Give Russia wings: The confluence of aviation and Russian futurism, 1909-1914

This dissertation explores the effects of early aviation on Russian art and society according to the hypothetical equation: aviation + popular culture = Futurism. In an effort to break new ground, seemingly unrelated forces---Russian folklore, the circus and cinema, pioneer aviators, the literary innovations of Khlebnikov and Kamenskii, flight imagery in the work of such artists as Malevich and Tatlin---are analyzed to demonstrate how deeply Futurism, as a movement, was rooted in and responsive to popular culture of its day. Key sources were the extensive periodical archives of St. Petersburg's Public Library.;Russia, unlike Europe, reacted coolly to airplanes at first. But by 1909, the growth of popular culture together with the flowering of avant-garde artistic experiments, led to a burst of Russian airmindedness. In aviation, Russian Futurists found the perfect vehicle for transcendence. The Futurists coined aviational words for the Russian tongue, beginning with Khlebnikov's deliberate replacement for aeroplan by the Slavonic samolet .;After treating the rise of popular aviation heroes Ivan Zaikin (a former wrestler) and Sergei Utochkin (a champion bicyclist), this work focuses on Vasilii Kamenskii---the key mediator between the worlds of new technology and literature. Kamenskii's hitherto unknown 1911 drama, Zhizn aviatorskaia, yields important clues on Futurist thinking about aviation and theology---a realized metaphor for salvation and resurrection. An anti-aviation backlash found in the Symbolist works of Blok and Andreev comprises another forgotten aspect of aviation lore.;Engineer-aviator Igor Sikorsky rescued the embattled metaphor for the tsar when Sikorsky recombined all the earlier elements of heroic feats and Futurist innovation by flying his own invention---Ilya Muromets ---the world's largest passenger plane over St. Petersburg. This led to the grand metaphor of the airplane as the airship of state. These hopes for a future crowned with technological excellence and artistic creativity perished, however, in the tragic onslaught of war and revolution. Clearly, the slogan "Give Russia Wings" carried embedded within it, both eloquence and pathos, courage and despair at the beginning of the century Lenin once called "the century of the airplane."...