Abstract
The notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a modern political phenomenon – the merging of art and life and the artistic transformation of life in its totality – has been limited to public political spectacle and the theatrical enactments of state programs. In contrast, this article about the Soviet 1920s and 1930s looks at everyday life or, in Russian, byt, as the primary domain of modern aesthetico-political intervention. The successful ordering of everyday life according to the principles of communism would mean that even the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives become part of a total work of art, which now encompasses not only the public but also the private sphere. The author traces the evolution of byt reform from the aesthetic associations between bureaucrats and artists of the 1920s to the 1930s mobilization of ordinary citizens as artists who mould their everyday environments in accordance with Stalinist politics.
On a cold winter day in the suburbs of St Petersburg, a crowd of about 500 bathers would gather in a gigantic round pool with a circumference of 54 meters. The pool would be located under a gigantic glass dome, in the centre of a round building resembling a spaceship which just landed on the Soviet metropolis. Immersed in warm water, the bathers would share a feeling of togetherness; looking upward at snowflakes falling on the gigantic transparent surface that envelops them, they would be overcome with wonder at its existence and the powers that brought it into being. On summer days, the dome would open and at night the bathers would gaze at the starry skies above them, contemplating the magnificence of existence. At least this was the plan when architect Alexander Nikol’sky set off to update the traditional institution of the Russian bath, or banya, for the age of technological and aesthetic progress. Each of the 4000 bathers that would pass through the building in a single day would experience something akin to baptism, a para-religious experience of communist modernity.
The plan was not put into action; the round building that was finally constructed in 1931 was much smaller and had at its centre merely a hot tub open to the sky, measuring around 6 meters in diameter. However, the idea behind the project, that of turning everyday routines, in this case, those of self-care, into a sublime experience of collectivity and progress, reflected a larger project – that of fusing art and life, the wonderful and the commonplace. In this paper, I will focus on the Soviet project of turning everyday life into a total work of art, as well as the two roles that the Soviet citizen was to take on – that of the immersed participant in the making of socialism and that of the connoisseur and admirer of the wonders of the Soviet Gesamtkunstwerk. My argument is that it is not high art and the rituals of state politics but the domain of the quotidian that was the key stage in the battle for a new society and the communist attempt to merge politics and aesthetics. The continuity of this project transcended the traditional historical divisions between ‘Leninism’ and ‘Stalinism’ and defined, in a fundamental way, how the Soviet subject was understood and constructed.
In his seminal work on the total work of art in modernity, David Roberts (2011) focuses on the role that the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk had for modern politics as well as the experience of modernity. Covering the period from the French Revolution to the emergence of Stalinism and the Third Reich, Roberts traces the origins of the total work of art in French Revolutionary festivals and the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and Wagner. He proposes that the modern theatre as a Gesamtkunstwerk is essentially an effort to sacralise art in order to endow it with a public role in a secular society. Roberts focuses on theatre as a synthesis of arts and looks at it as a form of ritual, which reaches its apotheosis in the political spectacles of the ‘totalitarian’ systems of the 1930s, in which the distinction between art and life, politics and performance, was erased.
Building upon Roberts’ work, I would like to focus on the quotidian as the Gesamtkunstwerk that complemented the public political spectacle in the Soviet Union. The counterpart to theatre, to the spectacular display of doctrine and power, was the fusion of art and life in the reform of everyday life. Transforming it was an aesthetic-political project which was meant to shape the most minute details of existence in accordance to the communist creed. This unique project was possibly ‘totalitarian’ to a higher degree than public theatrical displays of power because it was an effort to transform the totality of existence and penetrate the citizens’ intimate sphere. The reform of Soviet cultural and social habits developed in the shadow of the theatrical events of the 1920s and the 1930s that Roberts discusses, such as re-enactments of the Revolution in the streets of St Petersburg and the show trials, but was not less important.
The entire project of cultural reform starts in the aftermath of the Soviet civil war. In 1923, Leon Trotsky, its pioneer, published an article (later turned into a pamphlet) titled ‘Questions of Everyday Life’. The word for the ‘everyday’ in the original title in Russian, Voprosy byta, byt, cannot be directly translated as ‘everyday life’, as it has a broader meaning, denoting the entirety of the worldly and the banal, as the opposite of bytie – ideals, lofty ideas, and transcendental existence. Trotsky, as a communist and materialist, argued that this traditional dichotomy was to be destroyed by turning the banal, earthly existence into a domain of socialist construction and manifestation of revolutionary ideas. ‘When we look at questions of everyday life’, writes Trotsky, we see most clearly, to what extent man is a product of the environment, and not its creator […] Conscious creation in the realm of everyday life occupied a negligible place in human history. Everyday life is composed of random human experience, changes also randomly pushed to one side by technology or to another by revolutionary struggle, finally reflecting to a much greater extent the past of humanity than its present. (Trotsky, 1923: 34)
In order to manifest great ideas in their ordinary behaviour, the Soviet citizens had to salvage everyday life from randomness, to order it according to a set of aesthetic principles that would embody communist values. In Trotsky’s interpretation that, among other things, meant putting on a clean shirt, abstaining from drunken brawls and ceasing to spit in the corridors. It meant focusing on the aesthetic of ‘trifles’ as the battlefield for the revolution. He conceptualised Soviet society as a total work of art, every detail of which, from white shirts and shaved faces to clean corridors, was to reflect a commitment to instilling life with order and thus becoming the communist New Man – the product and producer of communism.
Trotsky’s belief in the necessity of addressing everyday life as the domain of political and aesthetic transformation was reflected in Soviet art theory of the 1920s. Boris Arvatov, prominent art and theatre critic, articulated these new aesthetic aspirations in colourful terms: We live in a disharmonious universe of mechanically produced things, which we do not feel; of feelings we do not believe in; of movements which we are not capable of directing. We do not govern everyday life [byt], it governs us instead – governs with its spontaneity and lack of organization. And we wallow in it like frogs in the mud and croak like frogs when it rains. […] But that is why we have theatre. There people teach and speak and lie and go for visits. There they make things and organize forms. There we have organized everyday life. Organized how? Aesthetically. (Arvatov, 1923: 158)
Taylorism had a key role in Meyerhold’s aesthetic. ‘Extreme economy is needed in work’, he would declare, ‘the utmost Taylorism. All tasks are fulfilled with minimal, most purposeful means’ (Meyerhold, 1922: 84). One of the theatre’s first performances, The Magnanimous Cuckold, which described a story of love and jealousy taking place in a village with a mill, was set on a stage imagined as a chronotope and presented with graphs of movement marked with both spatial and temporal coordinates (see Figure 1 ). In Meyerhold’s vision, actors would interact with the set as a machine, the most famous of which is Lyubov Popova’s construction for The Magnanimous Cuckold, performed in 1922. It was an abstract representation of a windmill with gigantic ramps, slides, rotating frames, and three rotating circles (see Figure 2). Meyerhold’s total work of art was to be a perfect merging of the body and the machine, time and space, in which affect was presented as production, and as precisely timed movement.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘Spatial-chronometric scheme’ of movement of an act in The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922.
The Magnanimous Cuckold with the set by Lyubov Popova in a performance of 1928.
The science of biomechanics was employed not only in theatre but also as a strategy for work training. While Meyerhold was enacting production on the theatrical stage, his collaborator Aleksey Gastev was establishing the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral’ny Institut Truda, usually abbreviated to TsIT), an institution dedicated to training workers to develop precise, timed, efficient movements, such as that of chopping wood, illustrated with a graph similar to those employed by Meyerhold in his theatre – the ‘cyclogram’ (see Figure 3). Like Meyerhold, he was attempting to establish a theory for his work, establishing three disciplines: ‘bioenergetics’, ‘psychotechnics’ and ‘social engineering’.
Gastev’s cyclogram of chopping wood with a chisel. Moscow, TsIT, 1924.
