Notes — Continued (2 of 2)

1. Fernand Léger, “Modern Architecture and Color” [1946], in Functions of Painting, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 152. The same anecdote is repeated in Léger’s “A New Space in Architecture” [1949], in Functions of Painting, 158.

2. The LoC transliteration is Maliarstroi for the institution and Maliarnoe delo for the title of its journal.

3. A. P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskie Zapiski, vol. 3 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii khudozhestv, 1951), 20.

4. Matyushin was the composer of “Victory over the Sun” (1913) (libretto written by Aleksey Kruchenykh, and costumes and stage set designed by Kazimir Malevich).

5. Mikhail Matiushin, “Ne iskusstvo, a zhizn’,” Zhizn‘ iskusstva, no. 20 (1923): 15. English translation in Margareta Tillberg, Coloured Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde: Matiushin on Colour Vision in Stalin’s Russia, 1932 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2003), 140.

6. See Tillberg, Coloured Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde, 152–54.

7. Larisa Zhadova, “Tsvetovaia sistema M. Matiushina,” Iskusstvo, no. 8 (1974): 38–42.

8. M. V. Matiushin, Spravochnik po tsvetu: Zakonomernost’ izmeniaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, 1932).

9. All the members of the Ender family were educated in the German Petersschule in St. Petersburg and were fluent in German.

10. In 1928, at the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers, Nikolsky created a Scientific-Research Cabinet and, within it, a Laboratory of Color, which was headed by Maria Ender. Vera Shueninova-Nikolskaya, the architect’s wife, was a volunteer there, focusing on the problem of the relationship between color and form and the principles of exterior coloration of buildings.

11. “Ustav Gosudarstvennogo tresta po proizvodstvu maliarnykh rabot VSNKh SSSR” (Statutes of Malyarstroy) [1928], in Igor A. Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov: Organizatsiia proektirovaniia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2009), 244.

12. E. Stokolov, “Ot redaktsii,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1–2 (1930): 1–2; Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 244.

13. Stokolov, “Ot redaktsii,” 1–2.

14. Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1968); Anatole Kopp, “Foreign Architects in the Soviet Union during the First Two Five-Year Plans,” in Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams, ed. William C. Brumfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176–214; Kurt Junghanns, “Deutsche Architekten in der Sowjetunion während der ersten Fünfjahrpläne und des Vaterländischen Krieges,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 29 (1983): 121–40; and, in Russian, publications by Evgeniya Konysheva, Mark Meerovich, and Dmitrij Chmelnizky.

15. For more on the Construction Commission, see chapter 4. Hungarian-born Alfréd (Fred) Forbát taught at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1920 to 1922; in 1933, he moved to the USSR, where he joined the “brigade” of Ernst May. See Renate Scheper, Vom Bauhaus geprägt: Hinnerk Scheper: Farbgestalter, Fotograf, Denkmalpfleger (Bramsche: Rasch, 2007), 92, n. 2.

16. Scheper stayed in Moscow from July 1929 to July 1930, October 1930 to March 1931, and May to September 1931.

17. V. Sestroretskii and N. Nishenko, “Puti pazvitiia maliarnogo dela v SSSR,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1–2 (1930): 2.

18. Vsekhimprom, or Vsesoiuznoe ob’edinenie khimicheskoi promyshlennosti (All-Union Association of the Chemical Industry), existed under the Supreme Council of People’s Economy of the USSR from 1929 to 1931. For conflicting opinions about Malyarstroy’s mission see, for instance, A. V. Shchusev, “Stroitel’stvo novykh gorodov i massovaia okraska zdanii,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1–2 (1930): 8–9, and Igor Grabar’, “Soiuz iskusstva i remesla,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1–2 (1930): 8.

19. Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 244.

20. Lou Scheper, “Retrospective,” in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People: Personal Opinions and Recollections of Former Bauhaus Members and Their Contemporaries, ed. Eckhard Neumann, trans. Eva Richter and Alba Lorman (New York: Von Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 125. The projects prepared by the Office of Design included the Club of Railroad Workers at Lyublino station (within contemporary Moscow), the Club of Factory No. 12 at Elektrostal’ station (near Moscow), a cinema in the residential complex of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in Moscow, the dining hall of the Moscow Union of Consumption Associations, and several buildings for a collective farm near Rostov-on-Don.

21. In Moscow, Erich Borchert designed color schemes for Lyublino Club of Railroad Workers, the Government Building, the Institute of Electric Energy, the Central Aviation and Hydrodynamics Institute, pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exposition (currently the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) (together with another Bauhaus graduate, Max Krajewski), and a project for painting the city of Gorky (today, Nizhny Novgorod). “Erich Willi Borchert. Biografia,” in Erikh Borkhert v Rossii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo im. Sabashnikovykh, 2008), 18–19.

