Contenu du sommaire : L'avant-garde russe : un dossier

Leonid Heller, E. Zamiatin's prose and the Russian avant-garde. Pursuing the investigation of the work of E. Zamiatin (cf. CMRS, XXII, 2-3, 1981), the present article endeavors to clarify the relations between the style of Us and the characteristics pertaining to the avant-garde of the 1910-1920' s in connection with plastic arts. These relations of which the article gives a preliminary classification are noticeable at all the levels of the novel. They constitute an important aspect of this work and are organized in a complex structure. The structure in question which is a result of Zamiatin's research on the subject of the "synthesis of arts" and of his attitude - both receptive and polemical with regard to the new artistic trends - can be defined as the constructivist method in prose.

Any Barda, The role played by Minskii in the revival of intellectual trends at the end of the nineteenth century. Minskii, considered by decadent and symbolist poets as one of their intellectual guides, has played a major part in the formation of this trend. Rejecting the materialistic and scientific theories which were at the basis of populist Utopia, Minskii proposed towards the 1890' s his meonism, a new and complex approach to the absolute. This concept, re-interpreted and developed, will become the starting point of the new poetical research.

Georges Nivat, A cure by the fantastic or Mikhail Bulgakov. The author takes stock of the principal interpretations of The master and Margaret the number of which greatly increased in the course of these last years. He adopts first of all the view according to which the work in question is a novel with a "mytho- logistic trend" that is a sum of mythologèmes destined to reflect the repetitive nature of human history (to which corresponds the fundamental weariness of Bulgakov when faced with history). The "apocryphization" of history is also one of the main elements of the book intended to fight any form of canonization. The incomplete plot, the appeal to Pushkin's refuge - neither hell nor paradise - are characteristic of this quest for rest within a world where no one is really settled. The article ends by a summary of neonationaiist interpretations of Bulgakov in the present-day USSR.

K.S. Malevich, Light and colour. We are giving below, published for the first time in the original language - Russian - three lectures of the founder of Suprematism addressed to the students of the "formal-theoretical section" of GINKHUK in Leningrad. The relevant manuscripts are preserved at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. These philosophical texts enounce the problem of the authenticity (podlinnost1) of the couple "light-colour" culminating in the conclusion that neither the light of the sun nor the light of learning really exist and that colour is only a phenomenon of the "prism of culture". The texts formulate also the essential theological problem, the "question of God". Though because of adverse circumstances, Malevich expressed his conceptions in a somewhat disguised way, we find here a passionate quest for God, for "non— objective God". Malevich conceives a new figure of God, a new relation to divinity.

Jean-Claude Marcadé, The correspondence of A. A. Smirnov with S.I. Terk (Sonia Delaunay). Sept. 16, l904-Apr.8, 1905. Little is known of the formative years of the painter Sonia Delaunay before her marriage with Robert Delaunay in 1910 which marked her entrance into the history of European avant-garde art. The letters of the young student, the future renowned professor of the St. Petersburg University, A. A. Smirnov, of which we publish below the first set, underline the artistic choices of a young Russian girl, then called Sofia Il'inichna Terk, who came to Europe to study the art of painting. Though we do not have the letters of S.I. Terk, those of A. A. Smirnov witness the great interest with which the future Sonia Delaunay was following all that was being done in Russia where the movement of Mir iskusstva was laboriously creating the new art. The letters of A. A. Smirnov, characterized by a great stylistic agility, give us also the picture of artistic and political life in Russia at the time of the 1905 revolution.

T.N. Glebova, Recollections of P.N. Filonov. A former student of Filonov, T.N. Glebova, who, from 1925 on belonged to the group of "Masters of analytic Art", communicates valuable information on the teaching of Filonov and analyzes the main principles of his pictorial theory. These memoirs analyze with sensitivity, passion and precision the "School of Filonov" such as it existed in the 1920's and in the early 1930's, that is an absolutely original movement belonging to the Russian European avant-garde.

Temira Pachmuss, Extracts from the archives. Serge Charchoune, a Russian painter and writer. Serge Charchoune (1888-1976), the first Russian Dadaist poet, was also a modernist painter. In 1921, he authored a long Dadaist work, Foule immobile : poème, and later published several unusual books in Russian, among them Stories unpleasant (1964), Sky à la Bell: a poem 1919-1965 (1965), Lighthouseless: four landscapes (1969), and an artistic portrayal of Charchoune's own alter ego, Mr. Longface: from the epopee "A hero is more fascinating than the novel" (1961). As the unusual titles suggest, the plots are indeed unorthodox. The "freed" contents of the works found curious expressions in Charchoune's equally unusual arrangement of halftone, colors and lines in his painting. An abstract artist, he succeeded in conveying the imperceptible and the inexpressible. His art requires an onlooker's participation, who is expected to complete the painting himself - through his own imagination and understanding of its subtle interplay of colors, lines, and musical notes. As his subject, Charchoune used various symphonies of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and other composers. Charchoune was a frequent visitor at the Merezhkovskys ' Sunday literary salons in Paris, where he came to know Greta Gerell, a Swedish artist and a close friend of Zinaida Hippius. This article is based on their correspondence which reveals Charchoune as a remarkable artist, poet, and man.