A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE

In 1912, a slim volume of poetry by several authors entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was published in Moscow. In the pamphlet, the poems were preceded by a brief introduction, which acted as a kind of manifesto, and which was also called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. It was the opening gambit of Russian Futurism, and its provocative title hinted at what was to become a constant stance.

The authors represented in this little book went by the collective name of ‘Hylaea’ which they borrowed from Chernyanka, or, in Greek, Hylaea, the home town by the Black Sea of their leader, David Burlyuk. Their message in the introduction to their poetic collection was simple: ‘Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the word’; ‘Throw Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, overboard from the Ship of Modernity’. It also attacked popular mainstream authors of the day – Gorky, Blok, Sologub, Bunin and others. Since it only stated one rather modest aim, to ‘enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary’, it was less a manifesto than a defiant statement of an extreme modernist position. It implied a Futurist attitude not just to art, but to life: a welcoming of whatever was new, and a disgusted rejection of the humdrum, the accepted and the everyday – what the Russians call ‘byt’. It voiced social protest as much as aesthetic aspiration, and implied what was only later articulated: that the Futurists wanted to remake the world, through art, through language, through overturning convention and, significantly, through theatre. Their rejection of the ‘old’ theatre meant interrogating every convention – standard dramatic language, play construction, stage settings, lighting, costume and of course acting – and inaugurating something new, a new world, which would be performative.

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was signed by David Burlyuk, Alexander Kruchenykh (whose real name was Alexei), Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov (who later changed his first name to Velimir). They were the most prominent of the Hylaeans, who also included David Burlyuk's two brothers, Nikolai and Vladimir, and Benedikt Livshits.