I saw eurythmics – a dancer of sounds … In it, the tongue of tongues.
ANDREI BELY1
The current prominence of the body in the arts and in practices for well-being in daily life hardly needs to be stressed. Some time ago, the emphasis spread from the performative arts, the arts of movement (theatre, film, mime, dance, the circus, gymnastics), to academic culture. Even in literary studies, there are writings dedicated to the ‘embodiment’ of literature, the ‘pragmatics’ of written utterances and the ‘behavioural’ character or ‘performativity’ of creation. Much of this has been prompted by the way avant-garde artistic productions pose a central problem of interpretation. Avant-garde art has often been performative art, in which the realization of the art just at a particular moment is the art. As Nikita Sirotkin wrote, avant-garde art ‘opposes tradition … [and] relativizes the boundary between interior and exterior, making the external internal, and vice versa’.2 It is art fully committed to rejecting dualism of mind and body, and to the elevation of the former over the latter in terms of aesthetic and ethical value, followed by social preference and status for mental over bodily cognition and capability. It is art that embraces gesture as the unity of mental meaning and bodily movement. Indeed, to mention gesture is to point towards a view of communication and language as originating from, or having a basic structural form in, movement. As has been said, ‘gesture is an action that helps to create the narrative space that is shared in the communicative situation’.3 As a result, this chapter turns from the dance of the body to the dance of language and poetry. Sharing kinaesthetic experience, and sharing performative techniques based on kinaesthetic knowledge, the dance of the body and the dance of language have the same roots. For the poet Andrei Bely, the body and the language were simply the life of one and the same person.
As it happened, one day a friend of Bely’s said that at his place, at night, rats danced along the corridor. Bely became heated: ‘They dance, how do they dance? Ah, how interesting it is that rats dance! I have to see them, you cannot even imagine how important it is.’4 And Bely spent the whole night, starting at ten in the evening, at a partly open door watching the rats.
Dance interested Bely in many different manifestations. He knew, better than other people because of his agility, that a person achieves meaning through movement or rhythm, the acts which Bely called ‘rhythmical gesture’. Lack of movement, stasis, became his personal enemy, and the greatest insult which he could hurl at official philosophy was to call conceptual thought ‘static’.5 Bely himself, as a living person, embodied thought in movement. When one reads his writing, as Mikhail Osorgin commented,
One sees Bely, his gestures, his stops, the searches for words, the underlinings, the double underlinings, and the wide illuminated smile: he found it! And once again, twice, three times, there is a going down, losing lines and air, a splash, and again he swims up to the surface with a new catch and the latest result: ‘we move, we progress’.6
‘In the whole way he held himself there was something always ready for a spring, for a dive and perhaps for a flight,’ Fedor Stepun, who knew him well, wrote. ‘He didn’t simply go into an enclosed place but, somehow specially diving with his head and shoulders, either flew, or burst or danced into it.’7 Bely’s body and his language formed a whole. One has to ‘dive’ for meaning, he claimed, to acquire the skill arbitrarily to change the rhythm of movement, to turn it around, and to jump over a gap, and this is the craft of the muscles. This was not simply the style of exposition but the acrobatic dance of his thought. ‘What the lecturer says is for him … a trampoline. Look, his thought runs away, pushes off, and it already circles on the flying trapeze on its own questions in the high cupola of his singular “I”.’8
Memoirists wrote about Bely as about a ‘dancing’ or ‘flying’ person:
[Bely] ‘dances’ – his gestures circle, flow, saunter, conclude, bring you to a new thought. But, well, he rises on tiptoe, and in a moment, just as suddenly, he stands on his knees or, glancing at you from below, springs into a squat. If you are not an experienced sharer of his presence, you lose him for a time, and, finding him, you will not know whether you should stand or also be on your knees. But Bely is already on the divan, has sat in the corner, having folded one leg under himself. He already runs, tacking agilely between the tables and chairs.9
FIGURE 5 Fedor Golovin. ‘M. F. Kokoshkina, Andrei Bely and F. F. Kokoshkin’. Paper, Indian ink. 1917.
Once, when deathly ill, Bely suffered as much from the impossibility of moving as from the illness: ‘I am in essence a peripatetic philosopher; and I cannot sit and cannot even stand in the process of thinking; no, I’m not a “Stoic”: “Stoa” is not for me; I’m a follower of Heraclites.’10 For Symbolists like Bely, ‘the very understanding of the Heraclitean logos was … the understanding of rhythm, the law of change, and not the static forms or norms of judgment’.11
In this worldview, the principal role in the act of meaning-formation, or semiosis, belonged to the symbol. Bely provided an example. While still a child, frightened by the purple lid of a box, he hid the lid in the shadows in order to see only its colour. Playing, the little boy said to himself, ‘something purple’:
‘something’ is the experience; the purple spot is a form of expression; the two taken together … is a symbol – it is a third thing. Having constructed it, I overcome two worlds (the chaotic condition of fearfulness, and the object of the external world given to me); both worlds are not actual; there is a third world; and I am tied into this third world, given neither to the soul nor to the external object.12
The symbol (‘something purple’) is thus concrete and sensuous. In the creative act of cognition, it is a changing of sensitive experience which has the ability to transform meaning. ‘In symbolization,’ Bely explained, ‘we underlined the process of establishing new qualities.’13 Experience as a student of chemistry, seeing ‘the chemical birth of new properties of a substance in the productions of our laboratory’, provided him with a model for the birth ‘of the third world’, the world of new qualities or symbols.14 He transferred the miracle of chemical change to the world of ideas.
