Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

Russian Literature 103–105 (2019) 119–143

www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit

“WHERE I HAVE BEEN WITH MY CAMERA”:

SERGEI TRET’IAKOV AND DEVELOPING OPERATIVITY

KATHERINE M.H. REISCHL

kreischl@princeton.edu
Princeton University

Abstract
Focusing primarily on his work after 1929, this article traces Sergei Tret’iakov as
an “operative author”. Tret’iakov’s writing practice, shaped by the camera appa-
ratus, embodied and dominated text and image production in the mid-1930s. The
article brings Tret’iakov’s writing on photography and the ocherk, including his
contributions to Sovetskoe foto, Pioner, and book-length collections featuring his
photography, into dialogue with his contemporaries, especially Mikhail Prishvin
and Leonid Leonov, and illustrates photography’s shifting role in the codification
of Socialist Realism. It suggests the expansive reach of Tret’iakov’s “operative-
eye” as a model practice beyond his death.
Keywords: Tret’iakov; Photography; Author-Photographer; Operativity; Ocherk;
Socialist Realism

The fine makings of the Leica [...] have combined to endow it

with an availability for creative work the mechanics of which
could be mastered with ease by anyone with a desire to portray or
to interpret things, people, or events as one sees them. Thus, to
many, this fine small camera represents a means of self-expres-
sion, a way to assert their attitude toward the world they live in.
To others, the Leica is an important method of communication, or
a way to make a living or to improve it. And to many thousands it

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2019.04.005
0304-3479/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
120 Katherine M.H. Reischl

is a wonderful pastime made especially attractive because it can

so easily be shared with others. (Morgan 1951: 6)

In 1935 Albert Parry, Russian émigré and academic, penned a colorful

characterization of author Sergei Tret’iakov for the American journal Books
Abroad. His ‘Bio-Critical Note’ is rife with quotations from Tret’iakov’s
early writings in Novyi LEF, and accounts from David Burliuk (“the self-
styled Father of Russian Futurism, now residing in New York”), who pro-
claims Tret’iakov as “the most American” of young Russian writers. Parry’s
note weaves together Tret’iakov’s authorial identity from his early writings
to the present and, in one revealing instance, describes his working
procedure:

This is how Tretiakov writes his books, poetry, plays, criticism: he

dictates his lines to a stenographer. In the next room two girls type
from the stenographer’s notes. In still another, assistant researchers
pore over books and newspapers preparing Data of Fact for the
Master. [...] [T]he ideal of wide collectivism is introduced by Tre-
tiakov into authorship. He revels in the mechanics of office and
factory, and loves to show readers and playgoers the inner springs of
his books and plays. The machine is the new god of his country; and
he is one of the most sincere and energetic worshippers.1 (1935: 7)

Here, Tret’iakov appears like the head of a literary factory. And this is not
just a case of Parry peering behind the curtain: Tret’iakov himself makes no
effort to conceal the inner workings of his literary machine. In fact, he lays
them bare. He is an author whose love of machinery and instrumentation
played a key role in the shaping of early Soviet literature.
This article will explore the role of Parry’s hyperbolic “machine
worship” through the author’s use of the camera– what he famously claimed
to be his “visual diary”. But whereas Tret’iakov has come to dominate con-
temporary criticism of the author-photographer movement of the late inter-
war period in the writings of Erika Wolf, Devin Fore, and Maria Gough, his
name, life, and legacy were erased from histories of photography penned in
the Soviet Union.2 In fact, his archive of photographs – that visual diary – is
largely lost to us except as it appeared in print.3 What remains, then, is an
entirely public life: the living vanguard of the Soviet experiment, made out
of text and photograph. Such a formulation, hybridizing subjectivity and
photography in life writing, will underpin an exploration of his identity, that
is, Tret’iakov’s authorial mask as the operative author-photographer.4 We
will analyze the ways in which the camera apparatus defined Tret’iakov’s
operativity and its expansive reach as it was made manifest in both his
critical texts and photo-ocherki from roughly 1929 to 1936. Close analysis
of the language of photography and its productive entanglements with
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 121

writing will illuminate the promulgation of Socialist Realism in 1934 and

provide the map for Tret’iakov’s shaping of self – as both an agent of
revolutionary change and its subject.

“A Camera in the Hands of the Writer”

In 1934, Sergei Tret’iakov contributed a now famous short piece on his

work as an author-photographer to Sovetskoe foto. This text and one by
Leonid Leonov were published together under the heading “Fotoapparat v
rukakh pisatelia” (“A camera in the hands of the writer”). An editorial note
foregrounds the precipitous moment at which photography and writing in
the Soviet Union were now poised:

25 июня созывается всесоюзный съезд советских писателей. Мы

помещаем ряд высказываний о роли и месте фотографии в твор-
ческой работе писателя. Спорные положения выдвигает т. Л. Ле-
онов. Однако одно остается неопровержимым: фотография на-
чинает занимать все более видное место на фронте изобрази-
тельных искусств. (Tret’iakov 1934a: 24)

(On the 25th of July the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers con-
venes. We are including a number of statements about the role and
place of photography in the creative work of the writer. Controversial
propositions are advanced by comrade L. Leonov. However, one thing
remains undeniable: photography has begun to occupy an increasingly
prominent place on the visual arts front.)5

This note introduces two essential points for orienting the reader: first, the
proximity and relation of these statements to the upcoming Writers’
Congress that would decree Socialist Realism (and lead to the multifaceted
attempts at its articulation); second, the implication that Tret’iakov’s state-
ment (as opposed to Leonov’s) was not controversial.
In fact, Tret’iakov’s opening statement is the most often cited line
from this short piece: “I do not know what would be more difficult when
traveling as a writer: if I were to lose my pen and writing pad or my
camera” (“Ну знаю, когда мне пришлось бы труднее в писательское
поездке: потеряй я перо с блокнотом или фотоаппарат”; 24). He likens
his Leica-film (“Leika-plenki”) to a “visual diary”, alerting the reader to the
fact that the photographs are not in and of themselves a completed project.
He acknowledges: “Precisely because this is a diary, photo-proofs, the shots
are of varying quality” (“Именно потому, что это дневник, своеобразные
фоточерновики, снимки очень не равнокачественны”; ibid.). Hence, it is
not in the gallery still, but in the transformations wrought by printing on the
122 Katherine M.H. Reischl

page, often with the expert hand of the retoucher, that photographs are fully
developed. Tret’iakov describes this relationship as, in part, a “photographic
marriage” which produces images that retain their “expressive dynamism,”
despite technical defects (underexposure, lack of clarity): these images are
weightier and more effective than the kind of monumental image that might
be “perfect to the last detail” but is “hopelessly immobile” (ibid.).
This emphasis on process in photography is key in considering the
author-photographer movement in general and Tret’iakov in particular. 6
While influencing trends in art photography, writers, including Il’ia Eren-
burg, Il’ia Il’f, and Mikhail Prishvin, utilized photography as an integral
part of their writing process – to be realized finally in (small) print as
illustrations for their writings. For Ehrenburg in his album Moi Parizh
(1933), the side-angle viewfinder attached to his Leica facilitated his cap-
ture of human documents, framed into a lyrical and nostalgic narrative on
his once-beloved city. For Prishvin, whose work might seem to be closest in
theme and volume to Tret’iakov’s, the author’s vision of documentary
authenticity was intimately tied to his Leica camera. In his diary Prishvin
proclaims that “with photography (svetopis’)” he “wants to prove [his]
views of the real world”.7 Contrasting his own work as an author-photo-
grapher to that of the general run of photographers, Prishvin states:

