Russian Futurist and Avant-Garde Works and Aesthetics

Abstract

All three substantial articles in this issue of Russian Studies in Literature consider the connection of art (verbal or pictorial) with politics, and with leftist politics in particular. All three are concerned with the interactions of literature and visual arts, which typified the activities of the Russian Futurists as well as the scholars who studied them and subsequent generations of avant-garde artists and writers who learned from or continued their strategies. The Futurists (especially Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, each in his own way) have exerted an enduring attraction for writers and scholars abroad, as well as for generations of creative artists working in Russia or in Russian. Evgenii Demenok’s “Graphic Symbols: Khlebnikov, Burliuk, and Kruchenykh” focuses primarily on the Futurist poet Velimit Khlebnikov (1885-1922) as a visual artist. Biographical and bibliographic data are drawn from various memoirists, especially David Burliuk but with copious citations from Roman Jakobson, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshits, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Anyone who wants to know more about Khlebnikov’s life and personality, and especially anyone interested in the interactions of visual art and poetry in Futurist practice, will find a wealth of information here. Demenok draws especially on material from David and Mariia Burliuk’s journal Color and Rhyme, published in both English and Russian in New York City through the 1970s. Anatolii Rykov’s article is entitled “Between a Conservative Revolution and Bolshevism: Nikolai Punin’s Total Aesthetic Mobilization.” Art historian Nikolai Punin (1888-1953) may be best known to readers of this journal Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, 2017, pp. 103–104. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group ISSN: 1061-1975 (print)/ISSN 1944-7167 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611975.2017.1424434