Universal War (ВсеЛенская Война Ъ) is an artist's book by Aleksei Kruchenykh published in Petrograd at the beginning of 1916. Despite being produced in an edition of 100 of which only 12 are known to survive, the book has become one of the most famous examples of Russian Futurist book production, and is considered a seminal example of avant-garde art from the beginning of the twentieth century.
Published at the height of Russian involvement in World War I (see Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive), the book attempts to echo the chaos and destruction of the war with the chaos and disruption of collage techniques new to the Russian Avant-Garde at the time, and opens with the bleak prophecy "Universal War will take place in 1985". Shortly after the book was published, Kruchenykh left Petrograd to live in a hut in the Caucausus to avoid the draft.
"One of the most outstanding merits of the album- a dadaist work in the fullest sense- is its successful realization of Kruchenykh's concept of collage as an artistic method transcending mere technique and capable of metaphorically expressing the 'discordant concordance' of the age."
The book is an early attempt to link zaum poetry (often translated as 'transrational' or 'beyonsense' poetry) with 'zaum' images. In the foreword, Kruchenykh refers to the book as 'Poetic zaum shaking the hand of the pictorial zaum'.
Universal War is often erroneously credited as a collaboration between Kruchenykh and his wife, the artist Olga Rozanova. Whilst the pair often collaborated on artist's books-including A Game In Hell (1914) and Transrational Boog (1915)- most authorities now consider the work to be by Kruchenykh alone. A series of similar collages - also credited to Kruchenykh - in the book 1918 was published in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in January or February 1917, whilst Rozanova was still in Moscow and the Verbovka Village Folk Centre working for Malevich and, later, Izo Narkompros.
Read more about Universal War: The Emergence of Russian Futurist Books, Universal War in Russian Literature, References
Famous quotes containing the words universal and/or war:
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with cylinder oil, and coat their outsides with sprayed rubber film, and let them statically await the next emergency.”
—Norbert Wiener (1894–1964)