Khlebnikov direction in literature. Velimir Khlebnikov: biography, interesting facts from life, photos

Abstract on the topic:

“The Silver Age of Russian Literature.

V. Khlebnikov."

Biography of the poet .

The poet's work.

2.1 Lyrics of the “Silver Age”.

Khlebnikov and Mandelstam.

3. Conclusion.

Biography of the poet.

Velimir Khlebnikov
(Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov)
28.X. (09.XI.)1885-28.VI.1922

Khlebnikov Velimir - Russian poet. Born on October 28 (November 9, n.s.) in the village of Malye Derbety (Khan's Headquarters) in the Astrakhan province in the family of a natural scientist, ornithologist, one of the organizers of the Astrakhan Nature Reserve. In 1898, the family moved to Kazan, and Khlebnikov continued his studies at the gymnasium; His passions are determined: ornithology, Russian literature, mathematics. The cultural atmosphere of the family contributed to the rapid intellectual development of the future poet and the versatility of his interests: foreign languages, drawing, literature. In the last grades of the gymnasium he begins to write poetry.
In 1903 he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University, first in the mathematics department, then transferred to the natural sciences department. The decisive moment was the move to St. Petersburg in 1908. Having entered St. Petersburg University in the natural sciences department, and then moving to the historical and philological department, he soon finally parted with the university. The destiny was determined - literature and philosophical and mathematical research.

Khlebnikov attracted attention and aroused interest with his original personality, striking with his worldview and independence of views, rare for his age. Gets acquainted with the circle of metropolitan modernist poets (including Gumilev And Kuzmin, whom he calls “his teacher”), visits the “bathhouse”, famous in the artistic life of St. Petersburg of those years. Vyach. Ivanova, where writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, and actors gathered. Friendly relations are established with young artists (Khlebnikov was a gifted artist). However, the rapprochement with the Symbolists and Acmeists was short-lived. Already in those years he was developing his own poetics. First published with the assistance of V. Kamensky Khlebnikov’s work is the prose poem “The Temptation of a Sinner” (1908). Acquaintance and rapprochement between Khlebnikov and Kamensky, D. and N. Burdyukami, A. Kruchenykh, E. Guro, M. Matyushin and a little later (in 1912) with Mayakovsky leads to the formation of a group of futurists or, as Khlebnikov, who jealously guarded the Russian language from foreign words, called them, “Budetlyans” (heralds of the future). In the futuristic collections “Tank of Judges”, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, “Dead Moon”, Khlebnikov’s works occupy an important place. In 1910-1914, his poems, poems, dramas, prose were published, including such famous ones as the poem “Crane”, the poem “Maria Vechora”, the play “Marquise of Deses”. The poet’s first brochure with mathematical and linguistic experiments, “Teacher and Student,” was published in Kherson.

His life was filled with moving from city to city; he had no home, no job and no money. In Kharkov and Rostov, in Baku and Moscow, he lived with friends, acquaintances and just random people. But everywhere he goes obsessively working, writing, thinking and researching. A scientist and science fiction writer, poet and publicist, he is completely absorbed in creative work. The poems “Rural Charm”, “Forest Horror”, etc., and the play “The Mistake of Death” were written. The books “Roar! Gloves. 1908 - 1914", "Creations" (Volume 1). In 1916, together with N. Aseev, he issued the declaration “The Trumpet of the Martians,” in which Khlebnikov’s division of humanity into “inventors” and “acquirers” was formulated. The main characters of his poetry were Time and the Word; it was through Time, fixed by the Word and transformed into a spatial fragment, that the philosophical unity of “space-time” was realized for him. O. Mandelstam wrote: “Khlebnikov fiddles with words like a mole, meanwhile he dug passages in the ground for the future for a whole century...”

In 1920 he lived in Kharkov, wrote a lot: “War in a Mousetrap”, “Ladomir”, “Three Sisters”, “Scratch on the Sky”, etc. In the city theater of Kharkov, the “buffoonish” election of Khlebnikov as “Chairman of the Globe” took place, with the participation of Yesenina And Mariengofa.

In 1921 he came to Pyatigorsk, where he worked at Terskaya ROSTA as a night watchman. The newspaper published his poems “The Night Before the Soviets,” “The Laundress,” “The Present,” and “Night Search.” At the end of 1921, after long wanderings, seriously ill, he returned to Moscow in the hope of publishing his works. Having recovered a little, he meets with Mayakovsky, Kamensky and other poets. In a friendly conversation, he puts his rough notes in order and completes a number of poems and poems he brought, including “Ustrug Razin”, a mathematical treatise on the “laws of time”, etc.

In May 1922, together with his friend, the artist P. Miturich, he traveled to the village of Santalovo, Novgorod province. There he becomes seriously ill. On June 28, “the most honest knight of poetry,” as Mayakovsky called him, died.

