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Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language
Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language brings together the first English translation of the Russian Formalist and Futurist writings on Lenin’s revolutionary language. The book includes the Russian Formalists’ (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, Lev Yakubinsky, and Boris Kazansky) most ‘political’ texts, first published in 1924 in the journal of the Left Front of the Arts (edited by Mayakovsky). Together with this collection, the publication also includes Futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh’s Devices of Lenin’s Speech, from 1925. Indispensable for any serious research dealing with the relationship between revolutionary politics and artistic forms, these writings had remained a marginal note, both in studies on avant-garde art, and in much literature on Formalist theory.
The publication is edited by Sezgin Boynik, who wrote an extensive introduction to the translations by contextualising the experiments of the Russian avant-garde through theories of conjuncture, or more precisely, the theory of contemporaneity within the revolutionary moment. Darko Suvin in his afterword discusses the actuality (and limits) of Lenin and Formalists in the shadow of never-ending warfare.
With this book, Rab-Rab Press is proud to present the first English translation of the most interesting project of political Formalism and avant-garde theory in the twentieth century.
Translated by Thomas Campbell and Mikko Viljanen, the book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
The publication is edited by Sezgin Boynik, who wrote an extensive introduction to the translations by contextualising the experiments of the Russian avant-garde through theories of conjuncture, or more precisely, the theory of contemporaneity within the revolutionary moment. Darko Suvin in his afterword discusses the actuality (and limits) of Lenin and Formalists in the shadow of never-ending warfare.
With this book, Rab-Rab Press is proud to present the first English translation of the most interesting project of political Formalism and avant-garde theory in the twentieth century.
Translated by Thomas Campbell and Mikko Viljanen, the book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
367 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2018
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About the author
Boris Eikhenbaum
21 books4 followersBoris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (Борис Михайлович Эйхенбаум) was a Russian literary scholar.
May also be found as:
Борис Эйхенбаум
Boris Eichenbaum
Boris Ejchenbaum
May also be found as:
Борис Эйхенбаум
Boris Eichenbaum
Boris Ejchenbaum
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April 13, 2025
This work is an interesting study of neglected texts of the Russian Formalists. Generally dismissed as a naked attempt to ingratiate themselves with Bolshevism, Boynik shows the Russian Formalist's study of Lenin's use of language (the "coiled verbal spring") was quite clearly something more:
It is hard to deny Lenin had a very effective style of comminication. On the other hand, the style of his communication is only half the loaf. Also I find large parts of the Russian Formalist paradigm hard to take seriously—Zaum being a good example; Bukharin's reaction is extreme, but not entirely wrong:
Even though I quite like Andrei Bely and think the comparison unfair, it is not unfair to compare Zaum with solipsism. Is such a position the inevitable outcome when the notion of 'pure form' dominates? To a degree Trotsky misses the trees for the forest, but this is another case of being not entirely wrong:
And clearly Trotsky was not alone in thinking this:
And Boynik illustrates the historical implications of such excess well:
Overall I found this a quite absorbing study of Russian Formalism, particularly since it uncovers texts which have historically been overlooked. But since I've become rather cynical towards the so-called "linguistic turn" in recent years, perhaps I'm not its ideal reader.
In his portrait of Bertolt Brecht, Sergei Tretyakov wrote that "he studies and quotes Lenin as a great thinker and as a great master of prose". Unlike Karl Marx, Lenin's language was not a topic of many sophisticated studies. The Russian Formalists' analyses are unique not only within the history of literature studies, but also within the field of the political avant-garde. This type of analysis is indispensable to any project dealing with the complex and contradictory relationship between avant-garde and revolutionary conjuncture. Most of the texts, pamphlets, interventions, and speeches of Lenin that were were contemporary outputs of their times.
It is hard to deny Lenin had a very effective style of comminication. On the other hand, the style of his communication is only half the loaf. Also I find large parts of the Russian Formalist paradigm hard to take seriously—Zaum being a good example; Bukharin's reaction is extreme, but not entirely wrong:
In Nikolai Bukharin's aforementioned 1934 paper on poetic language at the Soviet Writers' Congress, this same line was translated as "Dyr bull shirr". It was put forward as an example of an "extreme contraction", and used as an alibi to attack some Futurist tendencies towards mimicking the word-mysticism of Symbolists like Andrei Bely. Despite opposing the Marxists' neglection of form as a bureaucratisation of art theory, Bukharin was not an easy supporter of the extreme dimensions of poetic solipsism. Furthermore, he linked the Zaum experiments to reactionary forces that were opposed to the contemporaneity of the revolutionary movement. For Bukharin, "the extreme individualism of these arguments is also indicative of their social roots. They have their origin in [the] abject fear of the flood of new 'content' accompanying the revolution, which overturned the tea-tables in so many drawing-rooms."
