Bastard in the Family: The Impact of Cubo-Futurist Book Art on Structural Linguistics

Abstract

The impact of Russian avant-garde, especially the cubo-futurist artists’ books of Kruchenykh, Klebnikov and David Burlink (with illustrations by Goncharova, Kulbin, Malevich and others) played a significant role in determining the shape of early structural linguistics. This happened primarily through Roman Jakobson’s association with these artists at a time in his life when he was formulating a series of revisions to the linguistic concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure and the neogrammarians before him. Jakobson’s artist colleagues began working in interdisciplinary art forms (the artist’s book), as he was attempting to articulate a theory that would encompass the irrational in discourse focused on the relationship between sounds, and between sound and meaning, thus trying to retain a role for reason.