Утопии в облаках : Хлебников и Гуро

Abstract

In terms of Michel Foucault utopias afford consolation : “Although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold ; they open up cities with waste avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.” Utopias testify to our inability to dream our way out of the myths and the historical situation we live. As a matter of fact, our attitude towards history, says Dmitry Likhachev, is directed by notions “ encapsulated’’ in myths. During the 20th century, Russian utopian narrative expanded literary horizons by providing new visions of those “untroubled regions”. The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, new morality, and technology worship, generated in Russian utopianism a range of experimental fiction. This implied also a new genre of an “open-ended utopia”. Such an ambiguous utopia is indeterminate and incomplete, and often interrelated with the genre of the short fragmentary prose. Open-ended utopia involves the reader more actively in a dialectical process, giving him a more fundamental organizing role as the constructor of the text’s meaning. Velimir Khlebnikov (1885 -1922) and Elena Guro (1877-1913) - though not utopian writers in the same meaning as H.G. Wells or Alexandr Bogdanov - however, both directed their creative thought towards futurological visions of a new universal order and a new universal Man. In this paper I examine some of Khlebnikov’s and Guro’s futurological texts as fictional experiments of a spatial world-vision. Both authors domesticated and “colonized” in a very easy and concrete way the aerospace : the vault of heaven, the air, and the clouds, transforming them into their own, private heterotopias.