Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/197

189 aims. It might be supposed that Khlebnikov, with his astonishing 'feel' for language and its evolutionary laws, could not really have sympathised with the Slap manifesto's declaration of “uncompromising hatred of the language used hitherto". Markov supports this view when he notes that, strictly speaking, only Kruchenykh was to live up to this declaration. Practice and theory rarely perfectly coincide, however, and in considering the Slap manifesto we are really dealing with a declaration of aims, i.e. with theory. On this level, it is hard to see how Khlebnikov could have objected to the "uncompromising hatred" in question. It had been he, after all, who had pioneered the idea of “transrational language". And long after his early "futurist" period—-as late as in 1921-—he was still making the most "extreme" and uncompromising" imaginable statements on language, some of which put the Slap's declaration in the shade. In 1921 Khlebnikov demanded:


 * The destruction of languages as a duty.
 * Destroy the shell of language always and everywhere.

It would be hard to sound more "uncompromising" than that.

The demand for the poet's right "to enlarge the vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words", and the final, brief mention of the "self-centred word" were obviously inspired first and foremost by Khlebnikov's practical poetic example, beginning with the "Incantation by Laughter".

In conclusion, it can be said that Khlebnikov in 1912 was firmly associated-—not only in the public mind but internally and intrinsically——with the group who were shortly to become known as Russia's "futurists." In an important sense, he was actually the centre of the new movement. The various albums and manifestos which appeared in 1913 almost