Victory over the Sun

Music and Letters, 2014

The Russian Avant-Garde can be expressed in one word: unique. However, this “uniqueness” is what set it, as a whole, apart from all other forms of art because it became its own artistic revolution. It completely stripped away artistic form to create a sense of oneness, of being complete and spiritual in an entirely new way that art had never been viewed or portrayed before. Thanks to the combined efforts of Kruchenykh, Malevich, Matyushin, and even Mayakovsky, they created Victory Over the Sun, which is considered to be the most influential of multiple Russian futurist operas that existed at the beginning of the 20th century. This opera helped fuel artists into thinking outside of the box, being completely different and unique in their approaches, and with going against the grain (or brushstroke) in terms of how the fine arts were viewed and depicted. Through Victory Over the Sun’s unique makeup and composition, it helped to inspire and influence an entirely new way of thinking in terms of fine arts and with opening new doors during an already complicated artistic era; it became essential to reject the old, favor the new, embrace a different sense of spirituality, and start an artistic revolution.

Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference Presentation, 2021

Larissa Shmailo discusses the work of Russian Futurist Alexei Kruchenych. She shares scenes from her original English translation of Victory over the Sun (Ĉervená Barva Press 2014) and analyzes themes of hypermasculinity, war, and eradication of the feminine through the lens of gender theory. She remarks upon the relevance of Kruchenych’s linguistic manifestos to the avant libretto of Victory. Question: What is the relevance of Kruchenych to experimental poetry today? To women today?

2016

The Caine College of the Arts Visiting Artists and Scholars Series is underwritten by the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation-Russell Family, the Tanner Charitable Trust, and Differential Tuition provided by the students of the college.

Academia Letters, 2021

The first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun (VOTS) by Alexei Kruchenych,is known as a brilliant linguistic, poetic, and theatrical experiment, an anti-opera which may have been the world's first performance piece. The inspired shenanigans of VOTS even pre-date the antics of Dada.

" Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, "-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the inability of their audiences to understand. Tim O'Brien writes of the war he experienced in Vietnam: " There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. " From ancient Nordic ballads to Masai folk songs or Red Indian sagas, war has always been a predominate theme in literature. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind portrays a war ravaged Barcelona and comments, " There's something about that period that's epic and tragic " for like the Old English Elegiac poetries, the Arthurian Romances, Gorky's Mother or Tolstoy's War and Peace, the literature of the Great Wars have altered human perception and the very fabrics of literature. However, we witness a distinct line between the literature of both world wars. The Second Great War threatened the humankind like never before. It was a manmade crisis which threw us to the brink of extinction, and thus displaying the futility of human existence. As humanity experienced the terror of the 'absurdity' of reality, the philosophy if 'nothing to be done' surfaced in their consciousness. This paper aims to evaluate the marked change in the form of poetry written in the two Great Wars and how far the Second World War was responsible for the advent of Modernism.

“Life has got out of its rails, everybody has forgotten his insignificant business, everything became confused and was seized by just one goal, by one idea, the idea of war”, so Ivan Kliun described his first impressions as the 1914 war broke out. Still, Russian avant-garde artists and poets treated the new subject not only according to their personal aesthetical attitude (which would not be surprising), but, what is more significant, saw in the Great War a confirmation of their own creative strategies. On the one hand, Futurists claimed that their assault on philistine decency anticipated the military conflict, undermining the predominant conventions of beauty and measure (“Even before the war Futurists lived out of war and at war” the manifesto of the last Futurist exhibition “0.10” affirmed). On the other hand, pacifist writers such as the Symbolist poet Maximilian Voloshin perceived the outbreak of World War I as a tragic fulfillment of their apocaliptycal fears. Drawing on a number of examples, I will argue that the literary response to the Great War in Russian avant-garde circles was largely affected by the crisis that in 1914 both Futurists and Symbolists were confronted with; consequently, the war period, rather than being an opportunity for further evolution, represented a short phase of self-reassessment before the radical changes brought by the October Revolution.

Experiment =, 2017

While the aspiration to harmony, utopian in its essence, became a distinctive feature in the particular vein of modernist aesthetics, interested in constructive principles, which came to the fore after the October Revolution in the early 1920s, another line, which will interest me the most in this essay, had been predominant during 1912-17, and developed in quite a different direction, striving for dystopia, dissonance, and the absurd. The metaphor of war in the pre-revolutionary avant-garde was paradigmatic to the concept of innovation and directly linked to the rather symbolic "destruction" of previous achievements. A deeper understanding of avant-garde ideology-on social, political, and aesthetic levels-appears when contextualized in relation to World War I. Natalia Goncharova's series of lithographs Misticheskie obrazy voiny [Mystical Images of War] (1914), Pavel Filonov's artist book Propeven o prorosli mirovoi [Canticle of World Flowering] (1915), Olga Rozanova's linocut portfolio Voina [War] (1916), and Aleksei Kruchenykh's album of collages Vselenskaia voina [Universal War] (1916) were among the most profound artistic responses to the war. These unique works represent three different artistic explorations of the theme, as reflected in neoprimitivist, futurist, and suprematist aesthetics.