[RUSSIAN LITERATURE] - KRUČENYH (Aleksej Eliseevič) - LARION - Lot 175

[RUSSIAN LITERATURE] - KRUČENYH (Aleksej Eliseevič) - LARIONOV (Mihail Fedorovič). Pomada. Mockba: Изд-во Г. Л. Кузьмина и С. Д. Долинского, [Moscow: G.L. Kuzmin and S.D. Dolinsky Publishing House], [1913]. -In-16, 155x107: 10 ff., 6 plates. Paperback. Very rare first edition of this collection of poems by Russian poet, illustrator and Futurist theorist Aleksej Eliseevič Kručenyh (1886-1968). It is illustrated with 12 lithographs by Russian avant-garde artist Mihail Fedorovič Larionov (1881-1964), including one pasted on the red cover (Cupid and Psyche), three in the text (abstract composition, orgiastic scene, bird carrying a twig in its beak), one full-page (still life with vase) and six hors texte pasted on gilded paper (palm tree, acrobat, woman with hat, fruit seller, nude woman, singer, radiant portrait). The text was also lithographed by Larionov. This work was published in February 1913 in an edition of 480 copies, and immediately became an important event in the history of Russian Futurism. One of the most famous poems in it, entitled "Дыр булл щыл" ("Dyr bull schyl"), uses a particular language called "zaum", created by Kručenyh, which is employed here for the very first time. "The purely phonic zaum, a realization both in its extreme and most provocative form of the Futurist conception of poetry, was in its beginnings the random assembly of phonic groupings with no relation except incidental to any language whatsoever. This is the famous 'dyr bul scyl' proposed by Kručenyh in 1913: its elements mean nothing, nor can they be referred to syllables of the Russian language" (Agnès Sola, A. E. Kručenyh: de l'alogisme à la logique des sons, in Cahier du monde Russe, 1990, p. 585). The last three poems are said to have been written jointly with E. Lunev, a pseudonym of the Russian poet and playwright Velimir Hlebnikov (1885-1922). One of the first 25 copies containing some of Larionov's watercolor lithographs; this one, numbered 15, features 5 (Palm tree, Acrobat, Fruit seller, Nude woman and Radiant portrait). The cover also bears the artist's autograph signature. Copies may differ from one another in the arrangement of the leaves and the size of the out-of-text lithographs. Tears and tears to spine.