The paper deals with anti-Western motifs in Russian avant-garde culture, especially their refraction in Russian futurism. On the one hand, the tendency is linked to a strategic goal—asserting independent versions of this or that new form of art and, on the other, it coincides with fundamental features of Russian modernism such as archaization, national self-identification and Eastern cultures.
The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new ideas of matter. A paradoxical fusion of scientific and occult thought, coupled with ideas of Christian anthropology, formed a crucial component of Chekrygin’s works. The artist produced his anthropological project at the intersection of two cultural paradigms: that of Christianity, on the one hand, and science and the occult, on the other. This blend of such heterogeneous concepts was not an accidental fact of the artist’s biography. It makes it possible to see certain problems and antinomies that were fundamental to the Russian culture of the 1910s through the early 1920s.
The article focuses on several aspects of the theory and practice of rayonism in the work of Mikhail Larionov, which have to date remained at the periphery of art historians' interest. The bringing together of positivist science and occultism was one of the most paradoxical "avant-garde" features of fin-de-siècle culture. Like many European avantgarde artists, Larionov created the concept of rayonism based on the scientific and occult mythology of his time. The concept of painterly rayonism appeared in the context of research and practical experiments into the visualisation of invisible radiation.
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