Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/14

6 sciences. From the start of his new university career, however, he showed a much stronger interest in literature than in these subjects. In October he wrote to his father of seeing various prominent Symbolists (including Sologub and Gorodetsky) at a poetry-evening he had attended. Before long, as he put it in a subsequent letter (to his mother), he was leading the life of a literary Bohemian. To the disgust of his father, Khlebnikov attempted in the following year to drop science and to study Sanskrit and Slavic philology. He succeeded in changing his course of studies, but soon resolved to leave the University altogether. However it was not until June 1911 that he actually left—sent down for his failure to pay the fees outstanding for the previous autumn term.

Khlebnikov had been fond of Symbolist poetry for some time, having been seen carrying copies of the journal "Vesy" in his Kazan student days. He had been particularly attracted by Sologub—whom he would single out in 1912, however, for especial condemnation. Early in 1908 he had met Vyacheslav Ivanov—who had become the leader of Symbolism in its final phase—while holidaying in the Crimea. Then in March, 1908, he had sent fourteen poems to Ivanov for perusal. In the accompanying letter, Khlebnikov had associated his own use of words with a "pan—slavic language" of which he was beginning to dream. The "shoots" of this language were to "sprout through the thickness of contemporary Russian." Ivanov by all accounts appreciated the poems, and became Khlebnikov's first Poetic tutor in St. Petersburg, inviting the young student regularly