Lidantiu Faram

Lidantiu Faram (1923) is an artist’s book by Ilia Zdanevich and Naum Granovskii. Zdanevich was born in 1894 and died in 1975. He was a writer and artist who associated with the DADA movement in Georgia, Russia and Paris. Zdanevich adopted Khlebnikov's technique, Iliumism, but created a starker contrast through pictorial isolation. In 1919 Zdanevish published his first collection of zaumist verses and immigrated to Paris immediately after the October Revolution where he took part in the French Dada group. In 1923 he published his fundamental work: Lidantiu Faram, a dramatic poem in Zaum language. This work is a visually fascinating typographical contrivances and was highly influenced by Dadaist poetry. The cover was designed and made by Naum Granovskii and consists of illustrated wrappers with a collage of onlaid gold and silver paper, cork and synthetic materials while the text includes letterpress designed by Iliazd. Iliazd published a play inspired by this book shortly after he moved from Russia to Paris. The play combines slapstick with the resolution of visual aesthetic problems and is unquestionably a masterpiece of the Russian poetic avant-garde.

Isselbacher (1926:27) states:

Each page of this book offers itself as a picture that is, as pure ‘graphism’, exhibiting a typographical repertory so vast that it defies inventory. Furthermore, so playful is its organization that some of the pages virtually defy reading, breaking as they do with the linear conception of the text and forcing the reader to adopt a circular contemplation, to decipher in a back-and-forth manner more appropriate for viewing a picture. In Lidantiu Iliazd reached a high point in his development of ludic typography as an integral part of the modern page layout; it was a moment of synthesis and a culminating point in his formal experiments.

Ilya Zdanevich. Available on: https://monoskop.org/Ilya_Zdanevich

Zdanevich, Ilya. Granovskii, Naum. Available on: https://www.eprarebooks.com/cgi-bin/phillips/65.html