page_title: Zangezi
section_title: Title and history
hierarchical_section_title: Zangezi / Title and history
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Остров тюльпанов, Ики-Бурульский район This image is related to the protected area of Russia number 0810006This template and pages using it are maintained by the Russian WLE team. Please read the guidelines before making any changes that can affect the database!
context_page_description: Zangezi, or Zangezi: A Supersaga in 20 Planes, is a futurist poem-play by Russian, later Soviet, poet, writer and scholar Velimir Khlebnikov.
context_section_description: Zangezi is the name of a prophet in the work, the name being composed from Kalmyk word 'zyange', that in Kalmyk language means "messenger".
  The name Zangezi had different variants in Velimir Khlebnikov's draft book (which he was ironically calling in German fashion 'Großbuch'): Zengezi, Mangezi, Changezi, Changili (Зенгези, Мангези, Чангези, Чангили). Some critics said the name Zangezi associated with famous rivers Ganges and Zambezi. Other pointed out that Zangezi is name composed from Kalmyk word 'zyange', that in Kalmyk language means 'the messenger'.
  Velimir Khlebnikov wrote to his friend, fellow futurist poet Vasily Kamensky in 1909, that he had wanted to create a work in which 'every chapter must not have a likeness of another' ('...каждая глава не должна походить на другую...'), wanted in the work 'with the generosity of a beggar, throwing all his paints and discoveries on the palette' ('...с щедростью нищего бросить на палитру все свои краски и открытия...').
  It is thought that the work was completed in January, 1922, when Velimir Khlebnikov had written in his diaries on January 16, 1922: 'Zangezi gathered-solved'. Literary critics Nikolay Stepanov (Николай Леонидович Степанов) and Yury Tynyanov (Юрий Николаевич Тынянов) thought that different parts of Zangezi were written between 1920 and 1922. Petr Miturich (Пётр Васильевич Митурич), a painter and who helped his friend Velimir Khlebnikov to edit the printed texts when the author was ill and powerless, helped to prepare the work for publication when the author died. He painted the cover of the first publication (see picture above).
  The first edition of Zangezi was published in July 1922, but Khlebnikov didn't see the publication because had died a few weeks earlier on June 22, 1922, from what some sources said was malaria. Avant-garde painter Vladimir Tatlin staged the play Zangezi on May 23, 1923 in the Petrograd Museum of Feature Art, in a production where cultural researcher Nikolay Punin and poet Georgy Yakubovsky read lectures before the play began. Tatlin constructed in the play a mechanism for connecting prophet Zangezi with masses, and the stage was decorated with 'star language graphemes'.
  Some cultural critics praised the play, while others said (such as Sergey Yutkevich, who would later become a well-known Soviet screenwriter) it was very badly staged.
caption: Fields of Kalmykia with tulips in bloom. This is near Velimir Khlebnikov's birthplace in the village Malye Derbety (Rus. Ма́лые Дербе́ты).
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