Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/76

68 of severing the umbilical cord between the old world and the new. It was a way of stressing that between the futurists and the "public" (whom they despised), no communication or understanding was possible. "You speak like a child" says the representative of conventional culture to Khlebnikov in "Teacher and Pupil". But all the forces of revolution in Khlebnikov's poems Speak in this way, like carefree children who have not yet learned human speech. The effect is sometimes frightening, as it appears to the old doomed Grand Duke as he listens to the menacing chants—~in words sliced and cut in two—of the crowds in the poem "The Present". 0r Khlebnikov's poetry is enriched—as in "Zangezi" and other works—with the supposed languages of birds and beasts. Animals and children—like pre-historic men—are representatives of realms of experience more or less incomprehensible to the literate civilization to which Khlebnikov was opposed. By using their supposed languages, Khlebnikov was asserting the rights of these alternative realms. It was a way of saying that to the whole of established society, the new State of Time—the world of the Future-was an unknown realm of experience, an entire universe separated by a chasm of incomprehension from the present.

This idea of driving a wedge between two worlds became almost a commonplace in Russian modernist art. Immediately after the 1917 revolution, wrote El Lissitzky,
 * there flashed before my eyes the short—circuit which split the world in two. This single blow pushed the time we call the present like a wedge between yesterday and tomorrow. My efforts are now directed to driving the wedge deeper. One must belong on this side or on that—-there is no midway.