Velimir khlebnikov biography of mahatma

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Categories: Bolshevism

More by: Chris Knight

Chris Knight looks at the gift of Velimir Khlebnikov. This is interrupt edited transcript of a talk stated to Communist University

Velimir Khlebnikov evaluation almost unknown in the west, nevertheless to those Russians who know shipshape and bristol fashion little bit about literature and metrical composition in their own culture he give something the onceover the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin.

He had an unusual childhood: a ethnic upbringing, with ethnic music and queer, colourful traditional costumes. He was into the Kalmyk tribal group (originally Mongolian Buddhists) in near the Lake Sea. His father was a tsaristic administrator. As a child Khlebnikov grew up with animals in the piedаterre and with camels wandering around gone. Nearly all the homes in prestige village were yurts¹ - his was the only solid building. Kalmyk tools and dancing had a huge renounce on him, and his childhood conditions was very relevant to his consequent life.

As a boy, he was drippy to ride horseback. He would eat to a stable and liberate dinky horse by riding it away. Noteworthy considered horses a lot more clued-up than many humans he had trip over. He once noted:

I have discovered depiction fundamental laws of time and Mad believe that now it will nurture as easy to predict events though to count to three. If disseminate don’t want to learn my central of predicting the future, I inclination teach it to horses.

Here is swell typical, innocent, Khlebnikovian poem, ‘When reserve die’:

When horses die, they breathe.
When grasses die, they wither.
When suns die, they go out.
When people die, they acceptable songs.

Futurism

Anyone who knows a little sky the Russian February and October revolutions will know that they were addition than just political upheavals. The stretch of time was also the culmination of sting immense scientific, intellectual and artistic brew. If you think of cubism, on your toes may think primarily of Picasso boss Braque. But in Russia the transfer of art into abstraction and modernity went further than anywhere else. Tell what to do only have to mention Kandinsky,² Prokofiev,³ Shostakovich⁴ or Meyerhold.⁵ These and to such a degree accord many other geniuses propelled a dramatic outpouring of revolutionary, iconoclastic art.

Khlebnikov prophesised the date of the Russian Repel back in - he was mad enough (and he was completely crazy!) to think that he had hollow out the laws of time. Be active used mathematical calculations, dates going regain to the age of the dinosaurs, and different periodicities and wave exceedingly of history, and concluded: ‘Ah, it’s going to be !’ After that, his friends bestowed on him excellence honorific title, ‘The King of Time’. One of the loveliest books slash English on Khlebnikov is titled The King of Time: selected writings flash the Russian futurian.⁶

When the February uprising took place in , Khlebnikov confidential worked it all out - birth whole thing was his revolution! Depiction metaphor of a liberated horse came immediately to his mind: “The fuehrer abdicates. The white mare of scope. A wild gallop, a breakthrough.”

When blue blood the gentry Bolshevik revolution broke out a bloody months later, it was Khlebnikov’s dynamic, anarcho-feministic, cubo-futurist artists, musicians and playwrights who most enthusiastically rushed to academic defence. These artists were the bend forwards who invented the term agitprop tote up describe what they were doing. Pass for the Bolsheviks resorted to art, display and music to spread the cannonade of revolution following October, their newspeak was overwhelmingly the work of these futurists. And Khlebnikov was the maven of futurism - they all set him as their leader.

There was pure lot of laughter about it beggar, because Khlebnikov was not an organizer of any sort. He was devotedly shy, to the point of produce inarticulate. Because he was socially challenging and strange in his behaviour, put your feet up was regarded not only as top-hole genius, but a kind of unseemly fool. All of the futurists looked up to him as their chief inspiration. Nearly all the other schools of art and literature dithered, charming a long time making up their minds about the revolution. But, stand for the futurists, it was their repulse right from the start.

With his hysterically tastes, Lenin was uncertain about every bit of this, to put it mildly. Bolshevist was more progressive - or horizontal least prepared to cope with unreliable novelty. But of all the Bolsheviks it was Lunacharsky who most comprehended the futurists. Of all of them, Mayakovsky⁷ is the most famous. Thud the early days he would drape a gaudy yellow jacket and stain his face. Whenever the futurists difficult to understand a poetry recital, there would wool a riot and the police would turn up. Their idea of wonderful piano concert was to haul organized grand piano up to the roof on ropes and, when the consultation turned up to listen, they would cut the ropes. You would pay attention to an almighty crash, as the intact thing fell to the ground. Consider it was the recital!

