The Fundamental Principles of Constructivism

1. The nature of modern production technology—accelerated, economical, and intensive—influences the modes of ideological representation, subordinating all cultural processes to these internal formal-organizational demands.

Constructivism is the expression of this heightened attention to technical and organizational questions.

2. In our context, the USSR, Constructivism acquires a broad socio-cultural significance, owing to the necessity of covering, in a relatively short time, the distance that separates the proletariat—as a culturally backward class—from modern advanced technology and the entire developed system of cultural superstructures. These superstructures, in the context of sharpening global class struggle, are also used by the bourgeoisie as technical instruments of struggle.

3. Constructivism is the organizational formulation of this task.

4. Thus, Constructivism is a systematized set of ideas and social dispositions that emphatically reflect the organizational pressure of the working class, which, in a peasant country and after seizing power, is compelled to build an economy and lay the foundations of a new socialist culture.

5. This cultural pressure is primarily directed toward its technical aspects—across all domains of knowledge and skill—beginning with the most basic mastery of literacy.

6. The bearer of the Constructivist (i.e., assertively organizational) and cultural movement must first and foremost be the proletariat, and then the intermediate social strata under the ideological and political influence of the proletariat.

7. When transferred to the field of art, Constructivism formally becomes a system of maximum exploitation of the theme, or a system in which all artistic elements functionally justify one another. In other words, Constructivism is, in its essence, motivated art.

8. In formal terms, such a demand culminates in the so-called principle of “gruzofikatsiya” (load-bearing), i.e., the increase of functional burden or necessity per unit of material.

9. Right-leaning social strata—the intelligentsia and petty-bourgeois groups—adapt the formal requirements of Constructivism as aesthetic trenches, where they take refuge from the onslaught of revolutionary modernity that seeks to consolidate itself within the artistic theme. In this way, Constructivism degenerates into a particular easel genre—a non-motivated demonstration of technique. This is equally true in both painting and poetry.

For the left social layers, this demand for maximum exploitation is naturally fused with the search for a grand epochal theme and a tightly bound form adequate to it—a logic of content that introduces into poetry the techniques of prose.

10. The principle of gruzofikatsiya, when applied to poetry, becomes the demand to construct verse on the basis of local semantics—that is, to develop all the material texture of the poem from the fundamental semantic content of the theme.

11. The Literary Center of Constructivists (LCC), which has taken the above principles as its banner, is an organizational association of people united by common goals of communist construction. Its aim is, through collaborative practical engagement with the formal-technical and theoretical aspects of Constructivism, to endow literature—and poetry in particular—with an active meaning in the contemporary cultural situation.

ILYA SELVINSKY
KORNELY ZELINSKY
VERA INBER
BORIS AGAPOV
YEVGENY GABRILOVICH
D. TUMANNY
I. A. AKSYONOV

Moscow, August 1924