Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/173

165 In the light of these considerations, Khlebnikov‘s "zaum" or "transreason" should be understood as representing an “ultra-rationalist" rather than "irrationalist" viewpoint. Perhaps "ultra-rationalist" is not the right word, but at least it may help emphasize the almost complete absence of obscurantism or mysticism in Khlebnikov's intentions. This point is essential to an understanding of Khlebnikov's work as one expression of an essential element in the spirit of the Russian Revolution.

To understand Khlebnikov, it is necessary to see how his work finds its own place in, and sheds light upon, the world he was living in—a world which in some respects is that in which we continue to live today. Khlebnikov may have seemed like a survivor from a pre-historic age, or like a visitor from the space-age future. These semblances, however, do not alter the fact that he was a product of his age. The important thing is that the times he lived and wrote in were a strange and decisive turning-point in human history, and that the appearance of a meeting of past and future in a way characterized these revolutionary years no less than they characterized Khlebnikov himself.

Khlebnikov saw his own work as in a sense paralleling the work of the revolutionary workers of 1917. As he declared in his "Declaration of the Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere" early in that year:


 * We—are a special kind of weapon. Comrade workers, do not complain that we are going by a special route to the common goal. Every type of weapon has its own methods and laws... We are worker-architects (social-architects).

The ultra-rationalist, systematizing, sound-tabulating tendencies in Khlebnikov's work were carried further by other Futurist writers and theoreticians—and also (in a much more genuinely scientific way) by the 'Opoyaz' or "Formalist" critics