Опыты с фотографией убедили меня в возможности продолжить

литературно-худ. реализм, иллюстрируя свои художественные
находки фотоснимками. А убедился в том еще, что в обыкно-
венных фотоработах получается “фотографичность”, а не худо-
жественный реализм только потому, что фотографы подчиняют
себя воле машины-камеры, а не пользуются ею, как писатель
пером и художник кистью. Если же понимать фотографию как
техническую возможность реализации худ. восприятия, то вы-
разительность снимков получается чрезвычайная. Вместе с тем в
литер.-худож. произведении “иллюстрация”, имея единое проис-
хождение с текстом, должна дать сочинению большую простоту
и выразительность. (2006 [1930]: 275)

(Experiments with photography have convinced me of the possibility

of continuing the line of literary-artistic realism, illustrating my
artistic discoveries with photographic snapshots. But I have also be-
come convinced that ordinary photographic-work has “photographic-
ality” but not artistic realism only because photographers have made
themselves subservient to the will of the camera-machine, and do not
use it as an author uses his pen or a painter his brush. If one under-
stands photography as a technical means for realizing artistic per-
ception, then one can achieve extraordinary expressiveness in photo-
graphs. At the same time, “illustrations” for literary-artistic works,
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 123

having the same origin as the text, should give the composition a
greater simplicity and expressiveness.)

Although Tret’iakov’s work and his advocacy of the purely technical in-
strumentality of the “camera-machine” might certainly be one object of this
critique, the questions of “origin” and compositional unity were likewise
key to Tret’iakov’s authorial ethos.
The question of authorial perspective for Tret’iakov in the early 1930s
hinges on his “operativity” (operativnost’), that is, on the notion that radical
transformation of the world is possible through the process of repre-
sentation.8 This perspectival relationship to representation is repeated often
in his work, not least in the context of the ocherk. By the late 1920s, during
the drive toward industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan, the ocherk had
become the dominant mode of representation for the “literature of fact
[literatura fakta]” movement with Tret’iakov at its head. The faktoviki drew
directly from Soviet reality, inscribing reportage, documents, scientific data,
along with photographs and film into brief accounts of contemporary life
and production. By 1934, the ocherk had reached the peak of its influence,
canonized not only by the All Union Conference on the Artistic Ocherk
(Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie po khudozhestvennomu ocherku) just preceding
the Writers’ Congress, but also in the series of articles dedicated to the life
and future of the genre in Nashi dostizheniia. In his contribution to this
cluster of articles (heading up those by Mikhail Prishvin and Boris Kushner,
among many others), Tret’iakov sketches the genre’s evolution, reaching
operativity:

Очеркисту необходимо было врасти глубже в материал, войти в

него своей биографией, чтобы суметь стать ответственным за
него. Отсюда возникает длительное наблюдение и даже непо-
средственное участие в тех или других процессах, с другой сто-
роны, втягивание в очерковую работу людей из недр самого про-
изводства, досконально знающих дело, о котором они пишут.
Создается целое движение [...] [Ч]ему научился у газеты очерк –
это оперативность. Быть оперативным, это значит быть конкрет-
ным, своевременным, действенным. (1934b: 161)

(For the ocherkist it was necessary to grow deeper into the material, to
enter into it with his own biography, in order to be able to answer for
it. From this arose the extended observation and even the direct
participation in one or more processes, and on the other hand, the
draw of people into ocherk work from the very center of production,
those who thoroughly understand the matter about which they are
writing. A whole movement is created, [...] [W]hat was learned from
124 Katherine M.H. Reischl

the newspaper ocherk is operativity. To be operative means to be

concrete, timely, efficient.)

While the camera is not mentioned here, there are clear links to the dis-
cussion of “extended observation” in his essay on the Filippov photo-
ocherk, which had been published in both A-I-Z and Proletarskoe foto in
1931 (an essay discussed later in this article). But perhaps of greater
importance is Tret’iakov’s emphasis on the participation of the author (the
previously mentioned extension of the “biography”) in the labor he depicts
– this is what makes for a successful operative ocherk. Elizabeth Papazian
observes that it is characteristic of Tret’iakov’s introductions that the author
lays bare the mechanics of the self/subject relationship in his writing. In
Vyzov (1930), the author intertwines self with the development of the
kolkhoz (Papazian 2009: 55). For his Mesiats v derevne, this fusion is again
developed at the outset of the collection:

Если прежде писатель бывал удовлетворен тем, то он рассказы-

вает о том, как делается деревня, то сейчас он может быть горд
тем, что он вместе с другими товарищами сам эту деревню
строит, то-есть не только отображает жизнь, но эту жизнь пере-
страивает. Вышедшая книга моих колхозных очерков ‘Вызов’ и
подготовленная к печати ‘Месяц в деревне’ – это не книги
заезжего писателя, а книги писателя-колхозника [...].9 (Tret’iakov
1930: 15)

(If the writer was satisfied before with the fact that he tells about what
was done in the village, then now he can be proud of the fact that he
constructs this very town together with other comrades; that is, he is
not simply reflecting life, but he is reshaping this life. The last book
of my kolkhoz ocherki ‘Vyzov’ and ‘Month in the Village’, now
prepared for print, are not the books of a visiting writer, but the books
of a kolkhoz worker-writer [...].)

For Tret’iakov, the vanguard advocate of the faktoviki, the ocherk answered
literature’s call not simply to keep pace with the changing landscape of the
Soviet Union, but to participate in the drive towards production as well.
This self-same impulse unifies Tret’iakov’s presentation of the bio-
graphical portraits of German revolutionary artists in his 1936 volume Liudi
odnogo kostra (1936). Each is heralded by a photographic portrait of the
German artist, author, or poet (including Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich
Wolf), taken by Tret’iakov himself and unified by the fact that he has
known each one personally – a format that is not in itself radical, but the
figures he potrays, as Tret’iakov reminds his reader, certainly are. Oddly
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 125

enough, the portrait of Brecht looks strikingly like Tret’iakov himself (fig.
1).

