Ukrainian futurism re-visited

Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj. Ukrainian Futurism, 1914-1930: A Historical and Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by the Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1997. xviii, 413 pp. Illustrations. Index. $35.00 cloth; $17.00 paper.

In February 1929, the Czech modernist Karel Teige (already familiar to Ukrainian Panfuturists from his theoretical writings on Constructivism published in Nova generatsa) dedicated a special number of his Prague journal ReD (Revue Devetsilu) to F. T. Marinetti's reception. Its cover featured a drawing showing the Italian Futurist leader standing erect on a pedestal with arms outstretched, a manifesto in one hand, as if welcoming to the Italian fold, not just Czech kindred spirits, but Futurists of diverse hues from all over the globe. "Marinetti and World Futurism," the caption read in Czech, French, German and Italian. Given that Teige's attitude to Italian Futurism was by no means always uncritical, it may not be without significance that Marinetti seems to resemble some betogaed senator (or possibly a posturing Mussolini addressing the fascist faithful). Yet although there appears to be a calculated ambivalence to the illustration, the equation of Marinetti with il futurismo mondiale was evidently not in dispute for Teige, any more than it ever had been for Marinetti himself. Indeed, by the late 1920s there can have been few international avant-garde groups and Futurist coteries that Marinetti had not actively sought to proselytise-or in many cases visit-in his role as pan-European Futurism's self-appointed leader. In this respect, Ukrainian Futurism would appear to be unique: a Futurism undiscovered by Futurism's global impresario. Perhaps because of its relatively late appearance and failure to attract Milanese attentions or possibly because in the eyes of many it would be forever condemned to stand in the shadow of Russian Futurism, it has remained the Cinderella among Futurisms until recently.

When Venice's Palazzo Grassi mounted its "Futurismo & Futurismi" exhibition in 1986, the accompanying catalogue proudly declared that Futurism was here being "studied for the first time as an international cultural phenomenon."I However, there is no mention of Ukrainian Futurism, either in the catalogue's illustrative sections representing sixteen national Futurisms or in the concluding "Dictionary of Futurism" (pp. 411-613). Such an omission appears all the more surprising in the light of the dutiful way in which the Venice exhibition followed Marinetti in notionally annexing to Futurist territory almost every other observable piece of avant-garde terrain (from Orphism and Vorticism to Ultraism and Zenithism), not to mention seeking to establish Italian hegemony over virtually any movement which dared to sail under the flag of 'Futurism' or any of its conceptual derivatives. It was as if Marinetti's own ignorance of Ukrainian Futurism still exercised a hold over comparative literary scholarship more than half a century later. Or, bearing in mind the many tensions which the present volume chronicles between Russian and Ukrainian avant-gardes, it is as if Moscow's gradual Gleichschaltung of Ukrainian culture in the 1920s were still leaving its mark. Even Peter Drews's generally comprehensive study of Die slawische Avantgarde und der Westen pays scant attention to Ukrainian Futurism: an appendix presents it as a minor movement that would have been more timely if it had chosen to occur entirely before the First World War. 2 Awareness of the main achievements and the complex history of Ukrainian Futurism can also hardly have been furthered by the cursory treatment the movement received in Vladimir Markov's pioneering account of Russian Futurism. It may have been no more than an unfortunate coincidence that Markov's reference to Ukrainian Futurism follows immediately an anecdotal section on Futurist hoaxes and "examples of futurist imitation in provincial cities" and elicits little more than the "interesting fact" that "despite all the efforts of the Hylaeans, in 1914, futurism for many people meant egofuturism," with Ukrainian Kvero-Futurism being adduced as prima facie evidence of this provincial tendency to lag aesthetically behind the times.3 In other words, Panfuturism's history and prolific experiments in the twenties-the main focus of Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj's Ukrainian Futurism-are not even hinted at in this context. What is more, even the few subsequent correctives to such a picture have often lacked balance. As Ilnytzkyj has demonstrated in another context, even though Nova generatsa, the main organ of Ukrainian Futurism, was "first and foremost a literary journal," the most detailed English-language study of the subject approached its material largely "from the perspective of the non-literary arts, emphasising the role it played in the promotion of modern painting, set design, photography and the new typography.'4

