Invisible Avant-Garde and Absent Revolution: Walter Benjamin’s New Optics for Moscow Urban Space of the 1920s

Abstract

Walter Benjamin spent the fall and winter of 1926-1927 in Moscow. His experience and observations were recorded in “Moscow Diary” and essay “Moscow” (1927). In the present paper, the author refers to the latter text, in which Benjamin reflected on the space of Soviet capital that was undergoing severe transition. Without even mentioning Avant-garde architecture that was being constructed in his presence and that was transforming the living space of the new state on all levels, Benjamin left deep analyses of Moscow's post-revolutionary urban constitution, revealed its nature, and predicted its future. Benjamin came to Moscow to observe the Revolution in action, but could not find it. Instead, he saw Constructivism as already dismissed. While recording those huge transformations that he witnessed during his stay, Benjamin had not described them either in terms of new functionalist architecture, or through the reflection on demolition of Empire's architectural symbols. He turned to other features and spatial dimensions that were not directly related to any particular architecture, such as mobility, rhythm, aura and through which he fully revealed reformation of Moscow space that was initiated by functionalists and supported by the new regime. The “Moscow” essay along with another text that I refer to, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), enable for deeper analyses of Avant-garde aesthetics, of its origin, development and end, which is the major objective of the present article.

Full text

Теория искусства
575
УДК: 72.036
ББК: 85.11085.118
А43
DOI: 10.18688/aa188-6-56
Irina Seits
Invisible Avant-Garde and Absent Revolution:
Walter Benjamin’s New Optics for Moscow Urban Space
of the 1920s
Walter Benjamin spent the fall and winter of 1926–1927in Moscow. His experience and
observations were recorded in “Moscow Diary” [2] and essay “Moscow” (1927). In the present
paper I refer to the latter text, where Benjamin reected on the space of the Soviet state capital
that was undergoing severe transition. Without even mentioning avant-garde architecture that
was being constructed in his presence to transform the new state’s living space on all levels,
Benjamin le deep analysis of Moscow’s post-revolutionary urban constitution, revealed its
nature, and predicted its future.
While recording those vast transformations that he had witnessed during his stay, Benjamin
described them neither in terms of the new functionalist architecture, nor through reections
on demolition of Empire’s architectural symbols. He turned to other features and spatial
dimensions that were not directly related to any particular architecture, such as mobility,
rhythm, aura, and through which he fully revealed the reformation of Moscow space that was
initiated by functionalists under support by the new regime.
e “Moscow” [4] essay, along with another text that I refer to, “Experience and Poverty”
(1933)[5], enables for the deeper analysis of Avant-garde aesthetics, of its origin, development,
and end, and which is the major objective of the present article.
e Essay “Moscow” that is taken here for closer reading is based on the “Moscow Diary”
that Benjamin wrote during his stay in the new capital in December 1926and January 1927.
His immediate impressions and experiences along with highly complicated relationship with
Asja Lacis, the lover and, later, the wife of Benjamin’s friend, Bernhard Reich, the Austrian
playwright, were recorded in the diary that was rst published in Germany only in 1980, aer
Asja’s death in Russia [1]. e Essay “Moscow” was written by Benjamin for “Die Kreatur”
journal as part of his agreement with Buber that was made before he went to Moscow [17, p. 83].
e rst English edition of the “Moscow” essay, where the hardships of Benjamin’s private life
were set aside to give full way to his reections on Moscow as urban and spatial phenomenon,
was rst published in 1978[7].
e interest to the works by Benjamin has been rising tremendously through the last
decade, yet the present article introduces an attempt to take the “Moscow” essay to the close
reading with an idea to restore and analyse the urban space of the new Soviet capital of the
late 1920s. Here the original text becomes a tool and the spectacles that are borrowed from

