Roman Utkin. [Introduction] // Ilya Zdanevich. Berlin khaltura. 1922. Helsinki: Rab-Rab Press, 2024. pp. 5-8.

Introduction

    Ilya Zdanevich - Iliazd gave the Berlin and Its Khaltura lecture on January 10, 1923, in the La Closerie des Lilas café in Paris. What is today a gourmet restaurant in Montparnasse was, in the twenties, a hangout for bohemian artists and writers. Before traveling to Berlin on the November 24, 1922, Zdanevich - together with the Union of Russian Artists and the editorial team of the magazine Udar [Strike] - organized a banquet for Vladimir Mayakovsky who was passing through the French capital. Natalia Goncharova and Sergei Diaghilev gave talks on this occasion, and the group Cherez [Through] - to which Zdanevich also belonged - decided it would be joining the Left Front of Arts (LEF), a project Mayakovsky was putting together at the time. Zdanevich's visit to Berlin was in part related to a larger plan of pushing what was a predominantly 'White' Russian art milieu in Paris to the left.
    Viktor Shklovsky invited Zdanevich to Berlin. In the invitation letter he sent, Shklovsky mentioned that Berlin is affordable ("the cost of living is ten dollars per month!"). This was the reality of German hyperinflation, which skyrocketed in 1923, bringing ruin to millions. (1) This socio-political situation was, however, not Zdanevich's concern; he reported instead on the co-optation and watering down of zaum and other Futurist inventions by the Russian avant-garde writers living in Berlin. Zdanevich, dismissively wrote about Russian writers trying to navigate the editoria Schemings of the precarious private émigré market and the Narkompros' [The People's Commissariat for Enlightenment] lucrative commissions. In 1921, there were as many as 72 Russian-language publishing houses in Berlin, which belonged to a wide political spectrum running from monarchists to Bolsheviks.
    As Shklovsky wrote in 1923, "three hundred thousand Russians of various nationalities wander aimlessly in the cracks of a perishing city" (2) of Berlin; at one point, this number accounted for one tenth of Berlin's entire population. With lives oscillating between extreme poverty and luxurious bacchanalia, rising right-wing nationalism and the complicated network of the Communist International, Berlin was a "trial emigration" for many Russian writers. (3) As Roman Utkin - whose translations of Zdanevich are published in this volume - states: "Berlin provoked, offended, disrupted, and stimulated."(4)
    In the first half of the 1920s, "no city was so closely linked to Moscow as Berlin." Brigitte Studer notes: "Berlin stood alongside Moscow as international communism's second center of global operations."(5) Ilya Ehrenburg - who acted as a bridge between the Soviet Union and the West - wrote that "there is only one contemporary city in Europe - Berlin."(6) Zdanevich's primary target in his lecture on Berlin was Ehrenburg, whom he dismissed (alongside Andrei Bely and others) as an opportunistic impostor. He accused Ehrenburg, who was then a powerful Soviet representative in Berlin, of being a khaltura' writer, transforming zaum into kitsch. (7) In the lecture we are publishing here, Zdanevich briefly explained the meaning of 'khaltura' - an old word which had re-emerged after the October Revolution to designate hackwork. Zanevich was most likely aware of the linguist Sergey Kartsevski's article 'Khaltura' published in 1922 in the Paris newspaper Posledniye Novosti.(8) Ehrenburg, according to Zdanevich, represented the new Russian 'khaltura' in Berlin. The left circles close to Ehrenburg did not show much enthusiasm for Zdanevich either - as we can gather from reports published in Nakanune [On the Eve], a newspaper whose mission was to encourage Russians living abroad to come to terms with the Bolsheviks.
    Zdanevich gave a lecture-performance in Berlin on 8 December, 1922, hosted by the House of Arts [Dom iskusstv] platform at café Leon. He performed Yanko, Albanian King and gave a lecture on zaum, published in this volume as 'Towards Berlin'. The day before the event, Nakanune (No. 204, 7. 12. 1922) announced that alongside Zdanevich's lecture and performance, Viktor Shklovsky and the linguist Petr Bogatyrev would be reading their papers comparing Zdanevich's work with Pushkin and Ostrovsky. Both Nakanune and Louis Lozowick, an Ukrainian- born American artist, reported sarcastically on Zdanevich's eccentric performance. During his visit, Zdanevich also performed at a private dinner hosted by Vladislav Khodasevich in the presence of Maxim Gorky. In this volume, Jyrki Siukonen introduces the environment of 1922 Berlin, and presents three letters Shklovsky sent to Zdanevich, published for the first time in English. They shed light on a fleeting moment of post-revolutionary Russian art, when the non-referentiality and radical abstraction of zaum was still perceived as a hope towards a new internationalist language.
    Although Zdanevich is mainly known today through his typography and design works, he was also a notable performer. He concludes his 'Towards Berlin' lecture by stating: "I write zaum poetry in order to be able to sing, and I will stop being a zaum poet when I lose my lovely voice." It turned out that his singing stopped soon after, with the 1923 publication of LidantYU fAram, which would be the last zaum work he wrote.
    This volume also contains gaROland, Zanevich's first sound poem, which he had written back in 1914. Translated and contextualized by poet Eugene Ostashevsky, for whom "zaum is a national literature," (9) gaROland tells the myth of a European suicide bomber. Marking the beginning of Zdanevich's poetic experiments, it is meant to be read aloud.