Rhythm, however, appeared in Bely’s childhood before the symbol. Lying in his bed, the little Boris Bugaev heard his mother play on the grand piano; this awoke his consciousness and filled it with rhythms. The boy perceived sound kinaesthetically. In music, ‘all is clear’ to him, ‘and all free: fly as you wish, up, down, to the right, to the left, in this sounding space’.15 His father was a mathematician, and when the son was a little older, he learned about his father’s theory of number and measure under the name of ‘arhythmologia’. In 1909, as an adult and a poet, Bely organized a Rhythmic Seminar and, together with the participants, prepared a Text-Book of Rhythm. In the words of Mikhail Chekhov, ‘by way of calculations, researching versification, he penetrated to the soul of the poet and heard how he spoke – the pulse and breathing of Pushkin, Tyutchev and Fet at the moment of their creativity’.16
If rhythm was one of Bely’s first impressions, then eurythmics was his passion as an adult. The boy was motor gifted from early childhood, and he became conscious of his unusual dexterity when a new governess began to take him to a German gymnastic society.
And for two years, still before going to the gymnasium [classical high school], I marched and jumped and stretched on the ‘parallel bars’ (subsequently, as an older boy, I showed off with different tricks on the trapeze, ran with speed, sprang high, with the ability to move with a lighted lamp on my head and crawl on four chairs placed next to each other).17
When Bely came to Anthroposophy, his kinaesthetic experience was further concentrated. At this stage of his life, he began to work as a wood carver on the construction of the anthroposophical temple, the Johannes Baum or Goetheanum, in Dornach (Switzerland). In a letter, Bely confessed:
I never worked physically in my life, but now, it turns out, I can cut fully in wood … One goes out in the morning to work, one returns towards night: the body aches, the hands are finished, but blood pulses with some kind of unprecedented rhythm, and this new pulsation of the blood gives to one … a life-affirmative song, hope and joy.18
Anthroposophical eurythmics, the art of movement in a group that he himself took up and even passed to others, also produced a strong impression.
Bely’s own motor, kinaesthetic giftedness, was the sister of his dynamic and flexible thinking. Zarathustra – a dancer with light feet – was his brother by birth. Rudolf Steiner also appeared to him to be a Nietzschean dancer with light feet, ‘not a man, but himself rhythm’: ‘he came slowly from the passage, greeted me and went round a row of chairs, but it seemed to me he floats’.19 After Steiner separated from the Theosophists and created his Anthroposophical Society, he and those who supported him used theatrical practices to create their own rituals. In 1910, Germany, and especially Munich, became the centre for experiments in expressive movement and new dance. There, it seems that Steiner was familiar with Dalcrozian rhythmics and with new experimental dance (Ausdruckstanz). Besides this, his comrade-in-arms and wife, Maria Iakovlevna Sivers, had learned art drama and declamation, first in Petersburg and then in the Paris Conservatory of the Arts, and she substantially assisted in creating anthroposophical theatre. One day, after a lecture on the opening phrases of the Gospel of St John, Steiner asked his follower, Margarita Sabashnikova, whether she could dance through these phrases. Sabashnikova did not take this up, but another woman, the young Lori Smits, had the courage. She undertook ‘to dance the words’, and thus arose eurythmics.20
The eurythmicists created their own repertoire of movements: level gliding on half-tiptoe, as if to fly above the earth, free waves made by the arms, and statuesque, noble poses. Long, many-layered tunics from streaming fabric, with wide-winged sleeves, emphasized and prolonged the movement. Running to and fro on the stage, the eurythmicists traced geometrical figures with symbolic meaning, while their arms pictured sound-letters: ‘A variety of forms of consciousness fly, like many circling wings; and with arcs of arms we begin to reason, with spirals of scarves to explore the world.’ Bely himself, even before he became acquainted with eurythmics, had pondered over and written a lot about ‘the rhythmical gesture’, ‘the sound-form’ and ‘the ornament’. However, it is perfectly possible that dancers, Duncanists and eurythmicists, in light tunics and with scarves, suggested to him the graphic gesture which he loved, the spiral. ‘Spirals are the constitution of worlds and every day the universe expresses a cosmic dance in the harmony of a living sphere.’21
The word ‘eurythmia’ was ancient. In Plato, ‘eurythmia’ expressed the determination of the whole of life by correct rhythm, by a kind of universal image of time. Vitruvius used the word to denote the proportionality of parts, the attractive look and the beauty, which correlates with the demand of vision. Following in his footsteps, Vincent de Beauvais wrote that ‘architecture consists of order, disposition, eurythmy, symmetry and beauty’.22 Steiner, in turn, defined eurythmia as ‘visible speech, visible song’.23 According to his calculation, the correspondence between breathing (eighteen breaths a minute) and the pulse (seventy-two beats a minute) is exactly 1:4, and this is one of the principal musical times. The bodily-musical rhythm flows into movement, dance and eurythmia – and action: rhythm is drawn into waves of the circulation of the blood from the heart, finding itself in finitude as will.24 Steiner placed great hopes on eurythmia for the creation of ‘the new man’ whose physiology and constitution would be permeated by music.
