Rapture Read online

  Hylaea’s “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” appeared in December 1912, signed by Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and David Burliuk. Each of them would subsequently have ample justification for laying claim to recognition as chief Futurist, and Zdanevich moved to position himself in this competition for first place by criticizing their poetry in his lectures and pseudonymous articles.10 Burliuk, always more impresario and instigator than poet and painter, was easiest to dismiss. Zdanevich believed that Mayakovsky, though talented, simply extended the Decadent trend in Russian poetry into cruder, less cultivated forms. He always thought of Khlebnikov as a genuine poet, new and exciting, although he, too, in Zdanevich’s opinion, owed most of his technique to Russian Symbolist tradition and demonstrated little essential connection to Futurism as Marinetti had defined it. Kruchenykh was the real wild card, dangerously exploring genuine abstraction in poetry and reducing text to texture. Zdanevich felt threatened enough to tactically accuse Kruchenykh of plagiarizing one of Larionov’s manifestos when Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov published their programmatic “The Word as Such” in September 1913. Still, Zdanevich characterized Kruchenykh’s experiments in Pomade, which featured the poem “dyr bul shchyl,” the debut of Russian Futurist “beyonsense” (zaum), as somehow overly sentimental.11

  Zdanevich was at last preparing to publicize the new ideas he’d been working up together with Larionov and his friend, the painter Mikhail LeDantu, when he encountered Kruchenykh’s abstract poems. Futurism had done its work, but in rejecting the past, it encouraged a new academicism. Each artistic movement claimed to promote an exclusively correct style justified by a superior realism grounded in turn on a scientific or mystical fact. That fact might be Symbolist access to unseen metaphysical realities, traditional realist representation of the world and life “as it is,” Impressionist truth in an artist’s immediate perception, or Futurist reference to the physiology of optic nerves. They began to promote “everythingism” to interrupt this endless succession of novelties without shutting down fruitful experimentation in the arts. Everythingism was founded on recognizing the sheer conventionality of works of art, their ultimate divorce from any claim to a basis outside of artistic activity. For Zdanevich, everythingism truly allowed artists to overcome the constraints of time and space by encouraging them to draw on all possible means of communication, no matter where or when they were first discovered and developed. “Everythingks” would not reject tradition, but neither would they respect the proprieties of style. To the charge of eclecticism, Zdanevich asserted a fundamental distinction: Eclectics borrowed and mixed superficial forms indiscriminately for equally superficial effect without understanding their artistic function and reason for being; an everythingk finds an integral place, fully motivated by the artistic problem or task addressed in the work, for every borrowed element and technique so that it contributes to the work’s unique overall structure and texture (the main considerations for judging an abstract work). By drawing on disparate sources and techniques, the everythingk artist weighs and offsets their peculiar distorting effects to achieve “equilibrium” in each work.

  Although this notion of equilibrium might suggest that everythingism is a retrograde reassertion of the artist’s genius for creating organic works, an important new note in Zdanevich’s drafts for an everythingist manifesto invokes concerns that would also arise among the Zurich Dadaists, especially Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. Zdanevich urges artists to strive for “fullness” in a work without any concern for achieving coherence by excluding contradictions. At one level, this meant integrating chance into strictly composed structures. Zdanevich expected equilibrium to emerge from forms that exploit both simultaneity and sequence (or perhaps, as in Saussure’s lectures on language, “synchrony” and “diachrony”) and exist at once in a state of authentic originality and utter dependence on other works (“the work as such and as a part of art”), relying on open theft as a strategy.12 Zdanevich and Larionov even released a “Da Manifesto” in the form of an imagined interview during which they answer “yes” to all questions posed, no matter how contradictory the result.13

  Zdanevich felt strongly the need to move beyond his role as propagandist and aspiring theorist toward practical application of everythingism—toward the moment when he could be called a poet. In October 1913, he attacked Nikolai Kul’bin, an older proponent of Futurism, in another talk from the stage of the Stray Dog, as though he were chiding himself: “But revolution only turns out to be revolution if you get things done.”14 He had, in a way seemingly uncharacteristic for the hotheaded avant-garde, put off publicizing everythingism for several months until he could connect it at least to Goncharova’s work, if not his own. He delivered two lectures on “Natalia Goncharova and Everythingism” to accompany exhibitions of her work in Moscow in November 1913 and in St. Petersburg in March 1914. For our purposes, the lectures are notable not only because Zdanevich first publicly presents everythingk positions, but also because he makes two creative departures in the texture of his writing from the still-prominent rhetoric he inherited from Marinetti. We can see fragments of Rapture emerging like studies for a larger painting out of Zdanevich’s simultaneously playful and aggressive provocations.

