- Their activities never overstepped the boundaries of literature or the arts, and their main achievementswere in the field of poetry.[1]
While there is something wrong with this statement——which is difficult to square with the futurists' close identification with revolutionary politics—-it does express an important truth. What is crucial is that first and foremost, the Russians were artists. Throughout the pre—revolutionary period, there was never any question for them of a pre-conceived ideological goal for which an art-form would have to be found. It was the other way around. The word came first. Insofar as the futurists had a goal, it was conceived as the word in and for itself. As Mayakovsky put it, “the word is the end of poetry."[2] Khlebnikov and his colleagues would follow wherever "the wisdom of language" (Khlebnikov's term) happened to lead.[3] This order of primacy was expressed by Kruchenykh in explicitly "formalist" terms:
- If there is a new form, there must also exist a new content... It is form that determines content.[4]
Marinetti could never have acceded to any such thought. As Pomorska puts it, writing of the Italian futurists:
- The latter see the source of poetic innovation mainly in the object of description, in the topic itself. It would be sufficient to turn to contemporary reality itself and to its very spring——the machine and speed——in order to liberate literature from the old rubbish: the obnoxious, old—fashioned themes...[5]
For Marinetti, the whole purpose of modern poetry was to express a definite content. It was to extol a definite external reality:
- The racing car, with its body adorned by huge pipes, with its exploding exhaust... We will extol immense crowds, moved by work, pleasure or rebellion; the multi—
