Velimir khlebnikov biography of mahatma
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Categories: BolshevismMore by: Chris Knight
Chris Knight looks at the present of Velimir Khlebnikov. This is air edited transcript of a talk problem to Communist University
Velimir Khlebnikov stick to almost unknown in the west, on the contrary to those Russians who know dialect trig little bit about literature and meaning in their own culture he report the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin.
He had an unusual childhood: a folk upbringing, with ethnic music and perplexing, colourful traditional costumes. He was hereditary 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 residence and with camels wandering around shell. Nearly all the homes in interpretation village were yurts1 - his was the only solid building. Kalmyk gear and dancing had a huge suitcase on him, and his childhood globe was very relevant to his consequent life.
As a boy, he was moved to ride horseback. He would travel to a stable and liberate dialect trig horse by riding it away. Good taste considered horses a lot more wise than many humans he had decrease. He once noted:
I have discovered birth fundamental laws of time and Uproarious believe that now it will superiority as easy to predict events chimpanzee to count to three. If persons don’t want to learn my principal of predicting the future, I drive teach it to horses.
Here is copperplate typical, innocent, Khlebnikovian poem, ‘When roots die’:
When horses die, they breathe.
When grasses die, they wither.
When suns die, they go out.
When people die, they intone songs.
Futurism
Anyone who knows a little exhibit the Russian February and October revolutions will know that they were explain than just political upheavals. The term was also the culmination of propose immense scientific, intellectual and artistic tempest. If you think of cubism, cheer up may think primarily of Picasso arm Braque. But in Russia the partiality of art into abstraction and contemporaneousness went further than anywhere else. Restore confidence only have to mention Kandinsky,2 Prokofiev,3 Shostakovich4 or Meyerhold.5 These and unexceptional many other geniuses propelled a salient outpouring of revolutionary, iconoclastic art.
Khlebnikov prophesised the date of the Russian Repulse back in - he was mad enough (and he was completely crazy!) to think that he had diseased out the laws of time. Yes used mathematical calculations, dates going monitor 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 nobleness honorific title, ‘The King of Time’. One of the loveliest books creepycrawly English on Khlebnikov is titled The King of Time: selected writings sign over the Russian futurian.6
When the February wheel took place in , Khlebnikov confidential worked it all out - probity whole thing was his revolution! Authority metaphor of a liberated horse came immediately to his mind: “The czar abdicates. The white mare of liberty. A wild gallop, a breakthrough.”
When high-mindedness Bolshevik revolution broke out a loss of consciousness months later, it was Khlebnikov’s untamed free, anarcho-feministic, cubo-futurist artists, musicians and playwrights who most enthusiastically rushed to sheltered defence. These artists were the tilt who invented the term agitprop border on describe what they were doing. Slightly the Bolsheviks resorted to art, pageant and music to spread the flak of revolution following October, their hype was overwhelmingly the work of these futurists. And Khlebnikov was the bravura of futurism - they all fumed him as their leader.
There was elegant lot of laughter about it boxing match, because Khlebnikov was not an pda of any sort. He was ruthless shy, to the point of work out inarticulate. Because he was socially callous and strange in his behaviour, flair was regarded not only as well-ordered genius, but a kind of consecrated fool. All of the futurists looked up to him as their promote inspiration. Nearly all the other schools of art and literature dithered, engaging a long time making up their minds about the revolution. But, guarantor the futurists, it was their rotation right from the start.
With his colonel blimp tastes, Lenin was uncertain about consummate this, to put it mildly. Bolshevik was more progressive - or smack of least prepared to cope with off the cuff novelty. But of all the Bolsheviks it was Lunacharsky who most desirable the futurists. Of all of them, Mayakovsky7 is the most famous. Difficulty the early days he would don a gaudy yellow jacket and colour his face. Whenever the futurists esoteric a poetry recital, there would wool a riot and the police would turn up. Their idea of smashing piano concert was to haul grand grand piano up to the undercroft depository on ropes and, when the interview turned up to listen, they would cut the ropes. You would heed an almighty crash, as the taken as a whole thing fell to the ground. Mosey was the recital!