  The November lecture includes an imaginary biography of Goncharova that provides her with a fairy-tale childhood and a career that takes her to several historical civilizations and places her in contact with their artistic masters. The biography is meant to demonstrate the primacy of art over life, so that the “artistic facts” of Goncharova’s career are projected onto her life to create a true biography.15 The theory is certainly of interest, and Zdanevich applies it to himself later in his “Iliazda” lecture, but the biography contains, more concretely, stylistic parodies and narrative material that reappear especially in Rapture’s depictions of Ivlita. In his March 1914 talk, Zdanevich offers “an engaging film scenario for movie directors” called “The Fallen Man.” Its hero, “son of an expansive Italian rich man,” joins a cell of genuine revolutionaries, “Natalia Goncharova included in their number.” He abandons them at the height of a planned uprising and runs away with “a gang of shady characters”—Mayakovsky and his henchmen, especially the Burliuk brothers. He falls still further, associating with figures representing the even more suspect Ego-Futurists and the Mezzanine of Poetry, and dies “a disgusting, inglorious death” in a hospital.16 The passage is nothing more than an amusing weapon in Zdanevich’s ongoing polemic with other Futurist groups, but, like an accidental mutation that turns out to be beneficial later on, this melodramatic—and silent, we should recall—allegory of Futurism in Russia looks now, as Régis Gayraud has pointed out, like the genesis of Rapture’s main plot.17

  Once Larionov and Goncharova had moved to Paris in May 1914, Zdanevich’s attention turned from theories of painting and invective directed against his rivals toward attempts to write “manifold poetry,” an alternative to “the poetry of a single mouth.”18 Zdanevich intended manifold poetry to be performed in an “orchestral” fashion like a score, not read in silence on the page. It would convey “the sounds of a marketplace, not the line at the cash register.”19 The need to free words from time, specifically the time needed to pronounce phonemes in sequence, required new techniques of simultaneous pronunciation. Among the many metaphors Zdanevich tries out in the notebooks to his unpublished manifesto on manifold poetry (metallurgy, bartending), he develops a long passage about “everythingk-woodsmen” cutting the “grove of trees [that is, words—T. K.] sententiously nodding their heads.” The everythingk-woodsmen aim to “extract their heat and saw them up into parquetry blocks for the palace of poetry” and “logs for the factory of everythingism.”20 Zdanevich’s metaphor in this unused sketch from his notebooks illustrates a fundamental procedure he applies later not just to words, but to “stolen” characters, plots, myths, and entire symbolic systems, cutting them up to make them burn more brightly or to reassemble them into structures entirely his own. Furthermore, it�
�s no surprise that before becoming a bandit, Laurence, the hero of Rapture, works at a sawmill, where, as it turns out, he is already a murderer of transformed humans “nodding their heads,” and that Ivlita’s father, the former forester, lives in a magnificent house made of fancifully carved mahogany—just such a “palace of poetry.”21

  Manifold poetry represented Zdanevich’s first contribution to beyonsense, and he believed he had found a method less arbitrary than Kruchenykh’s “poems in [his] own language.” Its first fruits were onomatopoeic poems inspired by early World War I flying aces like Roland Garros (GAROLAND). Zdanevich worked out a more complex approach to beyonsense after joining Olga Leshkova’s and LeDantu’s Bloodless Murder group in Petrograd at the end of November 1916.22 The group performed the first of his plays (he called it a “dra”), “yAnko olbAnian kIng,” on December 3.23 The play was inspired by their colleague Janko Lavrin’s war coverage from Albania and was composed in a combination of phonetic Russian and beyonsense words masquerading as Albanian.24 The tsarist censorship prevented its publication in 1916, but when it finally appeared in Tiflis in 1918, it was Zdanevich’s first book under his own name.25 Such long gestations remained characteristic of Zdanevich’s work throughout his life.

