[52] August 12, 1919, Proletkult central committee meeting, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 3, l. 69.
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cal staff. Some were drawn by the organization's class-based ideology and saw their own participation as a way to prove their loyalty to the victorious working class. Others perceived the Proletkult as an educational institution similar to those popular before the revolution where they could put their talents to work in order to serve the people. And finally, many came to the organization just to find employment. The Proletkult had wages and rations to offer, and that alone was a very compelling motivation during the hard years of the Civil War.
"Who didn't teach in the Proletkult!" exclaimed the actor Maksim Shtraukh. His years as a student in the Moscow Proletkult theater brought him into contact with Stanislavsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, and many other illustrious theatrical personages.[53] Some of Russia's finest writers taught literature courses, including Andrei Belyi, Valeryi Briusov, Nikolai Chuzhak, Nikolai Gumilev, and Vladislav Khodasevich.[54] In music the Proletkult had the services of Aleksandr Kastalskii, Reinhold Glière, and Arsenii Avraamov.[55] Art classes were led by avant-gardists like Liubov Popova and Olga Rozanova and more traditional figures like the academician Timofei Katurkin.[56]
Many of these gifted artists and teachers were enthusiastic
[53] M. Shtraukh, "Dva Sergeia Mikhailovicha," Teatr , no. 12 (1966), pp. 69–72, quotation p. 69.
[54] On Andrei Belyi see "Literaturnaia studiia," Gudki , no. 2 (1919), p. 30; on Valeryi Briusov see the protocols of national Proletkult presidium meetings, December 5 and 31, 1919, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 92, 95; on Nikolai Chuzhak see V. G. Puzyrev," 'Proletkul't' na Dal'nem Vostoke," in Iz istorii russkoi i zarubezhnoi literatury , ed. V. N. Kasatkin, T. T. Napolona, and P. A. Shchekotov (Saratoy, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 93–96; on Nikolai Gumilev see Griadushchee , no. 7/8 (1919), p. 30; and on Vladislav Khodasevich see V. Khodaserich, Literaturnye stat'i i vospominaniia (New York, 1954), pp. 325–31.
[55] Muzykal'naia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1973–1981).
[56] On Popova and Rozanova see Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, 1983), pp. 255, 259; on Katurkin see N. A. Milonov, "O deiatel'nosti Tul'skogo Proletkul'ta," in Aktual'nye voprosy istorii literatury , ed. Z. I. Levinson, N. A. Milonov, and A. F. Sergeicheva (Tula, 1969), p. 158.
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supporters of the Proletkult and came with the express purpose of serving the working class and the revolution. As a music teacher in Kologriv explained, the Proletkult gave the intelligentsia a chance to pay off a centuries-old debt to the people by opening up the doors of art to them.[57] The same tone pervades the memoirs of Aleksandr Mgebrov, who headed the Petrograd Proletkult theater with his wife, Viktoriia Chekan. For Mgebrov participation in the Proletkult ended "long ordeals and a dissatisfying separation from the masses." With romantic enthusiasm he recalled, "Once again, as in 1905 when I stood with the workers on the barricades, I found myself side by side with the working class in its grandiose struggle for the future."[58] The Proletkult offered a dual advantage to sympathetic intellectuals like Mgebrov. It allowed them to settle past accounts and also let them feel as if they were helping to build the future.
Of course not everyone was so zealous. Prince Sergei Volkonskii, a lecturer in the Moscow Proletkult, did not attempt to conceal his doubts about the theoretical premises of the organization. Volkonskii had been the director of the imperial theaters before October; he lost his post and all his property in the wake of the revolution. His lectureship in the Proletkult was just one of many small jobs he took in order to survive. In his memoirs, written after he emigrated to the West, Volkonskii admitted that he was very impressed by the eager attention of his working-class students, but he never believed that there could be anything like a uniquely proletarian art form.[59] In the opinion of the actor Igor Ilinskii, who was briefly a participant in the Moscow provincial organization, "Only a very small group of theater people went to the
[57] From a Kologriv Proletkult report, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1278, l. 13.