Zaum!
The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism
Description
If Dada and the European Avant-garde are your thing, then brace yourself for Gerald Janecek's ZAUM. According to Charlotte Douglas (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU), Janecek’s Zaum "is an encyclopedic account of zaum or 'beyonsense,' the most distinctive feature of Russian avant-garde art and poetry early in the 20th century. Janecek has mined a myriad of arcane and inaccessible sources, gathered the entire historical record in one place, and made it readable and comprehensible. His account of zaum theory and practice will be indispensable for anyone interested in modern poetry and art. Certainly it will become a standard text for all students of Russian Futurism."
Author Bio
GERALD JANECEK is a professor emeritus of Russian at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930; ZAUM: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism; and Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry; and the editor of Staging the Image: Dmitry Prigov as Artist and Writer.
Book Review
"Should such poetic brinkmanship be granted a place in poetry? Yes, argues Janecek, because it is a value working against the automatization of language and thus of life. More than eighty years after its inception, it is indeed remarkable that Zaum is still controversial, still avant-garde, still denigrated as having gone too far. In sum, Janecek's work is an extraordinarily comprehensive piece of scholarship, which succeeds in compressing several books' worth of research into one. He has raised the study of Zaum to a new level and in doing so has dampened none of its vitality."
- Crispin Brooks, University of London
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