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Vladimir Maiakovskii's “From Street into Street” as Cubo-Futurist Canvas: A View through the Art of Kazimir Malevich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Juliette R. Stapanian
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Extract

The artist Kazimir Malevich once called Vladimir Maiakovskii's lyric “Iz ulitsy v ulitsu” the best example of “versified cubism.“ Although Maiakovskii's early poetry has often been linked to developments in the pictorial arts, the precise nature of this connection requires more detailed examination. Investigation of the role of the visual arts in a literary interpretation appears exceptionally intriguing considering that Malevich, both a contemporary of Maiakovskii and a painter of high caliber, paid special tribute to this poem in painterly terms.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Winter 1982 , pp. 639 - 652
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. Illustrations: (A) Kasimir Malevich, Scissors-Grinder, Yale University Art Gallery, gift of Collection Societe Anonyme; reproduced by permission. (B) Kasimir Malevich, Woman at a Tramstop, private collection Leningrad, photo Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; reproduced by permission. The Russian text is taken from Maiakovskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1955-61), 1:38–39 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as PSS). The translation is my own.

2. Quoted in Khardzhiev, N. and Trenin, V., Poeticheskaia kul'tura Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1970), p. 48 Google Scholar.

3. The work of N. Khardziev is the fullest, most accurate account of Maiakovskii's background in the visual arts. In addition to the insights provided by scholars such as Jakobson, Roman, Eichenbaum, Boris, and Lotman, Iurii, Brown, Edward J.'s Mayakovsky, A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973)Google Scholar and Markov, Vladimir's Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar offer valuable information.

4. Maiakovskii and the Cubo-Futurist poet/painter David Burliuk were expelled from the Moscow School in 1914. Earlier, a group of painters including Mikhail Larionov had been expelled.

5. See Malevich, 's “Cubo-futurism” in Andersen, Troels, ed., Malevich: Essays on Art 1915-1933, 2 vols. (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969), 2:85–94 Google Scholar.

6. “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, 1915” (Moscow, 1916), in Bowlt, John E., ed. and trans. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 123 Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., p. 127.

8. Ibid., p. 132.

9. Ibid., p. 131.

10. John Bowlt notes the significance of Cubo-Futurism in Malevich's progression toward Suprematism: “The years 1912-1913 were of vital importance to Malevich's evolution for it was during that time that he explored, rapidly and exhaustively, the possibilities of cubism, futurism, new scientific theory and the ideas of the new literary avant-garde headed by Burliuk, David, Khlebnikov, Velimir, and Kruchenykh, Aleksei, Bowlt, , ed., Russian Art 1875-1975: A Collection of Essays (New York: MSS Information Corporation, 1976), p. 133 Google Scholar.

11. In contrast to Michelangelo's freeing of David from a piece of marble “like a splinter from a foreign body,” Malevich felt the following: “One must extract from marble those forms which could arise from its own body, and a carved cube or other form is more valuable than any David. The same in painting, the word, music.” “From Cubism to Suprematism in Art, To the New Realism of Painting, To Absolute Creation” (1915), translated by Douglas, C. in Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1976), p. 110 Google Scholar.

12. Maiakovskii, PSS, “O noveishei russkoi poezii” (1912), 1:365.

13. Later Malevich worked directly with texts by Maiakovskii — for example, illustrations for Sovremennyi lubok and stage decorations for Misteriia-buff (1918).

14. See Malevich, 1:30. In an article on Cubism, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler explained that Cubist art is characterized by its rejection of the closed forms of traditional art. He defined “closed form” as the depiction of objects as “contained by their own surfaces.” Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, trans. H. Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), p. 10. (Kahnweiler's work was written in 1915 and first published in 1920). Although art historian D. Sarab'ianov considers Malevich's Knifegrinder in sum a closed composition (with a beginning and end), it is constructed from the fractionation of conventional images. This supports Sarab'ianov's assertion of a strong Cubist base in Malevich's most Futuristic works. D. V. Sarab'ianov, “Noveishie techeniia v russkoi zhivopisi predrevoliutsionnogo desiatiletiia (Rossiia i zapad),” Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie ‘80, 1 (Moscow, 1981): 151-52.

15. Malevich, 1:35.

16. In 1928 Malevich wrote that in Cubist art there is no background; rather, “background, like space, begins to enter the general composition of the picture, with the result that a Cubist picture is equally valuable over its entire surface.” Malevich, 2:40.

17. Camilla Gray differs with this interpretation of Knifegrinder. She feels there is “no attempt to represent speed” in the work. Gray, , The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), p. 188 Google Scholar.

