Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/196

188 If we take the Slap's line attacking "all these Maxim Gorkys, Kuprins, Bloke, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chernys, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc., etc.,' it could be imagined that here was something which must have seemed offensive to the gentle Khlebnikov. Far from it. Khlebnikov had himself damned, by name, roughly the same set of authors in his "Teacher and Pupil". True, the correlation was not exact (Khlebnikov‘s soft spot for Kuzmin has already been mentioned), but the names of Kuyrin, Sologub, Remizov and Bunin are all prominent in Khlebnikov's accusatory "tables".

Finally, let us turn to the notorious call for Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to be thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity. Those who believe that Khlebnikov could not possibly have identified himself with so crude and wholesale a rejection of the past should read Khlebnikov‘s “!Budetlyansky”, in which the point made by the Slaps author or authors is made in a Slightly different way:


 * We have found that twentieth—century man, in dragging along a thousand—year—old corpse (the past), has been bowed down, like an ant dragging along a log. We alone have restored to man his stature, having thrown off the bundle of the past (the Tolstoys, Homers, Pushkins).

In his "Teacher and Pupil“, Khlebnikov went further than the Slap in condemning the writers of the past. He allowed for no exceptions when he condemned wholesale "Russia's writers" as such (contrasting them with the old folk—singers) as cursers of Time.

There was not much of a theoretical nature in the Slap manifesto. What there was, however, was very much an expression of Khlebnikov's own distinctive formal achievements or