Bely, like Steiner, wrote about how, in the future, men and women will change physically thanks to the flowing together of sound, gesture and meaning. The thought, which at the moment takes place ‘in one part of the body under the bone of the forehead’, will spread all over the body. ‘My whole body overflows with thought,’ Bely wrote. But the idea that it is possible ‘to record’ sound ‘in lines’, ‘to dance’ them, ‘to build form in them’, evidently ripened long before he shared this view with Steiner and Sivers. In Glossolalia, he discussed theurgical (divine or magical) words and the importance for them of physical movement and plastic gestures. He also compared the tongue as a physical organ with a dancer: ‘The whole movement of the tongue in the cavity of our mouth, is the gesture of an armless dancer, which envies the air, like a gauze, a dancing scarf.’25 The motion of a tongue-dancer – ‘speech mimicry’ – creates a new meaning before the appearance of words: ‘here thought flows in the heart; but the heart with arm-wings speaks without words; and the doubled arms speak.’ If one thinks over the movements of ‘mimetic dance’, opens their inner form, then the dance surpasses usual speech. And then the tongue, ‘an armless dancer’, ‘having created arms for itself, with the arms splits apart the grave; and it comes out from its dark cave, the cavity of our mouth’. Man finds the means to create the living word as a being from ‘fine flesh’, as if the word were human: ‘From heat and sound we create language. And our words will sometime become, like us, human.’26
At the end of the 1910s, Bely experienced disappointment with Anthroposophy. This was closely connected with a personal drama, separation from his wife, Asia Turgeneva. He bitterly complained that ‘eurythmic art took away my wife (this is a fact)’, and he criticized ‘the paradise fields of Anthroposophy in which the eurythmic female dance saviours forget, for the ceremonial dance, husbands, children, her people’. As a consequence, in Berlin at the beginning of the 1920s, he was often seen in cafés dancing the foxtrot. Bely himself called this episode ‘a flight … from “the paradises of anthro[posophical] society into … Variety, where eurythmicists don’t dance, but, simply, people do, though “half-naked”; and this is more open than eurythmic curves … I ran away from the mystical bodily-dancings of a woman to the highly, openly real bodily-movements of Variety girls.’ Music was to Bely ‘the way of consecration’, but he came to prefer ‘a good jazz band to the bells of Parsifal’.27 To Russian emigrants in Berlin after the Revolution, shy and embarrassed at dancing new dances in public, the foxtrotting Bely appeared strange and even terrible. One observer thought he showed ‘a distorted reflection of his true character’ in reaction against events in Dornach. But who can say what exactly Bely experienced dancing and improvising light-footed dance? Another observer saw him at the centre of respectful attention.28
When Bely was mentally reconciled with Steiner and had returned to Anthroposophy, and to Russia, he was very active in eurythmics, in particular in association with Mikhail Chekhov and the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre. The actress Maria Knebel recalled:
Bely (and after him Chekhov) was taken with the idea that each letter and word, and each sound in music, has its plastic expression. Consequently, it is possible ‘to calculate’ plastic verse, prose and music. Bely, with the fixation characteristic of him, drew us into this search. … We sought the plastic expression of every letter, studied ‘the grammar’ of gestures, transferred from the letter to the syllable, then to the phrase and to the sentence. Having trained, we made difficult enough exercises. We ‘read’ with gestures the poems of Pushkin, the sonnets of Shakespeare and the chorus from ‘Faust’, and one day independently prepared verses of Mayakovsky, which Bely much loved.29
Chekhov grasped from Bely the thought that the body of the actor must develop under the influence of impulses of the soul. Bodily movement and narrative, or story, meet, according to Chekhov, in ‘the psychological gesture’.30 What he called ‘the psychological gesture’, we call the dance-word. Bely, precisely, gave the dance-word the principal role in his linguistic utopia, the idea of the ‘tongue of tongues’. There was no discussion of kinaesthesia as a psycho-physiological phenomenon in this, but the modalities of the movement sense occupied the prime place in the phenomenal awareness presupposed by the discussion.
Eurythmics developed in the midst of Europe at war, when peoples – or, as was said in the past in Russian – ‘tongues’, went to war against each other. The word demonstrated its lack of strength and the brotherhood of peoples-tongues was destroyed. Switzerland turned out to be an oasis, a refuge for many Europeans, a place of meeting of many peoples-tongues. And there eurythmics appeared: dance, uniting gesture, word and sound, came to the help of the word. In the fourth year of the war, in the autumn of 1917, Bely described a cosmic ‘tongue of tongues’ which could put an end to the war. The young Bely had given the role ‘of a tongue which unites’ to music; later he filled this role with dance and gesture.31 He had the vision, recreating Christian mythology, that in its second coming, the word would be perfected and universal, general and understandable to all people without exception. In a perfected language, expressiveness would correspond to substance and the name of a thing to its essence. In just such a language God spoke to Adam.32 The Bible, however, said nothing about whether God’s language had been verbal or gestural. It might have been that God spoke to Adam in the language of dance, through dance-words. Bely himself, it turned out, was ready to create the perfect language. The daughter of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Lidiia, recalled how, as a guest with them, Bely taught her five-year old brother, Dima, his letters: ‘Having spread his legs widely and having placed his arms akimbo, Bely very clearly mimicked the letter “Ф”, and then with corresponding movement of long arms the letter “У”.’33
The art of the nursery is not great art. All the same, Bely, relating to his own childhood, linked the linguistic sign and the movement of the body. The child learned that his body, in precise, delineated symbolic performance, constituted his relation with others. Kinaesthetic sensation was the living, phenomenal content of the (social) relation. Cognition of language was at one and the same time mental and bodily – a person’s (not a brain’s or a mind’s) cognition. Later, when he became a master of Symbolist prose and had a vision of a universal language based on movement, or gesture, Bely learned how to put the same movements into poetry. The play in the nursery was a microcosm of culture.
Bely attracted his young comrade in poetry, Sergei Esenin, to his project to create a universal language. At Tsarskoe Selo outside Petrograd, in the autumn of 1917, Esenin and Bely often met and talked. Under the influence of these meetings, Esenin wrote a tract about art, The Keys of Maria. In this he thought over and expounded a scheme of letters formed into poses, as Bely had done in his Glossolalia. If Bely wrote the Latin alphabet (‘for the gesture “b”, taking a step back, having inclined the head downwards, I raise my arm above it, leaving under a covering’),34 then Esenin did the same for the Cyrillic alphabet. The letter ‘Б’ appeared to him to be a crouching man whose lifted arms draw the arch of heaven. Further, ‘the navel is the knot of the human being; the man has put his hands down on the spot from where everything began, and produced the letter Б’.35 In The Keys of Maria and other work on poetics from the years 1918 to 1920, Esenin, developing Bely’s theme, wrote about plasticity, ‘the modelling of word and form’, their ‘current’ and ‘fluidity’ and about characteristic verbal ‘ornament’. His fundamental terms were ‘line’ and ‘ornament’, ‘song’ and ‘melody’, and ‘dance’ and ‘gesture’.36
It is as if Esenin’s early work on poetics anticipated his later meeting with Duncan. In his phrase, the sound of words began to appear to him to be palpable and not only plastic, thus anticipating the expressive movement of which she was the mistress. As the poet Maksimilian Voloshin said, ‘Isadora Duncan dances everything that other people say, sing, write, play and draw.’37
There is a recollection (there is no way of knowing its accuracy) of Esenin’s meeting with Duncan:
‘You’re an Imaginist!’
