Hylea (disambiguation)
« Hylea― Russian literary and artistic group of Cubo-Futurists in the 1910s.
History of creation
The name was proposed by the poet Benedict Livshits, borrowed from Herodotus’s “History”, where he calls the part of Scythia beyond the mouth of the Dnieper Hylaia. Here in the Tauride province was the Chernyanka estate, where the Burliuk brothers spent their childhood and youth. In 2011, through the efforts of enthusiasts, a house was found in the village of Chernyanka, where the birth of the group took place, which was previously considered not to have survived.
The leader of the group was Velemir Khlebnikov, the organizer was David Burliuk. On their initiative, in 1910, the first collection of Budutlyans, “Tank of Judges 1,” was published. The group included V. Mayakovsky, V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh, E. Guro.
Group activities
Among the poetic groups of the early 20th century. Gileya was the most left-wing and loudest of all the futurist groups. They had their own publishing house “EUY”, the “Gileans” took part in numerous literary disputes at that time, promoting left-wing art. The group released almanacs: “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, “Tank of Judges 2”, “Trebnik of Three”, “Three”, “Dead Moon” (all in 1913), “Milk of Mares”, “Gag”, “Roaring Parnassus”, “The First Journal of Russian Futurists” (all in 1914), “Spring Contract of Muses”, “Took” (both in 1915).
Nikolai Gumilyov wrote: “We are present at a new invasion of barbarians, strong in their talent and terrible in their disdain. Only the future will show whether they are “Germans” or... Huns, of whom not a trace will remain.”
The work of "Gilea" was in many ways close to the artists of "Jack of Diamonds", "Donkey's Tail", and "Target". In March 1913, the Gileya group joined the Union of Youth artists association, but the name Gileya was used by the Futurists. "Gileya" together with the "Youth Union" organized the "Budetlyanin" theater, where they staged the tragedy "Vladimir Mayakovsky" with the author in the title role (artists P. Filonov and O. Rozanova) and the opera "Victory over the Sun" by A. Kruchenykh (artist K. . Malevich, music by M. Matyushin).
The activities of the Budutlyans were greatly assisted by the philanthropist L.I. Zheverzheev; after he stopped giving money for publications and performances, the association disintegrated.
The name of the publishing house “Gileya”, which has existed since 1989, is taken in honor of the literary group.
Cubo-futurism (“Gilea”)
Cubo-futurism is a movement in the art of the 1910s, most characteristic of the Russian artistic avant-garde of those years, which sought to combine the principles of cubism (the decomposition of an object into its component structures) and futurism (the development of an object in the “fourth dimension,” i.e. in time).
When it comes to Russian futurism, the names of the Cubo-Futurists - members of the Gileya group - immediately come to mind. They are remembered for their defiant behavior and shocking appearance (Mayakovsky’s famous yellow jacket, pink frock coats, bunches of radishes and wooden spoons in their buttonholes, faces painted with unknown signs, shocking antics during speeches), and scandalous manifestos and sharp polemical attacks against literary opponents , and the fact that their ranks included Vladimir Mayakovsky, the only one of the futurists “not persecuted” in Soviet times.
In the 1910s of the last century, the fame of the “Gileans” really surpassed other representatives of this literary movement. Perhaps because their work was most consistent with the canons of the avant-garde.
“Gilea” is the first futuristic group. They also called themselves “Cubo-Futurists” or “Budetlyans” (this name was suggested by Khlebnikov). The year of its foundation is considered to be 1908, although the main composition was formed in 1909–1910. “We didn’t even notice how we became Gilaeans. This happened by itself, by general tacit agreement, just as, having realized the commonality of our goals and objectives, we did not take Hannibal’s oaths of allegiance to any principles to each other.” Therefore, the group did not have a permanent composition.
At the beginning of 1910 in St. Petersburg, “Gilea” announced its existence consisting of D. and N. Burlyuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, V. Kamensky, E. Guro, A. Kruchenykh and B. Livshits. It was they who became representatives of the most radical flank of Russian literary futurism, which was distinguished by revolutionary rebellion, oppositional sentiment against bourgeois society, its morality, aesthetic tastes, and the entire system of social relations.
