The Unlikely Futurist : Pushkin and the Invention of Originality in Russian Modernism [1 ed.] 9780299328139, 9780299328108

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The Unlikely Futurist

P ub l icat i o n s o f t h e Wi s c o nsi n C enter f o r P u s h k i n S t ud i es

David M. Bethea Series Editor

The Unlikely Futurist Pushkin and the Invention of Originality in Russian Modernism

James Rann

Th e

U n i v e r s i t y

o f

Wi s c o n s i n

P r e s s

The University of Wisconsin Press 728 State Street, Suite 443 Madison, Wisconsin 53706 uwpress.wisc.edu Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2020 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America This book may be available in a digital edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rann, James, author. Title: The unlikely futurist: Pushkin and the invention of originality in Russian modernism / James Rann. Other titles: Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2020] | Series: Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019041252 | ISBN 9780299328108 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837—Influence. | Futurism (Literary movement)—Russia. | Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PG3020.5.F8 R36 2020 | DDC 891.71/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041252

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father

Andy Rann

Contents Acknowledgments Note on Conventions

ix xi

Introduction

3

1

The Pushkin Myth and Russian Modernism 25

A Dance to the Music of Time:

2

A Stowaway on the Steamship of Modernity: Pushkin in the Futurist Manifestos 63

3

Making a Prophet: Pushkin and Khlebnikov 92

4

Pushkin and Maiakovskii 137

The Poet, the Statue, and the State:

5

Pushkin and Kruchenykh 188

Saving the Sacred Text:

Conclusion

244

Notes Bibliography Index

255 295 317

vii

Acknowledgments Like you, I often read the acknowledgments in academic books, especially if it is the author’s debut. Previously, I would scan those long lists of names with a mixture of suspicion and envy. Part of me would dismiss the whole thing as an exercise in performative namedropping; another would fume quietly at the author’s lucky breaks. Of course this person has, unlike me, managed to produce a monograph: at every turn they have been offered assistance by eminent senior scholars and spendthrift institutions. Now, as I look back on the making of The Unlikely Futurist, I realize that my indignant cynicism was not just misplaced but hypocritical and that again and again I too have relied on the kindness of superstar scholars, both current and future, and even the occasional grant. So any skeptical and self-pitying young researchers reading this should be assured that these names, eminent though some may be, are cited out of a genuine gratitude for my own good fortune. First, however, I would like to express my appreciation to the staff of the University of Wisconsin Press, and especially to Gwen Walker, for her early championing of my proposal, and to Anna Muenchrath and Adam Mehring for helping turn that proposal into a book. That transformation was made possible by two anonymous reviewers, whose comments were as diligent, perceptive, and constructive as I could have hoped. Similarly assiduous was the copyediting of Marlyn Miller, who dealt masterfully with inaccurate notes and incomprehensible Briticisms alike. I am also grateful to Marie-Pierre Evens for compiling the index and to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow for funding it. The reading and thinking that went into this book began more than a decade ago and this project has followed me around Britain’s higher education establishments, taking in Oxford and UCL as a student, Queen Mary University of London, Oxford, and Birmingham as a teacher, and finally a lectureship at Glasgow. In all these places I have found inspiring mentors, acute readers, and generous advocates. Foremost among ix

x

Acknowledgments

these is Robin Aizlewood, who supervised my doctoral thesis (which was generously funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council), but the list of those who gave help, advice, or encouragement in the book’s earliest stages also includes Mike Nicholson, Julian Graffy, Pamela Davidson, Seth Graham, Phil Cavendish, Katharine Hodgson, Robert Chandler, Robin Milner-Gulland, Andreas Schönle, and Alexandra Smith. Just as helpful were fellow postgraduates like Anastasia Koro, Alexandra Berlina, Katia Shulga, and particularly Simon Pawley, who suggested crucial improvements to my book proposal. More recently, the fact that my somewhat peripatetic career as a researcher has maintained some sense of direction is in large part thanks to colleagues like Jeremy Hicks, Philip Bullock, Natalia Rulyova, Stephen Forcer, and, most recently, Michael Syrotinski and Andrea Gullotta. In writing this book, I have relied not only on fellow Russianists but also on equally intelligent and giving people who somehow live fulfilling lives without even a passing interest in the literary squabbles of either the early Soviet Union or contemporary academia. Many friends have helped along the way—with moral support, with specialist advice, with a roof over my head—but in particular I would like to thank Dom Tsui, Julia Halej, Chris Tapp, Owen Jones, Alex Beecroft, Stefan Smith, and Debbie Linsky. Finally, I would like to thank those whose contribution has come in the shape not of individual acts of kindness (although there have been those) but of love and support so constant and all-encompassing as to be almost imperceptible—my family. Although the birth of my son, Innes, during the final stages of manuscript revisions hardly galvanized that process, it made my life so generally joyful that even formatting footnotes became a pleasure. It also gave me another opportunity to marvel at the patience, kindness, and indefatigable talent for happiness possessed by my wife, Rosie—all qualities from which I too have benefited enormously. The greatest debt of all, however, I owe to my parents, Maryanna and Andy, who gave my wonderful sisters and me the sort of nurturing, open-minded upbringing that allows a person to believe that devoting their professional life to fairly inscrutable Russian poetry is not only a possibility but even a good idea. The early Soviet avantgarde was never something my dad ever took much interest in, but with this book, as with everything I have done, he was enthusiastic and eager to help. My happiness at its publication is clouded only by my sadness that he did not live to see it.

Note on Conventions All Russian names and words in this book are transliterated in accord­ ance with the Library of Congress scheme. As a result, some familiar names may appear in a way that is unfamiliar to non-specialist readers, such as “Tolstoi” not “Tolstoy,” and “Maiakovskii” not “Mayakovsky.” While authors sometimes make an exception for well-known figures when transliterating, this practice requires a subjective judgment on who exactly is already known in the English-speaking world and can thus contribute, in a small way, to a reductive account of Russian culture. Please also note that in the Library of Congress scheme a single right quotation mark (in, for instance, Gogol’) signifies the so-called soft sign, which is not a separate sound but rather indicates the palatali­za­ tion of the previous consonant; readers with no interest in Russian pronunciation can safely disregard it. Finally, where ellipses appear in square brackets in a quotation, this indicates that I have omitted material for the sake of brevity; where the three dots appear without square brackets, the ellipsis is present in the original text.

xi

The Unlikely Futurist

Introduction

I

n late December 1912, four young men gathered in a hotel room in Moscow. They all came from similarly modest backgrounds on the southern fringes of the Russian empire, but they had very different talents and temperaments, ranging from dreamy introversion to cocksure ebullience. This quartet had been brought together by their shared desire to shock bourgeois society out of its complacency, to expose the moribund status quo, and to transform Russia. Their first step would be to write a manifesto. This document, which they gave the provocative title “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” did indeed scandalize its readers and, in its own small way, change Russia forever. It was not a political uprising that these young men were trying to foment, but a cultural coup. Their aggressive manifesto laid out their demands for a new literature that would be dynamic enough to capture the fervid energy of the new century and vigorous enough to communicate their own boisterous creative spirit. It was not their vision for the future that caused the scandal, but rather their insolent disregard for the past. In order to make way for a new age, they said, all existing literature 3

4

Introduction

must be forgotten; the sacred cows of Russian literary culture were impeding new creativity and so had to be slaughtered. The manifesto’s most prominent demand has become a byword for ruthless cultural nihilism: “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and so on and so forth from the steamship of Modernity.”1 The publication of “Slap” and the jettisoning of the sainted writers of the Russian classical tradition from the literature of tomorrow marked the symbolic birth of Russian Futurism, one of the most vibrant and influential cultural movements to emerge in Russia in the early twentieth century, one responsible for a wealth of innovative new poetry, drama, and visual art, as well as a lot more provocative manifesto writing. By the end of 1913, the manifesto’s four signatories—Vladimir Maiakov­ skii, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and David Burliuk—were famous throughout Russia for their flamboyant disdain for convention and, to a lesser extent, for their innovative verse, which sought to expand the boundaries of possibility in the literary language. The new aesthetic advocated in “Slap” was not actually all that new. Khlebnikov had been publishing poetry for two years and was already acknowledged as the leading light in a small group of emerging poets who also supported the manifesto’s sentiment and would also come to call themselves Futurists.2 But it was “Slap” that made the Futurists famous in Russia and their shocking statement remains their calling card in the history of world literature. What is more, it has come to represent something much bigger. In the century and more since the publication of “Slap,” the Futurists’ violent dismissal of their illustrious predecessors has come to be seen as a high-water mark of hostility to tradition in literature and, as such, it continues to be used as a shorthand for the antihistorical mood that was sweeping across European culture at the time. It stands as one of the many decontextualized epigraphs for the cultural phenomenon that we call modernism. The Russian Futurists were not alone in calling for the forgetting of the past, or in being remembered for this forgetting. Three years earlier, in a manifesto of their own, the Futurists’ Italian namesakes had urged readers to “set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!”3 Ezra Pound’s famous—and famously misunderstood— injunction to “make it new!” may not actually have been a call to wipe clean the slate of culture, but that is exactly what many of his peers were trying to do.4 Or at least so they said. It is one thing to renounce your predecessors and quite another to make this renunciation a reality.5

Introduction

5

This book explores the tensions and paradoxes that prosper in this gap between loudly rejecting the past and quietly reusing it by examining the sustained and productive intertextual relationship between the Russian Futurists and the most prominent victim of their steamship’s exclusionary entrance policies: Russia’s beloved national poet Aleksandr Pushkin. It is not that the Futurists tried to throw Pushkin off their steamship and failed. In fact, they were happy to keep him on board (albeit mostly below decks) and put him to work: for the Futurists, as for most Russian poets, Pushkin remained a uniquely important source of ideas and images. But the unprecedented value of conspicuous originality to the Futurists’ self-image meant that they could not straightforwardly conceive of Pushkin as an inspiration or a model for emulation, still less present him as such. The Futurists’ solution was not, as has often been assumed, to strike a superficial pose of violent, oedipal nihilism. Instead, they made deliberate use of Pushkin’s venerable preeminence to emphasize their own insurgent novelty, either by dismissing his legacy and defining themselves against him—a persistent tendency, but one that was particularly prominent during the group’s early years—or by demonstratively transforming and updating Pushkinian poetic mythology in order to showcase their ingenuity and intuitive connection with the present—an approach that became increasingly significant after the 1917 revolution. In proving their newness, the Futurists abuse Pushkin, but they also use him, treating him not as a stable, sacred ideal, but as a cultural myth that derives transhistorical validity from its flexibility, not its fixity. The variability of the Futurist Pushkin is further evidence, therefore, of the protean multiplicity for which Pushkin is famous. But more importantly the Futurists’ careful exploitation of this plasticity to articulate their identity and to illustrate their general model for cultural innovation also helps us to understand the nature of the Futurist project, both in its typicality, as a quintessentially modernist approach to change and continuity, and in its particularity, as a unique worldview and a response to the challenges of being a poet and a proselyte of “the new” in the turbulent decades on either side of the revolution. Thus, on the one hand, the Futurist Pushkin is a product of the fraught negotiation with tradition that motivated modernism as a whole. On the other, he is a child of a particular time and place, his character shaped as much by practical concerns as by avant-garde poetics. Just as, over time, the Futurist poets changed the demands they made on literature—moving

6

Introduction

from a principled demand for a fresh, iconic language, and the dethroning of false idols (like Pushkin) to an eventual interest in manipulating potent floating signifiers (Pushkin again)—so too they adapted their use of Pushkinian precedents to meet the specific artistic, political, and strategic imperatives of the moment, such as the need to legitimize the aggressive utopianism of their collective break with tradition, or, after 1917, to find their own niche in a competitive and unstable literary ecosystem as gatekeepers capable of repurposing the past to build the new Soviet future. The Pushkin of Futurism shows us, then, that despite the explicit opposition between “old” and “new” that characterized much of the rhetoric of radical modernism and that still defines its reception, modernist writers cannot be characterized as being simply “for” or “against” tradition; rather, their handling of binary categories like “old” and “new” or “traditional” and “original” is another field of negotiation in a constant, contingent, and culturally embedded process of writerly self-mythologization.

The Meanings of Modernism For the past thirty years or more, the meanings of the term “modernism” have been endlessly debated. One valuable outcome of this discussion has been the revision of the narrower, more canonical definitions of modernism that were often associated with the sound bites quoted above, or with the words and the works of other white male poets, and especially the “men of 1914” of Anglo-American modernism—Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. This has meant both making modernism more inclusive in terms of gender, geography, race, and genre and, at the same time, challenging the validity of “modernism” as a stable, determinative category. Why then am I trying to understand modernism by returning to one of its canonical clichés? Why go back to Russia’s “men of 1913,” when modernism has rightly been understood as too big and too complicated to be conceptualized in reference to the example of a few talented individuals? There are three reasons. In the first place, it is because clichés are both powerful and easily misunderstood, and so should not be allowed to persist unchallenged. In Russia and, to a lesser extent, in Englishspeaking academia, the Futurists’ hostility to Pushkin is one of the givens of literary history and this assumption needs to be debunked, or at least reassessed in order to salvage its true explanatory potential. Second, if we want to get a sense of what modernism was—or is—we

Introduction

7

can only do so by understanding it in its specific manifestations and then attempting to discern congruences in this detail that might allow for broader conclusions.6 For this reason I treat Russian Futurism and its attitude to tradition not so much as a crystallization of some global modernist Zeitgeist, but as a situated and often pragmatic response to the cultural and political context in Moscow and St. Petersburg in a period roughly between 1910 and 1930. Of course, this specific Russian context, and the Russian experience of “modernity” more broadly, cannot be taken as typical either of the global situation in the early twentieth century, or of that in the Western European countries that are the focus of most English-language studies. This is not just because of Russia’s divergence from an assumed European norm, but also because at a sufficient level of magnification all objects of study lose their typicality. St. Petersburg was unique, but so was Paris. This does not mean, however, that modernism was a mirage, but rather that we can only hope to derive its essence from its particularities. To proffer another famous modernist maxim: “The local is the only thing that is universal.”7 Finally, Pushkin’s (non)ejection from the steamship of modernity helps us to understand modernism because this cliché reveals an essential truth. If there is one thing that unites definitions of modernism, especially modernism as an outgrowth of “modernity,” it is the acknowledgment that modernists are particularly exercised by the question of the coordination of past, present, and future and that this concern is manifest in their rhetoric and their aesthetics.8 While awareness of temporality might not necessarily express itself in hostility to the past, most writers and artists associated with modernism display a tendency to objectify tradition—either to elevate it or to denigrate it, but nonetheless to treat it as something that is both important and somehow at odds with the present.9 Nowhere is this acute historical consciousness better captured than in “Slap,” in which the concept of modernity is so reified that it actually floats, and that begins with the words, “We alone are the face of our time. Through us sounds the horn of time in the art of the world.”10 The attitudes to time, tradition, and novelty expressed in Russian Futurism should not be taken as straightforwardly generalizable tenets that apply to all modernism’s many varieties. Russian Futurism was not produced in a vacuum, but rather was first and foremost a product of specific discourses and pressures in a culture that was particularly self-conscious about its paradoxically intimate and distant connection to Europe. What is more, even when seen as an exemplar of European modernism, Russian Futurism without doubt belongs to the negative

8

Introduction

extreme on the spectrum of modernist attitudes to tradition, a position most frequently associated with the term “avant-garde.”11 These qualifications notwithstanding, however, Russian Futurism does provide us with an excellent test case for exploring what happens when we look for a typically modernist attitude to temporality not just as a provocative line in a manifesto, but as a principle that underpins an entire body of work. Like any test case, this one has certain limitations of scope as well as scalability. Russian Futurism was a diverse and disputatious movement, comprising numerous self-professedly Futurist groups working in art and literature, which were nonetheless all united both by a commitment to expand and invigorate culture by finding new means of expression, new perspectives, and new subjects, and by their shared distaste for compromise, for bourgeois niceties, and—outwardly at least—for the rival schools that abounded in this era. Similarly, in the immediate post-revolutionary period the concept of Futurism remained both flexible and polemical, serving as a banner of identification for a wide range of avant-gardists who remained committed to the message of absolute novelty in culture. As with “modernism,” therefore, Futurism is best defined de facto not de jure, by studying the specific cases of self-professed Futurists, three of the signatories of “Slap”: Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893–1930), and Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886– 1968). In the months and years after this manifesto’s publication, these three, along with David Burliuk, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Benedikt Liv­ shits, formed the nucleus of the most influential subdivision of Futurism. (The group’s only female member, Elena Guro, died in 1913.) Although Khlebnikov always preferred his own coinage “Budetliane” (the “Futurians” or “It-will-be-ans”), this grouping was initially known as the “Cubo-Futurists,” in recognition of the inspiration they took from recent French and Italian art, or as “Hylea,” in honor of the ancient Greek name for the area of southern Ukraine in which the Burliuk family home was located and that, according to Herodotus, had previously been inhabited by the bold, barbaric Scythians—an association that delighted David, his brothers, and their many soon-to-be Futurist guests.12 In this study I give only incidental consideration to the other branches of Futurism; likewise I do not treat at length the works of Burliuk, Kamenskii, Livshits, or other Cubo-Futurists, despite their considerable contribution to the movement’s development and their sustained engagement with Pushkin. In both instances this is largely because

Introduction

9

Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii, and Kruchenykh—not coincidentally the most famous Futurists—both capture the diversity of Futurism and best exemplify its shared poetics and metaphysics.13 Futurism, especially in its first years, was a label appended to both writers and painters, and all of the signatories of “Slap” were themselves talented artists. Nevertheless, despite the parallels and connections between modernist writing and modernist painting in Russia in this period, I concentrate on the particular challenge that the Futurists faced as writers, as they sought to articulate their break from the past in language. Then, as now, creating something truly original—or at least something that might be perceived as truly original—seemed easier in painting and sculpture, where innovators could adopt unfamiliar, primarily abstract forms.14 But for poets, novelists, and dramatists, the very medium of their self-expression, the written word, seemed to condemn them to repeat the thoughts of their forebears. As Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, said: “I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too.”15 Futurists in both Italy and Russia responded to this same problem by trying to liberate language from the taint of past usage. One solution was to use disorienting design and typography, such as the Italians’ parole in libertà or the Russians’ ferro-concrete poetry, to make words look like they never had before.16 Another approach was to take the coining of neologisms—always a part of the poet’s arsenal—and make it the chief feature of one’s creativity. The most extreme and programmatic examples of this turn to neologism came from Ball and the Dadaists and before them from the Russian Futurists, who sometimes forsook existing language entirely in favor of words of their own invention to produce what they called zaum, “transrational” poetry. Although the Futurists sometimes claimed that this non-semantic poetry was the most effective expression both of their inner creative spirit and of the modern world around them, zaum only ever constituted a tiny, if important, fraction of their output. In most of their poetry, prose, and theoretical pronouncements, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and Maiakovskii continued to wrestle with the problem of how to make a literature that felt substantively new but that used building blocks— themes, motifs, images, words—that were either picked up from the cliché-strewn scrap heap of everyday discourse or recycled from the literary edifices of previous generations, including those constructed by the grandees they wished to expel from “modernity.”

10

Introduction

The problem was actually even more far-reaching and paradoxical than this. The Futurists’ rejection of the validity of literary tradition in some ways only intensified their reliance on the past. Countless writers before them had subscribed to the notion, dominant since antiquity, that literary tradition is an unbroken, quasi-genetic inheritance from one generation to the next and could therefore be confident that this filiation would help readers to understand who they were and what they did. The Futurists and other radical modernists ostentatiously rejected this more straightforward path to social recognition and so had to find other ways of articulating their identity and their ambitions, in the first place to themselves, and then to a wider public of readers and nonreaders, not to mention publishers and government officials.17 The result was a radical broadening of the range of identities that could serve as models for writerly self-identity, with inspiration sought in new domains such as politics and science, and the emergence of new conceptions of the correct use of the cultures that came before. The Futurists’ counterintuitive engagement with the past was thus one example of an ambivalent attitude to cultural antecedents that was widespread in the modernist era, which we can loosely define as the late nineteenth and in particular the early twentieth century. Many of the most noted exponents of modernist neophilia anathematized the accumulated achievements of post-medieval European civilization, but also enthusiastically acknowledged the inspiration they drew from other sources in the past, such as classical antiquity, a romanticized version of the Middle Ages, or, especially, from other cultures that were thought to have maintained their primitive potency.18 Pablo Picasso rejected classical Western painting, but sought inspiration in African masks; Friedrich Nietzsche repudiated the enervating effect of modern historical consciousness, but rhapsodized about ancient Greece; the Russian Futurists, for their part, may have been the helmsmen of the steamship of modernity, but they also advocated for a return to the imagined pre-Christian, non-European roots of Russian culture.19 Furthermore, although it certainly prompted a reevaluation of accepted norms, the rejection of fathers and grandfathers in favor of more distant ancestors did not undermine the prestige of the canons of art and literature. Quite the opposite, in fact. Despite its association with antiquity, “tradition” does not represent an actually existing premodern state, but is itself a product of “modernity,” as societies, in part as a reaction to the perception of a rising tide of newness, ascribe a timeworn

Introduction

11

quality to practices that are either objectively recent or implicated in long processes of evolution.20 The same is true in the case of literature, even if there is in the discourse of literary tradition some acknowledgment of the dialogue between continuity and change that occurs when literary norms are passed from generation to generation. Accordingly, in the early twentieth century, the modernists’ rejection of European cultural tradition also helped to reinforce its discursive dominance, since these virulent disavowals were obviously contingent on the revolutionaries’ acute consciousness of their place in history. The avowed intent to destroy tradition was consequently also an ironic vindication of tradition’s strength and thus, perhaps, contributed to the prolongation of tradition’s hold on culture and society. You could even argue that anti-traditionalism always serves as a necessary dialectical corrective that ensures tradition’s continued vitality.21 In the case of the Futurists, however, anti-traditionalism also exhibits another, more particular paradox inherent to the totalizing logic of the rhetoric of the modernist avant-garde. The call to reject cultural continuity and to build an utterly new culture demands an immediate and absolute rupture with what came before. This presents a difficulty for the proponents of this transformation: a partial success would in fact be a failure because it would constitute approval of the gradualist, evolutionary logic of literary tradition; a total success, however, would obviate the need for advocates for change. The survival of polemically anti-traditional literature as a genre is, therefore, reliant on the nonfulfillment of its mission. It exists in an ambivalent mode in which the utopian rupture with the past promoted in “Slap”—what Maiakovskii calls “the great break, begun by us in all areas of beauty in the name of the art of the future”—is eternally demanded and eternally postponed.22 In this regard, of course, modernist literary radicalism shared much with contemporary political radicalism, the survival of which in the form of organized movements was predicated on the continued deferral of the decisive decoupling from the problems of the past that many of their programs urged.23 What is more, these two epoch-defining utopian projects of the twentieth century—one in art, one in politics—which unfolded together, at times in parallel, at times in conjunction, both partake of a temporal paradox that emerges in the logic of Christian eschatology. (Let us leave aside for now the question of whether this was a result of coincidence, causality, or convergent evolution.) In that Christian cosmology, the

12

Introduction

longed-for break with the debased human world that would be occasioned by the Second Coming is continuously delayed but also insistently imminent—or at least it is in branches of the faith that are eager to rapidly acquire followers and moral authority.24 Likewise, just as the cult leader who has predicted the end of the world is obliged to perform adroit rhetorical gymnastics when the sun does rise again the next day, so the proselytes of a sudden leap forward into the future in language and culture must also eventually come to terms with the awkward fact of their own historicity. At what point does your determination to discard the detritus of the past conflict with your own growing back catalog? And how many times can you say you represent the art of tomorrow before your claim loses credibility, especially when you are no longer a bright-eyed twenty-two-year-old? For writers, one way of forestalling this aporia is to give up, to emulate Arthur Rimbaud by putting down your pen while you are still only twenty-one. An even more extreme solution is to put an end not just to your writing life, but your life tout court—an option that quite a few modernist writers did take in the end, although it would be foolish to say that the contradictions of temporality were their only motivation. For the most part, however, the writers of the avant-garde wanted to write and continued to do so. This does not mean that the exponents of radical, anti-historical modernist writing were blind to the ironies inherent in their continuing project, or that they were unaware of the challenges and opportunities that these contradictions offered as they sought to find a unique niche for themselves in literary culture and in society. In a recent study of Russian modernism Petre Petrov jokes that Futurism is a movement that “arguably has nothing but early days.”25 While this deliberate exaggeration might be disputed as a statement of fact—Futurism continued, and continued to develop, well into the 1920s—it points to a certain truth: the internal logic and external rhetoric of Futurism remained defined by the tensions of its specific, ambivalent temporality. It was forever poised between the moment of birth, of newness ex nihilo, and the imminent, unfulfilled moment of the absolute transformation of the world that this newness was supposed to precipitate. As such, it exemplified Theodor Adorno’s paradoxical description of modernist innovation as a form of involuted desire: “The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.”26 One product of this per­ sist­ent, unfulfilled longing was the tendency to keep relaunching the Futurist project as if for the first time, for instance by publishing “Slap”

Introduction

13

two years after the debut of A Trap for Judges, or by producing new manifestos, and new definitions of Futurism, after the revolution and beyond. The same tension is encoded in another of those famous one-liners that hovers around any definition of modernism, Rimbaud’s dictum “Il faut être absolument moderne.”27 Invoking Rimbaud here for the second time may seem somewhat inappropriate, given my determination to define modernism from the ground up and the fact that Rimbaud’s (likely ironic) injunction to modernity preceded the Futurists by nearly forty years.28 However, the endurance of this line, too, is testament to its diagnostic value. It neatly foreshadows the Futurist project’s embodiment of modernist temporality. First, it captures the tendency toward totality: being a bit modern is not enough; one must be absolutely modern, because the break with tradition does not permit half-measures. Second, Rimbaud’s “modern-ness” is conceived of not as a style or an artifact of culture, but as a way of being or, at the least, an identity. Third, this way of being is a product of the individual’s will, but it does not come into being solely internally—rather, it arises as a conscious effort to meet an abstract need. As such, being modern is both universal and personal, part of the world and part of the self. A similar emphasis on modernism as a sensibility or way of being in the world—as a set of behaviors or identities, rather than a collection of aesthetic or poetic norms—is evident in much of the scholarship resulting from the aforementioned problematization of modernism’s narrow limits, which has catalyzed an interest in the performance of modernist identity outside of the space of the text, in the lives of artists, writers, and “ordinary” people.29 This tendency has been particularly productive in regard to Russian modernism because nearly all Russian modernists took as one of their goals a refutation of the artificial division between creativity in art and creativity in life, between making and being.30 Nevertheless, while the Futurists shared this commitment, what set them apart from their peers, and what still constitutes their greatest achievement, was not their lives but their texts—the space in which they sought and found methods to express novel ways of being without losing their sense of novelty, and in which they constructed new identities. It is here, in literature and language, that we can find the essence of modernist novelty, because it is here that modernists must most obviously confront the fact that the communication of their originality is beholden to a medium that makes absolute originality impossible.

14

Introduction

Futurism in Russia In order to substantiate this somewhat abstract notion of Futurism as a manifestation of the interaction of time and language in modernist literature, Futurism and its discourses of originality must in the first place be understood as products of the immediate cultural and political situation in Russia. My emphasis on the particularity of the Russian situation is not meant to imply, however, a definite position on the question of whether the forces shaping the nature of Russian modernism were confined to Russia or one expression among many of a single multifaceted worldwide phenomenon.31 Rather, it is a way of saying that Russian Futurism is a valuable witness in two overlapping narratives: the story of early twentieth-century Russian culture and the story of global modernism. Regardless of any special characteristics of Russian modernity, the modernist art and literature that it provoked was still motivated by the same self-consciousness about temporality—the feeling that it is not just the times that are changing, but that time itself is changing—that is definitional of modernism as a whole. But this same obsession with time and novelty also means that Russian Futurism was an important landmark in a long-running, and still unfinished, debate within Russian culture about the dynamic between the old and the new. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an acutely self-conscious attitude to history and to novelty was itself already centuries old in Russia, stretching back at least as far as the late seventeenth century and Peter the Great’s sweeping and absolutist agenda of reform and modernization. As a result, the Futurists’ program for rapid and total change was characterized by paradox in a Russian context as well as a modernist one, since the Futurists were aware that their demand for a destructive burst through into newness was itself a familiar rallying cry. The thoroughgoing changes to society instigated by Peter and, more recently, the maximalist demands of a revolutionary underground that brooked no compromise with an illiberal and inflexible regime meant that, at home and abroad, Russia was perceived as a society that was unusually inimical to gradual evolution.32 As Oscar Wilde said in his melodrama Vera, or, The Nihilists (1883), “In Russia, nothing is impossible but reform.” Unsurprisingly, Wilde’s uninformed aphorism was something of an exaggeration, as was his characterization of Russian nihilism, the midnineteenth-century movement that inspired later generations of radicals, including the Futurists, with its demand for the total dismantling of existing social and political systems. There certainly were proponents

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of gradualism in Russia and they had a measure of success. But Wilde was right inasmuch as Russia, more than anywhere else in Europe, was home to a strong tradition of anti-traditionalism—a fact that presented the Futurists with both a useful precedent and a further obstacle to their claim to originality. Although the demand for a liberating destruction of the status quo was not new in Russia, unlike the nihilists, the Futurists actually got to see something approximating the fulfilment of their desires. In the years during which Futurism existed as a viable movement, the territories of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union were changing faster and more fundamentally than perhaps any places ever have— economically, politically, socially, and culturally.33 Just as importantly, these changes were not implicit or unacknowledged, but viewed at the time as enormous disruptions and thus accompanied by intense debate about the interplay of old and new. In the field of culture alone, Russia stopped being a late adopter of European artistic and literary trends and became a powerhouse of innovation, setting the international aesthetic agenda for much of the twentieth century, which prompted considerable reflection from practitioners and audience alike about the essence of originality. We can better understand the nature of this Russian conversation about novelty by reading the Futurists’ attempts to be “absolutely modern” as a contribution to it. How did the artists and writers responsible for this outbreak of newness reconcile their activities with the expectations of their audience and with their own grounding in Russian and European culture? What is more, this cultural change did not happen in isolation but rather in the midst of unprecedented upheaval— the First World War, the revolution of 1917, the rapid changes of the 1920s, and eventually the onset of Stalinism—which not only utterly reconfigured Russian life, but also posed a series of challenges to the self-presentation of avant-gardists as guarantors of newness, as their attempts to change the world with paintings and poems were outflanked and outpaced by stern-faced men with guns.34 Every time one of these major shifts in the political order took place, the artists and writers of the avant-garde were required to respond to new questions. What, if anything, should the new world borrow from that which came before? And what role should established poets play in building a new culture? Were the bold, decadent-seeming experiments made by the Futurists and their friends in 1913 still relevant and legitimate under the dictatorship of the proletariat? Who should get to decide? The Futurists’ answers to these specific questions and their interventions in

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Introduction

the wider debate about cultural transformation reveal not only that the Futurists were engaged in political point-scoring and pragmatic maneuvering as well as the enactment of poetic principles, but also that a key figure occupying the intersection of these different aspects of their poetic identity was Aleksandr Pushkin.

Aleksandr Pushkin In relation to both the European modernist avant-garde as a movement and to early twentieth-century Russian culture as a milieu, Futurism is a proving ground for the most radical ideas about rejecting the old in favor of the new and a showcase for the effects that this rejection has on poetic self-fashioning. Elucidating these bigger themes, however, requires a point of entry into understanding the Futurists’ own conception of tradition and novelty in itself. The Futurist movement’s account of itself is not enough: entangled as they are in the polemical formation of identity, the Futurists’ pronouncements on literature should not be taken at face value; nor do they account for Futurism’s diversity. Instead we need to read both Futurist theory and Futurist poetry as articulations of their self-perception and their comprehension of the interaction of time, culture, and language. Enter Pushkin. Despite its somewhat simplistic bombast, “Slap” and the ejection of Pushkin is still a good place to start in order to understand Futurism. The Futurists’ attitudes toward the most canonical figure of Russian culture, whether that be through the aggressive denunciation of “Slap” or through more subtle forms of interrogation and reappropriation, offer a prism through which to examine their understanding of the mechanisms of cultural change (both as they were and as they ought to be) and to identify the strategies the Futurists adopted to formulate and communicate their “newness.” It is at the moment when they come closest to tradition that it is easiest to see what is so novel about the Futurists.35 Moreover, despite the eminence and international cachet of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, it is the Futurists’ relationship to Pushkin that best demonstrates their response to the challenge of being modern, because Pushkin is unique in Russian culture in his ubiquity and flexibility, and in the reverence afforded to his legacy. It is hard to overestimate the significance of Pushkin to Russian culture. Pushkin was credited with almost single-handedly creating a Russian national literature with its own distinct and characteristic language and its own masterpieces to rival those of France or Germany.

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His elevation to the status of national poet over the course of the nineteenth century was not entirely surprising: his singular achievements in verse, drama, and fiction were unprecedented on Russian soil and his oeuvre proved ambiguous enough both to withstand constant reinterpretation and to serve as a universal reference point for a diverse nation seeking shared cultural symbols.36 Nevertheless, Pushkin’s dramatic life, which began in the last year of the eighteenth century and was ended by a fatal duel in 1837, was too close in time and too rich in detail to serve as a blank canvas on which his descendants could straightforwardly project the nation’s image. His tragic early death certainly assisted his elevation to a figure of national significance in a country with a predisposition toward martyred saints, but his life and his work—which were characterized by wit as much as by contemplation, by ribaldry as much as seriousness—provided a readymade riposte to attempts to transform him into an anodyne fountainhead and figurehead of Russian literary culture.37 The imperfect fit between Pushkin’s function in Russian culture and his credentials for this role have, in fact, contributed to his continuous reinvention and, in a further paradox, helped to secure his preeminence as a constituent of and metonym for Russian self-identity. Who Pushkin was—or rather, who he is—remains a question that is never conclusively answered since “the fear that someone has created a false image of Pushkin has kept alive a passion for the ‘real’ Pushkin, always just beyond reach.”38 Pushkin’s exalted but uncertain position has generated a succession of transformations in his popular image—from superficial scapegrace to secular saint to proto-Bolshevik revolutionary and back again—but done so without risking his function as the key to understanding Russia and as the ultimate touchstone of legitimacy and belonging.39 One result of this consistent inconsistency is a library of books, in Russian and many other languages, that examine the impact of Pushkin’s legacy on nearly every other writer or cultural phenomenon. Curiously, given the prominence of the steamship quotation and the blossoming of scholarly interest in Pushkin and modernism, no such book has been written about Pushkin and the Futurists. In some ways, this is that book. The extent and the diversity of the Futurists’ engagement with Pushkin problematizes the common assumption, which is in itself a testament to the catchiness of the Futurists’ phrase-making, that the Futurists’ rhetorical ejection of Pushkin from the steamship of modernity was entirely sincere, comprehensive, and achievable. This is hardly an original observation—as early as 1913 the poet Aleksandr Blok pointed out

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that the Futurists’ rejection of Pushkin actually catalyzed a new appreciation of him—but many have overlooked it.40 In other ways, however, this is not that book. There has been a tendency in studies of the reception of Pushkin, especially in the Soviet Union, to treat evidence of Pushkinian intertexts as an end in itself. There is little point, however, in demonstrating a connection between the Futurists and Pushkin if it is only so that the Futurists can be acknowledged as Pushkin’s heirs and finally be incorporated into some great tradition of Russian poetry.41 Likewise, the complexity and subtlety of the Futurist engagement with Pushkin need not be seen as evidence of secret, suppressed affection. The dominant metaphor for this discourse of unspoken love, often presented as the antipode to the steamship, comes from Livshits, who said in his 1931 memoir that “I found the text of the manifesto quite unacceptable. I slept with Pushkin under my pillow—and who didn’t? [. . .] To throw him overboard together with Dostoevskii and Tolstoi from the ‘ship of modernity’ seemed hypocritical.”42 Although Livshits may have had his own motivations for distancing himself, post-factum, from Futurist anti-traditionalism, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity or accuracy. In all likelihood, the Futurists probably did have Pushkin under their pillow and all the evidence suggests that they knew Pushkin’s work very well and reread it often and with enthusiasm. But this is hardly important: Pushkin is not some literary laird to whom all subsequent writers must pay fealty and understanding an intertextual relationship in the binary terms of love and hate is a dead end.43 More important than what the Futurists think of Pushkin is what they do with him—how they use him to articulate their own originality. But although it is the Futurists, not Pushkin, who are the heroes of this story, the Futurist reception of Pushkin—if “reception” is not too passive an expression for the different destructive and constructive positions they took in relation to him—introduces new evidence and new arguments to long-standing debates about the function of Pushkin in Russian culture. Seeing Pushkin through the eyes of the Futurists— which is to say, seeing him as by turns incompetent and inspirational, rebellious and revered—helps to combat a still persistent tendency to sanitize and sanctify Pushkin, often with the aim of making him more ideologically fungible.44 Moreover, the uniqueness and the heterogeneity of the Futurist Pushkin serve as another argument against any stable, centripetal conception of Pushkin as a unified and holistic phenomenon that persists unchanged through time, showing Pushkin instead to

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be an inherently multifaceted, contradictory, and constantly evolving construction of Russian culture.

The Structure of the Book Just as the Futurists militated against reductive readings of Pushkin, so I too must acknowledge that even the small sample of Futurists presented for study here does not constitute a fully integrated, unchanging whole. Futurism remained a popular and persuasive selfdesignation for about twenty years, but the movement that marched under that banner was in a constant state of flux, with its individual members drifting apart one moment and drawing together the next. Given this, the way this book is arranged is intended to accommodate an appreciation of the tension between unity and diversity in Futurism, both across time and between different individuals. Its broadly chronological structure—starting with the Futurists’ manifestos in the period 1912 to 1917, focusing in depth on the early 1920s, and finishing with Kru­che­nykh’s demise in 1968, long after his comrades had died—reveals that the Futurists’ approach to Pushkin did remain coherent and distinct over this period, but also that it evolved in accordance with its own internal momentum and in response to wider changes in culture and society.45 In particular, the new cultural norms that followed the 1917 revolution, which threatened to make the Futurists obsolete, prompted a gradual shift in their self-presentation in general and in their appropriations of Pushkin in particular. The Futurists began to downplay the anti-traditional rhetoric that dominated their manifestos and recast themselves as technical experts ready to tutor a new generation and to carry out the process of triage and rehabilitation that could make the artistic legacies of the bourgeois past suitable for a new society. Accordingly, in later works, Pushkin is not so much rejected as remade, signaling a gradual shift in the Futurists’ conceptualization of their own originality. In the terms used by Edward Said, they turn away from an emphasis on origin, which is “divine, mythical and privileged,” in favor of beginning, which is “secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined.”46 Regardless of this shift, however, both these models of creative “newness”—the exaltation of destruction and ex nihilo creation and the valorization of reinterpretation and repositioning—are present in the Futurist reception of Pushkin throughout, albeit in differing measures. As a result, the increasing prevalence of more recuperative uses of

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Pushkin after the revolution should not be understood as an act of reconciliation or retrenchment.47 Instead, one can see the Futurists’ often light-hearted manipulation of the meaning of Pushkin in the 1920s both as the maturation of an inherent tendency in Futurism encouraged by the first manifestations of Soviet dogmatism and as a forerunner of the attitudes to Pushkin evident in later writers such as Daniil Kharms, Andrei Siniavskii, and Dmitrii Prigov. The relationship between the individual and the collective in Futurist self-identity also exhibits a perceptible arc of development, starting from an intense insistence on the group’s unity of vision in the manifestos and then gradually dissipating as Maiakovskii, Kruchenykh, and especially Khlebnikov sought to consolidate their own personal poetic mythologies. There were, however, notable exceptions to this entropic principle: at crucial junctures such as the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Kruchenykh, Maiakovskii, and others resurrected the Futurist brand, not least as a means of establishing their credentials at a time of turmoil and opportunity. Moreover, it would be a mistake to imagine strong collective and individual identities as mutually exclusive, or even as polar opposites. The Formalist Iurii Tynianov once argued that “Futurism and zaum are by no means simple values, but rather a conventional name covering different phenomena, a lexical unity, something like a surname, under which go about different relatives and even namesakes.”48 This useful metaphor allows for the possibility that the shared tag “Futurist” could indicate anything from close kinship to coincidence; it even allows for the existence of distant cousins in Italy. The works of the three most famous and prolific holders of this surname display a strong family resemblance (in a Wittgenstein­ ian sense), but also play host to a productive and self-conscious tension between personal and group identities. A forename and a surname have different meanings and functions and are, to an extent, opposed to one another, but they are also constituent parts of the whole and without both full identification is impossible. The interplay of individual and collective identity is also reflected in the structure of my argument, which begins by treating the Futurists as a collective and then looks at the three individual poets in turn. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical context for the Futurist reception of Pushkin, presenting the Futurist Pushkin as the product of the intersection of the Futurists’ unique avant-garde philosophy with the extraordinarily significant and multivalent position that Pushkin had come to occupy in Russian culture by the 1910s. More than just an exemplar of talent and

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originality, Pushkin was interpreted as a mythic figure, a force outside of history with the potential to radically transfigure the future. The Futurists, for their part, subscribed to many of the ideals that underpinned Russian modernism as a whole and contributed to this eschatological interpretation of Pushkin, not least the widespread tendency to understand humanity as somehow fallen and trapped in patterns of recurrence and, furthermore, to see in art a force capable of loosing these bonds and instigating universal revitalization. Their approach to this task, however, was informed by a distinctive and discriminating worldview that saw contrast where others saw continuity and that demanded willful antagonism where others sought integration. They did not, therefore, treat Pushkin as an ally in their mission to reshape existence; still less did they endorse the notion that he could be the agent of Russian culture’s redemption; instead they envisaged him as a false idol—a figure whom heretical devotion had mistakenly isolated from history, making of the living poet not a transcendent savior but an emblem of the deathly stagnation that had overtaken culture. The subsequent chapters will look more closely at the Futurists’ texts and reveal the ways in which the Futurists combated the morbid influence of this idol, either by dethroning it or by revivifying it, and examine how these efforts were shaped by the emergence of different imperatives over time, both inside and outside the Futurist movement. Foremost among these was the Futurists’ continuing need to demonstrate their originality, both in general and in regard to specific metaphors for poetic identity that they took from Pushkin. Chapter 2, therefore, is devoted to the Futurists’ first engagements with Pushkin, in “Slap” and other prerevolutionary manifestos—the site of both their most vitriolic rejection of the past and their most explicit endorsement of a group identity. Manifestos played a special role in modernism, often serving as both an announcement of a group’s orientation in regard to the past, present, and future and as a source of alternative, autogenous legitimation for writers no longer able to justify their status in society in reference to their forebears. In the Futurists’ manifestos Pushkin operates as a meto­ nymic representation of literary tradition itself but also serves as a more specific negative pole against which the Futurists can define their own myth: whereas Pushkin is obsolete, effeminate, and out of touch with his people, the Futurists are the virile embodiment of the present and of the true spirit of Russia. Such differentiation is not always entirely hostile, however: the Futurists’ use of the uncompromising rhetoric of the manifesto to distance themselves from the Pushkinian idol is at times

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Introduction

revealed to be part of a wider strategy to redeem literature as a whole, and Pushkin along with it. The next three chapters chart the increasing importance of this more positive evaluation of Pushkin by looking in turn at Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii, and Kruchenykh’s individual responses to Pushkin’s poetic mythology. Chapter 3 examines Khlebnikov’s reshaping of the complex of allusions and associations accompanying the idea of prophets and prophecy in Pushkin’s work. Khlebnikov was convinced that he alone had deciphered the deterministic patterns of repetition to which history was beholden. Accordingly, his intertextual engagement with Pushkin’s prophet myth in poems such as “The One-Eyed Player” (1921) operated both as a means of articulating his own prophetic identity and as an embodiment of the fatal recurrence that he detected. Khlebnikov sees a typological similarity between himself and other poet-prophets throughout the ages, not just Pushkin, especially in regard to the struggles they endured in sharing their message; but he also differentiates himself from previous iterations, because, he thinks, his rational approach to prognostication represents something truly new. He is not like a prophet, he actually is a prophet. The Futurists’ use of Pushkin to interrogate assumptions about continuity and change in culture is further evident in their appropriation of the Pushkinian myth of the statue. Just as statues (and idols) loom large in Pushkin’s poetry, so the Futurists are fascinated by Pushkin’s statues and by statues of Pushkin. This is not only due to the statue’s position at the intersections of poetry and architecture and of discourses of power, permanence, and the human body, but also because the statue can act as a metaphor for both the stability and the transformation of meaning across time. Chapter 4 examines how, in the postrevolutionary phases of his career, Maiakovskii repeatedly returns to Pushkin’s monumental mythology to articulate the Futurist position in debates about the nature of the new Soviet state and the new Soviet culture. At first this meant asserting the avant-garde’s revolutionary credentials, critiquing the government’s preservationist tendencies, and advocating for a cultural tabula rasa, but over time, in works like “Jubilee Poem” (1924) and “At the Top of My Voice” (1930), Maiakovskii began to interrogate his own subservience to the state and to propose a new approach to the past and to posterity that emphasized the possibilities of creative reinterpretation, metaphorically represented in the mobilization of the static monument.

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The increasing prominence of this transformative approach, in which the Futurists preserve the outward form of Pushkin—his name, his statues, his metaphors—but inject it with new content, was a response both to debates about the role of prerevolutionary art and a reflection of the Futurists’ own historicity. Scared of becoming yesterday’s men in a rapidly changing society, they adopt and adapt Pushkin both to showcase the role they can play as intermediaries between the old culture and the new and to use him as a stalking horse in an argument for their own continued relevance. Chapter 5 examines this tendency with particular reference to Kruchenykh’s practice of quoting Pushkin verbatim in order to suggest that, while quotations allow Pushkin’s words to persist through time (like statues), their meaning is inherently mobile. The best example of this is Kruchenykh’s 1924 work 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin, which responds to the first stirrings of the Soviet state’s appropriation of Pushkin and manifests Futurism’s willing incorporation of contemporary influences such as Constructivism and cinema to find new ways to prove its newness. Maiakovskii and Kruchenykh’s playful transformations of Pushkin in the 1920s do not share the utopian aspirations or insistence on iconicity of the Futurists’ earlier works, but rather exploit stale and familiar symbols to find new meanings and challenge dogmas. In part this is a product of the Futurists’ implication in a wider change of direction in Russian culture, as the world-changing ambitions of the avant-garde began to lose some of their energy and appeal, and at the same time came to be co-opted and instrumentalized by the state. By the 1930s the avant-garde’s insistence on an imminent eschaton came to be replaced by a Stalinist emphasis on the present as an already achieved utopia, one that the strictures of socialist realism obliged writers to hymn. But it is not the incipient hegemony of socialist realism that the change in the Futurist Pushkin heralds; rather, this ludic, arbitrary Pushkin is an embryonic anticipation of the response that socialist realism would go on to elicit from former avant-gardists and their successors in the postStalin underground whose literary and artistic production foregrounded absurdity and valorized the individual’s ability to imitate, mock, and expose empty and hypocritical official discourses. In modernism’s end is postmodernism’s beginning. The Futurists’ use of Pushkin is the key, therefore, not just to understanding Russian Futurism—its origins, its uniqueness, and its embodiment of a typically modernist attitude to time, tradition, and

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Introduction

novelty—but also to apprehending, if only in part, the reasons for its decline and supersession, and the nature of its legacy to Russia and to the world, right up to the present day. Ultimately, the best guide to the steamship of modernity—the most eloquent witness to its launch, its voyage, and its wreck—is not the crew, but the stowaway, the unlikely Futurist Aleksandr Pushkin.

1 A Dance to the Music of Time The Pushkin Myth and Russian Modernism

Signs of the next century: entrance of Russia into culture. A grandiose goal. Proximity of barbarism, awakening of the arts. Magnanimity of youth, fantastic madness, and real strength of will. Friedrich Nietzsche

A

year after the publication of “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” the Futurists released another manifesto, which, unusually, contained a moment of retrospection. Not that they had tempered their aggression in any way: the manifesto was called “Go to Hell” and it informed readers that the Futurists still “spit out the past that has got stuck in our teeth.” But the signatories, which now also included Livshits and Igor’ Severianin, did allow themselves to reflect on their success in making Futurism a national cause célèbre: “The appearance of the New poetries had the same effect on the greybeards of little old Russian literature, still crawling along, as a white marble Pushkin dancing the tango.”1 25

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A Dance to the Music of Time

Perhaps even more than the infamous expulsion of the classics from the steamship, it is this statement that best expresses Futurism both as a unique poetics and as a response to its time. On the one hand, it makes plain the Futurists’ fundamental commitment to “the New” as an abstract value in itself that must be attained not through the respectful adaptation of tradition but through sudden violent shocks. Gradualism and compromise are impossible because of the strict divisions that the Futurists see everywhere and reinforce with their denunciations, restating the difference between right and wrong, now and then, us and them. Indeed, it is perhaps this insistence on distinctiveness that is itself the most distinctive feature of Futurism, setting it apart from rival poetic schools of the time, which were no less experimental but which were more rhetorically invested in notions of continuity and integration. On the other hand, despite the refusal of the possibility of allies or antecedents, “Go to Hell” and its Pushkin simile do tacitly acknowledge that Futurist originality is shaped by external factors. In the first place, the dancing statue helps to locate their new poetries within the context of an amorphous global transformation that is already underway, represented by the scandalous Argentinian dance craze that had recently swept through Europe. Second, the specifically statuesque form of Pushkin indicates that the Futurists take as their target not so much Pushkin the poet as Pushkin the symbol, the Apollonian “white marble” demigod frozen in stone that emblematizes the bloodlessness of non-Futurist literature. As in “Slap,” the Futurists show their power over this false idol, leading it down from its pedestal to bring an abrupt end to the complacent, almost cultic devotion it had inspired. No less significantly, however, the tangoing totem also shows that idoloclasm does not always end in oblivion: not only has Pushkin survived a year of Futurist vitriol, but he seems to have emerged reinvigorated with an injection of contemporary vitality. This may be more a partial rejuvenation than a total resurrection—it is not Pushkin the man who is dancing, but his statue, showing that the effects of seventy years of ossifying adoration cannot entirely be undone—but the image also makes clear that Pushkin can be a beneficiary as well as a victim of the Futurist project for a new culture. Tynianov once described the process of literary succession from one generation to the next as “above all a struggle.”2 The specific word he used, bor’ba, also means “wrestling” and, while the antagonism and energy of hand-to-hand combat seems apt for the Futurist engagement

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with Pushkin, just as relevant is the intimacy that this metaphor suggests. “Go to Hell” does not specify as much, but the tango cannot be danced alone: we might, therefore, reimagine the Futurists’ close encounter with Pushkin not as a death match, but a dance. It was, of course, an articulation of Futurist poetics and identity, but this selfexpression was driven by the beat of modernity and determined by the particularities of their partner in this pas de deux, Pushkin. Accordingly, while subsequent chapters will trace the development of the Futurist Pushkin in different historical moments, in this chapter we will explore the coming together of these three elements of the dance: the Futurist commitment to novelty; the mood music of Russian modernism, with its obsession with the rhythms of history and the disharmony of the present; and Pushkin himself, both as an original voice in his own time and as a product of the deficient culture of the present—Pushkin as poet, myth, and idol. Pushkin had always been a lodestar for Russian writers, but in the hands of the poets who dominated the literary scene from the mid1890s to the 1920s, his significance not only grew but changed in nature. In short, all the multifaceted contents of Pushkin as a cultural phenomenon—all the characters, motifs, and narratives that made up his life, his work, and his later reception—came to be treated less as historical facts or literary objects than as constituent parts of a complex myth, one that was fundamental not just to the past of Russian culture, but also its future.3 As part of a wider effort to break down the distinction between creativity in life and creativity in art, these poets took an omnivorous approach to Pushkin’s biography and work, eagerly drawing on both to provide structures and leitmotifs for their daily life as well as their written output. Kamenskii, for instance, later recalled that he and Maiakovskii had imagined themselves to be Pushkin’s characters Lenskii and Onegin when they went to pay a visit to two young ladies; in his youth, the poet Osip Mandel’shtam used to play on a vague resemblance to Pushkin and once dressed as him for a masquerade. In the often theatrical performance of modernist identity, many of the scripts came from Pushkin. Not that this was all just idle make-believe, however. To many, Pushkin seemed like a very real presence in their lives, not just as an inspiration and a warning—the painter Pavel Filonov once prevented Mandel’shtam and Khlebnikov from fighting a duel by saying “I don’t want Pushkin being killed again”—but as an agent of future change, and possibly even salvation.4

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A Dance to the Music of Time

The Futurist response to Pushkin has been characterized as a mere inversion of the myth promulgated by other modernists more willing to acknowledge his example—a rejection that changed the myth’s valence but reinforced its premise. In the words of Boris Gasparov, “they simply attached a minus sign.”5 There is some truth to this—the Futurists’ own poetic myth was, in part, defined by rejecting what others accepted—but it is also an oversimplification. In the first instance, the Futurist Pushkin was not just reactive, but rather emerged from a studied questioning of the functioning of the Pushkin myth, and especially the slippage between mythology, hagiography, and idolatry. What is more, the Futurist response to the Pushkin myth was not monolithic, but rather comprised two tendencies, in dialectical tension with each other, which derived from specific aspects of Futurism’s uncompromising poetics. The first, based on the Futurist critique of current culture, was an attempt to “secularize” and historicize Pushkinian mythology, revealing it as multiple and contingent in order to refute the widespread idealization of Pushkin as an extra-historical messianic force. Given their fundamental belief in the differences between people and epochs, the Futurists could not countenance such transcendence— at least not from someone else. The second tendency, in contrast, emerged from the Futurist vision for the world as it should be—their version of the “new life” being proclaimed all over early twentiethcentury Russia—and, as such, was distinctly unsecular in its ambition to use Pushkin to both describe and actualize the Futurists’ own central myth, in which they used their original art to precipitate a break in historical time, dissolving all barriers and borders.

Myth, Religion, and Time While the tension between the sacred and the secular that underpinned the Futurist response to Pushkin has also always accompanied the idea of “myth” in poetry, at least in Russia, the concept of “poetic mythology” has nonetheless served as a productive framework for scholars looking to explore the complexities of the writerly self in Russian modernism without necessarily getting tangled up in theology.6 In part this is thanks to Roland Barthes’s popularization of the term “mythology” as a tool for exposing “falsely obvious” assumptions in culture, but still more influential has been the Futurists’ friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson, who first introduced the term “mythology” as a specific and ostensibly neutral way of describing the construction of identity across

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an oeuvre by highlighting the “constant organizing, cementing elements which are the vehicle of unity in the multiplicity of the poet’s works.”7 This understanding of mythology has proved useful because it provides a convenient way of discussing poetic identity—and intertextuality too—at a higher level than the individual poem or cycle, incorporating the poet’s life as well as their work. It is an approach, therefore, that lends itself well to a period like modernism in which the distinction between the two was deliberately blurred. Moreover, this methodology has not been confined to modernist poets: it was in reference to Pushkin that Jakobson first used the term in earnest and it has continued to prosper in the study of Pushkin because it is flexible and comprehensive enough to capture the ubiquity of his ramifying influence across different aspects of Russian life.8 Nonetheless, we should not forget that in the early twentieth century “myth” seemed less like a useful analytical tool than a word to conjure with. Before turning to Pushkin, Jakobson had identified the presence of a consistent mythology in the work and life of his friend Maiakovskii and the very idea that a poet is engaged in the construction of a “myth” of self was likely inspired by Maiakovskii’s own tortured and titanic mythopoesis.9 What is more, in both the mythologies of Pushkin and of Maiakovskii Jakobson detects—and, arguably, perpetuates—the unshakeable influence of one of the dominant forces in Russia’s intellectual history, the Orthodox Church.10 This latent connection between poetic identity and sacred narratives was far from unique, but a product of the new significance that myth came to acquire across Europe in the early twentieth century. To many modernists, myth was attractive because it seemed both old and new; it represented not just a storehouse of time-honored themes and images, but also a potent way of seeing the world that could profitably be applied to the extraordinary present moment. Writing in 1923, the annus mirabilis of high modernism in English, T. S. Eliot presented myth as a solution to one of the movement’s defining problems—the disjuncture between the transformed present and the conservative literary mainstream. “Instead of narrative method,” he wrote, “we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.” He argues that Joyce’s Ulysses, along with the poetry of Yeats and, implicitly, his own The Waste Land, employs myth as a way of “giving a shape and a significance” to a now disordered world.11 Although himself an avid defender of the concept of tradition, in his advocacy of myth as a new source of structure, Eliot

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avails himself of the same tools as the vehemently anti-traditional Nietz­sche and his successors who saw in mythology an alternative to both discredited bourgeois rationalism and the enervated culture of the present. One of those successors was the Russian writer Andrei Belyi, who gave an astute and succinct account of the attraction of myth in “The Magic of Words” (1909), an essay that greatly influenced the Futurists in its celebration of the possibilities for a new poetic language: Mythic creativity either precedes aesthetic creativity (the conscious use of means of representation is possible only at the stage of the decomposition of myth) or follows it (in eras of the decomposition of knowledge, general scepticism, the decline of culture) and is resurrected in mythical brotherhoods and unions among people who have consciously rejected science, art, and philosophy, but who still unconsciously conceal inside themselves the living element of creativity. We are living through such an era now.12

Belyi sees the turn to myth as a response to the epistemological crisis of the fin de siècle: centuries of the increasing predominance of science and philosophy over religion and other structures of belief had not, it seemed, culminated in the cementing of empiricism and rationalism as a more solid foundation for understanding human experience, but rather provoked a certain skepticism toward any claim to absolute truth, or at least a disinclination to divide the world into two distinct categories labeled “fact” and “fiction.” Myth suited such a moment, therefore, not only because it offered an alternative to the positivist model of inexorable cultural progress but also because it could provide narratives and structures for understanding the world that felt authoritative while still accommodating a certain multiplicity.13 Myth was particularly important in articulating the era’s overriding concern with the question of the nature of time and its relationship to innovation in culture. Belyi, in presenting the rise of myth both as the product of a repeating cycle of epochs and the signal of a new era, hints at its ability to express two different temporal paradigms that prospered in modernist thought. The first is the notion that the present could and should be separated from the past by an abrupt leap forward—or perhaps already has been, as Virginia Woolf famously contended when she proposed that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”14 The second, contrary but not always mutually exclusive model was contained in the terrifying prospect sensed by Nietzsche and others that “time itself is a circle.”15 In a somewhat ironic revisiting

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of an ancient idea, many modernists came to see history as comprising an endless cycle of recurrence, proving that progress, and perhaps even time itself, was an illusion, as “if all time is eternally present | All time is unredeemable.”16 The coexistence and cross-fertilization of the competing paradigms of rupture and recurrence had significant consequences for concepts of originality. On the one hand, the idea that a new epoch had begun or was beginning seemed to necessitate the invention of fresh means of expression. Woolf gently upbraided some of her peers for seeking to render the evident strangeness of the unprecedented present with timeworn techniques: “instead of throwing away those tools, they tried to use them. They tried to compromise.”17 The Futurists, typically, expressed a similar sentiment much more vehemently: “Art has died,” Maiakovskii claimed, “because it ended up being behind life: portly, it could not defend itself”; Kruchenykh argued that “new wine instantly breaks through old wineskins.”18 On the other hand, if history repeats itself, how could people be sure that every attempt to produce something new, motivated though it may be by a desire to break free from recurrence, was itself not just a superficial echo, a farcical reprise? In 1912, the same year that the Futurists declared a new beginning in culture, Aleksandr Blok depicted a vision of time as a closed system in which past, present, and future form a loop: Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека, Бессмысленный и тусклый свет. Живи ещё хоть четверть века — Всё будет так. Исхода нет. Умрешь — начнешь опять сначала, И повторится всё, как встарь: Ночь, ледяная рябь канала, Аптека, улица, фонарь.19 [ Night, street, lamppost, chemist, | Pointless and dull light. | Live even another quarter of a century | Everything will be the same. There is no escape. | Once you die, you will start again from the beginning and everything will be repeated as it was of old. | Night, the icy ripple of the canal, | Chemist, street, lamppost.]

Blok locates his vision of endless recurrence in the symmetrical landscape of St. Petersburg, the self-consciously European capital founded by Peter the Great that had once promised to be Russia’s great new

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beginning, but that two hundred years later seemed to many to be overburdened with history. The same might be said to have happened with Pushkin, one of the authors of the Petersburg myth: a former enfant terrible, he had, seventy years after his death, attained the status of a popular classic, revered but ubiquitous, even anodyne. These two strands to his image, as a fearless creator and as a creature of a cultural imaginary that had ceased to be imaginative, meant that the Pushkin myth could be used to express ideas of both rupture and recurrence. This era came to be known, retrospectively, as the “Silver Age,” an inferior iteration of the Pushkinian Golden Age. This name is accurate inasmuch as it captures the intense and self-conscious interest that modernists focused on Pushkin and his era as a precedent; where it is lacking, however, is that it overstates the modernists’ sense of deference and underestimates their own sense of a unique destiny.20 It captures the era’s obsession with repetition, but not its eagerness for rupture, nor the role of Pushkin in helping to articulate that break. The year of Futurism’s greatest success, 1913, also saw the publication of two enduring books that address the interrelation of repetition and rupture in reference to both the city of St. Petersburg and the poetry of Pushkin: Mandel’shtam’s debut collection Stone and Belyi’s novel Petersburg. Like Blok, Mandel’shtam pictures the capital as a place outside of progressive chronology, a “chastely built ark” where the time on the clock is “eternity.”21 This indifference to the passing of time applies both to the city’s obdurate stone architecture and its literary existence: in “Petersburg Stanzas,” for instance, Pushkinian characters roam the streets unceasingly and bear witness to events from different epochs as they transpire both simultaneously and recurrently. A snowstorm (the name of a Pushkin short story) has “long circled” over the city; a law student “again” sits in his sleigh, in the same place Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin once had; “Onegin’s ancient longing” coincides with “the chill of bayonets [. . .] on Senate Square,” a reference to the failed Decembrist Uprising of 1825; finally, a certain “Evgenii” (the name is also shared by the doomed hero of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman) survives to inhale the modern odor of gasoline.22 Belyi’s Petersburg is still more explicit in its exploration of eternal return and the possibility of a break from it. Dmitrii Likhachev sees the novel as both a response to and a continuation of The Bronze Horseman (1833), with all its main characters functioning as both heirs and antagonists to Pushkin’s.23 As Pushkin does, Belyi begins with a prologue devoted to the city itself and then opens each chapter with an epigraph

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from Pushkin. At a climactic moment the narrator even pointedly tells us that “the fate of Evgenii is repeated, the past century is repeated”: Pushkin’s humble hero, driven insane by the loss of his beloved in a flood, angrily confronts the titular equestrian statue of Peter the Great, which then, it seems, comes to life, pursuing him through the streets and to death. In Petersburg that same Bronze Horseman pays a similar visit to the half-mad terrorist Dudkin: he is a “Metal Guest” (an allusion to another Pushkinian statue) who first transfixes his “son” then transfuses his vengeful essence into him as white-hot liquid, setting Dudkin on course for murder.24 In the years before and during the writing of Petersburg, Belyi devoted considerable energy to the problem of cyclical time.25 His dense and deliberately ambiguous novel bears witness to this thinking about history and progress, but, typically, does not provide any clear answers. The terrorist conspiracy and ticking time bomb that drive the plot ultimately come to nothing—a symbol, perhaps, of the futility of any attempts to alter the status quo. In the epilogue, the young protagonist Nikolai has abandoned his flirtation with revolution in favor of history, studying ancient Egypt and eighteenth-century philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. There are intimations, however, of imminent change. First, the slight alteration in the Bronze Horseman’s actions, driving his victim not to death but to murder, might represent the introduction of variation in repetition—what Belyi describes elsewhere as a helical progression, a form of innovation made possible by the living language of creativity.26 Second, allusions abound to a more thoroughgoing transformation of the city and the country. In “Petersburg Stanzas” Man­ del’shtam hints at a possible end to the atmosphere of unperturbed quiet: “Russia is relaxing,” he says, “like a battleship in dock,” presciently sensing the way in which the mechanized slaughter of war was poised to wrench his nation back into the flow of world-historical events.27 Similarly, in Petersburg, Belyi makes frequent mentions of the faceless “crowds of vague shadows” that inhabit the “islands,” the outlying proletarian districts that shelter the capital from the still more tenebrous and uncertain vastness of Russia but that also threaten to disturb its fragile existence.28 This too showed a certain foresight: in February 1917, the islands did indeed invade, when female workers took their demands for peace, bread, and rights from the suburbs to the central streets of St. Petersburg, beginning a chain of revolutionary events that left no one in any doubt that the era of somnolent stasis was over.

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Order and Chaos The emergence of the new state of revolution and then the new revolutionary state gave a heightened significance to questions of repetition and rupture, and the role of human agency in both, but they did not deprive Pushkin of his role in helping to answer them. Both Belyi and Blok described this undeniable change not as a product of conscious action but as a renovating incursion of chaos into civilization, as, respectively, “the shock of an earthquake breaking everything apart, [. . .] a hurricane sweeping forms away” and “a stormy whirlwind, a snowy blizzard [that] always brings the new and unexpected.”29 In his controversial 1918 address “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” Blok appeals to his class to be attentive to this new chaos, to “listen to the music thundering in the ‘air torn by the wind’” and its promptings “to remake everything [and] arrange it so that everything is new and different.”30 Mankind can make it new, he seems to suggest, but only by channeling external stimuli. For Blok, this idea of creativity as sensitivity to the sublime was closely associated with Pushkin. In his 1918 address, Pushkin features above all not as a force of originality but as a cultural object and, therefore, as beneficiary of a new era that will dispel the misconceptions that had prospered under bourgeois rule; in 1921, however, in a speech dedicated to Pushkin called “On the Function of the Poet,” Blok is considerably more circumspect about the new dawn of the revolution and foregrounds Pushkin’s role both as a cultural bulwark, impervious to change, and as a paragon of a specific version of poetic originality. It is the eternal duty of the poet to be “a son of harmony” capable of registering and retransmitting the fluctuations in the chaotic forces that stand outside of repetitious culture and thus contain the seeds of the new. Blok suggests that he takes this model of the original poet as a medium for chaos from Pushkin himself, who used the phrase “the son of harmony” in his play Mozart and Salieri (1832); Blok also quotes “The Poet” (1827) in which the poet is silent and unproductive until “a divine voice | touches his sensitive ear” (божественный глагол | До слуха чуткого коснется), inspiring him to flee human society in favor of the “shores of the desolate waves, the broad-rustling forests” ( На берега пустынных волн, | В широкошумные дубровы).31 Blok suggests, rightly, that Pushkin views such wild, liminal places, and especially the shoreline, as places of imagination because they represent the collision of rational and irrational, and allow the poet to “get

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close to ‘native chaos.’”32 His opinion was shared by another modernist poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, who argues that the attachment to the sea that she shares with Pushkin represents a longing for a freedom outside of civilization that is felt by all poets: “The elements [stikhiia], of course, are poetry [stikhi].”33 Just as Charles Baudelaire locates the sublime unknown out in the open ocean in his “Invitation to the Voyage” (1857), so, when discussing inspiration, Pushkin’s poetry often features places where the “free element” of the sea comes in contact with the immovable earth. Communion with chaos is not the only thing that happens on the shoreline, however, and sensitivity to the renewing power of nature is not the only version of originality that Pushkin bequeathed to modernism. The Bronze Horseman begins with an almost exact quotation from “The Poet” as it describes the decision of Peter the Great to found St. Petersburg on the bleak banks of the Baltic Sea: На берегу пустынных волн Стоял он, дум великих полн, И вдаль глядел. [. . .] И думал он: Отсель грозить мы будем шведу, Здесь будет город заложен [. . .] Прошло сто лет, и юный град, Полнощных стран краса и диво, Из тьмы лесов, из топи блат Вознесся пышно, горделиво34 [On the shore of deserted waves | He stood, full of great thoughts, | And looked into the distance. [. . .] || And he thought: | From here we will threaten the Swede, | Here a city will be founded [. . .] || A hundred years passed and the young city, | The beauty and marvel of northern lands | From the forests, from the swampy bogs | Arose, magnificent and proud].

Peter looks over the formless face of the deep and then wills the city into being by quasi-divine fiat. The swift passing of a century casts a veil over the drawn-out misery of its construction by indentured laborers and confirms the impression that the gleaming capital is born,

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Athena-like, from Peter’s head, fully formed and beautiful. Through Peter, the all-powerful demiurge, culture seems to triumph over nature. He is not a responsive “son of harmony,” but an active progenitor, and a point of contrast to Alexander I, who claims that “it is not for tsars to overcome God’s elements” (С божией стихией | Царям не совладеть).35 Peter is not, to be sure, a poet, but many readers, including Andrei Siniavskii and Boris Pasternak, have seen a parallel between Peter’s harmonious creation, in which the might of the river Neva is contained, and that of Pushkin’s harnessing of language in verse; the poet at work even puts in a cameo appearance during a description of the city’s “strict, orderly appearance” (строгий, стройный вид).36 The Bronze Horseman is riven with ambiguity, however, which is what made it so attractive to Belyi and many others. Even in the triumphant proem Pushkin reminds us that the desolate shore is not, as Peter sees it, terra nullius, but the home of a fisherman, foreshadowing the struggles of Evgenii, who has little hope against the forces either of nature—the floods of the Neva cannot be held back forever—or of autocratic ruthlessness. Peter himself is a paradox: he is both familiar and uncanny, mobile and static—a man with a name meaning “rock,” a builder and a monument. Finally, he is presented as both the conqueror of chaos and its embodiment, the synthesis of the initial opposition between man and nature. The hooves of his horse sound like thunder, recalling the description of Peter in Poltava (1829) as “God’s storm” (божия гроза), and Evgenii curses him for his complicity in the flood.37 It is this similarity to an irresistible natural force that marks out Peter not only as culpable but, more importantly, as capable of changing the course of history. Both the bringer of new beginnings and the harbinger of death, he is, as Pushkin says elsewhere, “revolution incarnate.”38 Whereas certain Russian modernists often felt that their country was suffering from too much history, some in Pushkin’s generation felt that it had too little. In his controversial Philosophical Letters (1826–31), Petr Chaadaev described Russia as an orphan, devoid of a past and so stuck without a future. He made a partial exception for Peter, lauding his well-intentioned but fruitless attempt to “civilize” Russia.39 This praise was too faint for Pushkin, however, who told Chaadaev in a letter that Peter was not a noble failure but rather a single-handed “universal history”; he further argued that Catherine the Great and Alexander I deserved more recognition for taking Russia first to “the threshold of Europe” and then, in 1814, all the way to Paris.40 Pushkin invokes the common Romantic idea of the heroic individual’s ability to shape history, but presents it from a particularly Russian peripheral standpoint:

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projecting time onto space, he equates modernity with Western Europe. In Pushkin’s letter, Catherine and Alexander seem to complete the westward movement begun by Peter in The Bronze Horseman when he “cut a window through to Europe.”41 While Chaadaev and Pushkin disagree on the question of Russia having a history, they share the assumption, widespread now as then, that Russia is a land predisposed to sluggishness and in need of strong individuals to drag it forward. Pushkin’s contribution to the myth of Peter the Great helped to cement this as a commonplace in the discourse of Russian history and created a language not just for the depiction of later implacable leaders, but for impetuous new beginnings in general, even in literature. The divine image of Peter at the opening of The Bronze Horseman has its origins in the odic tradition of the eighteenth century, the style of which Pushkin almost pastiches. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the model of ex nihilo creativity that Pushkin ascribes to the tsar came to be used to describe his own role in Russian culture. Just as The Bronze Horseman skips over the gradual development of St. Petersburg, so the mainstream interpretation of Russian literary history has often overlooked its origins in the Middle Ages and its rapid development in the eighteenth century in order to position its greatest poet not as the culmination of an evolutionary process, but as a solitary founder in the void. Moreover, as with Peter, the sudden progress supposedly made possible by Pushkin’s achievement has frequently been presented in geographic terms, as an integration of Russia into Europe. The influential critic Vissarion Belinskii once claimed that “only with Pushkin does Russian literature begin, for in his poetry beats the pulse of Russian life. It is no longer Russia getting to know Europe, but Europe getting to know Russia.”42 Some forty years later, in 1880, Ivan Turgenev also described Pushkin as a kindred spirit to Peter, a lonely pioneer who “alone had to carry out two jobs, in other countries separated by a whole century and more, which is to say establishing a language and creating a literature.”43 Writers at the turn of the twentieth century looking to make their own fresh start in culture were naturally drawn to the myth of heroic originality that was attached to both Pushkin and Peter. In an effusive 1896 essay dedicated to Pushkin, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, one of the moving spirits of Russian modernism, emphasized the parallel between Russian culture’s two great founders: Like Peter the Great, with whom he felt a deep connection, Pushkin was not so much the finisher as the initiator of Russian

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A Dance to the Music of Time enlightenment. In the most various areas he lays the foundations of future buildings, puts down roads, cuts through the undergrowth. The novel, the novella, lyric poetry, narrative poems, drama—everywhere he is one of the first, or the first, lonely or alone.44

Although clearly building on an established trope about Pushkin’s creativity, Merezhkovskii focuses on specific aspects of his myth and Peter’s in order to illuminate and justify his own strategy for making it new. Like Pushkin before him, he likens such world-historical figures to forces of nature, but under the influence of Nietzsche, he also insists that transformative creation first requires annihilation: “What is the difference between a hero and a poet? In essence, none [. . .]. Both destroy the old life and create a new one, both are born from the same elemental force.”45 He contrasts this unsentimental activism to an overly meek version of Russian Christianity, allegedly promoted by Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, that has initiated “a decline in artistic taste and aesthetic and philosophical education,” recalling the title of his landmark 1893 essay “On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Russian Literature.” One of the foundational texts of Russian modernism, this essay set a precedent, taken up by the Futurists, for denouncing the present and demanding a new start: he calls on a new generation to emulate the sort of sudden change that he later attributed to Peter and Pushkin and in so doing precipitate “an internal break and battle with the past, a crossing of the abyss” that will kindle “the spark of a new life.”46

The Sacred and the Secular For all his Nietzschean disgust at the meek inheriting the earth, Mere­zh­ kovskii’s vision of the new life was in many ways very Christian in its intent. He ends his essay where The Bronze Horseman begins, indeed where everything begins, with the biblical image of “the Spirit of God moving over the land” to signal the rise of a new Christian mysticism that will rescue Russia.47 Merezhkovskii’s willingness to find a synthesis between Nietzscheanism and Christianity is indicative of a wider dialectic between the sacred and the secular in Russian modernity, an interrelation that became particularly intense in the modernist period. Rivalry between the secular and the supernatural was already a factor in Pushkin’s own poetic career, which embraced both radical free-thinking and

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sincere dialogue with the church. The question of Pushkin’s own religious faith continues to provoke considerable debate, but more significant for his legacy was the indisputable fact that he made extensive use of motifs from both Christianity and classical paganism to lend authority to his poetic mythology. This religious imagery, and especially metaphors drawn from the Bible, were then taken up with enthusiasm after Pushkin’s death. For both the educated readers of the mid-nineteenth century who first shaped the Pushkin myth and for the less educated public among whom this myth prospered in the latter part of the century, internalized narratives from the Bible and the lives of the saints presented a natural template for understanding Pushkin’s life, and especially his death, promoting both hagiographical and mystical interpretations of his special significance. The immediate poetic responses to his death of Mikhail Lermontov and Fedor Tiutchev, for instance, presented Pushkin as a martyr and agent of divine will on earth.48 It has been suggested that the extraordinary position that Pushkin came to occupy as both an object of popular adoration and the cultural measure of all things was in part a response to the disenchanting, secularizing processes of modernity, as Russian society found itself in need of a non-monarchical figurehead of national identity.49 Although his undoubted talent, tragic biography, and carefully cultivated poetic mythology did make Pushkin a suitable candidate for this promotion, it was also a vacancy waiting to be filled. And vacancy really is the word: as with other national poets, a corollary of Pushkin’s assumption of the mantle of tutelary deity of Russian culture was a certain emptying out of the content of his literary legacy. This hollowness, which Siniavskii would later present as the defining feature of Pushkin, was present in his reception from the very beginning: in his elegy to Pushkin Tiutchev describes him not only as a martyr, but as an empty vessel, “a divine vial.”50 Pushkin’s proverbial proteanism, although it also has origins in his own genuine multiplicity, is to some degree a product of this flexible vacuity, which permits him, even requires him, to be all things to all people. We see this also in Apollon Grigor’ev’s famous description of Pushkin as “our everything”: he is a totality delimited only by the boundaries of Russianness, or, for a time at least, Sovietness. The combination of Pushkin’s flexibility and his existing association with still potent Christian narratives made him all the more attractive to modernists at time when, despite the seemingly unstoppable rise of rationalism, there was a general resurgence in interest in the supernatural. All over Europe the first decades of the twentieth century saw the

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legitimacy of rational inquiry undermined—or, in the eyes of some, augmented—by a willing embrace of mysticism and the esoteric. Science and philosophy had unsettled the dominance of traditional religious faith, but not yet found convincing answers to the eternal questions about inspiration, purpose, and belonging that continued to fascinate writers and artists. Accordingly, many ostensibly secular writers returned to the texts, narratives, and images of religion to help them understand and negotiate the vacuum of authority left, in part, by the dethroning of these same religious sources.51 This double movement away from and back to religion was particularly noticeable in Russia. Since the 1860s, members of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia had, broadly speaking, drifted ever further from traditional church-going Orthodoxy. This trend continued, but around the turn of the century many writers and artists had grown disillusioned with the rival philosophies of liberalism and radical materialism that dominated intellectual life and started to seek new ways of engaging with higher powers. The work of the devout but resolutely anti-obscurantist philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev inspired poets like Pasternak and Anna Akhma­tova to reinterpret the Christian liturgy as a means of understanding their own lives; Belyi explored the potent irrationalism of the ecstatic Christian sects flourishing on the margins of society and later became a disciple of Rudolf Steiner; even Communists like Anatolii Lunacharskii and Maksim Gor’kii reframed their initially atheist and consistently anticlerical project as an exercise in “God-building.”52 And when the Communist revolution eventually did come, it only intensified the theological and often apocalyptic filter through which Russian history was viewed. Blok’s poem The Twelve, like his contemporary speech “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” pictures the revolution as a snowstorm, but also describes it through the actions of a detachment of Red Guards, whose leader is ultimately revealed to be Jesus Christ. The rise of myth is itself typical of the paradoxical interaction of the supernatural and the secular in modernism, since it functioned both as an alternative to a partly discredited Christian worldview and a continuation not only of religion’s mode of operation but also of particular cosmological narratives. Even Nietzsche’s combative use of myth as a new axiology that could replace the pernicious influence of JudeoChristian morality was motivated by an awareness of the need for “a language of self-transcendence” that could replicate religion’s ability to serve as the heart of a heartless world.53 This desire for a more universal

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anchoring was especially keenly felt in relation to the all-important question of temporality. One of the most attractive features of a mythological worldview was that, while it operated outside the discredited genetic paradigm of linear causality, it still allowed for an anchoring of the self in affinities between people, events, and stories that resonated across time and space.54 The individual might have lost or abandoned their link to the preceding generation, but they found new connections with more distant ancestors and descendants. Somewhat counter-intuitively, those newly discovered antecedents could include such ubiquitous figures as Christ, who, as Blok showed, could be reimagined for the purposes of the new historical moment as a radical solution to the aporia between repetition and rupture. Blok sees the revolution as both a novel irruption of chaos and the long-foretold Parousia: messianic eschatology serves as the site of the synthesis of discourses of return and revelation. Partly because of the religious charge already attached to him as a figure, a similar combination of mythology and teleology could also be used in reference to Pushkin, making him not only a symbol of stasis, of cultural continuity and repetition, but also a potential force for messianic change, “a sign of the eruption of eschatological time into the history of culture.”55 The connection of Christ with Pushkin was not new, but it acquired a new intensity and a new temporality in modernism. We can see the difference if we compare the presentation of Pushkin’s death in the poems of Tiutchev and Lermontov to Mandel’shtam’s 1916 speech “Skria­bin and Christianity.” In both cases, Pushkin is described as a martyr but, for Mandel’shtam, Pushkin’s demise is not a singular tragedy, but the enactment of a recurring principle of imitatio Christi in Russian culture, also hypostatized by recently deceased composer Aleksandr Skriabin, that was capable of transforming death into a creative, regenerative act.56 Merezhkovskii’s equation of Pushkin with Christ is similarly focused on the present and the future. In his mythic synthesis of Christianity and Nietzscheanism, he presents Pushkin as a “Galilean” who stands in opposition to “contemporary culture based on the power of the mob, on the democratic concept of equality and the majority of votes” and instead, “like a pagan,” prefers “the autocratic will of the single man—creator or destroyer, prophet or hero.”57 His Pushkin is not only foresighted in his critique of the present, but also has the potential to change the future: he begins his article by arguing that Aleksandra Smirnova’s account of Pushkin in everyday life, which continues to have little credibility, is of enormous significance because

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it reveals “the Pushkin of the future, the Pushkin of uncompleted plans.”58 This shift in the temporality of the Pushkin myth was in part a product of the modernists’ own desire for a utopian breakthrough, but it was made possible, as Merezhkovskii acknowledges, by Fedor Dostoevskii, whom he calls the only person who has “made even an attempt to find in Pushkin’s poetry a harmonious worldview, a great idea.”59 He is referring here to the speech that Dostoevskii gave at the festivities to mark the new Pushkin monument in 1880. While Turgenev’s address at this event, quoted above, was well-received, the response to it paled in comparison to the effect that Dostoevskii’s impassioned oration had on its immediate audience and on subsequent generations. Like so many others, Dostoevskii frames Pushkin’s unique contribution in relation to Peter and to Europe, but he takes this comparison to an extreme. Peter’s reforms, he proposes, were not an act of superficial Europeanization, but a prescient first step in Russia’s holy mission to unite all the nations of the world together in Christian harmony—a mission that will, in some undefined future, be fulfilled by Pushkin. Dostoevskii ignores the political questions that had characterized much of Pushkin’s reception up to that point and, rebuking the sublunary solidity implied by the new statue, he ascribes to Pushkin an extraordinary and ongoing role in Russian and world history, not as a respected authority, but as a powerful metaphysical phenomenon, a “prophet.”60 This attitude was not entirely unprecedented. In the letter to Chaadaev cited above, Pushkin himself had suggested that, by suffering Mongol rule, Russia had sacrificed itself for the benefit of Europe, and, of course, Pushkin himself was often seen as a martyr.61 Dostoevskii fuses these two myths and shifts Pushkin from the role of Christ crucified to that of Christ the redeemer, moving the moment of his decisive intervention in human history from the past to a potential time-outsideof-time.62 He turns Gogol’s description of Pushkin as “a unique manifestation of the Russian spirit [. . .] a fully developed Russian man of the sort that might appear in two hundred years,” which he quotes in part, into an argument for Pushkin as a proleptic embodiment of utopian universality and global deliverance.63 Had he lived, Dostoevskii suggests, Pushkin would have healed all possible rifts between Russia and Europe (and within Russia too), but he was taken too soon and so instead left behind “a great secret” for his successors to unravel in the present.64

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The universality of this potential transformation appealed to some: Merezhkovskii picks up on this theme when he suggests that Pushkin contains not just “the seeds of an unrealized Russian culture” but also “the great makings of a future Renaissance, of that spiritual harmony that is for all nations the rarest fruit of millennia of effort.”65 Nonetheless, what really caught the imagination of modernist poets, who were already predisposed to view their craft in a mystical light, was the idea that, since Pushkin was no longer bound by time, he could be invoked in the present not as a reference but as an agent of deliverance. Dostoev­ skii’s detachment of Pushkin from the ordinary run of historical time seemed to offer both a way of rescuing Pushkin from popular trivialization and official appropriation and a way of using Pushkin to rescue Russian culture as a whole.66

The Cult of Pushkin The loftiness of the powers ascribed to Pushkin was one of the main reasons why the Futurists focused so intently on him. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see the Futurists’ hostility to Pushkin described as an attack not on the poet himself, but his cult.67 This view was prevalent as early as the 1920s, when a friend of Kruchenykh said that “he was just annoyed by the stupid aura around Pushkin’s top hat.” Even in 1913, Livshits, always the most measured of the Futurists, explained their assault on the classics as a corrective to myopic over-enthusiasm: “seen at a new angle of vision, from a new perspective, their works lose a considerable amount of their now illegitimate power of enchantment.”68 The Futurists were not alone in pushing back against the apotheosis of Pushkin. In the 1890s Solov’ev had made a careful Dyophysite distinction between the two natures combined in Pushkin, the poet and the man, and in the Futurists’ own time, Vikentii Veresaev paid scrupulous attention to the minutiae of Pushkin’s life, saying he wished to reveal “Pushkin the living man, and not an iconized image of the poet.”69 A similar approach was also taken by the prominent poet, and frequent antagonist of the Futurists, Valerii Briusov, whose rigorous scholarly studies of Pushkin made clear that some aspects of his life and work were anything but piously transcendent.70 Despite their emphasis on Pushkin’s mortality, however, these arguments all still understood him as a singular and numinous phenomenon capable of unlocking the potential of Russian literature. Briusov, for instance, presents his own

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work as an attempt to undo the distortions engendered by Pushkin’s reception and reveal his true self: “Between us and Pushkin too many magnifying glasses have been placed,” he said, “so many that nothing is visible through them”; proper analysis can determine what about Pushkin is only superficially true and what “true to the depths.”71 For Briusov the “real” Pushkin was not confined to the past but the source of a deeply personal connection in the present; he set something of a trend for conflating the “true Pushkin” with “my Pushkin,” the title of his 1929 collection of essays, which was later also used by Tsvetaeva. So confident was Briusov about his intimate link with Pushkin that in 1916 he published a conclusion to Pushkin’s unfinished story “Egyptian Nights” (1837), suggesting that he was able to channel him in the present.72 Belyi agreed, saying in 1906 that “Pushkin’s secret, which Dos­ toev­skii told us about, has been figured out by Briusov.”73 Considering the connection made between Pushkin and Christ, it is perhaps not surprising that controversies about Pushkin can be mapped onto debates about the nature of the incarnation. Dostoevskii’s description of Pushkin’s self-abnegation as a path to universal significance is, for instance, partly derived from the idea of Christ’s kenosis, the “emptying out” of his divine nature on the assumption of mortal flesh.74 While kenosis enjoyed particular currency in Orthodoxy, it was contingent on the doctrine of Dyophysitism—two natures in one body—that was accepted throughout European Christianity and that informed Solov’ev’s distinction between Pushkin the man and Pushkin the poet. By acknowledging his partial mortality, this doctrine facilitated post-Enlightenment attempts to submit the divinity of Jesus, long taken for granted, to rational scrutiny. Those striving to prove the historical reality of Jesus often undermined his universalism by grounding him in the specific context of first-century Palestine and comparative mythology unearthed analogues and antecedents in other cultures for the miracles of the gospels and even the resurrection.75 The same patternoriented reading of history that underpinned the modernist embrace of mythological thinking (not to mention conspiracy theories and chiliastic cultists) can also be used to secularizing ends, since, with a shift in emphasis, transhistorical similarities serve as evidence not of particular specialness but of widespread ordinariness. While Veresaev, and to a lesser extent Briusov, could be said to pursue the first approach, reasserting Pushkin’s humanity without gainsaying his singular importance, the Futurists go further in using both historical context and a comparative mythological framework to rebut

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the notion of Pushkin as either a unique phenomenon or an irruption of transcendent genius into the run of Russian culture. Instead, they pre­ sent him as doubly historically contingent. First, their intertextual engagement with Pushkin shows him to be embedded in his era and its literary culture, remaking material from his contemporaries as well as from more venerable sources. Second, when reaching back through time to a particular Pushkinian motif in order to use it themselves, they do not imagine themselves to be in direct contact with Pushkin but lay bare the waypoints along Pushkin’s journey into the present constituted by the reworkings of his myth by intermediaries like Dostoevskii, Tiutchev, and Nikolai Nekrasov. Rather than seek to remove the lenses between Pushkin and the present, as Briusov sought to do, the Futurists chose to examine these refractions. What is more, they did not presuppose a hierarchy of authenticity between these iterations but rather treated adaptations of Pushkinian mythology not as a deviation, but as evidence that Pushkin, like all cultural phenomena, is a malleable object remade in accordance with new circumstances. More than just a Proteus, capable of willed self-transformation, the Futurists see Pushkin as an inherently multiple cultural construct—an epistemological position that accords not only with the relativism of myth, but also with Pushkin’s own skepticism about the possibility of uncovering a single truth among the multifarious interpretations of the past.76 In short, they celebrated what Tynianov called the “evolutionary significance” of Pushkin.77 It was in his 1924 article “On the Literary Fact” that Tynianov laid out this particular argument for Pushkin to be seen not as an absolute eternal quality—nor, indeed, as a heroic founding father—but as a participant in the dynamic and ongoing development of Russian literature. This was but one instance, however, in a long-standing campaign by Tynianov and other Formalist critics to demystify literature in general and Pushkin in particular. The Futurists’ historicization of Pushkinian mythology can be seen, in many ways, as a poetic counterpart of the Formalists’ self-consciously scientific project, which sought to challenge baseless biographical, psychological, and hagiographical readings of literary works by showing that they would be better understood in terms of the internal mechanisms and patterns underlying their construction.78 Although this exercise has sometimes been seen as in itself promoting too abstract and isolated an appreciation of literature, it would certainly be unfair to accuse Tynianov of thinking in ahistorical terms.79 When it came to Pushkin, for instance, he used both criticism

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and fiction to demonstrate that Pushkin was not an “incomprehensible ‘miracle,’” but rather a child of the eighteenth century whose meaning was still developing well into the twentieth.80 In The Latest Russian Poetry (1921), a description of Futurist poetics against a Pushkinian backdrop, Jakobson made a similar complaint that the overriding emphasis on Pushkin’s enduring values had obscured the fact that his verse was perceived in a different light by his contemporaries. This lack of context was associated with an unhealthy sense of devotion: “Pushkin’s poems, as poems, are now clearly being taken as an article of faith, they are petrifying, like a cult object.”81 This insistence on seeing the poetry from various eras in its original context in fact led Nikolai Trubetskoi to reject an earlier version of the underlying thesis of Jakobson’s book on the grounds that “if Pushkin read Khlebnikov, he simply would not consider him to be a poet [. . .] by dint of the radical difference in their aesthetic approaches.”82 The Futurists might have welcomed this emphasis on their distinctiveness, given how much their own identity was founded on oppositions in space, time, and taste. Jakobson’s own defense was to find structural similarity in the midst of this difference, arguing that if Pushkin would not have recognized Khlebnikov as a poet, it would have been “because of the difference between the poetic tradition Khlebnikov is ‘rejecting’ and that which Pushkin ‘rejected.’”83 In many ways, the parallel proposed by Jakobson also combines elements of both repetition and rupture: he underscores Pushkin’s credentials as an agent of change, not as a unique phenomenon, but rather as a prototype emulated in the present by the Futurists. This too is a view that the Futurists would endorse, since they also understand history as beholden to repeating patterns. Where their model of cultural time differs from Jakobson and his sober-minded colleagues, however, is that they understand their own rebellion as something much more powerful than just an iteration of a familiar aesthetic position.