Figure 1. Left: Aleksandr Rodchenko, photograph of Sergei Tret’iakov, 1928.

Right: photograph of “Bert” Brecht, photography by Tret’iakov, included in Liudi
odnogo kostra (1936).

Both men were clearly forged in the “same fire” of the title, by their fight
against fascism in the interwar period and their commitment to “create a
deeply objective and material art”. As Tret’iakov articulates further, de-
scribing operativity without explicitly naming it: “Art is about reality (deist-
vitel’nost’). And not only about reality, about what can remake that reality.
[...] The proletarian revolution called for an epic that would not serve to
ossify reality, but rather, to change it” (“Искусство о действительности. И
не только о действительности, но и такое, которое способно было эту
действительность переделывать [...] Пролетарская революция требова-
ла эпоса, который помогал бы не окаменять, но, наоборот, изменять
действительность”. 1936: 17).10 Photography’s role in this effective
change is described in his account of his friend, the photomonteur John
Heartfield.
[Хартфильд], который ищет объективного, [...] берет исходным
элементом своих работ фотографию – наиболее объективную из
всех доступных нам форм запечатления действительности. Доку-
мент – вот исходный строительный материал для одних из этого
поколения. Монтаж – способ такого сцепления (сопоставления,
противопоставления) фактов, что они начали излучать социаль-
ную энергию и скрытую в них правду. [Его] творческое внима-
126 Katherine M.H. Reischl

ние всегда вне из собственной внутренней жизни –, о ней можно

судить лишь по косвенным признакам в [его] творчестве. (18)

([Heartfield] who refuses subjective arbitrariness [...], chooses the

photograph as the initial element for his works – the most objective of
all the forms available to us for imprinting reality. The document –
this is the initial building material for some of this generation. Mon-
tage is a means of linking (confrontation, opposition) of facts, such
that they begin to emit a social energy and the truth hidden inside
them. [His] creative attention is always outside of his own internal
life, which can be judged only by the oblique traces in [his] work.)

Tret’iakov divides the people in his literary portraits into those for whom
document and objectivity are primary and those for whom the construction
of epic hinges on their personal biography. Their bodies and blood, as
Tret’iakov says, exceed a mere linkage of facts. 11 And perhaps even here,
Tret’iakov writes and photographs himself obliquely into another account of
development – this time, into the artistic body.
This extension of the camera into its subject was facilitated by the
ocherk, channeling an already existing mode of writing along with new
developments in camera technologies. During the first Five-Year Plan, the
ocherk, as a short genre, was especially favored due to the rapid pace at
which it could be produced, and lauded from a pedagogical standpoint for
its clear narrative structure, which might “teach new writers to write and
new readers to read” (Papazian 2009: 15). Equipped with the camera, which
in 1926 Anatolii Lunacharskii envisioned in the hands of every Soviet citi-
zen, a new generation would be schooled in (Soviet) literacy (1926: 2). In
his 1927 essay ‘Novyi Lev Tolstoi’, Tret’iakov rejects the need for a “new
Tolstoy” and calls for a new generation of authors to emerge from the ranks
of the proletariat. Their subjects will be the material conditions of life,
captured in “short” genres: the ocherk, the novella, the newspaper article.
These genres – and particularly the ocherk, which was tied to scientific and
journalistic modes of writing – would provide a more direct documentary
relationship to the subject matter.12

Time marches on, the relations of production themselves change,

science matures [...]. The party, tirelessly in contact with the current
day’s fact, is constantly formulating the next slogans and directives.
[…] Next to this collective brain of revolution, for the individual
writer to imagine his personal philosophical hegemony is laughable.
The space of the writer’s problematic only keeps getting narrower –
just a bit more and there will be nothing left for the writer as teacher
to do. The person of science, the person of technology, the engineer,
the organizer of matter and of society are coming to occupy the place
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 127

where not long ago one could still catch a glimpse of the last teacher
of life.13 (2006 [1927]: 48)

And in this sense objectivity and operativity – as well as the operativity that
the camera apparatus embodies – extended well beyond the self, reaching
towards a potential annihilation of authorship. As the forward pace of life
increased, Tret’iakov argued that the author of old (perhaps not unlike a
piece of outmoded machinery) would no longer be relevant as either sym-
bolic figurehead or model of praxis. He goes on to argue that proletarian
society can abolish the “illusion of authorship,” as well as literature (belles
lettres) as such. The most important thing for the ocherkist is his or her
“observation post” (or vantage point – “nabliudatеl’nyi post”) – and “the
worst [of these] is to observe in the capacity of a tourist or guest of honor”
(1928: 9).14
The camera had long been a tool of just such a tourist, of just that
guest of honor. But for Tret’iakov – and for his contemporary, the German
critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his writings inspired by Tre-
t’iakov’s concept of the “operative” author – the camera comes to be key to
the very notion and the realization of a new worker-centric art.15 As we
know, Tret’iakov’s photographic illustrations caught Benjamin’s particular
notice when the Soviet author was lecturing in Germany about collective
farms in the USSR, with accompanying slides and photographs (Wolf 2010:
385). In one of his most influential essays, ‘The Author as Producer’,
Benjamin lauds the Russian author as the model of an operative writer who
is not just ideologically engaged but labors alongside the proletariat, rather
than indulging in the selfish autonomy of the bourgeois writer (1978 [1934]:
223).16 While at the “Communist Lighthouse” (“Kommunisticheskii
maiak”) kolkhoz, Tret’iakov was “calling mass meetings; collecting funds
to pay for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz
[...]; reporting for Moscow newspapers [...], etc.” (1978 [1934]: 223). In
response, Benjamin adapts the formulation of “the teacher of life” to the
new (proletarian) landscape:

An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters,

therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able first
to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved
apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more
consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, readers or
spectators into collaborators. (233)

And as I would argue, for Benjamin and for Tret’iakov, the camera was just
such an apparatus: a tool to be placed in the hands of any individual in order
to make him a powerful producer. The Leica and other small handheld
35mm film cameras of the day mark the next stage of a revolution in the
128 Katherine M.H. Reischl

photographic medium, making mechanized image capture available to ever

more people. But what is most fundamental for Benjamin and Tret’iakov is
the mechanically determined process of image capture, that is, that
photography becomes a medium that takes creative control out of the hands
of the individual. This unconsciousness in artistic production also removes
“the long-since-counterfeit wealth of creative personality” that could be
construed as inherently bourgeois (232). 17
Tret’iakov’s performative meta-modeling of this photographically
constructed operativity is featured in the collection of ocherki, Mesiats v
derevne. In the chapter, “Diad’ka kotoryi snimaet (“Uncle who photo-
graphs”), set at the Vyzov kolkhoz, Tret’iakov makes himself and his
camera (textually) visible as the titular “Uncle”. While he initially figures as
intrusive in the life of the kolkhoz, potentially alienating his subjects as he
snaps pictures, the author-photographer eventually becomes a normalized
presence. He shoots the picture, the picture is developed, the subjects assess
the picture, and the picture is pasted to the wall or the page of an album.
Here too Tret’iakov lays bare the blueprints to his “plans”.

