Exploring Early-Soviet-Era Insect Culture

In the Soviet-era children’s book,The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya, a boy and girl are suddenly reduced in size and find themselves in a world of ruthless insects. A professor, who has also shrunk, sets out to save the children and is constantly forced to enter into mortal combat with bugs who now look like towering, repulsive monsters. The fact that this work was published in 1937 – the worst year of Stalin’s purges – leads to a search for additional layers of dark meaning in this engaging fantasy. Now the mole cricket’s newfound power over a man who just the day before had been hundreds of times bigger begins to look like a metaphor for the precariousness of social roles through the twists and turns of Russian and Soviet history.

According to art historians Nadya Plungyan and Alexandra Selivanova, the insect world had a sort of heyday in post-revolutionary Russia. The pair curated an exhibition last year – Beetles and Caterpillars: Insect Culture in the 1920s-1940s – and introduced it with these words: “The ‘tiny creatures’ closest to the body, buzzing through the air, and burrowing through food crept into Soviet mythology and culture and gained a firm foothold there.”

Plungyan and Selivanova are known for their explorations of obscure facets of Russia’s post-revolutionary arts. “In Russia, late-Soviet Cold War rhetoric persists in art studies,” Plungyan said, “and the tension between socialist realism and the avant-garde is still the main paradigm applied to the study of Soviet Era art. Unfortunately, for now, this is still the program being taught in Russian institutions of higher learning. But it also persists in the West, where, since the 1960s, the ‘Russian avant-garde’ has been transformed into an oriental commercial brand. All this makes it harder to move toward a deeper look at Soviet art and hinders scholars’ efforts to discover its more complex aspects.”

One of Plungyan and Selivanova’s most talked-about projects was their exhibition Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which explored the relationship between an unofficial movement that existed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s and European surrealism.

Beetles and Caterpillars: Insect Culture in the 1920s-1940s represents a continuation of this project. “While surrealism is a broad framework,” Selivanova said, “here we took specifically insects and began to analyze them in the context of artistic and literary interpretations from the 1920s and 1930s. This is the history of the strange, of a microcosm, of something frightening, of rather creepy or humorous marginalia happening off to the side of the mainstream of Soviet art, where very many of the artists of interest to us took refuge.”

Plungyan and Selivanova describe the literary insects that existed in prerevolutionary culture as “marginal and comical.” In Golden Age classics, insects are most often encountered as an instrument of satire. Pushkin, for example, wrote an epigram, “A Collection of Insects,” in which he assigned various men of letters monikers such as “little bug,” “angry spider,” “Russian beetle,” and so forth. The best-known literary insects of that era were the carefree dragonfly and hardworking ant of Ivan Krylov’s fable (an adaptation of the well-known Aesopian fable, “The Grasshopper and the Ant”). But here it was not the heroes’ insect qualities that were of primary importance – in essence, more than insects, these characters were vehicles for the allegorical representation of human vice and virtue, a role played by all sorts of animals in the didactic fable tradition.

Insects started attracting more attention around the turn of the century: decadent butterflies and dragonflies, exotic scarabs and scorpions, fairytale fireflies, snails with fancifully shaped shells, and beetles that captivated with their strangeness were present both in the graphic and decorative modern arts and became a popular part of theatrical costume design. “Growing in size, they reached human scale,” Selivanova said, “and began appearing in ballets and processions, in children’s books – but for now, they were simply carnival figures: people with butterfly wings strapped on.”

Things changed radically after the upheavals of the First World War and the revolution. “War, the disruption of everyday life, the breakdown of sanitation, and migration spawned a proliferation of insects, who became people’s constant companions,” a guide to the exhibition explains. It was as if historical developments and social upheavals gave insects equal rights to the homes humans occupied – they slept in the same beds and ate from the same plates. As a result, cockroaches, bedbugs, lice, mosquitos, and other carriers of disease and dirt were constantly featured in Soviet propaganda posters. Ideologically infused slogans promoting hygiene captured the spirit of the times with all its militarism and naive straightforwardness.

