The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art RGALI is a real Mecca for those who study Russian and Soviet literature, art, music and theater. Of course, not to the same extent as before, when the authors of the archives, having sold them to the state, came here to drink tea, like Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, but still, the Treasures in RGALI are countless. Some of the most remarkable areas include the local Silver Age and the Russian avant-garde. Some things have already been published: the rgalish Khodasevich, for example, has been published in full in his collected works. But quite a lot continues to go to waste. True, the Silver Age has been completely unfashionable in recent years, but the Russian avant-garde, despite all the political vicissitudes, continues to excite not only specialists, but also those simply suffering from radical romance. It was in the order of things for an avant-garde or constructivist to decorate the streets for some revolutionary holiday. But, I’m afraid, even if you strain yourself, you won’t imagine what the festive decorations by Malevich looked like on the streets of Vitebsk in 1919.

Today there is practically a holiday on RGALI street. The project “Visual Sources of RGALI”, financed by the Ford Foundation, ended with an exhibition of part of the funds in the Tretyakov Gallery.

The peak of exhibitions of Russian futurists, constructivists, suprematists and other “ists” occurred during the late perestroika. The fatty black soil layer, which has fertilized a fair amount of world architecture and artistic culture over the last century, has been legalized. It was then that everyone understood what was happening. Even if the Kraftwerk group looked for inspiration in the works of El Lissitzky, then there is no need to talk about industrial design. Of course, the Frenchman Le Corbusier lived in the world, but there was also Rodchenko with his montage, and Tatlin with his tower of the Third International, and Burliuk in America continued to bear fruit, little by little influencing everyone and everything. There was even a futurist Igor Terentyev, who penetrated the rather secretive camp of Parisian Dadaism of the 1920s. Then everything somehow subsided - and sales at auctions fell, and all sorts of bad stories began with speculation. Now the scale is smaller. It is stupid to consider what is exhibited by the avant-garde to be crumbs and leftovers - these are completely different things. If previous exhibitions of the Russian Museum gave out a charge accumulated over many decades, then exhibitions like the one in the Tretyakov Gallery are evidence of the normal work of archivists and art historians in the public service, people doing important work and, judging by their salaries, eating air. And what is shown today is living, not canonized art.

The value of the exhibition is also that avant-garde artists are a very difficult field of work, so everything new that appears is the fruit of rather painstaking work. According to the well-known apocrypha, Khlebnikov kept his manuscripts in a pillowcase, moreover, he used to light the stove with them on occasion. Plus the confusion of the Civil War. Here is an example: the center of life of the youngest futuristic clan, the “41 Degrees” group, was Tbilisi. There, an older scoundrel, Alexey Eliseevich Kruchenykh, joined the young scoundrels Terentyev and the Zdanevich brothers for some time. How the manuscripts wandered around for decades is no longer clear. But all three listed in one form or another are present in the new exhibition; Georgian Dadaists - in the form of two or three sheets of cartoons and sketches.

And Kruchenykh is represented by sheets of albums with collages from different years and, again, a collage book from 1916, “The Universal War.” Alexey Eliseevich died in 1968, what he lived in recent years is unclear; He must have been selling manuscripts and bibliophile publications or, as rumor claims, he served in the KGB. He never stopped working on collage - neither in literature, where editing was his main (slanderers say, only) weapon, nor in graphics. Here he is a purer classic than Alexander Rodchenko, if only because he began gluing triangles and circles from colored paper into compositions a decade earlier. The fragment of the album that appeared at the exhibition is the second one this year; the first, in the amount of one sheet, happened at the Photobiennale.

And if we are already talking about the sources, manuscripts and originals of the Soviet avant-garde, then we will have to talk about politics. Everything that was collected from the 1930s to the 1970s was collected with great caution: official art criticism did not favor the avant-garde. However, some artists themselves, having matured, overestimated radicalism - and they tried to force those who did not overestimate. Here Tatlin of the 1940s is pencil realism, and Tatlin of the 1920s is masterpieces of industrial design: “overall clothes,” haute couture overalls and next to it is Tatlin’s portrait of Kazimir Malevich, very caustic towards the master. Malevich looks like a bristling cat in it.

However, the light did not fall like a wedge on the greats. What is interesting today is not even them, but the people in the second row, of whom there are plenty at the exhibition. The author of the play "Janko - Kul Albanian" Le Dantu is represented by his 1916 magazine "Bloodless Murder". A member of the Burlyuk clan, Elena Guro, whose legacy is small, with unknown graphics. And the constructivist Yakov Chernikhov with his “architectural and machine forms” is a triumph of Russian design in its purest form.

A meeting of scoundrels