In 1960, the poet’s ashes were transported to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

2. The poet's creativity.

2.1. Lyrics of the "Silver Age"

The lyrics of the “silver” age are diverse and musical. The epithet “silver” itself sounds like a bell. The Silver Age is a whole constellation of poets. Poets - musicians. The poems of the “silver” age are the music of words. In these verses there was not a single extra sound, not a single unnecessary comma, not a single point placed out of place. Everything is thought out, clearly and... . . musically.

At the beginning of the 20th century. There were many literary trends. This is symbolism, and futurism, and even the ego-futurism of Igor Severyanin. All these directions are very different, have different ideals, pursue different goals, but they agree on one thing: to work on the rhythm, the word, to bring the playing of sounds to perfection.

In my opinion, the futurists especially succeeded in this. Futurism completely abandoned the old literary traditions, the “old language”, “old words”, and proclaimed a new form of words, independent of content, i.e. a new language was literally invented. Working on words and sounds became an end in itself, while the meaning of poetry was completely forgotten. Take, for example, V. Khlebnikov’s poem “Perverten”:

Horses, trampling, monk.

But it’s not speech, it’s black.

Let's go young, down with copper.

The rank is called with a sword on the back.

How long does hunger last?

The spirit of the crow's paws fell and the spirit of the crow fell...

There is no meaning in this poem, but it is remarkable in that each line is read from left to right, and from right to left.

New words appeared, were invented, and were composed. From just one word “laughter” an entire poem “The Spell of Laughter” was born:

Oh, laugh, you laughers!

That they laugh with laughter, that they laugh with laughter,

Oh, laugh merrily!

Oh, the laughter of mockers - the laughter of clever laughers!

Oh, make these mocking laughers laugh!

Smeivo, smeivo,

Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh,

Laughers, laughers.

Oh, laugh, you laughers!

The work of V. Khlebnikov falls into three parts: theoretical studies in the field of style and illustrations for them, poetic creativity and comic poems. Unfortunately, the boundaries between them are drawn extremely carelessly, and often a wonderful poem is spoiled by an admixture of unexpected and awkward jokes or word formations that are far from thought out.

Very sensitive to the roots of words, Viktor Khlebnikov deliberately neglects inflections, sometimes discarding them completely, sometimes changing them beyond recognition. He believes that each vowel contains not only the action, but also its direction: thus, the bull is the one who hits, the side is what is hit; beaver is what is hunted, babr (tiger) is the one who hunts, etc.

Taking the root of a word and attaching arbitrary inflections to it, he creates new words. So, from the root “sme” he produces “smekhachi”, “smeevo”, “smeyunchi-ki”, “to laugh”, etc. He dreams of the simplest language of only prepositions that indicate the direction of movement. His poems such as “Smekhachi”, “Perverten”, “Black Lyubir” are, to a large extent, a dictionary of such a “possible” language.

Khlebnikov’s poetry is not based on the experience of “something” or on thinking about “something”. The poet wrote, say, the forest morning itself, and not about the morning, the evening itself in the mountains, and not about the evening. Each image turns out to be accurate, created again. Khlebnikov’s epicness is intimate, his myth is homely, good-natured, fabulously bright:

Green splash and weave

And the whole world disappeared into a blue shine

(“Blue Shackles”)

As a poet, Viktor Khlebnikov has an incredible love for nature. He is never happy with what he has. His deer turns into a carnivorous beast, he sees how at the “vernissage” dead birds on ladies’ hats come to life, how people’s clothes fall off and turn - wool into sheep, linen into blue flax flowers.

He loves and knows how to talk about bygone times and use their images. For example, his primitive man says:

What happened to me

Recently?

The beast barks with a roar

(Terrible jump,

Breath Hot),

Face burn.

What a death!

The breath is wild

With sparkling eyes,

Great muzzle...

But my knife saved me

Otherwise I'm dead.

This time

There was a trace of a bruise.

Both in the rhythms and in the confusion of syntax you can see a frightened savage, hear his excited speeches.

Somewhat naive chauvinism gave much value to Khlebnikov’s poetry. He perceives Russia as an Asian country (although he does not invite it to learn wisdom from the Tatars), asserts its originality and fights against European trends. Many of his lines seem like fragments of some great, never written epic:

We are a flock of water grandfather,

Jokingly, let's scratch our heels with laughter,

His family is simple

Was there for Christmas.

The weakest thing is his jokes, which give the impression not of laughter, but of convulsions. And he jokes often and always inappropriately. When Juno’s lover calls her “dear auntie,” when someone says: “my jaw dropped out of delight,” it’s sad for the poet.

In general, V. Khlebnikov has found his path and, following it, he can become a significant poet. It is all the more sad to see what a fuss has been made around his work, how they borrow from him not his achievements, but his breakdowns, of which, alas, there are too many. He still has a lot to learn, if only from himself, and those who inflate his fledgling talent risk that it will eventually burst.

