Marketing the Avant-garde: Co-opted Scholarship?

The first Russian avant-garde maintains a prominent position within intellectual and critical discourse. The present paper offers an unorthodox explanation for this by identifying the avant-garde's contract with the reader, which promotes the writer as a prophetic genius, while demanding abeyance and worship from the reader, offering him/her masochistic pleasure. Mainstream avant-garde scholarship, in its turn, certifies the avant-garde's claims as its true essence and markets its product as exceptional. These pressures create a dilemma for contemporary scholars. Choosing the co-opted approach elevates further the rating of the avant-garde, avant-garde studies and the scholar's own work, but means engaging in mythmaking, whereas choosing a nonco-opted reading reduces the value of the avant-garde and the scholar, generating accusations by mainstream critics of a non-scholarly attitude toward the subject.