Одно время снимал только документально, т. е. моменты дейст-

вительности, как она есть. Сейчас, кроме таких “документаль-
ных” фотографий, делаю еще и фотографии заранее органи-
зованные. Это те фотографии, которые должны показать не то,
как работа в действительности делается, а как она должна де-
латься. А еще этот же метод может быть полезен там, где какой-
то трудовой процесс или отрасль надо изобразить на одной
картинке, вроде тех, по которым в школах пишут сочинения.
(1930: 201)

(Once I shot only in a documentary way, that is, moments of reality as

it is. Now, in addition to “documentary” photographs, I also take ones
that are pre-arranged. These are the photographs which should show
not how the work is done in reality, but how it should be done. And
this same method may be useful where a labor process or industry has
to be depicted in a single picture, like those which are the basis for
school compositions.)

Here we might also read an extension of Tret’iakov’s Biografiia veshchi.

Writing in 1929, the author advocates for a reevaluation and restructuring of
the novelistic form not around the consciousness of a hero but around the
machine object:

The compositional structure of the “biography of the object” is a

conveyer belt along which a unit of raw material is moved and
transformed into a useful product through human effort. [...] The
biography of the object has an extraordinary capacity to incorporate
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 129

human material. [...] [O]nce we run a human along the narrative

conveyer belt like an object, he will appear before us in a new light
and in his full worth. But that can happen only after we have re-
oriented the reception practices of readers raised on belles lettres to-
ward a literature structured according to the method of the “biography
of the object”.18 (2006 [1929]: 61-62)

It is in fact the camera which provides just such a conveyor belt. With
Tret’iakov as operator, shot by shot film captures the human subject as
object. Organized into the (re)construction of the photo-ocherk, the kolkhoz
worker is revealed both within and by this mechanized literary method,
laboring as he should. It seems that just such a reading prompted one critic
to regard Tret’iakov’s ocherk portraits as successfully revealing the
“decisive role of the [Soviet] system (sistema)” (Pertsov 1935: 125).
Тhe flexibility and breadth of both the ocherk as genre and the
camera’s potential range of capture enlarge the scope of operativity. What
might be called the Tret’iakovian camera-eye displays many parallels to
Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye. Vertov, mobilizing the kinoks, describes the role
of the camera in the organization of the Krasnaia Presnia Pioneer group:

Among a number of gifts received on the detachment’s anniversary

was one from the kinoks: a real still camera with all the accessories.
[...]
Right now, the fellows are putting out a weekly newspaper of their
own, Photo-eye, consisting of their own photographs (every photo-
graph, even those that have not turned out, is included). Through this
newspaper they can gauge their progress in photography, and, in
addition, illuminate all the main events in their lives each week.
(1984: 67)

Here, focusing his attention on a new (revolutionary) generation, Vertov

lays the groundwork for his own network of kino-eye productions. While
far more organized in production and product, Vertov’s proposed pro-
gression from observation to film-object reads and looks not unlike the
Tret’iakovian operative-eye (fig. 2). In this schematic, the many individual
observers (who are described by Vertov as observing place, person, and
object in action, using photography to build up documentation) are organ-
ized into localized kino-eye circles. Group leaders of the local circles would
in turn contribute to the Kino-Eye Council (Bol’shoi sovet kino-glaz),
wherein the raw material of the kinok-observers is made into a finalized
film, or “film-object” (70). And here a key distinction arises between Ver-
tov’s model of a centralized product based on a hierarchical group structure
and Tret’iakov’s looser notions. As Maria Gough notes, Tret’iakov left no
130 Katherine M.H. Reischl

organizing schematic for photo-circles or photo-clubs. Rather his impulse

was an almost purely democratic one: let whoever can photograph do so
(2006: 168). However, the work of just the kinds of networks described
here by Vertov would resonate with the later words of Tret’iakov as well as
Benjamin:

[A]ll groups of kinok-observers will be drawn into the production of

the future kino-eye series. They will be the author-creators of all
subsequent film-objects. This departure from authorship by one
person or a group of persons to mass authorship will, in our view,
accelerate the destruction of bourgeois, artistic cinema and its
attributes. (1984: 70-71)

Figure 2: A rendering of Vertov’s Kino-eye organization. From Oushakine (2016).

However successful the operative-eye was in inspiring the worker-

photography movement into the early 1930s, by 1934 the democratically
driven photographic craze faced many ideological obstacles, including the
centralization of artistic groups and the economy, just at the point when the
author as producer came to be recognized as an international phenomenon.19
And for the author-photographer as model producer, the shifting aesthetic
discourse provides yet another stumbling block. The author-photographer
Leonov’s critique in Sovetskoe foto is a representative case in point. Pro-
viding a stark foil to Tret’iakov’s celebration of the Leica as visual diary,
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 131

Leonov evaluates this practice under the heading “Crude stenographic note”
(“Syriia stenograficheskaia zapis’”). While asserting his own expertise in
photography – his study of the craft since 1925 and mastery of more than 10
cameras – he concludes that the Leica is insufficient. Moreover, Leonov
denies that aesthetics can have anything at all to do with photography:

Художник должен быть стоглазым. У объектива ––всего только

один глаз. Видимое глазом художника можно увеличить на лю-
бой размер. Через мироощущения писателя, его взволнованность
могут возникнуть новые детали, – все это недоступно фото-
графии, она статична, фотография – плоскостный план, схема.
[…] На фотоаппарат надо смотреть как на секретаря и друга,
который может что-то напомнить, но он – только архивариус,
протоколист. Он всегда знает меньше меня. Художник может
изменять свои точки зрения на объект, поворачивать его в зави-
симости от авторской композиции. (Leonov 1934: 24)

(The artist must be hundred-eyed. The lens has only one eye. That
which is visible by the eye of the artist can be enlarged to any size.
Through the author’s sense of the world, his awe can give rise to new
details, – all this is inaccessible to photography; it is static, the
photograph is a flat plane, schema [...] The camera must be seen as a
secretary or a friend which can remember something, but it is only an
archivist, a recorder. It always knows less than I do. The artist can
change his points of view on an object, to shape it to depend on the
author’s composition.)