Escaping the Trap of Time For the Futurists, no one stands outside of time, at least not yet, and especially not Pushkin. In his brief essays “Chaucer and Me” and “Pushkin and the Pure Laws of Time” (1921), Khlebnikov demonstrated how Pushkin was fully subject to the overarching mathematical laws that he believed govern all history.84 Khlebnikov made it his mission to uncover

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these laws. In Teacher and Disciple (1912), after showcasing some of the hidden functions that he had detected in language and that he used as the basis for his zaum, he explained his desire to do something similar with people’s lives: “I wanted to take a look at the whole human race from afar, like a bank of clouds, like a distant mountain ridge, and find out whether its waves had any measure, order, and harmony.”85 The evidence he presents shows how historical individuals are constituted by the intersection of repetition and variation: The universally known Socrates, the prophet of oral dialogue, born in 458 BC. 355 × 5 after him comes Tsongkhapa, the greatest teacher of the Mongols, born in 1357. [. . .] He is the Socrates of deserted Asia. After 365 × 6 comes Skovoroda (the Ukrainian Socrates) born in 1722. [. . .] Here is the old Socrates in a new situation.86

Skovoroda is the product both of an archetypal Socratic essence and of his circumstances. In fact, the latter could be said to predominate, since the repeating essential inner core of identity is so hidden that it takes Khlebnikov’s special perception to reveal it. Khlebnikov detects a similar schema of repetition and change in the case of Pushkin, which he described in a note written in 1915, in an album belonging to Levkii Zheverzheev, the industrialist who had sponsored many of the Futurists’ endeavors: The Futurian is Pushkin in the light of the world war, in the cloak of the new century, teaching the right of that century to “laugh” at the Pushkin of the 19th century. It was Pushkin who threw Pushkin from “the steamship of modernity,” but behind the mask of the new century. And in 1913 the dead Pushkin was defended by the D’Anthès who had killed Pushkin in 18**. Ruslan and Liudmila was called “a peasant in bast shoes come to an assembly of noblemen.” The killer of the living Pushkin, who turned the wintry ground crimson with his blood, has hypocritically put on the mask of defending him (the corpse), in order to repeat the distant shot at the ascent of a herd of the young Pushkins of the new century.87

Khlebnikov here anticipates Jakobson in seeing the Futurists and Pushkin as sharing a contrarian spirit that propels literature forward. In

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many ways this note suggests quite an orthodox way in which to use the Pushkin myth in modernism: Khlebnikov cites Pushkin as a distinguished and creative forerunner and, seemingly, endorses the idea that Pushkin is an eternal principle outside of history, returning in different incarnations. We could compare the transhistorical connection implied in Khlebnikov’s note with Mandel’shtam’s description, in the same year, of Pushkin and Skriabin as “two transformations of a single sun, two transformations of a single heart.”88 Like Khlebnikov, Mandel’shtam recognizes that figures from the past must necessarily change in order to express new realities. Writing after the revolution, he said: “I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus again and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus.”89 There are also significant differences, however, that derive from the Futurists’ emphasis on contrast. Mandel’shtam urges a willed remaking of the past in the present as a step toward greater cultural integration of diverse people and places across time and space; he repeats the familiar refrain of the union of Russia with Europe, describing Pushkin and Skriabin as steps in the “further logical uncovering of the Hellenistic nature of the Russian soul,” and, later, in 1921, praising Catullus as more relevant to Russia in 1921 than “any Futurist riddle” and taking as his ideal Dante, for whom “time is the content of history understood as a unified synchronistic act.”90 Khlebnikov, in contrast, continues to focus on the agonies and agonisms caused by recurrence, which he understands as an inevitable and undesirable fact of life, not an artistic creation. Furthermore, Khlebnikov’s persecuted Pushkin seems more like a structural principle than an eternal spirit: he is not presented as possessing originary authenticity but, like the Futurists, is given a historical epithet, marking the fact that he belongs in the nineteenth century. Finally, while both Khlebnikov and Mandel’shtam focus on Pushkin’s death, the former presents this death as an act of termination, not a creative rebirth, dwelling, as Tiutchev had before him, on the pathos-filled image of blood on the snow and repeatedly emphasizing the contrast between the corpse of Pushkin and his living successors, who now face a mortal threat. Repetition brings with it not happy homogeneity, but homicide. This frustration at historical recurrence was felt by all the Futurists and, although it did not always directly concern Pushkin, it was fundamental in shaping their attitudes to him. Krystyna Pomorska’s description of Maiakovskii’s attitude could stand for each of them: “All his life Majakovskij considered time a trap, and all his life he was looking for a

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way out of this trap.”91 Poetry, something that Maiakovskii first turned his hand to during a lonely spell in prison, was one such escape. All writing could be said to be a way of attempting to defy time and its companion, death, not only because ars is longa and vita brevis, but also because of the way time becomes manipulable in text: we recall, for instance, Pushkin skipping over a century at the beginning of The Bronze Horseman. One of the hallmarks of modernist literature is that this manipulation often took the form of reimagining time in terms of space (although such spatialization was far from unprecedented). In a famous article Joseph Frank described the modernist obsession with recurrence and the concomitant adoption of myth as the result of the replacement of an “objective historical imagination” by a “mythical imagination for which historical time does not exist [. . .] which sees the actions and events of a particular time merely as the bodying forth of eternal prototypes [. . .] which finds its appropriate esthetic expression in spatial form.”92 Igor’ Smirnov has seen the same process at work in Futurist poetry, in which, he says, “time inevitably loses its sign of irreversibility and events are linked in time as if they were organized in space, which is to say they are not understood from the point of view of temporal order.” There is, however, a crucial distinction between Frank’s picture of mythical “timelessness,” which serves well enough for the integrated, undifferentiated universe of Mandel’shtam’s “Petersburg Stanzas,” and what Smirnov calls the “topological understanding of time” that obtains in Futurism.93 Both represent time as a unified space and dispense with implicit hierarchy of chronology but, while the “timelessness” of Mandel’shtam and Frank represents an amorphous synchrony outside of history, in the Futurists’ historical topology the structure of time does not collapse but instead becomes more visible and hence more navigable. Futurist poems do not model synchrony, but heterochrony.94 This structured spatialization of time within the poem expresses the same desire to reveal determinative patterns in history that underlies both Khlebnikov’s tracking of iterative essences and the recurrent intertextual instantiations of the Pushkin myth that we will see in forthcoming chapters. In all cases, however, revealing this structure is not enough; it must also be dismantled. One way to do this, or at least to imagine it, is through the then still novel motif of time travel.95 For their timetraveling characters, who are often a cipher for the poets themselves, time is unitary but not unstructured: time travel is still travel, with distinct points of origin and destination. For the eponymous hero of

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Khlebnikov’s tale “Ka” (1915), for instance, “there are no barriers in time,” but he still has to move and so he “goes from dreams to dreams, cuts across time.” Kruchenykh’s opera Victory over the Sun (1913) features a character named “the Traveler through all ages” who, sure enough, says, “I will go back and forth through the ages,” anticipating Khlebnikov’s Zangezi (1922), in which the title character, a Zarathustralike prophet, also boasts that “I can go back and forth through the ages.” In Maiakovskii’s The Bathhouse (1930), the future is a train ride away and in “At the Top of My Voice” (1930) just a walk: “Мой стих дойдет через хребты веков [. . .] я шагну | через лирические томики, как живой | с живыми говоря” (My verse will reach across the ridges of the centuries [. . .] I will stride | across little lyrical tomes, like the living | speaking with the living).96 Even when the manipulation of time is extradiegetic, the emphasis remains on distinction, not holism. Futurist poems often present new relations between historical epochs in terms of juxtaposition and anachronism, using proximity for the demonstration of difference, not similarity. In 1909 Khlebnikov wrote to Kamenskii to say: “I’ve thought up a work, Athwart Time, where the rights of the logic of time and space would be broken as many times as a drunkard goes to his glass in an hour. Each chapter should not be like the next.”97 Chronology is disrupted, but time remains heterogeneous. This proposed work was never written, but it did likely provide the inspiration for further investigations into reordering time that Khlebnikov carried out together with Kru­chenykh. In 1912 they jointly authored the collection Worldbackwards, the neologistic title of which was coined by Kruchenykh in his poem “The Old Tongs of Sunset,” which ends with a coda explaining that the ordering of events in the poem runs counter to linear time and causality.98 In 1913 Khlebnikov wrote a play with the same name but with a more precise attitude to the reordering of time, with events unfolding in strict reverse chronological order. Such rearrangements of time seem, nonetheless, somewhat trivial compared to the Futurist’s ultimate goal of the complete remaking of time. We can see the extent of their ambition in a number of poems that contain depictions of future utopias in which time and death have no dominion. Maiakovskii can be resurrected in Man (1918) and in Khlebnikov’s paradisiacal Ladomir (1922) he instructs “the holder of the banner of freedoms” to “bury the remains of times and drink freedom from the glass of the stars.”99 Not all Futurist utopias are as blissful as La­ domir, however, especially in the case of Maiakovskii. As their attitude

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to the revolution would bear out, the Futurists were more invested in the process of change than the product and the pristine future worlds of their imagining were ultimately imperfect because they had no need for the sort of antagonism that was the Futurists’ specialty. The pleasure comes from the moment of defeating time, not the extra-temporal aevum that results from it. As a result, the Futurists do not consider it the function of the poet to be a “son of harmony,” as Blok does, someone who helps to generate a new world by responding to the incursions of chaos into civilization; instead, they repeatedly profess their confidence in their own ability to reorient the cosmos by using an originality internal to art to produce a single, punctual act which interrupts history and inaugurates a new time-outside-of-time. They share the same apocalyptic expectations as many of their modernist peers, but assign the role of deliverer not to Pushkin, but to themselves. Of course, this attempted breakout from history continually fails—paradise is never regained—but, given the Futurists’ preference for action over ataraxia, we might surmise that the inevitability of this failure is what sustains them.

The Myth of Rupture While rupture as an idea and an ideal is present in many branches of Russian modernism, it is in Futurism that it is most clearly articulated as a fundamental aim. For critics like Marjorie Perloff and Julia Kristeva it is precisely this desire for a moment of instantaneous liberatory disconnection that defines the avant-garde, Russian Futurism’s part in it, and its legacy to future generations.100 Of course, the utopian proposition of reconfiguring all human existence through poetry seems a long way from any project to demystify literature. Many have argued, indeed, that the avant-garde should properly be viewed as an artistic component of the aforementioned attempt to re-enchant the world and fill the void left by secular modernity. In the Russian context, for instance, Mikhail Epshtein has suggested that the Futurists’ “intense, world-fighting relationship to the reality around them” followed from the fact that “in contrast to the sacral art of the Middle Ages and the secular art of the early modern era, the avant-garde is the sacral art of a secular age.”101 While Epshtein argues that Futurism manifests the specific influence of Orthodox theology, the desire for rupture that was shared across the European avant-garde was both sufficiently eschatologically charged

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and sufficiently general to invite parallels from across Judeo-Christian thought. We can see similarities, for instance, between the temporal break desired by the Futurists and Walter Benjamin’s concept of “messianic time.” First, like the Futurists, Benjamin finds the present experience of history intolerable since, in the words of Peter Osborne, it promotes “abstract continuity with the past, in a naturalized and merely chronological form [. . .] which presents the phenomena of the past in terms of their ‘value as heritage,’ or as ‘cultural treasures.’”102 Second, Benjamin holds that the spell of this obsessive continuity can only be broken by a single kairotic event, which he associates with revolution.103 Finally, he believes that while this history-ending avant-garde irruption is made in the image of a divine intervention, it is not a perfect likeness, but only “a model” that contains “chips” of the messianic, so, as a consequence, the avant-garde cannot itself bring closure or redemption, only an intimation of it.104 The Futurists do sometimes plainly state their desire to interrupt historical time—Khlebnikov, for instance, describes himself as the “mouthpiece of the fracture of ages”—but more often this aspiration takes the form of the metaphorical murder of time in the form of the sun, the engine of the endless sequence of days.105 The same intent is also present, if less palpable, in their general valorization of eruption— Kruchenykh has a collection called Explodity (1913)—and in their two most explosive and ephemeral means of self-expression, zaum and the manifesto, both of which insist on their presentness not only as a refusal of “abstract continuity with the past” but as the promise of an unbounded future. Neither the extravagant manifesto nor the non-semantic poem precludes an awareness of the past—zaum is often presented as an emulation of a lost Edenic language and the manifesto’s disgusted insistence on dissimilarity is a form of codependency—but both genres operate outside of a paradigm of gradual progress. The zaum of Kru­ chenykh in particular rehearses the Romantic aspiration to the spontaneous creativity of the inspired individual and ignores the task of representing the world in favor of the fleeting expression of some otherwise ineffable inner feeling. He likens zaum to ecstatic glossolalia and frames it as an alternative to interpersonal communication: “thought and speech cannot keep up with the experience of one who is inspired, so the artist is free to express himself not only in the common, shared language (concepts), but a personal one too (the creator is individual).”106 As an antisemantic idiolect of one speaker, zaum refutes not only Ferdinand de Saussure’s division between signifier and

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signified, but also his other fundamental dichotomy between parole, language as individual utterance, and langue, language as a diachronic interpersonal system. In the moment of creative ecstasy, the zaum poet asserts his individuality, originality, and presentness, producing speech as pure parole, stepping outside of langue and thus outside of history. Instead, the perlocutionary utterance looks forward to the future: like the quasi-divine instruction of Pushkin’s Peter, zaum aims not to describe the old world, but to make a new one: “New verbal form creates new content, and not the other way round,” Kruchenykh says, “giving new words, I bring new content.”107 The manifesto is similarly presented more as a bullet than a bulletin— a one-off that interrupts the flow of historical events with words intended to not just say something but do something. By at once announcing a crisis and its future resolution the manifesto belongs neither to the past nor the future, but models an ideal “discontinuous temporality” that matches the Futurists’ preferred ambivalent position on the threshold between an illegitimate past and an eternally unfulfilled utopian future.108 As Maiakovskii said, “The Futurians [budetliane] are the people who will be [budut]. We are on the eve.”109 The manifesto’s very insistence on the need for urgent transformation is also proof positive that the new dawn has not yet come so all we have are the future’s spokesmen— the authors—and their promises. The manifesto is thus the textual distillation of what Benjamin calls Jetztzeit, the now-time of potent stillness outside the continuum of history that precedes the explosion that will recast the world.110 As much as it was a genuine program for world transformation through art, the avant-garde discourse of rupture was itself a myth. This does not mean that it was a flight of fancy: on the contrary, writing is often at its most effective when it is at its most mythic and the Futurists believed that promulgating the myth of rupture was both a way of describing a sudden transformation and a way of achieving it. Like zaum and the manifesto, myth was understood as a way of avoiding mimesis, which is necessarily derivative, and achieving genuine demiurgic originality. Even after the 1917 revolution, Maiakovskii was using the idea of a history-ending new myth as the catalyst for a still more fundamental revolution: “В диком разгроме | старое смыв, | новый разгромим | по миру миф. | Время-ограду | взломим ногами” (In a wild rout | Having washed away the old, | We will thunder a new | Myth through the world. | We will break open with our feet | The barrier that is time).111 He is drawing here not only on the newly pervasive rhetoric of

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revolutionary insurrection, but on the idea, promoted by predecessors like Merezhkovskii, Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov, that myths are not reflective, like literature, but a truly novel generative or regenerative force, especially if used in harness with Christian eschatology.112

From Idol to Icon Although neither the “new myth” of Futurism nor Pushkin’s role in it was entirely simplistic—in the next chapter, for instance, we will explore how the Futurists used it to develop a fairly complex self-legitimating identity—it nevertheless drew much of its strength from its black-andwhite axiology, which is customary in myths, and especially from the implied opposition between the Futurists’ puritanical purge of Russian literature and the unholy adoration afforded to Pushkin. In 1913 David Burliuk made a speech in which he shocked audiences by contrasting Pushkin and Khlebnikov in the latter’s favor and by disavowing tradition with a characteristically spatial metaphor: “We are at a right angle to Pushkin.” Unsurprisingly, given the sanctimony that surrounded Pushkin, his contentious address was condemned as blasphemous. Just as typically, however, Burliuk himself characterized the mainstream attitude to Pushkin as itself a mixture of heathen fetishism, denouncing Pushkinists for having “turned the poet into an idol.”113 In the morality play of early Futurism, it is Pushkin-the-idol, not the poet himself, who is used as a symbol of the heresies of contemporary culture, sins like unreflective conformism, the illusory timelessness of the classics, the dead end of figurative and symbolic representation, and the general absence of spontaneous living creativity. The figure of the idol also lent itself well to the Futurist myth of rupture, since its destruction could serve not only to expose a false god but also to function as the violent and decisive act that would mark a fundamental break with the past. In a common irony, this myth of renovation had its own deep historical roots: the casting overboard of the classics from the steamship of modernity seems designed to recall a fundamental inflection point in Russian history—Prince Vladimir’s destruction of the statues of the pagan gods in Kiev prior to his imposition of Christianity on his people in the late tenth century.114 According to The Primary Chronicle, Vladimir “ordered the overturning of the idols— some to be chopped up, others burned,” with the statue of Perun cast into the river Dnieper. Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii describe this “decisive milestone in the consciousness of Old Russia” as an influential

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instance of a powerful tendency in premodern Russia toward “a conception of the new not as a continuation, but as a total eschatological change.”115 The drowning of Perun, the Slavic god of thunder, featured in a number of poems written by Khlebnikov in 1909 and 1910 in St. Petersburg. In one of these poems Khlebnikov, forever seeking historical parallels, imagines Perun exacting his revenge on Christian Russia by instigating the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Japanese at Tsushima in 1905.116 In another, a Perun-engendered storm assaults a dreamlike St. Petersburg, recalling The Bronze Horseman.117 A third poem in this cycle, “Monument,” was first published in the miscellany that accompanied “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” and bore the same name; it features another underwater statue and another reference to The Bronze Horseman and Tsushima: the monument to Alexander III comes to life and plunges beneath the Pacific in an attempt to save Russian sailors. Just as Belyi invokes Pushkin’s Peter as an apocalyptic horseman, so there is an unspoken equation in Futurist mythology between Pushkin, statues, and epoch-making events. The idoloclasm of “Slap” had other, more recent precedents. In the 1860s the trenchant “nihilist” critic Dmitrii Pisarev, on whom the Futurists partly modeled themselves, described Belinskii’s influential articles on Pushkin as “eulogies for an old idol” and “invitations to an old temple.”118 Just as the Futurists expose Pushkin’s feet of clay, Pisarev imagines himself to be revealing him as an empty totem: “We hope to show our public that the old literary idols crumble from dilapidation at the first touch of serious criticism.”119 This connection between Pushkin and paganism was, for better and for worse, reinforced with the opening of his monument in Moscow in 1880—a crucial moment in the formation of the Pushkin myth, and not only because of the response it elicited from Dostoevskii. While the novelist ignored the earthbound memorial, for many others then and since the erection of this statue in the middle of Russia’s ancient capital served as a physical sign of Pushkin’s centrality to Russian identity and, in its indifference to the mutable world around it, as an embodiment of a different kind of eternity— one derived not from transcendence but endurance. In verses dedicated to the inauguration Afanasii Fet also calls Pushkin a prophet, but only because Pushkin’s implied prediction, in the late poem “I have erected a monument not built by human hands . . .” (1836), that he would be thus memorialized had now been fulfilled. The imperturbable statue both symbolizes and guarantees Pushkin’s abiding virtues, as well as providing a contrast with the vulgarity of the crowd. Fet rehearses

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Pushkin’s own undiscriminating use of Christian and pagan metaphors: he contrasts Pushkin’s angelic voice with the crowd’s “Babylonian shriek,” but also perpetuates Pushkin’s self-image as a pagan priest, setting up an analogy between the new monument and the “tripod of Apollo.”120 This image is taken from Pushkin’s poem “To the Poet” (1830), which also counterposes the vatic poet and the ignorant mob, but whereas Pushkin describes the crowd disturbing the tripod, for Fet it is “unshakeable.” The tripod went on to be a leitmotif in responses to Pushkin, used with different resonances but usually as a means of contrasting Pushkin’s lofty constancy with the petty caprice of the populace.121 The statue’s embodiment of a timelessness based in resolute aristocratic remoteness was no less loathsome to the Futurists, because, like the transcendent, messianic Pushkin of Dostoevskii, it too presumed an ability to withstand the effects of history. Instead of changing with the world around it, the statue is indifferent to its context and so ends up marooned in a new era. For the Futurists it symbolizes not eternal life but perpetual death. In this regard, the Futurist statue myth cleaves quite closely to that created by Pushkin himself, partly validating Khleb­ni­ kov’s claim to be truer to Pushkin than the Pushkinists. Neither Fet, Pi­ sarev, nor the subscribers who funded the Pushkin monument could have failed to be aware that, in treating Pushkin in statue form, they were continuing a dialogue with Pushkin’s own potent and ambivalent statue myth. While Pushkin was willing to employ metaphors of pagan religion in works like “The Poet,” he also used the trappings of heathen idolatry as a sign of misplaced veneration and almost demonic power, especially in The Bronze Horseman, in which the statue of Peter is described as an “idol.”122 With the erection of the poet’s monument in Moscow, the same compelling ambiguity that Pushkin had ascribed to Peter, as both dynamic founder and inert, vainglorious statue, had now come to be attached to Pushkin himself. As Jakobson observes in his pioneering analysis of Pushkin’s mythology, which is precisely an account of his myth of the monument, one of things that most interests Pushkin about statues is their function as signs. As three-dimensional objects, they come much closer to matching their human referents than other representations, such as paintings. This proximity only serves, however, to underline the crucial differences between the human body and its sculptural sign: the latter is hard to the touch and inanimate, both immobile and devoid of a soul. Pushkin does not only observe this distinction but also shows how text can undo it, exploring the transgression

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of boundaries as humans become motionless statues and statues become moving beings.123 For all their uncanny verisimilitude, statues also seemed to both Pushkin and the Futurists to exemplify the inadequacy and even profanity of much artistic representation. This is partly the result of the lingering influence of religion: Pushkin’s statue myth derived much of its intensity from Orthodoxy’s particularly strict interpretation of the biblical prohibition of graven images, meaning that, after their belated introduction in the eighteenth century, statues remained associated with temporal power. They were contrasted negatively with the native tradition of icons, which were held to provide a more genuine connection with the deity. Pushkin invoked this contrast in “I have erected a monument . . .” when he compared his own superior intangible poetic monument “not made by human hands,” a typical description of miraculous icons, to the memorials of monarchs.124 The fact that lines from this same poem eventually appeared on the statue of Pushkin in Moscow only further compounded the conflicting discourses around the poet and his commemoration. For the Futurists, these two aspects of the Pushkinian idol—its connections with death and with deficient representation—were closely linked both to each other and to their critique of culture, which itself was rooted in contemporary debates about the meaning and interrelation of “art” and “life.” The latter term especially functioned as a ubiquitous, potent, and vague rallying cry for the modernist era, invoked by both poets and politicians who took advantage of the fact that “life” could signify both everyday reality as it is—the sense that had predominated during the reign of realism—and an ideal state of superior vitality that would radically improve human existence, overcoming compulsion, constriction, and perhaps even death itself. The Pushkinian idol was seen to violate both imperatives: it is a false image that not only demonstrates the failure to render of “life” in art but also serves as a memorial to death, an outpost in which stasis and morbidity can continue to linger into the bright future.125 Thomas Seifrid argues that underlying Jakobson’s interest in the statue as “the sign of a sign,” as well as parallels between statuary and language drawn by Konstantin Bal’mont and Belyi, was the influence of Neoplatonist philosophy, which continued to carry considerable intellectual weight in early twentieth-century Russia, partly a result of the influence of the nineteenth-century philosopher Aleksandr Potebnia, who used sculpture as a way of describing his triadic model of the

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sign.126 Potebnia also presented the statue as a counterpoint to the dynamism of language, however, emphasizing the difference between static and unchanging physical artworks like sculptures and intangible literature, which, as a product of language, necessarily undergoes constant transformation. For Potebnia, works of literature and music are inherently mobile and immaterial and thus, as John Fizer says, “every time they are perceived, they are born anew. The visible signs through which they are affirmed are merely the means of their reproduction, rather than their true essence.”127 Through Potebnia, Russian modernism came into prolonged contact with the Romantic conception of language first developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, which presented language in organic terms, not as a product, but as an activity—not an ergon, but energeia.128 Like the work of Henri Bergson, such theories were attractive to modernists because they seemed to explain the intense dynamism of the present and validate their own attempts to unsettle the established institutions that failed to recognize it.129 For the Futurists, the Pushkinian idol is one such institution: it represents the cessation of the process, described by Potebnia, of the constant reassessment and remaking of literature over time and thus embodies the freezing of vital energeia into static, statuesque erga. In Burliuk’s speech about Pushkin and Khlebnikov, in which he cited both Potebnia and Humboldt, he labeled Pushkin “the callus of Russian life,” dead skin hardened by habituation—an action that mimics the transformation of the living poet into a stone idol. He also accused the pettyminded Pushkinists not just of idol-worship but of necrophagia, reinforcing the connection between the statue and death. In fact, as we saw in Khlebnikov’s description of Pushkin’s duel, there is a tendency throughout Futurism to draw attention to Pushkin’s corpse, not as the incorruptible remains of a martyr but as a cadaver, even when thinking of Pushkin in statue form. Looking back to the expulsion of Pushkin and the other idols of classicism from the steamship, Kruchenykh claimed it was because “they were poisoning the air,” like putrefying bodies. In a 1914 poem, “Along Tverskaia” (the street on which the Pushkin monument is sited), Khlebnikov says that “Pushkin has gone silent | They speak about him only in the grave | [. . .] Accustomed as he is to being a perch for a bird” (Умолкнул Пушкин. | О нем лишь в гробе говорят. [. . .] Насестом птице быть привыкший). In Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem” (1924) the Pushkin monument describes itself as a “carcass” (tusha).130

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This unburied statue-corpse, this stiff, is a metonym for the rigidity and morbidity that the Futurists thought had overtaken Russian culture as a whole. In their manifesto “The Letter as Such” (1913), for instance, they compare the language of their rivals to two Orthodox martyr-saints—“it is dead (like Boris and Gleb), your word is stillborn”— and accuse the Italian Futurists of having brought about “the death of life and art.”131 The Futurists’ own language, in contrast, is vivid and vital: Kruchenykh complains that devotees of “the former stagnant language” miss out on “the whole living supraconscious element in the word”—what Nikolai Burliuk describes elsewhere as “the word as a living organism.”132 Indeed, the antinomy between organic movement and material immobility was central to Futurist poetics. The title that another Formalist, Viktor Shklovskii, gave to his precocious 1914 study of Futurism, “The Resurrection of the Word,” perfectly captures the sacral subtext of their project to reanimate language. Just as the Futurists combat the petrifaction of the living Pushkin in his idol, so, Shklov­ skii argues, their linguistic experiments expose tradition not as the reservoir of eternal values, but as a dogmatic and complacent enchantment that ossifies literature and language.133 Shklovskii’s emphasis on “resurrection” reveals the influence of the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who tasked mankind with bringing their dead ancestors back to life.134 The Futurist revivifying response to the Pushkinian idol was indeed not an isolated act but part of a wider obsession in Russia at the time with overcoming death, which in culture meant not just challenging superficial naturalism but also bringing new life to art and language.135 For the Futurists, this task required defeating both petrified classics and their contemporaries, many of whom were engaged in the same utopian project. Foremost among these were the Symbolist poets, who from the 1890s on had determined the future direction of all Russian poetry, including Futurism, by problematizing realism’s falsely transparent relationship with reality and arguing that “the symbol” could serve as the key to a deeper understanding. By the early 1910s, however, both the Futurists and members of the rival Acmeist tendency sought to distance themselves from their Symbolist origins and so began to argue that their erstwhile tutors’ preoccupation with the symbol as the site of mystical intercession between the ineffable and the mundane had degenerated into a futile merry-go-round of meaning. Despite his debt to Belyi, who formulated the idea of the creative, “living word,” Kruchenykh sought to distance himself from

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Symbolist poetics by distinguishing it from the Futurist turn to “the word as such”: “We don’t need an intermediary, a symbol, a thought; We give our own new truth, we don’t serve as the reflection of some sun.”136 The ultimate expression of this rejection of mediation is zaum, in which words are intended not as signs but as powerful self-sufficient things, like “a saw or the poisoned arrow of a savage,” that can themselves have an effect in the world.137 As such, it displays close affinities with the abstraction of Kazimir Malevich, who turned his back on representation in search of the truer originality and vitality available in making wholly new forms in the imagination. Malevich rejects nature only to replace it with a still more powerful instantiation of life: “the forms of utilitarian reason are higher than any depictions in paintings. Higher because they are alive and have come from material that has been given a new form, for a new life.”138 The art critic Alexandre Benois perceptively described Malevich’s Black Square as “that icon which the Futurists put in the place of the Madonna.” This comment neatly captures both what the avant-garde opposed—representational art and Western tradition—and what they proposed instead—a reengagement with traditionally Russian (and religious) forms like glossolalia and the icon that offered a more direct connection with the sublime.139 In contrast to the figurative painting of the West, the icon was held in Orthodox theology not to be a representation but a portal linking the observer with the deity. This is not to say that the Futurists necessarily replaced Pushkin the idol with Pushkin the icon, not least because this would also imply a certain extra-historical transcendence on Pushkin’s part. There were, however, some limited attempts by the Futurists to restore a certain zaum-like iconic selfidentity to Pushkin, undoing his misrepresentation not by stripping away distortions to uncover a hidden truth, like Briusov, but rather, like Malevich, by creating something new in the present. This impulse is evident in the Futurists’ frequent punning on the root of Pushkin’s name, pushka, which means “cannon,” transforming Pushkin from a cultural figurehead into a practical object. While such wordplay may seem trivial, the profundity of the underlying principle is evident in Khlebnikov’s poem “The Dostyology of racing clouds . . .” (1908–9), first published in Worldbackwards: О Достоевскиймо бегущей тучи! О Пушкиноты млеющего полдня!

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Ночь смотрится, как Тютчев, Замерное безмерным полня. [The Dostoyology of racing clouds! | Pushkincandescence of noon! | Night resembles Tiutchev, | filling the unfathomable full of the unknown.]140

Three of the titans of Russian literature, Dostoevskii, Pushkin, and Tiutchev, here lose their significance as historical figures and, through puns and portmanteau neologisms, become just words. Or perhaps not “just” words: Rudol’f Duganov calls this seemingly insubstantial poem an “integral picture of the visible cosmos” and argues that the poet uses these familiar names to demonstrate the extent of his capability to transfigure the known world into something new. The names of Russian literary history are no longer fixed points of cultural memory but are born afresh as inscrutable abstract nouns describing the unknown natural qualities of a parallel universe that we can only glimpse.141 The refutation of fixed arbitrary meaning in Khlebnikov’s proto-zaum was further enhanced in Worldbackwards by Nikolai Rogovin’s setting of the poem, which intermingles the lines of the poem with an illustration. Next to the word “Pushkincandescence” (Pushkinoty), Rogovin has drawn a cannon, pointing vertically up the page—a visual pun that is further emphasized by the fact that the barrel of the cannon resembles an upper-case Russian “P” (П). Pushkin’s name does not just sound like a cannon, it looks like one too.142 Rather than being an empty vessel into which different meanings can be poured, Khlebnikov reduces the range of meanings in Pushkin’s name until it stands only for itself. In his play Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy (1913), Maiakovskii imagines a scenario in which the rift between inner essence and outer appearance that affects all things is bridged as objects spring to life and throw away “the rags of their worn-out names,” overcoming their false representation in language, recovering their lost energy, and, as a consequence, fomenting an existential revolution.143 The disjunction between name and object pictured by Maiakovskii parallels Khlebnikov’s dualistic schema for the recurrence of internal essences in different forms throughout history. Likewise, the (impossible) unity of signifier and signified that is the goal of Futurist poetics is the equivalent of Christ’s incarnation, the moment, partly recapitulated by the icon, in which the word (as either divine Logos or as prophecy) becomes a thing

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in the world, triggering a fundamental change in reality.144 Incarnation provided modernist poets with a way to conceive of their playing out of preexisting scripts not as inferior, a form of pretense or plagiarism, but as superior, the fulfilment of a presentiment that brings iteration to a close. Viktor Turbin describes Khlebnikov’s life as “a thought-through and conscious incarnation of the word of Pushkin” and, although this does not account for all Khlebnikov’s complex behaviors, it is true that the Futurists often insist on realizing Pushkinian metaphors, taking on his identities not as a deliberate pose but a lived reality.145 Nevertheless, both these methods of resurrecting Pushkin, iconicity and incarnation, remain outliers in Futurist practice. As the failure to make zaum anything more than occasionalism attests, iconic language remained above all an ideal, a foretaste of the post-rupture utopia to come. Furthermore, as Khlebnikov’s self-identification with Pushkin as a victim of persecution showed, the Futurists were wary of presenting themselves as subordinate to an extra-historical Pushkinian essence. Instead, we should see the two responses described above as the most effective Futurist strategies to restore life to the defunct Pushkinian idol—sacral idoloclastic violence and the “secularizing” historicization of his mythology, which are revealed as two expressions of the same impulse. In the first instance, Futurism’s symbolic murder of Pushkin was not just a gesture aimed at marking an interruption of historical time, but a bid to replace ergon with energeia.146 It is the slap in the face that brings the complacent Russian public to their senses and—to reapply a term from Shklovskii—estranges the overfamiliar figure of Pushkin, allowing him to be seen again with fresh eyes. By the same token, the demystification of Pushkin, showing how his motifs are not transcendent but constantly reworked, not only shatters the mystique of the idol, but also reverses the ossification caused by treating classics in isolation from the contemporary moment. The transformation of Pushkin into a statue is not utterly undone: the living Pushkin does not return in the present as a man, but as a moving sculpture. His reanimation is not a reversal of the unnatural process of mortification, because the effects of history cannot be ignored, but must be brought forward into the future in a new form that lays bare both the Futurists’ deathridden antagonist and their alternative—movement and life. Despite its murderous rhetoric, the Futurist myth of Pushkin does not erase all the Pushkins that came before, but incorporates them, working with Pushkin as well as against him. The Futurists might be leading the dance, but it takes two to tango.

2 A Stowaway on the Steamship of Modernity Pushkin in the Futurist Manifestos

In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. Walter Benjamin

Futurism began with a crash. Long

before Pushkin was either dumped from a steamship or danced down from a pedestal, the publication of Filippo Tommaso Mari­ netti’s first Futurist manifesto in Le Figaro in February 1909 had caused a scandal with its violent imagery and devil-may-care energy. The abrupt impact of the manifesto was foreshadowed in a key moment in the text itself when Marinetti recounts how, just prior to his first declamation of the mantras of Futurism, he recklessly drove his car into a ditch: 63

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A Stowaway on the Steamship of Modernity I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! . . . I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air . . . O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse . . . When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!1

This act of destruction and rebirth has been seen not only as a metonym for the manifesto as a whole but as a microcosm of the entirety of Futurism, a movement predicated on a swift and aggressive departure from normality, and a hyperbolic valorization of the Futurists’ solitary, selfgenerated genius. In fact, Rosalind Krauss proposes that it stands for all anti-traditional modernism, “as a model for what is meant by originality among the twentieth-century avant-garde.”2 For Krauss, when Marinetti emerges from the womb-like ditch with a new, self-confirming identity, he is poised both to make “an absolute distinction [. . .] between a present experienced de novo and a tradition-laden past” and to use this myth of rupture to perform “continual acts of regeneration.”3 In both Italy and Russia, the genre of the manifesto would become the site par excellence for staging and restaging this Futurist origin story, which not only precipitated the avant-garde’s break with the past with its belligerence, but also provided some compensation for the losses incurred in this abandonment, offering in the place of the legitimacy of tradition a form of autogenous validity derived from the mythic persona it promoted.4 The manifesto’s display of explosive originality was thus both a symptom of and a palliative for the Futurists’ self-inflicted isolation. However, Krauss’s description of Marinetti’s roadside renaissance as the epitome of avant-garde newness overlooks the way in which this story also contains elements of second-guessing, ambiguity, and even bathos. Although Marinetti describes a personified Death waiting for him at every turn, the actual cause of his crash is two comical cyclists. More importantly, at the moment of self-willed renovation, he cannot help but turn to the past, remembering the African wet nurse of his infancy in Alexandria. Although they seem antithetical to the Futurist credo of autonomy, these two moments are no less typical of the

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Futurist manifesto, a genre that, especially in its Russian development, often tempers its bullishness with irony and leavens its hatred of history with a longing for other, less familiar pasts. This combination of rejection and retrospection is also much in evidence in the Russian Futurists’ attitude to Marinetti. Although the Italian Futurists’ continent-wide fame was not a necessary and sufficient cause for the emergence of Russian Futurism, it did play an important role in shaping its public image, not least in providing it with a name.5 It is precisely because of this ineradicable stain of anxiety-making influence that, when Marinetti was feted as a celebrity on his visit to Russia in 1914, the local “Futurists,” who had only recently adopted that nomenclature, responded with displays of the sort of defensive resentment and refusal of dialogue that typify manifestos. Khlebnikov, who never liked the term “Futurist,” wrote an open letter calling Marinetti “a vegetable” and comparing the hospitable Nikolai Kul’bin, a sometime supporter of the Hylea group, to the Slav vassal of an Ottoman sultan. He then demanded duels with both Kul’bin and Marinetti, with the latter confrontation due to take place in Dubrovnik as part of a wider war against an Italo-German alliance. (Even blind with rage, Khlebnikov had considerable foresight.) Ultimately, Khlebnikov announced that he was breaking with the other signatories of “Slap” because they were insufficiently hostile to the Italian. This was an overreaction: Maiakovskii and Burliuk also published letters condemning Marinetti, and Livshits had, the day previous, joined Khlebnikov in producing a furious flyer denouncing Marinetti and showcasing a similar strain of aggressive Slavophilism. The pamphlet laments the fact that Marinetti’s admirers are “bending the noble neck of Asia under the yoke of Europe” and warns that the Futurists, like hunters on the ancient steppe, have their bowstrings drawn.6 Of course, the Russian Futurists’ bellicose disavowal only further demonstrates their fundamental similarity to Marinetti, who decried German cultural hegemony in equally xenophobic terms. 7 Moreover, their thin-skinned unwillingness to countenance Marinetti’s legitimacy, let alone his historical priority, underlines two of the tenets of avantgarde originality adduced by Krauss: first, that being perceived as unprecedented is of paramount importance; second, that this obsession does not preclude repetition, but rather provides a constant motivation for frequent Futurist rebirths—at different times, in different places, and for different people—but with each new beginning presented as unique and total. After all, even the supposedly groundbreaking

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publication of the Futurist manifesto in Le Figaro recycled much of its material from an earlier version.8 Seen in this way, Marinetti’s arrival in Russia early in 1914, just over a year after the publication of “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” represented less a challenge than an opportunity for the Futurists, allowing them to revisit the Manichean morality and plain-speaking brutality of their first manifesto in order to restate their mission and reemphasize their particularity. Not that the Futurists ever struggled to find figures against whom to define themselves. In the first years of their existence as a poetic group, the most prominent of these rhetorical adversaries were contemporaries, often members of either the dominant Symbolist school or the newer Acmeist grouping. As “Slap” and its reception suggests, however, the most potent and most programmatic constitutive other was Pushkin, whose close association with Russian literary tradition as a whole made him an obvious target for a group looking to announce a break with the past, and whose diverse and flexible poetic mythology provided a wealth of points of contrast for the Futurists to exploit. We have already seen how they characterized Pushkin as a lifeless, profane idol as a way of underscoring their own vitality and demonstratively rescuing Pushkin from the deadening debasement of popular misuse, either by shattering the idol or by mobilizing it. This fundamental opposition between life and death underpinned a further series of contrasts in their work: whereas Pushkin was archaic, effeminate, and corrupted by the West, the Futurists were modern, macho, and marvelously Russian.9 In the first years of Futurism the manifesto, and to a lesser extent the theater, provided the perfect place to articulate these oppositions. The manifesto appealed so much to the avant-garde partly because, as we discussed in the previous chapter, it modeled a break from the status quo of pedestrian linear temporality and promised to engender a new reality. The close fit between the manifesto as a genre and the worldview of the avant-garde does, however, put us at risk of overlooking the manifesto’s other functions. All manifestos are, to an extent, performances: whereas a decree has perlocutionary force, with its words substantively changing the world, a manifesto only claims to do so, achieving this aim only if it is taken seriously.10 Literary and artistic manifestos are even further removed from action in the world, since their promises and instructions are either clear exaggerations (burning down museums and the like) or confined to creative endeavors. Moreover, a political manifesto can be said to get closer to achieving its own

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stated goals by helping to garner necessary popular support. But nothing is stopping a poet or an artist from creating a daringly original work and letting it stand alone, without fanfare or explanation. To those skeptical of self-professedly mold-breaking modernist art, the need for manifestos and scandals is just more evidence of superficiality and intellectual poverty. This position misunderstands the performative nature of the manifesto, however: first, the manifesto is rarely meant to be a handmaiden to the creative work it advertises but is rather a work of art in itself. Second, to ask experimental endeavors such as zaum or parole in libertà to speak for themselves would be to underestimate the important roles that extraliterary factors like the cultivation and management of an audience have in the reception of the work—a mistake that the Futurists would never make. As much as it was an embodiment of a distinct avant-garde temporality, the manifesto was also an expedient resource for securing attention in a crowded marketplace. The popularity of the literary manifesto went hand-in-hand with the constant emergence of the discrete and antagonistic schools that functioned as the basic units of literary self-organization at the time and that gave rise to the efflorescence of new “isms” that is so characteristic of modernism. The emphasis on collectives was in part a means of compensating for the break with the past: outside of the relatively safe environment of avowed conformity to tradition, the group provided experimental writers with a means of acquiring mutual self-confirming legitimacy. It was, however, also a matter of practical expediency—the group’s economies of scale reduced costs, for instance—and a self-consciously quasi-capitalist exercise in strategic branding. Maiakovskii even compared the Futurists to a popular manufacturer of galoshes: “And what is Futurist?—a brand-name, like ‘Triangle.’”11 Nevertheless, this appropriation of the terminology of capitalism was not necessarily a sign of a willingness to conform to the metrics of the market. In “Go to Hell,” the Futurists criticized those who have profiteered on their success: “These commercial old men have dumbly guessed the value of the new earlier than their duped audience and ‘out of habit’ looked at us through their pockets. Kornei Chukovskii (no fool he!) has been peddling a popular product around the market towns: the names Kruchenykh, the Burliuks, and Khlebnikov.”12 “Go to Hell” was written during a brief period of collaboration between the Hylea group and the leader of the rival Ego-Futurists, Igor’ Severianin. This alliance did not, however, prompt the Futurists to take

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a more catholic approach to membership, but rather to double down on the exclusivity of their identity: “All Futurists are united only in our group.”13 Paradoxically, this persistent emphasis on delimiting their clique helped to increase the potential for expansion of both audiences and membership. The manifesto, with its long tradition of multiple authorship and political proselytism, was the perfect place to enunciate an enticingly trenchant but still adaptable corporate identity. The attention-seeking us-against-the-world rhetoric of the Futurists, with their contempt for the crowd and their boast that “we stand on the rock of the word WE,” was capable not only of exciting the casual interest of a headline-hungry general public but also of encouraging in sympathetic outsiders the development of a more lasting attachment than the time-honored hauteur of the individual poet ever could.14 Byron’s readers were never going to be Byron, just like Byron; fans of the Futurists, like 1970s teenagers listening to punk, could, by adopting the right attitude and the right style, hope not just to emulate their heroes, but to join them. The flexible literary moniker “Futurist,” like the “we” of the manifesto, may conceal as much as it reveals, but the brand developed in these aggressive early pronouncements remained marketable for more than a decade, and as such continued to be a useful touchstone for all the signatories of “Slap” (with the partial exception of Khlebnikov, who always bridled at any hint of groupthink).15 There were other contributory factors to the longevity of this Futurist identity, over and above combative coterie-formation and, of course, the genuine quality of the Futurists’ work. One factor was the Futurists’ skillful handling of spectacle—their use of striking book designs, posters, costume, photographs, and performances on the stage and in the street. Another was their ability to promulgate a shared mythology that resonated with the era in which they lived. The self-creation myth pioneered by Marinetti and recapitulated by the Russian Futurists may have sought to draw a line between the Futurists and everything that had come before them, but their mythopoesis did not entirely jettison the ideas of precedent and comparison, instead finding points of contact outside the mainstream of elite culture that could help to emphasize and justify their departure from literary norms. One such reference point was the discourse of radical politics, which also foregrounded the importance of an embattled vanguard and adopted the manifesto as the genre that best suited its uncompromising worldview. Similarly, the emergence of new social types in the modern city provided new models for identity, as it had for other modernist and proto-modernist poets: in

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addition to the aforementioned allusions to advertising, Maiakovskii styled himself as a hooligan, appropriating the energy of the marginal working-class man; the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun featured soccer players; Kamenskii was initially as famous for being an aviator as for his poetry.16 Not all the influences on Futurist identity belonged to the new century, however, as Khlebnikov and Livshits’s Eurasianist posturing suggests. Their self-presentation as an exclusive and superior sect in possession of the keys to the future of all humanity, something they shared with the political underground, also drew on the “new men” of Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s influential novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). The most important influences were still older. As the embrace of myth as a worldview implies, an important component of radical modernism was a “palingenetic” impulse to reach back through time to an idealized period before discredited, decadent European modernity and to use this purer past as the foundation for the future.17 The key figure in this backward turn, which Jürgen Habermas terms “the counter-discourse to modernity,” was Nietzsche, who anticipated the Futurists not only in his call to live “in an unhistorical condition” but also in his explicitly black-and-white axiology, which valued the archaic over the modern, the masculine over the feminine, and the irrational over the rational.18 While Nietzsche and others found their ideal in ancient Greece, Russian modernists did not have to go so far to find models for emulation, since the pre-Petrine history of the Russian lands, and especially the non-Slavic nomads who once occupied those territories, provided them with clearly non-European “others” with whom they could claim close kinship. In Futurist art this tendency produced the primitivism of Mi­ khail Larionov and Natal’ia Goncharova; in Futurist poetry, it is manifest in the neo-pagan poetry of Khlebnikov and in the Futurists’ frequent presentation of their linguistic experimentation as a return to a lost ideal.19 The legacy of “Asiatic” primitivism had traditionally been seen by Russian intellectuals as a barrier to Russia’s inclusion in normative European modernity (although elements of it had been embraced by the Slavophiles of the nineteenth century), but modernity’s model of development, which contrasted the advanced center with the backward margins, put educated Russians in a potentially privileged position in the early twentieth century, since, when that model was inverted by the modernist embrace of the archaic, these Russians found themselves with access to both the innovative metropole and the prehistoric

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periphery, facilitating a unique juxtaposition of different historical epochs. As Groys says, “a member of the Russian intelligentsia [. . .] was at the start of the 20th century in the unique position of an African who knew Picasso, or an ancient Greek who had read Freud.”20 This experience of simultaneity allowed some members of the Russian intelligentsia to believe that their perennial belatedness was actually evidence of a special capacity to master time and thus make a new future, one that might both escape from history and transcend the hierarchized spatial organization of modernity.21 Accordingly, the Futurist manifestos conflate traits from both the past and the present to posit an ideal mythic persona that is equally at home at any point in the span of chronological history. As such, it is typical of the way in which the Futurists break with the continuum of tradition and then seek alternative sources of legitimation from outside it. Nonetheless, despite the ancient origins of the heroic identity to which the Futurist aspired, it was ever-present throughout history: the culture of the nineteenth century might have been, in the Futurists’ estimation, effeminate, geriatric, and pretentious, but like nearly all cultures it heaped praise on bold, patriotic young men. Indeed, in Khlebnikov’s denunciation of Marinetti, he calls him “a little Frenchman from Bordeaux,” an epithet for any indulged but mediocre foreigner taken from Aleksandr Griboedov’s famous play Woe from Wit (1823) about an irrepressible young man, Chatskii, who denounces the hypocrisy and conservatism of polite society, much as the Futurists would do a century later. As Chatskii says, “the houses are new but the prejudices are old.”22 It was partly to disguise such continuity that the Futurists resorted to the shock tactics of “Slap.”

The Slap Heard around the World While there is much more to the Futurist reception of Pushkin than “The Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” there is no doubt that this was the crucial moment in Futurist mythopoesis. The only rival in this regard is the “victory over the sun” in the Futurist opera of that name, another instance of the defeat of a mighty enemy inaugurating a new era, but even this act of triumph, performed nearly a year after “Slap,” is to some extent only a reminiscence of that first outburst of sudden, self-legitimizing violence. For that reason, it is important to go against the Futurists’ intentions and read this famous sound bite in context, not just as an extra-historical exclamation point, but as an allusive and at

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times ironic contribution to wider conversations. Much of the polemical intent of the manifesto is aimed at the Futurists’ contemporaries, many of whom are slandered and dismissed, but the Futurists’ debut begins with a fine example of the avant-garde rhetoric of truculent independence and self-creation that questions what it even means to be “contemporary”: To the readers of our New First Unexpected. Only we are the face of our Time. The horn of time sounds through us in verbal art. The past is crowded. The Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible than hieroglyphs. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, etc., etc., from the steamship of Modernity.23

The opening lines of the manifesto make clear that the Futurists are both unprecedented and in perfect communion with the present. This meaning would be even more palpable if we were to translate the steamship’s modifier more literally, repeating the root word “time” as the Russian does: it is “the steamship of Contemporaneity,” the ship that is with its time. The individuality and timeliness of the Futurists is contrasted with the archaism, overabundance, and homogeneity of the objects of the past: Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi are presented as humdrum names in a seemingly inexhaustible list and officially sanctioned art, inscrutable Egyptian pictograms, and Pushkin are all lumped together in the indecipherable mass that is the accumulated patrimony of culture. Still more shockingly, the Futurists proclaim that, contrary to popular belief, it is not modern experimental art and poetry that are opaque, but rather those alleged paragons of clarity, the Academy and Pushkin. The universal comprehensibility of Pushkin was treated as axiomatic and self-evident at the time and writers are still today urged to emulate “Pushkinian simplicity.” While this reputation for readability is not undeserved, Pushkin’s feted accessibility was used as a way of emphasizing his ability to transcend the boundaries of class and of time, unifying the Russian people. Dostoevskii argued that “for a Russian not to understand Pushkin is to lose the right to be called Russian” and suggested that, because Pushkin loved and understood the Russian people, his depictions of their history are “comprehensible to the people as their very own essence.”24 Just as Pushkin makes the past accessible, so his

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own writing remains resistant to obsolescence. Even a writer as idiosyncratic as Vasilii Rozanov cannot avoid lapses into cliché. In a 1912 article, after idly suggesting a special children’s edition of Pushkin, since “he has something appropriate for every age,” Rozanov says that “Pushkin is calm, clarity, and poise.” As a result, the poet represents “a sort of strange eternity” and, while not only Goethe but even Tolstoi and Dostoevskii have come to seem old-fashioned, “Pushkin has not aged at all.”25 The Futurists could not tolerate this lazy stereotype for two reasons. The first reason is that it is untrue and reductive: although they would hardly admit it in a manifesto, the Futurists’ later handling of Pushkin reveals their commitment to exploding the myth of Pushkin’s timeless, spontaneous genius, and exploring the complex construction of his work. In so doing, they helped lay the groundwork for the reevaluation of the work behind Pushkin’s work by the Formalists and their successors. The second reason, more germane to the manifesto as a genre, is that Pushkin’s perceived ability to speak of the present to the present makes him a pretender to the title of “the face of our time.” Accordingly, the Futurists do not just recognize Pushkin’s inherent complexity and difficulty but say that he is impossible to understand. Over time, they would temper this hyperbole, but they never stopped wanting to prick the bubble of Pushkinian clarity and universality, especially in the 1920s, when literature was obliged to speak to a new mass audience of workers and peasants. Thus in a 1928 article Maiakovskii argued that at the time Pushkin was only “fully understood by his own class”; Pushkin has since become accessible to new, untutored readers, but is properly only of academic interest.26 By that stage of his career, Maiakovskii is willing to recognize Pushkin as “the greatest mouthpiece of his time in poetry”—not of all times, we note— but such magnanimity would not be appropriate for a manifesto in 1912. Instead, the Futurists issue a call to action, a demand that the ship of the present be purged. The addressee of this injunction to “throw” the literary greats off the steamship is unclear: it is an infinitive verb used as an imperative, but later the authors describe their own actions using the same construction and use the second person plural for their readers. The overall sentiment is nonetheless evident: these outdated literary lions need to be expelled. As previously discussed, it is possible to imagine this expulsion as a sort of burial at sea for the steamship’s superannuated former sailors, now deceased and decaying, or as a reiteration

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of Prince Vladimir’s purging of the city of Kiev of pagan idols. Aleksandr Zholkovskii, however, has described the ejection as a deliberate drowning and likened it to an act of Bloomian parricide—a sublimation of the Futurists’ anxiety at the classics’ lingering influence. 27 He bases his case for attempted murder on the use of a particular variant of the verb “to throw.” In his memoir Our Arrival (1932) Kruchenykh describes his initial suggestion for the manifesto: “throw out [vybrosit’] Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Pushkin”; Maiakovskii adds: “from the steamship of modernity”; someone (presumably Burliuk) then suggests that the verb be amended to “throw off” (sbrosit’). Maiakovskii allegedly disagrees, arguing that: “throw off—it’s as if they were there, we have to ‘throw’ [brosit’] them from the steamship.”28 The fact that the classics are not already present can only suggest that the Futurists bring them aboard in order to then drown them in open water. In so doing, the Futurists emulate one of their great heroes, the peasant rebel Sten’ka Razin, who drowned a Persian princess in the Volga—an event immortalized in the pioneering Russian film Sten’ka Razin (1908).29 Even if this is homicide, however, it is not necessary parricide, nor a manifestation of anxiety. Harold Bloom’s oedipal narrative of intergenerational discursive violence presupposes a progressive model of history and culture: sons replace their fathers and then become fathers themselves. The Futurist manifestos, in their ambition not only to express the present but ultimately to break free from history, strive to discredit this genetic model of literary inheritance itself: they may want to kill their fathers, but they are even keener to pretend they never existed. This is paralleled in their prominent disdain for museums and cemeteries, which do not claim to stand for the present, but are despised as repositories of memory, which furnish the present with a grounding in the continuum of history.30 The Russian Futurists prefer to imagine the present as unconnected from the past and to see themselves as Adam, the man without a father who is coeval with the fresh, newborn world and who utters creative, living words: “The artist has seen the world anew and, like Adam, gives everything its name.”31 Furthermore, while Pushkin is more than just unwanted cargo, the steamship does nevertheless belong in a series of Futurist metaphors that picture the past as a burden on the dynamism of the present. Although the Russian Futurists did not share the Italians’ obsession with machines, they were still at pains to demonstrate their association with the speed and mobility of the modern age.32 Khlebnikov, for instance, called for the liberation of “the swift engine of the young ages from the

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fat caterpillar of the goods train of older ages.”33 These same values were evoked by Maiakovskii when, in 1915, he explained the Futurists’ motivations for slapping the face of public taste: 1. To crush the freezer of canons of all sorts, which makes ice from inspiration. 2. To break the old language, which is unable to catch up with the gallop of life. 3. To throw off [sbrosit’] the old great ones from the steamship of modernity.34

Maiakovskii not only uses the less murderous form “throw off” but emphasizes the mismatch between the rapidity of the present and its sluggish culture, which is not only itself slow but which has slowed everything down, turning water into ice. This metaphorical conflation of the inhibiting past and ice is also found in Khlebnikov’s rejected suggestion for “Slap”: “We will drag Pushkin by his iced-over moustache.”35 Not only is his facial hair outmoded (and historically inaccurate), but Pushkin is so ancient that he resembles a Neolithic man preserved in a glacier. Once again, Pushkin is connected with the solidification of what should be vital and fluid. Pushkin was not always so static, as Khlebnikov suggested in his self-identification with Pushkin’s rebelliousness in his note in Zheverzheev’s album, cited in the previous chapter. There he recalled how Pushkin’s mock epic Ruslan and Liudmila had scandalized contemporary readers in an almost Futurist manner. Duganov suggests that this same work is also alluded to in this manifesto, proposing that the “slap” of the title is itself a reference to an incident in which the young hero Ruslan delivers a mighty blow to a mountain-sized head, and in so doing wins the head’s sword and his respect.36 This intriguing but unprovable suggestion certainly accords with the Futurists’ self-image as impetuous young warriors and raises the possibility of a different relationship with Pushkin, not only in the ironic fact that the rejection of Pushkin has a Pushkinian precedent, but also in the implication that, as in Pushkin’s tale, the Futurists’ hostility might merely be the first step necessary for a grudging passing of the baton between generations. Even if this is not the case, the Futurists’ own choice of vehicle perhaps suggests a degree of dark humor, somewhat undercutting their bravado. Steamships were far from a new means of transport, but transatlantic liners, routinely called “steamships” in Russian, were at that time at the forefront of engineering and design, as such, an inspiration to many modernists.37 The steamship of the manifesto, therefore, seems

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both to nod to the Italian Futurist discourse of speed and to demonstrate the Futurists’ knack for staying in harmony with the changing spirit of the present. This ability to keep pace is encoded in the steamship metaphor itself, which seems to recall an aphorism from Gor’kii’s play The Lower Depths (1902), in which one character tells another that “you won’t go anywhere in the carriage of the past,” arguing that one must not be a prisoner to memories.38 This carriage of the past is thus replaced with the more technologically advanced steamship of modernity, which is capable of carrying Russian literature forward, and which self-reflexively demonstrates the Futurists’ ability to update culture. Nonetheless, the metaphor of the poet as one sailor among many on a sea voyage is both ancient and ambivalent, with the threat of disaster ever-present. In his long work The Children of the Otter, which was written over a number of years prior to publication in 1914, Khleb­ni­kov expresses a similarly pessimistic view of maritime travel—“Сурова и мрачна судьба nароходов” (Harsh and dark is the fate of steamships)— while describing the voyage of a group of “Futurians,” which ultimately ends with the ship sinking.39 The year in which Khlebnikov likely wrote this was the same year as the composition of “Slap,” 1912, and it was not a golden one for modern shipping: in April the Titanic had sunk. The giant liner, which was famed for its technological advancement and speed and routinely referred to as a “steamship” in Russian, might represent the positive attributes of Futurist dynamism, but the Titanic’s demise and status as a symbol of the hubris of modernity also means that any comparison seems somewhat ironic. Given how often in Futurist mythology the glorious present contains hints of an unhappy future, we can read “Slap” as containing an intimation that speed does not always triumph over ice.

Victory over the Sun of Russian Poetry Just as the manifestos offered the Futurists a figurative stage on which they could enact a performative breakout from the prison house of history, so, in the first years of Futurism, performance proper provided them with a further means to express their novelty, to consolidate themselves as a group with a communal Futurist persona, and to create a bridgehead for art’s invasion of everyday life. Many of these perform­ ances were ad hoc affairs that left little trace outside of memoirs and so the best place to trace the Futurists’ dramatic self-image, and Pushkin’s role in it, are in the two performances they staged on successive nights

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in December 1913, the opera Victory over the Sun and the play Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, as part of their attempt to “decisively transform that bastion of artistic sickliness—the Russian theater.”40 The solipsistic title of Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, which came about thanks to a mistake by the censor, somewhat obscures the extent to which these two works were, like the manifestos, presented as products of the Futurists’ unified genius. The posters describe them as “the world’s first productions by the Futurists of theater” and Victory over the Sun was indeed a genuinely collaborative work, with a prologue by Khlebnikov, a libretto by Kruchenykh, music by Mikhail Matiushin, and costumes by Malevich.41 Like the manifestos, these plays juxtapose the old—Roman emperors, ancient Egyptians, stone statues—with the new—soccer players, airplanes, time travel—to suggest a fundamental rearrangement of time outside of sequential history, an abandonment of the ordinary that was made all the more apparent by the unusual sets, costumes, and lighting. Victory over the Sun opened with the following exchange between two “Futurist strongmen”: First: All’s well that starts well. Second: And ends? First: There will be no end.42

The strongmen then ripped apart the stage curtain, which featured a prototype of Malevich’s Black Square.43 As ever, the Futurists’ emergence requires an act of violence. The rending of the curtain represents a rejection both of theatrical convention and of the division between the realms of artifice and reality, and also seems to symbolize a burst of kairotic time into history, reminiscent of the tearing of the curtain in the Temple at the moment of Jesus’s death. The comedic norm of happy endings, expressed in Shakespeare’s dictum that “all’s well that ends well,” is also inverted and replaced by the Futurist regime of constant beginning. The destructive break with tradition signaled by the curtain-ripping is not as thoroughgoing, however, as the play’s chief plot point, which takes place offstage: the imprisonment of the sun by the strongmen of the future, an event that ushers in an entirely new age. Similar hostility to the sun is evident in Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, which is also about an existential revolution that delivers a dubious utopia: the hero describes with disgust the sun’s “fat fingers with little ginger hairs”

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and boasts that he has “borne hatred of the day’s rays for centuries.”44 Most simply, the Futurist battle against the sun can be read as a gesture of absolute non-conformism, an assault both on the planet’s only source of light and life and on one of poetry’s most commonplace symbols. More particularly, the sun represents clarity and rationality; it is the emblem of Apollo, who also lent his name to a magazine that regularly published their literary rivals, and so the Dionysiac Futurists must destroy it. The sun is also the embodiment of calendrical time, the unceasing sequence of day after day—another reason for the Futurists’ enmity.45 Accordingly, the personified sun and its assassination is a recurring leitmotif in Futurist poetry. For example, Khlebnikov’s 1912 poem “Flames” recounts the tale of a hero’s destruction of an iron sun; in 1913 Maiakovskii identified the sun as a brutal father and then, in 1914, he too murdered it, in “Napoleon and Me.”46 These multiple associations notwithstanding, Evgeny Steiner has suggested that the “Victory over the Sun is the Victory over the sun of Russian poetry: Pushkin,” referring to the epithet given to him in an obituary by Vladimir Odoevskii.47 Although Steiner’s case is at times overstated, there is no question that Pushkin’s association with the sun had only strengthened over the course of the nineteenth century and that the Russian word pushki (cannons) recurs with surprising frequency in Victory over the Sun, for instance in the announcement of the sun’s death: “The sun of the iron age has died! The cannons [ pushki ] have fallen broken and the tires yield like wax before people’s gazes.”48 The phrase “iron age” debases the “golden age” associated with Pushkin’s name. Moreover, there is a Pushkinian air to the eccentric and antagonistic figure of “The Ill-Intentioned One,” who attempts to start fights with nearly every character on stage, including himself. He is not only obsessed with dueling with pistols, recalling Pushkin’s demise, but after shooting at another character, the Time Traveler, he lies down as if dead and says: “Although I did not even shoot myself—out of bashfulness, I put up a monument to myself—I’m not stupid either. I’m the first to have a monument—marvelous!”49 This statement alludes to Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument . . . ,” in which the poet imagines his immaterial immortality in poetry—a particular point of contention for the Futurists.50 Maiakovskii also hints at Pushkin’s poem in Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, in which a giant stone woman comes to life to foment existential revolution but is transformed by popular adulation into a monument, draining her of energy: “on the black granite of sin and vice | we will put up a monument to red meat.”51 It is, therefore,

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perhaps no coincidence that the reference to monuments in Victory over the Sun is immediately followed by the appearance on stage of “a Futurian machine gun,” pointing to the very physical limitations of the posterity claimed by the Ill-Intentioned One. The image of the sun is both too primal and too multivalent to be reduced to just a cipher for Pushkin, but there is an indisputable and powerful analogy between the defeat of the sun and the ejection of Pushkin from the steamship of modernity: both are inaugural acts of shocking violence intended to usher in a new world and to establish the Futurists’ identity as hyper-masculine men of the future. Moreover, in both Victory over the Sun and Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy the overturning of the status quo proves to be something of a hollow victory. Life “without a past” has “danger but no remorse and no remembering” and, while “it is easy to breathe,” far from everyone enjoys this new state and “many have tried to drown themselves, the weak have gone crazy.”52 The sense of disenchantment with utopia is even more pronounced in Vladimir Maiakovskii, in which the protagonist, who is made king of a postrevolutionary world, is “bored” and required to collect people’s tears.53 A pattern is established that will obtain throughout Futurist depictions of the glorious future: the excitement of the defiant beginning gives way to the tedium of a new conformity. There can be no final revolution, as Evgenii Zamiatin says, and so the Futurists must keep authoring new beginnings. Thus Victory over the Sun ends as it began: “All’s well that starts well and has no end the world will die but we have no end.”54 This same automatic self-questioning of their program also appears in the Futurists’ early poetry, where Pushkinian suns are also much in evidence. For instance, in “Napoleon and Me” Maiakovskii pointedly invokes Victory over the Sun, casting himself as the killer of the sun: “Через секунду | встречу я | неб самодержца, — | возьму и убью солнце!” (In a second | I will meet | the autocrat of the heavens— | I will up and kill the sun).55 This murder will prove Maiakovskii’s superiority to Napoleon, a Romantic, world-changing figure brought to mind, perhaps, by the fact that a continent-wide conflict has again erupted, a century after Waterloo. The heroic action of sun-killing is soon revealed to be of dubious value: Maiakovskii describes himself as a victim of war in the poem’s final lines and calls the sun his “deathbed sun” and even “our final sun,” pointing to some wider catastrophe. More than once in the poem Maiakovskii uses the epithet “the sun of Austerlitz,” appropriating an honorific that was given to Napoleon after his crushing defeat of Russian and Austrian forces in that battle as

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recognition of the decisive role played by the sun. Although this was a common enough title, there can be little doubt that Maiakovskii is alluding to Pushkin’s use of it in “Napoleon” (1821), which was written on the occasion of the French emperor’s death: “Померкни, солнце Австерлица! | Пылай, великая Москва!” (Go dark, sun of Austerlitz! | Blaze, great Moscow!). Pushkin employs again the imagery of light and fire with which he begins this ambiguous half-condemnation-half-elegy: “Угас великий человек” (A great man has been extinguished). He praises Moscow, which, by burning to the ground in 1812, played a crucial part in the eventual eclipse of the Napoleonic sun.56 Maiakovskii adopts the same ambivalent attitude to Napoleon as Pushkin does, treating him as both a great man and a pernicious invader; he extends this attitude to Napoleon’s avatar, the sun, which is seen invading Moscow as both cavalryman and flame: “Красным копытом грохнув о площадь, | въезжает по трупам крыш!” (Thundering a red hoof on the square, he enters along the corpses of the roofs).57 Pushkin’s influence on Maiakovskii is further evident in the latter’s invocation of Napoleon’s famous visit to plague victims in Jaffa: Он раз чуме приблизился троном, смелостью смерть поправ, — я каждый день иду к зачумленным по тысячам русских Яфф!58 [He on his throne once came close to plague | Correcting death with boldness | Every day I go to the plague victims, | In thousands of Russian Jaffas.]

Maiakovskii here recalls another of Pushkin’s engagements with Napoleon, “Hero” (1830), in which the poet argues that this act of humility and bravery was the emperor’s most striking achievement. This reliance on Pushkinian imagery, and his exaggeration of the ambivalence of Pushkin’s Napoleonic mythology, further prevents us from claiming a straightforward equivalence between the sun and Pushkin. Rather, we see that, just as violent triumphalism is always accompanied by doubt, so the rejection of the past necessitates a reengagement with it.

Futurism’s Significant Other There are clearly aspects of the Futurists’ mobilization of Pushkinian poetic mythology that are intended to help recuperate Pushkin, freeing

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him from his idol, but for the most part early Futurist manifestos and essays present Pushkin as falling on the wrong side of a strict divide between good and bad. In fact, Pushkin is so self-evidently deficient that the Futurists can use him as their opposite in a number of binary categories: he represents the past, they the present; he is out of touch with the popular spirit, they are its embodiment; he is effeminate and corrupted by foreign influence, they are masculine and proudly, purely Russian. The attempted drowning notwithstanding, the general attitude taken to Pushkin in “Slap,” and indeed to all the many writers mentioned, is one not so much of hostility as contempt: “We look down on their pathetic insignificance from the height of skyscrapers.”59 Pushkin is a pitiable encumbrance because his work is alien to the true spirit of the idealized present, doubly connected with history because he is not only from the past, but an enthusiast for it too. In a brief note, “On Our Predecessors” (1913), Kruchenykh writes: “Pushkin said that the past is nice. That’s only for the indolent.”60 While it is not clear what Kru­ chenykh is referring to here—he quickly moves on to a jab at Rozanov— Pushkin certainly was an eager would-be historian, carefully researching works such as his History of Pugachev (1834). In reinforcing their own position as the face of their time, the Futurists emphasize the disjunction between Pushkin’s poetry and the present. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Maiakovskii argues in an essay that art must change in response to the times: “Poetry is the word loved every day in a new way.”61 The works of Pushkin cannot capture the demands of the new era of industrial warfare and Maiakovskii warns him against martial themes: “Forget the war, Aleksandr Sergeevich, it’s not your uncle!”62 Maiakovskii not only addresses Pushkin as an equal, but reduces the variety of his oeuvre by suggesting that his only sphere of expertise is the domestic, which is symbolized by the uncle who features in the first line of Eugene Onegin. Maiakovskii’s comment is prompted by a comparison between the opening of Onegin and four lines describing a battle from Lermontov’s “Borodino” (1837), which Maiakovskii incorrectly attributes to Pushkin, whom he condemns for being unable to respond differently to different stimuli because of his limited metrical range: “both quatrains are identical. A defunct measure. An indifferent approach. Is there really no difference between the feelings of a nephew and the turbulent sensation of conflict?”63 In his next article, Maiakovskii dismisses the misattribution as an “annoying bit of nonsense” occasioned by “the numerous blotches”

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on his copy, but this supposed mistake was surely an extension of Maia­kovskii’s polemical point that all non-Futurist poetry is undifferentiated dross.64 While the Futurists want to remain in contact with modern life, they still strive to distinguish their artistic endeavors from other forms of production in the contemporary city. The Futurists plot a careful course, trying to avoid the isolationist impulses of aestheticism while still maintaining a similar distaste for the profanum vulgus and for the commercialization of literature. They are, therefore, happy to adopt some of the tactics of advertising—and after the revolution Maiakovskii would write countless commercial slogans—but in their manifestos and essays they make a point of distinguishing themselves from the hacks they claim populate Russian literature: in “Slap,” for instance, contemporary writers are compared dismissively to tailors.65 Pushkin is invoked as an example, representing the excesses of both commercialism and isolationism. In his article “Not Butterflies, but Alexander of Macedon” (1914), Maiakovskii inveighs against the servile nature of most poetry.66 Although the principal targets of his attack are Briusov and Bal’mont (who, typically, is imagined wearing a skirt), his main supporting example is taken from Pushkin. Maiakovskii employs a now familiar device, juxtaposing lines from advertisements for “Riz Royale” paper and “Viktorson” ink cartridges with four lines (slightly misquoted) from Eugene Onegin and decrying their similarity: “Examine the fingerprints! How close are the free fingers of the bard to the hired hand of Mikhei!”67 The clichéd image of the free bard is ironically contrasted with that of Uncle Mikhei, the pseudonymous author of cigarette advertisements. Although Maiakovskii is not seriously accusing Pushkin of product placement, he equates “pleasant” poetry with the idea of art as a mere diversion: “poets are not nice little butterflies, created for the pleasure of ‘useful’ citizens.”68 Although Maiakovskii ultimately exculpates him because he is only a product of his time—“For old poetry this is nothing shameful”—Pushkin is still a point of contrast with the Futurist’s urgent avant-garde mission to safeguard artistic autonomy: “The aim of the poet is the word. [. . .] Gentlemen, enough of serving events in white aprons! Get involved in life!”69 A similar description of non-Futurist poetry as limited in scope and ambition can also be found in Kruchenykh’s “New Ways of the Word” (1913), in which he argues that: “before us there was no verbal art [. . .] there were verses for all sorts of domestic and family use.”70 This forms part of a wider critique of contemporary Russian literature, which is

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presented as the nadir of a long-standing decline that began with Europeanization. In contrast to the most common versions of the history of Russian literature, which presupposed a general improvement over time as foreign models were adopted, domesticated, and improved upon, and which afforded pride of place to Pushkin in this process, Kruchenykh relates a story of decay from the heights reached by oral epics: “after the byliny and The Lay of Igor’s Campaign verbal art declined and in the time of Pushkin it stood lower than in the time of [Vasilii] Trediakovskii.”71 Pushkin’s language is presented as pandering to enervating foreign influence and is thus contrasted negatively with the Futurists’ own, which restores the native vitality of the Russian tongue. This discourse of decline was part of a wider reaction against the perceived decadence of modernity that informed both Futurism and Fascism. Although this shared origin does not necessarily imply an equivalence between them, it does mean that both groups promoted a contrast between, on the one hand, a lost ideal of purity and masculine strength embodied in an unmiscegenated people and culture, and, on the other, the world as it is, debased by cosmopolitanism, effeminacy, and deviance. In a polemical 1913 essay Kruchenykh framed “Slap” as an exercise in linguistic hygiene: Everything has been done to quash the primordial feeling of our native language, to strip the word of its fertile grain, to castrate it, and release it around the world as “the clear honest resonant Russian language” although it’s not a language anymore, but a pitiful eunuch unable to give the world anything. It’s impossible to perfect it and we were absolutely right to announce: “throw Pushkin, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and so on from the steamship of Modernity.”72

The undisguised gender bias of Kruchenykh’s analysis is instantly familiar to anyone who has read the Italian Futurists or Nietzsche, who use similar terms to express their enthusiasm for a new beginning, condemning, respectively, “the neurasthenic cultivation of hermaphroditic archaism” and the “race of eunuchs [that] watch over the great historical world-harem.”73 The Futurists, in contrast to Pushkin, position themselves as the inheritors of the traditions of Russian culture that thrived before the rot set in with the invention of printing and the adoption of Western models. Maiakovskii seems to channel Herderian Romanticism in his praise of

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“that literature, which, having in its ranks Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, has emerged not from the imitation of books that have come out of ‘cultured’ nations, but from the bright stream of the narrative primordial word, from nameless Russian song.”74 Likewise in Piglets (1913) Kru­ chenykh argues that Pushkin is only tolerable, although still derivative, when he pastiches native creativity: The best thing that Pushkin wrote was “out came a she-bear . . .” But Pushkin has got nothing to do with this—it is slavish imitation of folk tales. It’s always like this: they spoil and smarm up to great art and then they throw themselves at its feet—and that’s good! . . . But why not then burn his previous fakes of folk tales along with Eugene.75

Kruchenykh distinguishes between different types of similarity: while he and other Futurists present themselves as a worthy continuation of oral literature, Pushkin is a “slavish imitation.” Nonetheless, Kru­ chenykh’s emphasis in this book is less on continuity than on purgative violence—hence the call for a Savonarolan bonfire of the vanities—and on uncorrupted newness: he says that the Futurists have “shocked the universe” and the book is coauthored with an eleven-year-old girl named Zina, who represents the unprejudiced originality of childhood.76 The equation of Futurism with folk creativity occasionally took on a class dimension. In his two speeches comparing Pushkin and Khlebnikov, Burliuk associated the former with the Frenchified aristocracy and the latter with the purity and righteousness of the Russian people: “We need a genius who is a word-leader. Pushkin was a nobleman, but Khlebnikov is legendary, holy simplicity. He is a real Russian genius.”77 Khlebnikov himself had laid the groundwork for the Futurist narrative of decadence and malign foreign influence. In “The Burial Mound of Sviatogor” (1908) he describes Russia as the descendant of an ancient sea and, as such, eternally different to Europe, which emerged from the dry land. Pushkin ignores Russia’s true heritage: “And should not the great Pushkin himself be scolded because in his work the sonorous numbers of the existence of the people [i.e., words]—the heir to the sea—have been replaced by the figures of peoples that are obedient to the will of the ancient islands?”78 This article predates the birth of Futurism by some four years and so the attitude to Pushkin is considerably more forgiving than in later works. Furthermore, the gendered geography is different: Khlebnikov,

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writing under the influence of Ivanov, is pleased to believe that Russia has an essentially feminine soul. Even at this early stage, however, Pushkin is used as a point of contrast with Khlebnikov’s idealized selfimage and imagined to be an ally of inferior contemporary poets, “the mockingbirds of Western voices.”79 Just after scolding Pushkin, Khlebnikov proposes that an imagined, proto-Futurist hero better deserves Pushkin’s position as the fountainhead of a genuinely Russian literature: “And should we not welcome with the name of ‘the first Russian who has dared to speak Russian,’ he who tears apart the wicked, but sweet spells, and conjure his rise with cries of ‘Let it be! Let it be!’” Khlebnikov alludes here to Belinskii’s sixth article on Pushkin, in which the critic lauds Pushkin’s independence from influence: “Pushkin dared to write in a way in which no one in Rus’ had written before him, to have the unheard-of boldness, or rather the downright riotous defiance, to take his own path, not taking as his example one of the Parnassian lawmakers, great poets either foreign or Russian.” 80 Khlebnikov recognizes in Pushkin a threat to his own desired position not only as the truest Russian poet, but as the first Russian poet (in Futurism, the two are almost synonymous). The Futurists are both attracted and threatened by Pushkin’s reputation as an innovator. Once he was allied with the other Futurists, Khlebnikov adapted his mythology somewhat, while maintaining elements of the symbolic geography of “The Burial Mound of Sviatogor.” He begins an untitled and unpublished manifesto of 1912 or 1913 with a description of himself as “a warrior of a kingdom that has not yet come,” encapsulating both the liminal temporality and the heroic ambition of the Futurist persona. “Who are we?” he continues. “We will run rampant, like a new pox, until you are as similar to us as two drops of water. Then we will disappear. We are the mouth of fate. We have emerged from the depths of the Russian sea. We are warriors beginning in ourselves a new class in the state.”81 The mysticism and patriotism of “The Burial Mound of Sviatogor” is allied to the group identity and transformative ambition of Futurism. The Futurists’ forceful fluidity is contrasted with Pushkin and Tolstoi, who constrain Russian culture’s inherent Slavic energy: “We demand that the Pushkinian dams and the piers of Tolstoi be opened up for the waterfalls and torrents of the Montenegrin aspects of the proud Russian tongue.”82 The Futurists would later go into greater detail about why Pushkin should be regarded as a traitor to the Russian language. In the jointly authored manifesto “The Word as Such,” discussing Kruchenykh’s

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infamous zaum poem “Dyr bul shchyl,” Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov suggest that Pushkin’s lexis reveals his lack of connection with the nation: “(By the way there is in these five lines more of the Russian national spirit than in all the poetry of Pushkin) not a voiceless languorous creamy smear of poetry (patience . . . pastille . . . ) but tremendous bardry.”83 The implicit gendering of language, with certain sounds and morphological structures presented as insufficiently masculine and thus insufficiently Russian, continues in Kruchenykh’s Secret Vices of the Academicians (1916), a hallucinatory parable about contemporary Russian literature that forsakes the explicit clarity of earlier manifestos but maintains their strict division between the laudable (Futurism) and the loathsome (everything else). Kruchenykh, expanding on the narrative of decadence he used earlier, suggests that Russian literature has been degraded into a succession of whistling sounds. He cites as evidence eight lines from Eugene Onegin, which he compares unfavorably to a laundry bill: in the latter “the style is higher than Pushkin” because it features “those rare and sonorous letters of the Rusichi: y, f, iu, zh . . . (and they are so rare in the novel) in general there are more sounds than in Pushkin and there’s no sia—sia, te—te and so on.”84 Kruchenykh makes Pushkin the opposite of the pure language of Russia before the fall, which is symbolized by the ethnonym rusichi, which appears first in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign. The bathetic comparison with the found poetry of Mr. Iushchinskii’s laundry list follows on from an act of poetic remaking. Kruchenykh reproduces Pushkin’s whole work in miniature: “all of Eugene Onegin can be expressed in two lines ‘ёни — вони | се — и — тся [yoni—voni | se—i—tsia].’ Sleepy whistling is victorious! Slush crawls!”85 A similar diagnosis of Pushkin’s verse is evident in Khlebnikov’s 1920 essay “On Contemporary Poetry”: “In Pushkin words sounded on ‘enie.’”86 Kru­ chenykh is more radical, however: he takes over and transforms Pushkin’s text, demonstrating not only that it is repetitious and effeminate— he uses grammatically feminine nouns to describe the many negative properties of Pushkin’s text—but also implying that Pushkin is literary scrap metal awaiting recycling. Pushkin’s novel in verse effectively becomes a zaum text, with no plot or meaning, only sound. The Secret Vices of the Academicians suggests a further binary to accompany those between the masculine and feminine and the foreign and Russian: the opposition between the earthy and the ethereal. The Futurists present themselves as grounded in the Russian soil. In Khlebnikov’s final epic Zangezi, the poet’s disciples crave a connection with

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the ground and implore the titular prophet: “Zangezi! Something earthy! Enough sky!”87 A contemporary of Kruchenykh remembered him saying of “Dyr bul shchyl” that “it becomes clear that our earth is in this sharp gamut and that Pushkin is the foreign sky.”88 By contrast, Kruchenykh portrays Pushkin, like all non-Futurist writers, as remote from the physical reality of modern urban life. Pushkin is described as “watery,” but so are “Lermontov and all the Realists and the Symbolists.”89 Pushkin’s exceptionalism is challenged: the Futurists single him out, but do so only to argue that he is neither special nor immune to the trends that have subsumed others. He is compared here to Fedor Sologub, who, like him, seems to praise angelic inspiration or intangible forms of existence and thus to promote an unhealthy isolation from modern life. Kruchenykh locates this aestheticism in the Romantic topos of the desert, which is particularly associated with Lermontov but which he now sees as the haunt of the Symbolists—“Those who were grieving with sadness at modernity and vulgarity have gone off into the deserts (not new attempts) and still the old results . . . !”90 He further connects such solitude with effeminacy and sexual deviancy, saying, “they go about with their sufferings and their soul like young ladies with a hairdo,” and asking whether “we should go off into the desert to dream, knowing what it is like and what they do there on their own?!”91

Reviving Pushkin This portrayal of Pushkin as out of touch, effeminate, and insubstantial is closely related to the Futurists’ critique of the timeless Pushkinian idol. The manifesto was sometimes the place not just to stage the destruction of this idol, but also to use gentler methods to dispel its enchantment by showing that the combination of martyrdom, mysticism, and messianism that had come to constitute Pushkin’s aura was not evidence of inherent saintliness, but rather a construct of his reception at the hands of overly reverent readers like Tiutchev and Dostoevskii. The next line in “Slap” after the ejection of Pushkin reads: “Whoever does not forget his first love cannot know his last love” (50). (The word here translated as “last,” poslednei, could also mean “latest.”) On the surface, this statement seems to reinforce the overall message that Russian culture has too much baggage hindering its progress. It is also a deliberately obvious allusion to Tiutchev’s well-known elegy for Pushkin, “29th January 1837.” The invocation of this elegy is fitting, perhaps,

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given that Pushkin may just have been killed by the Futurists. Kruchenykh later admitted, however, that the purpose of this allusion was to “pique Tiutchev,” who is guilty, in the eyes of the Futurists, of a morbid mixture of sentimentalism and eroticism.92 Tiutchev portrays Pushkin as a passive savior whose blood sacrifice on behalf of the mourning Russian nation makes him beyond reproach: Вражду твою пусть тот рассудит, Кто слышит пролитую кровь . . . Тебя ж, как первую любовь, России сердце не забудет!93 [May he pass judgment on your enmity | Who smells the spilled blood . . . | You, like a first love, | Will not be forgotten in Russia’s heart.]

This passivity has a fragility normally associated with the feminine: Pushkin is described as “a brittle vessel” punctured by a bullet and is most often referred to as a grammatically feminine “shade” (ten’), modified with feminine adjectives. Moreover, the Futurists’ mention of a “last” or “latest” love alludes to one of Tiutchev’s most famous lyrics, “Last Love” (1852–54).94 In this poem, which features important prosodic innovations on the iambic tetrameter associated with Pushkin, Tiutchev looks back, from the verge of death, on his own career and rejoices in the consolation of a love affair.95 The Futurists’ juxtaposition of first and last loves highlights the links between it and “29th January 1837.”96 Both poems treat the theme of the death of the poet and mention the interplay of light and shadow, the blood in the poet’s veins, unforgetting hearts, words for “cooling,” and the rhyme of the words “blood” (krov’) and “love” (liubov’) in the final quatrain. Tiutchev seems to want to contrast his own gentle end, which is alleviated by the love of a woman, with Pushkin’s brutal demise, which brought him the love of the nation. The connection the Futurists make between these two poems reinforces the feminine characteristics of the martyred Pushkin in “29 January 1837”: Pushkin, the first love, is the counterpart of Tiutchev’s partner Elena Denis’eva, the last love. The Futurists, in contrast, wish to rid literature of this nexus of love and death entirely. At first they do so through mockery, crudely sexualizing the concept of “love,” which is for Tiutchev either a matter of (eroticized) patriotism or faithful

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companionship. “Slap” continues: “Who, trusting, would give their last Love to the perfumed lechery of Bal’mont?”97 The idea of literature as a quasi-romantic venture is then dismissed wholesale: “Does this love reflect the masculine soul of the present day?”98 The Futurists do not wish to compete with their peers for the love of their readers, but rather to remove this feminized element from culture entirely. They disparage the books of Leonid Andreev, which were known for their frank sexual content, as “dirty slime” and state their preference for “a sea of whistling and outrage” over the affection of their readership. While Tiutchev had presented Pushkin as a passive martyr, Dostoev­ skii adopted a more active and eschatological approach to the national poet, presenting him as a force of potential in the future. In The Secret Vices of the Academicians Kruchenykh specifically takes aim at the mystical, transcendent Pushkin described in Dostoevskii’s 1880 speech and in particular the notion that Pushkin had a secret that subsequent generations were obliged to uncover.99 Despite the seriousness of Dostoev­ skii’s oration, there may be some irony here: the “secret” seems to recall both Pushkin’s sarcastic description of the death of Lenskii—“Его страдальческая тень, | Быть может, унесла с собою | Святую тайну” (His tormented shade | perhaps took with it | A holy secret)—and the novella The Queen of Spades (1834), in which the hero’s obsession with discovering an old woman’s “secret” gambling trick continues after her death.100 Any possible irony was lost, however, on Kruchenykh, who includes “Pushkin’s secret” in his litany of literary skullduggery. He attributes the tolerance of Pushkin’s degraded language of whistles to a failure in education: “the poor reader has already been so scared by Pushkin in school that he doesn’t dare let out a peep and until this day ‘Pushkin’s secret’ has remained a secret.”101 Kruchenykh is deliberately ambiguous: the institutionalization of Pushkin has prevented readers from fulfilling the task set by Dostoevskii, but the real dirty secret is that Pushkin’s use of language is so ineffective and effete. In both cases, Kruchenykh contrasts his own practical bent with Dostoevskii’s mystical hermeneutics. The Secret Vices of Academicians has considerable affinities with another prose work, The Devil and the Wordsmiths (1913), a similarly dense satire on contemporary literature in which Kruchenykh portrays the Futurists as rescuing Russian literature from the morbid and ethereal obsessions of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Dostoevskii. The two essays were republished together in slightly altered versions after the revolution, under the title The Apocalypse of Russian Literature, and the

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two do indeed constitute Kruchenykh’s response to the chiliastic atmosphere of the 1910s and showcase his irreverent take on the era’s obsession with questions of recurrence and revelation. In The Devil and the Wordsmiths Kruchenykh condemns pre-Futurist literature for its obsession with demons: “Russian literature before us was spiritualistic and anemic it spun round in the devil’s wheel.”102 He exploits a pun—in Russian a “devil’s wheel” is a Ferris wheel—to emphasize the fact that, until the Futurists, Russian literature was trapped in recurring cycles, a fact exemplified by the ubiquitous demons that crop up in the work of author after author. At the head of this tradition stands Pushkin: “it is no coincidence that literature before us is overflowing with hellish voluptuousness (the negro Pushkin, the gloomy cornet Lermontov, the secret fire of Gogol’, etc.).”103 Kruchenykh is being somewhat disingenuous—few writers have been as preoccupied with demons as he was—but he needs to contrast this repetition with the transformation embodied by the Futurists: “wordsmiths have come—Futurian bards— and immediately turned the devil into a janitor.”104 This narrative of Futurist rupture stands in contrast to the main story of The Devil and the Wordsmiths, such as it is, which combines elements of the book of Revelation with motifs appropriated from the likes of Sologub and Dostoevskii. Kruchenykh offers a series of manic, sarcastic intertextual riffs that find parallels and recurrences everywhere. A single brief passage, for instance, which describes a dog eating an insect, is constructed out of references to the book of Revelation, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Bellini’s opera Norma.105 The insect stings the dog, causing it to foam at the mouth, which prompts Kruchenykh to associate it with Dostoevskii not only as an author but as an epileptic. He mocks the universalist vision of Christian redemption that Dostoevskii outlined in his Pushkin speech: the rabid dog is faced by a fiery apocalyptic scene but is still hopeful for some final rapture in which “everyone will flow together in love.” Kru­chenykh tells him to curb his enthusiasm—“Be humble, proud man”—with a line taken from the Pushkin speech. Dostoevskii argues that this call to humility is the central message of Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies (1827) and as such is evidence of the unique insight into the Russian national character that allows Pushkin to step outside the boundaries of history and embody the future union of all mankind.106 The prickly Kruchenykh uses Dostoevskii’s own words to undercut his mystical hopes for allencompassing union in favor of a never-ending antagonism that is better suited to the Futurists’ combative persona.

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According to Kruchenykh, the reason that Dostoevskii should “be humble” is not as a step toward the Christian brotherhood that he espoused in The Brothers Karamazov and attributed to Pushkin, but because, in contravention of this gospel of common feeling, he is still rejected by his fellow men because of his epilepsy: “those close to him do not know do not believe and are afraid to go up to him.”107 Kruchenykh again uses Dostoevskii’s own words against him, citing Ivan Kara­ma­ zov’s opinion that it is easier to love humanity in theory than in practice. He asks how the reader might react to Dostoevskii having a fit: “You can love mankind and a man, in the abstract, from a distance, a dead man, but when he’s in front of you, raving, dying, what are you going to do?”108 The answer supplied by the imagined bourgeois reader is: “Shoot him like Pushkin, like Lermontov, like a rabid dog.”109 Although Kruchenykh mocks Dostoevskii, he also sees him as party to the recurring tragedy faced by Russian writers, which is a product not so much of the patterns of fate as the unceasing philistinism of the Russian reader, who prefers their writers dead and anodyne. Earlier he frames this murderous indifference in explicitly Christological terms. Prompted by a reminiscence of Lermontov’s Demon to misquote his poem “No, I am not Byron, I am another . . .” (1832), which predicts the poet’s early death, Kruchenykh describes Lermontov’s fate as “a prototype (although strangely happening later) of the death of another such young and beautiful lamb (Pushkin).”110 Lermontov famously repeated Pushkin’s fate by also dying in a duel and thus established a pattern of premature, partially self-inflicted deaths that would help fuel the martyrdom myth. As with everything in this text, however, there are multiple layers of intertextuality: the image of the lamb invoked by Kru­ chenykh is already a symbol of transhistorical connections, with Jesus, the Lamb of God, recreating the blood sacrifice of the Paschal lamb of Passover and, before that, the ram sacrificed by Abraham. Kruchenykh seems torn between mocking the association between the Russian poet and Christ—for example, by reversing the chronology of type and antitype between Pushkin and Lermontov—and endorsing the notion that the death of the poet is not just a tragedy but an act of deliberate sacrifice and redemption. This tension may have arisen from the fact that the source of this reading of Russian literary history was not Kruchenykh’s own musings on the fate of the poet, but Khlebnikov’s pattern-obsessed reading of history. In his memoir, Kruchenykh explains that the comparison of the rabid dog Dostoevskii with Lermontov and Pushkin was one of many

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additions to the text made by Khlebnikov, who would use the same image again in his own 1916 manifesto, “The Trumpet of the Martians,” which was written independently from the other members of Hylea, but which calls for a similar heroic and violent rejection of “the people of the past” and of consumerist sensibilities.111 He condemns readers who failed to acknowledge the geniuses of the past, anticipating his own lack of recognition: You try to use monuments and laudatory articles to sanctify the joy of the theft you have committed and temper the grumbling of your conscience [. . .]. Your supposed banner—Pushkin and Lermontov—were once killed like rabid dogs outside of the city, in a field!112

As in his 1915 note in Zheverzheev’s album, written only a short time later, Khlebnikov moves beyond the Futurists’ antagonism to Pushkin in order to present a united front: he, Pushkin, and Christ himself (who was also killed on the outskirts of town) are all victims of the same common enemy, the unthinking, uncomprehending public, who look set to kill Khlebnikov and his comrades too. Although the Futurists would revive the manifesto as a genre for a while after 1917, and although they never abandoned combative essay-writing or expressions of hostility to the Pushkinian idol, Khlebnikov himself never wrote another manifesto, but rather started to seek out alternative means to express his identity and his relationship to Pushkin. With the coming of revolution, Futurism entered a new phase, and with it came a new attitude to Pushkin.

3 Making a Prophet Pushkin and Khlebnikov

A poet [. . .] never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria [. . .] he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play. [. . .] He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power. W. B. Yeats

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he pure laws of time were discovered by me in the year 1920, when I lived in Baku, the land of fire, in the tall building of the sailor’s boarding house, together with Dobrokovskii.”1 So begins Velimir Khlebnikov’s essay, “Words about Numbers and Vice Versa,” written in Moscow in 1922, six months before his untimely death at the age of thirty-six. This sentence is typical of Khlebnikov’s prose in its combination of plain syntax and precise detail with a strange poetic flourish. It is also typical in its deadpan announcement 92

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of a seemingly earth-shattering claim. In this essay Khlebnikov explains that his lifelong mission to analyze the rationale governing the occurrence of historical phenomena has finally come to a successful conclusion. He has understood the mechanisms that control the timing of everything in the universe, from the literary to the geological, including: “Gogol’s soul, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the lights of the solar world, the shifting of the earth’s crust, the replacement of the rule of serpents by the rule of men, the replacement of the Devonian period with the period marked by the interference of mankind into the life and construction of the globe” (6:2:21). Khlebnikov’s vision is universal in a way that seems alien to the science of today, but he is insistent on the empiricism of his method and shows remarkable foresight: for instance, his argument for a geological period marked by human intervention anticipates the now fashionable concept of the Anthropocene. For Khlebnikov, who studied first mathematics and then zoology at university, the key to understanding both history and nature is numbers: “I realized that time is built on powers of two and three, the lowest even and odd numbers. I realized that the repeated multiplication of twos and threes with themselves is the true nature of time.” He refuses, however, to make a distinction between science and folklore: “And when I remembered the ancient Slavs’ belief in ‘even and odd,’ I realized that wisdom is a tree that grows from the seed of superstition” (6:2:11). Even during his lifetime, when the boundaries between science and mysticism were less rigorously policed than they are today, Khlebnikov was considered by many to be an eccentric, even a crank. Friends often saw his obsession with unpicking the laws of historical causality as a foible to be tolerated and a distraction from his true talent—poetry.2 Despite the occasional uncanny accuracy of the predictions that Khlebnikov used his formulae to make—in 1912 he asked whether Russians “should not expect the fall of the government in 1917?” (6:1:43)—it is hard, given the benefit of hindsight, not to agree with these critics.3 Indeed, Khlebnikov is now remembered less for his theory of history than for his equally ambitious plan to transform natural language, for his innovations in the language of poetry, and for an unusual approach to life that was both ingenuous and ingenious.4 To dismiss Khlebnikov’s historical theorizing, however, or even to treat it as discrete from his linguistic experiments, his poetry, and his life, would be to misunderstand the nature of the modernist avantgarde as a milieu and as a mission. For Khlebnikov his whole existence

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was a unified and thought-through project to understand and to improve the world around him. His one-time collaborator Matiushin spoke for many modernists when he said: “Artists have always been knights, poets, and prophets of space in all areas. Sacrificing to everyone, perishing, they have opened eyes and taught the crowd to see the great beauty of the world which was hidden from it.”5 At the age of nineteen, Khlebnikov imagined his future epitaph in similarly beneficent terms: He had inspired dreams of being a prophet and was a great interpreter of the prince-tissue [the brain] and only that. He dreamed of the distant future, of the ball of the earth in the future, and his dreams were inspired when he compared the earth with a beast of the steppe, running from bush to bush. He discovered the true classification of the sciences, he linked time with space, he created the geometry of numbers. He discovered the element Slavonium, he founded the institute for studying a child’s life before birth. He discovered the microbe of progressive paralysis, he connected and explained the foundations of chemistry in space. (6:2:7)

Like Matiushin, who recapitulates the Romantic distinction between the extraordinary artistic individual and the crowd, Khlebnikov pre­ sents himself as the heir of two different but related intellectual traditions: the systematizing efforts of the Enlightenment to illuminate the mysterious recesses of the universe with the lights of human rationality and the Romantic discourse of the genius’s special intuition and irrational communion with the hidden forces of nature. Khlebnikov sees the inspired individual’s maverick pursuit of esoteric knowledge as a continuation, not a refutation, of the efforts of science: “the tree of wisdom grows from the seed of superstition.” One of Khlebnikov’s great intellectual heroes is the Russian pioneer of non-Euclidean geometry Nikolai Lobachevskii, who opposed the scientific dogmas of the nineteenth century in order to reveal previously concealed laws of spatial relation. Khlebnikov’s rejection of a hard-and-fast distinction between science and mysticism was not untypical of the era of modernism and his beliefs were not more unorthodox than those of the celebrated physicist Niels Bohr, who posited a universal consciousness, or of the mystic Yeats, who became an Irish senator.6 Indeed, this was a time in which the political leaders of Khlebnikov’s own country had their deceased colleague embalmed and placed in a pyramid, hopeful of the imminent

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conquest of death. Khlebnikov was an exemplar of the new hermeneutic spirit of the post-Newtonian era, a spirit that contributed to both modernism’s ambition and its sense of detachment from the past. The science of the nineteenth century had scrutinized the visible universe; the new science of the twentieth looked poised to fully comprehend the complex mechanisms that underlay the perceptible cosmos. Ernest Rutherford exposed the unseen workings of the atom; Sigmund Freud explicated the invisible workings of the psyche; Velimir Khlebnikov shed light on the hidden patterns underpinning language and history. He sought to understand the universe holistically, but, like a scientist, to derive the general by extrapolating from the particular. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin later said that Khlebnikov possessed “a mysticism without mysticism. [. . .] He thought in categories that were really very broad, cosmic, but not abstractly cosmic.”7 It is no coincidence that Jakobson listed Khlebnikov as one of the three geniuses he had ever met: he shared with the other members of Jakobson’s triumvirate, the linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (and indeed with Jakobson himself ), a self-confident urge to find order in chaos.8 Like these famous structuralists, he saw the world as consisting of integrated, mutually self-constituting systems. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between Khlebnikov and the founding fathers of structuralism. For Khlebnikov, understanding the true nature of language and history was only a first step in fixing evident inadequacies in both and by so doing helping to usher in a new, more perfect age. Marxists were not alone at this time in thinking that “philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world; the point is to change it”: in “Words about Numbers and Vice Versa,” Khlebnikov explains how his quest to understand the function of time was inspired by his horror at the deaths of Russian sailors in their catastrophic defeat at Tsushima (6:2:10). Nor were the Bolsheviks the only group who conceived of this change in the world as sudden, all-consuming, and irreversible. Many of Khlebnikov’s avant-garde peers—not just in Russia, but in Russia especially—shared this transformative impulse and apocalyptic mindset, albeit with a particular focus on the power of art, not the art of power. In the decade either side of the 1917 revolution, in collaboration and in conflict with contemporary political programs, artists and poets sought to bring into everyday life—dogged as it was with convention, constriction, and injustice—the same spontaneity, freedom, and sense of agency they found in art. This meant not just finding a new living language, but a new way to live as a poet.

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In some ways, Pushkin and his cult were a hindrance to the mission of avant-gardists like Khlebnikov as they strove to communicate the newly revealed intricacy of the universe and to overcome the perceived disjuncture between art and life and in so doing transform both. Nevertheless, the Futurists’ need to understand, articulate, and justify the rationale behind these attempts to be a new sort of poet—both in words and in deeds—also provoked them to turn to established mythologies in search of metaphors and models of behavior to explain their aims and theirs means. Throughout his career, Khlebnikov repurposed Pushkinian mythology in a way that not only reveals the same methods of pattern-seeking analysis that he applied to his reading of the universe, but also suggests a deep self-identification with Pushkinian precedents. His thorough knowledge of Pushkin’s work is not surprising for an educated Russian of his generation, and especially one who attended Semen Vengerov’s Pushkin seminar in St. Petersburg in 1909, but it is noticeable that, of all the Futurists, Khlebnikov was and is the one most often compared to Pushkin.9 For instance, on the verso of a later manifesto also given the title “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” the Futurists placed excerpts from the classics next to their own for “a demonstration and comparison ‘in our favor’”: it was Khlebnikov who was matched with Pushkin—with a zaum poem compared to Eugene Onegin—just as he was in the speeches Burliuk gave in 1913.10 In the audience of one of those talks was Jakobson, who that evening angered his father by defending Burliuk’s scandalous argument for similarity, anticipating his own controversial juxtaposition of the two poets in the 1919 paper given to the Moscow Linguistic Circle that eventually became The Latest Russian Poetry.11 Such comparisons were in part suggested by the fact that Khlebnikov was, like Pushkin before him, evidently extravagantly talented, but they were also motivated by Khlebnikov’s own willingness to pit himself against Pushkin. He is believed to have said of his 1919 poem “The Poet” that in it he “showed that he could write as well as Pushkin.”12 For the Futurists, however, this was not enough: they strove not just to write better, but to live better too, to outmatch Pushkin in his embodiment of the essence of poethood. Khlebnikov, therefore, used Pushkin’s metaphorical self-identification with the prophet in order to explain his unprecedented success in the exegesis of the mysterious patterns of the universe, and did so in two ways. First, he treated Pushkin’s life, work, and reception as historical facts that constituted evidence in his proof of the theories of time. Pushkin featured regularly in

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Khlebnikov’s calculations, but the notion that Pushkin and his works are indices of deterministic time is not limited to such theoretical texts. Rather, the intertextual appropriation of Pushkin in Khlebnikov’s poetry also exemplifies his dualistic and spatialized typological model of history, which combines both linearity and transhistorical correspondences. Khlebnikov historicizes Pushkinian mythology, showing both where it comes from, by drawing attention to Pushkin’s borrowings from other sources, as well as the complex intertextuality within Pushkin’s own oeuvre, and where it goes, by acknowledging the changes Pushkinian myths underwent at the hands of his successors. As such, Khlebnikov presents Pushkin not as an eschatological force outside of history, but as a historically contingent avatar of a certain persistent poetic essence. Second, Khlebnikov uses Pushkin’s own myth of the prophet as a collection of metaphors, motifs, and discourses that he can appropriate, subvert, and polemicize against in order to demonstrate his novelty and superiority. These reworkings of the Pushkin prophet not only showcased Khlebnikov’s ability to innovate—to make something new out of Pushkin—but also to demonstrate in his own life how recurrence in time could be overcome. Khlebnikov believed that he had unlocked the secret of historical determinism, enabling him to predict the future and therefore actually to be a prophet, unlike Pushkin, who had only pretended. Khlebnikov is not a repetition, but the incarnation of Pushkin’s metaphor.13

Pushkin’s “The Prophet” The most important single source for the poet-prophet myth in Russian literature is Pushkin’s “The Prophet” (1826), a short poem dense with intertextual allusions that became one of the most influential statements on the role of the poet in Russian literary history and that has, therefore, attracted a penumbra of legends, variant readings, and re­ imaginings. In it Pushkin draws on the visionary imagery of the book of Isaiah to describe the violent transformation of the protagonist (a poetic “I” whose exact relationship to Pushkin is uncertain) into a proselyte for a higher cause.14 As the protagonist wanders through a desert, a seraph descends and opens up his eyes to reveal hidden mysteries, then rips out his heart and replaces it with a burning coal; the voice of God instructs him “to burn the hearts of men with the word” (Глаголом жги сердца людей ).15 (Note that revelation is not enough and the poet-prophet has a duty to share his findings.) These words proved

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prophetically self-aware: this poem left a searing impression on the next century of Russian poets and stoked a lively tradition in which poets were imagined as quasi-prophets. One reason for this influence was that Pushkin’s poem provided later poets with a powerful new repertoire of images; another was that “The Prophet” acquired a particular political force thanks to the frequent, and likely erroneous, connection made between it and Pushkin’s friendship with the conspirators in the disastrous Decembrist Uprising of 1825.16 In engaging with Pushkin’s poet-prophet, Khlebnikov was also perpetuating and commenting on the evolution of this myth over the course of the nineteenth century. The resonance of “The Prophet” was both a cause and a beneficiary of Pushkin’s ascent to supreme national significance and the entanglement of his legacy in political, nationalist, and religious discourses, all of which suggested a special role for writers as vectors of the nation’s moral conscience and potential agents of salvation.17 The use of Isaianic imagery in “The Prophet” prompted associations not only with the Old Testament prophets as possessors of moral authority and bulwarks against monarchical excess, but also with Christ in the New Testament—the Messiah foretold by Isaiah who would, like Isaiah, face apathy, incomprehension, and persecution.18 “The Prophet” has thus always been interpreted both sociologically and eschatologically, as it would be by Khlebnikov too. During the mid-nineteenthcentury dominance of critical realism, when writers were expected to be arbiters of ethical and political probity, it was the former interpretation that prevailed.19 For instance, Nekrasov, the champion of the notion of the poet as a socially involved citizen, produced an iteration of the myth in “The Prophet” (1874) that conferred the status of prophet on the exiled radical critic Chernyshevskii. Nekrasov, who partakes fully in the prevailing martyrdom complex of Russian radicalism in the period, foregrounds Christological elements of the poet-prophet myth not pres­ ent in Pushkin’s poem, putting new emphasis on the prophet’s persecution and self-sacrifice and on the promise of deliverance, which is political, not eschatological, in nature.20 Nekrasov’s emphasis on the prophet’s rejection itself builds on Lermontov’s integration of the Romantic theme of the poet’s alienation from the crowd into his iteration of the myth, “The Prophet” (1841), in which the benevolent poet-prophet is pelted with stones. Lermontov’s poem was also an important source for another notable version of the myth, So­lov’ev’s “Prophet of the Future” (1884), which the philosopher-poet himself described as a deliberate fusion and continuation of Pushkin and Lermontov—a synthetic approach

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that anticipates Khlebnikov’s presentation of Pushkin in his wider intertextual context.21 The most important restatement of the poet-prophet myth came not from a poet, however, but from Dostoevskii, in his speech at the opening of the Pushkin monument in 1880, which he concluded by reading “The Prophet.” Dostoevskii infers a self-identification with the prophet on Pushkin’s part and uses it to promote the notion that the poet was most important to Russia not as a symbol of its past or present, but as a sign of its bright future: “Pushkin is an extraordinary and, perhaps, unique manifestation of the Russian spirit,” said Gogol’. I will add myself: he is a prophetic one too. Indeed, for all us Russians there is something undoubtedly prophetic in his coming. Pushkin came just as we were starting to be properly conscious of ourselves, a self-consciousness that had barely begun and that took root in our society after the whole century following the reforms of Peter the Great, and his appearance helped to shine so much guiding light on our dark path. It is in this sense that Pushkin is prophetic and revelatory.22

Jonathan Brooks Platt has argued that Dostoevskii’s speech marks the “ripening of a countertradition in the reception of Pushkin, one fundamentally opposed to the chronotopic structures underlying the formation of national literary canons.”23 With this speech, Platt suggests, Dostoevskii stands at the head of the modernist tendency to overlook Pushkin’s significance as a figure constitutive of national unity in favor of an emphasis on his ability to transcend time. Accordingly, Dostoev­ skii’s conception of Pushkin-the-prophet can be said to anticipate Khlebnikov in three ways: he seeks to understand Pushkin in the context of the longue durée of history; he makes explicit the connection between the poet-prophet and the fate of Russia and the world; he looks to realize the metaphor of the poet’s identification with the prophet. For both Dostoevskii and Khlebnikov, the sociological function of the poetprophet as a source of authority derives from his eschatological function as the herald of the future. Just as Kruchenykh mocked Dostoevskii’s notion of “Pushkin’s secret,” so Khlebnikov’s emphasis on his self-conscious assumption of the mantle of the prophet marks a significant divergence from Dos­ toevskii’s essentialist and mystical rhetoric, in line with the Futurists’ insistence on historicizing Pushkin. Dostoevskii’s Pushkin seems to

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exist prior to consciousness: “Pushkin was always a complete whole [. . .] the beyond only awakened in him that which was already in the depths of his soul.”24 Khlebnikov contrasts his own sort of prophecy to the kind that Dostoevskii imputes to Pushkin: rather than an innate, preconscious destiny, he presents his own prophethood as a rational response to a cruel and irrational world. He wants to know the future, rather than be the future, and so he is avowedly interested not just in eschatology but in epistemology too—not just the “why” but also the “how” of prophecy.25

The Rational Prophet In his early poetry Khlebnikov tries to show that the style of prophecy of his predecessors, and especially Pushkin, is precisely that—a style, without substance. Khlebnikov differentiates his prophetic activity from the accretion of stereotypes surrounding the Pushkinian prophet myth by contrasting the revelatory mysticism of “The Prophet” with his own rational approach to the rule-bound interrelation of past, present, and future. As in the Futurist manifestos of the same period, we see that the earlier part of Khlebnikov’s career combines both antagonistic and recuperative attitudes to Pushkin but gives more prominence to the former. Also typically Futurist here is Khlebnikov’s ambivalent relationship to previously predominant modes of poetic prophecy: although his interest in numerology has precedents among the Symbolists, he distances himself from their rhetoric of lofty inspiration.26 Most influential, however, on Khlebnikov’s presentation of his prognostications is contemporary science. In 1919’s Our Foundation he contrasts his empirical prophecy with the old revelatory model by making reference to the latest developments in this arena: This data shows the superficiality of the concept of state and peoples. Exact laws cut through states freely and they are not noticed, like X-rays go through the muscles and give the imprint of the bones: they separate humanity from the scraps of the state and give another fabric—the starry sky. In addition to this they give a prediction of the future, not with foam on the lips, like the prophets of old, but with the help of cold mental calculation. Now, thanks to the discovery of the waves of the ray of birth, one can say without joking that in some or other year a certain person will be born, let’s say, “someone” with a fate, similar to the fate of someone born 365 years before him. In

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this way our attitude to death changes: we stand at the threshold of a world in which we will know the day and hour when we will be born again and look at death as a temporary swim in the waves of non-being. (6:1:179)

Khlebnikov’s ability to calculate future events is reliant on his conception of human history as a wave, like the recently discovered X-rays. Consequently, it is possible “to point to the regularity of fate and give it the mental outline of a beam and measure it in time and space” (6:2:178). Khlebnikov derives his model from patterns discerned in his data—the taxonomic tables of historical dates that he has carefully collated. This process of collecting data and inferring patterns is of a piece not only with Khlebnikov’s similar efforts in the study of language, a field in which he was both a theoretician and a practitioner, but also with his conception of poetry. Just as August Strindberg described Carl Linnaeus as a poet because he was “a man who had fantasy, which is the capacity to combine phenomena, see contexts, arrange, and sort out,” so Khlebnikov likened himself to Copernicus and Dmitrii Mendeleev because he saw himself as sharing their talent for proposing paradigmshifting interpretative models (5:140).27 Khlebnikov’s model could then be used to avoid catastrophe, by treating history as possessing a certain rhythm, like a poem. In verses written in the year of his death, as Russia experienced its eighth year of almost uninterrupted war, Khlebnikov drew a parallel between the long-standing process of reforming the Russian alphabet to increase efficiency by discontinuing obsolete letters— a reform that had begun with Peter the Great and been taken up again in 1918—and his own attempts to forestall predetermined historical disasters: Если я обращу человечество в часы И покажу, как стрелка столетия движется, Неужели из нашей времен полосы Не вылетит война, как ненужная ижица? (2:363) [If I turn mankind into clockwork | And show how the centuryhand moves | Surely from our column of times | War will drop out like the unneeded letter izhitsa?28]

Human control over language is based on awareness of its hidden structures; this control becomes a metaphor for mastery over the universe in general. Just as the poet marshals the infinite possibility of

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language into set forms, revealing the inherent connection between seemingly disparate words, so Khlebnikov the mathematical prophet makes the chaos of history fit into a pattern, uncovering the rhymes and alliteration between people and events. In 1910, early in his career, Khlebnikov promoted the analogy between cosmos and text: “Я не знаю, Земля кружится или нет, | Это зависит, уложится ли в строчку слово” (1:206) (I do not know, whether the world turns or not, | It depends if the word fits into the line). In the same poem Khlebnikov expresses his attempts to uncover harmonies in terms of being attuned to the fluctuations of the universe: “Но я знаю, что я хочу кипеть и хочу, чтобы солнце | И жилу моей руки соединила общая дрожь” (1:206) (But I know that I want to come to the boil and I want the sun | And the vein of my arm to be united by a single trembling).29 While Khlebnikov’s scientism is underpinned by a quasi-Romantic longing for the ego’s dissolution into the universe, the poet’s function is still to provide structure (the vibration of the universe, like the wave, is another way of expressing iteration). He again suggests parallels between the laws of the universe and versification in “People, When They Love” (1911), which ends with an unexpected reference to Pushkin: Боги, когда они любят, Замыкающие в меру трепет вселенной, Как Пушкин — жар любви горничной Волконского. (1:243) [Gods, when they love | Confining in measure the trembling of the universe, | Like Pushkin did with the heat of love for Volkonskii’s maid.]

Gods in love confine the trembling of the universe into some measured, regular form; Pushkin brings order to the confusion of his feelings by confining his erotic desires in verse form.30 Pushkin seems to share, to some extent, Khlebnikov’s ability to create order from chaos as a poet, but, Khlebnikov later suggests, he is insufficiently rational and too reliant on revelation. In “Numbers” (1913), Khlebnikov explains that his own intensive study of numbers gives him special insight: Я всматриваюсь в вас, о, числа, И вы мне видитесь одетыми в звери, в их шкурах, Рукой опирающимися на вырванные дубы.

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Вы даруете единство между змееобразным движением Хребта вселенной и пляской коромысла, Вы позволяете понимать века, как быстрого хохота зубы. Мои сейчас вещеобразно разверзлися зеницы Узнать, что будет Я, когда делимое его — единица. (1:239) [I look closely at you, o numbers, | And you seem to me to be dressed as beasts, in their skins, | Propped up on your arm on torn-out oaks. | You give the unity between the snake-like movement | Of the ridge of the universe and the dance of the dragonfly, | You let me understand the centuries as the teeth of quick laughter. | My eyes have now opened up in a thing-like way | To realize what “I” is to be when its numerator is a single unit.]

Khlebnikov makes a clear reference to the moment in “The Prophet” when Pushkin describes the new sight gifted by the seraph: И шестикрылый серафим На перепутье мне явился. Перстами легкими как сон Моих зениц коснулся он. Отверзлись вещие зеницы, Как у испуганной орлицы.31 [And a six-winged seraph | Appeared to me at a crossroads. | With lips light as a dream | He touched my eyelids. | My prophetic eyes opened, | Like the eyes of a frightened eaglet.]

In “Numbers” Khlebnikov again activates the parallel between the prophet, who finds patterns in time, and the poet, who finds patterns in language. Like many of Khlebnikov’s poems, it employs puns to point to these hidden connections: the unusual word veshcheobrazno (in a thing-like manner) is intended as a reminiscence of Pushkin’s veshchie (prophetic).32 The pun illuminates intertextual links across time, but it is also used to show both the superiority of Khlebnikov’s more considered prophetic methodology and how he, as a new and improved poet-prophet, is still also shaped by his specific historical context. By using the word veshcheobrazno, Khlebnikov suggests that he can perceive the supposedly inaccessible Kantian thing-in-itself: veshcheobrazno is the Russian translation of the German Dingliche (thing-like)—a concept

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central to one of the most popular philosophical texts at the time of the poem’s composition, Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which was published in Russian in 1911.33 In contrast to the “thing presented in consciousness” (a “non-thing-like object”): the object that appears in experience is a thing-like object, and, qua thing, requires an infinite perception and intuition, for it always escapes or transcends the gaze of sensual perception. It is in this sense that this object is understood as an immanent transcendent object, the apprehension of which is, by default, always inadequate.34

Thus the suggestion that Khlebnikov’s eyes open in a “thing-like” way when looking at numbers is evidence of the way in which they provide for a level of perception that is impossible when examining ordinary objects. What is more, Khlebnikov understands his second sight in the latest philosophical terms, showing how Pushkin’s original motif can be updated and improved upon. Khlebnikov further contrasts his scientific prophetic project with a range of irrational values that he sees Pushkin as exemplifying. His poem “To You” (1909) consciously recalls familiar literary topoi associated with the Romantic sublime of the Russian empire’s southern edges. Like the hero of Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822) or Lermontov’s “A Dream” (1843), the “I” of Khlebnikov’s poem is inspired by the alien landscape to think of Russia: “Я путешествовал по Кавказу | И думал о далекой Волге” (I traveled through the Caucasus | And thought of the distant Volga) (1:202). Khlebnikov contrasts his rational response to this landscape of vertiginous mountain valleys to Pushkin’s awestruck fear on seeing a similar scene in Crimea, recounted in the unfinished poem “Tauris” (1822). Khlebnikov finds comfort in calculation: Конь, закинув резво шею, Скакал по легкой складке бездны. С ужасом, в борьбе невольной хорошея, Я думал, что заниматься числами над бездною полезно. Невольно числа я слагал, Как бы возвратясь ко дням творенья, И вычислял, когда последний галл Умрет, не получив удовлетворенья. (1:202)

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[The horse, throwing back his neck sharply, | Galloped along the fold of the abyss. | With horror, growing beautiful in unwitting struggle, | I thought that working with figures above the abyss is pointless. | Unwittingly I combined numbers, | As if returning to the days of creation | And calculated when the last Gaul | Would die, not having received satisfaction.]

In “Tauris” Pushkin considers the possibility of nothingness after death and compares the angst that this inspires with the fears felt by a traveler in the mountains: Так путник, с вышины внимая Ручьев альпийских вечный шум И взоры в бездну погружая, Невольным ужасом томим, Дрожит, колеблется: пред ним Предметы движутся, темнеют, В нем чувства хладные немеют, Кругом оплота ищет он, Всё мчится, меркнет, исчезает.35 [Like a wanderer, listening from the heights | To the eternal noise of alpine streams | And plunging his gaze into the abyss, | Wearied by unwitting terror, | Trembles, hesitates: before him | Objects move, grow dark | In him cool feelings go dumb | He looks around for support, | Everything rushes, goes dark, disappears.]

“To You” reprises the Romantic topos of the ravine, including precise details from Pushkin’s description such as the sound of the river below and the traveler’s unwittingly horror-filled response. The phrase “Невольным ужасом томим” (wearied by unwitting terror) brings to mind a metrically identical phrase in “The Prophet,” “Духовной жаждою томим” (wearied by spiritual thirst), serving as a link between Pushkin’s two travelers in unpopulated zones that might have prompted Khleb­ nikov’s focus on the nature of perception in Pushkin’s earlier poem. Khlebnikov is able to forestall thoughts of his own death by calculating the deaths of future generations, but Pushkin’s traveler becomes almost blinded by fear, which makes the world less clear rather than more so. In “Tauris,” Pushkin calms his fears of inevitable death with the consolation of the afterlife; Khlebnikov treats the inevitability of death, which

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terrifies Pushkin, as a consolation, since it demonstrates the mathematical logic underpinning the universe. Nevertheless, despite his advocacy for mathematical prognostication, Khlebnikov recognizes that, owing to the laws of recurrence in history, there may be other viable means of prophecy. One such route to prophecy is literature itself. Texts are not just a place to discuss prophecy but can, if read correctly, provide insight into the patterns that dictate the future. In a prose work, written in 1916, unpublished in Khleb­ ni­kov’s lifetime, and often referred to as “Ka2,” the protagonist wanders through Moscow, observing conscripts on their way to the front and reflecting on the city’s past, which seems to interpenetrate with the present. At one point he stops by the Pushkin monument, one of those places where the past shines through the veil of the present, converses with the poet’s statue, and warns him not to catch a cold. Just before this scene he visits the artist Aristarkh Lentulov and discusses his paintings of Moscow. The narrator sees in their depiction of twisting streets an echo of the curly beard of Kuchka, the nobleman who is said to have owned the land on which Moscow was founded. This historical parallel further suggests to him that the fate of the Futurists, who had spent the last few years dispersed by the war, was encoded in Ruslan and Liudmila: We chatted, gathering to weave together the air of the word for this big city. I thought that these curved streets were only the curls of the beard of the executed boyar Kuchka and that it was time for those who once gave the head-hill a wild slap to pull out the hidden sword. Sometimes it’s not bad to be a Pushkinist. Through the beautiful (Pushkin was, all the same, a bit of smoked glass) it is possible to see the future. By the way, I am not intending to be deceitful. Once again I went stubbornly, reading the orders of seconds, along the hairs of the boyar Kuchka. But long ago, because of his laughter (Pushkin’s head in Ruslan and Liudmila) we wandered from sea to sea, borne by the wind of breathing to the edge of the earth. (5:163)

Just as the streets realize Kuchka’s curly beard, so the blow that the princely hero Ruslan gives to the fantastical giant head in Pushkin’s mock epic is presented as the prototype of the Futurists’ own “Slap in the Face of Public Taste.”36 The Pushkinian narrative thus also suggests what the Futurists’ next steps should be: it is time for them to find their

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own hidden weapons to fight the enemy, just as in Pushkin’s poem Ruslan pulls out a sword to defeat the evil Chernomor. This seems to be a call to action for the Futurists to enter another heroic phase of activity. Both Khlebnikov’s suggestion that being a Pushkinist can be acceptable and his reference to positive aspects of Pushkinian “beauty” are perhaps surprising: in addition to the Futurists’ antipathy to “Pushkin­ ism,” Khlebnikov polemicized against Pushkinian “beauty.” In “Reminiscences” (1915) he compared their attacks on Pushkin to the heroic actions of the Russian army during the First World War: “Вы помните, мы брали Перемышль | Пушкинианской красоты” (You recall, we took the Przemys´ł | Of Pushkinian beauty) (1:322). The edifice of Pushkinian aesthetics is compared to a heavily fortified town on the Eastern Front that was eventually taken with great losses in 1915. This generally negative appraisal of Pushkin is reflected in the ambivalent description of his work in “Ka2” as “smoked glass”: on the one hand, literature allows one to safely observe the bright future; on the other, it is a very limited viewing apparatus, far inferior to Khlebnikov’s more perspicacious calculations. In any case, the moment of prophetic insight is located not in the text—Pushkin is unaware of his prediction of the future—but in its exegete Khlebnikov. Being a Pushkinist is acceptable only when you possess the correct hermeneutic approach. Over time, however, Khlebnikov becomes less confident in the infallibility of his rational prophecy, perhaps as a result of his continued failures to convince a wider audience of their importance. In the short drama The Storming of the Universe (1921) Khlebnikov not only presents his most unequivocal expression of the mathematical means and soteriological ends of his prophecy, but also blurs the distinction between the rational prophet and his more ecstatic predecessors.37 This play depicts an assault on heaven made to rescue Russia, which, in the form of a beetle, is in danger of being crushed by an absentminded girl. Perhaps because of the emphasis on the nation’s destiny, direct engagement with Pushkin’s “The Prophet” is more evident here. Khlebnikov again inserts scientific language into the metaphoric template of Pushkin’s poem to show how far he diverges from its revelatory model of prophecy: Мой разум, точный до одной энной, Как уголь сердца, я вложил в мертвого пророка вселенной, [Стал] дыханием груди вселенной. И понял вдруг: нет времени. На крыльях поднят как орел, я видел сразу, что было и что будет,

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Пружины троек видел я и двоек В железном чучеле миров, Упругий говор чисел. И стало ясно мне, Что будет позже. (4:77) [My reason, sharpened to a single nth | Like the coal of a heart, I placed in the dead prophet of the universe, | [Became] the breathing of the chest of the universe. | And I understood suddenly: there is no time. | Raised up on wings like an eagle, I saw at once, what was and what will be, | I saw the springs of threes and twos | In the iron dummy of worlds, | The elastic speech of numbers. | And it became clear to me, | What will happen later.]

This speech is given by “the Son,” a dynamic character who eventually saves Russia and can be read as representing Khlebnikov, given that he also uses powers of two and three to calculate the future.38 The Son’s ability to calculate the immanent connections between events allows him to see outside the paradigm of linear, deterministic time, providing a hint of the desired utopian state outside of history. Accordingly, his rhetoric echoes the book of Revelation, alluding to the angel’s pronouncement that “there should be time no longer” (Revelation 10:7). The character identified with Khlebnikov is again less passive than the traditional prophet: he takes on the role of the seraph in Pushkin’s poem by actively placing reason, the substitute for the burning coal, into the dead prophet of the universe. The cosmos is itself prophetic, if it is submitted to rational interpretation. However, the confidence of this statement is soon undermined by the ecstasy into which the Son falls: “И вдруг застонал, увидев молнии и подымая руку, | И пена пошла из уст, и [молнии] растерзали меня” (4:77) (And I suddenly groaned, seeing the lighting and raising my hand, | And foam started coming out my lips and [the lightning] tore me apart). The Son’s foaming lips recall the outmoded version of prophecy described in Our Foundation. Despite his mathematical approach to divination, the Son is not protected from either ecstatic reactions or the punishments of heaven. The scientific perspicacity of the Son is futile, prompting a questioning of the communicative powers of the poetprophet that will recur in Khlebnikov’s later poems and in particular “The Lonely Player” (1921).

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“The Lonely Player” The Storming of the Universe can be seen as a transitional piece between the triumphant heroism of the epic The Children of the Otter (1914) and the cycle of late poems in which Khlebnikov’s poetry becomes unprecedentedly personal as he laments the public’s failure to recognize the importance of his teachings about time.39 This sense of rejection is most memorably expressed in “Once again, once again . . .” (1922):

Горе и вам, взявшим Неверный угол сердца ко мне: Вы разобьетесь о камни, И камни будут надсмехаться Над вами, Как вы надсмехались Надо мной. (2:400) [Woe to you too, who have taken | The wrong angle of heart to me | You will be smashed on the rocks | And the rocks will laugh | At you | Like you have laughed | At me.]

We see here the increasing importance to Khlebnikov of his relationship with his audience: sociological concerns outweigh epistemological ones and communication becomes more important than cognition. Nonetheless, the question of the interaction of the poet and the masses was crucial to Khlebnikov throughout his career. Raymond Cooke describes his identity as characterized by extremes and by isolation: “Exalted or cursed, king or beggar, Khlebnikov’s poetic persona is separated from the crowd which surrounds it.”40 The poet-prophet myth shares this ambivalent relationship with the masses: the prophet stands apart from the people, but he also exists for them, even when they reject him. Khlebnikov’s most powerful interrogation of his relationship with both the people and his identity as a prophet is “The Lonely Player,” which was written during or shortly after his return from the Caucasus in 1921, following a sojourn in northern Iran with the Red Army. Khlebnikov turns his attention to the heroic personae that inhabited his earlier poetry, including that of the prophet, and integrates them with the self-reflexivity and concerns about reception that typify his later work.

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Like the poems analyzed above, “The Lonely Player” deliberately places itself in the context of Pushkin’s prophet myth with a very obvious reference to “The Prophet,” so that Khlebnikov’s interrogation of his own prophet myth extends to a meditation on the mythology of the poet-prophet as a whole and, by extension, the relationship between history and poetry. I quote it here in full: И пока над Царским Селом Лилось пенье и слезы Ахматовой, Я, моток волшебницы разматывая, Как сонный труп влачился по пустыне, Где умирала невозможность, Усталый лицедей, Шагая напролом. А между тем курчавое чело Подземного быка в пещерах темных Кроваво чавкало и кушало людей В дыму угроз нескромных. И волей месяца окутан, Как в сонный плащ вечерний странник Во сне над пропастями прыгал И шел с утеса на утес. Слепой я шел, пока Меня свободы ветер двигал И бил косым дождем. И бычью голову я снял с могучих мяс и кости И у стены поставил. Как воин истины я ею потрясал над миром: Смотрите, вот она! Вот то курчавое чело, которому пылали раньше толпы! И с ужасом Я понял, что я никем не видим, Что нужно сеять очи, Что должен сеятель очей идти! (2:255) [And while above Tsarskoe Selo | The singing and the tears of Akhmatova poured out, | I, unwinding the sorceress’s skein, | Dragged myself like a sleepy corpse through the desert | Where impossibility was dying, | A tired player, | Striding forward unhindered. | And meanwhile the curly forehead | Of the

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underground bull in dark caves | Bloodily munched and ate people | In the smoke of immodest threats. | And shrouded by the will of the moon, | As in a cloak of sleep the evening wanderer | In sleep I leaped above the chasms | And went from clifftop to clifftop. | Blind I went, while | The wind of freedom moved me | And beat me with slanting rain. | And I took the bull’s head from the mighty meats and bone | And placed it by the wall. | Like a warrior of truth, I shook it above the world: | Look, here it is! | Here is the curly forehead, which the crowds used to burn for! | And with horror, I realized that I was seen by no one, | That I need to sow eyes, | That I should go as a sower of eyes!]

The story described in the poem is clear enough: a solitary actor (a litsedei, literally “a maker of faces”) wanders through the wilderness until he finds a monstrous man-eating bull, which he kills; he is disappointed, however, that no one witnesses this act and therefore resolves to become a “sower of eyes.” On this simple framework an intricate superstructure of metaphor and allusion is constructed, which fluctuates between the obscure and the insistently obvious: the central mythological strand of Theseus and the Minotaur is complicated with references to the grieving Akhmatova, Pushkin, the Bible, and other Greek myths, as well as discourses of anti-imperialist politics and theatrical identity. Of the various prisms for poetic identity at play here, one of the most important is clearly Pushkin’s poet-prophet. The fourth line, “Как сонный труп влачился по пустыне” (I dragged myself like a sleepy corpse through the desert), instantly recalls two lines from “The Prophet”: “В пустыне мрачной я влачился” (In the gloomy desert I dragged myself ) and “Как труп в пустыне я лежал” (I lay like a corpse in the desert). While some of the allusions in “The Lonely Player” qualify almost as cryptograms, seemingly designed to baffle the reader into a prolonged engagement with the text, this is more like an epigraph, an undisguised quotation intended to locate the poem within a certain tradition. Along with the explicit reference to Khlebnikov’s contemporary Akhmatova, the invocation of “The Prophet” both overshadows more subtle allusions and provides the context necessary for the existence of these other references to become apparent. The node of corpse/ dragging/desert serves as the point of contact between the semantic worlds of “The Lonely Player” and “The Prophet” and, more broadly, Khlebnikov’s poetic universe and Pushkin’s. The clearly enunciated

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convergence of the two in this image necessitates an engagement not only with the immediate object of the allusion, but with an entire constellation of Pushkinian texts and intertexts. It is important to be sensitive to intertextuality when reading this poem in particular because here the division between “plot” and metaphorical overlay, which is blurred in all poetry, is maximally unclear: metaphors and allusions inform action and vice versa. One important example of this interaction is the possibility, suggested by a number of readers, that the climax of the poem, the killing of the bull, is a metaphor for the Futurists’ symbolic murder of Pushkin.41 In addition to the poem’s saturation with Pushkin references and the Futurists’ history of metaphorical violence toward him, the identification of the bull with Pushkin is supported by the fact that Khlebnikov twice draws attention to the bull’s curly head, recalling Pushkin’s famous curls.42 In “Ka2,” which displays strong thematic and semantic affinities with “The Lonely Player,” Khlebnikov’s description of the Pushkin monument emphasizes his hair: “More than once I had walked past that black, curly, iron gentleman with his hat in his hand” (5:164). Furthermore, as the manifestos attest, the Futurists often treated Pushkin as a metonym for the past in general.43 This connection has prompted some to treat the bull as a symbol of the burden of the past and the killing of the bull as a metaphor for the Futurists’ break with tradition.44 This argument is supported by Khlebnikov’s essay “The Futurian” (1914) in which he describes the Futurist triumph over the established literary order as a bullfight: O, bull of Aragon! In 1913 we called a beautifully colored bull out onto the sand; in 1915 his knees will shake as he falls to that same sand. And a great string of saliva (praise be to the victor) will flow from the shaking animal. [. . .] Goodbye, all you Mr. Bulls! The bullfighter raises his hat and leaves. It is only we who have discovered that twentieth-century man, dragging a thousand-year-old corpse (the past), is bent over like an ant dragging a beam. Only we have returned man his full height, having discarded the bundle of the past (the Tolstois, Homers, and Pushkins). (6:226)

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The connection between this essay and “The Lonely Player” is reinforced by the invocation of the dragging of a corpse, which alludes to “The Prophet.” Khlebnikov ironically uses a hackneyed literary reference to articulate contemporary man’s struggles under the burden of hackneyed literary references. Khlebnikov has seemingly found a new setting for the Bloomian agon between poets, restaging it as a corrida; the poetic equivalent of the Freudian Oedipus complex is shifted across the Greek myth cycle from Thebes to Crete, with Laius being replaced by the Minotaur. Nevertheless, the idea that the bull is a representative of the literary past does not explain why this Minotaur lives underground and devours innocent people. Cooke notes that an original draft of the poem specifically identified war as the means by which the bull consumed people.45 For this and other reasons, other critics have proposed that bull actually represents a connection between Pushkin and the horrors of war.46 The alleged link between Pushkin and the bull is not entirely convincing: when Khlebnikov discusses Pushkin in relation to war elsewhere—most often by noting the similarity between Pushkin’s name and the word for cannons ( pushki)—he does so not to suggest an unambiguous connection between the national poet and warmongering, but rather to lament Pushkin’s appropriation by oppressive forces or to observe how modern warfare has made him seem obsolete.47 To propose an affinity between Pushkin and the monstrous bull is not, therefore, invalid, but it does misinterpret the significance of Khleb­ nikov’s allusion to “The Prophet”: Khlebnikov is interested in Pushkin, no doubt, but he is more interested in prophecy. He often referred to his struggle to understand the hidden laws of time using heroic tropes and particularly the idea of a climactic battle with a monster. In 1916, while writing “Ka2,” Khlebnikov prepared a talk, never given, entitled “Iron Wings,” in which he was to discuss the use of his theories of time as a means to prevent war.48 One of the points advertised on the poster for the talk was: “The Future of Futurism as the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.” Likewise, in a letter to his sister Vera from Baku, dated 2 January 1921, Khlebnikov described his forthcoming year of calculation in similarly heroic terms: It is time to break the spell of the serpent; there will be the hissing of the serpent kingdom. This year will be the year of the great final battle against the serpent.

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Everything that is in my mind—black windows, the breath of the panting firewood as it hurries to become cinders—all this I am raising for my Victory over the serpent. Over this time I forged a spear for my fight against him—it is predicting the future: I have the equations of the stars, the equations of the voice, the equations of the mind, equations of birth and death. [. . .] I have titled the presentation The Quran of Numbers. (6:2:200)

Just as in “The Lonely Player,” Khlebnikov fuses the prophetic pretensions of the Russian poet, and particularly the trope of the poet as Quranic prophet, which entered Russian literature in Pushkin’s “Imitations of the Quran” (1824), with the heroic imagery of St. George’s defeat of the dragon. At the time of writing, Khlebnikov had armed himself properly by figuring out the patterns of history, but he had not yet defeated the beast, which furthers recalls not only the monsters of Russian folklore but also the “great dragon” of Revelation that is defeated by Michael and the other angels. The snake thus signals the chiliastic importance of Khlebnikov’s task. It also symbolizes the structure of history itself, its sinuous coils standing in for the wavelike form of time, much like the “snake-like movement of the ridge of the universe” in “Numbers.” This snake seems to lurk behind the bull of “The Lonely Player” and underlies the new associations with the Minotaur and the corrida. Indeed, there is something serpentine about the bull’s curly head that tallies with Khlebnikov’s description, in an essay on the laws of time, of the extinction of the dinosaurs and their replacement by men: “In that time the kingdoms of slippery serpents, covered in flashing scales, were replaced by the kingdoms of naked men in the soft covering of skin. Only the curls of the head, like the wind of the centuries that have descended, remind us about the past” (6:2:21).49 Curly hair is a reminder of the sinuous serpents and, therefore, of the waveform of history; we remember that the curls of Kuchka’s beard in “Ka2” also persisted through time and symbolized repeating historical patterns. In addition to Khlebnikov’s enduring fascination with the Minotaur myth, the choice of a bull as the symbol of his utopian intervention into deterministic time was likely inspired by his time in Iran, where he wrote a longer poem about spectatorship and bull-killing, “The Trumpet of Gull’-Mullah” (1921), and reinvigorated his long-standing interest in Zoroastrian religious lore.50 In Zoroastrian belief bull sacrifices are held to reenact the slaughter of the Primal Bull, the first creature created by

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the deity Ohrmazd, at the hands of Ahriman, the force of evil—an act that produced all the plant life on the earth.51 More importantly, one of the key moments in Zoroastrian eschatology, which Khlebnikov would have been familiar with from the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, was the ritual immolation of the bull Hadhayans by the redeemerhero Saoshyant, the third in a succession of saviors, carried out in order to bring an end to evil and usher in a permanent state of immortality, unity, and the absence of evil, called Frashokereti. The similarity of this scenario to Khlebnikov’s own utopian worldview (including not only the notion of recurring types, but also the existence of a single universal language) was obvious and in a poem written in 1920 Khlebnikov compared himself to Ushedar-Mar, who prefigures Saoshyant: “Я Гушедармах, пророк | Века сего и несу в руке | Фрашокерети (мир будущего)” (I am Ushedar-Mar, the prophet of this Age | and I bear in my hand Frashokereti (the world of the future)) (2:132).

Freedom Abroad, Freedom at Home While the defeat of the bull represents the summit of the poet’s millenarian ambitions for mankind, we should not overlook the more specific political readings also suggested by the poem’s Pushkinian intertexts. Khlebnikov here treats the two functions of the poet-prophet, eschatological and sociological, as almost indistinguishable. He felt this association particularly keenly in the febrile years after the revolution in which he, like many others, believed that rapid political change was the precursor to a fundamentally new state of being for humanity, or at least a substantially freer world. In “Loneliness” he described the end of autocracy in Russia as “a sort of breakthrough into the worlds of the future” (6:2:41). He particularly eagerly anticipated a bright future for the countries of Transcaucasia, which seemed poised to shake off the shackles of imperialism. Khlebnikov, who was born among Buddhists near Astrakhan and went to university in the Muslim city of Kazan, had always maintained a strong sympathy for the cultures of “the East,” but his interest in anti-imperialism in Asia became especially acute after his journeys in the Caucasus and Iran in 1921, a time when this region was the subject of a power struggle between Britain and the Bolsheviks. Khlebnikov was present at the Congress of Nations organized by the Comintern in Baku in order to combat British intrigues; he then joined the Red Army on a mission intended to bring freedom to Iran. The poem about Frashokereti quoted above ends with the line: “ Персия

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будет советской страной. | Так говорит пророк!” (Persia will be a Soviet country. | So speaks the prophet) (2:133).52 Khlebnikov did not consider himself just a spectator in this struggle: one of the most frequent subjects of his prognostications was the fall of empires and he believed that his knowledge of the laws of time would free mankind from the state as a whole because, without war, “there will be nothing for states to do” (6:2:42–43). In a note written between 1911 and 1913 Khlebnikov says: “I will perform a miracle: at my beck (not against fate) the state will fall” (6:2:80). The intertexts of “The Lonely Player” reveal the crucial role that Pushkinian mythology played in Khlebnikov’s understanding of his roles as a prophet of anti-tyrannical liberation and as a spokesperson for the oppressed peoples of the Orient. In his essay “Pushkin and the Pure Laws of Time” Khlebnikov argues that Pushkin fluctuated between two poles: the positive, typified by The Gypsies, was connected to the East and promulgated freedom from the tyranny of the state; the negative, typified by Poltava, was drawn to the West and glorified government.53 Furthermore, as his analysis of Pushkin’s work in “Chaucer and Me” suggests, Khlebnikov considered England to be the quintessential Western imperial power, one with too much influence on both Pushkin and the internal politics of Transcaucasia (6:2:69). Pushkin, liberty, and the orient are also closely connected with the theme of prophecy. Khlebnikov reads the anarchic state of nature of the eponymous heroes of The Gypsies as presaging the freedom from government that the East will eventually secure: On 10 December 1824 Pushkin finished The Gypsies. In this piece inspiration sacrificially smoked before the human individual alien to the laws of state and society. And by the fire, proclaiming the death of the state and the emancipation of the individual from it, stood Pushkin himself like a seer. (6:2:64)

Accordingly, in “The Lonely Player” Khlebnikov reads Pushkin’s poetprophet myth through the prism of resistance to tyranny. The protagonist is motivated by the quest for “freedom,” even when he cannot see: “Слепой я шел, пока | Меня свободы ветер двигал” (Blind I went, while | The wind of freedom moved me). In a draft Khlebnikov wrote here not “freedom” but “birth” (2:471), which must surely be a reference to his calculation of the coincidences between birth dates and their effect on a person’s fate. The coexistence of these two variants is

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revealing: the protagonist is driven both by his fate—a product of the deterministic nature of history—and by his desire to end this determinism and thus spread freedom. Khlebnikov understands the anti-imperial context of the poetprophet in relation to the repetitive patterns of history, which affects his choice and handling of intertexts. He treats the anti-tyrannical mission of the poet-prophet as a universal anti-imperialist principle of which he is the latest realization and thus presupposes an inner connection between all previous incarnations of this principle, intermingling texts and myths associated with different poets. In the first instance, “The Prophet” is treated as part of an overarching poetic mythology expressed in a number of Pushkinian texts that touch on discourses anti-imperialism, prophecy, and the crowd, in particular “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” (1823), “Imitations of the Quran” (1824), “André Chénier” (1825), “The Poet and the Mob” (1828), and “The Wanderer” (1835). Of these, “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” is alone in openly engaging with the politics of liberation, and then only to dismiss it. Nevertheless, the way in which Khlebnikov blends elements of these poems in “The Lonely Player” suggests that he perceives them as a cycle.54 What is more, Pushkin’s prophet, ostentatiously invoked early in the poem, is assimilated to other prophets and poet-prophets, like Isaiah, Jesus Christ, and certain of the Decembrists. Khlebnikov locates this cycle within a broader coalition of antiimperialist sentiment, signaling the fact that Pushkin is not the transcendental origin of these motifs, but a historical product of his times and of long-established traditions. For instance, Pushkin’s use of the imagery of Old Testament prophets in “The Prophet” draws on the Decembrist practice of using the Bible as a sourcebook for anti-imperialist rhetoric. Poets such as Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker foregrounded a reading of the Bible as a vade mecum for freedom fighters and saw Jesus Christ as a proto-democrat.55 The Decembrist poets’ use of biblical themes and archaic language with Church Slavonic elements was in part an attempt to mimic and subvert the style of imperial odes in order to undermine their endorsement of the power of the monarch, but it also drew vigor from the fact that the imagery of the Hebrew prophets could readily be adapted to hymns to freedom from imperialism.56 Pushkin draws explicitly on Kiukhel’beker’s “Prophecy” (1822), which was inspired by the struggle for an independent Greece and which was sent to Pushkin while he was in exile in Kishinev in 1822 by Anton Del’vig.57 In addition to the similar titles, Pushkin’s “The Prophet” echoes Kiukhel’beker’s

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poem in the phrasing of the command given to the prophet to stand: Pushkin’s “Восстань, пророк” (Arise, prophet) recalls Kiukhel’beker’s “Восстань, певец, пророк Свободы!” (Arise, singer, the prophet of Freedom!). Likewise, the figure of the “walking corpse,” also used by Khlebnikov, originates with the Decembrist poet: Kiukhel’beker’s line “Ты дни влачишь в мертвящем сне” (You drag out your days in deadening sleep) seems to inform Pushkin’s “В пустыне мрачной я влачился” (In the dark desert I dragged myself).58 Khlebnikov’s version of this image—“Как сонный труп влачился по пустыне” (I dragged myself like a sleepy corpse through the desert)— fuses numerous elements of the “walking corpse” motif from various poets, including: Kiukhel’beker’s deadly dream, which is absent from Pushkin; Pushkin’s specific verb form (vlachilsia); and elements of a later line from “The Prophet”—“Как труп в пустыне я лежал” (Like a corpse in the desert I lay); as well, perhaps, as parts of Lermontov’s “A Dream,” which describes a near-dead figure dreaming in a valley in the Caucasus.59 Although the motif of the “walking corpse” came to be used as an expression of Russia’s imperial ambitions, here Khlebnikov understands it and its Old Testament connections as part of an antiimperial discourse.60 For Kiukhel’beker in “Prophecy,” the object of his ire is the imperial machinations of Britain, which he describes, in the language of the Old Testament, as motivated by an idolatrous love of gold, and which he prophesies will be brought to an end by the hosts of heaven.61 The concentration here on the decline of empires and freedom from tyranny corresponds to the biblical source of Pushkin’s “The Prophet,” the book of Isaiah, which has always been popular among oppressed peoples for its foretelling of the fall of Babylon and the emancipation of the exiled Israelites. Very often Russian writers have used commentary on tyranny abroad as a vehicle for discussion of the curtailment of freedom within Russia and it is reasonable to include Kiukhel’beker’s “Prophecy” in this company. Pushkin’s “The Prophet” has also been read as an appeal for domestic liberty, particularly thanks to an anecdote, widespread in the early twentieth century, which suggested that Pushkin wrote the poem for his exiled Decembrist friends and originally included a further verse that described the prophet confronting the tsar. Khlebnikov also connected freedom at home and freedom abroad, especially as the distinction between them was elided by the revolution, which purported to export freedoms won at home. In “The Lonely Player” Khlebnikov uses a subtle allusion to Pushkinian mythology to signal the role

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of the poet-prophet in bringing freedom. The opening of the poem describes the death of the poet Nikolai Gumilev at the hands of the Bolsheviks and the grieving of his ex-wife Akhmatova: И пока над Царским Селом Лилось пенье и слезы Ахматовой, Я, моток волшебницы разматывая, Как сонный труп влачился по пустыне. [And while above Tsarskoe Selo | The singing and the tears of Akhmatova poured out, | I, unwinding the sorceress’s skein, | Dragged myself like a sleepy corpse through the desert.]

Khlebnikov draws attention to Akhmatova’s poetic engagement with Tsarskoe Selo, the town outside St. Petersburg where she lived with Gumilev and where Pushkin went to school. Khlebnikov contrasts the private and nostalgic elements of the Pushkinian legacy favored by Akhmatova with his own championing of a more active and forwardlooking strand of Pushkinian mythology—the prophet. This distinction is made more striking by the shift in meter between the dolnik of the first two lines, which recalls Akhmatova’s poetry, and the subsequent iambic lines of varied length, the use of which alludes to “André Chénier,” which is also in this meter.62 The presence of such an allusion seems all the more likely when we see how the framing of the turn away from Akhmatova is modeled on the beginning of Pushkin’s poem: Меж тем, как изумленный мир На урну Байрона взирает, И хору европейских лир Близ Данте тень его внимает, Зовет меня другая тень, Давно без песен, без рыданий С кровавой плахи в дни страданий Сошедшая в могильну сень.63 [While the astounded world | Looks at Byron’s urn, | And his shade near Dante hears | A chorus of European lyres, | I am called by another shade, | Long since without songs, without weeping, | Having gone down into the shadow of the grave, | From a bloody scaffold in a time of sufferings.]

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Pushkin uses the mourning of one recently deceased poet, Byron, as a contrast to his own honoring of the long-dead French poet and constitutional monarchist Chénier. This has been interpreted as Pushkin’s way of announcing his own move away from the solipsism of his early Byronic phase in favor of a more committed type of poetry, one strong enough to make him a rival to royal power.64 Likewise, Khlebnikov uses the mourning of Gumilev, who was, like Chénier, executed by a revolutionary regime for his promonarchical views, as a contrast to his own selfless ambitions. Although Khlebnikov does not go on to discuss another poet, the parallel between the passages is clear: Akhmatova’s “songs and tears” are a reworking of the “songs” and “sobbing” that did not greet the death of Chénier. “André Chénier” was a crucial text for the development of the Pushkinian myth of the active, anti-tyrannical poet-prophet.65 In this poem, written before the failure of the Decembrist Uprising, Chénier proclaims the importance of liberty: “Но лира юного певца | О чем поет? Поет она свободу: | Не изменилась до конца!” (But the lyre of the young singer | sings of what? It sings of freedom: | It was loyal till the end!).66 “The Prophet” may adopt a different tone, but it continues many themes and motifs from the earlier poem, including wandering thirsty in the desert. The line “Как будто Вакхом разъяренный, | Он бродит, жаждою томим” (As if maddened by Bacchus, [The people] wander, wearied by thirst) anticipates the opening description of the protagonist of “The Prophet”: “Духовною жаждою томим, | В пустыне мрачной я влачился” (Wearied by spiritual thirst, I dragged myself in the dark desert). Furthermore, “André Chénier” features a similar model of knowledge of the future to that in Kiukhel’beker’s “Prophecy”: in both the poet predicts the downfall of a tyrant, whose victory will only be temporary—a defiant doomsaying that is far removed from Khlebni­ kov’s precise calculations of future events but that does coincide with his interest in freedom. In reading “André Chénier” and “The Prophet” as evidence that Pushkin’s poet-prophet is an opponent of tyranny, Khlebnikov echoes Pushkin’s own presentation of these poems in correspondence with friends. After Alexander I’s death in 1825, Pushkin wrote to Petr Pletnev with the ironic suggestion that “André Chénier” had predicted his demise: “Dear heart! I am a prophet, good God a prophet! I order that ‘André Chénier’ be printed in church type in the name of the Father and Son, etc.”67 Pushkin, with his tongue in his cheek, anticipates Khlebnikov’s realization of the metaphor of the prophet and suggests

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that the very act of his prophecy brings about liberation, transforming prophecy itself into a heroic act—prediction is tantamount to action.

The Frustrated Prophet Pushkin’s ironic self-promotion as a genuine prognosticator shows that he was well aware of the way in which “André Chénier” would be read as a comment on the political situation in Russia and his own treatment at the hands of the tsar, who had refused his request to be allowed to travel abroad.68 Although in this case the so-called tyrant died before the poet, figures like Chénier, whose prophetic powers seem intimately connected with their imminent martyrdom, reinforced the implicit connection between prophecy and persecution. The primary source for this tradition is the Bible, in the frequently harsh reception of the Old Testament prophets and in the people’s rejection of Jesus, summed up in the aphoristic line that “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country” (Mark 6:4 KJV). This association is not confined to the Christian tradition, however: when Pushkin was banished from Odessa to his Mikhailovskoe estate in 1824, he wrote a letter to his friend, the poet Petr Viazemskii, in which he likened his expulsion to “the flight from Mecca to Medina” of the Prophet Muhammad, and the poems he took with him to the Quran.69 Khlebnikov found that this aspect of Pushkin’s myth of the poetprophet corresponded to his own situation on his return from Iran, when his exposition of the laws of time was met with indifference. In “The Lonely Player” the killing of the bull is ineffectual because it is ignored, prompting the player to become a sower of eyes. In addition to alluding to Greek heroes Jason and Cadmus, who sowed teeth that grew into skeletal soldiers, Khlebnikov recalls “The Desolate Sower of Freedom,” in which Pushkin uses the metaphor of seeds that have not germinated to describe the failure of his attempts to spread freedom. Pushkin recants his efforts to disseminate liberal values through poems such as “Liberty” (1817) and offers a vicious indictment of the unthinking masses who have failed to heed his message, describing them as cattle that should be whipped. Pushkin took much of his imagery for the poem from the New Testament parable of the sower, as is openly announced in the epigraph, a slightly adapted version of Luke 8:5, “A sower went out to sow his seed.”70 In this well-known story, which is also told in Mark 4 and Matthew 13, Jesus tells a crowd that seeds sown on the path will be

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trampled and eaten by birds; those that are sown on rocky ground will grow but then wither; only those that fall on fertile ground will prosper. The disciples, like the rest of the assembled crowd, do not understand the meaning of this story and ask Jesus to interpret it for them. He tells them that the seed represents the Word of God and quotes Isaiah to explain his message, which he admits is not only confusing, but deliberately so: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.’ This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God” (Luke 8:10–12 NIV). Jesus speaks in parables precisely so that people will not understand. These parables may seem straightforward to us but in the gospel they are presented as nearly incomprehensible. Simpler messages run the risk of giving the mistaken impression of understanding. The text of Isaiah 6, which Jesus quotes, also emphasizes the importance of the people’s rejection of the prophet: He said, “Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” (Isaiah 6:9–10 NIV)

God appears to be telling the prophet to do the very opposite of what we might expect: people must listen but not hear. God warns Isaiah that his warnings will be ignored, but also encourages this indifference. Jesus deliberately recalls the sense that the mission of prophecy is by its very nature doomed to failure, an idea that permeates the Old Testament, as he tries to prepare his disciples for the difficulties that he and they will face. His citation of Isaiah draws a parallel between his own ministry and that of the prophet and points to their shared lot of rejection. There can be no question that Pushkin was aware of this link between the parable of the sower, the book of Isaiah, and the general context of the hostile reception of the prophetic word when he returned to Isaiah 6 in writing “The Prophet” in 1826. We can be sure, therefore, that he wished to draw a parallel between “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” and “The Prophet” in order to imply that the newly made seer of “The Prophet” would not be any more successful in his mission than the sower of freedom had been. By focusing attention on the connection between these poems, Khlebnikov problematizes triumphalist readings

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of “The Prophet” and emphasizes the inherent futility of the prophet’s mission, which keeps recurring throughout history and is in every instance doomed because of the incomprehension of the masses. The metaphorical blindness of indifference that Khlebnikov treats as a recurrent feature in history has two constituents: it represents both the crowd’s unwillingness to pay attention to Khlebnikov’s heroic revelation of historical determinism and their general obliviousness to the immanent mechanisms of deterministic time. In the contemporary essay “Loneliness,” whose title points to its connection with “The Lonely Player,” Khlebnikov again draws on biblical metaphors to explain the dangers of such ignorance. He describes humanity walking blindly through time, unable to see the pitfalls of history: I thought: a blind man recognizes a pit when he has fallen into it (a rough measuring of the pit). But one endowed with eyes sees it and wisely walks around it. I thought that it would be quite useful to find something like galoshes for the puddles of fate and waterproofs from the slanting raindrops for the downpour of fate. Man, build yourself a home! I thought when such a device is discovered, there will be nothing for states to do. War is a rough way of measuring holes. Predicting the future is a subtle, elegant solution to the equations of time. (6:2:42–43)71

Khlebnikov alludes to Jesus’s description of the Pharisees in Matthew 15:14: “Leave them; they are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” This passage occurs two chapters after the parable of the sower in the Matthean narrative; the equivalent phrase is also found at Luke 6, two chapters before the parable of the sower. As with the reference to Isaiah in the parable of the sower, the New Testament is itself implicated in an intertextual relationship with Old Testament discourses of the prophet, since the blindness metaphor occurs in a passage discussing the nature of prophecy in which Jesus dismisses the moral leadership of the Pharisees by saying: “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men’” (Matthew 15:7 NIV). Again Khlebnikov pays special attention to the gospel precisely at those moments where it is self-consciously intertextual. What is more, these moments of connection between the testaments are also points of contact with Pushkin’s mythology of the prophet: Isaiah 29, quoted by Jesus above, is another source of the imagery of

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“The Prophet” and in particular the theme of spiritual thirst evident in the poem’s opening line, “Wearied by spiritual thirst,” which can be traced back to Isaiah: “the hordes of all the nations [. . .] will be as it is with a dream, with a vision in the night—as when a hungry person dreams of eating, but awakens hungry still; as when a thirsty person dreams of drinking, but awakens faint and thirsty still” (Isaiah 29:7–9 NIV). By activating such connections between the testaments and Pushkin’s appropriation of them, Khlebnikov again demonstrates how no writing can be conceived of as originary, but rather that all texts— not least Pushkin’s—are both historically situated and made up of other texts. By tracing these texts-within-texts, we can see how literature encodes the repetitious nature of history: writers return to the same themes because the same things keep happening. In particular, Khlebnikov tells us that prophets keep failing to communicate by citing four different historical instances—the cases of Isaiah, Jesus, Pushkin, and Khlebnikov—with each failed prophet quoting the one that came before, but with none seeming able to escape the inevitability of rejection.

Fail Again, Fail Better Given that Khlebnikov appears to think that it is impossible for a prophet to succeed in communicating his message, why does “The Lonely Player” end on an ostensibly optimistic note, with Khlebnikov confident that he can provoke the masses out of indifference by sowing seeing eyes? What does he have that other prophets did not? “The Lonely Player” suggests four ways in which Khlebnikov can expedite mankind’s emancipation from determinism. First, Khlebni­ kov himself proves that overcoming blindness is possible; second, initial failure is shown to be a prerequisite for eventual success; third, the poem itself is a blueprint for the functioning of historical determinism and thus a manual for escaping from it; and, finally, the theatrical roleplaying of the poem’s protagonist holds the key to an eschatological and anti-deterministic union of viewer and actor, poet and reader, past and present. Khlebnikov stands apart from his predecessors because of his awareness of the recurrent failures of prophecy, which to him serve as further evidence of the wavelike nature of history. Since he at least can see the reasons for the failure of other prophets, blindness is not necessarily inevitable. Indeed, his own coming to knowledge is also alluded to in the

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poem. At first the lonely player walks blind through the land, recalling the initial blindness of Pushkin’s prophet before the seraph opens his eyes, as well as, perhaps, the dust-filled eyes of the wanderer in “Imitations of the Quran.” Such blindness is perhaps no bad thing, since in the classical tradition it is associated with the second sight of prophets like Tiresias. Pushkin refers to this tradition in “André Chénier,” in which the French poet can see far beyond the confines of his cell and in which words of seeing have particular importance not connected to physical sight.72 Khlebnikov, however, does not emphasize this positive account of blindness, preferring instead to suggest that, while he does wander blindly, he is not entirely blind, at least not anymore, or when compared to everyone else. To Khlebnikov, for whom the pun is always intended, the adjective odinokii (lonely) suggests the meaning “one-eyed,” from odin (one) and oko (eye).73 This play on words was widespread among the Futurists, but first appeared in Maiakovskii’s poem “A Few Words about Me Myself” (1913): Время! Хоть ты, хромой богомаз, лик намалюй мой в божницу уродца века! Я одинок, как последний глаз у идущего к слепым человека!74 [Time! You could at least, lame icon-painter | daub my face | As an icon case of a freak of the age! | I am lonely like the last eye | Of a man going to the blind!]

Maiakovskii, whose protagonist is also fighting against the forces of deterministic, calendrical time, echoes the old saw about the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind in order to suggest a hierarchy of perspicacity in which the Futurists have a gift of vision that sets them apart from the crowds. Khlebnikov’s player—once blind, now one-eyed—is also an example of how people can be made to understand the workings of history: because his second sight is derived from reason, not revelation, it is theoretically available to all.75 The description of the player as a “wanderer” (strannik) (the term also has connotations of pilgrimage) recalls Pushkin’s 1835 poem of that same name. Like “The Lonely Player,” Pushkin’s “The Wanderer” has multiple levels of intertextual interiority: it is a

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loose adaptation, probably via the French translation, of the opening of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which is itself a tissue of biblical quotations. Furthermore, “The Wanderer” is in dialogue with the same cycle of Pushkinian poems, described above, that interrogate the poet’s role in society, and in particular “The Prophet,” which it recalls in its opening description of the protagonist walking through a wild valley beset by strife because he foresees the imminent downfall of his hometown. His problems are alleviated when he comes across a young man with a book who points the way to him, causing the metaphorical scales to fall from his eyes. Although Andrew Kahn has argued convincingly that Pushkin is being ironic when he describes this acquisition of new sight (which is actually a form of madness), there is no reason to suppose that Khlebnikov would have departed from most contemporary analyses of this poem when incorporating Pushkin’s wanderer into his own poetic mythology. This emphasis on the power of education notwithstanding, “The Lonely Player” further suggests, counterintuitively, that Khlebnikov’s position as the latest instantiation of a recurring principle of failed prophetic communication is actually to be welcomed. In two of the traditions on which Khlebnikov draws, that of the Bible and that of Russian political radicalism, failure, persecution, and death are necessary steps on the path to ultimate salvation. The Decembrist poet Kondratii Ryleev is said to have been certain that his rebellion would fail but that “their initiative and their example will bear fruit”; at least fifteen years before Chernyshevskii’s actual death, Nekrasov says in his version of “The Prophet” that Chernyshevskii’s chief desire is “to die for others” and “to remind slaves of Christ.”76 This death wish derives in part from the Bible: God wills Isaiah’s prophecy to fail so that the people should be punished for not heeding him; in the New Testament Jesus quotes Isaiah not to bemoan his fate, but to welcome it: rejection and persecution are necessary in order for him to fulfill his redemptive messianic destiny through self-sacrificing death.

The Poem as Parable The paradoxical desire of the prophet not to be understood is also evident in the fact that Jesus is pleased that the audience fails to comprehend the parable of the sower. Jesus’s consolation here is not so much that his audience’s confusion hastens salvation by inciting persecution, but rather that initial incomprehension eventually motivates the crowd

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to a deeper understanding. One could say the same of Khlebnikov’s dense and allusive poem, which stands in a similar relationship to his theoretical treatises as does the parable to Jesus’s other teachings: its opacity means that readers will not understand it at first, but their puzzlement secures their further engagement and perhaps, therefore, the beginning of the end for their blindness. We remember that both Khlebnikov and Jesus have three audiences: an indifferent diegetic crowd, a contemporary extradiegetic readership (respectively Khleb­ni­kov’s peers and the early Christians, two groups who need to be convinced of the rectitude and importance of an eschatological message), and, finally, the unknowable audience of posterity. Even though the ostensible main action of the poem, the unseen bullkilling, is a metaphor for his failure to communicate his message to his contemporaries, Khlebnikov retains some optimism about future readers because “The Lonely Player” is designed to work as a parable-poem, encoding deeper meanings that, once deciphered, will reveal the workings of history. In a further element of self-reflexivity, the multilayered poem is itself one of the “eyes” that the poet-prophet has sowed to grant future vision. In a note from 1922 Khlebnikov says: “I have scattered seeing eyes in Kharkov, Moscow, and Baku” (6:2:101). In the same note Khlebnikov reveals his disenchantment even with this attempt at communication, which founders because these “seeing eyes” are also ignored: “Who has not wound them round their feet in place of footbindings?” Like the crowd of Pushkin’s “The Poet and the Mob,” who prefer a crude bowl to a statue, Khlebnikov’s audience, suffering the privations of the Civil War, have more practical concerns than the poet. Nevertheless, Khlebnikov’s eventual frustration does not exclude the possibility for optimism if his more ambiguous poetry is read, and read carefully, by future readers. In another note in 1922 Khlebnikov uses the same ocular metaphor in a typically dualistic way, writing that “words are especially powerful when they have two meanings, when they are living eyes for a mystery and their second meaning shines through the mica of everyday meaning” (6:2:101).77 If we follow this prompt to look for “a second meaning,” we can see “The Lonely Player” not just as a poem about Khlebnikov’s desire to understand and defeat the mechanisms of deterministic history, but also as a textual enactment of this very process and, therefore, as a sui generis instructional guide that the masses can use to come to understand the laws of time. In both the poem’s structure and its intertextual underpinnings Khlebnikov constructs a world characterized by

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repetition and parallelism. The temporality of the poem emphasizes parallel action, since a number of clauses are linked paratactically, either by words expressing simultaneous action or by simile markers (“like a sleepy corpse,” “like [. . .] a wanderer,” “like a warrior of truth”). The same parallelism is expressed on a grammatical level: all the verbs are in the imperfective aspect, implying simultaneous action, until the player makes his decisive intervention in history by killing the bull, which Khleb­nikov describes using the perfective aspect, implying a completed action. This decisive event is foreshadowed by an escalation in the power attributed to the protagonist: in the anaphoric tricolon of similes he comes to life, like Pushkin’s prophet, going from “a corpse” to a dreamer to finally, after the ritual slaughter, “a warrior.”78 This triumphant puissance presages a section characterized by perfective verbs marking decisive action like “shook” and the emphatic “I understood” when the protagonist suddenly realizes the failure of his heroic endeavor. These perfectives, and especially the last one, which is also metrically distinct, contrast sharply with the dreamlike accumulation of clauses above. Both killing and realizing are decisive actions that serve as a textual foretaste of the eventual desired breakout from the spell of historical determinism. Furthermore, as we have seen from the discussion above of Khlebnikov’s handling of Pushkin’s borrowings from both the Old and New Testament, the deployment of intertext in “The Lonely Player” is predicated on structured recurrence through history—transhistorical essences repeat through time and in their specific manifestations are shaped by their circumstance. In the Bible, for example, Jesus positions himself as both replaying and incarnating Isaiah’s prophecy. In literary terms, the same themes and motifs keep coming back, but in each instance their form is at least partly determined by its historical location. Pushkin is treated neither as a literary progenitor nor as a transcendental point of either origin or eternal return, but as one of many historically situated vectors of timeless myths. All of Khlebnikov’s allusions to Pushkin also invoke the intertexts behind them. So, in regard to the motif of blindness, Khlebnikov refers to Pushkin who refers to Chénier, or refers to Jesus referring to Isaiah; in regard to the prophet’s mission for freedom, Khlebnikov refers to Pushkin who refers to Kiukhel’beker, or to Jesus; all three of these refer to Isaiah. Every allusion contains at least one other: the reader can choose different ways to turn at every instance and the text becomes a Minoan labyrinth, in which, as in Yeats’s gyre, seemingly distant moments become adjacent.79

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As such, “The Lonely Player” is a good example of the way in which Futurist poems embody the modernist ideal of a time-outside-of-time not as a formless synchrony, but as a structured heterochrony, in which the privileged individual is able to navigate time as space. In “Words about Numbers and Vice Versa,” written not long after “The Lonely Player,” Khlebnikov describes a vision in which he journeys through a landscape of numbers, and says that “the numerical bonds of the quantities of time lined up one after another in a strange kinship with the bonds of space” (6:2:21). The player does not travel so obviously between different locations in time as other Khlebnikovian heroes, like Ka or like Zangezi, but the way in which the poem’s implicit structure mirrors that of history allows the perceptive reader to follow the connections that run through time, to trace Ariadne’s thread and thus navigate the labyrinth of history.

Actors, Spectators, and Readers “The Lonely Player” suggests another means of understanding the recurrence of archetypes through history, one that not only helps explain the nature of time, but also promises to serve as a powerful new tool for the eschatological undoing of determinism: drama. Theatrical perform­ ance is an apt metaphor for Khlebnikovian history: the same action occurs again and again, even if the cast and the interpretation are different. Furthermore, by making the central protagonist of “The Lonely Player” an actor, Khlebnikov can demonstrate how his identity encompasses the fulfillment of a number of historical types. We see the litsedei, the maker of faces, adopt a series of masks over the course of the poem, his only real characterization: he is Theseus, Jason, Christ; a corpse, a wanderer, a warrior, a sower, a prophet. There is an important difference, however, between acting and the historical repetition of types: just as the poet is a conscious manipulator of the hidden patterns of language, so the actor stands apart from the blind crowds because, although he is playing out a predetermined script, he does so knowingly. Khlebnikov alludes to theatrical conscious selftransformation in one of the poem’s many similes: И волей месяца окутан, Как в сонный плащ вечерний странник Во сне над пропастями прыгал И шел с утеса на утес.

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[And shrouded by the will of the moon, | As in a cloak of sleep the evening wanderer | In sleep leaped above the chasms | And went from clifftop to clifftop.]

These typically dense lines allude to Pushkin’s “wanderer” motif and the topoi of the Romantic sublime. Moreover, as well as a frequent attribute of prophets (see 2:160 and 3:363), cloaks in Khlebnikov’s poetry can serve as metonyms for actorly self-fashioning and, more generally, as metaphors for the interplay of external form and internal content. In a letter to Kruchenykh in 1913 in which he proposes a new Slavic terminology for the theater, two of Khlebnikov’s proposed replacements for the word “actor” are “recloaker” ( perevoplashch) and “recloakmaker” (peredelplashch) (6:2:157).80 Khlebnikov often depicts himself or his alter egos wearing cloaks, for instance, in his celebrated 1919 poem “The Poet,” which Barbara Lönnqvist sees as a nod to the poem’s dialogue with Romanticism—the era of cloak-wearing heroes.81 More particularly, I would argue, the cloak is a reference to Romantic self-fashioning, especially under the influence of literature. In Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes his hero as “a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak” ( Москвич в Гарольдовом плаще).82 The cloak is the attribute of those for whom dress is a deliberately literary construction of self, in this case in homage to Byron’s Romantic hero. Again we see an implicit intertextual sequence of recurrences: Byron is quoted, sartorially, by Pushkin who is quoted by Khlebnikov. Since the cloak represents an attempt to acquire a new identity, it can also signal an attempt to conceal one’s true nature. In some of his earlier poems Khlebnikov extends the range of meanings of the cloak to have it stand for the very fabric of the perceived universe, which he presents as a costume that conceals the true mathematical underpinnings of reality. In “The Beast + the Number” (1915) he writes: “И ум, и мир, как плащ, одеты | На плечах строгого числа” (Both the mind and the world, like a cloak, are placed | On the shoulders of the strict number) (1:335). We recall “Numbers” (1913), in which Khlebnikov realizes that beasts are just numbers in disguise: “И вы мне видитесь одетыми в звери, в их шкурах” (And you seem to me to be dressed as beasts, in their skins) (1:102). In “Words about Numbers and Vice Versa,” in the line immediately preceding the comment on spatialized time quoted above, Khlebnikov uses clothes to describe how the accreted layers of human knowledge have hidden the fundamental nature of things: “I did not invent these laws; I simply took the living quantities of time, trying to strip off existing learning until I was naked, and observed according to

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which law these quantities crossed over one into the other and constructed equations” (6:2:12). Inasmuch as human personalities are, in Khlebnikov’s system, also mathematically determined, this same dualistic model applies to them too, along with the accompanying clothing metaphor. We recall Khlebnikov’s acknowledgment of the Futurists’ inner kinship with Pushkin in his 1916 self-description as “Pushkin in the light of the world war, in the cloak of the new century” (6:2:84). Both are victims of philistine hostility, but this is concealed by the fact that, on the outside at least, the Futurists represent contemporaneity. Khlebnikov contrasts the Futurists’ hidden connection with Pushkin with the superficial coincidence of views between Pushkin and latter-day Pushkinists. This interior/ exterior model, consisting of an undying essence housed inside an ephemeral, historically contingent vessel, is evident in “Ka,” in which the eponymous time-traveling hero has a name connoting an immortal element of the soul in Egyptian tradition, and also in the poem “Oleg Trupov” (1915–16), which is not only in dialogue with Pushkin’s “The Song of Prophetic Oleg,” but which states that Pushkin’s immortal soul is immortal and capable of transmigration: Как голубь, если налетается, Вдруг упадает в синий таз, Я верю, Пушкина скитается Его душа в чудесный час. И вдруг, упав на эти строки, Виёт над пропастью намеки. Платком столетия пестра Поет — моей душе сестра. (3:160) [Like when a dove, if it has had enough flying | Suddenly falls into a blue basin | I believe that Pushkin’s soul | Goes wandering at the hour of miracles. | And suddenly, falling on these lines, | It twists hints above the abyss. | Motley with the kerchief of this century | It sings—sister to my soul.]

Although Khlebnikov here grants Pushkin an essential immortality denied to him elsewhere, note that he does not suggest that Pushkin’s soul is reborn in him: they are related, but not identical. The different associations of clothing in Khlebnikov’s work contribute to the essential ambiguity of the image of the “cloak of the moon” in “The Lonely Player.” On the one hand, cloaks stand for the veil that

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conceals the true essence of things; on the other, they represent the ability to don costumes as a way of demonstrating the wearer’s awareness of a previously hidden connection. These seemingly opposing interpretations nonetheless share considerable common ground; this becomes clearer if we consider the link between acting, costumes, and historical determinism in the wider context of Russian modernism’s use of theatricality as a way of understanding both the unique ontology of their period and the analogy between the self and the word. We recall the different approaches to iconic language taken by Khleb­ nikov and Kruchenykh, and their relationship with different models of time. Similarly, the relationship between form and content assumed in Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s different conceptualizations of natural and ideal language finds a parallel in their different approaches to costume. The abstract iconicity of Kruchenykh’s zaum, which refuses all logic and structure, manifests itself in the extravagant elements of Futurist public self-presentation such as face-painting, wearing carrots in buttonholes, and Malevich’s cardboard costumes for Victory over the Sun. Colleen McQuillen suggests that these unprecedented costume forms disrupt “culturally determined assumptions about aesthetics and form-function relationships.”83 One can be even bolder: these costumes seek to create a performative and visual language that transcends representation. By not dressing “as” anything, the Futurists collapse the difference between form and content, between signifier and signified. Khlebnikov, in contrast, was not an eager participant in public displays of costumed extravagance and maintained an attitude to clothing somewhat closer to Symbolist theorizing on the subject. Ol’ga Matiu­shina recalls an incident when Khlebnikov attended a masquerade dressed as a Roman patrician. On arrival, he immediately stepped onto an empty pedestal and spent the duration of the event motionless, posing as a statue, before wandering back barefoot through wintry St. Petersburg. Matiushina thinks the reason for this eccentric behavior is that Khlebnikov “was not playing a role but really thought that he was a Caesar. It must have been the costume that made him transport himself entirely to ancient Rome.”84 Just as Khlebnikov’s zaum seeks to find the hidden connections between words, so he uses costume as a way of actualizing a hidden inner kinship between discrete historical individuals. Likewise, when he is given a hat by Vera Budberg in 1915, he says that he is “glad that it is made from threads, like Theseus’” (Я рад, что он из ниток, как Тезей) (1:338), because he is pleased that his outward appearance

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will represent his inner connection to the Greek hero. Much in the same way as Khlebnikov changes the outer form of words—“actor” becomes “recloaker”—so that their form matches their true inner essence, so he uses clothes to signal inner connections. This notion of the costume as an index of true, inner identity derives from the theories of Viacheslav Ivanov, who argued that the theatrical mask originated as an attribute of Dionysiac ritual: The mask was initially a commemoration of the universal law of transformations, of “metamorphosis” and “palingenesis.” Dionysus appears in cosmic masks, and his servants enter into communion with him only through masks. But the mask in cult is a genuine religious essence and whoever puts on the mask genuinely becomes identical, in their own consciousness and that of the world, with the creature whose image he has acquired. That is the initial, mythological meaning of the mask.85

In its true form, therefore, the mask is not a symbol, but an icon—it does not conceal or deceive but rather reveals. In the same way, the lonely player of our poem, who dons so many guises, is not a great pretender, but a complex hybrid personality. His many different masks do not demonstrate his capacity for fictive imagination but rather demonstrate the many different transhistorical essences that he contains. By adopting the persona of Theseus or the Pushkinian prophet, Khlebnikov is making his (metaphorical) exterior match his inner essence. In relation to the prophet, this act of fulfillment has an eschatological force: like Jesus quoting Isaiah, Khlebnikov cites Pushkin as a legitimating authority, but he also transforms his word into deed, Logos into ergon, text into life, signaling a transfiguration that inaugurates a new era.86 Khlebnikov cannot do it all alone, however. In order to make this new era possible, he needs to shake the crowd out of their blind passivity. In “The Lonely Player” theatricality is closely connected with spectatorship, a theme that is not confined to the sowing of eyes but runs through the whole poem. The player’s different personae—the actor, the prophet, and the beast-destroying mythical hero—all require an audience to give meaning to their actions: Perseus must show the Gorgon’s head to Polydectes; Jason must show the golden fleece to Pelias; Theseus fails to change his sails after killing the Minotaur. Khlebnikov often treats bullfighting as an example of misguided, even grotesque

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spectatorship, for instance in an unfinished poem that depicts an old nag being sent out to be killed by a bull—a scene savored by the voyeuristic crowd.87 In Khlebnikov’s poetic mythology, therefore, the masses are both the monster’s victims and the transfixed spectators of this slaughter. In “Ka2” Khlebnikov sees in the crowds of young men heading to their deaths at the front the equivalent of the young Athenians sacrificed to the Minotaur. He can see an old script at work, but is unable to transform this consciousness into decisive intervention for lack of a suitable cast: “In those days I sought in vain for an Ariadne and a Minos, intending to play out one of the stories of the Greeks in the twentieth century” (5:157).88 Instead, the crowds continue to be devoured, hoodwinked by bellicose false prophets: “The fabric of seers who lead us somewhere by right of birth, the kindness of numbers, quickly shrouded mankind and the words of their preaching wove together into an enormous net useful for catching fish” (5:154). The young soldiers, whom Khlebnikov earlier compares to fish in barrels, are entangled in a net that symbolizes both the grid-like repetitions of history and the obfuscations of the propagandists that obscure these repetitions. Khlebnikov is in control of this net, however, and is confident that he can persuade these doomed spectators to exercise agency. His words, written in 1916, directly anticipate “The Lonely Player”: “I had the pole of the net. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘At the moment I am a lonely player [litsedei ] and all the rest are spectators. But there will come a time when I will be the only spectator and you will be players’” (5:154). The conversion of the passive audience into engaged actors was one of the cherished goals of a utopian tendency in Russian modernist theater, the proponents of which saw this union of actor and viewer, of the poet and the mob, as a necessary step in ushering in a new era. This conception of drama is most closely associated with Ivanov, who, under the influence of Attic tragedy, Nietzsche, and Wagner, imagined theater as an inclusive, transformative force, akin to a civic ritual, which could replace religion as a means to unite people toward a common purpose and ultimately effect a fundamental eschatological change. Ivanov describes how the fusion of spectacle and spectator will inaugurate “a new organic epoch” in an essay written just after the turn of the century that directly anticipates Khlebnikov not only in its espousal of a new “prophesiacal” mode, counterposed to the secular and the ecclesiastical, but also its rejection of artifice: “Enough acting [litsedeistva], we want actions [deistva]. The viewer must become a doer.”89 Given Ivanov’s close association with this sort of chiliastic theatrical ritual, it

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is no coincidence that shortly after articulating his desire for a kind of universal Gesamtkunstwerk in “Ka2,” Khlebnikov recalls a recent meeting with his one-time mentor. Khlebnikov saw Ivanov again in Baku in 1921, not long before the writing of “The Lonely Player.” At that time Ivanov had returned to theorizing about drama, albeit in a more scholarly mode, in preparation for writing Dionysus and Protodionysianism. It seems likely that it was Ivanov’s revisiting of Dionysian theater that prompted Khlebnikov also to return to the theme of redemptive drama he had discussed six years earlier in “Ka2.” In Dionysus and Protodionysianism Ivanov suggests that Greek tragedy originated in public rituals in Minoan Crete: Where did the drama of mysteries itself come from? There is no doubt, in any case, that it existed by itself and was older than the tragic structure. It is even likely that it goes back to pre-Hellenic times. Buildings [. . .] found in the Cretan palaces of Knossos and Phaistos were interpreted by Evans as the remains of theaters. If that is the case, it is scarcely possible to imagine any spectacle on the Minoan stage other than a sacral act—perhaps something protobucolic and focused on sending prisoners as sacrifices to the bull and pursuing and killing the bull-god.90

We see, therefore, that Khlebnikov’s monstrous bull is not just a reminiscence of Theseus and the Minotaur (and perhaps of Pushkin), and not even just a symbol for the machinations of deterministic time: it is also an emblem of the intimate connection between religion and theater that is constituted by ritual. In killing the bull, Khlebnikov aspires to create the sort of disruptive communal rite that can help to overcome the alienating, divisive effects of modern life and usher in a new age of unity and serenity. Of course, seen from the present the lonely player’s defeat of the bull is not a world-changing ritual act or even a theatrical one, but a sequence of words on a page. There are no spectators, only readers. This reveals a common paradox—the poet’s complaint about being ignored is only seen by those who do not ignore him—which complicates the poem’s temporality: the killing of the bull represents a failed attempt to break out of repetitive time with a single act, but this single act is repeated every time the poem is reread. As strange as it might seem, however, this unending rereading may be precisely what Khlebnikov is hoping to achieve: he wants to make us better readers, not just of poems, but of the whole universe.

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While this argument may seem somewhat self-serving, given my own lengthy analysis of “The Lonely Player,” it gets to the heart of Khleb­nikov’s epistemology. We recall that Khlebnikov is himself a compulsive exegete, an inveterate reader of the rhythms of time and space. He wants his readers to share his hermeneutic talents and, like him, to see the universe as a text that can be decoded. Fittingly for a rational prophet, the new holistic sensitivity advocated by Khlebnikov replaces the revelation of religion with a sort of esoteric empiricism, while, in a typically modernist manner, retaining religion’s sacral power. Thus, in “The One Book” (1920), Khlebnikov calls for the burning of the holy texts of the world’s religions, so that they can be replaced by a single, totalizing text, “The One Book”: Род человеческий — книги читатель, И на обложке надпись творца, Имя мое, письмена голубые. Да, ты небрежно читаешь. Больше внимания! Слишком рассеян и смотришь лентяем. Точно урок Закона Божьего, Эти снежные горные цепи и большие моря, Эту единую книгу Скоро ты, скоро прочтешь. (2:114) [The human race is the reader of a book, | And on the cover is the creator’s title | My name, blue letters. | Yes, you read carelessly. | Pay more attention! | You are too distracted and you look lazily. | Soon, soon you will read | Like a Scripture lesson | These snowy chains of mountains and giant seas | This one book.]

To the end, Khlebnikov maintains his Futurist appetite for a cultural purge to allow room for a more grandiose new creation. Moreover, like Stéphane Mallarmé, whose obsession with language and numbers makes him a close cousin, Khlebnikov harbors the typically modernist aspiration that a single book—the single book—can be made coextensive with the world in all its complexity and that, as a result, the boundary between what is book and what is world will be impossible to distinguish. The extent of Khlebnikov’s optimism becomes evident: he not only considers himself a new type of prophet—a better prophet than Pushkin—but he thinks that we can be prophets too.

4 The Poet, the Statue, and the State Pushkin and Maiakovskii

A détruire les statues, on risque d’en devenir une soi-même. [In destroying statues, you risk becoming one yourself.] Jean Cocteau

A

twenty-minute stroll along Moscow’s Tverskaia Street separates the Kremlin, the historic center of state power, from the monument to Pushkin, one of the holiest sites in the cult of the Russian writer. You will find the gloomy-looking bard standing high on a pedestal ringed with bouquets; behind him is Pushkin Square and deep below his feet trains pull into Pushkinskaia metro station. Walk on for a further ten minutes in the same direction and you will come to another statue, another square, and another eponymous metro station, in honor of another poet—Vladimir Maiakovskii. The two poetic monuments operate as a geographical rhyme in the endlessly rewritten text of Moscow, providing the central couplet in a quatrain of memorials that also comprises a bronze Maksim Gor’kii and 137

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the embalmed corpse of Lenin on Red Square. This monumental ley line inscribes a particular version of Russian identity onto the car-choked surface of the capital, encouraging residents of this historic city of merchants and patriarchs to consider, if only for a moment, their cultural patrimony. The proximity and symmetry of the central duo also continually invite citizens to think about poetry and, what is more, to think poetically, as they ponder the similarities and differences between the most reverenced Russian writers of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Monuments, taken individually, operate as pinch points in time at which different eras appear to come together. They seem indifferent to life around them and, as such, resemble “islets of eternity in the movement of time,” as Mikhail Yampolsky puts it.1 However, the coordination of the Maiakovskii and Pushkin statues reminds us that monuments are objects of topography as well as temporality and can thus be read syntagmatically as well as paradigmatically. In a city as dense with memorials as Moscow, each monument is in dialogue with others nearby, suggesting a projection of the vertical axis of time onto the horizontal axis of space. Moving through space becomes akin to moving through time, recalling the Futurist vision of history as a navigable field. Furthermore, monuments create new meanings through their contrast with their surroundings, not just in the clash between the tastes and priorities of different eras, but also in the way that the individual monument’s association with historical continuity per se stands out against the mutable circadian life around it. The seemingly timeless monument does not exist outside of time entirely, therefore, and its transcendence is still inseparable from the specifics of history and geography. In its ambivalent position both outside and inside time and space, the monument parallels the ambiguous temporal status of classics like Pushkin. (In Russian, important and indicative literary works are even called “monuments.”) On the one hand, the classics can appear to persist in time unchanged and, as such, either provide a wormhole back in time or constitute a space outside of history. (This schema roughly corresponds to the New Historicist and New Critical positions respectively.) On the other hand, the evergreen classics, like statues, mark points of contact and contrast with the lifeworld of the present around them as well as with each other. Such is the Futurist position on Pushkin: for them, Pushkin’s durability does not make him immune from history, but rather more deeply embedded in it and, as such, an index of cultural change. In the Futurists’ historicized mythology, Pushkin, as

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both literary figure and as statue, embodies the coincidence of different eras; in so doing, however, he does not conceal difference, but lays it bare. Yampolsky’s “islets of eternity” metaphor is also predicated on the contrast between the monument and its surroundings. He suggests that monuments embody a peculiarly Soviet concept of space and time, since they represent the “achronistic space [toward which] the whole ideology of the Soviet regime gravitated, its aim being the immediate achievement of an ahistorical condition (Communism) that was originally supposed to arise as atemporal islets in the social space, gradually spreading and seizing the whole country.”2 This emphasis on the statue as the prefiguration of an as-yet-unrealized eschatological break aligns with the vanguardist, utopian ideology of both the Futurists and the Bolshevik leadership in the 1910s and much of the early 1920s, before the emergence of a new Stalinist rhetoric that characterized the present as an already-achieved utopia that subsumed past and future.3 The static monument possesses a paradoxical mobility, since it seems to move from epoch to epoch, and, for that reason, to offer both a potential escape from the deadly pincer of mortality and mundanity and a foretaste of an escape from time itself. Nevertheless, the statue’s persist­ ence not only highlights the ongoing existence of linear time in the world evolving around it, but also freezes the vital human body, making it an emblem of the deadening effect of fetishistic conservatism and a point of contrast with the Futurists’ own vigorous self-image. Thanks to this concatenation of contradictory associations, the Futurists were both attracted and repelled by statues. They feature regularly in their work and in their lives, whether in the form of the stone pagan fertility symbols of the Ukrainian steppe (one of which was a fixture in the Burliuk family home), in the idol-like Pushkin of “Slap,” in poetic responses to existing monuments, or in discussions of their own hypothetical memorials.4 Of all the Futurists, however, it was Maiakovskii, whose statuesque frame and occasionally hyperbolic self-confidence belied deep anxiety about the vulnerability of his flesh, who was most preoccupied with monuments and their ability to both transcend and exemplify the passing of time and to serve as both symbols of death and symbols of immortality. Iurii Karabchievskii, in his energetic perestroika-era debunking of the Soviet cult of Maiakovskii, argues that “there has never been in Russian literature, nor, I think, in any other, another writer so obsessed by the idea of a monument.”5 Predictions of his own future

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monument do, to be sure, recur throughout Maiakovskii’s poetic career. Legend has it that as an impoverished eighteen-year-old art student in 1911 he made the arrogant but accurate boast that a statue would one day be erected in his honor near Tverskaia Street, and he is said to have repeated the claim in 1918.6 Those stories may well be apocryphal, but Maiakovskii certainly did predict that he and Pushkin would “stand pretty much next to each other” in 1924 and he was still writing about his putative monument in the months before his suicide in 1930.7 Obsession is not the same as ambition, however, and it would be a mistake to see the realization of Maiakovskii’s teenage braggadocio as a wish come true. The statue that was unveiled on Maiakovskii Square in 1958 was a rugged, realist colossus of stout Soviet patriotism that seems deliberately indifferent to the tortured ambivalence that characterized Maiakovskii’s life and a world away from the quicksilver energy and disdain for nostalgia that he and the Futurists espoused. If Maiakovskii did want a monument, then this is not what he would have chosen. Just as the pensive Pushkin erected half a mile away seventy years before encapsulates the poet’s pious posthumous reception better than his boisterous life, so the Maiakovskii monument is more a relic of the Stalin-approved patron saint of Soviet poetry than it is a testament to his life or work. But there is more connecting the monuments of Pushkin and of Maiakovskii than the dubious benefits of official approval and a fourlane arterial road. Like Jakobson, Maiakovskii recognized that the monument occupied a central place in Pushkin’s poetic identity precisely because it equipped Pushkin—and his imitators—with a potent set of metaphors for exploring questions of poetic identity. The monument was a way to consider not only mortality and immortality, but also the poet’s relationship with the state. With this in mind, Maiakovskii, faced by new challenges to his self-conception as an original poetic voice, formed his own monument mythology in dialogue and in competition with Pushkin.

The Statue in Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology Like Khlebnikov in his reinterpretation of Pushkin’s prophet myth, in engaging with Pushkin’s statues Maiakovskii was consciously taking on—which is to say, both adopting and confronting—one of Russian literature’s most famous and flexible motifs, a device used in multiple ways both by Pushkin and his successors. In this diversity one can

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identify three distinct strands in Pushkin’s monumental mythology as Maiakovskii saw it. The most prominent is the moving statue, an ancient trope that acquired its most famous Russian incarnation in The Bronze Horseman. This poem’s climactic scene, in which Evgenii, insane with grief, thinks that he is being pursued by the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, has been much imitated, not least because it speaks to Russian writers’ concerns about the almost supernatural dominance of autocracy over the private individual. Moving statues do appear, however, in less political contexts in Pushkin, such as his theatrical riff on Don Giovanni, The Stone Guest (1830), in which an uncanny moving statue, inhabited by the spirit of the murdered Commendatore, exacts revenge on his murderer Don Guan before the latter can succeed in wooing his widow. The second cluster of images in the Pushkinian myth of the statue centers on the intangible memorial that Pushkin uses as a metaphor for his poetic achievement in “I have erected a monument. . . .” This monument draws on both Orthodox theology and a classical tradition that reached Pushkin from Horace via his Russian predeces­ sors Gavriil Derzhavin and Mikhail Lomonosov to posit the longevity of Pushkin’s fame and the superiority of his poetry over state power. Like the moving statue, the intangible monument became a staple of Russian poetry.8 Finally, these two metaphors of Pushkin’s own construction fed into the third strand of his statue myth as it stood in Maiakovskii’s time—the collection of individual encounters, urban legends, and ekphrastic literary responses that accumulated around the Moscow monument to Pushkin, a vibrant tradition that began on the day of the statue’s unveiling in 1880. For the Futurists, therefore, and especially for the adopted Muscovite Maiakovskii, Pushkinian statue mythology was not only part of the common coin of literature, but also a fact of everyday life.9 Despite this real-life strand, the dominant structure of Pushkinian monument mythology is the division between the two major motifs, the moving statue and the intangible monument of literature, which sometimes overlap and sometimes stand in opposition to each other. Both tropes have very deep roots in the history of culture and pose fundamental questions about the relationship between author, text, and the built environment. They bring these different elements into contact not only by putting the monument into text—a quintessential example of ekphrasis—but also by emulating the insertion of text into the monument, most notably in the form of the epitaph. In both cases, there is a triangular opposition between animate but mortal flesh, durable but

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immobile stone, and immaterial but eternal language. Ekphrasis imparts vitality, mobility, and a new sort of longevity to immobile stone; the epitaph lends both mortal man and ephemeral language the invulnerability of stone. As a result, both the moving statue and the intangible monument have been employed to explore the interrelation of language, literature, and life. The different motifs, the intangible monument and the animate statue, have tended to have different uses, however: of the two, it is anthropomorphic, mobile sculpture that has more often been featured in the context of personal questions about love, death, and the creative process, as, for instance, in the story of Pygmalion and Galatea.10 In contrast, since the intangible monument is not only not abstract, but also addressed to a wide audience in the present and in posterity, it has more frequently been used to address the poet’s public role and in particular their relationship with the state. This being said, thanks to their size, expense, and prominence in the metropolis, all public statues are inevitably manifestations of the exercise of power, and all the more so in Russia, where they have largely been the preserve of rulers seeking to write their own stories in the cityscape.11 Étienne Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, for example, is both a sculpture and a monument and as such is used by Pushkin to raise questions of both an ontological and a political nature. As it had been for Pushkin, Maiakovskii’s interrogation of monuments and statues was, therefore, a way of relating to his own personal concerns, but also a means of speaking truth to power and about power. As such, although it is present in his prerevolutionary work, the monument becomes a favorite motif of Maiakovskii only in the years after 1917, when he exchanged his largely tacit hostility to tsarism for a loud but troubled identification with the cause of the Bolsheviks, and when his perennial preoccupation with death and obsolescence started to become an obsession.

Monuments of Socialist Construction There was another reason, however, for the prominence of the monument myth in Maiakovskii’s postrevolutionary work. The monument, with its inherent triadic opposition between person, text, and material and its juxtaposition of human evanescence with material permanence, serves as metonym for the built environment more generally. And building, both literal and metaphorical, was to become one of the

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overriding concerns of the young Soviet state. Architectural metaphors were common among both politicians and artists in the era and reveal a common tension between the attractions of change and of continuity.12 Writing about building became for Maiakovskii and others a way of thinking through fundamental questions raised by the revolution. Should the creation of a new culture be an exercise in destruction or construction? And, if it was a matter of moving from the former to the latter, then when? And who should decide: political leaders or the would-be cultural hegemon, the avant-garde? Building is expensive, slow, and requires public consent, or at least obedience. It cannot share the impetuosity and improvisation of art or literature and so, as Miles Glendinning says, “a truly ‘avant-garde architecture’ is a contradiction in terms.”13 At the beginning of their careers, the Futurists had militated against what they saw as the invasion of architectural values such as solidity, utility, and self-evidence into literature, which they believed should be ephemeral and energetic, and fought against the petrifaction of the living language. The Futurist program for an originality derived from transience—“Once you have read this, rip it up,” as one manifesto says—became more problematic after the explosion of the “Futurist moment” had subsided.14 Later in their lives, the Futurists not only had to acknowledge that their own texts had persisted, but also felt compelled to take the opportunity offered by the revolution to make a lasting contribution to the culture. In the 1920s, political thinkers faced a similar impasse, which can also be understood in architectural terms. Fittingly for an avowedly materialist worldview, the rhetoric of Marxism is rich with architectural and sculptural imagery, notably in the opposition of base and superstructure and in the notion of commodity fetishism.15 The Marxist vision of history as a dynamic struggle culminating in the ideal state of Communism nevertheless harbors a potential architectural problem, since it posits both an unstoppable force for dissolving existing structures (class struggle) and an immovable end point for history (Communism), which needs must be resistant to dissolution. Marshall Berman addresses this paradox in his aptly titled analysis of Marxism and modernism, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Even if the workers do build a successful communist movement, and even if that movement generates a successful revolution, how, amid the flood tides of modern life, will they ever manage to build a solid communist society? What is to prevent the social

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forces that melt capitalism from melting communism as well? If all new relationships become obsolete before they can ossify, how can solidarity, fraternity and mutual aid be kept alive?16

Berman asks the same question that many asked themselves in the early Soviet Union: how can an accommodation be made between the world-changing energy of revolution and the need to consolidate its gains? In the 1920s in Russia construction became a powerful symbol of this transformation of energy into matter, of revolution into order, for better or for worse. The glass-domed world of Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (1920) resembles Maiakovskii’s own flawed utopias in implying a connection between construction and constriction and anticipates Berman’s concern that a communist society would necessarily have to “try to dam the flood by imposing radical restrictions, not merely on economic activity and enterprise [. . .] but on personal, cultural and political expression.”17 Nonetheless, despite its negative, anti-revolutionary associations, many modernist poets and painters aspired to the status of builders, because, unlike painting or poetry, architecture makes a direct and lasting impact on the existence of ordinary people and thus more adequately fulfils the avant-garde imperative that art should be united with life. What is more, circumstances aligned propitiously for would-be modernist makers in the first fifteen years or so after the revolution: industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization meant that there were buildings that needed to be built, as well as a general enthusiasm for new methods and styles of building, and, in the early years at least, a strong organizational base for avant-gardists within official bodies. It was in this atmosphere that artists like Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko attempted to transport their Constructivist ethos from the studio to the building site and organizations like OSA (the Organization of Contemporary Architects) gave a lasting physical form to Russian modernist principles. Maiakovskii did not himself try his hand at building, but in the late 1920s his magazine New Lef (a reincarnation of the earlier Lef, representing “the Left Front of the Arts”) was at the forefront of the change in rhetoric that replaced unfocused life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) with the more teleological and materialist lifebuilding (zhiznestroenie) and in his later poetry we can see the tension between construction and destruction gradually resolving in favor of the former, roughly in line with official discourse.18

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Although the shift in the national mood had begun earlier—Stalin’s policy of “socialism in one country,” announced in 1924, speaks obsessively about “building socialism”—it was only in about 1927 that construction became the master metaphor of Soviet life, combining with a revival of the militarist discourse of the Civil War to form a new rhetoric designed to mobilize the population in preparation for the grandiose industrialization projects of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32).19 Maiakovskii captured the tenor of the era in his hymn to the ambition and accomplishment of Soviet building, “Khrenov’s Story about Kuznetskstroi and the People of Kuznetsk” (1929).20 In the next decade, while literature would remain the dominant Soviet art form, it would increasingly pay obeisance to architecture, which became the most evident and most orthodox embodiment of Stalinist socialist realism.21 The evident transition from revolutionary dismantling to Stalinist construction has also prompted historians to employ architectural and monumental metaphors to explain the interconnected evolution of politics and culture in this period. Vladimir Paperny’s Architecture in the Age of Stalin, for instance, uses architecture to propose a broader binary opposition between the mobile, horizontal, uniform “Culture One” of the avant-garde and Stalinist “Culture Two,” which is associated with immobility, verticality, and hierarchy. Paperny’s persuasive structuralist framework might, however, be said to overaccentuate difference at the expense of the considerable continuities between the two cultures. Katerina Clark, therefore, suggests a less absolute division between “monumentalists” and “iconoclasts” that cut across art and politics until the monumentalists emerge triumphant in the 1930s.22 Finally, Platt has argued that Clark underplays the survival of anti-monumental currents in the 1930s, especially around the figure of Pushkin, and has adduced a further binary, albeit one characterized on both sides by ambivalence and hybridization, between “monumental” and “eschatological” chronotopes. For Platt, therefore, as for Groys, the distinction between the Russian avant-garde and Stalinism as cultural systems is primarily a shift in temporality. While the logic of the avant-garde remains reliant on the past, since the overthrow of tradition is its raison d’être, socialist realism models a “post-temporal Stalinist order,” in which the present both stands outside of history and subsumes it. The hybrid of monumental and eschatological chronotopes makes possible “a convergent or superimpositional model of time, [in which] the future and the past do not crowd out the present; rather, the threshold

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space of the present subsumes the entire normal temporal span, making all times equivalently ‘now.’”23 An examination of Maiakovskii’s monument mythology validates, to an extent, all three of these narratives for early Soviet culture, inasmuch as the diminishment of Maiakovskii’s desire to explode the trappings of the past, be they monuments or metaphors, reflects a culture that was becoming more interested in institutions than insurrections. As his reception of Pushkin will show, however, despite his ostentatious political loyalty and the new pressures of a postrevolutionary perspective, Maiakovskii’s model of the interaction of past, present, and future remained closer to its avant-garde roots than to Stalinist atemporality. In Maiakovskii’s work, iconoclasm (or idoloclasm) is replaced not by monumentalism, but rather by a conscious foregrounding of the Futurists’ ability to retain, remake, and revivify fossilized remnants of the past. The artifacts of yesteryear are recuperated, but without being subsumed into an all-consuming present; instead they survive but retain their mark of difference, in accordance with the Futurists’ hetero­ chronic concept of time. My focus on a single person, especially one as willful and idiosyncratic as Maiakovskii, reminds us that this transition between different temporalities and different artistic paradigms does not happen in abstract terms, but is implicated in the arcs of individual biographies.24 The extinguishing of the avant-garde is something that happens in people as well as to people. As such, to understand how the insouciant teenage Maiakovskii of 1911 became the glowering bronze of 1958, we have to look at the intersection of wider cultural trends with his individual identity and ethos. The recurring monument becomes a beacon (a maiak in Russian) that allows us to locate the poet’s position in relation to persistent debates. What can be done with the past? What is the role of the poet? And, more specifically, how can the Futurists maintain their claim to originality after the revolution, now they seem less like the dernier cri and more like yesterday’s bourgeois news? Maiakovskii’s postrevolutionary career can be divided into three phases according to his predominant attitude to monuments. The initial period, exemplified by poems such as “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” (1918) and “The Fifth International” (1922), recapitulates the idoloclastic energy of the ejection of Pushkin from the steamship of modernity and makes a similarly negative use of Pushkinian mythology in order to express Maiakovskii’s hostility to the past and promote a Futurist vision for postrevolutionary culture that is considerably more radical

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than that of the Bolshevik government. In the mid-1920s both the rivalry with the Kremlin and the animosity to the persistence of statues and of Pushkin recede, to be replaced by an uneasy recognition of the fact that the new world promised by the avant-garde must make accommodations for the authority of the state and for continuity with the past. Accordingly, in poems like “Jubilee Poem” and Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (both 1924), Maiakovskii’s use of Pushkinian mythology reveals a version of novelty that is based in remobilizing, not removing, as well as including considerably more reflection on the implications of his selfsubordination to the Soviet cause. Finally, in the last months of his life, the harassed and disenchanted poet returns to the monument motif, and the dialogue with Pushkin, for an ultimate reckoning on what the revolution had given him and what he had given the revolution in “At the Top of My Voice,” which captures the tone of his last years in its combination of fraught urgency with thinking sub specie aeternitatis.

Idoloclasm and Insolence The first postrevolutionary debates about statuary were not straightforward conflicts between a conservative group seeking to maintain continuity and another more radical faction bent on destruction. The government itself did not pursue a single, coherent policy, but rather oscillated back and forth between pro-monument and anti-monument positions. Thus in a decree of 12 April 1918 Lenin called for the removal of the “most hideous idols” of tsarism—to be replaced by temporary statues of left-wing heroes—but in that same year also sanctioned the establishment of the Section for Museums and Preservation of Monuments, which worked for the protection of existing art and architecture on the grounds of lasting aesthetic value.25 The extent of the tension within official structures at this time is evident in the fact that the most implacable opponent of the Section for Museums was not the peasantry smashing up palaces in the countryside, but the avant-garde newspaper The Art of the Commune, which shared with the Section for Museums the capacious bureaucratic umbrella of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment and which, thanks in part to the involvement of Maiakov­ skii and his friend Osip Brik, vigorously promoted the Futurist position. Specifically, the editors of The Art of the Commune considered government policy on monuments to be reprehensibly toothless. For the newly confident left avant-garde, the persistence of prerevolutionary monuments was not only a problem in itself, but also an emblem of the wider

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failure of the political revolution to galvanize Russia’s cultural and spiritual transfiguration. One of the clearest and most controversial expressions of this antimonumental sentiment, and of Futurist chutzpah, was the publication in The Art of the Commune of Maiakovskii’s poem “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” (1918), which, partly by invoking the figure of Pushkin, manages to magnify a targeted critique of the continued presence of a monument to Tsar Alexander III in St. Petersburg into a wider polemic: А царь Александр на площади Восстаний стоит? Туда динамиты! Выстроили пушки по опушке, глухи к белогвардейской ласке. А почему не атакован Пушкин? (2:16) [But Tsar Aleksandr | is standing | on Uprisings Square? | Send dynamite! | They have lined up cannons around the edge, | Deaf to the affection of the White Guard. | But why | is Pushkin not attacked?]

The virulent hostility to Pushkin of 1912–13 has been revived, with the addition of bellicose Civil War rhetoric but with the familiar aim of using extremist language to draw attention to the Futurists in a confused literary scene.26 This time, however, the stakes are somewhat higher and the threat posed by Pushkin subtly different. In the first place, the revolution represented a clear new beginning, a threshold beyond which obsolete art should not pass. Maiakovskii is reported to have said in 1918 at a debate about “The Proletariat and Art” that he was “prepared to lay chrysanthemums on Pushkin’s grave. But if corpses come out of the graves and want to influence the creativity of our times, then we need to tell them that there is no room for them among the living” (12:453).27 The revolution marks a hard boundary between then and now, between the living and the dead, and the revenant Pushkin is most dangerous not as a competitor, but as a malign influence on the real rivals to the Futurists’ claim to originality—the Bolsheviks themselves, who, as the inaugurators of this new era, seemed to be the trailblazers of authentic originality in culture, even more than working-class groups

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like Proletkul’t.28 Maiakovskii’s solution is to use the Bolsheviks’ own tactics against them, politicizing and militarizing culture and equating the old art with the hated enemies of Communism in order to highlight the unfinished business of October. The Futurists are, he claims, still at the cutting edge. It is a testament to how seriously the Bolshevik leadership took this presumptuous appropriation of control over the cultural agenda, even at a time when they were notionally indifferent to such petty squabbles, that Lenin instructed Anatolii Lunacharskii, the head of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, responsible for cultural administration), to quash the extremism of “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate.” Lunacharskii’s rebuttal article, “A Spoonful of Antidote,” which was included in the next issue of The Art of the Commune, continues Maiakovskii’s architectural imagery but upbraids the paper for presuming to speak on behalf of the government and criticizes their “destructive tendencies,” arguing that “too often in the history of humanity we have seen how fastidious fashion has promoted something new, while striving to turn what is old into ruins as quickly as possible.”29 That Pushkin is not incidental to this argument becomes evident in the editorial response to Lunacharskii, which Maiakovskii likely had a hand in.30 The editors make the reasonable—and witheringly sarcastic— defense that poetry should not be read literally: The destructive tendencies displayed by employees of the newspaper can be seen only in Maiakovskii’s poem in issue No. 2 of The Art of the Commune. The editors, in printing this poem, supposed that one of the most solid cultural achievements of European literature in recent times is freedom from literal interpretation. Not a single contemporary critic would have taken it upon himself to state that Pushkin in his poem “Burn with the Word the Hearts of Men” [i.e., “The Prophet”] is calling on the poet to burn the hearts of his nearest and dearest with incendiary materials of some sort. [. . .] We considered it our duty to feature the verses in question, although they could provoke a false interpretation in certain circles untutored in poetry.31

As in the manifestos, Pushkin, the archetypal poet, is used to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the Futurists’ opponents.32 Somewhat disingenuously, considering how much more explicit Maiakovskii’s military imagery is than the elusive metaphors of “The Prophet,” Pushkin is

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used to draw a line between the spheres of activity of art and politics: just as Lunacharskii had warned The Art of the Commune away from the business of government, so its editors imply that the state is not competent to try its hand at literary criticism (a particular dig at sometime author Lunacharskii).33 By comparing Maiakovskii to Pushkin they attempt to not only normalize (and elevate) his position in the literary field, but also to expose Lunacharskii’s double standards and impute to him, quite unfairly, a certain naiveté. The invocation of Pushkin’s most famous statement of his vatic power, along with its subversive connotations, is tantamount to a threat: the state may have control over urban space and over the press, but the hearts and minds of the people belong to the poets. Lunacharskii, who was constantly required to mediate between different interest groups in this period, did not always find himself on the opposing side to Maiakovskii. In fact, when he authorized an extended print run for Maiakovskii’s epic poem 150,000,000 in 1921, he infuriated Lenin, who wrote the following note: Are you not ashamed to vote for the publication of 5,000 copies of Maiakovskii’s 150,000,000? Rubbish, stupid, arrant stupidity and pretentiousness. I think that you should print only 1 in 10 of such things and not more than 1500 copies for libraries and eccentrics. And flog Lunacharskii for Futurism.34

The contents of this note became known to Maiakovskii, who incorporated them in preparatory drafts of his next epic The Fifth International (1922), in which a hyperbolically huge alter ego of the poet surveys the world and foments global revolution. The unpublished section of the manuscript that responds to Lenin’s note also draws heavily on Pushkinian statue mythology, and especially The Bronze Horseman’s use of the moving statue as a metaphor for the uncanny power of the autocrat. Lenin meets Maiakovskii in a direct exchange: Ленин медленно подымает вечища Разжимаются губ чугуны Раскатываясь пустотою города гулкова на мрамор цоколя обрушивая вес загрохотали чугунобуково ядра выпадающих

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пудовых словес. Садитесь товарищ а где-то в уме там: носит чушь такую пороть его видят занят стою монументом за чем только смотрит эта Фотиева (4:305) [Lenin | slowly | lifts | his huge eyelids | the iron of his lips relaxes | rolling through the emptiness of the echoing city | crashing their weight down on the marble of the socle | they start rumbling like iron | the cannonballs of dropping-out | poodheavy words. | Take a seat, comrade. | But somewhere up there in his mind: | “He’s talking such rubbish flog him | they can see I’m busy | I stand as a monument | watched over only by that Fotieva.”]35

Although there is in the depiction of Lenin a clear reminiscence of Vii, the chthonic monster with heavy stone eyelids from Gogol’s tale of the same name, the primary source for Maiakovskii’s imagined meeting with Lenin is Pushkin. This is suggested not only by Lenin’s iron face and his standing “as a monument” but by verbal echoes of The Bronze Horseman in the words pustoiu (empty) and zagrokhotali (started rumbling), which are taken from the scene in which Evgenii is pursued by Peter’s statue.36 Maiakovskii fuses the myth of the clash of the benighted citizen and the mighty monarch from The Bronze Horseman with both the doomed love triangle between young woman, young man, and revenant statue of The Stone Guest and the meeting of the eponymous hero and the mountain-sized talking head in Ruslan and Liudmila. Lenin may share Peter’s autocratic power, but the transformation he undergoes is in the opposite direction: he is not a statue that comes to life, but a man that has become a monument. Like the Commendatore statue in The Stone Guest, his movement is not that of a mortal being but instead stiff, slow, and inexorable. This does not diminish his power, however, because, unlike the Horseman, Lenin is not silent. The Bolshevik leader—the maker of speeches, signer of decrees, and author of anti-Futurist memos—is mighty in what he says more than what he does. What is more, while Evgenii never stands a chance against Peter, Maiakovskii shares much of the cunning, virility, and impudence of Don Guan and Ruslan, figures with whom he had previously identified

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and who both hope to win a prize from their older rival.37 He is considerably more nimble than the monumental Lenin and not deterred by the claim that the redoubts of power are impenetrable: Владимир Ильич Напрасно зовете Что ей воскресать пустяковины ради Меня ль секретарша и дверь озаботит И сквозь грудь я пролезу. Радий. (4:306) [Vladimir Il’ich | In vain you call | That she should resurrect herself for a trifle | Would a secretary and a door bother me | I can crawl even through someone’s chest. | Radium.]

The Kremlin is depicted as a kingdom of the dead, unable to keep out Maiakovskii’s intangible energy, which is likened to the modern miracle of X-rays. Maiakovskii’s self-identification with folkloric heroes and giants carried over into the published text, in which he compares himself to the bogatyr Sviatogor. Maiakovskii, however, has also taken on some of the aspects of statuesque immobility ascribed to Lenin in the draft variant. In a punning self-description, he likens himself to the giant head in Ruslan and Liudmila: Ия на этом самом на море горой-головой плыву головастить — второй какой брат черноморий. (4:127) [And I | on that very | on the sea | will, as a mountainous head, swim and be a head | a second brother of Chernomor]

Similarly, in the final text it is Maiakovskii, not Lenin, who is likened to Pushkin’s Peter the Great. He humorously inverts the famous opening of The Bronze Horseman, in which Peter stands full of great thoughts: “Стою спокойный. Без единой думы” (I stand calm. Without a single thought) (4:128). Maiakovskii is, self-effacingly, a transmitter, not a formulator of ideas, but he nevertheless attributes to himself, not Lenin,

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the ability to change the world. This will to power comes at a cost, however, because in Fifth International it is also Maiakovskii, not Lenin, whose humanity is infringed by transformation into an immobile object: Казалось: миг — и постройки масса рухнет с ног со всех двух. Но я оковался мыслей каркасом. Выметаллизировал дух. (4:117) [It might seem: | Just a moment | and the mass of construction | will collapse from my legs | from all two. | But I am fettered in a carcass of thoughts. | I have metallized my spirit.]

Maiakovskii’s metamorphosis into a machine seems to anticipate a more general unwilding of the world. At the end of the poem he sees the refulgent earth of the future as a fulfilment of the fantasies of utopian socialists like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, a land of gilt and marble in which rivers have been replaced with canals. Pain and hunger may have ended, but with them so has all activity, so is this really a happy ending? The poet seems content enough, but the fact that Maiakovskii stopped writing at this point and did not make good his promise to explore the twenty-first-century Communist utopia beneath him suggests that the gleaming postrevolutionary paradise is somehow suspect. Maiakovskii shows a marked preference for the process of attaining utopia over the achieved condition itself. While the theme features prominently in Man (1918) and The Bedbug (1929), the first such anodyne idyll occurs in Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy (1913), in which the poet comes to regret ascending to the throne of a surprisingly tedious new world. The disappointment of the utopia described in the second act of the play is anticipated in the first with the erection of a monument, recalling Pushkin’s own poetic monument, to the giant stone woman who started the revolution that created this new world. Like Lenin in The Fifth International, the leader of the revolt is immobilized by being immortalized and the energy of revolution cannot be maintained.38 As Jakobson was the first to observe, Maiakovskii repeats Pushkin’s interest in the moving statue but inverts its valence: movement is

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not disturbing, but rather essential and it is stasis that is truly frightening, both in people and in politics.39

Moderation and Mobilization As the 1920s progressed and the energetic explosion of 1917 became more and more an object of historical memory and less and less a fact of everyday life, Maiakovskii continued to struggle against the petrifaction of revolutionary dynamism. Indeed, this battle seemed even more important when the ambition and austerity of War Communism gave way to the compromise and relative comfort that ensued from Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which restored a limited private market and, in the eyes of the Futurists, risked a return to superficial bourgeois cupidity. For Maiakovskii, the onset of NEP coincided with the end of his participation in the ROSTA windows campaign, in which poets and artists collaborated on propaganda posters sponsored by the state telegraph agency, and, therefore, with the end of a period that he described as the busiest and the happiest in his career.40 In his personal life, too, Maiakovskii tended to prefer busy striving to quiet contentment, and it was with regret that, in 1924, his turbulent relationship with Lili Brik entered a new phase characterized less by passion and jealousy than chaste, biddable domesticity. Contemplating his situation that summer, Maiakovskii pictured himself, somewhat ironically, on the verge of a new era, since he was now “free from love and posters” (6:48). That line comes from “Jubilee Poem,” which was written in response to two major events of 1924: the celebrations for the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth and, more obliquely, the death of Lenin in January. The leader’s death, and especially the official reaction to it, further convinced Maiakovskii that the attenuation of revolutionary energy he had sensed since 1918 was now irreversible. And he was not far wrong: Clark argues persuasively that 1924 marked the beginning of a new mini-epoch in Soviet life, which was precipitated in part by the failure of a Communist insurrection in Germany in late 1923 and which prefigured Stalinism in its increasingly heavy-handed censorship and preference for homegrown “Soviet” values over cosmopolitan, revolutionary ones.41 This change in political mood music was reflected in a shift in Maiakovskii’s attitude to Lenin. While earlier poems had imagined Lenin as his rival, he began to adopt a more positive attitude toward the Bolshevik

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leader, who had also warmed to Maiakovskii, if only slightly. After Lenin’s death, Maiakovskii came to see him less as an agent of petrifaction and more as a potential symbol of resistance to it. This change is evident in his plangent epic Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (1924), which presents a very positive characterization of Lenin, who is both humanized and almost apotheosized.42 He is, for instance, granted the Pushkinian ability to set fire to the hearts of men (6:235), denied to him in the “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” dispute. This Pushkinian reminiscence in the poem seemingly activates an implicit Bronze Horseman subtext, which reveals the ambiguous relationship between Lenin and Pushkin’s monarch. Lenin is again likened to Peter: his bourgeois opponents recall Evgenii in their challenge to the titanic leader, which uses the word uzho, meaning “soon” and often implying imminent violence, that Evgenii uses against Peter’s statue: Буржуи прочли — погодите, выловим. — животики пятят доводом веским — ужо им покажут Духонин с Корниловым, покажут ужо им Гучков с Керенским. (6:284) [The bourgeois read it: “Wait, we’ll fish him out.” | They stick out their little bellies like a weighty argument. | “They’ll soon be shown what for by Dukhonin and Kornilov | They’ll soon be shown what for by Guchkov and Kerenskii.”]

The impudent bourgeois meet the same fate as Evgenii: Но фронт без боя слова эти взяли — деревня и город декретами залит, и даже

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безграмотным сердце прожег. Мы знаем, не нам, а им показали, какое такое бывает “ужо.” (6:235) [But these words took the front without a fight | the countryside and the city were flooded with decrees | and he burned the hearts even of the illiterate. | We know that it was them, not us, who were shown | what “what for” really means.]

Maiakovskii builds on an association, implicit in The Bronze Horseman, between the awesome power of the monarch and the flood that Peter has indirectly caused by hubristically building his city on a marsh. Lenin resembles Peter, the builder who shares characteristics with the force of elemental revolutionary destruction, the flood.43 We see here evidence of Lenin, despite his continuing association with autocracy, becoming a symbol for revolutionary energy. Maiakovskii was horrified to hear of the plans to preserve and publicly display Lenin’s dead body in a pyramid on Red Square like a latter-day pharaoh.44 Ancient Egypt, derided in “Slap,” had reemerged to provide the window-dressing for the transfiguration of flesh into an ersatz statue, making a reality of the petrifaction Maiakovskii had described three years previously in The Fifth International. The death of Lenin seemed to confirm the harsh reality that, despite the avant-garde’s hope for a utopian escape, the revolution was beholden to time after all.45 This was probably no great surprise, but it did bring with it the realization that the Bolshevik leadership was not raging against this transition from kairos to chronos, but celebrating it, eagerly installing death and retrospection at the center of the Soviet project. Maiakovskii’s counterproposal to this ghoulish display is presented in the hagiographic Vladimir Il’ich Lenin and the shorter, thematically similar “Komsomol Poem.” In the former, Maiakovskii criticizes the morbid image of his preserved corpse, which, he argues, immortalizes not Lenin’s life, but his infirmity and death: “Люди видят замурованного в мрамор, | гипсом холодеющего старика” (People see him walled up in marble, | an old man growing cold in plaster) (6:252). However, he also elevates Lenin into a cosmic symbol for vitality: “Ленин и ‘Жизнь’ — товарищи”

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(Lenin and “Life” are comrades) (6:36). This abstraction serves to remove Lenin from the grips of linear time, something very evident in the following famous lines, which were quoted on countless Soviet posters despite their Christian resonance: “Ленин — жил, | Ленин — жив, | Ленин — будет жить” (Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live) (6:36).46 Lenin’s bodily transformation into a statue also signaled his instrumentalization at the hands of both political successors and unscrupulous profiteers. In an article in Lef, the magazine he and Osip Brik founded in 1923, Maiakovskii urged the makers of memorabilia not to “trade in Lenin” and produced a spoof advertisement of Lenin busts to ridicule the kitsch Leniniana that emerged after his death.47 The attitude to Lenin adopted in this article is reminiscent of the Futurists’ prerevolutionary critique of the cult of Pushkin as a deadening fetishization: just as Lenin memorabilia is mocked here, so Maiakovskii had poured scorn on a Pushkin-branded cigarette case in “Hymn to a Critic” (1915).48

The Pushkin Jubilee In the Lef article Maiakovskii again stresses Lenin’s true immortality, framed in literary terms: “Lenin is still our contemporary. He is among the living. We need him alive, not as a dead man. For that reason learn from Lenin, but don’t canonize him.”49 This anti-mummification sentiment recurs in a different form in “Jubilee Poem”: “Я люблю вас, но живого, а не мумию” (I love you, but alive, not as a mummy) (6:54). The addressee here is Pushkin and, in this poem at least, Maiakovskii is more exercised by the fetishization of Pushkin in his jubilee year than by the nascent cult of Lenin. This government-sanctioned celebration of Pushkin gave Maiakovskii an important opportunity not only to restate his argument for the Futurists’ right to cultural hegemony, but also to redefine their relationship to Pushkin and promote a new version of originality more consonant with the demands of the era. Throughout the 1920s the argument about what should be carried over from bourgeois culture often centered on Pushkin. In response to the allegedly nihilistic anti-traditionalism of Proletkul’t and the Futurists, Lunacharskii, following Lenin’s lead, promoted the necessity of continuity, a trend that culminated in 1923’s campaign to “learn from the classics” and in the 1924 Pushkin Jubilee, which also marked an important step in the party’s increasing involvement in literature and in the development of a new Soviet incarnation of Pushkin.50 In a range of

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speeches and articles Lunacharskii argued that Pushkin should occupy a central place in the new culture: It is unthinkable that, in the name of this renewal we have hoped for, we should reduce ourselves to the state of a naked man on the naked earth. [. . .] The proletariat is able to renew the culture of mankind, but in deep-rooted connection with and dependence on the culture of the past.51

Moreover, although Pushkin was held out as an exemplar primarily for his mastery of form, in June 1924 Lunacharskii praised his work not only for its technical virtues but also for its “emotional and ideological content,” which was “of value to all humanity.”52 Lunacharskii echoed Trotskii, who in an essay in his 1923 book Literature and Revolution dismissed the Futurists’ possible contribution to the development of proletarian culture and praised the classics, saying that the working class “does not know the old literature, it still has to commune with it, it still has to master Pushkin, to absorb him, and so overcome him.”53 This is not only a matter of technical mastery, as another essay in that collection demonstrates: “What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoyevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc.”54 In many ways the government saw in Pushkin a safe alternative to the internecine squabbles of active cultural groups and especially the demagogic Futurists, whom Lunacharskii describes as Pushkin’s defeated rivals: “Even the most turbulent Futurist figures are now bowing down before him”; Maiakovskii is said to talk about Pushkin “with reverence.”55 A new love triangle has emerged: Pushkin and Maiakov­ skii seem to compete for the affection of the regime.56 Lunacharskii refers here to a speech made by Maiakovskii on 26 May 1924 in which he not only spoke fondly of Pushkin, but also seemed to endorse the use of the classics as the basis for the new art: So Anatolii Vasil’evich [Lunacharskii] reproaches us for not respecting our ancestors, but a month ago, while I was working, when Brik started to read Eugene Onegin, which I know by heart, I could not tear myself away and listened till the end and for two days I wandered round under the spell of this quatrain:

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Я знаю: жребий мой измерен, [sic] Но чтоб продлилась жизнь моя, Я утром должен быть уверен, Что с вами днем увижусь я. [I know: my lot has been measured out [sic] | but so that my life continues | I must be sure this morning | That I will see you in the day.] Of course, we will return hundreds of times to such works of art and study these incredibly sincere artistic examples that provide endless satisfaction and a true formulation of a thought taken, dictated, and felt. (12:266)

We should not necessarily join Lunacharskii in seeing Maiakovskii’s speech as evidence of submission to Pushkin, not least because Maiakovskii changes the first line in the quotation.57 Nonetheless, Maiakovskii had certainly been trying to change the public perception of his attitude to Pushkin for at least a year. As its prominence in Trotskii’s Literature and Revolution shows, the ejection of Pushkin from the steamship of modernity was now more of a millstone than a calling card. In the first issue of Lef Maiakovskii establishes the continuity of the present moment with Futurism’s prewar high point but also signals a new era in which attitudes to the literature of the past have been modified to fit the new priorities of the Soviet Union: “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi from the steamship of Modernity” is our slogan from 1912 [. . .] Now the 150,000,000 classics are an ordinary textbook. Anyway, we are even now able to welcome these books as books that are no worse or better than others, helping illiterates use them to learn. (12:45)

While Maiakovskii is willing to abandon his former extremism, he denies that there is anything exceptional about the classics and is keen to limit their role to technical education for fear of a zombie takeover, saying that “we will fight against the transfer of the methods of the dead into contemporary art” (12:45). Maiakovskii was keen that the public recognize this distinction between his position and that of Luna­ charskii, to the extent that he redacted the printed version of his May

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1924 speech, adding the caveat that: “this is in no way similar to the slogan ‘Back to Pushkin.’ My attitude to this question is in my poem ‘Jubilee Poem’” (12:266).58

Incompetence and Irreverence Although the title of “Jubilee Poem” baselessly positions itself as a quasi-official publication, it is a much more eccentric and intimate affair than that suggests, consisting of a conversation between a distressed Maiakovskii and Pushkin’s statue in Moscow—although it could hardly be called a dialogue, as Maiakovskii dominates. The attitude to Pushkin in the poem is double-edged, revealing elements of essential kinship between Pushkin and the Futurists, but also downplaying Pushkin’s alleged mastery and establishing the Futurists as more suitable tutors for the new generation. From the familiar greeting of the first line onward, Maiakovskii constantly makes Pushkin his equal or subordinate, especially in technical matters. This is particularly evident when Maiakov­skii has grown in confidence toward the end of the poem: Были б живы — стали бы по Лефу соредактор. Я бы и агитки вам доверить мог. Раз бы показал: — вот так-то, мол, и так-то . . . Вы б смогли — у вас хороший слог. Я дал бы вам жиркость и сукна, в рекламу б выдал гумских дам. (Я даже ямбом подсюсюкнул, чтоб только

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быть приятней вам.) Вам теперь пришлось бы бросить ямб картавый. (6:53) [If you were alive you would be a coeditor of Lef. | I could even entrust agitprop material to you. | If I showed you once—“Like so, you see, like so . . .”— | You would manage: you write well. | I would give you the perfume and cloths | I’d give you the GUM ladies for advertising, | To sell perfume and cloth to all the ladies. | (I’ve even started simpering in iambs | Just to please you.) | Now you’d have to drop the guttural iamb.]

Maiakovskii imagines that a contemporary Pushkin would be a Futurist, contrary to what Lunacharskii and others might believe. He would have to adapt to Maiakovskii’s vision of the role of the Soviet poet, abandoning his preferred meter and subject matter and instead churning out the agitprop posters that Maiakovskii has left behind. To make Pushkin seem even more Futurist, Maiakovskii has him speak like a pugnacious hooligan: “Тyшу вперед стремя, | я с удовольствием справлюсь с двоими, | а разозлить — и с тремя” (Driving this carcass forward | I’d happily deal with two | and if you get me mad, even with three) (10:50).59 Pushkin’s tough talking is part of a different, but equally crucial, element of Maiakovskii’s response to the jubilee. Just as he had drawn attention to Lenin’s humanity in Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, here he distances Pushkin from appropriation by the state by emphasizing the mundane and humorous aspects of his poetry and personality that were excluded from the sanitized official version, both in order to counteract the deadening effects of canonization and to point to Pushkin’s affinities with the Futurists’ own rebellious identity.60 This was not a new tactic for the Futurists, and it was one that Maiakovskii continued to turn to, for instance in a dispute about cinema in 1928 in which he criticized the bio­ pic The Poet and the Tsar for depicting Pushkin as a saintly figure, when “we know Pushkin as a womanizer, a bon vivant, a rake, a drunkard” (12:355). Writing in Lef in 1923, Sergei Tret’iakov even argued that “mischievous Pushkin” had played “a Futurist role” in the literature of the time, by opening up elite poetry to the influence of folk genres. In words that echo Khlebnikov’s note from 1915, he contrasts the “dead Pushkin in academy tomes and on Tverskoi Boulevard” to “the living

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Pushkin of today, living with us today in the explosive words and ideas of the Futurists, who continue today the work on the language that he did the day before yesterday.”61 In a similar spirit, in “Jubilee Poem” Maiakov­skii warns Pushkin away from his official exegetes—“Бойтесь пушкинистов” (Beware of Pushkinists) (6:54)—and underlines his rebelliousness and unorthodoxy, emphasizing his non-Russian background, his hell-raising youth, and, in an echo of the Futurists’ own position, his rivalry with established poetic authorities: Вот арап! а состязается — с Державиным . . . Я люблю вас, но живого, а не мумию. Навели хрестоматийный глянец. Вы по-моему при жизни — думаю — тоже бушевали. Африканец! (10:54–55) [Here’s a Moor! And he’s competing with Derzhavin | I love you, but alive, not as a mummy. | A textbook gloss has been applied. | You also while you were alive, I think, | caused trouble. You African!]

Maiakovskii reminds us that Pushkin is not a placid source of unassailable formal and moral values, but, like Maiakovskii, a controversial figure. In this same vein, a collective Lef editorial in 1923 compared contemporary criticism of Maiakovskii to Pushkin’s feuds and rivalries, as a “historical necessity”: “Every Pushkin has his Shishkovs and Bulgarins.”62 Pushkin too is party to what Tynianov calls the “struggle and replacement” processes of literary evolution.63

Strolls with Pushkin Despite this emphasis on conflict between poetic generations, Maiakovskii’s literal and metaphorical dialogue with Pushkin in “Jubilee

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Poem” also presupposes a different model of originality from that evident in “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate,” one grounded in recontextualization and adaptation. In 1927, at a public debate with the critic Viacheslav Polonskii, Maiakovskii explained the evolution of his approach to the past, and to Pushkin in particular, and distanced himself from idoloclasm: “Burn it, down with everything old? No. It’s better to use the old culture as a textbook for the present day, so long as it does not crush modern living culture.”64 He still imagines the past as a threatening physical impediment, but no longer calls for its destruction. This approach is enacted in “Jubilee Poem,” in which Maiakovskii invites the Pushkin monument, a bulky relic of the past, to step down from his pedestal and accompany him on a walk through the streets of nocturnal Moscow, thus transforming an obstacle into a companion. During the debate with Polonskii, Maiakovskii explained his specific rationale for mobilization: My poem dedicated to Pushkin is a way of shaking up Pushkin the Academician and of constructing the sort of Pushkin that a person with a certain revolutionary enthusiasm can talk about as if he were his poet. [. . .] We are using not a harness, but a means of steering the monument in order to be able to still talk to this Pushkin.65

Pushkin is brought into the present and made to conform to its norms— by working for Lef, for instance—rather than conferring his own extrahistorical virtues on the young Soviet society. Making Pushkin move was, however, not only a metaphor for a more flexible and instrumental approach to the past, but also a way of overcoming the idol and making Pushkin modern. Many people in the 1920s, in the Soviet Union as in the West, characterized their era as one of intense movement.66 The technological developments that had initially inspired the paeans to mobility of the Italian Futurists in the early 1910s—the automobile, the airplane, and the cinema—had developed and been disseminated, prompting a widespread sense of dynamism that was only increased by the rapid changes to Europe’s established political and social order after World War I. Although there were new aspects to the 1920s iteration of the need for speed—primarily in the political context, but also in the emergence of new art forms like jazz—it was still a variation on the fundamental modernist values of freedom, novelty, and rupture. In addition, therefore, to the contrast with the idoloclasm of “Slap,” in which the monumental

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Pushkin is cast down, we can also see continuities between the ambulant Pushkin of 1924 and the “white marble Pushkin dancing the tango” of “Go to Hell.”67 While in the 1920s there was less acknowledgment of the direct influences on early Futurist dynamism—movement-obsessed artistic and intellectual currents such as multiperspectival Cubism or Bergson’s “flux”—the emphasis on shifting perspective was the same. In fact, animate statues are a constant in Maiakovskii’s career: in addition to the giant stone woman of Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, there is “The Final St. Petersburg Fairy Tale” (1916), in which a rather genial Peter the Great escapes his statue and descends from his pedestal, not in order to punish insolent citizens, but rather to escape the boredom of being “a prisoner shackled in his own city” (1:129).68 Even in Maiakovskii’s final, unfinished play Moscow Is Burning, stone Romanov eagles come to life (11:366). Despite this continuity, however, static anthropomorphic memorials seemed even more reprehensible in the postrevolutionary age because they became associated with the wider category of nostalgic clutter that Maiakovskii saw as evidence of a return to petit bourgeois domesticity occasioned by the NEP. In “On Trash” (1921) Maia­kovskii critiques both fetishistic commemoration and backsliding into acquisitiveness by describing a picture of Karl Marx that comes to life in order to denounce the indulgence he sees around him (2:74). As with other statues, Maiakovskii had long associated the Pushkin monument in Moscow with imprisonment of the spirit. In an epigram aimed against Briusov in 1916 for completing Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” Maiakovskii describes Pushkin as “shackled forever in [. . .] bronze” (1:123). While Briusov reduces the ambiguity of Pushkin’s unfinished work by providing an ending, Maiakovskii, in poems like “Jubilee Poem” and “The Final St. Petersburg Fairytale,” is less reverential but also less confining: Maiakovskii expands the original’s semiotic potential precisely by eschewing genuflection in favor of gentle, obvious parody and faux-naive misquotation. “Jubilee Poem’s” irreverent updating of Pushkinian poetic mythology was, therefore, not entirely unprecedented but rather a response to the resurgence of the cult of Pushkin in a new Soviet guise. As in 1913, the new Soviet adoration of Pushkin was understood in religious terms, as an outbreak of idolatrous paganism. In 1922 Tynianov pleaded for an end to the exceptional status afforded to Pushkin: “Historical literary study, taking full account of the value of phenomena, must break with fetishism.”69 This continuity notwithstanding, the upheaval of the revolution had changed the significance of the widespread perception of Pushkin as an ahistorical phenomenon. Less radical cultural figures looked to the

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transcendent Pushkinian genius as a source of stability at a disorienting time and, as Fet had done on its opening, welcomed the immobility of the Pushkin statue as a symbol of continuity amidst chaos.70 Tsvetaeva, for instance, viewed the Pushkin monument as a “vision of inviolability and immutability,” and Briusov hymned its serenity in “To Maksim Gor’kii in July 1917,” a poem based on a real event that describes the monument rebuffing an attack by boorish provincial hooligans with divine silence and indifference: Но неизменен, в новых бурях света, Его спокойный и прекрасный лик; На вопль детей он не дает ответа, Задумчив и божественно велик.71 [But unchanged, in the new storms of the world, | is his calm and beautiful face; | He gives no reply to the shrieking of children, | Thoughtful and divinely great.]

Although many in the intelligentsia would not have welcomed the comparison, this valorization of Pushkin’s statuesque stillness has affinities with the model of Pushkinian inheritance proposed by Lunacharskii. In an article published in June 1924, Lunacharskii emphasizes a similar sense of continuity as part of an argument that it is not the intelligentsia but the proletarian poets who are the true guarantors of Pushkin’s cultural ascendancy, since they do not need to “return to Pushkin” but have always been with him, whereas more conservative poets have trivialized him.72 Lunacharskii, like Briusov and others, emphasizes Pushkin’s calmness and suggests that Maiakovskii should cede to Pushkin because the Futurist is too much of a rabble-rouser to be of use in the present stage of more stable revolutionary development. Writers should instead take inspiration from Pushkin’s persist­ent clarity because, Luna­ charskii says, they need “to express this calm, joyful, and self-assured construction, since we want not only to thrust upward like a fountain, but also to spread out like an entire lake.”73 On the one hand, Maiakovskii agreed with Lunacharskii that Pushkin should be reassessed in the light of the new Soviet reality and be treated as a point of departure rather than a link with the past—a commitment to change that was a principled position for Maiakovskii, but also a pragmatic one, since, by showing a poet was not confined to their prerevolutionary identity, Pushkin served as a useful cipher for Maiakov­s kii’s own tacit self-transformations. On the other hand,

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Maiakovskii’s mobilization of Pushkin presented an alternative to the imagery of quiet, cumulative, impersonal construction suggested by Lunacharskii. The mobile Pushkin, whom Maiakovskii brings to life at the beginning of the poem and returns to his imprisoning pedestal at the end, foregrounds the avant-garde poet’s ability to animate and control the past. The mobilization of the monument is party to a wider strategy promoted by members of the avant-garde who wished to make a positive contribution to the city and the country without forsaking their modernist principles, and who were thus faced with the question of how to engage with architecture without being passéist, stolid, or restrictive. One popular solution was to imagine that buildings should reflect the era’s dynamism by being mobile. As early as 1915 Khlebnikov had imagined that the domiciles of the future would be glass boxes on wheels and in 1923 in Lef Boris Arvatov defended the practicality of rotating buildings.74 After 1917, mobility also provided a solution to the problem posed by the increasing demand from above that the history and prehistory of the revolution receive some physical recognition in the landscape of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Writing in The Art of the Commune in 1919, the critic Nikolai Punin argued that monuments should become places of “the most intense movement” in order to avoid becoming embodiments of political stasis.75 Punin takes as his inspiration Tatlin’s famous design for a monument to the Third International, which was intended to rotate constantly. Maiakovskii shared Punin’s passion for the energy and innovation of Tatlin’s project, describing it as “the first monument without a beard.”76 While Tatlin’s extraordinary tower is indeed far from nostalgic—it is a monument to a political organization that had only just been created—it does reference the past, taking the open ironwork of the Eiffel Tower, the symbol of capitalist grandeur, and giving it a Soviet twist, quite literally, by transforming the vertical pinnacle into a spinning spiral.77 In “Jubilee Poem,” written five years later, when retrospection and stasis seemed to have tightened their grip on the Soviet Union, Maiakovskii adopts a similar strategy in regard to Pushkin’s monument and his legacy: embrace the artifacts of the past, by all means, but make them dance to your tune.

Death and Intertexts The removal of Pushkin from the remote and ahistorical realm of commemoration effected by Maiakovskii’s mobilization of the monument

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also occurs at an intertextual level in “Jubilee Poem.” As in Khlebni­ kov’s “Lonely Player,” Pushkinian mythology is shown to be embedded in history, both derived from his predecessors and evolved by his successors. Moreover, this mythology is doubly historically contingent because Maiakovskii uses the diversity of iterations of Pushkinian mythology as a means of addressing his present concerns about the role of the poet. As such, “Jubilee Poem” is both a snapshot of the tensions between the modernist poet and the modern state in the early 1920s, and a window into Maiakovskii’s intense preoccupation with his own mortality. Maiakovskii’s eventual suicide in 1930 was a shock even to his close friends, but it did not come entirely without warning. Not only had he tried to take his own life on multiple occasions, but his poetry was replete with references to suicide and ruminations on life and death. The meeting with Pushkin’s statue in “Jubilee Poem” seems to take place on another of these dark nights of the soul for the poet, who appears to be less lifelike than the statue he addresses: Дайте руку! Вот грудная клетка. Слушайте, уже не стук, а стон; тревожусь я о нем, в щенка смиренном львенке. Я никогда не знал, что столько тысяч тонн в моей позорно легкомыслой головенке. Я тащу вас. Удивляетесь, конечно? Стиснул? Больно? Извините, дорогой. (6:47) [Give me your hand, please. Here’s my rib cage. Listen, not a knocking anymore, but a groaning | I’m worried about him, this lion cub that’s been tamed into a puppy. | I never knew that there were so many thousands of tons | in my shamefully lightweight little head. | I’ll drag you. You’re surprised, of course? | Did I pinch you? Is it sore? Sorry, my friend.]

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While Maiakovskii seems to be saying that his heart has stopped beating and started groaning, he is more than just dead, he has become the statue of the Commendatore from The Stone Guest. His request for Pushkin’s hand echoes the statue’s words to Don Guan—“Дай руку” (Give me your hand)—and he has the same crushing grip, which hurts a surprisingly tender Pushkin. The “knocking” (stuk) that has stopped recalls the ominous sound of the Commendatore’s approach.78 Maiakovskii uses The Stone Guest to think through the breakdown in his relationship with Lili Brik, which was caused by her support for her lover of two years, the politician Aleksandr Krasnoshchekov, who had recently been imprisoned. Maiakovskii returns to the adultery leitmotif later, noting that even now there are “all sorts of hunters after our wives” and using menacingly contemporary terms to describe Georges D’Anthès, the young man whose amorous interest in Pushkin’s wife provoked the fatal duel: Сукин сын Дантес! Великосветский шкода. Мы б его спросили: — А ваши кто родители? Чем вы занимались до 17-го года? [That son of a bitch D’Anthès! High-society cad. | We’d have asked him: “And who are you parents? | What did you do before 1917?”]

Neither Maiakovskii nor Pushkin is a young Don Juan anymore; they are old, nearly dead, and vulnerable to the younger generation.79 Once dawn comes, everything returns to how it was before, giving the whole poem a dreamlike quality. This, in conjunction with the moonlit night, the uncanny moving statue, and the theme of anxiety about sex and about the resurfacing of the past suggests that “Jubilee Poem” is party to the resurgence of Gothic modes that Eric Naiman argues is typical of the NEP era.80 Even the invocation of Eugene Onegin, which was initially a parody of Melmoth the Wanderer (among other things), can be related to the Gothic.81 The undead Pushkin could thus be seen as evidence of Maiakovskii’s anxieties about the persistence of a past that would not stay buried.82 While there is some truth to this,

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Maiakovskii dismisses the Gothic as much as he indulges it. Not only does he exert agency over the revenant Pushkin, but at the end of the poem he reaffirms his commitment to the present: Мне бы памятник при жизни полагается по чину. Заложил бы динамиту — ну-ка, дрызнь! Ненавижу всяческую мертвечину! Обожаю всяческую жизнь! (6:47) [I am due a monument during my lifetime according to rank. | I would lay dynamite—there you go, kersplat! | I hate dead meat of all kinds! | I love all kinds of life.]

The pattern of the poem, in which Maiakovskii discusses life, death, and legacy with a figure from beyond the grave before ultimately and unconvincingly expressing his love of life, is common in his poetry of the mid-1920s, also featuring in “To Teodor Nette: Man and Steamship” (1926), “To Sergei Esenin” (1926), and the epic Good! (1927), in which he talks to the recently deceased commissar Leonid Krasin. The poetic conversation with the dead, especially with other poets, is a venerable genre, stretching back past Dante’s meeting with Virgil to Ennius’s dream of Homer. In “Jubilee Poem,” however, Maiakovskii sticks most closely to one of Pushkin’s variations on this theme, “The Shade of Fonvizin” (1815), which describes the return to earth of the eighteenth-century playwright Denis Fonvizin. Given the date of Pushkin’s poem, and the fact that it also features a ghost on a moonlit night, one might expect that it too would allude to the Gothic. Pushkin is more interested, however, in using the past to make fun of the present and his Fonvizin is a mouthpiece for a damning analysis of contemporary poetry and an excuse for pastiches of contemporaries, especially Derzhavin.83 Maiakovskii uses Pushkin to similar satirical ends, ridiculing Esenin for his faux-rustic stylings. The war of words between the two most prominent poets in the early Soviet Union had been running for some time, but Maiakovskii’s attack here was likely occasioned by the fact that Esenin had published his own

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conversation with the Pushkin monument in June 1924, “Dreaming about a Mighty Gift,” which anticipates “Jubilee Poem” in its familiar tone and emphasis on the poets’ shared reputation for troublemaking. It differs, however, in that Esenin envies Pushkin his status as a monument, which is treated as evidence of his ability to overcome his rambunctious youth and win the popular affection denied to Esenin.84 Maia­ kov­skii insists that he alone prefers Pushkin alive, rather than envying his monument: “Может, я один действительно жалею, | что сегодня нету вас в живых” (Maybe I alone really am sorry | that today you are not among the living) (6:51). Maiakovskii’s eagerness for distinction is likely motivated by an awareness of how much he and Esenin have in common. In the more conciliatory poem addressed to Esenin after his suicide, Maiakovskii alludes to the bronze monument that Esenin had wished for in his Pushkin poem and bemoans the lachrymose response Esenin’s death has provoked: Вам и памятник еще не слит, — где он, бронзы звон или гранита грань? — а к решеткам памяти уже понанесли посвящений и воспоминаний дрянь. (6:103) [A monument still has not been cast for you, | where is it, the ringing of bronze or the face of granite? | And they’ve already brought to the railings of memory | The trash of dedications and reminiscences.]

The poem ends with an allusion to Esenin’s suicide note, which is rephrased in order to express the same over-insistent sentiment that ends “Jubilee Poem”—that we should focus on building a new life, rather than celebrating death: “В этой жизни помереть не трудно. | Сделать жизнь значительно трудней” (In this life dying is not hard | Making a life is significantly harder) (6:105).

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The Lover and the Bureaucrat In both “To Sergei Esenin” and “Jubilee Poem,” Maiakovskii proposes that the remedy for lovelorn depression is to work still harder for the reshaping of life in the Soviet Union. He contrasts such selfless labor with the indulgence of lyric poetry. He is frank about his own fondness for love poetry and alludes to his previous successes in this genre, and while he ostensibly rejects love as a theme, he acknowledges its persistence: Нами лирика в штыки неоднократно атакована, ищем речи точной и нагой. Но поэзия — пресволочнейшая штуковина. (6:49) [We have attacked lyric with bayonets more than once, | we are looking for an exact, naked speech. | But poetry is a real bastard of a thing.]

The occasion for Maiakovskii’s questioning of the relative merits of lyric and civic verse is the breakdown in his relationship with Lili. He tells us that his alter ego, the jealous bear of Man, has now become a bearskin rug, suggesting that he has pacified his worst excesses, but also reinforcing the sense that he has died a death of sorts. He goes on to explain his relationship in terms Pushkin might understand, with reference to Eugene Onegin. Later in the poem, however, as he moves toward his outwardly optimistic conclusion, Maiakovskii downplays the possible relevance of Onegin. Both it and Poltava pale in comparison to modern life: “битвы революций посерьезнее ‘Полтавы,’ | и любовь пограндиознее онегинской любви” (the battles of revolutions are more serious than Poltava | and love is a bit more grandiose than Onegin’s love) (6:54). The wording here is ambivalent: Maiakovskii could be emphasizing the titanic scale of his love for Lili, but he also seems to be aligning himself with a revolutionary tradition that compared romantic

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love unfavorably to the greater cause of human liberation. In his poetry-writing textbook How to Make Verses (1926) Maiakovskii is dismissive of the romantic plot of Eugene Onegin, saying that it is not hard to disprove critics who believe that the classics offer the only template for modern poetry and who think that “no dialectic can comprehend eternal poetry”: “It’s enough to compare Tat’iana’s love and the ‘science that Ovid sang’ with the law on marriage” (12:82). This insistence on the obsolescence of Pushkin’s poetry might be seen as ironic, or perhaps even disingenuous, given the extent to which Pushkinian sources inform “Jubilee Poem.” The animate Pushkin statue himself is depicted as modern enough to agree that the time for love poetry is over, and to use contemporary slang to say so: “ Айда Маяковский! Маячь на юг! | Сердце рифмами вымучь — вот и любви пришел каюк” (Come on Maiakovskii! Loom to the south! | Torture out your heart with rhymes—it looks like it’s curtains for love) (6:54). Pushkin may use current slang, but he also quotes himself, and specifically the play Boris Godunov. His words recall the letter that he wrote to Petr Viazemskii on completion of the play, in which he congratulates himself with some light cursing: “ай да Пушкин! ай да сукин сын!” (Good on you Pushkin! Good on you, son of a bitch!).85 Maiakovskii reminds us again that Pushkin is no saint, but also, more subtly, recalls the words of a character in that play with his use of the rare word “torture out” (vymuchit’). In another moonlit debate about the relative importance of love and politics, the False Dmitrii confesses to his fiancée, the Polish princess Marina Mniszek, that he is not the real tsar of Russia. He tells her that only she could torture out his heart: “Клянусь тебе, что сердца моего | Ты вымучить одна могла признанье” (I swear to you that from my heart | only you could torture out a confession).86 This mingling of Pushkin’s biography and his fiction is not the limit of the entanglement between different aspects of Pushkinian mythology. In finding parallels between his own situation and Pushkin’s, Maiakovskii also looks to Pushkin’s posthumous reception. After mentioning D’Anthès, he cites Lermontov’s elegy, “Death of the Poet,” which describes Pushkin’s fatal duel: “Так сказать, невольник чести . . . пулею сражен” (So to speak, a prisoner of honor . . . by a bullet wounded) (6:55).87 The casual invocation of Lermontov’s poem demonstrates the extent to which Pushkin’s death and its reception has become a commonplace. More than this, however, it shows how the reception of Pushkin elides any distinction between art and life. Maiakovskii seems to struggle to remember “Death of the Poet” and gets

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mixed up: the description of Pushkin as a “prisoner of honor” is a quotation from the first line of that poem, but the next phrase “by a bullet wounded” is not a direct quotation, despite the anachronistic poetic form of the word for “bullet” ( puleiu). Instead, it fuses together different poems, combining a line in Lermontov’s poem that draws a parallel between Pushkin and the hack poet Lenskii from Eugene Onegin, who is also killed in a duel—“Сраженный, как и он, безжалостной рукой” (Wounded, like he too, by a pitiless hand)—with Pushkin’s original description of Lenskii’s death, which use the word “wounded” (srazhen) twice.88 The most programmatic intertextual interference here comes not from Lermontov, however, but Nekrasov. He stands between Pushkin and Maiakovskii not just chronologically, but also quite literally, since, as Maiakovskii points out, in the imagined alphabetized library of the future he will be shelved between them (6:51). Nekrasov acts as a gobetween in another way, too, since he is an important touchstone in the ancient debate, which acquired particular resonance in Russia, about the relative virtues of civic and lyric poetry. Pushkin, despite the liberal themes of many of his earlier poems and his apparent assumption of moral authority in “The Prophet,” largely opposed the idea that poetry was obliged to serve a political purpose and criticized the Decembrist poets for being too ideological.89 Thereafter he came to be seen as a figurehead of poetry for poetry’s sake, both to its defenders and to detractors like the utilitarian critics of the 1860s. The success of the revolution seemed to vindicate the Nekrasovian tradition of politically engaged writing and Maiakovskii, although he describes Nekrasov as sharing with him and Pushkin good looks and a fondness for gambling, invokes him above all in his capacity as an exponent of civic poetry. He calls him “a good fellow” (muzhik khoroshii ), using the word for a peasant man, muzhik, to allude to Nekrasov’s magnum opus of peasant suffering Who Lives Well in Russia? (1869) (Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho?). Maiakovskii even returns to Nekrasov’s question and seems to answer it in “Jubilee Poem”—“Хорошо у нас в Стране советов. | Можно жить, работать можно дружно” (It’s good here in the Land of the Soviets. | You can live, you can work together as friends) (6:55). The dialogue format of “Jubilee Poem” is also favored by both Pushkin and Nekrasov, who use it to discuss the purpose of poetry, for instance in Pushkin’s “Conversation of a Bookseller with the Poet” (1824), which inspired Maiakovskii’s own “Conversation with a Tax Inspector” (1926). More specifically, Maiakovskii’s insistence that he

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needs to exchange idle dreaming for hard work recalls Pushkin’s “The Bureaucrat and the Poet” (1823) in which the bureaucrat contrasts his own commitment to service to the poet’s fantasizing.90 More fundamental still to the argument of “Jubilee Poem” is Maiakovskii’s use of Nekrasov’s famous dialogue poem on the merits of civic poetry, “The Poet and the Citizen” (1856). The two poems share the same structure: we first meet the poet in the midst of depression and unwilling to talk; then an intervention of Pushkin lifts their spirits—for Maiakovskii as a statue, for Nekrasov in the form of a book. They differ, however, in that Nekrasov’s Poet uses Pushkin to argue the case of apolitical poetry, citing another dialogue poem, “The Poet and the Mob,” as authoritative evidence. Maiakovskii’s Pushkin, in contrast, is less hostile to civic verse. The debate over engaged poetry is closely related to the monument myth. In “The Poet and the Mob,” it is a statue, the Apollo Belvedere, that Pushkin describes as the epitome of artistic excellence and purity, which the profane masses cannot understand because it has no obvious utility.91 Conversely, Maiakovskii associates statues with civic poetry. Midway through the poem, as Maiakovskii regrets the fact that Pushkin is no longer alive, he predicts his own imminent death: “Скоро вот и я умру и буду нем” (Soon I too will die and be unable to speak) (6:51). The emphasis on silence rather than bodily decay suggests that Maiakovskii is here thinking of death in terms of transformation into a statue. Moreover, his wording recalls a line from “André Chénier”—“Я скоро весь умру” (Soon I will die completely)—in which Chénier is described as having rejected love poetry in favor of political engagement, inspiring both Pushkin’s rejection of solipsistic Byronism, and, now, Maiakov­ skii’s own embrace of civic verse.92 Chénier’s prediction of his total death is itself a partial quotation of Horace’s “Exegi monumentum,” in which the Roman poet says, “I will not die completely” (“Omnis ne moriar”). Chénier says that he will die completely, but, like Horace and others, goes on to hope that his manuscripts will keep his memory alive, granting him an immortality that will serve as a contrast to the imminent downfall of his jailer Maximi­ lien Robespierre. This juxtaposition of poetic and political immortality recalls Horace’s championing of his literary afterlife as longer lasting than emperors’ physical monuments. By saying “I too soon will die,” Maiakovskii writes himself into a noble tradition of Russian poets who produced versions of “Exegi monumentum” in order to consider their mortality and their monumentality. These include Lomonosov (“Не

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вовсе я умру” [Not entirely shall I die]), Derzhavin (“весь я не умру” [Not all of me will die]) and, inevitably, Pushkin in “I have erected a monument . . .” (“весь я не умру” [Not all of me will die]). Nonetheless, Maiakovskii senses the strongest affinity not with these Russian poets, but with Pushkin’s Chénier, whose switch from love poetry to political engagement ultimately caused his death at the hands of the revolutionary regime. Maiakovskii associates the monument with mortality and martyrdom, not a peaceful eternity. What is more, Maiakovskii sees his potential monument less as a symbol of the contestation of state power and more as a tribute to his subservience: “Мне бы памятник при жизни полагается по чину” (I am due a monument during my lifetime according to rank) (6:56). The word “rank” (chin), with its connection to the strict hierarchical system by which the Russian imperial bureaucracy was organized, suggests that his monument is owed him not so much for his innate poetic gift as for his graft, for the station he has achieved as a bureaucrat (chinovnik).93 The reference to bureaucracy is somewhat ambiguous: in the traditions of nineteenth-century Russian literature, omnipresent petty bureaucracy was presented as both the domain of quintessential struggling “little men” like Pushkin’s and as a stultifying force that invited satire. Just as Lenin in Vladimir Il’ich Lenin took Evgenii’s words of rebellion and turned them against the enemies of the state, so now the put-upon pencil pusher is, in Soviet form, no longer a victim but himself complicit in suppressing vitality. Maiakovskii, who railed against red tape all his life, suggests that he has become a bureaucrat so diligent and so servile that he is rewarded with transformation into a lifeless statue.

Architecture and Archaeology At the end of “Jubilee Poem,” Maiakovskii demonstratively explodes his hypothetical monument, reasserting his freedom and his love of life, although not disavowing political poetry. While he wrote considerable amounts of functional, uninspired verse in service of official causes in his last six years, Maiakovskii also continued to attack aspects of the Soviet system and especially what he saw as the deadening influence of red tape—an uncontroversial position at the time. This anti-bureaucratic campaign became particularly intense toward the end of his career, when the literary establishment had begun to turn against him, for instance in The Bathhouse. In October 1929, Maiakovskii turned to Pushkin

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to help express this frustration and published “The Upas Tree (A Long Poem about Inventiveness),” which, ironically enough for a poem about originality, reworks Pushkin’s 1828 poem “The Upas Tree.” Pushkin tells the tale of a tree in the desert that, because of its deadly sap, is avoided by all until a king sends a slave to gather its poison; the slave obeys but dies from the poison, which the king then applies to arrows that he fires at his enemies. Although significant doubt has been cast on such readings, in the 1920s “The Upas Tree” was largely seen as a political allegory for the cruel despotism of tsarism, which may have prompted Maiakovskii, a century later, to turn to the poem to demonstrate that a similar heartlessness was now the hallmark of the new bureaucratic class.94 There are no statues in this poem, but Maiakovskii elaborates on a contrast in Pushkin’s poem in which the innocent are mobile (animals, the slave) and the immobile are wicked (the tree, the king). Maiakov­ skii depicts a vigorous Soviet poet who marches through life but is obstructed by bureaucratic hurdles, until he eventually succumbs to a death that is described in lines lifted directly from Pushkin’s original. Now it is bureaucrats, not autocrats, who kill the innocent and Maiakovskii demands that these meddling mandarins be sent to the frozen (and immobile) Arctic Ocean (10:86). There is an ambivalence hidden within Maiakovskii’s diatribe that emerges from a considered reading of Pushkin’s original. While Pushkin’s slave is the victim of callous despotism, he is also complicit in its functioning: he “obediently” carries out the king’s orders, just as the “obedient” poison arrows are aimed against the king’s neighbors. By extension, the Soviet inventor, Maiakovskii’s alter ego, is both a victim and an instrument of the whims of the powerful. Ambiguity is never far away when Maiakovskii affirms his commitment to public service. The most famous of these equivocal statements comes in one of his final poems, “At the Top of My Voice,” which was allegedly intended as the prologue to an epic about the first Five-Year Plan (see 10:375). Maiakovskii returns to the debate between lyric and civic poetry and again asserts his self-sacrificing commitment to political verse: И мне агитпроп в зубах навяз, и мне бы

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строчить романсы на вас — доходней оно и прелестней. Но я себя смирял, становясь на горло собственной песне. (10:281–82) [And agitprop has got stuck to my teeth, | and writing romances for you | would be more profitable and pleasant. | But I tamed myself, standing | on the throat of my own song.]

Many have seen these lines as evidence of a dying man’s regretful confession of the violence he inflicted upon his own talent; others have argued that Maiakovskii simply uses typically visceral imagery to emphasize the scale of his willing sacrifice for the Soviet cause.95 What is indisputable is the fact that, for Maiakovskii, the symbol of the foot on the throat is closely associated with statues and, therefore, with the stagnation of writerly creativity. This recurring motif first appeared in the 1914 essay “Two Chekhovs,” in which the young poet excoriated contemporary attempts to establish literary figures as moral and patriotic lodestars. He recounts a story about a Futurist performance in the south of Russia during which an audience member took umbrage at the disrespect they showed to Pushkin: “Bear in mind, I won’t let you say anything disapproving about the activities of the authorities and Pushkin and all that!” (1:296). Maiakovskii is horrified by the conflation of Pushkin and the government, which he compares to the oppressive influence of statues: “It is against this bureaucratization, against this canonization of the writer-enlighteners, who with the heavy bronze of monuments are stepping on the throat of the new verbal art that is freeing itself, that the young are fighting” (1:296). “Two Chekhovs” can be read, in contrast to “Jubilee Poem,” as a continuation of the anti-ideological arguments of Pushkin’s “The Poet and the Mob.” Maiakovskii argues that “the word is the aim of the poet” and that “content makes no difference” (1:297). He further criticizes the transformation of writers like Nekrasov into “heralds of the truth, posters of beneficence and justice” (1:296)—a description that brings to

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mind the latter’s description of the poet as “the herald of age-old truths.”96 Moreover, while Nekrasov saw such heralds as dissidents, for Maiakovskii they are mouthpieces of the state and proponents of bourgeois mediocrity: “Out of writers they squeeze pencil pushers of enlightenment, historians, and guardians of morality. [. . .] How can we differentiate the citizen from the artist? How can we see the real face of the bard behind the portfolio of the court attorney?” (1:296) The motif next appeared after the revolution in the “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists,” coauthored with Burliuk and Kamenskii in 1918. Maiakovskii is worried, as ever, that the indefatigable hydra of bourgeois culture has reemerged, now in the form of a film based on a play by Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov: “As before the theaters are showing The King of the Jews and other Kings (works by Romanovs), as before the monuments of generals, princes—the lovers of the tsars and lovers of the tsaritsas—continue to stand on the throats of the young streets with a heavy, dirty foot.”97 The battle lines are similar to those in “Two Chekhovs”: Maiakovskii is on the side of the young, who are being prevented from speaking by the weight of the omnipresent old art, while the Bolshevik government does nothing. A further variation occurs in a draft version for 150,000,000 (1920) in which stepping on throats is seen as the typical act of the bourgeois: “To be a bourgeois does not mean to own capital or squander gold. It means to be the heel of a corpse on the throat of the young.”98 Here the statue is replaced by its twin, the corpse. Throughout the 1920s, Maiakovskii continues to imagine statues as obstructions that prevent free expression, even if they are not literally suffocating the young. In 1926’s How to Make Verses he explains that he has never attacked “the old poetry, which is not guilty of anything,” only tried to expose “the zealous defenders of the old ways [who] hid from the new art behind the backsides of monuments” (12:81). He repeats the argument in 1928: The comrade says that I just destroy all the classics entirely. I have never engaged in this ridiculous business. [. . .] Learn them, love them in the time in which they were working. But don’t let their big bronze backsides block the road to young poets who are on the road today. (12:434–35)

There can be little doubt, therefore, that in “At the Top of My Voice” Maiakovskii implies that he has betrayed his former principles, and

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that, in taking on political themes, has become not a rebellious Nekrasovian citizen, but a perpetual bureaucrat. Such a reading seems all the more natural, of course, from our present perspective, since we know—as Maiakovskii could not—that his poetry would be repackaged as the quintessence of Soviet ideological orthodoxy and forced on an increasingly unwilling public. This Soviet canonization—Maiakovskii’s second death, according to Pasternak— was far from inevitable at the time of the composition of “At the Top of My Voice.” To a significant extent, it was an accident of history, after Stalin, on the lookout for new, safely dead heroes, answered Lili Brik’s 1935 petitioning letter with the memorable and menacing response that “Maia­kovskii was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory is a crime.”99 In 1929 and 1930, in contrast, Maiakovskii found himself out of favor with both readers and officials, with his own jubilee exhibition “Twenty Years of Work”—evidence of Maiakovskii’s growing willingness to memorialize himself—poorly attended. As such, the typically grandiose legacy he imagines for himself in this poem should be seen not as a confident prediction, but rather the fantasy of an increasingly morose and desperate man. “At the Top of My Voice” is, therefore, not only an investigation into “the tension between appropriating the revolution and being appropriated by it,” but also as a meditation on different forms of immortality and their relation to mortality.100 This theme is most evident not in the image of the throat on the foot, but in the poem’s other engagements with Pushkinian monument mythology. On first inspection, the poem seems to present a Soviet version of the familiar Horatian motif of the “monument more lasting than bronze”—the intangible poetic legacy that will outlast physical manifestations of power. The poem, addressed to future generations, is reminiscent of an epitaph, a sta viator. In a departure from his position in “Jubilee Poem,” Maiakovskii imagines that he would have been rewarded with multiple monuments for erotic, not civic verse: Неважная честь, чтоб из этаких роз мои изваяния высились по скверам, где харкает туберкулез, где б . . . с хулиганом да сифилис. (10:281)

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[A poor honor to have from these roses | my sculptures rising up in little parks where tuberculosis is hawking up, | where there’s a wh(ore) with a hooligan and syphilis.]

The ambiguous wording here means that these “sculptures” represent both his potential public memorials and the imaginary love poems themselves—apolitical “sculptures” made from roses.101 Maiakovskii immodestly rejects such monuments because, as the unhappy world around them suggests, without his political poetry the utopia of the future will never be attained. Instead, he imagines an alternate universe— one created partly in the image of his former identity as a hooligan.102 He contrasts this counterfactual with his real legacy, which is intangible, communal, and political: Мне наплевать на бронзы многопудье, мне наплевать на мраморную слизь. Сочтемся славою — ведь мы свои же люди, — пускай нам общим памятником будет построенный в боях социализм. (10:284) [I spit on the weightiness of bronze, | I spit on the slime of marble. | Let’s take stock of fame—we are all friends after all— | let’s have as our communal monument | socialism built in battles.]

Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument . . .” may be the most famous Russian instance of the trope, but the intangible monument that Maiakovskii proposes here has more in common with Derzhavin’s earlier iteration. Whereas Pushkin imagines his poetry as a force of popular freedom and a rival of imperial power, Derzhavin is ambivalent about the state that he has both praised and, occasionally, confronted: Что первый я дерзнул в забавном русском слоге О добродетелях Фелицы возгласить, В сердечной простоте беседовать о боге И истину царям с улыбкой говорить.103

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[That first I dared in the amusing Russian tongue | to proclaim the virtues of Felitsa, | To talk about God with a simple heart | And tell the truth to tsars with a smile.]

Unlike both Derzhavin and Pushkin, Maiakovskii subordinates himself to the collective, while also underlining his exceptional status: not everyone is obliged to refuse a monument. What is more, whereas his poetic predecessors had used the Horatian monument to establish their defeat of death, Maiakovskii draws attention to the fact that martyrdom is the price for eternal memory. He had made this point before in Man, where his name is inscribed into the fabric of the city because of his suicide: — Прохожий!

Это улица Жуковского? [. . .] “Она — Маяковского тысячи лет: он здесь застрелился у двери любимой.” (1:269) [“Passerby! Is this Zhukovskii Street?” . . . “It’s been Maiakovskii Street for thousands of years: he shot himself here by his lover’s door.”]

In “Napoleon and Me” Maiakovskii included himself among the dead of the First World War (1:74); in “At the Top of My Voice” he makes liberal use of similar military metaphors in order to invoke those who died in the Red Army and posit a total death for the martyr-poet: “Умри, мой стих, умри, как рядовой, | Как безымянные на штурмах мерли наши” (Die, my verse, die like a private, | Like our nameless lads died in assaults) (10:283). Not only will the poet die, but so will his verse. As in “Jubilee Poem,” Maiakovskii invokes the executed Chénier of Pushkin’s poem, who regrets his decision to write civic verse and so wishes that this poetry will die with him: Забытые следы Безумной ревности и дерзости ничтожной. Погибни, голос мой, и ты, о призрак ложный, Ты, слово, звук пустой.104 [The forgotten traces | Of mindless jealousy and pathetic impudence. | Die, my voice, and you, o false apparition, | You, word, empty sound.]

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These lines are, of course, ironic, since Chénier’s poetry not only survived but also guaranteed him lasting fame. Similarly, Maiakovskii calls for the death of his verses in a poem that is addressed to his future generations. As with Khlebnikov’s lament for his invisibility, our own status as readers changes the poem’s significance. The desire for self-immolation notwithstanding, Maiakovskii admits that he will have some posthumous existence other than his immaterial contribution to historical materialism. In fact, it is striking how much emphasis he puts on the physicality of his legacy—a marked contrast to the intangible monuments of Horace, Pushkin, and others. Maiakovskii imagines that he will persist into posterity as a fossil—like a statue, a frozen version of the living form: “я становлюсь подобием чудовищ ископаемо-хвостатых” (I become the image of tail-bearing fossils) (10:284). This self-description recalls the initial premise of the poem, which imagines the readers of the future as archaeologists, “digging through the petrified shit of today” (10:279). His verse, too, will have a very solid existence in the future: Мой стих дойдет через хребты веков и через головы поэтов и правительств. Мой стих дойдет, но он дойдет не так, — не как стрела в амурно-лировой охоте, не как доходит к нумизмату стершийся пятак и не как свет умерших звезд доходит. Мой стих трудом громаду лет прорвет и явится весомо, грубо, зримо, как в наши дни вошел водопровод, сработанный еще рабами Рима.

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В курганах книг, похоронивших стих, железки строк случайно обнаруживая, вы с уважением ощупывайте их, как старое, но грозное оружие. (10:281) [My verse will reach you across the ridges of the centuries | and over the heads of poets and governments. | My verse will reach you, but it won’t reach you like that, | not like an arrow in Cupidolyrical hunting, | not as a worn-out five-kopeck coin reaches the numismatist | and not as the light of dead stars reaches us. | My verse will break through the enormity of years of hard work | and appear, heavy, rough, visible, | just as a water pipe made by the slaves of Rome entered into our days. | In tumuli of books that have buried my verse | discovering the steel of my lines by chance, | handle them with respect, | like an old but terrifying weapon.]

Maiakovskii’s verses will not be museum pieces and will have no association with either love or money—part of his rejection of profitable romantic poetry. Instead, they will appear as something more practical: a water pipe. This alludes to his early identity as the bard of the city streets, who played “nocturnes on the flute of drain pipes” (1:40) but also reinforces the poet’s self-association with the cleansing power of water, seen earlier in the poem in his self-description as a “sanitizer and water carrier mobilized and drafted by the revolution” (10:279), but also evident in works like Mystery-Bouffe (1918). While in the first half of the poem, water represents poetry itself, which is used to irrigate the perfumed rose gardens of erotic verse, once Maiakovskii has announced his self-denying rejection of love—“cutting off the flows of poetry” (10:281)—poetry now becomes a vehicle for something still more abstract; it is the conduit through which water flows. Or, more precisely, flowed: the Roman plumbing admired by Maiakovskii no longer serves any function, but rather attracts his admiration for its inherent qualities and its former utility, casting doubt, perhaps on his own verse’s ability to keep transmitting Communism in the distant future.

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Maiakovskii’s water-pipe monument is a polemical inversion of Pushkin’s intangible monument: whereas the latter is “not made by human hand,” the former is not only proudly unaesthetic, but also defiantly man-made and proletarian, the work of Roman slaves (a nod to Horace). This emphasis on labor marks the culmination of Maiakov­ skii’s decade-long campaign to rebrand poetry not as an exercise in Mozartian ease and inspiration, but the product of hard graft and, therefore, a worthy occupation in the workers’ state.105 In “To the Workers of Kursk” (1924), a poem that contrasts the monumentalism of classical literature negatively to the practical energy of miners, Maiakovskii compares the laborers’ work with Pushkin’s monument: Курскам ваших мраморов не нужно. Но зато — на бегущий памятник курьерский рукотворный не присядут гадить вороны. (5:164) [Kursks don’t need your marbles. | On the contrary, the charging express built by human hand | will not be sat on and befouled by crows.]

He contrasted his own painstaking construction of poems, which is described in depth in How to Make Verses, with the Romantic myth of Pushkin’s ingenious ability to extemporize, for instance by criticizing the Pushkin biopic The Poet and the Tsar (1928): I asked people who write poetry how they do it . . . In different ways . . . But in any case—the stupid tousled hair, the left leg being pushed to one side, the sitting at the table and immediately writing a brilliant poem—“I have erected to myself a monument to myself not built by human hands, | The people’s path to it will not be overgrown . . .”—is pandering to the most banal and idiotic notion of the poet, one that can only be held by the most banal and idiotic people. (12:354–55)

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It is not entirely coincidental that the makers of The Poet and the Tsar chose this poem for this scene, given that it was one of Pushkin’s last and that the monument “not made by human hand” perpetuates Romantic notions of poetry as the product of inspiration, not perspiration. Although the emphasis in “At the Top of My Voice” on communal construction chimes with the general mood of the first Five-Year Plan, the framing of the poem and its monuments undermines many of the positive associations of building. The poem is written from the perspective of the distant future, with the poet imagining his descendants looking back at the present. In this instance Maiakovskii does not speculate about what this Communist future will look like but does use this perspective not only to diminish the “shit” of the present but also to cast doubt on future historical continuity. He is remembered only by specialists, and his poetry resembles an artifact from a dead civilization. There is nothing linking the eager building of today and tomorrow’s bright future but ruins and—one shudders at the thought—the arid musings of pedantic literary scholars. On the one hand, Maiakovskii seems to participate in the era’s general turn against antiquarianism, when he distinguishes his useful monument from coins and arrows.106 On the other, by picturing the building of today as the ruins of tomorrow, Maiakovskii aligns himself with modernist contemporaries like Dziga Vertov and Boris Pil’niak, whose work of the late 1920s and early 1930s finds in archaeology a provocative counterpoint to the relentless optimism of the discourse of socialist construction.107 Michael Kunichika argues that Vertov and Pil’niak used archaeology to problematize the atemporality of Stalinism, which seemed to efface historical difference despite the manifest antiquity of material culture in Russia. They did not seek to rehabilitate the past, or to preserve it as a museum piece, but rather to testify to its continued existence by depicting the present not as a culmination, but as a threshold, where “the past [is] not yet obliterated, the future not yet realized” in part because “the past is not obliterated by the new, but dialectically necessary to it.”108 Despite his outward enthusiasm for socialist construction, Maiakovskii’s invocation of architecture is still more subversive, because the poet, with his mind on his own legacy, casts doubt not just on what the past gives the present, but also on what the present will leave for the future. It is not just that the ruins of the past persist in the present, but that ruination, as a process, is still inevitable under Communism. These are not the ruins that Lunacharskii accused Maiakovskii of desiring in

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1918, the remnants of destruction, but rather the fragments left by entropic decay. What is more, the universe of the future is not at peace: Maiakovskii says that the “proletarian planets” will still be in need of his martial verse as they continue to face his old foe “the enemy of the mighty working class” (10:283). This continued violence is, however, the key to Maiakovskii’s salvation. In a boring utopia the poet of revolutionary struggle would indeed be of only academic interest and Maiakovskii’s personal immortality would last only as long as the revolution. But the imperfect future imagined here, in which the enemies of the working class still present a threat, has plenty of need for the combative poet: just as selfsacrificing work staves off suicide in poems like “Jubilee Poem” and “To Sergei Esenin,” so here Maiakovskii’s literary immortality relies on continued utility. Although this picture of posterity presumes some aspects of continuity thanks to the ongoing struggle, it also maintains a sense of history as a heterogeneous, structured space, not a single undifferentiated plane—the future is different from the past. As such, his immortal monument is subject to reinterpretation: Maiakovskii only introduces the imagery of military martyrdom after the water pipe of his verse is mistaken by descendants for a weapon, presumably the barrel of a cannon. It is the potential for creative misprision that guarantees his continued relevance, not transcendent immutability. Of course, this is precisely how the Futurists characterize Pushkin’s continued usefulness in the Soviet present—as an object to be used and remade. The flexible legacy that Maiakovskii imputes to Pushkin and claims for himself sets itself against Pushkin’s own universalist picture of his poetic afterlife in “I have erected a monument . . . ,” which posits a homogeneous reception across time and space. The survival of Pushkin’s poetry will make his soul resistant to rot, like an Orthodox holy man: “душа в заветной лире | Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит” (my soul in my sacred lyre | Will outlive my ashes and avoid corruption). He will become disembodied, immaterial, and in this way will find an accepting multinational audience: Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой, И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык, И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикой Тунгус, и друг степей калмык.109 [Word of me will travel through all great Rus’ | And every tongue existing there will call my name, | The proud grandson of

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the Slavs, and the Finn, and the currently wild | Tungus, and the Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.]

Although Pushkin initially juxtaposes his verse to the achievements of the Russian state, he also deliberately aligns his posthumous fate with the expansion of the empire throughout Eurasia.110 In so doing, he posits an accumulative, correlative model of the interaction of time and space: more time means more space means more fame for Pushkin. Maia­kovskii, too, employs an analogy between time and space, but his spatialization of time is both more personal and more differentiated as he imagines himself, like other Futurist time travelers, crossing the terrain that intervenes between himself and the future. “Я к вам приду в коммунистическое далеко́” (10:281) (I will come to you in the Communist distance). Whereas it is Pushkin’s name that travels throughout the growing Russian empire, Maiakovskii locates this mobility in himself. He inverts the logic of the statue, which buys immortality for the price of immobility: he does not persist unchanged, but allows himself to be reinterpreted, embracing a semiotic flexibility that grants him mobility in time. He imagines himself walking through time as a single plane from the past via the present and then on into the future—treating these each as distinct waypoints. And on this implicit map of Russian literature, Pushkin and Maiakovskii are only a short walk away from each other, just like they are in Moscow.

5 Saving the Sacred Text Pushkin and Kruchenykh

It is a lie that thoughts are repeated. Every thought is new, because it is surrounded and shaped by something new. Aleksandr Blok

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leksei Kruchenykh was an extremist: an unrestrained experimenter in poetry, an unrelenting polemicist in prose, and, in his personal life, a willful eccentric. As a result, neither in life nor in death has he found a comfortable niche in the Russian literary canon, except, perhaps, as the quintessential outsider, “Russia’s greatest non-poet.”1 This marginal position raises an important question for a consideration of avant-garde originality and Kruchenykh’s part in it: how can you tell the cutting edge from the lunatic fringe? Discussions of literary history and the canon often employ spatial metaphors like this, contrasting the prestigious, stable center with the disregarded but potentially transformative periphery. Two competing models are at play: a synchronic vision of literature as a concentric 188

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system, in which the best writers are at the heart of things, and a progressive, diachronic narrative in which the real heroes are the literary frontiersmen who inhabit and extend the boundaries. The first model is evident in Pushkin’s epithet “the sun of Russian poetry,” which signaled not just his role as the fundamental source of energy and enlightenment, but also his position in the middle of the Russian literary universe. By contrast, the notion of the avant-garde presupposes that culture is a forward march and lauds not the generals in the rear, but the outriders, scouts, and skirmishers. In Russia after the revolution many modernists continued to imagine themselves to be at the front of the column. Indeed, the Civil War made the military flavor of vanguard metaphors considerably more pronounced, not only for the Futurists around Lef (“the Left Front of the Arts”), but also for their more committedly proletarian rivals at the journal On Guard (Na postu) and then at its successor On Literary Guard (Na literaturnom postu). In reality, however, the recruits of these different factions spent more time fighting each other than any shared antiCommunist enemy. Soviet culture of the 1920s was less like a pitched battle than a barroom brawl, with punches being thrown on all sides and new combatants regularly entering the fray. In the early 1930s, the landlord put a stop to this melee and the state instituted its own strict rules of engagement, which acquired the name “socialist realism.” Thereafter, while the idea that talented writers and artists were to be found not in the center but at the front did not disappear, it did diminish in importance, not least because the role of the bold vanguard came to be assigned to the party or to the shock workers of industrialization. The proper role of artists and writers was not to innovate but to apprehend the new world that others were making and to disseminate “the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development” and, in so doing, promote “the ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.”2 Moreover, the state established a clear and concentric structure to literary life, with a Manichean distinction between those on the inside—the members of the Union of Writers, who benefited from the light emitted by Stalin, “the life-giving sun”—and those on the outside, who took some time to adopt a positive interpretation of the obscurity in which they dwelt as the darkness not of endless night, but of the underground. The practical, political, synchronic system of the organization of socialist realism was then supplemented by the ceremonial, diachronic system of the Soviet canon, which was no less centralized in its operation and maintained a

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heliocentric model arranged around Pushkin (alongside Tolstoi) but complicated it with new heavenly bodies like Maiakovskii and Gor’kii. Neither of these literary systems had any place for Kruchenykh. From the early 1930s until his death in 1968, he had no access to official printing houses and although he did become a member of the Union of Writers in 1942, this was only because his influential admirer Il’ia Erenburg was worried that the straitened circumstances of the war would spell the end for the penurious poet. And so, despite his ongoing relationships with leading figures of both official culture—Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Aseev gave him material and moral support—and unofficial culture—Anna Akhmatova once attended his birthday party— Kruchenykh ended up a long way from the limelight in the unforgiving spectacle of Stalinist culture. Many well-read young poetry lovers of the 1950s and 1960s were shocked to find him still alive, an avant-garde ghost at the socialist realist feast.3 So at odds did Kruchenykh seem with the new reality that he acquired an almost supernatural aura. In the late 1920s Aseev compared him to a vampire and the poet Pavel Vasil’ev later claimed he had the horns of a demon.4 More complimentary and accurate was Kruchenykh’s Lef colleague Sergei Tret’iakov who in 1923 described him as “the bogeyman of Russian literature,” presaging his future role as a semi-mythical cautionary tale, a warning from history about the importance of respecting your elders and not talking nonsense.5 Kruchenykh was not unused to inhabiting the shadows. Selfeffacingly (and strategically), he was always willing to concede that other poets were more talented and significant, saying, for instance, that “Maiakovskii was a luminary that drew in smaller celestial bodies, and so he attracted me too.”6 Nevertheless, at least three times in his career he found himself at the heart of important and exciting literary movements: in the Futurist explosion of 1913, in the equally experimental 41° movement in Tbilisi between 1916 and 1919, and in the resurgence of the avant-garde under the banner of Lef between 1923 and 1925. Even so, on all three occasions, Kruchenykh was the most extreme exponent of an extreme artistic doctrine. In the foreword to a book dedicated to Kruchenykh in 1926, Pasternak described him as the embodiment of marginality: “A step to the side and you will be outside of art. You are a living piece of the imagined edge.”7 While Kruchenykh’s edginess could attract ambivalent praise in the 1920s, from the 1930s on it became increasingly intolerable. In his memoir The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer (1933), the one-time Futurist

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Livshits, never a fan of Kruchenykh, characterizes him as the epitome of the superficiality and fundamentalism that were Futurism’s worst aspects: “Kruchenykh, in his frivolous maximalism, had reduced our extreme tenets to the absurd.”8 But one man’s frivolous maximalism is another’s unflagging commitment to the cause. Pasternak, for instance, was consistent in his appreciation of Kruchenykh’s fidelity to avantgardism and repeated the sentiment of the aforementioned foreword from 1926—“You are the most tenacious of us, we should take you as an example”—in a 1946 poem dedicated to Kruchenykh: “И впредь цвести. Мечтай, пиши | И своим примером радуй” (And blossom hereafter. Dream, write | And delight us with your example).9 Even if very few did take Kruchenykh as an example at this time, least of all Pasternak, we can still see him as an exemplary Futurist, indeed the exemplary Futurist, precisely because he did not possess the same enormous, distinctive talent as Maiakovskii or Khlebnikov.10 Futurist experimentalism was all he had and, consequently, more than any of his comrades, he concentrated his energies on making the Futurist aspiration of ex nihilo originality into a reality. Indeed, one could argue that Kruchenykh’s lack of immediate successors is evidence not of the inadequacy of his poetic achievement but its comprehensiveness. Vladislav Khodasevich argued, with a disdain resembling grudging respect, that Kruchenykh’s Futurist project to push language to the nadir of non-representation was so successful that after it “there was nothing to write and no reason to write it: anything else would be only repetition.”11 In this way Kruchenykh and his zaum poem “Dyr bul shchyl” stand for Futurism in general—a movement forever trying to achieve the impossible by recapturing the energy of its first shocking emergence without becoming a slave to its past. The extent of zaum’s refutation of the logic of language made it infamous and “Dyr bul shchyl” became an emblem of the avant-garde for both its defenders and its detractors. As early as 1913, Kornei Chukovskii had reduced Kruchenykh to the role of an empty figurehead for experimentalism: “For me there is a prophecy in him, a symbol of our future days. Sometimes it seems to me that if we were all to disappear, and he alone was left, then our entire era would be preserved for coming ages. [. . .] It doesn’t matter that he is a shallow, dim little figure; as a symptom he is enormous.”12 Although he may not necessarily be typical at any given moment, for both admirers like Pasternak and opponents like Chukovskii, Kru­che­ nykh is representative of Russian avant-garde poetry in its historical

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development. He is a bellwether pointing the way for literature. The two spatial models here combine, with the static, concentric pattern aligning with the diachronic paradigm of progress at the margins. A similar synthesis is made in the theory of literary renewal proposed in the early 1920s by Tynianov, whose theories have particular relevance for my analysis of Kruchenykh’s poetics. “In the era of a certain genre’s decomposition, it moves from the center to the periphery,” Tynianov argued in Lef in 1924, “and in its place, from the trivialities of literature, from its backyards and lowlands, a new phenomenon floats into the center.”13 Kruchenykh and his legacy do not entirely vindicate this centripetal model of renewal, since neither his preferred genres nor his conception of literature ever established themselves as a new orthodoxy. This does not mean, however, that Kruchenykh’s continuing marginality necessarily confines him to the role of perennial bogeyman. His long life meant that he had to endure the transformation of his youthful originality into a cliché and keep finding new ways to promote a specifically Futurist version of newness. The poet Boris Slutskii characterized this ongoing experimentalism as a heroic achievement: “A decade and a half of Dadaism and Surrealism, the work of half a generation of talent in France, Germany, Italy, and Yugoslavia, was accomplished in Russia by one person.”14 These words of praise not only betray a very Soviet obsession with matching and overtaking the West, fusing the rhetoric of Cold War rivalry onto the equally linear paradigm of the avant-garde, but also recall the notion of the specifically Russian genius ascribed to both Pushkin and Peter the Great by writers like Turgenev and Merezhkovskii: the fact that Russia generally lags behind the West only makes the achievement of these lone creators all the more remarkable. What is more, there is a good deal of truth in Slutskii’s description of Kruchenykh as a sort of one-man vanguard, an independent inventor whose genius compensated for his isolation: not only did his early work parallel developments in Dada, but his later work mirrors aspects of late modernism and even postmodernism as they developed elsewhere. Nonetheless, even if we accept a reductive description of literary history as a journey from one “ism” to the next, the split between “official” and “unofficial” literatures (not to mention the parallel universe of emigration) complicates any sense that Russian poetry was a unified forward march with Kruchenykh secretly leading the way. The dominance of socialist realism as system, style, and dogma divided the culture it purported to unite, in part by keeping the work of people like

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Kruchenykh hidden from public view. As a result, those within Russian culture who, from the 1960s onward, defined themselves in opposition to the realist orthodoxy took a more recuperative attitude toward modernism, which had only just emerged from official purdah, than their peers in the West. Whereas the artists, architects, and artists of Western postmodernism often sought to rebel against modernism’s overextended empire, their Russian counterparts sought to rescue a lost world.15 Kruchenykh was a survivor from this avant-garde Atlantis. Or, rather, he resembled one of those rare species of birds, which, by living on a remote island, avoids an environmental cataclysm—a Dadaist dodo hidden in the vastness of the socialist realist ocean, evolving in isolation. As such, Kruchenykh, as both living relic and exponent of an evolving poetics, serves as a counterexample to the two dominant scholarly narratives about the fate of the avant-garde: first, the outmoded but not entirely incorrect idea that freewheeling modernist invention was crushed under Stalin’s heel, and, second, Groys’s corrective to this myth, which emphasizes the shaping influence on Stalinist culture of the avant-garde’s supposedly all-consuming demiurgic ambition.16 We can see in Kruchenykh evidence of a different continuity, in personnel but also in poetics, not between modernism and socialist realism— although there was that too—but between early Soviet modernism and late Soviet unofficial art and poetry. Although Kruchenykh’s longevity allowed him to serve as an inspiration to experimental poets like Semen Kirsanov or Gennadii Aigi, he did not see himself as a keeper of the flame of prerevolutionary poetry in the manner of the most famous Atlantean, Akhmatova. Instead his life and work prefigured many of the characteristics of later unofficial art and poetry. Not only did Kru­ chenykh’s marginal modus operandi, producing handmade texts for a small audience, anticipate and in some cases inspire samizdat, but also, more importantly, a new attitude to originality emerges in his late work as an obsession with absolute originary novelty gives way to the sort of playful appropriation and transformation that we associate with postmodernism. Kruchenykh may have been a dodo, but he was also a Duchamp, a pivot between cultural systems. The surest evidence for Kruchenykh’s changing understanding of originality is his lifelong engagement with Pushkin and his myth, which continues the clear (but not unwavering) movement toward a more pragmatic and positive attitude to Pushkin traceable in the work of Maiakovskii and Khlebnikov. Just as Kruchenykh’s zaum had found its outer limit in 1913, so in that same year his orbit around the sun of

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Russian poetry reached its aphelion. After the revolution, Kruchenykh remained committed to the irreverent puncturing of Pushkin’s transcendent mystique, but he also demonstrated an increasingly nuanced attitude to the past and a willingness to use Pushkin’s canonical status to probe assumptions about the nature of art and literature and to expand the possibilities of being a poet, most notably in 500 New Witticisms and Puns from Pushkin (1924).

Kruchenykh and Quotation Pushkinian poetic mythology provided the Futurists with a way of thinking about the role of the poet, both as a time-honored figurehead of popular enthusiasm and counterweight to the state and as a specifically Soviet entity shaped by new practical and political pressures. Accordingly, Khlebnikov and Maiakovskii openly engage with Pushkin as a poet, updating motifs—the prophet and the statue—that Pushkin himself had used to think through his own calling. Kruchenykh did not share his colleagues’ fondness for lyric and in fact showed almost total disregard for content or the cultivation of an identifiable poetic persona, focusing his energies instead on innovative form and on developing a myth of self through combative essay-writing.17 As such, what is most revealing of Kruchenykh’s evolving identity, poetics, and model of originality is not his relationship to Pushkin as a poet, but the way he approaches Pushkin as a text, and in particular, as the source of quotations. Like Maiakovskii, Kruchenykh made frequent recourse to Pushkin’s works in his manifestos, interlarding them with citations, often in unflattering contexts. At first blush, this abundance of quotation might seem counterintuitive. The Futurists famously prioritized the perform­ ative aspect of their verse, making good use of their considerable talents as entertainers and emphasizing extemporaneous, ephemeral creativity and the sensory effects of articulation.18 Why then display Pushkin’s words like this, preserved in aspic, seemingly perpetuating his obstructive, ahistorical dominance over contemporary creativity? Moreover, did the scrupulous reproduction of Pushkin’s original not contravene the flexible mythological approach to Pushkin seen elsewhere in his Futurist reception, effectively elevating his works to the status of an untouchable sacred text? On the contrary, the Futurists’ verbatim quotation of Pushkin became a tool for challenging the ahistorical Pushkin by laying bare both the malleability of Pushkin’s text and its inherent disjunction with the

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new age. In its Futurist treatment, exact quotation from Pushkin reveals the gap between the text and its aural reception. The Futurists’ focus on the material qualities of Pushkin’s poetry in quotation—the quotation as such, so to speak—complements their historicizing approach because it foregrounds juxtapositions and transformations, revealing the contingency of meaning and militating against the mystical veneration of Pushkin as a timeless source of wisdom. Quotations, like statues, may appear to stand outside of history, but they are in fact constantly repurposed and remade. This ambivalence in regard to history is partly a result of the fact that the quotation is only a fragment of a work or oeuvre. On the one hand, the quotation can serve as a metonym for a work or an author and contribute to the concretization of that author or work’s identity, especially when quotations become so familiar that they become clichés—what Shklovskii called “fossilized quotations.”19 On the other hand, the quotation can become detached from its origins and be employed in such a way that it triggers a typical act of Shklovskian estrangement, forcing a revivifying reassessment of words that have lost force and meaning through habituation. It is this latter operation that is most prominent in the Futurist use of Pushkin. Counterintuitively, the Futurist resistance to the fossilization of the quotation manifested itself in an insistence on accuracy. In 1919 Kru­ chenykh condemned Briusov’s new edition of Pushkin for converting his works to the new simplified orthography that was introduced in 1918 and that discontinued certain letters. He complained that Briusov “squeezes him into a new, Americanized (abbreviated) orthography. Pushkin without ‘i,’ ‘Ѣ’ and ‘ъ’ is like Venus in a pince-nez and American boots.”20 It might be surprising to hear Kruchenykh defend the old orthography, since the Futurists proposed that it should be dispensed with as early as 1913, but Kruchenykh takes umbrage mostly because Briusov makes these changes assuming that they do not affect meaning.21 To Kruchenykh, one of the authors of “The Letter as Such,” graphical appearance is a fundamental element of a text’s overall effect and Briu­sov’s introduction of new spelling is not an act of renewal, but an attenuation of whatever force Pushkin’s words had in their own time and a means of concealing Pushkin’s archaism, allowing the classical to infiltrate the present in modern garb. A quotation necessarily serves two masters, the text from which it has been excerpted and the text onto which it has been grafted.22 In insisting on verbatim quotation down to the letter, the Futurists make

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sure that this primary allegiance is not forgotten and that the introduction of material from the past does not come to conceal this alien origin. This does not mean, however, that the Futurists do not assume full control over the quoted text; rather, they seek to use its difference to their own ends. We can see the surprising abundance of explicitly quoted material in Futurist writing as an approximate textual analogue to the collage principle of the art of the period, which used the juxtaposition of heterogeneous fragments in order to effect a shift in perception. In 1913 Kruchenykh himself proposed an analogy between the Futurists’ fragmentation of words and the similar approach in Cubo-Futurist art: “Futurian painters love to use parts of bodies and sections, and Futurian wordsmiths—chopped up words, half-words, and their bizarre, cunning combinations, and in this way maximal expressiveness is achieved.”23 Over the course of the 1910s, the interpolation of non-painterly material became more and more prominent in visual art and in the 1920s the same urge for juxtaposition manifested itself in the genre of photomontage. Kruchenykh himself worked extensively in collage and photomontage, especially while in Tbilisi.24 Exponents of the genre like Rodchenko and Iurii Rozhkov would incorporate photographs of ideologically hostile figures into their work, making their inclusion into an act of transformation and subjugation.25 Quotations can, in the right hands, function as evidence not of continuity, but of the inherent heterogeneity, conflict, and change that underpins culture. In his memoir Kruchenykh recalls a dispute with the Jack of Diamonds art group in 1912 in which Maiakovskii cited examples of literary works from prehistory to the present so that the audience might, as Kruchenykh says, “compare the art of different epochs and notice: there is no eternal art, it is multiform, dialectical.”26 Quotation is used to demonstrate the impossibility of accommodation between eras. Kru­ chenykh pretends to be Maiakovskii’s opponent and encourages the spectators to laugh at the inferiority of contemporary writing compared to that of previous eras. He is, however, setting them up for a fall: .

I asked about the eccentricities of the innovators: “Is it not true that their writing has gone much too far. For instance, do you like this image: ‘a disenchanted lorgnette’?” The audience laughs. Then I revealed all. “That’s an epithet from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin!” The audience applauds. Having shown in this fashion that those who scorned us did not themselves really know what

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was going on, I defeated them, along with the Cubists [the artists of the Jack of Diamonds] who had been “vanquished” by me.27

Kruchenykh’s example undermines his own feigned criticism of modernist writing as exceptionally nonsensical, but it also contradicts Maiakovskii’s suggestion that art is never eternal, because it seems to suggest that Pushkin’s words could be perceived as belonging to the present. This illusion of contemporaneity is only possible, however, because these words have been recontextualized by Kruchenykh to give them a new connotation. Pushkin possesses a form of eternity, but it is one that relies on his dismemberment and redefinition. The severed head of Orpheus continues to sing as it floats downstream, but it is singing a new song. By quoting Pushkin, Kruchenykh distances him but also makes an ally of him, attempting to disavow his timeless relevance, while also bringing him closer, demonstrating his manifest similarities with the poets of the avant-garde. A similar double movement, undercutting Pushkin but also embracing him, is evident in Maiakov­skii’s “Jubilee Poem” as well. Indeed, such ambivalence became increasingly typical of the Futurists’ attitude to Pushkin, as they responded to their own historicity and to challenges to their status as significant cultural authorities, one of which was the return of Pushkin as an officially endorsed figurehead.

New Witticisms and Puns from Pushkin Kruchenykh’s own answer to the emergence of a new Soviet variation on the Pushkin cult was 500 New Witticisms and Puns from Pushkin (1924), his most protracted and systematic engagement with Pushkin’s text and the best exemplar of the changes in his poetics. Published initially by Kruchenykh himself, 500 New Witticisms is a booklet of about seventy pages consisting of a long essay and a typically Futurist “Declaration” by Kruchenykh, dated April-May 1924, and two shorter pieces reacting to the essay by the Constructivist poet Aleksei Chicherin and a certain K. Iakobson. Kruchenykh sets out to show how any line of Pushkin’s verse can acquire a different meaning when it is not read on the page but rather heard from the stage. This misinterpretation comes about, he argues, because the divisions between words are not articulated but inferred by the listener—which is true—and so these divisions can become obscured by the rhythm of the verse, forming new semantic units—which is less plausible. Borrowing a term from Cubist painting,

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he calls this effect a “shift” (sdvig) and provides an example from Eugene Onegin: Со сна садится в ванну со льдом. Сосна садится сольдом. (Сольдо(и) — итальянская монета).28 [So sna saditsia v vannu so l’dom. | Sosna saditsia sol’dom. (Sol’do(i)—ital’ianskaia moneta).] [After waking he sits in a bath with ice. | A pine sits like a solido. (Solido(s) are an Italian coin.)]

Kruchenykh goes on to provide a superficially scientific analysis of the causes and effects of such shifts, interspersed with examples from a wide range of works by Pushkin. This is followed by a “systematic” (29) catalog showcasing a selection of the seven thousand shifts Kruchenykh claims to have found in Pushkin. Such toying with word boundaries had long featured in jokes, known in English as mondegreens, and other Futurists enjoyed submitting verse to similar deformations, but it was Kruchenykh who decided to transform the manipulation of such ambiguities into a whole pseudoscience, “shiftology.”29 Kruchenykh first promoted his sui generis theory in 1922’s Shiftology of Russian Verse, but he had already made limited use of the device in Melancholy in a Bonnet: History AS Anal Erotica (1918), an experimental text produced while he was living in the fertile creative atmosphere of independent Tbilisi. This exuberantly unorthodox text seeks to establish the essentially anal nature of Russian history, language, and culture, largely on the evidence of the Russian word kak (“as” or “how”)—something hinted at in the fairly untranslatable title Malakholiia v kapote: Istoriia KAK anal’naia erotika—and achieves this through a combination of puns, visual double entendres in letter shapes, and references to Freudian theory, which was then enjoying its first vogue in the territories of the Russian empire.30 The scatological element in Melancholy in a Bonnet, which is typical of Kruchenykh’s impish disdain for literary niceties, survives in 500, albeit in an attenuated form: Как увижу очи томны? (Из Гонзаго) — что вижу я?! (7)

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[Kak uvizhy ochi tomny? (Iz Gonzago) | — chto vizhy ia?!] [When I see languorous eyes | I see cack, languorous eyes? (From “Gonzago”) | —what do I see?!]

In general, Kruchenykh takes greatest pleasure from shifts that reveal taboo words or ideas. As a result, sexual puns also abound: Была наука страсти нежной Кастрати?! (32) [Byla nauka strasti nezhnoi | Castrati?!] [There was a science of tender passion. | Castrati?!]

Kruchenykh’s methodology is far from strict: he finds shifts where he needs them, not where his professed rules demand and he reacts to the identification of new words formed with a quite unscholarly pose of mock surprise. One might argue that Kruchenykh merely repeats the same puerile, not-all-that-funny joke over and over again. Nonetheless, the sheer enthusiasm with which he expounds his unconvincing and inconsistent theory holds the reader’s attention, as does his deliberate and provocative occupation of the uneasy middle ground between seriousness and humor.31 Just as the gap between words in a “shift” is elided to create something new, so Kruchenykh fuses different genres— primarily the literary critical essay, the manifesto, and the zaum poem— to create what an advertisement in Lef billed as “a completely new critical approach” destined to “cause a stir among a broad audience.”32 In Kru­chenykh’s description of the work in its introduction, this generic blending is metonymically represented in a shift that characterizes 500 New Witticisms as both an indulgence and a work of scholarship, “a super-professorial dessertation ideamonstration” (sverkh-professorskaia dessertatsiia idemonstratsiia) (4). This pervading sense of joyous uncertainty not only prevents the reader from becoming either comfortable or bored, but allows Kruchenykh, under the camouflage of ridiculousness, to provide a complex and persuasive riposte to the idea that Pushkin is an eternal master deserving only of reverence. Much of the polemical thrust of Kruchenykh’s presentation of Pushkin in 500 New Witticisms anticipates Maiakovskii’s treatment of him in “Jubilee Poem.” He presents Pushkin not as an incorruptible source of

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timeless truth and technical skill but as a sporadically incompetent and down-to-earth product of his times who is, like it or not, constantly and necessarily being remade. In part, in taking aim at the aura of Pushkin, Kruchenykh rehearses earlier Futurist polemics against ethereal Symbolism. He mocks those Pushkinists who have spent more time trying “to figure out Pushkin’s ‘soul’ than his ear or mouth” (6) and, delighting in the unlikely creations of the shifts, proposes that we “forget about ‘the wisdom of Pushkin’” (29)—an allusion to Mikhail Gershenzon’s influential The Wisdom of Pushkin (1919) in which Pushkin is portrayed as “a religious mystic, a seer of the hidden nature of the universe.”33 Indeed, 500 New Witticisms can be understood as an attack on all quasi-religious attitudes to literature. Kruchenykh’s rhetoric against mysticism undoubtedly took some energy from the state-sponsored atheism campaigns of the era, but it is ultimately more a product of the Futurists’ puritanical contempt for idolatry than any genuine attempt to secularize literature. Kruchenykh complains that Pushkinists are “fetishists” who are “usually blind and deaf in their service to Pushkin” and “have made of him an idol, a fetish” (6); Viacheslav Ivanov is accused of thinking of Pushkin as his “deity” (53). Kruchenykh hopes that the infelicitous shifts revealed in Pushkin’s poetry may give the lie to the false perfection of his idol—“what a cacophony Pushkin’s marble has borne” (16)—but in their fervor the idolaters will brook no criticism, condemning any word against Pushkin as “blasphemy” (6). (Kru­ chenykh is likely making a dig at Briusov who, in an article on Pushkin’s use of sound, praised his particular talent for euphony.34) Pushkin’s position in Soviet society not only recalls the reverence formerly afforded to the church and the monarchy, but actually outstrips it since now “attacks against religion are more quickly forgiven than attacks on ‘the white marble radiant tsar of the old aesthetics’” (6). In addition to this familiar lambasting of the Pushkin cult, Kru­ chenykh also seems to respond to the tendency that would soon have a stranglehold on Soviet aesthetics—the obligatory valorization of verisimilitude in literature and, along with it, the notion that Pushkin was a forerunner of socialist realism. Kruchenykh launches a preemptive strike against this position, arguing that the countless shifts in Pushkin’s work disqualify him from consideration as a realist: “7 thousand shifts in Pushkin! That proves once again that so-called ‘clean, pure, honest realism’ in art (particularly in Pushkin) is complete fiction” (61). It is unclear who Kruchenykh purports to be quoting here, other, perhaps, than his own manifesto of eleven years previous, “The Word as

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Such”: “Before we came along the following demands of language were announced: clean, pure, honest, sonorous, pleasant (gentle) on the ear.”35 As these claims of realism suggest, the interest of critics promoting Pushkin had started to switch from the medium to the message. This is clearly not a trend endorsed by Kruchenykh, who ignores the content of Pushkin’s poems and continually emphasizes the role of their aural reception as a means of overturning the white marble idol. By imagining a purely auditory and public consumption of Pushkin—a picture that is typical of the Futurist valorization of performance, but ironic within the prosaic and unperformable context of his essay—Kruchenykh can use selective quotation to criticize Pushkin’s technique. It is notable that, while their own poetics is founded on the notion that the relationship between form and content is anything but arbitrary, Kruchenykh and Maiakovskii both critique Pushkin’s technical skill independently of ideology. Others in the Futurist camp did not maintain this dichotomy. Nikolai Gorlov, responding in Lef to Trotskii’s criticism of Futurism in 1923, said: From the point of view of content Pushkin is a negative value for the working class. You are left with form [. . .]. But you have to distinguish between two aspects of form. One is form as the image of the content, a concrete wrapping in which content appears, entirely fused with it. Rejecting the content, we also reject this aspect of form. The other aspect is technique, mastery [.]36

Kruchenykh and Maiakovskii are less extreme than Gorlov in some respects: they do not propose that the forms Pushkin chooses are inherently ideological. They are, however, more extreme in their insistence on their own technical superiority. The Futurists put special emphasis on their mastery of rhythm, comparing it favorably to Pushkin’s alleged solecisms. Choosing such a fundamental area of expertise was a sensible and uncontroversial choice, but, since rhythm is one of the defining features of poetry, it also underlined the Futurists’ besting of Pushkin as poets. In How to Make Verses, for instance, Maiakovskii explained his trademark “staircase” layout as a measure to ensure the correct rhythm: Размер и ритм значительнее пунктуации, и они подчиняют себе пунктуацию, когда она берется по старому шаблону. [. . .]

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Довольно, стыдно мне Пред гордою полячкой унижаться. читается как провинциальный разговорчик: Довольно стыдно мне. Чтобы читалось так, как думал Пушкин, надо разделять строку так, как делаю я: Довольно, стыдно мне. При таком делении на полустрочия ни смысловой , ни ритмической путаницы не будет.37 [Meter and rhythm are more significant than punctuation and they subordinate punctuation to themselves when it is taken according to the old template: [. . .] Enough, it is shameful for me to Humble myself before a proud Pole. Which reads like provincial chattering: I’m quite ashamed. For it to be read in the way Pushkin thought you have to divide up the line like I do: Enough, it is shameful for me. With such a division into half-lines, there will not be any confusion either in terms of sense or rhythm.]

Kruchenykh was conscious that foregrounding technical expertise marked something of a departure for the Futurist self-image. In a 1923 essay he remarks: “As strange as it may seem, the Futurists, predominantly destroyers, must be the guardians of the craft of versification and of poetic technique!”38 In 500 New Witticisms he explicitly suggests that the shifts present in Pushkin’s work are the result of a tin ear, asking whether “Pushkin was a bungler” since some of his lines are “not classical, but schoolboy” and contrasting this incompetence with Khleb­ nikov’s “masterful and successful” poetry (11). Kruchenykh does not promote his own verse as a model, but he does adopt a pose of expertise in his disquisition on the nature of rhythm in poetry, not least by making frequent references to the work of the Formalists either through citation or through allusion, for instance by giving one subsection the title “Shift as a Device” in homage to Shklovskii’s “Art as a Device” (1917). In his appendix, Chicherin makes Kruchenykh’s implication

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clear, arguing that Pushkin’s errors “have destroyed the teacher in him; from a historical point of view they have uncovered a comrade; in reality they would have made him our pupil” (54). The destruction of Pushkin-the-teacher not only frees him up for a role in the new Soviet polity, but also proves that it is the Futurists who should be the tutors of the next generation; consequently, Iakobson reminds readers that the new working-class poets are not true innovators but epigones of the master Maiakovskii (70). Kruchenykh’s enthusiasm for rebutting orthodoxies about Pushkin drives him to draw somewhat inconsistent conclusions about the origins of shifts. Building on his work in Tbilisi, Kruchenykh raises the possibility that they are Freudian slips that reveal the hidden workings of Pushkin’s suppressed subconscious (12); this is part of a polemic against the sanitized Pushkin promoted by the official jubilee, which he does not refer to directly, and by conservative critics. He disdains those who have an “adoring attitude to Pushkin” that results in them being “more bruised by Pushkin than able to adapt him” (6). Kruchenykh opens with a promise that “Pushkin’s toga will be removed” (4) and closes with the boast that “the shift unmasks authors’ subconscious work and lays bare their secrets” (61). Shiftology exposes the real man underlying the Parnassian image, in all his sexual and scatological complexity. This metaphorical unmasking seems to contradict Kruchenykh’s avowed interest in the sonic aspect of Pushkin’s verse and to constitute a concession to the idea of a transcendental Pushkin—a “real” identity that Freud’s theories bring to the surface. However, it is not just taboo sexuality that distinguishes this Freudian Pushkin from the misappropriated Pushkin of the cult: the true, unconscious self that Freudian analysis unlocks, according to Kruchenykh, is not a fixed inner core of communicable meaning, but rather something more fleeting, organic, and private. Moreover, the cult of Pushkin presupposes that his text can be reliably used as vehicle for moral lessons; Kruchenykh’s Freudian Pushkin, in contrast, challenges language’s ability either to describe the world or to facilitate practical communication. As in his early zaum, Kru­chenykh treats language as expressionistic and impervious to conscious control. Shifts prove that “a phrase is not a ‘thought, expressed in words’” because, in this case, “form refuses to accommodate the meaning that the author forces onto it, not having taken it into account” (18). Ultimately, “the sense meaning is secondary, the auditory meaning is primary” (18–19). This rhetoric, which introduces the vague notion of a non-semantic “auditory” significance, is a somewhat more sober

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recasting of the sentiments of Kruchenykh’s “New Ways of the Word” (1913), which argues not so much for a hidden meaning in language, as for a transcendence of meaning per se: Clear and decisive evidence that the word has up till now been in chains is its subordination to meaning. Until now people have claimed: “thought dictates laws to the word, and not the other way round.” We have pointed to this mistake and given a free language, universal zaum. Previous artists went through thought to the word; we go through the word to unmediated comprehension [. . .] the word is wider than meaning.39

This same rejection of semantics was also evident in the Futurists’ continuing valorization of the creative potential of randomness and error.40 In 500 New Witticisms Kruchenykh approvingly cites his comrade Igor’ Terent’ev’s maxim that “poetry is the ability to make mistakes” (26). For this reason, Kruchenykh relishes a misprint in Briusov’s edition of Pushkin as a “shift by the State Publisher” (20). This attitude leads to a contradiction in the portrayal of Pushkin, since Kruchenykh evidently revels in Pushkin’s accidental concoctions and urges Pushkin’s defenders to stop denying the existence of shifts and instead embrace them (26). Such enthusiasm may derive from the fact that Pushkin’s shifts produce new formations that resemble nothing so much as Kru­ chenykh’s own zaum coinages. Прими с улыбкою, мой друг, Свободной музы приношенье. (Посвящение. «Кавказский пленник»). Он слушал Ленского с улыбкой . . . Наконец-то муза заговорила свободными словами: сулыбка — это маленькая, чуть чуть заметная улыбка, подобие ее (сравни: супесок, суглиноу) — вот первый неологизм Пушкина! (26) [Primi s ulibkoiu, moi drug, Svobodnoi muzy prinoshen’e. (Posviashchenie. “Kavkazskii plennik”). On slushal Lenskogo s ulibkoi . . . Nakonets-to muza zagovorila svobodnymy slovami: sulybka —

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eto malen’kaia, chut’ chut’ zametnaia ulybka, podobie ee (sravni: supesok, suglinok) — vot pervyi neologizm Pushkina!] [Accept with a smile, my friend The offering of a free muse. (Dedication. The Prisoner of the Caucasus). He listened to Lenskii with a smile . . . At last the muse has started to talk in free words: sulybka is a small, barely noticeable smile, the semblance of one (compare: supesok, suglinok)—here we have Pushkin’s first neologism!]

From the word for “with” (s) and the word for “smile” (ulybka) Kru­ chenykh constructs a neologism, sulybka. To explain the meaning he ascribes it (“a barely noticeable smile”), he then provides a rather unconvincing folk etymology for it, reanalyzing the initial su- as a prefix meaning something like “partially constituted by” using an analogy with two words for types of soil: supesok and suglinok, which mean respectively soil containing sand (pesok) and soil containing clay (glina).41 Ultimately, Kruchenykh concludes with his tongue in his cheek that: “maybe these shifts are the best thing in Pushkin and, of everything he wrote, poets will value only these little words” (28). In addition, therefore, to condemning shifts as errors and praising them as shortcuts to the subconscious, Kruchenykh also adopts the third position that shifts can be deployed consciously as a useful part of the poet’s armory. He cites Maiakovskii and Khlebnikov’s manipulation of word boundaries (3–4) and says the Futurists lead the field in the quantity of “conscious shifts” that they use (59). The chapter “Shift as Device” uses examples of Pushkin’s own deliberate shifts and cites a letter in which Pushkin shows that he is aware of the risk of new coinages arising from ambiguous word boundaries: “Nothing would be easier than putting: ‘Равна грузинка красотою’ [Ravna gruzinka krasatoiu (A Georgian girl equal in beauty)] but inkakr . . . and the word gruzinka [Georgian girl] is needed here” (22). Pushkin seems to sense a possible shiftological misreading in which the combination of “Georgian girl” ( gruzinka) and “beauty” (krasotoiu) will be interpreted as creating a nonsensical neologism inkakr. Kruchenykh in fact slightly misquotes Pushkin in order to exaggerate the extent to which he anticipates shiftology: Kruchenykh writes inkakr as one word, whereas Pushkin wrote it as two.42 Similarly, Kruchenykh cites an authority on verse

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construction, Vasilii Chernyshev’s Laws and Rules of Russian Pronunciation (1915), in which Chernyshev shows Pushkin manipulating word boundaries in a draft for Eugene Onegin: “Порой ленив, порой упрям, | Порой лукав, порою прям” [Poroi leniv, poroi upriam | Poroi lukav, poroiu priam (Sometimes lazy, sometimes stubborn, | Sometimes cunning, sometimes straight)] (51).43 Finally, Kruchenykh draws attention to examples of bawdy verse, first printed and attributed to Pushkin by Briusov in 1919, in which an ellipsis stands in for a repetition of the word two lines above with a different word boundary and a new, sexual meaning: I.

День блаженства настоящий [nastoiashchii] Дева вкусит, наконец. [nakonets] Час пробьет и . . . (на стоящий) [na stoiashchii] Дева сядет . . . (на конец) [na konets] II.

Мы наслаждение удвоим [udvoim] И в руки взявши свой . . . (уд воем) [ud voem] Дева, ног . . . (не топырь) [ne topyr’] Залетит нетопырь! [netopyr’] (21)44 [I. The day of true bliss | The maiden will taste at last. | The hour will strike and on the upstanding | Tip the maiden will sit. | II. We will double the pleasure, | And taking my prick in your hands with a moan, | Maiden, do not open your legs | A bat will fly out.]

There is a clear attempt to establish a parallel between Pushkin and Kruchenykh as connoisseurs of a dirty joke, as well as a clever “shift,” and Kruchenykh pointedly quotes Pushkin’s blasphemous epic The Gabrieliad (1821), in which the Angel Gabriel deflowers the Virgin Mary (11). This is not the Pushkin of cultish adoration, either tsarist or Soviet.

Cinema by Other Means Kruchenykh’s ambitions are not limited, however, to reimagining Pushkin; he also wants to reimagine what it means to be a poet. We have already seen how Kruchenykh, like Maiakovskii, attempts to find

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a position for himself in the Soviet literary scene as an instructor on technical matters, the equivalent of the bourgeois specialists tolerated after the revolution only because their expertise was needed—not that anyone at Lef would have welcomed this comparison. Unable to compete with the inherent ideological credentials of rivals like the proletarian poets, the Futurists instead put an emphasis on mastery. Other poets were far from the only competition the Futurists faced in their aspiration to cultural preeminence, however. Although claims that the Soviet Union of the 1920s witnessed “a broad rejection of poetry and especially the poet” are somewhat exaggerated, especially considering the huge numbers of autodidact or newly educated workers and peasants who took up poetry in this period, there is no question that established poets and critics became increasingly convinced that verse was obsolete.45 “Now poetry has gone into irrevocable ‘retreat,’” said Tynianov in 1924. “A fact is a fact: prose has won.”46 Indeed, by the end of that year, most of the major poets of the prerevolutionary era had either died (Blok, Gumilev, Briusov, Khlebnikov), gone into exile (Ivanov, Tsvetaeva, Severianin), or largely given up publishing poetry (Akhmatova, Mandel’shtam, Belyi). Although Maiakovskii and others determinedly redoubled their efforts in this time, there was an impression abroad that the new political context, with its emphasis on popular sovereignty and materialism, did not lend itself to poetry or to the traditional image of the poet as an exceptional individual with a rarified talent. It was not only politics, however, that motivated the perception that poetry had lost its cultural ascendancy. For one, there was a general sense that Russian literature naturally cycled through periods of dominance of prose and poetry and that, just as it had in the mid-nineteenth century, prose had regained the upper hand, especially thanks to the boom in journalism. More concretely, the revolution had both coincided with and contributed to a global disruption of conventional cultural hierarchies in which elite culture’s superiority over popular entertainment was challenged. Novel technologies and forms of social and political organization helped to promote new media that not only outdid the avant-garde in its project to bring creativity to the people, but also infringed on the poet’s established status as the darling of popular affection and embodiment of the Zeitgeist. Predominant among these new pretenders was cinema, but one might also mention photography, amateur theater, cabaret, mass demonstrations, sport, and aerobatic displays. Just as the revolution had brought politics out onto the

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thronging streets, so these activities transformed culture both geographically and demographically, replacing private sites—the study, the salon, the gallery—with public spaces that invited the masses of the metropolis to engage as both participants and observers. Compared to their former poetic rivals, the Futurists certainly had some advantages in adapting to this new environment. In addition to their at least notional allegiance to political revolution, they also had plenty of interdisciplinary experience on which to draw, having always combined their poetry not only with prose manifestos and essays, but also with visual art, theater, and other more amorphous happenings. Furthermore, their rhetorical commitment to the urban crowd offered a potential point of contact with the new mass age. These assets notwithstanding, however, the Futurists also recognized that the new era required them to “review their tactics,” as Maiakovskii said in Lef.47 In light of this desire to reposition Futurism, we can read 500 New Witticisms not as a trivial literary stunt—or, at least, not just that—but as an attempt to broaden the bounds of poetry as a medium. The accent on performance evident in 500 New Witticisms was by no means new to the Futurists, but we can see in it a new emphasis on opening up his work to the masses. Kruchenykh’s shiftology acknowledges the collective ethos of the era in its presupposition that poetry is meant to be performed in front of a mass audience; it is only in this context that misprision would be possible. Furthermore, in explaining the importance of oral reception, Kruchenykh reframes the usual Futurist emphasis on “the word as such” in more scholarly terms, recalling the contemporary interest among the Formalists in the work of scholars like Eduard Sievers and Franz Saran in the field of Ohrenphilologie (earphilology): “Reading out loud is one of the most import elements of the correct reception of poetic works. Until the work is read out loud properly there is no sonic reception, there is no sound (deaf Beethoven does not count), there is no verse” (10).48 In his final “Declaration,” Kru­ chenykh describes shifts as “the best example” of the “predominance of the sonic element in verse” (61). As a consequence of the fundamental importance of sound, Kru­ chenykh is dismissive of other means of consuming poetry, mocking those who read “in lonely studies, in ‘the secret places of the soul’” (6), recalling his attack on solitude in The Secret Vices of Academicians, and saying that the new postrevolutionary era is “an age of voice and stage” (10). Or at least it will be if his prescriptions are heeded: “We will cure the deafness of readers and old chamber scribblers! Poets—to

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the squares and the stages! Beat the moth of shifts from your threadbare cloaks” (59). The cloak-wearing Romantic poet invoked by Khlebnikov in “The Lonely Player” needs a dose of fresh air, and a new means of addressing the new, mostly illiterate audiences opened up by the revolution.49 The importance of the collective audience is further evident in Kruchenykh’s attempts to reposition zaum, conceived a decade earlier largely as a form of individual self-expression, as a communal achievement. In The Phonetics of Theatre (1923), Kruchenykh approximates zaum to a socially determined dialect and argues that it can revivify the moribund theater, which, like Pushkin’s poetry, suffers from a lack of awareness of rhythm.50 Zaum transcends not only the boundaries between people, uniting them in harmony—“zaum language was always the language of the choir”—but is also collective on the grandest scale, since it will help the Soviet Union achieve its mission of global unity as “the new art given by the new Russia to a suffering world.”51 (The universal redemptive mission described by Dostoevskii has not gone far.) Even in 1925, when the Soviet leadership had largely given up on exporting revolution, Kruchenykh still believes that the Futurists have “a great responsibility to lead a great migration of peoples into beyond-realms [zaoblasti ].”52 In order to save themselves from obsolescence, Kruchenykh proposes that theater and poetry follow the example of the wonder of the new mass age, cinema. In the manifesto cited above, Kruchenykh observes that “a new generation is growing up under the sign of the gramophone, cinema, and phono-zaum!”53 He makes efforts to overcome this technology gap in his 1928 poetry collection Talking Cinema, which contains poems synchronized with films. In the introduction Kruchenykh openly says that because “cinema is capturing more and more public attention [. . .] other arts (for instance, literature) should strive to get closer to cinema.”54 Maiakovskii had long been trying to achieve a similar synthesis with film, not only by working as an actor and screenwriter, but also by bringing cinema into his poetry. The animation of the statue, for instance, replicates cinema’s ability to make the static mobile, a theme Maiakovskii explored in his own movie Bound in Film (1918), in which a girl on a poster comes to life.55 In The Phonetics of Theater and in 500 New Witticisms, Kruchenykh conceives of shiftology in cinematic terms, as the means by which outmoded theater and literature can emulate cinema’s propulsive speed, its mass consumption, and its ability, through montage, to transform isolated fragments into new

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wholes with new meanings. He describes “the shifted construction of the word” as the “cinema-word, zaum language,” since it mimics the “cinema-image” in which “the mind cannot catch up with the imagination and the action.”56 In 500 New Witticisms he praises poetry’s inherent momentum as an approximation of cinema’s dynamism, arguing that lines of verse in which word boundaries do not coincide with metric feet have “a forward-moving, ≥, cinematic character” (13) that is superior to static prose. The traffic of ideas between cinema and literature certainly moved in both directions at the time, with directors like Dziga Vertov taking inspiration in Futurist methods as well as rhetoric, but it was clear to all which art form was the most radical.57 The Futurists’ desire to transform poetry under the aegis of cinema was far from unique at the time and can be related to a trend across the European avant-garde for what Pavle Levi has called “cinema by other means.”58 Writers and artists wanted to replicate not only cinema’s popularity, but also the new modes it offered as a technology.59 Cinema reconfigured the way in which people thought about the consumption of culture and the nature of attention. In particular, one can see affinities between Kruchenykh’s irrepressibly forward-moving, constantly misunderstood, anti-auratic notion of public poetry in 500 New Witticisms and the argument in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) that the technological advances of modernity had fundamentally changed the reception of art, since “the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.”60 Just as Kruchenykh disdains solitary reading, so Benjamin valorizes the communal experience of cinema as the field in which concentration, the formerly dominant means of perceiving the work of art, has been most thoroughly replaced by the new mode of distraction. The experience of watching film is utterly unlike that of reading a text in solitude, or contemplating a work of art in a gallery: “Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. [. . .] In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”61 We will return to Benjamin’s thesis about the relationship between mass reproduction and the aura of the artwork, but it is worth noting at this stage that, although Benjamin devotes little space to literature in his essay, his article draws on his thinking on literature and rehearses his concern that modernity, and especially the introduction of industrial labor, had destroyed the conditions of reception necessary for the

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proper appreciation of storytelling.62 The novel is indicative of the alienated, individualistic world of bourgeois society, as Benjamin argues in “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” (1936): “A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller [. . .]. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader.”63 Like Kruchenykh, Benjamin longs for a more collective form of reception for literature, as well as a more organic and socially grounded mode of production. In “The Storyteller” Benjamin lauds nineteenth-century Russian writer Leskov as one of the last bastions of the traditions of oral storytelling that have suffered as a result of technology. Printing has killed off the personal transmission of tales and so modern men and women read on their own rather than listening in a state of semi-attentive boredom, as they once would have done while spinning or weaving. Benjamin is not exclusively nostalgic, however, but believes that certain strands of modernist writing have found new solutions to the problem of overly alert attention. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), the French poet is spared criticism for the individualistic mode of reception of his lyric poetry because these poems were composed in full awareness of the daily assault of modern urban life and as such embody modernity in a way that helps protect the reader from its vicissitudes. Baudelaire’s text communicates to the reader the author’s successes and failures in absorbing the everyday shocks engendered by the urban crowd.64 Benjamin does not mention Baudelaire in “The Work of Art” itself; instead, the writers that he commends do not belong to the world of belles lettres—the Dadaists and Freud. He praises the Dadaists because their literary work represents an attempt to avoid the solitary consumption typical of the novel and instead replicates the experience of watching a film. Dada’s value lies in its deliberate cultivation of “uselessness for contemplative immersion”: Dadaist activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public. From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.65

In their denial of contemplation, the Dadaists anticipate the work of Bertolt Brecht, who also wins Benjamin’s approval. In “What Is Epic

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Theatre?” (1939), Benjamin applauds Brecht’s ability to replicate the conditions of the audience of traditional storytelling through his stagecraft, which ensures that the viewers do not concentrate too much, but experience the play in collective relaxation.66 Finally, like Kruchenykh, Benjamin lauds the insights of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), not as a work of art, but as a guide to a new way of seeing the world, which, like cinema, has forever changed the nature of human perception: Fifty years ago a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since The Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception.67

Freud’s book is not itself consumed in a state of distraction; it operates in the opposite manner, isolating speech and making it analyzable. By doing so it has helped to train people to better appreciate the true nature of language, bringing about a “deepening of apperception” of the stuff of life.68 Benjamin thus proposes four different approaches to the crisis of individualistic over-attention afflicting language-based art: that of Bau­ delaire, who grafts modern collectivity into his work at the stage of composition; that of Dada, which uses scandal to prevent contemplation; that of Brecht, who achieves the same end using orality and collective reception; and that of Freud, who achieves an apperceptive shift by recontextualizing habituated speech as fragments of quotation, revealing their hidden meanings. While there is no doubting the considerable influence of the Soviet avant-garde on Benjamin, the affinities between Benjamin’s anticontemplation strategies and those present in Kruchenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, both in the imagined ideal of mass aural misprision and in the text itself, are most likely products of convergent evolution.69 Nevertheless, in their quest to redeem literature in modernity the German critic and the Russian poet find strikingly similar solutions. In the first place, Kruchenykh’s prescription for quasi-cinematic public poetry anticipates Brechtian theater in its emphasis on orality and collectivity and parallels the “bullet” of Dada poetry in the way it gives the

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audience no time for contemplation. Shock is not confined to the imagined reading but is also a fundamental device of Kruchenykh’s own text. On the one hand, like a Dadaist performance, 500 New Witticisms uses a scandalous exposé of the beloved national poet to prevent the reader from consuming the text in a state of attention—we are never allowed to get comfortable. On the other, just as Baudelaire’s lyric hero mediates the blows of modern life, so Kruchenykh inserts a version of himself into the text as the first recipient of the shocks of Pushkin’s shift, as if he were indeed hearing them for the first time, rather than publishing them in a book after exhaustive research. Finally, 500 New Witticisms shows Kruchenykh trying to be a different, more analytical sort of writer—not a Tristan Tzara or a Charles Baudelaire, but a Sigmund Freud or a Walter Benjamin. In order to describe an ideal of poetry consumed in a state of distraction, he approaches Pushkin’s works with the solitary over-attention typical of the critic, breaking up its natural dynamic flow, using selective quotation to slow it down, defamiliarize it, and reveal hidden meanings. This sort of internal self-contradiction between the message and the medium of the text is also common in the manifestos, which used extensive discussion of the past in order to urge its forgetting. The Futurists’ eagerness for paratextual explication always casts a shadow over the alleged effectiveness of their poetry and here Kruchenykh tacitly undermines the credibility of the supposedly self-sufficiently transformative power of zaum and shiftology by arguing for them so vehemently. The general shift in apperception that Kruchenykh seeks to inspire in the public will not come about in a state of distraction, like that engendered by cinema, but emerges as a result of his scholarly over-attention.

Futurism as Formalism The natural model for Kruchenykh to turn to when adopting a more academic pose to lay bare the hidden mechanisms of literature was the work of the Formalists. The personal and intellectual entanglement of Futurism and Formalism is well known, but it is worth restating that not only did influence move in both directions between the groups, but also that there was considerable overlap in their areas of operation.70 As the manifestos attest, the Futurists had always fancied themselves as theoreticians and some of the Formalists had engaged in creative writing even before the revolution. The boundary between the groups became

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still more blurred over the course of the 1920s, as the Futurists presented themselves as teachers of poetic technique and the Formalists’ creative ambitions became more pronounced, with first Shklovskii and then Tynianov starting to write fiction. One of the places in which the expanding domains of the two groups overlapped was film. Shklovskii and Maiakovskii, for instance, worked together on the screenplay of the documentary Jews on the Land (1927). The influence that the technology of cinema had on the Futurist conception of poetry was also felt by the Formalists, and especially Tynianov, whose interest in the coordination of part and whole in poetry and in film mirrors many of the concerns of Kruchenykh in 500 New Witticisms and elsewhere. In Talking Cinema, Kruchenykh eagerly anticipates the introduction of sound in films as an opportunity for poetry. He proposes to create a new form of art by uniting “the Great Mute with the Great Chatterbox— poetry,” a union that is possible because of an inherent structural similarity between cinema and poetry, which are both made up of small selfcontained units: “it is easy for them to become friends: the shot fits into a line of verse and the stanza becomes an episode in a film.”71 In 500 New Witticisms Kruchenykh atomizes poetry in the same way, drawing attention to even smaller constituent units, the foot and the syllable. However, just as a succession of stills creates a moving image in cinema, and just as the subsequent juxtaposition of these images in montage creates a dynamic new set of meanings, so the multiple divisions of the poetic line do not impede movement but create it. Although Kruchenykh has a dubious grasp of the mechanisms of prosody and although he is not sure whether the misalignment of metrical feet and words is desirable, he is certain that it imparts a sense of forward motion: If a foot has finished, but only part of a word has gone into it, then all subsequent post-accentual syllables become preaccentual syllables of the next foot, all the syllables hurry toward the stressed syllable [. . .] the line has a forward-moving, ≥, cinematic character. Prose speech has one main stress in a phrase (logical stress), but a poem also has metrical stress that strengthens movement. (12–13)

In parenthesis, Kruchenykh compares the sense of movement created by this sequence of discrete units to a recent theatrical production: “Quick replacement and forward movement: instead of Ostrovskii’s 4 acts—33 episodes!—Meierkhol’d’s The Forest” (13). It is typical of new

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art, Kruchenykh implies, to break down monoliths into smaller pieces and in so doing guarantee a sense of dynamism. We can easily recognize the implied similarity between Kruchenykh’s own modernization of Pushkin and Vsevolod Meierkhol’d’s updating of a classic play by Aleksandr Ostrovskii, the nineteenth-century chronicler of bourgeois provincial life, mainstay of the Russian theatrical repertoire, and one of Lunacharskii’s preferred inspirations for the new Soviet literature. What we perhaps miss is that Kruchenykh is alluding here precisely to the cinematic qualities of Meierkhol’d’s production, which ignored the original time sequence of Ostrovskii’s play in favor of multiple episodes arranged according to the principle of montage.72 A critic wrote in Kino-Gazeta that “Meierkhol’d’s Forest is not theater at all but a film [. . .], Meierkhol’d cuts and edits his scenes like film; as in film he works through gesture; as in film he uses close-ups and long-shots; as in film he changes the location for each scene.”73 The word that Kruchenykh uses to describe the quick interchange of scenes in Meierkhol’d’s production, “replacement” (smena), which also has the sense of “change,” “interchange,” or “shift,” was a favorite of Tynianov. He uses it in three fields: the rhythmic construction of verse (“the interchange of accented and unaccented syllables of a text are entirely part of the concept of meter”), literary history (“the chief concept of literary evolution is the replacement of systems”), and the theory of montage (“not the linking of shots, but the differentiating interchange of shots”).74 Tynianov believes that meaning is created not through connection, but alteration and juxtaposition.75 In fact, one might say that a principle of Tynianov’s theory of poetics is that the creation of a new whole is dependent on the interchange of individual, discrete elements over time. In an almost Darwinian fashion, large-scale diachronic change is contingent on small-scale synchronic heterogeneity and clash.76 Tynianov’s fascination with the interaction of discrete parts is manifest in his interest in the fragment, which he considers a useful and indicative literary device because it is so self-evidently an independent unit that openly declares its difference from its surroundings.77 In The Problem of Verse Language, also published in 1924, Tynianov argues that the meaning of all words is contextual—“the word is a chameleon”— and that this inherent contingency is particularly evident in fragmentary archaisms and foreign words, which function differently in the works of different poets.78 The ambivalence of the word is particularly noticeable in poetry, Tynianov proposes, because of its “successive” nature: “one word suggests another.”79 Tynianov, who dedicates the

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first half of The Problem of Verse Language to rhythm and the second to semantics, is concerned with the way in which rhythm in poetry pushes words together and, in so doing, creates new meaning: Words end up inside verse series and units in stronger and closer coordination and connection than in everyday speech; this power of connection is not without effect on the nature of semantics. [. . .] The thing is that ambivalent signs of meaning can appear, determined by the density of the series (close proximity), and these intensify at the expense of and instead of the fundamental meaning and create “the semblance of meaning,” “apparent meaning.”80

That the emergence of “apparent meaning” from a combination of proximity and rhythm is also the cause of Kruchenykh’s “shifts” should be evident enough, but, if further proof were needed of the connection between the theories of Kruchenykh and Tynianov, we might observe that in a discussion of innovation in rhyme from 1924, Tynianov cites some of the same passages of Pushkin as Kruchenykh, noting the ingenuity of the rhymes Garol’dom | so l’dom and poroiu priam | poroi upriam.81 In that same essay, Tynianov gives credit to Maiakovskii for his skill in handling such composite rhymes and describes Khlebni­kov’s experiments as the best example of the conscious manipulation of the meaning-creating faculties of juxtaposition and proximity in poetry.82 Without naming it, Tynianov establishes zaum as the purest embodiment of the ambiguous meanings that are necessarily created in poetry and makes an enlightened defense of the Futurists’ ability to deliberately maintain ambiguity.83 Zaum also features prominently in “On the Literary Fact,” Tynia­ nov’s essay on cultural evolution. This influential article, which proposes a new theory of literary development through time, was published in Lef on 25 May 1924, making it almost exactly contemporary with 500 New Witticisms. Tynianov describes the “complex process” that “precedes evolutionary replacement.”84 While one movement, genre, or form is dominant, a conflicting, dialectically opposed “constructive principle” is formed that will generate the dominant system’s replacement. As in biological evolution, the creation of this new principle is motivated by chance. Unlike in nature, however, the fitness of the new principle is proved not by its reproductive capability—we have not arrived at meme theory yet—but rather becomes apparent in comparison with

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the formerly dominant system, which becomes automatized over time in the manner first laid out by Shklovskii in “The Resurrection of the Word.” Like Shklovskii, Tynianov describes the Futurists as the preeminent opponents of automatization and generators of novelty through accident: “In fact, every deformity, every ‘mistake,’ every ‘error’ in normative poetics is, potentially, a new constructive principle ( just such a principle, for example, is the use of instances of linguistic carelessness and ‘mistakes” as a means for semantic shift by the Futurists).”85 Again, while he does not mention him by name, Tynianov could well be thinking of Kruchenykh when, in an accompanying footnote, he condemns contemporary literature for its prudery and reminds readers of the abundance of “mistakes” made by Pushkin.86 Tynianov would go on to explore the principle of aleatory meaning creation in the novella Lieutenant Kizhe (1927), in which the titular officer is a phantom presence created by a shiftological error in copying, when a scribe mistakenly reads the emphatic particle zhe as part of the preceding word, replacing the phrase “Lieutenants [ podporuchiki zhe] Stiven, Rybin, and Azancheev are appointed” with “Lieutenant Kizhe [ podporuchik Kizhe], Stiven, Rybin, and Azancheev.” 87 Like the neologisms of 500 New Witticisms, Kizhe is born from nothing—or, rather, a double nothing, from the omission of a gap. This is creation ex nihilo, but of a very different sort from the tabula rasa proposed by the early Futurist manifestos. The effect of this meaningful vacancy (the obverse of an empty signifier) is compounded in the 1934 film of Tynianov’s own adapted screenplay, which employs the principles of The Problem of Verse Language in depicting the phantom Kizhe by focusing on the meaning-giving objects proximate to him.88 I refer at such length to the parallels between Tynianov’s theories and the practical example of 500 New Witticisms not in order to borrow some credibility for Kruchenykh’s semi-facetious text, but rather to draw attention to the fact that Kruchenykh’s appropriation of Pushkin’s text promotes not only a new type of literature—one that is oral, public, and cinematic—but also a new concept of originality in which novelty is not manufactured by the will of the writer, but rather revealed by them as they reconfigure existing material. Given that Tynianov’s The Problem of Verse Language also prioritizes the use of examples from Pushkin, we might wonder why Kruchenykh and Tynianov turn to Pushkin as evidence for their theories. Both were clearly extremely fond of Pushkin as a historical figure and as a writer— Tynianov devoted much of his career as a scholar, biographer, and

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novelist to Pushkin and his milieu—but so was pretty much every educated Russian of their era. One might ask instead, therefore, why did both Kruchenykh and Tynianov feel that the example of Pushkin had special explanatory power? In the case of Tynianov it is partly because he considered Pushkin to exemplify the principles of fragmentariness, ambivalence, and agonistic innovation that he detected in operation in culture as a whole.89 More specifically, the elucidation of parallels between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a leitmotif of Tynianov’s criticism and he argues in “Interval” (1924) that Pushkin prefigured the poetry of the early 1920s by being a transitional figure, a pivot between old and new.90 As we have seen in his contradictory stance toward Pushkin’s shifts, Kruchenykh also acknowledges that Pushkin was, in his own time at least, an innovative force. The poet Aleksandr Zharov recalls a conversation following the death of Stalin in 1953 in which Kruchenykh said that he would turn to poetry to help him express his feelings and, when Zharov asks him if he will turn to one of the “innovative poets,” Kruchenykh said, “Indeed, to Pushkin,” and quoted Boris Godunov.91 Both Tynianov and Kruchenykh were exercised by the treatment of Pushkin as a special case. Tynianov argued that the study of Pushkin should not be an independent field, but a subdivision of literary studies as a whole, and devoted much of his work on Pushkin to reinserting him into the process of literary evolution, either by illuminating the figures around him or by demonstrating his involvement in the literary disputes of the day. An early sally in Tynianov’s attack on what he condemned as “the science of Pushkin” was the philippic “The Pretend Pushkin,” likely written in 1922, which, after ridiculing the mysticism of Gershenzon and Dostoevskii’s approaches to Pushkin, takes to task contemporary Pushkinists for falsely ascribing poems to their idol. 92 Tynianov lambasts the trend for scraping the barrel of manuscripts and albums in search of “new” material by Pushkin, a tendency that, just like the pettifogging obsession with mundane details of Pushkin’s life, had become even more pronounced after the revolution, so that between 1918 and 1924 twelve new works had come out purporting to include previously unpublished material by Pushkin: It is time to announce completely openly that Pushkin came down to us in a sufficiently complete form [. . .] and that over the course of the last 20 years the “new acquisitions of Pushkinian text,” which have been published with entirely extraneous

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triumphalism, and sometimes even with newspaper hype, have contributed little that is substantially new [. . .] If, of 1000 epigrams 999 have reached us, then there is no point in printing the thousandth when two of the four lines are marked “illegible.”93

The title of 500 New Witticisms and Puns by Pushkin alludes wryly to this fashion for “new” extant works and especially to the compendiums filled with wisecracks from visitors’ books, and shares Tynianov’s hyperbolic enumeration.94 Kruchenykh pretends that he has discovered preexisting coinages hidden in Pushkin’s text and that their “newness” is not located in his intervention but is inherent and revealed by objective, impersonal mechanisms. He criticizes those who downplay Pushkin’s errors and says: “It’s much better to study carefully and listen closely to the new Pushkin, who is being revealed (for the first time!) before us!” (26). Superficially, Kruchenykh is ascribing the same sort of novelty to his Pushkin as that suggested by the discovery of “new,” previously unpublished works, but his emphasis on the conditions of reception refutes the Briusovian idea of a single essential Pushkin waiting to be uncovered. Pushkin is new because he is constantly remade. “Pushkin read to oneself and Pushkin read from the stage are not one and the same,” writes Kruchenykh, before quoting Boris Tomashevskii’s argument that “whatever the author thinks about his work, the conditions of perception can destroy what he has invented” (10). He explicitly locates Pushkin’s constant metamorphosis in his aural reception, but also implies that Pushkin becomes something new in the space of his book. It is Kru­ chenykh’s ingenuity and industry that transforms Pushkin, as Chiche­rin says, “into a comrade” (54)—a zaumnik, a Freudian analysand, and a proponent and product of creative misprision. In this regard, Kruchenykh’s treatment of Pushkin exemplifies the model of literary evolution presented in “On the Literary Fact.” Tynia­ nov argues that, although it is important to study literary works in their specific literary historical context, “this does not mean that works cannot ‘belong to the ages.’”95 Such immortality is conferred only by becoming the raw material for future innovation: Things that have become automatic can be used. Every epoch promotes some or other phenomena from the past, which are close to it, and forgets others. But these, of course, are secondary phenomena, new work on old material. Pushkin the historical

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figure differs from the Pushkin of the Symbolists, but the Pushkin of the Symbolists is incomparable with the evolutionary significance of Pushkin in Russian literature; an epoch always selects the materials it needs, but the use of these materials is characteristic only of the epoch.96

Tynianov’s emphasis on “evolutionary significance” differs from the standard argument for the proteanism of Pushkin and from Briusov’s personal Pushkin because his metamorphoses are understood neither as a revelation of his own inherent multiform self, nor as the product of an idiosyncratic personal connection between the poet and a later reader.97 Rather this labile Pushkin is a natural consequence of the function of literature as a diachronic system. He is not the exception; he is the rule. Tynianov then furnishes the reader with another example of the importance of the evolutionary context—the Futurists. Returning to the example of zaum, he upbraids critics for ridiculing early Futurist experimentalism because “evaluating a dynamic fact from a static position is the same as evaluating the qualities of a cannonball in isolation from its flight. A ‘cannonball’ can be very nice to look at and not fly, i.e., not be a cannonball, and it can be ‘awkward’ and ‘ugly,’ but fly nicely, i.e., be a cannonball.”98 In his post-factum rationalization of zaum, in the parallel he draws between the capacity for transformation of Pushkin and the Futurists, and in his valorization of movement, Tynianov marches in step with the Futurists themselves, who frequently sought to defend zaum from postrevolutionary criticism on the grounds that it made subsequent developments possible, and whose argument for Pushkin’s continued flexibility often seemed designed to emphasize their own adaptability.99 Tynianov seeks to move away from naïve speculations on the psychological makeup of the individual genius and instead to understand works by contextualizing them within the unfolding of cultural history, rejecting any sense of immutable aesthetic standards in favor of the idea of literature as a “dynamic speech construction.” 100 This impersonal language and diminishment of individual genius might prompt us to ask what role, if any, the initial author plays in determining the merit and indeed the meaning of the work. There are indeed considerable similarities between the models of spontaneous meaning creation suggested by Kruchenykh and Tynianov and later trends that shifted critical attention to the importance of the reader or interlocutor in determining

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meaning, challenging the primacy of “the author.” Kruchenykh and Tynianov treat language as inherently ambiguous and intersubjective, prefiguring the more systematic and far-reaching theories of Bakhtin, and the manner in which they distinguish between Pushkin as a historical figure and Pushkin as a name, a convenient catch-all for a disparate and unbounded phenomenon, anticipates Michel Foucault’s “author function.”101 Is the Futurist resurrection of Pushkin, therefore, indirectly responsible for “the death of the author”?

Rumors of the Death of the Author Have Been Greatly Exaggerated Kruchenykh’s not entirely successful attempts to suppress his own creative intervention in Pushkin’s text and present shifts as an unmediated product of qualities inherent in the text draw on the theories not only of Formalism, but also of the third constituent of Lef ’s avant-garde trinity— Constructivist art. While many non-Futurist poets understood the turn away from poetry in the early 1920s as a loss, the most progressive artists of the prerevolutionary period, who moved further and further away from two-dimensional figurative painting, presented their eventual abandonment of the easel as a positive and necessary step in the transformation of the role of art in society. Kruchenykh collaborated closely with leading Constructivist artists like Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, not only at Lef, but also, for instance, in book design, as well as with “Constructivist” poets like Chi­ cherin. More important than this cooperation, however, is the fact that Kruchenykh shares with the Constructivists an interest in the organizational properties of the work of art. The mutual influence in this area between all three groups, Constructivists, Futurists, and Formalists, is evident in the fact that the members of the Working Group for Objective Analysis, founded by Rodchenko and Stepanova, promoted “rhythm” as one of the three chief areas of scrutiny in their study of painting.102 Moreover, just as Kruchenykh makes an example of the alleged master Pushkin in order to show how both rhythm and meaning elude the control of any author, so the artists of the Working Group used famous paintings by Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne as evidence not of conscious painterly technique but of abstract principles of arrangement. In 500 New Witticisms and other works of the period Kruchenykh employs Constructivist terminology that emphasizes the organization

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of the work not as a subjective manifestation of authorial intent, but as an objective reality. An obvious example is words related to “construction,” which occur six times in 500 New Witticisms, but more revealing is the word faktura. This term, which had long been a favorite term of Futurist discourse, is related to the Western concept of “facture,” the application of paint, but in Russia it acquired a more pronounced emphasis on materiality and came to be associated with the avant-garde’s project to eliminate the distance between artist, producer, and consumer.103 In his 1923 work The Faktura of the Word, Kruchenykh presents faktura in impersonal terms, as a laying bare of the structural organization of poetic language.104 This same principle is evident in the argument of 500 New Witticisms that oral performance exposes the hidden structure of Pushkin’s verse: “A shift can be the result of several reasons: aside from rhythm-meter, its appearance can be influenced by specific qualities of speech sound (phonetic faktura)” (49). In positing the creation of shifts as an automatic process, Kruchenykh seems to be drinking deep from the streams of Formalist and Constructivist thought that would later carry objectivism to extremes in the doctrine of “literature of fact.” This vehemently anti-fictional, anti-poetical tendency was promoted by theoreticians such as Arvatov, Tret’iakov, and Nikolai Chuzhak, who had coalesced as a group around Lef and then New Lef (1927–29).105 “Literature of fact” only enjoyed a brief heyday, losing out first to the briefly dominant Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and then to government-sanctioned socialist realism, but it nevertheless exerted significant influence, not just in the Soviet Union, but on Benjamin too, which is one of the reasons why we see affinities between him and Kruchenykh. In “The Author as Producer” (1934) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin lauds the Soviet avant-gardists around New Lef, already without honor in their own land, as early adopters of the de-hierarchized relation of author, work, and consumer that is an inevitable result of technological change.106 Regardless of Kruchenykh’s attempts to align himself with currents espousing the necessary withering away of the creative personality, closer examination of his practice, both in the early 1920s and in its evolution thereafter, shows that his poetics continue to valorize the individual’s creative agency. While he is faced with the same problem of the role of the individual in the postrevolutionary period as his comrades in painting and in the “literature of fact,” Kruchenykh, who did not contribute to New Lef, posits a different future for the author.