Cubo-futurism is considered to be the result of the mutual influence of futurist poets and cubist painters. Indeed, literary futurism was closely associated with avant-garde artistic groups of the 1910s, such as the “Jack of Diamonds”, “Donkey’s Tail”, and the “Youth Union”. The active interaction of poetry and painting, of course, was one of the most important incentives for the formation of Cubo-Futurist aesthetics.
The first joint performance of the Cubo-Futurists in print was the poetic collection “The Judges’ Fishing Tank,” which actually determined the creation of the “Gilea” group. Among the authors of the almanac are D. and N. Burliuk, Kamensky, Khlebnikov, Guro, Ek. Niesen and others. Illustrations by D. and V. Burliuk.
The idea of the exhaustion of the cultural tradition of previous centuries was the starting point of the aesthetic platform of the Cubo-Futurists. Their manifesto, which bore the deliberately scandalous title “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” became the programmatic one. It declared a rejection of the art of the past, and there were calls to “throw out Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. from the steamship of modern times.”
However, despite the rather harsh tone and polemical style of the manifesto, the almanac expressed many ideas about ways to further develop art and bring poetry and painting closer together. Behind the external bravado of its authors there was a serious attitude towards creativity. And the famous shocking phrase about Pushkin, which seemingly does not allow for other interpretations, was explained by Khlebnikov, to whom, in fact, it belonged, in a completely different way: “Budetlyanin is Pushkin in coverage of the world war, in the cloak of the new century, teaching the right of the century to laugh over Pushkin of the 19th century” and no longer sounded shocking. In another declaration (1913), Khlebnikov wrote: “We are offended by the distortion of Russian verbs with translated meanings. We demand that Pushkin’s dams and Tolstoy’s piles be opened to the waterfalls and streams of the Montenegrin sides of the arrogant Russian language... Apart from the howling of many throats, we say: “Both there and here there is one sea.” A.E. Parnis, commenting on this statement, states: “Khlebnikov’s declarative thesis, outwardly directed against the classics - Pushkin and Tolstoy, against their linguistic canons, is in fact dialectically addressed to their own authority, primarily to Pushkin: Khlebnikov’s metaphor “ one sea” clearly goes back to Pushkin’s famous “Will Slavic streams merge into the Russian sea?”
Another futurist, S. Tretyakov, speaks in the same spirit:
“Mocking idols: Pushkin and Lermontov, etc. is... a direct blow to those brains that, having absorbed the spirit of lazy authoritarianism from school, never tried to give themselves an account of the truly futuristic role that for their time at least played by the cheeky Pushkin, who brought essentially the most common folk ditty to French salons, and now, after a hundred years, chewed up and familiar, he has become a yardstick of elegant taste and has ceased to be dynamite! Not the dead Pushkin, in academic volumes and on Tverskoy Boulevard, but the living Pushkin of today, living with us a century later in the verbal and ideological explosions of the futurists, who continue today the work that he did on language the day before yesterday...”
The publication of “The Slap” was perceived by the public mainly negatively, as a fact of immorality and bad taste. But the cubo-futurists believed that the publication of this book officially approved futurism in Russia (although the word “futurism” itself was never mentioned in the text).
In February 1913, the same publishing house published (also on wallpaper, but in an enlarged format) “Tank of Judges II.” If in the first manifesto we talked mainly about the ideology of the futurists, here we talk about poetic techniques that can put these ideas into practice.
One of the founders of the movement, V. Khlebnikov was actively involved in revolutionary changes in the field of the Russian language. He wrote: “To find, without breaking the circle of roots, the magic stone of transforming all Slavic words into one another, to freely melt Slavic words - this is my first attitude towards the word. This is a word of its own, outside of everyday life and life’s benefits. Seeing that the roots are just a ghost, behind which stand the strings of the alphabet, to find the unity of world languages in general, built from the units of the alphabet, is my second attitude towards the word.”
Khlebnikov, trying to expand the boundaries of language and its capabilities, worked hard to create new words. According to his theory, the word is deprived of its semantic meaning, acquiring a subjective coloring: “We understand vowels as time and space (the nature of aspiration), consonants - paint, sound, smell.”
The very concept of the meaning of a word has now moved from the level of sound association to the levels of graphic constructions and connections within one word according to structural features. Lexical updating of literary texts was now achieved by introducing vulgarisms, technical terms, inventing unusual phrases, and abandoning punctuation marks. Some poets produced new words from old roots (Khlebnikov, Kamensky, Gnedov), others split them with rhyme (Mayakovsky), others, using poetic rhythm, gave words the wrong stress (Kruchenykh). All this led to the depoetization of language.
