Tzvetan Todorov - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Tzvetan Todorov

Avant-gardes & totalitarianism
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

The history of modernity is character-

ized by an immense transformation: IL
transition from a world structured by re-
ligion to a world organized exclusively in
terms of human beings and worldly val-
ues. This process of emancipation and
humanization, which has been going on
for several centuries, has taken two main
forme. First came the project of replac-
ing the divine absolute with a collective
human absolute, what revolutionaries
in France called ‘the Nation.’ Initial en-
thusiasm for this project began to wane,
Tuttavia, from the moment the Revolu-
tion engendered the Terror. The struggle
for liberty had ended in the suppression
of liberty: was this not proof that the
project itself had been ill-conceived
from the beginning?

Tzvetan Todorov is Directeur de Recherche hono-
raire at the Centre National de la Recherche Sci-
enti½que in Paris. He is the author of numerous
publications, including “The Conquest of Amer-
ica” (1984), “On Human Diversity” (1993),
“Facing the Extreme” (1996), “Imperfect Gar-
den: The Legacy of Humanism” (2002), “Hope
and Memory” (2004), and “The New World
Disorder” (2005).

Those who did not wish to turn back
the clock but were still dissatis½ed with
the present then sought a second way,
that of an absolute accessible to the au-
tonomous individual. The search for this
second way itself took several forms;
the most influential of these identi½ed
the individual absolute with beauty and
favored what Friedrich Schiller would
call the aesthetic education of man.
This doctrine was Romanticism, adopt-
ed ½rst in Germany and then through-
out Europe; it glori½ed the poet in place
of the prophet and the work of art in
place of prayer. “Beauty in its absolute
essence is God,” declared a spokesman
for the movement.

The fact that Romanticism reserved
such a role for art and poetry, exempla-
ry incarnations of the beautiful, did not
mean that it neglected other human ac-
tivities: for Schiller and his successors,
aesthetic education and political vision
went hand in hand. One of the best ex-
amples we have of the desire to improve
the human condition by action in both
spheres is that of the German composer
Richard Wagner. Influenced by the rev-
olutionary ideas of Mikhail Bakunin,
Wagner took part in political agitation in
Dresden in 1848–1849. Forced into exile
by the ensuing repression, he sought ref-
uge in Switzerland, where he produced

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Tzvetan
Todorov
SU
nonviolence
& violence

two texts setting forth his ideas about art
and its relation to society: Art and Revolu-
tion and The Art Work of the Future, both
written in 1849.

These texts make clear that Wagner
aspired to the absolute but did not seek
it in traditional religion. Art seemed to
him the absolute’s best incarnation: Esso
was “living religion represented.”1 On
this basis, he suggested, a two-way rela-
tionship between artistic activity and so-
cial life is established. If art was to flour-
ish, society must have the most favorable
conditions for it. Now, Wagner’s world,
as de½ned by the Germanic states of his
day, was far from satisfying those condi-
zioni. Hence, that world had to be trans-
formed; revolution was essential. Wag-
ner was interested in politics only to the
extent that politics enabled art to flour-
ish. For him, social revolution was not
an end in itself but a means to artistic
revolution, the foundation of a new edi-
½ce of the arts.

Why bestow such honor on artists?

This is where the second part of the
relationship between art and society
comes in: “The supreme goal of man
is the artistic goal,” Wagner declared,
and “art is the highest activity of man,"
that which crowns his earthly existence.
“Genuine art is the highest form of
freedom.” Wagner shared the dream
of the Saint-Simonians, who believed
that machines would soon take over
man’s most arduous labors. Freed from
exhausting chores, all would turn their
attention to artistic creation in freedom
and joy.

Art was not opposed to life, as another

version of Romantic doctrine held, Ma

1 Richard Wagner, Œuvres en prose, vol. 3 (Par-
È: Éditions d’Aujourd’hui, 1976), 91; English
translation by William Ashton Ellis, Richard
Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 1 (New York: Broude
Bros., 1966).

rather the culmination of life. ‘Artistic
humanity’ was synonymous with ‘free
human dignity.’ Craft was to become
art; the proletarian was to transform
himself into an artist; the industrial
slave was to metamorphose into a pro-
ducer of beauty. The society of the fu-
ture would no longer exist to serve art,
as Wagner demanded for the present,
because all life would have become artis-
tic. Here art became the ideal model of
society. There would no longer be any
need to celebrate artists because every-
one would be an artist. To be more pre-
cise, the community as a whole would
freely decide how it was to live, così
adopting the attitude of the creator. “But
who will be the artist of the future? IL
poet? The actor? The musician? IL
sculptor? Let us put it in a nutshell: IL
people.”2 Because this could be achieved
only by a common effort, Wagner opted
for the opposite of egoism, namely, com-
munism–whose Manifesto had been pub-
lished the year before by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels.

The failure of the revolutions of 1848

throughout Europe would sound the
death knell of such dreams. Thereafter
began a second major period in the his-
tory of the worldly absolute, from 1848
to World War I, during which the two
paths, the collective and the individual,
the political and the aesthetic, diverged.
Baudelaire, though an enthusiastic com-
mentator on Wagner, saw the hope that
art might influence the world as an illu-
sion. Nel frattempo, Marx showed little
concern for the aesthetic education of
the individual. The two proudly ignored
each other, though neither dreamed of
renouncing the absolute.

Things changed again between the two

world wars–the period to which I now
turn. Two trends can be discerned, Ma

2 Ibid., 19, 16, 243.

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Avant-
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totalitar-
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each can be described as an actualiza-
tion of the Wagnerian project of a total
work of art, one that would be coexten-
sive with life itself and with the world
as a whole. On one hand, avant-garde
groups, such as the Futurists and Con-
structivists, differentiated themselves
from the modernist movement in gener-
al by attempting to expand the limits of
the work of art so as to act on society at
large. D'altra parte, extremist po-
litical movements modeled their plans
for transforming society and humanity
on the creative activity of the artist. Questo
was true of Communism, Fascism, E
Nazism.

