.
The gap between paintings was reduced to a minimum—
works were hung right up next to one another as far as the
similarity of their size permitted.
The most cultured attitude toward installation went no
further than DECORATlON of the walls with works, that is,
the paintings served to fill the walls in accordance with the
general decor of the space.
Here the symmetrical distribution of paintings on the wall,
with proximity determined by size, was taken for a system.
The new museum building cannot approach installation so superficially, flouting the primary task—TO SHOW
the painting.
Above all, the space and the wall are seen as a technical
means to show the picture.
Given this approach to the question [of installation], the
question of economy in utilizing a given wall no longer arises.
The carpet approach to covering the wall is undoubtedly
rejected.
The wall does not play a self-contained role, and the work
doesn’t adjust to the wall; the work becomes an active agent.
The common principle of installation should correspond
to the stages of artistic form’s development and artistic
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On The Museum Bureau
methods, and not be based on the chronological order in
which a given work was painted.
During the installation, the value of a given stage in art is
taken into consideration, along with the quality and skill of
the given work, not the status of the given master.
The work is hung on the wall with the interval necessary
to allow each work to be seen on its own.
In determining the height of the installation required
for a given work, the eye level of the viewer and the nature
of the work are strictly taken into account, that is, its
greater or lesser decorativeness or the diminutive size of
the picture.
The proximity of authors as well as works should correspond to the stages of development of artistic form, excluding any intuitive, taste-based approach in the combining of
works on the wall.
In placing [the picture] on the wall, the calmest and most
neutral position will be sought for the picture, without subjecting it to any special tasks of wall placement.
Report on the Factual Activites
of the Museum Bureau
The Museum Bureau was organized in 1918. In the first
months of its existence, its activity consisted of developing
theoretical questions of museum building and acquisition
through materials purchased for the organization of museums. Then it undertook the organization of an experimental
Museum of Painting Culture in Moscow, which at present is
located at 14 Volkhonka St., Apt. 10.
Local museums began to be organized beginning in
August 1919.
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Organizational principles: to present as fully as possible
the stages of development in artistic form, beginning with
Realism up to the latest achievements in art, without overburdening the museum by repeating artists and individual
stages in an artist’s work.
Furthermore, local conditions were taken into consideration, i.e. the presence of State [Art] Studios and the significance of a given place, and likewise independent initiative
from the localities.
During the 1919–20 period, the Museum Bureau
organized thirty museums in the following towns: Yelets,
Vitebsk, Samara, Astrakhan, Slobodskoy, Penza, Simbirsk,
Petrograd, Smolensk, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, Kazan,
Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Shuia, Ekaterinburg, Kosmodemiansk,
Moscow, Lugansk, Bakhmut, Kostroma, Tula, Ufa, Kishtym,
Tsaritsyn, Barnaul, Tobolsk, and Perm.
A total of 1,211 works have been distributed to the abovementioned museums, in the following types of art:
Painting—952
Sculpture and spatial forms—29
Prints and drawings—230
The average number of works per newly organized museum
is between thirty and forty-five, not including drawings.
At the present time, the Museum Bureau has sixteen
requests from localities to organize museums, of which six
are feasible.
Between 1918 and 1920 the acquisition staff of the
Museum Bureau acquired 1,907 works, which break down
into the following types of art:
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On The Museum Bureau
Paintings—1,415
Sculptures and spatial forms—65
Drawings—305
Prints—122
The indicated works were acquired from 384 painters and
printmakers, and twenty-nine sculptors.
The paintings acquired represent the following art
movements:
rightist—210 artists
centrist—236 artists
leftist—twenty-five artists
Sculptors:
rightist—ten artists
centrist—twelve artists
leftist—seven artists
November 29, 1920. Rodchenko
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The Museum of Painting
Culture at Rozhdestvenka
Street, 11
From Museums and Places of
Interest in Moscow
The Museum of Painting Culture
First published in 1926
Translated by Bela Shayevich
The central purpose of the museum is to demonstrate the
chief preoccupations of new Russian painting. With this
theoretical foundation, all exhibited materials can be
divided into two groups—volumetric and planar works—all
of which illustrate the different manners in which artists
posed questions and solved problems. The nature of this
division means that the same artists sometimes fall into
both categories (Mashkov, Malevich, Popova). Thus, we are
not in the least obliged to observe a logical progression in
the further development of our collection because each category can exist in relative isolation from the other. In this
way, while Suprematism (see room F) is the logical consequence of Cubism (see room C), it has no points of intersection with the two-dimensional artists group. The museum is
distinguished by its intent to resemble a laboratory. Here,
artifacts are not self-sufficient; they are seen as illustrations
for the tasks set out by the museum. The museum also has
an analytic painting bureau, whose work is exhibited in the
permanent collection.
Room A
The presentation of major contemporary collectives begins
with the Jack of Diamonds group, who are very influenced
by French art. Mashkov, influenced by Matisse, reinterprets
the French painter’s principles. Despite the ornateness of his
paintings, the richness of their colors, and clarity of the color
relationships, two-dimensionality is not characteristic of
Mashkov’s art. His Two Women has volume, as does his most
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decorative object, Still Life with Fruit, which stops the viewer
in his tracks with the originality of its composition. The artist simplifies and partially deforms the object. Even more
volume can be found in the paintings of Konchalovsky and
Kuprin, the latter distinguishing himself with the restraint
of his color palette. In his spatial constructions (through
the alternation of volumes), which are taken from Cezanne,
Konchalovsky does not reject vibrant colors, often creating
paintings out of contrasting color relationships (Self-Portrait
and Landscape). His Portrait of Yakulov is stylized, painted in
restrained tones. It’s important to note that all of these artists are interested in purely formal tasks that allow them to
simplify and transform objects.
Room B
Konchalovsky, Rozhdestvensky, Falk, Osmerkin, and
Lentulov provide examples of another interpretation of
reality, with different technical and formal methods. They
not only transform the object by emphasizing its most characteristic features; they deform it completely. The object
is simplified, losing its individual characteristics. The artists demonstrate its main forms, representing volume with
geometricized planes. Through the shifts in the planes, the
viewer is able to see the composition sequentially, that is, in
time. Paintings that do this include Rozhdestvensky’s Urban
Landscape, as well as Lentulov’s Psychological Portrait. The
vibrant color palette and rich transitions in Rozhdestvensky
and Lentulov’s works speak of their liberated approach to
representing objects using methods not yet seen in the works
of French Cubists. It bears mentioning Konchalovsky’s Still
Life, in which we also see shifted planes. Osmerkin’s Portrait
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of a Woman is unique in its compositional tasks and distinguished by the interplay of warm and cold tones with a
dynamically resolved background. We should also touch on
Falk’s monumental portraits, including Portrait of a Woman
in Red, whose conception is reminiscent of Cezanne’s Portrait
of a Lady in Blue, but marked with greater dynamism.
Room C
Further development of the principles put forth by the artists
above can be found in Malevich’s Harvesters and Popova’s
Portrait of a Woman, where the object is deformed, simplified, but has not lost its organic unity. The latter is completely
lost in the works of Rozanova, Popova, Ekster, and Malevich
in his “Cubism.” The object is broken down into geometric
planes and the juxtaposition of these planes creates the spatial construction of the composition. The artist leaves the
world of reality behind; his task is shaped by purely formal
pursuits. In order to broadly demonstrate spatial relationships, the artist introduces a graphic element—for Popova,
it’s letters or cut-outs from a newspaper in Ekster’s work, the
latter also doing this for texture. These artists are close to the
Cubist group whose main principles (spatial constructions
through the juxtaposition of geometric planes and lines)
were first advanced by Picasso and Braque in France.
Room D
The next three rooms contain artists from the so-called “planar group.” This term is provisional, because the works of
Shevchenko and Goncharova are not planar. In this group
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(excluding the Nonobjectivists) we will see a tendency
toward ornamentality.
The works of Pavel Kuznetsov, which maintain a single
color scheme (blue and green tones), are distinguished by
the sparseness of their composition and the unity of the
rhythm of movement. Their pictorial simplicity represents a
stylized version of reality. We find another manner of stylization in the work of Goncharova. In her Bathing the Horses, we
see much simplification, only the most important forms set
off by lines, but with this typical scene from folk life, the artist is also borrowing from folk art (the lubok). The forms are
simple and convincing, the relationships are vivid and clear.
Room E
The works of Goncharova, Larionov, Shevchenko, and Tatlin
exhibit a liberated sense of perception in how the artists
reconfigure impressions of the world. Each has a dramatically expressed individuality. Thus Larionov’s Chansonette
and The Soldier are distinguished by their marked crudeness
of form and dull colors. His painting is similar to poster art
in its simplicity and the certitude of its effect. We will also
note Tatlin’s Fishmonger, a painting with a light-brown color
palette. The artist does not create deep space; following from
the composition, he freely places the objects over the surface
of the canvas.
Room F
In this room, we find the representatives of radical leftist
movements. Shternberg’s works demonstrate a particular
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interest in the material, which he characterizes with emphatic
realism. The introduction of foreign materials is related to
the artist’s interest in textures. We note his Still Life with a
Pastry and Still Life with a Glass.
We find a total rupture with realistic representation in the
works of the Suprematists: Malevich, Rozanova, Klyun, and
Rodchenko. These artists draw the logical conclusion from
the principles laid out in their Cubist works (see Room C).
If in those paintings the artists’ spatial explorations concerned the object translated into geometric planes, here
they reject objectivity entirely and operate using solely line,
color, and plane. Their paintings are experimental studies
of color, the surface of the canvas, and the construction of
space through the juxtaposition of geometric planes of varying colors. The main task is studying the movement of planes
and their interrelations.
Alongside the purely rational quests of the Suprematists,
Kandinsky’s non-objective paintings appeal to the emotional side of the viewer, forcing him to sympathize with the
artist’s feelings. The expressiveness in Kandinsky’s paintings is achieved through the tension of the color combinations and the dynamism of his line. Each color is intended
to inspire a particular feeling in the viewer, which mutates
in accordance with the effect of variously shaped and interrelated dabs of paint.
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III
The Materialistic Museum
Lenin’s Attitude
Toward Museums
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Lenin's Attitude Toward Museums
First published in 1931
Translated by Ian Dreiblatt
Vladimir Ilyich was no lover of museums. Granted, those
museums we had occasion to visit abroad were primarily of
historical interest, selected according to a spirit quite foreign to historical materialism and devoid of vibrant Marxist
thought. We were unable to visit technical museums, for
example, or those reflecting the history of manufacture and
the like. Ilyich would immediately grow tired of casting indifferent glances upon innumerable suits of heraldic armor.
In London once, he and I went to the Kensington
Museum, and I remember how he was pleased by a particular
vitrine displaying the parallel development of embryos in an
egg, a monkey embryo alongside a human one. He enjoyed
as well an exhibit displaying the skulls of a monkey, a prehistoric man, and a modern one. Ilyich belonged to a generation educated when the teaching of biology was prohibited in
elementary and secondary schools, a generation immersed
in the writings of Pisarev that took in all the revolutionary
developments in biology, in evolutionary theory. It was a matter by which he could not but have been fascinated. When I
visited the Museum of Natural History at Sverdlov University
organized by Comrade Zavadovsky and his team, I thought
how Ilyich would have welcomed the construction of such
museums on kolkhozes and in houses of socialist culture.
He would as well have welcomed the construction of
museums of revolution. In Paris an exhibition of the revolution of 1848 was once mounted. The exhibition was a paragon of modesty, arranged in two modest rooms. As I recall,
it was not discussed in the papers; when we visited, there
were but two workers attending to it. There were no exhibition guides. Yet the exhibition had been mounted with the
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greatest of care and deliberation. And Ilyich became transfixed by it. Every detail fascinated him utterly. The exhibition
became, for him, a piece of the living struggle.
There is another conversation with Ilyich that I remember. A question had arisen concerning the construction in
factories of polytechnic exhibitions. This was the enterprise
of a certain Latvian tour guide. He had even attempted to
construct such an exhibition in a factory in Kolomna. I at
the time was completely consumed with the work of envisioning an exhibition of factory museums, contemplated
in connection with the propaganda around production of
which Ilyich so approved. The plan was this: to display in an
exhibition the work of the factory, to show what departments
it housed, what was done in each department, and how the
product changed as it moved from department to department. In this way we would have provided a complete picture
of the working of the factory. It would be necessary too to
show the sources of raw materials, those places where they
were extracted for delivery to the factory. Thereafter, it would
likewise be necessary to show where the factory’s equipment
was fabricated, where and how manufactured goods flowed.
It was a time when Ilyich was reiterating with special vigor
the need to broaden the political outlook of the proletarian masses. It was shortly after the Eighth Party Congress,
when Ilyich was particularly troubled over the question of a
unified economic plan, thinking through how he might pull
the proletarian masses into working over it, and he wanted
propaganda around production to be expanded in order to
develop the mental outlook of workers. I remember with
what close attention Ilyich listened to what I had to say about
polytechnic museums in factories.
That is the little I can recall of how Lenin regarded
museum work.
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Dialectical Materialism
and the Construction of
the Museum
Ivan Luppol
Dialectical Materialism
First published in 1931
Translated by Natasha Randall and
Niko Japaridze
Comrades! My introductory report initiates a series of
reports, united by one theme: the method of dialectical materialism and the construction of the museum. If the theme
of dialectical materialism, as applied to the construction of
Soviet museums, does not seem novel in terms of recognizing its relevance and great significance, the problem of the
actual application of the method of dialectical materialism to
museum building as a whole is undoubtedly a new challenge,
despite all of our conversations on this topic for the last two
or three years. There is no doubt that this problem is difficult,
and indeed more difficult than many of us think. After all, the
matter is not one of words. Words on the subject of applying
the method of dialectical materialism to museum work have
been uttered, and perhaps rather a lot of them. The point is,
of course, to rebuild the very foundations of Soviet museums,
based on the correct understanding and application of the
method of dialectical materialism.
On the other hand, while not denying the fact that this
task is both new and difficult, we must recognize that only by
solving this problem can we successfully move forward in the
construction of museums. If we do not yet possess a perfect
method of dialectical materialism in its application to museums, in any case, we do already have the method itself, and
the question therefore is how one can apply it to this rather
complex area of our work.
To this end, we have made, no doubt, only the first steps,
and would like to acknowledge the First All-Russian Museum
Congress discussion of this problem as a significant milestone on our path and the path of museum building.
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I think we should start by stating the fact that at present
none of the experiences thus far in the construction of museums can be endorsed as well-defined and fully acceptable in
methodological terms. We have no one to whom we can give
the patent for consistent Marxism in museum affairs. Such
canonization, such dogmatization would now be very dangerous. I would like it if all co-rapporteurs would respect this
point, because though we all try to apply the most consistent
method of dialectical materialism to one type of museum
or another, we still have an ultimate goal that has not been
achieved. Undoubtedly, we have some differences on certain
issues. In order to avoid these differences in the future, we
should discuss them in full detail here, at our first museum
congress. We must leave here with a clear idea. We must
come to terms and exhaust all of our doubts and questions
like comrades.
First of all, we must categorically emphasize that there is
not and cannot be any discrepancy between, on the one hand,
Comrade Epstein’s opening speech, with its sharp political
content, and the political greetings that were uttered here,
and on the other, the content of those reports that we shall
be hearing forthwith. It would be quite wrong to present any
matter, after the political nature of the greetings and opening
speech given by Comrade Epstein, by moving on to something
philosophical or methodological. For us, there is not and cannot be any discrepancy between politics and our theory, our
methodology. We affirm the unity of our politics, as conducted
by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and our theory,
our methodology, with which the party has been armed for its
historic “actions.” It would be extremely dangerous to allow
any discrepancy between the two sides of a single matter.
A few years ago, it’s true, in another region, such voices
were heard in relation to some individual workers or groups
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of workers: “They accepted Soviet construction, but they
were still neutral toward socialist construction.” This formulation is absolutely wrong, because Soviet construction
is socialist construction. Equally, we must not think that one
can put a museum into the service of socialist construction
while remaining neutral toward the requirement of creating a Marxist museum, because the Soviet museum is, or
at least should be, a Marxist-Leninist museum. We shall
accept only one philosophy: philosophy in the service of
revolution. We understand dialectical materialism as the
only scientific method, which is the basis of all the processes
of our revolution, of socialist construction, including its
museum component. On the contrary, it is impossible to
accept the slogan of the founding of a Marxist museum and
to be neutral toward socialist construction. This, in the best
case, would be “academic Marxism.” Academic Marxism,
to put it simply, is a sort of gibberish to us. For us, there is
no “academic Marxism.” For us, there is only Marxism in
revolutionary action.
We live and act in the era of proletarian revolution. We
have already entered the period of socialist reconstruction of the entire national economy. We are conducting the
industrialization of the nation, but for us the process of the
industrialization of the nation is not just a simple technical
process. The process of the industrialization of the nation
for us is at the same time the process of uprooting the roots
of capitalism, a process that creates new socialist relations of
production—those that characterize a qualitatively different
social formation, which is already socialist. We are carrying
out the collectivization of agriculture, but the process of the
collectivization of agriculture is not only a technical process, it is an equally profound sociopolitical process. With
complete collectivization as our foundation, we eliminate
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the kulaks as a class, and in the process of completing collectivization we create new socialist relations of production.
This decisive offensive by the socialist sector provokes,
quite naturally, a furious resistance from the once-ruling
classes. Because of this, there is an extraordinary intensification of the class struggle. The remnants of the bourgeoisie
and the adjacent circles of the bourgeois technical intelligentsia have realized that the question of “who will overtake
whom?” has been placed in sharp focus and posed for the
last time. Therefore, the current forms of class resistance and
new forms of class struggle are obvious, and are only possible
in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
If, immediately after October 1917, we experienced sabotage from some quarters of the technical intelligentsia, then,
of course, it characterized a certain worldview, a kind of theoretical attitude of those circles of the technical intelligentsia
that believed that they were the salt of the Earth and that if
they had refused to work, the workers would not have been
able to cope with the challenges facing the state. Sabotage is
represented undoubtedly in the shape of the class struggle
of the bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia, a shape that is generally unthinkable in the bourgeois state, in a capitalist society.
Now a new kind of class resistance and class struggle is manifesting itself: sabotage, with all its evolution from “the small
craftsman” to the systematic, to intervention, to the espionage services of the imperialist states. This is undoubtedly
one of the last and most peculiar forms of the class struggle
of the bourgeoisie, a form, flowing out of our greatest successes on the front of socialist construction, conceivable only
on this stretch of our victorious path.
But while this form of bourgeois class struggle is new, the
content is old: a desire to return to political and economic
domination at the hands of the deposed exploiting class, and
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to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, the
Soviet Union is not just a thorn in the side of capitalists, but
also a bright shining beacon for all working people, and a
socialist fatherland, an eternal threat to capitalist society.
Hence our policy objectives are clearly within the bounds
of one common task—the task of building a socialist society in the shortest historical period possible. This task of
the overall construction of a socialist society in the shortest
historical period synthesizes a whole series of slogans that
have been paraded before us in recent years, and which have
already been partially implemented: the slogan “to catch up
and overtake” advanced capitalist countries in technical and
economical terms, the slogan about the industrialization of
the country, the slogan about the Five-Year Plan in four years,
and so forth.
All these political problems can be resolved only under
certain conditions: only with a general mobilization of
resources and efforts to perform the substance of these
problems; only with a single direction of effort by all organizations, institutions, including cultural institutions, and
including museums; and only with a certain ideological
orientation. This ideological setting can only be MarxismLeninism, and the only revolutionary method can be dialectical materialism. This method is forged by the development of
a revolutionary workers’ movement, and under such a banner, under such an emblem, this method can form, evolve,
and develop Marxism further. This method was victorious in
the days of the October Revolution, and now it is the nervous
system of the entire socialist edifice.
Dialectical materialism represents at the same time both
the acceptance of explanations about natural and social
phenomena and also guidelines for action, guidelines for
the subordination of nature to man, and guidelines for the
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revolutionary transformation of society. We are guided by
dialectical materialism on a large scale and a small scale,
in socialist construction as a whole, and in the building of
museums in particular. Based on this method, we will reconstruct museums “externally,” in the sense of their network, in
the sense of types of museums, and “internally,” in the sense
of the exhibiting of material that characterizes and identifies
a particular museum.
Of course, one may ask, is it necessary to reconstruct altogether, to break down our old museums? Maybe they will
gradually grow into socialism, gradually become socialist
museums because everything around them is moving toward
socialism? This peculiar use of the familiar theory of “growing into socialism” is completely unacceptable to us. To hope
for a spontaneous kind of “socialist rebirth” of our museums—and this applies not only to the museum, but also to
a number of other senior-level academic institutions—is not
necessary. Such a view would be opportunistic. We should
not only contribute to the transformation of a museum into
another kind of museum; we need to remake our museums,
transform them from the old museums into new museums
built on the principles of dialectical materialism.
Whether we want to or not, we will certainly participate
in the class struggle that goes on in our museums, against the
backdrop of all of the political events. We have both reactionary attempts to return old museums to obsolete ways, and
the well-known conservative trends that seek to continue,
preserve, academicize museums into the form in which many
of them exist today. We have both active and passive resistance in the reorganization of our museums. Therefore, we
cannot avoid an active restructuring and perhaps even a surgical operation in this creative work. And all this work should
be performed on the basis of dialectical materialism.
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I do not flatter myself by thinking that in this opening
report I can, in any detailed way, present a solution to this
problem. I think that now we only need to agree on the correct underpinning, on the foundation, on the guidelines, and
on certain starting points in the reworking of our museums.
There is but one reality, and this reality is material.
Dialectical materialism represents a thoroughly consistent
monistic concept. But the monism of dialectical materialism
is not vulgar. It is not a metaphysical, one-sided materialism.
Reality is material, but it may not always be perceptible, tangible, or visible to the eye.
We distinguish between being and thought, just as we
distinguish between the objects of ideas and our ideas about
these objects. But to confine ourselves to the observation
that we distinguish between being and thought, between
abstraction and thought, would be extremely inadequate,
because depending on how you resolve the problem of the
relationship between being and thought, the result can be
a completely different perspectival positioning. If we say
that being is thought, we have a clearly expressed classical
idealism. This would be the point of view of the identification of being with thought, and, moreover, the identification
under the symbol and under the leadership of thought—
this would be idealism. If we say that thought is being, we
will have undoubtedly a materialistic point of view; however, in such a case we obtain a one-sided vulgar metaphysical position that entirely discards the distinction between
being and thought. Meanwhile, in fact, being is not thought
and thought is not being, but at the same time thought is
not some other independent substance, because a subject
thinks in the particular form of its movement, at a particular
stage of its development. Thus, we affirm the unity of being
and thought (rather than seeing them as identical, whether
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idealistic or vulgar materialist), the dialectical unity of
material reality.
Material objects are interconnected in certain respects,
and this relationship between material objects is material,
but it is not objective. Take the production relationship in a
capitalist society between capitalists and workers. This is a
material relationship, but it is impossible to grasp directly, in
any visual representation. We cannot perceive this relationship without theory, without analysis.
The differences between material objects in various
material relations bring great difficulties to the work of our
museums. After all, our museums are collections of material objects, things, and yet we have to show not only these
objects, not only these things, but also the relationships
between these objects and things. But these relations are
very complex, just as the relationships between those objects
that we refer to as human beings.
Movement is characteristic of material reality, and it is
in this motion, in this universal category of material reality, that we find the clue to all the variety of phenomena we
see. Various forms and motions of matter cause different
types, different categories, different complexes of phenomena. They cause different sets of phenomena: physicalchemical, biological, social. This is also a difficulty in the
work of museums.
If we want to build a museum in accordance with the provisions of dialectical materialism, the museum, as a collection of items, must at the same time show the movement of
these items, and all the sets of their phenomena. Of course,
it would be a screaming vulgarization to think that if we
make our individual exhibitions move themselves, we will
reveal them as a specific category of motion characteristic
of material existence. The discussion here is not about the
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mechanical movement of individual exhibitions, but about
the motion of the historic, which is undoubtedly much more
difficult to reveal in museum exhibitions.
So, it is the relationship between material objects and
various forms of material motion that we should establish
as the foundation of museum building. This last statement
offers an idea of, firstly, how to construct the “external,” that
is, the network of museums, and also how to build the “internal,” that is, the structure of each individual museum.
Turning to the problem of the network of museums in
terms of a possible plan, we encounter the general question
of the classification of museums. If material reality is one, and
if this unity is a tangible unity, if all objects and phenomena
are related, fused together, can we build separate branches
of museums, with each branch involved in the identification
of only certain aspects of reality, in isolation from other, adjacent aspects? The first task of science—the first but not the
ultimate—is to come to know objects, to reflect on them, and
to show items accordingly in the use of the museum. If this
is the first task of the museum, then should there be various
types of museums, or should there be only one, so to speak,
single, general, comprehensive museum? I think any dogmatism here, any rigid decree-making, would be dangerous—
as it would be evidence of a metaphysical point of view.
The answer to this general question should be as follows: in
addition to comprehensive museums, separate museums—
museums dedicated to individual branches of material
reality—can, must, and should have the right to exist.
Material reality is one, but in its depths, we distinguish,
as I have already said, physical-chemical phenomena, biological phenomena, and social phenomena arising due to the
various forms of motion of a single material. And we have to
distinguish between these groups of phenomena if we want
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to know reality. After all, within the same social reality, in
the process of coming to know it, we use analysis, although
we are mindful of the fact that in reality all of these different
aspects of social formation exist within a concrete unity.
We distinguish between the economy—the forces of
production and industrial relations—as basis, as a certain
foundation for society; we distinguish between the political
superstructure and a number of ideological superstructures,
such as religion, art, and so forth. Therefore, we do not sin
against the objective materialistic point of view if we say that
various types of museums accord with the different aspects,
elements, regions, and sectors of reality, ever mindful that
in reality all these aspects exist in a fused form, in a specific
unity. Therefore, the comprehensive museum will be only
one of the possible variants, one of the types of museums. In
practical terms, we are building, for example, regional museums as comprehensive museums.
The problem of the system, the problem of the classification of museums, is not an idle question. If anyone thinks
otherwise, he or she should think that the problem of the
classification of the sciences, the problem of the classification
of branches of knowledge, is also an idle question. We know,
however, that for hundreds of thousands of years, people
have considered this latter problem. Famous subjective classifications of the sciences rest upon pseudoscientific notions
of the faculties of the soul. Suffice it to recall the classification
of Francis Bacon, who derived it from three faculties of the
mind, dogmatically postulated thus: firstly, the imagination,
and from it, the arts; secondly, memory, and from it, history;
and thirdly, reason, and from it, philosophy. However, further theoretical developments rejected this subjective, idealistic point of view on the question of the classification of
the sciences. Also, there was a moment in history when there
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was an objective attempt to construct a system of sciences, an
objective-formal system—for example, Comte’s postulation
of the simple to the complex and the general to the particular, or in Spencer, from the abstract to the concrete.
There are some analogous formal taxonomies in museums, for example, in the old divisions (which in some cases
persist to this day) between scientific, educational, and political museums. A scientific museum, you see, is not an instructive museum, but a museum just for scientists; political and
educational museums are just that—museums without science, for the masses, like the old tea temperance societies.
In order to approach this question correctly, we must
start from the object itself. This will be the only scientific,
materialistic position to take. And here a question arises,
over which we must pause, because some of our comrades in
museums follow the path of least resistance. Is a materialistic
point of view needed to resolve the problem of classifying
museums? Everyone agrees that it is. Fine. But what is collected in a museum? Things. So let’s classify the museum,
let’s build a system of museums, a museum network, starting from the object, from the material substance that is collected in museums. Such is often our understanding, and
also the understanding of the West, when it comes to the
requirement of constructing a museum network according
to content. And what is the result? Allow me briefly to tell you
about one such attempt in America (as printed in one leading European magazine dedicated to the museum business)
relating to 1929, about the experience of classification and
types of museums.
The requirement is put forward of the necessity of the
classification of museums according to their content. In
such a general formulation, this seems materialist and
it may be accepted. Hence, this system: art museums,
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historical museums, science museums. These are the main
groups, followed by a whole series of sub-units. However, if
you think about it, it is easy to see that we have here a pseudoscientific, pseudo-materialistic foundation for the building of a museum system. In practice, it turns out that it is
a very minor refurbishing of the subjective classification of
Bacon, which dates back to the early seventeenth century. A
museum of art, the arts—this refers to mental capacity, which
at that time was called a cultural objection; the museum of
history, history itself, is something that, at the time, belonged
to memory. For history, it is alleged, especially needs memory; the science museum is what before, in the seventeenth
century, referred to reasoning, because in science we must
reason. Such is the last word of the bourgeois classification
of the museum in the West.
We have the same thing when the classification of museums is delivered not according to its content but according to
its form. We, in Moscow, undertook a project not so long ago
to divide art museums according to form: sculpture, painting, drawing. Thus, a single area of the fine arts was artificially
torn. In implementing such a system, we would have a kind
of “materialism” not from the word “matter” but from the
word “material,” that is, it is not materialism, but thing-ism
or technolog-ism in the classification of art museums. It goes
without saying that in this example I’m referring to art/ideological museums, rather than art/industrial museums. In the
latter, a division of material is necessary—for example, the
former Stieglitz Museum in Leningrad, with its focus on textiles, ceramics, wood, and metal. From the aforementioned
it is clear that the problem of the classification of museums
is not an idle theoretical question, but a question that is also
practical, because if we accept a certain system, we will need
to implement it practically.
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So, I repeat, in orienting itself, it would seem, with the
material element, i.e. with those exhibits that are in its collection, a museum thinks that it is expressing a materialistic
point of view. In fact, this doesn’t result in dialectical materialism but in a vulgar materialist point of view. You must not
orient yourself using the subjective faculties of the mind or
some other formal designations, but rather using the object
itself, from the object that is perceived and recognized by
knowledge, and then revealed in the specific language of
the museum. Therefore, the classification of museums can
only be based on the same point of view from which we proceed with the classification of the sciences and the objects
of reality or, in more abstract terms, according to the forms
of matter in motion.
With these underlying principles, if only marked as
an outline, we will have a group of natural science museums, but if we take the separate sciences, then we will have
a group of special museums, such as ones for mechanics,
physics, chemistry, and biology, and these museums will
speak in their own museum language about the physical form of the motion of matter, the chemical form of the
motion of matter, the biological form, and so on. Then we
will have a group of technical and economic museums that
will display the forces of production and industrial relations
of society, economy, and economic construction; next, a
group of sociohistorical museums where we should include
ethnology and identify problems of social formations in all
their aspects, the history of forms of class struggle, the history of the revolutionary movement, and so on. Next we will
confront the group of “superstructure” museums, where
we include art, the antireligious, the superstructure-comprehensive types. Such is a general underpinning of starting points for building the museum network, but not in
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the sense of the geographical-political or the geographical
distribution of them, but in terms of the basis for separate
types of museums. This methodological underpinning, of
course, requires further elaboration and development.
A single dialectical materialist point of view must penetrate all the inner content of the museum. There must be
specified starting points and supporting principles only in
order to determine certain limits beyond which would mean
a departure from dialectical materialism. First, an initial,
decisive, crushing blow should be directed toward idealism,
which veils itself within the museum, and sometimes appears
in the form of dualism and dualistic eclecticism. We can say
that in its pure form we no longer have such museums, but
still the danger of dualism and the throwback of idealism is
extremely strong, and I do not know if you can say that we are
freed from the remnants of all of these “virtues” and qualities
in our museums. The material of the museum cannot give
any guarantees in this regard.
A technical museum may be equipped nicely and located
in a new, special building with some wonderful exhibitions,
but the ideological orientation may be wrong and unacceptable. Let me give an example or two. In Leipzig, in the
summer of 1930, though it was not in the museum but at an
exhibition of the fur and hunting industries, the latest technical achievements were shown, and they were extremely
interesting, valuable museum exhibitions that we urgently
needed. And right there, in the German Pavilion, on an entire
wall, hung a gigantic panel, artistically hung and somehow dominating all the other exhibits; on this panel were
depicted Adam and Eve, whom an angel, on the orders of
God, if I am not mistaken, expels from paradise. Under the
picture, an inscription corresponding to the scene: “The Lord
God made Adam and Eve fur garments and clothed them”
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Dialectical Materialism
(Bible, Genesis, Ch. 1, 21).1 It is clear that, as it were, this
exhibition in a technical respect was amazingly executed,
but no matter how beautiful the individual exhibits, all of its
“philosophy,” its whole methodological and ideological attitude, its orientation to the Christian religion, the Bible, and
from the Bible deducing the origin and role of fur garments,
was worth nothing to us and is, for us, totally unacceptable.
In the same year in Dresden, at an exhibition of hygiene
in the recently opened new building of the Museum of
Hygiene, a lot of extraordinarily winning and interestingly
arranged exhibits were presented. Along with this, in the
first introductory hall hung a poster (or rather, a mural on
the wall) in which a hypothesis of the universe was given.
First of all, a quote, again from the Book of Genesis, was
given, expressing the Bible’s account of the creation of
the world. Then Aristotle was represented, and finally, the
Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the origin of the world was
given. Here, they seem to say, all these are equal, so choose
as you like. And there, on the same wall, was a poster—in
the bourgeois state, as you see, they do not shrink from
extensive exhibition, forcibly giving a solution to the riddle
of life. Unfortunately, I have no records with which to bring
you the text literally, but it went something like this: there
are two points of view, the “mechanistic,” that is, in the
current context, an overall materialistic point of view, and
the vitalistic point of view—choose what you want: both
are equally valid. At best, we have here a revival of what
was, in a sense, progressive in the Middle Ages: a revival
of the doctrine of double truth, which now can be called a
reactionary doctrine.
1. An inexact quotation and inexact reference. In the original:
“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of
skins, and clothed them” (Gen: 3:21). —Ed. [1931]
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I will not say, of course, that in our museums we often
encounter such installations in such an obvious form. But I
think that each museum worker, digging in his memory, can
recall a few examples that follow along the same lines.
I turn to the question of what practical methods we need
to build a museum on the basis of dialectical materialism.
I am sure that every museum worker can recall examples
of a time when, with such a purpose, the center of gravity
tended toward labeling. It was believed that nothing else
was as important as the Marxist explanation in the form of a
label—this was everything or almost everything. I agree that
the editing of labels, the text of the inscriptions, should be
approached very carefully and cautiously. More consistent
Marxist formulations need, of course, to be provided. But
we must bear in mind that, although labeling is a necessary
element of our museums and must be organically linked with
the exhibition, not just externally attached to it, it is all the
same a secondary museum resource, and not the specific
language of the museum. Therefore, to seek refuge from a
failed anti-materialist exhibition in “decent” Marxist labeling would be completely wrong.
One could say that the great task lies with the museum
guide. We now introduce a new workforce for that purpose.
Needless to say, the guide should give the Marxist interpretation of everything that is available in the museum. Again,
it is undoubtedly true that a bad guide can ruin a good
exhibition, but we must bear in mind that a good guide can
do little with a poor exhibition. It will disturb him, but he
cannot change it. The guide, of course, is not an outsider to
our museum. There is no doubt that he must be organically
linked to it. Still, even a very lively story from a guide—this
is not museum-specific language, and when we talk about a
Marxist exhibition in a museum, the presence of a wonderful
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Marxist guide does not eliminate the problem of the construction of a relevant exhibition. The same is true for brochures, leaflets, and so forth.
For the museum, the most significant part is the exhibition, as it is its language, its specificum. The exhibition
cannot be dissolved in descriptions and explanatory text,
which, although necessary, cannot veil and cover the failings of the exhibition. Just as if 60–70 percent of a film was
taken up only by names, descriptions, and explanatory text,
we undoubtedly would have said that such a composition of
film does not attain its goal and target, and that because of
this, it is not worthy of making an unnecessary cinematic
fuss over it.
*
*
*
I did not speak without some irony when I said that the
museum was a collection of things. In fact, the museum should
show relationships through things. Of course, the museum
ostensibly, at first sight, is a collection of things arranged in a
certain order. However, our goal is that the museum should
not even be a system of things, a system in the true classical
sense of the word, that is, made up of many parts of a whole.
The museum should rather provide a certain system of ideas,
and here again lies the difficulty for the museum.
A museum conjures particular visual representations, acting on our external physical senses. This is inevitable and this
is not bad. In this, if you will, there is merit and the positive
aspect of the museum as an educational and cultural institution. But with such visual representations, the museum
should conjure also a particular formation of concepts.
It should inspire a particular understanding, a particular
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worldview, so to speak, a historical and political concept.
How is this done? I said that the museum conjures particular
visual representations, and I also said that this is not bad,
because visual representations are bright and direct; indeed,
they are brighter than abstract concepts. Such representations are more widely accessible to our as yet underqualified
masses. However, the matter is not just one of visual representation. Here you can make a certain analogy between the
artistic and the photographic portrait. Photography, maybe,
can be extremely accurate in transmitting all the details of its
object, but at the same time it will be, so to speak, an exterior
portrait, it will be the transfer of some external marks and the
smallest details. If we have a truly artistic portrait made—we
can talk about a single-subject portrait or a group portrait—
then we see the transfer, so to speak, of interior moments of
essence. We see how an artistic portrait, while not reproducing in minute detail, penetrates deeper, in a sense, and gives
more toward the understanding of its object.
*
*
*
I have said that we may have museums of different types and
various branches, but they should all be dialectical materialist museums.
The task of subsequent reports includes giving concrete
expression to this general position. As an example, we can
say that the sociohistorical museum should reveal the whole
arsenal of categories of historical materialism, and not in
their abstract isolation, but in their concrete unity. They
should identify socioeconomic formations and their productive forces in their technical aspects, as well as referring to
the most revolutionary productive force—the human—and
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Dialectical Materialism
indeed, man is not abstract but concrete. Likewise museums
should identify industrial relations, that is, the relationships
among classes: they must show the class struggle, its forms,
including those forms of class struggle such as the proletarian revolution; the changes of some forms of class struggle
into other forms; and history, understood as the history of
the struggle of classes. These same categories in a particular
museum’s language should be presented not only in sociohistorical museums, but also in technical, economic, art, and
antireligious museums. Such a specificity of separate types of
museums corresponds to the separate aspects of reality that
Marxism does not deny.
We should not be limited to giving an explanation of the
patterns of natural and social phenomena in the material
and media of a museum, and to helping to comprehend certain aspects of reality. Though the primary task of science is
to know, and the primary task of the museum is fundamentally to show, the business of knowing and displaying are not
exclusive. Just like science, the museum has a second task, in
unity with the primary, composed of, so to speak, the soul of
the museum.
Dialectical materialism teaches partisanship, teaches on
the basis of knowing how to determine, from a revolutionary point of view, everything that is for or against this or that
phenomenon. And museums should, with all their exhibitions, not only objectively reflect the exchange of phenomena or that same class struggle, but they must at the same
time guide visitors to an evaluation. This requirement is part
of the arsenal of dialectical materialism. The museum visitor
should be “political” if he looks at the exhibition carefully,
“political” in the sense in which Lenin spoke about it philosophically, that is, he must speak either for it or against. With
regard to social phenomena, for example, it is necessary that
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our museum be built so that the visitor speaks against when
different forms and aspects of capitalist society are demonstrated, and for when certain aspects and processes of socialist construction are shown in the museum.
In delivering their specific media of visual representation
that are more powerful and accessible than abstract concepts
and abstract language, museums should bring us close to the
action, should summon in us the will of the toiling masses on
the basis of dialectical materialism, on the basis of the theory
of revolutionary communism. Our theory—it is not dogma,
but a guide to action, a guide to revolutionary action. The
requirement that the museum on the basis of knowledge not
only reveals and shows, but also brings us close to the action,
organizing a person’s will to revolutionary action—these
are the challenges facing us, and they require the method of
dialectical materialism. A museum constructed in this way
will thus give workers a new additional jolt in their struggle
against capitalism, for communist society, and, at the same,
the museum, built in such a way, in its own specific form, is
itself included in this fight for communist society.
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Marxist Exhibition Methods
for Natural Science Museums
Boris Zavadovsky
Marxist Exhibition Methods
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasiya Osipova
A
1. Marxism is a monistic worldview that encompasses
all aspects and phenomena of the world around us.
It is within its goals, therefore, to consider the entire
sum of facts and conclusions of the natural sciences
and technology. The revolutionary transformation
and socialist reconstruction of the Land of Soviets,
reflective of the revolutionary praxis of Marxist
theory, inevitably demands a reconsideration and
reevaluation of the entire structure and organizational principles of the museums of our Union.
2. A key point in the transformation of the entire
inner structure of natural science museums is the
reorganization of rigidly outdated prerevolutionary museum exhibitions (which have not been
completely eradicated from the majority of Soviet
museums) according to Marxist methods of exhibition. These methods will allow us to restore a connection between museums and contemporary life,
and will grant the museum its proper place as an
active weapon of militant Marxism on the field of
theoretical struggle, as well as in the praxis of socialist construction.
3. These are the main traits that characterize the metaphysical profile and the structure of a prerevolutionary museum:
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Boris Zavadovsky
The inner content of prerevolutionary museums was characterized by:
1) The mechanical mix of a cabinet of curiosities with an attempt at the formal and systematic collection of disparate items treated
as “things in themselves,” severed from their
inner relation with other similar museum
items and the context in which they were
found naturally.
2) Combining the tactics of the dogmatic assertion of certain ideas (which the exhibition
in question takes as its conscious or unconscious foundation) with the “democratic
liberalism” that allows interpretation of displayed facts in a materialist, as well as idealist, sense.
3) Abstracting displayed items from their historical context, class, and social content, as
well as from the productive relations that
made them and which they reflect.
4) The appearance of political neutrality that
conceals the clear class-character of such
exhibitions and the service that they render to bourgeois capitalist society. This is
expressed in (a) a prevailing naked empiricism and formulaic technical presentation of
industrial themes, and in careful avoidance
of general topics and problems of the natural sciences as something that clearly reinforces a revolutionary materialist worldview
of the working masses; (b) the rather crafty
use of the “language of things,” displayed in
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Marxist Exhibition Methods
a museum to inspire subservient, militaristic, and chauvinistic feelings in its visitors.
Prerevolutionary museum exhibiting methods were characterized by:
1) The stagnancy of the exhibition, expressed
in the lifelessness and immobility of each
separate object, as well as in the sanctity of
the object’s placement, calibrated for nothing “less than eternity.”
2) Solipsistic aristocratism, the self-isolation
of the museum exhibition from the viewer,
unwillingness to make exhibitions understandable to the mass visitor.
3) Lack of coordination between the museum
and other parallel pedagogical approaches
and methods (publications, lectures, guided
tours).
4) The monotone systematic continuity of the
placement of material, meant to reflect the
lifeless and immobile character of nature, as
understood by a museum worker.
4. Against all this Marxist exhibition principles require:
1) The unity and coherence of the museum
exhibition’s content, doing away with the
isolation of objects from each other. The
items in Marxist museums are not to be
approached as metaphysical “things in
themselves.” Rather, they are significant
to the extent that their individual content
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Boris Zavadovsky
reveals the workings of the universal laws of
nature. The principles and responsibilities of
the thematic placement of museum materials develop in correspondence with this.
2) The unambiguous reflection and assertion of
a consistent dialectical-material worldview
that is founded in the natural sciences and
that corresponds to an understanding of the
objectively existing world.
3) To counter the analytical dissection of a phenomenon into separate parts and spheres
that correspond to the formal separation of
sciences into discrete disciplines (anatomy,
zoology, botany, and so on), we need a complex, cross-disciplinary, and synthetic grasp
of any given subject.
4) Contrary to the static historicism of prerevolutionary museums, all the efforts of which
were directed toward the past and saw monumentalizing this past as their main goal,
Marxist exhibition demands true historicism in its scientific dialectical understanding. For a Marxist exhibition, the history of
an object is a necessary condition for understanding its present and for predicting its
future development. Out of this develops an
understanding of a museum not as an archival collection of antiques, but as a living and
vibrant organism that is connected in multiple ways with contemporary everyday life
and that is oriented toward the future. Such
a museum guides its visitors toward new
struggles and victories, instead of doggedly
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Marxist Exhibition Methods
following the tail of history, trying to monumentalize its conquests.
5) Contrary to the static character of a prerevolutionary museum, we demand dynamism
via the following means:
(1) Disrupting the dead peace of the
museum, this “temple of science,”
by introducing live things (plants
and animals), which would allow
us to study the laws of nature in
their dynamism, in the very process
of living.
(2) Maximal flexibility of the thematic
design of a museum, which would
allow us to rearrange its exhibition
space in response to changes in the
tempo of life and the demands of
socialist construction, as well as of
the task of deepening the dialectical understanding of our surrounding reality.
6) Against the old museum’s dogmatism and
scholasticism we propose exhibiting not only
empirical facts and scientific achievements,
but also the methods by which these facts
were uncovered. We ask to make it the museum’s responsibility to fully reveal the methods and technologies of scientific research.