She understood but, having raised ‘the blue spray’ of her eyes on him, said, puzzled:
‘Pa-chem-u?’ [Why?]
‘Because in your art the obraz [image] is the main thing.’
‘Was ist “obrass”?’ Isadora turned to me.
I translated.
Esenin began to laugh, then tried to explain to her in a variety of languages without a verb.
‘Image’, he said, making a sharp negative gesture with his arm, ‘is not Mariengof [the Imaginist poet]! Image is Isadora!’ He extended a finger to her side.38
It seems that no one has thought seriously about this anecdote, in which, in a way, there is much truth. Memoirs, biographies and histories of belles-lettres describe Duncan’s and Esenin’s relationship in the genre of a romance, not for the depth of contact in their art. Nevertheless, the meeting turned out to be fateful for both, artistically as well as personally. If, speaking in different languages, it was difficult for them to associate, Duncan and Esenin understood each other excellently as artists. Without judging the intimate side of their relationship, we shall think about the way they might have been interesting to each other as artists. Duncan already had experience of a creative partner, having worked with the artist and director Edward Gordon Craig (and it was through her that Craig, in tsarist times, received the invitation to do the scenography at a performance of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre (1911–12)). We want to show that there was a sharing of the movement sense between Duncan’s dance and Esenin’s lyric poetry. This modality of sensory awareness underlay different forms of the arts, and it made it possible for the two artists to share something artistically in common and to provide mutual support.
Esenin and Duncan lived almost all the time, in private as in public life, within a theatrical frame, often bordering on provocation and scandal. Indeed, it is thanks to Esenin that the word ‘scandalist’ became accepted into Russian. It is not surprising that, from the very beginning, the story of their meeting gave rise to myths. Thus, we read, with the words zolotaia golova (Golden Head), allegedly using the only Russian words she knew, Duncan seized hold of Esenin’s head, drew it to her and kissed him on the lips.39 Was this not the kiss impressed by Salome on the dead lips of John the Baptist? Fear of the woman-destroyer also sounds in stories about how Isadora performed ‘the apache dance’, fashionable at the time, with a scarf in place of a partner, and in the finale she threw the scarf on the floor and trampled on it. All the same, Duncan never performed the role of Salome in public.
Not all memoirists, however, gave way to myth. Varlam Shalamov, a writer and journalist, later famous as a recorder of the Gulag, came to Moscow in 1923, when Esenin and Isadora were still together; two years later he was present at the funeral after the suicide of the poet. Disputing the opinion of those who had seen in Duncan only a ‘rich woman’ seducing the ‘peasant poet’, he wrote that what she possessed ‘was wealth of the soul’. In Esenin’s
very short path to the summit of art, Isadora Duncan, an enthusiast, revolutionary member of the intelligentsia, who had come to serve the Soviet people, played a large and very positive role. (This is a claim opposed to the usual picture.) She introduced Esenin not to the circle of people in great art but to the circle of his ideas, his air.40
They met on 3 October 1921, on Esenin’s twenty-sixth birthday. By then, he had for some time borne the glory of renown as a rebellious poet. On that day he met a sister in spirit, a revolutionary in art, in the image of life, dress and love. Duncan had come without fear to Soviet Russia because she believed that the government would grant her ‘a free school and a free theatre’. Having come, she wrote, inspired: ‘Farewell Old World. Welcome New World!’41 Russia was not terra incognita for Duncan. In Russia she was held in such high regard that she was called ‘almost the only woman to whom … we attach … the epithet, genius’.42 She appeared the incarnation of Dionysian dance, and her dance was a real reform in art. Meyerhold called Duncan’s dance the leading example of the ennobling influence of movement.43 Esenin could not have failed to know what Duncan meant for his fellow-workers, and therefore, having heard she was in Moscow, he rushed to see her.
The first condition of creative contact is sensitivity to the interests and activities of the other person. In 1918, well before meeting Duncan, Esenin contributed to a film scenario, Zovushshie zori (The Call of the Dawn). In one episode, the events in the film were to take place in a temple for the proletariat with a large hall where workers exercised by doing rhythmic gymnastics. Another episode included workers’ festivities on green meadows by a lake, in which workers danced around the Statue of Liberty.44 For Esenin, dance was therefore part of the revolutionary scenery. He was ready to meet Duncan.
