Vladimir Khlebnikov

“ The childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual can both be seen as pre-literate stages of existence. A wave of interest in what Nikolai Kulbin called "the art of children and prehistoric men" [356] accompanied the emergence of "primitivism" in Russian art and—as we noted in Chapter Five—it was largely as a poetic expression of this movement that Russian Futurism (and particularly its "Khlebnikovian" aspects) took shape. The generally "clumsy" and "illiterate" impression created by Larionov's or Goncharova's paintings was equally conveyed by much of Khlebnikov's language. ”

“ Just as Markov sees a conflict between Khlebnikov's poetry and his thought, so it is possible to see a conflict between almost every element of his thought and every other one. His primitivism clashes with his futurism, his Russian nationalism with his universalism, his mathematical "ultra-rationalism" with his championship of transreason and his "formalism" with his revolutionary commitment. Khlebnikov himself was aware that he had not explained himself. [508] is great book on numbers and fate was left unwritten. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is perhaps unfair, since the Italians' greatest achievements were not in poetry but in painting. Here too, however, an intellectual pre—conception——e.g. the idea of representing mechanical speed-generally predominated over "inner form" or "material" as understood by the Cubists or Russian futurists. ↑ Erlich, Russian Formalism, p 44. ↑ Livshits declared to Marinetti, in words which are worth quoting: "Unfortunately, Khlebnikov for you is merely a name: he is utterly untranslatable in those very works where his genius is expressed with the greatest force. ”

“ The theme of speaking to the stars and commanding suns is to be found almost throughout Khlebnikov's works. In his "Declaration of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere", written in 1917, he tells the public not to blame him and his colleagues for their audacity and impudence. It is the sun which is to blame, for it has given them their thoughts and words. [105] In his poem, "The Sailor and Singer", his "self" merges with that of mankind, while the human race is to take to its wings and teach "neighbouring suns" to pay their respects. ”

“ Being artists, they surrendered first and foremost to their own inner world, the world of forms, dreams and the subconscious. To take the question of revolutionary commitment, it was arrived at only through this prior commitment to the inner world of form. It was Khlebnikov's formal preoccupations—with the subjective aspects of language, with the meanings and sound-correlations subconsciously felt, and in general with the need to give voice to a new inner world in its own language—which led him in the general direction of the Bolshevik revolution. ”

“ Barooshian, op cit pp 29-35 and Jakobson Modern Russian Poetry in: E J Brown op cit pp 64-67. One of the best analyses of the "Cubism" of Khlebnikov's poetry is in Pomorska, op cit pp 95—106. ↑ Modern Russian Poetry, p 64. ↑ “It is time for us to be the masters"-—Guillaume Apollinaire The Cubist Painters, Lionel Abel (trans.) , N Y 1949 p 9. Khlebnikov's idea of a world government of artists—an expression of the same impulse-will be considered later. ↑ Markov, Russian Futurism, p 134. ↑ Quoted in: Woroszylsky, op cit p 55. ↑ Quoted by John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso, p 22. ”

“ A clash between East and West (and between oriental, oral culture and the culture of literate civilization) would form an essential ingredient of Khlebnikov's art. [3] A "junction" of another kind—between the arts and the sciences—was embodied in the differing interests of the poet's parents. His father was an ornithologist and natural scientist. As the poet later wrote himself:
Father was an adherent of Darwin and Tolstoy. ”

“ He wrote to Mayakovsky in 1921:
I am thinking of writing a thing in which all 3 milliard of humanity would participate, and in which it would be obligatory for mankind to play. But ordinary language is unsuitable for it; a new one will have to be created step by step. [501]
This suggestion should be seen as an elaboration of Khlebnikov's idea of the world as a poem" [502] , which we noted earlier. A related notion was Khlebnikov's picture of the futurist (budetlyan) as a balalaika-player, plucking the strings of the globe, of human heart-beats and of humanity's fate. ”

“ A LANGUAGE T0 UNITE MANKIND.
The previous three chapters, dealing generally with Cubism and Futurism, have set the scene: the new art-forms were to change the world, not mirror it. In this, they were to parallel, in a certain sense, the achievements of modern science. The following chapters show how this world-changing desire expressed itself in Khlebnikov's work—in a way which was very much his own. This chapter deals with one example: Khlebnikov‘s attempts to create a language form which would abolish war and restore to man the lost unity of his primitive past. ”

“ The "political" differences between these two forms of language have been noted already: one divides people, the other unites them; one corresponds to the "states of space", the other to the "state of time"; one corresponds to the world‘s "governments", the other to its "people"; one corresponds to "the present", the other to the future and the distant past. Another difference is suggested when Khlebnikov states his own preference as between these two forms or realms of existence of the word:
I would much rather Gaze at the stars Than sign a death—warrant... ”

“ Despite his early optimism, Khlebnikov later felt that his task had still to be accomplished. At the beginning of 1921 he wrote to his sister: "This year will be the year of the great and final battle with the serpent" (SP V 315) . In April 1922—shortly before his death—he wrote to his mother of his projected world-shattering book of equations: "it's got stuck on the first page and won't go any further" (SP V 325) . ↑ SP V 182. ↑ David Burlyuk's expression: Boris Lavrenyev, Novy Mir, No 7, 1963. In: Woroszylsky, op cit p 85. ↑ Markov, Longer Poems, p 54. ↑ Pomorska, op cit pp 85–85. ”

