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Vasily Vasilyevich Kamensky (; – November 11, 1961) was a Russian Futurism poet, playwright, and artist as well as one of the first Russian Aircraft pilot.
He left school in 1900, and from 1902 to 1906 worked as a railroad clerk. In 1904 he began to contribute to the newspaper Permskii Krai, publishing poems and notices; at the newspaper he met local Marxists and developed his own leftist political orientation. At this time he also took up acting and traveled around Russia with a theatrical troupe. On his return to the Urals, he became an agitator and led the strike committee at Nizhny Tagil, for which he was sentenced to prison. On his release, he traveled to Istanbul and Tehran; the impressions from this Eastern trip would leave a mark on his later work.
In 1910 Kamensky published his first prose work, the short novel Zemlyanka (The mud hut), "in which urban life is abandoned for the joy and beauty of nature,"Victor Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature (Yale University Press, 1990), s.v. "Kamensky, Vasily Vasilievich", p. 214. but its lack of success temporarily discouraged him from further literary endeavor.
Kamensky left Moscow to travel around the country, and became one of the first Russians to master the new art of aviation, flying a Blériot XI; he brought the Russian word самолет samolyot 'airplane' into circulation. Большой Энциклопедический Словарь entry After an airplane crash in 1911, however, he gave up flying. For a couple of years he lived on his estate near Perm, but in 1913 he moved back to Moscow, though he toured Russia with Burlyuk and Mayakovsky, promoting Futurism; "from this time Kamensky was an invariable participant in Futurist collections, newspapers, journals, and public appearances." He also returned to literary activity, in 1914 publishing his poetry collection Tango s korovami (Tango with cows) and in 1915 his long poem Stenka Razin, about the 17th-century Stenka Razin.
Stenka Razin was played by Nikolai Znamensky from the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was designed in an attractive childish-primitive style by Pavel Kuznetsov and directed by Meyerhold's former pupil, Arkady Zonov, and Vasily Sakhnovsky, formerly Komissarzhevsky's partner at the theatre named after Vera Komissarzhevskaya. It was, wrote one critic, an 'enormous success', partly at least because it 'reeked of streets and circus'.... The play employs an utterly direct and simple style, with plenty of clowning but a minimum of Futurist mannerisms, and achieves something of the spirit of the folktale.Robert Leach, Revolutionary Theatre (Routledge, 1994), p. 35.
The Dictionary of Literary Biography sums up his career in these words:
Kamensky was involved in significant literary events throughout his career and knew many people who were central to the Russian avant-garde. His zhelezobetonnye poemy (ferroconcrete poems) were among the boldest and most distinctive experiments in Russian Futurism, and he freely adapted other Futurist techniques to his own impressionist style. Although his greatest contribution to literature was most likely his discovery of Velimir Khlebnikov, Kamensky was a creative poet in his own right and an active participant in the artistic life of Russia in the first third of the twentieth century. Dictionary of Literary Biography
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