Breakthrough into Languages. Velimir Chlebnikovʼs “Language Husbandry” and Life-Creation

Abstract

Within the extensive context of Russian cultural and poetic experiments, the figure of Velimir Khlebnikov stands out as evidence of the utmost coherence of creative principles manifested in his writings and the ideology of his everyday life, realized through an adventurous program of language policies in his oeuvre. It is this linguistic challenge of the Futurian that has inspired discussion from his first academic critics (B. Bukhshtab, V. Gofman, R. Jakobson, G. Vinokur) up to the present. However, the issue of how Khlebnikovʼs “language husbandry” (“iazykovodstvo”, a term coined by the poet himself) relates to and coheres with his own life behavior, has yet to be investigated. In this study I propose to give a sketch of the poetʼs philosophy of language and then relate it to the idea of life-creation. Khlebnikovʼs experimentation in language creativity is viewed here in close relation to the substantial dimension of his linguistic research. This is to demonstrate that language, for him, is not only a means of artistic play, but also a way of transforming consciousness. Moreover, language is a tool for transforming reality (cf. his statement “Slovo upravliaet mozgom, mozg – rukami, ruki – tsarstvami” (“The word rules the brain, the brain rules the hands, the hands rule the realms”). The aim of this article is to bridge Khlebnikovʼs philosophy of language and the ideas he implemented in his life behavior. The concept of “breakthrough into languages” (“proryv v iazyki”), used in his later poem ‘The Scratch across the Sky’ is analyzed in this paper as the constituent metaphor defining his poetic strategies and the elements of his life-creation.