Following syntactic shifts, semantic shifts began to arise. This was manifested in a deliberate inconsistency of phrases, in the replacement of a word that was necessary in meaning with its opposite in meaning.
The visual impact of the poem now played a major role. “We began to give content to words according to their descriptive and phonetic characteristics. In the name of freedom of personal occasion, we deny spelling. We characterize a noun not only with adjectives... but also with other parts of speech, also with individual letters and numbers.” The essence of poetry has shifted from questions of “content” of the text to questions of “form” (“not What, A How"). To do this, the futurists used a figurative construction of verse, where they actively used the techniques of rhyming not the final, but the initial words, as well as internal rhymes or the “ladder” method of arranging lines.
Showing a keen sense of words, the futurists reached the point of absurdity when designing. They attached particular importance to word creation, “the word itself.” In the program article “The Word as Such” the following abstruse lines were given:
The result of such activities of the futurists was an unprecedented surge in word creation, which ultimately led to the creation of the theory of “absent language” - zaumi.
In literary terms, zaum was a kind of action in defense of the “self-contained word” against the subordinate meaning that the word had in the poetics of symbolism, where it played only an auxiliary role in the creation of a symbol and where poetic vocabulary was extremely strictly separated from the vocabulary of colloquial speech.
In an article by L. Timofeev, characterizing this phenomenon, it is said that “Acmeism had already significantly expanded its vocabulary boundaries, ego-futurism went even further. Not content with including the spoken language in the poetic dictionary, Cubo-Futurism further expanded its lexical and sound capabilities, following two lines: the first line - the creation of new words from old roots (in this case the meaning of the word was preserved), the second line, i.e. zaum - the creation of new sound complexes devoid of meaning - which brought this process of returning the word its “rights” to the point of absurdity.”
Zaum was one of the main creative principles of Russian cubo-futurism. In the “Declaration of Abstruse Language,” Khlebnikov, G. Petnikov and Kruchenykh defined the essence of abstruse language as follows: “Thought and speech do not keep pace with the experience of the inspired, therefore the artist is free to express himself not only in a general language... but also in a personal one... and in a language that does not have a specific meaning (not frozen), abstruse. A common language binds, a free language allows you to express yourself more fully. Zaum awakens and gives freedom to creative imagination, without offending it with anything specific.”
Zaum, therefore, appears to be either a combination of sounds that have no meaning, or the same words. The innovation of the futurists was original, but, as a rule, it was devoid of common sense. M. Wagner notes that “from one verbal root, the futurists produced a whole series of neologisms, which, however, did not enter the living, spoken language. Khlebnikov was considered the discoverer of the verbal “Americas”, a poet for poets. He had a subtle sense of words in the direction of searching for new words and phrases. For example, from the stem of the verb “to love,” he created 400 new words, of which, as one would expect, not a single one entered into poetic use.”
Khlebnikov's innovative poetics was in tune with the aspirations of the Budutans. After the release of “Tank of Judges II,” other collective and individual collections of equally shocking properties began to appear, where futurist poems were published and discussed: “Dead Moon,” “Roaring Parnassus,” “Tango with Cows,” “Blown Up,” “I!” , “Gag”, “Trebnik of Three” and others.
However, the movement that was gaining strength immediately had a mass of epigones and imitators, trying in the wake of the fashionable literary movement to turn their opuses into a hot commodity, not alien to this kind of “modernity,” and forgetting that imitation is only useful for study. And one can fully agree with O. Rykova’s statement that “the futurist poets, despite the commonality of the manifestos presented, certainly differed in their creative quest and depth. The mediocrities enjoyed only shocking effect, but the true poets over time “outgrew” the existing movement and remained specific individuals in the literary process - it could not have been any other way.”
In the spring of 1914, an attempt was made to create an “official” cubo-futurism, which was to become the “First Journal of Russian Futurists”, published in the “Publishing House of the First Journal of Russian Futurists” created by the Burliuk brothers. But the publication stopped after the first issue - the war began.
This most directly affected “Gilea,” which by the end of 1914 ceased to exist as a single group. Its members each went their own way. Many futurists left Moscow and Petrograd, hiding from conscription, or, on the contrary, ending up at the front.
Young people, who in peacetime constituted the main fertile audience of the futurists, were mobilized. Public interest in “futuristic audacity” began to quickly decline.
Despite all the cardinal external differences, the history of Cubo-Futurism in Russia is strikingly similar to the fate of Russian symbolism. The same furious non-recognition at first, the same noise at birth (among the futurists it was only much stronger, developing into a scandal). Following this was the rapid recognition of the advanced strata of literary criticism, triumph, and enormous hopes. A sudden breakdown and fall into the abyss at the moment when it seemed that unprecedented possibilities and horizons had opened up before him in Russian poetry.
Exploring futurism at the dawn of its inception, Nikolai Gumilyov wrote: “We are present at a new invasion of barbarians, strong in their talent and terrible in their disdain. Only the future will show whether they are “Germans” or... Huns, of whom not a trace will remain.”
Well, today, after almost a century, we can say with confidence that the art of many “Budetlyans” has stood the test of time.
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Cubofuturism- a direction in the art of the 1910s, most characteristic of the Russian artistic avant-garde of those years, which sought to combine the principles of cubism (decomposition of an object into component structures) and futurism(development of an object in the “fourth dimension”, i.e. in time).
When it comes to Russian futurism, the names of the Cubo-Futurists - members of the Gileya group - immediately come to mind. They are remembered for their defiant behavior and shocking appearance (Mayakovsky’s famous yellow jacket, pink frock coats, bunches of radishes and wooden spoons in their buttonholes, faces painted with unknown signs, shocking antics during speeches), and scandalous manifestos and sharp polemical attacks against literary opponents , and the fact that their ranks included Vladimir Mayakovsky, the only futurist “not persecuted” in Soviet times.
In the 1910s of the last century, the fame of the “Gileans” really surpassed other representatives of this literary movement. Perhaps because their work was most consistent with the canons of the avant-garde.
"Gilea"- the first futuristic group. They also called themselves “Cubo-Futurists” or “Budetlyans” (this name was suggested by Khlebnikov). The year of its foundation is considered to be 1908, although the main composition was formed in 1909-1910. “We didn’t even notice how we became Gilaeans. This happened by itself, by general tacit agreement, just as, having realized the commonality of our goals and objectives, we did not take Hannibal’s oaths of allegiance to any principles to each other.” Therefore, the group did not have a permanent composition.
At the beginning of 1910 in St. Petersburg, Gileya announced its existence as part of D. and N. Burlyukov, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, V. Kamensky, E. Guro, A. Kruchenykh and B. Livshits. It was they who became representatives of the most radical flank of Russian literary futurism, which was distinguished by revolutionary rebellion, oppositional sentiment against bourgeois society, its morality, aesthetic tastes, and the entire system of social relations.
Cubo-futurism is considered to be the result of the mutual influence of futurist poets and cubist painters. Indeed, literary futurism was closely associated with avant-garde artistic groups of the 1910s, such as the “Jack of Diamonds”, “Donkey’s Tail”, and the “Youth Union”. The active interaction of poetry and painting, of course, was one of the most important incentives for the formation of Cubo-Futurist aesthetics.
The first joint performance of the Cubo-Futurists in print was the poetic collection “The Judges’ Fishing Tank,” which actually determined the creation of the “Gilea” group. Among the authors of the almanac are D. and N. Burliuk, Kamensky, Khlebnikov, Guro, Ek. Niesen and others. Illustrations by D. and V. Burliuk.
The idea of the exhaustion of the cultural tradition of previous centuries was the starting point of the aesthetic platform of the Cubo-Futurists. Their manifesto, which bore the deliberately scandalous title “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” became the programmatic one. It declared a rejection of the art of the past, and there were calls to “throw out Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. from the steamship of modern times."
