“Impressionists’ Studio”: between Modernism and Avantgarde

In 1910 Russian cultural life was at a turning point. The death of V. Komissarzhevskaya, M. Vrubel, M. Petipa, A. Kuindzhi, and L. Tolstoy marked the end of an entire epoch. At the same time, several essays published in some of the most important literary magazines of the time exposed the crisis of the symbolist movement, while books such as “Symbolism” by Andrey Bely attempted to give a conclusive account of its ideas. The beginning of a new chapter in the world of Russian art was prefigured in three programmatic works published in 1910: M. Kuzmin’s article “On Beautiful Clarity”, the miscellany “Impressionists’ Studio” edited by N. Kulbin, and the anthology “A Trap for Judges I”, the first collective publication of the Cubo-futurists. The present study focuses on Kulbin’s work and on the miscellany he edited to suggest that this text constitutes both a “bridge” between modernism and the avant-garde and a prototype of subsequent futuristic almanacs.