The October Revolution of 1917 split Russia into pieces, turned the minds of millions of people, crippled destinies, destroyed families, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. For many years, the view of this revolution was shrouded in a halo of heroism. But any revolution, and even more so, a civil war, brings only death and destruction. I.Babel wrote about this in the twenties of the last century in the novel "Cavalry" and E. Zamyatin in the story "Dragon".
Both works begin with a description of the external situation: "Petersburg was on fire and delirious." The world is divided into two parts: where you can see the columns, the gray lattices of the Summer Garden, the spiers of magnificent monuments - there are the remains of the real world, and here, in the frozen cold world, dragon-people reign. And there is no place for feelings: “Hot, unprecedented, icy sun in the fog - left, right, above, below - a dove over a burning house,” the movement of a dove in the sky symbolizes an inverted cross. The reign of Antichrist has come.
With Babel, nature, filled with bright colors, seems to be a symbol of harmony. But a man breaks into this harmony: the highway along which the army moves was built “on the bones of men by Nicholas the First.” Against the background of pearly fog, yellowing rye, an image of an orange sun appears, which rolls like a severed head, and the smell of yesterday's blood and dead horses “drops” into the cool evening air.
Both worlds are poisoned by the premonition of death and madness. Everything is unfavorable in a world where war and antagonism reign. Human life is devalued. The people who create the revolution are impersonal. The hero of Yevgeny Zamyatin is rushing on a tram into the unknown: “temporarily there was a dragon with a rifle, rushing into the unknown. The cap fit on the nose and, of course, would have swallowed the dragon's head if it weren't for the ears: the cap sat on protruding ears, "there is no person, he was completely swallowed up by the essence, the hypostasis of a guide to the kingdom of God. The famous overcoat, sung by Russian writers, here is the embodiment of the brutal essence of the leader of the revolution. Babel has started six - he also has no name, he is ruthless and determined. In a delusional state, he dreams of the hero, who planted both eyes of the brigade commander with one shot.
At Zamyatin, the dragon suddenly meets a frozen sparrow, and saves him from death. At this moment, even from under the cap, eyes appear on the face, and hands peep out of the sleeves. The dragon that killed a man for an intelligent muzzle brings a small creature back to life. The hero of Babel falls asleep, but sees a terrible dream in which everything is mixed up. It is difficult to find meaning and peace in a house where in the room there are "scraps of women's fur coats on the floor, human feces and shards of sacred dishes used by Jews once a year - at Easter." Dream - reality - death - everything is mixed up, where the boundaries of the human world and where the delusional one is unknown. The question of a pregnant woman helps to return to reality: "... the Poles slaughtered him, and he prayed to them: kill me in the backyard so that my daughter does not see how I die ... I want to know where else in the whole world you will find such a father as my father..." The horror of death is also terrible because those who are able to think about the future life, about the pregnant daughter, die.
The inhumanity and bloody slaughter that revolution and war bring with it are shown with all clarity. The call not to make such mistakes is heard in each of these works. It is necessary to remember this. Both writers tried to prevent future wars, knowing that they would not become more humane.
Civil war in the image of M. A. Sholokhov
In 1917, the war turned into a bloody turmoil. This is no longer a national war requiring sacrificial duties from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the onset of the revolutionary era, relations between classes and estates change dramatically, moral foundations are rapidly destroyed and traditional culture and with them the state. The disintegration that was generated by the morality of war embraces all social and spiritual ties, brings society into a state of struggle of all against all, to the loss of the Fatherland and faith by people.
If we compare the face of the war depicted by the writer before this milestone and after it, then an increase in tragedy becomes noticeable, starting from the moment the world war turned into a civil one. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for its quick end, because the authorities "must end the war, because the people, and we do not want war."
First World War portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster,
Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war, crippling people both physically and morally. Death, suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in the second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke joyful feelings among the Cossacks, they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of finishing it. How many of them have already died: not one Cossack widow voted for the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand the historical events. Having returned from the fronts of the world war, the Cossacks did not yet know what tragedy of the fratricidal war they would have to endure in the near future. The Upper Don uprising appears in the image of Sholokhov as one of the central events civil war on the Don.
