Избранные сочинения: стихотворения, поэмы, проза, драматургия, статьи, письма

by Velimir Khlebnikov

Russian

Genres: Poetry, Russia

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Velimir 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.

Reviews

[Artem Lukianov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) was a preeminent Russian futurist poet, playwright and prose writer. Diverging from Italian futurism of Marinetti and boycotting the speeches he gave on his visit to Russia in 1914, he repudiated Marinetti’s proto-fascist tendencies and war-worshiping. Khlebnikov had his pan-Slavist phase, however not at all Russia-centric, focusing more on synthesis of Slavic dialects which in his day have already developed into separate languages such as Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian, etc, etc, etc. He believed that Russian writers of the 19th century have considerably limited the vocabulary of Russian literature by excluding those numerous peripheral dialects. Similarly, he considered his contemporaries writing in those languages as trapped in perhaps even narrower vernacular framework. Khlebnikov turned to ancient Slavic, Egyptian, Caucasian, Nordic mythologies and sagas to draw inspiration from and create a much wider range of literary symbols; in this his work can be reminiscent of Ezra Pound borrowing from Chinese poetry, the troubadour tradition and Roman Golden Age poets like Catullus and Propertius. Furthermore, Klebnikov engaged in his own word-creation, calling the process ‘the word-building’, synthesising roots of rare Slavonic and Finno-Ugric words. He often prefered freer meters for his poems, however never losing alliteration and frequently incorporating alternating rhythms in his poems, thereby being highly experimental whilst also poetically melodious. In the then prominent polemic in Russian avant-garde of West-versus-East Khlebnikov was inveterately on the side of the latter, devoting a large chunk of his artistic endeavours to bringing Russia closer to cultural and artistic paradigm of Asian peoples and nations.

The book is titled ‘Creations’ after one of his collection of works first published some time in 1914, however this editions contains numerous other works irrelevant to that particular publication. It is a collection of his verses, poems, short fictions, plays, articles and letters. Some of his poems are among the best of what Russian poetry has to offer. Despite being arrantly internationalist, there aren’t many overtly political or partisan poems characteristic of his fellow Futurist and friend Mayakovsky. His short prose is wildly experimental, conjuring up mythological figures of Egypt, Greece and ancient Slavic world. At times, unfortunately, despite explicit musicality, his fiction seemed rather impenetrable narratively or thematically. His plays were a pleasant surprise to me by not being plays at all, but rather short stories stylised as plays; the results are almost impeccable pieces of prose writing. The articles of his discuss a wide range of subjects such as urban planning and architecture, contemporary Russian poetry, inspirations behind his own works and on potential sources for enriching contemporary Russian language. His letters contain some interesting details about his time in a military mental asylum spent there in an attempt to avoid service, the struggles he had to go through, the humiliations he had to endure from other soldiers looking down upon and abusing him for his evasion and supposedly unpatriotic sentiments of pacifism. In another of his letters he also mentions his vegetarianism. Also in a letter to Andrei Bely he recognised the brilliance of Bely’s just published novel ‘Silver Dove’, despite being on the opposite side of Russian art politics of that time. To my regret, the collection does not contain any of his supersagas - a genre invented by Khlebnikov himself. Neither does it contain his articles on the dispute between his two close friends, Malevich and Tatlin. Thus, the collection prompted in me further interest in one of the most creative Russian literary figures of the 20th century, notwithstanding a slight disappointment regards the contents of this particular collection of his works.