–

“Here, as always, we check the theory of art against its practice. Practical outcroppings of the ideas of formalism were the early ideology of Russian futurism, the propagation of abstruse language, the absence of plots, etc. We see that practice has led the futurists to loudly repudiate all they had asserted in their manifestoes on the basis of theoretical assumptions: ‘We have destroyed all the punctuation marks, thereby for the first time emphasizing and recognizing the role of the word mass’ – they claimed in paragraph 6 of their manifesto.

In actual fact this means that the futurists have not only done away with punctuation marks in their verse-writing practices but have introduced a whole series of new punctuation marks, such as the famous dashed line of Maiakovskii’s verse.

‘We have shattered the rhythm,’ they announced in paragraph 8 of their manifesto, and in Pasternak’s poetry they introduced a sample of choice and sophisticated rhythmic compositions that had been long absent in Russian poetry.

They preached abstruse language, proclaiming in paragraph 5 that abstruseness awakens creative fantasy and gives it freedom, does not offend it with anything concrete, since ‘sense or meaning make a word shrink, contort, and stay rigid as if it were petrified.’ Actually however, they brought sense and meaning in art to hitherto unattained heights of sophistication, while Maiakovskii was busy composing advertisements in verse for Mossel’prom (Association of Moscow Enterprises Processing Agricultural Products).

They preached abstraction, but in fact composed exceptionally meaningful works, with both plots and subjects. They repudiated the old themes and plots, but Maiakovskii worked on the motif of tragic love, which can hardly be called novel. Thus, Russian futurism set up a natural experiment for formalistic principles, and that experiment showed beyond any doubt the incorrectness of the prevalent views.”

– Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art, 1922, pp. 61-2

Image: Kazimir Malevich, The Knifegrinder: Principle of Glittering, 1912-13