- Khlebnikov never completed any extensive and finished poetic works. The apparent finished state of his published pieces is most often the work of his friends' hands. We chose from the pile of his discarded notebooks those that seemed most valuable to us and we published them...
- When bringing something in for publication, Khlebnikov usually remarked, "If something isn‘t right, change it." When he recited his poems he would sometimes break off in the middle of a sentence and indicate simply "et cetera.[1]
The idea of preserving his manuscripts apparently hardly occurred to Khlebnikov who, according to Sergey Gorodetsky, would give them to anyone who wanted them.[2] And even many of Khlebnikov's most "finished" extensive works are deliberately composed of seemingly unfinished fragments, like scattered pieces of mosaic. His Zangezi was constructed, in his own words,
- ...from independent pieces, each with its own god, its own faith, and its own code.[3]
His "Children of the Otter" was composed of equally independent fragments or, as he rather strangely termed them, "sails". A. Metchenko observed that "a mosaic quality is present even in Khlebnikov's larger works"[4], while Petrovsky called the poet's work "a mosaic of his biography."[5] Khebnikov's love of unfinishedness, impermanence, transience and discontinuous movement was clearly the corrollary of his dislike of everything which the act of writing typically does to language. Perhaps nothing says more of the "anti-literacy" of all this than the idea that poets should write on their books: "After reading, tear it up." ho instruction could hit more surely at the central principle of literacy as such.
- ↑ Mayakovsky, VVV Khlebnikov, in: E J Brown, op cit p 83. Khlebnikov wrote to Kruchenykh in 1913: “A work, 'Vila', is being sent to you, unfinished. You may, if you.like, cross out or omit something, or, if you find it necessary, make corrections"—quoted by Markov, The Longer Poems, p 32.
- ↑ S Gorodetsky, Velemir Khlebnikov, Izvestia, July 5 1922 (cited by Markov, Longer Poems, p 32).
- ↑ SP II p 317.
- ↑ Quoted by Markov, The Longer Poems, p 54.
- ↑ Quoted by Markov, loc cit. Compare with Walton Litz on James Joyce: "The comparison between Joyce's method of composition and that of the mosaic workers...is strikingly appropriate. Joyce himself called the corrected galleys of Ulysses 'mosaics'"—A Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce, London 1961, p 12.
