Soviet, Sacred, Sexual:

The Carnivalised Architecture in Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU

Author

Evgeniya Makarova

Abstract

Before DAU the films, there was DAU the built environment, an architectural setting populated with flesh and bone, imbued with meaning, and endowed with agency. An eclectic, idiosyncratic, metamorphic and utterly sexualised architecture of nipples and vaginas, hands and legs, that both incarnates the Bakhtinian carnival and perpetuates it. Based on a series of with the project’s set designer Denis Shibanov, the present essay explores the grotesque architecture of DAUniverse with its ‘carnal’ Institute and the ephemeral ‘City in the Sky’. Without necessarily posing problematics or drawing specific conclusions, it considers Khrzhanovskiy’s cinematic artwork through a Bakhtinian lens, providing insights into the potency of its material culture.

Keywords

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy; Mikhail Bakhtin; Denis Shibanov; Russia; Ukraine; Kharkiv; post-Soviet; DAU; heterotopia; grotesque; carnival; Soviet architecture; sculpture; Soviet material culture; body.

I have observed that the pleasure-twats of women in this part of the world
are much cheaper than stones, therefore the walls of the city should be built of twats.

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel¹

Introduction

“Can’t you see that these apartment blocks look just like two legs with a vagina in between?” – asks Denis Shibanov. Sitting in his studio, surrounded by mysterious blueprints and massive sculptures, the set designer and architect-in-chief of Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU is sharing his insights into the conception of this phantasmagorical project.² Shibanov’s role in the project is hard to underestimate; if you think about it, in an artistic experiment produced without a proper screenplay or invasive directing, an important factor shaping the participants’ behaviour was their immediate physical environment – the isolated and introverted space dubbed the Institute, a “heterotopia of cinematic production”, to use the term coined by Alexandre Zaezjev (2020: 72) in his recent study on DAU.

Shibanov continues talking about the architecture of the residential quarters and, suddenly, it all comes together: you cannot unsee a massive crotch crowned with volutes of pubic hair (Fig. 1). On its left – a series of oblong forms with openings in the middle swells out, earning this wall the title of the “Vagina Wall”. The opposite façade with two rows of circular protrusions gets dubbed the “Nipple Wall”.

In fact, The Origin of the World³ stood at the origin of the entire DAUniverse. Here is how Shibanov’s cosmogonic myth goes: “Whatever the point of departure [for the Institute’s design] was – the Vagina Wall or the Nipple Wall – that was it, once I found this image, everything else just fell into place.” The abundance of sexual connotations in the architecture of the Institute was a conscious choice on the part of the artist, a result of what Shibanov describes as the search of “vitality and eros” in architecture. “Architecture that does not exude life juices is puritan bullshit [херня]!”, exclaims Shibanov.

Carnal imagery is so blunt and prominent in the resulting built environment that it infiltrates the everyday language of its inhabitants, with anatomical terms acquiring the status of nomina loci: “And there’s my office – vagina number fifteen,” says the director of the Institute, Anatoly Krupitsa (portrayed by the Russian theatre director Anatoly Vasiliev), while showing visitors around in DAU. Imperiia / DAU. Empire (0:47:18. Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Anatoly Vasiliev, 2020, Germany, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Russia).

One cannot help but notice, however, that there is something odd, something out of balance. There are no towers in the Institute, no obelisks, no spires, not even remotely phallic structures or sculptural elements, except, maybe, for the puny bombs and missiles caught up in the folds of vulvar flesh to the left of the Nipple Wall. Given the ‘in-your-face’ excessiveness and explicitness of yonic forms in this architecture, the almost total absence of the phallic ones becomes a statement in its own right. The fact that the 150-meter-long interior courtyard features a total of 21 vaginas, which is more than one vagina per ten meters, is all the more noteworthy, given that Shibanov considers himself an heir to Soviet architecture.

The Soviet (A)sexual

Such exaltation of yonic forms is simply inconceivable in the megalomaniac architecture of Stalinism to which Shibanov claims to appeal. The hierarchical structure of political power and the cult of an omnipotent leader that inspired much artistic production in this historical moment find their ultimate expression in the verticality of the Palace of the Soviets (Fig. 3). In 1931-1933, Le Corbusier’s competition entry – a composition of ‘sprawling labia’ in reinforced concrete (Fig. 2) – did not stand a chance against Boris Iofan’s phallic design (Fig. 3).

