Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/135

127 5. His epic inclinations.

The classic study of this aspect of Khlebnikov's style is, of course, Markov's "The Longer Poems." Khlebnikov's "epic" inclinations are shown in a number of characteristics which are reminiscent of the "Igor Tale", the Russian byliny and the Homeric tales. In keeping with the generally anonymous, oral collective or tribal origins and mode of existence of the great epic tales, the individualistic "I"—standpoint is generally lacking in epic poetry. Markov points to the same absence of an "I"—standpoint in Khlebnikov as one of the two basic "epic" features of his work. The second such feature, for Markov, is the "mosaic" quality discussed above. The era of Symbolism, Markov notes, "brought the writing of long poems to a virtual standstill." Most of the Symbolists' poems were short, highly-polished and finished expressions of a unified mood or theme. Khlebnikov yearned for works of immense size, and so could only regard shorter pieces as fragments of some larger unfinished whole. Jakobson notes that even
 * his small poems create an impression of epic fragments, and Khlebnikov, without any effort, frequently integrated them into a larger poem.

N. Gumilyev made a similar point in 1914:


 * Many of his lines seem to be fragments of a never written epic.

And Sir Maurice Bowra wrote of "broken epics by Khlebnikov". There is no need to summarise Harko 's study here. It will suffice if we note that the great epics were orally composed and transmitted, and that in his epic tendencies, as in so many other respects, Khlebnikov was returning to the traditions of a pre-literate cultural era.