Stephanie Sandler: The Russian Avant Garde’s Enigmatic Misfit, Elena Guro

In this episode of Houghton75, we speak with Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, about one relatively unknown and enigmatic artist from the time of the Russian Revolution, 100 years ago this year. Featuring special guest host Christine Jacobson.

Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library’s 75th anniversary celebrations at http://houghton75.org/hist-75h

Music

Historic reproducing piano rolls from The Pianola Institute

Podcast Transcript and Music Notes

[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra]

Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.
Deidre Lynch: It’s fascinating.
Stephen Greenblatt: It’s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!
Stephanie Sandler: Plus it’s cool.

James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I’m James Capobianco.

Hannah Ferello (HF): And I’m Hannah Ferello.

[end music]

JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we’re celebrating the library’s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.

HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton’s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit houghton75.org for more information.

JC: For this episode, we brought in a special guest host: our former colleague, Christine Jacobson. Take it away Christine!

[background music: Poème, Op. 32, no. 1 by Alexander Scriabin. Recorded on the Welte recording piano by Alexander Scriabin (Moscow, February 1910). Played back on a Steinway Welte grand piano (London, October 2007). Copyright: Pianola Institute, 2007. Used by permission.]

Christine Jacobson (CJ): While Houghton Library may be celebrating its 75th anniversary, 2017 marks the anniversary of another significant event: the centennial of the Russian revolution. This period of Russian history sparked not only significant upheaval in the political sphere but also in Russia’s cultural capital of St. Petersburg. Dozens of competing and overlapping artistic and literary movements emerged, each seeking in their own way to cast off the influence of their predecessors.

The work of one relatively unknown and enigmatic artist from this period is featured in Houghton’s Masterclass exhibit. Elena Guro’s 1912 play, Ossenyi Son’ or Autumn Dream looks ordinary at first, until you take a second look. I sat down with Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stephanie Sandler, to do just that.

[end music]

Stephanie Sandler (SS): If you look at the title page of this book, you see that it has what seems to be an inscription, and that it is signed by somebody whose name is something like Eleonora von Notenberg. And it says that this book is dedicated to her son. What’s amazing about that is that that name, which is not her name, her name is Elena Guro, that name was – it’s a name that she took for this volume, but scholars on seeing this thought “oh my goodness, that must be her real name.” And so there are histories of Russian literature and things that have been written about her which say that Elena Guro is a pseudonym and that that is her actual name.

In addition, the book is dedicated to the memory of her dead son. And so you can read in histories about what a devoted mother she was and how the loss of her son was so meaningful to her. And the image of the child is very important in her work, and so a connection to children made a great deal of sense. Although the child in this book is a pretty grown-up teenager, a young man. But even so, the idea that this was a grieving mother became part of the mythology of Elena Guro. But there was no son. This is something that is part of the myth of this book. This was all an invention in order to write a really very powerful fantasy about a kind of alter-ego that she developed for herself.

[background music: Piano Sonata no. 3 in F# minor, Op. 23 by Alexander Scriabin. Recorded on the Hupfeld recording piano by Alexander Scriabin (Leipzig, January 1908). Played back on a Steck grand Pianola Piano (London, June 2009). Copyright: Pianola Institute, 2009. Used by permission.]

CJ: Around this time, Russian avant garde writers were keenly interested in the interaction between visual and literary art. In publications of their works, some artists took risks with typography, playing around with font size and shape, while others printed lithographs of their hand-written poems. Many books featured bold colors and abstract illustrations. With its standard typography and delicate pencil illustrations, Guro’s Autumn Dream stands apart from the canon. I asked Professor Sandler about the connection between the visual and textual elements of Guro’s work.

[end music]

SS: So Guro, another reason she’s interesting is that she was actually trained as a visual artist. And so we have some beautiful images by Guro; gouache paintings, pastels, the drawings which are in here. So this very beautiful layout, it has a kind of old fashioned feeling. And that also is incredibly interesting. This is not what Russian futurist books look like! This looks much more like something that you would associate with Russian symbolism, and that kind of self-mythification, that life-creating aspect, that’s actually an aspect of Guro that ties her more to the symbolists than to the futurists. But, as you suggest, the connection between the visual and the verbal in broader terms, that very much ties her to the futurists.

Guro’s husband, Mikhail Matyushin, was also a composer, and this book ends with some sheet music that he wrote for one of the texts in the book. So the idea of the connection between the verbal arts, the visual arts, the musical arts, that too is very much in the air in general in the period, and it’s something that the Russian futurists embraced, too.

