Poetry. Russian Studies. Translated by Jack Hirschman, Alexander Kohav, and Venyamin Tseytlin. Alexei Kruchenykh was one of the central figures of Russian Futurism and the leading practitioner of ZAUM poetry. ZAUM, meaning literally, "beyond sense," was an attempt to undermine and/or ignore the conventional meaning of words, "allowing their sound," as Marjorie Perloff has written, "to generate their own range of signification, or, in its most extreme form, the invention of new words based purely on sound." In a series of inventive works, Kruchenykh sought to transform the landscape of Russian modernist poetry. "Alexei Kruchenykh was the wild man of Russian literature, a tireless promoter of Russian Futurist poetry, and its most loyal adherent clear through to the end of his life. Kruchenykh was BAAAD. The term is apt. He was funky, hip, interested in destroying every taboo of the literary past. He constructed his words to evoke a spontaneity that overcame the chaos he was also reflecting, a