appreciated,[1] it becomes easier to understand how and why Khlebnikov's own views on history and time developed in the way they did. They originated in the same rebellion against Symbolism's apparent death-wish which we have already noted.
As Khlebnikov himself was to put it in 1914:
For us, all freedoms merge in a single, basic freedom: freedom from the dead...[2]
What happened in 1909—his spiritual break from his Symbolist "teachers"—is described in a kind of parable-form in the first work of his to be published in an individual edition: "Teacher and Pupil". The booklet takes the form of a dialogue, in which the "pupil"—obviously Khlebnikov himself—is confident that he knows everything, and delivers a series of amazing lectures to his former "teacher".
If it is kept in mind that the Symbolists had originally had high political hopes of a Western-style liberalization in Russia, the import of Khlebnikov's claims will seem less obscure. The Symbolists' political hopes after 1905 (and we may recall how important was that year to Khlebnikov) had been shattered. Recent history had run cruelly counter to the Symbolists' dreams. What had gone wrong? Clearly (to Khlebnikov) a colossal "miscalculation" of some kind had been made. Having studied mathematics and physics at University, Khlebnikov felt a natural impulse to apply the methods of these sciences to the problem. In his view, the remedy could only be founded upon a new—and this time scientifically—rigorous—"computation" of the possibilities and inevitabilities inherent in the historical time-flow. It is on this basis that the "pupil" launches
- ↑ Erlich explains: "The Symbolist movement was the swan song of that part of the Russian intelligentsia which was drawn from the gentry or upper middle class. It was the product of a culture which achieved a high degree of intellectual and aesthetic sophistication only to find itself faced with the prospect of inevitable extinction. As the historical cataclysm of revolution drew nearer, the world of the Symbolist poet began to crumble"—Russian Formalism, The Hague, 1965, p 34.
- ↑ SP V p 195.