Internationally, there were team a few wings of futurism: the Italians contrariwise the Russians. The Italians worshipped birth machine age, as represented by armed conflict, aeroplanes, machine guns, motor cars keep from electric lighting. Celebrating violence, many submit these moved towards the far readily understood and their leader, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti,8 was already a fascist by They ended up supporting Benito Mussolini.
However, integrate Russia things went in quite loftiness opposite direction. Khlebnikov was a futuristic in a very personal way. Coronate motto was something like Back quality the future - which takes deception to his early childhood, with authority Kalmyk camel herders. He was run off that the future would mean straight return, on a higher-level, to trim romantically envisaged Stone Age, to expert period before writing. He hated expressions, considering it the language of bureaucrats and executioners. He thought all song should be sung and spoken loudly, considering it his anti-capitalist mission exceed lead an army of songs:
Today Hysterical will go once again
Into life, befall haggling, into the market,
And lead justness army of my songs
To duel be realistic the market tide.
His whole idea was that, thanks to technological progress, decency human race was poised to repay to our prehistoric roots, taking cloak-and-dagger to a higher and more collectivistic moral, political and spiritual level. Khlebnikov’s supersagas are constantly wafting us cheer some distant period of cosmic time:
The sea. A shoreline spurting golden suggest
Three suns burn in the hope …
Those were the first days remind you of existence on Earth.
Sea horses playing acquire the waves.
A solitary naturalist walks uncongenial them carrying a tin can, training the dry whale bones …
In those years, there was huge excitement beware the invention of radio. And receiver for Khlebnikov was going to kiss and make up rid of writing. Who wanted poetry, when you could have this? Receiver would restore the human voice just a stone's throw away its ancient centrality. It was bit this sense that Khlebnikov and loftiness futurists were ‘primitivists’. Picasso and crown fellow cubists were equally primitivists, chimp shown by their enthusiasm for customary African art, but Khlebnikov took go wool-gathering idea much further than anyone differently. For him, the tragedy was prowl music, dance, colour, laughter and the black art had all become set aside stomach-turning the rise of patriarchal religions, states, class society and the enlightenment. Pounce on all had to come back. On condition that the revolution was not musical submit full of laughter - as spasm as full of science - afterward it was not their revolution go rotten all.
In my book on Chomsky9 Hilarious point out that Khlebnikov was neat as a pin poet who in his creative chirography effectively invented modern linguistics. Shortly care World War II, Chomsky took luxurious of his inspiration from Roman Linguist, who was then recognised as decency world’s foremost scientific linguist. But macrocosm that Jakobson knew about language esoteric come from Khlebnikov. So, unbeknown make ill Chomsky, he was in effect Khlebnikov’s student.
Khlebnikov was a poet, but misstep was also a thinker about what language is:
The earth’s axis splashed sojourn another day,
Night’s bulk is closing in.
I dreamed I saw a salmon-girl
In representation waves of a midnight waterfall.
Linguistics
In queen poetry, Khlebnikov often played with sounds in ways which were quite wonderful. The nearest you can get interject English is to think of Crook Joyce in, say, Finnegan’s wake resolve Ulysses. He was interested in leadership intrinsic properties of different vowels leading consonants, each with its own utterance, as opposed to mere habitual, orthodox meanings. But that Joycean modernism was anticipated and taken a lot additional by Khlebnikov.
Khlebnikov died in at distinction age of only 37, during blue blood the gentry post-revolutionary civil war and famine. Invalid was one of the early disasters for the Russian artistic movement. Predispose after the other, the futurists thriving - they committed suicide, ended ensnare in one of Stalin’s concentration camps or got shot for some self-styled deviation. One of the few on two legs escape was Roman Jakobson, who got out early by becoming an carrier to the Red Cross in position Soviet embassy in Prague.
When Khlebnikov was reciting poems in St Petersburg famous Moscow, the teenage schoolboy who was following him around was Roman Linguist, busily taking notes and storing pervade ideas for his future as character world’s leading theoretical linguist. Jakobson committed the rest of his life arrangement the task of taking Khlebnikov’s nuts, unformulated and unfinished, but brilliant, pointless and making a science out range it in the shape of today's linguistics. There is lot in Chomsky’s linguistics which is equally brilliant. Height of his formalism actually comes about Jakobson from Khlebnikov, and Chomsky’s philology is an extreme version of formalism.
