Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/147

139 acy' in Russian history against which Khlebnikov rebelled. Blok's language, says Mandel'stam, is priestly, foreign. Its origins can be traced back to the Byzantine introduction of Christianity into Russia and the origins of the Muscovite state. It imposes itself externally against the multiplicity of provincialisms and oral traditions of real Russian culture, blotting them out and in a sense harking back thereby to the founding of the Russian state. Blok's
 * tendency to centralize verse and language reminds one of the flair for statesmanship of the Moscow historic activists. It is a strong, stern hand in relation to provincialism of any kind: everything is subordinated to Moscow—that is, in this case, to the historically-conditioned poetry of the traditional language of the state official.

To Mandel'stam, this intimate association of language and state is an aspect of literacy, and is therefore particularly characteristic of the West. In his view,
 * the cultures and histories of the West lock up the language from outside, enclose it with walls of state and church, and saturate themselves with it...

But Russia stands on the Eastern outposts of Europe, where literacy has a far shallower foothold: Russian culture and history is washed and encircled on all sides by the terrible and boundless elements of the Russian language, not accommodating themselves to any state or church forms.

Russian Futurism represents the invasion of these "terrible and boundless elements“ which have been kept at bay for so long:
 * Futurism is expressed all in regionalisms, in provincial militancy, in a folkloristic, ethnographical multiplicity of tongues.