Aleksandr Rodchenko. Osip Brik. 1924.

Osip Brik and the Politics of the Avant-Garde*

NATASHA KURCHANOVA

It is not difficult to be a Futurist of ones future but this is not real Futurism. Osip Brik Critic, editor, impresario of Left art and a lifelong friend and collaborator of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Brik arousedand still arousescontroversy.1 Although his centrality to the Soviet avant-garde is recognized in foundational studies and anthologies on the subject, hostile views of him abound, especially in Soviet accounts.2 In 1968, during the Khrushchev thaw, two articles appeared in the popular Soviet periodical Ogonek in which Brik was defamed as
* I would like to thank Stuart Liebman for his encouragement and help in bringing this publication into being, as well as Malcolm Turvey and Annette Michelson for their support and editorial advice. 1. I commented on the ironic aspect of this portrait by Rodchenko and on Briks irony in general in my paper Half-Blind Brik: Reduction of Visuality in Constructivism, presented in Russian at the First Brik Readings held at the Moscow University of Print Media (MGUP), February 1012, 2010. The proceedings of this conference are being prepared for publication as Poetika i fonostilistika. Brikovskii sbornik, vypusk 1. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii Pervye Brikovskie chteniia: poetika i fonostilistika, ed. G. V. Vekshin (Moscow: Moscow State University of Print Media, 2010). 2. Among scholars who laid the groundwork for an in-depth study of Russian modernism, Victor Erlich considered Brik an important member of the group of critics and writers who became known as the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ). See V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (1955): 4th ed. (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton Publishers, 1980), p. 68. In several publications, Bengt Jangfeldt provided groundwork for a detailed historical account of Briks efforts to institutionalize Futurism. See Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky and Futurism: 19171921 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1976) and Osip Brik: A Bibliography in Russian Literature 8 (1980), pp. 579604 among others. Christina Lodder presented Brik as an active participant in the reorganization of Soviet art education and the major critic behind the movement of artists into production. See Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 49, 7677. The writer and translator Maria Enzensberger and the historian of photography Christopher Phillips have positively evaluated Briks attempt to bring together revolutionary art and politics and translated a selection of his writings. See Enzensberger, Osip Brik: Selected Writings, Screen 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 35120 and Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), pp. 21320 and 22733.

OCTOBER 134, Fall 2010, pp. 5273. 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Mayakovskys sham friend who abused the great poets trust during his life and after his death began to use his fame for his own aggrandizement.3 In addition, memoirs denouncing Brik and his wife, Lili, were published with encouragement from Mayakovskys sister, Liudmila. Evgeniia Lavinskaia, the wife of the artist Anton Lavinsky, authored the most hostile of these. Their gist was the same as that of the Ogonek articles: the Briks did not appreciate Mayakovskys talent and did not care for him personally, but cultivated his friendship for political and material advantage.4 As the Iron Curtain fell and details emerged about Briks service in the Cheka, the fearsome Soviet secret police, even Western scholars confidence was shaken.5 Today, studies of the art and culture of the period preserve Briks enigma by either attempting to absolve him of all sins or avoiding the issue of his close connection to the repressive organs of the state.6 He therefore emerges as a split, misaligned figure: on the one hand helping to establish the avant-garde as a viable cultural force, but on the other undermining its freedom by subordinating it to a political dictatorship.
3. V. Vorontsov and A. Koloskov, Liubov poeta [A Poets Love], Ogonek 16 (April 22, 1968), pp. 913; and A. Koloskov, Tragediia poeta [Poets Tragedy], Ogonek 23 ( June 3, 1968), pp. 2631 and Ogonek 26 ( June 24, 1968), pp. 1822. 4. E. A. Lavinskaia, Vospominaniia o vstrechakh s Maiakovskim [Memoirs about the meeting with Mayakovsky], in Maiakovskii v vospominaniiakh rodnykh i druzei (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1968), pp. 32174. 5. According to the available documentation, Brik worked for the Cheka as a legal consultant from 1920 until 1924. In 19891994, Valentin Skoriatin, a Moscow journalist, published a series of articles in the popular journal Zhurnalist, tracking down every detail of Mayakovskys life during the last months, days, and minutes before his death, which looked like a suicide. He tried to figure out if Cheka agents following the poet might have staged his murder. Although the in-depth scrutiny revealed no proof of Briks connection to the poets death, the fact of his and his wifes service in the Cheka was definitely established. See Pochemu Maiakovskii ne poekhal v Parizh? [Why did Mayakovsky not go to Paris?], Zhurnalist 9 (1989), pp. 8795; Mezhdu dekabrem i martom [Between December and March], no. 1(1990), pp. 5663; Vystrel v Liubianskiom [The shot in Liubanskii (alley)], Zhurnalist 2(1990), pp. 5257; Posleslovie k smerti [Postface to death], Zhurnalist 5(1990), pp. 5262; Mne by zhit da zhit [I wish I could keep living], Zhurnalist 5 (1991), pp. 7071; Prozrenie [Seeing again], Zhurnalist 6 (1991), pp. 8493; Moment lzhi [A moment of lie] Zhurnalist 5 and 6 (1992), pp. 8490; Zevs osvedomliaet [Zeus informs], Zhurnalist 1 (1993), pp. 6873 and Zhurnalist 2 (1993), pp. 4347; Sretenka. Malyi Golovin 12 . . . , Zhurnalist 7 (1993), pp. 5053; and Skazano eshche ne vse [Not everything is said yet], Zhurnalist 10 (1994), pp. 3744. 6. See Anatolii Valiuzhenich, Osip Maksimovich Brik: materialy k biografii (Akmola: Niva, 1993). Selim Khan-Magomedov, by far the most prolific scholar of the avant-garde in Russia today, barely mentions Brik in his many books and articles on the subject. Among his writings, those translated into English include: Alexander Vesnin and Russian Constructivism (New York: Rizzoli, 1986); Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); and Rodchenko: The Complete Work (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). However, he does acknowledge Br iks import ance for Mayakov sky and the avant- garde in one of his latest publicat ions, Konstruktivizm: kontseptsiia formoobrazovaniia (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 2003), pp. 199206. In her recent study of Constructivism, Maria Gough refers in passing to various roles Brik performed as an administrative and critical functionary of the avant-garde, but she does not emphasize his central role in the formation of the avant-gardes identity; see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Christina Kiaer, on the other hand, discusses Briks involvement at length, but leaves aside the question of the corruption of art by political violence. See Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

