Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/206

198 that these had permeated the subconscious and modified it in ways discernible in the realm of "form". The Italian futurists, Jakobson noted, proclaimed that new subject-matter and new concepts had "led to a renewal of the devices of poetry and of artistic forms", so that content in a direct fashion determined form. But, he continued, the Russians in no way felt obliged to speak only of motor cars and of contemporary machine-industry and civilization. For them, new forms—a new "language"—came first. They had invented a poetry of the "self—developing, self—valuing word" as the established and clearly visible "material" of poetry:


 * And so it is not surprising that Khlebnikov's poems sometimes deal with the depths of the Stone Age, sometimes with the Russo-Japanese War, sometimes with the days of Prince Vladimir... and then again with the future of the world.

To lend force to his position, Jakobson made a further point. The Russian futurists, he wrote, seemed often hostile to the very facts of city life which the Italians set out to praise. He cited Mayakovsky's words:


 * Abandon cities, you foolish people.

And Khlebnikov's:


 * There‘s a certain fat gourmand who's fond of impaling human hearts on his spit, and who derives a mild enjoyment from the sound of hissing and breaking as he sees the bright red drops falling into the fire and flowing down—and the name of that fat man is——"the city".

This brings us to the question of what was the Russian futurists' attitude to the new "contents"—the new technological and social realities-—of their time. It is a question which the previous pages of this work have taken up and attempted to answer at least in part. The fact that the Russian futurists were "formalists" did not mean that they lacked any