Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/68

60 emble those of a worm. However, this thought takes on a life of its own. It becomes the thought of the train itself, which consciously imitates the movements of a worm. The simile has been "realized"—it has run out from the poet's head, as it were, and animated the scene he was describing. Jakobson gives a number of examples—from the poetry of both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky—of what he calls
 * the projection of a literary device into artistic reality, the turning of a poetic trope into a poetic fact, into a plot element.

This "realization of device" expresses clearly the impulse to subdue reality rather than merely to serve it. The idea here—as in Cubist and Futurist art generally——is that the techniques of artistic creation should actively dominate, re—structure and transform the external world.

However, this "world—changing" activity is still only imaginary. The devices of artistic creation are "realized" only in the sense that they become part of the "plot" or "content" of the art instead of merely its "form". Outside the poem, the world is not changed at all.

For the same "formalist" impulse to run to its logical conclusion, it would have to overstep the boundary between art and life. The Futurists attempted to make this happen in a number of different ways. One was by spilling hot tea over the first row of seats during their first public recital in Moscow on October 13, 1913. Another was by painting their own faces in bright colours and strolling along public streets. As the initiators of this practice, the painters Larionov