sound-waves of language. As a theoretician and as a poet, Khlebnikov was an inseparable part of that outburst of "thunder and lightning, roars and screeches" of which Chukovsky speaks. The apparently rough and elemental "loudness" and extraordinary sound-effects of Mayakovsky's verse stemmed in fact from an extremely sophisticated poetic technique, and the pioneer in the development of this technique was undoubtedly Khlebnikov.[1] In the view of Roman Jakobson, Khlebnikov's technique represented a carrying to its logical conclusion of a tendency 'essential to all poetic language:
- It has been observed many times in the history of the poetry of all peoples and countries that, as Tredyakovsky put it, for the poet "only sound" is important. The language of poetry strives to reach, as a final limit, the phonetic, or rather—to the extent that such a purpose may be present—the euphonic phrase—in other words, a trans-sense speech.[2]
However, in carrying this general tendency to its conclusion, Khlebnikov was at the same time breaking new ground. All poetry can perhaps in a sense be regarded as a use of language in a way which runs counter to the normal tendencies of literacy. All poetry is a kind of "song", harking back, in one way or another, to the tradition of folk~song. But Khlebnikov's poetry breaks with literacy to a quite unprecedented degree.
In our earlier survey of the Russian concept of 'byt', we noted the peculiar Russian experience of the "temporariness" of civilization, the precariousness of the "order" represented by a city such as St Petersburg, the sense of slippage, as if everything had been built-iike St Petersburgr-on a marsh. The fact is that civilization in Russia—and with it, a literate culture—had very shallow roots compared with its Western European counterparts. Even in the nineteenth century, and in the
