In this study of "The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde," I argue that central writers, artists, and theorists of the Russian avant-garde employed constructions of the 'child' in order to accomplish the artistic renewal they sought as part of a revolution in the arts. Ideally situated before the conventions of verbal and visual representation, the borderline figure of the 'infant/child' represented an unspeaking subject with the potential to destabilize the relationship of signifier and signified and offer a defamiliarized perspective. Ultimately, I argue that the avant-garde used infantilism to achieve simplification of form, challenge the conventions of signification, and alter the nature of interpretation, as it charted a course toward profound simplicity. Based on analysis of avant-garde literature, theory, and art, the body of the dissertation comprises four chapters that treat avant-garde attention to children's art, language, perspective, and cognition. As part of the stage I term infantile primitivism, I discuss the significance of children's drawings for the artistic evolution of Mikhail Larionov and Neo-Primitivist art and the role of children's language in the development of the Cubo-Futurist poetics of Aleksei Kruchenykh. I then trace the evolution of an infantilist aesthetic by examining the place of the naive perspective within the Formalist theory of Viktor Shklovsky and by investigating the influence of children's logic and lore in Daniil Kharms' absurdist writings for children and adults. My study traces how the anthropological distance of the first phase, where the child is regarded as a primitive 'other,' shifts to a theoretical fascination in the second phase, which privileges and attempts to occupy the 'naive' perspective of the child. In the later, more synthetic stage of the dialectic, the child becomes more than an object of fascination or locus of a strange perspective, as it begins to acquire subjecthood and voice within literary experiments with children's cognition. Yet, throughout, the 'infant/child' serves as an 'other' that serves mainly to mirror the aims and agenda of the avant-garde. Although based in the Russian context, the implications of this interdisciplinary study also extend to Modernism in a wider Western context, where similar principles apply.
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