Revolutionaries in Form: the Russian Futurist Poets in the Cultural Politics of the Early Soviet Union, 1917-1928 (original) (raw)
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2000
This article will examine the place of Futurists artists in Bolshevik Russia in the first years after the October 1917 Revolution, using the Futurist newspaper Art of the Commune as a case study. It will also raise the question of how effective could Futurism be in the political education of the illiterate people. The author will focus on 1918-1919the first two years after the October Revolution when both Proletkult and Narkompros gained a national following and became major players in cultural debates. Following 1922, as a result of funding cutbacks at the end of the Civil War and changed status of both organisations in Soviet society, they rapidly declined to a small and restricted core of members, and soon lost their influential position in the new State of Workers and Peasants. In this article the author concentrates on the formation and blossoming of Proletarian Culture in Russia (the term 'proletariat', which in Russia represented the class of wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, were reduced to selling their labour power in order to live). The establishment of the new values of the new society became the main aim of art after the revolution and Art of the Commune was a major player in it.
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: The Russian Futurists' Aesthetics of Revolution
This thesis examines the historical context in which Russian Futurism formed in 1910 in order to comprehend better this significant movement’s motivations, ideologies, aesthetics, and effects on subsequent literature, art, and politics, particularly those of Russia. It identifies the primary problems of the late Russian Empire and how various groups sought to provide solutions to these troubles to help Russia become modern. While scholars often focus on the Bolsheviks’ proposal of a two-fold socio-political revolution because this view prevailed in and after 1917, other organizations promoted their own interpretations of how to address Russia’s numerous troubles that offer insight into the era and the diversity of opinions that existed during this turbulent period. This project focuses on the most well-known group of Russian Futurists, Hylaea (sometimes also called the Cubo-Futurists), because its members developed unconventional aesthetics of revolution to spread their plan to the Russian public from the time of its founding in 1910 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The Hylaean Futurists’ proposal expanded upon and differed from the Bolsheviks’ vision of revolution because it called for a three-tiered revolution that would encompass aesthetics in addition to politics and society. By deliberately infusing their iconoclastic aesthetics of revolution into their writings, books, and performances, the Hylaeans slapped ambivalent and complacent Russians awake to the shameful conditions that existed in the empire’s antiquated political, social, and artistic systems. This thesis includes a number of detailed case studies of the Hylaean Futurists’ pre-war publications, rhetoric, illustrations, and performances in order to understand more comprehensively their inspiration, aesthetics, techniques, interpretation of revolution, and relationship with the socialists before the momentous revolutions of 1917.
Three Names of Russian Futurism in Music
Musicologica olomucensia, 2019
Filippo Marinetti in his Beyond Communism (1920) called Futurism the official art of Soviet Russia. What is Futurist art in the viewpoint of Russia? Defining art as “a source of power and transformation,” Russians believed that it is essential to arrange human society in a new way to create unified art. This paper deals with the viewpoints of Nikolai Kulbin (1868–1917), Arthur Lourie (1891–1966), and Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934). Having joined the Futurism movement during a certain period, their art concepts found a reflection in the form of an essay that the current paper is based on.
Matica Srpska Journal of Fine Arts, 2017
This article examines how—and why—Futurism became part of the discourse of madness in late Imperial Russia. Framed around a study of three sets of sources—writings by the creative intelligentsia intended for educated readers, studies by medical professionals concerning mental illness, and mainstream news reports on Futurist art and performance—it is argued that with the failed Revolution of 1905 having turned everyday life on its head, discussions on Futurism operated as a proxy for social critique across Russia. Ultimately the Futurist term would be dissociated from art entirely, and used conterminously with madness, in a process that would raise a still-pertinent question: what do we talk about when we talk about madness in art?
Victor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts and Philosophy , 2019
Russian Futurism surprised readers and writers alike during the years of social ferment leading up the 1917 Revolution. In particular, the participants in the movement themselves had no idea what events would have in store for them. Three among them, Bruno Jasienski, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky, are representative of the literary upheaval, explosion of creativity, and of the difficult decisions writers came to face. Taken together for comparison, a study of their work also gives us a sense of the confusion of the time, how outcomes often seemed strangely arbitrary, and how events took unexpected turns. On another level, the route taken by each writer, nevertheless, is consistent with the overall direction of art and culture during the Soviet era. Paradoxically perhaps it was the writer who most directly challenged the assumptions of early Socialist Realism (more precisely its precursors) who survived to later reflect on the history. An interesting aspect of this history is the relationship between the Futurists and Russian Formalism. The discussion of their work will turn on three important historical studies that trace the course of the revolution (the broader context) and the course of parallel literary currents. *Final verse line from a poem written in 1937 by Bruno Jasienski in Butyrki prison prior to his trial and conviction.