KHLEBEIKOV'S LIFE AND HIS WORK were inextricably intertwined. It is often difficult to distinguish between the typical features of his poetry and his habits and characteristics in everyday life.[1]
The impression of inarticulateness created by much of Khlebnikov's poetic language was also created, as we have seen, by his speech—behaviour on a personal level. If his work seemed incomprehensible at times, then it was in this respect true to its author, who was psychologically largely incomprehensible to his friends[2] and has been misunderstood by most literary critics ever since.
In his poetic imagination, the poet roamed freely across centuries.[3] This was no merely literary stance—it reflected a real incapacity to accommodate himself to life in what he called
- that world and that century into which by the grace of good providence, I have been thrown...[4]
As Mandel'stam put it: Khlebnikov does not know what a contemporary means. He is a citizen of all history, of the whole structure of language and poetry. He is an idiotic Einstein who cannot ma e out which is nearer, a railroad bridge or the Iyor Tale.[5]
A parallel incapacity related to the dimensions of space.
- ↑ One facet of this "confusion" is captured by Petrovsky in his description of Khlebnikov's work as "a mosaic of his biography"—quoted by Markov, The Longer Poems, P 34.
- ↑ Khlebnikov was aware of this. fie wrote in 1914: "...now I know for sure that there is no one capable of understanding me except myself.“-—Neizd. P. p 371.
- ↑ As Khlebnikov wrote of his alter-ego, Ka: "He finds no obstacles in time; Ka goes from dream to dream, intersecting time and achieving bronzes (the bronzes of time). He accomodates himself in the centuries as comfortably as in a rocking-chair. Isn't this the way the consciousness unites times together, like the armchair and the chairs of a drawing-room"—SP IV p 47
- ↑ Neizd. P. p 358.
- ↑ Burya i natisk, in Mandel'stam, Collected works, 2, P 390.
