What do you think?
Rate this book
Collected Works, Vol. 2: Prose, Plays, and Supersagas
Velimir Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great innovators of literary modernism. In Russia a powerful and growing mythology surrounds this Futurist poet and his reputation elsewhere continues to mount.
The second volume of the Collected Works consists of Khlebnikov's fiction (thirty-five short stories, dreams, mysteries, and fanciful folktales), his plays, and his unique supersagas, a syncretic genre he created to encompass his iconoclastic view of the world. Paul Schmidt's are the first translations of these works into English. They chronicle the artist's imagination in his feverish search for a poetics that could be as diverse as the universe itself.
The fictions, ranging from the mysterious "Murksong" to the epic "Yasir," show a great variety of styles and themes. But it is in the dramatic text that we best see Khlebnikov's struggle to find a workable form for his vision. The Girl-God, symbolist-inspired, is a mélange of stylistic shifts and impossible scene changes. In The Little Devil, The Marquise des S., and the sardonic Miss Death Makes a Mistakes, Khlebnikov finally finds a stageable theatrical form, in a mixture of satire, colloquial speech, and poetic reflections on art and immortality. The dramatist reaches even higher in the supersagas Otter's Children and Zangezi, achieving a Wagnerian fusion of action, poetry, history, theory, and the musical rhythms of incantation.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published November 11, 1989
1 person is currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Velimir Khlebnikov
109 books64 followersVelimir Khlebnikov (Russian: Велимир Хлебников; first name also spelled Velemir; last name also spelled Chlebnikov, Hlebnikov, Xlebnikov), pseudonym of Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov was a central part of the Russian Futurist movement, but his work and influence stretch far beyond it.
Khlebnikov belonged to the most significant Russian Futurist group Hylaea (along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, and Benedikt Livshits), but had already written many significant poems before the Futurist movement in Russia had taken shape. Among his contemporaries, he was regarded as "a poet's poet" (Mayakovsky referred to him as a "poet for producers") and a maverick genius.
Khlebnikov is known for poems such as "Incantation by Laughter", "Bobeobi Sang The Lips", “The Grasshopper” (all 1908-9), “Snake Train” (1910), the prologue to the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), dramatic works such as “Death’s Mistake” (1915), prose works “Ka” (1915), and the so-called ‘super-tale’ (сверхповесть) “Zangezi”, a sort of ecstatic drama written partly in invented languages of gods and birds.
Khlebnikov's book Zangezi (1922).
In his work, Khlebnikov experimented with the Russian language, drawing upon its roots to invent huge numbers of neologisms, and finding significance in the shapes and sounds of individual letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. Along with Kruchenykh, he originated zaum.
He wrote futurological essays about such things as the possible evolution of mass communication ("The Radio of the Future") and transportation and housing ("Ourselves and Our Buildings"). He described a world in which people live and travel about in mobile glass cubicles that can attach themselves to skyscraper-like frameworks, and in which all human knowledge can be disseminated to the world by radio and displayed automatically on giant book-like displays at streetcorners.
In his last years, Khlebnikov became fascinated by Slavic mythology and Pythagorean numerology, and drew up long "Tables of Destiny" decomposing historical intervals and dates into functions of the numbers 2 and 3.
Khlebnikov died of paralysis while a guest in the house of his friend Pyotr Miturich near Kresttsy.
Khlebnikov belonged to the most significant Russian Futurist group Hylaea (along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, and Benedikt Livshits), but had already written many significant poems before the Futurist movement in Russia had taken shape. Among his contemporaries, he was regarded as "a poet's poet" (Mayakovsky referred to him as a "poet for producers") and a maverick genius.
Khlebnikov is known for poems such as "Incantation by Laughter", "Bobeobi Sang The Lips", “The Grasshopper” (all 1908-9), “Snake Train” (1910), the prologue to the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), dramatic works such as “Death’s Mistake” (1915), prose works “Ka” (1915), and the so-called ‘super-tale’ (сверхповесть) “Zangezi”, a sort of ecstatic drama written partly in invented languages of gods and birds.
Khlebnikov's book Zangezi (1922).
In his work, Khlebnikov experimented with the Russian language, drawing upon its roots to invent huge numbers of neologisms, and finding significance in the shapes and sounds of individual letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. Along with Kruchenykh, he originated zaum.
