At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the world was slightly “shaken”. The rapid growth of industrial production, the consolidation of capitalism with its harsh and pragmatic attitude towards life, towards man, turned people's minds, intensified the contradictions between the usual unhurried ideals of the passing century and the spontaneous seething of the coming century. And no matter how difficult it was to accept these new laws of life, no matter how difficult it was to part with the familiar and sweet, changes were inevitable, and the first response to them arose in the minds of creative people, as they most acutely felt the advent of a new time.
In 1909, Tommaso Marinetti issued a manifesto of futurists in Italy, a new direction in art, the main idea of which was the complete rejection of all the established principles for creating works of art. And if any avant-garde movement in art and literature began with a rejection of canons and traditions, then futurism was particularly successful in this, since it was distinguished by extreme extremism. Marinetti proclaimed the daily desecration of the altar of arts the main task of the new direction and affirmed strength, aggression, movement and destruction as priorities.
In Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, the confusion in the minds was great, artists were looking for new forms of expression of difficult time, so any emerging trend in art immediately found a gracious response, and futurism was no exception. On the contrary, futurism in literature and painting has become widespread in Russia. Many famous writers and poets who later went down in the history of culture (V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, V. Khlebnikov, D. Burliuk, B. Pasternak) began as members of numerous futuristic circles, moreover, theses and numerous manifestos proclaiming the principles of the new directions in art were for them much more important than the art itself. Cubo-futurists, self-futurists, scientists and suprematists, as well as everyone and nobodies, amazed the public’s imagination not only with their harsh statements about traditional art, but also with their unusual creativity, as well as very eccentric antics. Many of them were very good "producers" of themselves. They not only created new art, but also very successfully presented it to the public, making good money on it. The main methods for self-presentation were public scandals, causing appearance and behavior. They attracted public interest by shocking, the audience very willingly came to exhibitions and literary evenings, giving a lot of money for the entrance ticket.
In Russia, the new avant-garde movement was reflected mainly in poetry. Futurism in literature was clearly manifested in new word-making, phonetics of sound, unusual syntactic constructions. The word for new poets lost its usual semantic and lexical meaning, it turned into plastic material from sounds, with the help of which it was possible to "fashion" any design, create new, completely unusual combinations, where the meaning was far from the main thing, or rather, other things were created meanings. Thus, futurism in literature tried to create a new language, democratic and popular, consonant with modern transformations in society, understood by everyone and accepted by all.
A new direction in art not only sought to comprehend and convey the complex phenomena occurring around, but also to transform the world itself, create time. Futurism in literature was distinguished by completely unusual experiments related to color images of sounds and words. Thus, a certain color correspondence was attributed to each vowel and consonant sound. Combining them in their poems, futurists created figurative color canvases with the help of words, thereby trying to convey a certain mood.
Futurism in literature was closely intertwined with other forms of art. This trend was quite widespread in painting, and some futurist poets were very original painters, for example V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky and others. Futurism in painting, as well as in literature, manifested itself in vivid experiments. Moreover, the painters K. Malevich, P. Filonov and others with the help of brushes and paints were able to more effectively and clearly express on canvas what the poets sought in their literary work.
Futurism is rebellion, a denial of traditional art and an attempt to create a new one, aimed at the future. These are experiments with word and sound, the search for new syntactic and semantic constructions that are democratic, understandable to the masses and able to express complex transformations in the society of the early twentieth century.