One small box caught my attention on the first day I visited the storage. However, I was too afraid to touch anything, wary of inadvertently disrupting someone else’s prior work in the library. On my next visit, curiosity got the better of me, and I retrieved the ivory-colored box from the storage shelves. It turned out to be a bookcase made of parchment,[3] folded in the form of an envelope, containing a book about the size and thickness of a sturdy dictionary. Surprisingly, for such a thick book, it was very light. Taken out of the parchment case, the pages of the book lay beneath the illustrated cover, which bears the inscription Ne coupez pas mes pages (Don’t cut my pages) (fig. 1). At first glance, I assumed this French phrase to be the book’s title, but this proved not to be the case. I tried to “leaf through” the pages, but it was not straightforward. Inside the Ne coupez pas mes pages parchment cover were five smaller “books,” folded into a paper cover that, again, bore no title. Then, on the first of these five booklets, I read five well-known names: Arp, Villon, Domínguez, Matisse, Picasso.[4] What exactly was I holding? Within the cover inscribed with the names of famous modernist artists were five A4-sized sheets, folded into quarters. It was only upon reaching and unfolding the third sheet that I discovered the book’s creator and publisher—Iliazd. During that first encounter, even after identifying the publisher, I still could not grasp the book’s title.
Fig. 1. Iliazd, Poésie de mots inconnus (Paris: 41°, 1949). On the left: the bookcase; on the right: the cover containing five smaller “books.” From the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, on loan from the Khardzhiev-Chaga Foundation. Photograph by the author.
Finding information about this enigmatic book proved challenging—an unexpected difficulty in the modern age. Aside from auction sales records, there was little information on Iliazd’s works available online, at least in English. However, while exploring the catalog from a rare book auction, I finally discovered the book’s title: Poésie de mots inconnus. It seemed I was not the only one who had struggled to describe it. The book’s absence from the initial inventory list further attested to its elusiveness. I suspect that the mystery surrounding the book—its value, combined with the possibility that other rare artists’ books from Khardzhiev’s collection may have vanished—might have inadvertently contributed to its preservation.
Not only was the book difficult to identify, but compared to other popular modernist artists and creators, there are disproportionately fewer publications about Iliazd’s life and work. Born in Tiflis in 1894 (now Tbilisi, Georgia) to a mother who was a pianist and father who taught French, Iliazd was exposed early on to multiple languages and cultures. In 1911, he moved to the Russian Empire’s capital, Saint Petersburg, to study law, where he became involved in avant-garde circles. What followed were years spent between Russia and Georgia, working closely with and befriending many early avant-garde writers and painters. In these years, Iliazd fostered and adapted futurism to the Russian context. He reflected on his mission in his own words: “I don’t claim that the term ‘Futurism’ . . . was my invention, but I was incontestably the first to bring it to the street, the first to make it known in a public declaration.”[5]
Iliazd first encountered Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos in Tiflis in 1911. There he learned the texts by heart, then organized and led debates and discussions on the principles of Futurism in Saint Petersburg. In 1913, he grew close to Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, co-authored the Futurist manifesto Pochemu my raskrashivayemsya (Why We Paint Ourselves) (fig. 2), which promoted Futurist face painting, and, under the pseudonym Eli Eganbury, published a catalog of these artists.[6] In the revolutionary year of 1917, he settled in Tiflis and became deeply involved in Futurist poetry and publishing. There, alongside Aleksei Kruchenykh (fig. 3), Iliazd emerged as both an inventor and an advocate of the Futurist language zaum. Together with Kruchenykh, Igor Terentiev, and his brother, the artist Kirill Zdanevich, Iliazd established Futurist university 41°, an initiative under whose name he would carry forward his work throughout his life. It was in Tiflis, during the years of the Russian Civil War, when the city experienced a noticeable influx of artistic immigration, that Iliazd developed as an experimental publisher, pushing the boundaries of typography, printing techniques, and book design (fig. 4). He organized the publication of limited-edition zaum poetry collections, also printed under the 41° imprint. In 1921, he emigrated from Georgia to Paris, after spending a year in Constantinople (now Istanbul) waiting for the approval of his French visa.
