The Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the Nightmare of Free Fall

chapter three

the Soviet icaruS: From the Dream oF Free Flight to the Nightmare oF Free Fall

maria tsantsanoglou

the replica of a fascinating and grandiose design stood in the courtyard of london’s academy of arts from october 2011 until January 2012, during the exhibition Building the Revolution—Soviet Art and Architecture 1915–1935. it was the Model for the Monument to the Third International, by the artist vladimir tatlin, or, as it is more widely known, Tatlin’s Tower. the original design, dating from 1920, existed only in the form of drawings and models— it was never actually constructed. the idea was based on a synthesis of diverse elements from architecture, sculpture and painting, with carefully designed rotating forms of metal and glass, electric elevators, heating and projection systems, and telephone and radio transmitters. Naturally the question was asked: is this art? the critic, Nikolai punin hastened to its defence, claiming that it was indeed a work of art—a form created ‘on the basis of the organic synthesis of those principles that govern paint-ing, sculpture and architecture, and offering a new type of monumental construction—one that would combine creative form with utility’.1

ten years later, during the period 1929–1932, vladimir tatlin set up a workshop in moscow’s Novodevichii monastery and worked—with the help of students from the moscow vkhutemas (vyshhie khudoz-hestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie—the higher artistic and techni-cal Workshops)—on one of the most bizarre, utopian, and daring of all his projects: the construction of a flying machine, an air-bicycle, which he called the Letatlin (a compound of the artist’s own surname and the russian verb ‘letat ’ ’—to fly (Fig. 3.1). What tatlin sought to create was a machine driven solely by human power. his air-bicycle was to free man from the bonds of gravity and give him the sense of flight as enjoyed by

1 N. punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (petrograd: otdel iZo Narkompros, 1920); reprinted in N. punin, O Tatline, eds. i.N. punina and v.i. rakitin (moscow: ra, 1994), p. 18; english translation in larissa alekseevna Zhadova, ed., Tatlin, (london: thames and hudson, 1988), pp. 344–346.

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44 maria tsantsanoglou

birds. in its construction, tatlin laid more emphasis on its organic nature than on technology, using such materials as wood, cork, silk, leather and steel thread. progress in the field of aviation, various studies on the laws of flight, his own research into the ‘culture of materials’, and a profound study of natural forms and structures—all these played their part in shap-ing tatlin’s work. he produced at least three models of the Letatlin. Yet, despite all its creator’s efforts, the letatlin never flew more than a few metres.

it is important to remember that the Letatlin was conceived at a time when people were already regularly flying in aeroplanes and Zeppelins, and the first gliders of the nineteenth century were already a part of avia-tion history. Why, then, was tatlin so interested in constructing a flying machine—when aircraft had already been in production for almost three decades? this is another key question, like that concerning the artistic value of the Model for a Monument to the Third International.

in his diary, punin recorded that he met tatlin in 1924 and that the art-ist had talked about his plans to create a flying machine.2 this indicates that tatlin had started designing such a device much earlier than 1929, when he started working on the actual construction.

in the booklet, which was published for the catalogue of the Exhibition of the Works of the Operative Vladimir Tatlin at the pushkin museum in

2 See Sidney monas and Jennifer greene Krupala, eds., The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904–1953 (austin: university of texas, 1999), p. 128.

Fig. 3.1 vladimir tatlin, Sketch plan of Letatlin, 1929–32, pencil on paper, a. a. Bakhrushin State central theatre museum, moscow.


the soviet icarus 45

moscow in 1932 and where three versions of the letatlin were exhibited, tatlin himself explained the reasons for his interest in constructing such a machine:

1. i have selected the flying machine as an object for artistic composition, since it is the most complicated dynamic form that can become an everyday object for the Soviet masses, as an ordinary item of use.

2. i have proceeded from material constructions of simple forms to more complicated: clothes, articles of utility in the environment—as far as an architectural work to the honour of the comintern. the flying machine is the most complicated form in my present phase of work. it corresponds to the need of the moment for human mastery of space.

3. as a consequence of this work, i have drawn the conclusion that the artist’s approach to technology can and will lend new life to their stag-nating methods, which are often in contradiction with the functions of the epoch of reconstruction.

