Fast forward: the aesthetics and ideology of speed in Russian avant-garde culture, 1910-1930 9780299233242, 9780299233235

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Fast Forward

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The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930

TIM HARTE

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from Bryn Mawr College.

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street London wec2e 81vu, England

eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2009 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

5 43 21 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harte, Tim. Fast forward : the aesthetics and ideology of speed in Russian avant-garde culture, 1910-1930 / Tim Harte.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-299-23324-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-299-23323-5 (e-book)

1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Soviet Union—History—2oth century. 2. Speed in art. 3. Speed in literature. 4. Experimental poetry, Russian—History and criticism. 5. Motion pictures and the arts—Soviet Union—History—2oth century. I. Title. N6988.5.A83H37 2009 700’.41109470904—d 22 2009013797

FOR

Jenna and Isaac

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS / 1x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / Xi

Introduction: The Zeitgeist of Speed / 3 PART 1: Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion -_ Urban Poets on the Move / 33

The Accelerating Word / 67 PART 2: Visual Arts of Acceleration «Light Speed: Rayism in Russia / 101 Throughout the earliest printing of this poem, a disjointed yet symmetrical arrangement of morphemes underlies Mayakovsky’s

The Accelerating Word 75 chaotic semantic displacement and quick morphological shifts from one related

lexical item and theme to the next.** The poem’s title alone suggests urban motion with its reference to a progression through the city streets, a sense of momentum also elicited by the poem’s unorthodox structure, in which sudden jumps between words and syllables require the reader to follow by visual as well as notional means. Hence reception of the poem slows, as the incessant shifts create a countervailing effect of deceleration. As inherently dynamic as the poem’s imagery and impressions are, Mayakovsky’s verse requires a slow, deliberate reading that serves to highlight the overwhelming, challenging nature of

the fast-paced urban environment. Visually, “From Street to Street” seems to propel itself forward, as lines consisting of one or two syllables are approximately mirrored in the syllables of a subsequent line. Establishing a palindromic effect throughout the poem, this mirroring of individual words and morphemes generates the visual and aural sensation of quick movement from one street to another, as is evident in the poem’s opening lines:

ymuta.

JIuta y TOTOB

TOOB

pesye. Ye-

pes KeJIC3HbIX KOHEMN

C OKOH 6eryllux TOMOB IIpbIrHyIM WepBble KyObI. (38) [S-

treet. Faces

of Great Danes are more severe than years.

76 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion Over

iron horses from the windows of running homes jumped the first cubes. | Mayakovsky’s exercises in overlapping form endow the poem with a swift flow of language well-suited to the urban thematics. Playing with the same or similar morphemes in successive lines (“dogov / godov’”) or flipping the syllables of a fragmented two-syllable word to form the next word (“rez- / che. / Che- / rez”), Mayakovsky linguistically simulates the effect of fast movement through the cityscape. Mention of running—“from the windows of running homes / jumped the first cubes’”—likewise conveys speed as well as a syntactical and semantic indeterminacy typical of the futurists’ brand of dynamism. The modifying participle begushchikh—the genitive plural form for “running”—grammatically captures the way speed itself engenders confusion: “begushchikh” can modify the genitive plural noun “homes” (domov) or, at least in theory, the genitive

plural noun “windows” (okon)—and thus the line can be read as “from the windows of running homes” or, albeit much less likely, as “from the running windows of homes.” Moreover, the “windows” and their second syllable, kon, repeat the root of the Russian noun for “horses” (koni), which appeared in the previous line, so that the normally lifeless windows, lexically associated with fast animals, come alive. In a similar fashion, the horses are labeled “iron” (zheleznye) and are thus transformed into city trams, the urban, modern replacement for horse-drawn transport.” Through these semantic associations, the ambiguous syntax, and an innovative array of repeated syllables, Mayakovsky challenges, and even slows, the reader, yet creates verse in which the words conceptually keep pace with the poem’s vibrant urban backdrop. In experimenting with syntax and language, Mayakovsky never denied words their semantic connection to standard Russian, yet he fostered a wordplay and verbal dynamism that clearly tended toward abstractionism. Often a simula-

tion of the way in which rapid movement generates a distortion of familiar reality, his futurist poetics heralded a form of linguistic indeterminacy and freedom. “The word,” Mayakovsky declared in 1914, “should not describe, but express all by itself. The word has its own aroma, color, soul, for the word is a living organism, and not only a mark for the determination of any sort of con-

cept.’ Elaborating on the futurist conceit of “self-sufficiency,” Mayakovsky rendered the “living” word its own nonrepresentational expressivity. A wide range of attributes—not just “aroma, color, [and] soul,’ but also dynamism—

The Accelerating Word 77 enabled Mayakovsky’s words to function independently of the conventional line of verse and conventional language and in a way that often reflected the ubiquitous velocity of the poet’s urban milieu. For Mayakovsky and other futurist poets in Russia, the word’s visual and acoustic “texture”—its faktura—had the capacity to generate an impression of fluid movement. First introduced in David Burliyuk’s essay “Texture” (which appeared in the 1912 almanac A Slap in the Face of Public Taste), poetic faktura signified the audible textures of a word or phrase. This concept of faktura, like the shift, corresponded directly to the visual dynamism of cubo-futurist painting. As Khardzhiev would explain in “Poetry and Painting (Early Mayakovsky),” Russia’s cubo-futurist poets, much like their counterparts in painting who defied

the conventions of academic art, “fought against the smooth, melodious phonetics of the symbolists, promoting a new, taut ‘texture [faktura] of the word’ based on repetition and the stressed accumulation of consonants with an aural timbre.”’’ Citing the example of Mayakovsky’s earliest verse, which boasted unusual phonetic textures and a unique “aural timbre,” Khardzhiev argues that alliteration, as well as the repetition of fricatives (the Cyrillic letters zh, sh, and kh) and affricatives (ch, ts), enabled cubo-futurists to distinguish their work from

the more mellifluous style of poetry ascribed to Russia’s symbolist poets. An emphasis on these distinctive, often harsh sounds also endowed cubo-futurist poetry with a sharp, vigorous texture that bolstered its inherent dynamism.”® Attentive to the modern city’s chaotic, active sounds, Mayakovsky often fostered an aural texture based on rapid alliteration and internal rhyming, which are nowhere more evident than in the 1913 poem “Noisekins, Noises, and Noiseings” (“Shumiki, shumy i shumishchi”).”’ As its alliterative title suggests, the poem features acoustic wordplay and neologisms, which, in addition to repli-

cating the din of the hectic city, boast overt similarities to Khlebnikov's early neologistic work (for instance, “Incantation by Laughter” [“Zaklatie smekhom,” 1908]). Yet whereas Khlebnikov’s early word-creation maintained a resolutely neoprimitivist basis (as suggested by the poem’s title and all its neologistic variations on the root of the Russian word for “laughter,” smekh), the noises Mayakovsky reproduces stem directly from the city’s mounting speed; just as the machines, engines, and bustling crowds produce a clatter of sounds, the poem’s shifting lines, dynamic textures, and evocative word combinations foster an analogous dissonance. In the opening stanza of “Noisekins, Noises, and Noiseings,’ discordant sounds race across the city: [lo oxam ropoyja IpOHOCAT LIyMBI Ha iemote NOOB MU Ha rTpoMax KO/Iec,

78 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion a OAM UW WOWaH—93TO TOMbKO TpyMbl,

ClelAlne IMHUM yOeraoulnx KOC. (54)

[Through the echoes of the city noises are carried On the whisper of soles and thunders of wheels, while people and horses—they’re only grooms, who trail the lines of fleeing scythes. | Here cacophony predominates in both a thematic and formal manner. As Mayakovsky highlights the “echoes of the city,” the “whisper of soles,” and “the thunders of wheels,” the Russian fricative sh—a buzzing sound that pervades the city streets—resonates in every line (“shumy,” “shepote,” “podoshv,’ “loshadi,” “slediashchie,” and “ubegaiushchikh”). Urban noises permeate Mayakovsky’s verse; they virtually race along in synch with the poem’s fast-moving point of view, which follows the “people and horses” as well the “lines” of the personified “kosy” (a Russian word that means both “scythes” and “braids”) as they flee, seemingly, away from threatening urban forces. Using an array of aural, visual, and verbal techniques, Mayakovsky replicated the urban tempos central to futurism’s infatuation with speed. The poet’s cubo-futurist verse ultimately reveals a marked use of pictorial and linguistic shifts as well as faktura appropriate to the dynamism of his distinctly modern subject matter. Like Shershenevich, Mayakovsky integrated elements of Italian futurism’s cosmopolitan cult of speed into the Russian context, but he did so in a way that relied on an unparalleled, creative use of the Russian language. Fellow cubo-futurist poets would take the era’s dynamism in other innovative directions, yet it was Mayakovsky who most comprehensively quickened Russian poetry; he established an aesthetic approach to the living, self-sufficient word that effectively embodied the speed of the modern city. “READ FASTER, DON’T THINK”

Self-sufficient words, unconventional sounds, and an abstract approach to dynamism all figured prominently in the formulation of Russia’s transrational futurist poetry. Following the emergence of Khlebnikov's neologistic poetry, which appeared as early as 1908, a transrational language (zaumnyi 1azyk, or zaum ) took shape that, while based on standard Russian, nevertheless diverged dramatically from the language’s morphological and syntactical rules. As Gerald Janecek has noted in his comprehensive study of the Russian futurists’ trans-

rational poetry, zaum’—a neologism formed from za, the Russian word for “behind” or “beyond,” and um, the Russian word for “mind”—can be separated

The Accelerating Word 79 into three varieties: phonetic zaum’, in which combinations of letters do not form identifiable morphemes and thus lack any meaning or “sense”; morphological zaum’, which uses recognizable morphemes to form words with no distinct, familiar meaning; and syntactical zaum’, which features recognizable words presented amid unfamiliar (1.e., nonsensical) syntax.°*° All three varieties

of zaum reflected the futurists’ desire to liberate the word from the fixed role it occupied in conventional verse and to establish unprecedented verbal dynamism in Russian poetry. Zaum in its various manifestations reflected a desire on the part of Russia’s futurists to produce a language in which words would no longer be burdened by meaning and grammar. “Read faster, don’t think” (chitaia skoree ne dumat), Kruchenykh instructed readers in one of his transrational texts, as if to defy the deceleration inherent in Mayakovsky’s challenging shifts and syntax, suggesting that a speedy delivery and reception of verse should outweigh slower thought processes.*! For Kruchenykh, deliberation over meaning could only diminish the power and pace of language.*” Striving for a language that they could generate spontaneously without slowing down for the sake of convention or com-

prehension, Kruchenykh and Russia’s other transrational poets transformed speed into the basis for a uniquely nonobjective form of futurist poetry. Regardless of whether they in fact deliberated over their creation of such verse and whether their audience could in fact “read fast,” practitioners of zaum’ (particularly Kruchenykh; less so Khlebnikov) invented a vibrant expression of the era’s dynamism that exuded spontaneity and conveyed speed’s distortion of reality through its radical alteration of linguistic structures. In the 1913 manifesto “Declaration of the Word as Such” (“Deklaratsiia slova kak takovoe”), Kruchenykh articulated the primacy of the transrational poet’s fast, expressive language. Beginning with a series of points on zaum’ (that he jumbled so that the list irreverently commences with point number “4”), Kruchenykh wrote: “(4.) THOUGHT AND SPEECH CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THE EMOTIONS OF SOMEONE IN A STATE OF INSPIRATION, therefore

the artist is free to express himself not only in the common language (concepts), but also in a personal one (the creator is an individual), as well as in a language which does not have any definite meaning (not frozen), a transrational language. Common language binds, free language allows for fuller expression.» Formulating zaum’, Kruchenykh envisioned a transrational language free of any fixed—or “frozen,’ as he put it—signification and capable of expressing emotions faster and more fully than conventional words, intrinsically laden with meaning, ever could. As Janecek explains, “While for Marinetti a new language is required mainly to express the intense new experiences of modern life .. . for

80 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion Kruchenykh it is the intensity and speed of human emotion that requires a new language.’* A liberation of words from their accepted semantic position in language, zaum enabled futurist verse to keep pace or “keep up” with all the intensity and emotion of the modern era; the poet would no longer have to waste time on any unnecessary adherence to syntax or semantics. For Kruchenykh, zaum provided an ideal, accelerated form of expression, a new poetic language that increased the potency and speed of the word as well as the creative act. The 1913 poem “Dyr bul shchyl,’ one of Kruchenykh’s earliest and most notorious examples of transrational verse, lacks any discernable syntax or recognizable words. It comprises primarily a series of monosyllabic morphological items that engender dynamism not only through the absence of meaning but also through its frenetic acoustic textures. Published alongside rayist illustrations by Mikhail Larionov in the collection of verse Pomade ( Pomada, 1913), Kruchenykh’s five-line poem is a rapid-fire burst of nonsensical sounds:

pip Oy WbUI YOellIny p CKyM

BbI CO 6y

p 193° [Dyr bul shchyl Ubeshshchur skum vy so bu rl ez|°° In Kruchenykh’s poem, short guttural sounds generate an explosive pace. Instead of emulating modern noises associated with speed, as the Italians were doing at this time, Kruchenykh moves beyond acoustic imitation into verbal abstraction— a linguistic and aural indeterminacy of meaning—as the mostly monosyllabic “words” (plus the three-syllable form ubeshshchur, which loosely resembles ubezhat’, the Russian verb meaning “to run away”) generate an audible rendering

of speed via their abrupt, harsh essence rather than indirectly through onomatopoeia, alliteration, or metaphor. Although the primordial, gruntlike noises of “Dyr bul shchyl” afford Kruchenykh’s work a raw, unrefined quality, the transrational verse is ultimately a modern creation in its forceful, impatient spirit and defiant rejection of fixed meaning. Part of a transrational triptych included in Pomade, “Dyr bul shchyl” offers a nonrepresentational form of verse

The Accelerating Word 81 in which rapid, uninhibited expressivity materializes out of the nonsensical words and sounds. Transrational poetry, “Dyr bul shchyl” suggests, constituted a bold statement of contemporaneity, despite all its primordial, gruntlike sounds. As Kruchenykh explained in “New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism)” (“Novye puti slova [iazyk budushchego smert’ simvolizmu]”), one of the major theoretical discussions of zaum’, “We loosened up grammar and syntax; we recognized that in order to depict our dizzy contemporary life and the even more impetuous future, we must combine words in a new way, and the more disorder we introduce into the sentence structure the better.’*” Nongram-

matical word constructions and their indeterminacy of meaning indeed fostered a lexical simulation of modernity’s “dizzying contemporary life” and its alteration of visual reality. Zaum’, it could therefore be argued, introduced linsuistic “disorder” into poetry in a manner comparable to the way speed distorts our surroundings to the point of nonobjectivity. In fact, Kruchenykh went on to explain in “New Ways of the Word” how “the irregular structuring of a sentence (in terms of logic and word formation) generates movement and a new perception of the world and conversely, that movement and psychological variation generate strange ‘nonsensical’ combinations of words and letters.’*®

For Kruchenykh, movement, a new abstract “perception of the world,’ and “nonsensical” transrational word creations had merged, as his irregular verse gave rise to an abstract impression of speed, and vice versa. Constituting a nonrepresentational form of verse, zaum’ altered phenomenal reality and anticipated, in Kruchenykh’s words, the “impetuous future.” As in the poetry of Mayakovsky and other cubo-futurists, faktura—or texture—contributed to the dynamism of Kruchenykh’s zaum’. In a pamphlet titled The Texture of the Word ( Faktura slov, 1923), which included a brief essay of the same name, Kruchenykh explored the textural underpinnings of zaum’. The bulk of Kruchenykh’s essay addresses “sound texture” (zvukovaia faktura), that

is, the timbre and pitch of the poetic word, which Kruchenykh cultivated to enhance the vitality of his transrational phrases, words, and letters. Sharp sound texture, for instance, could produce a sonic impression of impulsive action: “The

letter zis suitable for the representation of sudden movement, an itch,” Kruchenykh claimed.* This acoustic “movement” prevailed in much of Kruchenykh’s

early transrational poetry, where the letters and sounds often appear to move quickly, much like an “itch.” Consider, for instance, the title of the 1913 verse book Vozropshchem (Let’s Grumble) where the z of vozropshchem arguably cre-

ates a brief burst of motion that reverberates throughout the whole word, as if in conjunction with the explicit “grumble”; the z seemingly provides the textural

82 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion impetus for the quick, sudden sound that comes later in the word. Hence dynam-

ism often constituted a crucial ingredient of many of the diverse textures in zaum, for as Kruchenykh declared elsewhere in The Texture of the Word, with

an appropriate emphasis on “rhythmical texture” (ritmicheskaia faktura)— that is, syncopation—and rapid alliteration: “Nash bog—beg” (“Our god is the race” ).*°

Zaum, in Kruchenykh’s formulation, emerged as an extremely dramatic lan-

guage requiring active, forceful recitation, for in printed form transrational poetry could only elicit a partial measure of its inherent dynamism. This theatrical component of zaum’ is particularly evident in the 1913 collection Let’s Grumble, which included the short work Deimo, a neologism Kruchenykh used here and elsewhere to denote a dramatic “act.” In Deimo lines of zaum’ appear alongside Kruchenykh’s parenthetical stage directions explaining that “the elocutionist [chtets], standing unnoticed by the table, begins to read quickly and in a high pitch, [while] his voice at times falls, slips, [and] cuts through” the following lines of transrational verse that consist mostly of nonsensical items but also of several familiar words: 310 IIIO 9 CIIPyM

pela M

YI Tax 3e OH IbI Ly GeperaM aMepUK He yBUeTh IUMTYHOB

we ry Gery.*!

[ziu tsiu e sprum reda m ugi tazh ze bin tsy shu to the shores of americas will not see the shiguns tse shu I run.|] Despite the recognizable words (such as “americas,” a frequent Western motif in Kruchenykh’s verse), the passage remains a surge of meaningless sounds, yet it succeeds in expressing the era’s pace via its quick, frenzied exposition of predominantly monosyllabic transrational words. Contemplative reception is rendered irrelevant by the accelerated effusion of harsh noise. The passage’s final

The Accelerating Word 83 word, “begu” (“I run”), accords with the previous stage directions for a quick reading, as the actor-reader is indeed able to run through these transrational lines of verse by dispensing with semantics and jumping chaotically from one explosive word to another. Further expression of transrational poetry's dramatic spirit came in December 1913 when the term deimo reappeared in Kruchenykh’s libretto for the futurist opera Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem). Performed in conjunction with Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy and featuring sets and costume design by Kazimir Malevich, Victory over the Sun constituted a watershed in avant-garde drama, especially given the opera’s synthesis of zaum’, abstraction, and boisterous celebration of athletes, airplanes, and modernity’s triumph over nature. In fact, Victory over the Sun—the creative result of the “First All-Russian Congress of Bards of the Future” (Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd biachei budushchego), a July 1913 gathering of Kruchenykh, Malevich, and the musician and artist Mikhail Matyushin—indicates how transrational verse heralded a futuristic, fast-paced utopia: the sun is vanquished, a new reality is established, and zaum’ is presented as the futurians’ preferred form of communication.” At the conclusion of the opera, an aviator, safely removing himself from the wreckage of his airplane that has just crashed, breaks into a transrational, nearly vowel-less “military song”: “1 ll / kr kr / tlp / tlmt / kr vd t r / kr vubr” (with irregular spacing between each transrational sound).** The velocity of the airplane may be fleeting (and dangerous), yet Kruchenykh’s aesthetic rendering of modern dynamism remains and implicitly flourishes well into the future. Kruchenykh simultaneously envisioned zaum as an international language of the future that through its dismissive treatment of grammar and semantics could effectively bridge the gap between various cultures. In the 1913 collection Explodity ( Vzorval’), for instance, Kruchenykh boasted (albeit flippantly) of writ-

ing lines of transrational poetry in Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew. Even this switch to “foreign” languages reflects a preoccupation with modernity’s pace, for Kruchenykh claimed in a brief introductory passage devoid of punctuation to have learned all foreign tongues in one brief moment: “on April 27 at 3 o’clock in the afternoon | instantaneously mastered to perfection all languages Such is

the poet of the current era I am here reporting my verses in Japanese Spanish and Hebrew.’“* Transrational poets, Kruchenykh asserted, could function at the fast pace of the “current era” by devising innovative forms of zaum’. A transrational “Japanese” poem accordingly follows Kruchenykh’s claim: UK9 MUHa HU CHHYy KCH

84 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion Max aJyIMK

3en”

like mina ni sinu ksi iamakh alik zel |

These transrational lines, printed in Cyrillic calligraphy so as to resemble Japanese characters, have little in common semantically or syntactically with the Japanese language, yet the poem boasts some phonetic resemblance to the Asian tongue.*° By presenting zaum’ as a modern global tongue, mastered instantaneously, Kruchenykh strove to eradicate linguistic, cultural, and geographical distances through his poetry’s inherent dynamism, as he envisioned his transrational words accommodating the impetuous future. Other avant-garde poets in Russia, following Kruchenykh’s lead, used zaum’ to produce a verbal yet also conceptual form of dynamism. In the poem “City Spring” (“Gorodskaia vesna,” 1913), for instance, Konstantin Bolshakov moves from the relatively straightforward urbanism of his long poem Le Futur to more idiosyncratic transrational verse. Integrating transrational neologisms with a scattering of familiar words, Bolshakov tempers the nonsensical, alogical basis of Kruchenykh’s zaum to produce a rapid-paced, semirepresentational poem. “City Spring,’ quoted in its entirety here (with an approximate translation), proves well suited to brisk recitation, especially given how marks inserted over the stressed syllables of the poem’s transrational words facilitate a sprightly live reading: IcMepaMNH, BepOMU TPpyBepHuT BecHa,

JImcuied TloneN SIMON arent. Bu3v3aMi BU3aMU CHyeT TULA, [louetyaAch B THIMeHHbIe Bepe109 TpesHn, AKCUME10, OKCAMH 3U3aM 30 CHa, AKCHME€}0 OKCaAMM 3aCHM W30MEJINT.

[leHscb lacKY BeJIEMM BesIaM BesleHa, JInnameT ayW10OBble BeJIEMUM Mes. IcMepaMH, BepHOMU TPpyBepHMT BecHa.

Asmenb! BecKpbulaTOCTb HaAKpbUIMM Wponesin.

IcMepaMH, BepHOMU TpyBepMT BecHa.”

[Esmerami, verdomi the spring truvers, Lisiléia of fields eliloi alielit.

The Accelerating Word 85 Vizizami vizami the silence scurries, Kissing in the quieted vérelloe of a trill, Aksiméiu, oksami zizam from sleep, Aksiméiu oksami zasim izomelit. Reproaching caresses velémi velam velena, Lilaleét alilovye velémi of a shoal. Esmerami, verdomi the spring truvers. Aliel’! They sang the winglessness of overwings. Esmerami, verdomi the spring truvers. |

The poem’s energetic rhythm (anapestic tetrameter), alliteration, and frequent recapitulation of words and lines, such as the nonsensical terms “esmerami,” “verdomi,’ and “aksimeiu,’ endow Bolshakov’s verse with a swift, flowing tempo endemic to both the fast-paced modern city and the vibrant vernal motif evoked in the poem’s title. As if to accentuate the futurists’ notion of the animate poetic word, Bolshakov’s transrational word creations seemingly blossom forth like live organisms, spawned by the spring’s fertility and the city’s speed. By presenting the word as a living entity in a manner unique to Russian futurism, the zaum of “City Spring” maintains a raw, spontaneous, and elemental flavor, even as it exudes the dynamism of the modern city. A more extreme rendering of zaum and its underlying dynamism can be found in Vasilisk Gnedov’s Death to Art (Smert’ iskusstvu), published in April 1913. Consisting of fifteen poemy—or “long” poems—that each ironically contain no more than a line of poetry (and, in several cases, just one letter), Death to Art conveys speed both linguistically and conceptually through its quick

reduction of words and letters from poem to poem and through its striking denouement, a blank page, which in effect offered a most telling example of how speed could render language immaterial and nonobjective. Death to Art begins with twelve “long” poems featuring neologistic titles that abruptly disappear, much like the words and letters that noticeably decrease throughout the work. By the conclusion of Death to Art, Gnedov has made a swift transition from his initial semicoherent language to a pseudo-linguistic form of abstractionism, as the final poem ends with a wordless, minimalist flourish: [logma 1

CTOHTA

[lonprouaetca—lIlenenbe Jyuty. Ilooma 2 KO3J1O

By6uuru Kosiepasa—Cnupena.

86 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion CKpbIMb Covina.

[looma 9 BYBAA TOPA

By6a. By6a. By6a.

[logma 14 1O.

Ilooma Kouta (15)*8 [Poem 1

GROANGA

Wormwoods—Ashing I Shower. Poem 2 GOATER

Bubchigi Goatings—Lilacing. Hidings of the Sun. Poem 9 BUBAIA SADINGS Buba. Buba. Buba. Poem 14 Tu.

Poem of the End (15) |

Death to Art begins with transrational word creations boasting a Slavic, neoprimitivist flavor (Gnedov draws on the Russian words for “wormwood” [polyn’], “goat” [koza], and “lilac” [siren’]); in later sections, the poet shifts to evocative sounds (e.g., the quick rhythms of “bubchigi” and “buba”) and a sudden reduc-

tion in words—and letters—that, in contrast to the initial neoprimitivism, endow Death to Art with a modern, dynamic tone. Words and letters appear to dematerialize, as if to suggest that the pace of the era has subverted their form, causing them to vanish. “Poem of the End,” the most striking component of Death to Art, accentuates the visual effect of the quickly disappearing verse by consisting, in its printed form, of a blank page. A rejection of language corresponding to the collection’s title, this visual silence establishes a nihilistic form of abstraction commensu-

rate with the nonobjectivity achieved by other avant-garde artists. Arguably

The Accelerating Word 87 presaging Malevich’s nonobjective suprematism, the final poem of Death to Art renders words an unnecessary hindrance to poetry’s ultimate expressivity and speed. As Gnedov’s fellow ego-futurist Ivan Ignatev explained in a foreword to Death to Art, “Deliberately quickening future potentialities, several of our literary trendsetters have rushed to steer sentences toward words, syllables, and even letters. ‘It is impossible to proceed any further, they have claimed. But this has turned out to be a lie.’*? Gnedov indeed proceeded further and faster than all other futurists, accelerating his poetry to the point of abstraction, or nothingness, save a blank sheet of paper. Recitation of Death to Art likewise involved a measure of speed: when publicly reading the cycle’s “Poem of the End,’ Gnedov resorted to rapid physical movement to compensate for the glaring lack of words. In his reminiscences on avant-garde art, Vladimir Pyast describes how Gnedov’s final poem “did not have any words and all of it consisted only of one gesture of the hand, which [Gnedov] quickly raised over his hair, and sharply dropped downward, and then to the right. This gesture, somewhat like a detour, was the entire poem.” Distorted to the point of immateriality, letters and words disappeared entirely from the transrational work and all that remained was the quick motion of the poet’s own hand. Gnedov’s “Poem of the End” draws attention to two significant trends in Rus-

sian futurist poetry. First, the poet’s own active recitation of the transrational verse, or lack thereof, exemplifies the tendency among Russia's futurist poets to fashion themselves and their poetic personae as a prime source of modern speed, as has been discussed earlier. Second, the blank final page of Death to Art and the poet’s quick arm gesture amplify how futurist poets turned away from the traditional structures of verse toward powerful visual imagery—be it the wordless page or rapid gesticulation—to generate dynamism. In liberating the word,

the futurists strove to transform their poetry into vivid icons of modernity. PICTURING SPEED IN VERSE

As suggested by Gnedov’s Death to Art as well as by Shershenevich’s word-images and Mayakovsky’s conspicuous shifts, the visual attributes of avant-garde verse increasingly eclipsed more-conventional poetic concerns such as meter, rhyming, and standard syntax. Between 1912 and 1914, when a futurist aesthetic took shape

in Russia, avant-garde poets, most notably the cubo-futurists, seized on pictorial forms of poetry, largely the result of their early training as artists and their close collaboration with fellow left painters. Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, David Burliyuk, and Kamensky, among others, applied a visual awareness to their verse, transforming futurist poetry into an unprecedented pictorial synthesis

88 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion of word and image that expanded the graphic scope of futurist verse and, in particular, its dynamism. Russian futurists’ painterly orientation supplemented their widespread urge to destabilize conventional poetry through indeterminate meaning and linguistic abstractionism. By favoring the visual over syntax, meter, and the traditional line of verse, Russia's avant-garde poets were often able to intensify their poetic simulation of velocity. The faster the urban world moved, the less syntax and semantics proved suitable for depicting such dynamic surroundings, and the

more futurist poets strove to replicate through unconventional poetic means what they experienced on city streets. Thus the more visual the futurists’ nonrepresentational poetic word combinations became. Speed, although not the sole factor behind this pictorial verse, of course, helped trigger the cubo-futurists’ embrace of the visual.

The cubo-futurists’ desire to integrate the visual and the verbal within their nonrepresentational poetry constituted a key theoretical component of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s 1913 pamphlet The Word as Such (Slovo kak takovoe),

in which the two poets established a conceptual parallel, predicated in part on the depiction of dynamism, between their transrational verse and the works of Russia's avant-garde painters. By replicating the period’s painterly forms and mechanisms through an array of disjointed verbal elements, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov aimed to create a uniquely modern language: “Futurian painters | zhivopistsy budetliane| love to use parts of the body, its cross sections, and Futurian wordwrights | budetliane rechetvortsy] use chopped-up words, halfwords, and their artful combinations (transrational language), thus achieving the very greatest expressiveness, and precisely this distinguishes the swift language of modernity, which has annihilated the previous frozen language.”>! Fragmentation, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov argued, was critical to futurist innovations in both painting and poetry, for it replicated the way speed visually distorts—or “annihilates’—the modern environment. Whether painters rupturing the human figure or poets chopping up the word, Russia’s “futurians” succeeded in creating effective formal expressions of their visually fragmented world. A “swift” graphic dissection of words enabled cubo-futurist poets to reproduce modernity’s boundless dynamism and simultaneously advance the avant-garde’s evolving aesthetic of nonobjectivity. In emphasizing the visual nature of their verse, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov focused not only on the printed word but also on the letters comprising handwritten words. In “The Letter as Such” (“Bukva kak takovaia’), a theoretical essay from 1913 (which remained unpublished until 1930), Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov postulated that the pictorial attributes of handwritten poetry—

The Accelerating Word 89 particularly the textural feel of letters (“graphic signs, visual signs as if felt by the hand of a blind man” )—should outweigh legibility and semantic content by way of visual expressivity.°’ The two transrational poets emphasized how the “self-sufficient” word, vociferously promoted by cubo-futurist poets in their manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” and elsewhere, required expressive

handwriting capable of communicating “the wild snowstorm of inspiration, ” whereby their letters, innovatively written, could potentially transform words into efficient vehicles for sudden, spontaneous creativity.’ Autonomous letters and words, once removed from their customary place on the conventionally printed page, offered a valuable iconographic means for imparting modern reality’s impulsive, accelerated spirit. Overtly dynamic, handwritten transrational verse abounded in Kruchenykh’s books of poetry from this period, for instance, in the previously discussed Explodity, which featured a range of transrational experiments.** On one explicitly pictorial sheet from Explodity (fig. 1), words of zaum’ appear to burst forth from a long vertical design. Handwritten word clusters such as “alik a lev amakh” and “li li liub biul”—all devoid of meaning, but graphically conveying the volatility implicit in the collection’s tith—curve upward from left to right, like a sudden gush of letters. Designed by Nikolay Kulbin (who, along with Rozanova, Malevich, Goncharova, and Natan Altman, provided semiabstract illustrations for Explodity), the page and its nonuniform lettering exude a chaotic pictorial essence that complements the semantic indeterminacy of the zaum’.°°

The letter, along with the word, appeared to be on the move in futurist poetry. Even a painter like Malevich acknowledged the letter’s newfound free-

dom from conventional language. Writing in 1916 to Matyushin, Malevich argued that Russian avant-garde poets had successfully established a nonrepresentational verbal art form by removing the letter from the traditional line of verse and presenting it as an acoustic and pictorial entity full of movement: “The letter is no longer a symbol for the expression of things but rather an acoustic note (not musical). ... Arriving at the idea of sound, we generated notelike letters that express acoustic clusters. Perhaps in composing these acoustic clusters (what were once words), we will find a new path. Thus, we extract the letter from the line of verse, from one direction, and provide it with the possibility of free movement.”** As emphasized by Malevich, who himself dabbled

in transrational verse, cubo-futurist poetry had introduced detached clusters of letters capable of exuding a liberated acoustic vitality that existed independently of words and was nonobjective in that it went beyond “the expression of things.” For Russia’s visually oriented poets and painters such as Malevich,

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FIGURE 1. Nikolay Kulbin, design of transrational poem by Aleksey Kruchenykh, 1913. Lithograph illustration from Vzorval’, 17.4 x 11.7 cm. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The Accelerating Word 91 the disassembly of words and the “free movement” of letters proved crucial to poetry's abstract conceptualization of dynamism. The visual attributes of Russian avant-garde verse were on prominent display in verse attributed to the short-lived movement of “literary rayism” (literaturny1 luchizm). In a lengthy article on futurist poetry found in the 1913 futurist publication The Donkey’s Tail and Target (Osliny1 khvost 1 misherr ), the critic S. Khudakov included several examples of highly pictorial verse by “N. Bleklov, A. Semenoy, and Reyshpar,’ an elusive group of “poet-rayists” (poety-luchisty).°’

These rayist poems, which offered a verbal variant of the rayist movement of painting introduced by Mikhail Larionov in 1912, featured diagonal word clusters that, in addition to representing a bold rejection of syntax, lent the verse an energetic, semi-abstract structure.** In one example of Semenov’s rayist verse included in The Donkey’s Tail and Target, obliquely arranged words appear to emanate, like rays, out of a lexical item or phrase: for instance, in what resembles a tridentlike form, the word “Poshlost’” (a Russian term signifying “banality” and “philistinism”) virtually spawns “poshlo” (“it went”), which proceeds

diagonally to the lower right out of the center of the horizontally positioned “Poshlost’”; the nonsensical “looo” juts off to the lower left; and printed in mirrored form, upward and downward from the center of “Poshlost;” appears the Russian neologism/fragment “lost.”°? Elsewhere on the page, additional “rayist” words and lines—“rayist” in that they appear to speed across the page like rays—have been geometrically (e.g., diagonally) arranged to replicate the appearance of light.®? Although no other rayist poetry exists apart from these samples included in The Donkey’s Tail, the verse provides some indication of how attention to light and its inherent velocity informed the cubo-futurists’ merging of poetic and painterly techniques.°! The cubo-futurists’ often abstract expression of dynamism via their pictorially vibrant poetic forms persisted well into 1914. In the almanac The First Journal of the Russian Futurists, David Burliyuk published several poems—“Railway Whistlings” (“Zheleznodorozhnye posvistyvaniia’), “The Steam Engine and Tender” (“Parovoz i tender”), and “Winter Train” (“Zimnii poezd” )—that utilized typography and atypical stanzaic patterns to reproduce both linguis-

tically and visually the headlong momentum of the locomotive. In all three poems Burliyuk uses mathematical symbols (such as + and =), as if to relieve his verse of unnecessary words and to increase its denotative velocity, while in “The Steam Engine and Tender,” digits, a seemingly random display of capital letters, spacing between letters (what in Russian is called razriadka), and a double-columned passage contribute to Burliyuk’s attempt to impart the visual sensations of train travel through his verse form.

92 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion The most explicit pictorial form, however, belongs to “Winter Train,’ where the inverted pyramid shape of the poem’s single stanza closely corresponds to the theme of the train and its forward movement. Burliyuk’s poem features a gradual diminution of words in each successive line, a technique that simulates a locomotive racing ahead and disappearing into the distance. “Winter Train,” in its entirety, reads: CKJIOH€HUM JIbAMCTbIX ropHee Hayao

Tpoma cHeros = myTu 6emm1 Mopos = yKYyCcblI = >KaJIo M1 cCKOTCKMX HalIpsoKeHbe 2KWI

Iuimenbe mapa JleT Manekux UcKp

yxo], yrapa McK P.°2

|The mountainous beginning of icy declinations The path of snows = the routes of whiting Frost = bites = a sting And the tension of bestial tendons The hissing of steam The flight of distant sparks fumes vanishing disk R.

An array of sensory impressions, “Winter Train” evokes the physical and visual sensations arising from a fast, frigid train ride. Beginning with images of snow

and the whitened route observed from the moving train, Burliyuk shifts to a condensed, telegraphic description (“Frost = bites = a sting) of the train traveler’s exposure to the wind and cold, followed by mention of the locomotive’s steam and sparks. In Burliyuk’s “disappearing poem” (as critics have labeled this visual type of verse, given the subtraction of words from each successive line), the distinct reverse pyramid form replicates a view (from the top of the poem) of the train vanishing into the distant landscape, reduced by the end to a single letter, a bold R.* This solitary R, a visual, linguistic, and acoustic signifier of the locomotive’s disappearance into the wintry landscape and speed’s alteration of visual form, also serves as an emblem of the futurists’ impulse

The Accelerating Word 93 toward nonobjectivity, for the fast pace and forward progression of the train causes the lines of poetry to disappear before our very eyes.“ Pyramid-shaped verse and visual simulation of the era’s dynamism constituted a key element of Vasily Kamensky’s 1914 collection Tango with Cows. Illus-

trated by David Burliyuk and his brother Vladimir, this collection consisted of highly pictorial verse printed on pentagonal-shaped sheets of colorful wallpaper.® Rather than train travel, however, Kamensky drew on his own exploits in aviation for the first poem of Tango with Cows, the pyramid-shaped “Vasia Kamensky’s Airplane Flight in Warsaw” (“Polet Vasi Kamenskogo na aeroplane v Varshave”—fig. 2). Here lines of verse carefully arrayed from the bottom to

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from Tango with Cows. Wallpaper cover with letterpress typographic design, 18.9 x 19.2 cm. Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

94 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion the top of the page in decreasing length replicate the upward trajectory of an airplane; the pyramid structure simultaneously resembles the exhaust of an ascending plane, the diminishing sounds of the aircraft as it rises into the sky, and a spectator’s view of the disappearing aircraft. To accentuate the poem’s perceptible trajectory, Kamensky parenthetically instructs his readers to “read from the bottom up” (chitat’ snizu vverkh).® Each subsequent line accordingly grows shorter and shorter, proceeding from a twelve-syllable line at the bottom of the page to a single vowel (“1”) at the top. Contributing to the implicit speed of the aeronautic motif in “Vasia Kamensky’s Airplane Flight in Warsaw,’ Kamensky includes a wide variety of letter sizes and types, which fluctuate throughout the paintinglike poem to produce an unmistakable pictorial dynamism. For instance, the poem’s title, printed at the bottom of the page, appears to bounce about, for each letter differs in size and in position relative to adjacent letters. The poem also reflects speed’s distortional effects through its syntax and semantics, or lack thereof, for individ-

ual lines and words increasingly lose meaning as the airplane climbs higher into the sky. Initially presenting a series of aeronautic impressions, Kamensky accentuates preparations for the flight (“the aerodrome the crowd the mechanic fusses” is the third line from the bottom, as Kamensky inserts irregular spaces between the words and syllables) as well as a view of the land from the perspective of the ascending plane (“the stripes of fields are racing higher,’ the poet observes nearly midway up the poem,). But toward the top, comprehensible words and syntax ebb in accordance with the flight’s speed and distance from the earthbound viewer (“chu t’ eshch” reads the sixth to last line, as Kamensky breaks apart the phrase chut’ eshche, or “hardly yet”). Adding to the poem’s vanishing effect are four separate vertical strips of words formed through the atypical yet symmetrical spacing that merge into one at the top of the poem. Eventually all that remains are fragmented words and, in the end, a solitary letter, which can be construed as signifying the airplane as it disappears into the clouds. Kamensky has thus transformed language into a direct visual signifier of modern velocity, for the letter seemingly zooms off into the distance. Like “Vasia Kamensky’s Airplane Flight in Warsaw,” a majority of the poems from Kamensky’s Tango with Cows evoke the accelerated spirit of modernity via their highly pictorial, unorthodox structure. Although the title of the collection, along with the title poem “Tango with Cows,” suggests a rural orientation (Kamensky moved between the city and the countryside throughout his

career), mention of the tango—an extremely rhythmical dance that enjoyed widespread popularity in cities throughout Europe at this time—underscores the poet’s fascination with the era’s more fashionable manifestations of modern

The Accelerating Word 95 tempos.°” Several poems in the collection, for instance, “A Challenge,’ “The Cinema” (“Kinematograf”), and “Telephone No. 2b” (“Telefon No. 2b”), feature both an eclectic array of typographical forms and a semiabstract assortment of words that some critics have labeled “telegraphic” collage, given how the verse is fragmented, elliptical (words and letters are often missing from various verse lines), and similar in appearance to the modern telegram.®* Even more visually suggestive of dynamism are the collection’s six “ferroconcrete poems” (zhelezobetonnye poemy)—* Constantinople,” “The Cabaret Zone” (“Kabare zon”), “The S. I. Shchukin Palace” (“Dvorets S. I. Shchukina”’), “Nikitin’s Circus” (“Tsirk Nikitina”), “The Skating Rink” (“Sketing rin”), and “Bathhouses” (“Bani” )— that likewise impart Kamensky’s enthusiasm for the pace of modern life through their dynamic visual form and innovative typography. Using Marinetti-inspired typography in his “ferroconcrete poems,’ Kamen-

sky pictorially generated semiabstract impressions of the modern, fast-paced city. Labeled “ferroconcrete”—a new building material at the time—to emphasize the contemporary spirit and innovative composition of the verse, particularly its graphic resemblance to rapidly rising modern structures, Kamensky’s poems contain delineated spatial segments in which long lists of words (mostly nouns), printed in a vibrant array of typographical forms, render grammar, punctuation, and semantics unnecessary.” These vertical lists of nouns, or what contemporaneous critics called “futurist columns” (futuristicheskie stolbik1), pictorially support the buildinglike “ferroconcrete” structure of the poem. More-

over, the typography and semi-abstract arrangements of words constituting Kamensky’s “visual rhythms,’ as Anatoly Strigalev has characterized the interplay between picture and word in ferroconcrete verse, replicates the speed and excitement evident in the contemporary subject matter of virtually every poem included in the collection.” Rather than allow a conventional perusal of words on the page, Kamensky compels readers to participate viscerally in the era’s dynamism, as the act of reading becomes a swift visual progression through the various sections and semiabstract display of words, be it the various sections—or rooms—of a bathhouse or the halls of a private painting gallery. A proprioceptive sense of motion arises by means of the visual interplay between the poetry’s nonlinear structure and the diffusion of words, for Kamensky in essence replicates how a modern-day urban dweller might traverse the city (in this case Moscow) and visit its various sites. The ferroconcrete “Skating Rink” (color plate 1), which initially appeared (in a slightly varied form) in The First Journal of Russian Futurists, constitutes one of Kamensky’s more visually dynamic “poem-paintings” from Tango with Cows.

Here the poet describes a visit to the eponymous “Skating-rink,’ a popular

96 Avant-Garde Poetry in Motion roller-skating venue in Moscow at the time.’! Although one might surmise that the rink is for ice skating, the repetition of the letter “o” tilted on its side and

the prominence of the noun “rollers” (roliki) at the top of the poem indicate that Kamensky’s subject can only be roller-skating. Accordingly, the poem’s futurist columns appear to roll along, most notably in an angled section in the upper

left, where a diagonal column of words ascends from left to right (one alliterated section of the slanted column reads: “kroliki / roliki / kliki” [“rabbits / roller skates / screams” ]). A reflection of roller-skating’s excitement and energy, words virtually spin about the poem. Consisting of six separate sections that constitute different halls of the rollerskating venue, “Skating Rink” exudes a perceptible sense of hectic, rapid motion through its dynamic pictorial form, its unorthodox arrangement of words, and the contemporary motif of roller-skating. Throughout the roller-skating rink’s six sections, different speeds seem to materialize, conveyed through the visual structure of the poem and its scattered words: in a right-hand section of the rink, a graceful waltz (“val’s”) is played, for Kamensky’s selection of words and letters highlights a slow waltzing rhythm (the musical beat “t-ta-ta” is inserted into a column of words), while on the lower left a more intense, faster pace arises as dapper “gentlemen” (dzhentl’meny) in “dress-coat / gloves / tie” (frak / perchatki/ galstukh) dance the “tango.” In the poem’s center section, which includes explicit “movements” (dvizhenzia), the “electrified” atmosphere (Kamensky uses just the root “elektr”) of the roller-skating rink produces joyful “jumps” (podskoki) and “skips” (skok1) that are also evoked by the various words and typographical forms that appear to jump about the page. Seemingly disconnected “feet” (ogi) appear three times (accentuating the idea that people’s feet are in rapid motion), while in the bottom right corner, Kamensky cuts off a syllable of “[ci]garettes” ([pa] pirosy) and repeats the numeral “6” eight times in varied fonts, as if to emphasize that the fast, hectic rhythms of the roller-skating rink have made a jumble of the verse. Kamensky, evidently out to prove that verbs are not the only means of generating a sense of heightened activity, includes only one verb”—“Tiutsia’ (“they flow” )—in “Skating Rink,” yet the poem’s fast,

energetic nature is manifest. Through his various contemporary motifs, typography, and wide array of lexical items, Kamensky creates an unparalleled expression of dynamism, to which the reader, jumping among the strewn words in an attempt to make visual and semantic sense of the poem, must actively respond. While Kamensky’s ferroconcrete poetry, unlike Kruchenykh’s transrational verse, did not completely dispense with semantics, the pictorial arrangements of words and their conspicuous lack of syntax reflected a comparable urge toward

The Accelerating Word 97 nonrepresentational poetic forms and heightened linguistic freedom. Both Kamensky and Kruchenykh succeeded in establishing modes of swift, fleeting expression that rejected conventional lines of poetry for the sake of greater, faster expressivity. Indeed, the ferroconcrete poems (most of which appeared in Tango with Cows) represented yet another example of the “liberation of the word” from its customary stasis, as Kamensky’s hybrid fusion of painting and verse enabled words to function apart from their meaning and place in the sentence.”” Much like the wordless last page of the transrational “Poem of the End,” which Gnedov “recited” with a quick, silent swing of the arm, the ferroconcrete poems broadened the conceptual limits of futurist verse and its expression of modern dynamism, rigorously uniting the visual with the poetic. As if to underscore these poems’ semiabstract visual character, Kamensky exhibited his ferroconcrete “poem-paintings” at Larionov’s 1914 avant-garde exhibit No. 4, where cubist and nonfigurative rayist paintings hung on display, and at the Last Futurist Exhibit 0.10 (Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0.10), which in 1915 marked the beginning of pure—or “zero”—abstraction in avant-garde painting.

CO The visual orientation of Russia’s futurists undeniably bolstered the energetic tempo of their verse. Endowed with a visual authenticity, futurist poetry transported readers and viewers viscerally into an accelerated, aestheticized modern landscape in which the gaze was compelled to follow along with the linguistic dynamism. In the 1913 booklet The Word as Such, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov instructed poets and illustrators collaborating on cubo-futurist collections to aspire toward art “written and perceived in the twinkling of an eye!” (vo mgnovente oka!).’> For Kruchenykh, readers’ perceptions of transrational poetry required instantaneous ocular attention to the written word, just as Kamensky prompted his readers to shift their gaze between letters and words and to move quickly through the delineated pictorial sections of his ferroconcrete poems. Visual engagement—of a very fast variety—with the unconventional forms of futurist poetry would transform readers into active participants who could then make the imaginative leap into the abstract aesthetics underlying futurism’s speed. Whether the rapid upward thrust into the sky of Kamensky’s Tango with Cows, the limitless possibilities of Kruchenykh’s zaum’, the apocalyptic chaos of Mayakovsky’s urban verse, or the blank, wordless nonobjectivity of Gnedov’s “Poem of the End,” Russian futurist poetry expanded readers’ visual and conceptual understanding of modern dynamism and its nonrepresentational essence. As their avant-garde counterparts in painting would also do, Russia’s futurist poets conceptually propelled audiences toward abstraction.

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PART 2

Visual Arts of Acceleration

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Light Speed Rayism in Russia

n September 1913 Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, and a small group

| of fellow avant-garde artists rebelliously dispensed with the traditional canvas. Establishing an unusually personal expression of modern dynamism, Larionov and his colleagues applied futurist designs to their own faces and bodies. These were not tattoos but rather removable images that the artists produced for their cheeks, foreheads, chests, and others prominent spots on the body. Adorned with their own artwork, the face painters would set out on foot through the streets of Moscow, causing a stir wherever they strolled. A bold affront to convention, this active, confrontational art form of face and body painting signaled an unusually vivid, corporeal approach to modernity’s pace. Russian avant-garde art had literally been set in motion. In “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto” (“Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: Manifest futuristov”), published in a December 1913 issue of the St. Petersburg magazine Argus, Larionov and his colleague Ilya Zdanevich accen-

tuated the modern, dynamic spirit of their physical art form. Comparing face painting to the flux of images witnessed daily on city streets, the two artists wrote: “We paint ourselves for [only] an hour ... a change of experience calls for a change of painting, just as picture devours picture, when on the other side of a car windshield shop windows flash by running into each other: that’s our faces.”! For Larionov and Zdanevich, face and body painting represented a new way to keep up with the urban kaleidoscope of fleeting impressions. “Our faces,” Larionov and Zdanevich explained, “are like the screech of the trolley warning the hurrying passersby, like the drunken sounds of the great tango.” Attempt-

ing to express the rhythms of modern life, the face painters fused themselves and their art with the city’s rapid pace.’ In addition to four photographs of the “painted” artists displayed alongside 101

102 Visual Arts of Acceleration the treatise “Why We Paint Ourselves,’ several detailed sketches of the face and body designs also appeared. One sketch, described as suitable for a woman’s chest, featured a mix of diagonal lines, swirls, undulating curves, crosshatching, letters, numbers, and short, expressive strokes, all arranged at a sharp diagonal to express a vivid sense of hectic motion. An arrow in the top right pointing upward further underscored the impression of abundant energy by lending the image an implicit trajectory. Two other designs, designated for the left and the right cheek, respectively, and each described by its caption as “a sign signifying a person’s link to urban construction,’ included the number 8, musical notes, and letters (such as an incorrect spelling of the Russian word for “idea”), ele-

ments that linked the face painting to the concurrent trend of transrational poetry.’ Evoking speed and noise through visual means, all three designs dramatically conveyed the dynamism of urban existence.° Larionov and Zdanevich’s 1913 article for Argus included one more drawing: a nonfigurative pattern of thin overlapping diagonal lines that appeared to race both across the page and through space in a momentary, energetic fashion. Drawn by Larionov and described in the Argus caption as “rayist” (luchisty1), the illustration’s nonfigurative lines and their multiple points of intersection resembled fast-moving bursts of light. The image, essentially abstract, exuded speed through its composition. Like the face and body paintings, Larionov’s rayist drawing signified a concerted attempt to capture, albeit in one frozen pictorial moment, a rush of spontaneous energy. Formulated by Larionov in the summer and fall of 1912 and lasting as a cohesive movement until 1914, rayism (or in Russian, /uchizm) encapsulated many of the aims of the Moscow face painters.° Indeed, the aesthetic celebration of urban dynamism and its rapid tempo did not simply fade with the removal of paint from the artists’ torsos. The rayist movement, to which most of the face painters belonged, offered colorful arrangements of clashing, diagonal rays to create on the static canvas the impression of bright light interpenetrating multiple spatial planes and rays emanating at an unprecedented pace from ordinary objects and their environment.’ Expanding on the Italian futurists’ depiction of violent, urban speed, the rayists explored the way a modern understanding of motion, particularly one based on the recently quantified speed of light, challenged conventional perceptions of reality.’ The desire to render the era’s unparalleled pace in general, and the speed of rays (light rays, X-rays, radioactive rays, and ultraviolet rays) in particular, led the rayists well beyond recognizable everyday images toward a cosmic state of flux—what some, including Larionov, classified as the pseudo-scientific, metaphysical fourth dimension—that they replicated through their chaotic arrangement of rays and distorted forms.’

Rayism in Russia 103 Although the rays depicted on the rayist canvas resembled the “lines of force” (linee-forzi) that Italian futurists used to elicit the impression of speed vibrating off moving objects and people, Larionov and Goncharova—along with other rayists such as Aleksandr Shevchenko, Morits Fabri, and Viacheslav Levkievsky— strove to create an art form that superseded expropriation and stylization. The rayists accentuated the Russian core of their art—particularly through neoprim-

itivist motifs and a metaphysical sensibility evident in their allusions to the fourth dimension—while using color and texture to create a physical yet increas-

ingly abstract evocation of speed.'° Attempting to “bear man’s multiple soul to the upper reaches of reality,’ as Larionov and Zdanevich wrote in the facepainting manifesto, the rayists gradually dissolved all discernable objects in a blur of numinous dynamism." The rayists envisioned their nonfigurative aesthetic ushering in a transformation of ordinary existence. Citing the interchangeability of art with daily life (“Art for life and even more—life for art!”) in “Rayists and Futurists: A Manifesto,’ Larionov and Goncharova accentuated rayism’s ties to modern existence: “We exclaim: the whole brilliant style of modern times—our trousers, jackets, shoes, trolleys, cars, airplanes, railways, grandiose steamships—is fascinating, is a great epoch, one that has known no equal in the entire history of the world.’ The rayists drew directly from the speeding symbols of modernity, replicating the abundant energy of contemporary life found in such popular activities as sports and the circus, while they also channeled this dynamism toward a spiritualized vision of the world, expanding the parameters of modern existence into an abstract realm. Rayism was thus both physical and metaphysical. Like the face and body painters, the rayists pushed art into and beyond modern life, expressing the pace of the city while unveiling speed’s cosmic potential.

CO In this first of two chapters devoted to the treatment of speed in Russian avantgarde art, I focus primarily on the expressive images of dynamism found in Larionov and Goncharova’s paintings between 1910 and 1915. Both Larionov, the main

proponent and practitioner of rayism, and his close companion Goncharova quickly emerged at this time as leading painters of the Russian avant-garde, vying with several other artists, most notably Malevich and Tatlin, in their efforts to shape the development of modern art in Russia.'* Following an initial period of neo-impressionism in the early 1900s, Larionov and Goncharova formulated rayism alongside two other concurrent trends in Russian avant-garde

art: cubo-futurism and neoprimitivism.'* Cubo-futurism, embraced by both painters and poets alike, fused cubism’s fragmented forms and simultaneous

104 Visual Arts of Acceleration perspectives on a single static object with futurism’s emphasis on rapid movement. Whereas cubo-futurism represented a forward-looking, modern aesthetic, neoprimitivism turned in the opposite direction, toward Russia’s past. The neoprimitivists, most of whom were also cubo-futurists, promoted a simplified, often semifigurative style stemming from Russia’s native art, such as the icon and /ubok (a popular print or woodcut). Despite their divergent impulses, however, cubo-futurism, neoprimitivism, and rayism were all elaborately intertwined for Larionov, Goncharova, and their close colleague Shevchenko.'° A series of avant-garde exhibitions between 1912 and 1914 highlighted the aesthetic proximity of cubo-futurism, neoprimitivism, and rayism. Beginning with the December 1912 World of Art (Mir iskusstva) exhibition and continuing through two exhibits organized by Larionov—the Target (Misher’ ) exhibition in 1913 and, a year later, the one titled No. 4—rayist paintings frequently appeared alongside cubo-futurist and neoprimitivist work. These exhibitions and the wide

variety of work Larionov and his colleagues offered at them effectively united the movements of cubo-futurism, neoprimitivism, and rayism, providing the practical basis for a concept of art the rayists would label “everythingism.” “Everythingism” (vsechestvo) denoted an artistic amalgamation of styles and

periods, a concept that the rayists underscored by synthesizing an array of tendencies in an increasingly abstract fashion.'* As Larionov, Goncharova, and Shevchenko alternated between crude neoprimitivist forms, cubist fragmentation, the modern motif of physical movement, and rayist notions of the fourth dimension, speed arose as a key unifying principle. PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE: NEOPRIMITIVE AND CUBO-FUTURIST DYNAMISM

In a 1913 public address on the avant-garde concept of everythingism, Ilya Zdane-

vich asserted, “With progress and with the increasing pace of developments, styles change faster and faster, rising and falling hourly. ... Our era is replete with the blending of styles, their transience, their theories, and the specialization of art. For our time is one of speed and progress, dizzying and impatient.” The modern era’s pace, Zdanevich suggested, had erased sharp distinctions between artistic styles and schools. As if to prove Zdanevich’s point and take it considerably further, Russia’s cubo-futurists not only fused various styles of Western and Russian art but also used a blend of the old and the new to convey elements of this contemporary pace on the static canvas. By evoking the past, the present, and the future in their work, cubo-futurists painters like Larionov, Goncharova, and Shevchenko discovered effective forms of modern speed. With

“everythingism” blurring the distinction of various time periods, avant-garde

Rayism in Russia 105 painters’ attention to both the nationalist, rural spirit of neoprimitivism and modernist techniques from the West came through in the visual excitement and dynamism of their cubo-futurist and rayist work. At atime when cubist and futurist trends were developing throughout Europe, Russian avant-garde artists seized on elements of the country’s primitive art. In December 1910, for instance, Larionov, Goncharova, and the poet/painter David Burliyuk organized the first Jack of Diamonds (Bubnovyi valet) exhibi-

tion, a show that highlighted the Russian avant-garde’s emerging interest in neoprimitivist aesthetics.'® Although the term “neoprimitivism” did not come into existence until 1913, the Jack of Diamonds exhibition provided Larionov and Goncharova a venue for some of their first so-called neoprimitivist works.” Here, for instance, Larionov exhibited his initial “Soldiers” series, several paint-

ings and drawings based on the artist’s own military service, in which he employed conspicuous elements of Russia’s primitive art, most notably a flat two-dimensionality (as opposed to a typical three-dimensional effect) and crude sraffiti-like lettering associated with the Russian !ubok, mass-produced prints and woodcuts that enjoyed great popularity throughout Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” In March 1913 Larionov put together the Exhibition of Original Icon Paintings and Lubki (Vystavka original’nykh ikon 1 lubkov),

which featured more than one hundred old Russian icons from as early as the fourteenth century, various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century /ubki, and numerous examples of primitive art from the Far East. A distinctively Slavic, Eastern artistic sensibility, Larionov attempted to show, could be gleaned from Russia’s past. Larionov, Goncharova, and Shevchenko, along with other avant-garde paint-

ers such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Marc Chagall, realized that the nonmimetic flatness and figural distortion found in the Russian icon, the ubok, and other primitive art forms such as signboards (wooden shop signs featuring pictures to accommodate illiterate Russians) could significantly enhance modernday art through its semifigurative treatment of visual reality.’' In particular, the icon’s flat, two-dimensional plane, coupled with its lofty, religious basis and nontraditional reverse perspective—where all lines of perspective project out to the viewer instead of, as was the rule in Western religious art, inward to a focal point within the image—contributed to the neoprimitivists’ belief that these ancient depictions of an ideal spiritual realm harbored a unique Slavic aesthetic.” Exploring ideas that anticipated his subsequent nonrepresentational work, Larionov argued that abstraction constituted a definitive trait of the Russian icon.” The Russian icon painters,’ Larionov writes, “were boldly led towards an important abstraction. ... The beauty and finesse of the drawing of these

106 Visual Arts of Acceleration stylized forms and the fascinating abstract harmony aspire to render the world of beyond.”?? Goncharova, meanwhile, would go even further than Larionov in embracing Russia’s religious and rural artistic traditions, for instance, in numerous works depicting peasant life or in her 1914 series Mystical Images of War (Misticheskie obrazy voiny), lithograph drawings that combined Russian past and European present through apocalyptic religious imagery of death, destruction, and redemption. To be sure, appreciation of earlier cultures was not unique to the Russian avant-garde. In the initial decades of the twentieth century, with modernism in full swing, artists across Europe regarded the incorporation of a primitive aesthetic into contemporary art as an extremely effective means for overcoming the stagnating conventions and techniques of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. A certain timelessness and freedom—a tabula rasa—that modern painters,

poets, and musicians found intrinsic to primitive art ignited a new spirit of experimentation with painterly forms and the spatial attributes of the canvas. Whether Gauguin’s use of Polynesian art, the French Fauvists’ bright, bold colors and coarse brushstrokes, or Picasso’s cubist appropriation of African art, modernists in the West found inspiration in primitive cultures and their inherent remove from the established conventions of the day. Although neoprimitivism would hardly seem reflective of the era’s pace, attention to the simplified neoprimitivist forms affected and in some ways amplified modernist forms of dynamism. In emulating primitive art’s incomplete, nonmimetic depiction of space and form, as well as its vibrant colors, painters could obtain valuable creative principles and techniques for fostering the impression of motion in their work. The often imperfect appearance of primitive art and what Ernst Gombrich has described as its “disregard for what we call the real appearance of things” could, in fact, elicit a sense of movement.*4 The incompleteness of a primitive painting or sculpture often initiates a dynamic response to the art, for a missing detail or an imperfect use of perspective challenges long-held viewing habits, requiring spectators to compensate by swiftly fusing their fragmented perceptions of a primitive image.” Elsewhere Gombrich suggests that a primitive work of art’s “incompleteness becomes an indi-

cation of the painter’s hurry, of his own preoccupation with time, which is contagious.’”° The audience, following the artist’s lead, makes a quick intuitive leap, actively inferring a complete, integrated image out of the fragments presented in the work of art. Promoting these and other elements of primitive cul-

ture, avant-garde artists had at their disposal techniques through which they could evoke and explore modern dynamism. Rayism, although closely linked to futurism, preserved distinct elements of

Rayism in Russia 107 Russia's native culture and rural, primordial essence in its elicitation of the era’s dynamism. Just as the underlying premise of neoprimitivism hinged on a return to a simplified aesthetic and a rejection of the West’s accumulated artistic conventions, rayist painting arose from a desire to reevaluate accepted methods of perceiving reality. Indeed, with rayism Larionov claimed to be painting an object “not as we know it, but as we see it.”””? Despite explicit parallels between their seemingly fast-moving rays and Italian futurism’s “lines of force,’ Larionov and Goncharova (who, like the cubo-futurist poets, resisted the Western term “futurists,” using instead the Russian term budushchniki, a neologism—quite close to the cubo-futurist poets’ budetliane—derived from the Russian word for “future”) fashioned their movement to reveal Russia’s independence from the West and proximity to the East. “Long live the beautiful East! ... Long live nationality! ... Long live the style of rayist painting that we created—free from

concrete forms, existing and developing accordingly to painterly laws,’ the rayists declared in their first manifesto.”* Rayism, like neoprimitivism, offered

the avant-garde the means to break with convention and to develop a new dynamic aesthetic according to painterly laws unburdened by long-standing Western custom. Neoprimitivism and rayism intersected in more-specific, technical ways. Just as a spiritual, otherworldly illumination permeates the icon, a single, specific

light source—prevalent in art since the Renaissance—disappears in rayist paintings, giving way to a diffuse radiance.”? Accordingly, the human eye’s perception of light rays emerged as a subject of marked interest to the rayists: “We do not sense the object with our eye. ... We perceive a sum of rays proceeding from a source of light; these are reflected from the object and enter our field of

vision, Larionov wrote in “Rayist Painting.’*° Inspired in part by the nonmimetic rendering of light found in Russian icons, Larionov’s rayist work constituted a rigorous attempt to show the heightened velocity of light rays. Even the manner in which rayists depicted their ubiquitous rays arguably harkens back to the Russian icon. In many Russian icons, gold hatched lines provide the distinct contours and folds in the garments of saints. Know as assists, these sharp diagonal lines (referred to as “lines of energy” by one prominent scholar of Russian Orthodoxy) lent icons a distinct liveliness that might possibly (though not definitively) be seen as presaging the dynamic rays in Larionov and Goncharova’s paintings.*! While Italian futurism’s “lines of force” in many ways prefigured the speeding lines of rayism, ancient Russian icons provided a dynamic,

neoprimitivist precedent for rayism that facilitated the artists’ urge to distinsuish their work from the West’s.*” A rayist “farmyard” triptych produced by Larionov between 1912 and 1913

108 Visual Arts of Acceleration thematically exemplifies the neoprimitivist basis of rayism. In the “farmyard” rayist painting Rooster and Hen (Petukh 1 kuritsa, 1912— color plate 2), for instance, Larionov depicts a pair of fowl in full, colorful flight to generate a blend of rural, neoprimitivist subject matter and modern, dynamic rays. In this oilon-canvas work, diagonal rays abound, forming the yellow and red plumage of the central cock, which appears to race downward past the viewer. The eponymous hen, by contrast, has virtually vanished amid the rapid diagonals and indistinct rays in the background, underscoring how speed gives rise to visual instability and indefiniteness. The bird’s hurried flight becomes a blur of rays. Rather than depicting an airplane, one of futurism’s most conspicuous symbols, or a fast, aerodynamic bird (such as the swifts featured in several paintings by the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla), Larionov has chosen as his subject a farmyard fowl that cannot even fly great distances.** In an ironic manner typical for the artist, Larionov suggests that Russian images of speed need not stem solely from new technology or streamlined natural forms.*4 Goncharova, like Larionov, often chose rayist motifs more inherently primitive, or at least rural, than overtly modern. Forests, flowers, and animals constitute the subject matter of almost all her rayist paintings. Accordingly, Goncharova produced a series of rayist paintings in which a primordial spirit permeates the natural landscape, lending the dynamic display of rays an elemental quality running counter to the contemporary thrust of rayism. In Goncharova’s Yellow and Green Forest: Rayist Construction (Zhelto-zelenyi les: Luchistaia konstruktsi1a, 1913—color plate 3), for instance, through the use of vivid color and paint of a noticeably thick texture, the forest’s dense vegetation comes alive in a burst of rays. A tree dominates the center of the canvas, while prismatic lines and patches of bright color—such as yellow foliage on the left and thick strips of dark blue in the background—contribute to the impression that the entire sylvan landscape is in motion. As in other rayist “forests” produced by Goncharova, the woods appear lifelike and full of energy, while the bursts of rays lend the painting a semirepresentational essence, as if the abundant motion renders the organic natural forms abstract. Shevchenko, who developed his own neoprimitivist style alongside Larionov and Goncharova, accentuated the icon’s “flowing color,’ a technique that involved

the application of diluted colors to everything but the thickly painted faces and garments of figures in the icons.* “Life without movement is nothing,” Shevchenko declared in a neoprimitivist manifesto from 1913, “and therefore we always

aspire not to enslave the forms of objects on one plane, but to impart movement to them by means of the depiction of intermediate forms.’*° Neoprimitivism’s “intermediate forms,” Shevchenko suggested, bridged the gap between