The head of the People’s Commissariat for Education, Anatolii Lunacharskii, who had defined the official cultural agenda in the first decade of Soviet rule, spoke of Le Corbusier’s project as completely alien to its intended context, describing it in the following terms: “It would seem that some kind of machine would be overlooking Moscow, some kind of naked, huge structure” (Atarov 1940: 37; my translation).⁴ Moreover, the official decree on the Palace of the Soviets, from February 28, 1932, demanded to overcome the “squat character” (“приземистость”) characteristic of many of the competition entries to achieve a “bold, high-rise composition” (“смелая высотная композиция”) (Iofan 1939: 38). As Sona Hoisington aptly points out in her discussion of the Palace of Soviets, “by the end of 1931 […], monumentality, verticality, hierarchy and privilege were emerging as important Soviet cultural values” (Hoisington 2003: 67). Iofan’s competition entry was therefore bound to succeed.

Of course, the binary pairing where verticality is necessarily associated with masculinity, and horizontality with femininity, has been widely criticised and deconstructed by scholars (see, for example, the work of Aaron Betsky [1995]). However, we cannot disregard the fact that “phallic verticality” is a familiar (arguably, to the point of vulgarity) trope in spatial thought, most notably discussed by Henri Lefebvre (1974), but going as far back as Jean-Louis de Saint-Maux (1779).

At the same time, there seems to be a tendency to downplay the sexual in Soviet architecture. In relation to Iofan, the aggressive verticality of his pavilion for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair is manifestly offset by the puritan austerity of Vera Mukhina’s sculptural composition Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937). In Mukhina’s key work, the male and the female figures appear as two efficient automatons at the service of heroic labour. This sense of de-sexualised, machine-like corporeality has previously been noted by scholars like Boris Groys (2011), who notably speaks of the beautiful athletic bodies in Soviet art as dispassionate machines rather than sentient beings of flesh and bone: “Deineka’s athletic bodies”, writes Groys (2011: 84), “are idealized and, so to say, formalized bodies. Looking at them the spectator cannot imagine them becoming ill or infirm, transforming themselves into the vehicles of obscure desires, decaying, dying. [...] Deineka understands the athletic body as mimesis of a machine.” Similarly, the Russian historian Evgeny Dobrenko speaks of the concept of “asexual love” as “essential to Soviet culture”, emphasising the disembodied, disincorporated nature of this love (Dobrenko 2007: 132).

The dispassionateness of the Soviet bodies-machines, their imperviousness to emotions, desires, and appetites are said to be a function of their politicisation. As the Soviet journal Novyi mir (1949) explains to its readers: “A Soviet person cannot ‘simply’ love someone without criticism, without political and moral vigilance” (Pozdnyaev 1949: 237). That is to say, political vigilance must take precedence even beneath the sheets.

Functioning at the intersection of biological and economical sciences, the Soviet regime sought to downplay all forms of sexual relations that were not driven by the need to reproduce. This quality of the Soviet system has been emphasised by such scholars as Bernice Rosenthal, who defines it as “the super-functional model that combined the Apollonian principle of form with a secular version of the Christian contempt for the corruptible flesh” (Rosenthal 2010: 190). Or, as Aaron Schuster (2013: n.p.) puts it, the “male-dominated ethic of sacrifice in the service of constructing another world.”

As a result, the conception of the human body literally elevated onto a pedestal by Iofan stands in sharp contrast with the thriving exuberance of female corporeality in Shibanov’s Institute. If in the Soviet Union the state attempted to rationalise, regulate, and contain sexuality, in the heterotopic DAUniverse, all taboos are transgressed, the libido is unharnessed, and emblems of carnal desire fill the public space. Thus, although at a cursory glance Shibanov does reproduce the forms of Stalinist neo-classicism with its columns, cornices, and volutes, on a deeper level he also distorts their original meaning and the ideology they come to stand for. In other words, Shibanov borrows the visual language of the epoch in order to speak about its forbidden topics.

To be sure, there is nothing radically new about this. Socialist Realism and the poster style have previously been appropriated and deconstructed by the unofficial Soviet art of the 1970s. However, if sots-art scrutinises and demystifies Soviet pathos by means of parody and witty sarcasm, sexual symbolism in Shibanov’s architecture does not actually stem from a desire to ridicule and banter (“steb is the desire to simplify,” says Shibanov, “But here [in the Institute], we have a juxtaposition of various complexities”). Neither does this deconstruction work on the intellectual, cerebral, conscious level of conceptual art, but rather on the level of affect, of the subconscious.

