were not really felt. The purpose of art was, by breaking the routine of habit and making things seem fresh, unexpected and new, to restore a sense of the reality, the physical tangibility of living existence—"to restore the sensation of life, to feel things, to make a stone stony..."[1] Khlebnikov was determined above all to restore a sensation of the tangible materiality of language itself. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov attacked the Symbolists' View of language as something smooth, mellifluous, clear and tender to the ear. This, to them, was a View of language as ideally effeminate. The Symbolists wanted language to be like a woman:
We think, on the other hand, that language should, first and foremost, be language, and if it should resemble anything at all, it should be a hand-saw, or the poisoned arrow of a savage.[2]
Writing of Khlebnikov's language, Jakobson notes:
an initial consonant is often replaced by another drawn from other poetic roots. The word in question thus gains as it were a new sound character. Its meaning wavers, and the word is apprehended as an acquaintance with a suddenly unfamiliar face, or as a stranger in whom we are able to see something familiar.[3]
The "disturbing" effect of "making strange" is discussed by Jakobson in a slightly different context (although still referring to Khlebnikov) as follows:
There comes a time when the traditional poetic language hardens into stereotype and is no longer capable of being felt but is experienced rather as a ritual, as a holy text in which even the errors are considered sacred. The language of poetry is as it were covered by a veneer—and
- ↑ Loc. cit.
- ↑ Slovo Kak Takovoe, p 10. Mayakovsky, in the opening lines of his 150,000,000 described the poem's rhythms as bullets, and its rhymes as fires spreading from building to building. Compare also with Khlebnikov's picture of words as weapons, e.g. in "Prachka" ("We write by knife!"). IS 291.
- ↑ Modern Russian Poetry, in: E.J. Brown op cit p 79.
