Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/74

66 The notion of modern art as a kind of "suicide" perhaps bears closer examination. Khlebnikov's view of the Symbolists as a "crowd of suicides" has already been mentioned. The suicide theme was bound up intimately with the creative life—and the death—of Mayakovsky. There is a certain parallel between the idea of revolution and the idea of suicide, in the sense that for an individualistic bourgeois soul—such as that of Blok—-to surrender to a collectivist revolution is "suicidal" from the standpoint of his class, his background and, perhaps, his entire psychology. Trotsky wrote of Blok, who died soon after the revolution:
 * Blok is not one of ours, but he reached towards us. And in doing so, he broke down.

Khlebnikov thought—as we have seen—that it was necessary for the "I" to die in order to be re-born as a "We". And his letter to Petnikov, written on a wave of revolutionary enthusiasm and exclaiming: "We intend to die, knowing the instant of our re-birth and bequeathing the end of the poem“, may be thought of as "suicidal" in a metaphysical sense.

Khlebnikov certainly felt that Symbolist culture represented "death". The Futurists generally felt that a socia catastrophe was approaching, that the whole of the old culture was doomed, that it was dead, past and meaningless already and that a break with it had to be made. However, while wishing to break free from the world they saw as doomed, they had no wish to evade the impending ultimate crisis. On the contrary, they wanted to bring it to a head. They saw salvation not in the postponement of the fatal hour or in escape from the fate awaiting them-—but in accepting the inevitable, and even in speeding up and accentuating the catastrophe which they had for some time