IN AN EARLIER CHAPTER, the Russian concept of 'byt' was discussed. We noted Jakobson's remarks about the peculiarly Russian historical consciousness of the precarious reign of 'byt'—of fixed norms, conventions and order—over an ocean of chaos. And mention was made of the fact that a very similar consciousness was prevalent not only in Russia but throughout Europe in the immediate pre-war period in which Cubism was born.[1] Russian Futurism, we have seen, was in large part a revolt against byt. The Sun in Mayakovsky‘s "Extraordinary Adventure" comes down from the sky and drives the fires back—"for the first time since creation". Everything in the Futurists' poetry seemed new, strange—reminiscent in part of what Khlebnikov called "those first days of life on earth", when mountains belched lava and there were three suns in the sky. Khlebnikov's word—creation was designed to make words sparkle with fresh life, in his own words, “as in the first days of creation”. For both Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, the age they were entering was a "second rebirth" of mankind. For Kruchenykh, all previous art in Russia had consisted merely of
- pitiful attempts on the part of servile thought to recreate its byt, its philosophy and its psychology...[2]
- ↑ The poet Pierre Reverdy, an associate of the Cubists, writes that the year 1911 was a time "when the future was quite bare and the present unusually complex and precarious... I doubt if ever before in the history of art was there so much sunshine, so many blue skies, so much responsibility so bravely assumed, or so great a gap set between disaster and the hoped-for"— Une Aventure Methodique (1949), quoted in: John Russell, G Braque, London 1959 p 153.
- ↑ A Kruchenykh, Nozye Puti Slova, (1913); in: V Markov (ed), Manifesty i Programmy russkikh futuristov, 1967, p 65.
