Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/77

69 The same rift between "yesterday and tomorrow" Khlebnikov saw as a "shift" (sdvig), a word taken from the vocabulary of Cubist painting. The word implies a break in continuity, a displacement, an abrupt juxtaposition of alien worlds. Khlebnikov's poetry is full of such collisions or displacements; he "builds his verse", as Tynyanov put it,
 * on the principle of combining strata which are semantically foreign to one another.

Since for Khlebnikov (as Tynyanov also writes), "the methods of literary revolution and historical revolution were similar", it was inevitable that he should have seen the Russian revolution as one gigantic "shift" or sdvig. The establishment of the power of the Soviets is presented as one of the "shifts of the Russian people" in the poet's "Boards of Fate", published in 1922. , For Khlebnikov, in other words, the post-revolutionary power and the pre-revolutionary system which preceded it were two different strata, two different worlds "semantically foreign to one another." As early as in 1912, the Futurists in their "Slap" manifesto had described the culture of the old world as "more unintelligible than hieroglyphs". Since they thought of themselves as representing the future, it was entirely appropriate that the language of their "semantically foreign" world should seem equally incomprehensible to “public taste" and the inhabitants of the present day. In this sense, the “incomprehensibility” of their "transrational language" was both an artistic and historical necessity.

However, as we have noted, death was seen as an entrance to new life: the extremes of meaninglessness, dumbness, inarticulateness and incomprehensibility were seen as barriers beyond which unimaginable heights of awareness and communicative power could be attained. Those who felt the barriers merely