Rayism in Russia 109 the static, “enslaved” two-dimensional images of painting and the dynamism of everyday life. In Shevchenko’s 1913 painting Musicians (Muzykanty—fig. 3),

which was reprinted in Shevchenko’s neoprimitivist manifesto (accompanied by the subtitle “The primitive with signs of futurism. The repetition of forms and their movement. The movement of color in its repetitive coloring.”), a combination of simplified neoprimitivist forms and repeated, dynamic lines conveys the rhythm and energy of melodies produced by two standing musicians (a man playing the violin and a woman on the harp, both of whom are virtually enveloped by the music). Although not a scene of explicit speed, the painting

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FIGURE 4. Natalya Goncharova, Airplane over a Train, 1913. Oil on canvas. Kazan Fine Art Museum, Republic of Tatarstan. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Rayism in Russia 113 of the aircraft, as if the entire scene and its spatial parameters are in flux. Spanning the length of the entire train, the airplane’s wings dominate the upper half of the painting. These wings, transparent in certain spots, appear as if in multiple positions in the sky while the train, church, and clouds burst through in contiguous planes in front of the airplane. On the ground, the landscape is even more visually active: the locomotive is rendered in fragmented form, occupy-

ing various spatial planes of the foreground and middle ground as the front two wheels of the locomotive assume a foremost position while the front of the locomotive itself proceeds off to the left and the trailing train cars file along in the center of the canvas. Above hangs another wheel of the locomotive, evidently detached from the rest of the train. These illogical spatial shifts in Airplane over a Train allow Goncharova to replicate the destabilization of figurative reality caused by modernity’s most rapid modes of transportation, which transform the visible world into a blur of fleeting images. Goncharova intensified her focus on modern motion’s distortion of space and image in The Cyclist ( Velosipedist, 1913—fig. 5). Here a lone man is portrayed

pedaling along a city street past store windows and various shop signs. Shown alongside Airplane over a Train at Goncharova’s 1913 solo show, The Cyclist fea-

tures cubo-futurist shifts as well as dynamic pictorial elements borrowed from Italian futurism. Spatial displacement occurs as a street grating stands vertically on the street, cobblestones protrude through the front wheel of the bicycle, and the Russian letters nit (as in nitka, “thread”) appear over the body of the bicyclist, the letters having visually “shifted” from the storefront onto the bicyclist. In a shop sign on the left a large hand points to the right (in the opposite direction of the bicyclist), evoking a visual clash of contradictory motions. In the foreground, Goncharova renders the cyclist’s legs and torso, as well as the entire landscape, in dynamic flux by depicting the moving bicycle and bicyclist in multiplied form (i.e., numerous legs are shown to create the impression of quick pedaling), the repeated outlines appearing as rapid vibrations. Goncharova’s use of this repeated delineation of a figure to convey the hurried motion of the bicyclist as well as the jarring bumpiness of the ride (the bicyclist proceeds over a cobblestone street) is further amplified by broad, expressive brush strokes.*! Using shifts, repeated images, and animated brushwork, Goncharova conveys the way the bicyclist’s rapid progression distorts a typical view of the city. The cubist concept of passage, much like the shift, proved crucial to the cubofuturists’ attempts to fuse the subject matter of their works with its dynamic environment. A French term, passage was achieved in painting through the artist’s blurring of spatial planes, a diminution of well-defined contour, or a conspicuous

114 Visual Arts of Acceleration

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Museum, St. Petersburg. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

reduction of depth to undermine the distinction between a painting’s background and foreground. Using passage, cubists deemphasized the subject matter of their paintings, as they allowed the entire canvas to function in equal measure to content. In cubism, the painted object increasingly blends into its background and surroundings. Although the cubists applied passage to their painting of static objects, the technique possessed enormous potential for Russian cubofuturists in that it could convey the fusion of spatial planes resulting from the

eradication of rigid demarcation between a moving object and the object’s dynamic environment. Cubo-futurist painters utilized passage as they sought to illustrate how dynam-

ism could envelope objects and figures on the static canvas.” In the cubofuturist Portrait of V. Tatlin (Portret V. Tatlina, 1913), for instance, Larionov highlights the fusion of Tatlin’s figure with an array of fragmented lines emanating from and across his head and torso. Diagonal lines, suggestive of rayism,

Rayism in Russia 115 obscure the body, while crystal-like crosshatching (especially evident on Tatlin’s chest) similarly enhances Larionov’s passage. The obscured forms and striking

lines, along with various letters and numbers scattered about the canvas, render the environment in an active flux that partially envelopes the figure of Tatlin, who accordingly merges with his dynamic surroundings. Arguably assuming the pose of a saint, Tatlin appears as if in an icon, enveloped in light. While hardly

a direct evocation of speed, Portrait of V. Tatlin nevertheless shows how the human figure could virtually merge with the light and dynamism of the modern environment. Another apt example of “everythingism,” this Tatlin portrait effectively unites not only its Western and Russians influences but also cubist stasis and futurist speed, as Larionov lends the genre of portraiture a dynamism and

ephemeral quality that would prevail throughout much of his rayist work. THE SPEEDING BoDy

“With the first goal scored we are the victors,” Larionov and Zdanevich asserted in “Why We Paint Ourselves,’ trumpeting their victory over the “menials of the earth” steadfastly defending the “goalposts” of tradition.** In addition to serv-

ing as a triumphal assertion of successful attempts to go beyond established convention, this metaphor and the face painters’ accompanying comparison of themselves to runners (“we're off and the track awaits the runners”) underscore the prominence athletics enjoyed at this time, among both the public at large and avant-garde artists.** Sports, in fact, represented a patent manifestation of the era’s dynamism, for success in athletics, in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century, typically requires (and rewards) speed; through explicit training of the human body, the athlete increases her pace and timing. Be it face and body painting, a continual privileging of athletics in avant-garde art, or a broader accent on quick, efficient motion, heightened awareness of the human body and its speed helped shape cubo-futurist art, reflecting the Russian

avant-garde’s commitment to evolutionary human progress and the utopian ideal of the perfect human. The body of the future “new man” had to be fast. Sports, along with other highly active modern pastimes like the circus and dancing (e.g., the tango), grew in popularity throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, with the Modern Olympic Games commencing in 1896, and soccer, tennis, and a host of other athletic activities spreading throughout Europe. As the popularity of sports increased, painters seized on athletic competition and activity as a mode of creativity and a theme. Marinetti, for one, extolled “the passion, art, and idealism of Sport,’ while Boccioni produced a number of works devoted to athleticism, for instance, Dynamism of a Soccer Player ( Dinamismo di un footballer) and Dynamism of a Cyclist (Dinamismo di un ciclista),

116 Visual Arts of Acceleration paintings from 1913 that both feature a blur of fast athletic movement.* By the second decade of the century, soccer players, bicyclists, aviators, and other types of athletes had all become fertile subject matter for artists fascinated by the pri-

mal physicality of sports and their inherent suggestion of enhanced human capacities. Also, the ideal of sports presupposed a social ethos with distinctly utopian connotations: through its emphasis on health, active competition, and camaraderie, organized sports in modern society would create, some believed, a cohesive, lively populace; athletics, typically oriented toward excellence and lofty achievement, were evidence that human beings, like technology, could develop and progress quickly, keeping pace with modern technology and its evolving dynamism. In a theoretical discussion of sports and their popularity in modern culture, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has explored how “body transformation” and a refashioning of human corporeality constitute one of our key “fascinations” with athletics.*° Sports, Gumbrecht emphasizes, allow for an evolutionary reworking of the body that has long fascinated aficionados of athletics. A spirit of transfiguration (Gumbrecht’s term) intrinsic to athleticism indeed permeated avant-garde art devoted to sports, for here the body and its potential dynamism represented a conspicuous manifestation of futurist ideals and the futurists’ vision of a faster, stronger human race. In his “Destruction of Syntax” manifesto, Marinetti touted the art and idealism of sports, and as John Bowlt has noted in his discussion of the avant-garde’s “aspiration to redesign the human body and create a perfect physique,’ various Russian artists at the time revealed a fascination with corporeality that celebrated not only the body’s physical attributes, but also its powerful internal essence and, in the 1920s, its increasingly machinelike qualities.” As early as 1908, Russian avant-garde painting showed signs of this new fascination with sports and strength. Consider, for instance, Ilya Mashkov’s SelfPortrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky ( Avtoportret 1 portret Konchalovskogo, 1910),

which depicts the painter and his colleague Pyotr Konchalovsky (also an artist) as two weightlifters proudly displaying their musculature, a clear manifestation of the avant-garde’s growing preoccupation with the athletic body.** Concurrently, Goncharova devoted several of her neoprimitivist and cubo-futurist canvases to contemporary athletics.” At her 1913 solo exhibition, Goncharova displayed the neoprimitivist Wrestlers ( Bortsy, 1908-9), along with The Boat Race (Gonki grebtsov), Skating (Sketing), Football (Futbol), and Swimmers (Plovtsy), all painted between 1911 and 1913. These works, featuring an overt celebration of physicality, presaged Goncharova’s more mature cubo-futurist work, such as The Cyclist, in which physical motion, implicitly fast, prevailed. Even in a wide range of neoprimitivist paintings (e.g., The Harvesting of the Wheat | Uborka

PLATE 1. Vasily Kamensky, “Skating Rink,” 1914. Ferroconcrete poem in Tango with Cows.

Wallpaper cover with letterpress typographic design, 18.9 x 19.2 cm. Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

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PLATE 2. Mikhail Larionov, The Farm: Rooster and Hen, 1912. Oil on canvas, 68.8 X 65 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGBP, Paris.

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PLATE 6. Kazimir Malevich, Airplane Flying (Suprematism), 1915. Oil on canvas, 58.1 X 48.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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© 2009, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Rayism in Russia 117 khleba, 1908| and The Woodchopper | Drovokol, 1910] ), Goncharova highlighted

physical (i.e., manual) labor and showed peasants as they toiled away, using their bodies in an efficient, harmonious fashion. According to a telling account by the poet Marina Tsvetayeva (a close acquaintance of the painter), Goncharova declared, “The principle of motion for the machine and the living being is the same. And you know, all the joy of my work is to reveal the equilibrium of motion.”°° This urge to render modern movement pervaded much of Goncharova’s art, from neoprimitivist scenes showing peasants hard at work to cubofuturist and rayist paintings in which human figures function synchronously, and often athletically, with machinery and the urban world. While Larionov less frequently depicted athletic activities, a conspicuous physicality similar to that found in Goncharova’s work permeates a number of his neoprimitivist and cubo-futurist paintings. In addition to Larionov’s Portrait of Vladimir Burliyuk (Portret Vladimira Burliuka, 1908), in which the physically

imposing artist Vladimir Burliyuk (well known for his strength and fitness) holds a dumbbell, The Dancers ( Tantsuiushchie, 1909), Quarrel in a Tavern (Ssora v kabachke, 1911), and Boulevard Venus all feature displays of physical human

activity and dynamism that link the neoprimitivism of The Dancers and Quarrelin a Tavern to the cubo-futurist aesthetic of Boulevard Venus.*! He also produced the small work Female Acrobat ( Acrobatka, 1913) for The Donkey’s Tail and Target. A less physical but nevertheless athletic image also appears in one of Lar-

ionovs illustrations for Bolshakov’s long poem Le Futur, where Larionov has drawn, along with a tangle of dynamic raylike lines, a small bicycle over the right cheek of his central female figure, who is implicitly a prostitute. As in Goncharova’s Cyclist, the modern athletic apparatus of the bicycle is a symbol of the city’s dynamism, now superimposed over the body of another icon of urban life. As a corollary to sports, the circus likewise arose at the turn of century as a prominent form of action-filled, physical entertainment. Here wrestlers, acrobats, and clowns performed and competed, drawing on their well-honed athleticism to captivate audiences.** Quite appropriately, in Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Female Rider (Naezdnitsa, 1913—color plate 5) the rapid, intoxicating movement of a female circus performer riding bareback dominates the canvas.** The circus, which, like modern sports, captured the imagination and close attention of artists at the beginning of the 1900s (most notably in the work of the poet Kamensky), appears in Shevchenko’s painting as the site of ceaseless, semiabstract dynamism and highly physical entertainment. Capturing the spirit of the circus through “everythingism,’ Shevchenko blends elements of cubo-futurism, neoprimitivism, and rayism by highlighting repeated dynamic forms, scattered lettering, ray-like diagonal lines, and vibrant colors (bright pink and yellow),

118 Visual Arts of Acceleration which all merge to create a vivid, semi-abstract moment of exciting circus action.

The female rider, who appears to gyrate on top of her horse, moves quickly through the circus arena, proceeding past the audience and other attractions that are barely discernible within the indistinct background. The entire circus atmosphere has become a blur of rapid motion. As the indistinct female figure of Shevchenko’s Rider suggests, the cubofuturist focus on the movement of athletes and circus performers paradoxically accompanied the dissolution and fragmentation of the human body on the cubo-futurist canvas. Like the self-sufficient, transrational word in cubofuturist poetry or the words in Kamensky’s “poem-paintings” devoted to modern, motion-filled activities like aviation and the circus, the fast moving human

form was losing its distinct representational form and corporeality in avantgarde painting. Sports celebrated the body, yet the speed of sports, among other factors, gradually rendered this body immaterial. As a trend that would continue in the work of Malevich, whose designs for the opera Victory over the Sun included costumes for athletes and whose nonobjective, suprematist work referenced both soccer and aviation, sports bolstered a move away from corporeality that characterized much of the avant-garde’s work at this time.*4 Even paintings not addressing modern sports per se—for instance, many of the rayist paintings—conveyed this dissolution of the human body, as figures seemed to vanish from the canvas, transformed into nonfigurative matter. The shift away from corporeality was particularly evident in the rayist work

of Larionov and Goncharova. Engulfed in a blur of speeding rays and light, human figures in rayism seem to gradually lose their familiar shape, merging with their dynamic surroundings. The material forms of rayism virtually fuse with the flux of diagonal rays as ubiquitous dynamism destabilizes the rigid contours of both objects and figures. Conveying the “ceaseless and intense drama

of the rays that constitute the unity of all things,’ Larionov saw the transformation of physical bodies into light rays as symbolizing a new phase in modern art’s progression from an imitative medium into a vibrant, abstract form of artistic expression.*° Rendering the material body translucent, the energetic rayist lines constituted an increasingly nonfigurative embodiment of modern dynamism.°° A series of rayist portraits produced by Larionov and Goncharova between 1912 and 1914, in addition to capturing the lively interplay between human be-

ings and their dynamic surroundings, allowed rayists to document the fusion of living material with an environment saturated by light and speed. As in the cubo-futurist Portrait of V. Tatlin, Larionov presented the human face and body disappearing amid a vortex of rays; this is particularly evident in Portrait of a

Rayism in Russia 119 Fool (Portret duraka, 1912), another of the paintings comprising Larionov’s ray-

ist “farmyard” triptych.*’ Only the intersection of dark lines in this predominantly blue painting suggests the rough outline of a human figure. Somewhat larger than most of Larionov’s rayist works, Portrait of a Fool features a conspicuous displacement of spatial planes and an array of fractured segments. The layered planes, more than the rays themselves, outline a human visage, while the fractured blue shapes resemble shards of glass that reflect active bursts of light.°®

Rayist portraiture would ultimately render the human figure superfluous. In the drawing Rayist Portrait of Natalya Goncharova (Luchisty1 portret Natal’1 Goncharovot, 1913—fig. 6), which Larionov produced for Mikhail Matyushin’s avant-garde almanac A Hatchery of Judges II (Sadok sudei II, 1913), short diagonal lines, cross-hatching, and various bursts of clustered rays offer virtually no indication of any portrait. Larionov has created an abstract rayist portrait of Goncharova, substituting lines and expressive brush strokes for a delineated, identifiable head and body. The dynamic lines and brush strokes, however, exude more vitality than any faithful figurative rendition of Goncharova could ever do. As with Portrait of a Fool, the viewer is prompted by the painting’s title to search for a human shape amid the dynamic pattern of rays and abrupt brush strokes, but to no avail. Larionov’s nonfigurative portrait of his wife resembles, if anything, Goncharova’s own Head of a Clown (Golova klouna, 1913), a drawing that similarly presents human physiognomy in an abstract, unfamiliar fashion. Amid Goncharova’s display of sharp diagonal rays and linear shapes that seemingly race through this drawing, energetic lines and forms render the clown’s head indiscernible, which, like Larionov’s portraits, reflects the rayists’ shift toward nonobjective forms. The avant-garde development of nonfigurative portraiture, which similarly prevailed in the work of Malevich (e.g., the cubo-futurist Head of Peasant Girl | Golova krest’1ansko1 devushkt, 1913] ), Lyubov Popova, and others, represented a

significant avant-garde trend at the time, a point accentuated by the composer, painter, and theorist Matyushin in a 1926 discussion of prevailing tendencies in modern art. Here Matyushin argued that his avant-garde contemporaries had produced nonfigurative portraits that revealed a subject’s interior world, where “the vibration of life is stronger and life moves faster” than in recognizable visual reality.°? As Matyushin contended, these contemporaries innovatively rendered physical form unnecessary for a penetrating exploration of human subjects. Modern art, Matyushin emphasized, “reveals the inner world of all semblances and brings to life that which the ordinary eye neither sees nor apprehends.”® Indeed, with their portraiture and depiction of rays, Larionov and

120 Visual Arts of Acceleration

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Goncharova attempted to delve into a reality far removed from the traditional view of everyday reality and human physiognomy. In accordance with this new, penetrating view of the inner human world, Matyushin emphasized how audiences might also strive, in an athletic sense, to uncover a latent dynamism in what they see.°' Evoking the physical spirit of modern athletics through a set of instructions for viewers of avant-garde art, Matyushin proposed overcoming “the inertia of vision” with “an extremely useful gymnastic exercise for the eyes.” This exercise entailed spectators placing

Rayism in Russia 121 one hand over their eyes while looking straight ahead into the distance. By shifting their eyes from afar onto their hand, participants in this exercise would “expe-

rience the sensation of a strong muscular shift in [their] ocular alignment and [their] hand will seem to expand and almost cover the far expanse.’® Rapid physical motion, Matyushin’s exercise suggested, could be a visual act, with the movement of the eye producing a shift in spatial perception, as well as heightened receptivity to one’s motion-filled surroundings. Although published a full decade after the blossoming of cubo-futurism and rayism, Matyushin’s call for ocular gymnastics to advance the eye’s ability to see beyond figurative forms and discern rapid motion reflected aesthetic principles crucial to the rayists. Through their nonfigurative portraits, Larionov and Goncharova combined the era’s physicality and dynamism in ways that challenged the eye, inspiring audiences to see further and more actively than ever before. SCIENCE AND SPEED IN RAYISM

An expanding culture of science and technology, like sports, significantly informed the rayists’ treatment of modern dynamism. As discussed in chapter 1, theoretical exploration of space, time, and motion in the late nineteenth century had led to a reevaluation of the physical world and human perception of this world. Whether Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the spread of electricity, or inventions like the cinema and the X-ray, scientific and technological breakthroughs offered a useful starting point and potent metaphor for artists striving to delve into the essence of modern existence and its speed. For the rayists, who referred to their movement as a “doctrine of luminosity,’ dynamic art complemented these scientific breakthroughs by alluding to a new, higher reality.“ Drawing on practical inventions like the X-ray as well as the more nebulous, pseudo-scientific notion of the fourth dimension, the rayists used science to bolster their exploration of speed and its presaging of a bright, ideal future.® The X-ray, a technological breakthrough first championed in the West, exem-

plified the belief that the invisible could be made visible, which as a physical concept had great appeal to modern artists, many of whom aimed to depict a reality inaccessible to the human eye.®° Discovered by the German physicist Wil-

helm Conrad Roentgen in 1895 and introduced into Russia by Abram Yoffe (a Roentgen disciple), X-rays—fluorescent, electromagnetic rays produced in an X-ray (Roentgen) tube—were able to penetrate the most opaque of objects, including the human body and all other physical matter. Hence the X-ray offered a convenient theoretical basis for the belief that modern art, emulating science, could likewise penetrate into hidden realms, uncovering a new visual authenticity and dynamism previously out of reach (i.e., invisible) to audiences.®

122 Visual Arts of Acceleration Inspired by Roentgen’s modern breakthrough, Larionov evoked the underlying visual principles of the X-ray in both his cubo-futurist and rayist paintings. Larionov’s fascination with X-rays, for instance, contributed to the somewhat lewd effect of translucency in the previously discussed Boulevard Venus, where we are evidently able to see through the prostitute’s clothes in a way unimaginable before the X-ray. In rayism, the influence of the X-ray went even deeper; the abundant rays in Larionov’s semiabstract canvases often resemble X-rays, implicitly penetrating surface materiality and conveying the inherent flux of all matter, which, as modern science had revealed, was perceived by means of light moving at the speed of 186,329 miles per second. Besides referring directly to radioactive and ultraviolet rays in his “Rayist Painting” manifesto, Larionov fashioned his new movement as an aesthetic manifestation of the X-ray, through which the true velocity of modern reality could be revealed.” For as Larionov wrote in “Pictorial Rayism,” his 1914 theoretical piece on rayism, “there exists a real and undeniable intersection of rays proceeding from various forms,’ which are “new, intangible forms that the painter’s eye can see.””° Rendering light rays not visible to the ordinary human eye, the rayists believed that by creating previously unfathomable images of speed they could expand the creative and phenomenological worlds of their audience. In early rayist still lifes, such as Larionovs Glass (Steklo, 1912) and Rayist Sausage and Mackerel (Luchistye kolbasa 1 skumbiriia, 1912), a vortex of rays helps demarcate an abstract, motion-filled realm existing apart from the static material referred to in the paintings’ titles. In Glass, the first rayist work exhibited by Larionov (at the December 1912 World of Art show in Moscow), the glass and corresponding light that reflects off the normally translucent material evince a deeper, more active authenticity than that which ordinary vision perceives. Given how the painting’s various glass objects—a goblet, tumblers, and a bottle—exist in a variety of shifting planes on the canvas, Larionov’s rays, much like X-rays, appear to have penetrated the inferred three-dimensional plane in which the glass sits to uncover a hidden reality of speeding rays. Seemingly in conjunction with Glass, Larionov discussed in his 1913 manifesto “Rayist Painting’ how rayism explores notions of vision and speed inherent in reflective glass; the artist remarked that his work “introduces painting to the problems posed by glass and, in addition, natural dynamics,” thus enabling rayism to emerge “as a new kind of art.””' Infusing the radiant, semiabstract scene of Glass with brightness and dynamism, Larionov suggested that a fast-paced, luminous flux exists behind the static element of glass and the paradoxically active rayist still life. In Rayist Sausage and Mackerel, which Larionov displayed at his 1913 Target

show, the objects from which the rays emanate are distorted almost beyond

Rayism in Russia 123 recognition. In their place a complex pattern of diagonal lines and bursts of light appears along the outer edges of the painting. As in Glass, X-ray-inspired perspicacity informs Larionov’s impression of luminosity and suggestion that the viewer can now see through the sausage and mackerel into a highly kinetic sphere existing well beyond the still life’s subject matter. The blue mackerel in the center blends in with the blue background, establishing an effect Larionov referred to as the “colored dust” that “sums of rays” form between objects.” Instead of a sum of repeated outlines used to generate an image of speed, as encountered in the paintings of Balla or Duchamp, Larionov’s “sum of rays” constitutes an abstract plane in which all material fuses amid the flux of light pervading phenomenal reality.”’ Although discernable objects remain in Rayist Sausage and Mackerel, the painting’s general thrust, even in this semifigurative manifestation of rayism, dictates a transformation of visual reality and space by means of implicitly fast rays. The impact of science on Larionov’s theory of rayism and the rayist urge to reveal a heightened form of dynamism is particularly manifested in Larionov and Goncharova’s various references to a theory of the fourth dimension. Speculation regarding the existence of a fourth dimension arose among scientists, philosophers, and even theosophists in the second half of the nineteenth century, the theoretical consequences of various mathematical advancements, such as the non-Euclidean geometry developed by Russian mathematician Nikolay

Lobachevsky that in challenging established geometrical principles of solid three-dimensional space suggested that space is in fact curved and therefore far different than conventionally perceived. By the turn of the century, the English mathematics teacher Charles Howard Hinton had formulated a seminal, pseudoscientific theory of four dimensions, which postulated that an extra (i.e., fourth) dimension of space exists, a conjectural realm unfathomable to the ordinary

human mind. This fourth dimension—which Hinton attempted to explain by positing that since a two-dimensional square has four sides and a threedimensional cube consists of six squares, a four-dimensional “hypercube” would

thus take the form of eight cubes—could only be perceived through an ambitious expansion of human consciousness.”4 Hinton’s “hyperspace philosophy,’ as Linda Henderson calls it in her extensive study of the fourth dimension and its role in modern art, in turn gave rise to the mystical writings of the Russian scholar Pyotr Uspensky, author of The Fourth Dimension (Chetvertoe izmerenie, 1909) and Tertium Organum (1911).” To apprehend the fourth dimension, Uspensky argued, humans would have to expand their “cosmic sensation” so as to overcome what he saw as standard yet inherently flawed notions of time, space, and motion.”° According to Uspensky,

124 Visual Arts of Acceleration a “new reality” would accordingly arise through active exploration of the fourth dimension by philosophers and artists alike, who at the beginning of the twentieth century were aggressively seeking out the conceptual means to understand a world transformed by modern science and technology. Just as sports underscored the possibility of physical development in modern man and woman, the fourth dimension allowed for a similar emphasis on evolutionary growth, only in a purely psychological, intuitive sense. Human intuition, popularized at this time by the philosopher Henri Bergson as means of grasping abstract principles of time, duration, and space, would have to be

expanded if people were to comprehend the fourth dimension.” Hence the fourth-dimension appealed to avant-garde artists, who not only believed that they could access this new dimension through their pseudo-scientific studies of space and motion but also considered their art capable of transforming human

consciousness. The theory of the fourth dimension, which coincided with the rise of abstraction in modern art, liberated artists from a conventional depiction of three-dimensional space, time, and motion, allowing them to expand the scope of their work to account for the era’s unprecedented pace. In addition to providing the theoretical grounds for far-reaching nonfigurative art, the fourth dimension drew directly on the modernist preoccupation with speed. In Western Europe, following cubist investigations of fourth dimensional space by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, the Italian futurist Boccioni declared in his 1913 manifesto “Plastic Dynamism” that “dynamic form is a spe-

cies of the fourth dimension,” and that “with dynamism ... art climbs to an ideal, superior plane, creating a style and expressing our own age of speed and of simultaneity.’”* Boccioni believed that futurist art should convey “plastic dynamism” through a synthesis of “relative” speed—the continually changing relationship between a moving object and its environment—and an “absolute” form of infinite speed that by maintaining continuity in space moved into the fourth dimension. Such a synthesis arguably emerged in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio, 1913), Bocciont’s celebrated sculpture of a quickly striding figure, which, as Henderson notes, “suggests

the passage through our space of a four-dimensional figure (a unique form), whose successive states materialize and dematerialize before our eyes” to form a continuous dynamic mass in flux.”? Speed, in other words, provided a conceptual channel into the fourth dimension. Boccioni’s explication of the fourth dimension and notions of absolute speed made a pronounced impression on various avant-garde artists in Russia, as attested by the theoretical writings of the poet Benedikt Livshits, the composer

Rayism in Russia 125 and painter Matyushin, and other artists like Larionov, Goncharova, and Malevich.®° Ilya Zdanevich, Larionov’s close colleague and a most vigorous proponent of rayism, echoed Boccioni’s formulation of modern motion and the fourth dimension in a 1913 letter to the artist Vera Ermolayeva, where he discussed two types of velocity—one that is purely visual and another that “we sense not only through vision but also through intuition.”*' But unlike Boccioni, who fused his relative and absolute forms of speed while maintaining some semblance of figurative form, Zdanevich questioned “whether the object of painting can be the ordinary dynamism perceived through an external sensation or though spontaneous, intuitive dynamism.’® As Zdanevich’s letter to Ermolayeva indicates, Russia’s rayists, placing significant emphasis on intuition and an abstract, hyperspace formulation of rapid motion in art, had begun to perceive speed and its close ties to the fourth dimension in purely abstract terms. Larionov and Goncharova were even more explicit than Zdanevich in their evocation of the fourth dimension as a means of explaining the abstract manifestation of dynamism so prominent in rayism.® In “Rayists and Futurists: A Manifesto” (published two months after Zdanevich’s letter to Ermolayeva), Larionov and Goncharova accentuated the rayists’ desire to evoke the fourth dimension by depicting rapid movement—or “slipperiness” as they called it—as an “extratemporal” progression out of three dimensions into the abstract fourth dimension: “The [rayist] picture appears to be slippery; it imparts a sensation of the extratemporal, of the spatial. In [the painting] arises the sensation of what could be called the fourth dimension, because its length, breadth, and density of the layer of paint are the only signs of the outside world.”* The “slippery,” that is, dynamic, nonmimetic appearance of a rayist painting, Larionov and Goncharova argued, constituted the link between the viewers’ three-dimensional perspective (the painting’s length and breadth, along with the paint’s density) and a four-dimensional reality existing beyond the painting.® As the authors of “Rayists and Futurists: A Manifesto” suggested, speeding rays and the texture of the paint underlay the abstract, otherworldly crux of rayist painting and its uncovering of the fourth dimension. Much like Russia’s cubo-futurist poets, who advocated a transrational liberation of the word, Larionov believed that rayism represented “the true liberation of painting and its own life according to its own rules,” which, as rayism’s abstract, dynamic lines and emphasis on texture and color attest, entailed unfettered motion at a remove from the familiar reality of three dimensions.®° The

rayists progression toward a liberated, abstract aesthetic form in the fourth dimension was especially apparent in Larionov’s 1913 formulation of “pneumorayism” (pnevmoluchizm in Russian, and also referred to in “Rayist Painting”

126 Visual Arts of Acceleration as “concentrated rayism”), which signified an amplification of rayism’s multitude of diagonal rayist lines and nonrepresentational forms.®’ Larionov’s Sunny Day: Pneumo-Rayist Composition (Solnechnyi der’: Pnevmoluchistaia kompozitstia, 1913/1914— fig. 7), exhibited at the 1914 No. 4 show, features abstract forms

that convey an intensification of the artist’s treatment of light and space, with little or no attempt to portray any figurative objects. The only discernible elements in the painting are several letters that exist amid the tangle of rays and color, as well as the sunlight alluded to in the painting’s title. Throughout Sunny Day, sunlight, like the letters, appears to penetrate the canvas in various spots where bright flashes of yellow and white evoke intense energy. Also, three letters—KA and a separate T—exist behind the complex patterns of rays, as if

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papier-maché on canvas. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Rayism in Russia 127 remnants of the figurative world have faded into the background (several of Shevchenko’s rayist paintings likewise feature letters amid an abstract flux of rays).°° Larionov further emphasizes the abstract quality of the painting by using an overlay of papier-maché and oil paint so that the three-dimensional texture enhances the spatial dimension of the painting and its implicit movement into the fourth dimension. The tangible materials comprising Sunny Day accentuate the rayist evocation of dynamism and hyperspace, for the rays and vivid colors

interact on a resolutely abstract four-dimensional plane. The artistic movement of rayism, one could argue, culminated with its search for a cosmic fourth dimension. At the conclusion of the 1914 manifesto “Pictorial Rayism,” Larionov remarked how “the colored masses” of rayism go “beyond

time and space” to provide a glimpse of the fourth dimension, “that superreal order that man must always seek, yet never find, so that he would approach paths of representation more subtle and more spiritualized.”®’ Through rayism’s impression of speed and related metaphysical thrust into the fourth dimension, Larionov aspired to transport his audience toward an ideal albeit ultimately unattainable four-dimensional state. Although Sunny Day: PneumoRayist Composition maintains a faint link to the natural world (the painted scene, after all, remains a sunny day), Larionov had pushed his art considerably closer to pure abstract dynamism.” Others, such as Malevich (who likewise explored notions of the fourth dimension), would take abstraction further, dispensing with light and sun to achieve a purely nonobjective celebration of dynamism. Nevertheless, through an awareness of science, technology, hyperspace, and the modern ethos of speed, Larionov pushed Russian art forward and upward, seeing in it a transformative, spiritual force. CS)

Russian rayism and its futurist-inspired forms soon gave way to bolder expressions of dynamism. By 1914, as war spread across Europe, issues of velocity took on a more aggressive tenor, rendering rayist depictions of farmyard animals and sunny landscapes secondary to more bellicose concerns. While Italian futurists championed both war and speed (two themes that arose concomitantly in Western Europe), Larionov and Goncharova resisted this aggressive aesthetic, for rayism’s neoprimitivist undercurrent clashed with the rhetoric of violence found in Western European futurism and the belligerent tone of its manifestos devoted to speed. Thus it comes as no surprise that World War I marked both the end of rayism as a cohesive movement and the gradual demise of Larionov’s own energetic creativity.”

128 Visual Arts of Acceleration Rayism, despite its fleeting existence, initiated subsequent innovation in the Russian avant-garde; it presaged nonobjective expressions of speed that adhered to the avant-garde’s vision of a dynamic, transformative art. The artistic movements of suprematism and constructivism soon followed, as the rayists’ futurian beliefs gave way to more resolutely utopian notions of the early Soviet era. “I am convinced,’ Goncharova prophesied in 1913, “that modern Russian art is developing so rapidly and has reached such heights that within the near future it will be playing a leading role in international life.”*? The rayist manifestation of painterly dynamism indeed precipitated a reevaluation of modern reality and its increasing pace. As kinetic rayist images took on greater nonobjectivity, the avant-garde’s spiritual vision for contemporary humanity expanded accordingly, intensifying throughout the era. The speed initially expressed in rayism would soon be superseded by a pure nonobjective form of velocity and, after 1917, a Soviet aesthetic and ideology that harbored its own fast pace.

°°9

cc Hurry!| For tomorrow you will not recognize us Suprematism and Beyond

n December 2, 1913, the curtain rose on a radical new phase of Russian

() avant-garde art and its expanding treatment of speed. Staging the futurist opera Victory over the Sun at St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theater, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Matyushin, and Malevich revealed an unprece-

dented, abstract vision of the era’s dynamism.' Incorporating transrational poetry by both Khlebnikov (author of the prologue) and Kruchenykh (who, besides penning the libretto, directed the production), innovative set and costume design by Malevich, and a discordant score by Matyushin, Victory over the Sun offered an ideal vehicle for far-reaching aesthetic experimentation.” Divided

into two “actions” (referred to by the Russian neologism deimy) rather than “acts,” the opera boasted a semilogical plot involving two futurian strongmen who, following a violent conquest of the sun, strive to establish a utopian land of fantastical, cosmic dimensions. Treating mimetic art as a relic of the past, the creators of Victory over the Sun

amplified the elevated, eternal spirit of their dynamic vision. In the opera’s opening and closing refrain, two strongmen declare, “All is well that begins well! ... There will be no end!”’ Once the futurian strongmen achieve their ever-

lasting utopia, phenomenal reality and logic vanish in favor of acceleration, efficiency, and strength: “Here ... everything runs [ bezhit| without surrender,” remark several athletes, highlighting the endless movement in such a world.* Even an airplane crash does not hinder the opera’s futurians, most notably an aviator, who enters the stage after his accident laughing and singing in a transrational burst of sounds. Elsewhere a worker cryptically mentions to a bourgeois fat man, “Speed you know is effective, if one puts the wagon filled up with

boxes on each of two molars and powder [sic] it with yellow sand and put all this in action then you will see yourself”? Fast-paced action, such a semicoherent 129

130 Visual Arts of Acceleration assertion seems to suggest, will enable inhabitants of the future world “to see for themselves,” to perceive reality anew. Staged alongside Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, Victory over the Sun en-

abled Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Malevich, and Matyushin to present modernity’s headlong pace through both familiar and highly unconventional images and ideas. The opera’s recognizable manifestations of speed such as airplanes, athletics, and a cast of circuslike characters, combined with transrational verse and Malevich’s costume designs (which required performers to move unnaturally and abruptly on stage), emphasized dynamism’s close link to a futuristic utopia and to the rise of an abstract, otherworldly aesthetic. Even Malevich's decor, which included various geometrical designs, presented arresting signifiers of the dynamic cosmic realm championed in the opera. Victory over the Sun simultaneously widened the scope of various modern leitmotifs initially raised by Larionov and Goncharova, whose rayist movement was in full swing at the time of the opera’s staging. Images of velocity, physicality, and light, as well as ideas of human development and utopianism—all integral to rayism—figured in Victory over the Sun, as the opera’s creators, particularly Malevich, eclipsed rayism with a metaphysical vision that aggressively attacked conventionality and logic. Investigation of the speed of light and its rays had initiated rayism’s precipitous shift toward abstraction, but for Malevich and his colleagues, a more powerful, nonobjective formulation of futurism beckoned. This second of two chapters on Russian painting explores the avant-garde’s postrayist treatment of speed, as Malevich’s suprematist movement along with three-dimensional sculpture/reliefs and protoconstructivist works by such artists as Vladimir Tatlin and Ivan Kliun drew on notions of dynamism prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The chapter will then follow “left” art’s transition away from easel painting to design and three-dimensional composition, analyzing how early Soviet avant-garde artists ushered in a new creative synthesis of the machine and the human body that served as the basis for the movement of constructivism. Progressing, in constructivist Varvara Stepanova’s words, from the “spiritual representationalism” of abstraction to the “conscious direct action” of utilitarian art serving society at large, the constructivists cultivated a heightened sense of rapid mechanical motion in their work to underscore their utopian visions of a new Soviet state and a superior Soviet individual whose rapid evolution corresponded with the emergence of a dynamic, streamlined Marxist order.’ Arising soon after the nonobjective action of suprematism, constructivism signaled increasing ideological prominence for speed throughout the 1920s.

Suprematism and Beyond 131 DYNAMISM AND THE RISE OF SUPREMATISM

Our time is one of immense power; trembling in its nervous élan, it has not a moment of repose in its headlong, lightning-like rush. ... Our age is speed. —KAZIMIR MALEVICH, Architecture as a Slap in the Face to Ferro-Concrete” (1918)

Between December 1913, when the futurists staged Victory over the Sun, and December 1915, when the groundbreaking Petrograd (St. Petersburg) exhibit The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 opened, left art in Russia underwent a remarkable transformation. While rayism, despite its abstract thrust, maintained a discernable link with elements of the natural world (ie., light rays), the avant-garde art created in Russia in 1914 and 1915 increasingly shunned natural, recognizable forms. Malevich, for one, proceeded from cubo-futurism to his “alogical,” irrational paintings and then, almost overnight, to his suprematist works produced for 0.10, as he determined that a rendering of the era’s acceleration ought to be achieved through nonmimetic forms. Although not generally perceived as a foremost component of suprematism, speed provided a key conceptual basis for the movement. Aiming to free art from a slavish copying of visual reality, Malevich and other avant-garde painters, most notably Olga Rozanova and Kliun, developed unorthodox manifestations of velocity out of seemingly static, nonobjective painterly masses. The roots of suprematism’s dissolution of natural, mimetic forms for the sake of greater visual dynamism can first be discerned in Malevich's cubo-futurist “peasant” paintings of 1912 and 1913. Like Larionov and Goncharova, Malevich had embraced neoprimitivism, seizing on the rudimentary, semi-mimetic techniques of Russia’s native art. Amid the reduced neoprimitivist figures and motifs in Malevich’s pre-1915 work, however, emerged a cubo-futurist sensibility that entailed close attention to energetic, dynamic composition. This dynamism is evident, for instance, in Morning after a Snowstorm in the Country ( Utro posle v'1ugi v derevne, 1912-13), a painting first exhibited at Larionov’s 1913 Target exhibition, in which Malevich employs a complex array of geometric shapes to depict a Russian village in wintertime, with two peasant women carrying water buckets and a third figure in the background dragging a sled. It is a peaceful yet visually active scene: recognizable traces of the familiar rural world remain, but nonmimetic geometrical elements, vigorously interacting, come to life on the canvas, as if constituting their own animated reality full of visual dynamism. Or consider Knife Grinder. Principle of Flickering (Tochil’shchik: Printsip melkantia, 1912-13), a painting incorporating cubo-futurist techniques and explicit kinetic rhythms. Malevich’s chaotic tableau of displaced, repeated shapes outlines various stages of rapid motion: the hands, legs, and feet of a laborer

132 Visual Arts of Acceleration operating his grindstone appear in numerous positions, multiplied to show how the man and his machine move in time and space. Four hands seem to hold the knife above the revolving grindstone, while a foot—likewise depicted fourfold in four distinct positions—operates the pedal. Reminiscent of Italian futurism’s renditions of modern velocity in the way it replicates various phases of movement, Malevich’s painting conveys intense action as the knife grinder fuses with the rapid motion of his equipment and surroundings.® Other cubo-futurist works by Malevich conveyed speed even more explicitly. Semiabstract forms and lines, for instance, elicit the era’s rapid pace in Malevich’s lithographs Death of a Man Simultaneously in an Airplane and on a Railway (Smert’ cheloveka odnovremenno na aeroplane 1 zhelznoi doroge—fig. 8) and The Moving Carriage (Ekipazh v dvizhenii), both produced in 1913 and both appearing as illustrations in books of cubo-futurist verse. Death of a Man Simultaneously in an Airplane and on a Railway, accompanying transrational verse by Kruchenykh in Explodity, unites blurred images of the title’s two prominent symbols of speed through an array of angled dynamic lines and geometrical

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Suprematism and Beyond 133 forms while also alluding to the inherent danger of speed and the concept of simultaneity, quite popular among futurists at this time. Moving Carriage, included in The Three (Troe) along with verse by Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and Guro, likewise depicts a vortex of modern velocity through its elaborate clutter of nonmimetic forms, lines, and spatial planes arranged to replicate the view from a speeding carriage. Confidently moving beyond cubism and futurism in his subsequent work, Malevich used Death of a Man Simultaneously in an Airplane and on a Railway and Moving Carriage, in addition to Knife Grinder, as a springboard for a more abstract, original approach to speed that went well beyond Western aesthetic models. Malevich was not the only avant-garde artist to apply a futurist awareness of speed to increasingly nonrepresentational work. In 1913 Olga Rozanova, bemoan-

ing conventional art’s “plagiarism of nature,” called for “other methods of expressing the World.’? Unabashedly receptive to many of the tenets of Italian futurism, Rozanova was soon creating semiabstract scenes of urban flux and tempestuous imagery that corresponded to—and often accompanied—much of Russia’s urbanist poetry in various illustrated books of cubo-futurist verse.!° She would also produce futurist-inspired linocuts for one of the most notable Russian avant-garde works devoted to World War I, the 1916 portfolio War (Voina), which in addition to featuring a cycle of poems by Kruchenykh, included Rozanova’s cubo-futurist depictions of airplanes, fast-paced violence, and horrific death that captured a deep-seated ambivalence toward the war’s violence and velocity (which the Italian futurists promoted).'! But for Rozanova, whose status as a leading left painter lasted until her premature death in 1918, attention to the speed of war and modern urban life would accompany a forceful move toward abstraction. In Rozanova’s cubo-futurist painting Cityscape (Fire in the City) (Gorodskot1 peizazh |Pozhar v gorode], 1913-14—fig. 9), a work boasting sharp internal rhythms and dynamically overlapping spatial planes, the natural world—the city’s architecture and modes of transportation—seemingly disintegrates under the velocity and force of urban reality. A reddish fire and its burst of orange light provide the only vivid color in the painting, illuminating the side of a train as it zooms into the depths of Rozanova’s image. Diagonal lines comprising the pronounced contours of the train, fire, and urban architecture converge in the center of the canvas to establish a vortex of overlapping shifts. It is as if figurative forms have begun to dissipate, engulfed by the energy of the city. On the outer edges of the painting, meanwhile, nonobjective geometrical figures appear to proceed off the canvas. The multiple directional forces and disintegration of urban elements in Cityscape (Fire in the City) suggest an urge to transform

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speeding images into abstract forms, an urge that would mark many of Rozanova’s subsequent paintings and illustrations. Ivan Kliun, a close friend of Malevich’s and another painter who, prior to suprematism’s emergence, actively searched for ways to evoke a modern tempo on the static canvas, utilized cubo-futurist techniques to move well beyond a straightforward display of perceptible reality.'? In accordance with views similarly articulated by Malevich, Kliun alluded to the role speed played in the avant-garde’s transition from figurative art to abstraction, remarking in 1915, “Now art is replete with beauty, which the artist discovers in ...a fast race, in

Suprematism and Beyond 135 dynamism, in rhythm, in abstract concepts, and even in accidental combinations of form and color that signify nothing.’’’ Kliun, it follows, saw contemporary art progressing toward aesthetic forms capable of conveying rapid motion and what would eventually arise as pure nonobjectivity. Speed’s patent dissolution of visual reality constituted a central impulse behind several paintings Kliun produced between 1914 and 1915, each of which he titled Landscape Rushing By (Probegaiushchi peizazh).'* The best-known version of Landscape Rushing By, displayed initially at the First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings Tramway V (Pervaia Futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin “Tramvai V’ )

in March 1915 and then at 0.10, presents an array of blurred, semifigurative shapes multiplied to produce a composite depiction of a natural setting as seen from the window of a speeding train. Expanding waves of rapid motion, replicated through a multitude of diagonal lines running across the canvas at a variety of angles, appear to flow from various points on and off the painting, while fragmented cubist forms designate various phases of this swift motion. Kliun’s expressive lines and angles also convey speed by requiring the gaze of the viewer to shift in a variety of directions. Layered planes and repeated patterns of prosressive phases of movement likewise evoke the impression of the landscape racing past the implicitly train-bound viewer’s field of vision. All the shapes and color tones lack sharpness, as if acceleration has distorted the passing scenery beyond the point of recognition. Although an earlier study for Landscape Rushing By contains some figurative elements, in the version exhibited by Kliun all recognizable forms have virtually disappeared amid the visual flux. Malevich, who collaborated with Kliun on a number of avant-garde exhibi-

tions, likewise distorted and dismembered natural shapes and figures in his dynamic cubo-futurist paintings, yet he simultaneously began to foster a more intuitive formulation of speed. Displaying figurative elements devoid of any rational, discernible correlation to one another or to their background, Malevich produced canvases in which the juxtaposition of images and themes connoted a purely conceptual dynamism. This conceptualization of modernity’s pace first appeared during Malevich's brief so-called alogical period (referred to as alogizm in Russian), which lasted from 1913 until 1915. Featuring an absurd blend of modern motifs similar to those that prevailed in Victory over the Sun, these alogical paintings provided little or no unifying link between objects displayed on the canvas. Instead, alogical painting—which Malevich also labeled “transrational realism” (zaumnyi realizm) in recognition of its close links to Kruchenykh’s transrational, illogical verse—repudiated common sense as a means of pointing to an otherworldly, irrational plane. Malevich, who, like Larionov, evoked the cosmic fourth dimension in his writings and paintings, saw

136 Visual Arts of Acceleration dynamism as an essential component of art’s precipitous move toward a new metaphysical aesthetic, the roots of which were found in the alogical paintings: “The beauty of speed which [futurism] discovered is eternal and the new will still be revealed to many,’ Malevich commented in 1915.'° Malevich accordingly

promoted alogical “relationships” between an array of elements as an unconventional way of conveying the cosmic possibilities of modern dynamism. Malevich's alogical use of speed to explore an otherworldly plane is particularly evident in the 1914 Aviator (fig. 10). Airplanes, given their headlong thrust into the sky and explicit reliance on acceleration, offered avant-garde artists a broad new perspective on the modern landscape and beyond, as evident in not only the work of Malevich but also in Kamensky’s verse (and life), Khlebnikov's aeronautic neologisms, the plane in Victory over the Sun, and, somewhat later, linocuts by Rozanova for War. In Aviator, Malevich evokes the contemporary, lofty spirit of aeronautics through semiabstract images: in addition to the large central figure of the aviator (whose appearance resembles the costumes Malevich drew for Victory over the Sun) and a fish superimposed over the aviator’s torso, one finds a saw, a playing card (a club), a fork, and the Russian word for

apothecary (apteka), which appears in a fragmented diagonal form as a, pte, and ka. If these objects possess inherent meaning or a unifying idea, it exists only

on an irrational level that viewers themselves must intuit. A small red arrow and a larger beam of light proceeding from the aviator’s hat into the right-hand corner of the painting lend the work some sense of outward motion, but the dynamism is predominantly indirect and abstract. The disparate, oddly arranged forms, coupled with the painting’s stated emphasis on aeronautics, underscore an intuited synthesis of cosmic motion and velocity that would only intensify in Malevich’s subsequent work. Rozanova’s The “Moderne” Movie Theater (On the Street) (Teatr Modern | Na ulitse|, 1915), much like Malevich’s Aviator, conveys dynamism through a semiabstract aesthetic lacking any explicit motion. Resembling a collage, this Rozanova painting combines several figurative forms including the circular logo of the Moderne Movie Theater, a carriage wheel, a comb, and a section of a brick

wall, various words at the top of the canvas, and a number of nonfigurative color planes, as if all these elements have begun to fuse with one another amid the energetic milieu of the street referred to in the title. Abstract color masses obscure the identifiable objects within the painting, and in the center of the canvas a small rectangle with a bright spectrum of colors suggests that nonobjective geometrical shapes could also indirectly evoke the rapid flux of the street (and the cinema) despite the absence of overt speed. As Rozanova argued in 1916, “The dominance of symmetry or asymmetry, static or dynamic elements,

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138 Visual Arts of Acceleration is the result of creative thinking and not of the preconceived notions of mundane logic.”!® Rozanova’s notion of unconventional “creative thinking”’—the conceptual leap needed to comprehend abstract art—and an expanding awareness of contemporary dynamism, it follows, would enable viewers to perceive the accelerated essence of The “Moderne” Movie Theater and subsequent nonobjective work by Rozanova. By December 1915, when the 0.10 exhibition opened, Malevich had replaced the recognizable elements of his alogical works with the purely abstract forms of “suprematism.” Suprematism—the ambitious term Malevich applied to works depicting geometrical masses of various shapes and colors displayed against a solid white background—constituted, at least in part, a concerted effort to ele-

vate futurism’s visually dynamic forms onto a conceptual, nonmimetic plane that was intuitively active and fast in that it revealed movement of a cosmic nature.!” “Suprematist painting,’ Jean-Claude Marcadé explains, “is not philosophical painting, for this would situate it in illusionism. Rather it is painting in philosophical action.’'® Suprematism’s conceptualization of nonobjective dynamism, its “philosophical action,” represented a rejection of the futurists’ illusion of speed, instead constituting a depiction of nonobjective forms proceeding rapidly through an abstract realm far removed from familiar reality and the modern environment of speed so prominent in futurist painting.” In the 1928-30 article “Dynamic and Kinetic Futurism,’ Malevich retrospectively drew a sharp distinction between futurist and suprematist conceptions of dynamism in particular: “The difference between the Suprematist revelation of dynamic sensation and Futurist revelation is that the Futurist [one] reveals dynamic sensation through the phenomenon of the model, 1.e., man, and then through the movement of things. The Suprematist revelation of sensations of the same power, on the contrary, does not depend upon any objects or natural phenomena. ... Therefore a picture revealing Suprematist dynamism does not present a chaotic appearance. It is not constructed out of the dynamic elements of the objects, like some Futurist pictures, 1.e., those by Boccioni, it is a harmoniously constructed image of abstract elements.’”? Suprematism, Malevich suggests, offered a pictorial dynamism that dispensed entirely with mimesis and instead presented painterly masses moving “harmoniously” yet implicitly fast on an abstract plane devoid of a conventional point of perspective.”! This implicit sense of speed corresponded closely to a comparable tendency in Russian avant-garde verse. Just as readers of transrational poetry were often required to abandon logic to appreciate zaum’ and its expression of contemporaneity’s dynamic spirit, Malevich’s audience now had to make an analogous conceptual leap into abstraction to discern the potential velocity of suprematist masses.

Suprematism and Beyond 139 Suprematist artists (most notably Malevich but also, among others, Rozanova, Kliun, and Ivan Puny, the chief organizer of the 0.10 exhibition) believed that their depiction of nonobjective geometrical masses deepened a pictorial tension between stasis and speed, as an outward impression of immobility coexisted with suggestions of infinite space and the dynamism of nonobjective forms. This juxtaposition of stasis and speed emerges in Malevich's Black Square (Cherny1 kvadrat), the most celebrated (and controversial) of the suprematist

canvases displayed at 0.10 and a painting consisting of a large quadrilateral mass displayed against a white background. Although devoid of the outward dynamism found in other suprematist works featuring a variety of geometrical forms and colors, Black Square—or Quadrilateral (Chetyreugol’nik), the title initially given to the painting for 0.10—established Malevich's pure nonobjectivity, or “zero form,’ as he referred to his new, objectless beginning for painting. A modern icon (in his room of the exhibition hall Malevich hung Black Square in an uppermost corner, where a Russian religious icon would traditionally be

located), this suprematist canvas gave rise to a pure, intuited form of cosmic energy.

Malevich claimed in his famous theoretical tract “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Pictorial Realism” (“Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu: Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm,” 1915) that his paintings were “based

not on the interrelation of form and color, and not on an aesthetic basis of beauty in composition, but on the basis of weight, speed, and direction of movement.” A striking impression of pure nonobjective weight and speed is created

out of the floating color masses found in many suprematist works. In Malevich’s Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles (Suprematizm [s vosnviu priamougol’nikami], 1915), also displayed at 0.10, a dynamic arrangement of forms

facilitates a heightened sense of steady, otherworldly motion. The painting’s eight rectangles, of varying sizes but all situated at a sharp diagonal (leaning to the right at approximately a forty-five-degree angle), appear to pull up and away from the center of the painting. Devoid of a discernible reference point, the rectangles possess no overt sense of speed, yet their shape, texture, color, and arrangement all bolster the painting’s inherent suggestion of dynamism. The abstract dynamism unique to suprematism is even more vividly conveyed by Malevich's Airplane Flying (Suprematism) (Polet aeroplana | Suprematizml, 1915—color plate 6). Returning once again to the theme of aviation, Malevich

generates the sensation of flight without any figurative (1.e., natural) trace of airplanes (save the painting’s title). A large black quadrilateral, angled at a diagonal to suggest steady motion, occupies the lower half of Airplane Flying, along

with two smaller black forms—a rectangle and a square—that appear to split

140 Visual Arts of Acceleration off from the larger mass; elsewhere, five small yellow forms break away from a larger yellow rectangle situated in the center. The spatial arrangement and diagonal position of these forms evoke a distinct sense of harmonious movement, yet their velocity is impossible to discern, given the lack of horizon and familiar point of reference in the painting. The form, flight, and speed of the airplane

referred to in the title must therefore be intuited by the viewer, as Malevich makes no attempt to reproduce in recognizable visual terms the aircraft or its celerity. For Malevich, the airplane served as a symbol of human technological evolution that suprematism depicted not through mimetic forms but through painterly masses embodying a similar spirit of evolution and speed.” Although Malevich would elicit more overt dynamism in subsequent suprematist canvases (e.g., Dynamic Suprematism: Supremus No. 57 | Dinamicheskit suprematizm: Supremus No. 57,1916] and its visually active array of suprematist shapes), initial suprematist paintings like Airplane Flying reveal the artist’s desire to convey a harmonious, cosmic form of modern velocity. Following Malevich’s example, Rozanova initiated a series of suprematist works soon after 0.10 that used vivid displays of color—what she called “col-

orwriting” (tsvetopis )—to enhance the sensation of speed embedded in the suprematist arrangement of geometrical masses. In one of several paintings by Rozanova from 1916 titled Nonobjective Composition (Suprematism) (Bespredmetnaia kompozitsiia | suprematizm|—color plate 7), shades of blue predomi-

nate, while several horizontal strips of yellow and green in the center of the image contrast with the visually dynamic blue shapes found in a multitude of geometrical bodies. Discernible tension arises between the varying colors and the multitude of diagonally arranged blue masses—some rectangular, some in the form of a triangle, and some rounded on one side—that occupy the center of the canvas, giving Nonobjective Composition more explicit, chaotic energy than

that generally conveyed in Malevich's initial suprematist works. Nonobjective Composition vividly suggests the rapid movement of nonobjective masses unfettered from earth and its gravity, for the colorful forms in Rozanova’s painting appear to float through an ethereal plane, far removed from any familiar notion of speed but nevertheless inherently dynamic. Suprematism’s orientation toward speed was complemented by the movement’s swift aesthetic evolution. Malevich, for one, divided suprematism’s development into three progressive stages that commenced with the black colorless phase of the original Black Square and proceeded quickly to the intermediate stage of color masses before culminating with Malevich’s later series of “white on white” suprematist canvases of 1918 (such as White Square on White | Bely1 kvadrat na belom, 1918]|). The “white” phase of suprematism, Malevich wrote in

Suprematism and Beyond 141 1920, evoked through its form and color “the establishment of world building as ‘pure action, as self-knowledge in a purely utilitarian perfection of ‘all man.””4 “Pure action,’ the ultimate manifestation of Malevich’s emphasis on cosmic dynamism, represented the utopian fulfillment of suprematist dynamism, for

it embodied the conceptualization of rapid motion intrinsic to an advanced state of human consciousness. Reflecting a utilitarianism that would come to characterize much of post-1917 avant-garde art, Malevich’s “white on white” canvases symbolized an aesthetic transformation of suprematist masses and the emergence of an “all man,’ who would possess an evolved, active state of metaphysical awareness and dynamism. As Malevich declared at the conclusion of “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” in 1915, “We, suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognize us.’?° Speed, Malevich suggested, offered a means for the transformation of not only avant-garde art but humankind as well, as Russia’s left artists embraced a new aesthetic of speed and its presaging of a new social reality. SPEEDING OFF THE CANVAS

In 1915, as Malevich initiated the abstract speed of suprematism, other avantgarde artists began utilizing an array of materials to create three-dimensional works that similarly cultivated speed through abstract form, only with greater tangibility and explicit volume. At the 0.10 exhibition in 1915, Vladimir Tatlin— who had recently parted ways with Malevich—unveiled what he referred to as his “counter-reliefs” (kontrrel’efy), assemblages that supplemented the abstract thrust of suprematism’s colors and shapes with everyday materials such as metal, glass, and wire. Following Tatlin’s lead, other Russian avant-garde artists soon began to project their works into “real” space, as left art shifted its emphasis toward modern reality and an industrialized landscape. Artistic renditions of swift motion now assumed a materiality offering the creative basis for an idealized vision of a fast-moving, efficient society. The shift off the canvas and into space came suddenly. Tatlin’s swift maturation as an artist expedited his development of a distinct conceptual alternative to the abstract canvases of suprematism, as Tatlin vied with Malevich for control over avant-garde aesthetics.”° Like Malevich, Tatlin had worked closely with Larionov in the early part of the decade, and it was at this time that Tatlin produced several notable sailor portraits and nudes, which exuded a vivid sense of flux and rhythm in their composition.” Tatlin, however, would soon abandon two-dimensional art. On a visit to Paris in early 1914, he observed firsthand the work of Pablo Picasso, most notably the cubist’s collages and reliefs (such as Guitar, 1912); this innovation in the West subsequently inspired Tatlin’s own

142 Visual Arts of Acceleration incorporation of materials, particularly metal and wood, into his work, which he called “painterly reliefs” (zhivopisnyi rel’efy), visually dynamic art consisting of various three-dimensional materials protruding from the surface of the can-

vas.” In May 1914, just as Malevich was formulating nonobjective suprematism, Tatlin unveiled these reliefs at his own show, First Exhibition of Painterly Reliefs (Pervaia vystavka zhivopisnykh rel’efov). Refusing to limit himself to the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, Tatlin inserted “real materials” into “real space,’ as his explicitly active technique has been described.” Through nonobjective displays of everyday materials that appeared to be racing through space, Tatlin soon dispensed with the canvas altogether. At the 0.10 exhibition in December 1915, Tatlin introduced twelve “counter-reliefs,” which, in Tatlin’s words, were a dynamic “selection of materials” (material’nyi podbor) displayed in a corner of the exhibition hall or directly in front of a wall. Tatlin, Christina Lodder argues, used the prefix kontr’ to evoke “increased tension and energy in the same way that the impact of a ‘counter’ attack was more forceful than an attack.’°° Utilizing wood, industrial materials such as sheets of iron, aluminum, and metal cables, and an array of ropes, Tatlin positioned his “corner counter-reliefs” (uglovye kontrrel’efy)—technically not reliefs, given their detachment from a flat, two-dimensional background—at sharp diagonals to suggest aggressive, directional movement on a swift, sweeping trajectory. The “corner counter-reliefs,” suspended by taut ropes and pulleys in corners at various angles to the intersecting perpendicular walls, appeared to be breaking free from their flat backdrop and rushing into three-dimensional space. Nonrepresentational in their lack of resemblance to any identifiable object, Tatlin’s reliefs established a highly kinetic interplay between an array of modern materials and

the surrounding spatial environment. The materials of Tatlin’s counter-reliefs visually evoked a powerful burst of action. In one titled Corner Counter-Relief (fig. 11) shown at 0.10, for instance, sheets of iron and aluminum slotted together comprise the main body of the assemblage, which protrudes out from the corner and its two interconnecting walls as if racing upward.°*' The outermost metal sheet is suspended by means of a long horizontal wire spanning the entire corner space at a downward diagonal to the right, while two shorter wires hold the interior elongated metal body in place between the walls; a vertical wire supports the entire structure from above. The wire and metal significantly expand the area that the work encompasses, for the tightly strung wires and diagonal sheets of metal appear to stretch the relief within the corner while also allowing the sculpture to convey gravity-defying weightlessness. Generating visual and physical tension between the materials, a sharp, delineated trajectory through the conspicuous

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Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

144 Visual Arts of Acceleration angling of the metal and wire, and a dynamic transformation of the exhibition space, Tatlin cultivated a potent impression of motion, seemingly fast, in three dimensions. In addition to representing a sense of three-dimensional dynamism unattainable on the flat canvas, Tatlin’s corner counter-reliefs and their aesthetic transformation of space portended increasing ideological significance for kinetic art in Russian (and early Soviet) society. As Sergey Isakov noted in his 1915 review

of Tatlin’s work at 0.10, the counter-reliefs offered a compelling aesthetic response to the modern, fast-paced machine era through their “tremendous tension” and “potential energy,’ which would enable the modern artist to become “master of the material world.”*? Isakov put forth the idea that Tatlin, by incorporating industrial materials into his counter-reliefs, could facilitate an artistic harnessing of the machine and its overt manifestation of speed. In this same essay, Isakov also elaborated on the choice of metal as a medium for left art, seeing it as well suited to the avant-garde’s celebration of modern dynamism: “Our material is different, it is metal. It should be regarded not only in the

static sense but predominantly in a dynamic one.’*? The metal comprising Tatlin’s counter-reliefs as well as other three-dimensional art on display at 0.10 conceptually expressed latent energy and motion, for irrespective of metal’s inherent weight and solidity, it could be used to produce highly effective, idealistic modes of mechanized motion.

