If in his world—government project, Khlebnikov in one sense carried the "I"-principle to extremes, it was really to transcend this principle altogether and re—unite the "1's" of all humanity into the primeval "We". As Khlebnikov described his own work:
- I piece together the human race, like the parts of a whole conceived long ago.[1]
In 1916, Khlebnikov wrote an extraordinary manifesto entitled "Martian Trumpet", to which he obtained the signatures of a number of colleagues, and which he himself signed in the capacity of "The King of Time, Velimir Ist". It began with an attack on existing states for being based on spatial axes rather than on the axis of time. The next section was an attack on those subordinated to the reign of byt:
- Those who are drowned in the laws of family-life and the laws of commerce—those who have only one speech: "I eat"—do not understand us, thinking neither of this, nor that, nor the other.[2]
These sections of the population were identified with the older generations. Satisfied with the present constitution of things, they were nearer death than birth. "But we", Khlebnikov continued,
- we have explored the soil of the continent of Time—and have found it to be fruitful... We call you to a land where the trees speak, where associations of scientists resemble waves, where there are spring troops of love, where Time blossoms like a bird-cherry tree and moves like a piston, and where transman in a carpenter's apron saws time into boards and like a lathe-operator handles his own tomorrow.[3]
- ↑ SP V p 177.
- ↑ SP I p 152.
- ↑ Loc cit. Khlebnikov's classification of the opposing forces in society can be compared with flayakovsky's version: "to be a bourgeois does not mean to own capital or squander gold. It means to be the heel of a corpse on the throat of the young. It means a mouth stopped up with fat. To be a proletarian doesn't mean to have a dirty face and work in a factory; it means to be in love with the future that's going to explode the filth of the cellars...Believe me"—quoted by Jakobson, On a Generation... in: E J Brown, op cit p 13.
