Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/168

160 In his dreams and in his art, Khlebnikov could not keep still. He flitted across Asia, around the globe and among the stars. The same incapacity to inhabit a given space afflicted him in his everyday life. Shortly before the War, he was seized by what his friends called a "hunger for space", and travelled up and down across Russia several times. It was a habit which stayed with him. His friend Spassky remarks that Khlebnikov


 * literally lived in train stations, getting off one train and waiting for another.

We noted earlier Khlebnikov's demand for


 * the right to rooms in any town, and the right to change one's dwelling—place continually... the right to a home independently of the dimensions of space.

It was a demand which was obviously seriously—meant. Khlebnikov only wished that the trains in which he travelled could carry him through time as well as space.

Khlebnikov seemed somehow “primitivist” not only poetically but in his whole being. Vyachcslav Ivanov wrote:


 * He is like the author of the Slovo, who, by some miracle, continues to live in our age.

He was also "infantilist" or "child-like" not merely linguistically but as a person. Artyom Vesyoly has called him "a visionary with child's eyes", while Korney Zelinsky refers to him as a poet who "became a child“. We have noted how the poet saw "meaning" in the most varied numbers and facts, and how he believed he could connect everything and foresee all. The child—psychologist Piaget remarks that it is an important (if often overlooked) fact that the child


 * conceives the world as more logical than it really is. This makes him believe it possible to connect everything and to