Anatoly Lunacharsky

Анатолий Луначарский, Религия и социализм, том II (1911)

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ГЛАВА I.

Иудейская почва. Иисус.

Подготовленные явления Христа–Мессии.

В главах, посвященных иудейской религиозности, мы указывали уже на то, как созрела идея мессианизма с одной стороны, религия справедливости с другой. Для Вторачивай и Мессия — не кто иной, как символическое лицо, идеально представляющее собою страдальческую и праведную часть страдальческого народа. Это — бедняки и святые Израиля, заслуги которых спасут не только народ Божий, но и все народы земли. Заслуги эти сводятся к добродетелям истинного демократа тех времен: чувству справедливости и любви к ближнему, смирению, преданности судьбе, в которой все признается божественным, отвращению к власти, к роскоши и соединенным с ними порокам и преступлениям. Дух пророческий не умирал в Израиле, хотя ему приходилось трудно в борьбе с официальной церковностью и сухими книжниками, сумевшими извратить чисто демократическое «писание» и сделать из него базис для личной и надменной теократии. Религия иудеев имела, таким образом, два лица, которые выразились в двух школах или манерах толкования писания. Агада — была свободным толкованием, творческой манерой проповедовать, Галаха мертвым историческим комментированием. Агада жила интенсивной жизнью в северных провинциях, в Галилее, ко времени начала нашей эры, Галаха господствовала в Иерусалиме, вокруг храма. Не только народные проповедники, но и многие фарисеи (Гиллель и его школа, напр.) были агадистами.

Связь христианской морали и христианского мессианизма с Агадой и пророками не оспаривается никем. Даже Гарнак, — некритический поклонник довольно фантастического «первобытного христианства», самый правый бога слов из тех, с которыми можно еще считаться, как с людьми науки, — признает еврейско-пророческую сущность христианства Иисуса в самой широкой степени:

«Вместе с Вельгаузеном», говорит он, «я должен признать, что все то, о чем благовествовал Иисус, что до него высказывал в своей проповеди Иоанн, все это можно найти у пророков и в иудейских преданиях их времени».

Но мировоззрение Иисуса и его непосредственных учеников не есть еще христианство; это не только не наше православно-католическое, но даже не реформатское, не «евангелическое» христианство, это даже не то «первоначальное христианство», сомнительную традицию которого почтенный пр. Гарнак старается поддерживать всею своею тяжеловесной ученостью.

Христианство возникло из множества отдельных культурных потоков, слившихся, в конце концов, в две реки: иудейское учение, связанное с именем Иисуса, как центрального выразителя, и греко-азиатское, связанное с именем Павла и других. Позднее на нем сказалось еще могучее влияние Запада, Рима и Африки, с Тертулианом и Августином.

Впрочем, уже с самого начала христианство есть сочетание иудейских и греко-азиатских элементов. Христианство Иисуса, вероятно, уже включило до некоторой степени этот второй элемент. Continue reading →

Анатолий Луначарский, Религия и социализм, том I (1908)

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Предисловие.

I.

Настоящая работа в самых существенных своих чертах задумана около 10 лет тому назад, в годы ранней молодости. Основные идеи: о сущности религии вообще, о смысле и направлении развития религиозности, о связи научного социализма с заветными чаяниями человечества выраженными в религиозных мифах и догмах и сменивших их метафизических системах, о центральном месте «труда» в новом миросозерцании — все эти идеи уже рано зародились в уме автора и, не изменяясь в существе своем, лишь прояснялись и упрочивались по мере более глубокого ознакомления с историей религии и философии и с научным социализмом.

В 1898 году автор прочел в Киеве реферат «Идеализм и марксизм», — в котором был дан первый очерк его идей. Между другими оппонентами находился и г. Бердяев, тогда еще совсем юноша, и по воззрениям своим не ушедший еще так далеко от социал-демократии, как теперь. Реферат показал даже, что мы, без нашего ведома, но конечно не случайно, работали в сущности над той же проблемой. Но как различны были результаты! Если первый реферат пишущего эти строки на философскую тему встретил очень дружественную критику со стороны Н. Бердяева, то одна из первых его серьезных статей, через три года после того, волей неволей должна была стать беспощадной критикой воззрений Бердяева, «о булгаченного» к тому времени совершенно.

