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« indietro
POLISH FUTURISM: ADVENTURES OF A SHOE IN A BOUTONNIČRE
by Ewa Chrusciel
Czeslaw Milosz asks: «What is poetry that does not save nations?». For a long time Polish poetry has held a Romantic heritage, and the poet has had a special calling: to save the nation. Polish poetry has been inseparably linked to the issues of patriotism. One of the reasons was that since 1795, when Poland (then called the Noble’s Commonwealth) ceased to exist, Polish culture began to substitute for Polish institutions, and in this way poetry was yoked into national politics. It was not until 1918 that poets attempted to cast off the cloak of patriotic verse speaking on behalf of the nation. One of these poets was Jan Lechon who belonged to the Skamander Group. His famous phrase, «[a]nd in the spring let me see spring, not Poland»[1] became a manifesto for a new generation of avant-garde authors who contested the ethical and moral imperative behind the high-flown diction of poetry of moral witness. These were Polish Futurists who disseminated their poetic fireworks between 1919-1924, ten years after Marinetti published his founding manifesto in «Le Figaro» on February 20, 1909. They wanted poetry that would be a lifestyle; poetry that would rather be than mean. These were also poets who wanted to respond adequately and in a new way to changes in the perception of the world in the 20th century. As Virginia Woolf claimed, human nature underwent a fundamental change around December 1910. The invention of the airplane, incandescent light, telephone, and radio led to multiple and simultaneous ways of communicating and traveling. A modern man could ‘bilocate’; could detach himself from hic et nunc, could somehow ‘dematerialize’. Thus Polish Futurists wanted to convey the changeability of time and the fact that the universe had every possible history. They wanted to convey that the «motion of now occurs in a time shorter than the blink of an eye, since a second of time delineates a segment of space spread out like a 186,000-milelong caterpillar. Artists were like Alice in Wonderland moving through this «caterpillar at ever-increasing speed»[2]. But how can one convey the Einsteinian spatiotemporal conception of the universe which led to indeterminacy and discontinuity? How can one convey multiple polarities of a text in which relativity means the infinite variability of experience as well as the infinite multiplication of possible ways of measuring things? Cubism, for example, managed to do this through the representation of an object from many angles at once, thus breaking with the Renaissance techniques of perspective. The concept of simultaneity in art was also undertaken by avantgarde artists such as Marcel Duchamp in his famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), as well as by the poet Apollinaire. Duchamp’s Nude is an artistic rendering of the adventures of time at the speed of light. Just as in Einstein’s relativity theory, which conveyed the inseparability of space and time, all frames of reference in a Cubist painting are simultaneous and relative. Cubism was congenial, capturing mind’s fluidity. In Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon or Duchamp’s Nude the figures were supposed to jump out at a viewer simultaneously.
In Poland, Jerzy Jankowski was one of the first Futurists trying to capture 20th century adventures of time and space. In the first editorial of the weekly «Tydzien» (‘Week’) he criticized the constipation of traditionalism and instead he propagated bergsonism and intuitionism. Although his first Futurist poem, The Conflagration of the Flier, went unnoticed, his book In Tram Astride the Street was to be considered the first Polish Futurist work. Via conflation of genre and styles, here he captured an «urban cacophony of sounds and colors»[3], as well as the modern conception of time and space. Jankowski also captured both the apologia of the city and the apologia of folk motifs and primitivism. Inside Tram, one will find, for example, a symbolist formal poem, Premonition, based on a Lithuanian folk belief concerning dreams about shadows as premonitions of death. In another fragment a human heart becomes the protagonist of the story. Jankowski also experimented with orthography which inspired other Polish Futurists to invent their own. According to a Polish critic, Edward Balcerzan, it was not Jankowski but Bruno Jasienski who really initiated the movement of Futurism in Poland[4]. Together with Stanislaw Mlodozeniec, Jasienski formed in 1919 a Futurist Club called Katarynka. Soon Tytus Czyzewski (1880-1945) joined. A poet and a painter, Czyzewski propagated in art and poetry primacy of form over content. He established a new trend in Polish painting called Formism, which informed theories of Futurism in poetry. One of the first magazines popularizing Futurism was called «Formists» (Formisci). These two Futurists created a curious blend of Western and Eastern Futurism and Expressionism by looking to Russian, French and Italian influences. Also one cannot dismiss the influence of Dadaism on Polish Futurists. Dadaism was the most contemporary movement to Futurism. In My Century, Aleksander Wat claims that the biggest influence on Polish Futurists was on the one hand Russian Futurism, especially the poetry of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and on the other hand Dadaism[5].