7) To counter self-centered artistocratism, we
will provide thorough and detailed explanatory accompanying texts that will be written
in clear language and be understandable to
a mass audience.
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Boris Zavadovsky
8) As part of destroying old museum traditions,
we demand maximal use of all available
technologies and materials brought from
outside the museum, necessary for rendering exhibitions more effective and enhancing their educational and pedagogical effect.
(Some possible auxiliary methods include:
organizing reading rooms inside a museum;
using posters, photographs, drawings, models, and other visual media.)
9) Against monotonous systematic display, we
propose to implement a principle of interrupted continuity by breaking the single
unified ideological and thematic direction
of a museum into a series of sections, each
of which would have its own clearly defined
theme or subtheme. The subdividing of the
major themes must reflect the logical structure of a phenomenon, to emphasize the crucial problems of the natural sciences and, at
the same time, to ensure maximal tactical
flexibility in the use of museum materials by
individual visitors and by tour groups.
10) Museum exhibitions must reveal the principal dialectical laws behind the process of
development: the law of the unity of opposites, negation of the negation, and the
transformation of quantity into quality.
11) To overcome the distance of the museum
from the praxis of real life, we demand its
politicization by all available means: bringing museum display methods out onto the
street and into workplaces, introducing
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Marxist Exhibition Methods
into museum practice the entire experience
of work initiatives that were born in the
struggle for socialist construction (methods
of shock-labor, social competition, and so
on; inclusion of current tasks and statistics
about the completion of the labor plan in a
museum exhibition).
12) Finally, to counter the apolitical and neutral
appearance of prerevolutionary museums,
we demand the clear articulation of the class
orientation of the meaning and content of
exhibited subjects, understanding that the
nature of class and the role of science are
among the most powerful weapons of the
proletariat in its struggle for liberation from
capitalism, as well as from the rule of nature
over man.
13) The presence of any of the above listed elements alone is of course insufficient for any
given exhibition to be considered a Marxist
one. What is needed is a combination of at
least several of them while observing the unity
of dynamic form and class content as well as
the general orientation of the museum.
B
As part of the reorganization of natural science museums
according to Marxist exhibition methods, museum workers
and planners face an obligation to include the exhibition
elements that most fully and vividly concretize main dialectical postulates.
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Boris Zavadovsky
1. We require that all museums observe the principle
of the unity of theory and praxis in the organization
of the exhibition space. Their task is not only to give
sufficient explanation of the theoretical foundations
behind displayed phenomena, but also to address
how they are used practically in the socialist reconstruction of our country and in the exploitation of its
productive forces.
2. However, such principles of the unity of form and
content in the museum, and of the rational organization of its thematic sections, require that we distinguish between two main types of museums: (a) those
focused on broader theoretical questions and that
address the subject of the practical and industrial use
of natural resources only tangentially and insofar as
they help to illustrate the theory; and (b) museums of
a primarily industrial orientation, which, nevertheless, address theoretical foundations behind this or
that particular technical problem. The first type of
museum is almost without precedent in the history
of prerevolutionary museums, both here and abroad.
This is not surprising, since the capitalist order was
not at all interested in broadening and deepening the
scientific and materialistic education of the masses.
While developing museums and museum sections
of this type, it is necessary to clearly identify and
give special attention to the issues that may serve as
keys for understanding dialectical principles. This
should be done despite the difficulties that may arise
when translating such principles into the format
of museum display. Among these crucial issues we
count the following:
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1) The history of the natural sciences and their
interaction with the development of productive resources, as well as class relations at
different stages of human society’s development. (To be represented in the Communist
Academy Museum of Natural History.);
2) The structure of matter and the principal
laws of physics and chemistry (not presented anywhere);
3) The history and structure of the universe
(cosmos) (some promise of addressing
this topic is given by the organization of
planetariums);
4) The dynamics and history of the Earth’s
core; its connection to and interaction with
the development of life on Earth;
5) The origins of life. Addressing this subject
should involve a dialectical analysis of the
characteristics of life as a special form of the
movement of matter. This includes the presentation of the correspondence between
living and dead matter and an analysis of
the lowest limit of life separating it from the
nonorganic nature. (This is not offered anywhere, but included in the program of the
State Biological Museum.)
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THE PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS
of Fine Art Museums: Joint Report
Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov
THE PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS of Fine Art Museums
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasia Skoybedo
In his opening remarks, Comrade Luppol quite correctly
focused his attention on permanent exhibitions, and on methods of presentation. The question of the exhibition is really
the fundamental one in terms of museum building—in it, as
if in a focal point, the whole of museum work is gathered. The
labor of this gathering is the starting point for any politicoenlightenment museum work, and essentially, the permanent
exhibition of a museum is the measure by which we can judge
its worldview and what it plans to tell its visiting masses.
All of us here already agree with the idea that museums
show not objects, but processes, and that the classification of
a museum, the specificity of a museum, is defined not by the
objects that are collected within it, but by those processes—
those objects that are not always material in the sense of
being palpable—that this museum reveals. That is why, when
speaking on the permanent exhibitions of fine art museums,
I have to occupy your time a little bit with a discussion of the
specificity of art. I will try to be succinct and speak concretely.
The theses of Comrade Milonov and Comrade Luppol
correctly state that one and the same thing or object can and
must be shown in different museums. Luppol is absolutely
right in saying that artistic material, the material of fine art,
must be used by all museums. We need to find out how any
kind of material can be used in a fine art museum.
What is art? By art we understand a defined, specific kind
of socially necessary human activity. Its own specificity as a
defined sphere of human life is based on the functions it fulfills—namely, revealing the psyche of various social classes in
pictorial form. The visuality of art is what drastically distinguishes it from other human ideologies.
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Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov
Of course, this does not mean that visual thinking is a special kind of thinking, as opposed to other types of thinking—
the theses that were read at the previous meeting on “scientific thinking” force us to make this correction. Otherwise
we would assume incorrect positions, like those of some
art historians, for example Pereverzev, who maintains that
visual thinking can flow through an individual artist independently of philosophy, politics, or religious life. We say
that the field of ideology is uniform, but the forms, methods,
practice, methods of understanding classes, class position,
and methods of self-affirmation and agitation among classes
can be completely different, and we need to find out the qualitative identity of art as a kind of human activity and visual
thinking that class ideology expresses in its own ways. The
particularities of this process and its visual demonstration
is the main purpose of fine art museums. This is easiest to
understand when you compare them to museums of a different kind, especially natural history and historical museums.
Art expresses and reflects reality, and the subjectivity of its
content is at the same time the objectivity of recording facts,
which is what needs to be shown in museums of the revolution through art. It is, first and foremost, art as a document,
as a portrait of reality, for art, as an emotional irritant, is the
strongest method of influence, and magnifies the revolutionary charge that the observer receives from nonartistic
material in this museum. In a historical museum, since the
full scope of a historical process should be shown there—i.e.
not only a socioeconomic or sociopolitical process, but also
a socio-ideological process—and since for a full picture and
full understanding of the historical process it is necessary to
understand all of its aspects and influences and the reverse
influence of the superstructure on the base—then the artistic
superstructure needs to be present in this museum. However,
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THE PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS of Fine Art Museums
there is a colossal difference between displaying art in a historical museum and displaying it in a fine art museum: in a
historical museum, the display of art, along with other ideologies, must demonstrate what is common in the different
forms, qualities, and methods of showing one and the same
thing. In an art museum, we need to reveal art in such a specificity as to show what differentiates this ideology from other
ideologies, i.e. to show the forms of this process—to show
not only how art reflects life, but how it reveals class content, to show its special, specific nature, its methodology of
organizing its own material, be it real material (stone, wood,
and so on) or the material of human psychic experience. This
task—to show the specificity of art, to show how the artistic
process happens, in what ways and with what methods this
particular class, in this particular stage of its development,
demonstrates, its own ideas of class in specific forms—is dictated by those tasks that stand before the fine art museum
in general. This task consists first\foremost in teaching the
proletariat to use art as its class weapon; and in order for the
proletariat to know how to use art as its class weapon in the
modern era, it is necessary for it to know what the weapon
was and how it was used by other classes that came before
it. Then, by mastering the preceding artistic culture, the fine
art museum must help the proletariat to facilitate the birth of
proletarian amateur and professional art. And finally, taking
into account the great emotional power of art’s influence,
we need to put forth a goal, a common goal for our time, a
common goal of constructing socialism and class struggle in
our country—i.e. the goal of influencing through art, as art is
the most effective means of influence, in an emotional sense.
Therefore, it is clear that the tasks that stand before art
museums are twofold. The long-term and ongoing task is the
task of the proletariat’s mastering of art as a class weapon,
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Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov
the task of the proletariat mastering the whole of the former culture. This is a long-term task that needs to be completed by art museums in their general construction. In
addition, there is a task that is not purely artistic but rather
sociopolitical, which is that art needs to be used in temporary exhibitions and expositions as a powerful emotional
weapon. If we are building a fine art museum according to
the specificity of art as a social process, as a special kind
of socially necessary human practice, as a special means of
demonstrating class ideology, then in our permanent collection we need to assume the main category common to
science and art. This category is the understanding of style,
style as unification, as the process of the unification of form
and substance, the unification of organizational principles
of creative work of one or another class at various stages of
its development. Here, it is not only class struggle that is
reflected in art. Art, in its process, is one way of demonstrating this class struggle. Art is not just a mirror, is not just
a reflection. In art, ideology finds its development, which
exists in various other forms. So the problem lies not only
in understanding how this or that style in its context, in its
forms, depended on various socioeconomic conditions, but
that the problem lies in understanding these socioeconomic
conditions, this political struggle of one or another epoch, as
a specific artistic process; to understand class struggle, taking place within art itself as a struggle of artistic ideologies,
if we want to show it as a struggle, as a change, as a dialectic
transformation of one style into another, in constant flux
and collision, in constant transformation into its own opposite, it is completely clear that it would be absurd for us to
think that separate museums can be built based on different
types of art—museums of architecture, sculpture, painting,
furniture, ceramics, and so forth.
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THE PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS of Fine Art Museums
We have to show the development of class-based visual
thinking. That is why the feature of complexity, i.e. the amalgamation of such different types of specialized arts, is for us
a deliberate postulation. The principle of division by nationality and the principle of identity should be subordinated to
the principle of showing the struggle of styles within a particular class struggle during various stages of the economic
development of society. It is completely clear that socioeconomic formations and class struggle happen under concrete
historical circumstances, and one or another historical formation or class struggle happens differently, depending on
concrete historical circumstances: we have one kind of capitalism in Russia and a completely different kind in England.
It would be absurd to blur governmental and national differences, but they should not obscure common characteristics
of equal economic stages, and even if there is a big difference
between the art of French and Russian capitalism, the two
have more in common than, say, the art of Russian capitalism and the art of Russian feudalism. We cannot deny identity, but we should abandon the old principle of grouping
paintings by painter, as is done in the hall of Rembrandt and
so on. It is ludicrous to think that a painter painting for forty
or fifty years reflects the ideology of only one class group
during those years. This practically never happens and it is
barely present in societies that are just emerging from feudalism, when the speed of life was completely different, and
later in his life the artist, in his evolution, goes through many
different styles.
Of course, we are not supposed to discover this in a painter’s biography, as it would be rather absurd, as a Marxist, to
talk about discovering something in a biography, but rather
from those socioeconomic shifts that happened during the
time when he was active, from which it is clear that the artist’s
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identity is also subjected to this principle of stylistic display.
We need to juxtapose this with socioeconomic processes
and economic struggle, but we can understand this life as
a particular life of art within its specific stylistic character,
and that is why we need to show not only the change in class
relations, not only how it is refracted in the subject matter,
theme, and treatment of this theme, but we need to show the
dialectic shift of art as a particular socioeconomic process,
and as one of the forms of human labor—in other words,
we need to provide the dialectic for the shift in the actual
kinds of art. We know that in feudal society—which has a
closed farmstead as its nucleus—where exchange is not yet
fully developed, we have different systems of art, which are
synthetic in their nature. Art is monumental, architecture is
the leading art form, painting exists only as wall decoration,
there is not independent sculpture, and sculpture is part of
the whole art complex—as it was in, let’s say Egypt, ancient
Greece, Europe from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries,
and so on. The further the process of trade and financial
relations develop, the more elements of capitalism appear,
and the more and more heterogeneous and differentiated
art becomes. Painting stands out independently first, then
sculpture stands out, which at first exists in the shape of monuments in squares. The forms of art become smaller: giant
frescoes disappear, and small easel paintings appear, etchings acquire more importance. Here, by showing the general
process of art development, we have to show this change in
forms of human labor, forms of art, the change in types of
art, to show whether it was synthetic and monumental or if
it was isolated and differentiated, and served the needs of
a bourgeois individual and his living room. In this way, as
our base, we have the complex permanent collection, and
then we arrange it according to artistic styles. By complex
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we mean, first of all, the general complex of art, and in no
way a complex of art and non-art. We have to draw attention
to this because such kinks have been quite common. One
such kink is the attempt to unify art and to dilute it, to show
so-called ideological art, i.e. painting and sculpture, and to
combine it with furniture and architecture, in order to, in this
way, reconstruct the former picture of this art. For example,
if you have a rococo-period painting, which very frequently
hung in an alcove, then you would need to build an alcove
and hang this rococo painting there. This transformation of
art museums into interiors would have been a grave mistake,
because these interiors don’t even show a real way of life. If
someone thinks that from the halls of Peterhof Palace you
can learn about the everyday life of the seventeenth century,
then this notion does not correspond with reality, because
only the grand side of life is shown there. Generally, the study
of everyday life can be called a science in its own right. This
manner of displaying art would have erased the organizing
power of art, and its class content. Even more so, it would
have been wrong to deny the necessity of showing art separately from the process of material culture.
Another kink is the urge to dilute art in other objects of
culture. This shows a lack of understanding of the difference
between materialistic and utilitarian objects and what ideological processes are happening within objects. Even though
art is an object which can be touched with your hands, which
costs a particular amount of money and has a particular
weight, which is made from a particular material—i.e. even
though art has all of the characteristics of an object—it is
only an object in quotation marks, because the meaning of
this object, the content of it, is not material and utilitarian in
the general sense of the words, for a painting does not have
anything material or utilitarian. Its essence is not in what
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it has (weight and length, that it is painted with paint …).
That’s not the issue. The essence is purely dialectic—it is
the essence of the artistic. That is why by “a complex” we
mean the complex of objects of art. The main purpose of
this complex is to show whether this art was monumental
or differentiated, what type of art was the leading type for a
given era; a comparison with the industry of that era would
even better show the unity of style and the creative artistic
difference—was it art for this given class at this or that stage
in its development?
This is the principal understanding of a complex.
Moving toward a technical understanding of it, we need
to introduce additional auxiliary materials. First of all, this
additional material is so-called secondary art. If we can show
the class struggle of styles, then it is absurd to think that
someone like Rembrandt was the only exponent of seventeenth-century culture, that all French art is only Poussin,
and that Russian fine art culture of the capitalist period is
only Vereschagin, Surikov, Vasnetsov, Benois, and so on.
This is the art of the ruling class, and the only reason that
exclusively aristocratic and bourgeois art was on display in
museums is that museums were an organ of the ruling class.
We need to show the bourgeoisie along with the aristocracy
during the time of feudalism; folk art in the era of capitalism,
during the era of city capitalism; the way in which the city
influenced the village, showing some paintings of Benois or
Vasnetsov; and along with them the primitive pictures, which
went to the village; and the art of the city bourgeoisie—only
this gives the real picture of the state of art. This art, which
does not represent the full picture, only serves a small portion of the population, and along with showing the accomplishments of the ruling classes, there is great barbarity in
the sense that it was used as a method for exploiting other
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classes and so on. Therefore, the display of the class dialectic
and the interpretation of styles show art of different classes.
I invite all comrades who are interested in this question
to visit our State Tretyakov Gallery, where we show how the
grand art of the nineteenth century was turned into pathetic
primitive painting in the backwater, how folk art was vanishing, and how these famous weavings, towels, archangel
embroidery, and so on were greatly influenced by aristocratic art. Using the art of various classes we can show the
processes of the struggle between styles and the dialectic of
art in its actuality.
However, this is not enough: other non-art material
should be introduced into the complex—not physical material, but rather étiquetage.1 (It would be possible, but difficult,
to introduce physical material, considering our constrained
museum spaces. Étiquetage, however, has to be introduced
into an art museum.) I need to say that people who have the
worst opinion of étiquetage are art historians and museum
workers, who are more or less aesthetes. At a time when
workers of the zoological museum are not preoccupied with
beauty, we think about beauty more than about science.
That’s why many of our museum workers fetishize all art
monuments, treating them with adoration; they are afraid
of anything that can disrupt the quietude and beauty of the
museum hall.
We envision étiquetage, firstly, in the shape of tables, diagrams, and even geographical maps, which absolutely need
to be introduced into museums. I think that if you were to
ask an average visitor to the Museum of Fine Arts, where we
1. Étiquetage refers to museum labels or the system of such labels
in a museum. It is a loanword from French used in Russian academic circles (transcribed in Cyrillic) for the lack of a similar word
in Russian. —Trans.
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have Assyrian monuments, “Where do you think Assyria
was located?” he would probably suggest five different parts
of the world. Therefore, it is very good that those maps are
being introduced there. Next, we will introduce, and already
have been introducing, graphs that display the economics
of the time. Then, we envision étiquetage as freestanding on
particular monuments.
Finally, another type of étiquetage, the most difficult,
which has to overcome the most obstacles, especially aesthetic ones: this is slogan étiquetage. It is important to provide
a visual image, to immediately provide a strong impression—
in other words, when you are showing the imperial and aristocratic portraits of the eighteenth century, you need to also
provide political slogans for these things, for a visitor often
does not like to read in museums. He comes to see, not to
read. Therefore, you need to make him look. Here, Comrade
Milonov rightly talked about a museum slogan. The creation
of this museum slogan is possible not only in historical museums, zoological museums, technical museums, and so on,
but is possible in art museums. For this you need once and
for all to abandon the beauty of hanging paintings and you
need to know how to unite the general composition; you
need to build walls in such a way that the slogan does not
appear as just étiquetage, but is a unifying bridge between
different things, so that paintings plus slogans, writings, and
posters make up the unified composition of a wall. Then you
will not have to be afraid of all of this étiquetage.
Finally, I would like to finish with one point. This is the
question of the so-called introductory hall, a question that
has still not died out in our art museum. It needs to be said
that the introductory hall was born as a subconscious desire
to give Marxism one room in a museum, so that it would not
get in the way of other work. They thought in this way: we will
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provide a room for it, put quotes from Lenin there, as well as
socioeconomic graphs, the class struggle, and geographical
maps, and whatever else—we will even put a live elephant
there, but we do not want it in a museum. No matter how we
tried to change or reconstruct this introductory hall, everything remained the same.
If we want to show class struggle and to trace it through
the entire collection of the museum, we will no longer need
the introductory hall.
However, art museums need halls of a different order. We
can show the history of art in museums, but in conjunction
with this we need to show the theory of art. We need to teach
the viewer to discern what art forms are—space, color, air,
and so on, with which esteemed museum workers in their
general mass are as unfamiliar as I am unfamiliar with sociological things. We need to teach the analysis of artistic forms
and, on the other hand, provide it with Marxist theoretical
sociology. For this we need to build one kind of exhibition in
one hall, one that constantly changes, for example, showing
how the human body can be expressed in pictorial representation, how you can show its size, and further, how, by using
concrete physical material, you can provide the framework
for a Marxist sociology of art. This is the problem of showing
real objects.
As far as the room is concerned, we need to create what
our museums are still not providing—consultation and information for people who want to study art in greater depth.
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An Experiment in Marxist
Exhibition-Making at
the State Tretyakov Gallery
Natalya Kovalenskaya
An Experiment in Marxist Exhibition-making
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasiya Osipova
The State Tretyakov Gallery, together with the rest of the
Soviet museums, faces the task of reorganizing its operations according to the principles of dialectical materialism.
A radical transformation of the exhibition space is required
to abolish the old system, founded on the principle of pure
aestheticism. The new museum should reveal the class
nature of art and its significance as a mighty weapon of
class war. Such exhibitions will cultivate a Marxist worldview and help the proletariat learn how to employ art in its
struggle. Finally, the new museum will have immediate significance as propaganda, since it will reveal all historically
formed class contradictions, reflected one way or another
in an exhibition.
Since the new exhibition methods had not yet been fully
discovered, in 1929–30 we arranged an experimental show
in order to facilitate their study and further development.
On December 8, 1930 the State Tretyakov Gallery opened
an exhibition of Russian art from the period of the decay of
feudalism (the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth) that was organized according to the
Marxist methodology of display. The experience of this show
will be taken into consideration during the upcoming general reorganization of the Gallery.
Among the central goals of the exhibition was developing
methods of selection, grouping, and interpretation of material. The task of external decoration, which was immensely
more difficult in this case as compared to a regular museum
exhibition, was only partially outlined; its full realization
was hindered by the lack of necessary funding and time:
although the scientific planning of the exhibition lasted
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about a year, the physical implementation happened in a
month and a half, because the exhibition was planned for
a museum convention.
The main principles behind the organization of this
show were those approved by an artistic section of the
museum conference after the discussion of Aleksey FedorovDavydov’s presentation.1
Our first task was to select materials. It was absolutely
clear that our collections alone were insufficient, since up
until then the Gallery displayed only the art of the ruling
classes and was focused almost exclusively on easel painting.
First of all we had to juxtapose the art of the ruling
classes with the art of the oppressed (within the temporal
scope of our exhibition, that meant the art of peasants). It is
only possible to fully understand the ideological character of
the art of the landowners when the entire system of exploitation that produced it is exposed. Within an art museum we
can show the effects of oppression in the sphere of art. It is
precisely exploitation that caused the extreme backwardness of folk art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as its strong bond with feudal or even prefeudal
culture. The exhibition showed just such conservatism in
folk art.
At the same time, it was necessary to show the shift
toward realism and nascent social satire, which began to
develop within folk art as its ties to the cities, commerce, and
crafts of the regional centers began to grow. (Such changes
can be seen in toys, weaving instruments, and primitive popular prints [lubok].)
1. A. Fedorov-Davydov is directing the current reorganization of the
State Tretyakov Gallery. The Experimental Complex Marxist Exhibition
was directed by N. Kovalevskaya with the participation of Z. Zonov, M.
Kolpachka, and S. Velikanov.
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The question of the influence of the art of the ruling class
on the art of peasants—our third important issue—could not
be properly addressed in the show for the lack of materials
supplied by the History Museum. Until the mid-nineteenth
century, the merchant class was progressively suppressed
by the aristocracy. For this reason its eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century art never gained the status of “big”
and “real,” and thus deserving of the viewer’s attention. At
the same time, establishing the roots of bourgeois art is of
high importance. In particular, it is absolutely necessary to
emphasize the difference between merchants and industrial
traders. This distinction is very often omitted, which results
in the crude vulgarization and the forgetting of the positions
stated by Marx on this subject in the third volume of Capital.
The art of the merchant class is represented in our exhibition by several portraits. We must stress that selection of
these artworks was not based on the class affiliation of the
people depicted in them—after all, not every portrait of a
merchant belongs to merchant art—but solely on its style,
understood as an expression of class ideology and class interests. We must acknowledge that most merchant portraits
possess a coherent style, the specificity of which cannot be
explained by a mere lack of artistic skill. Rather, the emergence of this style should be understood as an expression of
the psychology, ideology, and the deep-seated conservatism
of the merchants. And its roots may be traced to feudalism
with its icons and early primitive portraiture.
Unfortunately, we must admit that the exhibition only
hinted at the existence of this style. We did not have the
means to fully represent its development or, for that matter,
the development of the art of the industrial merchants up to
the mid-nineteenth century. This section of the exhibition
had to be built entirely with “borrowed” material, and the
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Museum of History, the main trove of such art, did not show
sufficient generosity to the State Tretyakov Gallery, lending
us only two merchant portraits. We were obliged to build
our exhibition with materials offered by the Crafts Museum,
whose collection was created in a very specialized way (costumes) and thus is not sufficiently thorough.
The situation is much better with the primitive popular
prints (lubok), an art form in which we see the emergence of
social satire and bourgeois protest against aristocracy. These
materials were received from the Museum of Fine Arts.
We must once again admit that even the art of the ruling classes had not been sufficiently represented in the State
Tretyakov Gallery until recently. Established during the capitalist epoch, it is only natural that the Gallery’s collections
contain primarily easel painting, which was the dominant
art form of capitalism. Decorative and architectural art of
the precapitalist period, art that rejected all studio forms,
was not represented. It is clear that to display an eighteenthcentury painting, taken off the wall and torn away from the
sculptural context that usually surrounded it, seems to be an
act of violence toward its artistic essence. Moreover, to suggest that painting was the sole art form of a period, when it
did not truly play a leading role, means to directly misrepresent the real state of art. It is impossible to understand style
as an expression of class ideology through such an artificial
dissection of the material. However, if we do display a painting in a museum, and not in a palace for which it was made,
we should still explain what place it used to occupy there
within a broader decorative ensemble. Only completely
revealing the boundless sway of decorative imagination
allows us to fully understand the hedonistic ideology born
out of the parasitic existence of the slaver class that gained
such prominence at the height of their rule. On the other
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hand, the exhibiting of the décor would uncover a precapitalistic system of artistic production as well: the absence of a
market, created by capitalism, with work done “on commission,” and for a very specific architectural setting.
To fulfill these tasks, we must first of all show our visitors
the palace architecture, its interior and exterior decoration.
This was not done in our exhibition in a satisfactory manner,
once again for lack of money and space. We could show only
few photographs and two models, one of which was rather
poorly made. Certainly, this section needs to acquire significantly more models, drafts, plans, etchings, and so forth. To
recreate a real palace interior in its entirety is neither possible for the Gallery, nor is it one of its aims.
What is absolutely necessary, however, is to display
samples of decorative arts—first of all, of furniture, the art
most closely related to architecture. Our exhibition contains
examples of rococo and classicism, the two most contrasting
styles, representing two deeply divergent stages in the development of Russian aristocracy.
To fully expose the pleasure-centered character of
rococo, we displayed ceramic miniatures that make the
decorative orientation of this style very clear. Bronze
objects, coins, and medals, on the other hand, express
the strictness of classicism, a style that developed in the
period when class energy was directed toward reinforcing
the “dictatorship of slave-owners.” It goes without saying
that these auxiliary art forms were treated precisely as art;
the purpose of the exhibition had nothing in common with
wanting to show the everyday—this remains the prerogative of history museums.
The inclusion of graphic arts seems especially important.
They are most closely related to painting, yet are more flexible and more responsive to all social changes. It is extremely
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significant to show how different the functions of etching
were in different periods: ranging from utilitarian scientific
illustrations of the bourgeoisie during the time of Peter the
Great, to court propaganda in the eighteenth century, and
finally, to bourgeois satirizing of feudalism in the mid-nineteenth century.
Only by showing multiple types of art can we really
establish which of them was prevalent at any given stage of
societal development. So, the wall dedicated to rococo in
hall number two was dominated by painting and decorative
carving—this corresponded to the period’s focus on the picturesque and the decorative. The classical section contained
predominantly sculpture, since it was the principal art form
of this style. Finally, in the late nineteenth-century section,
graphic arts were given the main focus, as it was this art form
that first initiated the critique of the ruling classes.
In addition to broadening the selection of artworks, our
exhibition also strove to include many nonartistic materials to clarify the social foundations of art. The usual phrases
about this or that artwork expressing bourgeois ideology by
now have become learned clichés and tell our viewers nothing about what meaning stands behind the name of this or
that class, let alone about the political conjuncture within
which this class acted. For such formulaic phrases to gain real
meaning, it is necessary to present right here in the museum,
in direct proximity to art, everything that can be borrowed
from life in order to concretize abstract social categories—
although one must be aware that if this expansion of scope
is done in too radical a manner, the center of gravity will shift
from art as an ideological superstructure to the base. In order
to prevent this, exhibitions should present by way of historical evidence only documents and citations—nothing too
“material,” bulky and distracting.
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Documentary materials were displayed in our exhibition
in the following ways: the economy was presented primarily
through diagrams and maps; the characterization of classes,
through quotations from contemporaries and excerpts of
governmental decrees and publications, which were particularly revealing for their class ideology interests. For example,
the exhibition showed the struggle of early nineteen-century
conservative landowners to preserve serfdom, a struggle that
found its expression in the paintings of Venetsianov. Finally,
much attention was given to various articles that contained
the central ideals that each given class held about art at the
specific moment of their development. It was often the case
that people living through a specific historical period formulated their class attitude toward art no less critically than any
Marxist. (For instance, testaments from eighteenth-century
writers tell us that “masters used the labor of artists to render
their rule pleasant to the subjugated; wishing to make people
bear their burden patiently, they offered pleasant distracting
celebrations that would attract all their attention.”)
Citations of this sort allow vivid illustration of the significance of art in class struggle, which functions in a dual role,
as both propaganda directed to sway the lower classes and as
an educational tool for a ruling class to maintain its morale
and promote the qualities most needed at the moment. For
instance, art offered the aristocracy a feeling of class superiority during the apex of its rule in the mid-eighteenth century, the self-discipline needed for the preservation of the
dictatorship of landowners in the period of its decline, and
finally real class consciousness during their transformation
into the bourgeoisie in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. Such citations allow us to uncover the class orientation within art itself. By these means we establish the nature
of art as a unity between ideological and social processes,
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and eliminate the automatic parallelism between art as a
superstructure and art as a social basis, which is retained
even in “Marxist” interpretations in instances when the outline is not filled with any particular content.
At the same time, documentary material allows us to
expose with the utmost clarity the exploitative nature of
landowner art and to counter its “indulgent” splendor, its
mendacious idealization of peasant life, with the picture of
true conditions the peasants were in—to counter peasant
portrayals by Venetsianov, filled with beauty and spiritual
clarity, with real documents on the serf trade or permission
slips for “exemplary whippings” (from the Museum of the
Revolution).
Finally, we employed samples from literature and poetry
as the last type of supplementary material to provide stylistic
counterpoints to the artworks. For example, Lomonosov’s ode
was displayed side by side with folk art of the mid-eighteenth
century, and passages from Pushkin and Ryleev next to the
Romantic style of the early nineteenth century, and so on.
Such were the novel materials included in the exhibition.
With the new tasks placed before museums, the principles of
display and presentation must change accordingly.
Instead of grouping artworks by their authors, we
decided to organize them according to their style, the latter
understood as an expression of a particular class ideology.
This form of presentation allowed us to show the dialectical development of styles. In the cases where, in the span
of an individual artist’s life, he or she created works of different styles, they were divided accordingly. For instance,
most of Levitsky’s paintings express the ideology of the
court and aristocracy (his portrait of Catherine the Great
as Felicia); however, among them we find a small group of
paintings which betray an entirely different ideological
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orientation—that of the middle aristocracy, which, toward
the end of the eighteenth century, began to adopt the qualities of the bourgeoisie (e.g. a portrait of a priest, of the
Bakunin family, and so on). Various Marxist art historians
offer different theoretical explanations for this phenomenon.
However, the fact remains: to display together such disparate
works appears to us impossible.
When grouped according to their style, works which
shared similar artistic content, as a rule, ended up being
placed together. This was true not only for paintings, but also
for all types of art shown in the exhibition. The fears of many
art historians that different art forms would “fight” with
each other turned out to be unfounded. Common stylistic
language wonderfully united them in life into an aesthetic
ensemble for which they were produced. In this way, a mirror
in the style of Rastrelli, with its opulent, decoratively architectural frame, placed next to Torelli’s Triumph of Catherine
strikingly emphasizes the decorative meaning of the painting, while a classicist sculpture emphasizes the austere linear
dimensionality of the latter in painting. Of course, it is harder
to combine painting with prints and drawings, which is why
the latter are displayed in separate display vitrines.
The greatest difficulties are posed by the task of displaying artworks and texts together (inscriptions, additional
documentary materials, explanatory plaques). Large inscriptions, necessary for orienting an unprepared visitor who
comes to an exhibition without a tour guide, were placed
on top of a frieze. Grey lettering on a white background fit
well with the rest of the space and did not distract from the
paintings. Lengthy textual explanations were attached to
movable plaques to avoid crowding the artworks. Only the
most essential explanatory information was printed on the
walls themselves.
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By uniting the artworks expressive of the same class
ideology at the same stage of development and juxtaposing
them with the art of other classes, we built our exhibition
around a set of oppositions. Next to the art of exploitative
landowners we displayed the art of exploited peasants.
Impressions from the contradictions made apparent by
this placement were reinforced by supplementary materials about the nature of serfdom.
A tremendous gap separated peasants as a class from the
landowners. Since their struggle against the latter very rarely
assumed the form of open rebellion (such as the Pugachev
uprising), it is very rare that we find in their art traces of
interaction with the art of the ruling class. The art of peasants developed almost entirely autonomously from the art
of their masters. That’s why, despite placing the two strains
of art together in the same hall, we almost did not emphasize the connection of folk art to that of the landowners’.
On the contrary, the middle strata of the aristocracy that, in
1770–80, began to cultivate its own art forms (dominated
by sentimentalism) did so in close interaction with the art of
the ruling class. It was, therefore, displayed as a subcategory
of the art of the most dominant class. We must admit though
that we did not find all the solutions to the problem of displaying art from different classes together. We managed to
avoid making the mistake of insisting on a mechanical parallel between the development of the class of serf-owners and
the increasingly bourgeois aristocracy. But, unfortunately,
we failed to clearly present all the stages of development of
the latter. In the mid-eighteenth century, the bourgeois aristocracy was aligned with rococo, and in the early nineteenth,
with classicism. It would have been better to display the
development of the two social groups on opposing walls in
the same hall. With the lack of physical space in our gallery,
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such a maneuver was impossible. However, a large exhibition space would not resolve all these problems, for then one
would have to display the simultaneous and interdependent
development not only of two but of several classes and subgroups. Finding a solution to this challenging problem will
require long and persistent work.
There is no need to deny that an exhibition based on
classes and their styles presents many difficulties. In this
manner, the necessity of displaying one or another work of
art in a particular group and therefore in a particular spot on
the wall often contradicts the decorative requirements. It is
very hard to hang paintings in a way that would satisfy the
main objective of the class-based exhibition and at the same
time not unnecessarily and harshly violate the museum and
aesthetic rules.
For instance, the need to display “high” art of the ruling
classes side by side with the “low” art of the peasants contradicts many of the rules of museum aesthetics.
The latter should be displayed with the utmost courage,
for it is impossible to demonstrate the whole depth of difference between arts of different classes in any other way. Here
we must add one correction though. Despite their apparent
“backwardness,” neither peasant nor merchant art should
be regarded as merely lacking talent (which is what is really
meant by “low quality”); they just represent a separate style.
Therefore, one cannot talk about “low quality” in the common sense of the word; rather, one has to talk about different
“aspects” of the philosophical meaning of the word.
Matters stand differently with copies, reproductions,
and photographs, which in the absence of originals we
occasionally have to resort to. The presence of these objects
of low artistic value is really unfortunate, although, at
times, necessary.
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Our experience of a Marxist exhibition prompted a series
of other objections among museum workers. One of the common criticisms was that when displayed according to our
methods, art lost its emotional meaning and became a mere
“illustration” of history. This objection has a double meaning. It is dictated in part by fear that the focus would shift
from art to the “base” and that art would be seen merely as
a direct reflection of the socioeconomic process. To this we
reply that the base was invoked only to the extent to which
it helped to understand the meaning of a given artwork. If
at times one may have felt that citations printed on the walls
“crowded” and distracted from the artworks, this shortcoming was solely due to a lack of space, and would not be an
issue in a larger museum where the ratio of text to images
will be more proportionate. However, there is yet another
dimension to this question. Indeed, what can be said for the
emotional impact of art that belongs to the classes hostile to
ours? Art of course has to have some kind of emotional effect
in order to be understood, but is it really fair to expose our
visitors to the poisonous, infectious influence of the hedonistic and sensual art of the eighteenth century? It is clear that
we must unmask its serfdom character. And if its immediate
affective power is lessened as the result, than we can only welcome such an outcome. Only a critical attitude to our cultural
heritage allows us to use it now.
The final objection to the exhibition was that it came off
as too difficult and too inaccessible to a mass audience. We
must admit that some serious work to popularize these shows
is still needed to make Marxist exhibitions maximally legible to broad swathes of visitors. It must be stressed, though,
that an exhibition like ours was necessarily more difficult
and demanding than the usual presentation of art according to artists, which does not require an understanding of
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artistic process as a whole. The new mode of exhibition must
reveal the ideological meaning of art, and this is a very difficult and philosophical task. But, of course, such exhibitions must also be popular. In essence we face two different
goals: to make our exhibitions more scientific, and also more
popular. Naturally, this is very challenging. It is necessary
to note, however, that each exhibition must be multifaceted
and engaging for the least prepared as well as to the most
sophisticated visitor who strives for a deeper familiarity with
art. The trick is to satisfy the latter category while at the same
time offering essential educational information to our firsttime visitors. We are already installing explanatory plaques
and accompanying texts with this purpose in mind, but it is
clear that we will have to keep searching for more solutions.
Inventing new display methods, which will help to entrench
in our visitors the far-reaching goals of the Marxist understanding of art, requires our most serious efforts.
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Everyday Life of the
Working Class from 1900 to
1930 Exhibition: History and
Everyday Life Department of the State
Russian Museum
Valentin Kholtsov
Everyday Life of the Working Class
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasia Skoybedo
The History and Everyday Life Department at the State
Russian Museum, which appeared after the revolution (its
foundation goes back to 1918), set out to create an exhibition in which the whole historical process of the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries would be reflected; in
other words, of both prerevolutionary Russia and the Soviet
Republic, up until the present moment, and in which the
everyday life of all classes during this time—landowners,
bourgeoisie, peasantry, and the working class—would be
represented in their interaction and struggle. The enormity
and difficulty of this problem is apparent, and completely
new paths should be laid while resolving this problem, without the option of relying on the experience of either prerevolutionary museums, or the achievements of contemporary
European museums, because the setting of such a goal is,
clearly, only possible in our times and in our country. That’s
why the History and Everyday Life Department approached
the task very carefully and, so to speak, in stages, first finishing the smaller and then, gradually, bigger and bigger
exhibition complexes, which pertained to one or another
side of the problem, and which should have culminated in
the general picture described above. Among the large number of temporary and permanent exhibitions which were
curated by the History and Everyday Life Department, two
are the most important and to a certain extent summarize
the work of the department; these are the currently open
exhibitions Everyday Life of Merchants from the Eighteenth
to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, and the exhibition
dedicated to the everyday life of the working class, which is
the main topic of this report.
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The exhibition Everyday Life of the Working Class from
1900 to 1930 is only a small sketch, a short outline of a larger
upcoming exhibition of the department. In this larger exhibition, the everyday life of the working class will naturally
occupy a more prominent place, while the current exhibition
only explores a part of it, namely, on the one hand, the era of
imperialism in Russia (from the end of the nineteenth century until the October Revolution), and, on the other hand,
current Soviet everyday life. Neither part of the exhibition,
in its current state as described above, aspires to present
the full picture; this is especially true of the part on Soviet
everyday life, in which the organizers, while constructing the
exhibition, were consciously striving to show only shots of
the new life introduced into workers’ lives by the October
Revolution. As far as the era of imperialism is concerned, the
choice of this particular period is driven by the special interest we have in that era, where class contradictions reached
their highest point, which finally led to the social revolution.
Material on the life of the Leningrad proletariat forms the
basis for the exhibition; the everyday life of provincial workers is represented to a lesser extent, even though the exhibition presents workers from the Urals, Petrozavodsk, Siberia,
the Donbass, and other regions. Despite the small scope, collecting and studying the material required a lot of effort and
hard work by a number of members of the department.
Material based on the everyday life of workers from the
era of imperialism is concentrated in the first two halls, in the
passages between the halls, and in a small anteroom; Soviet
life is located in the last, large hall.
Two walls in the first hall are occupied by a general
introduction to the depiction of workers’ life before the
Revolution. Here, in diagrams, photographs, and drawings,
there is a lot of information on economics, politics, and the
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Everyday Life of the Working Class
revolutionary movement of the epoch. These materials show
land shortages among the peasantry as the main reason
behind their attraction to the factory; they demonstrate the
concentration of Russian industry at the beginning of the
twentieth century and the development of strikes and the
revolutionary movement; they reveal the main points of this
movement from 1900 to 1903; they depict the Revolution of
1905 and discuss the main reasons for its failure; they illustrate the Era of Reaction (1907–11); and finally they show
the incipient new proletariat in 1912–14 and shed light on
the underlying reasons for the First World War as the only
way to resolve the escalating conflicts in capitalist society.
This ends the introduction. The next topic of the exhibition, information on which is located in the same hall, is the
everyday life of the worker at the factory. As the most striking example, two large but drastically different proletariat
groups are selected—steelworkers and textile workers.
The everyday life of steelworkers is predominately characterized by the idea of the high level of technical production at metallurgic factories of the given period. Here we see
photographs showing overhead cranes, steam hammers, and
steam presses, and diagrams showing the increasing power
output of engines, the increasing rates of production, and
so forth. Under these conditions, a worker must have special qualification, sometimes of a very high order, and this
fact determines his pay, which influences the aspects of his
daily life that we will encounter in the next hall. No matter
how mechanized the production is, there are still moments
when a live workforce is required. One such industry is casting. A mannequin in the exhibition portrays a foundry man
in work clothes, protecting him from fire (glasses, mittens,
apron, and so on), holding a ladle in his hand, into which hot
metal is poured.
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The everyday life of a textile worker at the factory has a
different character. Mechanization is apparent here as well,
and the exhibition shows us a number of developed and complicated machines, but in addition to this, this means of yarn
processing is characterized by extreme refinement, which
limits the participation of the worker in the process to just
one habitual movement. This work does not require special
qualification, or even physical strength, which may explain
the widespread use of female labor at textile factories and
the low pay, which the visitor can see displayed on the table
of daily wages. The rest of the material further elaborates on
working conditions at the textile factories of that time (the
system of fines, deductions from pay for goods taken by workers, practically nonexistent labor safety, and so forth).
In the second hall, we move from workers’ labor life to
their domestic life, which is represented by two interiors that
portray a room occupied by a textile worker, and a room in
an apartment of a steel worker. The objects for these interiors
were collected by the History and Everyday Life Department
while surveying workers’ living quarters. However, due to the
fact that these surveys were carried out after the revolution,
the surveyors had to examine each object while also incorporating workers’ memories, documents, and so on, in order to
be sure that the collected material really characterized the
everyday life of workers before the revolution.
The textile worker’s interior is a room shared with other
tenants, since the low wages of textile workers did not allow
for renting a separate room. We see that there are different
types of life in every corner, depending on the salary of the
tenant. Directly opposite us is a bed, which is occupied by
two working girls who have just arrived from the village.
All of their possessions consist of a small trunk and a dress
that hangs on the wall. To the left we see the next level of
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Everyday Life of the Working Class
prosperity: there, a woman worker occupies a whole bed,
and she has a table. Finally, further to the left we see a working family consisting of a husband, a wife, and a child. They
have a window, a dish cabinet, and what was called a “booth,”
a bed with curtains which provides a semblance of private
space. This relative prosperity, however, is only seemingly
so: among the graphic and visual material exhibited on the
wall there is a table that shows the budget of a textile worker.
From it we can see that only single and childless workers
could make ends meet, if just barely, while the birth of a child
immediately caused a deficit.
Let’s walk over to the interior of the steelworker, which
represents the room of a mid-level laborer. We need to note
that first and foremost we have a separate room here; the
only people who shared rooms were domestic workers who
had just arrived from the village. The figure of the steelworker’s wife shows that only the husband works here, while the
wife stays at home and keeps house. She sometimes works
outside the home to help her husband, but she does not stay
away from the family for long: she either works part time, or
has a sewing machine, the presence of which shows a certain
degree of prosperity. Prosperity is further indicated by things
as a dresser, a mirror, a samovar, and an alarm clock. We can
see that the living conditions of a steelworker are drastically
different from those of a textile worker. However, we should
not exaggerate this prosperity: in the steelworker’s room
there is only one bed—children still do not have a separate
bed, and they have to sleep on so-called pridelki, that is, two
boards attached to the back of their parents’ bed. Sometimes
the children sleep on the trunk or on the floor.
We have pointed out that the exhibited interior shows
the living conditions of a mid-level worker. On the front wall
of the interior, to the left and to the right, is information on
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the living conditions of low- and high-level workers. The living conditions of the former are naturally worse than those
of a mid-level worker, however, they are better than those of
textile workers. As far as the high-level worker is concerned,
here we see plush furniture, a gramophone, a sideboard, and
other luxury items.
In this hall we also pass material on the everyday life
of rope makers, which demonstrates the highly primitive
nature of this production in the prerevolutionary period,
when the labor conditions for the workers were harsh and
the wages were extremely low.
