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Reviews by:
S. Frederick Starr
(Johns Hopkins)
Susan Buck-Morss
(Cornell)
Boris Groys
(HfG)
John Bowlt
(USC) Jean-Luis Cohen
(NYU) |
Vladimir Paperny’s volume on Soviet architecture
is, very simply, the grandest and most provocative synthesis on
Russian culture to be written in any language in the last generation. “Synthesis” because
it put a firm seal on the Manichean conflict between Good and Evil,
or between Evil and Good, that had dominated Soviet debate over
culture since the October Revolution. One version
of this view presented true revolutionaries in the 1920s, who were
succeeded by relentless counter-revolutionaries during the years
1930-1954, only to raise their glorious banner once more in the
1960s. The alternative version accepted the same chronology
but reversed the nouns and adjectives.
Instead of this glib progression, Paperny proposed
a seven decade-long civil war among the victors of 1917,
with each party adopting a total (and intellectually totalitarian)
approach to architecture and society and each party defining itself
as the complete antithesis of the other. These Siamese twins,
whom Paperny dubbed Culture One and Culture Two, remained locked
in mortal combat throughout the Soviet era until the entire organism
of which they were a part expired in 1991, if not earlier.
Paperny’s focus is on architecture and urban
planning but his argument could be extended to music, literature,
or clothing design. And if he concentrates on the Soviet era, he
shows how the dichotomy had rich antecedents extending back at
least to the seventeenth century. A particular strength of
Paperny’s
study is that it traces the outlines of an analogous life-and-death
struggle in the time of Peter the Great. But he does not stop there. In
a few telling remarks Paperny suggests that at some future point
the same pared world-views are bound to reappear, with the awesome
might of the state once more supporting Culture Two, the culture
of hierarchy, verticality, epic struggle, the hero,… and
of brutality.
Is all this merely clever, more
suggestive than real? This charge might be sustained had Paperny
not pored through the entire written record of his subject. No
one else has come close to him in the thoroughness of his research
on Soviet architecture. Having done so, Paperny then allowed
the documents to speak eloquently and in their own voice. As a result, his book set a standard
that anyone challenging his conclusions would have to meet. As
of now, no one has stepped forward to do this.
Russian and Western writing on
Soviet architecture has been divided between moralist-romantics
and stamp collectors, i.e., those who enthuse over one movement
or another and those who merely pile up data. Much the
same can be said of writings on earlier Russian architecture.
A final virtue of Paperny’s fine study
is that he recognizes architecture as the ultimate human activity,
combining ideals of beauty, government and society, and practical
utility in a way unequalled by literature, music, or the fine arts.
By doing so, Paperny broadened and deepened the way
we view Russian history as a whole. |