I should say that Guro participated in a volume called A Trap for Judges which is held in Houghton, which is one of the other things I thought about having us use because it’s such a great little volume, printed on wallpaper. And that’s a much more typical example of what Russian futurist bookmaking might look like, the sort of deliberately impoverished look of it, the pages being slightly uneven, things set in a sort of rough way, but visually very arresting, very dramatic. And Guro was part of that.

CJ: The turn of the century Russian avant garde was comprised of many movements that each sought to push the boundaries of literary and visual art. You may be familiar with the constructivist movement which influenced architectural design for decades, or Malevich’s famous “Black Square” which gave rise to the suprematist movement, or perhaps even Viktor Shklovsky’s discussions of form over content which created the formalist movement in literature. Lesser known is the group of artists who pre-date these movements and who referred to themselves as Futuristi or the Futurists. The term had come up a few times in our discussion of Guro, so I asked Professor Sandler if we could take a step back and define the Futurist movement for listeners.

[end music]

SS: The word movement, you know again, this is our word as literary historians. We think about movements or schools, but what happened was much more of a kind of ragtag group of people doing a lot of different things, wanting to set themselves apart from what looked to be the movements or the schools that had come before, principally the Russian symbolists. So the symbolists, who are so interested in finding a kind of otherworldly meaning. Not in believing that the truths can be known in our daily life, but wanting to reach for something which is ethereal, cosmic, eternal. The futurists, you can tell by that name, they have a notion of temporality which actually is more past, present, future, not the eternal. But the futurists are thinking that we are the future, that they have come into modernity at this moment, so the beginning of the 20th century, come into modernity at this moment when things are changing very fast. So, as opposed to the patient gaze of the symbolists toward something which needs to almost come to you as a kind of divine revelation, a cosmic revelation, the futurists are in a hurry. They’re wanting to move more quickly. The sense of the modern is itself speeded up.

So futurism is also associated with the city, with urban spaces rather than something that is more like the countryside, and the poetics of futurism are much more of a break with the past tradition. The symbolists are in many ways building on the romantic and the post-romantic traditions in Russian poetry, which are, of course, very great. There’s a lot to build on. The futurists want to announce their difference with more clangorous rhythms, more aggressive intonations. Mayakovsky is often thought of as a kind of quintessential futurist. When we think, visually, what do Mayakovsky’s poems look like, they’re stair-stepped across the page. So they don’t sit in these nice compact units like a sonnet or something that looks just like we expect poetry to seem, but it’s spread out all over the page. So it can affect the look, or futurism can affect the sounds. Velimir Khlebnikov, another great futurist playing with the sounds of the language, creating words built out of the roots of Slavic etymologies in order to create new possibilities, or creating zaum, a nonsense language, trying to make poetry just be about the sounds, to get that kind of immediacy of sensory experience.

CJ: Many of the seminal ideas of Futurism were laid out in a manifesto called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, or Poshchëchina obshchestvennomu vkusu. This work is held at Houghton and like A Trap for Judges, the volume is similarly bound in unconventional materials — in this case, course burlap.
In it, the authors call for Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to be “thrown overboard the steamship of modernity.” I asked Professor Sandler if she thought the futurists would be annoyed to learn that their subversive handmade books sat on the shelves of Houghton Library not far from cherished volumes of Pushkin.

SS: Yes and no. They would in some sense think that all of this, all of this beauty and these collections at Houghton, that this represents a kind of dull tradition. And yet, everything that they did in fact also built on the tradition. So to take the example of Mayakovsky: it’s a little bit into the future, futurism has waned, this is after the revolution, but in 1924 Mayakovsky writes a poem to and about Pushkin where he talks about how in the rows of books, he, Mayakovsky starting with “M”, he’s going to be right there near Pushkin starting with a “P.” So they are aware of the thrill of seeming to throw off everything that’s old and just embrace the new, but these people also had a keen sense that in a way, they were taking their own rightful place in that tradition. And that’s in fact what has happened. That’s why we preserve their books. That’s why when we tell the story of Russian literature, they are very much a part of it. They were building on what came before them, and what has happened since has built on their work as well.

CJ: To bring our discussion back to Guro, I asked Professor Sandler where Guro belonged in the constellation of Russian futurists. Whose work did Guro build from and who, if anyone, was she trying to throw overboard the steamship of modernity?

