as barriers—as obstacles and nothing more—were those who were incapable of perceiving in the destruction of the old world the birth of a new one. As Tynyanov writes of Khlebnikov:
- Those who think his language is 'meaningless' do not see how a revolution is simultaneously a new order.[1]
For those able to see this "new order" behind the apparent chaos of revolution, the destruction of the old language was not the end of the world. It was a zero-point beyond which stretched an infinity of numbers under a new sign. It was a sudden "shift" or "displacement"—after which everything was reversed, the reduction to zero becoming a new ascent on the "other side". Wrote El Lissitzky:
- We are living in a field of force which is being generated between two poles. Minus: one society which is destroying itself; plus: one which is building itself up.[2]
For those associated with the positive pole, what seemed to be taking place was the birth of the world-“in a sense a "primeval" re-enactment of the Creation. After 1917, wrote El Lissitzky in 1922:
- it became clear to us that the world was only just coming into existence, and everything must be recreated from scratch, including art.[3]
Khlebnikov's passion for "those first days of life on earth"[4] and his use of "pre'historic" language then assumed a new and deeper significance in the context of the Genesis which seemed to be taking place.[5]
- ↑ Tynyanov, op cit p 95.
- ↑ In: Lissitzky-Kuppers, op cit p 60.
- ↑ Ibid p 330.
- ↑ "The Otter's Children", Choix de Poemes, Paris 1967, p 3.
- ↑ One can apply to Khlebnikov Marcel Brion's words on Joyce, inasmuch as his linguistic experimentation (like the later work of Joyce), “gives us the impression of assisting at the birth of the world, because we perceive in the aspect of chaos a creative will, constructive, architectural, which has spilled around it the traditional dimensions, concepts and vocabulary, to find in these scattered materials the elements of the edifice"—written March 1928; in: Denning, op cit p 428.