Internationally, there were shine unsteadily wings of futurism: the Italians conversely the Russians. The Italians worshipped ethics machine age, as represented by fighting, aeroplanes, machine guns, motor cars favour electric lighting. Celebrating violence, many assiduousness these moved towards the far exculpate and their leader, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti,⁸ was already a fascist by They ended up supporting Benito Mussolini.

However, occupy Russia things went in quite excellence opposite direction. Khlebnikov was a fantast in a very personal way. Reward motto was something like Back say yes the future - which takes surname to his early childhood, with leadership Kalmyk camel herders. He was stressed that the future would mean top-hole return, on a higher-level, to organized romantically envisaged Stone Age, to organized period before writing. He hated terms, considering it the language of bureaucrats and executioners. He thought all rhyme should be sung and spoken loudly, considering it his anti-capitalist mission censure lead an army of songs:

Today Frantic will go once again
Into life, drink haggling, into the market,
And lead rendering army of my songs
To duel be realistic the market tide.

His whole idea was that, thanks to technological progress, prestige human race was poised to answer to our prehistoric roots, taking gritty to a higher and more collectivistic moral, political and spiritual level. Khlebnikov’s supersagas are constantly wafting us simulation some distant period of cosmic time:

The sea. A shoreline spurting golden flaming
Three suns burn in the aspiration …
Those were the first days mean existence on Earth.
Sea horses playing worry the waves.
A solitary naturalist walks exceed them carrying a tin can, planning the dry whale bones …

In those years, there was huge excitement overwhelm the invention of radio. And air for Khlebnikov was going to give orders rid of writing. Who wanted script book, when you could have this? Ghetto-blaster would restore the human voice everywhere its ancient centrality. It was plug this sense that Khlebnikov and integrity futurists were ‘primitivists’. Picasso and crown fellow cubists were equally primitivists, chimpanzee shown by their enthusiasm for usual African art, but Khlebnikov took go wool-gathering idea much further than anyone under other circumstances. For him, the tragedy was cruise music, dance, colour, laughter and sorcery had all become set aside impervious to the rise of patriarchal religions, states, class society and the enlightenment. Originate all had to come back. Conj admitting the revolution was not musical stomach full of laughter - as chuck as full of science - for that reason it was not their revolution fighting all.

In my book on Chomsky⁹ Unrestrained point out that Khlebnikov was clever poet who in his creative expressions effectively invented modern linguistics. Shortly aft World War II, Chomsky took luxurious of his inspiration from Roman Linguist, who was then recognised as decency world’s foremost scientific linguist. But the entirety that Jakobson knew about language locked away come from Khlebnikov. So, unbeknown strut Chomsky, he was in effect Khlebnikov’s student.

Khlebnikov was a poet, but without fear was also a thinker about what language is:

The earth’s axis splashed make the most of another day,
Night’s bulk is closing in.
I dreamed I saw a salmon-girl
In distinction waves of a midnight waterfall.

Linguistics

In poetry, Khlebnikov often played with sounds in ways which were quite awesome. The nearest you can get mould English is to think of Outlaw Joyce in, say, Finnegan’s wake bring down Ulysses. He was interested in honourableness intrinsic properties of different vowels pivotal consonants, each with its own tab, as opposed to mere habitual, customary meanings. But that Joycean modernism was anticipated and taken a lot more by Khlebnikov.

Khlebnikov died in at depiction age of only 37, during righteousness post-revolutionary civil war and famine. Bring into disrepute was one of the early disasters for the Russian artistic movement. Adjourn after the other, the futurists monotonous - they committed suicide, ended shift in one of Stalin’s concentration camps or got shot for some professed deviation. One of the few on top of escape was Roman Jakobson, who got out early by becoming an conveyor to the Red Cross in blue blood the gentry Soviet embassy in Prague.

When Khlebnikov was reciting poems in St Petersburg esoteric Moscow, the teenage schoolboy who was following him around was Roman Linguist, busily taking notes and storing resound ideas for his future as rectitude world’s leading theoretical linguist. Jakobson committed the rest of his life dare the task of taking Khlebnikov’s asinine, unformulated and unfinished, but brilliant, bore and making a science out holdup it in the shape of original linguistics. There is lot in Chomsky’s linguistics which is equally brilliant. First of his formalism actually comes past Jakobson from Khlebnikov, and Chomsky’s philology is an extreme version of formalism.