4. my apparatus is built on the principle of utilising living, organic forms. the observation of these forms led me to the conclusion that the most aesthetic forms are the most economic. art is: work with the shaping of the material, in this respect.3

he also stated that he had carried out extensive research into the organic function of his flying machine, and had studied the movements of birds. Yet even this was nothing new. From the plans of leonardo da vinci for flying machines, in the late fifteenth century, to the first gliders built by otto lilienthal at the end of the nineteenth century, improving on the earlier designs of Sir george cayley, the study of the aerodynamics of birds’ wings was well-established.

the fact that tatlin’s project was completed and abandoned in 1932—the same year that independent artistic organisations were abolished as a prelude to the introduction of Socialist realism, which in 1934 was enshrined in law as the only approved aesthetic method for the arts—gives the Letatlin and its pursuit of the freedom of flight a symbolic impor-tance as the last major design of the avant-garde period.

at the same time, in November 1931, igor Sikorskii’s ‘flying boat’, piloted by the american charles lindbergh, completed its first passenger flight

3 Vystavka rabot zasluzhennogo deiatelia iskusstv V.E. Tatlina (moscow, leningrad: ogiz-izogiz, 1932), p. 8.



from North to South america. Four years earlier, it had made the first transatlantic flight. Sikorskii’s backer was another russian expatriate, the composer Sergei rachmaninoff. Sikorskii relates how when he entered the smoking area of the plane, feeling the sense of suspended motion, he saw the aisle with the little blue lights, the wooden inclined partition, the door at the rear, and felt that he remembered the scene from a dream that he had had thirty years before.4

the history of flight in russia is deeply rooted in philosophy. Space travel in particular had its origins in the strange views of the eccentric librarian and philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who inspired leo tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevskii, and others at the turn of the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries, with what he called the ‘philosophy of the common task’. Fedorov was convinced that men have a specific reason for existence, of which they are unaware, and this makes them stumble among various metaphysical and ontological questions, missing their real ‘objective’. he believed that if all men could dedicate a few hours a day to a shared objec-tive, or common task, each employing his own individual knowledge and skills, then through this systematic, collective endeavour they would arrive much sooner at that point where humanity could ascend to a higher stage. For Fedorov, the ultimate aim of the common task was to achieve the res-urrection of the dead—using science, rather than faith or mysticism.5

one of Fedorov’s disciples was the young engineer Konstantin tsiolk-ovskii. tsiolkovskii was very impressed by his teacher’s observation that when resurrection became a practical possibility, there would not be enough room for the population of the earth and that mankind would have to explore the possibilities of colonising other planets. he went on to lay the foundations for the design and construction of the first space rockets, and is now regarded as the father of space science, having lent his name to the State museum of the history of cosmonautics in Kaluga (muzei istorii kosmonavtiki imeni K.e. tsiolkovskogo).

the russians welcomed and embraced Western theories and inven-tions relating to human flight, but assimilated them into their own, dis-tinctively russian, way of thinking, endowing them with philosophical ramifications. Faith in the ability to transcend human limitations made the russians approach the question of human flight by balancing physics

4 See igor Sikorsky, The Story of the Winged-S: Late Developments and Recent Photo-graphs of the Helicopter, an Autobiography (New York: Dodd, mead, 1938).

5 N.F. Fedorov, Filosofia obshchego dela, vol. 1 (vernyi, 1906), vol. 2 (moscow, 1913).



and metaphysics, science and philosophy, technology and faith. perhaps the russian need to align the physical with the metaphysical, or the astro-logical with the astronomical, is ultimately what stimulated tsiolkovskii’s fascination with rocket technology and space stations—which he called ‘ethereal colonies’.6

