Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/15

7 to the poetic gatherings which took place every Wednesday at his famous "Tower".

In this way, Khlebnikov's arrival in St. Petersburg proved the start of a temporary but close personal association with many of the leading Symbolists of the period. Among others to influence him was probably Gorodetsky, whose primitivistic volume "Yar" was much in fashion. Khlebnikov's own love of Russian folk-lore, however, had begun much earlier. In the Autumn of 1909 Ivanov's group began calling themselves the "Academy of Verse". In October they published the first issue of "Apollo", their luxuriously-printed and expensively-illustrated journal which brought together the European-oriented "elite" of Russian writers and artists and survived until 1917. With its reproductions of paintings and drawings tending heavily toward Grecian columns, fauns, nymphs, satyrs and classical nudity, it would be hard to think of a publication more different in appearance or content from those in which Khlebnikov's future works would appear. But in letters to his family written in October and November, the student repeatedly expressed his anticipation that his own works would be published in Apollo. On several occassions he read his verses to the