He wrote futurological essays about such things as the possible evolution of mass communication ("The Radio of the Future") and transportation and housing ("Ourselves and Our Buildings"). He described a world in which people live and travel about in mobile glass cubicles that can attach themselves to skyscraper-like frameworks, and in which all human knowledge can be disseminated to the world by radio and displayed automatically on giant book-like displays at streetcorners.
In his last years, Khlebnikov became fascinated by Slavic mythology and Pythagorean numerology, and drew up long "Tables of Destiny" decomposing historical intervals and dates into functions of the numbers 2 and 3.
Khlebnikov died of paralysis while a guest in the house of his friend Pyotr Miturich near Kresttsy.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 9, 2016
Khlebnikov scrambled my brain with his zaum and futurism and I loved every minute of it, thank you. I will read you again, you deserve it.
Read him.
"Remember?
I ordered the shoeshine boy
to scrape the Little Dipper off my shoes;
I tossed a coin to the universe, made
an anxious hash of ancient words.
Where the ragged fields of dawn are
plowed by the horsemen of centuries,
I ordered a crow to fly and said in passing to the sky:
"Do me a favor, heaven. Die!"
Later I got a better idea—
always looking for bigger laughs—
I smashed the matchbox race of men
and started reading poetry.
Planet Earth was an easy fit
in the dark curve of a madman's mitt.
Follow me now!
What's there to be afraid of?"
--
" Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it. "
Read him.
"Remember?
I ordered the shoeshine boy
to scrape the Little Dipper off my shoes;
I tossed a coin to the universe, made
an anxious hash of ancient words.
Where the ragged fields of dawn are
plowed by the horsemen of centuries,
I ordered a crow to fly and said in passing to the sky:
"Do me a favor, heaven. Die!"
Later I got a better idea—
always looking for bigger laughs—
I smashed the matchbox race of men
and started reading poetry.
Planet Earth was an easy fit
in the dark curve of a madman's mitt.
Follow me now!
What's there to be afraid of?"
--
" Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it. "
June 26, 2018
Khlebnikov is one of my literary heroes. His crazy, Pangaean way of neologism-as-language-spanning truth, his creative ways of using rhyme, sonance, and word-cracking (in English, something like 'toward' has 'war' as its creamy center) are to be admired and evolved. He's sadly overlooked and not read much outside of Russia. Harvard published this collected works series some years ago and I'd recommend hunting them down.
This volume, like pretty much everything about Khlebnikov, is a little deceiving: This isn't really prose. I wouldn't go so far to use the word "prose" so much as "poems that indent like prose". They're not very linear and not very narrative, more like stream-of-conscious than anything else, with a few exceptions. They're beautiful, nonetheless. The plays are decent (I hate reading plays). The "supersagas" are just big poems and could've been included with Volume III.
This volume, like pretty much everything about Khlebnikov, is a little deceiving: This isn't really prose. I wouldn't go so far to use the word "prose" so much as "poems that indent like prose". They're not very linear and not very narrative, more like stream-of-conscious than anything else, with a few exceptions. They're beautiful, nonetheless. The plays are decent (I hate reading plays). The "supersagas" are just big poems and could've been included with Volume III.
June 9, 2021
this is only 400 pages long but the variety is kind of incredible. first up you've got the short stories, which range from early experimental things that remind me a little of finnegans wake, to pastoral gogol homages and brief character pieces, to timewarping spiritual excursions involving ancient egypt and the prediction of the future via mathematics. the plays i largely skipped as i have almost no knowledge of theatre but they seemed to explore many of the same themes as his other writing. the supersagas in the last section are a form invented by khlebnikov, and are supposed to be equivalent to sentences, but with whole texts as components instead of words. some of them contain a mixture of prose, verse and playwriting, but others are just in verse and I found these less effective. the prose section was by far the highlight for me because of the consistently excellent writing no matter what style he's using.
excerpts:
"And the visions came faster and faster, and after the vision and regurging a chunk of immortality someone had swallowed, with the help of a hook and the sound of general laughter, after blizzards of horrible fearfaced idols there was Worldevour whose thighs were humans swooping over everything and some kind of Univerk moved up and down, something beyond anyone's conception, whose occasional feather as it fell marked the horror of his very existence."
