Kruchenykh and the Russian futurists

I know it's blackout day today, but I post when I have spoons. Sorry. This one is for sovay , because we got to talking about the Russian futurists, and I asked sovay who was her favorite; the name Kruchenykh came up.

Aleksei Kruchenykh is most well known for his invention of zaum', literally 'beyond the mind', a word that in Russian came to denote a language and discourse so convoluted as to be nonsensical. Today zaum' is often used to describe especially gratuitous academic prose (which is especially piquant since Kruchenykh, in his early theoretical period, authored a pamphlet entitled "The Secret Flaws of Academics"). The original meaning of  zaum' (zaum' poetry especially) for Kruchenykh and his circle was producing words and sentences which seemed nonsensical or senseless, but which resembled 'real' words or sentences/constructions, and thus could be processed by analogy. This actually works and is rather neat, though the meanings extracted from zaum' by analogy tend to be vague.

For example, Kruchenykh authored the following five-liner, which happens to be one of the most famous futurist poems:

дыр бул щыл
убешщур
скум
вы со бу
р л эз

Let me transliterate:

dyr bul schyl
ubeshschur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez

There is not a single recognizable element in this poem, yet it sounds familiar to a Russian ear. I cannot tell you what it means, though Kruchenykh himself claimed that those five lines contain more Russian national spirit than the totality of Pushkin's poetry.

Kruchenykh was also an artist, and it is his artistic endeavors that intrigue me the most. During WWI and the Revolution Kruchenykh lived in Tiflis (Tbilisi), where he founded an incredibly curious futurist collective - together with the Zdanevich brothers and some others - titled 41°. While other futurist groups were more politically inclined, this one was doing things for the benefit of the future cognitive scientists, or something along these lines. Kruchenykh and the Zdaneviches collaborated on some books. It is in Tiflis that Kruchenykh's interest in twisted letterpress really blossomed. Look:

     



Now, some of you will tell me that you can as easily do this in Adobe Photoshop or Gimp or whatever. Sure. But how many do? Kruchenykh did crazy things with the letterpress.   I don't know anybody else who did anything like that. Yes, many futurists experimented with the placement of words on the page, but they all drew by hand. This is letterpress. If anyone of my readers here ever worked on a letterpress, you can imagine exactly how easy it is to do something like that; it requires great ingenuity. He was not afraid to do such things. He invented things that seemingly couldn't interest anyone, and then he did them. If you think about the historical/technological context, then either words can go every which way - if you draw them - or they can go straight and be mass-produced on a letterpress. But here is Kruchenykh in his letter-manipulating glee. 

I need to go to sleep, so this is going to be it.