A stream. A bridge. Plus artillery. Plus infantry. Plus trenches. Plus cadavers. Dzang-bah-bakh. Cannon. Kha-kh-kha. Mitrailleuse. Tr-r-r. Sh-sh-sh-sh. S-s-s-s-s-s. Bullets. Chill. Blood. Smoke.

To complete the character of Marinetti I shall quote his article in The London Daily Mail in which he states his “profound disgust for the contemporary stage because it stupidly fluctuates between historic reconstruction (pasticcio or plagiarism) and a minute, wearying, photographic reproduction of actuality.”

His ideal is the smoking concert, circus, cabaret, and night-club as “the only theatrical entertainment worthy of the true Futurist spirit.” “The variety theater is the only kind of theater where the public does not remain static and stupidly passive, but participates noisily in action.” The variety show “brutally strips woman of all her veils, of the romantic phrases, sighs, and sobs which mark and deform her. On the other hand, it shows up all the most admirable animal qualities of woman, her powers of attack and of seduction, of treachery, and of resistance.”

The variety theater is, of course, antiacademical, primitive, and ingenuous, and therefore all the more significant by reason of the unforeseen nature of all its fumbling efforts.... The variety theater destroys all that is solemn, sacred, earnest, and pure in Art—with a big A. It collaborates with Futurism in the destruction of the immortal masterpieces by plagiarizing them, parodying them, and by retailing them without style, apparatus, or pity.

At this point I am ready to agree with the Russian critic, A. Lunacharsky, who thus defines Marinetti:

He combines in his personality the exoticism of an East-African with the cynical blaguerie of a Parisian and the clownishness of a Neapolitan.

In connection with the foregoing it is curious to observe the pranks of Marinetti’s colleagues in the land of eternal contradictions—Russia. The Russian Futurists, Ego-futurists, and Acmeists, vie with the Italians in noisiness and eccentricity, and they have aroused an extensive pro and con polemic. In the last issue of Russkaja Mysl there is an interesting criticism of the Futurist poetry written by Valery Brusov. This foremost poet, known on the continent as the Russian Verhaeren, began his literary career some fifteen years ago with the one-line “poem”: “Oh, conceal thy pallid legs.” This extremist is now ranked by the Futurists among the reactionaries. Brusov is not hostile to Futurism, although he opposes the contemporary bearers of its banner. In a dialogue supposedly carried on between a Symbolist and a Futurist Brusov makes the latter say:

Tell me, what is poetry? The art of words, is it not? In what else does it differ from music, from painting? The poet is the artist of words: they are for him what colors are for the painter or marble for your sculptors. We have determined to be artists of words, and only of words, which means to fulfill the true vocation of the poet. You, what have you done with the word? You have transformed it into a slave, into a hireling, to serve your so-called ideas! You have debased the word to a subservient rôle. All of you, the realists as well as the symbolists, have used words just as the “Academicians” have used colors. Those understood not that the essence of painting is in the combination of colors and lines, and they have strived to express through colors and lines some meager ideas absolutely useless for commonly known. You likewise have not understood that the essence of poetry lies in the combination of words, and you have mutilated them by forcing them to express your thoughts borrowed from the philosophers. The futurists are the first to proclaim the true poetry, the free, the real freedom of words.

And so, since words have become enslaved and carry, unfortunately, within them the ballast of established notions and conceptions, the Futurists experiment in liberating the words of their accepted meanings by creating new words, weird combinations of syllables, skilful arrangements of sounds which defy translation. For the benefit of that part of mankind which does not understand Russian the Futurists invented a “universal tongue” which consists exclusively of single vowels. Here is a specimen under the title Heights. I give the original letters and their English transliteration.

е у ю—yeh oo you
и а о—ee ah oh
о а—oh ah
о а е е и е я—oh ah yeh yeh ee yeh yah
о а—oh ah
е у и е у—yeh oo ee yeh oo
и е е—ee yeh yeh
и и ы и е и и ы—ee ee ēh ee yeh ee ee ēh