Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T10:21:29.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Revolution, Production, Representation: Iurii Rozhkov's Photomontages to Maiakovskii's Poem “To the Workers of Kursk”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

Abstract

In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem “To the Workers of Kursk” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anamoly (KMA). Rozhkov's series for Maiakovskii's ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov's less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii's poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Bošković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s—socialist realism.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. One of the biggest iron-ore basins in the world.

2. For more on the exhibition, see the award-winning documentary film Маяковский – навсегда (Maiakovskii—Forever) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1cgae762xc (last accessed February 15, 2017).

3. A half-century later, a limited edition of Rozhkov and Maiakovskii's unreleased book was published in Germany and Czechoslovakia, and—only 90 years after its creation—in Russia. See Majakowski, Wladimir und Roschkow, Juri, Den Arbeitern von Kursk, ein vorläufiges Denkmal von Wladimir Majakowski 1923 (Duüsseldorf, 1980)Google Scholar; Majakovský, Vladimír, Kurským dĕlníkům, kteří vytĕžili první rudu, tento prozatimní pomník vytvořený Vladimírem Majakovským, trans. Taufer, Jiří (Prague, 1982)Google Scholar; Maiakovskii, Vladimir, Fotomontazhnyi tsikl Iuriia Rozhkova k poeme Vladimira Maiakovskogo Rabochim Kurska, dobyvshim pervuiu rudu: rekonstruktsiia neizdannoi knigi 1924, stat'i, kommentarii, ed. Matissen, Kira and Rossomakhin, Andrei (St. Petersburg, 2014)Google Scholar.

4. Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov (1898–1940) was not affiliated with any of the usual artistic or educational venues in Moscow at the time, such as INKhUK (Moscow Institute for Artistic Culture, 1920–1922) or VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios, 1920–1927). He was an ardent Bolshevik—a Red Army soldier, a political instructor on the Lenin agit-train, a Party appointed security guard, a Party committee organizer—not to mention a family man, a seasoned geologist and explorer who discovered 33 minefields of golden ore in northern Kazakhstan. For more about his life see the following files at the Arkhiv Gosudarstvennogo muzeia V. V. Maiakovskogo (Maiakovskii State Museum and Library): Iurii Rozhkov, Avtobiografiia (инв. №: КП 31209); I. Iu. Matissen-Rozhkova, Dopolnenie k avtobiografii Rozhkova Iuriia Nikolaevicha (инв. №: КП 31211); I. Iu. Matissen-Rozhkova, Vospominaniia docheri Rozhkova Iuriia Nikolaevicha Ingy Iur'evny Matissen-Rozhkov (инв. №: КП 31212); Knoblok i Komissarov: Справка о революционной, общественно-партийной и служебной работе бывшего начальника геологоразведочного отдела треста «Коззолото» и начальника геологоразведочной партии треста «Золоторазведка» и института «Нигрозолото» товарища Ю. Н. Рожковa (инв. №: КП 31213); and Kira Matissen, “Eto to nemnogoe chto ostalos',” Fotomontazhnyi tsikl, 69–71.

5. The avant-garde journal Lef printed photomontages and published theoretical articles on this medium. At the very end of the first issue of Lef, for example, the editors—most probably Osip Brik—wrote in the section “Fakty” (Facts) the short rapport on the contemporary activity of constructivists. The rapport notes on Rodchenko's work on intertitles for Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravdy (Cinema-Truths), activities within VKhUTEMAS, and innovative work in graphic production (полиграфическое производство): “Activity in the area of book illustration: A new kind of illustration was introduced by way of montaging print and photography material on a given topic, which in view of the richness of material and its realistic clarity renders the entire ‘art-graphic’ illustration non-sensical.” See: “Konstruktivisty,” Lef, No. 1 (March 1923), 252.

6. I draw here upon the notion of photopoetry introduced by Jindřich Toman, who defines it as the extraordinary junction between poetry and photography and/or photomontage, and an intermedial, hybrid genre that flourished in avant-garde books and journals throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. See Toman, Jindřich, Foto/Montáž tiskem (Prague, 2009), 284311 Google Scholar. Taking cue from Frano˙is Albéra and Maria Tortajada's discussion of dispositif, I follow Ruggero Eugeni's definition of dispositive and apparatus as two different and connected concepts to which the French term dispositif refers. Thus, an apparatus is “a network of discourses, pieces of knowledge, values, etc., reciprocally linked and governed / defined by strategies of management of power,” while a dispositive is “mechanism of a device, instrument or machine” which allows spectators to attend a representation. See Albéra, Françis and Tortajada, Maria, Cine-Dispositives (Amsterdam, 2015), 21Google Scholar; and Ruggero Eugeni, “Dispositif, Apparatus, Dispositive,” available online at https://prezi.com/2rn4eww1nhcu/dispositif-apparatus-dispositive/ (accessed on February 15, 2017).

