Kruchenykh, A. "Dyr bul shchyl," in Pomada (1912) [detail of page]
1 2017-05-11T08:58:09-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283ab 12041 1 Kruchenykh's first recognized example of zaum poetry, illustrated by Mikhail Larionov plain 2017-05-11T08:58:09-07:00 Christopher Gilman 1985b99a2acd541caa12a10c3ebf6896565283abThis page has annotations:
- 1 2017-05-13T23:55:25-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e A Russian speaker is more likely to parse this as two words instead of one. In addition to the gap between the letters, "ш" and "щ" do not appear sequentially in standard morphological processes. Dexter Blackwell 2 plain 2017-05-14T00:03:00-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-05-13T23:56:13-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e Poem starts with an actual Russian word, the genitive plural form of "holes." Dexter Blackwell 2 plain 2017-05-14T00:03:02-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
- 1 2017-05-14T00:04:32-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e The sounds can still appear in sequence when understood as the beginning and end of different words. They would then not reduce, but instead blend together. Dexter Blackwell 1 plain 2017-05-14T00:04:32-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
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- 1 2017-04-13T11:04:35-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e Dyr bul shchyl and the Dominant Dexter Blackwell 39 plain 2017-05-14T00:05:24-07:00 Dexter Blackwell 92e005ca94195f836c6089cf147faff4c74fa79e
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CoaRse CaLIBration
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ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing" (Pedersen) and CSLC134/RUSN334 "Exploding Tongues" (Gilman)
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During the middle third of the Spring, '17 Semester, two classes at Occidental College (ARTS 227 "Introduction to Letterpress Printing (Pedersen) and CSLC 134 / RUSN 334 "Exploding Tongues: Language, Art and The Russian Avant-Garde") collaborated on a book making project, with printed submissions of text and design compiled in a miscellany volume, Exploding Tongues: NthOlogy, inspired by the Russian Avant-garde.
Through creative making of their own collaborative book, students explored historical literary phenomena, such as "zaum," or "trans-sense" language, a nullification or distortion of meaning through invented words, as well as visual abstraction, neo-primitivism, "Rayism," "Suprematism," "Prouns," and other visual innovations that manifest as illustrations and cover and page designs. Students took inspiration from the authors, artists and book designers from the early years of the Avant-garde, when visual and verbal "abstraction" developed simultaneously.
A century's distance from the creative ferment of the Avant-garde has given time to literary scholars and art historians to sort out radical innovations in verbal and visual cultures as if they were discrete phenomena. Time, also, has separated complex creative processes that transpired between people working in close partnership and common purpose into individuated lines of authorial credit. The scholarly impulse to conceive of cultural history on the model of scientific discovery is not, however, well-suited for understanding the ambiguous work processes and products of this brief historical moment.
As Aleksei Kruchenykh, whose "Dyr bul shchyl" (1912) is generally acknowledged as the first instance of "zaum" poetry, explained in a letter to A.A. Shemshurin, the visual and verbal elements of his book art, produced with collaborators such as Mikhail Larionov, or his wife Ol'ga Rozanova, are inextricably confused [for more on "Dyr bul shchyl" and its publication history, see Dexter Blackwell's case study on this site]:
Course readings and discussions were informed by Gerald Janecek's pioneering works on zaum, and the Russian Avant-garde artist book, as well as Nancy Perloff's most recent contribution to the topic, both of whom address the integrated nature of multimodal, collaborative arts. An "intellectual" grasp of the matter is not sufficient, however, for deep understanding. To jolt student researchers of the Avant-garde from any of their own automatic assumptions about art and literature, a hands-on, creative unit of zaum poetry writing, illustration and book-making, allowed an opportunity to view and reconstruct cultural historical processes, as it were, inside-out.Many have noticed that the genius of external beauty is highest of all, so that if anyone likes best of all the way, say, Te li le is written (from the painterly aspect) but not its meaning (toothless meaning, of which, by the way, there is none in zaum’ either), then it seems that such a reader is right and not a ruffian at all.