There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of the representatives of the Soviet authorities on the Don in the novel are shown with great artistic power. Sholokhov showed in the novel that the Upper Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations of peasant life and the age-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that became the basis of peasant morality and morality, which developed over the centuries, and passed down from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already in the course of events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal character. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.”
The epic covers a period of great upheavals in Russia. These upheavals had a strong impact on the fate of the Don Cossacks described in the novel. Eternal values determine the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period that Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love for the native land, respect for the older generation, love for a woman, the need for freedom - these are the basic values without which a free Cossack cannot imagine himself.
Depiction of the civil war as a tragedy of the people
Not only civil, any war for Sholokhov is a disaster. The writer convincingly shows that the cruelties of the civil war were prepared by the four years of the First World War.
Dark symbolism contributes to the perception of the war as a nationwide tragedy. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarsky, “at night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible cries hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, soiled by calves, groaned over the brown, haunted graves.
“To be thin,” the old people prophesied, hearing owl voices from the cemetery.
“The war will come.”
The war broke into the Cossack kurens like a fiery whirlwind just at the time of harvesting, when the people cherished every minute. The orderly rushed in, raising a cloud of dust behind him. The fateful...
Sholokhov demonstrates how just one month of war changes people beyond recognition, cripples their souls, devastates them to the very bottom, makes them look at the world around them in a new way.
Here the writer describes the situation after one of the battles. In the middle of the forest, corpses are completely scattered. “They lay flat. Shoulder to shoulder, in various poses, often obscene and scary.
A plane flies by, drops a bomb. Next, Yegorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: “The released intestines smoked, shimmering with pale pink and blue.”
This is the merciless truth of war. And what blasphemy over morality, reason, betrayal of humanism became under these conditions the glorification of the feat. The generals needed a "hero". And he was quickly “invented”: Kuzma Kryuchkov, who allegedly killed more than a dozen Germans. They even began to produce cigarettes with a portrait of the "hero". The press wrote about him excitedly.
Sholokhov tells about the feat in a different way: “But it was like this: people who had collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind, stumbled, collided with animal horror that declared them, delivered blind blows, mutilated themselves and horses and fled, frightened by a shot that killed a man, dispersed morally crippled.
They called it a feat."
People at the front are cutting each other in a primitive way. Russian soldiers hang like corpses on wire fences. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The ground is thickly stained with human blood. Everywhere settled hills of graves. Sholokhov created a mournful cry for the dead, cursed the war with irresistible words.
But even more terrible in the image of Sholokhov is the civil war. Because she is fratricidal. People of the same culture, one faith, one blood engaged in an unheard-of extermination of each other. This "conveyor belt" of senseless, terrible in terms of cruelty, murders, shown by Sholokhov, shocks to the core.
... Punisher Mitka Korshunov spares neither the old nor the young. Mikhail Koshevoy, satisfying his need for class hatred, kills his centenary grandfather Grishaka. Daria shoots the prisoner. Even Gregory, succumbing to the psychosis of the senseless destruction of people in the war, becomes a murderer and a monster.
There are many amazing scenes in the novel. One of them is the massacre of the podtelkovites over forty captured officers. “The shots were fired feverishly. The officers, colliding, rushed in all directions. A lieutenant with beautiful female eyes, in a red officer's hood, ran, clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if through a barrier. He fell and didn't get up. The tall, brave Yesaul was cut down by two. He clutched at the blades of the checkers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child, fell on his knees, on his back, rolled his head in the snow; his face showed only bloodshot eyes and a black mouth drilled with a continuous scream. His flying checkers slashed across his face, along his black mouth, and he was still screaming in a voice thin with horror and pain. Having squatted over him, the Cossack, in an overcoat with a torn off strap, finished him off with a shot. The curly-haired cadet almost broke through the chain - he was overtaken and killed by some ataman with a blow to the back of the head. The same chieftain drove a bullet between the shoulder blades of the centurion, who was running in his overcoat, which had opened from the wind. The centurion sat down and scratched his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired podsaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he kicked a deep hole in the snow and would still have beaten like a good horse on a leash, if the pitiful Cossacks had not finished it. These mournful lines are extremely expressive, filled with horror before what is being done. They are read with unbearable pain, with spiritual trepidation and carry the most desperate curse of a fratricidal war.