7. Maiakovskii's and Rozhkov's work was closely related to the task of production propaganda in the reconstruction period—after introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy) and the campaign for a “reconstruction of everyday life” (перестройка быта) in March 1921—when the basic themes of agitation became the building of the economy and the increase in labor productivity.

8. Arvatov, Boris, “Agit-Kino,” Kino-fot, No. 2 (1922), 2Google Scholar. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Russian are mine.

9. Arvatov, “Agit-Kino,” 2. In the essay “Utopia or science,” Arvatov writes: “Decisively rejecting living-room and museum oriented easel art, Lef is fighting for the poster, the illustration, the advertisement, the photo- and kino-montage, i.e. for those kinds of utilitarian forms of visual art that are made by the means of machine technology and closely connected with the material byt of urban industrial workers.” Arvatov, , “Utopia ili nauka?Lef, No. 4 (1924), 18Google Scholar.

10. Arvatov, “Agit-Kino,” 2. My emphasis.

11. Maiakovskii, Vladimir, “Рабочим Курска, добывшим первую руду, временный памятник работы Владимира Маяковского,” Lef No. 4 (1924), 4557 Google Scholar.

12. Maiakovskii, Vladimir, “Agitatsiia i reklama,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 t., 13 vols. (Moscow, 1955–1961), 13:57Google Scholar. Originally published in the journal “Tovarishch Terentii,” No. 14, (1923).

13. Foucault, Michel, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York, 1980), 194228 Google Scholar. See also Agamben, Giorgio, What is Apparatus?: And Other Essays (Stanford, 2009)Google Scholar.

14. On different dispositives, see: Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: 1985)Google Scholar; Bonnell, Victoria, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkley, 1997)Google Scholar; Kelly, Catriona, “‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers’: The Stengazeta (Wall Newspaper), Kul'turnost' and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 4, 2002: 573602 Google Scholar.

15. In his article and book of the same title, film scholar Pavle Levi argues that the art forms fitting this category are not made “under the influence of, or referring to, the cinema.” Rather, they conceptualize the cinema “as itself a type of practice that, since the invention of the film apparatus, has also (simultaneously) had a history of execution through other, ‘older’ artistic media.” Levi, , “Cinema by Other Means,” October 131 (Winter 2010): 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levi, , Cinema by Other Means (Oxford, 2012), 27Google Scholar. El Lissitzky proposed in his 1923 manifesto-like essay “Topography of Typography” the idea of the “bioscopic book,” which he defined simply as the continuous page-sequence.” Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie and Read, Herbert Edward, eds. El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London, 1992), 359Google Scholar. Originally published in Merz, no. 4 (Summer 1924). It should be emphasized that Lissitzky borrowed this term from the name of a particular type of film projector.

16. To reconstruct knowledge associated with cine-dispositives, according to the media theorists Albera and Tortijada, it is necessary to go into the detail of a) the concrete elements of dispositive (the medium's materiality), b) the abstract notions associated with these concrete elements (series, repetitions, periodicity in relation to its concrete elements), and c) key notions which at a given historical moment come to define a given dispositive (they convey certain idea of a medium, be it a poster, book, photography, or cinema). See Albéra and Tortajada, Cine-Dispositives, 33.

17. On the definition of iconic and indexical signs, see Peirce, Charles S., The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 6 vols., ed. Fisch, Max Heralf and Kloesel, Christian J. W. (Bloomington, 1984), 2:53–54Google Scholar.

18. Kracauer wrote in the mid 1920s about the “blizzard of photographs,” referring to the proliferation of images in illustrated magazines: “The blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference towards what the things mean.” Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography,” in Levin, Thomas Y., ed., The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays (Boston, 1995), 58Google Scholar.