The word (letter), of course, has undergone a great change here; perhaps it has even been replaced by painting, but what does a “drunkard of paradise” care about all this prose? And I have already met persons who bought Te li le without understanding anything about dyr-bul-shchyl but who admired its painting.
On the matter of instantaneous writing:- The first impression (by correcting it 10 times we lose it and perhaps therefore lose everything).
- By correcting, thinking over, polishing, we banish chance from art that in a momentary art of course occupies an honored place, by banishing chance we deprive our works of that which is most valuable, for we leave only that which has been experienced and thoroughly acquired, and all of the life of the unconscious goes to pot!
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Dyr bul shchyl and the Dominant
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Debate over the importance of oral and handwritten components of poetry surfaced among art and literary scholars who examined the works of the Russian avant garde. Centered on the poetry included in handmade books such as Vzorval’ and Mirskontsa, scholars sought to establish a theory over a balance in the oral qualities of the poetry versus the handwritten visual design of the poems and books themselves. In terms of poetic language within these handmade books of the Russian avant garde, Gerald Janecek cites the handwriting and drawing as the important visual elements in the creation of the poems. On the other hand, Johanna Drucker’s insight into these works focuses on the qualities of the printed text instead. However, both authors evidently focus on the printed text of the poem, not its oral qualities. In order to understand the ruling force behind the creation of these works and the importance of their oral components, we can look to Yury Tynyanov’s theory of the Dominant to decipher this puzzle. Lastly, we will see that not only was the oral the preferred element, but various works also challenged our understanding of the visual in art.
As a vital component to Russian Formalist theory, the Dominant is the ruling force of an artistic work. According to Roman Jakobson's description of the Dominant, each type of work holds a system of values, which are organized into a hierarchy. The time period determines which of these values is at the top of the hierarchy, thus becoming the “dominant” feature of a work. Furthermore, one established dominant form that existed during the era of the Russian avant-garde was the textual, which began with the rise of the novel as a literary form during the Romantic period and through the poetry of Pushkin. Ultimately, the dominant can help uncover which is more important, vocal or written.
When asked to explain Anna Karenina, Tolstoy replied that he would have to re-write the whole book, exactly the same. This is to say, there is no reduction of the novel's textual form. The Romantic period created a cascade of literary styles that were focused on the individual as a subject experiencing the world. This experience through text established the dominant form of literature present in the early 20th century and still today.
In terms of the Russian avant-garde, the works of Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov best exemplify the ambiguity between oral and visual elements of poetry. The poem “Akhmet” from Mirskontsa exemplifies the intertwining of these different values within their poems. The different qualities of the poetry, oral and visual, are at odds with each other when attempting to assign meaning to the works.
However, Kruchenyk's Dyr bul shchyl gives us insight into which of these competing poetic qualities is more important. The poem itself has at least three different textual forms created by the author, all quite different in their appearance. With this many inconsistent variants of the poem, it suggests that the textual aspect is not the dominant feature of the poem. Instead, sound has become the dominant feature of this first instance of Zaum poetry.
According to Jakobson, cultural change reflects itself through a re-ordering of values in artistic works, therefore asserting a new dominant. Pre-dating the Russian avant-garde was the so-called "Golden Age" of Russian literature. The 19th century saw the rise and acclaim of novelists and poets such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin, who remain as some of Russia's most celebrated writers. Their literary dominance, as well as the influence of the Romantic era in general, made the textual form the dominant aspect of the era.
However, the dominant form was changing amongst the Russian avant-garde. Starting in 1913, Alexei Kruchenyk authored at least three different versions of his Zaum poem Dyr bul shchyl. These three versions had varied textual presentations, sourced from the same author. The first appeared in his book Pomada in 1913. This version included an illustration of a nude woman by Mikhail Larionov, which aids to the poems’s “monosyllabic, primordial, and erotic sounds,” as described by Nancy Perloff. (Explodity, Getty Publications, 2016. pg. 75)
Furthermore, Kruchenyk asserts before the poem that Dyr bul shchyl is a work that is written “in its own language, the words have no other meaning.” However, the first word “Дыр” is actually a Russian word, being the genitive plural form of “holes.” The rest of the poem does not contain any known word forms from the Russian language, falling in line with Kruchenyk’s assertion of the poem containing its own language.
