A Play of Letters, Words, and Images: On One Line by Mayakovsky and Its Visualization (The Experience of Decoding the Cover of Rodchenko’s NO.S)

Abstract

The problem of the book cover has gained little attention from researchers (philologists, art historians, literary historians, designers). However, what is in plain sight in a book may paradoxically remain invisible, both to contemporaries and to posterity. In other words, the reader/viewer/researcher may not even realize that he is dealing with a kind of “cipher,” “code,” “secret,” “rebus,” “secret writing.” The article demonstrates the cryptographic nature of one of these covers, created by Alexander Rodchenko for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s collection of poems NO. S (Moscow, 1928). Any reader should be immediately intrigued by the very obvious “weirdness” of both the cover and the title of this book. On the title page this weirdness is partially cleared up, for here the title is subtitled: NO. S: New Poems. However, such an author’s “transcription” is deliberately deceitful and provocative, due to a deliberately illiterate abbreviation of the adjective. It is noteworthy that this book opens with a poem with the program title Incomprehensible for the Masses. We can, with equal reason, assume that the occasion for the cover could equally serve as a verbal pun, as well as a visual one. That is, the question could be posed as follows: what exactly determined the letter composition of the cover? It could be some kind of visual artifact that became the source for mastering in Rodchenko’s work, in which case the graphics of the cover itself are not random, but strictly constructed and possess an implicit program. Or, on the contrary, Rodchenko’s recognizable constructivist style bears in this case only a secondary and incidental plastic decorative function, and all the unobvious meaning for the public is concentrated only in the title, reduced to three mysterious letters. The deciphering of the cover of this book is undertaken for the first time, 94 years after its publication.