Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/175

167 on a distant, different plane.

According to Malevich:


 * Cubism and Futurism were the revolutionary forms in art foreshadowing the revolution in political and economic life of 1917.

Tatlin went so far as to declare:


 * The events of 1917 in the social field were already brought about in our art in 1914...

Although in the early years of the Revolution, Futurism made a bid for recognition almost as the "official" school of art, the Bolshevik leaders themselves (where they were concerned at all with such questions) disputed such categorical claims. Leon Trotsky, however, while arguing that Futurism had not "mastered" the Revolution, conceded that


 * it has an internal striving which, in a certain sense, is parallel to it.

This was more than he was prepared to say for any other school of art.

The notion of Khlebnikov's work as expressing a "striving" running in a peculiar way "parallel" to the Russian Revolution is important to an understanding of the poet. We have already surveyed Khlebnikov's attempts to "anticipate" and "foresee" the events of history (conceived to be mathematically regular and measurable) by means of algebraic formulae. The "striving" or "impulse" behind these attempts, we have seen, was a determination to find order and meaning in the chaos of human affairs, and to subject the processes of history to the human intellect and will. It was a reaction against the historical passivity and gloomy fatalism of the Symbolists.

Now it does not need much special insight to see that this anti—Symbolist reaction, in itself, represented a striving running in a way parallel to one of the central themes of the October revolution. One has only to turn to a passage of Trotsky's