The Bakhtinian Grotesque

The architectural environment that Shibanov created for the inhabitants of the Institute appeals to the “lower stratum of the body” in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, as an expression of the sublime or “the source of vitality, from which the cosmogonic torrent gushes, generating and permanently reviving life, beginning with death and decay,” to borrow the words of the Bakhtin scholar Yves Benot (1972: 115). The excessive sexualisation of the Institute’s built environment should therefore be seen not as an expression of licentiousness, but rather as an appeal to the aforementioned “life juices” (a concept that Shibanov brings up time and time again in the interview) as a “cosmogonic torrent” that imbues the heterotopic space of the Institute with the orgiastic spirit of the Bakhtinian carnival. Thus, the transgression of Soviet taboos on the level of symbols, forms, and iconography is not at all about profanation, but about the ritualisation and the sacralisation of space in DAUniverse.

Shibanov’s project can also be read as an attempt at what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the restoration of the pre-Renaissance body, of the “grotesque body”, whose “hideousness” stands in sharp contrast to the purified, idealised, classicised forms of totalitarian culture. Both in the Greco-Roman tradition, with its Apollos and Venuses, and in the neoclassical sculpture of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes (e.g. Arno Breker, Vera Mukhina, etc.), the body flaunts completion – closed contours, gentle curves and smooth finishes. The grotesque body in Rabelais, on the other hand, is an ever-unresolved, porous thing of orifices that suck in and consume the World, protuberances that penetrate it, and perpetual evacuations. It is exemplified by the Hellenistic terracotta figurines of “senile pregnant hags” that Bakhtin discusses in his writings (Bakhtin 1965: 31).

In the Institute, attributes of the grotesque body, the body in a state of becoming, are manifested both on the level of sexual iconography (nipples and vaginas) and on the level of the overall structure – the sunken form of the stadium reminds us of a womb. It is also alluded to by the constant transformation of this built environment and the successive layering of heterogeneous stylistic elements. Khrzhanovskiy himself explained the stylistic evolution of the Institute in quite gloomy terms: “Denis [Shibanov] and I decided that the Institute should look as if it was built by different architects, neither of whom had a chance to complete the project because one after another, they’d be arrested. The next one would take over, with his own vision [of the Institute], but he too would get arrested.” (Хржановский 2019)

The visual appearance of the heterotopia DAU that took shape from 1938 to 1968 on the project’s fictional timeline metaphorically evokes the search for a stylistic idiom in these years, drawing freely on Constructivism and Neoclassicism and combining heterogeneous elements with no concern for historical accuracy. When designing this stylistically heteroclite environment, Shibanov imagined himself “in the shoes of those architects who had moved on [with their work] as if there was no such thing as the [Decree on the] Liquidation of Excesses.” (Kashin 2010: n.p.).⁵ He enlarged the classicist decorative elements such as corbel-volutes on the otherwise Constructivist façade of the living quarters to monumental dimensions, completely out of scale with the building itself. They towered over the entrance and multiplied below the cornice, losing their load-bearing function in the process and becoming a purely decorative solution.

The principle of the palimpsest, of the systemic layering of different styles and epochs, also informs the interior design. The filming props used in the Institute can be divided into three main stylistically different periods of the DAU timeline: from 1938 to the 1950s, the 1950s proper, and from 1962 to 1968. At the beginning of each new time interval, elements of décor, furniture, tableware, and appliances characteristic of the previous epoch were not removed from the mise-en-scene. Obsolete or redundant objects accumulated and multiplied, so that the films taking place in the 1960s on the DAU timeline exhibited the broadest spectrum of period-specific material culture and ephemera. In Dau and Nora’s apartment, for example, rigid, laconic furniture pieces of the late 1930s coexisted with a bourgeois room divider from the 1950s. (Fig. 4).

The appearance of the Institute, its material culture, reflects the heterochronic storyline of DAU, which conjured a number of real historical events from World War II to the nuclear race, but was otherwise fictional. Changes to the architectural setting evoked the refraction of these events in the broken mirror of DAUniverse. For example, during the war years, the original bicorne street lamps were replaced with brutalist T-shaped structures that look as if smelted from rails, hybrid objects midway between Czech hedgehogs and El-Lissitzky’s skyscrapers, while the nipples and vaginas were painted a darker colour (Fig. 5).

The conception of the Institute as a grotesque body in a state of becoming rather than completion, a porous and fluid body open to change, metonymically corresponds to the developmental dynamic of the entire project, whose production spanned three decades and still claims the status of an ‘ongoing’ project. Curiously enough, this longing for processuality and reluctance to accept finality was presented by Khrzhanovskiy in his 2009 interview with the journal Seans as a conscious artistic choice: “The final result is not the goal, the goal is the process,” says the director, forgoing the completeness of the classical body in favour of Bakhtin’s ever-evolving grotesque (Arkus 2009).