Let’s turn to the exhibition on the everyday life of gold
diggers, with which this hall ends. Workers in the gold industry of this period are a very particular group of the proletariat:
on the one hand, the gold trade widely used highly developed
machinery that needed highly qualified labor, together with
primitive forms of production; and on the other hand, the
specific labor conditions of gold diggers are characterized by
the absence of basic comfort. Gold mines are located far from
city centers, and for months they are cut off from the rest of
the world, resulting in the dependency of the mine workers
on the tyranny of the businessmen.
Material presented at the exhibition illustrates the aforementioned. Here we predominantly see photographs and
separate objects that relate to both primitive and developed
machines. Further, we see materials on the everyday life of
gold diggers, in this case photographs showing gold diggers
in full attire for a long journey to their work site; showing
their means of transportation across wild and deserted land
(predominantly by water, on rafts or boats); and finally, showing us their living quarters. Images depict several types of
gold digger huts. The most common is the one that is built in
our exhibition. It is a log house built on bare ground, without
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Everyday Life of the Working Class
a floor, and with flat boards instead of a roof. Inside the hut
there is a black stove that looks like a pile of stones, the smoke
from which escapes through an opening in the ceiling. Bunk
beds along the walls and a board attached to the wall to make
a table are the only other furniture in the room. During harsh
Siberian winters, this construction would of course provide
weak protection from the cold, and when the stone stove was
fired, the whole hut would fill with smoke. However, sometimes (and especially at large gold mines) workers settled not
in huts but in barracks, which were a bit more comfortable.
However, stuffy air, overcrowded conditions, and a lack of the
simplest comforts were the rule there.
In the hut there are clothes, utensils, and other things
used by gold mine workers.
The passage between the halls is occupied by material on
the imperialist war.
The conditions of the war are illustrated here by a freight
car with two militiamen who are being sent to the theater of
war, and also by a booth and the figure of a telephone operator (the use of a skilled worker at the front), and a trench and
a tent with a soldier standing next to it wearing a gas mask
and a protective suit.
The display board shows an official depiction of the
war, useful to the ruling class of that time, who tried to stir
up patriotic feelings in the soldiers by all possible means;
we see primitive patriotic pictures, matching literature,
Georgian crosses, and so on. The opposite display board
shows the real face of war: colossal numbers of killed and
wounded, refugees, destroyed buildings, and so on. Finally,
the third board familiarizes us with economic consequences
of the war, which resulted in the complete impoverishment
of the country and a drastic worsening of conditions for the
working masses.
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Valentin Kholtsov
The small anteroom is dedicated to the period from
February to October of 1917. Here, a number of photographs
and drawings depict the February Revolution; the creation of
the Provisional Government and the Union of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies; the arrival of V. I. Lenin and the beginning of preparations for the proletariat revolution, carried
out under the slogan “All power to the Soviets”; the imperialist politics of Kerensky and the first major demonstration in
Leningrad against the Provisional Government on July 3–5;
its suppression and bourgeois reaction; Bolsheviks working underground; the military revolt under the leadership
of Kornilov; and finally the agony and the toppling of the
Provisional Government.
Two big panels here depict the storming of the Winter
Palace, and V. I. Lenin delivering a speech in front of the
Smolny Institute.
This ends the historical part of the exhibition.
The last hall, dedicated to Soviet everyday life, portrays
only the life of today, and, as was mentioned above, not thoroughly, but as a first attempt to reveal the new life brought
about by the October Revolution.
The first part of the hall shows material on the new socialist industry, which served as the real basis for reconstructing
life. Here, power plants are presented as the basis of our production; in addition, there are models and photographs of
new plants, which are of interest for their improved technology, their new appearance, and their technical and hygienic
advances, which are aimed at improving working conditions
for laborers. Also, in this part we have presented everyday life
at the new factories, the defining factor of which is the fact
that the worker now owns the plant. From here several facts
emerge: workers participate in managing the plant through
the plant “triangle”; workers are promoted to management
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Everyday Life of the Working Class
from the shop floor; they attend production meetings, and
so on. Because of this there are also completely different conditions compared to past labor: a transition to a seven-hour
workday, an increase in wages, labor protection, medical
assistance, sanatoriums and health centers for workers, and
protection for working mothers and children. Finally, there
is material (photographic, diagrammatic, and physical) on
social competition, shock work, worker inventions, and so on.
The second part of the hall is dedicated to the communal and private life of a Soviet Union worker. The material
pertaining to this shows the defining role a worker has in
the government, in the Party, and in unions. Further, we see
material on the assistance the worker provides to his government (industrialization loans, donations to the industrialization fund, to the collectivization fund, and so forth). The
same idea is reflected in the material on cooperative construction—which gradually develops a new way of life—and
on housing construction: here we see the exteriors of new
houses and the interiors of new dwellings with abundant
light, air, and so on. We see elements of the new way of life
in old houses as well, starting with a radio, a library, and red
corners in the Society for Renting and Living Cooperation
(SRLC), and ending with social work and the greater inclusion of workers in the managing of the SRLCs.
The reconstruction of life based on the new socialist principles puts forth the creation of the “new man” as its main
goal, an active fighter and builder of socialism. This idea is
reflected in a theme dedicated to the new ways of child rearing and education, club and excursion work, and also physical education, for which the worker government does not
spare any expenses. In conjunction, there is material on the
fight against the old way of life (alcoholism, religion, and so
on) and the external enemy—world capitalism—which has
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Valentin Kholtsov
not abandoned its desire to bring our country back to the old
bourgeois way of life; related to this are pre-conscription and
reserve military training, the greater inclusion of workers in
the army and its leadership, and so on.
Finally, we see material that depicts the growth of the level
of activity and amateur activities of the working class, which
manifests itself in the form of volunteer societies, worker correspondents, the participation of workers in purges carried
out in Soviet institutions, patronage, and so forth. The theme
of “assisting the new village,” which points to the leading role
of the proletariat in the task of the socialist reconstruction
of agriculture, is particularly important. Material pertaining
to this topic primarily stresses the whole technical base—
namely, the production of agricultural machinery—without
which the socialist reconstruction of the village cannot succeed, and the general participation of workers in the process
of collectivization (worker brigades sent to collective farms,
preparatory courses for workers in the village, and so on).
The exhibition ends with an electrical map of the FiveYear Plan, which demonstrates the Soviet Union’s grand
industrialization plan and reveals the specific characteristics of this “great works plan”: the close connection between
factories and feeding centers, the development of new types
of production that barely existed or did not exist at all in prerevolutionary Russia, the creation of numerous engineering
plants, the construction of several power plants—all this
positions the new worker government on the same level as
the leading capitalist governments and turns the country of
the Soviets from agriculturally industrial into industrially
agricultural. The powerful industrial development that will
occur as a result of accomplishing the Five-Year Plan will
serve as a mighty factor in the task of creating completely
new living conditions for the working class.
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Everyday Life of the Working Class
The exhibition does not, of course, exhaust all the material on the everyday life of the working class that has been
and still is being collected by the History and Everyday Life
Department, which organizes special expeditions for this
purpose. All this material will merge into the main collection
of the department, which was mentioned at the beginning
of this note and which will present the everyday life of the
proletariat as not removed from the everyday life of other
classes, but rather together with them in their cooperation
and struggle.
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On A Museum
of INDUSTRY AND ART
David Arkin
On a Museum of INDUSTRY AND ART
First published in 1931
Translated by Bela Shayevich
My brief report is mainly concerned with the branch of culture and the aspect of museum work that is currently one of
the least developed and, I would say, one of the least defined
in its boundaries, both in terms of public perception and the
principles of the discipline. I am talking about that which we
used to call industrial art, and what we now call productivism, a genre whose significance for all artistic culture in the
epoch of reconstruction is incontestable, but which nonetheless continues to remain in the shadows of our artistic edifice
not only in the practical sense, but also in terms of a theoretical analysis of the related issues.
I would first of all like to briefly touch upon the framework of the problem of productivism from which the
museum work in this field should stem.
We know that in the common “table of ranks,” this kind
of art takes practically the last place. Until recently, “pure”
art was at the top, followed by “impure,” applied art. The term
“applied” itself is proof of a certain kind of spiritual poverty.
It’s commonly accepted that today, a new conception has
come into currency that stands in contradiction to the traditional conception of “applied.”
I believe that it does not make sense to have to prove a
position that should be one of the foundational postulates
of Marxist aesthetics, that is, that the complex of everyday
objects should not be a merely technical category. The tangible object not only has certain essential characteristics;
it also carries a significance on the social and ideological
planes. Moreover, the object is not limited by its technical
potential in its function as a utilitarian thing; it also has an
ideological function.
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David Arkin
It must be said that the preference for traditional art,
more often than not, results in the incorporation of noneasel types of art (for example, posters and photo-collage)
into productivism. I stress that I do not consider these to be
industrial art, as they are of the type where aesthetic content
is fully identical to the original goal. The poster does not have
a utilitarian significance in everyday life. It’s a different story
when it comes to a table or a chair, where the thing itself is
right up against its own utility; it is not easy to come to the
ideological interpretation of a chair.
Our goal is to specifically demonstrate how to stress, to
reveal, to show the ideological content of material forms that
have specific, utilitarian functions in everyday life. It is the
era of reconstruction that presents the problem of everyday
objects with ever-increasing urgency. To address this emerging problem, holding to the position of the dualism of the
applied, or the duality of art and mass production, would be
a needless vacillation between technology and art.
We must approach the art of material objects and demonstrate the dialectic connection between machinery and
the ideological content of material form. The assessment of
what we consider to be artistic production and its aesthetic
and ideological nature is precisely what the study of artistic
production is.
If studying the artistic and manufacturing technology
of any age must have its necessary volume, then studying
the relationships to objects—which are form, in turn, under
the influence of relations of production—characterizes
objects’ role in the given societal formation. Analyzing relationships to the realm of everyday objects allows us to envision the entire history of artistic production as the history of
struggle and shows us the development of the class struggle
underpinning this development. From the point of view
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On a Museum of INDUSTRY AND ART
of such important general assumptions, we need to admit
that we have not seriously approached productivism in our
museum work. In building the edifice of our artistic culture,
we have not yet gotten through the inventory of objects left
behind from the previous era. The historical study of industrial art started and ended with handicrafts. It did not follow the development of mass production that we’ve seen in
recent years. The artistic portrayal of industrial art stopped
with manual labor. It is as though it was forgotten that in
the course of the past few years, the chief artistic supplier
has been plant and factory manufacturing, responsible for
the design of everyday life for the various classes of society.
How and where the artistic forms of mass-produced objects
were created, what aesthetic factors went into their design,
the path of their contemporary production—none of these
questions interest either economic or artistic scholarship.
At the same time, anyone today can see the relevance
of this problem—the problem of reevaluating the material
inventory. This is being presented as an artistic problem. We
see not only the appearance of obsolete forms and complex
forms connected with old influences, with the moribund systems of gentility, landowner nobility, the merchant class, and
other such obsolete forms, which were reflected in works of
art. Alongside these virtually dead forms we must also look
at a number of objects from our own era that develop and
reflect our reality.
It is manifestly clear that in light of these issues, the
research activity of art museums should proceed on two
fronts. First of all, toward the end of influencing mass manufacturing, production, and new design; secondly, toward
a different kind of influence: an impact on everyday life
itself, consumption, and shaping the aspects of everyday
life that constitute contemporary material culture. I am of
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David Arkin
the opinion that in both of these realms museum research
should be thoroughly constructed and reconstructed.
As one of its principal tasks, museum-directed research
should strive to have an impact on the artistic quality of
mass-manufactured everyday objects, the construction of
new homes, new workers’ clubs, and new public buildings
of every stripe, and it should exert this influence specifically
on their design.
Stemming from the foundational principle—that is, our
refusal to see an object as a purely technical form and the
insistence on our ability to see the ideological content in
everyday objects—we reach further and discover the dialectic connection between the technological side of mass production and the artistic, that is, the ideological content in the
form of any given object.
If we follow the first line of argument from the ones I have
specified above—in other words, the argument about influencing production—then the proposal will be the following.
First and foremost, manufacturing that creates everyday
objects and not the tools of production should find in museums a center that would aid in, and sometimes even direct,
production in terms of guiding the design approach.
What would this entail? First of all, in the manufacturing sectors where the artistic design of the product is one
of the most important elements of its quality (for instance,
in glassware and china production; woodworking, including
furniture-making; printing; sewing; textiles; and so on), the
museum needs to become the center of artistic quality control in the full sense of the word, and, moreover, needs to have
influence over the design of these objects. Museums would
fight the vestiges of traditional models and blueprints that
have been collected at our factories where the artistic direction is remarkably weak and in sharp contradiction with the
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demands of modernity. Museums must demonstrate to the
manufacturing sector, to everyone who works in manufacturing, how ill-suited the drawings and blueprints collected
in the archives of every possible china plant and every other
kind of plant are for contemporary everyday use.
We must organize an exhibition of unsuitable materials
and create expert-manned bureaus for questions related to
the consumption of everyday objects in the corresponding
sectors. I believe that within this schema of the creation of
corresponding museums for every field, we must acknowledge that sector-specific museums must be maintained in
a controlled number for sectors where artistic design plays
a main role. I am referring to sectors such as glassware and
china production, everyday tableware, and the analogous
sector of furniture production. Manufacturers should maintain museums of everyday life so that their artifacts can
figure in the complex exhibitions of other museums. I will
add that in these sector-specific museums, the collections
should be organized not solely to display discrete objects,
as it would thus be impossible to discover anything coherent in terms of a technical category; an isolated object does
not contain the full complex of related issues in and of itself.
For instance, furniture should be displayed as an element of
the class-specific design of a dwelling, and a building with
the corresponding auxiliary design elements. Only then
can museums play an integral role in the reconstruction of
everyday life.
Turning to the influence that the museum can have over
everyday life, on the design of the everyday, I must say that
in this realm, we see great gaps. The first major gap is that
vast realms of design, such as, for instance, architecture, are
entirely missing from our museums. I speak of the architecture that directly affects all of modernity, beginning with the
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1850s, since the introduction of concrete. In all related sectors we see utter chaos, a yawning chasm in this broad sphere
of everyday design, but I am not, dear comrades, saying that
we need to create special architectural museums. This initiative may be proposed by construction organizations. We can
only address this upon reconstructing museums as modular
complexes. We need materials on contemporary architecture, up to and including the issues under discussion today
(in general, I believe that the concept of “the past” is itself
from the past; the past is regarded as everything that’s five
or six decades before the present day and onward; in reality,
we should consider the province of the museum to be all of
time up to the very last hour).
It seems to me that even the questions of the construction of new cities and villages, the design of workers’ housing, municipal complexes (parks and so on), should all find
their place in the museum. The museum should fight for the
creation of corresponding organizations addressing the
needs of the complex of the mass-manufacturing of everyday
objects. Maximal attention should be devoted to developing
approaches in individual sectors in order to render them as
capable of addressing public needs as possible when it comes
to constructing workers’ housing, workers’ clubs, public
cafeterias, villages, green cities, and so on. These museums
should exhibit not only the best projects and blueprints but
also all relevant designs and historical materials, displayed
for informational and education purposes.
Thus, the museums will strike out against the archaic
elements in today’s production complex, which releases an
unbelievable quantity of disgusting things into the mass
market, vestiges of bourgeois culture, tchotchkes that litter
the living space and that also have a tangible effect not only
on manufacturing, but also on the organizations charged
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with constructing the new way of life, that is, on the housing
construction cooperative, the unions, and so on.
*
*
*
Some of our museums, especially the Museum of Handicrafts
and the Museum of Oriental Cultures in Moscow, have
already had a significant impact on enterprises manufacturing artistic objects: they are already doing what I am proposing should be done in all sectors, namely, presenting
manufacturers with models. They are providing manufacturers with specific instructions. Still, there is a lot of inertia in
this field and, I would say, aloofness. This is not only related
to the work of the museums; it’s also due to the relative lack
of inspiration on the part of craftsmen and this realm of our
artistic production overall. The production of art objects in
our country is, for the most part, for export. Ideas such as
the foreign market always demanding originality from the
Russian craftsman are too deeply entrenched and we forget
that the products of this so-called originality more often than
not disgust us, and that the foreign market is actually sick of
them, too—take, for instance the outmoded grace cups that
were once in style and, similarly, carved objects.
New things are needed from the original craftsmen of the
Soviet Union, but our artistic organs that deal with handicraft are not significantly concerned with this fact; the same
goes for our museum workers. They’ve attempted to protect
the craftsman from industry. Exhibitions play a huge role in
artistic production; meanwhile, many of the relevant organizations practically consider them to be acts of violence
against the integrity of handicrafts.
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*
*
*
All of this demands accepting the basic premise of fostering
close relationships between our art museums—especially
their scholarly and research cells—and the organs of manufacturing and a number of other artistic organizations.
Here I put forth the idea that the People’s Commissariat
for Education, which is in charge of museums, should come
to a general agreement with the Supreme Council of the
National Economy to use museums for the needs of domestic construction. This agreement would not free individual
museums from having to propose independent initiatives to
strengthen ties with manufacturers and from making their
own contracts with various enterprises. Museums must take
all necessary measures to attract workers from a given sector
to museum work. These connections between museums on
the one hand, and research and scholarly production institutes on the other, are especially crucial considering that
many of the materials that will come out of art museums will
need to go through the corresponding technical processing
performed at the research and scholarly institutes of a given
manufacturing sector before being put into production.
These are all of the major tasks presented in brief, but
which first of all demand that museums turn their attention and efforts toward the sector of artistic production that
remains underrepresented as museum material, and underresearched in terms of how it should be handled. Today, all
work with our industrial art legacy is based on outdated
applied art practices, on the materials of handicraft labor, the
labor of handmade objects, and completely excludes industrial art from its sphere of interest, as though it doesn’t exist,
simply because it was born of mass production.
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On a Museum of INDUSTRY AND ART
We must have a clear conception of each complex feature
of everyday design and remind all museums of the existing
materials, insisting that museums not only be filled with
these artifacts, but also influence their design in manufacturing and in everyday life.
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A Museum Exhibition
or a Theatrical Performance?
N. a. Shneerson
A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical Performance?
First published in 1932
Translated by Margarita Shalina
Soviet museums are working intensely on new types of
museum exhibition, striving to build a museum upon the
foundation of Marxism-Leninism, while providing a vivid
narrative of our past and present day in order to rally the
working masses into action in the fight for socialism.
By abandoning the academic display of objects, it
becomes apparent that the museum value of particular
objects was determined relative to their antiquity, and not to
their class. The museums have set this difficult task for themselves: to use examples of material culture as documentary
monuments that provide a vast opportunity to visually show
that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles,” that we will only achieve a class-free society as a result of a fierce class struggle.
*
*
*
We strongly believe that in present-day RSFSR [The Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic], there is no museum
that does not participate, in one way or another, in the study
of the national economy and the productive forces of its
corner of the world, does not represent the construction of
socialism in its halls, does not organize both permanent and
mobile exhibitions based on contemporary political and economic issues, and so on.
We have achieved remarkable success in this sphere
of museum activity, in museums of all types. However, we
have not yet made any significant strides in the sphere of
re-exhibition 1 in either central or provincial museums.
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Several exhibits organized by museums of history and
everyday life, especially by the State Historical Museum,
were recognized by reputable institutions as not meeting
the requirements of Marxism-Leninism, and were therefore
closed. Art museums can’t boast any particular achievements either: they have not yet resolved the problem of building Marxist exhibitions, even though several experimental
exhibitions are worthy of serious attention and study.
The situation is even worse in provincial museums, which
are only just now embarking on the process of re-exhibition.
The only exception consists of a few dozen museums (out of
250) that are working on the task of building local history
museums according to Marxist principles. In general, the
situation is rather unsatisfactory: cabinets of curiosities are
far from being abolished.
*
*
*
The absolute political significance of this national problem is
so apparent at this stage of socialist construction that there is
no need to explain to the reader why we must devote special
attention and apply rigorous standards to its new portrayals
in our museums.
Two such shows are drawing the attention of museum
workers: the Central Museum of Ethnography’s Peoples of
the Urals and the Volga Region, and th­­­e Moscow Regional
Museum’s Socialist Construction and Ethnic Minorities of the
Moscow Region.
1. This term could additionally be a play on the terms “revolution”
and “exhibition,” i.e. revol-exhibition —Ed.
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A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical Performance?
*
*
*
In order to properly assess these exhibitions, we must define
the fundamental political message of the museums that have
set for themselves the goal of depicting the past and the present of the peoples of the USSR.
The fundamental goal of such a museum must be to
show the nature of the Party’s nationalist policies and of
Soviet power in its exhibitions, to reveal the substance of
a culture that is “national in form and socialist in content,”
and to sharply contrast it with all that is politically oppressive not only in the tsarist autocracy, but also in the entire
capitalist world.
How can these colossal challenges be reflected in the
museum exhibition? How can we show the creative endeavors of the working people of all nationalities, inhabitants of
the USSR, creators of a new, bright world of genuine brotherhood and equality? How can we show that all nationalities are working toward this great construct in which they
emerge as participants with equal rights, and that all displays of either imperial chauvinism or regional nationalism
are met with a determined rebuff from the sides of both the
Party and the Soviet state, that all we have gained we have
secured for ourselves as a result of a fierce class struggle in
national regions?
The Museum of Ethnography has only just begun working on meeting these challenges in the last few years. In order
for these new endeavors to achieve the desired results, for the
museum exhibition to provide a vivid portrayal of the national
policies of the SCP (Soviet-Unified Communist Party [of
Bolsheviks]) in contrast to the politics of the czarist government, an enormous amount of creative effort is undoubtedly
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needed. The main condition is a detailed reworking of the
structure of a museum’s entire layout and every individual
topic. It is completely normal that the greater the scope and
the depth of the main topic of an exhibition, the more difficult
it is to organize the study and the collection of all the material
that is vital for a museum to acquire.
*
*
*
It goes without saying that by making a conscious decision to refrain from simply foraging for objects that might
be interesting to include in the exhibition, from automatically using the ethnographic collection passed on to us as
an inheritance, we are essentially bringing to light the question of establishing a new museum; moreover, it can be said
in advance that a significant portion of the property previously accumulated by the museum will remain behind the
scenes of our exhibition. After all, in refusing to chase after
“interesting” objects, we must expose class relations with
the assistance of objects in the broad sense of the word—
we must show the social nature of the depicted era, its base
and its superstructure. The experience of many museums
has already sufficiently demonstrated that while establishing such goals, the museums cannot find relevant artifacts
within their archives. This is an inheritance of the past!
*
*
*
First, we are faced with the fact that in resolving the issue
of museum exhibition, an extreme dumbing-down has
occurred by way of presenting an assortment of flashy
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exhibits instead of those that are relevant in terms of social
relations and class struggles, which can only come about
as a result of performing research. Next is the transition in
museum methods of display toward the bookish: there are
posters hanging on the walls (and—the latest fad in museum
technique—from the ceilings), quotations from Marxist classics, photographs, and other related materials. By using these
methods of display, they supplant the real nature of museum
work, forgetting that the museum operates primarily with
objects, while everything else is only secondary, explanatory,
and is necessary only as far as the various types of labels and
illustrations aid in a gradual understanding of the foundation
of the exhibition based on physical materials. Refusal to make
physical objects the foundation of the exhibition is a refusal to
build the museum.
A visitor does not go to the museum to read quotations
from books hung on walls, but in order to find in a museum
what he can’t find in books and what is needed to round out
his knowledge: he goes to see tangible monuments of the
past, the most varied scientific exhibits that an informed
exhibition has to offer, machinery, and so on. Our goal is
for the exhibition to help him gain a type of knowledge that
would give him a solid foundation for a dialectical-materialistic worldview, one that would equip him for the enduring
revolutionary struggle for the work of socialism.
It goes without saying that it is much easier to adorn the
walls with hundreds of posters on class struggle than it is for
a museum to portray at least one historic moment of class
struggle in such a way that the visitor would clearly understand, for instance, that in the hands of the ruling classes,
religion was and remains an instrument of oppression of
the working masses; or using the materials from the natural
history department to show the influence of geographical
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conditions on the everyday lives of the peoples of the Ural
and the Volga Region, and so on.
However, elucidating relations by means of objects, we
must, with the help of museum labels, and most importantly
illustrated material, provide the supplemental material that
will help the visitor master our exhibition in the light of a
dialectical-materialistic worldview. In the same way, while
portraying some key elements of class struggle we have to
resort to using original documents, the exhibiting of which
without explanatory text will not achieve the desired goal.
An original document attracts the visitor’s attention, but the
visitor won’t read it if he’s already familiar with that distant
era. Moreover, he’ll rarely read it in its entirety—while it is
vital for us that he becomes familiar with the basic meaning
demonstrated by the document. Here is where the museum
label comes to the rescue—better yet if it is accompanied by
an illustration, an artistic rendering that depicts the content
of the document.
No less important is the question of aesthetic arrangement in the exhibition, especially in regard to the depiction
of everyday life.
In order to avoid mistakes in building the exhibition,
we must first conduct a study of the scene to be depicted
from a Marxist point of view, and then acquire a selection
of assorted, timely materials to be exhibited based on this
foundation. It is not for the artist to decide what is displayed,
but for the researcher, while questions about the arrangement must be decided collectively. Moreover, the last word
belongs to the researcher, who must demand from the artist
a kind of arrangement where exhibits are not overshadowed
by the aesthetic arrangement, but exactly the opposite—the
aesthetic arrangement must help the visitor to better understand the museum exhibit.
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We must present this demand even more strongly when
a museum devotes wall space to displays in which the role
of the artist is of major significance. The experiences of
the Museum of Ethnography and the Moscow Regional
Museum have vividly demonstrated that a museum that
yields the directorial role in the exhibition to the artist invariably devolves into spectacular methods of display, where
the deciding factor is the external effect rather than a well
founded, scientifically-based demonstration of class relations. We must consider the rejection of the latter as a refusal
to build a Marxist museum, which should use various exhibiting methods, but regardless of the form of the exhibition,
its content should be justified by information received as a
result of studying the exhibited event. As far as the arrangement is concerned, we must exclude anything that is arbitrary: every detail, every stroke must be precisely justified
regardless of whether they satisfy the artist.
What is allowed and understood in a theatrical setting cannot be tolerated in a scientific one, which is what a
museum is; there can be no artificiality: objects missing from
one era substituted with objects from another cannot occupy
space of equal value in the museum exhibition, whether the
conversation pertains to dioramas on the natural sciences or
everyday life.
Using these founding principles to analyze the current
exhibition organized by the Museum of Ethnography, titled
People of the Urals and the Volga Region, we have to mention
a slew of gross mistakes that are of essential significance.
We know that its exhibitions are not complete—the directors of the museum have warned us about this—however, if
we were just talking about a few missing exhibits then this
warning would have a mitigating effect. But the sad fact is
that it is missing its fundamental material—its depiction of
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class struggle in the past is extremely weak, while we don’t
see it at all in the Soviet period; it does not show cultural construction among the people of the Urals and the Volga region
at all, which, it is known, had a colossal role in the national
politics of the SCP; it is extremely naive in its depiction of the
industrial strength of the Urals and the Volga regions with
their Soviet powerhouses; finally, though the Volga itself was
of great significance in tsarist colonial politics, which in turn
had a strong impact on the everyday life and economics of
the people of the Volga region—in an exhibit dedicated to the
people of the Volga region—there is no Volga!
None of these significant gaps are accidental. They have
appeared as a result of the fact that the museum has set a goal
for itself of depicting the lives of peoples of a vast territory—
which is extremely diverse in its economic and national
makeup—without doing research. Without acquiring the
vital materials for the exhibition through proper analysis,
the museum picks and chooses from what it happens to find
in its old reserves, uses already-available printed materials
from various researchers on other peoples of the Ural and
the Volga regions, and to the weakest possible way uses this
material in its own short-run exhibitions. These inadequate
materials are too weak to allow for the possibility of laying a
sound foundation for building the exhibition; without these
necessary items, the museum tries to fill the gaping hole with
labels, posters, and diagrams hung on walls and even, sometimes, from the ceiling. At the same time, all this graphic
material cannot convey to the visitor a visual understanding
of class struggle in its various manifestations, which is rather
complex—especially in the national regions—and which is
often disguised as a form of protecting the interests of “the
whole nation,” while in its class content it is directed purely at
protecting the proprietary interests of the propertied classes.
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No matter how artistically arranged the dioramas may
be, their museum value will be determined first and foremost based on their scientific relevance, which means that
the entire arrangement of the diorama cannot be the arbitrary product of a museum worker’s unfettered creative
endeavors, but must be a realistic depiction of that true class
struggle which occupied a place in the past and occupies a
place in the present. In order to provide such a depiction,
both that past and this present must be studied. It can’t be
achieved by way of accidental, haphazard collecting, or by
selecting flashy artifacts chosen at the personal discretion of
the museum worker, but exclusively as a result of scientific
research, which lays the foundation for the entire exhibition, which brings to light the driving force of today’s society, with all of its interconnectedness and facilitation. Only
under these conditions will the museum know what must be
included at the forefront of the exhibition, what needs to be
at the center of visitor’s attention, and what concrete task
should be given to the artist, while directing his work along
a path that is in full accordance with the entire exhibition.
In this regard things are essentially no better at the
Moscow Regional Museum. Take for instance the composition of the exhibit Socialist Construction. Here the dominant
role of the artist over the whole exhibition is particularly
apparent: the arrangement overshadows the exhibits, particularly the graphics. And can you really call a section where 95
percent of the exhibits are captions, photographs, posters,
slogans, and so on a “museum”? Museum exhibits are supposed to stand out from precisely this kind of a background,
for the exhibits themselves are intended to show the socialist
construction of nationalities populating the Moscow region.
Switching over to dioramas exhibited by the Central
Museum for Ethnography, their very content raises a series
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of serious objections. For example, there is a scene depicting, according to author’s intent, the parasitic role of monks.
How is this moment conveyed? Two monks with icons in
their hands walk into a peasant hut and beg for alms. And
that’s it. The monks are crudely portrayed; the scale is in complete discord with the setting (with a low ceiling). The first
question is: Why has this particular moment been chosen?
Is the depiction of begging for alms really the most striking
expression of the parasitic nature of clerics, of their exploitative role in regard to the working people representative of
all nationalities? Drunkenness, depravity in the “houses of
the holy,” faithful servility to the monarchy, ruthless exploitation of peasants and workers—would the depiction of this
“everyday life” of church officials, in real surroundings, be
less vivid and convincing? Especially if these dioramas are
surrounded by genuine documents proving how beneath the
mask of godliness and sermons on “Christ’s” teachings lies
hidden parasitism, depravity, and service to the exploiters?!
An incompetent and incorrect use of dioramas in
museum exhibitions can undeservedly discredit this relatively appropriate technique of depicting various scenes of
the past and present.
In order to prevent museums from transforming from the
former cabinets of curiosities into theatrical set design, we
must decisively speak out against any sort of simplification
and primitivism, and just as decisively we must demand from
museums that dioramas of domestic arts are scientifically
based. This is why we are of the opinion that the artist must
perform the tasks that the researcher gives him. The creative
impulse of the museum artist must be directed toward a better realization of these tasks, which are strictly defined by the
present, and by information received as a result of research
into one or another event.
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A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical Performance?
If these conditions were observed by the Museum of
Ethnography and the Moscow Regional Museum, if the
researcher directed the artist in these museums, we would
not be eyewitnesses pointing out the significant gaps in
recently opened and ongoing exhibitions.
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On the Question of
the Principles of Exhibition:
Central Park of Culture and
Leisure Exhibitions
I. M. Zykov
On the question of the principles of exhibition
First published in 1932
Translated by Leo Shtutin
Of all types of exhibitions, it is the technical-industrial
and socioeconomic varieties that correspond most closely
and directly to the propaganda of socialist construction.
Exhibitions of this kind are becoming powerful instruments
of agitation, and are acquiring considerable scope. They have
become indispensable components of political campaigns,
congresses, and reporting days. Alongside stationary, sitespecific exhibitions, the necessity of organizing peredvizhkas,
or mobile exhibitions, has arisen.
The idiosyncrasies of new forms of labor necessitate particular museological principles of exhibition conforming to
the specificity of the material and the concrete conditions
of its expression, whatever they may be. The methods that
are currently implemented cannot yet be deemed sufficiently refined. In consequence of growing demand, events
are being staged before methods can be verified. Theory is
lagging behind practice, and the quantity of exhibitions
trumps their general quality.
We begin our tour of exhibitions with an overview of
those that took place in 1931 at the Central Park of Culture
and Leisure in Moscow.
The Park’s endeavors in exhibition-making have attained
a broad scope. It enjoys conditions propitious for this purpose: convenient grounds, suitable premises, sixty thousand
viewers a day, and, finally, considerable financial assistance
from organizations and bodies with an interest in putting
on exhibitions. The three major exhibitions of 1931—Giants
of the Five-Year Plan, Laying the Foundations of a Socialist
Economy, and Socialist Construction in the Moscow Oblast—
delved into themes relevant to the pressing questions of
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modernity and were extremely extensive, stretching across
a combined distance of two kilometers.
The Park deserves praise for the very fact of organizing
exhibitions, and for the genuinely effective strategy of staging them outdoors along a walkway, with exhibits and viewers in immediate proximity. Yet the 1931 exhibitions, though
broad in extent, fell short. Just like some of the Park’s other
undertakings, they suffered from inferior quality, despite
their engagement with pressing questions, their broad
scope, and their externally lavish presentation.
*
*
*
The plethora of errors that distort meaning, the unbalanced
arrangement of the exhibits, the lack of explanatory captions
and labels—all this amounted to a major deficiency in its own
right. But the limitations of the exhibition did not stop there.
The problem stemmed from the exhibition’s very character.
It’s a revealing fact that neither the comments book nor
the questionnaires—of which, incidentally, too few were collected in comparison with the immense foot traffic at the
exhibition—featured remarks concerning errors identified
by visitors, even though spotting most of them required no
specialized knowledge but merely a good dollop of common
sense, the inconsistencies being an affront to the eye. Which
augurs ill: the viewer failed to notice the errors, and therefore
also failed to absorb the content of the exhibition.
The Foundations exhibition, its seventy areas encompassing every major branch of manufacturing, was arranged
outdoors along a central walkway, with visitors inevitably
traversing its entire length, at a distance of a few meters
from the exhibits. Foot traffic ran into the millions. Yet a
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On the question of the principles of exhibition
considerable percentage of visitors simply walked past, their
apprehension of the exhibition passive in nature. It was only
in a handful of the most interesting areas that these “passersby” became spectators.
Day after day, without fail, you could observe groups
of spectators gathering at the exhibition zones dedicated
to non-ferrous metallurgy, ore minerals, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) crude oil, rubber, and peat. These were
constructed along different lines. The reason they enjoyed
so much attention is this: the non-ferrous metallurgy, ore
minerals, crude oil, and peat zones of the exhibition were
set up by the exhibitors themselves, with its other areas put
together by the Park’s administration.
The non-ferrous metallurgy zone comprised a true exhibition—in other words, a vivid display of objects underpinned
by an elucidation of their nature. The zone offered a more
comprehensive assessment of its branch of manufacture
than did other zones, and provided the viewer with a host of
fresh insights—something other zones failed to achieve.
The information offered in other areas of the exhibition
was scant, exclusively numerical, and of a scope inferior to
what might be gleaned from newspapers. The zones focusing on aspects of the national economy each featured two
or three statistics and a few uncaptioned, nonsensicallyordered photographs.
*
*
*
The Giants of the Five-Year Plan and Socialist Construction
in the Moscow Oblast exhibitions featured fewer realitydistorting errors, but were by no means better in terms
of their general level. If the Foundations exhibition was a
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profoundly tiresome sequence of measly numbers that provided absolutely no insight into the various branches of the
national economy, then Giants of the Five-Year Plan was all
construction-themed decorativeness. Granted, the task of
presenting and visualizing new construction developments
isn’t an easy one—since it’s impossible to incorporate actual
components of the building work directly into the exhibition space, it becomes necessary to resort to schematism
and images—but this difficulty does not excuse the exhibition’s weaknesses.
The Park’s exhibitions were flawed not only in the sense
of being riddled with minor errors and misrepresentations,
but by dint of their very nature or character. Despite their
colossal scale and externally lavish execution, they were too
lightweight and dry in terms of content, providing insufficient insight into the objects on display, failing to penetrate
into the significance of the phenomena in question, and dealing not so much in facts as in a decorative execution stuck in
the potholes of formalistic excess.
*
*
*
The reasons for the inferior quality of the Park’s exhibitions
stem from a fundamental distortion of the methods of putting
on exhibitions, as well as from using techniques that are alien
and incongruous with the specific use of exhibitions as instruments of political enlightenment.
In part, these reasons stem from an unsound legacy. The
Park’s exhibitions have their roots in the advertising displays
of the ad agency Dvigatel’ (Engine). Exhibitions as conceived
by the Park’s exhibition administrator are tantamount to
advertising and must be constructed according to principles
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On the question of the principles of exhibition
tested in practice and conforming to the advertising methods of 1907, complemented by all the newest achievements
of the bourgeois system of Western Europe.
“Exhibitions = advertisements.” This equation has two
corollaries: an idiosyncratic means of putting on exhibitions and an idiosyncratic system of exhibit arrangement.
Exhibition practice comes to be regarded as a commercial
endeavor whose primary concern is the maximization of
profit. The cart is put before the horse and the entire exhibition process is muddled.
If the exhibition organizer serves merely to receive and
execute orders from advertisers, then, of course, concerns
about content and its execution may be absent; the exhibition administration may consist of agents whose role is
to attract exhibitors and artists of all ranks and abilities.
Although, under present-day conditions, the Park’s endeavors are being steered away from the sphere of advertising, its
attitude toward exhibitions and the system for organizing
them has remained the same, as has its administration. The
fundamental element of administration is absent—both in
those who are working on content and those who are working on the arrangement of exhibits.
*
*
*
Conscious distortion consists of the introduction of professional artistic tendencies, the emasculation of content,
and the displacement of the appropriate ratio between fact
and image.
Fine art is a domain of particularly steadfast traditions.
At the same time, in no other domain is tradition as inimical
to the objectives of the present day as in that of fine art. Not
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long gone is the era when every sphere of human endeavor,
eager to differentiate itself from related spheres, strove to
acquire its own particular focus, its own method, its own
idiom, and its intrinsic laws of development.
Afforded a leading role by the Park’s idiosyncratic system
of putting on exhibitions, all the artists cut down on content
in the most ruthless fashion.
*
*
*
The artists’ reworking of content invariably led to a fundamental metamorphosis in the character of the exhibition,
to the substitution of facts for images, schematism, and
decorativeness. Their opposition to a naturalistic display of
objects gave the exhibitions the character of a wall newspaper, wherein text became the primary, and in some cases the
only, conduit for content. Exhibitions ceased to be vivid displays of facts. Depending on the professional inclinations of
the artist, they became either posters or decorative constructions, with content reduced to a minimum in both cases.
The emasculation of content exists in correlation with the
principle of equating the notion of “exhibition” with those
of “propaganda” and “advertising.”
According to this principle, political agitation differs
from all other advertising only in terms of its content rather
than its principles, meaning that the techniques of Western
advertising—reliant on tricks, effects, and the imperative
form of the expression of the content—are perfectly applicable here, too. Exhibition content must be reduced to brief
splinters of factual information without any elucidation of
their meaning, as the exhibition must allegedly be of an agitational rather than educational or informative character
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On the question of the principles of exhibition
(“educational” and “informative” being employed as synonymous with “objective,” and antithetical to “agitational”
or slanted). Objective insight is professed to be superfluous,
inimical, and capable of destroying the agitational effect.
The fallaciousness and ignorance of this position is obvious, as are its origins in the practice of bourgeois advertising. No less obvious is its inapplicability with regard to the
propaganda of socialist construction. The aspectual presentation of material by no means precludes familiarity with
its content.
Incidentally, the mechanical transposition of the principles of bourgeois advertising—a tendency not limited to
the Culture Park—renders exhibitions lightweight, reducing them to a series of stumpy, fragmentary notices, embellished by light effects and others, too. If we are informed that
Magnitogorsk1 is the world’s biggest metallurgical plant, and
told no more about it, this information is, of course, principally identical to a poster featuring “Katyk’s world-beating
cigarette papers.”
Experience shows that the effectiveness of brief informational snippets where no attempt has been made to penetrate
into the meaning of things or to offer the viewer novel insights
is slim to nil: Who nowadays is unaware of Magnitogorsk’s
existence? Repeated exposure to long-known facts quickly
grows tiresome and is capable of eliciting altogether undesirable emotions.
In the Park, economy and technology are kept apart.
Anything remotely technological is dispatched directly to
the science and technology village. The exhibitions, meanwhile, are pure economy. Yet, alongside abstract statistical
1. Magnitogorsk is an industrial city in the province of Chelyabinsk.
—Trans.
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measures, viewers may be interested in the industrial process
as a whole. Agitation that fails to elucidate the concepts it is
based on will never fulfill its goals. If the viewer is informed
that blooming mills and cracking plants are under construction in the USSR, he’ll want to know what these are, what
they’re for, and how they work.
There is a profound and fundamental distinction to be
made between agitation and bourgeois advertising: the
focus of agitation is not the same, and neither are its aims;
the set of conditions in which it takes place is different, as,
indeed, are the people it targets. The techniques of bourgeois
advertising, developed in the ultra-individualistic conditions
of a Spenglerian Europe, a Europe of dead ends and crisis,
serve predominantly to exert pressure on the emotions, to
shift them beyond the domain of conscious control. The psychotechnics of advertising are predicated in no small part on
Freudian psychoanalysis. Its purpose is to blind and deafen,
to liberate desire from the control of the intellect.
Under the conditions of our culture, wherein man is being
liberated from the anarchy of his fragmented emotional complexes and disjointed appetites, and is acquiring an integral
unity of intellect and organizing will, advertising of this kind
is unnecessary and ineffective. The popularity of our program
of socialist construction can be based only on a deep understanding thereof. This program can be based only on a clear
awareness of the goal. The program’s realization requires the
triumph of the intellectual faculty over biological appetites.
Exhibitions focused on the problems and prospects of
our country’s industrialization must impart knowledge, and
lots of it. The more knowledge conveyed, the more the viewer’s interest is piqued. The most convincing way to exhibit
the program of our development cannot be limited to brief
informational snippets and bare statistical tables—it must
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On the question of the principles of exhibition
offer a more or less complete set of insights into the industrial process as a whole, including its technological aspects.
The viewer knows that “during the epoch of reconstruction,
technology determines everything.” The viewer is hungry for
technological knowledge.
As regards the form in which exhibition material is presented, “showing” must, by definition, take precedence
over “telling.” Inappropriate organization frequently
results in exhibitions being reduced to mere description
and bare abstraction.
*
*
*
Exhibitions dealing with questions of current affairs must,
of course, have a different fate. They must not become newspapers on a wall. Concrete, viewable facts are most convincing. They constitute a condition for intensive apprehension
and must form the keystone of the exhibition as a whole.
It goes without saying that the role of concrete facts in the
exhibitional orchestra must not be limited to their external shells—it must shed light on all its prerequisites and
corollaries.2 An exhibition is, by its nature, a subvariety of
a museum, typified by a strong centrality of purpose and a
singularity of theme.
The process of organizing a political exhibition is antithetical to the work being done in museums—made up as
they are of monuments of the past—and to the changes in
which the task of reconstructing the system of museum exhibition consists. The given and the unknown stand in inverse
relation here.
2.
This sentence is circular in the original —Trans.
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I. M. Zykov
When organizing museum exhibitions—especially in art
and historico-cultural museums—it is necessary to proceed
from the self-sufficient concretism of individual objects to
an elucidation of their meaning and to an unveiling of their
interrelationships. At the same time, it is necessary to overcome the vestiges of the recent immanentism of facts, to
combat the vestiges of the era of cultural disintegration,
when the study of art, striving to break the link of time, did
not even want to be a history of art, and strove to limit itself
to a scrutiny of individual monuments, unwilling to know
when objects were produced, what conditions spawned their
production, and what social shifts they epitomized. The most
consistent expression of time being “out of joint” was the call
to remove captions in museums (Fritz Burger).
Today, the focus of our attention has naturally shifted
from individual monuments to the unveiling of their meaning and interdependence. Our gaze is directed at the monument, beyond the monument, and between monuments.
A new element in the exhibition system is therefore perfectly appropriate, even indispensable—text as the condensation of conclusions abstracted from the ecorpus of
the exhibition.
If, in a museum context, the monument represents the
given quantity and its meaning represents the unknown,
the reverse is true when conceptualizing an exhibition on
current affairs: the task here is to find concrete incarnations
of ideas, problems, and goals directly perceivable by us.
