Reconstructing Mayakovsky is a hybrid media web-based novel by Illya Szilak. Set in the future, the novel revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. Inspired by the life and poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist who killed himself in 1930 at the age of 36. Moving between past and future, revolutionary Russia and post-apocalyptic America, the novel explores the universal desire to create meaning in the face of senseless destruction and reaffirms the enduring power of art.
Literature is not immune from cultural, technological and social change, nor should it be if it is to remain a vital art form. Two of the most profound influences on both the readers and writers of literature are the enhanced ability to find, process and suture together disparate pieces of information in multiple medias and the rise of media industries that buy and sell dominant narratives for mass-consumption.
In my work, I am interested in subverting this Googlification of knowledge and sentiment through a filmic cutting and suturing of media, information, and narrative that eschews both the insular poetics of modernism and the irony and boredom of post-modernism. In Mayakovsky, I employ accessible narratives derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, as well as film (for instance, the trope of the meteorite falling to earth, strange things happening, an alien arrival is familiar to anyone who has seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Close Encounters.) At the same time, I disturb these narratives by juxtaposing highly idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, “cut-and-paste” appropriations, repetitions, and translations (the OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using AltaVista’s Babelfish program.) Thus, Reconstructing Mayakovsky is at once predictable and disorienting, conventional and experimental, plot and character-driven and conceptual. The overall effect is a gradual buildup of cognitive dissonance that is deeply unsettling.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.