Research Project Clemena Antonova  The Apocalyptic Project of the Soviet Avant-garde: The Modernist After-life of a Premodern, Religious Concept.

This project relies on an understanding of the apocalyptic “as an end and a beginning” (my italics), which implies fear and hope at the same time and is thus, profoundly paradoxical and ambivalent. While the genealogy of this meaning is premodern and much of the history of the concept is religious, I will side with scholars who have claimed that apocalyptic thinking, understood in this sense (in contrast to the purely negative connotation of impending catastrophe), “did not go away with the advent of modernity,” but, rather, became “one of the key forces that gave us the modern world” (J.J. Martin, 2022). In other words, I will claim that it is not just that apocalyptic language reappears in modernity, but apocalyptic thinking drives certain aspects of modernity.

My case study for this project will be the rhetoric of the Soviet avant-garde in the first several years after the October Revolution in 1917. The iconoclastic language of poets and artists, which played on “burning” and “destroying” all the art and culture of the past has been interpreted by practically all scholars in the field as eccentric behaviour aiming not at actual destruction, but at “transformation.” What I would like to do in this project is to take this rhetoric literally and interpret it as an instance of the survival and secularization of apocalyptic thought in modernity.