Irina Seits
576
an “attentive viewer” [4, p. 22] in order to reect on the transformations in the living space of
Moscow in the decade between the Revolution and the followed totalitarisation of the state.
ose are Benjamin’s precise remarks and observations that allow for deeper reection on the
further destiny of modernism in Russia and globally, which, together with his genius ability to
grasp the concrete, opens up to analysis of the urban space produced in that era [3].
Invisible Revolution and Resistance to Avant-Garde
e period of Benjamin’s visit to Moscow is still the era of Constructivism in architecture,
and yet Benjamin discovers that “constructivists, suprematists, abstractionists who under War
Communism placed their graphic propaganda at the service of the Revolution have long since
been dismissed” [4, p. 39]. Even though the ocial abandonment happened only 5years later,
aer the declaration of the course towards socialist realism, Benjamin had already noticed that
there was no space for the voice of constructivism on Moscow streets.
Although the most famous objects of Avant-garde were yet to come, at the time of
Benjamin’s stay there, Moscow was a huge construction site, where a number of housing estates
(“zhilmassivs”), factory-kitchens, administrative buildings, trade houses, garages and industrial
objects were being constructed [9].
Still, neither the general constructivist practice, nor the masterpieces of Avant-garde that
continued appearing in the Soviet capital till the mid-thirties, had turned Moscow to the city
of modernism. Brilliant pieces of Avant-garde remained the islands on the city’s body, but
they failed neither to penetrate its very nature nor to transform its absolute urban space [14].
Moscow remained outlined by the architecture of the pre-revolutionary ages on one side, and
by the architectural embodiments of the Socialist realism on the other [13].
Even today there are not many monuments of Avant-garde that stand as architectural
symbols of Moscow. One can imagine Melnikov’s house and workers’ clubs by Rusakov and
Golosov located anywhere, not precisely in Moscow. Most people who are familiar with images
of Russia will name Moscow if shown the pictures of Kremlin or St. Basil’s Cathedral. But how
many would do so, if given an image of one of the constructivist gems? ere are hardly any
Avant-garde masterpieces that symbolise Moscow [10].
Yet those are the “Seven Sisters” born in the followed era of Socialist realism that represent
Russian capital along with Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, and which are perceived as
Moscow brand images. Stalin’s neo-classicism is more characteristic to the portrait of Moscow,
than constructivist dom-kommunas and workers’ clubs.
One could argue for the Lenin’s Mausoleum that was built in the Avant-garde decade
(1929–1930) by AlexanderShchusev as for one of the most prominent and symbolic buildings
of Moscow. Yet Mausoleum stands for the memory of all Soviet ideology, rather than for
the modernist aesthetics. It is inseparable from the Red Square and Kremlin wall behind it.
Mausoleum represents not a piece of constructivist architecture (and it is hardly ever referred
to as to a work of constructivism), but it is the Soviet Temple, a sacral building, which does
not manifest its Avant-garde nature, but serves as Temple for the God of the Soviets. e
architecture of Mausoleum is not more Avant-garde than that of Egyptian pyramids, which are
pure and elementary in their forms and which merge entirely with their function— to be the
tomb of the Pharaoh’s body.

