FACTORY WHISTLES
By:
June 24, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
When the morning whistles blow in the
factory districts, this is no call to slavery.
It is the song of the future.
Once upon a time we toiled in humble
shops and started work in the morning
at different hours.
Now the whistles shrill at eight o’clock for a
whole million.
Now we all start in at once to the minute.
A million men take up the hammers at the
same moment.
Our first blows thunder together.
What do the whistles sing about?
They are the morning hymn of unity.
— “Gudki” (“The Factory Whistles”), a poem in prose, seems to have already been written by 1913. But first published in 1918.
The Futurist poet Nikolaj Aseev called Gastev “The Ovid of the miners and metal-workers”. This epithet seems to refer mainly to the second section of Poezija rabocego udara (The Poetry of the Factory Floor, 1918), “Mašina” (“The Machine”), which contains the most interesting poems about the coming industrial age. “Gudki” is one of the poems that appears here. Except for “Železnye pul’sy” (“Iron Pulse-beats”) which is mainly prose, all the works here may be called poems in prose.
In 1918 Gastev established a network of trade unions according to the model of the French syndicalists. Allegedly a personal acquaintance of, and in correspondence with, Henry Ford, Gastev led a popular movement for the “scientific organization of labor” which considered increasing automatization and standardization of workers’ movements, language, and even thoughts as means for improving the efficiency of labour. In 1938 Gastev was arrested on false charges of ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist activity’ and sentenced to death by a fast trial; his institute was closed. On 15 April 1939 he was shot to death in the suburbs of Moscow.
See Russian Poetry: An Anthology (1921), chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. There also seems to be a later edition of this book….
See this PDF.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.