Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/199

191 APPENDIX 'C'.

Some notes on Italian Futurism.

To a large extent, it was the primitivist origin of Russian futurism——and, correspondingly, the central role played in it by Khlebnikovh—which set the Russian movement so far apart from the Italian one of the same name.

There is no need to detail here the way in which the newspapers in Russia rather arbitrarily attached the name "futurism" to the primitivist Hylea group, to the initial consternation of its members. The subject has been well documented by Markov. In this note what concerns us is the position of Khlebnikov not merely as (to a considerable extent) the central pole of attraction for the Russian movement but as the polar opposite (as one might put it with some simplification) of everything for which Marinetti and the Italians stood.

In essence, this polar opposition can be expressed as follows. Khlebnikovian futurism was "formalist"; the Italians were content—oriented, ideological.

Such enormous differences are implied in this dichotomy that it is sometimes hard to see what the two movements had in common. Markov brings out the contrast well. The Italian movement, he writes,


 * sought to be not only an aesthetic creed, but also a new morality and an appeal to action, political or social, for the regeneration of Italy...

In this sense, it was a content—oriented, ideologically—motivated movement. The Russians, writes Markov, were quite different: