Transformed by Emigration: Welcoming Russian Intellectuals, Scientists and Artists (1917-1945) 8021097094, 9788021097094

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Ivan Foletti. After Kondakov. The Heritage of Russian Emigration in the Czech Lands
Ekaterina Shashlova. Russian Philosophers in France in the Interwar Period. A Review of the Studies of Emigrant Philosophers
Juliette Milbach. Zinaida Serebrjakova in Paris. Iconographic Analysis of a Russian in Exile
Karolina Foletti. Presenting Russia to the West. Helene Iswolsky, Russian Catholic Émigré Intellectual
Cécile Pichon-Bonin. The Russian Illustrators of the Père Castor. Russian Mediators in France of the Concept of Construction in Art and Pedagogy in the 1930s
Jordan Ljuckanov. The Russian Émigré Community in Interwar Bulgaria. Attemptat a Typology of Transformations, with Focus on the “Aestheticization”of Newspaper
Adrien Palladino. Transforming Medieval Art from Saint Petersburgto Paris. André Grabar’s Life and Scholarship between 1917and 1945
Back Matter

Citation preview

Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean Seminarium Kondakovianum, Series Nova Université de Lausanne • Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic • Masaryk

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University •

CONVIVIUM SUPPLEMENTUM  2 020 Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean Seminarium Kondakovianum, Series Nova Journal of the Department of Art History of the University of Lausanne, of the Department of Art History of the Masaryk University, and of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic This supplementary issue was carried out as part of the project “The   Heritage of Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov in the Experiences of André Grabar and the Seminarium Kondakovianum” (Czech Science Foundation, Reg. No 18 –20666S)

Editor-in-chief / Ivan Foletti Executive editors / Karolina Foletti, Sarah Melker, Adrien Palladino, Johanna Zacharias Typesetting / Kristýna Smrčková Layout design / Monika Kučerová Cover design / Petr M. Vronský, Anna Kelblová Publisher / Masarykova univerzita, Žerotínovo nám. 9, 601 77 Brno, IČO 00216224 Editorial Office / Seminář dějin umění, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno Print / Tiskárna Didot, spol s r.o., Trnkova 119, 628 00 Brno E-mail / [email protected] www.earlymedievalstudies.com/convivium.html © Ústav dějin umění AV ČR , v. v. i. 2020 © Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity 2020 © Faculté des Lettres, Université de Lausanne 2020 Published / November 2020 Reg. No. MK ČR E 21592 ISSN 2336-3452 (print) ISSN 2336-808X (online) ISBN 978-80-210-9709-4 Convivium is listed in the databases SCOPUS, ERIH, “Riviste   di classe A” indexed by ANVUR, and in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of the Web of Science.

supplementum

committees Editors — Michele Bacci ( Université de Fribourg), Klára Benešovská (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic ),  Ivan Foletti (Masaryk University, Brno), Herbert L. Kessler ( Johns Hopkins University, Masaryk University, Brno),  Serena Romano ( Université de Lausanne), Elisabetta Scirocco (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte) Emeritus — Hans Belting (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe) Editor - in - chief — Ivan Foletti Associate editors — Nathan Dennis (University of San Francisco), Stefanie Lenk (University of Bern), Adrien Palladino (Masaryk University, Brno) Executive editors — Karolina Foletti, Sarah Melker, Adrien Palladino, Johanna Zacharias Advisory board — Xavier Barral i Altet ( Université de Rennes, Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari), Nicolas Bock ( Université de Lausanne), Valentina Cantone ( Università di Padova), Jaś Elsner (University of Oxford), Clario Di Fabio ( Università di Genova), Finbarr Barry Flood (New York University), Ondřej Jakubec ( Masaryk University, Brno), Alexei Lidov (Moscow State University), Assaf Pinkus ( Tel Aviv University), Stefano Riccioni (Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari), Jiří Roháček ( Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), Erik Thunø (Rutgers Unive­rsity), Alicia Walker ( Bryn Mawr College)

Transformed by Emigration Welcoming Russian Intellectuals, Scientists and Artists (1917–1945) edited by Ivan Foletti, Karolina Foletti & Adrien Palladino

contents

TRANSFORMED BY EMIGRATION. WELCOMING RUSSIAN INTELLECTUALS, SCIENTISTS AND ARTISTS (1917–1945) 10

Ivan Foletti After Kondakov. The Heritage of Russian Emigration in the Czech Lands

articles 32

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Ekaterina Shashlova Russian Philosophers in France in the Interwar Period. A Review of the Studies of Emigrant Philosophers Juliette Milbach Zinaida Serebrjakova in Paris. Iconographic Analysis of a Russian in Exile Karolina Foletti Presenting Russia to the West. Helene Iswolsky, Russian Catholic Émigré Intellectual Cécile Pichon-Bonin The Russian Illustrators of the Père Castor. Russian Mediators in France of the Concept of Construction in Art and Pedagogy in the 1930s Jordan Ljuckanov The Russian Émigré Community in Interwar Bulgaria. Attempt at a Typology of Transformations, with Focus on the “Aestheticization” of Newspaper



Adrien Palladino Transforming Medieval Art from Saint Petersburg to Paris. André Grabar’s Life and Scholarship between 1917 and 1945

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photographic credits

introduction

After Kondakov The Heritage of Russian Emigration in the Czech Lands Ivan Foletti

Readers of Convivium – a journal devoted mainly to the Mediterranean space in the Middle Ages – may be surprised to hold in their hands a volume devoted to Russian emigration in the first half of the twentieth century. Even more unexpected might be the framework of the following articles, crossing through the history of art history and literature, as well as of visual arts and philosophy. In reality, this is anything but surprising when we consider the unique history of our journal, which took up the legacy of one of the most important endeavors of Russian interwar émigré culture. I addressed this aspect in the first editorial of Convivium in 2014. We do believe that one of the missions of our journal is to pursue this path as well. It is a very fertile ground for understanding our present  *

This article was carried out as part of the project “The Heritage of Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov in the Experiences of André Grabar and the Seminarium Kondakovianum” (Czech Science Foundation, Reg. No 18 –20666S).

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introduction

research, but more in general, the history of ideas. What is an unexpected topic for an art historical periodical devoted to medieval visual cultures is thus a way of analyzing the roots of our tradition and our field as well. More importantly, we firmly believe in what is generally called “transdisciplinarity”. It seems absolutely fundamental to us to understand the milieu that produced the ancestor of our journal from this perspective. It is not by chance that this supplementary issue is also the result of a conference which discussed the way Russian scholars, artists, and thinkers were transformed by their emigration – an emigration caused by the dramatic events following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the October Revolution, and the Civil War. The diverse authors gathered in this volume – all belonging to different scholarly traditions – focused first on the narration of personal destinies: some émigrés ended up at the ends of the Earth, others stayed in Europe. Some immediately found a new place to call “home”, while others wandered for decades. Many had a decisive impact on the societies that took them in, while others – probably much more numerous – disappeared into anonymity. Taken together, they constituted a political and cultural phenomenon without precedent (but which, unfortunately, was a precursor to many similar catastrophes over the course of the twentieth century): the mass departure, within a short period of time, of much of a country’s elite. Their emigration radically transformed the world around them. They transformed the country they left – Russia, the many places they landed, as well as themselves, their own thinking, their scientific research, and their art. My intent is not to repeat here the findings of the articles which follow this introductory essay. The reader is kindly invited to discover them one by one. I would only like to emphasize that the editors’ aim – which we believe has been fulfilled – was to collect examples from very different fields. The result is a fascinating mosaic: philosophers, artists, art historians, and writers meet in an ideal space, each contributing his or her part to a dialogue of love and hate for their homeland and their adoptive countries. The diaspora of Russian emigrants was a worldwide phenomenon – an international and extensive network of refugees. Across the continents, men and women of Russian origin formed a true “global” community. Their mass emigration can find close parallels in the present day. There are certainly many differences, but a phenomenon like the “Russian Action”, promoted by Czechoslovakia, demonstrates a remarkable ethos and maturity in dealing with global problems, even if the world at that time was much “smaller”. I would also like to mention those who received the Russian refugees: the encounter was not always easy and we should not succumb to idealizing the coexistence of émigré and host society. However, there were, without a doubt, many moments when hosts revealed the best of their humanity. The arrival of these emigrants meant not only progress in the arts and sciences, but afforded those who took them in the opportunity to be transformed by their own humanity. Even while still recovering from their own experiences of war, Czechs, Slovaks, French, Britons, Germans, Americans, Brazilians and many others were able to show true generosity to these new arrivals. The early 1920s demonstrate that a “migrant crisis” can be approached ethically and generously – perhaps an interesting lesson for times like our own.

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Naturally, this narration will start with the prehistory of our journal: the first years after Nikodim Kondakov had arrived in Prague, and, later, after his death, when a small group of pupils and scholars started the glorious tradition of the Seminarium Kondakovianum, of which Convivium. Seminarium Kondakovianum Series Nova is a proud heir.

introduction

1 / Natalia Grigorevna Jashvil, Nikodim Kondakov, Prague, 1925

Transformed by emigration? February of 1925 saw the death, in Prague, of Nikodim Kondakov (1844–1925), widely considered the father of modern art history in Russia [Fig. 1] 1. As a medievalist with a great interest in Byzantine and medieval Russian art, Kondakov was, for many, the epitome 1

For historical biographies of Kondakov see: Jegor K. Redin, “Professor Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. K tridca‑­ tiletnej godovščine ego učenopedagogičeskoj dejatel’nosti”, Zapiski Russkogo Arxeologičeskogo Obščestva, ix (1897), pp. 1–32; Georgij V. Vernadskij, O naučnoj dejatel’nosti N. P. Kondakova, in Aa.Vv., Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. 1844 –1924. K vosmidesjatiletju so dnja roždenija, Prague 1924, pp. 3–16; idem, Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, in Aa.Vv., Recueil d’études dédiées à la mémoire de N. P. Kondakov. Archéologie. Histoire de L’art. Études byzantines, Prague  1926, pp. i–xxx; Viktor N. Lazarev, N. P. Kondakov, Moscow 1925. For critical reflections, see mainly: Irina L. Kyzlasova, Istorija izučenija vizantijskogoui drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Rossii. F. I. Buslajev, N. P. Kondakova: metody, idei, teorii, Moscow 1985; eadem, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve Vizantii i drevnej Rusi 1920 –1930 gody. Po materialam arxivov, Moscow 2000; eadem,“Kondakov N. P.”,  in Pravoslavnaja Enciklopedija, Moscow 2014, vol. 36, pp. 599 – 601; Ivan Foletti, From Byzantium to the Holy Russia. Nikodim Kondakov and the Invention of the Icon, Rome 2017 [2011].

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of a Russian sensibility open to both East and West, studying oriental subjects with methods borrowed from French and German archaeologists and art historians 2. He made no secret of the fact that for him, studying Russian and Byzantine antiquities was also a patriotic duty 3. It was no coincidence that some of his research was, as has been demonstrated by Vzdornov, deeply devoted to the service of his country. In some extreme cases, we could even say that Kondakov worked at the edges of what a modern reader would consider ethical, deforming historical reality in order to promote the interests of Czarist Russia4. But at the same time, as befitted a man working in his field, he was profoundly cosmopolitan, corresponding with the most prominent French, Italian, and German specialists, and towards the end of his life, even with English-speaking experts5. In other words, Kondakov was clearly anchored in his times. His manner of politicizing his research was far from unique, and it is easier for us to understand if we consider his humble origins. Born a serf, Kondakov had an astonishing career, rising as far as to become the de facto imperial court historian, thanks to the political reforms of Alexander ii (1855–1881) and the benevolence of his successor, Alexander iii (1881–1894)6. Thus, his loyalty to the Czar and his country were completely logical and understandable. The world of Imperial Russia, to which Kondakov owed his loyalty, was completely overturned by the Russian Revolution in 1917. Like many intellectuals, his first response to the chaos in Saint Petersburg was to flee to the countryside, and then, as the civil war neared its end in 1920, to leave Russia altogether 7. Setting sail from Odessa on board a ship emblematically named the “Sparta”, he headed for Constantinople 8. From what I have read of his diary I am convinced that when he left, he still held out hope that he would return someday, but his thoughts were dominated by a feeling of defeat, as if his life were simply over 9. He had no idea at the time that his relatively brief stay in Czechoslovakia – where he arrived in 1922 – would leave an indelible imprint on the cultural history of Central Europe. But let us take one thing at a time. In this paper I would like to briefly deal with three distinct questions intrinsically linked to emigration and immigration as transformative phenomena. To start with, I would like to remind of the impact that emigration had on Nikodim Kondakov’s biography and scholarly work10. Second, however, I would also like to reflect on how both emigrants and Czech scholars, with financial support from the interwar political and cultural elite, benefitted from Kondakov’s heritage. Finally, I will conclude with a look at the long-term impact of Kondakov’s work, in the second half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. My starting hypothesis will be a simple one: emigration changed not only the last years of Kondakov’s life, but also radically changed the subject of his scholarship and the way it was received.

Nikodim Kondakov in Czechoslovakia

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Before looking at what Kondakov did in Prague, it is important to retrace briefly not just his itinerary once he left Russia, but what happened along the way. The first stage of his exile was, as we noted, Constantinople. He then made a stop in Sofia before landing, two years after he left Russia, in Prague [Fig. 2]11. We all imagine emigration as a traumatic experience in which, besides losing our home, we also lose most of our material possessions. This is precisely what happened to Kondakov, who lost his extraordinary apartment in Saint Petersburg, his luxurious villa at Yalta, his notable collection of Byzantine coins, and to top it all off, his library as well12. But the way in which Kondakov was received, wherever he landed, demonstrates that these losses had not diminished, in any way, his status as a celebrity within his field and beyond. At Constantinople he managed to avoid,

2 / Grand Hotel in Sofia, ca 1920

along with his traveling companion Ivan Bunin, the humiliating disinfection simply by showing his Légion d’honneur to the French soldiers receiving emigrants at the port13. As soon as he reached Sofia, he was received by the Bulgarian emperor Boris iii (1918 –1943), thanks to whom he soon had not just accommodation, but also a personal chauffeur and a well-paid job 14. Finally, the scholar travelled to Prague ostensibly on the invitation of his eminent colleagues Niederle and Polívka, but behind that invitation was the personal 2 3

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Irina L. Kyzlasova, “O naučnom nasledii N. P. Kondakova. K voprosu o russo-italianskix naučnix svjazax”, in Europa Orientalis, x (1991), pp. 71– 94; Foletti, From Byzantium to the Holy Russia (n. 1), pp. 171– 215. Nikodim P. Kondakov, “O naučnyx zadačax istorii drevne-russkogo iskusstva”, in Pamjatniki drevnej pismennosti i iskusstva, Saint Petersburg 1899, pp. 1– 47, sp. p. 46. See also Redin, “Professor Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov” (n. 1), p. 13. Gerold I. Vzdornov, Istoria otkrytija i izučenija russkoj srednevekovoj živopisi, xix věk, Moscow 1986; idem, “Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. V zerkale sovremennoj vizantinistiki”, in Restavracija i nauka. Očerki po istorii otkrytija i izučenija drevnepusskoj živopisi, Moscow 2006, pp. 291–306. Arxivy russkix vizantinistov v Sankt-Peterburge, Ivan P. Medvedev ed., Saint Petersburg 1995; Foletti, From Byzantium to the Holy Russia (n. 1), pp. 171– 215. Michel Heller, Histoire de la Russie et de son Empire, Paris 1997, pp. 829 – 830, 838. Kyzlasova, Istorija izučenija vizantijskogo i drevnerusskogo iskusstva (n. 1); Foletti, From Byzantium to the Holy Russia (n. 1), pp. 62 – 71. Kyzlasova, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve (n. 1), p. 45. Julia Jančárková,“N. P. Kondakov. Dnevniki 1922—1923 gg. Fragmenty”,in Vzpomínky. Deníky. Vyprávění. Ruská emigrace v Československu, Ljubov Běloševská ed., Prague 2011, pp. 251–316. Ivan Foletti,“Nikodim Kondakov et Prague. Comment l’émigration change l’histoire (de l’art)”, Opuscula Historiae Artium, lxii/2 (2014), pp. 2 –11. Foletti, From Byzantium to the Holy Russia (n. 1), pp. 70 – 74. Kyzlasova, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve (n. 1), p. 33. About the Kondakov’s apartment and collections see Sergej A. Žebelev, “ΟΞΥΣ ΤΑ ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΑ”,  in Aa.Vv. Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. 1844 –1924 (n. 1), pp. 31–38. Vera N. Muromceva-Bunina, “N. P. Kondakov (K pjatiletiju so dnja smerti) (1930)”,  in Nikodim P. Kondakov, Vospominanija i dumy, Irina L. Kyzlasova ed., Moscow 2002, pp. 348 –358, sp. p. 354. Kyzlasova, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve (n. 1), p. 49.

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3 / Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Lomen Brothers, 1920

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interest of President Masaryk [Fig. 3]15. It was probably thanks to Masaryk that Kondakov met, rich businessmen and celebrated Slavophiles from Chicago, the Cranes, who offered Kondakov a flat in the Schönborn Palace they owned. Meanwhile, Niederle and Polívka saw to it that Kondakov was immediately hired to teach at Charles University16. This kind of reception, one which I would not hesitate to call regal, seems almost unimaginable to us today. Simply put, no modern-day art historian enjoys such prestige. The explanation for this phenomenon, however, is not so complex. The intellectual world at the turn of the twentieth century was, compared with our days, much smaller. We would exaggerate only slightly if we said that, in good European society, everyone knew everyone else. Moreover, art history was part of a politicized vision of the world, and politicians used art history to justify their aims. Kondakov was not only part of “good society” but had a special prestige at court simply for being a celebrated art historian. And as far as his relationship with the powers was concerned, Kondakov had been particularly vociferous in his opinions about whom Macedonia belonged to, ethnically and culturally 17. In one study which appeared in 1909, he clearly embraces Russian Imperial policy regarding the region, while at the same time sympathizing with the Bulgarians [Fig. 4]18. This shines a different light on his triumphal reception at the court of Boris iii: he was not just an exceptional emigrant, but one who, perhaps above all else, had used his pen to advance the interests of Bulgaria.

4 / Nikodim Kondakov, Makedonia, Saint Petersburg 1909

With Masaryk the matter was perhaps more personal. Once Masaryk began to favor independence ever more strongly, the future President was forced to leave the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, and if Andreyev’s recollection is correct, Masaryk requested a professorship at the university in Saint Petersburg. Professor Kondakov personally supported this candidacy 19. For political reasons, i.e. to maintain good relations with the empire of Franz Josef i, Russia decided not to accept this troublesome refugee, but it was certainly logical for Masaryk to offer Kondakov a helping hand when the tables were turned some years later. We can, of course, also note that Kondakov’s presence in Prague was just one part of the “Russian Action” promoted by Kramář and Masaryk, which saw numerous Russian intellectuals and students arrive in Czechoslovakia 20. Nevertheless, I am convinced that in the case of Kondakov, his previous scholarship and fame, as well as his personal connections, played a decisive role. By emigrating, then, Kondakov lost his material possessions but not his status. At a time when Europe’s elite was still a relatively small club, his merits were enough to assure him a warm welcome wherever he went. It is no coincidence that just a few days after his death, it was learned that on the basis of a request from Antonio Muñoz, another of Kondakov’s friends and correspondents, Benito Mussolini had invited 15 Kyzlasova, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve (n. 1), pp. 56 – 78. See also the materials in the Prague Archives:

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17 18

19

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Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, Korespondence vlastní, přijatá, John Crane, č. Přír: 165/42; ibidem, Korespondence vlastní, přijatá, Alice Masaryková, č. Přír: 165/42; ibidem, Doklady vlastní, Zasedací pořádek na návštěvě u T. G. Masaryka, č. Přír: 165/42, 15 ll. See the archival documents at Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, Korespondence vlastní, přijatá, Lubor Niederle, Letter to N. P. Kondakov, č. Přír: 165/42, 15 ll. In the same archives there are also copies of the contracts. Nikodim P. Kondakov, Makedonia. Arxeologičeskoe putešestvie, Saint Petersburg 1909. The fact that this situation was already clearly perceived by his contemporaries is documented in an article by František Táborský,“Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov”,  Vzdělávací příloha, Národní Listy, 1. 11. 1924. The framework of this situation was also described by Vzdornov, “Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, V zerkale” (n. 4). Nicolaj Andreyev, “Material supplied by Dr. N. E. Andreyev, Formerly Student, Fellow and Acting Director of the Kondakov Institute in Prague”, Columbia University Libraries, Manuscripts collections, Bakhmeteff Archive, Vernadsky Collection, box 158, p. 1. Elena Chinyaeva, Russians outside Russia. The Émigré Community in Czechoslovakia 1918 –1938, Munich 2001; Irina Mchitarjan, Das “russische Schulwesen” im europäischen Exil. Zum bildungspolitischen Umgang mit den pädagogischen Initiativen der russischen Emigranten in Deutschland, der Tschechoslowakei und Polen (1918 –1939), Bad Heilbrunn 2006; eadem, “Prague as the Centre of Russian Educational Emigration: Czechoslovakia’s Educational Policy for Russian Emigrants (1918 –1938)”, Paedagogica Historica, xlv/3 (2009), pp. 369 –402.

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5 / The order of merit delivered to Nikodim Kondakov by the tsar Boris iii, Bucharest, 1924

6a, b / Nikodim Kondakov, Příspěvky k dějinám středověkého umění a kultury, Prague 1929

the scholar to Italy, offering him a pension for life 21. That this interest was real is confirmed by the fact that upon his eightieth birthday, Kondakov received the title of “Great Officer” from the crowns of Bulgaria, Romania and Italy [Fig. 5] 22. The next question, then, is the one of how emigration could transform Kondakov if he had lost none of his prestige in the act of emigration. If we concentrate on his time in Czechoslovakia, where he stayed the longest and where he was able to finish several publications as well as to teach regularly, we are immediately struck by a radical change in the subjects he devoted himself to. The courses he taught, as well as the only new large-scale publication, Les costumes orientaux à la Cour Byzantine, are only tangentially concerned with Byzantine and Russian medieval art; their true focus is the art of nomadic peoples 23. In those same years, Kondakov was working on a monograph, left incomplete and published only after his death, dedicated in large part to the art of the nomadic peoples of the steppes [Figs 6a, b] 24. This reorientation – or to be more accurate, this return 21 A fragment of an unidentified journal announcing this “Gesture of Mussolini” is at the Památník národího

písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov.

22 Original documents at Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. 23 Nikodim P. Kondakov, “Les costumes orientaux à la Cour Byzantine”,  Byzantion, i (1924), pp. 7 – 49. The complete

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list of Kondakov’s teachings in Prague is quoted at the end of Vernadsky’s article of 1926: Vernadskij, “Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov” (n. 1), pp. xxvi–xxvii, n. 3. 24 N. P. Kondakov, Příspěvky k dějinám středověkého umění a kultury / Očerky i zametki po istorii srednevekovago iskusstva i kultury, Prague 1929.

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to one of Kondakov’s earliest interests – can be explained at least partly by what we find in a document dated April 20, 1920 25. In this official document, the Minister of Education, Dr. Šrobár, confirms his invitation to Kondakov to teach two years of courses in Prague. The document stipulates the salary – 39,684 Czechoslovak crowns – remarkable for the era, but above all the subject of the courses. They must deal with the “history of Slavic art”. This aspect of his teaching is again confirmed in a document from July 19, 1924 which prolongs his teaching and specifies again that Kondakov must teach courses devoted “to medieval art from its earliest times, with particular attention to Slavic art”26. Kondakov is thus contractually obligated to study Slavic antiquities. This was a logical choice within the cultural climate of the First Czechoslovak Republic, where the idea of the Slavic race, freed from the “Germanic” yoke, was fundamental to the country’s identity 27. It is no coincidence that upon Kondakov’s eightieth birthday, Táborsky wrote an article in honor of the Russian scholar which mentioned his other interests but insisted on his contribution to Slavic studies. In parallel, Táborsky underlined Kondakov’s identity as a “great Slav”28. Kondakov’s arrival in Czechoslovakia brought about a forced change in his perspective. What interested his new colleagues was not Byzantine Imperial art. This lack of interest was logical for a democratic country, recently liberated from a great empire. What held their interest instead was the art of an entire “race” to which the Czechoslovak state officially belonged. (In reality, as is well known, only about sixty percent of the country’s population considered itself Czech or Slovak 29.) The subjects that Kondakov had previously devoted himself to did not excite any particular interest in Prague, and the Russian labored to publish the two volumes which he had managed to take out of Russia with him when he fled: the third volume of his monumental Ikonografia Bogomateri (a project dedicated to the study of Christian iconography from its early Christian origins to the end of the Renaissance), and a monumental volume on Russian icons. The first has, in my opinion, a decidedly pan-Orthodox structure, wherein Kondakov demonstrates that the history of the iconography of the Mother of God as a devotional image, ended in the West at the end of the Middle Ages, but then continued in Russia to the present day 30. The second work is devoted to a medium, the icon, which was, in fact, “invented” in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century 31. The subjects of the two works, then, were ones which, in the early 1920s, right after the traumatic experience of the First World War, had suddenly ceased to be interesting to those around Kondakov. The world of empires had collapsed, while the world of the “Russian icon” was still totally foreign to Western Europe at that moment. Studying the (Slavic) nomads of the steppes, on the other hand, would not only allow Kondakov to respect his employment contract, but would also mean that his work could find an interested public in Prague, his new home 32. A third element also needs to be mentioned. As demonstrated a decade ago by Ekaterina Velmezova with respect to Russian philologists, the traumatic experience of emigration had an explicit effect on their research, even at the level of methodology 33. Having left a fundamentally monolingual world, they soon began to study language as a cosmopolitan phenomenon, seeking universal lexical unity. Velmezova framed this change within the larger context of “Eurasianism”, which, as taken up by figures like Trubetzkoy [Fig. 7], became an intellectual reaction to a situation in which one could no longer identify oneself with a single country. It became, effectively, a common element for the intelligentsia in exile. In the early 1920s Kondakov was not only very close to Trubetzkoy, but also to another exponent of this “Eurasian” current of thought, Georgij Vernadsky, who lived in Prague in those very years (before making a brilliant career for himself at Columbia University in New York)34. Some years ago, therefore, I proposed interpreting Kondakov’s

7 / Nikolay Sergeyevitch Trubetzkoy, Vienna (?), 1920s

choice to dedicate himself to the art of the nomads in the following way: studying their art meant studying a supranational phenomenon, extending over two continents. The frustration of losing one’s fatherland mutated into the desire to study something which, by the very definition of nomadic, could not be contained within one country, nor even within one continent. Kondakov’s diary entries from those years are quite terse, and we cannot glean much from them except for the fact that he did not like Prague’s climate. He dreamed of moving to Italy, and so implicitly at least, suffered from his exile. In the archives of the Památník národního písemnictví in Prague there are some receipts for books that Kondakov borrowed from the city’s public library, only about ten altogether. We do not know if other receipts have been lost, but those that survive tell an interesting tale. They are all for books in Russian or French: Julian Kulakovskij’s Byzantine History, the Annales du Musée Guimet, Robin Hood 25 Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, Korespondence vlastní, přijatá, Dr. Šrobár,

ministr, Č. j. 35425/22.

26 Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, Korespondence vlastní, přijatá, Zemská

zpráva politická, Č. 271.231. ai 1924.

27 Jan Křen, Konfliktní společenství: Češi a Němci, Prague 1990. 28 Táborský, “Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov” (n. 18). 29 Jan Křen, “Changes in Identity: Germans in Bohemia and Moravia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, in Bohemia in History, Mikuláš Teich ed., Cambridge 1998, pp. 324 –343. 30 Ivan Foletti, “Nikodim Pavlovitch Kondakov, Iconographie de la Mère de Dieu: le manuscrit retrouvé”, in

Nikodim P. Kondakov, L’iconographie de Mère de Dieu iii, Ivan Foletti ed., Rome 2011, pp. xi–l.

iv, Il Medioevo al passato e al presente, Enrico Castelnuovo, Giuseppe Sergi eds, Turin 2004, pp. 589 – 606; Olga Mevedkova, Les icônes en Russie, Paris 2010; Ivan Foletti, “L’icona, una costruzione storiografica? Dalla Russia all’Occidente, la creazione di un mito”,  Annali di critica d’arte, xii (2016), pp. 175–194. 32 It is not by chance that Niederle, who invited Kondakov, was active in the field: Lubor Niederle, O původu Slovanů: studie k slovanským starožitnostem, Prague 1896; idem, Původ a počátky národa slovanského, Prague 1902 –1904; idem, Vpády Slovanů na Balkán za vlády Justinianovy, Prague 1905. 33 Ekaterina Velmezova, “Les linguistes russes à l’épreuve de l’émigration: quelques pistes pour une future recherche sur les contacts russo-tchèques dans le domaine de la linguistique”,  in La Russie et l’Occident. Relations intellectuelles et artistiques au temps des révolutions russes, Ivan Foletti ed., Rome 2010, pp. 53– 63. 34 André Ratchinski, “G. V. Vernadski (1887 –1973) et le mouvement eurasien”,  in Les historiens de l’émigration russe, Danièle Beaune-Gray ed., Paris 2003, pp. 43– 48; Eurasie: espace mythique ou réalité en construction?, Wanda Dressler et al. eds, Brussels 2009. See also Foletti, “Nikodim Kondakov et Prague” (n. 10), p. 8. 31 Xenia Muratova, “La riscoperta delle icone russe e il ‘revival’ bizantino”,  in Arti e storia del Medioevo,

21

8 / The Kondakov Institute, Prague, ca 1943

by Alexandre Dumas, La Fontaine’s Fables, but especially La Débacle by Émile Zola and, to top it all off, Les Rois en Exil by Alphonse Daudet 35. This choice of reading material is not terribly optimistic. But I think that the reality was more complicated. Kondakov suffered from his exile but at the same time, perhaps for the first time in his life, he became enthusiastic about teaching. The elderly professor’s lessons were avidly attended by many colleagues and by some special students. Kondakov had never before transmitted such enthusiasm36. When he was no longer there, the students who had gathered around him, and not just students of art history, felt like orphans.

Seminarium Kondakovianum: keeping a legacy alive? Shortly before he died, Kondakov had one last moment of glory: his last two manuscripts were acquired by the Czechoslovak state – probably through the direct intervention of Masaryk – and by the Vatican37. The celebrations of his eightieth birthday became an important social event 38, and at the international congress of Byzantine Studies held in Bucharest in 1924, the elderly Kondakov was acclaimed as the patriarch of the field39. In short, Kondakov departed life receiving, after the trauma of the Russian Revolution, esteem and affection. After his death, those who considered themselves his disciples decided to publish a volume to the memory or their great master 40. The “Russian Action” had brought to Prague and its immediate vicinity a large number of emigrants. Within this diaspora, with its important international contacts, was born the desire to honor Kondakov by following up on research he had already begun. Thus, in the late 1920s, the Seminarium Kondakovianum was founded, an entity which, for legal reasons, became in 1931 the Institutum Kondakovianum [Fig. 8] 41. This institute launched a series of publications which garnered immediate international success: two series of monographic studies – Zōgraphika and Skythika – dedicated, respectively, to the study of oriental visual traditions and to the visual traditions of the nomads, and above all, Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. Kyzlasova, Istoria otečestvennoj nauki ob iskusstve (n. 1), p. 38. Foletti, “Nikodim Pavlovitch Kondakov, Iconographie de la Mère de Dieu” (n. 30), pp. xxx–xxxviii. The invitation and the letters of congratulations are conserved at the Památník národího písemnictví, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov. 39 Henry Grégoire, “Le Congrès Byzantin de Bucarest”,  L’Indépendance roumaine, 18 July 1924. 40 Recueil d’études dédiées à la mémoire de N. P. Kondakov (n. 1). 41 Lawrence Hamilton Rhinelander, “Exiled Russian Scholars in Prague: The Kondakov Seminar and Institute”, Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, xvi/3 (1974), pp. 331–352; Zdena Skálová, “Das Prager Seminarium Kondakovianum, später das Archäologische Kondakov-Institut und sein Archiv (1925 –1952)”, Slavica Gandensia, xviii (1991) = A Thousand-Year Heritage of Christian Art in Russia, pp. 21– 43; Věra Hrochová, “Činnost Institutu N. P. Kondakova v Praze a jeho mezinárodní význam”,  in Ruská a ukrajinská emigrace v čsr v letech 1918-1945, Václav Veber et al. eds, Prague 1995, vol. 3, pp. 32 – 41 ; Martin Beißwenger, Das Seminarium Kondakovianum in Prag (1925 –1952), M. A. Thesis, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2005 [2001]; Roman Zaoral, “Karel vi. Schwarzenberg. Student, spolupracovník a mecenáš Kondakovova ústavu”, in Schwarzenbergové v české a středoevropské kulturní historii, Zdeněk Bezecný et al. eds, České Budějovice 2008, pp. 547 – 556; Michal Řoutil, “Kníže Karel vi. Schwarzenberg a jeho učitel ikonomalby Pimen Maximovič Sofronov (na materiálu archivu Archeologického institutu N. P. Kondakova v Praze)”, Parrésia. Revue pro východní křesťanství / A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, vii (2013), pp. 261– 282; Francesco Lovino, “Communism vs. Seminarium Kondakovianum”,  Convivium, iv/1 (2017), pp. 142 –157; Ivan Foletti,“Russian Inputs in Czechoslovakia: when Art History meets History. The Institutum Kondakovianum during the Nazi occupation”,  in Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia 1918 –1968. Between Slavs, Germans, and Totalitarian Regimes, Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino eds, Brno/Rome 2019, pp. 63– 92; Adrien Palladino, “The Wolfgang Born - Kondakov Institute Correspondence. Art History, Freedom, and the Rising Fear in the 1930s”,  Convivium, vi/2 (2019), pp. 128 –135. The complete correspondence of Seminarium is preserved in Prague in the Archives of the Department of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic (údu av). See in particular Boxes ki-12 to ki-18. For the numbers of subscribers see Věra Hrochová, “Les études byzantines en Tchécoslovaquie”,  Balkan Studies, xiii (1972), pp. 22 –26. 35 36 37 38

23

9 / Cover of the Journal Byzantinoslavica, Prague 1929

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the Seminarium Kondakovianum, a periodical which for the next ten years became one of the most authoritative voices for the study of Byzantium and the artistic relations between East and West 42. But alongside this international success, the reality at home in Czechoslovakia was more somber for two reasons: first, Seminarium continued to be essentially “foreign”, bound as it was to circles of emigrants who, as we know, generally struggled to integrate into the Czechoslovak society 43. Indeed, the “Russian Action” was explicitly designed to help these emigrants maintain their own culture and not integrate. The second reason for which Seminarium remained more or less at the margin of academic life in Czechoslovakia (with the only local contributors being Josef Myslivec, Josef Cibulka and František Dvorník) was the particular cultural situation the new country found itself in44. After 1918, the priority for local historiography was to begin to write a history of the country’s “national” art. The most prominent of the figures involved in this enterprise was Adalbert (or Vojtěch) Birnbaum, who after studying Ravenna with Alois Riegl in Vienna, became a specialist in Czech art 45. In this context, Byzantine and Russian studies could never be the center of interest, except for marginal scholars occupied with the study of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, which came to be considered the “Byzantine” eastern part of the new republic 46. In spite of this relative disinterest of Czechoslovak academic circles, Seminarium remained a flourishing international publication with high standards. Nor was it alone in this regard, for those same years saw the birth, in Prague, of another periodical with a very

similar orientation: Byzantinoslavica [Fig. 9]47. This second publication had less of an international profile, but essentially continued on the trails first blazed by Seminarium, albeit with a narrower focus on the relations between the Slavic world and Byzantium. Since it has always been more firmly anchored in the Czech academic system, Byzantinoslavica has survived to our day without any significant interruptions. This means that between the two wars, Prague could boast of being the only city in the world home to two periodicals dedicated to the Byzantine world. Paradoxically, in a republic recently born, whose art-historical elite devoted itself to writing a nationalist historiography, Byzantine Studies – a field traditionally associated with Imperial Russia – were flourishing. This fact will seem a bit less strange if we consider the complex vision entertained by the new nation’s founders. Masaryk and Kramář, for very different reasons, saw the role of Czechoslovakia as a bridge between East and West, a mediator between Russia and Europe 48. Thus they supported the “Russian Action”. I think there was also another factor that should be mentioned here: Masaryk and Kramář, cosmopolitan by choice, realized that for their new, relatively small country to survive, it would have to serve as a kind of mediator on the international stage, and this meant maintaining a dense web of international connections. Byzantine Studies, which were being diffused throughout the West by the massive emigration of scholars from Russia, seemed an ideal component of this effort to constructing such a network. And the changing nature of Byzantine Studies certainly did not hurt their efforts. Just as Kondakov – transformed by his emigration – now saw in Eurasia a new continent to belong to, other scholars now saw “Byzantium” from a different perspective. No longer would it be associated, as it had been in the past, primarily with Russia. Instead, it became a supranational entity. Naturally, the pan-Slavic question also played a part in this complex web of cultural endeavors. Even though the Byzantine Empire had been a multi-ethnic entity dominated by its Greeks component, the Russian Empire became, over the course of the nineteenth century, almost synonymous with Byzantium (a phenomenon that had already been noted in 1889 by Anton Springer, a native of Prague) 49. Moreover, according to the official narration of events, the Christianization of the Slavs through Cyril and Methodius had taken place thanks to the Byzantine Empire. The policy of the country’s founders to support and 42 Francesco Lovino, “Leafing through Seminarium Kondakovianum, i. Studies on Byzantine Illumination”,

43

44 45

46

47 48

49

Convivium, iii/1 (2016), pp. 206 –213; idem, “Southern Caucasus in Perspective. The Scholarly Debate through the Pages of Seminarium Kondakovianum and Skythika (1927 –1938)”,  The Medieval South Caucasus (=Convivium, Supplementum, iii [2016]), pp. 36 –51. Elena Chinyaeva, “Ruská emigrace v Československu: vývoj ruské pomocné akce”,  Slovanský přehled, lxxix (1993), pp. 95 –110; eadem, Russians outside Russia (n. 20), pp. 44 – 47, 50 – 68; Mchitarjan, Das “russische Schulwesen” im europäischen Exil (n. 20); eadem, “Prague as the Centre of Russian Educational Emigration” (n. 20). Francesco Lovino, “Seminarium Kondakovianum / Byzantinoslavica: a Comparison”,  in From Kondakov to Hans Belting Library, Ivan Foletti, Francesco Lovino, Veronika Tvrzníková eds, Brno, pp. 38 –55. See, for example, Petra Hečková, “Disquiet in the Camp: The Question of Roman Art and the Orient oder Rom Issue in Czech Art History”,  in Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901–1970), Ivan Foletti, Francesco Lovino eds, Rome 2018, pp. 131–146. See for example the activities of Florian Zapletal, who dedicated part of his research activities to the cultural production of the region. See Florian Zapletal, Horjanská rotunda, Olomouc 1923; idem, Rusíni a naši buditelé, Prague 1921. About the life of Zapletal, see Florian Zapletal. Život a dílo. Proceedings of the conference of the Comenius Museum (18 –19 October 2005), Přerov 2006. Lovino, “Seminarium Kondakovianum / Byzantinoslavica” (n. 44). Vítězslav Houška, T. G. Masaryk: myslitel a státník, Karviná/Paris 2007; Tomáš G. Masaryk, La Russia e l’Europa. Studi sulle correnti spirituali in Russia, Ettore Lo Gatto ed., Bologna 1971 [1913]; idem, “Pomoc Rusku Evropou a Amerikou” [1922], in Otevřít Rusko Evropě. Dvě stati k ruské otázce v roce 1922, Věra Olivová ed., Prague 1992, pp. 8 –21; Martina Lustigová, Karel Kramář. První československý premiér, Prague 2007. Anton Springer, “Introduction”,  in Nikodim P. Kondakov, Histoire de l’art byzantin: considéré principalement dans les miniatures, Paris 1886 –1891, pp. 1–14.

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promote Byzantine Studies in Czechoslovakia alongside the more obviously nationalist historiography was thus the result of a tangle of political visions, among which was PanSlavism (and the concomitant anti-German feelings). It should not be overlooked that the first and fundamental support for Seminarium came from the Crane family at the behest of the President 50. When the “Russian Action” faded in importance, regular subsidies from the Slavic Institute, book sales, and donations from honorary members kept the Institutum Kondakovianum alive 51. The Institute was not entirely free from financial difficulties, but if we can judge from the documents preserved in its archives, these problems never became existential thanks to a constant increase in the number of subscribers. In 1938, with conflict clearly approaching, Director Toll’ decided to transfer most of the Institute to Belgrade but to leave a part in Prague 52. In the confused days after the Munich Agreement, Toll’ left for Belgrade and designated the young Nikolaj Andreyev (1908 –1982) administrator of the Prague branch [Fig. 10]. The Institute was thus divided into two groups for the three years preceding the tragic German bombardment of Belgrade in April of 1941, which killed Dmitri Rasovsky, the general secretary and one of the founding members of the Institute along with his wife Irina Okuneva-Rasovskaya53. We now know from an unpublished account by Andreyev, recently discovered in the archives at Columbia University in New York, that the division of the Institute had brought serious problems into the group 54. After the disaster in Belgrade, however, according to Andreyev it was the German Army itself that brought back to Prague what could be salvaged after the bombing. The situation became calmer and Seminarium survived thanks to a large donation from Karel Schwarzenberg vi (1911–1986) and, strangely enough, thanks to the support of some German officials55. It seems ironic now that the great Maecenas and “patriot” Schwarzenberg subsidized an institute also protected by officials of the Third Reich. The explanation for this may lie in the international character of the project. According to Andreyev, the Germans boasted of the Institutum Kondakovianum as proof to the international community of their tolerance and open-­mindedness. For an enlightened person like Schwarzenberg, it must have been a matter of prestige to have the Institute return to the Czechoslovak capital and flourish there. At the end of the war the Institutum Kondakovianum went through difficult times and then disappeared entirely 56. But its story is fundamental for this volume. It shows us how a concept like Byzantium was radically transformed by the reality of emigration. From an idea tied to one state – Imperial Russia – Byzantium became, thanks to the new political reality in Europe, a continent united by a web of relations between locals and refugees from Russia, an entity that could no longer be appropriated by anyone. I do not consider it a coincidence that in the following decades, other emigrants, this time Jewish ones like Krautheimer and Kitzinger, chose Byzantium as their intellectual homeland.