In his recent analysis of DAU in terms of postmodernist poetics, Alexandre Zaezjev (2022) also appeals to its perpetual becoming, listing DAU’s “liminality, heterogeneity, transitoriness, incompleteness, [and] intermediality” as its defining qualities. Equally important for my understanding of DAU as an endless carnival is the abundance of festive activities in the daily life of the Institute, the “cornucopia of food and booze”, as so accurately noted by Michał Murawski (2022), that makes for its modus operandi. According to Bakhtin, the key events in the life of the grotesque body happen on its rims and edges, points of contact with the world, of interpenetration – the mouth, the nipples, and the “lower stratum”. Gluttony and excessive alcohol consumption allow for these orifices to remain permanently open, asserting the grotesque body as a process of perpetual exchange with the world, as opposed to a stable and complete state of the classical body.

Discussing the classical body as characterised by a state of static wholeness, Bakhtin notes that this principle is utterly alien to the hyperbolisation inherent to the grotesque body. The severance of organs from the classical body or their independent existence (prominently featured in literature from Rabelais to Gogol’) is unimaginable since its aesthetic value is based on the harmonious relationship between all of its parts. This conception of the body is symbolised by the Vitruvian man and the Corbusian modulor, and, as a consequence, materialises in architecture built according to these idioms.

The Institute, on the contrary, features an array of independently existing organs and body parts: 21 vaginas, nine nipples (what an odd number!) and twelve pairs of hands holding tablets on one wall, and three more on the other (what an odd number of hands!). “On a symbolic level, the building can be read as a strange sarcophagus, from which the arms of some gigantic body burst out,” writes Mikhail Iampolskii in an article about DAU published in Seans (2019), also noting the similarities between the architectural complex of the Institute and the grotesque body.

It is worth mentioning that the term “grotesque” comes from the Italian word ‘grotto’ and thus alludes to a proto-architectural trope of the cave – the vaginal cave in the context of the Institute – from which all humans crawl. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin himself does not fail to note this parallel between human flesh and the built environment: “Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers and subterranean passages” (Bakhtin 1984: 318).

The subterranean, cavernous character of the Institute is the defining trait of this architecture, its ‘primary sexual characteristic.’ The idea of a sunken habitat for the project’s participants haunted Shibanov from the very beginning. His initial plan was to set it in an actual stone quarry (Fig. 6), but while touring potential locations in and around Kharkiv, Shibanov came across the abandoned “Dynamo” swimming pool, constructed in the 1950s (Fig. 7). The bowl of the swimming pool and the surrounding spectator tribunes offered ideal foundations for the construction of an isolated, introverted architecture within the city line.

The resulting ensemble is located three meters below ground level, setting it off from the rest of the world, literally relegating it to a different dimension, a different plane of being. Shibanov’s built-on addition expanded the existing system of covered rooms and passageways, thus transforming the infrastructure of the swimming pool into a troglodyte habitat with a central courtyard. As previously noted, however, this sunken, cavernous built environment is nevertheless deprived of the Bakhtinian “buds and sprouts”, of “mountains and towers”, of phallic architectural elements, and thus, it would seem, is denied the complex unresolved dialogism central to Bakhtin’s understanding of the grotesque body, whereby the feminine and the masculine collide and amalgamate.

City in the Sky

My discussion of DAUniverse and its architecture would, however, be incomplete without a consideration of Shibanov’s unrealised architectural concept of the “City in the Sky”, which was intended to complement the sunken, cavernous built environment of the Institute with an architecture of priapic verticality and to counterbalance its closeness with an unobstructed view of the horizon. The City in the Sky is first mentioned by Oleg Kashin in his 2010 interview with Shibanov, conducted in the midst of film production. After visiting the Institute and talking to the project’s participants, Kashin concluded that “[w]hat has been built in the stadium is an important but minor part of the filming space” (Kashin 2010; my translation).

The City in the Sky was conceived by Shibanov as another key filming location 100 metres above street level. Towering over Kharkiv’s Freedom Square, the City in the Sky was planned to occupy the rooftops of three neighbouring buildings designed by Aleksandr Dmitriev and Oscar Muntz at the beginning of the twentieth century – Kharkiv State University, the former Govorov Academy, and the Gosprom building and to transform them into the streets of Moscow, where the major part of the film when it was still a Lev Landau’s biopic was supposed to take place (Fig. 8). Automobiles would drive over skyways connecting the Constructivist high-rise buildings of Gosprom; a busy city street with shops, cafés, and metro entrances would occupy the roof of the Karazin University. Shibanov even planned for a dramatic scene with a steamroller slowly making its way across the frame, set against a background of clear blue sky.

