Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/111

103 :The activities of the artist of the pen and the artist of the brush, the discoveries of the artists of thought (Mechnikov, Einstein) Suddenly transporting mankind to new shores...
 * The task of communing with the one soul of mankind, with the one quotidian spiritual wave which sweeps over the country every day, drenching it with a rain of scientific and artistic news——the Radio has accomplished this task with the aid of lightning.

Khlebnikov is already prophesying the invention of television. The Radio, he writes,


 * has sent coloured shadows out on its instruments, so that the whole country and every village can become a communicant in an exhibition of paintings from the distant capital. The exhibition is transmitted by impulses of light and is repeated in thousands of mirrors through all of the Radio's stations. If previously the Radio was the ears of the world, now it is the eyes which admit no distance.

This is Khlebnikov's vision of "the conquest of space" in the future:


 * Proud skyscrapers plunging into the clouds, a game of chess between two people located at opposite ends of the globe, a lively conversation between a man in America and a man in Europe...
 * Thus the Radio will forge the unbroken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind.

The sensation of existing in the form of a radio-wave—roaming freely over the spaces of the globe—is conveyed in the following poetic lines:


 * I am a wave, rolling down,
 * From the white brow of a mountain in Iran,
 * And reflected in black