Chris Knight

“ Khlebnikov welcomed "inventions" in general, but reserved his most ardent enthusiasm for those connected with "lightning". He saw Radio as "the language of lightning" and believed that it would achieve the aim of his "universal language"—the unification of mankind. Khlebnikov treated Radio very much as he treated the "magical" and "transrational" language of primitive chants, prayers and folk-culture, saw humanity as a "ray" and talked of "a sonorous string of tribes" stretching across the globe. He believed that the entire Earth itself could be treated "as a resonant plate". ”

“ However, as we have noted, death was seen as an entrance to new life: the extremes of meaninglessness, dumbness, inarticulateness and incomprehensibility were seen as barriers beyond which unimaginable heights of awareness and communicative power could be attained. Those who felt the barriers merely as barriers—as obstacles and nothing more—were those who were incapable of perceiving in the destruction of the old world the birth of a new one. As Tynyanov writes of Khlebnikov:
Those who think his language is 'meaningless' do not see how a revolution is simultaneously a new order. ”

“ If all this seems rather far-fetched, we should perhaps turn to a more convincing Utopian vision: Khlebnikov's "Radio of the Future", which deals less with time than with the conquest of space. To a certain extent, it is a vision which has already come true, but it is remarkable that it should have been written as early as in 1921:
The Radio of the future—the main tree of consciousness— will open up a knowledge of countless tasks and will unite all mankind. ”

“ Escapism forces the modernists to prefer dreams to reality. Just as imaginative experience is preferred to life, the world of artificial inventions is preferred to reality and, at the same time, while the world is being transformed into a playhouse and man into an actor, the deepest emotions become simply theatrical subjects. Shunning life, the modernists move away from people, into solitude and death. [214] Khlebnikov‘s revolt against this escapist tendency was thorough-going. ”

“ Khlebnikov was determined above all to restore a sensation of the tangible materiality of language itself. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov attacked the Symbolists' View of language as something smooth, mellifluous, clear and tender to the ear. This, to them, was a View of language as ideally effeminate. The Symbolists wanted language to be like a woman:
We think, on the other hand, that language should, first and foremost, be language, and if it should resemble anything at all, it should be a hand-saw, or the poisoned arrow of a savage. ”

“ To understand the will of the stars means to unfurl before the eyes all the scrolls of genuine freedom. They hang above us only in the black night, these boards of future laws, and doesn't the point's path follow this course in order to avoid the wire of states among the eternal stars and hearing of humanity? ”

“ The believers in a religious, celestial heaven, after a series of adventures, realize their mistake. They see
that they had been wrong to condemn the earth: washed by revolution and dried with the heat of new suns, it appears to them in a dazzling brightness, in which only we can see life, we, who beyond all the terrors of the day can clearly sense another, marvellous existence. ”

“ Futurism is against mysticism, against the passive deification of nature, against the aristocratic and every other kind of laziness, against dreaminess, and against lachrymosity—and stands for technique, for scientific organization, for the machine, for planfulness, for will—power, for courage, for speed, for precision and for the new man, who is armed with all these things. ”

“ As the mind slips into a dream, the "sunlit" and "rational" world—-the world of literacy, logic, everyday business and officialdom—is reduced to zero. In its place there opens up a new world of freedom from the dimensions of time and space. If the world of dreams lies beyond the reach of literacy and the state, the opposite is the case in relation to the "governing" layers of the mind. Khlebnikov sees the “sunlit” or "rational", everyday or literate layers of language and consciousness as "ruling over" the starry, transrational layers just as governments rule over people. ”

“ Destruction of languages which resemble the claw on the wing... Languages on contemporary humanity—are the claw on the wing of birds: a useless residue of antiquity, a Claw of former times. [430] As a source of magic, as the seat of the world's consciousness and as a means of spiritual "flight"—in these three forms, Radio was seen, then, as in a sense "paralleling" the functions of Khlebnikov's "transrational" or "universal" language. One could cite other parallels-'the "instantaneous", space—conquering nature of the two communications—forms, their shared "oral" bias and so on. ”

“ When the future, thanks to such computations, becomes transparent, the sensation of time is lost, and it seems that you are standing motionless on the deck of the foresight of the future. The sensation of time dissappears and it resembles a field before and a field behind, turning into a kind of space... ”

“ An art-form which was to express the spirit of the times would have to base itself not on the old and familiar certainties—which were certainties no more—but on the void, on the unknown world which seemed to be just coming into view. ”

“ If we survey attentively the period left behind, we cannot help but realize how vital and progressive was the work of the Futurists in the field of philology. Without exaggerating the dimensions of this "revolution" in language, we must realize that Futurism has pushed out of poetry many worn words and phrases, and has made them full-blooded again and, in a few cases, has happily created new words and phrases which have entered, or are entering, into the vocabulary of poetry and which can enrich the living language. ”

“ A town of logs of sound, A town of stones of sound, There I lead you To the town whose food you can hear, The town where people eat sounds, let us go, Where there are logs of sound, Logs of laughter, And streets of song... Enough of idly straining Strings with one's hand Enough of catching and clinging To the sounds, hungry-eared, To listen to them. ”

“ Identifying "inventions" with his own poetic work, Khlebnikov saw the electronics revolution more generally as stemming from the inner world of the human spirit, while at the same time it returned "the light-ray" of humanity in a direct way into contact with the light-rays of the suns and stars of the universe. In this way the inner world of man's dreams was linked with the infinities of the universe, just as man's future was linked with his prehistoric or even cosmic past. ”

“ The purpose of art was, by breaking the routine of habit and making things seem fresh, unexpected and new, to restore a sense of the reality, the physical tangibility of living existence—"to restore the sensation of life, to feel things, to make a stone stony..." ”

“ From the dark comes a familiar name, and at once all becomes clear. They are our people coming. "Oursl"—floats the sound from the darkness, spoken in words of the shared language. Language united people then, just as did a familiar voice. The weapons—is a sign of cowardice. If one goes into the matter, then it turns out that the weapon is an additional dictionary for those speaking in a different language—a pocket dictionary. ”

“ All life would take place in a process of endlessly—repeated obedience to pre—existing laws and written words. It would be the reign of 'byt' carried to its ultimate extreme. But although this ideal is never actually reached—conflicts always break out, laws have to be re-written and so on—to the extent that changelessness is achieved, time in a sense ceases to exist. And to that extent, the state is a pure "state of space".
Khlebnikov's language, we have seen, evolved in a process of continuation of—and reaction against—the language-use of the Symbolists. ”

“ However, perhaps the most important parallel which Khlebnikov saw between Radio and his linguistic projects was that both were to unite humanity. In 1920, as we have noted, Khlebnikov wrote of his "future language of the universe in embryo":
It alone can unite people. [432] In 1921, however, he wrote that something else could"unite people". Almost as if his "universal language" were now unnecessaary, he wrote that it was Radio which
will forge the unbroken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind. ”

“ No longer is the objective world "out there", at a measurable distance from the eye, while the "ego" or "self" is in its own four walls. One seems to be "inside" the objects depicted, and on all sides of them, while they seem to be inside one's own mind and eye. All art is largely an expression of the subconscious—of the world of dreams—-and it is obvious that the Cubist "distortion" of reality is in part of this "dream-world" kind. ”

“ But, since Khlebnikov was an artist, the question to be asked (if we are going to treat his work as a product of the scientific revolution of his age) is not whether his writings constituted science, but whether they expressed, from the subjective, human side, the experience of scientific mastery, the sensation of opening up new vistas of knowledge, and the optimism and hopes aroused by the discoveries of the new age. In the light of this question, as (it is hoped) the preceding pages have helped to show, Khlebnikov'e works score perhaps more highly than any other literature of his time. ”

“ Occurring as it does "for the first time since creation", this is a novel, time-defying event. Time's tyranny is conquered; the poet treats the sun familiarly as an equal—a comrade—and the two resolve to pour forth their 'byt'—destroying, creative light, to "dawn and sing in a gray tattered world". ”

“ His "transrational language" is designed to reach the "people" as if "over the heads" of the "government":
If one may distinguish, within the soul, the government of intellect from the stormy people of feelings, then charms and transrational language are an appeal over the head of the government straight to the people of feelings, a direct cell to the twilight regions of the soul or the highest point of popular sovereignty in the life of the word... [410] This, of course, throws important new light on Mandel'stam's comment that Khlebnikov sees language as a state. ”

“ Even the most extreme "modernist" art of the period—Malevich's white square on a white background, for example—can only be described as "the destruction of art" if by "art" is meant what Mayakovsky calls "dessert“——an "extra", a postscript to life, a commentary on it or a "reflection".
We have noted already the statement of Larionov and Zdanevich justifying their face-painting in which they explain that while it is good that life should invade art (i.e. that art should reflect contemporary themes, the machine—age etc) , even this is not enough: what is needed is that art should invade life. ”

“ He continues, in words equally applicable to Khlebnikov: "...reality is for the child both more arbitrary and better regulated than for us. It is more arbitrary, because nothing is impossible, and nothing obeys causal laws. But whatever may happen, it can always be accounted for, for behind the most fantastic events which he believes in, the child will always discover motives which are sufficient to justify them; just as the world of the primitive races is peopled with a wealth of arbitrary intentions, but is devoid of chance."——loc cit. ”

“ It is easy to see now that language has always been a mass medium even as the new media are new languages having each its own unique grammar and aesthetic modes...
NOBODY yet knows the languages inherent in the new technological culture; we are all technological idiots in terms of the new situation. [431] Whether the "idiot" Khlebnikov was, in creating his "incomprehensible" language, sensing in some way this impending impact of Radio is perhaps an interesting thought, but we have no direct evidence that the poet himself consciously thought of the new media as incomprehensible languages. ”

“ It was hoped that from Malevich's pure geometrical shapes would emerge an art, an architecture and forms of self-government and work emanating directly from the springs of human creativity and owing nothing to the forms of the out—lived world. The "abolition of art" expressed only one side of the modernists' programme. The other was the artistic recreation of life. Wrote El Lissitzky:
In the new order of society...where work is being done by everyone for everyone, in such a society work is given free scope and everything which is produced is art. ”