Zaum is an experimental, transrational, and trans-mental language intended to go beyond the logical meaning of words and language. Words in zaum mean nothing and were mostly organized phonetically or morphologically (building on existing linguistic roots and prefixes, yet forming undefinable words). It was theorized, developed, and used by Russian Futurists such as Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Terentiev, and Iliazd, mostly in the early 1910s, and then existed parallel to Dada. Their works were included in Poésie. For example, Khlebnikov’s poem Zaklyatiye smekhom (1910, Incantation by Laughter), builds on the Russian word for “laughter” (smekh), incorporating all kinds of impossible prefixes and suffixes. In turn, Kruchenykh’s poems in Poésie are composed of sound-based transcriptions of languages resembling Russian, Ukrainian, or Georgian.
Fig. 2. Photograph of Iliazd and Mikhail Larionov with their painted faces, as published in the manifesto Why We Paint Ourselves (Saint Petersburg, 1913). Retrieved from: Artguide.
Fig. 3. Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh lies in the hands of Mikhail Matyushin and Kazimir Malevich, Saint Petersburg, 1913. Photograph by Karl Bulla. This image, part of the State Mayakovsky Museum collection in Moscow, was acquired through Nikolai Khardzhiev in 1949. Retrieved from: State Mayakovsky Museum.
Fig. 4. Iliazd, typographic composition from the poetry anthology Sofii Georgievne Mel’nikovoi: Fantasticheskii kabachok (To Sofia Georgievna Melnikova: The Fantastic Tavern), (Tiflis, 1919). Retrieved from: National Parliamentary Library of Georgia
Iliazd entered the Parisian scene with bold plans to continue the activities of the 41°. He announced the establishment of the university branch in Paris, within which he organized and delivered lectures on literature and art. He was also active in the circles of Russian artistic émigrés and participated in organizing balls and events associated with L’Union des artistes russes (The Union of Russian Artists) (fig. 5, 6). By 1923, he continued writing works in the zaum language and publishing them. Like many émigrés, Iliazd struggled to make a living, so the union of Russian artists was not the only project he engaged in. Applying his visual taste and artistic skills, he appeared in the world of the Paris fashion industry. He apprenticed in the couture shop of the artist and fashion designer Sonia Delaunay, and in 1926, he began designing fabrics for Coco Chanel. He then married a fashion model, Simone-Axèle Brocard, but the marriage ended in 1935, on the eve of the Second World War. In the 1940s, he began publishing luxurious editions of books, still under the 41° imprint, and began his lifelong collaboration with Pablo Picasso. It was in occupied Paris, in 1943, that Iliazd met his second wife, Ibironke Akinsemoyin, Nigerian royalty, soon after she had been released from internment as a British citizen by German occupation forces. The marriage did not last long, as Akinsemoyin had contracted tuberculosis in the internment camp and died from the disease in 1945. Poésie de mots inconnus includes poetry that Akinsemoyin wrote, dedicating it to her and Iliazd’s son, Chalva, in her native Yorùbá.[7]
The later years of Iliazd’s life were marked by his final marriage to Hélène Douard-Mairé, who supported him in his work and legacy, as well as his continued production of luxe editions and collaborations with renowned modernist artists until his death in 1975.[8]
Fig. 5. Mikhail Larionov, Invitation to the Grand Bal Travesti Transmental, organized by L’Union des artistes russes, 1923, typographic print on paper. From the collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, on loan from the Khardzhiev-Chaga Foundation.
Fig. 6. Iliazd, The Program Design for the Grand Bal Travesti Transmental, organized by L’Union des artistes russes, 1923, typographic print on paper. Courtesy of Iliazd Estate.