  In the meantime, Zdanevich had finally met Kruchenykh. Zdanevich had been engaged during 1916 as a war correspondent for the liberal Petrograd newspaper Rech’, covering the Russo-Ottoman front in Eastern Anatolia. He was based in his family’s home in Tiflis, where Kruchenykh was doing his wartime service as a draftsman for the railroad in Georgia, and the two became acquainted in March 1916.26 Some of Zdanevich’s polemic energy had been blunted by his experiences near the front, and despite Zdanevich’s formerly keen sense of competition, it turned out that he and Kruchenykh shared interests and inspirations. Both engaged critically with Khlebnikov’s theories about word formation. Khlebnikov had derived some of his ideas from etymological and morphological studies, but many were less convincingly the result of purely speculative association between sounds or shapes of letters and particular concepts and emotions. Both had primitivist interests. Kruchenykh found a source for beyonsense in folk charms and curses, as well as in ecstatic religious glossolalia.27 He also liked to collect writing by children and the insane. Zdanevich had long been impressed by painted shop and tavern signs in Georgia, especially by the work of Niko Pirosmanashvili (or Pirosmani), whose paintings he, his brother Kirill, and LeDantu collected for Larionov’s 1913 Target exhibition. He had been thinking more and more about the nonstandard orthography he found on these signs. And both had become interested in Freud, especially The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.28 Their rivalry gradually heated up and eventually boiled over into three years of feverish collaboration and almost graphomaniac productivity.

  But first, Zdanevich had to return to Petrograd to finish the exams for his law degree. He received it just before the February Revolution and then was caught up, along with other Futurists, in organizing a Union of Cultural Workers (Soiuz deiatelei iskusstv) to press for artistic freedom from government interference of any kind. Despite his dedication to the cause of leftist art and his impassioned speeches in the name of the Free Art faction, he failed to be selected for the Union’s steering committee in spring 1917.29 Mayakovsky was among those selected, and Zdanevich felt a lasting bitterness over the episode. When Professor Ekvtime Takaishvili invited Zdanevich to participate in an archeological expedition to investigate medieval Georgian architecture on Ottoman territory then under control of the Russian army, he readily accepted and left Petrograd at the beginning of May. As a result, he missed the subsequent revolutionary upheavals, from the July Days through the Bolshevik takeover in October and the first stirrings of the Civil War in January 1918. Zdanevich and Kruchenykh had the good fortune of spending the next years in an independent Georgia largely spared the devastation of the Civil War.

  Kruchenykh and Zdanevich formed the Futurists’ Syndicate in late 1917.30 As Tat’iana Nikol’skaia has pointed out, the Futurists in Tiflis were freed from the game of scandal and riot, the need for continual self-advertisement, and the endless polemics that took up so much of their energy in Moscow and St. Petersburg before the war.31 The public in Tiflis showed genuine interest in new artistic trends, and even when the writers presented lectures, plays, and poems that were undeniably much more scandalous than ever before, audiences took them seriously. Futurists from different camps performed and published together, sharing the stage and page with local Georgian Symbolists from the Blue Horns group and with Sergei Gorodetsky’s section of the Acmeist Poets’ Guild.

  The following spring, Zdanevich, Kruchenykh, and the newcomer Igor Terent’ev joined to form “41°,” a self-styled “duet for three idiots.”32 Zdanevich gave frequent lectures at the Fantastic Cabaret for the newly founded Futurist University. (Kruchenykh pointedly employed Khlebnikov’s Slavic neologism, vseuchbishche [all-study institute], rather than the standard foreign borrowing universitet.) He covered numerous topics, including “Dodi Burliuk’s Lorgnette,” “Theater at an Impasse,” “Orthography and Straining,” “On the Magnetism of Letters,” and “Tyutchev, Singer of Shit.”33 Now, however, he was known as a poet rather than merely a propagandist, the author of a series of dras under the collective title drUnkeyness: “yAnko olbAnian kIng,” “dUnkee for rEnt,” “EEster AIland,” and “asthO zgA.” Even Gorodetsky the Acmeist found them “amusing.”34

