Futurist Manifesto Research Articles

What is Art?: Tolstoy’s Criteria in the Light of Works by Mikhail Bulgakov and Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Widely criticized since its first appearance in 1898, Tolstoy's What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) remains of interest not so much for the author's own definitions of art as for his fundamental approach. His question is, of course, an old one, which has given rise to whole theories of aesthetics, some of which he mentions, dismisses, in his essay. He himself spent a lifetime trying to determine what art should be, indeed wrote other articles on the subject. But the strength originality of What is Art?-for all its undoubted prejudice, exaggeration sheer dogmatism-lies precisely in Tolstoy's attempt to cut through differing views to ask the simple question: why do we put such an effort into the production of is it worth it, what should art be? We may not agree with his conclusions, which at times are dubious if not preposterous, but his overall treatment of the problem, resulting from his lifelong struggle to discover what human existence is all about, at least provides a framework which, with certain modifications, allows us to make some kind of judgment. Tolstoy, of course, tries to define art anew, prescribing what it should be rather than describing what it is. Instead of giving a definition of true art, he complains, and then deciding what is what is not good art by judging whether a work conforms or does not conform to the definition, a certain class of works which for some reason pleases a certain circle of people is accepted as being a definition of art is then devised to cover all these productions (115).2 His own attempt to by-pass existing works, however, would seem to be an exercise in futility, for it is production itself that has given rise to the very concept of art for most of us any definition which does not include Shakespeare, Tolstoy himself, other familiar names, must fail. Here we shall simply try to test specific authors against Tolstoy's criteria-basing our discussion on literature while bearing in mind the extent to which this may be appropriate to other art forms too. For the purposes of a short paper have chosen two widely recognized twentieth-century writers: Mikhail Bulgakov, representing Russian literature, Friedrich Durrenmatt, representing Western. Both sons of ministers-Bulgakov of a professor of theology, Durrenmatt of a Lutheran pastor-they also show a non-dogmatic concern with religion, important to Tolstoy's ideas about art in a sense which we shall examine later. We should note, of course, that neither has an immediately obvious affinity with Tolstoy. Durrenmatt barely mentions him in his writings and, at least on the surface, refuses to divulge his own theories (although some of his more general attitudes are apparent in his many articles): I too have a theory of art, he writes, ...but hold it back as being my private opinion (otherwise would have to comply with it) prefer to be considered as a somewhat confused child of nature lacking a will for form (5:142).3 Bulgakov has usually been seen as closer to Gogol, even if critics have found some similarity between his White Guard (Belaia gvardiia) Tolstoy's War Peace (Voina i mir)-of which he also made a somewhat mechanical stage adaptation.4 But his most frequently quoted reference to Tolstoy concerns the broader matter of truth: The fact that he existed... that there existed the phenomenon of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy obliges every Russian writer after Tolstoy... to be mercilessly strict towards himself others; it obliges him: complete truth of thought word.... To utter sincerity. To knowing why for what end you are writing! To a merciless intolerance towards every untruth in your own compositions! That's what the fact that there was a Lev Tolstoy in Russia obliges us to!5 Apart from this necessity for artistic truth, Bulgakov says little about his own views on art.6 Comparatively few writers, in fact, talk of their theories, notwithstanding such documents as the Russian Futurist Manifesto of 1912, with its bombastic rhetoric which says little more than that its creators, more suited to the current age than past writers, demand to do their own thing. …

