FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS, but above all because it set out not to interpret the world, but to change it, John Berger has described Cubism as the nearest there has been to an expression of Marxist dialectics in art. Referring to the period 1907 to 1914 he writes:
- ...it is both possible and logical to define Cubism during those years as the only example of dialectical materialism in painting.[1]
If that is so, there seems a peculiar appropriateness in the fact that it was in Russia, in the years immediately preceding and following the October revolution, that the reverberations of Cubism soundest loudest and its implications were most fully developed.
The "Cubist" characteristics of Russian Futurism have often been noted, particularly in the work of Khlebnikov. The fundamental fact was the idea of the "self-sufficient word", which corresponded to the Cubist idea of the primacy of form over content—of the "way of seeing" over the object itself. Mayakovsky declared:
- ...the word is the end of poetry.[2]
This was a conscious attempt to carry over into the field of poetry the idea of the primacy of "the material itself"——i.e. of paint, and geometric shape-in Cubist painting.[3] The same idea was expressed in a different way when Mayakovsky wrote:
