The seventh volume of the bie bao series presents the first English translation of the “Albanian” issue of Bloodless Murder magazine published in Petrograd in 1916. Edited and published by the group of avant-garde artists who called themselves Bloodless Murder, this obscure magazine reminiscent of Kruchenykh’s early Futurist publications, was printed in a very limited edition.
Almost completely unknown to scholars and curators of the avant-garde, the Bloodless Murder [Beskrovnoe ubiystvo] group included artists such as Vera Ermolaeva, Olga Leshkova, Nikolay Lapshin and Mikhail Le Dentu. Their “anarchist” publications and actions were intended to “insult and offend” bourgeois morality. The “Albanian” issue targeted the nationalist ideas of their old friend, the journalist Janko Lavrin, who later on became an internationally known literary historian.
In this volume, we publish the entire issue of the magazine with an extensive commentary by the researcher and curator Alexandra Strukova, who unearthed these documents from the RGALI archives. The volume also includes a brief retrospective note and two letters from Olga Leshkova, one of the magazine’s editors, to Zdanevich in 1924.
Inspired by the magazine, Zdanevich wrote the Zaum play Yanko I, King of Albania, which was performed in December 1916. Here we include an essay by the scholar and librarian Andrei Krusanov, who reconstructs the background and atmosphere of this historic performance. The volume also includes an essay and illustrations by Miklavž Komelj, a poet and art historian from Ljubljana, offering an unusual insight into Lavrin's Balkan legacy.
The bie bao series is dedicated to militant zaum investigations of Ilya Zdanevich - Iliazd (1894-1975). Zdanevich was a poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, and publisher who developed a new philosophy and methodology from zaum (trans-sense) experiments.
The series will include eight publications, covering many layers of Zdanevich’s rich theoretical and artistic output. Each volume will consist of a bio-bibliographical introduction, a commentary, a translation with annotations, and an artistic intervention.
The bie bao series is designed by Bardhi Haliti.