Khlebnikov's interest in philosophy, mythology, Russian history, and Slavic folklore brought him closer to late symbolism. However, despite the outward student-devoted adherence to the “precepts of symbolism,” Khlebnikov was internally alien to this movement, as well as to the emerging Acmeism. The divergence was based on a fundamental difference in views on the nature of the Word (language) and Time. Symbolists and Acmeists sought to identify encoded “eternal essences” in an abstract word and moved modernity into the context of the previous culture, leading the present to the “primordial clarity of the past.” Khlebnikov's philosophical and aesthetic orientation was fundamentally different. The poet counted the beginning of his work with the unusually powerful social media. charge of 1905: “We rushed into the future...from 1905.” Acutely experiencing the shameful defeat in the East and the strangulation of the first Russian revolution, intensely reflecting on the course of history, Khlebnikov made a utopian attempt to find some universal numerical laws of Time, one way or another influencing the fate of Russia and all humanity. The past, present and future in his utopian system were represented as only fragments of a single continuous Time, elastically and cyclically repeating in its circular development. The present, being, together with the past, part of the totality of time, thus received the opportunity to move to a “scientifically predictable” future. Khlebnikova approaches this issue as a research scientist, but, being a poet by his natural essence, he comprehends Time through a mythopoetic prism and turns the subject of research into his main and lifelong theme, along with his other constant hero of his poetry - the Word, language. The word in his philosophical and poetic system ceased to be only a means of transmitting his cultural tradition in its semantic and aesthetic meanings, but became an intrinsically significant and self-valuable sensory given, a thing and therefore part of space. It was in this way, through Time, recorded by the Word and transformed into a spatial fragment, that the sought-after philosophical unity of “space-time” was realized. A unity that allows for the possibility of its reorganization in the word and, therefore, amenable to active regulation at the will of the speechmaker. An outwardly logically clear concept of overcoming physical time as space was created through the restoration (in the past) and reconstruction (in the present and future) of words-things and the re-creation on this basis of the entire system of legalized artistic forms and social institutions frozen in space and time. It was as if a single “book of existence” was opening, the book of Nature - Khlebnikov’s utopian dream, to the poetic embodiment of which he devoted his entire life.

Velimir Khlebnikov is from Kalmykia, born into a large family in 1885. The poet's mother managed to give all five of her offspring an excellent education. Thanks to her, the children mastered literature well and showed interest in history and foreign languages. The poet's father, a naturalist, instilled in his son a love of ornithology. As a student, Khlebnikov published several works in this area.

Vladimir Alekseevich, Khlebnikov’s father, was a natural scientist, and due to his occupation, his family often had to change their place of residence. In Simbirsk, where Vladimir Alekseevich was transferred in 1895, Victor (the poet’s real name) began his studies at the local gymnasium. Three years later, the Khlebnikovs moved to Tataria, and Victor continued his studies in Kazan.

After the revolution of 1905, which had a great influence on the young man’s worldview, Victor completely immersed himself in literature, ignoring ornithology classes and university studies. A serious milestone in the poet’s work was his work “Enya Voeikov,” which, unfortunately, was unfinished. At the same time, the poet writes many poems, and gains the courage to send them to the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, whom he soon meets personally.

The desire to become a poet forced Khlebnikov to come to St. Petersburg, where he was accepted into the third year of university. In St. Petersburg, Victor quickly met young poets and began to lead a social life. He is present at almost all poetic meetings, at which time his interest in pagan mythology develops, which is manifested in the works of Khlebnikov of that time.

For some time, Khlebnikov moves away from literature, experiencing a creative crisis, he becomes interested in numerical patterns in the development of history.

The university does not receive payment for Klebnikov’s tuition, and comes to the decision to expel the student from the educational institution.

After Khlebnikov moved away from the symbolist poets, he began to publish poems related to the direction of futurism, although his work differed from the work of the futurist poets, he was closer to new quests, combining the ideals of paganism and the history of the Slavs.

Fascinated by numbers, absent-minded and eccentric, Khlebnikov was the complete opposite of his fellow futurists.

Khlebnikov denied the structure of bourgeois life, the bourgeoisie was alien to him, he strived for rebellion, which is clearly visible in his work of the late period.

Financial assistance from his family, who did not recognize his literary talent, was negligible; the poet had to give cheap lessons. A wandering life and constant malnutrition struck Klebnikov with paralysis of the lower limbs. In 1922, the poet-prophet who predicted the beginning of the October Revolution and the war of 1914 passed away.

The poet’s remains were reburied at the Novodevichy cemetery, transported there from the graveyard of the village of Ruchi.

Velimir Khlebnikov was and remains one of the greatest poets and writers in Russia.

Biography by dates and interesting facts. The most important.

Other biographies:

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The poet Velimir Khlebnikov spent his high school and student years in Kazan, and therefore the city, which influenced the formation of so many talents, could not but leave a mark on his formation.

When studying the biography or creativity of a bright personality, researchers and admirers are always interested in the environment in which the person lived and worked, what streets he walked along, what landscape he saw from the window. Alexandra BIRYALTSEVA, a well-known researcher in Kazan about the Kazan biography and work of Velimir Khlebnikov, offers to take a correspondence tour of Khlebnikov’s places in our city.

Velimir Vladimirovich Khlebnikov (real name Victor) (1885-1922), Russian poet and prose writer. The founder of Russian futurism (Budetlyan group). Creator of the utopian society of Chairmen of the Globe (1916).

Reformer of poetic language (experiments in the field of word creation, zaumi, “star language”). The pacifist poem about the First World War “The War in the Mousetrap” (1919), the monumental revolutionary poems (1920-1922) “Ladomir”, “Night Search”, “Zangezi”, “The Night Before the Soviets”.

A series of historical and mathematical articles devoted to the nature of time “Boards of Fate” (1922). Stories. Dramas. He influenced the Russian and European avant-garde, including in the field of painting and music.

The original poet of the Silver Age, Viktor (Velimir) Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, was born on October 28 (November 9), 1885 in the Kalmyk steppe ulus of the Astrakhan province (now Kalmykia) in the family of an ornithologist.

He visited his parents in Astrakhan, where his parents lived, during his long travels around the country and the world.

Philologists at Astrakhan University have been studying the work of this poet for a long time (by the way, it was practically not studied in Soviet times), but they also regularly gather researchers from all over Russia. The only Velimir Khlebnikov museum in the country operates in Astrakhan; it is located in the former apartment of his parents.

Does Kazan remember Klebnikov? In the KSU History Museum there is a small stand with a portrait of his gymnasium era, a book of poems published in the 80s, and a copy of student Khlebnikov’s apartment certificate. The funds contain a folder with his photographs and publications about him.

There is no street named after the poet in the city, there is not a single memorial plaque dedicated to him. Of the three houses in which his family lived, only one remains. But we can walk along the streets along which he walked, see the houses whose doors he entered.

In Kazan everything starts from the Kremlin

We will begin our route through Khlebnikov’s places in our city from the Tainitskaya Tower of the Kazan Kremlin. It is located on the northern side of the fortress on the banks of the Kazanka River. In the photo, it is in the foreground on the left, square, squat, with a three-tier hipped roof, topped with the symbol of a UNESCO cultural heritage site (a diamond inscribed in a circle).

To the right of the tower we see the ancient two-tier building of the palace church, and further and higher - the beautiful Syuyumbike tower - the symbol of the city of Kazan.

This panorama was seen by the young high school student Viktor Khlebnikov upon his arrival in Kazan from Simbirsk in 1898, since it is precisely this panorama that opens to a traveler arriving in our city from the west or south.

And we have the right to assume that Khlebnikov’s lines are dedicated to her:

And the view of the Volga Kremlin?

Although they can also be attributed to the Astrakhan Kremlin.

If we go around the Kremlin hill to the right of the Tainitskaya Tower (counterclockwise), then soon the following panorama will appear before us. In the center of the panorama we see the round corner South-West Tower, on the right - the expressive stepped Spasskaya Tower with a clock - the southern entrance to the Kremlin, and on the left, behind the tent of the passage of the Resurrection Tower - the dome and six minarets of the Kul Sharif mosque.

Khlebnikov could not see this mosque, since it was built at the turn of the 20th century in memory of the mosque destroyed here by the troops of Ivan the Terrible. But even during the Kazan period of his life, Viktor Khlebnikov could observe at least 15 mosques in our city. Therefore, his next lines could well have been inspired by his Kazan impressions:

The mosque and the temple are carried by the lowland

And he sees sorrow in our lot

Beautiful and wild, the call of the muezzin

Calls the peoples to new porridges.

With cobblestones there is henbane

On the clear square I was friends,

And the towers form a slender wall

She surrounded both the city and the hill.

And about the beautiful Syuyumbik tower, which you and I can get close to by going to the Kremlin, the poet speaks openly:

Kazan's guard is the needle of Sumbeki,

Rivers of tears and blood flowed there.

If you come to Kazan, you will definitely be told romantic legends about this tower, which all Kazan residents have known since childhood.

The name of the tower is associated with the name of the Kazan queen Syuyumbike, the daughter of the Nogai Murza Yusuf and the wife of the last three Kazan kings: Jan-Ali, Safa-Girey and Shah-Ali. She was brought to Kazan in 1532 and remained here until 1551, when, together with her young son Utyamysh-Girey, she was sent to Moscow. According to the description of eyewitnesses, “the people of Kazan saw off the queen with great sorrow,” and the mosque where her mourned husband Safa-Girey was buried was called the Syuyumbike mosque. Perhaps the remains of the mosque were located next to the later built tower, to which the name was traditionally transferred.

There are also more poetic legends about the name of the tower. One of them says that Ivan the Terrible, having heard about the beauty and charm of the Kazan queen Syuyumbike, sent ambassadors to Kazan with an offer for her to become the Moscow queen. But proud Syuyumbike rejected the royal hand. The angry king came with a huge army to the city and besieged it. Then the beauty agreed to get married, but as a wedding gift she asked to build the tallest tower in Kazan in seven days. Hasty construction began: on the first day they built the first, largest in size, tier, on the second day the second, etc.

Finally, at the end of the seventh day, the tower was built and the wedding feast began. Syuyumbike asked permission to climb to the very top of the tower to survey the city and say goodbye to its citizens. When the queen climbed the tower, not having the strength to part with the city that had become close and dear to her, she threw herself down onto the sharp stones. In memory of the last Kazan queen, the people named the tower after her.

