The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930

By Iva Glisic

Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve in their comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda. By tracing the political and ideological evolution of Russian Futurism between 1905 and 1930, Iva Glisic challenges this view, demonstrating that Futurism took a calculated and systematic approach to its contemporary socio-political reality. This approach ultimately allowed Russia's Futurists to devise a unique artistic practice that would later become an integral element of the distinctly Soviet cultural paradigm. Drawing upon a unique combination of archival materials and employing a theoretical framework inspired by the works of philosophers such as Lewis Mumford, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, Fred Polak, and Slavoj Žižek, The Futurist Files presents Futurists not as blinded idealists, but rather as active and judicious participants in the larger project of building a modern Soviet consciousness. This fascinating study ultimately stands as a reminder that while radical ideas are often dismissed as utopian, and impossible, they did—and can—have a critical role in driving social change. It will be of interest to art historians, cultural historians, and scholars and students of Russian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781609092450

Book preview

THE FUTURIST FILES

AVANT-GARDE, POLITICS, AND IDEOLOGY IN RUSSIA, 1905–1930

IVA GLISIC

NIU PRESS

DEKALB, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2018 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18         1  2  3  4  5

978-0-87580-790-4 (paper)

978-1-60909-245-0 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

CONTENTS

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND ABBREVIATION IN ARCHIVAL CITATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

THE BIRTH OF RUSSIAN FUTURISM OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF CRISIS, 1905–1917

CHAPTER TWO

NOT BY BAYONETS ALONE, 1917–1921

CHAPTER THREE

A PERMANENT REVOLUTION, 1921–1930

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SOVIET 1920s’ CULTURE WARS

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND ABBREVIATION IN ARCHIVAL CITATIONS

The Library of Congress system has been used for the transliteration of Russian words, excluding well-known names such as, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Leon Trotsky, and Anatoly Lunacharsky where the more common spelling has been retained. The use of apostrophes to designate the Russian soft sign has been excluded in the transliteration of the names of individuals for stylistic consistency. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.

f., fond (collection)

D., deloproizvodstvo (record; a volume of a fond)

op., opis’ (inventory)

d., dd., delo, dela (file, files); the designation d. (delo) has been used throughout the text, although some archives use e.kh., edinitsa khranenia (storage unit) instead of d. when referring to a file.

ch., chast’ (part)

l., ll., list, listy (folio, folios or sheet, sheets)

ob, oborot (back side of a folio)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Western Australia, which supported my research for this book over a four-year period. In addition, various grants from the university’s Graduate Research School and School of Humanities facilitated research trips that were instrumental in this project. I was honored to be the inaugural recipient of the School of Humanities’ Patricia Crawford Research Award in History, and I hope that this work represents a worthy tribute to this award. My research trips to Russia were also aided by the generous support of the Open Society Foundations. I am grateful for the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which enabled me to spend time at the Getty Research Institute and the Hoover Institution and to expand my thinking on Russian Futurism. I am also very grateful for funding provided through the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies First Book Subvention Program, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy Scheme.

To paraphrase a familiar proverb, it takes a village to write a book. I am especially thankful to Mark Edele for his robust and inspiring support throughout the years of my working on this project as well as for his intellectual generosity and his direct and honest approach. I am very fortunate to have been able to turn to Jenna and Philip Mead for advice and assistance whenever I needed it. The opportunity to work with Robert Stuart, Tijana Vujošević, Darren Jorgensen, and Kati Tonkin also profoundly influenced my thinking and writing on Russian Futurism.

The final revisions of this book were undertaken during my time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen. I am very grateful for the support that I received from the university’s Institute for Eastern European History and Area Studies, and in particular from Klaus Gestwa, Dietrich Beyrau, Ingrid Schierle, and Katharina Kucher. Their collegiality and hospitality made for a most memorable experience. My Tübingen conversations with Boris Kolonitskii also had a profound influence on the composition of this book.

Long and engaging discussions with Tanja Mitrović and Biljana Purić on avant-gardism and radicalism of all types influenced my thinking more than they could know. I would like to thank Nevena Marković-Kopil and Jovana Krstić for their continued friendship and for appearing miraculously in the middle of Moscow to save me from a thorny situation. Janko and Milica Djurić became a very special part of my life during my time in Russia, and their friendship will always remain dear to me. The unwavering support of the Burtons was a great source of strength throughout this project.

This book is dedicated to Snežana Glišić and Michael Burton—two quintessential Futurist minds. Their enthusiasm, relentless optimism, and ability to remain strong in the face of immense challenges were inspirational. I know just how fortunate I am to have Nena and Michael as my comrades in arms; this book is theirs as much as it is mine.

My love of the Russian avant-garde—the original catalyst for this book—was first sparked during my engagement at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The research for this study saw me comb through the archives, libraries, and museums of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Los Angeles, and Stanford. The writing and rewriting of this material occurred in the idyllic but distant settings of Perth in Western Australia and Tübingen in Germany. Ultimately, however, this book is dedicated to my home city of Belgrade—the city that taught me to be resilient, that instilled in me the strength to disregard the confines of what might seem realistic and possible, and to always pursue the things that are most important. I have no doubt that the utopian and dystopian forces that shaped the spirit and recent history of my home city drew me toward the subject matter of this research, as it is not by chance that a topic finds its writer.

INTRODUCTION

Upon entering the archives of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, visitors are confronted by a peculiar model, suspended from the ceiling, of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1932 flying machine Letatlin. Reminiscent of the skeleton of some prehistoric bird this sleek, delicate contraption was designed to function as an aerial bicycle upon which the Soviet proletariat would soar ever higher. In its ethos, the design harked back to the principles of Russia’s first avant-garde movement—Russian Futurism, formed in the first decade of the twentieth century with the aim of using innovative artistic methods to provoke and support the creation of a modern, dynamic, and future-oriented society. Tatlin’s ornithopter never took to the skies. Instead, the Letatlin (much like its creator) came to be regarded as a symbol of the intrinsically utopian nature of the Russian avant-garde, and its ostensibly misguided efforts to radically modernize human experience and the built environment through art.

The charge of utopianism has long haunted the avant-gardes. Indeed, although Russian avant-garde art in general (and Russian Futurism in particular) continues to fascinate scholars and the broader public alike with its artists’ capacity for innovation and the ambition and audacity of their ideas, their ventures have habitually been interpreted as a form of utopian thinking. Libraries abound with monographs and exhibition catalogues that routinely equate avant-gardism with utopianism, reproducing the notion that avant-garde artists in their creative enthusiasm operated beyond the realm of what was possible and, ultimately, exhibited scant understanding of the everyday life they were so eager to redesign. Yet a careful study of the materials held in the corridors stretching out from beneath Tatlin’s flying machine in the Shchusev Museum and other archives, libraries, and research centers both in Russia and abroad paints a different picture of the relationship between Russia’s radical artists and the political, social, and cultural environment in which they operated.

In this book the aim is to trace the theoretical and political evolution of the Futurist idea in Russia from the opening years of the twentieth century up until 1930. Foregrounding the historical reality faced by members of the Futurist cohort will reveal that, throughout its existence, the movement exhibited an acute understanding of—and was shaped through its direct engagement with—the sociopolitical conditions of modern Russia. Reconsidering the utopian nature of this project without fearing the conclusion that radical ideas can bring about meaningful change adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Futurist phenomenon.