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A Literator Osip Maksimovich (Meerovich) Brik was born in 1888 to a Jewish merchants family in Moscow. Like his future Formalist colleagues Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum, he belonged to the second generation of assimilated Russian Jews who were historically persecuted but gradually allowed some measure of civil rights, among them the right to live in the capital cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.7 Many Jews fought czarism by joining illegal revolutionary parties, but Brik, who was not a revolutionary by temperament, chose to study law and stated his intention to fight the system from within by legal means, using intellectual weapons. After graduation, however, Brik moved to the capital city of St. Petersburg to frequent poetry readings and theater performances. Why Brik ultimately chose bohemia over the law is not clear. But his meeting, in July 1915, with Mayakovskya Futurist who strove to abolish the boundary separating art from life by spurning the artistic establishment and attempting to make his poetry relevant to middle-class and working people proved to be a fateful event that profoundly shaped his future.8
7. On the emancipation of Russian Jews, see Russian Jewry (18601917), ed. Jacob Frumkin, Gregor Aronson, Alexis Goldenweiser (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1966). 8. This is how Lili Brik described her husbands and her own reaction to Mayakovskys recitation of his new poem The Thirteenth Apostle (191415), later titled The Cloud in Trousers: A door

Rodchenko. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Brik. 1926.

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In 1929, when his work on behalf of the avant-garde was behind him, Brik responded to a questionnaire for a playwrights union by describing his occupation as a literator, a word that can be translated as publicist or man of letters.9 Both translations fit because they relate to different aspects of his literary work. As a publicist, Brik wrote short critical and journalistic textsmostly manifestos and reviewsand produced several important longer publications. His first steps in this direction were inspired by Mayakovskys poem The Cloud in Trousers (1915). After hearing Mayakovsky recite the poem, Brik wrote a panegyric to it, Give Us Bread, which he published in the Futurist almanac Took (Vzial ) in 1915, alongside contributions by Mayakovsky; the poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, and Bor is Pasternak; and the literar y cr it ic Shklovsky. Already in this text, which extolled the poem as daily bread as opposed to the sugary eatables of the Symbolists, a prominent theme in Briks writings over the course of his career emerges: the triumph of low folk art over high art. A contribution to Maxim Gorkys journal Annals (Letopis ) followed, in which Brik published a few reviews of poetry and plays. Gorkys journal provided a particularly suitable forum for Brik, because it covered both literature and left-wing politics. After the abdication of the czar and the formation of the Provisional Government in February 1917, Brik became active in reorganizing the arts by joining the Left Block of the Union of Art Workers.10 The Democratization of Art, his first article on the relationship between art and politics, appeared in Annals in 1917. In it, Brik argued for the necessity of artists connection to the changes taking place in the political structure of the country but also insisted on the separation between art and the state in order to preserve artistic freedom. This text stands out among the others he wrote because of its liberal bent: Brik explained that freedom of the arts allows for a social interaction in which freely formed poets, painters, and musicians . . . enter into a complex relationship among themselves and with society, in the process creating art as a socio-cultural phenomenon. He claimed to be a middleman of sorts

had been removed between the two rooms. Mayakovsky stood there, leaning back against the doorframe. He took out a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket, looked in it, and put it back in the same pocket. He pondered, and then looked around the room as if it were an enormous auditorium. He read the prologue and then askednot in verse, but in prosewith his quiet, never to be forgotten voice: You think it is raving malaria? It happened. Happened in Odessa. We lifted up our heads and did not take our eyes off the unseemly miracle till the end . . . . See Lili Brik, And Now About Osip Maksimovich, in Valiuzhenich, Osip Maksimovich Brik, p. 138. Valiuzhenich did not date Lili Briks memoirs. However, parts of it were first published in 1934 under the title Iz vospominanii, in Almanakh S Maiakovskim, ed. N. Aseev, O. Brik, and S. Kirsanov (Moscow: Sovetskaia literatura, 1934), pp. 5979. 9. RGALI, fond 2852, opis 1, delo 323. Notably, Brik did not call himself pisatel (writer), which would have implied a broader reference to imaginative writing. 10. The Union of Art Workers, set up to defend the interests of independent artists and art professionals, was established on March 12, 1917, less than two weeks after the February revolution. See V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1983), pp. 87, 88, 90 and Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 48.

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who would facilitate the artists transition to the new, ostensibly democratic society. 11 With this text, Brik inserted himself in a conflict that Benjamin Buchloh has called one of the most profound . . . in modernism itself: that of the historical dialectic between individual autonomy and the representation of a collectivity. . . . 12 In addition to his work as a publisher and critic, Brik was a founding member of the group of literar y scholar s who later became known as the Formalists and who were members of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ) in Petrograd.13 This association makes the translation of literator as a man of letters more pertinent. In his tribute to Brik, the linguist Roman Jakobson acknowledged his friends active participation in the discussions of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and especially his proclivity for subjecting art to rigorous scientific analysis.14 Indeed, in his studies of poetic language, Brik left no room for indeterminacy. In Sound Repetitions, for example, he analyzed hundreds of individual examples from Pushkins and Lermontovs verses to illustrate the argument that in poetry, repetitions of sounds and sound combinations that did not carry any semantic charge stood on a par with imagery and served not only as euphonic additions, but were the results of an independent poetic striving, anchoring the work structurally.15 This position diverged somewhat from the tenets of zaum poetry but was generally in agreement with the OPOIAZ opposition to the nineteenth-century Romantic school of Veselovsky and Potebnia, which considered thinking in images as the prevalent form of poetic creation. The most well-known rebuff to this theoretical model in literary criticism was, of course, Shklovskys Art as Device, which immediately followed Sound Repetitions in the famous 1919 collection of OPOIAZ essays, Poetika. Instead of analyzing textual properties, Shklovsky focused on how such properties are perceivedessentially, on our psychological reaction to artistry. Unlike Shklovsky, Brik avoided psychology because of the intuitive, subjective nature of the readers response, which, he felt, resisted strict
11. The ideas elaborated in The Democratization of Art first appeared in the program Brik drafted for the Left Block, in which he was one of the most active members. See my dissertation, Against Utopia: Osip Brik and the Genesis of Productivism (City University of New York, Graduate Center, 2005), ch. 2, pp. 9496. 12. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, From Faktura to Faktography, October 30 (Fall 1984), p. 114. 13. See Erlich, Russian Formalism, pp. 5269. Andrei Krusanov specified that OPOIAZ received its official name only in October 1919. Before this date, the group was known through the name of its publication, Collections on the Theory of Poetic Language (Petrograd, 1916 and 1917). See Krusanov, Russkii avangard: istoricheskii obzor, 19071932, vol. 2, Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia, 19171921 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), pp. 29697. 14. Roman Jakobson, postscript to Two Essays on Poetic Language by Osip Maksimovich Brik, Michigan Slavic Materials 5 (Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, 1964), pp. 7781; p. 81. 15. Sound Repetitions was first published in 1917 and reprinted in the 1919 compendium of articles Poetika: Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (Petrograd: OPOIAZ, 1919), pp. 5898; Rhythm and Syntax, another Formalist analysis of poetry by Brik, appeared in 1927 in Novyi Lef 3, pp. 1520; Novyi Lef 4, pp. 2329; Novyi Lef 5, pp. 3237; and Novyi Lef 6, pp. 3339.

