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[ILIAZD, PRESENTATION COPY] Lidantiu Faram [i.e. (roughly) Lidantiu As a Beacon]

Iliazd (Il’ia Zdanevich)

Item #2157

Paris: Editions 41˚, 1923. 61 pp. 19x14 cm.

With original illustrated wrappers with printed design and collage of onlaid gold and silver paper, cork and synthetic material by Naum Granovskii. Text includes letterpress typographic designs by Iliazd. Very good. Small bit of the spine is missing. First edition. Copy 448 of 530. Inscribed from Iliazd to Andrè Billy (1882-1971), writer the literary critic for L'Œuvre, friend of Apolinair and a figure in modernist circles of 1920s Paris. The first pages bear contemporary pencil and pen annotations in French, possibly by Billy himself.

One of the most iconic publications of the Russian avant-garde, it’s always celebrated as the first oeuvre in the caledoscope of Iliazd’s editions, printed in Paris in the next 50 odd years. But it’s less known, than in 1923 it was more connected with LEF in Moscow, then Parisian circles.
One of the undoubted leaders of the red camp was Vladimir Mayakovsky who had formed the Left Front of Arts in 1922. He wanted to unite the avant-garde artists and writers under a new flag and call this ‘Red INKISTERN’ (The International of the Art Workers). The ambitious idea to undo what was done by the revolution and the civil war didn’t succeed, however, Mayakovsky’s visits to Paris were frequent in 1922-24. The main conductor of these ideas was Iliazd, who knew Mayakovsky well from the 1910s – after all, both were born and raised in Georgia and knew each other from early years. When Vladimir was in Paris Iliazd founded the left artist group called ‘Cherez’, that was supposed to be LEF representative in France, but it has not worked either. Having that in mind, “Le Dantu Faram”, printed in 1923, could be considered the most leftist of all 41 degrees publications.
It’s a letterpress symphony in a form of a book – for the first time the ideas Iliazd nurtured when in Tiflis, when he was working with reserved powers of print shops back home, for the first time those ideas of typographical poetry has found their embodiement in Paris, where the opportunities to produce the higher quality printing material would eventually materialize in career of a pioneer livres d’artiste creator.

The Russian Avant-garde book, pp. 354-356 ; Hellyer, n°144 ; Getty Museum, Russian modernism, cat. 249 ; MoMA, Iliazd and the Illustrated book, 1962, cat. 8.