No less scary are the pages devoted to the execution of the "podtelkovtsy". People who at first “willingly” went to the execution “as if to a rare merry spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of cruel and inhuman execution, are in a hurry to disperse, so that by the time of the massacre of the leaders - Podtelkov and Krivoshlykov - there were very few people left.
However, Podtelkov is mistaken, presumptuously believing that people dispersed because of the recognition of his innocence. They could not endure the inhuman, unnatural spectacle of their violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life.
Two “truths” collide on the pages of the novel: the “truth” of the Whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtelkov: “A traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the “truth” opposing it, Podtelkov, who thinks that he is defending the interests of the “working people.”
Blinded by their "truths", both sides mercilessly and senselessly, in some kind of demonic frenzy, exterminate each other, not noticing that there are fewer and fewer of those for whom they are trying to approve their ideas. Talking about the war, about the military life of the most combative tribe among the entire Russian people, Sholokhov, however, nowhere, not in a single line, praised the war. No wonder his book, as the well-known Sholokhov expert V. Litvinov notes, was banned by the Maoists, who considered war the best way to socially improve life on Earth. " Quiet Don is a passionate denial of any such cannibalism. Love for people is incompatible with love for war. War is always a people's misfortune.
Death in the perception of Sholokhov is what opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially violent death. In this sense, the creator of The Quiet Flows the Don is a faithful successor to the best humanistic traditions of both Russian and world literature.
Despising the extermination of man by man in war, knowing what tests the moral sense undergoes in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, on the pages of his novel, painted the classic pictures of mental stamina, endurance and humanism that took place in the war. Humane attitude to the neighbor, humanity cannot finally be destroyed. This is evidenced, in particular, by many of the actions of Grigory Melekhov: his contempt for looting, the protection of the Pole Frani, the salvation of Stepan Astakhov.
The concepts of “war” and “humanity” are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and at the same time, against the backdrop of bloody civil strife, the moral possibilities of a person, how beautiful he can be, are especially clearly drawn. War severely examines the moral fortress, unknown to peaceful days.
Similar information.
The second volume of the epic novel by Mikhail Sholokhov tells about the civil war. It includes chapters about the Kornilov rebellion from the book Donshchina, which the writer began to write a year before The Quiet Flows the Don. This part of the work is precisely dated: the end of 1916 - April 1918.
The slogans of the Bolsheviks attracted the poor who wanted to be free masters on their land. But the civil war poses new questions for the protagonist Grigory Melekhov. Each side, white and red, seeks its own truth by killing each other. Once at the Reds,
Gregory sees cruelty, intransigence, thirst for the blood of enemies. War destroys everything: the well-established life of families, peaceful work, takes away the last, kills love. The heroes of Sholokhov, Grigory and Pyotr Melekhov, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy, almost the entire male population are drawn into battles, the meaning of which they do not understand. For whom and for what should they die in their prime? Life on the farm gives them a lot of joy, beauty, hopes, opportunities. War is only deprivation and death.
The Bolsheviks Shtokman and Bunchuk see the country exclusively as an arena of class battles, where people are like tin soldiers in someone else's game, where pity for a person is a crime. The hardships of war fall primarily on the shoulders of the civilian population, ordinary people; to starve and die - to them, not to the commissars. Bunchuk arranges lynching of Kalmykov, and in his defense he says: “They are us or we are them!.. There is no middle ground.” Hatred blinds, no one wants to stop and think, impunity unties hands. Grigory witnesses how Commissar Malkin sadistically mocks the population in the captured village. He sees terrible pictures of the robbery of the fighters of the Tiraspol detachment of the 2nd Socialist Army, who rob farms and rape women. As it is sung in an old song, you have become muddy, Father Quiet Don. Gregory understands that in fact, people who are distraught with blood are not looking for the truth, but a real turmoil is going on in the Don.
