The semantics of space in the literature of Russian modernism: Revisiting the <italic>Topoi</italic> of Petrograd's House of Arts (1919--1923).

Abstract

The Petrograd House of Arts existed during a period of dramatic transition in Russia. During the later years of War Communism and the beginning of the New Economic Policy, the House of Arts (or DISK) was one of the city's most significant sources of cultural programming and social assistance for the creative intelligentsia, particularly writers. Given the celebrity of many of its members and that almost all them were writers, it was perhaps inevitable that the House would figure in their work. More remarkably, this included not only memoirs, but also stories, poems, and other artistic texts, most of which invested the House's interior spaces with metaphorical resonance. The texts coalesce into a response to the House's embattled political situation and, more importantly, into a mythos about the House of Arts, a collaborative impulse to reproduce the social and artistic space of an institution whose meaning reverberated beyond the few years of its existence. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to set forth the defining characteristics of the DISK mythos in its reproduction of the House of Arts as social, artistic and architectural space. This includes an examination of the ways in which the mythos functions as an artistic text and an artistic space. To more distinctly delineate the space of the mythos, the dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part reconstructs the administrative-bureaucratic narrative surrounding the House and posits the DISK mythos as a counterplot to this more public story of the institution. The second part addresses the nexus of spatial interpretations of memory, power and text that underlies the mythos' creation. The third part discusses four types of rooms within the House that emerged as critical spaces for the mythos authors' construction of their identities as writers during an era when these identities were contested. The rooms can be interpreted as representations of choices confronting the era's creative intelligentsia: to participate in a dialogue about the future, to turn to the past for material, to write about present realities, or to cultivate an aesthetics independent of time and place.