Both avant-garde artists and political
extremists saw violence as a legitimate
means of achieving their ends more rap-
idly. They knew they were promoting
revolution, which might well provoke
resistance. That resistance had to be ov-
ercome–if necessary, by force. We see
signs of this rapprochement of the two
major forms of the worldly absolute–
the political and the artistic–in Russia,
Italy, and Germany. The convergence
persisted until the end of World War II.

Avant-garde movements appeared in

Russia around 1910 with the ½rst glim-
merings of abstraction in painting and
Futurist experimentation in poetry. Ini-
tially, Tuttavia, the gulf between art and
society widened rather than narrowed.
Painters were exhorted to forget the ma-
terial world and to obey no laws other
than the intrinsic laws of their art. Later,
Tuttavia, people began to question this
divorce of art from the visible world of
objects and the intelligible world of the
senses–and therefore to question as
well the quest for the absolute in the
work of art as opposed to society. Some
of those who questioned this divorce
were the same people who had advocat-
ed it earlier.

The new turn took the name ‘Con-
structivism’ because its adherents es-
chewed artistic creation in favor of
constructing objects and artifacts in-
tended to become part of the environ-
ment. Their ½rst group show was held
In 1921, but the ½rst manifestations of
the movement date from 1915, Quando
Vladimir Tatlin presented his “Coun-
ter-Reliefs” at the same time that Kaz-
imir Malevich unveiled his “Black
Square.” The “Counter-Reliefs” were
assembled from a variety of materials;
and the artist’s goal was not to reveal to
the world the existence of a ‘work’ but
rather to bring out the intrinsic qualities
of the materials used in the construc-
zione.

The difference between Construc-
tivism and earlier avant-garde move-
ments was not political: all enthusias-
tically supported the ongoing revolu-
zione. It was rather in the relation be-
tween the work of art and its social
context. According to one Construc-
tivist theoretician, Boris Arvatov, even
when earlier artists took nothing from
life but its spiritual content or other es-
sential elements, as in the case of Wassi-
ly Kandinsky and Malevich, they still
“placed art above life and sought to ren-
der life in the form of art.” By contrast,
Constructivism “placed life above art”
and gave primacy to function at the ex-
pense of form. “Not the creation of
forms of great ‘aesthetic’ value but utili-
tarian construction from basic materi-
COME,” he wrote. “Not autonomy of the
thing as such, but richness of content.”3
In concrete terms, Constructivism
transformed all forms of expression.

3 Boris Arvatov quoted in J.-Cl. Marcadé,
L’avant-garde russe 1907–1927 (Paris: Flammar-
ion, 1995), 19; “L’utopie objectalisée," 1923, In
G. Conio, Le constructivisme russe, vol. 2 (Lau-
sanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1986), 46.

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Tzvetan
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nonviolence
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Instead of producing literary works,
writers were urged to focus on the utili-
tarian value of language. Per esempio,
Vladimir Mayakovsky would eventually
turn to the production of political slo-
gans and advertising. In his autobiogra-
phy, he de½ned his group’s position as
being “against ½ction and aestheticism,
for propaganda, for quali½ed journalism,
and for opinion writing.” Indeed, IL
materials he had in mind were not only
language but also real events evoked by
lingua: rather than imaginative liter-
ature, Constructivists preferred what
they called ‘factual literature,’ drawn
from the world in which the writer lived.
Così, literature no longer existed in a
separate sphere; everyone could partici-
pate in its creation. “In the Commune,
everyone was a creator,” wrote another
Constructivist theoretician, Osip Brik,4
who was repeating, perhaps unwittingly,
an idea of Novalis: “Every man should
be an artist. Everything can become ½ne
art.”5

The same could be said of the visual
arts: their goal was no longer to produce
paintings or sculptures but rather to
transform the world through artistic ac-
zione. Alexander Rodchenko, the leader
of the plastic Constructivists, was as
fervently opposed to easel painting as
Mayakovsky was to ½ction. “Non-½gu-
rative painting has left the museum,"
he declared in the course of a 1920 show
of his work. “Non-½gurative painting is
the street itself, the town square, the city, E
the entire world.”6 He chose to make post-
ers and to design wallpaper and fabrics.

4 Quoted in Conio, Le constructivisme russe, 153;
Osip Brik, “L’artiste et la Commune,” in Conio,
Le constructivisme russe, vol. 1.

5 Foi et Amour in Novalis, Œuvres, vol. 1, 341.

Here, pure, reality was preferable to the
imagination–Rodchenko devoted him-
self more and more to photography. Tat-
lin, meanwhile, went from “Counter-
Reliefs” to architectural constructions,
such as his (proposed but never-built)
tower intended as a “Monument to the
Third International.” Architecture was
the logical culmination of the Construc-
tivists’ plastic experiments: inspired by
artistic principles, the architect shapes
the world by building real houses, life-
sized cities, and landscapes.

The performing arts followed the same

course. Arvatov spoke of the “fusion of
theater with life in socialist society” as
though it were self-evident. But what
form was this fusion to take? In his view,
the goal was no longer to stage plays in
the traditional manner, even if the audi-
ence were expanded to a broad segment
of the population. It was rather to give
form to life itself, “to construct our way
of life rationally.”7 This was the best way
for the theater to ful½ll its propaganda
function. In ½lm, Dziga Vertov’s theories
of montage similarly reflected Construc-
tivist aims. Merely by ½lming what exist-
ed and then proceeding to an audacious
montage, Vertov created beautiful ½lms
without inventing anything: he simply
reorganized the visible world. The ma-
terial itself acted on the viewer, provid-
ed the ½lmmaker knew how to put it to-
gether in the right way. Così, everything
in the world became potential material
for the artist.

