Light in captivity: Spectacular glass and soviet power in the 1920s and 1930s

Slavic Review

Volumn 66, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 82-105

  Chadaga, Julia Bekman ^a  

^a MACALESTER COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35848959458     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20060148     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. See M. Gor'kii, "Pozhary," Sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh (Moscow, 1951), 15; 143-44. The Journal was published in 1942; Gor'kii dates the story to 1922.
2. Although I consider the evolution of light imagery over several decades, my main goal is not to establish causality; I am primarily interested in tracing the manifestations of the discourse concerning light in written and visual sources as well as exploring the creation of the light-producing objects that themselves generated such discourses. For a broader historical framework within which to view the evolution of light imagery discussed in this study, as well as a compelling approach to the interpretation of visual propaganda, see Victoria Bonnell, The Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997).
3. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, 1995), 1:3.
4. For example, see James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley, 1993)
5. and Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000).
6. Recently, Jeffrey Brooks has written about the "performative culture" of the Stalin era - the period in which the Kremlin stars were created - when the Soviet leadership "employed rituals of theater to draw citizens into public displays of support." Brooks shows how the print media created a space for Stalin to "display himself and the new order he claimed to have created, an omnipresent magic theater in which all active participants in Soviet public life acquired ancillary roles." Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2001), xvi.
7. Richard Stites, "The Origins of Soviet Ritual Style," in Claes Arvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist, eds., Symbols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Stockholm, 1987).
8. The Church of the Annunciation and the Church of the Savior in the Wood - the oldest church in Moscow - were destroyed in 1932 and 1933, respectively. Both were located in the Kremlin. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, situated half a kilometer from the Kremlin, was destroyed in 1931. See Timothy Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 260-62 and 268.
9. As expressionist artist Paul Scheerbart put it in 1914, "Glass architecture makes homes into cathedrals, with the same effects." Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, trans. James Palmes, ed. Dennis Sharp (New York, 1972), 72.
10. People living in glass houses would undergo a moral regeneration. See also the extensive use of glass architecture in Velimir Khlebnikov's "Projects for the Future," Tvoreniia, ed. M. Ia. Poliakov (Moscow, 1986), 119, as well as a skeptical view of a glass-based utopia in Eygenii Zamiatin's novel We.
11. Constructivist architects drew an explicit connection between glass and good health in the article "Steklo v sovremennoi arkhitekture," Sovremennaia arkhitektura 3 (1926): 63.
12. Frederick Starr documents Konstantin Mel'nikov's strategic use of glass to expose the human body to the sun in Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton, 1978), 177.
13. El Lissitzky attributed symbolic values to modern construction materials: "Iron is strong, like the will of the proletariat. Glass is clear, like its conscience." El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution,
14. quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, 1983), 65.
15. Such associations informed the design of the glass chambers in Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. See Nikolai Punin, "Pamiatnik III Internatsionala" (originally published in 1920), O Tatline (Moscow, 1994), 21.
16. Other spectacular glass objects included Vladimir Lenin's sarcophagus, the spire of Moscow State University, and the columns inside Avtovo Station in the St. Petersburg metro.
17. See the essay "Lenin's Light Bulb" by Diane P. Koenker, as well as the accompanying photograph of a peasant woman looking on as electric light is installed in her hut, in Peter Fritzsche and Charles Stewart, eds., Imagining the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1997), 30. Another photograph from the period shows a rural couple trying out electric light for the first time. They gaze upward as the man switches on the light; the woman smiles and looks up at the bulb with wonder, while the expression in the man's eyes is rather more ambivalent.
18. See Ian Grey, The Horizon History of Russia (New York, 1970), 361.
19. "Over a bright and free world ... the Red Army star shines with an international light. Its inextinguishable rays show scarlet through the fog, and the workers of the world walk toward it as pilgrims once did." As Ivan Esaulov points out, what is notable here is that the Christian star is replaced by the Bolshevik star, an "'antistar' shining in a peculiar anti-Christian world." See Ivan Esaulov, "Sotsrealizm i religioznoe soznanie," in Hans Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 51.
20. The poster is reproduced in Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, 1988), 48 (plate 3.10). I am grateful to John Malmstad for bringing this poster to my attention.