Isadora Duncan knew literature well and loved poetry – her mother read Shakespeare, Keats and Burns to the children. Duncan herself was not a bad producer of literature: while still a small girl, she ‘published’ a domestic newspaper, and she wrote articles, an autobiography, free verse and letters which were in love with rhythmic-sounding prose. To Elizabeth Styrskaya she showed ‘verses, written by her in English and translated into Russian, filled with the same inspiration as her speech’.45 But Duncan’s dance was more expressive than her words. As her contemporaries recognized, she possessed an exceptional capacity for pantomime, in its root sense. She was called ‘the tsarina of the gesture’.46 Preparing to show her dance, ‘The International’, in the Bol’shoi Theatre, she promised:
You will ‘see’ the word. See in my gesture – hand, shoulder, back and face – you will see the word. Gesture is dumb words! It is speaking silence. I want to read by gesture with my body all the lines of ‘The International’.47
Duncan herself recalled that she first sensed the force of inner gesture when she observed the performance of the great tragic actress, Eleonora Duse. In one of her spectacles, Duse stood unmoving, but she created in the viewer, Duncan recounted, the full impression that she grew and became an even more significant presence. After the performance, Duncan said to herself: ‘When I can come out on the stage and stand unmoving, as Eleonora Duse stood this evening, and in this way depict the colossal force of dynamic movement, then I will become the greatest female dancer in the world.’48 In this she was brilliantly successful. In ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, ‘the great mimetic actress [Duncan], almost not moving, had the ability with magic strength of gesture to summon up the impression of a whole crowd of warrior Amazons of Valhalla, striving forward’.49 The audience even saw what was not on the stage, ‘the double-headed eagle’ (the tsarist symbol) which, in her ‘Slavic March’, Duncan seized and threw down, or ‘the heavy shaft of a huge standard in the force of a strongly blowing wind’ to the music of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sixth Symphony’.50 The Imaginist Anatoly Mariengof (mentioned by Esenin in his first meeting with Duncan), who was absolutely not charmed by Duncan, all the same recognized her as a great actress:
It is apparent that ‘The Slavic March’, God-like and human-like, these sounds of great, mighty pride and terror, not only violins, cellos, flutes, kettledrums and drums can play, but also a woman’s torso, neck, head, hair, arms and legs. Even with suspicious little dimples alongside knees and elbows. The breasts which have become weighty, and the belly which has become fat, and the eyes with the fine lines of creases, and the dumb red mouth, and the crooked nose, as it were, which divides the round face, can play it. Yes, they can play splendidly, if they belong to a great actress.51
Contemporaries like Rudolf Laban believed that Duncan returned to contemporary men and women the feeling of the poetry of movement.52 Her dance was considered full of ‘lyricism’ and was compared with ‘verse forms or small poems, loaded with emotion and meaning’.53
What gave ‘lyricism’ to Duncan’s dance? (It must be remembered that the only surviving filmed sequence of her dance lasts less than a minute.) Possibly, first, there was its difference from classical dance, the refusal of balletic mimesis and pas or steps, and the rejection of the conventions of stage presentation. Deviating from the customary rules and norms, free dance approached verse, and with this created, in Baudelaire’s words, ‘the miracle of a poetic prose without rhyme, supple and rough enough to adapt itself to the lyric movement of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the sudden starts of consciousness’.54 Free verse has a special closeness to free dance. Compared to metrical verse, at this time free verse appeared ‘shaky’. The metre played a subordinate role, and yet rhythm carried the poetic form. According to Bely, ‘metre is a mechanism, but rhythm is the organism of poetry’.55 In contrast to a metric poem, with its single form, a poem with changing rhythm comes closer to music, and it may be thought of as proto-music. Bely proposed, in poetry, to get rid of ‘excessive extremes and fancy images, sounds and rhythms which are not coordinated around the singing soul-lyric, the melody’.56 Rhythm and intonation, endlessly changing, like dance, may better express the deep meaning of verse forms than words do with their lexical meaning.
Insofar as the freedom of the modernist artist lay in improvisation and individually spaced accentuations of rhythm, Duncan fully realized freedom in her dance. Before her, the canvas for dance was considered to be music, which presented formal parameters of tempi and metrical rhythm and which the movement of the dancer had to follow. Jaques-Dalcroze had created his rhythmics precisely according to this formula, as exercise to prepare for the exact reproduction of the tempi and rhythmic frame of musical works. Duncan, by contrast, considered rhythmics mechanical, rejected the blind following of tempi and rhythm, and never reduced her dance ‘to the level of musical illustration’.57 Her movement in no way recalled ‘dancing algebraic formulae’.58 Her dance was always passionate; improvising, she felt free to express her own emotions, within the mould of music, but nevertheless still with her personal feelings.
Duncan conducted herself in relation to Antiquity just as freely, though with tact. At a time when she had not had enough experience, she had wanted to present Aeschylus’s tragedy, The Supplicants, in Greece with a real chorus, which would have sung and danced. If one accepted, as she did, that poetry began from legs and arms beating out a rhythm, then it was possible to read poetry as if it were its own kind of dance or as instructions for creating sounds and gestures. To a degree, therefore, she had at first thought it possible to reconstruct the movements encoded in the poems of Homer or in ancient tragedies and comedies. Duncan had hired dozens of Greek boys for the chorus, and in order to find the music she had listened to Byzantine hymns and consulted with a Greek priest. She had tried to found the movements on what was conserved of vase and carved depictions. Soon enough, however, she had understood that the whole task was too difficult for her. From then on, she affirmed that she strove to communicate the spirit but not the letter of ancient dance.
Esenin, a lover of chastushki (two or four line rhymes of humorous verse sung to a simple tune) and Kamarinskaia (a folk dance), would at first glance seem to have been distant from the spirit of Antiquity that Duncan tried to revive in dance. Yet, as concerns rhythmic structure, the chastushka is nothing other than a hexameter. To create a glittering chastushka is as difficult as to write a good sonnet. Its rhythmical structure is complicated and refined; it contains ‘artfully combined long and short, and sometimes contracted lines, pauses of different intonation and structural length, and constant and inverted accentuations’.59 The art of the chastushka is the art of arranging emotional, meaning-forming accentuations with the help of intonation and gesture. In other words, a chastushka rhythm is not, finally, metrical, but dictated by expressive intonation, and this intonation can be connected with dancing movement. Esenin grasped this connection well, and not only in relation to chastushki, which he sang, accompanying himself on the accordion, and, possibly, dancing a little. His readings of his own verses were distinguished by artistry and expressiveness, and also accompanied with gesture.
There was a circle of discussion and mutual influence among ‘the Scythians’ (a name taken from the ancient inhabitants of the lands north of the Black Sea), a close-knit society of poets at the time. Their ideas can be found in Bely’s article, ‘Aaron’s Crosier’, Nikolai Klyuev’s verse cycle, ‘Earth and Iron’ and Esenin’s tract, The Keys of Maria. One of the themes discussed was the plasticity of the sounding word, visualized in ‘gesture’, ‘line’ and ‘ornament’. If Bely inclined towards theatrical metaphor (‘rhythmical’ or ‘gestural intonation’), then Klyuev inclined towards musical metaphor (‘song’, ‘line’) and Esenin towards plastic metaphor (‘ornament’), though their vocabularies overlapped. Bely wrote about ‘picturing the sounds of words in the ornament of a line’ and about ornament as ‘the flesh of our thoughts’.60 The phrase ‘ornament of bodily movements’ led him to recall Duncan’s dancing.