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categorization: he mentioned only that sound repetitions can have emotional content, but left the development of this thought for Shklovsky.16 Briks reliance on hard scientific facts, free of psychological overtones, was much closer to Jakobsons approach to poetic language, which was informed by the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. In fact, Brik was the only member of the Formalist circle whom Jakobson explicitly praised, which he did on account of the Saussurean idea of the sound-image that could be found in Briks Sound Repetitions.17 Briks methodological disregard for history and for such nebulous psychological phenomena as emotions and memory can also be linked to the Swiss linguists theory. Saussures emphasis on the synchronic axis of language replaced the search for the original meaning of a word with a binary system of signs in the present in which the meaning of a sign is thought to be produced through its differences from other signs. Brik transformed this insight into a method for the study of not only poetry and literature but also the relationship between the individual and society; he began to think, to use Fredric Jamesons formulation, in relational as opposed to substantive terms, where the immediate context determines the meaning of an utterance.18 As Jameson has noted, there are obvious disadvantages to this synchronic model: Saussures prison-house of language does not allow for the dynamism of the Hegelian notion of history to come into play, and this model led Brik to think of the relationship between an individual and a society as a static, self-sufficient, metaphysical system. Moreover, judging by his analysis of sound repetitions in poetry, Brik tended to ignore Saussures emphasis on the arbitrariness of the sign and underscored instead the willful, purposeful nature of artistic design. An Ideologue of the Bolshevik Utopia After the Bolsheviks capture of power in October 1917, Brik continued mediating between the avant-garde and the rapidly changing political structure. Unlike his fellow Left-Block members Mayakovsky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Nikolai Punin, he refrained from cooperating with the new authorities and supported the convention of the Constituent Assembly until the Bolsheviks forcibly dissolved it on January 19, 1918. Briks maneuvering through muddy political waters during this turbulent period resulted in shifting allegiances. In December 1917, he publicly avowed
16. Viktor Shklovsky, On Poetry and Zaum Language, Poetika, pp. 1326. 17. Brik must have been particularly taken by the Saussurian idea of the sound-image, because in Jakobsons book Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (The newest Russian poetry), Jakobson mistakenly attributed this concept to his friend: Form is perceived by us only when it is repeated in a given linguistic system. A lone form dies away. Similarly, a sound combination in a given verse . . . becomes a sound-image [Briks terminology] and is perceived only when it is repeated. Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (Prague: Politika, 1921), p. 48. 18. For a brilliant discussion of Saussures thought and its implications for Formalism and Structuralism, see Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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that Bolshevik politics were not only objectionablebecause, like any power, the Bolsheviks arrest those who think differently from them and violate the word and the pressthe cultural program of the Bolsheviks was impossible, and as a cultural worker he refused to join the parliament on the Bolshevik ticket.19 The following month, however, he reversed his stance and submitted to the authority of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Peoples Commissar of Enlightenment, who was responsible for art and culture. As a practical man attuned to the actual turn of events, he realized that the Bolsheviks had gained a firm hold on power and by siding with them he would have a better chance of enacting his artistic agenda. His January 22, 1917, article Autonomous Art extolled the Peoples Commissars speech at the Third Congress of Soviets, which took place immediately after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. He praised Lunacharskys promise to allow artists freedom from the state and, in the same breath, attacked the established generals of art who misused arts autonomy to fortify their positions.20 After agreeing to serve the Bolsheviks, Brik worked not for one but for several government organizations. He joined the party and the Art Department of the Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment (IZO Narkompros) as the head of the Subdivision of Artistic Labor. There, he was charged with the organization of artistic competitions, participation in festivals, and sponsorship of artistic projects as well as with the editorship of the newspaper of the Art Department, The Art of the Commune (Iskusstvo Kommuny).21 In the fall of 1918, he was involved in the creation of Pegoskhum (Petrograd Free Art Workshops), which replaced the Academy of Art in April 1918. In November 1918, he joined the Art and Art Industry Collegium of IZO Narkompros, an administrative organ responsible for reorganizing and regulating the artistic life of the country. After the government moved to Moscow in March 1919, he became a representative of the commissariat in the Second Svomas (Free Workshops), which was the former Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In his official capacity, Brik also participated in organizing projects sponsored by the Art Department, such as Tatlins Monument to the Third International and the competition for designing book kiosks with the participation of members of Zhivskulptarkh (the Painting, Sculpture,
19. Brik, My Position, Novaia zhizn (New life), December 5 (18), 1917, p. 4. 20. Brik, Autonomous Art, Vecherniaia zvezda (The evening star), January 1 (22), 1918, p. 2. 21. Brik remembered joining Narkompros in the summer of 1918. See his IMOIskusstvo Molodykh [IMOThe art of the young], in Maiakovskomu (Leningrad: 1940); repr, in Valiuzhenich, Osip Maksimovich Brik, pp. 8195; p. 84. Also, on October 24, 1918, David Shterenberg, the head of the Art Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, issued a certificate stating that Brik was the head of the Subdivision of Artistic Labor (zaveduiushchii buro khudozhestvennogo truda) (RGALI, fond 2852, opis 1, delo 317). As far as party membership is concerned, Valiuzhenich cited Briks membership card, dated May 6, 1920: . . . Brik has been listed as a member of RKP [Russian Communist Party] from 1917 . . . . (Valiuzhenich, Osip Maksimovich Brik, p. 16). It seems unlikely that Brik joined the party as early as 1917, considering his harsh critique of the Bolsheviks up to the end of that year. He probably became a member of the party simultaneously with joining Narkompros in the summer of 1918. Krusanov confirms this dating. (Krusanov, Russkii avangard, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 45590). In 1921, Brik was expelled from the party during a purge.

