Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/187

179 With so many of Khlebnikov‘s concepts only half-formed and fragmenterily-expressed, there are obvious difficulties and risks in any attempt at interpretation. In the preceding pages, an attempt has been made to show that, despite the reality of the conflicting tensions in Khlebnikov's thought, the outlines of a relatively coherent and consistent world-view can at a deeper level be discerned. Central to his view of the future was his concept of revolution as a "shift" or "displacement" of temporal planes. The oral past and the electronic future were conjoined, in a process which cut out the present. Man and the universe were being turned on a new axis——the axis of time instead of that of space. Khlebnikov's excitement and anticipation began, as we have seen, long in advance of the revolution itself. But at no time was his enthusiasm so great as in the days immediately preceding the Bolsheviks insurrection. "In those days“, as he wrote afterwards,


 * the word "Bolshevik" rang with a strange pride, and it soon became clear that the phantoms of "today" were about to be ripped apart by gunfire.

In his imagination it was he and his colleagues who had seized the winter Palace and the communications-media and were broadcasting to the world:


 * Here. The Winter Palace. To Alexandra Fedorovna Kerenskaya. To all. To all. To all... What? You still don't know that the Government of the Terrestrial Sphere already exists? Well, well——so you don't know it exists! The Government of the Terrestrial Sphere. Signatures.