and the willing." It was to depict "the life of our time, bound up with the time of Vladimir the Red Sun", and to be composed of dramatic and other fragments "all united in a single time and sculptured into a single piece of flow in one and the same time."[1] This was to be the start of an obsession with the "conquest of time" which would remain with Khlebnikov until the end of his life. One of the very last written expressions of this aim was to be a letter to P V Miturin written on March 14, 1922. By this time he had completely re-arranged his earlier systems and come to the conclusion that "in time there occurs a negative shift through 3n days and a positive one through 2n days" enabling him to construct "an edifice purely of threes and twos". After a series of dates and computations (incorporating the dates December 22 1905—the Moscow insurrection-and March 13, 1917—the February revolution—among others) he wrote:
When the future, thanks to such computations, becomes transparent, the sensation of time is lost, and it seems that you are standing motionless on the deck of the foresight of the future. The sensation of time dissappears and it resembles a field before and a field behind, turning into a kind of space... I hope to publish the law of time and will then be free.[2]
The last line shows how Khlebnikov related the solution of his personal problems to the definitive and published solution of the "problem of time".
How is the genesis of Khlebnikov's time-theories to be explained? It would be a mistake to argue that Khlebnikov's early Symbolist environment—and his reaction to it—can in itself afford a complete explanation. One would have to go
- ↑ NP pp 354–55.
- ↑ SP V pp 324–5. On February 18, 1921 Khlebnikov had written to Meyerhold: "As concerns myself, I have achieved the promised revolution in the understanding of time, seizing the territory of several sciences, and I have an inescapable mandate for the publication of my book... The book is already completed and written in the language of equations. It's a canvas on which there is only one colour—number." SP V 318–19.
