Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/19

11 "...if it is true that we start dying from the day we are born, then I have never died so strongly as I do these days. It is as if a whirlwind were sweeping from my roots the life-giving, needed soil."

A little later he wrote to his father that his mood throughout 1909 had been one of "tiredness, unconcern, recklessness."

It may be imagined that to begin with such feelings would have harmonized well with (and perhaps even have been to an extent modelled upon) the dominant Symbolist mood, which grew more melancholy with the passing of each year. Khlebnikov's idea of "dying", of being "without roots"—detached from the "life-giving soil"—was certainly not original. It was a general feeling among the Symbolists that they were in a sense rootless, cut off, rejected and misunderstood by their age. Such feelings, combined with an escapist interest in "inner voices" and "the soul", had characterized aspects of Symbolism even before the traumatic experience of the 1905 revolution and the period of reaction which followed. But after this event the note of escapism became exaggerated and morbid. Communication was abandoned as impossible, loneliness accepted as fate. The experience of spiritually "dying" became one of the principal poetic themes.

1909—the year of Khlebnikov's closest association with the Symbolists—was not only one of personal crisis for Khlebnikov. It was also, as it happened, the year of Symbolism's own supreme crisis, after which it steadily fell apart. The Symbolists had lost their way. Khlebnikov's membership of the 'Academy' group was short-lived. In fact it seems that even as he wrote to his father about joining, he was already aware of something wrong