Nowadays, the silhouette of the tower is often used as an architectural emblem of the city: we see it on postcards, badges, and souvenirs. The tower of the Kazansky railway station in Moscow more or less accurately reproduces the Syuyumbike tower, which, obviously, according to the architect’s plan, was supposed to indicate the direction of the railway.

Near the Syuyumbike tower there are the ruins of the tombs of the Kazan khans (“At the tomb - the ancestors of the tomb” by V. Khlebnikov).

If we return to the square in front of the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower (now called May Day Square), then one of the historical events that took place here was also reflected in Khlebnikov’s poems:

Dear, dear to us, Pugachevism,

Cossack with an earring and a dark ear.

She is known to us by rumor.

Then militant knife fight

I fought with a German and a three-faced man.

It was on this square that in July 1774 the fierce battle of Pugachev’s army for the Kazan Kremlin took place. The walls of the Kremlin were fired upon by cannons, and prisoners were taken out of the casemate (now the building of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan), among whom was Pugachev’s wife and three children. The eldest son Trofim, 11 years old, recognized his father. And Pugachev, posing as Tsar Peter III, loudly ordered: “Take the family of the Cossack Pugachev to the Arskoe field and treat them kindly.”

From here, the next day, the defeat of Pugachev’s army began, and soon after his capture and execution, a civil execution took place in Kazan on this square. In 1833, A.S. Pushkin came here, examined the walls and towers of the Kremlin, questioned surviving eyewitnesses, collecting material for “The History of Pugachev” and “The Captain’s Daughter.”

Could Khlebnikov the high school student and Khlebnikov the student know about all this? Let us recall that in 1899, when Victor was studying in the 4th grade of the gymnasium, all of Russia celebrated Pushkin’s 100th anniversary, and since Pushkin spent only 3 days in Kazan in 1833 for a specific purpose, the gymnasium teachers should have in their conversations mention both Pushkin’s visit and the “Pugachevism” in Kazan.

Now let's move from the Spasskaya Tower in the same direction - counterclockwise. Under the eastern Kremlin wall we will meet a two-story building of the city oncology hospital.

City Oncology Hospital (formerly a city transit prison)

This building housed the city Transit Prison, where Velimir Khlebnikov had to spend one month at the end of 1903 due to his participation in student unrest. This is what he wrote to his parents while here:

“Dear mom and dear dad! I didn’t write because I thought someone would come for a date. Now there’s not much left - five days - or maybe even less and time is passing quickly... I recently started drawing on the wall and copied a portrait (illegible) and two more heads from “Life”, but since this turned out to be a violation prison rules, then I erased them... I was studying physics the other day and read more than 100 pages, today I’m reading Minto... I read more than half of the analysis... I kiss everyone - Katya, Shura, Vera - see you soon. Vitya. Kazan, Transit Prison, 3.12.03.” (E.R. Arenzon, a modern researcher of Khlebnikov’s work, deciphered an illegible word in a letter from an arrested student, and claims that Khlebnikov painted a portrait of Herzen on the wall of his cell).

Not far from the eastern wall of the Kazan Kremlin is the place where the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was found. The Kazan Mother of God Convent was founded on this site in the 16th century.

The famous Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, the savior of Russia from the Poles in 1612, was kept in this monastery from the moment it was found until its daring abduction in 1904. Khlebnikov at this time was a student at Kazan University, although in the summer of 1904 he left for Moscow.

The theft and destruction of the icon shook the entire city, and aren’t these events echoing the lines written in 1922:

...And if Vila took away the golden chuvals of Kazan,

Look for it in Vila and Leshem

The instructions I gave on time...

We assume that by “golden chuvals” we can mean the precious frame of the Kazan miraculous icon.

The icon of the Kazan Mother of God was kept in this cathedral

One of the copies of the icon donated by Pope John Paul II is kept in the Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Cross in Kazan.

When Pugachev was in Kazan, here, on the porch of the monastery, the elderly Major General Kudryavtsev was brutally killed by the Pugachevites, as mentioned by A.S. Pushkin in “The History of Pugachev”:

“The condition of Kazan was terrible: out of two thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven houses in it, two thousand and fifty-seven burned down. Twenty-five churches and three monasteries also burned down. Gostiny Dvor and other houses, churches and monasteries were plundered. Up to three hundred dead and wounded ordinary people were found; about five hundred were missing. Among those killed were the director of the Kanits gymnasium, several teachers and students, and Colonel Rodionov. Major General Kudryavtsev, an old man of one hundred and ten years old, did not want to hide in the fortress, despite all kinds of admonitions. He prayed on his knees in the Kazan nunnery. Several robbers ran in. He began to exhort them. The villains killed him on the church porch.”

And now let’s read Velimir Khlebnikov’s lines about the “slender, white city” with a continuation:

You see a slender, white city,

And the view of the Volga Kremlin?

The ground is watered with blood there,

There the old man is abandoned,

Heed the terrible alarm.

