ZAUM

The AVANT-GARDE movement of poetry (and visual arts, art MANIFESTOS, art theory, theatre, graphic design) in Russia that peaked during World War I. Its politics were clearly anti-war. The term was coined by the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, and its prime exponents were Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. A composite word, the prefix meaning ‘beyond, behind’, followed by a noun meaning ‘the mind’, it has been translated variably as ‘transreason’, ‘transration’, ‘transsense language’ or ‘beyonsense’. The pre-eminent modern scholar of the movement, Gerald Janecek, prefers to define Zaum as ‘indeterminacy in meaning’. Kruchenykh also wrote essays clarifying Zaum and arguing for ‘a transrational language’ that ‘allows for fuller expression’. Notable areas of EXPERIMENTATION were the ‘symbolism of sound’ and the ‘creation of language’. Zaum was contemporary with dada, but its close link to metaphysics meant that, unlike Dadaism, it was full of seriousness, either dipping into the sound symbolism of the lost primeval Slavic mother-tongue or NATIONALISTIC mysticism. It influenced many later styles and movements, from SURREALISM to Pop Art.

READING

Janecek, Gerald (1984) The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments 1900–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Janecek, Gerald (1996) Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego: San Diego State University Press.