19. In his use of the typographic variety Rozhkov followed the experiments of Russian Cubo-futurists and Dadaists (“Association 41°”), such as Vasilyi Kamensky's Tango With Cows (Танго с коровамы, 1914), Ilya Zdanevich's Yanko krUl' albAnskay (Янко крУль албанскай, 1918), Aleksei Kruchenykh, Lacquered Tights (ЛакиРованное Трико, 1919), or Igor Terentiev's 17 Petty Guns (17 еРУндовых оРУдий, 1919), among others. Unlike his predecessors, Rozhkov used photo materials in his collages, thus following the ideas and practice of Russian constructivism.

20. There are, nevertheless, a few exceptions of the similar merger of the printed text and photo materials outside Soviet Russia. A good example is Vilém Szpyk, a Czech poet who published his “photosyntheses” as separate photopoems in Czech magazines. See Toman, Photo/Montage in Print, 297–301.

21. Rozhkov was familiar with Lef’s most representative collaborator among graphic designers, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and his seminal work on illustrations for Maiakovskii's long narrative poem About This (1923). A fervent reader of Maiakovskii and his true admirer, Rozhkov was also a dedicated reader of Lef magazine and an ardent believer in the constructivist ideas about art and culture that Lef members and collaborators promoted and fought for.

22. According to Albéra, and Tortajada, , “viewing and listening dispositives involve three essential terms: the spectator, the representation, and the machinery which … also refers to all the means implemented to give to representation to see and to hear … the user-spectator is not placed in front of the dispositif; she or he literally belongs to it,” in Cine-Dispositives (Amsterdam, 2015), 33Google Scholar.

23. “Рабочим Курска, добывшим первую руду, временный памятник работы Владимира Маяковского.”

24. Brechin, Gray A., Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley, 1999), 15Google Scholar.

25. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 15–17.

26. “Rodchenko's iconic image of Lili Brik from About This refers not only to her as Maiakovskii's object of desire and a fetishized love commodity, but also to the commodity world of everyday mass culture (byt) which, in both Lev Trotskii's and Maiakovskii's writings, is explicitly gendered as feminine.” See Aleksandar Bošković, “Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2013). On the link between the matter and femininity in Lev Trotskii's writings on everyday life see Kiaer, Christina, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 5767 Google Scholar.

27. Arvatov, Boris, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” trans. Kiaer, Christina in October, 81 (Summer 1997): 124Google Scholar.

28. Quoted in Efimova, A.P.Budushchego priotkritii glaz …” (A Half-Open Eye of the Future), Советское фото (Soviet Photo), no. 1 (1982), 24Google Scholar.

29. The stepladder, introduced for the first time in About This and developed and perfected soon after, represents a new stage in the development of the formation, organization, and visual structure of Maiakovskii's verse. The stepladder form demands the reader's eye to travel differently than while reading conventional verse forms: down and back rather than continuously. Our eyes wander in a similar way as they do while in the process of perceiving a photomontage. The inherently melodic nature of verse that the intonation proposes becomes inseparable from the visual organization of the verses: the stepladder layout of the verse clearly directs readers’ comprehension of the function that intonation has in the overall structure of meaning. Thus, the text's layout serves as a soundplay score. The explicit stepladder form clearly indicates what are the verses, what are the syntagmatic segments, and what the rhymes are; it introduces a breaking device (less distance is covered by the eye); “its role in rhythm and intonation seems much like that of soundplay … what soundplay is to rhyme, the lesenka is to meter. Its value is precisely in its freedom and unpredictability.” See Janechek, Gerald, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton, 1984), 234Google Scholar.

30. The compositional complexity and high concentration of assorted images on Rozhkov's pages create the effect of an intensification of rhythm.

31. “Сразу дать все права гражданства новому языку: выкрику—вместо напева, грохоту барабана—вместо колыбельной песни,” in Maiakovskii, “Kak delat' stihi?” (How to make verses), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tomakh, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1959), 12:85Google Scholar.

32. Both 1923 editions of the poem—in the journal Lef and separate book edition—present the lesenka layout with margin titles. See Maiakovskii, “Pro eto,” Lef, no. 1 (1923): 65–103; Maiakovskii, Vladimir, Pro eto: Faksimil'noe izdanie, stat'i, kommentarii, ed. Rossomakhin, Andrei (St. Petersburg, 2014)Google Scholar.

33. Eisenstein, Sergei, “Word and Image,” in Leyda, Jay, ed. and trans., The Film Sense (New York, 1947), 63Google Scholar.

