Avant-Garde Poetics of Language in Central and Eastern Europe

This dissertation is a comparative study of the Russian and Czech avant-gardes and their responses to the crises of representation and artistic language in the first decades of the 20th century. In particular, it examines the theoretical and creative output of two artists who worked at the intersection of the word and image: the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the visual artist Karel Teige. Both artists were central figures in the founding and theoretical articulation of Russian Futurism and Czech Poetism, respectively. The chapters trace these artists’ artistic evolutions, from their earliest conceptions of a crisis in art to the development of solutions for overcoming this crisis. The theoretical and creative output of these figures is examined both within the artists’ individual oeuvres, as well as in light of their respective artistic movements and the broader tendencies of the international avant-garde. Chapter 1 traces Mayakovsky’s response to the crisis from his initial impulse toward abstraction, characteristic of the Russian Cubo-Futurist movement in the verbal and visual arts more broadly, to the introduction of a political agenda into his art. On the basis of Mayakovsky’s p