Past, Present and Futurism: The End of the Term

My students this term have again been doing some of their own research, doing what I call "filling in the gaps" between the authors and texts we've been reading and exploring together.

"A Slap in the Face of Public Taste"

Some presentations have been more successful than others, but one last week on Futurism struck me as particularly timely.

We've been emphasizing drama this semester, in particular performance and performativity, and so the stage was set for the Futurists and their 1912 manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste."

For the students, the idea that one scholar has called "aesthetic disobedience" (in regards to Pussy Riot performances in recent years) was rather strange: "Why did anyone care how they dressed? Why couldn't they wear wooden spoons in their lapels if they wanted to? Why was a yellow shirt so shocking? What other color shirts were being made and worn, and why were they somehow less shocking?" Another reaction, though, was admiration: how cool that futurism spread to music, architecture, behavior and dress as well as poetry and book design. How bold to limit printing colors to red and black. How interesting to maintain a poetic meter while also innovating the "stairstep" design, thus integrating a revolutionary approach to the visual with a tie to the past, and this despite the call to "throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc. off the ship of contemporaneity."

In short, I should not underestimate the power of Futurism to reach students. Some students were being naive, simply not aware of the degree of their own freedom of personal expression growing up in the United States today, but others immediately recognized the possibilities of "hooliganism," the ways in which "acting out" could challenge social norms and shake the very foundations of society.

What intrigued me most about the presentation, though, was that the students pulled out one particular quote from the "Slap in the Face" manifesto: the "past is too tight." An interesting choice, since it seems to me that the meaning of this quote is not self-evident in English. This rejection of the past -- an important hallmark of the revolutionary avantgarde -- in fact of course goes against what I have been teaching them all term.

This semester I constructed my "Masterpieces of Russian Literature" course as an exercise in juxtaposition and intertextuality. We spent many weeks on Pushkin and his novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, looking both at the novel internally (stanza and rhyme scheme, but also social and cultural mores highlighted in the book) and externally -- its connections to Byron, to other literary traditions, and also its renditions and reincarnations, from various translations (including Nabokov's, which my students hated, and Douglas Hofstadter's, which they tolerated, preferring to both the standard "best translation" of James Falen) to transformations, especially Vikram Seth's Silicon Valley version Golden Gate. We also explored Gogol, and we read two stories and a play, but also talked about Pamela Howard's staging of Martinů's "The Marriage, and Shostakovich's opera "The Nose." More important, perhaps, we watched portions of Mira Nair's film The Namesake, based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. Some of my students were actually familiar with the novel, and the idea of an Indian-American immigrant family's tie to Russian literature underscored for them the weight of the past, the meaning of family and culture, in a way that expanded their view of Gogol and Russia considerably.

Our last "module" has been a Chekhov module, and in addition to reading / watching Three Sisters, we read Ludmila Petrushevskaya's Three Girls in Blue. This too has represented a huge juxtaposition -- late 19th century Russia (and the comfortable lives of the gentry, who despite their complaining have plenty of food and a roof over their heads, even if they never get to Moscow), and late Soviet Russia -- with its despairing women, their hooligan sons, drunken husbands and lovers, and lonely mothers. The weight of the past drags Petrushevskaya's play from comedy toward tragedy, even though the leaking dacha roof, fevers, aches and pains, and eternally missing kitten represent the truly absurd conditions of stagnation-era Soviet life.

In Three Sisters, in the new Tracy Letts translation I was using, Irina exclaims: "we're suffocating." That feeling, of suffocating under the weight of the past, of expectations, of cultural dead ends, is something that resonates today, I think, both in contemporary Russian life and even for my American students.

The final presentation yesterday, on perestroika, reminded the students that economics underlie much of what we've been studying about imperial and Soviet-era Russia. As the value of the ruble nose-dives for the first time in recent memory, I wonder whether the future is as bright in the 21st century as it was in the past, given the energy, creativity, and revolutionary aesthetics of one hundred years ago.