From Seminarium to Convivium: the present of a story from the past

26

As we said before, the fate of the Institutum Kondakovianum and the magazine Seminarium was sealed when the Bolsheviks came to power in Czechoslovakia. Officially the Department of Art History of the newly created Academy of Sciences – founded on a Soviet model – took on the mission of the Institutum, but in reality, once the collections and the library had been absorbed, the Institute’s legacy of studies in Byzantine art history gradually disappeared57. Some of its most important members, like the historian and cleric Dvorník, chose to emigrate58. Others remained but became ever more isolated from those working around them. In this Soviet satellite, interest in Russo-Byzantine art was

10 / Nicolas Andreyev in front of the Kondakov’s Institute, Prague, ca 1940

50 Lovino, “Seminarium Kondakovianum / Byzantinoslavica” (n. 44), pp. 45, 51. The support of the Crane family

is also directly mentioned in the introduction to the Recueil d’études, dédiées à la mémoire de N. P. Kondakov, see: “Avant-propos“, in Recueil d’études (n. 1), pp. v–vi; Archives of the Academy of Sciences in Prague: Archiv Ústavu dějin umění av čr v Praze, složka ki-4. 51 Hrochová, “Činnost Institutu N. P. Kondakova” (n. 41), p. 34; Dokumenty k dějinám ruské a ukrajinské emigrace v Československé republice (1918 –1939), Zdeněk Sládek, Ljubov Běloševská et al. eds, Prague 1998, p. 190; Zaoral, “Karel vi. Schwarzenberg” (n. 41), p. 549. 52 Lovino, “Communism vs. Seminarium Kondakovianum” (n. 40); Andreyev, “Material supplied by  Dr.  N. E. Andreyev” (n. 19), p. 11. 53 Lovino, “Communism vs. Seminarium Kondakovianum” (n. 40); Andreyev, “Material supplied by Dr.  N. E. Andreyev” (n. 19), p. 43. 54 Andreyev, “Material supplied by Dr. N. E. Andreyev” (n. 19), pp. 35 – 43. 55 Ibidem. 56 Lovino, “Communism vs. Seminarium Kondakovianum” (n. 40); Zaoral, “Karel vi. Schwarzenberg” (n. 41). 57 Hrochová,“Les études byzantines”(n. 41), p. 305; Lovino,“Communism vs. Seminarium Kondakovianum”(n. 40); Zaoral, “Karel vi. Schwarzenberg.” (n. 41), pp. 555 – 556. 58 Homage to Francis Dvorník, Vladimír Vavřínek, Petra Melichar, Martina Čechová eds, Prague 2018.

27

so limited that the study of the Christian East almost completely vanished, with the only notable exceptions being Myslivec, and after him Hana J. Hlaváčková 59. It is perhaps still too early to write the story of art history as a discipline in communist Czechoslovakia, but some elements of it are already clear. First, the tendency to study almost exclusively Czech and Slovak medieval art, which had taken hold between the wars, continued to dominate 60. At the same time, scholars worked behind the Iron Curtain, which severely limited their exposure to scholarship from the West. Nor should we forget that the new regime was strongly anticlerical, and study of the “iconographic” tradition, dedicated to Christian content, received no support whatsoever. Except for the most enthusiastic supporters of communism, Czech intellectuals developed an implicit hostility to everything Russian. This meant that Russo-Byzantine art would remain at the margins. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Seminarium was essentially dependent on the presence in Prague of a Russian diaspora which would be dismantled after the Second World War. As late as 1945, Soviet troops carried out arrests and deportations of members of the Russian emigrant community in Czechoslovakia, and Andreyev himself was arrested and lived two years in a Soviet concentration camp. Others chose to flee, while those who remained lived in isolation and fear. The arrests began again in 1948 and continued at least until the death of Stalin61. Between one thing and another, after the disappearance of the Institutum Kondakovianum the study of Byzantine art history effectively vanished from the country. In conclusion, the experience of emigration had transformed Kondakov first of all. Thanks to his pupils, to the new rules imposed on him by the University at Prague, and to the interest of figures such as Masaryk, he abandoned studies tied to an “imperial” vision of Byzantium in favor of a wider interest in the cultural exchange between Asia and Europe, with particular attention paid to the production of the nomads of the steppes. And beyond Kondakov himself, in the 1920s the experience shared by Russian emigrants and Kondakov’s students led to a change in the very notion of Byzantium. This empire of the past could no longer “belong” to one country and instead became a cosmopolitan concept that had even influenced, in a roundabout way, Czechoslovakia. The events which occurred in the wake of the Second World War, however, gave rise to a still different notion of Byzantium for Czech scholars: with the disappearance of the emigrant community, the very idea of a world of “Byzantine” art was gradually abandoned and gave way to nationalistic art history. We can, it is true, say that thanks to figures like Dvorník and Vernadsky, the legacy of interwar Prague survived in a second and longer exile, but in reality, an important chapter in historiography was now closed.

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The story, nevertheless, did not end then and there. I must confess that it is difficult for me to talk or write about its continuation because I have been personally involved in it. As fate would have it, at the start of the new millennium, at the University of Lausanne, I have decided to write my thesis on Nikodim Kondakov. Once I had defended it, I was offered a position in Brno where, thanks to the efforts of three different institutions – the universities of Brno, and of Lausanne, and the very Department of Art History at the Academy of Sciences in Prague which had long before taken in the remains of the defunct Institutum Kondakovianum – a new periodical was born. Its title – Convivium. Exchanges and Interactions in Medieval Art of Europe, Byzantium and Mediterranean – was a program in and of itself [Fig. 11]62. But what is still more interesting is another aspect of the publication. Its subtitle is Seminarium Kondakovianum Series Nova. Together with the founding, also in Brno, of the “Centre for Early Medieval Studies: West, Byzantium and Islam” and

of the “Hans Belting Library”, this magazine has contributed to what we could rightly call a renaissance of interest in Byzantine studies (and not only Byzantine) in the former Czechoslovakia63. I will leave it to others to evaluate our results, but Convivium is now in its seventh year of publication, and our successful collaboration with other Czech and international institutes indicates that, even today, the notion of a history of Mediterranean art is a world without frontiers. Whatever others may think of our efforts, one thing seems certain: through Convivium, and thanks to the memory of scholars like Kondakov and their contribution to the field of art history, refugees from the Russian Civil War continue to transform our world even today.

11 / Anna Kelblová, Petr Vronský, Convivium 2019, Brno 2019

59 Hana J. Hlaváčková,“Introduction. Josef Myslivec, Catalogue of Icons from the Collection of the Former N. P. Kon-

60 61 62 63

dakov Institute in Prague”, in Josef Myslivec, Catalogue of Icons from the Collection of the Former N. P. Kondakov Institute in Prague, eadem ed., Prague 1999, pp. 7 –13. In general, see Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino, “The History of (Medieval) Art History, Some Introductory Observations”,  in Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia (n. 41), pp. 11– 20. Zaoral, “Karel vi. Schwarzenberg” (n. 41), pp. 555 – 556; údu av, sv. 2, 10. Ivan Foletti, “From Nikodim Kondakov to ‘Seminarium Kondakovianum’ and to ‘Convivium’”,  Convivium, i/1 (2014), pp. ix–xi. Ivana Molnárová, “Knihovna Hanse Beltinga”,  in Centrum je v Brně. Je Brno v centru? Zpráva o aktivitách Centra raně středověkých studií při Semináři dějin umění ff mu (2012 –2016), Ivan Foletti ed., Brno 2016, pp. 17 – 20; Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino, “Knihovna Hanse Beltinga v Brně: dějiny setkávání”,  Bulletin uhs, ii (2016), pp. 8 –11.

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articles

Abstract – Russian Philosophers in France in the Interwar Period. A Review of the Studies of Emigrant Philosophers – While the older generation of Russian immigrant philosophers in France in the 1920s and ’30s clung to most of their Russian culture, the younger generation – Koyré, Kojève, Gurvitch, and Levinas – introduced German philosophy and created the specific conditions for the transfer of German culture to France at a time when French scholars ignored the academia of defeated Germany. The marginal position of Russian emigrants, which contributed to this cultural transfer, made possible the formation of a new French philosophy based on German phenomenology. The research methodology answering questions on the specifics of the scientific rejection of German science in the inter-war period is taken from Schroeder-Gudehus. Based on a quantitative analysis of the texts in digital databases, the article also tries to follow the status change of the young emigre philosophers. It finds 1933 to be the year when the institutional participation of young philosophers in the community of Paris’s Russian emigrants ended, and the elevation of their status to “French philosophers” began. Keywords – Russian emigrants, Koyré, Kojève, Gurvitch, cultural transfer, French philosophy, German phenomenology, history of philosophy, quantitative analysis Ekaterina Shashlova Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don [email protected]

Russian Philosophers in France in the Interwar Period A Review of the Studies of Emigrant Philosophers Ekaterina Shashlova

Russian émigré thinkers between Russia, Germany and France This article focuses on a group of Russian émigré philosophers who contributed to the transformation of French philosophy in the interwar period, becoming physical vectors of cultural transfer. Through their movement, they “imported”ideas first elaborated by German philosophers to Paris. An analysis of limited empirical data (the number of publications, references, and mentions) will be combined with an assessment of theories on (German-French) cultural exchange

and a contextualization of this exchange in its precise historical moment. From this case study, cultural transfer and migration of scholars thus emerge as crucial elements that should be taken into account in studies on the history of philosophy. This article compares Russian philosopher emigrants from two generations who performed different functions in the transmission of knowledge to Europe after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Their intellectual paths touch closely on the

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notion of “Russia Abroad”, a phenomenon of Russian culture that tried to preserve its own national identity while being situated within other national cultures. This perception works well in the study of the older generation, including famous Russian religious philosophers Nikolay Lossky (1870 –1965), Lev Shestov (1866 –1938), and Nikolay Berdyaev (1874–1948), who received recognition in Russia before the revolution 1. However, the situation is quite different for the philosophers of the younger generation. Deprived of their belonging to the official Russian philosophical tradition, they emerged in Europe as French thinkers. Between the world wars, they played a crucial role in the transfer of German philosophy to France. It seems significant to link these two facts: on one hand, the marginal position of Russian emigrants and their identity and, on the other hand, the German-French transfer which later deeply impacted French post-war philosophy. At the center of these phenomena are emigrants from the Russian Empire belonging to the younger generation: Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965)2, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) 3 [Fig. 1] , Alexandre Kojève (Kojevnikoff, 1902–1968)4 [Fig. 2], and Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995) 5 [Fig. 3]. Gurvitch was educated in tsarist Russia, and began

to teach immediately after his arrival in Europe. Koyré, Kojève, and Levinas, however, studied at European universities and spent a significant part of their careers in France. The marginal position of émigrés, who did not fully belong to the official French academy, allowed these philosophers to conduct research on Husserl and Heidegger, while famous French academics were boycotting German culture in the interwar period. This boycott, and the marginal transfer, formed the institutional context of new French philosophy between the world wars. It is important to remember that German philosophy had a long tradition in the Russian milieu. Nineteenth-century Russian philosophers tried not only to assert Russia’s autonomous “national” identity, but also to situate themselves in the wider context of European philosophy. Ideas about the superiority and authority of German philosophy had a significant impact on scientific communications and educational practices of Russian students and scientists 6. Getting a German education and having scientific communication with German philosophers was the norm in Russian academic life. For example, the editors of the Russian international journal Logos (published from 1910 to

1 / Alexander Koyré 2 / A. Kojève in 1922, Atelier Hanni Schwarz, Berlin 3 / Emmanuel Levinas

1914 [Fig. 4a, b], with one issue published in 1925, in exile in Prague) gave explicit priority to German philosophy as a model of scientific philosophy: “Now as before, we, wishing to be philosophers, must be, above all, Westernizers. We must recognize that however, significant and interesting individual Russian phenomena may be within the scope of scientific philosophy, philosophy, being initially Greek, is presently primarily German 7.”

As stated by Nikolaj S. Plotnikov, Russian and German cultures were in symbiosis at that time, and “[…] it is impossible to remove the German component from the substance of Russian culture and Russian thought at the beginning of the century without destroying this substance completely”8. This profound cultural interaction played a decisive role in Russian implementation of the German-­French philosophical transfer between the world wars. European identity turned out to be associated with cultural values that Russian philosophers also shared. The Russian-­ German Logos allowed “each of the participating parties to build their identity in cultural integrity, 1

On Lossky: Elena V. Serdjukova, Vladimir V. Jancen, “Ob istorii russkoj filosofii v epistoljarnom nasledii N. O. Losskogo. Perepiska N. O. i B. N. Losskix s D. I. Čizhevskim”,  Voprosy

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Filosofii, vi (2019), pp. 108 –130; Fréderic Tremblay, “Nikolai Lossky and Henri Bergson”,  Studies in East European Thought, lxix (2017), pp. 3–16; On Shestov: Michael Finkenthal, Lev Shestov. Existential Philosopher and Religious Thinker, New York 2010; On Berdyaev: Ivana Noble, “Three Orthodox Visions of Ecumenism: Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Lossky”, Communio Viatorum, lvii/2015, pp. 113–140. See: Mikhaïl Antonov, “La théorie du droit de Georges Gurvitch et ses origines philosophiques russes”, Droit et société, xciv/3 (2016), pp. 503–512., Mikhaïl Antonov, Étienne Berthold, “Sources russes de la pensée de Georges Gurvitch : écrits de jeunesse dans les annales contemporaines (1924–1931)”, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, cxxi/2 (2006), pp. 197–226. Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science. Hommage to Alexandre Koyré 1964–2014, Raffaele Pisano, Joseph Agassi, Daria Drozdova eds, Berlin 2018. Marco Filoni, Le philosophe du dimanche. La vie et la pensée d’Alexandre Kojève, Paris 2010; Jeff Love, The Black Circle: a Life of Alexandre Kojève, New York 2018; Ivan S. Kurilovič, Francuzskoe neogegel’janstvo. Ž. Val’, A. Kojre, A. Kožev i Ž. Ippolit v poiskax edinoj fenomenologii Gegelja–Gusserlja–Hajdeggera, Moscow 2019. Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Bruno Clément eds, Paris 2007; Claire E. Katz, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism, Bloomington, in 2012; Anna Jampol’skaja, Emmanjuèl’ Levinas: filosofija i biografija, Kiev 2011. Vitaly Kurennoy, “International Argument: Regarding the History of the Development of International Philosophical Communication in the Nineteenth Century”, Studies in East European Thought, lvi/1–1 (2014), pp. 17–28. From the Editorial Staff, Logos: Meždunarodnyj ežegodnik po filosofii kul’tury, i (1910), reprinted edition, Moscow 2005, p. 13, quoted in Kurennoy, “International Argument” (n. 6), p. 21. “Logos“ v istorii evropejskoj filosofii: proekt i pamjatnik, Nikolaj S. Plotnikov ed., Moscow 2005, p. 9.

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presenting it in the form of European identity par excellence”9. By formulating an attitude towards universal values and objective truth, a Russian or German philosopher was constructing a shared European identity. After the Revolution of 1917, Russian philosophy, continuing in the tradition of pre-revolutionary thought, developed among the philosophers of “Russia Abroad”(in Prague, Berlin, Paris, etc.) 10. In the only issue of Logos published after a long break, in exile in Prague in 1925, attention is given not only to the supranational character of philosophy but also to another objective – “the revival”of Russian philosophy. In 1926, Koyré describes the ideological transformation of Logos that occurred in Prague with these words: “The old Logos, that of Moscow, was less assertive about the role of Russian philosophical thought. It was even quite often accused of outraged ‘Occidentalism’. It was because the philosophical ‘situation’ was not the same. These were almost entirely epistemological issues that preoccupied pre-war philosophical thought. This ‘preparatory’ period has now passed. We are entering, according to Logos, a new period, a constructive period. The instrument is forged; we must now take advantage of it to build a philosophy of being 11.”

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It is therefore no surprise that Heidegger’s philosophy of being, representing a holistic criticism of the scientific way of comprehending the world, drew many responses from Russian emigrants. Emigrants of the younger generation, the above-mentioned Gurvitch, Koyré and Kojève, were, in the early stages of their careers in France, associated with Russian philosophy and led to teach courses on Russian philosophy. This is probably because, at that point, their European professional identity and independent philosophical language had not yet been formed. For instance, Gurvitch – the oldest of the younger generation – dedicated one of his first articles published in France to Russian philosophy. In a text from 1925, he introduces the French audience to the state of Russian philosophy in the first quarter of the twentieth century 12. Gurvitch demonstrates how the theories of Lossky, Frank, Karsavin, Berdyaev, and others at that time were related to the development of their philosophical ideas before the 1917 revolution. Gurvitch views the intuitivist school headed

by Lossky as derivative of Soloviov’s metaphysics and defines this school as “the center of the evolution of philosophical ideas in Russia”, located between Russian religious philosophy and critical transcendentalism13. Gurvitch defined Russia as the youngest of the great nations, associating this historical fact with metaphysics: “[…] the metaphysical tendencies of Russian philosophy – the aspirations of youth – coincide with the return to metaphysics, which is taking place (after long retreats in other directions) in the countries of the old philosophical culture (led by Germany and France). That is why the metaphysical tendency of Russian philosophy could, in the event of its development, receive a response outside Russia14.”

The fates of Koyré, Kojève, and Levinas differ from Gurvitch’s and from one another. However, we consider all four of them to be representatives of the same emigrant group on the following grounds: emigration from the Russian Empire and professional development in France; participation in the transfer of ideas of German philosophy to France, major publications written in French; participation in the activities of French scientific institutions and the transformation of French philosophy. Levinas’ position is particularly interesting and his categorization as a “Russian émigré philosopher” may be problematic. Levinas called himself a Lithuanian Jew – he was born and lived his youth in the Lithuanian city of Kovno (Kaunas), except from 1915 to 1920, when his family moved to Kharkov. He received a classical Jewish education, but his native language was Russian, which he spoke until his death. In 1923, Levinas went to study in Strasbourg15. However, he did not concentrate on Russian philosophy and immediately began his professional career with German phenomenology. Researcher Andrius Valevičius points out that Levinas’ production in Lithuanian means that one can fully consider Levinas a “Lithuanian thinker” and thus expand the field of his identity16. However, it should be noted that Levinas did not know the Lithuanian language, as proven by Michail Maiatsky and further explored by Anna Yampolskaya17. His only article written in Lithuanian was translated by someone specifically for a Lithuanian journal. In Valevičius’ assertion,

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“Logos“ v istorii evropejskoj filosofii: proekt i pamjatnik, Nikolaj S. Plotnikov ed., Moscow 2005, p. 10. See: Elena Serdyukova, “Keeping of Cultural Heritage in Emigration: Experience of Russia Abroad“, Cultural International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, xi (2014), pp. 163–180. Alexandre Koyré, “Un annuaire de la philosophie russe“, Le monde slave, n.s., iii/1 (1926), pp. 147–151, sp. p. 148. Georges Gurvitch, “La philosophie russe du premier quart du xxe siècle“, Le monde slave, viii (1926), pp. 254–272. Cit.: Gurvitch G.D., “Russkaja filosofija pervoj četverti xx veka“, Issledovanija po istorii russkoj mysli: ežegodnik za 2006 –2007 god, Modest A. Kolerov, Nikolaj S. Plotnikov eds, Moscow 2009, pp. 495–515, sp. p. 515. Ibidem, p. 496. Ibidem, p. 515. See Jampol’skaja, Emmanjuèl’ Levinas (n. 5). Originally published in Lithuanian as “Dvasiškumo supratimas prancuzu ir vokiečiu kulturoje”, Vairas, v/7 (1933), pp. 271–280; See also Emmanuel Levinas, “The Understanding of Spirituality in French and German Culture”, Continental Philosophy Review, xxxi (1998), pp. 1–10; Andrius Valevičius, “Afterword: Emmanuel Levinas, the Multicultural Philosopher”,Continental Philosophy Review, xxxi (1998), pp. 11–14. Mixail Majackij,“Moj Levinas”,  Ežegodnik po fenomenologi­čes­koj filosofii, Moscow 2015, pp. 268 –278; Jampol’skaja, Emmanjuèl’ Levinas (n. 5).

4a, b / Journal Logos, mcmx/1 (1910), cover and contents

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5 / Journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale, xlii/4 (1935), cover

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we can see the desire of researchers to define Levinas’ identity and expand it based on the diversity of cultures in which he existed. Even though Levinas didn’t receive Russian philosophical training and though his identity was multiple, we believe it is important to include him in our study: it is precisely his “in between” position that made him a vector of philosophical thought in Europe. The intellectual life of interwar France the émigrés joined was particularly lively. Several philosophical trends competed, present in the academic environment as well as amongst free intellectual groups. The French academic environment had its own institutions and leaders, the majority of which were Sorbonne professors, members and founders of the French Philosophical Society and members of the editorial board of the journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale [Fig. 5] (among them Léon Brunschvicg, Xavier Léon, and Élie Halévy). Brunschvicg (1869 –1944) was a major institutional philosopher associated with the “official” philosophy from school to doctorate levels. Critical rationalism, neo-rationalism, positivism, and Kantianism dominated the academic environment. Non-academic philosophy was closely associated with new trends in art and literature (e.g. surrealism), religion, and psychoanalysis. Personalism became widespread – represented by the intellectual group formed around the journal Esprit – and French Hegelianism began to develop, as the College of Sociology was formed18. It was French Hegelianism that became most authoritative in the post-war period, changing the entire landscape of academic and non-­academic philosophy, as Descombes rightly wrote 19. Represented by Jean Wahl (1888 –1974) and Kojève, it had a substantial impact on the formation of French phenomenology and existential philosophy, where Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger (the three “H”) found unity. The main criticism was directed at positivist ideas about the consciousness and progress of science and at the ideas of Brunschvicg’s academic tradition. The death of the subject, the Other of Reason and its power, and the irrationality of society – these ideas formed the basis of “French theory” or French postmodernism as the main part of continental philosophy opposed to analytical methods.

This turn from rationalism to its criticism took place on the eve of a global tragedy, World War ii, and members of the Russian emigration played a fundamental role in this transformation. Overview of approaches to the study of German-French transfer in philosophy between the world wars

French and German philosophy, reflecting the content of the ideas and methods of philosophy and their impact on the younger generation in both countries 25: “The contemporary philosopher to whom French youth listen most of all is Léon Brunschvicg. His works are dedicated to the progress of consciousness. Progress of consciousness is understood as the directing of human thought towards the mathematical sciences 26.”

Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus used the term “boy“[In Germany,] Heidegger’s philosophy has an exceptionally large influence among German university stucott” to describe the relationship of most Europedents. When Heidegger speaks about spiritual reality, an states towards Germany after the First World he does not use the word ‘consciousness’, but rather War 20. In 1919, Germany was expelled from the ‘existence’ (this is where the name of his philosophy, International Research Council (irc) and German existential, comes from) wanting to emphasize the students were not allowed into international stuconcrete and dramatic aspects of the spirit 27.” dent organizations. Thus, politics determined the isolation of German philosophy, a situation Levinas also mentions the relationship between radically different to the pre-war period, when Heidegger and politicians who could exploit critiGerman science was fully included in the interna- cisms of rationalism for their own purposes. Using the example of Levinas’ reflection, we see that tional scientific and philosophical context. In this framework, the younger generation of emigrants politics had already become an important factor in France played an important role in returning in the definition of national relations and was the philosophical discussion to the internation- reflected in the explanation of cultural differences. al level. Particularly important was the journal Levinas – adopting the position of an observer Recherches philosophiques, published by a group – wanted to show more significant differences formed around Koyré. In their texts, they used between French and German cultures than posthe “international argument”21, making “explicit tulating a difference between “the ‘light-hearted reference to the state of scientific knowledge out- French’ and the ‘heavy German’”,without, howevside one’s national frontiers, the reference being er, identifying a “winning”side 28. Yet, history has employed with a polemical intent”22. This vision of shown that Heidegger won a philosophical victory in France as well. Levinas’s article, however, knowledge from a truly international perspective allowed the Recherches philosophiques to consider philosophy beyond national points of view, and, 18 See Pinto Louis,“(Re)traductions. Phénoménologie et ‘philosophie allemande’ dans les années 1930”,  Actes de la recherche to a certain extent, to ignore politics and the boyen sciences sociales, cxlv/5 (2002), pp. 21–33. cott of Germany. 19 Vincent Descombes, Le Même et l’Autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978), Paris 1979. The boycott phenomenon, however, also had 20 Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, Les scientifiques et la paix : la internal roots. French philosophers criticized incommunauté scientifique internationale au cours des années 20, consistent German phenomenology as unfounded Montréal 1978. 21 Kurennoy considers the journal Logos as an example, we as compared to the French philosophical tradition apply his method of analysis to the journal Recherches philoof critical rationalism. Furthermore, they believed sophiques. See Kurennoy, “International Argument” (n. 6). that Husserl was replicating the success of Carte- 22 Ibidem, p. 20. 23 See Léon Brunschvicg,“Préface”, in Georges Gurvitch, Les tensian philosophy and earlier French philosophers 23. dances actuelles de la philosophie allemande: E. Husserl, M. Scheler, The cultural opposition that existed between E. Lask, N. Hartmann, M. Heidegger, J. Vrin, Paris 1930, pp. 3– 8. 24 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Understanding of Spirituality” (n. 16). France and Germany in the interwar period was 25 Simultaneously in 1927, the following books were published: analyzed by young Levinas in his article “The UnBrunschvicg’s Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. derstanding of Spirituality in French and German 26 Ibidem, p. 2. Culture”24. Levinas identified Léon Brunschvicg 27 Ibidem, p. 6. and Martin Heidegger as key figures in coeval 28 Ibidem p. 10.

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shows that he – as a philosopher whose identity cannot be clearly defined – attempts a balancing of two intellectual cultures. The story of the young generation of Russian émigrés in France therefore highlights that studying the history of the ideas of philosophers is not sufficient; it is also necessary to turn to institutional facts that might explain transformations in philosophy. To analyze philosophers and their ideas in this kind of context, we must turn to sociological approaches that can offer explanations for the transformation of knowledge. French sociologists explain how philosophers belong to particular philosophical currents in a number of ways29. For example, Bourdieu presented a meaningful critique of the political neutrality of Heidegger’s philosophy by analyzing the opposition between philosophical autonomy and politics 30. Bourdieu’s followers Pinto and Fabiani described the French philosophical field between the world wars by giving more significance to the hierarchy of social agents than to the power of philosophical ideas 31. According to Bourdieu, attaining a position in the social space of the academic field of philosophy occurs by opposing the dominant philosophy; such a move is made by Heidegger, taking a position against neo-Kantianism and Husserl, whose criticism is similar to that of Marburg neo-­Kantianism32. We assume that young Russian emigrants used German phenomenology in general, and Heidegger’s philosophy in particular, to oppose the positions of the established masters of the French academic world. Heidegger, with his criticism, was out of place for Kantianism, which prevailed among French academics. For instance, disregard of the Cassirer-Heidegger debate in Davos (1929) in the French Philosophical Society’s agenda is contradictory to the assessment of the young Levinas 33. Brunschvicg and Levinas attended the Cassirer-Heidegger debate. According to Levinas, who viewed the debate as a crucial philosophical discussion, Heidegger clearly won. The French Philosophical Society’s Bulletin ignored this important philosophical development. Brunschvicg’s preface to Gurvitch’s book Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande (1930), with its criticisms of German philosophers,

demonstrates a conscious distancing from the new idol of youth – Heidegger 34. Heidegger was a figure in the development of opposition to old academic authorities by those who used the new philosophy to fight for the appropriation of philosophical recognition. Thus, we can further the idea that, by transferring leading German philosophy and using it as a significant argument in defense of the international character of scientific knowledge, young emigrants fought for recognition in the field of French philosophy. Pinto put Russian emigrants on a par with French philosophers based on their social status in Russia35. We disagree with this position. We believe that it is necessary to describe the marginal status of émigré philosophers in the new state, rather than merely their high status in the Russian Empire. In comparing the fates of two neo-Hegelians, Wahl and Kojève, we see that the social origins and socio-economic capital of the emigrant’s family have little weight in the new culture. Kojève’s social background does not matter in France, as he becomes an emigrant and loses opportunities to gain social capital that he could have had in Russia. Therefore, to the list of factors that determine the specifics of the hierarchy within the institution, which Pinto makes use of, one must add emigrant status. It is for this reason that, as Fabiani rightly notes, “Kojève’s place in twentieth century French philosophy is atypical”36. For a young emigrant, the most important tool for social mobility was a European education and belonging to research groups under the patronage of reputable scientists. At the same time, emigrant status, which did not allow one to become an “inspector” of the national French education system, freed one from the need to preserve the traditions of French philosophy as a national value and the face of French culture. The French Philosophical Society defended the philosophical tradition of France as cultural heritage and an elite activity for preserving social order and its ideological justification. The only way to gain recognition in such a system involves, we agree with Bourdieu, opposition to the views of the Academy. Kojève is considered to have come from a rich intellectual family, and between his position in the intellectual space and that of Jean Wahl, Léon

Brunschvicg’s nephew, in fact, there should be no difference. However, having been forced to leave Russia and having received his education in Germany, Kojève had to re-defend his dissertation in France (as France did not recognize German diplomas)37 and did not have French citizenship until 1937 38. After declaring bankruptcy in 1929, he worked in a library while giving lectures on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (ephe) in the Religious Sciences Section 39. Wahl became famous thanks to his 1929 work Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel 40, where he represents Hegel as a theologian, bringing the ideas of The Phenomenology of Mind to his early works. Wahl had been working at the Sorbonne since 1936, and after the war, he followed in Brunschvicg’s path: he became editor of the journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale and President of the French Philosophical Society. Wahl’s studies made a significant contribution to the development of French Hegelianism through an appeal to the figure of Kierkegaard, but this happened after the publication of his main work. Wahl introduced the existential dimension of Hegel’s philosophy into the philosophical space in the 1930s. However, Kojève’s audience (with Koyré’s leading ideas about Hegel: the rejection of the phenomenological and dialectical understanding of nature and the atheistic interpretation and “anthropologisation” of time 41) formed the future “masters of minds” of the postwar generation of philosophers 42, including Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron 43. These philosophers officially participated in Kojève’s seminars in different years. These events were also attended by many others, including Adler, Corbin, Gordine, Queneau, Fessard, Bataille, Lacan, Poplavski, Stern, Weil, Merleau-Ponty and others 44. Jean Hyppolite developed an alternative reading of Hegel and furthered the canonisation of Hegel in French philosophy. Merleau-Ponty argued that the figure of Hegel affirmed the basic content of French philosophy after the war. Bataille and Lacan are some of the famous followers of Kojève’s ideas; they formed the basis of postmodernism. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant, 1943) is based on many of Kojève’s ideas, including defining man as Nothingness

or as a historical being defined through negativity. Kojève’s political influence goes beyond his philosophical lectures. In the theoretical field, the concept of “the end of history” was used by Francis Fukuyama, and in practice, after World War ii, Kojève worked in the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and contributed to the formation of a unified European market to oppose American economic dominance 45. A comparison of the fates of Wahl and Kojève is important because it shows that sociological analysis should take into account the status of an emigrant in the aggregate of family social capital. That is, if Wahl followed the classical path of a French academician with the appropriate social capital, then Kojève’s atypical path was formed on the basis of recognition gained in the new culture. Further, Kojève not only transformed 29 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus, Paris 1984. 30 Idem, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Stanford 1991. 31 Pinto, “(Re)traductions. Phénoménologie et ‘philosophie

allemande’” (n. 18); Jean-Louis Fabiani, Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? La vie sociale des concepts (1880 –1980), Paris 2010; idem, Les Philosophes de la République, Paris 1988. 32 Main Heidegger’s text, where he is reacting on Husserl is Sein und Zeit (1927). About the criticism of Marburg neo-Kantianism see Chapter 2 of Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Stanford 1991. 33 See: Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. Band 3: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 274–296. 34 Brunschvicg, “Préface” (n. 23). 35 Pinto, “(Re)traductions. Phénoménologie et ‘philosophie allemande’” (n. 18). 36 Fabiani, Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? (n. 31), p. 195. 37 Die religiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews (Heidelberg, 1926), La philosophie religieuse de W. Solovieff (Paris, 1933). 38 Journal Officiel de la République Française, 28 Février 1937, p. 2582–2584. 39 Аleksej Rutkevič, “Predislovie”, in Аteizm i drugie raboty, Moscow 2007, pp. 7–44, sp. pp. 11–15. 40 Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, Paris 1929. 41 Аleksej Rutkevič “Nemeckaja filosofija vo Francii: Kojre o Gegele”,  Istorija filosofii, viii (2001), pp. 3–28. 42 See Descombes, Le Même et l’Autre (n. 19). 43 See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des Hautes Études, Raymond Queneau ed., Paris 1947. 44 See the list of participants in Kojève’s seminar in Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in TwentiethCentury France, Ithaca/London 1988, pp. 225–227. 45 One of the reports indicates Kojève’s ideas substantiating practical economic solutions. See: “Conférence faite par Jean Filippi le Jeudi 17 mars 1960”, Centre National du Commerce Exterieur, Institut de Commerce International. Fonds “Alexandre Kojève”au département des Manuscrits de la bnf, boîte xx, correspondance générale.

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French philosophy but also significantly contributed to the transformation the European field of economics. To better understand the history of philosophy in France between the world wars, the cultural transfer methodology can be employed. This, formulated by Michel Espagne, proposes transfer not between two autonomous entities (for example, between German and French culture) but transfer involving a set of institutional and cultural phenomena 46. The main vector of transfer may not be recognized by authoritative institutions, but rather through publishing and translation. Espagne’s theory is not aimed at finding identity and identifying differences, but at forms of mixing cultures. Thus, we cannot call Kojève a “Russian philosopher” or “French philosopher”. However, we must speak about his Franco-Russian emigrant identity. Espagne suggests considering a triangular cultural transfer, which must be seen as a more complex network of relationships 47. Franco-German relations are oversimplified when the third element is ignored – the third element being Russian culture. To the history of Gurvitch, Koyré, and Kojève, Espagne dedicated a text entitled “The Russians who introduce France to German philosophy”48. In Espagne’s view, Gurvitch fulfilled an important function in this process – he became a historian of Russian mediation between German and French culture, while Koyré and Kojève had foundations in Russian religious philosophy, which influenced their perceptions of German philosophy. Precisely because Espagne proposes analyzing the network (reseau) of relations of intermediaries, and Bourdieu in the field of philosophy, we come to the need for a social history of cultural transfer. Therefore, approaches of cultural transfer and the sociology of the philosophy of Bourdieu’s school are complementary in describing the manifold paths of philosophy’s development in France between the world wars. The sociologist Fabiani uses the term “conceptual transfer” when analyzing French philosophy in the interwar period. He states that “France was fertilized by Germany”, while “French philosophers have never been penetrated by German culture and often cannot access it without translation or without special mediation”49.

Translations in both the literal and figurative sense are an essential part of the study of cultural transfer, as they touch upon the issue of transition from one language to another and the adaptation of an object in a new space. “Any passage of a cultural object from one context to another results in a transformation of its meaning […] To transfer is not to transport, but rather to metamorphose”50. The translation and reception of Husserl and Heidegger created a new philosophical direction, French phenomenology, which cannot be reduced to the German tradition or interpreted as a copy, but must be seen as a new direction with its own content, created through transfer. The tools of transfer here were the translations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel into French 51 done by migrants, including Russian migrants, and publications in Koyré’s new journal Recherches philosophiques; the majority of Kojève’s works (reviews) were published in that journal. The first publication on Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity appeared in French. The translation of Husserl’s manuscript was done by Levinas and Peiffer on the recommendation of Koyré and Héring52. The most significant monographs on phenomenological philosophy were written by Alsatian Héring and Russian emigrants Gurvitch and Levinas 53. Heidegger’s first publication in French was carried out with the assistance of Koyré54, while the second was published in Koyré’s journal, Recherches philosophiques 55. Koyré also wrote several representative articles about Hegel and taught a course on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which Kojève attended 56. Starting in 1933, Kojève taught this course in Koyré’s place. The first translation of a passage (the section a of chapter iv) from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind into French was done by Kojève 57. Recherches philosophiques (1931–1937, six issues in total, [Fig. 6]) – a journal produced by the intellectual group that developed around Koyré – published Kojève, Levinas, Aron, Sartre, Bachelard, Wahl and others. The journal created a new field of philosophy in France by translating key German works and analyzing phenomenological and scientific research from other European countries. For their publication, the editors relied on famous French patrons (the patronage

committee included C. Bouglé, É. Bréhier, L. Brunschvicg, H. Delacroix, G. Dumas, E. Gilson, P. Janet, A. Lalande, É. le Roy, L. Lévy-Bruhl, A. Rey, A. Rivaud, and L. Robin). This was an impressive decision, since the number of patrons exceeded the number of editors of the journal: the editorial board in different years included A. Koyré, H.-Ch. Puech, A. Spaier, G. Bachelard, M. Souriau, and J. Wahl. This clearly shows that, without such “national” patronage, the publication would not appear legitimate. At the same time, the journal’s content indicates the independent and ground-breaking nature of its research. In the first issue of Recherches philosophiques, the editorial board describes the purpose of the journal and its principles. In the volume, the editors start by apologizing for the fact that the journal is critical and poses new questions and themes that were not conventional research topics at the time. They also explicitly express the possibility of mistakes and the fact that some articles may spur feelings of resistance in readers. That is, the journal’s editorial board defines its place 6 / Journal Recherches philosophiques, vi (1936–1937), cover

46 Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-alle-

47

48

49 50 51 52

53

54

55 56

57

mand (xviiie–xixe siècles), Michel Espagne, Michael Werner eds, Paris 1988. See Philologiques iv Transferts culturels triangulaires France – Allemagne – Russie, Katia Dimitrieva, Michel Espagne eds, Paris 1996. See Chapter “Des Russes initiant la France à la philosophie allemande” in Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-­ allemands, Paris 1999, pp. 167–178. Fabiani, Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? (n. 31), pp. 181, 184. Michel Espagne, “La notion de transfert culturel”, Revue Sciences/Lettres, i (2013). Anna Jampol’skaja, Fenomenologija v Germanii i Francii: problemy metoda, Moscow 2013. Edmund Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes. Introduction à la phénoménologie, Gabrielle Peiffer, Emmanuel Levinas transl., Paris 1931. Jean Héring, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse. Étude sur la théorie de la connaissance religieuse, Paris 1926; Gurvitch, Les tendances actuelles (n. 23); Emmanuel Levinas, La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, Paris 1930. Martin Heidegger, “Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?”,  transl. Henry Corbin, introduction by Alexandre Koyré, Bifur, viii (1931). Martin Heidegger,“De la nature de la cause”,  trans. by A. Bessey, Recherches philosophiques, i (1931–1932), pp. 83–124. Koyré’s articles on Hegel: “Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France”,  Revue d’histoire de la philosophie, v/2 (1931), pp. 147–171; “Hegel à Iéna: à propos de publications récentes”, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, lix/9 –10 (1934), pp. 274–283; “Hegel en Russie”, Le monde slave, n.s., xiii/2 (1936), pp. 215–248 et xiii/3, pp. 321–364. Alexandre Kojève, “Autonomie et dépendance de la con­ science de soi”,  Mesures, 14 janvier 1939.

43

in the existing field of philosophical publications as innovative and as having the function of publishing research in progress and describing what is happening in other countries. The publication of Recherches philosophiques did not go unnoticed. Reviews immediately pointed out the position of the new group of philosophers. For example, the journal Esprit raised a question about intergenerational relations in the journal’s innovation: “[…] It is not a simple opposition between the ‘old and the young’, between ‘academicians’ and ‘innovators’. Such oppositions are permanent and only reflect the different stages of a continuous evolution. Today, however, it is not a process of evolution that we are witnessing but rather a phenomenon of rupture. Young people do not content themselves with citing the ‘official’ philosophy: they are disinterested, which is much more serious 58.”

44

This precisely reflects reactions to Recherches philosophiques in assessing the philosophy of the younger generation of philosophers. Thus, using three approaches to the analysis of philosophy between the world wars – the political boycott of Germany, sociological studies of philosophy, and the theory of cultural transfer – we can conclude that the transfer of German philosophy to France and the subsequent transformation of French philosophy was possible because the young generation of Russian emigrants turned to norms of international communication in the midst of a boycott of Germany and used German phenomenology in general, and Heidegger’s philosophy in particular, to oppose the positions of established masters of the French academic world in their struggle for recognition in French philosophy. However, initially, for a young emigrant, the most important social boost was a European education and belonging to research groups under the patronage of renowned scholars and researchers. When comparing the older and younger generations of Russian philosophers, we see that the younger generation predominantly translated German philosophy, while the older generation of philosophers transferred Russian culture to France. For them, Germany and France served as places to preserve migrant Russian culture. As verification of these ideas, we present the results of a small empirical study.