21. See Olga Velikanova, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Göttingen, 1996), 104. The Maiakovskii quotation is from V. V. Maiakovskii, "Vladimir Il'ich Lenin," Stikhotvoreniia. Poemy. Proza (Moscow, 2000), 368.
22. Here I am following Nina Tumarkin's definition of the Lenin cult as the organized system of veneration around the leader. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 80-87.
23. Cited in Andrei Kotyrev, Mavzolei V. I. Lenina: Proektirovanie i stroitel'stvo (Moscow, 1971), 18. The words of the Soviet state anthem (1944) continue the Lenin-as-light motif: "The sun of freedom shone to us through the storms, and great Lenin lit the way for us."
24. One poem refers to Lenin as "another heavenly body ... the second sun of our days, our little earthly sun." Egor Nechaev, "Velikomu vozhdiu," 1922. Another calls him "our red sun." Vasilii Kamenskii, "Lenin - nashe bessmertie," 1924.
25. Both poems appear in P. B. Val'be, ed., Lenin v sovetskoi poezii (Leningrad, 1970), 100 and 120, respectively. A slogan from 1924 states: "Lenin is the sun of the future." Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 84.
26. Indeed, the sun was a sacred symbol for the Russian peasantry. The popularity of the sun as a visual motif in Russian peasant art can help to explain why this association was propagated in images of Lenin meant to appeal to large sectors of the Russian population. On the reasons for the centrality of the sun in peasant artwork, see Anthony Netting, "Images and Ideas in Russian Peasant Art," Slavic Review 35, no. I (March 1976): 53 -54.
27. R. Ia. Abolina, Lenin v sovetskom izobrazitel'nom iskusstve (Moscow, 1975), 44.
28. The inventor Pavel lablochkov devised the electric street lamps that illuminated Paris and London in the 1870s and 1890s; as Loren Graham recounts, lablochkov's lamps were acclaimed in western Europe, but he was unable to duplicate his success when he returned to Russia, and "the major cities of the Russian Empire were eventually electrified by foreigners."
29. See Graham, "The Fits and Starts of Russian and Soviet Technology," in James P. Scanlan, ed., Technology, Culture, and Development: The Experience of the Soviet Model (Armonk, MY, 1992), 16.
30. See also the illustration in M. Déribéré, Préhistoirie et histoire de la lumière (Paris, 1979), 257.
31. In his writings, Lenin argued that the wholesale electrification of Russia was the crucial step in creating an industrial base for the new socialist society, as well as in overhauling the agricultural system. See I. P. Verkhovtsev, ed., Svet nad Rossiei: Ocherki Po istorii elektrifikatsii SSSR (Moscow, 1960), 6-7.
32. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 48-49.
33. Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 58.
34. Verkhovtsev, ed., Svet nad Rossiei, 310. On 14 November 1955, the front page of Leningradskaia pravda reported that the village of Kashino was celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Lenin's visit and referred to Kashino as "the birthplace of 'Lenin's little lamp.'" "Tam, gde vpervye zazhglas' 'lampochka Il'icha,'" Leningradskaia pravda, 14 November 1955.
35. See also V Iu. Steklov, V. I. Lenin i elektrifikatsiia (Moscow, 1975), 226-29.
36. M. Isakovskii, "Vdol' derevni," in I. A. Shvedov, comp., Poet sovetskaia strana (Moscow, 1962), 97. Isakovskii's frequent collaborator V. Zakharov set the poem to music. I am grateful to Valerii and Larisa Bekman for bringing this song to my attention.
37. Quoted in Pavel Belitskii, "Poet, vernuvshii pesniu: K 100-letiiu Mikhaila Isakovskogo," Nezavisimaia gazeta, no. 8 (19 January 2000).
38. "Daite sointse noch'iu! Gde naidesh' ego? Pokupai v GUMe - oslepitel'no i deshevo." The poster is reproduced in Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Rodchenko: The Complete Work, intro. and ed. Vieri Quilici (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 149.
39. Quoted in Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, N.Y., 1990), 164. I am grateful to Polina Rikoun for this reference.
40. See Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 120.
41. Stalin came to appropriate the luminous aspect (among others) of the Lenin cult. Starting in the late 1920s, literature and particularly folklore praised Stalin in metaphorical language that invoked light or the sun. See examples in Jan Plamper, "The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles around Stalin," in Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle, 2003), 25-27.
