In one of his most vivid essays, “Puti klassitsizma v iskusstve” (1909), painter, designer, and author Léon Bakst observed that only by looking back to the remote past could European (and Russian) culture regain vitality and originality. In many respects, Bakst's prerequisite can be identified with much of the verbal, visual, and performing arts of Russian Modernism—whether Bakst's own elicitations of Ancient Egypt and Persia, Andrei Belyi's “pre-natal” novel Kotik Letaev or Aleksandr Tairov's productions of antique dramas at the Chamber Theater. In his Über das Vorgestern ins Übermorgen, Aage Hansen-Löve treats this common denominator, adducing extremely detailed and convincing evidence from a wide variety of disciplines and arguments in order to assess the role of “Primitivism” in the creativity of writers and artists such as Sergei Esenin, Natal΄ia Goncharova, Viacheslav Ivanov, Vasilii Kandinskii, Nikolai Kliuev, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Kazimir Malevich and many other heroes of Russia's fin de siècle and avant-garde.

Divided into thirteen basic sections, Über das Vorgestern ins Übermorgen encompasses both important theoretical tenets, including the very notions of “Primitivism” and “Neo-Primitivism,” the archaic and collective consciousness, the Dionysian urge, the Nietzschean subconscious, the “decomposition” of conventional communication and the development of an Ur-language, and the natural and cosmic landscape, among many other issues. Drawing upon the major tracts of the time such as Belyi's, Aleksandr Blok's, Ivanov's, and Vladimir Solov΄ev's essays; David Burliuk's, Aleksandr Shevchenko's, and Mikhail Larionov's manifestoes; as well as Kandinskii's On the Spiritual in Art, Hansen-Löve implies that the Apocalyptic force of Russian Modernism, colored by shades of war and revolution, was also driven by a fearful veneration of the archaic (Bakst's picture Terror Antiquus summarizes this apprehension). In many ways, the condition inspired writers, artists, musicians, and dancers to investigate legend, urban culture such as graffiti, and store signboards, folklore, rural handicrafts, children's drawings, and also Oriental art in an endeavor to identify alternative systems of linguistic expression, spatial definition, anatomical proportion, and hieratic movement, culminating, for example, in Malevich's “peasant” cycle of paintings, Kandinskii's abstract reductions, Khlebnikov's “mythopoetics,” Belyi's fascination with the khlysty, the synthetic opera Victory over the Sun, Vasilii Kamensky's, Kliuev's and Esenin's rural motifs, and even the universal molding of a “New Man,” whether in the hands of Nikolai Fedorov or Andrei Platonov. In debating these junctures, Hansen-Löve brings to bear an enormous arsenal of philosophical and ideological premises—from glossolalia to gnosis, from absurdism to the rebus, from the body to icon-painting. Of course, the references could be expanded almost infinitely to include, for example, Aleksei Remizov's folkloric reprises and “infantile” drawings, Nikolai Vinogradov's collection of Russian and Oriental lubki (which exerted such a deep impression on Goncharova and Larionov, for example), the rediscovery of Russian folk art at Talashkino and its impact on the World of Art group, Sergei Shchukin's collection of Black African sculpture, the other Jack of Diamonds artists such as Petr Konchalovsky and Il΄ia Mashkov, with their appeal to store signboards and hand-painted tin trays, and the several museum collections of “primitive” artifacts which left an indelible imprint on the painting of David Burliuk, Pavel Filonov, Goncharova, and others.

Of particular value is Hansen-Löve's comparative assessment of parallel movements in Europe and his placement of Russian Neo-Primitivism in a wider geographical context. In this respect, the discussion of Wilhelm Worringer's merging of “empathy” and abstraction and Carl Einstein's Negerplastik are of particular value, relating immediately to Vladimir Markov's (Voldymar Matvejs's) 1919 (1914) tract Iskusstvo negrov, on the one hand, and to Kandinskii's non-figurative painting on the other, emphases which, in some sense, mark the two magnetic poles of Russian Neo-Primitivism and of Hansen-Löve's own enquiry. As one might expect, Hansen-Löve also invites the countenance of Claude Lévi-Strauss, bringing an anthropological explanation to the basic question of why sophisticated and highly civilized artists and intellectuals would have questioned the values of their industrial world and called for regression rather than progress, raucous barbarity rather than false finesse.

With strategic illustrations, extensive bibliography, and detailed indices, Über das Vorgestern ins Übermorgen demonstrates not only Hansen-Löve's extraordinary erudition and deep understanding of Russian literature, art, ethnography, and social history, but also a keen desire to transgress the traditional boundaries of the media. The result is a truly interdisciplinary and synthetic study, one that contributes much to our evaluation and appreciation of Russia's cultural renaissance a century ago.