The desire of Polish Futurists was to praise technological advancement and rebel against tradition and established conventions. This manifested itself, for example, in outright rebellion on paper against established rules of orthography. Bruno Jasienski, influenced by the Russian poets Mayakovski, Khlebnikov (Jasienski attended a high school in Moscow between 1914 and 1918) composed neologisms which he called «dyrbulszczyzna». A question arises whether Jasienski could have been also influenced by Victor Schklovsky, one of the first Russian theoreticians of Futurism. Shklovsky’s article Iskusstvo kak priem [Art as Technique] in which the device of ‘defamiliarization’ (ostranenie) appeared, was actually first published in 1917. Here he refers to Tolstoy’s method of seeing things out of their normal context in order to arrive at estrangement, ostranienie, and wonder:
Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. […] Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important...[6]
It is quite possible that Jasienski who also understood writing as an act of ‘defamiliarization’ knew Schklovsky. After all, Jasienski spent his youth in the Soviet Union, where he studied in Moscow during the First World War and he certainly frequented various literary circles.
Other Polish Futurists, Aleksander Wat and Anatol Stern, were also interested in liberating words from their usual contexts and meanings and save them from habituation. In Caviar and Ashes, Marcy Shore emphasizes the importance of the materiality of language and the liberation of signifiers from the signifieds for Wat[7]. Later Wat explained to Czeslaw Milosz: «[y]ou see, that slogan, the idea of words being liberated, that words were things and you could do whatever you liked with them, that was an enormous revolution in literature; that was a revolution like, let’s say, Nietzsche’s God is dead»[8]
In his famous prose poem composed in 1919, I from One Side and I from the Other Side of My Cast-Iron Stove [JA z jednej strony a JA z drugiej strony mego mopsozelaznego piecyka], Wat negated the syntax and closure and tried to capture the Einsteinian theory of relativity. Wat wrote «The trams laid bare to him their bald heads and lisped, How wonderful and unfathomable is the motto of unclosed doors»[9]. Thus Wat ends his poem Cast Iron-Stove:
Gothic dreams ‘modern’ souls and orgies satanic faiths come under mandrake-mildewed
impotencies of doric columns.
THE END OF ALEKSANDER WAT.
It brings desperation it calls forth the spirit of the abyss, which breaks you away from yourself. Aha! the used key to the abyss!
Idiot beast moron fuck.
It is I who am burning in the inquisitorial insides of my cast-iron stove, it is I who am burning in the middle between me lying together on one side of the stove and me the same way on the other side of the stove. Arrr! I gaze balefully at the palm of he who is on the one side and of he who is on the other. From one and the other side sit I. It is I from the one side, and I from the other side[10].
Wat and Stern carried out their mission of liberating the words not only on paper, but in action. On February 8th, 1919, they organized their first futurist poetry evening, entitled Subtropical Evening Organized by White Negroes. The evening consisted of the performance of a black African dancer, and readings of the poems of Wat and Stern, among others, with skewed syntax and pornographic content. The apex of the program was a naked (but for a fig leaf) man reading Stern’s poem Burning of the Fig Leaf. The man was supposed to burn the fig leaf, but he got embarrassed and backed out. Another happening consisted of driving a wheelbarrow through the city with Wat, naked, in it. To scandalize further, Stern and Wat also organized a public funeral of Walt Whitman. Wat and Stern were the authors of a Futurist manifesto which began:
Primitives to the Nations of the World and to Poland
The great rainbow monkey named Dionysus took his last breath long ago.
