Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/190

182 "prophetic sounds" of his "universal language" not as affording glimpses of a world beyond——but as "dispersing" what he called "the gloom of times". The Symbolists had thought of their language as suffused with the light of other worlds; Khlebnikov wrote of the "shadow of the future" being cast over language. He also wrote his famous lines about the future being the "native land of creation" from which blows "the wind of the gods of the word". Khlebnikov had accepted the idea of "two worlds" or "a world beyond" from his Symbolist "teachers". However, he soon realized that the Symbolists were not very serious about reaching these other regions except in imagination. For him, this was not enough. The "world beyond" had to be brought down to earth. It had to be established on earth through the agency of his Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere" and his "universal language“. In recoiling from the pessimism and despair of the Symbolists, he developed a kind of mandatory optimism, an absolute insistence that the future did contain the “world beyond" for which the Symbolists had been longing. In this way, he re—constructed the Symbolist system of "worlds" along a time-axis. "This world" was now the present. “The world beyond" was the future. And he insisted that this future was already invading the present: "The Government of the Terrestrial Sphere already exists——it is We." Again, Nadezhda Mandel'stam is right to see a certain relationship with the optimistic "extremism" of the pro—Bolshevik artistic avant—garde in the early years of the revolution. In Mayakovsky's letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (October 1918) explaining his "Mystery‘Bouffe",