Vasily Kamensky

The poet Vasily Kamensky (1884-1961) was one of the founders of the movement that became Russian Futurism, an editor of the 1910 avant-garde miscellany Sadok Sudey, and the first person to publish Velimir Khlebnikov. In 1911 he also became the first ever poet-aviator, but a 1912 crash during a show flight in Poland returned him wholly to literature. In the winter of 1913-14 Kamensky participated, with Vladimir Mayakovsky and David Burliuk, in the Cubofuturist tour of the Russian Empire. That same winter he composed the typographic visual poems collected in Tango with Cows—earlier and more complex pieces than parallel efforts by Italian Futurists and Guillaume Apollinaire. Hand-drawn versions of his poems appeared in exhibits with Larionov, Goncharova, and other avant-garde painters. Living as an itinerant writer and lecturer during World War I, Kamensky—like many Russian Futurists—quickly sided with the Bolshevik Revolution, and in the twenties sought to construct a stable place for himself under the new regime. A prolific poet with a talent for lexical innovation and a wonderful ear for rhythm, he wrote poems, plays and a novel about the seventeenth-century Cossack ataman Stenka Razin, as well as proletarian-style poems praising Industrialization. An advocate of the theatricalization of everyday life, he wrote and even performed in the circus, was liked by Lenin (who generally hated Futurism), and authored autobiographies and memoirs about Mayakovsky after the poet’s suicide in 1930. Fêted in 1933 by the Stalinist literary establishment for 25 years of literary service, Kamensky was plagued by heavy illness and even paralysis during the last 25 years of his life.