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and Architecture Collective), one of whom was Aleksandr Rodchenko. He became the third director of INKhUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture) after Kandinsky and Rodchenko, and he helped organize VKhUTEMAS (The All-State ArtisticTechnical Workshops).22 He also continued his writing and editing, all the while advocating for the changes he was effecting.23 Briks utopianism was more practical than theoreticalhe concentrated on tasks that had an immediate pragmatic effect in the present, such as agitation and propaganda, rather than speculation about the future. From the moment he joined the Bolsheviks, his rhetoric and vocabulary shifted their emphases and his writings took on a manifesto-like urgency and ideological fervor. In his articles for The Art of the Commune, he called for building a foundation for proletarian art and elaborated on what this entailed, dedicating each to a key point of his plan to transform the arts. In Artist-Proletarian (December 15, 1918), for example, he repudiates the notion of artistic talent and amateurism and argues that artists should move from an individual to a collective consciousness. As for the nature of art, he called for its desublimation and urged that it move in the direction of the Futurist creation of life (A Preserved God; December 29, 1918). In December 1917, when Brik expressed his contempt for the Bolsheviks cultural program, he referred to his experience at the First Conference of Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organizations, which took place a week before the October uprising.24 The conference was dominated by supporters of Aleksandr Bogdanov,25 a Bolshevik cultural philosopher and Lenins nemesis, who promoted a proletarian cultural hegemony through educating workers in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Lunacharsky was just one among many organizers of the conference, which included other prominent Bolsheviks as well as members of Proletkult, a proletarian cultural-educational organization set up according to Bogdanovs tenets that, at one point, rivaled the party in popularity.26 Brik had a markedly different approach to culture, which was based not on educating workers in order to ensure their cultural hegemony, but on what he called, in The Democratization of Art, individual creativitywhat we would call talent. Briks articles in The Art of the Commune, with their insistence
22. See Pamela Kachurin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Retreat of the Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era (Ph. D. diss., Indiana University, 1988), pp. 94 and 126; Krusanov, Russkii avantgard, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 9194; Khan-Magomedov, Vkhutemas, vol. 1 (Paris: ditions du Regard, 1990), p. 40. On the history of INKhUK, see Selim Khan-Magomedov, Vozniknovenie i formirovanie INKhUKa (Institut khudozhestvennoi kultury), Problemy istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 2 (1976), pp. 2427; and Inkhuk i rannii konstruktivizm [INKhUK and early Constructivism] (Moscow: Arkhitektura, 1994). Brik became director of INKhUK on September 21, 1921. See Khan-Magomedov, Konstruktivizm, p. 201. 23. Privately, Brik lived with a new family structure: he and his wife, Lili, remained legally married, but at various times had amorous liaisons with others. Mayakovsky and Lili Brik had an affair from 1915 until 1924. From 1919 on, Mayakovsky lived in the same apartment with the Briks. 24. See Kurchanova, Against Utopia, p. 111. 25. Pseudonym for Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovsky (18731928). 26. On Proletkult, see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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on a non-imitative, creative approach to art as production, served as a riposte to Bogdanovs philosophy, which in 1918 dominated the cultural life of Russia. Unlike Bogdanov, Brik refused to engage in utopian theorizing and speculation about the future. It might appear that he simply lacked the ability to envision grandiose social changes that would radically improve peoples lives. Jameson reminds us, however, that alongside visions of a better future, utopias have always had a rough-and-tumble political dimension, which necessarily involves local, often unseemly and violent, political struggles in the present.27 In this respect, Lenins pamphlet State and Revolution, written a month before the October uprising but published in 1918, provides an insight into Briks practical, militant utopianism.28 In this text, Lenin upheld Marx and Engels tenet that the state is an apparatus of forced political domination by a hegemonic class over others, and argued against both the liberal idea of the state as a means of reconciling class antagonisms and the anarchist claim that the state becomes obsolete following the capture of political power by the proletariat. Typical of the writing of the Bolshevik leader in its polemical ferocity and its refusal of compromise, State and Revolution insisted on the necessity of the state as a political tool for annihilating the enemies of the proletariat. Bogdanov, whose vision determined his practice, was primarily a theoretician despite being a revolutionary. He had a critical perspective on the realization of the Bolshevik utopia not only because of his theoretical prowess, but also because he was cast out of it by Lenins political ambition.29 Because Bogdanovs theory was based on the principle of historical progression, in the aesthetic realm, it advocated the study of the past and the anticipation of the future. Brik, unlike Bogdanov, had no proclivity either for revolutionary struggle or for devising expansive theoretical schemas. He was an aesthete who repudiated history for full immersion in the present moment. For Brik, revolution was not about studying the past and imagining the future, but about destroying the past and actualizing the present by making every moment count as a transformative revolutionary event. After joining the Bolshevik government, then, Briks efforts were directed at the destruction of traditional artistic culture and ensuring favorable conditions for Mayakovsky and Futurist poetry. Briks most direct challenge to the traditional institutions of the visual arts in Soviet Russia came at the end of 1921, during one of the first meetings of his tenure as director of INKhUK, when he proposed that INKhUK be moved out of Narkompross art department.30 According to art historian Pamela
27. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), p. xi and pp. 1012. 28. V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1943). 29. Lenin began challenging Bogdanovs vision as soon as it became threatening to him politically. See Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: the Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.) p. 7 and T. C. Protko and A. A. Gritsanov, Aleksandr Bogdanov. Mysliteli XX stoletiia (Minsk: Knizhnyi zdom, 2009), pp. 2862. 30. Khan-Magomedov, Inkhuk i rannii konstruktivzm, 231-34. The critic Viktor Pertsov was the first to notice publicly Briks favorable treatment of literature at the expense of the visual arts. See Pertsov, Reviziia levogo fronta v sovremennom russkom iskusstve [Revision of the Left Front in Contemporary Russian Art] (Moscow: Vserossiiskii Proletkult, 1925), pp. 3337. See also Kurchanova, Against Utopia, pp. 19697.