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The effacement of authorial subjectivity in this era was not an inevitable, organic, and unconscious development, but itself the product of a certain authorial agency and performativity. As Petrov argues, “it is not as a fact that we should take the death of the author, as some sort of given that it is the task of anthropological philosophy or literary theory to render explicit, but as an act, a moment of concrete happening, an instance of historically determinate becoming.”107 Both writers and artists at the time found themselves on the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, the Romantic and realist figure of the individual autonomous artist as the ultimate creative authority seemed not only outdated, but, after the collective triumph of the revolution, politically intolerable; on the other hand, avant-gardists did not want to give up their hard-won position as an exceptional cadre deserving of a certain prestige. So they had to find a way to balance the requirement for “salient gestures of selfeffacement and depersonalization” with the need to make arguments for their own continued right to exist, if not as artists, then in some other specialized role, as teachers, organizers, analysts, or apparat­chiks.108 In short, many creative people wanted to both expedite “the death of the author” and to survive it. Such performative self-suppression is ostensibly a very different sort of “death” to that seen in Maiakovskii’s appropriation of Pushkin’s martyrdom myth. In the latter, the long-term health of the poet’s work is presented as dependent on their physical death; in the former, the artist or poet has no intention of physically dying, or even pretending to, in order to secure their legacy. In both instances, however, the act of self-abnegation must be visible: just as Khlebnikov’s “lonely player” needs witnesses, so it is not enough for the avant-garde author to die, he must also be seen to die. Although the modernist denial of authorship in the Soviet Union clothes itself in the language of science rather than religion, it partakes of a similar ritualistic energy to poetic martyrdom; it is, as Petrov says, “a symbolic act whose aim is as much to bury as to summon. It buries the individual self in effigy so that something more real can appear in its stead.”109 What is more, the two versions of authorial death were not mutually exclusive: Maiakovskii, for instance, pursued both strategies, imagining himself as a glorious martyr, but also as a faceless cog in the Soviet machine.110 Despite Maiakovskii’s concessions to impersonal construction, however, he was never willing entirely to surrender the lyrical ego as the chief organizing principle of his art and his life. In 500 New Witticisms, Kru­chenykh not only replicates Maiakovskii’s strategy of appropriating

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non-poetic, quasi-objective identities but also goes further in suppressing authorial intent and presenting poetic meaning as external to his agency. Nevertheless, he is never willing to cede as much control to internal laws of art as are the Constructivists, and as such his use of words connected to “construction” retains a place for the author’s special gifts. In The Phonetics of Theatre he describes zaum as “the only constructive language” but insists that “it is made and created by an artist”; it is superior to existing language not in the nature of its production, but in its consumption, since “it is not taken on passively, like the heavy heritage of the ages.”111 Kruchenykh is eager to promote active reception, but still insists on the determining skill of the artist or poet. Thus while the Constructivist Boris Kushner cites the contracted neologisms of the Soviet state (Cheka, Narkompros, etc.) as the first step in a socialist linguistic revolution of which zaum is the next stage, Kruchenykh distinguishes these abbreviations from zaum “because they are accidental.”112 In 500 New Witticisms, he presents “construction” in similarly normative terms, as an object of authorial intention that can be disfigured by errors: “A misplaced ‘shift’ disturbs the sonic quality of a line, breaks its construction, and can turn any ode into a farce” (60). Finally, the best example of Kru­ chenykh’s uneasiness with the complete surrendering of conscious authorial control is his ambiguous position on whether Pushkin is capable of deliberate shifts. Kruchenykh seems similarly unclear about the determining role of reception and especially the question of whether shifts are obvious lapses that are evident to all or concealed phenomena to which he is particularly sensitive. Although his sniggering tone suggests they are obvious, he admits that they can be difficult to spot in iambic verse: “if it is not noticeable to someone uninitiated in versification technique it is noticeable (?) [sic], then a person with a developed poetic hearing constantly catches these quiet but very dangerous knockings [stuki] (things [shtuki]), these tremors in the earth of the verse line” (18). In this instance, the true meaning of the work of art is not inherent and self-evident but generated by the peculiar attentiveness of the reader. As elsewhere, Kruchenykh’s practice embodies Tynianov’s theory. While Tynianov shared his colleagues’ contempt for biographical analy­ ses of literature and for naïve psychological, sociohistorical, or philosophical interpretations, he was not as radical as Brik, one of the chief cheerleaders of the move from the easel to production in art and from fiction to fact in literature, who proposed in his provocative article “The

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So-Called Formal Method” (1923) that “there are no poets and writers, only poetry and literature” and that “if there had been no Pushkin, Eugene Onegin would still have been written. America would have been discovered even without Columbus.”113 We note the difference between Tynianov’s cannonball metaphor and Brik’s more static continental image: the former is more drawn to dynamic systems, which leads him to operate with a fairly narrow concept of the role of the reader. In short, Tynianov is interested in reading above all as a corollary of writing. In “On Parody” (1929), he mentions the concept of “reader reception” only to reject it: The division of literature into a reader and a writer is on the whole impossible, because neither the writer nor the reader is fundamentally doing anything different. The writer is also a reader, and the reader, in constructing the literary work, does the same work as the writer after him. [. . .] The question of “reader reception” arises only in the case of a subjective-psychologistic attitude to these questions, and not in their systemic and functional analysis.114

Whereas Brik rejects “the history of the generals of literature,” Tynianov remains unconvinced and pointedly distances himself from Brik’s position: “A blind rejection of ‘the history of generals’ has led in turn to an interest in the study of mass literature, but without a clear theoretical recognition of the methods of its study and the nature of its significance.”115 Despite Tynianov’s description of largely impersonal systems, he imagines literary evolution as something that takes place not diffusely in the wider culture, but concretely in the minds and books of writers and poets, albeit not under their complete conscious control.116 While Kruchenykh seems to grant more influence than Tynianov to the reader—or, rather, the listener—as part of his promotion of collective reception, his ideal distracted audience could hardly be said to exercise any agency; nor does he imagine that, aural reception aside, the specifics of the listener’s identity or location have any part to play in how shifts are interpreted. Instead, he argues that misprision is hardwired in the original work. The only recipient of Pushkin’s text who displays unquestioned control over meaning is Kruchenykh himself; it is he who is responsible for making something new out of Pushkin’s tired old text. As such, Kruchenykh partakes of the same elevation of the interpretant that Petrov argues is an inevitable by-product of the rise of a

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“hermeneutics of suspicion” over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “As the text loses its anchorage in the figure of the author, another persona enters the plot in what seems, at first, to be a merely ancillary role [. . .] the persona of the analyst.”117 In systems of thought predicated on the text’s inherent deformation and distance from the world, rather than its willed and organic perfection and verisimilitude, the analyst—be they Freud, a Formalist, or Kruchenykh— becomes “the hero of hermeneutics” who “exposes the dissimulation and overcomes it [. . .] bridges the gap between the two hypostases of the text [. . .] and makes it one again, restores its identity/truth.”118 Kruchenykh senses the fundamental reordering of cultural capital in the “isms” of the mid-twentieth century, in which the glory went not to the great writers but to the great readers. Nonetheless, it is best to understand Kruchenykh’s valorization of critical analysis not as an abrogation of the role of the writer, but an expansion of it. As noted above, Tynianov saw little point in distinguishing readers and writers and in his acute studies of intertextuality he presented writers who move forward the evolution of Russian culture, like Pushkin, Nekrasov, Tiutchev, and Dostoevskii, not as the passive recipients of influence, but as diligent students who developed their own voice in conscious opposition to what had come before, either turning away from it or transforming it parodically.119 Kruchenykh’s quasi-analytical treatment of Pushkin matches Tynianov’s definition of parody, which underlies his understanding of literary evolution as a whole: All methods of parodying, without exception, consist of the changing of a literary work or of a moment, which unites a range of works (an author, an almanac, a magazine) or the changing of a range of literary works (a genre)—as a system, in the translation of them into another system. Properly speaking, even the use of a word in a different environment or context is a partial change of meaning [. . .]. Every removal of a certain literary fact from one system and introduction of it into another is the same partial change in meaning.120

500 New Witticisms is in fact a considerably more complex parody than the dyadic interaction imagined by Tynianov. In regard to the transposed “literary fact” of any particular quotation from Pushkin there are

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three systems at work: the conventional afterlife of the Pushkinian oeuvre (here represented by Briusov’s edition of Pushkin’s poetry, which is cited throughout), the imagined aural reception, and Kruchenykh’s own text. As it is moved through each of these environments, the fragment acquires new meaning. Take, for example, the line “Как увижу очи томны” (kak uvizhu ochi tomny) (7) from Pushkin’s poem “From the Portuguese” (itself also a translation). In Pushkin’s original it means “When I see languorous eyes”; Kruchenykh tells us in mock horror that this would be misinterpreted by a crowd as a shocking reference to feces (kaka); finally, in the context of 500 New Witticisms, the whole line takes on another identity, ceasing to be a fragment of a poem and becoming a joke. Moreover, Kruchenykh is also perpetrating another parody by bringing the trappings of serious literary scholarship into an entirely new domain and intermingling them with his own off-the-cuff style. Like the writers examined by Tynianov, Kruchenykh does not announce himself as a parodist. But while Dostoevskii, say, keeps implicit his debt to Gogol’, Kruchenykh openly admits to using material from the past, while denying that he is transforming it. Nonetheless, for parody to be effective as a parody the switch between systems must be evident to the reader. Kruchenykh cannot help but remind us not only that there is a joke here, but also that he is in on it, making frequent interventions into the text with nudges, winks, and over a hundred exclamation marks. One can contrast this tongue-in-cheek, attention-seeking transformation of existing material to contemporary Constructivist photomontage. Although photomontage’s repurposing of existing material, a technique originating in Cubism, actually demonstrates considerable artistic virtuosity, practitioners refrained from presenting their work as the product of any talent for mixing and matching, preferring instead to focus on the genre’s superior verisimilitude. Writing in Lef in 1923, Liubov’ Popova said: By photomontage we have in mind the use of a photographic print as a means of depiction. The combination of photo-prints replaces the composition of graphic depictions. The point of this replacement is that the photo-print is not a sketch of a visual fact, but its precise fixation. It is this precision and documentary quality that gives the photo-print such power over the viewer.121

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The individual components of the montage are presented less as building blocks in the creation of something new than as a tool for the truer representation of the existing world. We see here the increasing importance of documentary realism to the Constructivists, which prompted Rod­chenko to abandon photomontage in favor of photography in 1924.122 Similarly, contemporary practitioners of creative juxtaposition in cinema, although aware of montage’s power to change perspectives, did not join Kruchenykh in celebrating their ability to manipulate and transform found material into something new, but rather consistently stated that their resequencing and recombination of footage laid bare a hidden truth. Writing in 1924, Dziga Vertov, the director closest to Lef, described his approach to filming and editing as an attempt to “organize [. . .] the visible world,” “making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt” in order “to show the truth on screen.”123 Kruchenykh, in contrast, steers clear of the word “truth” and mentions realism only to dismiss it. This continuing disinterest in reality had a profound influence on the development of his poetics and, indeed, his politics: unlike some members of the avant-garde, Kruchenykh remained distant from state-sponsored projects to capture the glories of the state reborn under Stalin and his only concession to content-driven work was his turn to autobiography, starting with Fifteen Years of Futurism in 1927. Other than that, he continued to pursue linguistically innovative free verse and to develop his interest in the creative reconfiguration of existing material. Rather than stage the death of the author in order to elevate “the real world,” Kruchenykh promotes a new life for the poet as a selector, transformer, and archivist.

The Alien Word As his career progressed, Kruchenykh, the onetime champion of neologism, became ever more devoted to other people’s utterances. This apparent abandonment of Futurist principles is perhaps less surprising than it might seem at first. For one, the long history of Futurist collaboration signaled an openness to the creative repurposing of existing material.124 More importantly, Kruchenykh’s poetic outlook was significantly influenced by his participation in the 41° group in Tbilisi between 1916 and 1919.125 Motivated by the typically avant-garde aspiration to break down boundaries between art, artist, and audience, members of that group drew on the theory of “Everythingism,” the loosely defined

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aesthetic creed first formulated in 1913 by 41° member Il’ia Zdanevich as a riposte to the Hyleans’ insistence on novelty. In place of the Futurist paradigm of the replacement of the profane with a pure, new art, Zdane­ vich and Larionov proposed that all works of art are equally conventional and so artists and writers should adopt a deliberately omnivorous attitude to existing culture and recognize all kinds of borrowing as legitimate in order to bring about a situation in which works of art “exist at once in a state of authentic originality and utter dependence on other works.”126 Terent’ev summed up the group’s enthusiasm for such norm-defying plagiarism in his 1919 work Seventeen Rubbish Implements: “Down with authors! You have to say the alien word [chuzhoe slovo].”127 Critics with a less open-minded attitude to intellectual property than Terent’ev often accused Kruchenykh of being too eager to say other people’s words, including, ironically, Zdanevich himself, in the first “Everythingist” manifesto. In a 1921 poem Khlebnikov scolded Kru­chenykh for exaggerating his contribution to Futurism’s development, repeating the usual denouncement for extremism: “Ловко ты ловишь мысли чужие, | Чтоб довести до конца, до самоубийства” (Skilfully you catch other people’s thoughts | To push them to the end, to suicide).128 When Aseev likens Kruchenykh to a vampire in 1929 it is not only because of his otherworldly aura but because he appears too confident that “the world was created for his use.”129 The sense that Kruchenykh obtained his creative nourishment at others’ expense was only heightened by the fact that the majority of his published output in the late 1920s consisted not of original poems but of hostile attacks on other writers, especially Esenin. In these polemics Kruchenykh rehearses the identity-formation tactics of the early manifestos by finding an enemy to define himself against, and in the recently deceased Esenin he found one who was suitably famous, controversial, and incapable of returning any punches. While the manifestos maintain some positive agenda, however, in Kruchenykh’s haranguing of Esenin and his supporters there is little mention of an alternative Futurist program, and even the vivid critical persona of 500 New Witticisms fades away. In these self-published, self-plagiarizing pamphlets, we are left only with polemic for the sake of polemic, writing for the sake of writing. It would be wrong, however, to characterize Kruchenykh’s late career as a headlong descent into parasitic graphomania. In his continuing appropriation of the classics, Kruchenykh revealed flashes of an evolving poetics. In particular, Kruchenykh had a close relationship with a fellow

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son of Ukraine, Gogol’, with whom he shared interests in humor, nonsense, and the demonic. The title of his pointedly derivative wartime cycle Arabesques from Gogol’ (1944) plays the same trick as 500 New Witticisms, making the half-hearted pretense that this is an original work by Gogol’, a revisitation perhaps of his heterogeneous collection Arabesques (1834). Nor is the suggestion that Gogol’ is the author completely inaccurate, since Arabesques from Gogol’ weaves together a plethora of quotations from and allusions to the Gogolian oeuvre to form “a collage [that] facilitates the ongoing production of text and the creation of a space of intense intertextuality.”130 This composite technique was not unprecedented, since the poem jointly authored by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in 1912, A Game in Hell, makes similar use of lines from Pushkin and Kruchenykh’s apocalyptic essay The Devil and the Wordsmiths is replete with references to Gogol’.131 Nonetheless, The Devil and the Wordsmiths mixes together numerous sources, including the book of Revelation and the work of Lermontov, and this diversity precludes the sort of challenge to the idea of authenticity evident in the poems of Arabesques from Gogol’, which retell the plot of particular short stories by Gogol’. Kruchenykh’s reconfiguration of material taken from the classics here, and, to a lesser extent, in 500 New Witticisms, recalls the ancient cento in its creative plagiarism, as well as Benjamin’s own highly citational Arcades.132 Likewise, while Kruchenykh’s authored, literary remixes are less radical than those of Tristan Tzara’s agenda for the aleatory recombination of existing material in “How to Make a Dada Poem” (1920), in which he instructs readers to cut up a newspaper and rearrange it by chance in order to create a new poem, they employ a similar defamiliarizing technique, changing the presentation and the context of the familiar to produce the new. Kruchenykh’s probing of the limits of authorship becomes still more evident when we consider his engagement with Pushkin, which continued to display an almost pedantic insistence on verbatim quotation.133 When the author Konstantin Paustovskii misquoted Pushkin, Kru­chenykh rebuked him for remaking Pushkin in his own style and, when he was not happy with Paustovskii’s response, he exclaimed: “But this is Pushkin! He has everything in its place and there’s no need to invent things for him. You have to know Pushkin.”134 Kruchenykh certainly did know Pushkin and this allowed him to reuse quite obscure elements of his oeuvre to reproduce Pushkin’s exact words in a

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new, meaning-altering context. For instance, in the visitors’ book at the Maiakovskii Museum, after an exhibition dedicated to the artists Mikhail La­rionov and Natal’ia Goncharova in 1965, he left the following brief verse: Пришел Узрел Восторг Исторг Очарован, огончарован.135 [I came I saw | Delight I extracted | Enchanted, engoncharova’ed]

Kruchenykh borrows Pushkin’s own neologism “engoncharova’ed” (ogoncharovan), which he used in a visitor’s book and which punned on the surname of his future wife Natal’ia Goncharova and the word for “enchanted” (ocharovan), in order to pay tribute to the other Natal’ia Goncharova, the artist who had collaborated with the Futurists in the 1910s.136 Such appropriation reached its logical conclusion in 1941, when Kru­ chenykh rewrote an entire poem by Pushkin, an obscure entry in Anna Kern’s album, adding two lines (about oranges and lemons), signing it “Pushkin-Kruchenykh,” and appending a poem of his own: 1.

Мне изюм Неидет на ум, Цуккерброт не лезет в рот. Апельсины и лимоны И противны и зловонны, Пастила не хороша Без тебя, моя душа! Пушкин-Крученых [To me raisins | Are no treat, | Zuckerbrot doesn’t crawl into my mouth. | Oranges and lemons | Are both horrid and foul-smelling, | Fruit paste is no good | Without you, my love! || PushkinKruchenykh]

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2.

Пышный ужин — пища мужа, Да и музочке — не ужас. В тесте — Тмин, Песни не затмил. Новый год, Винное море — вброд! Съедаю сотый Бутерброд. Полнится в кружке брага, Песня подружке рада. А. Крученых137 [A filling dinner is food for a husband, | And it’s not terrible for Miss Muse. | Caraway in pastry | Has not obscured Song. | New Year, wading through a sea of wine! | I eat up a hundredth sandwich. | Homebrew fills up the mug | Song is glad of a friend. || A. Kruchenykh]

The choice of poem is typical of the Futurist approach to Pushkin in the way it underlines his humorous, trivial side. While this suggests a certain common ground between Pushkin and Kruchenykh, since the latter is also writing a piece of occasional light verse, Kruchenykh also maintains difference by rejecting Pushkin’s thesis that love affects the appetite. Nevertheless, the most striking aspect of Kruchenykh’s composition is that he signs Pushkin’s amended work as his own. Sergei Sigei calls the poem, with a nod to Tbilisi, “not so much a quotation as an act of plagiarism taken to the 41st degree,” and argues that it is intended as a rebuke to the Soviet obsession with literary tradition: “This is not just a ‘lowering’ of a classical text, but a demonstration: ‘This here is what “the classics are good for”—appropriation.’”138 Kruchenykh’s use of Pushkin is not as dismissive as Sigei suggests, however: he does not erase Pushkin’s signature, but rather adds his own, implying not

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usurpation but equivalence or even identity, with the tag “PushkinKruchenykh” functioning as a literary pseudonym in the manner of Saltykov-Shchedrin, as if Kruchenykh were Pushkin’s alter ego.139 Moreover, there is no evidence that Kruchenykh’s deformations of Pushkin and Gogol’ are particularly anti-Soviet, unlike the underground poet Sigei’s own poetic practice. In fact, Kruchenykh’s repeating of Pushkin and Gogol’ poses a challenge that is not directly political. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s roughly contemporary “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939), the reappearance of a classic in a new context prompts uncertainty about the authenticity and singularity of all artistic production. Kruchenykh can thus be seen as a member of an overlooked, copy-oriented counterdiscourse within modernism, which, Jacob Edmond argues, undermines modernism’s headline-grabbing obsession with novelty and threatens “a fundamental upheaval in the value system of originality and mimetic desire upon which both accounts of global modernism are built.”140 Moreover, in the performative Duchampian gesture of simply appending a signature to appropriate a work, Kruchenykh anticipates the emergence from this modernist subcurrent of one of the most visible features of postmodernism—the conceptual artist.

The Concept as Such In seeking to understand how modernism gave way to—or led into— postmodernism we would be wise not to give too much credence to what Brik called “the history of generals.” Nonetheless, despite considerable conscious and unconscious continuities across systems, this replacement certainly did happen, albeit in the Russian case with a long detour via socialist realism, and we can certainly gain insights into the mechanisms behind the change by studying figures who, temporally and temperamentally, straddle modernism and postmodernism. In Western art history, one of the most prominent figureheads of this transition is Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades are often cited as the point of departure for a new definition of the artist not as a gifted transmitter or propagator of beauty, but as a trafficker in ideas.141 This is not the place to undertake a complete sequencing of the conceptualist genome in either its Western or Soviet expressions but we can use the example of Duchamp to better understand how Kruchenykh’s appropriation of Pushkin’s text effaces the dividing lines not just between words, but between authors, and between art and non-art, and in so

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doing marks, occupies, and elides the border between two aesthetic systems. Kruchenykh’s axiomatic marginality can thus be reimagined as liminality, revealing him as a “living piece of the imagined edge” that separates and unites modernism and postmodernism. Although Duchamp was much more integrated into the European and American avant-gardes, there are some clear parallels between his career and that of Kruchenykh. They were born within a year of each other in 1886 and 1887 and their deaths were six months apart in 1968. Both came of age under the influence of Cubism and then moved beyond it, seeking to harness the power of the “fourth dimension” and embracing the creative power first of chance and then of Freud, before disappearing from prominence in the 1930s. They both displayed an unflagging talent for pushing the boundaries of art, by combining text and image or by using shock and humor. Finally, both took a maximalist position in their search for novelty and felt similar frustrations at the limitations of the tools of their trade. Duchamp’s most profound and influential solution to the inadequacy of painting was his readymades—the series of ordinary, preexisting objects such as a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel, and a urinal that he purchased and displayed in galleries as his own works. This contestation of received ideas about the nature of art has been compared to the thorough reconfiguration of the place of art and the artist spearheaded by the Constructivists in the Soviet Union.142 However, whereas the roadmap for art promoted by Rodchenko and others afforded no place for the individual artist of genius, Duchamp, like Kruchenykh, retained a very visible position for the creative personality as the agent of recontextualization. Although Duchamp used different personae to complicate perceptions of “Duchamp” as a unified personality, he also presented these fictional personae as autonomous and innovative, and, through a series of flamboyant gestures of ownership or non-ownership, always refocused attention on himself.143 Indeed, an unsympathetic critic cites this performative self-abnegation as inspiration for later selfindulgence: “In the Duchampian tradition, the artist as author died only to be resurrected as a dandy. Worse was to come. In the more degenerate continuations of Conceptual Art, the death of the artist was the birth of the artist as self-curator—proprietor and protector of an always-consistent, always-unmistakable logo.”144 That the readymade merely repositions the creative ego, rather than refuting it, is evident in the famous story of Duchamp’s Fountain—a urinal, bought from a catalog, then rotated and signed “R. Mutt,” which was submitted to New York’s Armory Show in 1917. When it was

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refused by the jury, an unsigned editorial in the American Dadaist magazine The Blind Man, which is often attributed to Duchamp, not only turned this rejection into a scandal but also made the case for Fountain’s fictional creator-as-selector: “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”145 We see that the value of the work and the site of the production of novelty lies not with the immanent properties of the object but emerges from the conscious act of recontextualization. In the critic persona he adopts in 500 New Witticisms Kruchenykh explicitly presents himself as an agent of revelation, not reinvention, and is generally more discreet than Duchamp’s imaginary Mr. Mutt, who, with his prominent signature, boasts of his control over the creation of “a new thought.” Nevertheless, Kruchenykh, like Duchamp, also turns the renunciation of authorial fabrication into an occasion for the promotion of his own creative ingenuity. While the unity of the creative psyche is explicitly challenged through the performance of multiple personalities, we never doubt that the work is the product of intention. Moreover, the presentation of both these acts of recycling emphasizes not the salvaging of the old, but the generation of the new, as an end in itself. Duchamp’s loathing of repetition, which was evident in his lack of productivity and frequent changes in artistic direction, did not put him off either using mass-produced objects in his art or replicating his own works in authorial or authorized copies. He argued instead that in all duplications there was an element of difference, because of inexact or delayed copying, and accused painters like Picasso of self-plagiarism for their tendency to produce variations on a theme.146 Indeed, Du­champ criticized all painting as not only inherently derivative but also disingenuous in its claims to originality since, among other things, paint is itself a man-made product, meaning that the painter is only ever rearranging existing material.147 This critique echoes the early Futurist position that new combinations of words are not enough to guarantee originality, necessitating the creation of entirely new words. The readymade, however, Duchamp’s solution to the inadequacy of painterly originality, uses a different logic, one that only later became apparent in Futurist practice: it suggests that newness is not absolute, but contingent, and as such is attained not through unprecedented acts of self-expression like zaum, but by a self-aware manipulation of the context and interpretation of existing objects.

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In order to effect these novelty-bearing transformations, Duchamp stages ostentatious transgressions of the boundary between art and non-art, mostly by bringing the mass-produced objects of everyday life into the physical space of the gallery and the discursive space of the art world, exposing and challenging the distinction between those spheres. At first sight, it would seem that Kruchenykh is less radical, since Pushkin, the target of his appropriation, belongs firmly to the highest echelons of culture. Kruchenykh, however, is actually crossing the same border in the opposite direction, bringing something lofty into the domain of everyday life. Explicitly, he achieves this in his ideal of collective poetic reception; more powerful still is his implicit transplantation of Pushkin’s work—in the popular conception, a nonpareil of individual creativity and aesthetic and moral purity—into the realm of non-art, first by demonstrating that the Pushkinian text is itself a mass-produced object, endlessly copied until faults have appeared, and, second, by transforming Pushkin’s poetry into a tissue of tawdry hidden meanings. Duchamp moves the toilet into the art gallery; Kruchenykh moves art into the toilet. Not all of Duchamp’s readymades probed the distinction between art and non-art. Much as Kruchenykh put his name to a Pushkin poem, so Duchamp once spontaneously added his signature to a battle scene hanging on the wall and declared it a perfect readymade.148 Duchamp’s celebrated L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), which depicts the Mona Lisa with a moustache and beard, closely resembles 500 New Witticisms in the way it reproduces an over-familiar, over-reverenced classic with a subversive twist. L.H.O.O.Q. not only blurs gender boundaries but exploits a salacious shiftological pun in which the letters of the inscription “L.H.O.O.Q.,” when read aloud, are revealed to encode the phrase “Elle a chaud au cul,” implying that this gender-ambiguous Gioconda is soliciting for sex. Duchamp’s laconic doodle conceals a wealth of intricacies and allusions, but most important for our purposes is the fact that the material that Duchamp transforms is not the Mona Lisa itself, but a postcard reproduction. Although superficially identical to the original, the postcard has a very different meaning and function, both as a mass-produced, commercial object and as a means of communication. By defacing the image, Duchamp is not, as it may initially appear, relegating an artwork to the lowly realm of childish scribbles; rather, he is bringing a debased object back into the fold of art by dint of his artistic authority alone; the mustache and title function as a signature claiming the

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postcard as the property of Duchamp and, therefore, of art.149 In the same way, Kruchenykh’s apparent perversion of Pushkin can be understood not as an expulsion from art, but an act of retrieval. For Kruchenykh and the other Futurists, the reputation of Pushkin as a besieged citadel of artistic integrity was not just incorrect, but the inverse of the truth: the idolized Pushkin of the early twentieth century had already crossed the border into vulgar mundanity, and so Kruchenykh, in casting him down, actually lifts him up, back into the blessed realm of art. As with other aspects of Futurism, Kruchenykh presents the most clear-cut case of Futurism’s paradoxical mix of the secular and the sacred. On the one hand, Kruchenykh was singled out for his hostility to religion in Lef, which described as his specialty “experiments in the use of the phonetics of street-slang for the presentation of anti-religious and political themes,” and he was indeed forthright in his condemnation of Christian elements in Esenin’s postrevolutionary work.150 Likewise, in 500 New Witticisms he attacks quasi-religious attitudes to Pushkin as outdated and unhelpful. On the other hand, Kruchenykh’s contemporaries identified something distinctly hieratic in him: both Maiakovskii and Tat’iana Tolstaia-Vechorka call him a “Jesuit,” and he was otherwise likened to a shaman, a self-immolating Old Believer, a member of the self-castrating Skoptsy cult, and a holy fool.151 For his part, Kru­ chenykh described himself in his old age as “religious in my soul” and displayed a profound and lasting interest in sectarians, often citing them as an inspiration for zaum.152 The only sort of believer to whom Kru­chenykh is not compared is a pious and conventional Orthodox believer: he is always a zealous outsider who wishes to reform a corrupted faith. In his thesis on the latent apophatic religiosity of the avant-garde, Epshtein suggests an equivalence between Duchamp, Kruchenykh, and medieval Russia’s holy fools, whose rejection of all social norms was taken as a sign of their particular godliness: “The avant-garde is holy fool art, consciously aiming for debasements, for the disfigurement of its aesthetic appearance, to the point that a urinal takes the place of a sculpture at an exhibition, and instead of beautiful and meaningful harmonies there is the poor, crooked ‘dyr bul shchyl ubeshchur.’”153 500 New Witticisms represents a still closer analogue to Duchamp’s toilet humor and to the behavior of holy fools like Basil the Blessed, who threw rocks at an icon of the Virgin Mary in order to reveal a hidden demon.154 For such believers, and their modern successors, the defilement of the sacred is actually an act of purification, since it reveals the

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essence that has been concealed by the accreted layers of pharisaic hypocrisy. The demonstrative transgression of the border between the sacred and profane does not destroy the distinction between the categories but recovers and strengthens it. There is a difference, however, between the transgression of the avant-gardists and that of the holy fool because, whereas the holy fool presents the division between the sacred and profane as a God-given, immutable fact of earthly life, obscured by human ignorance or wickedness, for Duchamp and Kruchenykh the line between art and non-art is labile and determined by no authority higher than their own. As such, by moving objects in and out of the field of art, they reinforce their position as the ultimate source of artistic legitimacy. Epshtein argues that avant-garde art, which rejects a straightforward representation of the world, has an essentially religious structure because it replaces “such tried-and-tested aesthetic categories as ‘comprehension’ and ‘pleasure’” with other categories, closer to the religious consciousness, “‘doubt’ and ‘faith.’”155 Just as an unjust world can only be tolerated thanks to an act of faith in an unseen deity, so incomprehensible avant-garde art like zaum or Black Square provokes doubt that “can only be resolved by faith—faith in this artist, in this view of the world,” thus reinforcing “the individuality of the artist, his inimitable gift.”156 There is something of the same appeal to faith at play in the appropriations of Fountain and 500 New Witticisms, in which the defiance of the traditional limits of art demands that the public trust the person telling them that this, too, is art. Unlike Malevich, however, Duchamp and late-period Kruchenykh both put emphasis on transgression, the moment in which non-art becomes art, in which the profane becomes holy, or vice versa. This distinction is evident when we compare Kruchenykh’s later performative, appropriative quotation with his early zaum. In “Declaration of the Word as Such” (1913) he presents “a poem of only vowels,” which, he says, represents “a universal language”: оеа и е е и157 [o e a | i e e i]

In a similar vein, he contributed to the 1913 Futurist collection The Croaked Moon the following poem, “heights (universal language)”

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еую иао оа оаееиея оа еуиеи иее и и ы и е и и ы158 [e u iu | i a o | o a e e i e ia | o a | o a e e i e ia | o a | e u i e i | i e e | i i y i e i i y]

Both poems anticipate 500 New Witticisms inasmuch as they are not original compositions but transformed versions of well-known prayers (the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, respectively), with all the consonants removed.159 As in 500 New Witticisms, Kruchenykh both exploits and challenges the status of the universally respected text by repeating it and bringing it under his own creative control. Kruchenykh does ask the reader to have faith that his text is indeed a poem, but he also seeks to extract the existing power from the sacred text in a practice akin to the making of spells from deformed prayers.160 The avant-gardist, like the sorcerer, does not reject the supernatural, but harnesses its power, whether real or imagined, for himself.161 Although it employs a similar methodology of transformative selective quotation, the use of Pushkin in 500 New Witticisms displays a further evolution of Kruchenykh’s attitude to the sacrality of text. Whereas in “Heights” the prayer is transformed in secret as a private joke or, at most, an act of esoteric word-magic, Kruchenykh’s later appropriation of Pushkin is entirely open, even attention-seeking. Moreover, while in “Heights” Kruchenykh seeks to exploit an existing sacred text for himself, in his later open use and abuse of Pushkin, Kruchenykh seeks to rescue the purity of poetry, and with it Pushkin, from the deadening effects of modern mass reproduction. In effect, he sets out to restore the sacral “aura” that Benjamin argues is destroyed by new reproductive technologies. The essay in which Benjamin makes this argument, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is so canonical that it has acquired something of an aura of its own, prompting many readers to overlook its context, both historically and within Benjamin’s oeuvre, as well as its lapses and lacunae.162 Foremost among these is the fact that,

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contrary to Benjamin’s hypothesis, the rise of mass reproduction, which in the digital age has reached levels he could never have imagined, has not diminished the reverence afforded to the “original” artwork.163 Nevertheless, both the terms and the trajectory of Benjamin’s thumbnail history of art provide a useful way of understanding the concerns of his contemporaries, Kruchenykh included, about the intersection of art, technology, and religion. Like many modernists, Benjamin combines an avowed atheism with mournfulness at the disenchantment engendered by modernity. He takes it as a given, as do Ivanov and Nietzsche, that the artwork had its origins in sacred ritual, maintained a similar function under the auspices of the Christian church, and then, in modernity, when craftsmanship was first secularized and then outpaced by new technology, became a feature of the ersatz religion of aestheticism.164 The ideal next stage in Benjamin’s story is that, as part of a conscious mobilization against Fascism, art, “instead of being based on ritual, begins to be based on another practice—politics.”165 Rejecting art for art’s sake, Benjamin wants to return to art its instrumental function, but to shift the arena of this function from the mystical to the political— although for Benjamin the distinction between these two fields is not always clear. Duchamp and Kruchenykh would both endorse Benjamin’s diagnosis that the exalted status of the original cannot persist unchanged in the era of mass reproduction. Duchamp would also argue, however, that in his repeated replicas the power of the original is not diminished, but rather extended to the authorized copies, saving both “original” and “copy” (a distinction he does not acknowledge) from the hegemony of the market. “The readymades,” he said, “were a way of getting out of the exchangeability, the monetarization of the work of art, which was just beginning about then. In art, and only in art, the original work is sold, and it acquires a sort of aura that way. But with my readymades a replica will do just as well.”166 Duchamp uses his own personality (“my readymades”) to maintain the independence of art, defying Benjamin’s argument that “when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever.”167 The distinguishing factor between a good reproduction and a bad reproduction is the authority of the artist. Kruchenykh’s adaptive quotation rehearses Duchamp’s belief that exact reproduction is, counterintuitively, a less derivative way of working than the borrowing of themes or motifs—the usual stuff of intertextuality—because it openly confronts the problem of using other people’s work. Moreover,

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Kruchenykh demonstrates that such exact reproduction does not preclude the creation of something new, if it is accompanied by artistic recontextualization. One obvious but significant difference between Kruchenykh’s reproductions and those of both Duchamp and Benjamin is that he is working not with objects or images, but with writing—in itself an ancient means of technological reproduction reliant on the premise that the messages encoded in graphic signs survive replication intact and so can transcend their immediate context in time and space. Since the invention of the printing press, if not before, text has been in a condition similar to that which has been achieved, according to Benjamin, only latterly in the visual arts: the creative work can be accessed by many people on their own terms, without traveling and without needing to consider the “original.” In literature, reproduction does not result in a “plurality of copies” but a plurality of originals.168 The history of writing should perhaps have given Benjamin pause when he argued that film and photography would revolutionize art, since, far from threatening to “detach [. . .] the reproduced from the domain of tradition,” in classical antiquity it was the introduction of reproduction in the form of writing that instituted the categories of tradition, originality, and innovation, ousting the more flexible oral transmission that Benjamin values so highly in “The Storyteller” and replacing it with a literary system founded in the replication and dissemination of a stable authoritative version.169 This textuality is also the necessary precursor of intertextuality: whereas oral composition can borrow indiscriminately and imperceptibly, writing creates a bounded text, instituting the borders across which ideas or motifs are then smuggled. It was precisely this accumulated burden of centuries of textuality and intertextuality that the Futurists sought to throw off their steamship. Many of the hallmarks of Futurism speak of a rejection of the reproducible text: their promotion of handmade books, as if to undo the homogenizing and controlling influence of printing; their preference for unprecedented, unrepeatable zaum; their calls for the destruction of the text; their valorization of glossolalia and children’s tales, which are essentially oral in origin; their love for folkloric motifs; their belief, evident in 500 New Witticisms, that the one-off performance is the true essence of a work.170 Finally, their hostility to the Horatian “monumentum aere perennius,” the monument more lasting than bronze, betokens a suspicion of the idea that any “original” can, through the medium of reproduction, survive through time. Instead, in treating Pushkin

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mythologically, ignoring the divisions between different texts and between fact, fiction, and biography and emphasizing humor and spontaneity, they imagine a prelapsarian Pushkin, a figure from before the introduction of writing, from the time of the mythopoetic living word. Despite its obvious reliance on textuality, therefore, Kruchenykh’s appropriative quotation of Pushkin is an integral part of this Futurist mission to take literature back to its beginnings, not just in its explicit promotion of oral performance, but also in the more fundamental challenge it presents to the idea of text as a stable entity maintaining a single meaning across different contexts. As he demonstrates in 500 New Witticisms, this unity of interpretation is exposed as a fantasy when the text comes into contact with real life. Instead, Pushkin’s oeuvre, like the Futurist Pushkin in general, is transformed by its context. This is Pushkin’s great limitation, but it is also his salvation.

Paper Monuments My argument that Kruchenykh and the Futurists set themselves against not only traditional publishing, but even the very idea of writing must take into account the fact that Kruchenykh was both a borderline gra­ phomaniac and an avid accumulator of books. In the last years of his life he made a living by sourcing and selling original manuscripts, letters, and photographs relating to Russian modernism, drawing on his own collection and pestering friends for signed memorabilia, to the extent that rumors circulated that he was a thief.171 Kruchenykh’s appropriation of other people’s words and works here reaches its logical conclusion. One might see a sad irony in this acquisitive coda to Kruchenykh’s career: the former scourge of nostalgia has become a hoarder. There is no doubt that Kruchenykh’s transformation into a dealer and an collector— he made an extremely valuable contribution to the state archives—neatly represents the completion of the final stage of Futurism’s evolution, in which not only its words have become museum pieces, but its practitioners too. As one of the leading voices of the next generation, Evgenii Evtushenko, said of Kruchenykh, “in trading manuscripts, by the paradox of time, he himself became a manuscript of the era, eccentric like an ink stain, but unrepeatable.”172 In his emphasis on Kruchenykh’s inimitable eccentricity, Evtu­shenko unwittingly hits on a more positive assessment of Kruchenykh’s collecting. Kruchenykh was not a librarian, he was a bibliophile; he was interested in the book not as a mass-produced text, but as a unique

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auratic object, complete with autographs and ink stains. Just as the Futurists sought to rescue Pushkin from the deadening grip of official adulation, so Kruchenykh shores up these fragments against the avantgarde’s ruin and, equally, against its museumification. Fittingly for a book collector, he rejects both the bronze of the statue and the intangible Horatian monument in favor of something more material, saying: “I don’t need glory either in marble or bronze—I want a paper monument, so that my books, my lines, even on the worst paper, on rough, packaging paper, are read.”173 Kruchenykh’s method of cataloging, arranging material in highly subjective homemade albums, is markedly different from the positivist museum archive and instead much closer to a work of art in itself, one that looks back to modernist collage and forward to the work of Il’ia Kabakov.174 We see again the difference between Kruchenykh and the Constructivists: Varvara Stepanova wrote in 1921, anticipating Benjamin: “the ‘sacred’ value of the work of art as a single unique object has been destroyed. The museum, as the repository of this uniqueness is transformed into an archive.”175 Kruchenykh strives to achieve the opposite: to make the archive not only into a museum but into the museum’s precursor, the reliquary, creating a space in which the venerated remains of the avant-garde could retain their sacred power forever.

Conclusion

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ll’s well that starts well and has no end the world will die but we have no end.”1 So sing the Futurist strongmen at the end of the Kruchenykh’s opera Victory over the Sun, repeating a line from the opening. But Futurism did come to an end. In postwar Soviet culture it was an object of historical interest only, cherished by a minority, but officially dismissed as the last violent death spasm of decadent bourgeois culture. The opera’s author, Kruchenykh, did survive into the 1960s, but as a fossil of Futurism, a forgotten curio. Khlebnikov enjoyed a better reputation, but the ardent enthusiasm he inspired among the few never ignited broader recognition among the many. While Khlebnikov was a cult figure, Maiakovskii became, thanks to Stalin’s imprimatur, an officially sanctioned saint—ubiquitous to the point of tedium and sanitized to the point of being unrecognizable. There was no end to Maiakovskii, but there was no Futurism in him either; in fact, it was common knowledge that his Futurism was a passing, adolescent affliction that was quickly cured by immersion in the bracing reality of proletarian struggle. The immortal Maiakovskii was a symbol not of Futurist dynamism, but of solid, timeless Soviet values. 244

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Like Pushkin before them, the Futurists lost their fluidity; energeia petrified into ergon. The demise of Futurism was in itself nothing new, however. Even in its salad days, the movement was always starting again because it was always stopping. Maiakovskii declared Futurism dead as early as 1915, just so he could bring it back to life again. The Futurists were well aware of the inherent contradiction in their attempt to achieve absolute liberating newness: the new inevitably becomes the old, revolution devolves into dystopia, the living word fossilizes into a monument. This process is not irreversible, however. As the philosopher Pavel Florenskii suggested, the transformation of energeia into ergon is not an irreversible reaction; rather the two exist in dynamic equilibrium.2 Florenskii, an astute analyst of the Futurists’ poetic language, criticizes them for failing to realize this and, therefore, for failing to produce anything of lasting value.3 This was perhaps unfair: eventually even Kruchenykh, the most radical proponent of ecstatic, living language, came to realize that the hardening of his words into paper monuments did not kill off their energy, but rather preserved it. After discussing Futurism’s failings, Florenskii turns to an ancient and powerful analogy that helps to explain this survival of vital energy in language and literature, one that was favored by many of the figures in this book— Jesus, Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Khlebnikov. The word, he argues, has a life like that of a person, but also a life like that of a seed.4 This metaphor is amenable to an avant-garde sensibility because it imagines language as creative, not reactive, while also offering the possibility that language can transcend the individual, allowing for a life beyond life. Although the soil of Russian culture grew increasingly inhospitable, the Futurists did leave something substantial buried in it—not the waterpipe gun imagined by Maiakovskii, but the “seeing eyes” scattered by Khlebnikov’s lonely player. The Futurists really were sowers of eyes because what they bequeathed was not just poetry, but also a perspective, a way of looking at the culture that promoted self-confident hostility to convention, sincere passion for novelty, and unwavering faith in the power of art. With this perspective naturally came a specific approach to Pushkin, one that continued to thrive after Futurism itself had withered away, which not only rejected Pushkin as the static idol of popular cult, but also sought to replace that empty effigy with something more organic and more mobile. The Futurist Pushkin did not “die entirely” because

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as an early Futurist manifesto says, “the word, dying, gives birth to a myth.”5 The afterlife of this Futurist myth of Pushkin is evident in Daniil Kharms’s short, absurd pieces from the late 1920s and 1930s, “About Pushkin,” “Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin,” and “Pushkin and Gogol’,” which, while possessing a weirdness that is all their own, emulate the Futurists’ insistent and insouciant puncturing of Pushkin’s mystique. Kharms pictures the great poet in ridiculous, unflattering scenarios: tripping over Gogol’, falling off chairs, throwing stones, and sleeping in hammocks. Among other things, these unlikely scenes satirize the Pushkin industry and its insatiable desire for trivial biographical tidbits, recalling the exasperation of Tynianov and Kruchenykh at the same phenomenon. The latter of these two was mentioned in writing by Kharms only once, but, significantly, it was in relation to his own collection of Pushkinian “anecdotes,” 500 New Witticisms.6 Just as Kru­ chenykh takes Pushkin’s words and transplants them into a new context to give them a radically different meaning, so Kharms, who repeats Pushkin’s name almost obsessively, makes an ostentatious demonstration of that name’s flexibility. As Khlebnikov, whose influence Kharms acknowledged, showed in “The Dostyology of racing clouds . . .,” the name “Pushkin” can be made to mean anything and, as such, can serve as a building block in the construction of an alternative universe in text.7 Despite these similarities, however, Kharms’s treatment of Pushkin achieves a degree of willed absurdism that is not present in Futurism. While Kharms’s poetics is more than just a product of his circumstances, both his demystifying of Pushkin and his uncoupling of signifier and signified can be seen as responses to the saturation of the Soviet culture of the 1930s by Stalinist ideology, which restored the monumental Pushkin to a central position in culture and, contrary to its stated aims, drove a wedge between language and reality.8 As briefly discussed in chapter 4, this same ideology brought with it a different attitude toward time: regardless of the omnipresent calls to build the Communist future, the dominant chronotope shifted: the avant-garde model of a perfect tomorrow just out of reach was replaced by an insis­te­ nt, if disingenuous, celebration of the glorious present understood as the consummation of all times, both past and future. Naturally, along with a new temporality and a new theory of language, this ideology promoted its own Pushkin and the 1937 jubilee celebrations revealed a complex new image for the national poet that contrived to turn this long-dead aristocrat into the life and soul of the proletarian present.

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It is testament to the pervasiveness of this version of Pushkin, against which Kharms so pointedly rebelled, that it is instantly recognizable even in unlikely places. To mark the jubilee the one-time “father of Futurism,” David Burliuk, living in America and writing for a local proSoviet newspaper, produced some decidedly un-Futurist verses that seem almost parodic in their concoction of saccharine émigré nostalgia, religious sentimentalism, and a paint-by-numbers Stalinist Pushkin who is both effortlessly timeless and insistently contemporary. “To the Rhymeholder A. S. Pushkin, in Memory of One Hundred Years since the Day of the Great Poet’s Martyr’s Death” begins with him recalling family readings of “immortal Pushkin” and ends as follows: И революций идеал В нас пионерно воспитал. И позже, в бурных лет терзаньях, Изведав едких чувств разлив, Мы Пушкина красот и див Любовно сберегли блистанья. Как облик мамы свят и чист, Так Пушкин близок и лучист.9 [And in the Pioneer spirit he nurtured in us | the ideal of revolutions. | And later, in the torments of turbulent years, | Having experienced a flood of caustic feelings, | We lovingly preserved the sparkle | Of Pushkin’s beauties and marvels. | As mama’s face is holy and pure, | Pushkin is so close and radiant.]

The tendency to see Pushkin as a source of eternal Soviet values, incipient in Lunacharskii’s approach to the 1924 Pushkin jubilee, was by now dominant. In line with the paradoxical temporality of the period, Pushkin was presented as both the forerunner of the official doctrine of socialist realism and its best example. A good deal of manipulation and repositioning was needed to make this proleptic Sovietness seem selfevident and immutable. As it often had and still often does, the Pushkin monument in Moscow served as a metaphor. In 1936, the inscription beneath the monument was changed to emphasize Pushkin’s selfdeclared interest in promoting “freedom,” reversing Vasilii Zhukov­ skii’s politically correct bowdlerization of “I erected a monument to myself . . . ,” which had been used when the statue was erected.10 Then,

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in 1950, the monument was moved across the street to the other side of the square, to where the Strastnoi monastery had once stood. In order to continue to serve as a symbol of seamless continuity, Pushkin was repositioned and reoriented; the Soviet Pushkin had to move in order to appear to stand still. A marked contrast to the official resiting of the static Pushkin is provided by the controversial book Strolls with Pushkin, written in the Dubrovlag labor camp between 1966 and 1968 by the dissident critic Andrei Siniavskii and published in the West in 1975 under the pseu­ do­nym Abram Tertz. Like Kharms and the Futurists before him, Si­ niav­skii talked about Pushkin not with pious awe but with familiar affection and occasional critique. A skilled debunker of the dogmas of socialist realism, he takes Pushkin down from his pedestal, freeing him, once more, from the accumulated burden of narrow political readings and expanding the field of possible interpretation. While it is not possible or necessary to prove that this liberation was inspired by the Futurists, Siniavskii was certainly a great admirer of Maiakovskii and his own cherishing of mobility. Even in his immaculately politically orthodox early article on Maiakovskii’s aesthetics, he observes that “For Maia­ kovskii, life is movement.”11 Strolls with Pushkin caused two, very similar, scandals—one on its publication abroad in 1975 and then another on its publication in the last years of the Soviet Union. For both the émigrés who cherished Pushkin as the talisman of a lost Russian culture and the mass audience of the Soviet Union, for whom decades of the Soviet cult of Pushkin had again made him untouchable, Siniavskii’s lack of deference was tantamount to sacrilege. On both occasions, he was accused of blasphemy, proving that cultic attitudes toward Pushkin cut across political and geographical divides.12 After its first publication, the responses of Roman Gul’ and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—both émigrés, both unsympathetic to the Soviet Union—recapitulated the position held by the proponents of socialist realism—the position that the Futurists had abhorred in their own era—that “there is only one correct, harmonious, unitary Pushkin, who serves as a gauge of the Russian writer’s legitimacy.”13 The Futurists, Kharms, and Siniavskii are clearly on the same side in the ongoing battle over Pushkin’s soul, inasmuch as they refuse to believe that Pushkin has a single immortal soul to fight over.14 They all refute the idea of an ideologically stable and singular Pushkin and draw attention to the semiotic multiplicity concealed under the placid

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surface of “the happy name Pushkin.”15 There are, nevertheless, significant, historically contingent differences between them. Futurism, at least in its early stages, operates under the typically modernist assumption that such mismatches between form and content are evidence of a fallen world that must be saved; when the Futurists first overthrow the Pushkinian idol, they do so in the hope that this will help them to create a more perfect language and a more perfect world. Siniavskii’s strolling Pushkin, in contrast, reflects the profound wariness about goal-oriented, instrumentalized ideologies that was provoked in him by the official obsession with monologic truth and teleology, which was itself derived at least in part from the avant-garde’s self-confident project for world transformation. As a consequence, Siniavskii celebrates Pushkin’s hollowness—“emptiness,” he says, “is Pushkin’s content”—on the grounds that it makes him immune to dogma: His art is so purposeless that it pokes its nose into every nook and cranny. [. . .] He is free enough to allow himself to write about anything that comes into his head without turning into a doctrinaire of any single ideal. [. . .] Pushkin’s road embodies the mobility and elusiveness of art, which is inclined to shift and therefore is not subject to strict rules with regard to where you go and why. Your way today, ours tomorrow. Art strolls.16

Siniavskii’s celebration of indeterminacy and profound cynicism about self-righteous, and inevitably hypocritical, projects of truthseeking and transformation laid the groundwork for similar antiideological projects in Soviet postmodernism, notably in Sots Art and Conceptualism.17 Not coincidentally, these movements’ attitude to the past, and to Pushkin, has considerable similarities with the late Futurist experiments of Kruchenykh, which also show an artist responding not to the promise of utopia, but the failure to achieve it. By the mid-1920s both Kruchenykh and Maiakovskii knew that the absolute break with the past that they desired was never going to happen; instead, they had to live under a regime that told them that the fundamental reordering of the cosmos had already occurred, in 1917. For true believers with such high expectations of the potential of revolution as an idea, frustration with the limitations of the revolution as a reality was inevitable. For the Futurists, therefore, the sense of ubiquitous stagnation and pharisaism that motivated later, avowedly postmodern forms of expression was already a fact of life by the 1920s and they shifted their model of

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novelty accordingly in order to emphasize not absolute creativity, but mobilization and recontextualization. For this reason, we can see similarities between Kruchenykh’s destabilization of the meaning of the familiar Pushkin, both as a text and an idol, and the way in which Komar and Melamid, the leading lights of Sots Art, used exact quotations of the slogans and symbols of Soviet ideology, to which they added their own signatures, to draw attention to the semiotic emptiness of these signs and, in so doing, call into question the underlying discursive structuring of Soviet life.18 Another underground group that used the same methodology of recontextualization was quite open about their allegiance to Kru­ chenykh’s legacy—the Conceptualist Transfurist group, centered on Sergei Sigei and Ry Nikonova and based in the provincial southern town of Eisk. Their geographic isolation—like Kruchenykh, they embraced marginality—has meant the Transfurists have not featured prominently in histories of Conceptualism in the Soviet Union, which is primarily associated with Moscow.19 They represent, however, one of the clearest connections between the historical avant-garde and its late Soviet rediscovery: not only did members of the group, which was active from the 1960s until the 1990s, have personal contact with Kru­ chenykh, but they also regularly reprinted his work in their samizdat journal Transponans, identifying themselves with a “base” tradition of poetry originating in figures like Kruchenykh, Chicherin, and Vasilisk Gnedov.20 The Transfurists’ attitude to Pushkin clearly reflects their adherence to this tradition. In 1979, Sigei published a revision of the first stanza of Pushkin’s “Before a Noble Spanish Woman” under the title “Rhymummy: A Versie by aspushkina” (Zarifmumiia: Stikha aspushkina).21 The attribution to “aspushkina” recalls the elisions of Kruchenykhian shifts, creating a neologistic—and, contrary to Futurist practice, potentially feminine—identity for Pushkin. The title, a portmanteau of the words for “to rhyme” and “mummy” recalls Maiakovskii’s description of the mummified Pushkin, but also promises to find new, revivifying rhymes. These allusions to the Futurist Pushkin notwithstanding, some have suggested that the Transfurist attitude to Pushkin is necessarily different from that of their avant-garde predecessors—less ideological and less utopian—because the Futurists had already taken Pushkin from his pedestal: “the living Pushkin was long ago cast off the steamship of ideology and so one can have a dialogue not with his image, but with

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Pushkin himself.”22 Denis Ioffe further distinguishes the practice of the Transfurists from that of the early twentieth-century avant-garde on the grounds that the former “make no claim to an unconditional, ontological, and absurd Novelty. Rather their novelty took the form of meticulous micro-work with the heritage of the past, into which in the same moment something entirely new and to some degree unseen was introduced.”23 This picture is correct, but needs some amendment in light of the fact that, as 500 New Witticisms shows, as early as the 1920s an avant-gardist like Kruchenykh was willing to forego the quest for an apocalyptic break with the present and promote a paradigm of novelty that was relational and internal to existing culture. The Transfurists’ evident enthusiasm for transrational language led their contemporary and one-time collaborator, the celebrated Moscow Conceptualist Dmitrii Prigov, to cast doubt on their own postmodern credentials. In a letter to Transponans in 1983, he called them “apologists and continuers of the avant-garde of the ’10s and ’20s” on the grounds that they “seek out ontological units of usable material and a series of ontological operational signs with the help of which one can create genuine works of art”; the only thing that earns them the right to “the prefix post” is their open, eclectic style.24 Prigov contrasts what he sees as the ambitious, goal-oriented poetics of Transfurism, which privileges zaum over natural language, to what he describes as Moscow Conceptualism’s non-hierarchical linguistic consciousness, “where every language is genuine within its own axiomatics.” By way of an example, Pri­gov contrasts the groups’ different approaches to quotation. The Trans­furists, he says, value “authored insertion into someone else’s text with an original text that shines through and confirms this insertion.” Moscow Conceptualists, in contrast, cherish “the manifestation of the language of reading at any chosen level.”25 Prigov himself aspired to practice this sort of creative, value-neutral remixing of texts. Particularly reminiscent of Kruchenykh’s experiments with quotation is his Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1992), in which he copied out the entirety of Eugene Onegin by hand, but with the introduction of the typically Lermontovian adjectives “insane” (bezumnyi ) and “unearthly” (nezemnoi) throughout. Like both Kruchenykh and Sigei, Prigov demonstratively attributes his new work to Pushkin, drawing attention to the fact that Eugene Onegin had long since become unmoored from its author, while also removing the original poem from the overly habituated field of printed text. In a further similarity to the Futurists, Prigov refuses to read Pushkin, or indeed anyone, outside of the evolving

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context of reception; he depicts Pushkin “as a concept, that is as the product of mythologized mass consciousness formed not by reading Pushkin’s works, but by an ideology in which all values are a priori confirmed and attributed to the cult object despite reality.”26 We can see a clear continuity here with the Futurist project to expose the hollowness of the Pushkinian idol. The historical avant-garde and the Soviet postmodernists have a common enemy in unthinking convention and automatized language. But whereas the Futurists use the deconstruction of the Pushkin myth as material for their own mythopoesis, either by repurposing it or demonstratively rejecting it, Prigov is at pains to parody and pick apart his own poetic identity along with all other givens of the literary process. He has no monument of his own to erect in place of Pushkin’s, no living word to propose in the place of the stagnated language of the present. “Language is only language, and not the absolute truth,” he says; “and having understood this, we will obtain freedom.”27 Despite his aspiration to produce post-ideological literature, Prigov’s valorization of “freedom” suggests that Conceptualism is not entirely without higher motives. Even while eschewing moralizing or worldbuilding, members of the late Soviet underground, like the avant-garde and Siniavskii before them, tried to use their work to promote the emancipation of art in the most abstract terms—the freedom that, in “On the Function of the Poet,” Blok described as “not childish volition, not the freedom to play at liberalism, but creative will, the secret freedom,” and associated above all with Pushkin.28 Perhaps the greatest novelty, and the greatest legacy, therefore, of the Futurists’ reception of Pushkin was that it offered new methods for obtaining this freedom, new ways of undermining the pillars of convention, coercion, and complacency that might obstruct it. Of course, Futurists’ own fossilization shows that whatever creative release they secured was only short-lived, but the vitality contained in the seeds that they scattered behind them, and above all in the attitude to authority that they pioneered, is evident not only in their successors’ assaults on the Pushkin cult, but in their treatment of the Futurists themselves, once they too had become hollow idols. As early as the mid-1920s, the second-generation zaum poet Aleksandr Tufanov lumped the Futurists in with Pushkin and excluded both from his own steamship of modernity in the manifesto for his “Order of Zaumniks,” which included Kharms among its core members: “The order unites all Becomians [stanovlian], i.e., those who are becoming,

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and not those who were and will be. (No Pushkins and no Futurians.)”29 Kharms himself echoed the fire and fury of the Futurists’ manifestos when he too pointedly distanced himself from his forebears in the founding document of the OBERIU group, announcing that “there is no school more inimical to us than zaum” and accusing their predecessors of castrating the word.30 Siniavskii had a more obvious and pernicious false idol to overturn than the Futurists—Stalin, whom he called “the all-seeing, all-powerful [. . .] living monument of our age”—but he still felt compelled to distance Maiakovskii from both the hypocrisy of official literature and from his own burgeoning cult, proposing in his revelatory essay “What is Socialist Realism?” that “Maiakovskii is too revolutionary to become traditional” and complaining that “despite the encomia [. . .] poets imitate his verses rather than follow his example.”31 Komar and Melamid continued Siniavskii’s sallies against the Stalin monument, but they took aim at Maiakovskii’s too in their 1993 project Monumental Propaganda, which solicited suggestions for the transformation of the now obsolete sculptural relics of Soviet ideology, including the poet’s statue.32 Their playful proposal that these monuments be remade rather than removed echoes aspects of the Futurist attitude to Pushkin, but also demonstrates the extent to which they and other postmodernists, Prigov included, eschewed the agonistic model of literary development expounded in Futurist rhetoric. The ostensibly unironic Sturm und Drang of Futurist denunciations of the past was not their style. As a result, the most demonstrative overthrowings of the Maiakovskian idol occurred, not in poetry but in criticism, and even then not until the 1980s. One of the prominent voices in this backlash against Maiakovskii, Aleksandr Zholkovskii, who would later go on to debunk many of the myths cultivated by Akhmatova, openly aligned himself with Siniav­ skii’s “demythologization of the Russian classics” in a polemical article that characterizes Maiakovskii’s poetic persona as violently misogynistic and that bears the subtitle “Strolls through Maiakovskii.”33 Zholkov­ skii also cites another inspiration, Iurii Karabchievskii, whose own booklength denunciation of the Maiakovskii cult pulls no punches in its vivid and vitriolic takedown of Futurism. Maiakovskii’s admittedly prodigious talent, Karabchievskii argues, was squandered and overshadowed by his personal faults and his willing subjugation to the Soviet cause and, what is more, Khlebnikov is not really a Futurist but a “mad genius” and Kruchenykh “a boring con man.”34 Karabchievskii concludes his evisceration of Maiakovskii by saying that “no one can dispute his

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terrible seriousness as a phenomenon”—as well he might after hundreds of pages on the subject—and chronicling Maiakovskii’s ongoing influence in Russian poetry.35 This perpetual posterity, he suggests, is the life after life to which Maiakovskii had aspired and he duly names his book The Resurrection of Maiakovskii. But as Karabchievskii surely knew when he borrowed this potent and persistent Christian myth from Maiakovskii, the immortality of resurrection first requires crucifixion; only death can bring eternal life. As such, it was not his Soviet epigones who were really rescuing Maiakovskii from oblivion, or facilitating his transfiguration, but his clear-eyed executioner, Karabchiev­ skii himself. Just as the Futurists had done with Pushkin, he deconstructs the myth to rescue the poet, toppling the monument to save the man. We can see in Karabchievskii’s wrestling with Maiakovskii’s monument that the idoloclasm championed by the Futurists outlasts modernism and stands as an ever-present principle in Russian culture, a natural counterweight to the still more inevitable tendency to turn poets into idols—to make them transcendent, inviolable, inflexible. This same process of canonization is already well underway with the antiestablishment poets of the late twentieth century, despite their own best efforts. Soon after his death in 2007, people were already discussing a monument to Prigov. We can be sure, however, that if that statue is ever erected, other poets will come, either to tear it down or to make it dance. As long as there are Pushkins, there will always be Futurists.

Notes Introduction 1. David Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink, 1967), 50. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own. 2. Vladimir Markov considers the beginning of Futurism as a grouping to be the collection The Impressionists’ Studio, featuring work by Burliuk and Khlebnikov, published in 1910. See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), 6–7. 3. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgit, Caroline Tisdall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 19–24, 23. 4. See Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 65. 5. Compare Irina Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm: Ideologiia, poetika, pragmatika (Saratov: Izdatel’stvo Saratovskogo Universiteta, 2003), 118: “On the question of traditions, the theory and practice of Futurism are fundamentally different.” 6. Compare Mark A. Wollaeger, Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12: “What is needed, then, is not a static definition that attempts to specify the sine qua non of modernism, but [. . .] a polythetic form of classification in which the aim is to specify a set of criteria, subsets of which are enough to constitute a sense of decentered resemblance.” 7. William Carlos Williams, “Kenneth Burke,” in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 358. 8. See, for instance, Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48, and Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9. On the distinction between “modernism” and “modernity,” see Vincent Sherry, “Introduction: A History of ‘Modernism,’” in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19. 9. Many critics have supposed that the essence of modernism is to be found in the rejection of tradition. See, for instance, Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of

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Notes to Pages 7–11

Harvard University Press, 1968), 108, 143; Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 52. This position has often been refuted with reference to figures who are recognized as indisputably modernist and almost obsessively traditional, such as Eliot. See Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989), 61. 10. Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina,” 50. 11. I will not be using a technical, limiting definition of the avant-garde here but will rather treat it as a set of tendencies, many, if not all of which are manifest in Russian Futurism, such as a self-conscious group identity as an artistic vanguard in a hostile, philistine world and an ambitious belief that art can serve as a tool in a reconfiguration of the structure of human existence. 12. The translation “It-will-be-ans” is taken from Harsha Ram, “Futurist Geographies: Uneven Modernities and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy; Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909–1914,” in Wollaeger and Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 317. On Hylea, see Markov, Russian Futurism, 33. Ivaniu­ shina, following Igor’ Smirnov, associates the name with the Aristotelian concept of hyle, the raw material that is then imbued with form. See Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 39. 13. Burliuk, who was primarily responsible for the establishment and emergence of Futurism as a group, is not afforded individual consideration in this study because, despite his considerable organizational contribution to Futurism, he did not match the depth or ambition of his colleagues either in his poetry or his theoretical work and because he left European Russia in 1918, never to return. 14. The vaunted originality of much of the art of this period—the famous “shock of the new”—was a product as much of rhetorical strategies as artistic practice. See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 157–58. 15. Hugo Ball, “The First Dada Manifesto,” in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 219–35, 221. 16. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 58. 17. See Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003), 12, and Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiii. 18. See Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 5. 19. See Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, “‘Mif istoka’ v russkom avangarde 1910-kh godov,” in Russkii avangard: Istoki i metamorfozy (Moscow: Piataia strana, 2003), 24–43, 29. 20. The classic study of this phenomenon is Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Notes to Pages 11–15

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21. See Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2014), 16. 22. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh (hereafter PSS), ed. V. A. Katanian (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955–61), 1:275. 23. Compare Jonathan Brooks Platt, Greetings Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 17–18; Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5; and Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 113. 24. See Erik Tonning, Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 1. 25. Petre M. Petrov, Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015), 133. Compare Perloff, The Futurist Moment, xxiii. 26. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede­ mann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), 32. 27. Arthur Rimbaud, Un saison en enfer (Brussels: M. J. Poot, 1873), 52. 28. See Robert St. Clair, “Le Moderne absolu? Rimbaud et la contremodernité,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40, nos. 3–4 (2012): 307–26, 307. 29. Compare Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 96. 30. This concept is known in Russian as zhiznetvorchestvo, “life-creation.” See Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 31. See Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 21–48. 32. Compare Iurii Lotman, Kul’tura i vzryv (Moscow: Gnozis, 1992), 269: “Russian culture perceives itself in categories of explosion [. . .]. Even in places where empirical research shows multifactorial, gradual processes, on the level of self-awareness we come across the idea of complete and unmitigated destruction of the preceding and the apocalyptic birth of the new.” 33. In the course of this study I will mostly refer to the Futurists and the cultural milieu in which they worked as “Russian,” not least because most of the texts under discussion were written in and relate to the Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, it is important to note that all of the writers under consideration were born outside of European Russia—Maiakovskii in Georgia, Kruchenykh in Ukraine, and Khlebnikov in what is now the Republic of Kalmykia—and that, although they self-identified as Russian, this identity was complicated by their allegiances to other nationalities and, later, to Soviet nationalism and internationalism. 34. See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 60: “artistic practice

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Notes to Pages 15–17

could no longer attempt to disrupt the continuum of history as defined and led by the party. It could not challenge the temporality of the political revolution which, as the locomotive of history’s progress, invested the party with the sovereign power to force mass compliance in history’s name.” 35. Compare Groys, On the New, 44. 36. See Platt, Greetings Pushkin, 33. 37. See Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26, and Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, “Introduction: Beyond Pushkin as Dogma,” in Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 3–38, 3. 38. Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 6. 39. See David M. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 37. 40. Blok said of the Futurists: “They have taught us to love Pushkin again in a new way—not Briusov, Shchegolev, Morozov etc., but . . . the Futurists. They abuse him, in a new way, and he becomes closer in a new way.” See Aleksandr Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, 1901–1920, ed. V. Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestven­ naia literatura, 1965), 168. There are no book-length studies of the Futurist reception of Pushkin, but elements of the question have been well analyzed. See, for instance, Aleksandr Parnis, “My nakhodimsia k Pushkinu pod priamym uglom (Futuristy i Pushkin),” Russkaia mysl’ 4255 (1999): 17; T. Nikol’skaia, “Pushkin i futuristy,” in Traditsiia i novatorstvo v sovetskoi literature, ed. D. D. Ivlev (Riga: Latviiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1986), 57–64; V. P. Grigor’ev, “Khlebnikov i Pushkin,” in Pushkin i poeticheskii iazyk XX veka: Sbornik statei posviashchennykh 200-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia A. S. Pushkina, ed. N. A. Fateev (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 132–51; V. P. Grigor’ev, Grammatika idiostilia: V. Khlebnikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); V. N. Turbin, “Khlebnikov i Pushkin (K posta­ novke problemy),” Studia Slavica Finlandensia 9 (1994): 141–66; Henryk Baran, “Pushkin in Khlebnikov: Some Thematic Links,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 356–81; Andrea Hacker, “To Pushkin, Freedom, and Revolution in Asia: Velimir Khlebnikov in Baku,” Russian Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 440–68; Jean-Claude Lanne, “Pouchkine dans le contexte de l’avant-garde russe. Examen d’un cas particulier: Pouchkine et Khlebnikov,” in L’Universalité de Pouchkine, ed. Michel Aucouturier and Jean Bonamour (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2000), 333–42; Z. S. Papernyi, “‘Ot Pushkina do nashikh gazetnykh dnei . . . ,’” in V mire Maiakovskogo: Sbornik statei, ed. A. Mikhailov and S. Lesnevskii (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984), 80–116; Irina Ivaniushina, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’ Vladimira Maiakovskogo,” Voprosy literatury 4 (2000): 312–26; Sergei Sigei, “Strashnaia mest’ Alekseia Kruchenykh,” in Slovo o podvigakh Gogolia; Arabeski iz Gogolia, by Aleksei Kruchenykh, ed. Sergei Sigei (Madrid: Ediciones del Hebreo Errante, 2001), 39–47; Nina Gur’ianova, “Za sem’iu pechatiami slova,” in Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pamiat’ teper’ mnogo razvorachivaet: Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kru­ chenykh, ed. N. Gur’ianova (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1999), 311– 39; Iu. B. Orlitskii, “Russkaia literatura v interpretatsii radikal’nogo futurizma

Notes to Pages 17–27

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(Pushkin i Gogol’ v tvorchestve A. Kruchenykh i I. Terent’eva),” in Postsimvolizm kak iavlenie kul’tury: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (Moscow: RGGU, 2003), 90–95. These studies notwithstanding, there has been a tendency to reduce the Futurist reception of Pushkin solely to the one incident of “Slap” that is held by Paul Debreczeny, among others, to be “symptomatic” of Futurism in general. See, for example, Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 231. 41. See, for example, Gennadii Glinin, “‘Boris Godunov’ A. S. Pushkina i poema Khlebnikova ‘Marina Mnishek’: Opyt sopostavlennogo analiza,” in Poeti­ cheskii mir Velimira Khlebnikova: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Astrakhan: Astrakhanskii pedagogicheskii institut, 1992), 152–59, 152. 42. Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 121. 43. This binary approach is evident at, for instance, Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 100. 44. See Gillespie, “Introduction,” and Greta N. Slobin, “Appropriating the Irreverent Pushkin,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 214–30. 45. See Vahan D. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910–1930: A Study in Avant-Gardism (Paris: Mouton, 1974), 142. 46. Said, Beginnings, xviii. The position of the Futurists in the 1920s mirrors that of the English-language “high modernists,” for whom, as Rod Rosenquist argues, the challenge changed from one of “‘being modern’ to that of ‘remaining modern.’” See Rod Rosenquist, Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 176. 47. This narrative has particularly often been applied to Maiakovskii. See, for example, Innokentii Oksenov, “Maiakovskii i Pushkin,” in Pushkin: Vremennik pushkinskoi komissii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, B. S. Meilakh et al. (Moscow: Pushkinskaia komissiia, 1937–41), 3:282–311. 48. Iu. N. Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova: Stat’i i issledovaniia, ed. Viacheslav Ivanov, Zinovii Papernyi, and Aleksandr Parnis (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 214–33, 224. Tynianov deploys this analogy in an argument against treating Khlebnikov as a Futurist.

Chapter 1.  A Dance to the Music of Time 1. David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Benedikt Liv­ shits, Vladimir Maiakovskii, and Igor’ Severianin, “Idite k chortu,” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973), 80– 82, 80. 2. Iurii Tynianov, Dostoevskii i Gogol’ (k teorii parodiia) (Petrograd: Opoiaz, 1921), 6. 3. Compare Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 192: Pushkin is “the main actor in a mythical story about the classical, a myth that is recounted time and time again whenever it is a matter of reinterpreting culture.” See also Irina Paperno, “Pushkin v zhizni

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Notes to Pages 27–29

cheloveka Serebrianogo veka,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 19–51; Alexandra Smith, Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 36. 4. See A. E. Parnis, “O metamorfozakh mavy, oleni, i voina: K probleme dialoga Khlebnikova i Filonova,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova: Stat’i issledovaniia 1911–1998, ed. Viacheslav Ivanov, Zinovii Papernyi, and Aleksandr Parnis (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury), 637–95, 642. 5. Boris Gasparov, “Introduction: The ‘Golden Age’ and Its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 1–16, 8. 6. Examples of the use of mythology as a framework in the study of Russian modernism include: Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies. 7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1972), 10; Roman Jakobson, “The Statue in Pu†skin’s Poetic Mythology,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 318– 67, 318. David Bethea has argued that mythology, as a stable, “cementing” system, is “too blunt an instrument to capture the complexity and dynamism of [a] poet’s self-fashioning”; like many other aspects of structuralism, it can be seen as too arbitrary and determinative a framework. Nevertheless, it can still be a helpful way of describing the construction of poetic identity if we accept that: first, poetic mythopoesis in art and life is not necessarily coherent or devoid of contradiction; second, that this conscious mythopoesis is not exhaustive, but is rather only one very important element of an overarching poetic mythology constituted by both the poets’ choices and the reception of their life and works; third, that mythology continues to evolve posthumously and is never closed or resolved. See Bethea, Realizing Metaphors, 96. 8. For studies of Pushkin and myth, see, for instance, Robert Reid and Joe Andrew, eds., Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, vol. 2, Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument (New York: Rodopi, 2003); Mariia Virolainen, Legendy i mify o Pushkine (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1994); Viktor Esipov, Pushkin v zerkale mifov (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2006). 9. See Maiakovskii, PSS, 2:125. On the Futurist origins of Jakobson’s concept of mythology, see Savely Senderovich, “Rhythm, Trope, Myth: The Early Poetics of Roman Jakobson,” Semiotica 40, no. 3 (1982): 347–70. 10. Compare Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 217–22. 11. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 175–78, 178, 177.

Notes to Pages 29–33

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12. Andrei Belyi, Simvolizm (Munich: Fink, 1969), 447. Nikolai Burliuk echoes Belyi in saying that “the word is linked with the life of myth and only myth is the creator of the living language” and, in an early collective manifesto, one of the fundamental tenets of Futurist belief is that “we consider the word the creator of the myth.” Nikolai Burliuk, “Poeticheskie nachala,” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973), 78–80, 79; David Burliuk et al. “[Iz almanakha ‘Sadok sudei’],” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973), 51. See Aage Hansen-Löve, Russkii formalizm: Metodologicheskaia rekonstruktsiia razvitiia na osnove printsipa ostraneniia, trans. S. A. Romashko (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), 111. 13. See Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 165; and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy in Russian Religious Thought,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 330–57, 330. 14. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 319–38, 320. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 125. 16. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 171–90, 171. Compare Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert HullotKentor (London: Athlone, 1997), 19: “since the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of high capitalism, the category of the new has been central, though admittedly in conjunction with the question whether anything new had ever existed.” 17. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 334. 18. Maiakovskii, “Kaplia degtia,” in PSS, 1:349–51, 350; Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova," in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 64–73, 67. 19. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, ed. V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, and K. I. Chukovskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), 3:37. 20. On the terminology of “the Silver Age,” see Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997). 21. Osip Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v trekh tomakh (hereafter PSS), ed. A. G. Mets (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2009–11), 1:66, 57. Compare Irina Surat, Mandel’shtam i Pushkin (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2009), 50–55. 22. Mandel’shtam, PSS, 1:63–64. 23. D. S. Likhachev, “Ot redaktora,” in Andrei Belyi, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 5–6, 5. 24. Belyi, Peterburg, 305–6. 25. See Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

262



Notes to Pages 33–39

Press, 1987), 96–145; and David Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 115–41. 26. Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 104. 27. Mandel’shtam, PSS, 1:63. 28. Belyi, Peterburg, 28. 29. Andrei Belyi, Revoliutsiia i kul’tura (Moscow: Izdanie G. A. Lemana i S. I. Sakharova, 1917), 3; Aleksandr Blok, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia,” in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, ed. V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, and K. I. Chukovskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), 6:9–20, 12. 30. Blok, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia,” 12. 31. Aleksandr Pushkin, “Poet,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (hereafter, PSS v 10 tomakh) (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1950–51), 3:21. 32. Blok, “O naznachenii poeta,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 6:160–68. 33. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Moi Pushkin,” in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. Anna Saakiants and Lev Mnukhin (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1994), 5:57–91, 84. 34. Pushkin, “Mednyi vsadnik,” in PSS v 10 tomakh, 4:375–98, 378. 35. Ibid., 385. 36. Ibid., 385, 379. See Andrei Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, trans. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 98. 37. Pushkin, Poltava, in PSS v 10 tomakh, 4:249–309, 294. 38. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 7:537. 39. P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Filosofskie pis’ma,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbran­ nye pis’ma, ed. Z. A. Kamenskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 1:320–440, 330. 40. Pushkin, “P. Ia. Chaadaevu,” in PSS v 10 tomakh, 10:595–97, 596. 41. Pushkin, “Mednyi vsadnik,” 378. 42. V. G. Belinskii, “Russkaia literatura v 1840 godu,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, ed. Iu. Kirilenko (Moscow: Knigovek, 2011), 1:461–510, 481. Belin­ skii does mention Pushkin’s predecessors Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavriil Derzhavin but dismisses them as imitators of Western forms. 43. I. S. Turgenev, “Rech’ po povodu otkrytiia pamiatnika A. S. Pushkinu v Moskve,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1978–), 12:341–51, 345. 44. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, “Pushkin,” in Vechnye sputniki: Portrety iz vsemir­ noi literatury, ed. E. A. Andrushchenko (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2007), 229–97, 232. 45. Ibid., 269. Compare Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Stages of Nietzscheanism: Merezhkovsky’s Intellectual Evolution,” in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 70–93, 71. 46. Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” in Vechnye sputniki, 428–502, 468, 502. 47. Ibid., 502. 48. See Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 224. 49. See M. N. Virolainen, “Kul’turnyi geroi novogo vremeni,” in Legendy i mify o Pushkine (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1994), 321–41, 334; and A. M. Panchenko, “Russkii poet, ili Mirskaia sviatost’ kak religiozno-kul’turnaia problema,” in Russkaia istoriia i kul’tura: Raboty raznykh let (St. Petersburg: Iuna, 1999), 361–77, 374.

Notes to Pages 39–43

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50. Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, 44; F. I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pis’ma v shesti tomakh, ed. N. N. Skatov, L. V. Gladkova, L. D. GromovaOpul’skaia et al. (Moscow: Klassika, 2002–5), 1:57. Compare Platt, Greetings Pushkin, 38. 51. Compare Matthew Mutter, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 3. See also Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The most extended summary of the motivations behind this modernist attempt to “re-enchant” a world left bereft by modernity is Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), but that position has both many contemporary adherents and many distinguished forebears, notably Mircea Eliade. 52. Compare Martha M. F. Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 53. Scott Freer, Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4. 54. Iurii Lotman sees the predominance of typological, isomorphic affinities as the primary difference between literature and myth. See Iu. M. Lotman, Z. G. Mints, E. M. Meletinskii, “Literatura i mify,” in Mify narodov mira: Entsiklo­ pediia, ed. S. A. Tokarev (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1980), 220–26, 220. 55. Gasparov, “Introduction,” 8. 56. Mandel’shtam, “Skriabin i khristianstvo,” in PSS, 2:35–41, 35. See also Surat, Mandel’shtam i Pushkin, 6. 57. Merezhkovskii, “Pushkin,” 264. 58. Ibid., 232. 59. Ibid., 230. 60. Fedor Dostoevskii, “Pushkin (ocherk),” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (hereafter PSS), ed. V. G. Bazanov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), 26:136–49, 136. 61. Pushkin, “P. Ia. Chaadaevu,” in PSS v 10 tomakh, 10:595–97, 595. 62. Compare Platt, Greetings Pushkin, 36. 63. N. V. Gogol’, “Neskol’ko slov o Pushkine,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati trekh tomakh, ed. Iu. V. Mann (Nauka: Moscow, 2009), 3:90–96, 90. 64. Dostoevskii, “Pushkin,” 149. 65. Merezhkovskii, “Pushkin,” 285. 66. See Marcus C. Levitt, “Pushkin in 1899,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 183–203. 67. See, for instance, D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell, eds., Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford: W. A. Meeuws, 1976), xvii. 68. Tat’iana Tolstaia-Vechorka, “Sliuni chernogo geniia,” in Zhiv Kru­ chenykh!, ed. Boris Pasternak, David Burliuk, Sergei Tret’iakov et al. (Moscow: Vserossiiskii soiuz poetov, 1925), 10–39, 18; Benedikt Livshits, “Osvobozhdenie slova,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 73–77, 76. 69. Irina Paperno, “Nietzscheanism and the Return of Pushkin in TwentiethCentury Russian Culture (1899–1937),” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 211–32, 218, 222.

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Notes to Pages 43–49

70. Joan Delaney Grossman, “‘Moi Pushkin’: Briusov’s Search for the Real Aleksandr Sergeevich,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 73–87. 71. Valerii Briusov, Moi Pushkin (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1929), 9. 72. Compare Monika Frenkel Greenleaf, “Tynianov, Pushkin, and the Fragment: Through the Lens of Montage,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 264–82, 265. 73. Quoted in Paperno, “Pushkin v zhizni,” 25. 74. See Platt, Greetings Pushkin, 38. 75. See Eric Csapo, Theories of Mythology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 11–12; James P. Mackey, Jesus, the Man and the Myth: A Contemporary Christology (London: SCM, 1979), 30–51. 76. Compare Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 12; Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 15. 77. Iurii Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” in Poetika, Istoriia literatury, Kino, ed. B. A. Kaverin and A. S. Miasnikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 255–70, 259. 78. See, for instance, Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). 79. See Pavel Medvedev, Formal’nyi metod v literaturovedenii (Hildsheim: Georg Olms, 1974), 107–8. 80. Iu. N. Tynianov, “Mnimyi Pushkin,” 78–92, 78; and Greenleaf, “Tynia­ nov, Pushkin and the Fragment,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 264– 92, 267. 81. R. O. Iakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (Prague: Politika, 1921), 21. 82. “Vokrug ‘Noveishei russkoi poezii.’ Po materialam perepiski R. O. Iakobson i N. S. Trubetskogo,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova: Stat’i i issledovaniia, ed. Viacheslav Ivanov, Zinovii Papernyi, and Aleksandr Parnis, 97–102, 98. 83. Ibid., 101. 84. Velimir Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (hereafter SS), ed. R. V. Duganov (Moscow: Nasledie, 2000–2006), 6:2:64–65. 85. Khlebnikov, “Uchitel’ i uchenik,” in SS, 6:2:35–47, 35. 86. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:32. 87. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:84. 88. Mandel’shtam, “Skriabin i khristianstvo,” in PSS, 2:35–41, 35. 89. Mandel’shtam, “Slovo i kul’tura,” in PSS, 2:49–54, 51. 90. Mandel’shtam, “Razgovor o Dante: Pervaia redaktsiia,” in PSS, 2:413– 55, 434. Compare Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandel’†stam (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), xi. 91. Krystyna Pomorska, “Majakovskij and the Myth of Immortality in the Russian Avant-Garde,” in Slavic Literatures and Modernism, ed. Nils Åke Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987), 49–69, 56. 92. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 643–53, 653. 93. I. P. Smirnov, Khudozhestvennyi smysl i evoliutsiia poeticheskikh sistem (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 121. 94. Compare Harsha Ram, “Futurist Geographies: Uneven Modernities and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy: Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909–1914,” in

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The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 327. Ram sees the Russian insistence on heterochrony as one of the main points of difference between Russian and Italian Futurisms (“Futurist Geographies,” 315). 95. The idea of time travel as a form of journey akin to travel through space, as opposed to simply awakening in the future, had earlier precedents, including the work of Russian Aleksandr Vel’tman, but was really popularized by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). 96. Khlebnikov, “Ka,” in SS, 5:122–41, 122. See Mikaela Bemig, “Vremia v prostranstve: Khlebnikov i ‘filosofiia giperprostranstva,’” Vestnik obshchestva Velimira Khlebnikova 1 (1996): 179–94; Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913), 7; Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:281. 97. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:112. 98. See Nancy Perloff, “Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards): Collaborative Book Art and Transrational Sounds,” Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 101–8, 104. 99. Khlebnikov, SS, 3:234–58, 244. 100. See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15, and Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 32–33. 101. Mikhail Epshtein, Vera i obraz: Religioznoe bessoznatel’noe v russkoi kul’ture 20-go veka (Tenafly, NJ: Ermitazh, 1994), 55. Compare Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty, 17: “In Russia’s case modernism often takes on the aspect of a neoreligious model of modernity.” Despite their emphasis on demystification, the Formalists have also been said to be pursuing an essentially sacralizing project. See Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 25, 80, 131. 102. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 140. 103. Ibid., 149–50. 104. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 253–64, 263. Compare Krzystof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the AvantGarde, and the Event (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 19: “The avant-garde rupture dislocates the present and discloses it as an event whose historicity marks a structural incompletion, opening the now to the future.” 105. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:69. 106. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova, kak takovogo,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 63–64, 63. See also Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 64–73, 67. 107. Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo,” 63. See Belyi, Simvolizm, 448. 108. Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race, and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6. See also Benedikt Hjartarson, “Myths of Rupture: The Manifesto and the Concept of the Avant-Garde,” in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 1:173–94.