In English, Poésie de mots inconnus means “poetry of unknown words.” The book’s beauty, craftsmanship, and the renowned artists who collaborated on its creation have drawn attention from both scholars and auction houses specialists. It has been called “the first anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry from the twentieth-century avant-garde to appear in print,”[9] making it an unsurprising subject of study. In her research on Poésie, cultural critic and visual theorist Johanna Drucker delves into the dispute between Iliazd and the Romanian poet Isidore Isou, the inventor of Lettrism, who claimed a pioneering role in visual and sound poetry. With the Lettrist artistic movement, Isou declared that letters would be used in ways other than forming words, because words had compromised themselves and were “killed” by wartime propaganda. Instead, letters would become new signs, and Lettrism was a principle for ordering them. He argued that this “poetry of letters” preceded other poetic language experiments, including those of Futurist artists in imperial Russia and Dadaists.
At some point, Isou resorted to personal attacks on Iliazd, sabotaging his lectures held within university 41°. During one such public debate on Dada in 1947, tensions escalated into a physical altercation, with the artist Camille Bryen struck on the head with a chair.[10] The degree of debates in postwar Paris’s art scene peaked. Iliazd could not accept Isou’s false claims and the historical inaccuracies in his efforts to promote Lettrism. The poetry anthology Poésie de mots inconnus became Iliazd’s ultimate response to Isou’s attacks. It was the culmination of meticulous work to gather visual and sound poetry and to enlist artists for the book’s illustrations, aiming to demonstrate the historical precedence and repute of the included poets over Lettrism.
The anthology reflects Iliazd’s nature, his principles, and his commitment to justice and precision. The book includes works by twenty-one poets, with the earliest poems dating between 1910–13 (Velimir Khlebnikov’s works) and the most recent from Antonin Artaud, dated 1947–48. The colophon, located on the book’s third page, provides detailed information about the principles of the anthology (fig. 7). Texts without bibliographic references are published here for the first time, while previously published works include references to their original collection and the year of their first publication. The language of the book is French, but the collected poetry is written in other “transrational” languages as well. The colophon notes that texts in German, English, French, and Yorùbá are given in their transcription (as sound poetry is the largely untranslatable), and Russian Cyrillic texts are transcribed using Latin characters. The selected texts were then orchestrated by Iliazd in collaboration with artists, transforming each page into a text-visual artwork,[11] with an additional auditory dimension when the poetry is read aloud.
Fig. 7. Sheet 3 featuring the book colophon and an engraving by Óscar Domínguez. Iliazd, Poésie de mots inconnus. From the collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photograph by the author.
The construction of such a multimodal artwork can be analyzed in various ways. For instance, we can deconstruct the book by examining its material qualities, such as typography and design choices, in the context of Iliazd’s personal history and motivations. However, the book’s non-material qualities, as well as its perception as a whole, are more challenging to fully describe. Art historian Sarah Wilson encountered similar difficulties. In her assessment of Poésie, she references an edition from an unnamed private collection. Reproduced in the publication, the book appears as Iliazd intended—with loose folded pages stored in a case. Wilson notes that the book was printed in the Baton typeface, as in later works Iliazd’s logically anticipating his later transition to the softer Gill Sans. She also highlights that Georgian, Iliazd’s mother tongue, is an ancient and predominantly oral language[12]—a significant influence on Iliazd, we note, as well as on Kruchenykh and Terentiev during their years spent together in the Caucasus when zaum was invented.
Examining the book’s colophon further, we read that 157 copies were to be printed on Isle de France paper, of which 115 were numbered. Forty-one copies were numbered using Roman numerals and were intended for Iliazd’s compagnons (companions who contributed to the book’s content), while copies marked pour le dépôt (for the French copyright office) were designated as letters A and B. However, it was later established that there was likely a mistake in the print run number listed in the colophon. As a result, modern scholarship adjusts the official print run on Isle de France paper to 158.[13]
Further details in the colophon reveal that 13 proof copies of the book were produced: 10 on Chinese paper and 3 on vellum, raising the total number of copies made to 171. Judging by the appearance of the case for the copies on Chinese paper, it seems this edition was never intended to be folded.[14] The engravings in this edition are signed by the artists, and the pages function more as art objects than as a book—albeit an exquisitely crafted one.
