Cultural Amnesia (81 page)

Del Sarto’s golden arms don’t make us forget for a
moment his everlasting internal mediocrity, just as Wölfflinn, by laying bare with such clarity the laws of “classic art” in del Sarto’s composition, tries vainly to
discover in it for us one of the heroes of the High Renaissance.

—PAUL MURATOV,
Obrazy italii
, VOL. 1, P. 277

C
AN A GREAT
book vanish?
The fate of Paul Maratov’s
Obrazy italii
(which I prefer to translate as
The Forms of Italy
, exercising my
prerogative as one of the few people alive who have ever picked up a copy of it) suggests that it can. The book is seldom mentioned now, and the name of its author does not crop up often even in
histories of the Russian emigration after 1917. (From all the Russian departments of all the universities in the world, the Web reveals a grand total of three scholars, one French and two
Italian, who are on his case.) For a long time, when I began to read in that field, I never knew Muratov had been there. Looking back on it, however, I am glad to have discovered Muratov
comparatively late in my life. His taste was too sure, and his view too wide, to have been much use to me earlier. It was his bad luck, and indeed the whole of modern history’s, that one of
the most accomplished of all writers on art remained almost unknown to the international reading public: but it was my good luck, because when I found him I was ready, and his masterwork
Obrazy italii
hit me like a long and beautiful poem. Ostensibly, the work is a three-volume prose treatise, published in the original Russian by the Leipzig
émigré publishing house Z.J. Grschebin-Verlag in 1924. But for the mature student armed with patience and a sufficiently large Russian–English dictionary,
Muratov’s first few paragraphs have a surprise in store. Cool as equations, they are as rich as lyrics, and when it transpires that there are thousands more of them to come,
the enthralled reader finds it hard to believe his good fortune.

There are many unknown masterpieces in the world, but they usually get that way because they were never
very good. The Forms of Italy is a genuine unknown masterpiece. As a book on the Italian Grand Tour it not only stands directly in the tradition of Goethe, Gregorovius, Burckhardt and Arthur
Symons, but it is better than any of them. (Better than Goethe? Yes, better than Goethe.) Muratov went to all the towns and cities, knew everything about the art and literature, had unfaltering
judgement, and packed the whole complex mental and physical experience into tight, clear paragraphs saturated with meaning and sensitivity. The book is just too good to be true, and until
somebody translates it into appropriately neat English the enthusiast will always run the risk of being thought to have made it up. It exists, though. I own two sets, and one of them is in front
of me now. The three volumes are tiny, in a unique format which was probably specified by the author himself: shorter and squarer than crown octavo, bound in faded red linen, they slot into a
maroon paper-covered cardboard box. There are black-and-white photogravure illustrations of some of the more famous paintings, frescoes, fountains and buildings, but mainly all you can see as you
flick through is creamy white little square after creamy white little square of tightly packed black Cyrillic letters to a grand total of about a thousand pages of text. The magic is in the
writing, and magic it really is; not flowery, but lavishly fruitful; sense and sensibility in their most condensed yet fluent congruity of form. It would be almost a relief if his judgement had
sometimes lapsed. An ephemeral element might have been a comfort. But uncannily, indeed hauntingly, he spoke with an authoritative timbre that seemed to come from the future rather than the past,
as if his testament, published in exile, was the harbinger of a time when the devastation of modern history would be put into reverse.