The Constructivist theoretical project

was pushed to its ultimate limit by yet
another theoretician, Nikolai Chuzhak,
who explicitly proposed “the construc-
tion of life” as the movement’s goal. In
articles published in the journal lef,
edited by Mayakovsky, In 1923 E 1929,

6 Quoted in Conio, Le constructivisme russe, vol.
1, 44.

7 Arvatov, “Utopie ou science?” in Conio, Le
constructivisme russe, vol. 2, 65–66.

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he drew the consequences of this exten-
sion of artistic experimentation’s ben-
e½ts to all of life. As he saw it, two con-
ceptions of art were in contention. One
of these, the bourgeois conception, saw
“art as a method for obtaining knowledge
of life.” The other, the proletarian con-
ception, perceived “art as a method for
the construction of life.” The ½rst view
limits art to representation and invites
us to contemplate the world; the sec-
ond seeks to dominate and transform
the material. In this we hear echoes of
Marx’s celebrated formula concerning
the status of knowledge: “Until now
philosophers have only interpreted the
mondo; the point, Tuttavia, is to change
it.”8 Now it was the frontier between the
artist and the political activist that was
being crossed. Art in the old-fashioned
style might, at best, serve as a kind of
preparation, a “timid apprenticeship in
the formidable creation of a new way of
life now under way.” Chuzhak believed
that the moment had come to “declare
war on artistic literature,” or belles-lettres,
questo è, on literature based on opposing
literature to life when in fact the two
ought to merge to the point of indistin-
guishability. It was high time, he argued,
to dispatch “belles-lettres to rot on the
rubbish heap of outmoded art.”9 The
new art was simply to be one more
method of constructing life.

At ½rst sight, art emerged the loser
from its conflict with life. Invece di
delving into his imagination, the art-
ist now borrowed his materials ready-
made. Instead of creating original arti-
facts, he settled for demonstrating the

8 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in K.
Marx and F. Engels, Etudes philosophiques (Par-
È: Editions Socials, 1947), 11.

9 Conio, Le constructivisme russe, vol. 2, 39, 23,
170, 178; Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.”

intrinsic quality of existing materials,
which he assembled according to pre-
established rules. Instead of creating
works for disinterested contemplation,
he placed them in service of society, sub-
ject to “social command.” But his sub-
mission was also a kind of victory, E
his humility stemmed from a higher am-
bition: the artist now identi½ed with the
political actor who shapes society, IL
people, and individuals, in accordance
with a preconceived design. The Con-
structivist project thus represented, at
the same time, a death sentence for art
and its apotheosis, since the artist no
longer worked solely with words or col-
ors but rather with human beings: he
became an artist, engineer, and demi-
urge all rolled into one.

If the dream was to become reality,
Tuttavia, politicians would have to agree
to share their power with artists. Questo
did not happen: none of these grandiose
utopian conceptions was realized. By the
end of the 1920s, the last vestiges of the
avant-garde in Russia were reduced to
silence. The leaders of the movement
were either punished–victims of the
revolution they themselves had wanted
–or else turned into obedient propagan-
dists for the regime.

At the end of World War I, Germany

experienced political upheaval similar
to Russia’s but with the opposite result:
The revolution was crushed in bloody
repression. The uprising of the (commu-
nist) Spartacists in early 1919 ended in
failure; its leaders, Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg, were executed; E
the liberal Weimar Republic was estab-
lished. Yet a transformation of the arts
had begun even as the political revolu-
tion was being prepared: a “council (so-
viet) for the arts” was established, E
the architect Walter Gropius became its
codirector. The council declared that

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Tzvetan
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SU
nonviolence
& violence

“art and the people must be one” and
that “art will henceforth be not for the
pleasure of a few but for the welfare and
life of the masses.”10

Once again, this project was reminis-

cent of Wagner’s some seventy years
earlier. Like Wagner, Gropius seemed to
want to compensate for the failure of the
political revolution by launching a proj-
ect in the arts (whereas, in Russia, IL
victory of the revolution had for a time
facilitated progress in the arts). E
Ancora, like Wagner, Gropius dreamed
of unifying the arts, though not in op-
era but rather in architecture, which he
envisioned as absorbing painting and
sculpture.

One week after the inauguration of the

Weimar Republic in 1919, the Bauhaus
was founded. This was a group of archi-
tects led by Gropius and committed to
the same principles as the council. Arte
does not coincide with life, secondo
the Bauhaus manifesto, but rather aims
to create a total work of art, an edi½ce
“that will one day rise toward the sky,
the crystalline symbol of a new faith.”
This edi½ce would resemble a cathedral
more than anything else: like the old
religion, the new faith would need a
temple. Both were incarnations of the
absolute. But this project, with its reli-
gious overtones, was not maintained for
long. Bauhaus theoreticians could not
ignore the fact that the religious absolute
had been brought down to earth. Mod-
ern man’s temple was no longer a cathe-
dral. “Man has become God–his house
is his church.”11

10 In Anthologie du Bauhaus (Brussels: Didier
Devillez, 1995), 51–54; quoted in E. Michaud,
“L’oeuvre d’art totale et le totalitarisme,” in
L’oeuvre d’art totale (Paris: Gallimard, 2003),
43, whose analysis I am following here.

11 Bauhaus 1919–1969, Musée National d’Art
Moderne, 1969, 13; quoted in Michaud, L’oeuvre

Così, the work envisioned by the
founders of the Bauhaus gradually drew
closer to everyday life. The goal was not
only to build homes for people but also
to transform their entire environment,
from furniture and utensils to cities and
landscapes. Such a program required
knowledge of the ‘people’ for whom
the artist worked: Gropius introduced
courses in sociology and even biology at
the Bauhaus. By transforming the setting
in which people lived, one could perfect
the people themselves. By producing ob-
jects for everyday use, artists could influ-
ence individual and collective ways of
life.

In this period the Russians and Ger-

mans maintained constant contact.
Kandinsky began teaching at the Bau-
haus in 1922. The arrival of the Hungar-
ian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1923
introduced a signi½cant new influence,
as he was steeped in the ideas of the
Constructivists. The goal, he declared
In 1925, should not be to create a total
work of art à la Wagner but rather “to
synthesize all the moments of life, Quale
is itself a total work of art encompassing
everything else and annihilating all sepa-
ration.”12 The aim was no longer to pro-
duce art but to shape life. To build hous-
es and cities was to organize a vital pro-
cess. Thus architect-artists would hence-
forth fashion a new mankind.

