The legacy of Anatoly Strigalev

Anatoly Strigalev [StrigalyOv] was a researcher, cultural historian and a historian of architecture, active in the Soviet Union and in the Russian Federation. He belongs to the very small group of Soviet scholars who in the late sixties and early seventies began to research the history of Avantgarde artists in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, a subject that before was considered impermissible, and even in the last two decades of the existence of the Soviet Union needed to be handled with great political consideration. His greatest accomplishment as a historian of the Avant-garde lies in his many texts dedicated to the life and work of Vladimir Tatlin, culminating in the catalogue raisonné published in 1993, to accompany the historic Tatlin exhibition in Dusseldorf, Baden-Baden, Moscow and Leningrad. It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything we know about Tatlin, including the vast majority of archival data, is either disclosed by Strigalev, or reinterpreted by him in such a thorough and fundamental way, that it will always bear his mark.

Besides his work on Tatlin, Strigalev was first and foremost a historian of architecture, and his contribution to the disclosure of Soviet Avant-garde architecture, especially the architecture of Konstantin Melnikov, is of fundamental importance for our collective knowledge of the subject. He also wrote extensively on the history and theory of monumental art, and the role of art in public space. While most of his works are historiographic in nature, he wrote some very fundamental, theoretical or conceptual texts as well, concerning for example the relationship between art and space, architecture and time, and, especially the interconnectedness of artistic disciplines. His wide artistic interests led him also to write about design and literature, and his texts about Velimir Khlebnikov, Daniil Kharms and Vasili Kamenski are important contributions to the literary sciences as well.

Still, the great documentary qualities of his decades of research are, in my mind, not his greatest achievement. It is his wonderful, precise, and concise, way of reasoning, at once very dense and very transparent, and the easiness and scope with which he alternates between attention for the smallest factual detail and its theoretical or conceptual interpretation. He never hides vagueness behind theoretical concepts, he rarely uses sociological terminology, and only so if he is completely sure that they will make sense in the context at hand. His longer biographical articles have a wonderful narrative drive, that I have never seen before or after in scholarly works of this depth. And in all his texts permeates a touching sense of dignity and wonder at the magic of human creativity, that makes reading his work, which because of its substance can be demanding of course, a light and luminescent experience.

Despite all these extra-ordinary qualities (and I am of course not the first to recognize them) Strigalev's works are often lesser known than those of other great specialists of his generation, maybe because the vast majority of his works exists only of articles, published in specialized, sometimes relatively marginal publications.

Out of admiration for Strigalev I started to compile this bibliography, in order to help other contemporary specialists, to find their way to his remarkable legacy.

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