Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/183

175 There is no need at this point to detail Khlebnikov's view of the revolution: the preceding pages have shown how he saw it as a "rebirth", a leap into the future and at the same time a return to the prehistoric past. To Khlebnikov, the revolution was "his own" revolution—he had, after all, predicted its date long in advance—and an event through which his theories and dreams were being materialized. When it occurred, it was almost a familiar thing to him. It was a "shift" —an abrupt transfer on to a new plane of existence. He had long been used to such things in his own poetry: the entire revolution was almost to be seen as only a colossal "realization" of an artistic "device". It was a movement in which the right to terrestrial property was being destroyed and replaced by the battle for time. But Khlebnikov had "foreseen" this in 1916. In the storm of revolutions, Khlebnikov and his colleagues were to be crowned with laurel-wreaths and made "Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere." But already in 1916, Khlebnikov wrote that he had been made "head of the first State of Time in the world". It was almost as if, for Khlebnikov, the Revolution had already in a sense happened in advance—as if it really did not matter too much what particular point in time he was writing in, since he stood in a way astride and outside the time dimension, determining its course as a railway-pointsman guides the path of a train.

The starting-point for Khlebnikov was the revolution of form. The core of his revolt was a linguistic one. Where Mayakovsky fought to defy the reign of 'byt' as the hardening and fossilization of life, Khlebnikov fought first and foremost against the hardening and fossilization of language—a struggle which in effect took (to a large extent) the form of a fight against the linguistic results and implications of literacy. The struggle was for a restoration of the prinacy of sound in language and for the impermanence, pervasiveness and "darkness"

(in the sense earlier discussed) of the world of sounds. The