Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/205

197 enthusiastic, as we have seen, about air—travel, speed-of-light radio-communication, the idea of space-rockets and similar things. But in a sense Livshits was right. The Russians, putting “form” or "the inner world" first, were prepared to see beauty in these things only conditionally. The condition was the subordination of these inventions to man's inner world, to human needs, either through the agency of the "Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere“ (Khlebnikov's version) or through that of the "Red Art International or the Third International itself (in the version of Mayakovsky and his LEF associates in the post—revolutionary period). The Italians did not put “form” or "the inner world“ first. For them, it was the pulse, the rhythm, the staccato beat and the clangour of naked machines—wand not any inner complex of forms and sounds emanating from the "word as such"-—which was to animate their art. The distinction, so far as it holds, amounts to a diametric opposition.

And in what remains to this day probably the most brilliant {if philosophically one-sided) brief account of the poetry of Khlebnikov and his colleagues, Roman Jakobson made the same point. Having quoted from Marinetti's manifesto the words about extolling crowds, factories, railway-stations and so on, he remarked:


 * But this is a reform in the field of reportage, not in poetic language.

What Jakobson is really saying is that the Italians were not artists at all. We noted earlier that, because they were first and foremost artists, the Russians did not base themselves intellectually or directly upon specific indications of technological advance in the external world. They based themselves on the forms of the inner world-a largely subconscious realm–and on external changes only to the extent