Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/182

174 :In the early years of the revolution there was no existence, or rather, the storm itself was existence. There was no man of calibre who did not go through a period of faith in the revolution. One believed in the Bolsheviks. Germany and England would fall-and the frontiers that no-one needed any more would be ploughed up. Ang heaven would be rolled up like a scroll of parchment...

When Khlebnikov signed manifestos on behalf of the "Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere" and Kamensky proclaimed the Futurists "the poets of all-mankind's revolution", it was in an atmosphere of just such hopes and expectations as these.

To Mayakovsky, the revolution represented the ultimate defiance of byt. The whole earth was engulfed in a revolutionary ocean—liquid and flowing—in which states, bourgeois relationships and the personal agonies of the past were being swept away. But as the dream of a world revolution failed to materialize, and the revolution in Russia grew cold, the reign of byt seemed to be establishing itself with a grip more total even than before. Mayakovsky dreamed of a new revolution, and of a Fourth and a Fifth International. But the process of cooling and solidification went on. "By April, 1930", as Erlich writes,


 * when Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart, the revolutionary chaos which he celebrated so resonantly had solidified into the mold of the most elaborate system of cultural repression in modern history.

Mayakovsky needed revolution as other men need air.

Khlebnikov, too, needed the same element of chaos in which to breathe. It may be that he was even less capable of surviving without it than Mayakovsky. Writing of the chaotic revolutionary period, Korney Zelinsky observes that life in it was an "unreal" one—an "existence of being constantly on the move" and suggests:


 * "Perhaps only the "chairman of the world", Velimir Khlebnikov, who was entirely immersed in it, wished for nothing else. All the others began to organize their existence as they could...