These human-sized bugs were not people in funny carnival costumes. They looked like actual insects, but a thousand times bigger – alien, bizarre, and terrifying. The image of the repulsive insect was ideally suited to represent the class enemy. Priests and White Guard officers, the bourgeoisie, and capitalists were ubiquitously shown in the form of a disgusting, many-legged creature sucking on the body of Soviet society.

By the second half of the 1920s, this metaphor was being used in campaigns to unmask the internal enemy, the traitor to the Soviet government. The machinery of repression adopted the agricultural term “pest,” the term for harmful insects.* Now, the image of the insect – no longer anthropomorphic – underwent another important metamorphosis. As Selivanova observed, it lost any personality.

“Initially, this insect creature had a face, and then it became simply a ‘pest,’” Selivanova said. “There were thousands of them and they were disguised and unseen, and you never knew when they’d perform some monstrous act.”

Propaganda urged the destruction of ‘pests’ as cold-bloodedly as it had called for the killing of crop-destroying insects.

“The pest is a sort of worm gnawing away at the underpinnings of structures, the aphid destroying vineyards,” the newspaper Pravda editorialized in 1928. “Among people, this profession never previously existed... Never before has there been the stubborn, day-in-day-out undermining, gnawing, and destruction of the means of production and economic organization.”

In parallel with this depiction, bugs were making inroads into children’s literature. Beetles and caterpillars, flies and cockroaches, “unlike the animals of children’s literature, did not yet have archetypes ‘engraved in stone’ by the canon, specific characters (with the exception of the classic ‘Dragonfly and Ant’),” according to Selivanova, “so authors were able to experiment with new heroes however they wished.” This meant that Soviet writers wishing to separate themselves from the prerevolutionary literary traditions and images that they considered bourgeois and unsuitable for the shaping of Soviet citizens had a clean slate with which to experiment.

“The dangerous monster cockroach and the curious little cockroach children, the evil spider-king and the cheerful little spider were perceived as fresh, not clichéd, and could allow themselves the most varied and crazy antics,” Selivanova continued. “The characters in Monster Cockroach, which were conceived by [Kornei] Chukovsky in 1921 and first reached readers in 1923, became some of first in this series.”

The plot of this verse tale centers on a cockroach. This tiny villain somehow manages to terrorize the entire animal kingdom: everyone is afraid of him, even the elephants and bears believe him when he threatens to gobble up their children. What really terrifies everyone is his long “cockroach mustaches.”

This remains one of Kornei Chukovsky’s most popular works, and it has acquired a political subtext: it is impossible not to associate the “monster’s” mustaches with Stalin’s, even though the text was written well before the tyrant came to power. Indeed, Plungyan wrote of the phenomenon of the Stalinesque cockroach mustache in her introduction to the exhibition: “The mustache in the absence of a beard in 1930s Kremlin circles really did serve as a distinctive mark of loyalty to Stalin among the surviving old Bolsheviks. You could say that the image of the ‘mustachioed vozhd’ had a conservative-militarized, imperial connotation, while the Lenin goatee was associated with the bourgeoisie that was becoming a thing of the past and of the turn-of-the-century intelligentsia... The fashion for mustaches looked like a tragic parallel with Chukovsky’s Monster Cockroach verse tale, which nevertheless was never banned by Soviet censorship. An echo of this comparison exists in Osip Mandelstam’s famous epigram, “We Live without Feeling the Country Beneath Us,”: “his cockroach whiskers laugh, and the tops of his boots shine.”*  

Another famous children’s book by Chukovsky, Buzzy-Wuzzy, Busy Fly (Dorian Rottenberg’s and Andrii Iesypenko’s translation of the title of Mukha-tsokutukha), which was written around the same time, did wind up being banned, although it told a rather innocent story about the adventures of a frivolous fly. The fly finds a coin and holds a feast for some other insects and later falls into the web of a villainous spider. The pretty little fly is ultimately saved by a brave little mosquito, whom she marries. A commission discerned “sympathy for the countryside’s kulak element” in a line about “wealthy muzhiks” («А жуки рогатые,/ Мужики богатые»).

