Words in Revolution

This is the second edition of Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes 1912-1928, originally published by Cornell University Press (1988). Futurism as a world movement profoundly affected the course of twentieth-century art and culture. This collection made available for the first time in English the writings of the Russian Futurists, which supplied the theoretical base of their movement. In her extensive introduction, Lawton has highlighted the historical development of the movement and has related Futurism both to the Russian national scene and to avant-garde movements worldwide. She describes how the Russian Futurists declared their enmity to the aesthetic canons of nineteenth-century realism and to the mysticism of the Symbolists. Eagle's concluding essay discusses how Futurism's most significant theoretical ideas, through the medium of Russian Formalism, had a lasting impact on the subsequent development of structuralism and semiotics. The lively and imaginative translations by Lawton and Eagle capture the distinctive polemical style of the Russian Futurists-jarring, provocative, neologistic-and reproduce their often idiosyncratic typography. Among many Futurists represented are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Viktor Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Vadim Shershenevich, and Boris Pasternak.