Due to its stark difference from the Italian movement of the same name, the application of this term in the Russian context is often confusing, particularly in relation to the so-called Cubo-Futurist branch, which enlisted most of the avant-garde artists and poets. Different trends, that the critical literature often joins together under the vague and historically motivated terminological umbrella of the "Futurist movement" constituted the most noticeable element of the early avant-garde in Russia, and the most important for our discussion. This indicates a paradoxical contradiction in the movement, which was unwilling to build a dominant school or style controlled by one leading aesthetic system. In the context of the early Russian avant-garde, we can see this "principle of anarchy" as an essential feature of an open and diverse aesthetic phenomenon that those involved did not even articulate until that brief period came to an end. By discovering the new laws, art should rather lead to an even greater, more conscious freedom-to different new possibilities. But this theory should also not turn its back on other courageous pathfinders. Only this principle can lead us to a glorious future, to a new Renaissance. The principle of anarchy in art should be welcomed. Herein lies the great hope for future musical theory, as well as for the other arts a theory that does not want to promulgate the tedious "one can" or "one cannot," but does say, "In this case one can use this, or that, or yet another method." These methods will perhaps be related to earlier ones, but they will possibly reveal much more efficient possibilities than those that are made available to us by the unconscious feeling only. To me, the engagement of the conscious element seems to be necessary, absolutely necessary, but only to enrich creative methods i.e., only if this conscious element provides new possibilities, discovers new worlds. In 1912, the Russian composer Thomas von Hartmann, a friend and follower of Kandinsky's and a member of the Blaue Reiter group, tried to justify the principle of anarchy in art as a new methodology, revising widespread interpretations of Bergsonian ideas founded on the primacy of intuition and the unconscious in creative work: ![]() VasiliiKandinsky, Nikolai Kulbin, and Voldem?rs Matvejs (best known by his Russian pen name, Vladimir Markov) used them more persistently than others in their theoretical writings to valorize the new aesthetic system. The sharp, pronounced break with previous European cultural traditions in an attempt to create a new self-identity, and to see the world anew, as if for the first time, as "other," distinguishes the ideology of the Russian avant-garde from that of earlier "Westernized" modernist movements.Īlthough the words "anarchy" and "anarchic" are to be found in the vocabularies of the artists and poets of this period, neither the avant-gardists nor their critics directly treated them as aesthetic terms. Russian poetry followed a similar path: from Symbolism to all the possible brands of Futurism, toward zaum, the visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. "It's enough to mention several 'inventors' of non-representational art, such as Kandinsky, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, and Matiushin, in order to see that each and every one of them is absolutely autonomous, independent, and unique." "No country at the early stage of the avant-garde movement produced such a wide array of personalities who differed from one another in significant ways," Dmitri Sarabianov, a prominent scholar of Russian art, emphasizes. In less than a decade, Russian painting expanded stylistically from Impressionism and Symbolism to Neoprimitivism, Cubism, and Futurism (and Cubo-Futurism as well), and aspired toward new developments in nonrepresentational art such as Suprematism. ![]() The years 1910-18 in Russian avant-garde culture stand out for their remarkable intensity and concentration, especially in regard to the visual arts.
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