The openness of the skies and the desire to convey the experience of vastness were actually the starting point in the master-plan of a City conceived as the counterpart of the Institute. As Shibanov explains:

The Institute itself is an enclosed space. There are two walls – the Vagina Wall and the Nipple Wall – with a small patch of sky in between and no horizon line. But here, in the City in the Sky, I wanted to open up a view onto the horizon, a breathtaking view, with skies just like in the paintings from the 1950s, exuding optimism. I wanted to emphasise the contrast between the closed, stuffy world of the Institute, a world of concentrated cerebral activity, of condensed human passions […] and the City in the Sky, breaking free and into the open.

It would seem that Shibanov’s utopian idea stems primarily from the visionary urbanism of the twentieth-century avant-gardes – the Futurist Città Nuova of Antonio Sant’Elia, integrating high-rise buildings with multi-level transportation arteries; the experiments of the Italian Rationalists anticipated by the Fiat-Lingotto building with its rooftop automobile test track; the Metabolist megastructures suspended over Tokyo; El Lissitzky’s horizontal skyscrapers – and their interpretation in cinematic dystopias such as Fritz Lang’s multi-level Metropolis (1927, Germany), which Shibanov mentions as a source of his inspiration.

The centrepiece of Freedom Square is without a doubt the Gosprom building. Constructed in 1928 by the Russian architect Sergei Serafimov, this factory cum palace is a remarkable monument of Constructivism and is often dubbed the first Soviet skyscraper. “The building has an amazing structure,” says Shibanov, “the three high-rises are connected by covered aerial passageways.” Shibanov’s plan was to push this design concept even further, expanding the network of skywalks and skyrides to bridge Gosprom with the two remaining buildings of the Freedom Square ensemble – the Kharkiv State University and the former Govorov Academy.⁶

Like many other projected architectural components of DAUniverse outside of the Institute (the expansive wall installation in Berlin and the bridge between the two theatres at the world première in Paris, to name just two), the City in the Sky proved to be too eccentric and logistically complex, and was bound to remain on paper. It nevertheless constitutes an inherent part of DAUniverse and entertains a dialogical relation with the Institute. The vertically oriented, erect City in the Sky, with its towers and antennae, is the complete opposite of the sunken, subterranean space of the Institute, dominated by yonic forms – nipples and vaginas. At the same time, just like the Institute in its excavated concavity, the City in the Sky would have been ripped out of the mundane reality. City rooftops, especially those of high-rise buildings, are in and of themselves liminal, heterotopic spaces – spaces between heaven and earth. Their physical border cannot be easily crossed without one risking life and limb. It also speaks to the otherworldly nature of DAUniverse: it can only exist below or above ground, but most certainly not on this earth.

Kora

An argument can of course be made that yonic eroticism in Shibanov’s architecture is nothing but the working of the heteronormative fetishising male gaze, a form of patriarchal sexploitation (hence the absence of phallic elements). Moreover, such a reading would be in line with the kind of ideas that permeate the memoirs of Lev Landau’s wife Konkordiia (“Kora”) Landau-Drobantseva (1999).

The sexual component really comes to the fore in Landau-Drobantseva’s book, and, although an attentive reader would most probably be able to tell the memories and observations of a jealous wife from her own fantasies (and, perhaps, delusions), the defiant openness with which Academician Landau engaged in his polygamous relations does border on patriarchal abusiveness. Moreover, it is precisely Landau’s overt libertinism, described by Kora in her memoirs, that seems to have awakened Khrzhanovskiy’s initial interest in the physicist’s biography. And it was precisely this provocative bluntness that Shibanov captured in the architecture of the Institute.

Either way, Shibanov’s project still distorts the socialist discourse, where the female body – just like the male body, by the way – is nothing but a machine of production, never an object of desire. A Soviet woman had to be “hard” [твердая]. In Barbara Clements’s words: “A tverdaia revolutionary woman was tough, durable, and if need be merciless. She was also understood to be diligent, rational, and unsentimental” (Clements 1997: 19). As has already been demonstrated, these notions of cold rationality and emotionlessness are obviously being undermined by Shibanov.