The aesthetic interplay between modern materials, particularly metal, in Tatlin’s counter-reliefs underscored left artists’ emerging reliance on the composition of art to replicate dynamism. Faktura—which, as discussed earlier in conjunction with cubo-futurist poetry, translates narrowly into English as “texture’”—now became essential to the way the avant-garde imparted modernity’s rapid pace. Derived from the Latin word facere (to make), faktura came to connote the manner in which a work of art has been made and, more specifically, the tactile feel of a painting’s surface or the material substance comprising a sculpture. Construed in a variety of ways throughout the second and third decades of the century, faktura augmented the prevalent view that the physical texture and form of a work of art should take precedence over content.** Tatlin was undoubtedly alluding to faktura when he advocated placing “the eye under the control of touch,” for the material feel and substance of avant-garde art took precedence over figurative, optical elements.°° Just as transrational poets drew on faktura to achieve a nonobjective, indeterminate form of dynamic verse, Russia’s avant-garde artists relied on a broad understanding of faktura when producing abstract kinetic artwork.*°

Suprematism and Beyond 145 At 0.10, Tatlin was not the only artist to accentuate abstract dynamic composition through the insertion of faktura—or, more specifically, modern materials—into three-dimensional space. Kliun, for instance, displayed a “relief” version of his Landscape Rushing By series, in which he applied pieces of wood, wire, metal, and porcelain onto a flat painting surface to achieve a vibrant expression of speed as might be experienced from a fast-moving train. Shown first at the 1915 exhibition Tramway V (with the subtitle “Good Fellow” [“Golubchik” |—color plate 8) and then at 0.10 (without the subtitle), Kliun’s Landscape Rushing By relief conveyed phases of rapid motion through the layering of painted materials, particularly overlapping pieces of rounded wood, which protrude outward toward the viewer at a pronounced angle to produce vivid,

semiabstract imagery of rapid movement in three dimensions (length and breadth horizontally across the flat plane of the work, but also depth directly out away from the canvas). Whereas the painting Landscape Rushing By drew viewers into the dynamic pictorial environment, in the relief three-dimensional materials enter the audience’s spatial sphere and thus appear to rush by all the more vibrantly. Other artists exhibiting at 0.10 fostered dynamism in abstract, oblique ways, a la suprematism, while dispensing with both the canvas and the flat relief. Rozanova’s metal sculptures Automobile (Avtomobil’, 1915) and Bicyclist (The Damn Path) (Velosipedist |chertovo panel’], 1915), lacking any obvious resemblance to moving vehicles, generate a nonobjective rendition of fast motion through their modern arrangement of materials and the conceptualized form of mechanization implicit in their titles.*” The speed of the automobile and the bicycle, two of modernity’s most prominent symbols of mechanized locomotion, must be intuited by viewers. Exhibited at 0.10 alongside Rozanova’s collagelike works (such as The Workbox | Rabochaia shkatulka, 1915] ), Automobile and Bicyclist consisted mostly of metal, wood, and paper. The large, rectangular metal base of Bicyclist and a metal ring that hangs from the work hardly seem to express a burst of velocity, for the weight and solidity of the material lends the piece a static appearance at odds with the bicycle’s inherent speed. Automobile, a rectangular work from which hangs a large weight, is likewise devoid of explicit movement; only the work’s metal structure, title, and context provide the basis for an expression of automotive acceleration. Rozanova’s two sculptures, it can be argued, reveal an emerging tendency to use materials as a means of signifying speed: the dynamism and force, rather than stemming from external form, exist within the material at a purely conceptual level. Like many suprematist paintings, Bicyclist and Automobile evoke this dynamism through seemingly static, indirect means, for although Rozanova’s sculptures appear

146 Visual Arts of Acceleration motionless, they compel viewers to develop a new, instinctual appreciation of industrial materials and their potential velocity. Following 0.10, Russian avant-garde art continued to evolve along the parallel tracks of suprematism and three-dimensional reliefs, with increasing emphasis on kinetic sculpture capable of functioning in the proximate space of the everyday urban domain. The title alone of the next noteworthy exhibition of left art—the 1916 Moscow show The Store (Magazin)—reflected the avantgarde’s mounting desire to bridge the divide between abstract art and public

life. Left artists envisioned their art, particularly that of the kinetic, threedimensional variety, as playing a significant role in the country’s social and political events. By 1917, while war raged throughout Europe and revolution loomed on the horizon, Russia’s left artists had made a pronounced shift to three-dimensional forms and assemblages intended for public installation, as aesthetic forms of dynamism entered the social, ideological sphere. The avant-garde’s desire to apply artistic notions of kinetic construction to the everyday environment of revolutionary Russia conspicuously materialized in the 1917-18 design and implementation of three-dimensional works for Moscow’s Café Pittoresque (Kafe Pittoresk). Commissioned by the Russian industrialist Nikolay Filippov in 1917, the Café Pittoresque project presented an opportunity for left artists—most notably Georgy Yakulov, along with Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, but also Lev Bruni, Softya Dymshits-Tolstaya, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Kseniya Boguslavskaya, among others—to produce dynamic material for prominent public display.** Transforming the interior of this café, located in the heart of Moscow, into a comprehensive, elaborate work of art, Yakulov and his fellow left artists referred to their project as Café Pittoresque to accentuate its festive, vivid nature.°? The Café Pittoresque installation, which John Milner has fittingly described as “dynamic clutter,’ featured an impressive array of visually active components: counter-reliefs suspended from the ceiling, a central podium designed by Yakulov, colorful murals, and utilitarian, machinelike sculptural forms made from wood, metal, and cardboard.” A distinct kineticism also arose through a coordinated synthesis of natural and electric lighting within the space of the café. One of Yakulov’s assistants, in fact, noted that the “interior space of the Café Pittoresque, [was] iridescent with light: it all moved—it seemed as if the whole décor was in motion.”*' Accentuating the kinetic potential of the building’s interior space and the various installations, the avant-garde contributors to Café Pittoresque sought to bolster the energetic lighting scheme through elaborate designs; Rodchenko, for one, crafted elegant metal lamps with rounded, angled lower sections spiraling upward around interior vertical segments, the dynamism

Suprematism and Beyond 147 of which complemented the café’s creative lighting. Through this lighting, design, and the suspended counter-reliefs rotating overhead, the interior of Café Pittoresque appeared to be moving at a fast, carefully coordinated pace. The close collaboration of left artists on Café Pittoresque reflected the increasingly prevalent belief that avant-garde aesthetics and, among a variety of explicit artistic principles, its overt emphasis on dynamism could contribute to the cultural enrichment of contemporary Russian society, which in 1917 was on the cusp of great change. Contemporaneous accounts of Café Pittoresque attest to the project’s energetic, utopian thrust. Yakulov, according to the poet Kamensky (himself an enthusiastic proponent of the project and its aesthetic aims), called Café Pittoresque a “railroad of the world’s art” that through its dynamism and active integration into the country’s public sphere would provide “orders to the [cultural] army from masters of the new era’ (Yakulov had recently returned from fighting in the war). Like many in the avant-garde, Yakulov envisioned the kinetic art of the period ushering in a new aesthetic and social reality, which Café Pittoresque, embodying the modern, accelerating spirit of the railroad, vividly underscored. The poet Velemir Khlebnikov perceived the designs for the café in even loftier, cosmic terms, noting how the installation would serve “all the chairmen of the world who [would] finally decide its fate.” As the Café Pittoresque project suggests, the avant-garde believed their work could play a major role in the country’s bright future. Café Pittoresque effectively merged avant-garde idealism with lofty aspirations for the Bolshevik future. Although Café Pittoresque would open in January 1918, several months after the October Revolution, because the conceptualization of the café began in mid-1917 this collaborative effort represented a culmination of prerevolutionary avant-garde art in Russia while simultaneously presaging subsequent Soviet avant-garde projects for the post-1917 public. Remaining open through 1919, Café Pittoresque entailed an ambitious merger of art and public life that through its emphasis on fast-moving form and utilitarian design proved well suited to the early Soviet period. A new, more ideological emphasis on speed beckoned. CONSTRUCTING SOVIET SPEED

Following the October 1917 revolution and the rise to power of the Bolshevik party, many in the avant-garde quickly adapted to the Marxist ideology of the new Soviet regime, embracing the belief that art should facilitate social growth and the nation’s rapid industrialization. Many left artists endorsed the Bolsheviks’ promotion of an egalitarian, classless society in which the arts could bolster the rise of the proletariat. Soon utilitarian, propagandistic works in support

148 Visual Arts of Acceleration of the Bolsheviks’ utopian cause proliferated, as the avant-garde adapted to the evolving political landscape and the distinction between art and Soviet life began to waver. Although the lofty metaphysics dominating much of prerevolutionary art diminished at this time, the notion of ideal, well-integrated social and cultural realms now took on unprecedented immediacy for the avant-garde in the early Soviet era. Tatlin, developing on his counter-reliefs from 1915 and his credo of “art into life,’ was instrumental in precipitating left art’s post-1917

transition away from metaphysical abstraction toward utilitarianism and a mechanized dynamism with conspicuous propagandistic purpose.“ Avant-garde creativity, be it Tatlin’s designs or work by a new generation of constructivist artists, offered an ambitious vision of a classless, efficient society in which speed and notions of acceleration constituted an essential ingredient of the country’s rapidly growing industrial system and energized, ambitious proletariat. Moving faster meant drawing closer to the Marxist utopia fundamental to Soviet ideology. While prerevolutionary artists had endeavored to transcend modern reality through metaphysics, the post-1917 avant-garde, particularly the constructivists, shifted to the machine as a means of building a model, high-speed society. Accordingly, early Soviet aesthetics expanded on the prerevolutionary avant-garde

interest in the texture—or faktura—of industrial materials. This broadening of faktura to include three-dimensional materials coincided, as earlier noted, with the emergence of the machine as a source of inspiration for left artists. No other component of modern reality highlighted the twentieth century’s “culture of materials” (Tatlin’s term signifying the active artistic use of everyday materials) like the machine, a feat of engineering that unified disparate parts, often made of metal, for the explicit purpose of generating mechanical force and velocity (whether locomotive, automotive, aeronautic, or industrial). The

constructivist architect Moisey Ginzburg, asserting that the quintessence of the machine “resides in its movement,” contended in 1924 that “any machine that is not dynamic in the most rudimentary sense of the word appears to be an obvious absurdity.’* The machine, Ginzburg suggests, embodied the era’s accelerated thrust. For the Soviet avant-garde, artist-engineers would promote an ethos of acceleration as they aimed to transform society through the machine.

Although left artists had frequently evoked modern technology in their work prior to the revolution, only after 1917 did the machine and its energetic thrust take on such aesthetic and ideological import. Tatlin’s 1919-20 design for Monument to the Third International, one of the most celebrated (and symbolic) works of the early Soviet period, signaled the beginning of the avant-garde’s active participation in the nation’s social growth

Suprematism and Beyond 149 and mechanization. Responding to an April 1918 decree by Lenin for the creation of “monumental propaganda,’ Tatlin envisioned his Monument to the Third International as an enormous tower comprised of rotating sections and a forward-leaning facade that could embody the era’s swift progress.*° The massive edifice—named in honor of the Third International formed by the Bolsheviks in March 1919 (following Karl Marx’s First International Workingmen’s Association of 1864-76 and the Paris Second International of 1889—1914)—was to serve as the Third International’s headquarters and as a political agitation center for the evolving Communist state. Integration of dynamism and mechanical motion into the public sphere, Tatlin believed, would enliven the masses’ ideological and physiological capabilities.*” Although Monument to the Third International was never constructed, Tatlin did exhibit a small (fifteen-foot) model (fig. 12) made of wood, cardboard, wire, metal, and oilpaper. Designed to be a spiraling iron and glass structure replete with dynamic curves and multiple diagonal supports that could loom over St. Petersburg— then Petrograd—and reach as high as four hundred meters (one hundred meters higher than the Eiffel Tower), Tatlin’s Monument was to convey ambitious, force-

ful movement into the sky and the future. The expressive tilt and shape of this “tower” resembled a powerful, striding human being, with the base constituting an anthropomorphic stride of legs and the curved structure the torso. As Nikolay Punin claimed in his 1920 essay on Tatlin’s tower, “By flexing its muscles the form is searching for the way out along the most resilient and dynamic lines the world knows of—spirals. They are full of movement, aspiration, and speed, and they are as tight as a creative will and an arm-muscle strained with holding a hammer.’*® While he modeled his tower on the moving human body and its musculature, Tatlin simultaneously used the dynamic form of the spiral to accentuate the Soviet avant-garde’s “creative will,’ or potential, as the thrust of the tower symbolized art’s ability to facilitate the Soviet nation’s rapid ascent toward its utopian Marxist goals.” Even the inner mechanics of Monument to the Third International expressed kinesis, physical vitality, and purpose. Inside the tower’s anthropomorphic frame, Tatlin envisioned four large sections of glass, the cyclical rotations of which were to supplement the exterior dynamism of the spiraling structure. The tower’s bottom section, a cylinder, was to revolve around its axis once a year, while the next section, a pyramid, would rotate monthly; daily rotations were planned for the cylindrical section above the pyramid, while the uppermost hemispherical enclosure was to rotate hourly. Those individuals working in the four sections and using the tower for proletarian, agitational purposes—for example, the broadcasting of Marxist propaganda throughout the country—would thus

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Suprematism and Beyond 151 be unified through the motion of the tower’s “all-encompassing form” (ob’emlitushchaia forma), Tatlin’s terminology for how the Monument could fulfill multiple functions and unite human beings with technology. Above all, the design furthered the notion that Soviet artists could harness the machine and its speed for utilitarian, propagandistic objectives. As Tatlin’s anthropomorphic design for Monument to the Third International attests, avant-garde artists in the early Soviet period actively promoted the human body and its inherent potential for speed. Whereas the human figure had vanished from cubo-futurist, rayist, and suprematist works, the reverse occurred in left art after 1917, as the pace of contemporaneity and constructivism’s emphasis on utilitarianism necessitated a renewed interest in the physical dynamism of the body, albeit in a mechanized form corresponding to the

eras growing reliance on efficient, fast-moving machines. In the works of Tatlin and other artists at this time, the machine was often linked to the human

body by the shared ability of both to move with pace and purpose. “The machine,” the constructivist A. Toporkov wrote in 1921, “is much more like an animate organism than is generally thought. . .. The machine is the word that has become flesh.’*! Instead of depicting speeding rays or floating geometrical masses, after the dramatic events of 1917 the avant-garde returned to the human body to underscore the material bearing of speed and its pertinence to the rapid evolution of a revolutionized state and populace. As Richard Stites argues, “Revolution opens up new space and discloses endless vistas; it invites

rebirth, cleansing, salvation.” The abstract dynamism of the futurists and suprematists had indeed yielded to the (re)birth of a fast, new Soviet individual, mechanized and capable of traversing the nation’s vast socialist, post-1917 space.

El Lissitzky, an artist who bridged the gap between suprematism and constructivism, produced one of the more notable images of the new Soviet individual in his figure designs for a 1920—21 restaging of Victory over the Sun. Lissitzky, who studied briefly under Malevich in 1919, had just produced a large series of suprematist canvases identified by the acronym “Proun” (“Project for the Affirmation of the New” [“Proekt utverzhdeniia novogo” | )—a nonobjective aesthetic

featuring geometrical elements depicted axonometrically (i.e., the drawing of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions) to lend these elements a pronounced impression of movement—that Lissitzky applied to Kruchenykh’s futurist opera, only now in the recognizable form of the human body or what Yve-Alain Bois has called “a kind of anthropomorphization of the Prouns.’>* In The New One (Novyi—fig. 13), the most visually kinetic of Lissitzky’s Victory over the Sun designs, suprematist-inspired Proun shapes and sharp diagonal

152 Visual Arts of Acceleration

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lines compose the head, torso, and limbs of the “new” individual, who in the Proun-like image appears as a mechanized human being sprinting into the utopian future celebrated in the opera. For this “electromechanical peepshow,” as Lissitzky called his post-1917 production of Victory over the Sun, puppetlike figures such as “The New One” were mechanically rotated and shifted on stage to suggest fast-forward progress or, in Lissitzky’s words, “to offer the “bodies in play’”’—his Proun personae—“all the possibilities of movement.”*

Suprematism and Beyond 153 In Lissitzky’s design of The New One, forward acceleration is accentuated by

the anthropomorphic appearance of the nonobjective Proun forms. Two thin black strips curving at the figure’s center and thicker gray axonometric shapes delineate outspread arms and legs, while a narrow semicircle constitutes the torso and two ovals mark the head. Through a complex arrangement of geometrical forms, Lissitzky fosters the impression that the figure races, like an aerodynamic machine, into the depths of the image from right to left, as several triangles, angled toward the upper right, enhance this impression. Although these geometrical shapes are mostly black, gray, or beige, a red suprematist quadrilateral lies at the center of the work, arguably the heart of New One, given its color and position. Two stars, one red and one black, designate the figure’s eyes. Uniting organic and mechanical forms in a way that captures the Soviet avant-garde’s dash into the future, Lissitzky transforms Victory over the Sun's

original cosmic, utopian thrust into streamlined mechanization and an ideological expression of speed. In early Soviet aesthetics, the human body seemed poised to race onward and upward. Pyotr Miturich, another artist often linked to constructivism, advanced the avant-garde’s evolving synthesis of fast-paced technology and organic structure with the creation in 1921 of Wings (Kryl’ia), a large, motorless flying apparatus designed to replicate the wing motion of birds.** This ultimately unfeasible

flying device—which Miturich worked on throughout the 1920s and early 1930s—would eventually be referred to as The Flyer (Letun); it consisted of three pairs of broad-spanned wings that a pilot could manually operate from a central sitting position by means of a variety of levers. The main source of propulsion was to be what Miturich referred to as “wavelike motion” (volnovoe dvizhenie) or “oscillating motion” (kolebatel’noe dvizhenie) generated by the movement of the large wings. This “wavelike motion” was the result of Mitu-

rich’s experimentation with metal balls on curved and straight paths, which demonstrated how a curved trajectory produces higher speeds than a straight trajectory. Miturich claimed that the fast, natural motions of living creatures like snakes and birds underlay his findings. Miturich applied his principles of “oscillating motion” to his design of various flying machines and, later, boats, all of which he referred to as “undulating mechanisms” (volnoviki).°° Miturich’s “undulating mechanisms,” particularly the flying mechanisms, vividly reflected the Russian and Soviet avant-garde’s desire to coordinate their ambitious designs with modernity’s rapid pace. “It is no longer possible,” Miturich wrote in 1921, “to move along the earth in carts

and trains, which are too slow, too dull, and too out of synch with the contemporary temperament of the human soul. All of this compels me to work on

154 Visual Arts of Acceleration my wings of freedom.’*’ Just as Russia’s cubo-futurist poets believed that their

transrational verse reflected the era’s tempo and freedom, Miturich (who in fact collaborated with the cubo-futurist poet Khlebnikov) saw his wing designs as embodying the fast “contemporary temperament” and the speed of free movement in air.°® A realization of Khlebnikov's aeronautic neologisms (e.g., letun and let’ba, words derived from letat’, the Russian word for “to fly”) introduced eight years earlier in the cubo-futurist almanac A Slap in the Face of Public Taste and prototypes for Tatlin’s subsequent design for a flying machine (Letatlin), Miturich’s Wings and Flyer demonstrated the Soviet avant-garde’s desire to bring the dynamism of futurism to fruition in the new era.” Various avant-garde artists in the early 1920s moved toward a mechanized aesthetic that they believed could convey the era’s dynamism far better than the ultimately static forms of futurism. In “The Realist Manifesto” (“Realisticheskii manifest,’ 1920), a proto-constructivist essay, the sculptors (and brothers) Naum Gabo (born Naum Pevsner) and Antoine Pevsner disparaged the attempts of the futurists to depict velocity through a display of “momentarily arrested movements,” which Gabo and Pevsner equated with eliciting the “pulse of a dead body.’® As the two artists explained, “The pompous slogan of ‘Speed’ was played from the hands of the Futurists as a great trump. We concede the sonority of that slogan and we quite see how it can sweep the strongest of the provincials off their feet. But ask any Futurist how does he imagine ‘speed’ and there will emerge a whole arsenal of frenzied automobiles, rattling railway depots, snarled wires, the clank and the noise and the clang of carouselling streets. ... Does one really need to convince them that all that is not necessary for speed and for its rhythms?”*! Deeming the futurists’ depictions of speed hyperbolic and artificial, Gabo and Pevsner proposed to replace the two-dimensional futurist rendering of velocity with three-dimensional constructivist works, which they regarded as better able to evoke a vivid, realistic sensation of fast, rhythmical movement through time and space. In Gabo’s Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (Kinettcheskaia konstruktsiia | Stotachaia volna], 1920), for instance, a thin metal rod attached to an electric motor vibrated rapidly, producing waves of quick, fluttering motion. As Gabo’s sculpture revealed, modernity’s dynamism could be produced (and not just illustrated on a flat canvas) through carefully constructed form possessing explicit applicability to Soviet existence. Kinetic rhythms, Gabo and Pevsner proposed, “should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts... at the bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play.’°? Endeavoring to see their aesthetic of speed assume a prominent role in everyday life, early Soviet avantgarde artists like Gabo and Pevsner—who were soon to become constructivists—sought to make the era’s rapid pace all the more tangible and constructive.

Suprematism and Beyond 155 Constructivism, described by several of its practitioners in 1922 as “the highest springboard for the leap into universal human culture,” expanded the utopian principles of speed and progress that had emerged in the prerevolutionary avant-garde and in the works of Tatlin and Lissitzky following October 1917.° The constructivists sought to create art that could contribute to the building of society through utilitarian design, production art (i.e., mass-produced industrial

items such as clothes and furniture), and the promotion of a new machineinspired aesthetic, which emulated the machine’s efficient, productive use of speed. Championed by Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Lyubov Popova, constructivism offered an artistic doctrine predicated on the integration of technological and industrial materials into the creative realm. “Technology and industry,’ wrote Stepanova in the catalog for the 1921 constructivist exhibition 5 x 5 = 25, “have presented art with the problem of CONSTRUCTION as an active operation and not as contemplative invention.’™ The constructivist artist was to be a builder who could solve “the problem of construction,’ that is, utilitarian creation, by elevating creative technique and “active operation,” or quick, efficient action, over aesthetic contemplation devoid of practical application. To apply their modern aesthetic of dynamism to contemporary Soviet society, the constructivists generated industrial, utilitarian artwork that they believed would have direct relevance to Soviet workers and Soviet life. Among the constructivists, the productivists (proizvodstvenniki)—a group of constructivists

who, as Lodder notes in her seminal study of the movement, promoted “the complete fusion of the artistic and technological aspects of the productive process’ —created “production art” (proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo) in which function proved as important as artistry.©° Simultaneously, the constructivists aimed to cultivate a proletarian aesthetic based on efficiency, speed, and maximum pro-

ductivity. The constructivist Aleksandr Vesnin, noting that “the tempo of our age is fast and dynamic,” argued, “Each particular object created by the contemporary artist must enter life as an active force that organizes the consciousness of human beings, acting both psychologically and physiologically, and prompting energetic activity.’® Vesnin and his fellow constructivists envisioned

their works—be it agitational posters, workers’ clothes, furniture designs, or elaborate, machine-inspired propaganda stands—contributing to the psychological and physical development of the Soviet people, who the constructivists hoped would play an active role in the evolution of a Soviet, Marxist society.°’ Inspired by Tatlin’s credo of “art into life,” the constructivists aimed to foster the creative faculties of the Soviet populace through innovative design, which many of them saw as contributing to the evolution of a faster, more receptive human mind and body; a proletarian, Marxist consciousness for the new era;

156 Visual Arts of Acceleration and a more efficient society. Although constructivists addressed the issue of speed only sporadically in their work, the movement as a whole and its aesthetic ethos

benefited in myriad ways from the era’s attention to dynamism and dynamic fusion of the mechanical and the physical. The constructivists’ application of their utilitarian aesthetic to the human body coincided with a flurry of innovation in early Soviet theater, a medium obviously well suited to an accentuation of the body’s mechanical potential. Following October 1917, Aleksandr Tairov and Vsevelod Meyerhold, two of Rus-

sia most prominent directors at the time, strove to coordinate their dramatic works with the nation’s new political landscape and mechanized tempo, for, as Tairov pointedly stated, the revolution provided the impetus to create “something more quick, more truthful and more dynamic, something that matche|d] [their] contemporary soul.’® Conceptually integrating the cult of the machine into its aesthetic vision, early Soviet avant-garde theater reflected the fast-paced “contemporary soul” through an emphasis on the well-coordinated movement of actors and on set designs well suited to the early Soviet emphasis on streamlined industrialization.

Fast, mechanized movement was the pace of choice for Meyerhold, whose famous system of biomechanics for the stage took shape almost immediately after the revolution. The constructivist actor, Meyerhold emphasized, should move in accordance with modern industry. Working closely with avant-garde artists like Popova, Stepanova, Vesnin, and the filmmaker-to-be Eisenstein, Meyerhold drew conspicuously on the American-based theory of Taylorism, a broad set of motions designed for modern industry and intended to increase worker efficiency.’ To achieve Taylor-like results on stage, Meyerhold formulated

his biomechanics as a series of rhythmical movements and swift, streamlined gestures that would make actors appear all the more machinelike. Adhering to the belief that art should be based on mechanical, physiological principles, Meyerhold trained his actors with biomechanical “études” based on physical motions found in sports (boxing, fencing, gymnastics), the circus, and military drills, among other activities.”” The new Soviet actor had to be ready to move fast.

A dynamic synthesis of the physical and the mechanical proved central to Meyerhold’s 1922 production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Magnanimous Cuckold ( Velikodushny1 rogonosets), which featured costume and set designs by the constructivist Popova, an enthusiastic proponent of biomechanics and an avant-

garde artist whose work consistently presented dynamism as an underlying principle.”! Popova’s designs for The Magnanimous Cuckold, which opened in Moscow in April 1922, included workers’ costumes for the actors (prozodezhda, or “production clothing”) and a large wooden “acting apparatus” consisting of

Suprematism and Beyond 157 ladders, doors, scaffolding, and rotating wheels (Crommelynck’s farce takes place in a mill) that required actors to be in constant motion during the course of the play. Describing her apparatus for The Magnanimous Cuckold, Popova emphasized how the doors, windows, and wheels revolved at “movements and speeds [that] were supposed to accentuate and raise the kinetic meaning of each moment of the action.”” Allowing for a flurry of chaotic mechanized activity, Popova’s sets fostered a dynamism, or “kinetic meaning,” that corresponded closely with the acrobatic biomechanical movements of Meyerhold’s actors. Just one of many innovative theatrical productions in the early 1920s, The Magnanimous Cuckold reinforced the notion that the revolution signaled the birth of a new, Soviet man, for whom the stage actor served as vivid prototype. A final, most telling example of avant-garde art’s representation of the Soviet new man and his mechanized form of speed can be found in Kliment Redko’s “electroorganism” (elektroorganizm) movement, which emerged in conjunction with constructivism at the beginning of the 1920s. Drawing on late nineteenthcentury breakthroughs in the production of electricity and the investigation of

light speed, Redko formulated his theory of electroorganism, through which he asserted that light and a corresponding dynamism labeled “electro-energy” could constitute the basis for modern painting. In accordance with this theory, Redko produced a series of “electroorganisms,’ semiabstract paintings that featured a broad notion of speed at its conceptual core. As Redko argued in the December 1922 “Declaration of Electroorganism” (“Deklaratsiia elektroorganizma’), the accurate demarcation of “maximum” velocity required a unification of all living and mechanized matter through a system of knowledge—an architectonics—that would replace the era’s prevailing schools of art, such as futurism and constructivism. As Redko explained (albeit in a cryptic fashion), “The art of ‘today’ explains: I build out of water, out of air, out of wind, out of dynamite, and these are the elements of the architectonics of the electroorganism.... Electroorganism is ...an architectonics that raises the concept of the abstract to the essence of the maximum unit of velocity.’” Perceiving the speed of light and the physical laws of nature as essential to contemporary art, Redko formulated his electroorganism as an abstract manifestation of nature’s abundant power, electro-energy, and “maximum velocity.” Redko’s electroorganic paintings Speed (Skorost’, 1922), Dynamite (Dinamit, 1922), The Dynamics of Forms and Color (Dinamika form 1 tsveta, 1922), and Mechanical Person (Mekhanicheski1 chelovek, 1923) highlight modern velocity

through a semiabstract synthesis of organic and mechanical forms. In Speed, also known as Study of a Composition (Etiud kompozitsi1), a row of five human figures, all identical, appears amid an array of elongated mechanical shapes, as

158 Visual Arts of Acceleration if living beings have fused into functioning components of a complex industrial system and electrical grid. The small heads on the human figures, in accordance with the painting’s title, appear to be in rapid motion (each torso is delineated by a curved contour conveying brisk sideways movement). Resembling vibrating units of a machine, these five streamlined figures reinforce Redko’s electroorganic vision of speeding electric light and its integration of the mechanical and human. Demonstrating velocity’s distortional effects on figurative forms, Speed presents living and mechanical matter as united through ubiquitous, fast-paced electro-energy. CO In Redko’s “Declaration of Electroorganism,” which was published in conjunction with the December 1922 exhibition of work by avant-garde painters calling themselves “projectionists” (proektsionisty), the artist elaborated on his “electroorganism” theory, emphasizing how cinema could ideally express the speed that was conceptually essential to his electroorganic paintings.”4 “The light and color of cinema,” Redko wrote, “are crowding out “paint, which yields to the strength of ‘light-matter.’ The two-dimensional cinematic plane ‘electrokinetically’ reveals the method of mastering the essence of the electroorganism in painting.’”> Like the electroorganic paintings, cinema could use light’s electroenergy and speed—that is, kineticism—for explicitly aesthetic purposes. Although Redko never worked with celluloid, he endeavored to convey through his paintings the kinetic power of cinema, which, with its mechanically pro-

jected light and quick array of images, proved essential to the avant-garde’s exploration of speed.” For Redko, his fellow projectionists, and many other left artists in Soviet Russia, the cinematic reproduction of modern dynamism indeed offered an ideal, effective means for conveying the era’s potent velocity. As if on cue, Soviet avant-garde film would flourish in the 1920s.

PART 3

Fast Motion Pictures on the Soviet Screen

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Early Soviet Cinema Tricks and Kinesthetics

n August 1922, with the publication of the film journal Kino-Photo ( Kino-fot),

| speed in effect entered early Soviet cinema. A forum for the country’s constructivists who had recently turned their attention to film, this journal presented the dynamism of cinema as a unifying trend of avant-garde art. Through a series of theoretical articles and manifestos that would help shape the development of Soviet cinema during the 1920s, Kino-Photo’s contributors—many of whom were soon to emerge as leading avant-garde filmmakers and film critics—touted film’s powerful fast pace and energy. In advocating this dynamic approach to the medium, contributors such as Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov emphatically ushered in a revolutionary new velocity for Soviet cinema.! The first issue of Kino-Photo included, among a number of theoretical articles, film reviews, and innovative design work, Vertov’s “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,’ which called for a kinochestvo—a neologism denoting filmic art—that boasted “hurricanes of movement,” and Kuleshov’s declaration “Americanism” (“Amerikanshchina”), in which the young filmmaker stated his preference for Hollywood’s fast-paced vitality over Russia’s slower moving prerevolutionary cinematic fare.* Other contributors to Kino-Photo likewise championed a style of cinema capable of amplifying the speed of the era. As the critic Ippolit Sokolov wrote in this same issue, “Today cinema should reflect the technology and

labor of our epoch amid its feverish tempo of zooming automobiles, locomotives, airplanes, machines, and the worker’s physical gestures.” This first issue of Kino-Photo, edited by the constructivist Aleksey Gan, also provided a sampling of Western European film criticism, for instance, the essay “Dynamic Painting” (with the parenthetical subtitle “Nonobjective Cinema”) by the German theorist and architect Ludwig Hilberseimer. In “Dynamic Painting” Hilberseimer argued that recent film work by the German artists Viking 161

162 Fast Motion Pictures Eggeling and Hans Richter represented an attempt to overcome the inability of

the plastic arts to convey time and speed. The author contended here that dynamic cinema “arises not from the superficial impression created by mechanical movement, but from within, from the recognition of [movement's] essence.”* The speed of cinema, Hilberseimer suggested, was not simply quick motion on the movie screen, but rather a rigorous exploration of speed’s abstract visual attributes. As if in response to Hilberseimer, Soviet filmmakers would soon dedicate themselves to uncovering techniques and images inherent to the medium of film and its underlying dynamism. Above all, Hilberseimer’s advocacy of abstract filmic speed, coupled with Kuleshov’s embrace of American-style editing and Vertov’s kinochestvo of rhythmical movement, offered a compelling blueprint for early Soviet cinema. Although the journal Kino-Photo lasted less than a year, the ideas set forth on its pages had a far-reaching impact on how speed would figure in the era’s films. Subsequent issues of the journal included a range of features that likewise celebrated the dynamism of cinema and its increasing relevance for Soviet cinema: articles devoted to the plasticity of Charlie Chaplin, contributions from the cubo-futurist poet Mayakovsky, prescriptions for fast-paced propagandistic (or “agitational”) cinema, and illustrations by the constructivist artists Rodchenko and Stepanova. Despite one scholar’s contention that Kino-Photo was an “isolated phenomenon,” the journal’s call for greater dynamism in cinema had far-reaching effects for the burgeoning medium.° Indeed, the themes and theories broached early on in Kino-Photo anticipated much of Soviet cinema’s development in the 1920s, during the course of which avant-garde filmmakers shifted away from Hollywood-inspired velocity to purer, often abstract depictions of Soviet speed that expanded on the dynamism of Russian avant-garde poetry and painting. As the initial issues of Kino-Photo suggest, early Soviet filmmakers saw speed as essential to the medium’s underlying aesthetic as well as to cinema’s propagandistic power. While the czarist regime had offered only tepid support to early filmmakers, the post-1917 political order embraced cinema and its dynamism; cinema thrived, at least initially, under a political regime that envisioned this mass medium as an extremely effective instrument for spreading Socialist ideology.° In an oft-cited account from the first Soviet minister of culture Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin acknowledged cinema’s propagandistic potential when he allegedly declared film “the most important of the arts.”” By the mid-1920s, cinema had accordingly evolved into a key Soviet art form, a convenient creative vehicle for the new Bolshevik state. For as Richard Taylor notes, the Bolsheviks

required “a more dynamic, more modern medium of propaganda” and thus

Early Soviet Cinema 163 found filmic art ideally suited to their cause.’ To be sure, Soviet cinema’s close link to the ideology of the times would eventually overwhelm creativity, yet

throughout much of the 1920s avant-garde experimentation with speed and with what can be termed the medium’s “kinesthetic” impression of movement flourished. In early Soviet cinema, montage emerged as a central means for both capturing and controlling the era’s dynamism. Inspired by Western editing practices, Soviet filmmakers went considerably further than their counterparts in the West, cultivating techniques in which fast editing facilitated ideology. As a creative assemblage of pieces, or fragments, of film, montage proved highly applicable to the avant-garde movement of constructivism, which through its celebration of the machine and technology afforded filmmakers a useful set of

aesthetic principles. Constructivist cinema accordingly arose as a utilitarian artistic expression of modern society's technological essence, which its practitioners envisioned permeating Soviet society and aiding—both visually and ideologically—the building of the socialist state. For constructivists like Vertov, Rodchenko, and Gan, separate film shots constituted documented “facts” that could be used as building blocks for avant-garde film work, montage then arising through the piecing together of “factual” shots.? Embracing the ideological power of montage, the constructivists believed that the careful juxtaposition of cinematic facts could “influence the workers’ consciousness.”!? An example of what Benjamin Buchloh has described as the Soviet avant-garde’s transition from factura to factography, these facts provided the basis for ideologically potent forms of dynamism." By the middle of the 1920s, a revolutionary use of rapid film shots and their fast-paced, meaningful display on screen had emerged, with films like Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) and Vertov’s Kino-Eye ( Kino-glaz, 1924) exemplifying the application of constructivist aesthetics and Soviet ideology to celluloid. Constructivist filmmakers, along with others like Vsevolod Pudovkin and Ilya Trauberg, all used montage techniques to varying degrees to enhance the dynamic representation of figures and objects on film. Amid this experimentation with montage techniques arose two varieties of on-screen dynamism: an “internal” depiction of rapid motion within film shots (such as the image of a man racing down the street) and an “external” variety of speed elicited by shot length and dynamic cutting, which entailed the juxtaposition of individual shots in rapid sequence to generate a uniform idea or impression.'” Ultimately, this external dynamism contingent on quick cuts resulted in a more abstract, more ideologically potent manifestation of cinematic speed.

In Soviet cinema of the 1920s, “internal” speed—the result of fast-paced Hollywood-style shots saturated with motion (trains, athletes, etc.)—gradually

164 Fast Motion Pictures yielded to the more suggestive “external” rhythms of montage.’ Evolving in the work Kuleshov, who experimented early on with rapid editing, and Vertov, who devised a “theory of intervals” (a highly kinesthetic technique of cutting “on

movement” to generate motion between film shots), early Soviet montage achieved its most complex expression in the films and theoretical writings of Eisenstein. Out of “accelerated” montage—most famously utilized in the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin) and

a style of editing that created the impression of speed through an increase in the frequency of film cuts—came more complex montage techniques like Eisenstein’s overtonal montage (adjacent film shots linked by unifying “dominants,’

or secondary stimuli) and intellectual montage (the assemblage of film shots intended “to force the spectator to perceive this ‘progress’ [of movement between

the shots] intellectually”).'* Through all these montage techniques and their “external” speed, Soviet Russia’s avant-garde filmmakers succeeded in establishing a highly creative sense of space, time, and modern motion. The external dynamism of Soviet cinema constitutes a central thrust of theoretical work by Slavko Vorkapich, one of the few scholars to study this conspicuous yet underappreciated component of film aesthetics.'° Writing on film between the 1920s and the 1960s, Vorkapich highlighted the montage techniques

of Eisenstein and Pudovkin to explain how visual-dynamic film methods enhanced cinema’s underlying pace. To define this phenomenon, Vorkapich used the term “kinesthesia” (along with the adjective “kinesthetic” ) and explored the impression of movement that cinema conveys to the film viewer. Echoing Vertov’s views on a kinochestvo that would organize “the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole,’ Vorkapich explained how filmmakers and critics “must be able to organize movements . . . into what may be called ‘kinesthetic melodies and orchestrations.” '° Although speed represents only one component of kinesthesia’s rhythmical parameters, the kinesthetic nature of Soviet cinema allowed for a potent display of velocity. By elaborating on Vorkapich’s largely forgotten work as a basis for my discussion of cinema’s speed, I likewise explore the application of kinesthesia to film, which proved essential to early Soviet cinema.'”

Co Following the tumultuous events of 1917, cinema—a product of modernity’s speed much like the revolution itself—offered an ideal conduit for revolutionary dogma. Given its mechanical underpinnings and mass appeal, film was optimally suited to the propagandistic impulse that arose as the Bolsheviks consolidated their political gains and worked to realize their ideological vision

Early Soviet Cinema 165 of a new socialist state, which entailed the immediate ascendance of the proletariat, rapid industrialization, and an ambitious economic leap past capitalism. Soviet cinema could facilitate these lofty goals by presenting images of swift transformation and by developing film techniques superior to those in the West. Hence filmmaking provided a creative articulation of avant-garde aesthetics and Soviet Russia's ideology of speed, an ideology according to which art and propaganda merged to highlight revolutionary ideals, unprecedented progress, and a streamlined utopian vision of a model communist state. Through an array of innovative techniques reliant on the inherent motion of the medium, the nation’s filmmakers used speed as a primary means to coordinate their work with Soviet dogma and convey the era’s fast pace to Soviet audiences in ways that eclipsed what painters and poets had done in their respective, more overtly static art forms. As Soviet avant-garde filmmakers merged the aesthetic and the propagandistic throughout the 1920s, the prevailing ideology of speed proved fundamental to the period’s groundbreaking cinematic innovations in the broad areas of technique and camera work, for filmmakers now tapped into the era’s pace and mechanical spirit in a fittingly revolutionary, convincing fashion. In devising ingenious methods of rapid editing and in eliciting abstract images out of an increasingly mechanized landscape, avant-garde filmmakers and others aimed to cultivate a new viewer who would actively participate in the speed of the era. As I set forth in the following two chapters, Soviet filmmakers challenged audiences to engage actively with rapid displays of film images. Once spectators could make the necessary conceptual and artistic connections between ideologically powerful representations of speed on screen, they would virtually be participating in the nation’s mechanization and expeditious advance toward a utopian future. Soviet audiences, it follows, would then be compelled to embrace the call for rapid construction of an ideal socialist state. During the latter half of the 1920s, however, ideology and aesthetics began to diverge. With the influx of cinematic speed came a tendency to overpower viewers through dizzying arrays of images and ideas. In fact, Soviet authorities worried that the pace of the country’s most revolutionary films might disorient audiences or even slow them down by requiring meticulous, intellectual engagement with the quick display of images, such that spectators would have difficulty making cognitive sense of the film work and its ideology. Soviet cinema’s speed, it was feared, could render audiences ambivalent to what was shown on the nation’s film screens. As a result of this potential disjuncture between art and audience, rapid editing gave way to a more fluid, less fragmented assemblage of images, requiring less mental and visual engagement from viewers. The

166 Fast Motion Pictures emphasis soon shifted from fast images to fast reception and an unwavering pace. In the waning years of the decade, Soviet cinema, while still conveying certain notions of “internal” speed, would begin to deemphasize the creative techniques and “external” tempos critical to cinema’s underlying dynamism and revolutionary thrust. Eventually audience submission replaced active participation, as a new Stalinist conception of speed, aimed primarily at propelling the country toward Communism, encroached on the artistry and dynamism of this revolutionary art form. THE KINESTHETIC ART

“Now and forever,’ Vertov wrote in 1923, assuming the voice of his camera, “I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then

away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies.”'® The nascent medium of cinema—its very name derived from the Greek word for movement—indeed provided an enticing, original perspective on modernity’s dynamic yet disorienting environment. By virtue of its ability to establish the illusion of movement mechanically and to present audiences with a new way of experiencing contemporary life’s velocity, cinema embodied modern motion like no other artistic medium, as static images, caught by the highly mobile camera and viewed in quick succession on a large screen, appeared to come alive. Constituting a mechanical re-creation of movement in time and space, cinema offered a distinctively aestheticized treatment of that movement. Invented

in 1895, motion pictures imparted an impression of speed unprecedented in other media, save the possible exception of music, an inherently abstract, image-

less art form incapable of evoking speed in cinema's direct, visceral fashion. The rapid projection of individual images on film—sixteen or eighteen frames per second in the silent era and twenty-four in the sound era—created a visual impression of time passing while also endowing twentieth-century artists with the capability of formulating in resolutely visual terms the manner in which modern time and its movement are experienced.” “If there is an aesthetics of the cinema... it can be summarized in one word: ‘movement,” the French filmmaker René Clair declared in 1924.”° Not everyone, however, initially saw cinema as a valid representation of physical motion. Among cinema’s early critics and widely influential at the turn of the century, Henry Bergson believed that the new medium promoted spurious movement. Cinema, according to Bergson, constituted a contrived, “unintuitive”

Early Soviet Cinema 167 representation of physical motion in that it merely pieced together individual, frozen frames, which when viewed in succession only appeared to be moving. To film theorist Christian Metz, however, this appearance of movement proves paramount: “Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality.’?! Or consider Gilles Deleuze’s statement that “cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.’”* As Metz and Deleuze suggest, the optical nature of speed, however fleeting, validates cinema's representation, and thus cinema’s visual representation of movement constitutes authentic movement, contrary to Bergson’s critique of the medium. From the outset, movies showcased locomotives, automobiles, and a flurry of animate and inanimate entities in the throes of motion, but this portrayal of speed was hardly cinema’s only means for exploring the rhythm and pace of modernity. “Besides reproducing motion and distorting motion, the cinema is capable of creating motion,” film theorist Ivor Montagu has written.”* Not only could filmmakers accelerate, decelerate, or stop action, they could also edit visually static images to generate kinesthetic effects. For the first generation of Soviet filmmakers, this kinesthesia represented the core of what was to emerge as an audacious approach to the new medium. In work ranging from experimental newsreels to revolutionary agitation, speed constituted a ubiquitous, unifying force that enabled silent Soviet cinema to break definitively with a broad range of artistic conventions. A PREREVOLUTIONARY PACE

Although prerevolutionary Russian cinema boasted impressive artistry, its style

and themes represented an outdated, bourgeois manifestation of film art for the Soviet avant-garde. Just as early Soviet filmmakers spurned czarist Russia's imperialist principles, they quickly dispensed with the film aesthetic that had prevailed in Russian cinema prior to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Foremost in this rejection of the past was a repudiation of early Russian cinema’s measured internal and external pacing, which the Soviets saw as evidence of how the other arts had impeded the development of motion pictures in Rus-

sia. The pressing need to do away with the old and proceed forward swiftly with the new would soon contribute to the rise of Soviet kinesthetics. Cinema enjoyed considerable popularity in Russia’s major cities long before the 1917 revolution, as a noteworthy film industry had formed in both Moscow and St. Petersburg by the end of the new century’s first decade.” Russian films, although forced to compete with Western imports, increasingly appealed to the Russian public, thanks in large part to the efforts of several pre-1917 directors.

168 Fast Motion Pictures Yevgeny Bauer, the most celebrated and prolific of imperial Russia’s directors, shot approximately eighty films over a period of only four years, while Yakov Protazanov directed numerous prerevolutionary works prior to the release of his Aelita (1924), the Soviet Union’s first science-fiction film. These two filmmakers, along with others like Pyotr Chardynin and Vladimir Gardin, pioneered an industry that, although successful, struggled to define its relationship to the other arts, particularly drama and fictional literature. In fact, early Russian film

practitioners frequently questioned whether the medium should emulate the comparatively slower narrative techniques of plays and novels or establish its own criteria and motion-based aesthetics.” Although films from Western Europe and the United States enjoyed considerable success in Russia, prerevolutionary Russian directors tended to disregard Western practices as they attempted to articulate a film aesthetic that coincided with contemporary Russian tastes.”° The films of Bauer, for instance, featured contemporary stories with heart-wrenching melodrama, yet the underlying pace of Bauer’s work remained far from modern. Bauer’s Daydreams (Grezy, 1915), to take one example from his vast oeuvre, opens with protracted shots of a husband grieving over the recent death of his wife; an aura of lassitude—hardly an attribute of modernity—accompanies the husband’s lingering anguish. Bauer may have made films at an impressive, prolific speed, but both the internal and the external movement of these prerevolutionary films maintained a distinctly slow, dramatic pace. “Film stories” (kinopovesti), as Russians initially called their movies, reflected a deep-seated suspicion of Western cinematic techniques and styles that highlighted dramatic events through incessant on-screen action and quick camera movement.” Instead, early Russian filmmakers strove to decelerate their work. Favoring complex emotion over action, pre-1917 Russian cinema emphasized the inner psychology of characters, an attribute that arose in large part out of acting methods espoused by the Moscow Art Theater and its renowned director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Reverence for theater and ballet trumped the steady stream of new film techniques arriving from the West; thus Russian actors were encouraged to employ conspicuously slow gestures that could enhance a film’s emotional undercurrent.** Rather than utilize film’s rich potential for conveying quick physical motion, early Russian filmmakers advocated languid movement that would soon be deemed both decadent and bourgeois by the Soviets. The slow acting style of prerevolutionary films matched the pace of the narrative and images. One prerevolutionary critic, for instance, described the action of Bauer’s film Silent Witnesses (Nemye svideteli, 1914) as moving “no faster than four miles per hour.”?? While American movies, especially those in the “Western”

Early Soviet Cinema 169 genre, boasted dynamic, motion-filled chases and an array of thrilling events arranged in quick succession, Russian cinema opted for emotional panoramas and slowly expanding melodrama. Within Russia’s prerevolutionary film industry, a code of unhurried theatricality took hold. To maintain a measured tempo and narrative continuity between contiguous film shots, for instance, extreme measures were taken; cuts in the action occurred only when characters exited or entered the stage-like screen. Furthermore, the slow track-in shot (one of Bauer’s favorite techniques), in which the camera inched toward a character’s face or focused on a prominent object within the elaborate mise-en-scéne, presented viewers with a sense of composed mobility. The popular Italian-born ““Cabiria movement”—a slow, lateral traveling shot named after the Italian film first employing this technique that viscerally invited viewers into the film’s setting by providing a three-dimensional impression of the set—also appealed to

filmmakers like Bauer, who strove to establish a distinct impression of depth within his lingering shots.°° In his analysis of prerevolutionary Russian film, Yuri Tsivian suggests that the country’s initial uneasiness with cinema stemmed in part from the widespread influence of Bergsonian philosophy at this time. Bergson’s denunciation of cinematic movement, Tsivian argues, colored the views of Russia’s film and theater critics, who betrayed a clear preference for the stage over cinema.*' In the view of many theorists and critics in imperial Russia, film introduced a “fallacy of movement” (lozh’ dvizhentia), affording the medium’s outspoken detractors ample grounds to characterize motion pictures as too mechanical to convey rapid physical movement. To some, in fact, the speed of cinema was symptomatic of the dehumanizing threat modernity posed to modern society.°? As suspicion of cinema increased, a certain “technophobia” pervaded early Russian film criticism. Made of highly flammable celluloid, film gained notoriety as

a fire hazard, while the visual nature of the medium was also targeted; critics claimed, for instance, that motion pictures could damage filmgoers’ eyes.** The proprioceptive instability of the cinematic image—its oscillations and dizzying, fast-paced effects—evoked comparisons to seasickness and drunkenness. The disparaging label of “futurism” also entered the period’s prerevolutionary film criticism; reverse projection and other cinematic techniques used to challenge the mimetic, visual authenticity of film were criticized for distorting the cinematic image and undermining traditional concepts of temporal progression and motion as conveyed on film. As Tsivian writes, “Whatever absurdity the critics discovered in films was immediately labeled ‘Futuristic’; conversely, Mayakovsky’s poems were criticized for being as illiterate as cinema intertitles.’*4 It would be some ten years, in fact, before these “futurist” film methods

170 Fast Motion Pictures truly took hold in the country, surfacing as conspicuous components of a new cinema that rejected the slower, older aesthetic for the sake of forward-looking Soviet ideas and ideology. HOLLYWOOD IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS

Reflecting in 1929 on the rise of Soviet cinema and its elaborate montage techniques, Lev Kuleshov presented a telling comparison between American and prerevolutionary Russian films: “In American films, where shots very quickly alternate one with another, the combination of these changes is clearly perceived by the viewer. In a Russian film, shots changed very slowly, and the effect... was ... incomparably weaker.”*> Not only was the action and editing of American cinema faster than in Russian cinema, but it also proved more successful at captivating viewers. This ability of American cinema to appeal to a wide audience in an expedient fashion offered enormous potential to early Soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov, who realized that Hollywood, despite its capitalist underpinnings, could help transform Soviet cinema into an effective propagandistic art form. Given the conservative, unhurried nature of Russia’s prerevolutionary film aesthetics, it is hardly surprising that after 1917 the Soviet avant-garde chose to reject theater-inspired cinema for a faster-paced “American” style. Politically,

Soviet Russia had taken a significant step away from the United States, yet implementation in the 1920s of the Soviets’ New Economic Policy (NEP) and its market principles facilitated this acceptance of Hollywood and its popular, moneymaking product. By 1922, once directors were no longer adhering to the theatrical code of pre-1917 filmmaking, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, and others turned to American cinema's alluring methods for expressing the essence and energy of the era.*° Hollywood films, consistently pared down to their technical essence, appealed to Soviet filmmakers and critics, who marveled at these films’ “expedience” (tselesoobraznost ), a term found throughout Soviet film journals in the 1920s and a concept encapsulating the avant-garde’s emphasis on technical efficiency and the quick, proficient presentation of filmic material.*’ Kuleshov, previously an assistant to Bauer, now praised American cinema for its “maximum amount of movement” and for its “cinema specificity” that accentuated, above all, the medium’s dynamic link to contemporary life.** Early Soviet film journals like Kino-Photo devoted considerable space to theoretical discussion of American imports and Hollywood’s prominent roster of movie stars, for amerikanshchina, as Kuleshov and others called it, was on the rise.*? For many in Soviet Russia during the early 1920s, Hollywood became synonymous with the “detective story” (detektiv), or “Pinkerton,” a common term of the period referring to films inspired by the fictional detective Ned Pinkerton,

Early Soviet Cinema 171 hero of a popular series of detective novels.*? Although certain Soviet critics, such as Kino-Photo editor Aleksey Gan, considered the detektiv a trivial strain of Western cinema that placed too great an emphasis on narrative, others praised this crime-oriented genre as the most enticing of cinematic plot structures.*! Abram Room (director of Bed and Sofa | Tret’1a meshchanskaia], 1927), for instance, articulated the view that the underlying excitement and dynamic images of the detective story could help Soviet filmmakers “organize their material in a more entertaining and interesting way.’ Vertov, however, remained somewhat dismissive of the detectiv, declaring in “WE: Variant of a Manifesto”: “To the American adventure film with its showy dynamism and to the dramatizations of the American Pinkertons, the kinoks say thanks for the rapid shot changes and the close-ups. Good . . . but disorderly, not based on a precise study of movement.’ Yet while Vertov spurned Hollywood’s “showiness,” other Soviet filmmakers turned to America’s movie stars and moviemakers for inspiration and a burst of contemporary dynamism. Continuity editing, which came to epitomize the American product, offered an attractive option for filmmakers wishing to tell a story or convey ideas in an efficient, swift fashion. As a technique reliant on unobtrusive editing to match the action from one shot to the next without any conspicuous, sudden jumps, continuity editing allowed film plots to proceed in a straightforward, logical manner that maintained a clear, coherent sense of time and space. By developing continuity as one of their signature techniques, early American filmmakers succeeded in establishing a pace in their films that compelled early Soviet filmmakers to foster a comparable albeit more ideological tempo and flow in their own work. Among those Americans promoting continuity through their entertaining film work was the actor-director Charlie Chaplin. One of the most prominent icons of American cinema in Europe, Chaplin struck many in Soviet Russia as epitomizing Hollywood’s aesthetic of continuous, nonstop movement. In the third issue of Kino-Photo, which featured Chaplin on the cover along with various constructivist drawings by the avant-garde painter Stepanova, Kuleshov extolled the star’s ability to adapt his body to the screen, a sentiment that echoed the widespread acclaim for Chaplin’s unique plasticity as an actor. “This is why we love Chaplin,” Kuleshov declared, “and why he is the enemy of those who cherish Russian cinema’s old psychological languor induced by the syphilitic

theater.” In extolling Chaplin as a key cultural phenomenon, the third issue of KinoPhoto included a short piece on Chaplin’s dynamic acting style written by Nikolay Foregger (a dance specialist collaborating at the time with Eisenstein in

172 Fast Motion Pictures avant-garde theater) as well as “Charlot” (Chaplin’s nickname in Europe), a creatively designed article by the constructivist Rodchenko, who noted, “The tempo of [Chaplin’s] movement contrasts with his partner’s tempo. He does not act— rather, he walks, runs, and falls—and he grabs things, swinging them about, like he swings himself about.’* Chaplin, with his dynamic, circus-inspired slapstick,

soon occupied a metonymic position in a medium that conspicuously blurred the line between high and low art, prompting the critic Valentin Parnakh to bemoan how Russian intellectuals tended to dismiss Chaplin while ignoring how

this world-renowned tramp embodied the proletarian roots of the medium. These critics, Parnakh argued, failed to comprehend Chaplin’s kinesthetic bril-

liance and, more broadly, the valuable contribution Hollywood cinema was making to the development of the medium as a whole.“ A long line of other Hollywood figures—Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—made their way onto Soviet screens and into the nation’s popular film journals. In 1926, for instance, Fairbanks and his wife, Pickford, captured the attention of the Moscow public in a highly touted visit, footage of which was included in Sergey Komarov’s 1927 film The Kiss of Mary Pickford (Potselui Meri Pikford), a popular romantic comedy parodying movie

mania in the Soviet Union. In fact, between 1918 and 1931 over half of the roughly 1,700 foreign films shown in Soviet movie theaters came from Hollywood, while during this same period the Soviet film industry accounted for only 700 feature-length works.*’ Among America’s early moviemakers and stars, D. W. Griffith most significantly affected the evolution of cinema as a serious art form in Soviet Russia. Griffith’s early years at Biograph Studio, followed by the release of his most celebrated feature films—The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), and True Heart Susie (1919)—-struck many in Russia as being far more serious than the typical American film. Moreover, Griffith’s work antic-

ipated the new emphasis on speed in cinema following the revolution: “The Americans offered no more impressive example of dynamic cinema than Intolerance,’ explains Vance Kepley, “and various incidents attest to its impact in the USSR.’*® Vsevolod Pudovkin, according to Jay Leyda, chose to become a filmmaker after seeing Intolerance in 1918, while the film’s fast pace, technical attri-

butes, and political message appealed to many others, such as Vertov, who commented that after the appearance of Intolerance in 1916, it “became easier to talk.” As Leyda explains, “No Soviet film of importance made within the following ten years was to be completely outside Intolerance’s sphere of influence.”°° This wide-reaching impact became even more readily apparent in Soviet cinema’s evolving treatment of speed.

Early Soviet Cinema 173 Griffith’s films, like many other American movies at the time, constituted a bold rejection of cinema’s reliance on theater and literature, particularly through their dynamism. Kuleshov, in addition to noting Griffith’s predilection for shooting street scenes without an established script, applauded the American’s work

with actors: “Griffith either works with pure film dynamics or on the pure emotion of his actors, making them portray their psychological states by means of complex movements of their whole body.”*! Able to coordinate his actors in an efficient way well suited to the cinema (rather than the stage), Griffith shot impressive crowd scenes, which served as an important antecedent to the depiction of the revolutionary masses in subsequent work by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Most importantly, though, filmmakers like Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Vertov gleaned valuable technical lessons from Griffith’s movies, particularly crosscutting and the close-up. Abandoning the strict continuity of images and events in the work of his forebears, Griffith employed briefer shots and abrupt transitions between scenes (i.e., crosscutting), which eventually became known as parallel montage. In the 1944 essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Eisenstein retrospectively delved into the originality he and other early Soviet filmmakers had encountered in Griffith’s work. Griffith, Eisenstein argued, achieved an unprecedented tempo in his films by finding inspiration in the “dynamic face of America” and its “dizzying pace,” but Griffith, according to Eisenstein, did not go nearly as far as Soviet filmmakers, who were able to generate “rhythm” (internal alternations in speed through editing), rather than just “tempo” (Griffith’s parallel editing that corresponded with external plot developments).°? More significantly for Eisenstein, given the American’s reliance on straightforward transitions between shots and his “ideological limitations,” Griffith failed to create the “abstraction of the lifelike representation” and the “generalized conclusions on historical phenomena from a wide variety of historical data” that early Soviet filmmakers achieved through their synthesis of ideology (Marx’s “laws of process’) and the rhythmic internal speed of montage.*’ Soviet cinema, although inspired by Griffith and American cinema, aimed for what Eisenstein, echoing the avant-garde metaphysics of the prerevolutionary period, called a “unity of higher order” that could arise as an abstracted fusion of revolutionary ideals and rapid editing techniques.” By the mid-1920s, the Soviets had moved well beyond American cinema and its speed, but Hollywood’s prominent role in the emergence of a Soviet style of filmmaking was undeniable. The avant-garde embrace of American cinema led to amore ambitious film form, for avant-garde Soviet filmmakers now strove to achieve Hollywood’s dynamism and excitement while simultaneously generating

174 Fast Motion Pictures a form of propagandistic art in which artistic innovation complemented the lofty goals of the new socialist state. Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, and other, less prominent directors rose to this challenge, seizing on rapid montage as a means to transform both cinema and Soviet audiences. THE REVOLUTIONARY PACE OF AGITATION

Recalling in 1944 how Griffith and American cinema had provided the basis for Soviet cinema and its flurry of innovation, Eisenstein declared: “What enthralled us was not only these [American] films, it was also their possibilities. Just as it was the possibilities in a tractor to make collective cultivation of the fields a reality, it was the boundless temperament and tempo ... that led us to muse on the possibilities of a profound, intelligent, class-directed use of this wonderful tool.’ As Eisenstein recognized, the dynamic style of American films helped inspire Soviet cinema’s creative presentation of class issues, revolutionary ideals, and Marxist ideology. For Eisenstein and others, these Hollywood films provided the techniques and basic form to which they could apply a wide range of proletarian ideals. Ignoring the capitalist roots of Western imports, Soviet directors realized that Hollywood ingenuity presented a convenient foundation for the creation of propagandistic works, as the mass appeal and mass distribution

of films from the West established an expedient model for Soviet political agitation and the Bolsheviks’ goal of generating a revolutionary consciousness within the working classes. The bold propagandistic vision of Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially materialized in agitki (literally, “small agitational pieces”), short films produced immediately after the revolution and during the Russian civil war that endorsed a given ideological message.*° Addressing topical issues of politics, industry, and health, agitki provided the new government with an expedient vehicle to communicate their aims to the public in an era when financial and technical resources were scarce. The film industry was in shambles following the revolution, and from 1918 until 1921 these agitki—also called agit-films—constituted some of the only cinema available to Russian audiences. Lasting between five and thirty minutes, agitki offered a highly efficient way to encourage viewers to support the Red army and the Bolshevik cause. What also made these agitki unique—and dynamic—was their mobile means of distribution, for the Bolsheviks, instead of concentrating on urban exhibition, brought these films to the rural and largely illiterate masses via the agit-train (agit-poezd). Transporting films between agitational centers (agitpunkty) scattered throughout the country, agit-trains delivered their propagandistic cargo to audiences unfamiliar with the new medium of cinema. Although the agit-train

Early Soviet Cinema 175 featured compartments for various types of propaganda, such as newspapers, posters, and educational classes, the film division enjoyed the most success.°’ And as two symbols of modernity, agit-trains and agit-films embodied the speed of the era by making communication—or at least the delivery of propaganda— swifter and more efficient, while seizing the attention of the populace through brief yet engaging displays of didactic images. Moreover, with little film stock on hand, agit-film directors resorted to highly elliptical editing techniques, a style that subsequently informed the direction in which Soviet cinema developed.°*® Although the techniques and style of the agitki were far from advanced, the restricted parameters of these short films forced early Soviet filmmakers to convey their message in a quick, appealing fashion. Thus speed, which could capture the attention of viewers and visually reflect an ethos of efficiency, merged with the ideology of the agitka to form an essential component of early Soviet cinema and its burgeoning forms of montage. The agitki, beyond their impact on Soviet film techniques, initiated a dynamic

phase in Soviet cinema while inspiring a new generation of directors, for the agit-train constituted early Soviet filmmakers’ political and technological “kindergarten,’ as Leyda observes.°’ Both Vertov and Kuleshov, for instance, worked on agit-trains during the civil war. Among Vertov’s first film productions were The Exhumation of the Remains of Sergey of Radonezh ( Vskrytie moshchei Sergeia Radonezheskogo), a 1919 antireligious agitka, and The Agit-Train VTSIK (Agitpoezd VTSIK), a1921 travelogue in which Vertov highlighted the agit-train activities of his film collective, the kinoks. Kuleshov, meanwhile, made newsreels for

agit-trains prior to directing the agit-inspired On the Red Front (Na Krasnom fronte, 1920), which combined newsreel documentary and acted footage—most notably an American-inspired chase—in the feature format.® Even Eisenstein, who did not turn his attention to cinema until 1923, worked as a poster designer on agit-trains.°’ In Boris Arvatov’s “Agit-Kino” (1922), a short article from the second issue of Kino-Photo, the relevance of agitki to 1920s cinema and its speed comes clearly

into focus. Referring to American cinema as the most “expedient” and “maximally agitational” of aesthetic forms, Arvatov called for Soviet filmmakers to seek

similarly efficient cinematic means to help create a cinema suitable for Soviet Russia's proletarian audience.” To achieve this end, Arvatov argued, filmmakers needed to embrace the speed found in contemporary reality. “Dynamism and hyperbolic action,” Arvatov wrote, “are the cardinal conditions for agit-kino.”® Describing how “the wild tempo of industrial urban life” had rendered superfluous those art forms that “continued to reflect reality statically,’ Arvatov championed propagandistic (i.e., agitational), fast-paced cinema that in blurring

176 Fast Motion Pictures the line between high and low art (by creatively elevating action over moresubtle psychologizing) would appeal to the proletariat: “The realism of the material and the shock of action—that’s what we need.” This “shock” (in Russian, snogshibatel’nost ), a precursor to Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” and its edited series of exaggerated actions, was intended to surprise audiences, shaking them from their passivity and stasis. For Arvatov, agit-kino was a rejection of “bourgeois society’s passive contemplation of beauty” and thus represented dynamic cinema in its most active, engaging form. Arvatov also believed that Soviet cinema should seize on reality, for “only the most real and contemporary of material”—such as “a zoom-

ing train, a moving skyscraper’—was appropriate for propagandistic film. Building on American cinema and its “naked entertainment,’ Soviet agit-kino, Arvatov argued, ought to revolutionize dynamic reality to “endow entertainment with a special social purpose.’® As Arvatovss article suggests, by merging the dynamism of the era with Marxist ideology, Soviet cinema would attain a higher rationale and propagandistic thrust that could, at least in theory, appeal to all audiences. Arvatov’s evocation of contemporary cinema’s transformative potential and widespread kinesthetic appeal suggests that Soviet cinema as early as 1922 had taken a significant philosophical step toward the style of its noted silent films of the mid-1920s. Constituting a socialist display of swift (and persuasive) technical efficiency, agit-inspired films presented a unique Soviet brand of heroic realism—fictionalized, often hyperbolic accounts of revolutionary valor—as a convenient Soviet means for inspiring audiences. In films by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and others, a romanticism would prevail that by mythologizing revolutionary moments of the past (most notably, the events of 1905 and 1917) highlighted the active role of the proletarian masses in the nation’s

sudden overthrow of bourgeois, reactionary forces. Speed, given its close ties to violent revolution and to highly suggestive montage work, often figured in this heroic realism, and as Arvatov suggested, cinema’s dynamic images could captivate mass audiences, compelling them to seize on the nation’s revolutionary ideals. “Modern propaganda,” Jacques Ellul argues, “is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.’®’ Early Soviet cinema’s fast display of images, especially in the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, suddenly became a call to action for the nation’s filmgoers. By 1924 Eisenstein had introduced what was to become the most conspicuous strain of Soviet cinema’s heroic realism, which, while it possessed a fictional storyline, promoted ideology and innovative technique (rapid montage) over any complex narrative. Eisenstein’s protagonists were not lonely heroes or

Early Soviet Cinema 177 heroines but rather the downtrodden, proletarian masses, urban crowds in search of justice, or peasants yearning for a less backward existence. Attempting to demonstrate how collective action of the masses leads to revolution and social

transformation, Eisenstein fostered in all four of his major silent films—The Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October (Oktiabr’, 1927) and The Old and the New (Staroe i novoe, or General’naia liniia |The General Line], as it was originally titled)—a heroic realism in which mass uprisings and revolutionary momentum served as the ideological basis for displays of “dynamic montage.” Other early Soviet filmmakers contributing to the nation’s dynamic form of heroic realism included Pudovkin, Ilya Trauberg, and the FEKS (The Workshop of the Eccentric Actor) film collective headed by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. This “eccentrism,” as Kozinstev and Trauberg called their iconoclastic filmmaking, was based on an embrace of, among a long list of diverse attributes,

“the rhythm of the machine, concentrated by America, realized on the street” and “the synthesis of movements: acrobatic, gymnastic, balletic, constructivemechanical.”® Following Arvatov’s call for cinema to blur the line between high and low art, FEKS strove to adapt their “eccentric” art to the masses by cham-

pioning “the electric siren of Contemporaneity [that] bursts with a mighty roar into the perfumed boudoirs of artistic aestheticism!”®? Several of the technically impressive films made by FEKS—the 1927 S.V.D. (Soiuz velikogo dela, “Union of the Great Cause”), on an uprising connected with Russia’s famous 1825 Decembrist revolution, and New Babylon (Novyi Vavilon, 1929), a work highlighting events connected to the Paris Commune uprising of 1871—featured a style of heroic realism that was unabashedly eccentric and dynamic, given its relatively quick montage and plethora of creative film tricks. Although these fictional forms of heroic realism were shunned by Vertov, he too aimed to develop a propagandistic, innovative form of cinema that would rival Hollywood in popularity while showcasing socialism’s move toward a utopian socialist future. As Vertov wrote in his manifesto “Kino-Eye,’ “The battle against the blinding of the masses, the battle for vision can and must begin only in the USSR, where the film-weapon is in the hands of the state. To see and show the world in the name of the worldwide proletarian revolution—that is the most

basic formula of the kinoks.’”° Vertov, despite the nonnarrative basis of his work, idealistically believed that the dynamism of Kino-Eye and his subsequent film work would win over audiences worldwide, a dream that, of course, never materialized. Soviet propaganda, like the bold eccentrism of FEKS and the forthright manifestos of Vertov, was direct and conspicuous. Whereas governing bodies often go to considerable lengths to conceal their propaganda, the Bolsheviks never

178 Fast Motion Pictures hid their propagandistic intentions and ideological objectives. Propaganda, Lenin and others in the government realized, needed to play a crucial role in both the

rapid transformation of the country and the enlightenment of the masses, so no stealth or deception was necessary. Early Soviet filmmakers boldly mixed ideology and aesthetics, as the inclusion of propaganda in art hardly constituted a rejection of artistic ideals, particularly given the emphasis on cinema’s applicability to indoctrination. Thus filmmakers eagerly participated in the new state, adapting the inherent speed of their medium, most notably its montage, to fit the period’s propagandistic current. THE THRILL OF THE CHASE

Once early Soviet filmmakers moved beyond the short agitki, they turned their attention to the fictional feature-length format, in which they could experiment with America’s dynamic techniques and motifs. As intimated by the title of Kuleshov’s Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, one of the period’s first major films, Western practices were quickly materializing on Soviet screens. And it was in this 1924 film by Kuleshov that the chase, a staple of American cinema, emerged as a vigorous expression of Soviet kinesthetics. Constituting a key component of silent cinema, the chase allowed for a hurried pace and visual dynamism that would only increase throughout the 1920s. Soviet agitation and speed comically merged in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. A parody of both the “chase” film and early American Westerns, Kuleshov’s Mr. West features an American protagonist who arrives in Moscow to experience life in the newly formed Soviet state. Looking and behaving like Harold Lloyd, an American comic star renowned for his velocity-filled stunts, Mr. West is duped by a gang of “bad” Russians before he can meet “real” Soviets. Replete with frantic chases, fights, and stunts, this film demonstrates how the Soviet avant-garde could adapt Hollywood plot devices and techniques to suit the highly ideological, propagandistic sphere of early Soviet culture. As the prominence of pursuit in Mr. West suggests, the chase constitutes a primary albeit early manifestation of film’s kinesthetic spirit. The German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, for one, regarded the chase as one of three prototypes of cinematic movement, the other two being dance and nascent motion.”! As is apparent in many early American movies, the chase arose as an integral component of the cinematic spectacle not long after the medium’s invention. Early Keystone Kops film shorts, for instance, featured endless pursuit, while Griffith introduced the “last-minute rescue” variant of the chase, in which someone in distress, typically a beautiful woman, would be saved, most often thanks

Early Soviet Cinema 179 to the hero’s timely action and determination. Alfred Hitchcock, Kracauer adds, touted the chase as “the final expression of the motion picture medium,” while the early documentarian Robert Flaherty equated the popularity of the Western with the spectators’ demand for rapid pursuit through a wide, open land-

scape (“People never get tired of seeing a horse gallop across the plains”).” Chases could draw expediently on the motion inherent in the medium, thus allowing audiences to participate viscerally in the images of speed. Indeed, high suspense and the exciting finale of many action films have long gone hand in

hand with the simple visual thrill that viewers to this day experience when observing an exciting chase on screen. Discussing the early, action-filled work of Griffith, Tom Gunning aptly applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope—a term denoting the spatial and temporal dimensions of a literary work that constitute a unified whole—to the chase.” Rather than signifying a specific genre, fast-paced chases enabled filmmakers to convey a distinct impression of time and space on screen. Gunning subsequently claims that the chronotope of the chase, particularly in the early work of Griffith, gave rise to parallel editing, in which alternating film shots accentuate a fluctuation between pursuer and pursued within a well-established sense of time and space.” It follows, then, that within the chronotope of the chase, the temporal and spatial attributes of filmic speed took shape. Although the chase, particularly in films from the West, enjoyed great pop-

ularity in czarist Russia as early as 1907, critical perceptions of this nonstop pursuit ranged from repugnance to bafflement. Noting how this common plot device from the West struck early Russian audiences as “absurd” and “understructured” and how the repetition of chases undermined narrative tension, Tsivian claims that Russian critics of the chase feared that “movement for movement’s sake” was undermining the complexity of movie plots.” Yet while pre-1917 Russian cinema resisted the influx of chase scenes and seemingly pointless thrills, many of Soviet Russia’s first filmmakers, most notably Kuleshovy, seized on the aesthetic possibilities inherent to this dynamic American motif, which was ideally suited to their “plotless” brand of cinema.” Like early American filmmakers who promoted wild pursuit at the expense

of narrative continuity, Kuleshov used the chase to repudiate intricate narrative, which he believed obscured the true nature and visual essence of cinema. Substantiating the fears of early Russian critics, the chase facilitated the rise of a cinema that favored movement over intricate plot and psychological nuance. Reliance on rapid pursuit also constituted a means for Soviet filmmakers to wean early viewers from Russian cinema’s weighty theatricality: while dramatic plot development and elaborate psychologizing potentially hindered experimentation,

180 Fast Motion Pictures action-filled chases prompted experimental work more specific to the affordances of cinema. Chases did not preclude narrative altogether (for pursuit implies linear plot progression), but they provided filmmakers with a chance to promote images of speed over complex emotions and intricate story lines. Although the chase had functioned prominently in Ivan Perestyani’s 1923 comedy-adventure The Little Red Devils (Krasnye d’iavoliata), Kuleshov’s Mr. West proved more instrumental in inserting this American dynamism into the progressive sphere of early Soviet cinema. Emulating American-style action, Kuleshov attempted to demonstrate that Hollywood techniques, namely, the chase and crosscutting, could conform to the Bolsheviks’ ideological criteria for film. Although the second half of Mr. West features plot-intensive interior scenes involving the kidnapping of the American protagonist that is orchestrated by the villain Zhban (played by Pudovkin) and his gang, the film’s most compelling, dynamic sequences come in the chases that transpire on Moscow's streets. In Mr. West, the first and most prominent chase sequence occurs early on when a young Russian steals the hero’s briefcase. Jeddie, Mr. West’s right-hand man and a character clearly modeled on the American cowboy, rushes to his boss’s service, and thus begins Kuleshov’s lengthy series of chases through Mos-

cow’s snowy streets. The sequence commences with a traveling long shot of Jeddie (played by Boris Barnet, who would subsequently act in and help write the 1926 “adventure,” chase film Miss Mend), with his back to the camera, riding on top of an automobile; this establishing shot, lasting seven seconds, appears to be taken from a vehicle following behind it, thus lending a sense of pursuit to the filming itself.”” Toward the end of this shot it becomes evident that a suitcase placed behind Jeddie is starting to fall off the vehicle’s backseat. Initiating the film’s first instance of rapid montage, Kuleshov cuts to a brief moving close-up shot (taken from Jeddie’s vehicle) of tire tracks on the empty street, onto which the suitcase suddenly falls. After approximately half a sec-

ond, Kuleshov cuts back to his original long-shot perspective of the automobile; during this two-second image Jeddie turns to see that the suitcase is no longer behind him. Another cut to an extremely brief moving shot of the snowy road shows the stationary suitcase, for just a moment, at the bottom of the frame. Then in the fifth shot of the sequence—yet another long shot of the vehicle— Jeddie athletically leaps from the roof of the automobile onto the road, landing just as Kuleshov cuts to a more distant shot of the vehicle that now includes the

fallen suitcase in the foreground. The brevity of these shots corresponds with quick physical action, as Jeddie jumps and then scurries to retrieve the suitcase.