It is not by chance that Melekhov rushes between the two belligerents. Everywhere he encounters violence and cruelty, which he cannot accept. Podtelkov orders the execution of the prisoners, and the Cossacks, forgetting about military honor, cut down unarmed people. They carried out the order, but when Grigory realized that he was chopping down prisoners, he fell into a frenzy: “Whom did he hack!.. Brothers, I have no forgiveness! Cut to death, for God's sake ... mother God ... Death ... betray! Khristonya, dragging the “enraged” Melekhov away from Podtelkov, bitterly says: “Lord God, what is happening to people?” And the captain Shein, who has already understood the essence of what is happening, prophetically promises Podtelkov that "the Cossacks will wake up - and they will hang you." Mother reproaches Gregory for participating in the execution of captured sailors, but he himself admits how cruel he became in the war: “I don’t regret the child either.” Leaving the Reds, Grigory rushes to the Whites, where he sees the execution of Podtelkov. Melekhov tells him: “Do you remember under the Deep Battle? Do you remember how they shot officers?.. They shot at your order! A? Now you're burping! Well, don't worry! You are not the only one to tan other people's skins! You departed, chairman of the Don Council of People's Commissars!
War embitters and divides people. Gregory notices that the concepts of “brother”, “honor”, “fatherland” disappear from consciousness. The strong community of Cossacks is disintegrating for centuries. Now - every man for himself and for his family. Koshevoy, using his power, decided to execute the local wealthy Miron Korshunov. Miron's son, Mitka, avenges his father and kills Koshevoy's mother. Koshevoy kills Pyotr Melekhov, his wife Daria shot Ivan Alekseevich. Koshevoy for the death of his mother is already taking revenge on the entire Tatarsky farm: leaving, he sets fire to "seven houses in a row." Blood is looking for blood.
Peering into the past, Sholokhov recreates the events of the Upper Don uprising. When the uprising began, Melekhov perked up, decided that now everything would change for the better: “We must fight those who want to take life, the right to it ...” Having nearly driven his horse, he rushes to fight the Reds. The Cossacks protested against the destruction of their way of life, but, striving for justice, they tried to solve the problem with aggression and conflict, which led to backfire. And here Gregory was disappointed. Attached to Budyonny's cavalry, Gregory does not find an answer to bitter questions. He says: "I'm tired of everything: both the revolution and the counter-revolution ... I want to live near my kids."
The writer shows that there can be no truth where there is death. The truth is one, it is not “red” or “white”. War kills the best. Realizing this, Grigory throws down his weapons and returns to his native farm to work on his native land, raise children. The hero is not yet 30 years old, but the war turned him into an old man, took away, burned out the best part of his soul from him. Sholokhov, in his immortal work, raises the question of the responsibility of history to the individual. The writer sympathizes with his hero, whose life is broken: “Like a steppe scorched by fires, the life of Gregory became black ...”
In the epic novel, Sholokhov created a grandiose historical canvas, describing in detail the events of the civil war on the Don. The writer became a national hero for the Cossacks, having created an artistic epic about the life of the Cossacks in a tragic time of historical change.
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"Cavalry" by I. E. Babel is a collection of short stories, related civil war and a unified way of the narrator. The stories from this book began to be published in 1923. Different in material, they painted a new and unexpected world. Fate decreed that, having accepted the revolution with its bewitching passion and gone into it, Babel begins to publish his stories and correspondence in the St. Petersburg newspaper Novaya Zhizn, which is facilitated by M. Gorky. But then, perhaps one of the first, he saw in the revolution a break in life, a break in history. Babel was aware of all this as a fracture of being. This sense of truth led Babel to the paths of war. In July 1920, he voluntarily went to the front, to the First Cavalry Army.
Babel came to the front as a correspondent for the newspaper "Red Cavalryman" Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov. Moving with parts, he kept a diary. Reading it, one cannot fail to notice that Babel was stunned: new impressions came into sharp conflict with his life experience. He saw something that he could not even think about: the troops and the Cossacks were serving with their equipment, with their horses and edged weapons. Separated from the army, the Cossacks were forced to feed themselves and provide themselves with horses at the expense of the local population, which often led to bloody incidents. They gave vent to their fatigue, anarchism, arrogance, disregard for the dignity of other people. Violence has become commonplace.