A second version was produced in the book Te li le, a written collaborative effort by Kruchenyk and Khlebnikov, illustrated by Olga Rozanova. This version of Dyr bul schul from 1914 is the richest of the three in color and is the only one to have a feminine creative influence, as Rozanova was deemed responsible for its creation. Some of the letters in this version are heavily faded on the page, which resulted in a different first reading for the class and myself. Despite this, the oral qualities of the original first printing of the work remain.
Lastly, in his 1913 essay The Word as Such (Слово как таковое), Kruchenyk printed yet another version of the poem to use as an example in the work. It is devoid of illustration and any handwritten creation, existing only in print on the page. The type in this version actually ends up further asserting the poem's oral qualities above all else.
Overall, the only things that are consistent between these three variations of Dyr bul shchyl are the authorship and the sounds of the recitation of the poem itself. The three printed versions of Kruchenyk's poem leave us unable to pin down a singular "stable" text, but maintain the same phonetic qualities in all three. This should lead us to acknowledge sound as the Dominant force of Kruchenyk's poem, rather than its textual, artistic, and physical elements.
Kruchenyk was not alone in his reorganization of traditional artistic values in the era of the Russian avant garde. Other artists of the same time period allowed their works to uphold a different dominant feature, and also contributed to undermining the concept of the visual in art. One example of this is Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph of his own apartment building.
While photography usually does not contain oral elements in its creation, Rodchenko is clearly toying with our expectations of normal visual understanding. The photo is tilted on a different axis, giving the viewer a radical perspective of an ordinary, familiar construction. Most photography is level with the eye, creating a representation similar to human vision. This leveled orientation, in my opinion, is the dominant hierarchical feature of photography in other works. It also serves in making us question the visual medium in all sources of art.
Similar to Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and its associated artistic movement, Suprematism, reflect a reordering into a new hierarchy of dominance. The painting, now cracked from age, attempts to represent the purest form of a geometric shape.
Such assertions about purity and perfection might be comparable to the still life or trompe l’oeil movements in art. Rather than depicting the real world, the Black Square reaches towards an abstract perfect form of the square. Since traditional depictions of perfection consisted of physical objects, Malevich’s painting causes his audience to reflect on the geometry and abstract shapes which make up our world.
Not only do the poems of the Russian avant garde mark the importance of the vocal, auditory qualities as dominant, but purely visual works challenge our sense of sight and our preconceived notions of art. Overall, there exists a reduction in the visual, textual form, that rules over most other artistic and literary movements. The significance of this move has primordial overtones. Before writing systems, geometry, and even language itself, there was only sound. Perhaps this is what the Russian avant garde hoped to achieve: humans envisioning a world without systematic human imposition on all things.
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BookENDS: A Working Theory of Textuality as Cultural Dominant, 1912-
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An Introduction and Conclusion to a Semester's Investigation into the Book Arts as an Avant-garde Practice
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Textuality and the Nullification of Dimension
This page represents both the beginning and an end. It is an introduction to the assignments, projects and resources contained within, as well as a summary of ideas that resulted from a semester's window inquiry.
We began with two artifacts: Kazimir Malevich's (in)famous "Black Square" (1915) and Aleksei Kruchenykh's zaum ("transrational") poem "Dyr bul shchyl." Each is a cultural monument in its own domain: the "Black Square" stands as the epitome of geometric simplicity and stark abstraction, an image for its own sake, with zero referentiality; "Dyr bul shchyl" (1913) similarly upended poetic language by offering primordial sounds in place of meaning-bearing words. The question was whether these two phenomena were simply parallel or loosely inspired by each other, or whether there was some more fundamental relationship between them, causal or otherwise.
