Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/33

25 It was certainly out of a despair of the communicative efficacy of human language as such that Khlebnikov was to embark on his radical programme for the "destruction of languages..." Languages in his view had become "congealed" and "fossilized". They no longer united people but divided them. Towards the end of his life he was to describe his "word-creation" technique as the "blasting of linguistic silence, of the deaf-and-dumb layers of language". There can be little doubt that some part at least of this "blasting" was directed at the "deaf-and-dumb" layers which he felt around himself.

But a despair of the communicative efficacy of language was widespread in the literary circles in which Khlebnikov at first mixed. A sense of the powerlessness of words, of the complete impossibility of communication between one soul and another, was present to an extreme degree among the Russian Symbolists. Konevskoy wrote: "I am alone on the earth, alone..." Merezhkovsky lamented:

"Another's heart is a foreign land,

To which there is no road!

In the prison of your own self,

Poor man,

In love, in friendship, in all

You are alone, forever alone!"

Sometimes this loneliness was asserted agressively. Wrote Balmont:

"I hate mankind

and run from it, breathless.

my only home

Is my empty soul."

Minsky sighed that he was made in such a way that he could not love anyone but himself.