Quantitative analysis of mentions of Russian emigrants in periodicals and lectures between the world wars This analysis considers the presence of Russian emigrants in educational institutions and periodicals. It uses the database of the National French Library (bnf),“Gallica”(gallica.bnf.fr), for a digital search of mentions. This database allows for advanced searches of words in selected periodicals. These search results come from French journals that are representative of the institutions of “official”philosophical thought: Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger and Revue de métaphysique et de morale 59. The Revue de métaphysique et de morale is the main journal of the French Philosophical Society. In addition, research was carried out to find references made in the newspaper chronicle of Russian emigrants and the Consolidated index of articles on Russian emigration 60. A comparison of emigrant mentions made in the newspaper chronicle from 1920–1940 shows that in a number of Parisian newspapers by Russian emigrants (Poslednie Novosti: eženedel’naja gazeta, Vozroždenie: Organ nacional’noj russkoj mysli, Russkaja gazeta v Pariže: eženedel’naja gazeta, Zveno: Eženedel’naja literaturno-političeskaja gazeta, and Evrazija: Eženedel’nik po voprosam kul’tury i politiki), Koyré, Gurvitch and Kojève were presented as follows (Levinas did not participate in Russian Abroad events as a Russian emigrant; he was associated with Jewish organizations) [Tab. 1] 61. The older generation of philosophers are presented in the newspaper chronicles as follows: Berdyaev – more than 350 mentions; Shestov – 60 mentions; and Lossky – only 8 mentions, since he lived in Prague until 1942, but sometimes participated in events in Paris. Kojève, Koyré, and Gurvitch are represented in reference to a variety of institutions, Sorbonne being mentioned the most often. In the early period, both Koyré (1924–1928) and Gurvitch (1925–1926) gave lectures on Russian philosophy there. Kojève is mentioned only 4 times from 1930–1931, in relation to talks given at the Philosophical Science Society: “Basic Concepts of Geometry”and “Ideas of Determinism in Classical and Modern Physics” (the latter topic belongs to Kojève). Ryabushinsky,

name

characteristics of the person in mention

number of mentions

period of mentions

institutes

meeting topics or lecture topics (number of lectures)

Kojevnikov

as a philosopher, physicist, and cultural figure

4

1930–1931

Scientific and Philosophical Society

Geometry, infinity, types of culture, and physics

Koyré

as a lecturer

21

1924–1933

Sorbonne, Institute of Slavic Studies, the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the ephe , and the Russian Academic Union

The topics divide into periods: 1924–1928, Russian philosophy (9); 1928–1930, religion, Russian philosophy, Boehme, and science (11); 1932–1933, Hegel (2)

Gurvitch

as a lecturer and participant in meetings

52

1925–1933

Sorbonne, Russkij narodnyj universitet (Russian People’s University), Franko-russkij institut social’nyx i političeskix nauk (Franco-­Russian Institute of Social and Political Sciences), Parižskaja gruppa evrazijcev (Paris Group of Eurasians), Francuzskoe filosofskoe obšestvo (French Philosophical Society), Russkoe filosofskoe obšestvo (Russian Philosophical Society), Académie des sciences de la France and others

The main topics divided into periods: 1925–1926, Russian philosophy and Russian philosophy of law; 1927–1930, German philosophy, social philosophy, law, and Lossky’s philosophy; 1932–1933, German social philosophy, Fichte, Hegel, social law, Proudhon, state, fascism and others

Tab. 1 / Mentions of emigrants made in the newspaper chronicle

who participated in the debate in 1931, sent Kojève a letter asking him to provide biographical information: “In the journal ‘Monde Slave’ published in Paris, there will be an account of the activities of Russian scientists over the past decade living outside their homeland. The Russian Academic Group and the Russian Academic Union entrusted me with the physical and mathematical department. I would be extremely grateful if you did not refuse me a condensed report on your academic, organizational, and teaching activities; a list of your printed works and which societies you are a member of; and if possible, your photograph and biographical data”62. In 1932, Kojève completed work on the manuscript The Idea of Determinism in Classical and Modern Physics 63, which served as an additional dissertation for his research on the religious philosophy of Solovyov 64. Thus, in this newspaper chronicle, Kojève appears both as a physicist and philosopher of science. The chronicle also indicates that Kojève did not give open lectures on philosophy before starting to 58 Alexandre Marc, “Une philosophie nouvelle ?”, Esprit,

xv

(1933), pp. 472–476, sp. p. 472: “Et c’est un fait dont il ne faut

59

60

61 62

63 64

pas méconnaître la véritable portée. Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple opposition entre les ‘vieux’ et les ‘jeunes’, entre les ‘académiciens’ et les ‘novateurs’. De pareilles oppositions sont permanentes et ne font que refléter les différents stades d’une évolution continue. Aujourd’hui cependant, ce n’est pas à un processus d’évolution que nous assistons, mais bien à un phénomène de rupture. Les jeunes ne se contentent pas de critiquer la philosophie ‘officielle’ : ils s’en désintéressent, ce qui est bien plus grave.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (1876 –1944). Available at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34349223n/ date.r=; Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1893–1944). Available at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb343491074/date.r=. L’Émigration russe: Chronique de la vie scientifique, culturelle et sociale en France. 1920 –1940, Paris/Moscow 1996; L’Émigration russe – Revue et recueils, 1920 –1980. Index général des articles, Paris 1988. See L’Émigration russe (n. 60). Dmitry Riabouchinsky, 17.11.1931, bnf, département des manuscrits, Fonds Alexandre Kojève, naf 28320, box 22.2. Correspondance reçue: m–z: “В журнале ‘Monde Slave’, издаваемом в Париже, предполагается дать отчет о деятельности русских ученых, проживающих в данное время вне пределов Родины, за истекшее десятилетие. Русская академическая группа и Русский Академический Союз поручили мне физико-математический отдел. Буду Вам чрезмерно благодарен, если Вы не откажете сообщить мне в сжатой форме отчет о Вашей ученой, организационной и преподавательской деятельности, перечень ваших печатных трудов, членом каких обществ Вы состоите, если возможно Вашу фотографию и биографические данные.” Alexandre Kojève, L’Idée du déterminisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne, Paris 1990. Alexandre Kojevnikoff, “La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev”,  Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, xiv/6 (1934), pp. 534–554; xv/1–2 (1935), pp. 110 –152.

45

7 / L’Émigration russe – Revue et recueils, 1920–1980. Index général des articles, Paris 1988, cover

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work at the ephe in the 1933–1934 academic year. Kojeve’s lectures on Russian religious philosophy (ephe, 1933–1935) and on Hegelian philosophy (ephe, 1933–1939) are not mentioned. Concerning the number of mentions made for participating in public events, Gurvitch is the most quoted one of the younger generation. However, the minimal presence of young Russian emigrants in newspaper chronicles, compared to the older generation, is also confirmed by the Consolidated Index of Articles of Russian Emigration (L’Emigration russe – Revue et recueils, 1920–1980. Index général des articles, [Fig. 7]) 65: Gurvitch – 23 publications (his main focuses include social and political philosophy and the philosophy of law); Koyré – 2 publications (reviews of French publications by Groethuysen and Bergson); and while Kojève is absent 66, Filoni reminds us of Kojève’s review in the Evrazijskaja xronika 67. By comparison, data for the older generation in the Consolidated Index are as follows: Shestov – 40, Lossky – 59, and Berdyaev – 143 articles in Russian. The articles of young emigrants are limited in time span: Koyré was published in Russian only in 1927 and 1928, and Gurvitch was actively published in Russian until 1932 – Gurvitch would later write several articles in Russian, though they were mainly devoted to the memory of philosophers and would appear much less frequently. In the chronicle of events, the activities of young emigrants are limited to 1933 (and those of Kojève to 1932). It can be concluded that, after 1933, they were concentrated in specialized French institutions such as 1) the journal Recherches philosophiques, created by Koyré as a review of new philosophy oriented towards foreign authors; 2) the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger; and 3) the Religious Sciences section created at the ephe. Young emigrants rarely appear in events and publications as Russian philosophers [Tab. 2]. In the early thirties, the young generation began to take part in the events of Russian emigrants less frequently. To explain this fact, one might rely on events in German philosophy that took place from the eve of 1933 onward. The figure of Martin Heidegger, who became a rector at the University of Freiburg in the spring of 1933 and supported the new political regime in Germany, became one

russian emigrant philosopher

number of mentions in revue philosophique de la france et de l’étranger (*before the first world war)

number of mentions in revue de métaphysique et de morale

number of mentions of events in l’émigration russe: chronique de la vie scientifique, culturelle et sociale en france. 1920–1940, paris/moscow 1996, tab. 1–4.

number of articles in russian in l’émigration russe – revue et recueils, 1920–1980. index général des articles, paris 1988.

N. Berdyaev

0/2*

0

350

143

N. Lossky

7/9*

2

8

59

L. Shestov

17

0

60

40

G. Gurvitch

9

11

52

23

A. Koyré

18

0

21

2

A. Kojève

1

0

4

1

E. Levinas

6

1

0

0

Tab. 2 / Comparison of mentions of Russian emigrant philosophers made in different documents after the First World War

Conclusion of the main landmarks for the phenomenological methodology for young emigrants at the time. The latter became the authors of the Recherches philosophiques, while French philosophical institutions continued to ignore Heidegger in training courses and publications. For instance, the Bulletin des groupes d’études philosophiques de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris demonstrates that German philosophy was ignored in Sorbonne philosophy courses in the 1936–1937 academic year 68. At the same time, by 1933, the number of mentions of the younger generation in chronicles of the Russian emigration sharply decreased. By this time, Gurvitch, Koyré, and Kojève were focused on German phenomenology in French institutions. This short analysis demonstrates how quantitative research on the history of philosophy allows us to discover new data within the institutional academic field of philosophy where the hierarchical positions of agents are distributed, and inextricable links are established between social and academic status. A quantitative analysis of mentions of Russian emigrants of the older and younger generations between the world wars shows that it was in 1933 that the institutional participation of young philosophers in the community of Russian emigrants in Paris ended, and their status as “French philosophers” began; a status that would be confirmed in the future.

Having analyzed the political boycott of Germany between the world wars, sociological studies of philosophy, a study of the transfer of German philosophy to France, and a quantitative study of references to and mentions of Russian emigrants, we conclude that the professional development and identity of the younger generation of Russian emigrants differs significantly from the older generation. Furthermore, their work also allowed for the transformation of French philosophy in an environment where the older generation of French philosophers ignored German philosophy. In describing the research areas of two philosophical generations and the positions of Russian emigrant philosophers in the French academic field, we find that French philosophers of the older generation, such as Brunschvicg and Léon, held key positions at French universities, and determined the agenda of French philosophy through their critique of German phenomenology, while ignoring the Vienna Circle and other new trends in 65 See L’Émigration russe (n. 60). 66 Kojève is absent in the Consolidated Index, but the new-

spaper Evrazija: Eženedel’nik po voprosam kul’tury i politiki published Kojève’s article in Russian in 1929. 67 Marco Filoni,“Bibliographie de l’œuvre d’Alexandre Kojève”; idem,“La bibliothèque philosophique d’Alexandre Kojève”,  in Hommage à Alexandre Kojève, Paris 2007, pp. 99 –132, sp. p. 99. 68 Bulletin des groupes d’études philosophiques de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris (1936 –1937).

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philosophy. The older generation of Russian emigrant philosophers – namely Berdyaev, Shestov, and Lossky – engaged in German phenomenology and commented on and developed key ideas from contemporary German philosophy to substantiate metaphysics in Russian philosophy. However, they were Russian emigrants with a Russian identity, writing mainly in Russian. The younger generation – Gurvitch, Koyré, Kojève, and Levinas – included marginal young philosophers who transferred German phenomenology to French institutions through their translations and interpretations of Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger. They lectured on German philosophy at the Sorbonne and the ephe. They thus became a true authority for the younger generation of French philosophers, such as Aron, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, and others. These philosophers developed new methods and concepts in the post-war period thanks to the epistemology of Koyré, the sociology of Gurvitch, the Hegelianism of Kojève, and the phenomenology of Levinas.

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summary Ruští filosofové ve Francii v meziválečném období Přehled prací filosofů-emigrantů

Otázka ruského vlivu ve Francii v meziválečném období patří mezi nejoblíbenější badatelská témata ruských historiků, filosofů a literárních kritiků. Autorka článku se zaměřuje na specifika utváření kulturní, národní a profesní identity ruských emigrantů-filosofů ve Francii v meziválečném období. Popisuje metodologie užívané pro analýzu (národní a profesní) identity ruských emigrantů, tedy digitální hermeneutiku (analýzu textů v digitálních databázích), a sociologické a institucionální přístupy k historii filosofie (Bourdieu, Pinto, Fabiani). Když se autorka zabývá otázkami spojenými s národními specifiky, používá též popis vědeckého „bojkotu“ německé vědy v meziválečném období (Schroeder-Gudehus). Spojení výše zmíněných přístupů autorce umožňuje položit si otázku vlivu ruské emigrace na evropskou filosofii z pohledu institucionální pozice emigrantů. Autorka tak sleduje profesní formaci mladší generace

ruských filosofů-emigrantů v Německu a jejich následnou pozici ve Francii a poukazuje na to, že identitu emigrantů spoluutvářely politické, akademické a socio-ekonomické podmínky. Starší generace ruských emigrantů se z velké části držela své ruské kultury. Mladší generace ruských emigrantů (Koyré, Kojève, Gurvitch, Levinas) neměla stabilní pozici ve francouzském institucionálním prostředí, ale byla vnímavá k bojkotované německé kultuře. Tato generace ruských emigrantů přinesla do Francie německou filosofii a následně determinovala horizont poválečného filosofického myšlení. Autorka volí mezioborový přístup, do něhož začleňuje koncept „kulturního transferu“ (Espagne, Fabiani). Dochází k závěru, že marginální postavení ruských emigrantů přispělo ke kulturnímu transferu německého myšlení do Francie ve dvacátých a třicátých letech dvacátého století a hrálo rozhodující roli v utváření nové francouzské filosofie založené na německé fenomenologii.

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Abstract – Zinaida Serebrjakova in Paris. Iconographic Analysis of a Russian in Exile – Born in Russia in 1884, the painter Zinaida Serebrjakova arrived in France at age forty and lived there, troubled by both social and financial difficulties, until her death in 1967. Pictures and excerpts of published letters to relatives and friends place Serebrjakova in the context of research on Russian emigration to France. Visual analysis based on monographs and exhibition catalogues devoted to Serebrjakova’s work published in 1922 and following years (mostly in Russian) reveals a huge gap between her Russian and Parisian periods. Her case, and the particularity of rural inspiration, should be understood as a unique phenomenon, to be considered separately from that of other artists in comparable circumstances. That Serebrjakova remains enigmatic underscores how much study is still to be done regarding her own identity and other, substantive issues of identity such as woman vs. man, mother/wife vs. childless spinster, and intelligentsia vs. bohemian. Keywords – artistic emigration, Mir Iskusstva, exile, female artist, modern art, Zinaida Serebrjakova

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Juliette Milbach Research Associate at cercec (ehess/cnrs) Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies [email protected]

Zinaida Serebrjakova in Paris Iconographic Analysis of a Russian in Exile Juliette Milbach

The painter Zinaida Serebrjakova was born in Russia in 1884. She arrived in France forty years later, where she lived until her death in 1967. Although Serebrjakova left Russia in the mid-1920s, she cannot be considered representative of the émigré population, which consisted mainly of young men, as she was not a man and neither was she particularly young when she arrived in France (her husband had died long before she decided to emigrate). She left behind four children, the two youngest of whom later joined her (Aleksandr and

Ekaterina). From an early age in Russia, she had lived within an artistic milieu of nineteenth-century culture, which placed a strong emphasis on art with symbolic and allegorical significance. She exhibited with the Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), and, when in France, she remained part of this cultural circle, along with several artists who had emigrated with her. Zinaida Serebrjakova’s destiny was tragic: she died in apparent extreme poverty, which she could have avoided. Based on a visual analysis,

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the gap between her Russian and Parisian periods is apparent. In one of her most iconic paintings, At the Dressing Table, she depicts herself as a reflection in a mirror [Fig. 1], in what could not have been a more traditional approach to self-portrait. However, Serebrjakova did not represent herself as an artist accompanied by traditional painting accessories; rather, she insisted on her identity as a woman, with attributes of female beauty symbolized by the dressing-table features. After At the Dressing Table – and the iconic depiction of a familial morning in a cinematographic angle in The Breakfast (1914; State Tretyakov Gallery) – the quality of her French productions became very poor, in terms of both her plastic language and chosen subjects. Although Serebrjakova used the same genre during both periods, namely portraits, she depicted more landscapes and still life during the Parisian one. As such, she defied the expectations of the artistic emigrants and Parisian bohemia (i.e. to depict coffee shops and restaurants, views of Parisian streets and places, etc.). Above all, formal marks of modernity, which were present in her Russian paintings, disappeared almost completely from her French-period productions – or were only repetitions of previous pictures. These observations, which are based on a visual comparison of Serebrjakova’s Russian and French productions, is at the forefront of the analysis of the context of these productions. Research for the present article was conducted using published sources, including many primary documents. The first monograph written about Serebrjakova’s work was published in Saint Petersburg in 1922 with a print run of 1,000 copies. This book is quite succinct but includes very high-quality illustrations. The author, Sergej Érnst (1894–1980), was working at the Hermitage Museum when it was published 1. He was close to Serebrjakova, and she painted his portrait in 1921. Érnst also emigrated to France in the middle of the 1920s. This seems to be the only monograph dedicated to Serebrjakova’s work that was published before she left for France. After that, there were some books and articles, mainly published in Paris and London, by Russian art critics or artists living in either Russia or abroad. Serebrjakova was well known in Russia, especially after 1955.

At the Dressing Table was immediately acquired by the Tretyakov Gallery after it was first exhibited at the Seventh exhibition of paintings by Russian Artists’ Union in 1910, and The Breakfast was added to the national collections in 1955. Most of the publications in Russian appear after 1965, including books2 and many articles in key artistic journals, such as Xudožnik (The Artist), Iskusstvo (The Art) and Junyj xudožnik (The Young Artist) – including souvenir from her daughter 3. A second peak in editorial activities occurred during the 2000s, with the publication of catalogues and some monographs, which were mostly biographical in nature, such as those by the authors Vladimir Kruglov and Alla Rusakova4. The Tretyakov Gallery has a personal fund, and many of the letters from this fund were published in the 2017 catalogue of the Tretyakov collection5. There are some publications editing primary documents (mostly letters and souvenirs)6. In August 1924, when she arrived in France, Serebrjakova was already an accomplished artist. She was born into an artistic family. Her father, Evgenij Lanceray (1848 –1886), was a sculptor, and her mother, Ekaterina Benois (1850 –1933), was the sister of the painter Aleksandr Benois (1870 –1960). After her father died, she lived in Saint Petersburg in the house of her grandfather, the architect Nikolaj Benois (1813–1898). She had exhibited with the Mir Iskusstva since 1911 and was introduced to the Society directly by her uncle Aleksandr Benois, who was one of the founders of the magazine. Her introduction was so successful that she was invited to participate in a large project for the Moscow Kazanskij railway station in 1915–1917. In 1915, Aleksandr Benois was commissioned to decorate the restaurant at the railway station. Benois’ idea was to present Russia as a bridge between East and West by involving colleagues of the Mir Iskusstva (notably Boris Kustodev and Serebrjakova’s brother Evgenij Lanceray). In that configuration, the fourth decorative panel was supposed to be painted by Zinaida Serebrjakova, in collaboration with Mstislav Dobužinskij, with allegoric images of the Orient. The “Odalisque” from Turkey, known by several sketches, and the nude allegory of Siam presented a beautiful complementarity of blue and

1 / At the Dressing-Table, self-portrait, oil on canvas, 75 × 65 cm, 1909 / State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

1 2

3 4 5

Sergei Érnst, Z. E. Serebrjakova, Petrograd 1922.  Including collections from Aleksej Savinov, Zinaida Serebrjakova, Leningrad 1973, ( the Parisian period is well described); Valentina Knjazeva, Zinaida Serebrjakova, Moscow 1979 (only on the Russian period). Tat’jana Serebrjakova, “Destvo Zinaidy Serebrjakovoj”,  Junij xudožnik, iii (1981), pp. 6 –11. Vladimir Kruglov, Zinaida Evgenʹevna Serebrjakova, Saint Petersburg 2004; Alla Rusakova, Zinaida Serebrjakova, Moscow 2008. Those letters were given by Tatjana Serebrjakova to the State Tretyakov Gallery in 1987 –1988. They were written to Serebrjakova’s children between 1931 and 1967. Zinaida Serebrjakova, 1884 –1967, Moscow 2017, pp. 316 –332. In addition to the archival materials available at the Russian State archives, there are also two foundations that have supposedly kept primary documents relating to Serebrjakova. The Fond

6

Zinaida Serebrjakova is directed by Serebrjakova’s nephew, Ivan Nikolaev, who is also known as an artist. And, with reference to the French period, there is the Foundation Serebriakoff/Serebrjakova, which was created under the initiative of Serebrjakova’s daughter, Ekaterina, in 2007. The foundation preserved a lot of her work that was produced in France. Both Serebrjakova’s daughter and nephew support exhibitions and catalogues, such as the one published at the Tretyakov in 2014 that focuses on the Parisian period. There are also two books published in 2014 and 2018, about the Parisian period, with abundant illustrations. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to contact either of these foundations. Z. Serebrjakova: katalog vystavki: sbornik materialov i katalog ékspozicii k 100-letiju so dnja roždenija xudožnika, Nadežda Sen’kovskaja ed., Moscow 1986 and Zinaida Serebrjakova: pisʹma, sovremenniki o xudožnice, Moscow 1987.

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yellow, where the gold of the jewels was particularly well embodied [Figs 2–3]. The sketches were reproduced by Sergei Érnst during the 1920s in the monographs devoted to Serebrjakova 7, and they attest to how she used the occasion to project her work on nudity for the first time on a large scale. The events of the Revolution apparently stopped the project. At the time, Serebrjakova lived and worked primarily in Kharkov and the surrounding regions, and she did not return to Russia – Petrograd, to be precise – until 1920. As Serebrjakova had French roots and was part of the artistic intelligentsia, it is not surprising that she frequented the Montparnasse art school, the Académie de La Grande Chaumière, for a few months in 1905–1906. However, neither she nor her biographers refer to her young years in order to explain her path to French exile. Rather, she used the opportunity of some money received after the sale of her paintings at the exhibition of Russian art in New York in 1924 to go to France, again with the help of Aleksandr Benois 8, who had been organizing exhibitions in Paris since the beginning of the 1920s. Serebrjakova’s biographies all insist on the fact that she had no intention of staying in France permanently, and for a very long time she was certain she would return to Russia. She was later joined by her children in France in 1925 and 1928. She lived there with a Nansen Passport until she received French citizenship in 1947. Her close ties with the Mir Iskusstva movement, and her familial and artistic ties in France, suggest that Serebrjakova was very well engaged with the artistic community when she arrived in Paris. However, the fact that she may have been well connected with the Russian artistic community in France does not hide the reality that the path she followed in Russian Paris was far from traditional. The artistic world of Paris in the 1920s was very concerned with the Russian émigrés. In her PhD dissertation on the Russian emigration, Charlotte Waligora insists on a real commitment, particularly during the 1920s, to preserving Russian artistic heritage in France through the establishment of structures such as the Société russe d’histoire, the Union des artistes russes and the Institut russe d’histoire

de l’art 9. An Université Populaire was opened by Prince Jusupov, and both Ivan Bilibin and Mstislav Dobužinskij taught there. A second one was established by Tatiana Suxotina, Lev Tolstoj’s daughter, with Mstislav Dobužinskij and Aleksandr Benois as teachers. Another tradition was to spend the summer in Bretagne with the former member and founder of the Mir Iskusstva, Konstantin Somov. This “name-dropping” highlights the fact that Serebrjakova knew all these figures from her artistic activities in Saint Petersburg. She exhibited with them in France, and was undoubtedly in contact with them, but she apparently never had the occasion or the desire to teach within these established structures herself. Nothing in her letters allows us to determine whether this was because she had decided against it or because she did not have the opportunity to do so. The sources consulted for this article furthermore do not help us to understand how Serebrjakova used the Russian network, although it is clear that she knew it very well, as attested by the list of galleries that exhibited her work. During her Parisian period, she had the honour of many solo exhibitions in some of the most famous Parisian galleries. In 1927, 1930, 1932 and 1938, she exhibited at the Galerie Charpentier. Jean Charpentier, a collector, was very keen during the 1920s–1930s to promote both the exhibitions and publications of many artists, including those in the Russian community. He encouraged the state to acquire and include works by artists such as Filipp Maljavin in the French collections. In 1929, Serebrjakova’s work was exhibited at the Galerie Hirschmann, the only Russian-run gallery to exhibit Serebrjakova’s work. Vladimir Hirschmann arrived in France almost immediately after the Revolution via London. Although his gallery was like an antique shop, it promoted Russian artists, particularly members of the Mir Iskusstva. That same year, in 1929, Serebrjakova exhibited at one of the most historic Parisian galleries: Bernheim-Jeune. The gallery did not specialize in the Russian artistic community, or in the art of emigration, but it did promote a lot of avant-garde movements. In December 1932, Serebrjakova presented some works at the gallery La Renaissance. Like the Galerie Charpentier, La Renaissance worked a lot with Russian artists during

the 1920s and allowed the French government to acquire Russian paintings through national museums, such as a Nu by Serebrjakova in 1931. Serebrjakova’s solo exhibitions occurred during the 1920s and attest to the fact that she had a clientele in France during this time, although she was less popular during the 1930s. However, at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, she continued to exhibit with Russian artists as a native artist in some of the major collective exhibitions held in Paris for Russian artists. At the Galerie Lesnick, on 22 June 1928, an exhibition was dedicated to the Mir Iskusstva, with the participation of Lev Bakst, Serebrjakova and her uncle Aleksandr Benois, her son Aleksandr Serebrjakov and her colleague from the Kazanskij railway station project, Mstislav Dobužinskij. The only other woman (nine male artists exhibited at the show) was Vera Šukaeva, who was virtually unknown and primarily described as the wife of Vasillij Šukaev, who exhibited a lot in Paris with the above-named artists until he returned to the ussr in 1935. Thus, Zinaida Serebrjakova appears to have been the only famous female artist, and this observation can be applied to most of the collective exhibitions in which she later participated. On 10 July 1929, the Galerie Hirschmann opened an exhibition primarily populated by artists from the Mir Iskusstva. As at the Gallery Lesnick, works by Aleksandr Benois, Mstislav Dobužinskij, Lev Bakst and both Serebrjakova and her son were exhibited. This time, Serebrjakova was the only female artist. The exhibition went well, and six months later, on 2 January 1930, a second event with the Mir Iskusstva opened at the same gallery. The new participants were the very famous Jurij Annenkov and Ivan Bilibine, and another woman in addition to Serebrjakova, Aleksandra Ščekatixina-Potockaja. She was even less known within the Russian artistic emigration than Vera Šukaeva. Ščekatixina-Potockaja was working on 7

8 9

Érnst, Z. E. Serebrjakova (n. 1), p. 24; The sketches, mostly tempera on paper, are kept at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and the Peterhof State Museum. He moved to Paris permanently in 1926, a year and half after Serebrjakova. Charlotte Waligora, La vie artistique russe en France au xxe siècle l’art de l’émigration (peinture – sculpture), PhD thesis, Charles de Gaulle University, Lille 3, 2008.

2 / Turkey (two odalisques, tempera, 48,5 × 48,5 cm, 1916 / State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 3 / Siam, tempera, 48 × 48 cm, 1916 / State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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ceramics and had married Ivan Bilibin in 1923. She apparently spent some ten years in France. In April of the same year, the Galerie Hirschmann opened a third show with Russian artists. During the summer of 1931, the Galerie d’Alignan (at 83 rue de la Boétie) exhibited Russian art of very ambitious and diverse media (painting, graphics, sculpture, textile) and from a long list of participants. Some of them, such as Konstantin Korovin and Natalija Gončarova, who were both in France during the 1920s, were major figures of the Russian artistic emigration. Artists such as Ivan Puni had arrived in France in 1924, the same year as Serebrjakova, and were representative of a more avant-garde artistic project, like that of Fernand Léger and Giorgio Severini. These figures of disparate artistic tendencies suggest that this exhibition was a little bit different from the others, being more similar to the contemporary Russian shows organized in the United States (in which, by the way, Serebrjakova also participated). The above attests to how Serebrjakova used many vectors of the Russian artistic community to exhibit her work, utilizing not only those within the emigration circle but also her contacts in Russia, thereby demonstrating how capable she was of using them to exhibit abroad (both in France and elsewhere). Serebrjakova participated twice more at a group show in Paris – at Salle Yteb and at La Renaissance, both in 1932 – and she also continued to exhibit abroad, notably in the United States. During and after the Second World War, she exhibited less and less, and only in group exhibitions or Salons (at the Autumn Salon in 1941, for example). Nevertheless, during her lifetime, she experienced the success of a great retrospect presented in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev (1965 –1966), exhibiting paintings sent specially from France with the help of the Russian consulate.

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The relative regularity of her correspondences and exchanges indicate that Serebrjakova was fully aware of the daily lives of her relatives who remained in the ussr. Serebrjakova’s letters, particularly those written to her children Tat’jana and Evgenij, which are often heart-breaking as she could not see them for several decades, give pertinent information regarding her state of mind

in France. Serebrjakova’s letters express support for and enthusiasm about her children. They were both working in the art world – Evgenij was an architect, and Tat’jana a theatre artist. She explained to her children several times, and apparently in response to their fears, not to be discouraged in their artistic activities and not to give too much importance to the critics. She also exhibited interest in household activities, asking how the house was organized10. She complained a lot about her financial situation, as well as the difficulties of her everyday life. This appeared to be the manner of communication she valued most with her children, since she was more willing to learn about the domestic problems of her relatives in the ussr than about their professional activities. It was indeed very rare for her to express opinions regarding aesthetics in these correspondences. One such opinion can be found about Cézanne, whom she claimed to hate, and she strongly discouraged her daughter from looking at his work, mainly because he drew figures without power 11. Her judgment of Picasso was slightly less damning, at least for his early period. She even attached to one of her letters a postcard of one of Picasso’s works (without specifying which one)12. The letters also demonstrate that she was fully aware of contemporary artists working in the ussr, and the series of work that were almost “in real time”, as her children sent her postcards of socialist realist artists. The names cited indicate which artists she particularly appreciated (Semën Čujkov 13 [1902–1980] and Arkadij Plastov 14 [1893–1972], for example); Serebrjakova’s taste for lyrical and rural themes was undeniable. Although postcards of these artists’ works were sent to her, the books she requested – which she did regularly – were mostly about nineteenth-century Russian artists such as Vasilij Tropinin and Aleksej Venecjanov. These choices reveal a lot about Serebrjakova’s practice in France, which had to be nourished by images, whereby her memory was sustained by these reproductions. One of the discussion topics at the conference at which this article was presented was the use of Russian identity as a vector. The study of the gap in aesthetic quality between Serebrjakova’s Russian and French productions offers a means

of defining this notion of vector. Serebrjakova’s material conditions in Paris were undeniably difficult even though she had a good Russian network. The fact that Serebrjakova had remained living in Russia in her mind seems to offer an alternative path for understanding her work. Her exile was only physical, and she seems, as we can read in her letters, to have never really left the Russia she once knew. An analysis of the works in the Tretyakov catalogue that is devoted to the Parisian periodcould shed some light on the above comment15. The genres depicted by Serebrjakova in France were, more or less, the same as in Russia. During the decades she spent in France, Serebrjakova realized several self-portraits16. But, unlike the canvas of the Tretyakov, number of self-portraits, but these were more traditional than At the Dressing Table, with the eyes looking at the spectator, a canvas in progress at the bottom and a palette in hand. The portraits of her two children who had joined her were also numerous, but they were a thousand miles away from the sweet childish scenes realized in Russia. The difference was not that the children were now adults, engaged in tasks appropriate to their age (especially Alexander, who was

reading in 1938 or dressed in a Carnaval’s Costume in 1952; both pictures from the Fondation Serebriakoff, Paris). Unlike the previous works representing Serebrjakova’s children, these were painted in a very academic manner and without a lack of originality as is also the case with the small scenes of the same genre she depicted in the Tuileries in Paris, in Collioure [Fig. 4], in Corsica and in Italy during the 1930s.

4 / Collioure, watercolour on paper, 45 × 56 cm, 1930 / Fondation Serebriakoff, Paris

10 Z. Serebrjakova to T. Serebrjakova and E. Lansere, 23 No-

vember 1931; Zinaida Serebrjakova, 1884–1967 (n. 5), p. 316

11 Z. Serebrjakova to T. and E. Serebrjakovy, 25 April 1938; Zinaida Serebrjakova, 1884 –1967 (n. 5), p. 320 12 Z. Serebrjakova to T. Serebrjakova, 24 November 1957; Zinaida Serebrjakova, 1884 –1967 (n. 5), p. 324 13 Semën Čujkov studied in Uzbekistan before going to vhutemas

in Moscow. He had been exhibiting since the mid-1920s, particularly depicting themes related to his native Kyrgyzstan. 14 Arkadij Plastov studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (mužvz). Although he was active in Moscow from the mid-1930s until his death, he officiated in several institutions in the capital. He remained closely linked to his native land near the Volga, where he spent a lot of time, and which remained the main subject of his paintings. 15 Zinaida Serebrjakova: parižskiij period, Aleksandr i Ekaterina Serebrjakovy: iz sobranija francuzskogo fonda = Fondation Sérébriakoff, Anastasija Nikolaeva, Pavel Pavlinov eds, Moscow 2014. 16 Her Parisian period was punctuated by travelling abroad, mainly to European countries, but her two journeys to Morocco (1928 and 1932), where she found a great deal of inspiration, were perhaps the most productive.

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5 / Portrait of Svjatoslav Prokov’ev, pastel on paper, 63 × 48 cm, 1927 / Fondation Serebriakoff, Paris

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Of the pastel portraits, often of compatriots, which Serebrjakova depicted and which ensured that the Russian manner remained present in her work, few are as powerful as that of the son of Sergej Prokov’ev, Svjatoslav [Fig. 5]. The force and the charm of childhood evocation in this particular portrait is similar to her early works. The still life in the foreground, composed of small wooden figurines, notably a small pig and duck placed on the straw chair, suggests the play of imagination interrupted to take a malicious look at the spectator. In comparison, her other pastel portraits are devoid of inspiration. Serebrjakova does not seem to have been inspired by the scenes of everyday life, including rural life, although her sketches of daily life had been quite successful before her exile. Above all, her work from the French period appears to be dominated by commissioned portraits. These are flattering, and therefore of much less artistic interest. It is pertinent to discuss one of Serebrjakova’s perennial subjects: the female nude. The persistence of the theme of Russian Banja in her work, although primarily in pieces dating from the beginning of her stay in Paris, reveals how Serebrjakova reused motifs that she had realized previously. These bathing scenes, with their subject of collective female nudes, which she had rendered at least since the 1910s [Fig. 6], continued during the years following her exile. Her works on this subject gradually evolved to much more traditional pastel nudes, testifying to the fact that they were made to be sold. According to art historian Olga Furman in the Tretyakov catalogue of 2017, Serebrjakova’s arrival in France symbolized the end of the Russkaja tema (Russian thematic) in her paintings. For Furman, the fact that Serebrjakova began her artistic practices with the Mir Iskusstva allowed her to work on the Russian thematic, and this thematic is particularly visible in the krest’janskij cikl (peasant cycle). Serebrjakova had been interested in this topic since her stay in the countryside in the north of the region around Kharkov. Her first pieces on this theme date to 1903–1905. She painted peasants in bright colors and with feminine dresses, reminiscent of the peasants of Filipp Maljavin. Serebrjakova created a gallery

of peasants differentiated by facial features and attitudes [Fig. 7]. In particular, she rendered the peasants’ garments in very precise detail, and some of these drawings, especially those devoted to young girls, offer insight for ethnographic studies [Fig. 8]. By elaborating this portrait gallery, Serebrjakova was thus creating a whole repertoire of motifs that she would use, and sometimes repeat, in more ambitious compositions [Fig. 9]. It evoked the memory of Neskučnoe, the place where she had long observed the rural world, and which, while in Paris for more than thirty years, she remembered with the artistic enthusiasm she had felt when there. This evocation of inspiration, more than thirty years later, cruelly reveals what she lost17. Serebrjakova is also intriguing because she was a great source of inspiration for some Russian and Soviet artists, and her inspiration was very different to that of the Mir Iskusstva. Her influence on the development of the rural thematic in the ussr appears to be a key point for understanding the fortune critique of her work, and, beyond that, what her exile represents. The rural painter Arkadij Plastov was one of the many artists fascinated by Serebrjakova’s work. Plastov was particularly interested in Serebrjakova’s concern with childhood and her delicate depiction of family life and the rural world, the krest’janskij mir. But, beyond that, Serebrjakova is rare in Plastov’s pantheon of references for using a modern language. It seems that her interest in Russian (and Ukrainian) rural identity contributed to her influencing Soviet paintings, even though she used a slight Mir Iskusstva manner. Through her works, Serebrjakova was a vector for other artists. The rural inspiration was, again according to Furman, essential for Serebrjakova, even as a way of life. It is the subject of some of her most ambitious compositions, for example the four women eating bread for lunch in the middle of the fields in The Harvest [Fig. 10] and the well-known Bleaching Cloth (1917, State Tretyakov Gallery), which also depicts a group of four women. The women in 17 Zinaida Serebrjakova to E. Klimov, Paris, 9 May 1955; Zinaida

Serebrjakova: pisʹma, sovremenniki o xudožnice (n. 6), p. 199.

6 / Banja, oil on canvas, 103,6 × 83,2 cm, 1912 / State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

this painting are depicted solidly, particularly their legs, which are obvious to the spectator. These two paintings indicate the scale of the work carried out by Serebrjakova in parallel with her project at the Kazanskij station. Furman also compares sketches for these two canvases to the sketches for Javlenie Xrista narodu (1837–1857) by Aleksandr Ivanov, and to Aleksej Venecjanov’s work. She lost this sensibility in France, according to Furman, even though she sought similar inspiration, as is evident in her letters to her family in which she expressed her disappointment on this point.

7 / Peasants, oil on canvas, 124 × 98,3 cm, 1914 / Russian museum, Saint Petersburg 8 / Young Peasant Girl, tempera on paper, 54,3 × 38,1 cm, 1906 / Russian museum, Saint Petersburg

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The lack of critical and historical works about female artists during Serebrjakova’s exile is being addressed by works such as that of Gillian Perry. Her book Women Artists and the Parisian Avant‐ Garde: Modernism and “Feminine” Art, 1900–1920s analyses the work and artistic culture of women artists in France just before Serebrjakova arrived in Paris 18. Perry demonstrates how the lack of historical material has encouraged false representations of the complex relationships between women such as Maria Blanchard or Marevna Vorobev and avant-garde groups and artists. However, a study of gender does not contain the key to understanding Serebrjakova’s impasse in France. The difference between the Russian and French periods of production generally follows a traditional pattern for emigrant artists, but Serebrjakova is intriguing because she remained attached to her Russian identity, even though it is virtually absent from her paintings. She had a very good network in both Russia and France. She exhibited with the “correct” galleries and knew a lot of people, so the complete change in her painting style is intriguing. Even the fact that she was unable to sell enough paintings to live comfortably is not understandable. She had an important support network, and her art would have been regarded as interesting by a lot of French collectors, or those who were nostalgic for the Russian period. The aim of this article was to explain the difference between Serebrjakova’s career in Russia and in France, and to determine whether this can 18 Gillian Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde:

Modernism and “Feminine”Art, 1900–1920s, Manchester 1995.

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9 / The Harvest (Uborka Khleba), tempera on paper, 40,9 × 56 cm, 1910s’ / Russian museum, Saint Petersburg 10 / The Harvest, oil on canvas, 142 × 177 cm, 1915 / Fine Art Museum, Odessa

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tell us something new, for example about the treatment of women during the emigration period. Zinaida Serebrjakova’s activities and career in Paris were not unique but do present a very interesting case of a non-traditional adaptation to the environment. The Serebrjakova case details how important it is to question the frequent understanding of the members of the Russian artistic emigration from this period as one homogenous group with limited interests but similar problems

and aspirations. One of the main aspirations appears to have been to maintain Russian identity in a new context. Her case should be understood as an individual phenomenon. Serebrjakova should be considered separately, and the fact that she remains enigmatic underscores how much work is still to be done regarding her own identity and other substantial issues of identity, such as woman versus man, mother versus bachelor and intelligentsia versus bohemia.

summary Zinaida Serebrjakova, Ruska v Paříži Ikonografická analýza

Malířka Zinaida Serbrjakova se narodila v Rusku v roce 1884. Do Francie přijela o čtyřicet let později a žila zde až do své smrti v roce 1967. Exil pro ni byl nelehký po společenské i finanční stránce. Autorka článku díky vizuální analýze ukazuje velký rozdíl mezi obrazy z „ruského“ a z „pařížského období“. Formální znaky modernismu přítomné v ruských malbách téměř zcela zmizely z tvorby francouzského období, nebo zůstaly jako pouhé opakování dřívějších obrazů. Právě rozdíly mezi ruskou a francouzskou tvorbou považuje autorka článku za rozhodující pro analýzu kontextu studovaných děl. Autorka též používá biografické informace, postupuje chronologicky, ale pohybuje se také mezi před- a porevolučním obdobím. Využívá monografie a katalogy výstav věnované malířce, které vyšly po roce 1922 především v ruštině, a analyzuje výstavy ve Francii, kterých se Serebrjakova účastnila. Na základě vybraných obrazů a výňatků z publikovaných dopisů, které umělkyně zasílala příbuzným a přátelům, autorka zařazuje Zinaidu Serebrjakovou do kontextu

mezinárodního bádání o ruské emigraci ve Francii. Zaměřuje se tak na analýzu (převážně soukromé) korespondence, která poskytuje relevantní informace o psychickém rozpoložení umělkyně, ale nepomáhá nám pochopit proměnlivou recepci jejího díla ani její vztah k Sovětskému svazu. Působení a kariera Zinaidy Serebrjakovy v Paříži nebyla ojedinělá, představuje však velmi zajímavý příklad netradičního přizpůsobení se okolí. Její příklad podrobně ukazuje, jak je důležité zpochybňovat běžné chápání členů ruské emigrace jako jedné homogenní skupiny s omezenými zájmy, ale podobnými problémy a touhami. Jednou z hlavních malířčiných snah se zdá být zachování Ruské identity v novém kontextu emigrace. Její případ je však třeba chápat a studovat jako individuální fenomén. Skutečnost, že Serebrjakova v mnohém zůstává záhadnou, podtrhuje, kolik otázek týkajících se její identity si ještě bude třeba klást. Mezi ně patří i zamyšlení nad rozdíly mezi ženou a mužem, matkou a svobodnou bezdětnou ženou či mezi inteligencí a bohémou.

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Abstract – Presenting Russia to the West. Helene Iswolsky, Russian Catholic Émigré Intellectual – The Revolution of 1917 radically changed the career of Hélène Iswolsky (1896–1975), from Russian aristocrat to émigré writer. Living in Paris, then in New York from 1940, she cultivated the acquaintances of her father, the tsar’s last ambassador to France. She was thus connected to the Russian elite as well as to Parisian high society. Raised Russian Orthodox, Iswolsky entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1923. She became a fervent promoter of ecumenical dialogue, participating in the French Catholic Action as well as in the meetings of her Orthodox compatriots and publishing an intconfessional journal, The Third Hour. Iswolsky took advantage of her emigre position in-between, fighting against the prejudices between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and between Russia and the West in general. She has devoted a significant part of her work to informing the French and the Americans about Russia and its culture, through translations and through her own texts. Opposing communist doctrine, she presented Russia as a profoundly religious and humanitarian society oppressed by the totalitarian Soviet regime. Keywords – Post-Revolutionary movement, The Third Hour, Iswolsky, ecumenism, Russian Catholics, Russian émigré

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Karolina Foletti Masaryk University, Brno; Université de Lausanne [email protected]

Presenting Russia to the West Helene Iswolsky, Russian Catholic Émigré Intellectual Karolina Foletti

The little-known story of Helene Iswolsky (1896–1975), embracing many different places and many interesting people, could easily provide rich material for a novel1. As the daughter of a tsarist ambassador, Alexandre Iswolsky (1856–1919), Helene spent her childhood in Germany, Denmark, Japan, France, and Russia2. Living in the  *

1

This article was carried out as part of the project “Potenciál migrace. Přínos (nejen) ruských emigrantů meziválečné Evropě” Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (tl02000495). I am very grateful to Prof. Anastassia de la Fortelle, to Prof. Pavel Boček, to Ivan Foletti and to Adrien Palladino for giving me the opportunity to discuss the manuscript of this article with them. I would like to thank also Sarah Melker for her kind and precious help with the English proof reading. The bibliography on the life and work of Helene Iswolsky is relatively scant: Florian Michel, Itinéraire d’une intellectuelle russe : Saint-Pétersbourg, Paris, New York. Hélène Iswolsky (1896 –1975), Master’s thesis, l’Université Paris 4 Sorbonne, unpublished. I am very grateful to the author for sharing his manuscript with me. Florian Michel, “Jacques Maritain et

Hélène Iswolsky : les enjeux politiques d’une amitié franco-­ russe”, Nova et Vetera, lxxxvii/2 (2012), pp. 167–192 ; Letters from D. S. Mirsky and Helen Iswolsky to Marguerite Caetani, Sophie Levie, Gerald S. Smith eds, Rome 2015; Youlia Maritchik Sioli, “La Jeunesse rouge d’Inna d’E. Izvolskaia et d’A. Kachina-­Evreinova: un ‘roman de choc’ à l’adresse des Français”, presentation at the conference Regards croisés sur la mémoire de la Révolution russe en exil (1917–2017), (24–25 octobre 2017, University Grenoble Alpes), accessible online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGn8Z7F5dlo &feature=youtu.be [21.07.2019]; Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, “Hélène Iswolsky (Elena Aleksandrovna Izvol’skaia)”, in Alien Tongues. Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration, Ithaca/London 1989, pp. 152–153; Karolina Foletti, “L’émigration, une ouverture intellectuelle: Hélène Iswolsky et la ‘force des faibles’”, La Revue russe, li (2018), pp. 53– 64. Important source of information about Iswolsky’s life are her autobiographical writings Light before Dusk a Russian Catholic in France, 1923–1941, New York / Toronto 1942 (French translation quoted here below: Au Temps de la lumière, Montreal  1945), and No Time to Grieve, Philadelphia 1985. 2 For Alexandre Iswolsky cf. e.g. Alexandre Iswolsky, Mémoires, Paris 1923 ; idem, Au service de la Russie : Alexandre Iswolsky, correspondance diplomatique, Hélène Iswolsky ed., Paris 1937 –1939.