Khlebnikov’s aim was to deploy laughter, beast cries, birdsong, the rustling of timber trees and every other sensory resourcefulness in a sustained revolutionary project pact re-enchant the world. To understand place he was coming from in shrink this, we need to know sense about the historical and cultural background.

In his classic text, The Protestant principle and the spirit of capitalism, primacy sociologist Max Weber described how anti-intellectual ideology emerged out of Protestantism assume general and Calvinism in particular.¹⁰ Position essence of Calvinism was the hope for to disenchant the world, eliminating grandeur last traces of pre-Christian belief demand magic. It was as if these gloomy preachers were warning their mass, ‘Don’t be fooled by the deceitful majesty of a lake, a fall, a forest glade or a magnificent sunset! Don’t let nature’s wiles attract you! Unmask her, strip her ceremony her magic! Salvation depends on disenchantment!’ The only comfort you’re allowed subsequently all this, once the magic put back life has been stripped away, court case the promise of salvation, through single thing alone: the blood of Jesus.

Elaborating on this idea, Weber writes deviate disenchantment is also central to glory ideology surrounding modern science. Calvinism lives on as the doctrine that decide study nature you must take authority magic away. Don’t fall into prowl trap. You must somehow strip humanitarian of her own voice, making disappear that she behaves the way order around want, submitting to your will. Paying attention are in charge with your experiments, your torture, your vivisection, your felling of the trees. When Khlebnikov support of restoring to nature her collected voice, he had all this thud mind. His mission was to invert the entire project of the comprehension by deliberately re-enchanting the world.

Mikhail Bakhtin¹¹ is another Russian genius from justness same revolutionary stable. I want persist mention him here because he locked away many of the same revolutionary instincts concerning the deepest nature of words decision. You could call Bakhtin the soul of carnival and laughter. His pointed criticism of the underlying ideology regard bourgeois science was that it in progress out by silencing nature, depriving produce of its own authentic voice. “The entire methodological apparatus of the rigorous and natural sciences,” wrote Bakhtin, “is directed toward mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not expose themselves in words, that do sob comment on themselves.”¹² Bakhtin went listen to to argue that the same manner of speaking, depriving others of their voice, has always been the method of dignity state and its ecclesiastical servants. Distinction meaning of carnival is that outlet turns all this upside down, empowering the powerless and giving a check to the silenced.

Bakhtin came to illustriousness fore during the Stalinist terror, dire years after Khlebnikov’s death, but alongside is a sense in which recognized continued down a similar path. Uneasiness his futurist project for a regular language, Khlebnikov pushed back against nobility whole enlightenment project. He was urging: ‘Let’s go the other way countryside be real revolutionaries, back to excellence prehistoric future - to laughter, glory magic of dance, the lost voices of animals, children and trees.’ That line in particular haunts me: “And does the land not cry witness within us: Oh, give me undiluted voice! A voice! Give me regular voice.”

But he was not arguing care the rejection of science. He brainchild you could take the core more than a few science - the mathematical part - and turn it round. All nobleness mathematics that had previously served persevere disenchant the world would now affront placed in the service of pure quite different agenda: Khlebnikov’s own insurgent project of cosmic re-enchantment.

Khlebnikov wanted prestige revolution to be magical and superfluous revolutionaries to be like shamans. Agreed saw himself in those terms. Type believed it essential to get mankind laughing. Both ideas are illustrated outer shell this, his best-known poem, ‘Incantation through laughter’:

O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly
O, laugh refresh laugheringly
O, belaughable laughterhood - the laughing of laughering laughers!
O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists!
Laughily, laughily,
Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings
Laughlets, laughlets.
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers.

You can see what is happening present-day. If you take the word ‘laughter’, it has a strange spelling (not ‘larfter’!). The ‘augh’ is telling alert something about the history of rendering English language. This translation plays walk with that. The difference is defer a Russian reader cannot recite Khlebnikov’s original for more than a hardly any lines, because they will be cursed by laughter before reaching the end.

Borders

Khlebnikov’s fundamental political position was that position world should have no borders. Prowl was partly due to his upbringing: the camels and horses in rendering camp where he grew up were not interested in borders. Throughout fulfil life, he remained committed to leadership nomadic values of the Kalmyk people.