Early Soviet Cinema 181 Kuleshov’s reliance on frequent cuts and rapid movement establishes a pace and rhythm of edits that continue in ensuing episodes. Forced to pursue Mr. West’s car, Jeddie now participates in two simultaneous chases: one for his boss’s stolen briefcase and one for Mr. West, whose vehicle has disappeared from sight. Through extended shots of the Moscow streets and the long procession of vehicles featured in Jeddie’s pursuit, Kuleshov provides his audience with time to visualize the chase within this cinematic chronotope. Kuleshov thus creates, in Barry Salt’s words, a “synthetic space” that unites shots taken in different places and at different times.’”® Hence Kuleshov’s audience must engage actively with the chase, to keep up with the hectic pace and rapid film cuts. Kuleshov continues to accentuate the need for active observation in subse-

quent phases of Jeddie’s chase. In a shot of an empty street corner, two cars (one evidently carrying Mr. West, with only his large hat in view) cross paths in the middle of the frame before proceeding off in opposite directions, followed

immediately by the reappearance of Jeddie, who moves to the middle ground of the frame before looking both ways and then stopping. In much the same predicament as the disoriented viewer, Jeddie has no idea where to turn; quite appropriately, the ensuing intertitle reads, “Everything became topsy-turvy in Jeddie’s head.” A steady stream of vehicles from various directions disorients Jeddie, just as they challenge the viewer, who must also contend with Kuleshov’s rapid cuts. Consequently, a close-up of Mr. West’s license-plate—“999”—dissolves into a shot of the license-plate number “666.” This diegetic information— that Jeddie confuses license plates and mistakes some other vehicle for his boss’s car—provides the premise for the subsequent series of quick action shots that further expedite the abatement of narrative logic in the film.” Searching in vain for Mr. West, Jeddie pulls out his gun, fires at passersby, and lassos the driver of a passing sleigh as the street crowd scurries away and the police come running.

Fragments of the chase persist in ensuing scenes. For example, in a subsequent interior sequence Kuleshov inserts several frames of a horse’s hooves galloping across the snow (implicitly the horse of a sleigh hijacked by Jeddie). The slimpse of the horse’s hooves, a synecdoche for the ongoing chase’s hectic pace,

underscores the simultaneity of action intrinsic to Kuleshov’s Griffithesque crosscutting. Moreover, this inserted shot—an early example of associative editing that unites disparate images into a cohesive theme—maintains the internal

movement of the chase and anticipates the high-paced drama that persists in the film as Jeddie flees from the police. Throughout this chase sequence, in fact, Kuleshov complements his rapid montage and crosscuts with an abundance of

182 Fast Motion Pictures on-screen movement, be it trams, cars, motorcycles, horses, sleighs, or Jeddie scampering along on foot. As the chases continue in Mr. West, Jeddie manages to evade the police by engaging in a series of wild stunts, such as a jump from the sleigh into an automobile (fig. 14) and a high-wire crossing between tall buildings. The original purpose of the chase—to retrieve Mr. West’s bag—is long forgotten, for the dynamics of the pursuit overshadow the narrative. With the entire sequence bordering on the absurd, Kuleshov and his camera participate actively in the chase, as rapid pursuit and rapid editing take precedence over logical plot devel-

opment.” Images of speed have replaced narrative, requiring the viewer to engage actively with the visual nature of the film rather than with just the various plot turns. Kuleshov, who lauded Griffith’s ability to fill “the interim spaces between scenes of heavy suffering with pure cinedynamics,” embraced the Americanstyle chase in order to offer Soviet audiences their own form of kinesthetic

a ‘ TE . E) ae , ,* J

- : +Ww, -4&i4 :4 se | LA ; , tas & J FIGURE 14. Lev Kuleshov, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, 192.4.

Early Soviet Cinema 183 entertainment.*' By endowing his chaotic scenes of pursuit with a pace that only haphazardly illuminates the film’s various narrative developments, Kuleshov introduced a simplified plot form ideally suited for propaganda and experimentation with montage. Plot complexities would rarely hamper the innovation and ideology of early Soviet cinema. By the end of Kuleshov’s film, once upstanding Bolsheviks have rescued the American hero, Mr. West realizes how forwardlooking a land this new Soviet state is; during the concluding scene Kuleshov juxtaposes documentary images of Bolshevik soldiers in Moscow’s Red Square with shots of Mr. West and his rescuers gazing ahead, as if reviewing the troops. Montage, dynamism, and propaganda had all begun to coalesce. THE SPEED OF THE [TRICK

As Gunning suggests, parallel montage in early silent cinema arose in close con-

junction with the American chase motif. This intersection of speed and technique was especially pronounced in Soviet Russia, where Kuleshov’s chases accompanied the filmmaker’s evolving method of editing. Moreover, as Soviet montage took shape, an array of other filming techniques and methods emerged to complement the fast cuts. Kuleshov’s early embrace of chases, for instance, coincided with attempts to boost the pace of actors’ performances. Drawing on the theoretical work of the Frenchman Francois Delsarte and the Swiss Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (who had garnered popularity throughout Western Europe by advocating mime and rhythmical, choreographed gestures for stage acting), Kuleshov required actors to employ a range of motion-filled, “mechanical” gestures that could be coordinated with the rapid montage.® The naturshchik, or model, as Kuleshov and others called the movie actor, was to become machinelike, in accordance with the period’s constructivist aesthetics. Striving to control (and choreograph) this rapid action, Kuleshov matched the rhythm of human movement with frequent cuts and his subsequent editing of film shots.® “Montage,’ Mikhail Yampolsky explains in his analysis of Kuleshov’s experimental work, “was now the expression of the new conception of man and derived literally from the human body, as a record of its movement.’** This new concept of the human body, generated by the speed of montage and complex methods of performance, gives further credence to the notion that the era’s dynamism was intricately connected to the evolutionary utopianism of Soviet ideology. Foremost in the postrevolutionary reevaluation of on-screen performance standards in Soviet cinema were methods linked to the triuk (from truc, the French word for “trick” ). Although the term triuk would eventually imply trick camera work, or what Christian Metz has termed trucage, it initially denoted a “stunt.’®> Originating in the circus, stunts required physical skill, well-timed

184 Fast Motion Pictures agility, a good dose of daring, and great alacrity. Whether it was the portrayal of police leaping out of cars, criminals racing through the streets, or heroes fleeing their evil pursuers by daredevil means, the filmic triuk provided audiences with a burst of energy and rapid action that the cinematic medium only accentuated. By the 1920s, in fact, actors such as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd had elevated the stunt, often in the form of a slapstick gag, to an art form by emphasizing the physical over the psychological, while in the genre of the adventureaction drama Douglas Fairbanks gained renown for his daring, swashbuckling stunts. Among Soviet filmmakers, Kuleshov once again proved instrumental in initiating new practices, as the chase scenes from Mr. West attest. Although the American-style stunt, or triuk, played a prominent role in the development of early Soviet cinema, stunts also met with considerable resistance in Soviet Russia. Ippolit Sokolov, declaring how “disgusting” these dangerous, death-defying acts could be, complained that the filming of stunts used for Kuleshov’s second feature-length work, The Death Ray (Luch smerti, 1925), resulted in one actor falling from a tall building and breaking his shoulder.®° And during the filming of Mr. West, Barnet, playing the role of Jeddie, was nearly

killed performing the tightrope walk between buildings.®’ Kuleshov himself wrote at length about his own various attempts to shoot intricate stunts that only succeeded when the actors were fully prepared, which was hardly the norm.** The dangerous nature of these stunts even worked its way into the era’s dialogues. In Sergey Komarov’s Kiss of Mary Pickford, the shooting of a dangerous stunt for a film (within the film) prompts an actor to quip, “My contract requires me to perform, not to die.” Accompanying the rise of speed-oriented

aesthetics in film, these stunts reinforced the fact that Soviet cinema had left the safe confines of the theater and studio and had entered a faster world full of genuine danger. Although the Russian term triuk initially signified a stunt, by the mid-1920s the term had evolved to include established filming techniques that could be used to generate a startling visceral—and often ideological—effect in the viewer. In fact, early Soviet filmmakers would eventually recognize these trick-inspired techniques as priemy, or cinematic devices.*®? The result of technological innovation and a pressing desire to alter visual reality for propagandistic purposes, such devices soon figured prominently in Soviet films. For instance, the popu-

lar conventions of accelerating the film image (an effect created by cranking the movie camera slower than normal) and decelerating to an unnaturally slow pace (quicker than normal cranking) provided Soviet filmmakers with powerful creative means, for even the slightest distortion of pace could impart special significance to a given shot or scene. Moreover, the editing room supplied its

Early Soviet Cinema 185 own atray of options for image manipulation: superimposition, dissolves, fades,

and animation allowed filmmakers to enhance their depiction of reality in a manner highly applicable to the era’s ideological tenor. In early Soviet cinema, modification of the image through an array of cinematic devices served, above all, as an extremely effective model, or metaphor, for how the socialist government would transform Soviet society. Just as the Bolsheviks strove to hasten the development of the country in an unprecedented fashion, filmmakers could accelerate or enhance visual reality by means of their new technology. In the films of Vertov, for instance, cinematic techniques often accompany a utopian vision of Soviet life. Cinema, Vertov and others realized, could now convey a prototypical world in which speed and efficient motion were the norm. Allowing for more dynamic cinema, these filming techniques presented a world where speed, be it mechanical or physical, was abundant, well coordinated, and thus ideally suited to depict the Bolsheviks’ goals of rapid industrialization and social transformation. Also, these evolving techniques required that viewers become visually attuned to this dynamically evolving landscape where rapid change—be it technological or political—and the distortion of conventional reality could be discerned and appreciated. Having evolved out of primitive film tricks (or attractions, as they were often called) devised by such early practitioners of film as Georges Méliés, innova-

tive cinematographic techniques soon began to abound on Soviet screens. In an early Soviet film like the 1924 comedy Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom (Papirosnitsa ot Mosselproma), the film trick is rather primitive; the Chaplinesque hero (played by the popular actor Igor Ilinsky) jumps into the Moscow River to save the heroine, who, he later learns, was participating in a film stunt while a mannequin was tossed off the bridge in her place. But in more avantgarde work, the tricks carried more weight. For instance, in The Devil’s Wheel (Chertovo koleso, 1926), a FEKS film directed by Trauberg and Kozintsev, tricks contribute to a cinematographic style aptly described by Denise Youngblood as “wearisome to the eye but artistically justifiable’? Trauberg and Kozintsev’s tricks, in fact, provide an expressive means for conveying the disorienting, frenetic nature of the “devil’s wheel,” a carnival attraction on which the film’s plot of criminal intrigue is centered. The film’s tricks and typically “eccentric” nature (as prescribed by FEKS and its “eccentrism”) create a dynamic aesthetic that complements the way the film’s protagonist Vanya, a young sailor, becomes caught up in the excitement and speed of Leningrad’s underground world. Vertov, like Trauberg and Kozintsev, adapted basic techniques—such as the freeze-frame, accelerated motion, decelerated motion, the split screen, superimposition, reverse motion, stop-motion cinematography, and other optical

186 Fast Motion Pictures effects—to his developing aesthetic.*! In fact, all these techniques helped the filmmaker achieve his ambitious goal of exploring “the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space” to create a Soviet vision of social order.” With the freezeframe, for instance, Vertov could highlight the motion-based mechanical essence of cinema. Or he could use reverse motion to undermine the viewer's standard

perception of time and motion. These tricks, in addition to creating a new visual reality, amplified the way cinema could transform human vision, offering an ideal vehicle for Bolshevik propaganda.*° Film tricks, so applicable to the constructivist, avant-garde ethos that anthropomorphized the machine, gradually became the technical muscles behind Vertov’s camera mechanics. Vertov even titled some of his early kinopravda (kino-truth) newsreel work “races,” specifically his no. 19 Kino-Pravda newsreel A Movie Camera Race Moscow—Arctic Ocean (Probeg kinoapparata Moskva— Ledovitii okean, 1924).°* Or consider an extended diving sequence from KinoEye (1924), in which Vertov uses a series of camera stunts to conduct his own filmic diving instructions. At a time when modern athletics were emerging as a popular pastime and a fit populace meant a strong, powerful nation, cinema’s tricks provided an ideal means to highlight human physicality as well as the prowess of Soviet citizens, with the camera able to probe and even enhance the mechanics of the athletic act. The diving sequence in Vertov’s Kino-Eye contrasts traditional modes of observation with new, efficient means of viewing the modern world and all its dynamism. Preceded by the intertitle “They swim,” the first shots of what will later become a carefully choreographed sequence reveal Soviet youth—“pioneers’ —wildly splashing about in a pond. Cutting to a distant shot of a boy plunging awkwardly into the water, Vertov brings to light the ineptitude of this dive before cutting to an iris shot (circular masking that creates the impression of a view through a camera or telescope) of another boy who sits in a nearby tree and observes the dive. Following another shot of an unsuccessful dive, Vertov cuts to the intertitle “Kino-eye shows how to dive properly.” The filmmaker now demonstrates how his camera outperforms the naked eye, especially when it comes to the depiction and analysis of quick athletic movement. Vertov’s diving instruction begins with a low-angle long shot of a man plunging from an elevated platform into the water far below. Lasting ten seconds, this initial shot documents the diver’s graceful trajectory and the small splash he makes as he lands in the water. Not content with this traditional view of the dive, Vertov cuts to an ever so slightly raised perspective of the water, in which the ripples float inward and the splash reappears, as the diver magically emerges from the water and floats backward up onto the diving platform. The reverse

Early Soviet Cinema 187 motion, in addition to constituting an entertaining trick, accentuates the refined athleticism of the dive (fig. 15). Following this reverse footage, a similar series of shots features a second diver carrying out a complicated forward flip, splashing into the water, resurfacing, and projecting back onto the diving platform, where Vertov, using a close-up to frame the diver’s legs and buttocks, pinpoints the physical mechanics behind the reverse takeoff. Although the pacing of KinoEye cannot compare with the fast tempo of Vertov’s subsequent work, the use of motion-based tricks in this sequence demonstrates how Vertov envisioned his film work contributing to the creation of a new Soviet individual. Just as he hoped to create a new Soviet viewer, he similarly envisioned cinema facilitating unprecedented physical and visual alacrity. Images of graceful diving could in fact be highly propagandistic and utopian, as the celebrated diving sequence in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia IT (1936) attests with its depiction of the diving competition at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. Vertov’s reliance on tricks, however, came under significant criticism, especially from Eisenstein, who in 1929 declared that his rival’s filming techniques

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beyond the physical sensation of rapid movement constituted the essence of modern art, according to Malevich, and Soviet cinema, it follows, could (and should) effectively transform the dynamism of futurist painting into pure (i.e., abstract) images of this speed. Although suprematism was on the wane by the mid-1920s, Malevich used several essays on cinema to articulate a dynamic, nonobjective vision for film comparable to that found on suprematist (and futurist) canvases. In two initial pieces on cinema, “And Images Triumph on the Screens” (“T likuiut liki na ekranakh,’ 1925) and “The Artist and the Cinema” (“Khudozhnik i kino,’ 1926), Malevich first contended that abstraction would ultimately prevail in avantgarde cinema, enabling the medium to overcome the traditional faithfulness to representational images witnessed in most of the arts: “One would expect the

cinema to overturn the whole of imitative culture, and, of course, it will be overthrown when abstractionists with their new flash of consciousness get into the cinema.”'® Coupled with the film work and writings of the German abstract

artist Hans Richter, who throughout the 1920s experimented with highly dynamic, abstract cinematic form (“Abstract film? Why not!” Richter would subsequently write, “But created under the conditions prescribed by the nature of

film itself: the form and arrangement of fleeting moments. ...In other words, the articulation of TIME!”), Malevich’s prediction points to a crucial cinematic union of speed and abstraction that would emerge at this time.” Malevich, as his articles on cinema indicate, was highly attentive to the development of Soviet film throughout the 1920s. In “Painterly Laws,” for instance, he argued that among Soviet filmmakers, Vertov was the one who had most convincingly succeeded in drawing on cinema’s abstract potential through nonfigurative images of speed.'* According to Malevich, in two of Vertov’s films—

196 Fast Motion Pictures The Eleventh Year and The Man with the Movie Camera—a definitive move to-

ward abstract dynamism had been achieved through the elicitation of nonobjective speed in a variety of scenes that, while visually evocative of Italian futurist painting, offered a new avant-garde expression of the era’s velocity. In establishing a cinematic equivalent to the dynamic tension created between blurred forms in futurist paintings by Russolo, Boccioni, and Balla (a reproduction of Balla’s 1913 Speeding Car: Abstract Speed, as well as a still from The Eleventh Year,

illustrated Malevich’s key points in this Cinema and Culture article), Vertov had emerged as “a trailblazer of new possibilities of kinetic art,’ well on his way to creating “new dynamic film in pure form.’ Vertov, Malevich conceded, might not always be aware of how “abstract” his dynamic images were, but these non-

representational instances of speed constituted film “hitherto unseen” in cinema.”° In The Man with the Movie Camera, for instance, Vertov had “made a step forward” with sequences featuring objects in motion as well as cubo-futurist “shifts” (Vertov’s abrupt transitions between images in street traffic), techniques that attested to the filmmaker’s ability to generate the impression of fast-paced

movement in a nonmimetic fashion.”! Such a focus on “dynamism” was thus moving film toward what Malevich deemed its true nature. As Malevich maintained, Vertov’s abstract renderings of speed represented “the true food of cinema, its essence.””?

Malevich’s cinematic vision, however, remained at odds with the prevailing trends of the day, for the painter’s accent on pure forms of cinematic speed precluded any overt political basis. In “Painterly Laws,” for instance, Malevich deemphasized the role Soviet ideology was playing in the creation of the avantgarde’s dynamic images; he criticized Eisenstein’s films for constituting a continuation of the painterly tradition established by the Wanderers (peredvizhnik1), the group of late nineteenth-century Russian painters whose realist art promoted social criticism over pictorial concerns.’ Eisenstein’s ideologically potent use of montage, despite its creativity, proved anathema to Malevich. Yet by the late 1920s, aesthetics—the aesthetics of speed, among a variety of other creative trends—would gradually be subsumed under propaganda, and with ideology looming so significantly over Soviet art, Malevich’s vision of a nonobjective cinema, reliant on the speed of modernity in its purest, nonideological state, constituted a headstrong divergence from this politicization of cinema. Given how the Bolsheviks had seized on cinema as a propagandistic tool and how notions of speed were closely tied to the ambitious political and industrial goals of the era, abstract dynamism constituted at best an ideal, a pure manifestation of speed to which Soviet filmmakers could only aspire. Although Malevich was “in his understanding of cinema first and foremost

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 197 a painter,’ as Bulgakowa argues, he succeeded in grasping how closely intertwined speed and abstraction could be in cinema.*4 What Malevich did not account for, however, is that with the era’s new pace came an ideological orientation that increasingly eclipsed the pure abstraction inherent to speed and that even Vertov used speed in political ways that transformed the images of dynamism found in The Eleventh Year and The Man with the Movie Camera into a larger statement about Marxist productivity and efficiency. Vertov, Eisenstein, and others did sporadically produce moments of pure cinematic speed in accor-

dance with Malevich's painterly vision, but this abstract dynamism and creativity precariously coexisted with politics. Mayakovsky and Malevich, both of whom had infused their own works with explicit dynamism, saw great potential in cinema. Although both artists remained on the periphery of the period’s cinematic innovations, their prominence in theoretical discussions throughout the 1920s points to the great creativity— and speed—that prevailed at this time across the arts. Futurism and, by extension, Malevich’s suprematism pointed Soviet cinema in creative directions that helped shape the evolution of cinema in Russia from its initial theatricality and melodrama to dynamic experimentation. Politics may have influenced this fervent experimentation, yet throughout most of the 1920s the propaganda did not preclude original expressions of dynamism. Avant-garde cinema had appropriated futurist speed and deftly adapted it to the ideological parameters of the Soviet state. THE IDEOLOGY OF ABSTRACT KINESTHETICS

The synthesis of abstract dynamism and ideology that Malevich highlighted, albeit indirectly, quickly took shape in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. While early American-inspired films, such as Kuleshov’s Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks or Perestyani’s Little Red Devils, were generally devoid of abstract imagery, other films featured moments of nonobjective speed that prevailed within the era’s propagandistic framework. Vertov and Eisenstein, for instance, eagerly experimented with abstract notions of veloc-

ity, as they endeavored in their respective ways to apply this dynamism to an ideological vision for cinema and the new nation. Indeed, several sequences from

films by both Vertov and Eisenstein underscore how these two filmmakers’ dynamic brands of cinema flirted with pure abstraction yet simultaneously remained wedded to highly ideological notions of speed. Vertov, more so than other Soviet filmmakers at the time, fostered a comprehensive aesthetic of speed that bordered on pure abstraction; his nonrepresentational images of rapid movement often seemed to lack any physical referent

198 Fast Motion Pictures in the physical world.** Elements of this abstract ideal (as Malevich suggested in “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema”) were most notable in The Eleventh Year and The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov’s final two silent films. As Vertov wrote in his 1929 “Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” the kinoks (Vertov’s film collective) had devised a “visual formula” that was “a 100 percent film-object, the concentrated essence of ‘I see’ —'I kino-see.”*® With this ambitious cine-

matic aesthetic came a conspicuous emphasis on velocity, which corresponded to Vertov’s rigorous vision of cinema as an inherently dynamic medium unadulterated by and distinct from the other arts. The Eleventh Year (1928), which preceded The Man with the Movie Camera by a year and in many respects anticipated it, contains various scenes of rapid construction that harbor pronounced instances of nondiegetic dynamism. Amid the film’s celebration of ten years of Soviet growth (as commissioned by the Soviet government in honor of the ten-year anniversary of the revolution), Vertov presents a complex web of connections between the fast pace of cinema, the fast pace of industrialization (as illustrated by the building of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station in Ukraine), and the fast pace of flowing water, which all occupy a central position in the film. At the beginning of The Eleventh Year, for instance, Vertov superimposes images of rippling water over shots of the Ukrainian countryside (a village and its church), suggesting that the antiquated past will soon be submerged by the water and, it follows, Soviet progress. Subsequently, semifigurative images full of dynamism show the channeling of water through the hydroelectric station to produce electricity. These shots of rushing water, taken at the Volkhov Hydro-Electric Station outside Leningrad, accentuate the Soviets’ growing capacity to produce industrial forms of energy or, in a word, speed. Furthermore, through associative montage Vertov reveals how

electricity, resulting from the water that rushes over the damn and into the hydroelectric plant, will enlighten (literally) the country, a direct reference to Lenin’s plans to electrify the entire country and an indirect, metaphorical allusion to Vertov’s aim of enlightening the masses through cinema.”’ Vertov lends even greater ideological significance to the shots of racing water by briefly superimposing an image of Lenin over the racing water (fig. 17). Toward the conclusion of The Eleventh Year, with the water generating electricity and this electricity facilitating industrialization, Vertov presents a rhythmical, semidiegetic display of machinery—pistons, rods, shafts, and drives—in motion. An increase in the pace of Vertov’s editing complements this mechanical speed and thus bolsters the film’s underlying message of industrial progress. Accordingly, images of human labor recede in favor of the more mechanized Soviet backdrop; thanks to Vertov’s creative use of filming tricks and techniques,

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workers appear to dissolve into the machinery, simultaneously obscured by the high rate of external movement produced through rapid montage.”® The tempo

of the film, merging with the tempo of the featured machines, gradually detaches the images of speed from any visual sense of their material essence, as Vertov produces a distinct form of nonreferential dynamism. Nevertheless, ideology remains, for Vertov fosters this dynamism as a way of incorporating cinema and its speed into the broad Soviet paradigm of modernization. The closing images of The Eleventh Year exemplify Vertov’s ideological evocation of speed particularly well. Following an intertitle that reads “FORWARD!” (VPERED!), the pace of the film quickens, as if this lone word prompts acceleration. Vertov immediately cuts to several medium close-ups of uniformed men and women marching in rank to a rhythm that quickly increases in a sub-

sequent montage sequence of human labor and machinery, as shots of men tending to blast furnaces are interposed between shots of workers pitching hay into a baler. These rapidly displayed images contain intense internal motion that subverts the diegesis; the brevity of Vertov’s shots (most last less than one

200 Fast Motion Pictures second), coupled with the blurred motion of machinery and dark interior lighting, significantly diminish the representational quality of the images. The movement of the camera, which frequently rotates in unison with the machinery, likewise destabilizes the representational nature of the images. By the end of this final sequence of the film, mechanical speed has virtually swallowed the human figures and the machines’ recognizable forms. Although Vertov would expand his synthesis of quick montage and mechanical motion in The Man with the Movie Camera, the pace of The Eleventh Year and its conspicuous themes of water and progress attest to the filmmaker’s urge to integrate Soviet ideology with an abstract aesthetic of acceleration. Metaphorically, the water—like the film—reflects the “facts” of Soviet industrial reality, that is, until the flow of water and the pace of the film become so fast that distortion ensues, resulting in the nondiegetic images of speed, or in Malevich's terms, film “as such.””? Yet the ideology and industrial goals implicit in these purified images of speed never wane in The Eleventh Year, and the fact that they are intricately tied to abstraction underscores how avant-garde aesthetics and ideology could coexist, at least initially, in Soviet art. In The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov’s most celebrated film, content and form likewise accentuate the evolving avant-garde exploration of cinema’s dynamic underpinnings. Throughout this complex documentation of the passing of a day in what emerges as a fusion of Soviet cities (with footage taken in Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev), Vertov continually highlights the kinesthetic nature of the medium, showing how cinema transforms static images into a modern expression of dynamism. Following several segments (referred to by Petri¢ as “Arrested Movement” and “Editing Room”) in which Vertov freezes an array of images to draw attention to the paradoxical fact that the motion-filled medium of cinema is nothing but a series of immobile images, the film moves in the opposite direction, offering proof of how cinema itself constitutes a powerful manifestation of speed.°° In one central segment (referred to as “Cameraman and Machines”), the speed of machines and the speed of the cinematic medium merge, as Vertov focuses on the eponymous cameraman, who is featured with his camera on his shoulder against a backdrop of abstracted images of Soviet mechanization and what can be seen as an idealized utopian future for the Soviet nation. “Cameraman and Machine” is, in fact, one of Vertov’s most complex displays of modern dynamism. In this forty-nine-second segment consisting of 152 shots (averaging an impressive yet visually exhausting three individual images per second), the filmmaker cuts furiously between shots of the cameraman—Vertov’s reallife cameraman and brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who directed his own urban

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 201 “run” (probeg) in the 1927 Moscow (Moskva), a less daring and dynamic film than The Man with the Movie Camera—and footage of rotating machinery, steam valves, and smokestacks, which all fuse to form an elaborate montage sequence.*!

The cameraman, whose nearly motionless body stretches from the bottom to the top within many of the film frames, appears to jump across the industrial landscape by means of what Petri¢ labels “kinesthetic pulsation,” an editing technique that creates—through extremely rapid intercutting between an object and a distinct background—the impression that a certain physical object leaps across the screen.** Amid the shots of the machinery, three directional patterns of mechanical movement—vertical, circular, and horizontal—help establish a blurred array of semiabstract moving forms, an intensifying form of dynamism that, as in The Eleventh Year, generates the sense that abstract mechanical speed

momentarily overwhelms the figure of the cameraman. From an ideological perspective, the cameraman becomes enveloped in the process of industrialization and the rise of proletarian culture. The sequence therefore contributes to the film’s utopian message in that it presents fast, efficient productivity and labor as a model for both Soviet industry and art, with speed an integral component of the Marxist state’s industrial and cultural future. In addition to Vertov, other Soviet filmmakers similarly attempted to convey broad ideological concepts through abstract dynamism. Eisenstein, although he included experimental images of speed in his work far less frequently than Vertov, nevertheless crafted several films in which semirepresentational shots offer a critical window into the filmmaker’s complex, often metaphorical use of speed.** In The Strike, for instance, a revolutionary form of heroism is bolstered by several prominent displays of nonrepresentational speed. Although working in a narrative format, Eisenstein—much like Vertov—sporadically generated the impression of semiabstract dynamism to accentuate dogma, but his

methods would prove more forceful and more overtly persuasive than those found in The Eleventh Year or The Man with the Movie Camera. Toward the conclusion of The Strike, as Eisenstein’s account of insurrection reaches its climax with a lengthy sequence highlighting the way firemen hose down a rebellious crowd of workers, the heightened pace of the action and images gives way to semirepresentational forms of filmic speed that supplant plot development. While falling short of pure, nondiegetic speed, the prolonged blasts of water in this sequence signify an integration of kinesthetic movement with other more ideological concerns of the filmmaker, such as the forceful subjugation of the masses through propaganda.

The hosing sequence of The Strike commences with an establishing long shot of disgruntled workers proceeding in unison across a cobblestone square.

202 Fast Motion Pictures Consistent with Eisenstein’s brand of heroic realism, which promoted the proletarian masses over the individual, faces in the crowd are barely discernable— only a mass of bodies and legs can be seen. Following a subsequent long shot revealing how the firemen open water valves to fill their hoses, Eisenstein cuts back to an image of the workers that maintains the initial point of view of the firemen who aim their hoses at the crowd. Throughout this sequence, in fact, the camera perspective remains conspicuously close to that of those behind the hoses, thereby linking the camera to the hoses and the force of the water that will stream forth, as if surging out of the camera itself. Then comes the water, which Eisenstein shows through a series of semidiegetic, semiabstract images of rapid, powerful spray. In these shots the water and its directional force appear to overpower everything else. Eisenstein, however, conveys more than just speed: the velocity and strength of the spraying correspond metaphorically to the filmmaking’s visual force, specifically its capacity to influence viewers by overpowering them with a particular viewpoint. Eisenstein’s audience must succumb to the film images that speed toward it, much like the water aimed straight toward the striking workers, who are eventually cornered and subdued by the firemen. The emotional impact of these hosing shots, a manifestation of Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions,” lies outside the trappings of the plot, but like the very force of the water that corners the striking workers, the film’s images overwhelm viewers by means of montage, metaphor, and the stark images of speed that emerge in the shots of gushing water. The violent clash of the water and the workers suggests, metaphorically, the increasing “conflict” of shots central to Eisenstein’s system of montage. In the final scenes that follow this spraying in The Strike, the authorities proceed to massacre the workers, as Eisenstein, using ideologically potent montage to draw attention to the brutality of the authorities, famously intersperses nondiegetic footage of a cow being slaughtered with images of the helpless proletariat perishing, victims of the police. The fast-paced flow of the water has become the flowing blood of the cow, which in turn is linked associatively to the frenzied flow of the workers, who race in vain down a hill away from their brutal pursuers. This ending is loaded with political import; the speed, in the form of violent imagery, the film’s fast action, and the advocacy of swift insurrection, offers a potent message to Eisenstein’s audience. Power—and pace—should belong to the revolutionary proletariat, not to the oppressive authorities, Eisenstein suggests. While the dynamism of Vertov’s water imagery in The Eleventh Year represents a form of pure cinema used for the purpose of equating the medium’s visual potency with rapid industrialization, the speed of Eisenstein’s water emphasizes an even greater power and efficiency for cinema. And while Vertov’s

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 203 vision of speed points to the integrated role film and its viewers were to play in the country’s march toward a Marxist utopia, Eisenstein highlights speed in a more aggressive, revolutionary fashion meant to grab viewers persuasively. Although the water in The Strike is the weapon of the repressive government, it simultaneously conveys the ability of cinema and its speed to compel viewers toward a revolutionary consciousness, much like “a tractor plowing over the audience’s psyche in a particular class context,’ as Eisenstein characterized his own filmmaking.* IDEOLOGICAL ACCELERATION IN SOVIET MONTAGE

As the hosing sequence from Eisenstein’s Strike suggests, by the mid-1920s Eisen-

stein and other Soviet filmmakers were beginning to realize how persuasive cinema’s fast pace could be. The internal action in film shots contributed to this persuasiveness, but it was the complex, rapid juxtaposition of film shots that offered the greatest possibilities for challenging and swaying viewers. By developing their respective forms of film montage, Soviet filmmakers fostered an external, often abstract manifestation of dynamism in their fast-paced work that supplemented the internal action achieved through conventional, narrativebased cinema. In films by Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin, the collision of images, along with other montage techniques such as intervals, the phi effect, and linkage, generated powerful, ideologically potent forms of Soviet dynamism. While Eisenstein’s most memorable fusion of fast montage and revolutionary thematics can be found in the celebrated Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin, where amid the massacre of innocent citizens by czarist troops a baby carriage dramatically careens down the steps (“The pram works in relation to the feet [of marching soldiers] as a direct staged accelerator,’ Eisenstein wrote in 1929), a more pronounced manifestation of speed permeates the conclusion of Potemkin, in which the eponymous battleship rushes through Black Sea waters toward the imperial squadron.*° Following a series of constructivist-

inspired shots of the machinery pumping away to propel the boat forward, swift, aggressive momentum is contrasted with what appears to be the backward flow of the quickly receding waters, thus resulting in a lasting impression of fast, clashing movement. In one short segment that encapsulates the sequence’s rapid events, Eisenstein cuts from the intertitle “Meet them head-on” (“Grud’iu navstrechu’), a verbal evocation of conflict and velocity, to an overhead medium shot of the battleship’s front prow cutting through the water. Two more shots

taken from above follow, one of water rushing by on the port side, and the other a mirror image taken on the starboard side. These, along with four subsequent overhead shots of the boat proceeding through the waves, metaphorically

204 Fast Motion Pictures convey the potential conflict that the battleship faces. With water splashing violently against the charging vessel, Eisenstein cuts to sailors at the helm, speeding the boat toward impending combat. To endow this dramatic scene with even greater internal, plot-driven velocity, Eisenstein inserts several shots of the Potemkin’s accelerometer, the arrow of which is pointed toward “forward” (vpered) and “medium” (sredni1) velocity. Several shots later, this arrow proceeds counter-clockwise to “full” (polnyi) and then, as Eisenstein sporadically cuts to shots of the boat’s guns rising upward, the arrow attains maximum speed (samyi polny1), suggesting that the boat's

firepower corresponds to its velocity. Although the shots here are greater in length than those found in the subsequent October or in Vertov’s films, Eisenstein uses his montage to convey the speed of the boat and the potential for violent conflict. In fact, images of the vessel cutting quickly through the water replicate the symbolic thrust of the hosing sequence from The Strike: in both films, Eisenstein’s dynamic shots and montage seem designed to penetrate the mind-set of viewers through their velocity. Like Eisenstein, Vertov sought out a variety of technical means to suit the era's ideological pace; he integrated highly kinesthetic forms of montage into his nonfiction newsreels and later “plotless” films. Early experimentation with film editing led, almost immediately, to the formulation of a “theory of intervals,” Vertov’s unique variety of montage in which editing “on movement” (cutting in the middle of an action) could create dramatic transitions between adjoining film shots to lend a given sequence a heightened sense of motion and acceleration. Also, interdependent variables, such as recording speeds and internal movement, allowed carefully integrated yet visually disparate shots to merge, thus establishing an underlying contrapuntal rhythm—or syncopation—within the spaces (i.e., intervals) between contiguous film images. According to Vertov, patterns of movement would arise in these intervals, as “the visual correlation of shots with one another” generated the kinesthetic groundwork for the montage sequence.”° By the end of the 1920s, the “interval” occupied a foremost position in Vertov’s

theoretical framework as well as in his major works. Throughout The Man with the Movie Camera, for instance, intervals provide the basis for much of the film’s furious pace. In one segment referred to as “Working Hands,” numerous shots of workers’ hands are juxtaposed to generate quick rhythm and a kinesthetic amalgamation of action. Once again, abstract speed, now produced externally by the intervals between images rather than internally within the image,

contributes to the film’s Marxist tenor, for labor, in a variety of forms, predominates, as Vertov highlights fast-paced typing, shoe shining, engineering,

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 205 piano playing, and filmmaking, among a multitude of other modern-day occupations. Soviet workers, Vertov shows, function with lightning-quick efficiency. In “Street and Eye,’ another brief segment from The Man with the Movie Cam-

era, the intervals underscore a new vision of urban dynamism, as Vertov integrates quick, semiabstract images of the city with extreme close-ups of a single eye gazing out at the viewer. Vertov prefaces this overtly kinesthetic sequence with several shots offering a defamiliarized view of street life: following an accelerated traveling shot of a street crowd that scurries out of the way as the camera—slightly elevated—rapidly approaches, Vertov shifts his perspective to the ground by cutting to a high-angle shot of a tram that proceeds over the camera before disappearing from view. Three frames prior to the conclusion of this shot, Vertov inserts several empty black frames to create a momentary flickering effect. These black imageless frames—cinematic “blinks”—provide jumpy external rhythm to the sequence, while they also lead immediately to the appearance of a fleeting eye and a series of kinesthetic intervals that challenge viewers with their quick, disorienting pace. Continuing for twenty-eight seconds, Vertov’s “Street and Eye” segment features the rhythmical juxtaposition of bird’s-eye-view shots of a city square below and fleeting close-ups of the wide-open human eye. The long shots of the city are either slanted or blurred by quick panning and directional shifts of the camera. The duration of each individual shot quickly decreases to the point that the final images of the city consist of only two or three frames, while the eye appears for as little as one frame at a time. Such a sudden increase in the rate of film cuts—a form of accelerated montage—creates an effect of speed that complements the energy conveyed by the camera’s sudden shifts. This sequence, in fact, is immediately followed by a shot of a woman calling into the hospital to report a road accident, suggesting, as Petri¢ notes, that all this kinesthetic movement has metaphorically precipitated the crash.*” The violent motion between the shots supplements the violent urban speed of the street. Throughout “Street and Eye,” the eye sporadically seems to open and close as a result of Vertov’s quick transitions, an effect underscoring Vertov’s belief that cinema could enhance human vision and facilitate the Soviet populace’s acclimation, at least visually, to the speed of the modern city. While intervals generate much of the external speed in “Street and Eye,” Vertov also makes use of what various film scholars have termed the “phi effect.” Based on the notion that the human brain retains an image for a split second even after the image has disappeared from view, this phi effect occurs when the rapid projection of two objects within several successive frames contributes to the impression that the two objects appear simultaneously as if superimposed on each other (what Eisenstein

206 Fast Motion Pictures called “vertical” montage). In “Street and Eye,’ the phi effect is particularly noticeable at the conclusion of the rapid montage sequence, when the eyeball and the street appear for only one or two frames at a time, with the fast cutting creating the sense that the eye has been superimposed onto the street. This phi effect figured prominently in a range of Soviet films from the 1920s, as did the related “phi leap,” which allows a single object, projected in successive frames in different areas of the frame, to appear as though it jumps across the movie screen. Eisenstein, for one, frequently used the phi leap, which lent his ideologically charged images an anarchic aura.*® In October, Eisenstein’s account of the revolutionary events of 1917, an overt dynamism stemming from

the phi leap is readily apparent in a brief sequence in which a young peasant boy leaps—in just a few fragmented frames—onto the throne in the Winter Palace: in one shot the boy stands before the throne and in the next shot he sits on the throne, for Eisenstein has removed the intervening stages of the jump.°” For Eisenstein, the phi effect and the phi jump produced a kinesthetic effect more violent in nature and ultimately more persuasive than that found in Vertov’s work. Alluding to the phi effect in his 1929 essay “The Dramaturgy of Film

Form,’ Eisenstein underscored the sense of collision integral to his montage work: “The eye follows the direction of an element. It retains a visual impression,

which then collides with the impression derived from following the direction of a second element. The conflict between these directions creates the dynamic effect in the apprehension of the whole.’*? This “conflict”—elsewhere referred to by Eisenstein as a collision—gives rise to dynamic “counterpoint,” as the filmmaker himself called this rhythmical display of speed. Just as movement is crucial to the counterpoint, the thematic material of the shots also proves indispensable, for a synthesis of colliding themes prevails, creating a powerful ideological statement through the clashing agitational concepts and speed.

A vivid example of visual counterpoint and collision arises in an early sequence from October (1928). Eisenstein, highlighting a peaceful mass demonstration transpiring on Nevsky Prospekt, the main artery of Petrograd (St. Peters-

burg), begins with conventional transitions between shots of the crowd and portentous shots of a machine gun, which points upward to the left. Suddenly, the montage becomes rapid and fierce, as Eisenstein cuts repeatedly from a frame

of the machine gun pointing down to a frame of the gun pointing upward, followed immediately and several times by a dark close-up of the machinegunman’s face (fig. 18). This “effect almost of double exposure with rattling montage” (Eisenstein’s own description) continues in subsequent frame-byframe cutting between the gun and the gunman, before a more transitional cut to lengthier bird’s-eye-view shots shows the street crowd dispersing frantically

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 207 (fig. 19).41 The montage has not only simulated the visual experience of bullets being fired but also replicates, through the swift and aggressive interchange of images, the firing sound of the bullets. Moreover, the images appear to collide, like bullets hitting their mark. One might even compare this machine-gun scene from October to Vertov’s “Street and Eye” sequence, described earlier, to emphasize how the two film-

makers similarly incorporated speed into their work through montage, yet often for divergent ends. Given that both sequences include extremely rapid cuts between close-ups of objects (Eisenstein’s machine gun and Vertov’s eye) and long shots of the distant urban street, similarities abound. Both filmmakers use their montage to convey the violent speed of the city, but whereas Vertov uses intervals to analyze the eye’s attempts at perceiving rapid motion, Eisenstein, less concerned about issues of perception, draws on his montage of collision to suggest violence and injustice. In both of these brief sequences, montage and its speed underlie ideology, but while the “Street and Eye” segment betrays Vertov’s vision of a Soviet cinema capable of uncovering a deeper reality within

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208 Fast Motion Pictures

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modern existence, Eisenstein’s images offer a more overtly propagandistic, revolutionary rationale for rapid montage as his quick images compel the viewer to take the side of the Bolsheviks.

While Vertov and Eisenstein adapted the inherent pace of the cinematic medium to fit their respective aesthetic and ideological visions, Vsevolod Pudovkin succeeded in molding a rapid montage style well suited to the fictional and overtly political nature of his own films. For Pudovkin, montage was to merge with narrative as a means to engage audiences both visually and ideologically. Instead of employing collisions or intervals, Pudovkin developed what he himself called “linkage by movement” within his edited film footage, with one shot moving logically to the next to propel a film narrative forward in an efficient,

transparent fashion.” Linkage, in large part indicative of Pudovkin’s stated admiration for wellestablished Hollywood techniques such as continuity editing, enabled the film-

maker to promote narrative economy as well as quick, efficient transitions between scenes, all of which Pudovkin believed “spares the spectator’s energy,”

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 209 thus allowing for greater visceral participation in a film’s images and plot.* Having initially worked as a chemist before first directing the scientific documentary The Mechanics of the Brain (Mekhanika golovnogo mozga, 1925), an exploration of Pavlovian physiology, Pudovkin was drawn to the theory of thermodynamics, that is, the conversion of energy from one form to another; this work prompted the young filmmaker to establish, according to Vance Kepley, “the film as the site of energy conversion” between artist and viewer, as Pudovkin visually transferred this energy to audiences.“ Selectively intensi-

fying the energy and pace of his film, Pudovkin used sporadic moments of extremely rapid montage to underscore his pronounced commitment to revolutionary heroics and Marxist ideology. Although his main concern was to link film images together to present a coherent, efficient story, he also linked speed with propaganda, demonstrating how essential a rapid tempo was to the depiction and transmission of revolutionary ideals in Soviet cinema. Pudovkin’s first feature-length narrative film, Mother ( Mat’, 1926), may have

earned the Soviet director his fame, while his End of St. Petersburg (Konets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927) solidified it, but it is Storm over Asia, or Heir to Genghis Khan (Potomok Chingis-khana, 1928), as the film was titled in Russian, that most

vividly demonstrates his commitment to an ideological form of filmic speed. As one brief sequence from Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia reveals, rapid montage offered great propagandistic potential, even within the relatively strict narrative framework adopted by Pudovkin. This sequence—a furious scuffle between the film’s Asian hero and a group of British soldiers that comes toward the end of the film—trepresents one of the period’s fastest manifestations of montage, while it also illustrates how intricately the aesthetics and ideology of speed had merged in Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Toward the end of Storm over Asia, Pudovkin’s Mongolian protagonist Bair rises up against the British generals who have installed him as the puppet leader for British-controlled Mongolia. Having witnessed British soldiers unjustly shoot a defenseless Mongolian prisoner, Bair flies into a rage, which Pudovkin creatively approximates through quick editing.* As Bair’s fury grows, the camera

captures the protagonist’s ferocity through linked images of rapid movement and frequent cuts from one violent motion to another. The use of a swirling camera and a multitude of brief angled shots frame the action, adding visual emphasis to Pudovkin’s advocacy of revolutionary insubordination. Following the initial shots of fierce resistance, Bair violently shakes a column in the room where his adversaries have congregated, causing nearby stagelike scaffolding supported by the column to collapse. In an ensuing long shot, Bair stares straight at the camera as the toppled staging crashes down in the

210 Fast Motion Pictures background; the film set, now superfluous, seemingly dissolves, and all that remains in front of the camera is Bair and his sword. As Bair brandishes his weapon in angry defiance, the camera homes in on the Mongol’s slashing, violent motions. A pronounced form of linkage, the frequency of Pudovkin’s rapid cuts matches Bair’s swipes with the sword. The violent motion, however, soon becomes so frenetic that not even the camera can keep pace, and the viewer must struggle to discern the blurry details of the action, which begin to lose their representational quality. Throughout, the pace of the hero’s movement increases, as the slashing rhythmic pattern of sword images achieves a semiabstract, semidiegetic essence that, while not immediately evident to the naked eye, creates a powerful illustration of violent rebellion. What follows these initial shots of the sword is an extraordinary four-secondlong sequence, in which each second of celluloid consists of eighteen separate shots or intertitle frames. Each single-frame shot conveys the violent pace of Bair’s attack on the British, with the rapid montage generating a hyperdynamic effect. Employing his own form of the edited phi leap, Pudovkin fosters the impression of sudden movement by interspersing frames of the hero (fig. 20) with single-frame flashes of an intertitle (implicitly, words that the hero shouts). Over the course of approximately two seconds of this sequence, Pudovkin fluctuates sixteen times between frames of the intertitle “Bandits” and a close-up of the hero, whose expression—either a fierce grimace or an enraged smile— changes ever so slightly from one frame to another. After a brief interlude of relatively longer shots, Pudovkin again resorts to images shown in a single frame, only now he forgoes the use of intertitles, as if attempting to achieve an even purer impression of speed and violence. In place of the exclamatory intertitles, Pudovkin fluctuates between close-ups of the hero

and the hero’s sword, including hyperbolized shots of multiple swords; each second of this most kinesthetic moment consists of eighteen distinct, singleframe images. Pudovkin’s frenetic editing continues for approximately three seconds, concluding with two frames of blurred, virtually abstract motion suggesting that the pace of Bair’s attack has become simply too fast to record. Although the viewer cannot discern the variations and nuances of this sequence when projection occurs at a normal speed, the overall visual effect is one of extreme energy and dynamism. The ensuing events of Storm over Asia seemingly leap out of Bair’s revolt and the rapid montage. As the Mongols charge on horseback across an open plain in defiance of the British, Pudovkin intersperses shots of the rebels with images of a strong wind blowing across the steppe, suggestive of the uprising’s organic surge (fig. 21). It is in the preceding sequences of single-frame editing, however,

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 211

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FIGURE 20. Vsevolod Pudovkin, Storm over Asia, 1928.

that Pudovkin most effectively conveys—through rapid montage—the era’s revolutionary spirit. Although brief, the scene packs a powerful ideological punch.

The impact of the edited shots, particularly within the context of revolutionary heroism and the political ideals of the 1920s, is overpowering: at first with intertitles and then with the sword, Pudovkin evokes intense emotional drama, a furious pace, and an intense impression of violent rebellion, all achieved by means of montage, linkage, and an ideological commitment to one’s art. AN ACCELERATED VIEW OF THE REVOLUTION

Early Soviet cinema, Storm over Asia attests, provided a highly politicized frame-

work for the era’s speed. It also offered an unprecedented perspective on the accelerating modern landscape. “The filmmaker,” Kuleshov wrote in 1929, “takes

the viewer as if by the scruff of his neck and... thrusts him into an airplane and forces him to see the landscape from the air, makes him whirl with the propeller and see the landscape through the whirling propeller.’** Indeed, one of the central aims of filmmakers like Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin

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212 Fast Motion Pictures

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was to transform the viewing habits of Soviet audiences. Instead of resorting to conventional (1.e., theatrical) means to captivate spectators, these directors generated techniques and imagery that they believed would revolutionize their viewers’ perceptiveness, all in accordance with the Soviet state’s conspicuous commitment to Marxism and proletarian, class-conscious propaganda that was regarded as fundamental to the nation’s development. While abstract, edited forms of dynamism constituted one element of this new ideological aesthetic, more recognizable, “internal” forms of speed, such as those created by the locomotive and other mechanized modes of transportation, also occupied a prominent place in avant-garde cinema. Soviet filmmakers simultaneously highlighted modernity’s fast-paced machines, realizing that trains and automobiles, given their mechanical form of acceleration, offered a dynamism closely linked to cinema’s ideological potential. Accordingly, early Soviet filmmakers used these machines to accentuate their advanced point of view on modern reality

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 213 and to educate audiences so that they might acclimate themselves to the increasingly fast-paced world. For once capable of perceiving fleeting images of speed, the masses would, at least theoretically, possess an up-to-date outlook more in sync with the Soviets’ socialist experiment and explicit sprint past the West. The propagandistic aims of the early Soviet era stipulated a heightened role for cinema, whether avant-garde or more traditional fare that could captivate as well as edify the viewer. The rapid display of film images was in part aimed at enhancing the visual acumen of the urban proletarian crowd and its receptiveness to speed, for Soviet citizens, especially those coming from the coun-

tryside to the city, required instruction in how to observe and make sense of their era’s pace. Familiar figurative images were therefore needed if filmic speed was to have any immediate relevance for the public at large, for audiences could hardly have been expected to appreciate, at least initially, abstract dynamism;

even in the concluding sequence of The Man with the Movie Camera, a film audience is shown paying scant attention to nonfigurative images of high velocity—nondiegetic shots of a quickly rotating spool of wire—projected on a movie screen. Too much speed, it seems, could lead to spectatorial stasis, while more recognizable forms of speed could more effectively alter the perspective of the uninitiated masses.

“Perspective, Erwin Panofsky explains, “creates distance between human beings and things . .. but then in turn abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye.’*” As Panofsky suggests, perspective allows audiences the opportunity to engage images that initially appear foreign and distant. To draw the disorienting world of speed into their audience’s field of vision and to augment the audience’s perspective, Soviet avant-garde filmmakers consistently turned to the modern era’s most prevalent symbols of acceleration, vehicles of modern transportation, machinery, and rapid industrialization. By elaborating on “the rhythms of machines, the delight of mechanical labor” through film, Vertov, for one, declared that his “basic programmatic objective [was] to aid each oppressed individual and the proletariat as a whole in their effort to understand the phenomena of life around them.”** The speed of the urban, industrialized landscape, inspiring crucial propagandistic lessons in how to make sense of the chaotic pace of a swiftly evolving society, soon occupied a foremost position in early Soviet film. Trains, such ubiquitous symbols of modernity and its velocity, became one of the more conspicuous images on Soviet movie screens. Throughout the silent era, filmmakers in Soviet Russia emphasized the close correlation between cinema and the railroad, particularly in regard to the way both the locomotive and

214 Fast Motion Pictures movies brought power, speed, and a sense of mobility to the public at large. And the pace and perspective of train travel could conveniently be replicated in the cinema. Lynne Kirby, describing how the train served as a “mechanical double” for silent cinema, writes, “Like film’s illusion of movement, the experience of the railroad is based on a fundamental paradox: simultaneous motion and stillness.”* Just as rail passengers could sit motionlessly yet move and experience a panoramic landscape through the train window, filmgoers could enjoy a similar sensation when sitting in the movie theater. Both train travel and cinema-going were transformative experiences, altering the sitting spectator’s vision of the world through images of speed. As a symbol of modernization and efficiency, the train itself boasted great ideological significance: like cinema, trains enabled passengers to witness firsthand the technological progress occurring throughout the expanding modern Soviet state. In fact, many early Soviet filmmakers promoted the train both as the camera’s mechanical companion and as an ideological symbol of the proficient means of communication and transportation that Soviet society hoped to achieve; these filmmakers, many of whom began their careers by shooting films on post—civil war agit-trains, emulated the experience of train travel through constructivist aesthetics and rapid montage, and they strove to advance the nation’s broad Marxist goals of an efficient state-controlled economy and classless social structure in much the same way the locomotive offered the Soviets a faster, more streamlined nation. The train, its velocity, and its ideological significance emerge as crucial elements of Ilya Trauberg’s China Express (1929). Like Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia, China Express features a narrative detailing political unrest in imperial China, where downtrodden Chinese workers on a train rebel against the ruling classes and China’s European occupiers. Trauberg, drawing on the work of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, applies a highly kinesthetic editing style to the topos of revolu-

tion (which the Soviets helped instigate in China in the late 1920s), for the majority of the film’s mutinous action occurs aboard a train traveling west. Over the course of the film, this train emerges as a powerful allegorical symbol of the looming Chinese rebellion: the intertitle “Tt’s coming!” appears periodically during the first half of the film, as the advent of the train both expedites and embodies the angry uprising of the Chinese. Trauberg also uses images of the train and its speed as well as his rapid montage to exhort spectators to follow the lead of the Chinese proletariat and to engage—at least visually—with the insurgency, for viewers, much like train passengers, become caught up in the headlong force of the insurrection. The speed of both the railroad and cinema, China Express suggests, provides the catalyst for revolution.

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 215 After a relatively slow-paced opening segment in which Chinese warlords and wealthy Europeans board a train called the Blue Express, the journey begins.

