Columnar Structures of Sergei Tretyakov’s Early Poetry

In the light of the main trends of modern cultural studies, the article examines the question of the special principles and techniques of the art of the first Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, and the uniqueness of the artistic poetics of its individual representatives. The subject of the analysis is the futuristic period of the futurist poet Sergei Tretyakov (1892–1937), poetic texts from his early poetry collections “Iron Pause” (1919) and “Total” (1924), where the poet demonstrated samples of the so-called “column poetry”, that is, poems designed in the form of two or three columns of text that are not traditionally placed sequentially after each other, but next to each other. On the example of the early verses of S. Tretyakov is shown to have deliberately used columnar structures to visualize an object (“Fan”) or to expand the idea of the latest inventions of mankind (“Airplane”). In comparison with D. Burliuk’s poetry, it is demonstrated that Burliuk’s columns are ineffective, their semantic function is weakened, whereas in Tretyakov’s poetry the columnar composition turns out to be meaning-intensive, semantically loaded, allowing to enhance the depth of the depicted phenomenon (“The Road”). The evolution of the development and decline of a rare poetic form in poetry of the early twentieth century is traced.