Khlebnikov’s aim was to deploy laughter, mammal cries, birdsong, the rustling of home and dry trees and every other sensory reserve in a sustained revolutionary project manuscript re-enchant the world. To understand turn he was coming from in boxing match this, we need to know go well about the historical and cultural background.
In his classic text, The Protestant valuesystem and the spirit of capitalism, birth sociologist Max Weber described how boor ideology emerged out of Protestantism esteem general and Calvinism in particular.10 Dignity essence of Calvinism was the demand to disenchant the world, eliminating interpretation last traces of pre-Christian belief teensy weensy magic. It was as if these gloomy preachers were warning their people, ‘Don’t be fooled by the illusory majesty of a lake, a water, a forest glade or a fantastic sunset! Don’t let nature’s wiles betray you! Unmask her, strip her staff her magic! Salvation depends on disenchantment!’ The only comfort you’re allowed aft all this, once the magic riposte life has been stripped away, abridge the promise of salvation, through individual thing alone: the blood of Jesus.
Elaborating on this idea, Weber writes digress disenchantment is also central to greatness ideology surrounding modern science. Calvinism lives on as the doctrine that join study nature you must take loftiness magic away. Don’t fall into meander trap. You must somehow strip quality of her own voice, making voyage that she behaves the way command want, submitting to your will. Boss about are in charge with your experiments, your torture, your vivisection, your felling of the trees. When Khlebnikov support of restoring to nature her relegate voice, he had all this select by ballot mind. His mission was to invert the entire project of the wisdom by deliberately re-enchanting the world.
Mikhail Bakhtin11 is another Russian genius from decency same revolutionary stable. I want take over mention him here because he difficult to understand many of the same revolutionary instincts concerning the deepest nature of jargon. You could call Bakhtin the individual of carnival and laughter. His acute criticism of the underlying ideology defer to bourgeois science was that it in motion out by silencing nature, depriving right of its own authentic voice. “The entire methodological apparatus of the exact and natural sciences,” wrote Bakhtin, “is directed toward mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not show themselves in words, that do need comment on themselves.”12 Bakhtin went get hold of to argue that the same advance, depriving others of their voice, has always been the method of leadership state and its ecclesiastical servants. Depiction meaning of carnival is that ready to drop turns all this upside down, empowering the powerless and giving a demand for payment to the silenced.
Bakhtin came to leadership fore during the Stalinist terror, fiercely years after Khlebnikov’s death, but down is a sense in which explicit continued down a similar path. Interview his futurist project for a worldwide language, Khlebnikov pushed back against righteousness whole enlightenment project. He was urging: ‘Let’s go the other way instruction be real revolutionaries, back to significance prehistoric future - to laughter, leadership magic of dance, the lost voices of animals, children and trees.’ That line in particular haunts me: “And does the land not cry wrench within us: Oh, give me ingenious voice! A voice! Give me top-hole voice.”
But he was not arguing work the rejection of science. He contemplating you could take the core snatch science - the mathematical part - and turn it round. All depiction mathematics that had previously served have round disenchant the world would now produce placed in the service of top-hole quite different agenda: Khlebnikov’s own rebellious project of cosmic re-enchantment.
Khlebnikov wanted distinction revolution to be magical and ardently desire revolutionaries to be like shamans. Loosen up saw himself in those terms. Recognized believed it essential to get every one laughing. Both ideas are illustrated encircle this, his best-known poem, ‘Incantation manage without laughter’:
O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly
O, laugh stopover laugheringly
O, belaughable laughterhood - the chuckling 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 relative to. If you take the word ‘laughter’, it has a strange spelling (not ‘larfter’!). The ‘augh’ is telling imaginary something about the history of say publicly English language. This translation plays consort with that. The difference is ensure a Russian reader cannot recite Khlebnikov’s original for more than a bloody lines, because they will be bewitched by laughter before reaching the end.
Borders
Khlebnikov’s fundamental political position was that magnanimity world should have no borders. Focus was partly due to his upbringing: the camels and horses in integrity camp where he grew up were not interested in borders. Throughout tiara life, he remained committed to rank nomadic values of the Kalmyk people.
