Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/179

171 Something like this view was also expressed by Lev Trotsky, who was one of the few Bolshevik leaders to write perceptively about Futurism and is therefore worth quoting. Writing of "Khlebnikov's or Kruchenykh's making ten or one hundred new derivative words out of existing roots" Trotsky insists that such experiments lie "outside of poetry", even though they "may have a certain philological interest" and


 * may, in a certain though very modest degree, facilitate the development of the living and even of the poetic language, and forecast a time when the evolution of speech will be more consciously directed. }}

But when he comes to survey the overall philological work achieved by the Futurists, Trotsky is much less equivocal, and it is evid- ent that he treats the "linguistic revolution" as very much part of the wider social revolt:


 * The struggle against the old vocabulary and syntax of poetry, regardless of all its Bohemian extravagances, was a progressive revolt against a vocabulary that was cramped and selected artificially with the view of being undisturbed by anything extraneous; a revolt against impressionism, which was sipping life through a straw; a revolt against symbolism which had become false in its heavenly vacuity, against Zinaida Hippius and her kind, and against all the other squeezed lemons and picked chicken-bones of the little world of the liberal-mystic intelligentsia. If we survey attentively the period left behind, we cannot help but realize how vital and progressive was the work of the Futurists in the field of philology. Without exaggerating the dimensions of this "revolution" in language, we must realize that Futurism has pushed out of poetry many worn words and phrases, and has made them full-blooded again and, in a few cases, has happily created new words and phrases which have entered, or are entering, into the vocabulary of poetry and which can enrich the living language. This refers not only to the separate word, but also to its place among other words, that is, to syntax. In the field of word-formations, Futurism truly has gone somewhat beyond the limits which a living language can hold. The same thing, however, has happened with the Revolution; and is the "sin" of every living movement.