Ghosts in the Urban Machine: Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s Images of Technological Modernity

• In Event: Humanity’s Liberation or Decline?: Representations of Technology in East/Central European Cultures in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

The pages of the leading Russian Silver Age art periodical, Mir Iskusstva, were most often adorned with retrospectival images celebrating the arts of past epochs. Of the figures associated with this journal and its eponymous art group, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky alone concerned himself with the predominantly contemporary themes in industrializing European cities. While his fellow miriskusniki reveled in the aesthetic achievements of the rococo and folk arts, Dobuzhinsky manifested his unease with modernity through his portrayals of built environments. Dobuzhinsky sketched Saint Petersburg, Vilno, and London as spaces devoid of human life, yet shaped by modern technologies. Dobuzhinsky’s depopulated cityscapes are home to an array of cranes, smokestacks, barbed-wire fences, and excavators–devices that displace and obfuscate expected urban subjects.
Although the first skyscrapers in the Russian Empire were not under construction till the early 1910s, Dobuzhinsky’s imaginations of perception altered by heights continually occupied his works. In particular, his 1912 - 1918 series Gorodskie sny (City Dreams), portraying phantasmagoric metropolises with collapsing skyscrapers, ominous flying machines, and treacherous pits conveys a marked concern with the newly available vertical axis. Dobuzhinsky’s London images repeat these motifs as spectral human figures are overwhelmed by lofty towering bridges, while his Petersburg portfolio is filled with views of cityscapes from disorienting rooftop heights. Ultimately, the spaces and subject matter that Dobuzhsinky chose to portray cause his work to stand out from among his miriskusniki peers through the direct manner in which he confronted modernity.

Author

• Lucas Plazek, UC Berkeley