22. Astrid Volpert, “Bez vozmozhnosti vozvrata,” in Erikh Borkhert v Rossii, 11.

23. In 1936–37, Malyarstroy also employed the German sculptor Will Lambert.

24. Larisa Zhadova, “B. V. Ender o tsvete i tsvetovoi srede,” Tekhnicheskaia Estetika, no. 11 (1974): 6.

25. Der Bund zur Förderung der Farbe im Stadtbild (1926–37) published the journal Die farbige Stadt and included such architects as Ernst May and Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Its work was discussed in Malyarstroy (L. M. Antokol’skii, “O planovoi okraske gorodov,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 3 [1931]: 5–13).

26. Scheper, Vom Bauhaus geprägt, 148n11. See also Scheper, Vom Bauhaus geprägt, 24–25.

27. G. L. Sheper, “Arkhitektura i tsvet,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1–2 (1930): 12–15. English translation: Morgan Ridler and Natasha Kurchanova, West 86th 25, no. 1 (2018): 89–96. My quotations of this article are based on the original Russian-language publication.

28. See W. Ostwald, “Normen,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, no. 3 (1914): 77–86; Thomas Hapke, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Combinatorics as a Link between In-formation and Form,” Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 286–303.

29. V. Ostvald, Tsvetovedenie, trans. Z. O. Mil’man (Moscow: Promizdat, 1926). Ostwald’s color theory departed from the Weber-Fechner law, the work of Ewald Hering and Ernst Mach, and other discoveries of modern psychophysiology.

30. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 205.

31. See Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 720.

32. Sheper, “Arkhitektura i tsvet,” 14.

33. Moisei Ginzburg, “Tsvet v arkhitekture,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 75.

34. Letter to Italian architect Piero Bottoni (1928), quoted in Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 217; August Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation” [1893], in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 287.

35. Letter to Viktor Nekrasov, quoted in S. Frederick Starr, “Le Corbusier in the USSR: New Documentation,” Oppositions 23 (1981): 132. The letter was sent in response to the students’ assurances of solidarity after the announcement of the results of the first round of the Palace of the Soviets competition.

36. Redaktsia, “Pochemu my pomeshchaem zhivopis’ Lezhe,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 58. At VKhUTEMAS, the Cezannists Alexander Osmerkin and Alexander Drevin taught courses on the relationship between color and form: “Expression of Form through Color” (Osmerkin) and “Simultaneity of Color and Form” (Drevin). The constructivist Gustav Klutsis, who taught the propaedeutic discipline “Color” between 1924 and 1930, explored the interaction of color with planar and volumetric form and the surface of the material.

37. Moisei Ginzburg, Zhilishche: Opyt piatiletnei raboty nad problemoi zhilishcha (Moscow: Gosstroiizdat, 1934), 93–94.

38. Sheper, “Arkhitektura i tsvet,” 13.

39. Ginzburg, Zhilishche, 92–94.

40. Arkhitektor Kuz’min, “Problema nauchnoi organizatsii byta,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 3 (1930): 14.

41. Ginzburg, “Tsvet v arkhitekture,” 74.

42. Both were published in Maliarnoe delo, color supplement to no. 3–4 (1930); the originals are kept at the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

43. E. Borkhert, “Metody proektirovaniia maliarnykh rabot,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 2 (1931): 48–51.

44. On the history of this diagram, see Robin Rehm, “Die ‘Einsicht des Blickes’: Das Perspektivschema in der Wissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts und das Sich-Zeigen des Raumes,” in Zeigen: Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 46–67.

45. Wilhelm von Bezold, Die Farbenlehre im Hinblick auf Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1874), 281–82, Tafel VI. In a similar manner, a contemporary study in the psychology of architecture points out that color affects how we perceive this diagram as space: whereas white makes its “ceiling” look higher, black makes it seem lower; blue makes the walls seem further away and orange makes them seem closer. Jörg Kurt Grütter, Grundlagen der Architektur-Wahrnehmung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), 328–29.

46. I am indebted to Yve-Alain Bois for drawing my attention to Shklovsky’s article “Space in Painting and the Suprematists” (1915), which discusses the diagram.

47. David Katz, Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben und ihre Beeinflussung durch die individuelle Erfahrung (Leipzig, 1911), 1–30; English translation 1935. In his article “Prostranstvennye i ‘vesovye’ svoistva tsveta,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 2 (1931): 5–8, Boris Teplov referred to Raumfarben as prostranstvennye.

48. Scheper, “Arkhitektura i tsvet,” 14; Renate Scheper, Farbenfroh! Die Werkstatt für Wandmalerei am Bauhaus (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2005), 84–88.