So, in 1929, when tatlin began planning the Letatlin, not only was avia-tion technology fairly advanced, but the foundations had also been laid for space flight, since both Konstantin tsiolkovskii and Fridrikh tsander, had already produced designs for space rockets, and the focus had moved from the earth into the realms of space, while a new space architecture was generating fantastic images of colonies on other planets, and science fiction was producing a whole range of books and films.7

it is worth mentioning that tatlin was not the first avant-garde artist to be inspired by space and to construct a flying machine. petr miturich, who had been a pilot during the First World War, had begun designing and building small models of flying machines that were supposed to fly without an engine, using only human power in 1921. as tim harte has explained, miturich’s flying device called the Letun (The Flyer) consisted of three pairs of broad-spanned wings that a pilot could operate manually from a central sitting position, by means of a variety of levers. the main source of propulsion was to be what miturich called ‘wave-like motion’ (volnovoe dvizhenie) or ‘oscillating motion’ (kolebatel’noe dvizhenie) gen-erated by the movement of the large wings. this ‘wavelike motion’ was the result of miturich’s experimentation with metal balls on curved and straight paths, which demonstrated how a curved trajectory produces higher speeds than a straight trajectory.8 petr miturich had used the term ‘Letun’, one of Khlebnikov’s neologisms along with ‘let’ba’, which derived from the verb ‘letat’ ’ (to fly) and were used in his Futurist poems.

Since the early years of the russian avant-garde, the aeroplane had been linked to a vision of the future, the pilot becoming a symbol of the new man—the man who transcends the constraints of his own time and acquires greater freedoms than ordinary mortals. in fact, the Futurist poet

6 Konstantin tsiolkovskii used the term ‘ethereal colonies’ (efirnye poseleniia) in many of his books, such as Vne Zemli [Beyond the earth] (Kaluga, 1920) and Volia Vselennoi. Neizvestnye razumnye sily [the Will of the universe: the unknown intelligence] (Kaluga, 1928).

7 Science-fiction writers from this period include aleksandr Beliaev, aleksandr Bogdanov, ivan eefremov and aleksei tolstoi.

8 tim harte, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-garde Culture 1910–1930 (madison, Wi.: university of Wisconsin press, 2009), pp. 173–4, 270.



vasilii Kamenskii was one of russia’s very first pilots. painters strove to capture the excitement of flight, and comparisons were drawn between this new form of transport and the train. the latter was the traditional means of transport for ordinary russians, and since the nineteenth cen-tury it had been a source of inspiration, with railway lines spreading out across the huge expanses of the motherland. Some images combined these two forms of transport to evoke the dynamism of contemporary reality, as in Natalia goncharova’s Plane over the Train (1913, oil on canvas, museum of Fine arts of tatarstan, Kazan) and Kazimir malevich’s The Simultane-ous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railroad of 1913, which was produced as a lithograph for aleksei Kruchenykh’s book Explodity (Vzor-val). the adventure of flight also featured in depictions of war, with the aeroplane represented as a source of terror, dispensing inescapable death to the people below, as in goncharova’s Angels and Aeroplanes, from her series of fourteen lithographs entitled Mystical Images of War (moscow, 1914, Fig. 3.2) and olga rozanova’s collage Aeroplanes over the City, which was composed from a lino-cut and paper for the book War, which she produced with Kruchenykh and which was published in petrograd in 1916. two abstract paintings, both called Aeroplane Flying were devoted to the new means of transport: one by malevich (1915, Fig. 3.3) and the other by rozanova (1915–16, Samara art museum, Samara). Neither work rep-resents flight itself, but rather evokes a realm in which the organisation of the dynamics of flight can overturn conventional relationships and the force of gravity. Between 1923 and 1926, aleksandr rodchenko produced a series of joyful images of aeroplanes for the logo and advertisements of the russian Society of the volunteer air Fleet (rossiskoe obshchestvo Dobrovol’nogo vozdushnogo flota—Dobrolet). later, in 1929 and 1930, while tatlin was working on his Letatlin, Konstantin iuon was painting airmen of the future (People of the Future, 1929, Fig. 3.4) while Solomon Nikritin produced a sequence of difficult symbolic compositions featuring aeroplanes for his Monument series.9

We should also take into account the fact that the 1966 film Andrei Rublev, directed by andrei tarkovskii, begins with the story of a monk who was supposed to be the first russian icarus. actually, a russian monk, Furvin Kriakutnoi, was believed to be the first man to become airborne in

9 Natalia adaskina, John e. Bowlt, Nicoletta misler and maria tsantsanoglou, eds., Solo-mon Nikritin. Spheres of Light: Stations of Darkness (thessaloniki: State museum of con-temporary art, 2004).