Работа автора шла своим чередом, нельзя сказать, однако, чтобы достаточно систематично, так как тюрьмы, ссылки, практическая работа и ряд частных обстоятельств являлись сильными препятствиями для такой систематичности. Первоначальный план работы был задуман очень широко. Это должна была быть целая история религии с материалистической точки зрения, со включением в нее европейской метафизики, утопического социализма и, наконец, научного социализма. Материал накоплялся, но открывались все новые горизонты, а свободного времени становилось все меньше. Наконец, воспользовавшись месяцами не совсем добровольной свободы от «текущей жизни», автор решил радикально пересмотреть план и, не гоняясь за полнотой, дать идейный абрис с своей теории, останавливаясь лишь на важнейших опорных пунктах. Теперь дело идет уже не об истории религии, а только о более или менее глубоком исследовании взаимоотношений религии и социализма, об определении места социализма среди других религиозных систем.

Не только соображения о колоссальных трудностях выполнения работы по первоначальному плану, не только со знание того, что обстоятельства не позволят отдать 2-3 года сплошного, методического труда, необходимого для его выполнения, руководило автором: для него было ясно, что научный труд в 2-3 тома с большим количеством фактического багажа — будет мало доступен для широкой публики и скорее заслонит, чем усилит то новое, жизненно важное, что автору хотелось бы высказать. Но распределяя свой материал таким образом, чтобы изложить его в небольшой книге на 20 печатных листах, автор часто с болью сердечной отбрасывал то или другое интересное построение, исследование, догадку, обобщение. Поэтому он решил издать отдельно для тех читателей, которые заинтересуются его идеями, наиболее важные фрагменты задуманной прежде большой работы. Continue reading →

Anatolii Lunacharskii: Socialism, religion, and enlightenment

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Roland Boer has a new article out on Anatolii Lunacharskii’s controversial two-volume treatise, Religion and Socialism (1908, 1911). Lunacharskii was the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, in charge of education initiatives throughout the fledgling socialist republic. His campaigns to fight illiteracy, making secular education available in the most distant reaches of the union, were highly effective. Moreover, Lunacharskii’s tolerant temperament toward independent cultural and artistic groups — i.e., not forcibly unionized or centrally run by the state — during his tenure throughout the 1920s stands in stark contrast to the Stalinist policies established in the mid-1930s, which put an end to such associations and civil society groupings. Also, he was fairly receptive to new literary and aesthetic styles and movements, especially compared to the prescriptions handed down by Zhdanov et al. at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s first book is a study of the Commissariat of Enlightenment under Lunacharskii, and it provides an excellent institutional survey, as well as a portrait of the “Russian Faust” (a title given him by Mikhail Lifshitz).

Boer’s article with justice claims to be “first full engagement in English with Anatolii Lunacharskii’s near lost work, Religion and Socialism.” The reason the book is so obscure today is that it gave theoretical expression to the concept of god-building, an unusual tendency within prewar Bolshevism reviled by Lenin. Like many of the heresies that rocked the early Church in Roman Christianity, its contents are primarily known through texts written condemning it. Still, this point is easily exaggerated. It is not quite as rare as Boer makes it out to be. For example, in the gloss provided by his article:

Conditions: Lost and Found

Religion and Socialism is a work that has been lost and found. Its loss was hardly due to any lack of quality. The reason is, rather, its particular history. Lenin launched a spirited attack when it was published, persuading the editorial board of Proletarii to condemn it. Or rather, he lumped God-building in with the Left-Bolshevik interest in empiriocriticism and otzovism, as much for political as for theoretical reasons. Seeing the increasing appeal of these not necessarily connected positions among some younger and very articulate Bolsheviks, Lenin realized the need to quell the leftward push, thereby bringing philosophical questions to the fore. In hindsight, of course, he was probably correct, for a revolutionary push at the time would have generated an even fiercer reaction. But a side effect was the complete sidelining of Religion and Socialism. And given Lenin’s crucial role in the 1917 revolution and the subsequent establishment of communism in Russia, the few copies of the book were left to the dust and bookworms of forgotten archival corners.

