The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique l The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique Edited and introduced by Christopher Pike Translated by Christopher Pike and Joe Andrew Prefaces, notes and afterword provided by Gerard Conio and translated by Rupert Swyer IINKI LINKS The Russian journal from which each of these articles has been translated is signalled at the start of each piece. This edition first published in 1979 by Ink Links Ltd, 271 Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2JS © English translation rights Ink Links Ltd., 1979- The prefaces and afterword by Gerard Conio, as well as his notes to several of the articles, are taken, with permission, from the book, Le Formalisme et le futurisme russes devant le marxisme, published by Editions l’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1975. © Editions l’Age d’Homme, 1975. The translation of the Gerard Conio contributions by Rupert Swyer: © English language rights Ink Links Ltd., 1979. The introduction by Christopher Pike: © World rights, Ink Links Ltd., 1979. No part of this book may be reproduced except for brief excerpts for criticism. ISBN 0906133 149 cloth Set in lOpt Garamond by Red Lion Setters, 22, Brownlow Mews, London WC1N 2LA. Printed by Whitstable Litho, Millstrood Road, Whitstable, Kent and bound by Hunter and Foulis, Bridgeside Works, McDonald Road, Edinburgh EH7 4NP. QOotfa < F'/p IQiq Contents Introduction by Christopher Pike page 1 Section I: Debate on the Formal Method 39 Preface by Gerard Conio 41 <1 Concerning the Question of the “Formalists” by B.M. Bykhenbaum 49 2 From First Source by P.N. Sakulin 63 3 The Method and the Apologist by S. Bobrov 68 X 4 Formalism in the Science of Art by A. V. Lunacharsky 72 d 5 On the Formal Method by P.S. Kogan 88 6 Concerning B.M. Eykhenbaum by V. Polyansky 92 Section II: Formalism and Futurism 99 Preface by Gerard Conio 101 1 Interval (To Boris Pasternak) by Y. Tynyanov 106 'Ll About Khlebnikov by Y. Tynyanov 144 Section III: Socialist Revolution and Cultural Revolution 159 Preface by Gerard Conio 161 1 On Futurisms and Futurism (concerning comrade Trotsky’s article) by N. Gorlov 169 sJ 2 Futurism and Revolution by N. Gorlov 181 Afterword by Gerard Conio 243 CHRISTOPHER PIKE Introduction: Russian Formalism and Futurism The Beginning The revolution which took place in Russia in 1917 was preceded and survived by similarly radical changes in the Russian cultural scene, in particular in the fields of poetry and poetics. The first of these developments in about 1910 was the reaction of a number of progressive young artist-writers (including Sergei Bobrov, David Burliuk, Vassily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Benedict Livshits and Vladimir Mayakovsky) against the prevailing artistic canons of traditional nineteenth-century realism on the one hand and symbolism on the other. These excited, brash, challenging writers existed in various loose and fluid groupings until about 1930; all of them, reluctantly or otherwise, came to accept the name of “futurists” to describe their attitudes and their art. Shortly after the emergence of the first kinds of futurist literature, and to a considerable extent under their influence, there were formed in Moscow and St. Petersburg between 1914 and 1916 two groups of original and energetic young linguists and students of literature who, in reaction against the traditional impressionistic, “psychological” and “bio¬ graphical” academic study of literature, sought instead to apply the principles, methods and results of the newly discovered linguistic science to the phenomenon of literature. These innovative linguists, theorists and critics (headed by Boris Eykhenbaum, Roman Jakobson and Victor Shklovsky) came to be known, quite against their wishes, as the “formalists”. Both groups attempted to achieve “purity” and autonomy within their own fields: the futurists to create a pure new poetry, purged of the psychological, religious and mystical baggage of previous Russian poetic forms, a poetry which would for the first time possess a valid and completely contemporary relationship to modern reality; the formalists to develop a pure study of literature, a poetics, in which literature would be treated as an independent phenomenon in its own right, its specific features as “literature” discovered and their 2 INTRODUCTION relationships formulated—free for the first time from the vision of literature simply as an extra dimension, a content-form for the self- expression of artist or society. With the coming of the October revolution in 1917, both the formalists and the futurists found them¬ selves in a society to which they were naturally more sympathetic on the whole, than the old society against whose cultural attitudes and procedures they had been rebelling. At the same time, the pressure of this circumstance, together with the ensuing debate over the culture that was to be preserved and created by the new society, forced both formalists and futurists to re-examine their previous, simply