An initial long shot shows the steam engine pulling out of the station in daylight, moving straight toward the camera. Night suddenly descends, and the locomotive continues ahead, passing by the camera as its lights and illuminated puffs of smoke quickly expand in size. The steam engine—revolution, in veiled metaphorical terms—has arrived out of the darkness, its smoke and speed portentously increasing. Subsequent close-ups highlight the engine’s mechanical underpinnings— the pistons and the furnace—and their resemblance to the mechanical workings of a movie projector, as Trauberg emphasizes the links between the railroad and cinema, particularly the velocity generated by both. As the train accelerates, Trauberg quickens the pace of his editing by inserting increasingly shorter shots and faster transitions between scenes. Brief long shots of the locomotive’s mechanics in the throes of motion give way to close-ups of a gaunt Chinese man

who operates the engine’s gears. Through swift associative progression from the train and its powerful mechanics to the Chinese workers’ control of this power, Trauberg insinuates that a comparable use of speed enables Soviet cinema and its propaganda to serve as an effective proletarian tool. By the film’s violent, chaotic end, the Blue Express has anthropomorphically come alive: the Chinese workers’ mutiny transpires successfully on board, as the train appears to speed wildly into the darkness and the future. “This express has gone insane,” one intertitle states. The trains momentum and speed ensures a swift transformation of the social and political landscape. “There is no stopping it,’ onlookers exclaim toward the end of China Express, as the train proceeds forward at a relentless pace. One is hard pressed to find other examples from early Soviet cinema where the association is made so explicitly between

trains and cinema, and between speed and the Soviet celebration of revolution. Trauberg’s viewers must acquiesce to the speed, be it the rebellious force of the train or the film’s rapidly edited images of agitation. Even Aleksandr Dovzhenko, a filmmaker who would become known for his slow-paced, lyrical shots of the Ukrainian countryside (particularly those in his 1930 masterpiece Earth |Zemlia|), presented the train and its velocity as a harbinger of revolution. In Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929), the speeding train accordingly portends revolutionary activity. At the very outset of this often

elliptical film, Dovzhenko shows World War I soldiers returning home to Ukraine from the front on top of a train, with the scenery racing past them in an unrecognizable blur that vividly symbolizes the violent speed of historical

216 Fast Motion Pictures events. These soldiers, moreover, will soon play a prominent role in the Ukrainian civil war fight for a bright communist future. After an early sequence highlighting the horrors of war, Dovzhenko returns in Arsenal to the train motif as soldiers, resisting the threats of Ukrainian nationalists, take over a locomotive that, according to the conductor, has faulty brakes. In the ensuing sequence, this train dramatically picks up speed, prompting soldiers to fight for control of the accelerating locomotive (“Make her go faster,” the rebellious soldiers yell). Dovzhenko cuts rapidly between angled shots of the racing train, the scuffling of soldiers, and close-up shots of an accordion (a connection made between music and locomotive velocity that Trauberg also evokes in China Express). Eventually, the pace becomes too great, causing the train to come to a crashing halt, as Timosh, the film’s proletarian hero, admits that he must learn to operate a train. As will later become evident, the rapid, headlong train ride and subsequent crash metaphorically foreshadow the revolutionary, civil war events that transpire at the end of the film when Red soldiers, led by Timosh, strive in vain to resist the siege of Ukrainian nationalists. Dovzhenko, like other avant-garde directors at the time, highlights the pathos of tragic revolutionary events, simultaneously lending them a velocity and force that hint at ultimate glory. Images of the train’s power and pace often helped glorify the Communists’ achievements and goals, particularly in the period’s nonfiction films. In Viktor Turin’s Turksib (1929), for instance, the train plays a conspicuously ideological role, serving as the explicit protagonist in this visually arresting “culture [i.e., educational] film” (kul’turfil’m). Turin, who had earlier studied in the United States at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traveled to impoverished Turkistan, a small southeastern region of the Soviet Union, to direct this “agit”inspired work, his first and only significant film. As Konstantin Feldman asserted in a 1929 Cinema and Culture piece on Turksib, Turin’s work represented a victory of the culture film over narrative film in that the “agitational force of its well-developed and well-edited facts is shown with exhaustive persuasiveness.’~° Similar to Vertov’s ethnographic Sixth of the World (Shestaia chast’ mira), a 1926 film drawing attention to the variety of cultures throughout the Soviet Union, Turksib demonstrates how both cinema and the train, racing between Siberia and Turkistan, could conquer the vast space of the country.”! A documentation of the building of a train line on which water and goods will be brought to underdeveloped, drought-stricken Turkistan (“WAR on Prim-

itivism” reads one intertitle), Turksib features a dramatic shift from lengthy shots of outdated agricultural practices to rapid montage sequences highlighting industrial success in Turkistan. In a crescendo of speed that reaches its

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 217 culmination in the film’s closing images of the locomotive’s arrival in this remote region, Turin interweaves accelerated shots, striking dissolves from dormant to pumping machinery, and exhortative intertitles (“The pace of the mills will quicken”) to underscore his filmic celebration of the railroad and the infusion of velocity into the Soviet landscape (fig. 22). The train races past tradition, easily outpacing the native population, which rides on horseback. Turin also inserts the reoccurring intertitle “Forward” to emphasize the headlong progress of not only trains and Soviet industry but also Soviet cinema and its spectators, who will be inspired to participate in the advancement of socialism. With accel-

erated close-ups of railroad track disappearing beneath the fast locomotive and shots of a prosperous Turkistan, Turin suggests that the speed of technology and its proper use by the socialist state will transform the Soviet landscape. The train plays a similar role in the films of Vertov. In Vertov’s own “culture film” Stride, Soviet! (Shagat, Sovet! 1926), for instance, the locomotive provides

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218 Fast Motion Pictures thematic and visual impetus for a propagandistic message promoting the modern over the old-fashioned and out-dated.°’ A testimony to the efforts made by the Moscow soviet (the Moscow city government) to rehabilitate the nation’s industry and social network, Stride, Soviet! features dramatic shifts from scenes of devastation—the result of the czarist regime’s neglect, the revolution, and the subsequent civil war—to contemporary images of rapid progress, with the promotion of swift, forward advancement accentuated by the very title of Vertov’s film. Accordingly, the production of new steam engines emerges as a key symbol of Soviet resurrection. In one of many sequences from Stride, Soviet! depicting extensive destruction followed by scenes of accelerated construction and social restructuring, Vertov focuses on ruined train track and an overturned locomotive to suggest a dearth of transportation and communication in the aftermath of Russia’s tumultuous civil war. Soviet society, however, will infuse this devastated backdrop with speed and power. Complemented by a host of comparable images reflecting hastened revitalization, shots of new locomotives bolster Vertov’s kinesthetic approach to propaganda, for the trains signify progress, transformative efficiency, and a dynamic landscape, all of which are foremost in the film. In The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov places an even greater premium

on the locomotive and its transformative effect on both the physical and the cultural landscape of the Soviet Union. Although trains constitute only one of many dynamic themes in Vertov’s film, the numerous internal manifestations of speed in The Man with the Movie Camera derive largely from either shots of moving trains or shots taken from moving trains. Early in the film, for instance, Vertov takes full advantage of the railroad and its velocity in the segment “Awakening,’ where he initiates the quick montage and associative crosscutting that will prevail throughout the rest of the film. In this segment Vertov introduces crucial exegesis on the nature of human perception, as he shifts back and forth between kinesthetic shots of a train to shots of an awakening woman, who embodies the soon-to-rise city as well as the aroused viewer. After an establishing shot of the cameraman’s automobile crossing train tracks, followed by a brief glimpse of the rising woman, Vertov presents a long shot that shows the cameraman positioning his camera between

the rails of the train track, while in the distance a steam engine approaches, moving directly toward the viewer and Kaufman. The duration of this image (over twelve seconds), considerably longer than the typical Vertov shot, generates a visceral sense of danger as the cameraman fidgets frantically on the tracks and the train zooms forward. With this excitement comes a burst of velocity,

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 219 as the rate of montage increases dramatically and Vertov begins to challenge his viewers ability to perceive images of speed. Responding to the energy and pace initiated by the racing train, Vertov imme-

diately reduces the length of subsequent shots, and for approximately half a second (seven frames), a close-up shows the cameraman crouching alongside the tracks as a blurred train races by him. Just as train travel offered passengers a defamiliarized view of the world flashing by outside, Vertov introduces a flurry of shots that undermine viewers’ conceptions of phenomenal reality: the train moves past the cameraman from frame right to frame left, the opposite of the train’s direction in the preceding shot (the image seems to have been flipped). This inconsistency destabilizes the spatial dimensions of the sequence, while it also increases the viewer's disorientation. In a subsequent set of shots—an unremitting array of camera tilts and pans—Vertov creates the fleeting impression that the train races downward and then upward.

In “Awakening,” Vertov also inserts shots that introduce fleeting tension clearly intended to undermine established cinematic clichés, particularly those associated with speed. For instance, a tilted shot of the train racing by from frame right to frame left is followed by a brief close-up of the cameraman’s shoe caught on the rails. In the next image, the point of view shifts to that of Kaufman’s camera situated between the tracks, while the locomotive, which appears to be moving with even greater speed thanks to pixilation (the removal of various frames from a shot to create a jumpy, accelerated effect), proceeds over the camera (fig. 23). The dangerous action around the rails, the ensuing shots of Kaufman crouching by the tracks, and the sheer speed of the cutting evoke a sense of mock calamity, for this scene parodies, as various critics have noted, the cinematic trope of the train rushing over the helpless victim. Highlighting these Hollywood-style effects and plot devices, Vertov offers his own Marxist rendition of cinematic suspense and speed. Instead of Hollywood melo-

drama and fast-paced suspense, there is Vertov’s athletic cameraman as the proletarian hero who documents the dynamism of the socialist nation for Soviet audiences. After the image of the locomotive running over the camera, Vertov crosscuts back to a close-up of the woman, lying in bed but soon to rise. By alternating between the train and the awakening of the woman as well as the city around her, Vertov promotes a new mode of perception appropriate to Soviet society's accelerating pace. The rising woman must adjust to the speed: Vertov subsequently shows this woman blinking rapidly in sync with venetian blinds that quickly open and shut before her. These blinds and the woman’s eyes open and shut at roughly the same pace as Vertov’s cuts, thus suggesting that this ordinary

220 Fast Motion Pictures

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: -_ _ = am = * aiid 5 = FIGURE 23. Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929.

Soviet citizen is adjusting to the unprecedented velocity of both the city and the cinema. When cutting back to shots of the train, Vertov inserts several empty black frames to create a temporary flickering effect that mirrors the woman’s blinking perspective. Together with the filmmaker’s “intervals,” the flickering challenges viewers to perceive a sequence of images that diverges from traditional cinematic sequences comprised of logical cuts and motion. Shifts in direction, rapid acceleration, flickering frames, and halting jump cuts to and from the waking woman likewise provide an unprecedented kinesthetic display of dynamism to which viewers must adapt if they are to follow the film’s action. Adjusting to such rapid movement meant achieving a unique perspective on modernity: “Kino-eye,” Vertov wrote in 1929, “is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed inaccessible to the human eye.”°? For Vertov, avant-garde filmmaking could engender in viewers greater perspicacity and greater awareness of modernity’s dynamism.

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 221 While the issue of perception is raised by the multitude of train shots in The Man with the Movie Camera, other sequences further highlight the prominent role vision and the viewing of speed play in the film. Vertov, for instance, includes shots of his mechanical “kino-eye” gazing across the bustling city, and in later sequences Soviet citizens are featured in the simple yet celebrated act of observation: spectators watch sporting events, magic shows, and also the movies. In all such instances, the spectators observe fast-paced, kinesthetic images or, shifting to the other extreme, slow-motion images that vividly contrast with Vertov’s normal dose of speed (Vertov repeatedly presents the athletic action through slow motion—fig. 24). These accelerated and slow-motion shots provide, in Vertov’s words, “a system of seeming irregularities [of camera speed] to investigate and organize phenomena” of modern life, while the mobility of the camera, be it on an ambulance, train, carousel, or motorcycle, enables the filmmaker to affect how the spectatorial eye adjusts to the increasing velocity

&,=

pommel e SP 8 ry ae aS —

FIGURE 24. Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera.

222 Fast Motion Pictures of modern society. By replicating the visual sensation of rapid mechanized movement, Vertov affords his viewers the opportunity to expand their conception of speed and, in effect, to keep pace with modernity. A revealing example of this new perspective on speed and its close link to the mechanized world comes in the “Motorcycle and Carousel” segment of The Man with the Movie Camera, in which Vertov affixes his camera (and cameraman) to

the machinery itself. The segment begins with the cameraman filming from a motorcycle before Vertov shifts to a spinning carousel platform, from which the cameraman films individual carousel riders sitting before the camera as a whirl of onlookers and scenery flashes by in the background (fig. 25). Subsequent shots taken from this same carousel show only the blur of the surrounding crowd (and no human figures in the foreground), thus enabling Vertov to approximate the

disorienting nature of this fast amusement-park ride by means of his semiabstract images.” Filming from the amusement-park machinery enables Vertov

.

Te : —"7‘eat .|2 | -_ -—a, -

=

rh 7 a. a ee ———e : 7 FIGURE 25. Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera.

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 223 to aid moviegoers’ adjustment to modern dynamism, to facilitate their visceral understanding of the period’s increasing pace. Shots from this “Motorcycle and Carousel” segment, along with many other images featured throughout the film, reappear at the conclusion of The Man with the Movie Camera, part of Vertov’s “film within a film” that he shows in a movie theater to Soviet viewers (who are also shown congregating at the beginning of the film). The pace of these concluding images, as if intended to challenge and provoke audiences, quickly escalates; intervals, flickering, accelerated motion,

split screens, and other techniques inherent to the film’s underlying dynamism comprise this highly kinesthetic finale, a coordinated synthesis of the film’s events accompanied by accelerated shots of a pendulum swinging away that marks, like a metronome, the sequence’s furious tempo. It is a crescendo of speed almost orgasmic in nature. Vertov sporadically highlights his movie-hall audience’s expressive, ecstatic reaction to the various forms of dynamism— figurative and nonfigurative—on display. Images of eyes—the eye of the artist (Svilova’s), the camera eye (an actual eye superimposed onto the camera lens), and the eyes of the audience—also appear, underscoring the filmmaker’s call for improved perspicacity. Through this emphasis on vision and the sequence’s conspicuously accelerated montage, Vertov’s attempt to revolutionize human perception of speed receives its most elaborate exposition. Reality has been quickened and transformed for Soviet audiences to adjust to and learn from by not simply observing but also by actively engaging with the speeding images and, it follows, a new, exciting pace of life. In “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” written seven years earlier, Vertov declared that the kinoks’ “path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.”*° Vertov’s utopian vision for the new Soviet citizen was based in large part on the notion that this future individual could claim a symbiotic relationship with modernity’s speed, for both work and play required not only fast hands but also fast, perceptive eyes. The concluding footage of The Man with the Movie Camera—Vertov’s symphonic reiteration of the entire film—indeed constitutes a synchronization of humans, machines, and the cinema. Vertov, presenting a resounding climax of acceleration through spedup shots, abstract and semiabstract imagery, and incessant cuts, challenges his audience to achieve this ideal, to become consummate viewers—and actors— of speed. Despite Vertov’s dynamic images and desire to sway a large segment of the Soviet populace, The Man with the Movie Camera from all accounts achieved only measured popular success and considerable critical disparagement upon its release in 1929. Like most other avant-garde films of the time, The Man with

224 Fast Motion Pictures the Movie Camera failed to attract as wide an audience as Vertov had envisioned; the film’s utopian ideals—particularly its aim of transforming the Soviet masses into discerning viewers and willing recipients of Marxist ideology—were never fully realized, due in part to the authorities’ efforts to subvert Vertov’s creative

vision. Vertov, in fact, had been compelled to make The Man with the Movie Camera in Ukraine because of financial and artistic disagreements with Sovkino

(the Soviet state cinema enterprise), and this enmity between the filmmaker and the authorities only intensified after the release of the film in 1929. Although

evidence exists that the film initially fared better than critics had anticipated, it nevertheless came under attack by a chorus of official detractors, who increasingly accused avant-garde filmmakers of formalism, a common charge in Soviet Russia at the end of the 1920s.°” One article from the time notes the misgivings of Konstantin Shvedchikov, head of Sovkino, who noted that The Man with the Movie Camera would appeal to only tens of thousands of viewers, rather

than the hundreds of thousands, or millions, that the government envisioned for and demanded from its cinema.** The experimental nature of Vertov’s film, particularly its challenging pace and what some derogatorily called its “technical fetishism,” undoubtedly contributed to the official remonstration.» The lukewarm reception of The Man with the Movie Camera and the film’s prompt disappearance from Soviet screens signaled a sudden curtailment of Soviet cinema’s ambitious experimentation with speed. While many factors led to the demise of Soviet avant-garde film at the end of the 1920s, the cinematic forms of dynamism that challenged viewers increasingly elicited close attention from the authorities; official critics condemned not only Vertov’s work but also other innovative films and filmmakers. Indeed, Ippolit Sokolov, previously a contributor to Kino-Photo and a vociferous proponent of avant-garde cinema, cast aside his former sentiments, writing in 1929, “The futurists and formalists, wishing to justify the transrational language |zaum’] of Kruchenykh and the creative word formation of Khlebnikov, devised the dangerous theory that everything ‘new is incomprehensible. ... Our mass movie spectator rejects in film the absence of unity, the disjointedness and incompleteness, the external, superficial mechanical union of disparate scenes, and the absence of plot.’°° As Sokolov’s critique of avant-garde, “plotless” cinema suggests, the Soviet masses were apt to reject disjointed, nondiegetic images and all external pacing, the very aesthetic elements engendered by an emphasis on acceleration and rapid montage. Indeed, speed of any technical, abstract complexity would face increasing

criticism. Repudiating the formalism and futurist dynamism that underscored much of early Soviet cinema, Sokolov helped frame the authorities’ mounting suspicion of the avant-garde and its demands on audiences. Accompanying the

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 225 advent of socialist realism at the end of the 1920s, when restrictive guidelines for all Soviet forms of creativity were established, groundbreaking exploration of modern dynamism would be shunned for the sake of a simpler evocation of speed capable of appealing to the millions. COLLECTIVE SPEED

In “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema,’ Malevich extolled The Man with the Movie Camera but reproached Vertov for his inconsistent commitment to nonobjective speed: representational “junk,” according to Malevich, sporadically undermined the filmmaker’s images of “dynamic motion.”*! Nevertheless, Male-

vich believed that Vertov had begun to capture the kinesthetic essence of his medium and the era: “Dziga Vertov is moving inexorably toward a new form of expression for contemporary content—for we should not forget that the content of our era cannot be reduced to showing pigs being fattened on a Soviet farm, or ‘gold cornfields’ being harvested.’® As optimistic as these sentiments might seem, they also suggest the growing sense that by the end of the 1920s, state-sponsored speed was beginning to eclipse avant-garde kinesthetics. Rather than just a broad indictment of contemporary Soviet cinema, Malevich’s disparagement of films glorifying Soviet farms constituted a semiveiled critique of Eisenstein’s 1929 film The Old and the New. Eisenstein’s final silent film, The Old and the New provides an illuminating glimpse into the ideological pressures increasingly weighing on Soviet cinema, restrictions that would only intensify in the 1930s once the doctrine of socialist realism took hold. Documenting the formation of a new Soviet collective farm designed to replace the backward ways of the peasantry with efficient machinery and Bolshevik values,

The Old and the New served as a nod to the authorities and to the 1928 Party Conference on Cinema, which demanded films more accessible to the moviegoing masses.® Eisenstein and his assistant director Grigory Aleksandrov, repeating what was becoming an increasingly common refrain for cinema, envisioned

the film appealing to the broad Soviet public: “May this experiment [| The Old and the New], however contradictory it may sound, be an experiment, intelligible to the millions!”* Eisenstein and Aleksandrov now strove to maintain a precarious mix of innovation, doctrine, and popularity. The Old and the New constituted an early response to the government's call for a Five-Year Plan (piatiletka) of industrialization officially declared in 1928 and implemented the following year. The rigid time frame of the Five-Year Plan represented an evolving state-sponsored emphasis on speed that diverged from the less restrictive ideology of dynamism of the early and mid-1920s, for the socialist nation, under Stalinist rule, increasingly channeled its speed to suit the

226 Fast Motion Pictures strict temporal parameters and lofty production goals of this and subsequent industrial plans, which The Old and the New promoted in aesthetic and ideological ways.

Having responded to the call for filmmakers to bring the new medium to the countryside, Eisenstein produced a cinematic work that corresponded extremely well to general cultural trends. In a 1929 article titled “Life as It Should Be,’ the writer Nikolay Lukhmanov championed The Old and the New as an exemplification of the new Soviet zeitgeist. Noting that “the tempo of general culture development still significantly lag| ged] behind the [nation’s] processes

of industrialization,’ Lukhmanov suggested that in addition to industry and culture needing to develop in synch and at a fast pace, “the plans for artistic production in the era of cultural revolution in this respect necessitate[d] a new industrial precept that art show ‘life as it should be-”® As Lukhmanov concluded, “This is why the first realized demonstration of a ‘model’ life in an artistic film acquires enormous social significance. Bragging rights here belong to Eisenstein. In his latest film The General Line |the original title of The Old

and the New], he planned out and shows a model state farm, a model dairy farm.... The power of cinematography on this path is defined not only by its emotional sway over millions of mass viewers but also by the pressure it places on workers in all possible spheres of our culture, without whom the production of a socially progressive film is impossible.”® For Lukhmanov, Eisenstein had masterfully captured the appropriate pace of artistic development in the

Soviet Union and had begun a trend to show “life as it should be,” in all its accelerated grandeur. By putting “pressure” on its audience, The Old and the New represented a new, aggressive aesthetic in Soviet cinema that used speed to move explicitly toward the nation’s industrial goals. Filming The Old and the New, Eisenstein strove for greater simplicity and less

demanding images of dynamism; thus The Old and the New boasts a streamlined dynamism (along with a healthy dose of humor). As David Bordwell notes, in The Old and the New Eisenstein even “composes his shots to create a ‘mon-

tage within the frame,” a technique that resisted rapid cuts in favor of bold contrasts within individual shots, which suggests that the filmmaker had begun

to deemphasize the dynamism generated between frames through rapid cutting and fragmented, fleeting images.” Making the increasingly stringent Stalinist ideology of the era intelligible for everyone, Eisenstein dispensed with a filming style that formally challenged viewers. Dynamic montage did not disappear altogether from The Old and the New, but Eisenstein offered a simpler aesthetic that allowed for more-passive appreciation of cinema’s speed. Throughout The Old and the New, Eisenstein pits progress against tradition,

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 227 presenting images of mechanization and its efficient speed as emblems of the rapidly evolving Soviet Union and its plans for collectivizing the countryside. In certain respects a reevaluation of the constructivist ethos inherent to Soviet avant-garde cinema, The Old and the New celebrates the arrival of machinery (and, by extension, cinema) on the Soviet collective farm, most notably in the film’s celebrated cream-separator sequence, which epitomizes how drastically Eisenstein altered his approach to conveying dynamism on screen. Not simply a kinesthetic display of cascading liquid, this sequence constitutes an efficient, seamless manifestation of speed that has more in common with the socialist realist art that would prevail in the 1930s than with 1920s avant-garde cinema. The cream-separator scene of The Old and the New begins with skeptical peasants gathering around a large farm machine (much like moviegoers might congregate), led by the party agronomist (who resembles Lenin) and Marfa, the film’s heroine. As this machine—the cream separator—begins to turn, light reflecting off the rotating machinery shines onto the faces of Marfa and the agronomist, thus fusing these two individuals with the steady mechanical movement. Through a mixture of dissolves from one image to the next, along with more distinct cuts, Eisenstein highlights the accelerating surge of the cream, juxtaposing shots of falling liquid with images of the separator’s rotating mechanical wheel and low-angle close-ups of Marfa and the agronomist. Neither Marfa nor the agronomist move in this sequence, but with the light shining on their faces, they are subsumed in the rhythmical motion of the swirling machinery. The link between the two model Soviet citizens and the efficient machinery intensifies as the agronomist’s face dissolves into a dark frame onto which streams

of cream suddenly begin to shoot up from the bottom of the frame, arcing into the middle of the screen. These orgasmic eruptions of cream, lasting approximately two seconds, appear as a nondiegetic, semiabstract hyperbolic interlude underlying the potency, energy, and efficient productivity generated by the separator. To conclude this central portion of the sequence, Eisenstein intersperses the awed reaction of Marfa and the other peasants to the creation of cream with ensuing images of the gushing liquid. They have witnessed a modern Soviet miracle. Eisenstein’s cream-separator sequence synthesizes a variety of kinesthetic styles initially encountered in The Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October. It draws, for instance, on the filmmaker’s constructivist beginnings through an emphasis on the separator’s swirling machinery (a preoccupation with machinery found throughout The Old and the New, such as when a squadron of tractors, appearing collectively on a large field, performs a choreographed dance). Yet it harnesses this constructivist aesthetic in a doctrinaire fashion, elevating

228 Fast Motion Pictures ideological message over aesthetic form. Also, through dissolves and nondiegetic

shots, Eisenstein exaggerates the separator’s mechanical rotation and endless bursts of cream, using hyperbole to contribute to the period’s utopian, idealized vision of a collectivized society. Whereas earlier films presented socialism’s speed-induced future as a feasible objective or displayed speed as a means of accentuating the power of the cinematic medium, The Old and the New features an agrarian utopia and productive dynamism that are conspicuously unrealistic, therefore transforming the film into a cinematic fairytale for Soviet viewers.

The presence of liquid in The Old and the New particularly underscores the director’s propensity for depicting the flow of water (and cream) as a metaphor for filmic speed. Indeed, the peasants, gathered around the new machinery, observe both the cream and, by inference, the cinema. While in The Strike and Potemkin, respectively, the hosing scene and the progression of the battleship through the Black Sea present images of clashing, fast-paced motion that symbolize the filmmaker’s conception of collision between ideologically contradictory shots, in the separator sequence of The Old and the New the images of gushing cream are devoid of visual conflict. The liquid streams forth, and the awed peasants observe passively, as does Eisenstein’s audience. Although collectivization in historical terms constituted a violent clash between the authorities and the peasantry, this filmic depiction of collectivization’s speed and transformative power proves smooth and conflict-free. Eisenstein’s cream-separator sequence highlights the nation’s new treatment of speed in other ways as well. Following the shots of the cream pouring from the separator and gushing up like a fountain, Eisenstein inserts numerical intertitles (4, 17, 20...) that represent the collective farm’s increasing productivity and thus its rapid expansion, a nod to the state’s demand for expeditious growth. From intimations of sexual potency (a motif that runs throughout The Old and the New) to newfound abundance to the primacy of the mechanical world over older agricultural methods, Eisenstein incorporates into this one rich sequence an array of themes highly applicable to the Soviet state and its increasingly doctrinaire policies.

Co The Soviet era of kinesthetic experimentation, as The Old and the New confirms, was drawing to a close, for the country’s embrace of speed no longer entailed abstract images of pure cinema or a utopian symbiosis of spectator and image. Instead, dynamism, now lacking any visceral collision and carefully coordinated with the government’s social goals, was to be viewed and experienced

Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 229 passively, a trend arguably intensified by the emergence of sound in cinema at this time. While experimental Soviet films with noteworthy dynamism continued to trickle out, for instance Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (Sol Svanetit,

1930) and Vertov’s first foray into sound, Enthusiasm (Entuziazm, 1931), less creative, more didactic work quickly became the norm. Suddenly a complicit element of collectivization and Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, kinesthesia ceased to constitute an interactive agent requiring attentive engagement with Soviet cinema’s dynamic images and montage. Rather than challenging viewers, speed was emerging as a means of blunt persuasion.

Conclusion The Speed of Coercion The epoch demanded adventurism. And so, one must be an adventurist. The epoch did not spare those who fell behind or disagreed. —VALENTIN KATAYEV, lime, Forward! 1932

uring the late 1920s and early 1930s, avant-garde experimentation with

1) speed conspicuously diminished, as Soviet artists submitted to the pressures of the Stalinist regime. Whereas in the second decade of the century a poet like Mayakovsky could explore the chaotic dynamism of the urban world through his futurist verse, by 1930 he was coordinating his poetry with the first Five-Year Plan, instituted by Stalin in October 1928 as an economic

program that called for rapid industrial development throughout the Soviet Union in accordance with a series of ambitious benchmarks. The hurried pace of industrialization stipulated by the first Five-Year Plan (other Five-Year Plans would follow) provides the ideological premise for Mayakovsky’s 1930 poem “March of the Shock Brigades” (“Marsh udarnykh brigad”), a celebration of

the Soviet Union’s swift progress toward model industrial efficiency in the name of socialism. Dispensing with the complex urban imagery, shifts, and ambiguous semantics that had bolstered the impression of dynamism in his cubo-futurist poetry, Mayakovsky endorses the rigid time frame of the FiveYear Plan: Bnepeg,

Oecrpory/bHbIM TMraHCTCKTUM XO0M!

He B3aATb Hac Oy PK yeBbIM TOHYMM!

Brepen!

[laruneTKy B YeTHIpe ropa 230

Conclusion 231 BbITIOHMM, BbIMUUM, 3aKOHYUM.

OeKTPUYeCTBO men,

peka-7nxa!! | Forward

with a conscientious gigantic stride! They won't catch us those bourgeois wolfhounds! Forward! The Five-Year Plan in four years we ll fulfill it, we ll rush it, we ll finish it.

Electricity flow,

like a dashing river! |

As in his earlier futurist verse, Mayakovsky champions speed in “March of the Shock Brigades,” but it is the Soviet people, rather than just the poet himself, who race ahead (“Forward with a conscientious gigantic stride!”). Mayakovsky’s tone has changed markedly from his futurist days, as his loud voice, now part of a broader unified chorus, echoes the popular slogan of the era that the FiveYear Plan must be fulfilled in four years. Conveyed through Stalinist thematics—“we'll rush [the Five-Year plan]”—and the stepladder form of the verse lines, speed shapes the poem and its call to produce a “dashing river” of electricity, all for the greater Soviet good. The fast, unwavering pace demanded by Stalin likewise informed the era’s prose, most notably Valentin Katayev’s 1932 novel Time, Forward! ( Vremia, vpered!).’ A fictionalized account of a brigade of workers at a Soviet metallurgical plant that breaks a world record for the production of concrete mixes, Time, Forward! conveys the ambitious spirit of the first Five-Year Plan, as it highlights speed and its conceptual counterpart, time, to exalt Soviet advancements. Promoting the Soviet Union’s efforts at rapid industrialization, Katayev creates a recurring refrain out of part of a 1931 speech by Stalin calling for an

232 Conclusion increase in the velocity of production throughout the nation’s industries: “To lower tempos means to fall back, and those who fall back are beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we will not have it.” Stalin’s demand for accelerated productivity looms over all of Time, Forward! for both the subject matter and the prose style of Katayev’s novel—an early example of socialist realism—reflect a strident, metonymic use of speed by both the government and artists to cultivate rapid progress throughout all facets of Soviet society.’ The speed of Time,

Forward! I contend, signaled a sudden shift from the creative model of left artists to the aesthetic stridency of Stalinism, thus serving as a repudiation of present-day theories on the avant-garde, most notably that of Boris Groys, who has drawn close parallels between the avant-garde and Stalinist periods.° Speed did link these two disparate periods, but by 1930, speed signified something quite distinct from the earlier decades’ experimentation, for Stalinist art offered fast, forward movement without any of the previous dynamism. Through its fictional depiction of Soviet industry’s extraordinary gains, Time, Forward! ushered in a new literary treatment of speed. An account of twentyfour hours at an industrial plant in Magnitogorsk, a city founded in 1929 on the edge of the Ural Mountains (which, Katayev emphasizes, separate East and West in Russia), Time, Forward! chronicles the Magnitogorsk brigade’s world-record production of cement mixes, an event signaling extraordinary Soviet productivity and growth. Many of the speed-infused images and themes of the previous two decades—the city, ferroconcrete, airplanes, American dynamism (which Katayev critiques by alluding to the crash of the American stock market), the circus, and athletic stunts (“This is construction, not Greco-Roman wrestling,” shock workers sporadically exclaim )—are alluded to in Time, Forward! only now they accentuate Stalinist art’s sharp divergence from avant-garde aesthetics. The fast tempo of Soviet development under Stalin is fittingly conveyed by

Katayev through the city of Magnitogorsk and its rapid development as an industrial center. Magnitogorsk represents a new Soviet reality unconstrained by past customs and the measured pace of normal urban expansion. As the narrator of Time, Forward! notes, “[Magnitogorsk] lacked tradition. It had grown too rapidly. It had appeared with a speed that had upset the conception of time necessary for the creation of such a large city. History had not yet had time to place its brand upon it.” Rather than allow Magnitogorsk to expand according

to a familiar, well-established rate, the Soviets defy history by constructing their new city at such a rapid velocity that they “upset”—or refute—the conventional “conception of time.’ A symbol of Stalinist ambition and a new Soviet pace, the Magnitogorsk of Time, Forward! embodies unprecedented speed and progress.

Conclusion 233 In the expanding atmosphere of Magnitogorsk everything—the buildings, the streets, the industrial sector—moves in tandem with the rapidly developing socialist state. Even the natural environment surrounding Magnitogorsk reflects the hurried rate of change in this new socialist reality. “The sun,” Katayev’s nar-

rator remarks, “came out behind white, scurrying clouds. The power of the light changed every minute. The world either disappeared in shadows or struck the very eyes with all its tremendous, blinding detail. The temperature changed every minute.”” The powerful sunlight, earlier described as blazing “with the

speed of magnesium ribbons” (burning magnesium produces a bright white light), rapidly moves and oscillates, as if in synch with the momentous changes in Magnitogorsk.® This tempo is also conveyed here by Katayev’s prose. Using short descriptive sentences and simplified syntax that critics have described as cinematic, given how the terse descriptions of Magnitogorsk often resemble a quick flow of fleeting film images (i.e., montage), Katayev vividly establishes a natural setting in Time, Forward! that is as fast paced as Soviet industrialization.? Like the new Soviet city and the surrounding natural environment, Katayev’s

proletarian heroes valiantly maintain the heightened speed with which Soviet industry and society are expanding. Fast motion, for instance, characterizes Ishchenko, the pace-setter for Magnitogorsk’s record-breaking shock brigade: “Ishchenko hurried to the sector. ... He moved rapidly, his brows firmly knitted. However, at times it seemed to him that he was going too slowly. He began to run. He ran at a trot for some time, thinking of nothing. Then thoughts returned, and he again increased his speed.”!° At times Ishchenko instinctively maintains his velocity as he rushes to his sector in the metallurgical plant, but acceleration—so crucial for the Five-Year Plan—proves to be a highly conscious act, one that befits a Soviet hero. Like Ishchenko, the engineer Margulies (the novel’s central protagonist) also consciously races ahead, inspired by his bold Marxist views of scientific knowl-

edge and industrial engineering: “Margulies had dared to violate [academic] traditions. .. . Margulies had insisted that science be regarded dialectically. What was a scientific hypothesis yesterday became an academic fact to-day; what

was an academic fact to-day became an anachronism to-morrow—a stage passed by.”'! Adhering to the dialectical tenets of Marxism, Margulies rapidly synthesizes technical hypotheses to achieve the greatest industrial output. An opponent in Magnitogorsk later predicts Margulies will “break his neck” by violating the rules of established science and setting too fast a pace as he leads the brigade of workers in their pursuit of a world record for concrete mixes, yet the Soviet engineer rushes onward.'”

234 Conclusion By highlighting the feats of Margulies, Ishchenko, and others in the Magnitogorsk brigade, Time, Forward! presents socialism and Stalin’s Five-Year Plans as means by which contemporaneity’s speed could be tightly controlled. Commentary on life in Magnitogorsk written by Katayev’s fictitious novelist Georgy Vasilyevich accentuates the Stalinist regime’s desire to streamline what it believed was modernity’s unruly multitude of speeds: ““The anarchy of speeds, of rhythms.

Lack of coordination. I stood at the railroad crossing. A freight train was being switched back and forth. A local-made woven cart was jogging along. A fiveton truck raising dust. A bicycle flickering blindingly. A man walking (by the way, where was he going?) ... A large, three-motor airplane flying. All moving at different speeds. Maddening! We live in an epoch of varying speeds. They must be coordinated. But perhaps they have been coordinated? But by what?’”!? For Georgy Vasilyevich, the “anarchy of speeds” witnessed throughout Magnitogorsk appears haphazard and “maddening,” given the lack of coordination. The novelist seeks uniformity. In posing the question of how these diverse rates of motion might be streamlined, Georgy Vasilyevich evidently arrives at the realization that it is Stalin’s Five-Year Plan and socialism that can effectively coordinate such disparate manifestations of speed. In Time, Forward! Georgy Vasilyevich later associates the multiplicity of speeds

he witnesses with “creeping empiricism.”!* Thus he proposes to dispense with subjectivity and personal experience—the empirical basis for much avant-garde art—to attain, at least implicitly, a broad objectification of the world and its velocity. Whereas in the preceding two decades avant-garde art celebrated the diverse, “maddening” tempos of the day, now socialist realism and its promotion of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans accommodated Georgy Vasilyevich’s teleological desire to see contemporaneity’s various speeds synthesized into one fast, forceful tempo and uniform ideology. Katayev’s break with Russia’s experimental art of the previous decades goes well beyond the empiricism of modernism. Unlike many avant-garde artists who consistently drew on the primitivist underpinnings of Russian culture to invigorate their creative works, the author of Time, Forward! expresses an urge to rush as quickly as possible into an industrialized, socialized future, away from what he sees as Russia's backward past and burdensome heritage. While the country’s Asiatic roots and Orthodox traditions had previously been used to distinguish Russian modernism from its Western counterpart, Katayev charts a new route for the Soviet Union and Soviet art. Describing the swift progress of a train as it races eastward away from Moscow at the beginning of the novel, Katayev shifts his third-person narrative to a more inclusive first-person plural to emphasize what he perceives as the collective will and momentum of the

Conclusion 235 Soviet people: “We are crossing the Urals. Flickering across the windows from right to left, swirls the obelisk: “Europe-Asia. ... It is a senseless post. Now it is

behind us. Does that mean that we are Asia? ... Curious! ... We are moving toward the east at a terrific speed and we carry the revolution with us. Never again shall we be Asia.’”!> The Soviet nation will “never again” be Asia, which for Katayev represents Russia’s culturally and socially regressive roots. The train’s

rapid movement past the “obelisk” marking the division of Asia from Europe and East from West indicates a new Soviet geography. Insinuating that the speed of the Stalinist industrial revolution will enable the Soviet Union to achieve a social and industrial ideal far removed from Asia and its implicit backwardness, Katayev envisions a utopian destination for the country, a socialist paradise where industry is streamlined and the proletariat works for the good of the nation.

This is a Marxist vision of utopia superimposed on traditional religious motifs of apocalypse. As in much avant-garde art, signs of apocalypse accompany the emphasis on speed throughout Time, Forward! only now the results of such turmoil prove far more quantifiable, explicit, and prescriptive. Cataclysmic destruction—which in Marxist, Hegelian terms might be seen as the end of the dialectical process—arrives in the form of a windstorm that rages as the shock brigade races against time to produce its record number of cement mixes in Magnitogorsk. The brigade’s furious work seemingly whips up the forces of nature: “The storm ... swept down inexorably, crashing upon the sectors, one by one, shaking the scaffoldings and the steel structures. It swept from the west to the east, and then changed its direction.’'® As the wind blows in from multiple directions, Katayev alludes to biblical notions of apocalypse by mentioning (and anthropomorphizing) “four whirlwinds,” a veiled reference to the four riders of the apocalypse from the book of Revelation, which have generally been interpreted as symbolizing pestilence, war, death, and famine: “Four whirlwinds—from the west, the north, the south, and the east—clashed, lost their footing, whirled in the black rows of winds. The four whirlwinds were like four armies.”!” In Time, Forward! the four whirlwinds—or “armies” (further accentuating Katayev’s allusion to the book of Revelation )—of the storm portend a highly industrialized socialist future, emphatically presaged by the inspired productivity of the Magnitogorsk brigade. In accordance with its apocalyptic subtext, while the storm rages and the brigade toils in Time, Forward! the wife of pace-setter Ishchenko gives birth to a baby boy, a secular allusion to the biblical motif of Christ’s Second Coming and his role in the book of Revelation as the harbinger of a new world. The birth of this Christlike child, along with the accelerating industrial tempo, thus

236 Conclusion signals the arrival of a new world, a resolutely Marxist one. Katayev’s novel appropriately ends with news that another Soviet metallurgical plant has just broken the Magnitogorsk record for cement mixes, suggesting that the revolution, along with its speed and productivity, continues on into the utopian future. To be sure, utopian notions of the future abounded in avant-garde art and in the theoretical writings of left artists, but generally as remote, subjective concepts, not the unambiguous ideals promoted in Time, Forward! and subsequent socialist realist novels. The novel’s inferred end point is a social utopia in which time and speed have been reined in by Stalinism and a model socialist reality achieved. This industrial utopia is in fact predicated on an accelerated yet highly controlled conception of time. Describing how both the engineer Margulies and time rushed ahead “like two runners” as the brigade achieves its world record, Katayev’s narrator explains that the race against the clock was to be perceived in purely functional terms: “For [Margulies], time was not an abstract concept. Time was the number of turns of the drum and of the driving pulley; the lifting of the scoop; the end of one shift and the beginning of another.’'® Presenting time as the basis for prototypical efficiency and production, Margulies and, by extension Katayev, construe speed not as a subjective phenomenon bolstering unfettered creativity and abstraction but as an industrial quantity in which spontaneity has been removed, and rigidity, that is, stasis, predominates under the auspices of a Stalinist utopia.” CS)

Stalinist culture, Time, Forward! suggests, offered a highly utilitarian form of modern velocity, a rigid extension of avant-garde dynamism. The modernist aesthetic of speed, evolving throughout the second and third decades of the twentieth century, arguably achieved its logical—and ideological—place in Soviet

culture of the 1930s. One could indeed contend that socialist realism adopted the avant-garde’s innovative expression of speed to establish its doctrinaire vision of a new Marxist reality. In his study of socialist realism, Boris Groys contends that left art’s utopian underpinnings in many ways anticipated the dogmatism of art produced under Stalin. “The Stalin era,’ Groys writes, “satisfied the fundamental avant-garde demand that art cease representing life and begin transforming it by means of a total aesthetico-political project.’”° According to Groys,

both avant-garde art and socialist realism stipulated a swift transformation of life from an ordinary, everyday phenomenon into a utopian ideal, and one could certainly add that speed, hastening the “aesthetico-political”—or ideological—projects of modernism and socialist realism, bolstered this transformation through its conspicuousness in both avant-garde and Stalinist art. Yet the

Conclusion 237 aesthetic restructuring of reality under Stalinism drew on speed in an explicit, assertive manner that diverged dramatically from the avant-garde’s utilization of dynamism for creative, experimental purposes. Speed, instead of inspiring the avant-garde’s abstract metaphysics, now conformed to the strict ideology by which the revolutionized Stalinist society was to be depicted in socialist realist art. Hence the lack of artistic autonomy under Stalin led artists to envision speed no longer as a reflection of their creative ingenuity and freedom but rather as a dogmatized component of socialist realism.*! In the end, ironically, speed hastened the demise of the Russian avant-garde. After two decades of experimentation with creative forms inspired by dynamism and acceleration—from the urbanism, zaum’, and nonobjective suprematism of the prerevolutionary era to the constructivism, film stunts, and rapid montage of the 1920s—speed had achieved a magnitude in avant-garde art that only amplified its ideological applicability to both ongoing artistic trends and industrial expansion in Soviet Russia. The avant-garde’s aesthetics of speed, how-

ever, represented a threat to Soviet efficiency, expansion, and velocity; Soviet art increasingly had to show fast, concrete progress, not the creative, conceptual leap into nonobjectivity nor the dynamism entailing both acceleration and its counterpart, deceleration. Socialist realist doctrine rejected abstract manifestations of dynamism for the sake of a constantly rapid, headlong pace that could mirror as well as augment the nation’s forward momentum.” Under Stalin, speed could no longer be a relative, empirical concept. “Adventurism” (avantiurizm), the term Katayev used to characterize the period’s bold, ideological emphasis on swift industrial development, stipulated high velocity and ambitious vertical movement, but this was the only pace and the only direction artists could proceed. The diverse, innovative forms of dynamism from the past two decades had suddenly become synchronized. Fast movement persisted, but in one-dimensional forms antithetical to the experimentation of previous decades. Overwhelmed by aggressive Soviet dogma, the avant-garde and its creative expressions of speed quickly vanished, an apposite end to this most elusive of modernist concepts.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Mayakovsky’s words were quoted in a newspaper article, “Futuristy,’ by V. Nezhdanov, which appeared in Trudovaia gazeta (Nikolaev) no. 1419, January 26, 1914, 3. Reprinted in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinent v trinadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955), 1:453-54. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from Russian are my own. 2. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909,” in Futurist Manitfestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio and trans. Robert Brain et al. (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 21. 3. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991), 60. Virilio, in dissecting speed in the twentieth century, has authored an expansive theory of dromology (from the Greek dromos, “race”), his term for the study of velocity, acceleration, and speed in modern life. 4. See, for instance, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194.

5. Galileo was among the first to attempt to measure the speed of light. Although his attempts failed to yield any significant results, his later discovery of the moons of Jupiter led to the first approximation of light’s velocity in 1675, when Olaus Christensen Roemer noted that the eclipses on Jupiter’s moons could be observed in various phases, depending on the time of year and the earth’s varying distance from Jupiter. By dividing the diameter of the earth’s orbit (186 million miles) by the difference in seconds (996) when observing the eclipse of Jupiter’s moons from the far side of the earth’s orbit as compared to the near side, Roemer determined that light moves at a finite speed of roughly 186,300 miles per second. George Gamov, One Two Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 75-77.

6. While they did not go so far as to deny the ether’s existence, Michelson and Morley prompted others to declare ether a nonexistent entity, used only to explain light’s movement according to the soon-to-be outdated model of absolute space and time. 7. A kinetic theory of gases emerged in the 1870s, when the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann explored thermodynamics, the mechanical theory of heat. See William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 47-62. 239

240 Notes to pages 7—10 8. Ibid., 235. Other groundbreaking work soon followed the special theory of relativity, for instance, Einstein’s E=mc? equation, which stated that an object’s energy content equals its inertial mass multiplied by the speed of light (c) squared. 9. As a result of his 1905 work, Einstein maintained that clocks had to be synchronized in a way that took into account light’s constant speed and the miniscule variations in time it took light to travel from its source (the clock) to those observing the time. For more on Einstein’s work with clocks, see Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 10. The visual distortion of an object moving at light speed became known as the “Lorentz contraction.” 11. Einstein’s general theory of relativity starts from Mach’s hypothesis that there is no way to distinguish between gravity and acceleration: whether an object falls due to the earth’s gravity or is accelerating through space at 32 feet per second per second (acceleration due to gravity at the earth’s surface) is impossible to determine. 12. For more on modern art’s link to science, see Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and Arthur I. Miller, Eisenstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

13. The color spectrum changes when the observer approaches the speed of light, due in part to the Doppler effect. See Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Time and Space (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 130.

14. In the 1909-10 Twelfth Congress of Russian Naturalists and Physicians in Moscow, the Russian scientists V. S. Ignatovsky, P. S. Ehrenfest, and P. S. Epstein delivered

papers on the speed of light in conjunction with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. See Alexander Vucinich, Finstein and Soviet Ideology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5. 15. Nikolay Kulbin, “Kubizm,” in Strelets, ed. A. Belenson, vol. 1, reprint of 1915 original (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), 216. 16. Mikhail Matyushin, “An Artist’s Experience of the New Space,” trans. in Charlotte Douglas, “The Universe: Inside and Out, New Translations of Matyushin and Filonov,’ The Structurist, nos. 15-16 (1975-76): 75. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100-107. 18. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 12. 19. Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 22. 20. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 63. 21. As Robert P. Morgan has aptly noted, “Although considerable controversy persists concerning both the nature and chronology of modernism, there seems to be widespread

agreement that it incorporated a wish to turn away from concrete, everyday reality, to break out of the routine of ordinary actions in the hope of attaining a more personal and idealized vision of reality.” “Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 35. 22. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 13.

Notes to pages 10-14 241 23. See A. Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 5. 24. Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 227. 25. Marianne Martin writes, “Although not acknowledged at first, one of the most fundamental points of agreement among [futurist] painters and writers was their awareness of the double-edged thrust of photography and the moving picture as a powerful means of visual communication. The Futurists accepted these new media as direct artistic challenge and inspiration, although, at first, they denied such dependence.’ “Futurism Now,’ in Futurism: A Modern Focus (New York: Solomon T. Guggenheim Foundation, 1973), 23. 26. For more on Europe’s evolving preoccupation with clocks in the eighteenth century, see Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,’ American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 685-709. 27. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 314.

28. For discussion of the way modernist novels reflected a new understanding of space stemming from temporal simultaneity, see Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in Essentials of the Theory of Literature, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 61-73. 29. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 370. 30. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books, 1979), 60. 31. E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 58. Introducing his chapter titled “Moment and Movement in Art,’ Gombrich notes that “the representation of movement [in art] has been strangely neglected” by art historians (40). 32. A variety of opinions exist on how abstraction might be defined. Meyer Schapiro writes, “The charge of inhumanity brought against abstract painting springs from a failure to see the works as they are; they have been obscured by concepts from other fields. The word ‘abstract’ has connotations of the logical and scientific that are surely foreign

to this art. ‘Abstract’ is an unfortunate name; but ‘non-objective, ‘non-figurative, or ‘pure painting’ —all negative terms—are hardly better.’ Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 228. Or as Briony Fer writes, “As a label, the term ‘abstract’ is on the one hand too all inclusive: it covers a diversity

of art and different historical moments that really hold nothing in common except a refusal to figure objects. On the other hand, ‘abstract’ is too exclusive, imagining a world of family resemblances (geometric, biomorphic or whatever—terms originally deployed by the early critics but still pervasive) which is hermetically sealed from a world of representation outside it.” On Abstract Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 5.

For further discussion of the difficulties in characterizing “art with no object,” see Everdell, First Moderns, 303-20. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 148.

34. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote in 1857, “strives ... to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin, 1973), 540.

242 Notes to pages 14-17 35. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ix. 36. Discussing the rise of ‘Taylorism throughout the West, Lenin remarked in 1914,

“The cinema is systematically employed for studying the work of the best operatives and increasing its intensity, i.e., “speeding up’ the workers.” “The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine,” trans. Bernard Isaacs, in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 152. 37. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Cultural Sociology, ed. Lyn Spillman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 28. 38. For more on the fatigue caused by modernity’s rapid pace in the late nineteenth century, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

39. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. from the 2nd ed. of the German work (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 42.

AQ. Ibid., 118. The Russian symbolist Andrey Bely mockingly included the character Max Nordau in his 1902 experimental prose work Dramatic Symphony, in which Nordau arrives by train in Moscow. “The point was,” Bely writes, “that Moscow had no need

of Nordau. It had its own life to lead. ... Here was Nordau denouncing degeneration today.” The Dramatic Symphony; |and]| Forms of Art, trans. Roger and Angela Keys (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 62. 41. Nordau, Degeneration, 118.

42. For a discussion of high modernist literature’s ambiguous relationship to technology, see Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 43. Disputing the notion that photography is art, Ruskin wrote: “Let me assure you,

once for all, that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine art, and have so much in common with nature, that they even share her temper of parsimony, and will themselves give you nothing valuable that you do not work for. They supersede no good art.” Lectures on Art, 6: Light (1870), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 20 (London: George Allen, 1903-12), 165. 44, Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 15. 45. Ibid., 9. Later in this essay, Baudelaire remarks on Guys’s ability to capture the grace of a speeding carriage: “In whatever attitude it may be caught, at whatever speed

it may be running, a carriage, like a ship, derives from its movement a mysterious and complex grace which is very difficult to note down in shorthand” (40). 46. As the poet Ezra Pound has written, “Futurism ...1is, for the most part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated impressionism.” “Vorticism,” in GaudierBrzeska (New York: New Directions, 1960), 94.

47. Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 16. 48. Discussing the cultural significance of the Eiffel Tower, Robert Hughes writes, “The

idea of space that [the Eiffel Tower] provoked, a flatness that contained ideas of dynam-

ism, movement, and the quality of abstraction inherent in structures and maps, was also the space in which a lot of the most advanced European art done between 1907 and 1920 would unfold.” The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 14.

Notes to pages 17—20 243 49. It was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who labeled Delaunay’s work “Orphic Cubism,” suggesting a brand of cubism that accentuated not only dynamic composition and a simultaneity of planes but also potential mystical and musical attributes of objects in motion. Discussing the “simultaneous” laws that prompted the creation of these works, Delaunay wrote in a 1912 letter to Kandinsky, “I am still waiting until I can find greater flexibility in the laws I discovered. These are based on studies in the transparency of color, whose similarity to musical notes drove me to discover the ‘movement of color.” Bright colors, Delaunay believed, could induce a rhythmical movement that went beyond

any thematic treatment of pictorial speed. See Delaunay’s letter as translated by and quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 318-19.

50. Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 21. 51. Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1951), 178. 52. Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 1909-1915 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 86.

53. In Carra’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli I funerali del?'anarchico Galli, 1911-12), fragments of light and “lines of force” convey the movement of an urban crowd of striking workers. Fan-shaped forms further imbue Carra’s image with a sense of rapid motion through time and space. As an incomplete illustration of an object’s dynamic trajectory, these multiple lines suggest a fragmentation of speed, whereby the viewer must actively unify separate phases of motion. 54. U. Boccioni, “Plastic Dynamism 1913,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 92. 55. Boccioni’s conception of speed here alludes to the ideas of Henri Bergson, who proved extremely germane for modernist perceptions of time, space, and flux. In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Bergson discusses the discrepancy between relative and absolute motion, writing, “When I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to

the moving object an inner life and, so to speak, states of mind. I also imply that... I insert myself into them by an effort of imagination.” See his Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London: MacMillan, 1913), 1-2. 56. See Andrew Wilson, “Rebels and Vorticists: “Our Little Gang,” in Blast: Vorticism, 1914-1918, ed. Paul Edwards (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 35. 57. Blaise Cendrars, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, in Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars, ed. Walter Albert (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1966), 78. 58. Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 20. Discussing similarities between Mayakovsky’s early futurist verse and modern French poetry, specifically Cendrars’s 1913 “Atel’e,” which both boasted

“dynamic syntax dependent on a quick fluctuation of various intonations,” Nikolay Khardzhiev explains that rather than representing a case of one poet influencing another, both Mayakovsky and Cendrars developed upon advances made at this time in art. See Nikolay Khardzhiev, “Poeziia i zhivopis,” in K istorii russkogo avangarda, ed. N. Khardzhiev et al. (Stockholm: Hylaea, 1976), 65-66. 59. Cendrars, Complete Poems, 92-93. 60. On December 22, 1913, the young critic A. A. Smirnov delivered the lecture “Simultané” at the St. Petersburg café The Wandering Dog, and at this well-attended lecture he introduced his audience to the work of Cendrars and Delaunay-Terk. This speech is

244 Notes to pages 20-25 described in A. E. Parnis and R. D. Timenchik, “Programmy ‘Brodiachei sobaki,” Pamiatniki kuPtury: Novye otkrytiia 1983 (1985): 220-21. The next night Viktor Shklovsky delivered

a speech on futurism (“Mesto futurizma v istorii iazyka”) at The Wandering Dog. See also John Bowlt, “Orfizm i simul’taneizm: Russkii variant,” in Russkii avangard v krugu evropeiskot kultury, ed. V. Ivanov (Moscow: Radiks, 1994), 137-39; Jean-Claude Marcadé, “Delaunay et Russie,” in Robert Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, 1906-1914: De impressionisme a l'abstraction (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1999), 67-74. 61. Margaret Davies writes, “To express the sense of life being lived all over the globe at one and the same time seemed to be the great challenge for the modern poet, the ideal way in which [Apollinaire] could convey the swiftness of communication, the intensity of modern life.” “Modernité and Its Techniques,” in Chefdor, Quinones, and Wachtel, Modernism, 149-50. 62. In reflecting modernity’s swift pace, Marinetti vociferously promoted onomatopoeia, mathematical symbols, “semaphoric” adjectives, free expressive orthography, and infinitive verbs. “I maintain,” Marinetti wrote in 1913, “that in a violent and dynamic lyricism the infinitive verb might well be indispensable. Round as a wheel, like a wheel adaptable to every car in the train of analogies, it constitutes the very speed of the style.” See FE, T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-inFreedom,’ in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 103.

63. Elsewhere in the manifesto “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-in-Freedom,” Marinetti claims that futurism’s “typographical revolution” would enable him “to grasp [ideas] brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face” (105). 64. Although photography is not a main focus of this study, one might note the photographs of the young Frenchman Jacques Henri Lartigue, who in the first decade of the twentieth century began to document the technologies of speed so prevalent in modern society. Lartigue’s photographs highlighted aviation, automobiles, sports, and a range of other modern pastimes that drew conspicuously on the era’s rapid pace. For more on Lartigue, see Vicki Goldberg, “Lartigue: The Passions of a Child and the Eye of an Adult,” in Jacques Henri Lartigue: Photographer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), vii—xi. 65. In 1911 Bragaglia published the treatise Fotodinamismo. Here Bragaglia argued that with speed “appearance is replaced by transparency.” 66. Maksim Gorky, from an article that appeared in the Nizhegorodskii listok, July 4, 1896, trans. by Leonard Mins and appearing in New Theatre and Film 4, no. 1 (March 1937): 11.

67. In the 1890s, Russia’s annual industrial growth rate was an impressive 8 percent. See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 426. 68. In 1892, St. Petersburg was 2 hours, 1 minute, and 18.7 seconds behind Greenwich. See Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 13. It was only in 1912 that a uniform system of time was adopted throughout the continent. 69. R. W. Flint, introduction to Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 27. 70. Letter from Aleksey Kruchenykh to Andrey Shemshurin, September 29, 1915, quoted in Nina Gurianova, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000), 54.

Notes to pages 26-37 245 71. Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus, in Malevich, Essays on Art, 1915-1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlang, 1968), 27. 72. Andrey Bely, Simvolizm (Moscow: Musaget, 1910), 143. CHAPTER 1. URBAN POETS ON THE MOVE

1. The quotation, “nash vek = aerovek—bystrota, krasota forma,” comes from an unpublished manuscript by Kamensky titled “Iz istorii russkogo futurizma,” which is reprinted in John Malmstad, “From the History of the Russian Avant-Garde,” in Kul’tura russkogo modernizma, ed. Ronald Vroon and Malmstad (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1993), 218-19. 2. David Burliyuk, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velemir Khleb-

nikov, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 3. Whenever possible I cite the translation of futurist manifestos included in Lawton and Eagle’s translated edition of futurist documents. Otherwise translations are my own. 3. D. Burliyuk et al., “Slap in the Face,” 51. 4. Ibid., 52. 5. Ibid. 6. David Burliyuk’s two essays were erroneously credited in the almanac to his brother Nikolay. In addition to the work of Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshits, David and Nikolay Burliyuk, and Ekaterina Nizen, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste included several impressionistic prose pieces by painter Wassily Kandinsky that were translated from German into Russian by David Burltyuk and, according to Vladimir Markov, were included in the almanac unbeknown to Kandinsky. See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 48, 392n26. 7. David Burliyuk, “Kubizm,” in Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu, ed. David Burliyuk et al. (Moscow: Izd. G.L. Kuz’mina, 1912), 100. 8. Velemir Khlebnikov, “Obrazchik slovonovshestv v iazyke,” in D. Burliyuk et al., Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu, 110-11. 9. Centrifuge (Tsentrifuga), another major faction of futurists that included the poets Boris Pasternak and Sergey Bobrov, while certainly aware of modern dynamism (as the group's name suggests), tended to downplay the element of speed in its verse. 10. Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 21. “Marinetti’s futurism,” Vladimir Markov has noted in his history of Russian futurism, “was much more of an

influence in Russia than is customarily thought, and more than the Russian futurists wanted to acknowledge.” Markov, Russian Futurism, 382. Elsewhere Markov writes, “Prac-

tically all [futurists] claimed independence from the Italians, afraid of being considered imitative. But slowly the implications of both the meaning of the word and of its western European history dawned on them in different ways. Thus there is the fascinating spectacle of various individual futurists at different stages in their development trying to live up to the name, depending on how they interpreted its meaning” (91). 11. For more on Italian futurism and its similarities with Russian futurist poetry, see John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Anne Lawton, “Russian and Italian Futurist Manifestos,” Slavic and East European Journal 20, no. 4 (Winter 1976): 405-20. 12. EF T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Marinetti, Critical

246 Notes to pages 37-39 Writings, ed. Giinter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 107. 13. Ibid., 12.

14. As Gerald Janecek notes, Kruchenykh’s “Dyr bul shchyl” “represents a step never taken by Marinetti and Italian futurism and only subsequently by the Dadaists.” See Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1996), 53. 15. The Russian magazine Vestnik literatury (no. 5, 1909) included initial discussion of futurism, and Mikhail Kuzmin and Paolo Buzzi’s column “Letter from Italy” (“Pis’mo iz Italii”) in Apollon in the summer of 1910 highlighted Marinetti’s manifesto and various performances by the Italian futurists. 16. In 1914 Shershenevich published a Russian translation of Marinetti’s manifesto and other writings. See Vadim Shershenevich, Manifesty ital’ianskogo futurizma (Moscow: Tipo. “Russkago Tovarishchestva,” 1914). Here Shershenevich translated various futurist manifestos, as well as Marinetti’s long poem The Battle of Tripoli ( Battaglia de Tripoli, 1912) and the novel The Futurist Mafarka ( Mafarka la futuriste, 1910). Genrikh Tasteven’s Futurizm (Moscow: Iris, 1914) also included Russian translations of the Italian futurist manifestos. For more on Shershenevich’s translations of Marinetti, see Anna Lawton, Vadim Shershenevich: From Futurism to Imaginism (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981), 24-25. 17. Even before seizing on the title of futurism, Severyanin celebrated speed in his verse. Consider, for instance, Severyanin’s 1910 poem “A July Noon (The Cinema)” (“Tiulskii polder’ [Sinematograf]”), in which two young women, riding in a motorcycle sidecar (and evidently shown on a movie screen, given the poem’s subtitle), provide the narrative basis for this intricate, impressionistic depiction of fast movement, made even more explicit by the poem’s cinematic premise. Throughout the poem, Severyanin uses vivid imagery and evocative sounds (in the first stanza the sounds el, sh, and -strrepeatedly invoke the sound of the motorcycle motor) to generate a lively poetic simulation of modern velocity. 18. Marinetti, invited by Genrikh Tasteven (author of one of Russia’s first books on futurism), traveled to Russia between January 26 and February 15. 19. When Marinetti visited Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1914, several of Russian futurism’s central figures (specifically Burliyuk, Mayakovsky, and Kamensky) were in the south on tour, arguably in hostile response to the Italian’s visit. For more on Marinetti in Russia, see Benedikt Livshits’s first-person account in The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 181-213; for more recent critical accounts of the visit, see Andrey Kursanov, Russkii Avangard: 1907-1932, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: “Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,” 1996), 164-79; and Charlotte Douglas, “The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism,’ Art Journal 34, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 224-39.

20. Velemir Khlebnikov and Benedikt Livshits, “Na priezd Marinetti v Rossiiu,” in Poeztia russkogo futurizma, ed. V. N. Sazhin (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 620.

21. Larionov’s incendiary words were reported in “K priezdu Marinetti: Ugroza tukhlymi iaitsami i kislym molokom,” Vechernie isvestita (Moscow), no. 13, January 24, 1914, 8. Larionov also published a brief article (“K raspre futuristov”) in the Moscow newspaper Nov’ (no. 13, January 29, 1914, 8), in which he claimed that Marinetti deserved “rotten eggs from genuine contemporary futurists.” In response, Shershenevich wrote

Notes to pages 39-40 247 in the Moscow newspaper Virgin Soil (Nov’ ), “Of course, it is not for Mr. Larionov to judge what Marinetti has done for futurism. ... 1 would like to inform the readers that the words and threats of Mr. Larionov have nothing to do with the true intentions of Russian futurists, for... none of us has had or does have any desire to display any downright bad-manners [nekul’turstvo] at Marinetti’s lecture.” V. Shershenevich, “Pis’mo redaktsii,’ Nov’, no. 11, January 27,1914. This letter is reprinted in V. Shershenevich, Zelenaia ulitsa (Moscow: Izd. Pleiady, 1916), 105-6. See also Anthony Parton, Mikhail Lartonov and the Russian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 73. 22. According to Aleksandr Parnis, Livshits delivered “We and the West” at the public dispute Our Answer to Marinetti (Nash otvet Marinetti), and since the title of the speech coincided with the manifesto of the same name written by Livshits, Georgy Yakulov, and Artur Vintsent Lur’e, Livshits renamed it “Ital ianskii i russkii futurizm v ikh vzaimootnoshenie.” See Aleksandr Parnis, commentary to Livshits, “My i zapad,” in Terent evskit sbornik. 1996, ed. Sergey Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Hylaea, 1996), 258. 23. Ibid., 254. Describing Russian futurist poetry, Livshits wrote that “nonobjective poetry | bespredmetnaia poeziia] is free ... in the sense that it presents itself as a worthwhile entity not on the plane uniting reality and consciousness, but in the sphere of the autonomous word” (253). 24. Ibid., 253. 25. Ibid., 253, 255. Livshits based his approach to futurist poetry on concurrent trends in contemporary painting and Boccioni’s theory of “plastic dynamism,” yet he claimed that most of Europe’s cubist and futurist painters had created merely a “relative” form of speed (i.e., silhouettes of a fast-moving object in various phases of its trajectory). 26. Ibid., 256. 27. Ibid., 256-57. 28. Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, ““Galopom vpered!’” Vestnik znantia, no. 5 (May 1914): 360.

29. In an account by the Russian critic and artist Nikolay Kulbin, Marinetti stated, “We are very earthbound and from this stems our strength and, perhaps our weakness. Russian futurists are too abstract and from this stems their strength, and perhaps their weakness as well.” See Baudouin de Courtenay, “‘“Galopom vpered!’” 360. 30. A. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism),” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1928-1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 76. Kruchenykh quoted in Baudouin de Courtenay, ““Galopom vpered!’” 360. Baudouin de Courtenay and Kruchenykh engaged at this time in a series of disputes over linguistic issues and their significance in futurist poetry. For more on this polemic, see Gerald Janecek, “Baudouin de Courtenay vs. Krucenych,” Russian Literature 10 (1981): 17-30. Here Janecek makes only a passing reference to Baudouin de Courtenay’s “‘Full Speed Ahead!” 31. Baudouin de Courtenay, ““Galopom vpered!’” 360. 32. N. Khardzhiev, “Poeziia i zhivopis’ (Rannii Maiakovskii),” in Stat’i ob avangarde, vol. 1 (Moscow: RA, 1997), 55.

33. For more on the illustration of Russian cubo-futurist verse collections, see Gerald Janecek’s Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), in which Janecek discusses the visual nature of verse by Kruchenykh, Kamensky, and others; for a useful discussion of Rozanova’s

248 Notes to pages 41-42 illustrative work for Te-li-le (1914), a book of poetry by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, see Gurianova, Exploring Color, 52-61. 34. In Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision, an investigation of the painterly tendencies infusing Mayakovsky’s verse, Juliette Stapanian compares various early poems by Mayakovsky to paintings from the period, a critical technique she refers to as “graphic scansion.” See Juliette R. Stapanian, Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision (Houston: Rice University Press, 1986), 3. 35. See note 29. 36. Nikolay Gogol’, Polnoe sobrante sochinentt v desiati tomakh, vol. 8 (Berlin: “Slovo,” 1921), 214.

37. Ina subsequent passage from “Nevsky Prospect,” Gogol provides a vivid descrip-

tion of the street from the perspective of his hero, Piskarev: “The pavement moved under him, the carriages with galloping horses seemed motionless, a bridge stretched out and broke at its arch, a house stood upside down, a sentry box fell forward to meet him, and the sentry’s halberd along with the golden words of a signboard as well as the scissors drawn on it shined, seemingly on the very eyelash of his eye” (ibid., 227). Details of the street move through Piskarev’s field of vision as a tapestry of visual impressions

within the shifting urban landscape. Russian literature’s “first example of a ‘futurist’ landscape,’ as Khardzhiev describes this passage, was in fact quoted frequently by Mayakovsky, who drew consistently on Gogol’s idiosyncratic use of language, particularly hyperbole, synecdoche, and extensive personification. See Nikolay Khardzhiev, “Gogol’ v stikhakh Maiakovskogo,” in Poeticheskaia kultura Maiakovskogo, ed. N. Khardzhiev and V. Trenin (Moscow: “Izkusstvo,” 1970), 190. 38. Symbolist verse in Western Europe and Russia featured a variety of urbanist motifs

and techniques. Urbanism—a broad artistic trend focused on the city and all its modern features—first emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in the work of the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Emile Verhaeren, and Jules Laforgue (whose symbolist verse Shershenevich translated into Russian in 1914). In what can loosely be classified as an impressionistic poetic style, Verhaeren fused disparate, highly subjective observations and fragmented details in his verse to convey the city’s moods, sounds, and rhythms. Laforgue likewise produced impressionistic urban verse, but he (along with French symbolists Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, two other influential poets of the period) portrayed the city in a distinctly negative light, highlighting the modern metropolis’s detrimental effect on the psychology of urban dwellers (as discussed in chap. 1). Laforgue, one of the first to introduce free verse (vers libre) into French poetry, fashioned his loose poetic form as a reflection of the city and its hectic pace, subsequently inspiring the urbanism that emerged in Italy and Russia. 39. Andrey Bely, “Gorod,” in Arabeski (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 354.

