The poems contained in the album were written between 1909 and 1911. They draw attention to and manipulate the sounds of words in such a way as to destabilise their conventional meanings. ‘Words’, Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art, ‘are inner sounds … Skilful use of a word (according to poetic feeling) – an internally necessary repetition of a word twice, three times – can lead [to] unrealised spiritual qualities of the word. Eventually, manifold repetition … makes it lose its external sense as a name’.11 With this quest for ‘inner meaning’, ‘great possibilities open up for the literature of the future’ as language breaks from the constraints of its traditional usage.