Like Meyerhold, Gastev founded his teaching on ideas developed at the turn of the century by the main proponents of improving labour efficiency – Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, whose techniques were employed in the ‘scientific organization of labour’ (in Russian, nauchnaya organizatsiya truda, or NOT). He represented scientifically organized labour through ‘cyclograms’. In Gastev’s cyclogram, a photograph of workers is overlaid with a grid of movement that a particular labour operation involves. The graph denotes the ‘normal’, most efficient way of performing a movement. The result is strikingly similar to Meyerhold’s plans for the stage.
Gastev referred to TsIT as his ‘last work of art’, the culmination of his pre-Revolutionary experiments in workers’ poetry. ‘The entire world will become a machine’, he predicted in his poem We Encroached, ‘in which the Cosmos will for the first time find its own heart, its own beat’ (Gastev, 1918, cited in Johansson, 1983: 131). After the Revolution, Gastev wrote that great collective desire of the working class – its machinic passion – should be the means of communist transformation, and to channel it properly is to start creating the new world. To experience the rapture of ‘force’, the worker has to first realize that his body is a machine like other machines.
‘Our first task’, writes Gastev, consists of working with that magnificent machine that is so close to us – the human organism. This machine possesses sophisticated mechanics, including automatism and swift transmission. Should we not study it? The human organism has a motor, ‘gears,’ shock absorbers, sophisticated brakes, delicate regulators, even manometers. (Gastev, 1922, republished in Gastev, 1966: 41)
‘In the first place, we need elementary physical training’, Gastev writes in 1922: We have to struggle for the creation of a specific plasticity of movements. This science has up to now been scattered throughout the historical span of humanity: among different peoples it acquired extremely varied forms. Now we can use the entire rich historical material provided to us by the army, sports, trades, and create economic norms of movement. In a word, we have to create the biomechanics of everyday life [bytovaya biomekhanika]. (Gastev, 1922, republished in Gastev, 1966: 51)
In The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (1992), Boris Groys addresses the ambition of the avant-garde to transform the world and the will for power this project entailed. For Groys, the artist and the bureaucrat had the same aspiration – the aspiration to transform all of existence from a privileged position of a subject which understands the society in its entirety and is thus capable of moulding it according to revolutionary principles. The relative lack of success of the avant-garde during the 1920s is less a product of state intervention and more the result of the re-emergence of the free market during the New Economic Policy (1922 to 1928). In this period, the avant-garde failed to be the only aesthetic authority, which was the condition of its capacity to merge art and life, to transform the society into a Gesamtkunstwerk. The political suppression of the avant-garde would not happen until the Stalinist centralization of the economy and total seizure of power in the 1930s, when the fact that the avant-garde and the Party shared the same political aspirations became apparent. In Groys’ words, ‘There would have been no need to suppress the avant-garde if its black squares and transrational poetry had confined themselves to artistic space, but the fact that it was persecuted indicates that it was operating on the same territory as the state’ (Groys, 1992: 35).
It is possible to identify this territory, the exact locus of collaboration and then competition between the artist and the state. What the aesthetico-political project of the Party and that of avant-garde art shared was the effort to mould the political subject, to create the so-called New Man. In this project, they shared the same aesthetic and the same field of action – byt.
Gastev’s and Meyerhold’s biomechanics, with their peculiar brand of totalitarianism, were invented in a specific context where the main problem was that the proletarian, in the name of which the Revolution takes place, practically did not exist, that is, that a tiny minority of the Russian population belonged to the class of urban workers, and, as Trotsky pointed out in ‘Problems’, even fewer of these workers were ‘politically conscious’. In fact, in 1920, there were only 1.5 million workers in the Soviet Union, and they were not even the majority of the population in the cities, constituting only 34 per cent of working adults (Sigelbaum, 1992: 27). Communist leaders, both artists and bureaucrats, had to work on creating and defining the Soviet proletariat before working on ‘class consciousness’. This involved reforming the economy but also ‘training’ the citizen to think like an enlightened worker, to embrace modernity and industrialization. To become a New Man whose everyday interaction with the environment reflects revolutionary goals and ideals.
