Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/49

41 which is it best to command—people or suns? And with astonishment we see that the suns readily and quietly carry out our instructions.

Although here the "primitivist" implications remain the same, there is added the implication of space—age scientific mastery. As early as in 1914—in a letter to Kamensky commenting on some implications of Mayakovsky's work—Khlebnikov thought of the possibility of "a victory over the sun with the aid of lightning." El Lissitzky later gave a technological interpretation of Kruchenykh's opera "Victory over the Sun": "The sun as the expression of the world's age-old energy is torn down from the sky by modern man; the power of his technical supremacy creates for itself a new source of energy."

But all this has taken us a little away from the theme being discussed: the idea of 'byt' and the struggle against it. To Khlebnikov and the Futurists, this struggle—conceived as a fight to conquer the "condemnation of time"—found its chief practical manifestation at first in the realm of linguistic form. The 'novel' or 'non—repeatable' event which upsets the rule of 'byt' was linguistic. The Futurists' emphasis on the sound-values of words, on their "texture", their "inner form" and so on was designed to jolt or shake the mind from its accustomed routine, to shatter the hold of 'byt' on the reader. Victor Shklovsky described the essence of the technique as "making strange". Predictable, habitual words and experiences