Propeller Talk

Propeller Talk * Jeffrey T. Schnapp** (bio) It pleases me to scrutinize and ascertain that which I truly possess in the propeller myth, and thus also the nature of the propeller’s impulsion or propulsion. One thing seems clear: that the propeller cannot be just “any old myth.” —Carlo Emilio Gadda 1 Driven by the propeller myth of Carlo Emilio Gadda, this essay derives its title from the opening paragraph of Marinetti’s 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”: to be precise, from its famous description of how the poet, seated on the fuel tank of a soaring biplane, first felt the need to free language from the prison house of traditional syntactical form. You will recall that this exordium is pronounced by a figure well known to readers of La Conquête des étoiles (1902), Mafarka le futuriste (1909), and the early Futurist manifestos: Marinetti’s boastful and boisterous first-person narrator/orator persona. The phrase “io sentii l’inanità ridicola della vecchia sintassi ereditata da Omero” (I felt the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer) thus has a familiar ring to it, linked as it is with Marinetti’s usual claims of clairvoyance and prophetic urgency. By the paragraph’s end, however, this “I” has been recast in a less customary role, that of taking dictation...from a propeller. “Ecco che cosa mi disse l’elica turbinante, mentre filavo a duecento metri sopra i possenti fumaiuoli di Milano. E l’elica soggiunse....” (This is what the swirling propeller told me as I sped along at two hundred meters above the powerful smokestacks of Milan. And the propeller added....) 2 Dictation taken [End Page 153] from an object. A cutting-edge object, to be sure, but a mere object, all the same, and one that is infringing on the place usually reserved for Marinetti’s blunt-edged egocentric muse. Yet the manifesto is unambiguous: a propeller, not a poet, will do the talking; a propeller will dictate from on high the laws that are to govern modern poetic discourse and define the desublimated forms of individuality and subjectivity attached thereto. It might be objected that, despite this opening gambit, the poet-scribe’s silence does not last for very long. By article 7 of the manifesto his voice is cutting back into the propeller’s chatter, merging with its modernist whir as if to enact the manifesto’s closing dream of a fusion of motor and man, metal and flesh. 3 The takeover is complete once the properly “technical” portion of the argument has concluded, whereupon dictation ceases and the poet reasserts total control: “looking at objects from a new point of view,” he proclaims, “I have been able to demolish the old logical fetters and the leaden wires of ancient understanding.” 4 So, the “Technical Manifesto” animates the voice of a propeller only in order to absorb it within the poet’s own voice, and to remake that voice in the image of the new mechanical kingdom that Futurist poetry is called upon at once to presage and reproduce. The object world represented by the propeller is only a pretext, the true goal being the modernization and expansion of the poet’s subjectivity. But if such is an adequate account of the overall trajectory of the manifesto, I would like to return to and interrogate Marinetti’s opening fiction a bit further. For example, why is it desirable that this particular mechanical muse should propel the discourse of the “Technical Manifesto”? Why should a propeller stand in for the animated objects, courageous metals, and capricious motors that make up the manifesto’s redeemed material world? In what ways does Marinetti’s propeller prosopopeia regulate the manifesto’s argument and form? In the following remarks I will be addressing questions such as these through close scrutiny of the manifesto itself and by means of a lateral sectioning of the airspace in and around the manifesto’s propeller screw. What I am especially interested in is the multiplicity of simultaneous semiotic chains, institutions, technologies, and historical circumstances whose determinations interconnect in the 1912 “Technical Manifesto”. Of particular concern to me, for example, will be emerging links among various...

Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (review)

Nabokov Studies, 1 (1994), 207-33. BOOK REVIEWS John Burt Foster, Jr. Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. xviii, 260 pp. Foster's book deals in detail with the period 1925 to 1950, though there are frequent discussions, some of them extended, of later works. The three principal parts are labelled "Points of Departure," "Toward France," and "In English." The first deals with Mary, The Defense, and Glory; the second with Kamera Obscura, Despair, "Mademoiselle O," "Spring in Fialta," and The Gift; and the third with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory. There is an epilogue treating Pale Fire. The subject is highly intricate and at times elusive. It is neither memory nor art in isolation, but the metaphysical art/memory complex behind the deceptively simple phrase of the title. But it is not about this in isolation, either. It is about how Nabokov's art of memory participated in the grand dialogue of European artistic and cultural movements (principally but not exclusively Modernism) at the time. Foster's name for the genre in which he is working is "cultural biography." I have good news and bad news. First the good news. No one interested in the work of Nabokov can consult these pages without being informed, challenged, stimulated, and dazzled by Foster's erudition and daring. He is in many ways an ideal reader of Nabokov: one who has thoroughly mastered the text in its Russian, English, and, where necessary, French incarnations, and who is also massively informed in the European literary and cultural context. The whole might be likened to a solo intellectual dance with incredible leaps and pirouettes, startling and at times alarming to behold. The bad news is that this dance takes place on a towering and terrifyingly unstable intellectual scaffolding, a framework of argument, proof, and implication, the individual boards of which seem forever in danger of slipping from their supports. Everything about this scaffolding, from its overall design down to the tiny fasteners on the point of popping from their sockets (words like "therefore* and "because") makes me uneasy. It may be that the image of scaffolding itself came to me as a result of Foster's discussion of the ending of Mary, where Canin, after mentally reliving his youthful affair with the heroine, decides against resuming his intimacy with her, walks away from the sta tion where she will shortly arrive, and heads away from the choking little Berlin knot of emigration towards France and the sea. Nabokov surrounds his vicarious young self at the end of his first novel with novelistic shorthand for newness, earliness, and freshness. It is daybreak, a new house is under construction nearby, the lumber still yellow and fresh. This novel is done— both the roman-novel in the reader's hands and the roman-love affair with Mary, as recomposed in Canin's shaping memory. Mary (whose identity with Russia seems to have been forgotten by almost everyone except Ganin) belongs 208 Nabokov Studies to the past. The nom de guerre Canin masks the identity of one who had planned a counterrevolutionary foray across the border to liberate Mother Russia. But now a new geography, France and beyond, a new destiny, and many new novels lie ahead. In his Futurist Manifesto of 1915, Foster reminds us, Marinetti had blazoned the image of a house being built. Nabokov's image in Mary is therefore a sufficient pointer to the presence, somehow, of "futurism" in the book at this point. Later, in The Defense, the single phrase "glittering extremism" as applied to Luzhin's opponent Turati, also somehow 'suggests futurism." We are proleptically reminded that Sebastian Knight will have taken (one needs fussy tenses to keep the temporal kaleidoscope in focus) a trip with a Futurist, and (back now in Mary) that Mayakovsky had earlier been mentioned. But the reader wishes to ask: what is specifically Futurist about the image of a house being built? Marinetti might as well try to copyright tapwater. Why, for instance is it not rather Cartesian? Descartes makes vivid use of the image in the Discours de la méthode. Raymond Queneau...

