Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh (Алексей Елисеевич Кручёных; also Kruchyonykh, Kruchonykh) was the most extreme of the Russian Futurists, and the poet who pushed zaum past the point where a sentence can still be diagrammed. Born 21 February 1886 (9 February Old Style) in Olevka, Kherson Governorate, to a peasant family; died of pneumonia in Moscow on 17 June 1968. The name is often romanized three ways because of the ё.
He trained as an artist, not a man of letters. Odessa Art School, graduated 1906 with a diploma that let him teach drawing; then the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He published caricatures, taught, and only turned fully to poetry around 1912, when David Burliuk brought him into the Hylaea circle with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. That year he signed A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the manifesto that told the public to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy off the steamship of modernity. The same year he married the painter Olga Rozanova, who became his main collaborator on the handmade books.
Zaum is the thing he is for. The word is his and Khlebnikov’s, from za (beyond, across) and um (mind, reason): beyonsense, transrational. They did not mean the same thing by it. Khlebnikov built new words out of recognizable Slavic roots, prefixes and suffixes, a language he thought could be universal because the roots still carried sense. Kruchenykh was willing to cut the root. Sound combination first, meaning only if it arrived afterwards, and not required to. He dated the break to December 1912. In January 1913 the poem appeared in his booklet Pomada (Pomade), illustrated by Mikhail Larionov, with his own note that the words do not have a definite meaning.
In the transliteration Marjorie Perloff uses: Dyr bul shchyl / ubeshchur / skum / vy so bu / r l ez. He claimed there was more of the Russian national in those five lines than in all of Pushkin. That was a provocation, and also a theory: the national lives in the phonemes, the hisses and the hard л, not in the inherited lexicon. Readers have teased ghosts out of it ever since (дыр as hole, бул as a bun, щыл as a crevice, убещур as promise/convince/fain), which is part of the point. The hints are bait. The poem does not cash them.
The theory is in two 1913 texts. Declaration of the Word as Such, a leaflet dated 19 April and backed by Nikolai Kulbin, and The Word as Such, the brochure with Khlebnikov, issued in September under the imprint ЕУЫ (itself a zaum coinage). The declaration’s famous move is the lily: the worn-out, violated word “lily” has no expression left, so he renames it éuy, and original purity is restored. Consonants, he said, give everyday life, nationality, weight; vowels give the opposite, a universal language. He proved the second claim with a poem of vowels only, published in Dead Moon:
New paths of the word, shiftology, the accidental, the misprint, the slip of the tongue: he treated error as a compositional method. The books match the doctrine. Explodity (Vzorval'), 1913, Te li le, Pomada, A Game in Hell with Khlebnikov: lithographed, rubber-stamped, handwritten, uneven, with misprints and blank pages left in. Rozanova, Natalia Goncharova, Larionov and Kazimir Malevich drew in them. The page is not a container for the poem. The page is the poem.
In December 1913 the Luna Park theatre in Petersburg staged Victory over the Sun, two performances. Libretto by Kruchenykh, prologue by Khlebnikov, music by Mikhail Matyushin, sets and costumes by Malevich. Strongmen bury the sun. The sun is the old light, the old perspective, the old rational sky. Malevich’s backdrop for Act 2, scene 5 is the first Black Square, before the 1915 painting. The libretto is zaum set as drama: fractured, alogical, sung against Matyushin’s score. Audiences and critics were duly scandalized. It is the one work of his that entered general art history, mostly because of the square.
Hylaea broke up in 1915 under the war and internal fracture. He did military service as a draftsman on a Caucasus railway, then in Tiflis during the Civil War founded the Futurist group 41° with Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Terentiev. Universal War (1916) is the book usually called his major one: collage and abstraction as much as text, war as a shear in language. Rozanova died in 1918. After the move back to Moscow he was increasingly sidelined. Mayakovsky could be Sovietized for a while; pure zaum could not. He wrote memoirs in 1932, survived by becoming the archivist of the movement he had helped make, selling and annotating the old books, and he lived long enough to be visited by younger poets, Gennadii Aigi among them. A Russian punk band later recorded a homage. He died at 82.