The article deals with the program poems of the film director Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), written in the early 1920s during the transition from literary to cinematic creativity: “Start” and “From the Preface to the Poem ‘I SEE’ ”. Based on the analysis of the text, memoirs and archival materials, the time and circumstances of their creation are specified: 1922–1923 and 1925, respectively. As a result of comparison of biographical circumstances of the appearance of the poem “Start” and the cultural and historical context, it is argued that the creation of this literary text is directly related to the preparation for publication of the Manifesto “Kinoki. Coup” in the June issue of the magazine Lef in 1923, which was a public “start” to the implementation of Vertov’s concept of “non-played” films. The analysis of the text of “From the Preface to the Poem ‘I SEE’ ”, fragments of which are first published in Russian in this article, shows that its content reflects the struggle that Vertov led with his opponents after the release of the film Cinema Eye in 1924. Self-reflection here is expressed much brighter than in “Start”: Vertov is present in the text as a character; under his own name in the first person he expresses his creative views and ambition. The identification of the most significant content, composition and plot elements of the text and their functional and semantic analysis lead to the conclusion that this text, in fact, is a literary preface to the subsequent film text. It is concluded that the creative evolution of Dziga Vertov is an example of a kind of “personal” transmediality inherent in the revolutionary era in the Russia of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Not only ideas, images, narratives were manifested in different media due to the intermedial nature of their discourses, but also the authors themselves, figures of other arts (S. Eisenstein, V. Shklovsky, and others) moved into new media, mainly into cinema. The transition from literature to cinema, which happened with Dziga Vertov in the mid-1920s, was predetermined by a number of factors, both subjective (musicality, propensity to experiment, ambition) and spontaneously objective (February and October Revolutions, moving from Petrograd to Moscow, meeting with the cameraman Lemberg, the patronage of the fellow countryman M. Koltsov when joining the Film Committee). Written in this period, “Start” and “Preface” reflect the author’s consciousness at the initial and final stages of Vertov’s transmedial transition from “I hear” to “I see” and, therefore, can be considered as a verbal presentation of this process, which largely determined his further film biography.