IN 1908, KHLEBNIKOV had already begun to recoil from the Symbolists' sense of futility, powerlessness and the imminence of catastrophe. As a Symbolist himself, he had written to his fellow—artists:
- We know nothing, we foretell nothing, we simply ask in terror: has the time really come, really come?[1]
Khlebnikov soon decided that "the time" had come, and that the much-feared ultimate cataclysm should be positively welcomed and plunged into.[2] The experience of uncertainty was in this way overcome, while the feeling of "knowing nothing" and "foretelling" nothing was replaced by the sensation of knowing everything and foretelling everything, as we have seen.
In a similar "turning inside out" of Symbolist forms and premises,[3] Khlebnikov reached his own form of artistic collectivism not by a crude negation of the Symbolists' "ego" but by expanding its walls, until it became so enormous and vaguely—defined as to appear to merge with the human collectivity. An aspect of this process was his peculiar idea of becoming the "King of Time" and the "President of the Terrestrial Sphere".
The poet's first mention of his "Government" project seems to have been made in a letter to Kamensky written in the spring
- ↑ Neizd. P p 322.
- ↑ It was partly for this reason that Khlebnikov (like Mayakovsky) for a brief period actually welcomed the First World War. Another reason was that Khlebnikov saw in it an aspect of the struggle of the East against the West. See Nesob. P pp 405-06. A fierce anti—militarism soon replaced these moods, however.
- ↑ "Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art"—Trotsky, Lit. & Rev'n., quoted in: Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, N Y 1970, 1: 37 (introduction by P N Siegel).
