Le conte dans la pensée et l’oeuvre de Velimir Xlebnikov

Abstract

Though futurist manifestos loudly proclaimed artistic creation to be aligned on the paradigms of science and industrial technology, the actual practice of the most representative artists of the radical newness characteristic of the avant-garde is based on traditional, even archaic, models. Thus it is of the tale, which is the foundation of the most significant works of V Xlebnikov, that the Futurist even devoted a theoretical article to. This short but dense text situates the tale at the heart of the problematisation of Future for several reasons : 1. The tale is a structuring of time by language. The magic assistant or helper in traditional fairy-tales acts within the genre as a time "accelerator". 2. The tale is intrinsically linked to utopias and in Xlebnikov’s system of thought, is the cardinal vector of the great scientific and poetic myth he created for the twentieth century, in which science and artistic intuition converge. 3. Paradoxically, however, Xlebnikov’s scientism engenders a new kind of poetry, as the tale is also a reservoir of artistic and linguistic forms that program the future.