Voina i mir: Avant-Garde Responses to the First World War and the Politics of Form

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics I: Poetry as/and Political Action

Abstract

This presentation evaluates Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetic response to WWI in the context of artistic strategies for representing war among the international avant-garde, from F.T. Marinetti to Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and others. In particular, I focus on Mayakovsky’s narrative poem War and the World (Voina i mir, 1919), which not only critiques explicitly pro-war and more generally patriotic positions on this major cataclysm of the age, but also rejects abstraction as a formal strategy for conveying critical attitudes toward the war. I argue that instead of the erasure of artistic/poetic subjectivity that is implied by these various strategies, Mayakovsky attempts to create a form that would be capable of direct political action by reinserting the human in the form of the lyrical subject. However, in his utopian vision of post-apocalyptic resurrection, this human becomes reconfigured as a collectivity that anticipates the poet’s later imaginations of the body politic.

Author

• Irina Denischenko, Georgetown U