DOI issue:
Rozprawy
DOI article:Idzior, Aleksandra: Imagination with no limits: the frontier in the Soviet and American projects of a "future city" at the end of the 1920s
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42379#0075
IMAGINATION WITH NO LIMITS: THE FRONTIER IN THE SOVIET AND AMERICAN PROJECTS
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had shaped its own identity based on the notion of conquering the West-
ern frontier. Indeed, these two countries were both historically expanding
their states by pushing beyond their borders.* * * * * 6 What interests me is this
conjunction of Krutikov’s and Ferriss’s visions with “frontier” discourses
that had currency within their corresponding milieus, and how these is-
sues impacted their imagined gorod and metropolis of the future. Despite
the fact that the Soviet architect conceived the elements of the future city
as floating in the air, or rather because of this arrangement, I consider
Krutikov’s vision to be strongly grounded in the ideology of the newly es-
tablished communist state and its impetus towards spreading the Revo-
lution beyond its borders. At the same time, Ferriss’s book resonates
with sentiments and anxieties, expressed during the 1920s, about the
lost frontier - a frontier whose existence, according to some critics, was a
crucial element in shaping America’s democracy and her exceptionalism.
“PAPER ARCHITECTURE”
There are a few reasons for my choice of these works, aside from the
fact that both share the same subject matter, that of the imagined city of
the future. One of them is the fact that these works both represent so-
ture, ed. by Nicholas Rzhevsky, Cambridge 1998, 57-84, 85-102; Michael Khodarkovsky,
Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800, Bloomington (IN)
2002. There is also Marshall Berman’s figurative application of the “frontier” notion into
his reading of Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done? The street in St. Peters-
burg, on which the hero (who represents the class of “new people,” the envisioned avant-
garde to be), had transgressed the accepted social codes by everyday life politics, is inter-
preted by Berman as a “frontier” that is comparable to the mythical American frontier, the
site of “natural man”. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (1982), New York 1988. Elena Shulman applies the concept of frontier both to
the physical expanse of the Soviet far East as well as to the social and political landscape
of the Stalinist system while offering insight into the role of frontier Stalinism in con-
structing gender ideals and the nature of Soviet society and Stalinism in the 1930. See:
Elena Shulman, Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the
Soviet Far East, Cambridge 2008.
6 John Gould Fletcher, The Two Frontiers. A Study in Historical Psychology, New
York 1930. Donald W. Treadgold, Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner’s Study of
the American Frontier, “Agricultural History”, 26, 1952, 4, pp. 147-152 analyzed Russia’s
Eastward expansion in an attempt to identify parallels with North America’s Westward
movement and demonstrated several similarities. Voluntary migrants were motivated by
“the quest for land and freedom”. The frontier experience resulted in an ethnic melting pot
and, for those who migrated to Siberia, social and economic equality were substantially
greater there than in their European homeland. A similar thesis is proposed by A. Loba-
nov-Rostovsky, Russian Expansion in the Far East in the Light of the Turner Hypothesis,
[in:] The Frontier in Perspective, ed. by Walker D. Wyman, Clifton B. Kroeber, Madison
1957, pp. 79-94.
73
had shaped its own identity based on the notion of conquering the West-
ern frontier. Indeed, these two countries were both historically expanding
their states by pushing beyond their borders.* * * * * 6 What interests me is this
conjunction of Krutikov’s and Ferriss’s visions with “frontier” discourses
that had currency within their corresponding milieus, and how these is-
sues impacted their imagined gorod and metropolis of the future. Despite
the fact that the Soviet architect conceived the elements of the future city
as floating in the air, or rather because of this arrangement, I consider
Krutikov’s vision to be strongly grounded in the ideology of the newly es-
tablished communist state and its impetus towards spreading the Revo-
lution beyond its borders. At the same time, Ferriss’s book resonates
with sentiments and anxieties, expressed during the 1920s, about the
lost frontier - a frontier whose existence, according to some critics, was a
crucial element in shaping America’s democracy and her exceptionalism.
“PAPER ARCHITECTURE”
There are a few reasons for my choice of these works, aside from the
fact that both share the same subject matter, that of the imagined city of
the future. One of them is the fact that these works both represent so-
ture, ed. by Nicholas Rzhevsky, Cambridge 1998, 57-84, 85-102; Michael Khodarkovsky,
Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800, Bloomington (IN)
2002. There is also Marshall Berman’s figurative application of the “frontier” notion into
his reading of Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done? The street in St. Peters-
burg, on which the hero (who represents the class of “new people,” the envisioned avant-
garde to be), had transgressed the accepted social codes by everyday life politics, is inter-
preted by Berman as a “frontier” that is comparable to the mythical American frontier, the
site of “natural man”. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (1982), New York 1988. Elena Shulman applies the concept of frontier both to
the physical expanse of the Soviet far East as well as to the social and political landscape
of the Stalinist system while offering insight into the role of frontier Stalinism in con-
structing gender ideals and the nature of Soviet society and Stalinism in the 1930. See:
Elena Shulman, Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the
Soviet Far East, Cambridge 2008.
6 John Gould Fletcher, The Two Frontiers. A Study in Historical Psychology, New
York 1930. Donald W. Treadgold, Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner’s Study of
the American Frontier, “Agricultural History”, 26, 1952, 4, pp. 147-152 analyzed Russia’s
Eastward expansion in an attempt to identify parallels with North America’s Westward
movement and demonstrated several similarities. Voluntary migrants were motivated by
“the quest for land and freedom”. The frontier experience resulted in an ethnic melting pot
and, for those who migrated to Siberia, social and economic equality were substantially
greater there than in their European homeland. A similar thesis is proposed by A. Loba-
nov-Rostovsky, Russian Expansion in the Far East in the Light of the Turner Hypothesis,
[in:] The Frontier in Perspective, ed. by Walker D. Wyman, Clifton B. Kroeber, Madison
1957, pp. 79-94.