Cubo-Futurism

Cubo-Futurism was a Russian avant-garde poetry and art movement of the 1910s that fused the fragmented, multi-perspectival techniques of French Cubism with the dynamism, aggression and rejection of the past associated with Italian Futurism, developing its own distinctly Russian, more radically linguistic form of avant-garde experiment. Its leading poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchyonykh and David Burliuk, published the movement's 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, calling for the classics of Russian literature to be thrown overboard, and pursued radical formal experiments including zaum, or transrational language, invented words and deliberately jarring typography and syntax. Cubo-Futurism's most prominent poets, especially Mayakovsky, went on to become leading literary voices of the early Soviet period, and the movement is generally treated as the dominant strand of Russian Futurism, distinct from the parallel, more individualist Ego-Futurist current led by Igor Severyanin.