Handwriting, typography, illustration: The visual word of the Russian avant-garde

This dissertation considers the rise of Russian avant-garde book design, experiments in visual forms of language, and their role in shaping the modern reading experience. Chapter 1 is about the Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov and his pseudo-scientific system of letters. Departing from the earlier model of the "letter as such," which claims a relationship of identity between writer and handwriting, Khlebnikov develops a theory of the relationship between writing and historical events. I argue that in his linguistic essays, Khlebnikov adopts the alter ego of the nineteenth-century writer and mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia. She serves as a fictional lyrical subject that makes his theory of history both mathematical and literary. Chapter 2 is about Ilya Zdanevich (Iliazd), whose typographical designs represent the radical extreme of Russian Futurism. I examine his book designs, critical writings, and speeches for the way he uses typography to fashion a public self. In particular, Zdanevich's preoccupation with gender provides a point of entry into his opaque zaum' works. Zdanevich uses typography to explore how gender is mediated by, and can be shaped by, the creative use of visual language. Chapter 3 is about the painter, architect, typographer El Lissitzky. I argue that Lissitzky's experimental books represent a form of research into the distinction between written word and image. Far from a "limited design task," typography is the most important tool Lissitzky employs in order to explore the paradox of reading: that it is essentially a visual act, but that it is also predicated on a kind of blindness to the materiality of language.