Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/42

34 Khlebnikov by his surroundings on the estate.

In Larionov's works exhibited at the "Golden Fleece" six months earlier, the effect of primitivism had been conveyed by a number of techniques. The rules of shading and of perspective were ignored or broken: the figures looked flat rather than three-dimensional, and appeared to be arbitrarily hemmed in or cut off at the edges by the borders or surface of the painting. Camilla Gray notes:

"One thus gets the impression of a brief moment arbitrarily cut short, destroying the idea of a picture as a world complete in itself."

This refusal to create an illusion of "another world" complete unto itself was to be central to Futurism and to Khlebnikov. For the Futurists, an art work would require action by the public: without this, it would be incomplete. Khlebnikov would continually create the impression of an arbitrary cutting short of his work. He would invite others to complete what he had started. The idea that a poem could be "ended" on paper was itself something from which he recoiled. The only time Khlebnikov was to mention "bequeathing the end of the poem" would be early in 1917 when—on a wave of revolutionary enthusiasm—he would associate it with the abolition of all states of space and the unification of the human race.

In 1911, Khlebnikov wrote two of his greatest