Igor Terentiev: Tenderness Record – The Life of Ilya Zdanevich

The third volume of the bie bao series presents Igor Terentiev’s Tenderness Record, a hagiography of Ilya Zdanevich published in 1919 in Tbilisi. In this slim book, Terentiev summarises the plots of Zdanevich’s zaum dramas and portrays his artistic achievements as a product of collective creativity. Alongside this, the third volume also presents a letter from Terentiev to Zdanevich from 1924. Sent from Leningrad, the letter sheds light onto various zaum projects at the Phonological Department at the GINKhUK and includes the only surviving script of Terentiev’s zaum drama, Iordano Bruno. The first-ever English translation of his writings is here presented with an extended introduction and extensive annotations, as well as with a short note by Giovanna Pagani Cesa, who initially discovered Ternetiev’s letter in the Zdanevich Archives. The texts are further contextualised with commissioned essays by Adam Ranđelović, a poet, translator, and musician from Belgrade, and Ketevan Kinturashvili, a curator, art historian and a researcher of the Georgian avant-garde from Tbilisi.