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The 'Deliberate Woman/Nude' in MirsKONtsa (1912) and Pomada (1913)

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In their groundbreaking 1912 text, MirsKONtsa [WorldBACKwards], poets Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov collaborated with painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov to produce a text towards the heart of linguistic 'meaning' through opening-up new possibilities within a literary-artistic item. These texts were unique for several reasons; primarily, though, their handmade quality and collaborative stylistic produced an entirely alternative model for the representation of language. 

MirsKONtsa is noted for its odd drawings, multiple and diverse copies, and its use of zaum [transrational] poetry. However, MirsKONtsa, is also marked by a prevalence of oftentimes-nude female forms. Perhaps in keeping with the Neo-Primitivist tradition (Perloff 2) that existed within Russian Futurism, MirsKONsa is littered with images of the naked woman. The figures in MirsKONtsa are notable in three thematics: Firstly, the female figures across the images do not look directly out at the reader-- their glances are slanted or attending some other image; Secondly, there is a repeated presentation of the 'woman' with the 'natural' and the 'woman' and the 'supernatural/angelic'; and Thirdly, there are no figures with openly observable genitals, the only deliberate nudity is in the presentation of bare breasts. 

What is interesting is the occasion for what I will call the 'deliberate nude/woman' in MirsKONtsa. This 'deliberate nude/woman' is noted as such because the existence of such a figure in a work that seeks to come to the limit/rule of sound-images necessarily must fit in the system. Initial insights about a 'worldbackwards' represented through a tetrad of artists center on the linkage between a naive eroticism--one that barely even attempts to call the reader into seduction, let alone sexual fervor--and sound. Following this linkage, the consideration of the sound of the sensual-- especially as it relates to the natural and the supernatural-- becomes ground for analysis. Further questions on these images lead into the deeper intentions of the artists. One of the first obvious questions is simply, who painted these women-figures? Was it Natalia Goncharova or her late-in-life husband Mikhail Larionov? Was the Dryad painted in collaboration with the poetic text, or does the figure exist in complete distinctness from language?

MirsKONtsa is not the only book of zaum poetry to feature nude women. In Kruchenykh and Larionov's 1913 Pomada [Pomade], the nude woman is again a unique figured occasion in the text. However, the women of Pomada are not as deliberately visible as they are in MirsKONtsa. In the famous poem-painting 'dyr bul shchyl,' there is a nude woman hidden in what simply appears to be scratch marks and scribblings on the page. This nude is the only figure in either MirsKONtsa and Pomada to seemingly expose their genitals. It is notable that in alternative versions of 'dyr bul shchyl,' Kruchenykh's soon-to-be wife Olga Rozanova altered the image of the nude woman to produce an image seemingly more in line with female representations in MirsKONtsa. Later on in the Pomada and in contrast to the  "urban prostitutes" (Perloff 75) 'dyr bul shchyl,' a peasant woman with her breasts exposed carries a basket or some other burden. As Pomada lengthens the image of the woman-as-figure becomes more oblique and it begins to discern the sex of the figure at all. In the final image of what appears to be a woman figure, the defining motif of these female nude becomes itself obscured. Is this figure-in-horror exposing their breasts, or do they raise their arm to their chest in quiet exclamation? 

Citations:

Perloff, N. (2016). Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 2, 74-75.


 

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