Chapter IIIA. Modernism/Modernity in the Postrevolutionary Diaspora

I n its last decades, the twentieth century occasioned passionate debates in the West about its beginning—about modernism, its definition, aesthetics, and politics. The importance of a stocktaking of the modernist legacy acquired new urgency in the swiftly approaching turn of the twenty first century. As Marshall Berman noted in his seminal book on modernism, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), “we don’t know how to use modernism.”1 Berman’s explicit purpose was to restore the memory of modernism and its promise: “This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead.”2 This work, concerned with the relation between modernity and revolution, was one of the first that included an extended discussion of the Russian contribution and its distinct history in the context of European modernisms. Modernism for Berman is revolutionary in its break with the past artistic traditions. His main concern is to reveal “the dialectics of modernization and modernism” in the interwar period.3 In a subsequent discussion of Berman’s book, Perry Anderson provides a useful clarification of terms: “Between the two lies the key middle term of ‘modernity’—neither economic process nor cultural vision but the historical experience mediat-