40. In Petersburg, Bely frequently describes the commotion and sounds of the city, for instance, the ominous passing of an automobile: “A deafening, inhuman roar! Headlights gleaming, an automobile, belching kerosene, hurtled from under the arch toward the river.” Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert Maguire and John Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 65. Bely also focused on methods of rhythmical acceleration (and deceleration) in Russian verse, particularly in the predominant meter of iambic tetrameter. See Bely, “Opyt kharakteristiki chetyrekhstopnogo iamba,” in Simvolizm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 286-317.

Notes to pages 42-47 249 41. For more on accentual verse, the dol’nik, and free verse, see Barry Scherr, Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 42. Blok, in many ways, popularized the dol’nik in modern Russian verse, while he sporadically wrote in free verse, for instance, in an untitled 1906 poem that begins, “Noch’. Gorod ugomonilsia. / Za bol’shim oknom / Tikho i torzhestvenno, / Kak budto chelovek umiraet” (“Night. The city has quieted down. / Beyond the big window / It is calm and solemn, / As if a person has died”). 43. Symbolism’s close ties to futurism were the subject of Andrey Shemshurin’s seminal book Futurizm v stikhakh V. Briusova (Moscow: Tipo. “Russkago Tovarishchestva,” 1913).

44, V. Mayakovsky, “Bez belykh flagov,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenti v trinadtsati tomakh, 1:324. This quote is from a series of articles Mayakovsky wrote for the Moscow newspaper Nov’ between May and December 1914. 45. For more on Guro’s urbanism, see Kjeld Bjornager Jensen, Russian Futurism, Urbanism, and Elena Guro (Arhus, Denmark: Arkona, 1977). Jensen argues that Guro’s impressionism evolved into futurism’s expressionism (188-89). 46. Elena Guro, “Pered vesnoi,” in Sharmanka (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1909), 10. 47. E. Guro, “Gorod,” in Sazhin, Poeziia russkogo futurizma, 259-60. Guro’s “Gorod”

was published posthumously in 1914 in the futurist miscellany Roaring Parnassus (Rykatushchu Parnas). Unless otherwise noted, all English translations of the poetry are my own.

48. For more on the close connection between Guro’s urbanist prose and verse (specifically “The City”) and Mayakovsky’s work, see Nikolay Khardzhiev, “Maiakovski i Elena Guro,’ in Stat’i ob avangarde, vol. 2 (Moscow: RA, 1997), 113-14. 49. Konstantin Bolshakov, Le Futur (Moscow: n.p., 1913). 50. The ego-futurist depiction of upper-class urban society and its interest in modern forms of dynamism can also be found in verse by Konstantin Olimpov, whose Airplane Poesas (Aeroplannye Poezy, 1912) thematically conveyed the era’s modernizing spirit. 51. V. Shershenevich, “Punktir futurizm,” in Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1994 (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1998), 171-72. Also quoted in A. Kobrinsky, ““Nashi stikhi ne dlia krotov . . .’ Poeziia Vadima Shershenevicha,’ in Vadim Shershenevich, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo “Akademicheskii proekt,” 2000), 17-18. 52. Shershenevich, Zelenaia ulitsa, 37, italics mine. 53. V. Shershenevich, “Vy bezhali ispuganno, uroniv vualetku,” in Stikhotvorentia 1 poemy, 56.

54. A curious interplay between sex and speed exists in much of the futurist poetry at this time. Severyanin’s “July Noon (The Cinema)” (see note 16), Bolshakov’s Le Futur, and Shershenevich’s “You ran scared, having dropped your veil” all associate velocity with sex, as does Kruchenykh’s transrational poem “Dyr bul shchyl.” In his discussion of zaum’, Janecek makes a compelling case for reading Kruchenykh’s poem as an approximation of the sex act. See Janecek, Zaum, 62-65. 55. V. Mayakovsky, “Theater, Cinema, Futurism,” in The Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), 33. In discussion of Mayakovsky’s work, Edward Brown dismisses Mayakovsky’s “Marinetti-like” prose dec-

larations from the period, claiming “none of this ever appeared in any of his poems.”

250 Notes to pages 48-54 This, I contend, could not be further from the case. See Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 88-89. 56. Brown, Mayakovsky, 73. 57. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinentii, 1:33. Page numbers for subsequent cita-

tions of Mayakovsky’s verse will be included in the text. All cited poems come from the first volume of this thirteen-volume collection. 58. In A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, “Night” is printed without separate stanzas, but in later printings, Mayakovsky divided the poem into four stanzas. 59. For more on the close relationship between “Night” and cubist and futurist painting, see Stapanian, Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision, 17-33. 60. In Vladimir Matakovsku: Tragediia and in several speeches, Mayakovsky alluded to

the ancient Egyptian practice of creating electric sparks by rubbing cats. See Mayakovsky, “Bez belykh flagov,’ in Polnoe sobranie sochinenti, 1:324. Stapanian suggests that given the theme of burning in the previous four lines, Mayakovsky was alluding to the Russian phrase “kak ugorelaia koshka” (“like a cat on fire”), an idiom used to describe frenzied movement. See Stapanian, Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision, 30. 61. As Khardzhiev suggested in “Poetry and Painting (Early Mayakovsky),” the sur-

real images and alogical tendencies of Russian cubo-futurism helped distinguish the movement from its Western European counterparts. Khardzhiev, “Poeziia 1 zhivopis’ (Rannii Maiakovskii),” 33. 62. Brown aptly compares “V avto” and the poem’s “total effect”—i.e., its distorted

impression of rapid movement through the city—to Goncharova’s 1913 painting The Cyclist. Brown, Mayakovsky, 93. 63. A. Kruchenykh, Stikhi V. Maiakovskogo (Moscow: Izd. euy, 1914), 23. Reprinted in

A. Kruchenykh, Izbrannoe, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag), 151. 64. V. Kamensky, “Strannik Vasilii,” Futuristy: Pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov, nos. 1-2 (1914): 29-30. 65. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” 110. 66. David Burliyuk, Elena Guro, Nikolay Burliyuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ekaterina Nizen, Velemir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits, and Aleksey Kruchenykh, introduction, “Sadok sudei II,” in Manifesty 1 programmy russkikh futuristov, comp. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 52.

67. For more on the Russian modernist phenomenon of “life-creation,” see Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). A crucial source for the Russians’ notions of life creation was Nietzsche’s credo of individualism and the super-

man, which at the turn of the century informed philosophical and artistic thought throughout Europe. In a 1911 article exploring Nietzsche’s influence on Russian modernists, the symbolist Bely emphasized how the poetic “I,” taking shape through the poet’s active engagement with reality, would presage the rise of new values and a new reality: “'T is not something immobile and immutable within the limits of psychology. Our ‘T comes to life in the process of action. ... Creation concentrated on the self is the cre-

ation of values for Nietzsche. In it is the guarantee of life for all humanity” (Bely, “Fridrich Nitsshe,’ in Arabeski, 74). This “process of action” led to self-creation and the rise of the poet as the herald of an ideal world “for all humanity.” Seized on by Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Kamensky, among others, the Nietzschean emphasis on the

Notes to pages 54-56 251 active, individualistic artist permeated the futurist cult of the creative, motion-filled “I.” See Bengt Jangfeldt, “Nietzsche and the Young Mayakovsky,” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35-57; and Henryk Baran, “Khlebnikov and Nietzsche: Pieces of an Incomplete Mosaic,” in Rosenthal, Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, 58-83. 68. Vasily Kamensky, Put’ entuziasta, in Vasilit Kamenskii (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 450.

69. Many in the Russian avant-garde invoked the poetry of Whitman, seeing the American poet as an antecedent to their own promotion of the artistic self. Prototype of a liberated, modern-day bard and an emblem of a dynamic, young nation, Whitman and his creative persona—what he called his “Song of Myself”—appealed to a variety of Russian artists. The painter Larionov, for example, used lines from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (from a Russian translation by the symbolist Konstantin Balmont) as the epigraph to his 1913 manifesto “Rayist Painting” (“Luchistskaia zhivopis’”), just as the filmmaker Dziga Vertov quoted Whitman in his diaries. See Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. K. O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 256. Critics have also noted the Whitmanesque style of Khlebnikov’s long poem Zoo (Zverinets, 1911), while Korney Chukovsky, one of the first Russian literary critics to promote Russian futurism, frequently cited Whitman as inspiring futurism’s focus on the individual self and “the body electric.” Chukovsky, who trans-

lated Whitman’s poetry into Russian, claimed that in the early period of futurism, Mayakovsky’s “multifaceted style was the style of another rebel, Walt Whitman”; see Korney Chukovsky, Moi Uitmen: Ego zhizn’ 1 tvorchestvo (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 280. Meanwhile, Ivan Ignatev, one of the central figures in Russia’s ego-futurist movement and author of the theoretical treatise “Ego-Futurism” (“Ego-futurizm”), went so far as to claim that Whitman, rather than Marinetti, had provided the impetus for the egocentric verse of Severyanin. I. V. Ignatev, “Ego-futurizm,” in Markov, Manifesty 1 programmy russkikh futuristov, 40. 70. I. Severyanin, “Epilog “Ego-futurizm,” in Sazhin, Poeziia russkogo futurizma, 344. 71. For more on Severyanin’s contact with other Russian futurists, see N. Khardzhiev, “Maiakovskii 1 Igor’ Severianin,” in Stat’i ob avangarde, 2:37-71. 72. Notes for Mayakovsky’s talk “I Myself Have Arrived” are reprinted in Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobrantie sochinenii, 1:365—66. The Russian title of Mayakovsky’s lecture “Prished-

shii sam” (“I Myself Have Come”), as Khardzhiev has noted, is a play of words on the title of a book of essays by the Russian symbolist and futurist adversary Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Griadushchiu kham (The Future Boor). For more on Kamensky’s appearance at the Polytechnic Museum, see Kamensky, Put’ entuziasta, 472. Kamensky later recounted:

“They shouted to me, “Why do you have an airplane on your forehead?’ I answered: ‘It is a sign of worldwide dynamism.” 73. The three futurists, who were joined by Severyanin for a portion of the trip, frequently caused trouble with the local authorities, as their confrontational appearance and active iconoclastic style of delivery garnered attention wherever they traveled. For more on the futurists’ 1913-1914 tour, see N. Khardzhiev, “‘Veselii god’ Maiakovskogo,’ in Stat’i ob avangarde, 2:6-36. 74. In Life with Mayakovsky (Zhizw s Maiakovskim), Kamensky described how the touring futurists, upon arriving in Tiflis, were mistaken for circus performers: ““The circus has come to town, they muttered in the crowd. ‘Clowns walk about the street for

252 Notes to pages 56-62 publicity. In the crowd, of course, they did not yet know that these strangely dressed people were futurists.” Vasily Kamensky, Zhizn’ s Maiakovskim (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), 125-26. The tour lasted until March 1914. 75. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenti, 1:453—54.

76. Mayakovsky removed the exclamation point for the second printing of J in the 1914 futurist almanac Croaked Moon (Dokhlata luna). For more on changes between the first and second printings of J, see Janecek, Look of Russian Literature, 213-16. Ia, it should be noted, has sometimes been translated into English as Me. 77. Lev Trotsky, expressing a view of Mayakovsky’s work quite applicable to J, has been quoted as stating, “The Greeks were anthropomorphists, naively likening the forces of nature to themselves; our poet is a Mayakomorphist, and he populates the squares, the streets, and the fields of the Revolution only with himself?’ Quoted in Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,’ in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 276. 78. Asin much of Mayakovsky’s early verse, the grammar and the meaning are ambiguous in the verse line “mysli sumasshedshei vorokhi,” which can be translated as “heaps of a crazy thought” or “thoughts of a crazy heap.” 79. The Christ motif was also raised in the cycle’s first poem, “Along the roadway,” with the mention that “policemen have been crucified” (raspiatie gorodovye). 80. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Brown writes, “is a ‘monodrama’ in that there is nothing in it that is not Mayakovsky himself” Brown, Mayakovsky, 99. 81. An early draft of Vladimir Matakovsku: Tragedita was titled The Railway (Zheleznaia doroga). 82. Nikolay Berdyayev, Krizis iskusstva (Moscow: SP Interprint, 1990), 12. Discussing World War I and the violent speed that characterized the fighting, Berdyayev wrote, “The current world war begun by Germany is a futurist war. Futurism in art moved into life and in life produced more grandiose results than in art.... The current war is a war

of machines. It in many respects is the result of the machine’s increasing power in human life. It is an industrial war, in which the machine replaces the human being” (22). 83. Ibid., 22. 84. Shershenevich, Zelenaia ulitsa, 49. 85. Bystr’ was published in 1916, but in a preface to the play Shershenevich claimed it was written between 1913 and 1914. Markov translates Shershenevich’s play as Swifthood, but Fastness comes somewhat closer to capturing the spirit of the original Russian title, which is a neologism formed from the Russian noun for speed, bystrota. 86. Throughout his career, Shershenevich was accused of slavish imitation of the symbolists and Mayakovsky. Nikolay Gumilev, among others, noted the imitative underpinnings of Shershenevich’s verse. See Nikolay Gumilev, Pis’ma o russkoi poezii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 140. 87. V. Shershenevich, Bystr’, in Listy imazhinista (Yaroslavl’: Verkhne-volskoe knish. izd.-vo, 1997), 120.

88. Ibid., 140. 89. Ibid., 142.

90. For an example of Kamensky’s early neoprimitivist phase, see his antiurban novel The Mud Hut (Zemlianka, 1910). 91. In his autobiographical Way of the Enthusiast, Kamensky describes receiving his

Notes to pages 62—65 253 professional pilot’s license in Warsaw, where he made the acquaintance of several wellknown aviators, including Henri and Maurice Farman and Kh. N. Slavorosov, who held various world records for flying speeds. Kamensky later flew over Paris, London, and Naples, but did, however, experience several crashes. After one mishap in 1912, a local newspaper erroneously reported that he had died in the crash. As it turned out, Kamensky had landed into a swamp. Kamensky, Put’ entuziasta, 462-70. 92. Kamensky, Zhizw’ s Maiakovskim, 4. 93. A more metaphorical use of flying is found in Elena Guro’s 1913 poem “Giddy one, crazy one, flyer” ( Vetrogon, sumasbrod, letate? ). Addressing the poetic “flyer,” Guro

provides a bold vision of the contemporary poet, whose spiritual flight elevates the everyday into a metaphysical realm: “Giddy one, crazy one, flyer, / creator of spring storms, ... Listen, you mad seeker, / race, rush, / sweep on by you unbridled / intoxicator of storms” (“Vetrogon, sumasbrod, letatel’, / sozdavatel’ vesennikh bur’ . . . Slushai, ty, bezumnyi iskatel’, / mchis; nesis / pronosis’ neskovannyi / opianitel’ bur”). Guro’s eight-

line poem portrays the artist as liberated visionary, a prophet madly attempting to “race, rush, [and] sweep on by” to a cosmic reality through chaotic storms of creativity. 94. V. Kamensky, “Aeroplan i pervaia liubov,” Sinii zhurnal, no. 50 (December 2, 1911): 13. Kamensky’s play An Aviator’s Life (Zhizw aviatorskaia) remained unpublished, but a copy of it can be found in the Manuscript Division of the St. Petersburg Theater Library. In this play, the protagonist Max is an aviator obsessed with flying (“I am simply an aviator. A true aviator with the soul of a bird,” he states in act 1). Max leaves his wife, Elia, for Princess Mary, a wealthy woman who comes to him for flying lessons, boasting that she is ready to sacrifice her life for one lofty flight. Accordingly, Princess Mary dies in a plane crash, whereby Max returns to his wife. Yet he too succumbs to the velocity and danger of aviation, perishing in a plane crash at the conclusion of act 4. 95. V. Kamensky, “Vyzov,” Futuristy: Pervyt zhurnal russkikh futuristov, nos. 1-2 (1914): 27.

96. The version of “Vyzov” that appeared in the First Journal of Russian Futurists included a footnote on Kamensky’s aviating exploits, further accentuating the poem’s autobiographical basis. 97. At the Nikitin Circus, Mayakovsky, according to Kamensky, hoped to ride out on an elephant and read his poetry. See Kamensky, Zhizn’ s Maitakovskim, 141-42. Mem-

oirs of the renowned Russian clown Dmitry Al’perov recount how Kamensky ate and slept with Al’perov’s circus troupe during its visit to Kamensky’s hometown of Perm. See Tatyana Nikolskaya, “Drug tsirka,” Sovetskaia estrada 1 tsirk, no. 11 (1985): 32, which

discusses Kamensky’s infatuation with the circus and his subsequent performances in the Tiflis circus. 98. Nikolskaya, “Drug tsirka,” 32. Kamensky also celebrated this circus appearance in his 1916 poem “Ja—v tsirke”: “Vasilii Kamensky / Verkhom na kone / Ispolnit stikhi / Grianet rech’ o Poezii Tsirka”. 99. Nikolay Evreinov, Teatralizatstia zhizni: Poet, teatralizuiushchu zhizw (Moscow: “Vremia,’ 1922), 10.

100. Kamensky, in fact, published a book on Evreinov in 1917, although the conclusion to Kamensky’s tribute to Evreinov seems as much about Kamensky as it is about Evreinov: “Oh life, life. I give you the best outbursts of my soul, my tempered songs.” V. Kamensky, Kniga o Evreinove (Petrograd: Izd. “Sovremennoe iskusstvo,” 1917), 99.

254 Notes to pages 65-73 101. This column also comprised part of Kamensky’s 1916 poem “Nightingale” (“Solovei”). 102. Markov claims that Kamensky’s technique of dropping a letter with each word was inspired by D. G. Konovalov and his 1907 article “Religious Ecstasy in Russian Mystical Sectarianism,” which appeared in a 1907-8 edition of Bogoslovskii Vestnik. This article also contributed to the rise of the futurists’ “zaum’”” See Markov, Russian Futur1SM, 201.

CHAPTER 2. THE ACCELERATING WoRD

1. Shershenevich, Futurizm bez maski (Leitchworth-Herts, England: Prideaux Press, 1974), 65.

2. Livshits, “The Liberation of the Word,’ in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 81. Livshits’s “Liberation of the Word” (“Osvobozhdenie slova”) first appeared in the futurist collection of verse The Croaked Moon ( Dokhlaia luna, 1913, 1914).

3. Shershenevich mentions Bely’s “Magic of Words” in various theoretical tracts. See, for instance, Shershenevich, Zelenaia ulitsa, 30-32. For more on Shershenevich’s use of Bely’s “Magic of Words,” see Lawton, Vadim Shershenevich, 67-68. 4, Andrey Bely, “Magiia slov,” in Simvolizm, 436. 5. Shershenevich, Futurizm bez maski, 20. 6. Ibid., 7o. 7. Ibid., 77. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Shershenevich, “Open Letter to M. M. Rossiyansky,’ in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 145. As Lawton explains, the “word-image” is close to the cubo-futurists’ emphasis on the word’s primordial essence, but while Shershenevich and others in the Mezzanine of Poetry accentuated the pictorial nature of the word, the cubo-futurists proceeded on to phonetic abstractionism. See Lawton, introduction, in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Mantfestoes, 27. 10. Ibid., 145. 11. “Neboskreby triasutsia i v khokhote valiatsia,” in Shershenevich, Stikhotvorentia 1 poemy, 58.

12. Shershenevich, “From Green Street,’ in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 151.

13. The “word-image” would later constitute the broad basis of Shershenevich’s post-1917 “imaginist” movement (imazhinizm), but at this initial stage of futurist experimentation, it represented a concerted attempt by the poet to penetrate the imagination of his audience through rapid, graphic language. 14. V. Mayakovsky, Vladimir Maiakovskii: Tragedtia (Moscow: Pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov, 1914), 29-30. 15. A. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod: K istorii russkogo futurizma,” in A. Kruchenykh, Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Nina Gurianova (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1999), 77. 16. Eagle, afterword, in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Mantfestoes, 292.

17. Shemshurin, Futurizm v stikhakh V. Briusova, 4.

Notes to pages 73-79 255 18. A. Kruchenykh, Sdvigologiia russkogo stikha (Moscow: Gileia, 1923), 36. 19. Ibid., 15. For more on Kruchenykh’s theory of the sdvig (and faktura), see Gerald Janecek, “Aleksej Krucenych’s Literary Theories,” Russian Literature 39 (1996): 1-12. 20. Kruchenykh, Sdvigologiia russkogo stikha, 25. 21. A. Kruchenykh, “Otchaianie,” in Stikhotvorente, poemy, pomany, opera (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentsvo “Akademicheskii proekt,” 2001), 274. 22. Letter from A. Kruchenykh to A. Ostrovsky, n.d. (1920s), quoted in Gurianova, Exploring Color, 49-50. 23. Mayakovsky’s “From Street to Street,” it should be noted, is the first example of “shifting” verse provided by Shemshurin in Futurism in the Poetry of V. Bruiusov. See Shemshurin, Futurizm v stikhakh V. Briusova, 5.“From Street to Street” first appeared in the futurist miscellany The Prayer Book of Three (Trebnik troikh). 24. Later Soviet printings of “From Street to Street” lacked some of the complexity of the original layout.

25. Accentuating the motion-filled perspective inherent in his poem, Mayakovsky claimed that a “tram ride from Sukharev Tower to Sretenka Gate” inspired the images of “From Street to Street,” which he originally subtitled “I have a conversation with the sun near the Sukharev tower.” See Mayakovsky, “Kak delat’ stikhi” (1926), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenti, 12:91. For further discussion of how this poem conveys the view from the back of a moving tram, see G. S. Cheremin, Rannit Matakovsku, put’ poeta k Oktiabru (Moscow: ANSSR, 1962), 61—62.

26. This quotation comes from V. Nezhdanov’s article (“Futuristy”) on the cubofuturists, which appeared in Trudovaia gazeta (Nikolayev), no. 1419, January 26, 1914, 3. Khardzhiev quotes Nezhdanov’s account of Mayakovsky’s speech in N. Khardzhiev, “‘Veselyi god’ Maiakovskogo,’ in Stat’t ob avangarde, 2:13. 27. Khardzhiev, “Poeziia 1 zhivopis’ (Rannii Maiakovskii),” 53. 28. A similar systematic approach to texture, Khardzhiev notes, was promoted by David Burliyuk in a 1913 lecture titled “The Graphic Elements of Russian Phonetics” (“Izobrazitel nye elementy rossiiskoi fonetiki”). Delivering his speech at a meeting of the Union of Youth (Soiuz molodezhi), a prominent avant-garde art society in St. Petersburg, Burliyuk attributed a discrete textural quality to letters and words. For Burliyuk, who strove to develop a system of faktura for Russian verse, consonants broadly emerged as the bearers of color and texture, while vowels could convey time, space, and a tangible sensation of movement between words. Ibid., 53. 29. I use Brown’s English translation (in his Mayakovsky) for the title of the poem “Shumiki, shumy 1 shumishchi.” 30. Janecek, Zaum, 4-5. 31. A. Kruchenykh, Lakirovannoe triko, in Kruchenykh, Izbrannoe, 228. 32. The “free” wordplay that characterized the aerial neologisms of A Slap in the Face and in Kruchenykh’s initial cubo-futurist distortions of syntax in his and Khlebnikov's small book of verse, Worldbackwards (Mirskontsa, 1912), paved the way for a blossoming of zaum’ the following year. See, for instance, Vladimir Markov (Voldemar Matvei), “Printsipy novogo iskusstva,” Soiuz molodezhi, no. 1 (1914): 14. 33. A. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 67. The capitalization of the opening clause is Kruchenykh’s.

256 Notes to pages 80-91 34. Janecek, Zaum, 78. 35. Kruchenykh, Stikhotvorenia, poemy, romany, opera, 55. 36. Instead of translating “Dyr bul shchyl,” which would be impossible given that its words have no definitive meaning, I have provided a transliteration of the poem. 37. Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word,” 73. 38. Ibid., 73, italics in original. 39. A. Kruchenykh, Faktura slov, in Kukish proshliakam (Moscow: Hylaea, 1992), 11. AQ. Ibid., 12.

41. A. Kruchenykh, Deimo, in Kruchenykh, Izbrannoe, 65. 42. “The First All-Russian Congress of Bards of the Future” proved to be a key moment in the development of cubo-futurism, despite the failure of Khlebnikov to attend. For more on this “congress,” which was held at Matyushin’s Finnish dacha, see Aleksandra Shatskikh, Kazimir Malevich (Moscow: Slovo, 1996), 30. 43. A. Kruchenykh, “Pobeda nad solntsem,” in Stikhotvorentia, poemy, romany, opera, 402.

44, A. Kruchenykh, “From Explodity,” in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 66. 45. A. Kruchenykh, Vzorval’ (St. Petersburg: Izd. “euy,” 1913). 46. Ona subsequent page of Vzorval’, Kruchenykh continues his lightning-quick inves-

tigation of foreign tongues as he prints the word “SHISH” to resemble Hebrew letters. This foray into Hebrew, however, maintains a uniquely Russian flavor as shish signifies an offensive gesticulation in colloquial Russian. 47. K. Bolshakov, “Gorodskaia vesna,” in Poeziia russkogo futurizma, 416. “City Spring”

appeared in Bolshakov’s 1913 collection of verse, Heart in a Glove (Serdtse v perchatke). A longer version of this poem was published in a December 25, 1913, issue (no. 16) of the St. Petersburg journal Teatr v karikaturakh under the title of “Springs” (“Vesny”). For a translation and discussion of this longer version, see Janecek, Zaum, 100-101. 48. Vasilisk Gnedov, Smert’ iskusstvu: Piatnadtsat’ (15) poem (St. Petersburg: Peterburgsky glashatay, 1913). 49. Ivan Ignat’ev, “Predislovie” (Foreword), in Gnedov, Smert’ iskusstvu. Quoted in Sazhin, Poeziia russkogo futurizma, 699. 50. V. Pyast, Vstrechi (Moscow: “Federatsiia,’ 1929), 263. Quoted in S. Sigei, “Egofuturnaliia bez smertnogo kolpaka,” in Vasilisk Gnedov, Sobrante stikhotvorenii, ed. N. Khardzhiev and M. Martsaduri (Trento, Italy: Universita di Trento, 1992), 7. 51. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, The Word as Such, in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 61. 52. A. Kruchenykh and V. Khlebnikov, “The Letter as Such,” in Lawton and Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 63-64. 53. Ibid., 64. 54. Explodity was first published in June 1913; a second edition appeared in 1914.

55. I follow Susan Compton’s lead in attributing this lithograph design to Kulbin. See Susan Compton, The Word Backwards: Russian Futurist Books, 1912-16 (London: British Library, 1978), 104.

56. Kazimir Malevich, “Pis’ma k M. V. Matiushinu,” ed. Y. F. Kovtun, in Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1974 god (Leningrad: Izd. “Nauka,” 1976), 191. 57. S. Khudakov, “Literatura, khudozhestvennaia kritika, disputy i doklady,” in Oslinyi

Notes to pages 91-95 257 khvost 1 misher’ (Moscow: Miunster, 1913), 144. Khudakov, Janecek argues, was a pseudonym for the poet and painter Ilya Zdanevich, who was closely aligned with the rayist

painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova in the second decade of the twentieth century and later, following the 1917 revolution, produced a series of visual experiments in verse. See Janecek, Look of Russian Literature, 150.

58. Larionov was himself a driving force behind the publication of The Donkey’s Tail, thus accentuating the connections between rayist painting and poetry. 59. Khudakov, “Literatura, khudozhestvennaia kritika,” 146. 60. To accentuate the visual nature of “rayist” verse and its graphic, alogical display of words, Khudakov also included in his Donkey’s Tail article an example of pictorial verse from Italy (a poem by the Italian futurist A. Palazzeschi), which provided an earlier (and conspicuously less dynamic) example of futurist wordplay free from syntax. 61. The fact that rayist poetry subsequently failed to materialize raises the distinct possibility that the whole rayist endeavor in The Donkey’s Tail may have been a ruse on the part of Larionov, Khudakov/Zdanevich, and the elusive Semenov, Bleklov, and Reysh-

par. It remains to be seen whether these poems were created as a legitimate attempt at adapting a rayist aesthetic to verse or were fashioned as a parody of other visual poetry from the period. Hoax or no hoax, the inclusion of rayist poems in The Donkey’s Tail and Target highlights the dynamic pictorial forms uniting Russia’s futurist poets and painters as they moved toward nonobjectivity. Similarly, Anton Lotov’s Rekord (Record, 1913), also mentioned in Khudakov’s article, was potentially a hoax as well. No copy of Rekord can be found today, but several examples of Lotov’s transrational, rayist-like work were reproduced in The Donkey’s Tail, as they were in a September 8, 1913, edition of the Moscow journal Teatr v karrikaturakh (The Theater in Caricatures). Printed alongside discussion of two futurist, “rayist” plays (Va-da-ri and Futu) by Lotov, the Rekord poem “Ulichnaia melodiia” (“Street Melody”) includes nonsensical letters, random mor-

phological units, and a star-shaped section of words similar to the rayist poems in The Donkey’s Tail. Khardzhiev has argued that Lotov was a pseudonym for Ilya Zdanevich, while Markov, who questions whether Rekord ever existed, believes Lotov might have been Larionov. See Markov, Russian Futurism, 403n14.

62. David Burliyuk, “Zimnii poezd,’ Futuristy: Pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov, nos. 1-2 (1914): 42.

63. For more on the “disappearing” poem, see White, Literary Futurism, 264-67. White does not mention Burliyuk’s “Zimnii poezd,” but he does refer to several “disappearing” poems by Kamensky, including “Ta.”

64. Burliyuk afforded considerable attention to the letter R. For instance, in his poem “Railway Whistlings,” he noted that “on the letter R is concentrated the sensation of harsh severity.’ See David Burliyuk, “Zheleznodorozhnye posvistivaniia,’ Futuristy: Pervyt zhurnal russkikh futuristov, nos. 1-2 (1914): 39. 65. David Burliyuk is also listed as the publisher of Tango with Cows. 66. In Italy, futurist poets rendered speed by illustrating trajectory and an object’s “lines of movement.” John White cites Mario Bétuda’s 1914 poem “Looping the Loop” as one of the first attempts at depicting “lines of movement” through graphic typography that replicates the path of an airplane. See White, Literary Futurism, 19-20. 67. For more on the tango, see Robert Ferris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).

258 Notes to pages 95-102 68. Korney Chukovsky, complaining in 1922, “We don’t have time” for “verbal abundance,’ and bemoaning Russia’s “lazy, sluggish, and provincial” language, acknowledged Russian futurism’s “quick telegraphic language.” Korney Chukovsky, Futuristy: Igor’ Severianin.—Al. Kruchenykh.—Vas. Kamenskut.—VI. Matakovski (St. Petersburg: Poliarnaia zvezda, 1922), 22. For more on “telegraphic” futurist poetry in Russia and Italy, see White, Literary Futurism, 143-214. 69. As Janecek has noted, Kruchenykh was the first one to adopt the term “ferroconcrete,” using it in a motion-filled passage from the 1912 Piglets: “ferroconcrete weighthomes / drag and throw me downward” (zhelezobetonnye giri-doma | tashchut brosatut menia nichkom). See Janecek, Look of Russian Literature, 123. 70. Anatoly Strigalev, “Kartiny, ‘stikhokartiny’ 1 zhelezobetonnye poemy Vasiliia Kamenskogo,” Voprosy iskusstvoznantia 1-2 (1995): 514. 71. Roller-skating, as Kamensky’s focus on the sport suggests, emerged at the turn of the 20th century as a fashionable urban activity boasting an intoxicating mix of athleticism, artistry, and entertainment. And in 1910, a sports-related Russian journal titled Sketing-Rink appeared. For discussion of roller-skating’s popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Morris Taub, ed., Roller Skating through the Years (New York: William-Frederick Press, 1944). Anatoly Strigalev notes that Kamensky’s eponymous

roller-skating rink, along with the Nikitin Circus and the cabaret Teatr zon, were all located on the corner of Tverskoi Boulevard and Moscow’s Garden Ring (Sadovoe kol’tso). See Strigalev, “Kartiny,” 524. 72. In 1914 Kamensky republished several of his ferroconcrete poems in Nagoi sredi

odetykh (Naked among the Clothed). In 1918 he produced several more ferroconcrete poems, including the maplike “Tiflis.” 73. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, The Word as Such, 57. This focus on instantaneity is also reflected in Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s instructions for readers of transrational verse collections: “once you’ve read it—tear it up!” (prochitav—razorvi! [62]). CHAPTER 3. LIGHT SPEED

1. Mikhail Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto,” trans. John Bowlt, in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. John Bowlt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 82. 2. Ibid. 3. Larionov and Zdanevich also accentuated the physical underpinnings of their face painting with an overtly accelerated, athletic attitude: “To the frenzied city of arc lamps, to the streets bespattered with bodies, to the houses huddled together, we have brought our painted faces; we’re off and the track awaits the runners.’ See Larionov and Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves,” 80. 4, M. Larionov and I. Zdanevich, “Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: manifest futuristov,’ Argus 12 (1913): 114.

5. Actors (Larionov and Goncharova, among them) sported face drawings in the first Russian futurist film Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13 (Drama v kabare futuristov No. 13, 1914), directed by V. Kasianov. Only one still from the film remains and has been reproduced, for instance, in Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863— 1922 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 116. 6. Some have translated /uchizm as “rayonism,” with the root “rayon” from the French

Notes to pages 102-103 259 translation of the term intact. John Bowlt’s English translations of the Larionov and Goncharova’s rayist manifestos, for instance, use this French-based translation. The rayist piece “Pictorial Rayism,” in fact, originally appeared in French (“Le Rayonisme Pictural”) in the Parisian journal Montjoie! in 1914. I, however, have chosen to use “rayism” (rather than “rayonism”) to maintain the English translation of the Russian word [uch (ray). Some confusion, it should be noted, exists regarding the dates of rayism’s emergence. Much of this confusion stems from Larionov and Goncharova’s urge to establish their originality by backdating rayist canvases. Upon emigrating to the West in 1915, Larionov and Goncharova intentionally altered the dates of their rayist works, dating them back to as early as 1910 and 1911 in an effort to assert their originality. 7. “In painting,” Larionov writes in his 1913 manifesto “Rayonist Painting,” “futurism promotes mainly the doctrine of movement—dynamism. Painting in its very essence is static—hence dynamics as a style of motion.” Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 99. 8. The rayists, Larionov wrote retrospectively in 1936, strove “to find motion that is more rapid than the motion of the sun and to represent it in a tangible way.’ This quote is from a 1936 letter written by Larionov to Alfred Barr (then director of the Museum of Modern Art). See Larionov, “Rayism,” trans. John Bowlt, in Larionov, Michail Larionov: Pasteller/Pastels; Goucher/Gouaches; Teckningar/Drawings, exhibition catalog (Stockholm: Galerie Aronowitsch, 1987), 9. In this letter Larionov, in addition to denying that rayism analyzed motion, claimed that he realized before Einstein that light is material. 9. In “Rayist Painting,” Larionov associates a “doctrine of luminosity” with radioactive rays, ultraviolet rays, and “reflectivity,” underscoring the rayists’ awareness of contemporary scientific breakthroughs. See Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 98. 10. Although rayism undeniably facilitated the rise of abstraction in Russian art,

whether or not rayism constituted pure nonobjectivity remains a contentious point among art historians. The claim by some that rayism signifies a seminal variety of total abstraction is somewhat overstated. Magdalena Dabrowski, author of one of the earliest studies of rayism in the West, states that the rayists’ “theoretical experiments in color and texture” were “totally abstract.” See Magdalena Dabrowski, “The Formation and Development of Rayonism,” Art Journal 33, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 204. Yet even in the most nonfigurative rayist works, rays emanate from an implied source—from outside or

beyond the canvas. Therefore a more precise characterization of rayism would be abstracted, but not complete abstraction, like that achieved several years later in Malevich’s suprematist images. “Malevich,” Aleksandr In’shakov asserts in his comparison of rayism and suprematism, “came to nonobjective art later than Larionov, but, maybe because of this, his move was more decisive.” See Aleksandr In’shakov, “Larionov i Malevich: Luchizm i suprematizm,” in N. S. Goncharova 1 M. F. Larionov: Issledovantia 1 publikatsti, ed. G. F. Kovalenko (Moscow: “Nauka,” 2001), 12. As Yevgeny Kovtun argues in his work on Larionov, regardless of any “outward” appearance of nonobjectivity, rayist paintings maintained a strong link to the natural world through “their motion towards nature, light-bearing quality and complexly vibrating” imagery. See Yevgeny Kovtun, Mikhail Larionov, trans. Paul Williams (Bournemouth, England: Parkstone, 1998), 133. 11. Larionov and Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves,” 83. 12. M. Larionov and N. Goncharova, “Rayonists and Futurists: A Manifesto,” in Bowlt,

260 Notes to pages 103-106 Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 89. This manifesto originally appeared in the publication (miscellany) Oslinyi khvost 1 mishen’ (Moscow: Miunster, 1913), 9—48. 13. “We have all gone through the school of Larionov,’ Vladimir Mayakovsky declared in 1914. Quoted in Nikolay Khardzhiev, “Poeziia i zhivopis,” in N. Khardzhiev, K. Malevich, and M. Matyushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, 81. For more on Larionov’s close ties to cubo-futurist poetry, see A. Strigalev, “Mikhail Larionov—avtor i praktik pliuralisticheskoi kontseptsii,” Voprosy iskusstvoznantia 1 (1996): 482. 14. The Russian critic Yakov Tugendkhold, a contemporary of Larionov and Goncharova, later referred to rayism as “neo-impressionism” due to a similar play of light and color in rayist paintings. Yakov Tugendkhol’d, “Moskovskie pis’ma: Vystavki,” Apollon 4 (April 1913): 57-59.

15. As Anatoly Strigalev, who has written extensively on Larionov and Goncharova, explains, these two artists “discovered and acknowledged a definite congeniality, each serving as a ‘second I’ for the other.” Anatoly Strigalev, “Mikhail Larionov—avtor i praktik pliuralisticheskoi kontseptsii russkogo avangarda,’ Voprosy iskusstvoznantia 1 (1996): 473. 16. For more on “everythingism” and its relevance to Goncharova’s art, see Jane Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow AvantGarde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 254-60. 17. I. Zdanevich, “Natal’ia Goncharova i vsechestvo,” in G. F. Kovalenko, N. S. Goncharova i M.F. Larionov, 173. Zdanevich, Elena Basner accordingly writes, embodied “all the ebullient, spontaneous energy that motivated the Russian avant-garde.’ Elena Basner, “Lektsii Il’i Zdanevicha ‘Natal’ia Goncharova i vsechestvo’ i ‘O Natalii Goncharovoi,” in G. E Kovalenko, N. S. Goncharova i M. F. Larionov, 165. 18. The second Jack of Diamonds exhibition occurred in 1912. 19, Aleksandr Shevchenko introduced the term “neoprimitivism” in his November 1913 manifesto “Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievements” (“Neo-

primtivizm: Ego teoriia. Ego vozmozhnosti. Ego dostizheniia,’ translated in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde). In delving into the “painterly” side of Russian icons, Shevchenko and his colleagues followed the lead of Mikhail Vrubel, arguably the first Russian modernist to explore both Byzantine mosaics and the Russian icon, and also the first Russian painter to experiment with raylike lines, as is evident in a variety of drawings Vrubel produced in the 1900s. 20. Other neoprimitivist work appeared two years later, in March 1912, at The Donkey’s Tail show, alongside cubo-futurist canvases by Larionov and Goncharova. 21. For more on the Russian avant-garde’s treatment of the icon, see Margaret Betz, “The Icon and Russian Modernism,” Art Forum 5 (May 1977): 38. 22. Comparing the icon’s reverse perspective to traditional “direct” one-point perspective in paintings, Boris Uspensky writes: “The juxtaposition of direct and reverse perspectival systems can be connected above all with the immobility or, conversely, with the dynamism of the viewer’s perspective. ... The immobile figures of ancient paintings (for instance, the icon) do not need to move—the viewer is the one who moves.” As Uspensky thus suggests, the icon’s reverse perspective compelled viewers to interact, at least visually, with the religious image. B. A. Uspensky, “K issledovaniiu iazyka drevnei zhivopisi, in L. E Zhegin, lazyk zhivopisnogo proizvedeniia (Uslovnost’ drevnogo iskusstva) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Iskusstvo, 1970), 13. 23. Larionov, “Icons,” quoted and translated in Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 89-90. Parton

Notes to pages 106—108 261 has translated a French version of Larionov’s essay on the icon that appeared in Larionov, Une Avant-Garde Explosive (Paris: Editions lAge d homme, 1978), 132-33. “The Icons” was written in the early 1920s. 24. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989), 27. 25. Gombrich, Image and the Eye, 58. 26. Ibid., 59—6o.

27. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 98. 28. Larionov and Goncharova, “Rayonists and Futurists,” 90. In a published statement for her 1913 solo show in Moscow, Goncharova similarly wrote, “Now I shake the dust from my feet and leave the West, considering its vulgarizing significance trivial and insignificant—my path is toward the source of all arts, the East.” Goncharova, “Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition,” in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 55-56.

29. Within the Russian Orthodox tradition of icons, objects and individuals were not merely illuminated by a specific light source; rather, they embodied light. Light, Pavel

Florensky explains, was understood to substantiate the essence of all material things. Deeming the icon’s light “the space of true reality,’ Florensky wrote that “every iconic image appears always in a sea of golden grace, ceaselessly awash in the waves of divine light.” See Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 137-38. 30. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 98. 31. Florensky, Iconostasts, 126. 32. Parton appropriately contends that the link between rayism and the icon’s assist is “interesting, but not conclusive.” See Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 90. Several art historians, however, have argued that Goncharova’s modern appropriation of the assist (for instance, in her 1911 painting Washerwomen [Prachki]) prefigured the energetic lines of rayism. See, for example, Susan B. Compton, “Italian Futurism and Russia” Art Journal 4, no. 41 (Winter 1981): 344. 33. See, for instance, Balla’s Rondini: Linee andamentali + successioni dinamiche (1913) and Volo di rondini (1913). 34. Rooster and Hen has often been reproduced with the rooster’s head in the upper left corner, but I follow the Tretyakov Gallery’s positioning of the painting, in which the rooster flies downward to the left. Larionov’s work, in addition to its rural focus, exuded a crude humor and underlying tendency toward parody that can also be linked to primitive art and its playful, iconoclastic nature. For more on Larionov’s use of parody, see John Bowlt, “Mikhail Larionov, a Conjuror of Colored Dust,” in Larionov, Michail Larionov: Pasteller/Pastels, 57. In another “farmyard” rayist work, Head of a Bull (Golova byka, 1913), Larionov unites dynamic lines with a visually static image, providing a rayist articulation of the union of speed and stasis often found in cubo-futurism; thus it is not sur-

prising that Zdanevich, writing under the pseudonym of Eli Eganbiuri, referred to this painting in his 1913 monograph on rayism as “rayist-cubist” (luchisto-kubicheskaia). Eli Eganbiuri, Natal’1a Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov (Moscow: Ts. A. Miunster, 1913), 23. 35. A. Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivsm: Its Theory, Its Potentials, Its Achievements,” in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 51. In 1913 Shevchenko also self-published his treatise The Principles of Cubism and Other Modern Trends in Painting of All Ages and Peoples (Printsipy kubizma I drugikh sovremennykh techenit v zhivopisi vsekh vremen i narodov). 36. A. Shevchenko, “Neoprimitivsm,” 45.

262 Notes to pages 110-116 37. Even after cubo-futurism’s demise, Shevchenko fostered the notion that neoprimitivism should advance an aesthetic of speed. In 1919 the artist set forth his theory of “dynamo-techtonic primitivism” (dinamo-tektonicheskii primitivizm), which he claimed would revolutionize easel painting by evoking both science and far older primitive sources. See A. Shevchenko, “Dinamo-tektonicheskii primitivizm,” in Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let: Materialy 1 dokumentatstia, ed. van Matsa (Moscow-Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933), 118-20. This manifesto appeared in the catalog for the 1919 exhibition Techtonic ColorDynamism and Primitivism (Tsvetdinamosi tektonicheski i primitivizm), organized by Shevchenko and A. Grishchenko. 38. Dmitry Sarabyanoy, “‘Kubofuturizny’: Termin i real’nost,” Voprosy iskusstvoznantia 1 (1999): 227.

39. At the 1912 Donkey’s Tail (Oslinyi khvost) exhibition Scene—The Cinema appeared

alongside several other works by Larionov that addressed the theme of photography, namely, Photographic Study from Nature of a City Street, Instantaneous Photograph, and Photographic Study of a Spring Snow Melt, all of which have been subsequently lost. For more on Larionov’s interest in cinema and photography, see John Bowlt, “Life Painting and Light Painting: Photography and the Early Russian Avant-Garde,’ History of Photography 24, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 279.

40. Balla and Larionov shared a common predilection for applying futurism’s dynamic style to clothing and the human body. Balla, in fact, wrote his “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” in the very same month and year (December 1913) that Larionov and Zdanevich published their “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto.” Discussing the need for “happy” futurist garments, Balla proposed fashions that featured “forceful MUSCULAR colors.” These futurist clothes would emit light in a manner highly suggestive of rayism: “The consequent merry dazzle produced by our clothes in the noisy streets, will mean that everything will begin to sparkle like the glorious prism of a jeweler’s gigantic glass-front.” Giacomo Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing,” trans. Robert Brain, in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 132-33. 41. While evincing affinities with futurism and cubism, The Cyclist also underscores the close thematic and philosophical affinity of Goncharova’s work to the paintings of German expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger, who likewise strove to depict the bicycle and its dynamism. In his colorful Bicycle Riders (Radrennen | Die Radfahrer], 1912), Feininger fuses cubist and futurist techniques to underscore the velocity of five racing bicyclists. Goncharova’s cyclist, however, evokes a greater sense of motion than Feininger’s

bicycle riders, for as In’shakov observes, Goncharova is primarily concerned with movement while Feininger, although quite conscious of the bicyclist’s velocity, gives priority to color over dynamic form. See In’shakov, “Luchizm v russkoi zhivopisi i mirovoi avangard,” Voprosy iskusstvoznantia 2 (1999): 358. 42. For more on cubist passage and its manifestation in Larionov’s work, see Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 125. 43, Larionov and Zdanevich, “Why We Paint Ourselves,” 81. In his English translation of this manifesto, Bowlt translates vorota as “gates,” but given the sports context, “goal” or “goalposts” is more appropriate. 44. Ibid., 80. 45. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words in Freedom” (1913), in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 97.

Notes to pages 116—119 263 46. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 153-57. 47. See John Bowlt, “Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. J. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 37. 48. Gleb Pospelov has linked Self-Portrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky to Max Linder’s Max the Boxing Champion, a popular French boxing film from 1910. See Pospelov, Bubnovyi valet. Primitiv 1 gorodskoi fol’klor v moskovskot zhivopisi 1910-kh godov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990), 105. For further discussion of Russian modernism’s aesthetic celebration of the athletic body, see John Malmstad, “Wrestling with Representation: Reforging Images of the Artist and Art in the Russian Avant-Garde,” in Cultures of Forgeries: Making Nations, Making Selves, ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 145-68; and Bowlt, “Body Beautiful,” 37-58. 49. In the National Art Library of London’s Larionov Collection—a large variety of

books, pamphlets, and other items formerly in the possession of Larionov and Goncharova—one finds a conspicuous number of writings on athletics and physical activity, which further underscores the importance of sports for the two artists. Larionov and Goncharova, for instance, owned a copy of Education physique des adolescents (1917), by Georges

Demeny, who worked closely with the photographer Etienne-Jules Marey. Both Demeny and Marey were instrumental in creating “motion” photographs (chronophotography) of athletes, images that influenced many painters and filmmakers at the turn of the century. 50. Marina Tsvetayeva, Natal’1a Goncharova (zhizw 1 tvorchestvo), in Prometet, vol. 7 (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1969), 197. 51. For more on Vladimir Burliyuk’s physicality, see Livshits, One and a Half-Eyed Archer, 42—43.

52. Professional wrestling tournaments initially occurred at the circus in the early 19008. The St. Petersburg magazine Hercules (Gerkules), one of the many prerevolutionary journals devoted to sports, documents much of the circus’s close involvement with wrestling competitions. Hercules first appeared in December 1912. During the prerevolutionary years, a Soviet critic explains, “wrestling became one of the most popular forms of entertainment, overshadowing all other circus genres.” M. Medvedev, Leningradskit tsirk (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975), 46. 53. Shevchenko’s painting Rider has sporadically been titled Circus and Circus Rider. 54. See, for instance, Malevich’s 1915 Suprematism: Painterly Realism of a Football Player, Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, and Airplane Flying (Suprematism). 55. Larionov, “Pictorial Rayonism,” in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 101. 56. The Russian futurists (e.g., cubo-futurists and rayists), Elena Bobrinskaya argues, based their art (be it painting or poetry) on a concept of a new man fusing with his sur-

roundings. In cubo-futurist painting, according to Bobrinskaya, a pictorial blending of human subjects and their environment prevails, and this desire to merge man with nature and the dynamism of modern reality emerged as a central component of Russia’s futurist art. See Bobrinskaya, “Kontseptsiia novogo cheloveka v estetike futurizma,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 1—2 (1995): 485.

57. Head of a Bull (Golova byka, 1913), the third of Larionov’s “farmyard” rayist works,

also shows a body, albeit an animal’s, giving way to rays and abstracted form, which obscure the central bull’s torso. All that remains is the bull’s physiognomy.

264 Notes to pages 119-123 58. Displayed at the 1913 Target exhibition, Portrait of a Fool and its treatment of portraiture also extends into parody. Given the glasslike shapes, the title of the painting, and Larionov’s tendency to lampoon, it is possible to contend that viewers are looking at a reflection of their own “foolish” face and body. 59, Mikhail Matyushin, “Opyt khudozhnika novoi mery,” in Khardzhiev, Malevich, and Matyushin, K istorii russkogo avangarda, 174. Matyushin aptly credited the initiation

of the semiabstract portrait to Cézanne and Picasso, which he believed the Russian avant-garde developed further. 60. Ibid., 174.

61. In the 1920s Matyushin founded the avant-garde concept of dynamic, organic culture (“organicism”), which boasts discernible albeit metaphysical ties with the era’s emphasis on physicality. For more on Matyushin’s “organicism,” see Alla Povelikhina, “Teoriia mirovogo Vseedinstva i Organicheskoe napravlenie v russkom avangarde XX veka,’ in Organika: Bespredmetnyi mir prirody v russkom avangarde XX veka, ed. A. Pove-

likhina (Moscow: RA, 2000), 8-17. 62. Matyushin, “Opyt khudozhnika novoi mery,” 176. 63. Ibid. 64. Larionov and Goncharova, “Rayonists and Futurists,” 98. 65. In the September 1913 issue of Apollon, the conservative Sergey Makovsky published “The ‘New’ Art and the ‘Fourth Dimension’” (“‘Novoe’ iskusstvo i ‘chetvertoe izmerenie’’), in which he criticized cubo-futurists and rayists alike for their blending of science and art. See Sergey Makovsky, ““Novoe’ iskusstvo i “chetvertoe izmerenie,” Apollon 7 (September 1913): 53. 66. The French cubists, spurred on by the X-ray and its possibilities, believed they had uncovered a penetrating, internal perspective on objects and people, while the Italian futurists aspired to match the perceptive power of the X-ray. In “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” Boccioni and his colleagues queried, “Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of the X-rays?” See U. Boccioni, C. Carra, L. Russolo, G. Balla, and G. Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, 1910,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 28. 67. For more on the X-ray’s significance for Russian avant-garde art, most specifically the works of the constructivist Naum Gabo, see John Bowlt, “The Presence of Absence: The Aesthetic of Transparency in Russian Modernism,’ Structurist 27/28 (1987-88): 15—22. 68. Larionov owned a book of X-ray photographs (Italo Tonta’s Raggi di Réntgen e loro Practiche Applicazioni), which can now be found in the National Art Library of London’s Larionov Collection. 69. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 98. 70. Larionov, “Pictorial Rayonism,” 100, italics in original. 71. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 96. See Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 303. 72. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 98. Parton argues that Larionov’s emphasis on “sums of rays” indicates the author’s adherence to the theory of ether, despite its debunking at the end of the nineteenth century. Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 138. 73. Repeated outlines of movement foster the dominant impression of speed in many works by Balla and Duchamp, for instance, Balla’s Abstract Dynamism ( Velocita astratta, 1913) and Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase.

Notes to pages 123-125 265 74. Fora late nineteenth-century fictional account of the fourth dimension, see Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885). 75. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 76. Pyotr Uspensky, Tertium Organum, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and P. D. Uspensky (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 92.

77. Evidence of Bergson’s influence on Russian avant-garde art can be found in I. Rozenfel’d, “Intuitivizm i futurizm,” Maski 6 (1913-14): 17-26. For more on the Russian reception of Bergsonian philosophy, see Hilary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 78. U. Boccioni, “Plastic Dynamism,” in Apollonio, Futurist Mantfestos, 93-94.

79. Linda Henderson, “Italian Futurism and “The Fourth Dimension,’ Art Journal (Winter 1981): 321.

80. Matyushin, who penned the unpublished manuscript “The Sensation of the Fourth Dimension” in 1912 (the same year he translated Metzinger and Gleizes’s Du Cubisme, in which the two cubists discussed the fourth dimension), likewise expanded on Boccioni’s notion of speed in the fourth dimension, observing in his notebook in 1915: “Only motion crystallizes outward appearance into a single [four-dimensional] whole. Objectness is changed by motion. A speeding train fuses the separateness of its cars into a compact mass.” Through speed, Matyushin suggested, objects would be perceived as a solid, unchanging mass, subsequently eliciting a vision of the fourth dimension. This discussion of the fourth dimension appeared in Matyushin’s notebook entry from May 29, 1915, and is quoted and translated in Charlotte Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980), 61. A more complete exposition of these ideas also can be found in an unpublished essay from 1917 by Matyushin. See Matyushin, “Bystroe vrashchenie zerkalopodobit formu” (1917), authorized typewritten original, Manuscript Division, Pushkin House, St. Petersburg, f. 165, op. 1, no. 108, str. 27. For more on Matyushin’s role in advocating an aesthetic treatment of the fourth dimension, see A. Povelikhina, “Matyushin’s Spatial System,’ in The Isms of Art in Russia, 1907-1930 (Cologne: Galeria Gmurzynska, 1977), 27-41. 81. Letter from Ilya Zdanevich to Vera Mikhailovna Ermolayeva, May 22, 1913. This draft of the letter is located in the State Russian Museum Archive (OR GRM) in St. Petersburg: f. 177, ex. 50, str. 40. In 1913 Zdanevich gave a series of lectures on futurism, drafts of which can also be found in the State Russian Museum, for instance “O futurizme” (f. 177, ex. 10) and “Futurizm i vsechestvo” (f. 177, ex. 21). 82. Letter from Zdanevich to Ermolayeva, OR GRM, f. 177, ex. 50, str. 40, italics mine. 83. Larionov also alluded to Boccioni in 1914 when he attempted to downplay the cosmic nature of rayism but nevertheless evoked Boccioni’s “plastic” synthesis of relative and absolute dynamism: rayism, Larionov argued, “might appear to be a form of spiritualist painting, even mystical, but it is, on the contrary, essentially plastic.” See Larionov, “Pictorial Rayonism,” 101. 84. Larionov and Goncharova, “Rayonists and Futurists,” 91. 85. As Pospelov contends, Larionov’s use of dynamic brushstrokes conveyed “not simply a reality that slides along, but rather the effect of reality sliding along past our own eye.’ See G. Pospelov, ““Ravnovesie tantsa’ ili ‘Ogorodnoe pugalo’? (Luchizm Larionova: Ot ploskosti k prostrantsu),” in Kovalenko, N. S. Goncharova1 M. F. Larionov, 24.

266 Notes to pages 125-132 86. Larionov, “Rayonist Painting,” 100. 87. Ibid. 88. Parton claims that “ka” might be a reference to Vasily Kamensky or Khlebnikov’s well-known poem “Ka,” but as John Malmstad has convincingly argued, any such reference seems unlikely, given the date of the painting, which precedes Khlebnikov’s poem by a year. See Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 76; and Malmstad, “The Sacred Profaned: Image

and Word in the Paintings of Mikhail Larionov,” in Bowlt and Matich, Laboratory of Dreams, 172-73. 89. Larionov, “Pictorial Rayonism,” 102.

90. Pneumo-rayism quickly dissipated as a movement. In 1915 Larionov and Goncharova left Russia for the West, and while they sporadically continued to produce rayist paintings, the movement as a whole had already reached its apex. As a result, pneumorayism never came to full fruition and, arguably, never achieved pure abstraction. 91. As émigrés in Paris, Goncharova remained active as a painter, while Larionov’s creative output dwindled, except for sporadic rayist canvases and a series of designs he did for the theater. This sudden drop in Larionov’s productivity stemmed in part from a wound he received in 1914 while serving as a soldier in World War I. Larionov spent three months in a hospital due, most likely, to a concussion caused by exploding shell (see Parton, Mikhail Larionov, 145). Pospelov and E. Ilyukhina, however, note that Larionov’s interest in kinetics influenced his choreography in Paris. See G. Pospelov and E. Ilyukhina, M. Larionov (Moscow: Izd. “Galart,” 2005), 152. 92. Goncharova, “Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition,” 57. CHAPTER 4. “Hurry! FoR TOMORROW YOU WILL NOT RECOGNIZE US” 1. Victory over the Sun, presented alongside Vladimir Mayakovsky’s own play Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, was staged twice in St. Petersburg’s Luna Park Theater. 2. Avant-garde music, although not a key component of this study, likewise reflected conspicuous attributes of the era’s pace. Whether atonal work by a Western composer like Anton Webern, groundbreaking neoprimitive compositions by Igor Stravinsky, or four-

tone work by Matyushin, avant-garde music throughout Europe presented a rhythmic and conceptual dynamism on par—and often more explicit—than the dynamism found in futurist poetry and painting. 3, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Victory over the Sun: An Opera in 2 Acts 6 Scenes, trans. Ewa Barton and Victoria Nes Kerby, Drama Review 15, no. 4 (Fall 1971): 109. 4. Ibid., 123. 5. Ibid., 121. 6. As Kruchenykh later noted, the costumes “were cubist constructions of cardboard

and string. This transformed the human anatomy—the actors moved, contained and directed by the rhythm of the artist and director.’ Kruchenykh, “‘Pervye v mire spektakli futuristov,” Nash vykhod, in Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, 83. 7. Varvara Stepanova, “Constructivism,” in The Future Is Our Only Goal, ed. Peter Noever (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991), 176. 8. Art historians have voiced a diversity of opinions on the way Malevich’s Knife Grinder incorporates Italian futurism’s aesthetic of speed. Dmitry Sarabyanov, for instance, argues that while Knife Grinder outwardly resembles works by the Italian futurists, it also draws on cubist painting, as well as Delaunay’s Orphist Windows, given the

Notes to pages 133-138 267 division of the central figure into discernible parts. See D. Sarabyanov, “Zhivopis’ Kazimra Malevicha,” in Kazimir Malevich: Khudozhnik 1 teoretik, ed. A. D. Sarabyanov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990), 63. Camilla Gray, meanwhile, deemphasizes the overt velocity of Malevich’s Knife Grinder, writing, “Although | Knife Grinder] is an analysis of

the movement of man and a machine, there is ... no attempt to represent speed.” See Gray, Great Experiment, 199. 9. Olga Rozanova, “The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why It Is Misunderstood,’ in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 105. Rozanova argues that Van

Gogh broached fundamental issues of dynamism, while Cézanne advanced construction of static form and surface dimension, and although dynamism and stasis “were diametrically opposed to each other” initially, these aesthetic currents established by Van Gogh and Cézanne later merged to lend “a common tone to all modern trends in painting” (108). Malevich made a similar claim, associating Van Gogh with futurism and Cézanne with cubism, in On New Systems in Art/Statics and Speed, a treatise from 1919. See Malevich, On New Systems in Art/Statics and Speed, in Malevich on Suprematism: Six Essays; 1915 to 1919, ed. Patricia Railing (lowa City: University of Iowa, 1999), 56. 10. Much of Rozanova’s work featured close ties with Italian futurism, and in 1914 at

the “First Free International Futurist Exhibition” in Rome, Marinetti included several of Rozanova’s paintings and drawings. See Gurianova, Exploring Color, 56. 11. Rozanova’s linocuts for War continued the avant-garde’s guarded treatment of the war, such as that found in Goncharova’s 1914 book of lithographs War: Mystical Images of War, which included images of airplanes, angels, and soldiers. Rozanova and Goncharova, like the majority of Russia’s left artists, did not subscribe to the Italian futurists’ glorification of war as a positive force (what Marinetti called “the world’s only hygiene”), but the scale and swiftness of World War I and the war’s transformative effect on modern society did correspond to their and other Russians’ broad metaphysical notions of apocalypse, utopia, and the merging of aesthetics and reality. “We Russians,” Nikolay Berdyayev wrote in 1917, “are less futuristic in this war [than the West], we are less suited to its machine-like quality, to its speed, to its whirlwind movement, for we have generally preserved both the old emotional virtues and old emotional sins and vices” (Berdyayev, Krizis iskusstva, 23). These old emotions, however, would soon be swept away by the Russian Revolution, no doubt a response, at least in part, to World War I’s violence and velocity. 12. “The nature that was ornamented by the neorealists and neoimpressionists was torn to pieces by futurism,” Kliun wrote in 1919, pointing to the way futurism (and its emphasis on speed) undermined visual reality. van Kliun, “Color Art,” in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 143.

13. I. Kliun, “The Hermitage,” in I. Kliun, Moi put’ v iskusstve (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “RA,” 1999), 215.

14. Another Kliun painting from this period, Ozonator (1914), attempts to convey the rapid whirl of a fan through fragmented cubo-futurist forms. 15. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 27. 16. O. Rozanova, “Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism,” trans. John Bowlt, in Gurianova, Exploring Color, 196.

17. As Matyushin notes in his review of 0.10, Malevich chose not to replicate the dynamic content of modernity through futurist images of speed “held in a running start

268 Notes to pages 138-142 and condemned in torture to die statically in motion’; rather, he engendered an intrinsically liberated form of speed. M. Matyushin, “O vystavke “poslednikh futuristov,” Ocharovannyi strannik (Spring 1916): 18, quoted in Douglas, Swans of Other Worlds, 66. 18. Jean-Claude Marcadé, “Malevich, Painting, and Writing: On the Development of a Suprematist Philosophy,’ in Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, ed. Matthew Drutt (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003), 34, italics in original.

19. Drawing on the widespread, pseudo-scientific interest in the fourth dimension and the expanding notion of intuition advocated by French philosopher Henri Bergson, Malevich believed that suprematism’s counterintuitive variety of modern velocity was crucial to the representation of a cosmic plane. As Charlotte Douglas explains, “For Malevich to depict objects without accidental features and in implied motion was in effect, to create the fourth dimension. The objects become ... embedded in the natural cosmic order” (Swans of Other Worlds, 61). 20. K. Malevich, “Dynamic and Kinetic Futurism,” in Malevich, Essays on Art, 2:95. “Dynamic and Kinetic Futurism” was part of a series of articles titled New Art (Novoe iskusstvo), the Russian original of which was unpublished and subsequently lost, although a Ukrainian translation remained, from which this English translation comes. 21. Malevich’s rejection of natural forms arguably reflects the mystical nature of his thought at this time. Kovtun suggests that in devising suprematism, Malevich drew on popular notions of supernaturalism that arose in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, which stipulated that an invisible, supernatural reality existed apart from phenomenal reality. Malevich, according to Kovtun, used the term “supernaturalism” for one of his first nonobjective works but changed it to “suprematism” when he realized that his title coincided with the German philosophical label. See Y. Kovtun, “Nachalo suprematizma,’ in A. D. Sarabyanov, Kazimir Malevich, 105. 22. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 24, italics in original. 23. “A developing comprehension of statics, speed and dynamics,’ Malevich wrote in 1920, “will inevitably bring us to questions and answers that reveal themselves in new inventions throughout the world.” K. Malevich, “The Question of Imitative Art,” in Malevich, Essays on Art, 1:174. 24. K. Malevich, “Suprematism. 34 Drawings,’ in Malevich, Essays on Art, 3:127. While

white represented “pure action,” black, according to Malevich, signified “economy” and color—particularly red—represented revolution. 25. Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism,” 41. 26. For more on the complex relationship between Malevich and Tatlin, see D. Sarabyanov, “Zhivopis’ Kazimra Malevicha,” 90. 27. As a young man, Tatlin worked as a sailor, an experience that clearly informed not only his early sailor-inspired paintings (e.g., the paintings Fishmonger | Prodavets ryb, 1911] and Sailor {| Matros, 1911-12]) but also his later use of materials such as ropes and pulleys. 28. As various art historians have noted, while Picasso used materials to create familiar objects, Tatlin highlighted the material itself. See, for instance, Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 49. 29. See Gray, Great Experiment, 179-80. 30. Christina Lodder, Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 16.

