Alexei Kruchenykh; Suicide Circus: Selected Poems

Translated from the Russian by Jack Hirschman, Alexander Kohav, and Venyamin Tseytlin

with an Introduction by Jack Hirschman

and a Preface and Notes by Guy Bennett

Series No.: 027

ISBN: 1-892295-27-X, Pages: 277

Russian Literature, Poetry

With Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchenykh was one of the central figures of Russian Futurism, and the leading practitioner of zaum poetry. Zaum, meaning literally "beyond sense," was an attempt to undermine and/or ignore the conventional meaning of words, "allowing their sound," as Marjorie Perloff has written, "to generate their own range of signification, or, in its most extreme form, the invention of new words based purely on sound." In a series of inventive works, among them Pomade, Learn Art and Four Phonetic Novels, Kruchenykh sought to transform the landscape of Russian modernist poetry.

Jack Hirschman's selection of Kruchenykh's work represents many periods of the poet's life, and includes early, Futurist work, as well as later, longer works from the 1930s such as "The Ironiad" and "The Rubiniad," revealing the range and complexity of this startling Russian poet's writing.