At the beginning of 1918, Esenin, at Bely’s invitation, attended meetings of the Anthroposophical Society, and in this way witnessed the activities of the Moscow eurythmic circle. Margarita Sabashnikova led the latter, and one day she performed the second chapter of St Luke’s Gospel:
Tall, slim, covered with a white, shining mantle, which was spread open by her movements, she turned into a white flame. Her arms, together with the chorus standing behind the eurythmicists sang vowels, and all her figure trembled and moved just like the flame of a hot candle. But this was not without order, a candle trembling by chance, hot in the wind. It was music, song, filled with higher Meaning. Her face, slightly lifted upwards, free from any emotion, reflected a face in prayer or meditation. And all the body was in full harmony with what was developing around its attire, around what clothed it, which moved together with it in a united sound of the great words: ‘Glory to God in the Highest and on earth, peace.’61
In this way, Esenin saw the flowing and streaming movements of the eurythmicists. Shortly thereafter, Bely called Esenin’s poetry ‘streaming, eurythmic words’.62 Esenin himself, with his friend Mariengof, wrote an Imaginist manifesto in which the friends proclaimed two paths for verbal art: ‘the attire of everything flowing in a cold, fine form’, and ‘eternal animation, that is, a turn to the transformation of fossilized into spirited flesh’.63
Esenin’s task, as his biographers put it, ‘was to lead the image, the word into movement’.64 The striving to give dynamic life to works of art and to find artistic means to represent this was, of course, not specific to Esenin. The Italian Futurists had been one of the earlier groups to set out this project, and it was the Russian Futurist, Vadim Shershenevich, in February 1914, in an article, ‘The Dotted Line of Futurism’, who wrote that the artist ‘wants to convey all the simultaneity of one moment’. Esenin, however, called Futurism ‘half-stupid’ because it did not understand the meaning of images, including images of movement. Along with ‘the Scythians’, in opposition to the Futurists, he believed in connecting with the life-giving myths of nature in the past and with the mystical meaning of the way ahead. It was not given to the Futurists, Esenin declared, to see that ‘the earth swims’, that ‘night is the time when whales go down for food to the sea depths’ and ‘the day is the time for the continuation of the journey by sea’.65
When Esenin discussed ‘the organic image’, he may have known Duncan’s ideas, formulated by her in the article-manifesto, ‘The Dance of the Future’, two Russian translations of which had come out between 1906 and 1908. Duncan wrote about her understanding of ‘the organic’ in dance:
If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and always will be the same.
The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement in the past and what will be its movement in the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature.…
Through this human medium, the movement of all nature runs also through us, is transmitted to us from the dancer.66
Free dance, from its birth, nourished the ideals and images of nature: growth, light and the wave. It shared the background for this in Goethe, Romanticism and Naturphilosophie (romantic philosophy of nature on idealist principles) with Steiner and Anthroposophy. The forms of the Goetheanum and the movements of eurythmics followed cosmic lines and, by this means, like free dance, were intended to bring elevated spiritual mediation.
In thoughts about the organic image, Esenin and Duncan were thus on one side, in opposition to the Futurists on the other. The Futurists almost refused to depict the naked body, because it was Nature, and instead they hymned the geometrical and mechanical wonder of the machine. In the ‘Futurist Manifesto of Dance’, Marinetti looked down on Duncan for ‘feelings of desperate nostalgia, of spasmodic sensuality and cheerfulness, childishly feminine’.67 Duncan’s followers were criticized for sentimentality, called ‘milk-blooded Hellenes’, and their ‘wave-image movements’ were considered ‘amorphous’ and ‘sugary’.68 When ‘machine dances’ became popular in the 1920s, circus eccentricity – ‘aggressive movement, gymnastic step, dangerous spring, slap in the face and box on the ears’ – took the place of ‘the thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and dreams’ of the Duncanists.69 The new choreography, modelled on machine production, discredited the dance of bare-footed women as women’s protest against mechanistic civilization. Dance borrowed movements from the city, the factory and the machine. Duncan ignored the criticism, but Esenin, following Klyuev and Bely, responded and, to repeat, called Futurism ‘sub-stupid’. He answered the Futurists and proletarian poets with lyric images taken from peasant culture, opposing ‘the red-maned colt’ to the steam engine.70
Both sides of the argument, we would note, nevertheless took movement to be at the base of what they articulated in aesthetic terms. It is not that one side of the argument was modernist and the other not, though, clearly, Futurism was modern in a way that Duncan dance was not, given that the latter looked back to Antiquity and to Romanticism. Each side broke with predecessors, in their respective mediums, for not recognizing the dynamism that would give life to the modern age. An interpretation of modernism in kinaesthetic terms has place for both.
One day, Duncan and Esenin together conceived of a performance in the manner of an ancient tragedy. She was to dance, he to present a Greek chorus. Duncan
outlined it with passion, explaining to Esenin the role of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre. With a bold line, drawn around the amphitheatre, she enclosed the orchestra and, having placed in the centre of it her black circle, wrote under it ‘Poet’. Then she quickly drew from the point many spreading rays, in the direction of the audience.71
Duncan, in love, schemed for Esenin to go with her to Petrograd. In fact, the project for a joint performance remained unrealized. Yet, even after his separation from Duncan, Esenin, reflecting on all the nine muses, called only one by name – the muse of dance, Terpsichore.72 In the union of these two artists, poetry and dance, the word and plastic art, achieved a special closeness, a closeness so intimate that it was possible to think of one muse as the common inspiration. She was the voice of movement.