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1 / Helene Iswolsky as a debutante in 1914

highest circles of the international society, she was destined to become a lady-in-waiting at the St Petersburg court and then to have a prestigious marriage. Young Helene, dreaming about studies at university, was not enthusiastic about this. However, she did not rebel and in 1914 she was presented at the St Petersburg court [Fig. 1]. At the beginning of the war, she joined her father in Paris and served as a nurse of the Red Cross. In 1917 her father was dismissed; he died two years later, and left the family indebted. At that time, already in France, Helene was studying, working, and writing. Falling seriously ill, she went through a personal crisis, described in her autobiographical writings, and converted to Catholicism. In the 1920s she contributed to different journals, mainly the Revue de France, and translated and published several books 3. She was part of the entourage of Marguerite Caetani (1880 –1963) founder of the journal Commerce and organizer of a Paris salon that brought together European intellectuals and artists 4. At the end of the 1920s, Iswolsky entered in contact with the philosophers Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier and the journal Esprit 5. At the same time, she maintained relationships with other Russian émigrés, and was for several years particularly close to Marina Tsvetaeva6 [Fig. 2]. Her Parisian life was interrupted by an unexpected offer of marriage from Rolf von Ungern-Sternberg (1880 –1943), her father’s former colleague at the embassy7. In spite of the fact that she barely knew him, Iswolsky accepted his proposal and joined him in Japan. Two years later, she returned to France, separated from her husband and never speaking (nor writing) about her experience. After her return, she continued her writing, participating in ecumenical meetings and meetings of Esprit. At the beginning of the 1930s, she met Alexander Kerensky, ex-prime minister of the provisional government; their friendship endured until his death 8. After the occupation of France in 1940, Iswolsky emigrated – for the second time in her life – to the usa. Lacking financial means, she was sustained by the Tolstoy Foundation for the relief of Russian émigrés 9. Later, she worked for the French branch of Voice of America and published in Catholic

journals. After the war, she founded a small ecumenical group called The Third Hour, taught Russian language and literature at Fordham University and several colleges and was close to liberal Catholics, e.g. to Dorothy Day 10. In her later years she entered the Benedictine order as a tertiary. She died in 1975 at the age of 79. Her written work represents nearly 200 articles, ten books, as well as numerous translations and edited volumes 11. The aim of this essay, however, is not to focus primarily on Iswolsky’s adventurous life story but on two principal questions – which indeed are no less intriguing. Both of them focus on transformation: the first one searching for the specific impact emigration had on Iswolsky’s work; the second one asking what kind of transformation Iswolsky’s work brought to the society she lived in as an émigré. Émigré life Before focusing on the “transformation” itself, it would be worthwhile to dwell for a moment on the kind of emigration Iswolsky experienced. What kind of émigré was Helene Iswolsky? What was her life in exile like? Iswolsky did not have to make a hasty exodus provoked by the victories of the Bolsheviks, and she did not find herself without any means and connections in a foreign country. The revolutions of 1917 were without any doubt at the beginning of many changes in her life. However, these changes were rather gradual. 3 4 5 6

7

Cf. note 11. Letters from D. S. Mirsky and Helen Iswolsky to Marguerite Caetani (n. 1); Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 166 –170. Michel Winock, “Esprit”, des intellectuels dans la cité : (1930 –1950), Daniel Lindenberg (et al.) eds, Paris 1996. Elena Izvol’skaja, “Poet obrečennosti (Iz vospomi­nanij o Marine Cvetaevoj)“, in Vozdušnye puti, lxiii/3 (1963), pp. 150 –160. (Reprinted in Marina Cvetaeva v vospominanijax sovremennikov ii. Gody émigracii, Lev M. Turčinskij, Lev A. Munchin eds, Moscow 2002); eadem, “Teň na stěnax”, Opyty iii (1954). See also letters from Marina Tsvetaeva to Anna Teskova on 22.  1.  1931 and 1. 1. 1932 : Marina Cvetaeva, Spasibo za dol’guju pamjat’ ljubvi..., Pis’ma k Anne Teskovoj, 1922–1939, Мoscow 2009, pp. 179, 201 (cf. also pp. 180, 212–213). For the (scant) mentions of the marriage cf. e.g. Julia Zarankin, Michale Wachtel,“The Correspondence of Viacheslav Ivanov and Charles du Bos”,  Archivio italo-russo / Russko-­italianskij arxiv, vol. 3, Salerno 2001, pp. 518 –327, 538 –530 quoted in Letters from D. S. Mirsky and Helen Iswolsky to Marguerite Caetani (n. 1), pp. 82– 84.

2 / Helene Iswolsky (on the left) with Marina Tsvetaeva and her son, 1930

Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970). On their friendship: Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 193– 266 and passim; Corresponde­ nce with Kerensky, Helen Iswolsky Papers, University of Scranton, box 1. 9 On the Tolstoy Foundation, e.g. Paul B. Anderson, “The Tolstoy Foundation”, The Russian Review, xvii/1 (1958), pp. 60 – 66. 10 Dorothy Day (1918 –1939) was a liberal Catholic, journalist, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and a key figure of the nonviolence movement in the usa; Michael True,“Dorothy Day”,  in The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, Nigel J. Young ed., Oxford 2010. 11 There is still no exhaustive bibliography of Iswolsky’s works. For a bibliography of French works: Leonid Livak, Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France. A Bibliographical Essay, London/Ithaca 2010, pp. 160 –164; for the bibliography of English works Thomas E. Bird, “A Selected Bibliography of the Writings of Helen Iswolsky (1896 –1975)”, Third Hour, x (1976), pp. 133–142; cf also Michel, Itinéraire (n. 1), pp. 109 –115. Books authored or co-authored by Iswolsky are: Les Rois aveugles, Paris  1925 (with Joseph Kessel); La Jeunesse rouge d’Inna, Paris  1928  (with Anna Kachina); La Vie de Bakounine, Paris 1930; L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique, Bruges/Paris  1936; Femmes soviétiques, Bruges/­Paris  1937; Light Before Dusk (n. 1); Soul of Russia, London 1944; Amerikanskie svjatye i podvižniki, New York 1959, Christ in Russia, Milwaukee, wi 1960; No Time to Grieve (n. 1). Javlenie Gvadelupskoj Božej Materi, New York 1969. 8

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3 / Bendictin nuns Varvara Turgenev (1865–1934) and her daughter Eustochie Komarov (1881–1939), around 1930

At the time of the revolution she was in Paris – the city she knew well and where her father had a considerable network of acquaintances – as he had, in fact, all over Europe. The majority of time before the revolution, Iswolsky’s family lived abroad. Europe was for Helene no less familiar than Russia where she had spent in total only five years. A considerable change for the Iswolskys occurred when the father was dismissed from his services in May 1917 12. Income ceased, and the family moved to a small villa in Biarritz. After the death of Iswolsky’s father two years later, it turned out that the family was indebted, and the inheritance was spent to pay creditors. However, there were still some personal possessions of Iswolsky’s mother which prevented both women from falling into total poverty and which even enabled them to help other members of the larger family13. Helene and her mother were also helped by Helene’s uncle Ivan Kudashev (1859 –1933). Ex-ambassador to Spain and widower, he was very close to Iswolskys and moved with them to an apartment in Pau. In her memories, Anna Evereinova (née Kachina, 1900 –1981), Iswolsky’s friend and coauthor of the novel La Jeunesse Rouge d’Inna 14, mentions her stay at their place in Pau, in 1927, saying: “Izwolskys and Kudashev were living still quite ‘in an aristocratic style’, in a huge apartment with a view on the Boulevard des Pyrénées, with two servants, obligatory changing for lunch – not at all in the émigré style 15.”

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Iswolsky’s own story offers several hints concerning her financial situation. She could not continue her studies after her illness in 1923, because her savings were drained. However, she still could leave the well-paid job of senator’s secretary to pursue her literary work, where the income was far less sure16. Helene Iswolsky’s economic situation touched the very bottom probably only in 1932, after her return from Japan following her unsuccessful marriage. According to Evreinova, in was only after their return, that mother and daughter had moved to a small apartment and Helene, started to work, “this time already out of necessity”17. While the revolution meant for Iswolsky a considerable (even if not total) loss of the financial base, the same could not be said about the social

capital of the ex-ambassador’s daughter. The new situation made her privileges of a Russian aristocrat no more relevant. However, she retained connections with important people and could take advantage of the fine education she had received. In her memoirs, Iswolsky dedicates a lot of space to the people she was in contact with as well as to the question of her education. With a certain bitterness, she describes her education as “retrograde”and regrets she did not receive preparation for university studies18. At the same time, she mentions excellent private teachers and describes the advantage of not learning from books but rather through direct contact with different countries and milieus that she, as an ambassador’s daughter, was part of: “I met members of the French Academy René Doumic and Gabriel Hanotaux; journalists [Auguste] Gauvain and Joseph Reinach; historians such as Frédéric Masson; lawyers like the noted Maître Henri Robert, the most famous defense attorney of that time. I met sociologists like Gustave Le Bon, pioneer of mass psychology; novelists like Paul Bourget and Marcel Proust; and the formidable literary critics Henri Bidou and Paul Souday. Father’s connections with Paris intellectual circles were growing closer and I feel very much indebted to him for my cultural formation, even though he did not encourage me to study at the university for a degree. Very few girls of my ‘set’ followed academic careers so I do not blame my parents for not helping me toward this goal. I was obliged to ‘do it the hard way’ later on when the necessity of making a living overtook me. In the meanwhile, the lack of academic training was largely compensated for by all that I learned simply by listening and absorbing the ‘tabletalks’ in our own home 19.”

Iswolsky spoke and wrote four languages: French (as her first language), Russian, English and German. Even if she had not had high-school lectures, her education was advanced enough to pass the entrance examination for the Sorbonne, where she started her studies at the École de Droit in 1919. Emigration for Helene Iswolsky thus meant the loss of the status and privileges of the high Russian society and considerable reduction of her financial means. It, however, did not mean an abrupt fall into poverty and necessity to settle for any humble work – as was the case for some of her co-émigrés. Nor was Iswolsky forced to

leave her country and start a new life in an unknown environment. Paradoxically, the Bolshevik revolution which completely damaged Iswolsky’s predetermined trajectory opened her a way to university studies. She gained her liberty to choose her career in continuity of her previous interests – intellectual and literary ones – and was able to become an active member of the international intellectual elite which in fact she was already acquainted with, having observed it as an ambassador’s daughter. Conversion and ecumenism The significant change closely linked to Iswolsky’s experience of emigration and to her consequent work was, according to all the information we have, her conversion to Catholicism. In 1923, probably overworked and exhausted by the events of the preceding months, she collapsed physically as well as on the psychological level. Doctors were not able to diagnose the problem. In this crisis, as she describes it in her autobiographical writing, she started to ask herself questions on the meaning of her life. To give a frame to this search turned out to be difficult. Helene was raised in the Orthodox tradition understood as closely linked to the imperial power and representation of Russia without a real spiritual life 20. Even though she met Catholic individuals who inspired her, she found the Catholic Church “too different from [the Orthodox Church; with] too strict theology and liturgy alien to [her]”; 21 and she disapproved of the efforts of some Catholics to convert her 22. At the same time, the Orthodox priest, she could reach, was, in Iswolsky’s view, “excellent for the old, traditional members of his flock, but [she] could not possibly lay before him the troubles of the ‘lost generation’23”. Finally, she embraced the Catholic faith of the Eastern Rite, in 1923, in the Saint Scholastica Benedictine Monastery in Dourgne 24. In several of her autobiographical writings, she describes in detail her experience and underlines the role of two Benedictine nuns – Orthodox women converted to Catholicism but still devoted to Russia and Eastern spiritual tradition [Fig. 3]. It was their example which inspired her to enter the Catholic Church 25. She asserts her

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 30. Ibidem, p. 138. Iswolsky/Kachina, La Jeunesse Rouge d’Inna (n. 11). “Извольские и Кудашев жили еще совсем ‘по барски’, в огромной квартире с видом на бульвар Пиренеев, с двумя прислугами, с обязательным переодеванием к обеду и вообще отнюдь не по эмигрантски.”Anna Kachina Evreinoff, Article nécrologique sur Elena Izvolskaïa, 1975, bnf, Fonds Nicolas Evreinoff (théâtre), 4-col-22(208). Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 147 –148. “[…] на этот раз уже по необходимости”. Evreinoff, Article nécrologique (n. 15). Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 67. Ibidem, pp. 96 – 97. Cf. also pp. 11, 14. “[N]o one talked about faith in our family, the religious and mystical aspects of life. They were as remote for me, as though I had been agnostic […]”, Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 69. Ibidem, p. 146. “A Catholic priest learned that I was interested in religious problems and came to visit us, under the pretext of bringing me books. But his intentions to ‘convert me’, as he believed was his duty, were all too obvious.” Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 148. Ibidem, p. 148. Ibidem, pp. 149 –155. These were Ekaterina N. Turgenev  (1881–1939) and her mother Varvara L. Turgeneva (1856 –1934), Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 148 –160; eadem, Au Temps (n. 1), pp. 23– 49.

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choice of Catholicism was not due to theological or political reasons: “When asked why I became a Catholic, I answered, ‘I wanted to get back to the Sacraments’. The Catholic Church helped me to do so at the time of a complete spiritual blackout. It was as simple as that 26.”

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At the time of her conversion Iswolsky’s perceived the situation as “simple” but the context in which she decided to take the step was on the contrary very complex. On the one hand, abandoning Orthodoxy for Catholicism, she joined a very minor group of émigrés – estimated in France to be 300 individuals27. She thus became part of a minority within a minority, having to face the fact that for many of her co-émigrés abjuration meant treason with regards to Russia, and loss of nationality28. On the other hand, at the beginning of the 1920s, the in many ways condescending attitude of the Catholic hierarchy towards Orthodoxy and to other traditions besides the Latin one was not making things easier. Already since the papacy of Leo xiii, interest in Russia was manifested, concerning a possible union with the Orthodox Church. This interest increased after the revolution under the papacy of Benedict xv and Pius xi, and resulted in the creation of four Catholic institutions: Congregation pour l’Église orientale (1917), Commission pro Russia (1925), Institut pontifical oriental (1917), and Séminaire pontifical russe (1929) 29. These were devoted to the study of Eastern liturgy, Orthodox tradition, and the Russian situation. The goals of the mission were the instauration of the Catholic hierarchy in Russia as well as the organization of structures for Russian émigrés who had converted to Catholicism. The hierarchy encouraged the Eastern rite for the Catholic liturgy to be close to the Russian tradition and to facilitate its acceptance by converts. The Catholic Church presented itself as not only Latin but universal, comprising many different liturgical traditions including the Eastern one. This attitude of the Catholic Church meant an effort to better understand Orthodoxy and, compared to the situation before Leo xiii, could be seen as a step towards a rapprochement30. However, the reunion Catholic Church was striving to was not conceived as an ecumenical dialog in the post-second-Vatican sense but as conversion of the Orthodox to Catholicism – either en masse

by the treaty with the patriarch or by individual conversions31. The Orthodox were still designated as schismatics and sectarians over whom an anathema was proclaimed. In this logic, Iswolsky was obliged to proclaim during the ceremony of her acceptance the following abjuration: “I, Helene Iswolsky, knowing the true Catholic and Apostolic faith, anathemize here publicly every heresy and all schism. I join with all my heart the Holy Roman Church and I confess […] that I believe everything that the Holy Apostolic See, by the authority of Holy Scriptures, proposes to believe. […] and I pronounce that everybody who goes against this faith is worthy of eternal anathema, him, his dogmas and his sectarians […] 32.”

The priest responded: “You have just pronounced words which express the real faith of your soul, the faith in Church, the conviction that out of the Catholic Church there is no Church, there are only errors and shadows. […] Tomorrow, the Heavenly Feast will take place, because you will sit at the Holy Table for the first time 33.”

Iswolsky’s description of her conversion is in contrast with the abjuration formulas. The main reason she gives – to “get back to the sacraments” – reveals she did not perceive joining Catholic Church as a rupture with the Orthodox tradition of her childhood. It is interesting to observe the difference of her point of view regarding the official Catholic teaching. The Catholic (as well as Orthodox) Church not acknowledging the intercommunion, the official formulation pronounced by the priest presented Iswolsky’s participation in Eucharist not as “getting back” but as being “for the first time”. Iswolsky was not dissuaded by these formulas, even if later she described the abjuration as a “painful task”34. On the contrary, encouraged by the Benedictine nuns, her joining of the Catholic Church went hand in hand with the decision to “work for unity”35 which she did not take to mean the victory of Catholicism over Orthodoxy. Iswolsky was convinced that the major obstacles were not the points of doctrine but mutual prejudices and ignorance. Even in her initial enthusiasm, she perceived the reunion as a long process, requiring, first and foremost, mutual knowledge

and respect. It was precisely the spreading of information on Russia – on its spirituality and culture – that she saw as her role36. Religious experience as a trigger of politic and social engagement Iswolsky’s spiritual experience – although it may seem to belong to a very personal level – is particularly important for the question of her work in emigration and largely surpasses the religious domain of inter-confessional dialog. Her case enters into the specific context of France in the first third of the twentieth century. At that time an open religious commitment was understood as a response to problems of a specific historical moment and went hand in hand with public – social and politic – engagement 37. Iswolsky speaks about the context of her conversion in the following way: ”If my story has any value, it is precisely because it does not represent a single case. It is not a story of a lonely soul which seeks and finds the truth behind the walls of a monastery. What happened to me happened at that time to other young French intellectuals. Those later joined the Catholic Action. We were, in a certain sense, disoriented by the Great War, and our spirits were shaken 38.”

She describes a generation which lived through the trauma of World War i and which found the responses to its questions in (Catholic) Christianity. It is worth underlining that publicly declared conversions among intellectuals also happened before wwi. By far, this was not a massive phenomenon. However, from 1885 onward, several intellectuals openly made known their spiritual experience and deduced from it (sometimes very extreme) consequences for their stances and public activities. Among them were Charles Péguy (1873–1914), Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), Paul Claudel (1868–1955), and the above-mentioned Jacques and Raissa Maritain. After the war others joined them, such as Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), Charles du Bos (1882–1939), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973). The inter-­war period brought a certain relaxation of the anti-Catholic mood in the Third Republic and the argument of the “Christian values” reappeared in the public sphere – on the right as well as on the left side of the political spectrum39. One

of the organizations which strove for the reinsertion of the religious discourse into the public life was Action catholique mentioned above by Iswolsky. The unifying characteristic of this heterogenous 26 Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 155. (Emphasis mine.) 27 The questionnaire “Quaestiones de Russis aliisque Orientali-

bus dispersis” by Congregation for Oriental Church in 1927 mentions 300 Russian Catholics in France, 200 of them in Paris, 30 in Lyon and 64 in Metz dioceses. Archives historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris, 9k2 9a; quoted by Laura Pettinaroli, La politique russe du Saint-Siège (1905–1939), Rome 2015, p. 417. 28 Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 159; eadem, Au Temps (n. 1), p. 64. 29 On these instituions: Pettinaroli, La politique russe du SaintSiège (n. 27), pp. 353– 447.  30 On the attitude of the Vatican to the question of union with Orthodoxy after the February revolution and during the 1920s, cf ibidem, pp. 253–541. 31 Leonard Swidler, “Vatican ii – The Catholic Revolution from Damnation to Dialogue!”,  Journal of Ecumenical Studies, l/4  (2015), pp. 511– 524. 32 “Moi, Hélène Iswolsky, connaissant la vraie foi Catholique et Apostolique, j’anathémise ici publiquement tout hérésie et tout schisme : j’adhère de tout mon cœur à la Sainte Église Romaine ; et je confesse de cœur comme de bouche que je crois tout ce que le Saint Siège Apostolique, par l’autorité des Saints Évangiles propose à croire. Je le jure au nom de la Très Sainte Trinité et des Saints Évangiles ; et je prononce que quiconque va à l’encontre de cette foi est digne d’un éternel anathème, lui, ses dogmes et ses sectateurs.” Archives of the Monastery Our Lady of the Resurrection (ny) quoted in Michel, Itinéraire (n. 1), p. 119. 33 “Vous venez de prononcer la parole qui exprime la foi réelle de votre âme, la foi en l’Église, la conviction qu’en dehors de l’Église Catholique il n’y a pas d’Église, in n’y a que des erreurs, des ombres. […] Demain sera le Festin du Ciel ; car vous vous assiérez à la Table Sainte pour la première fois.” Ibidem. 34 “devoir pénible”,  Iswolsky, Au Temps (n. 1), p. 69. 35 Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), p. 157. 36 Even if Iswolsky’s work was mainly focus on presentation of Russian issues to the Western public, her efforts to achieve better understanding were not one-direction only. She also tried to inform the Russian public of her co-émigrés about different aspects of the Western politics and society, as evidenced by her articles in Russian émigré press: e.g. “Duchovny put’ francuzskoj intelligencii”,  Novyj Grad, xi (1936), pp. 120 –127; “Novejšie tečenija katoličeskoj social’noj mysli vo Francii”,  Put’, lx (1939), pp. 57– 64; “Francuzskaja intelligencija posle Mjunxena”, Novyj Grad, xiv (1939), pp. 114 –124; and other. 37 Frédéric Gugelot, “Le Temps des convertis, signe et trace de la modernité religieuse au début du xxe siècle”,  Archives de sciences sociales des religions, xlvii/119 (2002), pp.  45– 64; idem, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France 1885–1935, Paris 1998. 38 “Si mon histoire a quelque valeur c’est précisément parce qu’elle ne représente pas un cas unique. Ce n’est pas l’histoire d’une âme isolée cherchant et trouvant la vérité derrière les murs d’un cloître. Ce qui m’arriva en ce temps-là arriva à d’autres jeunes intellectuels de France, qui adhérèrent plus tard à l’Action catholique. Nous avions été, en un certain sens, désaxés par la Grande Guerre, et nos esprits avaient été bouleversés.” Iswolsky, Au temps (n. 1), pp. 36 –37; cf. also pp. 150 –151. (Translation mine.) 39 Cf. Philippe Chenaux, Entre Maurras et Maritain. Une génération intellectuelle catholique (1920 –1930), Paris 1999.

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movement was firstly the already mentioned effort to bring back the spiritual dimension to the social and political life. The second essential point was the engagement of laics – and not only of the clergy, as was habitual – as well as the engagement of people of all social classes – and not only of intellectuals40. Distinctive figures of converts could be found not only among French Catholics but also among Russian émigrés, whether Catholic or Orthodox. In Iswolsky’s circles, we could name the ex-revolutionary and Orthodox nun Maria Skobtsova (1891–1945); founder of Friendship House for the needy, Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896–1985); the writer Ilya Fondaminsky (who wrote under the pseudonym Bunakov 1880–1942), or the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) first third of the twentieth century 41. In the article “Les recherches sociales et politiques de l’émigration russe“, Iswolsky gives a politic explanation of the émigrés’ interest in the religious and the spiritual: “The paradise on Earth, the society without classes, the city of justice built without God [advertised by the Bolsheviks] were only a vulgar caricature on the Russian social ideal which is profoundly humanitarian and religious. It is for this reason that the reaction of the intellectual elite was essentialy humanitarian and religious proclaiming above all the primacy of the spiritual 42.”

Iswolsky’s description concerned only a small segment of the Russian émigré intellectual elite. Nevertheless, to this particular group and to Iswolsky personally, religion offered means to reorganize their values and to guide their social and political action. Presenting Russia in a post-revolutionary perspective

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In Iswolsky’s specific case, the conversion transformed her view on the society she was living in but also on Russia and its history. She joined the group of the journal Esprit, led by Emmanuel Mounier, where she published (with several other émigrés of the same worldview) articles on Russia. Her writings were strongly inspired by Mounier’s personalism43, Maritain’s philosophy of the “primauté du spirituel”44, Berdyaev’s philosophy and

4 / Hélène Iswolsky, L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique, Bruges/Paris 1936; Femmes soviétiques, Bruges/Paris 1937

his views on Russia45, and by Catholic social teachings 46. Iswolsky describes her collaboration with Esprit in the following way:

the aberrations of the tsarist regime and of the Western Capitalist and “bourgeois society”48. In this sense, her articles could be understood as “impartial” .  Iswolsky refused the dualism between “We understood that to face the actual social revoluBolshevism or Capitalism present in the French tion – in the form of communism or of other totalitarian ideologies – it was necessary to formulate fundamental public debate. However, this does not mean that principles which would be based on the ‘primacy of her texts were devoid of any interpretation. On the spiritual’. Existing politic and even metaphysic the contrary, Iswolsky tried to offer a different facts as noble as they could be, are nothing worthy stance which she formulated in detail in her book if this primacy has not been established. Christian L’Homme 1936 en Union Soviétique [Fig. 4]. teachings offered us this indispensable spiritual base and furnished us weapons to fight Communism and the national-socialist tyranny.

“The point is that the writers who adopted towards this country [ussr] a favorable or a hostile attitude make the same error; they confuse the Marxist communism with much more profound and more organic manifestations of the national consciousness; they direct

[…] This conception led us to a system called ‘personalist’ and ‘pluralist’ opposed to rigid principles of the totalitarian doctrine. […] May I allow myself to hope that I have been a bit useful to my collaborators as I received from them inestimable instructions. On every occasion, I tried to deliver them impartial and well-controlled information about Russian issues 47.”

Iswolsky’s words show clearly that she understood Christianity as an alternative to Bolshevism and Nazism. Christianity was offering her “weapons to fight”. In this battle against totalitarianism, she saw her own role in delivering and spreading information about Russia and in the work of mutual discovery of East and West. An intriguing question thus arises, what kind of image was Iswolsky presenting and what the attributes “impartial and well-controlled” might mean. In her articles, Iswolsky covered a large range of topics – from literature and history to economy, politics, and religion. The information she presented was based on her analysis of the Soviet and émigré press and on testimonies of Russians she might meet, as well as on her own experience. She endeavored to base her writings on reliable sources and supported them, where possible, by hard evidence. Her texts had a largely descriptive character, she used statistics and related direct testimonies. Often, she made public material which would otherwise be hardly accessible for the non-Russian-speaking public. Even if Iswolsky criticized the Bolshevik government, her texts do not present a black and white image. She acknowledged the good things Communism proclaimed (being skeptical toward their implementation); she also criticized

40 Charles Baladier, “Action Catholique”,  Encyclopedia Universa-

41

42

43 44 45

46 47

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lis, http://www.universalis-edu.com/encyclopedie/action-catholique/ [accessed on 19.07.2019]. Iswolsky translated (with Charles du Bos) Ivanov’s correspondence with historian Mikhail Gerschenson: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Gerschenson, Correspondance d’un coin à l‘autre, Paris 1931; published also in journal Vigile, iv (1930), pp. 35 –120. “Le paradis sur terre, la société sans classe, la cité de justice érigée sans Dieu [propagés par les Bolsheviks], n’était qu’une caricature grossière de l’idéal social russe, profondément humanitaire et religieux. Voici pourquoi la réaction de l’élite intellectuelle fut essentiellement humanitaire et religieuse, affirmant avant tout chose la primauté du spirituel.” Hélène Iswolsky, “Les recherches sociales et politiques de l’émigration russe”,   La Vie Intellectuelle, viii (1939) quoted in Michel, Itinéraire (n. 1), translation mine. Emmanuel Mounier, Le personnalisme, Paris 1949. Jacques Maritian, Primauté du spirituel, Paris 1927. Among numerous inspirations, Berdyaev’s book Un Nouveau Moyen Âgе (Paris 1924) is directly quoted by the member of the post-revolutionary group George Schirinsky, “Le movement Post-révolutionnaire Russe”, Esprit, ii/17 (1934), pp. 892– 898, sp. p. 896. Articles published in the Esprit by the members of the movement continue in the direction given by Berdyaev’s article, “Vérité et mensonge du communisme”,  Esprit, i/1 (1932). Cf. Michel, Itinéraire (n. 1), pp. 174–182. Especially by the encyclic Quadragesimo Anno issued by Pius xi in 1931. “Nous comprenions tous que pour faire face à la révolution sociale actuelle, soit sous la forme du communisme ou des autres idéologies totalitaires, il était nécessaire de dégager les principes fondamentaux basés sur la ‘primauté du spirituel’. Les données politiques et même métaphysiques existantes, quelque pures et nobles qu’elles soient, ne valaient rien tant que cette primauté n’était d’abord établie. Les enseignements du christianisme offraient cette base spirituelle indispensable, et nous fournirent des armes pour combattre le communisme et la tyrannie national-­socialiste. […] Cette conception nous conduisit au système appelé ‘personnaliste’ et ‘pluraliste’, opposé aux principes rigides de la doctrine totalitaire. […] Et puis-je me permettre d’espérer que je fus de quelque utilité à mes collaborateurs alors que je recevais d’eux des enseignements inestimables. Je tâchai, à chaque occasion, de leur fournir des renseignements impartiaux et bien contrôlés sur les affaires russes.” Iswolsky, Au temps (n. 1), pp. 14 –15. Cf. e.g. Iswolsky, L’Homme 1936 en Union Soviétique (n. 11), p. 63.

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either their praise or their blame without difference to the first as well as to the second element which are often contradictory and nearly always distinct. However, it seems to us that the only way to avoid this confusion is to think or at least to try to think a large historiosophic panorama which would embrace the whole of Russian national, social and religious aspirations traditions and aspirations. We will then see that it is possible to discern accidental phenomena temporally created by Marxist leaders from great processes which we called organic because they are attached to the very soul of a people 49.”

5 / Helen Iswolsky (on the left) autographing her book Light before Dusk

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With several similar-minded friends, they called their attitude towards Russia “post-revolutionary”. The core of the post-revolutionary interpretation (following up with the Slavophil tradition and the ideas of “Russian soul” and Russian mission in the world) was the conviction that the revolution had taken place and it was not possible to return to the foregone order. However, Russian people, profoundly religious and imbued with values of humanity, would surpass the aberration of Bolshevism to create a new and better social system – “anti-Capitalist and anti-Communist – based on Christian values”50. The ideas of the post-revolutionary group were in accord with the main ideas of the group Esprit. Both, they were against Capitalism, productivism and bourgeois individualism. They rejected nationalism, Bolshevism and Nazism and strove for the establishment of a society based on respect for individuals and the community. Both refused to profess allegiance to one or the other political side which could lead them into a compromise with moral values they wanted to defend 51. If we consider closer the categories, post-revolutionary movement used, it becomes evident that they were only hardly usable in practice. If, in theory, it was possible to distinguish “people” and their “government”, in political and economic affairs, they were often inseparable – even more when the government was totalitarian dominating the whole society. The significance of the post-revolutionary theory thus should not be seen on the level of concrete politic solutions. Their importance should be seen rather in the fact, they relativized the main pro- or contra-attitudes, pointed out different sides of “Russia” and brought to the

French public enlarged views on complex Russian situation. The post-revolutionary theory could also be seen as an attempt by the émigrés to formulate a view which would give them a possibility to still identify with Russia – Christian and tradi­­tional – and not with the revolutionary Soviet Union. Iswolsky – a European émigré in the usa In 1941, Iswolsky left occupied France for the usa. Once again, she was to face the situation of being an émigré. And once again, for us, it means asking questions: What kind of change in her life and in her work has this second experience of emigration caused? And what was her impact on the society which received her? Even if, in contrast to her first emigration, Iswolsky had to deal with more serious financial problems and with the practical difficulties of life in an unknown country, she was immediately welcomed by her friends who reached the usa before her. She joined a large community of European refugee intellectuals and participated in activities in support of their invaded countries. In the first three years in the usa, Iswolsky published two books. As remarked by Florian Michel, the first one, entitled Light before Dusk. A Russian Catholic in France [Fig. 5] was written at the suggestion of Jacques Maritain. It was the third volume of the series directed by Jacques Maritain and Julie Kernan and followed the books Through the Disaster and We Have Been Friends Together  52. All three volumes – even if different in genre – dealt with personal accounts and reflections on the pre-war years in France. They were destined, on the one hand, for the American public in order to present and explain the situation in France, as well as to show the positive – the resistance and anti-collaboration – forces in France. On the other hand, their aim was to encourage the French in their struggle 53. In Light before Dusk, Iswolsky mentions Russia and the question of ecumenism. The main focus is, however, directed to France and on the specific intellectual milieu to which she belonged. Iswolsky thus becomes a witness for France, she is presented and understood as a participant and supporter of the French cause, of the Catholic

cause, and finally of the common cause of Europe invaded by Nazi forces. This shift – from a Russian émigré to a European émigré – is visible also in the fact that her signature is present on the manifesto Devant la crise mondiale subtitled Manifeste de catholiques européens séjournant en Amérique 54. This text denouncing the destructive character of totalitarianism and its radical opposition to civilization and Christianity deals briefly with several key questions – among them democracy, Capitalism, and antisemitism; one special page is dedicated to the Germano-Russian conflict. As presented in detail by Florian Michel who analyzed the correspondence between Maritain and Iswolsky, in this passage, Maritain used ideas and formulations proposed by Iswolsky55. These follow Iswolsky’s stances already expressed in her L’Homme 1936 en Russie Soviétique: It is necessary to distinguish between the Soviet regime and the Russian people. No support should be declared to the former, even 49 “C’est que les écrivains ayant adopté envers ce pays [urss] une

50 51

52

53

54

55

attitude favorable ou défavorable commettent la même erreur ; ils confondent le communisme marxiste avec des manifestations infiniment plus profondes et plus organiques de la conscience nationale ; ils adressent leurs éloges ou leurs blâmes indifféremment à l’un et à l’autre de ces phénomènes souvent contradictoires, et presque toujours distincts. Or, il nous semble que le seul moyen d’éviter cette confusion est d’envisager, ou du moins de s’efforcer à envisager, un vaste panorama historiosophique qui embrasserait l’ensemble des traditions et des aspirations nationales, sociales et religieuses russes. Nous verrons alors qu’il est possible de distinguer des phénomènes fortuits créés provisoirement par les dirigeants marxistes, et les grands processus que nous avons traités d’organiques, parce qu’il se rattachent à l’âme même d’un peuple.” Iswolsky, L’Homme 1936, pp. 11–12. Shirinsky,“Le mouvement Post-révolutionnaire Russe”, Esprit, ii (1934), pp. 892– 898, sp. p. 898. Winock, “Esprit” (n. 5), pp. 71–106. Shirinsky, “Le mouvement Post-révolutionnaire Russe” (n. 50), Iswolsky, “Les recherches sociales et politiques” (n. 42). Jacques Maritain, France, My Country, Through the Disaster, New York 1941; Raissa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, New York / Toronto 1942. Michel, Itinéraire (n. 1), p. 75. French versions were also published. Jacques Maritain, À Travers le désastre, New York 1941. (The book was published clandestinly in France several times.); Raissa Maritain, Grandes Amitiés, New York 1941; Iswolsky, Au Temps (n. 1). Devant la crise mondiale. Manifeste de catholiques européens séjournant en Amérique, New York 1942. (Published also in Jacques Maritain, Œuvres complètes, vol. vii, pp. 1214 –1129.) The authors of the idea and of the first version of the text were Joseph Delos, Charles De Koninck and Auguste Viatte. Jacques Maritian and Joseph Vincent Ducattillon worked on the final formulation of the declaration. Michel, “Jacques Maritain et Hélène Iswolsky” (n. 1), pp. 187 –191.

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in the context of comparison with the Nazi regime. It is the Russian people, oppressed by Bolshevism, which deserve and need support in their struggle. (Michel points out that, in the end, it was nevertheless still Stalin’s regime that stood to gain from the [moral or military] help to the Russian people and from its victory. This case shows the limits of the post-revolutionary categories, as discussed above56.) Iswolsky, as the only Russian, added her signature to forty-two names of European intellectuals – from France, Britain, Germany, Poland, Italy, and beyond. The third demonstration of Iswolsky’s belonging to the European and particularly French milieu, is her participation in Voice of America. Starting in 1943, she was in charge of the religious broadcasts for the French branch of the radio57. Although she was integrated in the European refugee society, Iswolsky did not abandon her interest in Russia and her ecumenical agenda. She strengthened her links with Russian émigrés. When she arrived in America, and had no means and no work, she lived at the farm run by the Tolstoy Foundation for the relief of Russian refugees, which was directed by the writer’s daughter, Alexandra. Iswolsky carried on her interests in Russia in her publications as well. Her second book written in the usa was dedicated to Russian Orthodox spirituality, as its title Soul of Russia suggests 58. The purpose of the volume was twofold. The first was to familiarize the Western public with the Orthodox tradition and – above all – to emphasize the common points of Eastern and Western traditions. The second purpose was, again, to underline the difference between the Communist regime and the Russian people, with the latter deserving sympathy, admiration and support in the battle against Nazism. In the foreword, Iswolsky, in 1944, writes: “[T]he old ideal of social justice and human solidarity founded on brotherhood […] is the true expression of Russia’s soul. It is this ideal which enabled the Russian people to resist the godless onslaught of Communism, so that after twenty-five years of persecution they remain a Christian people. And it is this ideal also, we are convinced, which has mobilized all her strength 76

for this present conflict 59.”

Thus, in a similar way as The Light before Dusk, Soul of Russia [Fig. 6] was written not as a mere description or a story but it transmitted an actual message in a specific political situation. As Iswolsky’s texts and correspondence bear witness to, in her second emigration she continued her work and tightened her bonds with those whom she had already collaborated with in France. Gradually, thanks to her “European” friends and to her writing, Iswolsky also built ties with American Catholics interested in social and ecumenical problems. Lay movements After the war, Iswolsky decided to stay in the usa. Teaching and translating to earn her living, she pursued her interest in ecumenical dialog. In 1946, she founded in New York a group called The Third Hour [Fig. 7] which published a journal of the same name. The journal presented itself as follows: “The publication of the third hour is due to personal contacts established by a group of friends. It was, at its very beginning, an intercourse shared by a few Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, seeking a better understanding, and trying to discover all that could bring them closer together. […] The third hour invites its friends, known and unknown, to take part in this intercourse; it calls upon all those who are working and seeking in the same direction, and who know that the souls of men in their diversity are inhabited and moved by the Spirit Who is One 60.”

 

The journal was published irregularly – between 1946 and 1976, only ten issues came out. Among the contributors, there were various important figures interested in ecumenical dialog, such as George Tavard (1922–2007) and Jean Daniélou (1905–1974), theologians and participants in the Vatican Council ii, Abbé Pierre (Henri Grouès, 1912–2007) founder of the Emmaus movement, as well as the writers Basil Yanovsky (1906–1989) and Julien Green (1900–1998) 61. The audience, to judge from Iswolsky’s own notes, was limited in number. For this reason, it is difficult to assess the journal’s real reach and impact which seems to be restricted to a group of friends and people already interested in the topic62. Nevertheless, several pieces of

evidence indicate that the impact of Iswolsky’s efforts reached far beyond the journal. In fact, the Third Hour group fit in a larger phenomenon of lay movements, which were active in the usa. These were striving to increase engagement of lay people in the Church and in the evangelization of the society. Several lay movements active in New York were closely linked to each other. Iswolsky was particularly bound – also by personal friendship – to the charitable and anti-war movement of Catholic Workers co-founded by Dorothy Day63. She was close to Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House64, directed to the relief of the poor and to fight against racial segregation. Iswolsky was also in touch with the Grail – a movement gathering Catholic women65. All these groups, even if their principal activities were oriented to different groups of the needy, were linked by the personal friendship of the members and sometimes even by the parallel membership of some of the participants. They shared the principal ideas of social justice, racial equality, charitable work, and the importance of lay engagement in the Church. Iswolsky, who was often invited to speak for different groups of the movements added and developed there also the idea of the necessity of ecumenical dialog. She gave lectures and organized meetings with specialists in ecumenism,

6 / Helene Iswolsky, Soul of Russia, London 1944 7 / Clipping of the article by Walter Roming, “Of Books and Bookmen”, Michigan Catholic. Weekly Newspaper of the Archidiocese of Detroit, May 1949

56 Michel, “Jacques Maritain et Hélène Iswolsky” (n. 1),  57 58 59 60 61

62

63

64 65

pp. 191–192. Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 242 – 251. Iswolsky, Soul of Russia (n. 11). Ibidem, p. vi. “Editorial”,  Third Hour iii (1947), p. 6. “Daniélou, Jean (1905 – 74)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Frank L. Cross, Elisabeth A. Livingstone eds, Oxford 2005 (published online in 2009); “Green, Julien (1900 – 98)”, in The Oxford Companion to American Literature, James D. Hart, Phillip W. Leininger eds, Oxford 1995 (published online 2004); Axelle Brodiez-Dolino, Emmaüs et l’abbé Pierre, Paris 2008; “Janovskij Vasilij Semenovič (1906 –1989)“, Literaturnoe zarubež’e Rossii. Énciklopedičeskij spravočnik, E. P, Čelyšev, A. Ja. Degtjarev, Moscow 2006, p. 597. Iswolsky also mentions that they were officially allowed to exist by the Catholic hierarchy, on the condition of not advertising their movement. Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve (n. 1), pp. 251, 258. On the movement, cf. e.g. Mark Zwick, Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, New York 2005. C.f. Kathleen L. Riley, “Doherty, Catherine de Hueck”,  American National Biography, published online 2000. Cf. e.g. Janet Kalven, Women Breaking Boundaries: A Grail Journey, 1940 –1995, Albany, ny 1999.