The editors of Sovetskoe foto would have good reason to frame Leonov’s
comments as “controversial.” But these comments do in fact anticipate the
anti-photographic rhetoric of the Writer’s Congress in July. In a high-profile
speech at the Congress, Karl Radek rhetorically calls upon photography in
order to contrast it unfavorably with socialist realism:

Мы не фотографируем жизнь. Мы в совокупности явлений ищем

ведущее явление. Нет реализма, который без разбора дает все.
Это был самый пошлый натурализм. Мы должны выбирать явле-
ния. Реализм состоит в том, что мы делаем отбор под углом
зрения существенного, под углом зрения ведущих начал. […]
[П]окажите типично, в индивидуальном. Делайте это, основы-
ваясь на критерии закономерности исторического развития. Вот
что такое соцреализм.20 (1934: 181)

(We do not photograph life. In the totality of phenomena we seek out

the main phenomenon. Giving everything without discrimination is
not realism. That would be the most vulgar kind of naturalism. We
132 Katherine M.H. Reischl

should select phenomena. Realism means that we make a selection

from the point of view of that which is essential, from the point of
view of guiding principles [...]. Show the typical in the individual. Do
this, basing yourself on the criteria of the laws of historical develop-
ment. That is what socialist realism means.)

Here authors and photographers – and author-photographers like Tret’iakov

or Mikhail Prishvin – are faced with a manifold set of pressures: to eschew
the personality that was a detriment in early Soviet and prerevolutionary
literature, and to embrace right-minded creative authorship which trans-
forms naturalism into socialist realism.21
The editor of Sovetskoe foto in 1935 uses the photo-series to counter
the attacks on naturalism in Radek’s speech. Quoting Radek in his own
editorial, Leonid Mezhericher lauds the photo-ocherki of Maks Al’pert and
Arkadii Shaikhet, rhetorically asking, “Can we call this naturalistic? No! A
thousand times no!” (1935: 7). While Tret’iakov’s name does not appear in
this polemical discussion, it is certainly Tret’iakov who was responsible for
the codification and celebration of the Al’pert and Shaikhet photo-series in
his “From the Photo-Series to the Extended Photo-Observation”. As
Tret’iakov noted in his response to the Filippov series in 1931:

Осуществленный Союзфото серийный снимок семьи Филиппо-

вых ценен именно тем, что в нем показанный человек становится
огромным весом, ибо он выступает перед нами не как лицо, не
как изолированная персона, в как частица нашей активной
социальной ткани, от которой идут корешки ее включений по
разнообразнейшим линиям – производственной, общественно-
политической, семейно-бытовой. Этот фотобиографический от-
рывок ценен тем, что он дает как бы поперечный разрез того
потока, который называется жизнью семьи Филипповых, причем
эта семья такая, каких у нас много.22 (Tret’iakov 2016 [1931]: 75)

(The serial picture of the Filippov family produced by Soiuzfoto is

valuable precisely because it gives the subject of its depiction
enormous substance, for we see the person not as an individual, not in
isolation, but as a particle in our active social tissue, connected by
little roots along the most diverse lines: the line of production, that of
the sociopolitical, the familial lines of everyday existence. The value
of this photo-biographical excerpt lies in its cross section of the flux
that we call the life of the Filippov family, a family like many others
among us.)

Family ties are repeated thematically, not only in the family presented, but
also in the “family” of photographs as the images were serially presented in
the journal. We also recognize (as Soviet viewers) that we might forge lines
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 133

of connection to this family through other substitutes with equally strong

“familial” ties: the productive and collective labor that shapes our everyday
lives. This theme of the “great family” is present in much of the ideological
rhetoric of the 1930s, particularly in opposition to the incursion of foreign
otherness.23 In capturing these binding ties, the photo-series unifies material
production and the experience of the everyday, thereby encapsulating the
totality of life in the Soviet Union – a totality that could never be captured
in a single photograph.
Here the photo-ocherk served to concretize this optimistic moment of
the First Five-Year Plan and exemplified the new programmatic model for
photographic production in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Tret’iakov would
himself speak out against barefaced “documentalism” in his ‘Evolution of
the Genre’. Echoing the apparatus relationship first outlined in Mesiats v
derevne as praxis, Tret’iakov firmly states that the ocherkist is not a
documentalist. Rather, documentalism is characterized by the pursuit of the
“absolute exactitude of fact”; it is “a dry and bare cipher”. Thus the docu-
mentalist “comes to the object of his work together with the stenographer
and limits himself only to the role of a man who asks a few questions and
corrects the transcript”.24 While the camera is not expressly mentioned here,
the language and critique of bare “documentalism” and the stenographer
also resonate with Tret’iakov’s early statements on photography as the
editor of Novyi LEF: “[P]hotography is not just a stenographer, it also ex-
plains”– an assertion that Tret’iakov as stenographer for the 1934 Writers’
Congress would intimately know for a fact (Tret’iakov 1989 [1928]: 271). 25
For post-1934 photography two clear paths lay open. The first led
toward the monumental and iconic photograph (the gallery still), clearly
writ with socialist optimism, which had less bearing for Tret’iakov whose
concern for aesthetics in photography was limited to concerns for quality
and effect. The second would be in the long life of the ocherk. Even if the
proletarian photographer movement would wane with the restructuring of
artistic organizations in 1932, the ocherk’s operativity – its flexibility, effi-
ciency, and material intervention into its subject, continued to dominate the
illustrated press – from the photo-heavy and collectively sourced USSR in
Construction to the text-heavy Ogonek – journals to which Tret’iakov often
contributed during the 1930s. In fact, the post-war period saw a resurgence
of the photo-ocherk, projecting the themes of brotherhood and friendship
among the Soviet nationalities (Morozov 1958: 137). The reappearance of
Sovetskoe foto in 1957, supporting amateur photographic circles and giving
a renewed outlet to the cameras and voices of photojournalists, rekindled
the artistic debates about photo-journalism as art, the inherent “naturalism”
of photography, and even questions of party-mindedness (Reid 1994: 39).
The democratic pull of the ocherk and the operative potential of the camera
were undeniably determining factors in the Thaw’s revaluation of Socialist
134 Katherine M.H. Reischl

Realism on nearly the same grounds visited to near exhaustion in the mid-
1930s.

A Retrospective Ride: “Where I Have Been with my Camera”

In large part the texts included in this study – such as Tret’iakov’s

photographs when they appeared in print – belong to the paratext.
Illustrations, prefaces, introductions all “present” the subject, and in Ge-
nette’s characterization, “make it present”. And this is likewise key to
Tret’iakov’s operativity: paratexts are the threshold through which the
reader/viewer turned producer must enter to change reality (1991: 261;
italics in the original). From the (always) meta-literary and autobiographical
introductions, positioning both text and self, to the short critical essays on
photography and the ocherk, it is in the paratext that we can locate Tre-
t’iakov.

Figure 3. Sergei Tret’iakov, ‘Gde ia byl s fotoapparatom’ (1933).

But perhaps the essay in which Tret’iakov can be most clearly located
is ‘Gde ia byl s fotoapparatom’ (‘Where I Have Been with my Camera’),
published in 1933 in the youth journal Pioner. This short photo-essay might
be read as an epitext – that biographical text beyond the bound volume – for
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 135

Tret’iakov’s life as operative photographic traveler (fig. 3). Here the author
is pictured photographing the very title of his article; he is the “head” –
dynamically cut from the frames of the photograph – from which the
following retrospective springs. He has been cut out, removed from his own
backdrop. Lacking a frame of reference, the bare image of Tret’iakov with
his Leica suggests that the author-photographer might be anywhere with his
camera. The narrative and accompanying photographs highlight the author-
photographer’s trajectory – from Peking in 1924 where he worked as a
correspondent to the 1929 test run of the novel aerosani (aerosleighs) where
he served as co-pilot. While not showcasing the aesthetic prowess of his
camera eye, these photographs are a celebration of the places where Tre-
t’iakov the author-photographer did not simply witness but became an
active part of the story himself.
I will zoom into a photographic story that serves most powerfully as a
metonym for Tret’iakov’s author-photographer persona: the ride in the
aerosani. This propeller-driven sleigh was not an exclusively Soviet (or
Russian) phenomenon, but it was embraced, produced, and fully branded by
Soviet-Russian power in the pages of popular and elite journals, in
children’s books, and in film. Designated as military sleighs, aerosani first
appeared on the front in World War I and in even greater numbers during
World War II, proving to be the most efficient vehicle for reconnaissance
and raids. These powerful sleighs were particularly suited to Russia’s
challenging northern clime and facilitated the Soviet Union’s aims in
colonizing and exploring the Arctic.
For several prominent photo-journalists (likely machine-worshippers,
in Albert Parry’s characterization), the power of the aerosani proved an
irresistible subject. In 1929, Sergei Tret’iakov, in collaboration with Izves-
tiia correspondent Boris Gromov, covered the test runs of the new NAMI
(Nauchnyi avto-motornyi institut) and TsAGI (Tsentral’nyi aero-gidrodina-
micheskii institut) models of aerosani.26 In their Polnym skol’zom (1930),
Tret’iakov and Gromov follow the triumphs and dangers of the test run as
the correspondents ride along with the aerosani “pilots”, reveling in the
rush of the machine as it travels at top speeds. The text and images describe
speeding by bucolic scenes: sluggish horses and Moscow’s old churches.
Even a remnant of the Russian literary past is added to complete a “long”
picture of continuous automobility, as the aerosani make a pilgrimage to
the house where the radical nineteenth-century poet Nikolai Nekrasov was
born – a juxtaposition of old and new that makes each appear anachronistic:
one a vision of the future, the other the house of old (fig. 4). And unlike the
recasting of Tolstoi that Tret’iakov undertook in essay form in 1929, this
inscription of the Russian literary past into the long look of aerosani auto-
mobility now makes Nikolai Gogol’ into a technological prophet. As Tre-
t’iakov writes: “It turns out that Gogol, describing the monstrously ex-
136 Katherine M.H. Reischl

aggerated troika in Dead Souls, quite accurately described the ordinary

aerosani” (Tret’iakov, Gromov 1930: 16).27 The aerosani approaches the
fantastic, repeatedly described in Tret’iakov’s account as something almost
ineffable for the lay observers (perhaps as incredible as Chichikov’s own
proposals had seemed to his interlocutors): what is it? how does it fly? In
the almost poetic description of Tret’iakov: “Supported by wings on the air,
the airplane glides over the strata of the atmosphere. Supported by skis on
snow, the aerosani glides over the strata of snow’s icy crust” (fig. 5).

Figure 4. Sergei Tret’iakov, “The house where the poet Nekrasov was born”, from
Polnym skol’zom (1930).

Figure 5. Tret’iakov with aerosani, photographer unknown; RGALI f. 2886, op. 2,

d. 74.
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 137

In his micro-autobiographic excerpt in Pioner, Tret’iakov highlights

the excitement and danger in which he found himself as an operative author
on this expedition. In the cold of February, the aerosani run raced outside of
Moscow: ““Мы шли дорогами, […] вылетали на речную гладь, и на
реке нас постигла катастрофа, в которой, к счастью, не погибли наши
товарищи. Двое саней ночью провалились в Волгу там, где теплые
воды, шедшие с береговых фабрик, подточили лед” (1933: 11; “We
went along the roads, [...] flew out onto the river’s mirror-surface, and on
the river a catastrophe befell us, in which, luckily, our comrades did not
perish. Two sleighs fell into the Volga where the warm water, coming in
from the factories on the shore, had eaten away at the ice”). Tret’iakov
works quickly to help save his comrades – a heroic act which is omitted
from this short account. Albert Parry proclaims this incident as “a truly
melodramatic flourish” characteristic of Tret’iakov’s writing (1935: 7). Tre-
t’iakov’s own heroism, and that of the novel Soviet machine, come to be
fused not in the act of heroism itself, but rather, in their “fixation” in the
hybridizing creation of word (by Tret’iakov’s pen) and image (by Tre-
t’iakov’s camera) – even as the photographic image itself glares with fixed
immobility.
Аerosani also make a last appearance in Tret’iakov’s final narrative
before his execution in 1937. In the stenographic report of his interrogation
and confession, Tret’iakov claimed that a Japanese agent was the impetus
for the aerosani photographs:
В 1928 году осенью Курода позвонил мне на квартиру. [...] Ин-
формировал его о принципах колхозного строительства, на осно-
ве моей поездки в колхозы. А также информировал о борьбе ли-
тературных группировок. [...] Беседа шла о возможном зимою
аэросанном пробеге. Курода интересуется типом саней. Предло-
жил снять.
В марте 1929 дал 3 фото заснятых мною, как участником этой
поездки. Военных аэросаней заснять не удалось. Фото переданы
Куроде на Тверском бульваре при встрече. (2016 [1937]: 426)

(In the fall of 1928 Kuroda called me at my apartment.[...] I informed

him about the principles of collective farm organization, based on my
trips to the collective farms. I also told him about the struggle among
literary groups. [...] The conversation turned to the possibility of the
aerosleigh run in the winter. Kuroda was interested in these types of
sleighs. He suggested I photograph them.
In March 1929 I gave [him] three photographs taken by me as a
member of the trip. I was not able to photograph the military aero-
sleighs. The photographs were handed over to Kuroda at a meeting on
Tverskoi boulevard.)
138 Katherine M.H. Reischl

In the end, the life of the networks created over the course of the operative-
photographer’s travels and his operative photographs became dangerous
collateral. Tret’iakov’s photo-ocherki, grounded in the belief in evidence
and information that Tret’iakov built into the understanding of his photo-
graphic enterprise, could be used as irrefutable evidence for the accusations
of treason that were fabricated against their author. Like a Soviet memoir,
“an instrument of both self-creation and community building”, Tret’iakov
built a project in which his alignment of the self – wholly given over to text
and image with a public face – created the most assailable of records.28
As Sergei Morozov dryly notes in his Soviet Artistic Photography,
1917-1957, by the early 1930s “more and more often readers of newspapers
and journals met with photographs with the short caption, ‘Photo by the
author’. Authors, literati, and writers of ocherki all played the role of photo-
graphers. This is not news in our photography” (1958: 140). Despite his role
as newsmaker, Tret’iakov was not to be included in the ranks of those with
authorial captions. Rather, he was lost to Russian photographic history until
nearly the end of the Soviet period. His embrace of the camera as extension
of self, and self as extension of the camera, created an authorial figure that,
like the aerosani traveling at top speed, could race only until the ice beneath
him gave way. However, the photo-ocherk, pioneered and modeled by Tre-
t’iakov, built lasting bridges between photography and writing throughout
the Soviet period, and among peoples across the USSR and beyond. In
writing himself into objectivity, the operative-photographer surrendered his
subjectivity almost exclusively to the object-driven paratext. Here Tre-
t’iakov offered a model of the subject as operative author, making himself
the precarious threshold through which to enter the developing and ex-
panding Soviet system.

NOTES

1
Here Parry is paraphrasing Viktor Pal’mov, Ukrainian avant-garde artist and
professor at the Kiev Arts Institute. The language of “machine worship” is
characteristic of an earlier age, that of the first Five-Year Plan, describing
the pull of the USSR for American photographer Margaret Bourke-White.
At a time when Soviets were worshipping at the altar of the “beauty of the
machine”, her photographs and texts in American magazines clearly
captured the excitement of industrial progress, including the first American
images of the Dneprostroi dam.
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 139

2
Not unexpectedly, he is excluded from Sergei Morozov’s Sovetskaia khu-
dozhestvennaia fotografiia, 1917-1957 (1958), and is also conspicuously ab-
sent from Volkov-Lannit’s overview of photography of the 1920s (1980).
See also Wolf (2010); Gough (2006); Fore (2006).
3
The vast majority of photographs in Tret’iakov’s archive at RGALI are of
the author, not taken by the author.
4
The “mask” is a common trope of the first half of the Soviet period. As
Clark has shown, the intelligentsia would make themselves allies of the
proletariat by donning the role or mask of the proletarian (2011: 41).
5
All translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.
6
See also Wolf (2010).
7
The author’s choice of the Russian word svetopis’ rather than the Greek-
based fotografiia hints at the role that nature, and specifically light (svet),
might have in shaping his photographs; in such a statement, Prishvin be-
comes the transformative channel for the natural world which is the subject
of the great majority of his photographic work (Mikhail Prishvin in
Grinshina (2004: 513).
8
See also Fore, ‘The Operative Word in Soviet Factography’ and ‘Intro-
duction’ (2006: 10); Literatura fakta: pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov
LEFa (1929).
9
The title is a clear play on Turgenev’s play of the same name (1850), and we
can easily intuit that the nameless corporate author mentioned at the outset
of the citation would be Turgenev.
10
Tret’iakov’s role as a model for the “portrait” ocherk was often cited in the
contemporary press between 1934-1935 (see, for example, Begak 1934; Per-
tsov 1935).
11
This reading has some resonance in parallel with Osip Brik’s and Aleksandr
Rodchenko’s observations about photography, and in particular the photo-
graphic portrait, in the late 1920s (see Rodchenko 1928; Brik 1928).
12
On “documentary” in the works of Tret’iakov and film of this period, see
Papazian (2009: 3-22, 13-15, 64, 120), and particularly relating to photo-
graphy (7-8, 13-15, 60-61, 134-135).
13
Maria Gough argues that this view of authorship was most likely influenced
by Iurii Tynianov’s essay on “The Literary Fact” (Gough’s introduction to
Tret’iakov’s ‘New Leo Tolstoy’; 2006a: 1).
14
Cited in Gough (2006: 166).
15
As Elizabeth Papazian has also noted, the travelogue was particularly suited
to the faktoviki. Tret’iakov’s writings almost all had a basis in travel. Here
“the author observes something foreign to him, although from as internal a
position as possible – by taking on a defined role within the foreign culture”
(2009: 40-41).
16
See more on Benjamin and Tret’iakov in Clark (2011: 42-50).
17
See also Tret’iakov (1927).
18
In Russian: Tret’iakov (2016).
19
See Wolf (2006; 2011).
140 Katherine M.H. Reischl

20
The title, “Where to Direct the Eyes of Literature”, is absent in the Russian
original; see Radek (1980). This “threat” was later quoted in a series of
articles by Mezhericher in Sovetskoe foto in defense of Socialist Realist
photography (1935).
21
See Gorky (1977: 54-55); Gor’kii (1934: 13-14).
22
In Russian: Tret’iakov (1927: 45).
23
Katerina Clark states: “The Soviets focused on the primordial attachments of
kinship and projected them as the dominant attachment for social allegiance.
[…] The new root metaphor for society provided the state with a single set
of symbols for enhancing its increasingly hierarchical structure by endowing
it with a spurious organicity.” This attachment to a symbolic family would
not, however, weaken the ties of the nuclear family, which “was to be
strengthened because it was regarded as a microcosmic auxiliary to the
state” (2000: 114-115).
24
Tret’iakov (1934b: 161). This also marks a departure in Tret’iakov’s think-
ing about the ocherk and documentary. Papazian notes that 1934, the mo-
ment of the codification of Socialist Realism, is the “dead end of Tretiakov’s
utopian model” as “the point where ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ meet”
(2009: 65). The capture of this shift in action in a series of articles under the
heading, “Fakt i vymysel v ocherke” in Nashi dostizheniia (12, 1935: 142-
156).
25
In Russian: Tret’iakov (1928b: 42).
26
Boris Gromov would also be aboard the famed Cheliuskin expedition in
1933-1934. The role of the aerosani in the rescue operation became part of
the children’s imaginary in books like Boris Zhitkov’s Pomoshch’ idet
(1948).
27
On automobility see Urry (2004: 25).
28
On the Soviet memoir, see Paperno (2009: 41).