Interestingly, even among the 158 copies on Isle de France paper, some are found unfolded, and are referred to as “exemplaires à plat” (flat copies)—a term mentioned to me by an auction house. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has digitized and made available online one such unfolded copy. Wilson observes that this digital version of the book fails to replicate the tactile and visual experience inherently offered by encountering the book in person. She also notes that the names of the artists and poets featured in the book are “given on the verso of each page,”[15] a detail true only for these flat exemplars, though the reasons for leaving them unfolded remain unknown. In Iliazd’s fully realized design, the names appear on the front of the folded pages, showcasing his visionary mastery and exceptional execution.
The Stedelijk copy, numbered 105, is the folded version of the book. A video-digitized version of the book is now available, showing the continuous process of unfolding and folding the pages as envisioned by the creator.[16] This digitized version is one of the compagnon editions but closely resembles the Stedelijk copy, except for variations in the colophon’s copy information and traces of individual use. Interestingly, each page in the Stedelijk copy is interleaved with tracing paper, likely added by a previous owner to preserve the book.
Perhaps the most detailed and “mathematically” precise description of Poésie de mots inconnus to date is offered by librarian and researcher David Sume. He analyzes its architectural structure through Le Corbusier’s theories, supporting his research with evidence of Iliazd’s professional knowledge of architecture. Sume examines the book’s rhythm, the placement of texts relative to illustrations, and even visualizes detailed diagrams.[17] He notes the symmetry in Iliazd’s books, particularly in Poésie: “all sheets are folded in quarters, and all feature texts and printed illustrations on the inner, recto face. All but three sheets include a printed credit on the lower right verso quadrant, which when folded, face forward.”[18] An exception is Sheet 11, which Sume identifies as having its credits on the lower left verso quadrant—he speculates this page may be a misprint.[19] However, given Iliazd’s meticulous approach, this seems unlikely. Copies available to me (MoMA’s scan, the Stedelijk edition, and the video digitization) all feature this design. This “error,” which could have been corrected during the printing of any of the copies, has been preserved. Sheet 11 unfolds from right to left, unlike the other pages, a choice that appears intentional.
Iliazd’s books are difficult to read because they demand active engagement and time from the reader. Opening an anthology of “unknown words” does not permit immediate comprehension—they must be studied, pronounced aloud, and memorized. Even for a Russian speaker, reading Khlebnikov’s works in Latin transcription is challenging (fig. 8), while Kruchenykh’s sound-based poetry cannot be interpreted as actual words (fig. 9). This explains Iliazd’s insistence: Ne coupez pas mes pages (Don’t cut my pages). Readers must interact with each sheet at length, taking time to figure out how it works, exploring it visually, tactically, and aurally—a multisensory experience that cannot be replicated by digitization and is orchestrated by the rhythm of the movements required for physically engaging with the book. The symmetry and asymmetry of the page designs serve as yet another reminder to the reader of how to interact with the poetic works being presented.
Fig. 8. Sheet 18 featuring three poems by Velimir Khlebnikov and an engraving by Marc Chagall. Iliazd, Poésie de mots inconnus. From the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photograph by the author.
Fig. 9. Sheet 19 featuring three poems by Aleksei Kruchenykh and an engraving by Alberto Giacometti. Iliazd, Poésie de mots inconnus. From the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photograph by the author.
Iliazd designed each sheet to foster prolonged engagement and interaction. Poetry collections are not read like novels with a linear plot. The book adds another dimension through the rustling of paper and the sounds of Russian, German, and Yorùbá languages when read aloud. Among the artistic elite, particularly the pre-revolutionary avant-garde in imperial Russia, the ability to perform memorized quotes was essential. In today’s Kindle era, it may be hard to imagine, but during the First World War and later the Russian Civil War, there was periodically a shortage of paper. Russian magazines and poetry collections often announced, in issues preceding their next publication, a twofold or greater price increase per issue due to rising paper costs. Consequently, books were sometimes unbound or disassembled into separate pages for the purpose of sharing among readers. In its form of disassembled, folded pages, the book reflects this historical mode of existence of modernist poetry—designed to be shared, enacted and performed (fig. 10)—while also, in a postmodern manner, humorously commenting on notions of incompleteness, amateurism, and nostalgia: “Don’t cut my pages,” says the keeper of the Futurists’ spirit.
Fig. 10. Still from the film Ne dlya deneg rodivshiysya (Not Born for Money), 1918. Poets David Burliuk (holding a lorgnette and a notepad) and Vladimir Mayakovsky are shown standing in the setting of a poetry café, decorated by Futurists. Photograph by E.O. Slavinsky. From the collection of the State Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow. Retrieved from: State Mayakovsky Museum.
The focus of this description of Poésie is to explore the Stedelijk copy and share its story. The museum copy has not yet been added to the collection of art objects and is currently stored as part of Khardzhiev’s library. However, I believe that, in time, this copy will have its own exhibition history.[20]
The Stedelijk copy is numbered 105, signed by Iliazd and dated 14/2/51 in pencil. As seen in other examples available online, Iliazd most often signed his books with an ordinary pencil. Books with Roman numerals, dedicated to his compagnons, were apparently signed with a red pencil, often accompanied by a personal dedication. A book of this quality, produced in a limited edition, was immediately valued by specialists.[21] There is no reason to believe that anyone other than Iliazd himself could have added an inscription or dedication on the colophon page. This is precisely what makes the Stedelijk copy of Poésie so distinctive—it appears to bear a personal dedication, likely written by Iliazd but then erased.
Because of the paper’s slightly rough surface, it is immediately apparent that another pencil inscription once existed beneath Iliazd’s signature. The erased text is now visible only as faint graphite traces and an impressed outline. The inscription was written in my native Russian, in Cyrillic script, unlike the rest of the book’s text, which made me feel especially drawn to this copy. By holding the page up to the light, the erased text becomes legible: для Крученых 24755 (for Kruchenykh 24755) (fig. 11). Four years, five months, and ten days after signing the book, Iliazd inscribed a dedication to his friend, the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, with whom he had worked closely before moving to Paris. This dedication was written in Poésie, which published Kruchenykh’s poems, alongside an etching by Alberto Giacometti (fig. 9).
But how can we be sure that Iliazd himself wrote the inscription? Was the book ever in Kruchenykh’s hands? If so, how did it make its way to the Soviet Union? Why did it end up with Nikolai Khardzhiev, and who, ultimately, erased the dedication? Given the book’s value, it is unlikely that anyone aware of its importance would have written in it other than Iliazd himself. Furthermore, the date is written in Iliazd’s characteristic single-line style, and the handwriting of the erased dedication closely matches another note he wrote just a week earlier in a copy of his book Pismo (The Letter), now part of the Van Abbemuseum collection in Eindhoven.[22] Additionally, since Iliazd printed copies of Poésie specifically for his compagnons in its creation, it is reasonable to assume that he would have wanted to give a copy to Kruchenykh if the opportunity arose.[23]
All these clues led me to conclude that the erased dedication was written by Iliazd. But how to answer the remaining questions? There is no trace of correspondence between Iliazd and Kruchenykh in the 1950s. The last known thread of their published correspondence, mentioning the exchange of books and periodicals, ends in 1924.[24] There are no records in the catalog of archival materials from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where Iliazd’s legacy is preserved,[25] nor in the Aleksei Kruchenykh archive in Moscow,[26] mentioning documents or books they might have exchanged. Could the book have been brought to the Soviet Union by Vasily Katanyan, a receiver of the dedication in the copy of Pismo?[27] Did Kruchenykh ever see this copy of Poésie? If so, who erased the dedication, and why?
Fig. 11. Close-up shot of Sheet 3 featuring the book’s colophon and an erased dedication by Iliazd. Iliazd, Poésie de mots inconnus. From the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photograph by the author.
In highly logocentric cultures like Russian and, later, Soviet, books carry immense importance. They have bypassed censorship, been circulated privately, copied by hand or retyped on typewriters. They have carried stories of their usage, and sometimes disappeared from one person’s possession, only to reappear with someone else. Interestingly, Olga Setnitskaya, historian, bibliographer, and longtime friend of Kruchenykh, mentions in her diary the disappearance of some books from his apartment. “Camilla Gray’s book The Russian Art as The Great Experiment and a chrestomathy—an anthology of Russian poetry in French and Russian languages—have gone missing. Chaos, hopelessness, soul crushing,”[28] she concludes. It is unlikely that this diary entry from February 7, 1968 refers to Poésie. But still, there is a small chance that this elusive book, with its history of evading description, may have escaped proper documentation here as well. In the end, would someone erase an inscription unless the book had reached them under less-than-honest circumstances?