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Kachurin, this must have been prompted by the concerns of officials such as Olga Anikst, who argued that education in the applied arts should be removed from the purview of IZO Narkompros and placed under the control of professional unions and the Council on National Economy. IZO, in her opinion, was dominated by the most extreme Left trends, and was capable of producing a few hundreds of thousands of unsuccessful Futurists instead of such a number of artistically trained workers.31 Brik responded to Anikst's charges by enthusiastically agreeing to this move, which would have placed INKhUK among institutions concerned with the economic base as opposed to a derivative cultural superstructure, thereby assuring that the government consider it an organ of the first order. Had Brik succeeded in this undertaking, independent artistic activity would have been curtailed even further by being placed under the direct control of a body that had nothing to do with visual creativity or visual production or art in general. Fortunately, Lunacharsky was against such a radical change, and despite Briks wishes, this transfer never occurred. Instead, on January 1, 1922, INKhUK became part of the newly formed Russian Academy of Art. Brik, however, had not relinquished the hope of remaking the Institute into the base of technological labor: at the meeting on October 6, 1923, he proposed to rename INKhUK as INDUK (the Institute of Industrial Culture). Briks proposal was formally accepted, although in the long-term the old name remained in use.32 Art in Production Because Brik had to take into account Proletkults popularity and provide a theoretical justification for his stance, his first book, Art in Production, appropriated Bogdanovs vision and presented it in the form of a politically expedient Futurist manifesto. The book came out in 1921, at the onset of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which shifted the orientation of the Soviet government from war-time terror and expropriation to reconciliation with private proprietors and small-scale entrepreneurs. The introduction, most likely written by Brik, stated that the aim of the publication was the clarification and working out of issues concerning the role of art in the production process.33 Following the introduction, in Our
31. Olga Anikst, minutes of a meeting at IZO Narkompros, GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Fond A-2306, opis 2, delo 104, list 101. Cited in Kachurin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, p. 115. 32. See Minutes of INKhUK meeting on October 6, 1923, RGALI, Fond 2852, opis 1, delo 317. 33. Ot redaktsii, Iskusstvo v proizvodstve (Moscow: IZO Narkompros, 1921), p. 3. In 1994, Svetlana Boym singled out the word byt as designating the reign of stagnation and routine, of daily transience without transcendence, which became current with the Symbolists and the avant-garde, but gradually entered common parlance. In its absolute opposition to bytie, the realm of spiritual pursuit, byt became a reviled symbol of everything retrograde, dirty, and unorganized. (See Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia [London: Cambridge University Press, 1994], pp. 2940.) For more on the political currency of the question of the transformation of byt, see Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, esp. ch. 1 and 2.

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Agenda, Brik called for the abolition of the distinction between pure and applied art on the grounds that it reflected a social hierarchy between architects, sculptors, painters and engineers, metalworkers, woodworkers. Instead, there were only workers who had to understand why [they were] applying a certain form and a certain color to an object, so that they could become conscious, active participant[s] in the creative process of the making of the thing.34 Whereas Briks rhetoric in Art in Production remained consistent with his earlier thoughts on the democratization of art, the book as a whole ran counter to his ahistorical approach. All the essaysexcept for the introductory ones by Brikoffered an abridged, limited, and simplified historical perspective that was camouflaged by the new rhetoric of the machine aesthetic. The four central texts of the collection, written by Briks protgs, traced the historical trajectory of Productivism as a progressive movement.35 Nietzsches proactive philosophy was claimed as a source of the Productivist impulse, and the Symbolist idea of remaking the world through art was seen as carrying it further. The abolition of the hierarchy between pure and applied art was also viewed as part of this progression. As a result, Art in Production replaced artistic creativity with technological acumen. Contextwhich, under the influence of Saussure, had been the defining element of Briks thinking about language, art, and societyhad now taken priority over the individual creativity that Brik had been so concerned to preserve four years earlier in The Democratization of Art. Lef In contrast to Art in Production, which dealt exclusively with the visual arts, Briks next publication, the journal Lef (19231925), devoted most of its space to poetry and short storiesgenres that determined in large measure the journals success and proved resistant to iconoclastic forays into Productivism. In the initial plan for the journal, which Brik launched together with Mayakovsky in 1923, the poet omitted the visual arts completely.36 It was Brik, as a co-editor, who invited visual artists to participate. The journal had typographic covers and included occasional photomontages by Rodchenko and designs for theater, textiles, book kiosks, and clothes by Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Lavinsky, and Liubov Popova, which were often squeezed into the practice section and confined to a few pages. Many of Briks major articles from the Lef period have been translated: his call for artists to go Into Production is well-known, as is his explanation of the significance of the so-called formal method and his appeal for moving from pictures
34. Brik, V poriadke dnia, Iskusstvo v proizvodstve, pp. 78. 35. A. Filipov and David Arkin were former Svomas students; A. Toporkov was picked out by Brik as early as March 1919 to give a lecture on the subject of Artist and Machine. See Krusanov, Russkii avangard, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 10809 and p. 205. 36. See Halina Stephan, LEF and the Left Front of the Arts (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1981), pp. 38 39.

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Rodchenko. Cover for Lef no. 1. March 1923.

to textile prints.37 The texts offered here highlight Briks persistent concern with limiting the power of imagistic representation. In The Constructivist School (1923), he emphasizes the orientation of VKhUTEMAS toward producing utilitarian, non-artistic objects. In Photomontage (1924) one of the earliest articles on the subject, he highlights the value of photography for the avant-garde, citing its inherent ability to fixate the fact itself, as compared to drawing (a primitive
37. V proizvodstvo, T.n. formalnyi metod, originally published in Lef 1 (March 1923), pp. 1058, 21315, and Ot kartiny k sitstsu, Lef 2 (1924), pp. 2734 were translated by Richard Sherwood as Into Production, The So-Called Formal Method, and From Picture to CalicoPrint, in Documents from Lef, Screen Reader I: Cinema, Ideology, Politics, ed. John Ellis (London: The Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977), pp. 26869; 27982; and 27375. A translation of Into Production was also published in Stephen Banns anthology The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), pp. 8385. Ot kartiny k sitstsu appeared as From Pictures to Textile Prints, in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism: 19021934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 24449. Some of Briks important collaborative manifestos, Za chto boretsia Lef ? [What Does Lef Fight For?] and Nasha slovesnaia rabota [Our linguistic work], appeared in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 19195 and 2023.

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Rodchenko. Cover for Lef no. 3. JuneJuly 1923.

medium) because it lives, it reflects reality, it changes the appearance of this reality.38 For Brik, photographic representation was superior because it was created by a machine, which, for him, was the paradigm of scientific objectivity. Manual drawing lacks this object ivit y because it chang[es] the appearance of realit y. 39 Unsurprisingly, The Breakdown of VKhUTEMAS (1924), which deplores the schools return to traditional artistic mediums, emphasizes the graphics department as one of the most important sectors to be kept within the purview of Productivism.
38. See Brik, Fotomontazh, Zaria Vostoka 683 (September 21, 1924), p. 4. Another article from 1924 entitled Photomontage, appeared in Lef 4 (1924), pp. 4344. As Leah Dickerman noted (in The Fact and the Photograph, (October 118 [Fall 2006], p. 135), it was unsigned and misattributed to Gustavs Klucis, who was not a member of the Lef circle (see Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 21112). I agree that there is little doubt that the text in Lef was authored by Brik, because it reiterated not only the title, but also the argument of the article in Zaria Vostoka (albeit in a much more concise format). Moreover, the Lef Photomontage praised the three artists most favored by Brik: Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, and George Grosz. 39. In his subsequent articles on photography, the gist of Briks argument is essentially the same. See The Photograph versus the Painting (1926); What the Eye Does Not See (1926); and From the Painting to the Photograph (1928), in Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 21320 and 22733.