But without question, the era’s foremost bug bard was Nikolai Oleynikov, a poet and member of the Futurist Association for Real Art, as well as an amateur entomologist. Oleynikov dedicated verse tales to beetles and butterflies, wrote poetry describing the vivisection of cockroaches, and seems to have expressed in his works the full range of emotions elicited by bugs: everything from panic to envy, from disdain to compassion. Insects were the organizing principle of his grotesque poetics and the standard against which all things were measured. He even used bugs in his love poetry:

Я муху безумно любил
Давно это было, друзья
Когда еще молод я был
Когда еще молод был я...

Любовь пройдет.
Обманет страсть.
Но лишена обмана
Волшебная структура таракана.

I was madly in love with a fly,
This was in the past, friends, when I
Was young, youth had yet to fly by,
Still young, youth had yet by to fly...

Love will fade.
And lust deceives.
But one thing’s surely past reproach:
The amazing form of the cockroach.

Oleynikov once published the following words in the children’s magazine Hedgehog (Yozh):

Insects became giants under a magnifying glass. If a person was as small as a flea, he’d be surrounded by such frightful giants. From out of the grass would fly stone-headed horses – crickets. Monkeys would buzz as they flew by – flies. Evil old men would be sitting in spider webs – spiders. The frightful voices of crickets would be roaring in damp holes. Ants the size of houses would be deafeningly rustling down roads.

This text seems to reflect the main impression encounters with insects leave on people: existential dread in the face of a complicated and inhuman world and the happenstance that gave us the size advantage.

It is this anxiety that largely informs Yan Larri’s Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya, the book where the professor winds up in the hands of what just the day before had been a powerless mole cricket. “It is incorrect to reduce man to the level of a little insect. Intentionally or not, this winds up showing humans not as masters but as helpless creatures,” reads the publisher’s first review of the book’s manuscript. Nevertheless, with help from the famous writer Samuil Marshak, the book was published and went on to be extremely popular.

In the story, a boy and girl inadvertently drink a shrinking potion they find sitting on the desk of a professor of entomology. They then climb onto the back of a dragonfly, who carries them through the window and out into a perilous world. Packed with enlightenment and as many scientific facts as there are bugs in the forest, the book is still rather creepy. It describes a fascinating and fantastic world where the main force at play is brutality. The plot’s main device – the change in size of one class of being in relation to another – brings to mind a famous line from “The Internationale”: “Those who were nobody, they will be everything.” This parallel suggests an interpretation where the shrunken humans travel to the past, where ascendant Soviet Man once again winds up slave to a privileged segment of society.

But from a historical perspective, it is hard to ignore the fact that this story came out at a time of mass repression, a time when people knew that at any moment they could be squashed like a bug. Then again, Plungyan sees this perspective as overly simplistic:

You can’t see all works published in 1937 as very gloomy and everything published in 1929 as very lighthearted: that is a one-dimensional and politicized approach. I wouldn’t call  The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya gloomy – it is a captivating and suspenseful surrealist thriller. Yes, surrealism was not just a mainstream movement in Europe in 1937, but also in the USSR, where there were many creative avenues being pursued beyond “totalitarian art.” And, as for the mole cricket... Modernism in the 1930s was struggling with nature and actively subjugating it: in the USSR, think of the crop-dusting of pests with chemicals and the reversing of the courses of rivers. In Larri’s story, the professor’s struggle against the mole cricket is probably a metaphor for the modernist preoccupation with technology and anthropocentrism, rather than a representation of the intraparty struggle you’re referring to.

Of course, Larri is describing the era of the thirties in all its facets, as any major artist does, Plungyan said, but this doesn’t mean that he was making direct political insinuations. It wasn’t Karik and Valya that was the political satire, but Larri’s next novel – that was the one that got him arrested, she added.

