Dot Dot Dot: Futurist Punctuation and Elliptical Censorship in Avant-Garde Books, 1910-1917

• In Event: Unspeakable Things: Omission, Ellipsis, and Erasure from Censorship to Creative Strategy, 1910-1930s

Abstract

When Vladimir Maiakovskii first published Oblako v shtanakh (A Cloud in Pants) in 1915, he lamented that 'the censors blew threw it’ and that ‘six pages were entirely dots’ The poet had fallen victim to a common strategy in nineteenth and twentieth-century literary censorship: the practice of replacing banned content with rows of printed dots. And yet, even as Maiakovskii despaired of having his poetry censored, he nonetheless, later began incorporating similar effects into his own poetic stanzas.
Indeed, ellipses were ubiquitous in the Futurist poetic canon. Sentences trailed off into rows of dots, pinpoints were incorporated into the text as perforated line breaks, and pages were peppered with dashes and asterisks. This paper explores this distinctive mode of experimental punctuation in comparison to the censorial ellipsis which redacted literary classics, exploring how classic works from Pushkin to Tolstoy reached their readers with lines of prose reduced to dots. By questioning how censorial strategies were simultaneously evaded and imitated by the creative vanguard, I reconsider how early twentieth-century readerships were primed to encounter signs of omission in everyday texts.

Author

• Kamila Kocialkowska, U of Warwick (UK)