The meat and the skeleton, or In the revolutionary dead-end. On Ilya Selvinsky’s Constructivist experiment

Abstract

The study of critic and literary scholar K. Shakaryan is concerned with I. Selvinsky’s works created during his experimentation with Constructivism, an artistic movement he essentially co-founded and headlined. The scholar offers a radically new interpretation of Selvinsky’s Constructivist oeuvre (notably, his novel in verse Fur Trade [Pushtorg] (1927) and tragedy Komandarm-2 (1928)), considering them components of the same experiment. This lyric experiment, argues Shakaryan, is constituted by Selvinsky’s attempts to create works on a momentous scale that are defined by a perfect balance between the big truth of the day and the small truth of an individual. Interestingly, Selvinsky was more preoccupied with the latter, in a way hardly expected from a champion of revolution. Possessing a unique standing in the literature of his day, as well as artistic insight and personal integrity, Selvinsky was able to foretell, as early as in the 1920s, many of the woes that were to befall his country and its people in the subsequent decades.