Frequently these ideas are still in the process of being realized and reified. The task of putting on an exhibition on current affairs means finding the visual material necessary for a
complete and convincing perception of the ideas that represent the object of agitation. Museum exhibition proceeds by
way of abstraction, exhibitions by way of concretization. The
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On the question of the principles of exhibition
shortcomings of museum exhibition manifest themselves
in the hegemony of isolated self-sufficient objects; those of
political exhibitions, conversely, in an abstract presentation
of material and an excess of text. Battle must be waged on
two fronts.
*
*
*
An exhibition must offer a well-orchestrated, sequentially
unfurling corpus of insights into the object under scrutiny.
The abstraction of isolated aspects of the object’s nature is
permissible only to a certain extent. The exhibition must
penetrate as deeply as possible into the character of the
object—the deeper it penetrates, the greater the interest
elicited in the viewer. It is futile to pin one’s hopes on brevity and superficial popularization. It is imperative that each
and every notion invoked in the exhibition is properly elucidated. “Showing” must take precedence over “telling.” Text
is indispensable in the form of labeling, captioning, and commentary, but it is scarcely capable of being the exhibition’s
central focus, and external effects and tricks are of little help
for it in this impossible role.
Facts have the right to hegemonic status in the expositional system. Images may merely stand in for facts when
there are lacunas in the chain of facts. The reverse is absolutely unacceptable. Decorativeness and schematism must
not enter into conflict with facts and must not drown out
their voice.
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Plates
IV
The Museum Outside
of the Museum
Museums in
Industrial Enterprises
K. I. Vorobyov
Museums in industrial enterprises
First published in 1931
Translated by Caroline Rees
I would like to make it absolutely clear that what I have in
mind here does not involve natural history museums in
industrial plants, or indeed “mini-Hermitages.” I intend
to discuss museums in plants like Krasny Putilovets,
Krasny Gvozdilshik, Krasnoye Sormovo, Dnieprostroi,
Magnitogorsk, Svirstroy, and the Stalingrad Tractor Plant,
i.e. museums associated with the giants of socialist construction that are emerging in ever-increasing numbers on our
Soviet soil.1
The question of studying industrial enterprises was
raised at the Fourth All-Russian Conference on Local-lore
1. The Putilov Company was founded in 1848 and produced rolling
stock for the railways; then, in 1917, after the revolution, the plant was
renamed Krasny Putilovets and was responsible for manufacturing
the first Soviet tractors.
Krasny Gvozdilshik was built on the site of an old steel-rolling factory on Vasilievsky Island, Saint Petersburg. The water tower, which
was built between 1930 and 1931, is regarded as a landmark of constructivist architecture.
The Nizhny Novgorod Machine Factory, founded in 1849, was one
of Russia’s oldest shipbuilding companies. After the Civil War (1918–
1920), the Krasnoye Sormovo plant became one of the Soviet Union’s
most progressive and distinguished shipbuilding yards.
Dnieprostroi (the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station), was designed
during the 1920s as part of the Soviet drive toward industrialization.
Work on it began in 1927 and it was producing electricity by the end
of 1932.
Magnitogorsk is an industrial city in the province of Chelyabinsk. It
became a steel-producing center and was crucial to Stalin’s Five-Year
Plan during the 1930s. It went on to play an important part in the production of machinery used during the Second World War.
Construction on the Lower Svir Hydroelectric Station in the
province of Leningrad began in 1927 and it opened in 1933. The
settlement, which was economically dependent on the hydroelectric
station, was known as Svirstroy. —Trans.
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K. i. Vorobyov
(kraevedenie) 2 in the spring of 1930 and a competition
in association with the VSNKh (Supreme Soviet of the
National Economy) was announced for the best work on
factories and industrial plants. The need to harness the
country’s creative energies in order to build up the national
economy was highlighted at the 16th Party Congress, with
a particular emphasis on Soviet industrialization and the
collectivization of agriculture.
What is, then, so striking about this current direction?
Unfortunately, the study of industrial enterprises is going
ahead in spite of the announcement of the competition
and a plethora of instructions issued by the VSNKh and the
Central Bureau for the Study of Local-lore (TsBK) that are
quite out of step with the desired tempo for socialist construction. Although work involving the study of industrial
plants is being undertaken by the TsBK, most people are
unaware of this research and, for the moment, we are unable
to gauge its current scale, the direction it has taken, and
where it is heading.
The main reason behind the delayed study of industrial plants is that the workforce itself—that fundamental
research body that should have been included from the very
outset—has not been involved. To date, there have been no
large-scale projects in industrial organizations; nor has there
been any campaign emphasizing the necessity for this study.
I do not mean the individual initiatives that might have been
conducted in a whole range of central and provincial cities
2. Kraevedenie is variously translated as “local-lore,” “local studies,” or sometimes simply transliterated as “kraevedenie.” The conservation societies came under attack for their opposition to the new
Soviet construction programs, but there was no overt rejection of
conservation issues per se at the Fourth All-Russian Conference on
Local-lore. —Trans.
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Museums in industrial enterprises
since, as these initiatives are not representative of a mass
phenomenon, they do not constitute proof that this work is
actually in progress.
Due consideration must of course be given to the creation
of factory museums at the same time as the study of local-lore
and research projects. The giant socialist construction program now under way in our country is absolutely new and we
must, therefore, assemble all the material relating to it—documents, in fact, of colossal historical importance. Indeed, if
we take one of the new construction projects—Dnieprostroi,
for instance—the way it is portrayed depends on the manner
in which it develops, taking into account its domestic, social,
economic, and technical sides. Material relating to it is currently being preserved in archives and assembled, not as a
detailed, specific kind of body of information, but in order
to preserve material that has emerged during its creation.
Additionally, this is at a time when we are well aware that
there is a wealth of sociopolitical factors involved in the work
currently being undertaken in our industrial enterprises,
defining the difference between our factories, our system,
and their Western European counterparts.
I will take the political label that a pioneer sticks on the
machine tool of an absentee worker as an extreme, though
perhaps rather trifling, example. We do not pay much attention to it now, but perhaps the process of labeling the tool
and its exact wording would appear in a different light in a
film. In many years that label will be a document of great
political importance because it epitomizes the new social
conditions in force in a given plant at a given time, or indeed
those in practice in a young pioneers’ organization. This is
only a trifle, but there is an unlimited supply of information
to be gleaned from minutiae as well as from material of more
large-scale import.
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K. i. Vorobyov
Now if we take as our example a plant from the period of
economic collapse in which lighters were manufactured for
the private market and a plant where work is in step with the
required socialist tempo, then the difference is necessarily
so huge that the representation of this timespan, although
insignificant in the grander scheme of things, is of colossal
importance for educational policy makers.
A museum in an industrial enterprise has before it a very
precise set of goals. These include the necessary support
for the development of the plant as well as the struggle to
implement an industrial and financial plan (Promfinplan), to
adhere to the socialist tempo required for production, to collectivize the daily routine, and to register the shortcomings
and achievements in terms of factory production as well as
the day-to-day running and socioeconomic conditions representative of the plant in both the past and the present.
The first goal involves the factory museum as a point of
reference for scientific research and the study of local-lore
in a given plant and as a repository for material of particular
value concerning different sides of life in that plant. In my
opinion, the organization of local-lore sections and museums in industrial enterprises will force the TsBK out from
its current state of impasse. Without a point of reference for
local-lore in industrial enterprises, there can be no discussion concerning the large-scale involvement of the workforce
in matters relating to it. If you wish to interest that workforce in local-lore through the study of the flora and fauna of
a given area, you will automatically fail. But if you encourage
the workforce to study the factory where it is currently living
and working, it will clearly react more swiftly and purposefully than if it were studying a branch of botany. We must
also bear in mind that, since the creation of these museums
is important not only for a particular plant, the foundations
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Museums in industrial enterprises
will also be laid for the development of large-scale museums
of technology and economics to act as repositories for all
manner of material.
So, who will manage this task? Special research groups
will only capture life in a plant during a given period—let
us say from June to August—but we would need to ensure a
continual collection so that the museum, a small study-group
in fact, would therefore be able to justify its existence as part
of an industrial enterprise. It would act as a continual source
of propaganda promoting the industrial and financial plan
(Promfinplan), the Five-Year Plan, and the socialist reconstruction of each particular factory. Its visual representation
would be of considerable use for the plant’s sociopolitical
organizations.
Training campaigns are indeed being conducted in the
factories. Let us suppose that a ten-day civil defense training campaign is conducted and then put on one side, or a
campaign to eradicate any potential hold-ups is carried out
and also put on one side. These campaigns are conducted
by sociopolitical organizations at the factory, but there is
no continual, detailed visual repository available to anyone
who wishes to familiarize himself with the matter in hand.
This is precisely the responsibility of factory museums and
all the material relating to the different campaigns should be
housed there, including of course other main issues facing
the museum itself.
The museum would, thenceforth, introduce new teams
of workers fresh from the country and collective farms (kolkhoz) to life in a factory. As there is a significant percentage
of workers of peasant origin in these plants—workers as yet
unfamiliar with factory life—it is only natural that, since a
museum is somewhere where questions surrounding the
economic and political development of a given factory either
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K. i. Vorobyov
before or after the October Revolution might be answered, it
is also the place where groups of incoming workers would be
able to familiarize themselves with the workings of the plant
of which they are the masters. Of course, this would not be
a museum’s only function. Its principal task is to help sociopolitical organizations resolve questions concerning the
process of familiarization of these new teams of workers. We
know very well that in large industrial plants and new construction sites, the familiarization of workers, newly arrived
from the country, is of critical importance.
You are only too aware that there are a vast number of
outside visitors to a factory, including workers from other
industrial enterprises, collective farmers, students, and tourists. They become acquainted with a plant and what it produces, but fail to see the dynamics behind its development
and inner workings because the guide in charge of conducting the visit has scarcely enough time to conduct a lightning
museum tour, paying attention only to the technical side and
failing to elaborate on the history of a particular department
or factory shop. In a museum, these issues are represented in
a nutshell.
The character of the work undertaken by these museums is not limited to the foregoing: there is a whole range
of other areas in which their importance is enormous. In
organizational terms, this was solved by a resolution made
by the Fourth All-Russian Conference on Local-lore as follows: “Museums come under the jurisdiction of the locallore section of the cultural branch under the aegis of the
factory committee.” I believe that their place has now been
correctly defined, but in my view, in addition to the majority of workers from the factory floor, we need to interest
engineering and technical personnel, students, the school
affiliated with a given enterprise, and students studying
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Museums in industrial enterprises
at the technical college for the associated discipline in the
museum’s work.
Community work undertaken by students at a plant can
be divided into two groups: work at the plant in the true
sense of the word and work undertaken for the local-lore
section involved in studying a particular factory or plant.
Students at the factory school should be involved in this
work because, with a view to permanent work in the future,
they will undoubtedly be more closely involved with production than anyone for whom a detailed knowledge of
the material associated with the factory to which they are
attached is impossible.
What, then, is the fundamental difference between a factory museum and a museum of technology and economics?
The latter is devoted to the technology behind production,
whereas in the former, this is not paramount. It is, in fact,
paramount, but only generally speaking, with additional
areas being interpreted in relation to the factory to which a
particular museum is affiliated. Neither should its goals be
the same as a museum of technology and economics.
In my opinion, this is what a factory museum should be and,
in its essential form, it should include:
1. The economic and political history of the factory up
until the October Revolution.
2. The economic and political history of the factory
after the October Revolution. Here, the October
Revolution is perceived as a line of demarcation. We
would also need to refer to the civil war, the famine,
and the periods of recovery and reconstruction.
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K. i. Vorobyov
3. The role of the factory within the general economic
system and district. Here, we should bear in mind
the supply of raw materials, distribution points, and
recruitment of labor.
4. The factory in practice: the Five-Year Plan, the FiveYear Plan achieved in four years, the industrial and
financial plan (Promfinplan), the counter-industrial
and financial plan (vstrechnyi promfinplan), and the
socialist methods of working to include socialist competition, shock work, and production (the question
of export is included here). This material is constantly
changing, being added to, and developing. Numerous
diagrams would be included in this section.
5. Enemies of socialist construction and the battle
against them, sabotage, sacerdotalism, sectarianism, illiteracy, drunkenness, and the struggle against
absentees and anti-Semites. These issues would not
receive attention in an ordinary museum. A museum
of technology and economics would feature sabotage generally and sabotage by the Industrial Party
(Prompartiya).3 Individual cases of sabotage might
also feature in the museum affiliated with a particular enterprise.
6. The day-to-day routine of the workforce. This is
an unsatisfactory area as we are on the periphery
3. The Prompartiya, or Industrial Party, Show Trial took place
between November 25 and December 7, 1930. A number of prominent engineers and economists were accused of forming the party in
order to wreck Soviet industry and transport and, ultimately, overthrow the government. —Trans.
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Museums in industrial enterprises
between the old and the new. There is a wealth of
matters relating to the socialist way of life, which is
receiving scarcely any attention. Individual attempts
to summarize it are currently under way, however,
and the City Museum in Leningrad is taking steps in
that direction, but again of a general nature. Displays
would play a key role here. There could be diagrams
and etchings on view as well as miniature models of
rooms, communal flats, and hostels.
7. Finally, ideas for the development of a factory should
be included as well as any campaign work—the shock
brigades’ ten-day period of civil-defense training and
the battle against illiteracy, and so forth.
This is, in brief, how I imagine the organization of factory
museums in industrial enterprises.
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The Experience of Developing
Mobile Exhibitions
Yuri Samarin
the experience of developing mobile exhibitions
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasia Skoybedo
The task of mass enlightenment work is the most pertinent and exciting task for a museum worker today. How to
approach the organization of this mass work? How to switch
over to the rail of enlightenment work, renouncing stewing
in one’s own juices of admiration and amateurishness, so
typical of philanthropists and collectors? We need, once and
for all, to put the following principal points at the center of
the museum: each museum must actively realize the slogan
of our day, namely, that science and art are the property of
all working people.
Every museum must reorganize its work in such a way as
to turn itself from a repository of objects, collected together
by the select few for their contemplation and admiration,
into a weapon of science and political enlightenment, a
mouthpiece of militant materialism that broadcasts theory
to the masses through the language of vividly shown objects
and through the language of art.
For the majority of our museums—the collections of
which have been accumulated over the course of decades,
and sometimes centuries—this question is especially difficult. In our larger museums there are sometimes such heaps
of heterogeneous material, collected without any scientific
system, that one cannot immediately understand them or
begin to orient oneself in relation to them. It is sometimes
especially difficult to create an orderly system for restructuring a museum in order to reveal separate themes. Frequently,
one encounters a great deal of material, and at the same time,
the most important and valuable material is lacking. This
happens because previous collectors did not have a scientific
method and often gathered exhibits only in order to have
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Yuri Samarin
more in number, without really thinking about the existing
connections between one object and another.
The state of other museums (including national, regional,
and district museums) is different. These museums, which
were founded only after the October Revolution, in practice
could not yet select objects that were necessary for an orderly
and thematic installation. Here we see another extreme, but
unfortunately, the results in the first and in the second case
are equally unsatisfactory. Therefore we have to assert in
earnest that despite the fact that there is a wide network of
museums within the Soviet Union, despite the massive and
intensive work that is being done in some of them to bring
them closer to their viewers, museums, generally speaking,
remain unpopular among all levels of the working class in the
city, and especially in the village. Museums are generally visited by students. The percentage of working-class visitors is
comparatively low. The peasant masses are unfamiliar with
museums, and take up the last position in statistics of museum
visits. This sad fact is apparent not only in central museums,
but also in museums in smaller towns and more remote locations. Meanwhile, the plan for the cultural restructuring
of our entire country dictates the necessity and urgency of
including museums in the first ranks of forces moving culture
into the masses. The work must be reorganized in such a way
that all museums, without exception, become cultural centers, closely connected in their work with production groups,
schools, collective farms, clubs, and so forth. We need to reach
a point where this connection would not have an accidental,
sporadic character of visits and “nice gestures,” which are
good while they are happening but soon forgotten. We need
to reach a point where this connection is organic in character
and where the museum becomes a connecting center, a niche
for every working person who lives in a given area.
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the experience of developing mobile exhibitions
Every museum practitioner knows that it is not always
easy to entice a visitor, who goes there driven not by mere
curiosity but rather with a realization that he is going to a
museum to increase his knowledge, to learn. This kind of
visitor, whether an industrial worker, peasant, or collective
farm worker, will not only learn what is interesting to him
when he comes to a museum, but will also teach a museum
worker himself—will help him with practical instructions
and advice. Creating such a core group of patrons attached
to every museum is a very important and vital task. But the
most efficient and the most convenient way to actualize this
connection between a museum and the masses is by organizing mobile exhibitions.
If a worker or a peasant occupied with their daily work
neither has time to attend a museum, nor has yet acquired
the habit of going to museums, the museum has to come to
them. A museum has to call to them and provoke in them a
desire to develop their cultural standing. We need to admit
that workers and peasants have been attending museums
rarely up until now because our museums, for the most
part, could not assume a position necessary to satisfy visitor
demands. In this direction, museums should not fall behind
other cultural organizations, and a mobile exhibit should
become one of the most impactful and central areas of contemporary museum work. However, bare words and appeals
are going to help less than the language of objects that are
successfully and consciously selected.
Mobile exhibitions must hit the road to factories and
factory clubs, cultural parks, and reading huts in collective
farms, to schools and other similar places that workers are
accustomed to visiting without considerable strain of will or
desire to see something or hear something. A mobile exhibition, accompanied by an accessible discussion, set up in
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Yuri Samarin
such a place of cultural recreation, undoubtedly will be a
convenient conduit for scientific knowledge and an agitating factor for attracting a conscious and interested visitor to
a museum. In its content, the mobile exhibition must answer
pertinent sociopolitical questions to a much greater extent
than the internal collection of a museum.
In conjunction, an exhibition organized outside the
walls of a museum should strive not to be thematically disjointed from the actual museum and its main goals and
principles. Very successful and desirable exhibitions would
be those that represent some kind of social conclusion or
report from the museum, or from some department of the
museum, on the work performed in a given field, presented
in a popular manner.
While preparing the exhibition for any particular group
of people (peasantry, craftsmen, a particular group of workers) a particular theme can be selected, one that is closest to
this category of laborers, so that they get a substantial benefit
from visiting the exhibition (for example, an exhibition on
the development of agricultural tools for the peasantry, an
exhibition on the history of spinning and weaving for textile
workers, and so on). While leaving it to the museum worker
to select the theme of a planned mobile exhibition, we would
only summarize some industrial sectors to which mobile
exhibitions can be dedicated. These sectors would be: (a)
agriculture (in any of its various fields); (b) artisanal industry; (c) questions related to various technical and industrial advances, medicine, and generally, to various areas of
applied knowledge. It ought to be noted that a very representative and convenient method for the agitation factor, which
should always predominate, is the juxtaposition of the old
and the new. Such a concurrent contrasting display is more
lively and is the best way to increase a viewer’s interest in new
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the experience of developing mobile exhibitions
scientific and technological achievements, and to provoke
the desire to learn how to use them; revealing and explaining
various “nonscientific” ways of working would force them to
abandon them faster.
In relation to social and historical sciences—setting educational tasks as their main goal—mobile exhibitions must
try, in popular form, to acquaint the viewer with the history
of labor processes, socioeconomic formations, class struggle,
and so on. In relation to the natural sciences, mobile exhibitions must open the viewer’s eyes to the surrounding nature,
in accordance with the principles of a materialistic worldview that are to be imprinted upon his mind. It is imperative
(especially for national and ethnographic museums) that
mobile exhibits respond to the main problems of political
and economic life in the area—problems of national emancipation, separate agricultural problems, problems connected
with the Five-Year Plan for that area. If at all possible, it is
highly desirable to time mobile exhibitions according to various dates of local historical-revolutionary significance. For
example, an exhibit dedicated to the labor and everyday life
of a woman on March 8, antireligious exhibitions during
antireligious and anti-Easter campaigns, and so on.
In addition, mobile exhibitions must relate to general
problems of the day, such as: the fulfillment of the industrialfinancial plan, the struggle for skilled workers, socialist competitions, agitation, government lending, and so on.
Moving on to the question of how to build a mobile exhibition, we need to point out that when developing a plan for the
exhibition, one should select a clear and well-defined theme.
The experience of organizing mobile exhibitions shows that
diverting into different subthemes and complicating the exhibition is impractical and unnecessary. It is also completely
unnecessary to agglomerate a lot of objects, illustrations,
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Yuri Samarin
and diagrams. Abundance and overloading the exhibition
will only spoil it and will turn visitors away. It is necessary to
have a very clear and precise selection, choosing only what is
necessary for the main idea demanded by the exhibition.
While in the process of developing the plan and organizing the actual exhibition, the cooperation of specialists
from different scientific fields (for example, a historian, an
economist, an ethnographer, and a industrial worker) is very
important. Moreover—and we underscore this—the cooperation between a theoretician and a practitioner in the field
is very important. With this collective work, a theoretician—
a historian, for example—reveals the connection that various stages of production have to socioeconomic formations;
speaking about the tasks of the current moment, he points
out the dialectic development of various phenomena, progressive and viable many years ago and completely useless
under contemporary conditions. A specialist in practical
knowledge popularizes the results of scientific advances and
provides concrete conclusions and ways in which they can
be used.
Mobile exhibitions pertaining to one particular scientific
area should not, if possible, be limited to it; on the contrary,
they must try to show some general and complimentary facts
from other areas of knowledge.
Large numbers of people should be incorporated into
exhibition planning, those for whom the exhibition is
intended as well as, for example, workers for exhibitions
going to the village, and peasants and collective farm workers for exhibitions intended for the cities.
We envision the exhibits within the mobile exhibition as
follows: firstly, real objects taken from museum collections;
secondly, models and replicas if real objects are not meant
for travel or are the only one of their kind at the museum.
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When introducing models, one should try to make them
resemble the original as closely as possible and make them
to the same scale, so that there is not a false impression.
The next and very important part of the exhibition
should be illustration material, in the form of photographs,
drawings, paintings, and posters. Keeping in mind a clear
and strict selection, it is necessary to choose only what is
most relevant to the theme, providing photographs that are
maybe bigger, and if possible, of standard size, trying to
avoid photographs that are hard to understand, and if possible, trying to show in photographs what cannot be shown
in the exhibits (the process of work, living conditions, and
so on). Schematic drawings and plans should be kept to a
minimum, because they are badly and reluctantly accepted
by visitors who are not used to museums. What makes any
exhibit livelier (even one that is not specifically dedicated to
the problems of art) is the addition of artistically rendered
sketches of paintings by famous masters or their reproductions. These materials, being vivid and bright, decorate the
exhibit very well and draw attention to it. It is possible to
use both artistically agitating material and separate posters but again, in moderate quantities, not overloading the
main composition.
Material that is very useful to almost any exhibition, but
at the same time very complicated to present, is statistical
material: diagrammatic and cartographic. Following the
same principle that only what is most necessary should be
presented, every museum worker building an exhibition
must make a trial exhibition, checking the impression created by it on various groups of visitors. Only then should
he or she begin to create any diagrams or cartograms. We
would like to point out, by way of practice-based advice,
that it is necessary to try to deviate as much as possible from
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clichéd types of diagrams and cartograms—cubes, circles,
curves, and so on; instead, replace them with vivid markers,
for example, coal (show a piece of coal or its replica), grain
(show a pile of grain), and so forth.
A diagram should be interesting and accessible not only
to the person who is leading the excursion; it needs to be
composed and executed so vividly and satisfactorily that
every independent visitor stops at it. A diagram must not
be an appendix to the theme of the exhibition, but must
predominantly form a composite and necessary part of
the whole plan. If it is possible in local conditions, it is very
desirable to use light effects in the exhibition, in the form
of glowing diagrams, slides, geographic maps, and so on.
The exhibition would only benefit if some aspects presented
could illustrate the exhibited theme and its various independent episodes, for example, a replica of a tractor including
people and the whole everyday environment. A replica must
replace and reproduce what cannot be shown in reality. If it is
not possible to make a good artistic replica, then you should
abandon the idea rather than providing something that is
not artistic and does not represent real life.
Explanatory labeling is of great importance at the mobile
exhibition and in every museum exhibition. First of all, the
organizers of the exhibition must create a general introductory label, where, in a clear, intelligible form, the content of
the exhibition must be provided—its purpose, and those
conclusions that it is trying to make. This introductory label
should be accessible to everyone who visits the exhibition
and must, at the same time, serve as a list of main theses, on
which a discussion about the exhibition can be based.
If there are separate sections of the exhibition, they
should also be furnished with similar labels. A very brief
text label must accompany every object and illustration—the
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the experience of developing mobile exhibitions
more concise, the better. At the end of the exhibition there
needs to be a small, general, summarized conclusion.
Our experience in organizing mobile exhibitions suggests that labels are further animated by the inclusion of
elements of oral folklore and written literary work. To demonstrate the theme, a small number of proverbs, riddles,
sayings, songs, and poems presented in an abridged format.
This material, which reveals the theme more fully, can sometimes serve as auxiliary material for revealing social, class,
and other important topics that are sometimes not fully
shown in the exhibitions themselves.
It is necessary to provide a small number of slogans for
each exhibition (but under no circumstances overloading it
with them). Slogans must address political problems that
appear in connection to the exhibition; moreover, it is good
to provide a source from which this or that slogan is taken, if
it is taken from a written work, newspaper, appeal, and so on.
Undoubtedly, the ideal method of showing the exhibition is when the person who is very familiar with it guides the
exhibition from beginning to end and can lead discussions
when it is being shown. If this is not possible, it is necessary to accompany the exhibition with detailed instructions
on how to show it—in other words, to make the exhibition
talk for itself, to include the plan of the exhibits’ locations,
to mark the route of guided tours with arrows, to attach a
list of popular literature on the topic of the exhibit (and for
the most important books to provide hard copies of). It is
necessary to include a notebook for recording impressions
and instructions that would arise during the visit. From our
experience we can assert that this kind of notebook contains extremely valuable material, which can teach a great
deal. It is also possible to create a small questionnaire for the
viewers, with separate questions connected to the exhibit.
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During discussions, if possible under local conditions, it
is sometimes very appropriate to accompany these discussions with film screenings or slide shows that are thematically connected to the exhibition and that can supplement it.
Photographs and other types of illustrative materials
must be as standardized as possible, or combined into one
or several common groups of the same size and with the
same mounting or frames. Diagrams and cartograms must
not bring discord into the uniform artistic composition, and
must be as unified as possible. If it is not possible to provide
labels that are professionally printed, then they should be
written on durable material (cardboard, tin, ply board), in
clear and relatively large handwriting, with titles and section titles emphasized by a different font or a bigger size.
Labels typed on a typewriter should be excluded, as they fade
quickly and disappear.
As it is meant to be transferred from place to place, the
whole mobile exhibition must be constructed in such a
way that it is easy to take it apart and put it back together
in a short period of time. In this case, labels and other flat
materials can be permanently attached during setup—and
this would be useful later, because it would help anyone
to quickly orient himself during the process of hanging
the exhibits. It is highly desirable that an exhibition that
has been at a given place for a long time is not forgotten
afterward by local organizations and visitors; therefore, it
is desirable to have a small brochure, even one that is typed
on a typewriter or a hectograph, so that it can be distributed
as a reminder of the exhibition.
While organizing a mobile exhibition, organizers must
always connect their enlightenment work to some extent
with the general popularizing work of the museum. And
while showing the exhibition, they must try to promote
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the experience of developing mobile exhibitions
their museum with the goal of increasing attendance and
creating a pool of regular patrons from the working and
peasant classes.
To further demonstrate and practically assist museum
workers in constructing mobile exhibitions, we provide
here a general description of typical exhibitions, which were
organized by the East Slavic Department of the State Central
Ethnographic Museum in 1930.
*
*
*
False and Scientific Agriculture
The purpose of the exhibition is to demonstrate the connection between religious beliefs and backward forms of agriculture; the main task of the exhibition is to demonstrate
the connection between production and ideology and to
reveal the class essence of religious beliefs. The antireligious
importance of the exhibition is based on comparing elements of agricultural magic, or “false agriculture,” with new,
scientific methods of agriculture. The organizing principle
of the exhibition: for greater contrast, all material pertaining
to the old way of life is exhibited against a dark-gray background; material pertaining to the new way of life, against a
red background.
An introductory label on the topic of “Agricultural Cults,”
which introduces the exhibition’s theme and enhances the
viewer’s comprehension.
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1.
“False Agriculture”
1. Ceremonial cookies that are baked and eaten, or buried
in the ground during planting, with the magical purpose
of increasing crop yields: “a plow,” “a harrow,” “molding,” “a sickle,” “a lark,” “a cross and a tail bone”
(cookie replicas). Proverbs and popular sayings connected with them.
2. Primitive agricultural tools, with which the previously
discussed rituals were carried out. Models of a plow,
a harrow, a sickle, a scythe, with photographs of the
labor process.
3. Objects related to spring rituals connected with agricultural works: (a) photographs of the cooking process of
traditional “fried eggs,” which were fried during the
female spring holiday of “Margoski”; (b) photographs
of a ritual female “Turnip” game; (c) a wreath of birch
branches, which was used to tell fortunes during the
days of green branches, the so-called Trinity Day.
4. Objects related to summer rituals. A cuckoo coffin,
pertaining to the ritual titled “The Cuckoo Funeral,”
performed in the days of so-called Peter’s Lent. This
ritual is connected to the myth of a dying and resurrected god of vegetation.
5. Objects related to autumnal preharvest rituals.
Photographs showing the ritual of “weaving the
beard,” performed in the final moments of the harvest, which has as its basis a sacrifice to the god of
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vegetation and a transfer of vegetative power to
the Earth for future harvests. A bunch of ears—the
“flower,” which was blessed in church, and the grains
from which were used during winter sowing. The ritual cookie known as “Ilyinskaya snake,” which was
eaten as protection against magic.
6. “Holy” patrons of the land. The icons of Christian
“saints” who acted as patrons of agriculture for
common people are demonstrated in the exhibition, and their pre-Christian origin is revealed.
“Saint Nicholas”—the patron saint of agriculture
and the “Savior from all Troubles”(one icon). “Saint
George”—the saint of farming and cattle breeding
(one icon). “The Virgin Mary”—“the grower of bread”
(one icon).
7. The cult of cattle breeding and magic. Ritual cookies
that are baked and given to cattle to increase the size
of the offspring: “horses,” “cows,” “pigs.” “Saint”
Vlasius—cattle protector (an icon). “Saint” Modest,
“Medost” in folklore —the protector of cattle rearing
and beekeeping (icon). “Saint” Flor and Lavr—protectors of horses (icon). A clay smoking pipe, used to
smoke cows during calving. A clay pitcher, in which
holy water was brought to the fields for blessing the
cattle during the first grazing in the spring. A photograph depicting the ritual of “plowing the village”
during mass cattle epidemics. “Chicken god”—a
stone with a hole, which was hung in a chicken coop
and was considered to be the protector of chickens.
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2.
Scientific Agriculture
In contrast to the previous section of the exhibition, here is
a collection of photographs, slides, and slogans that characterize the new life of the village and illuminate scientific
methods of agriculture, such as harvest feasts, the startup of
the first tractor, the operation of the first reading hut, various
moments in the mechanized cultivation of land (a tractor,
a combine, an electric plow), a communal cattle barnyard,
an incubator, improved cattle breeds, and so on. A diagram
that compares harvest yields from one hectare using “God’s
help” and old, manual tools for cultivating land; and using all
the latest advances in science and technology. This section,
equipped with various slogans corresponding to political
momentum, provides a stark contrast to the first section and
makes it “agitational” in the sense that it demonstrates old
forms of agriculture, based on “false agriculture,” while at the
same time propagandizing new rational, scientific methods
of agriculture in a socialist village.
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Museum in the Street
P. N. Khrapov
Museum in the Street
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasia Skoybedo
It has been ten years since the first harbingers—display cases
in the street. Now we have whole park districts for recreation
and leisure, certain parts of which are being turned into
museums. The idea of bringing the museum out to the street
is becoming a reality. But these are just cases—singular cases
on our cultural front. And, unfortunately, we have to conclude that these projects still maintain “old traditions”—they
are just as expensive and inaccessible to large demographics, they still exhibit (if it is a museum on a “closed” street)
with a large degree of academism and mute objects which
are incomprehensible to individual visitors. We need museums in the street that literally correspond to the meaning of
this word—where visitors, while resting, can gain knowledge
of various topics of science and technology, industry and
agriculture, without spending a cent and without having to
resort to assistance from a specialist-guide, rather only relying on short, smartly composed labels.
Needless to say, a museum could be the best propagandist of scientific-historical knowledge, of science and technology; and a museum in the street represents the most efficient
method of mass cultural enlightenment for the general
public. Is our society, and are our cultural budgets, ready to
adequately meet the idea—museums in the street, museums
without fences? We can answer confidently and strongly:
yes, we are ready. We already have experience in organizing
museums, mobile exhibitions on health education (National
Commissary on Health), and antireligious and agricultural
displays (Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum). We also have
made several attempts to bring the museum out to our inner
public alleyways (Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum).
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The experience of having working mobile museums and
museums in public passageways has fully justified itself; a
visitor, upon entering such open museums, sometimes ending up there by chance, draws knowledge on various topics
that interest him, widening his intellectual ken and then,
after increasing his curiosity, goes into closed scientific-educational museums, where he satisfies his cultural-political
inquiries. And finally, we have two years of experience in
organizing a biological corner on the square of the Miusskaya
Public Garden in Moscow—this is the first step in the realization of the idea to “take the museum into the street.”1
The Miusskaya Public Garden, after a three-year-long
negotiation with Moscow Communal Services, became part
of the Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum, and it was here that
the initiative on organizing a biological corner of a museum
started; after further negotiations with the department of
municipal improvement of the Krasnopresnensky Council,
we provided management, while the department provided
everything else—tools, workers, seeds, planting material,
and so forth.
The whole production plan was composed of several
sequences or steps, contingent upon material capabilities and
the financial support on which the museum could depend.
The first step or phase of our work—the minimum program—amounted to us asking the department of municipal
improvement to leave the park to us without any changes in
the layout of its lawns, taking upon ourselves the management of the work that was being done by the department of
1. Biological corners were green spaces organized by the nearby
Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum to demonstrate mostly to school students the growth process of the most valuable technological medicinal
herbs and seed cultures; and also to demonstrate a technique of artificial pollination and plant vaccination. —Ed.
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municipal improvements in the park, without any additional
expenses. We wanted to give the green spaces of the park,
which are generally planted with regular grass, a character
of scientific-educational illustrations, revealing a number of
common biological themes through plants, paving the way
for the practice of agriculture.
In the second phase of our production we envisioned the
creation of a pool in one of the central parts of the garden,
which would allow us to show the water and swamp fauna by
means of populating the pool with common freshwater animals, and in this way to introduce into the biological corner
both elements of zoological themes and methods of combating the larvae of malarial mosquitos.
In the third phase of our work, we intended to put caged
enclosures in different parts of the garden. Additionally,
we thought it rational to select the dwellers of these cages
based on practical themes, like “friends and enemies of agriculture,” an insectarium for the biological study of human
enemies, revealing ways to combat them.
And finally, if it were possible to construct, in one part of
the garden, big glass cases, then the museum could commit
to creating periodic exhibitions of its collections on various
topics in them, or, to put it differently, to becoming a museum
in the street.
Exclusively working with museum employees was not
part of the museum’s plan, and contradicted the principal
goals of the whole museum. Therefore, it was necessary to
firstly include in this work various scientific and research
organizations, which are connected in their daily activities
with a number of themes that we were projecting on the
garden. Through negotiation we were able to find the support and willingness to participate in the work on the park
from the following agencies: (a) the nursery of medicinal and
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technical cultures at the Chemical Department of Moscow
State University, (b) 2nd Chemical and Pharmaceutical
University, (c) the experimental forestry project of LosinoPogonniy Island, (d) the corporation for the processing of
edible fats, and (e) the agricultural laboratory of the newspaper The Poor (the latter for the direct participation in the
work on the park); and also a number of other organizations
and consulting foundations. These connections with the
aforementioned organizations provided us with seeds and
seedlings, and also with consultation; this assistance was
given readily and for free.
The second stage of the organizational work, and the
most important one, which would guarantee the success of
the whole enterprise, was the creation of a group of “friends of
the garden”—daily assistants to perform the work to be carried out in the space. The best people for this job were young
naturalists from district schools. With this purpose, the
Biomuseum, at one of the assemblies of teachers-natural scientists of the Krasnopresnensky district, presented a report
on the proposed work in the garden, the projected plan for
further development of the idea of bringing the museum into
the street, and the role that students could play in this.
As to be expected, the teachers of the district unanimously accepted the idea of a collective use of the garden for
cultural purposes.
Soon, after two or three assembly meetings of teachersnatural scientists of the Kransopresnenskiy district and one
meeting with a representative of the students (who later
formed the main nucleus of young naturalists), an active
group of workers was organized, responsible for the realization of the minimum program.
One of the main jobs in the garden was a working
Sunday dedicated to cleaning up the park for the planting
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campaign—the fence needed to be repaired, garbage
needed to be removed, paths needed to be cleared, and so
on. For this purpose, it was necessary to combine this active
group of students with a larger body of students from the
whole district.
This was done relatively easily: each teacher-natural scientist promised to provide ten to fifteen people from the
school, and if possible, even more.
On the eve of the working Sunday there was a meeting of
the central student group—representatives from the twenty
district schools—in the building of the Biomuseum, where
students were given a more detailed overview of the upcoming goals. At the meeting, the seriousness of the upcoming
work was strongly stressed and the Biomuseum’s demands
of the active group were discussed, along with the prospects
for the growth of the biological corner in the garden. Then
the student participants in the working Sunday were divided
into groups. One person from the active group was made
responsible for the organized conduct of the work and the
inventory count: fifty shovels, twenty rakes, pliers, hammers,
saws, and wheelbarrows. Every person from the active group
knew, according to the list, the tools that he was responsible
for during this working Sunday.
A whole army of students showed up for the working
Sunday.
During this memorable working Sunday, many of the students held a shovel or a rake for the first time in their lives; for
them it was a celebration of labor, a time to put theoretical
studies of agriculture from school to use. Here they felt their
power as the creators of future life. By one o’clock, more than
half the garden was cleaned up completely.
All participants in the working Sunday clearly understood the goal set before them, and the importance of the
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work they carried out; they knew what was required of them.
It was a different case with visitors to the public garden: the
regulars—aunts, mothers, and children—were ignorant;
they were surprised by everything that was going on. As they
observed, outsiders asked work leaders why this was necessary and why Moscow Communal Services wasn’t doing the
work. The students, not fully understanding our goals, were
confused by these questions. We had to react accordingly to
such ignorance from visitors. Two students, who were the
most active, organized an ad hoc rally in the public gardens,
where they quickly and clearly informed the visitors of the
present work being done and the prospective development
of the plan for the biological corner on the grounds of the
Miusskaya Public Garden. Rallies, similar to this one, have
been repeatedly organized by students with children in the
garden, in order to prevent looting and damage to the plants
in the future.
The next step of our work in the garden was a sowing
campaign. Here, as to be expected, there were skeptics and
detractors: “Planting cabbage, tomatoes, and other things
will spoil the whole garden,” some people said—representatives of the “higher circle,” the aesthetes. Other “sensible”
individuals feared that the edible plants would be stolen and,
as a result, the whole garden would be damaged. To counteract this we needed to intensify with ever more energy
our everyday work among the population—the visitors of
the garden—and to display a number of warning labels; we
put most hope in the latter. Labels appeared in the garden
three days after we began work, and they contained warnings like: “Don’t walk on the grass,” “Children, respect your
comrades’ labor,” and so on. Additionally, there were several
large labels, which pointed out who organized the work, who
handled it, and what was being done in the garden.
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Every theme of our plan had its caretaker in the form
of two or three responsible persons from each school. We
received seeds and planting material for free from various
organizations that were interested in our work, and also
from the department of municipal improvements, which
has always been very helpful to us in this respect.
We were provided with working power for tillage and
for the daily care of the plants: the department of municipal improvements provided us with one qualified worker—a
gardener-horticulturalist—for the duration of the vegetation
period and, depending on the need, provided the workforce
for seasonal agricultural work.
The work of schools and their representatives consisted
in executing the main tasks at hand for each theme and in
keeping a diary. The person in charge needed to create étiquetage, manage all the information, work to communicate with
departments and specialists to buy seeds and seedlings, plant
and sow under the direction of people competent in this field,
and perform the collection and registration of crops.
In addition, the responsibilities of those in charge of a
theme included protecting the plants by creating and displaying warning labels for them in a timely manner, carrying out daily cultural educational work with residents of
the district, and organizing activities for children in order
to make these young regulars true friends of the garden.
One to three days before any plant-based work that exhibited clear educational value, those in charge of themes had
to create short, colorful labels that would show the time of
the proposed work in order to always keep visitors informed
about the work being done in the garden. Caretakers of the
themes, in addition to the étiquetage of course, had to be prepared to provide visitors with explanations for any questions
they might have in connection with the theme; this work
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demanded ongoing learning and preparation from the one
doing the explaining, requiring him to keep his knowledge
on the given topic current. For visitor questions outside the
docent’s purview, a protocol was created to guide them to the
appropriate organization for more comprehensive answers.
In order for a school and its students, responsible for
a given theme, to get acquainted with the content of their
theme in a timely manner, they were provided a list of literature, including addresses of organizations where they could
get full information on the theme. The majority of literature
on various themes in our plan can be found in the library of
the Biomuseum.
We have carried out our minimum program as follows:
1. Using over one hundred plants—medicinal and
technical—we illustrated the meaning of their cultivation in the USSR and the importance of each plant
for export.
2. In one big area of the garden, we demonstrated crop
rotation, with the grain areas of various crops, in
order to acquaint the city population with those measures that are the basis of the contemporary goal for
developing agriculture.
3. A forest school was organized, where technology for
maintaining and developing forests in the USSR was
demonstrated. In the same vein, willow and poplar
plantations were erected to demonstrate a method
for battling deforestation and dune sand, as well as
fortifying ravines.
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At the forest school, using a variety of tree types (ash, maple,
pine, fir, and so forth), various ways of managing forests
were taught, along with transplanting techniques, seeding
in plots, and the difference between annual, biennial, and
triennial plants. In the future we envision starting work on
grafting forest trees, acclimatizing various plants, and planting a Japanese miniature park-grove in a special glass display
case (this last project will be carried out by one of the garden
regulars—a worker, an amateur gardener).
In the same area, we plan to display, in a glass case, various
instances of wood technology from 1931:
1. “Melliferous plants.” There are various plants displayed with large quantities of nectar and, additionally, two beehives, one of them behind glass for
scientific work with bees. This is the realization of a
portion of the third part of our project, the prospective development of a biological corner in the garden.
2. “Experiments in bacterial and mineral fertilization.”
We conduct these experiments predominantly on
technical plants. At the same time, we display several experiments on seed stimulation. These works
are carried out by the agricultural laboratory of the
newspaper The Poor.
3. “The weeds of the field and the garden, and the means
of combating them.” We displayed twenty-four plots
with various weeds, and had one general label, and
individual labels based on the number of weeds.
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4. Experiments in hybridization: there were more than
ten types of poppy, petunia, and peas.
5. Experiments in grafting on grass plants. We sowed:
flowering tobacco, potatoes, and tomatoes. Students
from the second category school are working on
grafting and hybridization.
Initially, before working in the public garden, students
had a short practicum on hybridization and grafting in the
Biomuseum’s greenhouses. It is hard to imagine the excitement of the students when they managed, by means of grafting, to get tobacco and potatoes on a tomato, tomatoes and
potatoes on tobacco, and tomatoes on potatoes. All works on
this theme were carried out in the evenings, in view of garden
visitors. In these cases, a crowd of curious people surrounded
the students; the majority of them asked with interest, “Will
something come from this?” And the answer was the assurance, “Yes, of course.” The answers were assured because
the students already had results from grafting greenhouse
plants, and now they had faith in the success of their work
in the garden.
It is hard to say who was awaiting the grafting results
more, the visitors or the workers; apparently they were all
interested. After a week, the bag cap was removed from the
place of grafting, and a label with the words “grafting” and
an arrow to the place of grafting was installed.
Every day, caps were removed, and there were more
than twenty or forty successful grafts; it needs to be mentioned that they all avoided being damaged or stolen until
the end of the vegetation period. Frequently, you could see
a visiting worker explaining the “magic” of grafting to his
acquaintances.
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In conclusion, the two-year experience was rather successful; for some themes there were instances of going
beyond the plan—various goals of the second project of
our program for the future have been completed. The main
accomplishments of the first year: (a) skeptical doubts
about this project’s success have been destroyed; (b) residents of the district are prepared to accept a new, until now
unheard-of movement in Moscow—“take the museum into
the street”—even more; it has become a laboratory.
