Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/29

21 "They were placed in blocks: it was assumed that dates differed by the number 317 or its multiple. The last line was: "Someone 1917."

I met the fair-haired, quiet Khlebnikov, dressed in a black coat buttoned up to his neck, at some occasion or other.

"The dates in the book," I said, "are the year when great empires fell. Do you think that our empire will fall in the year 1917?" (Slap was published in 1912).

Khlebnikov replied almost without moving his lips, "You are the first man to understand what I meant.""

Regardless of the merit or otherwise of his "computations", the fact that Khlebnikov managed to get the date right naturally helps explain his later reputation as something of a prophet. Whether it was chance, good guess—work, political acumen or something more can be argued about, although few would find it possible to take Khlebnikov's algebraic version of historical determinism very seriously. What concerns us, however, is the impulse behind Khlebnikov's efforts. The final part of "Teacher and Pupil" makes this fairly clear.

The fatalism of the Symbolists which we have noted—their sense of being historically-doomed—is the real target of Khlebnikov's attack. He sees the Symbolists as cursed by time—and as having no answer but to curse time in return. To the question "What are these writers engaged in?", Khlebnikov answers—singling out in particular Bryusov, Andreyev, Artsybashev and Merezhkovsky: ""They curse! The past, the present and the future!""

Instead of cursing time, Khlebnikov advocates the mastery of its laws. His "discovery" of the formula z=(365+48y)x implies, in his own view, that mankind need no longer submit to an