  While Zdanevich fleshed out his orchestral poetry and learned the printer’s trade in order to represent it on the page, Terent’ev took up the study of how chance contributes to artistic creativity. He produced a book on the topic, 17 Nonsense Tools, as well as an article, “The Highway to Roundabout Discovery.” One of the techniques Terent’ev advocated for producing meaningful nonsense was called “shooting at random.” In Rapture, Iliazd treats Terent’ev’s term in the same way he tends to treat idioms and metaphors—by making it into a concrete image. The inept former forester in the novel illustrates one aspect of this idea when he reacts to his daughter’s abduction by grabbing his gun, firing without taking aim, and scaring himself nearly to death. But the image also describes the wenny old man’s hunting habits. In his madness, he never misses his prey—thanks not to reasoned skill, but to some implied intuitive sense. It’s also worth noting, as far as gun play goes, Zdanevich’s continual reference to a Russian juridical term that describes an act that fails because of the agent’s inadequacy or incompetence: “a criminal attempt using unsuitable means.”35 The phrase has come to designate any failure due to inadequacy. Zdanevich adopts this phrase to describe the entire practice of poetry.

  And, while we’re on the topic of failure due to inadequacy or impotence—Zdanevich’s writing in Tiflis incorporates an intensified use of sexual and scatological double entendre, again under Kruchenykh’s immediate influence. Kruchenykh was studying not just Freud, but Havelock Ellis, especially his volume on autoeroticism. Before coming to Georgia, Kruchenykh had initiated a new method of literary study, “shiftology,” by inspecting the classics of Russian literature for secret sexual and scatological obsessions. The most reliable method for bringing these secrets to light was listening for puns across word boundaries when the poems were read aloud.36 Terent’ev also contributed to this line of research with his Tract on Outright Obscenity. According to the Georgian poet G. Robakidze, Zdanevich began prefacing his readings with the claim that “Futurism is erotic solipsism.”37 The scatological aspects of Zdanevich’s dras probably also find a source in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays. Inevitably, despite the generally amiable atmosphere among Tiflis artists, Kruchenykh, Terent’ev, and Zdanevich were compared to boys writing bad words on fences. Zdanevich, however, manages to organize this play of beyonsense in his dras into something that for English readers might be most conveniently compared to Joyce’s manipulations of standard English in Finnegans Wake. Like Joyce, he weaves material from other languages through Russian and alters standard orthog
raphy to engage multiple simultaneous meanings that similarly tie trivial slips of the tongue to deep mythologies within an intermittently discernible plot.38 Vladimir Markov, the first historian of Russian Futurism, called the collective output of 41° between 1917 and 1920 “the clearest crystallization of Futurism’s avant-garde elements and its evolutionary, if not necessarily aesthetic, climax.”39

  As the Soviet Union gradually absorbed the independent Transcaucasian republics, Zdanevich started saving up for a ticket to Paris by working for the American organization Near East Relief.40 He may have been drawn to Paris by news of Dada actions, but he told his contacts when he arrived in France that he had left Georgia because it was getting to be impossible for anyone to deal with “pure art” free from politics.41 In any case, he arrived in Istanbul in November 1920 and found himself in the midst of a sizeable Russian diaspora, most of whom were waiting, like him, for permission to move on. It took nearly a year for a wary French government to issue a visa to this “grammatical revolutionary and murderer of words,” as the French journalist André Germain later called him.42

  Within two weeks of arriving in Paris in November 1921, Zdanevich was already using Larionov’s contacts to arrange a lecture in “picturesque” French on “The New Schools in Russian Poetry,” where he introduced Parisian society to the history and tenets of Russian Futurism. Naturally, his lecture included propagandistic distortions that exaggerated the importance of 41° and laid claim to independence from any French influence whatsoever. He summarized the work of 41°, emphasizing “Terent’ev’s First Law”: Pragmatic language finds its center of gravity in meaning, poetic language in sound.43 This “eternal dualism” maps onto a whole series: heaven and earth, day and night, body and soul, reason and intuition, thought and feeling, Dr. Faustus and John the Theologian.44 When writers and speakers focus exclusively on pragmatic language, “shifts” (Freudian “displacement”) or deformations occur in morphology, etymology, syntax, phonetics, and orthography to assert the emotional and instinctive, sexual and obscene (following Freud) aspects of language.45 These shifts are both “a useless consequence of language decay” and “a means of poetic expression” that should be compared neither to “magic tricks” nor to “music.”46 Zdanevich announces plans to open a new 41° University and makes the Tiflis venue sound far more substantial than the cabaret reading series it was in reality. He concludes, “Reason is mendacious, poetry is immaculate, and we, too, are immaculate when we are alone with it.”47