"Fame kept advancing with his broadsword. Prideful sheaf of vengeance in the eyes of one who sings with it, death winds its wings and smothers the small man where all are great, the great man where all are small, the coward where all are brave, the brave man where all are cowards. The vision of a bast shoe may be a worldring one. The rivers rolls, a silver singer. See the hornmuzzleherdmaneheadstream flow by the shores of the road. Munching a morsel of darkening dark bread, the white boy trails his switch. Dawns exchanged smiles and one of them kissed the edge of the ear bent down beneath his hat. And the kiss lit up his face as he chewed his bread. A twilit hound with a wicked bonfire eye."
"These bugles ignore you and your private passions; they know only the people as a mass and they twist its will like a serpent, as they hurl themselves forward to conquer fire.
"Wake up," they cry, "fire is loose, go put it out, bind and chain it and throw it back in its cage. Its time has not yet come, the final struggle between man and fire has yet to be joined. It is not yet time to tame the beast."
I thought for a long time about the immeasurability of their grandeur. I knew that all things that exist are only written signs and I have made constant efforts to understand them, for, after all, a grasp of number is the great translator between languages that bear no relationship to one another. In these sounds, agonizing and threatening, speaking a language of some kind or other, one could feel the breeding place of the resurrection of the dead. And in the terrifying howl that rose at an angle above the world, and fell back onto it like lava from heaven, was hidden the promise of a day when fire would be victorious, a precursor and sign dear to the hearts of the people. Is fire the natural state of the deceased? Are the deadly embraces of the sun so distant? For things living are more akin to this earth than things dead. And the combat of fire and earth with fire victorious, ripping open the covers of earthly graves and burning them up, that is what [illegible] disturbs you after [illegible]. And some day he will come, this angry crimson conqueror, this red fire. If, in death, our mortal wax bids farewell to fire, then what we hear at such moments is the return of mankind as a thing of fire."
"One time we met people who held themselves together with buttons. Really. Their insides were accessible through a flap of skin, buttoned down by little round hornlike protuberances. Whenever they ate, a furnace of thoughts glowed through this flap. That's really true.
I stood on a great steel bridge and threw a coin into a river, a two kopek
piece. "Someone should be worried about the science of the future," I said.
"I wonder if maybe someday some underwater archeologist will come along and find my sacrifice to the river.""
"Another time Ka grabbed me by the arm and said, "Let's go see Amenhotpe." I saw Ay there, and Shurura, and Nafertiti. Shurura had a black beard, all curls.
"Hello there," said Amenhotpe. He nodded at us and then continued:
"O Aton! Thus speaks your son Noferkheperura. Some gods swim and some gods fly, and some gods even crawl around on the ground. Sukh, for instance, and Mnevis, and Bennu. In fact, is there a single mouse on the banks of Hapi-Nile who does not demand to be worshiped? All those gods quarrel among themselves, so a poor man is left with no god to pray to. He's happy if someone simply announces Ί am the One' and demands a fatted calf or two. By the Nine Bows and Arrows! Did you not tremble once, all of you, at the warcry of my ancestors? And if I am here, while Sheshat holds my shade in her resourceful hand, does not her hand preserve me-here from me-there? Isn't my Ka at this very moment among the clouds, lighting the blue Hapi-Nile with pillars of fire? I-here command you to adore me-there! And you, strangers, convey what I say to your own times.""
"One time we were all together and champing at the bit, so we decided to telephone the Winter Palace.
"Winter Palace? Operator, please connect us with the Winter Palace."
"Hello, Winter Palace? This is the Moving-Van Workers' Cooperative."
"Yes, what can I do for you?" The voice was cold, polite, humorless.
"The moving-van workers would like to know how soon the occupants of the Winter Palace will be moving out."
"What? What?"
"Are the residents of the Winter Palace planning to move?"
"Ah! And is that all you want to know?" We could hear a sour smile in the voice.
"That's all." We could hear someone laughing at the other end of the line. Petnikov and I began laughing on our end."
excerpts:
"And the visions came faster and faster, and after the vision and regurging a chunk of immortality someone had swallowed, with the help of a hook and the sound of general laughter, after blizzards of horrible fearfaced idols there was Worldevour whose thighs were humans swooping over everything and some kind of Univerk moved up and down, something beyond anyone's conception, whose occasional feather as it fell marked the horror of his very existence."
