Catherine Merridale
ALL WOOD AND DREAMS
Tatlin's Tower: Monument to Revolution
By Norbert Lynton (Yale University Press 276pp £35)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

PUtopianism has a bleak reputation in the early twenty-first century. In our violent, anti-intellectual and destructive age, the idea that humans, using their creativity and reason, might perfect society and resolve their conflict with nature is laughable, though the notion that we might perfect ourselves enjoys a dismal vogue. Less than a hundred years ago, after all, utopian politics led to the Gulag, while its handmaid, the science of the late industrial era, created bombs and smoke and industrial battlefields. If today's Left has a colour after all that, it is probably greenish-yellowish (or red-brownish, with chauvinist overtones, in Russia). The contrast with the confident scarlet banners of the revolutionary Russian avant-garde of a century ago could not be greater.

Vladimir Tatlin, the artist whose work is the subject of Norbert Lynton's last - and posthumous - book, was a dreamer in that great utopian age. Born in 1885, Tatlin grew up in Kharkov, a major industrial city but also a centre of revolutionary thought in the Romanov Empire. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, he ran away to sea, and though he later trained at a succession of art schools, the freedom of travel (and the appeal of boats, rigging and masts) remained central to his later work. What mattered to him most, however, was art's creative potential to explore, embody and inspire the optimism of an experimental age. His two most famous projects - neither of which, fittingly, was ever realised - reflect his faith in liberation and harmony. One was to be a massive tower, a working building as well as a monument; the other was a series of prototypes intended to allow individual human flight, an airborne bicycle whose purpose (apart from acting as a form of transport) was to take humans upwards into a better future.

Tatlin's tower, more accurately known as the Monument to the Third International, remains his most famous creation. It was commissioned in 1919 as a monument to the Bolshevik Revolution, which had taken place just two years before. As Lynton observes only in passing, the entire project was undertaken against a background of civil war, food shortage, political terror and epidemic disease (the last of which had killed several of Tatlin's colleagues by the mid-1920s), so the artist's bravado was breathtaking. What he planned was to be the tallest structure in the world, and also the most innovative, though elements of Eiffel's tower in Paris (which Tatlin had seen) and of Athanasius Kircher's famous seventeenth-century representation of the Tower of Babel were evident in the design. Conceived in deliberate contrast to the lifeless, useless busts and memorials of the previous regime, it was also to be functional, to include a massive conference hall, meeting rooms (the building was to be the headquarters of the Communist International), and a space for projecting films and disseminating messages of brotherhood, harmony and peace (the top tier would also function as a radio mast). The marvels of technology were one theme, but movement was another, so each of the four main function spaces, suspended within an open framework, was designed to rotate, each at a different but predictable speed. In this way, as well as reflecting the dynamism of the dawning age, the building could double as a slow-moving calendar and clock, perhaps even as a means of measuring stars and space. In its restlessness and transparency, the building embodied the democratic challenge to authoritarian power that Tatlin so welcomed. As Viktor Shklovsky, the critic, approvingly observed when he saw Tatlin's model, 'The monument is made of iron, glass and revolution.'

In fact, the tower was never made of anything but wood and dreams. A fifteen-foot high model was exhibited in Moscow and St Petersburg, and pictures show workers processing past a simplified prototype on the 1925 Leningrad May Day parade, but the 400-metre colossus of Tatlin's vision was never built and soon even the artist's models had been lost. Tatlin was neither arrested nor disgraced, but times changed, and the Soviet regime of the late 1920s had little time for transparency in architecture or politics. While constructivists like his friend Alexander Rodchenko moved into photography, quietly dropping the experimental art that was now deemed un-proletarian, Tatlin (who defied the narrow definition implied by any artistic 'ism') became fascinated by flight, studied birds, and began to make sketches for a personal flying machine, the Letatlin (the Russian verb 'to fly' is letat), which was to be a wicker frame supporting wings and powered, like a bicycle, by pedalling. He died, never having soared as he had hoped, in May 1953, just weeks after the death of Joseph Stalin.

Norbert Lynton's account focuses on Tatlin's output, his ideas, and the works that may have inspired him. The setting and the politics, the realities of Tatlin's daily life and of his work in the Soviet artistic establishment, are barely covered; there are no archives in the bibliography, though someone surely should trace Tatlin's life through his friendships with poets like Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov and with the politician Lunacharsky. The book is memorable, however, as all Lynton's work tends to be, for its close study of what we can see, and also through the boldness of its conclusions. Of these, Lynton's assertion that Tatlin was inspired by images of St John the Baptist is the most striking. The incorporation of Orthodox, mystical and folk traditions in Tatlin's work is uncontroversial, but the specific identification of the tower with a famous representation of the Baptist (the angled profile of the latter can be mapped, Lynton argues, onto the lines made by the Baptist's cloak and outstretched arms in Alexander Ivanov's 1855 painting Christ's First Appearance Before the People) is arresting. Like many of Lynton's conclusions (a similar one is made about the Letatlin), it is fanciful and impossible to prove, but the book is the richer for it, and left me with a happy sense of possibilities opened and associations creatively explored.

CATHERINE MERRIDALE is Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of several books on Russian history. She is currently preparing a major new cultural history of the Moscow Kremlin.