Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/38

30 itself as an "incantation", it had affirmed the power of words to magically upset the normal laws of existence. In its form as laughter—and in part as an imperative, a call on the world to laugh—it affirmed in the simplest possible way the theme of the conquest by life of death. The humour was in a sense "primitive" or "elemental" in that it was not 'about' anything at all. One thinks of a crowd of somewhat simple, robust folk—or perhaps wizards or witches—laughing at their own and one another's laughter. It was one of the most comprehensible demonstrations and forms of what Khlebnikov was to describe as "the self-sufficient word." It was peculiarly Russian, being a carrying to extremes of the possibilities of morphological derivation inherent in the Russian language as in few others. It was anything but "bookish", almost every word being an invention of Khlebnikov's through the addition of suffixes and prefixes to the root "smekh-", and the language forcing one to read aloud, with a hissing and clacking of consonants. It was strangely "impersonal". There was no suggestion whatsoever of a particular individual as the subject of the poem, the laughter appearing rather as an elemental expression of collective (perhaps tribal) mirth. And finally—to take the question of philosophic standpoint or mood—its theme of merriment was not unconnected with Khlebnikov's views on fate, history and time. It was appropriate that a peal of laughter should announce the arrival of an art-movement whose members insisted that they had mastered the laws of fate.