Futurists - who is this? Russian futurists. Futurists of the Silver Age

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Futurism (from the Latin word futurum, meaning "future") is an avant-garde trend in the art of Europe in 1910-1920, mainly in Russia and Italy. It sought to create the so-called "art of the future", as the representatives of this direction declared in manifestos.

In the work of F. T. Marinetti, the Italian poet, Russian Cubo-Futurists from the Gilea society, as well as members of the Mezzanine of Poetry, the Association of Ego-Futurists, and the Centrifuge, traditional culture was denied as a legacy of the "past", was developed aesthetics of the machine industry and urbanism.

Characteristics

The painting of this direction is characterized by influxes of forms, shifts, multiple repetitions of various motifs, as if summing up impressions received as a result of rapid movement. In Italy, the futurists are G. Severini, U. Boccioni. In literature, there is a mixture of fiction and documentary material, in poetry -experimentation with the language ("zaum" or "words on the loose"). Russian futurist poets are V. V. Mayakovsky, V. V. Khlebnikov, I. Severyanin, A. E. Kruchenykh.

Group

This direction arose in 1910-1912, simultaneously with acmeism. Acmeists, futurists and representatives of other currents of modernism in their work and association were internally contradictory. The most significant of the Futurist groups, later called Cubo-Futurism, united various poets of the Silver Age. Its most famous futurist poets are V. V. Khlebnikov, D. D. Burliuk, V. V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh, V. V. Mayakovsky and others. The ego-futurism of I. Severyanin (poet I. V. Lotarev, years of life - 1887-1941) was one of the varieties of this trend. Famous Soviet poets B. L. Pasternak and N. N. Aseev began their work in the Centrifuge group.

Freedom of poetic speech

Russian futurists proclaimed the independence of form from content, its revolution, the unlimited freedom of poetic speech. They completely abandoned literary traditions. In a manifesto with the rather daring title "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste", published by them in the collection of the same name in 1912, representatives of this trend called for throwing such recognized authorities as Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy from the "Steamboat of Modernity". A. Kruchenykh defended the poet's right to create his own, "abstruse" language, which does not have a specificvalues. In his poems, speech was indeed replaced by an incomprehensible, meaningless set of words. But V. V. Kamensky (years of life - 1884-1961) and V. Khlebnikov (years of life - 1885-1922) were able to carry out very interesting experiments with language in their work, which had a fruitful effect on Russian poetry.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

The famous poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was also a Futurist. His first poems were published in 1912. Vladimir Vladimirovich brought his own theme to this direction, which from the very beginning distinguished him from other representatives. Mayakovsky the futurist actively advocated the creation of something new in the life of society, and not just against various "junk".

In the time preceding the revolution of 1917, the poet was a revolutionary romantic who denounced the so-called realm of "fat", foresaw the impending revolutionary storm. Denying the entire system of capitalist relations, he proclaimed the humanistic faith in man in such poems as "Flute-Spine", "Cloud in Pants", "Man", "War and Peace". The theme of the poem "A Cloud in Pants" published in 1915 (only in a truncated form by censorship) was later defined by the poet himself as 4 cries of "Down!": Down with love, art, system and religion. He was one of the first Russian poets to show in his poems the whole truth of the new society.

Nihilism

In the years before the revolution, in Russian poetry there werebright personalities, which were difficult to attribute to a specific literary movement. These are M. I. Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) and M. A. Voloshin (1877-1932). After 1910, another new trend appeared - futurism, which opposed itself to all literature, not only of the past, but also of the present. It entered the world with the desire to subvert all ideals. Nihilism is also visible in the external design of collections of poets, which were published on the reverse side of the wallpaper or on wrapping paper, as well as in their titles - "Dead Moon", "Mare's Milk" and other typical poems of the futurists.

A slap in the face of public taste

A declaration was printed in the first collection "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" published in 1912. It was signed by famous futurist poets. They were Andrei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. In it, they asserted their exclusive right to be the spokesmen of their era. Poets denied as ideals Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, but at the same time Balmont, his "perfumed fornication", Andreev with his "dirty slime", Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Alexander Kuprin and others.

Rejecting everything, the futurists' manifesto established "lightning bolts" of the self-valuable word. Not trying, unlike Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, to overthrow the existing social system, they only wanted to renew its forms. In the Russian version, the slogan "War is the only hygiene of the world", which was considered the basis of the Italianfuturism, was weakened, however, according to Valery Bryusov, this ideology still "appeared between the lines".

According to Vadim Shershenevich, the futurists of the Silver Age for the first time raised the form to the proper height, giving it the significance of the main, self-targeting element of the work. They categorically rejected poems that are written only for the sake of an idea. Therefore, a lot of formal declared principles arose.

New language

Velimir Khlebnikov, another Futurist theorist, proclaimed a new "abstruse" language as the future language of the world. In it, the word loses its semantic meaning, acquiring a subjective connotation instead. So, vowels were understood as space and time (the nature of aspiration), consonants - sound, paint, smell. In an effort to expand linguistic boundaries, he suggests creating words according to the root feature (roots: charm …, chur … - "we enchant and shun").

The futurists countered the aestheticism of symbolistic and especially acmeistic poetry with an underlined de-aestheticization. For example, "poetry is a frayed girl" by David Burliuk. Valery Bryusov, in his review "The Year of Russian Poetry" (1914), noted, noting the conscious coarseness of the futurists' poems, that it is not enough to scold everything that is outside one's own circle in order to find something new. He pointed out that all alleged innovations of these poets are imaginary. We meet them in the poetry of the 18th century, in Virgil and Pushkin, and the theory of sounds-colors was proposed by Theophile Gauthier.

Difficultiesrelationships

It is interesting that, with all the denial in art, the Futurists of the Silver Age still feel the continuity of symbolism. So, Alexander Blok, who watched the work of Igor Severyanin, says with concern that he lacks a theme, and in an article of 1915 Valery Bryusov notes that the inability to think and lack of knowledge belittle his poetry. He reproaches Severyanin for vulgarity, bad taste, and in particular criticizes his poems about the war.

Even back in 1912, Alexander Blok said that he was afraid that the modernists did not have a core. Soon the concepts of "futurist" and "hooligan" became synonymous for the moderate public of those years. The press eagerly followed the "exploits" of the creators of the new art. Thanks to this, they became known to the general population, attracted great attention. The history of this trend in Russia is a complex relationship between representatives of the four main groups, each of which believed that it was she who expressed the "true" futurism, and fiercely argued with others, challenging the main role. This struggle took place in the streams of mutual criticism, which increased their isolation and hostility. But sometimes members of different groups moved from one to another or approached.