Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/185

177 This suggestion should be seen as an elaboration of Khlebnikov's idea of the world as a poem", which we noted earlier. A related notion was Khlebnikov's picture of the futurist (budetlyan) as a balalaika-player, plucking the strings of the globe, of human heart-beats and of humanity's fate.

Some ideas of Marshall McLuhan which seem relevant have been discussed above. Khlebnikov's "world as a poem" idea, however, can be related not only to cLuhan's concept of "electronic" and "technological" art taking "the whole earth and its population as its material", but also to the ideas of some who were living and writing in Russia in Khlebnikov's own time. Vassily Kamensky writes, discussing the futurists in the early revolutionary years, that


 * new creative projects of a cosmic scale were born in our circle every day.

In relation to plans to stage Hayakovsky's play depicting the world revolution, Kamensky recalls:


 * We were dreaming of a revolutionary mass theatre of the future, where thousands of people, as well as hundreds of cars and airplanes, would fill a gigantic arena, creating for millions the vision of, say, the heroic epic of the October Revolution.

However, here the mention of cars and airplanes indicates that Kamensky was still thinking in mechanical, rather than electronic terms. It was electricity and Radio which seemed to promise the most effective means of creating an art-form to involve millions and embrace the globe. Where Khlebnikov talked of "people-rays" and "lightning", Malevich spoke of "I-beams" and "electricity".

Khlebnikov's vision of Radio uniting the globe and of the world as a poem was matched by the words of El Lissitzky, written in 1920:


 * only a creative work which fills the whole world with its energy can join us together by means of its energy components to form a collective unity like a circuit of electric current.