Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/67

59 :The important ability of the poetic neologism is its objectlessness. Here Jakobson directly compares one of the chief characteristics of Khlebnikov's poetry with Cubism's "overthrow of the object". Livshits referred to the same feature of both Cubism and Khlebnikov's futurism when he declared that
 * a work of art is complete only when it is self-contained, when it does not seek an object beyond itself.

However, this "self-contained" idea was not quite what Khlebnikov himself intended. He did not want his art to be insulated from the real world. He was simply against merely "mirroring" it. The real implication of both Cubism and Futurism was not that these art-forms needed no objects. It was that they created their own objects. Pasternak wrote of "transrational" poetry as
 * poetry without reference——pure and palpable sound which can evoke new "referents".

It was this ability to create new referents, to create new "meaning" and new "objects" in place of the realities which already exist which was the real "secret" of the newest forms of art.

One of the key "Cubist" features of Khlebnikov's art was what Jakobson called the "realization of the device." Just as in Cubist painting the geometric forms needed to depict objects take on a life of their own——imposing themselves on the depicted things and transforming them——so, in Khlebnikov's poetry, we find time and again a parallel feature in the realm of words.

In Khlebnikov's "The Crane", a train is described (as part of a general "insurrection of things") rising up from its rails. The thought occurs to the poet that the train's movements res-