Voiceless Vanguard

Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde offers a new approach to the Russian avant-garde. It argues that central writers artists and theorists of the avant-garde self-consciously used an infantile aesthetic as inspired by children's art language perspective and logic to accomplish the artistic renewal they were seeking in literature theory and art. It treats the influence of children's drawings on the Neo-Primitivist art of Mikhail Larionov the role of children's language in the Cubo- Futurist poetics of Aleksei Kruchenykh the role of the naive perspective in the Formalist theory of Viktor Shklovsky and the place of children's logic and lore in Daniil Kharms's absurdist writings for children and adults. This interdisciplinary and cultural study not only illuminates a rich period in Russian culture but also offers implications for modernism in a wider Western context where similar principles apply.