Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry

All her life Zinaida Gippius remembered how startled she was when as a young girl she was told that the Russian word predmet was devised and introduced into the language by Karamzin at the very end of the eighteenth century. The discovery left her wondering how the Russians who lived before that time could discuss all sorts of basic things without a word denoting "object" in the language. We may well be startled in a similar way when we stop to realize that the handy adjective "surrealistic" was coined only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the word did not initially mean what it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the French Surrealists during his trip to Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what their movement was about but from their behavior concluded that they must be the French equivalent of his own LEF group

Adjective · Art · Girl · Linguistics · Literature · Noun · Object (grammar · Poetry · Word (group theory · European Linguistics and Anthropology · History · Philosophy · Psychology

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