Avant-garde and power: Semenko and Maples Arce in comparative perspective

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of Mykhail Semenko’s Ukrainian Futurism and Manuel Maples Arce’s Mexican Estridentism – two avant-garde phenomena that emerged independently of one another and almost simultaneously (in 1914 and 1921, respectively), against the background of profound revolutionary upheavals in Ukraine and Mexico during the 1910s–1930s. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that a comparative analysis of the work of these two poets has not previously been undertaken in international Slavic and Latin American studies, despite the evident typological affinity of their artistic programmes and the complete absence of any direct mutual influence between the authors. The article systematically compares their programmatic texts – Semenko’s manifesto Querofuturism and Maples Arce’s Mexican broadside Actual No. 1. The analysis identifies a number of common features, including the rejection of tradition and the national canon, the cult of the present moment, an aggressive break with the previous generation, and a claim to universality, as well as significant differences in their attitudes towards technological progress, the stylistics of provocation, and the degree to which artistic imagery is politicised. Particular attention is paid to the urban poetry of both authors. Semenko’s poem The City is analysed as a phonetic-kinetic, corporeal, and olfactory score of urban experience constructed through occasionalisms and onomatopoeia, whereas Maples Arce’s poem Urbe emerges as a politically and erotically charged image of the city-as-body, engulfed by the class dynamics of the revolutionary crowd. A key aspect of the study is the interaction between the avant-garde and revolutionary state power. Maples Arce’s diplomatic career is contrasted with the tragic fate of Semenko, who was executed in 1937, making it possible to trace the patterns through which state power either integrates or destroys the avant-garde impulse depending on the cultural, political, and historical context of each country. In conclusion, the avant-garde manifesto and avant-garde poetics are interpreted as transnational genre phenomena governed by shared conventions, while the specific realisation of these conventions remains deeply rooted in the particular national, cultural, and historical realities of Ukraine and Mexico.