Fig. 3.2 Natalia goncharova, Angels and Aeroplanes, lithograph, 32.7 × 24 cm., from the portfolio of 14 lithographs Mystical images of War (moscow 1914).



Fig. 3.4 Konstantin iuon, People of the Future, 1929, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 66.5 × 100 cm., tver regional art gallery, tver.

Fig. 3.3 Kazimir malevich, Aeroplane Flying, 1915, oil on canvas, 57.3 × 47.3 cm., museum of modern art, New York.



the city of riazan in 1731. the story of Kriakutnoi had first been published in 1901, and was often repeated, but in 1958 was proved to be completely untrue.10

another popular russian legend relating to the theme of human flight was the story of the young, flying serf, Nikitka, who during the reign of ivan the terrible in the fifteenth century, announced that he had built a flying machine with which he could take to the air. he ascended a bell tower, leapt into the air, and luckily, made a safe landing. When ivan learnt about his feat, he sentenced him to a cruel death, on the grounds that ‘man is not a bird; anyone attaching wooden wings to his body is defying nature and flouting the will of god—therefore he deserves the most severe of punishments’.11

another story features a very different reaction from another tsar, peter the great. on 30 april 1695, a peasant, emelian ivanov, announced that his flying machine would take to the skies from moscow’s red Square. When the attempt failed, ivanov blamed the weight of his construction, and the tsar offered him money to build a lighter model. When the sec-ond attempt at flying also failed, the tsar put a lien on the peasant’s prop-erty to ensure that he returned the money he had been given.12

in 1940, aleksandr Deineka painted Nikitka The First Russian Flyer (Fig. 3.5 and explained:

our age is characterised by a love of flying, a love for men with a genius for design, with the courage and persistence of the pilot chkalov,13 who have provided painters with unusual subjects like flying gliders and young aero-modellers and parachutists who make such remarkable demonstrations of their skills and abilities. it is this which led me to the story of Nikitka, the first russian pilot. modern times have given us in Nikitka an exemplar of russian ability, courage and determination. in the painting of the past there

10 v.F. pokrovskaia discovered that the original manuscript (which was supposedly discovered in the 1820s by the historian aleksandr ivanovich Sulakadzev), was a forgery, which had probably been made by Sulakadzev himself. See v.F. pokrovskaia, ‘esche ob odnoi rukopisi a.i. Sulakadzeva. K voprosu o popravkakh v rukopisnykh tekstakh’ in Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, vol. XIV (moscow: akademiia Nauk, 1958), pp. 634–636; and Dmitrii S. likhachev, Tekstologia. Chast’ VII. Issledovanie avtorskogo teksta. Poddelki (St petersburg: aleteia, 2001), p. 345.

11 N. Borozdin, Zavoevanie vozdushnoi stikhii (Warsaw, 1909), p. 6; cited in Scott W. palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), p. 4.

12 For the young, flying serf Nikitka, the peasant emelian ivanov, and other russian popular legends of human flight, see palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, pp. 4–6.

13 valerii chkalov was a famous test pilot, and a hero of the Soviet union, who flew from moscow to vancouver over the North pole (1937).



Fig. 3.5 aleksandr Deineka, Nikitka The First Russian Flyer, 1940, oil on canvas, 397 × 294 cm., State tretiakov gallery, moscow.



were few artists who depicted the brave actions of ordinary people. there are popular legends telling of magic carpets, and old chronicles which make passing reference to anonymous, but daring serfs who built themselves wings to take to the air. i am surprised that none of the great painters of the past interested themselves in the story of Nikitka . . . i have painted him at the moment of flight, the moment of maximum muscular tension, the moment, let us say, at which we see most clearly his determination to fly. the composition is vertically structured with a low horizon leaving much of the canvas representing the sky. i extended the bell tower to the very top of the canvas in order to show the highest point of the city at that moment, setting it on the bank of the river. Nikitka is placed in the fore-ground. this shift in the foreground towards the upper part of the picture gives it a particular dynamic, generating a sense of unease in the spectator. it also allowed me to represent the crowd watching Nikitka, with their faces turned towards us as we view the painting. i wanted to depict the range of emotions of the crowd as they watched the attempted flight, so extraordi-nary at that time: the hate and fear of some of the crowd, the antipathy of some, the sympathy and admiration of others . . .14