49. Ginzburg, Zhilishche, 94.

50. E. Borkhert, “Okraska bol’nits i sanatorii,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 4 (1931): 25. Borchert suggested replacing gray hues, which provoked depression, with light chromatic colors, and painting walls of patient rooms with calm tones, leaving bright color (usually red) only for therapeutic use in the neuropathological department, where its dose was to be regulated by a system of special screens.

51. Ginzburg, Zhilishche, 94–95.

52. E. Borkhert, “Krasochnoe oformlenie zhilishch,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 1 (1931): 8.

53. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

54. For more on energeticism, see the Introduction and chapter 1, “Space.”

55. Sheper, “Arkhitektura i tsvet,” 13.

56. A. Mosso, Fatigue, trans. Margaret Drummond and William B. Drummond (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 82–88. Among other first ergographers was Charles Henry, one of the founders of psychophysical aesthetics. See Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 133–42.

57. Charles Féré, Travail et Plaisir (Paris: Alcan, 1904).

58. F. Stefănescu-Goangă, Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Gefühlsbetonung der Farben (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1911).

59. Jordanna Bailkin, “Color Problems: Work, Pathology, and Perception in Modern Britain,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 68 (Fall 2005): 93–111.

60. “Vliianie okraski fabriki na proizvoditel’nost’ truda rabochikh,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 2 (1931): 69 (the text is a summary of articles in the German newspaper Malerzeitung, October 25, 1930, 450, and in the journal Werkleiter, no. 3 [1929]: 62; its author is not credited); B. Shn., “Tsvetovoe oformlenie fabrichnogo oborudovaniia,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 4 (1931): 58–60.

61. S. Beliaeva-Ekzempliarskaia, “K voprosu o vybore tsvetov dlia okraski rabochikh pomeshchenii,” Maliarnoe delo, no. 5–6 (1932): 9–11. Lissitzky also discussed the effects of various colors upon the physiological activity of the human (El Lissitzky, “Die künstlerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisieurung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung. Vortrag für die Sektion Standardisierung NTU WSNCh,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers und Jen Lissitzky [Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977], 111).

62. A. M. Lukina, “Vospitanie sochetatel’nogo refleksa na slozhnyi tsvetovoi razdrazhitel’,” in Novoe v refleksologii i fiziologii nervnoi sistemy, ed. V. M. Bekhterev (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925). Cited in Beliaeva-Ekzempliarskia, “K voprosu o vybore tsvetov dlia okraski rabochikh pomeshchenii,” 9.

63. S. V. Kravkov, “Ob adaptatsii glaza k tsvetnym razdrazhiteliam,” Zhurnal prikladnoi fiziki 5, no. 2 (1928): 105–15.

64. Aleksandr Liushin, “Practicum of Color Theory,” exercise 21, unpublished manuscript, Getty Research Library, VKhUTEMAS collection, accession no. 950052.

65. The program of research was subdivided into several steps: “1. The impact of color upon the process of muscle labor (the method of ergographic curves). 2. The impact of color upon cerebral work (the method of constant tests under changing irritants, recording of the speed of associations, etc.). 3. Testing the dependence of the received results upon color combinations of varied quality and quantity. 4. An investigation of the relationship of color and form. The change of spatial qualities of form [depending on the] color of its surfaces (the method of repeated introspective observation with the help of a specially constructed device).” G. T. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoria pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete VKhUTEIN,” Arkhitektura i VKhUTEIN, no. 1 (1929): 4.

66. Mikhail Barshch, “Vliianie zritel’nykh vpechatlenii na trudovye protsessy,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1928): 72.

67. M[ikhail] O. Barshch, “Tsvet i ego rabora,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 77–79.

68. Barshch, “Vliianie zritel’nykh vpechatlenii na trudovye protsessy,” 72.

69. Barshch, “Tsvet i ego rabora,” 77–79.

70. In 1925, in a project for the university hospital in Münster, Scheper suggested painting the operating room off-white to avoid blinding the surgeon, and the X-ray room dark red to help the eye adapt to darkness after the light was turned off. Scheper, Vom Bauhaus geprägt, 22–23.

71. Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 57–79.

72. The letter appeared in the German-language Moscow newspaper Moskauer Rundschau. H. Scheper and L. Scheper, “Offener Brief an die Schüler des ‘WCHUTEIN,” Moskauer Rundschau, no. 4 (January 30, 1930).

73. In September 1930, he published an enthusiastic article about its technical achievements, such as a machine for the pneumatic spraying of paint. P. Katichev, “Khudozhnik-stroitel,’” Iskusstvo v massy 9, no. 17 (1930): 14.