When I was first in Florence in the 1960s I swallowed Heinrich Wölfflinn’s line on Andrea del Sarto hook, line
and sinker. The Phaidon edition of Wölfflinn’s
Classic Art
was with me as a handbook when I toured the churches, cloisters and galleries. It
enshrined his
proto-structuralist thesis that the artists of the Cinquecento had been engaged in a quasi-architectural approach to composition in the form of a steadily more
compact pyramid, with the logical development—a Leonardo cartoon was here adduced—that several members of the Holy Family should end up sitting on each other. Andrea del Sarto,
according to Wölfflinn, brought this monumental formal trope to a
ne plus ultra
climax. After him, the aberration of Mannerism began, with Pontormo as
a particularly flagrant example of incipient monumentality sabotaged by neurasthenia. With the aid of Wölfflinn’s treatise I became a scolding bore on the subject of the Cinquecento.
On the Quattrocento, less hindered by academic assistance, I was capable of the odd independent judgement—I could see that any developmental theory that denied a high place to Paolo Uccello
must have something wrong with it—but when it came to the High Renaissance I had a seeing-eye dogma, and the snorting beast was provided by Wölfflinn. Pontormo was right there in front
of me (I was lodging only a few blocks from Santa Felicità and could see one of his supreme achievements every day just by stepping through the front door) but I had managed to convince
myself, by repeated shouting over too many beakers of cheap chianti, that del Sarto was the last true exemplar of the titanic impulse. I doubt if even Muratov could have impinged on an obtuseness
so well ingrained: unless, of course, he had got there first. But his book lay far in my future: far enough, luckily, to give me the remorseful but acute satisfaction of having expanded my view
before his opinion had the chance to endorse it.

Over the years I came to appreciate Pontormo and Bronzino without benefit of clergy. The impact was all the sweeter when I
found Muratov echoing my enthusiasm about the young Pontormo’s fresco cycle in the Medici villa called Poggio a Caiano. He called the fresco cycle “one of the most surprising and
beautiful productions of Italian art.” The key word is “surprising.” In a serenely dazzling ten-page stretch of prose, Muratov responds with a whole heart and mind to the
unexpectedness
of Pontormo; to the way a youthfully fulfilled and tirelessly original career like his just shouldn’t have been there at that point in
time; to the unanticipated refreshment, through one prodigiously gifted young man, of a tradition already buried by success. Muratov also seemed to take Bronzino at the same estimation I did, as
a hard-edged
paradigm of iconic excellence with an unplanned but inescapable literary application, someone who painted in a way one would like to write, presenting the
clean-cut relief of a cameo no matter how large the canvas, his unoccupied planes of colour as precisely calculated as his embroidered detail: a unique combination of the broad brush and the
engraving tool.

But the true revelation of Muratov’s book was how his high standard of aesthetic judgement extended
into the society and politics of the artistic context. He wasn’t the first writer who had treated Italian cultural history in this way, but nobody, not even Gregorovius or the mighty
Burckhardt, had come near Muratov’s ability to compress an encyclopaedic erudition into a dramatic prose narrative. The consideration did not escape me that this was what Marxist cultural
analysis ought to have looked like but conspicuously didn’t, even when it came from the pen of Walter Benjamin. (What did escape me was that Diaghilev’s writings on art, at the turn
of the century, had already established the cultural parameters within which Muratov later wrote: that not even Muratov, in other words, had sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus. In culture
there is
never
an innovation that does not spring from a tradition, because the interweaving of innovation and tradition is what culture is.)