42. The fact that the smaller, darker profile of Stalin is placed inside the larger, lighter profile of Lenin may have been an additional cause for concern.
43. Alexander Zakharov, "Mass Celebrations in a Totalitarian System," in Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich, eds. and trans., Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago, 1993), 210.
44. "'Lenies little lamp' is a phrase that has spread throughout the country and has become an expression of the people's gratitude to their great leader for his tireless energy in reconstructing the entire national economy on the basis of electrification and for his concern for the people's well-being." Verkhovtsev, ed., Svet nad Rossiei, 310.
45. A 1963 poem by Andrei Voznesenskii continues the tradition; describing a visit to Lenin's mausoleum, Voznesenskii refers to the leader's "transparent brow blaz[ing] like a lamp" (prozrachnoe chelo gorit lampoobrazno). Voznesenskii, "Lonzhiumo," in Val'be, ed., Lenin v sovetskoi poezii, 665.
46. Mikhail Zoshchenko, "Elektrifikatsiia," in M. Z. Dolinskii, ed., Uvazhaemye grazhdane (Moscow, 1991), 221; originally published in Krasnyi voron, no. 17 (1924).
47. Thus, the landlady cuts the wires only in her own room and insists on living in darkness and filth "as before" even after the narrator offers to repair her room "practically for free"; in case any ambiguity remains, a character not present in the first version calls her a "degenerate petite bourgeois." In the feuilleton, the narrator resigns himself to living in the apartment sans electric light; by contrast, in the revised version the narrator declares: "I am living by electric light i pri elektricheskoi lampochke] and am extremely satisfied." Mikhail Zoshchenko, "Bednost'" Rasskazy, fel'etony, povesti (Moscow, 1958), 29.
48. Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme d'une chandelle (Paris, 1961), 3;
49. cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, 1988), 29.
50. See Mikhail Zoshchenko, "Malen'kaia khitrost," Povesti i rasskazy (New York, 1952), 319-20.
51. For a translation, see "A Clever Little Trick," in Hugh McLean, ed., Nervous People and Other Satires, trans. Maria Gordon and Hugh McLean (Bloomington, 1975), 176-78. I have slightly revised this translation.
52. Moskovskii bol'shevik, 9 April 1948, cited in Verkhovtsev, ed., Svet nad Rossiei, 311. By contrast, the narrator of Zoshchenko's "Clever Little Trick" admits that the bright electric light in his apartment has dulled his ability to think: "golova u menia slabee rabotaet."
53. In a still later edition (1965), it received the neutral title "Lenin's Little Lamp." These dates are cited in Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). According to Seifrid, this story and others including "The Motherland of Electricity" were "conceived at least provisionally as contributions to that body of Soviet literature devoted to ... 'socialist industrialization and the 'struggle for the socialist transformation of the countryside' that had appeared after the civil war in response to the Party's campaign for electrification and industrialization" (60-61).
54. Andrei Platonov, "O potukhshei lampochke Il'icha," Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1998), 1:327.
55. Ibid., 1: 331.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 1:332.
58. Ibid., 1:332-33.
59. Ibid., 1:334.
60. For broader discussions of light and optical imagery in Iurii Olesha, see Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (New York, 1970);
61. Marietta Chudakova, Masterstvo, Iuriia Oleshi (Moscow, 1972);
62. Kazimiera Ingdahl, The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study of Jurij Oleša's Novel Zavist' (Stockholm, 1984);
63. and Nils Ake Nilsson, "Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An Introduction to Jurij Olesha," Scando-Slavica 11 (1965): 40-68.
64. Yuri Olesha, Envy, in Clarence Brown, ed., The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (New York, 1985), 251.
65. For the original, see Iu. K Olesha, "Zavist'," Ni dnia bez strochki (Minsk, 1982), 4.
66. The notion of Kavalerov's conflict with the "men of action" is developed in detail by Janet G. Tucker in Revolution Betrayed: Jurij Olesa's Envy (Columbus, 1996).
67. Not only is this a central image in Envy, but the image also appears literally at the center of the book - Olesha places it in chapter 3 of part 2, roughly halfway through the novel.
