Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh
Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh was a notable Russian artist and poet born on February 21, 1886, in the Kherson region of the Russian Empire. He graduated from an art school in Odessa and moved to Moscow, where he initially supported himself through caricatures while engaging with the Cubo-Futurist movement. His artistic pursuits led him to literature, and by 1912, he began writing poetry, becoming closely associated with prominent Futurist figures like Vladimir Mayakovsky. Kruchenykh was a key contributor to the Futurist manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," advocating for radical redefinitions of language and art. His most famous work, the abstract poem "Dyr bul shchyl," exemplified his experimental approach, prioritizing aesthetic value over conventional meaning. Throughout World War I, he balanced teaching with military service and continued his avant-garde activities in the Caucasus. However, as the Soviet regime grew more conservative, his experimental style faced rejection, leading to diminished visibility in the 1930s. Despite this, he managed to survive the harsh cultural purges of the Stalin era and became a mentor to younger poets. Kruchenykh passed away in Moscow on June 17, 1968, leaving a complex legacy within the realms of Russian avant-garde art and literature.
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Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh
Author
- Born: February 21, 1886
- Birthplace: Olivskii, Russia
- Died: June 17, 1968
- Place of death: Moscow, Russia
Biography
Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh was born on February 21, 1886, in Olivskii, in the Kherson region of the Russian Empire. He attended the local three-grade school in Olivskii, then went to the art school in Odessa, graduating in 1906 with a diploma which entitled him to teach art in Russian high schools. Although he failed to obtain admission to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, he moved to Moscow anyway as an independent artist. He supported himself by producing a series of humorous caricatures while becoming involved in the Cubo-Futurist movement. His involvement in the artistic side of this movement led him to become interested in its literary side as well, and he began to write poetry after 1912. He was a close friend of Vladimir Mayakovsky and other leading Futurist writers of the time, and was an active participant in drafting A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the notorious Futurist manifesto produced in 1912. Drawing upon that document’s call for not only the rejection of the canon of established literary figures but also for the invention of new words, he produced a purely abstract poem, “Dyr bul shchyl,” in which the created words are to be understood only in a purely aesthetic sense, rather than for any semantic content.
During World War I he lived in the Caucasus region of Russia, alternately teaching and involving himself in avant-garde artistic activities. He performed military service in 1915, working as a draftsman to help build a railroad through the Caucasus. In 1921 he returned to Moscow, which had now become the capital of the new Bolshevik government. Although by this time he had abandoned his most outrageous transrationalistic experiments, his works continued to be on the very edge of comprehensibility. As the decade wore on and Soviet society became more conservative, even stultified, Kruchenykh’s edgy experimentation grew steadily less welcome. In the eyes of the Soviet authorities, the time for experimentation and play had passed, and it was time to get down to the business of building the bright Soviet future, which meant that artists must support the practical, not chase after dreams.
By the 1930’s, Kruchenykh was effectively shut out of publishing, although he produced a few small editions on a primitive sort of mimeograph machine. He did escape the brutal series of purges that swept through the artistic and literary communities in the later phases of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror, largely because his work had been so far to the edge that he was perceived as a harmless and incomprehensible eccentric rather than an ideological threat. He survived the rest of the Stalin years by assembling collections of literary artifacts, and he later became the mentor of several young poets, including Gennadii Aigi, and Vladimir Kazakov. On his eightieth birthday he was given an honor by the Soviet Writers’ Union, but otherwise remained in obscurity. He died of pneumonia in Moscow on June 17, 1968.