In the early spring of 2005, a Scottish art collective known as Henry VIII’s Wives launched a new project in homage to one of the twentieth century’s greatest avant-garde works: “Tatlin’s Tower.” Their ongoing project proposes

to build the Tower, full size from steel girders and guy wires. It will be built in sections, in different venues and locations around the world until the whole Tower has been fabricated. The sections will not be united, but the Tower will exist in the world.

“Tatlin’s Tower and the World” is less interesting as an artistic “statement” than it is as evidence of the enduring legacy of one of twentieth-century Russia’s most visionary and inspiring artists, Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) a painter, sculptor, an architect who founded the avant-garde movement known as “Constructivism.”

“Tatlin’s Tower” (or, more properly, the “Monument to the Third International”) has been an object of curiosity, speculation, and inspiration since its architectural model was first unveiled in 1920. The visually striking new structure was intended to serve as the main headquarters for the International Workers’ Movement. “Tatlin’s Tower” was to rank among the greatest of the world’s architectural wonders once completed.

Encased inside double helix of iron and steel thrusting toward the heavens at an angle [photo], the core of the Tower would consist of three glass and steel building units shaped, from base to top, in the forms of a cube (for legislative assemblies), a pyramid (executive bodies), and a cylinder (information and propaganda services). Standing more than 1,300 feet tall, the edifice would have dwarfed the great monument to the French Revolution completed in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel. Moreover, unlike Eiffel’s static tower in Paris, Tatlin’s Monument would not stand still. Its three central units would mark the passage of time by revolving at different speeds: the cube rotating yearly, the pyramid monthly, and the cylinder daily. Meanwhile, the very top of the Tower would be equipped with a lighting apparatus capable of projecting messages and revolutionary slogans onto a giant screen (or, the clouds passing overhead).

In short, “Tatlin’s Tower” was every bit as grandiose, ambitious, and impossible to build as the proletarian paradise that it was intended to honor.

Aside from having produced one of the twentieth-century’s most enduring avant-garde architectural images with his “Tower,” Vladimir Tatlin is significant for having designed a second, no less impractical and marvelous device: a human-powered flying machine that he christened the “Letatlin.”

A play on the artist’s surname and the Russian verb “to fly” (letat’), the Letatlin was assembled during a period (1930-1932) when Tatlin’s Constructivist approach to art and architecture had fallen into disfavor with Communist Party officials. By the time that the full-scale model for the Letatlin was complete in 1932 the Stalinist assault on Soviet culture and the arts was beginning in earnest. That same year, Josef Stalin promulgated a decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations” which banned all independent studios, workshops, and groups. In their place the Party established official artistic and creative “unions” — bureaucratic mechanisms that would enable the Party to control artistic content and production throughout the country.

The Party also moved to impose an official style known as “socialist realism,” an artistic orthodoxy in which everything was portrayed as it was supposed to according to Stalinist ideology: the workers were enthusiastic about their tasks, the enemy vicious, cowardly and ever-present; and the Party always victorious. Irony, contradiction, and un-scripted conflict all were eradicated in favor of a grand “master narrative” that comported with the Party’s prevailing worldview.

Visually, the Letatlin is very much reminiscent of the ornithopter drawings that appear in the late 15th-early 16th century sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The similarities between the Letatlin and da Vinci’s ornithopter don’t end there. Both expressed an understanding of and approach to human flight rooted in a desire for personal freedom and transcendence. In the case of da Vinci, such longings were very much in tune with the emergent humanistic and individualistic worldview that evolved with the Renaissance. In the case of Tatlin, they represented sharply dissonant views that ran dangerously counter to the increasingly repressive and collectivist-minded political culture of the Stalinist 1930s.

The guardians of the politically correct Stalinist orthodoxy doubtless saw the Letatlin for what it was: a subversive statement regarding the need to liberate flight (and, by extension, the individual) from the mechanistic, industrial, and de-humanizing constraints that had come to dominate Soviet culture, society, and politics.

ScP