"Fame kept advancing with his broadsword. Prideful sheaf of vengeance in the eyes of one who sings with it, death winds its wings and smothers the small man where all are great, the great man where all are small, the coward where all are brave, the brave man where all are cowards. The vision of a bast shoe may be a worldring one. The rivers rolls, a silver singer. See the hornmuzzleherdmaneheadstream flow by the shores of the road. Munching a morsel of darkening dark bread, the white boy trails his switch. Dawns exchanged smiles and one of them kissed the edge of the ear bent down beneath his hat. And the kiss lit up his face as he chewed his bread. A twilit hound with a wicked bonfire eye."
"These bugles ignore you and your private passions; they know only the people as a mass and they twist its will like a serpent, as they hurl themselves forward to conquer fire.
"Wake up," they cry, "fire is loose, go put it out, bind and chain it and throw it back in its cage. Its time has not yet come, the final struggle between man and fire has yet to be joined. It is not yet time to tame the beast."
I thought for a long time about the immeasurability of their grandeur. I knew that all things that exist are only written signs and I have made constant efforts to understand them, for, after all, a grasp of number is the great translator between languages that bear no relationship to one another. In these sounds, agonizing and threatening, speaking a language of some kind or other, one could feel the breeding place of the resurrection of the dead. And in the terrifying howl that rose at an angle above the world, and fell back onto it like lava from heaven, was hidden the promise of a day when fire would be victorious, a precursor and sign dear to the hearts of the people. Is fire the natural state of the deceased? Are the deadly embraces of the sun so distant? For things living are more akin to this earth than things dead. And the combat of fire and earth with fire victorious, ripping open the covers of earthly graves and burning them up, that is what [illegible] disturbs you after [illegible]. And some day he will come, this angry crimson conqueror, this red fire. If, in death, our mortal wax bids farewell to fire, then what we hear at such moments is the return of mankind as a thing of fire."
"One time we met people who held themselves together with buttons. Really. Their insides were accessible through a flap of skin, buttoned down by little round hornlike protuberances. Whenever they ate, a furnace of thoughts glowed through this flap. That's really true.
I stood on a great steel bridge and threw a coin into a river, a two kopek
piece. "Someone should be worried about the science of the future," I said.
"I wonder if maybe someday some underwater archeologist will come along and find my sacrifice to the river.""
"Another time Ka grabbed me by the arm and said, "Let's go see Amenhotpe." I saw Ay there, and Shurura, and Nafertiti. Shurura had a black beard, all curls.
"Hello there," said Amenhotpe. He nodded at us and then continued:
"O Aton! Thus speaks your son Noferkheperura. Some gods swim and some gods fly, and some gods even crawl around on the ground. Sukh, for instance, and Mnevis, and Bennu. In fact, is there a single mouse on the banks of Hapi-Nile who does not demand to be worshiped? All those gods quarrel among themselves, so a poor man is left with no god to pray to. He's happy if someone simply announces Ί am the One' and demands a fatted calf or two. By the Nine Bows and Arrows! Did you not tremble once, all of you, at the warcry of my ancestors? And if I am here, while Sheshat holds my shade in her resourceful hand, does not her hand preserve me-here from me-there? Isn't my Ka at this very moment among the clouds, lighting the blue Hapi-Nile with pillars of fire? I-here command you to adore me-there! And you, strangers, convey what I say to your own times.""
"One time we were all together and champing at the bit, so we decided to telephone the Winter Palace.
"Winter Palace? Operator, please connect us with the Winter Palace."
"Hello, Winter Palace? This is the Moving-Van Workers' Cooperative."
"Yes, what can I do for you?" The voice was cold, polite, humorless.
"The moving-van workers would like to know how soon the occupants of the Winter Palace will be moving out."
"What? What?"
"Are the residents of the Winter Palace planning to move?"
"Ah! And is that all you want to know?" We could hear a sour smile in the voice.
"That's all." We could hear someone laughing at the other end of the line. Petnikov and I began laughing on our end."
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews