Patriotism and Pacifism: the Year 1914 for Futurist Vladimir Mayakovskiĭ

Chapter 7 Patriotism and Pacifism: The Year 1914 for Futurist Vladimir Mayakovskiĭ

Luigi Magarotto

1. On October 26th, 1914, the famous Russian philosopher Nikolaĭ Berdyaev wrote an article for the Petersburg newspaper entitled “The Messenger of the Stock Exchange” (“Birzhevye Vedomosti”):

The futurist war of the Germans has already given results. A part of the futurist program of Marinetti was achieved by German soldiers. They destroy old culture, raze ancient towns, churches, rob works of art. In order to justify this barbarism, German newspapers write that there is no reason to be sad because of the destruction of the ancient monuments, being Germany called to build new and more beautiful monuments. This is an absolutely futurist attitude that it was difficult to expect from Germany.156

According to Berdyaev:

Futurism had to originate in Italy, in the land of the ancient and great Latin culture. Futurism is the feverish attempt to shake off the exhaust- ing power of passed greatness, to burn the past in order to begin to live freely in a different way, creating a new life and a new beauty, which you may not compare with neither the early nor with the late Renaissance. In the futurist movement there is the insolence of the poor children of great fathers. [. . .] Futurism as ideology had to blossom in Italy, however, in Italy the futurist ideology has reached no authentic result. These results can be rather observed in the futurist war of the German soldiers.157

156 Berdyaev 2004: 19. 157 Ibidem: 92–93.

Russian futurists were also against the past. They promised to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevskiĭ, Tolstoĭ overboard from the Ship of Modernity” and for them “The Academy and Pushkin [were] less intelligible than hieroglyphics”.158 Berdyaev did not put the Russian futurists on trial because, in his opinion, there was no exhaustive power of passed greatness in Russia. Therefore, Russian futurists were simply modest followers, foolish imitators of the Italian futurists. In 1915, Maksim Gor’kiĭ expressed a similar opinion; indeed, he even denied the existence of Russian futurism:

In Russia there is no futurism, the authentic one, as the primitive Italian futurism represented by Marinetti. [. . .] You understand, in Italy oppress museums, beautiful architecture, the ancient sources of the culture and outdated ideas. They must get out of these bulky protections, jump out of this shell and Marinetti with the strength of his talent and the colour of his word infects youth and leads to an undoubted thaw. You cannot stop him. On the contrary, here in Russia, we have no fear of antiquity, it does not oppress us.159

Nevertheless, if the basis of both Italian and Russian futurism was a deep aversion towards the culture of the past, the attitudes of the two movements toward the war was very different. In his manifesto from 1909, Marinetti glorified war as the only “hygiene of the world”, and in 1911, during the invasion of Libya, he published his serialized futurist reportage entitled Battle of Tripoli (La battaglia di Tripoli), where he celebrated the war as a form of adventure and theatre. In 1914, when the First World War broke out, the Italian futurists showed an unbridled interventionism by using crude, vulgar and ferocious arguments. With the intention of pushing the Italian government towards war, on October 10th, 1913, the Italian futurists wrote a Political Futurist Program (Programma politico futurista) that was openly anti-pacifist. It glorified the conception of war and, once again, considered war to be the only hygiene of the world. At the beginning of 1914, Giacomo Balla published a work entitled Futurist Manifesto of the Man’s Suit (Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo) in Italian. Almost immediately after, he translated the work into French and on May 20th, he gave it to the press under the title of Le vêtement masculin futuriste. Balla, however, was an ardent interventionist and a few months later, he prepared a

158 Burlyuk, Kruchënykh, Mayakovskiĭ, Khlebnikov 2000: 41. 159 Gor’kiĭ 2006: 252–253.