Even though I quite like Andrei Bely and think the comparison unfair, it is not unfair to compare Zaum with solipsism. Is such a position the inevitable outcome when the notion of 'pure form' dominates? To a degree Trotsky misses the trees for the forest, but this is another case of being not entirely wrong:
In another pre-revolutionary text Eikhenbaum referred to, Trotsky complained that in a year which brought the most militant workers strikes, suffragette struggles, and Balkan Wars that shook Europe, the Secessionists' exhibition in Vienna in 1913 reduced the whole practice of art to what the eye beheld—a distribution of colours. Trotsky continued the argument, writing that this escape from content was also at the core of Russian intelligentsia, who jealously defended the position that "the content of art is in the form", constituting a fundamental contradiction within art, which he considered to be "between modernism of form and archaic, indifferent content".
And clearly Trotsky was not alone in thinking this:
These two general tenets of the Formalists-their declaration of principles (worldviews) that go beyond the scope of literary studies, and their arguing for this worldview to be represented through contentless art-were what most provoked the Marxists. Thus, the core of the issue was the ideological credibility of a project that placed contentless art as its principle. Advocating for form as opposed to content was an anathema for the Marxists. It wasn't that within their philosophy, form-as-concept wasn't important-it was but the order of things was different. For Marxists, form condensed the struggles that were firmly attached to content; form followed content, not the other way around. In the Marxist understanding of history, you can't start from the form, it has to be the end result, the final methodological outcome. This was how Marx wrote in 1871 about the political result of the Paris Commune: "form [was] at last discovered". The new discovered "commune form" became a new way of proletariat organising.
And Boynik illustrates the historical implications of such excess well:
The Russian proletariat that revolutionised working class struggles did not endure worsening economic conditions because their identities were molded by the regime's representational models (i.e. "Bolshevik speak", "Soviet tongue"), but rather as a result of a long history of struggles that shaped their politics via completely different registers from those that compelled bourgeois under-standing of economics. Simply put, the workers did speak with their own language that was different from the exploitative discourse of the bourgeoisie, but that was not conditioned by Communist institutions. The language of the proletariat was the sum total of their activism and experiences. As Marx and Engels wrote, a prerequisite of enacting revolutionary politics was to "descend from language to life", although this could hardly happen through the miraculous power of words.
The reduction of truth to a language-effect-or what Alain Badiou named as linguistic idealism, or "idealinguistery"-was also strongly present within studies of the Russian avant-garde.
Overall I found this a quite absorbing study of Russian Formalism, particularly since it uncovers texts which have historically been overlooked. But since I've become rather cynical towards the so-called "linguistic turn" in recent years, perhaps I'm not its ideal reader.
April 23, 2022
As Darko Suvin says in an afterword to this book, when the 2nd International collapsed at the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin retreated to the library in Geneva where he read Hegel for three months, after which he analysed the world situation and, a couple of years later, went back to Russia to organise the October Revolution.
110 years earlier Hegel said of the Enlightenment Spirit that produced the French Revolution:
“Enlightenment upsets the household arrangements, which spirit carries out in the house of faith, by bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now.”
The Enlightenment is the negative which “brings to light its own proper object, the ‘unknowable absolute Being’ and utility.” If Kant was right and “God” “unknowable” then whatever is divine essentially becomes privatised (as Marcuse, back in 1964, pointed out in One Dimensional Man, “spirituality” becomes commodified in the works of the guru of your “choice”). The absolute being becomes whatever produces the utilitarian “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” an idea which suits not only the ideologues of the free market, but also of state-capitalism in the forms of social democracy and Stalinism.
As Walter Benjamin put it,
“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
In post-Stalinist Russia, there are of course, few liberated grandchildren of the millions of people wiped out by Stalin’s regime. But before Stalinism there was great positive energy in the Russian revolutionary experience. As Russia was largely a peasant society, dominated for centuries by the Church, landlordism, poverty, and rural mafias, “everyday life” was a turgid back water which needed revolutionising. Having overthrown the old order, under the slogan, “Peace, Land and Bread”, Lenin announced that “Socialism is Soviets plus Electricity”; a definite case of “bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now..
Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language contains a selection of essays from 1924 by writers of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), drawn from the schools of Futurism, Constructivism and Formalism. The editor, Sezgin Boynik, quotes the leading light of this group, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:
“…the revolution cast the rugged idiom of the millions out on the streets; the slang of the outer suburbs flowed across the avenues in the city centre; the enervated burbling of the intelligentsia with their vocabulary of castrated words like ‘ideal’, ‘principles of justice’, the ‘divine origin’, the ‘transcendental countenance of Christ and Anti-Christ’ – all this kind of talk, once mouthed in the restaurants, has been wiped out. A new element of language has been liberated. How is it to be made poetic?”
Mayakovsky knew exactly how. He wrote an essay entitled How Verses are Made, which anyone who fancies themselves as a poet needs to read, and not because they’ll necessarily find in it the encouragement they might be looking for. Mayakovsky generously lays out his trade secrets, but they are not for the faint-hearted. The true poet is a poet all the time, alert to the rhythms and sounds of everything that can be experienced, whether standing in the rain on Brooklyn Bridge, riding a rickety Moscow tramcar, making love, or dealing with the trauma of a comrade and fellow poet, namely Sergey Esenin, having committed suicide.
When Mayakovsky sent Lenin a poem he had published, entitled 150 Million, Lenin commented, “You know, this is a most interesting piece of work. A peculiar brand of communism. It is hooligan communism.” To be a communist poet is to heed what Mayakovsky calls the “social command.” A poet must renounce the “production of poetical trifles”, have “thorough knowledge of theoretical economics, a knowledge of the realities of everyday life, [and] an immersion in the scientific study of history…”
And,
“To fulfil the social command as well as possible you must be in the vanguard of your class… You must smash to smithereens the myth of an apolitical art.”
Mayakovsky’s identification with the “vanguard” was won in the harsh experience of revolution, famine and civil war. It is a far cry from the crazy logic of modern-day groupescules who think that, because their “line” on any given subject under heaven and beyond is more “correct” than that of any other groupescule, then they must be the vanguard.
Mayakovsky argues that “Poetry is a manufacture.” But, he warns, “You must not make manufacturing, the so-called technical process, an end in itself.”
There is thus a teleology in Mayakovsky’s aesthetic. In this sense he is a follower of Lenin in the true sense of being a practising dialectician rather than a Lenin-ist. In 1924 he writes in protest against the canonisation of Lenin with mass-produced bronze statuettes and portraits. Mayakovsky does so because for him the Being of Lenin was, and remained, the Revolution. If you kill Lenin by making him into religious icon, you kill the Revolution by making a movement into a religion.
“Lenin is still our contemporary.
He is among the living.
We need him alive, not dead.
So:
Learn from Lenin, but don’t canonise him.
Don’t create a cult around a man who fought cults his whole life.
Don’t sell the objects of this cult.
Don’t merchandise Lenin!”
What made the canonisation all the more deadly, was the fact that Lenin’s legacy is ambivalent. As Darko Suvin points out, before Lenin read Hegel in 1914, his main philosophical contribution had been the notorious Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which “opened the door to a quite untenable theory of arts and sciences subjectively ‘mirroring’ and objectively reality, that is, to a mechanical materialism later warmly espoused by harmful Stalinist inquisitors into sciences and arts and amounting to a ban on radical innovation within Marxism quite uncharacteristic of Lenin’s own major achievements.”
And what is especially tragic is that the collection of the LEF articles in Coiled Verbal Spring ends with a quote by Stalin, supplied by Alexei Kruchenykh, which argues that the party leader, who is by definition infallible, can override the majority opinion of the party, Within a few years, Stalin would destroy the Left Front of the Arts and all it stood for, in favour of a reactionary school of resuscitated romanticism called “socialist realism.”
All of the writers in Coiled Verbal Spring survived the purges of the 1930s. But Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, after which Stalin imposed on his legacy the same fate as he imposed on the legacy of Lenin; he was ‘canonised’ as the great poet of the Bolshevik Revolution.
[ends]
110 years earlier Hegel said of the Enlightenment Spirit that produced the French Revolution:
“Enlightenment upsets the household arrangements, which spirit carries out in the house of faith, by bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now.”
The Enlightenment is the negative which “brings to light its own proper object, the ‘unknowable absolute Being’ and utility.” If Kant was right and “God” “unknowable” then whatever is divine essentially becomes privatised (as Marcuse, back in 1964, pointed out in One Dimensional Man, “spirituality” becomes commodified in the works of the guru of your “choice”). The absolute being becomes whatever produces the utilitarian “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” an idea which suits not only the ideologues of the free market, but also of state-capitalism in the forms of social democracy and Stalinism.
