ABSTRACT
In her Reminiscences of Lenin (1934; written in 1924 after Lenin's death) the German Marxist revolutionary Clara Zetkin recounts how she went to supper one day at Lenin's apartments in the Kremlin. In the section ‘on Culture’ she reports how Lenin denounced the avant-garde and its iconoclasm. Lenin's ambivalence regarding the avant-garde has long been noted (see Buck-Morrs 2002), along with the subsequent tension between the state and arts practices in the Soviet period and in particular the controversial issues surrounding ‘de-artefactualization’ (razveschestevlenie) and the problematic status of material culture, commodity fetishism and social reform. Lenin tells Zetkin in a rather frustrated tone: ‘It seems to me that we too have our Dr. Karlstadt. We are much too much “Iconoclasts”’ (Zetkin 1934: 12). The offhand comment is remarkable on many counts. First, in terms of Lenin's own intimate understanding of the details of the historical circumstances of the Protestant Reformation and by analogy of Lenin's implicit positioning in the present. Lenin places himself in the position of a frustrated Martin Luther having to rein in the Dr. Karlstadts of his day, working within the Soviet artistic avant-garde as it concerns the reworking of the material world and social relations it would enable.
