What Dreams About The (Im)Perfect Tell Us about The Avant-Gardists

By the late 2010s, the Russian avant-garde continues to merit our close attention.1 Some of today’s most influential Russian poets rediscover and revitalize its artistic and political legacy (Bozovic under review). In Amsterdam curators revive Malevich’s conviction that ‘the entire living world is ready to fly into space’ (Waag 2019), while slavist Sjeng Scheijen brought to life ‘the magic, the exaltation, and the drama of the Russian avant-garde’ in a study that is spawning raving reviews in leading Dutch dailies (Veraart 2019 on Scheijen 2019). Meanwhile, a transnational range of cultural theorists and practitioners claim that ‘the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance’ today, ‘in these times of global political crisis’ (Legèr 2014).
The ongoing relevance of the avant-garde outlook on life has long been self-evident to the addressee of this Festschrift. With this analysis, we honor both the legacy of her work and of the Russian avant-garde by highlighting the diversity within avant-gardist art and thinking. In 1975, in an influential essay on contemporary cinema, film theoretician Peter Wollen already argued that, rather than speaking of the avant- garde, we should distinguish between ‘two avant-gardes’ – one that shared an interest in painting, another that operated primarily in theatre and sound-poetry (Wollen 2018). In Wollen’s wake, several scholars have reverted to the plural form to underline diversity and heterogeneity among avant-garde practitioners and their heirs (among others, see Harding 2013; Seita 2019; Scheijen 2019). Despite this insistence on diversity, in popular usage ‘the avant-garde’ is still imagined as a neatly undifferentiated whole. In the analysis that follows, we contribute to the scholarly move away from this monolithic approach by comparing how influential Russian avant-gardists conceptualized two notions that played a perennial role in theorizing of the time: the concepts of imperfection and perfection.