Iliazd

(1894 - 1975)

4187

Igor Terentev

Трактат о сплошном неприличии

Treatise on solid indecency

Tiflis: 41°, 1919

290 x 170 mm. 16 pages 

Edition: 300. 

In 1918, Kruchenykh, Ilia Zdanevich and  Terentev founded the group 41 degrees in Tiflis, Capital of Georgia. Tiflis was yet outside the influence of the Bolsheviks and fleeing the Civil War, many artists found temporary refuge there. The city counted many thriving publishing-firms and had clubs and salons in abundance. In this atmosphere Iliazd, the pseudonym Ilia Zdanevich took in publishing the play LidantYU in 1923 in Paris, developed his pictorial typesetting of poetry. His masterpiece is the book LidantYU in which the text and words are printed using a variety of typefaces, sizes and line positions, this for visual purposes rather than for practical purposes. Kruchenykh’s experiments with language were the basis for Iliazd  experiments with book typography in a similar way, presenting, as in Kruchenykh’s poetry, a danger to the inexperienced reader of losing tract of the words. Treatise on total indecency is an essay on literature and culture, the cover is designed by Iliazd, but the typography by Terentev. The book contains some elegant displays and has some nice, mainly decorative, elements that are less functional than the typography of Iliazd. The cover of the book shows Iliazd’s more conceptual view of  typographical visualisations. The back cover of this copy is missing

References:

Janecek 1984, pp. 189-91

Getty 1997, nr. 771

New York 1987, p. 83