adopted stances of rejection and rebellion. Both groups strove over the next decade or so to defend and further their positions in the context of Marxism and the calls for “proletarian culture”. They thus became principal participants in this debate and, after the gradual erosion of their security, prominent victims of the debate’s suppression. The cultural environment of Russian futurism The complex phenomenon of Russian symbolism is surprisingly similar in its essential qualities to the futurism which attempted to destroy its all-pervading influence. This similarity of essence is the explanation for the fact that many futurist poets began as imitators of symbolism and were indeed sometimes supported by elder figures in the symbolist movement; in fact, even in its later stages, futurism was viewed by several influential critics as simply a new kind of symbolism. The origins of Russian symbolism, which came into being around the 1890s, lay in the attempt to remove literature and art from the political-social dictates of civic realism (“Babylonian captivity”, as the Acmeist poets described it), which had till then dominated nineteenth-century Russian literature, and to re-discover a true aesthe¬ tic of art. The symbolists were seekers of the same purity and autonomy for art as the futurists were to be later. To this end, they attempted to develop new poetic vocabulary and to write poetry of words rather than ideas, poetry whose language would attain a reality beyond the prosaic naturalism which, they believed, characterised realist writing. As the movement developed, however, its theorists and practitioners (principally, Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Alexan¬ der Blok, Valery Bryusov and Vyacheslav Ivanov) became caught up in the tumultous religious and metaphysical revival of the turn of the century. Their attention to questions of religion and metaphysics extended ultimately into the spheres of mysticism and the occult. As a CHRISTOPHER PIKE 3 result, the poetry of the symbolists became more and more dense, super-refined, recherche and elitist: the reality, or realities, to which they directed their poetic language became increasingly abstract, remote and mysterious. Eventually, the intense rarefication of symbol¬ ist theory and practice led to the dissolution of the movement at the end of the first decade of this century, its major poets surviving as individual literary figures. [1] * It is between these two poetic loci, the purity of the poetic word on the one hand and the nature of the referential reality on the other, that the relationship of futurism to symbolism (and, incidentally, to realism) may be constructively defined. The Russian futurist poets followed the symbolists in the extraordinary attention which they gave to the word as the foundation of poetry, but reacted against what symbolism had become in their rejection of poetry’s connection with abstract, non-actual realities, the use of the word as “magic”, as an entry to super-real planes of being. Instead, the futurists (in contrast to their name, perhaps) always directed their words towards a reality which was in some sense immediate, concrete, actual. To use Tynyanov’s statement of their procedure (as found in his articles in this collection), they “aimed” their “word” at the “thing”, and not at an idea or an ideal. The futurists almost exclusively rejected the metaphysical in favour of the physical (in all its aspects). In the immediacy of their art, the futurists reflect their other principal origin, as described by Vladimir Markov in his definitive study Russian Futurism. [2] This was European and Russian avant- garde art, namely impressionism and post-impressionism (including primitivism and cubism). The closeness of the relationship between visual arts and literature is a feature of most of the European movements in art at the time in question, not just futurism, but also symbolism, impressionism and expressionism (the latter curiously absent from the foreground of Russian art, although Markov interest¬ ingly identifies in literature Pasternak and Mayakovsky as being, in their different ways, the ‘ ‘truest Russian representatives of this aesthetic kind” [3]). Camilla Gray in her book The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 [4\ points out the way in which this universal vision of art links disparate movements in Russian art from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. She classifies as “one of the most impor¬ tant innovations” of the “World of Art” movement (the dominant ‘The notes to the introduction are to be found at its close, a procedure we have followed with each major article and preface. The notes for the group of short articles in section one are, however, all grouped together at the end of the section. 4 INTRODUCTION turn-of-the-century artistic movement in Russia, corresponding to “Art Nouveau” in the West) specifically “the conception of art as a unity, of a basic inter-relationship and common source of all inspira¬ tion regardless of the medium of expression”.