74. E. Borkhert, “Funktsionalistskoe zasil’e (v poriadke polemiki),” Maliarnoe delo, no. 3 (1931): 38.

75. Borkhert, “Funktsionalistskoe zasil’e,” 34.

76. Vladimir Kostin was an artist and an art critic for the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda. As he acknowledged, after submitting the article to the journal, he reworked it with the help of Mácza.

77. V. Kostin, “Arkhitektura i tsvetopis’,” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 8 (1931): 4.

78. El’ Lisitskii, “Fotopis’,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (May 15, 1929): 311.

79. Lissitzky, “Die künstlerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisieurung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung,” 111.

80. Kostin, “Arkhitektura i tsvetopis’,” 4.

81. Kostin, “Arkhitektura i tsvetopis,’” 5.

82. V. Friche, Sotsiologiia iskusstva (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stovo, 1926), 183–89.

83. Although after submission, Kostin asked the editors to withdraw his article, they still published it, supplementing with a scathing preface. “Ot redaktsii,” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 8 (1931): 4.

84. I. Amov, “Taktika klassovogo vraga na izofronte,” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 8 (1931): 9.

85. Maria Ender, “Predislovie,” in M. V. Matiushin, Zakonomernost’ izmeniaemosti tsvetovykh sochtanii: Spravochnik po tsvetu (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, 1932), 3–10. For an English translation, see Tillberg, Colored Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde, Appendix B, 347–54.

86. Due to the difficulty of the technological process, the illustrations to the book had to be hand colored by Matyushin’s students. As a result, the Handbook had a print run of only four hundred copies. In 1933, Mácza published his opinion on the role of color in art in a lengthy independent article “Problema tsveta v iskusstve,” Iskusstvo, no. 1–2 (1933): 8–47.

87. Vygotsky studied Alfred Adler’s Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsychologie (1927), which argued that to understand behavior, a psychologist must detect its purpose—the goal to which the organism strives. However, whereas Adler defined this goal as being superior to others, Vygotsky reformulated it as personal development. René Van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 65–75.

88. Alexei Leontiev, Activity, Consciousness, and Personality [1975], trans. Maris J. Hall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 6.

89. Matsa, “Problema tsveta v iskusstve,” 9.

90. Boris Ender, lecture on wall-painting, unpublished manuscript, 1936, Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts, Boris Ender collection, fond. 2973, op. 1, ed. khr. 11, l. 29.

91. Nikolai Troitskii, Ty moe stolet’ie (Moscow: Rusaki, 2006), 94–95.

92. While Dedyukhin, a prominent party member, was promptly executed, while Norman (born as Troitsky) (1903–2011) was freed the following year and was eventually able to emigrate. His memoir (Troitskii, Ty moe stolet’ie) documents his tumultuous life. I am thankful to Dmitrij Chmelnizki for introducing me to Nikolay and Vera Troitsky.

93. See Joy Knoblauch, The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

94. See, for instance, Peter Barrett et al., “A Holistic, Multi-Level Analysis Identifying the Impact of Classroom Design on Pupils’ Learning,” Building and Environment, no. 59 (2013): 678; Bradley E. Karlin and Robert A. Zeiss, “Environmental and Therapeutic Issues in Psychiatric Hospital Design: Toward Best Practices,” Psychiatric Services 57, no. 10 (October 2006): 1376–78.

95. Alexander G. Schauss, “Tranquilizing Effect of Color Reduces Aggressive Behavior and Potential Violence,” Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry 8, no. 4 (1979): 218–21.

1. Published in USSR in Construction, no. 9 (1934).

2. The first two words are indeed to be seen on the published note. Betty Glan, interview with Viktor Duvakin, December 16, 1980, published in “O sozdanii parka Gor’kogo, ego ozdorovitel’nykh i agitatsionnykh funktsiiakh i znamenitykh posetiteliakh,” OUI NB MGU # 781–782 (http://oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-781-782). Glan was born Berta Mendelzweig (Mendel’tsveig). Her adopted name was an homage to Knut Hamsun’s vitalist novel Pan (1894), whose hero was named Thomas Glahn (Glan in Russian translation). Katarina Kukher [Kucher], Park Gor’kogo: Kul’tura dosuga v stalinskuiu epokhu, 1928–1941 (Moscow: Rospen, 2012), 224.

3. Mikhail Korzhev, “Doklad o tvorcheskom puti parkovogo arkhitektora, chlena SSA i chlena sektsii ozeleneniia goroda Moskvy Prokhorovoi Militsy Ivanovny,” March 1960, p. 8, unpublished manuscript, Mikhail Korzhev collection, archive of A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow. Written at the end of her long and difficult life, her memoir is entitled Prazdnik vsegda s nami (Holiday That Is Always with Us / We Are Always Celebrating), an homage to Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Moveable Feast, whose Russian translation came under the title Holiday That Is Always with You (Prazdnik, kotoryi vsegda s toboi).