Like a language, with which it is contiguous, a book is both an entity, and the fulfillment of an expectation. From Ferdinand de Saussure we accept the methodological distinction between langue and parole (language and speech), as a means to consider the book in its phenomenological tensions. The book as system (langue) is transparent, a means to an end. It operates as any signifier, subordinate to a presumed reality toward which it points by means of a complex network of conventions and shared practices. The book as entity or artifact, unique in instance, on the other hand, resists the enslavement to social practices of its functional role. It becomes a singular instance of speech (parole).
By analogy, and as a member of the series of linguistic phenomena, the book can be interpreted as a word. The conceptual modeling as it was left by Saussure and his students too simply focused on the autonomic status of the sign as such. The network of correspondences was readily illustrated by condensing elements to simplified forms as entities, but it would take further work by other theorists thereafter to elaborate the necessary complexity of signification. Jakobson and Trubetskoy resolved words as bundles of sounds with distinctive features, and elaborated the minute differences between otherwise identical signifiers that speakers of a language would use to indicate wholly unrelated phenomena in the world. The foundation and premises of linguistic investigation were placed on new ground by Saussure. The premises had to be elaborated, however, to keep its insights from relapsing into commonplace, intuitive misunderstandings.
Kruchenykh and the practice of book arts. Dyr bul shchyl.
Velemir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. "The Letter as Such" (Bukva kak takovaia). 1913.The word is still not a value, it is still merely tolerated.
Otherwise, why would they clothe it in a gray prisoner's uniform? You have seen the letters in their words - lined up in a row, humiliated, with cropped hair, and all equally colorless, gray - these are not letters, these are brands! But ask any wordwright and he will tell you that a word written in individual longhand or composed with a particular typeface bears no resemblance at all to the same word in a different inscription.There are two propositions:
- That mood changes one's longhand during the process of writing.
- That the longhand peculiarly modified by one's mood conveys that mood to the reader, independently of the words. Also, one has to pose the question of graphic signs, visual signs, or simply tactile signs as if felt by the hand of a blind man. Of course, it is not mandatory that the wordwright be also the copyist of a handwritten book: indeed it would be better if the wordwright entrusted this job to an artist.
Facing Type: Johanna Drucker and the Resurrection of the Printed Word
As a linguistic phenomenon, the book presents new and different challenges to its interpreters. In The Visible Word (1994) Joahanna Drucker argues forcefully for a reconsideration of the Saussurean/Formalist/Prague Structuralist theoretical framework, properly identifying this line of inquiry as most directly relevant, while impeaching its findings on the grounds of an exclusive attention to sound and speech over visual and physical qualities of books. Those in the best position to know, in other words, were blind to the theoretical and methodological implications of their observations. The approach, following Drucker, is, perhaps paradoxically, to reapply the same theoretical discoveries of the moment, but to do so without the original methodological prejudice toward oral speech over written (inscribed and printed) language.
The rhetorical device of animacy, applying terms of humanistic discourse, with moving political connotations, to elicit sympathy for the fate of writing within a biased discourse.The paradox was that it was the inscription, the written text, which was ultimately subjected to analysis and not the elusive, ephemeral sound. The relationship of dependence went largely unnoted, until the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But throughout the nineteenth century, writing aided linguistics with the modesty and unassuming propriety of a well-trained servant.
Writing, then, through the very basis of linguistic study, was considered insignificant and invisible, as beneath mention or notice. The indispensable adjunct to linguistic scholarship, without which there would have been no object of study, writing went unnamed and unrecognized. Not only were the forms and material properties of writing, or even of written texts, not a distinct object of inquiry, but its very existence, the fact that it served as language, went unacknowledged.
