Universal War

"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.

[5][2][6] A series of similar collages – also credited to Kruchenykh – in the book 1918 was published in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in January or February 1917,[7] whilst Rozanova was still in Moscow and the Verbovka Village Folk Centre working for Malevich and, later, Izo Narkompros.

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.

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.

[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)'.

[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.