Babel saw in the soldiers their immaturity, lack of culture, rudeness, and it was hard for him to imagine how the ideas of revolution would germinate in the minds of these people. And, judging by the diary, a painful question arose in Babel’s soul: “Why do I have an unending longing?” And the answer was: “Because we are far from home, because we are destroying, we are going like a whirlwind, like lava ... life is flying apart, I am at a big ongoing memorial service.” The stories of Cavalry were based on the entries made by Babel in his diary. V The collection opens with the story "Crossing the Zbruch". The joy of victory from the capture of Novgorod-Volynsk is, as it were, emphasized by the joy of nature itself: “Fields of purple poppy bloom around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowing rye, virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon ...” And then: “ Orange sun rolls across the sky like a severed head,” and the “gentle light” that “lights up in the gorges of the clouds” can no longer remove the anxious anxiety. Pictures of victory acquire unusual cruelty. And then: "The smell of yesterday's blood of the killed horses drips into the evening coolness" - this phrase will "overturn" the entire triumphant chorus of the story.
All this prepared the finale of the story: the sleeping Jewish neighbor was brutally stabbed to death. In the story “Letter”, Vasily Kurdyukov, a fighter of the First Cavalry, almost a boy, dictates a letter to his mother, in which he tells how his brother Senka “finished” the “dad” of the White Guard, who in turn “finished” his own son Fedya. And this is the truth of the civil war, when fathers and children become sworn enemies and without.
In the story “Salt”, Balmashev Nikita, in a letter to the editor, describes how he let a woman with a child into the car with the cavalrymen going to the front and protected her from violence from her comrades, and when he found out that instead of the child she was carrying salt, he threw her out of the car and shot her: “... I washed this shame from the face of the working land and the republic.”
Babel describes heroism, just as spontaneous, but necessary in these conditions. The squadron commander Trunov, violating the charter, arbitrarily and cruelly cracked down on prisoners of war and immediately, together with a soldier, remains behind a machine gun in order to distract enemy aircraft from the squadron hiding in the forest.
On the grave of the “world hero Pasha Trunov”, the regiment commander Pugachev “shouted a speech about the dead soldiers from the First Cavalry, about this proud phalanx, hammering history on the anvil of future centuries” (“Squadron Trunov”). Focusing on the ordinary participants in the events, Babel says very little about the true leaders of the First Cavalry, who tamed this elemental freemen and turned it into an organized force. However, Babel does not hide his admiration for the commander Savitsky, whose prototype was the legendary Tymoshenko.
In all the stories of Cavalry there is the presence of the author himself, who, together with its heroes, went through a difficult path to comprehend the meaning of this bloody struggle. In the descriptions of events there is a cruel truth of the mighty bloody stream of life.
For an attempt to truthfully describe the events of the civil war, Babel was accused of "anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities ..." and in 1939 he was arrested, and in 1940 he was shot.
For the anniversary of the October Revolution, we remembered the ten most important works of art of that period - from Lissitzky's "Red Wedge to beat the Whites" to Deineka's "Defense of Petrograd".
El Lissitzky,
"Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"
In the famous poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge," El Lissitzky uses Malevich's Suprematist language for political purposes. Pure geometric shapes serve as a description of a violent armed conflict. Thus, Lissitzky reduces the immediate event, the action, to a text and a slogan. All elements of the poster are rigidly intertwined with each other and interdependent. Figures lose their absolute freedom and become geometric text: this poster would be read from left to right even without letters. Lissitzky, like Malevich, designed a new world and created forms in which a new life was supposed to fit. This piece is thanks to new form and geometry translates the topic of the day into some general timeless categories.
Kliment Redko
"Insurrection"
The work of Kliment Redko "Uprising" is the so-called Soviet neo-icon. The idea of this format is that the image printed on a plane is, first of all, a kind of general model, an image of what is desired. As in a traditional icon, the image is not real, but reflects a certain ideal world. It is the neoicon that underlies the art of socialist realism in the 1930s.
In this work, Redko dares to take a bold step - in the space of the picture, he connects geometric figures with portraits of Bolshevik leaders. To the right and left of Lenin are his associates - Trotsky, Krupskaya, Stalin and others. As in the icon, there is no familiar perspective here, the scale of a particular figure depends not on its distance from the viewer, but on its significance. In other words, Lenin is the most important here, and therefore the biggest. Great value Rarely gave light.