in 1943, Deineka painted The Shot Down Ace (State russian museum, St petersburg), which has the same dimensions and vertical orientation as Nikitka The First Russian Flyer, although the subject, being hurled into space, is a Nazi pilot whose parachute has failed to open. it is worth com-paring the two pictures: the bell tower has been replaced by the smoke from the burning aeroplane crashing to earth, while in the place of the crowd watching the attempted flight we see scattered pieces of metal on which the german pilot will be impaled.

Deineka sought to glorify Soviet man and the achievements of socialism, including feats of aviation. after the death of Stalin, from the late 1950s to the 1970s, artists conspicuously avoided embodying political ideology, socialist or otherwise, in their work. the prevailing atmosphere in the post-war period and after Stalin’s death in 1953 made itself felt in the work of most Soviet artists, whose heroes now tended to be more awkward and weary. Known as the ‘austere style’ (surovyi stil’), this approach is seen in artists like tahir Salahov and pavel Nikonov, who in their images of Soviet citizens were not afraid to show the misery of everyday existence, and people’s anxieties about life and death—whether the individual depicted was a labourer from the arctic, a working mother, a peasant from central asia, or the artist himself—the intellectual looking forward to the future of humanity.

14 See aleksandr Deineka, Iz moei rabochei praktiki (moscow: akademiia Khudozhestv SSSr, 1961). For the quote about Nikitka, see http://www.deineka.ru/work-nikitka.php.


http://www.deineka.ru/work-nikitka.php


in his painting The Flyer Egorka (1976, Fig. 3.6), the artist gelii Kor-zhev revived the myth of icarus and described the moment following that depicted by Deineka. he reminds us of the mercilessness of ivan the ter-rible, and the punishment of the young Nikitka (or the young egorka—there is a phonetic similarity between egor and icarus) seems terrible to the spectator. in his de-mystification of superhuman, individual endeav-our, the painter has also de-mystified the vision of the russian avant-garde. man’s attempts to transcend his natural powers are an example of hubris, and he who defies the laws of nature is abruptly brought back to earth. in 1991, the artist Boris orlov presented the moment of icarus’s crash to earth in an installation called The Twilight of the Gods (State tretiakov gallery, moscow) which evokes connotations of the collapse of the Soviet union.

on 12 april 1961, the first manned rocket to leave the earth’s atmo-sphere and fly through space took off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. the astronaut on board was Yurii gagarin, and this first manned space flight orbited the earth in one hour and forty-eight minutes. But in that short time it completely changed man’s view of the earth and the universe.

in russia, the idea of human flight became, once again, a source of inspiration and excitement for artists. in 1961, the Soviet union was enjoy-ing a period of optimism under Nikita Khrushchev, who had de-Stalinised the country, renounced the cult of personality, and allowed a revival of innovative art. in the 1960s and 1970s, many russian artists were inspired by the now real possibility of human exploration of space, some of them offering in their works representations of cosmic matter, using both sci-entific and imaginary elements. Francisco infante, for example, who was fascinated by the infinite and mysterious nature of the universe, created kinetic installations and paintings, which depicted infinite vistas through unexplored space, in obscure worlds between the earth and the heavens.

in parallel, ilya Kabakov created the airman Komarov, one of his ten characters.15 Komarov lives in a city where everything is just as we know it, with one difference: men are able to fly. they do not have wings, nor are they attached to machines—these pictures remind us of the floating figures in the paintings of marc chagall of 1914–1918.

in 1984, Kabakov designed and constructed the installation, The Man Who Flew into Space, which invites the viewer to inspect the traces left behind by a man who has launched himself, alone, from his apartment into space. the small, monastic room, full of objects and images relating

15 Between 1972 and 1976, the artist ilya Kabakov created fifty-five albums for his series Ten Characters (ink, watercolour, and coloured pencils on paper).



