Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/88

80 At an early stage, however, Khlebnikov's pan-Slavism, having merged into a wider pan-Asianism, began flowing towards a still wider internationalism. In 1913, Khlebnikov was already convinced that he had discovered the traces of an ancient international "protolanguage" underlying the existing languages of the world. Although from a scholarly or scientific standpoint Khlebnikov was as usual anything but convincing, the impulse behind this idea was significant. The poet asserted that the letter "A" must have meant "dry land" in the "protolanguage" on account of the fact that:
 * A stubbornly stands at the start of the names of the continents—Asia, Africa, America, Australia—although the names relate to different languages.

Leaving aside objections—among other things, the very idea of a "continent", and knowledge of the separate existence of the continents, arose only in recent historical times—what was reflected here was a search for a lost primeaval unity which was to become central to Khlebnikov's world-view. It is probable that Khlebnikov's Sanskrit studies at University must have seemed to provide him with a scientific basis for the idea of a "protolanguage" to which the world's existing languages can be traced.

Khlebnikov's theory of continent—names was only one example of a general View of the significance of the first letter in every word. Words beginning with the same letter were in his view joined by a kind of "wire", or a "river-bed of the currents of fate". In another article written in 1913, Khlebnikov defined the meanings of these first letters. "S", for example, meant in his view "the gathering of parts into a whole." "T" meant the subordination of a movement to a superior force. A large number of consonants were treated in this way, as if each one, in and of itself, lent its meaning to the word it headed.