Paradoxically, while Ukrainian Futurism has remained a lamentably marginalised avant-garde within the modern scholarly world, the original Futurists were themselves decidedly cosmopolitan in their interests and open to ideas from the West (Ilnytzkyj talks of Nova generatsa's "programmatic internationalism" [p. 118]). This receptivity already came through in Myroslava Mudrak's study, but it is far more extensively documented and analysed, and now primarily from a literary viewpoint, by Ilnytzkyj. Although M. Semenko rejected the word, there was nevertheless a strong nationalist (and often antiSoviet) strain to Ukrainian cultural tendencies during the 1920s; most Ukrainian Futurists were less parochial and more open to stimulus from Western avantgardes than their Russian counterparts. As early as 1913, Lunacharsky published an account of Marinetti's innovative ideas in Kievskaia mysl', and both Semenko and G. Shkurup subsequently did much to relay Western avant-garde developments to their readers. In the heyday of Ukrainian Futurism, crossfertilization occurred between Avanhard-Al'manakh and Nova generatsa and such focuses of the European avant-garde as Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus, the Cahiers d'arts in Paris, Der Querschnitt and Der Sturm in Berlin, and Stavba in Prague. According to Semenko, the Marinetti of Ukrainian Futurism, "the prototype for Nova generatsa was the [German Expressionist] journal Der Querschnitt, while the paintings and contributions with information on the arts abroad were largely taken from the... Cahiers d'arts." But of course, as Novyi Lef had shown in 1927,6 to turn westwards in this way-even to appropriate the term 'Futurism'-could also involve having to define, or deny, some kind of relationship to Italian Futurism. And in spite of (or possibly even because of) the way in which Russian Futurism largely turned its back on Marinetti and the Italians, it is often assumed that the Ukrainians' use of the word 'Futurism' in various forms (Kvero-Futurism, Panfuturism, ASPANFUT) was, as Ilnytzkyj puts it, a deliberate gesture of "recognition... of Marinetti's movement as the watershed in art history" (p. 335), a suggestion that only a handful of EgoFuturists would have found acceptable. As the Ukrainian Futurists must have been aware, Marinetti's catastrophic visit to Russia in 1914 revealed the widespread strength of anti-Western feeling behind the majority of Russian Futurists' desire to avoid a possible Italian takeover bid. Khlebnikov and Livshits, unmoved by the enthusiastic cult of all things Marinettian largely orchestrated by Shershenevich, cautioned against "placing the noble neck of Asia under the yoke of Europe" (Markov, p. 151). Noting in Polutoraglazyi strelets that "Marinetti regarded his trip to Russia as a boss might a visit to one of his branches," Livshits observed wryly that "this notion had to be rejected," adding that there was, in any case, little that was new in the Italian Futurist programme, moreover "the reasons which had occasioned a movement bearing the same name in both countries were... too diverse to speak of a common programme."7 The consequent predilection among some Russian Futurists for the term budetlianstvo, rather than futurizm, and their tendency to simplify what Livshits referred to as "the competition for Futurist primacy" (p. 208) in terms of a clash between Asiatic and the European cultures were symptomatic of a proneness to cultural isolationism on the part of Russian Futurists. The Ukrainian Panfuturists, on the other hand, were less inclined to play the Asiatic card,8 being anxious to mediate information about, and learn from, Western experiments without either regarding themselves as inferior to, or mere syncretisers of, any Western "ism" (cf. Ilnytzkyj, p. 182). Indeed, this openness to the West, not an easy stance to adopt in the Soviet orbit of the 1920s, can also be interpreted as in some measure a gesture of national autonomy vis-a-vis the USSR's cultural policies. In this it went hand in hand with a predilection for publishing either in Ukrainian or in a cocktail of Western European languages.

