In the preface to his futurist memoir, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer (1933), the poet Benedikt Livshits strangely seems to denounce the entire enterprise of his narrative:

Futurist aesthetics were founded on the fallacious concept of the racial character of art. The subsequent development of these views led Marinetti to Fascism. The Russian budetliane never went as far in their passion for the East, but even they were not unblemished by their nationalist desires.

Of course, in our day and age, there is no longer any sense in demonstrating the bankruptcy of racial theories. But I have considered it to be of some use in retrospect to expose these political prejudices of an erroneous aesthetics—in the formation of which I took an immediate part. (John Bowlt, trans., Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1977)

Livshits’s confession is a prime example of the “ritual ideological penance” (290) in which former modernists engaged during the Stalinist period, but it also encapsulates some of the most problematic aspects of the relationship between Russian modernism and the West.

Ilia Dorontchenkov’s Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, 1890s to Mid-1930s addresses the complexity of this relationship. This collection of critical essays, mostly from newspapers, journals, and pamphlets—though some are from diaries and letters—constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarly understanding of Russian modern art. The vast majority of texts in the volume are new and elegant translations by Charles Rougle, and those that are taken from earlier translations were clearly chosen to give a more complete view of the subject, as they were not included in such previous anthologies as John Bowlt’s Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), Stephen Bann’s The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Viking, 1974), or Charles Harrison and Paul Wood’s Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).

In that the title of the volume implies a new and different view of Western European modernism, it may be somewhat misleading. There are some striking and original insights into Western modernist painting (Ivan Aksenov’s 1917 essay, “Picasso and the Environs,” is an admirable example), but this is neither the strength nor the intent of the collection. As Dorontchenkov says in his introduction, the West is a constantly shifting abstraction in the consciousness of Russian artists and critics, and it is in response to this fantastical notion that artists in Russia developed their own understandings of the role of the artist in modernity. For this reason, the question of Western influence was always a troubling fact of Russian art: The search for the new and foreign helped to shape Russia’s unique identity in the arts, and with unprecedented intensity. For half a century, almost every important artistic trend had absorbed something from modern European art, and even deliberate rejections of any Western influence—demonstrated by Viktor Vasnetsov in the late nineteenth century—nonetheless kept Russian artists working within the same aesthetic paradigm. One could refuse to be Western, but one could not ignore or remain ignorant of European art (22).

Dorontchenkov’s introduction is a useful conceptual and chronological guide to the texts included in the anthology, and it makes the volume accessible to those with little background in Russian art or history. He also provides brief explanatory texts, with biographical and publication information, at the beginning of most entries. There are places, however, where the reader would benefit from a more thorough gloss. It would be useful, for example, to include a brief discussion of Pavel Muratov’s use of the concepts of “grand art” and “high art” (36–40), the distinctions made by Russian critics between expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, and a short explanation of why Ts. Plotkin puts quotation marks around the verb “to leave” when discussing émigré artists in France (280–83).

Despite these omissions, the thematic structure of the book is sound. The first half of the collection, which includes material from before the Revolution, indicates the wild diversity of criticism in the late imperial period. The dialogue that Dorontchenkov presents begins roughly with the ascendance of the World of Art, a group of young Petersburg artists and writers who presented the first challenge to the provincial realism of the Wanderers. Their position is complicated, and Dorontchenkov points out that the World of Art presented themselves to the West (with the Ballets Russes, for example) as archetypal Russians, but to their own countrymen they played the role of relentless Westernizers (27). Granted, it did not take much to fulfill that role, with the Wanderers’ champion, Vladimir Stasov, arguing (in 1901!) that Édouard Manet’s Olympia was “feeble, ugly, disgusting, and insignificant” (33).

