Push your philosophy like this year's look

When asked some years ago about my favorite Russian Futurist, I predictably blanked, but said that I thought I had imprinted weirdly on Aleksei Kruchonykh because of zaum—I discovered the Futurists through Victory Over the Sun (1913)—and because he looked in all the photographs I'd seen as though he were auditioning for the part of an eccentric clerk in a stage production of Dickens. Exhibit A, which I just ran into while looking as usual for something completely different:



Left to right, that's Kruchonykh, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Burliuk,¹ and Benedikt Livshits. Kruchonykh is twenty-seven; he would die in 1968, which I hope he found congenial in terms of the art of the time. I know almost nothing about his later life. There must be a biography somewhere. Anyway, I'm not saying that Mayakovsky's striped shirt and Livshits' flash tie don't have their fine points, but Kruchonykh looks like he just dropped in from his latest play or the last century or both. That makes me notice a person.

[edit] Velimir Khlebnikov beat me to the ghost poem. By more than ninety years, while they were both still alive. Sometimes I love history.

1. Okay, Tumblr thinks the figure at the top of the composition is Nikolai Burliuk; Wikipedia and this article think it's Vladimir. I don't suppose anyone has a source for the photo? I have not been able to trace it.