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

Mirskontsa as Event

The occasion for an Event, as philosopher Alain Badiou renders, is generally silent, hyper-localized, and only recognized as such retrospectively; indeed, the insertion of a new problematic (a Third Term) into the dialectics of everyday life can be so cacophonous that it can function at the level of white noise in its immediate present. While by no means the first handmade book in the Russian Avant Garde, Mirskonsta functions as an emblematic text for the genre-- both because of its literary composition/focus and its physical composition. Crafted in concert by poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexi Kruchenykh with the painter Natailia Goncharova, Mirskontsa demonstrated the uncanny representation across a text of bodies, poetry, and natural entities. Indeed, this moment in time was characterized as an Explodity!-- an occasion for the enter evacuation of all previous knowledges in the wake of a monstrous influx of alternative formations. 

Small, unevenly cut, and on the cusp of imagining new articulations of representation, Mirskontsa offers a special blend of content. From its nondescript but jarring figures, to its classical odes, Mirskontsa positions readers within a new relation to the text through the instantiation of multiple layers of conscious poetics. That is to say, by simultaneously (and immediately) locating alternative poetic formations, classical and personalized characters, and Rayonistic scenes, Mirskontsa bursts apart with literary life.

Mirskontsa offers an analytic inasmuch as it offers a book. Where Mirskontsa directs, we must follow. Consistent with variations of Pyotr Ouspensky's theory of the fourth dimension and Roman Jakobson's re-vitalization of Sausserian linguistic practices, Mirskontsa begs the question of meaning-making across and upon a text, not simply in its narrative. In this way, it is possible to consider the hand-made quality of the text as an important signifier for the completion of the sound-shape image of the a book written 'backwards.'

Whereas Ouspensky focused on the more simplistic four-dimensional model, Jakobson would argue that language functions from a six-dimensional world-being: Referentials, Poetics, Affect, Conates, Phatics, and Metalinguistics. An instructive moment, the unconscious deployment of these handmade texts served as the pedagogical materials for a new engagement with knowledge, perception, and being.

While not directly involved in the production of Mirskonsta, Kazimir Malevich demonstrated this Futurist aesthetic across this modality in his costumes for the opera Victory Over the Sun. This Futurist opera contributes to the theory of a four-dimensional literary-linguistic experience in that, from its theme of the re-valuation of values to its jarringly morphed costumes, a consideration of the simultaneity of play and history could be evaluated. In plain terms, this opera's production and material components offer a directing question: The Future (the aforementioned 'Victory') is happening in Russia at the same moment the play is being produced and performed, with actors (in real life and on stage) repeating their performances across the audience of time. 

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