"Avant-garde oeuvre" implies certain dualities. On the one hand, it attempts to present a new vision of the totality of the world, a rational proposal for the "reconstruction of the world." On the other hand, it might imply refined symbolist play, full of direct, and especially hidden, references and quotations. Furthermore, the avant-garde oeuvre is intended to speak universally; yet, it contains diverse national, nationalistic, and even chauvinistic traits (the latter flourished during and

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... ediately after World War I), which internally contradict its universalism from within. With regard to formative avant-garde dualities, El Lissitzky is a characteristic case. The "enigmatic artist" of the avant-garde epoch, 1 he was both Jewish and universal, rationally-constructive and symbolically-enigmatic. He attempted to be universal while playing with sophisticated and hidden Jewish metaphors. He constructed "the new worlds" while speaking in specific and complicated symbolical language. El Lissitzky's discourse had been essentially distinct from the language of his peers, Kasimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. Within all their differences, Malevich and Chagall remained symbolists in the avant-garde: their discourse refers to something beyond the rational. Chagall mentioned this explicitly: "Ah, qui a compris Chagall!?" 2 and Malevich affirmed this non-finito character of his thought through all his works. On the contrary, Lissitzky was a constructor. He tried to find clear visual solutions to the most irrational problems-infinity, quantity, space, etc. His sophisticated metaphorical textures are constructed and designed. To put it differently, the strongest rationalistic will towards synthesis moves Lissitzky beyond rationality, just as the Jewishness of his "Jewish-style" works contains formative impulses of universality. From yet another viewpoint, his abstract suprematist and post-suprematist creations and theories imply a hidden, genuine Jewishness. Despite the artist's own theories about his works, despite a perfect intellectual biography of Lissitzky written by his wife and the recollections of his contemporaries, 3 Lissitzky's ecstatic evolution and balance between artistic trends and national traditions create problems for researchers. The artist's passage from Darmstadt, where he was trained in late Art Nouveau perspective to pre-and post-revolutionary Russia, where he discovered Jewish tradition and searched for Jewish style, followed by the "exodus" to the universalism of Malevich's Suprematism and, later, a jump into a variety of German Weimar artistic trends, do not explain his heritage in terms of subtle evolutionary progression. Lissitzky is always between-between a Jewish search for style and cultural identity and the universal language of Suprematism, between Suprematism and Constructivism, between Malevich's concept of abstract non-objectivity and De Stijl, between "Constructivism" and Dada, and last, between the world of Vitebsk, the west-Russian provincial center-and Darmstadt, Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, Hanover, and imaginary America. Understanding El Lissitzky presupposes a study of evident and hidden traces from his previous stages of Schirften, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers (Dresden, 1967). I will use both the original German text of this book and its English translation: El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers (London, 1968).