Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde

Chapter Two. Infant Word: Aleksei Kruchenykh, Children’s Language, and Cubo-Futurist Poetics

62 Chapter Two Infant Word: Aleksei Kruchenykh, Children’s Language, and Cubo-Futurist Poetics IT FLIES IN THE FACE of chronological time to do as Kronos did—castrate one’s father and consume one’s children in order to defy fate and stake sole claim to the future. Yet both bloodthirsty acts credited to this Titan of Greek mythology apply equally well to the exploits of the Russian Futurists, who themselves defy their forefathers and the traditions of the past in order to stake their claim to the future of poetry. The devouring of children, or ‘pedophagy,’ to borrow the neologism of Lovejoy and Boas in Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935),1 proves a fitting metaphor for the infantile primitivism of the Russian Futurists, who fixate on the power and potential of the infantile and become consumers of the ‘infant/child’ as object. It is thus an apt illustration that ornaments the Cubo-Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1913 volume of Futurist poetry, The Devil and the Speechcrafters (Chort i rechetvortsy). Created by Kruchenykh’s colleague and close companion, the avant-garde artist Olga Rozanova, the cover design employs a primitivist style to depict a scene of impending pedophagy reminiscent of the deeds of Kronos. (See figure 14.) A sharp-toothed figure, who demonstrably resembles Aleksei Kruchenykh, seems about to devour a struggling infant. If he is the diabolical figure in this scene, then the infant is the ‘speechcrafter.’ Indeed, the Futurist poets followed the lead of Aleksei Kruchenykh in constructing the ‘infant/child’ through the framework of infantile primitivism as the ‘speechcrafter’ par excellence. The Futurists regarded the borderline figure of the ‘infant/child’ as a means of access to the future of language and, thus, as an admirable example of how to create the poetry of the future. The primitivist gaze involves a certain ambivalence, however, as shown by Rozanova’s provocative portrayal of savagery and cannibalism. Primitivism constructs the ‘other’ in necessarily limited ways, whether putting it forth as an example for emulation or making the ‘other’ into the object of consumption by bringing it into galleries, circulation, and the public discourse. The Infant Word 63 sinister underside of the Futurist fixation on their construction of the child becomes evident in examples celebrating savagery toward children or paedophobia , such as when Mayakovsky writes in “Ia” (“I”) (1913), “I love to watch children dying” (Ia liubliu smotret’, kak umiraiut deti).2 The performance of brutality evident here, and the desire for dramatic effect, deliberately run counter to the prevailing forces that align to glorify and celebrate the child. Mayakovsky’s declaration draws attention precisely to the centrality of the child as battleground and victim in contemporary cultural constructions and in the avant-garde’s attempts to fashion itself in contradistinction to all preceding forces. All this is to say that the Futurist child is neither the swaddled babe of times past nor the Romantic child in a country pastoral; if the child is a noble savage for the twentieth century and the Neo-Primitivists, then, for the Futurists, the emphasis is on savage. The Futurist child is the enfant terrible, as abundantly shown in the example of Aleksei Kruchenykh, whose Futurist exploits and radical poetry reveal that he self-consciously constructed himself Figure 14. Chort i rechetovortsy (The Devil and the Speechcrafters), cover design by Olga Rozanova for book by Aleksei Kruchenykh, 1913 The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (88-B26223) Infantile Primitivism 64 and his work in this manner, even as his primitivist practice delivered the same glorification of the infantile. Kruchenykh recognized that the savage child constructed by infantile primitivism contained tremendous subversive power through its revolutionary challenge to traditional notions like chronological time. Yet, like the baby that turns into a pig in the arms of Alice in Wonderland, this child has a strident squeal; perhaps it isn’t a baby at all. The Cubo-Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh exemplified the infantile primitivism of the early avant-garde in his person, practice, and poetics. (See figure 15.) Though Kruchenykh is infamous as the author of the poem “Dyr bul shchyl” that radically puts forth a doctrine of sound over sense, little attention has been given to the role of his primitivist interest in children’s language for the development of his radical poetics.3 In fact, however, beginning in 1913 and continuing over the next decade, Kruchenykh became involved with various...