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Title of Article

ZAUM AS TELEOLOGY: TUFANOV AND VYGOTSKY


Issue
3
Date
2022

Section
RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

Article type
scientific article
UDC
82
Pages
35-49
Keywords
русский авангард, заумь, популярная лингвистика, история идей, Туфанов, Выготский, Russian avant-garde, zaum, popular linguistics, history of ideas, Tufanov, Vygotsky


Authors
Markov Aleksandr Viktorovich
Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennyy gumanitarnyy universitet


Abstract
The article identifies the sources of one of the most extraordinary treatises of the Russian avant-garde A. V. Tufanov’s book Towards Zaum which are not indicated in the footnotes of the book, but comprise Tufanov’s undoubted reading circle. The identification of these sources is evidenced by the contexts of hidden quotations, which make the concept of the book clearer by qualifying it as an archaeology of semiotics. The underlying assumption is that after a series of striking performances by the avant-garde a demand for teleology emerged which was to strengthen the social position of the avant-garde. It found its most consistent form in Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art, where the social character of art was explained by its own teleological dimension of material, gesture and form. Tufanov does not produce a consistent doctrine of the social character of art, but depicts the primitive invention of art as a similar combination of material, gesture and form. Numerous parallels are drawn to this scheme with other intellectual projects from Scriabin to Eisenstein. These parallels have made it possible to establish the hidden sources of Tufanov's thought such as the constructions of Wundt and Potebnya in particular to explain the meaning of Tufanov's discourse on the image of the mouse. Common sources of Vygotsky’s and Tufanov's inspiration in the avant-garde theater Isadora Duncan's plastic dance and Expressionism's critique of symbolist versions of semiotics are also pointed out. In addition, the social framework of such thought is examined such as the understanding of the unconscious as a kind of awe and uncontrollable affect in psychoanalysis and its critique by Vygotsky the deficits of the epoch of military communism and the democratic aspects of the eccentric linguistic project of Nikolai Marr. The possible origins of Bakhtin's notion of speech genre are also established in a specific reading of avant-garde performance through the notion of contradictions and folds in the activities of primitive man. The conclusions allow us to clarify the role of teleology in the formation of the activity approach in psychology and of semiotics in literary studies

File (in Russian)