Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/37

29 "Tower" he drew closer to his alternative circle of friends.

In 1908, Khlebnikov was already dreaming of a pan-slavic language, mixing mathematical formulae with poetic lines, writing works based on neologisms and making a virtue of "unfinishedness" in his work. His letter to Kamensky of January 1909 (outlining his plans for a novel embodying "freedom from time, from space") pictured the native soil of Russia as deprived of its voice. Russia's writers, Khlebnikov wrote, had remained deaf to the land's pleas: "Give me a mouth! Give me a mouth!" The poet looked forward to the coming of "the first Russian, with the courage to speak in Russian", linking this idea with the "right" of the Russian people to create words of their own and converse in a pan-Slavic tongue.

The fruit of this concern for "Russianness" was Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughter". In February 1910, Nikolai Kulbin—organizer of "The Impressionists" art exhibition (among others) and close friend of Matyushin, Kamensky and the Burlyuks—published a collection of mostly amateurish poetry under the title "The Studio of the Impressionists". Its importance was that it contained Khlebnikov's "Laughter" poem, which quickly made the author famous (or notorious) in literary circles and with the newspaper-reading public.

The poem was an extraordinarily effective practical demonstration of many of the themes and theories closest to Khlebnikov's heart. It announced a return to a pre-historic, life-giving and magical view of the function of art. In