Shibanov disrupts the official Soviet discourse not only on the level of architecture, but also in his use of monumental sculpture. Thus the iconography of the previously mentioned Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is reappropriated by Shibanov only to be transformed into a fascinating allegory of the early Soviet social order (Fig. 9). Much like in Mukhina’s masterpiece, two seven-metre-long arms overhanging the Institute’s interior courtyard clasp a hammer and a sickle; there is a third limb, however, holding a brain. The proletarian tandem of a worker and a peasant woman is intruded upon by a scientist, a member of the scientific-technical intelligentsia. This ménage à trois turns the sculptural installation into a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the Bolshevik project. In DAUniverse, the proletariat loses its exclusive right to dictatorship and is compelled to share its place at the forefront of the early Soviet project with the intelligentsia, the scientific-technical intelligentsia that has thought up those bombs and missiles that ornament the Nipple Wall.

The Sacred

In the parallel reality of DAU, science becomes a religious cult, the members of the scientific-technical intelligentsia its priests, and the Institute its temple. Considering the Soviet project through the lens of DAUniverse, Dmitry Kaledin – a world-famous mathematician and DAU participant who, for a time, assumed the position of the Institute’s Director, identified it as an “atheistic theocracy with science for the state religion” (Volchek 2020; my translation) – a statement on the Soviet belief system which is literally embodied in the design of the Institute. Twelve further pairs of hands, extending into the Institute’s interior courtyard, held tablets (Fig. 10), on which the commandments of Moses were replaced by laws of physics.⁷ Shibanov replaces sacred scriptures with scientific formulae, obscure symbols to which men of science alone hold the key; they are the sole ministers of this cult, holding the keys to perennial knowledge. Presiding over the ‘clergy’ is the Director of the Institute, observing his congregation from his ziggurat-like, Shchusev-inspired mausoleum-headquarters (Fig. 11).

Most importantly, Shibanov endows the built environment of the Institute with subjectivity and a capacity to influence the behaviours and emotions of the inhabitants. Architecture becomes an active agent in the events that are then captured on film, if not their driving force. A visitor to the Director’s office would have to climb a series of steps of varying height and width that Shibanov calls the “Stairway to God” (Fig. 11), and pass through a labyrinth of granite slabs. According to Shibanov, this was “to make one feel puny”: “There he is,” he says, “a visitor, so fond of himself… and I thought that we should knock him down a peg or two [“сбить его пафос” [sic!]], make him question his own identity […]. [He] went [to the director’s office] and lost and expended himself along the way [“растерял, растратил себя по пути”].”

If we read the space of the Institute as sacralised (a reading for which the toponym “Stairway to God,” the mausoleum-like headquarters, and the scriptures provide ample grounds), then the visit to the Director’s office becomes a sacrament, a ritual. And this could either be the ritual of purification that Michel Foucault defines as the fifth principle of heterotopia,⁸ or a sacrificial one, where, as Shibanov puts it, one “expends oneself”, evoking Georges Bataille’s (1949) concept of ritualistic expenditure.⁹

The ultimate sacralisation of the Institute occurs through its ritualised annihilation, which took place in 2011 and is partly depicted in DAU. Degeneratsiia / DAU. Degeneration (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov, 2020, Russia). The act of ruthless – excessive – vandalism, which Guy Debord (1966), expanding on Bataille’s idea, called a “potlatch of destruction”, and one that marks an end to the project, rips the Institute out of both the real Soviet timeline and the utilitarian artifice of the film set. As far as the first is concerned, it is simply inconceivable for the Komsomol members to attack a state institution. While the vast majority of people were considered expendable in the Soviet Union, the wrecking of state property was systematically prosecuted. In the second case, the destruction of numerous props, so painstakingly tracked down or created by Shibanov’s team, goes against the (utilitarian) logic of film production. The very fact of set destruction on film brings the ‘fourth wall’ into the spotlight only to tear it down, bursting the diegetic bubble of the Institute.

The destruction of the Institute is the high point of the carnival, with various expressions of violence and many murders (all staged, with the exception of one – that of a pig) perfectly fitting the Bakhtinian conception of the carnival. As Julia Kristeva (1986: 50) has rightly pointed out, “in contemporary society [...] there is a tendency to downplay the tragic – the deadly, cynical, revolutionary – side of the carnival, which Bakhtin insisted on in every possible way.” It is this deadly, cynical, and most importantly, revolutionary side of the carnival that is most clearly manifested in DAU. Degeneratsiia, which ends with the “overcoming of hell” – the destruction of the Institute and a rave party on its ruins (as Bakhtin writes [1972: 74], “one of the indispensable accessories of carnival was the built set called ‘hell.’ This ‘hell’ was solemnly burned at the peak of the festivities.”). Paradoxically, both the victims of aggression (the scientists) and the aggressors (the Komsomol thugs) participate equally in the “overcoming of hell”.