The goal here is to understand how a few, focused efforts by a very small number of cultural practitioners could effect a wholesale collapse and regeneration of socio-cultural communication by strategically (though perhaps not consciously) targeting the nerve center, the most central nexus point through which the most diverse modalities of expression and communication could travel. The scenario that emerges from inquiry is one of highly specific, almost accidental, contingencies of personal biography, idiosyncratic processes, and random found material that leverage, nevertheless, immense cultural processes to follow, because the changes occurred simultaneously on the orders of parole (speech) and langue (language). The efforts by the Russian Avant-garde to “emancipate” (words, sounds, meanings, objects, etc.) amounted to an explosion in meaning that reverberated indefinitely in emanating spherical waves in historical time and place, and impacted all things, however minutely, in its wake.
Poetics becomes a way for cultural practitioners to expand the range of expression.
The experience making books was formative for the members of the AG, even while bookmaking is not considered an endeavor in and of itself.
Bookmaking is a language
1. To separate, methodologically, consideration of book production and consumption as a regularized system of meaning and individual instances of book creation.
So first: what IS the grammar of bookmaking? Following Saussure, this should be the sole focus of inquiry. Things are only meaningful to the extent they play a functional role in the system, and not otherwise.
Second: what is the system of reified made meanings in codicy as parole? In poetry, symmetries actuate non communicative aspects of language. Symmetries and other regularities are the particular instance of how languages are reified, but not all reification has to be symmetrical or regular.
The disturbance and transfer from langue to parole is dependent upon the medium. In poetry other means that tend toward entropy achieve the same outcome, while remaining recognizably poetic: metaphor, strikingly unexpected, illogical juxtapositions of words and concepts. (Cf Malevich's illogical paintings)
In book-making, which is already formalized and regular, accentuation of materiality can be achieved through very high value deluxe editions AND the demonstrative opposite: the aggressive nullification of anticipated (normal) order.
For bookmaking to become an expressive system in and of itself, the various components have to allow for marked oppositions to manifest, and to establish what those distinctions might represent as an object of signification. Does this happen?
The convention of book as an utterance channels the linguistic message through the semantics of the text only. The artist book redirects artistic message through the entire book.
The poetic function activates extra-linguistic media for primary or secondary expression. As a by-product, it expands for others that domain.From Langue and Parole to Literacy and Textuality: The Contra-Bution of Gerald Janecek
Gerald Janecek published "Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg" in the catalogue The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934 (2002) by the Museum of Modern Art, which accompanied an exhibit by the same name (a complete pdf file of the catalogue can be accessed here).
Saussure's establishment of language as a system rested upon the supposition that the matter of language is conceptual; that it resides in the minds of its speakers; and that it is shared within a speech community--the speakers of the language. That supposition is available as well to underpin a theory of written language, though the more immediate assignment of text to an opposing "material" category has precluded extension of Saussure's method. The tangible, immediate material qualities of written text, and the alluring, engaging processes of its production and dissemination serve as a theoretical red herring in this case.
Refocused attention from one form of realized language (speech) to another (text), distracts from their shared duality. Both are subject to the same methodological distinction between instance and system, where instance is defined as the individual and infinite sum total of all actual historical utterances, and system is understood to be the rules and patterns of occurrence as conceived by all speakers of the language. Text, for all its inherent materiality, carries with it a relatively brief history and minute pool of literates, as compared with verbal speech. It nevertheless has acquired its own regularities of practice (production, distribution and consumption of written words), that accompany each instance, and render significant that which would otherwise remain incomprehensible. These regularities include aspects and dimensions well outside the immediate scope of reading: how does one hold a book? What is the process of leafing through pages? What is the relationship, if any, between characters in lines and illustrations?
If Kruchenykh had consciously set out to dismantle (nowadays we might say "deconstruct") the legacy of Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1397-1468), it is unlikely that he could have done it more completely. Gutenberg's legacy of linear movable type and mass-produced books is such an innate part of modern Western culture that we are almost blind to its effects on our thought patterns and cultural assumptions. Yet these effects are arguably profound. As Marshall McCluhan has speculated, "A child in any Western milieu is surrounded by an abstract explicit visual technology of uniform time and uniform continuous space in which 'cause' is efficient and sequential, and things move and happen on single planes and in successive order."