4. B. N. Glan, Prazdnik vsegda s nami (Moscow: Soiuz teatral’nykh deiatelei, 1988), 112.

5. Although Wells used the word “rest” to translate the park’s name, I am using “leisure.” More on the semantic difference between the two notions will follow.

6. Fabiola López-Durán, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

7. In 1920, Lunacharsky met Glan in Kyiv, where she grew up, and, impressed by her knowledge of French and German, invited the sixteen-year-old to join his Narkompros team. After she moved to Moscow the same year, he assumed a paternal role toward her. From Glan, interview with Duvakin.

8. Konstantin Ukhanov, “V bor’be za kul’turu (K organizatsii v Moskve ‘Parka kul’tury i otdykha’),” Pravda, no. 68 (March 21, 1928).

9. Ukhanov, “V bor’be za kul’turu.”

10. The park was largely created by the weekend volunteer labor of thousands of Moscow workers, which was conceived and presented as an instrument of personal transformation.

11. G. M. Danishevsky, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR (Moscow: Profizdat, 1934).

12. Glan, interview with Duvakin.

13. In Capital, Marx quotes from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding. . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 483.

14. Sigfried Giedion eloquently described how the roots of the assembly line can be traced back to the “disassembly lines,” midcentury slaughterhouses in the American Midwest, in Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

15. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898; repr., Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Literary Press, 2003), 146.

16. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 143–44. Similarly, in The Time Machine (1895) Wells describes the evolutionary separation of humanity, under the condition of capitalism, into two new biological species: Eloi (descendants of privileged classes) and Morlocks (descendants of the proletariat).

17. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” [1845–46], in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), 425. The work, which remained unpublished during the lifetime of Marx and Engels, was first published in Moscow in 1932.

18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 81.

19. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki [1903] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 26–27.

20. Seneca’s De Otio (On Leisure), Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties), and the letters of Pliny the Younger are the most famous classical celebrations of otium. I am thankful to Robert Iliffe for these references.

21. See James Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (1985; repr., London: Thames and Hudson, 1995).

22. On the meaning and etymology of “leisure,” see also Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 8.

23. Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 145–46. In this passage, Danishevsky refers to the letter from Friedrich Engels to Marx, which discusses Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Property, dated November 19, 1844.

24. Lunacharskii, Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki, 13–19.

25. While Avenarius referred to cognitive energy expended during the perceptive process, Lunacharsky spoke about “vital energy.”

26. A. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stat’i po filosofii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo S. Dorovatovskago i A. Charushnikova, 1904), 94–124, and vol. 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo S. Dorovatovskago i A. Charushnikova, 1905), 43–50.

27. A. A. Bogdanov, Tektologiia: Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka, vol. 2 [1917] (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1989).

28. B. N. Glan, Udarno rabotat’—kul’turno otdykhat’ (Moscow: Mospartizdat, 1933), 15 (quoting Maksim Gorkii, “V Amerike” [1906]).

29. Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 8.

30. Glan, Udarno rabotat’—kul’turno otdykhat’, 57–58.

31. Glan, Udarno rabotat’—kul’turno otdykhat’, 58.

32. L. B. Lunts, Parki Kul’tury i Otdykha (Moscow: Gosstroiizdat, 1934), 80.

33. Julian Huxley, A Scientist among the Soviets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 18–21.

34. Glan also notes the role of Ivan Zholtovsky, the architect of the 1923 exposition, in devising the plan of the park (interview with Duvakin). In 1929, Ladovsky used the park as the topic for the diploma projects of his graduating students: Lyubov Zalesskaya, Vitaly Dolganov, Mikael Mazmonyan, Karo Alabyan, Ivan Bolbashevsky, Oganes Balyian, and Sergey Matorin. Some of them (most notably, Zalesskaya and Dolganov) began to work in the park immediately after graduating. Among Ladovsky’s other students who worked in the park were Mikhail Korzhev, Militsa Prokhorova, Innokenty Kychakov, and Mikhail Cherkasov. In 1932, Goszelenstroi (“state green building”) trust was created under the Russian Commissariat of Infrastructure as a center for developing the methodology for landscape architecture, and most of the members of the Office of Design and Planning moved to the new organization.

35. Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 56.

36. On god-building, see Alla Vronskaya, “From the Aesthetics of Life to the Dialectics of Collectivity: Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, and Maxim Gorky, 1905–1917,” in Productive Universals—Specific Situations: Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism, ed. Anne Kockelkorn and Nina Zschocke (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 316–35. On Lunacharsky’s concept of the revolutionary spectacle, see Alla Vronskaya, “Objects-Organizers: The Monism of Things and the Art of the Socialist Spectacle,” in A History of Russian Exposition and Festival Architecture, 1700–2014, ed. Alla Aronova and Alexander Ortenberg (London: Routledge, 2019), 151–67.

37. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “O narodnykh prazdnenstvakh” [1920], in Lunacharskii o massovykh prazdenstvakh, estrade, tsirke (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981), 85. Partial English translation: “On Popular Festivals,” in Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia, 1918–1933, ed. Vladimir Tolstoy, Irina Bibikova, and Catherine Cooke (New York: Vendome Press, 1990), 124.

38. L. Roshchin, “Iskusstvo massovykh prazdnenstv,” Iskusstvo v massy, no. 5–6 (1929): 28–29.

39. This idea would soon be explored by the ASNOVA brigade in the competition project for the Palace of the Soviets. The project articulated a new, organic, concept of monumentality: what they designed was “not . . . a static monument, but . . . a live, acting organism, living the same life as the demonstrations and revolutionary-political mass celebrations.” El’ Lisitskii, “Arkhitektura budushchego parka kul’tury i otdykha,” Park kul’tury i otdykha: Gazeta-desiatidnevka, no. 7 (November 1930): 3; Brigada ASNOVA [Viktor Balikhin, Militsa Prokhorova, Mikhail Turkus, P. V. Budo, Romual’d Iodko, Flora Sevortian], “ASNOVA: Dvorets Sovetov,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura 4 (1931): 52. For more on this project, see Alla Vronskaya, “Urbanist Landscape: Militsa Prokhorova, Liubov’ Zalesskaia, and the Emergence of Soviet Landscape Architecture,” in Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture, ed. John Beardsley and Sonja Duempelmann (London: Routledge, 2015), 60–80.

40. “The stage has to be set up in such a way that one can enter from all sides: from north, east, south, and west; the driveway of the auditorium—a driveway, not just a visitors’ entrance—will draw the spectator into the action when the masses ‘stream’ on the stage,” as Lissitzky explained his concept. El Lissitzky, “Protokoll des Gesprächs Meyerholds mit dem Architekten Lissitzky,” in El Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 202.

41. Lisitskii, “Arkhitektura budushchego parka kul’tury i otdykha,” 3.

42. Hadas Steiner, “For the Birds,” Grey Room, no. 13 (Autumn 2003): 16.

43. The Kinetic Construction System was published by Moholy-Nagy in From Material to Architecture (Von Material zu Architektur) in 1929.

44. Glan described her first emotional ride on the track in her memoirs. Glan, Prazdnik vsegda s nami, 54–55.

45. As late as 1971, a cable car was installed in the park of culture and leisure in Kharkiv.

46. A. G. Orliuk, Kak pol’zovat’sia sol’ntsem, vozdukhom i vodoi (Moscow: Fizkul’tura i turizm, 1930). The architects the Institute of Resort Studies employed were Alexander Golubev, Vladimir Tarasov, and Dmitry Chernopyzhsky.

47. A. Orliuk, “Fabrika zdorov’ia,” Park kul’tury i otdykha: Gazeta-desiatidnevka, no. 8–9 (December 1930): 5. In the course of his research on the impact of short-term rest in the Central Park of Culture and Leisure on working productivity, Orlyuk discovered that the increase in productivity visibly outweighed its initial loss: the textile workers of Krasnokholmskaya factory, who spent six days in the park in January, improved their productivity by 7 percent, while the productivity of the workers of the factory “Liberated Labor,” who spent twelve days in January and February, improved by 10 percent. Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 57.

48. Unlike its multistory nineteenth-century predecessors, the modern twentieth-century factory was a long, one-story building whose form followed the logic of the conveyor belt. Such factories were advocated, for example, by Nikolay Milyutin in Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities [1930], trans. Arthur Sprague (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 73. Another industrial element was the conveyor belt for food, which connected the kitchen (hidden behind a wall of greenery) to the dining hall.

49. El’ Lisitskii, “K proektu ‘Gorodka otdykha’,” Park kul’tury i otdykha: Gazeta-desiatidnevka, no. 8–9 (December 1930): 5.

50. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 132 Zasedaniia prezidiuma Mosoblispolkoma i Moskovskogo Soveta R.K. i K.D. ot 14 sentiabria 1930,” quoted in Betti Glan, Za sotsialisticheskii park: Obzor proektov general’nogo plana (Moscow: Izd. Mosoblispolkoma, 1932), 3.

51. V. Lavrov, “Park kul’tury i otdykha v Moskve po proektam diplomnikov VKhUTEINa,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 10 (1929): 14–16.

