Dal volto di Dio alle opere dell’uomo. L’arte e l’educazione del popolo nelle avanguardie russe

The present contribution deals in a historical and pedagogical-aesthetic key the contribution of the Russian Avant-gardes in the education of the pre-revolutionary Russian society and in the Soviet one between 1905 and 1930. We intend to shed light on the origin of the motives that favored the birth of the Russian avant-gardism: the enhancement of the icons made by the philosophers Florensky and Bulgakov on the path of the monastic tradition of the Imeslavcy. The sacred image, for the two philosophers, who also played important roles in the history of education, was not only a pedagogical device of evangelization and education, but was charged with a light, an energy, which transformed the process of signification in dynamics of presence and activity. From the face of God to the act of man. The icon aroused on the Russian avant-gardists (Majakowskij, Malevič, Kandinsky) a real collective fascination and began a movement of expressive freedom, varied and composite, which contributed to the construction of socialism. Among the invitation of Majakósvkij, welcomed by Lenin, to welcome the collaboration of artists, musicians and poets to the Soviet government (entrusting the management of schools or institutes such as the Institute of Arts and Crafts of Moscow) and the suicidal gesture of the poet , which left “the boat of love / shattered against domesticity” written, the Russian and European history of the first thirty years of the twentieth century unfolds, between the harsh history and the pedagogical-aesthetic utopias developed in Europe and Italy in the early twentieth century. The enormous intellectual and imaginative wealth that the revolutionary fact had aroused, and from which it had been produced, flowed into the doctrine of “socialism in one country” in which art had become the U.R.S.S.