The Concept of Museum in Early Futurist Manifestoes

*'And What is There to See in an Old Picture?'' in Early futurist manifestos The concept of the museum I cannot accept that our sorrows, our fragile courage should be taken for daily walks through the museum. (Founding Manifesto, 1909) When Futurism was to emerged on the cultural arena in 1909 its main goal dismiss the meaning of ali earlier achievements, to repudiate any it link to past or existent traditions so that a clean slate, to rasa, could to start anew, with only foun- emerge naked from the river of time '. The tabula as their proclaimed so ostentatiously by the futurists dation , was not only a rhetorical device, but also a meaningful opera- tional mechanism in their strategy. In a country were tradition was a of surpassing the fundamental factor in defining the aesthetic standard a fresh begin- ning was, the Futurists bave argued, the only mode perpetuai value system. Yet, rejecting the past was neither a new ele- ment in the cultural discourse, nor an entirely novel strategy. Futurism was able however, from the very beginning, to understand the wide ranging implications this open repudiation of cultural values would bave, and, with forcefulness and ingenuity, to use the fullest impact of this denial to suggest the superiority of its innovative elements. We will flght with ali our might the fanatical, senseless and snob- bish religion of the past. ^ With inflammatory and incisive statements the futurists openly acknowledged throughout their existence the necessity to tial renounce the perception of the past and tradition as essen- elements in the cultural discourse, and overtly discarded the validity

Politics as art

Italian Futurism emerged in the first decade of this century as a movement of both art historical and political significance. Led by impresario poet and propagandist F T. Marinetti, Futurism inaugurated the avantgardist attack on the autonomous status of art in modern bourgeois society, the repudiation of tradition, and the emphasis on formal innovation that would characterize modernist movements for decades to follow. As Renato Poggioli said, "the Futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it."2 The specific political affiliations and activities of the Futurists are by now well known. In "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" of 1909, Marinetti upheld the glory of war, "the world's only hygiene," as an announcement of the imminent crisis that would reveal the radical foundation of a new social and aesthetic world order. Futurist art, Marinetti declared, would act as an incendiary device, upholding the new values of speed, destruction, and violence necessary for a new age of Italian national grandeur. Active propagandists and campaigners for Italy's entry into the first World War, members of the movement formed a Futurist volunteer group to the front where several were wounded and killed, as Marinetti himself often boasted.3 In 1919, Marinetti not only led a group of arditi in the burning of the offices of the Milanese Socialist newspaper Avanti but appeared, as a member of the Central Committee alongside Mussolini, on the first list of Fascist candidates. In 1929, Marinetti accepted the prestigious appointment from Mussolini to the Accademia d'Italia.4

Futurism in America: 1909–14

The Futurist movement began in 1909 with F.T. Marinetti's Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism. It was not, however, until May 1915, at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, that actual paintings and sculpture by the Italian Futurists were first displayed in the United States. Meanwhile, however, the American public had been exposed to Futurist manifestoes, reproductions of Futurist paintings, and a large body of literature dealing with this art movement. Through the medium of newspapers and magazines, a wide variety of material was made available which makes it possible for us to see how the concept of Futurism developed in America.

