Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/22

14 For Khlebnikov, the road to a higher wisdom lay through this process of death:

"We will die

And having become wiser, will see all!"

With the coming of the Russian revolution, the death-process was associated with the death of an outlived way of life, while the vision of a life-beyond-death merged with the image of a post-revolutionary world in which all difficulties in human communication had been overcome.

Early in 1910, Khlebnikov wrote to his father:

"For two week I have not been to the Academy of Verse. I am preparing to rise again from my ashes."

Perhaps one could describe the rest of Khlebnikov's life as the story of this preparation for rebirth. It was a personal striving which found support not only in the Cubist and Futurist rebirth in art but also, later, in the wider social rebirth which seemed promised by the Russian revolution.