The Carnival of the Oprichniki

In this dialogic ritual, the aforementioned antagonism between the power structures (represented by the security officers in the Institute) and the people (embodied by the inhabitants of the Institute) is superseded by the opposition between the new world and the old world. The agents of the new world – the young and energetic Komsomol thugs, exuding “life juices”, to use Shibanov’s term (sweat, blood, and semen), take down the old world, the world of scientists, the world of Dau, now a helpless, bedridden old man, the world of the Institute and, most importantly, all hitherto existing power-structures, including the authority of the Institute’s security officers, who also happen to be part of that old world order, despite formally holding sway over the Komsomol.

The antagonism between the old ‘siloviki’¹⁰ and the young Komsomol thugs comes to the fore in several episodes. For example, in the athletic training scene featured in DAU. Degeneratsiia, the members of the Komsomol are enthusiastically practising boxing and knife fighting in the Institute’s interior courtyard, while the KGB agents watch them with an air of scepticism. Finally, one of them speaks up: “If I were 30 years younger, I could jump around as well.” (3:56:54). Vladimir Azhippo, the head of the security service, who is sensitive to the shifts in the balance of power, views this as a challenge to his authority and, understanding the need to reassert it, joins the Komsomol for a pretend boxing match.

The young thugs also affirm their vitality by seducing many female residents of the Institute, which obviously contrasts with the emotional coldness bordering on the impotence of the KGB officers, notably Azhippo.¹¹ Finally, the state security agents clearly demonstrate their complete lack of potency when they are unable to purge the Institute of the unwanted elements on their own and delegate the task to the militant youth, granting them full agency over brute violence – the main privilege of the power structures. This dialectic is all the more striking given that, according to the story, the leader of the Komsomol was himself previously repressed by the Soviet authorities: “I am an engineer,” says Maksim Martsinkevich, known for being a convicted neo-Nazi in real life, in DAU. Degeneratsiia (3:23:32), “but I read the wrong literature, discussed it with the wrong people, and was sent to the [labour] camps”.

In the final episode of DAU. Degeneratsiia, the Komsomol youth reenact the archetypal “carnival of violence” of Soviet culture – the dance of the “oprichniks” emblematically staged by Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev in the second part of the legendary epic Ivan Groznyi / Ivan the Terrible (1944, USSR). Bakhtin himself, in his seminal work (completed in 1940), reveals the carnivalesque aspects of the “oprichnina”:

While not breaking with the tradition of church bells, Ivan could not do without the jingle of the fools’ bells; even the outward attributes of the opritchina [sic] had some carnival elements, for instance, the broom. The opritchniks’ inner way of life and the banquets in the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda had a distinct grotesque aspect, as well as an extraterritorial character, similar to the freedom of the marketplace. (Bakhtin 1984: 270)

The closer we get to the denouement of DAU. Degeneration, the more the actions of the Komsomoltsy follow the carnivalesque logic. The slaughter of a pig is a sacrificial ritual that articulates an obvious reversal of roles – it transforms the Komsomol from passive “test subjects” (this is how the scientists and the security service refer to them, 4:49:57) into active persecutors.

Finally, the carnival fosters transgressive and deviant expressions of sexuality. In Ivan Groznyi, this takes the form of Fedor Basmanov’s cross-dressing, complemented with a female mask and unabashed choreography. The Komsomol thugs, on the other hand, appeal to the ‘lower stratum of the body’ quite literally: in the final episode of DAU. Degeneratsiia, their leader Maksim defiles the Institute by hanging an imprint of his buttocks on the wall of the public space. “Who gives me their ass? Give me your ass!” – says Maksim to one of his comrades. “No,” replies one of them, “my ass won’t fit. If it should be an ass, then it has to be the leader’s ass.” “All right.” Maksim agrees, takes off his pants and, to the approving cheers of his fired-up friends, applies oil paint onto his buttocks.

This dialogue, much like the scene itself, could easily have taken place in Vladimir Sorokin’s 2006 novel Den’ oprichnika / The Day of the Oprichnik, which was published when Sorokin was still working on DAU with Khrzhanovskiy.¹² Although Sorokin’s own involvement in the DAU project was brief, the image of one long caterpillar of copulating oprichniks, featured in his grotesque dystopia, is obviously informed by the same carnivalesque spirit of transgression as the Komsomol actions described above.¹³ To be sure, their sexual transgressions are much less explicit; they serve a similar purpose, however, namely the birth of a collective body as a result of a carnivalesque ritual. Moreover, in accordance with the structural dyads of carnival, in the final act of DAU. Degeneration, the collective male body of the Komsomol takes the collective female body of the Institute (with all its vaginas and nipples).