The figures seem to emit a glow, which makes the picture look like a neon sign. The artist denoted this technique with the word “cinema”. He sought to overcome the materiality of paint and drew analogies between painting and radio, electricity, cinema and even the northern lights. Thus, he actually sets himself the same tasks that icon painters set themselves many centuries ago. He plays with the schemes familiar to everyone in a new way, replacing Paradise with the socialist world, and Christ and the saints with Lenin and his henchmen. The purpose of Redko's work is the deification and sacralization of the revolution.
Pavel Filonov
"Formula of the Petrograd proletariat"
The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat was written during the civil war. In the center of the picture is a worker, whose majestic figure towers over a barely visible city. The composition of the painting is built on tense rhythms, creating a feeling of seething and growing movement. All the iconic symbols of the proletariat are captured here, for example, giant human hands - an instrument for transforming the world. At the same time, this is not just a picture, but a generalizing formula that reflects the Universe. Filonov seems to split the world down to the smallest atoms and immediately puts it together, simultaneously looking through both a telescope and a microscope.
The experience of participating in great and at the same time monstrous historical events (the First World War and the revolution) had a huge impact on the artist's work. The people in Filonov's paintings are crushed in the meat grinder of history. His works are difficult to perceive, sometimes painful - the painter endlessly splits the whole, sometimes bringing it to the level of a kaleidoscope. The viewer constantly has to keep in mind all the fragments of the picture in order to eventually catch a holistic image. Filonov's world is the world of the collective body, the world of the concept of "we" put forward by the era, where the private and the personal are abolished. The artist himself considered himself a spokesman for the ideas of the proletariat, and called the collective body, which is always present in his paintings, "the heyday of the world." However, it is possible that even against the will of the author, his "we" is filled with deep horror. In the work of Filonov, the new world appears as a bleak and terrible place where the dead penetrates into the living. The works of the painter reflected not so much contemporary events as a premonition of future horrors totalitarian regime, repression.
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
"Petrograd Madonna"
Another name for this painting is "1918 in Petrograd". In the foreground is a young mother with a baby in her arms, in the background - a city where the revolution has just died down - and its inhabitants are getting used to new life and power. The painting resembles either an icon or a fresco by an Italian Renaissance master.
Petrov-Vodkin interpreted the new era in the context of the new fate of Russia, but with his work he did not seek to completely destroy the entire old world and build a new one on its ruins. He drew plots for paintings in everyday life, but he takes the form for them from past eras. If medieval artists dressed biblical heroes in modern clothes in order to bring them closer to their time, then Petrov-Vodkin does exactly the opposite. He depicts a resident of Petrograd in the image of the Mother of God in order to give the ordinary, everyday plot an unusual significance and, at the same time, timelessness and universality.
Kazimir Malevich
"Peasant's Head"
Kazimir Malevich came to the revolutionary events of 1917 as an accomplished master, who had gone from impressionism, neo-primitivism to his own discovery - Suprematism. Malevich took the revolution ideologically; new people and propagandists of the Suprematist faith were to become members of the UNOVIS art group (“Affirmatives of the New Art”), who wore a bandage in the form of a black square on their sleeves. According to the painter, in the changed world, art had to create its own state and its own world order. The revolution made it possible for avant-garde artists to rewrite all past and future history in such a way as to occupy a central place in it. I must say that in many ways they succeeded, because the art of the avant-garde is one of the main visiting cards of Russia. Despite the programmatic rejection of the pictorial form as obsolete, in the second half of the 1920s the artist turned to figurativeness. He creates works of the peasant cycle, but dates them to 1908-1912. (that is, the period before the "Black Square"), so the rejection of non-objectivity does not look here as a betrayal of one's own ideals. Since this cycle is partly a hoax, the artist appears as a prophet who anticipates future popular unrest and revolution. One of the most noticeable features of this period of his work was the impersonality of people. Instead of faces and heads, their bodies are crowned with red, black and white ovals. From these figures comes, on the one hand, incredible tragedy, on the other, abstract grandeur and heroism. The “Head of a Peasant” resembles sacred images, for example, the icon “Savior the Fiery Eye”. Thus, Malevich creates a new "post-Suprematist icon".