Once again, Tuttavia, Constructivist
ambitions would run up against politi-
cal power. The founders of the Bauhaus
would not have been unhappy to carry
out the architectural plans of the Nazis,
who came to power in 1933, but the Na-

d’art totale, 47; Anthologie du Bauhaus, 110; Mi-
chaud, L’oeuvre d’art totale, 53.

12 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Peinture, photographie,
½lm (Nîmes: J. Chambon, 1993), 78; Michaud,
L’oeuvre d’art totale, 54.

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Avant-
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zis chose to implement their own ‘total
work of art.’ The political revolution did
not need the support of revolutionary
art.

Infatti, there was a deep reason why
the role of demiurge was not accorded
to artists: political leaders reserved it
for themselves. The identi½cation of
the political leader with the artist, each
working with different material but in
a similar spirit, reflected a long tradition
but had yet to be transformed into a
program of action. Plato compared the
statesman to the painter, whose gestures
mimicked those of the divine creator.
“[N]o city could ever be blessed unless
its lineaments were traced by artists who
used the heavenly model . . . . They will
take the city and the characters of men,
as they might a table, and ½rst wipe it
clean.” Elsewhere he compares the leg-
islator to the poet: “We are ourselves
authors of a tragedy, . . . the ½nest and
best we know how to make. Infatti, our
whole polity has been constructed as a
dramatization of a noble and perfect life
. . . . [W]e also are poets in the ½nest of
all dramas.”13 The German Romantics,
inspired by Platonic concepts of beau-
ty, rediscovered this comparison of the
statesman with the artist–an artist who
works with an entire country as his raw
Materiale.

In any case, whether in Plato, In
French revolutionary discourse, or in
Romantic doctrine, the idea of applying
artistic creation to social life remained
just an idea rather than becoming a con-
crete project. The situation did not really
change until the advent of the modern
totalitarian state, in which the supreme
leader wields the means necessary to re-

13 Republic, 500e–501a; Laws, 817B. Quoted
from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York:
Pantheon Bollingen Series, 1963).

duce the metaphor to its literal meaning.
Once political religions supplanted tra-
ditional beliefs, the transformation of
the individual and that of the state could
be promoted in parallel. The new man
and the new society both became works
of art to be produced by the leader of the
nation.

Mussolini was quick to seize on the

parallel between political action and cre-
ative work. In November 1917, he wrote
in Popolo d’Italia that “the Italian people
is now a deposit of precious mineral. UN
work of art is still possible. It requires a
government. A man. A man who com-
bines the delicate touch of an artist with
the iron ½st of a warrior.” In 1922 he de-
scribed himself as the “sculptor of the
Italian nation” and declared that “poli-
tics works with the most dif½cult and
obdurate of materials, man.” The politi-
cian, like the artist, must create the per-
fect work out of the most refractory ma-
terial: marble in the one case, man in
the other. To anyone who would listen,
Mussolini explained that his goal was
to create new Italians, to transform the
Italian soul, to shape the masses, to mold
an entire people. “The whole problem,"
as he put it some years later to Emil Lud-
wig, “is to dominate the masses as an
artist does,”14 to turn a shapeless raw
material into a masterpiece. To achieve
this goal, he may use physical means
(Mussolini embraced various eugenicist
ideas that were in the air) or spiritual
ones: the Great War had been a formida-
ble educator, without which the new fas-
cist man would have been inconceivable.

14 Quoted in L’homme nouveau dans l’Europe
fasciste (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 7; quoted in E.
Michaud, Un art de l’éternité (Paris: Gallimard,
1996), 17; Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussoli-
ni (Milan: UN. Mondadori, 1932); quoted in
L’homme nouveau, 284.

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SU
nonviolence
& violence

In peacetime, mass organizations, espe-
cially youth groups, would play an essen-
tial role and help transform the whole
country into a vast laboratory of human
experimentation.

Mussolini’s project had one distinctive

feature: il Duce was not content simply
to be the artisan of Italy’s renewal but
portrayed himself as its most consum-
mate product. He was both artist and
work of art. In seeking to fashion a new
Uomo, he took his inspiration from his
own image. In the beginning he sculpted
his own image, as if he were a statue;
the child of modest background trans-
formed himself by a conscious effort of
the will, so as to appear to his compatri-
ots as a perfect man, an example for oth-
ers. Mussolini never missed an opportu-
nity to demonstrate that he was capable
of doing the work of both peasant and
worker. He also liked to demonstrate his
mastery of sports, such as swimming
and skiing, as well as his ability to write
philosophy and literature. An editorial in
Critica fascista flatly stated, “For now the
regime’s only great artist is its founder,
Mussolini. All the speeches he has given
and all the political articles and essays
he has written suf½ce to show that he
is our greatest contemporary writer of
prose.”15 This was more than just flat-
tery. Once again, the association of art
with politics was not fortuitous.

Mussolini found both inspiration and

support in the contemporary avant-
garde, especially the Futurists. The ideo-
logical proximity of the artistic and the
political movements is obvious. To be-
gin, both were fond of the military meta-
phor ‘avant-garde,’ the forerunner her-
alding the coming of the revolution and
a new day. Both believed in the regener-
ative virtues of violence. Both sought to

exercise their influence over all aspects
of society. Both bore the hallmarks of
political religions. The Futurists recog-
nized themselves in Mussolini and were
pleased that he reserved an important
role for cultural action in the fabrication
of the new man. In this respect, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurist,
resembled Mayakovsky, the Russian Fu-
turist: both sought to place their talent
at the service of the revolution.