34. “Poetry is defined by the criterion of segmentivity; segmentivity is poetry's dominant, as narrativity is narrative's. Segmentivity, ‘the ability to articulate and make meaning by selecting, deploying, and combining segments,’ is ‘the underlying characteristic of poetry as a genre.’” See McHale, Brian, “Narrativity and Segmentivity, or, Poetry in the Gutter,” in Ryan, Marie-Laure and Grishakova, Marina, eds., Intermediality and Storytelling (New York, 2010), 28Google Scholar.

35. “For you cinema is spectacle. / For me almost a Weltanschauung. / Cinema—purveyor of movement. / Cinema—renewer of literature. / Cinema—destroyer of aesthetic.” (Для вас кино—зрелище. / Для меня—почти миросозерцание. / Кино—проводник движения. / Кино—новатор литератур. / Кино—разрушитель эстетики.) See Maiakovskii, “Кино и Кино” (Cinema and Cinema), Kino-fot, No. 4 (October 5–12, 1922): 5; in Taylor, and Christie, , eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London, 1988), 75Google Scholar.

36. Rozhkov reversed the process described by Vilém Flusser in his essay “The Codified World” (which is his take on the early history of media): “The invention of writing consisted not so very much in the invention of new symbols, but rather in the unrolling of the image into rows (‘lines’) … the line … rolls the scene out and transforms it into a story. It ‘explains’ the scene in that it enumerates each individual symbol clearly and distinctly.” See Flusser, Vilém, Writings, ed. Ströhl, Andreas, trans. Eisel, Erik (Minneapolis, 2002), 38Google Scholar.

37. For the salient example of the latter see Figure 7.

38. The dynamics of the action submits to the imagined movement of the gaze and, as we know, according to the western convention, the gaze moves from left to right as an irremovable beam. See Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, trans. Beaty, Bart and Nguyen, Nick (Jackson, MS, 2007), 48Google Scholar. In other words, the pace of reshaping the Russian everyday life during the NEP era considerably slowed down in comparison to the rapid pace of systematic and radical changes characteristic for the stormy epoch of the Civil War.

39. The target of Lef’s attack was the resurrected social strata of petit bourgeois, with their traditional meshchanski byt representing the entire old system of values, set of relationships, and organization of enjoyments and leisure time. As the chief editor of Lef, Maiakovskii was at the forefront of the group whose main oppositional claim “was defense of the legacy of October against increasing deviations and retreats.” See Wood, Paul, “The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” in The Great Utopia: the Russian and Soviet Avant-garde, 1915–1932 (New York, 1992), 89 Google Scholar.

40. His posture visually resembles the iconic representations of St. George, the saint deeply embodied in Russian visual culture, and the traditional protector of Moscow.

41. For more about the new Soviet state symbols and the strong consciousness of the Bolsheviks leaders of the power of thereof, see Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 8586 Google Scholar.

42. The image of a huge toad behind the youngster's muscular figure may seem puzzling for any non-Russian speaker. The Russian equivalent for “angina pectoris” (lat. strangling, gr. chest) is the phrase грудная жаба, which literally translates as the “toad on the chests.”

43. Although Rozhkov's photomontage series opens space for different deconstructivist readings, I will not delve further into these possibilities.

44. Alexei Gastev was known for his poetry that offered the animation of machinery and the mechanization of a man (“the iron demon of the age with the soul of a man, nerves of steel, and rails for muscles,” “my iron friends,” a man who is growing “out of iron” and becoming a machine, etc.). In addition, Gastev recognized the Ford plant as a model for a cultural transformation, and evoked “iron discipline” and organization in the work place—the same values propagated by Rozhkov's photomontages. Platon Kerzhentsev took Gastevism out of factory and into the realm of everyday life: the world of social management in the early 1920s. He founded the League of Time in 1923. See Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 150–9; and Vaingurt, Julia, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Evanston, 2013), 2553 Google Scholar.

45. The origins of both the symphony of factory sirens and the noise orchestra can be traced back to Italian futurism. For more on this idea among the Proletkult circles see Fülöp-Miller, René, The Mind And Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York, 1965), 261Google Scholar; Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 159; and Alarcón, Miguel Molina, Baku: Symphony of Sirens (London, 2008), 1921 Google Scholar.

46. In 1924, four different translations of Henry Ford's autobiography My Life were published in the Soviet Union. Also, during the first six years of the 1920s, the Soviet regime imported large number of Ford motorcars and even 24,000 Fordson tractors.

47. The beaming multicolored stripes rhyme visually with the image of the white gleaming rays from the only monochrome photomontage sheet, announcing the bright future yet to come. These flickering flashes, signifying the radiating beams of transformative energy, open into the vision of shared fruits of the communal effort or what Maiakovskii calls “the half-open eye of the future” (будущего приоткрытый глаз). The beams of light foreshadowing the bright future on the monochrome photomontage transform later into yet another model and metaphor for industrial production.

48. The League of Time was founded in July 1923 at the initiative of Platon Kerzhentsev. Although it was technically independent of government and the Party, the intimate relationship between the League of Time and the movement NOT (Научная Организация Труда, Scientific Organization of Labor) led by Alexei Gastev, was clearly reflected in its board members: Kerzhentsev, Gastev, and other Taylorists, including the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as honorary officers. See Brunnbauer, Ulf, “‘The League of Time’ (Liga Vremia): Problems of Making a Soviet Working Class in the 1920s,” Russian History, 27, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 461495 Google Scholar.

49. Maiakovskii's verses read: “The roof windows / of the burrow roof / gape open. / At once / on a hundred freight and / passenger lines, / planes / set out / brand new / flashing / their aluminum / in the Sun.” (Раззевают / слуховые окна / крыши-норы. / Сразу / в сто / товарно-пассажирских линий / отправляются / с иголочки / планёры, / рассияв / по солнцу / алюминий.)

50. It was also the first time that “the new technique finally receives its name—photo-montage.” Toman, Photo/Montage in Print, 45. See also Sudhalter, Adrian, “The Self-Reflectivity of Photomontage: Writing on and Exhibiting the Medium, 1920–1931,” in Roldán, Deborah L. and Sudhalter, Adrian, eds., Photomontage between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Ottawa, 2012), 11Google Scholar.

51. “What is necessary is the mode of art which will make people feel that they are not a mass of consumers but the organizers and managers of the very material of production. New, productivist literature should have for its application not narratives about people, but living words in living interaction among people. Art not as a consumer product, but as a production skill.” Sergei Tret'iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?” (From Where to Where?), Lef, no. 1 (March 1923), 198.

52. On the concept of the cyborg and Berlin Dada photomontages, see Biro, Matthew, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Germany (Minneapolis, 2009)Google Scholar.

53. The titles are given in chronological order from left to right as follows: “I,” “Vladimir Mayakovsky,” “Cloud in Trousers,” “Backbone Flute,” “War and Peace,” “Man,” “Our March,” “Mystery Buff,” “Left March,” [missing, but most probably “150,000,000”], “Love,” and, at the end, “About This.” Both verbal and visual images of Maiakovskii as the organizer and manager of a word factory are also echoed in his poem “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry” (1926). There, Maiakovskii calls the act of writing poetry “creative mining,” and writes: “Poetry's / also radium extraction. / Grams of extraction / in years of labor. / For one single word, / I consume in action / thousands of tons / of verbal ore.”

54. Krysodav (The Rat-Crusher) was a short-lived satirical periodical edited by young Ukrainian writers in Moscow, Leonid Nedolia (later the main editor of Iugo-Lef magazine) and Mark Gai. The meeting point of the three important early Soviet art collectives—the Lef group, Krokodil group and 41 degrees from Tbilisi, Georgia—Krysodav published only three issues in 1923. The issues featured writings and lithographic images including photomontages, which portrayed, ridiculed, and accused the enemies of the Soviet state.

55. A similar representation can be found in Igor Terentiev's photomontage for the cover of Krysodav’s second issue (Moscow, 1923). The image shows a bottle morphing into a two-legged monster dressed in military pants, loaded with baggage, and labeled “Contraband.” A fan of gentlemen wearing top hats stretch out of the bottle's neck, creating the beast's Hydra-like head.

56. Maiakovskii undoubtedly shared Lenin's views on the importance of Bolshevik propaganda, believing that the publicly spoken word is a more effective tool for the political education of the masses than the static materiality of a monument. Lenin's “monumental plan of propaganda” reflected in the first place his desire for expression: to spread the word about the Revolution. The aim of the plan was not to erect permanent sculptures and monuments, but to create podiums for orators who would spread fresh words of the Revolution. Both Lenin and Lunacharskii believed that these temporary monuments should champion the living word of the Revolution among the generations instead of epitomizing the merely ossified and fossilized quality of permanent but static monumentality. In a similar vein, Maiakovskii did not consider public monuments to be fully suitable for commemorating the working class.

