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Words in Revolution

Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912-1928

Contents

Preface Introduction by Anna Lawton Futurism in the World Futurism in Russia, 1912-1916 Futurism in the USSR, 1917-1928 Cubo-Futurism Slap in the Face of Public Taste. D. Burliuk et al. From A Trap for Judges, 2. D. Burliuk et al. [The Word as Such], A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov From The Word as Such. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov The Letter as Such. /. Khiebnikov and A. Kruchenykh From Explodity. A. Kruchenykh Declaration of the Word as Such. A. Kruchenykh New Ways of the Word. A. Kruchenykh The Liberation of the Word. B. Livshits Poetic Principles. N. Burliuk with D. Burliuk Go to Hell! D. Burliuk et al. We, Too, Want Meat. V. Mayakovsky From Secret Vices of the Academicians. A. Kruchenykh From Now On I Refuse to Speak 111 Even of the Work of Fools. D. Burliuk A Drop of Tar. V. Mayakovsky The Trumpet of the Martians. V. Khlebnikov et al. Ego-Futurism The Tables. Severyanin et al. Egopoetry in Poetry. Graal-Arelsky The First Year of Futurism. Kazansky Ego-Futurism. Ignatyev Mezzanine of Poetry Overture. Anonymous (L. Zak) Throwing Down the Gauntlet to the Cubo-Futurists. M. Rossiyansky From "Moment Philosophique." M. Rossiyansky Open Letter to M. M. Rossiyansky. V. Shershenevich Foreword to Automobile Gait. V. Shershenevich From Green Street. V. Shershenevich Two Final Words. V. Shershenevich Centrifuge Turbopaean. Anonymous (N. Aseyev, S. Bobrov, B. Pasternak) Charter. N. Aseyev et al. Foreword to The Lyric Theme. S. Bobrov The Wassermann Test. B. Pasternak Two Words about Form and Content. E. Bik Company 41° and Beyond Manifesto of the "41°." I. Zdanevich et al. From Kruchenykh the Grandiosaire. I. Terentyev Declaration of Transrational Language. A. Kruchenykh From Shiftology of Russian Verse. A. Kruchenykh Instead of a Foreword. B. Pasternak Left Front of the Arts (Lef) What Does Lef Fight For? N, Aseyev et al. Whom Does Lef Wrangle With? Lef Whom Does Let Warn? Lef Our Linguistic Work. V. Mayakovsky and 0. Brik From Where to Where? S. Tretyakov Language Creation. B. Arvatov Lef to Battle! Lef Lef's Tribune. S. Tretyakov Lef and MAPP. lu. Libedinsky, V. Mayakovsky et al. Reader! Lef We Are the Futurists. 0. Brik The Black Sea Futurists. S. Kirsanov Broadening the Verbal Basis. V. Mayakovsky Happy New Year! Happy New Lef. S. Tretyakov What's New. S. Tretyakov More Left than Lef. N, Chuzhak Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism by Herbert Eagle Literature as the Art of the Word Verbal Art as the Renewal of Perception The Process of Literary Evolution Notes Selected Bibliography Name Index Title Index

Introduction

By Anna Lawton

Futurism in Russia, 1912-1916

Futurism developed at almost the same time in Italy and in Russia. It is true that the first Russian Futurist manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," did not appear until 1912; Nonetheless, it represented the crystallization of a literary mood that had been gathering in Moscow and St. Petersburg for approximately two years. While Futurism in Italy was a compact phenomenon under the leadership of one man, Marinetti, in Russia it was heterogeneous, with many groups constantly engaging in literary warfare. Each group claimed to be the only true representative of Futurism; each launched vitriolic attacks against the "pretenders." Yet at times, temporary alliances of convenience occurred.