Теория искусства
577
Shchusev found the only acceptable form for the tomb that was beyond time and style;
it preserved grandeur and sacristy of petried space and its content— the Lenin’s body. e
forms of the Mausoleum are neither modernist, nor contemporary— the are timeless. Benjamin
notices that Lenin’s name “grows and grows” aer his death [4, p. 45]. e cult of Lenin becomes
an icon: “One nds shops in which it can be bought in all sizes, poses, and materials. It stands as
a bust in the Lenin niches, as a bronze statue or a relief in the larger clubs, as a life-size portrait
in oces, as a small photo in the kitchens, washrooms, and storage rooms” [4, p. 45].
Lenin’s images replaced Orthodox icons, and his body found rest within the new church of
the Soviets. e Mausoleum was to be a building that could never look outdated. It could not
represent any temporal architectural fashion or style that could be once abandoned. It should
be disconnected from the contemporaneity and deliver itself to eternity. e architect Shchusev
had built nearly forty Christian churches before the Revolution; later he adjusted his practice
to the Avant-garde aesthetics and designed some bright examples of constructivism. Aer the
prohibition of Avant-garde, he became a successful architect of Socialist realism. Shchusev had
a feeling and skill to design a piece of sacral architecture that would be impossible to remove
from the Red Square even aer the change of the regime. Lenin’s Mausoleum is hardly a work
of Avant-garde despite of the clarity and simplicity of its forms. It is in this denial of connection
to the immediate space and time, to the beat of the days, which Moisey Ginsburg dened as one
of the major features of constructivism [11], where Shchusev broke up with modernity.
Shchusev managed to overcome the opposition between space and history that was
mentioned by Benjamin regarding the image of Lenin: “…in the optics of history— opposite
in this to that of space— movement into the distance means enlargement” [4, p. 45]. e tomb
gives architectural forms to the memory of Lenin and to his image, and it has grown along with
his name.
Post-Revolutionary architecture in Russia is the most immediate architecture; it requires
not the contemplation but immediate experience of its space, forms and rhythms. Inhumanly
intensied mobility of life demanded for the immense mobility of architecture and the
living space that it produced. Benjamin notices in his essay the “unconditional readiness for
mobilisation” [4, p. 1] of Moscow population. Everything moves and changes, everything and
everybody are involved into certain transition of practices and meanings. e mobility and
intensity of life possess the nature of laboratory experimentation “to the point of exhaustion”,
and “no organism, no organisation, can escape this process” [4, p. 28]. Benjamin continues
that “employees in their factories, oces in buildings, pieces of furniture in apartments are
rearranged, transferred, and shoved about” [4, p. 28–29].
e temporality of the present conditions of existence and the tense feeling of awaiting
forces people to divorce with their past and become the new barbarians, who, according to
Benjamin, are inevitable inhabitants of modernity. e demanded inhabitant of the new reality
was the “naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the
dirty diapers of the present” [5, p. 733]. A man should have returned to the very beginning of
his existence— to the barbaric state of a newborn baby, and so the architecture should have
returned to the null of its form as was proposed in the “Black Square” by Malevich.
For Benjamin Moscow is full of the barbaric sense, where “goods burst everywhere from the
houses” [5, p. 733]: they are sold in the streets, carried along, lie in the snow. One of the features

Irina Seits
578
of new barbarism is the fullness of Moscow streets that he compares to the “princely solitude,
princely desolation” that “hang over the streets of Berlin” [4, p. 23]. Aer Moscow, Berlin is a
deserted city [4, p. 23]. Barbarians, just like children, are hostile to solitude, they fear it. e old,
experienced and noble need solitude, while young, strong and inexperienced are looking for
abundance and fullness of living.
Benjamin calls Moscow that reveals the peasant origin of its new population a “gigantic
village” [4, p. 33].Fascinated by the naïve colourfulness of the cheap trade, he describes the
objects of childhood sold on the streets, such as toys and fruit. e city is returning to its pre-
urban “childhood state”: “the instant you arrive, the childhood stage begins” [5, p. 22]. One
should learn to walk anew to proceed through the streets and needs to learn seeing Moscow
in order to comprehend its colours that “converge prismatically here, at the centre of Russian
power” [4, p. 24].
Benjamin found no Revolution in the Russian capital, but only its snatches hanging over
the windows: “You need to know Russia to understand what is going on in Europe” [4, p. 22].
Moscow served as a certain prediction of what might have happened in Europe if she went
similar way. Benjamin described Moscow as “a corporation of the dying” [4, p. 27]. e city was
regarded by him as being in a state of transition from life to death, from Revolution to non-
Revolution, of being in a state of a failing Revolution.
e experimental Avant-garde space in Russia was to be inhabited necessarily with migrants,
which, as Mark Mejerovich claims, was the conscious policy of the state [15]. Majority of the
new population of the towns, where constructivists realised their projects, were people who had
been previously displaced from their original living spaces. ey could have been brought from
far away or migrate within same region, city or even apartment, which became a communal at
through the program of “uplotnenie” (tightening), but in either way they had already parted
with their previous lives [8].
e new environment forced them to migrate all the time and in all dimensions. One could
be moved from a village to a town; his profession could be changed from a farmer to a worker;
his working space of a farmer’s eld replaced with a plant; his living space of a hut substituted
with a room in kommunalka; his family outlined with random neighbours. He realised that the
pause in the row of transformations of his living was temporal and could continue any moment
with anything from imprisonment to the communist leader’s career.
Constructivists captured and aesthetically reinterpreted the temporality and fragmentation
of the new living. Most types of buildings that they developed resembled social features of
the period and were based on the type of a barrack [15]. Dom-kommuna, obschezhitie—
those were the types of dwellings that were based on transitional character of a barrack, where
sleeping cells were arranged along corridors and required collective forms of living in large
communities, which eliminated notions of traditional household, home and family. Everyday
living practices were fragmented to separate spaces that provided control over routines by
collectiveness of their nature and unavoidable publicity: meals were to be eaten in factory-
kitchens and hygienic procedures realised in collective bath-houses, etc. People were constantly
moving in and out of those constructions, possessing high level of mobilisation and mobility
that was noticed by Benjamin during his visit to Moscow.

