It was certainly out of a despair of the communicative efficacy of human language as such that Khlebnikov was to embark on his radical programme for the "destruction of languages..."[1] Languages in his view had become "congealed" and "fossilized".[2] They no longer united people but divided them.[3] Towards the end of his life he was to describe his "word-creation" technique as the "blasting of linguistic silence, of the deaf-and-dumb layers of language".[4] There can be little doubt that some part at least of this "blasting" was directed at the "deaf-and-dumb" layers which he felt around himself.
But a despair of the communicative efficacy of language was widespread in the literary circles in which Khlebnikov at first mixed. A sense of the powerlessness of words, of the complete impossibility of communication between one soul and another, was present to an extreme degree among the Russian Symbolists. Konevskoy wrote: "I am alone on the earth, alone..."[5] Merezhkovsky lamented:
Another's heart is a foreign land,
To which there is no road!
In the prison of your own self,
Poor man,
In love, in friendship, in all
You are alone, forever alone![6]
Sometimes this loneliness was asserted agressively. Wrote Balmont:
I hate mankind
and run from it, breathless.
my only home
Is my empty soul.[7]
Minsky sighed that he was made in such a way that he could not love anyone but himself.[8]
