ABSTRACT
The “Russian Avant-Garde” is a set expression widely used in both the cultural and academic communities. It has become part of the everyday vocabulary, too. This chapter shows this term, first, to have emerged not that long ago as a retroactively fashioned construction, not unlike the “Avant-Garde” construction itself, and second, to belong to the normative discourse rather than be neutral. Normative discourse here refers to the authoritative discourse, which may manifest itself in art tendencies explicitly supported by the then-Soviet state’s ideological strategies, but also in the “universalistic” art history recounted from out of the Western world and discarding local discourse features.
The chapter shows the “Russian Avant-Garde” construction as a necessity following the radial post-1968 social and cultural change in Europe. Namely, it served to create a figure of the “Other”, inscribed into the dominant universalistic—or vertical, as Piotrowski calls it—narrative. The term “Russian Avant-Garde” carries a double load, though, evidenced by its recognition as an agent of the authorities embodying conservative values that run counter to the critical and self-critical functions proclaimed in the fundamental theoretical texts of the Avant-Garde. This contradiction is being exacerbated by the geopolitical escalation in the Russian–Ukrainian conflict.