Fascism relied on artistic action to
transform society, to make it a spectacle
worthy of admiration. Foreign observers
noted the aesthetic aspects of Fascist
political action. The French writer Rob-
ert Brasillach wrote that Fascism was “a
kind of poetry, the distinctive poetry of
the twentieth century (along with Com-
munism, to be sure).”16 Particular atten-
tion was devoted to anything susceptible
of being turned into a spectacle for the
masses–holidays, parades, and indeed
architecture, which was regarded as the
supreme art because it encompassed all
individuals and was available for all to
admire. But the aestheticization of the
political never became an end in itself;
it always remained subordinate to the
political objective. What became sacred
under Fascism was not the beautiful but
the state.

It has to be said that, in the eyes of il
Duce himself, his project ended in fail-
ure: he did not succeed in transforming
the Italians into new men or valiant Fas-
cists, and he therefore believed that Italy
would lose the war. He formulated even
this failure in artistic terms, Tuttavia:
the problem lay in the material, too soft
for its intended purpose. “What I lacked
was good material,” he told Galeazzo
Ciano a few months before his death.
“Michelangelo himself needed marble

15 Febbraio 15, 1927; quoted in L’homme nou-
veau, 82.

16 “Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60,” in Ecrit à
Fresne (Paris: Plon, 1967), 140.

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Avant-
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to make statues. If he had had only clay,
he would have been a potter and nothing
more.”17
With Hitler, the relation between po-

litical action and artistic activity was no
less powerful, but it took a somewhat
different form. As is well known, der
Führer reserved a special place for Wag-
ner, whose very name stands, in Ger-
man-speaking countries, for the idea of
the artist–not as one ½gure among oth-
ers in society but as the very model of
what society ought to be. Hermann
Rauschning, in his book Hitler Told Me,
reports, “Hitler refused to admit that he
had precursors. He made only one ex-
ception to this rule: Richard Wagner.”
This acknowledgment of Wagner was
not an isolated act. On May 5, 1924,
while in prison following an abortive
attempt to seize power, Hitler wrote to
Wagner’s son Siegfried to say that he
found in Siegfried’s father “the spiritu-
al sword with which we are ½ghting to-
day.”18 Later he established a special re-
lationship with the inhabitants of Bay-
reuth.

What accounts for this dubious priv-

ilege accorded to Wagner? Hitler had
been fascinated by Wagner’s music from
his youth in Austria. Rienzi, in particular,
plunged him into a state of stupor and
ecstasy. But his worship of Wagner did
not end there. His best friend from this
period, August Kubizek, reports that
“Adolf sometimes recited by heart . . .
the text of a letter or note of Wagner’s
or read to me out loud from his writing,
such as the The Art Work of the Future or

17 Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1939–1943 (Milan:
Rizzoli, 1963), 445; quoted in E. Gentile, Qu’est-
ce que la fascisme? (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 393.

18 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit (Par-
È: Coopération, 1939), 255; Musique en jeu 23
(1976): 60.

Art and Revolution.”19 Hitler himself
claimed to have seen Tristan and Isolde
thirty or forty times.

The special place accorded to Wag-
ner’s youthful opera Rienzi suggests a
possible explanation for Hitler’s atti-
tude, particularly since his devotion to
that work persisted throughout his life.
Years later, the overture to Rienzi was
regularly played at Nazi Party conven-
zioni. When Hitler visited the compos-
er’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wag-
ner, In 1939, he spoke to her of the im-
pact this opera had had on him. Kubi-
zek, who witnessed the conversation,
reports what Hitler said about hearing
the work for the ½rst time: “It was at
that moment that it all began.” Hitler
said much the same thing to his other
friend (and favorite architect), Albert
Speer: “While still a young man, listen-
ing to this inspired music at the Linz
opera, I had the vision of a German
Reich, which I would unify and make
great.”20

One might therefore assume that Hit-
ler’s attraction to this opera was deter-
mined, above all, by its subject: how a
powerful orator can capture the atten-
tion of a people and what dangers he
ought to anticipate. But this explana-
tion does not go far enough, as we can
see from Hitler’s familiarity with Wag-
ner’s other musical works as well as with
his writings. Hitler, who in his youth
dreamed of becoming a painter, could
not have been unaware of Wagner’s
general notions about the relationship

19 August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler. Mein Jugendfre-
und (Graz: l. Stocker, 1953), 101; quoted in B.
Hamann, La Vienne d’Hitler (Paris: Editions des
Syrtes, 2001), 88.

20 Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, 343; quoted in Ha-
mann, La Vienne d’Hitler, 77; Albert Speer, Jour-
nal de Spandau (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1975),
108; quoted in Michaud, Un art de l’éternité, 86.

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nonviolence
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between art and society. What attract-
ed him was precisely the continuity be-
tween the two, the possibility that each
might support the other. Though Wag-
ner gave up on revolution in the streets
to devote himself to the creation of a
total work of art, his opera, the goal re-
mained the same: to act on his people,
to make his country great and prosper-
ous. Allo stesso modo, Hitler, having experi-
enced not revolution but war, gave up
the practice of painting and committed
himself to producing an even more ‘to-
tal’ work of art: the new German people.
Unlike Mussolini, Tuttavia, he did not
put himself forward as an example of a
successful ‘work.’ In his case, the gap
between the guide and the masses was
unbreachable. Hitler was an artist, non
a work of art.

The resemblance of the two postures,
that of the artist and that of the states-
Uomo, can be found in the work of oth-
er Nazi theoreticians. In 1929, Joseph
Goebbels, who thought of himself as a
writer and therefore an artist, wrote a
novel entitled Michael, in which he bor-
rowed Mussolini’s simile: the people
were like the sculptor’s stone, Materiale
to be shaped. Two years later he insisted:
“For us the mass is but shapeless materi-
al. Only the hand of the artist can bring
forth a people from the mass and a na-
tion from the people.” After coming to
power, he wrote an open letter to orches-
tra conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in
April 1933: “We who are giving shape to
modern German politics think of our-
selves as artists entrusted with the lofty
responsibility of taking the brute mass
and shaping it into a solid and complete
image of the people.” No work of art
could be more total or more ambitious.
And the best preparation for the role
of statesman was none other than prac-
tice in the arts. In April 1936, the Nazi
party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter

published a front-page article entitled
“Art as the Basis of Creative Political
Energia,” which stated, “There exists an
intimate and indissoluble connection
between the Führer’s artistic works and
his great political work . . . . His artistic
endeavors . . . were the prerequisite for
his creative idea of the totality.”21 It was
because he had been an artist that Hitler
knew how to lead his people. It is worth
noting, Inoltre, that a good half of the
members of Hitler’s ½rst government
had previously been involved in the arts.
In 1937, Goebbels concluded: “All of Hit-
ler’s work is proof of his artistic spirit:
his state is truly an edi½ce of classical
composition. The artistic creation of his
political work establishes his preemi-
nence among German artists, a position
he has earned by his character and na-
ture.”22 Wagner’s dream seemed to be
coming true at last.