In a series of remarkable book works of 1912 to 1920, Kruchenykh and his collaborators challenged this legacy in an unprecedentedly complete way, step-by-step departing from our European expectations about what a twentieth-century book should be.
Drucker, p13.
Drucker's attention is upon the blank category of materiality, and it is triggered by practitioners and theorists whose intentions were to flout conventions of text. Put differently, an examination of textuality might acknowledge an important historical and theoretical break in the moment of the early 1910's, influenced by the recent insights of Saussure, that wrenched apart the coherent domain of material textuality, and exposed the otherwise imperceptible dual nature of text as literacy and textuality. (Codicy)
Drucker's critique returns writing as such to a central position of consideration -
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Prostitutes and Peasants
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Tim Lewis - Final Course Scalar Project
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Mirskontsa is not the only book of zaum poetry to feature nude women. In Kruchenykh and Larionov's 1913 Pomada [Pomade], the nude woman is again a unique figured occasion in the text. However, the women of Pomada are not as deliberately visible as they are in Mirskontsa. In the famous poem-painting 'dyr bul shchyl,' there is a nude woman hidden in what simply appears to be scratch marks and scribblings on the page. This nude is the only figure in either Mirskontsa and Pomada to seemingly expose their genitals. It is notable that in alternative versions of 'dyr bul shchyl,' Kruchenykh's soon-to-be wife Olga Rozanova altered the image of the nude woman to produce an image seemingly more in line with female representations in Mirskontsa.
Later on in Pomada and in contrast to the "urban prostitutes" 'dyr bul shchyl,' a peasant woman with her breasts exposed carries a basket or some other burden. As Pomada lengthens the image of the woman-as-figure becomes more oblique and it begins to discern the sex of the figure at all. In the final image of what appears to be a woman figure, the defining motif of these female nude becomes itself obscured. Is this figure-in-horror exposing their breasts, or do they raise their arm to their chest in quiet exclamation?
Contrast between representations of the city and the village seem to have centered in representations on the people who live in them-- however, in keeping with Neo-Primitivist themes, this Individual-of-Representation often took the shape of the woman (it is no coincidence that one's place of origin is often referred to as the 'motherland.' In engaging with Marc Chagall's painting Above the Town there is (while not ubiquitous) an clear demarcation between the individual and place. Seemingly caught in a saving or pleasurably embrace, Chagall's female figure connotes a concerning specter haunting the transition from the town/village to the major city/metropolis. In the same period of time (1910-1920) this concern bubbled to the forefront of Russian Avant Garde iconography: In simple landscapes, the city (Moscow) begins to shake and climb upon itself as if reaching for the heavens by creating Jacob's ladder from its own body. Also, in the costuming of women, the peasant girl is constructed as having both agency and personhood--there is a 'capability'/potentiality present in her that is distinct from the faceless scratchings of the women in Pomada.
Like a two-headed infant conjoined at birth, the rise of technology both fascinated and demanded intervention by the Russian people. From the gruesome representations of the titular Anna Karenina preparing for death via railcar decapitation to the very presence of any portrayal of a traveling female peasant, the identity of Russia-going-forward was all but submerged by the crashing wave of questions and conflicts arising from technological advancement and integration in the social.
The presence and juxtaposition of prostitutes, peasants, cities, and villages belies a theoretical stance on reproduction and collaboration--- the deconstruction/vilification of the city, functions as a collaborative stance with the production of hand-made books. Even more than what can be done in a press workshop, in the continued supremacy of the village woman over the city prostitute, Larionov reasserts the Anti-Gutenbergian stance of early Russian Avant Garde sentiments. In doing this, Larionov accomplishes the turn from a rudimentary Neo-Primitivist discourse into a complete swerve towards mystical/fused signifier-signified systems.
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"Dyr bul shchyl..."
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No.1 Dyr bul shchyl
ube sh shchur
skum
vy so bu
r l z