Between a Conservative Revolution and Bolshevism

Rykov’s article investigates the works of Nikolai Punin, a major figure in the Russian avant-garde and a theoretician of art and literature, in the context of the culture of late Stalinism. A central focus is Against Civilization, a work co-authored with Evgenii Poletaev that envisions a totalitarian utopia. It also explores the early 1940s literary work, Letters to M.G., and an unfinished dissertation on the nineteenth-century artist Aleksandr Ivanov. Rykov traces the evolution of Punin’s nationalist rhetoric from his early engagement in the conservative revolution in Germany to his essentialist interpretation of Russian art history. He also identifies a diverse array of discourses (ranging from Bolshevik, proto-fascist and militaristic to modernist and formalist) supported by the avant-garde matrix of Punin’s thought.