Can Man Live Without Wonder?

by Varvara Stepanova

Reviewed by Youry Nazarov

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this book compiled of texts by the Russian avant-garde artist Varvara Stepanova entitled "Man Cannot Live Without Wonder" can easily become one of the best readings about this period published during the last five years.

The secret is very simple: the book happened to be not one of those rather bulky volumes with numerous essays, commentaries, highly theoretical articles, that we were used to in the art- history. That book is just a very concentrated life story. The desire to live through the life of the main hero---Varvara Stepanova, the wife of the famous avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko---keeps you on alert during all of the 304 pages of the book. Sometimes even you may forget that you are reading a book of documents of the Russian Avant-Garde and feel that you are deeply involved into the fate of the people described here. The well-known artists like Malevich, Kandinsky, Tatlin, and a lot of others, suddenly become living persons for you, not abstract figures of the past, you start to realize their motives. Especially thrilling are the two diaries by Stepanova---the one of 1919--1920 and the other of 1927--1928. You read the story like a scenario of the film, like a fiction. And still all the events are real---the last futuristic exhibition, the declaration of the concept of the Non-Objective Art, attempts to formulate the Objective basis of Art-Creation and of Art-Perception. And the conclusion to which Stepanova comes, that despite all the mathematics in Art, "a man cannot live without Wonder," because no one had yet discovered the motive for Artistic Creation. The same real events are described in the second diary--- concerning the fate of Constructivism, concerning the dissipation of the Left Front of Art group, concerning the dreams of the artists and critics about the well-organized, technically perfect new social order.

The book itself is very well-designed, both from outside and inside. It consists of four chapters: "The Fate," "In the Epicentre of Avant-Garde," "Constructivism" and "Business and People." Each of the chapters starts with a short introduction by Alexander Lavrentiev, giving the background of Stepanova's life during 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and later years. Each of the chapters contains different sorts of material: letters, articles, diaries, even verses by Stepanova. Varvara Rodchenko, the daughter of the artist, carefully sorted all the texts, finding the best sequence. And finally Oleg Melnikov from the "Sphere" publishing house of the Russian Theosophic Society realized the layout concept on the computer as well as did the general editing of the book.

In fact almost the entire book is dedicated to problems of various branches of design: interior design and furniture, clothes and textiles, graphic design and advertising. Rodchenko and Stepanova were versatile artists and the reader gets this impression from the text.

The book breaks several stereotypes that became somewhat common in understanding of the Russian Art of the 20th century. First of all, it shows that there was absolutely no Unity in that what we call "The Avant-Garde Movement." There were individuals, competing with each other, joining from time to time for mutual projects. Second, the Avant-Garde artists did not have so much power in reality as was previously considered. They came across all the same difficulties in organizing their exhibitions as it could happen for instance later--in the 60s or 80s. And third, there were not only objective reasons that forced them for work and exploration. The certain feeling of the Wonder of life goes through the entire of the book even in the most dramatic years of the WWII or 1950s when Rodchenko was expelled from the Union of Artists. . . . Life doesn't go smoothly and the artists live through it with the spirit of Invention and blessing of the Wonder. . . .