The finding of such a work has thereby entailed a little sleuthing, for it has proved exceedingly difficult to find. The editors of the eight-volume Collected Works chose not to include Religion and Socialism in that collection. By contrast, the introduction to a separate volume, called Religion and Enlightenment, offers a statement concerning the waywardness of Religion and Socialism and cites Lunacharskii’s own somewhat halfhearted distancing from the work in his later statements. Religion and Enlightenment includes a wide range of material, including Vvedenie v istoriiu religii [Introduction to the History of Religion], lectures from 1918 which were reworked and published in 1923, and material that goes back to the early 1900s. Given this unfavorable early press and the subsequent Bolshevik victory, Religion and Socialism remained a work out of favor. A Yiddish translation of Religion and Socialism exists, but as far as the original work in Russian is concerned, only a few extant copies remain. The one in the National Library of St. Petersburg turned out to be too fragile to scan. Only after further inquiry (by my colleague, Sergey Kozin) was a copy found in the Lenin Library in Moscow. A high fee for scanning the two volumes resulted in a much-treasured copy being made, which is in our possession and is, to my knowledge, the only PDF version of it in the world. Since then, the text has been screened, converted into modern Cyrillic script (it was published before the 1917 language reform), and proofread. In addition to its republication in Russian, a translation is also planned.

An edifying tale, and evidence of his commitment. I do wish that Professor Boer had maybe approached me before sending his colleague on a wild goose chase to Saint Petersburg or shelling out a bunch of cash to the Lenin Library, however, because he might have saved himself some money. (The Lenin Library probably could use the funds, so it’s not too bad if viewed as a donation). Religion and Socialism has been available online for years now, free of charge, scanned by the University of Minnesota and Indiana University both. One page is missing from the second volume, but otherwise it’s all there. You can download them for free here, OCRed and everything:

Needless to say, I am less impressed by Lunacharskii’s god-building arguments than Boer. Lunacharskii has long been one of Boer’s favorites, alongside Ernst Bloch. His article does provide a very useful overview, though, even if the title is misleading. Misleading because it suggests that he deals with god-builders in the plural, whereas he really just deals with Lunacharskii in the singular (Maksim Gorkii and Vladimir Bazarov [Rudnev] are barely mentioned, if at all). Read it here.

  1. А.В. Луначарский, Религия и социализм, том I (1908)
  2. А.В. Луначарский, Религия и социализм, том II (1911)

Great to hear that a reissue in modern Russian is projected, as well as a translation into English. Boer brought up the 1921 Yiddish translation, published in New York, but forgot to mention the Italian translation prepared in 1973. In my next post, I’ll upload the full OCRed text of the document sans pre-reform orthography so that Russian readers can check it out. Though I should mention that the obsolete characters were removed in the copy/paste by a very crude find-and-replace method on Microsoft Office and not by painstakingly going through all 630 pages of the original in order to spell check.

For those who don’t know, Russian spelling was extensively reformed in 1917-1918 (by none other than Lunacharskii). The most important changes were

  1. the dropping of the hard sign “ъ” at the end of words, where it previously appeared in any word that otherwise would have ended in a consonant;
  2. the global replacement of “і” (the “dotted i” or “decimal i”) with “и” (i);
  3. the global replacement of “ѣ” (iat) with е (ie);
  4. a change in the genitive singular ending of adjectives, -аго becoming -ого, and -яго becoming -его.

Enjoy.