At various points this work intersects with research by scholars who wrote on Futurism and, more broadly, the avant-garde art scene in Russia before the revolution and with studies of Constructivism and Production art in the early Soviet period. Here, however, the Futurist idea is examined in a historical continuum that bridges the revolutionary divide of 1917. Allowing history to intervene in a direct and systematic manner demonstrates that the Futurist vision for radically modern art continually evolved in response to the real pressures of the time. This work is eclectic in the selection of sources and synthetic in method, drawing upon a wide array of historical documents and works of art, literature, and philosophy and switching between different (Futurist) voices. From artists and poets including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Tatlin, David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Vasilii Kamenskii, we move to theorists Nikolai Punin, Osip Brik, and Boris Kushner, then to critics Sergei Tretiakov, Boris Arvatov, and Nikolai Chuzhak, before finally hearing from Bolshevik leaders Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leon Trotsky. The aim is to tell the story of how a radical idea transferred into, transformed within, and impacted upon the Russian (and Soviet) reality.

This is at the same time a historical account and a historiographic intervention, offering an assessment of the artists and theorists who contributed to the Futurist cause as astute observers of their own moment, and their creative method as a reasoned response to the contemporary political, social, economic, and ideological forces that shaped daily life. The main question is, what exactly was utopian about the Futurist project? The perpetual identification of Russian progressive art with utopianism was initially normalized through academic and curatorial practice profoundly influenced by the Cold War discourse.¹ Seeking to champion their bold and innovative art, scholars in the West systematically deracinated Russian avant-garde movements from their historical context in order to disconnect the art from the dirty world of revolutionary politics. Such clean, ahistorical modernism was deemed utopian so as to distinguish the art from the reality of the Bolshevik project and thus indicate that, although these avant-gardists openly supported the Bolshevik cause, they did so while being unaware of its true nature. In this characterization, avant-garde artists feature as blinded idealists—inspired creators designing for a utopian world, who were simultaneously out of contact with the brutal reality of the new Russia.²

A different approach to the relationship between radical art and its historical moment was initiated in the early 1990s by a group of scholars led by art historian Paul Wood and philosopher Boris Groys.³ Intervening in existing debates, Wood challenged the habitual dissociation of art and politics and the perception of avant-gardists as being political virgins. Groys would upend another prevailing view—namely, that the Russian avant-garde disappeared with the sanctioning of Socialist Realism as the official Soviet art in the early 1930s. Taking aim at this view, Groys argued that many of the ideas and principles of the avant-garde—particularly its ambition to create a total environment for Communist society—had in fact been incorporated into the Socialist Realist aesthetic paradigm (albeit not entirely as the avant-garde had hoped). This argument remains controversial, in no small part because it raises uncomfortable questions as to the moral responsibility of the avant-garde for its participation in the Stalinist project.⁴

The arguments advanced by Wood and Groys sit at the eye of a storm of complex debate. Following on from Wood’s analysis and aided by greater accessibility to Russia’s archives during the 1990s and 2000s, scholars including Andrei Krusanov, Christina Kiaer, Maria Gough, Jane Sharp, and Pamela Kachurin have increasingly emphasized the historical forces that framed different forms of avant-garde production.⁵ Similarly, Groys’s claim of continuity has been elaborated upon and qualified in works by, for example, Katerina Clark, who has revealed the extent to which avant-garde concepts permeated cultural mores during the Stalinist era, and Evgeny Dobrenko, who has characterized the avant-garde as one of several artistic currents synthesized into Socialist Realism rather than its exclusive precursor.⁶

Although scholars no longer readily brand the avant-gardists as blinded idealists, there remains a clear lack of alignment between this new historical knowledge and the use of the term utopia with respect to the avant-garde project. Perhaps the utopian label, used to signify the romantic, the idealistic, and the impractical, offers a final bulwark against taking arguments of the political and social consciousness of the avant-garde to their logical conclusion, in which Groys’s question of moral responsibility cannot be ignored. Emblematic of this phenomenon are the works that, in response to Groys’s proposition, acknowledge an unhappy plausibility to [Groys’s] argument, while simultaneously highlighting the disappearance of numerous avant-garde artists during Stalin’s Terror (as a way to imply absolution for their sins), or scholarship that dismisses Groys’s argument and its implications but nonetheless acknowledges the continuity of avant-garde ideas in culture under Stalinism.⁷ Against such scholarly pirouetting, it is worth reflecting upon the observation by philosopher Slavoj Žižek that there is no such thing as a decaffeinated revolution, as revolutionary ideas cannot be separated from the aggressiveness with which they are realized simply by throwing out the dirty water of terror, while retaining the pure baby of authentic socialist democracy.⁸ Equally, we cannot talk meaningfully about how artists functioned within and contributed to the Soviet system while also separating them from this system by resorting to the utopian label. It is time to take stock and reconsider the Futurist phenomenon. This examination of the evolution of the Futurist idea in Russia thus aligns a historical understanding of this evolution with a more critical reading of its ostensibly utopian nature.

