Abstract

Valentin Yakovlevich Parnakh (1891–1951)—poet, dancer, translator, critic, and indefatigable mediator between artistic milieux—developed idiosyncratic avant-garde poetics in which verbal texture, choreographic invention, and graphic inscription form a single communicative ecology. Focusing on Parnakh’s Parisian collection The Acrobat Climbs (Karabkaetsya acrobat) (1922), this article reconstructs how “low” temporal arts (cabaret, music hall, circus, pantomime) and the modernist revaluation of the body reoriented lyric practice away from a representational “image” toward a performative event and a kinetic sign. The argument proceeds from Parnakh’s struggle “to free oneself from the burden of the word” to the compensatory emergence of dance as an international, non-nationalized medium—at once existential (a “cry of the soul”) and formally experimental. Central attention is given to the author’s attempts to fix movement: the enigmatic “hieroglyphs of dances” printed in 1922 and their later clarification through more legible pictographic systems (“stick-figures”) published in the second half of the 1920s. By correlating poems, self-descriptions of choreography, and visual materials, this study reframes Parnakh’s apparent “obscurity” not as gratuitous zaum, but as a deliberately intermedial hermeneutic problem—one that presupposes translation between sign systems (word/line/body) as the very substance of avant-garde meaning.

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