been prophesying. If the logical conclusion of Symbolism was absolute isolation, dumbness, incommunicability, meaninglessness and death—the death of an entire culture and way of life—then the Futurists wanted to reach this conclusion in order to pass beyond it on the other side. It was precisely the felt existence of this "other side"—a post-revolutionary world, a collective life-beyond-death—which in fact enabled the Futurists to carry the themes of dumbness, inarticulateness and spiritual death to their ultimate extremes: thematically in the work of Mayakovsky and formally or linguistically in that of Khlebnikov.
Khlebnikov linked his linguistic experiments with what he called "the suicide of states".[1] His language, to the extent that it was sometimes intentionally incomprehensible,[2] could perhaps be described as the linguistic aspect of this "suicide". It was a reduction of the old culture's language-forms to zero.[3]Admittedly, mere incomprehensibility in itself was for Khlebnikov far from being the central feature of his "transrational" experimentation with language. But it was one of its poles, the opposite pole being (in intention, at least) a level of understanding or meaningfulness far beyond the scope of the merely "rational" languages of the past.[4]
The pole of incomprehensibility-Khlebnikov praised sounds such as "shagadam, magadam, vygadam, pitz, patz, patzu" as "basically strings of syllables of which the intellect can make nothing"[5]—was a vital part of the new art. It was a way
- ↑ SP V p 259 (April 1917).
- ↑ In his article 0 Stikhakh (1920), Khlebnikov attacks the notion that poetry has to be comprehensible—SP V p 225.
- ↑ Khlebnikov described himself and his colleagues as "those youths who gave an oath to destroy languages"—Ladomir, SP I, p 198 (May 1920).
- ↑ Khudozhniki Mira, (1919), SP V p 217; Nasha Osnova, (1920), SP V p 229; letter to Petnikov, SP V pp 315-4.
- ↑ O Stikhakh, SP V p 225.
