- foresee everything, and the assumptions which he makes are endowed in his eyes with a richness in possible deductions which our adult logic could never allow them to possess.[1]
It is not difficult to see that Khlebnikov's "infantilism" was not merely an affectation, or a characteristic of his language in much of his work, but was an important characteristic of his thought—processes and world—view, too.[2] This may be looked upon as an intellectual failing, even if it constituted an essential part of the charm of his work. On the other hand, it might possibly be argued that a child's mode of thought expresses a freshness, an emphasis on the will and even a degree of insight lacking in the more habit—formed, resigned and routine mind of the adult, and that an element of such "childishness" was essential in a poet who was to express some of the sense of newness and optimism of the years of revolution. In those years, after all, Khlebnikov was not the only one to believe in the Possibility of inhabiting a more logical world and universe than mankind
had experienced in the past,
- ↑ Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, London 1960, p 212. He continues, in words equally applicable to Khlebnikov: "...reality is for the child both more arbitrary and better regulated than for us. It is more arbitrary, because nothing is impossible, and nothing obeys causal laws. But whatever may happen, it can always be accounted for, for behind the most fantastic events which he believes in, the child will always discover motives which are sufficient to justify them; just as the world of the primitive races is peopled with a wealth of arbitrary intentions, but is devoid of chance."——loc cit.
- ↑ The whole of Piaget's book, it seems, might almost have been written to describe the peculiarities of Khlebnikov's outlook and techniques. It discusses childrens' view of words as magic forces (p 5), and their tendency (p 149) "to find in every event and every sentence a hidden meaning of greater depth than that which is apparent..." Piaget writes of "the spontaneous etymology which children practise, or their astonishing propensity for verbalism, i.e. the imaginative interpretation of imperfectly understood words..P(p 149). Often, he writes, "the child seems to be on the look-out only for words resembling each other in sense or in sound" (p 157). Piaget relates (p 158) "the picking out of verbal and even punning resemblances" to the way in which the mind works in a dream.
