In view of all this, it is obviously important—in relation to any study of Khlehnikov and Russian Futurism—to ascertain what the significance of the Cubist revolution in painting was. We may begin with the subject just discussed: the idea of a slippage of all fixed norms, a collapse of the foundations of existence and a shattering of the hold of 'byt'. Writing of the years 1907-1914, the French Cubists' friend and dealer, Kahnweiler insists:
- what occurred at that time in the plastic arts will be understood only if one bears in mind that a new epoch was being born, in which man (all mankind in fact) was undergoing a transformation more radical than any other known within historical times.[1]
Leaving aside, for the moment, the threat of cataclysmic war and an epoch of social revolutions, the "transformation" to which Kahnweiler refers—a revolution in science and technology—was already real enough:
- Electricity, the internal combustion engine, the progress of chemistry and metallurgy, all these things had completely and radically changed the relationship of man with nature.[2]
A Russian physicist of the time wrote as follows:
- We live at a time of an unprecedented destruction of the o1d scientific structure... Among the truths which are being demolished today are concepts which seemed self-evident and thus lay at the base of all reasoning... A distinctive feature of this new science is the thoroughly paradoxical nature of many of its fundamental propositions; the latter are obviously at variance with what had come to be regarded as common sense.[3]
The most paradoxical and extraordinary discoveries were those connected with the infinitely large and the infinitely small poles of material existence: with the scale of the universe, the speed of light and its relation to time, and the structure of the atom.
