Hand at Work : The Poetics of Poiesis in the Russian Avant-Garde

Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. The readings of this book call for a revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making as well as the perception of literature and the arts.

"Susanne Strätling sees the Russian avant-garde from sudden, oblique angles, like Rodchenko or Tintoretto. The Hand at Work focuses on artistic discourses around gesture, especially that of the hand, from the revolutionary decade when artistic workers reinvented themselves as ‘makers,’ reactivating the original, physical sense of the Greek word poiēsis in the broad context of revolutionary idealization of proletarian labor. The author’s erudition is astonishing. So is her capacity for showing relations among seemingly unrelated ideas. This study of ideologies of embodiment—and their emphasis on touch and muscular effort—ranges not only synchronically, exhibiting related attitudes towards materiality over a dazzling variety of artistic and intellectual fields between the late 1910s and early 1930s, but also diachronically, towards earlier Russian history. I find the bridges that she builds with the Baroque period to be especially valuable. This is a book not just for specialists in the global avantgarde, or in the now burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of cultural studies of gesture, but also for readers who enjoyed Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language, and even the occult studies of Frances Yates.”

—Eugene Ostashevsky, poet and translator

"This is one of the most sophisticated and innovative interpretations of the Russian avant-garde to date. Susanne Strätling offers a nuanced and impeccably researched interdisciplinary account; her monograph is undoubtedly a considerable accomplishment.”

—Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London

"After the many decades that scholars have spent exploring productivist art, Strätling’s book at last provides the first sustained account of productivist literature. Drawing from rich materials in linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism, and media theory, this brilliant book reveals how one constellation of avant-garde writers reconceptualized the capacities of language in the early twentieth century to create a literature that would not just represent reality but actively intervene in and transform it. The Hand at Work is quite simply one of the most important studies to date on the relationship of the new Soviet subject to language."

— Devin Fore, Princeton University