A cover of Limonka from 1997 displaying a collage by Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov.
Post-Soviet
1997
The third object in the selection is the cover of an issue of Limonka displaying the reproduction of a collage by the artist and musician Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov that became an iconic symbol of early NBP culture. Lebedev-Frontov was a pioneer of Russian noise and industrial music with a keen interest in the futurist experimental composer Luigi Russolo, Italian Fascism, and, more generally, early twentieth-century European culture. His art combined elements of what can be seen as a specific kind steampunk. His collages, for which he employed techniques inspired by Rodchenko, portrayed a totalitarian or “retro-futurist surrealism of sorts,” combining motifs such as the death of God, a horrifying mechanization of the flesh, early modernist decadence, and a meticulous reconstruction of historical details such as uniforms, emblems, and family mottoes (Lebedev-Frontov described his own style as “national-conceptualism”; one of the NBP leaders, “futurist surrealism”). In the image, the French crime novel super-villain and ruthless murderer Fantômas points a gun in the direction of the viewer. The poster slogan reproduces the first line of the Russian version of The Internationale, which literally reads “Stand up, you who have been branded by a curse!” (which in the original is followed by the line: “All the world's starving and enslaved!”). The words from the communist anthem were of course immediately recognizable for any Russian of that generation, but, same time, taken out of context, they could also be taken as an allusion to a sort of satanic or mystical bolshevism—which was in line with the dark irony and taste for paradox of the early NBP. The slogan on the right side of the page reproduced the medieval prophecy about Moscow as the “third Rome”: “…the third stands, and there will not be a fourth” (in the original, “…two Romes have fallen, and a third stands, and there will not be a fourth”). The slogan alluded, more or less ironically, to the messianic or apocalyptic role of Moscow on the geopolitical chessboard after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russia
Limonov, Eduard, Dugin, Aleksander (Aleksandr) , and Lebedev-Frontov, Aleksandr
Russia and former Soviet Union
Front page, Limonka 73: Sept 1997