The Memoirs of Nikolai Punin in Italian. A very classic. Thanks to the Prokhorov Foundation and to Memorial, whose activity can never be praised enough, a very classic of art memoirs has been released in Italian. It is about Art in revolt. Petrograd 1917 by Nikolaj Punin, translated and edited by Nadia Cigognini, published by Guerini e Associati with goWare for the digital edition. These are the memoirs, even if the author does not want them to be called that, of one of the protagonists as an impresario, writer and art critic in one of the most unforgettable seasons of great Russian art. These memoirs cover the years 1916 1917 during which the Russian revolution broke out and the foundations of a new art were laid. Punin's project was to cover the period 1916-1925, but only the first 12 chapters of the memoirs relating to 1916 and 1917 have been found in the archives. These are the years, as Punin writes, in which "we are the ones who made the 'history' and here we want to explain why we made it”.
The parable of Punin
In collected memoirs The art in revolt, Punin reconstructs the historical and political events of which he is a direct witness, the milieu, even physical, in which the aesthetic foundations of the new art are born, which Punin allegedly defended rigorously throughout his career as a critic, public official and citizen. Punin was a key figure in the Russian art world. Extremely attentive to new trends, sensitive to the charm of the avant-garde and to innovative and experimental theories so as to deserve the nickname of "futurist" by artists and art historians, he emerged as one of the most refined, influential and erudite intellectuals of the time of he. In 1918 Anatoli Lunacharsky, Minister of Education, appointed him People's Commissar for the Russian Museum and the Hermitage. Disgraced in the Stalin era, accused of formalism and anti-Soviet activities, he was interned in a gulag where he died in 1953. His legacy is enormous. It is thanks to Putin that even today in Russian museums you can find a lot of Western art branded by the Soviet authorities of the Stalinist era as degenerate art and therefore worthy of concealment if not destruction. We are pleased to offer our readers the introduction to the full text of the book, which spanned the period 1916 to 1925. Enjoy your reading!
We know what we want
This is by no means a memoir, although it is devoted to the events of the past, but rather a book affirming the future. My intention is to affirm my individual point of view on the events that took place between 1916 and 1925 and on their significance in the light of the future. I would like force readers to evaluate the past through our criteria; with this I do not claim that ours are the only authentic or even the best criteria. What I can say in defense of these criteria is that they are true criteria which correspond to an organic system of interactions, which are not a random set of opinions and impressions, that's all. Events shake us and continue to shake us, yet despite everything we don't feel defeated; although we have not managed to submit them to our will, we have been able to dominate them and continue to dominate them through our thinking; we knew what we wanted and we know what we want. In our age this does not happen often. The fact is said to be an intruder and it is true, but intruders politely show themselves at the door. And we know well what means are used to put the facts at the door; otherwise we could not have participated in the Revolution.
Those fabulous years
In short, I would like to state that I do not intend to be objective and that the evolution of events described below, if it can be defined as history, is only so in the sense in which we are the ones who made "history" and here we are concerned with explaining how and why we made it. In this regard I would like to quote Benedetto Croce who in his essay On the Scientific Form of Historical Materialism wrote: «Labriola... did he not tell me himself once that Engels was still waiting for other discoveries that would help us understand this mystery that we we do ourselves, what is history?». In this book I would like to recount the events that marked our artistic life in the period preceding the Revolution and above all the Revolution itself at the time when the Narkompros Department of Figurative Arts was established; as well as those "fabulous years" when the arts sections were established in the district soviets of people's deputies and these sections were crowded with "futurists". I connect these events to a theme that I would define as «the struggle for a realistic culture of art». But will I be right? Can we really believe that realistic culture was the true protagonist of these events? And again, can we think that in the revolutionary sections of the Department of the figurative arts, behind all those names, at least half of which are now forgotten, a powerful realism lived and acted? I have no doubts about it because, if there is a sense and a unity in the world, the only sense of that specific group of phenomena was embodied in realism. It was precisely realism that marked the actions of that group of artists and ensured that neither the individual infatuations nor the personal interests of some influenced events but something that existed independently of them and that channeled their fragmentary and contradictory efforts towards a single purpose, perhaps resulting in each of them in a personal drama because that purpose was never achieved.
All in the same direction
It must be said that the artists who assumed the heavy responsibility for the fate of Soviet art during the years of war communism were very divided and that many of them had met for the first time after the October days. Where did that mutual understanding come from then, that enthusiasm that drove them all to act in the same direction? It is objected that this was «futurism» and that this was valid for the artists who had joined the futurist movement, the «futurists», but this is not the case. First of all, "futurism", in the literal sense of the term, did not exist, or hardly any, in Russia, and furthermore, throughout those years the most "futuristic" groups had remained on the sidelines, with the exception of Mayakovsky alone. However, Mayakovsky did not represent the visual arts movements to which we mostly intended to refer; and then it would not be the case to compare such a high-sounding name to the pure one of Chlebnikov… Many of us owe everything to Chlebnikov, while for us Mayakovsky represents the LEF.
An unavoidable necessity
Neither Futurism nor the Futurists created the art of the War Communism period. After all, how could it have happened that a single current or individual personalities held such a prerogative then? The art of that era was the product of the artistic culture of the past; it carried in itself an "undeferrable necessity", a historical ineluctability and was the bearer of the revolutionary impetus just as was every soviet of people's deputies. Sometimes I have the impression, however improbable, that if there hadn't been the Revolution, the currents of the left would not have existed either: they would have germinated within it and then emerged in more or less traditional forms. The whole leftist matrix of the art of that time was perhaps only a sign of his immaturity. I know that some party comrades would accuse Lunacharsky of having spawned "Futurist canaillery". The Marxists! But could it have happened otherwise?... After all, we'll focus on this later and it's better to let the facts speak for themselves... So it wasn't so much Futurism, but something more profound that was generated by the Revolution and nestled in Russian artistic culture itself; something that had long been simmering there, smothered by the abnormal course of history with all its pent-up fury… Sometimes it seemed as if it had been the will of a people of many millions and a terrible impulse to produce an infinitely vital realistic creation: it was this the true content of the art of that era. We were in 1916 and no one expected such a heavy and prolonged war.
Nikolai Punin (1888–1953), critic, theorist and art historian, is a key figure in the cultural life of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. After attending the Tsarskoe Selo high school, he graduated in art history at the University of Petersburg in 1914, but already in 1913, while still a student, he was invited to collaborate with the Christian antiquities department of the Russian Museum and made his debut in the prestigious Apollon magazine , directed by S. Makovsky, the first to discover his brilliant talent. From that moment he began to publish a dense series of articles and essays ranging from ancient Russian painting to Japanese graphics to European art. In 1917 he joined the so-called "left front" of artists who fought against the reactionary and conservative component of the artistic world for the affirmation of the foundations of the new art. In 1918 he was appointed by Lunacharsky as head of the Department of visual arts and commissioner of the Russian Museum and of the Hermitage and he passionately dedicated himself to museum activity and teaching, actively participating in public life, but already by the end of the 1949s his works are subjected to censorship. From the 1953s the accusations of formalism against him intensified and Punin became the object of a violent persecution campaign. In XNUMX he was interned in a concentration camp near Vorkuta where he died in XNUMX. The revolution had thus closed accounts with one of his most erudite and refined intellectuals.