Notes to pages 142-149 269 31. The corner counter-relief discussed here no longer exists. At 0.10 it was listed as exhibit no. 133. 32. S.K. Isakov, “On Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs,’ in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Zhadova (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1988), 334-35. Isakov’s article (“K ‘kontrrel’efam’ Tatlina”) first appeared in the Petrograd magazine Novy1 zhurnal dlia vsekh, no. 12 (1915): 46-50. 33. Isakov, “On Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs,” 333. 34. Following the publication of an essay on faktura by David Burliyuk in the 1912 futurist almanac A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, in 1914 the poet and painter Vladimir Markov (Voldemars Matvejs) wrote The Principles of Creation in the Plastic Arts: Faktura. A member of the Union of Youth, Markov strove to broaden the definition of faktura and its relevance to avant-garde art. Acknowledging the traditional association of faktura with painting, Markov suggested that faktura enjoyed “comparable significance in the spheres of sculpture, architecture, and all other arts where paints, sounds or other means are used to generate a certain ‘noise’ that our consciousness perceives in a variety of ways. Vladimir Markov, Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh: Faktura (St. Petersburg: Union of Youth, 1914), 1. 35. Vladimir Tatlin, “List of Works,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 239. 36. For more on the parallels between Khlebnikov’s use of faktura in poetry and Tatlin’s faktura, see Margit Rowell, “Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura,’ October7 (Winter 1978): 96-97. 37. Rozanova’s Automobile and Bicyclist were subsequently lost, but a black-and-white

photograph of them can be found in Ogonek (Petrograd), January 3, 1916, 11; this photograph has also been reprinted in John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian AvantGarde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 106. 38. Yakulov, the chief organizer of Café Pittoresque, described the project in an August 19, 1918, letter to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the head of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, as “a wonderful tribune for new aesthetic conquests in all spheres of art and their propagandizing among the masses.” Quoted in A. Raikhenshtein, “1 maia i 7 noiabria 1918 goda v Moskve,” in Agitatstonno-massovoe iskusstvo pervykh let Oktiabria (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 128n209. In his letter to Lunacharsky, Yakulov did not mention Rodchenko’s involvement in the project, but Rodchenko’s contribution to Café Pittoresque, specifically his dynamic design of lamps for the interior, should be noted. See Lodder, Constructivism, 276n87. 39. The Red Rooster (Krasnyi petukh) Café, which became Café Pittoresque, was located at 5 Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow. 40. Milner, Vladimir Tatlin, 127. 41. N. Lakov, quoted in A. Raikhenshtein, “1 maia i 7 noiabria 1918,” 101. 42. Kamensky, Put’ entuziasta, 519. 43. Ibid. 44. In a 1927 letter to Pavel Novitsky, Tatlin claimed that he was “the founder of the idea ‘art into life,” a misleading claim given the cubo-futurist and rayist promotion of a comparable idea in 1913. See Zhadova, Tatlin, 261. 45. Moisey Ginzburg, Style and Epoch, trans. Anatole Senkevitch Jr. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 90. 46. Lenin hoped to decorate Moscow with statues and monuments honoring the revolution. See Igor’ Grabar’, “Aktual’nye zadachi sovetskoi skul’ptury,” Iskusstvo, no. 1/2 (1933): 155.

270 Notes to pages 149-154 47. According to Anatoly Strigalev, Tatlin sought to foster intellectual and physical dynamism through his Monument, creating “enough space [through construction] for the most active processes of modern life... . Apart from communal needs, personal requirements had to be satisfied as well: an extremely highly developed information network could take care of intellectual needs; restaurants and gymnasiums, etc., of biological ones.” See Anatoly Strigalev, “From Painting to the Construction of Matter,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 36. 48. Nikolay Punin, “The Monument to the Third International,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, 345.

49. Tatlin’s emphasis on the body persisted in subsequent three-dimensional works and designs, for instance clothing that allowed for ample physical movement or a 1932

attempt to launch the human body into the air with his celebrated flying machine (Letatlin). Tatlin, Larissa Zhadova explains in her analysis of the artist’s clothing designs and their underlying dynamism, “did not put much emphasis on the cut for he wished to achieve a specific total expressivity by the dynamic unhindered unity of the dress and the human figure.” For Tatlin, the human and the aesthetic were to merge into one powerful, fast form. L. Zhadova, “Tatlin: The Organizer of Material into Objects,’ in Zhadova, Tatlin, 144. 50. Even Malevich, who had dispensed so categorically with human form in 1914 and 1915, remarked in 1918 that contemporary architectural design is a “young body flexing its muscles” as it contends “with the race of contemporary life.” K. Malevich, “Architecture as a Slap in the Face to Ferro-Concrete,” trans. Z. Glowacki-Prus, in Malevich, Essays on Art, 1:61-62. By the late 1920s, Malevich had placed the form of the body back into his paintings, reflecting the avant-garde return to figurative images. The cosmic supre-

matist landscape arguably remains, but humans populate this landscape. 51. A. Toporkov, “Technical and Artistic Form,” trans. John Bowlt, in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 30. 52. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3. 53. Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 162.

54. El Lissitzky, “The Plastic Form of the Electro-Mechanical Peepshow ‘Victory over the Sun,” in Sophie Lissitzky-Kitippers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 351. 55. Having served as a pilot in World War I, Miturich drew on his knowledge of aviation to make the claim that Wings could be propelled without the aid of a motor. 56. In the 1930s and 1940s Miturich wrote “The Dynamics of City Roads” (“Dinamika putei goroda”), an unpublished essay in which he explored ways of making cities faster and more efficient. “The basic law of freedom and happiness in city life is the possibility of fast movement,” Miturich wrote. P. Miturich, “Dinamika putei goroda,” in P. Miturich, Zapiski surovogo realista epokhi avangarda: Dnevniki, pisma, vospominantiia, stat’, ed. Mai Miturich, Vasilly Rakitin, and Andrey Sarabyanov (Moscow: RA, 1997), 108. For more

on this utopian approach to city life and Miturch’s earlier experiments with “wavelike motion” and designs for flying machines, see Lodder, Constructivism, 217-23. 57. From Pyotr Miturich’s notebook drafts (December 4, 1921), in P. Miturich, Zapiski surovogo realista epokhi avangarda, 104.

Notes to pages 154-156 271 58. Miturich designed the cover of Khlebnikov’s 1920 transrational “supersaga,” ZANngeZi.

59. Tatlin (who like Miturich collaborated closely with Khlebnikov following October 1917) would similarly explore the notion of human flight, expanding on Miturich’s experiments with rapid airborne movement to produce in 1932 his celebrated flying machine, Letatlin, a large, homan-propelled glider that took the form of a bird. Tatlin participated in the production of three plays by Khlebnikov in 1917 and, following Khlebnikov’s death in 1922, produced the décor for a 1923 staging of Zangezi. Tatlin’s title for his 1932 design for a flying machine, Letatlin, is a neologism combining his surname and the Russian verb meaning “to fly.” 60. Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner (Pevzner), “The Realistic Manifesto” (1920), in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 211. Here Gabo and Pevsner were also dismissive of Larionov’s rayonist style, arguing that a ray of sunlight was the fastest of forces yet “the stillest of still forces” (211). 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 214. 63. Konstruktivisty: K. K. Medunetsku, V. A. Stenberg, G. A. Stenberg (Moscow: Kafe Poetov, 1922). Quoted and translated in Lodder, Constructivism, 2. 64. Varst (Varvara Stepanova), personal statement, 5 x 5 = 25, exhibition catalog (MosCOW: N.p., 1921), 2.

65. Lodder, Constructivism, 75-76. 66. Aleksandr Vesnin, “Credo,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-32 (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1990), 68. 67. For an excellent discussion of the role of everyday objects in Russian constructivism, see Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions. 68. Nikos Kazantzakis, Russia: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution, trans. Michael Antonakes and Thanasis Madkaleris (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 1989), 177. 69. For an excellent discussion of Taylorism (and Fordism) in Soviet Russia, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 146—49. Elsewhere in Revolutionary Dreams Stites discusses how the “proletarian” poet Aleksey Gastev drew on Taylorism and how “Gastev’s ultimate

dream was of a new humanity, transformed by the clock and the machine, through a ‘revolution in time, reorganized in its diet, housing, clothing, transport, leisure, and work

into a community of kinetic-minded units, running around on schedule, organizing themselves, their work, and each other and producing in abundance” (183). 70. For a detailed account of Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises, see Mel Gordon, “Meyerhold’s Biomechanics,” Drama Review 18, no. 3 (1974): 74-88.

71. The dynamism of Popova’s constructivist works was presaged by her notable cubo-futurist canvases, such as Traveling Woman (Puteshestvennitsa, 1915), and abstract works like her series of Spatial-Force Constructions (Prostranstvenno-silovye postroentia) from 1921 to 1922. Popova stated that the Spatial-Force Constructions functioned as “prep-

aratory experiments for concrete material constructions,’ and the pieces featured the spirals so prominent in Tatlin’s Tower. The quote comes from Popova’s personal statement in the exhibition catalog for 5 x 5 = 25. For a facsimile of the catalog translated into English, see Milner, The Exhibition 5 x 5 = 25: Its Background and Significance (Budapest: Helikon, 1992).

272 Notes to pages 157-163 72. Lyubov Popova, “Introduction to the Inkhuk Discussion of The Magnanimous Cuckold,’ in Dmitryi Sarabyanov and Natalya Adaskina, Liubov Popova, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 378-79. 73. Kliment Redko, December 22, 1922, draft of “Declaration of Electroorganism,” translated and quoted in Irina Lebedeva, “The Poetry of Science: Projectionism and Electroorganism,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 442-43. The draft of Redko’s “Deklaratsiia elektroorganizma’ can be found at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, f. 2717, op. I, ed. Khr. 15,1. 15,1. 7.

74. The Projectionist group, which included Solomon Nikritin, Aleksandr Tyshler, and Redko, among others, aimed to explore electricity, motion, and modern technology through their work. See Lebedeva, “Poetry of Science,” 441-49. 75. Redko, draft of “Declaration of Electroorganism,” 442. 76. Cinema also emerged as a prominent component of constructivist art. In 1922, for instance, Aleksey Gan published the first edition of the constructivist film journal Kino-Photo (Kino-fot). Consider also Popova’s set and costume design for Meyerhold’s 1923 production of The Earth in Turmoil (Zemlia dybom), a modern adaptation of Marcel Martinet’s La Nuit by the former futurist poet Sergey Tretyakov; the play featured a large wooden “acting apparatus,” as well as a film projector and screen showing scenes from Dziga Vertov’s 1922 newsreel series Cinema Truth (Kino Pravda). CHAPTER 5. EARLY SOVIET CINEMA

1. Kino, the Russian word for “cinema,” causes some confusion for translators when part of a hyphenated term. Vertov’s kino-glaz, for instance, has been translated into English in various ways: “cine-eye,’ “film-eye,” and “kino-eye.” For consistency’s sake, I do not translate kino- in its hyphenated form but will use “cinema” when kino appears alone. 2. Dziga Vertov, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” in Vertov, Kino-Eye, 9; Lev Kuleshov, “Americanism, in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 72-73. 3. Ippolit Sokolov, “Skrizhal’ veka,” Kino-fot, no. 1 (August 25-31, 1922): 3. 4, Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Dinamicheskaia zhivopis,” Kino-fot, no. 1 (August 25-31, 1922): 7.

5. Denise Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 9. Youngblood notes that Kino-Photo failed to promote a consistent aesthetic, but I would contend that the broad advocacy of speed and dynamism constituted this underlying aesthetic. 6. In turn-of-the-century Russia, Czar Nicholas II first ridiculed and then suppressed

movie making as it gained in popularity. In a report to his secret police, Nicholas I wrote, “I consider cinematography an empty, useless, and even pernicious diversion. Only an abnormal person could place this sideshow business on a level with art. It is all non-

sense, and no importance should be lent to such trash.” Quoted and translated in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 69.

7. Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Conversation with Lenin: I. Of All the Arts ...,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 57. 8. Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 31.

Notes to pages 163-166 273 9. In 1925 Vertov alluded to his evolving use of a well-organized system of montage,

stating, “Instead of surrogates for life (theatrical performance, film-drama, etc.), we bring to the workers’ consciousness facts (large and small), carefully selected, recorded, and organized from both the life of the workers themselves and from that of their class enemies.” See D. Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” in his Kino-Eye, 50. Rodchenko’s

low-angle shots and aerial views of the urban landscape constituted semi-abstracted perspectives on factories, buildings, streets, and even trees. Rodchenko also incorporated photomontage and a constructivist aesthetic into his designs for movie posters, including designs for Vertov’s Kino-Eye and A Sixth of the World as well as for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. 10. D. Vertov, “Essence of Kino-Eye,” 49. 11. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984): 83-119.

12. As early as 1923, in fact, the theorist Léon Moussinac wrote, “Cinema has an inte-

rior rhythm, that of the image, and an exterior rhythm, between the images.” Léon Moussinac, “Théorie de cinéma,” Cinéa 95 (July 1, 1923): 9-12, italics in original. 13. As the formalist Yuri Tynianov (a close contemporary of Kuleshov and Eisenstein) observed, “Outside its meaning-bearing function, movement within the shot is not at all essential. Its meaning function can be taken over by montage, as a changeover of shots in the course of which these shots may even be static ones. (Movement within the shot as an element of cinema is strongly exaggerated; running for all one is worth wearies one.)” The kinesthetic effect of rapid montage, Tynianov noted, trumped movement on screen and even camera movement (a pan, a zoom, etc.). Yuri Tynianov, “The Fundamentals of Cinema,’ trans. L. M. O’ Toole, The Poetics of Cinema (Poetika kino, ed. B. Eikhenbaum, 1927), in Russian Poetics in Translation 9 (1982): 39. 14. S. Eisenstein, “Methods of Montage,’ in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), 82. For more on overtonal montage, see S. Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema” (1929), in his Selected Works, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI Publications; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1:181-94. 15. The Yugoslavian-born Vorkapich, in addition to working in Hollywood as a “montage specialist,” expounded on the creative “visual-dynamic organization” of cinema, an

emphasis on the medium’s underlying motion that has often been relegated to a side note by film scholars. See Slavko Vorkapich, “Toward True Cinema,” Film Culture 19 (March 1959): 13.

16. Vertov, “WE,” 8. Vorkapich as quoted in Barbara Kevles, “Slavko Vorkapich on Film as a Visual Language and as a Form of Art,” Film Culture 38 (Fall 1965): 38.

17. The one noteworthy mention of Vorkapich is found in Vlada Petri¢’s work on Vertov. Petri¢ cites Vorkapich in his discussion of the kinesthetic impact of images from Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. See Vlada Petri¢, Constructivism in Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. For more on Vorkapich’s views on kinesthesia, also see Kevles, “Slavko Vorkapich on Film,” 37-40. 18. D. Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye, 17. 19. For more on the function of time in cinema, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 162—63.

274 Notes to pages 166-169 20. Quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 34. 21. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 9.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomilinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986-89), 2. 23. Ivor Montagu, Film World (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1964), 45. Montagu worked briefly with Eisenstein in Hollywood. 24. Between 1913 and 1916, the number of movie theaters in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) grew from 1,500 to 4,000. See Denise Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 11. 25. This debate significantly informed the development of work by Kuleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein, and others after 1917. Kuleshov, for instance, wrote in 1922, “Shooting a chamber film in cinema is like driving a powerful racing car to get some milk from a dairy that is two doors away.” See Kuleshov, “Chamber Cinema,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 74.

26. Various breaks with the West also aided in the advance of Russian (and Soviet) cinema; World War I, for instance, prevented Western films from reaching Russia, allowing Russian cinema to succeed financially and to take shape on its own aesthetic terms. See Youngblood, Magic Mirror, 5. 27. Western European and American films, deemed “film dramas” (kinodramy) by many at the time, contrasted with the Russian productions. See Yuri Tsivian, “Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema,” in Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, and David Robinson (Pordenone: British Film Institute/Edzioni Biblioteca dell’ Immagine, 1989), 26—28. 28. See Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London: Routledge, 1994), 54. 29. Ibid., 11. 30. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1992), 127.

31. Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, 8. Tsivian quotes one such critic, who dwelled on

the “false” sense of movement existing in movies: “In cinema static moments are the basis of everything. Their swift succession creates movement and a kind of plastic picture.

But this movement, this plasticity, this rhythm, is only a mirage, a delusion.” V. Gei, “Dva ritma,” Teatral’’naia gazeta 4 (1917): 10.

32. For a provocative discussion of early Russian cinema’s relationship to modernity, see Youngblood, Magic Mirror, 143-45. 33. Parallels were also drawn between film and prostitution: some fashioned movie

houses, with their dark halls, anonymity, and promise of illicit escape, as modern-day brothels. See Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, 35-38.

34. Ibid., 61. Poets at this time began addressing the phenomenon of motion pictures. Although a detailed examination of the poetry addressing both cinema and its mechanized movement is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting the special place cinema came to occupy in the verse of the symbolists and the futurists. Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), for instance, drew significantly on German expressionist films like Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1920) and the wild police chases in

Notes to pages 170-172 275 Fritz Lang’s thriller Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922). See M. G. Ratgauz, “Kuzmin the Filmgoer” (“Kuzmin—kinozritel’”), Kinovedcheskie zapiski 13 (1992): 52-82. See also John Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 318-19. 35. L. Kuleshov, Art of the Cinema, in Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 47. 36. For a broad investigation of Hollywood’s impact on Soviet filmmakers, see Denise Youngblood, “Americanitis: The Amerikanshchina in Soviet Cinema,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 19, no. 4 (1992): 148-56. 37. Eisenstein also uses the word tselokupnost’, or “totality,” in “The Montage of Film Attractions” (1924), by which he meant “the principle of ‘totality’ according to which the

body as a whole participates in the execution of every movement.” Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in Selected Works, 1:51. Another scholar who notes the pre-

dominance of this word in avant-garde writings of the 1920s is Christina Kiaer in her discussion of everyday objects in constructivist art. See Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 8, 84, 90-91. 38. Kuleshov, “Americanism,” 73. 39. Not everyone embraced Kuleshov’s “Amerikanshchina” and its American speed. Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote both for and on the cinema, initially resisted the insertion of “American” elements into early Soviet works. In 1924, for instance, Shklovsky published the polemical piece “Mr. West Is Out of Place” (“Mister Vest ne na svoem meste”). Complaining that viewers would have difficulty empathizing with a cowboy galloping by the Kremlin (as one does in Kuleshov’s 1924 Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in

the Land of the Bolsheviks), Shklovsky compared this interpolation of American and Russian elements to a French word appearing in a Russian poem. See Viktor Shklovsky, “Mister Vest ne na svoem meste,” Kino nedelia 21 (June 24, 1924): 3. 40. Allan Pinkerton (1819-84), a Scottish-American detective, gained renown for thwarting an assassination plot against President-Elect Abraham Lincoln in February 1861. He later became known for his fight against Chicago crime. For more discussion of the “Pinkerton” novels in Russia, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1985), 143—45, 208-9.

41. As Gan wrote in a 1923 article in Kino-Photo, “Infected by fiction film and gravitating towards Russian film drama [private enterprises] all busily trade in foreign film rubbish and acquire the monopoly distribution rights “for the whole’ for any, even only quasi-American, detective film.” Aleksey Gan, “Two Paths,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 83.

42. Abram Room, “Kino-detektiv,” Sovetskii ekran 9 (May 26, 1925): 8. 43. Vertov, “WE,” 6. 44. L. Kuleshov, “Esli teper,’ Kino-fot, no. 3 (1922): 4. 45. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Sharlo,” Kino-fot, no. 3 (1922): 5. 46. Valentin Parnakh, “Proletariat. Eksentrizm,” Zrelishcha, no. 13 (November 21-26, 1922): 11. In the first half of the 1920s, Parnakh promoted dynamic “eccentric” dance. See M. Gordon, “Valentin Parnakh, Apostle of Eccentric Dance,” Experiment, no. 2 (1996): 423-4]. 47. Betty and Vance Kepley, “Foreign Films on Soviet Screens, 1921-1932,” Quarterly

276 Notes to pages 172-176 Review of Film Studies 4 (Fall 1979): 429-42. Hollywood films, however, were not the only cinematic imports to win over the Soviet public, for French and German cinema also garnered considerable popularity. For instance, the German movie star Harry Piel enjoyed a large following, as did Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), with its dark intrigue and stated focus on contemporaneity. Eisenstein, in fact, edited the Russian version of this popular German film, while Kazimir Malevich’s disciple Ilya Chashnik designed its suprematism-inspired promotional poster (some claim that Malevich designed this poster, but Oksana Bulgakowa argues that it was Chashnik). See Oksana Bulgakowa, ed., The White Rectangle: Writings on Film (San Francisco: Potemkin Press, 2002), 15.

48. Kepley, “Intolerance and the Soviets: a Historical Investigation,” in Inside the Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Jan Christie (London: Routledge, 1991), 52. 49. Leyda, Kino, 150; Vertov, “From the History of the Kinoks,” in Kino-Eye, 94. Also cited in Kepley, “Intolerance and the Soviets,” 52. 50. Leyda, Kino, 143. 51. Kuleshov, Art of the Cinema, 93-94. 52. S. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form, 196, 235. 53. Ibid., 242-44, emphasis in the original. 54. Ibid., 254. 55. Ibid., 204. 56. As Richard Taylor notes, agitation and propaganda constitute somewhat different forms of political persuasion in that propaganda generally conveys numerous ideas to one or several people, while agitation presents one extensive idea to the masses. This

distinction between agitation and propaganda, however, is more pronounced in the Russian language than it is in English. See Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 28-29. 57. Nicholas Reeves writes, “Of all the media employed by the agit-trains, cinema invariably made the greatest impact, not least because so many members of the rural population were encountering it for the first time.” See Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassel, 1999), 57. 58. “The agitka,’ Taylor explains, “had to convey its message entirely by simple, visual means. It had to attract and hold the attention of its audience and leave them with an impression of dynamism and strength.” Taylor, Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 56. 59. Leyda, Kino, 151.

60. In the fourth issue of Kino-Photo, Leonid Obolensky, Kuleshov’s lead actor in On the Red Front (which no longer exists), described at length the making of the film: “The

main current in the shooting of the film was devoted to a Red Army soldier chasing after a Polish spy. The method we took in adapting to the given conditions of the filming and the material turned out to be correct.” Leonid Obolensky, “Kak my snimali na ‘Krasnom fronte,” Kino-fot, no. 4 (October 5-12, 1922): 2. 61. David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2.

62. Boris Arvatov, “Agit-kino,” Kino-fot, no. 2 (September 1922): 2. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid.

Notes to pages 176-182 277 66. Ibid. 67. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 25.

68. Grigoryi Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Sergey Yutkevich, and Georgy Kryzhitsky, “Eccentrism,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 58-59, emphasis in the original. 69. Kozintsev et al., “Eccentrism,” 58. 70. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoglaz,” in Kino-Eye, 39-40, emphasis in the original. 71. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 41. Defining what constitutes cinematic art, Kracauer discusses how recorded movement on film constitutes one of cinema’s two “recording functions” capable of substantiating film’s status as a genuine artistic medium (the other function being the recording of inanimate objects). 72. Ibid., 42. 73. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 131. 74. Once the last-minute rescue began to occupy a conspicuous place in film narratives, parallel editing arose as the most efficient means of capturing the thrills associated with the frantic pursuit and the requisite speed of the automobile, train, horseback ride, or mad dash on foot. 75. Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, 164. 76. Discussing the prevalence of the chase in early silent cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson write, “In 1903 and 1904, the chase film, staged in a series of exterior locations, was becoming one of the most popular narrative genres. Rather than confining itself to a simple, brief slapstick fight, the film might prolong its action by having one combatant flee, with the other chasing and passersby joining in.” By the second decade of the century, however, chases had become somewhat less predominant and better integrated into the narrative structure of Hollywood films. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 160, 175. 77. Barnet, who directed films well into the 1960s, collaborated with Fedor Ostep on the writing of the 1926 Miss Mend, which was based on a popular novel by Marietta Shaginian titled Mess Mend: Yankees in Petrograd (Mess Mend ili Ianki v Petrograde, 1925). Shaganian’s novel, in fact, exemplifies how notions of speed permeated popular Russian culture in the 1920s. 78. Salt, Film Style and Technology, 193. For more on Kuleshov’s dynamic use of space and for a broad investigation of how space functioned in early Soviet cinema, see Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 79. The term “diegesis,” often employed in film criticism, is adopted from semiotics and refers to the elements of narrative in film, that is, action and dialogue that are presented in the established space and time of the plot. “Nondiegetic” elements in film are those that subvert the narrative and exist outside the plot’s space and time. 80. Chases even figured prominently in The Man with the Movie Camera, for Vertov adapted the chase to fit his own self-referential, nonfiction purposes. In one of the film’s central metacinematic scenes, Vertov films his cameraman standing in an open automobile in hot pursuit of a carriage. Similarly, in a later scene from the film, Vertov captures

278 Notes to pages 183-188 the cameraman cranking his filming apparatus while standing on a fire truck that rushes, as if involved in a chase, to the scene of an accident. 81. L. Kuleshov, “David Griffith and Charlie Chaplin,” in Kuleshov on Film, 144. 82. Prince Sergey Volkonsky, at one time director of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Theater, published various articles on the Delsarte/Dalcroze techniques, which, according to Mikhail Yampolsky, helped give rise to the constructivist aesthetics of the 1920s, particularly Kuleshov’s kinesthetic methods. See Mikhail Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor,” in Taylor and Christie, Inside the Film Factory, 31. Volkonsky’s pronouncement in 1913 that “man is machine,’ able to obey the “general laws of mechanics,” found a receptive audience among the Soviet constructivists and other avant-garde artists. Volkonsky, Vyrazitel’nyi chelovek: Stsenicheskoe vospttanie zhesta (po Del’sartu) (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1913), 79, quoted in Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments,” 35. 83. See Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments,” 46—47. Kuleshov also drew on the teach-

ings of Boris Ferdinandov, whose Experimental Heroic Theater continually experimented with innovative acting styles. Striving for a dynamic, “synthetic” theater (one that combined gesture and dance), Ferdinandov developed quick “two-beat” and “three-beat” measures of movement. 84. Ibid., 48. 85. See Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” trans. Francoise Meltzer, in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 151-69. In this insightful article, Metz provides a semiotic reading of the film trick. 86. Ippolit Sokolov, “Material i forma,” Kino-front A.R.K., nos. 9-10 (1926): 15. 87. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 33. As Youngblood notes, this dangerous stunt work precipitated a falling out between Kuleshov and Barnet. Barnet, it should be noted, was a boxer prior to his extensive work in the Soviet film industry. 88. Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film, 171-73. 89. Pudovkin, commenting on the evolution of the “trick” into the “device” in his collection of essays Film Technique and Film Acting, writes: “That which was called the

cinematic trick [triuk] is nothing other than an inherent device [priem] of cinematic representation.” Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sobranie sochinenti v trekh tomakh (Moscow: “Iskusstvo, 1974), 1:97. 90. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 96.

91. Describing in 1929 Vertov’s use of “trick” camera techniques, the Soviet critic K. Feldman wrote, “All of the devices | priemy], of course, are not new: they are widely used in foreign, especially American, cinema. Vertov cannot make the claim of having invented them. But Vertov systematized them, determining a place and significance for such devices in cinema.” K. Feldman, “V sporakh o Vertove,” Kino 1 kul’tura, nos. 5-6 (1929): 16.

92. D. Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye, 14-15.

93. As Vlada Petri¢ writes, Vertov used “tricks not merely as attractive optical effects or picturesque images but as cinematic devices capable of conveying messages through the very technique by which they are produced.” Petri¢c, Constructivism in Film, 131-32. 94. Vertov’s 1926 film A Sixth of the World (Shestaia chast’ mira) constitutes a more advanced form of this type of cinematic “race.” 95. S. Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot” (“Za kadrom,” 1929), in Selected Works, 1:149.

Notes to pages 188-191 279 96. These dynamic, aggressive moments intended to shock the viewer facilitated Soviet theater’s shift away from the static essence of conventional drama toward more kinetic

art that anticipated a similar transformation of film aesthetics. See S. Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions,” in Selected Works, 1:34. In “The Montage of Attractions” (“Montazh attraktsionov,’ 1923), one of Eisenstein’s first theoretical essays, the filmmaker-to-

be expounded on the dual association of the triuk to the “stunt” and the “trick,” which he called (in Russian) a trik. “It is high time,” Eisenstein claimed, “that this much abused term was returned to its rightful place,’ for in addition to suggesting that the Russian word trik be used instead of triuk, he drew a sharp distinction between his theatrical “attractions” and the traditional dramatic stunt or trick. While the stunt, Eisenstein argued, was “complete within itself,’ the “attraction” (tightrope walking, firecrackers under viewers’ seats, etc.) elicited a more effective, participatory reaction from the audience. This view underscores Eisenstein’s interest in applying a series, or “montage” (Eisenstein’s term), of attractions in the theater or cinema, to create a more powerful work of

art that, like his subsequent montage of “colliding” film shots, was designed to transform patterns of perception and viewer response. 97. Eisenstein also worked at this time with Nikolay Foregger, a dance specialist who had developed a “tye-fe-trenage” actor-training program consisting of three hundred different poses to help the actor become more physical and expressive. This catalog of gestures appealed to Eisenstein, who demanded bold, dramatic motions from his actors. Eisenstein also looked to the theoretical work of Rudolf B6de, a German scientist who had studied the physics of gymnastics. B6de maintained that a body in motion wavers between physical restraints, such as gravity and fatigue, and volitional (or free) movement. Eisenstein believed that B6de’s emphasis on both spontaneous impulses and controlled behavior would lead to more authentic acting. See Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 117. 98. Ibid., 3. Following this experimental work, Eisenstein served as set designer and assistant director (“laboratory assistant”) under the Soviet avant-garde theater director Meyerhold and studied at Meyerhold’s State Higher Directing Workshop. 99. In 1934 Eisenstein declared that Strike “floundered about in the flotsam of a rank theatricality.” Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” in Film Form, 16. 100. S. Eisenstein, “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form,” in Selected Works, 1:64.

101. A variety of tricks can also be found in Eisenstein’s 1929 film The Old and the New (Staroe 1 novoe, or General’naia lintia | The General Line], as it was initially titled), which features several scenes in which accelerated motion is used to convey the (desired) efficiency of the Soviet state. In his essay on trucage, in fact, Metz cites one such scene from The Old and the New—or The General Line, as the French theorist refers to Eisenstein’s film—as a “famous” example of such trick camera work. In this scene, a young

girl and worker attempt to rouse a group of governmental office workers; suddenly Eisenstein shows the office in high-speed action, moving faster than they possibly could in reality. See Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” 160-61. 102. Ivanych, “O Krasnom Pinkertone,” Kino 5, no. 9 (October-December 1923): 7. CHAPTER 6. SOVIET CINEMA’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD

1. Mayakovsky, “Kino i kino,” Kino-fot, no. 4 (October 5-12, 1922): 5, quoted and translated in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 75.

280 Notes to pages 193-195 2. For a useful discussion of the growing tension at the time between avant-garde “plotless” films and “plotted” films and between “unacted” and “acted” films, see Ippolit Sokolov’s “Za interesnyi siuzhet” (“In Favor of an Interesting Plot”) and Viktor Geiman’s “‘Igrovoe’ i ‘neigrovoe’” (“‘Acted’ and “Unacted’”), both of which appeared, side by side, in the June 4, 1929, issue (no. 22) of the Soviet film journal Sovetskii ekran (pages 8-9).

3. Mayakovsky, “Cinema and Cinema,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 75. 4, Discussing the Russian futurist poets “destruction of syntax” and alogical juxtaposition of contradictory components in what the futurists called “zaumnyi [transrational] realism,” Anna Lawton argues that futurism’s “collision of forms created a dynamic field and generated new meaning” analogous to montage. Lawton, “The Futurist Roots of Russian Avant-garde Cinema,” in Readings in Russian Modernism, ed. Ronald Vroon and John Malmstad (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 190. 5. Dziga Vertov, “On Mayakovsky” (“O Maiakovskom,” 1934), in Kino-Eye, 180. 6. Ibid. 7. Petri¢, Constructivism in Film, 137-38. 8. Mayakovsky, “Theatre, Cinema, Futurism,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 34. 9, Ibid. 10. Directed by Vladimir Kasianov, Drama in the Futurists Cabaret No. 13 was a parody of the popular film-Guignol, far removed from the abstract essence of Italian futurist cinema yet similarly dismissive of popular trends. See also note 5 in chap. 3. 11. Mayakovsky’s later film projects met with only measured success. 12. Lef in various respects replaced Kino-Photo as the mouthpiece for Soviet avantgarde filmmakers. In June 1923, soon after the demise of Kino-Photo, Lef published Eisenstein’s “Montage of Attractions” and Vertov’s “Kinoks: A Revolution.” 13. “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema,” appearing in Kino i kultura, nos. 7-8 (1929): 22-26, was printed under the name V. Malevich, which was clearly a misprint, as Dmitry Sarabyanov notes in his commentary in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinentu v piati tomakh (Moscow: Hylaea, 1995), 1:375. 14. Malevich, “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema,” trans. Cathy Young, in Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 147. 15. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Malevich in the Movies: Rubbery Kisses and Dynamic Sensations, trans. Elif Batuman and Liubov Golburt, in Bulgakowa, White Rectangle, 27. 16. K. Malevich, “The Artist and Cinema,” in Essays on Art, 1:235. Tupitsyn argues in her study of Malevich’s views on cinema that the painter embraced Soviet cinema’s symbiosis of abstraction and realism since it paralleled a comparable fluctuation between the figurative and abstract in his own paintings from the 1920s. Tupitsyn also contends that in his 1915 Black Square, Malevich attained “the sensation of stasis or speed” inherent to cinema. See Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film, 3, 47. 17. Hans Richter, “My Experience with Movement in Painting and in Film,” in The Nature and Art of Motion, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 152, emphasis in the original. Richter, however, contended that cinema by its very nature tends toward narration despite any abstract imagery: “I may use abstract forms poetically, as human beings—and can use human beings as abstractly as a rectangle—but whatever element I use, in whatever way, a story will develop. The medium film turns everything into a story, because IT MOVES” (156). 18. In the 1925 “And Images Triumph on the Screens,” Malevich suggested that Vertov,

Notes to pages 196-198 281 with his “‘showing of the thing” in an ostensibly nonmimetic fashion was “half way towards liberating the spectator from things pomaded by ideas, phenomena and objects, and, in showing the thing ‘as such, makes the public see things, not pomaded, but real, genuine and independent of ideas.’ K. Malevich, “And Images Triumph on the Screens,” in Essays on Art, 1:231.

19. Malevich, “Painterly Laws,’ 155.

20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 155-56. 22. Ibid., 158. Apart from his praise for Vertov’s work, Malevich was generally critical of current Soviet cinema, and he contended that most filmmakers were failing to embrace and explore the true spirit of cinema itself. 23. In “Painterly Laws,” Malevich wrote: “I must admit that | Eisenstein’s] pictures of Wanderers’ variety are not vulgar, but they can be compared to the paintings of the [nineteenth-century] Wanderer [Vladimir] Makovsky” (149). Later in 1929, Eisenstein responded to Malevich’s criticism with several derogatory remarks aimed squarely at the suprematist. Rejecting the premise of “Painterly Laws,” Eisenstein declared: “To pass judgment on the pictorialism of a shot in cinema is naive. It is for people with a reasonable knowledge of painting but absolutely no qualifications in cinema. This kind of judgment could include, for example, Kazimir Malevich’s statements on cinema. Not even a film novice would now analyze a film shot as if it were an easel painting” (“Fourth Dimension in Cinema,’ 191). For more on the complex relationship between Malevich and Eisenstein, see Shatskikh, “Malevich and Film,” Burlington Magazine, July 1993, 47078. Shatskikh, however, was unaware of Malevich’s “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema” when she wrote this article. 24. Bulgakowa, White Rectangle, 29. 25. Vertov’s experiments with nonfigurative speed, although unique in their aesthetic treatment of Soviet industrialization, followed a path established by a group of French and German artists who in the early 1920s created a body of experimental films replete with abstract dynamism. In France, kinesthetic speed proved central to the avantgarde “impressionist” filmmakers Germaine Dulac, Marcel Herbier, and Jean Epstein as well as the painter-turned-filmmaker Fernand Léger. In l’Herbier’s film short ’Inhumaine (1924), the radical use of cubist imagery and superimpositions accompanies fast-paced scenes of speeding automobiles, while the film’s split images of the road are reminiscent of imagery that would later figure in Vertov’s work. In Léger’s 1924 Ballet mécanique, a whirl of images—some semiabstract and some more figurative—give rise to the rhythm implicit in the title of Léger’s short film. In Germany, the painters Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger similarly created experimental, nonnarrative cinematic works full of dynamic, nondiegetic images. Richter’s abstract Rhythmus series (1921-25) and Film Studie (1926) as well as Ruttmann’s series of Opus films (1922-25) represent with their emphasis on music, light, and movement the pinnacle of this innovative German film work. Ruttmann’s Berlin—Symphony of a Big City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grofsstadt, 1927) prefigures The Man with the Movie Camera in that it documents the passing of a day in the modern city. Malevich, in fact, compares the work of Ruttmann and Vertov in “Painterly Laws,” noting how “Symphony of Berlin essentially dealt with the same task that Dziga Vertov faced in The Man with the Movie

282 Notes to pages 198-203 Camera—that is, the task of expressing dynamic force. For the former, it was the dynamism of the city; for the latter, dynamism as such.” See Malevich, “Painterly Laws,” 158. 26. Vertov, “Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” in Kino-Eye, 90. 27. Vertov, for instance, employed this metaphor of light when he declared in 1923, “Prospects for the future (a high objective): an institute for continuous invention and perfection, a take in the worldwide quality of production, the cinema-lighthouse of the USSR.” D. Vertov, “On the Organization of a Film Experiment Station,” in Kino-Eye, 21. 28. The Eleventh Year was criticized, in fact, for lacking a human element. For instance, Mikhail Koltsov wrote in a February 1928 issue of Pravda, “The sections [of The Eleventh Year| where there are people as well as machines are too cut back. This gives the film a certain mechanical dryness; you start pining for people, for the living builders of Socialism who, the devil take it, are standing behind these machines.” Mikhail Koltsov, “The Eleventh Year,” trans. Julian Graffy, in Lines and Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Gemona, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 304. 29. As Naum Kaufman wrote in his 1928 review of The Eleventh Year, “Vertov is remarkable in that he was the first person to begin to work on pure cinematic material; in other words, he purified this material, chose and selected what was best.” Naum Kaufman, “Vertov,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 295. Kaufman (no relation to Vertov, whose given last name was also Kaufman) published this review in Sovetskii ekran, no. 45 (1928): 6—7. In this review, Kaufman compares Vertov to the French painter Constantin Guys, arguing that both created art from what they experienced transpiring around them. 30. In describing scenes from The Man with the Movie Camera, I use the segment titles used by Vlada Petri¢ in his exhaustive, book-length analysis of the film. For a list of all fifty-five segments in the film and their length, see Petri¢, Constructivism in Film, 73-76. 31. For a valuable shot-by-shot description of this lightening-quick “Cameraman and Machine,” see Petri¢, Constructivism in Film, 157—60. In his article “Cinematic Abstraction as a Means of Conveying Ideological Messages in The Man with the Movie Camera,’ Petri¢ also compares this scene with one of Malevich’s suprematist paintings, arguing that Vertov “drew his idea for [his] theory [of intervals] from the suprematist method.” See Petric, “Cinematic Abstraction as a Means of Conveying Ideological Messages in The Man with the Movie Camera,’ in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (New York: Routledge, 1992), 102-4. Petri¢, however, does not cite any of Malevich’s own writings on cinema. Following Moscow and his camera work for The Man with the Movie Camera, Mikhail Kaufman directed the lyrical In the Spring (Vesnoi, 1929).

32. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 156.

33. Eisenstein’s celebrated films and theoretical writings, despite their prominence in numerous film histories, remain relatively unexplored from the perspective of 1920s avant-garde speed. In one of the few examples of scholarship that addresses this component of Eisenstein’s work, Francois Albera probes the filmmaker’s “little discussed” approach to “the illusion of movement created by cinema.” Francois Albera, “Eisenstein and the Theory of the Photogram,” in Fisenstein Rediscovered, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1993), 200. 34, Eisenstein, “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form,” 1:62. 35. Eisenstein, “Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” 1:185.

Notes to pages 204-222 283 36. Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” 90. 37. Petri¢é, Constructivist Cinema, 143-44.

38. For Vorkapich the phi effect constituted the “human perspective mechanism” that proved crucial to the kinesthetic work of Vertov, Eisenstein, and others. Writing in the late 1950s on a “language of motion” that stemmed from the innovations of early Soviet filmmakers, Vorkapich highlighted the phi effect (he called it the “phi phenomenon’), which he believed epitomized cinema's ability to explore the essence of speed. To demonstrate the “phi effect,” Vorkapich suggested alternating two related but different shots with each other to establish a new uniquely filmic dynamism. Echoing Eisenstein, Vorkapich suggested that a visual collision resulting from the juxtaposition of the different shots would generate an abstract external speed out of the static images. See Vorkapich, “Toward True Cinema,” 16. 39. Vertov also uses the phi leap in the “Cameraman and Machine” segment of The Man with the Movie Camera, where the protagonist appears to jump about the screen. As the nondiegetic images rush by and the kinesthetic energy increases, the vertical, iconic image of the cameraman appears throughout this sequence for only one or two frames at a time. By using the phi leap, Vertov also creates the impression that the protagonist has been dramatically superimposed onto the industrial shots. AQ. S. Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” in Selected Works, 1:64. 41. Ibid., 1:172.

42. Pudovkin, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, 11106. 43. Ibid., 93. For more on Pudovkin’s close ties to Hollywood cinema, see Vance Kepley Jr., “Pudovkin and the Classical Hollywood Tradition,” Wide Angle 7, no. 3 (1985): 54-61. 44. Kepley, “Pudovkin and the Classical Hollywood Tradition,” 60. 45. A similarly staged fight occurs in The End of St. Petersburg, Pudovkin’s fictionalized account of revolutionary counter activity in 1917, but in Storm over Asia Pudovkin

allows his camera work and montage to capture a greater sense of speed and outrage. 46. Lev Kuleshov, “Art of the Cinema,” 59. 47. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher $. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 67. 48. Vertov, “WE” and “Essence of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye, 8, 49.

49. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. 50. K. Feldman, “Turksib,” Kino i kultura, nos. 7-8 (1929): 37.

51. Noting how Turin “integrates the movement and speed of the train with that of the film,” Kirby suggests that Turksib “is the Soviet version of the western.” See Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 190. Bolstering an analogical (and clichéd) link between Siberia and America’s West, the film’s speed and space indeed provide a propagandistic, Soviet equivalent to the American western’s open vistas and racing horses. 52. The title of this 1926 film has also been translated by some into English as Forward, Soviet! which, although not as faithful to the original Russian, captures the overall tenor of forward momentum in the film, and in avant-garde Soviet cinema at this time. 53. Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,”’ 88. 54. Vertov, “Kinoks,” 15-16.

55. Vertov’s carousel shots are reminiscent of René Clair’s surrealist short Entr’acte

284 Notes to pages 223-226 (made in 1924 in collaboration with the artist Francis Picabia), which contains semiabstract roller-coaster shots replete with disorienting speed. Yet Clair’s kinesthetic shots and rapid montage prove overtly anarchic, for his roller coaster appears to skip the tracks, while Vertov’s speeding amusement-park images replicate the experience of riding a carousel. 56. Vertov, “WE,” 8.

57. The critic Konstantin Feldman, Vertov’s contemporary and vocal proponent, suggested that The Man with the Movie Camera fared far better than the Soviet authorities had expected. See Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 349-50. But the Soviet critic Khrisanf Khersonsky criticized Vertov’s film for its “narrow formalism” and “technical fetishism.” Khrisanf Khersonsky, “Chelovek s kinoapparatom,’ Kino, no.7 (1929): 4, quoted in Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 207. 58. See Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 349. Tsivian includes a translated excerpt from a 1929 interview with Vertov (“Filme grozit opasnost’ [beseda s Dzigoi Vertovym]”), which appeared in Novyi zritel’ 5 (January 1929): 27. 59. See note 56. Youngblood also cites the critic G. Lenobl, who, like Khersonsky, criticized Vertov for his “technical fetishism.” G Lenobl} “Chelovek s kinoapparatom,’ Kino, no. 7 (1929): 3, quoted in Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 207. 60. I. Sokolov, “Rabotat’ na massovogo kinozritel’ia,” Kino 1 zhizn’ 2 (November 30, 1929): 14-15.

61. Malevich, “Painterly Laws,” 156.

62. Ibid. 63. Toward the end of the 1920s, Eisenstein came under criticism for his reliance on complex, often rapid montage in October. Exemplifying the filmmaker’s move toward an intellectual montage that forced audiences to make difficult cognitive leaps while viewing fast paced images, October was a manifestation of avant-garde speed that critics feared would overwhelm Soviet audiences. “October as a whole is a physiologically intolerable object,” Viktor Pertsov wrote in 1928. Although Pertsov and others praised elements of Eisenstein’s film, they concluded that it was hardly suitable for the masses, despite its revolutionary theme. See Viktor Pertsov, “On October,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 230-31. A 1928 editorial in support of October declared, “We have heard voices from a third direction, the Soviet public, commenting on the ‘accessibility’ or “inaccessibility’ of the film for a worker audience. Comrade Rokotov, mentioning the ‘difficulty’ of October, is carried away by ‘piquant details’ like the ‘powerful snore’ of one of the participants at a public screening of the film.” “Zhizn’ iskusstva Editorial: October—The Results of the Discussion,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 233. As if in response to this criticism, The Old and the New arose as Eisenstein’s departure from the complex speed found in his earlier ode to the revolution. Now he would glorify a revolution imposed from above. The Old and the New was formulated before the filming of October, but production was postponed until after Eisenstein finished his contribution to the ten-year anniversary of the revolution. 64. S. Eisenstein and Grigory Aleksandrov, “An Experiment Intelligible to the Millions,” in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 257, emphasis in the original. The 1928 Party Conference on Cinema passed a decree stating that Soviet films were to be “understood by the millions.” 65. N. Lukhmanov, “Zhizn; kakoi ona dolzhna byt,’ Kino 1 Kul’tura, no. 1 (1929): 29-30.

Notes to pages 226-234 285 66. Ibid., 37. 67. Bordwell, Cinema of Eisenstein, 97. CONCLUSION

1. V. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobrante sochinenti, 10:163—64. 2. Katayev allegedly took the title for his novel from a line (“Forward, O Time! Time, Forward!”) in Mayakovsky’s play The Bath House ( Banta, 1929). See Robert Russell, Valentin Kataev (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 74. 3. Valentin Katayev, Time, Forward! trans. Charles Malamuth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 11-12 (and repeated on 334). Katayev quotes from a speech Stalin delivered on June 23, 1931. 4, Enthusiastically depicting Soviet industry’s impressive achievements and basing

his novel on real events that he himself witnessed, Katayev offered an early template for socialist realism, the broad Stalinist doctrine of aesthetics officially introduced in February 1932 that stipulated that the arts, whether novels, paintings, or films, should depict—in unambiguous, accessible terms—the Soviet Union as a technological, socially advanced Marxist utopia. Socialist realist novels featured a master plot documenting extraordinary Soviet feats in both the industrial and the social sectors, as socialist realism celebrated the fast, streamlined progress unique to a new ideological era. Katayev, who produced several socialist realist novels in the 1930s, incorporated prominent elements of this emerging artistic doctrine into Time, Forward! particularly through his glorification of the Soviet Union’s rapid move toward a highly productive, industrialized future. Katayev would go on to write the adventure novel The Lonely White Sail Gleams (Beleet parus odinokii, 1936), among other socialist realist works. 5. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 6. Katayev, Time, Forward! 155. 7. Ibid., 65.

8. Ibid., 6. 9, The dynamic cinematic style of Katayev’s prose, Gleb Struve argues, draws on the fiction of the American John Dos Passos, one of the first writers to evoke film as a means of reflecting the fast essence of modernity. See Gleb Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 247. In his trilogy U.S.A., Dos Passos uses “Newsreels” in place of chapters and “Camera Eye” passages that accentuate a cinematic perspective on reality. Another critical reading of Katayev’s use

of short sentences comes from Richard Borden, who argues that this shortened style reflects a shift in Katayev’s writing away from what was a more intricate prose style in the 1920s to a “relative simplification of language, reduction of verbal qualifications, and smoothing of syntax” in accordance with the emerging strictures of socialist realism. See Richard Borden, The Art of Writing Badly: Valentin Kataev’s Mauvism and the Rebirth of Russian Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 103. 10. Katayev, Time, Forward! 130. 11. Ibid., 184. 12. Ibid., 186. 13. Ibid., 91-92. Mayakovsky similarly promoted the Soviet Union’s potential when discussing his impressions of urban America in 1925: “New York is unorganized. Mere

286 Notes to pages 234-237 machinery, subways, skyscrapers and the like do not make a real industrial civilization. ... That is why I say New York is unorganized—t is a gigantic accident stumbled upon by children, not the full-grown, mature product of men who understand what they wanted and planned it like artists. When our industrial age comes in Russia it [Soviet industrialization] will be different—it will be planned—it will be conscious.” Michael Gold, interview with Mayakovsky, New York World, August 9, 1925, 4. 14. Katayev, Time, Forward! 104. A philosophical position promoting the attainment of

knowledge through observation, empiricism proved antithetical to Marxist-Leninism and the goals of the Stalinist Five-Year Plans; thus it became a pejorative epithet in socialist realist literature. 15. Ibid., 11. Katayev repeats this monologue at the conclusion of Time, Forward! 16. Ibid, 261. 17. Ibid., 262. 18. Ibid., 219—20.

19. As David Bethea explains in his study of apocalypse in Russian literature, “The ideal of utopia . .. is, by definition, static—it is already achieved and fixed.” Utopia, in other words, signifies an immutable endpoint (that follows apocalypse) rather than a dynamic stage of development. David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 148, italics in original. 20. Groys, Total Art of Stalinism, 36. 21. Other examples of socialist realist novels that celebrate speed include Fedor Gladkov’s Energy (Energtia, 1932-37) and Leonid Sobolev’s Complete Overhaul (Kapitalnyi remont, 1932).

22. To give one example of the uniformity of thought under Stalin, Einstein’s principle of relativity, so fundamental as an intellectual basis for the modernist era’s subjective embrace of speed, now clashed with Stalinist ideology. According to Alexander Vucinich, Soviet scientists increasingly believed that Einstein’s theories of relativity “led—

and could only lead—to a denial of the objective nature of motion.” An objective approach to speed was a key component to Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and socialist realist culture. See Vucinich, Einstein and Soviet Ideology, 61.

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Strigalev, Anatoly. “Kartiny, ‘stikhokartiny’ i zhelezobetonnye poemy Vasiliia Kamenskogo.” Voprosy iskusstvoznanita, 1-2 (1995): 509-39. ——. “Mikhail Larionov—avtor 1 praktik pliuralisticheskoi kontseptsii.” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 1 (1996): 466-89. Struve, Gleb. Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Taylor, Richard. Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998.

—_——. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Taylor, Richard, and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988. —_—, eds. Inside the Film Factory. London: Routledge, 1991. Tsivian, Yuri. Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Translated by Alan Bodger. London: Routledge, 1994. ——, ed. Lines and Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Gemona, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004. Tsivian, Yuri, et al., eds. Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919. Pordenone, Italy: British Film Institute/Edzioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1989. Tupitsyn, Margarita. Malevich and Film. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Uspensky, B. A. “K issledovaniiu iazyka drevnei zhivopisi.” In Iazyk zhivopisnogo proizvedentia (Uslovnost’ drevnogo iskusstva), by L. F. Zhegin, 4-34. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970. Vargish, Thomas, and Delo E. Mook. Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette Michelson. Translated by K. O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

296 Bibliography Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Translated by Philip Bettchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1991. Vorkapich, Slavko. “Toward True Cinema.” Film Culture 19 (March 1959): 10-17.

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INDEX Note: Illustrations are indicated by either plate number (for color images following page 116) or page number plus figure number.

acmeism, 24 275n39; influence on agit-kino, 176, actors: in D. W. Griffith films, 173; FEKS 178; stars of, 162, 171-72, 178, 184, 185

(The Workshop of the Eccentric apocalyptic motifs, 59, 235-36, 286n19 Actor), 177, 185, 193; movement Apollinaire, Guillaume, 20-21, 243n49, techniques for, 183, 278n83; plasticity 244n61 of, 171-72; as prototypes of the Soviet Apollon (Russian magazine), 38, 264n65 new man, 157; training programs for, Argus, 101, 102 156, 157, 168-69, 188, 278n82, 279N97 Arnheim, Rudolf, 12

Adorno, Theodor, 9 Arsenal (Dovzhenko), 193, 215—16 Adventurism (avantiurizm), 237 Arvatov, Boris, 175—76, 177, 188

Aelita (Protazanov), 168 athletes and athleticism: actor training airplanes: flying metaphors, 253n93; and, 156, 279n97; athletic body, 115-16, modern Russian terms for, 69; 118, 263n48; dance, 279n97; disappearpropulsion systems, 153-54; in score ance of the human body in, 117-18, for Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad color plate 5; diving, 186-87, 187115;

solntsem) (futurist opera), 129; in gymnastics, 279n97; Hercules suprematism, 139-40; as symbol of (Gerkules) (sports journal), 263n52; dynamism, 62, 251n72; and urban internal speed shots of, 163; Modern

growth, 10; in works of Olga Olympic Games, 115; roller-skating, Rozanova, 133; in zaum (transrational 95-96, 258nz71, color plate 1; slowpoetry), 83, 93-94, 257n66. See also motion sequences, 221f24; Time,

aviation Forward! ( Vremia, vpered!) (Katayev),

Albera, Francois, 282n33 232; wrestling, 116, 117, 263n52

Altman, Natan, 89 aviation: “The Airplane and First Love” American cinema: Americanism (“Aeroplan i pervaia liubov”) (Amerikanshchina), 161, 162, 170, (Kamensky), 63; Airplane Flying 275n39; chase scenes, 175, 178-80, (Suprematism) (Polet aeroplana 276n60, 277n76; the detective story, | Suprematizm]) (Malevich), 118, 170-71, 275n40; D. W. Griffith and, 139-40, color plate 6; Airplane over a 172-73, 178-79, 182, 277n74; editing Train (Aeroplan nad poezdom) (Gontechniques of, 170, 180; impact on charova), 112-13, 112f4; Airplane Poesas Soviet cinema, 161—63, 170, 171-72, 190, (Aeroplannye Poezy) (Olimpov), 62, 297

298 Index aviation (continued ) Bethea, David, 286n19 249n50; “Airplanes and Futurist Bétuda, Mario, 257n66 Poetry” (“Aeroplany i futuristicheskaia —_ Bleklov, N., 91, 257n61

poeziia”) (Kamensky), 55; birds, 108, Blok, Aleksandr, 41, 42, 249n42

153-54, 261n34; experiments on Blue Express (Goluboi ekspress, or China human flight, 26, 153-55, 270n49, Express) (Trauberg), 192, 214-15 270N55, 270N56, 271n59; in Kamensky’s —_ Blue Journal (Sinit zhurnal), 63

poetry, 63, 253n94; Letatlin (flying Bobrinskaya, Elena, 263n56

machine created by Tatlin), 26, Boccioni, Umberto: athleticism in works 270N49, 271n59; neologisms, 26, 154, of, 115-16; dynamic tension in work 270n49, 271n59; Victory over the Sun of, 196; on the fourth dimension, 124,

(Pobeda nad solntsem) (futurist 265n80, 265n83; on speed, 243N553 opera), 83; Wings (Kryl’ia) (Miturich), works: The City Rises (La citta che 153, 155, 270N55. See also airplanes sale), 18; Dynamism of a Cyclist (Dinamismo di un ciclista), 115-16;

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 179, 181 “Futurist Painting: Technical ManiBalla, Giacomo: birds as symbols of festo,’ 38; The Laugh (La risata), motion, 108; continuum of motion on 49-503 “Plastic Dynamism,” 124; canvas, 18-19; divisionism, 18, 111; on Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

futurism and the human body, (Forme uniche della continuita nello 262n40; images of speed, 123, 264n73; spazio), 18, 124

works: Abstract Speed ( Velocita Bode, Rudolf, 279n97 astratta), 19; Dynamism of a Dog on Boguslavskaya, Kseniya, 146 a Leash (Dinamismo di un cane al Bois, Yve-Alain, 151 guinzaglio), 18-19; “Futurist Painting: Bolshakov, Konstantin, 36, 42, 44—46, 68,

Technical Manifesto,” 38; Speeding 84-85, 111, 117 Car: Abstract Speed, 196; The Swifts: Bolshevik party, 147—49; film distribution

Paths of Movement + Dynamic methods of, 174-75, 276n57; image Sequences (Rondini: Linee andamentali modification by, 185; industrialization,

+ successioni dinamiche), 19 185; and the new Soviet individual, Ballet mécanique (Léger), 10, 17, 281n25 186, 187; propaganda of, 162-63, 174,

Barnet, Boris, 180, 184, 277N77 177-78, 196; social transformation, 185 Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Boltzmann, Ludwig, 239n7 Potemkin) (Eisenstein): accelerated Borden, Richard, 285n9 montage in, 164; heroic realism in, Bordwell, David, 226, 277n76 177; liquid images in, 203; machinery Bowlt, John, 28, 116, 258—59n6, 262n43

in, 204; Odessa steps sequence, 164, Bragaglia, Anton, 22

203-4; velocity in, 204 Braque, Georges, 16, 18 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 10, 16, 248n38 Brik, Osip, 194 Baudouin de Courtenay, 40, 247n30 Bruni, Lev, 146

Bauer, Yevgeny, 168, 169 Bryusov, Valery, 41, 73 Bely, Andrey, 42, 68-69, 242n40, 248n40, Buchloh, Benjamin, 163

250N67, 254n3 budetliane, 38, 107

Berdyayev, Nikolay, 60, 252n82, 267n11 budushchnikt, 107 Bergson, Henri, 124, 166—67, 169, 24355, Bulgakowa, Oksana, 195, 197, 275-76N47

265077 Burliyuk, David: art training of, 40; on

Index 299 neoprimitivism, 105; rejection of poetic reverse motion, 185; slow-motion traditions, 33, 34; self-promotion of, sequences, 221f24; slow track-in shot 55; WORKS: essays in A Slap in the (Cabiria shot), 169; spectatorial eye, Face of Public Taste ( Poshchechina 221-22, 221f24; split images, 281n25; obshchestvennomu vkusu) (futurist split screen, 185; stop-motion cinealmanac), 34-35, 245n6; “The Graphic matography, 185; stunts in, 183—90,

Elements of Russian Phonetics” 278n89, 279n96; superimposition, 185, (“Izobrazitel’nye elementy rossiiskoi 198, 205-6, 281N25, 283n39; swirling

fonetiki”), 255n28; illustrations in camera, 209; tilted shots, 219; of Tango with Cows (Tango s korovamt) trains, 163, 217, 218-19; triuk (stunt), (Kamensky), 93-95, 93f2; poems in 183-84; viewer disorientation, 218-19 The Futurists: The First Journal of the carousels, 222—23, 222f25, 283-8455

Russian Futurists (Futuristy: Pervyt Carra, Carlo, 17, 38, 243n53 zhurnal russkikh futuristov), 91; “Rail- cat imagery, 49, 250n60 way Whistlings” (“Zheleznodorozhnye _Cendrars, Blaise, 19-20

posvistyvaniia”), 91; “The Steam Centrifuge (Tsentrifuga), 245n9 Engine and Tender” (“Parovoz i Chagall, Marc, 105 tender”), 91; “Texture,” 3.4, 77, 245n6, Chaplin, Charlie, 162, 171-72, 185

269n34; “Winter Train” (“Zimnii Chardynin, Pyotr, 168

poezd”), 91, 92-93 Chashnik, Ilya, 275-76n47 Burliyuk, Nikolay, 245n6, 250n66 China, political unrest in, 214-15

Burliyuk, Vladimir, 93, 117 China Express (Blue Express | Golubot ekspress|) (Trauberg), 192, 214-15

cabarets, 95, 258n71 chronophotography

Café Pittoresque (Kafe Pittoresk), 146-47, (chronophotographie), 21-22, 263n49

269n38 Chukovsky, Korney, 258n68, 251n69

cameras: attached to machinery, 222; Cinema (film journal), 190 chronophotography (chronophoto- Cinema and Culture (Kino 1 kultura) graphie), 21-22; eye of the camera, 223; (Soviet film journal), 194-95, 196, 216 photography, 11, 15, 21-22, 241n25, circuses, 64, 117, 183-84, 253N97, 263n52

242N43 cities: cine-kaleidoscope tempo of, 60-61;

camera techniques: acceleration motion, “The City” (“Gorod”) (Bely), 42; “The 185; angled shots, 126, 209; animation, City” (“Gorod”) (Guro), 43-44; The 185; birds’-eye-view shots, 205, 206-7; City (Gorod) (Larionov), 110-11; The of chase scenes, 180—81, 277—78n80; City Rises (La citta che sale) (Boccinematic blinks, 205; close-up shots, cioni), 18; Cityscape (Fire in the City) 173, 180, 187, 189, 199-200, 206; dis- (Gorodskoi peizazh | Pozhar v gorode})

solves, 185, 198—99; in diving (Rozanova), 133-34, 134f9; “City sequences, 186-87, 187f15; fades, 185; Spring” (“Gorodskaia vesna”) (Bolfreeze-frame, 17-18, 185, 200; high- shakov), 84-85; dynamism of, 16, angle shots, 205; internal action, 203; 43-44, 61-62, 71, 72, 252N85, 281-82n25; iris shot, 186; juxtaposition of film Fastness ( Bystr’) (Shershenevich), shots, 203; low-angle shots, 186; optical 61-62, 252n85; growth of, 10; “In an effects, 185-86; overhead shots, 204-5; Auto” (“V avto”) (Mayakovsky), overlapping, 163, 189—90, 189f16; pan- 50-52; The Man with the Movie ning, 205; perspective shots, 186—87; Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom)

300 Index cities (continued ) 161, 162, 272n76; montage, 26, 27, (Vertov), 192, 194, 196, 197, 200—201, 163-64, 273n9; Soviet avant-garde

277-78n80, 281-82n25; “Night” cinema, 227—28. See also Eisenstein, (“Noch”) (Mayakovsky), 34, 47-40; Sergey; Pudovkin, Vsevolod; noise of, 46, 58-59, 77-78, 248n40; Trauberg, Ilya; Vertov, Dziga “Noisekins, Noises, and Noisings” Crematorium of Common Sense (Krema-

(“Shumiki, shumy i shumishchi”) torii zdravomysliia) (Mezzanine of (Mayakovsky), 77; street movements, Poetry almanac), 70 41, 44, 47-50, 56-57, 205, 207-8, “The Crisis of Art” (“Krizis iskusstva”) 248n37, 252n77; “Vasily the Wanderer” (Berdyayev), 60 (“Strannik Vasilii”) (Kamensky), Crommelynck, Fernand, 156-57 52-53; violence in, 44, 46-47; Vladimir cross-cutting, 173, 181-82 Mayakovsky: A Tragedy ( Vladimir crowd movement, 49, 173, 189, 206-7,

Matakovski: Tragedia) (Mayakovsky), 208f19 59-60; in the works of symbolist cubo-futurist painting: destabilization of

poets, 41-43, 248n38, 248n40 spatial planes in, 111-13; disappearance Ciurlionis, Mikalojus-Konstantinas, 13 of human body in, 151; distortions of

Clair, René, 166, 283—-84n55 space in, 111-13; fusion of humans collages, 95, 136, 138, 145, 258n68 with their environment, 118—19, color: in cubo-futurist art, 111, 117-18, 263N56; passage, 110, 113-15, 119; simulcolor plate 5; in “Proun” forms, 153; taneity in, 133; texture (faktura) in, 77, rayism (luchizm), 25, 44, 126; speed, 8, 25528, 269n34. See also Goncharova, 117-18, 240n13; in suprematism, 139, Natalya; Larionov, Mikhail; Malevich, 140—41; in urban images, 48—49, 133-34 Kazimir constructivism: defined, 130, 155; electro- cubo-futurist poetry: accelerated urban organism, 157-58; exhibitions of, 155; environment in, 47; distortions of

flight simulator, 153-55, 270N55, syntax in, 255n32; ferroconcrete 270N56, 271n59; mechanization of the poetry, 24, 64, 93-97, 93f2, 258n69, human body, 151-53, 152f13, 156, 183, 258n71, 258n72; Futurism in the Poetry 186, 278n82; Monument to the Third of V. Briusov (Futurizm v stikhakh V.

