Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/72

64 :the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction... D.S. Mirsky called it "pure nonsense, the work of a master of language writing nothing....", adding that "Russian futurism went through this period of nonsense in its earliest stages..." As often as not, when Futurism was spoken of in similar terms, the arch-villain to be singled out was Khlebnikov. Wladimir Weidle, for example, wrote in 1928 that the Symbolists


 * were followed by people who declared all the traditions of Russian literature to be outworn, and who created nothing, for the simple reason that they decided they could create out of nothing. These people wanted to rid form of meaning: as a result they forfeited form itself; taking it upon themselves to turn words into mere sounds, they were deprived even of words. However, the very fact that Russian Futurism was so extreme meant that it was to some extent harmless. It could not succeed in destroying the Russian literary tradition, for it denied literature itself; nor could it for long mutilate the Russian language, because it denied the very basis of all language, of all human speech. At any rate, this was what Futurism was in Khlebnikov, a man visited by genius but marked by idiocy; he preached the destruction of language...

G. Vinokur also wrote that Khlebnikov produced ultimately "nothing", and Maxim Gorky called his output “verbal chaos.“ Remarks about his being an "idiot" were frequently made.