Silhouettes of the Revolution: Ideas of V. I. Lenin, L. D. Trotsky and A. V. Lunacharsky in Zenith (1921-1926)

Abstract

The matters of the October Revolution are present on several levels in Zenit from the first issue until the closing of the magazine. The October Revolution appears as a topic in Zenit in discussions about Soviet Avant-garde art, as well as the sociopolitical consequences of the Revolution, but also as a symbol of the destruction of old civilisation, one of the fundamental programme principles of Zenitism. This paper analyses the strategies for shaping the concept and discourse on the October Revolution in Zenit. First, the intertextual connections between the texts that speak about the Soviet artistic Avant-garde and the texts about the political Avant-garde of the October Revolution are reconstructed, i.e. their ideological and aesthetic unity as a product of Ljubomir Micić's editorial policy. Then, the second level of analysis occurs through a comparative reading of the programmatic principles of Zenithism and the ideas of the representatives of the Soviet political Avant-garde - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Davidovich Trotsky and Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky. The aim of this paper is to examine how the figures of revolutionary leaders and artists, and the reception of their works and texts in the Zenit magazine, shaped the Zenitist understanding of the historical role of Avant-garde art as new art. Furthermore, special attention is paid to the interpretation of Zenit's artistic ideology in the context of revolutionary Marxism, i.e. to the analysis of implicit ambivalences between artistic individuality, on the one hand, and the Avant-garde and Revolution, as collective events, on the other.