68. Olesha, Envy, 326. This translation has been revised.
69. For the original, see Olesha, Zavist', 64.
70. Eliot Borenstein aptly characterizes Envy as a cautionary tale about overly orthodox reading strategies. See Borenstein, "Defying Interpretation: Allegory and Ideology in Jurij Oleša's Envy," Russian Literature 49, no. 1 (2001): 25-42. Thus, one should be careful about accepting at face value any interpretation that Envy offers, whether voiced by one of the characters or by the narrator in part 2.
71. During the interrogation sequence, Ivan uses such phrases as "peaceful revolt," "peaceful demonstration of feelings," and, in a draft, "shock troop of feelings," As Ingdahl points out, such expressions "parody the code of the Revolution." Ingdahl, Artist and the Creative Act, 84. This suggests that there are other potentially parodic moments in the interrogation sequence.
72. Writing of his visit to Moscow during the New Economic Policy, Walter Benjamin mentions the hourly power outages and the flickering light of Soviet lamps. See Benjamin, "Moscow," Reflections: Essays. Aphorisms. Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 110.
73. Velikanova's statistics illustrate the remarkable growth of the Lenin cult in publishing in the years when Olesha was working on the novel, especially 1924-25. Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 156-57.
74. In this novel structured by oppositions, the burned-out bulb appears as a counter-image to the hundred-watt bulb, a garish emblem of the technological and aesthetic triumph of the new world that illuminates Andrei and his cronies as they feast on his brand-new sausage. Olesha, Zavist', 23.
75. For a reading of this scene as Olesha's attack on the officially sanctioned art of his time, see Rimgaila Salys, "Sausage Rococo: The Art of Tiepolo in Olesha's Envy," in Salys, ed., Olesha's Envy: A Critical Companion (Evanston, 1999).
76. Cited in Igor Sukhikh, "Ostaetsia tol'ko metafora ... 1927. 'Zavist' Iurii Oleshi," Zvezda 10 (2002): 224, emphasis added.
77. The final light source in Olesha's novel is a wood splinter (luchina), a traditional torch for peasant huts that the electric bulb was meant to drive out; hence the agit-prop slogan: "We used to have the splinter and the candle, but now we'll have Lenin's lamp" (Byla luchina i svecha, a teper' budet lampa Il'icha). Cited in V. M. Mokienko, Tolkovyi slovar' iazyka Sovdepii (St. Petersburg, 1998), 307. An article in Bednota reports that the peasants of the village Berezova have installed electric lighting in all the huts, which had only recently been illuminated by wood splinters alone.
78. The article ends with the confident prediction that soon all of Soviet Russia will be bathed in powerful electric light - "the symbol of our new life." S. Grigor'ev, "Elektrichestvo v derevne," Bednota, 14 November 1920.
79. Iurii Olesha, "Zagovor chuvstv," P'esy. Stat'i o teatre i dramaturgii (Moscow, 1968), 83.
80. Olesha, "Avtor o svoei p'ese," P'esy, 261.
81. M. A. Topolin, Kremlevskie zvezdy (Moscow, 1975), 40.
82. Ibid., 42.
83. The following account is based on coverage in Pravda, 10, 11, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 28 October 1935 and Topolin, Kremlevskie zvezdy, 16-22.
84. The red star became the official emblem of the Red Army in April 1918 and was made into a badge to be worn on the breast; in July of that year, the new constitution incorporated the red star into the state coat of arms, and by the end of the year the star was made part of the Soviet flag. See Stites, "Origins of Soviet Ritual Style," and Maria Gough, "Switched On: Notes on Radio, Automata, and the Bright Red Star," in Leah Dickerman, ed., Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design 1917-1937 (New York, 1996), 40.
85. For interpretations of the red star as symbol, see V. V. Pokhlebkin, Slovar' mezhdunarodnoi simvoliki i emblematiki (Moscow, 1994), 209-11.
86. In July 1935, Stalin publicized his Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. The decree to make the first set of stars was issued just a few months later. See the remarkable album with commentary by Viktor Shklovskii, Moskva rekonstruiruetsia: Al'bom diagram, toposkhem i fotografii po rekonstruktsii gor. Moskvy (Moscow, 1938).
87. Topolin, Kremlevskie zvezdy, 18.
88. These included "wondrous amethysts, smoky topazes, aquamarines, chrysolites, berylliums, and transparent rock crystal." Pravda, 11 October 1935, 6.
89. Topolin, Kremlevskie zvezdy, 19.