"More often than not," Ilnytzkyj complains, "Ukrainian Futurism has been compared rather than studied" (p. 335). That is to say: when it was not being ghettoised or patronised, it was being found less adventurous ordeja lu when set alongside the achievements of either Western European avant-gardes or Russian Futurism. "Blinded by the name, critics saw... little else than what they had already witnessed in a foreign 'source'," the present study argues (ibid.). At the same time, Ukrainian Futurism has often been accused of the further sin of a failure to emulate its Western and Russian models independently enough. Of course, interpretations of Futurism predicated on the influence-model have often been preferred to those assuming a measure of polygenesis, not least because some Futurisms actually made it so obvious that they wanted to be copied; and priorita was, as the Italians were all too aware, very much a matter of groupprestige, if not national honour. In Ukrainian Futurism, Ilnytzkyj successfully avoids the traps of chauvinism and special pleading that have bedevilled so much Futurist scholarship by focusing on resurrecting the facts-facts about the history, the theory and the literary achievements of a complex movement that has sometimes been too easily identified merely with the life and work of Mykhail' Semenko. Ukrainian Futurism, as Ilnytzkyj points out in the study's Conclusion, "has purposely avoided comparative excurses on the premise that one needs to know a subject before it can be productively juxtaposed to others.... [T]he primary task here has been to allow Ukrainian Futurism to define itself" (p. 335)-an eminently sensible principle that is rigorously followed throughout this entire excellent study.

Ilnytzkyj's decision to divide his approach into three sections (historical, theoretical and literary) cannot have been an easy one. Many of the key disputes and more polemical phases of Ukrainian Futurism's history inevitably relate to the programmatic material covered in the volume's subsequent theoretical section. Moreover, because Ukrainian Futurism is less dominated by manifestoes than, say, early Italian Futurism or the work of the Sturmkreis, inserting a section on theory before a detailed consideration of the literary works is less of a necessity than it would have been in other cases. The resultant study consists of three loosely interlocking parts, although inevitably the justification of the first two sections only comes retroactively, above all with the detailed presentation of Ukrainian Futurist poetry. Nevertheless, the relative distribution and length of Ukrainian Futurism's three parts reveals much about the differences between its material and that of its Western European equivalents. That the historical section is more than half as long again as the one on "The Literary Legacy and the Major Practitioners" makes eminent sense, if one bears in mind the complex of historical factors that needed to be chronicled. These include not just the episodes of literary polemics and factional infighting that Renato Poggioli has shown to be the hallmark of virtually all avant-gardes at the time, but also, in the post-Revolutionary phase, Ukrainian culture's diminishing fortunes in the face of the Soviet Union's Russification policy. Consider also the need to demonstrate the vital role played by organization, and organizations,9 within the tactics of cultural positioning-eventually a political matter of life and death for whole movements and their individual members alike (something which in the West would only find an equivalent later in Hitler's campaign against `Degenerate Art')-as well as the need to chart Ukraine's sometimes symbiotic, sometimes turbulent relations with the Soviet Union. Nowhere are these debilitating factors more explicitly in evidence or are shown to have more destructive consequences than in the case of the exchanges between Nova generatsa and Novyi Lef in the period leading up to the time when Semenko would be forced to capitulate to the force majeure of the VUSPP and, after ritual self-criticism, see his movement destroyed and his country Russified, after which he and Shkurup could be duly handed over for the firing squads to do their work.

