Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930

Notes

Introduction 1. Mayakovsky’s words were quoted in a newspaper article, “Futuristy,” by V. Nezhdanov , which appeared in Trudovaia gazeta (Nikolaev) no. 1419, January 26, 1914, 3. Reprinted in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh (Moscow : Izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955), 1:453–54. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from Russian are my own. 2. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio and trans. Robert Brain et al. (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 21. 3. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991), 60.Virilio, in dissecting speed in the twentieth century, has authored an expansive theory of dromology (from the Greek dromos, “race”), his term for the study of velocity, acceleration, and speed in modern life. 4. See, for instance, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194. 5. Galileo was among the first to attempt to measure the speed of light. Although his attempts failed to yield any significant results, his later discovery of the moons of Jupiter led to the first approximation of light’s velocity in 1675, when Olaus Christensen Roemer noted that the eclipses on Jupiter’s moons could be observed in various phases, depending on the time of year and the earth’s varying distance from Jupiter. By dividing the diameter of the earth’s orbit (186 million miles) by the difference in seconds (996) when observing the eclipse of Jupiter’s moons from the far side of the earth’s orbit as compared to the near side, Roemer determined that light moves at a finite speed of roughly 186,300 miles per second. George Gamov, One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 75–77. 6. While they did not go so far as to deny the ether’s existence, Michelson and Morley prompted others to declare ether a nonexistent entity, used only to explain light’s movement according to the soon-to-be outdated model of absolute space and time. 7. A kinetic theory of gases emerged in the 1870s, when the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann explored thermodynamics, the mechanical theory of heat. See William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 47–62. 239 notes 8. Ibid., 235. Other groundbreaking work soon followed the special theory of relativity , for instance, Einstein’s E=mc2 equation, which stated that an object’s energy content equals its inertial mass multiplied by the speed of light (c) squared. 9. As a result of his 1905 work, Einstein maintained that clocks had to be synchronized in a way that took into account light’s constant speed and the miniscule variations in time it took light to travel from its source (the clock) to those observing the time. For more on Einstein’s work with clocks, see Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 10. The visual distortion of an object moving at light speed became known as the “Lorentz contraction.” 11. Einstein’s general theory of relativity starts from Mach’s hypothesis that there is no way to distinguish between gravity and acceleration: whether an object falls due to the earth’s gravity or is accelerating through space at 32 feet per second per second (acceleration due to gravity at the earth’s surface) is impossible to determine. 12. For more on modern art’s link to science, see Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and Arthur I. Miller, Eisenstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 13. The color spectrum changes when the observer approaches the speed of light, due in part to the Doppler effect. See Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Time and Space (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 130. 14. In the 1909–10 Twelfth Congress of Russian Naturalists and Physicians in Moscow, the Russian scientists V. S. Ignatovsky, P. S. Ehrenfest, and P. S. Epstein delivered papers on the speed of light in conjunction with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. See Alexander Vucinich, Einstein and Soviet Ideology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5. 15. Nikolay Kulbin,“Kubizm,” in Strelets, ed. A. Belenson, vol. 1, reprint of 1915 original (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), 216. 16. Mikhail Matyushin...