Elena Guro’s “Sound Poetry”: On the Road to Futuristic Pastiches

Abstract

In light of the main trends in the development of modern cultural studies and Russian literary studies, this work examines the specific principles and techniques used to create works of art (in the fields of painting and poetry) by the first Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, as well as the artistic originality of the poetic style of its individual representatives. The subject of analysis is the so-called pre-futurist period of the work of the poet and artist Elena Guro (1877–1913), whose poetic texts are notable for their obvious novelty and distinctive features, but also demonstrate a close relationship to the avant-garde search for new forms of verbal art, which was reflected in Russian Futurism, particularly in the use of zaum’, sonority, and phonetic imitation. The example of E. Guro’s so-called “sound poems” shows that the poetess skillfully indulged in naive childish wordplay, being able to convey the mood of a warm, lazy afternoon through light sound writing (the poem “Laziness”), and was able to hear and imitate foreign speech, particularly Finnish (the poem “Finland”), and use onomatopoeia to create an exotic sketch-painting (the poem “Vasily Kamensky”), while also humorously recounting the love stories of her close friends. In comparison with the poetry of other futurists, it is demonstrated that Guro was not as radical as A. Kruchenykh or V. Khlebnikov, but her poetry, which was not fully developed due to tragic circumstances, was part of the avant-garde search of the early 20th century and the linguistic experiments that opened up new possibilities for poetry.