Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/174

166 whose attentions were centred upon the Futurists. In his “Our Foundations", Khlebnikov complained of the “harm” done by "unsuccessfully constructed words", blaming this on the fact "that there are no account-books kept of the expenditure of popular intellect" and that "there are no railway-engineers of language“. It was just this "technologist" interest in the "nuts and bolts", as it were, of language which was thought of as characterizing Futurism in the post—revolutionary period. Khlebnikov's idea of constructing a "Mendeleyev's law" or "atomic table" of sound meanings was very much in tune with the revolutionary spirit of the times. The artists grouped around Mayakovsky's "Left Front of the Arts" liked to think of themselves as technicians, concerned with the real business-the brass tacks—of poetic creation, while others were concerned with sentiment, philosophy, religion or ideology—anything but language itself.

This extreme rationalist aspect of Futurism—which was to a large extent an extrapolation of Khlebnikov's linguistic experiments and tabulations-—obviously had something in common with the "technologist", "rationalizing" and "planning" aims of the Bolshevik revolution. Leon Trotsky acknowledged this when he wrote:


 * Futurism is against mysticism, against the passive deification of nature, against the aristocratic and every other kind of laziness, against dreaminess, and against lachrymosity—and stands for technique, for scientific organization, for the machine, for planfulness, for will—power, for courage, for speed, for precision and for the new man, who is armed with all these things. The connection of the aesthetic 'revolt' with the moral and social revolt is direct...

In Khlebnikov's case, the "parallel" with the social revolution was in some ways a more distant one than in the case of Mayakovsky and others. Khlebnikov's ideas and theories ran, in a sense, parallel with the revolution's aims, but they did so as if