5 Iron Flowers: Proletkult Creation in the Arts
I am not in gentle nature
Among the blooming bowers.
Under the smokey sky in the factory
I forged iron flowers.
Mikhail Gerasimov,
"Zheleznye tsvety"
This poem by Mikhail Gerasimov exemplifies the best-known genre of Proletkult artistic practice during the early revolutionary years. Its proletarian imagery was meant to set it apart from the art of the bourgeoisie, which was dedicated to gentle nature. Instead Gerasimov exalted iron flowers as a uniquely working-class image of beauty. The laborer in the midst of the factory milieu was both the subject and the creator of this new form.
Not all Proletkult productions evoked the life and labor of the working class in such a simple and direct way. Proletarian art, like proletarian class identity, was given many different meanings. Three very broad understandings competed with one another during the Civil War years. The revolutionary romanticism of proletarian artists such as Gerasimov certainly constituted the most distinctive direction. Creations ideally would be by, for, and about workers and would employ
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images drawn from factory life. Although best developed in literature, this approach also flourished in music, in the form of "revolutionary hymns," in posters and paintings, and in plays that depicted the heroic struggles of the working class.
The Proletkult also attracted a small but influential group of avant-garde artists who were determined to break with the stylistic conventions of bourgeois art and culture. This trend was most noticeable in the visual arts, where important groups rejected "easel art" and "museum art" altogether and devised programs to unify cultural creation with factory production. Experimental theater, which turned against realistic methods, and experimental music, where artists devised new tonal systems, also gained small followings. Here the definition of proletarian culture was largely oppositional; these creations, in theory at least, marked a radical departure from prerevolutionary artistic schools.
By far the most common activity in Proletkult cultural sectors, however, was to offer training and education in Russia's prerevolutionary cultural heritage. In this task the organization continued the work of educational societies, people's houses, and cooperatives formed long before 1917. According to this definition of proletarian culture the Proletkult would bring culture, especially the elite kul'tura of the nineteenth century intelligentsia, to the laboring masses.
None of these approaches represented a clearly defined artistic school. Those writers and painters who praised the factory milieu in their work accused one another of pursuing revolutionary content at the expense of revolutionary form. Avant-gardists faced the charge that their experiments forced culture out of the average worker's reach. And even those who saw the organization as an educational society did not agree on the proper content of the cultural heritage they hoped to transmit.
The movement's eclecticism disturbed many participants, yet it was precisely this diversity that contributed to its remarkable popularity. The Proletkult was simultaneously van-
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guardist and populist, agitational and educational, a continuation of prerevolutionary trends and an attempt to make something entirely new. Its programs gave stenographers poetry recitations, house painters piano lessons, and machinists the chance to become professional actors. At its most utopian the organization promised to break down the barriers between the cultured elite and the uncultured masses. It offered the optimistic message that even the humblest member of society could become a cultural creator and help to articulate what the new culture of revolutionary Russia was to be.