SOLOMON TELINGATER’S AND ALEXANDER BEZYMENSKY’S KOMSOMOLIA: A PROPAGANDA COMIC STRIP OR A MASTERPIECE OF CONSTRUCTIVIST TYPOGRAPHIC ART?

Abstract

The article provides a study of Komsomolia (1928) — a poem by Alexander Bezymensky set for print by Solomon Telingater. This text has been both long out of print and beyond the scope of critical attention both in Russia and beyond it, for almost a century. This book is reassessed here within the context of contemporary scholarship, as a specimen of literature of the 1920s, as a first-hand account of the life of members of the Komsomol (Young Communists Organization) during the years of the Russian Civil war, and last of all, as a masterpiece of Constructivist art which embodied the experimental typography of the Russian avant-­garde art. Transcending ideological bias, this article focuses on the realities of history and the most conspicuous markers of time which had influenced the contexts of the poem and informed its Romanticist drive. Using arguments from Bezymensky’s biography, the author argues that the view of Komsomolia as a Soviet propaganda comic strip, a narrative set in a sequence of simple pictures and photos, is too straightforward and can be extracted from the political expedience of its times. It were the polystylistics and polyphony of Komsomolia which informed its graphic art and formed the core of Telingater’s typographic experiment. Within this experimental space, the artist displays Komsomolia’s intricate architectonics and fascinating construction techniques, which makes use of such novel devices as photomontage, poetics of a cinematic frame, accentuating the text, figurative accidence, typographic drawing, as well as the visual optic of the ‘bioscopic book’.