Война [War]: futurist publishing as a reflection on wartime reality

While the completed publication contains 15 plates, a combination of linocut images by Rozanova and texts by Kruchenykh, cut and printed by Rozanova in the same manner, the Stedelijk only has a few pages from the publication, with 3 of them being labeled as an artwork. The cover and a few cutouts featuring poetry by Kruchenykh are yet to be labeled as art and now exist in an archival limbo. Yet this specific artifact can tell us so much about the time and conditions in which it was created, if only we let it. So let’s take a closer look.

While the audience is often used to viewing the avant-garde from a specific perspective: clean, polished, commercialized, with a strong focus on painting and abstraction, and with a particular emphasis on popular (male) names such as Malevich and Lissitzky, the avant-garde movement in the Russian Empire from 1910 to 1917 was an intertwined network of individual practices. Numerous collaborations, short-lived duos, collectives, and continuous exchange were at the heart of the movement.

The Russian avant-garde was perhaps united by one thing: the search for a new language. This wasn’t just a transformation of the visual language, but a revolution in linguistics and word forming as well, which went hand in hand with ambitions for total transformation of culture and society. One of the answers for this urgency was Zaum (За́умь), a literary technique that consists in the complete or partial rejection of all or some elements of natural language and their replacement with other elements or constructions, by analogy comprehended as linguistic.

According to Kruchenykh in the Declaration of the word as such (1913), Zaum can be considered as the most radical way of “increasing the vocabulary in its volume by derivative and arbitrary words”, being one of the ways to work on a “self-valuable (self-sufficient) word”. It had the right to be expressed “not only in a common language (concepts), but also in a personal one (the creator is individual), and in a language that does not have a definite meaning (not frozen), abstruse.” This is perhaps expressed most prominently in the 1912 manifesto for the Russian futurist movement Slap in the face of public taste, which proved to be influential and important piece of literature.¹ Zaum is therefore both a language and a type of poetry specific to futurist writing. With the visual and linguistic means of artistic expression merging within a futurist publication, Zaum expanded beyond word to illustration, painting amongst other mediums.

The search for new language sparked waves of innovation and experimentation with both the word itself and the means of its distribution. I am talking about the phenomenon of futurist publication, which traditionally includes a group of small-circulation poetic collections of futurist poets illustrated by avant-garde artists. An important feature of the futuristic book is its unusual visual solution, which, in addition to demonstrating new artistic techniques, also aimed to shock the bourgeois public.

While more artist groups were engaged in futurist book making, the productions associated with Kruchenykh’s name stand out. It was Kruchenykh, who, not without reason, considered himself the “first representative” of abstruse (Zaum) poetry began to actively collaborate with artists, involving them in publishing activities.

Kruchenykh’s futuristic books collected on their pages almost all the major masters of avant-garde: Mikhail Larionov, Nataliya Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Olga Rozanova, Nikolai Kulbin, amongst others.

In 1916 Rozanova designed Abnormal Rot, which presents texts by Alexey Kruchenykh himself and Roman Alyagrov (also known as Roman Yakobson), and became famous for the statement: “I forbid reading in my right mind.” The publication adopted the basic principles of abstruseness – fragmentation, alogism, shift, dissonance, minimalism. Different art disciplines played and equal part and were used as a multidisciplinary way of expression, hence the handwritten and lithographed books in which illustrations played an equal part with poetry and texts, often becoming a graphic composition.

Around this time Kruchenykh and Rozanova collaborated closely on several projects, maintaining correspondence even through wartime. Kruchenykh himself credits Rozanova with the discovery of abstraction (which he calls non-objectivity or non-representation) in both verbal and visual language. Rozanova’s development of Zaum painting became dominant and later transformed into the suprematism of Kazimir Malevich and Ivan Puni. Rozanova and Kruchenykh’s Zaum poetry, combined with progressively more abstract illustrations, inspired Malevich’s first theoretical work on the future of suprematist poetry, which operates with masses of sounds that, he believes, do not yet exist.

Returning to the pages in the depot. In 1916, Война (War), was published, along with a few other publications, belonging to “wartime” folders by Goncharova, Rozanova and Kruchenykh. It became the final step in the transformation of the Russian futuristic book from word to image. It is significant that even text pages with poems by Kruchenykh, “carved out” by Rozanova, are perceived as independent easel images.

While developing the book, on July 20, 1915, Rozanova wrote to Andrei Shemshurin, who offered to publish her engravings and engraved texts of Kruchenykh’s poems in the form of an album: “It would be nice to print wartime engravings for a change – some drawings – in 3 and 2 colors […] Manual printing method has, unfortunately, the disadvantage that some pictures are printed sloppily, and the advantage of the method is that it gives an exceptional texture […] It’s nice to spread the printing method laconic and not trivial”. Rozanova rightly considered this edition (album “War”) her highest achievement in “printed creativity”.

This revolutionary publication, both in format and content, was a direct response to the artists’ reality. The Russian Empire, having just gone through the 1905-1907 revolution, enters WW1 in 1914. First met with enthusiasm by many, participation in the war brought nothing but death, loss and disillusionment to the state. And “Война” reflects the Zeitgeist with painful sharpness.

The texts inside are a combination of Zaum poetry resembling the sounds metal weapons make, more poetic texts such as: “with eyes closed he saw a bullet, it was slowly crawling for a kiss”, and quotes from newspapers of the time such as: “with horror I remember seeing with my own eyes the crucified (by German army) bodies, hanging upside down”. Filled with imagery of not only mythological but also very real battlefields, soldiers and their dead bodies, arms and weapons, the book screams of the terrors of war.

This book is a brilliant proof that avant-garde artists were not only masters of abstraction as a new language of the early 20th century, but also politically engaged thinkers who reflected on the horrors of war. Through these publications, artists aimed to bring social issues into the light of a public discussion, which was crucially important in a time of pain and unrest. The futurist books were not just books with illustrations; they became verbal-visual objects in which the poetic and artistic levels were closely intertwined, violating any linear order of the text.