Dubbed by his fellow Futurists the "King of Time," Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) spent his entire brief life searching for a new poetic language to express his convictions about the rhythm of history, the correspondence between human behavior and the "language of the stars." The result was a vast body of poetry and prose that has been called hermetic, incomprehensible, even deranged. Of all this tragic generation of Russian poets (including Blok, Esenin, and Mayakovsky), Khlebnikov has been perhaps the most praised and the more censured. 
 This first volume of the Collected Works, an edition sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation, will do much to establish the counterimage of Khlebnikov as an honest, serious writer. The 117 letters published here for the first time in English reveal an ebullient, humane, impractical, but deliberate working artist. We read of the continuing involvement with his family throughout his vagabond life (pleas to his smartest sister, Vera, to break out of the mold, pleas to his scholarly father not to condemn and to send a warm overcoat); the naive pleasure he took in being applauded by other artists; his insistence that a young girl's simple verses be included in one of the typically outrageous Futurist publications of the time; his jealous fury at the appearance in Moscow of the Italian Futurist Marinetti; a first draft of his famous zoo poem ("O Garden of Animals!"); his seriocomic but ultimately shattering efforts to be released from army service; his inexhaustibly courageous confrontation with his own disease and excruciating poverty; and always his deadly earnest attempt to make sense of numbers, language, suffering, politics, and the exigencies of publication. 
 The theoretical writings presented here are even more important than the letters to an understanding of Khlebnikov's creative output. In the scientific articles written before 1910, we discern foreshadowings of major patterns of later poetic work. In the pan-Slavic proclamations of 1908-1914, we find explicit connections between cultural roots and linguistic ramifications. In the semantic excursuses beginning in 1915, we can see Khlebnikov's experiments with consonants, nouns, and definitions spelled out in accessible, if arid, form. The essays of 1916-1922 take us into the future of Planet Earth, visions of universal order and accomplishment that no longer seem so farfetched but indeed resonate for modern readers.

Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Volume I: Letters and Theoretical Writings

Literature & Fiction

Velimir Khlebnikov

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

This original anthology traces a century of Russian poetry, taking us through the turbulent decades from 1900 to 2000 with poets of stature who reflected or recorded their times. It combines work by famous and lesser known (outside Russia) poets, some never previously published in English, through the medium of six translators, who also contribute biographical and historical notes. The one unnamed poet is the writer from the Arsenal Mental Prison Hospital in the 1970s, whose anguished, affecting verse, in a little book bound in elastoplast, was smuggled out of the hospital. These are poems that will continue to survive.
The translators: Vladimir Baskayev, Kitty Hunter Blair, Belinda Cooke, Richard McKane, Michael Molnar.
Richard McKane is the translator of the Selected Poems' of Anna Akhmatova (1989) and, with Elizabeth McKane, of Osip Mandelstam's The Moscow Notebooks' (1991) and The Voronezh Notebooks' (1996). More recently he has published a selection from Nikolay Gumilyov's poems, The Pillar of Fire' (1999) and, with Ruth Christie and Talât Halman, a selection of poems by Nâzim Hikmet, Beyond the Walls' (2002).

Ten Russian Poets: Surviving the Twentieth Century

Osip Mandelstam

Katia Kapovich

Mikhail Kuzmin

Boris Poplavsky

Daniel Andreyev

Arseny Tarkovsky

Leonid Aronzon

Viktor Krivulin

Poetry

Anvil Press Poetry

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Books by Velimir Khlebnikov