Another Language, Another World: The Linguistic Experimentsof Velimir Khlebnikov

Willem G. Weststeijn

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 1998, pp. 27-37 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Another Language, Another World:The Linguistic Experiments of

Velimir Khlebnikov

Willem G. Weststeijn

THE FACT THAT THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917 succeededcan partly be attributed to the great energy of certain sectors of theRussian people. As is well known, a large part of the Russian intelli-

gentsia supported the Revolution. One had enough of the ossified tsaristsystem, which only half-heartedly or sometimes not at all carried through thenecessary social and political reforms, and one looked forward eagerly to anew time, in which Russia's remarkable economic and intellectual develop-ment at the beginning of this century would not be hampered anymore by along since hated autocratic power.

The just-mentioned energy was in any case clearly present in the Russianintelligentsia; it expressed itself in an unprecedented flowering of the arts andsciences. In the nineteenth century, Russia, with authors such as Tolstoy, Dos-toyevsky and Turgenyev, for the first time in its history contributed to Euro-pean literature a number of works (especially novels) which could competewith Western European literary prose. At the end of the nineteenth and thebeginning of the twentieth century, Russia turned out to be a completely equalpartner in other fields of culture as well, sometimes even surpassing WesternEurope. To mention only a few names: scientists like Pavlov and Mendeleyevwere already internationally famous during their lives. In the arts there was averitable explosion of talent. Malevich and Tatlin introduced important inno-vations into pictorial art; Stravinsky did the same as regards music. The the-ater was dominated by producers such as Stanislavsky and Meyerhold; in lit-erature there was an entire Pléiade of extremely gifted poets: Mayakovsky,Khlebnikov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva. Diaghilev's Russian bal-lets conquered the world and Sergei Eisenstein stood in the forefront of allkinds of innovative experiments in the new medium of the film.

One of the more remarkable figures in the cultural renaissance in Russiaat the beginning of this century was the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov(1885-1922). He was born in a small town in the region of the Southern Russ-ian city of Astrakhan, where his father was a district administrator. Halfwaythrough his study of mathematics and natural science at the University of

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Kazan, Khlebnikov went to St. Petersburg, where he enrolled at the Faculty ofArts of St. Petersburg University to study Slavic languages and Sanskrit. Inthe capital city, for the first time he came into contact with the literary world.The symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov invited him to take part in his famousWednesday literary soirées and showed an interest in his work. When, how-ever, Khlebnikov's poems were rejected by the leading symbolist journalApollon, being too experimental for the taste of its editor, the young poetturned away from the symbolists.

Khlebnikov was more successful with the poet (and one of Russia's firstpilots) Vasily Kamensky. In his journal Spring (Vesna) Kamensky publishedin 1908 one of Khlebnikov's early stories; moreover, he acquainted him witha group of young avant-garde poets and painters under the inspiring leader-ship of David Burliuk. In one of the joint publications of the group appearedKhlebnikov's programmatic and for that time (1910) remarkable poem Incan-tation by Laughter (Zaklyatie smechom), which is entirely composed of neol-ogisms based on the root smekh- (laugh). Two years later, in 1912, Khleb-nikov became a member of the so-called Hylaea group, which was foundedby the poet Benedikt Livshits and the brothers David and Nikolai Burliuk andwhich was soon joined by the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and AlekseiKruchenykh. In this group, better known as the Cubo-futurists,' Khlebnikov'spoems were highly appreciated. The poet was considered someone who couldplay an important role in bringing about a sorely needed renewal of Russianpoetry. Although Khlebnikov had his own conception of the role of poetry andpoetic language in the world, a conception which far surpassed the ideas ofhis fellow Cubo-futurists, he was held up by them as one of their leaders andmade important contributions to a number of manifestoes with which theCubo-futurists presented themselves to the public.

In accordance with the spirit of the age and with the revolutionarychanges, especially in pictorial art, in which figurative painting was replacedby abstract painting, the Cubo-futurists were an iconoclastic group. Thisbecame immediately clear from their manifestoes. In their first joint mani-festo, Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomuvkusu), they turned against the entire literature of the past ("The past is tootight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship ofModernity.")2 and declared themselves to be "the/ace of our Time." It is inter-esting that they protested not only against the authors of the past, but alsoagainst the content of their work and their poetic language. By analogy withthe new abstract painting, in which colour and line acquired an independent

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role and the represented object, the "picture," faded into the background, theCubo-futurists demanded a new role for the poetic word. In their opinion, thepoetic word no longer served the function of referring to aspects of reality, buthad every right to an independent existence, as an object in itself. This idea ofthe Cubo-futurists had a great influence on their work; it revealed itself in thevisual expressiveness of their texts (from Kruchenykh's "disordered" layoutswith letters differing in size scattered over the page to Mayakovsky's"stepladder lines") and in a conscious renewal of poetic language. Already intheir first manifesto, Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the Cubo-futuristsdeclared:

We order that the poets' rights be revered:1. To enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-

novelty).

And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of Your "Common sense" and "good taste" arestill present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the SummerLightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word, (idem, 51-52)

The last phrase of the quotation, the "self-sufficient word" (samovitoe slovo),is a key-concept in a number of manifestoes published between 1912 andWorld War I by the Cubo-futurists, notably Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. In thelead manifesto in the almanac of the Cubo-futurists, A Trap for Judges (Sadoksudej), which appeared a few months after Slap, there is much attention to"new principles of creativity," clearly focussed on language and the word:

We ceased to regard word formation and word pronunciation according to grammaticalrules, since we have begun to see in letters only vectors of speech. We loosened up syntax.

We started to endow words with content on the basis of their graphic and phonic charac-teristics.

Through us the role of prefixes and suffixes was fully realized, (idem, 53)

The central role of the word in the ideas of the Cubo-futurists is even morenoticeable in a manifesto written by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in 1913, butpublished much later, The Word as Such (Slovo kak takovoe):

From then on (since Ae appearance of some miscellanies by the Cubo-futurists-WGW) apoem could consist of a single word, and merely by skillful variation of that word, all the full-ness and expressiveness of the artistic image could be achieved. However, the expressiveness wasof a different kind-an artistic work was perceived and critiqued (or at least was intuitively felt)simply as word.

The work of art is the art of the word, (idem, 55)

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In a booklet which appeared in 1913 under the same title, The Word as Such,Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh wrote:

the Futurian painters love to use parts of the body, its cross sections, and the Futurian word-wrights use chopped-up words, half-words, and their odd artful combinations (transrational lan-guage), thus achieving the very greatest expressiveness, and precisely this distinguishes the swiftlanguage of modernity, which has annihilated the previous frozen language, (idem, 61)

As an example of "transrational language" Kruchenykh introduced hisfamous and often quoted five-line "poem" dyr bul shchyl..., a sound and wordcombination in which, according to him, "there is more of the Russiannational spirit than in all of Pushkin." The poem consists of words not exist-ing in the Russian (or any other) language:

dyr bul shchylubeshchurskum

vy so byr 1 ez (idem, 60)

Kruchenykh turned out to be the champion of transrational language (zaum-nyi iazyk). To describe the new times, an entirely new language was necessary,in which the word was freed from its "chains," its established meaning. Inanother manifesto of 1913, Declaration of the Word as Such (Deklaratsiiaslova kak takovogo), he wrote:

WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG. The artist has seen the world in a newway and, like Adam, proceeds to give things his own names. The lily is beautiful, but the word"lily" has been soiled and "raped." Therefore, I call the lily, "euy"-the original purity is reestab-lished, (idem, 67)

And in New Ways of the Word (Novye puti slova), again from 1913:

Clear and conclusive proof of the fact that up to the present the word has been shackled isprovided by its subordination to rational thought.

until now they have maintained:"rational thought dictates laws to the word, and not vice-versa."

We pointed out this mistake and provided a free language, transrational and universal.Previous poets arrived at the word through rational thought, we arrived at unmediated com-

prehension through the word.In our art we already have the first experiments of the language of the future.I...]

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the word (and its components, the sounds) is not simply a truncated thought, not simplylogic, it is first of all the transrational (irrational parts, mystical and aesthetic.) (idem, 70)

The main point of many Cubo-futurist manifestoes, which were strongly dom-inated by Kruchenykh (who is more interesting as a manifesto writer than asa poet), was that the futurists demanded the right to create an entirely new lan-guage, that had no connection with existing language and "fixed" meaning.For that reason the new language was "transrational" indeed: the newly cre-ated words could not be understood, but at most "felt"; one could only sensethe expressive power of the unexpected and surprising combinations ofsounds.

This transrational language as defined by Kruchenykh (and connected byhim with a superconscious state of the mind) was largely foreign to the muchmore rational Khlebnikov. Long before the Cubo-futurists manifested them-selves as a group, Khlebnikov had begun to develop his own thoughts aboutthe necessary renewal of poetic language. In a letter to Vasily Kamensky from1909 he wrote that he was occupied with a complex work, Ήme Transversal(Poperek vremen), in which he reserved the right "to use newly createdwords." It was "a kind of writing based on words from a single root, use ofepithets, universal phenomena, painting with sound."3

Khlebnikov was aware of the problematic aspects of his innovatory work."If it were published," he added, "this piece would seem as unsuccessful as itwould remarkable." A year later he published his remarkable "based-on-words-from-a-single-root"-poem Incantation by Laughter.

O laugh it out, you laughsters!O laugh it up, you laughsters!So they laugh with laughters, so they laugherize delaughly.O laugh it up belaughably!O the laughingstock of the laughed-upon-the laugh of belaughed

laughsters!O laugh it out roundlaughingly, the laugh of laughed-at laughians!Laugherino, laugherino,Laughify, laughicate, laugholets, laugholets,

Laughikins, laughikins,O laugh it out, you laughsters!O laugh it up, you laughsters!4

The principle applied by Khlebnikov in this poem is clear: the root "laugh" issupplied with all kinds of prefixes and suffixes, so that new words come intobeing. Although these words do not exist in language, a meaning can be attrib-

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uted to them. The semantic core is the meaning of the root, "laugh"; otheraspects of meaning originate from the analogy with existing words whichhave the same prefixes or suffixes (cf. laughikin-mannikin).

Khlebnikov's early experiments with poetic language show that his viewson language were different from those of Kruchenykh. Whereas the latteraimed at the "pure" word, not connected with any pre-existing meaning, forKhlebnikov meaning was always crucial. Although we can find in his workexperiments that go in the direction of Kruchenykh's transrational language,their main object was always to discover new meaning. Moreover, the dis-covery of new meaning was not only a matter of language and of poetry, butserved a much wider aim. Khlebnikov had undertaken the arduous task tocreate not only a new poetic language, but to create an entirely new world. Hesaw himself as a kind of scientific prophet, who was predestined to discoverthe "laws of time" and to show the world the way to a new future. Already in1904 he wrote his own "necrology," Let them read on my gravestone (Pust'na mogilnoi plite prochtut), in which he laid down, as it were, his life'sprogramme.

He raised high the standard of Galilean love, and the shadow of the banner fell on many a nobleanimal species. The heart, the real meat of the contemporary impulse forward of human societies,he saw not in the princely individual, but in the prince-tissue: the princely lump of human tissueconfined in the calcium box of the skull. He was inspired to dream of being a prophet and a greatinterpreter of the prince-tissue, and of that alone. Divining its will, with a single impulse of hisown flesh, blood and bone, he dreamed of increasing the ratio e/p where e equals the mass ofprince-tissue and Ï• equals the mass of peasant-tissue, as far as he personally was concerned. Hcdreamed of the distant future, of the earthball of the future, and his dreams were inspired whenhe compared the earth to a little animal of the steppe, darting from bush to bush. He discoveredthe true classification of the sciences, he linked time and space, he established a geometry ofnumbers: He discovered the Slav principle. He founded an institute for the study of the prenatallife of the child. He discovered the microbe that causes progressive paralysis. He linked andexplained the fundamentals of chemistry in the natural environment.'

Khlebnikov was not a scientist or discoverer, but a poet, and had to realize hisprogramme through his poetic Âœuvre. It is remarkable that in many respectsKhlebnikov has substantiated the high claims he made, not in the sense thathe really "founded an institute for the study of the prenatal life of the child,"but that he succeeded in presenting an extremely interesting and original visionof the world, in which past, present and future, nature and science, man andGod, the earth and the cosmos are brought together in a highly intriguing way.

The most important means for Khlebnikov to express his holistic vision ofthe world was through poetic language. His indefatigable search for meaning

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in language was based upon his belief that since mankind had started to uselanguage, it had become a storehouse of knowledge and experience. In thecourse of time, however, language became petrified and diversified, so that itlost much of its power to directly convey this knowledge and experience. Inprinciple, however, its power was still there, it had only to be resurrected, andpeople should be made aware of it. "Words [...] are living eyes for a secret"(idem, 403), wrote Khlebnikov, and "It is evident that language is as wise asnature, and only now, with the growth of science are we discovering how toread it. [...] The wisdom of language has long ago revealed the luminousnature of the universe" (idem, 378-79). Khlebnikov considered it his task tobring to the surface all that meaning that had disappeared owing to the diver-sification and petrification of language. One of the means he used was wordcreation.

Word creation is the blowing up of linguistic silence, the deaf-and-dumb layers of language.(idem, 377)

Word creation is hostile to the bookish petrifaction of language. It takes as its model the factthat in villages, by rivers and forests, language is being created to this very day; every minute seesthe birth of words that either die or gain the right to immortality. Word creation transfers this rightto the world of literary creativity. A new word must not only be uttered, it must be directed towardthe thing it names. Word creation does not contradict the laws of language, (idem, 382)

Interesting in the last quotation is the sentence "A new word must not only beuttered, it must be directed toward the thing it names." The sentence under-lines the important fact in Khlebnikov's word creation that the poet never cre-ated words "at random," but that he always looked for a certain connection, akind of motivated relation between the word and its referent. This motivation

was often based on an already existing meaning, for instance, in the case ofneologisms built on a root; in other cases there was a "natural" relationbetween the sound and the meaning of a word (as in an onomatopoeic word,or a relation created by the poet within a wider system).

This wider system was for Khlebnikov the original language of mankind,the protolanguage or Ursprache. In the beginning of his poetic career he triedto determine this language by going back to Slavic word roots.

To find-without breaking the circle of roots-the magic touchstone of all Slavic words, the magicthat transforms one into another, and so freely to fuse all Slavic words together: this was my firstapproach to language. This self-sufficient language stands outside historical fact and everydayutility, (idem, 147)

Many of Khlebnikov's neologisms are in point of fact based on Slavic word

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roots and, especially in the beginning of his career, the poet refrained frommaking coinages from words of foreign origin, often substituting for existingforeign words "Slavic" coinages of his own. They were, in his opinion, more"transparent" than the foreign words and, for that reason, easier to understandand more expressive. One of Khlebnikov's well-known neologisms is theword budetlyanin, meaning "futurist." To make this word, Khlebnikov tookthe Slavic root of the future tense of the verb "to be" (bud-) and added thesuffix -anin, by analogy with Russian words such as krest'yanin (peasant) andgrazhdanin (citizen). A great number of his neologisms, many of which arealso interesting from an aesthetic point of view, Khlebnikov made with rootssuch as lyub- (love) and let- (to fly). Successful examples are lyubenok (byanalogy with rebenok, child) and letavitsa (by analogy with krasavitsa, abeautiful woman). In one text, a prose experiment from 1913, Lyubkho,Khlebnikov used more than 400 words derived from the root lyub-!"

The creation of words from "transparent" roots is only one aspect ofKhlebnikov's semantization of parts of words. In his search for meaning inlanguage he became convinced that not only an "external," but also an "inter-nal," declension exists.

However—have you ever heard of internal declension? Of case endings inside the word? If thegenitive case in Russian answers the question from where, and the accusative and dative cases thequestions where and whither, the internal declension of a stem according to these cases ought toimpart opposite meanings to the resulting words. So words of the same family would have widelydisparate meanings. I can prove it. For instance, bobr in Russian means beaver, a perfectly harm-less rodent, while babr is a tiger, a terrifying beast of prey-but each represents a differentcase-accusative and genilive-of the common stem bo; the very structure of the words demon-strates that a beaver is something to be followed, hunted like game, while a tiger is something tobe feared, since now a man may become the game and be hunted by the animal. Here a verysimple element changes the meaning of a verbal structure by changing its case. The first wordmakes it apparent that the aggressive act is directed against the animal (accusative case-£>o-,action toward), while in the second word it is clear that the aggressive act proceeds from theanimal (genitive case-èa-, action whence).7

A curious form of Khlebnikov's semantization of parts of words is connectedwith the special role he allotted to the initial consonant of a word. In his opin-ion, the initial consonant is the most important letter of the word, because itcontrols the meaning of the word. It follows that words which begin with thesame consonant belong to the same semantic field:

Beyondsense language is based on two premises:i. The initial consonant of a simple word governs all the rest-it commands the remaining

letters.

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2. Words that begin with an identical consonant share some identical meaning; it is as if theywere drawn from various directions to a single point in the mind.

Let us take the words chasha [cup] and choboty [a kind of boot]: the sound ch governs bothwords. If we make a list of words that begin with ch-chulok [stocking], choboty [a kind of boot],chereviki [high-heeled boots for women], chuviak [slipper], chuni [rope-shoes: dial.], chupaki[felt boots], chekhol [underdress] and chasha [cup], chara [magic spell], chan [vat], chelnok[bark], cherep [skull], chakhotka [consumption], chúchelo [stuffed animal], then we observe thatall these words coalesce at the point of the following image: whether we speak of a stocking[chulok] or a cup [chasha], in both instances the volume of one body [foot or water] fills up theemptiness of another body, which serves as its surface. Whence magic spell [chara] as anenchanted casing or envelope that holds motionless the will of the thing enchanted-like water asfar as the magic spell is concerned; whence also chaiat' [to expect], that is, to be a cup for waterthat is yet to come. Thus ch is not merely a sound, ch is a name, an indivisible unit of language.If it turns out that ch has an identical meaning in all languages, then the problem of a universallanguage is solved; all types of footgear will be known as foot-cA«, all types of cups as waler-che.That is clear and simple. (Idem, 384)

Khlebnikov's ideas on the initial consonants of words laid the basis for his

most daring linguistic experiments. In one of the quotations above, in whichKhlebnikov said that his first approach to language was to find the magictouchstone of all Slavic words, he continues as follows:

I observed that the roots of words are only phantoms behind which stand the strings of the alpha-bet, and so my second approach to language was to find the unity of the world's languages in gen-eral, built from units of the alphabet. (Idem, 147)

Khlebnikov's first approach-to determine the Slavic word roots and theirmeaning, "to fuse all Slavic words together"-was mainly directed at the past.In his second approach, to create a universal language which everybody couldunderstand, the poet was concerned with the future. Both approaches can betraced back to Khlebnikov's vision of language, which has already been dis-cussed above, that is to say that language was a repository of (partly lost)human knowledge and experience and should be "opened up." Followingmany nineteenth-century linguists, amongst whom there is the Ukrainianscholar A. A. Potebnya, Khlebnikov was convinced that during the first stagesof the existence of language, when primitive man started to use language,there existed a "natural" relation between the sounds of the words and whatthey expressed, the meaning. At that time language could be understood byeverybody and created a feeling of togetherness. "There was a time when lan-guage united people. [...] Language unites them like a familiar voice" (idem,378). It was Khlebnikov's ambition to bring about in his own time the former

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uniting role of language. Hence his search for the primal units of language,the original forms from which all languages descended. More and more hesaw these original forms in the letters of the alphabet which, according to him,each had their own special meaning. In the course of his career Khlebnikovmade various lists in which he ascribed a rather global, general and abstractmeaning to each of the letters of the (Russian) alphabet. In this way he cre-ated a kind of "alphabet of the mind," which in certain respects reminds oneof the conceptual alphabets of Leibniz and John Wilkins.

M [m] is the division of a certain volume into an indefinite large number of parts, equal to it as awhole. M is the relation of the whole extent of a line to its members. Muka [flour], molot[hammer], mlin [mill: dial.], mel [chalk], mia[g]kii [soft], mysh' [mouse], mochka [earlobe].

K [k] is the conversion of forces of motion into forces of cohesion. Kamen' [stone], zakovannii[chained], kliuch [key], pokoi [rest], koika [bunk], kniaz' [prince], kol [stake], kol'tsa [rings].(idem, 314)

Contrary to Khlebnikov's neologisms, which he profusely used in his poemsand prose works, his attempts at universal language remain confined to histheoretical writings. The reason for this is not only the apparent difficulty ofusing the "alphabet of the mind" in a literary work, but also Khlebnikov's lateformulation of it. He was not granted time to carry on his experiments withuniversal language further than, in his own words, "first experiments" that areno more than "a baby's first cry."

Instead of saying:The Hunnic and Gothic hordes, having united and gathered themselves about Atilla, full of

warlike enthusiasm, progressed further together, but having been met and defeated by Aetius, theprotector of Rome, they scattered into numerous bands and settled and remained peacefully ontheir own lands, having poured out into and filled up the emptiness of the steppes.

Could we not say instead:SHa + So (Hunnic and Gothic hordes), Ve Attila, CHa Po, So Do, but Bo + Zo Aetius, KHo

of Rome, So Mo Ve + Ka So, Lo SHa of the steppes + CHa. (idem, 368)

Despite the extreme aspects of Khlebnikov's linguistic experiments-the lastquotation will not convince many people-the poet succeeded in making thoseexperiments an essential, intriguing and convincing part of his poetic Âœuvre.V. P. Grigoryev, probably the greatest authority on Khlebnikov's work, espe-cially as regards his poetic language, wrote that Khlebnikov "in each word feltwhat could be called the potential of its aesthetic semantics."8 In his book onKhlebnikov's word creation he discusses a number of the poet's most suc-

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cessful finds, among which the coinage ladomir. The word is a combinationof two roots, lad- (harmony) and mir- (1. world; 2. peace) and is the title ofone of Khlebnikov's Utopian poems about the future. Grigoryev not onlyshows how the roots lad- and mir- play a part in a great number of Khleb-nikov's neologisms (cf. also the poet's pseudonymic first name Velim/r), butalso how the word gradually came into being, which semantic associations itevokes (including Campanella's City of the Sun), and even its possible sourcein a really existing geographical name. From this and from many other exam-ples it becomes perfectly clear that Khlebnikov's word creation is an integralpart of his literary oeuvre, which has as its unique aim the creation of a newworld and a new future on the basis of knowledge and experience stored inlanguage since its existence.

University of Amsterdam

Notes

1. The Cubo-futurists were only one out of several futurist groups which existed in Russia inthe turbulent years before the Revolution. See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A His-tory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1968).

2. All the quotations from the manifestoes of the Cubo-futurists are from Anna Lawton, ed.,Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP,1988). The quotation from Slap is on p. 51.

3. Most translations of Khlebnikov's works are quoted from the Collected Works of VelimirKhlebnikov, Vol. I, Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. CharlotteDouglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987). The present quotation is from p. 49.

4. The translation is by Gary Kern, from Velimir Khlebnikov, Snake Train: Poetry and Prose,ed. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976), 62.

5. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, 196.6. For an extensive discussion of Khlebnikov's word creation see Ronald Vroon, Velimir Khleb-

nikov's Shorter Poems: A Key to the Coinages (Ann Arbor Ardis, 1983); V. P. Grigoryev,Slovotvorchestvo i smezhnye problemy jazyka poeta (Word Creation and Related Problemsof the Poet's Language) (Moscow: Nauka, 1986); a dictionary of his neologisms, Slovar'neologizmov Velimira Khlebnikova by Natalya Pertsova, was published in Vienna/Moscowin 1995 (Vienna: Gesellschan zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, v. 40, special series). Agood general discussion of the problem of poetic language in Khlebnikov can be found inthe chapter "The tower of the word" in Raymond Cooke's book, Velimir Khlebnikov. A Crit-ical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987).

7. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, 277.8. Grigoryev, Slovotvorchestvo i smezhnye problemy jazyka poeta, 165.

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