Although a similar story happened in Astrakhan during the uprising of Stepan Razin, it seems to us that the events of the poet’s childhood city, which coincided with Pushkin’s anniversary, should be closer to him.

So, we have looked at objects located in and around the Kazan Kremlin, one way or another connected with the work of Velimir Khlebnikov, and now we will walk along those city streets along which this amazing man walked.

Along Voskresenskaya Street to the University

The square in front of the Spasskaya Tower is now called May Day Square, but 100 years ago it was called Alexander II Square. Approximately where we now see the monument to the poet-hero Musa Jalil, there was a monument to the Tsar-Liberator Alexander the Second.

The corner building of the former Gostiny Dvor has housed a local history museum since 1898. At the time when the Khlebnikov family lived in Kazan (1898-1908), this museum was called the city museum, now it is the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, uniting many branches located in Kazan, in the cities and villages of the republic.

Opposite the museum is the building of the former city council (with a balcony above the entrance), and then, across the house, a long two-story corner building - the house in which at the beginning of the 20th century the doctor “for skin and venereal diseases” Ivan Evgrafovich Damperov, a close friend, worked and lived Khlebnikov family.

We determined the location of the house by analyzing address calendars. In the Kazan address book for 1899, Ivan Evgrafovich Damperov is listed at the address: Voskresenskaya street, Boldyrev’s house. He is the manager of the Kazan Hunting Society and a teacher at the Kazan Zemstvo Paramedic School. The address book for 1906 indicates that I.E. Damperov, in the same Boldyrev house on Voskresenskaya Street, conducts appointments for skin and venereal diseases from 9 to 10 am and from 5 to 6 pm.

Boldyrev's house on Voskresenskaya Street has been preserved; now it has the address Kremlevskaya Street, building 7. Currently, one of the buildings of the Kazan executive committee is located there.

Boldyrev's House on Voskresenskaya - the building today

Currently, the personnel policy department of the Kazan Executive Committee is located in this building. The inhabitants of this house are shown in the following photograph.

And we are moving along Kremlevskaya Street, moving away from the Kremlin, passing by the building of the National Museum, looking at the house where the Damperovs lived from the opposite side, passing the intersection and moving along a long building that occupies the entire block.

This is the building of a former theological seminary. Now it houses the Geological Faculty of KSU. Externally, this building has hardly changed over the past 100 years.

The building of the theological seminary (now the Faculty of Geology of KSU). Modern look

This is what the building looked like when the Kazan Theological Seminary worked in it

Turning the corner and walking a few steps, we approach the ancient Peter and Paul Cathedral, built in honor of the arrival of Peter the Great in Kazan in 1722.

Peter and Paul Cathedral

Petropavlovsky Lane (now Sh. Rakhmatullin Street) departs from the cathedral; at the very beginning there is the building of the Mariinsky Gymnasium, where Katya and Vera Khlebnikov, Varya and Olya Damperov studied.

Mariinskaya Gymnasium

Velimir’s younger sister, Vera, did not like studying at the gymnasium; she, later a famous artist, wrote about this:

“in the large dead classrooms with whitewashed windows, it suddenly became eerie after the green lily of the valley, strawberry, summer forest, so welcoming, so smiling.”

During the lessons we heard: “Khlebnikova, where are you, in the clouds?” The answer was calm: “I’m drawing.”

In the National Archives of the Republic of Tatarstan, we found a report card with marks from Vera Khlebnikova, as well as Varvara and Olga Damperov.

From Vera Khlebnikova’s report cards it follows that she entered the gymnasium in August 1899 in the senior preparatory class, then regularly moved from class to class until the fifth grade, and in the fifth grade she was not certified due to frequent absences from classes and was left for the second year.

In August 1905, at the request of Vera’s mother, she was issued a certificate of completion of 4 classes of the gymnasium with an excellent mark in the Law of God, good marks in natural history and handicrafts, and satisfactory marks in the Russian language, mathematics, geography, history, French and calligraphy.

Thanks to the gymnasium report cards, we were able to clarify the date of birth of Vera Khlebnikova. This is March 20, 1890. This date appears on the report cards for the first and fifth grades; the report cards are filled in with different handwritings, therefore, with different classy ladies. We pay attention to Vera's date of birth because it does not coincide with the date from her father's service record.

The archives of the Mariinsky Gymnasium also contain school reports of the Damperov girls – Varvara and Olga. Varvara, who is called Velimir’s first love, was born on November 29, 1887, and entered the gymnasium the same year as Vera (1899). to second grade. By decree of the Pedagogical Council of May 27, 1905, Varvara Damperova was issued a certificate of completion of seven classes of the gymnasium with A grades in the Law of God, physics and geography; fours in Russian, mathematics, history, pedagogy, German, cutting and drawing, and threes in French, needlework and calligraphy.

Velimir’s older sister Katya also graduated from the Mariinsky Gymnasium.

Currently, the building of the Mariinsky Gymnasium houses the Lyceum at Kazan State University.

