THERE IS A VIEW among critics that Khlebnikov was a mass of contradictions. In many ways he was, as perhaps the preceding pages have helped to show. But the contradictions were in certain crucial respects not nearly so fundamental as is usually alleged.
The chief accusation made against Khlebnikov has usually been of an inconsistency between his primitivist poetic practice and his allegiance to "the future". Marinetti himself was one of the earliest to lay this charge, when he attacked Russian Futurism as "savagism", and asked, referring to Khlehnikov:
- Why is this archaism necessary? Is it really capable of expressing the whole complexity of the tempo of contemporary life?[1]
A comparable remark of Chukovsky's—in which he points to the paradox of "futurists" who choose to write in pre-historic cries and screams—has already been cited.[2] The Soviet critic Gofman similarly concludes that
- in founding his system of a 'universal language', and in transforming the language of poetry, Khlebnikov attempted to establish structural and semantic principles more characteristic of one of the ancient phases of the evolution of vocal speech than of 'the language of the future', no matter how this is conceived.[3]
And Renato Poggioli cannot understand why Khlebnikov thought of himself as a futurist at all:
- Khlebnikov's Utopia is regressive and retrospective: it repudiates our own steel or iron age for a mythical age of gold, even for a stone or wooden age.[4]
