No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Russian Poetic Trends on the Eve of and the Morning after 1917*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2017
Extract
The October 1917 hurricane meant a clean sweep of the old forms of Russian life. It is now a truism to state that the revolution not only transformed political, social, and economic relations, but profoundly affected religion, science, and art as well. The thoroughness and the speed with which the destruction of the old took place may not have been intentional. One may suppose that Lenin and his aides were prepared for the gradational tempo of an evolutionary process. What accelerated and deepened this process was the refusal of the old to give way to, or to merge with the new, and its sullen resistance, both passive and active. Military Communism, with all its drastic levelling, was the direct consequence of counter-revolutionary risings and foreign intervention. By the same token, the “sabotage of the intelligentsia,” as the Bolsheviks branded the refusal of sundry experts to cooperate with them, caused a swift change in the intellectual and artistic aspects of the country. The change was sharply felt in the plastic arts and in the arts of verbal expression — literature and the stage.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1941
Footnotes
*
A fragment of a forthcoming survey of Soviet literature.
References
1 The nothingists, who exemplified a goodly portion of this sound and fury, advocated extreme refinement, subtilization of poetic forms, images, rhythm, “instrumentation, colophons”: “Refinement will reduce art to zero, will destroy it, will lead it into nothing, bring it to nothing. Our aim is the refinement of poetic productions in the name of Nothing.” They proclaimed the slogan:
“Write nothing!
Read nothing!
Say nothing!
Print nothing!”
2 In 1921, he was implicated in a conspiracy and shot.
3 Some symbolists borrowed another shibboleth from the second part of Faust, “das Ewig-Weibliche,” but for the most part they used this conception through the mystic prism of Valdimir Solovyov, who lent his Eternal Woman the attributes of Σo𝜙íα. Both Bely and Blok began as disciples of Solovyov. Blok's early cycle of Verses to the Unknown Lady is imbued with yearning for the Goethe-Solovyov femininity.
4 “Les Parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent.”
5 “Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le sugggrér, voilà le rêve.”
6 “De la musique avant toute chose.” Cf. Bely: “Music ideally expresses symbols. Hence the symbol is always musical.”
7 Marinetti urged the need of new motives in art, the replacement of centaurs and angels by automobiles and airplanes, the destruction of the old, the slow, the sentimental. Thus:
“We had been listening to the emaciated prayer of the old canal and to the rattling bones of ancient palaces, with that verdant landscape of theirs, when lo, of a sudden avid automobiles roared beneath our window. My friends, I said, let us go. Let us move on. At last mythology and mystic ideals have been overcome and eclipsed. We shall presently attend the birth of a [mechanical] centaur and witness the flight of first angels.”
Here are excerpts from the eleven “commandments” regarded as “il fondamento del movimento futurista” (Giuseppe d'Arrigo, Il poeta futurista Marinetti: sintesi della vita e dell'azione):
“We want to sing love of danger, the habit of energy and daring. Courage, audacity, rebellion shall be the essential elements of our poetry… . We want to exalt aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, the pace of a race-track, the dangerous leap, the slap in the face and the blow of the fist (lo schiaffo ed il pugno)… . Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault against unknown forces, with the view to subdue them and prostrate them before man.”
“We assert that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed… . A roaring automobile which seems to whir across grapeshot, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” The elasticity of Marinetti's dynamics, which ultimately brought him into the bosom of Mussolini's fascism, may be seen in these adjacent “commandments”:
“We want to glorify war—the only world hygiene, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of liberators, fine ideas to die for, and contempt for woman.
“We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of all sorts, and to fight moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian infamies.
“We want to sing the great surging crowds agitated by labor… . We shall sing the many colored and polyphonic tides of revolutions in modem capitals.” …
8 And here is the original:
9 Mayakovski's poem, not reprinted in his collected works, read in part:
A Whiteguardist
You uncover — and up with him against the wall.
But Raphael have you forgotten?
Have you forgotten Rastrelli?*
’Tis time
with bullets
to tattoo museum walls.
Shoot at the old rubbish from hundred-inch-maws!
You are sowing death in the enemy camp.
Doomed are capital's hirelings.
Yet tsar Alexander
in the Square of Insurrections
is standing.
Thither your dynamite!
Arrayed are your cannon near the woods.
Impervious to Whiteguards’ amenities.
But why isn't Pushkin attacked?
And other
classic generals?
The Art of the Commune “explained,” in the course of the polemic, that Mayakovski did not mean to be literal. The poet himself resented, in a subsequent public discussion, the accusation “of instigating violence against old art.” He himself was “ready to place chrysanthemums on Pushkin's grave. But should the dead emerge from their graves and pretend to influence the art of our day, they must be told that there can be no place for them among the living… . The leading role in art must remain with the new men.”
* An eighteenth-century architect who designed several palaces and monuments for official Russia.