In her diaries, Setnitskaya refers to Khardzhiev and herself as Kruchenykh’s only friends in the latter part of his life. After Kruchenykh’s death in the summer of 1968, a portion of his materials was entrusted to Khardzhiev. The two worked closely for years; collaborated on a book about the history of Russian futurism—a project that was never realized—united by their long friendship and shared ideas.
While we can identify who wrote the dedication, we may never know who erased it. Yet this unique feature makes this particular copy of Poésie de mots inconnus all the more significant, adding another layer of intrigue to its already complex history.
Daria Kobzeva is an art historian and former intern at the Research and Curatorial Practice department at the SMA, where she studied materials from Nikolai Khardzhiev’s library. She holds a Research Master’s degree in Art and Visual Culture from Radboud University. Her interests include global art histories, archives, and the historical avant-garde in Europe.
[1] Ilia Zdanevich began using the signature Iliazd, an anagram of his full name, after his immigration to France in 1921. Throughout the article, I refer to him as Iliazd for simplicity and consistency.
[2] The library inventory was written in Russian. The library collection includes books in non-European languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, which cannot be read without knowledge of the respective languages and their logographic writing systems, or without the use of automatic image translation tools.
[3] Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned animal skins, buffalo skin in the case of Poésie de mots inconnus. Iliazd’s artistic mastery and his attention to detail are emphasized by the fact that both the bookcase, in the shape of an envelope, and the book cover, adorned with an original illustration by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, were made without a single seam. This fact is mentioned in a transcript from a video interview in Russian with curator and artists’ books collector Boris Fridman, by Natella Voiskunskaya, “Vsechuvstviya Ilyazdа” (All the feelings of Iliazd), Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 50, no. 1 (2016).
[4] The total number of contributing artists is twenty-three. In addition to those mentioned on the first book cover, the contributors include Georges Braque, Camille Bryen, Marc Chagall, Serge Férat, Alberto Giacometti, Albert Gleizes, Raoul Hausmann, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, Alberto Magnelli, André Masson, Jean Metzinger, Joan Miró, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Léopold Survage, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Edgard Tytgat, and Wols, all of whom participated in the design of the book.
[5] Quoted in Johanna Drucker, Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), ePub.
[6] The catalog Eli Eganbury, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (Ts. A. Münster, 1913), was written by Iliazd and has long held significant importance for researchers studying Larionov’s work. As Iliazd wrote in a 1970 letter to Nikolai Khardzhiev:
The Eganbury book is indeed mine. For a long time, my authorship was denied here (Larionov said that “the author is some Caucasian”) and there has been a campaign against it, pushed into Waldemar George’s book on Larionov: all my dates are supposedly dubious, and the inventory incomplete.
Larionov, in his later years, tried at all costs to prove that he was the one who invented non-objective art and that Rayonism was non-objective. For this, he had to alter dates to earlier ones and fabricate paintings that are not listed in my inventory.
The result is that my dates, selflessly established on-site in Moscow jointly with Larionov in 1912, are deemed incorrect, and those falsified fifty years later in Paris contradict me, and my inventory is incomplete (1912). The Eganbury stands across the throat of forgers, and this is its historical merit.
Published in Arkiv N.I. Khardzhieva. Russkii avangard: materialy i dokumenty iz sobraniia RGALI (Archive of N. Khardzhiev. Russian Avant-Garde: Materials and Documents from the RGALI Collection), vol. 3, 256–58. The translation from Russian is my own.
[7] Yorùbá, a West African language spoken primarily in Nigeria, Benin, and parts of Togo and Sierra Leone, is the only non-European language included in the anthology by Iliazd. He featured Ibironke Akinsemoyin’s work on page 4, accompanied by a linogravure by Henri Matisse.
