For Khlebnikov, the road to a higher wisdom lay through this process of death:
We will die
And having become wiser, will see all![1]
With the coming of the Russian revolution, the death-process was associated with the death of an outlived way of life, while the vision of a life-beyond-death merged with the image of a post-revolutionary world in which all difficulties in human communication had been overcome.[2]
Early in 1910, Khlebnikov wrote to his father:
For two week I have not been to the Academy of Verse.
I am preparing to rise again from my ashes.[3]
Perhaps one could describe the rest of Khlebnikov's life as the story of this preparation for rebirth. It was a personal striving which found support not only in the Cubist and Futurist rebirth in art but also, later, in the wider social rebirth which seemed promised by the Russian revolution.
- ↑ Night in a Trench, IS p 178.
- ↑ See Khlebnikov's "Liberty for All" ("Volya Vsem"), SP III p 150. See also Poggioli, Russian Futurism, Khlebnikov, Essenin; Th Slavic and East European Journal, Spring 1958, Vol XVI No 1, p 12. Khlebnikov's letter to Petnikov in 1917 is also relevant (SP V 313–14). Here Khlebnikov writes: "We intend to die, knowing the instant of our second re-birth and bequeathing the end of the poem". The "end of the poem" is the transformation of the world through a terrible world-wide insurrection. Mayakovsky likewise wrote of the world revolution as "the day of our second re-birth" (quoted by Stahlberger, The Symbolic System...' p 131).
- ↑ SP V p 290.