So, in this first attempt at creating a museum in the
street, the Biomuseumcan can finally and boldly claim: we
are not alone. Now we are being helped by the district, a
gardening trust, and the district department of municipal
improvement, and they help us in such a way that beginning
in 1931, we can provide payment for two or three specialists
in agricultural gardening and a zoologist for organizing biocorners in various districts of Moscow—bio-corners realizing
the third phase of our work on museums in the street.
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Bringing the Agitprop-Truck
to the Service of
Cultural Construction
M. S. Ilkovsky
bringing the agitprop-truck
First published in 1932
Translated by Alexandra Fleming
Not such a long time has passed since the emergence of the
first agitprop-vans, charged with the responsibility of delivering cultural propaganda to remote, distant regions—especially those cut off from cities—where cultural centers or
clubs, reading huts, and so forth, either did not exist at all, or
existed in only their most rudimentary forms.
Indeed, it should be noted that the time has not yet come
for us to consign to history the attempts of many organizations to put cultural work on wheels and thus triumph over
those huge expanses that lie between important cultural
centers and our state farms, collective farms (sovkhozes and
kolkhozes), and villages. Such efforts have continued into
our age, and have led to the appearance of agitprop-vans,
agitprop-train wagons, and even agitprop-trucks—but, feebly equipped, and transporting mobile works in only an
ad-hoc manner, these have been unable to carry out any consistent, widespread, mobile cultural-educational work. Yet
it should not go unnoticed that the desired results of these
mobile endeavors have been achieved—even surpassed—
and that there are agitprop-vans nowadays. These must now
make way for powerful, high-speed, fully equipped agitproptrucks. The pace of cultural revolution demands this.
Modern agitprop-trucks can bring culture to the masses,
swiftly covering those vast expanses that extend across one
sixth of the globe’s surface, encompassing numerous factories, industrial plants, collective farms, tractor stations, coal
mines, metal ore mines, and sawmills—amongst others. It
is at these points that it is not always possible to provide
cultural facilities. And this is where the agitprop-truck must
play its part. We need it to access the most remote corners
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of the country, wherever there are roads, and to support the
thousands of troops of our cultural army as battle intensifies on the front lines of culture, against those fiercest enemies of socialism: illiteracy and cultural ignorance.
This support could be channeled through hundreds
of agitprop-trucks, which can quickly arm our cultural
soldiers—teachers, museum workers, cultural-educational
administrators—with every refinement of technical knowledge. The trucks will be able to travel quickly from place to
place, offering support along the way to clubs, houses of
culture, communal farm support institutions, reading huts,
schools, and museums, and also engaging directly with workers as they work, be it in the field, the forest, or lumber mills.
With the agitprop-truck and all of its equipment, the
cultural brigade is also able to organize a team of cultural
activists from workers and collective farmers (kolkhozniks).
It will also be entirely possible for it to provide exhibitions on
a variety of subjects—and to provide other forms of cultural
facilities—for village meetings, industrial and collective farm
conferences, regional congresses, and more.
These are the objectives that should stand before the new
agitprop-truck, and our trucks, technically well equipped,
will meet them with ease.
The truck can be fitted with auxiliary technical equipment (film and image projectors, photography equipment,
a radio, a gramophone, an electricity generator, and a whole
host of other appliances), and should be manned by a
well-trained cultural brigade of three, each assigned strict
responsibilities for their hours of work and travel. Such
an enterprise could with confidence be termed a “mobile
cultural complex,” and, because of its speed of movement,
its technical enhancements—which enable displays on the
exterior of the vehicle—and the clear, well-planned work of
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bringing the agitprop-truck
the brigade itself, this cultural complex can travel swiftly
from place to place, thereby achieving a wide reach, while
offering services to numerous workers and collective farmers, and extending support to local cultural institutions—all
in a short space of time.
How should the agitprop-truck be constructed? Above
all, the truck should serve as a well-equipped base, fitted
with all the latest technology, such as radio, film, and photography equipment, and so forth; it should make possible
the use of photography, to instantaneously capture the different forms of work going on in fields, tractor stations, and
repair shops, and breakthroughs in the fulfillment of an
enterprise’s industrial-financial plan; it should also enable
the swift organization of illuminated photographic displays,
exhibiting such photographs as vivid local material. In the
agitprop-truck there will also be a gramophone, musical
instruments (a bayan, a piano accordion, balalaikas, guitars, dombras, bugles, and so forth), an exhibition of posters,
mobile charts, and various plans, and collections of diapositives on different themes (on glass and film, or for projection
on a collapsible cinema screen).
The cultural brigade would align their work closely with
the united cultural plan, and make efficient use of all auxiliary equipment available on the agitprop-truck. One person must be a skilled driver, projectionist, radio technician,
and electrician; the second will read reports, lectures, and
discussions, answer inquiries and provide consultations,
and oversee the reading hut and other larger-scale operations; the third will lead cultural activities: in each location
he will nominate entertainers and performers from within
the team of cultural activists, gather local material for performance, develop this material with the performers, and organize musical groups. He must also be able to play a musical
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M. S. Ilkovsky
instrument himself. One of the crew must know how to use
the camera and record each individual event, and they must
also know how to edit a photomontage, to make it accessible
for the viewer.
The truck’s electricity generator is of great importance. A
dynamo is located within the truck’s body, driven by a small,
five horsepower engine. Under no circumstance is it recommended to use the car’s motor to set the dynamo in motion,
as this will lead to an inefficient use of both the powerful
motor, and of fuel. A small, five horsepower kerosene engine
set up alongside the dynamo is the most economical means
of driving the latter, with a discharge pipe for exhaust gases
directed down under the floor, itself thoroughly insulated
with asbestos or klingerit.
The agitprop-truck in its entirety consists of a one-and-ahalf metric ton cab and chassis, of the Ford or AMO brand. A
body with double walls and a double floor will be mounted
onto the chassis. The upper floor (approximately 2 meters)
can be pulled out in order to serve as a platform for entertainment. The lower floor (approximately 76 cm) is fixed; the
dynamo and kerosene engine are secured to it. The body’s
rear doors open outwards from the center; two radio masts
(made of small metal tubes) are installed on the body’s roof
and held up by collapsible supports secured at their base by
sockets and bolts; these masts are raised to a vertical position during broadcasts, and a wire dipole antenna is suspended between the mast tips. When the truck is in motion
the antenna is lowered, and the masts are stowed on the roof
and held in place with appropriate strapping.
The truck during a working session: the radio masts are
lifted, the radio antenna is suspended between the masts,
while at the rear of the truck’s body, two windows are opened;
one opens outward, supported on both sides by straps or
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bringing the agitprop-truck
small metal plates, and serves as a shelf where a loudspeaker
for radio or gramophone broadcasts can be set up; the second
hatch opens inward and serves as a window for inquiries and
consultations. The side walls of the body open outward; the
upper half opens upward and is supported from underneath
by two braces, whereas the bottom half is connected to the
wall of the body by hooks along its long edge. However, it also
attached to rotatable brackets and can therefore be moved,
meaning it can be unfastened and fixed at either a higher or
lower level, depending on the nature of the work being carried out by the agitprop-truck. In fig. 2,1 the agitprop-truck
is depicted during a radio or gramophone broadcast, where
inquiries are being dealt with and consultations are being
given; in the same image, the reading area has been opened
out, enabling easy access to reading materials.
The agitprop-truck’s work in the fields (fig. 3): in the evening, the agitprop-truck gives cinema screenings in the
fields; here, a film projector (the GOZ portable projector)
has been set up on the open rear window, and a collapsible
cinema screen has been set up at a specific distance from the
truck; in such an arrangement a motion picture can be displayed, the open space making it possible to put on a largescale cinema screening.
Exhibition at the agitprop-truck (fig. 4): the radio masts
are raised to their vertical position. A cloth banner hangs
between them, with slogans on both sides. The side walls
are both open, with the upper halves lifted and held by supports on the roof of the truck’s body, serving as a surface
that can be used to display the name of the exhibition, slogans, and other materials. The lower side walls are supported
by braces, and are fixed to the floor of the body by hooks,
1.
See illustration in the plates section—Ed.
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M. S. Ilkovsky
thereby serving as shelving for three-dimensional materials
(models, constructions, prototypes, molds, and more). The
rear doors and inner side walls of the body are used to display
two-dimensional materials (posters, diagrams, and other pictorial art). On the rear side of the body, a collapsible book
display case is assembled, where literature illustrating the
themes of the exhibition is presented.
The agitprop-truck’s stage (fig. 5): the rear doors are
opened on both sides, the floor is moved out of the rear and
supported by special scaffolding. The door opening into the
body is concealed by special curtains on either side.
The work of the agitprop-truck in conjunction with the local
reading hut (fig. 6): reading huts without electric lighting
can source electricity from the agitprop-truck. The radio set,
film, and image projectors can be transported inside, and the
truck itself can now serve as an auxiliary base, supplying all
auxiliary accessories to the reading hut or club, based on the
planned structure of each event at a given establishment.
These new trucks must be brought to the service of cultural construction, as they will play an enormous role in
the realization of economic and political campaigns, and
could also carry out the work of mobile museums, becoming mobile centers of mass culture, through which the decisions of party conventions and the decrees of the Central
Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
can be brought swiftly to each and every worker, collective
farmer, and individual farmer, and through which all questions regarding social construction can be illuminated.
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The Mobile Model of the
Instructive Laboratory Van
and its Operation
I. F. Sheremet
The Mobile Model
First published in 1935
Translated by Anastasiya Osipova
The Ukrainian Museum of Agriculture in Kiev has extensive
experience in constructing and equipping special load-trucks
(one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half tons) for the transportation of agricultural exhibitions. Since 1929, the Museum
of Agriculture has brought its mobile exhibitions to almost
5,000 collective farms (kolkhoz) in the Kiev, Vinnytsia, and
Chernigov regions of the Ukrainian SSR.
Each year our experience brought new changes in the
construction of the car trunk to increase the square footage of the exhibition. In order to help the collective farms in
the organization of laboratory vans, and also in improving
their operation, it was decided to equip a special car trunk
to house a model of a laboratory for a collective farm. The
task was to install demonstrative lab equipment according
to the list approved by the People’s Land Committee so that
it would be possible to conduct all the necessary chemical
tests right there in the car. Among the goals of organizing
the work of a mobile instructive laboratory van was to demonstrate to the collective farm workers how and with what to
equip the kolkhoz laboratory van.
Our task was to educate the collective farm workers on
how to handle and use the laboratory equipment and how
to conduct scientific tests to study the soils, fertilizers, parasites and plant diseases, grain quality and its by-products. In
the area of livestock farming these tests will permit the study
of the amelioration of stock, improving the quality of their
food stock and expanding its range. In addition, we must
teach kolkhoz workers how to use chemical equipment and
reagents, and how to conduct chemical tests in the laboratory van, and so forth.
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All of this required the construction of a new and
improved type of car trunk. As a result, we built a special
trunk designed by the director of the Museum of Agriculture,
T. P. Shirokosharov.
The main goals and requirements of a mobile instructive laboratory van dictated the following program for its
equipment:
Introductory part. On a board in front of the car
there is to be an artistic rendering of the process of
radically restructuring a village (old and new villages compared) according to the speech given by
Comrade Stalin at the 17th Congress of the Bolshevik
Communist Party; the process of the reconstruction
of agriculture presented in a historical perspective.
Instructors and leaders of the laboratory vans. An artistic montage with a portrait of Comrade Postyshev in
the foreground and the lead organizers of the laboratory vans along with citations from the early speeches
of P. P. Postyshev.
Experience of organizing and equipping the best model
laboratory vans of the Ukrainian SSR (a photo of the
external and inner organization, a model of the inner
arrangement, programs and work plans, activities of
special sections, and so on).
General Farming corner: (a) soil and fertilizers samples; (b) map of soils; (c) devices for the taking of
samples and determining the quality of fertilizers,
and so forth.
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The Mobile Model
Agricultural technology and grain laboratory corner:
(a) herbarium samples and grains of standard agricultural cultures; (b) devices for the analysis of the
sprouting of grain; (c) schemes for crop rotation; (d)
agricultural machines and their use for specific farming tasks.
Principal pests and plant diseases corner: (a) collections of pests and diseases; (b) main ways to fight
them; (c) devices and apparatuses for the study of
pests and diseases of agrarian cultures.
Meteorological station: (a) main devices; (b) methods
and technology of observations.
Fruit and vegetable production corner: (a) reproductions of the standard strains of fruit and vegetables;
(b) seeds of fruit and vegetable cultures; (c) tools and
equipment for garden and agrarian work.
A fodder corner: (a) samples and the main characteristics of different types of fodder; (b) study of the fodder with the goal of its rational use (liming, protein
enrichment, ensilage, damping, and so forth); (c)
models for the preparation of fodder.
Animal-farming corner: (a) bas-reliefs of the planned
breeds; (b) schema of the various ways of improving
local livestock with low productivity (i.e. crossbreeding) (c) schema for the studying of different rations
for large cattle, swine, and work horses.
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Laboratory of prophylactic zoo-hygiene: (a) collections
of livestock diseases and methods of fighting them
(infectious and skin diseases, parasites, and so on);
(b) disease prevention (keeping the animals clean,
taking care of their skin, quality feeding and rations,
and so on).
Chemical agrarian laboratory: (a) a complete set of
lab equipment recommended by the People’s Land
Commissariat of the Ukrainian SSR (scales, drying
cabinet, primus stove, vials, reagents, and so on); (b)
all instruments and reagents for soil analysis (fertilizers, poisons, milk, and so on).
Equipment for mass tours/events: (a) a projection lamp
with transparencies; (b) film projector; (c) equipment and instruments for excursions. For this activity a special brigade must be formed that will include:
(a) a brigadier (also an agrochemist); (b) an agronomist manager of mass entertainment; (c) a chauffeurmechanic (to drive the car, run the film projection
booth, and so forth).
During each trip to a collective farm, the work of the brigade
consists of the following:
Presenting the theory behind the general questions
of the social reorganization of agriculture and the
tasks of the laboratory vans. Lecture—one hour.
Chemistry at the service of socialist agriculture.
Lecture—one hour; practical lab workshop—five
hours.
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The Mobile Model
Field-crop cultivation. Lecture—two hours; lab workshop—four hours.
Animal husbandry. Lecture—two hours; lab workshop—four hours.
In total: nine lecture hours, thirteen hours of practical lab
workshops, demonstrations via slide transparencies, and a
film projection at the end of each work day.
Often we have had to arrange seminars for the active
lab van working groups from three to five collective farms
all in the same place. In a majority of cases we had to travel
from one collective farm to another according to a previously
developed and planned program.
Of special interest is the method of practical demonstration of the chemical equipment and the analysis of milk, poisons, fertilizers, and so forth. Many collective farm workers
left positive reviews of the mobile instructive laboratory van.
For example, an activist farmer from the Red October collective farm of the Semypolky village in the Kiev region writes:
I am still a young farmer, but the management of
our collective farm has sent me to attend a seminar
held at a mobile instructive laboratory van. Until
then I had no idea what a laboratory van was and
what its tasks were, but the agronomist brigade
of the mobile laboratory van gave me an excellent
introduction to its goals and the work methods necessary to increase our harvest levels through the
study of our farms, fertilizers, soils, and pests. Such
seminars should be held more often, because many
of us are new to our business and it is hard for us to
manage without a specialist. My fiery greetings to
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the initiator of the organization of laboratory vans,
P. P. Postyshev.
We have hundreds of responses like this one, and all of them
emphasize that the work of the laboratory vans is of great
practical help.
Two such mobile units are already working in collective farms in the Vinnytsia and Chernigov regions of the
Ukrainian SSR. Before the end of the year we will increase
their number to ten.
It is necessary to implement the experience of mobile
laboratories into all regions of our Soviet Union. Equipping
a single car-truck costs 8,000 rubles; the installation of lab
equipment and visual materials costs 5,000 rubles; staff salaries (two agronomists and a chauffeur), car maintenance,
gas, and lubrication costs 3,000 rubles a month.
For consultation about setting up a mobile laboratory
unit, programming, and work methodology, please contact:
Kiev, Paris Commune Street (formerly, Mikhailovskaya) 10,
Ukrainian Museum of Agriculture.
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V
Museum of the History
of the Revolution
Marxism-Leninism in
Exhibitions in the Museums
of Revolution
ANDREY Shestakov
marxism-leninism in exhibitions
First published in 1931
Translated by Anastasiya Osipova
My presentation is titled “Marxism and Leninism in
Exhibitions in the Museums of Revolution.” I would like
to make a transition from general statements, which you
heard in several previous presentations, to concrete problems concerning the application of the theory of dialectical
materialism and Leninism in the exhibition practice of the
museums of revolution. These museums are born out of the
October Revolution and do not exist anywhere else in the
world. Therefore, in constructing our historical revolutionary museums there is no past experience to rely on besides
our own. When we started to build the museums of revolution we faced a series of general questions, among which the
most important one was about the goals of these museums.
It was absolutely clear that museums of revolution must be
primarily political establishments, carrying out the work of
political enlightenment. Such museums must not only educate people about social relations, but also give them an emotional charge.
Museums of revolution face the task of creating exhibitions, which, on the one hand, will promote an understanding of social relations, and on the other, will have a strong
emotional impact.
Our main suggestions for the organizational principles
of the museums of revolution emerge from these premises.
But first of all, we must clarify our position regarding the
emotional influence that we would like these exhibitions
to have on our visitors. This problem of communicating an
emotional charge is specific to the museums of revolution.
With labels, accompanying texts, and citations from Marx
and Lenin, we are providing material for the formation of
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logical notions, but these remain rather difficult to grasp for
an average museum visitor. This is because our typical visitor
is still relatively poorly developed culturally, and lacks the
necessary elements in his consciousness for understanding
logical notions and forming associative connections, which
make these concepts easier for comprehension.
That is why while organizing its exhibitions, a museum of
revolution must use the most accessible language—the language of images. We must present logical structures about
the complex set of relations behind social conflicts by conjoining them with visual materials, by accompanying them
with visually formed impressions, and by amalgamating
rational thinking with thinking through images.
We are resolving this question by selecting and gathering materials which belong to the sphere of art. We are using
sculpture, painting, graphic arts, representations of different
concepts in formal artistic achievement, colorful stains and
other artistic means, which can help us present logical notions
in such a fashion that they would form a unified stream of
consciousness for each visitor. The amplification of emotional and artistic impact is the current task of the museums
of revolution. Trying to have museums of revolution organize
their exhibitions in a strictly logical and informative manner,
and only afterward adding material for visual thinking, is
wrong. Recently, Narkompros (The Commissariat of People’s
Enlightenment) raised the question of gathering all the most
valuable artworks and relocating them from the museums
of revolution to specialized art museums. We think that this
approach is principally and practically misguided. Artworks
within the museums of revolution play as important a role in
reawakening consciousness as the rest of the elements of our
exhibitions that provide material for logical concepts: labels,
signs, proclamations, and various material relics. Sovnarkom
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marxism-leninism in exhibitions
(Minor People’s Commissariat) also assumed our point of
view, and declared that requisitioning valuables from the
museums of revolution was wrong, and that increasing the
use of art in the museums of revolution was necessary. We
must speak about this now, for our local museums of revolution are quite poor in art objects. Meanwhile, the museum
of revolution, which will combine the logical presentation of
concepts with images, will be endowed with a tremendous
power of emotional influence and of organizing consciousness in a specific social direction. The exhibition forms, which
we are striving to assert, are the ones that are most understandable and comprehensible for the mass audience of our
museums. And this museum language that I am discussing
here is most useful for agitation and propaganda in the interest of political aims and goals, which we place before the
museums of revolution. From this follows the practical suggestion to necessarily engage in the work of the museums of
revolution not only scientists, but also artists. Artists must
not be hired as simple decorators, but must be placed among
the integral staff members of our museums. They should necessarily be involved in the construction of the museums of
revolution and in the task of political enlightenment. Their
labor must be closely coordinated with that of the rest of
museum staff. The preparation of exhibitions, all aspects of
their operations, must be coordinated with the work of scientists in order to form a coherent and unified, unbreakable
whole. Until now we have not at all organized the training of
artists to work in the museums. None of the sectors that manage public enlightenment have focused their attention on this
task. I find it necessary to emphasize this side of our work,
to, perhaps, make practical conclusions about implementing
some changes within the educational programs and introducing special training courses within art institutes.
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ANDREY Shestakov
I am now moving onto the question regarding the content and thematic scope required for the museums of revolution. I find the position expressed in Comrade Luppol’s
presentation to be entirely correct—all museums must be
founded on the principles of materialist dialectics, and this
problematic must be especially emphasized in the museums
of revolution. The dialectical development of the historical
process must be shown in the museums of revolution most
vividly and thoroughly. Starting from this foundation, we
must invent a special form for the exhibition. It is particularly
important to reveal the dialectics of the revolutionary movement, to stress the example of the culminating moments of
revolutionary events and the inherent contradictions in the
development of social phenomena, to bring attention to the
dialectics of these processes. We cannot build our exhibition
without approaching the history of revolutionary movement
dialectically. We already have some experience in this area,
which makes this quite feasible. Our task is made relatively
easy, since Marxism and Leninism have already conquered
a sufficient place in the history of revolutions. However, our
achievements in the theoretical field often run into difficult
obstacles when it comes to practical implementation. We
own a very scarce collection of physical materials for our
museum exhibitions, many details of revolutionary events
are insufficiently mined, we lack statistical data, and so forth.
Our exhibition work is made difficult by the insufficient work
done in the stated directions by Marxist historians.
I will now move on to the question of the thematics of the
exhibitions at the museums of revolution. They must, first of
all, represent the revolutionary struggle of class society in a
given country or in several states.
When one approaches this task practically it becomes
obvious how much is still left unclear. We are still
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marxism-leninism in exhibitions
constructing the exhibitions of our museums exclusively
on the materials pertaining to old tsarist Russia, while not
working with materials that lie beyond the borders of that
Russia. I set forth a proposal for the museums of revolution
to portray our revolutionary movement in tandem with the
revolutionary movement in Western Europe and in the East,
and so on. That is why in the future the museums of revolution should acquire materials not only from our country, but
also from abroad.
We must address the revolutionary movement in
Western Europe and America, as well as in the Eastern countries, and so on, in order to gain an impression of a complex
historical process.
We must also reconsider the system of periodization, as
the moments required to illuminate the revolutionary process
cannot be found, and provided solely, on the materials from a
single country or a small group of neighboring countries.
The following themes must become a red thread drawn
through all museums of revolution—provincial as well as
central ones. The first one is that of revolutionary peasant
uprisings in the feudal societies of Russia and the West.
Usually, whenever we present peasant wars, we focus solely
on Razin or Pugachev’s uprisings and treat them as disconnected from the revolutionary process in the feudal society at
large; we isolate the viewer’s attention from similar phenomena that have taken place in Western Europe. We narrow our
viewer’s worldview instead of broadening it.
Our second topic should be bourgeois revolutions in
Russia and the West. Right now, European bourgeois revolutions are almost entirely excluded from our exhibitions.
For instance, our Central Museum of Revolution lacks a
thorough representation of either the German or French
revolution.
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ANDREY Shestakov
Including materials relevant to these themes should offer
a complex impression of the bourgeois revolutions in the
West as well as in Russia.
Now, passing on to the subject of proletarian revolutions. I think that here we have to present, even if only in
a general outline, the Paris Commune and the October
Revolution in Russia. These thematic exhibitions are
extremely important, for through them we may formulate a perspective on the international revolution—a point
of view which has not been tied together until now and
which we offer only through a thematic representation
of the October Revolution, and even that in a rather onedimensional manner.
Our museums of revolution should also affirm revolutionary achievements in the USSR and represent contemporary revolutionary movements in the East and in the West.
These issues lead us to the current political tasks and sharply
set before the visitor questions about the goals and the role
of the Communist International, about the worldwide revolution, about our own position. These questions will provide a political focus that is for the most part lacking in our
museums, especially in the provinces. Our shortcoming with
regard to this must be promptly fixed.
With regard to use of local materials in local museums
of revolution, we must state that they should certainly be
most prominently displayed. However, this does not mean
that these items should be set separately and be taken out of
the broader process. I think that such local material adds to
the general exhibition and attracts visitors’ attention to the
specifics of local daily life, relating them to general processes,
which we want our visitors to understand.
The question regarding the installation of this or that
exhibition must be formulated in such a way that we should
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marxism-leninism in exhibitions
carefully select the most important and the most interesting items. Our approach to the exhibition materials may be
called a “crawling empiricism” (polzuchim empirizmom).
A view that many different kinds of materials must be displayed is popular among us. I find that this chasing after
quantity could cause us to fail to meet the tasks set by the
exhibition. It is necessary to select only the most important
and valuable material in order to teach the observer how to
understand not only revolutionary processes, but also the
very mechanics of these processes, and how to be able to
make the necessary conclusions.
It is necessary to get museum workers to pay special
attention to this task. In constructing the museums of revolution we face the challenge of refracting the theory of revolutions through the lens of historical materialism.
If we show productive relations and class war through
the lens of historical materialism, our presentation of the
development of productive forces, then these instances
must be absolutely clear and legible to the exhibition visitor.
Historical-materialist postulates about contradictions in the
development of productive forces and productive relations
must be axiomatic for the representation of the revolutionary process.
In our contemporary exhibitions, the elements of the
development of productive forces and productive relations
are often overshadowed by iconography. We must fight
against this. Until now, portraiture—a depiction of one or
another revolutionary or theoretician of revolutionary struggle—was placed in the foreground of the museums of revolutions, but this does not provide the desired effect. We need to
select the iconographic elements more thoroughly, in order
to display only those portraits that solve the tasks that we set
before them on their own.
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ANDREY Shestakov
Within our Museum of the Revolution of the USSR we
have one such iconographic exhibition in the popular movements section.
It is necessary to shrink it and offer only the minimally
necessary number of portraits.
Then a series of principles of historical materialism
would be advanced as special problems to be represented
in the museums of revolution. Such problems as the transition of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist
one, the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the
problem of base and superstructure, and so forth—all this
can be presented in a museum, and this task must be thoroughly resolved.
In addition, the goals of museum exhibitions must be
tightly bound to the present-day political struggle. However,
this does not mean that exhibitions of the museums of
revolution, saturated with the principles of Marxism and
Leninism, must necessarily be linked to contemporary
issues with each and every piece. This must be done in accordance with expedience and opportunity. Some contemporary problems may be included as addenda to the already
existing exhibitions.
In general, we should not regard the museum of revolution as a place where all exhibitions should remain permanent
and unchanged for a very long time. The museums of revolution should be organized so that all exhibits remain flexible
to a certain degree, so that there is always a chance to replace
corresponding materials with new, more relevant ones.
Such goals often get forgotten, and for this reason exhibitions get outdated and lose touch with life. As an example we can mention the theme of Party history, which is
extremely important today. This history calls for entirely
new ways of addressing the current times, and museums
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marxism-leninism in exhibitions
of revolution must discover how to instantly present and
emphasize these themes.
In general, exhibits within the museums of revolution
must be presented exclusively in a class light. They must be
easily understandable to the masses, mobile, and relevant,
and they must perform the tasks and functions that characterize the work of political enlightenment today.
Museums have to solve all of the same questions that
stand before the Party and the working class. There can be
no objective and loving contemplation of things, paintings,
and so on, in the museums of revolution. Everything has to
be built according to specific class requirements, taking into
consideration concrete problems and aiming to assist the
proletariat in its task of building socialism. The museums
of revolution must help the masses to comprehend the construction of socialism, class warfare, and their own place in
history. All exhibitions at the museums of revolution must be
dedicated to these tasks.
[Applause.]
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Museums of the Revolution
Nikolai Druzhinin
museums of the revolution
First published in 1931
Translated by Maria Tananyan Goldverg
There are over one hundred museum collections of a historical and revolutionary nature in the Soviet Union today. They
differ among themselves not only in their size and method,
but also in the core composition of their material. Some
museums roll out a general picture of our revolutionary
movement for their viewers (such as the revolutionary museums of Moscow and Leningrad); others prefer to emphasize
the characteristics of localized events (such as local heritage
sites of a provincial or regional scope). There exist some surviving installations of living revolutionary history (The Peter
and Paul Fortress in Leningrad, the underground Bolshevik
printing press in Moscow). There are purely commemorative museums, dedicated to some or other revolutionary
figure (the museums of V. I. Lenin, P. A. Kropotkin, N. G.
Chernyshevsky). There are specialized museums showing
prisons, labor camps, and places of exile. And finally, there
are museums that strive to show the origin and evolution
of Western revolutions (the Museum of the Institute of
Marx and Engels).
Historical and revolutionary museums have won
themselves a lasting place in the general system of
museum construction. They command an incomparable
edge over every other museum’s collection: they speak to
museumgoers in the concrete and accessible “language of
things”—the direct remnants of real life. In this materiality lies their most compelling strength, the source of their
interest, and their greatest affect. But the historical and
revolutionary museum (like any other museum) must not
be just a chaotic assemblage of “rarities,” but an orderly
and complete whole—one that provides a selection of
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museum-objects in a strictly scientific sequence and
according to a particular political point of view. The collection at the Parisian Carnavalet Museum undoubtedly
surpasses our museums in the wealth of their historical
and revolutionary relics, but they lack those distinctive
particularities that distinguish the exhibits that make up
the construction of our museum collections. The task of
any Soviet museum is not only to mirror the past and the
real, but also to effectively bear upon the transformation
of life by focusing the attention of its viewer on the current
tasks of modernity. The Soviet museum, in its particular
way, educates the masses in the name of a systematic and
robust construction of socialism. Museums of a historical
and revolutionary nature achieve this goal with the help
of specific materials and idiosyncratic methods of exhibition; in contrast to museums of popular culture or art,
they put before themselves the task of laying bare for the
masses the natural course of revolutionary history in a
visual and strictly systematic form.
To further flesh out this general evaluation, we must
equally contrast two incorrect points of view: on the one
hand, there is the tendency to limit the task of the historical and revolutionary museum and reduce it to that
of a museum of revolutionary life. Adherents of this belief
point out the paucity and fragmentation of historical and
revolutionary materials. They say that any surviving remnants of the struggle don’t afford us the opportunity to
expose the ideology of opposing movements and retrace
the successive stages of the revolutionary process. On the
other hand, some museologists formulate the tasks of the
historical and revolutionary museum too broadly and
assert that the object of its investigative and expository
labor is the occurrence of class struggle. The error in these
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two beliefs becomes apparent in light of the last ten years’
worth of experience and contemporary theories of museology. Depictions of revolutionary life don’t hold any absolute meaning for us. We search them for answers to deeper
and more important issues—those of social antagonisms.
But the portrayal of class struggle is not the task of historicrevolutionary museums alone: today, exhibitions showing
collections of artifacts from everyday life, art, and technology
are built according to its principle. However, this doesn’t preclude each category of social-science museum from possessing its own distinguishing properties. The particularity of the
historical and revolutionary museum lies first and foremost
in the object of its exhibition: as distinguished from museums of lifestyle and culture (more precisely, sociohistorical)
museums, the historical and revolutionary museum exposes
not just the history of socioeconomic systems, but the history of the transitions between these systems—those periods
of escalated struggle for new sociopolitical forms. The historical and revolutionary museum’s object of examination
and exhibition isn’t class struggle as a whole—it permeates
the entire history of mankind—but class struggle at its most
lucid and intensive, at the moment of its conscious destruction of an outmoded sociopolitical order.
Museums that investigate the natural evolution of our
revolution face three fundamental issues: (a) the struggle
against feudalism (that is, the struggle against its surviving
autocratic political superstructure and the oppression of the
serf), (b) the struggle against capitalism (beginning with its
origins and ending with the Russian Civil War, 1917–21),
and finally, and (c) the struggle over the construction of a
new socialist society (in periods of reconstruction and reparation). In other words, the historical and revolutionary
museum mirrors the fraught academic fields and focuses on
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them the especial attention of the museumgoer. Such specialization is not dictated by the rules of museum “logic,” but
by the foremost aims of our political moment. We live and
struggle in a revolutionary era. To prove the natural necessity of struggle and lay bare its captivating, creative pathos
is the primary, pressing concern of political enlightenment.
The museum can achieve this goal through the powerful
means of the visual image, which is why the idea of the historical and revolutionary museum is inextricably tied to our
victories in February and October: museums of this nature
emerged not merely as monuments to the triumphs of the
revolution, and not merely as instruments of the revolution’s
ideological impregnation in society, but also as vehicles of
the revolutionary ideology’s ultimate evolution. The period
of reconstruction brought with it significant new ambitions. It forced historic-revolutionary museums to step out
from the incipient frames of the historical past and sharpen
their focus on the critical, contemporary issues: the October
Revolution and the Russian Civil War found in themselves
the natural continuation of the class antagonisms endured
during the preceding era of “peace.”
In showing the history of the revolutionary movement,
the museum cannot be limited by a chronological depiction
of facts: this sort of historical narrative would contradict
both the principles of historical materialism and the goals
of political enlightenment. The museumgoer must grasp for
himself the facts of the revolutionary process in addition
to the endogenous correlation between individual, factual
elements. This is why the arrangement of historical and
revolutionary materials must be subordinated to two guiding principles: the revolutionary movement must be shown
as a dialectical process, one that passes through particular
stages and is characterized by the struggle of antagonistic
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contradictions; on the other hand, the arrangement of these
materials must reveal the causality of each bygone stage, not
only in the relations produced during each stage’s respective era, but in the reverse effects of the political superstructures and ideological trends of the present. That said, the
architect of the historical and revolutionary museum must
fight against a mechanistic point of view. In revealing the
spontaneous movements of the awakening masses, it is necessary to stress the organizing significance of revolutionary
ideologies and the creative role of a conscious enterprise.
The struggle against feudal holdovers and the capitalist system was waged chiefly by the proletariat, and the main, leading place was held by the Party. That is why the history of
the Party must be granted especial attention. The history of
the revolutionary past must be shot through by the political
assessment of our time: the past must cling to the present,
revealing the origin of contemporary goals and helping to
shed light on the issues of the modern age. Such are the specific goals of the historical and revolutionary museum. In
showing the masses the natural evolution of the revolutionary process, the museum is obliged to equip the consciousness of the masses with the will for independent and active
participation in the ongoing struggle.
What means does the historical and revolutionary
museum possess for the resolution of this important task?
It must be admitted that its possibilities for exhibition are
significantly poorer than those of an art or sociohistorical
museum. Revolutionary events occurred quickly and often
never managed to manifest themselves into steadfast, material forms. Clandestine efforts were carried out under conditions of strict conspiracy, and many revolutionary objects
underwent deliberate destruction at the hands of the revolutionaries themselves. More often than not, priceless—and
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especially, printed—relics were exterminated by sovereign
authorities. That is why surviving, original artifacts from the
revolutionary struggle are so few and far between. The most
valuable of those that do exist are physical relics: remnants
of the armed struggle (like weapons, bombs, and so on), the
symbols of agitation (banners, medals, political gifts, graveside offerings), objects of a revolutionary life (weapons technology, apartment furnishings, goods manufactured by state
prisoners, and others), and lastly, the personal belongings of
individual revolutionaries. But these three-dimensional, corporeal museum-objects are evidently desultory fragments,
accidentally spared and incapable of offering a complete
picture of the developments represented at an exhibition.
Much prized are handwritten documents (draft proclamations, meeting resolutions, assembly protocols, military
edicts, dispatches, handwritten letters and diaries, and so
on), but they are rare and subject to special protective custody, which cannot always be reconciled with the conditions
of a public exhibition. Printed publications (leaflets, books,
brochures, broadsides, and so on) emerge as characteristic
memorials of their era, but they are uniform in appearance
and difficult for the mass audience to perceive. No less uniform in their appearance are historical, revolutionary photographs; they tend to document individual figures rather than
events. Works of art (like paintings, sculptures, and others)
are a great deal more vivid and affective, but such exhibition items—assuming they are genuinely artifacts of their
era—reflect less the objective events, and more subjective
perceptions and estimations. The facts of the matter appear
transformed in them under the influence of private sympathies and the creative inspiration of the artist.
But for all the variety and diversity of its original artifacts,
the historic-revolutionary museum cannot construct from
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them a full and complete exhibition. In the reconstruction
of the natural historical process there will remain inevitable
gaps—broken elements that can’t be fixed by the exhibition’s goals. On the basis of that fact, outmoded museologists propose to capitulate before the arising hardships: to
abandon the vast ambitions of the historical and revolutionary museum and limit the museum to displaying the appearances of revolutionary life.
But the museum experience and principles of Soviet
museology propose another solution for the given situation. Without abandoning a vigorous search for historical
and revolutionary relics, they suggest that it’s necessary for
historical and revolutionary museums to bridge any lacunae
that appear with specially prepared reproductions: to exhibit
copies of artworks housed in other Soviet museums, to display photographic prints of rare archival material, and finally
to order models of physical monuments—striving to approximate the original as closely as possible. That being said, these
reproductions will also prove to be in short supply. To more
soundly connect disparate exhibition elements and demonstrably show the causality of events, the wide use of auxiliary
aids is essential. With the help of graphic materials (diagrams, maps, and charts), the architects of the historical and
revolutionary museum will contrive to shed light on the era’s
means of production, and provide essential explanations for
defining events. Works of art—assuming they are themselves
not original artifacts from the revolutionary era, but afterthe-fact illustrations of events long past—will acquire the
same auxiliary value, as will setting arrangements (manikins,
dummies, replicas), which will help to more clearly and vividly present reality as it was. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to
remember that reproductions and copies are unavoidable
surrogates for missing originals: they must not overshadow
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genuine artifacts of the revolutionary past. Its essential to say
this, even more vehemently, about auxiliary museum aids:
they are due not a primary but a secondary position in the
museum exhibit. By their number and by the reception of
their design, they must not upstage the exhibit’s principal
and authentic historical and revolutionary material.
The proper construction of a system of placards acquires
particular significance in a historical and revolutionary
museum. A verbal explanation must not only reveal the
essence of the exhibited object, but also offer a political
evaluation of the corresponding historical event. Often, the
historical and revolutionary artifact cannot on its own hint at
the scientific and political inference essential to the museum
visitor. In order to manage the reception of the masses, it’s
necessary to provide a concise yet emphatic annotation
that will instill in the visitor one or another interpretation.
Quotations and slogans, in addition to the brief labels identifying artifacts, are essential tools of a historical and revolutionary collection. Of course, here too, it’s necessary to
observe a sense of moderation so that the visual and corporeal language of the museum isn’t drowned out by uniform
and tiresome texts.
The deficiency of original materials and the unavoidable abundance of texts are the historical and revolutionary
museum’s inescapable shortcomings. There’s no doubt that
they dampen the interest of the mass audience and hamper
the ambitions of the historical and revolutionary museum.
To offset the effects of this element, it’s necessary to direct
persistent attention to arranging museum artifacts artistically. An expressive and vivid method of exhibition becomes
the historical and revolutionary museum’s most important reserve, one that is necessary to exercise broadly and
skillfully. The artist and the art historian must come to the
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assistance of the research fellow. By selecting appropriate
paints, they will strengthen lines and forms and render the
impressions of the designed exhibit more profound. The
viewer, intrigued and captivated by the exhibit’s artistic
configuration, will be better and faster able to dive into the
contents of the material on display. The experience of a particular background will serve as the psychological foundation for the intellect’s autonomous work. The fewer original
revolutionary artifacts there are and the more textual and
photographic material on display, the more important and
pressing the problem of artistic design.
The ambitions of the historical and revolutionary
museum are clear to us, and the limits and character of its
exhibited material are known. So, how can one represent
class struggle in its greatest and most intensive forms by
means of these exhibitionary methods? If the exhibit of the
historical and revolutionary museum must be shot through
with the ideas of dialectical development, then from there
follow certain requirements for the arrangement of material:
the revolutionary movement must be shown as an uninterrupted and accrescent process. In other words, the museum
exhibit must by dominated by the chronological principle
of construction. Before the viewers must develop not static
depictions of a “frozen” revolution, but the vigorous propulsion of a persistent struggle. The fundamental stages of
this societal course are composed of elements pivotal to the
exhibit’s narrative.
The professional museologist will not need to invent his
own frameworks here. He can adopt one ready-made from
the conclusions of seminal Marxist literature. According
to this point of view, the museum exhibit can be broken up
into three sequential categories in keeping with three fundamental concerns of historical and revolutionary movements:
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(a) the revolutionary collapse of feudalism, (b) the revolutionary dissolution of capitalism, and (c) the revolutionary
struggle over the construction of socialism. Every one of
these categories can be further broken down, corresponding to distinct periods in which each respective movement
occurs. In the ambit of the first category are the following:
(a) peasant uprisings against feudalism in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, (b) the patrician movement of the
Decemberists—the earliest manifestation of the emerging
capitalist system, (c) the petit-bourgeois populist movement
reflecting the ideology of the oppressed peasant class, (d) the
rise and development of the proletariat movement (1880–
1904), (e) the first mass revolution (1905–07), and (f) the
fall of the autocratic regime and the immediate antecedents
of this event (the progression of the era of financial capital).
The events of this great three-hundred-year period
are tremendously varied and intrinsically heterogeneous.
Here proceed various classes of first feudal and then capitalist society: the peasants, the upper bourgeoisie, the
petit-bourgeois intelligentsia, and finally, the industrial proletariat. In the period of emerging capitalism, the struggle
acquires a more complex character: it’s directed not only
against the feudal superstructures—namely, the autocratic
regime—but also against the foundations of the capitalist
system. In that entanglement of two revolutionary movements, an idiosyncrasy of the Russian historical narrative
begins to show: the fusion of a newly advanced capitalist
system with imperious feudal holdovers. But this conspicuous intermingling doesn’t interfere with the thoroughness
of the historical and revolutionary museum’s formulation:
the revolutionary dominance of the entire three-hundredyear period manifests itself in the continuous struggle of
the working masses against the political dictatorship of the
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landed gentry. Unifying all the moments of this struggle, we
get the opportunity to expose its inherent dialectic, to show
the powerlessness of the isolated peasant class, the political
futility of noble efforts, the political helplessness of the petitbourgeois intelligentsia, and finally, the leading significance
of the proletariat, having organized and directed the victorious movements of the revolution.
The second category of the historical and revolutionary museum (“the struggle to dissolve the capitalist system”) is composed of three exhibitionary subcategories:
(a) February–October 1917 (the escalation from a bourgeois revolution to a proletariat revolution), (b) the October
Revolution, and (c) the Russian Civil War (1917–21). Judging
by the sweep of its chronology, this category would appear to
be inferior to the one preceding it. But judged by the wealth of
its historical events and its political impact, it carries not less,
but more significance in the historical narrative. The struggle
of this period is uniform at its core, but is still no less complex.
Here various classes in society come to the fore, and the fate
of the former Russian empire becomes inseparably entwined
with world historical events. The predominant revolution of
this period: the struggle for rule by the proletariat without
regard for the borders of any one nation.
The third category (“the struggle over the construction of
socialism) is composed of two exhibitionary subcategories:
(a) a period of recovery, and (b) a period of reconstruction.
The substance of this category is comprised of class struggle
between the proletariat, led by the Communist Party, and old
societal classes, the bearers of enduring capitalist tendencies. The entire exhibit and all representations of economic
achievement and new sociocultural formations must be subordinated to this essential, predominant idea—class struggle
over socialism. The academic and politically enlightening
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significance of this category is no less important than that
of the preceding category: the exhibit couples the events of
the past with contemporary facts precisely here. Here, the
preceding course of the historical and revolutionary process discovers its final purpose. Our museums have arrived
at the construction of this consummate category, “socialist
construction,” relatively late. All too often it remains covered only in a rudimentary capacity. Methods of exhibiting
its emergence are yet primitive and vague. But there is no
doubt that this category is due a bright future, and that this
category is comparable, both in its quantity and quality, to
the history of the period leading up the October Revolution
and to the period of the socialist revolution.
On the basis of this chronological division of material,
installations must be built on themes more narrowly defined.
The task of a more granular composition is to focus the attention of the viewer on particular irreducible moments in the
revolutionary movement, to ascertain their causality, and
to expose the identities of the classes involved. Factoring in
the many years of experience of historical and revolutionary museums, we can observe here several fundamental,
repeating themes. Elements typically represented at exhibits are: (a) the revolutionary event (a strike, demonstration,
revolt, and so on), (b) the revolutionary organization (a
circle, group, collective, party, and so on), (c) the revolutionary ideological schools of thought (social instruction, a programmatic direction, a sectarian platform, and so on.), (d)
the feature of the revolutionary lifestyle (the technical work
involved, incarceration in prison, a stint in exile, and so on.);
and finally, (e) the revolutionary figure (an important theorist, the Party leader, and others). Along with these essential
installations, we can identify two other repeating themes:
the combined theme “Party conventions (and conferences),”
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which includes all the events occurring there, the organizations and ideological schools of thought; and, on the other
hand, the introductory theme, “Socioeconomic factors,” the
primary reference point in the explication of historic-revolutionary material from a particular period. If we look closely
at the composition of a major historical and revolutionary
museum, we will see that its entire exhibition is comprised
of these recurring thematic elements. In order to build a
proper and complete exhibit, it’s necessary to provide a clear
account of the content of each installation. Each theme must
be developed with respect to class struggle, but each must
also possess its own particular idiosyncrasies, which must
have been hitherto considered by museum staff.
There is no doubt that revolutionary events are the commanding theme of the historical and revolutionary museum.
The process of revolutionary struggle is composed of separate events, and through those very events the active dynamism immanent to the struggle is revealed. That is why
these events must set out in the forefront and illuminated
from all points of view. It’s essential that a central position
in the exhibit be assigned to show the appearance of class
struggle, attempting to display it as an active and dynamic
phenomenon, by way of its successive stages. It’s also necessary to underscore the movement’s social foundation using
particular artifacts: the struggling classes must be shown
in an expressive manner and thrown into relief in the faces
of their leaders and their representatives. Here, it’s essential to roll out the materials that introduce the ideologies of
the struggling classes and express their interests and goals.
With each particular instance, it’s necessary to shed light on
a question concerning the struggle’s organization: to deduce
the degree to which each camp was organized and identify
the character of their main offices. Every major revolutionary
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event displayed must be introduced by the socioeconomic
processes that had determined the event’s genesis and the
direction according to which it developed.
An installation called The October Revolution in Moscow
(The Museum of the Revolution of the USSR) can serve an
example of a similar exhibitionary presentation of revolutionary events. At the center of this nook were placed physical relics of the struggle in the streets: rifles and machine
guns belonging to the Red Guards, exploded weapons casings, various objects perforated by bullets and deformed by
gunfire. Upon looking at the original remnants of those arduous battles, museum viewers immediately feel the acuteness
of that particular moment and the general character of those
armed encounters. The expressive but fragmented artifacts
can convey the specificity of documentation and a vivid artistic whole. Beforehand, the viewer passes a whole series of
photographs that show street trenches and barricades, artillery equipment brought foreword, and the manifold destruction from armed weapons fire. Paintings by Yuon and Kotov
depict the final stage of the struggle: a massive assault on the
Kremlin by squadrons of soldiers and civilian-laborers. An
explanatory diagram conveys the principal moments of the
six-day battle, the principal and quickly vacillating military
victories and defeats. So, the main part of the exhibit paints a
picture of the October Revolution from within. Surrounding
this central nucleus are positioned photographs and illustrations depicting the typical actors from each of the warring
sides. On one side there were laborers, Red Guards, soldiers
from support units, representatives of revolutionary working youth. And on the other there are cadets, officers, university and grammar-school students. This sphere showing the
faces of those living and fighting is accompanied by a picture of leading organizations. Enormous murals put up on
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backboards illustrate the military-revolutionary committees
and the five Party leaders. Photographs of the participants
and photographic prints of the facilities used by revolutionary
bodies provide a bountiful supplement of documentary materials. Handwritten resolutions, printed leaflets, and quotes
from speeches delivered convey the ideology of the struggle
that took place, its motifs, immediate objectives, and ultimate
societal goals. The whole time, the viewer sees and feels the
two camps of the opposing classes. Events unfold before his
eyes not just in the dramatic encounters on city streets, but
in the preliminary preparation of the classes, the programs of
their platforms, and their final outcomes. That said, it should
be noted that the revolutionary side was pulled out into the
foreground. The human archetype helps to incite the feelings
of the mass movement, and portraits and speeches of Party
leaders underscore the organizing role of the Party’s work.
The events are perceived to make up a process advancing and
continuously evolving. The exhibit is closely tied together by
primary and secondary elements: at the front is the October
Revolution in Petrograd, and following it are the armed uprisings in the provinces. Socioeconomic antecedents can be seen
in a previous hall, and form a general expository introduction
to all the events of the period of the October Uprising. In this
fashion, the exhibit of revolutionary events is developed in
the remaining rooms of The Museum of the Revolution of the
USSR. With some or other variations, disparate elements of
the installation recur on a backboard dated March 1, 1881,
on a wall dated January 9, 1905, in a representation of the
Decembrist revolt, and in the artifacts from the February
Revolution of 1917.
The theme “The Revolutionary Organization” is being
planned on the basis of the same methodological principles.
The historical and revolutionary museum must provide,
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before all else, a concrete depiction of the members belonging to a political association, but, at the same time, it must
underscore the class nature of this collective entity. It must
familiarize the viewer with the ideology of the group represented, focus our attention on its revolutionary activities,
and, if at all possible, reveal the group’s internal social and
political stratifications (the warring factions and objectives). The organization must be opposed to those class
forces against which it stands and struggles. The moment of
class struggle must be paramount. The organization must
take shape as an active, evolving, continuously advancing
presence. An installation called The St. Petersburg Soviet of
Working Delegates, 1905 (at The Museum of the Revolution
of the USSR) can serve an example of a similar exhibit. A
series of photo portraits frame a backboard consecrated to
this one purpose. Before us pass images of the working men
who, with their entire physiognomy, bespeak their membership in the proletariat. Photographs are grouped together by
their subject’s political allegiance (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,
SRs, nonpartisans), and simultaneously help to shed light
on the inner composition of the Soviet organization. At the
top of this backboard hangs an additional diagram, which
shows the massive proletariat makeup of the Petersburg
Soviet. At the center, material depicting the militant, revolutionary purpose of the new organ is concentrated: decisions
made for strikes, “a financial manifesto” aimed against the
autocratic regime, a collection of news clippings printed in
an engrossing style, and a revolver belonging to a member of
the executive committee.
Looking closely at these exhibit items, we can discern
distinct stages in the activities of the Soviet, beginning with
the organization of the October strike and ending with
the call for an armed uprising. Large portraits, placed a bit
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higher, above the backboard, provide an understanding of
the Soviet’s leaders and, moreover, of the schools of thought
they represented. The Soviet was a populist and nonpartisan organization, but it was led by the Social Democratic
Party. Opposing declarations, one written by the Bolshevik
Knunyants and the other by the Menshevik Trotsky, underscore the existence of a sectarian conflict within the Soviet.
Certain artifacts (drawings, portraits, executive orders)
throw light on the orders of the executive camp. The viewer
can grasp the reciprocal dealings between the organs of
the revolutionary proletariat and the wavering, but not yet
wholly overpowered, tsarist regime. The material, in characterizing the activities of the Soviet, clearly speaks to the
Soviet’s chosen path. Large quotes from Lenin summarize
the Soviet’s militant intentions and encapsulate the whole
collection of evidence presented. Analogous themes—one
on a group called “Liberated laborers,” one on a collective,
“Earth and will,” and another on the editorial body called
“Sparks,” among others—are presented in the same fashion.
The thematic installation “Revolutionary-Ideological
Schools of Thought” lends itself with more difficulty to the
apparent influence of the museum: the divergent principles
of the Party’s program can’t be displayed with the same
visual expression with which are drawn distinct historical
events or the dramatic activities of revolutionary organizations. Here there is an inescapable abundance of textual
material and the limiting role of the concrete image. But
the political significance of this theme is so essential that
the historical and revolutionary museum must seek out all
possible measures for a vivid demonstration. It’s necessary
to focus the attention of the viewer on the fundamentals of
class ideology, in sharp relief against the ideology of another
opposing class. The viewer must see before him the original
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artifacts of attendant literature—books, brochures, leaflets,
and handwritten documents. He must find the exact yet concise expression of the given ideological position in the material. Before his eyes must pass active vehicles of the schools
of thought presented. Finally, and most importantly, he
must witness political theory in action, in active conflict with
other competing schools of thought. More so here than anywhere else, a political assessment is necessary in the form of
an attendant quote or museum placard. An installation on
the theme “Legal Marxism” (The Museum of the Revolution
of the USSR) can serve as an example of such an exhibit.
Censored publications from the 1890s, which were put out
under the banner of Marxist ideologies, are positioned at
the center of a large display. Above them are a group of portraits of “legal Marxists” from that period. The class nature
of this movement is shown by “human archetypes”—a few
group photographs depicting the bourgeois intelligentsia,
the agents of this new movement. The bourgeois, antirevolutionary nature of this entity, “Legal Marxism,” is emphasized in eloquent and vivid quotes, positioned in the gaps
between the artifacts on display. Nearby, as a counterweight
to this right-wing, opportunistic school of thought, another
revolutionary school of thought is shown in the faces of
Plekhanov, Lenin, and other orthodox Marxists. Polemical
quotes reveal the principal difference between true followers of Marxism and unfortunate Russian Bernstein-ians.
A neighboring display presents, in photographs and print
artifacts, the most important manifestations of Marxism in
legal literature, the sociopolitical stratifications in the ranks
of the Marxists, and the inner ideological struggle between
the orthodox and the opportunists.
A peculiar place in the historical and revolutionary
museum is held by the exhibit’s treatment of the facts
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of revolutionary life. This is where the museum worker
arranges some of the most prized and meaningful original material: the protracted use of various artifacts under
the conditions of clandestine work and especially imprisonment behind bars ensured the objects would be better
preserved than other relics from the revolutionary past.
The furnishings of prison cells, clothes, and utensils from
labor camps, goods manufactured by political prisoners,
and the remains of clandestine practices often enrich the
collections of historical and revolutionary museums. Some
of those who actively participated in the revolution and who
would be able to depict, with precision and detail, the conditions of clandestine work are sill alive. By their direction
and under their supervision, the museums create models of
workshops, underground printing presses, and the apartments of conspirators. But the exhibition of these lifestyle
installations presents an obvious difficulty: the objects of
revolutionary life are significantly harder to connect with
the entire system of historical and revolutionary material. Ordinarily, they break away from the whole and form
their own subcategories: “Underground Equipment,” “The
Prison, Labor Camp, and Life in Exile,” and others. This
kind of compartmentalization possesses a few advantages.
These objects of revolutionary life are concentrated by their
thematic attributes and thus acquire greater affect. The
abundance of corporeal relics evokes greater interest in the
viewer. Such scenes, like that of a prison, a labor camp, or a
life in exile, can be examined just by looking at them and can
beget a strong, agitating reaction. And finally, the concentration of household artifacts can curiously also stimulate a
desire to collect items among employees and visitors of the
historical and revolutionary museum. However, the development of exhibit categories specializing in the day-to-day
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of revolutionary life possesses other drawbacks: the exhibit’s chronology breaks, and the mature construction of the
museum—and most importantly, of the exhibit—takes on a
purely literal and autonomous character. Scenes from daily
life break loose from the universal context of class struggle, and end up isolated, deprived of their basis and without their essential Marxist justification. On the other hand,
without these collections, principal museum departments
also suffer: they forfeit their most prized material artifacts,
and their most vivid images from the history of our most
arduous class struggle.
Two solutions are possible for such a situation: either
departments on day-to-day revolutionary life will expand
the scope of their material to include a broad picture of revolutionary struggle and become, for all intents and purposes,
clones of the principal exhibit, or the departments on day-today life will be liquidated and its material will dissolve into
the general mass of the museum’s primary artifacts. The latter solution appears to be, on principle, the right one. The
appearance of a revolutionary life in and of itself lacks scientific or politically enlightened meaning. It is interesting and
significant only insofar as it reflects the attitudes of the era in
question. Evidence of revolutionary life must be considered
as just the incidental garb of the unceasing revolutionary
struggle within the conditions of a particular place and time.
And if that’s so, there is no reason to isolate representations
of revolutionary life. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s necessary
to incorporate them into the general system of a chronological exhibition and artfully weave them in with other artifacts of their period. The underground publication Working
Papers (1897) will find an appropriate place for itself near the
Kiev Social-Democratic Congress as the nearest antecedent
for the Party’s first convention there. The Military Technical
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museums of the revolution
Bureau of the RSDWP1 of 1906 would make up one of the
elements part of the first mass revolution, an instance of
the militant operations of the Social-Democratic Party. The
prison, labor camp, and exile will be allocated to different
categories and acquire a proper interpretation as instances
of revolutionary class struggle between the autocratic regime
as ruled by the landed gentry and the revolutionary avantgarde of the struggling classes. Every period will find itself
illuminated from many sides. The revolutionary struggle will
achieve its natural complement in its freedom, but the struggle is no less indomitable and no less grueling from within
cell walls. The core principle of the presentation of daily revolutionary life will reveal itself against the general background
of the social relations of production and the class conflicts of
a particular era.
The historical and revolutionary museum cannot and
must not strike out the characteristics of particular individuals from its exhibition’s program. The activity of one
revolutionary constitutes a legitimate subject of depiction
for an academic biographical construction and for a visual
museum exhibition. But that particular individual must be
shown not as an autonomous and omnipotent force, but as a
representative of particular class factions. This individual’s
views and actions must be derived from the social conditions of the corresponding period. The individual must be
presented before the viewer as a direct participant in class
struggle, in the key stages of his own inner development and
his manifest political activities. Even here, one shouldn’t
break loose this thematic installation from the general mass
of the historical and revolutionary material. Yet it’s possible
to form permanent commemorative sections (or halls) for
1. Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s Party —Trans.
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nikolai druzhinin
the portraits of the most significant revolutionary leaders,
e.g. Lenin. As a general rule, a biographic theme must unfold
against the exhibition’s general background and in seamless connection to revolutionary events. So, the biographical
theme “V. I. Ulyanov” must be included in the general exhibit
The People’s Will and the biographic theme “N. E. Bauman”
in the general exhibit 1905, and so forth.
The enormous significance of the Communist Party as
the leading organization, and the head of a mass proletariat movement, raises an important question concerning an
exhibition’s portrayal of Party congresses. Congresses—the
principle milestones in the history of the Party—are also
the turning points of the Party’s inner development. Here,
revolutionary ideology emerged most vividly. Here, schools
of thought paramount to the future aims of the mass revolutionary movement were determined. From here, the importance of the space occupied by the thematic installation
Party Congress is readily apparent.
Significant challenges arise here for the museum
employee. How to convey the political content of congressional work as visually and vibrantly as possible? There’s
no doubt that the core of the difficulty lies in that internal
ideological struggle that precedes the admission of final
orders. That’s why it’s necessary to arrange the artifacts
that best characterize the conflicts of various ideological
schools of thought—namely the drafts of resolutions, political brochures, and speeches delivered by delegates, among
others—at the very center of the entire exhibition. Warring
Party factions must be presented in the photographs of their
participants. The class basis for each departure from the correct Party line must be shown not only in verbal accounts
(quotes from Lenin, and so on), but also in the surviving
documents (for example, in the characteristics of the class
Museum of the history
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museums of the revolution
enemies of the Party), and in visual representations (for
example, in photographic stills of pre-congressional assemblies with a particular class makeup). The Party congress
must not be perceived as an isolated event—the museum
exhibition must draw a visible narrative thread between the
principal struggle at the congress and class antagonisms
beyond Party lines. For every political faction, the museumgoer must be able to witness the class sphere that would
have informed the faction’s conforming interpretations. The
museum placard here acquires an important political significance, but it’s also important to remember that an excessive
abundance of text will burden the exhibit and repulse the
mass visitor. And in them, as everywhere and always, it’s necessary to use concrete language and graphic descriptions to
introduce enlivening artistic representations (paintings,
drawings, caricatures on a few of the themes represented),
and to stir up the texts with arrangements of group photographs and especially with lively reproductions of mob
scenes (the demonstrations of orators, the presentation of
gifts, and so on).
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A New Exhibition at
the Leningrad Museum of
the Revolution
Vera Leykina
a new exhibition at the Leningrad Museum
First published in 1931
Translated by Bela Shayevich
The State Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad is the first
Soviet historical museum of the Revolution, founded in 1919.
Since the beginning, it has unswervingly followed a course
of “museifying” its historical-revolutionary exhibits, making
them more comprehensible and accessible to the masses. The
museum took the first steps in creating what are now templates for other museums—diagrams, historical-revolutionary
mock-ups and models, hand-colored photographs, and so
on. Given its wealth of original artifacts and relics from the
Revolution, the museum had a longstanding practice of
emphasizing its material holdings, rejecting the approach of
presenting two-dimensional diagrams and unreadable wall
texts covered in quotations, instead striving for a stylized presentation of each era. Today, in light of the objectives of reconstruction that stand before all museums, the importance of
developing more in-depth labels for our exhibits comes to the
forefront of our goals in providing the best possible Marxist
accounts of our collection. The museum’s development plan
therefore includes a fundamental restructuring of our departments. We have conducted a number of experiments in labeling, creating new guiding, descriptive, and evaluative labels,
as well as more attractive and comprehensible designs for our
exhibit on economics—the foundation of class struggle.
One of these experiments is the new exhibition, part of
the yet-unfinished department called “The Revolutionary
Movement Before the First Workers’ Revolution,” which
covers the period from Pugachev’s Rebellion through the
dissolution of The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) Party.
Stemming from its primary purpose—to thoroughly lay
out the history of class struggle—the museum uses everyday
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materials to frame its economic foundations. The thorough
illustration of economics is among the museum’s accomplishments in this realm.
The main condition for the comprehensibility of any
given collection of materials is the accessibility of its guiding
labels. In this case, the labels consist of thesis texts covering entire wall-lengths naming the larger topic, which is an
improvement compared to the commonly accepted system
of simply cataloguing topics or using slogans. The greater
simplicity and elementary nature of the thesis summary is
geared toward the masses and intended for maximal comprehension. Of course, certain success, that is, satisfactory
results, cannot be achieved without some experimentation,
and this approach is being used on a trial basis.
In addition to the main guiding labels (which are constructed from cut-out letters), the class characteristics of the
acting forces in each depicted event are laid out in descriptive labels with quotations from contemporary sources. The
aim of these labels is to provide examples of the style and
mood of the time. With a colorful background, they are like
their own museum pieces. The third kind of labels are evaluative, providing a Marxist assessment of historical phenomena in accordance with the goals and tasks of the proletarian
revolution. Finally, there are descriptive labels under each
artifact. These range from simple “naming” texts to political analysis, which is necessary for unintelligible objects or
those from a foreign class, and occasionally explanatory,
quantitative information that helps develop the theme of a
given object.
The exhibition begins with the thesis “The Serf Order
Was Based in the Forced Labor Exploitation of the Peasant
by the Aristocrat and Landowner.” The central themes are
illustrated by a life-size model of a peasant plowing with
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a new exhibition at the Leningrad Museum
an authentic antique plow, and over him, a symbol of noneconomic compulsion, an authentic three-tailed whip, and
a landowner of the magnate-parasite type. In front of the
model, there are materials relating to: (a) the consumerist
nature of the landowner’s household, (b) how developing
industry forced the landowner to cater to the market—the
serf industry grew more expensive, and (c) how, beginning
at the end of the eighteenth century, the expanding grain
market led to the intensification of forced labor.
The second wall addresses “Pugachev’s Rebellion –The
Peasant’s Answer to Intensified Forced Labor.” The subject is
framed by an ornamental mural presented against the backdrop of a burlap wall covering. Placards placed around a map
of the areas affected by Pugachev’s Rebellion describe the
social background of the movement. The way that the nobility dealt with the rebellion is illustrated by a breaking wheel,
shackles, brands, and other instruments of torture.
The third topic is “Absolute Monarchy Establishes The
Power of the Nobleman Over The Muzhik,”1 and is illustrated
with symbols. A tsar’s throne (a replica of the Romanovs’
throne) is placed high in a red velvet niche; on both sides of
the throne are the monarchy’s pillars of support—a guard
officer and a priest—and the throne is topped by a predatory,
two-headed eagle with a whip instead of a scepter, and fetters
around the ball. The aristocratic essence of the monarchy is
demonstrated by the Charter to the Gentry. It is adjacent to
a partition covering the battle with autocracy, Radishchev,
Novikov, and others.
The second room is dedicated to the time of Nikolai I,
and is accompanied by the following label: “The Decembrists
Were the First Division in the Bourgeois Revolution.” The
1.
Term signifying a hardy (male) Russian peasant—Trans.
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vera leykina
introduction to this subject is a small, partitioned interior
with antique furniture, paintings, engravings, and plaques
depicting the social origins of the Decembrists, diagrams of
their agrarian and political programs, and the social composition of secret societies. The three walls behind the interior present the December 14 uprising. At the center of the
room, the most prominent spot is devoted to the Chernigov
Regiment revolt. In order to analyze the tactics in these
revolts side by side, the museum created additional materials including a specially commissioned painting by Rudolph
Frentz, The Positions of the Soldiers On Senate Square (painted
in 1925), and a map of the positions of the Chernigov
Regiment and the activities of the “slavs” from a bird’s eye
view. Bright yellow walls, a dark blue interior, and a velvet
wall hanging with Masonic symbols reflect the age of nobility. Silhouettes of the statue of Peter the Great and the Peter
and Paul Fortress serve as its emblems.
The topic of the reaction under Nikolai, “The Agrarian
Crisis Temporarily Strengthens Serfdom,” is presented
with original luboks2 and lithographs reflecting the ideology of “autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality” as well as
the political machine of Nikolai I’s monarchy: the army, the
gendarmerie, and the bureaucracy. Models of cavalry and
foot soldiers from original Romanov collections help illustrate the presentation of the tsarist military; these include a
contemporary statuette of Nikolai II on a marble column in
a soldier’s overcoat and a general’s helmet. The third room
addresses the battle for bourgeois reform. A wall labeled
“Emerging Capitalism Requires ‘Free Workers’” provides
an account of the pre-Reform economy—the crises of forced
2. Woodcut prints popular in Russia beginning in the late seventeenth century, usually depicting folk, literary, and religious
stories.—Trans.
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a new exhibition at the Leningrad Museum
labor in agriculture pitted against the rise of voluntary labor
in manufacturing. The material is divided between two relief
diagrams: (a) The rise in grain exports, demonstrated by two
plywood ships floating on waves, and (b) The rise of manufacturing; groups of figures standing on a platform demonstrating the inefficiency of forced labor and the high cost of
voluntary labor when the bulk of the workers are peasants
on obrok.3
The wall dedicated to “The Bourgeois Intelligentsia Fights
for Reform” deals with the movement in the 1840s led by
Belinsky and the Petrashevites. A partitioned-off corner covers two topics: “The Surrender of Sevastopol” and “The Fall
of Serfdom in Russia,” which are presented with the help of
weapons—the rifles of the Russian and allied troops, and
what the serfs used to fight the bourgeoisie. The central artifact for “February 19, 1861—the Beginning of Bourgeois
Russia” is a model of a “freed” serf. It is created using acute
“defamiliarization” and the externalization of verbal material. In the model, (a) A rider sits atop a serf, and (b) The rider
has gotten off, having received a redemption payment to do
so while the serf now lies under the press of government tributes, with a policeman standing over him. Above this scene,
there is a bas-relief of the tsar’s manifesto announcement
under the cover of cannon fire.
The labels on the fourth wall illuminate the peasant revolution and its spokesman Chernyshevsky, who railed against
the landowners and nobility of Russia with the question,
“Through Revolution or Through Reform?” Materials on
Chernyshevsky are thrust into the wall at sharp angles, presented against the background of a blown-up title page of the
Sovremennik. Additional materials on the peasant revolts of
3.
A fine serfs were forced to pay if absent from their villages.—Trans.
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vera leykina
the 1860s include specially commissioned paintings by Ivan
Vladimirov on the Berdyansk Execution. The display also
includes little-known political caricatures about the reaction
from the 1860s.
The presentation of the economic underpinnings of
narodnichestvo—the vestiges of feudalism in the provinces
combined with the simultaneous growth of capitalist elements—is clustered around a large diagram titled “The
Development of Capitalism Following the Reform,” where
numerical graphs are displayed alongside original railroad,
bank, and manufacturing shares from the 1860s and 1870s.
The foreground of the diagram features a model of the comparative growth of coal, raw iron, oil, cotton, railroads, and
grain exports.
The next wall is titled “Revolutionary Intellectuals Seek
Ways to Connect with the People” (on the first clubs and revolutionary organizations of the 1860s and ’70s), and leads
into the room dedicated to narodnichestvo.
This room opens with a statement from Lenin:
“Narodnichestvo is the protest against serfdom and the bourgeois way of life from the perspective of the peasant and the
small producer.” Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya), the first
revolutionary party, is presented through selected materials
related to geography, terror, and party organization. Boards
of plywood placed over the fireplace create two “windows”
that are illuminated from the inside by electric light. The
first tall window displays the “shades of the past”—from
behind a muslin cloth, a meeting of the minor council of
Land and Liberty discussing their program. This appears
alongside original manuscripts (enlarged reproductions of
the originals, which are in the museum archives) of their
program and charter on the wall. The other low window has
a flower on the windowsill—a sign of safety—and is used as
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a new exhibition at the Leningrad Museum
a frame for the original documents arranged behind it from
the “bureaucracy in the sky” (false stationary, stamps, fake
passports, and so on). All of this comprises the topic “The
Revolutionary Conspiracy.”
Next is the wall on the workers’ movement of the 1870s,
titled “The Only Real Force is the Strike Movement of the
Workers.” The fracture of Land and Liberty, under the thematic heading “The Narodnaya Volya Party Takes a Step
Forward, Crossing Over Into Political Battle,” is illustrated by
a crack that goes through the entire wall, with materials on
the Black Repartition and The People’s Will on either side. The
text above the materials on the assassination of the tsar reads,
“March 1st—the Most Powerful Blow Against Autocracy. This
Wasn’t the Storm Yet, The Storm Would be the Movement
of the Masses.” Alexander II’s carriage is placed on a slant,
underlining its bad luck, and behind it there is a transparency
of an exploding bomb that lights up.
The next small room focuses on the decline of The People’s
Will and summarizes its achievements. Next to it, last year,
the museum installed models of the equipment in Pribylev
and Grachevsky’s dynamite-making studio as it would have
looked in the early 1880s, with two life-sized figures intended
to show the original technology of hand-to-hand combat with
autocracy. The same subject is addressed by the museum’s
replica of the basement of the Winter Palace where Khalturin
lived, the walls and layout of which are reconstructed based on
archival research. The defeat of the People’s Will party is also
represented in the model of a jail cell from the Shlisselburg
People’s Will Prison (with original details), which was constructed in 1922 and served as the prototype for all such models currently on view in museums.
Two additional small rooms illustrate Alexander III’s
reaction. An interesting artifact here is an emblem of a
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municipal police chief created with elements of a police uniform mounted on the wall and an expressive hand gesture
created by its white gloves.
The workers’ movement that developed in the years of
Alexander’s Reaction, which determined the course of the
Russian Revolution, are to be covered in the second half of
the section, entitled “The 1890s through the 1900s.”
Museum of the history
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The Museum as a
Weapon of Class Struggle:
Here and Abroad
Roza Frumkina
The Museum as a weapon of Class Struggle
First published in 1934
Translated by Ian Dreiblatt
When the Soviet tourist happens into one of the museums
of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, or another city, he is struck most
immediately by the relative paucity of fellow visitors. Only
in those that the Baedeker guide marks with an asterisk will
you find tour groups, particularly foreign ones. These groups
race through the halls of the Louvre, hurrying to see—or,
more accurately, not to see so much as to be able to say they
have seen—the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and a handful
of other masterpieces and attractions of worldwide repute.
It is the same in every world capital. In Berlin, Englishmen
and Americans throng before Pergamon—but merely press
a few blocks further to the richest of ethnographic museums,
and you will not encounter a soul. On a Sunday, perhaps, a
school trip will amble about. Five or six hundred visitors, at
the most, may stop by the ethnographic museum in a day.
Prewar capitalism treated the museum as a weapon of
class struggle and influence, with more than a touch of condescension. The art museum satisfied the bourgeoisie’s need
for aesthetic snobbery, the technical museum prepared the
qualified laborer-engineer, and museums of sociopolitical
development were with rare exception completely inaccessible to the masses.
After the war, when a proletariat that could enjoy the shining example of the October Revolution attempted to restore
to itself those material and spiritual values that the bourgeoisie had been plundering by the day and by the hour, a
question arose sharply. The bourgeoisie took shelter behind
its right to surplus value, employing all the means at its disposal, from gun and gallows to church and social-democratic
envelopment. Its class enemy—the proletariat—had to be
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disarmed not only physically, but spiritually as well. And
here, alongside the press, cinema, and radio, the bourgeoisie
deployed the museum.
In the postwar museum, the bourgeoisie agitates all the
more brazenly and remarkably for an eternal, indestructible
capitalist order. Here are a few striking examples.
1928. An exhibition of prints in Cologne. The signs of crisis are not yet visible on the horizon. The German bourgeoisie, in a moment of sharp museological wit, draws The Life
of Man as a series of newspaper ads. The first ad: two proud
parents announce to friends and acquaintances the birth of
their son Hans. The second: first day of school. The third: time
to learn a trade. The fourth: Hans, now a clerk, has become
engaged to Greta. The fifth: now they are married. The sixth:
Hans, now a sausage-maker (our Hans has in the interim
opened his own shop), and his wife Greta joyfully announce
to their friends and acquaintances the birth of their son Fritz.
The circle is complete. Not a single ad enfolds a meeting, a
lecture, a party demonstration into the grim life of its hero.
And this is only natural. The worker aspires only to ownership
of a small house with a small garden and his own shop.
A second example. The brilliantly appointed museum of
the national economy in Düsseldorf. By way of a series of
clever display gimmicks, the visitor is emphatically, obstinately induced to consider how magnificently well-ordered
is German industry, and how Germany and all its inhabitants might have flourished if not for the Treaty of Versailles.
Salvation lies in autarky, and the museum brilliantly illustrates this position with the help of another piece of museological wit. Before the viewer are two domestic interiors,
with two families sitting down to breakfast. One of these
is the family of a “traitor” to his motherland, a “betrayer”
of his fatherland, and on that family’s table sit butter from
Museum of the history
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The Museum as a weapon of Class Struggle
Denmark, coffee and eggs from Holland, and Australian
lamb. Every few minutes, some German bank notes flutter
by in the window. The other interior shows us how a “patriot”
of his fatherland takes breakfast: on his table sit ersatz coffee
made from acorns, margarine in place of butter, and so forth,
all of it made from domestic products, so that money stays
in the country, in the pockets of the fatherland’s capitalists.
Another display uses a mechanized, electric train to show
graphically how much capital is being carted out of Germany.
You can walk the full length of the museum’s ten halls
without seeing even the slightest tract of class struggle represented. In another section dedicated to the force of the
workers, which is horribly poor and meager by comparison,
only two things are shown: the rationalization and choice of
a profession based on a battery of tests. The entire function
is to ensure that a man best suited to working with a paintbrush is not instead placed before a lathe, and that the table
and instruments are arranged to ensure minimal loss of time.
As though the fulfillment of these two principles could somehow ensure a shining future …
It should be no surprise, then, that among the friends of
this museum who sit on its advisory board we see such names
as Thyssen and other leaders of German heavy industry.
There is only one problem: workers never visit this museum.
But the bourgeoisie must make its preparations for war
at an ever faster pace. A new generation has arisen. One that
did not fight in the trenches, that must be shown war from
its most appealing angle. How can this be done? One need
only look to the Stuttgart Museum of World War, or to Paris’s
Legionnaires’ Museum, to find out. In Stuttgart, the entire
museum consists of a selection of newspaper clippings and
photographs. There are hardly any actual artifacts. The museum’s ten halls follow, in obstinate sequence, an uncomplicated
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idea: the war was imposed on Germany and prosecuted by
her entire populace, the soldiers and officers on the front constituting a unified whole that went undefeated, and the rear
suffering its blockade, cornering the front into surrender.
Revolutionary progress reflected nothing but the machinations of the Triple Entente. The death of Karl Liebknecht was
declared in this notice, which had run in the Berliner Tageblatt:
“I bring to the attention of friends and acquaintances news of
the passing of my companion in juridical consultation, Doctor
of Laws Karl Liebknecht.” Signed—Doctor of Laws So-and-So.
The war had just ended, leaving thousands of cripples. But oh,
don’t worry about them! Let this row of photographs show
you what marvelous prostheses they received, what a variety
of crafts they were taught—in the end, you may even regret not
having been crippled yourself, or blinded. And if you should
chance to recall that five minutes before you encountered a
legless invalid begging alms on the streetcar, then surely you
were dreaming. And so it goes: long live war.
But for the fifteen years before the war in a series of countries, the Second International and all its parties in fact enjoyed
tremendous influence. The Second International fought for
the soul of the workers, and, in the guise of the German Party,
the Labor-Party, and the Austrian S(ocial)-D(emocrat) Party,
was periodically in power. How did it register its intentions?
The answer is clear and simple: it did not. The very house where
Karl Marx was born was in the hands of the Social-Democrat
Party. But in 1933 Hitler rose to power and hoisted his fascist
flag over it. The only exhibition of Social-Democrat materials
that I was able to see was in Cologne, consisting of printed
matter from the German Social-Democrats. In a small pavilion several newspapers lay dully together, graying and hardly
distinguishable from one another. Nothing more. I had the
opportunity to speak with the administrators of the pavilion,
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The Museum as a weapon of Class Struggle
and to my puzzled inquiries they answered simply, “Here in
Cologne there is an exhibition of printed materials, and so
we are displaying ours.” I held forth to them that the utility of
print derives from its contents, and here these could not be
discerned, but this proved quite incomprehensible to them.
The sole Social-Democrat museum worthy of this appellation
is the Commune Museum in Vienna. The entire museum consists of charts made according to Professor Neurath’s system,
which has been dispersed widely across the USSR through
the Institute of Representational Statistics. In this, it is typical of the refined methods of Social-Democratic envelopment.
Thus, for example, in the chart titled “How Many Votes Did
the Workers’ Parties Receive in the Elections?,” the votes of
communists and socialists are tallied together. The museum
is founded on glorifying the virtues of the municipality of
Vienna. Every mention and notion of class struggle has been
chiseled from the memorial to Otto Bauer.
Far more work has been done by fascism in the realm of
museum displays. In Italy, the fascists have created a great
archive and unveiled an exhibition of photographs, posters, and ephemera to commemorate the tenth anniversary
of the March on Rome. We may judge this exhibition by
its photographs, which are mounted on a series of discrete
boards. Taken together, they clearly show how great an
influence has been exerted by our own methods of display.
Certain of the boards directly duplicate particular models
from the Museum of the Soviet Revolution of 1925–26. A
tremendous amount of space is devoted to materials praising Mussolini, with especial stress on the struggle against
communism. A special display titled “Weapons Confiscated
from the Communists of Bibiena’s City,” in which we see
but a few rifles and revolvers, speaks eloquently to how
meagerly armed were our comrades. Another display titled
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Roza Frumkina
“Communist Insignias Seized by the Fascists” unwittingly
fills the soul with bitterness, and serves as a reminder that
the hour is not far yet when these insignias will be removed
to their rightful place: the Museum of the Italian Revolution.
The German fascists, copying their Italian predecessors to the fullest extent possible, have from the very first
given careful thought to the matter of exhibitions. First off,
immediately upon rising to power, they razed from the face
of the Earth the small Museum of the Great War, showing its
horrors. The museum was located in a small house. Now the
fascists have opened a giant exhibition of war memorials in
the center of Unter den Linden, extending the tradition of
the Stuttgart Museum. By displaying cutaways of trenches,
mock-ups of cannons, soldiers’ encampments, and the like,
it lavishes upon slaughter untold glories. For what does
Germany need war? In truth, only to restore its colonies. The
German people need colonies, and under this slogan a great
exhibition was unveiled in Berlin, showing the beneficences
conferred by Germans on the natives of their colonies. Nor
will the matter of exhibitions be pushed aside in the provinces. Votes are needed in Pomerania, and suddenly, just like
that, an exhibition is mounted: What the Fascists Have Done
for Pomerania. All words and pictures, with no facts.
For our article, we also stopped by a few typically bourgeois museums, but in other countries one finds the same.
The exhibition of colonization in Berlin is the direct progeny
of a tremendous and similar one in Paris, the Museum of the
Empire in London, and so forth.
In brief, we may say that the museum and exhibition
are, in capitalist countries, widely used as intoxicants of the
toiling masses.
What distinguishes our friends from them? Our friends
are distinguished by making visible the construction of
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The Museum as a weapon of Class Struggle
socialism in the fatherland of all laborers. The USSR appears
in all international exhibitions and fairs, and the pavilions
demonstrating the achievements of workers and peasants invariably swell with visitors. Over the past few years,
the Society of Friends of the USSR has often employed the
method of mounting small, traveling exhibitions on the various subjects that arise in the construction of socialism. They
arouse lively responses in the toiling masses; the visitors’
books have amounted to a kind of mass rally. “Lenin’s dream
lives—what has become of Masaryk’s?” wrote one Czech
worker, a visitor at an exhibition on socialist construction in
the USSR. This leitmotif runs through all the comments. The
last great exhibition, mounted abroad, commemorated the
fifteenth anniversary of the Soviet Union. Even today, this
exhibition remains open in Scandinavia, to great success.
Our foreign friends have discovered yet one more striking
way of utilizing exhibition materials—publishing the exhibition, in whole or in part. Recent years have seen part of an
exhibition on the construction of socialism published under
the title The Filippov Family as a special number of AITS; it
went on to circle the globe. An exhibition of the fifteenth
anniversary of the USSR was published in its own edition
in German, under the title Fifteen Iron Paces, and in the near
future a Dutch house will be following suit. These exhibitions have done their job: unmistakably standing up against
bourgeois terror and global crisis to achieve our Five-Year
Plan. The same struggle has been fought on this front as on
the others. That struggle continues, and we have the duty of
marshaling all our strength into a contribution to the work
of the great struggle for the majority of the working class, for
the propaganda of communism, for the shock brigade of the
world proletariat—our socialist fatherland.
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The Atheists’ Museum
An Exhibition and
Panorama of the Moscow
Crematorium
A. F. Levitsky
an exhibition and panorama
First published in 1931
Translated by Maria Tananyan Goldverg
An exhibition and panorama of Moscow crematoriums has
been up for three months already in Kharkov (1 Sverdlov
St.). Since there is no museum or permanent exhibit on
antireligious matters in the Ukrainian SSR, combined with
the construction of a crematorium in Kharkov for the popularization of the idea of cremation and the education of
the public in the materialist worldview, this exhibit is more
than welcome.
The exhibit and the panorama are housed in two moderately sized rooms within a shabby, newly built, nearly
plywood structure. In the first room: installation materials,
historical information on burials, buried remains, cremation
machinery, and “testimonials of cremation.” In the second: a
burial and cremation panorama, cremated remains, projection slides of contemporary crematoriums. There are a good
number of slogans at the exhibit, with sufficient explanatory
labels, tables, and photographs. The projection slides and the
panorama are relatively effective. The exhibition attendance
rates are high even today. Guides provide additional information to organized tours and small groups of visitors.
At the same time, it is necessary to note the drawbacks
of this particular exhibit: the organizing principle of this
mobile exhibit is unclear; the layout of the exhibit and
even a schematic diagram indicating the principles according to which materials are arranged are missing; themes
aren’t made clear to exhibit tours; there is no guidebook
or catalog available; no much-needed agitprop leaflets; all
captions and annotations for visitors are written only in
Russian, while the exhibit sign is written out in improper
Ukrainian; some of the photographs on display are terribly
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old; the projection slides are duplicates (the crematoriums
in Australia); captions are sometimes grammatically incorrect (the dimensions of Moscow’s cemeteries are measured
in “square hectares”); there is no literature or bibliography
provided on matters concerning burial and especially cremation. There is one ill-considered caption labeling a section “Testimonials of Cremation,” but actually, in addition
to testimonials, there is information on the period when
cremation was legalized by the state (in 1918, for us) and
photographs of those who had been cremated, for example:
Durov, Tsiurupa, Solovyov, Skvortsov-Stepanov, the scholar
Bekhterev, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Indeed, for such a
serious and important exhibition, one must be a wunderkind of a guide in order to be able to briefly outline, over
the course of a mere four or six minutes, the installation
and its materials to adult visitors or a group of schoolchildren—all this is done according to one manual. A disclosure
made on the part of the tour guide (and possibly according
to outlined instructions given to him) included the assertion that our oldest relics were those of Theodosius Uglich,
“preserved in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra” (right away, there
is an inaccuracy—one of chronology and fact). The guide’s
inability to relate his explanations with the exhibition’s
location in Ukraine is somewhat surprising. For example,
with respect to relics, even to this day there are relics in the
former Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, while at Kharkov’s cultural
museum, Artyom, there is a mummified corpse. Because all
the materials in the exhibition are so thoughtless, it is possible to leave it confused: Is cremation at all necessary, or is
it better to abide by the age-old custom of burying the dead?
In one ill-fated place in the exhibition—on the eastern wall
in the first room—appears the following thesis caption: “The
enormous work of liberating Earth from rotten plant matter
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an exhibition and panorama
and the corpses of animals and people is performed by bacteria. Due to their efforts, all major categories of organic
substances decompose into simpler compounds until they
become completely mineralized. This renders them again
fit for plant consumption, in order to once more enter a new
cycle of life.” This is not just a technical error, but a crude ideological blunder on the part of the exhibition’s organizers.
It is crucial that significant corrections be made to the
material and operation of this exhibit as soon as possible.
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The Question of Exhibitions in
Antireligious Museums
S. P. Lebedyansky
the question of exhibitions
First published in 1931
Translated by Margarita Shalina
First I’d like to talk about the principles of installation
with which we approached the challenge of organizing the
Antireligious Complex in Leningrad. We did not name it the
Antireligious Museum, but the Complex , and here’s why:
we have come to the conclusion that this manner of antireligious work must be conducted by all museums, since all
museums are built on Marxist methodology. Each of these
museums must conduct systematic propaganda around the
Marxist worldview, and the Antireligious Combine occupies
a definite place in this plan.
Today, when the question of antireligious work becomes
a political actuality, there is a need to create a particular
Complex that would conduct systematic antireligious work,
linking it to other departments. There must be fundamental themes included in the Antireligious Complex , linked to
religion, the role of class struggle, and the role of religion in
contemporary society; in addition, a department of natural sciences must be organized in all of the museums so that a different worldview is provided in place of the religious worldview
that we are erasing. These are the two sides that we were faced
with during the organization of the Antireligious Complex
. We consider it to be temporary. It will exist for fifteen to
twenty years, and with time the need for it will decrease, but
the propaganda opposing a religious worldview to a materialistic worldview and promoting the education of youth taking
their first steps toward Marxist appreciation will be passed on
to another museum. This compels us to approach the organization of the Complex with particular care.
Work on antireligious exhibitions began to develop
only after the October Revolution, and as our workers
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stepped up to the job—that is, the exhibition—they found
themselves completely at the mercy of the old workers and
patterns of exhibition derived from the old museums. Faced
with these new challenges to antireligious museums, the
old method of museum exhibition could not be taken into
consideration. The challenge of new forms and methods
of exhibition had arisen. However, strange as it may seem,
no new methods had been created, and in terms of exhibition today the antireligious museum falls behind all other
museums. I’ll repeat, the reason is that these new antireligious workers have not developed the techniques they had
in their own hands.
The experience of constructing the Antireligious
Complex in what was formerly St. Isaac’s Cathedral creates
the challenge of attempting to build the kind of form that is
most effectively expressive and provides maximum thematic
clarity in the museum’s presentations, all so that the viewer
does not think he is entering the cabinet of curiosities, but
instead has no illusions that he is viewing the Complex .
On the other hand, the following must be taken into
account about the work: when you view shows that are
antireligious in nature, it’s hard not to notice that to a large
degree this work is in line with cultural redistribution. The
most prominent show in Leningrad, open in the halls of the
Winter Palace, satisfies all aspects of antireligious work and
appears to be a purely culturally redistributive show. The gist
of the show is the history of religion, except the history of
religion is parallel to ethnographic studies and while viewing the exhibition an excursionist might come to the following conclusion: every nation and every group had their own
gods. A materialist explanation of religion is not provided.
This practice must be categorically condemned, because it
merely provides elements of cultural redistribution without
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even providing a Marxist outlook, which leads to a blurring
of antireligious work’s fundamental content with its current
political narrowness.
What is the role of the material in the exhibition and
how is it conveyed? Typically in the old museums, its
quantity and range was not determined by the political
relevance of the current theme, but by how much material could be collected around that current theme, and the
habits characteristic of old museums reveal that it was the
quantity of collected materials that determined the range.
The same thing often occurs in antireligious museum as
well. If the Sectarian Department has collected a large
quantity of material, their theme will fill half the museum
regardless of the fact that sectarians are of less importance
than religion in general, while the other, more important
theme is displayed on just one small panel. At the end of
the day, what it comes down to is that the museum-lover
goes to an exhibition because of the material. What does
this point to? Essentially, that the viewer arriving at the
museum may miss what’s important, paying more attention to the secondary part.
How should material be distributed within the theme?
On the surface, this question does not seem to present any
great difficulty, but in fact it is one of the most fundamental
questions of the exhibition. How is material exhibited in any
museum? There is a thematic banner mounted overhead,
while beneath that theme are mounted all the materials pertaining to the current theme. Occasionally a slogan may be
included. This concept was introduced at Peterhof and has
produced significant results.
Every theme must have a thesis, and the material must be
revealed by this thesis, which ties in to the entire exhibition
and guides the viewer through the theme, orienting the viewer
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and fully explaining the material. Sometimes this results in
connections being automatically made in the material.
With regard to the distribution of objects in the theme:
things are distributed according to how they pertain to the
current issue. Very often (this can be found in any museum)
objects that are secondary from the point of view of the fundamental theme overshadow the primary target, as they
are superficially more effective, thereby focusing the viewer’s attention on secondary objects to the detriment of the
entire exhibition.
Themes are severely overloaded. This is a vice which we
must struggle against. Quite often, having arrived at the
museum, the viewer gets bored. Museums are in competition with each other over who can cram the most material
onto a wall. The appreciation desired of the viewer will not be
achieved this way. Flashy objects attract the most attention,
followed by everything else being viewed “after the fact.”
Attempting to present fewer exhibitions gives more favorable results, and rightly so. Those who arrive for the tour will
view the whole exhibition with the utmost attention.
The experience of curiosity at the Tolstoy Museum in
Leningrad: they conduct this experience to its fullest there.
Sometimes on a wall, very large in size, only one exhibit is
displayed, and the excursionist will survey it with scrutiny.
This smaller quantity of material expresses the idea presented by the exhibition best of all. In many instances the
following conclusion may be drawn: it is possible to include a
large number of exhibits that convey the spirit of the chosen
theme. However, the material must be displayed in a way that
elicits the greatest response.
At the antireligious museum we overload the material
with photographs which are variations of one and the same
theme from different perspectives. Intriguing things happen
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as a result. A photograph pertaining to a current theme is
hung and when its timeliness fades away, new photographs
are hung, but the old ones are never removed and the result
is an overload. In certain instances it is necessary for there to
be less photographic material displayed, seeing as how it is
too congested in large quantities.
The fundamental and probably central shortcoming of
the exhibition is that the material grows stale. A museum is
typically visited only one time—one can’t compel the visitor
to come for a second time. These are the responses: “I went
to that museum, saw everything, it wasn’t interesting.” The
viewer must be taught that with the changing concerns of
the day, the exhibition changes, stepping aside for a new
one to take its place. Whenever you want to find out any
kind of news about the museum, you can drop by and get
that news. Another colossal shortcoming is that material
loses its political relevance.
The problem of exhibition design deserves broad discussion. It is the thorn in the side of all other museums too. What
role should exhibit design play in the exhibition of materials? First of all, exhibition design typically conforms to being
a kind of naturalistically decorative design. What does this
result in? For one thing, all the distinctness of the panel
itself is lost. When you display an icon using select exhibition design, what this leads to is that people come to pray.
Such episodes occurred at the Cabin of Peter I. Once that
icon is hung on a simple panel, it may bring out this sort of
response in a believer. When elements of biting cartoonish
artistry and caricature are missing, in many instances objects
displayed in a museum can have a purely religious impact
on the viewer. Churikovsky’s material was laid out simply in
display cases and that brought on the sort of ecstasy that I
just mentioned above.
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Typically, so that the theme can in some way be uniform,
materials that are either diagram, slogan, or schematically
oriented are included. How is this material applied? Most
times it is unsatisfactory. Every one of us has—we got this
from the old museums—held on to the idea that the schematic, the diagram, and the cartogram are supplemental
materials in the museum that have no right to be equal to
showpieces on display. This leads to our diagrams and schematics being made in a way that it is unpleasant to look at.
This is a careless making of two-dimensional objects, and a
place should be allocated for them the same as for supplemental materials. This is why a large part of the role that they
must play in explaining the exhibition is lost, even though
it’s we who employ them for the purpose of providing a materialist, Marxist explanation to a whole series of questions.
The explanation slips away as a result, because we do not
have a clear view that this is important material.
It is the same with museum labels. The problem of
museum labels in all the museums in Moscow is the loss of,
to put it simply, the slogan. This leads to the slogan being
understood, formally, in and of itself but not as an explanation of the object. Faced with this system of museum labeling,
a person arriving at the museum gets confused, reads slogans, and views displayed showpieces like the objects at the
Kunstkamera, but the theme is not expressed in an integrated
way to him. Even if guidebook materials were provided, to
make him follow a red line through the entire network of
museum labels, provided as more than just slogans—all this
could never be applied and could never be applicable, and
rightly so. It’s necessary to direct your attention here to the
experience of Leningrad, via the accomplishments made at
the Peterhof Museum, one of the best museums at organizing
materials. They applied themselves to reworking the system
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the question of exhibitions
of museum labels, and achieved favorable results. With organizational ineptitude, material turns out to be the primary
shortcoming of the exhibition, which we can observe in the
antireligious museums and which appear to have been inherited from the old museum exhibitions.
Now please allow for a shift to our findings on technique in
the exhibition. I’ll begin with a few words on the general principals of the exhibition as a whole. It may seem strange that
there is nothing about exhibition within a church in the thesis. The reason for this is that we’re only just now organizing
a museum in a church (in the former St. Isaac’s Cathedral),
and naturally, while we have not yet tested all the methods of
processing or “outplaying” the church, we cannot speak to
the general direction that the work must be pointed toward.
At the same time, I’ll try to sum this up in brief.
In our opinion, the fundamental goal of the antireligious
museum within the church is to decanonize, to outplay the
church. A big part that goes into building the museumchurch is the introduction of material that does not cultivate
the pairing of church qua church. The exhibition that we
bring into the church should relay the feeling that it is wholly
antireligious. Secondly, icons and existing materials must be
included in the exhibition, and we’re doing this. They must
be brought out into the light to show the much-needed piece
which connects the exhibition to the cathedral. If we encounter instances where both our theme and our material are
diverse and the segments do not tie in to our mutual plan for
the construction of the thematic museum, we focus on making the exhibition balanced without interrupting the theme.
We must then utilize all in-house material for the purpose of
exposing the current church, for the purpose of our beginning with a concrete cathedral that houses timely materials.
Here is the fundamental route that we are taking in regard
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to exposing the church. It’s the kind of exhibition that must
kill the church, show alien themes. Occasionally we include
whole chunks of the current cathedral in our exhibitions. I
acknowledge that this is the primary route which the organization of the museum must follow.
Now, regarding the general principles of our exhibition.
It is constructed on thematic principles so that the theme
will be clearly recognized and definitively concluded, and the
rather difficult task of organizing the cathedral is done in a
way that is designed to make it possible to mount any antireligious tour at the museum based on its themes and materials, while the Antireligious Complex provides an opportunity
to broadly establish antireligious work so that each and every
student may be shown the museum from different angles. It’s
not necessary to discuss the principles of Marxist construction. They are evident in and of themselves.
The fundamental goal is to direct the exhibition and distributing materials according to place and theme. What follows is our fundamental criteria. Our principle is: the theme
cannot be overloaded with exhibits and priority should
be given to exhibits that reveal the core of the theme. In
regard to secondary materials, however sad it may be (I’m
a museum lover too, and sometimes it’s painful to throw
things away), we have to go ahead and throw out secondary
material. This is the fundamental principle that must govern
the entire exhibition.
The enormous advantage of thematic materials is that
we have the ability to change the material during the thematic exhibition. When we have a grand communal theme,
we display the material with precision, particularly within
each theme. The elements of rearrangement in the exhibition, along with contemporaneity, will become an inner part
of the exhibition.
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the question of exhibitions
The principles of thematic exhibition are revealed foremost in the successful delivery of the exhibition. The theme
may be in the form of a stationary exhibition, but it grabs
hold of the fundamental material—the essence of the current
theme. When we display material about the history of religion, we display the elements of production in the General
Department, showing how it all came together. This provides
the economic base that it grew out of. The same applies to
contemporary religion as well. Construction remains ongoing, but the material may be changed daily. It is vital that
exhibit design is used totally for the purpose of accentuating this material, and we’re accomplishing much in this
regard. Secondary objects are excluded. Exhibition design
accentuates slight objects which are interesting for our purposes and places them center stage. We proceed in this way,
so that exhibition design remains a dutiful apparatus in our
hands. This method conforms to the design of departments.
Departments with beautiful materials will reveal themselves
to be exactly that, and we will apply exhibition design to
departments that are lacking.
On diagrams and cartograms: this material is just as
important as any other material. The diagram schematic
must be included in the conversation and should be just as
aesthetically pleasing as all other exhibitions. The viewer
must look at the diagram schematic in the same way that he
looks at the exhibition—that is what we must strive for. We
plan to introduce electrical lighting and maneuverable maps.
The introduction of all these things will compel the viewer to
look at the exhibition.
The question of museum labels: the museum label must,
in my opinion, be presented in three parts.
If the thesis has been artistically realized, then it will be
displayed as a whole of all its parts, including the theme. A
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thesis that is presented not only through slogans linked in
with the current theme, but materials explaining that theme
as well, becomes a part of the systematic construction of the
current theme. Secondary material: supplemental, allowing
for the story behind the current theme to be told; and tertiary
material: allowing for the organization of its construction.
The method of building a system of museum labels in such
a manner produces favorable results. The principal guiding
theme stands out sharply.
What themes should be included in the composition of
the Antireligious Complex: it is impossible to permanently
decide this for every Complex, since it is necessary to take all
regional material into consideration. For this reason, I, for
instance, cannot recommend the plan for executing exhibitions at the former St. Isaac’s Cathedral for other Complexes.
The question must be decided in every respective instance,
basing it, of course, on your respective installations.
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The Museum on the Frontlines
of the War on Religion
Yuriy Kogan
the museum on the frontlines
First published in 1932
Translated by Bela Shayevich
Alongside museums of the history of the Revolution, anti­
religious museums are the true children of October.
The October Revolution wrested one-sixth of the planet
from the hands of the exploiters who “require filling two
social functions in order to defend their dominance: the role
of the executioner and the role of the priest” (Lenin). “Our
Revolution … presented the greatest challenge to religious
thought, the greatest criticism of the religious worldview and
the societal forces that constrain religion” (Yaroslavsky).
After the October Revolution, the mass departure from religion took off, and the antireligious movement keeps growing. Our battle to liberate the working class from religion
is closely intertwined with our fight for socialism. “The war
against religion is the war for socialism.” This is the motto of
the millions-strong League of Militant Atheists.
The League of Militant Atheists (LMA) fights religion in
every way, using all possible approaches. Museum-related
methods are an extremely powerful weapon in our arsenal.
At the Antireligious Museum, we use visual aids to demonstrate our principles, debunking the class-exploitative
essence of religion using archival materials, documents,
photos, painting, sculpture, and so on. This can achieve great
results, especially amongst the religious and other categories of working people for whom the exhibition of original
documents and artifacts debunking religion in a museum are
often much more persuasive than even the most well-argued
lecture. For this reason, from its very first efforts, the LMA
has set out to establish antireligious museums and strongly
censure the failures that often occur in this area, especially
in relation to so-called historical churches and monasteries.
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The October Revolution broke open the doors to academies and museums for the working classes, where they
may find great cultural treasures. These treasures, however,
inherited from the era of slavery and exploitation, must be
contemplated with a critical eye by the working classes: they
need to be understood correctly in order to make sense of
the exploitative way of life, particularly the class-exploitative
nature of religion.
In the first few years after October, during the Civil
War and even while our economy was being established,
museums fell behind other warriors on the cultural front.
Museum collections were preserved, but it was very difficult
to reform the museums. Special antireligious museums did
not yet exist—neither in the big cities nor in the provinces.
The old central museums outright avoided antireligious
propaganda. However, the battle against museums undermining antireligious propaganda was already underway;
people fought against the perversion of Lenin’s party line in
the realm of antireligious work. Militant atheists were and
remain trailblazing activists in this battle.
In the first few years of the organized antireligious movement, antireligious museums were established without
a plan, haphazardly. There were only a handful, and they
were completely unsatisfactory in terms of their collections.
However, these first antireligious museums showed that
“visual aids” and the “museum method” were crucial for
antireligious propaganda.
The first antireligious museums were overall tainted
with amateurism. Most often, they featured materials from
Leningrad art reproduction workshops that focused on comparative mythology and the ancient history of religion. There
were almost no exhibitions on the counterrevolutionary,
exploitative role of religion or the antireligious movement.
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To a certain extent, the exception was the museum exhibition at the Central Soviet of the Society of the Friends of
the Atheist newspaper.1 This exhibition was organized in
1924 and shown to the delegates during the First Congress
of the Union of Atheists. It closed when the Central Union
of Atheists changed locations. Also of note is the Central
Antireligious Museum in Leningrad, which opened at the
end of 1924, which included displays on “The Church and
the State,” and “Religion and Marxism.”
In 1925, a handful of museums in the provinces opened
antireligious galleries (for instance, the Bryansk Guberniya
Museum), and then, a year later, we saw the appearance of
small antireligious museums at the Groznensky Oil Field
in Svedlovsk, the University of Minsk, as well as a handful
across several Soviet republics (Baku, Kokand, and others).
Alongside these generally auspicious beginnings, we also
had to contend with clerical elements infiltrating museum
administrations. An intense class war was being waged on
the consolidating antireligious museum platform of the
cultural front. Prominent examples of this occurred in the
monastery museums at the former Sergiev-Posad-Trinity
and Kiev-Pechersky monasteries. The next milestone in the
history of the construction of antireligious museums was the
opening of the Central Antireligious Museum in Moscow.
The Central Antireligious Museum (CAM) of the League
of Militant Atheists has only been open for four years. Its genesis can be dated to the Church and the Revolution exhibition
1. The Society of the Friends of the Atheist newspaper (Obschestvo
druzei gazety “Bezbozhnik” [ODGB]) was a committee of atheist
activists involved with the Atheist newspaper, which formed in 1924.
The League of Atheists was formed at the First Congress of the ODGB,
in 1921. In 1929, at the Second Congress of the League of Atheists,
it was renamed the League of Militant Atheists (Soyuz voinstvuyuschikh bezbozhnikov [SVB]). —Trans.
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organized in 1926 at the Military Engineering Academy in
Moscow. This exhibition featured a large number of documents revealing the class significance of religion and was
met with great success. Two years later, with the gathering of
the materials collected for the exhibition, the Antireligious
Museum was opened in an ill-equipped basement space.
To counter the aforementioned monastery museums
and the several antireligious institutions infected with kulturnichestvo,2 the Moscow Museum’s objective was to be an
instrument for exposing the class-exploitative essence of
religion. The museum illustrated the relationship between
religious organizations and organs of the tsarist government, the counterrevolutionary activities of religious organizations in 1905 in the reactionary years, and how these
organizations supported imperialist massacre; their resistance to the October Revolution; their relationship with the
White Guard.
The basement space where the museum was located was
not conducive to the expansion of its activities. All efforts
were made to find a different location, and finally, when, after
great difficulty, the museum was granted use of a cathedral
church of the former Strastnoy Monastery, it took a great
deal of work to reclaim this (incidentally ill-suited) space. The
museum was completed in the beginning of 1929, and thus,
the anti-Easter campaign was inaugurated in the very center
of Moscow, in a former stronghold of the religious opiate,
at the museum of atheism. Two months later, the museum
in the former Strastnoy Monastery was graced by delegates
from the Second All-Soviet Congress of Militant Atheists.
From November 1929 to November 1930, the museum saw
234,716 visitors.
2.
This term signifies apolitical cultural activity. —Trans.
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It’s important to emphasize that during that time, the
organization of CAM exhibits was highly unsatisfactory.
The politically acute displays made the mistake of attacking
Christianity (specifically and especially Russian Orthodox
Christianity), and not religion in general. On the other hand,
the overall objective was to build a museum that adhered to
a rather constricted Marxist framework, and thus, to display
materials on social formations that would be interrelated
and demonstrated in their historical contexts. It was important to show how religion emerged in a pre-class society, how
it developed throughout the subsequent course of societal
formation; its political role in a society transitioning from
capitalism to socialism; and finally, how religion will die out
in a socialist society.
Naturally, restructuring the museum presented a great
deal of difficulty. Today, as a result of the restructuring, CAM
has an introductory section (“The Dialectic of Nature”), and
displays addressing religion in pre-class, slave-owning, feudal, and capitalist societies, as well as societies transitioning
from capitalism to socialism. It also features permanent exhibitions on all Christian sects.
The CAM’s redesign by no means signals that the
museum is complete; indeed, the new exhibits require fresh
processing. We have taken only the initial steps in this direction in light of the fact that the objectives set out before CAM
are too great compared to its capacity to achieve them over
such a short period.
In its few years of operation, the CAM has managed to
achieve substantial results, including conducting thousands of organized tours, numerous traveling exhibitions
that are now prepared at a special exhibition workshop,
and participating in street and park exhibitions. However,
this is not enough. CAM’s work with the masses needs to
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cover a far greater scope, not to mention its methodological
and pedagogical elements, which are currently very weak.
CAM participates in public museum life, with various public museum shows, is on the museum methods commission of the Academic Sector of the People’s Commissariat
for Education, the Central Bureau on Local History, and
other organizations. In the near future, the CAM is poised
to become a true all-Soviet and even international museum
center for proletariat atheism.
Over time, antireligious museum construction came to be
more plan-oriented, and started following the path for achieving the objective of creating many antireligious museum locations around the country. The antireligious museum is not a
haphazard institution emerging from favorable conditions;
it’s a powerful lever of our antireligious propaganda machine
as important as the other forms and methods of battling religion that have gained currency concurrently.
The turning point in the development of this plan for the
antireligious museum inarguably came with the First AllRussian Museum Congress (December 1–6, 1930), which
called for the overall reconstruction of the entire museum
complex of the cultural front with a view to socialist construction, and turning museums into “instruments of the
cultural revolution.”
In his opening address, Comrade Bubnov declared that
museum work “remained contaminated with significant vestiges of backwardness, and [was] far from reaching the objectives in the struggle and construction of socialism relevant
today.” This was an irrefutably fair assessment of museums
in general and how museums approach antireligious propaganda in particular. In most museums, the latter seems to
have stalled in its often-haphazard application, which, more
often than not, was abandoned. At the same time, the socialist
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the museum on the frontlines
reeducation of the working masses, in which our museums
are called to play a prominent role, that is, the introduction
of the materialist Marxist-Leninist worldview into their consciousness, is unthinkable without atheist propaganda.
Rich and varied materials were provided by the antireligious panel of the congress, which worked in conjunction
with the League of Militant Atheists.3 The question of antireligious propaganda in local history museums inspired heated
discussion. The argument centered on whether local history
museums should have discrete antireligious exhibitions or
whether antireligious materials should be placed throughout their collections. Noting the tendency of the majority of
local history museums to have scant antireligious materials
scattered throughout their exhibition, the panel concluded
that in light of the meagerness of antireligious materials in
the provinces and the necessity of mobilizing the attention of
the masses, turning it to the battle with religion, special antireligious wings are needed in local history museums, which
does not, of course, preclude but rather further emphasizes
the necessity of adding antireligious elements throughout
their permanent collections. In its conclusion, the panel
emphasized that antireligious exhibitions in local history
museums should provide in-depth examinations of the
counterrevolutionary class role of religion. Unfortunately,
we must acknowledge that the recommendations set forth
in this resolution have yet to be thoroughly implemented.
3. The antireligious panel featured the following papers:
“Antireligious Work in Museums of Various Profiles,” “Antireligious
Work in Historical Museums,” “On Antireligious Work in Art
Museums,” “Antireligious Work in Local History Museums,” “Methods
for Exhibiting Materials on the Origins of Religion” (“On Exhibitions
in Antireligious Museums”), and “Scholarly Research in Antireligious
Museums” (See: “Papers from the First Museum Congress of the
RSFSR,” v. II).
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Yuriy Kogan
Nonetheless, the First All-Russian Museum Congress has
led to the rising profile of the antireligious front. Antireligious
work in museums have become the subject of serious inquiry
from the wider museum community. These successes should
not only be appreciated from the standpoint of the progress
of antireligious propaganda: the expansion of antireligious
activity in museums is one of the expressions of the museum
front turning toward the great construction of socialism.
For the past three years, especially during the First AllRussian Museum Congress, there has been an appreciable
increase in the number of antireligious museums as well
as antireligious wings in local history museums. Across the
RSFSR, there are nearly one hundred antireligious museum
locations, although the exhibition quality in the majority of
them is rather pitiful.
In Moscow, in addition to the CAM, there’s the Anti­
religious Museum of Art (formerly the Donskoy Monastery),
which breaks down the class essence of religion in art. Using
materials found in the monastery, the museum presents an
exhibition on Religion and War; the tombstones and memorials in the cemetery are incorporated into the Class Significance
of Burial exhibition. An incomparably less successful museum
in Moscow is the Museum of the Emancipated Woman, where
the role of religion in the enslavement of working women and
the struggle to liberate them from the opiate of religion are
among the topics explored.
Leningrad follows in Moscow’s footsteps in developing
its antireligious museums. Here we find the antireligious
museum (LGAM) in the former St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and the
broadly conceived Museums of the History of Religion and
Atheism currently under construction in the Kazan Cathedral.
Incidentally, the LGAM’s collection includes the first Foucault
pendulum in the USSR, which is also the world’s largest.
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the museum on the frontlines
The class enemy, seeing the might of the antireligious
propaganda in our museums, attempts to sabotage us. There
have been acts of sabotage and agitation at the LGAM.
Following the example of the large museums, smaller
museums outside of major cities demonstrate an increasing
aptitude for adopting the correct political orientation, and
their “toothless,” often apolitical4 museums are steadily transforming into true centers for militant atheism. Of course,
we will endure many pitfalls here yet, but there have still
been some successes. In particular, it bears mentioning the
Bryansk Antireligious Museum, which has been around for
several years. It has seven galleries and five thousand artifacts;
it has organized twenty-four mobile exhibitions and outfitted
an antireligious museum unit in a train car. This location sees
a widespread development of socialist competition, organizes a great deal of community service works, and facilitates
scholarly research. The Central Museum in Tatarstan is also
the site of notable ongoing antireligious activity.
The opposite can be seen, for instance, in the Volga
region, in the Urals, in the Ivanovsk Oblast. Inspections have
revealed thoroughly inadequate paces of construction and
reconstruction of antireligious museums and departments
in those areas. Local materials are not being used, exhibitions are far from politically acute, efforts to work with the
masses are weak, and no attention is paid to the techniques
of exhibition. The situation with funding and staff is pathetic,
the administration in the center has not been stable, and
regional museums are completely divorced from municipal ones. Finally, there is no dialogue—the examples of the
work of our finest antireligious museums are not reaching
these regions. The network of antireligious museums is by no
4.
Another reference to kulturnichestvo —Trans.
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Yuriy Kogan
means satisfactory: we see dozens of antireligious museums,
when the number of centers of antireligious museum operations should be in the hundreds and even thousands.
The majority of the progress made so far has been in the
realm of collecting the materials necessary for antireligious
museums and galleries. Of course, this is of great importance, but today, it is overshadowed by the tasks of significantly intensifying our antireligious activity and raising it to
a high ideological level.
On the eve of the second Five-Year Plan, our country
must triumph over the remains of capitalism in the consciousness of our people. This historical goal lends a special
importance to antireligious propaganda, which must go
deeper and reach the largest possible number of religious
working people; it must become more convincing. The
museum as a locus for antireligious activity will allow it to
meet all of these objectives and for this reason, it demands
to be a higher priority.
In the coming years, we aim to expand antireligious
work in museums, build antireligious museums or galleries
in every region and every city, and fill every museum with
antireligious information throughout its galleries, first and
foremost, at local history museums.
The second decisive element is cadres. The antireligious
museum workforce suffers from an almost complete lack of
personnel. They would need to be prepared and educated on
a broad range of subjects, and fast. Today, there are no qualified antireligious museum workers to serve even the specialized antireligious museums, not to mention the local history
museums. Meanwhile, antireligious work needs to be raised
to a higher level: the network of antireligious museums needs
to be expanded—which means that we must first make considerable advances in the direction of training personnel.
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the museum on the frontlines
The recently held Second All-Soviet Conference on
Antireligious Work of the League of Militant Atheists outlined
practicable pathways in this direction, namely: creating training and education facilities at CAM, LGAM, and the Museum
of the History of Religion and Atheism; holding correspondence courses; and creating methodical and educational textbooks for antireligious museum work, among other things.
We have made little progress in developing the methods
for curating antireligious exhibitions. Here, we find a lot of
amateurism and no set guidelines. The research work necessary for resolving certain theoretical issues connected to
antireligious propaganda in museums must take its rightful
place in the corresponding institutions as and become a part
of the absolutely crucial research on methods and means of
antireligious propaganda.
The successful development of our museum-exhibition
work is closely related to the expansion of the research work
of the League of Militant Atheists. The task lies in studying
local materials, studying the enemy, and studying the process of the emancipation of the workers from religion. This
work must involve low-level local history organizations and
follow through on arrangements made between the Central
Bureau of Local History and the LMA. It’s critical to mobilize
the forces of Soviet art so that our antireligious museums can
be filled with artistically powerful artifacts to take the place
of innumerable photos. Finally, the Central Antireligious
Museum must become the true administrative center for
all antireligious museum activity. The CAM needs to be provided with the best possible conditions for making the development of its work possible in the future. Following these
paths, we will ensure that our museums, first and foremost
the antireligious ones, will become powerful weapons in the
battle against religion and for socialism.
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Antireligious Work at the
Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum:
Supplementary Report
Vorontsovsky
antireligious work
First published in 1931
Translated by Ainsley Morse
The work of the Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum can serve as
an example of how our comrades from further-flung regions
can work with science museums in their own areas, toward
the end of using them in antireligious work.
We think that exhibits and topics not expressly constructed around an antireligious core can also be useful
from an antireligious angle. We believe that any scientific
position proceeding from general biological foundations,
even the purely educational, nevertheless offers a great deal
of material insofar as it replaces the nonscientific religious
worldview with a purely scientific, dialectical-materialist
worldview. Thus such general biological topics as the origin
of man and animals, variability, and inheritance can also be
made use of from an antireligious angle and supported as
such by appropriate labeling. Truth be told, not every beginning museum guide will know what to do with material not
previously established as antireligious in nature, and for this
reason labeling developed by comrades more experienced in
antireligious work will serve to direct them.
Further, we believe that each of the museum’s main sections should contain subsections of a specifically antireligious
bent. For instance, under the general education topic “The
Environment and the Organism” there could be a subsection, “Does Everything in Nature Have a Meaning?” or “The
Meaningless and the Imperfect in Nature.” The Timiryazev
Biomuseum has just such a subsection, which features a
collection of every imaginable example of deformity in the
world of man and animals, every imaginable case of inexpedience, by which we mean non-correspondence between
the functions of the animal and the conditions of existence.
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vorontsovsky
Additionally, there are all kinds of examples of predatory
behavior, parasitism, and so on. In this way the organization
of antireligious subsections within existing sections supplements and intensifies antireligious work.
Moreover, entire sections can be organized around an
antireligious core. The Timiryazev Biomuseum has a section of physiological demonstrations focused around the
topic “Does man have a soul?” We would like to use this section as an example of how museums are bound not only to
demonstrate finalized conclusions, but also the methods
of scientific study themselves, the methods used in laboratory experiments. Demonstrations of individual organs and
experiments on living animals are performed in this section,
and all of the labeling, indeed the whole stance of the section,
is of a purely antireligious character.
We believe that the material in science museums should
be necessarily used for all kinds of courses, seminars, political education work, and teachers’ retraining courses, courses
for workers and for workers promoted to administrative
work. These courses are held at biomuseums using this scientific material. The Timiryazev Biomuseum has been doing
this work for six years already, and the courses we hold for
rural reading-room managers, political education workers,
and pedagogues have been tremendously fruitful, because
we maintain our connection with them afterward as well.
The fruitfulness of our work is even evident in the fact that
small museums are being organized in far-flung areas; these
museums constantly have dealings with us and make use of
our guidance. Furthermore, we believe that museums’ materials should be brought out into workers’ clubs, kolkhozi,
into parks, public gardens, onto boulevards, public squares,
and so forth. I can point to what we are currently organizing at two major workers’ enterprises, the Aviakhim factory
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583
antireligious work
and the brake equipment factory, where there are constantly changing mobile exhibitions on the following topics:
“Science and Religion,” “The Origin of Man and Animals,”
and “Does Man Have a Soul?” They are exhibited in workers’
clubs and always accompanied by museum guides, who not
only provide explanations but also conduct guided tours. We
organized the same kind of work in the Park of Culture and
Leisure, and the carrying capacity of the scientific pavilion
there is tens of times higher than the number of visitors that
come through our museum.
Science museums should also represent themselves in
printed matter: the publication of small brochures, perhaps
illustrated with fresh new photographs from the museums’ exhibits; the publication of small-format antireligious
albums based around a drawn photographic image with
additional text, which is tremendously useful for low-level
audiences; and so on. After this follows the publication of
photographs of various wall diagrams, which we are in the
process of doing right now. Several brochure series under
the heading “The Brain and the Soul” and “The Structure and
Work of the Body” were taken from our museum’s exhibition materials. Thus the printed representation of biological
museums’ scientific materials should be tremendously varied and extensive.
All of the antireligious work in biological and scientific
museums should, of course, be conducted in close contact
with social organizations. In this sense we are connected
to the central and regional Soviets of the Militant Atheists
Union; we meet their specifications in the form of guest
lectures and the like. I mean that the Biomuseum not only
puts on mobile exhibitions in workers’ auditoriums, but also
lectures, and our lectures differ from those of other organizations in that the museum’s method of demonstration
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vorontsovsky
is for the most part inserted into the lectures themselves.
We endeavor to display experiments, slides, and a whole
selection of exhibits that we borrow from the museum, as
we have extra specimens for this purpose. Our lectures are
a huge success. We have been told directly that all it takes
is to bring a single little frog and use it to demonstrate a
few experiments in relation to the slackening of its neuromuscular apparatus, that this will most likely guarantee the
success of the lecture—the audience is that hungry for the
use of visual methods and for factual material. Leading up
to the anti-Christmas campaign, we start getting orders for
lecturers a month and a half in advance.
Further, we wish to indicate that our fundamental work
with scientific material should nevertheless not be self-contained. Our aim is not only to develop the materialist worldview but also to reveal the class-based essence of religion
using this material, and this should be dominant. I offer the
following examples. Take the question: “Does man have a
soul?” We endeavor through a whole series of experiments to
show the material basis of life processes and to show, at the
beginning and the end of the lecture, whether man has a soul
from the class point of view, in order to show that belief in the
soul has been used in fashioning a tool of oppression.
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585
Church Painting and its
History as an Object
of Antireligious Propaganda
Ivan Skulenko
church painting and its history
First published in 1932
Translated by Ainsley Morse
Amid the general successes of socialist construction, the process of cultural revolution is unfolding in our country at an
unprecedented rate. The victorious proletariat of one-sixth of
the Earth is not only refashioning the economy in a socialist
direction, but also retuning their worldview in terms of the
materialist dialectic, of Marxism-Leninism, educating the
laboring masses in the spirit of class hatred and uncompromising resistance to the oppressors. “Everywhere and at all
times, every manifestation of religion was the ruling classes’
most powerful and versatile tool of oppression and enslavement of the laborers, ever affirming faith in the ‘divine’ origin
of the oppressors” (Lenin).
In exposing the class nature of religion and the church,
antireligious propaganda naturally constitutes a powerful factor in the cultural revolution. Thus the task of the
antireligious propagandist is to seize absolutely all available opportunities and the slightest occasions for antireligious propaganda work. In particular, religious painting in
churches offers incredibly rich material for antireligious propaganda. The oppressors saw in church painting a powerful
means of influencing the laboring masses, and for this reason
everyone—from the shabbiest local priest to the “autocrat”—
worked to develop and support the necessary artworks, paying particular attention to the selection of artists as well.
The October Revolution declared a great number of
churches and monasteries of the former Russian Empire cultural-historical preserves; many of them are now museums,
mostly antireligious, and many are used as institutions of
cultural education. Antireligious museums housed in former
monasteries and churches are already visited by hundreds
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ivan skulenko
of thousands of industrial and kolkhoz workers. Sometimes
these monasteries and churches are many centuries old and
thus in and of themselves represent great cultural-historical
value, which we are bound to protect—not for the sake of
the churches themselves, but for the usefulness that we can
extract from them in reeducating the laboring masses in
Marxism-Leninism and thus atheism.
With its many and varied churches and “shrines,” Kiev1
was a center for Russian Orthodoxy and autocracy, not only
of the area once known as the southwestern territory, but for
the entire Russian Empire. Because of this, the ecclesiastical and secular authorities paid particular attention to Kiev
when building and outfitting churches and “holy places.” On
the other hand, the presence of a great quantity of churches,
monasteries, and various “holy places” in Kiev makes for
an extremely favorable atmosphere for antireligious propaganda, with the necessary condition that these monuments
be used comprehensively in the light of the materialist dialectic and Marxism-Leninism.
We have yet made little use of church painting—or, more
precisely, we have made no use of it—in antireligious propaganda. Meanwhile, in Kiev the All-Ukrainian museum complex is housed in a former monastery (the Kiev-Pechersk
Lavra), and the All-Ukrainian antireligious museum is
housed in the former Vladimir Cathedral. 2 In 1931 these
museums were visited by around 300,000 sightseers. All
of them in one way or another encountered and viewed the
churches’ paintings. Our task is to expose the class essence
and history of religious art, to lay bare its foundations, and
1. Now more commonly written as “Kyiv.” Here and elsewhere I use
the standard “Russian-English” spelling for Ukrainian place-names to
reflect the time the article was written—Trans.
2. Now known as the Volodymyr Cathedral—Trans.
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church painting and its history
we are commencing by taking as our main object the former
Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and Vladimir Cathedral, the paintings
of which were made nearly at the same time.
When examining church art, one must first and foremost
attend to the way in which its project was developed and
confirmed. At a session of the Ecclesiastical Council of the
Kiev-Pechersk Lavra held on May 22, 1893, it was resolved to
“replace the main church’s existing paintings with new ones
better suited to church traditions, in particular, paintings in
the style of tenth- to twelfth-century Byzantium, according to
the plans of Bishop Sergii of Umansk.” The plan for these new
paintings was confirmed by the Metropolitan of Kiev and
Galicia Joanicius, and subsequently by the Synod; later the
project was examined and confirmed by the imperial archaeological commission and finally, on May 14, 1894, it was presented for the “most high” examination of Tsar Alexander
III. The latter scribbled by hand on the project: “Approved. I
hope they won’t get too fanciful.” This resolution of the tsar
would be the primary guidance for the church’s new frescoes. That is, what was painted on the church’s walls had to
correspond to what the Lavra administration saw fit, and
there was to be no fantasizing. The Lavra typography would
later print a brochure declaring: “The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra
understood these sovereign words to mean that its new wallpaintings should hold strictly to church traditions and not
deviate in the direction of new-fangled trends in contemporary religious painting, avoiding the realism and individualism
of contemporary secular art.”3
And indeed, it is difficult to find any realism or individualism in these paintings, for not only were the artists selected
3. A. I. Savenko, Velikaia tserkov Kievo-Pecherskaya lavra (The great
Kiev-Pechersk Lavra) (Kiev, 1901), 20. Italics added —Trans.
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ivan skulenko
with great thoroughness, but “prior to being transferred
to the walls, the sketches and cartoons of all images had to
be presented for the inspection and approval of the Lavra
Ecclesiastical Council and its holy archimandrite.”4
As a result of such strict control over the artists, Savenko
(quoted above) declared: “This is icon-painting, not mere
painting” (20). But it would be naive to think that these are
just icons. After all, before installing the new frescoes, the old
ones had to be destroyed, and this caused some serious difficulties for the Lavra. The fact of the matter is that voices were
raised in the press—if not the most decisive—on the part of
the nationalist-inclined Ukrainian intelligentsia, favoring
the preservation of the old paintings in light of their historical significance.
The Lavra mobilized its ecclesiastical and secular scribblers and, backed by the authorities, got out of its difficulties
by proving “scientifically” that the old paintings were “of no
historical significance” and that they moreover needed to be
completely destroyed rather than just painted over; toward
this end they referred to the need for a total architectural
renovation of the main church building.
We will not go into the details of the artistic value of
the old paintings here, but we can say definitely that these
paintings date from the eighteenth century and doubtless
presented historical interest as a monument of that era.
The churchmen themselves did not deny this fact, saying
that the “Lavra images … present a certain historical interest.”5 Consequently, in destroying these paintings in order
to accommodate religious and imperial interests, the monks
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Izvestiia Tserkovno-arkheologicheskogo obshchestva pri Kievskoi
dukhovnoi akademii (Proceedings of the Church-archaeological
Society of the Kiev Theological Academy) (1886).
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church painting and its history
committed an act that can only be called vandalism, once
again proving the enmity of religion toward culture. In order
to repel the attacks mentioned above, the Lavra arranged
matters entirely “scientifically,” assigning a special commission (composed exclusively of priests, of course) to assess the
old paintings. In the commission’s report we learn the reason
why the Lavra could not reconcile itself to the old paintings,
as well as the reason the paintings were defended by some of
the Ukrainian nationalists. First and foremost: “The remains
of the eighteenth-century paintings strongly demonstrate the
stamp of the art of the previous century with its predominant
features of the late Renaissance, the so-called Baroque”; “This
is one of the most glaring and undesirable traces of the Latin
influence on the great Orthodox shrine of Kiev.”6 Further in
the report we read: “Four rows of non-sacred images of various people”—there follows a list of every imaginable prince
of Polish-Lithuanian origin and, finally, the very worst: “on
the same side, an image of the Little Russian leader, presumably Hetman Mazepa … A Little Russian leader in typical
Southern Russian national costume.”7 Here is why the Lavra
could no longer tolerate the presence of these paintings in the
church and why, on the other hand, the Ukrainian nationalists insisted on their preservation.
When the necessity of destroying the old paintings
had been proved in this way and the new project had been
approved, the selection of artists began. At this time work
6. Akt komissii (Commission report) / Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi
akademii (Proceedings on the Kiev Theological Academy) (1899), III.
7. “Little Russia” was an imperial-era synonym for Ukraine. Hetman
Mazepa (Ivan Stepanovich) was a military and political leader active
in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ukraine. Because
of his controversial politics and affiliation with the Roman Catholic
Church, the Russian Orthodox Church laid an anathema on Mazepa
in the early eighteenth century that is still in place today —Trans.
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ivan skulenko
on the Vladimir Cathedral frescoes was drawing to a close,
and the contractor who had been in charge of the project—
A. V. Prakhov—offered his services to the Lavra, including
the whole team of artists who had worked on the cathedral. But the Lavra declined his offer, informing the contractor: “You think we want Vasnetsov to paint us angels
drawn from streetwalkers, like in the Vladimir Cathedral!”
An offer from Brusnikov was also declined; the academic
painting expert Vasiliev refused to work for the Lavra for
some reason; and then they settled on V. P. Vereshchagin,
because the “name of Professor V. P. Vereshchagin can serve
as adequate guarantee that the paintings will be carried out
entirely conscientiously.” What the churchmen understood
as “conscientious” we will see later on, but for now let us
have a look at how generously the church remunerated its
servants for “conscientious work.”
According to his contract, Vereshchagin committed to
painting 280 images of saints, for which the Lavra would pay
him “more than 200,000 rubles.” In addition, Vereshchagin
painted two icons separately: Deposition of the Most Holy
Theotokos and Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the
Temple, for which he received an additional 10,000 rubles.
Carvings were done by academician Fartusov, who received
“more than 40,000 rubles.” Vereshchagin also had ten assistants, led by Popov. And yet, despite all of Vereshchagin’s
“trustworthiness” and the close supervision of the Lavra
administration, there arose a concern that the artists might
paint “something untoward,” and for this reason a special
consultant was called in. For his “work,” the Lavra paid
the consultant, academician Lazarev-Stanishchev, 20,000
rubles. All told, the Lavra paid around 400,000 rubles for its
new paintings, which meanwhile constituted less than half of
the sum squeezed annually out of its pilgrims and donors.
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church painting and its history
However, despite the meticulous selection of the artists,
the approval process of the new paintings (once again, by
a selectively composed commission) involved a number
of misunderstandings. Three members of the commission—Archimandrite Nikolaev and the artists Seleznev
and Pimonenko—signed a separate report in which they
declared that “the new paintings are largely monotonous
and there is a significant lack of variety in the depiction of
the saints.” The Lavra had to wage war yet again in order
to save the new paintings, since the Kiev Newspaper wrote
openly: “the paintings are so bad they need to be completely
redone.” But the Lavra had arguments and people capable
of standing up for its interests. Professor Petrov of the Kiev
Theological Academy wrote: “The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra fears
the artistic individuality, trueness to type and expression
required by Professor Vereshchagin’s artists’ report, and its
fears are not unfounded.”8
At this point the Vladimir Cathedral enters the scene,
with its paintings that many considered better than those
of the Lavra; this is what Petrov was hinting at with “fears
not unfounded.” But even earlier than Petrov, Ertel—president of the Kiev Insurance Society and an independent correspondent of the Kiev Theological Academy (there’s some
real pluralism!)—wrote:
and we declare that in the future this great church,
though it may not dazzle the eye with the extravagance and effects of the newly opened cathedral of St.
Vladimir, will nevertheless be a temple comprehensible to the people, as a church should be.9
8. N. I. Petrov, in Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (Proceedings
on the Kiev Theological Academy) (1901), 11.
9. A. D. Ertel, ibid., 527.
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ivan skulenko
Those “simple” people needed their paintings to be more
simple and stern so that, during sermons on the universal
equality of all before God, the art did not give rise to confusion over what was seen on the walls of the church; and
so that its earthly sensuality and beauty not distract the pilgrims from the heavenly and otherworldly, for
individual sensual beauty is not always appropriate in houses of God, where the overall atmosphere
should incline the pilgrim to an elevated and prayerful mood and at the very least not sway his attention
in the direction of sensual, corporeal beauty.10
Petrov goes on to reassure any doubters with historical
examples, and relates how one artist working on the frescoes
at the Novgorod Cathedral “depicted Archdeacon Stefan in
a sketch as a fat, squat village deacon with a red meaty nose,
swinging his censer far too freely”; thus
one should keep strictly to church traditions and
not deviate in the direction of new-fangled, sometimes sharply tendentious trends in contemporary
religious painting that are capable of disturbing the
religious feeling of the pilgrims.11
As we can see, particular fervor was devoted to defending the
religious feeling of the simple pilgrims, whom the clergy were
ready to tear away entirely from all things earthly, real, and
beautiful (such as give pleasure to others) and to carry over
into the next world.
10. N. I. Petrov, ibid., 12–13.
11. Ibid., 12.
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church painting and its history
The wall paintings of the great Lavra church, designed
for the simple people, must have a strictly religious
character or at the very least avoid tempting contact
with real, living beauty and every imaginable affectation and preciosity.12
But that’s not all. The Lavra paintings were also intended to
play a certain missionary-like role among the sectarians. It
wasn’t enough for the Lavra that its monks worked as missionaries in every corner of the globe; it also needed to make
church paintings that would
not offend or disturb the religious feeling of our socalled Old Believers and not turn still further from
the church our new iconoclast-Shtundists, who reject
sensual, realist depictions of God and his saints.
Here we see the full range of demands made of church painting, designed to dupe the pilgrim and deaden the class
sense of the working man. These demands were developed
together by the ruling heights of both the secular and theological authorities.
The paintings in the Vladimir Cathedral represent no less
gratifying material for antireligious propaganda than the
paintings in the Lavra. Much higher in artistic significance,
the former paintings were from beginning (that is, from the
selection of artists) to end directed toward a single goal:
to put the visitor into a mystical mood and to cultivate his
sense of “sovereignty and Orthodoxy.” And the fact that the
Vladimir Cathedral paintings are of very high artistic quality
12. Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (Proceedings on the Kiev
Theological Academy) (1901), 14.
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and vividness, with a noticeably realist tendency, provoked
a whole series of attacks on the artists from the Lavra and its
stooges at the Kiev Theological Academy. This circumstance
cannot, however, be seen as stemming from the ill-will of
artists who wished to play a dirty trick on the priesthood.
On the contrary, these paintings are entirely reactionary
and executed highly artistically, affirming mysticism and
the priesthood even more than the Lavra’s paintings. The
art of the late nineteenth century is reflected here in high
relief, entirely mystical and decadent, reflecting the terror
and confusion of part of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie
in the face of the burgeoning revolutionary movement of
the workers. The Vladimir Cathedral frescoes, like no other
church paintings, reflect Great Russian chauvinism and
imperial tendencies, as well as a striving toward portrait-like
realist depictions of imperial-princely saints, doused in the
romance of Old Russia—and the Lavra attacked the artists
for all this as well.
