[Introduction] // Le degré 41 sinapisé. Ilya Zdanevich. Helsinki: Rab-Rab Press, 2022. p. 8

Introduction

Literature
Le degré 41 sinapisé was published for the first time in L'Avanguardia a Tiflis, as a special issue of Quaderni del Seminario di Iranistica, Uralo-Altaistica e Caucasologia dell' Università degli Studi di Venezia, in Venice, 1982. Edited by L. Magarotto, M. Marzaduri, and G. Pagani Ceza, the publication is the first comprehensive study of the Tbilisi avant-garde movements from the beginning of the twentieth century. Edited and introduced by Marzio Marzaduri, Le degré 41 sinapisé was re-written from the manuscript in the Zdanevich Archives in Paris, now a part of the National Archives of France. The French translation was published in Pleine Marge, no. 33 in 2001, with an introduction by Régis Gayraud
    The same talk, with additional materials, is reprinted in Ilya Zdanevich, Dom na Govne: doklady i vystupleniya v Parizhe i Berline, 1921-1926 [House on Shit: reports and speeches in Paris and Berlin, 1921-1926], edited by Sergey Kudriavtsev, with commentaries by Gayraud and Kudriavtsev, published by Hylea in Moscow, 2021. Dom na Govne includes a short unpublished text 'Le degré 41 sinapisé (on denaturation of literature), which is an unfinished excerpt of the talk, with an additional but crossed-out note suggesting that the use of folk lyrics, and lyrics from Blues music, were also possible sources for further zaum experiments.
    The most exhaustive reference on Zdanevich, and other Russian avant-garde artists' and writers' activities in Paris is Literaturny avangard russkogo Pariza: 1920-1926, Istorija, hronika, antologija, dokumenty, edited by Leonid Livak and Andrei Ustinov, published by OGl, Moscow, in 2014. It is a 992 page book that follows the daily activities of Zanevich, and other Russian avant-garde writers in Paris in the first half of the 1920s, and includes reprints of hard to find documents and writings.
    
    
1
Vladimir Markov; Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968, p. 338.

2
'Manifesto of the 41%, in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, edited by Anna Lawton, Cornell University Press, 1988, p. 177.

3
Rosemarie Ziegler, 'Grupa 41", in Pojmovnik Ruske Avangarde, Vol. 1, edited by Aleksandar Flaker and Dubravka Ugresic, Graficki Zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb, 1984, p. 149. The Russian version is available in Russian Literature, 17, 1985.

4
Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism, San Diego State University Press, 1996, p. 251.

5
Tat'yana Nikolskaya, 'Fantasticheskiy gorod' Russkaya kulturnaya zhizn' v Tbilisi [Fantasy City': Russian Cultural Life in Tbilisi, 1917-1921, Pyataya Strana, Moscow, 2000.

6
R. Cogniat, 'L'Université du degré 41. Un laboratoire de poesie', Comoedia, 4.12.1921.

7
Johanna Drucker, Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, John Hopkins University Press, 2020.