Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language: Julia Kristeva and the Russian Avant-garde

Abstract

It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatological faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last minute and substituted a trivial farce.–Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere (1969)In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.