What emerges from Ilnytzkyj's impressively detailed introductory chronicle-running from Semenko's provocatively 'Futurist' attack on Ukraine's national poet Taras Shevchenko and the founding of Kvero-Futurism through what a chapter calls "The Lean Years" of the War (war never meant "lean years" to the Italian Futurists!) to such milestones as the appearance of Semafor u maibutnie and Katafalk iskusstva in the early twenties to the anni mirabiles of the late twenties, the New Generation and Panfuturist phase-is the picture of a movement, and a leader, skilled in deflecting, if not always neutralizing, powerful opposition, able to ride out the Tsarist cultural clampdown during the Great War and survive the ravages of the Civil War. With the rapid Bolshevization of culture, the Ukrainian Futurists were adroit enough to re-invent themselves as a constructive as well as iconoclastic force, one whose goals still appeared reconcilable with Leninism in a way that those of no Western European Futurism would have been. But then, Futurism is shown in this context to have moved ideologically not only more towards the left, but to have displayed aesthetic concerns strongly indebted to Constructivism and Formalism. So were they still Futurists in any sense but through the movement's chosen name?

In his Conclusion, Ilnytzkyj remarks:

If we take away Italian Futurism's nationalistic and fascist ideology, its glorification of war, its disdain for women and take into account Marinetti's financial fortune and Semenko's lack of one, there emerges a fairly accurate picture of Ukrainian Futurism in at least one of its major aspects. Although there are obvious parallels between the movements (devotion to speed, dynamism, urban life, and technology) it is primarily in the struggle they waged against traditional values and tastes that the two are most alike (p. 337).

Such a one and a half-eyed comparison would seem to be something of a tall order, and the present study's account of the theory produced by Ukrainian Futurism certainly suggests very different approaches and concerns from those of most Western European avant-gardes and serves to highlight a degree of individuality to the movement which those accusing it of derivativeness have been quick to overlook.

"Theory"-Ilnytzkyj also uses the phrase "programmatic musings"-"was a form of propaganda, a vehicle by which the Futurists fashioned their public image" ("The Theory of a Movement," 181). Admittedly, in the early KveroFuturism phase, such image-making did at times superficially resemble the tactics of Italian and Russian Futurism: as, for example, when what Ilnytzkyj calls Semenko's manifesto "Alone" (published in Derzannia in 1914) includes such provocative anti-pass6ist sentiments as "How can I respect Shevchenko, when I see that he is under my feet?" or "I'll suffocate in the atmosphere of your 'sincere' Ukrainian art.... I burn my Kobzar." But despite the furore these calculated affronts created, they were untypical. There is less of the "slap in the face of public taste" and of manifestoes directed at the unconverted than could be found in either Italy or Russia. Ukrainian Futurism seems, rather like German Expressionism, to have worked more through the in-group journal than the manifesto hurled at the petit-bourgeois crowd. And it is clear from the issues surveyed in Ilnytzkyj's analytical resume of its theoretical pronouncements that the movement's thinking operated at a higher level of generality: matters such as the relationship of ideology to facture, or what Walter Benjamin was later to refer to as the Entauratisierung of art, or the systemic "Theory of Cults" meant that, rather than literary theory, the reader was largely being offered, in Ilnytzkyj's words, a "theory of culture" (p. 187). No reason is given for this elevated plane of argumentation (is it some kind of inherited Hegelianism or merely a desire to find a distinctive, quasi-scientific aesthetic?). What is clear is that this kind of cultural rumination is very different from the tone and mind-set of the launching manifestoes of Italian and Russian Futurism, or the subsequent "technical manifestoes" devoted to one sole art-form (even when the movements' agendas ostensibly aimed at the synthesizing of the arts), or the single-minded promotion of a particular innovation, be it collage, calligrammatic effects, the telegraphic idiom, sound-music or zaum.