However, despite the rather harsh tone and polemical style of the manifesto, the almanac expressed many ideas about ways to further develop art and bring poetry and painting closer together. Behind the external bravado of its authors there was a serious attitude towards creativity. And the famous shocking phrase about Pushkin, which seemingly does not allow other interpretations, was explained by Khlebnikov, to whom, in fact, it belonged, in a completely different way: “Budetlyanin is Pushkin in coverage of the world war, in the cloak of the new century, teaching the right of the century to laugh over Pushkin of the 19th century” and no longer sounded shocking. In another declaration (1913), Khlebnikov wrote: “We are offended by the distortion of Russian verbs with translated meanings. We demand that Pushkin’s dams and Tolstoy’s piles be opened to the waterfalls and streams of the Montenegrin sides of the arrogant Russian language... In addition to the howling of many throats, we say: “Both there and here there is one sea.” A. E. Parnis, commenting on this statement, states: “Khlebnikov’s declarative thesis, outwardly directed against the classics - Pushkin and Tolstoy, against their linguistic canons, is in fact dialectically addressed to their own authority, primarily to Pushkin: Khlebnikov’s metaphor " “one sea” clearly goes back to Pushkin’s famous “Will Slavic streams merge into the Russian sea?”
Another futurist, S. Tretyakov, speaks in the same spirit: “Mockery of idols: Pushkin and Lermontov, etc. is... a direct blow to those brains that, having absorbed the spirit of lazy authoritarianism from school, never tried to give to imagine the truly futuristic role that, for his time, was played by at least the cheeky Pushkin, who brought essentially the most common folk ditty to French salons, and now, a hundred years later, chewed up and familiar, he has become a yardstick of elegant taste and has ceased to be dynamite! Not the dead Pushkin, in academic volumes and on Tverskoy Boulevard, but the living Pushkin of today, living with us a century later in the verbal and ideological explosions of the futurists, who continue today the work that he did on language the day before yesterday...”
The publication of “The Slap” was perceived by the public mainly negatively, as a fact of immorality and bad taste. But the cubo-futurists believed that the publication of this book officially approved futurism in Russia (although the word “futurism” itself was never mentioned in the text).
In February 1913, the same publishing house published (also on wallpaper, but in an enlarged format) “Tank of Judges II.” If in the first manifesto we were talking mainly about the ideology of the futurists, then here we are talking about poetic techniques that can put these ideas into practice.
One of the founders of the movement, V. Khlebnikov was actively involved in revolutionary changes in the field of the Russian language. He wrote: “To find, without breaking the circle of roots, the magic stone of transforming all Slavic words into one another, to freely melt Slavic words - this is my first attitude towards the word. This is a word of its own, outside of everyday life and life’s benefits. Seeing that the roots are just a ghost<и>, behind which stand the strings of the alphabet, to find the unity of world languages in general, built from units of the alphabet, is my second attitude towards the word.”
Khlebnikov, trying to expand the boundaries of language and its capabilities, worked hard to create new words. According to his theory, the word is deprived of its semantic meaning, acquiring a subjective coloring: “We understand vowels as time and space (the nature of aspiration), consonants - paint, sound, smell.”
The very concept of the meaning of a word has now moved from the level of sound association to the levels of graphic constructions and connections within one word according to structural features. Lexical updating of literary texts was now achieved by introducing vulgarisms, technical terms, inventing unusual phrases, and abandoning punctuation marks. Some poets produced new words from old roots (Khlebnikov, Kamensky, Gnedov), others split them with rhyme (Mayakovsky), others, using poetic rhythm, gave words the wrong stress (Kruchenykh). All this led to the depoetization of language.
Following syntactic shifts, semantic shifts began to arise. This was manifested in a deliberate inconsistency of phrases, in the replacement of a word that was necessary in meaning with its opposite in meaning.
The visual impact of the poem now played a major role. “We began to give content to words according to their descriptive and phonetic characteristics.<...>In the name of freedom of personal occasion, we deny spelling. We characterize a noun not only with adjectives... but also with other parts of speech, also with individual letters and numbers.” The essence of poetry has shifted from questions of “content” of the text to questions of “form” (“not what, but how”). To do this, the futurists used a figurative construction of verse, where they actively used the techniques of rhyming not the final, but the initial words, as well as internal rhymes or the “ladder” method of arranging lines.
Showing a keen sense of words, the futurists reached the point of absurdity when designing. They attached particular importance to word creation, “the word itself.” The program article “The Word as Such” contained the following abstruse lines:
Dyr bul schyl ubeshshur
skum you and boo
r l ez
The result of such activities of the futurists was an unprecedented surge in word creation, which ultimately led to the creation of the theory of “absent language” - zaumi.