Uplifted by the success of Karik and Valya, its author decided to write a story about Martians, The Celestial Guest, which lampoons Soviet bureaucracy. He began sending bits of it to not just anyone, but to Stalin himself, hoping to draw his attention to what was happening in the country. The letters were addressed to “Profoundly Respected Joseph Vissarionovich” and were unsigned, but their anonymous author was discovered and given a ten-year sentence for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Like the heroes of his books, Yan Larri managed to survive among the mole crickets and return to the human world. Three years after Stalin’s death, he was rehabilitated and continued to write and live in Leningrad until his death in 1977.

Nikolai Oleynikov, who was also labeled a “vreditel’” (pest or wrecker), was not so fortunate. He was accused of counterrevolutionary activity and arrested, also in 1937. His wife received a letter informing her that he had been given a ten-year sentence, but in actuality he was expeditiously shot.

And how did literary insects fare as this era came to a close? Experiments with new characters and roles, along with the other experiments of the 1920s, were cut short. Fantasy had become dangerous. As Selivanova wrote: “In the thirties, poetry and the fantastic were completely supplanted by books beneficial to young naturalists about pests and beekeeping.”

A second but much less colorful experimental wave that came in the 1960s included attempts to revive the fantastic world of insects as a literary theme. For example, in the popular 1963 animated film Barankin, Be a Sport (literally, “be a person”), two schoolboys transform themselves at first into birds and then into butterflies and ants, escaping to the world of tiny creatures to avoid their social responsibilities. They were sick and tired of school and the constant urging by more conscientious members of society to behave more like “real people.” The life of sparrows, butterflies, and ants, they learned, is not so easy and even more strictly regulated than the life of a Soviet schoolboy, who at least has days off and breaks. As might be expected, given the difference between Khrushchev’s Thaw and Stalin’s Terror, the brutality in this story is far more muted. Compared to the horrors that confronted Karik and Valya, the dangers these children faced in the insect word were child’s play. The story offers a simple moral: it’s good to be human rather than anything else, and it’s good to live in the Soviet Union rather than anywhere else.

The late Soviet period was not a time of great creativity, and most of what was published was along the line of the time-honored images created by Kornei Chukovsky. As for the postmodern realities of the 1990s, Victor Pelevin’s The Life of Insects, a sort of reimagining of the characters from Buzzy-Wuzzy, Busy Fly, captured the spirit of the time. The fly Natasha meets an American mosquito named Sam and dreams of being taken away by him. After all, in America, there’s lots of “sh*t,” and life in Russia is hard – you fly into the cowshed and you’ll be poisoned with insecticide.

Interestingly, Plungyan and Selivanova feel that the insect theme is now back in the artistic mainstream. They associate the current interest in the “chthonic-natural-organic” first of all with sociopolitical developments and the situation in the country.

“I think that what artists in the 2000s and 2010s were feeling is very close to what artists of the 1930s experienced,” Selivanova said, comparing them to insects driven to retreat into a “crack in the wall.”

Plungyan sees a second reason for the comeback: the intensity of artistic development in contemporary Russia. She attributes this to the openness afforded by the internet and the reduced pressure from prominent figures in the art world, which gives young artists the freedom to express themselves outside any institution. “This enables them to create a platform for interaction with art from other eras,” she said, “the Soviet era in particular, but with real rather than official art, and with contemporary art that should really be in museums.”

For Plungyan and Selivanova, insects have also become symbols of their own interests in the stories and personalia that history has pushed into the background, of everything that is marginal in relation to hackneyed and mass-distributed phenomena and authors, just as the insect world is marginal in relation to the human world.

As the duo designed their installation, the first thing that visitors saw was a video showing Russia’s national emblem made from beetles. It is, Plungyan said, a “striking juxtaposition of the scale of small beetles and a creepy imperial paradigm.” This piece is actually part of the Moscow University Zoological Museum’s collection, but in an animation specially created for the exhibition, one minute the beetles are running around chaotically and, the next, they assemble to form the double-headed eagle. It is as if official symbolism, official art history, and official historical memory are being contrasted with the complexity and chaos of real life, as exemplified by the restive insect class.