Miroslav Nemirov. All about Poetry 1

All about Poetry 1


Miroslav Nemirov

Publication date: November 17, 2000

Preface to the project

Avant-garde

Here, for example, is its definition from a brief literary dictionary for high school students (S. Turaev, 1988):

“Avant-garde (from the French avant-garde - vanguard) is a term that denotes the so-called “leftist movements” in art and literature that arose (mainly in the West) in the second decade of the 20th century and manifested itself mainly in poetry and drama. . reflected the spontaneous rebellion of poets against the bourgeois way of life of their time. Representatives of Armenia did not have a clear political program. They rebelled against the “well-fed”, against the contrasts of the city, against the unjust war unleashed by the imperialists in 1914. They considered the usual forms of literature and art obsolete , including strict standards of versification (even syntax), opposed realism, which seemed to them insufficient to express their rebellious sentiments. (...)

In a number of literatures, A. appeared as an early stage of revolutionary art. Among the future poets of socialist realism, besides Mayakovsky, one can name many who began their journey in line with A. (...)

The ambiguity of the term A., however, lies in the fact that in our time some bourgeois artists and poets consider themselves to be “avant-garde” only because they reject realism and strive to captivate the reader’s imagination with various experiments in the field of form (see formalism ), although In terms of content, their work is most often reactionary in nature. It is clear that they have little in common with those artists who stood at the origins of A. and called for revolutionary changes with great conviction . "

The definition, of course, is extremely stupid - which, in particular, is its charm. Secondly, I don’t have anything else at hand now - July 28, 2000, Friday, 14.59 - but to invent something out of my head somehow... So, we’ll use what we have plus a general idea of ​​A., which Probably every intelligent thinking reed has it.

Avant-garde and Modernism

Yeah, this should be discussed - the differences between A. and “modernism” (see), which are often merged into one.

And we - for convenience - will differentiate.

And then “modernism” is everything from Baudelaire until the World War, the art that completed - and at the same time refuted (from Nietzschean, aesthetic, ultra-individualistic and occultist positions) the 18th-19th centuries, the century of reason and progress. Blavatsky, Verlaine, Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Bryusov, the Silver Age, all kinds of Art Nouveau, Art Nouveau and Decadence, right up to - in Russia - Acmeism (see all these names and titles).

Politically, M. is extremely conservative and counter-revolutionary ( “And we, the sages and poets, Keepers of secrets and faith, Let us carry the lit lights into the catacombs, hermitages, caves” ), esoteric ( “I call the dreamers, I don’t call you” ), prone to “ individual utopia,” is determined to escape from life ( “I hate humanity! I’m running away from it in a hurry! My only fatherland is my deserted soul!” ) into the kingdom of pure beauty and the ivory tower, and so on, and so on.

For details, see decadence .

And the Avant-garde then is an attempt to build a completely new culture in a place cleared of all signs of the previous culture, on bare ground, on completely new foundations (however, first the soil really needs to be cleared and the previous culture destroyed to the ground). However, based on the principles of the same Nietzschean, occult, etc., only choosing other interpretations and other versions. In its purest form, A. is the suprematism of Malevich, futurism of 1918-21 (“The Art of the Commune”), LEF (minus Mayakovsky, about whom separately), Tatlin, Rodchenko, Mondrian, Corbusier, etc., right up to socialist realism, which, convincingly showed as B. Groys (see), is an extreme consequence of A.

Politically, A. is ultra-left and ultra-revolutionary; anti-individual (totalitarian), socially active (projective), that is, determined to directly influence life through the means of art and to completely and completely restructure it in accordance with the artistic tastes of the artist undertaking such a restructuring.

Using approximately the same set of artistic means (borrowing them from each other), Avant-garde and Modernism every now and then form a kind of symbiotic structures in which both, in fact deeply opposite and alien to each other, phenomena are simultaneously manifested. The same Russian (as opposed to Italian) futurism, the same German expressionism, the same American abstract expressionism (Tachisme) - all this is pure modernism, acting under the brand of the avant-garde and using some of its techniques, etc., etc.

Or the projectism of Avant-garde, the focus on reorganizing life primarily through art - this is already in full force in some branches of Modernism - in Russian symbolism, for example, and in artistic modernity itself.