world as it was. Renouncing the Symbolists' "life-creating" aspirations[1] he proclaimed:
- ...we shall learn to carry 'more easily and freely the mobile fetters of existence.’[2]
It was precisely Khlebnikov's refusal to carry any such fetters that led him not only to question the presuppositions of language and even the dimensions of time and space, but to ally with the Bolshevik revolution which seemed to promise a new and transfigured world. In this sense it can certainly be said that he was taking to Hts conclusion an essential Symbolist idea.
On the other hand, an element of continuity can probably be found in almost any "revolution". The fact that Khlebnikov seized on aspects of Symbolism which formed the basis of his own positions in no way lessened the scale of the rupture which this involved. The question has to be asked why it was that the Symbolists themselves dared not carry their own principles through "to the end"? Obviously a number of temperamental, aesthetic and other factors were involved, but behind everything lay the fact that the Symbolists were the bourgeois "elite" of
the intelligentsia who found it psychologically difficult to accept the requisite renunciation of the "I" and surrender to alien and unknown class forces. It was much easier for the Futurists-recruited from the lower, revolutionary, ranks of the intelligentsia-to see that the yearned for "transfigurations", "other worlds" and so on presupposed a revolution, and that this revolution could not for long tolerate the survival of the bourgeois individualistic "I". This is not to say that Nadezhda Mandel'stam was wrong in emphasizing the Symbolist-Futurist element of continuity. It is only to redress the balance by pointing out that a kind of revolution——a genuine rupture and "turning inside-out"-—was also involved.
