San Diego State University Press

Zaum

The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism

by Gerald Janecek

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About the Book

ZAUM: THE TRANsrational POETRY OF RUSSIAN FUTURISM
Gerald Janecek

Before Dada scrambled the signal, before concrete poetry made the page misbehave, before digital culture taught language to glitch, the Russian Futurists were already blowing words apart.

They called it ZAUM—language beyond reason, “beyonsense”: poetry built from sound, visual form, invented words, fractured syntax, and the exhilarating possibility that language might mean precisely by escaping meaning.

Gerald Janecek’s Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism is the definitive expedition into this radical linguistic laboratory. Drawing upon a staggering archive of rare and often inaccessible materials, Janecek reconstructs the theories, manifestos, poems, visual experiments, arguments, and provocations through which figures such as Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov attempted nothing less than the reinvention of poetic language.

Encyclopedic without extinguishing the strangeness of its subject, Zaum shows Russian Futurism not as an eccentric cul-de-sac of literary history but as one of modernism’s great experiments: What happens when words stop behaving? What remains when language exceeds dictionary meaning? And what new kinds of thought become possible when poetry breaks the machinery of ordinary communication?

Nearly three decades after its first appearance, Janecek’s study feels startlingly contemporary. In an era of algorithmic writing, machine-generated language, remix, memes, visual poetry, and linguistic mutation, Zaum returns us to an earlier generation of artists already asking what becomes of the human when language turns experimental, technological, autonomous—and gloriously strange.

Praised as an indispensable account of Russian avant-garde poetry and a foundational resource for scholars of the European avant-garde, ZAUM remains the book on the subject: 428 illustrated pages documenting the moment poets decided that ordinary language was simply not enough.

Dadaists. Futurists. Poets. Artists. Linguists. Experimental writers. Media theorists. AI obsessives. Word freaks. This one is for you.

GERALD JANECEK’S ZAUM
The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism
San Diego State University Press / CODE[X] Books
428 pages • Illustrated • Fourth Printing

Advance Praise

“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.” Charlotte Douglas (Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU)

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About the Author

Gerald J. Janecek is Professor of Russian at the University of Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1972. He specializes in 20th century avant-garde Russian literature of the early decades and in contemporary Russian poetry. He has written on Andrei Bely, on Russian Futurism and on a variety of contemporary Russian poets. His publications include translations of Bely's Kotik Letaev (2nd ed. Northwestern, 1999) and The First Encounter (Princeton, 1979), and the books The Look of Russian Literature (Princeton, 1984) and Sight & Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry (Berghahn, 2000).