57. Rozhkov embarked on the Lenin agit-train at the end of 1918, several weeks before the train was sent through the parts of the northwestern territory recently liberated from the Germans on a six-week journey ending in mid-March 1919. It was here on the Lenin train that Rozhkov met Lev Semenovich Sosnovskii, who later in 1921 became appointed the chief of Agitprop of CK RKP. The train, headed by Sosnovskii, who was at the time a member of the VTsIK Commission established the previous January, visited Pskov, Riga, Vitebsk, Vilnius, Minsk, Khar'kov and Kursk, thus covering the whole of the former front against the Germans. See Rozhkov, “Avtobiografiia” (note 4).

58. This statement is a pun on the proverb “Кто в лес, кто по дрова,” where the word “лес” is replaced by the similarly sounding word “леф.” Driving upon the meaning of the proverb—which describes a situation of disharmony, chaos, and disagreement—the statement points to the emerging split between those who support Lef and those who do not. See Eagle, Herbert and Lawton, Anna, eds., Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Washington, D.C., 2004), 329Google Scholar.

59. See “LEF to Battle!” Lef, (No. 3, June-July, 1923), 3; and Brik, “To Sosnovski,” Lef, No. 3 (June-July, 1923), 4.

60. Tynianov, Iu., “Promezhutok,” Arkhaisty i Novatory (Ann Arbor, 1985), 554–56Google Scholar. For an insightful reading of Tynianov's concept of the interval, see Kujundžić, Dragan, The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans after Modernity (Albany, 1997), 7394 Google Scholar.

61. Merkurov was a sculptor-monumentalist who was commissioned to realize Lenin's plan of monumental propaganda and who perfected the art of the death-mask (he took Maiakovskii's death-mask in April 1930). Leonid Andreev was a Russian Silver-age playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and photographer. I assume that another Andreev, whom Maiakovskii probably referred to in his verses, is Nikolai Andreev, a sculptor whose most famous work is the monument of the seated bronze figure of Gogol' at Prechistenskii boulevard (1909), the image of which Rozhkov used for the preceding photomontage sheet.

62. See Maiakovskii, Fotomontazhnyi tsikl, 59–67.

63. Lef, no. 1 (March 1923), 8–9. My emphasis. The number one hundred and fifty million was intended to remind the reader of Maiakovskii's poem with the same title.

64. Tret'iakov, “Otkuda i kuda?” Lef, no.1 (March, 1923), 196. My emphasis.

65. The earlier example is the poem's polemical sting aimed at Nikolai Chuzhak, a member of Lef’s editorial board with whom Maiakovskii had frequent disagreements. There, the poet wittily compares Chuzhak's behavior with the “deviant” needles of a compass, while Rozhkov uses the image of arrow-like needles showing opposite directions, along the recurrent image-motif of pyramid-like spikes, as the visual representation for obstacles.

66. Lunacharskii, A.V., Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1963–1967), 1:200Google Scholar.

67. Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass, 1995), 27Google Scholar.

68. It is not surprising that the aforementioned Pavel Sakulin, the Russian and Soviet literary scholar, historian, and academic whom Maiakovskii describes as the orator of “unctuous speeches” (речей елей), published the first edition of his book Theater of A.I. Sumbatov in Berlin in 1927.

69. The program of reconstruction of everyday life that he and his comrades-in-arms gathered around Lef advocated, involved appropriating new means of technical production, reproduction, and representation. See Arvatov, , “Utopiia ili nauka” (Utopia or Science), Lef, No. 4 (1924), 1621 Google Scholar.

70. In his landmark study “The Statue in Pushkin's Poetic Mythology,” Roman Jakobson found the destructive capacity of statues in Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, The Stone Guest and The Golden Cockerel to be an expression of the antinomy, inherent in every statue, between its living subject matter and the dead material out of which it is made. See Jakobson, Roman, Language in Literature, Pomorska, Krystyna and Rudy, Stephen, eds., (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 318–67Google Scholar. For more on Maiakovskii's conception of the “mobile” monument, see Rann, James, “Maiakovskii and the Mobile Monument: Alternatives to Iconoclasm in Russian Culture,” Slavic Review 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 766–91Google Scholar.

71. The poet's view of the importance of high velocity fully corresponds with the demand issued by Lenin, who in his letter to the KMA work and defense committee for research and exploration's president of the board on April 5, 1922 wrote: “I draw your attention to the exceptional importance of the work on the research of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. Comrade Krzhyzhanovski told me that according to the engineers with whom he talked, it is almost proven that we have an unheard-of reservoir of the pure iron out there… . it is necessary to achieve the fastest pace of running the work … in order to purchase the necessary plant and equipment, instruments, and machinery (diamond, mining and the like) with maximal speed.” Ленинский сборник XXXVI, 466. My emphasis. For more on the concept of speed and its role in Russian avant-garde, see Harte, Tim, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930 (Madison, 2009)Google Scholar.

72. Andre Breton's surrealist ideal of the “convulsive beauty” found its visual expression in the image of an abandoned locomotive in the forest. See Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 112Google Scholar.

73. Not coincidentally, one can find the image of the locomotive on the page after the front cover in the third issue of the trilingual international magazine Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet (1922), edited by Il'ia Erenburg and El Lissitzky, and published in Berlin with the aim to spread the idea of “construction art.” Later, the locomotive became “hero” of many Soviet agit-posters and agitprop films.

74. Formulae (usually the initial ones) can also contain information about the genre or the type of sujet (plot) that follows. In such cases, they can serve as specific “switchers” too (they send information about the change of discourse, i.e., about the transition from vernacular to poetic discourse). See Petković, Novica, Ogledi iz srpske poetike (Belgrade, 1990)Google Scholar.

75. “This subordination of historical reality to the preexisting patterns of legend and history (in the socialist realist novel) bridged the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought to be.’” Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1985), 41Google Scholar.

76. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1982), 135Google Scholar. One could also claim that Rozhkov's spatial sequencing, along the new ways of reading/viewing (i.e., of using a cinematic dispositive), introduced the model of segmented and goal driven temporality, a concept that will come to its fruition starting with the introduction of the first Five-Year Plan.

77. See Gor'kii, Maxim, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954), 27: 221Google Scholar. “Our reality is our teacher,” Gor'kii affirmed, despite the fact that “reality does not make itself visible. But then we are obliged to know more than just two realities—the past, and the present, the one in which we live and take part to some extent. We must also know a third reality—the reality of the future … we must somehow include this reality in our everyday lives, we must depict it. Without it we will not understand what the method of socialist realism is” in Gor'kii, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, 30 vols., (Moscow, 1954), 25: 455Google Scholar; 27: 419.

78. Maiakovskii's poem and Rozhkov's cine-dispositive introduce the following basic characteristics of socialist realist art: 1) the figure of a positive hero, represented both as a collective (“workers”) and an idealized concept of an individual with noble goals: “He who's come / to dig down the earth, / who's plotted places / on diagrams, / He / is the knight of today! / He also dreams / he also loves.” [Пришедший / в землю врыться, / в чертежах / размечавший точки, / он—/ сегодняшний рыцарь! / Он так же мечтает, / он так же любит]; 2) the heroic spirit: the hero (working class) emerges as the builder of a new life, overcoming all obstacles and defeating all enemies; 3) monumentalism: big generic forms with heroic spirit, such as the longer narrative poem as the embodiment of synthetic and “epic thought;” 4) aspirations to high art style (the genre of ode); 5) emphasis on the positive achievements of socialism (industrialization and collectivism); 6) utopian projection into the future, characterized by 7) classicism, as the ideal of harmony, order, and wholeness (the new beauty of the assembly line); 8) accessibility of the artwork (clarity of visual language communicates a message to the millions) with its 9) propagandistic didacticism (unambiguous ideological message promoting Bolshevik policies); and 10) “realism,” such as the use of documents (photographs, newspaper clippings, actual historical events, speeches) to augment the impression of reality, the use of recognizable (contemporary and/or historical) settings, events, and personalities. It is not thus surprising that the silent agitprop documentary cinema of the late 1920s, such as Victor Turin's Turksib (1929) and Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia (1930), resonate with the visual idioms promoted in Rozhkov's photomontage series.

79. Seeing Rozhkov's work as an example that indicated the state-sponsored program of a “dominant dispositif” inclined to achieve a “homeodynamic state” may substitute for Boris Groys's thesis that socialist realism “assimilated the experience of the avant-garde” and emerged from “the internal logic of the avant-garde method itself.” Groys, , Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton, 1992), 9Google Scholar.