Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksenov

Ivan Aksenov was a Russian writer whose work spanned a wide range of genres and themes. A poet, novelist, translator, historian, and critic of art, literature, film, and theater, he authored one of the first major books on French Cubism in the Russian language.

Details of Aksenov’s early life remain obscure. He was likely born on his family’s estate in present-day Ukraine (then part of the Kursk Governorate of the Russian Empire) to Aleksandr Vasil’evich Aksenov, a nobleman landowner and decorated military officer. In the dedication to his 1916 book The Corinthians, Aksenov describes his family as comprising seven members.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Aksenov enlisted in the First Moscow Cadet Corps and later went on to study at the Nikolaevsky Engineering School in Saint Petersburg. During the Russo-Japanese War, he fought for the Russian Empire as part of the 3rd Manchurian Army between August 1905 and July 1906. He continued to serve in battalions in Kiev and Siberia, though spent a month in prison for allegedly inciting a rebellion in 1907. He was nonetheless tasked with administering officers’ libraries during this time and cultivated an interest in humanist scholarship, reading widely and developing his facility in numerous languages.

Aksenov moved to Kiev in 1909. He quickly involved himself in the city’s artistic and literary community and befriended the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. In 1911 he joined the editorial board of the journal Lukomorye, which featured his translations of Renée Vivien’s poetry. In the years leading up to the First World War, Aksenov became acquainted with the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and painters Aleksandra Ekster and Natalia Mikhailovna, through whom he developed an interest in modern painting.

By 1912 Aksenov’s involvement with contemporary painters led him to shift his focus from literature to art. He came to share their interest in the developments of French Cubism and in the spring of 1914, possibly under diplomatic auspices, traveled to Paris to research his monograph on Pablo Picasso. While major examples of Picasso’s work were publicly exhibited in Moscow in the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, Aksenov was able to draw on a more capacious sample of the artist’s work in Paris to situate the emergence of Cubism within his larger oeuvre. Supplemented by visits to the artist’s studio, Aksenov’s book Picasso i okresnosti (Picasso and His Environs) would appear three years later with a cover designed by Ekster. Select articles on Cubism had been published in Russia previously, but Picasso and His Environs—published by the avant-garde group Tsentrifuga (Centrifuge)—represented the first book-length manuscript. Despite its intellectual ambitions, it received a limited print run of one thousand copies and quickly faded into obscurity, only appearing again in Russian nearly a century later in a 2008 two-volume publication of Aksenov’s collected writings.

Aksenov returned to active duty in the Russian Empire during the First World War, though remained in contact remotely with the cultural milieu of which he had been part. In the years preceding the Russian Revolution, Aksenov’s activities centered on the Moscow-based Tsentrifuga, which counted among its members the poet Boris Pasternak, in addition to Aksenov and Ekster. Through the group, he unsuccessfully attempted to organize a salon of international contemporary art, presumably in Moscow, that was to feature the work of Constantin Brancusi, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and Lyubov Popova, among others.

In 1917 Aksenov, then an imperial officer fighting on behalf of Tsar Nikolai II, was captured and turned over to the Red Army. He eventually cooperated with the Soviets and worked with the infamous Cheka, or secret police. Aksenov’s service toward the revolutionary cause afforded him a position within the People’s Commissariat for Education (known as Narkompros). Within the ministry, he served as rector of the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s studio, which he led from 1921 to 1927. He also became associated with the Russian Constructivists, translating from French to Russian, for instance, Fernand Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, which was staged at Meyerhold’s theater with Constructivist costumes and stage designs by Popova. Alongside his engagement with contemporary theater, Aksenov continued to publish his literary criticism, prose, and poetry with various early Soviet-state publishers. He met the revolutionary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein during this time and authored a biographical essay on him in 1933, published in the journal Isskustvo Kino first in fragments in 1941 and in expanded versions in 1968 and 1991.

Aksenov married Susanna Mar in 1925. Between July and October 1930, he taught mathematics and physics in Kichkas but soon returned to Moscow where he continued to publish primarily on literary topics—Elizabethan poetry, in particular. Aksenov died suddenly at a writers’ retreat in Maleyevka outside Moscow in 1935.