[8] A catalogue published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York includes a chronology of Iliazd’s life: Audrey Isselbacher, Iliazd and the Illustrated Book (The Museum of Modern Art, 1987). For additional sources on Iliazd, his life, and work, see a list available at The Iliazd Project.
[9] Drucker, Iliazd.
[10] Sarah Wilson, “Iliazd’s Poésie des mots inconnus, 1949: Fighting for the Russian Avant-Garde in Paris,” in The Many Lives of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nikolai Khardzhiev’s Legacy: New Contexts, ed. Dennis Ioffe and Frederick H. White, Pegasus Oost-Europese Studies 32 (Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2019), 323.
[11] A list of each author-artist pair is available in David Sume, “The Architectural Nature of the Illustrated Books of Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevich, 1894–1975),” PhD diss., (Université de Montréal, 2018), 156.
[12] Wilson, “Iliazd’s Poésie des mots inconnus,” 326. Another interesting feature of the Georgian language that influences its visual perception, and is worth mentioning, is the absence of capital letters. In Iliazd’s earliest typographic publications, he “played” with letter case.
[13] “Galerie Iliazd,” Imprimerie Union.
[14] The proof copies are numbered as 1, 2, 3, and so on, out of a total of 13. For example, see the copy numbered 4 out of 13 that was sold on February 4, 2020, at Christie’s.
[15] Wilson, “Iliazd’s Poésie des mots inconnus,” 328.
[16] Axis Point Studio, “Animation of Poésie de mots inconnus, complete,” Insights. From the de Young and Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).
[17] See Figure 4.10A. Core, Poésie de mots inconnus, and Figure 4.10B. Core, Poésie de mots inconnus, in Sume, “The Architectural Nature of the Illustrated Books of Iliazd,” 149–50.
[18] Ibid., 189.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Major museum exhibitions of Iliazd’s works include venues such as Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, New York (2019); Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1987); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1978); and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (1976).
[21] The presentation of the book’s pages took place on June 30, 1949, at the Galerie Graphique Thesée in Paris. A day earlier, Iliazd held a press conference dedicated to the book. For photographs of the exhibition poster and invitation, see https://www.christies.com/.
[22] An inscription in a copy of Pismo (The Letter) is dedicated to the literary scholar Vasily Abgarovich Katanyan, the husband of Lilya Brik, with the note in Russian: “In memory of the Paris meeting, Iliazd 17/7/55.” It is most plausible to assume that the copy of Poésie was brought from Paris to Kruchenykh in Moscow with Katanyan. I thank Anna Tchitcherine for help in deciphering this inscription. LS Collection, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Iliazd, Pismo (Paris: 41°, 1948). See https://ls.vanabbemuseum.nl/.
[23] The other Russian poets whose works are included in the book are Velimir Khlebnikov and Igor Terentiev. However, Khlebnikov died in 1922, and Terentiev was executed in 1937, so long before the book publication.
[24] Letters from Kruchenykh to Iliazd are held in his archive in Paris and were published in Russian Literary Avant-Garde: Materials and Studies, ed. Marzio Marzaduri, Daniela Rizzi, and Mikhail Evzlin (University of Trento, 1990), 143–44. Letters from Iliazd to Kruchenykh were part of the Khardzhiev collection and were published in the aforementioned Archive of N. Khardzhiev, 298–310.
[25] “Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevitch, 1894–1975),” Archives et Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Another part of Iliazd’s archive is in Marseille.
[26] “Kruchenykh Aleksei Eliseevich (1886–1968),” fond 1334, inv. 1 and 2, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow.
[27] The July 18, 1955 entry in Lilya Brik’s diary says: “Iliazd came by and gifted his books,” unfortunately without specifying which books, and there is no explanation as to why the dedication to Kruchenykh is dated a week after the meeting with Brik. Published in Vasily V. Katanyan, Lilya Brik. Zhizn’ (Lilya Brik: Life) (Zaharov, 2002), 212.
[28] Olga Setnitskaya, “Encounters with Aleksei Kruchenykh (from Diary Entries),” in Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 195. The translation from Russian is my own. The slightly inaccurate rendering of the title of Camilla Gray’s book has also been preserved; the correct title is The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922.
