Kruchenykh had been a member of the Gileia poets' group in Moscow that had published A Slap In the Face of Public Taste,^[8] a manifesto/provocation, an early Succès de scandale that helped to establish Futurism in Russia. He left Gileia in 1912 to join the rival Donkey's Tail group, which was founded by the Cubo-Futurist painter Mikhail Larionov. Each of the members would collaborate with Kruchenykh on his next three artist's books; A Game In Hell, Worldbackwards and Old-Time Love. These three publications set the tone for a radical deconstruction of the book format:

"If Kruchenykh had consciously set out to dismantle (nowadays we might say "deconstruct") the legacy of Johannes Gutenberg, it is unlikely that he could have done it more completely....In a series of remarkable book works of 1912 to 1920, Kruchenykh and his collaborators challenged this legacy in an unprecedentedly complete way, step-by-step departing from our European expectations about what a twentieth century book should be," (Gerald Janecek, quoted in The Russian Avant-Garde Book)^[9]

Universal War was an atypical book for Kruchenykh, since despite training as an artist, he usually only supplied the poetry for his books. This allowed collaborating artists such as Natalya Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Olga Rozanova unusual levels of freedom to integrate their pictures with his hand-written words.^[10] Universal War featured his own collages, in an abstract style Kruchenykh referred to as 'Non-Objective'. The series of collages run parallel to the poetry printed on the first two sheets. Germany is depicted as a belligerent spiky helmet with its shadow, a black panther, fighting Russia.

The book starts with two pages of poems, under the headline "Universal War will take place in 1985"^[11] with page references to associate them with specific images. These poems are followed by 12 related collages, consisting of coloured sheets of card-mostly dark blue, but interspersed with grey, white and pink sheets- with various other papers and fabrics stuck to the sheets. Whilst the copies are similar, they show subtle differences.^[12]

Poetic and pictorial Zaum edit

Zaum poetry attempted to “…lead the artist far beyond the restraints of socially sanctioned patterns and the vice of national vocabularies"^[13] and, whilst similar to Marinetti's insistence on the concrete nature of words, Kruchenykh insisted that Zaum was a liberation from meaning as well as form.

[Kruchenykh] described the new logic of zaum as ‘broader than sense’, a logic that liberated words, letters and sounds from their ‘submission to meaning’ as defined by conventional three-dimensional logic.^[14]

The poems are short, and are filled with onomatopeiac syllables;

Page 2—Battle Between Mars and Scorpio

appetite pegasus
appendicitus
grabz
chachen
respact
herself
female
tuningfork

Page 3—Explosion of a Trunk

with the queue full of whips
cuts the stone with vengeance
hil ble faes
och fi ge ^[15]

In the preface Kruchenykh claimed that the collages were born of the same source as transrational language- 'the liberation of creation from unnecessary conveniences (through non-objectiveness)'.^[16] He cited the style as originating with Rozanova, and taken up by Malevich under 'the rather uninformative name' of Suprematism. In fact, the Russian avant-garde were well aware of Kandinsky's experiments with Abstract art. Kandinsky, a Russian living in Munich, regularly returned to Russia, and had contributed to A Slap In The Face Of Public Taste with a poem from Klänge, an artist's book of sound poetry placed in tandem with abstract woodcuts, published in Munich, 1912. Another seminal artist's book, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France by Blaise Cendrars and another Russian, Sonia Delaunay, had been exhibited in Russia in late 1913, and similarly linked colourful abstract images with concrete poetry.

The work pre-dates Hans Arp's similar experiments with abstract collages done for the Cabaret Voltaire, an early Dada venue,^[17] although it's not known if the two men were aware of each other's works.

Exile edit

Unlike the Italian futurists, the attitude of the Russian futurists to the war and the Russian Revolution were at best ambiguous- Kruchenykh, like Kamensky, dodged the draft by retiring to a wooden hut in the Caucasus sometime in 1916.^[18] By 1917, he had moved to the newly independent (if short-lived), menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, and became a member with Ilia Zdanevich and Igor' Terent'ev of the avant-garde group 41°, centered at the Fantastic Cavern, an underground cabaret in downtown Tiflis. The scattering of artists during the revolution effectively brought Cubo-Futurism to an end, to be replaced by constructivism.

There are copies of Universal War in MOMA, New York, and in the Costakis collection.

• Markov, Vladimir; Russian Futurism: a History, MacGibbon & Kee, 1969
• Gurianova, Nina; Exploring Colour: Olga Rozanova and the early Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1918, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2000
• Margrit Rowell & Deborah Wye, ed.; The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934, MoMA Publications, 2002
• Rainer Michael Mason; GUERRE · S | trois suites insignes sur un thème · 1914-1916 | Natalija Gontcharova, Ol’ga Rozanova, Aleksej Kruchenykh, Genève, Cabinet des estampes, 2003 Paris, Adam Biro, 2003
• Universal War, An Online Version on MOMA Online
• "Kruchenykh, Aleksei"; essay by Humphreys, Grove Art Online
• Translation of The poems in Satire as Cultural Engagement, retrieved 27-08-2008

• Almost the whole of Universal War online at MOMA Online
• The poems translated by Jack Hirschman, Alexander Kohav & Venyamin Tseytlin
• A Game In Hell, second edition 1914, by Kruchenykh, Malevich and Rozanova
• A Little Duck's Nest . . . of Bad Words, An artist's book by Rozanova and Kruchenykh, 1913, + brief biography
• Transrational Boog by Kruchenykh and Rozanova, 1915
• A whole series of Russian Avant-Garde books online at Getty Archives, including Transrational Boog and A Game In Hell