As Walter Benjamin put it,
“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
In post-Stalinist Russia, there are of course, few liberated grandchildren of the millions of people wiped out by Stalin’s regime. But before Stalinism there was great positive energy in the Russian revolutionary experience. As Russia was largely a peasant society, dominated for centuries by the Church, landlordism, poverty, and rural mafias, “everyday life” was a turgid back water which needed revolutionising. Having overthrown the old order, under the slogan, “Peace, Land and Bread”, Lenin announced that “Socialism is Soviets plus Electricity”; a definite case of “bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now..
Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language contains a selection of essays from 1924 by writers of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), drawn from the schools of Futurism, Constructivism and Formalism. The editor, Sezgin Boynik, quotes the leading light of this group, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:
“…the revolution cast the rugged idiom of the millions out on the streets; the slang of the outer suburbs flowed across the avenues in the city centre; the enervated burbling of the intelligentsia with their vocabulary of castrated words like ‘ideal’, ‘principles of justice’, the ‘divine origin’, the ‘transcendental countenance of Christ and Anti-Christ’ – all this kind of talk, once mouthed in the restaurants, has been wiped out. A new element of language has been liberated. How is it to be made poetic?”
Mayakovsky knew exactly how. He wrote an essay entitled How Verses are Made, which anyone who fancies themselves as a poet needs to read, and not because they’ll necessarily find in it the encouragement they might be looking for. Mayakovsky generously lays out his trade secrets, but they are not for the faint-hearted. The true poet is a poet all the time, alert to the rhythms and sounds of everything that can be experienced, whether standing in the rain on Brooklyn Bridge, riding a rickety Moscow tramcar, making love, or dealing with the trauma of a comrade and fellow poet, namely Sergey Esenin, having committed suicide.
When Mayakovsky sent Lenin a poem he had published, entitled 150 Million, Lenin commented, “You know, this is a most interesting piece of work. A peculiar brand of communism. It is hooligan communism.” To be a communist poet is to heed what Mayakovsky calls the “social command.” A poet must renounce the “production of poetical trifles”, have “thorough knowledge of theoretical economics, a knowledge of the realities of everyday life, [and] an immersion in the scientific study of history…”
And,
“To fulfil the social command as well as possible you must be in the vanguard of your class… You must smash to smithereens the myth of an apolitical art.”
Mayakovsky’s identification with the “vanguard” was won in the harsh experience of revolution, famine and civil war. It is a far cry from the crazy logic of modern-day groupescules who think that, because their “line” on any given subject under heaven and beyond is more “correct” than that of any other groupescule, then they must be the vanguard.
Mayakovsky argues that “Poetry is a manufacture.” But, he warns, “You must not make manufacturing, the so-called technical process, an end in itself.”
There is thus a teleology in Mayakovsky’s aesthetic. In this sense he is a follower of Lenin in the true sense of being a practising dialectician rather than a Lenin-ist. In 1924 he writes in protest against the canonisation of Lenin with mass-produced bronze statuettes and portraits. Mayakovsky does so because for him the Being of Lenin was, and remained, the Revolution. If you kill Lenin by making him into religious icon, you kill the Revolution by making a movement into a religion.
“Lenin is still our contemporary.
He is among the living.
We need him alive, not dead.
So:
Learn from Lenin, but don’t canonise him.
Don’t create a cult around a man who fought cults his whole life.
Don’t sell the objects of this cult.
Don’t merchandise Lenin!”
What made the canonisation all the more deadly, was the fact that Lenin’s legacy is ambivalent. As Darko Suvin points out, before Lenin read Hegel in 1914, his main philosophical contribution had been the notorious Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which “opened the door to a quite untenable theory of arts and sciences subjectively ‘mirroring’ and objectively reality, that is, to a mechanical materialism later warmly espoused by harmful Stalinist inquisitors into sciences and arts and amounting to a ban on radical innovation within Marxism quite uncharacteristic of Lenin’s own major achievements.”
And what is especially tragic is that the collection of the LEF articles in Coiled Verbal Spring ends with a quote by Stalin, supplied by Alexei Kruchenykh, which argues that the party leader, who is by definition infallible, can override the majority opinion of the party, Within a few years, Stalin would destroy the Left Front of the Arts and all it stood for, in favour of a reactionary school of resuscitated romanticism called “socialist realism.”
All of the writers in Coiled Verbal Spring survived the purges of the 1930s. But Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, after which Stalin imposed on his legacy the same fate as he imposed on the legacy of Lenin; he was ‘canonised’ as the great poet of the Bolshevik Revolution.
[ends]
April 12, 2026
Run from the Wolf, Fall on the Bear.
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