The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde by Sirotkina Irina Smith Roger

Author:Sirotkina, Irina,Smith, Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350014336
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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