From Futurism to "Doblinism"

Ein Sprengungsversuch, wo nichts zu sprengen ist. Denn der Roman ist schon lange keine Form mehr. Was ist das for ein 'Roman': der Werther. Und Holderlins Hyperion: ist das auch ein Roman? With this rather facile rhetoric Doblin dismisses Otto Flake's novel Die Stadt des Hirns and with it Flake's entire theory of the reform of the novel.' His contention that Flake's 'destruction of form' is no novelty in literary history should not, however, be allowed to obscure the real reason why Doblin-himself a great practitioner of innovative effects-refused to accept this Sprengungsversuch of a contemporary. Its roots lie, rather, in Doblin's whole complex relationship to the various modernist movements of the early twentieth century-a relationship that was a good deal more consistent than is generally thought to be the case. To be sure, Doblin appears to have totally reversed his original enthusiastic acclaim for Futurism, for example, but in the last analysis this has more to do with his gradual realization of its inadequate philosophical and political underpinnings than with any eccentricity or flightiness on Doblin's part. At its first appearance, he claimed the Futurist manifesto as a vital Befreiungsakt, a breakthrough that should on no account remain confined to the pictorial arts2; three years later he had to admit that he could not agree with its basic premises. But even in his first response to Futurism, he had made a crucial distinction between methods and aims: [Der Futurismus] ist keine Richtung, sondern eine Bewegung. Besser: er ist die Bewegung des Ktinstlers nach vorwarts.3 What he recognized in Futurism was its sheer progressivity, its aggressive willingness to break with the traditional. As a movement, it therefore represented a groBer Schritt4 in its destruction of the old, but at the same time it lacked positive goals and could only be a catalyst, not an end in itself. Marinetti's novel Mafarka appeared to Doblin as a meaningless juggling with words, nothing more than a futuristische' Worttechnik, as he entitled his open letter to Marinetti in 1913. DOblin's disappointment with Expressionism is closely related to this conception of Futurism.5 He decried in particular the unwillingness of certain Expressionists to put their revolutionary techniques to the service of revolutionary ideas. With regard to Dadaism, he was more ambivalent. At times, he denigrates it in much the same vein as he had

Transports Of Delight: The Image of the Automobile in Early Films

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT: THE IMAGE OF THE AUTOMOBILE IN EARLY FILMS by Julian Smith In the summer of 1979, with the aid of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, I began to survey themes associated with the automobile in the American film before 1921. I undertook this project because I was interested in exploring how a new popular art form began to impose meanings on (or build myths around) an artifact that has become one of the central symbols of an entire culture. The bulk of my research was conducted at the Library of Congress, where I read copyright descriptions, plot summaries, and reviews of approximately twenty thousand films made before 1921 --and where I viewed several hundred of the earliest films in the motion picture collection. I found that at least five hundred of these thousands of films made significant use of the automobile in terms of plot, theme, or characterization. I have outlined the preliminary results of this survey in the Fall 1980 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review devoted to the automobile and American culture. My purpose now is to suggest several connections between the growth of the popularity of both movies and cars, the "transports of delight" of my title. This title involves a double conceit: that both motion pictures and automobiles are forms of transportation. This assertion may puzzle readers who are accustomed to using the word "transportation" in the utilitarian sense: the movement of people or objects through space. This is the sense of the word that John Howard Lawson intends when he says: "to most people, the automobile is a means of transportation, but it has assumed a ritualistic importance in film."- It is the sense that Harry Reasoner also intends in The Great Love Affair, a 1965 CBS documentary, Julian Smith teaches In the FiZm Studies Pnognam at the University ofa Florida. He is the author ofa Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam [Scnlbnens, 1975). 59 when he says that television's "car commercials all promise a lot— besides transportation. What they do is, they find out what are dreams are and play them back to us --- What we are dreaming about is love, beauty, freedom , fun, luxury, speed, class, and sex appeal." Both Mr. Lawson and Mr. Reasoner make a common mistake: they assume that the car is a form of transportation and that film isn't. Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens—none of these worthy gentlemen ever saw a movie, but could we bring them back in a time machine, one of those transports so dear to Hollywood, they would all agree that motion pictures do indeed provide transportation: the state or condition of being transported by emotion, of ecstasy—of being enraptured. Ah, you say: automobiles transport us in the primary sense of physical movement while movies carry us away in another sense. My response is that motion pictures and motor cars are equally capable of supplying emotional transport. Well before 1910, civic leaders were complaining of how the impressionable were being swept off their feet by movies—and in 1909, in the Futurist Manifesto, the Italian poet, artist and motorist, F. T. Marinetti, celebrated "the beauty of speed," hymned "the man at the wheel," and boasted of how the "raging broom of madness" caused by getting behind the Wheel "swept us out of ourselves and drove us through [the] streets." To demonstrate how early moving pictures and motor cars came together to provide transports of delight, I am going to focus on four short films from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection. A quick inspection of the index to the Paper Print Collection2 suggests something of the relative interest that various forms of transportation may have held—or the accessibility to those forms of transportation of the early camera operators. Ni ver lists ten films in which airplanes or balloons appear, sixteen showing bicycles, seventy-four in which automobiles appear, one hundred and nineteen focusing on ships, and one hundred and forty-one showing us railroads of one kind or another. I find these raw numbers interesting: though the automobile has clearly pulled ahead of the two other new modes of transportation, it seems to have a...

