Russian Hölderlin

Велимир Хлебников (портрет В. Маяковского)

Хлебников (автопортрет)

Хлебников (1916)

Хлебников в будущем (карандашный портрет Б. Григорьева, 1916)

Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) 

Velimir Khlebnikov was the embodiment of the Russian Futurist movement and larger than life illustration to the proverbial notion of the “mad genius”. Co-author of the Futurist manifestoes (together with Mayakovsky, Benedict Lifschitz, etc.) he defied all social conventions. Fellow poets, their illiterate servants, or Persians whom he met during Soviet invasion into Iran regarded Khlebnikov as a saint or a holy fool (urodivyu, in Russian). He traveled on the roofs of railway carriages. During botched Soviet attempt to support Iranian revolution where he served in a propaganda unit, he deserted, but did not return to Moscow and vagabonded instead around the Caspian Sea, earning the nickname of ‘Russian Dervish’ by the Persians.

Remarkably, this, the most difficult for understanding Russian poet of the late Silver Age, is the one most adequately translated into English. The titanic work of Paul Schmidt led to multivolume collected works. Brilliant and wicked Anna Akhmatova, once noticed that all what Maykovsky wrote before the Revolution was genial and garbage thereafter, but for Khlebnikov this was vice versa. Her pointed observation largely rings true, but even before his remarkable fount of post-Revolutionary creativity he wrote such masterpieces as Bobeobi (1908-1909), "Spells by Laughter" (1909), Menagerie (1909) or "Shaman and Venus." (1912) 

            Like Lautreamont, Khlebnikov created a personal mythology, with his ‘317 Chairmen of the Globe’ (including Khlebnikov himself, but also, e.g. Woodrow Wilson and Sun Yatsen, the founder of the Kuomintang), ‘Missus Lenin’ and numerological mysticism. Remarkable feature of his genius was his Mozart-like consistency in producing masterpiece after masterpiece. Khlebnikov’s tombstone in Novodevichii Monastery in Moscow is a genuine pre-historic female figurine from the steppes between the Black and the Caspian Sea, near which he was born. Some of the modern theories locate the original Indo-European populations in these steppes, fittingly enough, for the poet, for whom unity of Slavonic, Persian and Hindu cultures was interwoven with mythology of his “supersagas”. 

People, nations and the years
Altogether disappear,
As the water crystal clear 
In the nature's fluid mirror. 
Sky casts net where fishes we;
Gods are specters at the dark sea. 

Люди годы и народы
Исчезают навсегда,
Как прозрачная вода,
В гибком зеркале природы.
Небо--невод рыбы--мы,
Боги--призраки у тьмы.

References to Paul Schmidt's Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3


The death of the founder of Ego-Futurists Ivan Vasilievich Ignatiev--he ran after his newly wed wife with a razor--but unable to kill her, slit his own throat (Feb. 2, 1914) prompted the following epitaph by V. Khlebnikov:

И на путь меж звезд морозных
Полечу я не с молитвой;
Полечу я мертвый, грозный,
С окровавленною бритвой.

Into dark where stars are frosty
Will I carry not the prayer;
I will fly as horrid corpse
Carrying a bloody razor.

                    1914

Even in these four short lines Khlebnikov put a lot of covert meaning; for instance calling Ignatiev "грозный" he makes a pun on his first and second names (identical to Ivan the Terrible).