Skul’ptpovest’: a story of early twentieth century Russian poetry-sculpture correspondence

From Pushkin to Khlebnikov and Troubetzkoy to Tatlin, as far as this essay is concerned, poets have sculpted language and sculptors have poeticised the plastic arts. That (and how) they should do so using sculpture and poetry, as well as sculptors and poets, as their subjects is our subject. A line is drawn, and dimensions conceived, from Pushkin’s anticipation of Impressionist, Symbolist and Futurist sculptural-poetic form. A particular pedestal is given to the criticism of Nikolay Vrangel and Maksimilian Voloshin: their readings of Vrubel’s, de Charmoy’s and Golubkina’s existential poetic sculpture was without precedence. Around this pedestal is an assemblage of fragments of Russian poetry-sculpture correspondence, a skul’ptpovest’, whose syncretism indicates the embedded, transcendental nature of the relationship of the literary and material art forms.