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Notes to Pages 53–57

109. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:329–32, 339. 110. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261. Compare Hayden White, “Manifesto Time,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow (New York: Routledge, 2007), 220–31, 220, and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 129. 111. Maiakovskii, “150,000,000,” in PSS, 2:113–64, 125. 112. See Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy in Russian Religious Thought,” in Steinberg and Coleman, Sacred Stories, 330–57, 347. The Futurists were particularly influenced by Belyi’s notion of language as a creative mythic force. See Hansen-Löve, Russkii formalizm, 111. 113. Quoted in A. V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard: 1907–1932: Istoricheskii obzor; V trekh tomakh (St. Petersburg: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996), 1:141. 114. Boris Gasparov alludes to this association when he suggests that Pushkin is thrown overboard “like a pagan divinity.” See Boris Gasparov, “Introduction,” 8. See also Lars Kleberg, “Notes on the Poem Vladimir Ili†c Lenin,” in Vladimir Majakovskij: Memoirs and Essays, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt and Nils Åke Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975), 166–78, and Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “Sbrosit’ ili brosit’?” Novyi literaturnyi obozrevatel’ 96 (2009), accessed 29 July 2019, https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2009/2/sbrosit-ili-brosit.html. 115. Iurii M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M. Lotman, Lidiia Ia. Ginzburg, Boris A. Uspenskii, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 30–66, 33. 116. See Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:10. 117. See Khlebnikov, SS, 1:212. Elsewhere Khlebnikov argues that Perun and Pushkin are essentially the same because their names begin with the same letter. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:131. On other allusions to The Bronze Horseman in Khlebnikov’s work, see Grigor’ev, Grammatika idiostilia, 168. 118. Compare Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:181: “Я над всем, что сделано, | ставлю ‘nihil’” (Above everything that’s been done | I’ll put “nihil”). 119. D. I. Pisarev, “Pushkin i Belinskii,” in Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1956), 3:306–417, 378, 363, 364. 120. Afanasii Fet, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. B. Ia. Bukhshtab (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959), 364. 121. See Robert P. Hughes, “Pushkin in Petrograd, February 1921,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 204–13. 122. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 4:392, 393. 123. Jakobson, “The Statue,” 326. Compare Seifrid, Word Made Self, 218. 124. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 3:376. 125. Compare Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death, 21: “Reduced to its bare ideological essentials, the immortalization program postulates a construction fault that makes disintegration (and thus death) possible. Nature, society, the human form, all need to be restructured so that disintegration cannot occur. A time ‘out of joint’ must be set right again [. . .].” Masing-Delic proposes three negative parameters—three critiques of the world as it is, including “the denigration

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of a False Deity [. . .]; his worship hinders progress by inducing a crippling passivity, culminating in death.” 126. Seifrid, Word Made Self, 220–21. 127. John Fizer, Alexander A. Potebnja’s Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature: A Metacritical Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 13. 128. Ibid., 24. On Humboldt’s influence on Futurism, see Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 102. 129. See Hilary L. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 130. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 64–73, 65; Khlebnikov, SS, 1:311; Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:50. 131. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Bukva kak takovaia,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 60–61, 60; Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 71. 132. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 66; Nikolai Burliuk, “Poeticheskie nachala,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 77–80, 77. 133. Viktor Shklovsky, “Resurrecting the Word,” in Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. and trans. Alexandra Berlina (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 63–72, 69. This critique of the built environment can be contrasted with the position of the Acmeists, who, in dismissing the insubstantial Symbolists, aspired to grant their words the solidity of stone. 134. See Il’ia Kalinin, “Iskusstvo kak priem voskresheniia slova: Viktor Shklov­skii i filosofiia obshchego dela,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (2015): 133. 135. See Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death. 136. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 70. Compare Osip Mandel’shtam, “O prirode slova,” in O Poezii: Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Academiia, 1928), 26– 45, 41: “For the Symbolist [. . .] a rose is like the sun, the sun is like a rose, and a dove is like a girl and a girl is like a dove.” 137. Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, “Slovo kak takovoe,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 53–58, 56. See Smirnov, Khudozhestvennyi smysl, 103; Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1996), 8; Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 195. 138. K. Malevich, “Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu,” in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (hereafter SS), ed. A. S. Shtatskikh (Moscow: Hylea, 1995), 1:35–56, 47. See Mojmir Grygar, Znakotvorchestvo: Semiotika russkogo avangarda (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2007), 29, 155. 139. A. Benua, “Posledniaia futuristicheskaia vystavka,” Rech’, 9 January 1916; compare Oleg Tarasov, “Spirituality and the Semiotics of Russian Culture: From the Icon to Avant-Garde Art,” in Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives, ed. Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), 115–28. 140. Khlebnikov, SS, 1:103. This translation is by Paul Schmidt. See Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, ed. Ronald Vroon, trans. Paul Schmidt, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–97), 3:29. 141. See R. V. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov: Priroda tvorchestva (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 96. 142. See Perloff, “‘Mirskontsa,’” 109. 143. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:63.

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Notes to Pages 61–69

144. See Belyi, Simvolizm, 434, and Seifrid, Word Made Self, 50. 145. V. N. Turbin, “Khlebnikov i Pushkin (K postanovke problem),” Studia Slavica Finlandensia 9 (1994): 161. Compare Henryk Baran, “Temporal Myths in Xlebnikov: From ‘Deti vydry’ to ‘Zangezi,’” in Myth in Literature, ed. Andrej Kodjak, Krystyna Pomorska, and Stephen Rudy (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1985), 63–88, 82. 146. See Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 1:141.

Chapter 2.  A Stowaway on the Steamship of Modernity 1. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgit, and Caroline Tisdall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 20. 2. Rosalind Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 157. 3. Ibid. 4. Compare Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 18. 5. On the origin of the use of the term “Futurist” to describe the Hylea group, see Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), 118. 6. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:345. 7. See Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist, 103. 8. “Il Futurismo,” Gazzeta dell’Emilia (5 February 1909), 1. 9. Compare Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 39. 10. On the theatricality of manifestos, see Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 111. 11. See Maiakovskii, “I nam miasa,” in PSS, 1:313–15, 314. Compare Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist, 54, and Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 159. On Futurism and branding, see Ivaniushina, Russkii futurism, 35, 235. 12. Burliuk et al., “Idite k chortu,” 80. 13. Ibid. 14. David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 50. 15. On manifestos’ “pronominal sleight of hand,” see Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 26. The Futurists’ “brand awareness” and antagonistic coterie-forming strategy was in many ways anticipated by the Symbolists: see Jonathan Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 8–16. 16. See Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 142–51. 17. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 54. 18. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), xi; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely

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Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59–121, 64. On parallels between the mythologies of Russian Futurism and Nietzsche, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 101. 19. See Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, “‘Mif istoka’ v russkom avangarde 1910-kh godov,” in Russkii avangard: istoki i metamorfozy (Moscow: Piataia strana, 2003), 24–43. 20. Boris Groys, “Russkii avangard po obe storony ‘chernogo kvadrata,’” Voprosy filosofii 11 (1990): 67–73, 69. 21. Compare Ram, “Futurist Geographies,” 320: “Unlike past revolts against the cultural center, they strove not merely to synchronize the divergent temporalities of center and periphery but ultimately to refashion the spatial hierarchy that gave the center its authority.” As Ram points out, the same logic informed the thinking of the Bolsheviks. See also Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4–27. 22. Aleksandr Griboedov, Gore ot uma (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 47. 23. Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina,” 50. 24. Dostoevskii, “Pushkin, Lermontov, i Nekrasov,” in PSS, 26:113–19, 114–15. 25. Vasilii Rozanov, “Vozvrat k Pushkinu,” Novoe vremia (29 January 1912). 26. Maiakovskii, PSS, 12:164–70, 166. 27. Zholkovskii, “Sbrosit’ ili brosit’?” Compare Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 64. 28. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod: K istorii russkogo futurizma,” in Pamiat teper’ mnogo razvorachivaet: Iz literaturnogo naslediia Kruchenykh, ed. Nina Gur’ianova (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1999), 29–194, 52. Accounts of the composition of “Poshchechina” vary; they are comprehensively analyzed by Gur’ianova who largely vindicates Kruchenykh’s telling. Ibid., 359n12. 29. Zholkovskii, “Sbrosit’ ili brosit’?” 30. Ibid. 31. Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova, kak takovogo,” 63–64, 63. Compare Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 98. 32. See Tim Harte, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 33–97. 33. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:248–49, 249. 34. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:349–51, 350. 35. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 59. 36. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov, 117. 37. On steamships in modernism, see, for instance, Bruce Peter and Philip Dawson, “Modernism at Sea: Ocean Liners and the Avant-Garde,” in Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, ed. Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 145–58.

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Notes to Pages 74–80

38. Maksim Gor’kii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Khudozhestvnnye proizvedeniia v dvadtsati piati tomakh (hereafter PSS) (Moscow: Nauka, 1968–76), 7:175. 39. Khlebnikov, SS, 5:259. 40. M. Matiushin, A. Kruchenykh, K. Malevich, “Pervyi vserosiiskii s’’ezd baiachei budushchego (poetov-futuristov),” in Malevich, SS, 1:23–24, 23. 41. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 96. On the collaborative nature of Victory over the Sun, see Janecek, Zaum, 113. 42. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 5. 43. Compare Charlotte Douglas, “Victory over the Sun,” Russian History 8, nos. 1–2 (1981): 69–89. 44. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:151–72, 153. 45. Lawrence Leo Stahlberger, The Symbolic System of Majakovskij (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 117. 46. See Khlebnikov, SS, 1:253–55. Compare Henryk Baran, “Xlebnikov and the Mythology of Oroches,” in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson, C. H. van Schooneveld, and D. S. Worth (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 33–39. On connections between Victory over the Sun and “Napoleon and Me,” see Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Sud’ba Kruchenykh,” in Stat’i ob avangade (Moscow: Arkhiv russkogo avangarda, 1996), 1:300–306. 47. Evgeny Steiner, “Programme Notes: ‘Throwing Pushkin Overboard,’” in A Victory over the Sun, ed. Patricia Railing, 2 vols. (Forest Row: Artists Bookworks, 2009), 1:33–42, 33. Compare also Janecek, Zaum, 123. 48. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 13. Compare Mikhail Bezrodynyi, “K voprosu o kul’te Pushkina na Rusi: Beglye zametki,” Ruthenia (2000), accessed 25 October 2018, http://www.ruthenia.ru/document/242352.html#22_22. The burial of the Pushkinian sun was a recurrent leitmotif in the poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam. See Irina Surat, Mandel’shtam i Pushkin (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2009), 6. 49. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 8. 50. Steiner argues for further reminiscences of “I have erected a monument. . . .” See Steiner, “Programme Notes,” 35, 36. 51. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:165. Compare Robert Leach, “A Good Beginning: Victory over the Sun and Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy Reassessed,” Russian Literature 13, no. 1 (1983): 101–15, 110. 52. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 17. 53. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:165–66. 54. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 22. 55. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:74. 56. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 2:57. 57. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:74. 58. Ibid., 75. 59. Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina,” 50. 60. Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Elena Guro, Troe (St. Petersburg: Zhuravl’, 1913), 37. 61. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:306. 62. Ibid., 307.

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63. Ibid., 306. For another example of the pejorative use of uncles against Pushkin, see Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 64–73, 70. 64. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:308–12, 310. 65. Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina,” 50. 66. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:316–17, 316. 67. Ibid., 316. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 316, 317. 70. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 65. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Nietzsche, “On the Uses,” 84; Marinetti “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” 25. This notwithstanding, Kruchenykh dismissed Nietzsche, in terms most often reserved for the Symbolists, as a loner obsessed with the eternal feminine. See Aleksei Kruchenykh, Tainye poroki akademikov (St. Petersburg: Tip. I. D. Rabotnova, 1916), 10. 74. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:318–20, 320. 75. Aleksei Kruchenykh and Zina V., Porosiata (St. Petersburg: Svet, 1913), 14. The work of Pushkin in question is a fairy tale, based on folk motifs, first published by Pavel Annenkov. See P. V. Annenkov, A. S. Pushkin: Materialy dlia ego biografii i otsenki proizvedenii (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1873), 145. 76. Kruchenykh, Porosiata, 13. Compare Sara Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 62. Kruchenykh later claimed that his coauthor was Lev Trotskii’s daughter Zinaida, but this may be a fabrication: although the right age, she was not “Zina V.” but Zinaida Bronshtein until she married Platon Volkov after the revolution. See Ian Satunovskii, “Poseshchenie Kruchenykh,” accessed 29 November 2018, https://imwerden.de/pdf/satunov ­sky_poseshhenie_kruchenykh.pdf. 77. Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 1:140–41, 141. 78. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:22–27, 24. 79. Ibid., 25. 80. V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1953–59), 7:358. 81. Velimir Khlebnikov, “Voin ne nastupivshego tsarstva,” in SS, 6:1:204–6, 204. 82. Ibid., 203. On Khlebnikov’s enthusiasm for Pan-Slavism, see Irina Sheve­ lenko, Modernizm kak arkhaizm: Natsionalizm i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), 181. 83. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” 53–58, 55. 84. Kruchenykh, Tainye poroki akademikov, 14. 85. Ibid. 86. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:182–84, 183. 87. Khlebnikov, PSS, 5:330. Compare Vadim Shershenevich: “Global Futurism pushes away from old earth—toward the new earth, but it must be to the earth, because outside the earth, outside the terrestrial, there is no life. On the

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Notes to Pages 86–91

flag of Futurism, which flutters in the wind of modernity are the words: ‘I don’t like mystic stuff. The closer to the sky, the colder it is! To the earth above all— that is l’art poetique of Futurism.” Vadim Shershenevich, “Predislovie,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 147–48, 147. To describe Futurist anti-mysticism Shershenevich here cites Pushkin’s “Table-Talk,” using a quotation originally attributed to Pushkin’s friend Anton Del’vig. See Aleksandr Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, ed. D. D. Blagoi, S. M. Bondi, V. V. Vinogradov et al. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959–62), 7:209. 88. Attributed to Kruchenykh by Tat’iana Tolstaia-Vechorka in “Sliuni chernogo geniia,” in Zhiv Kruchenykh!, ed. Boris Pasternak, David Burliuk, Sergei Tret’iakov et al. (Moscow: Vserossiiskii soiuz poetov, 1925), 10–39, 30. 89. Kruchenykh, Tainye poroki akademikov, 14. 90. Ibid., 1. 91. Ibid., 2, 20. 92. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 53. 93. F. I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pis’ma v shesti tomakh, ed. N. N. Skatov, L. V. Gladkova, L. D. Gromova-Opul’skaia et al. (Moscow: Klassika, 2002–5), 1:57. 94. See Stanislav Shvabrin, “‘. . . A Sob That Alters the Entire History of Russian Letters . . .’: Cincinnatus’s Plight, Tiutchev’s ‘Last Love,’ and Nabokov’s Metaphysics of Poetic Form,” Slavic and East European Journal 58, no. 3 (2014): 437–64, 444. 95. Ibid., 442. 96. Compare Richard A. Gregg, Fedor Tiutchev: The Evolution of a Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 168, and Anatoly Liberman, On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1993), 127. 97. Burliuk et al., “Poshchechina,” 50. 98. Ibid. 99. Dostoevskii, “Pushkin,” 149. 100. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 5:135. Dostoevskii greatly admired The Queen of Spades and mentioned it in a letter written eight days after the speech. See Dostoevskii, “Letter to Iu. F. Abaza,” in PSS, 30:191–93. 101. Kruchenykh, Tainye poroki akademikov, 14. 102. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Chort i rechetvortsy (St. Petersburg: EUY, 1913), 1. 103. Ibid., 15. 104. Ibid., 14. 105. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Apokalipsis v russkoi literature (Moscow: Moskovskaia Assotsiatsiia Futuristov, 1923), 11. 106. Ibid.; Dostoevskii, “Pushkin,” 147. 107. Kruchenykh, Chort i rechetvortsy, 10. 108. Ibid., 9. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 6. 111. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 60; Velimir Khlebnikov et al., “Truba Marsian,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 160–64, 161. 112. Ibid., 162.

Notes to Pages 91–97

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Chapter 3.  Making a Prophet 1. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:9. Hereafter, references to Khlebnikov’s collected works will be made in parentheses in the body of the text. 2. See Ol’ga Matiushina, “Prizvanie,” Zvezda 3 (1973): 137–54, and Danila Davydov, “Khlebnikov naivnyi i ne-naivnyi,” Arion 4 (2001): 100–105. Sofiia Starkina says that, of his friends and colleagues, only Viacheslav Ivanov gave any credence to Khlebnikov’s theories of time. See Sofiia Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov: Korol’ Vremeni; Biografiia (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2005), 71. 3. Duganov makes an impassioned argument for the validity of Khlebnikov’s theories of time in Velimir Khlebnikov, 56. 4. Khlebnikov’s brief entry in the online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism does not mention his theories of time. See Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, s.v. “Khlebnikov, Velimir,” by Denis Ioffe, published May 5, 2017, https:// www.rem.routledge.com/articles/khlebnikov-velimir-1885-1922. 5. Quoted and translated in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 368. 6. See Juan Miguel Marin, “‘Mysticism’ in Quantum Mechanics: The Forgotten Controversy,” European Journal of Physics 30, no. 4 (2009): 807–22. 7. See M. Radzishevskii and V. Teider, “Velimir Khlebnikov v razmyshleniiakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (po fonodokumentam V. D. Duvakina 1960–1970 godov),” Vestnik Obshchestva Velimira Khlebnikova 1 (1996): 44–66. For a general introduction to the question of Khlebnikov and science, see V. V. Babkov, “Nauka i poeziia v tvorchestve Velimira Khlebnikova,” in Nauka i iskusstvo, ed. A. N. Pavlenko (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, Institut filosofii, 2005), 5–65; and V. V. Ivanov, “Khlebnikov i nauka,” in Puti v neznaemoe: Pisateli rasskazyvaiut o nauke, ed. G. B. Bashkirova (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 382–440. 8. See R. O. Iakobson, “Iz vospominanii,” in Ivanov, Papernyi, and Parnis, Mir Velimira Khlebnikova, 83–89. 9. Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov, 95. 10. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 54. Compare Markov, Russian Futurism, 50. See Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 1:140–41. 11. See Radzishevskii and Teider, “Velimir Khlebnikov,” 44–66, and “O poeticheskom iazyke proizvedenii Khlebnikova: Obsuzhdenie doklada R. O. Iakobsona v moskovskom lingvisticheskom kruzhke,” in Ivanov, Papernyi, and Parnis, Mir Velimira Khlebnikova, 90–96. 12. See V. P. Grigor’ev, Budetlianin (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 617. 13. See Ronald Vroon, “The Poet and His Voices,” in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987–97), 3:1–22, 6. 14. Pamela Davidson has argued against autobiographical readings of “The Prophet.” See Pamela Davidson, “Vladimir Solov’ev and the Ideal of Prophecy,” Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 4 (2000): 643–70, 664. 15. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 2:340–41.

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Notes to Pages 97–106

16. See Michael Wachtel, A Commentary on Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 23. 17. Compare Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 201. 18. Davidson, “Vladimir Solov’ev,” 664. 19. See Mariia Virolainen, “Kul’turnyi geroi novogo vremeni,” in Virolainen, Legendy i mify o Pushkine, 321–41, 334. 20. N. A. Nekrasov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, ed. V. E. Evgen’evMaksimov, A. M. Egolin, and K. I. Chukovskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1948–53), 2:381. 21. Vladimir Solov’ev, Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1908–11), 2:356. 22. Dostoevskii, PSS, 16:149. 23. Platt, Greetings Pushkin, 36. 24. Dostoevskii, PSS, 16:149. 25. Compare Betsy F. Moeller-Sally, “Masks of the Prophet in the Work of Velimir Khlebnikov: Pushkin and Nietzsche,” Russian Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 201–25, 202. 26. Compare Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” 53. On the influence of Symbolist numerology on Khlebnikov, see Barbara Lönnqvist, Mirozdanie v slove: Poetika Velimira Khlebnikova (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 19. 27. Quoted and translated at John Eric Bellquist, Strindberg as a Modern Poet: A Critical and Comparative Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 118. 28. Izhitsa was a letter descended from Greek upsilon that was used in the Glagolitic, Church Slavonic, and Russian alphabets, but that became increasingly rare outside of an ecclesiastic context. It was so uncommon that, contrary to a widespread belief perhaps shared by Khlebnikov, it was not officially discontinued in the 1918 alphabet reform. 29. Khlebnikov believed that all the separate elements of the universe existed in a state of constant “pulsation.” See A. N. Andrievskii, “Moi nochnye besedy s Khlebnikovym,” Druzhba narodov 12 (1985): 237–47. 30. Khlebnikov refers to “To Natasha” (1815), which Pushkin wrote for Princess Varvara Volkonskaia’s maid. 31. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 2:340. 32. This same connection is proposed by Betsy Moeller-Sally in “Masks of the Prophet,” 207, and Barbara Lönnqvist in Mirozdanie v slove, 19. 33. One notable enthusiast for Husserl was Roman Jakobson, who attended Georgii Chelanov’s Husserl seminar at Moscow University and may have introduced Khlebnikov to his work. See Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 34. Joaquim Siles i Borrás, The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life (London: Continuum, 2010), 78. 35. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 2:103. 36. See Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov, 117.

Notes to Pages 106–118

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37. See Moeller-Sally, “Masks of the Prophet.” 38. Compare Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:11. 39. See Nikolai Stepanov, Velimir Khlebnikov: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1975), 238. 40. Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 47. 41. See G. G. Amelin and V. Ia. Morderer, “‘Odinokii litsedei’ Velimira Khlebnikova,” in Poeziia i zhivopis’: Sbornik trudov pamiati N. I. Khardzhieva, ed. M. B. Meilakh and D. B. Sarab’ianov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 426–30, 428; and Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov, 251. 42. See Moeller-Sally, “Masks of the Prophet,” 212. 43. See “V kogo vgryzaetsia Lef,” Lef 1 (1923): 9. 44. Moeller-Sally, “Masks of the Prophet,” 212; see Harsha Ram, “Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Odinokii licedej,’” Die Welt der Slaven 46 (2001): 331–46, 340. Ram does not treat the bull as a cipher for Pushkin, instead making an effective argument that the curly-headed bull here is equivalent to the snake-haired Gorgon, but still sees it as a representative of both war and the past. 45. Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov, 251. 46. Amelin and Morderer, “‘Odinokii litsedei’ Velimira Khlebnikova,” 428. 47. Compare Khlebnikov, SS, 3:340–41; 1:311; 3:184. See also Andrea Hacker, “To Pushkin, Freedom, and Revolution in Asia: Velimir Khlebnikov in Baku,” Russian Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 461. 48. The hero of The Children of the Otter has iron wings that enable him to fly into the sky and fulfil his mythic duty by killing two of the three suns. See D. Petrov­skii, Vospominaniia o Velimire Khlebnikove (Moscow: Ogonek, 1926). 49. Compare Ram, “Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Odinokii licedej,’” 340–41. 50. P. I. Tartakovskii, Poeziia Khlebnikova i vostok: 1917–1922 gody (Tashkent: Fan, 1992). 51. R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi: A Compendium of Zoroastrian Beliefs (London: Sheldon, 1956), 128. 52. Hacker, “To Pushkin, Freedom, and Revolution,” 444. 53. Ibid., 459; see Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2:64. 54. On the existence of these poems as a cycle, see Boris Gasparov, Poeti­ cheskii iazyk Pushkina kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 1992), 239; and Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, 204. 55. V. P. Stark, “Pritcha o seiatele i tema poeta-proroka v lirike Pushkina,” Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy 14 (1991): 51–64, 52. 56. Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 145. 57. Ibid., 143. 58. Ram, “Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Odinokii licedej,’” 334. 59. See Ram, Imperial Sublime, 66. 60. Ram, “Velimir Chlebnikov’s ‘Odinokii licedej,’” 335. Ram regards the “walking corpse” motif as an attribute of the “Russian imperial sublime” and its Caucasian topos: the poems in this tradition “show the prophet intervening

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Notes to Pages 118–127

in a time of national calamity or imperial war” (Ram, Imperial Sublime, 158). Here this tradition is being used in an anti-imperialist way. 61. V. K. Kiukhel’beker, Sochineniia, ed. V. D. Rak and N. M. Romanov (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 67. 62. Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, 195. Kahn suggests that Pushkin borrowed this opening from Chénier himself, taking it from his poem “Iambes,” which surely also provides the meter. 63. Aleksandr Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh (hereafter, PSS v 17 tomakh), edited by B. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Maksim Gor’kii, D. D. Blagoi et al. 17 vols. (1937; Moscow: Voskresen’e, 1994), 2:352. 64. Stephanie Sandler, “The Poetics of Authority in Pushkin’s ‘André Chénier,’” Slavic Review 42, no. 2 (1983): 187–203, 197, 201. Kahn also argues that the poem is an expression of the poet’s independence from his predecessors. See Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, 191. 65. Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk, 240. 66. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 2:352. 67. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 13:249. 68. Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk, 235. 69. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 13:125. 70. Stark, “Pritcha o seiatele,” 51. 71. Khlebnikov also imagines himself as a prophet leading the blinded masses with his calculations in his utopian poem Ladomir. See Khlebnikov, SS, 3:239. 72. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 3:66. 73. Khlebnikov once wrote in his notebook “я бедный воин, я одинок” (I am a poor warrior, I am lonely/one eyed), which seems particularly salient considering that a draft title for “The Lonely Player” was “The Poor Player.” See Velimir Khlebnikov, Zapisnaia knizhka Velimira Khlebnikova, ed. A. Kru­ chenykh (Moscow: Izdanie vserossiiskogo soiuza poetov, 1925), 16; and Velimir Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, ed. V. P. Grigor’ev and A. E. Parnis (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 675. The word “lonely” (odinokii ) is also used in an ocular context in “Burliuk,” a short poem about the one-eyed David Burliuk, written in roughly the same period as “The Lonely Player”; Khlebnikov regularly punned on this word, for example in his short story “Oko: An Oroch Tale,” in which oko is both “an eye” and a native Oroch word for breast (5:93–95, 403). Robin Milner-Gulland has noted the importance of the word oko in this passage and in Khlebnikov’s semantics in general. See Robin Milner-Gulland, “Khlebnikov’s Eye,” in Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, ed. Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–220. 74. Maiakovskii, PSS, 1:48. 75. See Andrew Kahn, “Pushkin’s Wanderer Fantasies,” in Rereading Russian Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 225–47. 76. See Patrick O’Meara, K. F. Ryleev: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1984), 234, and Nekrasov, PSS, 2:381. 77. See also Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:40.

Notes to Pages 127–139

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78. See Jerzy Faryno, “Kak prorok Pushkina sdelalsia litsedeem Khlebnikova,” Studia Russica 12 (1988): 38–74, 54. 79. Compare Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 71: “We were the first to discover the thread for the labyrinth and we wander through it freely.” 80. The first suggestion, “recloaker” ( perevoplashch), puns on the word for “reincarnation” ( perevoploshchenie), alluding to Konstantin Stanislavskii’s use of this word to signal the good actor’s requisite internal transformation, or, perhaps, the link between acting and the transmigration of souls—a theme Khlebnikov took very seriously. 81. See Khlebnikov, SS, 5:481, and Barbara Lönnqvist, Xlebnikov and Carnival: An Analysis of the Poem “Po˙et” (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1979), 109. 82. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 6:149. 83. McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 163. 84. Matiushina, “Prizvanie,” 144. 85. Viacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. D. B. Ivanov and O. Deshart (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1971–87), 3:111–36, 115. 86. Compare R. T. France, Jesus and the Old Testament: His Application of Old Testament Passages to Himself and His Mission (London: Tyndale Press, 1971), 70. 87. This version is not present in this form in the more recent collected works but does feature in the collected works edited by Tynianov and Stepanov and republished by Markov in Munich in 1968–72. See Jerzy Faryno, “‘Kusok’ Khlebnikova (opyt interpretatsii),” Dissertationes Slavicae: Sectio historiae litterarum 19 (1988): 125–51. 88. Compare Khlebnikov, SS, 3:178. 89. Ivanov, “Predchuvstviia i predvestiia,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:86–103, 103, 95. Compare S. V. Stakhorskii, Viacheslav Ivanov i russkaia teatral’naia kul’tura nachala XX veka (Moscow: GITIS, 1991), 17. 90. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Dionis i pradionisiistvo: Fragmenty iz knigi,” in Eskhil: Tragedii, v perevode Viacheslava Ivanova, ed. N. I. Balashov, D. V. Ivanov, M. L. Gasparov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 351–453, 411. See also Philip Westbroek, Dionis i dionisiiskaia tragediia: Viacheslav Ivanov; Filologicheskie idei o Dionisiistve (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2009), 54.

Chapter 4.  The Poet, the Statue, and the State 1. Mikhail Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time,” trans. John Kachur, in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 97–112, 97. 2. Ibid., 97. 3. On Stalinist temporality, see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79: “Time became a path through the present, not to the present.” 4. On Futurism and “stone women,” see Michael Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism

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Notes to Pages 139–145

(Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2015), 55. For another Futurist take on monuments similar to Maiakovskii’s, see Vasilii Kamenskii, “Zhivoi pamiatnik,” in Ego-Moia: Biografiia velikogo futurista (Moscow: Kitovras, 1918), 220. 5. Iurii Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo (Munich: Strana i mir, 1985), 185. 6. On Maiakovskii’s first boast, see Dmitrii Bykov, Trinadtsatyi apostol: Maiakovskii; Tragediia-buff v shesti deistviiakh (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2016), 128. Il’ia Erenburg tells the story of Maikaovskii’s second claim at Il’ia Erenburg, Liudi, Gody, Zhizn’: Vospominaniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 1:260. 7. Maiakovskii, PSS, 6:52. 8. The best introduction to monuments in Pushkin’s work is still Jakobson, “The Statue in Pu†skin’s Poetic Mythology.” The influence of Pushkin’s monument myths on Russian literature is too extensive even to be summarized here. Important engagements with Pushkinian monuments that may have influenced Maiakovskii include those of Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Innokentii Annenskii. See Adrian Wanner, “Blok’s Sculptural Myth,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 2 (1996): 236–50; Smith, Montaging Pushkin, 49, 118. 9. Vadim Shershenevich recalls Maiakovskii staring “at the face of the iron Pushkin as if he were trying inquisitively to understand those eyes.” See V. A. Katanian, V. V. Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 464. When arrested for carrying illegal material as a teenager, Maiakovskii claimed he had received them at the Pushkin statue from a man called Aleksandr. See Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 31. 10. See Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 11. See Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870– 1997 (London: Reaktion, 1998). 12. See Mary Nicholas, Writers at Work: Russian Production Novels and the Construction of Soviet Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 22; and Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 3–18. 13. Miles Glendinning, “Architectures and Public Spaces of Modernism,” in Sherry, Cambridge History of Modernism, 200–229, 200. 14. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” 57. 15. Compare Clark, “Socialist Realism,” 4. 16. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 104–5. Berman’s theories of modernism and modernity are closely tied to discourses about the built environment and, indeed, to Pushkin’s monument myth, which forms the basis of one of the chapters in his book. 17. Ibid., 104. 18. See Nikolai Chuzhak, “Pod znakom zhiznestroeniia,” Lef 1 (1923): 12–39. 19. See I. V. Stalin, “October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists. December 17, 1925,” in Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1934), 159–66.

Notes to Pages 145–152

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20. Maiakovskii, PSS, 10:128–31. Hereafter, references to Maiakovskii’s collected works will be made in the body of the text. 21. Compare Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 38, and Clark, “Socialist Realism.” 22. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 29. 23. Platt, Greetings, Pushkin, 12, 11. 24. See also, for instance, Pamela Kachurin, Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 25. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Politicheskaia literatura, 1959), 2:95. See also Christina Lodder, “Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” in Art of the Soviets: New Perspectives on Post-revolutionary Soviet Art, ed. Matthew Cullerne Brown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 16–32; and Richard Stites, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution, Destroying and Preserving the Past,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 1–24. 26. On the reemergence of the themes and motivations of 1913 in 1917, see Bengt Jangfeldt, “Notes on ‘Manifest Letu†cej Federacii Futuristov’ and the Revolution of the Spirit,” in Jangfeldt and Nilsson, Vladimir Majakovskij, 152–65. 27. Jangfeldt locates this speech within the context of the tension within Narkompros; see Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism, 1917–1921, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Hylea Prints, 1977), 57. 28. Proletkul’t, which stands for “proletarian culture,” was an autonomous multidisciplinary federation promoting an industrial, specifically workingclass aesthetic that flourished after the revolution but which was officially dissolved in 1920. 29. A. V. Lunacharskii, “Lozhka protivoiadiia,” Iskusstvo kommuny 4 (29 December 1918), 1. For Lenin’s involvement and a fuller discussion of this controversy, see Halina Stephan, “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts (Munich: Sagner, 1981), 11. 30. See Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism, 58. 31. “Ot redaktsii,” Iskusstvo kommuny 4 (29 December 1918), 1. 32. Jakobson also uses Pushkin to defend the Futurists from their critics: “To attack a poet for ideas, for feelings, is as absurd as the behavior of a medie­ val crowd beating the actor who played Judas, as ridiculous as charging Pushkin with the murder of Lenskii.” Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia, 17. 33. See Jerzy Tasarski, “Komfuty: Ideologiczne awangardy w okresie wojennego kommunizmu,” Przegl˛ad humanistyczny 4 (1968): 41–59. 34. E. I. Naumov, V. V. Maiakovskii: Seminarii, 4th ed. (Leningrad: Gosu­ dar­stvennoe uchebnoe-pedagogicheskoe izdanie, 1963), 210. 35. A pood is an old Russian measurement of weight equivalent to about 16kg. Lidiia Fotieva was Lenin’s private secretary between 1918 and his death in 1924. 36. Irina Ivaniushina, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’ Vladimira Maiakovskogo,” Voprosy literatury 4 (2000): 313. 37. Ibid., 317.

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Notes to Pages 152–159

38. Compare Leach, “A Good Beginning,” 110; and Katherine Lahti, “On Living Statues and Pandora, Kamennye baby and Futurist Aesthetics: The Female Body in Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy,” Russian Review 58, no. 3 (1999): 432– 55, 445–47. 39. Jakobson, “The Statue,” 364. 40. See Bykov, Trinadtsatyi apostol, 399. 41. Clark, Petersburg, 184–88. 42. Mikhail Vaiskopf argues that in Vladimir Il’ich Lenin Maiakovskii has transferred much of the heroic gigantism that previously typified his own poetic persona to Lenin. See Vaiskopf, Vo ves’ logos: Religiia Maiakovskogo (Moscow: Salamandra, 1997), 104. 43. Compare Vaiskopf, Vo ves’ logos, 97–98. 44. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 175, 179. 45. See Clark, Petersburg, 160. 46. Maiakovskii invokes a religious precedent, borrowing, via Gavriil Derzhavin, the deity’s time-transcending self-description at Revelation 1:8 as the one “who is, and who was, and who is to come.” See Vaiskopf, Vo ves’ logos, 150. 47. See Lars Kleberg, “Notes on the Poem Vladimir Il’i†c Lenin,” in Jangfeldt and Nilsson, Vladimir Majakovskij, 166–78, 168. The article was refused by the censors. 48. Ibid., 168. 49. Ibid., 169. 50. See Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature, 237. 51. Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Alexander Pushkin,” in On Literature and Art, ed. A. Lebedev, trans. Y. Ganushkin (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 93–101, 96. See also A. V. Lunacharskii, “Pushkin i Nekrasov” and “Esche o Pushkine,” in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, ed. I. I. Anisimov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963–67), 1:28–37, 38–43. 52. Lunacharskii, “Eshche o Pushkine,” 39. 53. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 139. 54. Ibid., 224. 55. Lunacharskii, “Eshche o Pushkine,” 39. 56. Memoirs suggest that Lenin persistently contrasted Maiakovskii with Pushkin, in the latter’s favor. See E. I. Naumov, “Lenin o Maiakovskom,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Novoe o Maiakovskom, ed. V. V. Vinogradov and I. S. Zil’bershtein (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1958), 205–16, 208; and V. I. Lenin, V. I. Lenin o literature i iskusstve, ed. N. I. Krutilova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), 555–56. 57. Lili Brik recalls that, when quoting Eugene Onegin, “[Maiakovskii] did not like reading ‘век уж мой измерен’ [vek uzh moi izmeren / my time has already been measured out], which sounds like ‘векуш мой’ [vekush moi ], and he read the line in his own way.” Lili Brik, “Chuzhie stikhi,” in V. Maiakovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. N. V. Reformatorskaia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1963), 328–54, 331.

Notes to Pages 159–168

281

58. This text was amended, probably by later editors, to remove a reference to suicide: “Of course, we will return hundreds of times to such works of art, even at the moment when death will place a noose on our neck.” Compare Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh, ed. N. N. Aseev (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1939–49), 2:523. 59. See Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 135. 60. See Greta N. Slobin, “Appropriating the Irreverent Pushkin,” in Gaspa­ rov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 214–30. 61. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Otkuda i kuda? (Perspektivy futurizma),” Lef 1 (1923): 192–203, 196. In the same edition, Grigorii Vinokur makes a similar argument about Pushkin’s reform of poetry but suggests that the Futurists have gone further. See Grigorii Vinokur, “Futuristy—stroiteli iazyka,” Lef 1 (1923): 204–13. 62. “Krit-khaltura,” Lef 4 (1923): 22–26, 26. Aleksandr Shishkov was an older writer criticized by Pushkin for his position on the Russian literary language; the critic and novelist Faddei Bulgarin was as hostile to Pushkin as Pushkin was to him. 63. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 258. 64. Maiakovskii, “Vystupleniia na dispute ‘Lef ili blef,’” in Vinogradov and Zil’bershtein, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 49–68, 50. 65. Ibid., 66. 66. See Clark, Petersburg, 166, and, more generally, Harte, Fast Forward. 67. Burliuk et al., “Idite k chortu,” 80–82, 80. 68. Compare Khlebnikov, “Pamiatnik,” in SS, 1:216–18, 218. 69. Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia, 21; Tynianov, “Mnimyi Pushkin,” 78–92, 78. 70. See Robert P. Hughes, “Pushkin in Petrograd, February 1921,” in Gaspa­ rov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 204–13. 71. Marina Tsvetaeva, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestven­ naia literatura, 1980–84), 2:332. Valerii Briusov, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (hereafter SS), ed. P. G. Antokol’skii, A. S. Miasnikov, S. S. Narchatovyi, and N. S. Tikhonov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973–75), 3:43. 72. Lunacharskii, “Eshche o Pushkine,” 38. 73. Ibid., 41–42. 74. Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32. See Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1:229. Boris Arvatov, “Oveshchestvlennaia utopiia,” Lef 1 (1923): 61–64, 64. See also K. Zelinskii, “Ideologiia i zadachi sovetskoi arkhitektury,” Lef 7 (1925): 77–108, 105: “The city of the future is a city of movement.” 75. Nikolai Punin, “O pamiatnikakh,” Iskusstvo kommuny 14 (9 March 1919): 3. 76. Quoted at Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Pervyi illiustrator Maiakovskogo: K 90-letiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. Tatlina,” Moskovskii khudozhnik (18 December 1975). 77. See Robert C. Williams, Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1905–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 154. 78. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 5:409–10. Perhaps building on Maiakovskii’s

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Notes to Pages 168–180

self-identification, the novelist Valentin Kataev used the pseudonym “Commendatore” for Maiakovskii in his roman à clef My Diamond Crown (1978). 79. Maiakovskii’s identification with the statue repeats Pushkin’s own ambiguous relationship to it. See David Bethea, “Whose Mind Is This Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Boundaries of Legitimate Scholarship,” Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 1 (2005): 2–17, 13. 80. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 152–55. 81. Ibid., 154. 82. Ibid., 157. 83. See Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 1:125; and Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, 24. 84. See Sergei Esenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. Iu. L. Pro­ku­ shev (Moscow: Nauka, 1995–2000), 1:203. 85. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 9:188. 86. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 7:63. 87. Compare Mikhail Lermontov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, ed. G. N. Seleznev (Moscow: Voskresen’e, 1999–2002), 2:60. 88. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 6:131–32. 89. See Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 10:141. 90. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 2:73. 91. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 3:141. Maiakovskii makes fun of the Belvedere Apollo in The Bathhouse, which has a character named Bel’vedonskii. 92. Sandler, “Poetics of Authority,” 197. 93. A similar connection is made between monuments and bureaucratic ranks in 1923’s “To the Workers of Kursk”: “Обозначат в бронзе чином чин” (“They will mark it in bronze as they should”; literally: “rank by rank”). Maiakovskii, PSS, 4:163. 94. See Nikolai Gudanetz, “‘Prosto i gladko,’ ili Vosem’ lozhnykh traktovok ‘Anchara,’” Seminarium Hortus Humanitatis 11 (2007), accessed 6 June 2018, http://www.netslova.ru/gudanetz/anchar.html. 95. For a reading of the motif as subversive, see Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 120; for the dutiful service interpretation, see Z. S. Papernyi, Poeticheskii obraz u Maiakovskogo (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1961), 423. 96. Nekrasov, PSS, 2:11. 97. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Vasilii Kamenskii, and David Burliuk, “Manifest letuchei federatsii futuristov,” Gazeta futuristov 1 (15 March 1918), 1. 98. Quoted by Roman Jakobson in “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets,” in Language in Literature, 273–300, 276. 99. I. V. Stalin, “Zapiska N. I. Ezhovu,” Sochineniia, ed. M. N. Grachev et al. (Tver: Soiuz, 2006), 18:115. 100. Compare Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, 136. 101. Maiakovskii elsewhere describes roses as the essence of apolitical, sentimental poetry. See Maiakovskii, PSS, 2:17. 102. See Neuberger, Hooliganism, 142–51. 103. G. R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia, ed. G. N. Ionin (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002), 224. See Vaiskopf, Vo ves’ logos, 162.

Notes to Pages 180–191

283

104. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 2:354. 105. See, for instance, Maiakovskii, “Kak delat’ stikhi,” in PSS, 12:81–117, 116. 106. See Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity,” 291. 107. Ibid., 247–310. 108. Ibid., 259, 309. 109. Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 3:376. 110. See Katya Hokanson, “The ‘Anti-Polish’ Poems and ‘I Built Myself a Monument . . .’: Politics and Poetry,” in Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 283–317, 299.

Chapter 5.  Saving the Sacred Text 1. Vladimir Markov, “Kru†cenych, Russia’s Greatest Non-Poet,” in Izbrannoe, by A. E. Kruchenykh, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink, 1973), 7–12. 2. “Statute of the Union of Writers of the USSR.” See Bol’shoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. I. K. Lapina et al. (Moscow: AST, 2005), 854. 3. See Sergei Sukhoparov, ed., Aleksei Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh sovremennikov (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1994), 112, 176. 4. Nikolai Aseev, “Okhota na gien,” Molodaia gvardiia 12 (1929): 9–11; Su­kho­ parov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 101. 5. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Buka russkoi literatury,” in Buka russkoi literatury, ed. D. Burliuk et al. (Moscow: TsIT, 1923), 3–17. See also G. McVay, “Alexei Kruchenykh: The Bogeyman of Russian Literature,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 13 (1975): 571–90. 6. Ol’ga Setnitskaia, “Vstrechi s Alekseem Kruchenykh (iz dnevnikovykh zapisei),” in Russkii literaturnyi avangard: Materialy i issledovaniia, ed. Marzio Marzaduri, Daniela Rizzi, and Mikhail Evzlin (Trento: Dipartimento di Storia della Civiltà Europea, 1990), 151–201, 161. 7. Boris Pasternak, “Vzamen predisloviia,” in Kalendar’, ed. Aleksei Kru­ chenykh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vserossiskogo soiuza poetov, 1926), 3–4, 3. 8. Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 124. 9. Pasternak, “Vzamen predisloviia,” 3. Boris Pasternak, “Alekseiu Kru­ chenykh,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, ed. D. V. Teve­kelian (Moscow: Slovo, 2003–5), 2:277–78. On the relationship of Pasternak and Kruchenykh, see Christopher Barnes, “Boris Pasternak and the Bogeyman of Russian Literature,” Russian Literature 6, no. 1 (1978): 47–68. 10. Compare Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 24: “Within an ism the quality of individual artists can clearly be distinguished, although initially those who most explicitly draw attention to the peculiar characteristics of the school tend to be overrated in comparison with those who, like Picasso among the impressionists, cannot be reduced so conclusively to the program.” 11. Vladislav Khodasevich, Literaturnye stat’i i vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov, 1954), 222. 12. Kornei Chukovskii, “Futuristy,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965–67), 6:202–39, 223.

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Notes to Pages 191–199

13. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 255. 14. See Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 173. 15. Compare Mark Lipovetsky, “Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s,” Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 1 (2001): 31–50, 41: “both conceptualism and the neo-baroque emerged in Russian literature almost simultaneously—at the decline of the Thaw. On the one hand they were reactions to the crisis of ideological language in general; on the other, they were attempts to restore the interrupted traditions of the Silver Age and of the avant-garde.” 16. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 17. See Willem G. Weststeijn, “The Lyric Subject in Kru†cenych’s Poetry,” Russian Literature 37, no. 4 (1995): 659–77. 18. See Kristina Toland, “The Phenomenology of Kru†cenych’s Futurist Books,” Russian Literature 65, no. 1 (2009): 295–320. On Kruchenykh as a performer, see Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 84. 19. Shklovsky, “Resurrecting the Word,” 69. 20. Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 51. Like his disdain for Briu­ sov, Kruchenykh’s imagery is typically Futurist: the Venus de Milo (significantly, a statue) features regularly as a representative of classical beauty, and boots are a symbol of the brute force of modernity in the manifestos. 21. For the Futurist reaction to orthographic reforms, see Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 12–18. 22. Compare Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3. 23. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” 58. 24. On Kruchenykh as a collagist, see Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svide­ tel’stvakh, 242. 25. See Aleksandar Boskovic, “Revolution, Production, Representation: Iurii Rozhkov’s Photomontages to Maiakovskii’s Poem ‘To the Workers of Kursk,’” Slavic Review 76, no. 2 (2017): 395–427, 424. 26. Kruchenykh, “Nash vykhod,” 50. 27. Ibid., 50. 28. Aleksei Kruchenykh, 500 novykh ostrot i kalamburov Pushkina (Moscow: self-published, 1924), 7. Hereafter, references to this text will be made in the text. See Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 6:91. 29. On possible forerunners of shiftology, see Markov, Russian Futurism, 226. 30. See Janecek, Zaum, 253; Walter Comins-Richmond, “Kru†cenyx’s Malaxo­ lija v kapote: The Anagrammatization of Literature,” Slavic and East European Journal 38, no. 4 (1994): 618–35; Dmitrii Shukurov, Russkii literaturnyi avangard i psikhoanaliz v kontekste intellektual’noi kul’tury Serebriannogo veka (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2014), 104–18. 31. Pasternak finds 500 New Witticisms very unconvincing, describing it as “an unskillful simulation.” See Boris Pasternak, “Kruchenykh,” in Zhiv Kru­chenykh, 2.

Notes to Pages 199–210

285

32. “Knigi Lefov,” Lef 7 (1925): 138. 33. Brian Horowitz, The Myth of A. S. Pushkin in Russia’s Silver Age: M. O. Gershenzon, Pushkinist (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 59. 34. See Valerii Briusov, “Zvukopis’ Pushkina,” in SS, 7:127–48. 35. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” 56. 36. N. Gorlov, “O futurizmakh i futurizme (Po povodu stat’i tov. Tro­ts­ kogo),” Lef 4 (1923): 6–15, 10. 37. Maiakovskii, PSS, 12:114. 38. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Faktura slova (Moscow: MAF, 1923), 4. 39. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 65. 40. In the preface to A Trap for Judges 2 (1913), the Futurists announced that one of their principles was “considering blots an indispensable part of the work.” Burliuk et al., “[Iz almanakha ‘Sadok sudei’],” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 51–53, 52. On the role of chance in Futurist poetics, see Ivaniushina, Russkii futurizm, 131. 41. Kruchenykh’s folk etymology, albeit almost certainly by chance, does reflect the genuine etymology of supesok and suglinok, in which the prefix su- is derived from the same root as the Russian word for “with” (s or so). 42. See Pushkin, PSS v 10 tomakh, 10:76. 43. Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 6:619. 44. See Aleksandr Pushkin, Stikhotvoreniia 1815–1836, ed. Valerii Briusov (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1919), 291. 45. Donald Loewen, The Most Dangerous Art: Poetry, Politics, and Autobiography after the Russian Revolution (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 18; on the emergence of new poets in the 1920s, see Evgenii Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 61. 46. Iu. N. Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” in Literaturnaia evoliutsiia: Izbrannye trudy, ed. V. Novikov (Moscow: AGRAF, 2002), 415–53, 416. 47. See Maiakovskii, “V kogo vgryzaetsia Lef,” in PSS, 12:45–47, 45. 48. See Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 160. 49. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Lef Agitki Maiakovskogo Aseeva Tret’iakovskogo (Moscow: Vserossiiski soiuz poetov, 1925), 3. Kruchenykh argues that poetry, like newspapers, is now primarily transmitted by one reader to a largely illiterate audience, and that it thus should be created with this form of reception in mind. 50. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Fonetika teatra (Moscow: MAF, 1923), 6. 51. Ibid., 5, 7, 42. 52. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Zaumnyi iazyk u: Seifullinoi, Vs. Ivanova, Leonova, Babel’ia, I. Sel’vinskogo, A. Veselego i dr. (Moscow: Vserossiiskii soiuz poetov, 1925), 57–59, 57. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Govoriashchee kino (Moscow: self-published, 1927), 1. 55. Maiakovskii, PSS, 11:483–85. 56. Kruchenykh, Fonetika teatra, 9–10.

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Notes to Pages 210–215

57. On the influence of Futurist poetics on Vertov, see Anna Lawton, “Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema,” Pacific Coast Philology 13 (1978): 44–50. 58. Pavle Levi, “Cinema by Other Means,” October 131 (2010): 51–68, 53. 59. The popularity of film as a model for literary form is evident in, for instance, Sergei Tret’iakov’s presentation of his travel diary as a “journey-film.” See Tret’iakov, “Moskva-Pekin,” Lef 7 (1925): 33–58. 60. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 211–44, 232. 61. Ibid., 232. 62. See Carolin Duttlinger, “Benjamin’s Literary History of Attention: Between Reception and Production,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009): 273–91, 278. 63. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 83–109, 99. 64. Duttlinger, “Benjamin’s Literary History,” 285. 65. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 231. 66. See Duttlinger, “Benjamin’s Literary History,” 280. 67. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 229. 68. Ibid. 69. On Soviet influences on Benjamin, see, for example, Maria Gough, “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October 101 (2002): 53–83. 70. See, for instance, Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). 71. Kruchenykh, Govoriashchee kino, 1. 72. See Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 1998), 209. 73. Nikolai Lebedev, “O meierkhol’dovskom ‘Lese’: Vpechatleniia kinematografista,” Kinogazeta, 19 February 1924. Quoted and translated at Braun, Meyerhold, 209. 74. Iurii Tynianov, “Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka,” in Literaturnaia evoliutsiia, 29–167, 52; “O literaturnoi evoliutsii,” in Literaturnaia evoliutsiia, 189– 205, 191; “Ob osnovakh kino,” in Poetika, 326–45, 337. 75. See Greenleaf, “Tynianov, Pushkin, and the Fragment,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 264–82. 76. Compare Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 270: “This varied composition of the literary fact must be considered every time literature is discussed. Literature is heterogenous and in that sense literature is a [un]ceasingly evolving series.” Compare Steiner, Russian Formalism, 108: “The separation of synchrony from diachrony was utterly alien to [Tynianov’s] historical orientation.” 77. This interest was shared by all the Formalists, whose modus operandi, in contrast to the more holistic methodology of previous criticism, was to dissect the whole in order to isolate individual elements. See also Greenleaf, “Tynia­nov, Pushkin, and the Fragment,” 272. 78. Tynianov, “Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka,” 71, 117. 79. Ibid., 103. Tynianov here quotes Goethe.

Notes to Pages 215–221

287

80. Ibid., 105–6. 81. Ibid., 141. The unacknowledged relationship between Tynianov’s theory and Kruchenykh’s practice is examined at T. L. Nikol’skaia, Avangard i okrestnosti (St. Petersburg: Limbakh, 2002), 111–19. 82. Tynianov, “Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka,” 108. 83. Ibid., 109. 84. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 262. 85. Ibid., 263. 86. Ibid. 87. Iurii Tynianov, “Podporuchik Kizhe,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, ed. B. Kosteliants (Moscow: Khudozhstvennaia literatura, 1956), 273–97, 274. 88. See Mikhail Iampolskii, “‘Poruchik Kizhe’ kak teoreticheskii fil’m,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye Tynianovskie chteniia, ed. Marietta Chudakova (Riga: Zinatne, 1986), 28–43. Iampolskii notes that Tynianov treats the cinematic shot and the line of verse as equivalent units (31). See also Greenleaf, “Tynianov, Pushkin, and the Fragment,” 280. 89. See Tynianov, “Pushkin,” in Literaturnaia evoliutsiia, 221–79, 236; Greenleaf, “Tynianov, Pushkin, and the Fragment,” 281. 90. Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” 415–55, 423. 91. Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 191. 92. Tynianov, “Mnimyi Pushkin,” 78–92, 79. 93. Ibid., 79. The “new” works by Pushkin published in this period are listed at L. M. Dobrovol’skii and N. I. Mordovchenko, Bibliografiia proizvedenii A. S. Pushkina i literatury o nem, 1918–1936 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1952–73), 1:5–27. The triviality of prerevolutionary works like Nikolai Lerner’s “Did Pushkin Smoke?” (it seems he did) was continued after 1917 with emphasis on Pushkin’s love life (a persistent obsession in the reception of Russian poets). Thus in 1923 Petr Gruber published Pushkin’s Don Juan List, which uses Pushkin’s boasts of sexual conquests as the basis for more than two hundred pages of analysis and speculation, only to come to the bathetic conclusion that Pushkin “really only loved his muse.” See P. K. Gruber, Don-Zhuanskii spisok Pushkina (St. Petersburg: Petrograd, 1923), 287. 94. Vladimir Markov observes the success of Kruchenykh’s joke, noting that the Berkeley library listed Pushkin as the author of 500. See Markov, Russian Futurism, 418. This mistake is reprised by the British Library. 95. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 259. 96. Ibid., 259. Italics original. 97. Compare Greenleaf, “Tynianov, Pushkin, and the Fragment,” 265. 98. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 260. 99. See, for example, Vasilii Kamenskii, Put’ entuziasta, in Tango s korovami; Stepan Razin; Zvuchal’ vesneianki; Put’ entuziasta, ed. M. Ia. Poliakov (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 385–525, 483. 100. Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt,” 260. 101. Compare Steiner, Russian Formalism, 132; on similarities between the Formalists and Foucault, see Petre M. Petrov, Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015), 41.

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Notes to Pages 221–228

102. Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 34. 103. See Gough, Artist as Producer, 12. 104. Kruchenykh, Faktura slova, 2; compare Petrov, Automatic for the Masses, 74. 105. See Mariia Zalambani, Literatura fakta: Ot avangarda k sotsrealizmu (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006). 106. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 225: “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional”; compare Gough, The Artist as Producer, 193. 107. Petrov, Automatic for the Masses, 13. 108. See Gough, Artist as Producer, 19. 109. Petrov, Automatic for the Masses, 21. 110. See Maiakovskii, PSS, 7:92–95. 111. Kruchenykh, Fonetika teatra, 8. 112. Ibid., 3, 9. 113. Osip Brik, “T.n. formal’nyi metod,” Lef 1 (1923): 213–15, 213. 114. Tynianov, “O parodii,” in Poetika, 284–319, 294. 115. Tynianov, “O literaturnoi evoliutsii,” 190. 116. Ibid., 200: “‘Creative freedom’ proves to be an optimistic slogan, but it does not match reality and gives way to ‘creative necessity.’” Compare Petrov, Automatic for the Masses, 44. 117. Petrov, Automatic for the Masses, 47. 118. Ibid., 51. 119. Compare Jurij Striedter, “The Russian Formalist Theory of Prose,” PTL 2 (1977): 429–70, 459: “while for Sklovskij parody serves first and foremost as the testing and verification of his previously formulated thesis of art as estrangement, for Tynjanov the literary-historical analysis of parodistic texts and the subsequent ‘theory of parody’ are the starting point for a [. . .] theory of literary evolution.” 120. Tynianov, “O parodii,” 294. It is in a footnote to this last sentence that Tynianov dismisses “reader reception.” This paradigm for parody bears striking similarities with Jean-Claude Lanne’s astute summary of the Futurist appropriation of Pushkin: “Ainsi, face à l’écrasant paradigme pouchkinien, l’attitude futuriste consiste-t-elle en un second moment, à s’assimiler la poétique de leur grand ancêtre, à l’intégrer—c’est-à-dire la transcrire ou transformer—dans la structure de leur propre système poétique.” Jean-Claude Lanne, “Pouchkine dans le contexte de l’avant-garde russe. Examen d’un cas particulier: Pouchkine et Khlebnikov,” in L’Universalité de Pouchkine, ed. Michel Aucouturier and Jean Bonamour (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2000), 338. 121. Liubov’ Popova, “Foto-montazh,” Lef 4 (1923): 41–42, 41. 122. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (1984): 83–119, 103. 123. Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 40–42, 41–42. 124. See Sofiia Starkina, “Aleksei Kruchenykh i Velimir Khlebnikov kak so-avtory: Novye materialy,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 139 (2016): 164–77.

Notes to Pages 228–234

289

125. See Markov, Russian Futurism, 339. 126. Thomas J. Kitson, Introduction to Rapture: A Novel, by Iliazd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), xvi. The confluence of Kruchenykh and Zdane­vich’s views in the ideology of the 41° group is well summarized at Nikol’skaia, Avangard i okrestnosti, 51–52. 127. Igor’ Terent’ev, “17 erundovykh orudii,” in Igor’ Terent’ev: Leveishii iz levykh: Sbornik materialov k 120-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia, ed. D. Karpov (Moscow: Muzei V. V. Maiakovskogo, 2012), 119–37, 121. 128. Khlebnikov, SS, 2:141. 129. Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 91–92. Andrei Siniavskii compares Pushkin to a vampire for similar reasons. 130. L. Kotorcha, “Ot futurizma k postmodernizmu (A. Kruchenykh, ‘Slovo o podvigakh Gogol’ia’),” Golosa Sibiri: Literaturnyi al’manakh 8 (2008): 527–45. 131. Compare R. O. Iakobson, “Igra v adu u Pushkina i Khlebnikova,” in Sravnitel’noe izuchenie literatur: Sbornik statei k 80-letiiu Akademika M. P. Alekseeva, ed. A. S. Bushmin (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 35–37. 132. See Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 27. 133. Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 147, 191. 134. Ibid., 180. 135. See Nikolai Khardzhiev, Ot Maiakovskogo do Kruchenykh: Izbrannye raboty o russkom futurizme, s prilozheniem “Kruchenykhiady” i drugikh materialov, ed. Sergei Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Gileia, 2006), 556. 136. See Liza Knapp, “Tsvetaeva and the Two Natal’ia Goncharovas: Dual Life,” in Gasparov et al., Cultural Mythologies, 88–108. 137. Published in Khardzhiev, Ot Maiakovskogo do Kruchenykh, 429–30. See Pushkin, PSS v 17 tomakh, 3:126. 138. Sergei Sigei, “Strashnaia mest’ Alekseia Kruchenykh,” in Slovo o podvigakh Gogolia; Arabeski iz Gogolia, by Aleksei Kruchenykh, ed. Sergei Sigei (Madrid: Ediciones del Hebreo Errante, 2001), 39–47, 41, 46. 139. Literary pseudonyms were and are common in Russia and it has been common practice for the author’s real surname and pseudonym to be listed together, surname first, divided by a dash. Examples include satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Romantic author Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii. 140. Jacob Edmond, “Copy,” in A New Vocabulary of Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 96–113, 106. Edmond identifies the Russian conceptualist Dmitrii Prigov as an exemplary proponent of such creative copy-work. In the 1980s Krauss argued that “issues of copy and repetition” were “matter that a euphoric modernism sought both to signal and to repress,” with their prevalence and importance only becoming clear in retrospect, thanks to postmodernist experiments in this same area. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 6. 141. Duchamp’s reputation as the forebear of conceptual art is discussed and challenged in David Hopkins, “Re-Thinking the ‘Duchamp Effect,’” in A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 145–63. 142. See Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5–32, 8. As Foster points out (18), Rodchenko’s renunciation of

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Notes to Pages 234–237

painting was in itself a performative gesture, and as such highlighted his own agency. 143. Duchamp’s famous female alter ego Rrose Sélavy is not created as a replacement or alternative for the artist’s existing identity but rather as a supplement. As he said to Calvin Tomkins, “It was not to change my identity, but to have two identities.” See Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 231. Despite the very deliberate distance between Rrose and Duchamp (she is female and Jewish; he male and Catholic), Duchamp frequently alludes to their connection with puns. See Marjorie Perloff, “A Cessation of Resemblances: Stein/Picasso/Duchamp,” in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 127–43, 133. 144. Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 93–94. 145. “The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man 2 (1917): 5. 146. See Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), 129; and Francis M. Naumann, The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ghent and Amsterdam: Ludion Press, 1999), 15–23. 147. See William Campfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti-Art?,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 133–84, 166; and Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 8. In order to circumvent the derivativeness of using prepared materials, Duchamp made many of the materials for his enormous mixedmedium sculptural work Large Glass himself. See Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 175. 148. See Naumann, The Art of Making Art, 20. 149. Duchamp would later push this idea still further in the follow-up L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, a playing-card Mona Lisa without a moustache; he now transforms his own previous work, making it more similar to “the original” at the same time taking it one remove further away by implying another “original.” 150. Vladimir Maiakovskii and Osip Brik, “Nasha slovesnaia rabota,” Lef 1 (1923): 26–27, 27. See A. E. Kruchenykh, Liki Esenina: Ot kheruvima do khuligana; Esenin v zhizni i portretakh (Moscow: self-published, 1926), 8. 151. See Setnitskaia, “Vstrechi s Alekseem Kruchenykh,” 152; Maiakovskii, “Ia sam,” in PSS, 1:7–29, 21; for Tolstaia-Vechorka’s comment, see A. E. Kru­ chenykh, Zudesnik: Zudutnye zudesa (Moscow: self-published, 1922), 8; see also Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 86, 107, 161, 162. 152. See Setnitskaia, “Vstrechi s Alekseem Kruchenykh,” 152. See Kru­ chenykh, Fonetika teatra, 7, and “Novye puti slova,” 67. 153. Epshtein, Vera i obraz, 33. Epshtein sees a further parallel between Fountain and a group of peasants at a conference at the Winter Palace in 1919 who, according to Gor’kii, used priceless vases as chamber pots as a deliberate act of disrespect for beauty. 154. A. M. Panchenko, “Smekh kak zrelishche,” in Smekh v drevnei Rusi, ed. D. S. Likhachev, A. M. Panchenko, N. V. Ponyrko (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), 72–153, 103. Compare Epshtein, Vera i obraz, 34.

Notes to Pages 237–241

291

155. Epshtein, Vera i obraz, 38. 156. Ibid., 40. 157. Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova, kak takovogo,” 63. 158. Aleksei Kruchenykh, Stikhotvoreniia, poemy, romany, opera (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001), 263–64. 159. This connection was first proposed by Markov in Russian Futurism, 121. Nikolai Bogomolov has questioned the validity of this interpretation on the grounds that, in prerevolutionary orthography, there is not an exact match between the vowels of “Heights” and the Creed (which, significantly, is called the “Symbol of Faith” in Russian): Kruchenykh misses some words, adds others, and uses the wrong vowel (“e” instead of “ѣ”) in the first word. However, the disparity is too minor to disqualify Markov’s argument, especially if we allow that Kruchenykh may have misremembered the exact order of the wording of the prayer: two vowels are missing and one is replaced by a homophonous vowel. The counterargument—that this is merely a coincidence—is statistically almost impossible. Bogomolov further remarks that Kruchenykh’s reference to a “universal” (vselenskii) language is an allusion to the ecumenical (vselenskii ) council at which the Creed was authorized. See N. A. Bogomolov, “‘Dyr bul shchyl’ v kontekste epokhi,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 72 (2005), accessed 11 November 2019, https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2005/2/dyr-bul-shhyl -v-kontekste-epohi.html. 160. It is thought by some, for instance, that “hocus-pocus” derives from the Latin of the Eucharist: “hoc est corpus meum.” The Oxford English Dictionary casts doubt on this popular etymology. 161. Epshtein, Vera i obraz, 34. 162. See Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 336–75, which shows that Benjamin’s use of “aura” in “The Work of Art” was not characteristic. 163. See Jacquelynn Baas, “Reconsidering Walter Benjamin: ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Retrospect,” in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 337–49. 164. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 217. 165. Ibid., 220. 166. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant Garde (London: Penguin, 1976), 40. See also Naumann, “The Art of Making Art,” 394. 167. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 220. 168. Ibid., 221. 169. Ibid., 215. 170. See Gerald Janecek, “Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg,” in The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 41–49. Adorno sees “the conflict between the new and duration” as an inevitable consequence of the emergence of the category of “the new” in the nineteenth century. The willed ephemerality of Futurist production aligns them with those works that, according to Adorno, “seek to lose themselves in time so as not to become its prey,” seeking to emulate “the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks [. . .] the only art that aspires not

292



Notes to Pages 241–250

to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 28. 171. Sergei M. Sukhoparov, Aleksei Kruchenykh: Sud’ba budetlianina (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1992), 16. 172. Sukhoparov, Kruchenykh v svidetel’stvakh, 165. 173. Ibid., 167. 174. Charlotte Greve, “Art between Affective Memorisation and the Bu­ reauc­racy of the Archive: From Aleksej Kru†cenych to Contemporary Russian Artists,” Russian Literature 65, no. 1 (2009): 379–94. 175. VARST, Catalogue of 5X5=25 (Moscow: n.p., 1921).

Conclusion 1. Kruchenykh, Pobeda nad solntsem, 5. 2. Pavel Florenskii, U vodorazdelov mysli (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 163. 3. Ibid., 183. 4. Ibid., 271–73. To be more precise, Florenskii likens the word to semen. 5. Burliuk et al., “[Iz almanakha ‘Sadok sudei’],” 51–53, 51. 6. See Jean-Philippe Jaccard, Daniil Harms et la fin de l’avant-garde russe (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 32, 24. 7. Graeme Roberts likens Kharms’s approach to that of the medieval holy fool. See Graeme Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU—Fact, Fiction, Metafiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37. 8. Compare Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 117. 9. David Burliuk, “Rifmoderzhtsu A. S. Pushkinu,” Color and Rhyme 49 (1961): 8. See Norbert Evdaev, Burliuk v Amerike (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), 23. 10. See M. P. Alekseev, Pushkin i mirovaia literatura, ed. G. P. Makagonenko and S. A. Fomichev (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 10. 11. A. Siniavskii, “Osnovnye printsipy estetiki V. V. Maiakovskogo,” Znamia 2 (1950): 151–58, 154. 12. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 7, 33. 13. Ibid., 27. 14. Compare Gillespie, “Introduction: Beyond Pushkin as Dogma,” in Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 7–9. 15. Blok, “O naznachenii poeta,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 6:160–68, 160. 16. Andrei Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, trans. Catharine Theimer Nepom­ nya­shchy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 130; compare Nepom­ nya­shchy, Abram Tertz, 214. 17. See Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, trans. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, 2nd ed. (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 249, 261, 415. 18. Compare Ekaterina Andreeva, Sots Art: Soviet Artists of the 1970s–1980s (East Roseville, NSW, Australia: G+B Arts International, 1995), 44. 19. Compare Gerald Janecek, “Conceptualism in the Work of Sergej Sigej and Rea Nikonova,” Russian Literature 59, no. 2 (2006): 469–85.

Notes to Pages 250–254

293

20. See Il’ia Kukui, “Slovo KAK takovoe: Transponirovanie Kruchenykh; Sem’nadtsat’ erundovykh nabludenii o sploshnom neprilichii,” Russian Literature 65 (2009): 395–419, 403. 21. Sergei Sigei, “Zarifmumiia (stikha aspushkina),” Transponans 2 (1979): 5. 22. V. Otiakovskii, “Zakliatye smekhom,” Pros¯odia 6 (2017). Accessed 12 November 2019, https://magazines.gorky.media/prosodia/2017/6/zaklyatye -smehom.html. 23. Denis Ioffe, “Fin de siècle transgressivnosti russkogo postavangarda: Estetika i praktika transfurizma,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 149 (2018). Accessed 12 November 2019, https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_litera turnoe_obozrenie/149_nlo_1_2018/article/19436/. 24. Dmitrii Prigov, “Ne vse iasno s pervogo vzgliada,” Transponans 18 (1983): 93–95, 95. 25. Ibid., 95. 26. L. V. Zubova, “Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov: Installiatsiia slovesnykh ob’’ektov,” in Iazyki sovremennoi poezii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 164–99, 179. See also N. A. Kuz’mina, “Pushkinskii tekst sovremennoi poezii,” accessed 25 June 2012, http://www.imit.omsu.ru/vestnik/articles /y1999-i2/a108/article.html. See also Vitaly Chernetsky’s discussion of similar effects in Vladimir Druk’s “Iosif Vissarionovich Pushkin” in “Iosif Vissariono­ vich Pushkin, or Sots-Art and the New Russian Poetry,” in Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and the Soviet Grand Style, ed. Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 146–67, 155. 27. Sergei Gandlevskii, “D. A. Prigov. Mezhdu imenem i imidzhem. Dialog,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (12 May 1993), 5, quoted at Evgenii Dobrenko, “Socialist Realism, a Postscriptum,” in Balina, Condee, and Dobrenko, Endquote, 77–105, 82. Dobrenko remarks: “We can escape, however, neither from utopian­ ism nor from a certain kind of utilitarianism.” 28. Blok, “O naznachenii poeta,” 167. 29. Aleksandr Tufanov, “Zaumnyi orden,” in Ushkuiniki, ed. Jean-Philippe Jaccard and Tatiana Nikol’skaia (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1991), 176–80, 178. 30. “OBERIU,” Afishi doma pechati 2 (1928): 11. 31. Abram Tertz, “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realism?,” in Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku i drugie proizvedeniia (Moscow: Zakharov, 1999), 122–68, 166, 163. 32. See Dore Ashton, ed., Monumental Propaganda (New York: Independent Curators, 1994). 33. Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “O genii i zlodeistve, o babe i vserossiiskom masshtabe,” in Mir Avtora i struktura teksta, ed. A. K. Zholkovskii and Iu. K. Shcheglov (Tenafly, NJ: Ermitazh, 1986), 255–78. 34. Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo, 82. 35. Ibid., 280. The title of Karabchievskii’s book is more precise in Russian than in English, since Russian has two words for “resurrection.” Whereas Shklov­ skii’s essay “The Resurrection of the Word” implies that some external agent is responsible for the reanimation of language, Karabchievskii suggests that, like Christ, Maiakovskii brings himself back to life.

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Index References to endnotes consist of the page number followed by the letter n followed by the number of the note. When the author or subject mentioned in the endnote is not directly identified in the main text, the text page is added in brackets. For example, 263n55 (41) refers to note 55 on page 263, and the note number is to be found in the main text on page 41. abstract art, 9, 60 Acmeists, 59, 66, 267n133 “actor” term, Khlebnikov’s suggested replacement for, 130, 133 Adorno, Theodor, 12, 261n16 (31), 283n10 (191), 291n170 (241) advertising, 69, 81. See also branding aestheticism, 81, 86 Aigi, Gennadii, 193 Akhmatova, Anna: as keeper of the flame of prerevolutionary poetry, 193; in Khleb­n ikov’s “The Lonely Player” poem, 110, 111, 119, 120; and Kru­ chenykh, 190; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207; Solov’ev’s influence on, 40; Zholkovskii on, 253 Alexander I, 36, 37, 120 Alexander III, 55, 148 amateur theater, 207 ancient Greece, 10, 69 Andreev, Leonid, 88 Anglo-American modernism, 6 Annenskii, Innokentii, 278n8 anti-imperialism: Khlebnikov’s stance, 111, 115–16, 117, 118; “walking corpse” as Russia’s imperial ambitions, 118 antiquarianism, turn against, 185 anti-traditionalism, 11, 15, 18, 19 Apollo (magazine), 77 archaeology, vs. atemporality of Stalinism, 185 archaic, the: modernist embrace of, 70–71; and Nietzsche, 69

architecture: and Futurists, 143, 166; and Marxism/Communism, 143–44; and socialist realism / Stalinism, 145 Armory Show (New York, 1917), 234–35 ars longa, vita brevis, 49 art: and life, 57, 96, 144; and modernity (Benjamin), 210–11. See also abstract art; conceptual art; visual art artist. See author Art of the Commune, The (newspaper), 147– 48, 149–50, 166 Arvatov, Boris, 166, 222 Aseev, Nikolai, 190, 229 atheism, 40, 240; atheism campaigns, 200 Attic tragedy, 134, 135 audience: Kruchenykh on collective aural reception of poetry, 208–9, 225–26, 236; Russian modernist theater and conversion of passive audience into engaged actors, 134; Tynianov on “reader reception” concept, 225, 288n120; Tynianov on readers and writers, 225, 226. See also crowd, the author: artist as author and Duchamp/ conceptual art, 234; artist as creatoras-selector and Duchamp, 235; “author function” concept (Foucault), 221; authorship, denial of and modernism, 223; author’s role and Kruchenykh, 222– 24, 226, 235; “death of the author” and post-revolution creative people, 223; dehierarchized relation of author, work, and consumer (Benjamin), 222

317

318

Index

avant-garde, as defined by book’s author, 256n11 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 95, 221 Ball, Hugo, 9 Bal’mont, Konstantin, 57, 81, 88 Barthes, Roland, 28 Baudelaire, Charles: “Invitation to the Voyage” (poem), 35; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin), 211, 212, 213 Belinskii, Vissarion, 37, 55, 84 Bellini, Vincenzo, Norma (opera), 89 Belyi, Andrei: Christianity, interest in, 40; language and statuary, 57; language as creative mythic force, 266n112; “living word” concept, 59; “The Magic of Words” (essay), 30; myths as generative or regenerative force, 54; Petersburg and Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 32– 33, 36, 55; on Pushkin, Dos­toev­skii, and Briusov, 44; and Pushkinian monuments, 278n8; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207; on Russian Revolution, 34 Benjamin, Walter: Arcades, 230; on art and modernity, 210–11; on author, work, and consumer, de-hierarchized relation of, 222; “The Author as Producer,” 222; on Brecht, 211–12; on cinema, 210, 211, 212; on Dadaism, 211, 212; on Freud, 211, 212; Jetztzeit, 53; and Kru­chenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 212–13, 222, 239–41; and “literature of fact” doctrine, 222; “messianic time” concept, 52; “On Some Motifs in Bau­ delaire,” 211, 212, 213; Soviet avantgarde’s influence on, 212; “The Story­ teller: Reflections on the Work of Ni­kolai Leskov,” 211, 241; “tradition anew” quote, 63; “What Is Epic Theatre?” 211–12; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 210– 11, 222, 239–40, 241, 286n67 (212) Benois, Alexandre, 60 Bergson, Henri, 58, 164 Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 143–44 Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr, 289n139 Bethea, David, 260n7 Bible: as source for anti-imperialist rhetoric, 117. See also Isaiah; Luke, Gospel of; Mark, Gospel of; Matthew, Gospel of;

New Testament; Old Testament; Revelation, book of Blind Man, The (magazine), 235 Blok, Aleksandr: “On the Function of the Poet” (speech), 34–35, 252; on Futurists’ rejection of Pushkin, 17–18; “happy name Pushkin” quote, 292n15 (249); “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution” (1918 address), 34, 40; “It is a lie that thoughts are repeated” quote, 188; “Night, street, lamppost, chemist” (poem), 31; poet as “son of harmony” quote, 34, 36, 51; and Pushkinian monuments, 278n8; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207; “The Twelve” (poem), 40, 41 Bloom, Harold, 73, 113 Bogomolov, Nikolai, 291n159 (239) Bohr, Niels, 94 Bolsheviks: apocalyptic mindset of, 95; and Britain, power struggle with over Caucasus/Iran region, 115–16; death of Gumilev at the hands of (Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player”), 119; and Futurists’ claim to originality, 148–49; and Maiakovskii, 142, 147, 148–49, 156, 178; Pushkin as proto-Bolshevik revolutionary, 17; utopian ideology of vs. Stalinism, 139. See also Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich Borges, Jorge Luis, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (short story), 233 Boym, Svetlana, 282n100 (179) branding, and manifestos, 67 Brecht, Bertolt, 211–12 Brik, Lili, 154, 168, 171–72, 179, 280n57 Brik, Osip: and The Art of the Commune’s anti-monumental position, 147; “history of generals” notion, 225, 233; Lef, cofounded by with Maiakovskii, 157; on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 225; “The So-Called Formal Method” (article), 224–25 Britain: and Bolsheviks, power struggle with over Caucasus/Iran region, 115– 16; Khlebnikov’s views on, 115, 116; Kiu­khel’beker’s views on, 118 Briusov, Valerii: Belyi on Pushkin, Dos­ toevskii, and Briusov, 44; completion of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights” story, 44, 164; edition of Pushkin’s poetry as viewed by Kruchenykh, 195, 204, 227; Maiakovskii on, 81; “To Maksim

Index Gor’kii in July 1917” (poem), 165; on Pushkin, 43–44, 45, 60, 165, 200, 219, 220; Pushkin’s “The day of true bliss” (bawdy verse), first printed by, 206; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207 Bronze Horseman, The (Falconet’s statue), 142. See also Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman Brooks, Jeffrey, 277n3 Buck-Morss, Susan, 257n34 Budberg, Vera, 132 Budetliane (“Futurians” or “It-will-be-ans”), 8, 53, 256n12 building/construction: “building socialism” and Stalin’s “socialism in one country” policy, 145; and Maiakovskii, 143, 144, 145, 185–86; significance of in Soviet Russia, 142–45 Bulgarin, Faddei, 281n62 (162) bull metaphor. See under Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player” Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 126 bureaucracy: Maiakovskii’s antibureaucratic campaign, 175–76; in Russian literature, 175 Burliuk (family), 8, 139 Burliuk, David: Cubo-Futurist, 8; family home and Hylea, 8; and Futurism, limited contribution to, 256n13; “Go to Hell” signatory, 259n1 (25); Khleb­ ni­ k ov’s “Burliuk” poem, 276n73; “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists” (with Maiakovskii and Kamenskii), 178; and Marinetti, letter condemning, 65; on Pushkin vs. Khlebnikov, 54, 58, 83, 96; “To the Rhymeholder A. S. Pushkin” (poem), 247; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” coauthor, 4, 73; Trap for Judges, A (1910), 13; Trap for Judges, A, 2 (coauthor, 1913), 285n40 (204); “we stand on the rock of the word WE” (in manifesto), 268n14 (68) Burliuk, Nikolai, 59, 261n12 byliny, 82 Byron, 120, 130, 174 cabaret, 207 capitalism, terminology of and manifesto branding, 67 Cassedy, Steven, 265n101 Catherine the Great, 36, 37

319 Catullus, 48 Caucasus, and Khlebnikov, 109, 115 cento poetry, 230 Cézanne, Paul, 221 Chaadaev, Petr: Philosophical Letters, 36; Pushkin’s letter to, 36–37, 42 Chelanov, Georgii, 274n33 Chénier, André: “Iambes” (poem), 276n62; Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, 117, 119–20, 121, 125, 128, 174–75, 181–82 Chernyshev, Vasilii, Laws and Rules of Russian Pronunciation, 206 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 98, 126; What Is to Be Done? 69 Chicherin, Aleksei, 197, 202–3, 219, 221, 250 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christianity: Christian eschatology and modernist radicalism, 11–12; Christian eschatology and myths, 54; Dyophysitism, 44; in Merezhkovskii’s theories, 38; Prince Vladimir’s destruction of pagan gods, 54–55, 73; and Pushkin’s poetic mythology, 38–39; and Russian intelligentsia, 40–41. See also Jesus Christ; Orthodoxy Christian mysticism, 38 Chukovskii, Kornei, 67, 191 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 222 cinema: Benjamin on, 210, 211, 212; as challenge to poet’s established status, 207; creative juxtaposition and hidden truth, 228; Futurist-Formalist cooperation, 214; and Futurists, 23, 210, 214; and Italian Futurists, 163; and Kru­ chenykh, 209–10, 212, 213, 214–15; and Maiakovskii, 209; and Tynianov, 214 civic (political) poetry, vs. lyric poetry, 171–72, 173–75, 176–77, 178–79 Clark, Katerina, 145, 154 class, and Futurists, 83 classics, the: Kruchenykh on classics “poisoning the air,” 58; “learn from the classics” campaign, 157; Livshits on classics to be “seen at a new angle of vision,” 43; Maiakovskii’s view on, 158–60, 163, 178; Soviet take on, 157–58 cloaks: and Khlebnikov, 130–32, 133, 209; in poetry, 130. See also costumes Cocteau, Jean, 137 collage, 196, 243 Comintern, Congress of Nations (Baku, 1921), 115

320

Index

Communism, 40, 139, 143–44, 149; War Communism, 154. See also Marxism conceptual art, 233, 234 Conceptualism, 249, 250, 252; Moscow Conceptualists, 251; Transfurists, 250–51 construction. See building/construction Constructivism: Constructivist art, 144, 221, 234; Constructivist photomontage, 196, 227–28; “Constructivist” poets, 221; and Kruchenykh, 23, 221–22, 224, 243 Cooke, Raymond, 109, 113 Copernicus, 101 copy-work, and modernism, 233 cosmopolitanism, 82, 154 costumes: Khlebnikov’s approach, 132–33; Kruchenykh’s approach, 132. See also cloaks Creed, and Kruchenykh’s zaum poem, 239 critical realism, 98 crowd, the: Fet on Pushkin and the crowd, 55–56; Futurist’s contempt for, 68, 125; Khlebnikov on indifference of, 109, 121, 122–23, 124, 127, 133–34; prophet’s ambivalent relationship with, 109; in Pushkinian texts, 117; in Pushkin’s “The Poet and the Mob,” 127; in Pushkin’s “To the Poet,” 56; Romanticism and artistic individual vs. crowd, 94, 98. See also audience Cubism, 164, 227, 234 Cubo-Futurists, 8–9, 196 Dadaism, 9, 192, 193, 211, 212–13, 230 Dante, Alighieri, 48, 169 D’Anthès, Georges, 168, 172 Davidson, Pamela, 273n14 (97) death: overcoming of in art and language, 59; and statues, 57, 58–59 Debreczeny, Paul, 258n40 Decembrists: 1825 Uprising, 32, 98, 120; and Bible as sourcebook for anti-imperialist rhetoric, 117; Decembrist poets, 117– 18; Decembrist poets, Pushkin on, 173; and failure as necessary step, 126; as prophets, 117; and Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, 120; and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 98, 118 decree (12 April 1918), on statues, 147 Del’vig, Anton, 117, 271n87 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 141, 169, 175, 262n42, 280n46 (157); “Monument” poem (That first I dared in the amusing Russian tongue), 180–81

Dionysus, 77, 133, 135 Dobrenko, Evgenii, 293n27 (252) documentary realism, 228 Dostoevskii, Fedor: Belyi on Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Briusov, 44; The Brothers Karamazov, 89, 90; Crime and Punishment, 89; Futurists and reworkings of Pushkin myth by, 45; and Gogol’, implicit debt to, 227; The Idiot, 89; in Khlebnikov’s “The Dostyology of racing clouds” poem, 60–61; Kruchenykh on, 88, 89–90, 99; Merezhkovskii on, 38, 42; on Pushkin, “for a Russian not to understand Pushkin” quote, 71; Pushkin, reverent reader of, 86; Pushkin as messianic figure, 56; Pushkin monument speech (1880), 42–43, 55, 88, 89, 99–100; on Pushkin’s secret, 88; Pushkin’s self-abnegation and Christ’s ke­ nosis idea, 44; on Pushkin’s The Gypsies, 89; and Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, admiration for, 272n100; on Pushkin the prophet, 99–100; on Pushkin the prophet (quote from 1880 speech), 99; Rozanov on, 72; on Russian history and Peter the Great, 42; seed metaphor, 245; in “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” rejection of, 4, 16, 18, 71, 73; Tynianov on, 218, 226; universal redemptive mission as described by, 209 drama. See theater Duchamp, Marcel, 193, 233–37, 240; Fountain, 234–35, 238, 290n153 (237); Large Glass, 290n147; L.H.O.O.Q., 236–37; L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, 290n149 (237) Duganov, Rudol’f, 61, 74, 273n3 Dyophysitism, 43, 44 earphilology (Ohrenphilologie), 208 earthy, and Russian Futurists, 85–86 Eatough, Matt, 255n6 Edmond, Jacob, 233 effeminacy. See masculine, the (valued over the feminine) Ego-Futurists, 67–68 ekphrasis, 141–42 Eliade, Mircea, 263n51 Eliot, T. S.: “Burnt Norton” (poem), 261n16 (31); and modernism, 6, 255n9; on mythical method, 29–30; The Waste Land, 29 energeia, vs. ergon, 58, 62, 245 England. See Britain

Index Enlightenment: and Khlebnikov, 94. See also People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment Ennius, 169 epitaphs: Khlebnikov’s epitaph (written by himself), 94; and statues, 141–42 Epshtein, Mikhail, 51, 237–38 Erenburg, Il’ia, 190 ergon, vs. energeia, 58, 62, 245 Esenin, Sergei: “Dreaming about a Mighty Gift” poem, 170; and Kruchenykh, 229, 237; and Maiakovskii, 169–70 esoteric, the, 40, 94, 136 “estrangement” concept (Shklovskii), 62, 195, 288n119 Eurasianism, 69 Europeanization, 42, 82 “Everythingism” theory, 228–29 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 242 faktura term, 222 Falconet, Étienne, The Bronze Horseman (statue), 142 Faryno, Jerzy, 277n78 (128) Fascism, and perceived decadence of modernity, 82 Fedorov, Nikolai, 59 feminine, the. See masculine, the (valued over the feminine) ferro-concrete poetry, 9 Fet, Afanasii, 55–56 Figaro, Le, Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto (1909), 63–64, 66 Filonov, Pavel, 27 Five-Year Plan (1928–32), 145, 176, 185 Fizer, John, 58 Florenskii, Pavel, 245 folk creativity, and Futurists, 83, 241 Fonvizin, Denis, 169 Formalists: and cinema, 214; and Futurists, 72, 213–14; and Kruchenykh, 202, 208, 213, 221, 222; “sacralizing” project of, 265n101; and Working Group for Objective Analysis, 221. See also Shklov­ skii, Viktor; Tynianov, Iurii Foster, Hal, 289n142 Fotieva, Lidiia, 279n35 (151) Foucault, Michel, “author function” concept, 221 Fourier, Charles, 153 41° movement (Tbilisi), 190, 228–29, 232 Frank, Joseph, 49 freedom: in Blok’s “On the Function of the

