Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/177

169 haps almost as strange as Khlebnikov‘s correct prediction of the revolution's date in 1912.

There also seems to be a certain relationship between Khlebnikov's ideas on time and the ideas of the Russian Revolution, although here again the parallel is in the main between conceptual forms rather than concrete ideas. We have seen that Khlebnikov sensed, apparently, a close relationship between the future and the ;prehistoric past. In place of the straight-line or linear conception of time, he believed he was establishing "a new attitude towards time" which taught "that distant points can be closer than two neighbouring ones..." It does not need much knowledge of Marxism to perceive that there is a kind of "parallel" here similar to the one just described. Engels wrote of historical and natural evolution as a "spiral form of development", and, writing of "primitive communism", defined it as the task of the social revolution "to restore common property on a higher plane of development..." Lenin wrote in this connection of "the apparent return to the old", and of the "repetition" of lower evolutionary phases "at a higher stage". In relation particularly to Russia, Marx, after describing the disintegration of the ancient peasant “mir" or commune, wrote in an un-sent letter to Zasulich:

"To save the Russian commune, there must be a Russian revolution..."

And he went on to describe the circumstances under which "this commune will soon become an element that regenerates Russian society..." It is obvious that the Bolsheviks thought of themselves as, in a certain sense, "restoring" common property, enacting an "apparent return to the old", although "on a higher plane of development". This is true in the sense that they believed in the dialectic—even though the idea of a kind of "restoration" of the "mir" (which Marx himself was evidently unsure of) came to nothing. It is not difficult to see, in this