Poetry
Zangezi
Зангези
Velimir Khlebnikov · 1922
Synopsis
Subtitled “supersaga”, the work consists of twenty “planes”, sections that can be read separately. It opens at daybreak with the song of birds. On a mountain, the prophet Zangezi, the author's double, preaches to those who come to listen to him the laws of time, history and fate. He makes heard in turn the language of birds, that of the gods and a stellar language, which he presents as the common language of the future, and sets out tables of numbers meant to govern the fate of men.
Context
The text was assembled in early 1922 and printed in Moscow by the State Publishing House in June, in two thousand copies, with a cover by the painter Piotr Miturich; it came out in August, the author having died in June. In May 1923, Vladimir Tatlin staged it at the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd. In French, Yvan Mignot translated it in a bilingual edition published in 2021; in English, it appears in the collected works translated by Paul Schmidt.
Who it is for
An avant-garde text made of invented languages, best read with the Russian alongside and with notes.
Prizes and reception
According to the magazine Colta, the print run, threatened with pulping, was saved in July 1922 by an intervention of the People's Commissar Lunacharsky.
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