Tatlin’s Tower & Flyer:

Aside from having produced one of the twentieth-century’s most enduring avant-garde architectural images with his “Tower,” Vladimir Tatlin is significant for having designed a second, no less impractical and marvelous device: a human-powered flying machine that he christened the “Letatlin.”

Tatlin at Home by Raoul Hausmann

A play on the artist’s surname and the Russian verb “to fly” (letat’), the Letatlin was assembled during a period (1930-1932) when Tatlin’s Constructivist approach to art and architecture had fallen into disfavor with Communist Party officials.

By the time that the full-scale model for the Letatlin was complete in 1932 the Stalinist assault on Soviet culture and the arts was beginning in earnest. That same year, Josef Stalin promulgated a decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations” which banned all independent studios, workshops, and groups. In their place the Party established official artistic and creative “unions” — bureaucratic mechanisms that would enable the Party to control artistic content and production throughout the country.

The Party also moved to impose an official style known as “socialist realism,” an artistic orthodoxy in which everything was portrayed as it was supposed to according to Stalinist ideology: the workers were enthusiastic about their tasks, the enemy vicious, cowardly and ever-present; and the Party always victorious. Irony, contradiction, and un-scripted conflict all were eradicated in favor of a grand “master narrative” that comported with the Party’s prevailing worldview.

Visually, the Letatlin is very much reminiscent of the ornithopter drawings that appear in the late 15th-early 16th century sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The similarities between the Letatlin and da Vinci’s ornithopter don’t end there. Both expressed an understanding of and approach to human flight rooted in a desire for personal freedom and transcendence.

Tatlin’s tower concept resurrected in 1930s. Tatlin’s flyer, the Letatlin never flew. There is a modern font named after Tatlin. Who knows what would he say about it:

Sources: Dictatorship of the Air, Wikipedia

Image credits: Dunners @ Flickr, cocomera @ LJ, arkinet blog, aliciaamaridi, by ThDrV, tomislavmedak @ Flickr, maccampus.net