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Because Lef was essentially a literary journal, it became embroiled in bitter disputes about the proper character and direction of literature in the workers state.40 The struggle between various literary groups was so intense that none other than Leon Trotsky, President of the Revolutionary War Council, felt compelled to intervene. In 1924shortly after Lenins deathhe published Literature and Revolution, analyzing the various writers, literary schools, and movements that had emerged since the turn of the century. Despite his reserved praise for Mayakovskys poetry, he lambasted the Formalists for their scholasticism and derisively dismissed Briks story Not a Fellow-Traveler as evidence of the authors total lack of perspective on the vulgar environment he portrayed.41 In general, Trotskys criticisms of Futurism and Lef focused on their lack of perspective, distance, and vision. With a deep knowledge of the subject atypical of a Commissar of War, Trotsky charted the development of Futurism, mentioning
40. Even before the formation of Lef, Brik and Mayakovsky were ceaselessly attacked for favoring artists of bourgeois descent by advocates of proletarian art, who were first concentrated in Proletkult, and later in its various offshoots, such groups as October, MAPP (The Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers), and VAPP (The All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). During the years of the Civil War (19181921) and in its immediate aftermath, Brik and his allies could openly attack ideas propagating art by proletarians. With the change of the political climate during the years of NEP (New Economic Policy), they allied themselves with some of the earnest proletarian rhetoric, to which the agreement of cooperation between Lef and MAPP, published toward the end of 1923 in the fourth issue of Lef, bears witness. This union was directed mainly against fellow-travelers, non-Communist writers who sympathized with the revolution and who were grouped around the journals Red Virgin Soil and Press and Revolution. 41. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 138. Briks story Ne poputchitsa, in which the plot was structured around an unsolvable conflict between struggle for Communism and everyday life, appeared in the first issue of Lef. See Lef 1, pp. 10942.

Page of Ogonek no. 20. The Constructivist School. 1923.

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Constructivism and Futurism in the context of their tendency to join forces with trends and movements that were foreign or even hostile to them.42 The Commissar here hit the nail on the head: Briks allies-in-Futurism, whom he invited to cooperate in the journalthe theoreticians Sergei Tretiakov, Nikolai Chuzhak, and Boris Arvatovdid not share his debt to Saussure; they also had extensive connections either to Proletkult or Marxism and were not as adamant on the absolute dispensability of historical and psychological approaches to art.43 However, they united around Lef, drawn by Mayakovskys leadership and the Futurist rhetoric with its revolutionary pedigree and uncompromising hostility to art of the past. Novyi Lef In 1925, spurred by Trotskys preemptive strike, the party (then coming increasingly under Stalins control) accepted a Resolution on Literature, for the first time, which established official guidelines for the development of art in Soviet Russia.44 The resolution spelled out the partys support for proletarian groups and image-oriented representation based on traditional artistic techniques, that could be easily understood by the masses. This led to a reorientation of the journal: after its closure in 1925, it reemerged two years later under a new title, with photographs gracing the covers of all its issues. They were also prominently displayed inside its pages.45 Ever attuned to the slightest change in context, Brik responded to this official sanctioning of imagistic representation by leaving the editorship of Novyi Lef (192728) to Tretiakov.46 Ostensibly, his exit was prompted by Mayakovskys
42. . . . Articles are continually being published on the complete futility and on the counter-revolutionary character of Futurism between covers made by the hand of the Constructivist. In most official editions, Futurist poems are being published side by side with the most destructive summings up of Futurism. The Proletkult . . . is united to Futurists by living cords. . . . Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 141. 43. Sergei Mikhailovich Tretiakov (18921937)a Futurist critic, poet, and playwright, a close colleague of Eisenstein at Proletkult. Before moving to Moscow in 1922, Tretiakov was active as a writer and journalist in the Far East. Nikolai Fedorovich Chuzhak (18761937)an old Bolshevik, journalist, and critic sympathetic to Futurists; Boris Ignatevich Arvatov (18961940)an art historian and critic, active participant in Proletkult. On Tretiakov and Chuzhak, see Devin Fore, The Operative Word in Soviet Factography, October 118 (Fall 2006), pp. 95131; on Arvatov, see Christina Kiaer, Boris Arvatovs Socialist Objects, October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 10518. Tensions between Brik and Chuzhak surfaced even before the first issue came out: Chuzhak vehemently protested the publication of Not a Fellow-Traveler because of its unflattering portrayal of Communists and demonstratively quit the journal after the story was published over his objections. See Nikolai Chuzhak, Vokrug Nepoputchitsy, [Around not a fellow-traveler], Lef 2 (AprilMay 1923), p. 69. Brik responded to Chuzhak in Otvet tov. Chuzhaku [Response to Comrade Chuzhak], Izvestiia, April 15, 1923. 44. Nikolai Bukharin, the chief editor of Pravda and Stalins new favorite, was the author of this resolution. A comprehensive summary of the resolution is provided by Leah Dickerman in The Fact and the Photograph, p. 136. 45. Dickerman provides a detailed account of negotiations led by Mayakovsky in the State Publishing Company on behalf of Lef. See Dickerman, The Fact and the Photograph, p. 137. 46. Brik, Rodchenko, Mayakovsky, and the poet Nikolai Aseev quit in 1928 after the seventh issue allegedly to found a new cultural organization Ref (Revolutionary Front of the Arts); see Stephan, pp. 5556.

