Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/201

193 :coloured and polyphonic fits of revolutions in all modern capitals; the nightly vibrations of arsenals and shipyards beneath their powerful electric moons; the voracious railway stations devouring the steaming snakes; the factories, attached to the clouds by ropes of smoke...

Admittedly, in drawing this distinction, the Russian futurists‘ eventual commitment to the October revolution may seem to present a problem. Even here, however, it is important to remember that their art's social content was never for the futurists a starting-point. A wider sociological analysis could show, of course, that in developing their "new forms", the futurists were in the last analysis reflecting and responding to new external circumstances. Indeed, a central purpose of the preceding pages has been to show how futurism was influenced by the technological and scientific revolution of its time. The relationship between this technological revolution and the sense of impending social revolution has also been touched upon. In that sense——in a broad perspective——it was obviously "content" which determined "form" for the futurists as much as for anyone else.

But the link between, say, Khlebnikov's poetry and the "electronics revolution" was unlike the much more obvious link between, say, Marinetti's poetry and the "machine-age". Khlebnikov did not set out to "glorify" or even merely to "depict" the effects of the new scientific revolution. On the contrary, his poetry was often about the distant past. The point is that it was because of its formal characteristics that his language expressed the spirit of the new age, doing so as much when the subject—matter was an incident in the Stone Age as when it was a glimpse of the Space Age.

Taken in the widest historical context, as one literary school among others in a complex social setting, futurism appears as a product of its time. Its forms were produced