“Arrangment of the burials and cremations of deceased veterans of the VOV [Great Fatherland War], the MO [Defense Ministry], the FSB [Federal Security Service], the MVD [Interior Ministry], etc. Manufacture of tombstones.” Central District, Petersburg, 15 April 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
We now regard the word “USSR” as a proud acoustic commonplace, and “US” appears as solid as money to us. The first word emerged after the lab experiments of the Futurists. […] I am not writing a research paper here, but for words like “USSR” the term that describes their emergence is alphabetized words. The alphabetization of words involves compacting, abbreviating, and truncating words, turning them into titlos.
When you look at a book printed in Finnish, you see the pulse of life in the land of lakes is slow, and during the long winter evenings people lazily articulate what they want to say without letting their tongues hasten their breathing.
Without knowing it himself, Kruchonykh produced the first poem based on the principle of initializing words [“Dyr, bull, shchol”].
He occasionally wrote down only the initial sounds of words. The initialization of words is a magnificent principle, now in full use in the USSR.
VIL = Vladimir Ilyich Lenin*
NEP = New Economic Policy.
OPAHWENESP = Our Plains Are Huge, WE NEed SPeed.
“Dyr bul shol [sic]” = dyroi budet urodnoe litso schastlivykh olukhov [“The ugly face of happy blockheads will be a hole”].
* This particular abbreviation, spelled Vil (Виль), was used as a male first name in Soviet times, by analogy with the English “Will.” Vil Lipatov, a semi-famous Soviet writer, was probably the most well-known bearer of the name. Vil Lipatov achieved a modicum of renown for his novel A Village Detective, which was made into a movie. TRR
Source: David Burliuk, Excerpts from a Futurist’s Memoirs, Letters, and Poems (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Fond, 1994), pp. 41-42. Thanks to Comrades Stas and Lena for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader
The Russian Reader 