We are throwing away his rotten legacy we declare
1. CIVILIZATION, CULTURE
WITH ITS JUSTICE—TO THE TRASH HEAP
poetry. we are allowing rhyme and rhythm to remain asthey
are primary and fertile. the destruction of rules constraining
creativity the virtue of awkwardness. Freedom of grammatical
form, spelling and punctuation, independently of the
creator. Mickiewicz is limited. Slowacki is incomprehensible mumbling.
Words have their own weight, sound, color, their own design.
THEYTAKE UPROOM IN SPACE. here are the deciding values
of a word. the shortest words (sound) and the longest words (a book).
the meaning of a word is subordinate matter and is not dependent upon
the concept ascribed to it is necessary to treat words like phonetic
material USED NOT ONOMATOPEICALLY[11].
Polish Futurism emphasized the modernization of poetry by elevating the importance of the city and technology. Bruno Jasienski wrote poetry that was a tribute to machines. In his novel, The Legs of Isolda Morgan, [Nogi Izoldy Morgan] he writes,
The introduction of the machine into human life as an inevitable, complementary element, had to cause a radical change in man’s psyche, a need to produce equivalent counter-balancing elements – just as the introduction of foreign matter into living organism forces the organism to produce anti-bodies which in turn change the antigens into bodies which can either be absorbed or expelled. If the organism – individual or collective –does not produce enough of this energy, then it becomes infected by this foreign matter…To produce these anti-bodies in the collective consciousness, in other words to create forms which would subordinate machine to mass – this is the most immediate task of contemporary art[12].
In his essay About Poets of New Art [O poetach nowej sztuki], Anatol Stern echoes Jasienski:
One is not just a man today. I am also a telephone, cinema, telescope, printing press, a poster, radiotelegraph. The world is a dynamic orange, which we devour. Reality is beautiful in itself, there is no need to beautify it. The new art does not beautify but transforms [13]
In his manifesto, Stern quoted Boccioni: «Noi siamo i primitivi di una nuova sensibilita». This new sensibility in Polish version manifested itself in fetishizing the city and, ironically, changing it into a folkloric icon. In his poem Song of Hunger, Bruno Jasienski presents an apologia of the city:
In hundredstreet multithousand cities
every day thousands of newspapers come out,
long, black columns of words,
are announced loudly in all boulevards
they are written by little middle-aged men in spectacles
wrong
they are written by the City
in the shorthand of thousands of accidents
in its rhythm, pulse, blood
long forty-column poems
ticked out by multithousand machines
which feel the pulse of the world millions of miles away.
Agencies: reuter, havas, pat
Kilometer-long rolls of papertape
Messages
The City hears it all
It knows whom the Spanish princess is marrying
And about the latest conspiracy of the germans in dantzig
What new viaduct is being built in the Himalayan mountains
radiotelegrams from California
and weather reports from Timbuktu
all this the city writes in its forty-columns poems
this is true gigantic poetry
the only one ever new, every twenty-four hours
one that affects me as a strong electric current
how ridiculous is all other poetry in front of it
poets you are superfluous[14]
[…]
It is the proletarian City that supersedes poetry. The City that simultaneously contains all the cities just like Picasso’s Wild Squatter contains front, back, and side profile in one face. The City is poetry, therefore poets are superfluous. Song of Hunger has epic qualities; it tells a story of a Futurist and revolves around scandals, one of which is the hero’s suicide and his resurrection (Jasienski believed that every true Futurist poet was a Christ, especially after having had stones flung at him by his audience after his poetry reading in Zakopane in 1921). The main hero resurrects, however, only to announce to the crowds that he was hungry and needed to go for dinner. Song of Hunger is one of the most interesting meta-Futurist poems and Bruno Jasienski was a real legend of Polish Futurism. His poem A Shoe in a Boutonničre became required reading in high-schools after Jasienski’s death and is still frequently anthologized. The title has also become a common phrase in the Polish language, meaning something dandy or extravagant.
