Khlebnikov called on the world's youth to "raise the winged sails of time" and to strike “a new blow in the eyes of the crude folk of space".[1] He then went on to explain that the struggle of youth against age was also the fight of inventors (izobgetateli) against proprietors (priobretateli). Scientific inventors fought for time; property-owners only for space, stealing the produce of inventors in the process. Khlebnikov gave an example of this theft:
- From the standpoint of the proprietors themselves, the whole of modern industry on the terrestrial sphere is "theft" (in the proprietors' language and morals) from the first inventor-Gauss. He founded the study of lightning. And yet during his life he did not have 150 rubles annually for his scientific work.[2]
After further explanations, Khlebnikov concluded—placing himself and his colleagues in the camp of "inventors":
- That is why, fully conscious of their special nature, different morality and peculiar mission, the inventors separate themselves from the proprietors in a sovereign state of time (without space), placing rods of iron between themselves and them.[3]
At about the same time that he wrote this manifesto, Khlebnikov made a series of "proposals". One was to use heartbeats as the "monetary units of the future".[4] Another was:
- Put an end to the Great War with the first flight to the Moon.[5]
A selection of various other "proposals" follows:
- ↑ SP V pp 152—53.
- ↑ Ibid p 153.
- ↑ Loc cit.
- ↑ Ibid p 157. There is an echo of this idea in Mayakovsky's Man, in which the bourgeois enemy declares: "If the heart is everything then why, why have I been gathering you, my dear money!"—quoted in: Jakobson, On a Generation, in: E J Brown, op cit p 15.
- ↑ SP V p 157.