ЛУНАЧАРСКИЙ (сидит на скамеечке) С РОДИТЕЛЯМИ ЛУНАЧАРСКИЙ в рамке ЛУНАЧАРСКИЙ Фотография. Таганская тюрьма1 ЛУНАЧАРСКИЙ Фотография. Таганская тюрьма 2 Continue reading →

The Stenberg brothers and the art of Soviet movie posters

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MacDougal 8th Sept. 060

Alma Law: Let’s begin, if you’re agreeable, simply with some biographical information.

Vladimir Stenberg: My father was born in Sweden in the town of Norrkoping and he finished the Academy in Stockholm with a gold medal. Then he was invited to come here to Moscow to do some kind of work. At that time [1896] there was an exhibition in Yuzovka — now it’s called Donetsk — so there in Yuzovka my father worked on an exhibition. Later at the Nizhninovgorod fair he did some kind of work. In Moscow he met my mother. They married and had three children.1

My father lived and worked in Moscow and I wanted to enter a technical school. I was very fond of technology, mechanics, and so forth.2 But conditions were such that I had to enter Stroganov, the art school. My father worked as a painter, and from the time I was six years of age, we had pencils, brushes, and the like in our hands. We began to draw very early. Well, like children, they see their father drawing, and so we drew too. And here’s what’s interesting about our father. When we were going to school, we would bring home our drawings at the end of the year. My brother, Georgii, and I would play a trick and switch some of the drawings. But my father always knew. We would sit together and draw figures. Everything. And it seemed to us that we had everything the same. But nevertheless our father would still distinguish the hand of one son’s work from the other’s.

When we had to do perspective, to study all that, we told the teacher that our father was an artist and he had taught us a little. The teacher gave us a test assignment and we did it. He said, “That isn’t the way it’s done. The plan should be at the bottom, and at the top, the representation of that perspective.” But our father had another method: the plan on top and underneath the representation. Because when you’re working, it’s more convenient to have at the bottom what is most important. Therefore we had it the other way around. When the teacher asked, “Why do you do it that way?” we answered, “Our father taught us that way.” “Well, of course,” he said, “with foreigners, they have things the other way around.” Continue reading →

VKhUTEMAS exhibition in Berlin: Rediscovery of a Russian revolutionary art school

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Sibylle Fuchs
Verena Nees
April 5, 2015
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“Vkhutemas: A Russian Laboratory of Modernity — Architectural Designs 1920-1930,” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, December 5, 2014 to April 6, 2015.

A remarkable exhibition, featuring the art and architecture of the early Soviet Union’s VKhUTEMAS [acronym in Russian for Higher Art and Technical Studios] school, is currently at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, until April 6. For the first time, some 250 works — drawings, sketches, paintings, photographs and models, mainly in the field of architecture — created by the students and teachers of the Moscow workshops, which existed from 1920 to 1930, are on display.

Exhibition of student’s work on “Evidence and expression of mass and weight” School year 1927-1928 © The Schusev State Museum of Architecture Moscowia802601.us.archive.org-grerussi00schi_0302 copy 2

The exhibition was organized by the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, based on extensive research into numerous archives, as well as interviews with graduates of the school and the families of former teachers. Researchers were thus able to bring to light long-lost designs, construction plans and models. The exhibition provides a fascinating insight into a neglected school of art that revolutionized modern architecture.

The displayed works of the Vkhutemas students range from designs for residential buildings, theaters, kiosks, swimming pools, sports stadiums, workingmen’s clubs and entire cities to student research projects on theoretical questions such as “mass and weight,” “color and spatial composition,” and “geometric properties of a form.” The sketches of complex urban roofscapes, imaginatively conceived recreation centers in natural settings, seemingly weightless buildings with vibrantly curved features, aesthetic structuring and façades for industrial buildings—all testify to such a wealth of radicalism, experimentation and diversity of ideas that many Bauhaus [German art school, 1919-1933] creations fade in comparison.

All the designs, even the bold and less realistic ones like the floating skyscrapers attached to balloons, also evoke a sense of the seriousness with which architectural commissions assigned by the workers’ state were undertaken after the October Revolution.

