Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/126

118 had been above all littérateurs, seeing themselves as the educated, cultured ones, living in the world of the written word. But as Chukovsky wrote of Miayakovsky (perhaps in a sense misunderstanding him, but making an important point nevertheless):
 * It would be silly to call him a writer—-his calling is not writing, but yelling. His medium isn‘t paper, but his own throat-which is natural for a poet of the revolution.

Or again: ...he is the poet of thunder and lightning, roars and screeches; he is incapable of maintaining any sort of quiet. Khlebnikov personally was very quiet. Writing of an early public appearance of the Euturists in Moscow, Livshits recalls that Khlebnikov
 * could not be allowed to mount the platform because of his weak voice and the hopeless "and so on" with which he broke up his recital after the first few lines, as if stressing the continuity of his verbal emanation.

His speech-difficulties even in private have already been noted. If too much literacy creates an emphasized sense of the spatial and emotional isolation of the "I", then Khlebnikov embodied this condition in his own person to an unusual degree. The enormity of the task of penetrating space—of communicating—was for him no mere academic concept. It was a daunting and seemingly inescapable fact of his personal life. And it may be that it was precisely Khlebnikov's practical difficulties in verbally communicating that spurred his efforts to solve "the problem of communication"—leading to his stupendous output of solutions and answers on a theoretical plane. For all his personal quietness, in any event, the effect of Khlebnikov's linguistic experiments was to create a ringing awareness of the