In literary terms, zaum was a kind of action in defense of the “self-contained word” against the subordinate meaning that the word had in the poetics of symbolism, where it played only an auxiliary role in the creation of a symbol and where poetic vocabulary was extremely strictly separated from the vocabulary of colloquial speech.
In an article by L. Timofeev, characterizing this phenomenon, it is said that “Acmeism had already significantly expanded its vocabulary boundaries, ego-futurism went even further. Not content with including the spoken language in the poetic dictionary, Cubo-Futurism further expanded its lexical and sound capabilities, following two lines: the first line - the creation of new words from old roots (in this case the meaning of the word was preserved), the second line, i.e. zaum - the creation of new sound complexes devoid of meaning - which brought this process of returning the word its “rights” to the point of absurdity.”
Zaum was one of the main creative principles of Russian cubo-futurism. In the “Declaration of Abstruse Language,” Khlebnikov, G. Petnikov and Kruchenykh defined the essence of zaumi as follows: “Thought and speech do not keep pace with the experience of the inspired, therefore the artist is free to express himself not only in a general language... but also in a personal one... and in a language that does not have a specific meaning (not frozen), abstruse. A common language binds, a free language allows you to express yourself more fully. Zaum awakens and gives freedom to creative imagination, without offending it with anything specific.”
Zaum, therefore, appears to be either a combination of sounds that have no meaning, or the same words. The innovation of the futurists was original, but, as a rule, it was devoid of common sense. M. Wagner notes that “from one verbal root, the futurists produced a whole series of neologisms, which, however, did not enter the living, spoken language. Khlebnikov was considered the discoverer of the verbal “Americas,” a poet for poets. He had a subtle sense of words<...>in the direction of searching for new words and phrases. For example, from the stem of the verb “to love,” he created 400 new words, of which, as one would expect, not a single one entered into poetic use.”
Khlebnikov's innovative poetics was in tune with the aspirations of the Budutans. After the release of “The Judges’ Cage I”, other collective and individual collections of equally shocking properties began to appear, where the futurists’ poems were published and discussed: “Dead Moon”, “Roaring Parnassus”, “Tango with Cows”, “Blown Up”, “I!” , “Gag”, “Trebnik of Three” and others.
However, the movement that was gaining strength immediately had a mass of epigones and imitators, trying in the wake of the fashionable literary movement to turn their opuses into a hot commodity, not alien to this kind of “modernity,” and forgetting that imitation is only useful for study. And one can fully agree with O. Rykova’s statement that “the futurist poets, despite the commonality of the manifestos presented, certainly differed in their creative quest and depth. The mediocrities enjoyed only shocking effect, but the true poets over time “outgrew” the existing movement and remained specific individuals in the literary process - it couldn’t have been any other way”?..
In the spring of 1914, an attempt was made to create an “official” cubo-futurism, which was to become the “First Journal of Russian Futurists”, published in the “Publishing House of the First Journal of Russian Futurists” created by the Burliuk brothers. But the publication stopped after the first issue - the war began.
This most directly affected Gilei, which by the end of 1914 ceased to exist as a single group. Its members each went their own way. Many futurists left Moscow and Petrograd, hiding from conscription, or, on the contrary, ending up at the front.
Young people, who in peacetime constituted the main fertile audience of the futurists, were mobilized. Public interest in “futuristic audacity” began to quickly decline.
Despite all the cardinal external differences, the history of Cubo-Futurism in Russia is strikingly similar to the fate of Russian symbolism. The same furious non-recognition at first, the same noise at birth (among the futurists it was only much stronger, developing into a scandal). Following this was the rapid recognition of the advanced strata of literary criticism, triumph, and enormous hopes. A sudden breakdown and fall into the abyss at the moment when it seemed that unprecedented possibilities and horizons had opened up before him in Russian poetry.
Exploring futurism at the dawn of its inception, Nikolai Gumilyov wrote: “We are present at a new invasion of barbarians, strong in their talent and terrible in their disdain. Only the future will show whether they are “Germans” or... Huns, of whom not a trace will remain.”
Well, today, after almost a century, we can say with confidence that the art of many “Budetlyans” has stood the test of time.
25.06.2016Who among us has not heard of such an extraordinary and shocking poet, whose name is Vladimir Mayakovsky? We all learned or at least read his famous poem “I pull out a duplicate of a priceless load from my wide trouser legs...”.
But how many of us have heard that Mayakovsky was closely connected with Ukraine, or more precisely, with the Kherson region? The poet even had a poem “Debt to Ukraine,” dedicated to our country. Here are a few lines from it, more relevant than ever:
I say to myself: comrade Muscovite,
There are no jokes about Ukraine.
Learn this language on scarlet lexicon banners,
- This language is majestic and simple:
“You feel it, the surmys have begun, the hour of reckoning has arrived...”
But let’s return to Mayakovsky’s connection with our region. In 1908, in the inconspicuous village of Chernyanka, Kakhovsky district, a group of futurist poets called “Gilea” was created, which included, one might say, the fathers of a new direction in verbal art: David, Vladimir and Nikolai Burlyuk, Alexey Kruchenykh, Benedict Livshits, Vladimir Mayakovsky , Velimir Khlebnikov and others. They called themselves “Cubo-Futurists” or “Budetlyans” (this name was suggested by Khlebnikov).
What does the term “Cubo-Futurism” mean? Cubo-futurism is a movement in the art of the 1910s, most characteristic of the Russian artistic avant-garde of those years, which sought to combine the principles of cubism (decomposition of an object into component structures) and futurism (development of an object in the “fourth dimension”, i.e. in time) . Cubo-futurism is considered to be the result of the mutual influence of futurist poets and cubist painters.
It must be said that the influence of this direction of painting could be traced not only in the poems of the Gilaeans, but also in their appearance, as well as in their behavior: the famous yellow jacket of Mayakovsky, pink frock coats, bunches of radishes and wooden spoons in their buttonholes, faces painted with unknown signs, shocking antics in time of speeches, scandalous manifestos and sharp polemical attacks against literary opponents.
And although the Gileya group did not have a permanent composition, there were “three pillars,” or rather, the “holy trinity” on which it was based. Burliuk was, so to speak, the “FATHER”, the managing director of futurism.
The seer of the group, its “priest,” the invisible “SPIRIT” was, of course, Khlebnikov. He did not like foreign words and called himself not a futurist, but a “budetlyanin”, striving to find roots in the Russian language for every concept. Thus, he turned his name Victor into Velimir. Khlebnikov was obsessed with the idea of time. He wanted to reveal the rhythm of history and learn to predict future events.
The youngest member of the group, Vladimir Mayakovsky, became “SON”. Having become close to Gileya, Mayakovsky came prepared with everything.
The first book of the futurists, “The Tank of Judges,” was published in 1910 and was depicted on wallpaper as a symbol: “We will go through our whole life with the fire and sword of literature, under our wallpaper there were bugs and cockroaches, let our young, vigorous poems live on them now”. (D. Burliuk).
At the end of 1912, on December 18, the first program collection of “Budetlyans” was published - “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” with the manifesto of the same name by V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, D. Burliuk and A. Kruchenykh.
The idea of the exhaustion of the cultural tradition of previous centuries was the starting point of the aesthetic platform of the Cubo-Futurists. The manifesto declared a rejection of the art of the past, and there were calls to “throw out Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. from the steamship of modern times."
Then the poets worked very fruitfully, publishing collections of their creations literally one after another. In August 1913, in Kakhovka, in the small printing house of Kahn and Bergart, the first Kherson collective futuristic collection of the “Gileans” - “Dead Moon” - was published.
The collection published works by David and Nikolai Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, B. Livshits, V. Mayakovsky and V. Khlebnikov. The second low-art Kherson collection of futurists, “Gag,” was published in 1913 in Kherson in the electrical printing house of S. V. Poryadenko. It was a satirical collection of 14 pages. In December 1913, the third Kherson collection “Milk of Mares” was printed in the same printing house in Kherson.
In the spring of 1914, the “Publishing House of the First Journal of Russian Futurists”, created by the Burliuk brothers, published “The First Journal of Russian Futurists”. But the publication stopped after the first issue - the war began.
It was the war that put an end to the existence of "Gilea". At the end of 1914 the group disappeared. Its members each went their own way. Many futurists either hid from conscription or, on the contrary, ended up at the front.