Теория искусства
579
Concluding remarks
Benjamin does not draw any conclusions on his stay in Moscow. He leaves the reader of
his diary with the image of Lenin sitting at the table: “his gaze is turned, certainly, to the far
horizon; but the tireless care of his heart, to the moment” [4, p. 46]. Here Benjamin ends with a
denition of the living in his age, which becomes one of the hallmarks of the essay “Experience
and Poverty”, and which will be written in few years: “A total absence of illusion about the age
and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it” [5, p. 733]. e image speaks directly
on that complete disillusionment, concern and yet commitment to the age that Lenin and the
whole revolutionary Avant-garde era had ended up with before their death.
Staying in Moscow three years aer Lenin died, Benjamin found neither Revolution, nor
Avant-garde. e moment of commitment to modernity had passed, it was not present in the
Soviet capital where everyone was only digging for power “from early till late” [4, p. 36].
Benjamin feels the mourning for the lost hopes among the makers of Revolution. e death
of Lenin marked the end of the era of possibilities for the future: “For Bolsheviks, mourning for
Lenin means also mourning for Communism” [4, p. 45].
e main transformation of Moscow space was achieved through demolition of borders
between inner and outer spaces [14], between interior and exterior: “Bolshevism has abolished
private life” [4, p. 30], which disconnected living space from its traditional material frames. It
turned the living space inside out: “through the hall door, one steps into a little town” [1, p. 30].
In the presence of Benjamin, Moscow, along with the rest of the country, was going through the
collectivisation and communalisation of its space, where, as Hilde Heynen noted, the “public
openness, transparency, and permeability” became the “conditions of everyday life” [12, 119].
Yet, that process did not lead to the classless and open society; on the contrary, Benjamin
identied Communist Russia as “not only a class but also a caste state” [4, p. 35], meaning that
“the social status of a citizen is determined not only by the visible exterior of his existence— his
clothes or living place— but exclusively by his relations to the party” [4, p. 35]. ose relations
outlined the borders of penetrability through and within the space of existence. ey were
transparent and yet hard, just as sober glass praised by functionalists.
ose borders formed isolated islands that were inhabited by the members of the party
in which favour the state adjusted [15]. e party was the space where power collected and
concentrated. Benjamin noticed that party demonstratively retreated itself from money, leaving
it to the NEP-men [4, p. 35], but it was only for the time being. Benjamin recognised that new
economic policy that Soviet Russia had already accepted was fatal to the whole way of its being:
“Should the European correlation of power and money penetrate Russia, too, then perhaps not
the country, perhaps not even the party, but Communism in Russia would be lost” [4, p. 36]. e
prediction inevitably came true during Perestroika; yet in the 1930s it was the totalitarisation
of state and concentration of power and money in the hands of the party that managed to
postpone the collapse of regime for several decades [9].
Russian constructivists followed the route of the communists’ intuitive delay of their end.
ey were faking their own methods of the new space production [14]. e ribbon windows
that became the brand symbol of the method were very oen imitated on the facades due to the
shortage of glass production. at imitation, which demonstrated the lack of resources to build
the new reality bitterly symbolised the upcoming failure.