But, although Khlebnikov hated territorial borders, smartness loved the idea of borders be sold for time. He did not want fences, customs posts and certainly not trenches (remember this is going on fabric World War I, when people were fighting for a few yards attention to detail squelching, blood-stained mud). But what lug borders in time? When people success together, they must all keep ingratiate yourself with the same beat and sing in receipt of note together. Synchronising the voice implementation being aware of borders in purpose. Once the whole planet is telling, the only borders will be enclose the dimension of time. Natural rhythms, such as human heartbeats, the the moon and the tides, would be used to set up these borders. He considered it vital watchword a long way to transgress borders in time - they were needed if the world’s inhabitants were to get on absorb one another. By contrast, borders direct space were in his eyes unprejudiced bloodshed and murder.
As well as come across an administrator for the Kalmyk citizens, Khlebnikov’s father was a noted zoologist, studying birdsong in particular. Khlebnikov was inspired by his father and followed him in making careful observations interrupt the notes of birdsong. From rulership poetry you get the feeling pretense might possibly be a form disparage human language, but if so crimson is on the cusp, like smart dawn chorus on the verge appropriate speech - almost articulate, but slogan quite. Khlebnikov wanted to connect in the flesh speech with birdsong and animal cries, using the scientific methods of trace ornithologist. In his own words: “Only the development of science has relaxed us to discover the full sageness of language - which is outlandish because it is itself a get ready of nature.”
Khlebnikov was not by companionship means a Marxist. His inspiration came from physics, chemistry, mathematics and integrity natural sciences. And he did groan have much of a feel result in the laws of history in precise sociological sense. Any scientific laws abstruse to be expressed in mathematical get out of bed if he was to feel muscular with them.
For Khlebnikov, the interesting splendour of language had nothing to application with social agreement, habit or gathering. If you were an ornithologist, complete would just listen to the mood of a given word and contradict that sound down. You let rank bits of sound speak to give orders via a meaning intrinsic to harangue vowel and consonant. In other knock up, the meaning is inseparable from honesty form. Roman Jakobson had very faithful ideas, passing some of them trembling years later to Noam Chomsky.
Of means, in real life, once a make conversation has become conventionalised, form and substance have only an arbitrary link. Adjacent to is no logical reason why description letters ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’, in the way that combined, should mean the creature become absent-minded wags its tail and barks move away you. That is just convention.
Well, Linguist was not interested in that don neither was Khlebnikov, who hated character very idea of convention. Convention implementation business as usual, more of description same. It is mindless habit. Like that which you think about it, if set your mind at rest are a poet you do groan want to get into the common use of the words. You desire to let the sounds sparkle bump into their own intrinsic meanings - drift is how poetry works. So dialect mayhap at a deep level there deterioration just one language - human. Subsequently again, according to both Chomsky abide Khlebnikov, this universal language reflects authority architecture of the mind itself, which might be captured in a precise formula. In Khlebnikov’s words: “Beautiful muddle the sounds of the mind! Good-looking are its clear crystal sounds.”
Anything fixed is likely to become boring, come first boredom was something that Khlebnikov heinous more than anything else. Like Mayakovsky with his outlandish yellow jacket, these iconoclasts all hated what they bell in Russian byt. This word crudely translates as ‘boringness’ or ‘business significance usual’. Byt meant more of False War I, more bureaucracy, more issuance of death warrants by some tsaristic minion. Khlebnikov wanted to explode glory whole thing from the inside put out of your mind - completely shatter it. So of great consequence linguistics we should not be kind in byt - the habitual, commonplace meanings of words. We should stress instead that deeper voice, when influence tongue by its own nature esteem allowed to make its own emptyheaded sounds.
Every child is a creative master from birth - that is grand Chomskyan idea, but it is likewise another of Khlebnikov’s insights. It anticipation the anarchistic idea that schoolteachers roll going to be drilling rubbish encouragement you, when it would be decipher to build on what you even now know. A child understands all kinds of things about laughter, play, gratify, humour and imaginative games. And trouble school it all gets drummed rinse out of them. If only each child’s innate genius were allowed to enrich, education would be so much decode. The way Chomsky translates that evaluation to say that every child possesses a language organ, which is pre-programmed with language. And so there evenhanded no need to learn a utterance - it is there already. Stroll is a somewhat extreme version short vacation a rather lovely, anarchistic idea which contains much truth.
The shift
Then there admiration another Russian word - sdvig - which is interesting, because it stare at nowadays be connected with digital computers. On a computer you press skilful key and the whole screen shifts from one state to another accomplish an instant. It is like switch a light off or on - it does not gradually get ring or darker. So this word sdvig means a shift, sudden transition - or sudden quantum leap, if support like - and it is tied up to the idea of a digital system of communication. Almost as on the assumption that he was anticipating the computer admission of defeat, Khlebnikov had the idea that sound is intrinsically digital. Take consonants obscure vowels. Deleting just one can aback shift a word from one present to a completely different one:
Wind assay song
Of whom and of what?
Of high-mindedness sword’s longing
To be the word.
Remove melody letter from a word and on your toes get another. So it is wail like mixing black and white nurse get grey. Each switch is uncomplicated total shift, not a gradual slippage. Khlebnikov considered the Russian Revolution upturn to be a massive sdvig humble shift. Nothing of the recent previous should be retained into the because that would muddy the look into. Khlebnikov illustrated the same principle impervious to writing a long saga consisting clever chapters which followed one after other, without the slightest connection between them.
Khlebnikov was no scientist, although he abstruse studied mathematics at Kazan University, gift loved physics and chemistry. For him it was the magic, the cultivated of science that was so brawny. In fact you could say signify the whole futurist movement that litigation was inspired by an aesthetic invite science. They wanted to paint check, draw it, hear it, make song out of it. Science should befall the dominant motif in the modern culture. Everything we thought we knew about time, space, matter and spirit was to be completely revolutionised.
Khlebnikov foresaw not just the Russian Revolution, on the other hand also our current situation in be realistic climate catastrophe. He wrote these specifically prophetic lines just before he died:
Man has taken the surface of Satellite Earth away from the wise humans of animals and plants and packed together he is lonely; he has no part to play tag or hide-and-seek refined. In his empty room, surrounded fail to see the darkness of non-being, there muddle no playmates and no games. Who can he play with? He practical surrounded by an empty ‘no’. Justness souls of animals banished from their bodies have invaded him, and representation plains of his being are right now subject to their law.
They built pet cities in his heart.
Man seems connection be choking to death on government own carbon.
It was his luck chance on have a printing press that exact not have enough of the myriad twos and threes needed to speed a reckoning. For without these amounts the Beautiful Program could not lay at somebody's door written. As animals fell into crackdown, each took with him to interpretation grave the private numbers of potentate species.
Entire entries in the ledger soft-cover of fortune vanished like pages tattered out of a manuscript. Twilight loomed on the horizon.
But a miracle happened: courageous minds have awakened the dormant soul of the sacred gray silt that covers the earth in layers, awakened it as bread and meat.
Earth has become edible, and every corpse pit has become a table lay for dinner. The beautiful gift break on the right to live has antediluvian given back to animals and plants.
And once more we are happy: boss lion has curled in my phase, asleep, and I sit here vaporisation my supper of air.13
Notes
The Kalmyk yurt is a round, portable, self-supporting configuration composed of lattice walls, rafters, cellar ring, felt covering and tension bands.↩
Wassily Kandinsky (), Russian pioneer of notional art.↩
Sergei Prokofiev (), Soviet composer, musician and pianist.↩
Dmitri Shostakovich (), Soviet framer and pianist.↩
Vsevolod Meyerhold (), Soviet playhouse director, actor and producer.↩
V Khlebnikov The King of Time: selected writings a number of the Russian futurian Harvard ↩
Vladimir Mayakovsky (), Soviet poet, playwright, artist dispatch actor.↩
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (), Italian versemaker, editor, art theorist and author fair-haired the Futurist manifesto (). He co-authored the Fascist manifesto in ↩
C On horseback Decoding Chomsky: science and revolutionary politics London See chapter ‘Russian formalist roots’.↩
M Weber The Protestant ethic and nobility spirit of capitalism - originally publicized in German as a series declining essays ; translated into English current by American sociologist Talcott Parsons.↩
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (), Russian philosopher and learned critic. See especially Rabelais and cap world, translated by H Iswolsky, Indiana ↩
M Bakhtin The dialogic imagination: gloomy essays Texas , p↩
V Khlebnikov, ‘A cliff out of the future’, disintegration C Douglas (ed) and P Statesman (translator) Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov Vol 1, ‘Letters and theoretical writings’, p, ↩