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Speakers): Professor Jean-Philippe Jaccard

The written and pictorial works by Italian and Russian futurists reveal many similarities: indeed, parole in libertà by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti offer several analogies, in both phonics and graphics, with the “transrational” poetics of Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov (zaum’.) Even paintings representing the two futurisms carry striking resemblances in content (urbanism, speed, etc.) and aesthetics (post-cubism, pre-constructivism, etc.). However, there is a point where these two movements radically differ, specifically in their attitude towards World War I, which took place shortly after the introduction of futurism.
At first glance, there are inevitable parallels between the Italians and the Russians, since the War found its place in almost all of the Modernist projects of the time. Evident analogies can be found in the fascination with mechanized armaments, the cacophony of bombings, the speed of airplanes and their capacity to be liberated from gravitational force. Such liberation appears to be a grand project of the Avant-garde in general. Yet if we are to consider the “ideological” premises of these works in more depth, we would discover an incredible gap between the aggressive militarism of the Italians, especially Marinetti, and the unconditional anti-militarism of the Russian futurists, to whom the War appears of interest only as long as it represents a metaphor, rather than surrounding reality.
Even if different political circumstances in these countries can explain certain aspects of this opposition—Italy fighting for its liberation in relation to the Austrian Empire, for example—this radically differing perception of the War merits further consideration, especially given the urge to understand what compelled the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev to write in 1917: “We, the Russians, are the lesser of the futurists in this war.”
 
Jean-Philippe Jaccard is a Full Professor of Russian Literature and the Chair of Russian Studies at the University of Geneva (since 2001,) where he obtained his PhD (Daniil Kharms and the End of the Russian Avant-Garde, Bern, Peter Lang, 1991, in French; 1995 in Russian.) He has published and edited several books in French and Russian, and authored numerous articles based on the subject of European Modernism and, in particular, the Russian Avant-Garde. In his monograph Literature as Such: From Nabokov to Pushkin (Moscow, NLO, 2011,) he suggested re-reading Russian literary classics with insights gained from the studies of Modernism. His other works embrace the Soviet underground, the so-called “Second Culture.” He was one of the editors of the groundbreaking collection, The “Second Culture”: The Non-Official Poetry of Leningrad During the 1970s and 1980s (Saint Petersburg, Rostok, 2013). His most recent publications include: “Time Experienced” and “Time Constructed” in Russian and French Literature of the 20th Century (Ed.) (Paris, Kimé, 2013); 1913: “The Word as Such”: The Centennial of Russian Futurism (Ed.) (Saint Petersburg, European University, 2015); and Kandinsky, Malevich, Filonov and Philosophy: Systems of Abstraction in the Russian Avant-Garde (Ed.) (forthcoming). He is also a translator of the works of Daniil Kharms (1993) and Nikolay Erdman (The Mandate, 1998).