Aleksandar Bošković: Constructivist Ideological Converter: Serguei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis’ photomontages for Maiakovskii’s poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1925)

On The May 11, 2020

Video-conference seminar

The revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii set out to write a commemorative poem after Lenin’s death, completing it almost a year later. His poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was published by Leningrad’s State Publishing House (Gosizdat) as a separate edition in February 1925, featuring no illustrations. It remains a question of what kind of cinépoetry book it would be had it been accompanied by a series of photomontages that the two constructivist graphic artists, Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis, created soon after, inspired by Maikovskii’s verses. The talk represents a quest for the cinépoetry book’s spectral materiality.

In an aim to capture the ciné-poem’s revolutionary imaginary, the talk offers a speculative theory about the possible effects such a ciné-dispositive—as a visionary, visual agit-technology—would have produced. Based on a dialogue between Maiakovskii’s verses and Senkin and Klutsis’s accompanying poster-like photomontages, Bošković argues that it would be reductionist to read the agit-cinépoetry book as a celebration of Lenin’s personality cult. Instead, he proposes that we should apprehend the work as a Soviet ideological converter: an agit-ciné-dispositive, producing a vertigo effect both verbally and visually, inculcating an experience of excitement and joy in the prosumer, inciting their ideologic conversion through active engagement in participatory and revolutionary culture.

Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University.

Photo caption:
Serguei Senkin. “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” Illustration for V. Maiakovskii’s poem. 1920s. Carboard, paper, cut-outs from magazines, collage, gouache. 45,5 x 33cm.
Courtesy of The State Museum of V.V. Maiakovskii, Moscow.