Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/115

107 Poggioli concludes, rather amazingly, that Khlebnikov's poetry
 * has little to do with the movement to which he gave his allegiance.

Even Markov accepts the idea of the same contradiction, as when he writes:


 * Khlebnikov's work is built on a conflict between modernity (his thought) and the past (his poetry).

For those who hold this view, Khlebnikov's enthusiastic espousal-of "inventions", and particularly Radio, was a surface phenomenon, developed rather late in the poet's life, derived externally from the avant-garde milieu in which he mixed and having little to do with—and indeed conflicting with—the more deeply-rooted and original linguistic and poetic practice which was developed at an earlier stage.

In the present work an opposite view will be put forward. It is suggested that an important aspect of Khlebnikov's early linguistic practice was its character as a revolt against the forms and conventions of literacy. Far from conflicting with the poet's later espousal of Radio, it in a certain sense anticipated it. For if Radio really does mark, in a sense, the beginning of a new age of communication, then one of its important features is a certain transcendance over the written word—and a new emphasis on the primacy of the voice. In emphasizing the oral tradition of culture—the "song" as opposed to the "book"—Khlebnikov may have been helping to familiarize his contemporaries with the new oral emphasis which the age of Radio seemed to be promising.