52. The projects were submitted by the Scientific-Technical Society of Construction Workers (NTO Stroitelei): L. E. Biryukov, L. B. Velikovsky, N. S. Zarubin; ARU: V. P. Kalmykov, V. I. Fidman; The Brigade of Central Park of Culture and Leisure: L. S. Zalesskaya, I. P. Kychakov, M. I. Prokhorova; ASNOVA: T. N. Varentsov, S. A. Geldfeld, A. I. Repkin, S. B. Bekker; All-Union Association (ob’edinenie) of Proletarian Architects (VOPRA): P. I. Goldenberg and V. I. Dolganov; Architectural-Construction Institute (ASI): A. V. Natalchenko, P. P. Revyakin, K. Ia. Rogov; and SASS (Sector of Architects of Socialist Construction, as OSA was renamed in 1930): I. U. Bronshtein; Moisei Ginzburg; Konstantin Melnikov; I. I. Klang and A. S. Korobov.

53. Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter [1933], trans. Anthony Eardley (New York: Grossman, 1973), 69.

54. Lunts, Parki Kul’tury i Otdykha, 212. See also L. Lunts, “Opisanie proektov general’nogo plana tsentral’nogo parka kul’tury i otdykha Mossoveta,” in Glan, Za sotsialisticheskii park, 28–29.

55. Milyutin, Sotsgorod, 64–65, 71–72.

56. Glan, Za sotsialisticheskii park, 18.

57. Glan, Za sotsialisticheskii park, 11.

58. Danishevsky cited French pathologist Charles-Joseph Bouchard, in Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 9.

59. Lunts, Parki Kul’tury i Otdykha, 265.

60. The study is cited in Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 63.

61. A. Lunacharskii, Iskusstvo kak vid chelovecheskogo povedenia (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe meditsinskoe izdatel’stvo, 1930), 29–30. For more on the ideal of polytechnic education, see chapter 3, “Fitness.”

62. Glan, Udarno rabotat’—kul’turno otdykhat’, 13.

63. Danishevskii, Problemy massovogo otdykha v SSSR, 22.

64. Glan, Udarno rabotat’—kul’turno otdykhat’, 13.

65. The brigade included A. N. Rosenblium (head of research on the main territory of the park); L. I. Bozhovich (head of research on the visitors of Children’s Village); N. N. Kaulina (research in the Aviation Laboratory); G. L. Rosengart (research in the Electrotechnical Laboratory); V. Kh. Kharkevich and N. A. Klevin (research of the flow of visitors to the Children’s Village); A. A. Keldysh (research on the main territory of the park); and A. N. Leont’ev, the head of the project. I am indebted to Nikita Kharlamov for pointing to the brigade’s work in the park.

66. The key principle of field theory was described by Lewin as the formula B = ƒ(P, E), in which B stands for behavior, P for person, and E for environment. Lewin’s theory rejected the conception of human personality as stable (shaped, for example, by childhood experience or genetics).

67. See A. N. Leont’ev and A. N. Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie deiatel’nosti i interesov posetitelei Tsentral’nogo parka kul’tury i otdykha imeni Gor’kogo (Predvaritel’noe soobshchenie),” in Traditsii i perspektivy deiatel’nostnogo podkhoda v psikhologii: Shkola A. N. Leont’eva, ed. A. E. Voiskunskii, A. N. Zhdan, and O. K. Tikhomirov (Moscow: Smysl, 1999), 373.

68. Leont’ev and Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie,” 373.

69. Leont’ev and Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie,” 375.

70. Leont’ev and Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie,” 424–25.

71. For more on the psychological notion of setup, see chapter 4, “Process.”

72. Leont’ev and Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie,” 374.

73. Leont’ev and Rozenblium, “Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie,” 409–10.

74. Lev Vygotsky, “The Socialist Alteration of Man” [1930], in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. René Van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 182–83.

75. L. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (1923; repr., Moscow: Politicheskaia literature, 1991), 196.

76. René Van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 191.

77. See, for instance, Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (1961; repr., London: Continuum, 2003).

78. While Glan was directing amateur clubs in collective farms in Ivanovo and subsequently in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, Mazmonian headed the planning group in Norilsk.

79. Kathy Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 109.

1. In 1933, the Monist League was dissolved by the National Socialists in Germany, while Haeckel’s books were not reprinted in the Soviet Union after 1937.

2. Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Lev Tolstoy’s View of History” [1953], in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. H. Hardy and R. Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 436. For a similar use of this notion in architecture, see Samir Younés, “The Empire of Masks: Pluralism and Monism in Politics and Architecture,” Philosophy 79, no. 310 (October 2004): 533–51.

3. Robert Hunt Sprinkle, Profession of Conscience: The Making and Meaning of Life-Sciences Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 78.