The relative absence of primary male sexual characteristics in the Institute is no coincidence at all, then. Nor does it seem accidental that the murder of the Institute’s inhabitants is left out of the picture, while all violence is metonymically transferred onto the architectural setting and the interiors, as the “buds and sprouts” of the collective body of the Komsomol take over and violate the “orifices and apertures” of the Institute (Bakhtin 1984: 318). Following the sinister logic of the Bakhtinian carnival, with its “pregnant death, regenerative death,” (Bakhtin 1984: 25), the death throes of the Institute become the throes of labour through which a new world is born and a new cosmogonical cycle is initiated, as the title of the as yet unreleased film DAU. Regeneration (directors, year, countries) suggests.¹⁴

Conclusion

The twists and turns of this exploratory reflection on the architecture of the Institute has offered points of entry for a Bakhtinian reading of DAU, demonstrating the relevance of the Russian philosopher’s ideas for understanding of Khrzhanovskiy’s work, and the discussion of post-Soviet culture in general. The first part of this article provided a conceptual reading of the Institute’s sexualised built environment as a grotesque body, an incomplete grotesque body, that seemed to fall short of its quintessential traits – duality, liminality, and heterogeneity – by virtue of its almost exclusively feminine iconography. The second part of this article sought out the complementary masculine component of the grotesque body in the high-rise City in the Sky. Conceived by Shibanov, this ode to visionary urbanism never saw the light of day, thus failing to fulfill its mission. As discussed in the third and final part, this was achieved by the “collective body” of the Komsomol born in an act of ritualised, carnivalesque violence.

The Bakhtinian reading of DAU provides valuable insights into the artistic project of DAU itself and into the post-Soviet era in which it emerged. One of the dominant cultural trends of this era – if not the main one – was the development of postmodern culture, whose affinity with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival has been widely discussed in scholarly literature. (Kristeva 1980: 64-91; Groys 1989: 92-97) Carnival, as Mark Lipovetsky notes, “liberates itself from the oppression of such obscure notions as the ‘eternal’, the ‘immutable’, the ‘absolute’” (2008: 22); in other words, carnival reiterates the “incredulity towards metanarratives”, as articulated by Jean-François Lyotard (1984: 24). This “incredulity towards metanarratives” pervades the DAU project – it is a mistrust of progress, of science, and of the Enlightenment discourse in general.¹⁵ It is also a liberation from the dictates of the official historical narrative, exemplified by the way in which the Soviet past, including its darkest pages, are reworked. Finally, the carnival logic dismantles the grand narrative of Renaissance humanism, which results in the disregard for ethical norms witnessed in DAU, a valid point of critique both of the Bakhtinian carnival and of Khrzhanovskiy’s project. After all, “The Bakhtinian concept of carnival, for all its undeniable appeal and fascination, is tragic in its nature, [for] in it the individual is disregarded.” (Isupov 1991: 66).

Evgeniya Makarova
McGill University
evgeniya.makarova@mcgill.ca

Bio

Evgeniya Makarova holds an MA in Art History from the University of Geneva and a PhD in Art History from McGill University. She is interested in architectural history, theory, representation, and imagination. Her doctoral thesis focused on the complex relationship between German artists and the National Socialist state, specifically as it pertains to the development of architectural and technical subjects painting between 1933 and 1945. In her current research, Evgeniya explores the ways in which the “difficult heritage” of the twentieth-century dictatorships is addressed in contemporary art, cinema, fashion, and graphic design. Notably, her latest project is concerned with the role of built environment in Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s multimedia project DAU. Evgeniya is also a research fellow at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, working with an international team of scholars on reconstructing the family history and the art collection of Max Stern, a Nazi-persecuted German-Jewish art dealer. Her work has been supported by Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et Culture, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Deutsche Zentrum Kulturgutverluste.

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Filmography

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1945. Ivan Groznyi / Ivan the Terrible. Mosfilm.

Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya, and Ilya Permiakov. 2020. DAU: Regeneratsiia / DAU: Regeneration. Phenomen Films.

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Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya and Vasil´ev, Anatolii. 2020. DAU. Imperiia / DAU. Empire. Phenomen Films.

Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya and Oertel, Jekaterina. 2020. DAU. Tri dnia / DAU. Three Days. Phenomen Films.

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Lang, Fritz. 1927. Metropolis. UFA.

Suggested Citation

Makarova, Evgeniya. 2022. “Soviet, Sacred, Sexual: The Carnivalised Architecture in Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU”. Soviet Playtime: Architectures of Power and Profligacy in DAU (ed. by Philip Cavendish, Natascha Drubek, and Irina Schulzki). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 14. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00014.308

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/