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which were attended by the members of the move- maintained links with other Russian émigrés for ments mentioned. It thus seems that more than her entire life. However, she was not limited by her through the journal, it was by means of personal “Russian identity”. After the revolution, thanks to encounters and thanks to the network of lay move- her social capital and to her interests, she would ments that Iswolsky’s ideas could reach a larger become part of European intellectual milieu, a fact public. In this way, she could familiarize Ameri- particularly visible in the period of the wwii. The can Catholics with the idea of ecumenical dialog. third identity the emigration brought to Iswolsky At the same time Iswolsky spoke about Russia. was the Catholic one. All three identities were In accordance with her preceding texts, she pre- able to develop because of the situation of exile, sented the Russia hidden under Bolshevism; the and they offered Iswolsky three solid and large Russia that is Orthodox, suffering, and heroic – an bases: firstly, that of Russian culture and tradition; image probably not appreciated by the proponents second, the intellectual international milieu; and of McCarthyism66. third, that of a supranational religious community. Deeper analysis of Iswolsky’s work in the usa, At the same time, this multiplicity of identities however, is still to be done. Iswolsky’s concrete often brought Iswolsky into a minority position: impact on lay movements as well as the impact of she was an émigré Russian in France; a Catholic these movements – often radical and at the limits among her Orthodox compatriots; a partisan of of acceptance by the Catholic hierarchy – in both ecumenical dialog and a participant in Eastern the Catholic Church and the American society – liturgy in a Latin-centered Catholic Church; she are still to be assessed. was a woman with brought up to be a lady-­inwaiting (and with three years of law studies in Conclusion – the transformed her educational background) among men with as the transforming advanced degrees in philosophy. It was, however, thanks to her particular position that she was Looking at how Helene Iswolsky’s life was able to act as a point of interconnection. She could changed by her dual emigration and at the im- thus become a mediator, bringing information pact of her activities on the society she was living about Russia and Orthodoxy, contributing to the in, Iswolsky’s appurtenance to different groups changes in the Catholic Church, and enriching emerges as an important point enabling her to Western society. carry out the work she set for herself – that of me66 Iswolsky mentions hostile attitudes towards her opinions diator. Helene Iswolsky was a Russian émigré who in the period of McCarthyism: Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve worked on Russian topics, presented Russia and (n. 1), p. 267 – 269.

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summary Představit Rusko Západu Hélène Iswolsky, ruská emigrantka, katolička, intelektuálka

Autorka představuje postavu Hélène Iswolsky (1896–1975), spisovatelky, překladatelky a zastánkyně mezikonfesního dialogu. Zaměřuje se na to, jak se dvojí zkušenost emigrace (do Francie a následně do usa) projevila v postojích Iswolsky, a na to, jaký dopad měly její práce na západní společnost. Revoluce roku 1917 Hélène Iswolsky radikálně změnily život: z dvorní dámy se stala zchudlou emigrantkou. Avšak těžká situace jí zároveň otevřela cestu směry, kterými by se jako členka nejvyšší ruské aristokratické společnosti těžko vydala. Iswolsky mohla krátce studovat na Sorbonně a věnovat se literární tvorbě. Druhá velká změna se odehrála na velmi osobní úrovni: v roce 1923 Iswolsky vstoupila do katolické církve. Ve dvacátých letech se Iswolsky zařadila do pařížských literárních kruhů, avšak stále zůstávala v kontaktu se svými spoluemigranty. Po odjezdu do USA v roce 1940 se okruh jejích přátel dále rozšířil, spolupracovala mimo jiné s The Catholic Worker Movement a založila časopis The Third Hour, zaměřený na mezikonfesní dialog. Změny v oblasti intelektuální a spirituální i setkávání s novými přáteli se výrazně projevily v práci Iswolsky. Velmi osobní zážitek konverze ji vedl k rozhodnutí usilovat o lepší vzájemné

pochopení mezi pravoslavnými a katolíky, přičemž její přístup k mezikonfesnímu dialogu byl mnohem otevřenější než tehdejší postoj katolické hierarchie. Druhým klíčovým bodem pro veřejnou činnost Iswolsky bylo její nadšení pro sociální učení církve a snaha najít v obnoveném a sociálním křesťanství alternativu ke komunismu. Tuto myšlenku sdílela s emigrantským post-revolučním hnutím, jehož byla součástí, a s francouzskými personalisty, s nimiž spolupracovala v rámci časopisu Esprit. Iswolsky se v emigraci ocitla ve zvláštním postavení „na pomezí“: mezi Francouzi byla ruskou emigrantkou, mezi intelektuály (převážně muži) ženou vychovanou k tomu, aby se stala dvorní dámou, mezi pravoslavnými Rusy konvertitkou ke katolictví a mezi dělníky usilujícími o lepší sociální podmínky někdejší členkou nejvyšší ruské aristokracie. Tato ne vždy pohodlná pozice však Iswolsky nabízela ideální možnost stát se mediátorkou. Velkou část svého díla tak směřovala k Francouzům a Američanům, kterým přinášela informace o Rusku a jeho kultuře, a to ve vlastních textech, skrze překlady i skrze výuku ruského jazyka a literatury. Právě ve snaze bojovat proti vzájemným předsudkům mezi Ruskem a Západem můžeme vidět přínos Iswolsky západní společnosti.

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Abstract – The Russian Illustrators of the Père Castor. Russian Mediators in France of the Concept of Construction in Art and Pedagogy in the 1930s – Russian illustrators working in Paris from the 1910s through the ’20s contributed importantly to two major developments. First, a huge paradigm shift took place in the ’20s and ’30s about the definition of reality, whether constructed or perceived by reason and the senses. Second, there was a dual function of education in allowing children to build and grow according to their innate predispositions while also helping them adapt to the world in which they lived. This article examines how the Père Castor publisher’s Russian illustrators served as mediators of Soviet visual culture in France and focuses on the concept of the construction of image. The article recapitulates the concept of construction in the Russian and Soviet artistic milieu and describes the Russian illustrators’ visual experiments with the construction of image. It demonstrates that the search for the child’s active participation in reading gave rise to the goal of creating dynamic artwork. Finally, it places the Russian illustrators’ works in the double context of French and Russian educational thought, exploring convergences between the New Education promoted by Paul Faucher, his adaptation of its concepts in illustrations for children and Soviet works on the child’s perception, exploring the relationship between the construction of image and the construction of the child. Keywords – Children’s picture book, Russian illustrators, Père Castor, Nathalie Parain, construction, pedagogy, New Education Cécile Pichon-Bonin cnrs, Laboratorie Interdisciplinaire de Recherche “Sociétés, Sensibilités, Soins” 80 [email protected]

The Russian Illustrators of the Père Castor Russian Mediators in France of the Concept of Construction in Art and Pedagogy in the 1930s Cécile Pichon-Bonin

Throughout Europe, the early twentieth century was marked by a huge expansion of children’s literature. In France, a real renaissance occurred in the 1930s, especially thanks to the work of several talented illustrators of Russian origin. Immigrants or long-term residents, these authors reconfigured the French culture of children’s books. This article aims to contribute to the analysis of the Russian influence on French visual culture related to children during this period. To this end, we will study in particular the works of Russian illustrators for the collection of Père Castor at Flammarion, namely Nathalie Parain born Čelpanova (1897 –1958), Fedor Rojankovsky dit Rojan (1891–1970), Ivan Bilibin (1876 –1942), Hélène Guertik (1897–1937), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Natan Altman (1889 –1970), Alex­ andre Chemetoff or Chem (1898 –1981), Georges

Tcherkessof (1900 –1943) and Serge Wishnevsky. We occasionally mention books by these illustrators edited by other publishers in order to clarify our point. Three facts have led us to consider the Père Castor collection in particular: firstly, the importance of its role in the field of children’s literature since its creation by Paul Faucher, in 1931, to the late 1960s and beyond. Secondly, the latter’s approach, who viewed children’s book as a means of education and considered the renewal of its form for educational purposes 1. Lastly, Père Castor was 1

Juliette Roux, Collaborations d’artistes Russes et d’Europe de l’est avec le Père Castor de 1931 à 1940: illustration, mise en perspective et analyse d’image. Quelle place dans l’histoire de l’art?, Mémoire de Master i Histoire de l’art, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier iii 2009, p. 77.

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the main employer for Russian children’s illustrators until its reorganization in 1941, after France entered the war 2. Historiography has already produced important works on Père Castor’s picture books 3. The role of Russian artists has been the subject of several studies, in particular the overview by Michel Defourny and two master’s theses by Juliette Roux 4. In comparing the works of Russian artists of Père Castor and the achievements of avant-garde Soviet artists such as Vladimir Lebedev, El Lissitskij and Aleksandr Rodčenko, the above-mentioned studies have given rise to major themes of reflection and have highlighted various iconographic transfers. Claude-Anne Parmegiani has also offered visual analyses of the illustrations. Based on the very general historiography available in French and English on the Russian avant-garde, these works can now be more thoroughly explored thanks to a more precise knowledge of Russian and Soviet artistic and educational fields. The analysis of the images from these Russian illustrators reveals three main contributions to French children’s literature: the development of Russian folklore (which is mainly expressed in the works of Ivan Bilibin and, to a lesser extent, in those of Nathalie Parain and Alexandre Chem); the work on faktura (present in very different perspectives by Fedor Rojankovsky and Nathalie Parain, but also by Hélène Guertik and Alexandra Exter); and finally, the reflection on the construction of the image (explicit in the approach of Nathalie Parain, Hélène Guertik or Serge Wishnevsky). After having devoted an article to the presentation of the profiles of the illustrators and to the study of the notion of faktura 5, we will analyze here the concept of the construction of images. The term construction was indeed often used in the sources that studied the Russian illustrators of Père Castor. Widespread both in the artistic and educational circles of the 1910s–1930s, this term is rich and complex, and often surrounded by some confusion in historiography, particularly in the French one. As Paul Faucher explained in 1957, “it is because these books brought constructive games that these picture books were placed under the sign of an animal instinctively devoted to construction: the beaver”6. In his response

to a children’s letter, Paul Faucher detailed the qualities of beavers in nature and summarized, in conclusion: “It is for all these qualities of courageous pioneers, intelligent builders, citizens attentive to others that we wanted to put our albums under the sign of the beaver. It is also to say that our albums are intended to give, to those who read them, the desire to build, either in imagination, or in reality 7.”

The publisher thus referred to both the original toy-books, directly influenced by the Russian and Soviet tradition and developed directly from Soviet models by Nathalie Parain, that encouraged the child to concretely build masks, to cut out, to make scrolls 8, and illustrations of Russian artists who explored the question of the construction of images and thus invited children to develop their capacities of reflection, conception, creation and imagination. A brief history of the term of construction in the Russian and Soviet artistic milieu of the 1910s–1920s will help us to better understand the context of most Russian illustrators’ training years. After this, we will analyze those illustrators’ visual experiments around the construction of images before placing their works in the double context of French and Russian educational thought. The present study is based on the historiography concerning Soviet art of the 1920s also available in Russian. We refer to our work on painting by the Society of Easel Painters for bibliographical details 9. These references are supplemented by consultation of the archives of the Médiathèque intercommunale du Père Castor in Meuzac, of the Library Heure joyeuse in Paris, and parts of the archives of Nathalie Parain located in the National Library of France. These resources give access to the folders of the picture books made by the Russian illustrators, their critical reception in the French press and the artists’ correspondence with the publisher. The concept of construction in Russian and Soviet art in the 1910s–1920s In the ussr, in the post-revolutionary context, the notion of construction was pervasive in all areas: building a new society, a new way of life, the

economy, new cities, industry, socialism, etc 10. The term construction is simultaneously ideological, industrial, material, but also artistic. In this field, the concept of construction (konstrukcija) evolved along with the notion of faktura. It has occupied a central place in the field from the beginning of the 1910s until the end of the 1920s. In constant flux, the term of construction was the subject of debates and reflections, thus receiving multiple definitions. Malevich would have been the first to propose a metaphor of the painter as a builder 11. In 1912, in her article entitled “What’s New in French Painting”, published in the journal Iskusstvo of Kiev, Alexandra Exter wrote for the first time about compositional construction12 and juxtaposed the “contemplative passivity” of cubists to the “active dynamic construction” of the Russian futurists 13. She thus inaugurated a “dynamic theory of the work of art”, seeking to define the laws of rhythmic and dynamic construction. This link with movement and dynamism was reflected in Exter’s later work on stage sets and costumes. Paul Faucher himself used the notion of construction to describe her experiments14. In 1916, the art historian and theoretician Nikolaj Tarabukin presented construction as a principle of organization of painting materials, which was based on an internal logic inherent in the work15. Just as faktura was in opposition to manera, construction was in opposition to composition, in a context where the function of representation in a painting was overthrown in favor of research as to the materiality and the components of the visual language. The concept of construction was first confined to the pictorial field. In 1921, it expanded to the world of objects. That year, the Institute of Artistic Culture (inxuk), a theoretical think-tank closely linked to the vxutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow) – its members taught there –, hosted a debate on the definition of the notions of composition and construction in art 16. This discussion resulted, after a few months, in the creation of four groups, including the working group of objectivists and the constructivists. This last group brought together Aleksandr Rodčenko, Varvara Stepanova, Konstantin Meduneckij, the brothers Vladimir and Georgij Stenberg, Karl

Ioganson and Aleksej Gan. According to this group, construction cannot exist in the visual arts, which should therefore be abandoned. The Institute then proclaimed the death of easel painting. At the slogan “from representation to construction!” followed a new one: “from construction to production!”. Constructivists rejected the easel in the name of industrial art. However, faced with the difficulties of applying their program, they occupied essentially areas of production such as posters, books, and the press. In 1923, Rodčenko developed his first photomontages. Constructivists continued to claim the death of painting but in favor of photography, typography, 2

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For more details on this question, see Cécile Pichon-Bonin, “Rol’ russkix illjustratorov ‘Papaši Bobra’ v obnovlenii detskoj knigi vo Francii v 1930-x gg.: biografii xudožnikov i analiz ‘faktury’”, Detskie Čtenija, xvi (2019), pp. 152–179, online: http://www.detskie-chtenia.ru/index.php/journal/issue/ view/17?fbclid=IwAR1cApBi3J-vhiFiYHjHhq7joN3SyE_DxurskKhfb9QJWBi6_LFYHRDJhUI [accessed on 25 May 2020]. We refer here to the work of Claude-Anne Parmegiani, Isabelle Nières-Chevrel, Annie Renonciat, Marie-France Payraud-Barat and Céline Rousseau. Michel Defourny, Père Castor et les artistes russes, Paris 2017 ; Roux, Collaborations d’artistes (n. 1); eadem, Au cœur des problématiques des avant-gardes: six albums du Père Castor (1931–1940), Mémoire de Master ii Histoire de l’art, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier iii 2010; Mixail Seslavinskij, Randevu: russkie xudožniki vo francuzkom knigoizdanii pervoj poloviny xx veka, Moscow 2009. See Pichon-Bonin, “Rol’ russkix illjustratorov” (n. 2). Roux, Au cœur des problématiques (n. 4), p. 63, n. 21. All translations from French to English by the author. Archives de la Médiathèque intercommunale du Père Castor (amipc), Meuzac, 1J487. L’Album magique of Nathalie Parain and Hélène Guertik was an adaptation of Soviet magical images. Je fais mes masques of Nathalie Parain was inspired by a book with the same title created by Vera Ermolajeva (1925). Je fabrique mes jouets avec des plantes was the importation of the methods of the Czech pedagogue František Bakule and was in the same spirit as many of Soviet books inviting children to make their own toys; finally, the panoramas by Alexandra Exter adopt the process present in a book such as Port (1930). Cécile Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en urss, L’itinéraire des membres de la Société des artistes de chevalet (ost), 1917–1941, Dijon 2013. See ibidem, pp. 83– 84. Jean-Claude Marcadé, L’avant-garde russe, Paris 1995, p. 239. Andrei B. Nakov, Alexandra Exter, Paris 1972, pp. 15–16. Claude Leclanche-Boulé, Le constructivisme russe. Typographies et photomontages, Paris 1991, p. 18. amipc 1j 367. Paul Faucher’s foreword for the exhibition catalogue of Alexandra Exter’s theatrical works, Musée des arts et métiers, Paris, March 1937. See Nicolas Taraboukine, Le dernier tableau, Paris 1980. For details on this debate see Selim O. Xan-Magomedov, Inxuk i ranij konstruktivizm, Moscow 1994, pp. 36 – 72; idem, L’InKhouK, naissance du constructivisme, Paris 2013.

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photomontage, and cinema. Thus, the concept of construction left the sphere of abstract art and was applied to activities related to the reconstruction of a way of life. As such, at the beginning, the Russian constructivists were a rather small group of artists and did not have the monopoly of the development of the concept of construction. In their categorical and total rejection of easel painting, they met the opposition of many creators. In the field of non-representation, we can take note of the group of the Objectivists (Aleksandr Drevin, Ljubov Popova, Natalia Udalcova), resulting from the split with Constructivists within the inxuk. Defenders of pictorial construction, the Objectivists highlighted the fact that construction was a goal in itself that differed from composition, conceived as a distribution of elements according to taste, within a hierarchy and containing superfluous elements. Construction was different from representation as well as from abstraction. It emphasized the creation of a new object (hence the name of objectivism), of a new concrete reality, based on a study of the properties of visual language elements (light, color, shape, texture). The search for dynamism and movement remained, as well as the ambition to produce a powerful effect. Before giving full support to the Constructivists, Nikolaj Tarabukin spoke of compositional construction and attempted to unite construction (defined as the creative and constructive force) and composition (which can be understood as an organizational link) by viewing them as both essential components of a work of art. The Objectivists, essentially active in 1921, continued the research which was began in the 1910s. The 1920s were especially marked by the partisans of figuration who simultaneously seized the concept of construction. David Sterenberg and Vladimir Favorskij, teachers in the vxutemas, close to Alexandra Exter and teachers of Nathalie Parain and Hélène Guertik, belonged to this category. Likewise, construction, painting, and figurative graphic arts were associated. Sterenberg defined construction as an organization of forms and colors, in the manner of the Objectivists 17. Construction turns into a work in a laboratory, putting into question the status of painting as an autonomous

and independent object. Based on the recent discoveries of Einstein, Vladimir Favorskij taught his vxutemas students that the goal of art was to express time – this fourth dimension inseparable from space18. In order to explore space-time, movement became a privileged field of investigation. These discussions permeated the activity of groups like the Society of Easel Artists (ost), formed by young graduates of vxutemas, comrades of Nathalie Parain, and of which Sterenberg was the president. This association explored the principle of montage (the juxtaposition, in the same image, of fragments borrowed from different time-spaces) as a dynamic process for constructing representation. Alexandre Dejneka developed it within a synthetic pictorial and graphic realism. This process, associated with the notions of movement, rhythm, and dynamism, was widely experienced in Soviet children’s illustration, notably through the works of the most famous artist, Vladimir Lebedev. The works of Nathalie Parain, Serge Wishnevsky, Hélène Guertik, Alexandra Exter and Natan Altman follow in this vein. The devices of image construction in the work of Père Castor’s Russian illustrators: dynamic images and active reading According to a definition given by Rodčenko, construction applied both to the forms themselves and to the whole picture, presupposing basic elements to be combined and arranged. This was highlighted by Père Castor’s activity books / toybooks. They contain elementary geometrical forms from which children must create simple mimetic forms and then complete compositions, first following a model and then allowing their imagination to guide them. Construction refers to both the process and the outcome of this process. As Paul Faucher pointed out, it is simultaneously a concrete and conceptual activity. In the illustrations, the search for dynamism was expressed by the choice of iconography, colors, techniques, compositional lines, and the process of spatial construction. One of the main functions of the picture was to incite the child to move and to actively read the image. The Père Castor books, like the Soviet children’s books, highlighted topics such as speed and

means of transport. Allons vite! (1933) by Nathalie Parain, was probably inspired by the works Poexali and Kto Bystrej?, illustrated respectively by Lidja Popova and Evgenija Evenbax19, works that Nathalie Parain knew very well. Outdoor games and movement are also present, as in Nathalie Parain’s Jeux en images (1933). Physical activity was a priority of the New Education movement and was included in the recommendations of the hygienists, whose influence had remained very strong in the ussr since the nineteenth century. Paul Faucher oriented Hélène Guertik in this direction for the realization of the album Ah! La belle journée: “the sketches have to be redone according to a very different principle. You must use cheerful colors. The focus must be on movement and not on the landscape”20. Regardless of the topics, the formal processes of the image respond to a search for dynamic construction. The diagonals are often structuring lines. We see it in Exter’s works and in constructivist photomontages and typography. The French critic underlined the originality of this trend, still rare in French illustrations for children but frequent in the ussr. Critics explained that, in Rojan’s work, the images underlined the movement of the text  21. The animals of l’abc du Père Castor (1936) often follow a diagonal. In Six métiers (1935), Natan Altman also used this principle to represent the movement of his lumberjack. No doubt this was a reference to Cassandra’s 1923 advertising poster for the furniture store Au bûcheron. The book Baba Yaga repeatedly used this mode of composition: in the embroidery scene but also where the girl feeds the dog. And we find numerous other examples, such as in Jeux en images. As for all avant-garde artists, the quest for dynamism merged with that of maximum expressiveness. In order to achieve this expressiveness, the use of the contrast of shapes, colors and textures was common. Fernand Léger, an important source of inspiration for Russian artists who recognized themselves more in his art than in the cubism of Picasso or Braque 22, wrote: “contrast = dissonance, creating maximal expression”23. For him, as for the constructivists, contrast governs life itself and art works must be in formal accordance with modern life. In Faites votre marché! and activity-toy books,

Nathalie Parain applied this to the universe of childhood and to objects of everyday life. She favored flat areas of bright colors. Her palette often used the maximum contrast of black, white and red, common in the Soviet book art of the time, to which were added a soft green (rather than the dark green of constructivists) and beige (Baba Yaga, Jeux en images). Circles and triangles, rounded and angular forms oppose each other. In the ussr, for the constructivists and for illustrators such as Vladimir Lebedev or painters such as Aleksandr Dejneka and Juri Pimenov, expressiveness meant efficiency, energy and impression made on the spectator in order to stimulate and mobilize the young reader 24. Awakening the child’s emotions 17 David P. Sterenberg, Tradicija i sovremmenost’, 1932, archives

of the Sterenberg family.

18 We refer here to different writings of Vladimir A. Favorskij,

19 20 21 22 23 24

“O kompozicii”,  Iskusstvo, i–ii (1933), pp. 1–7; Kniga o Vladi­mire Favorskom, Jurij Molok ed., Moscow 1967; Vladimir A. Favorskij, Ob iskusstve, o knige, o gravjure, Moscow 1986; Literaturno-­ teoretičeskoe nasledie, Elena B. Murina, Dina D. Čebanova eds, Moscow 1988; V. A. Favorskij, Vospominaija sovre­mennikov, pis’ma xudožnika, stenogrammy vystuplenij, G. A. Zagjanskaja, E. S. Levitan eds, Moscow 1991. Roux, Au cœur des problématiques (n. 4), p. 104. Béatrice Michielsen, Hélène Guertik, Dix albums d’exception au Père Castor, 1932–1937, Meuzac 2011, p. 26. amipc, 1j 985. Claude-Anne Parmegiani, Les Petits Français illustrés 1860 –1940, Paris 1989, p. 276. Fernand Léger, “Les réalisation picturales actuelles, (1914)”, in Fonctions de la peinture, Paris 1997, p. 48. Many studies are dedicated to Soviet children’s books and it is not possible to be exhaustive here. We can mention, in Russian history, four main authors: Ella Gankina, Jurij Gerčuk, V. Tarasenkov and Valeri Blinov. The first author wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on this topic in 1963, followed by several articles and books. Having met the artists in person, her approach is historical and has a value of testimony. It generally offers an overview of trends, works and artists, including them in the history of forms. Jurij Gerčuk notably offers in-depth analyses of certain works (See in particular the series of works Хudožnik…delaet knigu, published in the 1980s by Sovetskij хudožnik editions in Moscow), as for Tarasenkov, his work is undoubtedly the most complete concerning the number of works listed in its bibliographic directory. More recently, we can mention, Evguenij Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books, Seattle 2000, and Valeri Blinov, Russkaja detskaja Knižka kartinka 1900 –1941, Moscow 2005. Many exhibitions catalogues have also been published. In recent years, we can cite Sara Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard, The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, Evanston 2014; eadem, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2018; and the project lead by Sergej Oushakine, “The Pedagogy of Images, Depicting Communism for Children”,  online: https://pedagogyofimages.princeton.edu/ [last accessed on 28 February 2017].

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was supposed to create an emotional attachment forms, geometric, especially in Nathalie Parain’s to the book, the only way to make the book effec- or Serge Wishnevski’s works. The study of elementive according to Paul Faucher 25. This view was tary forms was on the curriculum of vxutemas shared by Soviet pedagogues and sociologists who composition courses, as well as the Gestalt theory conducted readership surveys and reported on of German psychologists 27. The Soviet illustrator them in specialized journals such as Kniga Detjam. Vladimir Lebedev played with geometry to instiThe work on contrast is enhanced by another gate a new figuration, for example using one form specificity of Russian illustrators, namely the si- throughout an entire book: the rectangle in Bagaž multaneous use of a wide variety of techniques or the circle in Moroženoe. In this last work, the such as colored or patterned cut papers, collages, circle is used with transformational dynamics, folstencils, scrolls and silhouettes, swaths of gouache, lowing the metamorphosis of the main character colored pencils, scratch cards, etc. This is partic- into a snowman. Parain or Wishnevsky retained ularly notable in the works of Alexandra Exter, the playful aspect of this exploration by further Hélène Guertik and Nathalie Parain. In the latter, accentuating the combinatorial dimension of geothe flat areas of color adjoin textured areas re- metric elements and their ability to create other vealing the trace of colored pencils or the grain forms suggesting the idea of an introduction to of the airbrush. geometry through play 28. In addition, the many devices explored by NaThe use of these forms corresponded, in the thalie Parain in her illustrations are reiterated in Père Castor books as in the Soviet ones, to a conher toy-books. The figures of her picture books cern for order, clarity and legibility, observable in such as the children of the Jeux en images, the don- the picture-books of Nathalie Parain such as Mon key and the elements of the Beau chardon d’Ali Boron chat, Baba Yaga, Jeux en images but also Châtaigne, are cut out silhouettes that the illustrator assem- or in the animal picture books of Hélène Guertik bled to her liking in order to test different composi- and Rojan. These principles were more the retions. By keeping visible the process of elaboration, sult of international functionalism than Russian the illustration appears as a construction game. constructivism, whose search for expressiveness Play and creativity were thus associated with the passed through the introduction of disorder in process of constructing an image. Creation by the image thanks to the use of transparency and the illustrator and observation by the child are often unreadable typography arranged according meant to be playful activities: playfulness affects to geometric compositions more dynamic than the genesis of the work and the books encourage easy to understand. This triple preoccupation ludic behavior. This tendency had already been with order, clarity and legibility, appeared reobserved in relation to toy books 26, and can thus currently in the Soviet pedagogical periodicals be applied to illustrated stories. The ambition to and in the work of the illustrators of the Leninmake the child a constructor differs from the logic grad school or the Čičagova sisters. For his part, of identification with a hero, promoted by two Paul Faucher considered the advice of oculists other important publishers for children, Tolmer concerning the readability of texts and images. and Hartmann for example. In addition, Nathalie He chose carefully the format, the size of the Parain multiplied the figures’ features giving the characters and the length of the lines according heroine of Mon chat either blond or brown hair to the age of the children to whom the picture allowing them to thus adopt different faces. book was addressed 29. From a formal point of view, the books of RusIf the image must be readable, it is because it sian illustrators (except for those of Bilibin), broke must be understandable. It is necessary to protect with the two main trends in French illustration the child against confusion. Clarity, order and for children. Those that derived from caricature readability also refer to an imperative of informaand press drawing, or decorative and ornamental tion: precision. The image, as in science manuals, art, and emphasizing line and drawing. The con- had the function of providing knowledge 30. To struction game is based on the use of simplified “transmit a clear and sensible vision of reality”, it

must “avoid any distorted deformation, any desiccating schematization”31. Such were also the concerns of the Soviet pedagogues. The debate on the simplification and schematization of the image for children was thus animated in the ussr, especially during the 1920s–1930s. It was important to present unshattered objects in contrast to those in Braque, Picasso or Russian cubo-futurists’ paintings. One of the main sources of inspiration in this regard, especially for Nathalie Parain, was her teacher David Sterenberg from whose multiple still lives [Figs 1–3], she developed an interest in simple objects of everyday life and a concern for the integrity of the object in order to carry out an exploration of shapes and textures. She heightened this aspect of her work by adding geometric shapes and a more obvious contrasts, closer to the works of Alexander Dejneka. We should mention here her still life realized in papiers collés for Je découpe. The influence of Sterenberg in the Soviet children’s book is also obvious in Matrëški (1930) and Lakomki (1930) illustrated by Lidia Popova or on the cover of Sdača (1930), illustrated by Vera Ivanova. In order to present the object in all its characteristics, Nathalie Parain and Hélène Guertik often isolated it on a white page and avoided overlapping patterns. Using only a white page and eliminating extraneous details allows representation of individual elements. Favorskij explained it explicitly: on the blank page, the object can be presented in a very characteristic way, movements 25

26 27 28

29 30

31

amipc, 1j487. Père Castor’s quotes: “For the child, the book

is not only a story, it is an emotional object”; “The first books have a determining influence on the sensitivity, the taste and the judgment of the children”. Roux, Au cœur des problématiques (n. 4), p. 106. Parmegiani, Les Petits Français illustrés (n. 22), p. 280. Toy books forewords and critical reception of the books are illustrative. See in particular the untitled article published in La Revue de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles, 15 janvier 1933. About Ronds et Carrés, the author of the article evokes the discovery of the notions of surface, masses and their relationship, and emphasizes an introduction to geometry that is alive, attractive and artistic. Jeux de pliage would be an opportunity to also discover basic geometric and physics notions like pressure, elasticity and air resistance. Marc Soriano, Les livres pour les enfants, Interview de Paul Faucher, Meuzac 1998, p. 11.  Marie-Françoise Payraud-Barat, Paul Faucher,“Le Père Castor”, réflexion pédagogique et albums pour enfants, Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Rennes ii Haute Bretagne 2001, p. 561. Roux, Collaborations d’artistes (n. 1), p. 83.

1 / D. P. Sterenberg, Sheets from the Textural Experiments, 1920s, lithograph, 26 × 9 cm / private collection

2 / David P. Sterenberg, Still life in blue, 1916, oil on canvas, 79,5 × 100 cm / private collection 3 / David P. Sterenberg, illustration for the children’s book Posuda, Moscow, giz, 1930, gouache and collage, 14,2 × 22,5 cm, Andrej Eremin for the Sterenberg family

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4 / Nathalie Parain, Jeux en images, Albums du Père Castor, Flammarion, 1933

and gestures become particularly precise and free. He added that this draws attention to the outlines instead of individual traits of the characters, making them appear as types, which according to him was appropriate for children 32. The blank page affects the background of the images as well as becoming part of the figures. Leaving the drawing unfinished, Nathalie Parain suggests for example the socks or the dresses of her figures in Jeux en images [Fig. 4], Mon chat or Baba Yaga. By not drawing any outline and leaving the blank page visible in these places, the child understands the drawing and mentally reconstructs the missing elements. The same goes for

the little girl’s bowl and towel in Mon chat. In Ah! La Belle Journée, the reader is invited to complete the contour of the forms concretely, with a pencil. The white of the page constitutes a non-referential background and takes the symbolic value of the domestic or natural space. Soviet illustrators, Vladimir Lebedev in particular, often used this process, for example in Oxota. The white page is also used for shapes, thanks to stencil technique, as in David Sterenberg’s children’s books such as Moi igruški [Fig. 5], Cvety or Uzory. We observe it in the Baba Yaga river or in some objects of Allons vite! 32 Favorskij, Ob iskusstve (n. 18), p. 270.

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5 / David P. Sterenberg, illustrations of Moi igruški, Moscow giz, 1930

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for example. Rojan, in the abc du Père Castor, shows an iguana clasping an unrepresented rock in his paws [Fig. 6]. The blank page functions here as a surface where the child can project his own ideas and complete the drawing, invent additional elements and an environment for the actions unfolding on the images. It was likewise an active reading principle observable in the constructivist photomontages and in the painting of Aleksandr Dejneka. In the same spirit, the frame truncates the muzzle and tail of the cat, the hair and the hands of the girl and the body of the mother. This device suggests play outside the frame; the figures seem to leave the image. Children are invited to read actively, to develop their imagination, creativity, to continue the construction of the image, always in a playful manner. The device of spatial representation also encourages active reading. Following the research of Vroubel and the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the representation renewed by abstraction continued the work of questioning the visual illusion of the traditional Albertian perspective that is defined by the use of chiaroscuro to indicate the volume, the vanishing point located on the horizon line, the decrease in the size of the elements and the covering of one object by another to show their distancing. These visual devices correspond to human vision and reproduce a spatial and temporal unity of the represented scene. The white background creates a frontal effect. It makes it possible to combat the loss of perspective of the image, to affirm its two-dimensional character of the figurative space and to recall the materiality of the support. It also affirms that we are definitely in front of a representation, an image, an artifact. The blank page allows the deployment of devices such as polycentrism, that is to say, the juxtaposition, in the same image, of elements seen from different angles. Experienced by cubists, it was theorized in the vxutemas Favorskij’s courses Introduction to the theory of the arts of space and Theory of composition or in the course of one of the leading figures of the time, Pavel Florenskij, entitled Theory of Perspective. This philosopher, esthetician and mathematician is particularly famous for his work on icons and for his definition of inverted perspective 33.

David Sterenberg extensively used this device in his painted and engraved still lives of the 1910s and the 1920s. The album Mon chat presents in the most obvious way Nathalie Parain’s assimilation of his art. In three different instances, the artist shows a folded table top, seen from above, showing objects (inkwell, plate, glass, fruit, spoon, written page) and animals (cat, mouse) taken from different angles: cat seen from the front, mouse in profile, etc. In Sterenberg’s works, tables with raised trays and feet seen from the front affirm the two-dimensional character of the painting or the sheet. The representation surface is thus transformed into the presentation surface for the objects [Fig. 7]. This principle also aims to present each object in the most evocative angle to the child. It is found in Baba Yaga, when the embroidery loom is arranged frontally to allow the viewer to see the motif, in the double page showing the passing river, in the circle of girls who opens the book or in the final frame of Le beau chardon d’Ali Boron [Fig. 8]. Finally, polycentrism is a way of expressing space-time and is sometimes associated with the simultaneous representation of successive actions on the same page. In Mon chat, Nathalie Parain represented the same animal in several positions in the same space. The association of animal attitudes creates movement, as does the location of the text, which differs on every page. In constructivist photomontages, the montage is a playful process that aims to undermine any narrative thread and thus render the works anti-narrative and anti-descriptive. In the picture-books of Père Castor, this technique is used to energize the story. Children must link the iconographic elements to each other, play with the images and perceive them in a dynamic relationship with the text. They are invited to recompose the story. The boards of Bonjour-­ Bonsoir (1934) also offer this type of construction since children must associate an object with an action or arrange the scenes in chronological order. The search for an expressive and dynamic form was accompanied by the desire to involve the child in active reading thus making him a constructor. 33 Selim O. Xan-Magomedov, Vhutemas, Moscou 1920 –1930,

Paris 1990, vol. 2, p. 469. For Florenskij’s texts, see for example: Sobranie sočinenij v 7 knigah, Moscow 1994–2004.

6 / Rojan, “Iguane”, abc du Père Castor, Albums du Père Castor, Flammarion, 1936

7 / David P. Sterenberg, Still life in red, 1916, oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm, Andrej Eremin for the Sterenberg family 8 / Nathalie Parain, illustration for Le Beau chardon d’Ali Boron, Albums du Père Castor, Flammarion, 1940

This approach makes sense placed in the context of the educational reflections of the time. The study of the collaboration of Russian artists with Paul Faucher allows us to understand the convergences and the exchanges between the artistic reflections, the principles of New Education and the Russian psycho-pedagogy in order to specify the contribution of Russian artists to the development of the educational children’s book in France. Pedagogical resonances: from the construction of the image to the construction of the child

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At the end of the nineteenth century there was a profound change in the psycho-pedagogical approach to the child. Considered a being in the

making, it was agreed that children evolve in stages during which they develop their identity. This biological and psychic development underlines an internal dynamic. To educate children thus meant to help them develop their natural aptitudes by starting from their centers of interest. This idea was at the foundation of the New Education movement so promoted by Paul Faucher and was explicitly formulated in the charter of the Père Castor books 34. A set of questions arose and structured the debates 35: how can we define a child’s nature? What is the role of the schoolmaster, the educator and the pedagogue? How much freedom should be left to a child? How to define and articulate constituted knowledge (symbols of a traditional school based on a priori conception of the pupil) and natural knowledge (based on a pedagogy

of centers of interest adapted to the needs of the child)? What materials should be made available to the child? Père Castor’s books, conceived both from a child perspective and for the child, constituted the concrete answer of Paul Faucher to these debates and found their place in the controversies surrounding the practice of New Education. The notions emerging from analysis of the construction of the image make it possible to study the articulation between art and pedagogy according to two supposedly natural predispositions present in children: their propensity for movement and their innate talent for construction, play and creation. Through these themes, the whole relationship of the child to reality is questioned. The child was initially perceived as naturally interested in movement. This observation made

sense in an era that was obsessed with the rhythm and dynamism related to the revolutions of transportation. Artists addressed this issue: Impressionists, Futurists, Objectivists, Constructivists or those who explored montage and kinetic art. In the field of psychology, work on the stages of development of the child alluded to this concern with movement. These works highlighted the sensory-motor stage in the discovery of the world and therefore the fact that the child moves towards objects and touches them to discover them and to know them. A child’s relation to the environment thus passes primarily through movement and touch, and not by sight. 34 amipc, 1j156. 35 See the special issue L’Éducation nouvelle, Histoire d’une réalité

militante of Recherches et éducations, iv (2011).

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In Russia, Anatolij Bakušinskij and Evgenija Flerina developed those ideas through their study of children’s drawing and related the evolution of graphic expression to the stages of development 36. In accordance with the broad European consensus that had developed since the nineteenth century, they divided the evolution of children’s drawing into three major phases: scribbling up to three years; the schematic expression up to seven years then the drawing adopting the principles of visual realism, mastered around the age of ten. In the 1920s, the schematic phase appeared as the most characteristic phase of the children’s drawings. It is characterized by simplified forms retaining only a few important details, symmetrical and static faces, the non-respect of the scale of the elements, an arbitrary geometry of the bodies, the simultaneity in the representation of elements from different time-spaces, transparency, polycentrism and making all parts of an object visible. The dynamic process of schematic drawing was interpreted as the graphic translation of the fact that the child discovers the world through movement and touch, moving to the objects and manipulating them to know them from all angles 37. These statements were well known to Russian artists. They were part of the specific context of the development of studies on primitive art, which had been booming since the end of the nineteenth century. One of the dominant tendencies was to find common denominators joining the art of primitive people distant in time (prehistoric men or icon painters of ancient Russia), in space (“Negro art” by example) or close in time and space (children, masses). Favorskij and especially Florenskij conducted research in this direction and disseminated them in their vxutemas classes. Since the 1910s, children’s drawing had been a source of inspiration for artists such as Vasilij Kandinskij, Mihajl Larionov and Natalia Gončarova, who used new visual devices to revolutionize painting, to question traditional mimetic representations and the Western value system associated with them. In the 1920s, the question arose as to whether illustrators should draw inspiration from children’s drawings and primitive art to address the child. And, if so, how to adapt them. Completing her research on children’s drawings with studies of

the child’s perception of images, Evgenija Flerina established a link between the infantile perception of the world, the way they express it graphically and their understanding of images. She argued that the young child cannot understand visual realism because it does not correspond to his/her experience of the world of objects: a smaller bear, for example, is interpreted as younger and not more distant, a shadow as a stain, etc 38. Experiments have been conducted in France (notably by Célestin Freinet) and in the ussr around children’s books illustrated by children. Soviet artists imitated the graphic language of children in their illustration. Vladimir Lebedev delivered one of the rare examples of a complete picture-book based on this principle: Priključenja čučlo. Paul Faucher, like his model the Czech pedagogue František Bakule, rejected the idea of using children’s drawings or illustration imitating childish language. So did Evgenija A. Flerina and most Soviet illustrators. While imitation was prohibited, adaptation was under examination. This interrogation reflected a strong tension between the desire to be understood by children by offering them an image that corresponds totheir perceptive abilities and that of the desire to raise, educate and help them grow. Present in the ussr as in New Education, this question reflected the desire to give priority to children (that is to say, their interests and skills defined through scientific studies), to develop materials likely to accompany them in their development. The movement corresponds to a need and a desire to focus on children. Its importance is also scientifically demonstrated by studies on developmental stages. Soviet pedagogues, Paul Faucher and his Russian illustrators thus shared this desire to develop dynamic images39. In the charter of Père Castor’s books, Faucher emphasized the importance of action in the books 40. The development of toy-books also corresponded to his meeting with the Czech pedagogue Ladislav Havránek, who promoted education through activity. Like him, Faucher intended to lead the child to the acquisition of knowledge through the sensorimotor experience, step by step. In their clear and legible compositions, Russian illustrators perpetuated the idea inherited from

the nineteenth century, according to which a simplified image remains the best way to address the specific cognitive and perceptual abilities of the child. We also find this approach in the illustrations of André Hellé or Marie-Madeleine Franc-Nohain, one of the most well-known French illustrators of the interwar period, who offered a highly idealized image of childhood. The synthetic realism of Nathalie Parain and Serge Wishnewsky do not imitate the graphic expression of children, as Vladimir Lebedev did when he began with the Priključenja čučlo. But it adapted certain characteristics typical of the schematic stage which aim to suggest a dynamic reading and to develop the children’s innate talent as constructors. The idea that the child is naturally a builder dated back to the early nineteenth century. The German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, the first theoretician of games and educational toys, invented the famous cubes (combinable modules). It is thus this game of cubes that Nathalie Parain chose to represent in Bonjour-Bonsoir, to illustrate the playful activities in the day of a child. In the 1920s, this conviction came back in force. We observe this in Bauhaus artists’ toys (Alma Buscher’s construction toys, Gerrit Rietveld’s wheelbarrow and Peter Keler’s cradle) as well as in the Soviet illustrations. Far from the wild, undisciplined and destructive scribbler of the Romantics, the child constructor was wise and aspired to organization. It is the figure of this calm and disciplined child that the picture books of Nathalie Parain or Hélène Guertik suggest. Throughout the representation of these model children, that use graceful gestures, emerges the image of an ideal child, educated and naturally inclined to a well-crafted game, to construction and to supervised creativity. This revival of the image of the child-builder was part of the context of reconstruction between the two wars. The obsession with reconstruction was strong everywhere in Europe, after the disasters of the First World War, and especially in the ussr where a new world was being built after the regime change following the October revolution. And education, across Europe, was called upon to play a major role in the reconstruction of society. Games and educational toys were then, as for

Fröbel in nineteenth century industrial development, an awakening to responsibilities. The challenge was to train the builder of tomorrow’s world. Games can no longer be a charming and futile activity, as the Symbolists and Nabis represented them at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The toy and illustrated books thus had the function of developing in the child various qualities: manual skill but also personal expression, invention, observation, taste, imagination, personal initiative, by freeing the child of the bondage of imitation 41. In the 1920s and 1930s, this utilitarian aspect of learning through games was overtaken by the artistic world which was convinced that a game is creative, that artistic expression starts from this point, and that the child is a born artist not yet perverted by culture 42. Play was used and recognized as a full-blown creative process. If the game is the engine of creativity, the toy, in this case a book, is the vector  43. This brings us to the association between construction, play and creativity that founded the aesthetics of the albums of the Russian illustrators of Père Castor. An approach well identified by the critics 44. Emmanuel Pernoud’s 36 Since 1895 and the founding essay of Corrado Ricci, L’arte

dei Bambini, a whole opus of literature has developed, especially in the early 1910s. It identifies the graphic devices that are characteristic of children’s drawing. Authors (psychologists, pedagogues, arts historians, artistes or philosophers) sometimes offer explanations of these devices and children’s graphic impulse. See Jessica Boissel, “Quand les enfants se mirent à dessiner, 1880 –1914: un fragment de l’histoire des idées”, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, xxxi (1990), pp. 15–43. 37 Evgenija A. Flerina, Detskij risunok, Moscow 1924. 38 Eadem, “Kartinka v detskoj knige”,  Kniga detjam, i (1928), p. 7. 39 Ibidem, p. 10; R. Pruščickaja,“O knižke dlja doškolnika”,  Kniga detjam, i (1928), pp. 17–18. 40 amipc, 1j156. 41 amipc, 1j487 and 1j985. See for example the following articles: Jean Baucomont, in L’école libératrice, December 1933; Revue pédagogique, December 1933; Simone Ratel, in Les nouvelles littéraires, December 1933; Revue de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles, 15 January 1933; Alice Piguet, “Récréations d’hiver”,  Pour l’Ère nouvelle, February 1934; F. Derouret-Serret, “Des livres pour nos enfants”,  L’école émancipée, 1934. 42 Emmanuel Pernoud, L’invention du dessin d’enfant. En France à l’aube des avant-gardes, Paris 2003; Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard (n. 24); eadem, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-garde picturebook, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2018. 43 Emmanuel Pernoud, “L’enfant au jouet”, in L’enfant dans la peinture, Paris 2011, p. 351. 44 amipc, 1j985, Revue de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles, 15 January 1933.