How could, how can, such a prodigy of a book go missing? Egon Friedell’s
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit
, a comparable effort in a field where few comparisons are possible, was threatened with death but proved impossible to kill. Unlike its
author, it was invulnerable. Too many refugees took a copy with them in their baggage. Friedell’s lifetime testament was surrounded with affection and protected on its journey.
Muratov’s equivalent achievement was forgotten. The Russians in exile, except to the limited extent that they, too, were a Jewish émigré community, did not provide a framework
in which the book might be remembered. Nor did Russian émigrés of a conservative background, or even a merely liberal one, necessarily find favour among the Western intelligentsia,
which for the next fifty years devoted enormous resources of inattention to helping ensure that the Soviet Union’s official trivialization of the bourgeois heritage would be carried by
default. There was no émigré publishing house of Russian provenance that could equal the success of Phaidon or Abrams in
translating itself into English while
still preserving the core achievement of its origins. It might have helped if Muratov had gone to America, like, say, Ernst Kantorowicz, the fabulously erudite author of a book about Frederick II
that achieved the piquant distinction of finding favour with Mussolini, Hitler and Goering. But as a student of current events Muratov was last heard of in Ireland during the war, writing and
editing the Penguin volume on the Russia campaigns. No American university ever put money and effort into codifying his reputation and achievement with an appropriate archive. The Phaidon
archive, alone, would be sufficient to ensure the continued existence of Friedell’s key works: but I wonder if there is a proper shelf of Muratov’s books anywhere in the world. As
well as my two separate sets of
Obrazy italii
, bought in London and Buenos Aires, I own his
Fra Angelico
, translated
from French into English in 1928: since all the plates were monochrome, it nowadays rates as junk even in those doomed second-hand bookshops that have mainly scrap for stock. During the late
twenties and early thirties, he brought out several books in French: I have his book on Russian icons,
Trente-cinq Primitifs russes
, published in Paris in
1931. There was at least one other book in Russian, a little pamphlet on Cézanne. (It was published in Berlin in 1923, perhaps as a rehearsal for
Obrazy
italii
: I bought my copy in Oxford, and it already looked as if it had been chewed at the corners by two different sizes of rat.) His Penguin on the World War II battles in Russia is on
the shelf too, and I suppose it gives his career an unlooked-for illumination, such as Max Friedländer, say, might have provided for himself if he had spent the last year of his life writing
a treatise about ice hockey. But looking at my undocumented grab bag of Muratovian scraps, I can’t help wondering how to make sense of it all.

The point is that I shouldn’t have to do the wondering. It ought to be a task for scholarship. The thing I
really
wonder about is what the Russian departments of the British universities have been doing with their time. Unlike their American equivalents they
haven’t got much money, but even now, as the Cold War demand for interpreters has shrunk, they have had the benefit of dozens of Ph.D. students all requiring to be given suitable subjects.
Surely the scholars and creative artists who were lost to the terror and disenfranchised by the emigration constitute a reservoir of potential theses that might have actually
contributed to knowledge instead of just furthering careers. On the walls of my library are three Suprematist paintings by Nina Kogan, who taught on the faculty of Malevich’s
Unovis art collective in Vitebsk from 1920 through into 1922, at the very time when Muratov, in the Writers’ Library in Moscow, was engaged in the melancholy task of measuring out the
country’s literary heritage by its weight in black bread. Though Malevich at that time was keen on the idea that the work of his colleagues should all look the same, Kogan’s looked
different: she used the standard Suprematist kit of squares, oblongs and floating bits and pieces, but she gave them a pastel lightness hinting at the airborne boudoir of a futuristic angel. She
stood out, even though Unovis was an outfit dedicated, in all lack of irony, to the precept that the artist’s individual personality should vanish. No Unovis artist at the time, of course,
had any conception that the state would eventually take steps to guarantee just such a result. By late 1922, however, the official cultural organs were making it clear that the opinion of the
artists would not necessarily be heard first in the question of which direction the arts might take. (It was about this time that Muratov was lucky enough to be expelled from the country.) A
woman of integrity surrounded by men with the souls of gangsters, Kogan stayed on in Russia, sincerely believing that she had a duty to her country’s future. Her faith was rewarded with the
inevitable persecution and eventually, most likely during the siege of Leningrad, she disappeared into the whirlwind. In my wishful thinking, she starved to death along with all the poor souls
who weren’t awarded the survival ration: but there was a purge on as well as a siege, and it is more likely that the hoodlums got her. The final judge of the relevance of her airily lyrical
art to the monolithic purposes of the state was probably an NKVD slave driver in Siberia. There is one slim monograph about her, published in Zurich in 1985 to accompany a retrospective
exhibition. The booklet was given to me by the proprietor of the Paris boutique Petroushka, where, over the course of years, I bought several of her strangely lovely little pictures. “Nina
Ossipowna Kogan” says the title page. “1887 Vitebsk–1942(?)” In that bracketed question mark lies the tragedy.
Sunt lacrimae rerum
,
and the tears are a frozen lake with no clear shore: no wonder they get into everything. But at least, for Kogan, there is a booklet. Where is there anything about Muratov?