to Soviet life, is linked to the collective Soviet project for the conquest of space, and the propaganda associated with that project. the ceiling with a hole in it, the rudimentary launching pad, and the room itself—all demonstrate the contrast between the dream of space, a key component in Soviet policy, and the everyday life of the average Soviet citizen.

at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the mit’ki art move-ment in leningrad/petersburg (vladimir Shinkarev, Dmitrii Shagin, and aleksandr Florenskii), with their russian spiritual, yet ironic, approach, cre-ated the character of ‘poor ikarushka’ and used the myth of icarus as a sym-bol of the inevitable failure of any sublime, romantic, human aspiration.16

in the 1980s, the Soviet union witnessed a keen interest in the study of the russian avant-garde. it was not only scholars who were fascinated by this hitherto ‘forbidden’ aesthetic phenomenon, but also artists, who

16 in 1984 Dmitrii Shagin wrote the poem ‘poor ikarushka’ based on the painting Land-scape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally attributed to pieter Breugel the elder (1560s, royal museum of Fine arts, Brussels): ‘poor ikarushka!/ Forgotten by all of his brothers/ only pale legs stick out/ of the cold green water.”(a u ikarushki bednogo,/vsemi bratkami zabytogo,/odni tol’ko belye nozhki torchat,/iz kholodnoi zelenoi vody.) Dmitrii Shagin, ‘Bednyi ikarushka’, Dyk! (St. petersburg: Krasnyi matros, 2006).

Fig. 3.6 gelii Korzhev-chuveliev, Egorka the Flyer, 1976–1980, oil on canvas, 200 × 280 cm., State tretiakov gallery, moscow.



sought to engage with an artistic movement that had come to such a sudden end. the conceptual artist erik Bulatov recalls: in the late 1950s, ‘everything suddenly began to come alive, the word Formalism, which had been used in a dismissive sense, and in the early ‘50s had even had con-notations of intellectual criminality, now began to arouse interest again, eventually earning respect and finally becoming a desideratum that was used as a benchmark of quality in the visual arts.’17

leonid Sokov, who emigrated to the uSa in 1980, revived the Letatlin project in a variety of ways: reconstructing one of the few surviving origi-nal parts of the wing (which is now in the costakis collection at the State museum of contemporary art in thessaloniki, and which he had seen in the 1970s, in george costakis’ apartment in moscow), and presenting it as a work of art in its own right. Sokov returned to the theme in the 1990s and the following decade, with the Letatlin flying, but with cells in the place of man, or a wooden bear to symbolise russia.

Where tatlin sought, through his flying machine, to transcend the lim-its of human powers, the much younger russian artist, oleg Kulik, a rep-resentative of contemporary moscow actionism, has taken the idea even further, subjecting himself to extreme ordeals in a series of performances. in one of these, he attempted to emulate a bird, and actually fly, overcom-ing a fear of heights and subjecting himself to the psychological experi-ence of free flight (Kulik is a Bird, September 1995). this performance is reminiscent of the well-known image of Yves Klein’s earlier performance in rue gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-roses, in october 1960.

my original question—Why did tatlin design the letatlin at a time when technology had already conquered the air?—remains unanswered. perhaps it can only be answered in conjunction with that other, much more general question: What is the nature of the artist?

even though the Letatlin never took to the air, a vision of freedom had been born. the universal human values of the renaissance are deeply rooted in the process of creating The Monument to the Third International, in which tatlin wished to speak of humanity’s development through technology, and radio’s electromagnetic waves, transmitting to the whole planet from a height of 400 metres. it is also present in the Letatlin, where he focused on the solitary man flying free, borne aloft only by his own individual wings.

17 ‘Falk—Favorskii—Fonvizin’, in irina alapova, ed., Drugoe iskusstvo. Moskva 1956–1988, (moscow: National centre of contemporary art, galart, 2005), pp. 10–11. For an earlier edition of this text, see leonid talashkin and irina alapova, eds., Drugoe iskusstvo. Moskva 1956–1988 (moscow: moskovskaia galereia, 1991).


The Soviet Icarus: From the Dream of Free Flight to the Nightmare of Free Fall

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