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comments on artists’ toys can be repeated about these books: “While entertaining children, the artist’s toy would put in their hands an authentic work of art, stimulating their creativity from their own abilities 45.” Notably, the critics underlined the wonderful artistic quality of Père Castor’s books 46. As we have seen, the Russian illustrators working on the construction of the image proposed dynamic works, invitations to actual and imaginary constructions. Building the world of tomorrow meant inventing it and making it concrete. The toy books thus reflected John Dewey’s principle of “learning by doing” which was famous in France and in the ussr. The images offered an active reading, involving the child emotionally and intellectually. With books like Jeux de formes, Je découpe and Allons vite! for example, Russian illustrators embody some of Paul Faucher’s pedagogical principles. It allows us to seize the specific definition of creativity according to Paul Faucher. In 1921, the main theme of the New Education congress was “spontaneous creative expression in children”47. The dominant idea was that the child contains a potential energy which manifests by a creative power. Education serves to encourage expression and the liberation of this creativity. The question of how to release these creative energies arose during the congresses of Heildeberg (1925) and Elsinore (1929). The link between respect for spontaneity and the desire for rational education represented a difficulty 48. In the Père Castor books, it was not a matter of encouraging free design but of giving children basic tools and knowledge, examples and models, to enable them to create from these elements. In the role of the teacher, Paul Faucher wanted to be a guide and an incentive to action by proposing stimulating material but, in a more traditional way, he also intended to provide the child with knowledge and method. The forewords exposed the rules

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of the game, opened the field of possibilities and invited children to go further. In his own way, Faucher tried to find a balance between freedom and constraint, between free learning and transmission of knowledge. The publisher, thanks to the work of Russian illustrators on the construction of images, expressed the vast paradigm shift that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. In the images, coexist on the one hand, the conception, resulting from the avant-gardes, of a work of art as creation of a new reality and invitation to create the reality of tomorrow’s world and, on the other hand, the traditional conception of the image which is a reflection of reality and allows to acquire better knowledge. In animal picture books and research on faktura, we find the old definition of reality, understood as accessible by the senses and reason. In works geared towards construction, emerged the new sensibility admitting that reality is not a given and can only be constructed. In pedagogical words, this can also be interpreted as the expression of the dual function of education, defined at the Congress of New Education of Elsinore in 1929. That is to give to children the opportunity to build and grow according to their natural predispositions and at the same time to adapt to the world in which they must live 49. 45 Pernoud, “L’enfant au jouet” (n. 43), p. 352. 46 amipc, 1j985. See in particular the following articles: “À l’oc-

casion des Journées du livre, la librairie de la Mésange a organisé une intéressante manifestation enfantine”, in Les dernières nouvelles de Strasbourg, 15 May 1935; Mireille Nelly-­ Roussel, “Les Albums du Père Castor”, La Mère éducatrice, October 1935. 47 Annick Raymond, “L’éducation naturelle : une idée centrale mais controversée dans les congrès de la Ligue internationale pour l’éducation nouvelle (1921–1936)”, Carrefours de l’éducation, xxxi (2011), pp. 41– 60, sp. p. 42. 48 Béatrice Haenggeli-Jenni,“‘Savoirs’ constitués et programmes scolaires: Débats au cœur de la revue Pour l’Ère nouvelle (1922–1940)”, Recherches et éducations, iv (2011), pp. 14–17. 49 Raymond, “L’éducation naturelle” (n. 47), p. 52.

summary Ruští ilustrátoři edice Père Castor jako mediátoři konceptu „konstrukce“ v umění a pedagogice ve Francii

Autorka se věnuje roli, kterou hráli ruští ilustrá- mezi Éducation nouvelle propagovanou Paulem toři v mediaci sovětské vizuální kultury ve Francii Faucherem a jeho adaptací tohoto konceptu v rámve třicátých letech, a soustředí se též na koncept ci ilustrací pro děti a mezi díly sovětských auto„konstrukce“ obrazu. Jejím cílem je pochopit, jak rů o dětském vnímání, kteří zkoumali vztah mezi rodná kultura zmíněných ilustrátorů přetvoři- konstrukcí obrazu a důležitým tématem své doby la francouzské knihy pro děti. Začíná krátkým – „konstrukcí“ dítěte. Pojmy vycházející z analýzy úvodem do historie termínu „konstrukce“ v rus- konstrukce obrazů umožňují studovat spojení kém a sovětském prostředí desátých a dvacátých mezi uměním a pedagogikou na základě dvou let a zdůrazňuje přitom rozdílné definice koncep- údajně přirozených sklonů dítěte: tedy tendence tu v různých uměleckých skupinách. hýbat se a vrozeného talentu pro vytváření, hru V druhé části článku autorka popisuje vizuální a kreativitu. experimenty, které ruští ilustrátoři vytvářeli v rámSkrze analýzu zmíněných témat autorka odhaci spolupráce s vydavatelem Père Castor. Studuje luje změnu paradigmatu, jež se odehrála ve dvacáikonografii, roli diagonál a dělících čar i kontrastů; tých a třicátých letech. Ve studovaných ilustracích dále se zaměřuje na vztah mezi hrou a kreativitou, vedle sebe existují dvě koncepce definice reality: na na zachovávání prázdných ploch na stránce a na jedné straně koncepce vycházející z avantgardních polycentrismus. Analyzuje upřednostňování jas- uměleckých hnutí, která vidí umělecké dílo jako nosti, pořádku a čitelnosti, přičemž se soustředí na tvorbu nové reality a jako pozvání k tvorbě realipráci Davida Sternberga jako na důležitou inspiraci ty zítřejšího světa. Na straně druhé stojí tradiční pro ilustrátorku Nathalie Parain. Autorka dokazuje, pojetí obrazu, který odráží realitu a umožňuje tak že snaha dosáhnout aktivní účasti dítěte při čtení divákovi získat hlubší znalost. Vyjádřeno v pevedla k touze vytvářet dynamická umělecká díla. dagogických termínech, zmíněné ilustrace dávaAutorka též uvádí práce ruských ilustrátorů do ly dětem možnost stavět a růst v souladu s jejich dvojího kontextu francouzského a ruského pří- přirozenými sklony a zároveň se přizpůsobovat stupu ke vzdělávání. Poukazuje na podobnosti světu, ve kterém žily.

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Abstract – The Russian Émigré Community in Interwar Bulgaria. Attempt at a Typology of Transformations, with Focus on the “Aestheticization” of Newspaper – The “aestheticization” of Bulgarian newspapers reflects circumstances that changed with the presence of Russian émigrés between the World Wars. Typographic variation, design and spatial distribution of type and images, placement of decoration, and aesthetic choices mirror political and social shifts in the émigré community and their impact on Bulgaria. Analysis of this “reflexive transformation” substantiates the intuition that the Russian émigré presence in Bulgaria constituted a phase in the creation of a Russian-Bulgarian “contact zone.” Against this backdrop, considering newspapers as aesthetic and textual artifacts in the context of contemporary society highlights a transition towards a “conservative revolution” in the early 1930s, as a culmination of the “sedentarization” of emigration in the late 1920s. Keywords – vector of transformation, semantics of grammatical categories, Russian émigrés in Bulgaria, architecture of newspapers, aestheticization of newspapers, sedentarization of émigrés, conservative revolution, Day of Russian Culture, Day of Irreconcilability

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Jordan Ljuckanov Bulgarian Academy of Sciences [email protected]

The Russian Émigré Community in Interwar Bulgaria Attempt at a Typology of Transformations, with Focus on the “Aestheticization” of Newspaper Jordan Ljuckanov

Theoretical introduction: “vector of transformation” as an analytic category This attempt is indebted to works in semantics of grammatical categories by Roman Jakobson1. I start  *

I grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article for challenging me to rethink my subject in a European art-historical context and for urging me towards self-reflexivity. I would also like to thank two Bulgarian libraries for providing me with

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scans for the illustrations: Public Library “Ivan Vazov” in Plovdiv and Regional Library “Stilian Chilingirov” in Shumen. E.g., Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb” [1957], Selected Writings, vol. 2, Word and Language, The Hague 1971, pp. 130 –147; idem, “Poézija grammatiki i grammatika poézii” [1961], Selected Writings, vol. 3, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, The Hague 1979, pp. 63– 86, sp. pp. 74–76 (“iii. Grammatika i geometrija”).

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from the intuition that a “vector of transformation” can have different values and directions. Transformation can be (viewed as) “positive” and “active”, as in “active voice”: émigrés transform the host culture. Being “positive”, it can however also be “dissipated” or “refracted” or “distracted”. Reception may intensify inner contradictions within the objects of reception, shift them to a different intellectual idiom, simplify them, etc. This can be due to multiple mediators, the diverging contexts and concerns of the source and the receiver, and many other reasons. The transformation of the object of reception can be more visible than the transformation of the receiving party. A “positive” transformation can be “reflexive”, as in “reflexive voice”, but also “passive”: émigrés transform themselves, negotiating their new self-perception, but also self-accommodating to their new milieu. Émigrés would be willing to retain identity perceived as “theirs” (i.e., to “adapt”), or would be predisposed to leave it erode or to mimicry (i.e., “assimilate”) 2. I view these options as two different sub-values of “transformation in the passive voice”. Next, transformation can have a “zero” value: émigrés come but neither transformation nor self-transformation occurs. Émigré and local culture look at each other with condescension; or simply collocate conceiving each other as uninteresting equals. Lastly, transformation can be negative: contact may lead to (mutual or unidirectional) repellence. These are, of course, ideal types, of first, second, and third level: “positive” (“active” [direct vs. dissipated transformation] vs. “reflexive” vs. “passive” [adaptation vs. assimilation]) vs. “zero” (collocation vs. condescension) vs. “negative” one. These varieties can be better defined if we employ two more grammatical metaphors. In many languages, sentences expose the so-called ergative structure, whence a construction like “Me have arrived” can be normal3. And the Georgian language has the category of verb’s “version”; version can be “subjective” (“I do it for me”), “objective” (“I do it for someone else”), and “neutral”. Normally, an occurrence of intercultural (non)contact exposes, with fluctuations, features corresponding to more than one of the types mentioned; but it influences researcher’s decision to give preference

to one of them and even to choose a theoretic tool ostensibly most appropriate to it. Historical introduction: “reflexive” transformation within the Russian émigré community in Bulgaria In this section, I will briefly introduce to three possibly related processes of positive reflexive transformation undergone around 1930 by what became the community of Russian émigrés in Bulgaria. The third one will constitute the very subject of this article. From aggregate of refugees, most Russians who resided on the territory of Bulgaria since 1919 and were still there by late 1920s turned into a local émigré community and, subsequently, to a corporate body of émigrés4. Europe-wide, the institutions of emigration were on site by the late 1920s5. In Bulgaria, by then, they were able to “encompass all social layers and groups of the community”6. It is my contention that in Bulgaria the main symptom was the urge towards unification of emigration along economic or occupational lines (delovoe ob”edinenie émigracii) and “self-­organization”7. Anti-­ bolshevism was the only overtly political stance that had to be shared8. In late 1931 or early 1932, this urge crystallized in the formation of the Russian General-Laboral Union (Russkij Obšče-Trudovoj Sojuz, rots) – member of Brotherhood of Russian Working Christians (a Christian trade union based in Geneva)9. The community experienced a conservative revolution, or rightist avant-garde ascension to symbolical and organizational power between 1931 and 193310. Its intellectual core was a shift of common émigré sense from Christian liberal individualism to what can be called collective personalism, which included voluntary ceding of autonomy by culture to politics 11. Its societal core was the emergence of institutional constellation which sustained rots as a “consecrated avant-garde”embodying a mainstream tendency12. The National Union of New Generation (Nacional’nyj Sojuz Novogo Pokolenija, the future National-Laborist Union, Nacional’no-Trudovoj Sojuz) occupied the habitus of still non-consecrated avant-garde 13. To turn to media, formally independent Trud merged

with mainstream Golos into Golos Truda which became the overt organ of rots. It is against the backdrop of such movements that newspaper(s) underwent “aestheticization”. Within a literary market with limited opportunities and number of participants, publishing fiction and poetry in newspapers was a viable option for all. Some literary magazines and newspapers emerged between 1922 and 1931, but were shortlived14. Regular literary page as part of (not supplement to!) common newspapers existed under different names in 1928–1929 and in 1932–1938, but its overall output was significant in quantity only starting from 193615. Common and political newspapers, possibly instead, developed conspicuous aesthetic sensibility, initially on the occasion of festivities. In some holiday issues, the position of publications on a page and within an issue was semanticized, and sometimes texts were collocated in ways which produced visual aesthetic effects.

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A case of “reflexive” transformation under focus: aestheticization of newspaper By “aestheticization of newspaper”, I mean a semantization of certain aspects of composition (distribution of texts within an issue and a page) and typography (typeface, font, frames, visual dividers, negative and white space, chromatic color) which goes beyond organizational goals (economy of space, differentiation between and hierarchy of genres, topics and sources) and even beyond composing supra-textual semantic entities, in order to evoke some basic aesthetic perceptions16. These perceptions are related to notions of proportion, perspective and (constellations of) geometric forms, not to figural illusionism. 2

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These predispositions can be approached via theories of the cultural field (Bourdieu) and of assimilation/integration. It would suffice here to refer to the intuitively evident correlation between a will to assimilate and the amount of social and cultural capital at one’s disposal; and to consider “assimilation” as intention for conformity and to refer to: Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter, Fred Plaut, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, London / New York 1986, p. 10; Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York 1966 [1955], pp. 64, 138 –143. John R. Payne,“Ergative Construction”,  Encyclopaedia Iranica, accessible online, 1998/2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/ergative-construction [last accessed 20.06.2020] (in print: vol. viii, fasc. 5, pp. 555 – 558).

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Various events in 1926 –1929 served as impediments to repatriation and retarders of re-emigration (Cvetana Kjoseva, Bŭlgarija i ruskata emigracija: 20-te – 50-te godini na xx vek, Sofia 2002, pp. 192 –195, 200 –203). Statistical data on decrease of numbers of émigrés in Bulgaria (Miroslav Jovanovič, “Adaptacija russkix bežencev v Bolgarii (1920 –1940)”,  in Bjalata emigracija v Bŭlgarija, conference proceedings (Sofia, 23– 24 September 1999), Georgi Markov ed., Sofia 2001, pp. 87– 96, sp. pp. 87– 88 testify to distinct deceleration of decrease about 1928. More important, one can discern consecutive shifts towards self-conception in local terms in late 1928 and in 1933 (Radostin Rusev et al., Periodika na ruskata emigracija v Bŭlgarija (1920 –1943): Enciklopedičen spravočnik, Sofia 2012, pp. 119, 136, 203). Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of Russian Emigration, 1919 –1939, New York 1990, p. 6. Kjoseva, Bŭlgarija (n. 4), p. 285. On the unification along economic lines: Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 97, 119 –120, 136, 214, 713. It was proclaimed as a prime aim during the Fourth Congress of Russian [Émigré] Academic Organisations (Belgrade, 16 –23 September 1928). On self-organization: Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 213– 214. N. Marinin,“Ob”edinenie Zarubež’ja”,  Rus’, no. 1667, 31 Oct. 1928, p. 2. On early chronology, structures and active members of rots: Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 497 n. 44, pp. 711– 717. On conservative revolution and the place of rots in it: Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 197–200. The term “avant-garde” is used here in its usual sense with extrapolation to the political domain. In literary studies, the long-neglected possibility (and actual) existence of rightist or conservative avant-garde was briefly considered in: Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, ma 1968, pp. 212–213, 221–222. On voluntary ceding: Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 249 –250, 258 –260. Ibidem, p. 201. Here “avant-garde” is used in the specific sense stemming from Bourdieu’s theory of cultural field; on “consecrated” vs. “non-consecrated” avant-garde see in particular Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford 1995, pp. 121–123, 150, 158 –159, 218 –219, 255. Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), pp. 158 –159, 201. Ibidem, pp. 109 –111, 288 –293, 416 –421, 463– 464, 537 – 541, 722 – 728. Ibidem, pp. 128, 457 – 462; 166 –167. “Supra-textual entity” (sverxtekstovoe edinstvo) is a concept with some history in Soviet and Russian linguistics and literary studies. I would prefer to elucidate here a rarer and more suitable concept: “architecture of newspaper”.  It is based on the generalization that a newspaper displays two layers of sign systems: the first encompasses verbal and iconic signs; the second “is formed both by new signs, some of which have not their own semantic content (for example lines, ornaments etc)”,  and “by the signs of the first layer” resemanticized (Dimitŭr Georgiev, Arxitektura na vestnika: Njakoi tendencii v grafičnoto oformjavane na vestnika, Sofia 1982 [1967], p. 29). The techniques and technology of organizing the second layer (or: of organizing supra-textual trans-semiotic entities within a newspaper) was called by Georgiev “architecture of newspaper” (ibidem, pp. 29, 56 –57). He delineated in the latter three levels of semantic content: of a single signifying element, of a group of such, and of their totality within an artefact (ibidem, pp. 29 –30). And he viewed its main devices for “causing emotional-aesthetic impact on the reader” as composition of page, contrast, and multicolour printing (ibidem, p. 33).

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Perceptive entities organized according to the latter may be present, but usually they contribute to a non-figurative whole. I would consider the discernibility of a “supra-textual unity/entity” as the “ground level”of aestheticization. A reference to Vasilij Kandinskij’s works from the 1920s–1930s and to his theory of art could be of some typological and comparative-historical value17. The birth of sensibility to aesthetic parameters of the book page as the one demonstrated by the futurist Vasilij Kamenskij18, but also to the book as a whole as the one displayed by Ilja Ždanevič19, can be viewed as the most important prerequisites for the developments in the newspapers analyzed here. Whether transfer of sensibilities from book to newspaper was accelerated by side influences (for example, reassessment of newspaper propaganda experiences from the Civil War of 1918–1921) or was just a matter of adaptation to a cultural field with scarce resources, is unclear to me 20. I am unaware whether émigrés themselves had relevant perceptual experiences and I recognize that hyper-interpretation is an imminent danger in such setting. I suggest diverse solutions vis-à-vis two groups of recipients: the readers of this article and the erstwhile readers of émigrés’ newspapers. I hope to convince the former group on case-by-case basis. And I would hypothesize a receptive split among the latter one: not only along interpersonal differences in aesthetic sensitivity but along prior or parallel (non) acquaintance with some “perception-unlocking” artefacts or theoretical texts 21. Selection and arrangement of examples: justification

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I shall present four sequences of “aestheticized” newspaper issues, in order to distinguish the most vivid examples of “aestheticization”, trace its regularization, and explore the (non)correlativity between aestheticization and two coeval and “collocal” processes – the sedentarization of émigrés and the conservative revolution. Presenting sequences and not isolated cases pursues the supplementary goal of tracing a historical change. Examples will be taken from the following newspapers: Rus’-122, Golos [Voice], Trud [Labor], Golos

Truda [Voice of Labor], Informacionnyj bjulleten’ Rossijskogo fašistskogo dviženija [Informational Bulletin of the Russian/Russia’ Fascist Movement] Molodoe Slovo [Young Word], Za Rossiju [For Russia] / Za novuju Rossiju [For a New Russia], Rus’-2. Sedentarization might have instigated or sustained aestheticization for two major reasons. The end of flux might have resulted in a constellation of sedentary communities with uneven (symbolic and material) resources, in particular in talented producers of conventional artistic goods (e.g., novels, poems etc.); while it can be assumed that the demand in aesthetic experiences should have remained stable. The end of indeterminacy (“are we staying, or going back to Russia, or going farther?”) might have resulted in a rising necessity to model cohesion and recurrent emotional mobilization within any local émigré community. Sedentarization can be witnessed in qualitative terms by the emergence of holidays circumscribing a community. In post-1917 Russian émigré communities across Europe and worldwide, two such holidays emerged: the Day of Russian Culture (celebrated since 1925 in reference to 8th of June, accepted as Alexander Puškin’s birthday)23; and the “Day of Irreconciliability” (performed since 1930 and in reference to 7th of November, the day of the October coup d’état according to the “new”,  Gregorian, calendar) 24. Both were more “self-celebrative” than the rest of the first-rank holidays celebrated across the community (Easter and Nativity). They rather constituted than preserved an identity, despite their rhetoric of preservation and perseverance. In Bulgaria, despite remarkable one-day newspapers in 1926 and 1929, the Day of Russian Culture received stable media prominence not earlier than in 1931. And the “Day of Irreconciliability” came into being in 1932. These developments coincide in time with the most conspicuous occurrences of aestheticization: causation seems likely. Conservative revolution is likely to have necessitated intensification of emotional mobilization. More basic aspects of the possible correlation between aestheticization and conservative revolution are discussed below, after necessary contextualizations are provided in the core sections of the article.

Scarcity – either constant or fluctuating – of symbolic and material resources within the field of literary production was a third possible determinant of aestheticization 25. I postpone distinguishing a relevant sequence of newspaper issues (or of pages across issues) – one aimed at exposing (non)correlativity and potential (non)causation between the quantity of published artistic texts and aestheticization. One more possible factor should be minded: a newspaper’s “age”. Vivid examples of aestheticization: between dispositions for design and decoration, 1925–1929 The most vivid examples of aestheticization are to be found in issues celebrating the Day of Russian Culture (hereafter DoRC), the “Day of Irreconciliability”, on pages commemorating and celebrating the White Army and its commanders, and on pages welcoming or praising political leaders. These examples bring to visibility almost figural compositional types. In 1925 the Russian community in Bulgaria refrained from celebrating DoRC, deeming celebration inapt: Bulgaria lamented the victims of a communist terrorist act in the cathedral of the capital city on Maundy Thursday, – as explained in the mainstream Rus’-1 (no. 656, 12 June 1925, p. 2). However, Rus’-1 (no. 652, 7 June 1925) had already introduced the holiday, in an editorial within a simply composed first page on the verge of aesthetic relevance: discursive meaning of the composition is so clearly present that the latter cannot be denied aesthetic meaning in potentia. Composition invites to think that it displays some “idea”, but does not reveal clear “message” [Fig. 1]. The spatial core of the page is devoted to foreign policy news reports under a common title, “[United] Front against ussr”; it is flanked by framed advertisements (the first from the top is actually an obituary) and “Latest News” on the right and by editorial about DoRC under a portrait of Puškin 26 on the left. I would interpret the former flank as the economical-political “face” of the “quotidian” and the latter as the zone “touched” by “eternity” and its agenda. In general, a right-leftwards

gradation of zones (and of levels of intellectual existence) is recognizable too. No matter which compositional logic (concentric or linear) we assume to be prevailing, composition suggests that Rus’ understands itself as politics-focused mediator between economical-political everydayness and cultural memory. In 1926, Rus’-1 created a supra-textual unity through the means of editorials and brief factual accounts across several issues. The celebration proper was cast onto the pages of a special one-day newspaper (Den’ russkoj kul’tury [Day of Russian Culture], Varna, 6 June) which I would liken to a picture within a frame. But, to my perception, none of pages of the one-day newspaper represents a supra-textual entity with aesthetic 17 Wassily Kandinsky, “The Language of Form and Colour”, in

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idem, Concerning the Spiritual in Art [1911], New York 1977, pp. 27–45, sp. pp. 28 –32. Cf.: “Pure artistic composition has two elements: “[…] 2. The creation of various forms which, by standing in different relationships to each other, decide the composition of the whole.” (ibidem, p. 31). Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-garde Visual Experiments, 1900 –1930, Princeton 1984, p. 123. Johanna Drucker,“Iliazd and the Book as a Form of Art”,  The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, viii (1988), pp. 37 –51, sp. pp. 38, 51. I am aware of roughly coeval (1925 –1933) changes in (central) Soviet newspapers: more “shock headlines”,  more photographs and illustrations, and larger range of typefaces, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers, Harvard/London 2004, pp. 11–12, 36, 43– 44. The only point of comparability suggests contrast: demoticization in the ussr vs. refinement of perception in emigration. Compare Merav Ahissar, Shaul Hochstein, “The Reverse Hierarchy Theory of Visual Perceptual Learning”,  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, viii/10 (2004), pp. 457 – 464, p. 457, box 1. In terms of quantity, the non-affiliated rightist-liberal Rus’ edited by Ivan Kalinnikov et al. (hereafter Rus’-1) was the most significant periodical of Russians in Bulgaria (1704 issues, 1922 –1928). A second, fascist, Rus’ edited by Ivan Butov, existed in 1934 –1936 (99 issues) (hereafter Rus’-2). The Day of Russian Culture united people understanding literature not as a tool of rigid social engagement and political agitation (as testified by, e.g., editorials in Rus’-1 no. 361, 8 June 1924, p. 1; no. 653, 9 June 1925, p. 1), contrary to the prevailing custom of Russian intelligentsia of the late Imperial period. See Anon., “Den’ neprimirimosti”,  Golos, no. 289, 9 November 1930, p. 2. I would hypothesize a co-formative impact of a parallel scarcity within the field of visual arts production. The lack, within the local émigré community, of art magazines and even of newspapers publishing pictures’ reproductions, photographs and caricatures on regular basis is indicative. One single source of the latter category existed in June – December 1924. “Puškin in [Tsarskoe Selo] Lyceum Uniform”,  by unknown 19th-century author.

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Vivid examples of aestheticization: (re)emergence and contracting of design, 1930–1935

1 / Rus’, Ivan Kalinnikov ed., no. 652, 7 June 1925, p. 1

I would mark 1930 as a watershed year in the typographic celebration of DoRC. A visible zone dedicated to DoRC was demarcated in Golos (no. 244, 19 June, pp. 2–3) 28. Lack of prominence proved a transient feature (later, substantial portion of the celebratory texts would be placed on p. 1), while allotment of the lower half of the page span – a persisting one. I would interpret this development in the following way. DoRC gained in symbolical value, at least in the mainstream of the émigré community, especially due to the controversy over to whom to devote the celebration – to Puškin or, as was the alternative suggestion, to St Vladimir, the Baptiser of Rus’ (commemorated on 15/28 July) 29. Yet culture remained of secondary importance compared to politics and economy even (or even more?) in a society where conservative revolution was taking and had taken place 30. In 1931 nothing “prophane” was let into the “pictorial space”of celebration31. Moreover, the first pages of celebratory issues of Golos in 1931 and 1932 can be perceived as aesthetic entities. In 1931, Golos (no. 347, 14 June, p. 1) visualized “Exegi monumentum” in its most prominent Russian version [Fig. 2]; a variation on Horatio’s ode (iii 30) 32, Puškin’s text reads: “A monument not hand-made I have for me erected; / The path to it well-trodden will not overgrow; / Risen higher has it with unbending head / Than the monument of Alexander.” etc 33. A poem by Ljubov’ Stolica, “On the occasion of the Day of Russian Culture”, visually supports Puškin’s portrait (partly) re-coded into a bust 34. The composition, conflating graphdimension. It even fails – if we hypothesize, com- ic reproduction and plain poetry employed as paring to later specimens, such an intention – to figural poetry, occupies the left half of the space “cleanse” “pictorial space” from “alien” elements below the main headline 35. I would express the (advertisements)27. core discursive message of the composition as A third option is developed in the Army pages: follows: “Puškin continues to erect an eternal they display a standard aesthetically relevant core monument to himself, in particular through the which evokes the image of a diptychal tombstone, poetry of other Russian poets”. The right half is even when portraits of persons who are still alive occupied by a Г-like form (the beginning of an are reproduced, as in Rus’, no. 1085, 20 Nov. 1926, article, actually a “summary of a speech”, on “The p. 2 [Fig. 8]. Destiny of Russian Culture”) sheltering a poem by

Alexander Fjodorov, “Puškin”. One is tempted to view it as (reminiscent of) an architectural façade, book page and abstract representation of a home. “The Destiny…” looks like exegesis of “Puškin”. In 1932 (Golos, no. 399, 19 June, p. 1), a graphic reproduction of the same portrait of Puškin topped a less clearly visible structure resembling the face of a stepped pyramid [Fig. 3]. The structure recalls the face of what would become the paragon architectural form of Stalinism, the non-built

2 / Golos, Gleb Vološin ed., no. 347, 14 June 1931, p. 1 3 / Golos, no. 399, 19 June 1932, p. 1

27 In 1927 not even a homogenous page, to contain only ma-

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terials related to the holiday, was created; Rus’-1, nos. 1246 (8 June) and 1247 (9 June), being the most indicative source. The same was in 1928; and in 1929 in the successor newspaper Golos. In 1925–1928 Rus’ was practically the only newspaper of the émigré community in Bulgaria; its heir, Golos, had the same significance in late 1928 – early 1931. At its lowest tide, the mainstream self-celebration was challenged by an alternative, clerical, vision of Russian culture, through the 1929 one-day newspaper Den’ russkoj kul’tury (see below). If my impression that it surpasses the 1926 specimen in semiotic coherence is attributable to the émigrés, it might have posed not only an ideological but an aesthetical challenge. Ideological and sociology-of-the-cultural-field analysis see Yordan Lyutskanov, “The Genius and the Crowd of Peoples: The Day of Russian Culture in the Russian Émigré Newspapers of Bulgaria in 1929 –1933”, in Russian Classical Literature Today: The Challenges/Trials of Messianism and Mass Culture, Yordan Lyutskanov, Radostin Rusev, Hristo Manolakev eds, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014, pp. 236 –250, sp. pp. 241–244. The bifurcation surfaced in 1929 (Rusev et al., Periodika [n. 4], p. 204. Analysis of related textual artefact see in: idem, pp. 222–226; Lyutskanov, “The Genius” [n. 28], pp. 239 –241); it survived at least until 1935 (see Iosif Kuznecov, “‘Den’ russkoj kul’tury’”,  Rus’, no. 54, 9 June 1935, pp. 2–3, sp. p. 2). A semiotic explanation is also possible. If, when viewing pp. 2 –3, the recipient still holds in his mind the image of p. 1, he would not fail to acknowledge the visual dominance of celebratory space over non-celebratory. Ideological and sociology-of-the-cultural-field analysis of the 1931 celebratory issue see in: Lyutskanov, “The Genius” (n. 28), pp. 244 – 246. See Lev Pumpjanskij,“Ob ode A. Puškina ‘Pamjatnik’”(1923), in idem, Klassičeskaja tradicija: sobranie trudov po istorii russkoj literatury, Moscow 2000, pp. 197 – 209. Alexander Pushkin, Poems, Boston 1888, pp. 64– 65. Available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54991/54991h/54991-h.htm [last accessed 20.06.2020]. It is a graphic reproduction of the portrait by Orest Kiprenskij, 1827 or, possibly, a conflation of the mentioned and the one by Vasilij Mate, 1899. Rus’-2 (at least five times in 1934 –1936) and Za novuju Rossiju, no. 57, February 1937, p. 1, reproduce the model with some modifications. The former replaces the portrait with poetry and the poetry with prose, as if interpreting “Exegi monumentum” as “Poetry erected a monument to itself”. The latter reproduces another portrait, Ilja Repin’s 1913 replica of Vasilij Tropinin’s from 1826: “From Tropinin’s portrait / Ilia [?] Repin 1913, 15 Febr.”,  atop prose.

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Palace of Soviets36, and of the so-called Seven Sis- rehabilitates Peter and imperial state as educaters, including the main building of Moscow Uni- tor of talents (Puškin in the Lyceum uniform!)43. versity etc.; and a simplified templon37. The lowest It gives a key to non-aestheticist, civic praise of step of the pyramid is made visible by a horizontal Puškin, aligning him with down-top communiline dividing the page in golden ratio proportion. tarianism, personalism and political engagement This rectangular thematizes Russian writers against technologically updated despotism 44. etc. having anniversaries in 1932, while the two The front page of the 1935 DoRC issue (Golos overlaying steps thematize the 1932 celebration Truda, no. 130, 14 June) displays a minimalistic of Puškin and the Russian arch-poet himself. The close resemblance to the 1933 composition: the airy square hosting the image is inscribed with- “watercolors”Puškin takes the position of Peter, to in a bigger square imbued with systematic asym- introduce Chekhov who, however, is represented metry that almost transforms it into a clockwise only through his name45. rotating swastika. Poetry is missing; skipping Diptych was as old as 1927 in these celebratrivial explanation of this lack, one may suggest tory issues, but then it had remained only verbal: that now contemporary poetry was deemed less worthy of celebrating Puškin than a year earlier 36 I would see here both anticipation and polemical reference. As known, the public contest for the Palace, attracting more (this would hint at monumentalizing the past, or than one project that launched more or less the same general at development towards “Culture Two”38). Hesiarchitectural idea, was under way in 1931–1932. 37 Molodoe Slovo, no. 10, June 1932, p. 3, displays a variant of tation over time, producing diverging results, is the stepped pyramid: 1) pictorial portrait is skipped; 2) the also possible. Refrainment from anything that reader faces either the “profile” or half of the “face” of the architectural form. could remind of the self-proclaimed reincarnation of Puškin and apparent graphomaniac Viktor Ko- 38 Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, Cambridge, uk 2002. losovskij (in 1929, four publications in a satirical 39 Rusev et al., Periodika (n. 4), p. 97. newspaper mock him39) could have been a motive. 40 The composition commemorated Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia, executed with her family on the night In 1934, on inner page, 2, fascist Rus’-2 (no. 9, of 16/17 July 1918. 3 June) displayed a composition that combined the 41 For a period Golos Truda, brought to being by merging of Golos and Trud, was issued with double numeration. visual outlines of a monument (i.e., pillar car42 It looks like a version of the graphic portrait that was used rying a bust) and a stepped pyramid: a poem in 1925 (see above). 43 Let me isolate two strings of thought in Herzen’s farewell to in one column atop a poem in two columns friends from 1849 Paris: “Our separation will now continue atop a two-columned prosaic text40. for long – maybe forever. […] I am remaining here not only because it would be disgusting to me, having crossed the The 1933 celebratory issue of Golos Truda border, to put on the stocks again, but in order to work. […] (no. 445/3441, 10 June, p. 1) substantially compleEmigration is the first symptom of a coming overturn. […]” mented the “Exegi monumentum” model, actually (Aleksandr Hercen, “Proščajte!”, in S togo berega. Sobranie sočinenij v 30 tt, vol. vi, Moscow 1955, pp. 12 –18, sp. pp. 14, made use of another one [Fig. 4]. A diptych con15 –16, 16); “The overturn of Peter i replaced the outdated, lansisting of heavy, oil-on-canvas Peter the Great set dlord aristocracy rule over Rus’ with European bureaucratic order […]; but the non-written, morally restrictive towards in a metal frame, on the left, and a light graphic authorities, instinctive recognition of rights of person, rights or watercolors Puškin, on the right, is presented42. of thought, of truth could not get across and did not. Slavery While within the space of DoRC celebrations grew in our country together with education […] Russians abroad have one more work to do. It is time to really get Puškin makes possible the presence of Peter, this Europe acquainted with Russia. […] Let it discover the [Ruscomposition could suggest the opposite, evoksian] people […] which so firmly and amazingly expanded, without losing the communitarian element […]; which […] ing a historiosophic commonplace based on the in answer to Tsar’s command to educate itself answered famous saying of Alexander Herzen: “To the chalafter one hundred years with the enormous phenomenon lenge of Peter the Great, Russia answered with of Puškin” (ibidem, pp. 15, 17, 18). Puškin”.  Putting the Poet and the Statesman side 44 The 1934 issue (Golos Truda, no. 83, 7 June) represented a double semiotic setback: it offered no aesthetically relevant by side in 1933 indicates the success of consersupra-textual entity, the portrait of Nikolaj Gogol’ on the first page just taking the role of a singular visual center within vative revolution through symbiosis of politics a practically organized space. and culture. But Herzen’s text presupposes a sub- 45 It is safe to admit that in the non-iconoclastic Russian culture tler message than just semantic inversion that one who is not represented pictorially “fares” less.

4 / Golos Truda, G. Vološin and Nikolaj Plavinskij eds, no. 445/34, 10 June 1933, p. 1

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as title of an article (“Puškin and Glinka”in Rus’-1, no. 1246, 8 June, p. 2). In 1932 and 1933, newspaper issues devoted to the “Day of Irreconciliability” [Figs 5–7] display on their first-page compositions resembling street obituaries and a mourning band46. Such compositions are not present at later commemorations. A composition containing a semblance of a brooch or gorget patch in the form of clover leaf was displayed in Rus’-2, no. 12, 22 July 1934, p. 1, on the occasion of the arrival of Anastasij Vonsjackij, the leader of the Russian Fascists in the Far East. Compositions on first pages of Molodoe Slovo, nos. 5, 18 (1 Jan. 1932, [n.d.] May 1933), display the image and word of the Mladorossy

party patron (not leader), Grand Duke Kiril Vladimirovič of Russia. These compositions would deserve a separate analysis, impossible here for reasons of space. Regularization of aestheticization Aestheticization appears on regular basis in 1922 (see the typefaces of the newspaper names of Rus’- 1 and of Golos, since 1928, on [Figs 1–3])47. I view it as isolated and interpret it as “decorative” or “bourgeois” (in the sense of Aleksandr Bogdanov)48: it is not designed to participate in transfiguration of surrounding space but just adorn it. I would call it “positional” or  “enclaved”. The fascist

Rus’- 2 (1934–1936) adopted, since its eleventh issue, another kind of “positional” aestheticization – a distinct typeset for poems published on its pages – and deviated from it only twice, when publishing a parody on a Soviet author (no. 61, p. 3) and a satire (no. 44, p. 3). 46 Trud, no. 13, 6 November 1932; Golos Truda, no. 466/55, 4 No-

vember 1933; Informacionnyj bjulleten’ Rossijskogo fašistskogo dviženija, no. 2, 7 November 1933. The earliest specimen belongs, however, to the oppositional Naša žizn’, no. 52, 11 Octobre (sic) 1932. 47 Classifying and commenting on typefaces per se would divert me of the main topic of this article. I deem brief “impressionist” qualifications sufficient now. 48 E.g. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Iskusstvo i rabočij klass [1918], in idem, Voprosy socializma, Moscow 1990, pp. 411– 460, sp. pp. 411– 412.

