by Iliazd
4.
Iliazd did not disappear with his novel. He landed on his cat’s feet and refashioned himself. By 1930, he had enough money to publish Rapture because he had been working successfully as a textile designer for Coco Chanel. His interest in fashion was nothing new. After all, he had praised the supreme artifice of Paul Poiret in his 1914 face-painting lecture on changeability and infidelity.94 Sonia Delaunay recruited him to paint shawls in 1922 and he had gone back to working with textiles after being fired from the Soviet embassy in 1926.95 In September 1926 he married Simone-Axele Brocard, one of Chanel’s models, and went to work in 1927 for a textile factory that was acquired the next year by Chanel. On Serge Diaghilev’s recommendation, she appointed him as head designer. He even invented and patented a new weaving machine that was adopted in all of Chanel’s factories. In 1931, he became a factory director, but resigned two years later.
Iliazd took a break from writing novels, none of which, aside from Rapture, was published in his lifetime. He returned to his interest in church architecture. In 1933, he supplemented the drawings he had made of Byzantine, Georgian, and Armenian churches during his 1917 expedition and his 1921 layover in Istanbul with new drawings of Romanesque round churches he visited in Spain. This accumulation of material provided the basis for a series of presentations at Byzantinist congresses over the next four decades. In the 1960s, he was able to extend his comparisons through travel and study in Yugoslavia, Greece, and on Crete, as well. When his wife left him with two children in 1935, Iliazd planned to move to Spain permanently, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War intervened. He was rejected when he tried to enlist in an international brigade on the Republican side and never returned to Spain again after Franco’s victory. For a time, homeless and unemployed, he survived thanks primarily to help from friends—Picasso foremost, but also Tzara.
In 1938, Iliazd took a step toward printing the first of his meticulously designed books with work by leading artists. This undertaking would seal his artistic legacy in Western Europe. He returned to writing poetry—now, as for most of his subsequent work, operating within the constraints of traditional sonnet form, in five-foot iambs, and constructing entire “crowns” of sonnets. The cycle “Afet” provided the text for his first livre d’artiste under the revived 41° imprint. Iliazd worked, as he would for the rest of his life, with l’Imprimerie Union, the same Russian-founded printing house where his Dada associate Sergei Romov had worked before moving to the USSR in 1928 and where Apollinaire’s Calligrammes had been typeset. Picasso provided etchings, the first of many for Iliazd’s editions. They collaborated right up to Picasso’s death in 1973. From the start, Iliazd’s careful planning of every aspect of his editions set them apart. Louis Barnier, a later director of l’Imprimerie Union, remarked, “When some publisher released a livre d’artiste with work by Picasso, Rouault, Bonnard, they were books by Picasso, Rouault, Bonnard, but when Iliazd published a livre d’artiste with work by Picasso, Giacometti, Miró, Ernst, they were books by Iliazd.”96 Through the 1960s, Iliazd funded his publishing by searching out rare books for an antiquarian shop, where he was paid a small commission.
During the occupation of France, Iliazd met and married a Nigerian princess, Ibi Ronke Akinsemoyin, who was studying at the Sorbonne and who gave birth to his third child. Akinsemoyin died in May 1945, seven months after the liberation of Paris, from the tuberculosis she contracted during her internment as a British subject. I have already mentioned Iliazd’s postwar anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words. The collection was not only directed against the Lettristes. It also included one of Akinsemoyin’s poems and served as yet another memorial in print, further confirming what was evident already in Rapture—beyonsense had become, for Iliazd, a language of mourning. Many of Iliazd’s late poetic cycles, in fact, are explicitly conceived as memorials for Republican soldiers of the Spanish Civil War and for French Resistance fighters of the Second World War. The extravagant splendor of The Poetry of Unknown Words, graced by the work of twenty-two artists, far exceeded the needs of Iliazd’s polemic, and it has become a classic of the livre d’artiste genre.
Iliazd spent much of his time after the war with Picasso in the South of France, experimenting with ceramics alongside the artist. There he met the ceramicist Hélène Douard-Mairé, who became his constant companion and, in 1968, his third wife. From the early 1950s, Iliazd was able to pursue his publishing work on a continual basis. Iliazd’s inventive “books” were not so much bound codices as specially designed cases containing carefully arranged leaves of different kinds of printed and unprinted paper. Marcel Duchamp was sufficiently impressed by Iliazd’s attention to technical as well as visual design to engage him for a new edition of his Boîte-en-valise. During this period, Iliazd chose to print texts not just from his own and others’ modern poetry, but also from material he excavated from library archives. He published obscure travelers’ accounts of his native Georgia, baroque French poetry, and, in one of his most spectacular editions, 65 Maximiliana, or the Illegal Exercise of Astronomy (1964, with Max Ernst), Romantic treatises on astronomy. His final book, Adrien de Monluc’s Le Courtesan Grotesque, illustrated by Miró’s etchings with aquatint, appeared at the end of 1974, a year before his death. Any of Iliazd’s editions incorporating his archival finds might serve to illustrate how poets benefit by being “forgotten.”
Iliazd’s fame has always been fragmented among the many phases of his life and the many roles he has played. Book artists and collectors have long valued his Parisian publications, and historians of modern art are aware of his collaborations with Picasso, Giacometti, Ernst, and Miró. This body of work, tied to some of the most readily recognized names in modern art, has supported Iliazd’s fame in Western Europe and the United States. The Centre Georges Pompidou presented an exhibition dedicated to his artists’ books in 1978, followed in 1987 by another at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A 1976 exhibit at the Paris Museum of Modern Art focused on his collaborations with Picasso. Johanna Drucker, an accomplished printer in her own right and now a pioneering professor of digital humanities and media studies, emerged from this milieu. She proposed the first (unrealized) plan for a synthetic biography of Iliazd while working closely with his widow, Hélène Zdanevich.
Other audiences have concentrated on Iliazd’s Futurist phase. Slavists in Western Europe and the United States, like Russian audiences, have long been familiar with Iliazd’s Futurist work, but are generally unaware of his later career publishing artists’ books.97 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was given a major exhibition in Georgia. And his beyonsense books have also held a prominent place in exhibitions dealing with the Russian avant-garde in general. Only now, however, are all the aspects of Iliazd’s life and work being brought together. A retrospective exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts opened in December 2015. Although initiated by a new generation of Russian book collectors, it was dedicated to Iliazd’s entire career. For many Russians, who know nothing of his life after his departure for Paris, the exhibit was a revelation.
Until now, Iliazd’s prose from the 1920s and his more “traditional” poetry written from the late 1930s until the end of his life constitute the most neglected segment of his output. Beaujour published fragments of a 1928 novel titled Posthumous Works in 1987 and 1988, but none of Iliazd’s unpublished novels were available in full before Kudriavtsev’s Gileia published Parisites: An Inventory in 1995.98 Letters to Morgan Phillips Price followed in 2005, and Philosophia anchored the 2008 collection of Iliazd’s writings.99 His late poems existed only in luxurious limited editions held by libraries’ special collections and private collectors, out of reach for most readers. Their texts have now been collected into a single volume published in 2014 by Gileia, unavoidably stripped of Iliazd’s elaborate visual settings.100 Gayraud, along with André Markowicz, has been translating Iliazd into French since the 1980s and has now accumulated a substantial body of work. This long-overdue debut will be the first comple
te literary work by Iliazd available in English. And my introduction has been a rare attempt to hang on to this Proteus long enough to begin to see him whole, to herd these many cats’ lives into one.
