example, had written as recently as in 1908:
...only that literary creation in which the author burned himself to ashes can achieve greatness. If the soul immolated thus is enormous, it will move more than one generation, one people, one country.[1]
However, Khlebnikov had not any wish for death—spiritual or physical—as such. He may have thought of death as a door through which it was necessary to pass. But unlike Zinaida Hippius, who wrote "I die, I die" without seeing anything beyond[2], Khlebnikov insisted on re-birth on the other side. In a poem of his own, his "I" dies—but only to reveal a "We" in its place:
Я волосы зажег,
Бросался лоскутами колец,
Зажег поля, деревья—
И стало веселей.
Горело Хлебникова поле,
И огненное я пылало в темноте.
Теперь я ухожу,
Зажегши волосами,
И вместо Я
Стояло— Мы!
Иди, варяг суровый!
Неси закон и честь.[3]
This gives a very new twist to Blok's theme of burning oneself to ashes. Death now appears not as the end of everything, but only as the death of a particular state of consciousness or form of existence. It is the death only of the individualistic ego or "I". But this death is at the same time a re-birth into a new form of existence—that of the collective "We". This new mode of existence of the poet is also associated with the distant past: the "We" is collective in a tribal "Varangian" sense. As a "we", the poet marches proudly into the future.