“ The literate social strata dare not set foot outside the bounds of what is "literate" and "correct": Mandel'stam comments that the Russian Symbolists "have not more than five hundred words among them“. [353] He contrasts this with the "turbulent morphological flowering" of language in the hands of Khlebnikov, who multiplies roots, evolves new words out of existing ones and knows no limits to his vocabulary. [354] Markov comments that "Khlebnikov‘s vocabulary is easily the richest in Russian literature." ”

“ We—are a new breed of people-rays. We have come to illuminate the universe. [274] And his notes about "the ray of humanity, people as rays, the ray of KhlebnikovI the ray of the world" and so on have already been cited. [275] When Khlebnikov wrote to Petnikov about "a government of poets“ and "a sonorous string of tribes" encircling the globe—and went on to declare:We are like the sea's waves during a grey storm"—he was not being simply mystical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was as if the machine-age, having subordinated man himself to the rhythms of the machine, were now to do the same to his language.
Two of the most perceptive contemporary commentators on Russian futurism–Benedict Livshits and Roman Jakobson-both appealed to the example of Khlebnikov in contrasting the Russian to the Italian movement. In the case of both critics, it was the Italians' lack of respect for the "material" of their art which drew the heaviest criticism. ”

“ Russian Futurism, we have seen, was in large part a revolt against byt. The Sun in Mayakovsky‘s "Extraordinary Adventure" comes down from the sky and drives the fires back—"for the first time since creation". Everything in the Futurists' poetry seemed new, strange—reminiscent in part of what Khlebnikov called "those first days of life on earth", when mountains belched lava and there were three suns in the sky. Khlebnikov's word—creation was designed to make words sparkle with fresh life, in his own words, “as in the first days of creation”. ”

“ His hostility to Moscow-standard Russian.
This point will be discussed in the next chapter: it is relevant to the theme of Khlebnikov's tendency to identify "bookish" language with the state, opposing both almost as if they were one and the same thing. We may note here, however, that most of the futurists were "provincials", whose anarchistic rebellion always included an element of revolt against the "correct" and "literary" linguistic norms historically set by Moscow in opposition to the regions. This was particularly the case with Khlebnikov, as Markov points out in his "The Longer Poems". ”

“ SP V 43. ↑ SP V pp 112-113; written in 1922. ↑ SP V p 177. ↑ SP I p 152. ↑ Loc cit. Khlebnikov's classification of the opposing forces in society can be compared with flayakovsky's version: "to be a bourgeois does not mean to own capital or squander gold. It means to be the heel of a corpse on the throat of the young. It means a mouth stopped up with fat. ”

“ But Khlebnikov's poetry breaks with literacy to a quite unprecedented degree. In our earlier survey of the Russian concept of 'byt', we noted the peculiar Russian experience of the "temporariness" of civilization, the precariousness of the "order" represented by a city such as St Petersburg, the sense of slippage, as if everything had been built-iike St Petersburgr-on a marsh. The fact is that civilization in Russia—and with it, a literate culture—had very shallow roots compared with its Western European counterparts. ”

“ Several of the Symbolists—-among them Blok, Bely and Bryusov-—were quick to support the new Bolshevik government. For Bely, and particularly for Blok, this was a painful and in a sense suicidal surrender to the "sounds of Revolution". But the fact that this surrender could be made at all shows that the Acmeists were–—from a non-communist standpoint––correct to have drawn back earlier from the "logic" of many of the Symbolists' positions. Acmeism reacted against Symbolism in an opposite direction to Khlebnikov and the Futurists. ”

“ For Khlebnikov, the ideal of human unity could not be achieved in a simple, straightforward way: it had to be won through conflict, through a carrying-to-extremes of the incomprehensibilities, displacements and dissonances of life in order to reach a climax, a sudden resolution of the world's conflicts and a new unity on a higher plane. ”

“ Max Rychner writes of Joyce's Ulysses that in it: Nothing is isolated or separate; even the most singular, the most incomprehensible thing makes itself felt in countless connections which at first are unrecognizable, but reveal themselves in their darkness to sympathetic men. [238] The same notion of universal interconnectedness runs through. Khlebnikov's work. His studies of the planets and stars are based on the firm belief that the laws governing their motions are the same as those governing the lives of men. ”

“ Some ideas of Marshall McLuhan which seem relevant have been discussed above. Khlebnikov's "world as a poem" idea, however, can be related not only to cLuhan's concept of "electronic" and "technological" art taking "the whole earth and its population as its material", but also to the ideas of some who were living and writing in Russia in Khlebnikov's own time. Vassily Kamensky writes, discussing the futurists in the early revolutionary years, that
new creative projects of a cosmic scale were born in our circle every day. ”

“ The peculiar "activism" of Khlebnikov is noted by Markov, who writes (perhaps unfairly to Mayakovsky and other Futurists) :
Khlebnikov was the only futurist who not only thought and talked about the future, but tried to do something about it as well. [213] And although it would be a mistake, perhaps, to associate Khlebnikov's intentions too closely with those of Mayakovsky, Malevich and other modernists who linked their art with the Bolshevik revolution—it remains true that Khlebnikov's work ran parallel with some of the most topical and significant currents of his time. ”

“ Russian Futurism, as Pomorska writes, "transmitted the principles of Cubism into poetry." [123] Benedict Livshits considered his own work "100 per cent cubism transferred to the area of organized speech." [124] Virtually all the Russian Futurist poets were students of painting, or were originally inspired by the methods of painting. [125] Khlebnikov had Cubism clearly in mind when he declared in 1912:
We want the word boldly to follow painting. ”