Natalia ROZHKOVAN
In the photo: Shemshurin, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky
In 1908, in Chernyanka, the goals and objectives of the first futurist group, which was called “Gilea,” were outlined.This year is considered the year the group was created.As B. Livshits wrote in his memoirs: “We didn’t even notice how we became Gilaeans. This happened by itself, by general silent agreement, just as, having realized the commonality of our goals and objectives, we did not take Hannibal’s oaths to each other inloyalty to any principles." The group did not have a permanent composition, but the backbone of the association was the Burliuk brothers.But the foundation was laid by David, Vladimir and Nikolai Burliuk, Alexey Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshits, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov."Gilea" openly declared itself in St. Petersburg at the beginning of 1910.The group then included D. and N. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky, A. Guro, V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh, B. Livshits.
At the end of 1912, on December 18, the first program collection of “Budetlyans” was published - “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” with the manifesto of the same name by V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, D. Burliuk and A. Kruchenykh.
In 1920, David Burliuk left his homeland.This, in fact, was the end of the existence of the Gileya group.
Publishing activities of the association "Gileya"
The first book of Russian futurists, “The Tank of Judges,” was published in 1910 and was depicted on the wallpaper as a symbol: “we will go through our whole life with the fire and sword of literature, under our wallpaper there were bugs and cockroaches, let young, vigorous poems live on them now ours." (D. Burliuk). The authors of the book “Zadok of Judges” Veniamin Khlebnikov, David and Nikolai Burliuk believed that with this book they were laying “a granite stone at the foundation of a new era of literature...”
This publication had no source data, the word “futurism” was not yet mentioned in it, but it was the first book by Russian futurists.And it was with the publication of the book “Zadok of Judges” that the core of the future group “Gilea” was formed. The members of the group called themselves “Gileans”, “Futurists”."Cubofuturists".Their movement was based on the “spontaneous inevitability of the collapse of old things” and the desire to predict and realize through art the future “world revolution” and the birth of a “new man.”
In August 1913, in Kakhovka, in the small printing house of Kahn and Bergart, the first Kherson collective futuristic collection of the “Gileans” - “Dead Moon” - was published.The collection published works by David and Nikolai Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, B. Livshits, V. Mayakovsky and V. Khlebnikov.
The second low-art Kherson collection of futurists, “Gag,” was published in 1913 in Kherson in the electrical printing house of S. V. Poryadenko.It was a satirical collection of 14 pages.
In December 1913 in Kherson (and in 1914 in Moscow), again in the electric printing house of S.V. Poryadenok, the third Kherson collection “Milk of Mares” was printed.The book had a subtitle: drawings, poetry, prose.The artistic design was done by Alexandra Ekster and David Burliuk.The authors of poetry and prose were V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, V. Kamensky, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, B. Livshits and the Burliuk brothers.
The collections of futuristic drawings and poems “Dead Moon”, “Gag”, “Mares’ Milk” set out the credo of the futurists who sought autonomy, liberation of speech, tried to change the traditional system of literary text, opposed their directions to Italian futurism and persistently asserted the originality of the origin of Russian futurism .
In Kherson, separate books by Gilean poets were also published - V. Khlebnikov, B. Livshits, Alexey Kruchenykh.
D. Burliuk, highly appreciating V. Khlebnikov as a poet and calling him “the true father of futurism,” prepared materials for publication and published his works.In 1912, at the end of April - beginning of May in Kherson, in the steam printing house of the successors of A.D. Khodushina, the book “Teacher and Student” by V. Khlebnikov was published.The book “Creations” by V. Khlebnikov was first published in Kherson at the beginning of 1914 in the electrical printing house “Economy” by F. Narovlyansky and S. Faerman, and then in Moscow.
The collection of poetry by B. Livshits “Wolf Sun” was published by D. Burliuk in the futurist publishing house “Gileya” in February 1914 in Kherson with a circulation of 480 copies. The book was printed in the electrical printing house “Economy” by F. Narovlyansky and S. Faerman. Artists worked on the collectionA. Exter and N. Vasilyeva. The frontispiece of the book was made by A. Exter.
In 1910, the Khodushina printing house published 2 lithographed albums by Cubo-Futurism theorist Alexei Kruchenykh, “All of Kherson in Cartoons and Portraits.”The heroes of the Kruchenykh albums were famous Kherson residents: theater actors, doctors, teachers.
Futurist books were issued quickly, in a cheerful atmosphere of collective creativity.The Gilaeans called their lithographed books “self-writings.”Artists made not only illustrations, but also fonts.The publications were similar to ancient manuscripts.