Esenin and the Russian Futurists swapped insults, yet they shared a fascination with movement in artistic expression, if in different ways. To the Futurists, or the budetliane (literally, those of the future), as we shall now call them, as they are sometimes called in Russian, to distinguish them from the Italians, the underlying difference was an appreciation of the plasticity of the word – the mobility of sound, the capacity to shape speech and language on the page. Mallarmé, in his poetry, had great influence with his experiments with typefaces, the distribution of the words on the page and the look of facing pages. In Russia, there were subsequently many examples of the visualization of verse. Vladimir Khlebnikov’s poem, ‘Razin’, which has the drawings of Petr Miturich added to the right side of the page like a mirrored reflection of the strophe of the poem, is a well-known example. The poem, a palindrome (which can be read backwards as well as forwards), is designed to be followed visually. The text and drawing in ‘Razin’ are not simply combined with each other but form a new whole, a structure or gestalt. Similarly, when Aleksei Kruchenykh showed Khlebnikov the sketches of his poem, ‘A Game in Hell’, the latter suddenly ‘sat down and began to add, above, below and around, his own lines to mine’, composing a palindrome.73
Such techniques of visualization change the reader’s relation with a text as a self-sufficient object into something that demands completion of the construction.74 The visual additions to the verse create a new whole, which oversteps the text. This new wholeness, in addition to being visual, may be aural, through the uttering or singing of verse, or kinaesthetic, through dancing or gestural performance. Further, the enlargement of the text may involve all these things at once, bringing into existence something similar to the Wagnerian synthesis of art or to ‘the synthetic theatre’ of the Russian budetliane.
Yet historians of the arts have not written about the novelty that the budetliane brought into art in terms of theatricality, performativity and revision of the borders of production. In the previous chapter there was discussion of the belief that ancient theatre had achieved a syncretic unity, conserved, some people maintained, in folklore and the dance culture of the people. This would seem to have put the scholars of Antiquity who made this claim, like Ivanov, Innokenty Annensky and Zelinsky, at the opposite pole of culture to the Futurists. But in fact it was not like this. The budetliane actively took part in discussions about Antiquity; for example, the avant-gardist Khlebnikov frequented Ivanov’s ‘Academy of Verse’, where Annensky and Zelinsky gave lectures. This ‘Academy of Verse’ was a group of young poets and writers which began to gather at Ivanov’s home in Petersburg in May 1909, to discuss questions of form, to take part in ‘theoretical and practical researches on metre’, and so on.75 For their part, the budetliane took a lively interest in ideas about the Dionysian cult, the dance-chorea and the syncretic character of the word. Two decades later, the classicist O. M. Freidenberg, in her doctoral dissertation, covertly cited the poets (when it was hardly possible to do so openly), referring to ‘splashing’, the sound-act, as poets understood it, at the basis of words: ‘The most ancient Zeus in Didona prophesies on the rustling of the leaves of the oak, on the splashing of water … Every verbal utterance is sung or recited. Bodily movement and mimicry are turned into the kinaesthetic part of a rite; dancing and pantomime exist alongside.’ The meaning ‘of the small formulations, which are sung and danced’, Freidenberg wrote, ‘is not their factual content, but the semantics of their pronunciation, their existence in themselves, as the factual content only repeats the act of the word as such’.76
Freidenberg used the very phrase with which Kruchenykh, in ‘The Declaration of the Word as Such’, announcing the poetic freedom of the word from meaning, called on ‘singing, splashing, dancing, the throwing out of awkward constructions, oblivion, the learning of a part’. This declaration led to the formation of a group of poets who took part in the discussions and adopted the name zaumniki (literally, ‘those who are unintelligible’ or produce ‘nonsense’), implying that they set out to free the word from meaning, so that the word could act independently (‘splashing’ and so forth). The practice of zaum’ (nonsense) was thus close to giving the word a syncretic life: ‘Zaum’ is the original form (historically and individually) of poetry. At first, there is the rhythmical-musical wave, the proto-sound.’77 This sought meaning in the audible and kinaesthetic sensory world rather than in conventional semantic discourse. Both the scholars of Antiquity and the budetliane made the semantics of the word dependent on its sound, on its aural, acoustic and moving, kinaesthetic character, on singing, splashing and dancing.
The Futurists generally freed the word from its former logical, grammatical and syntactic ties with the help of discussions of this ancient context. Marinetti’s parole in libertà (utterance in freedom) and Kamensky’s ‘free-word poems’ recalled the actual quality of performance. Kamensky, for instance, criticized the Symbolist manner of reading as ‘monotonous’, ‘with some kind of mystical-rhythmic soughing at the ends of the lines’. He characterized his own declamation with kinaesthetic metaphors: ‘we, shrill guys, read, that is, press the words, absolutely differently, like weight-lifters.’78 Kamensky’s ‘ferro-concrete poems’, which N. I. Khardzhiev considered analogous to Apollinaire’s ‘simultaneous verses’ and the Italian Futurists’ free-word poems, were not to be read but to be performed, and the performance was to include movement. Reinforced-concrete building material had appeared not long before, and it was associated not with harshness and brutality but, on the contrary, with flexibility and plasticity. At first, people looked on concrete as a material close to wood, on account of its plasticity: cement was poured into a wooden mould and afterwards retained the impression of this structure. Indeed, for these reasons the second Goetheanum, after the first, wooden construction burned down, the cathedral of Steiner’s ‘organic’ project, was made from reinforced concrete. It may be that Kamensky called his poems ‘ferro-concrete’ because they were well-structured, or because they were made from a kind of carcass filled with the plastic ‘cement’ of poetic content.
FIGURE 6 Vasily Kamensky. Tango with Cows. Ferro-concrete Poems, 1914.
The textual record of the poetry of the budetliane is of idiosyncratic instructions or scenarios for performance. Il’ya Zdanevich, for example, proposed to write an ‘orchestrated poem’ and verse partitas, and he tried to record his own declamation on the phonograph.79 ‘The words in freedom’ approached articulated-sung-danced words – incantations and rituals.
FIGURE 7 ‘An Embarrassing Situation.’ Amongst bare-footed dancers there is a new trend to illustrate poetry with dances.
The Futurist (recites):
Te ge ne
riu ri
le liu
be
The dancer: O Lord! What gestures can illustrate this poem!
In spite of the fact that the macho Marinetti considered Duncan’s dances sentimental, he loved the society of bare-footed performers. It was similar with the poets in Russia. The actress Alisa Koonen, playing in the Kamerny (or Chamber) Theatre in Moscow inspired Kamensky to write the poem ‘The Bare-footed Girl’:
Oh, poetic possibilities –
Like the Northern Lights –
Which crown
The nights of my loneliness.
All the girls bare-footed –
All in the world –
All my loved brides.