Ilnytzkyj's detailed survey of the achievements of Ukrainian Futurist literature has been well conceived to combat various longstanding prejudices: that the movement was virtually synonymous with Semenko (an impression partly attributable to the fact that he was one of the few surviving links between Kvero-futurism and the 1920s, but also a result of his prolific output and organizational talents); that Ukrainian Futurism was an inferior provincial version of Russian Futurism (the present study presents the reader with extensive literary extracts as counter-evidence, and, without being intrusively interpretive or judgmental, highlights the distinctive features of the oeuvres of the leading exponents of visual and more conventional poetry, as well as demonstrating the importance of prose within the Ukrainian context). Chervonyi shliakh's dismissive verdict on Shkurup's work ("It is simple 6patement that is ten years too late," cf. Ilnytzkyj. p. 263), a recurrent charge not only in Shkurup's case, is demonstrably not true of the material surveyed here. In quantitative terms, Semenko inevitably takes pride of place in this account, with attention being drawn to the sheer heterogeneity of his output, his protean relation to questions of genre, the programmatically conceived constant shifting between elements of relative conventionality and innovation and his deliberate juxtaposition of "successful and unsuccessful experiments... achievements as well as failures" (Semenko, quoted in Ilnytzkyj, p. 223). While conceding that this "speaks poorly of him as a consistent, full-blown Futurist" (ibid.), Ilnytzkyj nevertheless reveals the extent to which Semenko's stylistic pluralism, his flaunted eclecticism and unending "attempt to regenerate his poetic self" (p. 234) had their rationale in Futurism's dismissive attitude towards High Art and in a concept of 'experiment' shared by many avant-gardes of the time. (It was certainly never, not even in the dangerous final years, a product of mere political opportunism.) Anyone looking for what Ilnytzkyj calls "consistent, full-blown" Futurism would be better advised to consult the section on the Shkurup of Psykhetozy, with its bold combinations of ideology and novelty, or the prose of Chuzhyi's Vedmid' poliuie za sontsem or the typographical boldness of "Kablepoema za okean" and "Moia mozaika" explored in Ilnytzkyj's excellent survey of "Visual Experiments." But then, one is left wondering whether it is necessarily an unequivocal virtue to be consistently Futurist (by whatever criteria are chosen) or to be more Futurist than one's fellow Futurists, be they Ukrainian, Russian or Western European. In any case, the permissive conception of "Futurism" at the core of Ukrainian Panfuturism-as Semafor u maibutnie had put it in 1922, "The Panfuturist system embraces all `isms,' considering them partial elements of a single organism" (cf. Ilnytzkyj, p. 183)-hardly gives grounds for the creation of a dependable taxonomy or offers an adequate criterion for evaluation merely based on embodiment of the movement's theoretical goals.

Like all scholarship of a high calibre, Ukrainian Futurism leaves the reader with many further questions. This particular reader, with a Germanist string to his comparatist bow, was, for instance, left wondering why Der Querschnitt, a distinctly minor Expressionist journal, should have loomed so large in the Ukrainian Futurists' estimation. And why, given that Ilnytzkyj claims that the Ukrainians "rarely strayed from their faith in the machine, rationalism and science" (p. 338), Les' Kurbas's Berezil' Theater-and also the journal Kermoshould have taken such an interest in Georg Kaiser's Gas, given its blatantly Rousseauistic and Luddite elements and its injection of woolly utopianism. Did they only know Gas and not Gas 2, which ends with a petulant destruction of the entire world with poison gas? Or was it the powerful depiction of alienated workers under capitalism the play's saving grace? And what was the reason behind the visit to Berlin that gave rise to Semenko's poems "Chornyi Berlin," "Alt-Berlin" and "Nimechchyna," and why did these cosmopolitan works not appear in Nova generatsa? And of more general importance: when we are told, in the context of the mid-1920s, that "Nova generatsa carefully tracked the developments in Der Sturm" (339), does this imply that interest in Herwarth Walden's publication extended beyond its early numbers (when Kandinsky, Doblin, Stramm and Walden himself frequented the journal's pages, and it was the showcase of Expressionist painting), or was the Der Sturm which now attracted the Ukrainian Futurists' attention that of the later years, when Walden's conversion to Marxism was allowed to dominate its less adventurous contents?

In his Preface to the present study, Ilnytzkyj points out that "the details of how Ukrainian Futurism intersects with the avant-gardes of Europe and Russia have been left for another work" (p. xvii). It is to be hoped that he will write that work. Ukrainian Futurism shows him to be admirably equipped to do so. He has done for Ukrainian Futurism what thirty years ago Vladimir Markov did for its Russian counterpart.