Our Notes & References

Very rare provincial printing of poetry: “Russian forgotten avant-garde, published in the Russian province on the banks of the Volga. Incredibly rare” (Savine). Apparently no physical copies in the US and no auction records in the West; only four physical copies in libraries (British Library, BNF, RGB Moscow, RNB St Petersburg), all other copies on Worldcat seem to be digital only.

The Russian futurists hailed and celebrated the October Revolution as an essential step towards the realisation of their utopian projects. Thanks to the Revolution, the futurist movement also spread from the capitals to the smaller cities: the “active relocations of people [and] the isolation of different regions from each other during the Civil War […] created unique conditions for the development of futurism in the Russian provinces” (Bagdasarov, our translation here and elsewhere). This development was however cut short, and from 1919, the most active (or radical) futurists “were removed from public offices, and their periodicals gradually ceased to be published” (Bagdasarov).

This first and only issue of the futurist literary almanac Bez muz was published in the summer of 1918 in Nizhnii Novgorod, a town which had been under Soviet governance for already a year. Proclaiming the break from the pre-revolutionary legacy, the issue presents a collection of avant-garde and futuristic poems, articles and manifestoes by one of the founders of Russian futurism and the “president of Planet Earth” [“predsedatel zemnogo shara”] Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), together with his followers and other futurists from Moscow, Petersburg and Nizhnii Novgorod.

Bez muz also includes the first appearance of Khlebnikov’s poem “Kapaiet s vesel siiaiushchii dozhd” [“The shining rain drips from the oars”], as well as works by two female poets Nadezhda Pavlovich and Galina Vladychina, and an announcement of the union of “Presidents of Planet Earth” forming a new futurist hermitage in a monastery. Among other contributors are V. Shershevich, R. Ivnev, S. Tretiakov, S. Spasskii, K. Bolshakov, B. Gusman, A. Reshetov, G. Gaer, B. Lavrentiev, I. Rukavishnikov and A. Olenin.

The issue ends with a peculiar letter of the poet Nikolai Aseev to another poet, Sergei Bobrov, from 12 April 1918. Aseev writes about his intentions to travel from Vladivostok to Shanghai, and then to the US, or perhaps to join the expedition of the union of “Presidents of Planet Earth” to Kamchatka. He also claims that the US recognise Khlebnikov as the president of the Planet Earth and asks Bobrov to send him his books to the following US addresses: “Itc Wockero institute ashland Budfoi Udelle Chicago ible”, “Bony Brothers, Greenich Village”, and “Pearsons Magazine Jrank Harris”.

Bibliography

Rozanov 4711; Evgenii Bagdasarov, Periodicheskiie izdaniia russkikh futuristov, MGU im Lomonosova, Moskva, 2006; not in MoMA.