In connection with the foregoing it is curious to observe the pranks of Marinetti's colleagues in the land of eternal contradictions--Russia. The Russian Futurists, Ego-futurists, and Acmeists, vie with the Italians in noisiness and eccentricity, and they have aroused an extensive pro and con polemic. In the last issue of Russkaja Mysl there is an interesting criticism of the Futurist poetry written by Valery Brusov. This foremost poet, known on the continent as the Russian Verhaeren, began his literary career some fifteen years ago with the one-line "poem": "Oh, conceal thy pallid legs." This extremist is now ranked by the Futurists among the reactionaries. Brusov is not hostile to Futurism, although he opposes the contemporary bearers of its banner. In a dialogue supposedly carried on between a Symbolist and a Futurist Brusov makes the latter say: Tell me, what is poetry? The art of words, is it not? In what else does it differ from music, from painting? The poet is the artist of words: they are for him what colors are for the painter or marble for your sculptors. We have determined to be artists of words, and only of words, which means to fulfill the true vocation of the poet. You, what have you done with the word? You have transformed it into a slave, into a hireling, to serve your so-called ideas! You have debased the word to a subservient rôle. All of you, the realists as well as the symbolists, have used words just as the "Academicians" have used colors. Those understood not that the essence of painting is in the combination of colors and lines, and they have strived to express through colors and lines some meager ideas absolutely useless for commonly known. You likewise have not understood that the essence of poetry lies in the combination of words, and you have mutilated them by forcing them to express your thoughts borrowed from the philosophers. The futurists are the first to proclaim the true poetry, the free, the real freedom of words. And so, since words have become enslaved and carry, unfortunately, within them the ballast of established notions and conceptions, the Futurists experiment in liberating the words of their accepted meanings by creating new words, weird combinations of syllables, skilful arrangements of sounds which defy translation. For the benefit of that part of mankind which does not understand Russian the Futurists invented a "universal tongue" which consists exclusively of single vowels. Here is a specimen under the title Heights. I give the original letters and their English transliteration.