Malevich scorned Tatlin, accusing him of having a “narrow view” and maintaining that “iron blocks Tatlin’s horizon.” Tatlin responded in kind.
That war for spheres of influence was not limited to ideological clashes. Before the opening of a show at Dobychina’s Artistic Bureau, the broad-shouldered Malevich and the agile giant Tatlin actually came to blows. Shows of the avant-gardists in Petrograd were becoming more like happenings at every occasion, but this soon-to-be-legendary fist fight contributed overwhelmingly to the overall theatrical nature of the event.
The ivory tower did not attract the Russian avant-gardists; they always thought of the potential audience and considered its possible reactions. That may be why attempts to reconstruct
The burning desire of the Russian avant-garde to conquer a mass audience took on religious overtones. Their proselytizing left its mark even on their appearance: “Malevich looked like a hermit, Tatlin, a martyr, and Filonov, an apostle.”66 Their activity was a tightly woven combination of creative enlightenment and pragmatic calculation, mysticism and scholarly reckoning, utopian ideas and striving for immediate changes in daily life. They were all interested in the study of the “fourth dimension,” a mystical “new reality,” the quest for which became fashionable after the publication in Petersburg of two books by the Russian theosophist P. D. Ouspensky,
In May 1913 Malevich wrote to Matiushin that he could see a time “when big cities and the studios of contemporary artists would be held up on huge Zeppelins.”67 In 1917 he casually informed Matiushin, “back in the summer I proclaimed myself chairman of space.”68 Therefore, it is not surprising that many avant-gardists hailed the Communist revolution, thinking it would clear the way for the realization of their radical ideas.
For all that, most of the leaders of the new Russian art had little interest in the social and economic aspects of the Russian Revolution. They were primarily concerned with artistic and moral issues, and the liberating promise of the revolution. Punin later recalled with bitter irony, “We imagined art autonomous of the state, perhaps even a dictatorship of art over the government.” The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, agreed to cooperate with the avant-garde only out of practical considerations. Most of the major art figures of a traditional orientation had emigrated or tried to sabotage the new regime. Someone had to run the enormous cultural empire that the Bolsheviks had inherited from old Russia. People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky intoned, “The work of protecting the palaces and museums, definitively passed on to the people, must not be put off.”69
Zheverzheyev was one of the first respected art figures of the capital to cooperate with the new regime. The Bolsheviks nationalized his enormous theater collection but named him its curator. Early in 1917 Zheverzheyev headed the Left Bloc of the Petrograd Union of the Arts. Its members included Mayakovsky, Punin, Meyerhold, and Nathan Altman. After the Bolshevik revolution they took top positions in the new apparatus for managing culture, and naturally did not forget Zheverzheyev.
Here is one of many examples. In 1918 Zheverzheyev applied to the state publishing house with a request to publish a manuscript on African art by the artist and art historian Vladimir Markov (pseudonym of the Latvian Voldemar Matvejs), who had died young. Markov was one of the most active members of the Union of Youth, which formally ceased to exist some years before the revolution but which, in Punin’s words, still stood as a landmark over Petrograd.
