Boris Asaf'ev and the Soviet Musicology - E-thesis

them to some degree in 1918–1919, he was forced to withdraw his support from their
radical demands for his policy attempted to integrate all cultural groups. Futurist poet
Vladimir Majakovskij’s (1893–1930) charismatic personality who attracted the public
had a crucial part in keeping the Futurist group alive. However, they had to make
enormous concessions in order to survive in the Soviet Communist atmosphere. This
meant co-option of Puškin, the placement of individual with the society and a transition
from theory to practice. Lawton writes that “[t]he absurdity of the dream of a Soviet
avant-garde encompassing Communist ideology and Futurist aesthetics finally became
clear to the last of the Futurists.” Majakovskij committed a suicide in 1930 as a member
of RAPP 31 , the conservative and dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. 32
Timo Suni has stated that Formalists appeared soon after the fraction of Symbolists.
This new literary research trend held poetry as an independent and valuable for its own
sake, without dependence of the laws of natural sciences and social values. Following
the “avant-garde” they considered poetry as an independent language, which in its
clearest appearance carries out only a poetic task. 33 Formalism had a profound influence
on literary criticism and semiotics in its emphasis on the structural features of the text
itself and its insistence that liteary study be scientific and autonomous. Formalist studies
fruitfully united different areas or science: literary reseach, language science, folklore,
ethnography, modern literature etc. They questioned the traditional means of the
literature research and applied generally approved scientific methods that answered the
special requirements of the object. Formalists possessed an avant-gardist attitude and
they got their first impulses from Futurists and especially theoretical propositions and
poetic practice of the Cubo-Futurists whose poetry became an important case study for
the Formalist scholars. Their other important sources were Symbolist poetics and
sturucturalist philology. Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) doctrines reached Russia
already in 1910. 34
31
All the most important abbreviations are forund from “Abbreviations” on p. 116.
32
Ibid., pp. 40–48.
33
Suni 2001, p. 9.
34
Eagle 1988, p. 281; Suni 2001, pp. 13–15.
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