“Arise, you cursed people!”: The Aesthetics of "Limonka"

This issue of Limonka displays a collage by the artist and musician Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov (1960-2022) that became an iconic symbol of early NBP culture. Lebedev-Frontov was a pioneer of Russian noise and industrial music with a keen interest in the Italian Futurist experimental composer Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), Italian Fascism, and early twentieth-century European culture more generally. His collages, which deployed techniques inspired by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), exhibited a totalitarian or retro-futurist surrealism that combined themes like the death of God and mechanized flesh with early Modernist decadence and a meticulous reconstruction of historical details like uniforms, emblems, and family mottoes.

In the Limonka cover image, the French crime novel super-villain and ruthless murderer Fantômas points a gun in the direction of the viewer. The poster slogan reproduces the first line of the Russian version of “The Internationale,” which literally reads “Stand up, you who have been branded by a curse!” In 1997, lyrics of the Communist anthem would have been immediately recognizable to any adult who had grown up in the Soviet Union. At the same time, outside their original context, they could also be interpreted as an allusion to a Satanic or mystical Bolshevism—in line with the early NBP’s dark irony and taste for paradox. The slogan on the right side of the page reproduced the late-fifteenth-century theological conceptualization of Moscow as the Third Rome: “The third stands, and there will not be a fourth” (in the original, “Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, and there will not be a fourth”)—a semi-ironic reference to the messianic or apocalyptic role of Moscow in global geopolitics after the collapse of the Soviet Union.