Moving along Kremlevskaya Street, we are approaching the educational buildings of Kazan State University. The first thing we see is the high-rise building of the Faculty of Physics. At this place at the beginning of the 20th century there was a police station with a fire tower, into which students who took part in the riots on November 5, 1903 were brought. Among them was a first-year student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, Viktor Khlebnikov (Khlebnikov wrote: “and we were taken to a building with a fire tower”...).

Opposite the physics department, the building of the KSU Faculty of Chemistry is now located, and in the time of Khlebnikov, the majestic Resurrection Cathedral stood here, which gave the name to the current Kremlin street - Voskresenskaya.

Chemical faculty

Resurrection Cathedral

Next we come to the block occupied by the university campus. On the left side we see a square with a monument to the great scientist mathematician, rector of Kazan University, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.

Monument to N. Lobachevsky

Opposite Lobachevsky Square is the main building of Kazan University - the alma mater of Kazan students of the last two centuries.

Kazan University

Velimir Khlebnikov studied here in 1903-1904 and in 1905-1908. The multi-columned portico of the main building of Kazan University remains to this day in its classical slenderness of Ionic columns.

In December, Khlebnikov successfully passed all the exams for the first semester, but did not want to study at the university anymore. On February 24, 1904, at his own request, he was dismissed from among the students and moved to St. Petersburg, where he was enrolled in the 3rd year of the natural sciences department of the university’s Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. He was overcome by a passionate desire to change places, which would be characteristic of his entire life: how many times, without any apparent reason, Khlebnikov suddenly left one city for another, or simply left on foot.

Soon Victor returns to Kazan. On August 28, 1904, he was reinstated at Kazan University, but in the natural sciences department.

In Kazan, he received initial but thorough training in a number of mathematical disciplines. And Velimir was engaged in mathematics and the search for numerical laws of time until the last day of his life. Here, “first hand,” he became acquainted with the scientific heritage of N.I. Lobachevsky. The personality of Lobachevsky, who made a revolutionary revolution in geometry, and his theory deeply struck Khlebnikov and became close to him. This is one of the key images of his poetic work.

In 1905, Khlebnikov, together with his brother Alexander, was sent on an expedition to the Urals, to the Pavdinskaya dacha to collect stuffed birds and skins. Skins and stuffed animals should be kept in the University Zoological Museum, which is located on the second floor in the left wing of the building.

There are memoirs about Khlebnikov by Ekaterina Neumayer, in which she recalls how she discussed her Kazan impressions and, in particular, the “cast iron slabs of the university” with Khlebnikov in Kharkov:

“Having learned that I traveled along the Volga and was in Kazan, I asked: what did I like there? I remember being amazed by the university’s cast iron stoves. The slabs sang. It was as if the sound was coming from different notes: from quickly walking steps - in one key, under the ladies' heels - in another. It all seemed unexpectedly magical.”

Now there are no such musical plates at the university.

So, if we turn back and take in the entire Kremlyovskaya Street that we passed, we can imagine the impressions of young Khlebnikov from this street, which he expressed in the unfinished passage “Lion”:

“...I remembered one street in Kazan, narrow, white from the sun, scorching the feet of the black cavalry in the distance, rushing towards us.”

The first academic semester ended with student unrest.

"A Past I'm Proud of"

In October 1903, an event occurred that had important consequences. On the 26th, student S. Simonov died, who was kept in a psychiatric hospital in terrible conditions for 4 months. The first student protest took place on the day of his funeral, October 27, the second on November 5, the day the university was founded. Students gathered at the snow-white columns and sang “eternal memory” to the victim of tyranny.

The text of the police report about the events of November 5, 1903 states that shouts were heard among the students: “To the theater, to the theater. We’ll sing there,” and some of the students headed to the old clinic.

And this building still looks the same, but it houses several research institutes that are part of the university. It is located opposite the left wing of the university.

Old University Clinic

Klebnikov was arrested for participating in this demonstration. Here's how he writes about it:

“The whip did not beat us, but the whip whistled over our backs. On the fourth of “November” last year we were talking peacefully at this hour at the samovar, on the fifth we sang, we stood calmly at the door of our Alma mater, and on the sixth we were already sitting in the Peryselnaya prison. This is my past that I am proud of.

The legs of the Cossack horses fell loudly onto the frozen ground when a detachment of Cossacks galloped rhythmically towards us...

With bitches in their hands, in sheepskin coats, the janitors stood around us, impassive and motionless, forming around us a ring of unspiritualized human meat, with their souls in the dark, not illuminated by consciousness.

And then two huge, clumsy hands, taking the armpits, almost led, and sometimes carried, into an old stone box with a black board above the entrance, next to which stood a fire tower.”

The poet’s mother, E.N. Khlebnikova, recalls:

“... He spent almost a month in prison... Since then, an unrecognizable change has occurred to him: all his cheerfulness disappeared, he went to lectures with disgust.”

