Page 44 - Studio International - April 1974

MALEVICH

AND THE

FOURTH

DIMENSION

SUSAN COMPTON

From 1910 on, the necessity of finding new
forms of expression was the constant
preoccupation of avant-garde poets, musicians
and artists in Russia. Most of them at some
time grouped themselves round the poet
Khlebnikov, who had coined the word
`budetlyanin' which can be translated 'man of
the future'. Only later did part of the group
accept the name futuristy', the translation of
the name of the Italian group.'
During 1913 Malevich became an active
member of the `budetlyanin' group and he
contributed lithographs as illustrations to small
b ooks containing manifestoes and poetry in
which the authors were consciously seeking a
new language. One of those books, which
included illustrations and a cover design by
Malevich, appeared in September 1913 — `Troye'
(The Three). It contains a manifesto, 'The New
Ways of the Word', written by the poet
Kruchenykh, which already describes the new
verbal language as universal and transrational —
'zaum' — the word which is often loosely used to
describe Russian futurist poetry, especially that
of Khlebnikov. Kruchenykh describes the new
language and speaks of adding a fourth unit,
which he calls 'highest intuition'.
Such an addition of a fourth form to life is an
intrinsic part of the thought of the Russian
P. Uspensky, whose book `Tertium Organum'
was published in St Petersburg in 1911.
Uspensky describes the four forms of life in
terms of dimension: the higher the form of life,
the higher the dimension it is capable of
experiencing. The third form, that of three-
dimensional space, includes 'that man whom
science studies', but the fourth form, that of four-
dimensional space, is 'characteristic of the man
who is beginning to pass out of the field of