Image: FIGURE 1 Letatlin model in the Shchusev Museum foyer, 2014.

The intention here is not to deny or explain away the failures, dead ends, or moments of sheer levity that were undoubtedly part of the Futurist experiment. Instead, the aim is to restore certain essential aspects to the story of Russian Futurism that have too often been ignored: those of creative pragmatism over utopianism, political prowess over naïveté, victory over defeat, and living potential over the musealization of the Futurist idea. This account also stands as a reminder that, although radical ideas are often dismissed as flippant, utopian, and impossible, they did—and can—have a critical role in driving social change.

Russian Futurism: The Term and the Time Frame

Originating in Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century, Futurism is widely recognized as having been the first European avant-garde movement.⁹ The publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism in the French daily Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 represents its official date of birth.¹⁰ Marinetti’s manifesto was loud and bombastic, his proclaimed goal nothing less than the total annihilation of centuries-old European cultural and intellectual traditions. Characterizing history as a barrier to progress, he outlined the Futurist mission to radically modernize human experience by refashioning art into an agent of social change. This principle, termed arte azione (art as aesthetic-cum-political action) was the driving force of the Italian Futurist movement.¹¹ Within a matter of weeks the Russian public learned of this new phenomenon, and Futurist ideas quickly took root in what was fertile Russian soil.¹² The gestation of these ideas culminated in the publication of the first Russian Futurist manifesto in 1912, signed by Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Khlebnikov and provocatively entitled, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu).¹³ From this moment until 1917, the term Futurism was used not only for denominating the endeavors of artists and poets who advanced Futurist ideas and embraced strategies of shock and provocation in subverting established artistic hierarchies and norms but also by the general public as a synonym for any modern (or nontraditional) art, regardless of any actual connection with the Futurist program or Futurist aesthetics.¹⁴

The postrevolutionary period brought further complication to the use of the Futurist epithet. After 1917 Futurism was one of the progressive tendencies gathered under the umbrella term Soviet avant-garde, but contemporaries (and many scholars) tended to use the term Futurism to signify the Russian or Soviet avant-garde in general.¹⁵ Similarly, the term leftist art was employed conterminously with Futurism, as a designation that had both political and artistic currency: members of the Futurist cohort supported the revolutionary cause, and in artistic terms they were revolutionary radicals, having rejected all of the traditional premises of art making.¹⁶ Two concepts—Constructivism and Production art (Productivism)—were born out of the Futurist logic during the 1920s. Artists and writers engaged in these practices were referred to as Constructivists (the term Productivist features rarely), although the Futurist label also remained in use.¹⁷

Prerevolutionary manifestations of Futurism differed markedly from the projects created during the 1920s under the banners of Constructivism and Production art. Constructivism crystallized as a movement between 1920 and 1921, foregrounding the idea of art as a rational process for learning to handle and use materials in the construction of objects. This was a dramatic departure from the early Futurist principle of art that aimed to shock. Production art represented a further radicalization of Constructivism. Taking shape between 1921 and 1924, this movement championed the notion that research into materials and the knowledge associated with production must transition from studios to factories and gain application in industrial production and the manufacture of everyday items.¹⁸

