VIKTOR VLADIMIROVITCH KHLEBNIKOV was born on October 28, 1885, in a small village near the ancient city of Astrakhan.[1] His family was to live in Astrakhan for most of his life, and it would remain the poet's spiritual home. D S Nirsky has described it as:
the most naked and the most ontological city in Russia, a Tartar capital surrounded by the elements of desert and water; a junction of Russia, Turan and Iran.[2]
A clash between East and West (and between oriental, oral culture and the culture of literate civilization) would form an essential ingredient of Khlebnikov's art.[3] A "junction" of another kind—between the arts and the sciences—was embodied in the differing interests of the poet's parents. His father was an ornithologist and natural scientist. As the poet later wrote himself:
Father was an adherent of Darwin and Tolstoy. He was a great expert on the bird kingdom, having studied them throughout his life...[4]
A fascination with science, with evolution (linguistic) and with bird—songs (and flight) were all later to become reflected in Khlebnikov's poetry. His mother was educated as an historian, and this interest too may have found expression in the poet's love of historical subjects, his search for the laws of history,
- ↑ This and most of the following details of Khlebnikov's early life are largely based (following the precedent of Barooshian, Markov and others) on Stepanov's sources and research—in the present case in particular on his introduction to Izbrannye stikhotvorenia, (Moscow 1936).
- ↑ Quoted by V Markov, The Longer Poems, p 110.
- ↑ 3. Compare with Picasso, who "was nourished on that art born of the clash of two civilizations, the Arab and the Lombard, on the remnants of the Iberian and the Roman", (P. Daix, Picasso London 1965, p 25).
- ↑ SP V p 279.
