Iliazd is the the nom de plume of writer and artist Ilia Zdanevich, who is perhaps best remembered as an artist and bookmaker who worked with Pablo Picaso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Alberto Giacometti. His novel Rapture, a fast paced adventure-romance that mythologizes the life of the Russian avant-garde, was overlooked when it was first published in Russian in Paris in 1930. Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, the book was nearly lost.