Although a number of scholars have observed that Constructivism and Production art arose out of Futurist ideas, in the literature analyzing these movements they are generally treated as being distinct from the Futurism of the prerevolutionary period.¹⁹ Yet while there is benefit in approaching these movements separately, they are here treated as a single phenomenon. The term Futurism is used throughout the entire time span under consideration here, with the later movements regarded as stages of the Futurist project. This approach also reflects the fact that progressive critics and theorists in the 1920s including Tretiakov and Chuzhak themselves used the term Futurism indiscriminately in describing progressive art both before and after the revolution. Futurists is also employed as a term to designate those individuals who carried the development of Futurist ideas from one stage into another even if, for example, artists such as Tatlin or Aleksandr Rodchenko are more commonly known as Constructivists, and Arvatov as the quintessential Productivist critic.²⁰ There is of course an inherent risk in conflating different creative philosophies and practices by referring to all of the book’s protagonists as Futurists. The term threatens to homogenize what was a diverse artistic community by obscuring differences—such as the fierce rivalry between Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich or the ideological dispute between Mayakovsky, Brik, and Rodchenko on one side and Tretiakov and Chuzhak on the other, which emerged during their collaboration on the journals LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and Novyi LEF (New LEF) during the 1920s. At the same time, however, Malevich’s participation in impromptu street provocations during the 1910s, Tatlin’s work on a monument to the revolution, Mayakovsky’s poems and posters, or Tretiakov’s theoretical essays all pushed the Futurist idea forward at different points in time. Retaining the terms Futurism and Futurists serves to highlight a distinct thread of development that can be traced from Futurism to Constructivism and Production art, both as a gradual deconstruction of traditional formats of art making and as an advancement of the utilitarian principle based on the original Futurist call for art to be reinvented as a part of everyday life. Although not always designating unity within the cohort, these terms do reflect the continued evolution of an idea. Finally, the term avant-garde is used as a collective noun for progressive artistic phenomena across the time span in question—such as, for example, Suprematism or Formalism—and is thus inclusive of but also broader than Futurism itself.

The formation of the Italian Futurist movement in 1909 and subsequent translation of its ideas to Russia would perhaps represent a logical starting point in determining the time frame for this study. Instead, however, the story begins with an investigation of the 1905 Revolution, which brings into focus the public engagement of those individuals who would eventually become doyens of Russian Futurism. Expanding this history to include the 1905 Revolution demonstrates that—even in its formative stage—the profile of the movement evolved to a large degree in response to the social and political upheavals of these years. The elaboration of the prehistory of Futurism provides a counterpoint to assertions from those scholars who, despite mounting evidence, still insist that avant-garde artists before 1917 remained persistently apolitical and who emphasize the aesthetic while omitting the activist character of those artists’ endeavors.²¹

The end date of 1930 is justified symbolically, as it was in April 1930 that the most prominent Futurist, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, committed suicide. Although Russian Futurism had undergone several metamorphoses between 1909 and 1930, Mayakovsky had remained a constant presence and was indeed synonymous with the movement. In an article dedicated to his memory, the then top Soviet cultural official Anatoly Lunacharsky eloquently captured Mayakovsky’s artistic commitment by evoking an image of the iron lyre—a powerful symbol of art in combat and one that remains emblematic of the entire Futurist project.²² There are alternative (perhaps historically more justified) dates that could have featured as the end point of this study. Active development of the Futurist program ceased in 1928 with the closing of its mouthpiece Novyi LEF. The year 1928 was also the year of a seismic shift in Soviet history, as Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy with a more radical program for rapid industrialization by introducing the first of his Five-Year Plans, a change that essentially marked the commencement of the Stalinist era in Soviet history and a simultaneous shift in cultural policies and practices. Alternatively, the year 1932 could have been taken as the end point, marking as it did the state sanction of Socialist Realism as the official Soviet art—a development that formally eliminated all other contemporary artistic and literary groups including the Futurists.²³

