Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/207

199 emotional or ideological attitudes whatsoever towards the external world. Just the contrary. Their "formalism" was their emotional, their ideological and their political attitude. It meant that the world's machines and cities—inhuman and terrifying in their "naked" form—were to be grasped, clothed, re-shaped by man. "Form" was to dominate over "content" not merely in a literary sense but "out there" in the real world.

Jakobson misses all this completely. Having quoted mayakovsky and Khlebnikov on the horrors of the naked "city", he robs the passages of their vital meaning by claiming that neither writer could possibly have meant what he said:


 * To incriminate the poet with ideas and emotions is as absurd as the behaviour of the medieval audiences that beat the actor who played Judas...

The analogy is grotesque: Khlebnikov in his poetry was not assuming a mask, adopting a guise, acting a part. He was not playing the role of someone else but expressing his own being in the fullest way he knew how. Despite a certain amount of “play-acting", at the deepest level the same can be said of Mayakovsky. Jakobson here as elsewhere, for all his brilliance, was carrying his theoretical conception of "formalism" to doctrinaire extremes which the futurist poets themselves could have had no sympathy for.

In actual fact, the ideological contrast between the Italian futurists and the Russians in respect of "the city" was a very real one. Barooshian sums it up as follows:


 * Poetically, the Russian Futurists reacted pessimistically towards, and violently against, industrial society because of its threat to human values and its dehumanization of man. The Italian futurists, on the other hand, viewed industrial society optimistically and wanted to glorify it poetically.