LITERATURE

Begak, Boris
1934 ‘Ocherkovyi portret i portret v ocherke’. Nashi dostizheniia, 7-8:
134-137.
Benjamin, Walter
1978 [1934] ‘The Author as Producer’. Ed. and Intro. Peter Demetz. Re-
flections. New York and London, 220-238.
Brik, Osip
1928 ‘Ot kartiny k foto’. Novyi LEF, 3, 29-33.
Clark, Katerina
2000 The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington, IN.
2011 Moscow: The Fourth Rome. Cambridge, MA.
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 141

Fore, Devin
2006 ‘The Operative Word in Soviet Factography’; ‘Introduction’.
October, 118, Fall, 95-131.
Fotoapparat v rukakh pisatelia
1934 ‘Fotoapparat v rukakh pisatelia’. Sovetskoe foto. March-April.
Genette, Gerard
1991 ‘Introduction to the Paratext’. Trans. Marie Maclean. New Lite-
rary History, 22, No. 2, Spring.
Gough, Maria
2006 ‘Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Light-
house’. October, 118, Fall.
Gorky, Maksim
1980 ‘Soviet Literature’. Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and
Speeches at the First Soviet Writers Congress by A. Zhdanov,
Maxim Gorky [pseud.], N. Bukharin, K. Radek, A. Stetsky.
[1934]. London, 54-55.
Gor’kii, Maksim
1934 ‘Doklad A.M. Gor’kogo o sovetskoi literature’. Pervyi vsesoiuz-
nyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: stenograficheskii ochet, 13-
14.
Grinshina, Iana
2004 Dnevniki: 1928-29. Moskva.
Literatura fakta
1929 Literatura fakta: pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa. Ed.
Nikolai Chuzhak. Moskva.
Lunacharskii, Anatolii
1926 ‘Nasha kul’tura i fotografiia’. Sovetskoe foto, 1.
Mezhericher, Leonid
1935 ‘O realizme v sovetskom fotoiskusstve’. Sovetskoe foto, 1.
Morgan, Willard D.
1951 The New Leica Manual. New York.
Morozov, Sergei
1958 Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia, 1917-1957. Moskva.
Oushakine, Serguei, Ed.
2016 Formal’nyi metod. Vol. 2. Moskva.
Papazian, Elizabeth
2009 Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet
Culture. DeKalb, IL.
Paperno, Irina
2009 Stories of Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca,
NY.
Parry, Albert
1935 ‘Tretiakov, A Bio-Critical Note’. Books Abroad, 9, 1.
Pertsov, B
1935 ‘Zametki o portrete’. Nashi dostizheniia, 12, 122-125.
142 Katherine M.H. Reischl

Prishvin, Mikhail
2006 Dnevniki 1930-1931. Sankt-Peterburg.
Radek, Karl
1934 ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo Karla Radeka’. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd
sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: stenograficheskii ochet, 373.
1980 ‘Where to Direct the Eyes of Literature’. Problems of Soviet
Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers
Congress by A. Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky [pseud.], N. Bukharin, K.
Radek, A. Stetsky. [1934]. London, 181.
Reid, Susan
1994 ‘Photography in the Thaw’. Art Journal, 53, No. 2.
Rodchenko, Aleksandr
1928 ‘Protiv summirovannogo portreta za momental’nyi snimok’.
Novyi LEF, 4, 14-16.
Tret’iakov, Sergei
1927 ‘Fotoapparat – zhurnalistu’. Sovetskoe foto, 9, 260-262.
1928a ‘Na kolkhozy!” Novyi LEF, 11.
1928b ‘Ot redaktsii’. Novyi LEF, 12, 42.
1930 Mesiats v derevne (iiun’-iiul’ 1930 g.): Operativnye ocherki.
Moskva.
1933 ‘Gde ia byl s fotoapparatom’. Pioner, 5-6, 10-11.
1934a ‘Moi zritel’nyi dnevnik’. Sovetskoe foto, March-April.
1934b ‘Evoliutsiia zhanra’. Nashi dostizheniia, 7-8.
1936 Liudi odnogo kostra: literaturnye portrety. Moskva.
1989 [1928] ‘From the Editor’. Ed. Christopher Phillips, Photography in the
Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings 1913-
1940. New York.
2006a [1927] ‘The New Leo Tolstoy’. October, 118 (Fall), 45-50.
2006b [1929] ‘The Biography of the Object’. October, 118 (Fall), 57-62.
2006c [1931] ‘From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation’. Octo-
ber, 118, Fall, 71-77.
2006d [1937] ‘Dokument 5 [l. 10-14]: Zaiavlenie arestovannogo’. Formalnyi
metod, Vol. II. Moskva, 423-427.
2016 ‘Biografiia veshchi’. Formalnyi metod: Antologiia russkogo mo-
dernizma, II. Ed. Sergei Ushakin. Moskva, 396-398.
Tret’iakov, Sergei; Gromov, Boris
1930 Polnym skol’zom. Molodaia gvardiia.
Tynianov, Iurii
1924 ‘Literaturnyi fakt’. Sovetskoe foto.
Urry, John
2004 ‘The “System” of Automobility’. Theory, Culture & Society,
Vol. 21, Nos. 4/5.
Vertov, Dziga
1984 ‘Kino-Eye’. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Trans.
Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley.
 Sergei Tret’iakov and Developing Operativity 143

Volkov-Lannit, L. F.
1980 Istoriia pishetsia ob”ektivom. Moscow,
Wolf, Erika
2006 ‘SSSR na stroike: Constructivist Visions to Construction Sites’.
USSR in Construction 2006 No. 1: An Illustrated Exhibition
Magazine. Eds. Petter Õsterlund et al. Sundsvall, Sweden.
2010 ‘The Author as Photographer: Tret’iakov’s, Erenburg’s, and
Il’f’s Images of the West’. Configurations, 18, 383-403.
2011 ‘The Soviet Union: From Worker to Proletarian Photography’.
The Worker Photography Movement [1926-1939]: Essays and
Documents. Ed. Jorge Ribalta. Madrid, 32-46.