International (Pamiatntk II Internat- Briusova) (Shemshurin), 73; The Mezsionalu) (Tatlin), 26, 148-50, 150f12, zanine of Poetry (Mezonin poezi1), 24, 271n71; “The Realist Manifesto” 36, 44, 45, 46; the reader of, 75-76, 79; (“Realisticheskii manifest”) (Gabo the “shift” (sdvig), 35, 73-75, 111-12; and Pevsner), 154, 271n60; texture shift-image (sdvig-obraz), 73-74; tex(faktura) in, 144-45, 148, 269n34; ture (faktura) in, 34, 77, 78, 81-82, utilitarian aesthetic of, 151, 155, 156. 255n28, 269n36; The Three (Troe) See also Gan, Aleksey; Popova, (Malevich), 133. See also Kamensky,

Lyubov; Stepanova, Varvara; Vasily; Kruchenykh, Aleksey;

Toporkov, A. Mayakovsky, Vladimir; neologisms; constructivist cinema: Aleksandr Rod- syntax; words; zaum (transrational chenko and, 146—47, 155, 162, 172, poetry) 269n38, 273n9; Aleksey Gan and, 162, cubo-futurists: exhibits of, 97, 104, 105; A 272n76; Eisenstein’s films as, 163, 177, Hatchery of Judges I (Sadok Sudei II) 188, 189, 192, 193, 201, 203, 227-28; (almanac), 54, 119, 120f6; Hylaeans as,

Kino-Photo (Kino-fot) (film journal), 38; lecture tour by, 55-56, 251n72,

Index 301 251N73, 251-52n74; merger of poetic Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, 176, 193, 215-16 and painterly techniques, 89—91, 9of1, Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13

256-57n57; The Mezzanine of Poetry (Drama v kabare futuristov No. 13) (Mezonin poezit), 24, 36, 44, 45, 46, 68; (futurist film), 194, 258n5, 280n10 pictorial forms of poetry, 87-88; Rus- Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 123, 264n73 sian futurist poets’ collaborations Dulac, Germaine, 281n25 with, 24; self-promoting lectures of, Dymshits-Tolstaya, Sofiya, 146 55-56, 250N67, 251n73; self-sufficiency dynamism: efficiency, 14, 156, 162-63, 179, of words, 67, 76-77; the “shift” (sdvig), 242N36, 271N69, 276n56; Eiffel Tower

35, 73-75, 111-12. See also Burliyuk, as symbol of, 10, 17, 242n48; intellecDavid; Italian futurists; Kamensky, tual dynamism, 149, 270n47; material

Vasily; Khlebnikov, Velemir; body as translucent in, 117-18, 119, Kruchenykh, Aleksey; Mayakovsky, 263n56; the new Soviet individual, 151, Vladimir; neoprimitivism; rayism 157, 186, 187; nondiegetic dynamism, (luchizm); A Slap in the Face of Public 198, 200, 201, 202, 213, 277N79; passage, Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu 110, 113-14; phi effect, 203, 205-6,

vkusu) 283n38; plastic dynamism, 18, 124, 125,

czarist Russia, 23, 162, 179 265n83; A Slap in the Face of Public

Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu

Dabrowski, Magdelena, 259n10 vkusu) (futurist almanac), 33-353

Dadaists, 246n14 use of term, 22—23. See also fourth Davies, Margaret, 244n61 dimension; industrialization; monda Vinci, Leonardo, 15 tage; rayism (luchizm); Soviet cinema; “Declaration of Electroorganism” suprematism; visual perception; (“Deklaratsiia elektroorganizma”) zaum (transrational poetry) (Redko), 157, 158

Delaunay, Robert, 10, 13, 17, 243n49, Eagle, Herbert, 73

266—67n8 Earth (Zemlia) (Dovzhenko), 215-16

Delaunay-Terk, Sonia, 20 eccentrism, 177, 185, 193

Deleuze, Gilles, 167 editing techniques: associative editing, Delsarte, Francois, 183, 278n82 181; cinematic blinks, 205; continuity

Demeny, Georges, 263n49 editing, 208; crosscutting, 173, 180, detective stories, 170-71, 275n40 181-82; kinesthetic pulsation, 201; Devil’s Wheel (Chertovo koleso) (Kozin- parallel editing, 277n74; quick editing

tsev), 185, 193 to demonstrate, 209; single-frame

diegesis, 181, 198-202, 213, 277N79 editing, 210-11 Dolinsky, Serge, 33-34 efficiency, 14, 156, 162—63, 179, 242n36,

dol’nik, 42, 249n42 271N69, 276n56

The Donkey’s Tail (Oslinyi khvost) Eganbiuri, Eli (pseudonym for Ilya

(futurist exhibit), 260n20, 262n39 Zdanevich), 261n34 The Donkey’s Tail and Target (Osliny1 Eggeling, Viking, 162, 281n25 khvost i mishen’) (futurist publica- ego-futurism (ego-futurizm): “T” in, 36, tion), 91, 117, 257N58, 257Nn60, 257n61 53-55» 60-62, 250—51n67; Ivan Ignatev

Dos Passos, John, 285n9 and, 87, 251n69; nonrepresentational Douglas, Charlotte, 28, 265n80 forms of dynamism, 68; upper-class

Dove, Arthur, 13 urban society, 45-46, 249n50; Vasilisk

302 Index ego-futurism (continued ) Ellul, Jacques, 176 Gnedov and, 68, 85-87, 97. See also Epstein, Jean, 281n25

Severyanin, Igor Epstein, P. S., 240n14

Ehrenfest, P. S., 240n14 Ermler, Friedrich, 193 Eiffel Tower, 10, 17, 242n48 Ermolayeva, Vera, 125

Einstein, Albert, 7-8, 121, 240n8, 240n9, everythingism (vsechestvo), 104-5,

240N11, 259n8, 286n22 109-10, 109f3, 112, 114-15, 117-18, Eisenstein, Sergey: abstract notions of 260n16, color plate 5 velocity, 197; agit-trains and, 175; Evreinov, Nikolay, 64-65 American cinema's influence on Exhibition of Original Icon Paintings Russian filmmaking, 174; Arvatov and Lubki (Vystavka original’nykh collaboration with, 188; criticism of ikon i lubkhov), 105 Vertov’s filming techniques, 187-88, exhibitions: Café Pittoresque (Kafe 189; crowd scenes in films of, 173; on Pittoresk), 146—47, 269n38; The D. W. Griffith’s influence on Russian Donkey’s Tail (Oslinyi khvost), 91, cinema, 173; gymnastics, 279n97; 257N58, 257N60, 257N61, 260N20,

heroic realism in work of, 176-77, 262n39; Exhibition of Original Icon 188, 189, 202; influence of American Paintings and Lubki (Vystavka origicinema on, 170; kino-fist imagery of, nal’nykh ikon i lubkhov), 105; 5 x 5 = 25, 189; liquid images, 198, 199f17, 200, 1553 First Exhibition of Painterly 202-3, 227-28; Malevich’s criticism of, Reliefs (Pervaia vystavka zhivopisnykh 196, 281n23; Meyerhold’s collaboration rel’ efov), 142; First Futurist Exhibition

with, 156; montage techniques of, of Paintings Tramway V (Pervaia 26-27, 164, 176, 193, 196, 202, 204-6, Futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 279N96, 284n63; on the phi effect, 206; ‘Tramvai V’), 135, 145, color plate 8; speed used by, 197, 201, 283n38; on Goncharova solo exhibit (1913), 113, theatrical stunts, 188, 279n96; on total- 116; Jack of Diamonds (Bubnovyi

ity of movement (tselokupnost’), valet), 105; Last Futurist Exhibit 275n37; tricks of, 279n101; tye-fe- 0.10 (Poslednaia futuristicheskaia trenage (actor-training program), vystavka kartin 0.10), 97, 131, 138, 279n97; violence in films of, 201-2, 139, 141-45; No. 4, 97, 104, 126; The 203-4; woRKS: Battleship Potemkin Store (Magazin), 146; Target (Bronenosets Potemkin), 164, 177, 203-4; (Mishen’), 104; World of Art (Mir The General Line (Generalnaia linia), iskusstva), 104, 122 226; October (Oktiabr’), 177, 189, 192,

206-7, 207118, 208, 284n63; The Old Fabri, Morits, 103 and the New (Staroe i novoe, or Gener- _ face painting, 101—2, 115, 258n3, 258n5,

alPnaia lintia | The General Line] ), 177, 262N40 189, 208, 225-27, 279n101; The Strike, Fairbanks, Douglas, 172, 184 163, 177, 188, 189, 192-93, 201—4, 228 faktura (texture): counter-reliefs (kontr-

electroorganism, 157-58 reVefy), 141-45, 146, 1483 in cuboThe Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi) (Ver- futurist painting, 77, 255n28; defined, tov): industrialization in, 198; light 144; factography compared with, 163; metaphors in, 198, 282n27; reviews of, in Russian verse, 77, 78, 255n28; sound 282n28, 282n29; speed in, 197, 199-200; texture (zvukovaia faktura), 81-82;

water themes in, 198, 199f17, 200 and three-dimensional works, 34,

Index 303 144-45, 148, 269n34; of words, 77, 78, Flint, R. W., 23

81-82, 255n28 Florensky, Pavel, 261n29

Feininger, Lyonel, 10, 19, 262n41 The Flyer (Letun) (flying device created FEKS (The Workshop of the Eccentric by Miturich), 153, 154, 27055

Actor), 177, 185, 193 Foregger, Nikolay, 171-72, 279n97 Feldman, Konstantin, 216, 278n91, 284n57. ~—fourth dimension: Boccioni on the, 124,

Fer, Briony, 241n32 265n80, 265n83; rayism (/uchizm) on, Ferdinandov, Boris, 278n83 8, 102, 103, 104, 123, 125, 127; scientific ferroconcrete poetry, 24, 64, 93-97, 93f2, speculation on, 123-24 258n69, 258N71, 258n72. See also French visual arts, 10, 16, 106, 248n38,

Kamensky, Vasily 281n25

Figaro (French newspaper), 38 futurism: journals, 64, 69, 91, 117, 194,

Filippov, Nikolay, 146 280n12; manifestos of, 37, 101-2, 103, film audiences: adjustment to rapid 107, 115, 122, 125, 245N10, 262n40; motions, 212-13, 218—19; for agit-film, Orphist school, 17, 243n49; photog175, 176; Bolshevik party’s goals, 185; raphy, 11, 15, 21-22, 241n25, 242n43.

changing perceptiveness of, 211-12; See also constructivism; ego-futurism empathy with rebellion, 214; engage- (ego-futurizm); syntax; words; and

ment with film images, 165—66; cinema headings engagement with speed by, 213-14, futurist poetry: borrowed words used by, 221-23, 221f24; intellectual montage of 69; internal velocity of, 46—47; linguis-

Eisenstein, 284n63; manipulation of tic elicitation of speed, 37-38; rejection reality, 185; Marxist consciousness of, of classic Russian authors, 33-34; 189; negative impact of cinema on, Soviet cinema, 193, 194, 280n4; West169; Pudovkin on, 208-9; in rural ern language used by, 69; Zang Tumb areas, 174-75, 276n57; for Soviet cin- Tumb (Marinetti), 21, 40, 244n62. See ema, 174-76, 276n56, 276n58; Soviet also Kamensky, Vasily; Kruchenykh, government on accessibility of films Aleksey; Mayakovsky, Vladimir; picto-

for, 225, 284n63 rial verse

5 X 5 = 25 (constructivist exhibit), 155 The Futurists: The First Journal of Russian Five-Year Plan (piatiletka), 193, 225-26, Futurists (Futuristy: Pervyi zhurnal

229, 230, 231, 234 russkikh futuristov), 64, 69, 91

“First All-Russian Congress of Bards of the Future” (Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd Gabo, Naum (né Pevsner), 154, 264n67,

biachei budushchego), 83 271N60

First Exhibition of Painterly Reliefs Gan, Aleksey, 161, 162, 163, 171, 272n76

(Pervaia vystavka zhivopisnykh Gardin, Vladimir, 168

rel’efov), 142 Gastev, Aleksey, 271n69 First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings German cinema, 178, 275-76n47, 281n25 Tramway V (Pervaia Futuristicheskaia Ginzburg, Moisey, 148 vystavka kartin “Tramvai V’), 135, 145, Gleizes, Albert, 124

color plate 8 Gnedov, Vasilisk, 68, 85-87, 97

First International Workingmen’s Associ- Gogol, Nikolay, 41, 42, 248n37

ation, 149 Gombrich, Ernst, 12, 106

Fischinger, Oskar, 281n25 Goncharova, Natalya: athletics in works

Flaherty, Robert, 179 of, 116, 263n49; canvas of, 101; face

304 Index Goncharova, Natalya (continued ) (cubo-futurist almanac), 54, 119, drawings in futurist film, 258n5; forms 120f6 of speed in works of, 104; on the Henderson, Linda, 123, 124 future of modern Russian art, 128; Hercules (Gerkules) (sports journal),

nature motifs in works of, 108; 263N52 neoprimitivism, 105, 116—17; in Paris, Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 161-62

266n91; physical labor in works of, Hinton, Charles Howard, 123 116-17; poetry illustrated by, 40, 89; Hitchcock, Alfred, 179 rayism (luchizm), 25, 44, 103, 119, Hollywood: Americanism (Amerikan120f6, 256—-57n57; Russian identity in shchina), 161, 162, 170, 275n39; chase art of, 103; the “shift” (sdvig) in works scenes, 175, 178-80, 276n60, 277N76;

of, 112; solo exhibit (1913), 113, 116; continuity editing, 171, 208; the detectheory of a fourth dimension, 123, tive story, 170-71, 275n40; impact on 125; the West rejected by, 107, 261n28; Soviet cinema, 163, 170, 178, 275n393;

works: Airplane over a Train (Aero- Russian cinema and, 173-74 plan nad poezdom), 112-13, 112f4; The horses, 18, 21-22, 110—11, 181, 210 Boat Race (Gonki grebstov), 116; Cyclist | Hughes, Robert, 242n48 ( Velosipedist), 113, 114f5, 116, 117, 144, human body: close-up shot of, 187, 189;

262n41; Drama in the Futurists’ Caba- in constructivism, 151-53, 152f13, 156, ret No. 13 (Drama v kabare futuristov 183, 186, 278n82; costume design, No. 13), 194, 258n5, 280n10; Dynamo 266n6; disappearance of, in cuboMachine (Dinamo-mashina), 110; Fac- futurism, 117-18, 119-20, 263n56, tory (Fabrika), 112; Football (Futbol), 263n57, color plate 5; in D. W. Griffith 116; The Harvesting of Wheat ( Uborka films, 173; in electroorganic paintings,

khleba), 116-17; Head of a Clown 157-58; heroic realism and, 176-77, (Golova klouna), 119; “Rayists and 188, 189, 202; mechanization of, 151-53, Futurists: A Manifesto,” 103, 107, 125, 152f13, 156, 183, 186, 278n82; Monument 259-60n12; Skating (Sketing), 116; Swim- to the Third International (Pamuiatnik mers ( Plovtsy), 116; War: Mystical Images III Internatsionalu) (Tatlin), 26, of War, 267n11; The Woodchopper (Dro- 148-50, 150f12, 271N71; motion and, vokol), 116-17; Wrestlers (Bortsy), 116; 183, 278n83; of the new Soviet individYellow and Green Forest: Rayist Con- ual, 187; overlapping shots of, 163, struction (Zhelto-zelenyi les: Luchistatia 189-90, 189f16; painting of, 55, 101-2,

konstruktsi1a), 108, color plate 3 115, 258n3, 258n5, 262n40; tye-fe-

Gorky, Maxim, 22 trenage (actor-training program),

Gray, Camilla, 266—67n8 279n97; workers’ hands in The Man Griffith, D. W., 172-73, 178-79, 182, 277N74 with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s

Groys, Boris, 232, 236 kinoapparatom), 204-5. See also athGumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 116 letes and athleticism Gumilev, Nikolay, 252n86 Huygens, Christiaan, 6 Gunning, Tom, 179, 183 Hylaea (Gileia), 38 Guro, Elena, 42—44, 46, 133, 253N93

Guys, Constantin, 16, 282n29 icons: Black Square (Chernyi kvadrat) (Malevich) hung as, 139, 280n15;

Haber, Samuel, 14 Christ figures and, 58; exhibitions of, A Hatchery of Judges II (Sadok Sudet I) 105; flowing color technique, 108;

Index 305 lubok, 25, 104, 105; rendering of light aviation and, 33, 62, 63, 93-94, 136, in, 107, 115, 260n19; visual perspectives 252-53N91, 253n94; on Café Pit-

of, 105-6, 160n22, 260n22 toresque (Kafe Pittoresk) exhibit, 147; Ignatev, Ivan, 36, 87, 251n69 on the circus, 64, 253n97; egocentrism

Ignatovsky, V. S., 240n14 of, 55, 63-66; ferroconcrete poems “T” in Russian futurism, 36, 53-55, 60—62, (zhelezobetonnye poemy) of, 95,

250—51N67 258n72; instructions to readers, 94, 95; Ilinsky, Igor, 185 Italian futurism and, 24, 41; on neoindustrialization: avant-garde art, 147—48; primitivism, 62; Nietzsche’s influence cameraman image, 201; efficiency, 14, on, 250—51n67; typographical forms 156, 162-63, 179, 242N36, 271N69, of, 63, 65-66, 95; WORKS: “The Airplane 276n56; The Eleventh Year (Odinnad- and First Love” (“Aeroplan i pervaia tsaty1) (Vertov), 198; Five-Year Plan liubov”), 63; An Aviator’s Life (Zhizw’ (piatiletka), 193, 225-26, 229, 230, 231, aviatorskaia), 63, 253n94; “Bathhouses 234; hydro-electric stations, 198; and (“Bani”), 95; “The Cabaret Zone” notions of acceleration, 148; in Soviet (“Kabare zon”), 95; “A Challenge” propaganda, 213; Taylorism, 14, 156, (“Vyzov”), 63-64, 953 “The Cinema” 242N36, 271N69; time, 5—6, 11, 14, 21-23, (“Kinematograf”), 95; “Constanti29, 45, 48, 60, 231-36, 285n4; train nople,” 953; “I” (“Ia”), 65-66; Life with

tracks symbolizing, 217, 218-19 Mayakovsky (Zhizw’ s Matakovskim), In’shakov, Aleksandr, 259n10, 262n41 62, 251-52n74; “Nitikin’s Circus”

Isakov, Sergey, 144 (“Tsirk Nikitina”), 95; “The S. I. Italian futurists: aesthetics of speed in Shchukin Palace” (“Dvorets S. I. Knife Grinder: Principle of Flickering Shchukina”), 95; “The Skating Rink” (Tochil’shchik: Printsip mel kantia) (“Sketing rin”), 95-96, 258n71, color (Malevich), 266—67n8; Carlo Carré, 17, plate 1; Tango with Cows (Tango s 38, 243n53; dynamism, 17, 18-19, 22, 233 korovamt), 24, 64, 93-95, 93f2; “Vasily

Gino Severini, 17, 38; glorification of the Wanderer” (“Strannik Vasilii’), war by, 133, 267n11; lines of force 52-53; Way of the Enthusiast ( Put’ (linee-forzi), 18, 19, 103, 107, 243N53, entuziasta), 54, 252—53Nn91 257n66; linguistic aspects of, 21, 35, Kandinsky, Vassily, 13, 64, 105, 243n49,

36-38, 244nN63, 245n10; motion pic- 245n6 tures, 11; rayists compared with, 102; Kant, Immanuel, 6 vorticism, 19, 242n46. See also Boc- Kasianov, V., 258n5, 280n10 cioni, Umberto; Marinetti, Filippo Katayev, Valentin, 29, 231-36, 285n2,

Tommaso; Russian futurists 285n4, 285n9 Kaufman, Mikhail, 200—201, 218, 219,

Jack of Diamonds (Bubnovyi valet) 282n31 (avant-garde exhibit), 105 Kaufman, Naum, 282n29 Janecek, Gerald, 28, 78-80, 247n33, Keaton, Buster, 172, 184

256—-57N57, 258n69 Kepes, Gyorgy, 17-18 Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile, 183 Kepley, Vance, 172, 209

Joyce, James, 10 Kern, Stephen, 11, 28 Khardzhiev, Nikolay, 40, 77, 248n37, Kalatozov, Mikhail, 229 250n61 Kamensky, Vasily: art training of, 40; Khersonsky, Khrisanf, 284n57

306 Index Khlebnikov, Velemir: airplanes as sym- Koltsov, Mikhail, 282n28 bols of acceleration, 62, 136; on Café Komarov, Sergey, 172, 184 Pittoresque (Kafe Pittoresk) exhibit, Konchalovsky, Pyotr, 116 147; cubo-futurist verse of, 133; influ- Kovtun, Yevgeny, 259n10, 268n21 ence of Walt Whitman on, 251n69; Kozintsev, Grigory, 177, 185, 193 on Marinetti’s visit to Russia, 38; Kracauer, Siegfried, 178, 179, 277n71 Miturich’s collaborations with, 154, Kruchenykh, Aleksey: art training of, 40; 271n59; neologisms of, 35, 37, 77; 78, at “First All-Russian Congress of

136, 154; Nietzsche’s influence on, Bards of the Future” (Pervyi vseros250—51n67; rejection of poetic tradi- siiskii s'ezd biachei budushchego), 83; tions, 33, 34; Tatlin’s collaborations instructions to readers, 79, 83, 97; on with, 271n59; and transrational poetry, Italian futurism, 40; linguistic innova88—89, 129, 224; WORKS: “Incantation tions in futurist poetry, 37, 80-83; by Laughter” (“Zaklatie smekhom”), rejection of poetic traditions, 33, 34; 77; The Letter as Such” (“Bukva kak shift-image (sdvig-obraz), 73-74; speed takovaia”), 88-89; “A Sample of Word in works of, 83; verbal dynamism of, Innovation in Language” (“Obrazchik 41, 80-83; zaum (transrational slovonoshestv v iazyke”), 35; “The poetry), 25, 79, 80, 82, 84, 88-89, 9of!1, Word as Such” (“Slovo kak takovoe”), 224; WORKS: “Declaration of the Word

88, 97, 258n73; Worldbackwards as Such” (“Deklaratsiia slova kak (Mirskontsa), 255n32; Zangezi (play), takovoe”), 79; Deimo, 82, 83; “Despair”

271n59; Zoo (Zverinets), 251n69 (“Otchaianie”), 74; “Dyr bul shchyl,” Khudakoy, S., 91, 256-5757, 257n60, 80; Explodity ( Vzorval’), 83, 89, 9of1,

257N61 132-33, 256n46; Let’s Grumble ( Vozrop-

kinesthesia (Vorkapich), 163-64, 166—67, shchem), 81-82; “The Letter as Such”

27313 (“Bukva kak takovaia”), 88—89; “New

kineticism, 191; Charlie Chaplin’s move- Ways of the Word (the language of the ments, 172; lighting, 146-47; and suspen- future, death to Symbolism)” (“Novye sion of suprematist assemblages, 142, puti slova [iazyk budushchego smert’ 143f11, 144, 146; of three-dimensional simvolizmu]”), 81; poems in War

works, 142—45, 148, 269n34 ( Voina), 133; Pomade (Pomada), 80; kinoks (film collective), 175, 177, 198, 223 The Shiftology of Russian Verse ( SdvigKino-Photo ( Kino-fot) (film journal): on ilogiia russkogo stikha), 73; Texture of

agit-films, 175-76; Aleksey Gan and, the Word (Faktura slov), 81, 82; Victory 161, 163, 171; constructivism and, over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem), 161-63, 171, 272n76; on Hollywood 83, 129, 266n1, 266n6; “The Word as movies, 170, 171; influence of, 162; Lef Such” (“Slovo kak takovoe’”), 88, 97, (futurist journal), as replacement for, 258n73; Worldbackwards (Mirskontsa),

194, 280n12; Mayakovsky on Soviet 255n32 cinema, 162, 191, 193; Western film Kulbin, Nikolay, 8, 89, 90

criticism in, 161 Kuleshov, Lev: agit-train involvement, Kirby, Lynne, 214 175, 276n60; Americanism (AmerikanKiss of Mary Pickford (Potselui Meri shchina), 161, 162, 170, 171, 275N39;3

Pikford) (Komarov), 172, 184 chase scenes of, 179, 180, 183, 184; on Kliun, Ivan, 131, 134-35, 145, 267n14, color D. W. Griffith, 173, 182; editing tech-

plate 8 niques of, 26, 27, 164, 180-82, 1813

Index 307 kinesthetic methods of, 278n82; Dancers (Tantsutushchie), 117; The works: Death Ray (Luch smerti), 184; Donkey’s Tail and Target (Osliny1 Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West khvost 1 mishen’), 91, 117, 257058, in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Neoby- 257n60, 257n61; Drama in the Futurchainye prikliuchentia Mistera Vesta v ists’ Cabaret No. 13 (Drama v kabare strane bol’shevikov), 27, 178, 180-81, futuristov No. 13), 194, 258n5, 280n10; 182, 182f14, 197, 275n39; On the Red Female Acrobat (Acrobatka), 117; Glass

Front (Na Krasnom fronte), 175, (Steklo), 122-23; Head of a Bull

276n60 (Golova byka), 261n34, 263n57; illus-

Kupka, Frank, 13 trations in Le Futur (Bolshakov), 117;

Kuzmin, Georgy, 33-34 illustrations in Pomade (Pomada), 80; “Pictorial Rayism,” 122, 127, 258—59n6;

Laforgue, Jules, 248n38 Portrait of a Fool (Portret duraka), 119, Landscape Rushing By (Probegaiushchiu 264n58; Portrait of Vladimir Burliyuk peizazh) (Kliun), 135, 145, color plate 8 (Portret Vladimira Burliyuk), 1173; Por-

Lang, Fritz, 275-76n47 trait of V. Tatlin (Portret V. Tatlina), Larionov, Mikhail: athletics in works of, 114-15, 119; Quarrel in a Tavern (Ssora 117, 118, 263n49; bird motifs of, 108, v kabachke), 117; “Rayist Painting” 261n34; constructivist criticism of, (“Luchistskaia zhivopis’”), 107, 122, 271n60; The Donkey’s Tail (Oslinyi 125-26, 251n69, 259n7; Rayist Portrait

khvost) (futurist exhibit), 260n20, of Natalya Goncharova (Luchisty1 262n39; end of career, 127, 266n91; portret Natal’i Goncharovot), 119, exhibits of, 97, 104, 105; face painting 120f6; “Rayists and Futurists: A Maniof, 101, 258n3, 258n5; farmyard motifs festo,” 103, 107, 125, 259—-60n12; Rayist of, 108, 119, 261N34, 263n57, color plate Sausage and Mackerel, 122-23; Rooster

2; founding of rayism (/uchizm), 102; and Hen (Petukh 1 kuritsa), 108,

on futurism and the human body, 261n34, color plate 2; Scene—The 262n40; influence of Whitman’s Leaves Cinema (Kinematograf), 110, 26239; of Grass on, 251n69; on Marinetti’s “Soldiers” series, 105; Sunny Day: visit to Russia, 39, 246—47n21; neo- Pneumo-Rayist Composition (Solnechprimitivism art of, 104; nonobjectivity nyi der’: Pnevmoluchistaia kompoziof, 259n10; parody used by, 261n34; tslia), 126, 127, 266n88; “Why We Paint

passage used by, 114-15; pneumo- Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto” rayism (pnevmoluchizm), 125-26, (“Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: 266n90; poetry illustrated by, 40; Manifest futuristov”), 101—2, 115,

rayist painting and, 91, 107, 122, 262N40 256-5757, 25907; rayist verse and, Lartigue, Jacques Henri, 244n64 257n61; on Russian icon painters, Last Futurist Exhibit 0.10 (Poslednaia 105-6; Russian identity in art of, 103; futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin Target (Mishen’) exhibit organized by, 0.10), 97, 131, 138, 139, 141-45 104, 122, 131, 264n58; theory of afourth Lawton, Anna, 280n4 dimension, 123, 125, 127, 265n83; World — Lazarenko, Vitaly, 64

of Art (Mir iskusstva) (avant-garde Lef (avant-garde Soviet filmmakers), 194, exhibit), 122; works: Boulevard Venus 280n12 (Venera na bul’vare), 111, 117,122, color _ Lef (futurist journal), 194, 280n12 plate 4; The City (Gorod), 110-11; The Léger, Fernand, 10, 16, 17, 281n25

308 Index Lenin, Vladimir, 149, 198, 199f17, 242n36 and the New (Staroe i novoe, or Gener-

Letatlin (flying machine created by al naia lintia | The General Line] ) Tatlin), 26, 270n49, 271n59 (Eisenstein), 227—28; The Eleventh

Levkievsky, Viacheslav, 103 Year (Odinnadtsaty1) (Vertov),

Lewis, Wyndham, 19 199-200; ethos of acceleration, 148; Leyda, Jay, 172, 175 mechanization of the human body, Herbier, Marcel, 281n25 151-53, 152f13, 156, 183, 186, 278n82

68 156-57

“The Liberation of the Word” The Magnanimous Cuckold ( Velikodush(“Osvobozhdenie slova’) (Livshits), ny1 rogonosets) (Crommelynck),

light: depictions in Russian icons, 107, Makovsky, Sergey, 264n65 261n29; electroorganism, 157; in exhi- Malevich, Kazimir: alogical period (alobitions, 146-47; in French impression- gizm) of, 135-36; cosmic dynamism, ism, 16; in icons, 107, 115; metaphors 141; costume design of, 83, 118; at for, 198, 282n27; rayism (luchizm), 102, “First All-Russian Congress of Bards 122; Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad of the Future” (Pervyi vserossiiskii solntsem) (futurist opera), 130; X-rays, s'ezd biachei budushchego), 83; on the

10, 102, 121—22, 264n66 fourth dimension, 118, 125, 127, 135-363 liquid images: Battleship Potemkin (Bro- human form in works of, 270n50; nenosets Potemkin) (Eisenstein), intuition, 135, 136, 139, 268n19; neo203-4; cream-separator sequence in primitivism, 131; nonfigurative forms, The Old and the New (Staroe i novoe, 119, 192; peasant paintings of, 119, 131;

or Generalnata lintia | The General poetry illustrated by, 40, 89; on primiLine]) (Eisenstein), 227-28; The tive art forms, 105; rejection of natural Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsaty1) (Vertov), forms, 138, 268n21; on Soviet cinema, 198, 199f17, 200; hosing sequence in 194-95, 196, 280n16, 281n23; supernatThe Strike (Eisenstein), 201-2, 204, 228 uralism, 268n21; suprematism and,

Lissitzky, El, 151-53, 152f13 25-26, 87, 118, 130, 131, 138, 140—41, The Little Red Devils (Krasnye @iavoliata) 263N54, 267—68n17; on Vertov’s films,

(Perestyani), 180, 197 195—96, 225, 280—81n18, 281—82n25; Livshits, Benedikt, 38, 39, 68, 124-25, visual orientation of, 89, 91; WORKS:

247n22 Airplane Flying (Suprematism) (Polet

Lloyd, Harold, 172, 178, 184 aeroplana [|Suprematizm]), 118, Lobachevsky, Nikolay, 123 139-40, color plate 6; “The Artist and Lodder, Christina, 142, 155 the Cinema” (“Khudozhnik i kino”), Lotov, Anton, 257n61 1953 Aviator, 136, 137f10; Black Square

lubok, 25, 104, 105 (Chernyt kvadrat), 139, 280n15; Color

Lukhmanov, Nikolay, 226 Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 118; Lumiére, Louis and Auguste, 22 Death of a Man Simultaneously in an Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 162, 269n38 Airplane and on a Railway (Smert’ cheloveka odnovremenno na aeroplane

Mach, Ernst, 6-7, 240n11 i zhelznot doroge), 132-33, 132f8; décor machinery: Ballet mécanique (Léger), 10, in Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad 17, 281n25; Battleship Potemkin (Bro- solntsem), 130; “Dynamic and Kinetic nenosets Potemkin) (Eisenstein), 204; Futurism,” 138; Dynamic Suprematism: cream-separator sequence in The Old Supremus No. 57 | Dinamichesku

Index 309 suprematizm: Supremus No. 57], 140; 218-19; utopianismM in, 201, 223, 2243

“From Cubism and Futurism to workers’ hands in, 204-5 Suprematism: The New Pictorial Marc, Franz, 19 Realism” (“Ot kubizma i futurizma k Marcadé, Jean-Claude, 138 suprematizmu: Novyi zhivopisnyi Marey, Etienne-Jules, 21, 22, 263n49 realizm” ), 26, 139, 141; Head of a Peas- Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: on airplanes,

ant Girl (Golova krestianskoi 62; cult of speed, 17; on linguistic devushkt), 119; “And Images Triumph innovations in futurist poetry, 37-38; on the Screens” (“T likuiut liki na Moscow visit of, 24, 38-39, 246n19, ekranakh”), 195, 280-8118; Knife 246—47n21; on the poetic “I,” 54; RusGrinder: Principle of Flickering sian futurists and, 37—41, 245n10, (Tochil’shchik: Printstp mel’kantia), 246n19, 246—47n21; Shershenevich on, 131, 133, 266—67n8; Morning after a 24, 246n16; on sports, 115; “whirling Snowstorm in the Country (Utro posle propeller” doctrine, 37; “words in v iugi v derevne), 131; Moving Carriage freedom,’ 34, 37, 69; WORKS: “Decon-

(Ekipazh v dvizhenit), 132, 133; struction of Syntax,” 39, 116; “The “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Founding and Manifesto of FuturCinema” (“Zhivopisnye zakony v ism,” 3, 37-38, 245n10; Zang Tumb problemakh kino”), 194-95, 198, 225, Tumb, 21, 40, 244n62 281N23, 281-82n25; Quadrilateral Markov, Vladimir (pseudonym for (Chetyreugol’nik), 139; Suprematism: Voldemars Matvejs), 269n34 Painterly Realism of a Football Player, Markov, Vladimir (scholar), 245n10 118; Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Martin, Marianne, 18, 241n25 Rectangles (Suprematizm |s vosnviu Martinet, Marcel, 272n76 priamougol’nikami]), 139; White Marxism, 130, 147, 149, 155-56, 176, 189,

Square on White (Belyi kvadrat na 209, 211-12

belom), 140—41 Mashkoy, Ilya, 116

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 248n38 Matyushin, Mikhail: “First All-Russian

Malmstad, John, 266n88 Congress of Bards of the Future” The Man with the Movie Camera (Pervyi vserossiiskii s’ezd biachei (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (Vertov): budushchego), 83; on the fourth arrested movement in, 200—201; dimension, 125, 265n80; four-tone “Awakening” segment in, 218-20; compositions of, 266n2; A Hatchery “Cameraman and Machines” segment of Judges II (Sadok Sudet IT), 54, 119; in, 200—201, 282n31, 283n39; camera- instructions for viewers of avantmen for, 218-19, 283n39; cinematic garde art, 120-21; on nonfigurative suspense in, 219; cities in, 192, 194, portraiture, 119; organicism founded 196—97, 200—201, 221, 277-78n80, by, 264n61; on scientific discovery, 8; 281-82n25; dynamism in, 197, 201, score in Victory over the Sun (Pobeda 281-82n25; as film poem, 194; montage nad solntsem), 129 sequence in, 200-201, 282n31; “Motor- | Mayakovsky, Vladimir: airplanes as sym-

cycle and Carousel” segment in, bols of acceleration, 62; art training 222-23, 222f25, 283-84n55; nondi- of, 40, 74; cat imagery, 49, 250n60; on egetic shots in, 213; reception of, the cinema, 169, 191, 194, 274-75n34;

224-25, 284n57; Street and Eye city’s speed in works of, 42; Gogol’s sequence in, 205, 207-8; trains in, influence on, 248n37; influence on

310 Index Mayakovsky, Vladimir (continued ) montage: accelerated montage, 164, Vertov, 193-94; insanity motifs of, 203-4, 205, 219; in agit-films, 175; asso57-59; Lef (futurist journal), 194, clative montage, 198; “Cameraman 280n12; linguistic forms of dynamism, and Machines” segment in The Man 47, 72, 76, 248n34; Nietzsche’s influ- with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s ence on, 250—51n67; rejection of poetic kinoapparatom) (Vertov), 200-201, traditions, 33, 34, 41; self-promotion 282n31; collision in, 206—7; construcby, 55-60, 251n72; Shershenevich’s tivist cinema, 26, 27, 163-64, 273n9;

imitation of, 252n86; on Soviet heroic realism, 176-77; and the human Union’s potential, 285-86n13; on body, 183, 199; and mechanical gestures, urban dynamism, 24, 47-52, 563 183; parallel montage, 173, 182; phi WORKS: ~ Lhe Achievements of Futur- effect, 203, 205-6, 283n38; rapid monism” (“Dostizheniia futurizma’), 55; tage, 163-64, 180-82, 193, 199, 206-11, Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13 213, 214, 217, 273n13; revolutionary

(Drama v kabare futuristov No. 13), principles in, 192; simulation of fired 194, 258n5, 280n10; essays in Kino- bullets, 206—7, 207f18; and “theory of Photo (Kino-fot), 162, 191, 193; “A Few intervals” (Vertov), 164, 193, 194, 203,

Words about My Mama” (“Neskol’ko 204-5, 207, 282n31; vertical montage,

slov 0 moei mame”), 57; “A Few 205-6. See also Eisenstein, Sergey; Words about Myself” (“Neskol’ko Kuleshoy, Lev; Vertov, Dziga slov obo mne samom’), 58; “From Montagu, Ivor, 167 Street to Street” (“Tz ulitsy v ulitsu”), Monument to the Third International 74—75, 194, 255n25; I! (Ja!), 56, 252n77; (Pamiatnik LI Internatsionalu)

“T Myself Arrived” (“Prishedshii (Tatlin), 26, 148-50, 150f12, 271n71 sam”), 55, 251n72; “In an Auto” Morgan, Robert P., 240n21 (“V avto”), 50-52; “March of the Morley, Edward, 7, 239n6 Shock Brigades” (“Marsh udarnykh Moscow, 10, 55—56, 95-96, 145-46, 168, brigad”), 230-31; “Morning” (“Utro”), 258n71, 269n38, color plate 1 34, 743 “Night” (“Noch”), 34, 47-40; Moussinac, Léon, 273n12 “Noisekins, Noises, and Noisings” Muybridge, Eadweard, 21, 22 (“Shumiki, shumy i shumishchi”), 77;

“Theatre, Cinema, Futurism,’ 194; neologisms: aeronautic, 26, 69, 154, 270n49, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy 271n59; budetliane, 38, 107; Death to (Vladimir Matakovskiu: Tragedia), Art (Smert iskusstvu) (Gnedov), 85-87;

58-60, 72, 83, 266N1 Deimo, 82, 83; in futurist poetry, 35, Méliés, Georges, 185 36, 38; of Khlebnikov, 35, 37, 77, 78, Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 251n72 136, 154; kinochestvo, 161, 162, 164; Metz, Christian, 167, 183, 279n101 “songwarrior” (pesneboets), 64;

Metzinger, Jean, 124 Zang Tumb Tumb (Marinetti), 21; Meyerhold, Vsevelod, 156, 272n76 zaum (transrational poetry) and, The Mezzanine of Poetry (Mezonin poezi1), 78-79, 86 24, 36, 44-46, 68, 70, 254n9g, 254N13 neoprimitivism: circus, 117—18, color plate

Michaelson, Albert, 7, 239n6 5; Death to Art (Smert iskusstvu)

Milner, John, 146 (Gnedov), 85-87; exhibits of, 77, 105; Miturich, Pyotr, 153-55, 270N55, 270n56, light source in, 107; lubok, 25, 104, 105;

271N59 motion in, 106; in rayist art, 103; of

Index 311 Russian native art, 131; in Stravinsky (Kruchenykh), 83, 89, 90f1, 132-33, compositions, 266n2; use of term, 105, 256n46; ferroconcrete poetry, 24, 64, 260n19; in work of Russian cubists, 93-97, 93f2; letters in, 88—89, 9of1, 24. See also icons; rayism (luchizm) 92-93; literary rayism (literaturny1

New Economic Plan (NEP), 170 luchizm), 91; pyramidal shapes of, The New One (Novyi) (Lissitzky), 151-53, 91-94, 93f2; sensations of train travel,

152f13 91-92; “The Skating Rink” (“Sketing

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 9, 13, rin”) (Kamensky), 95-96, 258n71,

250—51N67 color plate 1; typography, 20-21, 40,

Nitikin Circus, 64, 95, 253N97, 258n71 63, 74-75, 93-96, 244nN62, 257n66, color

Nizen, Ekaterina, 250n66 plate 1. See also zaum’ (transrational No. 4 (avant-garde exhibit), 97, 104, 126 poetry)

Nordau, Max, 15, 242n40 Piel, Harry, 275-76n47 Novitsky, Paul, 269n44 plastic dynamism, 18, 124, 125, 265n83 Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descen- pneumo-rayism (pnevmoluchizm),

dant un escalier) (Duchamp), 17 125-26, 266n90 Nudes in the Forest (Nus dans la forét) poetic “T,” 54-60, 62, 64, 250-51N67

(Léger), 17 Pomade ( Pomada) (Kruchenykh), 80 Popova, Lyubov, 119, 155, 156-57, 271071,

Olimpov, Konstantin, 62, 249n50 272n76 Olympia IT (Riefenstahl), 187 Pospelov, Gleb, 263n48, 265n85

organicism, 264n61 Pound, Ezra, 19, 24, 242n46

Orphist school, 17, 243n49 productivists ( proizvodstvennik1), 155-56

Ostep, Fedor, 277n77 Prologue “Ego-Futurism” (Prolog “EgoOzonator (Kliun), 267n14 Futurizm”) (Severyanin), 54-55 propaganda: aesthetics of speed, 196;

Palaeschi, A., 257n60 agit-films (agitk1), 174-75, 191, 276n56,

Panofsky, Erwin, 213 276N57, 27658, 276n60; agit-trains

Paris, 10, 149, 266n90, 266n91 (agit-poezd), 174-75, 214, 276n57; cin-

Parnakh, Valentin, 172 ema as tool of, 162-63; distribution

Parton, Anthony, 261n32, 266n88 of, 174-75, 276n57; diving motifs and, Party Conference on Cinema, 225 187; Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.

Perestyani, Ivan, 180, 197 West in the Land of the Bolsheviks Pertsov, Viktor, 284n63 (Neobychainye prikliuchentia Mistera Petri¢, Vlada, 28, 193, 200, 201, 205, Vesta v strane bol’shevikov)

273N17, 278n93, 282N31 (Kuleshov), 178; of Lenin, 174, 177-78; Petrograd. See St. Petersburg mechanized dynamism, 148, 149; Pevsner, Antoine, 154, 271n60 montage used in, 162; newsreels, 175, phi effect, 203, 205-6, 283n38 186, 272n76; proletariat instruction phi leap, 206, 210, 283n39 in, 211-13; in Soviet cinema, 27, 162; photography, 11, 15, 21-22, 241n25, 242n43 trains as tools of, 218 Picasso, Pablo, 16-18, 141-42, 268n28 Protazanov, Yakov, 168

Pickford, Mary, 172, 184 “Proun” (“Project for the Affirmation of pictorial verse: acoustic textures in, the New” [“Proekt utverzhdeniia 80-81; Death to Art (Smert iskusstvu) novogo” |), 151-53, 152f13 (Gnedov), 85-87; Explodity ( Vzorval’) Proust, Marcel, 10

312 Index Pudovkin, Vsevolod: heroic realism in manifest”) (Gabo and Pevsner), 154, works of, 176, 177; influence of Ameri- 271N60 can cinema on, 172, 208; montage Redko, Kliment, 157-58 techniques of, 164, 208-9, 2103; revo- Reeves, Nicholas, 276n57

lutionary themes in works of, 209, Reyshpar, 91, 257n61 211; on use of triuk, 278n89; WORKS: Richter, Hans, 162, 195, 280n17, 281n25

End of St. Petersburg (Konets Sankt- Riefenstahl, Leni, 187 Peterburga), 209, 283n45; Mechanics Rimbaud, Arthur, 248n38 of the Brain (Mekhanika golovnogo Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 146—47, 155, 162,

mozga), 209; Mother ( Mat’), 209; 172, 269N38, 273n9 Storm over Asia (Heir to Genghis Khan Roemer, Olaus Christensen, 239n5 | Potomok Chingis-khana]), 27, 192, Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 121

194, 209-12, 283n45 Room, Abram, 171 Punin, Nikolay, 149 Rosenblum, Robert, 16-17

Puny, Ivan, 139 Rossiansky, M. M., 70, 254n9

Pyast, Vladimir, 87 Rozanova, Olga: airplanes in works of, 133; colorwriting (tsvetopis’), 140; on

Rabinbach, Anson, 28 perception of symmetry, 136, 138; rayism (luchizm): abstraction in, 103, 104, poetry illustrated by, 40, 89; sculp259n10; art exhibitions, 97, 104; colors, tures of, 145-46; use of color by, 140; 108, 262n40; concentrated rayism, velocity in works of, 131; WORKS: 125-26; dating of works, 258—59n6; Automobile (Avtomobil’), 145, 269n373 disappearance of the human body, Bicyclist (The Damn Path) ( Velos1117-18, 119—20, 151, 263N56, 263n57, pedist | chertovo panel’) ), 145, 269n373

color plate 5; everythingism, 104-5; Cityscape (Fire in the City) (Gorodskot face painting, 101-2, 115, 258n3, 258n5, peizazh | Pozhar v gorode] ), 133-34, 262n40; fourth dimension, 8, 102, 103, 134f9; illustrations in War ( Voina), 133;

104, 123, 125, 127; icon assists, 107, The “Moderne” Movie Theater (On the 261n32; impact of science and technol- Street) (Teatr Modern | Na ulitse]), 136, ogy on, 121; importance of intuition, 138; Nonobjective Composition (Supre125, 136, 139, 140, 268n19; light, 102, 107, matism) (Bespredmetnaia kompozitstia

121, 122; literary rayism (literaturnyi | suprematizm]), 140, color plate 7; The luchizm), 91; lubok, 25, 104, 105; Workbox (Rabochatia shkatulka), 145 motion analyzed by, 102, 259n8; Ruskin, John, 15, 242n43 “Pictorial Rayism,” 122, 127, 258-59n6; + Russian cinema: criticism of, 166-67, 169,

plays in, 257n61; pneumo-rayism 274nN31; czarist regime on, 162, 272n6; (pnevmoluchizm), 125-26, 266n90; dramatic pace in, 168, 169, 170; fallacy

portraiture, 114-15, 119-20; rayist of movement in (lozl’ dvizhentia), poetry, 91-94, 257n61; Russian sensi- 169; popularity of, 167—68; as propability in, 103; translations of, 25, 44, ganda, 162—63; slow acting style of, 80, 102, 258-59n6; the West rejected 168—69; special effects in, 26—27; theby, 107, 261n28. See also cubo-futurists; ater as inspiration for, 168-70, 274n25; Goncharova, Natalya; Larionov, Mik- Western cinema and, 168—69, 274n26,

hail; neoprimitivism; suprematism 274n27. See also actors rayonism. See rayism (luchizm) Russian cubo-futurism: Benedikt Livshits “The Realist Manifesto” (“Realisticheskii and, 38, 39, 68, 124-25, 247n22; Elena

Index 313 Guro and, 42—44, 46, 133, 253n93. See Semenov, A., 91, 257N61

also Burliyuk, David; Goncharova, Severini, Gino, 17, 38 Natalya; Khlebnikov, Velemir; Kru- Severyanin, Igor, 36, 38, 45-46, 54-55, chenykh, Aleksey; Larionov, Mikhail; 246N16, 24617, 251n69

neoprimitivism; rayism (luchizm) Shaginian, Marietta, 277n77 Russian futurist poetry: avant-garde Shemshurin, Andrey, 73 painting, 68; cubo-futurists and, 24; Shershenevich, Vadim: airplanes as symdynamism in, 34; illustrations of, 40; bols of acceleration in works of, 62;

and Italian futurist poets, 24, 78; on Andrey Bely’s works, 68, 69, 254n3; poetic “I,” 54-60, 62, 64, 250-51n673 city’s speed in works of, 42, 46-47; rayist poetry, 91-94, 257N61; rejection influences on work of, 252n86; on Italof syntax, 39-40; rhythms and rhymes ian futurism, 38-39, 45—46, 246—47n21; in, 41—42, 70, 77, 85, 177; training as on Marinetti’s visit to Russia, 38-39, painters, 40; word usage in, 34, 35, 246—47n21; The Mezzanine of Poetry 36-38, 40, 47-50, 245n10. See also ego- (Mezonin poezit), 24, 36, 44-46, 68, 70, futurism (ego-futurizm); Kamensky, 254n9, 254n13; self-promotion by, Vasily; Mayakovsky, Vladimir; Sher- 61-62; on word usage in poetry, shenevich, Vadim; A Slap in the Face 68-72, 69, 254N9, 254N13; WORKS: of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshch- “Dotted Line of Futurism” (“Punktir

estvennomu vkusu); zaum (transra- futurizma’), 46; Drama in the Futur-

tional poetry) ists’ Cabaret No. 13 (Drama v kabare Russian futurists: cult of speed of, 23; futuristov No. 13), 194, 258n5, 280n10}; dynamism achieved by, 39—40; “I” in, Fastness (Bystr’), 61-62, 252n85; Futur36, 53-55, 60—62, 250—51n67; influence ism Unmasked (Futurizm bez maski), of Western Europe on, 39; Filippo 67, 69; Green Street (Zelenaia ulitsa),

Tommaso Marinetti and, 37—41, 46, 60-61; “Skyscrapers shake and in 245N10, 246n19, 246—47N21; rejection laughter fall down” (untitled poem), of syntax by, 39-40; Western futurists 70-71; “You Ran Scared, Having

compared with, 68. See also ego- Dropped Your Veil” (“Vy bezhali ispufuturism (ego-futurizm); Mayakovsky, ganno, uroniv vualetku”), 46—47 Vladimir; Severyanin, Igor; Shershene- Shevchenko, Aleksandr, 104; exhibits of,

vich, Vadim; A Slap in the Face of 262n37; flowing color technique on Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchest- icons, 108; letters in rayist paintings

vennomu vkusu) of, 126; on neoprimitivism, 108-9,

Russolo, Luigi, 38, 196 260N19, 262n37; woRKS: Female Rider Ruttmann, Walter, 281n25 (Naezdnitsa), 117-18, color plate 5; Musicians (Muzykanty), 109-10, 109f3 St. Petersburg, 26, 41, 55-56, 129, 148-50, the “shift” (sdvig), 35, 73-75, 111-12, 196

150f12, 266n1 Shklovsky, Viktor, 275n39 Salt, Barry, 181 Shvedchikov, Konstantin, 224 Sarabyanov, Dmitry, 110, 266—67n8 Simmel, Georg, 14

Schapiro, Meyer, 241n32 A Slap in the Face of Public Taste Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 12 (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu Self-Portrait and Portrait of Konchalovsky vkusu) (futurist almanac): aeronautic (Avtoportret 1 portret Konchalovskogo) neologisms in, 69, 154, 255n32; on the

(Mashkov), 116 autonomy of words, 67; Burliyuk’s

314 Index A Slap in the Face of Public Taste transportation; visual perception; and

(continued ) cinema headings; futurist headings

essays in, 34-35, 269n34; as futurist Speed (Skorost’) (Redko), 157-58

manifesto, 33-35; Khlebnikov’s Staiger, Janet, 277n76 aeronautic neologisms in, 154; Stalinism, 29; and audience engagement Mayakovsky’s poems in, 34, 47—48, 74; with film images, 166; doctrine of neologisms for poets of (budetliane, aesthetics, 285n4; Five-Year Plan Hylaea), 38, 107; self-sufficient word, (piatiletka), 193, 225-26, 229, 230, 231, 34, 39, 89; “Texture” (Burliyuk), 77; 234; industrialization, 4; productivity

use of “futurist” in, 38 as goal of, 231-33; uniformity of socialist realism, 29, 225, 232, 233, 236-37 thought under, 236-37, 286n22;

Sokolov, Ippolit, 161, 184, 224-25 utopianism of, 236 Soviet cinema: abstraction in, 195, Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 168 280n17; agit-films (agitk1),174-75,176, | Stapanian, Juliette, 248n34, 250n6o0 191, 276N56, 276N57, 276N58, 276N60; Stepanova, Varvara, 130, 155, 156, 162

American cinema and, 161—63, 170, Stites, Richard, 151, 271n69

171-72, 190, 275n39; audience for, The Store (Magazin) (avant-garde 174-76, 175-76, 276n56, 276n58; chase exhibit), 146 scenes in, 178-80, 183, 184, 277-78n80; Storm over Asia (Heir to Genghis Khan

detective stories’ influence on, 170-71, | Potomok Chingis-khana]) 275n40; development of a motion- (Pudovkin), 27, 209, 211, 212 based aesthetic in, 168, 274n25; FEKS Stravinsky, Igor, 266n2 (The Workshop of the Eccentric Strigalev, Anatoly, 95, 260n14, 270n47 Actor), 177, 185, 193; futurism and, Struve, Gleb, 285n9 193-95, 280n4; German film exports suprematism: airplanes, 139—40; alogical and, 275-76n47; heroic realism in, 176; paintings, 135-36, 138; disappearance intertitles in, 181, 186, 199, 203, 210, 211, of human body in, 151; The Donkey’s

214, 215, 216, 217, 228; journals, 190, Tail (Oslinyi khvost) (futurist 194—95, 196, 216; kinesthesia, 163-64, exhibit), 260n20, 262n39; dynamism, 166—67, 273n13; kinochestvo, 161, 162, 138, 141, 142, 143f11, 144, 146, 267—68n17;

164; Kino-Photo (Kino-fot), 161, 162, El Lissitzky and, 151-53, 15213; evolu272n76; phi effect, 203, 205-6, 283n38; tion of, 138, 140-41; Ivan Kliun and, phi leap, 206, 210, 283n39; restrictions 131, 134-35, 145, 267n14, color plate 8; on, 192-93; socialist realism, 225, 232, Last Futurist Exhibit 0.10 (Poslednaia 233, 236-37; speeding imagery in, 27; futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin stunts in, 183-90, 278n89, 279n96, 0.10), 97, 131, 138, 139, 141-453 Lyubov 281n25; suprematist art in, 195-96; Popova and, 119, 155, 156-57, 271N71, technical efficiency displayed in, 176; 272n76; on modern velocity, 268n19; and Western European film criticism, nonmimetic forms in, 131; philosophi161; Western influences in, 168, 274n26, cal action of, 138, 267—68n17; super274n27, 275n39. See also actors; camera naturalism, 268n21; white phase of, techniques; Kino-Photo (Kino-fot); 140—41; zero abstraction of, 25, 97, 139. Kuleshov, Lev; montage; Vertov, Dziga See also Malevich, Kazimir; rayism special theory of relativity (Einstein), 7, (luchizm); Rozanova, Olga; Soviet cin-

240n8, 240n14 ema; Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad

speed. See airplanes; aviation; montage; solntsem)

Index 315 sword sequence in Storm over Asia(Heir technological innovation: communicato Genghis Khan | Potomok Chingis- tion technologies, 3, 10, 11; as destruc-

khana]|) (Pudovkin), 210, 211 tive, 13-14; in modernist works, 10-11; symbolist poets, 29, 41-43, 73, 77, 248n38, photography, 11, 15, 21-22, 24125,

248n40, 249n42 242n43; productivists (proizvodstvensyntax: cubo-futurists on, 67, 75-76, niki), 155-56; productivity as a result 255n32; depictions of velocity, 93, 94; of, 29, 231-33, 285n4; and time, 5—6, 11,

dynamism, 39—40, 45; in futurist 13-14, 21-23, 29, 45, 48, 60, 231-36, poetry, 37, 39-41, 45, 96-97, 280n4; 285n4; and urban growth, 10; X-rays, poetic abstractionism, 68; in rayist 10, 102, 121—22, 264n66. See also cinema

movement of painting, 91; semantic headings shifts, 194; in transrational poetry, 80, texture. See faktura (texture)

280n4 theater: Central Workers Theater of Proletkult, 188; Experimental Heroic

Tairov, Aleksandr, 156 Theater, 278n83; The “Moderne” Movie Tango with Cows (Tango s korovamt) Theater (On the Street) (Teatr Modern (Kamensky), 24, 64, 93-95, 93f2 [Na ulitse]), 136, 138; Moscow Art Target (Mishen’) (avant-garde exhibit), Theater, 168; Russian cinema and,

104, 122, 131, 264n58 168-70, 194, 274n25; stunts in, 188, Tasteven, Genrikh, 246n16 279n96; “Theatre, Cinema, Futurism” Tatlin, Vladimir: airplanes as symbols of (Mayakovsky), 194 acceleration, 62; “art into life” credo Thompson, Kristin, 277n76 of, 148, 155, 269n44; clothing designs time, 5—6, 11, 21-23, 29, 45, 48, 60, 231-36,

of, 270n49; counter-reliefs (kontrrel’efy) 285n4 of, 141, 142, 143f11, 148; experiments on Time, Forward! ( Vremia, vpered!)

airborne movement, 271n59; flying (Katayev), 29, 231-36, 285n2, 285n4 machine (Letatlin) of, 26, 270n49, Toporkov, A., 151 271n59; human body in works of, 26, trains: agit-trains (agit-poezd), 174-75, 149, 151, 270n49; at Last Futurist 214, 276n57; Airplane over a Train Exhibit 0.10, 141, 142—43, 144; materials (Aeroplan nad poezdom) (Gonused by, 142, 144, 148; nautical themes charova), 112-13, 112f4; Arsenal

of, 141, 268n27; painterly reliefs (Dovzhenko), 216; Blue Express (zhivopsinyi rel’efy), 142; Picasso’s (Goluboi ekspress, or China Express) influence on, 141—42; Portrait of (Trauberg), 214-15; camera shots of, V. Tatlin (Portret V. Tatlina) (Lari- 163, 217, 218-19; dynamism symbolized Onov), 114-15, 119; protoconstructivist by, 59; images of speed in poetry, works of, 130; speed in works of, 26; 19—20, 91-92; progress symbolized use of texture (faktura) in works of, by, 217, 218, 234, 2353 Sensory impres144-45; WORKS: Corner Counter-Relief, sions of travel, 91, 92-93, 2123 in

142, 143f11; Monument to the Third Soviet propaganda, 213-14; as symInternational (Pamuiatnik III Interna- bol of revolutionary activity, 214, tsionalu), 26, 148-50, 150f12, 271n71 215-16; in urban landscape, 3, 10; Taylorism (Richard Taylor), 14, 156, velocity of, 213-14; viewers’ perception 162—63, 242N36, 271N69, 276N56 of, 91, 212 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Litera- Tramway V (futurist exhibit), 135, 145,

ture” (Marinetti), 37 color plate 8

316 Index transportation: automobiles, 8, 10, 50-52, (futurist opera), 130; in works of Sev53, 69, 212, 248n40; bicycles, 10, 113, eryanin, 55 114f5, 115-16, 144, 145, 262N41, 269n37;

motorcycles as examples of, 246n17; Van Gogh, Vincent, 267n9 railways, 10, 15, 19-20, 174-75, 214, velocity: of the city, 47-52; determination 276n57; in Soviet propaganda, 213. See of, 5, 7; disintegration of natural

also trains world, 133; electroorganism, 157-58; tional poetry) 67-68; kinesthesia (Vorkapich), Trauberg, Ilya, 163, 177, 185, 192, 193, 163—64, 166—67, 273n13; kinochestvo, 213-15 161, 162, 164; psychological impact of,

transrational poetry. See zaum’ (transra- futurist expressions of, 17-18, 36,

Trauberg, Leonid, 177 13-15; in rayist poetry, 91-93; Soviet

Tretyakov, Sergey, 36, 272n76 citizen’s adjustment to, 219—23; supretriuk, 183-88, 190, 278n89, 279n96 matism on, 25—26, 118, 139, 140,

Trotsky, Lev, 252n77 268n19, color plate 6; Victory over the Tsivian, Yuri, 169, 179, 274n31, 284n58 Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem) (futurist

Tugendkhold, Yakov, 260n14 opera), 130. See also human body; Tupitsyn, Margarita, 280n16 Soviet cinema; visual perception; and

Turin, Viktor, 27, 216, 217 poetry headings

Turksib (Turin), 27, 216, 217f22 Verhaeren, Emile, 248n38 tye-fe-trenage (actor-training program), — Vertov, Dziga: agit-films of, 175; camera

279n97 techniques in films of, 185-88, 187f15,

Tynianov, Yuri, 273n13 238n39, 278n91, 278n93; crowd scenes

typography, 63; calligrammes (Apolli- in films of, 173; on film’s dynamism, naire), 20—21; depictions of velocity, 166, 196—98, 204-5; on heroic realism, 21, 93, 94; innovations in, 20—21; 177; influence of American culture on,

movement indicated by, 95-96, 170, 251n69; kinesthetic approach to 257n66, color plate 1; semantic dis- propaganda, 218; kinochestvo, 161, 162, placements, 74-75; Zang Tumb Tumb 164; Kino-Pravda newsreels, 186; light

(Marinetti), 21, 40, 244n62 metaphors, 198, 282n27; Malevich on films of, 195-96, 225, 280-8118,

Udaltsova, Nadezhda, 146 281-82n25; Mayakovsky’s influence Union of Youth (Soiuz molodezhi), on, 193-94; montage techniques of,

255n28, 269n34 26, 163, 164, 194, 198-200, 273n9; phi

Uspensky, Boris, 260n22 effect, 203, 205-6; phi leap used by, Uspensky, Pyotyr, 123-24 283n39; “showing of the thing,” 281n18; utopianism: apocalyptic motifs, 59, speed in works of, 199-200, 213, 235-36, 286n19; in Bolshakov’s verse, 218-22, 221f24, 281n25; “theory of 44-45; Café Pittoresque (Kafe Pit- intervals,” 164, 193, 194, 203, 204-5, toresk), 146—47, 269n38; cinematic 207, 282n31; WORKS: Cinema Truth techniques, 185, 187; citizens’ engage- (Kino Pravda), 272n76; Enthusiasm ment with speed, 223; constructivism, (Entuziazm), 229; Kino-Eye ( Kino130; in Soviet cinema, 27, 201, 223, 2243 glaz), 163, 177, 186—87, 187f15, 189, 193,

sports, 116; suprematism and, 141; Tay- 273n9; °Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” 198; lorism, 14, 156, 242n36, 271n69; Victory A Movie Camera Race Moscow—Arctic

over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem) Ocean (Probeg kinoapparata Moskva—

Index 317 Ledovitit okean), 186; A Sixth of the Weber, Anton, 266n2

World (Shestaia chast mira), 216, White, John, 257n66 273n9, 278n94; Stride, Soviet! (Shagai, Whitman, Walt, 251n69 Sovet!), 217-18; “WE: Variant of a Wings (Kry?ia) (flying device created Manifesto,’ 161, 171, 223. See also The by Miturich), 153, 155, 27055 Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsaty1) (Ver- words: in cubo-futurist paintings, 136, tov); The Man with the Movie Camera 137f10; dynamism, 39—40; expressions (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (Vertov) of city’s speed in, 42, 46—47; liberation

Vesnin, Aleksandr, 155, 156 of, 68; modern cognates in Russian, Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad 69-70; motifs of movement in, 95-96, solntsem) (futurist opera): costumes color plate 1; onomatopoetic spellings, in, 118, 266n6; libretto in, 129-30; 62; palindromic effects in cuboLissitzky designs for, 151-53, 152f13; futurist poetry, 75; patterns in rayist “Proun” (“Project for the Affirmation poems, 257n61; in pyramidal shapes, of the New” [“Proekt utverzhdeniia 91-94, 93f2; self-sufficiency of, 34, 39, novogo’ |), 151-53, 152f13; rayist motifs 67-69, 76-77, 89, 90f1, 91; spatial

in, 130; St. Petersburg performances arrangements of, 91, 93-94; texture of, 129, 266n1; Vladimir Mayakovsky: (faktura) of, 77, 78, 81, 82, 255n28;

A Tragedy (Vladimir Maiakovsku: Western words describing modernity, Tragedia) staged with, 58-60, 72, 83, 69; word arrangements in rayist verse, 130, 266n1; zaum (transrational 91; word-image (slovo-obraz), 70, 71-72,

poetry) and, 83, 129 254n9g, 254n13; wordlessness in “Poem

Virilio, Paul, 5, 239n3 of the End” (Gnedov), 86-87, 97

visual perception: acceleration and, 5-8, World of Art (Mir iskusstva) (avant135; of the city, 47-52; in cubo-futurist garde exhibit), 104, 122 verse, 75; light rays, 122; ocular exer- World War I, 110, 127, 133, 193, 215-126, cises for, 120-21; propagandistic lessons 266nN91, 267N11, 274n26 in, 213; rayism (luchizm) and, 91-94,

122; the “shift” (sdvig), 35, 73-75, X-rays, 10, 102, 121-22, 264n66 111-12, 196; of speed, 5-8, 12, 75, 93-94,

213, 221-23, 221f24; of suprematist art, Yakulov, Georgy, 146, 147, 269n38

138; X-rays, 10, 102, 121-22, 123, Yampolsky, Mikhail, 278n82 264n66; zaum (transrational poetry), | Yoffe, Abram, 121

24, 75, 87-88 Youngblood, Denise, 185, 272n5 Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy

(Vladimir Matakovsku: Tragedia) Zak, Lev. See Rossiansky, M. M. (Mayakovsky), 58-60, 72, 83, 130, zaumnyt tazyk. See zaum (transrational

266n1 poetry)

Volkonsky, Sergey, Prince, 278n82 zaum (transrational poetry): aeronautic Vorkapich, Slavko, 163-64, 166-67, motifs in, 93-94, 257n66; blank pages

273N13, 273N15, 283n38 as, 86, 87; Death to Art (Smert Vrubel, Mikhail, 260n19 iskusstvu) (Gnedov), 85—87; defined, Vucinich, Aleksandr, 286n22 78-79; foreign languages in, 69, 70, 71, 83-84, 256n46; handwritten words in,

Wadsworth, Edward, 19 89, 90f1; instructions to readers of, 24, Wanderers (peredvizhnikt1), 196, 281n23 79, 83, 94, 97; Kruchenykh on, 79-81,

318 Index zaum (continued ) futurism and the human body, 25532; montage, 193, 280n4; recitation 262n40; on Larionov’s barnyard of, 82-84, 87; transrational realism motifs, 261n34; rayist poetry as hoax, (zaumnyi realizm), 135-36, 280n4; Vic- 257N61; WORKS: “Why We Paint Ourtory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem) selves: A Futurist Manifesto”

(futurist opera), 83, 129; visual effects (“Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: in, 36, 85-88, 97. See also neologisms Manifest futuristov” ), 101—2, 115,

Zdanevich, Ilya: Boccioni on the fourth 262N40 dimension, 125; on body and face 0.10 (futurist exhibit), 97, 131, 138, 139,

painting, 101-2, 115, 258n3, 258n5, 141-45 262n40; on everythingism, 104-5; on Zhadova, Larissa, 270n49