Song of Hunger forecasted many real suicides of Polish Futurists. Also the toxic affairs with Marxism and Stalinism led to their madness or suicides. Like true avantgardists, Futurists were in the front line, under a barrage of criticism from their contemporaries. The prevailing political climate in Poland did not foster the particular leftist agenda of the Futurists, and their work was not well received by both readers and the established poets. Even recently there was an imbroglio when a city street was named after Bruno Jasienski. Their contemporary, neo-Romantic novelist Stefan Zeromski, accused them of being mere imitators: «These trends are in essence new pages of Italian, French and Russian literature. In Poland, however, they are ‘cigarette butts’, alien, colorless, unreadable, material evidence of snobbism»[15]. Antoni Slonimski, a member of Skamander group accused Futurists of being mere imitators of Mayakowvski. Mayakovsky was also critical of Polish Futurists hinting that they read bad French novels and wanted Warsaw to be called little Paris. At the same time Mayakovsky called Wat «born futurist»[16].
Wladyslaw Broniewski, who initially sympathized with Futurists, observed that the Futurists tended towards «flashiness, quick development, false depth, and quick exhaustion. They are masters of outcry, of a noisy-gloomy passion entangled in itself, of boasting»[17]. Futurists were also critiqued for being too sacrilegious and scandalous. Some critics even characterized Futurism as a psychosis and a moral crime. As a consequence of such a pejorative reception, many futurist readings were interrupted by the police and their publications were confiscated by the Warsaw authorities.
In 1922 a group of emissaries from a right-wing group addressed a parliamentary question to the prime minister about Futurist posters. The group claimed that the posters should be banned, because they used a language which did not resemble Polish. Later, the claim was dismissed by the court.
In 1923 Polish Futurism disintegrated. Ironically, it became passé. Poesia non grata. Many Futurists proved, however, that after a tragic death, there is a revival, just like in Jasienski’s Song of Hunger. In 1955-1956, thanks to such critics as Kazimierz Wyka, Futurism was analyzed and reevaluated again in order to enter the canon of Polish literature. It is now a fundamental component of Polish Literary History.
[1] Jan Lechon, Stanislaw Mlodozeniec: Poezje zebrane 1916- 1953, in «Wiadomosci», Londyn, 1954, p. 9.
[2] Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. New York, Quill William Morrow 1991, p 188.
[3] Folejewski Zbigniew, Futurism and its place in the development of modern poetry. University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa 1980, p 86.
[4] Bruno Jasienski, Utwory Poetyckie, Manifesty, Szkice, ed. Edward Balcerzan, Wroclaw, Biblioteka Jagiellonska 1980.
[5] Aleksander Wat, Mój Wiek [My Century] part 1, Warszawa, 1990, p 25.
[6] Shklovsky, Victor, Art as Technique, Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan,Malden, MA, Blackwell 1998, p. 18-20.
[7] Marci Shore Caviar and Ashes, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p 16.
[8] «To haslo, ze slowa moga byc na wolnosci, ze slowa sa rzecza i ze mozna z nimi robic, co sie zywnie komu podoba, to byla jednak olbrzymia rewolucja w literaturze, to byla taka rewolucja jak – powiedzmy – Nietzschego: ‘Bóg umarl». (Wat, Mój Wiek,vol. 1, p. 28). Also in Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, trans. Richard Lourie, New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company 1988, p. 5; trans. by Marcy Shore in «(Modernism in) Eastern Europe», The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, ed. Pericles Lewis, New York, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011, p 12.
[9] «Tramwaje obnazyly przed im lyse glowy i seplenily: ‘Jak cudowna i niezglebiona jest dewiza niezamknietych drzwi». Aleksander Wat, JA z jednej strony a JA z drugiej strony mego mopsozelaznego piecyka, in Antologia Polskiego Futuryzmu, Biblioteka Narodowa 1978; trans. by Shore in «(Modernism in) Eastern Europe», p 17.
[10] «KONIEC ALEKSANDRA WAT’A. Gotyckie sny duszy ‘moderne’ i orgje sataniczne wiary przychodza pod omszale mandragora impotencje doryckich kolumn.
Przyprawia o rozpacz wywoluje ducha przepasci, który cie odtraca od siebie. Aha! uzyty klucz od przepasci!
