Khlebnikov, Viktor (Velemir) Vladimirovich (1885–1922)

Russian poet. He was a central figure in Russian Futurism, and sought to reform poetic language by creating a vocabulary free from the associations of ordinary words, a theory known as ‘transrational language’. His subject matter was often drawn from the prehistory of the Slav people, a world of mythic imagination; he also wrote about the Revolution and, in the long poem Ladomir 1920, about a future Utopia. He exerted enormous influence on the next generation of Russian poets.

Although often accused of obscurity, Khlebnikov was a master of technical effects, as seen in his ‘etymological’ poetry, such as ‘Zaklinanie smekhom/Incantation by Laughter’ 1910, in which all 12 lines are made up of morphological derivations of the Russian root sme-. He wrote several longer narrative poems, such as Nochnoi obysk/The Nocturnal Search 1920, about the clash between two opposing camps during the early days of the Revolution, and Zangezi 1922, a dialogue between a philosopher and the crowd, which has been described as his ‘confession’.

An eccentric, Khlebnikov frequenly lived as a vagrant. He contributed to the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face to Public Taste 1912 and with A Kruchenykh wrote the programmatic pamphlet Slovo kak takovoe/The Word as Such 1913.