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resignation from the journal in protest at the marginalization of his poetry by the prosaic literature of fact, or factography, taken up by Lef in opposition to the heroic canon of proletarian literature. Instead of individual heroes, this literature would feature the collective; instead of plots, it would present the unimpeded flow of life. In terms of language, the single authorial voice had to cede the place of honor to the voices of the millions of workers and peasants. Factographic literature was overwhelmed by detail and became indistinguishable from newspaper reporting.47 In contrast to Tretiakov, Brik wrote on factography as a critic, not a practitioner. In addition to explaining the advantages of factual knowledge as opposed to imagined experience, in To Teach Writers (1927) he also attempted to examine the reasons for factographys failure as a literary genre. Having absolved authors of sabotage, he insisted that they simply did not have the skills with which to approach the new subject matter. In his opinion, the inability of writers to produce successful factographic literature was caused, ultimately, by the lack of a suitable context, conditions in which authors could learn to respond to current tasks. It was not literature but photography that became the leading medium in factography, as Leah Dickerman has correctly argued. In contrast to the problems he encountered producing factographic literature, Tretiakovs photographyan integral part of his factographic practiceflourished.48 The suitability of photography to factography was the result of its indexical nature, and while he had no desire to become a professional photographer, Brik was an avid amateur. Film The shift from text to image, sanctioned at the highest echelons of the party, led Brik in 1926 to begin working as a scriptwriter at the film studio Mezhrabpom-Rus, a predecessor of Mezhrabpomfilm. While Briks articles on photography are well-known, his texts on film have received less attention. This may be because he considered photography to be the foundation of film, and stated so explicitly in Photo in Film (1926).49 More likely, it is due to what he saw as films tendency to evade the fixation of the fact and create spectacle. Whereas the task of a photograph, as he put it, was to document the new life and see and record what the human eye normally does not see, film, in his opinion, was ideally suited to igniting human passions, including those of the basest kind.50 His first article on the
47. See the special issue on Soviet factography in October 118 (Fall 2006) edited by Devin Fore, and Fores The Operative Word in Soviet Factography, p. 95 48. Dickerman, The Fact and the Photograph, p. 139. On Tretiakov, see Maria Gough, Radical Tourism: Sergei Tretiakov at the Communist Lighthouse, October 118 (Fall 2006), pp. 159178. As Gough explained, Tretiakov took more than two thousand pictures with his Leica when living in the kolkhoz, many of which were published in the Soviet press as photo-essays. On the importance of photo-essays during the Five-Year Plan, also see Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph: 19241937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 49. Foto v kino, Sovetskoe kino 4/5 (1926), p. 23. 50. The Photograph versus the Painting, in Photography in the Modern Era, p. 215.

Rodchenko. Cover for Novyi Lef no. 6. 1927.

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medium, A Man Beats Another (1925) was concerned precisely with what he considered to be the inherent perversity of spectatorial pleasure.51 Briks subsequent texts on film developed the theme of ethical responsibility, which he linked to communist morality. A Fact versus an Anecdote (1925) extols the virtues of documentaries, those by Vertov in particular, while disparaging the indulgence of emotions in fiction films.52 Other articles condemn the domination of Soviet screens by foreign films53 and ridicule the stylized and exaggerated emotionalism of traditional acting. 54 Against Cinematic Drama (A Private Opinion) (1925) asserts the priority of communist morality over whatever aesthetic qualities can be found in a work of art by claiming: Cinematic drama corrupts. Open pornography is a thousand times healthier than erotic understatement in cinematic novels.55 However, it abstains somewhat from polemicizing and contains more reflective passages that help explain the authors preference for documentaries. As its title suggests, the article proposes replacing cinematic drama with documentaries and comedies, because tragedy and drama are, according to the author, essentially literary and cannot be represented visually without demoralizing effects, particularly in film. Briks statement about the undesirability of visualizing drama is surprising given that drama is normally thought of as a theatrical genre. Brik, of course, was talking about cinematic drama, whose conditions of representation are different from those in the theater. As Adrian Piotrovsky explained, theater and film differ fundamentally in their representation of space, time, and, most importantly, a specifically will-filled action.56 The will-filled action of a living person in the spectators phenomenological space is the keystone of theater and is lacking in film, which separates the space and time of the actor from those of the spectator and transposes them into the domain of dream, fantasy, and imagination. Evidently, Brik was against this propensity of film to create imaginary, dreamlike experiences that could take spectators away from the practical tasks of the day. The first piece of film criticism in Novyi Lef was by Brik.57 Entitled A
51. Chelovek bet cheloveka, Kino 27 (September 22, 1925), p. 5. 52. Fakt protiv anekdota, Vecherniaia Moskva (October 14, 1925), p. 3; Nastezh li? Kino (November 24, 1925), p. 2; Net i neizvestno, Kino (April 6, 1926), p. 3. 53. Konkurs pod lozungom Sovetskaia filma na sovetskom ekrane, Kino 26 ( June 29, 1926), p. 2. 54. Pissi Puk, Sovetskii ekran 17/18 (1926), p. 4. 55. Protiv kino-dramy (chastnoe mnenie), Kino 32 (October 27, 1925), p. 2. 56. Adrian Piotrovsky, K istorii kino-zhanrov, in Poetika kino, ed. Boris Eikhenbaum (Moscow and Leningrad: Kinopechat, 1927), p. 147. Adrian Ivanovich Piotrovsky (18981938) was a well-known translator, philologist, historian, and director of the State Institute of the History of Art. 57. Brik, "Protivokinoiadie," Novyi Lef 2 (1927), pp. 2730. This article was the first critical piece of writing on film in the journal. Immediately preceding it, was Mayakovskys satirical description of his attempts to overcome the bureaucracy of a Moscow film studio and the publication of one of his scripts, see Mayakovsky, Karaul [Help] and Kak pozhivaete [How do you do], Novyi Lef 2 (1927), pp. 2327. Mayakovskys writing was satirical, not critical in nature. Also, Sergei Tretiakov discussed documentary film positively, if briefly, in his Bem trevogu [The state of alarm], in the same issue, which explained the political strategy of the journal. See Novyi Lef 2 (1927), pp. 15. The first of Mayakovskys articles was commented upon and translated in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film (1960; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 22730. Lef no. 3 had articles by Vertov and Eisenstein.

