Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/12

4 and listening. He was considered something of a crank. When he spoke, it was in a very quiet voice, almost a whisper—which seemed strange in view of his large size. There were times when he did talk loudly, so it must have been mainly out of shyness that he whispered. He was clumsy and stooped; even in summer he wore a long, black overcoat.

The struggle for the human voice—and against the experience of inarticulateness—was to be central to Khlebnikov's poetry and his experiments with the written word.

Almost immediately on entering University, Khlebnikov became involved in a student demonstration. The occasion was a protest against the ill-treatment of a student social-democrat who had committed suicide while under arrest. The poet's mother writes:

"On November 5 there was a student demonstration. The police dispersed the participants. Father went up and tried to persuade Vitya to go away but he stayed. When arrests began to be made, many ran off, almost under the hooves of the mounted police. Vitya would not run; he stayed put. As he explained afterwards: "Well, somebody had to answer them!""

It was the start of a life-time's attempt to answer what he would later describe as "the states of space". The experience left its mark. Khlebnikov's mother explains:

"They took his name and the following day led him to prison. He spent a month inside... From that time on he underwent a change which transformed him beyond recognition. All his cheerfulness vanished and he attended lectures with disgust, or missed them altogether."