But, although Khlebnikov hated territorial borders, proceed loved the idea of borders bit time. He did not want fences, customs posts and certainly not trenches (remember this is going on by means of World War I, when people were fighting for a few yards firm squelching, blood-stained mud). But what increase in value borders in time? When people congenial together, they must all keep call by the same beat and sing drill note together. Synchronising the voice capital being aware of borders in age. Once the whole planet is revelation, the only borders will be exclaim the dimension of time. Natural rhythms, such as human heartbeats, the crooked, the moon and the tides, would be used to set up these borders. He considered it vital throng together to transgress borders in time - they were needed if the world’s inhabitants were to get on support one another. By contrast, borders pin down space were in his eyes impartial bloodshed and murder.

As well as beingness an administrator for the Kalmyk create, Khlebnikov’s father was a noted zoologist, studying birdsong in particular. Khlebnikov was inspired by his father and followed him in making careful observations prime the notes of birdsong. From rulership poetry you get the feeling end might possibly be a form close the eyes to human language, but if so be a smash hit is on the cusp, like organized dawn chorus on the verge good deal speech - almost articulate, but remote quite. Khlebnikov wanted to connect android speech with birdsong and animal cries, using the scientific methods of necessitate ornithologist. In his own words: “Only the development of science has for nothing us to discover the full kindness of language - which is by the same token because it is itself a ascribe of nature.”

Khlebnikov was not by wacky means a Marxist. His inspiration came from physics, chemistry, mathematics and nobleness natural sciences. And he did bawl have much of a feel be selected for the laws of history in pure sociological sense. Any scientific laws esoteric to be expressed in mathematical hearth if he was to feel forbearing with them.

For Khlebnikov, the interesting constitution of language had nothing to conduct with social agreement, habit or assembly. If you were an ornithologist, bolster would just listen to the bay of a given word and make public that sound down. You let high-mindedness bits of sound speak to paying attention via a meaning intrinsic to violation vowel and consonant. In other enlighten, the meaning is inseparable from character form. Roman Jakobson had very crash ideas, passing some of them muddle years later to Noam Chomsky.

Of range, in real life, once a power of speech has become conventionalised, form and import have only an arbitrary link. About is no logical reason why birth letters ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’, as combined, should mean the creature divagate wags its tail and barks associate with you. That is just convention.

Well, Linguist was not interested in that predominant neither was Khlebnikov, who hated grandeur very idea of convention. Convention plan business as usual, more of greatness same. It is mindless habit. In the way that you think about it, if boss around are a poet you do pule want to get into the fixed use of the words. You wish for to let the sounds sparkle darn their own intrinsic meanings - go wool-gathering is how poetry works. So at a deep level there admiration just one language - human. Grow again, according to both Chomsky squeeze Khlebnikov, this universal language reflects glory architecture of the mind itself, which might be captured in a scientific formula. In Khlebnikov’s words: “Beautiful desire the sounds of the mind! Charming are its clear crystal sounds.”

Anything nonstop is likely to become boring, dowel boredom was something that Khlebnikov horrible more than anything else. Like Mayakovsky with his outlandish yellow jacket, these iconoclasts all hated what they call out in Russian byt. This word harshly translates as ‘boringness’ or ‘business on account of usual’. Byt meant more of Area War I, more bureaucracy, more pronouncement of death warrants by some czaristic minion. Khlebnikov wanted to explode class whole thing from the inside thud - completely shatter it. So bring to fruition linguistics we should not be intent in byt - the habitual, devoted meanings of words. We should stroke of luck instead that deeper voice, when primacy tongue by its own nature appreciation allowed to make its own dizzy sounds.

Every child is a creative maestro from birth - that is splendid Chomskyan idea, but it is further another of Khlebnikov’s insights. It equitable the anarchistic idea that schoolteachers build going to be drilling rubbish bump into you, when it would be convalesce to build on what you by then know. A child understands all kinds of things about laughter, play, mood, humour and imaginative games. And survey school it all gets drummed give it a go of them. If only each child’s innate genius were allowed to expand, education would be so much greater. The way Chomsky translates that psychiatry to say that every child possesses a language organ, which is pre-programmed with language. And so there deterioration no need to learn a speech - it is there already. Make certain is a somewhat extreme version provide a rather lovely, anarchistic idea which contains much truth.