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Cinematic Antidote (1927), it reiterated an argument from his earlier writings about the indiscriminate exhibition of films that promote bourgeois ideology foreign to the interests of the Soviet people. This time, Brik invoked Lenins authority in arguing his case. Referring to Lenins praise of cinema as one of the most important arts, Brik insisted that the meaning of these words had been distorted by Nepmen mentality: Lenins entire cultural program indicates that his first concern was bringing forth in the masses the correct, real attitude to actuality. Speaking about cinema, he meant that this technical apparatus can transmit the most necessary facts of the present day in a very short time and to a maximum number of people. Instead, lamented Brik, the Soviet movie-going public preferred the passive emotionalism of decadent bourgeois films to educationally valuable material based on the factual representation of reality. The article opposed the fiction-based play or narrative (igrovoi) film to the documentary unplayed (neigrovoi ) one, and this dichotomy was taken up in a number of critical reviews of recent films by Shklovsky, Tretiakov, and Viktor Pertsov as well as in a discussion published in the last issue of Novyi Lef in 1927.58 Shklovsky did not distinguish between narrative and documentary films, insisting that the line separating the two was blurry and that elements from the latter were frequently used in the former for either informational purposes or to convey authenticity, while some parts of documentaries were clearly staged.59 Tretiakov wanted to maintain the distinction. He defended the merits of both unplayed documentaries by Esfir Shub and ideologically correct, albeit play, films by Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. He objected to the exclusive focus on documentary films and insisted on the validity of an agitational Eisenstein along with an informational Vertov. 60 Brik, meanwhile, changed his mind about filming truth. The year 1927 saw Stalins resounding defeat of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and during that years discussion of film in Novyi Lef, Brik explicitly stated that filming the truth [snimat pravdu] was not the aim of Lef as he envisioned it, if this truth was out of line with
58. Lef i kino: stenogramma soveshchaniia [Lef and film: report from a meeting], Novyi Lef 1112 (1927), pp. 5070. This material was translated into English by Diana Matias in Ben Brewsters Documents from Novyi Lef in Screen Reader 1: Cinema, Ideology, Politics, pp. 30511. 59. Shklovsky praised Eisenstein for his proclivity for the play film, Esfir Shub for the authenticity (podlinnost ) of her films, and Pudovkin for the quality of his montage. See his Sergei Eisenstein i neigrovaia filma [Sergei Eisenstein and unplayed film], Novyi Lef, 4 (1927), pp. 3435, translated in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 18961939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, Harvard Film Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 16162; Po povodu kartiny Esfir Shub (Velikii Put) [About a picture by Esfir Shub (Velikii Put)], Novyi Lef 89 (1927), pp. 5254; Oshibki i izobreteniia [Mistakes and inventions], Novyi Lef 1112 (1927), pp. 2933. 60. Unlike Brik, Sergei Tretiakov stressed the importance of evoking emotion in a viewer, albeit not through titillating subjects, but through the expert filming of historical material. In order to classify films based on fiction versus documentaries, Tretiakov proposed a complicated system of the gradation of falsification of the material, according to which Vertov (strangely) would represent the tendency for its least distortion; Eisenstein would be in the middle, because of his use of actors for historical figures and his staging of historical events. The extreme would be a conventional fictional film, which used professional actors and was adapted from a literary work. Tretiakov, Kino k iubileiu, Novyi Lef 10 (1927), pp. 2731. Translated in Screen Reader 1, pp. 30508.

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Esfir Shub. Film stills from The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Illustration for Novyi Lef no. 4. 1927.

accepted ideology. Now he considered that the important question was not how to film, as he had argued a year earlier in Photo in Film, but what to film, and what aim to pursue when filming. At the same time, he concurred with Tretiakov about the importance of changing public tasteof educating people to like documentaries and to experience the excitement of real facts and not inventionsand he insisted this was one of Lef s tasks. Brik juxtaposed the films of Iakov Protazanov to those by Shub,61 praising the latters The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) as a high-quality film created entirely out of documentary footage made legible by montage.62

61. Iakov Aleksandrovich Protazanov (18811945) was a film director in pre-revolutionary Russia who fled the country during the Civil War and returned during NEP to continue making sentimental cinematic dramas as well as such films as Aelita and The 47. 62. Lef i kino: stenogramma soveshchaniia [Lef and film: report from a meeting], Novyi Lef 1112 (1927), pp. 6366; see also Victory of Fact, Kino 14 (April 5, 1927).

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Brik, of course, was one of the first critics in Russia to support montage in photography. However, his reluctance to acknowledge a nonideological role for the interval within cinematic montage led him in 1927 to a confrontation with Vertov over the latters The Eleventh Year (1928).63 Brik faulted the film not for Mikhail Kaufmans camera-work, which was brilliantly done, but rather for what he considered to be the centrifugal effects of the montage. In his first published manifesto, Vertov identified filmic intervals as elements of the art of movement, which govern transitions from one movement to another and draw the movement to a synthetic resolution.64 As Annette Michelson demonstrated in her comparative study of the Theory of the Intervals sources for Soviet film, Eisensteins model was music, whereas Vertovs was mathematicsalthough both, like so many artists of the time, proclaimed their debt to Einsteins theory of relativity.65 Brik, however, disapproved of the way Vertovs use of montage and intervals granted semantic independence to individual pieces of footage, thereby exempting them from the ideological message of the script. If in 1926 Brik had praised Vertov unreservedly for his experiments with the medium of film,66 by 1928, the first year of Stalins unimpeded reign and his all-embracing industrial offensive known as the First Five-Year Plan, Brik was faulting Vertovs films for their lack of ideological consistency.67 Five years after launching Lef, Briks tendency to overvalue context at the expense of text found its ultimate expression in Against Creative Personality (1928), where, speaking of literature, Brik used the example of photography to argue for the necessity of submitting to the ideology of the collective rather than dwelling on the development of an artists or a writers creative individuality.68 This article summarized Briks attitude toward individual creativity and it completely reversed his pre-revolutionary perspective as outlined in the Democratization of Art. Although he had begun as an ardent supporter of the avant-gardes self-determination, he now renounced his commitment to the freedom of art and ultimately advocated its service on behalf of a totalitarian state.
63. Briks article criticizing The Eleventh Year and Vertovs response are documented in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), pp. 31017. 64. We: Variant of a Manifesto, in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OBrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 8. 65. Annette Michelson, The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval, in Montage and Modern Life: 19191942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 6181; p. 80. 66. See There is Nothing and No One Knows about It, Kino 14 (1926), p. 3. 67. It is interesting to note that Aleksei Gan (1885, 1889, or 18931940), Vertovs former friend and an editor of Kino-Fot (where Vertov published his first manifestoes), defended Constructivism in film even in 1928. Without mentioning Vertov, Gan extolled cinema as an optical and mechanical apparatus, able to show movement and thereby capture immediately and dynamically the processes of all kinds of work and activity in society. See Gan, Constructivism in the Cinema (1928), in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), pp. 129 32. I am grateful to Kristin Romberg for consulting me about the bibliography on Gan. 68. Protiv tvorcheskoi lichnosti, Novyi Lef 2 (1928), pp. 1214, reprinted in Literature of Fact [Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov Lefa], ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), pp. 7576.