Meyerhold operated in the theatre, Gastev in the workers’ training institute. Yet it was the domestic stage that was the most important space in which the construction of the New Man took place. One of the most well-known attempts to introduce modern efficiency into the home are the ‘time-budget studies’ created by statistician Stanislav Strumilin for the Gosplan, State Planning Commission, in the first half of the 1920s. Strumilin undertook extensive efforts to gather data about activities in urban households and create tables that illustrated, for example, exactly how much time an average worker spends eating breakfast and dinner, or playing chess, or combing and shaving, dressing and undressing, even singing. This research was published in the journal Voprosy truda (Labour Issues) in 1923. This is how Strumilin explained his obsessive attempt to calculate the tiniest detail of everyday activity: Much is now being thought and said about the rationalization or, as it is now called, the scientific organization of labour. But the question of the rationalization of worker’s rest through the optimal use of his free time – this question no one has asked up to now. How could it be asked when we do not know even the factual distribution of this time and the level of its rationality and irrationality. (Strumilin, 1922, republished in Strumilin, 1957: 269)
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Graph of kitchen usage in a traditional kitchen and the design for the kitchen, 1928.
Even before encountering this precedent, Soviet architects and artists, as well as the designers of communal housing, attempted to create a habitat for a new kind of citizen and focused on the design of individual units with the same intensity they approached collective spaces. In the period between 1928 and 1930 designers started to treat this ‘individual unit’ as a site of domestic labour akin to labour in the factory, a site of ‘training’ for rational and efficient existence. For example, Alexander Toporkov proposes that the model for creating an efficient home was the American office and American inventions in office furniture, which were to be applied to the home (Toporkov, 1928; Arvatov, 1925, translation in Arvatov, 1996). In the design of the 1930 ‘living cell’ in the project for the socialist city, ‘Sotstgorod’, of merely 8.4 square meters, Nikolai Miliutin (1930, English translation Miliutin, 1974) tries to turn the home from a ‘dusty accumulation of useless trash’ by an assemblage of ‘the minimum necessary equipment that is indispensable for man’s living quarters’ (Miliutin, 1974: 81, 84). The room is not intended for a family, since marriage is ‘official prostitution’, according to the architect, but for individuals who were supposed to freely associate in collective spaces. The equipment that the socialist individual encounters in their home consists of objects that the inhabitant manipulates, turning his ‘cell’ from a day environment into a night environment, from a room for relaxing into a room for reading, etc. The New Man is constantly in action, manipulating the household, working with it.
The Soviet version of the Frankfurt Kitchen that emerged in the context of these experiments and fascination with industrial rationality was more radical than the one proposed by Schütte-Lihotzky. It was a piece of living ‘equipment’, a little apparatus, a machine that could be inserted into the house and removed from it, presumably when all cooking and dining is collectivized. In January of 1929, the journal presents graphs of movement that illustrate the inefficient use of the traditional kitchen, the improvement in the modern kitchen and the last step in this transformation – the ‘kitchen element’, an armoire for cooking and washing dishes that occupies only 4.5 square meters and contains a stove, a work surface, sink, pantry, drawers for food and utensils (see Figures 5 and 6).
Diagrams of traditional, rationalized kitchen and the ‘kitchen element’. Sovremennaya arkhitektura, January 1929.
Isometric drawing of the ‘kitchen element’. Sovremennaya arkhitektura, January 1929.
Vladimir Tatlin, Letatlin, drawing, 1932.
The avant-garde and the Party projects throughout the course of the 1920s are based on a shared assumption that rationalized movement is key to the identity of the New Man. ‘Class consciousness’ was to be instilled not only through propaganda but also, and even more importantly, through the training of the body, choreographies of movement in the dramatic, as well as domestic theatre. This was a project that involved a significant effort on the part of Soviet authorities to produce and control the Soviet citizen by transforming not only places but forms of movement.
