Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/95

87 of world history are repetitions, on a different plane, of events which occurred in the distant past. As he explained to Matyushin, his premise was:

The assumption that a particular war is a repetition of age-old times preceding it...

Another premise-flowing from this-—was: A third assumption was that, once a correspondence between two events has been established, the same correspondence would be found to extend to cover yet further events.
 * that, as regards the naval war of 1914, one must turn to the century of battles waged by Islam against the West from the beginning of the Crusades to 1095.

Having admitted his mistakes, Khlebnikov did not abandon his attempts but plunged deeper into them. He later described how he had to be rescued from his obsession by his friends:


 * Khlebnikov drowned in a bog of calculations, and was forcibly saved.

In 1916 he wrote to two friends of the ultimate aim of his researches:


 * The summit—the whole of knowledge in a single equation the size of &radic;-1