Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/202

194 in a complicated process of refraction and interaction stemming ultimately from changes in the socio-economic structure and technological level of the European and Russian society of that period. The new inner world was produced by the new outer conditions; the new "form" by the newly—developed "content" in that sense.

Seen in a narrower context, however, things appear almost in reverse. Because they were first and foremost artists, the futurists did not base themselves intellectually and directly upon economic statistics, measurements of technological advance or any other indicators of change in the external world. Being artists, they surrendered first and foremost to their own inner world, the world of forms, dreams and the subconscious. To take the question of revolutionary commitment, it was arrived at only through this prior commitment to the inner world of form. It was Khlebnikov's formal preoccupations—with the subjective aspects of language, with the meanings and sound-correlations subconsciously felt, and in general with the need to give voice to a new inner world in its own language—which led him in the general direction of the Bolshevik revolution. Cutting Khlebnikov, for analytical purposes, from his social context and seeing him as an individual, the priority of his inner world in determining his external choices appears clear. Form came first, and "determined" its content. Mayakovsky admitted the same when he described himself as having fallen into communism "from poetry's skies." On this psychological level, it was a definite kind of poetry which led in the direction of revolutionary politics rather than revolutionary commitment which dictated its own kind of poetry. Each futurist (and Khlebnikov is the prime example) reflected the new technological and other circumstances of the age not directly, not rationally, but only in an indirect way—"transrationally" one might almost say—in proportion as his