Why is the artistic model so attrac-
tive to politicians? We know that since
the Romantic crisis, artists, particolarmente
poets, have sought to occupy the place
of priests, of being guides and educators
of the people. In the eyes of Nazi leaders,
artists also enjoyed this advantage over
the servants of the old religions: Essi
were not obedient to an independent
Book or law but were free to de½ne their
own goals and their own ways of achiev-
ing them. This is the privilege of genius,
the model of every artist: it spurns all
rules so as to be totally free to create. By
the end of the nineteenth century, liber-
ation from the weight of tradition had

21 Combat pour Berlin, ed. Saint-Just (Paris,
1966, original 1931), 38; quoted in Michaud,
Un art de l’éternité, 20, 62.

22 Quoted by Franz Dröge and Michael
Müller, Die Macht der Schönheit, Avangarde
und Faschismis oder die Geburt der Massenkul-
tur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlangsanstalt,
1995), 57.

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become the rallying cry of avant-garde
movements in the arts. Cubists, Futur-
ist, Dadaists, and abstract painters out-
spokenly asserted their right to shape
the world according to their will.
Così, for Hitler it was no longer

enough simply to aestheticize politics,
to stage triumphal marches and funeral
processions, to combine dazzling light-
ing with stirring music. He had to fuse
politics and aesthetics, subordinating all
institutions and actions to the ultimate
objective of producing a Volk, a new peo-
ple–new in both a spiritual and a physi-
cal sense. The artist had become demi-
urge. “Anyone who fails to see that Na-
tional Socialism is a religion doesn’t
know anything about it,” Hitler said to
Rauschning. “It is more than a religion:
it is the will to create a new man.”23 He
conceived of this as a deliberate effort,
like that of an artist in his studio or an
inventor in a laboratory, on the scale of
an entire nation.

The two principal means of carrying
out this vast project were propaganda
and eugenics. The propaganda effort
could well pro½t from the example of
artists, while the eugenics effort would
depend on scienti½c progress. Both art
and science were to be enlisted in sup-
port of the Nazi program. Eugenics
meant eliminating defective individuals
and inferior races as well as selecting the
best individuals and controlling their re-
production. No longer was science con-
tent to interpret the world; now, in keep-
ing with Marx’s dictum, it aimed to
change it, to bring it closer to the desired
ideal–an ideal that science claimed to
have deduced rigorously from empirical
observation. In this it resembled art:
what was the work of the sculptor if not
to bring forth from a shapeless mass of

23 Dröge and Müller, Die Macht der Schönheit,
273.

stone or wood a perfect form, if not to
shape clay or plaster in accordance with
an idea of perfection?

Così, what mattered was not so much

art as such, although Hitler invariably
emphasized its exemplary role; it was
rather art in the service of life. Hermann
von Keyserling, a Nazi fellow-traveler,
said as much in the title of a speech he
gave in 1936: “Life is an Art.” Germanic
myths and legends of the sort that Wag-
ner had exploited were invaluable, Ma
it was, above all, the everyday life of the
German people that would bene½t from
an infusion of myth and legend. Every
individual would behave as an artist,
at the appropriate level. Work must be-
come creative; utilitarian activities must
respect norms of beauty.

Hitler seized power in Germany after

gaining a foothold in the 1932 elections.
At almost the same time, Stalin, having
defeated his rivals within the Commu-
nist Party, consolidated his absolute
power and began to devote some of his
attention to the situation of the arts in
the Soviet Union. Previously, various
schools had competed for the right to be
seen as the foremost representative of
the Communist Revolution. Stalin put
an end to this squabbling by replacing a
range of arts organizations with a single
centralized ‘union’ per profession: UN
Writers’ Union, a Painters’ Union, E
so on.

At the same time the slogan ‘socialist

realism’ was imposed as the de½ning
goal of Soviet art. At ½rst sight a danger
of incompatibility between the two
terms seems to exist, since ‘realism’ ap-
pears to involve the relation of represen-
tation to reality and therefore to belong
to the category of truth, whereas ‘social-
ist’ refers to an ideal and therefore in-
volves the power of a work to promote
the good. What if truth and goodness,

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‘is’ and ‘ought,’ proved not to be so
harmonious? What if realism did not
lead to the defense of socialism? Sta-
lin, who liked to discuss such questions
with writers, believed such incompati-
bility to be inconceivable. “If a writer
honestly reflects the truth of life, he
will inevitably come to Marxism,” he
insisted.24

Andrei Zhdanov, a Party theoretician,

provided the explanation of this inevi-
table solidarity, in a speech to the First
Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. So-
cialism was the Soviet future, he said,
and the seed of that future already exist-
ed in the present. Writers who realisti-
cally reported what they saw around
them must therefore include the social-
ist future. “Soviet literature must learn
to show our heroes, must learn to project
itself into our future. That future is no
mere utopian ideal, because the ground-
work for it is already being laid today as
a result of conscious planned effort.”25
But was that future so certain that it
could be described as present? Yes, be-
cause progress is no accident: the future
will unfold according to both the laws of
history and the will of the Party (as set
forth in its of½cial plans). Hence, it is
perfectly predictable.

Zhdanov also reminded the Congress
that during a 1932 meeting with writers
Stalin had bestowed a new de½nition on
them: they were “engineers of the hu-
man soul.” In the Russian tradition, Esso
was commonplace for the great writer
to be awarded the role of teacher of the
nation. Now the teacher was to be re-

24 Report by S. IO. Sechukov, Neistovye revniteli
(Moscow: Moskovskij rabochij•∨, 1970), 339;
quoted in V. Strada, “Le réalisme socialiste,” in
Histoire de la littérature russe. Le xxe siècle, vol. 3
(Paris: Fayard, 1990), 20.

25 Pervyj vsesojuznyj s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelej
(Moscow, 1934), 5.

placed by the engineer, and the methods
of the humble craftsman were to give
way to scienti½c knowledge of reality
and of the masses whose soul it was the
writer’s task to shape.

Tuttavia, unlike the Constructivists,
who toyed with the same image, Stalin
denied all initiative to the specialists
of the spirit. The Party was in charge
of construction, the master builder;
the writer-engineer had only to follow
orders. The need to observe reality and
describe it faithfully was not even men-
tioned. The role of the writer, like that
of the Marxist philosopher, was not to
interpret the world but to change it. IL
works of the 1930s that adhered most
closely to this program were narratives
of individual or collective education. By
describing the promise of the present,
the writer helped bring the future into
being. As the Romantics had hoped, life
imitated art. Così, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s
How the Steel Was Tempered was the story
of a man whose Bolshevik faith enabled
him to overcome paralysis and blind-
ness, while Anton Makarenko’s Peda-
gogical Poem told of the transformation
of a group of young vagabonds. Litera-
ture therefore ceased to search for an
absolute of its own and subordinated
itself to the propaganda needs of the
Party, which stood alone in possession
of a worldly absolute.

Much the same can be said of the oth-
er arts, which were denied any autono-
mous objective. Looking for an appro-
priate form, artists turned, as in Nazi
Germany, to the pompous bourgeois
styles of the nineteenth century rath-
er than to the revolutionary art of the
twentieth, which was deemed less ef-
fective. In practice, Tuttavia, even such
zealous propagandists as Mayakovsky,
Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Sergei Eisen-
stein tangled with the Party, with the re-
sult that the ½rst committed suicide, IL

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second was shot, and the third knuckled
under and toed the party line.

When Stalin called Soviet writers
“engineers of the human soul,” he was
flattering them. In reality, they were
mere technicians. The true creator of
new souls, the blacksmith who ham-
mered out a new nation, was of course
Stalin himself, backed by his closest
collaborators. The only true artist was
the dictator–an artist close to God–
since his work was the entire nation,
with millions of people as his raw mate-
rial. Paradoxically, we ½nd con½rmation
of this idea in a text written by the great-
est Soviet poet of the period, Boris Pas-
ternak. In a poem signi½cantly entitled
“The Artist” and published in a Mos-
cow newspaper on January 1, 1936, Pas-
ternak drew a contrast between the soli-
tary poet, who stays home and contem-
plates his soul, and the man in the Krem-
lin, Stalin, who was bringing to life the
most audacious of dreams and who daily
performed “a fugue in two voices,” com-
bining “two extreme principles that
know everything there is to know about
each other,” poetry and power. He did
not act as an individual would act be-
cause he was “a genius of action,” “an
act of global dimension.”26 What the
traditional poet accomplished in his
imagination, Stalin would accomplish
on the scale of world history: altering
the destiny of mankind.

From this standpoint, art in the nar-
row sense was merely one of the means
available to the artist-dictator. To be
sure, it was a particularly effective
means, as Communist theoreticians
noted and Nazi propagandists agreed.
Education was another means of action,
social pressure exerted through the fam-
ily a third, and manipulation of informa-

tion a fourth. The state security organs,
known successively as the Cheka, gpu,
nkvd, and kgb, had every imaginable
means of coercion at their disposal.
Might they not turn out to be better
“engineers of the human soul” than
writers? Infatti, Maxim Gorky, the lead-
ing Soviet writer, described their agents
in just those terms: “The gpu is not on-
ly the keen sword of the dictatorship of
the proletariat but also a school for the
reeducation of tens of thousands of peo-
ple who are hostile to us.” After a visit
to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, a gigan-
tic project built by the labor of zeks from
Soviet prison camps, he described it as
a “miracle of reeducation,”27 a success-
ful transformation of human beings
through labor, conveniently forgetting
the fact that the canal bed was littered
with the corpses of prisoners. Under to-
talitarianism, in Russia as in Germany,
“work makes free.”

The physical transformation of the hu-

man race was not as important a part of
the Communist project as it was of the
Nazi project, but it did play a role. Evi-
dence of this can be seen in Leon Trot-
sky’s Literature and Revolution, published
in Moscow in 1924. In the conclusion of
that work, Trotsky tried to imagine the
socialist society of the future. The fron-
tier between art and industry would be
abolished–everyone would be an artist
–and so would the boundary between
art and nature. Infatti, the man of the
future would not be content simply to
reshape society; he would also trans-
form nature to suit his desires. “The cur-
rent location of mountains, rivers, ½eld
and meadows, steppes, forests, E
coasts cannot be regarded as de½nitive.”
The human demiurge was truly the

26 O. Ivinskaya, Mes années avec Pasternak (Par-
È: Fayard, 1978).

27 Belomorsko-Baltijskij kanal imeni Stalina (Mos-
cow, 1934), 397; quoted in M. Heller, “Maxime
Gorki,” in Histoire de la littérature russe, 78–82.

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Tzvetan
Todorov
SU
nonviolence
& violence

equal of God: he would create a world
to suit his own convenience. It was in
this context that Trotsky envisioned the
transformation of the human element of
the universe. This task would be entrust-
ed, as we have seen, to educators, both of
individuals and of society as a whole. It
would also be shared by the organizers
of communal life. “At the initiative of
society, the family will be relieved of the
tedious chore of feeding and raising chil-
dren.” Life in communist society could
then advance not blindly but in a fully
planned and controlled way.