321 Poet” (speech), 252; Khlebnikov’s quest for, 116–21, 128; Prigov’s valorization of, 252; Pushkin on liberty and unthinking masses, 121; in Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, 120; Tynianov on creative freedom, 288n116 (225) Freud, Sigmund: and twentieth-century science, 95; in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” essay, 211, 212; in Kruchenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 203, 213, 219; Kru­ chenykh’s and Duchamp’s interest in, 234; and Kruchenykh’s Melancholy in a Bonnet: History AS Anal Erotica, 198; Oedipus complex, 113; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 212 “Futurians” (Budetliane or “It-will-be-ans”), 8, 53, 256n12 Futurists: and aestheticism, 81; and architecture, 143, 166; and cinema, 23, 210, 214; and class, 83; and Constructivism, 23; and costumes, 132; and the crowd, contempt for, 68, 125; and death, overcoming, 59; demise of, 244–45; diversity of movement, 8, 19, 20; earthy not ethereal, 85–86; and folk creativity, 83, 241; and Formalists, 72, 213–14; “great break” and temporal paradox, 11–13; handmade books, 241; het­e ro­chrony and Russian vs. Italian Futurists, 264n94; history, vision of as navigable field, 138; identity and new century, 68–69; identity and the past, 69–70; individual and collective in Futurist self-identity, 20; language, approach to, 9, 13, 59; Lunacharskii on, 158; manifestos, role of, 64–65; and Marinetti, hostility toward, 65, 70; masculinity valued over femininity, 70, 78, 82; modernism, contribution to, 21; museums and cemeteries, disdain for, 73; neologisms as chief feature of creativity, 9; and New Economic Policy (NEP), 154; and new social types, 68–69; and oral literature, 83, 241; originality (see under originality); Orthodoxy’s influence on, 51–52; and orthographic reform, 195; painting/ sculpture and abstract forms, 9; paratextual explication and effectiveness of their poetry, 213; and the past, engagement with, 9–11; and the past, present as unconnected from, 73; and perception of Russia as inimical to gradualism, 14–15; performance, emphasis on,

322

Index

Futurists (continued) 208; poet both in words and deeds, 96; poetry, combination of with other genres, 208; poetry and cinema, 210; vs. proletarian poets, 207; and quotations, 194–97; reproducible texts, rejection of, 241–42; rupture, myth of, 51–54; Russian culture before Europeanization, praise for, 82–83; self-creation myth, 68; shift in self-presentation in 1920s, 19; as situated response to cultural/political context, 7–8, 14–16; and Soviet postmodernism, 252–53; Soviet rejection of as decadent bourgeois culture, 244; as “sowers of eyes,” 245; spectacle, skillful handling of, 68; speed, association with, 73–74, 75; and statues, 56, 57, 139; sun, hostility to, 76–77; and Symbolists, 59–60, 66; and theater, 76; and time, 46–47, 48–51; Trotskii’s criticism of, 158, 201; Tynianov on, 217, 220; “word as such” vs. symbol, 60; and Working Group for Objective Analysis, 221; zhiznetvorchestvo (“life-creation”), 13, 257n30 (13). See also Futurists and Pushkin; “Go to Hell” (1913 Futurist manifesto); Italian Futurists; “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1912 Futurist manifesto); Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera); zaum (“transrational” poetry) Futurists (group of poets), 4 Futurists and Pushkin: change in Futurists’ approach after revolution, 19–20, 23; complexity of Futurist engagement with Pushkin, 17–19; Futurist myth of Pushkin, 245–46; punning on Pushkin’s name, 60–61; Pushkin, appropriation of (Lanne’s analysis), 288n120; Pushkin, criticism of and the masculine valued over the feminine, 21, 66, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88; Pushkin, historicization of, 28, 45, 62, 97, 138–39, 195; Pushkin, use of as their opposite in binary categories, 80; Pushkin, use of to emphasize their newness, 5–6, 16; Pushkin as false idol, 6, 21, 26, 57; Pushkin as figure from before introduction of writing, 241–42; Pushkin as multiple cultural construct, 45–46; Pushkin as significant other, 79–86; Pushkin as source of quotations, 194–97; Pushkin cult, attacks on and promotion of freedom, 252; Pushkinian

myth of the statue, appropriation of, 22; Pushkin myth, response to, 28; Push­ kin’s flexibility as way of emphasizing their adaptability, 220; Pushkin’s reputation as innovator as both attraction and threat, 84; Pushkin’s technical skills, criticism of, 201; Pushkin-the-icon, attempts at, 60, 62; Pushkin-the-idol, criticism of, 54, 55, 58–59, 62, 86; studies of Futurist reception of Pushkin, 18, 258n40. See also Pushkin in Futurist manifestos; Pushkin myth and Russian modernism Galatea, 142 Gasparov, Boris, 28, 263n55 (41), 266n114 Germany, Communist insurrection (1923), 154 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 218; The Wisdom of Pushkin, 200 Glendinning, Miles, 143 glossolalia, 52, 60, 241 Gnedov, Vasilisk, 250 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 72, 286n79 (215) Gogol’, Nikolai: Dostoevskii’s implicit debt to, 227; Kruchenykh on, 89; Kru­ chenykh’s Arabesques from Gogol’, 230; in Kruchenykh’s The Devil and the Word­ smiths, references to, 230; on Pushkin, 42, 99; Vii (tale), 151 Golden Age, Pushkinian, 32, 77 Goncharova, Natal’ia (artist), 69, 231 Goncharova, Natal’ia (Pushkin’s wife), 231 Gor’kii, Maksim: atheism and communism as “God-building” exercise, 40; The Lower Depths (play), 75; on peasants using priceless vases as chamber pots, 290n153; Soviet appropriation of, 190; statue of, 137 Gorlov, Nikolai, 201 Gothic, the, 168–69 “Go to Hell” (1913 Futurist manifesto), 25– 27, 67–68, 164 Gough, Maria, 288n108 (223) Greek tragedy, 134, 135 Griboedov, Aleksandr, Woe from Wit, 70 Griffin, Roger, 263n51 Grigor’ev, Apollon, 39 Groys, Boris, 70, 145–46, 193 Gruber, Petr, Pushkin’s Don Juan List, 287n93 Gul’, Roman, 248

Index Gumilev, Nikolai, 119, 120, 207 Gur’ianova, Nina, 269n28 Guro, Elena, 8 Habermas, Jürgen, 69 Harrison, Charles, 290n144 (234) Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 82–83 Herodotus, 8 heterochrony, 49, 129, 146, 264n94 historical determinism: and Khlebnikov, 97, 123, 124; and Russian modernism, 128. See also time historicization (of Pushkin myth), 28, 45, 62, 97, 138–39, 195 Homer, 169 Horace, 141, 174, 179, 181, 182, 184, 241, 243 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 58 Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations, 104 Hylea group, 8, 65, 67–68, 91, 229, 256n12 Iakobson, K., 197, 203 Iakobson, R. O. See Jakobson, Roman Iampolski, Mikhail, 138, 139, 287n88 (217) iconoclasm, vs. monumentalism, 145–46 icons: avant-garde’s reengagement with, 60; Christ’s incarnation in, 61–62; Pushkin-the-icon, Futurist attempts at, 60, 62; vs. statues, 57 idoloclasm, 26, 55, 62, 146, 147, 163–65, 254 idols: vs. Christian god, 54; Futurist criticism of Pushkin-the-idol, 54, 55, 58–59, 62, 86; Pushkin as false idol, 6, 21, 26, 57; in Pushkin’s poetry, 22, 56 imperialism. See anti-imperialism Impressionists’ Studio, The, 255n2 incarnation, 44, 61–62 intelligentsia. See Russian intelligentsia intertextuality: Khlebnikov’s historicization of Pushkin and intertextuality within Pushkin’s oeuvre, 97; and Khlebni­ kov’s “The Lonely Player” poem, 112, 128; and Kruchenykh/Duchamp comparison, 240–41; and Kruchenykh’s Arabesques from Gogol’, 230; in Kru­ chenykh’s The Devil and the Wordsmiths, 90; and Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem,” 166–67; and mythology, 29; and replication of stable written authoritative version, 241; Tynianov’s studies of, 226 introduction: Futurist Pushkin, 5–6, 16–19; Futurist Pushkin (after 1917 Revolution), 19–20; modernism, meanings of,

323 6–13; Russia and Futurism, 14–16; scope of study, 8–9; structure of book, 19–24. See also Futurists; modernism; “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1912 Futurist manifesto) Ioffe, Denis, 251 Iran, Khlebnikov and Red Army mission in Iran, 109, 115–16 Isaiah: Christ replaying and incarnating prophecy of, 128, 133; in parable of the sower (Luke 8:10–12 NIV), 122, 123; people’s rejection of the prophet in book of Isaiah (6:9–10 NIV), 122, 126; and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 97, 98, 117, 118, 122, 123–24; spiritual thirst theme (29:7–9 NIV), 125 Italian Futurists: and cinema, 163; criticism of in “The Letter as Such” manifesto, 59; as “distant cousins” of Russian Futurists, 20; heterochrony and Russian vs. Italian Futurists, 264n94; and machines, 73, 163; parole in libertà, 9, 67; “set fire to the library shelves!” quote, 4; and speed, 75, 163. See also Marinetti, F. T. Ivaniushina, Irina, 255n5, 256n12 Ivanov, Viacheslav: Dionysus and Protodionysianism, 135; exile, 207; Khlebnikov influenced by, 83–84, 135; and Khlebnikov’s theories of time, 273n2; Kru­ chenykh’s criticism of for thinking of Pushkin as “deity,” 200; on masks, 133; myths as generative or regenerative force, 54; Nietzsche’s influence on, 134; theater as transformative force, 134–35 Jack of Diamonds (art group), 196–97 Jakobson, Roman: and Husserl, enthusiasm for, 274n33 (104); on Khlebnikov, 95, 96; The Latest Russian Poetry, 46, 96; on Maiakovskii, 29, 153–54; on mythology, 28–29; on Pushkin, 46, 47, 56, 96, 140, 153–54, 278n8; on statue as “sign of a sign,” 57; “To attack a poet for ideas” quote, 279n32 (149) Janecek, Gerald, 291n170 (241) Jangfeldt, Bengt, 279n27 (148) Jesus Christ: in Blok’s The Twelve, 40, 41; death of and tearing of curtain in Temple and Victory over the Sun opening scene, 76; incarnation, nature of, 44; incarnation and signifier/signified, 61–62;

324

Index

Jesus Christ (continued ) and Isaiah’s prophecy, replaying and incarnating, 128, 133; kenosis, 44; Khleb­ nikov and Christ as failed prophet, 124; Khlebnikov on Christ and the unthinking public, 91; Kruchenykh and association between Russian poet and Christ, 90; parable of the sower, 121–22, 123, 126–27; as proto-democrat, 117; and Pushkin myth, 41, 42, 44; and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 98, 117; and seed metaphor, 245 Jetztzeit concept (Benjamin), 53 Jews on the Land (documentary film), 214 Joyce, James, 6; Ulysses, 29 Kabakov, Il’ia, 243 Kahn, Andrew, 126, 276n62 (119), 276n64 (120) Kamenskii, Vasilii, 8, 27, 50, 69, 178 Kant, Immanuel, thing-in-itself, 103–4 Karabchievskii, Iurii, 139; The Resurrection of Maiakovskii, 253–54, 278n5 (139) Kataev, Valentin, My Diamond Crown, 281n78 (168) Kelly, Martha M. F., 265n101 kenosis, 44 Kern, Anna, 231 Kharms, Daniil, 20, 246, 247, 248, 252–53 Khlebnikov, Velimir: “actor” as “recloaker,” 130, 133; Bakhtin on his “mysticism without mysticism,” 95; Britain, views on, 115, 116; Burliuk (David) on, 54, 58, 83, 96; cloaks, 130–32, 133, 209; Cooke on, 109, 113; cosmos and text, analogy between, 102; costumes, approach to, 132–33; as cult figure among minority, 244; the East, sympathy for, 115, 116; and Enlightenment, 94; Eurasianist posturing, 69; “The Futurian is Pushkin in the light of the world war, in the cloak of the new century” (in note), 47, 131; Futurists (group of poets) member, 4; on Futurists as “warriors beginning in ourselves a new class in the state,” 84; “Futurist” term, Budet­ liane coinage preferred to, 8; “Futurist” term, dislike of, 65; on Futurist triumph as a bullfight, 112–13; “Go to Hell” (Futurist manifesto) signatory, 259n1 (25); historical determinism, 97, 123, 124; on houses of the future (glass boxes on

wheels), 166; “I am a poor warrior” (in notebook), 276n73; “I have scattered seeing eyes” (note), 127; and Ivanov, 83–84, 135, 273n2; Jakobson on, 95, 96; in Jakobson/Trubetskoi discussion on Pushkin, 46; Karabchievskii on, 253; Kharms influenced by, 246; on Kru­ chenykh, 229; Kruchenykh on, 202, 205; on Lermontov, 91; Maiakovskii on, 83; and Mandel’shtam, prevented from fighting him in duel, 27; and manifestos, attitude to, 68; and Marinetti, letter/ flyer condemning, 65, 70; “mouthpiece of the fracture of ages,” description of himself as, 52; neo-pagan poetry, 69; numbers and breaking “the spell of the serpent” (letter to his sister), 113–14; numbers and prophecy, 100, 102–4, 105, 107–8; numbers and time, 129; Perun god in his poems, 55; prophecy and failing better, 124–26; prophecy and failure/frustration, 121, 122–24; prophecy and freedom, 120–21, 128; prophecy and literature, 106; prophecy and numbers, 100, 102–4, 105, 107–8; prophecy and Pushkin’s The Gypsies, 116; prophecy and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 98–100, 103, 107–8; prophecy and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem in “The Lonely Player,” 110, 111–12, 113, 117–18, 122–24; prophecy and science, 100–104; prophecy and the single book, 136; prophecy as rational response, 100, 104, 107, 108; Red Army mission in Iran, 109, 115–16; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207; and Romanticism, 94; Russian identity issue, 257n33; science and prophecy, 100–104; science and the esoteric, 94–95; “seed” metaphor, 245; “seeing eyes” metaphor, 124, 127, 245; “serpent” metaphor, 113–14; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” coauthor, 4, 8, 74; the state, views on, 116; on “the swift engine of the young ages,” 73–74; theater, proposal for new Slavic terminology, 130; time, theories of, 50, 52, 92–97, 113–14, 116, 121, 123, 127–31; time travel, 49–50; on Tolstoi, 84; Tynianov on, 216, 259n48 (20); “we stand on the rock of the word WE” (in manifesto), 268n14 (68); “words are especially powerful” (note), 127; zaum,

Index 47, 61, 96, 132; Zoroastrianism, 114–15. See also Khlebnikov, Velimir (works); Khlebnikov and Pushkin; Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player” Khlebnikov, Velimir (works): “Along Tver­skaia” (poem), 58; Athwart Time (unrealized project), 50; “The Beast + the Number” (poem), 130; bullfighting unfinished poem, 133–34; “The Burial Mound of Sviatogor” (article), 83–84; “Burliuk” (poem), 276n73; “Chaucer and Me” (essay), 46, 116; The Children of the Otter (epic poem), 75, 109, 275n48 (113); “The Dostyology of racing clouds” (poem), 60–61, 246; epitaph (written by himself ), 94; “Flames” (poem), 77; “The Futurian” (essay), 112–13; A Game in Hell (poem coauthored with Kru­ chenykh), 230; “I am Ushedar-Mar” (poem), 115; “I do not know, whether the world turns or not” (poem), 102; “If I turn mankind into clockwork” (poem), 101; “Iron Wings” (undelivered talk), 113; “Ka” (novella), 50, 129, 131; “Ka2” (novella), 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 134, 135; Ladomir (poem), 50, 276n71 (123); “The Letter as Such” (manifesto with Kruchenykh), 59, 195; “Loneliness” (essay), 115, 123; “The Lonely Player” (poem) (see Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player”); manifesto, unpublished (1912 or 1913), 84; “Monument” (poem), 55, 281n68 (164); note (1915), 47, 161–62; note (1922), 127; “Numbers” (poem), 102–4, 114, 130; “Oko: An Oroch Tale” (short story), 276n73; “Oleg Trupov” (poem), 131; “Once again, once again” (poem), 109; “On Contemporary Poetry” (essay), 85; “The One Book” (poem), 136; “The OneEyed Player” (poem), 22; Our Foundation (essay), 100–101, 108; “People, When They Love” (poem), 102; “The Poet” (poem), 96, 130; “Pushkin and the Pure Laws of Time” (essay), 46, 116; “Reminiscences,” 107; “Skilfully you catch other people’s thoughts” (poem), 229; The Storming of the Universe (drama), 107–8, 109; Teacher and Disciple, 46–47; “To You” (poem), 104, 105–6; “The Trumpet of Gull’-Mullah” (poem), 114–16; “The Trumpet of the Martians”

325 (manifesto), 91; Victory over the Sun (opera prologue), 76; “The Word as Such” (with Kruchenykh), 84–85, 195, 200–201, 267n137 (60), 278n14 (143), 284n23 (196); “Words about Numbers and Vice Versa” (essay), 92–93, 95, 129, 130–31; Worldbackwards (collection with Kruchenykh), 50, 60–61; Worldbackwards (play), 50; Zangezi (novella), 50, 85–86, 129 Khlebnikov and Pushkin: overview, 22; Pushkin, compared to, 96; Pushkin, incarnation of the word of, 62; Pushkin, lines from in A Game in Hell (written with Kruchenykh), 230; Pushkin, reference to in “Along Tverskaia” poem, 58; Pushkin, reference to in “People, When They Love” poem, 102; Pushkin, thinking he could write as well as, 96; on Pushkin and England, 116; on Pushkin and Lermontov “killed like rabid dogs,” 91; on Pushkin and Perun, 266n117; on Pushkin and the unthinking public, 91; on Pushkin and time, 47–48, 49, 96–97, 116; on Pushkin as “smoked glass,” 106, 107; on Pushkin “dead” and “living” (1915 note), 47, 161–62; on Pushkin­ ian “beauty,” 107; on Pushkin ignoring Russia’s true heritage, 83; on “Pushkin in the light of the world war, in the cloak of the new century,” 47, 131; on Pushkin­ ists, 56, 106–7, 131; on “Pushkin” name, flexibility of, 246; Pushkin’s “cycle” of poems, 117; on Pushkin’s “first Russian poet” status, 84; Pushkin’s name, punning on in “The Dostyology of racing clouds” poem, 60–61; on Pushkin’s Poltava, 116; on Pushkin’s reliance on revelation, 102; on Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liud­mila, 74; on Pushkin’s soul (in “Oleg Trupov” poem), 131; Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, allusion to in poem, 55; on Pushkin’s The Gypsies, 116; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Khleb­nikov’s “Numbers” poem, 103; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player” poem, 110, 111–12, 113, 117–18, 122–24; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Khlebnikov’s The Storming of the Universe (drama), 107–8; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Khlebnikov’s “To You” poem, 105; Pushkin’s “The Prophet”

326

Index

Khlebnikov and Pushkin (continued) and Khlebnikov’s view of prophet’s mission as futile, 122–23; self-identification with Pushkin as victim of persecution, 62; self-identification with Pushkin’s rebelliousness, 74; studies on Pushkin and Khlebnikov, 258n40. See also Khlebnikov, Velimir; Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player” Khlebnikov’s “The Lonely Player”: acting and historical recurrence of archetypes, 129–30, 133; Akhmatova, references to, 110, 111, 119, 120; anti-imperialist politics, 111, 115–16, 117, 118; “And shrouded by the will of the moon” section, 129–30; “And while above Tsarskoe Selo” opening section, 119; “Blind I went” line, 116; bull as connection between Pushkin and horrors of war, 113; bull as failed attempt to break out of repetitive time with single act, 135–36; bull as metaphor for Futurists’ break with tradition, 112–13; bull as metaphor for poet’s failure to communicate his message, 121, 127; bull as metaphor for symbolic murder of Pushkin, 112; bull as summit of poet’s millenarian ambitions for mankind, 115; bull as symbol of poet’s utopian intervention into deterministic time, 114–15; cloaks, 130, 131–32; crowd’s indifference, 109, 121, 122–23, 124, 127, 133–34; freedom, quest for, 116–21, 128; full text of poem, 110–11; “I dragged myself like a sleepy corpse through the desert” line, 111, 118, 128; masks and transhistorical essences, 133; ocular metaphors, 125, 127, 276n73; optimistic ending, 124, 127; and parable of the sower, 126–27; and poetprophet myth, 108–10, 111, 115–17, 118–19, 127; “The Poor Player” as draft title, 276n73; and Pushkin, allusions to and intertexts, 112, 128; and Pushkin as legitimating authority and new era, 133; and Pushkin’s “André Ché­nier” poem, 119–21; and Pushkin’s “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” poem, 121–22; and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 110, 111–12, 113, 117–18, 122–24; and Pushkin’s “The Wanderer” poem, 125– 26; spectators, 133–34; tenses, use of, 128; and time, 127–29; “walking corpse”

motif, 118; “wanderer” motif, 130; witnesses, need for, 223 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 191 King of the Jews, The (film), 178 Kirsanov, Semen, 193 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m, “Prophecy” (poem), 117–18, 120, 128 Komar and Melamid, 250; Monumental Propaganda, 253 Kotorcha, L., 289n130 (230) Krasin, Leonid, 169 Krasnoshchekov, Aleksandr, 168 Krauss, Rosalind, 64, 65, 289n140 Kristeva, Julia, 51 Kruchenykh, Aleksei: absolute creativity vs. recontextualization, 249–50, 251; and Akhmatova, 190; “The artist has seen the world anew” quote, 269n31 (73); and Aseev, 190, 229; on audience’s collective aural reception of poetry, 208–9, 225–26, 236; author’s role, 222– 24, 226, 235; as bellwether, 192; bibliophile and dealer of manuscripts, 242– 43; as bogeyman, 191, 192; Chukovskii on, 191; and cinema, 209–10, 212, 213, 214–15; on the classics “poisoning the air,” 58; collage and photomontage, 196; composite technique, 230; Conceptualist Transfurists’ allegiance to, 250; and Constructivists, 23, 221–22, 224, 243; copy-work and modernism, 233; costumes, approach to, 132; criticized for exploiting other people’s words, 229; and Dadaism, 192; on Dostoevskii, 88, 89–90, 99; and Duchamp, 233–37, 240–41; and Esenin, attacks on, 229, 237; Evtushenko on, 242; as the exemplary Futurist, 191; extremist and outsider, 188, 190–92; faktura term, 222; and Formalists, 202, 208, 213, 221, 222; on “the former stagnant language,” 59; as fossil of Futurism, 244; 41° movement, participation in, 190, 228–29, 232; and Freud, 198, 203, 213, 219, 234; friend of on “stupid aura around Pushkin’s top hat,” 43; on “Futurian” artists and juxtaposition of heterogeneous fragments, 196; on Futurists as “guardians of the craft of versification,” 202; Futurist vision and personal poetic mythology, 20; and Gogol’, 89, 230; “Go to Hell” (Futurist manifesto) signatory,

Index 259n1 (25); graphical appearance of text, 195; and Ivanov, 200; and Jack of Diamonds art group, 196–97; Karabchievskii on, 253; on Khlebnikov, 202, 205; Khlebnikov on, 229; and Khleb­ nikov’s proposal for new Slavic terminology for theater, 130; late 1920s publications, 229; late career, 229–30; Lef, role at, 190; on Lermontov, 86, 89, 90; Lermontov in The Devil and the Wordsmiths, references to, 230; Livshits on, 190–91; on Maiakovskii, 190, 205; Maiakovskii on, 83, 237; and modernism, 192–93, 233–34; mysticism, rhetoric against, 200; “new wine” quote, 31; on Nietzsche, 271n73; originality, changing understanding of, 193; “paper monument” quote, 243, 245; Pasternak on, 190, 191, 284n31; poet as selector, transformer, and archivist, 228; on poetry/ literature before Futurism, 81–82; and postmodernism, 193, 233–34; reality, disinterest in, 228; on Romanticism, 88; Russian identity issue, 257n33; on Russian pre-Futurist literature, 88–90; on “Slap” and allusion to Tiutchev, 87; on “Slap” and Russian language, 82; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” coauthor, 4, 8, 73; Slutskii on, 192; and socialist realism, 190, 192–93, 200–201; and Sots Art, similarities with, 250; Soviet state, attitude toward, 228; and Stalin’s death, 218; on Symbolists, 59–60, 86, 88, 200; time, reordering of, 50; “We don’t need an intermediary, a symbol,” 60; “we stand on the rock of the word WE” (in manifesto), 268n14 (68); on word and meaning, 204; zaum, as defined by, 52, 53; zaum and Futurist public self-presentation, 132; zaum and sectarians, 237; zaum and shiftology, 199, 203, 213; zaum as collective language, 209–10; zaum as “the only constructive language,” 224; zaum examples, 238– 39; zaum poem (“Dyr bul shchyl” poem), 84–85, 86, 191, 237. See also Kru­ chenykh, Aleksei (works); Kru­chenykh and Pushkin; Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin Kruchenykh, Aleksei (works): The Apocalypse of Russian Literature, 88–89; Arabesques, 230; Arabesques from Gogol’, 230;

327 “Declaration of the Word as Such” (zaum), 238; The Devil and the Wordsmiths (essay), 88–90, 230; “Dyr bul shchyl” (zaum poem), 84–85, 86, 191, 237; Explodity (collection), 52; The Faktura of the Word (essay), 222, 285n38 (202); Fifteen Years of Futurism (autobiography), 228; 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin (see Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin); A Game in Hell (poem coauthored with Khlebnikov), 230; “HEIGHTS (universal language)” (zaum), 238–39; “I came I saw [ . . . ] engoncharova’ed” (Maiakovskii Museum visitors’ book), 231; “The Letter as Such” (with Khlebnikov), 59, 195; Melancholy in a Bonnet: History AS Anal Erotica, 198; “New Ways of the Word” (essay), 81–82, 204, 271n72 (82), 277n79 (128); “The Old Tongs of Sunset” (poem), 50; “On Our Predecessors” (note), 80; Our Arrival (memoir), 73, 269n35 (74), 272n92 (87), 272n111 (90), 273n10 (96), 284n26 (196), 284n27 (197); The Phonetics of Theatre, 209–10, 224; Piglets (with Zina V.), 83; The Secret Vices of the Academicians, 85, 88–89, 208, 272n89/90/91 (86); Shiftology of Russian Verse, 198; Talking Cinema (poetry collection), 209, 214; “To me raisins” (signed Pushkin-Kruchenykh) with appended own poem, 231–33; Victory over the Sun (libretto) (see Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera)); “The Word as Such” (with Khlebnikov), 84– 85, 195, 200–201, 267n137 (60), 278n14 (143), 284n23 (196); Worldbackwards (collection with Khlebnikov), 50, 60–61 Kruchenykh and Pushkin: overview, 23; Pushkin, appropriation of and analogy with Duchamp, 233–37; Pushkin, lines from A Game in Hell (written with Khleb­ nikov), 230; Pushkin as source of quotations, 194–95, 196–97; Pushkin mythology, changing attitude toward, 193–94; Pushkin new edition (by Briu­ sov), criticism of, 195, 204, 227; “Pushkin said that the past is nice. That’s only for the indolent.” quote, 80; Pushkin’s “engoncharova’ed” neologism, borrowing of, 231; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, eight lines of compared to laundry bill,

328

Index

Kruchenykh and Pushkin (continued) 85; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Jack of Diamonds dispute, 196–97; Pushkin’s exact words in meaning-altering context, 230–31; on Pushkin’s language compared to oral epics, 82, 85; on Pushkin’s “out came a she-bear” as “the best thing” he wrote, 83; on Pushkin’s remoteness from modern urban life, 86; on Pushkin viewed by Dostoev­skii, 88, 89, 90; rewriting of Pushkin’s poem followed by his own, 231–33; studies on Kruchenykh and Pushkin, 258n40. See also Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin: advertisement for in Lef, 199; attack on notion of Pushkin as forerunner of socialist realism, 200– 201; attack on Pushkin cult, 23, 194, 197, 199–200, 203; attack on quasi-religious attitudes to literature/mysticism, 200, 237; attempt to broaden bounds of poetry, 208; author’s role, 222–24, 226, 235; and Benjamin’s theories, 212–13, 222, 239–41; break with present vs. novelty within existing culture, 251; cinema and poetry, 214; cinema and shiftology, 209–10, 213; cinematic qualities of Meierkhol’d’s production of Ostrov­ skii’s The Forest, 214–15; Constructivist terminology, 221–22; contents of booklet, 197; creative plagiarism and cento poetry, 230; and Duchamp’s, analogy with, 236–37, 238, 240–41; Kharms’s mention of collection, 246; one-off performance as true essence of work, 241; parody and complexity of Kruchenykh’s approach, 226–27; performance, collective audiences and zaum, 208–9; photomontage analogy, 227–28; “poetry is the ability to make mistakes” (Teren­ t’ev’s quote), 204; Pushkin, appropriation of and challenge to text as stable entity, 242; Pushkin, appropriation of and the secular / the sacred, 237–39; Pushkin as innovative force, 218; Pushkin listed as author of collection in some libraries, 287n94 (219); Pushkin read to oneself vs. Pushkin read from the stage, 219; Pushkin’s blasphemous epic The Gabrieliad, 206; Pushkin’s errors

as revelation of new Pushkin, 219; Pushkin’s “From the Portuguese” poem and parody, 227; Pushkin’s own deliberate shifts, 205–6, 213, 224; Pushkin’s shifts as Freudian slips, 203, 219; Pushkin’s technical skills, criticism of, 201–3; Pushkin’s transformation into zaumnik, 219; and religion, 237–39; scatological example, 198–99; sexual pun example, 199; “Shift as a Device” section, 202, 205; “shift by the State Publisher” (in Briu­ sov’s edition of Pushkin), 204; “shift’ effect, 197–98, 199, 203–4; shift example from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 198; shift example from Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 204–5; shift example in Pushkin’s bawdy verse (“The day of true bliss”), 206; shifts, construction, authorial intention, and errors, 224; shifts and audience aural reception, 224, 225–26, 227; shifts and faktura, 222; shifts and “predominance of the sonic element in verse,” 208; and Tynia­nov’s theories, 215–21, 224–27 Kuchka (boyar), 106, 114 Kul’bin, Nikolai, 65 Kunichika, Michael, 185 Kushner, Boris, 224 Lachmann, Renate, 259n3 (27) language: as creative mythic force (Belyi), 266n112; Romantic conception of and Russian modernism, 58; Russian Futurists’ approach to, 9, 13, 59; and “seed” metaphor, 245; signifier/signified, 52– 53, 61, 132, 246; on “Slap” and Russian language (Kruchenykh), 82; and statues, 57, 58. See also neologisms; puns; Russian alphabet langue, vs. parole, 53 Lanne, Jean-Claude, 288n120 Larionov, Mikhail, 69, 229, 231 Lay of Igor’s Campaign, The, 82, 85 Lebedev, Nikolai, 286n73 (215) Lef (magazine): Arvatov on practicality of rotating buildings, 166; cofounded by Maiakovskii and Osip Brik, 157; and Constructivist art, 221; editorial on criticism of Maiakovskii and Pushkin as “historical necessity” (1923), 162; Gorlov’s response to Trotskii’s criticism of Futurism, 201; Kruchenykh’s 500 New

Index Witticisms, advertisement for, 199; on Kruchenykh’s hostility to religion, 237; Kruchenykh’s role, 190; and literary specialists, role of in Soviet literary scene, 207; and “literature of fact” doctrine, 222; Maiakovskii on continuity with prewar Futurism, 159; Maiakovskii on need to “review their tactics,” 208; Maia­ kovskii’s on Lenin memorabilia, 157; and military vanguard metaphors, 189; Popova’s article, 227; Pushkin working for (in Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem”), 163; Tret’iakov on “dead” vs “living” Pushkin, 161–62; Tynianov’s article on literary evolution, 192; Tynianov’s “On the Literary Fact” essay, 216; and Vertov, 228. See also New Lef (magazine) Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich: death of and official reaction to it, 154; “learn from the classics” campaign, 157; and Maiakov­ skii, views on, 155, 280n56; on Maia­ kov­skii’s “150,000,000” poem, 150; Maia­kov­skii’s attitude to, 154–55, 157; Maiakovskii’s criticism of Lenin memorabilia, 157; and Maiakovskii’s “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” poem, rebuttal of, 149; Maiakovskii’s opposition to mummification of, 156, 157; in Maiakov­ skii’s “The Fifth International” poem, 150–53; in Maiakovskii’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin epic poem, 155–57, 161, 175; New Economic Policy, introduction of, 154; pro- and anti-monument policies, 147; Red Square mausoleum, 138, 156 Lentulov, Aristarkh, 106 Lermontov, Mikhail: “Borodino” (poem), 80; “Death of the Poet” (poem), 172– 73; Demon, 90; “A Dream” (poem), 104, 118; Khlebnikov on, 91; Kruchenykh on, 86, 89, 90; in Kruchenykh’s The Devil and the Wordsmiths, references to, 230; Lermontovian adjectives in Prigov’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 251; poetic response to Pushkin’s death, 39, 41; “The Prophet” (poem), 98–99 Lerner, Nikolai, “Did Pushkin Smoke?” 287n93 Leskov, Nikolai, 211 “Letter as Such, The” (manifesto by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov), 59, 195 Levi, Pavle, 210 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 95

329 Lewis, Wyndham, 6 liberalism, and Russian intelligentsia, 40 liberty. See freedom Lieutenant Kizhe (film, screenplay by Tynia­ nov), 217 life, and art, 57, 96, 144 life-building (zhiznestroenie), 144 life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo), 144, 257n30 (13) Likhachev, Dmitrii, 32 Linnaeus, Carl, 101 Lipovetsky, Mark, 284n15 (193) literary history, synchronic vs. diachronic vision, 188–90, 192 literary pseudonyms, 289n139 literature. See poetry; Russian literature; Soviet literature; storytelling; zaum (“transrational” poetry) “literature of fact” doctrine, 222 “living word” concept (Belyi), 59 Livshits, Benedikt: classics “seen at a new angle of vision” quote, 43; CuboFuturist, 8; Eurasianist posturing, 69; “Go to Hell” signatory, 25; on Kru­ chenykh, 190–91; and Marinetti, flyer condemning, 65; The One-and-a-HalfEyed Archer, 190–91; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” manifesto, criticism of, 18 Lobachevskii, Nikolai, 94 Loewen, Donald, 285n45 (207) Lomonosov, Mikhail, 141, 174–75, 262n42 Lönnqvist, Barbara, 130, 274n32 (103) Lord’s Prayer, and Kruchenykh’s zaum poem, 239 Lotman, Iurii, 54–55, 257n32, 263n54 Luke, Gospel of: parable of the sower (8:10–­ 12 NIV), 121–22, 123; on Pharisees (6), 123 Lunacharskii, Anatolii: atheism and communism as “God-building” exercise, 40; on Futurists, 158; “learn from the classics” campaign, 157; and Maiakov­ skii’s “150,000,000” epic poem, 150; on Maiakovskii’s desire for destruction, 185–86; on Maiakovskii’s reverence for Pushkin, 158–59; on Ostrovskii, 215; on Pushkin, the classics and new culture, 157–58; on Pushkin and calm construction, 165, 166; and Pushkin jubilee (1924), 247; on Pushkin’s cultural ascendancy and proletarian poets, 165; “A Spoonful

330

Index

Lunacharskii, Anatolii (continued ) of Antidote” article and Maiakov­skii’s “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” poem controversy, 149–50 lyric poetry, vs. civic (political) poetry, 171–72, 173–75, 176–77, 178–79 machines: and Italian Futurists, 73, 163. See also speed Maiakovskii, Vladimir: absolute creativity vs. recontextualization, 249–50; advertising slogans, 81; anti-bureaucratic campaign, 175–76; “Art has died” quote, 31; and The Art of the Commune’s antimonumental position, 147; backlash against (1980s), 253; on Bal’mont, 81; “To be a bourgeois” quote, 178; and Bolsheviks, 142, 147, 148–49, 156, 178; on Briusov, 81; building/construction and new society, 143, 144, 145, 185–86; canonization of writer-enlighteners, criticism of, 177–78; and cinema, 209; civic (political) vs. lyrical poetry, 171– 72, 173–75, 176–77, 178–79; the classics, view on, 158–60, 163, 178; “To crush the freezer of canons” quote, 74; and Esenin, 169–70; fetishistic commemoration, criticism of, 164; “free from love and posters” (from “Jubilee Poem”), 154; on Futurians (budetliane), 53; on Futurism and continuity with prewar era, 159; on Futurism being dead (1915), 245; on Futurist being a “brandname,” 67; on Futurists needing to “review their tactics,” 208; Futurist vision and personal poetic mythology, 20; “Go to Hell” (Futurist manifesto) signatory, 259n1 (25); “the great break” quote, 11; hooligan, styling himself as, 69; immortality and mortality, 179; as instructor on technical matters on Soviet literary scene, 206–7; Jack of Diamonds performance, 196–97; Jakobson on, 29, 153–54; Karabchievskii on, 253– 54; on Khlebnikov, 83; and Komar and Melamid’s Monumental Propaganda, 253; on Kruchenykh, 83, 237; Kruchenykh on, 190, 205; Lef, cofounded by with Osip Brik, 157; and Lenin (see under Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich); Lily Brik, relationship with, 154, 168, 171–72; on literature “from nameless Russian song,”

82–83; and Lunacharskii, 149–50, 158– 59, 185–86; and Marinetti, letter condemning, 65; and monumentalism vs. iconoclasm debate, 146; on Nekrasov, 173, 177–78, 179; Pasternak on, 179; petit bourgeois acquisitiveness, criticism of, 164; The Poet and the Tsar film, criticism of, 161; on poetry, servile nature of most poetry, 81; poetry as hard graft, 184–85; “Poetry is the word loved every day in a new way,” 80; poetry publishing in 1920s, 207; postrevolutionary career, three phases of, 146–47; on “proletarian planets” and future struggles, 186; revolutionary dynamism, struggle against petrification of, 154, 156; ROSTA windows campaign, 154; Russian identity issue, 257n33; Siniavskii on, 248, 253; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” coauthor, 4, 8, 73; Soviet canonization of, 179, 189, 244; “staircase” layout, 201–2; and the state, 147, 175; statue of, 137– 38, 140; statues, animate, 164; statues, interrogation of as means of speaking truth to power and about power, 142; statues, predicting his own, 140; statues, preoccupation with, 139–40, 142; statues and civic poetry, 174, 177; statues as metaphor for stagnating writerly creativity, 177, 178; suicide, 140, 167; sun and Napoleon, 78–79; sun as brutal father, 77; on Tatlin’s monument as “first monument without a beard,” 166; time as a trap, 48–49, 53–54; Tynianov on, 216; utopia and the disappointment of, 153; water, cleansing power of, 183–84; “we stand on the rock of the word WE” (in manifesto), 268n14 (68). See also Maiakov­skii, Vladimir (works); Maiakovskii and Pushkin; Maiakovskii’s “At the Top of My Voice”; Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem” Maiakovskii, Vladimir (works): “Above everything that’s been done, I’ll put ‘nihil’” (poem), 266n118; “At the Top of My Voice” (poem) (see Maiakovskii’s “At the Top of My Voice”); The Bathhouse (play), 50, 175, 282n91 (174); The Bedbug (play), 153; Bound in Film (film), 209; “Conversation with a Tax Inspector” (poem), 173; “A Few Words about Me Myself” (poem), 125; “The Fifth

Index International” (epic poem), 146, 150– 53, 156; “The Final St. Petersburg Fairy Tale” (poem), 164; Good! (epic), 169; How to Make Verses (textbook), 172, 178, 184, 201–2, 283n105 (184); “Hymn to a Critic” poem, 157; “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” (poem), 146, 148, 149–50, 155, 163; Jews on the Land (documentary screenplay with Shklovskii), 214; “Jubilee Poem” (see Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem”); “Khrenov’s Story about Kuz­ netskstroi and the People of Kuznetsk” (poem), 145; “Komsomol Poem,” 156; Lef article on Lenin, 157; Lef article on literature of the past, 159; Man (poem), 50, 153, 171, 181; “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists” (with Burliuk and Kamenskii), 178; Moscow Is Burning (unfinished play), 164; “Napoleon and Me” (poem), 77, 78–79, 181; “Not Butterflies, but Alexander of Ma­c­ edon” (article), 81; “150,000,000” (epic poem), 150, 159, 178, 266n111 (53); “On Trash,” 164; speech (May 1924) as reply to Lunacharskii, 158–60; The Stone Guest (poetic drama), 141, 151, 168; “To Sergei Esenin” (poem), 169–70, 171, 186; “To Teodor Nette: Man and Steamship” (poem), 169; “To the Workers of Kursk” (poem), 184, 282n93 (175); “Twenty Years of Work” (exhibition), 179; “Two Chekhovs” (essay), 177–78; “The Upas Tree (A Long Poem about Inventiveness),” 176; Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (epic poem), 147, 155–57, 161, 175; Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, 61, 75–77, 78, 153, 164 Maiakovskii and Pushkin: overview, 22, 23; Pushkin, changes in attitude toward (from 1918 onwards), 146–47, 159, 163, 165–66; Pushkin and Maiakovskii’s “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” poem, 146, 148, 149–50; on Pushkin as “shackled forever in [ . . . ] bronze,” 164; on Pushkin as “the greatest mouthpiece of his time in poetry,” 72; on Pushkin being only “fully understood by his own class,” 72; Pushkin-branded cigarette case in Maiakovskii’s “Hymn to a Critic” poem, 157; Pushkin in Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem” (see under Maiakov­ skii’s “Jubilee Poem”); Pushkin in

331 Maiakovskii’s “Two Chekhovs” essay, 177; Pushkin’s affinities with Futurists’ rebellious identity, 161–62; Pushkin’s and Maiakovskii’s “The Upas Tree” poems, 176; Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem and Maiakovskii’s “At the Top of My Voice,” invocation of, 181– 82; Pushkin’s character Onegin, imagining himself to be, 27; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, criticism of, 80, 81, 172; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, invocation of (in “Jubilee Poem”), 168, 171–72, 173; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in Maiakov­ skii’s 1924 speech, 158–59; on Pushkin’s grave in “The Proletariat and Art” debate (1918), 148–49; Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument” poem and Maiakovskii’s “At the Top of My Voice,” 180, 181, 184–85, 186–87; on Pushkin’s irrelevance for the new era, 80–81; Pushkin’s martyrdom myth, appropriation of, 223; Pushkin’s monument in Maiakov­ skii’s “To the Workers of Kursk” poem, 184; Pushkin’s poetic monument and Maiakovskii’s Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, 77, 153; Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila, allusion to in Maiakovskii’s “The Fifth International” poem, 151– 52; Pushkin’s statue mythology, 140– 42, 150–51, 153–54; Pushkin’s technical skill, criticism of independently of ideology, 201; Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, allusion to in Maiakovskii’s “The Fifth International” poem, 150–53; Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, allusion to in Maiakovskii’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin poem, 155–56; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Maiakovskii’s “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” controversy, 149–50; Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, allusion to in Maia­kov­ skii’s “The Fifth International” poem, 151–52 Maiakovskii Museum, Larionov and Goncharova exhibition (1965), 231 Maiakovskii’s “At the Top of My Voice”: “And agitprop has got stuck to my teeth” section, 177; building of today and ruins of tomorrow, 185–86; civic vs. lyric poetry, 176–77, 178–79; creative reinterpretation of the past, 22; Derzhavin’s “Monument” poem, invocation of, 180–81; “The forgotten traces”

332

Index

Maiakovskii’s “At the Top . . . ” (continued) section, 181–82; “I become the image of tail-bearing fossils” line, 182; immortality and mortality, 179–83, 185–87; “I spit on the weightiness of bronze” section, 180; “I will come to you in the Communist distance” line, 187; military metaphors, 181; “My verse will reach across the ridges of the centuries” line and section, 50, 182–83; poetry as hard graft, 184–85; “A poor honor to have from these roses” section, 180; Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, invocation of, 181–82; Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument” poem, invocation of, 180, 181, 184–85, 186–87; the revolution, reflection on rapport with, 147, 179; water, cleansing power of, 183–84; “waterpipe” image, 183, 184, 186, 245 Maiakovskii’s “Jubilee Poem”: adultery leitmotif, 168; attitude to Pushkin, 160– 62, 197; “Come on Maiakovskii!” section, 172; creative reinterpretation of the past, 22; and Esenin’s “Dreaming about a Mighty Gift” poem, 170; “free from love and posters” line, 154; “Give me your hand” section, 167–68; Gothic element, 168–69; “Here’s a Moor!” section, 162; historical context, 157; “I am due a monument” section, 169, 175; “If you were alive you would be a coeditor of Lef ” section, 160–61; Lermontov’s “Death of the Poet,” allusion to, 172–73; lyric vs. civic poetry, 171–72, 173–75; “Maybe I alone really am sorry” line, 170; mortality, preoccupation with, 167–68, 174–75; “mummified Pushkin” image, 157, 162, 250; Nekrasov’s “The Poet and the Citizen” (poem), invocation of, 174; Nekrasov’s Who Lives Well in Russia? poem, allusion to, 173; the past and remobilizing/recontextualizing, 147, 162–63, 166; Pushkin, Soviet appropriation of vs. Maiakovskii’s irreverence, 164–66; Pushkin and civic verse, 174; Pushkinian mythology, intertextuality and history, 166–67; Pushkin monument as “carcass” (tusha), 58; Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, invocation of, 174–75; Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, allusion to, 172; Pushkin’s

duel with D’Anthès, references to, 168, 172–73; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, invocation of, 168, 171–72, 173; Pushkin’s Poltava, reference to, 171; Pushkin working for Lef, 163; self-sacrificing work staving off suicide, 186; “Soon I too will die and be unable to speak” line, 174; “That son of a bitch D’Anthès!” section, 168; “We have attacked lyric” section, 171 Malevich, Kazimir: Black Square, 60, 76, 238; on “forms of utilitarian reason,” 60; Victory over the Sun (opera costumes), 76, 132 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 136 Mandel’shtam, Osip: burial of Pushkinian sun as leitmotif in poetry of, 270n48; and Khlebnikov, prevented from fighting him in duel, 27; “Petersburg Stanzas” (poem), 32, 33, 49; on Pushkin, 41, 48; and Pushkin, playing on resemblance to, 27; and rejection of poetry in 1920s, 207; “Skriabin and Christianity” (speech), 41, 48; Stone, references to St. Petersburg and Pushkin in, 32; on Symbolists in “O prirode slova” (essay), 267n136 “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists” (Maiakovskii, Burliuk, and Kamenskii), 178 manifestos: and branding, 67; and Futurist originality, 64; and modernism, 21, 64, 66–68; as rupture, 52, 53, 64. See also “Go to Hell” (1913 Futurist manifesto); “Letter as Such, The” (manifesto by Kru­ chenykh and Khlebnikov); “Manifesto of the Flying Federation of Futurists” (Maiakovskii, Burliuk, and Ka­men­skii); Marinetti, F. T.; “Order of Zaumniks” manifesto; Pushkin in Futurist manifestos; “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1912 Futurist manifesto); “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1913 Futurist manifesto); “Trumpet of the Martians, The” (manifesto by Khleb­ni­ kov); “Word as Such, The” (manifesto by Khleb­nikov and Kruchenykh) Marinetti, F. T.: first Futurist manifesto (Le Figaro, 1909), 63–64, 66; “neurasthenic cultivation of hermaphroditic archaism” quote, 271n73 (82); Russian

Index Futurists’ hostility toward, 65, 70; self-creation myth, 68. See also Italian Futurists Mark, Gospel of: parable of the sower, 121; “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country” (6:4 KJV), 121 Markov, Vladimir, 255n2, 283n1 (188), 287n94 (219), 291n159 (239) martyrdom, 90, 98, 121, 175, 181, 186, 223 Marx, Karl, picture of (coming to life), 164 Marxism, 95, 143–44. See also Communism masculine, the (valued over the feminine): and Fascism / Futurism as reaction against perceived decadence of modernity, 82; and Futurists’ criticism of nineteenth-century culture, 70; and Futurists’ criticism of Pushkin, 21, 66, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88; and Futurists’ identity as hyper-masculine men of the future, 78; and Kruchenykh’s criticism of Symbolists, 86; and Nietzsche, 69 Masing-Delic, Irene, 266n125 masks, 133. See also costumes masses, the. See crowd, the materialism, and Russian intelligentsia, 40 Matisse, Henri, 221 Matiushin, Mikhail: on artists, 94; Victory over the Sun (opera music), 76 Matiushina, Ol’ga, 132 Matthew, Gospel of: parable of the sower, 121, 123; on Pharisees (15:14 and 15:7 NIV), 123 Mayakovsky, Vladimir. See Maiakovskii, Vladimir McQuillen, Colleen, 132 Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod, production of Ostrovskii’s The Forest, 214–15 Melamid. See Komar and Melamid Melmoth the Wanderer, 168 meme theory, 216 Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 101 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 37–38, 41–42, 43, 54, 192; “On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Russian Literature” (essay), 38 “messianic time” concept (W. Benjamin), 52 military metaphors, 181, 189 Milner-Gulland, Robin, 276n73 Minotaur, 111, 113, 114, 134, 135 mob, the. See crowd, the

333 modernism: Anglo-American modernism, 6; the archaic, embrace of, 70–71; authorship, denial of, 223; change and continuity, approach to, 5–6; Christian eschatology and modernist radicalism, 11–12; and copy-work, 233; esoteric empiricism and religion’s sacral power, 136; high modernism, 29, 259n46; and Kruchenykh, 192–93, 233–34; “The local is the only thing that is universal” (W. C. Williams), 7; and manifestos, 21, 64, 66–68; and Marxism/Communism, 143– 44; meanings of, 6–13; and Merezhkovskii’s theories, 37–38; vs. modernity, 7, 255n8; and mythology, 28–33, 40–41; and religion, 40; and Romantic conception of language, 58; Russian Futurists’ contribution to, 21; Russian modernism, forces shaping the nature of, 14; Russian modernism and historical determinism, 128; Russian modernism and Stalinism, 193; Russian modernist theater and audiences, 134; Russian specificity of vs. broader conclusions, 6–7; and science, 94–95; as sensibility or way of being, 13; as situated response to cultural/political context, 7–8; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (Russian Futurist manifesto) as shorthand for, 4; theatricality, use of, 132; and time/temporality, 14, 30–33, 41–43, 49; tradition, attitudes to, 7–8, 10–11. See also modernity; Pushkin myth and Russian modernism modernity: and art (Benjamin), 210–11; counter-discourse to (Habermas), 69; and Futurism’s / Fascism’s perceived decadence of, 82; hubris of and sinking of the Titanic, 75; “Il faut être absolument moderne” (A. Rimbaud), 13; vs. modernism, 7, 255n8; reification of concept in “Slap” manifesto, 7; and storytelling (Benjamin), 211. See also modernism Moeller-Sally, Betsy, 274n32 (103) Mona Lisa: and Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., 236–37; and Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, 290n149 (237) mondegreens, 198 montage, 215, 228 monumentalism, vs. iconoclasm, 145–46

334

Index

“monument” term: use of in Russian, 138. See also statues Moscow, monuments to poets, 137–38 Moscow Conceptualists, 251 Moscow Linguistic Circle, 96 movement (in 1920s), 163–64. See also speed Muhammad, Prophet, 121 mysticism: Bakhtin on Khlebnikov’s “mysticism without mysticism,” 95; Christian mysticism, 38; Kruchenykh’s rhetoric against, 200; vs. rationalism, 40; and science, 94 mythology/myths: and Christian eschatology, 54; Futurists’ self-creation myth, 68; as generative or regenerative force (Belyi), 54; and intertextuality, 29; and modernism, 28–33, 40–41; and Nietz­ sche, 30, 40; and originality, 53; and religion, 40–41; rupture, myth of, 51– 54; and time, 49. See also poet-prophet myth; Pushkin myth and Russian modernism

Neoplatonist philosophy, 57 New Criticism, 138 New Economic Policy (NEP), 154, 164, 168 New Historicism, 138 New Lef (magazine): and “literature of fact” doctrine, 222; and zhiznestroenie (lifebuilding), 144. See also Lef (magazine) New Testament, 98, 121, 123, 126. See also Luke, Gospel of; Mark, Gospel of; Matthew, Gospel of Nietzsche, Friedrich: ancient Greece, 10, 69; archaic, masculine and irrational, 69; Ivanov influenced by, 134; Kruchenykh on, 271n73; and Merezhkovskii’s theories, 38, 41; mythology, 30, 40; “race of eunuchs [that] watch over the great historical world-harem” quote, 82; “Signs of the next century: entrance of Russia into culture” quote, 25; time as a circle, 30 nihilism: cultural nihilism, 4; oedipal nihilism, 5; Russian nihilism, 14, 15, 55 Nikonova, Ry, 250

Naiman, Eric, 168 Na literaturnom postu (On Literary Guard ) (journal), 189 Napoleon: in Maiakovskii’s “Napoleon and Me” poem, 77, 78–79; in Pushkin’s “Hero” poem, 79; in Pushkin’s “Napoleon” poem, 79 Na postu (On Guard) ( journal), 189 Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment), 147, 149, 279n27 (148) Nekrasov, Nikolai: Futurists and reworkings of Pushkin myth by, 45; Maiakovskii on, 173, 177–78, 179; “The Poet and the Citizen” (poem), 174; on poet as “herald of age-old truths,” 178; “The Prophet” (poem), 98, 126; Tynianov on, 226; Who Lives Well in Russia? (epic poem), 173 neologisms: and Futurism, 9; in Khleb­ ni­k ov’s “The Dostyology of racing clouds” poem, 61; Kruchenykh’s neologism after Pushkin, 205; Pushkin on, 205; Pushkin’s “engoncharova’ed” borrowed by Kruchenykh, 231; in Sigei’s “Rhymummy: A Versie by aspush­ kina,” 250; of Soviet State as part of socialist linguistic revolution, 224. See also puns

OBERIU group, 253 Odoevskii, Vladimir, 77 Oedipus complex, 113; Bloom’s oedipal narrative, 73; oedipal nihilism, 5 Ohrenphilologie (earphilology), 208 Old Testament, 98, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123 On Guard (Na postu) ( journal), 189 On Literary Guard (Na literaturnom postu) ( journal), 189 oral literature, and Futurists, 83, 241 “Order of Zaumniks” manifesto, 252–53 Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA), 144 originality: avant-garde originality, tenets of, 65–66; and copy-work within modernism, 233; Futurist claim to originality, 146; Futurist claim to originality and the Bolsheviks, 148–49; Futurist originality and creation of new words, 235; Futurist originality and “Go to Hell” Pushkin simile, 26; Futurist originality and language, 9, 13; Futurist originality and manifestos, 64; Futurist originality and manipulation of context, 235; Futurist originality and myth, 53; Futurist originality and Russian anti-traditionalism, 15; Futurist originality and time-outside-of-time, 51;

Index Futurist originality and use of Pushkin, 5, 18–19, 21, 157; Kruchenykh’s changing understanding of, 193; myth of heroic originality and Pushkin/Peter the Great, 37–38; and Pushkin’s conception of the sea/nature, 35; and reconfiguration of existing material, 217; and recontextualization/adaptation, 163; and rupture / recurrence paradigms, 31; and zaum, 53, 235 Orthodoxy: Christ’s kenosis, 44; icons, 60; influence on Futurists, 51–52; martyrsaints (Boris and Gleb) in “The letter as Such” manifesto, 59; prohibition of graven images and Pushkin’s statue myth, 57; and Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument” poem, 141; and Russia’s intellectual history, 29; and Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, 40. See also Christianity orthography, simplification of (1918), 101, 195 Osborne, Peter, 52 Ostrovskii, Aleksandr, The Forest, Meier­ khol’d’s production of, 214–15 Otiakovskii, V., 293n22 (251) Ovid, 48 Owen, Robert, 153 paganism: neo-pagan poetry, 69; pagan gods, 54–55, 73; and Pushkin as idol, 55–56; Pushkin’s use of pagan metaphors, 56 Paperny, Vladimir, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, 145 parable of sower, 121–22, 123, 126–27. See also seed metaphor parody: as defined by Tynianov, 226; in Kru­ chenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 226–27 parole, vs. langue, 53 parole in libertà, 9, 67 Pasternak, Boris: “And blossom hereafter” (poem dedicated to Kruchenykh), 191; on Kruchenykh, 190, 191; on Kru­ chenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 284n31; on Maiakovskii, Soviet canonization of, 179; on Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 36; Solov’ev’s influence on, 40 Paustovskii, Konstantin, 230 People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narkompros), 147, 149, 279n27 (148) perestroika, 139

335 Perloff, Marjorie, 51 Persia. See Iran Perun (Slavic god of thunder), 54, 55 Petersburg. See St. Petersburg Peter the Great: in Belyi, 33, 55; Dos­ toevskii on, 42; in Maiakovskii’s “The Fifth International” poem, allusion to, 151; in Maiakovskii’s “The Final St. Petersburg Fairy Tale” poem, 164; modernization agenda vs. gradualism, 14; in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 33, 35–38, 53, 56, 141, 152, 155–56; and Russian alphabet, reform of, 101; “Russian genius” notion ascribed to, 192; St. Petersburg, founded by, 31–32 Petrov, Petre, 12, 223, 225–26 Pharisees, 123 philosophy, changing vs. interpreting the world, 95 photography, 207, 228 photomontage, 196, 227–28 Picasso, Pablo, 10, 235 Pil’niak, Boris, 185 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 55, 56 plagiarism: and 41° movement, 229; Kru­ chenykh’s creative plagiarism and cento poetry, 230 Platt, Jonathan Brooks, 99, 145 Pletnev, Petr, 120 Poet and the Tsar, The (film), 161, 184–85 poet-prophet myth: and ambivalent relationship with the masses, 109; and Dostoevskii’s Pushkin monument speech, 99–100; and Khlebnikov, 22, 103, 108– 10, 111, 115–17, 118–19, 127; and Lermontov’s “The Prophet” poem, 98–99; and Nekrasov’s “The Prophet” poem, 98; and Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, 120–21; and Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem, 97–99, 110, 111, 120– 21; and Solov’ev’s “Prophet of the Future” poem, 98–99 poetry: cento poetry, 230; civic (political) poetry vs. lyrical poetry, 171–72, 173– 75, 176–77, 178–79; “Constructivist” poets, 221; Decembrist poets, 117–18, 173; ferro-concrete poetry, 9; Futurists (group of poets), 4; Kruchenykh on collective aural reception of, 208–9, 225–26; neo-pagan poetry, 69; new media as challenge to, 207–8; proletarian poets, 165, 207; and the state, 150;

336

Index

poetry (continued) turn away from in 1920s, 207, 221. See also Acmeists; Symbolists; zaum (“trans­ rational” poetry) political (civic) poetry, vs. lyric poetry, 171–72, 173–75, 176–77, 178–79 Polonskii, Viacheslav, 163 Pomorska, Krystyna, 48 Popova, Liubov’, 227 posters, ROSTA windows campaign, 154 postmodernism, 23, 192, 193, 233–34, 289n140; Soviet postmodernism, 249– 50, 251, 252–53 Potebnia, Aleksandr, 57–58 Pound, Ezra, 4, 6 prayers: and Kruchenykh’s zaum poem, 239; spells from deformed prayers, 239 Prigov, Dmitrii, 20, 251–52, 253, 254, 289n140; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 251 Primary Chronicle, The, 54 primitivism, 69 proletarian poets, 165, 207 “Proletariat and Art, The” (1918 debate), 148 Proletkul’t, 149, 157 prophets/prophecy: blindness and second sight of prophets, 125; Decembrists as prophets, 117; and Khlebnikov (see under Khlebnikov, Velimir); Kiu­ khel’beker’s “Prophecy” poem, 117–18, 120, 128; Lermontov’s “The Prophet” poem, 98–99; Nekrasov’s “The Prophet” poem, 98, 126; Old Testament prophets, 98, 117, 121; people’s rejection of the prophet (Isaiah 6:9–10 NIV), 122, 126; poet as Quranic prophet, 114; “a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country” (Mark 6:4 KJV), 121; prophet’s ambivalent relationship with the crowd, 109; Pushkin’s “The Prophet” poem (see under Pushkin’s “The Prophet”); Solov’ev’s “Prophet of the Future” poem, 98–99. See also poet-prophet myth pseudonyms (literary), 289n139 public, the. See crowd, the Punin, Nikolai, 166 puns: in Khlebnikov’s “Numbers” poem, 103; in Khlebnikov’s replacement word for actor, 277n80 (130); in Khlebnikov’s “The Dostyology of racing clouds” poem, 60–61; in Khlebnikov’s “The

Lonely Player” poem, 125; in Maiakovskii’s “A Few Words about Me Myself,” 125; on Pushkin’s name, 60, 61, 77, 113. See also Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin; neologisms pushka/pushki (cannon(s)), and Pushkin’s name, 60, 77, 113 Pushkin, Aleksandr: 1924 jubilee celebrations, 154, 157–58, 247; 1937 jubilee celebrations, 246–47; banishment from Odessa as “flight from Mecca to Medina,” 121; Belinskii on, 37, 55, 84; Belyi on Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Briusov, 44; Blok on, 17–18, 34–35, 252, 292n15 (249); Briusov on, 43–44, 45, 60, 165, 200, 219, 220; Burliuk (David) on, 54, 58, 83, 96; Chaadaev, letter to, 36–37, 42; clarity of, 71–72, 165; and the crowd, portrayal of in his work, 56, 117, 121, 127; on Decembrist poets, 173; Dostoev­ skii on (see under Dostoevskii, Fedor); duel with D’Anthès, 168, 172–73; Gas­ parov on, 266n114; Gogol’ on, 42, 99; Golden Age associated with, 32, 77; Gorlov on, 201; in “Go to Hell” (Futurist manifesto), 25, 26–27; idols in his poetry, 22, 56; Jakobson on, 46, 47, 56, 96, 140, 153–54, 278n8; and Kharms, 20, 246, 247, 248; Lenin’s preference for over Maiakovskii, 280n56; Lermontov’s poetic responses to his death, 39, 41; on liberty and unthinking masses, 121; Lunacharskii on, 157–58, 165, 166, 247; Mandel’shtam on, 27, 32, 41, 48, 270n48; Merezhkovskii on, 37–38, 41– 42, 43; monument to (Moscow), 137–38, 140, 160, 163, 164, 166–67, 247–48; monument to, inauguration (Moscow, 1880), 42, 55–56, 57, 99, 141; on neologisms, 205; “new” works published after revolution (1918–24), 287n93 (219); pagan religion metaphors, 56; in The Poet and the Tsar (film), 161, 184–85; on politics and poetry, 173; popular image of, changes in, 17; Prigov on, 251; puns on his name, 60, 61, 77, 113; readability, reputation for, 71–72; Rozanov on, 72; “Russian genius” notion ascribed to, 192; on Russian history, 36–37, 42; sea and shoreline in his work, 34–36; “seed” metaphor, 245; significance of

Index in Russian culture, 16–17; Siniavskii on, 20, 36, 39, 248–49, 289n129 (229); in “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (Futurist manifesto), 4, 16, 21, 71, 73–74, 80, 163–64; Soviet incarnation of, 157– 58, 164–65, 190, 246–48; sun, association with, 77–79, 189; supernatural/ religious in his work, 38–40; Tiutchev on, 39, 41, 48, 86–87, 88; Transfurist attitude to, 250; trivial works about, 287n93 (219); Trotskii on, 158, 159; Tsve­ taeva on, 35; Tynianov on, 45–46, 217– 20, 226, 246; in Victory over the Sun, allusion to, 77–78; in “The Word as Such” manifesto, 85. See also Futurists and Pushkin; Khlebnikov and Pushkin; Kru­ chenykh and Pushkin; Kru­chenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin; Maiakovskii and Pushkin; Pushkin, Aleksandr (works); Pushkin in Futurist manifestos; Pushkin myth and Russian modernism Pushkin, Aleksandr (works): “André Chénier” (poem), 117, 119–20, 121, 125, 128, 174–75, 181–82; “Before a Noble Spanish Woman” (poem), 250; Boris Godunov (play), 172, 218; Briusov’s new edition of his poetry, 195, 204, 227; The Bronze Horseman (see Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman); “The Bureaucrat and the Poet” (poem), 174; “Conversation of a Bookseller with the Poet” (poem), 173; “The day of true bliss” (bawdy verse), 206; “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” (poem), 117, 121, 122; “Egyptian Nights” (unfinished story”), 44, 164; Eugene Onegin (see Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin); “From the Portuguese” (poem), 227; The Gabrieliad (blasphemous epic), 206; The Gypsies, 89, 116; “Hero” (poem), 79; History of Pugachev, 80; “I have erected a monument” (poem) (see Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument”); “Imitations of the Quran” (poem), 114, 117, 125; “Liberty” (poem), 121; Mozart and Salieri (play), 34; MysteryBouffe (play), 183; “Napoleon” (poem), 79; “Out came a she-bear” (fairy tale), 83; “The Poet” (poem), 34, 35, 56; “The Poet and the Mob” (poem), 117, 127, 174, 177; Poltava (narrative poem), 36, 116, 171; The Prisoner of the Caucasus

337 (narrative poem), 104, 204–5; “The Prophet” (poem) (see Pushkin’s “The Prophet”); The Queen of Spades (novella), 88; Ruslan and Liudmila (mock epic), 74, 106–7, 151–52; “The Shade of Fonvizin” (poem), 169; “The Snowstorm” (short story), 32; “The Song of Prophetic Oleg” (poem), 131; The Stone Guest (poetic drama), 141, 151–52; “Table-Talk” (collection of anecdotes), 271n87; “Tauris” (unfinished poem), 104, 105; “To Natasha” (poem), 274n30 (102); “To the Poet” (poem), 56; “The Upas Tree” poem, 176; “The Wanderer” (poem), 117, 125–26, 130 Pushkin in Futurist manifestos: chapter overview, 21–22; “Go to Hell” manifesto, 67–68; manifestos, role of, 66–68; Marinetti and Russian Futurists, 63–66; Pushkin as significant other, 79–86; reviving Pushkin, 86–92; Russian Futurists’ self-creation myth and identity from past and present, 68–70; Russian Futurists’ use of manifestos, 64–65; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” manifesto, 66, 68, 70–75; Victory over the Sun and Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, 75–79. See also “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1912 Futurist manifesto); Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera) Pushkin myth and Russian modernism: chapter overview, 20–21; cult of Pushkin, 43–46; escaping trap of time, 46–51; Futurist response to Pushkin myth, 28; “Go to Hell” manifesto, Pushkin and tango dancing, 25–27, 62, 164; from idol to icon, 54–62; myth, religion and time, 28–33; myth of rupture, 51–54; order and chaos and The Bronze Horseman, 34–38; Pushkin myth, historicization of, 28, 45, 62; Pushkin myth and Christ, 41, 42, 44; Pushkin myth and Christian motifs, 38–39; Pushkin myth and myth of heroic originality, 37–38; Pushkin myth and poets of 1890s–1920s generation, 27; Pushkin myth and temporality in modernism, 41–42; Pushkin myth and vacancy for national identity figurehead, 39; the sacred and the secular, 38–43; statues, 22, 55, 56–57, 62 Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: Brik on, 225; Cher­nyshev’s example of manipulation

338

Index

Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (continued ) of word boundaries, 206; cloaks (“a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak”), 130; “His tormented shade, perhaps took with it, A holy secret” section, 88; Khleb­ nikov’s zaum poem compared to, 96; Kruchenykh’s comparison of eight lines from to laundry bill, 85; Kru­chenykh’s example from in 500 New Witticisms, 198; Kruchenykh’s quotation from and Jack of Diamonds dispute, 196–97; Maiakovskii on knowing it “by heart” and quote, 158–59; Maiakovskii’s criticism of, 80, 81, 172; Maiakovskii’s invocation of in “Jubilee Poem,” 168, 171–72, 173; Mandel’shtam’s invocation of in “Petersburg Stanzas,” 32; and Pri­gov’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 251 Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument”: bowdlerization of by Zhukovskii, 247; and Fet’s verses for Pushkin monument inauguration, 55; icons vs. memorials of monarchs, 57; intangible memorial, 141; vs. Maiakovskii’s conception of the monument, 175, 180, 181, 184–85, 186–87; in Maiakovskii’s Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy, allusion to, 77; in Victory over the Sun, allusion to, 77–78 Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman: analysis and significance of poem, 35–38; and Belyi’s Petersburg, 32–33, 36, 55; and Fal­conet’s Bronze Horseman sculpture, 142; in Khlebnikov’s poem, allusion to, 55; in Maiakovskii’s “The Fifth International” poem, allusion to, 150–53; in Maiakovskii’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, allusion to, 155–56; in Mandel’shtam’s “Petersburg Stanzas,” invocation of, 32; moving statue, 141; Pasternak on, 36; Peter the Great in, 33, 35–38, 53, 56, 141, 152, 155–56; “On the shore of deserted waves” opening section, 35; Siniavskii on, 36; statue of Peter described as “idol,” 56; time and skipping over a century, 49 Pushkin’s “The Prophet”: and Decembrists, 98, 118; and Isaiah, 97, 98, 117, 118, 122, 123–24; and Khlebnikov’s “Numbers” poem, 103; and Khlebni­k ov’s “The Lonely Player” poem, 110, 111–12, 113, 117–18, 122–24; and Khlebnikov’s The Storming of the Universe drama, 107–8; and Khlebnikov’s “To You” poem, 105;

and Khlebnikov’s treatment of prophecy, 98–100, 103, 107–8, 122–23; and Kiukhel’beker’s “Prophecy” poem, 117– 18; and Maiakovskii’s “It’s Too Soon to Celebrate” controversy, 149–50; moral authority, assumption of, 173; and poetprophet myth, 97–99; and Pushkin’s “André Chénier” poem, compared to, 120; and Pushkin’s “The Desolate Sower of Freedom” poem, parallel with, 122; and Pushkin’s “The Wanderer” poem, parallel with, 126; spiritual thirst theme, 124; “walking corpse” motif, 118 “Pygmalion and Galatea” story, 142 quotations: “fossilized” quotations (Shklov­ skii), 195; Futurists’ use of, 194–97; and Transfurists vs. Moscow Conceptualists, 251 Quran, 114, 121 radicalism: Christian eschatology and modernist radicalism, 11–12; radical materialism and Russian intelligentsia, 40; similarities between political and literary radicalism, 11 Ram, Harsha, 256n12 (8), 264n94, 275n44 (112), 275n69 (118) rationalism, 30, 39–40; the irrational over the rational (Nietzsche), 69 Razin, Sten’ka, 73 readers. See audience realism: critical realism, 98; documentary realism, 228; individual autonomous artist concept, 223; Kruchenykh’s criticism of, 86; Symbolists’ criticism of, 59. See also socialist realism recontextualization, 163, 234, 235, 250 religion: and avant-garde art, 237–38, 239; vs. esoteric empiricism, 136; and Kru­ chenykh, 237–39; and modernism, 40; and myth, 40–41; vs. science, 30, 40. See also atheism; Christianity; Orthodoxy; sacred, the Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 221 Revelation, book of, 89, 108, 114, 230 Rimbaud, Arthur, 12; “Il faut être absolument moderne” (quote), 13 Roberts, Graeme, 292n7 (246) Robespierre, Maximilien, 174 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 144, 196, 221, 228, 234, 289n142 Rogovin, Nikolai, 61

Index Romanov, Konstantin, Grand Duke, 178 Romanticism: artistic individual vs. crowd, 94, 98; and cloaks, 130, 209; individual autonomous artist concept, 223; individual’s ability to shape history, 36; individual’s spontaneous creativity, 52; and Khlebnikov, 94; Kruchenykh on, 88; language as activity, 58; and Lermontov, 86, 98; longing for ego’s dissolution into universe, 102; and ravines, 105; Romantic sublime, 104, 130 Rosenquist, Rod, 259n46 ROSTA windows campaign, 154 Rozanov, Vasilii, 72, 80 Rozhkov, Iurii, 196 rupture: manifestos as, 52, 53, 64; myth of, 51–54; originality and rupture / recurrence paradigms, 31 rusichi term, 85 Russia, cultural/political situation and Futurism, 14–16 Russian alphabet, reform of, 101, 195 Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, 222 Russian history: Chaadaev / Pushkin debate, 36–37, 42; Dostoevskii on, 42; Prince Vladimir’s imposition of Christianity, 54–55, 73 Russian intelligentsia: and liberalism/materialism vs Christianity, 40– 41; and modernist embrace of the archaic, 70– 71; and Orthodoxy, 40 Russian literature: bureaucracy theme, 175; Kruchenykh on pre-Futurist literature, 88–90; mainstream interpretation of Russian literary history, 37; prose and poetry, periods of dominance of, 207. See also poetry; Soviet literature Russian nihilism, 14 Russian Revolution, and religious/Christian imagery, 40, 41 Rutherford, Ernest, 95 Ryleev, Kondratii, 126 sacred, the: vs. the secular and Pushkin myth, 38–43; vs. the secular in Kru­ chenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 237–39 Said, Edward, Beginnings, 19 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 233 samizdat, 193, 250. See also Transponans (samizdat journal); underground (Soviet era) Sandler, Stephanie, 258n38 (17), 259n43 (18)

339 Saran, Franz, 208 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 52–53 science: and the esoteric/mysticism, 94; and modernism, 94–95; and prophecy, 100–104; vs. religion, 30, 40 sculpture: Futurist sculptors, 9. See also statues sea and shoreline, in Pushkin’s works, 34–36 Section for Museums and Preservation of Monuments, 147 secular, the: vs. the sacred and Pushkin myth, 38–43; vs. the sacred in Kru­ chenykh’s 500 New Witticisms, 237–39; vs. the supernatural/religious in Pushkin, 39–40 “seed” metaphor, 245. See also sower, parable of “seeing eyes” metaphor, 124, 127, 245 Seifrid, Thomas, 57 “serpent” metaphor, 113–14 Severianin, Igor’, 25, 67–68, 207 Shakespeare, William, “all’s well that ends well” dictum, 76 Shershenevich, Vadim, 271n87, 278n9 shiftology, 198. See also Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin Shishkov, Aleksandr, 281n62 (162) Shklovskii, Viktor: “Art as a Device” (essay), 202; “estrangement” concept, 62, 195, 288n119; fiction writing, 214; “fossilized” quotations, 195; Jews on the Land (documentary screenplay with Maiakovskii), 214; “The Resurrection of the Word” (essay), 59, 216, 293n35; Striedter on Shklovskii and parody, 288n119 Sievers, Eduard, 208 Sigei, Sergei, 232–33, 250, 251; “Rhymummy: A Versie by aspushkina,” 250 signifier/signified, 52–53, 61, 132, 246 Silver Age, 32, 284n15 (193) Siniavskii, Andrei (pseud. Abram Tertz): and emancipation of art, 252; on Maiakovskii, 248, 253; on Pushkin, 20, 39, 248–49, 289n129 (229); on Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 36; on Stalin, 253; Strolls with Pushkin, 248–49; “What is Socialist Realism?” 253; and Zhol­kov­ skii, 253 Skovoroda, Hryhorii, 33, 47 Skriabin, Aleksandr, 41, 48 “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1912 Futurist manifesto): authors and vision,

340

Index

“Slap in the Face . . . “ (1912) (continued ) 3–4; authors both writers and artists, 9; as brand, 68; contemporaneity defined, 71; and Cubo-Futurists, 8; Dostoevskii, rejection of, 4, 16, 18, 71, 73; as exercise in linguistic hygiene, 82; first lines, 71; idoloclasm, 55, 164–65; Khlebnikov’s “Monument” poem in accompanying miscellany, 55; Kru­chenykh on, 82, 87; literary hacks, criticism of, 81; Liv­ shits’s criticism of, 18; Maiakov­skii’s reference to in Lef article, 159; modernity concept, reification of, 7; mummification of Lenin and derision of ancient Egypt in, 156; publication of after debut of A Trap for Judges, 13; Pushkin, rejection of, 4, 16, 21, 71, 73, 74, 80, 163–64; Pushkin as obvious target, 66; “Pushkin­ ian simplicity” rejected as untrue, 71– 72; Pushkin idol-like, 139; and Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liud­m ila, 74, 106–7; rupture with the past, promotion of, 11; simplistic bombast as means to communicating newness, 16; steamship as metaphor, 73–75; and study of Futurist reception of Pushkin, 258n40; “throw” injunction, 72–73, 74; Tolstoi, rejection of, 4, 16, 18, 71, 73; and Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera), 70; “Whoever does not forget his first love cannot know his last love” section, 86–88 “Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A” (1913 Futurist manifesto), Khlebnikov’s zaum poem placed next to Eugene Onegin excerpt, 96 Slavophilism, 65, 69 Slutskii, Boris, 192 Smirnov, Igor’, 49, 256n12 Smirnova, Aleksandra, 41–42 social class, and Futurists, 83 “socialism in one country” policy, 145 socialist realism: and architecture, 145; and Kruchenykh, 190, 192–93, 200–201; and “literature of fact” doctrine, 222; practical/political system of, 189–90; and present as already achieved utopia, 23, 145; and Pushkin, treatment of, 200, 247, 248; Siniavskii on, 248, 253 Socrates, 47 Sologub, Fedor, 86, 89 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 40, 43, 44; “Prophet of the Future,” 98–99

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 248 Sots Art, 249, 250 Soviet literature: and the classics, 157–58; “learn from the classics” campaign, 157; literary specialists’ role in Soviet literary scene, 207; Soviet appropriation of Gor’kii, 190; Soviet appropriation of Tolstoi, 190; Soviet canonization of Maiakovskii, 179, 189, 244; Soviet incarnation of Pushkin, 157–58, 164–65, 190, 200, 246–48; and Stalinist ideology, 246–47. See also poetry; Russian literature; socialist realism Soviet postmodernism, 249–50, 251, 253 Soviet regime: and building/construction, 142–45; Five-Year Plan (1928–32), 145, 176, 185; monumentalists vs. iconoclasts, 145–46; “socialism in one country” policy, 145; statues, 139, 147–48. See also Stalinism sower, parable of, 121–22, 123, 126–27. See also seed metaphor space, modernist spatialization of time, 49 spectacle, Futurists’ skillful handling of, 68 speed: and the 1920s, 163–64; and Italian Futurists, 75, 163; and Russian Futurists, 73–74, 75. See also machines Stalin, Josef: death of and Kruchenykh, 218; as “life-giving sun” and Union of Writers, 189; as referred to by Siniav­ skii, 253. See also Stalinism Stalinism: and architecture, 145; atemporality of and Maiakovskii, 146; atemporality of vs. archaeology, 185; “building socialism” slogan, 145; death of Lenin (1924) and prefiguration of, 154; and Maiakovskii as officially sanctioned saint, 244; and Maiakovskii monument, 140; and present as already achieved utopia, 23, 139; and Pushkin jubilee celebrations (1937), 246–47; and Russian modernism, 193; and self-presentation of avant-gardists, 15; “socialism in one country” policy, 145. See also socialist realism; Stalin, Josef Stanislavskii, Konstantin, 277n80 (130) Starkina, Sofiia, 273n2 state, the: Khlebnikov’s views on, 116; and Maiakovskii, 147, 175; vs. poets, 150; and statues, 142 statues: and classics’ status, 138–39; and death, 57, 58–59; decree (12 April 1918)

Index on, 147; Futurists’ view of, 56, 57, 139; vs. icons, 57; and language, 57, 58; and Maiakovskii, 139–40, 142, 164, 174, 177, 178; Moscow’s monuments to poets, 137–38; moving statues, 141–42; Pushkin monument inauguration (1880), 42, 55–56, 57; Pushkin monument to (Moscow), 137–38, 140, 160, 163, 164, 166–67, 247–48; and Pushkin myth, 22, 55, 56– 57, 62; as signs, 56, 57–58; and Soviet regime, 139, 147–48; and the state, 142; and time, 139. See also Maiakovskii and Pushkin; Pushkin’s “I have erected a monument” “steamship” metaphor, 73–75 Steiner, Evgeny, 77, 270n50 Steiner, Peter, 285n48 (208), 286n76 (215) Steiner, Rudolf, 40 Sten’ka Razin (film), 73 Stepanova, Varvara, 221, 243 storytelling, and modernity (Benjamin), 211 St. Petersburg: in Belyi’s Petersburg, 31–33; Petersburg myth, 31–32; in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 35–36, 37 Striedter, Jurij, 288n119 (226) Strindberg, August, 101 structuralism, 95 sun: Futurists’ hostility to, 76–77; in Maiakovskii, 77, 78–79; Pushkin’s association with, 77–79, 189. See also Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera) supernatural: in Pushkin’s poetry, 38–39; resurging interest in, 39–40 Surrealism, 192 Symbolists: and Acmeists, 267n133; brand awareness, 268n15; costumes, approach to, 132; fragment, interest in, 286n77 (215); and Futurists, 59–60, 66; Kru­ chenykh on, 59–60, 86, 88, 200; Man­ del’shtam on in “O prirode slova” (essay), 267n136; numerology, interest in, 100 synchrony, 49, 129 Tatlin, Vladimir, 144; monument to Third International, 166 temporality. See time Terent’ev, Igor’, 204–5; Seventeen Rubbish Implements, 229 Tertz, Abram. See Siniavskii, Andrei (pseud. Abram Tertz)

341 theater: amateur theater, 207; Futurists’ take on, 76; Khlebnikov’s proposal for new Slavic terminology, 130; Russian modernist theater and audiences, 134; theater as transformative force (Ivanov), 134–35 Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Catharine, 292n13 (248) Theseus, 111, 113, 132, 133, 135 thing-in-itself (Kant), 103–4 time: and Futurists, 46–47, 48–51; Khlebnikov’s theories of, 50, 52, 92–97, 113– 14, 116, 121, 123, 127–31; and Maiakov­ skii, 48–49, 53–54; and modernism, 14, 30–33, 41–43, 49; and myth, 49; and myth of rupture, 51–54; and Pushkin myth, 47–48; spatialization of, 49; Stalinist atemporality, 146, 185; and statues, 139; time as a circle (Nietzsche), 30; time-outside-of-time, 51 time travel, 49–50, 76, 77, 187 Tiresias, 125 Titanic, sinking of, 75 Tiutchev, Fedor: “29th January 1837” (elegy for Pushkin), 86–87, 88; Futurists and reworkings of Pushkin myth by, 45; in Khlebnikov’s “The Dostyology of racing clouds” poem, 61; “Last Love” (poem), 87–88; poetic response to Pushkin’s death, 39, 41, 48; on Pushkin as “a divine vial,” 39; reverent reader of Pushkin, 86; Tynianov on, 226 Tolstaia-Vechorka, Tat’iana, 237 Tolstoi, Lev: Khlebnikov on, 84; Merezhkovskii on, 38; Rozanov on, 72; in “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” manifesto, 4, 16, 18, 71, 73; Soviet appropriation of, 190 Tomashevskii, Boris, 219 tradition: anti-traditionalism, 11, 15, 18, 19; and modernism, 7–8, 10–11 Transcaucasia. See Caucasus Transfurists, 250–51 Transponans (samizdat journal), 250, 251 Trap for Judges, A (Burliuk et al., 1910), 13 Trap for Judges, A, 2 (Burliuk et al., 1913), 285n40 (204) Trediakovskii, Vasilii, 82 Tret’iakov, Sergei, 161–62, 190, 222, 286n59 Trotskii, Lev: criticism of Futurism, 158, 201; Literature and Revolution, 158, 159; on Pushkin, 158, 159

342

Index

Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 46, 95 “Trumpet of the Martians, The” (manifesto by Khlebnikov), 91 Tsongkhapa, 47 Tsushima defeat (1905), 55, 95 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 35, 44, 165, 207 Tufanov, Aleksandr, 252–53 Turbin, Viktor, 62 Turgenev, Ivan, 37, 42, 192 Tynianov, Iurii: “cannonball” metaphor, 220, 225; cinema and conception of poetry, 214; on creative freedom, 288n116 (225); on Dostoevskii, 218, 226; fiction writing, 214; fragment, interest in, 215; on Futurism and zaum, 20, 216–17, 220; “Interval” (essay), 218; on Khlebnikov, 20, 216; and Kruchenykh’s 500 New Puns and Witticisms from Pushkin, 215–21, 224–27; Lieutenant Kizhe (novella), 217; Lieutenant Kizhe (screenplay), 217; on literary evolution, 26–27, 162, 192, 216– 17, 219–21, 225, 226; on Maiakovskii, 216; on meaning creation, 215–16; on Nekrasov, 226; “On the Literary Fact” (essay), 45, 216–17, 219–21, 281n63 (162), 284n13 (192), 286n76 (215); “On Parody” (essay), 225, 226; parody defined, 226; “The Pretend Pushkin” (essay), 218–19; The Problem of Verse Language, 215–16, 217; on Pushkin, 45–46, 217–20, 226, 246; on “reader reception” concept, 225, 288n120; on readers and writers, 225, 226; on “retreat” of poetry in 1920s, 207; smena (replacement), use of term by, 215; Striedter on Tynianov and parody, 288n119 (226); on Tiutchev, 226 Tzara, Tristan, 213; “How to Make a Dada Poem,” 230 underground (Soviet era), 23, 189, 250, 252. See also samizdat Union of Writers, 189, 190 Uspenskii, Boris, 54–55 V., Zina, 83 Vaiskopf, Mikhail, 280n42 Vasil’ev, Pavel, 190 Vel’tman, Aleksandr, 265n95 Vengerov, Semen, 96 Veresaev, Vikentii, 43, 44 Vertov, Dziga, 185, 210, 228 Viazemskii, Petr, 121, 172

Victory over the Sun (Futurist opera): collaborative work (libretto by Kru­chenykh), 76; constant beginning vs. usual happy endings, 76, 78; juxtaposition of the old with the new, 76; line at the beginning, 76; line at the end, 78, 244; Malevich’s costumes, 76, 132; opening scene, 76; part of Futurists’ dramatic self-image, 75–76; sense of disenchantment with utopia, 78; soccer players, 69, 76; sun and Pushkin, 77–79; sun victory over, as inauguration of new era, 70, 76; tearing of stage curtain, 76; time travel, 50, 76, 77 Vinokur, Grigorii, 281n61 (162) Virgil, 169 visual art, and collage/photomontage, 196 Vladimir, Prince, 54–55, 73 Volkonskaia, Varvara, 274n30 (102 Wagner, Richard, 134 “walking corpse” motif, 118 “wanderer” motif, 130 War Communism, 154 Wells, H. G., The Time Machine, 265n95 Wilde, Oscar, Vera, or, The Nihilists, 14–15 Williams, William Carlos, “The local is the only thing that is universal” quote, 255n7 (7) Wittgenstein, L., 20 Wollaeger, Mark A., 255n6 Woolf, Virginia, 30, 31 “Word as Such, The” (manifesto by Khlebni­ kov and Kruchenykh), 84–85, 195, 200– 201, 267n137 (60), 278n14 (143), 284n23 (196) wordplay. See puns Working Group for Objective Analysis, 221 Yampolsky, Mikhail. See Iampolski, Mikhail Yeats, W. B., 29, 92, 94, 128 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 78; We (novel), 144 zaum (“transrational” poetry): fraction of Futurists’ output, 9; Futurists’ preference for unrepeatable zaum, 241; and Khlebnikov, 47, 61, 96, 132; and Kru­ chenykh (see under Kruchenykh, Alek­ sei); and manifestos, 67; and OBERIU group, 253; occasionalism of, 62; and originality, 53, 235; and Pushkin’s

Index name, punning on, 60; and rejection of mediation/symbol, 60; and rupture, 52–53; and Transfurists, 251; Tynianov on Futurism and zaum, 20, 216–17, 220; zaum’s second generation and Order of Zaumniks, 252–53 Zdanevich, Il’ia, 229 Zharov, Aleksandr, 218 Zheverzheev, Levskii, 47, 74, 91

343 zhiznestroenie (life-building), 144 zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation), 144, 257n30 (13) Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 73; “Strolls through Maiakovskii” (article), 253 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 247 Ziarek, Krzystof, 265n104 Zina V., 83 Zoroastrianism, 114–15

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