ancient pre—eminence of sound, breath and the movement of the organs of the voice. Referring to Mayakovsky's rhythms, Chukovsky writes that they are:
- those we hear in the marketplace, on trolley cars, at meetings, the rhythm of shouts, conversations1 speeches, squabbles, agitators' exhortations, swearing.[1]
In the manifesto (Sadok Sudei II) containing the Ukrainian girl's poems a similar claim was made for Khlebnikov's rhythms:
- We have smashed rhythms. Khlebnikov has introduce the poetic cadence of the living conversational word.[2]
Yuri Tynyanov writes of Khlebnikov's verse that it is
- modern man's intimate language, given as though accidentally overheard.[3]
Khardzhiev details Khlebnikov's frequent use of conversational free verse, showing its close relationship to much of the poetry of Mayakovsky.[4]
All of this, however, taken in isolation might give an inaccurate impression of Khlebnikov's own language. It was by no means his primary intention to give at all times a realistic rendering of conversational or colloquial Russian. His language is based only in part on the contemporary colloquial word. Equally important is its basis in the oral tradition of the Russian folk-epic and song, as has been noted. Moreover, Khlebnikov in many of his experiments was attempting to convey not so much a "tape-recording" of everyday colloquial language as the underlying patterns in accordance with which the sound-combinations of speech evolve and arrange themselves. Often he was so successful that the res-
