Russian Futurist Theatre explores is the first book to comprehensively uncover the Russian futurist theatre in all its virtuosity and diversity.

In her extensive Introduction, Lawton has highlighted the historical development of the movement and has related futurism both to the Russian national scene and to avant-garde movements worldwide.

The Futurist opera Victory over the Sun was a key event of the Russian avant-garde. This volume brings together the first fully annotated translation of the libretto and other important primary source materials.

Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks and ending with semiotics and post-structuralism, Theories of the Theatre is the first comprehensive survey of Western dramatic theory. In this expanded edition the author has updated the book and added a new concluding chapter that focuses on theoretical developments since 1980, emphasizing the impact of feminist theory.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.

"The British Library has recently acquired a superb and representative collection of Russian Futurist books, which form a unique record of a modern movement. Based on this material, this book surveys the complexity of Russian futurism, and proviudes an unrivalled collection of illustrations which highlight developments in theatre, graphic design, and art in the years of flowering, 1912-16"--Back cover