Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/128

120 early decades of the twentieth, the culture-forms of literate civilization were familiar only to a relatively miniscule proportion of the population. Some scholars would date Russian poetry only from Vasily Zhukovsky‘s translation of Gray's "Elegy". For this reason, the struggle of the oral against the written tradition in Russian culture has been more fierce and evident in recent times than in any West European country.

Literacy can be traced back in Russia to the introduction of Christianity in the ninth century by the missionaries from Byzantium. For centuries, literate culture wax ls 'ely church culture: in a sense hostile, foreign, in a closed—in world of its own, set quite apart from the folk-culture of the Russian people. Mandel'stam writes that even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this hostile, foreign, Byzantine, priestly nature of the written language lived on in the literate culture and language of the intelligentsia. And this again is a reason why the struggle of the oral against the written language has lived on. Mandel'stam sees the written tradition as not only alienated and hostile, but also as a precarious structure in Russia. And it is a structure which Khlebnikov, identifying with the pre-Byzantine, pre-literate folk-singers of old, blows sky-high:
 * Khlebnikov's language is as lay, as vernacular a language as if no monks, no Byzantium, no intelligentsia's culture had ever existed. It is an absolutely Russian language, heard for the first time since a written Russian culture has existed.