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

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

The Hand 
at Work
The Poetics of Poiesis  
in the Russian Avant-Garde
S u s a n n e  S t r ät l i n g
Translated by 
Alexandra Berlina
B o s t o n
2 0 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Strätling, Susanne, author. | Berlina, Alexandra, translator.  
Title: The hand at work : the poetics of poiesis in the Russian avant-garde 
   / Susanne Strätling ; translated by Alexandra Berlina.  
Other titles: Hand am Werk. English (Berlina)  
Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Translation of: 
Die Hand am Werk : Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen Avantgarde. | 
   Includes bibliographical references and index. 
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033453 (print) | LCCN 2021033454 (ebook) | 
   ISBN 9781644697078 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697085 (adobe pdf) |
   ISBN 9781644697092 (epub)  
Subjects: LCSH: Experimental poetry, Russian—20th century—History and 
   criticism. | Literature, Experimental—Russia—20th century—History and 
   criticism. | Literature, Experimental—Soviet Union—History and 
   criticism. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Russia—History—20th century. | 
   Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Soviet Union. | Gesture in literature. | 
   Gesture in art. | Hand in literature. | Hand in art. | Arts, 
   Russian—20th century. 
Classification: LCC PG3064.E94 S7713 2021  (print) | LCC PG3064.E94  
   (ebook) | DDC 891.709/1109041—dc23 
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033453
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033454
The book is an abridged translation of Die Hand am Werk. Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen 
Avantgarde, München: Fink Verlag, 2017
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation 
Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of 
the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG 
WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers 
Association).
Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2021, English translation
ISBN 9781644697078 (hardback)
ISBN 9781644697085 (adobe pdf)
ISBN 9781644697092 (epub)  
Book design by Tatiana Vernikov
Cover design by Ivan Grave
Published by Academic Studies Press
1577 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02446, USA
press@academicstudiespress.com
www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents
Introduction	
IX
I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth	
1
II. Writing. Letters at Play	
63
III. Pointing. Theater between Performance and Perception	
114
IV. Working. The Word as a Tool	
153
V. Acting. Poetics of Operativity	
177
VI. Giving. Poetics of Life	
223
VII. Touching. Tactile Text Experiments 	
248
VIII. Toward a Philology of the Hand	
280
Bibliography	
288
Captions	
312
Index	
319

He is as unfamiliar to me as the back of my hand.
That’s what you should say about someone whom you don’t know.
—Viktor Shklovsky,  
“Chaplin as Policeman,” 1923

Introduction
1. Starting Point: Images of the Hand
Pointing, modelling, grasping, reaching, holding, throwing, catching, giving, stroking, writing, hitting, clutching, shaping, gripping, releasing, pushing, pressing, taking, pulling, drawing. . . . In the diversity of its motions, the 
hand shapes the relationship between the human being and the world. Its 
actions realize creative impulses; its sensory perceptions open up zones of 
experience and comprehension; its gestures form the foundation of social 
interaction. A tool of building and forming, an organon of knowledge, 
a medium of contact and communication—the hand unites body control, 
perception, and media use. Coordinating muscles and sensory stimuli, 
synchronizing motions of the fingers and palm, exercising gross and fine 
motor skills, we work, write, handle tools, and create tactile worlds. 
This brief description merely touches the surface of human hand use. 
Beyond the handling and handiwork listed above, there are also numerous 
manipulative steps and procedures in which the hand determines the form 
and content of artworks in both the productive and the receptive process. 
The interplay of the left and the right hand must be mentioned, too, since 
the manual spectrum is significantly expanded by their interaction. Despite 
all this, the history of art and culture has rarely paid attention to the hand. 
This practical body part seems ill-suited for theoretic, let alone aesthetic, 
analysis. In constant competition with the eye as the primary organ of 
philosophical and aesthetical reflection, the hand has been leading a shadowy existence to the present day.1 Cultural anthropology and media studies 
diagnose a constant regress of the hand while manual activities are being 
1	
Matthew Fulkerson’s monograph The First Sense. A Philosophical Study of Human 
Touch (Cambridge, Mass., 2014) is a recent important exception. Fulkerson breaks 
ground for a new conceptual understanding and—finally—appreciation of touch. 

Introduction
x
outsourced to machines and technical apparatuses. Only the touch technologies of the twenty-first century have granted the hand a comeback of 
sorts. Under these conditions, the hand is and remains the great unknown, 
as proclaimed by Viktor Shklovsky in 1923 in the epigraph.
Against this backdrop, an attempt is made here to take a closer look 
at the hand in all its obscurity. The analyses in this book critique the established consensus that represents the avant-garde as a picture-book 
epoch of visual lust fueled by media technology and propaganda art. The 
historical configuration of the avant-garde in the context of the “hand at 
work” is complicated not merely by the intensity with which it conjures up 
and rejects the image of the hand. Rather, the continuous reference to the 
hand as an aesthetical model leads to a shift in the aesthetical system itself, 
a shift that is concealed rather than illuminated by the much-mentioned 
synesthesia of this epoch. With unprecedented perseverance, the Russian 
avant-garde explores manual practices and haptic forms of experience. It 
exploits the hand as a primary organ to make aesthetic and poetic procedures graspable as poiesis, that is, the operative use of materials, techniques 
and instruments from and with which texts are created. Here, the hand is 
a model of both aesthetical reflection and artistic practice. 
In a demonstrative display, the working, forming, and creating hand 
thus becomes the central organ of art, emblematic of creative power and 
will, of productivity and manipulability. Almost all art forms use the palm 
and fingers to symbolize artistic self-reflection. This is particularly evident 
in the visual arts, where the motif of the hand—active or resting, pleading 
or refusing, giving or taking, tense or relaxed, clenched or opened—occupies a key position. Even a cursory glance at the iconography of that period 
suggests the dominance of this leitmotif, whose most complex visual formulation is arguably El Lissitzky’s self-portrait The Constructor (1924) with 
its palimpsest of face, hand, curve diagram, and a pair of compasses serving 
as the icon of the modern artist’s image. 
More than a recurrent motif, the image of the hand suggests an aesthetic experience of difference in the haptic area, as enabled especially by the 
plastic arts. In 1914, Vladimir Tatlin programmatically demanded that in 
the future “the eye should be placed under the control of the haptic sense,”2 
2	
Vladimir Tatlin, “Nasha predstoiashchaia rabota” [1920], in Mastera sovetskoi 
arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1975), 76–77, qt. 77.