Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/94

86 But above all, Khlebnikov's work is about the history of mankind, the rise and fall of empires, wars, revolutions and the laws of time underlying these events. It was this historical process which Khlebnikov dreamed of mastering with his "equations" and his plan for a world-government or "Presidents of the Terrestrial Sphere". Early in the course of the First World War—in the first or second week of December, 1914—he became excitedly convinced that he could "foresee" some of the major battles of the war. To Matyushin he wrote:
 * These days are important to me because, according to my calculations, on the fifteenth and twentieth of December there ought to be some naval battles of the first magnitude. I wrote about this long ago to Kuzmin (his address is Kuzmin First Aviation Company, Polytechnical Institute, Petrograd). And now, today, on the sixteenth, our paper publishes "rumours of a major naval engagement." Tomorrow I will know for sure whether one occurred or not. If it did, then I will be able to determine exactly the dates of the great naval battles—and their outcome—for the whole of this war. The days and nights of conquest! I have picked on this day as an experiment. If it turns out wrong, then I will chuck in the computations, the regularities of exhausting calculations. And for a whole month I have been living only for this.

Unfortunately, the “rumours“ proved without substance and the eagerly—expected battles failed to materialize. Undaunted, Khlebnikov wrote to Matyushin acknowledging his “mistake” and outlining the premises on which his calculations had been based. Essentially, his idea seems to have been that correspondences can be established across time: that the great events