Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards): Collaborative Book Art and Transrational Sounds

Abstract

The artist's book Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) occupies a unique place in the history of Russian futurism. It was the outcome of an intricate collaboration, in which two futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh, and four painters, most prominently Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, worked closely together to create a new form of book art. Mirskontsa was the first of the futurist books to cultivate an aesthetic of perpetual variation based on a curious impulse to resist finality and permanence and to embrace the idea of infinite beginnings. The sound poetry in this book transformed an essentially visual and verbal medium into an auditory one. Positing that the artist's book as a hybrid form has not received the attention that scholars devote to other media, this essay proposes a critical, analytic reading of Mirskontsa that highlights the hybrid, that is the interplay of word‐image‐sound, and foregrounds the phonic.