5 / Trud, M. Černjavskij and K. Dokov eds, no. 13, 6 Nov. 1932, p. 1 6 / Golos Truda, no. 466/55, 4 Nov. 1933, p. 1 7 / Informacionnyj bjulleten’ Rossijskogo fašistskogo dviženija, concealed eds, no. 2, 7 Nov. 1933, p. 1 8 / Rus’, Sergej Ševljakov ed., no. 1085, 20 Nov. 1926, p. 2

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9 / Za Rossiju, Dmitrij Zavžalov ed., no. 28, June 1934, p. 1 10 / Za novuju Rossiju, concealed eds, no. 55, Dec. 1936, p. 2

A different type of aestheticization emerged in 1932, in two party organs: Za Rossiju [Figs 9–10], monthly publication of National Union of Young Generation49; and Molodoe Slovo [Fig. 11] after its takeover by the political party of Mladorossy from the hands of a group of young writers (!) in November 1931 50. It was based on correlations: between typefaces, fonts, font-sizes, framed and non-framed text. I would call it “structural”. Limited “structural” aestheticization is present on the first pages of Golos Truda too. Mannerist typeface of the newspaper’s name in the masthead, recalling medieval Russian calligraphy but also decorative metalwork, overlooked in its first issue a more than prosaic abundance of advertising spots, thus “iconically” introducing to the heterogeneous world of labor [Fig. 12] 51. This typeface was a complete abandonment of the simple one of its “father”, Trud [Fig. 5], in favor of non-simplicity that exceeded the one of its “mother”, Golos [Figs 2–3]. Within a month, it was replaced by a futuristic looking typeface possibly normal for posters [Fig. 4] which contrasted slightly less with the rest of typefaces used. I would conclude that Golos Truda integrated the typeset of its name into the bulk of its typefaces and fonts by the means of contrast. Typefaces and fonts used by Za Rossiju constitute a scale which is slightly closer to continuousness, because of their greater variation under the page head. In Molodoe Slovo the typeface rift between the newspaper name and the rest is almost invisible: the former is simpler and, besides, texts’ headings and advertising and appellative lines display transitional forms 52. To summarize, the difference between the three newspapers comes not only from the diverse typefaces in the masthead, but by the size and style variation among the rest of the typefaces, fonts and sizes used. Golos Truda (1933–1936), Za Rossiju (1932–1940) and Molodoe Slovo (1931–1937) were published in parallel for more than three years, so the use of typefaces – and even of correlations between typographic elements – for the aims of “individualization” is quite probable. In none of them correlatedness is lacking, as it had been with the 49 P. 1 of no. 1 (March 1932) is already noteworthy. In 1938

chromatic colours were used for the newspaper title (occasionally red and several times green); I view this as an

element of “bourgeois” aesthetics which correlates with the drift of Nationalists-Labourists towards the habitus of “consecrated” avant-garde. Due to problems with authorities stemming from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and ussr in 1934, the newspaper had to twice change its name (to Za novuju Rossiju since March 1935, Za rodinu since April 1937). 50 P. 2 of no. 4 (1 December 1931) and p. 1 of no. 5 (January 1932) are the earliest specimens. 51 A coalescence of two newspapers, Golos Truda kept their – double – numeration (e.g., “431/20” instead of “1”); after “parents” “divorce”, it kept the numeration of its “father”. 52 As Za Rossiju, Molodoe Slovo contains political appeals in the shape of short, heading-sized sentences in free strips amidst publications. Both Golos Truda (gt) and Za Rossiju (zr) switched to less conspicuous typesets for their names, early in 1935 and in January 1939 correspondingly; the new typescript of gt was “neutral” while that of zr could evoke associations with stone- and wood- carving. Yet zr did not abandon moderate contrast as main constructive principle: this is one more explanation of the frequent use, in 1938 –1939, of green (in November 1938 – of red) ink for the name of the newspaper and the coat of arms of the issuing party (cf. n. 49 above).

11 / Molodoe slovo, Aleksandr Stojanov ed., no. 14, Dec. 1932, p. 1 12 / Golos Truda, no. 431/20, 5 March 1933, p. 1

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13 / Golos, no. 228, 20 Apr. 1930, p. 2 14 / Golos Truda, N. Plavinskij, G. Vološin eds, no. 437/26, 16 Apr. 1933, pp. 2–3

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mainstream newspapers of 1923–1932. This suggests that aestheticisation was likely to be driven by some overall change that had occurred by 1933. Sedentarization and aestheticization Construing a third sequence of newspaper issues helps address the hypothetic correlation between the sedentarization process of émigrés and the aestheticization of their newspapers. I chose celebrations of, arguably, the most important Russian émigré holiday besides the moments of self-determination through “Russian Culture” and “Irreconciliability”: Easter. I shall examine for and

trace changes in intensity of aestheticization of Easter issues along, and more important, across the sedentarization years, corresponding to the years 1926 to 1931. The Easter issues in 1925, 1927, 1928 and 1930 represent clearly identifiable supra-textual entities focused on the holiday, but, to my perception, only the 1925 and 1930 entities are aesthetically relevant. One could interpret the fragmented, or dissipated, composition of the celebrating space in the 1925 Easter issue of Rus’ (no. 614, 19 Apr.), one with relevant publications on pp. 1, 4, and partly 3, as a “diagrammatic” representation of dismemberment caused by the bomb on Maundy

Thursday. Composition on pp. 3–4 alone can be composition, wherein the “northwestern”element viewed as having aesthetic dimension too. It or the “1” is the innermost zone in a sector spanrepresents a space of rectangularized concen- ning three concentric zones (see p. 2, comprising tric circles the innermost of which expresses the “1”, “2” and two-thirds of the first “3”, or “Իս”, as theological-cum-political sense of Easter in 1925: [Fig. 13] 53). attempt at killing the Bulgarian Tsar was vain, In 1933 (Golos Truda, no. 26, 16 Apr., pp. 1, 2-3; just as attempts of Pharisees to eliminate Jesus see p. 2 as [Fig. 14]) and 1934 (Golos Truda, no. 75, through crucifixion. Semiotics of composition is 8 Apr., p. 1), supra-textual entities commemorating supported by the general semantics of the three Resurrection of Christ attain “positive” aesthetic texts assembled. dimension. The one for 1935 (Golos Truda, no. 124, The 1930 issue (Golos, no. 228, 20 Apr.) dis- 24 Apr., p. 1) is even better discernible [Fig. 15]. plays a semanticized arrangement throughout its pp. 2–4: the arrangement is reducible to a semi-ver- 53 Not as in Golos Truda, no. 26 (see [Fig. 14]), here all texts on tical ‫ש‬-, Чцц-, or Իապ-like configuration, or 1-2-3-3 p. 2 are part of the holiday block.

15 / Golos Truda, N. Plavinskij ed., no. 124, 26 Apr. 1935, p. 1

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Arrangement in no. 75, p. 1, corresponds to the “Exegi monumentum” visual model. More notably, the issue was printed in red instead of black (early in 1936, dark blue was used for the 150th, Nativity, issue). Unlike no. 75, no. 124 (pp. 1 and 2–3), suggests that poetry needs the mediation of sermon to touch the sacred; this has no relevance to sedentarization but has one to conservative revolution. The 1934 and 1935 “ensembles”are dubious: too great is the relative receptive weight of the most prominent of their elements (the reproduction of an icon by I. Ižakevič). However, in 1935 (no. 124, p. 1), the very heterogeneity of the texts on the page and the limited surface dedicated to Easter produces aesthetic effect. The latter is nurtured by the recipients’ awareness of the all-encompassing – across whatever heterogeneities and divides – significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. Elements alien to the “pictorial space” are integrated by it. To borrow a configuration of terms by Hans Belting: “presence” annihilates the most important outpost of empty “likeness”, the frame54. In the case of no. 26, the visual aspect of the supra-textual unity, i.e. what makes it an aesthetic entity proper – cross-like field on p. 1 and one resembling the profile of stepped pyramid on pp. 2–3 [Fig. 14], – is more conspicuous than its discursive, verbal aspect. Sedentarization and aestheticization correlate positively55. The 1930 Easter issue of Golos gives some, but irresolute, reason to think that sedentarization alone, beside the hypothetic impact of conservative revolution, stimulated aestheticization: the latter remains close to “ground” level. Conservative revolution and aestheticization

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The fourth sequence of supra-textual entities on focus should help probe the intuitive hypothesis that aestheticization is driven by conservative revolution. The hypothesis employs the assumption that conservative revolution should have as its aesthetic correlate an ensemble with restricted autonomy of parts within the whole, to the extent that aesthetic function might be carried by the ensemble only (while parts alone might even be empty of aesthetic dimension). This assumption, on its turn, rests on another one: that societal

structure and newspaper’s architecture are isomorphic. Did more frequent aestheticization mean more frequent “Baroque”(in the sense of Heinrich Wölfflin) ensembles? If yes, then aestheticization was (more probably) determined by conservative revolution (than not). I chose the sequence to be constituted by initial pages of newspapers across 1933. Irrespective of its genre and thematic content, an initial page is by assumption the most aesthetically sensitive page of a newspaper: it must grab the recipient’s attention, and a bit of time before he has become a reader. What would a “part more or less independent from the whole” mean within an aesthetically relevant supra-textual entity of a page? That a part would have aesthetic dimension disregarding the context in the page, I would assume. It is difficult to give a definition of “part”, so I shall turn to examples. For reasons of brevity they will be chosen among the specimens already referred to above. In Golos, no. 347, p. 1 [Fig. 2], Puškin’s portrait atop a poem (on the left) and rectangular c-text “hosting” another poem (on the right) seem to me as two distinct “parts” (even though that they can be disassembled further). Each of the two has aesthetic dimension. When looking at Golos, no. 399, p. 1 [Fig. 3] with the same degree of attentiveness, I cannot discern more than one part. Next, I perceive the Golos Truda 1933 [Fig. 4] and 1935 first page DoRC compositions as bipartite. But it seems to me that the constituting parts of each would lose aesthetic dimension if left alone. The aesthetic value of three of these parts would diminish to the value of the portrait reproductions (of Peter the Great and of Puškin, twice) they are formed around 56. And the right part of the 1935 composition would lose aesthetic dimension altogether. A drift towards “Baroque” composition is visible in 1932–1935. To summarize, it seems that tendencies towards aestheticization and conservative revolution were simultaneous and that the former became conspicuous earlier (June 1931 [Fig. 2] vs. January 1932 [Molodoe Slovo, no. 5, p. 1; founding of rots]); but that with the latter’s acceleration (issuing of Trud, May 1932 – February 1933) and culmination (merging of Trud and Golos, March 1933),

aestheticization was subsumed to revolution’s agenda and mental style (Nov. 1932 [Fig. 5], June 1933 [Fig. 4]); and that cooptation was preceded by anticipative accommodation on behalf of aestheticization (June 1932, [Fig. 3]). One result of the cooptation was that the “idiom”of aestheticization began shaping not only (and even predominantly not) the DoRC celebrations. Another was the shift from “Renaissance” to “Baroque” supra-textual ensembles (June 1931 [Fig. 2] vs. June 1932 [Fig. 3]). To rephrase, aesthetically relevant semiotic “communitarianization” on the level of a newspaper page prefigured extratextual societal “communitarianization” brought through the conservative revolution and was subsequently instrumentalized or co-opted by the latter. Towards narrative collation of sedentarization, aestheticization and conservative revolution A clerical version of conservative revolution was under way already by 1929. It manifested itself through a programmatic one-day newspaper dedicated to DoRC in 1929 in “Philipopolis” (Plovdiv) which urged to celebrate and perform Russian culture not around the cult of Puškin, but of Saint Vladimir the Baptizer of the Rus’. The mentioned 1929 newspaper was, at the same time, a vivid manifestation of sedentarization, being one of the very rare non-Sofia publications of Russian émigrés in Bulgaria. A community which did not feel inconvenience to be considered local expressed a self-constitutive will to live like a diocese and serve as a model57. This might have accelerated the leaning of rightist-liberal cultural current embodied in mainstream Golos towards secular and moderate version of conservative revolution under the banner of delovoe ob”edinenie58; and probably urged it towards appropriation of and mastering the idiom I call “aestheticization of newspaper”. Thus, Church and Army were (actually, continued to be) recognized as the most important, yet only two among many, vocational corporations around which the émigré society should organize itself. And Puškin’s DoRC appeared as the most convenient and inspiring occasion to “aestheticize” one’s efforts to mobilize a majority. The 1930 DoRC issue

was a diplomatic declaration of intention attached to Puškin’s day but not mentioning his name. The 1931 one was a self-celebration of autonomy of culture, yet of a culture declaring symbiotic relations with (Empire and) Christianity, before voluntary adoption of a relatively self-restrictive stance59. The latter is felt in the 1932 issue: half of its volume was not dedicated to DoRC; on p. 1 an editorial appeared which expressed an urge to explain why the celebration is necessary against unprecedented economic difficulties experienced by the émigrés. As the rightist-liberal mainstream elite evolved into / was replaced by a (secular yet Christian) 60 conservative-revolutionary one, the aestheticizing idiom evolved from “Renaissance” to “Baroque”-like. As the idiom was adopted by the structures of the society emerging through conservative revolution it evolved from 54 The opposition “likeness with vs. without presence” seems

to me the briefest expression of Belting’s theory of (medieval) cult images as something substantially different from (postmedieval) art. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, Chicago 1994, sp. pp. 9 –14, 47, 488, 490. It is pertinent to note that a cult image, a work of art, and an avant-garde visual image imply three completely different ontologies of (non)framing, with the first and the third being closer to each other than to the second through (the claim of) capturing the presence of the “numinous”, see Oleg Tarasov, Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich, London 2011, pp. 36, 331. 55 1925 presents an extraordinary case. 56 The left part of the Golos 1931 composition (no. 347, p. 1) [Fig. 2] is formed around a portrait reproduction too, but there the reproduction had no visual prominence over the other constituting element (the poem supporting the bust-like visual structure). Size ratio between image and text and the (non) accuracy in aligning them along a vertical axis might have been determinative. 57 The emergence, in February 1931, of the newspaper Naša žizn’, which in his first year was oppositional to Golos neither along the right vs. left nor along any other conventional political axis, is another major symptom of sedentarization and of conflicting views about it (see Rusev et al., Periodika [n. 4], p. 487 ff.). 58 Unification along occupational lines. 59 The backbone text even of this self-celebrative issue, the aforementioned “The Destiny of Russian Culture” (by Pëtr Bicilli), did not affirm (high nineteenth-century) Russian culture per se, but as an imperial culture, as culture of an empire. 60 As already mentioned, the central organisation of Russian émigré community in Bulgaria after the conservative revolution, an epitome of the corporative society that was aimed, the “society-within-the-society” per excellence, – The Russian All-Labour Union, – was a branch of a Christian trade union. I guess that a choice between two versions of conservative revolution was partially congruent with a choice between hostility and non-hostility to Metropolitan Eulogius and his fraction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

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“representation” to “expression” and “appellaA preliminary overview shows that the laytion”61; an aesthetics of “presence” prevailed over out of the newspapers analyzed in this article one of “likeness”. It was so in the pages of two is compatible with the Neue Typographie 66. Befrom the three party newspapers that emerged in sides perceptibility and intentionality of design, the course of conservative revolution and which our rightist newspapers share with the “New embodied the political constellation brought by Typography” a drive towards “illocution” and that revolution. Nationalist-laborist Za Rossiju “perlocution” in avoidance of “representation”, and neo-monarchist (and pro-Soviet) Molodoe actually of “decoration”67. Principles 1, 3 and 5 Slovo frequently displayed supra-textual compo- from El Lissitzky’s “Topographie der Typograsitions with expressive and appellative elements, phie”, 1923, finely explain the peculiarities of our while fascist Rus’ (just as the supra-party, of the samples68. Principles 1 to 10 (except for 6 and 9) All-Labor Union, Golos Truda) did it quite rarely. from Jan Tschichold’s “Elementare Typographie” of 1925 seem to be implemented in Za Rossiju69. Historical concluding notes: European Za Rossiju seems closer to Tschichold’s emphacontexts of the aestheticization of newspaper sis on order and organization than to Lissitzky’s and Moholy-Nagy’s on expression of content by A recent research on the page design of contem- form70. Both Molodoe Slovo and Za Rossiju are porary German newspapers across the political hardly dependent on book typography, using specter comes to the following conclusions. News- consistently varied type sizes, letter-spacing etc papers on the right use more serif fonts, more and (but not non-centered headings, except for the bigger initial capitals, older logos, bigger formats, masthead of Molodoe Slovo)71. Devices stemming fewer colors (in terms of frequency and of num- from the “New Typography”, such as the “acber); headlines in both right and left extremes ceptance of constraints, perhaps in the form of are bigger than in newspapers closer to the po- an underlying grid-structure”, “asymmetry, the litical center62. The authors agree with previous positive deployment of empty space, the meanresearch that more modernism and more aesthet- ingful use of colour, the meaningful use of conic appeal in leftist newspapers are due to the fact trast” between bold and light type, are without that their readership is younger; and that a “po- doubt at work in some of the newspapers studied litical extremity could be associated with a more here 72. I would add to these principles the contrast obtrusive design”63. Some remarks are needed between serif and non-serif typefaces. Acknowlbefore examining which conclusions apply to our edging the work of the latter principle drives to case. In our case, the intergenerational difference the hypothesis of a conscious retreat to centered seems more important than the left-right one: Za headings in Za Rossiju. Such a retreat is ascribable Rossiju and Molodoe slovo, the most aesthetically to a strategy of co-employment of features assoappealing newspapers, are targeting (and are ciable with conservative and avant-garde layouts, produced) by the younger generation of émigrés. i.e. to a kind of “spatial style”, in the definition of They are probably the most extreme ones, not in Jacob Burckhardt73. Symmetry in many of the first the conventional sense of political left or right, pages of Za Rossiju looks systematic; this necesbut in the Bourdiean sense of “non-consecrated sitates a complementing explanation. Symmetry avant-garde”64. In our case of non-existent leftist adds to the illocutive force of these pages; they parties within the émigré polity, the liberal center become a typographic image of a speaking face plays the role of a right (conservative) wing, and en face. These issues, however, would deserve the right wing the role of a left (modernist) one. separate studies. The very emergence of perceptible orderliness, The Russian émigré rightist avant-garde in the perceptible composition and layout, or of aesthet- early 1930s may have been influenced by Tschi­ ic effects, might indicate a shift – of individual chold or by the Russian leftist avant-garde of the newspapers but also as a general tendency – from 1910s–1920s. In its moderation and sober collecthe center to the right 65. tivism the émigré rightist adoption seems closer

to Tschichold. It is more important to hypothesize that the shift towards the “New Typography” could be understood as an aesthetically relevant move within the “European civil war”74. It is in such setting that the “right” could have adopted, albeit in moderate form, achievements of the “left”. Expectedly, it does so at a moment when the latter retreats to aesthetic conservatism: “Dalianism” in Europe 75; socialist realism, or “Culture Two”, in ussr 76. Theoretical concluding note: types of transformation and the “arts of the contact zone” I believe that the contacts between Russian émigrés in interwar Bulgaria and Bulgarians are inscribable in a “contact zone” between an indigenous community and an offshore imperial power. This zone is comparable to the paradigmatic Inca­Spanish one analyzed by Mary Louise Pratt, but shows constancy of only cultural imperial presence. This presence is grounded in Panslavism and, in particular, in the scholarly belief in mutually binding long-term Bulgarian-Russian cultural exchange and in the moral and culture-building imperative of gratitude for the 1878 Liberation 77. This belief and this imperative seem to shape the only specific conceptual framework employed, albeit in under-pronounced form, in research on cultural contacts between Russian émigrés in interwar Bulgaria and Bulgarians. Only instances of positive active transformation fit it well. I see this framework as analogous to the one at work in Royal Commentaries of the Incas, “a mediation that coded the Andean past and present in ways thought unthreatening to colonial hierarchy”78. “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression – these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone”79. I would add to the open list of “arts” just one: of unpremeditated parody. One can expect these arts both from Bulgarians in their (non-, self-)suppressed dialogue with Russian imperial culture and from imperial refugees in a culturally patronized nation-state. In such perspective, Russian émigré condition in Bulgaria

is radically different from the one in countries such as France or Czechoslovakia. The typology of vector of transformation drafted in the theoretical introduction to this article is translatable into the typology of the arts of the contact zone. Yet the former allows for more attention to low-intensity forms of intercultural communication. I believe I can introduce convincing examples from the interwar Bulgarian-Russian contact zone to illustrate any of the types, sub-types and 61 Such structures were, most notably, those political organi-

62

63 64 65 66

67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77

78 79

sations, old and new, of local and of non-local origin, which were essential to the new political constellation: solidarists (nsnp/nts), neomonarchists (Mladorossy), fascists. I am recalling the three basic functions of human language according to Karl Bühler: representative, expressive and appellative. I find the typology usable beyond the domain of linguistics: in literary and art studies. Johanna Schindler, Philip Müller, “Design Follows Politics? The Visualization of Political Orientation in Newspaper Page Layout”,  Visual Communication, xvii/2 (2018), pp. 141–161. Ibidem, p. 148. See n. 12. Compare Schindler/Müller, “Design” (n. 62), p. 146. This is the name of at least two documents, a 1923 article by László Moholy-Nagy and a 1928 book by Jan Tschichold, and of a related movement in typographic design. See Robin Kinross, “Introduction to the English-Language Edition”,  in Jan Tschichold, The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1998, pp. xv–xliv, sp. p. xxiv. On design proper vs. decoration in the context of New Typography see ibidem, p. xxvi; idem, Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History, London 2004, p. 104. Ibidem, p. 105. Ibidem, pp. 106 –108. Ibidem, p. 109. On the mentioned devices: Tschichold, The New Typography (n. 66), pp. 1– 233, sp. p. 212, 214. Enumeration of the mentioned principles, see Kinross, “Introduction” (n. 66), p. xxvi. Jacob Burckhardt, The Architecture of Italian Renaissance, Peter Murray ed., Chicago 1985, p. 32. On the latter concept and corresponding historical reconstruction: Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917 –1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Munich 1997. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities: The International Geography of the Avant-gardes in Interwar Europe”,  Visual Resources, xxxv/3– 4 (2019), pp. 295 –322, p. 315. Paperny, Architecture (n. 38). See Jordan Ljuckanov, “O dolžnoj mestosvjazannosti bolgarskoj rusistiki, ili čem ob’’jazana bolgarskaja rusistika svoemu mestorazvitiju”, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, liii (2015), pp. 70 – 91, available online http://sites.utoronto. ca/tsq/53/tsq_53_lyutskanov.pdf [last accessed 20.06.2020], sp. pp. 73–76, 82– 87. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”,  Profession, xv (1991), pp. 33– 40, sp. p. 37. Ibidem, p. 37.

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sub-sub-types of the category “vector of transformation”. My choice of first case to deal with in detail is determind by my “locus of enunciation”80. Intellectual conflicts of interest statement It is my conviction that I should recognize a number of “intercrossings” between my object, my relations with it and my integrity as a researcher81. Inviting to (re)construct (non)contacts between Russian émigré and Bulgarian litterateurs and artists as pertaining to a contact zone, I distance myself from a tradition of interpreting and performing Bulgarian-Russian contacts, which, to my understanding, nurtures entangled inferiority and imperial complexes. Yet constructing another tool, the category of vector of transformation, I make further choices. I refrain from adopting an idiom elaborated in an intellectual laboratory of the new global hegemon in deconstructing an idiom of a regional one82. I invest in what I would call “geo-gnoseological holism” (hence innovation and one based on Jakobson)83. I implement my belief that to model extra-linguistic phenomena on distinctions encoded in lingual semantics is an intellectually

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legitimate operation. It is performed on the same level of abstraction as “comparison” vs. “transfer” vs. “sharing” vs. “reciprocity” vs. “asymmetry” vs. “intermixing” vs. “(criss)crossing” in the work of Werner and Zimmermann. Yet it is derived not from the history of scholarship and basic commonsense mathematics and logic but from language. I am aware that my understanding of the Russian émigré presence in Bulgaria might be suspected of crypto-nationalism. Therefore, I chose for analysis a current of change within Russian émigré community of Bulgaria which, in my expectations, is completely aloof from Russian-Bulgarian contact, hence an object least dependent on my self-hypothesized nationalist bias. 80 On the latter term, see Walter D. Mignolo, “Editor’s Introduc-

tion”,  Poetics Today, xv/4 (1994), pp. 505–521, sp. pp. 507, 509.

81 Compare Michael Werner, Bénédicte Zimmermann,“Beyond

Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity”,  History and Theory, xlv/1 (2006), pp. 30 –50, sp. pp. 39 –42. 82 I believe that an academic cannot but enhance the symbolic power of the polity to which she or he nominally belongs, however oppositional she or he might be towards master or mainstream discourses in that polity. 83 I see “geo-gnoseological holism” as an imperative to explain texts using theoretical tools elaborated in contexts that are geo-culturally proximate to the object, to the researcher and, if possible, to her/his target readers and her/his place of “enunciation”.

summary Ruská emigrantská komunita v meziválečném Bulharsku Návrh typologie transformací se zaměřením na „estetizaci“ novin

V první části článku autor uvádí pojem „trans- v Bulharsku na počátku třicátých let. Nadtextové formace“ jako zastřešující termín označující „kva- entity vytvořené editory novin mohou získat estelitativní změnu, která je vnímatelná“ a utváří tický rozměr nehledě na (umělecký či neumělecký) kategorii „vektor transformace“. Autorovým zá- typ textu a včleněných obrázků, a to skrze rozloměrem historika je postavit vedle sebe několik žení v prostoru a skrze typografii. Autor uznává, linií vývoje, které bývají běžně vnímány samo- že jeho přístup s sebou nese riziko přeinterpretace, statně v rámci jednotlivých oborů, nebo bývají poněvadž mu není známo, na co se sami emigranti spojované s nadšeným sbíráním „faktů“ bez teore- ve svém vnímání zaměřovali, a spoléhá se tedy na tického rámce. Autorovým teoretickým záměrem přesvědčivost jednotlivých studovaných případů. je pojmenovat extra-lingvistický fenomén, charakAutor krátce analyzuje nejvýraznější příklaterizovaný na základě ontologických odlišností za- dy estetizace a sleduje pravidla, kterými se řídila. kódovaných v sémantice gramatických kategorií. Následně tento fenomén představuje v kontextu Tímto vzdává hold vědci, autorovi díla o gramatice, některých pravděpodobně souvisejících změn: geometrii a o dalších sémantických a gramatic- „sedentarizace“ ruských emigrantů v pozdních kých kategoriích, Romanu Jakobsonovi. dvacátých letech a „konzervativní revoluce“ v uvaProměnou zmíněné sémantiky z předmětu žování emigrantů i v jejich institucích v Bulharanalýzy v nástroj analýzy, vytváří autor katego- sku, která se odehrála kolem roku 1933. Uvažuje rie na třech úrovních: Základní úroveň staví na také o podobnostech s německým hnutím „nové intuitivním odlišení „pozitivní“, „nulové“ a „ne- typografie“ a s v Evropě rozšířeným vítězstvím gativní“ hodnoty vektoru. Druhou zakládá na „da­lianistické“ verze surrealismu nad nefigurativní distinktivních znacích kategorie hlasu. Co se avantgardou kolem roku 1934, atd. Idiom popisu, týče slučitelnosti používaných referencí, se autor který se pohybuje mezi filologií a uměleckými odvolává k Jacobsonovi a ke gramatické séman- studiemi (a který obsahuje základní intuice a mytice s jistými epistemickými imperativy histoire šlenky Dimitjura Georgieva vyjádřené v jeho textu croisée a s imperativy typů kontaktu modelova- Architektura na vestnika, 3. ed, 1982), je doplněn idiných skrze kategorie „vektor transformace“, „umě- omem sociologie kultury Pierra Bourdieu. Autor ní“ a „kontaktní zóna“. dochází k závěru, že estetizace koreluje se sedentaV druhé části článku autor analyzuje proud, rizací a že jí byla pravděpodobně způsobena. Dále který nazývá „reflexivní transformace“. Jedná usuzuje, že sedentarizace předjímala konzervase o estetizaci novin jako textového artefaktu, tivní revoluci a že konzervativní revoluce do sebe vytvořeného ruskou emigrantskou komunitou sedentarizaci následně zahrnula.

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Abstract – Transforming Medieval Art from Saint Petersburg to Paris. André Grabar’s Life and Scholarship between 1917 and 1945 – André Nikolajevič Grabar (1896–1990) – today esteemed as one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of medieval art history – endured the upheaval of his life path by emigrating, from Russia to France by way of Bulgaria, before becoming the famous French art historian we recognize. The experience of emigration profoundly recast Grabar’s thought both on his homeland and on his studies of medieval and Byzantine art. This transformation happened during a timespan, between 1917 and 1945, when the field of art history itself was undergoing important, seemingly contrary, changes, not only in the direction of internationalization but also toward nationalisms. Throughout those crucial years, Grabar ultimately became an ideal figure of mediation between his native Russian milieu and the French one to which he acculturated. Keywords – Byzantine Studies, History of Art History, Russian emigration, France, Bulgaria, André Grabar Adrien Palladino Masaryk University, Brno 122 [email protected]

Transforming Medieval Art from Saint Petersburg to Paris André Grabar’s Life and Scholarship between 1917 and 1945 Adrien Palladino

When, in 1990, near the end of a fruitful life, André Grabar was asked by the French newspaper Le Monde what books had shaped his intellectual career, he answered: “Searching for my intellectual origins in books? I am slightly bothered by this way of proceeding. I believe that the entourage, life circumstances, the context if you wish, but in a much wider sense than you suggest, have played for me a much more important role than any text 1.”

Born in Kiev in 1896 – the year Nicholas ii acceded to the throne of Holy Russia – and died in

1990 in Paris, the circumstances of Grabar’s life were shaped by a major event in twentieth-­ century history: the Russian Revolutions of 1917.  *

1

This article was carried out as part of the project “The Heritage of Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov in the Experiences of André Grabar and the Seminarium Kondakovianum” (Czech Science Foundation, Reg. No 18 –20666S). “Chercher mes origines intellectuelles dans des livres? Je suis un peu gêné par cette façon de procéder. Je crois que l’entourage, les circonstances de la vie, le contexte, si vous voulez, mais dans un sens beaucoup plus large que vous ne le suggérez, ont joué pour moi un rôle plus important que n’importe quel texte”,  “Les mosaïques de Kiev. André Grabar”,  in La bibliothèque imaginaire du Collège de France, Paris 1990, pp. 115–116, p. 115.

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Because of them, he lived outside of Russia for the entirety of the Soviet Regime. His intellectual trajectory spanned most of the twentieth century. As a scholar, he contributed decisively to the study of medieval art, both “Byzantine” and “Western”. His works display an innovative interest in the interactions between medieval art, architecture, and the social, ritual, and cultural implications thereof 2. The aim of this article is to present how Grabar’s emigration – from Russia to Bulgaria, and ultimately to France – contributed to transform his thought, both on his homeland and on medieval art. The transformative facet is crucial since, unlike other Russian émigré art historians who arrived abroad fully “formed” – such as Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov (1844–1925) in Prague, or the younger but already established Pavel Muratov (1881–1950) in Paris – Grabar achieved important steps of his intellectual formation whilst already an émigré 3. This transformation happened at the same moment as that of “Byzantine studies” as such. The history of “Byzantine studies”are a topic of increasing interest since several years for the history of art history and the philosophy of sciences, as attested by various studies of historiographical nature 4. “Byzantium” indeed became – especially in these crucial years for the formation of state nations and identities – a fluid entity which was “used” and “abused” in various national or international contexts5. Particularly important for Grabar’s formation is on the one hand the Russian gaze on the “Byzantine heritage”, which was entirely reconfigured by the fall of the House of Romanov6. On the other hand, the French perception of “Byzantium” was, at that time, oscillating between a multifaceted scholarly interest reflected by international scholars such as Gabriel Millet (1867–1953) and a negative perception into the public sphere 7. It is precisely against the backdrop of these two trends that Grabar’s scholarly career must be replaced. I would like to reflect here on three levels of Grabar’s “transformation”. Firstly, his own, personal one. Secondly, the level of Byzantine art history and its political role as a field through the movement of Russian émigrés between 1917 and 1945. Lastly, I wish to conclude with the impact

the scholarly work of Grabar himself ultimately had on his place of arrival, France. From Petrograd to Sofia: times of trouble On both sides of his family, André Grabar [Fig. 1] was affiliated to the Tsarist regime, and his early years in Kiev were marked by the city’s “Russo-Byzantine” background8. Before the Soviets destroyed some of the city’s major churches in the 1930s, he had certainly had the chance to see St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kiev, Grabar’s most famous monographs form a triptych composed of L’empereur dans l’art byzantin. Recherches sur l’art officiel de l’Empire d’Orient, Paris 1936; Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique, 2 vols, Paris 1946; L’iconoclasme byzantin, Paris 1954; on the question of the actuality of Grabar’s thinking, see Annabel Jane Wharton, “Rereading Martyrium: The Modernist and Postmodernist Texts”, Gesta, xxix/1 (1990), pp. 3–7; Adrien Palladino,“André Grabar, Plotinus, and the Potency of Late Antique Images”, in André Grabar, Plotinus and the Origins of Medieval Aesthetics, Adrien Palladino transl. and ed., Brno/Rome 2018; see also Ivan Foletti,“André/Andrej Nikolajevič Grabar”, in Personenlexikon zur Christlichen Archäologie. Forscher und Persönlichkeiten vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, Stefan Heid, Martin Dennert eds, Regensburg 2012, vol. 1, pp. 601– 602 and Maria Giovanna Muzj, Un maître pour l’art chrétien: André Grabar. Iconographie et théophanie, Paris 2005 [1995], sp. pp. 17–33. 3 On Kondakov, see Ivan Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia. Nikodim Kondakov (1844–1925) and the Invention of the Icon, Rome 2017; idem, “‘Mon seul regret: être né en Russie’. N.P. Kondakov et ses relations avec l’Occident”,in La Russie et l’Occident. Relations intellectuelles et artistiques au temps des révolutions russes, (Proceedings of the conference, Université de Lausanne, 20 –21 March 2009), idem ed., Rome 2010, pp. 31–51; on Muratov, Xenia Muratova,“Pavel Muratov historien d’art en Occident”,  in La Russie et l’Occident (n. 3), pp. 65– 95. 4 See, e.g., the collective volumes Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes, Robin Cormack, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Aldershot 2000; Byzance en Europe, Marie-France Auzépy ed., Saint-Denis 2003; Présence de Byzance, Jean-Michel Spieser ed., Gollion 2007; Byzanzrezeption in Europa. Spurensuche über das Mittelalter und die Renaissance bis in die Gegenwart, Foteini Kolovou ed., Berlin/Boston 2012; Wanted, Byzantium: The Desire for a Lost Empire, Ingela Nilsson, Paul Stephenson eds, Uppsala 2014; The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500, Przemysław Marciniak, Dion C. Smythe eds, Farnham 2016; Imagining Byzantium. Perceptions, Patterns, Problems, Alena Alshanskaya, Andreas Gietzen, Christina Hadjiafxenti eds, Mainz 2018. For individual volumes contributing to the question by studying individual figures or contexts, see, e.g., Massimo Bernabò, Ossessioni bizantine e cultura artistica in Italia: tra D’Annunzio, fascismo e dopoguerra, Naples 2003; Ivan Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia (n. 3); Giovanni Gasbarri, Riscoprire Bisanzio. Lo studio dell’arte bizantina a Roma e in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, Rome 2015. 5 Averil Cameron,“The Use and Abuse of Byzantium. An Essay on Reception”,  in eadem, Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium, 2

1 / André Grabar, 1920s

Aldershot 1996, no. 13; eadem, Byzantine Matters, Princeton, nj 2014; see also Helena Bodin, “Whose Byzantinism – Ours or Theirs? On the Issue of Byzantinism from a Cultural Semiotic Perspective”, in The Reception of Byzantium (n. 4), pp. 11–42. 6 On the transformation of the perception of “Byzantium” after the revolution, see, e.g., Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia (n. 3); see also, e.g., Sergey A. Ivanov,“Byzance rouge: la byzantinologie et les communistes (1928 –1948)”,  in Byzance en Europe (n. 4), pp. 55– 60; idem, “The Second Rome as Seen by the Third: Russian Debates on ‘the Byzantine legacy’”,  in The Reception of Byzantium (n. 4), pp. 55– 80. 7 This negative perception was at times condescending, at times colonial, often drawing on the imaginary of “decadence” and “orientalism”. On these questions, see, e.g.,

Silvia Ronchey, “La ‘femme fatale’, source d’une byzantinologie austère”, in Byzance en Europe (n. 4), pp. 153–175; Averil Cameron, “Byzance dans le débat sur l’orientalisme”, in Byzance en Europe (n. 4), pp. 235–250; Przemysław Marciniak, “Oriental like Byzantium. Some Remarks on Similarities Between Byzantinism and Orientalism”,  in Imagining Byzantium (n. 4), pp. 41–47. 8 On Grabar’s father, judge at the Cassation court in Saint Petersburg, see the unpublished memoirs, written by Grabar’s father partly in Bulgaria and partly in Strasbourg in 1924: Souvenirs de Nicolaï Stepanovitch Grabar, Fanchon Deligne transl. and ed. I profit from the occasion to thank Ms Fanchon Deligne for kindly sending me her unpublished translation of the text.

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2 /  St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kiev, postcard from the early 1900s

with its refined twelfth-century mosaic décor [Figs 2–3] – so close to coeval “Byzantine” monuments such as the Daphni Monastery – as well as the famous mosaics of St Sophia and frescoes of St Cyril9. Grabar carried the memory of this visual tradition and the rituals that happened within and around these sacred spaces with him. As suggested by the late Gilbert Dagron, it is perhaps precisely this orthodox cultural background that gave him a deeper understanding of the religious meaning of images10. While the matter of this “Orthodox identity” is important, what really appears fundamental to understanding Grabar’s background is his scholarly training in Saint Petersburg, with the best Russian “Byzantinists” of the time. Of these, we must of course mention Dmitrij V. Ajnalov (1862–1939), Jakob I. Smirnov (1869–1918) and Mixail I. Rostovcev (1870–1952)11. His most influential teacher, 9

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The medieval church of Saint Michael was destroyed by the Soviets in 1935–1937. The building visible today was rebuilt in the 1990s. Parts of its original mosaic decoration survive in the Museum inside of the Saint Sofia Cathedral, on the second floor. See Samuel H. Cross,“The Mosaic Eucharist of

St. Michael’s (Kiev)”, The American Slavic and East European Review, vi/1–2 (1947), pp. 56 – 61. More in general on the destructions caused by Soviets in the city, see Titus D. Hewryk, The Lost Architecture of Kiev, New York 1982. 10 “On dit et on écrit parfois qu’André Grabar, né à Kiev, avait par ses origines une compréhension plus particulière du sens religieux des icônes. Sans doute, mais il prit toujours grand soin d’inclure ce qu’il appelait plus volontiers des images dans la vaste problématique de la représentation ou du portrait, et de les étudier dans un premier temps hors du contexte confessionnel qui risque de conduire trop vite aux spécificités de l’Orthodoxie”, Gilbert Dagron, “André Grabar et les images”, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, cxlix/3 (2005), pp. 1125–1128, p. 1125; see also Henry Maguire,“André Grabar. 1896 –1990”,  Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xlv (1991), pp. xii–xv. 11 On Ajnalov and Smirnov, see Ludmila G. Krushkova,“Dmitrij Vlas’evič Ajnalov”,  in Personenlexikon (n. 2), vol. 1, pp. 53–54 and eadem,“Jakov Ivanovič Smirnov”,  in Personenlexikon (n. 2), vol. 2, pp. 1172–1173. Martin Jakubčo is preparing at the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, Brno, a Ph.D. dissertation which represents the first intellectual biography and systematic study on the fundamental figure of Ajnalov. I take the opportunity to thank him here for the discussions we had on the topic and for the materials he kindly shared with me. On the figure of Smirnov, see also Maria Medvedeva,“Yakov Smirnov’s Photo Collection. The Orient in Nineteenth-Century Photography”,  in À l’orientale. Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Fracine Giese et al. eds, Leiden/Boston 2020, pp. 201–212. Lastly, on Rostovcev, see, e.g., Marinus Antony Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile. Russian Roots in an American Context, Stuttgart 1990.

3 / Detail of the Eucharist mosaic, from St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, early 12th century / installed on the second floor of Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kiev

however, was Nikodim P. Kondakov, the father of Byzantine art history in Russia [Fig. 4]12. The “Petrograd group”gave Grabar a solid background, anchored in Kondakov’s iconographical method and interest on the one hand in Byzantine heritage and in forms of traditional Russian art – such as panel paintings – on the other13.

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As hinted above, this training was abruptly interrupted with the start of the Revolution. In Autumn 1917, in a rapidly deteriorating climate, Grabar left Petrograd, travelling back in a full train to Kiev. From 1917 to 1919, Grabar and his family attempted to remain in Kiev, but then left for Odessa, on the coast of the Black Sea. There, Grabar managed to finish his university studies, under Kondakov’s supervision. As the situation became intolerable, Grabar and his family decided to leave Odessa in January 1920, travelling on the ship “Sofia” towards Varna, and continuing on to the capital of Bulgaria14. This is where life outside Russia would start for the young scholar. In Sofia, Grabar’s financial situation was far from comfortable, but he managed to share a flat with another émigré, Konstantin V. Močulskij (1892–1948), who would later become a renowned professor of Russian literature and would play an important role in Grabar’s fate15. It is in Bulgaria that Grabar met his future wife, medical student Julia Ivanova. They would marry in France some years later. Moreover, he once again encountered his old professor Kondakov, and it is most likely thanks to Kondakov that he received a position at the archaeological institute and museum of Sofia16. Russian scholars in general, and Kondakov in particular – who had been received in Sofia with great ceremony by the Tsar Boris iii (1918–1943) himself – enjoyed a special relationship with Bulgaria17. The country had been largely supported by the Russians against the Ottomans during the Russo-­Turkish war of 1877–1878, and since then, the search for common “Byzantine” roots against the Ottoman enemy had become a topic uniting the “Slavic” nations18. After 1919, Bulgaria emerged as a major loser of the Second Balkan War and the First World War, having lost vast territories to Yugoslavia, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Greece in the wake of the Treaty of

Neuilly. The study of the country’s “Byzantine” heritage had become a topic of political relevance, despite retaining a very ambiguous status19. It is against this backdrop that Grabar, a young Russian scholar, was, almost immediately upon arrival, tasked with exploring medieval Bulgarian churches of “Byzantine tradition”. Extensively travelling through the often-picturesque landscapes and gathering photographic material, Grabar wrote a series of articles on medieval “Bulgarian” monuments [Fig. 5], such as the Church of Bojana, to which I come back later 20. However beneficial his position as a Russian scholar in Bulgaria may have been, his financial situation and, above all, the intellectual milieu, seemed insufficient to the young Grabar, who set out for the West. He first passed through Prague, where he never applied for a position at the university, and then turned his gaze to one of the most sought-after places for the Russian émigré community: the cosmopolitan interwar Berlin21. Despite meeting – likely once again through Kondakov’s mediation – with Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944), one of the most important German medieval art historians of the time, it seems that no position was available for Grabar in Germany 22. Whilst still in the country, however, he received word from his aforementioned friend, Konstantin Močulskij – in the meantime arrived 12 Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia (n. 3). 13 Ibidem. 14 Information on Grabar’s travels in these early years can be

15

16

17

18

found mainly in his autobiographical memoirs, kept at the Collège de France, Fonds André Grabar, boîte complémentaire, “Esquisse biographique”.  A slightly different Russian version of the same text was published in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Vizantija i Drevnjaja Rus’. K 100-letiju Andreja Nikolaeviča Grabara (1896 –1990), Engelina S. Smirnova ed., Saint Petersburg 1999, pp. 11–33. Sergej R. Fedjakin, “Tvorčestvo Konstantina Močulskogo”, in Konstantin V. Močulskij, Krizis voobraženija, Tomsk 1999, pp. 3–20. Irina L. Kyzlasova, “Novoe o rannem etape naučnoj dejatel’nosti A. N. Grabara (1919 –1924 gg.)”, in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo (n. 14), pp. 82– 96. Eadem, Istorija izučenija vizantijskogo i drevnerusskogo iskusstva v Rossii. F. I. Buslajev, N. P. Kondakova: metody, idei, teorii, Moscow 1985, p. 49; Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia (n. 3). See Diana Mishkova, “The Afterlife of a Commonwealth: Narratives of Byzantium in the National Historiographies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania”,  in Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Volume Three: Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies, Roumen Daskalov, Alexander Vezenkov eds, Leiden/Boston 2015, pp. 118 –273, sp. pp. 232–244; see also

4 / Nikodim Kondakov surrounded by colleagues and students in Sofia, on the back, fourth from the left André Grabar, 26.12.1921 5 / Grabar and M. N. Okunev travelling in Bulgaria, 1925

Johannes Niehoff-­Panagiotidis,“To Whom Does Byzantium Belong? Greeks, Turks and the Present of the Medieval Balkans”,in The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States. History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins, R. J. W. Evans, Guy P. Marchal eds, New York 2011, pp. 139 –151. 19 Olivier Buirette,“Les Traités de paix de Neuilly sur Seine et de Sèvres ou la redéfinition d’une nouvelle Europe Balkanique”, Revue Bulgare d’Histoire, iii–iv (2001), pp. 99 –113; Mishkova, “The Afterlife of a Commonwealth” (n. 18), pp. 232–244. 20 Andrej Grabar, “Bolgarskie cerkvi-grobnicy”, Izvestija na Bălgarskija archeologičeski institut, i (1921–1922), pp. 103–135;

idem,“Stenopisat na crkvata ‘Sv Cetirideset macenici’ v Veliko Tarnovo”, Godišnik, ii (1921), pp. 90 –112. 21 Kyzlasova,“Novoe o rannem etape”(n. 16), p. 83; On Russian Berlin in general, see Fritz Mierau, Russen in Berlin, 1918 –1933. Eine kulturelle Begegnung, Weinheim 1988. 22 The bibliography on Goldschmidt is too vast to be quoted here at length. I quote only Barbara Schellewald, “Liaison d’amour?: Goldschmidt und die byzantinische Kunst(-Geschichte)”, in Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944): Normal Art History im 20. Jahrhundert, Gunnar Brands, Heinrich Dilly eds, Weimar 2007, pp. 43–56.

