Bloodless Murder – "The Albanian Issue", 1916, bie bao zaum series volume 7

The seventh volume of the bie bao series presents the first English translation of the “Albanian” issue of Bloodless Murder magazine published in Petrograd in 1916. Edited and published by the group of avant-garde artists who called themselves Bloodless Murder, this obscure magazine reminiscent of Kruchenykh’s early Futurist publications, was printed in a very limited edition. Almost completely unknown to scholars and curators of the avant-garde, the Bloodless Murder [Beskrovnoe ubiystvo] group included artists such as Vera Ermolaeva, Olga Leshkova, Nikolay Lapshin and Mikhail Le Dentu. Their “anarchist” publications and actions were intended to “insult and offend” bourgeois morality. The “Albanian” issue targeted the nationalist ideas of their old friend, the journalist Janko Lavrin, who later on became an internationally known literary historian. In this volume, we publish the entire issue of the magazine with an extensive commentary by the researcher and curator Alexandra Strukov