It is Mayakovsky’s death in 1930, however, that stands as the strongest symbolic closure to this story. In life Mayakovsky’s work embodied the core principles of Russian Futurism, and as Rodchenko would later reflect, after [Mayakovsky’s] death we all split up . . . and our paths went separate ways.²⁴ This story thus opens with an investigation of Mayakovsky’s police files concerning his involvement with clandestine revolutionary activities in the late tsarist period; it closes by noting the publication of the secret file No. 50, compiled by Soviet agents on the circumstances of his suicide.²⁵ It is between these two files that the story of the political and ideological profile of Futurism unfolds.

The Approach: A Kaleidoscopic View

A wide range of sources underpin this work, and indeed the title is inspired by the diversity of materials brought together: from tsarist police files on artists who would later become leaders of the Futurist movement and court proceedings pertaining to the censorship of their publications to a folder from Trotsky’s personal archive containing newspaper clippings and essays on Italian and Russian Futurism. Along with programmatic texts, newspaper editorials, autobiographical documents, and artworks, these files demonstrate that the Futurist program for artistic production was firmly grounded in reality and was informed by the new and emerging challenges of its immediate environment.

Rather than placing primary focus on an analysis of artworks, art groups, or institutions, the Futurist program itself is cast in the leading role. The decision to resist a biographical approach is particularly significant as, in the words of one historian, it is often the case that too much emphasis on the personal obscures the sweep of historical forces [and] the potency of ideas.²⁶ Different people carried the Futurist banner forward at different times, so the dramatis personae change throughout. The first section of this work, dealing with the period between the Revolution of 1905 and those of 1917, centers around those individuals who belonged to the so-called Cubo-Futurist cohort in this period—Mayakovsky, Tatlin, Burliuk, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and Kamenskii. In the next chapter, covering the evolution of the Futurist program and the merging of its ideas with Marxism, the main focus is on those theorists who facilitated this process—Punin, Brik, and Kushner. The chapter covering the period between 1921 and 1930 relies on material from the publications LEF and Novyi LEF, within which (aside from those by Brik and Kushner) theoretical pieces by Tretiakov, Chuzhak, and Arvatov pushed Futurism into a new stage. The final chapter considers the Futurist program from a different perspective, as the Bolshevik luminaries Lunacharsky and Trotsky take center stage and their views on the Futurist project are explored.

The viewpoint shifts with each new set of protagonists. In the opening chapter we assume the identity of a tsarist operative assigned to the Futurist detail. We peruse police files detailing the clandestine escapades of several young Futurists; we read their first manifestos and newspaper articles and peer into their memoirs. We attend a Futurist soirée in the company of a secret agent who makes mental notes on the event. As the revolution breaks out and the country becomes consumed by the civil war, our perspective shifts rapidly between the offices of Futurist newspapers in Petrograd, Moscow, Vladivostok, and Chita. Once the conflict subsides, we return to Moscow, to the headquarters of the avant-garde journal LEF on Nikitskii Boulevard. In the final chapter we are taken inside the studies of leading Soviet politicians Lunacharsky and Trotsky, where we watch them compose essays, speeches, and correspondence pertaining to the contemporary cultural field and the phenomenon of Futurism. Within this kaleidoscope of people, places, and papers, the focus remains steady on the evolution of the Futurist idea.

One of the guiding principles throughout this journey is the importance of maintaining a close connection between art history and history. Expanding upon research into how historical circumstance influenced certain aspects of the art and behavior of the Russian avant-garde and the argument of scholars such as Kachurin that artistic idealism does not preclude political pragmatism, this exploration permits history to make a major and systematic intervention in the study of the Futurist idea over the full duration of its active development.²⁷ This context provides an important counterpoint both to the apparent failings of the movement and to the associated charge of utopianism that is so often leveled against it. Certainly the development of the Russian Futurist program did not always proceed unimpeded: artists and theorists alike often experienced difficulty in properly defining