Boris Anisimovich Kušner (Russian: Борис Анисимович Кушнер; 1888 – 1937) was a Russian poet, critic and political activist. He was a publicist for the Cubo- Futurists: In 1917 he wrote a manifesto, "Democratic Art", which called for a guarantee for all art movements to have a right to exist and the creation of an environment whereby fresh forces and views would be encouraged so that all works of art would be available to all people. He worked with

Mayakovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (, ; rus, Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский, , vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ məjɪˈkofskʲɪj, Ru-Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky.ogg, links=y; – 14 Apr ...

and Osip Brik in

IZO-Narkompros IZO-Narkompros was the Department of Fine Arts of the People's Commissariat for Education established after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia 1917. It was established in Petrograd (St Petersburg) on 29 January 1918. An Arts Board (Khudozhes ...

. His association with Mayakovsky continued in

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and

Novyi LEF The Novyi LEF or New LEF journal (russian: Новый Леф, ''The New Left Front of the Arts'') was a literary-critical periodical published by the State Publishing House “Gosizdat” in 1927-28 in Moscow, RFSFR. Futurist poet Vladimir Mayako ...

. He was involved with OPOJAZ, (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and their formalist approach to understanding poetry. He saw the comparison of poetry to music and dance as being understandable, being temporal rather than spatial media. However he distinguished between the tonal sounds of music and the sonorous sounds of poetry, where the sonic values were generally arbitrary. He thus set out to study what he called "sonorous chords" which, he argued, affect the perception of the listener a result of the poem as a whole and which Kušner set out to analyse by creating a grid in which the syllables in each line could be compared with the syllables of every other line. He was a victim of the purges and was arrested and executed in 1937.

Reference

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kusner, Boris 1888 births 1937 deaths Poets from the Russian Empire Soviet poets