Kamensky not only imagined how ‘on their toes they sing while drinking / singers bare-footed’, but he invited the dancers to appear at the evenings he orchestrated with the actresses Sofia Mel’nikova, Ol’ga Glebova and Vera de Bosset.80 When, for the first anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow, he staged his Sten’ka Razin, for the role of Princess Meiran, at Kamensky’s demand, Alisa Koonen was not just ‘invited’ but, given the Civil War conditions, ‘mobilized’.
In 1917, Kamensky, ‘the pilot-aviator of flesh and soul’, set out on tour around Russia in the company of two like-minded people.81 One Ekaterinburg newspaper reported: ‘already for several days strange people, who shock with their external appearance, have been walking on the streets of our town. Without caps, lightly, sometimes unusually and oddly clothed, they do not incline towards the usual stereotype set up for everyone.’82 This trio was ‘the king of the Futurists’ Kamensky, ‘the Russian yogi’ Vladimir Goldschmidt and ‘an ash-haired girl in an original costume, with black patterns on her matt forehead’, a ‘bare-footed female Futurist’. Kamensky declaimed his ‘ferro-concrete poems’, the yogi talked about ‘the sunny joys of the body’, demonstrated asana yoga and broke wooden name-plates over his gilded head, and the bare-footed girl, Elena Buchinskaya, performed ‘word-plastic dances’ to the verses of Kamensky and other contemporary poets.83
Apparently, the idea of poetic-plastic performance originated earlier with the budetliane. When Duncan came to Russia at the beginning of 1913, the rumour went around that she would dance the Futurists’ verses. Duncan in fact did not do this, but Buchinskaya did. She came out on the stage bare-footed, with a free, long chiton or eastern garb, with her arms exposed to the shoulders. She read, standing on her knees, accompanying the reading with flexible movements of her arms. Buchinskaya later repeated her performance in the ‘Café of Poets’ in Moscow. A witness recalled: ‘Here is the garlanded muse, and, between the ferro-concrete poems and an address about spiritual loneliness, a theatrically-dressed woman draws in the air the letters of an Assyrian choreography.’84 A regular frequenter of the ‘Café of Poets’, N. N. Zakharov-Menskii described ‘word-plasticity’ as a special genre:
As Elena Buchinskaya performed with word-plasticity, so there was the same plasticity with reading the verses of the Futurists and the humorist Teffi. Especially memorable was Buchinskaya’s realization of Vasily Kamensky’s ‘Swan’; we listened to this piece with bated breath, as the actress carried out the piece with so much feeling, with so much mysterious and touching, with movements which recalled the realization of Saint-Saens’ ‘Dying Swan’.85
Kamensky also had his own rich experience of performance: as is well known, he appeared in the circus arena and tried out in the troupe of the director Meyerhold. One day, Kamensky came to an exhibition in Mikhailova’s Petrograd salon with two mouse-traps on a rope, containing live mice, thrown over his shoulder. He ‘sang a chastushka, spoke humorous catch-phrases and accompanied himself with beats of a ladle on a pan … [People] started up from him in horror, but he triumphantly went around the hall.’ This was his ‘moving exhibition’, and Kamensky actually presented himself as ‘an exponent of synthesis’.86 Thus he was well able to appreciate Buchinskaya’s word-plasticity, and, possibly, he borrowed something for his own public appearances from her. ‘You perform, clearly with talent, the word-plasticity of my verses’, he wrote in dedication.87 His fellow avant-garde poet, Vladimir Goldschmidt similarly dedicated poetry with a title full of meaning to Buchinskaya, ‘Funerals of My Love’, with the inscription: ‘I give into the possession of the most talented girl in the world, ELENA BUCHINSKAYA.’88
These poets also took an interest in pre-First World War film, in which Buchinskaya acted. S. D. Spassky recalled how at the shooting of the film, Not for Money Born, walking in early spring, Buchinskaya threw off her shoes and ran on the warm thawed patches of ground.89 In her role, she had to dance on a table-cloth: in order not to break from the rhythm, she read Kamensky’s verses. When the public in the ‘Café of Poets’ had dispersed and only her friends remained, she sometimes danced naked. Later, she joined the emigration, and in the 1920s and 1930s, Helena Buczyńska (as her name was spelled in Polish) appeared in Warsaw cabaret, showed talent as a comic actress, played many parts in the theatre and cinema, and wrote plays.
In 1919, by which time neither the ‘Café of Poets’ nor Buchinskaya remained in Moscow, a new group of poets and artists, the Imaginists, contemptuously christened the budetliane ‘bare-footed artists’ (with the implication that they were ‘simple’). By an irony of fate, the first of the Imaginists, Sergei Esenin, a couple of years later met with the first of the bare-footed, Isadora Duncan. Kazimir Malevich forewarned his fellow artists in vain ‘to be careful with the grape juice: you know that for Dionysus it gives life, but for you, death’.90 The juice of Dionysus, full of the spirit of plyaska, embodied in the movement of the bare-footed women, continued to nurse the poets. The Dionysians from Ivanov’s ‘Tower’, the Futurists, and the Imaginists all saw in plyaska a pledge that a person could become free.
At one time, Russian Futurism appeared to the historian V. F. Markov to be ‘an imperfect and disorganized manifestation of a clear aesthetic idea, that of poetry growing directly from language’.91 He disdainfully called Kamensky ‘a showman’, introducing a contrast and creating a conflict between the ‘serious’ linguistic experimentation of the budetliane and the playful, ‘unserious’ side of their poetry. We have looked again at this history. It is necessary, at long last, to value the role of free dance and of the creative union of the poets and the bare-footed performers. It was definitely not by chance that, on the path that we know culminated in the modernist focus on ‘the word as such’, the Futurists opened their poetry to singing, splashing and dancing. The poet and painter Elena Guro wrote, shortly before she died young in 1913: ‘To all the poets, creators of future signs: walk barefoot while the earth is summery. Our feet are innocent and simple-hearted, inexperienced and admiring.… The earth talks to bare feet.’92