The sections on Cubism and Futurism are largely explanatory—discussing origins and methods—and mirror the European norms of criticism at the time. Mikhail Matiushin, however, evinces a mysticism (comparing On Cubism to Petr Ouspenky’s Tertium Organum, a spiritual and metaphysical explanation of the fourth dimension) particularly symptomatic of the interest in alternative spirituality in pre-Revolutionary Russia and Europe. Malevich, too, evokes this mystical tone when he writes that Cubism is constructed “on the foundations of the general unity of nature” (151). Another striking tendency is the attempt by such Russian artists as Aleksandr Shevchenko, David Burliuk, and Natal’ia Goncharova to renounce the originality of Cubism or Futurism in order to claim native tradition (rather than foreign influence) as precedent for their experiments with form. The invective against Marinetti distributed by Livshits and Velimir Khlebnikov at the Futurist leader’s lecture in Saint Petersburg reveals this tendency at its most strident, claiming that those who attended the lecture betrayed Russian art by “placing the noble neck of Asia under the yoke of Europe” (160). Despite the prevalence of these polemical passages, there are surprising moments of sober reflection: Aleksandr Benois’s “Icons and the New Art” offers a sensitive formal comparison of the most ancient and vanguard arts, while both Leon Trotsky and Roman Jakobson are represented by clear assessments of Futurism’s role in bringing about the end of the “old culture” (164).

The second half of the book includes criticism from after the Revolution, and it is here that some of the explanatory glosses offer key information that helps put the text itself into perspective. Vasilii Chekrygin’s and Viktor Perelman’s advocacy of realism against the “Babel” of European modernism (209) and the “extremely limited” (211) scope of Cézanne is certainly more interesting when it is known, as Dorontchenkov points out, that both critics had recently been advocates of modernism themselves.

Dorontchenkov’s achievement here is to present a compelling snapshot of the various intellectual and artistic strategies adopted to reconcile art with the new social structure. These range in tone from the characteristically exuberant Vladimir Mayakovsky’s observations on French art in 1923 to the dour 1936 denunciation of formalism by Polikarp Lebedev. Mayakovsky’s remarks, though highly personal, nonetheless get to the heart of the matter. Defending his criticism of the Salon d’Automne, the poet reassures the reader that he loves French painting more than anyone. In fact, he “would give our entire Jack of Diamonds style for a single variation from this cycle of Picasso’s or Braque’s. That’s not the point. The point is that the age has called the existence of pictures into question” (226). Aleksandr Rodchenko’s letters from Paris in 1925 are equally eccentric. Readers of Christina Kiaer’s work will already be familiar with some of this material, but the excerpt here is still surprising in its vehemently scatological quality, and reminds us why Kiaer chose to look at this period of the artist’s work from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Some of the most enlightening selections are those in which critics consider, and ultimately reject, the work of George Grosz, Diego Rivera, and John Heartfield as models for Soviet art practice. These texts are important additions to the broader Marxist debates on expressionism, realism, and photomontage from the period. While the discussions of these three artists reflect a sincere attempt to find a form appropriate to Soviet life, there are also abundant examples of artists and critics betraying their own convictions in the name of ideology. While Ivan Matsa’s “To the Highest Level!” is a disturbing (if incomprehensible) example of “ritual ideological penance,” Nikolai Tarabukin’s 1928 “The Still Life as a Problem of Style,” in which he complains that the Cézannist still life transforms “Humanity itself . . . into a thing” (298), is an even more chilling reversal of the position he outlined in From the Easel to the Machine (1923).

The perhaps inevitable conclusion to this ideological narrowing is found in Nina Iavorskaia’s “Eyewitness Account of the Closing of the Museum of Modern Western Art.” Iavorskaia’s narrative ends ominously with Aleksandr Gerasimov, the realist painter and head of the Soviet Academy of Art, telling her colleague, “If anyone dares to exhibit Picasso, I’ll have him hanged” (309). We can safely assume that Gerasimov did not intend to execute Picasso himself, and the coercive nature of much of the rhetoric here is undeniable. Nevertheless, Dorontchenkov’s anthology reveals the unexpected diversity of Russian and Soviet art criticism from the modern period, and brings together an abundance of texts that would not otherwise be available to scholars and students of Marxist criticism, Russian culture, and the history of the avant-garde.