SS: So she would seem to us, I think, much closer to the traditions of Russian romantic and post-romantic poetry. The work that she writes, this is both in her prose and in her poetry, where she embraces that figure of the child, the sense of the child going out into nature, I mean, that’s very familiar to us from, say, Rousseau, or from English romantic poets. We see it in Russian poetry as well. It’s harder to see Guro as adopting any of that kind of loud, brash break with the past that we connect more to the futurists, what we were just describing. But there is this sense of whimsy. She doesn’t go as far as zaum, so it’s not nonsense language, but there is this sense of whimsy. One of her volumes is called Little Camel Babies of the Sky (Nebesnye verbliuzhata). The story, the kind of fanciful story of the clouds looking like camels, looking like little camel babies and descending from the sky, that sense of imagination, that allies her more with the ethos of the futurists. And yet we can feel her building on what was going on in Russian romantic poetry as well.

CJ: Guro stands apart from her contemporaries for other reasons as well. Guro was one of the few women in the futurist movement, which is often described as a very male movement for its emphasis on speed, motion, dynamism, and modernity. Professor Sandler explained that Guro’s status as a bit of a misfit is what initially drew her to Guro.

SS: For me, the misfit figures are always among the most interesting. She’s not a typical futurist. You can tell by the look of this, by the fact that she’s a woman, there’s a kind of gentler feeling, gentler tonality of the poetry. And this is called Autumn Dream, so you get lots of beautiful landscapes, lush landscapes in Guro. But she has wonderful urban settings as well, and that focus on the city, that’s more typical of the futurists. So I’m really drawn to the way that she crosses simplistic notions of what a poetic movement was. Why do we care about poetic movements? We actually care about them precisely for the people who don’t exactly fit. That’s what’s really interesting; when it’s alive, when it’s vivid, when people do something that’s somewhat idiosyncratic, and Guro is a fantastic example of that.

CJ: Elena Guro ultimately published four works of poetry and prose in her lifetime and one posthumously. She contributed illustrations to many artists’ works including a book of fairy tales by the the French writer known as George Sand. Guro and her husband, Mikhail Matyushin, established their own studio in 1908 it quickly became a nerve center for the Russian avant garde. In 1913 Guro began to battle leukemia and died that year at the age of 36.

[music continues]

CJ: Professor Sandler told me the minute she learned Guro’s Autumn Dream was held at Houghton, she came to the reading room to see it in person. Sandler also regularly brings her classes to the library to see manuscripts and first editions of Russian literature. I asked her what she considered significant about seeing these works in person.

[end music]

SS: I think it depends on the work, what it will teach us. No matter what it teaches us, it inspires us. So that’s the first place that I would start. I think anyone who comes into Houghton and works with any of the materials in a classroom context has the thrill of being in the presence of something, an object that has this history. You can read that history in the work of scholars, but when you see a book like this and you see its beautiful pages, you see the care that was taken in making this object, and you put it next to the deliberate, kind of neo-primitivist, rough cut look of other futurists, you see something that you will not get when you read a reprint of this text. This text has been published, so it’s not that someone needs to come here in order to get at unpublished material.

So that’s the first thing is the kind of thrill, but then the object itself; how people used books, how they lived with books differently from the way that we live with books now, I think, is just very instructive. It’s a way to appreciate the stories that books tell us, not just what’s printed on the page, but the stories that they can tell us of their historical moment. And that’s invaluable.

JC: Thanks for joining us this week. We’d like to thank Stephanie Sandler for coming in and for broadening our understanding of Russian literature with a fascinating discussion on the Russian avant garde and the work of Elena Guro. We’d also like to thank our former colleague, Christine Jacobson, for guest-hosting this week.

HF: The music selections that you’ve heard throughout the podcast were Poème and Piano Sonata no. 3 in F# minor by Alexander Scriabin. Each piece was played by the composer onto a reproducing piano roll in the early 1900s, then played back and recorded roughly 100 years later. Our thanks to The Pianola Institute for use of the recordings. You can find out more at pianola.org.

JC: To see Autumn Dream up close as well as other fascinating objects from the collections, visit HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library, an online exhibition available at houghton75.org. Just click on the Exhibition menu at the top.

HF: Podcast transcripts and detailed music notes can also be found online at houghton75.org/podcast.

JC: Thanks again for listening this week, and we hope you’ll join us for the next episode of Houghton75.

[music continues to end]

Stephanie Sandler: The Russian Avant Garde’s Enigmatic Misfit, Elena Guro

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