Robot musicians! Moon cities! Immortality in pill form! Mystified by the breakneck pace of the Industrial Revolution, artists and scientists alike were thinking big at the turn of the 20th Century. Nothing seemed out of reach. Many of the everyday conveniences we take for granted – automobiles, bicycles, refrigerators, street lights, air conditioning, vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, etc. – were either novelties or yet to be invented. Every year – nearly every day – a new invention promised to revolutionize modern life. Influenced by the Italian futurist movement, a network of daring young artists in early 20th-century Russia advocated pushing art to its extremes in an effort to keep up with the times. The futurists were fascinated by the rapid development of urban life and worried that aspects of Russian culture lagged behind, including the Russian language itself. In perhaps his best-known poem, the futurist Velimir Khlebnikov seeks new uses for old words:
Invocation of Laughter
By Velimir Khlebnikov
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly
O, laugh out laugheringly
O, belaughable laughterhood – the laughter of laughering laughers!
O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists!
Laughily, laughily,
Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings
Laughlets, laughlets.
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
(Thoughts and prayers for the poor translator.) “Unlaugh” is not a word. But why not? In this poem, Khlebnikov adds existing suffixes and prefixes to the root “laugh,” many of which aren’t used in those particular configurations. Literary scholar Nandaka Maduranga writes that the poem “explores numerous possibilities that are embedded in language, but that had hitherto been ignored.”
Khlebnikov frequently uses intuitive word-building rules to create new vocabulary that he does not need to define:
Rus’, you are but a kiss in the frost
By Velimir Khlebnikov
Rus’, you are but a kiss in the frost!
The midnight roads are blueing.
Lips joined in a blue lightning bolt,
Clasped, he and she are blueing.
Sometimes at night lightning would spark
From the caress of two mouths.
And a blueing, languished lightning bolt
Would swiftly outline two coats.
And the night would shine intelligent and dark.
We can say something is “turning blue,” but we can’t say something is “blueing.” Why not? What is a word, anyways? Who has the authority to tell us what are “real” words? I am determined to use the word “blueing” on the first page of my next book.
The philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, who died in 1903, predicted that scientific advancements promised radical life extension and, very soon perhaps, even an affordable path to biological immortality. Khlebnikov himself seemed to question if the end of life was a fixed certainty:
When Horses Die
By Velimir Khlebnikov
When horses die, they breathe,
When grasses die, they wither,
When suns die, they go out,
When people die, they sing songs.
Futurism was by no means limited to poetry. The movement, which flourished between 1912 and 1921, encapsulated a wide breadth of art, including painting, drawing, architecture, typography, cinema, and even fashion design.
The Golden Age writers of Russian yesteryear, who we know and a love, were despised by the futurists. Tolstoy, Dosteovsky and Pushkin, according to the futurists’ manifesto, should be “heaved overboard on the steamship of modernity.” Ultimately, they lost this bet against history. Dosteovsky is read by millions today and taught in universities across the world. The futurists have been largely forgotten. I remember a conversation with a scholar of Russian literature at a conference a few years ago. He had no idea who the futurists were. Perhaps the most famous futurist poet (famous at the time, that is) was Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was a rather intense fellow. He advocated poetry as a channel to glorify the individual, writing poems with titles like “To His Beloved Self, The Poet Dedicates These Lines,” which includes the lines “Where am I to find a beloved equal to myself? / Such a woman has no place in the tiny heavens!” A bit full of yourself there, Mayakovsky? He continues praising himself in his poem “A Cloud in Trousers:”
No gray hair in my soul,
no doddering tenderness.
I rock the world with the thunder of my glorious voice,
strolling, looking good –
twenty-two.
If you prefer,
I’ll be pure raging meat,
or if you prefer,
as the sky changes tone,
I’ll be absolutely tender,
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
You can probably tell where this is going. The communist authorities, once they took power, were apprehensive at Mayakovksy’s glorification of the self rather than the larger social class. Other futurists sought to pare poetry down to its bare minimal elements. There was a minimalist sub-movement within futurism that too sought to push limits. What is a poem, after all? Some of Vasilisk Gnedov’s poems aren’t even a full word. One of his poems (untitled) is simply “Cruelt.” Another, “The Poem of the End,” is nothing more than a blank page. One of my favorite Russian minimalist poems is “Burial (A Sonnet)” by Vladislav Khodasevich.
Burial (A Sonnet)
By Vladislav Khodasevich
Forehead –
Chalk.
Coffin
Pale.
Priest
Sang.
Shaft
Bang!
Day
Sacred!
Crypt
Blind.
Shade –
To hell!
The futurists were involved heavily in politics and social issues of the day. They ridiculed the traditional way of life in Imperial Russia and advocated radical change. Mayakovsky in particular harbored savage hatred for Tsar Nicholas II and heaped praise upon revolutionaries like Lenin, who he idolized as a hero. Unfortunately for Mayakovsky and the rest of the futurists, that feeling wasn’t always mutual. It wasn’t long before the futurists had run afoul of the authorities in Communist Russia. The futurists had high aspirations after the revolution. They dreamed of dominating the artistic spheres of influence under the new regime, and did their best to help the cultural apparatus of the new government. But it was not to be so. Futurism began sputtering out in the 1920s. Mayakovsky’s death in 1930 was ruled a suicide, though the circumstances remain mysterious.
Then Joseph Stalin came to power and they were all put up against a wall and shot. The End.
