“A disappointed lorgnette”, American shoes, posters: strategies of interpreting the futurists’ speech acts

The paper focuses on the poetic activities of the Cubo-Futurist circle (comprising D. Burliuk, A. Kruchennykh, partly I. Zdanevich, although the latter had never been explicitly associated with the Cubo-Futurists). More precisely, the paper zeroes in on author-reader communication and the communicative models informing social and aesthetic experience. The author analyzes a particular communicative mode (“a literary scandal”), its specifics and pragmatic functions. A literary scandal is seen as a primarily participatory phenomenon contingent upon the existence of a mass public (according to M. Warner’s conception of public). The ultimate pragmatic goal of a literary scandal as a mode of communication is not only shocking the audience out of their complacency but also enticing the audience to take part in a performance. Two audience responses become prominent in that regard, and two profiles of reception could be singled out, respectively: a critic, “a newspaper reporter”, on the one hand, and an “ally”, on the other. The first type prefers to frame a speech act in a fixed, stable context whereas the second type gravitates towards putting a speech act into several context and observing the meaning change. The first recipient aims to highlight the violation of the norms in a speech act (even though the violation in question has to be exaggerated), draw the public attention to the violation and thus spread the news of a scandalous event. In doing so, the critic-recipient would advertise the performance to a broader public and broadcast it to the masses. The second recipient is more open to changes of meaning that happen when a speech act migrates from one context to another and perceives such shifts of meaning as a play they could share with the author. The conceptual model outlined above is projected onto the phenomenon of Futurist book demonstrating that there are two readers (a page-skimmer and a co-author) and two conflicting orientations: broadcasting the new aesthetics and enabling the reader to become one of the selected few, the one who completes the meaning of the text.