Aleksei Kruchenykh was one of the best-known poets of the Russian avant-garde, a theoretician of Cubo-Futurism, and an artist--called by his contemporaries the "buka of Russian literature," after the name of a fantastic being that Russians use to frighten small children into behaving ("Don't cry or the buka will come!"). For modern readers his name most frequently brings to mind two or three of his invented words, an extremely radical artistic program, and his inarticulate "trans-rational" verse, known as zaum'. Yet, many of the directions in which the avant-garde movement developed in Russia were made possible by Kruchenykh. He was one of the earliest creators of visual poetry in his country (remembered for the books and pamphlets he published in lithographic manuscript form), and a whole generation of avant-garde poets there, from the Futurists to the "Oberiuty" (as members of the OBERIU, the Association for Real Art, were...