Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/150

142 haps the best example is provided by "The Otter's Children", in which, (among other things), a mammoth—hunt is juxtaposed with a Futurist public stage—performance. This work, composed of "sails" each of which represents a fragment of life from a different age, was the one which came, perhaps, closest to realizing Khlebnikov's dream (noted earlier) of creating a novel which broke through the normal laws of time.

For Khlebnikov, the events of 1917 were, then, an abrupt uniting of far—removed times——the future and the pre-historic past. Hence in his poetic works, the revolution, besides being pictured as a leap into the future, was depicted, (as one critic has put it),


 * as a breaking in of the primeval world, as a new bubbling forth of the prehistoric springs of life.

In this way, the culture of literacy and the "states of space" were seen as being attacked from both ends. The rule of "the present" was being attacked by the combined forces of past and future.

For Khlebnikov, this meant that the “conception of Time" was gaining the upper hand over "the conception of Space.” The present——insofar as it was a manifestation of changelessness and 'byt'——had been a frozen, static world, a world of territorial states and of existence in space. Its language-form had been "bookish" or "fossilized" or "congealed" language-made of “words no longer beating with the waves of language" —which divided people territorially from each other. Such language (whose words