Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)

I believe that a broader, less determined concept of “public culture” can help us better explore the links between politics and culture in wartime Imperial Russia. In this context, a public is not a specific group of people or institutions but a “relation among strangers” self-organized through discourse; it is created by people who seek to address an indefinite and impersonal audience outside themselves.23 Public culture is the institutional and ideological nexus that structures the real and imaginary space between individuals and public inside modern society; it consists of the institutions, ideas, and customs people use to perceive the world, communicate with others, and act outside the immediate environment of faceto-face communication and action. Modern states with socially heterogeneous and large, anonymous populations have an overarching public culture that is usually bounded by language, law, and media institutions: pluralist publics include many audiences, public ideas, and centers of cultural production, while authoritarian or totalitarian publics contain fewer available audiences, more limits on public ideas, and stronger central institutions.-- As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of the new institutions, new public behaviors, and new cultural forms that emerged from this artistic engagement with war, some continued, others were reinterpreted, and still others were destroyed during the revolutionary period. Imagining the Unimaginable deftly reveals the experiences of artists and developments in mass culture and in the press against the backdrop of the broader trends in Russian politics, economics, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the revolution. After 1914, avant-garde artists began to imagine many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, “The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe.” As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevichs famous Black Square ), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of the new institutions, new public behaviors, and new cultural forms that emerged from this artistic engagement with war, some continued, others were reinterpreted, and still others were destroyed during the revolutionary period. Imagining the Unimaginable deftly reveals the experiences of artists and developments in mass culture and in the press against the backdrop of the broader trends in Russian politics, economics, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the revolution. After 1914, avant-garde artists began to imagine many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe. Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Wars against Tradition: The Culture of the Art Profession in Russia, 1863–1914 2. In the Storm: Reshaping the Public and the Art World, 1914–1915 3. Love in the Time of Cholera: Russian Art and the Real War, 1915–1916 4. Masters of the Material World: World War I, the Avant-Garde, andthe Origins of Non-Objective Art 5. The Revolver and the Brush: The Political Mobilization of Russian Artiststhrough War and Revolution, 1916–1917 Conclusion Appendix Notes Selected Bibliography Index World War I had a profound influence on the aesthetics and politics of Russian culture, perhaps even more than the revolution. Looking at how the war changed Russian culture, especially visual art, Cohen shows how the wartime environment allowed iconoclastic modern art to flourish