Today the general public tends to identify Russian Futurism as a whole with the single group of Cubo-Futurists, who numbered among their members several poets of talent. Nevertheless, the other major groups that emerged before the Revolution, the Ego-Futurists, the Mezzanine of Poetry, and the Centrifuge, played an important role in shaping Russian Futurism into a complex and vital movement. All these groups were short lived. They began to disintegrate as early as 1914 and gradually died out over the next two years. Cubo-Futurism, however, produced two offspring: the transrationalist Company 41° and the productivist Left Front of the Arts (Lef). Although opposite in nature, organization, and goals, these two groups were the ones to take over and carry the banner of Futurism in the 1920s. It is therefore necessary to consider two distinct phases in the history of Russian Futurism, the first bearing an anarchic-revolutionary character with a tinge of romanticism, typical of the historical avant-garde; and the second (where Lef is concerned) marked by an unsuccessful effort to embrace the Revolution and build the culture of the future communist society.

Cubo-Futurism

Before acquiring the name Cubo-Futurism in the second half of 1913, this group was known as Hylaea. In the winter of 1910 the founders (the three brothers David, Nikolay, and Vladimir Burliuk and their friend Benedict Livshits) were vacationing at the Burliuks' estate in the Kherson region. Hylaea was the old Greek name for that region, the ancient land of the Scythians where in mythical times Hercules performed his tasks. It was a name pregnant with poetic suggestion to the initiators of a trend in art and literature who looked back to prehistoryin order to build the future. Two other poets, Vasily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov, joined Hylaea at the very beginning. Even before this group came into being, Kamensky and Khliebnikov collaborated with the Burliuk brothers on the publication of the almanac A Trap for Judges (1910), which was vaguely Futurist in intention but not in substance. Moreover, Khlebnikov had published what later became his most famous transrational poem, "Incantation by Laughter," in Studio of the Impressionists (1910), another almanac with avant-garde claims, which also included some poetry by David and Nikolay Burliuk. In 1911, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksei Kruchenykh joined Hylaea; together with Khlebnikov they brought to the group extraordinary creative input. Hylaea was now ready to embark on a more aggressive program. One year later, its first official publication, the almanac Slap in the Face of Public Taste, appeared; it carried the homonymous manifesto.

The tone and imagery of this first declaration recalled the by-then-famous statements by Marinetti about the rejection of the past and the orientation toward urbanism and technology. It also proclaimed for the first time the idea of the "self-sufficient word," which became the cornerstone of Cubo-Futurist theory. In their second almanac, A Trap for Judges, 2 (1912), the Hylaeans published another important manifesto, more programmatic than the previous one, in which they reaffirmed in more precise terms their commitment to a new kind of word-oriented poetry. The most radical expression of this orientation is what Kruchenykh named "transreason" (zaum') or "transrational language" (zaumnyi iazyk). This term appeared for the first time in Kruchenykh's essay "New Ways of the Word" (1913), but Kruchenykh had already published three poems in transrational language a few months earlier, in his book Pomade. Among them was the famous "Dyr bul shchyl," which is to this day the most often quoted example of transreason. Kruchenykh, without formal training in poetics, had no aesthetic inhibitions and was able to carry the idea of the self-sufficient word to extravagant lengths, reaching a level of abstractionism that bordered on the absurd.

In general terms, the Cubo-Futurists proposed to treat the poetic word as an object in itself devoid of any referent. The "word as such" was considered a phonetic entity possessing its own ontology. Transrational language, rich in sound but devoid of conventional meaning, was organized by phonetic analogy and rhythm rather than by grammar and syntax. The reader was required to restructure his mental processes, from rational to intuitive, in order to grasp the message.

The main practitioners of transreason were Kruchenykh and Khliebnikov. Although they collaborated on many lithographed booklets and cosigned a number of declarations, their views on transrational language were substantially different. Khlebnikov's poetry aimed at revealing the primeval meaning of existing word roots, expressed through consonantal sounds rather than conventional semantics. He dreamed of a universal language based on similar-sounding roots. Kruchenykh considered transreason the manifestation of a spontaneous, noncodified language. His poetic idiom consisted of raw verbal material, which acquired expressiveness and meaning only through contextual relationships. As an example of transrational poetic expression, Kruchenykh cited the Russian religious sectarians who in moments of ecstasy start speaking in foreign tongues or nonexistent idioms.

