Natasha's Dance полностью

Yet there was also the Utopian faith that a new culture would be built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was entirely purged of historical and national elements. This 'Soviet culture' would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian. There would be a proletarian philosophy, proletarian science and proletarian arts. Under the influence of such ideas, experimental forms of art appeared. There were films without professional actors (using 'types' selected from the streets), orchestras without conductors and 'concerts in the factory', with sirens, whistles, hooters, spoons and washboards as the instruments. Shostakovich (perhaps with tongue in cheek) introduced the sound of factory whistles in the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October') in 1927.

But was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? How could one have a 'proletarian culture', or a 'proletarian intelligentsia', unless the proletariat was first educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? And if they were so educated, would they, or their culture, still be proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not expect to build their new culture entirely from scratch and that, however Utopian their plans, much of their work would consist of educating workers in the old culture. After 1921, once the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was assured, official policy encouraged something of a rapprochement with the 'petty-bourgeois' (that is, peasant and small-trading) sector and what remained of the intelligentsia, through the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters, had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. He once confessed to Klara Zetkin, the German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics were firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution's task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. As he put it to Zetkin, 'We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it

as a starting point, even if it is "old". Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is "old"? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is "new"?'³⁶

But pressure on the Proletkult came from below as well as above. Most of the workers who visited its clubs wanted to learn French, or how to dance in pairs; they wanted to become, as they put it, more 'kul'turny' ('cultured'), by which they understood more 'refined'. In their habits and artistic taste, the Russian masses appeared to be resistant to the experiments of the avant-garde. There was little real enthusiasm for communal housing, which never escaped its associations with grim necessity. Even the inhabitants of commune houses rarely used their social space: they would take their meals from the canteen to their beds rather than eat them in the communal dining room.³⁷ In the Moscow Soviet's model commune house, built in 1930, the residents put up icons and calendars of saints on the dormitory walls.³⁸ The unlifelike images of the avant-garde were just as alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with the visual arts was based on the icon. Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Chagall was asked by local officials: 'Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What's the connection with Marx and Engels?'³⁹ Surveys of popular reading habits in the 192Os show that the workers continued to prefer the adventure stories of the sort they had read before 1917, and even the nineteenth-century classics, to the 'proletarian poetry' of the avant-garde.⁴⁰ Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one 'concert in the factory' there was such a cacophonous din from all the sirens and the hooters that even the workers failed to recognize the tune of what was meant to be the anthem of their proletarian civilization: it was the Internationale.⁴¹

'For us the most important of all the arts is cinema,' Lenin is reported to have said.⁴² He valued film above all for its propaganda role. In a country such as Russia, where in 1920 only two out of every five adults could read,⁴³ the moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party's reach to the remote countryside, where makeshift