But that was not all. Trotsky envi-
sioned an even more radical way of
obtaining the humanity he wanted:
eugenics. Why should one shrink from
changing the human race through selec-
tion and organic action, or what would
today be called genetic manipulation?
Scienti½c arti½cial selection would sup-
plement natural selection: “Should the
human race, which no longer grovels
before God, the Czar, or Capital, capitu-
late to the obscure laws of heredity and
blind sexual selection? When man be-
comes free, he will seek to achieve a bet-
ter equilibrium in the functioning of his
organs and a more harmonious develop-
ment of his tissues.” After a successful
physical transformation, human beings
“will achieve a higher level and create
a superior biological and social type, UN
superman if you will.”28

Trotsky would later be deprived of
power by Stalin and never have the op-
portunity to put his ideas into practice,
though the Nazis did. In pursuit of the
goal of creating a new man and a new so-
ciety, Stalin made do with more familiar
levers of power, among them the party,
the police, educators, writers, and art-
ist.

It should be said, Tuttavia, that the
dictator was alone in identifying his
work with artistic creation. The subju-
gated masses, whether in Stalin’s Rus-
sia, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s
Italy, failed to perceive the fusion of pol-
itics and art and were unaware that their
lives were being shaped in accordance
with a canon of beauty. The absolute in
the name of which the state subjugated
them, and which they were supposed to
worship, wore a very different visage; Esso
appeared as a collective, not an individ-
ual, ideal. In Fascist Italy, this new god
was called the nation or the state; in Na-
zi Germany, it was the people; in Soviet
Russia, Communism. In all three places,
the high priests of the cult organized
themselves as a political party. The aver-
age citizen of these states was not at lib-
erty to shape his own life as a work of
art, according to his own conception of
beauty. He was obliged to conform to the
common ideal. Where the dictator saw
the fusion of two modern approaches to
the absolute, the political and the artis-
tic, the people saw only the imposition
of a political absolute: the revolution,
the party, the guide. The role of beauty
was quite minor.

How are we to interpret this parallel

between the ideas and forces that in-
spired both avant-garde artists and total-
itarian dictators in the period between
the two world wars? Following Walter
Benjamin, it has often been noted that
extremist political movements had a
tendency to combine aesthetic and po-
litical considerations in two different
ways: “Fascism naturally tends to aes-
theticize politics . . . . The response of
communism is to politicize art.”29

28 Leon Trotsky, Littérature et révolution (Paris:
Julliard, 1964), 213, 215, 217.

29 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illumina-
zioni (New York: Schocken, 1986).

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Avant-
gardes &
totalitar-
ianism

What we see here, Tuttavia, is a prox-

imity that cannot be reduced to an in-
strumentalization of one project by the
other. Piuttosto, it shows us how to under-
stand both as stemming from the same
matrix. What dictators and avant-garde
artists have in common is their radical-
ism, their fundamentalism. Both are
prepared to start ex nihilo, to take no
account of what already exists, in order
to construct a work based solely on their
own criteria. What differentiates them,
by contrast, is the scale on which they
lavoro: that of an entire country, includ-
ing its people, in one case; that of a
book, a canvas, a stage, a house, a street,
O, at most, a neighborhood in the other.
What they have in common is their to-
talizing ambition, which recognizes no
sacred boundary: the artist does not re-
spect existing aesthetic canons; the dic-
tator is ready to overturn all prior social
norms. Faithful to the Promethean proj-
ect that permeates all modernity, both
artist and dictator propose to fabricate
an entirely new art, new men, new peo-
ples. Nothing is given; everything is the
product of the will. Their ambition is
in½nite, yet it de½nes an enclosed space,
because it recognizes nothing outside of
Esso. Artists and dictators, intoxicated by
pride, are united by the belief that they
are masters of the entire process of con-
struction–whether it be of works of art
or of societies.

This comparison of Romantic and rev-
olutionary projects also suggests a more
profound relation between the two, go-
ing back to their origins in the nine-
teenth century. Consciously or uncon-
sciously, Romantic thinkers embraced
a Manichaean vision of the world: for
them, artists and poets constituted the
elite of mankind, and art played the role
reserved for gnosis in ancient religious
doctrine. The same can be said of utopi-
an thinkers, who dreamed of collective

salvation, whether of all mankind or of a
particular people. Political and aesthetic
Manichaeanism may ½nd themselves at
odds in certain circumstances, yet they
share similar worldviews. Proponents of
totalitarian doctrine may have been con-
temptuous of Romantic thinkers, just as
Romantic thinkers may have spurned
political engagement of any kind, yet
both were caught up in the same histor-
ical movement. Karl Popper, who was
aware of the similarity between politi-
cal extremism and aesthetic extremism,
ended his analysis of the origins of total-
itarianism with these words: “The en-
chanting dream of a marvelous world is
nothing more than a romantic vision.”30
We now know the damage the dream
of total revolution can do when the ideal
that inspires it is political in nature. IL
utopian visions that proposed a radiant
future in the place of present mediocri-
ty turned into the totalitarian systems
of the twentieth century, a remedy far
worse than the disease they purported
to cure. Today we spurn the peddlers
of political dreams, the utopians who
promised imminent happiness for all,
because we have learned that such
promises served to hide the sinister ma-
neuvers of Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini
and Hitler. We sometimes think of Ro-
mantic images of artistic perfection as
the antithesis of those political dreams.
In reality, that is far from the truth. IL
two were not simply associated or com-
petitive; they grew out of the same con-
ception of the world, the same convic-
tion of possessing a recipe for the per-
fect creation, one that would not need to
take any account of earlier ways of living
or creating. Both posited a radical oppo-
sition between low and high, present
and future, evil and good, and sought to

30 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
(London: Routledge, 1945).

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Tzvetan
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SU
nonviolence
& violence

eliminate the ½rst term of each pair once
and for all. But if the ideal ceases to be a
horizon and turns into a rule of everyday
life, disaster follows: the reign of terror.
History teaches us that the Romantic
dream–though in½nitely less lethal than
its inverted double, political utopianism
–is doomed to disappointment nonethe-
less.

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