Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/134

126 kov points out in his "The Longer Poems".

4. His use of "pre-historic" and "child-like" language.

The childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual can both be seen as pre-literate stages of existence. A wave of interest in what Nikolai Kulbin called "the art of children and prehistoric men" accompanied the emergence of "primitivism" in Russian art and—as we noted in Chapter Five—it was largely as a poetic expression of this movement that Russian Futurism (and particularly its "Khlebnikovian" aspects) took shape. The generally "clumsy" and "illiterate" impression created by Larionov's or Goncharova's paintings was equally conveyed by much of Khlebnikov's language. Already in 1908, as Markov mentions, Khlebnikov was (e.g. in his ballad "Lyubovnik Yunony") rendering child-like effects through the use of stylistic and grammatical errors. Pomorska cites the poet's "Komu skazatenki" (written a year or two later) in a similar context, and remarks that children's language was a source for Khlebnikov's zaum. In 1913, Khlebnikov insisted that the editors of Sadok Sudei II print two poems by a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian girl, Militsa, withdrawing one of his own poems to give her space. Khlebnikov was fascinated by the way in which literate language could be rendered illiterate—or by the way in which literature is distorted and transformed when children or uneducated people attempt to copy it. His use of folklore, as Markov explains, is
 * not the "respectable" imitation of, or use of motifs from folk epics, lyrical songs, and fairy tales which is so widespread in Russian literature. It is, instead, an interest in the naive and "illiterate" imitation and distortion of literature, especially of romantic poetry, in numerous songs, ballads and poems which seldom attracted the attention of scholars, who to this day tend to dismiss them as having no artistic merit.

The implications in terms of Khlebnikov's "anti-literacy" need no further elaboration.