Revolutionaries in Form: the Russian Futurist Poets in the Cultural Politics of the Early Soviet Union, 1917-1928 (original) (raw)

which was defined by the works of the poet Igor-Severyanin. After the revolution, "Futurist" was used interchangeably with the nebulous term "left artist" to describe any artist or poet within the avant-garde. The Cubo-Futurists were, however, the most influential strand of Russian Futurism 2 prior to the revolution. Additionally, a number of leading Cubo-Futurist poets, most notably Mayakovsky, Burliuk, Vasiliy Kamensky and Khlebnikov were among the first Russian artists to openly accept the October Revolution and the Bolshevik regime. In light of this, for the purposes of this essay, I use the terms "Futurist" and "Futurism" to describe the poets and artists who either originated in the pre-revolutionary Cubo-Futurist movement, or closely identified with its poetic platform. Cubo-Futurism, as Leon Trotsky correctly pointed out in 1923, "originated in an eddy of bourgeois art, and could not have originated otherwise." Most of the Cubo-Futurists were lower 3 to middle-class Russian bohemians who moved to Moscow and St. Petersburg from the Russian provinces, as opposed to the dominant poets of the time, the Symbolists, who were largely from upper-class and aristocratic backgrounds.. Marjorie Perloff in her book The Futurist Moment: