Ego-Futurism

Ego-Futurism was a Russian poetry movement founded in 1911 by Igor Severyanin, developing in parallel with and in rivalry to the better-known Cubo-Futurist current, and distinguished by its cultivation of individualist self-assertion, urbane sophistication and deliberately affected, often neologism-laden diction rather than Cubo-Futurism's more collective and linguistically radical program. Severyanin's own flamboyant public poetry readings and his coinages, along with fellow early participants such as Ivan Ignatyev, gave the movement a distinctly aestheticized, self-dramatizing persona that set it apart from the confrontational, anti-bourgeois posture of Mayakovsky's circle, though the two Futurist currents shared a common rejection of Symbolist convention. The movement was short-lived, with Severyanin drifting from it by the mid-1910s and it dissolving as a distinct grouping soon after, but it remains a recognized, if minor, branch of the Russian Futurist movement's early history.