M. Korshew- Abstrakte Aufgabe zur Ermittlung von Masse und Gewicht

On December 19, 1920, Lenin announced the Soviet government’s resolve to establish the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops — VKhUTEMAS. The aim was to use the visual arts in the training of technically, politically and scientifically educated architects and designers in all disciplines. In the ten years of its existence, VKhUTEMAS became a laboratory of modern architecture and art, in which diverse artistic ideas and methods, such as classicism, constructivism, psychoanalytic approaches and even futurism came together.

Time and again, the media refers to VKhUTEMAS as the Russian Bauhaus. Many scholars in the West have insisted on seeing the Bauhaus movement in Weimar and Dessau as a model for the Russian architectural avant-garde. However, the exhibition throws this conception into question. Although VKhUTEMAS had close ties to Bauhaus and the latter held some concepts and ideas in common with the Soviet workshops, the relationship is rather the reverse. In her contribution to the catalog, Barbara Kreis writes that the works of the students and teachers are “unmatched, and later often served architects as templates and sources of inspiration.”

The sheer scope of the training and the vast number of students and teachers make it clear that the Moscow workshops mark a unique stage in the development of modern architecture. Some 2,000 students enrolled in the first year alone, while Bauhaus trained only about 150 in the same time frame.

Many famed Russian artists and avant-garde architects were at least temporarily VKhUTEMAS teachers. These included Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, Vladimir Krinsky, Alexander Vesnin and his brothers Viktor and Leonid, Lyubov Popova, Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Nikolai Ladovsky, Konstantin Melnikov, Moisei Ginzburg, Alexei Shchusev, Wassily Kandinsky, Aleksandra Ekster, and Gustav Klutsis.

BookScanStation-2013-07-11-06-19-45-PM0001alq VKhUTEMAS faculty and professors

The VKhUTEMAS school’s reputation also spread internationally and reached New York, where the works of its students were exhibited. Alfred H. Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, traveled specifically to visit the VKhUTEMAS in Moscow in 1928. The Soviet pavilion designed by Melnikov and Rodchenko’s Workers Club were accorded great recognition at the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris.

The designs and sketches now shown in Berlin form eloquent testimony to the tremendous spirit of optimism that the October Revolution unleashed in architecture and other art forms. A documentary film, made by the German WDR broadcaster in 1984 and shown at the exhibition, features the comments of contemporaries, enthusiastically recalling their years of study in the VKhUTEMAS. Describing the atmosphere, one said he “always climbed stairs two steps at a time and, going down, in leaps and bounds.”

Curator Irina Tschepkunowa also writes in the introduction to the catalog that one can scarcely any longer imagine in today’s “pragmatically oriented” Russia the enthusiasm that broke out after the revolution. “Hunger and destruction during war communism, the ongoing civil war in the country’s border areas and the impoverished everyday life provoked in young people — as strange as this may seem today — not dejection, but an unprecedented creative enthusiasm and willingness to work.”

Establishing the VKhUTEMAS

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Training in the VKhUTEMAS was focused on the mobilization of all talents for the building of a socialist society. Immediately after the revolution, the academies and art schools, reserved for the privileged social elites, were abolished and artistic training procedures reformed with the introduction of free state art workshops. All who wanted to study art could enroll at such schools. This also initially applied to the VKhUTEMAS, where participation in preparatory courses of the RabFak workers’ university was obligatory in 1921 for workers and young people without qualifications. In 1925, an examination assessing artistic talent was also introduced as an entry requirement.

A. Wesnin- Entwurf zur Gestaltung der Außenfassade der WChUTEMAS zum 10. Jahrestag der OktoberrevolutionLissitzky_Proun-Street_celebration_design_2786-08

The VKhUTEMAS were divided into eight faculties that included three art workshops: painting (panel, monumental and decorative painting), sculpture and architecture, as well as five production workshops: graphics, textiles, ceramics, metal and wood working. Lidia Komarova, an architect and a 1929 graduate of the VKhUTEMAS described the overall orientation of the workshops as follows: “The goal was to unite art with production, science with technology, and the new content of socialist life with the needs of the people.”(1) Continue reading →