4. See, for instance, Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2016), which foregrounds a critique of binary thinking about nature and society.

5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): 1–31.

6. David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 203.

7. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. with an introduction by Jan van der Dussen (1994; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 212. Cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Emancipatory Histories, a Troubled but Living Legacy—Response to Latour,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 3 (2020): 29. The distinction between the biological process and the historical social custom recalls the nearly contemporaneous distinction between labor and work made by Hannah Arendt (discussed in chapter 6 of this book).

8. Bruno Latour, “Who Needs a Philosophy of History?” Journal of the Philosophy of History 14, no. 3 (2020): 8.

9. S. Suvorov, “Osnovy filosofii zhizni” [1904], in Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia: Sbornik statei po filosofii, obshchestvennoi rabote i zhizni (St. Petersburg: Izd. Dorovatskogo i Charushnikova, 1905), 74–79.

10. The term “the survival of the fittest” was first introduced by Spencer, in his Principles of Biology (1864), to describe the difference between his and Darwin’s method.

11. P. K. Engelmeier, Teoriia tvorchestva (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1910), 189. Cf. Kant’s definition of the beautiful as “purposiveness without purpose” (on the functionalist critique of Kantian aesthetics, see chapter 4).

12. See, for instance Ernst Mayr, “The Multiple Meanings of Teleological,” in Towards a New Philosophy of Biology, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 38–66; Ron Amundson and George V. Lauder, “Function without Purpose: The Uses of Causal Role Function in Evolutionary Biology,” Biology & Philosophy 9, no. 4 (1994): 443–69; Paul Sheldon Davies, Norms of Nature: Naturalism and the Nature of Functions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); John Zammito, “Teleology Then and Now: The Question of Kant’s Relevance for Contemporary Controversies over Function in Biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37, no. 4 (2006): 748–70; Colin Allen and Jacob Neal, “Teleological Notions in Biology,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2019 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/teleology-biology/.

13. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. 1 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893), 44. Hartmann later developed his polemics with Darwinism in Wahrheit und Irrthum im Darwinismus: Eine kritische Darstellung der organischen Entwickelungstheorie (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1875; Russian translation, 1906).

14. Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1:4–5.

15. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

16. Sean Sayers, “Marx and Teleology,” Science & Society 83, no. 1 (2019): 37–63.

17. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1867), quoted in Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 7, and in his Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 50.

18. Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” 466.

19. During the 1920s, Holzapfel was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Three of these nominations (in 1925, 1927, and 1928) were submitted by Romain Rolland.

20. Rudolf Maria Holzapfel, Panideal: Psychologie der sozialen Gefühle, with a foreword by E. Mach (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1901).

21. Lunacharsky published its Russian-language account in 1905. The account appeared in the same volume as that of Avenarius’s Critique of Pure Experience. R. Avenarius and A. Lunacharskii, R. Avenarius, Kritika chistogo opyta v populiarnom izlozhenii A. Lunacharskogo. Novaia teoriia pozitivnogo idealizma (Holzapfel, Panideal). Kriticheskoe izlozhenie A. Lunacharskogo (Moscow: Izd. Dorovatskogo i Charushnikova, 1905).

22. On the notion of totalitarianism, see Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001). On its use for the analysis of Soviet architecture, see Alla Vronskaya, “Deconstructing Constructivism,” in Re-framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990, ed. Ákos Moravánszky and Torsten Lange (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), 149–63.

23. Boris Grois, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 51.

24. R[oman] Khiger, “K voprosu ob ideologii konstruktivizma v sovremennoi arkhitekture,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 3 (1928): 92–102; R[oman] Ia. Khiger, Puti arkhitekturnoi mysli, 1917–1932 (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1933), 30–51; Aleksei Mikhailov, Gruppirovki sovetskoi arkhitektury (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1932), 40–65.

25. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 390; Louis Marin, “Frontier of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 397–420; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 70, 74. Cited in Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2010), 87.

26. Latour, Facing Gaia, 51.

27. Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 5.

28. See Vandana Shiva, “Resources,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2019), 228–42.

29. Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.”

30. Wark borrows this concept from the philosopher of science Karen Barad. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), 162; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 178.

31. Wark, Molecular Red, xvi.

32. Wark, Molecular Red, 200. The words belong to Robinson’s character Arkady Bogdanov. In the same passage, Wark specifies that “it won’t be a teleology. History has no plan. There is no horizon to orient toward, no line from present to future.” Like Derrida, Wark understands teleology in its “hard” definition.

33. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.

34. The drawings were exhibited together at Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment exhibition at the Cooper Union, New York (2017) and accompanied by an eponymous catalog (New York: Actar, 2018).

35. Latour, “Who Needs a Philosophy of History?” 11.