This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde

Kruchenyk Te li le 1914 (cover)

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

Dyr bul schul and the Dominant As a vital component to Russian Formalist theory, the Dominant is the ruling force of an artistic work. According to Roman Jakobson's description of the Dominant, each type of work holds a system of values, which are organized into a hierarchy. The time period determines which of these values is at the top of the hierarchy, thus becoming the dominant. Furthermore, the dominant form which existed during the era of the Russian avant-garde was the textual, which began with the rise of the novel during the Romantic period and through the poetry of Pushkin.

When asked to explain Anna Karenina, Tolstoy replied that he would have to re-write the whole book, exactly the same. This is to say, there is no reduction of the novel's textual form. In terms of the Russian avant-garde, Gerald Janecek examines the visual and material elements of the page, especially in the works of Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov. Evidently, his inquiry is influenced by this notion of the dominant textual form. However, Kruchenyk's Dyr bul schul has at least three different textual forms created by the author, all quite different in their appearance. This suggests that the textual aspect is not the dominant feature of the poem. Instead, sound has become the dominant feature of Zaum poetry.

According to Jakobson, cultural change reflects itself through a re-ordering of values in artistic works, therefore asserting a new dominant. Pre-dating the Russian avant-garde was the so-called "Golden Age" of Russian literature. The 19th century saw the rise and acclaim of novelists and poets such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin, who remain as some of Russia's most celebrated writers. Their literary dominance, as well as the influence of the Romantic era in general, made the textual form the dominant aspect of the era.

However, the dominant form was changing amongst the Russian avant-garde. Starting in 1913, Alexei Kruchenyk authored at least three different versions of his Zaum poem Dyr bul schul. These three versions had varied textual presentations, sourced from the same author. The first, as shown above, appeared in his book Pomada in 1913. This version included an illustration of a nude woman by Mikhail Larionov, creating an eroticized, masculine poem.

A second version was produced in the book Te li le, a written collaborative effort by Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov, illustrated by Olga Rozanova. This version of Dyr bul schul from 1914 is the richest of the three in color and is the only one to have a feminine creative influence, as Rozanova was deemed responsible for its creation. Some of the letters in this version are heavily faded on the page, which resulted in a different first reading for myself and the class. Despite this, the oral qualities of the original first printing of the work remain.

Lastly, in his 1913 essay The Word as Such (Слово как таковое), Kruchenyk printed yet another version of the poem to use as an example in the work. It is devoid of illustration and any handwritten creation, existing only in print on the page. Unlike the previous two, this printed version makes a clear distinction in the second line. The phrase "убышщур" is clearly intended to be one word. In the other versions, it is not evident that this is the case, where the line appears to look like two Zaum-like words "убыш" and "щур." In addition to the spacing in the handwritten versions, a native Russian speaker would most likely parse Kruchenyk's Zaum language in the same manner. According to standard Russian word formation, the sounds "ш" and "щ" do not occur sequentially in the same word. However, it is possible to end a word with one of the sounds and begin the following word with the other, and vice versa. In assuming that the text as the dominant, this leads us astray when examining the handwritten letters and the page itself. On the other hand, there is virtually no difference when considering the oral component of the poem. Since we have no grasp on the semantic qualities of the sounds as comprehensible words, the difference between "убышщур" and "убыш щур" is negligible.

The only things that are consistent between these three variations of Dyr bul schul are the authorship and the sounds of the recitation of the poem itself. This should lead us to acknowledge sound as the Dominant force of Kruchenyk's poem, rather than its textual and artistic elements.