Irina Seits
580
Constructivists possessed unlimited commitment to the age, and yet they lived in illusion.
ey le oases of architecturalised illusions in Moscow, but did not manage to reform its urban
space.
Both Revolution and Avant-garde that once were allies, proved temporality of their nature.
Neither the ideal model of society nor ideal organisation of the living space was reached. It was
a global experiment that had turned the country into the huge laboratory table. e very high
level of intensity of transformations and the re-appropriation of space along with the immediacy
of its very process were characteristic to the period [14]. e new space was not only being
produced, but it was rst of all being searched for within the old milieu. As Benjamin noticed,
the new reality, intentions and practices “oen have no site of their own, being held in corners
of noisy editorial rooms, or at cleared table in a canteen” [4, p. 31].
e living experience was traumatic for majority of the Soviets in the 1920s, though not
necessarily connected to the Avant-garde experiments. Still Russian constructivism is associated
generally with its age of the rst post-revolutionary decade, and thus it carries responsibility
for all housing solutions of the time that were realised by the state authorities in the processes
of collectivisation and industrialisation [15]. e historical period of Russian Avant-garde was
lled to the brim with dramatic events that contradicted its very aesthetics. e architectural
space produced in the 1920s evokes reference to the period that apart from the brilliant
futuristic experiments is connected with the red and white terror, civil war and humanitarian
catastrophes of the post-revolutionary age [16].
Russian constructivism was born in the 1920s, and it failed to make it to the next decade.
e snatches of Avant-garde that reached our times still refer to the past; they are disconnected
from the present and thus perceived as outdated. eir aura is very decently felt by general
public in Russia. e tenants who live in the buildings constructed by functionalists have never
explored them in their complete state. ey have never had a chance to distant themselves from
discomfort of living in buildings that were never completed before they started to decay aer
the decades of neglect, symbolising another failed utopia.
References
1. Benjamin W. Moskauer Tagebuch. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag Publ., 1980. 220p. (in German).
2. Benjamin W. Moscow Diary. Harvard, Harvard University Press Publ., 1986. 156p.
3. Benjamin W. e Arcades Project. Cambridge, e Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press Publ., 1999.
1098p.
4. Benjamin W. Moscow. Benjamin W. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. 1927–1940. Harvard, Harvard Univ. Press
Publ., 1999, p. 22–46.
5. Benjamin W. Experience and Poverty. Benjamin W. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. 1927–1940. Harvard, Harvard
University Press Publ., 1999, pp. 731–736.
6. Benjamin W. Reections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York, HBJ Publ., 1978. 348p.
7. Bowlt J. Russian Art of Avant-Garde: eories and Criticism 1902–1934(Documents of Twentieth-Century
Art). London, ames & Hudson Publ., 1988. 371p.
8. Boym S. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, Harvard University Press Publ.,
1995. 384p.
9. Cooke C. Russian Avante-Garde: eories of Art, Architecture, the City. New York, St. Martins Press Publ.,
1995. 144p.
10. Clark K. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–
1941.Cambridge, Harvard University Press Publ., 2011. 432p.

