Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/176

168 in which he describes (without in any way thinking of Khlebnikov) the "algebra of revolution"—-the dialectical method—-to see how close in a formal sense the parallel can appear to be:
 * In the arena visible to the external eye, are chaos and floods, formlessness and boundlessness. But it is a counted and measured chaos, whose successive stages are foreseen. The regularity of their succession is anticipated and enclosed in steel-like formulas. In elemental chaos there is an abyss of blindness. But clear—sightedness and vigilance exist in a directing politics. Revolutionary strategy is not formless like an element; it is finished like a mathematical formula. For the first time in history, we see the algebra of revolution in action.

It is difficult to imagine that Khlebnikov would have disagreed with a single word of the above——except that he would have seen the description as applying, not to the method of Marxism (in which he showed no interest) but to his own revolution—predicting "algebra". But for Trotsky, the idea of a revolutionary "algebra" is basically a metaphor, intended only to have an approximate relationship with reality. Writing of the “counted and measured" phases of history, he can hardly be thought to mean that the time-intervals between them are numerically-fixed. Describing the "regularity of succession" of these phases, he does not assume that they recur at fixed intervals of, say, 317 years. But Khlebnikov, as we have seen, does assume this. Extremist as he was, he might almost have been thought to have been deliberately caricaturing, exaggerating—carrying "to its logical conclusion"—the revolutionary dream of mastering fate and history by means of science. He took the idea of an "algebra of revolution" not metaphorically but in the most literal possible way. It was not deliberate caricature, however. The idea came to Khlebnikov long before 1917, as we have seen, and was taken in a deadly serious way, without his being aware of any parallels which seem to present themselves to us today. The coincidence seems strange—per-