1. Milner, John, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Many other articles and books have something to say about the tower (see Milner'sbibliography, pp. 236–237). One landmark in Tatlin studies must be singled out, Andersen, Troels, Vladimir Tatlin (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968 Google Scholar with much rare photographic material and manyvaluable texts in Swedish and English translation. The most important Russian sources are Zhadova, L. A., ed., V. E. Tatlin, exhibition catalog (Moscow, 1977)Google Scholar, and Strigalev, A., OproektepamiatnikaIII Internatsionalu in Voprosy sovetskogo izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva i arkhitektury (Moscow, 1973)Google Scholar. Abook based on a much-expanded version of Zhadova's catalog has been published in Hungarian andis due to appear in English from Thames and Hudson of London.

2. Milner and others give a more detailed description of the monument's projected structure; butit should be noted that there seems to have been no definitive blueprint, and some questions concerning Tatlin's intentions (particularly with regard to the inner system of halls) remain unresolved. As for the intended height, Shklovskii (1921) suggests twice that of St. Isaac's Cathedral in Petrograd (about 200 meters), Tschichold (1926) 200 meters higher than the Eiffel Tower (500 meters)—bothare quoted in Andersen, Tatlin, pp. 50, 64. An early sketch apparently by Tatlin shows its top as levelwith that of the Eiffel Tower. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 226, claims “twice the height of the Empire State Building” (nearly 800 meters) butgives no sources. The Empire State Building did not of course exist at that time. A. Strigalev in Zhadova, ed., Tatlin, p. 19, points out that the figure of 400 meters is not accidental, being ahundred-thousandth part of the Earth's meridian.

3. Creswell, K. A. C. and van Bercham, Marguerite, Early Muslim Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932).Google Scholar

4. Oleg Grabar, “The Ummayad Dome of the Rock,” in Ars Orientalis 1 (1954), and The Formationof Islamic Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973).

5. Creswell and van Berchem, Early Muslim Architecture, pp. 72, 90.

6. Tatlin's words, of 1925, quoted in memoirs of A. Begicheva; see Lodder, Christine, RussianConstructivism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 65 Google Scholar. Documentation concerning the Scheme for Monumental Propaganda has been edited and translated by John E. Bowlt in Design Issues (Fall 1984).

7. Andersen, Tatlin, pp. 56–67.

8. Ibid., p. 57.

9. There is a further association of the site in Hebrew lore with Adam and the creation of man: Grabar, Formation, p. 53. It is worth mentioning in this context the remarkable and provocative theory of the origin of Islam put forward in Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). This work views early Islam as an offshoot of Judaism, bent onthe physical recovery of the Holy Land. The theory has been vigorously challenged, though the evidence cannot be ignored. If correct the theory tends to strengthen my interpretations of the significance of the Dome of the Rock; for it is precisely to the reign of Abd al-Malik that Crone and Cookdate the emergence of “Islam as we know it,” to which indeed the dome's inscription bears vitaltestimony (Hagarism, pp. 29–30).

10. Grabar, Formation, p. 45.

11. K. A. C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Harmondsworth, U. K.: Penguin, 1958), p. 33.

12. Grabar, Formation, pp. 58–61.

13. Much has been written about the mobile aspect of the halls within the tower: in particular, their rotation at set speeds (of a year, a month, and a day) has been noted by commentators as givingit the functions of a cosmic “clock.” (In this connection it is not entirely frivolous to note that theDome of the Rock constitutes a massive sundial—this is made evident in an aerial view of the sitesuch as that reproduced in Grabar, Formation, plate 4.) More subtly Milner points out that thetower's rotating elements would set up a “mobile relationship” with the spirals, resembling a “vastscrew turning” (Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, p. 155). The reader will readily appreciate thatthis aspect brings a whole set of new associations into play. Suffice it here to mention a literaryanalogue: the futurist poet Maiakovskii's surrealistic vision of a city that “stands on a single screw/allelectro-dynamo-mechanical” in his poem 150, 000, 000 (composed in 1919).

14. Milner, Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde, pp. 160, 180.

15. A good general study of Khlebnikov is Cooke, Raymond, Velimir Khlebnikov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Milner-Gulland, Robin, “Khlebnikov, Tatlin and Khlebnikov's Poem to Tatlin” in Essays in Poetics 12 (1976): 2 Google Scholar. Kern, Gary Snake Train (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1976)Google Scholar and Schmidt, Paul, trans., The King of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985 Google Scholar are valuable anthologies of Khlebnikov in English, including futuristic architectural projectsthat may well have influenced Tatlin. Of course, Tatlin may also have drawn on other writtensources, particularly in the Utopian literature of the period (some of which Milner mentions). Aninteresting comparison, neglected by commentators, may be made with the prose-poem The Tower (published 1917) by the proletarian writer Aleksei Gastev. Other early Soviet monumental towers (notably Iakulev's) and such a scheme as the Bauhaus Cathedral of Socialism open up a broadrelated field.

16. Schacht, Joseph and Boswell, Clifford, eds., The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 249.Google Scholar

17. In this study I have avoided questions (at present unanswerable) of any direct influence fromthe concepts of Islamic art—or indeed from such individual monuments as the Dome of the Rock—onTatlin's aesthetic. It is quite likely that Islam's characteristic aniconism and suspicion of gratuitousartistic display would have met with Tatlin's sympathy, as would its medievally synthetic attitude toarchitecture (and, more generally, the uncompromising wholeness, purity, and self-sufficiency of itsworld view). Moreover Islamic buildings provide many examples of the impressive use of simplegeometrical forms. Indeed it has long been usual for commentators on the tower to cite one suchstructure—the minaret of the ninth century Great Mosque at Samarra near Baghdad—as an analoguefor the tower. This minaret (and another at the nearby Abu Dulaf mosque) is an impressiveconical spiral; it is sometimes, though inaccurately, called a ziggurat (it is doubtful that it derivesfrom Babylonian ziggurat architecture). More interesting still (though neglected by the commentators)is the minaret of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo (AD. 876), where a spiral element is combinedwith stories of various basic geometrical shapes (cube, cylinder, polygon, hemisphere) such as wemeet with in the halls of the tower. Egypt was among the countries Tatlin visited as a seaman in his youth.

18. Grabar, Formation, p. 64.

19. Milner, Tallin and the Russian Avant-Garde, pp. 175, 179–180.

20. Wheeler, Mortimer, Roman Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp.104–105.Google Scholar

21. Andersen, Tatlin, p. 25.

22. Ibid., p. 59.

23. Russische Avantgarde 1910–1930 (exhibition catalogue, Galerie Bargera, Cologne 1978), p.102.

24. Grabar, Formation, pp. 66–67.

25. The tower is angled on the apparent position of the polestar from the latitude of Petrograd (Milner, Tallin and the Russian Avant-Garde, p. 179).

26. Andersen, Tallin, pp. 8, 63 (illustration).

27. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture 1: 48 ff.

28. Andersen, Tatlin, p. 51 (translation by Andersen and Bradfield).

29. J. Elderfield, “The Line of Free Men,” Studio International (1969), p. 11.

30. J. Fleming and H. Honour, A Dictionary of Architecture (London: Alan Lane, 1975), p. 52.