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Abstract
This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917–1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bakhtin’s Circle (and associated animations with other intellectuals of tis era), and Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS—all in fierce dialogue with one another—made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin’s subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy.
Notes
1. Medvedev wrote no less than 58 now published papers or reviews between the period 1919–1923 (Nikolev, Citation2001).
2. According to Brandist et al. (Citation2004) Voloshinov also moved to Vitebsk in 1922.
3. The development of UNOVIS in January 1920 was a movement later described by Malevich as ‘the new party in art’ (Shakskikh, Citation2007, p. 78). While exhibitions across the streets of Vitebsk played a significant role in advancing this movement, there were also a series of public lectures that took place over this period.
4. For example, Malevich suggested that Chagall’s paintings were not only out of touch with the real world but they did not support the revolutionary spirit. He argued against figurative traditions, suggesting that painting should work to overthrow nature (Shakskikh, Citation2007).
5. As Brandist (Citation2015) emphasizes, Bakhtin’s engagement with sociological poetics and formalism cannot be attributed to the Bakhtin Circle alone. During this same period important discussions were taking place in the nearby Veselovskii Institute (with whom both Voloshinov and Medvedev were associated). As such Brandist argues for a consideration of the complex developments that arose as a consequence of fruitful dialogues ‘within institutional frameworks rather than abstract individuals’. A fuller discussion of the resulting interanimations is beyond the scope of this paper – suffice to say that it is no coincidence that these same discussions were taking place elsewhere with those that were associated with the Bakhtin Circle.
6. According to Shakskikh (Citation2007) the concept of ‘pale’ held two meanings—the first as being ‘beyond the pale’, in a metaphoric sense, denoting a social boundaries for existence; while the second referred to geographical boundaries in and around Lithuania where Jews could live (as opposed to other locations in the cities of St Petersburg and Moscow where Jews were forbidden).
7. Indeed based on the writing of Jean-Paul Bronekart and Christian Bota in their book Bakhtine Demasque: Histoire d’un menteur, asserts that the Circle never existed at all.
8. For example, according to Literature Online: The home of literature and criticism, Chagall and Kagan both taught in an orphanage for Jewish children in 1922. Kagan resumed meetings with Bakhtin in 1936–1937 and Bakhtin had Kagan’s work published posthumously.
9. See also the influence of neo-Kantism, gestalt, phenomenology, Marxism and Russian Orthodox religion during this period (Nikolev, Citation2001).
10. The idea that art is life.
11. Roman Jakobson and members of the linguistic circle are also implicated here, explaining the relationship to Levi-Strauss and French structuralism. However, we do point out that this relationship is complex and, though beyond the scope of this paper, largely under-theorised in Western thought (an exception is noted in the work of Zbinden, Citation2006).
12. In later writings the act came to be described as the ‘event’.
13. According to Hirschkop (Citation1999) Bakhtin’s friend Pompianaskii began this discussion during this era, introducing the notion of ‘answerability’ (which was to form a central and sustaining emphasis in Bakhtin’s work) during a walk around the lake.
14. Tihanov (Citation2014) explains that socialist realism brought about the demise of the Avant-Garde movement in Russia during 1930–40’s at it did Romanticism. This radical demise made it possible, argues Tihanov, to critique modernism which would not have been otherwise possible without these radical differences rubbing against one another.
15. Renfrew (Citation2006) explains that Russian formalism later developed into a kind of method that cannot be considered outside of Marxist literary aesthetics—orienting towards demand versus determinism. In this location form becomes treated as if it were content (since the material is merely a motivator for the narrative) as opposed to the pre-Vitebsk view of poetics as untouchable which formed the basis for the collectives critique.
16. Hirschkop (Citation1999) explains that Bakhtin’s project at this time was to publish a critique of formalism that had been commissioned by The Russian Contemporary Journal in 1924 but the journal was shut down by the party prior to publication.
17. See for example his famous painting ‘The Black Square’ where Malevich de-aestheticizes colour and transforms it into a pure theoretical concept. That:
- rejects constraints of textual, structural features (e.g. syntax, semantics)
- sees artistic space as the concrete space that surrounds the painting
- canvases are left unframed, unenclosed—symbolising the uncontainability of nonobjectivity, the foreclosure of meaning
- paintings are not abstract but non-objectivedeblack square is tabula rasa.
Note: The Bakhtin Circle utilised related techniques in their studies of language. Here, form was utilised in relation to language—i.e. linguistic devices such as accents and intonations —and its form-shaping potential to orient meaning (Haynes, 1995).
18. It is interesting to compare Malovich’s notion of zaum with Bakhtin’s notion of metalingvistika which promotes the idea that multiple viewpoints can create different meanings (Gomez-Moriana, Citation1989).
19. Marxist literary aesthetics oriented towards ‘demand’ (utility) rather than ‘beauty’.
20. Hirschkop (Citation1990) explains that art was the chosen medium because of Russia’s 80–90% illiteracy rate during this post-revolution period.
21. It should be pointed out that the Avant-Garde movement also sought to create new literary techniques using a variety of literary genres (Burger, Citation1984). Shatksikh (Citation2007) also explains that dancers, musicians and dramatists were all part of this Vitbesk collective (indeed, Chagall designed sets for the theatre during this time).
22. Here I refer specifically to Bakhtin’s interest in Dostoevsky (Bakhtin, Citation1986). However there are several other sources employed in Bakhtin’s lifelong scholarship to challenge the monologic potential of genres (see for example his discussion of musical time in his fifth lecture—see Nikolev, Citation2001; and his analysis of Goethe’s Bildungsroman (Bakhtin, Citation1981) to name but two).
23. A full exposition of the path from Russia to French modernism is beyond the scope of this paper. It is sufficient to say that Chagall and Malevich subsequently lived and studied in France. According to Schippers (Citation2011) Julia Kristeva, with Jacque Derrida and Michel Foucault were members of the subsequent French ‘Circle’ called the Tel Quel group around 1965—a group which engaged with avant garde literature, among other things.
24. As Guilbaut (Citation1983) explains, American Avant-Garde took root in an historical period marked by a post-war dismantling of certainty and a disbanding of European (particular French) cultural supremacy.
25. Zbinden (Citation2006) suggests that this fallacy was perpetrated by Kristeva who, on the basis of her exposure to Bakhtin’s later texts (the earlier works were not available at the time) claimed Bakhtin for French structuralism in 1967. Based on a misappropriation of the concepts in terms of intertextuality (forgetting the social dimension of meaning) and a corresponding emphasis on linguistic approaches, Kristeva positioned Bakhtin’s work within a structuralist categorization which was later rectified by Todorov. Both Kristeva and Todorov take Bakhtin into the realms of contemporary poststructuralist theory and use his work as a way of responding to the abstractness, formalist, and binary formulations of structuralist thinking.
26. Katnelson explains that, during this period, Malevich literally painted himself into his more conventional art to parody the arrogance of a Stalinist approach to culture (a technique also employed by Bulgakov in his famous novel ‘The Master and Margarita’).
27. This is hardly suprising since Bakhtin himself was explicit in this throughout his later texts (in particular Rabelais and Dosteovsky) which were published before his earlier ones.