«Дыр бул щыл» А. Кручёных как мнемонический эксперимент

Новое литературное обозрение. 2025. № 196. С. 235–248.

Uspensky P.

The article is devoted to the most significant text of Russian Futurism — Alexei Kruchyonykh’s poem «Dyr
bul shchyl», published in early 1913. Based on the obvious, but no less important idea that Kruchyonykh’s poem is meaningless, in the first part of the article I critically examine the sources of the text and its readings proposed by philologists. The main part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the contexts of the poem, which have not previously attracted the attention of researchers: positivist psychology of the turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries (tests
measuring imagination; Hermann Ebbinghaus’ experiments which were devoted to the formalization of
memory mechanisms). Special attention is paid to Mikhail Larionov’s illustration to the text. In the context of modernist-era psychology, «Dyr bul shchyl» turns out to be not only a poem using scientific discourse, but also a kind of mnemonic experiment, conducted not in a laboratory, but in the space of culture.

Keywords: история психологии, А. Крученых, history of psychology, русский футуризм, Literature and Science, Russian Futurism, Alexey Kruchenykh, литература и естественные науки