THE IDEA OF DYING AND BEING REBORN implies a transcendence of the normal laws of time. In later years this would become a central theme of futurist poetry, and particularly that of Mayakovsky.[1] In the cases of both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, personal experiences as well as political or philosophical considerations were instrumental in germinating the theme of the struggle for time.
On August 8, 1909, Khlebnikov wrote to Kamensky of his mood—which he had experienced earlier that summer—of dissatisfaction with "that world and that century into which, by the grace of good providence, I have been thrown..."[2] He declared that he was now more reconciled with this world, but nevertheless wanted to write a work which would express his feelings:
I have thought of a complex work, 'Across times', in which the logical laws of time and space would be destroyed as many times as a drunkard can bring his glass to his lips in an hour.[3]
In January 1909 he had already written to Kamensky along similar lines, outlining a plan for a great novel whose ideal was to be "freedom from time, from space", and "co-existence of the willed
- ↑ Stahlberger, op cit p 112–125.
- ↑ 2. Neizd. P. p 358. Khlebnikov's sense of "belonging to other times" has often been commented upon. Vyacheslev Ivanov wrote: "He is like the author of the Slovo, who, by some miracle, continues to live in our age quoted by Markov, The Longer Poems, p 22). Osip Mandel'stam wrote: "Khlebnikov does not know what contemporary means. He is a citizen of all history, of the structure of language and poetry. He is an idiotic Einstein who cannot make out what is nearer, a railroad bridge or the 'Igor Tale'" Burya i natisk, Collected Works of Mandel'stam, (ed G.P. Struve and; B.A. Filippot N.Y. 1966) I p 390.
- ↑ Neizd. P. 358. Compare with Louise Boyan's comment that, as Joyce was writing his Finnegans Wake over seventeen years, "Something unheard of and extraordinary was happening to language, history, time, space and causality..." Nation, May 6 1939, Denning, op cit pp 533–5.