The idea of building a cathedral in Kiev in honor of Prince
Vladimir had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century during the reign of Nicholas I, who decided for some reason
that he and Prince Vladimir had a lot in common, and was
thus greatly in favor of the idea. But the contractors building the cathedral were so greedy with regard to the materials
of God’s house (and so fearless of God’s punishment) that
when the cathedral had been nearly erected, it immediately
began to fall down. Renovating and fortifying the new building involved a great deal of nuisance and it was finished only
at the end of the nineteenth century. Immediately after the
architectural part was finished, representatives of the Kiev
Theological Academy began hanging around the cathedral with their plans for the wall-paintings. But they were
all outwitted by A. V. Prakhov, professor of the Petersburg
the athiests’ museum
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church painting and its history
Imperial Academy of the Arts, who received the contract for
the Vladimir Cathedral frescoes. He was responsible for making the plans and selecting the artists and general management, in return for 10 percent of the total sum to be spent on
the cathedral’s paintings and decorations.
Prakhov himself, a very religious man who believed in miracles, began looking for artists who were also “sincere” believers. And he was thoroughly lucky. In a letter to the Umansk
bishop dated October 30, 1882, he wrote obsequiously:
I hurry to inform you with particular pleasure that
Fate, it seems, wishes to smile upon the endeavor to
which you were so kind as to invite me as well. In passing through Moscow I managed to see a few of our best
artists, and two of them agreed to participate in the
work on the Vladimir Cathedral frescoes. The first of
them, V. M. Vasnetsov, is a man with brilliant gifts, and
furthermore, as is so important in this case, deeply
Russian gifts, and, finally, a sincerely religious man …
But in addition to Vasnetsov I also got the assent of
Surikov, who participated in painting the frescoes in
the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow.13
We don’t know why Surikov, the artist mentioned by
Prakhov, did not participate in work on the Vladimir paintings, but instead of him Prakhov got the extraordinarily
sugary mystic artist Nesterov. Besides Vasnetsov and
Nesterov, the Vladimir Cathedral frescoes were painted by
Kotarbinsky, Svedomsky, and many other artists. Vrubel,
who in the context of his religious-mystical work also demonstrated a certain striving toward some kind of demonic
13. Prakhov’s italics —I.S.
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expression, was not allowed to participate; when he painted
The Second Day of Creation (1898) on the right-hand plafond,
Svedomsky even repainted the entire plafond. This clearly
shows how carefully the churchmen selected the artists they
needed; and still they faced accusations that inadequate
attention had been paid to the question of artist selection.
Both the Lavra and the Kiev Theological Academy pilloried
Prakhov for the fact that he included artists “of non-Russian
origin,” which in the opinion of the monks had led to misunderstandings like the resemblance between “angels” and
“streetwalkers.” Professor Petrov wrote unequivocally:
the question of to what extent individual themes in
the Vladimir Cathedral paintings correspond to the
iconographic traditions of the Byzantine and Russian
Orthodox churches was predetermined by the selection of the four main artists slated to work on the
project, i.e. Vasnetsov, Nesterov, Svedomsky, and
Kotarbinsky, nearly none of whom, with the possible
exception of Nesterov, had previously worked on
church paintings; Svedomsky and Kotarbinsky were
not only entirely unschooled in religious painting but
had had no Russian art education at all. To judge by
his name (Wilhelm), Kotarbinsky belongs to those
non-Orthodox Christians about whom was once
written: “icons such as have been wrought of infidel
hands, shall not be accepted, and sacred icons into
infidel hands not passed; it does not do for Orthodox
Christians to accept icon images from infidel foreign
Romans and Armenians.”14
14. The quote within Petrov’s quote comes from Old Church Slavonic
theological writings —Trans.
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church painting and its history
This statement blatantly hammers in the Great-Russian
chauvinism fostered by the church and its stooges since time
immemorial. It is curious that despite following different
paths, the ignorant part of the clergymen grouped around
the Lavra and the Kiev Theological Academy (for the most
part, the regular clergy) and the educated (so-called) part of
the secular priesthood or the religiously inclined intelligentsia, nevertheless arrived at a shared goal and quickly made
peace with one another.
The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, drowning in gold and luxury,
with its million-ruble annual income gouged out of its pilgrims (most of them of the “simple folk”), saw the way to
ongoing peaceful existence in distracting the masses of
“simple folk” (i.e. the laborers) away from all earthly and
real matters and directing them to seek comfort in the world
beyond the grave. It thus made its devotional art unchangingly monotonous, grey, and colorless. Meanwhile, the
Vladimir Cathedral used art to develop in those same masses
a sense of devotion to all things Russian and evoked imperial
patriotism through the use of secular motifs in the paintings,
for which it was criticized by the Lavra. “Secular motifs in
religious painting can be noted even in such a talented and
deeply religious artist as is certainly Vasnetsov.”15
Another question that troubled the Lavra monastic
community was realism and a portrait-like quality in the
depiction of saints: “thus, for example, in Svedomsky’s
Resurrection of Lazarus we observe a woman wearing a
nearly present-day Serbian costume”; “In their Last Supper
Svedomsky and Kotarbinsky … have depicted the savior in a
distinctly indecent way.”16
15. Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (Proceedings on the Kiev
Theological Academy) (1899), 318.
16. Ibid., 318.
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ivan skulenko
And a complete scandal: “In the icons on the iconostasis,
many of the saints have been given artificial poses, and some
of their faces are portraits or likenesses of individuals still
walking among us today.”17
Nesterov was singled out for particular criticism, since
despite his religiosity and practice he had mixed up the
Mother of God with an ordinary woman. In the right-hand
gallery of the iconostasis, Nesterov painted a “Birth of
Christ” icon, “in which the Virgin is presented with a suffering and pained expression like that of ordinary birthing
mothers, which contradicts the Orthodox Church’s teaching on the innocence and painlessness of the Virgin’s birthing of Christ.”18 How could Nesterov have dared to present
a Virgin who could even slightly recall an ordinary woman?
The defamation of Nesterov for this ill-fated Virgin took on
such grandiose dimensions that there were even discussions
of the icon being repainted.
Soon, when the formal artistic features of the Vladimir
Cathedral paintings had been properly appreciated, all of the
attacks ceased—as if they had never been. And at bottom
there was nothing to argue about. After all, none of those
who had reproached the Vladimir Cathedral paintings had
recalled the fact that Nicholas I, during whose reign discussions of the building of a cathedral in honor of Prince
Vladimir had begun, had for some reason seen in Vladimir
his predecessor; consequently, the Vladimir Cathedral was to
have been a monument less to Prince Vladimir (whom no one
really remembered) than to Russian autocracy, which most
certainly existed at that time. This circumstance left its mark
in the selection of saints to be depicted in the paintings; let us
17. Ibid., 318.
18. Ibid., 319.
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601
church painting and its history
note that no objections were raised against the selection. The
saints painted on the walls of the Vladimir Cathedral include
the following: four tsars, two tsarinas, thirteen princes, six
princesses, ten metropolitans, twelve bishops, one merchant,
and thirty-one monks.
For this reason, when during the years of reaction in
Kiev (in 1907) a place was sought to keep the Union of the
Archangel Michael gonfalon, it was the Vladimir Cathedral
that agreed to house it. One year prior, a Black Hundreds
demonstration began from the Vladimir Cathedral—and
ended in a Jewish pogrom.19 This was also the starting point
for a patriotic demonstration accompanying deputies to the
Second State Duma, exulting in the fact that eleven of Kiev’s
fourteen deputies were priests. Thanks to all these qualities, the Vladimir Cathedral became Kiev’s center for Black
Hundreds and pogrom participants, great-Russian chauvinists, and monarchists.
Thus we have briefly sorted out the history of two churches’
religious paintings and frescoes. As the exploiters’ most effective means of influencing the feelings of religious people, these
paintings were supposed to act as a tool for the oppression of
the laboring masses. By revealing the class roots of religious
painting, the methods and aims of its production, we will force
it to speak the language of atheism and to serve the task of the
reeducation of the laboring masses on a socialist basis.
We should avoid general statements about these paintings
being indisputably and significantly useful to the exploiters
19. The “Black Hundreds” encompasses a number of Russian
nationalist-chauvinist monarchist groups (the Union of the Archangel
Michael was one) devoted to the ideas of national purity and autocracy. Known also for anti-Semitism and incitement to pogroms, these
groups experienced a heyday in the decade-plus between the 1905
and 1917 revolutions—Trans.
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ivan skulenko
in their enslavement and oppression of the laborers. Every
church and every monastery has doubtless preserved documents relating to its paintings and frescoes, and these must
be used to demonstrate through concrete, documentary facts
how the church and political authorities, working together
closely, developed the methods and devices of religious influence over the laborers.
At the present stage of the antireligious movement,
words will convince but few. The masses of industrial and
kolkhoz workers demand from antireligious workers varied and convincing arguments that reveal the class essence
of religion and the church. In this case, church paintings
represent exceptionally gratifying material for the anti­
religious worker.
the athiests’ museum
603
Authors’ Biographies
Authors’ Biographies
David Efimovich Arkin (1899–1957) was an art critic
and art historian. Arkin taught at the Moscow Architecture
Institute, and advocated for progressive aesthetic and technical principles within the art and culture of his time. He was
the author of a number of books on fine art, architecture,
and sculpture.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857–1927)
was a neuropathist, psychiatrist, psychologist, and morphologist of the nervous system, as well as a pioneer of reflexology. In 1908 he founded the Neuropsychiatric Institute in St.
Petersburg. Bekhterev devised the idea of a “pantheon of the
brain,” a scientific institution where visitors could view the
preserved brains of talented and outstanding Soviet people.
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (1873–
1928) was a revolutionary activist, Bolshevik, philosopher,
sociologist, economist, writer, and naturalist who was actively
engaged in medicine and research activities. He was one of
the ideologists and leaders of Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural
and Educational Organization). Additionally, Bogdanov was
the founder and director of the world’s first Institute of Blood
Transfusion (1926). His 1908 novel Red Star depicted one of
the first science-fiction socialist utopias.
Osip Maksimovich Brik (1888–1945) was a writer, literary critic, and a founding member of the Society for the
Study of Poetic Language (OPOJAZ). He was as well a member of LEF—Left Front of the Arts—a group of artists and
left-wing ideologues of Russian avant-garde art. Brik worked
in the visual department of the People’s Commissariat for
Education, which was responsible for art education throughout the Russian Soviet Republic and for the purchase of new
works of art for museums. He participated in the First AllRussian Conference on Museums in 1919, where he delivered
a lecture on “The Museum and Proletarian Culture.”
Vasiliy Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897–1922) was an
artist, painter, graphic designer, and one of the founders of the
Avant-garde museology
606
Authors’ Biographies
Makovets group of avant-garde artists (1921–1927). He was
a follower of the philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov and shared
Fedorov’s idea of the universal resurrection and the moral
perfection of human beings through art, which was reflected
in his works.
Leonid Osipovich Chetyrkin (?–1942) was a journalist who graduated from the All-Union Communist Institute
of Journalism at the Central Executive Committee of the
USSR. He later worked for the art publishing house known
as Iskusstvo.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Druzhinin (1886–1986) was a
historian, museum specialist, and a member of the Academy
of Sciences of the USSR. After the revolution of 1917, he organized educational work within the central state organs. From
1924 to 1934 he worked at the Museum of the Revolution of
the USSR as a research secretary, and then was put in charge
of the exhibition department, where he created vivid and
memorable exhibitions on the history of the revolutionary
movement. Druzhinin was an author of, among others, a number of theoretical papers on museum work and museology.
Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829–1903) was a
thinker, an advocate of Russian religious philosophy, and a proponent of Russian cosmism. From 1874 to 1898 he worked at
the library of the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow. He formed
the philosophical doctrine of the “common task,” which
implied universal resurrection and immortality. The museum
was to be the platform for this doctrine. His philosophical
ideas are most fully reflected in his articles “The Museum, Its
Meaning and Mission” and “Exhibition of 1889.” Fedorov participated in the organization of a regional museum in Voronezh
(founded in 1894), where he initiated and actively participated
in the preparation of a series of experimental exhibitions.
Aleksey Aleksandrovich Fedorov-Davydov
(1900–1969) was a Soviet art historian, museum worker,
and art consultant for the General Directorate of scientific,
A–F
607
Authors’ Biographies
scientific-artistic, and museum institutions of the People’s
Commissariat for Education. From 1929 to 1934, he headed
the department of new Russian art at the State Tretyakov
Gallery in Moscow, where he was one of the creators of the
Experimental Complex Marxist Exhibition; later, he was criticized for a “vulgar sociological approach to art,” which forced
him to leave his job. His museological works are mainly related
to the development of the principles of museum construction
and the organization of exhibitions. He participated in the First
All-Russian Museum Congress in 1930, and was the author of
numerous exhibition reviews and pieces of criticism.
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882–1937)
was a theologian, mathematician, physicist, art historian, and
museum worker. In 1911 he entered the ministry and from
1912 to 1917 he was the main editor of the Theological Journal.
From 1917 to 1919 he was the keeper of the sacristy of the
Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and was a member of the commission
for the protection of monuments of art and antiquities of the
Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He was an active participant in discussions around rethinking the role of art. He taught “Analysis
of Space in Fine Art Pieces” at VHUTEMAS (The Higher
Art and Technical Studios), where he worked together with
many avant-garde artists like Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr
Rodchenko, Vasily Kandinsky, and El Lissitzky, among others. Florensky conducted museological research related to
the problem of the preservation and museumification of
Orthodox cultural and historical heritage. He was persecuted
in the USSR and died in exile.
Roza Frumkina was an officer of the People’s Commissariat
for Education, an assistant to Nadezhda Krupskaya, and her
co-reporter at the First All-Russian Museum Congress in 1930.
Frumkina was a member of the editorial board of the journal
Soviet Museum launched in 1931.
M. S. Ilkovsky—biography unknown—was a contributor to
the journal Soviet Museum.
Avant-garde museology
608
Authors’ Biographies
V. Karmilov (probably V. I. Karmilov) was a physicist and
the dean from 1933 to 1934 of the Physics and Mathematics
Department at the Perm State University.
V. Karpov—biography unknown—was a contributor to
Soviet Museum.
Valentin Borisovich Kholtsov (1889–1942) was a
staff member at the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. He
worked on historical collections within the institution, which
in 1941 were transferred to the Hermitage Museum. Together
with M. Z. Krutikov, Kholstov developed concepts for exhibition projects. In the mid-1930s, he also worked at the Museum
of the Revolution in Leningrad.
P. N. Khrapov was a staff member of the State Biological
Museum in Moscow, which was named after the botanist and
physiologist Kliment Timiryazev.
Yuriy Yakovlevich Kogan was a prominent specialist in
the field of the history of religion who worked for the Central
Antireligious Museum in Moscow in the 1920s. He participated in the activities of the Union of Militant Atheists and
was the author of numerous scientific works.
Natalya Nikalayevna Kovalenskaya (1892–
1969) was an art critic and historian of Russian art. In the
1920s, Kovalenskaya developed a basic methodology for
museum work with A. V. Bakushinskiy. From 1929 to 1935,
Kovalenskaya worked at the State Tretyakov Gallery in
Moscow, where under the leadership of Aleksey FedorovDavydov she worked on the Experimental Complex Marxist
Exhibition. From 1942 to 1955, Kovalenskaya was a professor at the State Moscow University. She was also the author of
several works on the history of Russian art.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (1869–
1939) was a revolutionary, a Party and state leader, and the
wife of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin). From 1917 Krupskaya was
F–K
609
Authors’ Biographies
a member of the People’s Commissariat for Education. From
1929 she served as Deputy People’s Commissar for Education
of the RSFSR (The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic). Krupskaya participated in the First All-Russian
Museum Congress in 1930, where she delivered a report.
From 1931 Krupskaya was an honorary member of the USSR
Academy of Sciences and from 1936 onward she was a Doctor
of Education.
S. P. Lebedyansky participated in the First All-Russian
Museum Congress of 1930, where he delivered a report on
exhibitions in antireligious museums. Lebedyansky’s report is
based on his experience organizing the Antireligious Complex
in Leningrad.
A. F. Levitsky—biography unknown—was a contributor to
Soviet Museum.
Vera Romanovna Leykina (Leykina-Svirskaya) (1901–
1993) was a historian and a specialist in source studies. She
worked for the State Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad,
where she headed the Department of the Civil War. Leykina
was an author of numerous scientific publications on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia.
Ivan Kapitonovich Luppol (1896–1943) was a historian of philosophy, and from 1939, an academic at the USSR
Academy of Sciences. He was in charge of the science sector
at the People’s Commissariat for Education of RSFSR (The
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), and played a
major role in the preparation and administration of the First AllRussian Museum Congress in 1930. He was also the managing
editor of the journal Soviet Museum. In 1941 he was repressed
by the regime and was only rehabilitated posthumously.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1878–1935) was
a prominent avant-garde artist. In 1916 he founded the
Suprematist art group, and in 1920, he formed the UNOVIS
(Affirmers of New Art) student group in Vitebsk. After the
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Authors’ Biographies
October Revolution Malevich held several leadership positions in various cultural commissions and institutions. From
1923 to 1926 he was the director of the Institute of Artistic
Culture. From 1932 to 1933 he headed the experimental
laboratory at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. In
addition to his well-known paintings, set design, and other
graphic works, Malevich was the author of several texts
on philosophy and art theory, including his 1919 On New
Systems of Art.
Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844–1919) was a
teacher, a follower, and promoter of Nikolai Fedorov’s teachings, as well as an editor and publisher (with V. A. Kozhevnikov)
of Fedorov’s posthumous collection of works. Peterson first
met Nikolai Fedorov in 1864 in the town of Bogorodsk, and
became interested in his ideas. As a result, Peterson became
his assistant and co-author. In 1866 Peterson was involved in
the investigation as a former active member of a revolutionary group and sentenced to eight months in prison. Due to
his acquaintance with Peterson, Nikolai Fedorov was also
arrested for a brief period.
Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899–1951) was a
prominent fiction writer and playwright. In his early work he
was closely aligned with the Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural
and Educational Organization), and worked as an engineer
in the town of Voronezh, where he lived. In the late Twenties
and early Thirties, Platonov wrote the most significant fiction
works of the era: the novels Chevengur and The Foundation
Pit. Platonov was persecuted in Soviet Russia and much of his
work, including these two novels, remained unpublished until
the second half of 1980s.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin (1888–1953) was an art
historian, art critic, professor, and museum worker. Punin was
close to avant-garde circles, and from 1918 to 1919 he worked
in the Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat
for Education, where he became one of the founding members of The Art of the Commune newspaper. From 1913 to 1934
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he was a staff member at the Russian Museum in Leningrad.
Punin was married to the poet Anna Akhmatova from 1923
to 1938.
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko (1891–
1956) was a prominent avant-garde artist, photographer,
graphic designer, and set designer, and a representative of
Constructivist and Productivist art. From 1918 to 1922 he
worked in the Department of Fine Arts of Narkompross, where
he headed the Museum Bureau and was a member of the artistic board. From 1921 to 1922 was the head of the Museum of
Painting Culture. In the Twenties and Thirties, he taught at
VHUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios) and at the
Institute of Artistic Culture. In 1925, he designed the Soviet
section at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and
Industry in Paris, for which he received a silver medal. He was
a member of various art groups, including the LEF group.
Rodchenko was one of the founders of Soviet advertising.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rybnikov (1880–1961)
was a scientist and psychologist, and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1912 until the
end of his life he worked at the Institute of Psychology at
Moscow State University (now the Institute of Psychology,
Russian Academy of Education). One of his fields of interest
and research was pedagogical psychology. He developed the
biographical method in psychology.
Yuri Aleksandrovich Samarin (in original text
spelled as O. A. Samarin) (1904–?) was a researcher in the
Slavic-Lithuanian Department at the State Central Museum
of Ethnology in Moscow. He studied folk art, particularly
the art of pottery, and was a participant in various scientific
expeditions. He was the author of several articles and the
book Podolsk potters, published by the State Central Museum
of Ethnology in 1929. Beginning in the late Twenties, a wave
of arrests, and in some cases executions targeted museum
workers due to state charges of “anti-Soviet agitation.” In
1935, Samarin was fired for “ideological and political reasons.”
Avant-garde museology
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Authors’ Biographies
Many of his museum colleagues were sent to various prison
camps, where some were executed.
I. F. Sheremet—biography unknown—was a staff member
at the Agricultural Museum in Kiev.
Andrey Vasilyevich Shestakov (1877–1941) was a
historian, a member of the revolutionary movement, and a
corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
(1939). A teacher and the author of the main elementary
school textbook on the history of the Soviet Union, he was
also one of the organizers of the Society of Marxist Historians.
Shestakov was the Deputy Director for Science from 1930 to
1935 and then the Director of the Museum of the Revolution
of the USSR in Moscow.
N. A. SHNEERSON (1881–1937) was a museum worker and
administrator. He was the director of a pilot Local History
Museum of the Moscow Region, established in the former
New Jerusalem Monastery of the Resurrection in Istra, near
Moscow. This museum was an experimental platform for
Soviet exhibitions in local regional museums. He participated
in the First All-Russian Museum Congress in 1930, and was
an active contributor to the journal Soviet Museum, as well as
a member of its editorial board.
Ivan Mikhailovich Skulenko (1901–1990) was a
museum worker and a guide at the Ukrainian State Historical
Reserve, opened in 1926 in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. From
1934 to 1937, he was the first Director of the Sofia Reserve,
which consisted of the Cathedral of St. Sofia and the adjacent
eighteenth-century monastery in Kiev (now the National
Reserve “Sophia of Kiev”).
K. I. Vorobyov participated in the First All-Russian
Museum Congress of 1930, where he delivered a report outlining his vision for the creation of socialist factory museums
that would directly involve workers and students of the factory
schools in museum work.
R–V
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Authors’ Biographies
Vorontsovsky participated in the First All-Russian
Museum Congress of 1930, where he delivered a report on
the antireligious work of the Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum
in Moscow. Voronstovsky was probably a staff member there,
and his report describes the museum’s alignment with the
Militant Atheists Union.
Boris Mikhailovich Zavadovsky (1895–1951) was a
biologist, museum worker, and a theorist of museum administration. He was the founder of the Kliment Timiryazev
Biomuseum in Moscow, where he served as director from its
inception in 1922 to 1948. Zavadovsky was one of the organizers of the First All-Russian Museum Congress. He engaged in
museological research related to the design of a new typology
for biology museums.
I. M. Zykov—biography unknown—was a contributor to
Soviet Museum.
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Notes on the Original Publications
Notes on the Original Publications
1.
Art of the Commune newspaper
Malevich, Kazimir. “On The Museum,” Art of the Commune
no. 12, February 23, 1919, 2.
Punin, Nikolai. “On the Results of the Museum Conference,”
Art of the Commune no. 12, February 23, 1919, 1.
On June 21, 1918, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and
sculptor Boris Korolyov were elected to be a part of the
museum committee of the art board of the Narkompros
Department of Fine Arts. It was a unique moment when representatives of the artistic avant-garde became government officials. In February 1919, Kazimir Malevich participated in the
First Fine Arts Department Conference about museum work
in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where it was decided to
establish a Museum for Painting Culture. Kazimir Malevich’s
article “On the Museum,” written from a futuristic and nihilistic position, was associated with this conference, and it was
first published in the daily newspaper Art of the Commune. The
newspaper was published in Petrograd by the Department of
Fine Arts Commissariat of Education from December 1918
until April 1919, and served as the organ of the Petrograd
Futurists. Its editorial board included Osip Brik, Nikolai
Punin, and Nathan Altman, and until March 1919 Vladimir
Mayakovsky was closely associated with the newspaper. In
its nineteen issues, the periodical vigorously attacked the art
of the past, which was declared to be bourgeois. The publication took issue with Proletkult (the Proletarian Cultural and
Educational Organization which arose in conjunction with the
Russian Revolution of 1917) and proclaimed futurism to be
the only direction for proletarian art.
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Notes on the Original Publications
2.
Association of Print Artists journal
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. “Red Star,” Association of Print Artists
(St. Petersburg: Art Print Partnership, 1908): 70–74.
3.
Chevengur
Platonov, Andrey. “The Revolution Memorial Reservation”
from Chevengur, in Friendship of Peoples no. 3 (1988):
133–138.
Platonov wrote the novel Chevengur between 1926 and
1928, which in its first manuscript form was called “The
Builders of Spring” (1927). The final text was sent to Georgy
Litvin-Molotov, the chief editor of the Young Guard publishing house, and on September 18, 1929 the novel was also
separately sent via post to Maxim Gorky. The latter, despite
liking the work, expressed serious doubts about the publication prospects of the book, which in fact was to remain unpublished in its entirety during Platonov’s lifetime.
In 1928 the Moscow-based journal Red Virgin Soil published excerpts titled “The Origin of the Master” and “The
Descendant of a Fisherman.” The next year, the journal New
World published an excerpt called “Adventure.” On October 6,
1971 a fragment of the novel titled “Traveling with an Open
Heart” was published in The Literary Newspaper, and in
the same year, the journal Kuban published another fragment titled “Kopenkin’s Death.” In 1972, a French translation of the full novel titled Les herbes folles de Tchevengour
(Chevengur’s weeds) was published in Paris. An Italian translation published the same year titled Villaggio della nuova
vita (The village of new life) received high praise from Pier
Paolo Pasolini.
The first complete publication of the novel was released
in London in 1978. In the USSR the publication of the novel
was only possible during perestroika years; thus in 1988
Friendship of Peoples journal published the full novel over two
617
Notes on the Original Publications
issues. The excerpt in this volume appeared on pages 133–138
in the third issue.
4.
Don newspaper
Fedorov, Nikolai and Nikolai Peterson. “The Catherine the
Great Exhibition at the Voronezh Provincial Museum,” Don,
no. 132, November 21, 1896. Cited in N. F. Fedorov: Collected
Works in Four Volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow: Tradition, 1997),
158–161.
Fedorov, Nikolai. “The Voronezh Museum in 1998,” Don, no.
64, June 14, 1898. Cited in N. F. Fedorov: Collected Works in
Four Volumes, vol. 3, (Moscow: Tradition, 1997), 177–184.
Don was a Voronezh-based economic, juridical, and literary
newspaper, running from 1868 until 1915. Don is one of the
oldest provincial newspapers, and its mission was to function
as a mediator between the capital and the czarist empire’s
provinces as well as promote local interests. The daily periodical was aimed at the industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie.
Issues like agricultural trade, industrial development, the
growth of private and public credit, roads, and Zemstvo meetings and councils were discussed in its pages. The paper almost
never commented on the most important social and political
events in Russia, like the revolutions of 1905 and 1907, or the
First World War, and usually confined itself to reprinting the
official government statements on those matters.
See also note 14: The Philosophy of the Common Task: Articles,
Thoughts, and Letters of Nikolai Fedorov
Avant-garde museology
618
Notes on the Original Publications
5.
N. F. Fedorov: Collected Works
in Four Volumes
Fedorov, Nikolai. “The Art of Resemblances (of False Artistic
Regeneration) and the Art of Reality (of Real Resurrection),”
N. F. Fedorov: Collected Works in Four Volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow:
Tradition, 1995), 230–231.
6.
N. F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra
Chekrygin, Vasiliy. “On the Cathedral of the Resurrecting
Museum,” N. F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra, vol. 2, eds. A. G.
Gacheva, S. G. Semenova (St. Petersburg: Russian Way,
Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy, 2008), 450–482.
The anthology N. F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra was published in
2008 in commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the birth
and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Fedorov. The
second volume contains the original publication of Vasiliy
Chekrygin’s text “On the Cathedral of the Resurrecting
Museum,” written in 1921 on Fedorov’s relationship with
contemporaries such as Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov. It
also introduces previously unpublished materials on Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s acquaintance with Fedorov and the latter’s
criticism of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
7.
The First All-Russian Conference
on Museums, 1919
Brik, Osip. “The Museum and Proletarian Culture: Speech
at the Meeting of the First All-Russian Conference on
Museums” archival material stored at the Department
of Written Sources of the State History Museum, part of a
shorthand report of the First All-Russian Conference on
619
Notes on the Original Publications
Museums, typed text with hand corrections by an unidentified person, 1919, 4 – 61.
Cited in Museological Thought in Russia in the Eighteenth–
Twentieth Centuries: Collection of Documents and Materials,
collective of authors, ed. Eleonora Shulepova (Moscow:
Eterna, 2010), 471–73.
The First All-Russian Conference on Museums was held on
February 11–17, 1919 in Petrograd. The People’s Commissar
of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, prominent scientists,
museum figures, art critics, and artists were in attendance.
It was deemed necessary to create a program for museum
development in the new historical conditions brought by the
October revolution of 1917. Urgent measures were taken to
protect and preserve the cultural heritage of the country, and
to unite the efforts of the scientific and artistic intelligentsia in
the implementation of this program. Some continuity in the
issues debated can be traced back to the Preliminary Congress
for the First All-Russian Conference on Museums in 1912. The
conference brought together all existing museums into a single
network, focusing the institution on scientific research and on
broader public outreach in relation to the cultural heritage
in the various collections. Reports by Alexander Miller, Igor
Grabar, Osip Brik, and Nikolai Romanov reflect the views of
different groups the government sought to attract in the process of institution building.
—Adapted from Museological Thought in Russia in the
Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries: Collection of Documents
and Materials, collective of authors, ed. Eleonora Shulepova
(Moscow: Eterna, 2010).
Avant-garde museology
620
Notes on the Original Publications
8.
The First All-Russian Museum
Congress, 1930
Arkin, David. “On a Museum of Industry and Art,” Reports
from the First All-Russia Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol,
vol. II (Moscow: Uchgiz, 1931), 148–155.
Fedorov-Davydov, Aleksey. “Permanent Exhibitions of Fine
Art Museums: Joint Report,” Reports from the First All-Russian
Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. I (Moscow: Uchgiz,
1931), 75–82.
Lebedyansky, S. P. “The Question of Exhibitions in
Antireligious Museums,” Reports from the First All-Russian
Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. II (Moscow: Uchgiz,
1931), 123–128.
Luppol, Ivan. “Dialectical Materialism and the Construction
of the Museum,” Reports from the First All-Russian Museum
Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. I (Moscow: Uchgiz, 1931),
25–40.
Shestakov, Andrey. “Marxism-Leninism in Exhibitions in the
Museums of Revolution,” Reports from the First All-Russian
Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. I (Moscow: Uchgiz,
1931), 69–75.
Vorobyov, K. I. “Museums in Industrial Enterprises,” Reports
from the First All-Russian Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol,
vol. II (Moscow: Uchgiz, 1931), 48–52.
Vorontsovsky, “Antireligious Work at the Kliment Timiryazev
Biomuseum: Supplementary Report,” Reports from the First
All-Russian Museum Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. II (Moscow:
Uchgiz, 1931), 111–113.
Zavadovsky, Boris. “Marxist Exhibition Methods for Natural
Science Museums,” Reports from the First All-Russian Museum
621
Notes on the Original Publications
Congress, ed. I. K. Luppol, vol. I (Moscow: Uchgiz, 1931),
40–55.
The First All-Russian Museum Congress secured emerging theoretical trends of the Twenties for museology. The
Congress took place December 1–5, 1930 in Moscow. Threehundred twenty-five delegates from a variety of institutions
and disciplines attended, including the People’s Commissar
for Education of the RSFSR (The Russian Soviet Federative
Socialist Republic) Andrei Bubnov, and the Deputy of People’s
Commissar for Education Nadezhda Krupskaya. Also in attendance were museum workers (mainly museum directors),
representatives of the national education system, university
professors, and employees of academic research institutes.
The congress marked a new stage of museum history in the
USSR, which lasted until the late Eighties.
9.
Izvestia newspaper
Bekhterev, Vladimir. “On the Creation of a Pantheon in the
USSR: A Proposal,” Izvestia no. 137, June 19, 1927, 5.
Izvestia (“news” or “reports”) is one of the oldest Soviet and
Russian sociopolitical and business daily newspapers; it has
been in print since March 1917. During the Soviet era, it was
an official organ of the governing bodies of Soviet power, and
in particular the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
10.
Makovets journal
Florensky, Pavel. “The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of Arts,”
Makovets no. 1 (Moscow, 1922): 28–32.
In 1921 a new organization of artists, the Union of Poets and
Artists, was created in Moscow, renamed Makovets in 1922.
Avant-garde museology
622
Notes on the Original Publications
This movement implied a creative, reconciling, spiritual
approach based on the continuity of cultural tradition that
was expressed in the name of the group. The name was taken
from Makovets hill, on which the Trinity-Sergius Lavra stood
in the town of Sergyev-Posad, and where Pavel Florensky lived
during most of his lifetime.
The founders of the group were Vasiliy Chekrygin and
Pyotr Bromirsky. In 1922 the journal Makovets was created,
edited by the poet Aleksey Chernyshev. The first issue of the
journal contained Pavel Florensky’s text “The Church Ritual
as a Synthesis of Arts,” as well as poems and texts by Boris
Pasternak, Konstantine Bolshakov, and Velimir Khlebnikov,
among others. Only two issues of the journal were published,
as the third issue was stopped due to censorship in 1923. The
journal ceased to exist, and the Makovets art group fell apart
in 1926.
11.
The Museum Bureau
Rodchenko, Aleksandr. “On the Museum Bureau,” Aleksandr
Rodchenko: Opyty dlia budushchego (Moscow: Grant, 1996),
98–102.
Between 1918 and 1921 Aleksandr Rodchenko worked in the
Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat, and
was the head of the Museum Bureau. The Museum Bureau
opened in 1918, and aimed to theoretically develop questions of museum building and amass an art collection large
enough to organize several Museums of Painting Culture in
the USSR. A procurement commission of six people was created for that purpose, including Robert Falk, Vasily Kandinsky,
and Aleksandr Rodchenko. At their first session the commission decided to found a Museum of Painting Culture first in
Moscow, then in Petrograd, followed by other cities across the
USSR. From 1918 to 1920 about two thousand paintings by
Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Nathan
Altman, El Lissitzky, and others were purchased, worth nearly
623
Notes on the Original Publications
twenty-seven million rubles (at that time). The general price
of four thousand rubles per painting was established, and in
many cases artists were personally invited for the sale. During
a one-year period from 1919 until 1920, the Museum Bureau
established thirty new museums in twenty-seven different
cities across the USSR including Vitebsk, Samara, Penza,
Voronezh with a total of 1,211 artworks distributed to these
newly organized museums. In early 1922 the Museum Bureau
was closed due to the economic difficulties and famine in the
country. Many of the artworks that were sent to the provincial
museums deteriorated in the museum’s cellars or were burned.
12.
Museums and Places of Interest
in Moscow
Zgur, V. V., ed., “The Museum for Painting Culture at
Rozhdestvenka Street, 11” from Museums and Places of
Interest in Moscow, (Moscow: Moscow Municipal Economy
Printing House, 1926), 82–85.
The Museum of Painting Culture was founded in Moscow
in 1919 by the order of the Department of Fine Arts of the
People’s Commissariat of RSFSR as both an exhibition
and educational museum of modern art. Its purpose was
to exhibit developments in painting, as well as to acquaint
the masses with modern art. The museum was headed by
Vasily Kandinsky (1919–1920), Aleksandr Rodchenko
(1921–1922), and its collection contained works by Kazimir
Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Luybov Popova, Pablo Picasso, and
André Derain, among others. Similar museums were opened
in Petrograd, Smolensk, Penza, Ufa, Vitebsk, Orenburg, and
Ryazan. Initially, exhibitions were installed not by the painting schools represented, but rather based on the principle of
contrast between forms and painting techniques. In 1923,
there was an attempt to create a new type of museum: the
museum-laboratory. In 1923–1924, the museum was reorganized into a branch of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
Avant-garde museology
624
Notes on the Original Publications
13.
OGIZ—IZOGIZ
Chetyrkin, Leonid. “The Diversity of Forms of Amateur Art,”
[alternatively titled “Avalanche Exhibitions: The Experience
of the Leningrad Organization of Worker Artists”] WorkerArtists (Moscow, Leningrad: OGIZ—IZOGIZ, 1933), 29.
IZOGIZ (State Art Book and Journal publisher) was created
in July 1930 by the order of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a part of OGIZ (the
Association of State Book and Journal Publishers). IZOGIZ
published monographs, textbooks, and fine arts manuals,
some of which were based on the work of the USSR Academy
of Arts.
14.
The Philosophy of the Common
Task: Articles, Thoughts, and Letters
of Nikolai Fedorov
Fedorov, Nikolai. “The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission,”
The Philosophy of the Common Task: Articles, Thoughts, and
Letters of Nikolai Fedorov, vol. 2., eds. V. Kozhevnikov and
N. Peterson (Verniy [now Alma-Ata], 1906; Moscow: A.
Snegireva’s Printing House, 1913), 398–473. Cited in Nikolai
Fedorov, N. F. Fedorov: Collected Works in Four Volumes, vol. 2
(Moscow: Tradition, 1995), 370–422.
Fedorov wrote “The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission”
during the mid-1880s, but the text was not published as
such within his lifetime. The Philosophy of the Common Task:
Articles, Thoughts, and Letters of Nikolai Fedorov was originally published only after Fedorov’s death, in the town of
Verniy (now Alma-Ata) in 1906 in an edition of 480 copies,
each marked “not for sale.” Part of this edition was sent to
major libraries and scientific societies in Russia, and anyone
could order a free copy. It was later reprinted in Moscow in
625
Notes on the Original Publications
1913 at A. Snegireva’s Printing House. Fedorov was remembered by his contemporaries as a shy and private person, who
would speak and write anonymously or using an alias. During
his lifetime, Fedorov was a pacifist who advocated for knowledge and education in the public domain, and fought against
copyright laws. All of the reasons above didn’t allow him to
publish a systematic edition of all his writings during his lifetime; the full publication of all of his writing was released only
in the 1990s.
15.
Rybnikov’s Biographical Institute
Rybnikov, Nikolai. “Materials on the Biographical Institute,”
Biographies and Their Study (Moscow, 1920), 3–47.
Rybnikov, Nikolai. “Example of an Autobiography,” Workers’
Autobiographies and Their Study (Moscow: State Publishing
House, 1930), 58–59.
Nikolai Rybnikov only received a primary education, and subsequently studied high school courses on his own. He began
working in psychology at the age of twenty-seven, as an assistant to Georgy Chelpanov, who established the first psychology laboratory at Moscow University in 1907.
In 1918 Rybnikov began to work closely on one of the
themes that interested him most, the biographical method
and its application in psychology. In 1920, Rybnikov’s book
Materials on the Biographical Institute was published, and in
1923, a collection of articles he edited titled The Contemporary
Child were also released. In 1926 Rybnikov published several
books such as The Professional Choice and a School, Child’s
Language, The Interests of a Contemporary School Pupil and
Children’s Drawings and Their Studies. In 1930 he published
three more books titled Peasant Child, An Example of an
Autobiography, and Memory, Its Psychology and Pedagogy.
Avant-garde museology
626
Notes on the Original Publications
16.
Soviet Museum journal
Druzhinin, Nikolai. “Class Struggle as an Exhibit at the
Museums of the Revolution,” Soviet Museum no. 1 (1931):
32–49.
Frumkina, Roza. “Museum as a Weapon of Class Struggle:
Here and Abroad,” Soviet Museum no. 1 (1934): 42–45.
Ilkovsky, M. S. “Bringing The Agitprop-Truck to the Service of
Cultural Construction,” Soviet Museum no. 3 (1932); 85–88.
Karmilov, V. I. “The Astronomical Observatory at the Perm
Regional Museum,” Soviet Museum no. 4, (1935): 80–81.
Karpov, V. “The Museum Newspaper: Suggestions for
Regional Museums and Community Centers,” Soviet Museum
no. 5 (1931): 89–91.
Kholtsov, Valentin. “Everyday Life of the Working Class
from 1900 to 1930 Exhibition: History and Everyday Life
Department of the State Russian Museum” Soviet Museum
no. 3 (1931): 45–53.
Khrapov, P. N. “Museum in the Street,” Soviet Museum no. 4
(1931): 40–47.
Kogan, Yuriy. “Museums on the Frontlines of the War on
Religion,” Soviet Museum no. 6, (1932): 46–51.
Kovalenskaya, Natalya. “An Experiment in Marxist ExhibitionMaking at the Tretyakov State Gallery,” Soviet Museum no. 1
(1931): 50–59.
Krupskaya, Nadezhda. “Lenin’s Attitude Toward Museums,”
Soviet Museum no. 1 (1931): 5–6.
627
Notes on the Original Publications
Levitsky, A. F. “An Exhibition and Panorama of the Moscow
Crematorium,” Soviet Museum no. 5 (1931):116–117.
Leykina, Vera. “A New Exhibition at the Leningrad Museum of
the Revolution,” Soviet Museum no. 6 (1931): 33–40.
Samarin, Yuri. “The Experience of Developing Mobile
Exhibitions,” Soviet Museum no. 2 (1931): 61–69.
Sheremet, I. F. “The Mobile Model of the Instructive Laboratory
Van and Its Operation,” Soviet Museum no. 5 (1935): 89–91.
Shneerson, N. A. “A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical
Performance?” Soviet Museum no. 4 (1932): 25–30.
Skulenko, Ivan. “Church Painting and Its History as an Object
of Antireligious Propaganda,” Soviet Museum no. 2 (1932):
57–64.
Zykov, I. M. “On the Question of the Principles of Exhibition:
Central Park of Culture and Leisure Exhibitions,” Soviet
Museum no. 4 (1932): 31–40.
The Soviet Museum journal was an outcome of the First AllRussian Museum Congress in 1930. It was a scientific journal, and functioned as the major periodical in the field of
museology. The first issue came out in 1931. From 1931 until
1940, the journal was published by Narkompros (People’s
Commissariat for Education), first as a part of Science Sector
department (1931–1933), then as a part of the Department
of Museums (1933–1938), and subsequently as a part of the
Local History Museums Department (1938–1940). Its publication was interrupted from 1940 until 1983. In 1993, after the
fall of the Soviet Union, the journal was renamed The Museum
World, and has since been in circulation in Russia.
Avant-garde museology
628
A Short Postscript on Difficulties
Experienced in Translation
Translation is a notoriously inexact science of resolving deficiencies and intensities in multiple languages. This book is
no exception, as many Russian words contain layers of meaning that cannot be fully expressed in English. For instance, a
word like собор (sobor) in Nikolai Fedorov’s “The Museum, its
Meaning and Mission” has been translated as “congregation”
to balance the religious implications of the word with Fedorov’s
metaphorical usage, when in fact the meaning of the Russian
term is closer to “spiritual communion.” Similarly, while
соборность (sobornost) was translated as “cathedral” in the title
of Vasiliy Chekrygin’s essay, the term also carries a more complex meaning suggesting freedom and unity, wholeness, and
spiritual consensus. Fedorov and Chekrygin’s essays are also
the only ones in the book where “universe” (вселенная) is capitalized to emphasize the spiritual or religious connotations of
its usage, and because the authors themselves capitalized the
word in Russian. Wordplay in N. A. Shneerson’s essay makes
it nearly impossible to convey that “revol-exhibition” could
have been a play on the terms “revolution” and “exhibition,”
so the term he wrote—literally “re-exhibition”—was used.
Throughout the book, the distinction between the Russian
words for “exposition” and “exhibition”—which generally
signals a difference between temporary and more permanent
exhibitions—is sometimes accommodated with the phrase
“permanent exhibition,” but sometimes simply flattened in
translation to “exhibition,” as “exposition” implies a different
meaning to Anglophone ears.
Colophon
Avant-Garde Museology
Arseny Zhilyaev, Editor
ISBN 978-0-8166-9919-3
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Copyright 2015 e-flux, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right
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Every reasonable effort has been made
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“The Museum of Art” from Aleksandr
Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik
Utopia, Loren R. Graham and Richard
Stites, eds., trans. Charles Rougle
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984), 74–81. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved.
“The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of
the Arts” from Pavel Florensky, Beyond
Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art,
ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy
Salmond (London: Reaktion Books,
2002), 101–11. Reprinted by permission of Reaktion Books. All rights
reserved.
“On the Museum” from Kazimir
Malevich, Essays on Art 1915–1913, vol.
16, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia
Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin
(New York: George Wittenborn, 1971),
68–72. Reprinted by permission of
Wittenborn Art Books, San Francisco.
All rights reserved.
“The Revolution Memorial
Reservation” from Andrey Platonov,
Chevengur, © the Estate of Andrey
Platonov. Translation © 2015 Robert
Chandler. All rights reserved.
“On the Museum Bureau” from
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments
for the Future, Diaries, Essays, Letters,
and Other Writings, ed. Alexander
N. Lavretiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell
(New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2004), 115–118. Reprinted by
permission of Jamey Gambrell. All
rights reserved.
Colophon
Series Editors
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Brian Kuan Wood
Anton Vidokle
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Design
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Translation,
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Research
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Arseny Zhilyaev would like to heartily thank everyone listed
above and also the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Katerina
Chuchalina, Annet Sundieva, and Ivan Kostin for their valuable
support and advice.