POSTLUDE
Just as the end of Russian Futurism around 1925 had triggered a flood of memoirs and retrospective work among its participants, the 1960s initiated a cascade of golden anniversaries and important birthdays for the international avant-garde more generally. Iliazd wrote a series of French memoirs, first in response to a meeting in 1962 with the Italian Futurist, Ardengo Soffici, who asked him to tell the story of Russian Futurism.101 He extended this memoir in 1965 with “Approaching Éluard,” an account of artistic life in Paris in the 1920s intended as a preface to a book of Éluard’s poems, and then again in 1968 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 41°. Meanwhile, his brother Kirill was given permission to visit France in November 1966, their first direct contact since 1921. His last book with Picasso was likewise retrospective. In Pirosmanashvili 1914, Iliazd reprinted his early article on Niko Pirosmani, the Georgian artist who had meant most to him at the beginning of his career. Its frontispiece is a drypoint portrait of Pirosmani by Picasso, the artist who meant most to him at the end, etched solely on the basis of Iliazd’s anecdotes and reminiscences of the earlier painter. It was released in December 1972, just months before Picasso’s death, a year prior to Iliazd’s own eightieth birthday celebration. Drucker has written of this project,
Drawing to the end of his energies, Iliazd had evidently wished this book to perform a double closure: as the end of the cycle of large books, and as the close of the full cycle of his life’s work. There was a mirroring effect between the beginning and the end, a deliberate, marked recognition of the self-consciousness which had dictated the construction of the oeuvre as a whole.102
Iliazd took an everythingist approach to his own life, pulling together elements from all of its phases. The Caucasian outfit he wore on his Paris strolls with his cats recalled a charming 1916 caricature by LeDantu of the “Fu-tourist” Zdanevich trekking through the mountains followed by a herd of goats.103
Now we are another fifty years on, in the midst of centenary celebrations. I have invoked Dante’s vision as a model that Iliazd “perverts” in Rapture. I would like to end with a longer retrospective glance toward Augustine. Rapture, like Augustine’s Confessions, narrates a series of errors and misplaced longings, and demonstrates the rhetorician’s reformulation of himself and his art toward a new end. Iliazd, like Augustine, contemplates eternity, the arbitrary relation of signs to meaning, and the dream of direct communication in eloquent silence. Confessions is also, in part, the story of Augustine’s shame before the “violent,” less complicated, less educated, monks who “bear away” the Kingdom while he hesitates, slave to other forms of “rapture.” But whereas Augustine famously addressed God at the beginning of his book, saying, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” Iliazd embraced the restlessness and allowed his semiautobiographical hero in Philosophia to identify, with characteristic ambiguity, “a secret in motion.”104 The artist needs to keep moving and changing, but the goal of art is also elusive and unstable. Augustine looked forward to a final transfiguration in resurrection, while Iliazd welcomed ceaseless metamorphoses, the cat’s nine lives, continual rebirth here on earth, even after death. The cat buries the waste product of its digestion. Shit turns to gold.
As though to bring everything full circle, Lili Brik, Mayakovsky’s great love, came to Paris for the opening of an exhibit on the poet. Playing the novel’s “herald of snows,” she paid Iliazd a visit a month before his own death in 1975, on Christmas, like the heroes of Rapture. Hélène found him in the kitchen, still standing up like a tree.105
I would like to thank Dick Davis, translator from Persian, for allowing me to entertain this project many years ago in his class on literary translation at The Ohio State University. I am indebted to the circle of translators who meet once a month with Bobbi Harshav, and to Ross Ufberg, who introduced me to them, for giving me the impetus to complete it. Katia Mitova graciously took time to read and comment on the first chapters. I am also grateful to the editor of Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series, Christine Dunbar, for her enthusiasm and support. Finally, I echo Iliazd’s dedication in thanks, above all, to my wife, Valentina Izmirlieva, and daughter, Hannah.
To my wife and daughter
The snowfall was rapidly rising, revoking the bluebells, then the gravel, and in no time Brother Mocius was striding over whiteness instead of moss and blossoms. It wasn’t cold at first, and the refreshing snowflakes crept down, sticking to his cheeks and sinking into his beard. Through the turbulent air, the valley slopes, studded with crags, had begun to dress up in lace and soon disappeared altogether; and then their outlines trembled, shifted, whirled, and whipped Brother Mocius across the face, freezing and fretting his eyes. The path, hidden from view, slipped frequently out from under his bare feet, and the traveler now and then wound up stumbling into the chinks between drifts. Sometimes his foot got stuck, and Brother Mocius tumbled and floundered, rattling his penitential chains, then got up again with some effort after eating his fill of an icy treat
Finally, trumpets sounded. The winds broke free of the surrounding ridges and, diving into the valley, beat about fiercely, but you couldn’t tell why. On the right, unclean spirits made the most of the disarray by sending up an infernal roar, and from behind, something like violins or the whine of an infant in pain barely bled through the tempest. Voices added to voices, unlike anything recognizable, more often than not. Occasionally, they tried to pass for human, but ineptly—so all this was obviously a contrivance. Someone started romping on the heights, pushing down snow
But Brother Mocius was not afraid and never thought of turning back. Crossing himself from time to time, spitting, wiping his face with his cuff, the monk followed his habitual, easy path along the valley floor. True, of all the rambles he’d had to take through this pass, and, yes, even through the neighboring, less accessible passes, today’s was by far the most unpleasant. Not once had the pilgrim observed such ferocity, especially at this time of year. In August, such fuss. As though this journey were prompted by nothing in particular. No need for the mountains to get so worked up. But if fate saw him through and they didn’t cast an avalanche down just now, he’d be out of danger in an hour or two
The valleys the trekker was making his way through, up to his knees in snow at every step, ended in a steep grade just before the pass to the range’s southern slope. Brother Mocius reached this grade about three hours after the blizzard started. He could climb up only on all fours. His arms sank deeper than his legs. The snow yielded so readily that when his staff slipped from his hand, it was buried without a trace; at times, everything gave way under the monk, and he hid his head, trying to stop the slide. Brother Mocius could no longer see what was happening around him. But he could feel: he wasn’t up to it. He became lighter, brighter; he rose, levitated. He didn’t hear the ravines rumbling, paid no heed to their foolery. Thirst alone coursed through his body and became more intense the longer he gnawed on ice, until the snow first turned pink, then was covered in blood. Finally, the grade became less steep, and still less: here was a place so level you couldn’t take even a step without fatal fatigue. Brother Mocius broke open his iced-up eyelashes, froze, and collapsed onto his back
Above him, the storm kept raging. Monstrous shades moved around him or trod upon him, breaking him. It was hard to look, but he had to keep an eye on gargantuan coiling death, to monitor his own extremities, horrifying, now that they’d been touched by it: the way his fingers, tying themselves in knots, swelled, turned wooden, were overgrown with lichens and pinecones, split—and life (transparent, not crimson) dripped from the cracks. But things are light and easy again, not painful, not stifling. This brushwood still somehow sweeps snowflakes from eyelids; you can cross yourself and observe the eerie magic. It’s growing warmer because of the snow
; and at just this moment the weary wanderer is permitted to fall asleep. After driving away all other sounds, the storm intones a prayer for his repose
Brother Mocius, dying, was on the verge of wanting to recall something, and maybe even someone, but there wasn’t time, and, besides, the state of his soul allowed no thought for things past and unimportant. The blissfulness of this glacial slumber was, if you like, sinful, but still, sent from on high in the midst of this life as a reward and the forecourt of paradise. And the interred monk awaited the opening gates and the unearthly light that surely must pour forth. The wisdom inexhaustible and lavish charity of him who has sent this so ravishing death
But Brother Mocius slept and was not sleeping, and the order of events was such that his mind rose from the dead and got to work. A sequence of trivia, more and more numerous, compelled him to ascribe them meaning and then to refer them to the order of things below. The buried monk did not know why, but concluded that his soul had not yet parted ways with his body: death had not taken his soul. He remained waiting, and gradually the thought arose that waiting was tedious and he needed to hurry events along. It was already clear that death had laid hold of Brother Mocius—but it had also dropped him, either by accident or by command from on high, and now he had regained his freedom, otherwise known as earthly existence, since there, there is no personality, and that means no freedom, and you dissolve into absolute necessity
After checking to confirm that this was indeed the case, the traveler got back to moving. He tried using his hands, but didn’t succeed at first; then his right hand found a way out and discovered the crust formed by the snow his body heat had melted. The crust turned out to be brittle, and with the help of his other hand, Brother Mocius set to breaking up the vault and digging his way through the thickness above—which was easier, since the snow was dry and airy, and, evidently, not much had piled up on top of him