Теория искусства
581
11. Ginsburg M. Stil’ i Epokha /Style and Epoch. Moscow. Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1924. 238p.
12. Heynen H. Architecture and Modernity. Cambridge, MIT Press Publ., 1999. 276p.
13. Kiaer C. Imagine No Possessions. Cambridge, MIT Press Publ., 2005. 326p.
14. Lefebvre H. e Production of Space. Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell Publ., 1992. 464p.
15. Mejerovich M. Gradostroitel’naia politika v SSSR (1917–1929). Ot goroda-sada k vedomstvennomu rabochemu
posyolku (e City-Building Policy in the USSR (1917–1929). From the Garden City to the Departmental
Workers’ Village). Moscow, NLO, 2017. 352p. (in Russian).
16. Roman G.; Marquardt V. (eds.). Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West 1920–1930. Gainesville,
University Press of Florida Publ., 1992. 312p.
17. Wellek R. Benjamin’s Diary. e New Criterion, 1986, vol. 5, no. 3, p. 83.
Title. Invisible Avant-Garde and Absent Revolution: Walter Benjamin’s New Optics for Moscow Urban
Space of the 1920s.
Author. Seits, Irina Sergeevna— Ph. D. student. Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels alle 7, Fleminsberg,
14189Stockholm, Sweden. irina.seits@sh.se
Abstract. Walter Benjamin spent the fall and winter of 1926–1927 in Moscow. His experience and
observations were recorded in “Moscow Diary” and essay “Moscow” (1927). In the present paper, the author
refers to the latter text, in which Benjamin reected on the space of Soviet capital that was undergoing severe
transition. Without even mentioning Avant-garde architecture that was being constructed in his presence and
that was transforming the living space of the new state on all levels, Benjamin le deep analyses of Moscow’s
post-revolutionary urban constitution, revealed its nature, and predicted its future.
Benjamin came to Moscow to observe the Revolution in action, but could not nd it. Instead, he saw
Constructivism as already dismissed. While recording those huge transformations that he witnessed during
his stay, Benjamin had not described them either in terms of new functionalist architecture, or through the
reection on demolition of Empire’s architectural symbols. He turned to other features and spatial dimensions
that were not directly related to any particular architecture, such as mobility, rhythm, aura and through which
he fully revealed reformation of Moscow space that was initiated by functionalists and supported by the new
regime.
e “Moscow” essay along with another text that I refer to, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), enable for
deeper analyses of Avant-garde aesthetics, of its origin, development and end, which is the major objective of
the present article.
Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Russian Revolution; Moscow; Avant-garde; constructivism, living space; new
barbarism; modernist architecture; urban history.
Название статьи. Невидимый Авангард ипотерянная Революция: новый взгляд Вальтера Беньями-
на на городское пространство 1920-х годов.
Автор. Сейц Ирина Сергеевна— аспирант. Университет Содерторн, Альфред Нобель алле, Фле-
мингсберг, Стокгольм, Швеция, 14189. irina.seits@sh.se
Аннотация. Вальтер Беньямин жил вМоскве осенью изимой 1926–1927гг. Свои впечатления он
описал в«Московском дневнике» иэссе «Москва» (1927). Последний текст посвящен столице как ис-
ключительно жилому ипространственному феномену. Внастоящей работе я обращаюсь кдетальному
прочтению этого текста с целью анализа Москвы как среды, где создавалась новая советская реаль-
ность, игде Беньямин надеялся увидеть Революцию вдействии.
Именно вто время вМоскве эстетика конструктивизма воплощалась взнаменитые архитектурные
шедевры, атрадиционное жилое пространство реформировалось лучшими архитекторами авангарда.
Беньямин не нашел Революцию вМоскве, нообнаружил небывалую концентрацию и интенсивность
происходящих конструктивных трансформаций городской среды. Он не описал их ни спозиций функ-
ционализма, который считал уже пораженным, ни спозиций разрушения архитектуры старого мира.
Беньямин обратился к иным, внеархитектурным свойствам московского пространства. Однако, он
оставил глубокий анализ реформаций, происходивших вмосковской среде, которые были начаты аван-
гардом иподдержаны новым режимом.
Эссе «Москва» позволяет глубже понять эстетику авангарда, ее истоки, развитие иконец, не смотря
на то, что сам авангард иего архитектура исключены изполя зрения автора. Однако, гениальная спо-
собность «увидеть сущее» всамом пространстве города позволила мыслителю написать многогранную
иглубокую картину Москвы.

Irina Seits
582
Взаимодействие «нового человека» спост-революционной реальностью ивосприятие им нового
жилого пространства, сформированного 1920-егг. являются объектами анализа настоящей статьи.
В данном исследовании я анализирую процессы трансформации старого иформирования нового
жилого пространства в1920-е гг. Инициированные Октябрьской революцией иподдержанные аван-
гардом, они сглубоким вниманием, восхищением и, одновременно, спредчувствием грядущего краха
были описаны одним извеличайших современников эпохи.
Ключевые слова: Вальтер Беньямин; русская революция; Москва; авангард; жилое пространство;
новое варварство; бедность опыта; конструктивизм; модернистская архитектура; история градострои-
тельства.