Literature

Not content with merely taking over the urban and modernist themes of Futurist painting, the writers who embraced Italian literary Futurism sought to develop a language appropriate for what they perceived to be the speed and ruthlessness of the early 20th century. They established new genres, the most significant being parole in libertà (“words-in-freedom”), also referred to as free-word poetry. It was poetry liberated from the constraints of linear typography and conventional syntax and spelling. A brief extract from Marinetti’s war poem “Battaglia peso + odore” (1912; “Battle Weight + Smell”) was appended to one of the Futurists’ manifestos as an example of words-in-freedom:

Arterial-roads bulging heat fermenting hair armpits drum blinding blondness breathing + rucksack 18 kilograms common sense = seesaw metal moneybox weakness: 3 shudders commands stones anger enemy magnet lightness glory heroism Vanguards: 100 meters machine guns rifle-fire explosion violins brass pim pum pac pac tim tum machine guns tataratatarata

“Designed analogies” (pictograms where shape analogically mimics meaning), dipinti paroliberi (literary collages combining graphic elements with free-word poetry), and sintesi (minimalist plays) were among other new genres. New forms of dissemination were favored, including Futurist evenings, mixed-media events, and the use of manifesto leaflets, poster poems, and broadsheet-format journals containing a mixture of literature, painting, and theoretical pronouncements. Until 1914, however, output fell far short of the movement’s declared program, and Futurist poets—in contrast to Marinetti—remained largely traditionalist in their subject matter and idiom, as was demonstrated by the movement’s debut anthology I poeti futuristi (1912; “The Futurist Poets”).

Marinetti was for some time primarily associated with his “African” Mafarka le futuriste (1910; Mafarka the Futurist), a tale of rape, pillage, and battle set in North Africa. Apart from its misogyny, racism, and glorification of a cult of violence, the novel is remembered for its hero’s creation of a machine brought to life as a superman destined to inherit the future. Only when Marinetti started grounding his avant-garde poetry in the realities of his combat experiences as a war reporter during World War I, however, did a distinctly innovative Futurist idiom emerge, one that represented a significant break from past poetic practices.

The title of literary Futurism’s most important manifesto, Distruzione della sintassi–immaginazione senza fili–parole in libertà (1913; “Destruction of Syntax–Wireless Imagination–Words-in-Freedom”), represented Marinetti’s demands for a pared-down elliptical language, stripped of adjectives and adverbs, with verbs in the infinitive and mathematical signs and word pairings used to convey information more economically and more boldly. The resultant “telegraphic lyricism” is most effective in Marinetti’s war poetry, especially Zang tumb tumb and “Dunes” (both 1914). A desire to make language more intensive led to a pronounced use of onomatopoeia in poems dealing with machines and war—as in the title of Zang tumb tumb, intended to mimic the sound of artillery fire—and to a departure from uniform, horizontal typography. A number of Futurist painter-poets blurred the distinction between literature and visual art, as Severini did in Danza serpentina (1914; “Serpentine Dance”). While Marinetti’s poetic experiments revealed an indebtedness to Cubism, he elevated Italian literary collage, often created for the purpose of pro-war propaganda, to a distinctively Futurist art form. The culmination of this tendency came with Carrà’s Festa patriottica (1914; “Patriotic Celebration”) and Marinetti’s Les Mots en liberté futuristes (1919; “Futurist Words-in-Freedom”).

A “typographical revolution” was also proclaimed in the Futurists’ 1913 manifesto; it grew out of both a desire to make form visually dynamic and a perceived need for visual effects in type that were capable of reflecting—through size and boldness—the noise of modern warfare and urban life. A diverse series of shaped poetic layouts depicted speeding cars, trains, and airplanes, exploding bombs, and the confusions of battle. Apart from Marinetti’s work, the most accomplished typographical experiments are to be found in the poetry of Francesco Cangiullo and Fortunato Depero.

During its first decade, Italian literary Futurism remained a largely homogeneous movement. By contrast, Russian Futurism was fragmented into a number of splinter groups (Ego-Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Hylaea [Russian Gileya]) associated with a large number of anthologies representing continually regrouping artistic factions. While there was an urbanist strand to Russian Futurism, especially in the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yelena Guro, Russian writers were less preoccupied with machines, speed, and violence than their Italian counterparts. The dominant strain of so-called primitivism in Russian Futurism led some to conclude that the two movements have little in common apart from the word Futurism. While there was a shared interest in the renewal of language, the Italians’ innovations were invariably designed to express an ultramodern sensibility, whereas Russian Futurist poets and playwrights confined their attentions to “The Word as Such” (the title of one of their most famous manifestos, Slovo kak takovoye, published in 1913). A number of these writers, most impressively Velimir Khlebnikov, explored the archaic roots of language and drew on folk culture for their inspiration.

As was the case in Italy, the main achievements of Russian Futurism lie in poetry and drama. As it did in Italy, neologism played a large role in Russian attempts to renew language, which in turn aimed at the destruction of syntax. The most-famous Futurist poem, Khlebnikov’s “Zaklyatiye smekhom” (1910; “Incantation by Laughter”), generates a series of permutations built on the root -smekh (“laughter”) by adding impossible prefixes and suffixes. The result is a typical (for Russian Futurism) concern with etymology and word creation. Khlebnikov’s and Alexey Kruchenykh’s radical forays into linguistic poetry went hand in hand with an interest in the word as pure sound. Their invented zaum—the largely untranslatable name given to their “transrational” language—was intended to take language beyond logical meanings in the direction of a new visionary mysticism. Kruchenykh’s opera Pobeda nad solncem (1913; “Victory over the Sun”) and Khlebnikov’s play Zangezi (1922) are two of the most-important examples of the Futurist blend of transrationalism with the cult of the “primitive.” Mayakovsky, the greatest Russian poet to have gone through a Futurist phase, was coauthor of the manifesto Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (1912; “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”), and his poems figure in many of the movement’s key anthologies. While sharing an Italian-influenced Futurist sensibility with the Ego-Futurists and belonging more, on account of their concern with verbal innovation, to the body of works by the Cubo-Futurist painter-poets, his poetry and plays are, above all, Futurist in their provocative rejection of the past and their subjectivist approach to the renewal of poetic language.

During the 1920s, Marinetti and those around him gravitated toward fascism, whereas the Soviet communist regime became increasingly intolerant of what it dismissed as avant-garde Formalism. While relations between Italian and Russian Futurism were, on the whole, strained, the Italian Futurists exercised a strong influence on German Expressionism, English Vorticism, and international Dada.