own subconscious itself had been and continued to be moulded and changed imperceptibly by the changing social and technological circumstances of his time. What is especially interesting about Khlebnikov, as we have seen, is that this generally subconscious process, besides being expressed in one way or another in the entirety of his poetic output, was also to an extent something of which he became conscious. The French Cubist painters did not depict or write about the inventions of the "electronics revolution", however much they may have been subconsciously influenced by them; Khlebnikov did. It has been with the writings in which he did so that we have been mainly concerned in the preceding pages.
It may be worth noting that the "subjective" route to revolution was recognized by Lev Trotsky, who no doubt was recalling the Russian experience when he wrote in 1938:
- The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity——the need for the emancipation of man.[1]
In the same year he insisted:
- Art can become a strong ally of revolution only insofar as it remains faithful to itself.[2]
A sense of fidelity to itself–to the material and (largely) autonomous laws of artistic creation–was something which Italian futurism in general lacked. The Italians had little of the Russians' deference towards the rules of their craft, fidelity to the "language" of the subconscious mind or sensitivity towards the inner texture of words or linguistic evolution.[3] Far from all this, Marinetti insisted, as we have seen,that modern poetry was to extol an external beauty—the beauty
- ↑ Trotsky on Literature and Art, p 119.
- ↑ ibid p 114.
- ↑ The reference here is to the Italian futurist poets, not the painters. This is perhaps unfair, since the Italians' greatest achievements were not in poetry but in painting. Here too, however, an intellectual pre—conception——e.g. the idea of representing mechanical speed-generally predominated over "inner form" or "material" as understood by the Cubists or Russian futurists.
