When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism was published in 1909, the Russians welcomed it like an epiphany. However, a mere five years later it had become clear that while the avant-garde movement in the East was hurtling along just as fast as the Italian movement led by the pioneers of modernity, it was headed in a very different direction.

The atmosphere was tense before Marinetti’s first reading in the auditorium of the Kalashnikov Stock Exchange in St. Petersburg. A day earlier, Nikolai Kulbin had gathered an informal welcoming committee of local Futurists at his home. The host – a popularizer and theoretician of new art who was older than the rest of the attendees and held prestigious positions as state councillor and doctor of the General Staff of the Russian Army – tried to coerce everyone into giving the Italian Futurist a friendly welcome. He was afraid of an embarrassing scene, remembering an interview that had appeared in a Moscow newspaper a few days before Marinetti’s arrival in Russia. In the interview, Mikhail Larionov – a co-founder of Rayonism, the second-most radical branch of the Russian avant-garde movement (after Suprematism) – argued that the Italian guest should be greeted with rotten eggs for betraying his previously proclaimed views.