by Iliazd
49. Cogniat, 814–15.
50. Livak, 71. Zdanevich had announced his new name in May 1922. I will refer to him as Iliazd in what follows. (See note 4.)
51. Livak, 73.
52. Livak, 90–92; Hentea, 194–97. Iliazd’s recollection of the evening in a February 1936 letter to Tzara is reprinted in Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), 306.
53. Livak, 109.
54. Livak, 110.
55. Livak, 112.
56. Livak, 70, 117.
57. Livak, 113.
58. Boris Poplavsky, “Stikhotvoreniia 1920-kh godov [Poems of the 1920s],” in Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha, 659, my translation.
59. Livak, 122. Charchoune, who had become disillusioned about the Bolsheviks while waiting in Berlin for a visa to return to the Soviet Union, had publicly attacked Iliazd and his associates over the same issue in 1925, when they were openly pro-Soviet: “And when you go to take a shit, do you ask permission from Narkompros [People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment]? My spit pursues you from the right—fellow travelers!” (103).
60. Livak, 136.
61. I would conjecture, also, that Mayakovsky’s subsequent canonization by Stalin led in part to Iliazd’s adoption of the dictum that “a poet’s best fate is to be forgotten.” In that sense, Iliazd’s “suicide” was more successful than Mayakovsky’s.
62. Il’iazd, “Venok na mogilu druga [A Wreath on a Friend’s Grave],” appendix to Régis Gayraud, “1923—De Ledentu le Phare aux Parigots: Il’ja Zdanevic et la transformation de la zaum’,” Zaumnyi futurism i dadaizm v russkoi kul’ture [Beyonsense Futurism and Dadaism in Russian Culture], ed. Luigi Magarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, Daniela Rizzi (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 235.
63. Petr Kazarnovskii notes that Iliazd’s tone is quite similar to André Breton’s first “Surrealist Manifesto,” which appeared a year later. See “‘…Taino v dvizhenii…’: Rets. na kn.: Zdanevich, I. M. [Il’iazd]. Filosofiia futurista: Romany i zaumnye dramy. M. 2008 [‘…The Secret is in Motion…’: A Review of I. M. Zdanevich, A Futurist’s Philosophy],” (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie no. 101, 2010), 322. Given the history of such farewells in Russian literature, from Turgenev’s “Enough” and Dostoevsky’s parody of Turgenev with Karmazinov’s “Merci” in The Demons, one should probably not take the solemn tone too seriously.
64. Régis Gayraud, “Mnogolikii Il’iazd [Polymorphous Iliazd].” Il’iazd: XX vek Il’i Zdanevicha [Iliazd: The Twentieth Century of Ilia Zdanevich](Moscow: ROST media, 2015), 29.
65. Milovoje Jovanović, “Voskhishchenie Zdanevicha-Il’iazda i poetika ‘41°’ [Rapture by Zdanevich-Iliazd and the Poetics of ‘41°’],” in Izbrannye trudy po poetike russkoi literatury [Selected Works on the Poetics of Russian Literature] (Belgrade: Filologicheskii fakul’tet Bel’gradskogo universiteta, 2004), 267.
66. Gayraud, “Mnogolikii Il’iazd,” 30.
67. In depicting the vicious practices prevalent in Rapture’s provincial capital, Iliazd gives Baudelaire’s “trivial expressions” his usual treatment by making them concrete: “The mind of man is glutted with passion: he has, if I may use another familiar phrase, enough to resell …. He never imagines that he is selling himself wholesale.” (Baudelaire, “The Poem of Hashish: Chapter 1: The Longing for the Infinite,” Aleister Crowley’s 1895 translation modified to make the italicized idiom literal).
68. “Iliazda. Na den’ rozhdeniia,” 703.
69. Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 366.
70. Reviewers at the Federation publishing house suspected in 1928 that the novel might be religious. It featured, among other things, “some mystical state of the spirit.” Olga Leshkova, a member of Zdanevich’s circle in 1915–1916, even passed along some gossip from Moscow in August 1930, letting Iliazd know that the monk Mocius’s appearance on the first page of Rapture had guaranteed its rejection. Régis Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 738.
71. Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neoscientific Novel, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1996), 21.
72. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 725.
73. Jovanović, 268–69.
74. Nikol’skaia, 78.
75. The classic treatment of “poshlost’ ” (or, as Nabokov has it, “posh lust”) for English-speaking readers can be found in section 2 of “Our Mr. Chichikov” in Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), 63–74.
76. “Raskraska litsa (Beseda na Gaurizankare),” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:155.
77. Kazarnovskii, “Roman kak svidetel’stvo,” 84.
78. Elizabeth K. Beaujour, “Introduction,” Voskhishchenie: Roman (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1983), xv.
79. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 741.
80. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardour: A Family Chronicle (New York: Vintage International, 1990 [1969]), 158. Nabokov is also fond of the “pretender” and paternity/parricide themes, especially in Bend Sinister, Pnin, and Pale Fire.
81. Kazarnovskii, “Taino v dvizhenii,” 327.
82. Nabokov uses “Crime and Pun” to refer to Crime and Punishment in his Lectures on Russian Literature. I apply it here to Nabokov’s own novel following an unpublished paper by Valentina Izmirlieva. Recall Lolita’s concluding sentences: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels [!], the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (309). Russian tur signifies both the Caucasian mountain goat (Capra caucasica) present (with angels) in Rapture and the extinct aurochs (Bos primigenius) Nabokov invokes.
83. Jovanović, 286–87.
84. We should not forget that Russian Futurism contributed significantly to the milieu in which Roman Jakobson (himself a minor Futurist poet) began thinking about structural linguistics and in which the group of young scholars later dubbed the Russian Formalists (including Viktor Shklovsky) founded OPOIAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in Petrograd in 1916.
85. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 715–16.
86. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 716.
87. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 716–17.
88. Livak, 118.
89. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 738.
90. Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 740.
91. Livak, 137.
92. Quoted in Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie,” 742.
93. See Dostoevsky’s epigraph for The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24 AV).
94. “Raskraska litsa,” Futuriszm i vsechestvo 1:159.
95. I rely for many details in the following account on “Khronika zhizni i tvorcheskoi deiatel’nosti Il’i Mikhailovicha Zdanevicha (Il’iazda) [Chronology of the Life and Works of Ilia Mikhailovich Zdanevich (Iliazd)],” compiled by Boris Fridman in Il’iazd: XX vek Il’i Zdanevicha, 68–89.
96. Boris Fridman, “Vmesto predisloviia [In Place of a Foreword],” Il’iazd: XX vek Il’ia Zdanevicha, 12.
97. For an English-language treatment of Iliazd’s Futurist books, see Gerald Janecek’s chapter “Typography: Zdanevich and Others,” in The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
98. “Posmertnye trudy,” ed. E. Bozhur, Novyi zhurnal 168–169 (1987): 83–123; 170 (1988): 49–76. Il’iazd (Il’ia Zdanevich), Parizhach’i: Opis’ (Moscow: Gileia; Düsseldorf: Goluboi vsadnik, 1994).
99. Il’iazd (Il’ia Mikhailovich Zdanevich), Pis’ma Morganu Filipsu Praisu (Moscow: Gileia, 2005). “Filosofiia,” in Filosofiia futurista, 185–473.
100. Il’iazd (Il’ia Zdanevich), Poeticheskie knigi, 1940–1971, ed. Sergei Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Gileia, 2014).
101. Livak, 824 (note 66).
102. Johanna Drucker, “Iliazd and the Book a
s a Form of Art,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 7 (Winter 1988): 49.
103. Gayraud, Il’iazd v portretakh i zarisovkakh [Iliazd in Portraits and Sketches] (Moscow: Gileia; Paris: Iliazd-Club, 2015), 30–32.
104. Il’iazd, “Filosofiia,” Filosofiia futurista, 281.
105. Gayraud, “Predislovie [Foreword],” Filosofiia futurista, 17. In a further mystification, Iliazd had provided his birth and death dates in the colophon for the 1923 edition of lidantIU as a bEEkon, setting his end in 1973, fifty years after this first elegy for his friend and his own youth. He missed by two years.