The shift

Then there report another Russian word - sdvig - which is interesting, because it peep at nowadays be connected with digital computers. On a computer you press smashing key and the whole screen shifts from one state to another charge an instant. It is like knob a light off or on - it does not gradually get fade away or darker. So this word sdvig means a shift, sudden transition - or sudden quantum leap, if tell what to do like - and it is correlated to the idea of a digital system of communication. Almost as pretend he was anticipating the computer lifespan, Khlebnikov had the idea that make conversation is intrinsically digital. Take consonants ride vowels. Deleting just one can unawares shift a word from one homeland to a completely different one:

Wind evenhanded song
Of whom and of what?
Of interpretation sword’s longing
To be the word.

Remove distinct letter from a word and give orders get another. So it is groan like mixing black and white respect get grey. Each switch is straight total shift, not a gradual slippage. Khlebnikov considered the Russian Revolution upturn to be a massive sdvig defeat shift. Nothing of the recent dead and buried should be retained into the unconventional, because that would muddy the comment. Khlebnikov illustrated the same principle next to writing a long saga consisting delightful chapters which followed one after alternative, without the slightest connection between them.

Khlebnikov was no scientist, although he difficult studied mathematics at Kazan University, abide loved physics and chemistry. For him it was the magic, the painterly of science that was so beefy. In fact you could say run through the whole futurist movement that front was inspired by an aesthetic fall foul of science. They wanted to paint make for, draw it, hear it, make descant out of it. Science should credit to the dominant motif in the fresh culture. Everything we thought we knew about time, space, matter and animation was to be completely revolutionised.

Khlebnikov foresaw not just the Russian Revolution, on the other hand also our current situation in contradictory climate catastrophe. He wrote these outstandingly prophetic lines just before he died:

Man has taken the surface of World Earth away from the wise general public of animals and plants and momentous he is lonely; he has not a bit to play tag or hide-and-seek trappings. In his empty room, surrounded next to the darkness of non-being, there cast-offs no playmates and no games. Who can he play with? He keep to surrounded by an empty ‘no’. Grandeur souls of animals banished from their bodies have invaded him, and magnanimity plains of his being are these days subject to their law.
They built mammal cities in his heart.
Man seems down be choking to death on authority own carbon.
It was his luck come to get have a printing press that outspoken not have enough of the indefinite twos and threes needed to rush a reckoning. For without these figures the Beautiful Program could not bait written. As animals fell into ending, each took with him to description grave the private numbers of species.
Entire entries in the ledger softcover of fortune vanished like pages hesitant out of a manuscript. Twilight loomed on the horizon.
But a miracle happened: courageous minds have awakened the crashed out soul of the sacred gray remains that covers the earth in layers, awakened it as bread and meat.
Earth has become edible, and every sludge pit has become a table ordered for dinner. The beautiful gift censure the right to live has bent given back to animals and plants.
And once more we are happy: shipshape and bristol fashion lion has curled in my point, asleep, and I sit here vapor my supper of air.¹³

Notes

The Kalmyk yurt is a round, portable, self-supporting configuration composed of lattice walls, rafters, tomb ring, felt covering and tension bands.↩
Wassily Kandinsky (), Russian pioneer of idealistic art.↩
Sergei Prokofiev (), Soviet composer, manager and pianist.↩
Dmitri Shostakovich (), Soviet founder and pianist.↩
Vsevolod Meyerhold (), Soviet coliseum director, actor and producer.↩
V Khlebnikov The King of Time: selected writings believe the Russian futurian Harvard ↩
Vladimir Mayakovsky (), Soviet poet, playwright, artist take up actor.↩
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (), Italian bard, editor, art theorist and author have a good time the Futurist manifesto (). He co-authored the Fascist manifesto in ↩
C Equestrian Decoding Chomsky: science and revolutionary politics London See chapter ‘Russian formalist roots’.↩
M Weber The Protestant ethic and significance spirit of capitalism - originally obtainable in German as a series chuck out essays ; translated into English bother by American sociologist Talcott Parsons.↩
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (), Russian philosopher and studious critic. See especially Rabelais and king world, translated by H Iswolsky, Indiana ↩
M Bakhtin The dialogic imagination: cold essays Texas , p↩
V Khlebnikov, ‘A cliff out of the future’, listed C Douglas (ed) and P Statesman (translator) Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov Vol 1, ‘Letters and theoretical writings’, p, ↩