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in France–, that André Mazon (1881–1967), a reputed Slavicist at the University of Strasbourg, was looking for someone to take a position as Russian language lecturer at his university 23. Towards France: Continuity and assimilation

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“As you know, I have been performing the duties of Russian language lecturer in Strasbourg for several years in a row. This position does not satisfy me anymore, either materially or in the sense of work. Without betraying my studies in the history of art, I would like to get a place corresponding to my specialty. Despite the assistance of Millet and Perdrizet, this turns out to be impossible, since, according to the law of the country, only French subjects are allowed to engage

in teaching 31.” After accepting the offer, in October 1922, Grabar entered, although not in the desired position, the As is evident from this letter, the main problem French academic system, in the “provincial” city was the fact that scholars who were not French of Strasbourg 24. Two important elements from this could not obtain higher teaching positions than period are notable. On the one hand, Grabar and lecturer. The same situation was true for Grabar’s his family were quickly pushed to acculturate wife – who could not have practiced her trade themselves by the French system. On the other as a medical doctor 32. In this atmosphere of emihand, the feeling of belonging to a community gration and national tensions, legal, medical, and of émigrés is still palpable in Grabar’s correspon- pedagogical professions especially were indeed dence and memoirs. Grabar describes how difficult “protected” and reserved solely for citizens33. For acculturation was for his parents, who had left the Grabars, the logical move was to obtain citimany Russians of their generation behind in Sofia, zenship, to officially “become” French. This was especially former colleagues of his father 25. From facilitated by a beneficial change in naturalization his father’s memoirs, the feeling of having lost law in 1927, allowing them to become French citiall social status is omnipresent. We learn that in zens in April 1928 34. Julie and André Grabar thus Dresden, where they lived for some time before narrowly avoided any problems when, from the joining their son in Strasbourg, Grabar’s mother 1930s onwards, laws restricted certain professions sewed linen, while his father painted wooden toy exclusively to citizens35. birds – receiving a paltry salary for this task, which Even after his naturalization, Grabar’s feeling occupied him from dawn to dusk 26. The deep rup- of belonging to the Russian émigré community, ture they felt is clear in the text, and despite the despite his almost complete acculturation, perpresence of immediate family –  Grabar’s brother sisted – in a way that can be perceived clearly Pierre (1898–1986) also came along to France, where in a letter to Paul Perdrizet (1870–1938). In the letter, he would have a brilliant career as an immunolo- Grabar bitterly comments on the assassination gist – Grabar’s parents seemed to share the same of French president Paul Doumer by a Russian homesickness as thousands of other Russians 27. émigré in 1932: Grabar’s parents both passed away just two years “You know me well enough to have guessed the feelings after his move to France, where he then remained of horror and guilt in which the news of the dreadful with Julia, who had joined him shortly after his arcrime had plunged me. Besides, the dozen or so Russians I know in Strasbourg and who came to see me rival in Strasbourg 28. During this time, Grabar also yesterday and today, were as discouraged and consterindicates the sometimes difficult mental and affecnated as myself, and the comparison with Brest-Litovsk tive acculturation into French society, describing imposed itself. Fate spares us no ordeal 36.” what he calls a “quiet xenophobia”29. On the other hand, he was connected to the city’s Orthodox Unfortunately, we lack additional personal corémigré community and had even been “elected” respondence, which might tell us more about to organize the liturgies several times a year 30. Grabar’s relationships with other Russian émiLastly, as we know from a 1927 letter to his former grés in this period. But what can be drawn from teacher Ajnalov, Grabar was not entirely satisfied the accessible materials – that is, the memoirs and with the position of Russian language lecturer he few personal letters – is that we are dealing with held from 1922 to 1928: successive steps in the acculturation of a Russian

émigré into French society. Émigrés were directly pushed to assimilation, notably by not being allowed to practice certain professions. While retaining a bond with the émigré community at the same time, Grabar was becoming French on an institutional as well as mental level. These years are thus crucial to the formation of Grabar’s “in between” identity. This situation is also reflected in his scholarly discourse. Institutions, nations, and transformations On the academic side, Grabar’s hopes for a better position had already started to come true at the end of 1927, when he became a substitute professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg 37. This favorable change was made possible by two things: his above-mentioned naturalization, and the steps Grabar took to receive a French doctoral title. During his early years in France, Grabar received further training and significant encouragement chiefly from two French scholars. In Strasbourg, his mentor was Paul Perdrizet. In Paris, on the other hand, the supervisor of his thesis was the distinguished Byzantinist Gabriel Millet [Fig. 6]38. It is under the latter’s supervision that Grabar wrote 23 Grabar, “Esquisse biographique” (n. 14), p. 17. On the figure

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

of Mazon and his role in Slavonic studies in France, see Antoine Marès,“André Mazon, un slaviste au xxe siècle. Profil politique d’un savant”,Revue des études slaves, lxxxii/1 (2011) = André Mazon (1881–1967) et les études slaves, pp. 69 – 94. In Grabar’s own words, see Grabar,“Esquisse biographi­que” (n. 14), p. 18. Ibidem, p. 17. Souvenirs de Nicolaï Stepanovitch (n. 8), p. 238. See the émigré stories, e.g., in Isabelle Nicolini,“L’émigration Russe en France. ‘La recomposition d’un espace de l’entre-soi’ comme exutoire”,  Migrations Société, v (2010), pp. 11–28; on Pierre Grabar, see Georges Hauptmann, “Pierre Grabar 1898 –1986. Débuts à la Faculté de Médecine de Strasbourg d’une carrière particulièrement brillante”, Histoire & patrimoine hospitalier: bulletin de l’Association Les Amis des hôpitaux universitaires de Strasbourg, xii (2003), pp. 34–36. Grabar, “Esquisse biographique” (n. 14), pp. 17–19. Ibidem, p. 22. Ibidem, pp. 23–24. “Kak Vam izvestno, ja uže neskol’ko let podrjad ispolnjaju v Strasburge objazannosti lektora russkogo jazyka. Eta dolžnost’ ne udovletvorjaet menja bol’še, ni v material’nom otnošenii, ni v smysle raboty. Ne predavaja svoix zanjatij nad istoriej iskusstva, ja xotel by polučit’ mesto sootvetstvujuŝee moej special’nosti. Vo nesmotrja na sodejstvie Millet i Perdrizet, èto okazyvaetsja nevozmožnym tak kak po zakonu strany tol’ko francuzsko-poddannye dopuska­jatsja k zanjatiju prepodavatel’skoj dejatel’nost’ju”,  Archives Saint Petersburg, letter from André Grabar to Dmitrij Ajnalov, 03.01.1927.

6 / Gabriel Millet 32 Gérard Noiriel, “Professions de santé, professions protégées:

un historique”,  Migrations Société, xvi/95 (2004), pp. 65– 67.

33 More generally, see Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?

Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution, Paris 2002.

34 See Archives nationales (France), bb/11/10719, dossier 50225

x 28. Julia and André Grabar both profited from the law of the 10 August 1927.

35 Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? (n. 33). 36 “Vous me connaissez assez, pour avoir deviné les sentiments

d’horreur et de honte dans lesquels m’avait plongé la nouvelle du crime abominable. D’ailleurs, la dizaine de Russes que je connais à Strasbourg et qui sont venus me voir hier et aujourd’hui, sont aussi abattus et consternés que moi-même, et la comparaison avec Brest-Litovsk s’imposa à plusieurs d’entre eux. Le sort ne nous épargne aucune épreuve”,  Archives Paul Perdrizet, Nancy, pp.336, letter of Grabar to Perdrizet, 08.05.1932. On this event, see Katherine Foshko, “The Paul Doumer Assassination and the Russian Diaspora in Interwar France”,  French History, xxiii/3 (2009), pp. 383–404; see also Sophie Coeuré, Frédéric Monier, “Paul Gorgulov, assassin de Paul Doumer (1932)”, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, lxv (2000), pp. 35–46. 37 Grabar, “Esquisse biographique” (n. 14), p. 20. 38 On Perdrizet, see Charles Picard, “Éloge funèbre de M. Paul Perdrizet, membre de l’Académie”,  Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, lxxxii/3 (1938), pp. 270 –280; on Millet, see Judith Soria, Jean-Michel Spieser, “Millet, Gabriel”, in Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art actifs en France de la Révolution à la Première Guerre mondiale, Philippe Sénéchal, Claire Barbillon eds, [accessible online: https://www.inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/publicationsnumeriques/dictionnaire-critique-des-historiens-de-l-art/ millet-gabriel.html, last accessed 01.04.2020]; Claude Lepage, “Gabriel Millet, esprit élégant et moderne”, Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, iii (2005), pp. 1097–1110; Ioanna Rapti, “L’objectif à la recherche de Byzance: les photographies de la collection Gabriel Millet”,  in L’École Pratique des Hautes Études. Invention, érudition, innovation. De 1868 à nos jours, Patrick Henriet ed., Paris 2018, pp. 650 – 665. See also Grabar’s own memories of his master, André Grabar, “Gabriel Millet (1867–1953)”, Annuaires de l’École pratique des Haute Études, lxii (1953), pp. 11–20.

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his doctoral dissertation, which resulted in two contribution to a debate which had made much studies published in 1928 [Figs 7a, b, 8] 39. The two ink flow some twenty years earlier, concerning books are intimately linked to Grabar’s early years the “Byzantine” origins of Balkan art, and namely as an émigré and dedicated to religious paintings their partial “oriental influence”42. Inserting himfrom the sixth to the sixteenth century in Bulgaria, self directly into the continued debate between as well as more broadly in the surrounding Bal- Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) and Louis Bréhier kan regions. From both texts, a clear interest once (1868 –1951) on the one hand and the position of again emerges not for only for Bulgarian materials Byzantinists such as Charles Diehl (1859 –1944) as such, but for “Byzantium” as an overarching and Millet on the other, Grabar subscribed to the entity. From a methodological point of view, these second position by arguing for a deep common topics are strictly related to Kondakov’s interest “Byzantine” language spoken by the monuments in the iconography of Byzantine and what has of Balkan painting 43. In this sense, Grabar’s pobeen termed “post-Byzantine” monuments 40. The sition in between the interests and methods of two studies must also be seen in close relation to Kondakov and Millet gave him a place in the inthe interest long promoted by Millet towards the ternational dialogue, presenting new materials oriental and Hellenistic origins of Byzantine art with a two-sided point of view. This point of view forms, and especially to his inquiries into the art deserves further explanation. of the Balkans 41. In the more international sphere In 1924, Grabar, already in France, published of Byzantine studies, Grabar offered a significant an important monograph on the above-mentioned

7a/ Frontpage of André Grabar, Recherches sur les influences orientales dans l’art balkanique, Paris 1928 7 b/ Pl. i, Saint Theodore, Patleina ceramics, Recherches sur les influences orientales dans l’art balkanique, Paris 1928 8 / Frontpage of André Grabar, La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie, Paris 1928 9 / Frontpage of André Grabar, Boyanskata cŭrkva. Architektura – živopis / L’église de Boïana. Architecture – peinture, Sofia 1924

Bojana Church, near Sofia, a sort of Bulgarian Sainte Chapelle, part of the palace of the princes and entirely covered with frescoes [Fig. 9]. The 39 André Grabar, La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie, foreword

40 41

42

43

of Gabriel Millet, 2 vols, Paris 1928; idem, Recherches sur les influences orientales dans l’art balkanique, Paris 1928. See Foletti, From Byzantium (n. 3). Millet had already studied the arts of the Balkans in several publications, e.g., Gabriel Millet, L’ancien art serbe. i. Les Églises, Paris 1919; idem, “Sur les rapports entre l’art italien et l’art byzantin dans les Balkans, au xive siècle”,  in L’Italia e l’arte straniera, (Atti del x Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte in Roma), Rome 1922, pp. 92– 95. This is also in this perspective that Grabar’s studies were perceived, e.g., by Laurent Marcel, “Review of: André Grabar, Recherche sur les influences orientales dans l’art balkanique, Paris 1928”,  Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, viii/2 (1929), pp. 651– 654. On the debate in general, see Carola Jäggi, “Ex oriente lux: Josef Strzygowski und die ‘Orient oder Rom’-Debatte um 1900”,  in Okzident und Orient, Semra Ögel, Gregor Wedekind eds, Istanbul 2002, pp. 91–111; Orient oder Rom? Prehistory, History, and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1880 –1930), Ivan Foletti, Francesco Lovino eds, Brno/Rome 2018.

well-preserved second layer of these, precisely dated to 1259, is of high artistic and historical value [Fig. 10]44. The foreword of the volume was written by the Bulgarian archaeologist Bogdan Filov (1883–1945), then the head of the archaeological museum in Sofia45. He had also been responsible for Grabar receiving a job at the city’s archaeological museum in the 1920s. He would remain famous for later becoming the prime minister responsible for the country’s alliance with Nazi Germany46. In the foreword, Filov expresses the notion of the Byzantine roots of Slavic countries quite clearly, a concept which he underlined as fundamental in Grabar’s monograph: “All these monuments are the product of a same art which, despite the local imprint which was imposed by the national spirit of the country where it developed, had not ceased, in general traits as well as in more recent traditions, to be the manifestation of an artistic activity which found its roots in Byzantium. This explains the great resemblance of artistic monuments in all Balkan countries. […] This unity is best recognizable in religious mural painting 47.”

To Filov’s mind, the “national spirits”of the Balkan countries were united by their Byzantine roots. While I will return to the origins of such an interpretation below, Grabar’s position seems to be more delicate on the matter. From what we can deduce from his writings, Grabar is opposed to the very idea of defining medieval “national schools” in the Balkans, arguing: “I am persuaded, besides, that one cannot prove the existence, in the Middle Ages, of national Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, etc., artistic schools by basing oneself

Balkan art. On the other hand, the painters, who were traveling, with their ateliers on the call of founders of churches or monasteries did not stop at the political or ethnical boundaries of a country. By passing from one town to another, they were not founding durable schools, attached to a specific place 50.” 44 André Grabar, Boyanskata cŭrkva. Architektura – živopis /

45

46 47

48

49

on technical or aesthetic considerations 48.”

Here, it seems Grabar attempts to deconstruct national prejudices, which were so important in the construction of national narratives, after about 1900 but also during the interwar period49. This attitude was already evident in his own introduction to the volume on Bulgarian painting, where he states: “It would be in vain to try to establish in Balkan painting as many schools as there are Christian nations in the peninsula. On the one hand, the fusion of religious and social conceptions, of political and military events, the instability of frontiers, have deeply unified

10 / Archangel of the Annunciation, detail, Boyana Church, 1259

50

L’église de Boïana. Architecture – peinture, foreword of Bogdan Filov, Sofia 1924. The text, on two columns, is in Russian and in French. An article in the first volume of Byzantion on the frescoes of the Bojana Church, in which Grabar highlights iconographical elements, especially those displaying a “transcultural” contact with the Latin world, must also be recalled here: André Grabar,“Un reflet du monde latin dans une peinture balkanique du 13e siècle”, Byzantion, i (1924), pp. 229 –243. Alberto Basciani,“Un archeologo al servizio della monarchia bulgara. La parabola di Bogdan Filov (1940 –44)”,  in Intellettuali versus democrazia. I regimi autoritari nell’Europa sud-orientale (1933–1953), Francesco Guida ed., Rome 2010, pp. 111–157. On Filov’s role in the use of antique peoples in national contexts, see also Tchavdar Marinov, “Ancient Thraces in the Modern Imagination: Ideological Aspects of the Construction of Thracian Studies in Southeast Europe (Romania, Greece, Bulgaria)”, in Entangled Histories (n. 18), pp. 10 –117, sp. pp. 84– 89. Basciani, “Un archeologo” (n. 45). “Tous ces monuments sont le produit d’un même art qui, malgré l’empreinte locale qui lui a été imposée par le génie national du pays où il s’est développé, ne cesse d’être la manifestation, dans ses traits généraux et dans ses traditions les plus récentes, d’une activité artistique dont l’origine se trouvait à Byzance, ce qui explique la grande ressemblance des monuments d’art dans tous les pays balkaniques […] Cette unité est constatée surtout dans la peinture murale religieuse”,  in Grabar, Boyanskata cŭrkva (n. 44). “Je suis persuadé, d’ailleurs, qu’on n’arrivera pas à prouver l’existence, au Moyen Âge, d’écoles d’art nationales bulgare, serbe, grecque, etc., en se fondant sur des considérations d’ordre technique ou esthétique”, André Grabar, “Review of: N. Mavrodinov, Ednokorabnata i krŭstovidnata cŭrkva po bŭlgarskitê zemi do kraja na xiv v. (L’Église à nef unique et l’église cruciforme en pays bulgare jusqu’à la fin du xive s.)”, Byzantion, ix/1  (1934), pp. 438 –439. On the construction of national art histories in the interwar period in the Balkans, see the essays in Balkan Heritages. Negotiating History and Culture, Maria Couroucli, Tchavdar Marinov eds, Farnham 2015 and Entangled Histories (n. 18). For a more global frame, with focus mainly on France and Germany, see also Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national. Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne 1870 –1933, Paris 2012; Éric Michaud, Les invasions barbares. Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art, Paris 2015; Michela Passini, L’œil et l’archive. Une histoire de l’histoire de l’art, Paris 2017, sp. pp. 27–32. “Il serait vain de chercher à établir, dans la peinture balkanique, autant d’écoles qu’il y a de nations chrétiennes dans la péninsule. D’une part, la fusion des conceptions religieuses et sociales, les évènements politiques et militaires, l’instabilité des frontières ont profondément unifié l’art balkanique. D’autre part, les peintres, qui se déplaçaient, avec leurs ateliers, à l’appel des fondateurs d’églises et de monastères, ne s’arrêtaient pas aux limites politiques ou ethniques d’un pays, et, en passant d’une localité dans une autre, ils ne fondaient guère d’écoles durables, attachées à un lieu précis”,  Grabar, La peinture religieuse (n. 39), p. iv.

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Behind the idea of challenging these national prejudices and the idea of local “schools”, however, there seems to be a more intricate narrative in Grabar’s position. This concerns the vast question of Byzantium’s place in the Slavic world. In the same years, the role of Byzantium in the formation of modern nations was widely accepted, varying between three different perspectives: a colonial, a nationalistic, and a “supranational” point of view. Coming from the Russian empire, Grabar could not subscribe fully to the colonial point of view, best represented by Charles Diehl’s 1920 position in his Byzance. Grandeur et décadence51. Here, “Byzantium” is presented as the great illuminator of barbaric nations, the only source of light in the Dark Ages52. But, as highlighted above, Grabar also rejected the national perspective, too strictly related to the formation of nations like Bulgaria. This attitude can be explained by the traditional Russian imperial outlook: as the Romanov Empire was what we would today call “transcultural”, the official perception of “Byzantium” somewhat mirrored this situation53. Until the last year before the revolution, however, the Empire underwent a wave of Russification, supporting implicitly national narratives 54. This framework was, however, broken, for Grabar, by the revolution. Furthermore, he never belonged to these nations, being a Russian émigré passing through them. Grabar’s identity as a Byzantinist in these years is, rather, closely linked to a transnational community of scholars, linked by mutual ties from the beginning of the twentieth century but especially bonded in the experience of emigration. Grabar was an active member of the Kondakov Institute, which had been founded in Prague by a group of Russian émigré Byzantinists in 1927 to honor the memory of their late professor, Nikodim P. Kondakov 55. He entertained regular exchanges with the Prague group, participated in their activities, and had close personal ties with some of its members. It is precisely in this fertile context of an émigré community in Czechoslovakia that the third point of view – the supranational – seems to arise with renewed strength. It is tempting here to see a projection of Grabar’s present into the historical past he was studying. This comes out in some way as he describes the nature of Byzantine

artists, arguing that: “the painters, who were traveling, with their ateliers […] did not stop at the political or ethnical boundaries of a country”56. Here we might see the echo of the Russian émigré community of scholars, not separated by “nations”. We can thus assume that Grabar was transformed, in his perception of the past, by his experience as a migrant having lost his homeland. This led him, I believe, to see the Russian supranational émigré community as a phenomenon united by its cultural background, the heritage of Orthodoxy, its artistic manifestations, and ultimately its shared “Byzantine” roots. Working on “Bulgarian”materials, Grabar was, at this stage of his career, in continuity with the works undertaken by the Kondakov Institute. It is also here that he published, in 1931 – in a series published by the Institute, Zōgraphika – a volume on the Sainte Face of Laon [Figs 11–12] 57. The book, written on a thirteenth-century Eastern “Russian” devotional image which travelled to modern-day France during the Middle Ages seems to resonate strongly with Grabar’s personal history. Even more interestingly, the movement of this image echoes the movement of Russian émigrés, who brought eastern medieval and early modern devotional paintings with them, greatly contributing to the spread and appreciation of “icons” in the West 58. We can just recall that, in the very same year as Grabar’s book, Pavel Muratov’s Primitifs russes was published, aiming precisely to assess the place of Russian artistic culture in medieval and early modern Europe [Fig. 13] 59. In a very different way – though against the backdrop of the same “trend” – Grabar offered a contribution on the meeting of “oriental” images with “Western” devotional practices. As such, the movement of persons and objects transformed not only the scientific landscape, but also the public aesthetic appreciation of the very objects studied in scholarly circles. While Grabar must of course be considered as an individual scholar working in France, he must also be seen as part of an overarching network of émigrés, spread across Europe in the aftermath of Russian 51 Charles Diehl, Byzance. Grandeur et décadence, Paris 1920. 52 Ibidem, sp. chap. ii: “La diffusion de l’orthodoxie et la forma-

tion du monde slave”, pp. 292–310.

11 / Frontpage of André Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon. Le mandylion dans l’art orthodoxe, Prague 1931

12 / Sainte Face of Laon, tempera on wood, Slavic school, 13th century / Cathedral of Laon, treasury of the cathedral

53 On the multi-ethnic dimension of the Russian empire, see, e.g.,

Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung – Geschichte – Zerfall, Munich 1992. On this perception of “Byzantium”,  see Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia (n. 3); see also, e.g., John Meyendorff, “Was There Ever a ‘Third Rome’? Remarks on the Byzantine Legacy in Russia”,  in The Byzantine Tradition after the Fall of Constantinople, John J. Yiannias ed., Charlottesville, va, 1991, pp. 45– 60; Ivanov, “The Second Rome” (n. 6) 54 In general, on the russification, see Theodore R. Weeks, “Russification: Word and Practice 1863–1914”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxlviii/4 (2004), pp. 471–489. 55 For an overview, see Lawrence Hamilton Rhinelander, “Exiled Russian Scholars in Prague: The Kondakov Seminar and Institute”,  Canadian Slavonic Papers, xvi/3 (1974), pp. 331–352; Zuzana Skálová, “Das Prager Seminarium Kondakovianum, später das Archäologische Kondakov-Institut und sein Archiv (1925–1952)”,  Slavica Gandensia, xviii (1991), pp. 21–49; Martin Beißwenger, Das Seminarium Kondakovianum in Prag (1925–1952), M.A. Thesis, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2005 [2001]; Marina Dmitrieva, “Towards a Trans-national History of Russian Culture: The N. P. Kondakov Institute in Prague”, in Transcending the Borders of Countries, Languages, and Disciplines in Russian Émigré Culture, Christoph Flamm et al. eds, Cambridge 2018, pp. 173–198. This topic is developed extensively in Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino, Byzantium or Democracy? Kondakov’s Legacy in Emigration: the Institutum Kondakovianum and André Grabar, 1925–1952, Brno/Rome 2020.

56 Grabar, La peinture religieuse (n. 39), p. iv. 57 André Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon. Le mandylion dans l’art

orthodoxe, Prague 1931.

58 On the phenomenon, see Xenia Muratova, “La riscoperta

delle icone russe e il ‘revival’ bizantino”, in Arti e storia nel Medioevo, vol. iv: Il Medioevo al passato e al presente, Enrico Castelnuovo, Giuseppe Sergi eds, Turin 2004, pp. 589 – 606; Irina L. Kyzlasova, “L’exposition d’icônes russes en Europe et aux usa de 1929 à 1932, en tant que début de la gloire mondiale de la peintre russe ancienne”,  in La Russie et l’Occident (n. 3), pp. 181–196; François-René Martin, “Le moinepeintre et le primitif. L’invention des ‘Primitifs’ russes dans une perspective internationale”, Cahiers du monde russe, liii/2–3 (2012), pp. 476–477; Wendy R. Salmond, “Ellis H. Minns and Nikodim Kondakov’s The Russian Icon (1927)”, in Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art. New Perspectives, Louise Hardiman, Nicola Kozicharov eds, Cambridge 2017, pp. 165–193; On the notion of “icon” and its construction, Ivan Foletti, “L’icona, una costruzione storiografica?: dalla Russia all’Occidente, la creazione di un mito”,  Annali di critica d’arte, xii (2016), pp. 175–194. 59 Paul Muratoff, Trente-cinq primitifs russes, catalogue de la collection Jacques Zolotnitzky, préface de Henri Focillon, Paris 1931; Martin, “Le moine-peintre et le primitif” (n. 58); Muratova, “Pavel Muratov” (n. 3). See also Enrico Castelnuovo, “L’infatuazione per i primitivi intorno al 1900”,  in Arti e Storia (n. 58), pp. 47–54.

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13 / Frontpage of Paul Muratoff, Trente-cinq primitifs russes, Paris 1931

emigration. This milieu contributed greatly to the transformation of the place of Byzantium, both for Slavic nations and as a broader entity, as well as the artistic appreciation and study of Byzantium as such. Grabar’s particularity, which he shared with others in his generation of émigrés, lies precisely in his deep dual formation and progressive acculturation to the French milieu. Here we come to the reflection of Olga Medvedkova, who noted that Grabar was part of a generation of “Occidentalized” Russians – such as Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) or Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) – who transposed Russian thought and science, but in a way were transformed by their emigration to Occidental Europe60. The question of Russian émigré scholars being a pendulum between “Russian” and “Occidental”science is thus crucial. What also seems important is that it is only the actual physical movement of émigrés such as Grabar from East to West, in Grabar’s case, that truly allowed for this synthesis to happen. Acculturation and synthesis

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It is certainly with the volume L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin, published in 1936, that Grabar would

decisively transform his gaze on “Byzantium”, and his approach to art history in general61. In this volume, Grabar proposes a completely new perspective on the development of imperial imagery from Late Antiquity to the later periods of the Byzantine Empire. Special interest is placed on the iconographies and attributes that make imperial images so efficient [Fig. 14a, b]. These questions are ultimately linked to their perception within the Late Antique imperial cult, and the power of images over the “masses” and society. His approach, based on monuments but including historical factors and ultimately situating artworks into their socio-religious milieus, while borrowing from Kondakov and French and German historians, was ground-breaking. It is interesting to note that, according to Grabar’s memoirs, Millet and Perdrizet never saw the interest of this approach, a fact that Grabar attributes to the general generational gap between the scholars62. But many scholars, in several reviews of the book, highlighted the novelty of Grabar’s approach to imperial representation, especially in the affiliation Grabar proposed between imperial images and images of Christ63. This great success, which would open the door to a position in Paris, and to the Collège de France after the war,

14a / Frontpage of André Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin, Paris 1936 14b / Plate xxv of André Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin, Paris 1936

to Grabar, should be attributed, on the one hand, to the methodological renewal brought by Grabar’s opus. But according to Ivan Foletti, Grabar’s “Byzantium” had also been transformed by the French democratic context, especially when considered in direct contrast with other publications on imperial figures in the same interwar period, such as Ernst Kantorowicz’s Frederick the Second 64. Foletti argues that, instead of a mystified imperial individual, Grabar’s emperor becomes a type fully created by symbols and attributes. Foletti compares this to the way the French Presidents of the Republic are typified only by their garments and official attributes, thus suggesting Grabar’s perhaps unintended reaction to the new democratic context on his research65. This is an interesting hypothesis, since for Grabar himself, the greatest achievement of L’Empereur is that he was “[…] able to show the deep symbolic sense of ruler images of different types and uses, while until then they were seen only as ‘portraits’ of individuals”66. The importance of “types” instead of “portraits” is of primarily importance, not only in Grabar’s approach to the image as a signifier, but also for the second stage of his intellectual process, which addresses the role played

by imperial imagery in the creation of Christian imagery. It appears that a methodological transformation is here accompanied by a possible projection of the French images of democratic leader figures onto historical images in the Byzantine empire. While this is perhaps true for the images and their primary aim, that is, representing a function, this is of course not true for the socio-religious role of these images, which Grabar highlights specifically in this book. In contrast to previous studies, which seem to be linked to the émigré dialogue, Grabar emerges here with a series of strong theses, 60 Olga Medvedkova, “André Grabar et la filiation entre l’art

61 62 63 64

65 66

antique, l’art byzantin et russe ancien dans l’historiographie russe”, Revue des études slaves, 87/1 (2016), pp. 95–106, p. 99; in this volume, see also Ekaterina I. Shashlova, “Russian Philosophers in France in the Interwar Period: A Review of Studies of Emigrant Philosophers”,  pp. 32–49. Grabar, L’Empereur (n. 2). Idem, “Esquisse biographique” (n. 14), pp. 32–33. Idem, L’Empereur (n. 2). Ivan Foletti, “How to Write Images about the Medieval World: André Grabar and his Byzantium. The case of L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin (1936)”,  Word & Image, xxxvii (2021), (forthcoming). Ibidem, with bibliography. “Ce livre a connu un grand succès, parce que j’ai pu y montrer le sens symbolique profond des effigies des souverains de type différents et d’usages différents, tandis que jusque là on n’y voyait que des ‘portraits’ d’individus”,  Grabar, “Esquisse biographique” (n. 14), p. 32.

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and as an individual scholar. This individuality, however, must be seen as the result of a transformation of Kondakov’s methods by a French milieu, itself mediated within the new democratic context of Byzantine studies. To conclude, it is also, I believe, precisely from this perspective of progressive acculturation that we should interpret one of Grabar’s fundamental articles from 1945, on Plotinus67. A “Russian” background emerges from the text, notably in the use of concepts indirectly taken from Pavel Florenskij and Sergej Bulgakov’s considerations on “icon” painting68. But interestingly, in the figure of the philosopher, Grabar finds what we might define as a “lay” approach to Late Antique religious and non-religious visual culture. The whole text is a manifesto for the need for a renewed perspective on what ultimately was the beauty of images after the Second World War. But, in using the specific figure of Plotinus, it is not an Orthodox point of view that Grabar wishes to present, nor a message influenced by national issues, but an “a-historical” perspective on Late Antique visuality. In this sense, the idea of a rebirth after the Second World War is linked to the birth of a new aesthetic. It is perhaps no surprise that Plotinus was “rediscovered” and translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino precisely in the humanist circles of fifteenth-century Florence, at a moment later called in historical thought a “Renaissance”69. Grabar also included himself in a long humanist tradition, at the very end of a time of absence of real academic freedom 70. But he used this to reappraise Late Antique and medieval visuality beyond, it seems, national borders. This very choice seems programmatic for the opening article of the newly founded Cahiers archéologiques. Finally, using the figure of the Greek Plotinus in this context to speak about Western and Eastern artwork likewise was a way to unite Grabar’s two worlds, which had ultimately merged into one and the same. Conclusion I have attempted to show the attitude adopted by an art historian in the face of his own emigration and, in turn, what impact this event had on his 140

scholarly work. It would of course be straightforward to interpret Grabar’s scholarly activity over these decades only from the point of view of the immediate historical conditions. However, in these pages, we have seen how the phenomenon of emigration broadly impacted Grabar’s personal scholarship, and the entire field of “Byzantine” studies, between 1917 and 1945. For Grabar personally, this “transformation” can be summarized in three stages: firstly, Grabar, a young Russian scholar, studied “Byzantine” monuments in Bulgaria, a country forming its own nation on the one hand around its powerful Russian neighbor, and on the other around this very fluid “Byzantine” identity. Secondly, after emigrating to France, he presented and mediated these “Bulgarian” materials to a double audience. The international audience, interested in “Byzantine” art around figures such as Millet, was a rather small and united world of scholars. The other audience was the group of émigrés all around the world, who, while continuing to study their subjects of predilection, were trying to assess their place, and Russia’s place, in a new world. Finally, Grabar’s studies themselves ultimately became the meeting point. Rather than choosing an “inner exile” or a refuge into his Russian past, circumstances forced him to be proactive in adapting to new contexts. Kondakov’s pioneering methodology, mediated by French scholarship, became the fertile ground after the Second World War for a cutting-edge approach to medieval monuments and architecture, brought into the new international framework by Grabar.  67 André Grabar, “Plotin et les origines de l’esthétique médié­

vale”,  Cahiers archéologiques, i (1945), pp. 15–34.

68 See Vittorio Strada, “Icona e anti-icona: armonia e caos nella

spiritualità russa”, in Il mondo ed il sovra-mondo dell’icona, Sante Graciotti ed., Florence 1998, pp. 71– 81; Palladino, “André Grabar, Plotinus” (n. 2), pp. 32–46. 69 Henri D. Saffrey, “Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus”, Renaissance Quarterly, xlix/3 (1996), pp. 488 –508; on the notion, see the classic Wallace K. Fergurson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation, Cambridge, ma, 1948. 70 On humanistic traditions on Neoplatonism, notably around figures such as Panofsky, Chastel or Kristeller, see Stéphane Toussaint, “‘My Friend Ficino’: Art History and Neopla­ tonism from Intellectual to Material Beauty”,  Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, lix/2 (2017), pp. 147–173.

summary Transformace středověkého umění na cestě ze SanktPetěrburgu do Paříže Život a dílo Andrého Grabara mezi lety 1917 a 1945

André Nikolajevič Grabar (1896–1990) je dnes oceňován jako jeden u nejdůležitějších badatelů dvacátého století v oblasti středověkých dějin umění. Jeho cesta do emigrace vedla z Ruska přes Bulharsko a než se stal slavným francouzským historikem umění, přestál mnohé zvraty osudu. Zkušenost emigrace hluboce přetvořila Grabarův pohled na jeho vlast i na studia středověkého a „byzantského“ umění. K této proměně došlo v období mezi lety 1917 a 1945, kdy obor dějin umění procházel důležitými a zdánlivě protichůdnými změnami, které jej směrovaly jak k internacionalizaci, tak k nacionalismům. V těchto klíčových letech se Grabar stal ideálním mediátorem mezi rodným ruským prostředím a francouzskou společností, do níž se akulturoval.

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photographic credits

Copyright rules K autorským právům In the matter of copyright, every author is responsible for the illustrations published. In general, Convivium follows § 31 of the law no. 121/2000 Coll. (Copyright Act), where in paragraph 1 c explicitly states: “Copyright is not infringed by anybody who uses the work while teaching for illustration purposes or during scientific research, without seeking to achieve direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage and without exceeding the extent adequate to the given purpose; however, if possible, the name of the author, unless the work is an anonymous work, or the name of the person under whose name the work is being introduced in public and the title of the work and source, shall always be indicated.” Ve věci autorských práv ilustrací je každý autor odpovědný za publikované ilustrace. Obecně se ale Convivium řídí ust. § 31 zákona č. 121/2000 Sb. (autorský zákon), kde je v odst. 1, písm. c) výslovně řečeno: „Do práva autorského nezasahuje ten, kdo užije dílo při vyučování pro ilustrační účel nebo při vědeckém výzkumu, jejichž účelem není dosažení přímého nebo nepřímého hospodářského nebo obchodního prospěchu, a nepřesáhne rozsah odpovídající sledovanému účelu; vždy je však nutno uvést, je-li to možné, jméno autora, nejde-li o dílo anonymní, nebo jméno osoby, pod jejímž jménem se dílo uvádí na veřejnost, a dále název díla a pramen.“

I. FOLETTI – Figs 1, 8, Department of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; Figs 2, 3, 7, private collection; Fig. 4, Nikodim P. Kondakov, Makedonia, Saint Petersburg 1909; Fig. 5, Memorial of National Literature, in Prague, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov, č. Přír: 165/42, 28 ll; Fig. 6a, b, Nikodim Kondakov, Příspěvky k dějinám středověkého umění a kultury, Prague 1929; Fig. 9, from Byzantinoslavica; Fig. 10, from Nikolay Andreyev, A Moth on the Fence. Memoirs of Russia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Western Europe, Kingstonupon-Thames 2009; Fig. 11, Anna Kelblová, Petr Vronský, Center for Early Medieval Studies, Masaryk University, Brno. E. SHASHLOVA – Fig. 1, from Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore 1957; Fig. 2, Bibliothèque nationale de France, photo from Atelier Hanni Schwarz, bnf, dép. des Estampes et de la Photographie, Zj 1 4, fonds Kojève, from Hommage à Alexandre Kojève: Actes de la “Journée A. Kojève” du 28 janvier 2003 [online], Florence de Lussy ed., Paris 2007, p. 140; Fig. 3, from Emmanuel Levinas, La compréhension de la spiritualité dans les cultures française

et allemande, Paris 2014, cover; Fig. 4a, b, from Journal Logos,

from periodicals Golos, Golos Truda, Informacionnyj bjulleten’

mcmx /1 (1910), cover and contents; Fig. 5, from Revue de

Rossijskogo fašistskogo dviženija, Molodoe slovo, Trud, Rus’, Public

métaphysique et de morale, xlii/4 (1935), cover; Fig. 6, from

Library “Ivan Vazov” in Plovdiv and Regional Library “Stilian

Recherches philosophiques, vi (1936–1937), Paris 1988, cover;

Chilingirov” in Shumen. A. PALLADINO – Fig. 1, Archives du

Fig. 7, L’émigration russe – Revues et recueils, 1920–1980. Index

Collège de France; Figs 2, 5, 10, private collection; Fig. 3, Photo

général des articles, Paris 1988. J. MILBACH – Figs 1–3, 6–10,

by Anna Kelblová, Center for Early Medieval Studies, Masaryk

from Zinaida Serebrjakova, 1884–1967, Moscow: Tretyakov

University, Brno; Fig. 4, pnp, Fond Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov,

Gallery 2017, pp. 105, 181, 111, 159, 163, 145, 169, 166; Figs 4–5,

Fotografie, No. přír 165/42; Fig. 6, École Pratique des Hautes

Pavel Pavlinov, Zinaida Serbrjakova. Parižskij period, 1924–1967:

Études, Photothèque Gabriel Millet, Collection chrétienne et

živopis‘, etjudy, nabroski, Paris: Fondation Serebriakoff 2014.

byzantine – d 5116; Fig. 7a, b, André Grabar, Recherches sur les

K. FOLETTI – Figs 1–3, 5, from Helene Iswolsky, No Time to

influences orientales dans l’art balkanique, Paris 1928; Fig. 8,

Grieve, Philadelphia 1985, pp. 24, 141, 143, 205; Fig. 4, Hélène

André Grabar, La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie, Paris 1928;

Iswolsky, Femmes soviétiques, Bruges/Paris 1937, cover; eadem,

Fig. 9, André Grabar, Boyanskata cŭrkva. Architektura – živopis

L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviètique, Bruges/Paris 1936, cover;

/ L’église de Boïana. Architecture – peinture, Sofia 1924; Fig. 11,

Fig. 6, Helene Iswolsky, Soul of Russia, London 1944, cover;

André Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon. Le mandylion dans l’art

Fig. 7, from “Of Books and Bookmen”, Michigan Catholic Weekly

orthodoxe, Prague 1931; Fig. 12, Cathedral of Laon, treasury

Newspaper of the Archidiocese of Detroit, May 1949. C. PICHON-

of the cathedral; Fig. 13, Paul Muratoff, Trente-cinq primitifs

BONIN – Figs 1–3, 5, 7, Andrej Eremin for the Sterenberg family;

russes, Paris 1931; Fig. 14a, b, André Grabar, L’Empereur dans

Figs 4, 6, 8, Flammarion. J. LJUCKANOV – Figs 1–15, scans

l’art byzantin, Paris 1936.

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selected publications of the centre for early medieval studies, department of art history, masaryk university. all publications are available at www.viella.it. Byzantium or Democracy? Kondakov's Legacy in Emigration: The Institutum Kondakovianum and André Grabar, 1925–1952 Ivan Foletti & Adrien Palladino, 2020 25€ Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia 1918–1968 Between Slavs, Germans, and Totalitarian Regimes Ivan Foletti & Adrien Palladino eds, 2019 25€ From Kodakov to Hans Belting Library Emigration and Byzantium – Bridges between Worlds Ivan Foletti, Francesco Lovino, Veronika Tvrzníková eds, 2018 20€

Plotinus and the Origins of Medieval Aesthetics André Grabar / translation & introduction by Adrien Palladino, 2018 24€ Migrating Art Historians on the Sacred Ways Reconsidering Medieval French Art through the Pilgrim's Body Ivan Foletti, Katarína Kravčíková, Adrien Palladino, Sabina Rosenbergová eds, 2018 70€ The Mystic Cave A History of the Nativity Church at Bethlehem Michele Bacci, 2017 70€

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