Vladimir Tatlin, the famous architect of the Monument to the Third International, shared the zeal for choreographing of everyday rituals which was at the centre of the socialist Gesamtkunstwerk. In order to reform everyday life, in the 1920s Tatlin replaced the design of grand political projects, such as the Monument to the Third International (1917) with blueprints of clothing, pots and pans, stoves and the like. The pinnacle of his work on byt was his design for portable wings for everyday use, the Letatlin, on which he worked in the late 1920s and unveiled in 1932 (see Figure 7). ‘Letatlin’ literally means ‘flying Tatlin’ and was the result of the architect’s search for a new identity, an identity that would be defined not by ‘great ideas’ but by a change in motility. He considered the wings ‘the most complicated form which meets the needs of the moment for man’s mastery of space’ (Tatlin, 1932, in Zhadova, 1989: 311). The Letatlin would be mass-produced and used by ordinary citizens for daily chores, like going to work. Classes in operating the Letatlin would be introduced in schools, similarly to swimming classes, especially since it was envisioned as a device for ‘aerial swimming’. For this swimming, the citizen would ‘need to expend no more energy than for ordinary swimming’ (Rakhtanov, 1932, in Zhadova, 1989: 310), making ‘small flapping movements’ and ‘rocking in the air’ (Zelinskii, 1932, in Zhadova, 1989: 30).
Critics have written about Tatlin’s project as a formalist enterprise (Groys, 1993) but it is significant that Tatlin really tried to make the Letatlin fly, in experiments that took place in the outskirts of Moscow throughout the 1930s, and that this was not an isolated utopian attempt but rather the product of the prevailing social discourse on the course of socialist emancipation and modern subjectivity and the choreographic approach to everyday life. Tatlin’s project for liberated movement and ascent into the skies is part of the entire narrative on articulating new forms of movement and reforming everyday life, emerging in the early 1920s and permeating a host of social practices. What is significant about this project is that it was not formulated under any bureaucratic pressure, or directly shaped by power, but was an attempt at self-redefinition and personal search for new practices and a new aesthetic that would take place in the bright new world of Soviet socialism. As tempting it is to interpret Tatlin’s wings as a response to the crammed living conditions of ‘cells’ promoted by bureaucrats, it is hard to understand it as a protest against them, in particular because, despite his eccentricity, Tatlin embraces the common effort to redefine the choreographies of the everyday and is, throughout the 1920s, fanatical about the entire communist project of byt reform.
In the 1930s, art radically changed but, as Groys (1992) points out, it entailed the suppression of the avant-garde but also the amplification of the avant-garde ambitions. He suggests that the consolidated Stalinist state was at the same time an aesthetic and political authority. Evgeny Dobrenko proposes a similar idea in The Political Economy of Socialist Realism (2007), pointing to the complete merger of aesthetics and politics in the 1930s under the rule of the state, in which the art of socialist realism did not merely represent reality but also produced it by giving it a visible, material form. The Soviet state was a socialist-realist enterprise, which subsumed art, science and bureaucracy as enterprises of making a colossal Gesamtkunstwerk. Groys (1992) points out the dimensions of this project, which encompassed not only all kinds of social and artistic activity but aimed to incorporate the art of all ages and places as ‘material’ for socialist representation.
What was the role of the Soviet citizen in this project? What did it mean to be a New Man or a New Woman in this context? This time, the citizens themselves were to become artists, to coordinate their ideas about order and beauty with the aesthetico-political program of the state. This meant translating the aesthetic of socialist realism into an aesthetic of byt, translating the high art of the Soviet State into the low art of creating the everyday environment. The citizen would demonstrate loyalty to the regime, as well as personal evolution, by being connoisseur of the Soviet Gesamtkunstwerk.
The case study that illustrates this point is the movement of obschestvennitsy, or ‘socially minded women’ of the 1930s. It emerged in the early 1930s when the wives of engineers and ‘technical specialists’ employed in production complexes all around the Soviet Union decided to take a socially active role by ‘beautifying’ the factory environments. The results of the efforts of these women who abandoned their professions to accompany their husbands but were looking for a new social role were published in the main mouthpiece of the movement, the journal Obschestvennitsa, which came out between 1934 and 1941 in 10,000 to 80,000 copies. The authors in the journal, many of whom were housewives themselves, exchanged opinions on the decoration of factory yards and train stations, sewing and latest fashion, diet, face care, childrearing and horticulture. At the same time, they were celebrating Stalin and glorifying Soviet society, presenting their home improvements and potted plans as part of the great Party effort to bring progress and prosperity to the Soviet people. The adulation of Stalin and the Party leadership, the context of all articles and pictures in the journal, was connected to stories about how to make plants bloom in winter, the advice for making a colourful lampshade, instructions on how to gain weight, before and after pictures of factory dining halls and community rooms, etc.
