Russian motion: Kinetic dynamism in Russian avant-garde poetry, painting, and film

At the beginning of the twentieth century, speed emerged as an important artistic motif throughout Europe. Scientific advancements were changing the way humans perceived their surroundings, and with urban centers transformed by a influx of technology and mechanized means of transport, modern artists developed new techniques and styles to accompany this energy, excitement, and dynamism. In Russia, the ambiguous reaction of avant-garde painters, poets, and filmmakers to Western trends prompted a new "Slavic" manifestation of kinetic dynamism that grew through the 1920s, well into the Soviet era.;This dissertation analyzes the Russian avant-garde's treatment of speed between 1910 and 1930. Chapter I addresses the medium of painting and the manner in which the Russian avant-garde movement of rayonism, founded by Mikhail Larionov and Natal'ia Goncharova, conveyed modern motion through complex arrangements of clashing, diagonal lines and the superimposition of colored forms. Chapter II explores Russian futurist poetry and its evocation of the sensation of speed through highly visual verse and even "ferroconcrete," as was the case with the work of Vasilii Kamensky; the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky is also discussed. Finally, Chapter III highlights early Soviet cinema and a series of revolutionary films that brought kinesthetic motion into focus, just when motion pictures were emerging as a legitimate artistic medium. Through montage and other innovative filming techniques, Soviet filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, elicited an unprecedented impression of velocity and flux, extending much further in their exploration of speed than artists before them. By the 1930s, however, socialist realism had surfaced in Stalinist Russia, whereby the speed of the Russian avant-garde was quickly reined in by Soviet doctrine. Valentin Kataev's 1932 novel Time Forward! , for instance, accentuates this sudden shift from avant-garde experimentation to the rigid organization of Stalin's Five-Year Plans. As this dissertation shows, Russian experiments in motion distinguished the nation's art from that of the West but eventually dissipated under the pressure of socialist realism's one-dimensional speed.