The other Cubo-Futurists, although sharing the common concern for verbal experimentation, were not transrationalists. Possible exceptions are Elena Guro, marginally associated with the group, who created a transrational language based on children's speech, and Vasily Kamensky, who consistently used transreason in the first edition of his long poem Stenka Razin, the Heart of the People (1918). Mayakovsky, the most popular and charismatic figure in the group, created his own strikingly original poetic language by using conventional words in a non-conventional way. He deformed the meaning of words by foregrounding their component sounds in structuring the verse line and by making odd semanic juxtapositions. The result was a tremendous broadening and enrichment of the verbal base.

All in all, the Cubo-Futurists did accomplish an aesthetic revolution that largely surpassed the literary field. Their contributions to the other arts cannot be the subject of this essay, but their connection with painting must be mentioned, if only because they chose to stress their ties with Cubism in their name. Many of the Cubo-Futurists were artists as well as poets and worked closely with leading art groups such as the Jack of Diamonds and the Union o Youth. The painters most closely associated with the Cubo-Futurists were Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, and others, who illustrated the poets' publications. The Hylaeans shared their predilections for primitivism with Larionov and Goncharova, and some of Larionov's paintings are believed to have had an impact on the poetry of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh.

But the true connection between literature and painting lies deeper. It is to be found in the Cubo-Futurist understanding of the poetic word as a "living organism." In their essay "Poetic Principles" (1914), David and Nikolay Burliuk used this expression as part of their contention that the poetic word is "sensible," possessing not only aural but visual properties. Other Futurists went even further, pointing out the "palpability" of the word (this notion was also strenuously maintained by the Formalists of Opoiaz) and the word's "smell." This synesthetic understanding of art, which was common to the whole avant-garde, produced among the Cubo-Futurists some remarkable results. While roughing up the texture of the text to make it "palpable" through an unorthodox use of the verbal material, they also performed a typographical revolution. Conventional layouts exploded under the effect of Futurist dynamite, and the debris was picked up and rearranged for visual effect. Kruchenykh, however, mostly did not even bother reassembling the scattered letters and let them lie around the page in colorful disorder. For all its declared spontaneity, the effect of the explosion was obviously calculated to emphasize the shape of words and letters and thereby enhance their visal expressiveness. Notable in this respect are Kruchenykh's previously mentioned lithographed booklets (often produced in collaboration with Khlebnikov), which were written in longhand by the author and illustrated by avant-garde artists. As we shall see, this practice was eventually continued and developed by the members of 41°, Ilya Zdanevich, Igor Terentyev, and others. Another example of visual poetry is Kamensky's "ferro-concrete" poems, very similar to Marinetti's tables of liberated words and Apollinaire's calligrammes. In these poems the words are often composed figuratively to form a picture. Mayakovsky's solutions to the visual aspect of poetry were not so spectacular but just as valuable and more durable. His most notable technique is the "stepladder line," where the verse is divided into syntagmatic segments, each one of them arranged on successive "ladder steps" in a descending progression.

The year 1913 was the golden year of Cubo-Futurism, and of Russian Futurism in general, as an avant-garde force. If the Futurists did not succeed in throwing Pushkin and the other venerable masters into the waters of oblivion, they certainly were able to inject a new perspective into the appreciation of art. Their rather rude tactics created considerable resentment within the cultural establishment and among its well-to-do patrons, but what was to be done? A sort of fatal fascination has always surrounded the "barbarian" destroyers of a dying civilization. And so it happened that, never ceasing to heap abuse on the Futurists' hooliganism and charlatanry, the "pharmacists" (as the philistines were called in avant-garde circles) and their wives agreed to get themselves "slapped in the face." Futurist evenings of poetry reading and manifesto declamation became fashionable season events to which the respectable public flocked with a confessed feeling of condescending curiosity-after all, the performance smacked of the circus-and an unacknowledged feeling of exciting, sinful transgression. An aura of scandal made the Futurist evenings irresistible. The proximity of those social outlaws on stage created the illusion of a daring adventure and impending danger. One never knows what to expect from Genghis Khan!-even if he is armed only with wooden spoons (quite harmful to good taste when worn in the buttonhole a la Burliuk) and dressed in a clownish yellow blouse (the clownishness only conceals the raging belligerence of a Mayakovsky). To tell the truth, the public's fear was not totally unjustified. It was not unheard of for the Futurists to switch from verbal to physical violence, though such occurrences were more frequent in Italy, where Futurist evenings often ended in a fistfight or salvos of rotten eggs and ripe tomatoes. But in Russia, too, the public was occasionally subjected to physical abuse, judging from Kruchenykh's "spilling of hot tea on the audience." More contemporary avant-garde exponents (in the West, of course) would express their contempt in a more explicitly obscene way. But that was the time of the avant-garde infancy, when épatage consisted mainly of nose-thumbing.

And yet the Russian Futurists took their task, if not themselves, seriously and with extraordinary zeal devoted their energy and talents to the cause of a global aesthetic revolution. The name change from Hylaea to Cubo-Futurism undoubtedly served that cause. At the same time it created a great deal of ambiguity in the relationship with the Italians. It may be true, as the Hylaeans firmly maintained, that it was the press that started calling them Futurists. They seem nevertheless to have welcomed the publicity benefits of being associated with the Marinetti cyclone, which had been storming all over Europe for more than four years. To concede any Marinettian influence, though, was another matter altogether. The Cubo-Futurists, rightly or wrongly, never did. Actually, in an excess of concern over a possible misunderstanding of their alleged absolute independence from the "Stranger," they went so far as to falsify some publication dates and never missed an occasion to pile contempt and scorn on their name-giver.

All this was bad news to Marinetti when he set foot in Russia on January 26, 1914. He went there on a cultural mission-so he thought-invited by the association Les Grandes Conferences, with the intention of making new alliances and broadening the Futurist front. Alas! Owing to an unfortunate or planned coincidence there were no Futurists in Moscow at that time. Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, and Kamensky were on a poetry-reading tour of the Southern provinces. Livshits and Khlebnikov were awaiting Marinetti in St. Petersburg, planning a well-publicized boycott of his lectures (fortunately the scandal was avoided at the very last minute). The only confrères who met Marinetti at the railroad station with the welcoming delegation were Vadim Shershenevich and Constatin Bolshakov, members of the Mezzanine of Poetry and therefore "enemies" of the Cubo-Futurists. But not all the news was bad. The mission's failure was more than compensated for by Marinetti's personal, if mundane, success. The public and the critics regaled him with treatment reserved for foreign celebrities. Standing ovations, banquets, rave newspaper reviews, floral showers on stage (adieu, rotten eggs and tomatoes!), and-mamma mia!-hundreds of perfumed ladies' notes. This was flattering indeed, even to the "duce of Futurism," who as a rule sought the "voluptuousness of being booed." And so Marinetti found himself in the embarrassing position of wanting to "slap in the face" his Futurist brothers (brothers?!) rather than that amiable public.

The need for fisticuffs became most urgent during an altercation with Livshits at a dinner party. The dispute polarized over their differences regarding the idea of transreason. Marinetti would not budge from his conviction that transrational language was nothing more than the Russian version of his concept of liberated words and wireless imagination while Livshits just as stubbornly claimed that transreason was an altogether different notion, probing deeper into the ontology of the poetic word. In any case, on that evening wild "liberated words" darted back and forth across the table, and soon the literary dispute degenerated into a nationalistic squabble that had little to do with poetry.

Or perhaps it did, because what separated the Cubo-Futurists from the West was not only a different set of poetic devices but the vision of a poetic universe that had its roots i the Slavophile ideology of the preceding century. On that vision the movement developed it's original and truly national character-which does not mean that the Russians had not heard of and appropriated some of the "shouts, drumbeat, and grenades" coming from beyond the Alps. They had indeed. And no disclaimer will ever change the fact that their declared hatred for the past, their iconoclastic fury, their debasement of Art, their rejection of Beauty, their emphasis on intuitive rather than rational mental processes, their concern for technology and urbanism, and-above all-their use of manifestoes not as mere theoretical supporting statements but as a publicity medium all are features of an avant-garde that bears the trademark "made in Italy." But for centuries the Russians have had a knack for processing Western cultural imports in their intellectual workshops. Often the results were less than satisfying, but occasionally, as with Futurism, they came up with a brilliant product.

(Continues...)

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