18. In this way Malevich's work seems to combine two different concepts of “simultaneity” in art: for the French Cubist Robert Delaunay “simultaneity” involved color contrasts, but for many Italian Futurist painters it meant the accumulation of various spatial and temporal moments. The distinction is noted by Cachin-Nora, F. in “Le Futurisme a Paris,” in Le Futurisme 1909-1916, Leymarie, J., ed. (Paris: Editions des Musses Nationaux, 1973), pp. 21–30 Google Scholar.

19. Charlotte Douglas describes Malevich's “alogical” style (a painterly parallel to zaum’) as a style with no “systematic perspective” nor “narrative cohesion“; “unrelated and incongruous images simply turn the mind back on itself until interpretation is abandoned” as illustrated in the basically “cubistically constructed” Woman at the Tram Stop. Douglas, , Swans of Other Worlds (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), p. 33 Google Scholar. It can be demonstrated, however, that a logic does emerge in Dama v tramvae when the work is interpreted from the flexible perspective of a persona in motion through space and time.

20. Another Russian Futurist poet, A. Kruchenykh, said that the word play of children “had become the game of giants.” He felt, for example, that a device whereby one half a line becomes the reverse rhyme in another enables a poet to saturate his work with sound. See A., Khruchenykh, 15 let russkogo futurizma (1912-1927) (Moscow, 1928), p. 18 Google Scholar.

21. In this respect, Maiakovskii's style recalls the contention of Italian Futurists that “poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new images.” U., Apoflonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, trans. Brain, R., Flint, R., Higgit, J. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 100 Google Scholar.

22. Compare the use of color in The Knifegrinder.

23. In an early article (1914) Maiakovskii uses the expression elektricheskaia konka (which he discusses as an epithet for tramvai) to illustrate the evolution of language in response to technological advances. PSS, 1:326-27. In certain contexts “iron horses” may also refer to trains. Although the motif of the horse had special significance in a variety of Russian artistic trends, it was also a major image in European Futurism. For example, a huge horse is a key image in the painting The City Also Rises (1910-1911) by the Italian artist U. Boccioni. Maiakovskii's poem is also reminiscent of the poet F. Marinetti's description of “deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing.” Apollonio, p. 22.

24. A similar image appears in Maiakovskii's earlier poem “Night” (1912) in which lighted windows appear as “burning yellow cards.” PSS, 1:33. The visual depiction of urban structures, such as houses and windows, in terms of squares and cubes is a common feature of Cubist cityscapes.

25. For examples of Maiakovskii's sketches, see V., Katanian, ed., Maiakovskii khudozhnik (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar.

26. In their efforts to explore the artistic potential of prosaic materials, Cubist sculptors (Picasso for example) sometimes used metals that would rust.

27. In addition to the various masculine nouns in the poem, the particolored “son” could also be a reference to the bright garb of the Futurist poet himself.

28. G. S. Cheremin also notes the possibility of a persona describing this view from the rear platform of a tram. Cheremin, , Rannii Maiakovskii, put’ poeta k oktiabriu (Moscow, 1962), pp. 61–62 Google Scholar.

29. PSS, 12:91.

30. A similar motif appears in Maiakovskii's Razgovor s fininspektorom (1926).

31. In addition, the numerals implied by the Russian word for “clock-faces” (tsifra means “numeral“) are reminiscent of Cubo-Futurist pictures such as Malevich's Lady in a Tram, in which numbers are employed as pictorial features of the urbanscape.

32. PSS, 1:376.

33. The concept of shift as a major element of pictorial Cubism is discussed by Burliuk, David in the essay “Kubizm,” in Poshchechina po obshchestvennomu vkusu (Moscow, 1912), pp. 95–110.Google Scholar

34. Both Maiakovskii's poem and Malevich's painting recall a passage in the Italian Futurists' Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910): “The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.“ Apollonio, p. 28.

35. The role of memory as the simultaneous merging of past and present was of great interest, for example, to the Italian Futurists.

36. Tension between the concepts of wanting and not wanting recurs throughout Maiakovskii's early long poem “Cloud in Trousers” (1914-1915). See PSS, 1:191, 194, and 195 in particular.

37. In the first published version of the poem a “dark-blue stocking” was used. The change to a black stocking increases the color contrast in the final scene of the poem and adds another instance of alliteration (chernyi chulok) to the sound texture of the lyric.

38. Baldness is frequently used as a negative motif both in Maiakovskii's lyrics and in his poster work.