Idjota bydlo dran cholera.To JA sie pale w inkwizytorskim wnetrzu mego mopsozelaznego piecyka, to JA sie pale wposrodku miedzy mna wspóllezacym z jednej strony piecyka a mna tak samo z drugiej strony piecyka. Hurr! Ogladam zlowrogie dlonie tego z jednej strony it ego z drugiej strony.
Z jednej i drugiej strony siedze JA.
To JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony».
Aleksander Wat, JA z jednej strony a JA z drugiej strony mego mopsozelaznego piecyka, in Poezje, ed. Anna Micinska and Jan Zielinski, Warsaw, Czytelnik 1997, pp. 307-335; trans. by Shore in «(Modernism in) Eastern Europe», p 19.
[11] «PRYMITYWISCI DO NARODÓW SWIATA I DO POLSKI wielka teczowa malpa zwana dionisem dawno juz zdechla. wyrzucamy jej zgnila spuscizne oglaszamy CYWILIZACJA, KULTURA Z ICH CHOROBLIWOSCIA – NA SMIETNIK». Stern and Wat, GGA, in Antologia Polskiego Futuryzmu i Nowej Sztuki, ed. Helena Zaworska, Wroclaw, Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich 1978, p. 3; trans. by Shore in Caviar and Ashes. Yale University Press. New Haven 2006, p 18.
[12] Jasienski, Utwory Poetyckie, manifesty Szkice, Wroclaw, Biblioteka Narodowa 972. In Folejewski Zbigniew, Futurism and its place in the development of modern poetry, p 92.
[13] Nie jest sie dzis tylko cz:owiekiem. Jestem takze telefonem, kinem, teleskopem, maszyna rotacyjna, plakatem, radiotelegrafem. Swiat jest dynamiczna
Pomarancza, ktora pozeramy
Realnosc jest piekna sama w sobie – nie trzeba jej upiekszac! Nowa sztuka nie upieksza lecz przeksztalca in Antologia Polskiego Futuryzmu, Biblioteka Narodowa 1978, p 68, trans. Ewa Chrusciel.
[14] Prolog
w wieoltysiecznych, stuulicowych miastach
wychodza codziennie tysiace gazet,
d:ugie, czarne kolumny s:ów,
wykrzykiwane g:osno po wszystkich bulwarach.
pisza je mali, starsi ludzie w okularach.
nieprawda,
pisze je Miasto
senografia tysiaca wypadków.
rytmem, tetnem, krwia.
d:ugie czterdziestoszpaltowe poematy.
wystukuja je stutysieczne aparaty,
które s:ysza puls swiata za miliony mil,
agencje reutera, havasa, paty,
d:ugie kilometrowe papierowe zwitki.
komunikaty.
miasto s:yszy wszystko.
wie za kogo wychodzi ksiezniczka hiszpanska
i co spiskuja w gdansku niemcy wciaz niesforni,
o budowie w himalajach nowego wiaduktu,
radiodepesze z kalifornii
i stan pogody w Timbuktu.
o wszystkim pisze miasto w swoich 40-szpaltowych poematach:
strajki w elektrowniach. przejechania. Samobójstwa.
oto jest prawdziwa gigantyczna poezja.
jedyna. dwudziestoczterogodzinna. wiecznie nowa.
która dziala na mnie, jak silny elektryczny prad.
jak smieszne sa wobec niej wszystkie poezje.
poeci, jestescie niepotrzebni!
Folejewski Zbigniew, Futurism and its place in the development of modern poetry, p 235.
[15] «[s]a to gryzki cudze, bezbarwne, nieczytalne, dowody rzeczowe snobizmu», in Stefan Zeromski, Snobizm i Postep, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo J. Morkowicza 1926, pp. 1, 4, 73.
Shore, «(Modernism in) Eastern Europe», p 17.
[16] V.A. Arutchev, Zapisnye knizhki Maiakovskogo, «Literaturnoe nasledstvo» 65 (Moscow: izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1958), p. 384. In Shore, «(Modernism in) Eastern Europe», p
[17] Shore, Caviar and Ashes, p 31.
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