Bozhidar

Bogdan Gordeyev was born in the family of a professor at the Kharkov Veterinary Institute and a school teacher of literature. In 1913 he graduated with a gold medal gymnasium. He took the pseudonym Bozhidar, quickly became close to the futuristic group " Centrifuge ". In March 1914, he became one of the founders of the Liryen publishing house in Kharkiv (where Nikolai Aseev and Grigory Petnikov also participated). In the same year, the only book of Bozhidar’s poems was published - “The Tambourine” (in the spelling of the author mixing the Latin and Cyrillic graphics - “Byben”).

On the night of September 7, 1914, he hanged himself in the forest near the village of Babki near Kharkov ; partly the suicide of Bozhidar was associated with the beginning of the First World War . In 1916, the posthumous 2nd edition of The Bubna was published, supplemented by unpublished poems.

Bozhidar experienced a strong influence of Velimir Khlebnikov , which was reflected in the choice of a pseudonym (Bozhidar is a South Slavic name, like Velimir ). Khlebnikov was posthumously included in the Society of the Presidents of the Globe , his name Khlebnikov put under the manifest "Trumpet Martians" in 1916 .

Posthumously, the Bozhidar treatise on poems “The singing unity of dimensions” was published, according to which the meters (“dimensions”) are united by a common rhythm (“singing”). Bozhidar’s own poems are written in accordance with these principles (in particular, the rhythm of reading is marked in a special way); they are characterized by Slavic vocabulary, sound writing , syntax destruction. The preface to the treatise was written by a futurist poet and poet of poet Sergei Bobrov . Roman Jacobson described this work as “poetical fantasies”, Mikhail Gasparov saw in the theory and practice of Bozhidar “systematic to the painful development” of Khlebnikov’s “fleeting discoveries”, recognizing Bozhidar as the “brightest” of the followers of Velimir.

• N. A. Bogomolov Bozhidar // The Short Literary Encyclopedia, 1962-1978
• Bozhidar (inaccessible link) (inaccessible link from 14-06-2016 [1147 days]) // Russian humanitarian encyclopedic dictionary, T. 1, 2002

• Poems of Bozidar from the collection “The Poetry of Russian Futurism” (“The New Library of the Poet”)
• “Penalty Unity” on the GPIB website
• Edition of the unpublished poem "Maria"