Boris Kustodiev
"Bolshevik"
The name of Boris Kustodiev is associated primarily with bright, colorful paintings depicting the life of the merchants and idyllic festive festivities with characteristic Russian scenes. However, after the coup, the artist turned to revolutionary themes. The painting "Bolshevik" depicts a gigantic peasant in felt boots, a sheepskin coat and a hat; behind him, filling the whole sky, flutters the red banner of the revolution. With a giant step, he passes through the city, and far below, numerous people are swarming. The picture has a sharp poster expressiveness and speaks to the viewer in a very pretentious, direct and even somewhat rude symbolic language. The peasant is, of course, the revolution itself, bursting into the streets. Nothing can stop her, there is no hiding from her, and she will eventually crush and destroy everything in her path.
Kustodiev, despite the grandiose changes in the art world, remained true to its already archaic pictorialism at that time. But, oddly enough, the aesthetics of merchant Russia organically adapted to the needs of the new class. He replaced the recognizable Russian woman with a samovar, symbolizing the Russian way of life, with an equally recognizable man in a padded jacket - a kind of Pugachev. The fact is that in the first and second cases, the artist uses images-symbols that are understandable to anyone.
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the III International
Tatlin came up with the idea of the tower back in 1918. It was to become a symbol of the new relationship between art and the state. A year later, the artist managed to get an order for the construction of this utopian building. However, she was destined to remain unfulfilled. Tatlin planned to build a 400-meter tower, which would consist of three glass volumes rotating at different speeds. Outside, they were supposed to encircle two giant spirals of metal. main idea of the monument was in dynamics, which corresponded to the spirit of the time. In each of the volumes, the artist intended to place premises for the "three powers" - legislative, public and informational. Its shape resembles the famous Tower of Babel from the painting by Pieter Brueghel - only Tatlin's tower, unlike the Tower of Babel, was supposed to serve as a symbol of the reunification of mankind after the world revolution, whose offensive everyone was so eagerly waiting for in the first years of Soviet power.
Gustav Klutsis
"Electrification of the whole country"
Constructivism, with more enthusiasm than other avant-garde movements, took responsibility for the rhetoric and aesthetics of power. Bright to that An example is the photo montage of the constructivist Gustav Klutsis, who combined the two most recognizable languages of the era - geometric constructions and the leader's face. Here, as in many works of the 1920s, it is not the real picture of the world that is reflected, but the organization of reality through the eyes of the artist. The goal is not to show this or that event, but to show how the viewer should perceive this event.
Photography played a huge role in the state propaganda of that time, and photomontage was an ideal means of influencing the masses, a product that in the new world was to replace painting. Unlike the same picture, it can be reproduced countless times, placed in a magazine or on a poster, and thus conveyed to a huge audience. Soviet montage is created for the sake of mass reproduction, man-made here is abolished by a huge circulation. Socialist art excludes the concept of uniqueness, it is nothing more than a factory for the production of things and very specific ideas that must be assimilated by the masses.
David Shterenberg
"Curdled milk"
David Shterenberg, although he was a commissar, was not a radical in art. He realized his minimalist decorative style primarily in still lifes. The main technique of the artist is a tabletop slightly upturned vertically with flat objects on it. Bright, decorative, very applicative and fundamentally "superficial" still lifes were perceived in Soviet Russia as truly revolutionary, overturning the old way of life. However, the ultimate flatness here is combined with incredible tactility - almost always painting imitates a particular texture or material. Pictures depicting modest, and sometimes meager food, show the modest, and sometimes meager diet of the proletarians. Shterenberg places the main emphasis on the form of the table, which in a certain sense becomes a reflection of the culture of the cafe with its openness and exposure to the show. The loud and pathetic slogans of a new way of life captured the artist much less.
Alexander Deineka
"Defense of Petrograd"
The painting is divided into two tiers. The lower one depicts fighters briskly marching to the front, and the wounded returning from the battlefield at the top. Deineka uses the technique of reverse movement - first the action develops from left to right, and then from right to left, which creates a feeling of a cyclical composition. Full of determination, male and female figures are written out powerfully and very voluminously. They personify the readiness of the proletariat to go to the end, no matter how long it takes - since the composition of the picture is closed, it seems that the flow of people going to the front and returning
with him, does not dry out. In the hard, inexorable rhythm of the work, the heroic spirit of the era is expressed and the pathos of the civil war is romanticized.