The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo

The publication of Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, in March of 1913 marked the beginning of one of the strangest and most colorful musical careers of this century. Up to that time, Russolo's endeavors had been strictly limited to the graphic arts. Although he had studied the violin and organ with his father, an amateur church organist, and although his older brothers, Giovanni and Antonio, were graduates of the Milan conservatory, Russolo had remained essentially a novice in musical matters. Even his career in the visual arts had been spotty: he had been variously employed from time to time as a designer of theatrical costumes, a restorer of Renaissance paintings, and a free-lance engraver. In 1910, however, his professional activities had taken a more definite direction when he had joined with the Milanese artists Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra in forming a painters' branch of the futurist literary movement created only the year before by the Italian poet, F.T. Marinetti. Russolo was the most enthusiastic, if not necessarily the most gifted, of the new group. The new freedom of choice and technique offered by the wild and woolly doctrines of futurism seem to have greatly spurred his imagination. Some of his paintings of the period, with their superimposed and freely-associated images, clearly look ahead to the surrealism of painters like Chagal. It is curious, then, that Russolo should have chosen this moment to launch a totally new career. The change in direction

Russian and Italian Futurist Manifestoes

Russian and Italian Futurist Manifestoes

Two Manifestos: The Influence of Italian Futurism in Russia

From the very beginning of the Futurist movement in Italy in 1909, Russian artists, poets, and critics were well informed about the movement's manifestos and general development. Strong schools of Futurist poetry and painting quickly came into being. By 1913, Russian Futurism was already in full force. In that year, on December 2 and 3, the first Futurist theatre productions took place: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun (T52). However, Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh were not familiar with the first Futurist manifesto devoted to theatre: the Variety Theatre Manifesto (September 29, 1913). Their plays and productions were influenced by general Futurist principles, rather than a specific theatrical theory.

Futurism and the French Théâtre D'Avant-Garde

voice, considered sola igiene del mondo, namely, war. Within Italy, futurism was essentially a high-powered publicity organ in behalf of the bellicose spirit, and, though eclectic in its origins (an ill-digested stew of French romanticism and symbolism, verismo, Nietzsche, Bergson, D'Annunzio, Verhaeren, etc.) and hence literary in its rhetoric, its end was, and was meant to be, militant nationalism. Paradoxically, however, futurism made its bid for attention-if a scream can be called a bid-outside Italy in terms of its programs for the arts, which happened to coincide broadly with certain programs beginning to find currency among various avant-garde groups (particularly in France). Such a coincidence is easily explained by the oltremontane roots of the vast majority of futurist notions on art, so that in one sense it is fair to say that the numerous futurist manifestoes on the arts, published throughout Europe between 1909 and 1919, said nothing of any importance that had not already been said better by stranieri. The question then becomes: How can one explain the momentary attraction exercised by futurism on such serious artists as Pound, Severini, Kahn, Papini, Soffici, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Apollinaire? Without having recourse to a concept of Zeitgeist, it can be said that it was precisely the propagandist or advertisingagency side of futurism that made its fortune in Europe. Its calculated overstatements, its will to outrage, its stage Italian garishness, its high exasperation-quotient, were offered in behalf of modernity and the liberty to experiment and directed against the confining -isms of the past. Everywhere on the Continent were groups (cubists, orphists, vorticists, imagists, paroxyists, dynamists, vitalists, expressionists, et al.) struggling for a public, frustrated by the massive indifference of the public that existed (symbolized in that figure of defensive fun, l'homme moyen sensuel, canonized in Jarry's Pere Ubu). T en Marinetti (tres riche et tres fat, according to Gide1) dropped from heaven (Milan), burning to spend his money and ti e on an internationally scaled war against the past; more than happy to epater le bourgeois and even punch him in the nose; delighted to issue manifestoes in English, French, and Italian directed against academies, museums, gondolas, Beethoven, Shakespeare, spiritual women, solemnity, syntax, logic, etc. If such a process did not educate the public, it at least provoked it, and provocation has notoriously ever been the first step toward interest. On such grounds as these, as an unreasonable facsimile of the Socrat-