The logical connection between expertise in planting flowers and choosing colours in interior decoration on the one hand, and ‘social-mindedness’, on the other, was possible because of the idea, pursued since Trotsky, that the details of the quotidian correspond to the great ideas on which socialist progress was based. The connection ‘socially-minded women’, as executors of the Party vision, established between state politics and their activities was based on the myth of bounty in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. In line with Stalin’s famous dictum: ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous’, reproduced on banners as well as in socialist realist paintings, communist society was, due to centralized production, becoming a land of plenty in which Malthusian theories were no longer valid and in which communal wealth, prosperity and population can grow ad infinitum, despite famines that were state engineered, and the general lack of food and consumer goods, as well as a general decrease in population (Davies et al., 1995). Women in the journal saw themselves as subjects sharing in the joys of socialism and the consumers of bounty. They were to demonstrate that ‘life has become more joyous’ and the Soviet society is that of plenty by adhering to diets that would make them look plump, producing plump, well-fed children, consuming the supposedly advanced Soviet consumer products such as face creams and perfumes, putting up curtains in factory dining halls, etc. (see Figure 8). They also celebrated the joys of socialism by turning ‘drab’ spaces into objects of beauty and sites of happiness (see Figure 9).
Ads for face creams ‘Flora’ and ‘Onyx’. Obschestvennitsa 7, 1938.
Side cabinet (buffet) in a nursery. Obshchestvennitsa 9–10, 1936.
The expertise needed for these ‘socially minded’ domestic activities was aesthetic and political at the same time. The housewives were manifesting that they were ‘socially conscious’ by becoming connoisseurs of classical art and perception psychology which would help them choose the right colours and compositions in their design and decoration activities (Anon, 1936). For example, ‘The Interior: Its Architecture and Lighting Design’, suggests to the housewife that she should consider ‘the artistic aspects of painting the interior’ and ‘pay attention to the advice of the artist and the architect and study the best models of interior design of buildings similar in type’ (Kravchenko, 1937: 19). Women were supposed to know what are achromatic and what are chromatic colours, the relationship between the properties of surface and colour, as well as the rules for how to apply particular colours in different geographic contexts (see Figure 10).
‘Wife-activists of the Debal’tsev station are creating a flower garden in front of the passenger platform’. Obshchestvennitsa 7–8 1937.
Before and after images of a factory dining hall. Obschestvennitsa, May 1938.
The journal was, by all means, a piece of propaganda, controlled and edited by Party officials, such as Yevgenia Yeshova, the editor of the luxurious international propaganda publication USSR in Construction and the wife of the chief of NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), directly involved in the Great Purge, or Vera Schveister, the official of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, which probably ghost-edited it from 1937 to 1941. At the same time, the zeal and meticulousness with which the obschestvennitsy approached their artistic task, the occasional ridiculousness of proposals and the general cacophony of design ideas testify to the fact that the housewives rendered the project personal and participated in defining what it means in practice.
In effect, Obschestvennitsa as a whole was a minor, gender-appropriate genre of socialist realism, one of the works that reflect the epoch’s fanatical focus on the quotidian, which was arguably more prominent in Russian art of the period 1930–1980 than the official historical painting that is primarily studied as the socialist realist paradigm. The lasting legacy of the 1920s and Trotsky’s famous appeal to the populace to grasp the importance of ‘prosaic trifles’ is the positioning of everyday life as the material that was to be shaped into a Gesamtkunstwerk and admired as such. The making of this total work of art was ultimately the process of making the Soviet subject and the ultimate bastion of the attempts to define Soviet modernity and its protagonists.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
This article was completed during the author’s Fellowship at the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.