From prison, Khlebnikov wrote to his parents:

“Dear mom and dear dad! I didn’t write because I thought someone would come for a date. Now there is not much left - five days - or maybe even less and time is passing quickly.<....>I recently started drawing on the wall and copied a portrait (illegible) and two more heads from “Life,” but since this turned out to be a violation of prison rules, I erased them.<....>. I was studying physics the other day and read more than 100 pages, today I’m reading Minto.<....>I read more than half of the analysis.<....>I kiss everyone - Katya, Shura, Vera - I'll see you soon. Vitya. Kazan, Transit Prison, 3.12.03.”

In Kazan, Victor survived the Russian-Japanese War; according to his mother, he met the 1905 revolution “with enthusiasm,” attended rallies, and took part in the work of a revolutionary circle. The Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Tsushima that took place during it had a great influence on Klebnikov and prompted him to begin searching for the “basic law of time” and to try to find an excuse for the deaths. Khlebnikov subsequently wrote: "We have rushed into the future since 1905."

Admitted in December 1906 to the Society of Naturalists of Kazan University as a member-employee and who published an article about the discovery of a new species of cuckoo during one of the expeditions, after 1906 Khlebnikov practically stopped paying attention to both ornithology and studies at the university, concentrating on literature .

Around this time, he wrote a large-scale prose work, “Enya Voeikov,” which remained unfinished, but was an important stage in Khlebnikov’s creative development. In addition, during this period he wrote a large number of poems. The “word-creative” period began in Khlebnikov’s work.

In March 1908, Khlebnikov decided to send his poems to the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, whose article “On cheerful craft and smart fun,” published in 1907 in the magazine “Golden Fleece,” made a great impression on him. In the spring of 1908, a personal acquaintance took place in Sudak. During this period, Khlebnikov, who came under the influence of Ivanov, wrote about a hundred poems and the play “The Sacrament of the Distant,” full of allusions to ancient mythology. The influence of symbolism can be seen in these works.

In September 1908, Khlebnikov was enrolled in the third year of the natural sciences department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University and moved to St. Petersburg. The main reason for the move was the desire to seriously study literature.

In 1916, Khlebnikov was called up for military service. In the same year, Velimir once again, for the last time, came to Kazan - to the hospital.

Now you and I will walk past the old university clinic and along Nuzhina Street, the former Universitetskaya, and go down to Pushkin Street. Along Pushkin Street we will pass by the monument to the chemist Butlerov, who worked at Kazan University, past the building with a memorial plaque where Gorky held his “universities” in one of the Marusovka dosshouses, we will pass by the Lenin Garden - the former Nikolaevskaya Square, about which Gorky wrote:

“If they had offered me: “Go and study, but for this, on Sundays, on Nikolaevskaya Square we will beat you with sticks,” I probably would have accepted this condition.”

Through the Leninsky Garden, laid out on the site of the former Nikolaevskaya Square, we pass to Pushkin Street, then, passing by the rooming house in Marusovka, where Gorky lived in his youth, we find ourselves on Gorky Street, passing by the Gorky Museum. In the basement of this house there is a memorial bakery where the future writer Alexey Peshkov worked.

In Khlebnikov’s time there were no memorial plaques on these buildings, but Gorky himself was already widely known and student Khlebnikov sent him his play “Elena Gordyachkina”, addressing Alexei Maksimovich like this: "Dear and dear writer."

Vera Khlebnikova recalled that when Victor received a response from Gorky, “He looked proud and joyful” despite the fact that his manuscript was crossed out in many places with a red pencil.

Moving along Gorky Street we are approaching the building of the Art School on Karl Marx Street. Now it houses the Kazan Art School; in the 20th century, for a long time there was an educational building of the Kazan Aviation Institute.

During Khlebnikov's time there was an Art School here. This is how Vera Khlebnikova wrote about this building in her memoirs:

“In the city there is a mysterious red building with sharp turrets...”

Kazan art school. Modern look

In the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, report cards of volunteers for the years 1905-1906 of Vera Khlebnikov and Alexander Khlebnikov, the sister and brother of the future poet, were found.

Vera was very glad to leave the gymnasium and study at an art school:

“...a kind of growing joy flows into the soul: paints, palette, brushes... Huge sketches with fearless strokes. Paints on the floor, on the cheeks, on the hands, on the shoes.”

The report card shows that training took place in daytime and evening classes. Vera studied in evening classes in September in the “head contour with plaster” class, then was transferred to the inking class. In the “head inking” in December, January, February and March there are marks in the line “Portrait finished.” and in the “Sketches” line in February and March. Also on Vera’s report card there are marks in the “Day classes” section in the line Natur mort of the painting class in December and January.

She, like her brother, was taught by the famous Kazan artist P.P. Benkov. After graduating from the Mariinsky Gymnasium, which was located in the current building of school No. 6, Vera entered the Kazan art school, where she studied until 1908, when the entire Khlebnikov family, except Victor, moved to Kyiv.

Judging by V. Khlebnikova’s memoirs, the joy of being at art school gradually faded. The teachers told her:

“Your works attract too much attention, it is necessary that the students’ works do not differ from one another in their reception, your mosaic is a bias... Change your style.”

Her report card for this academic year and the report card of her brother Alexander Khlebnikov have been preserved.

The student report card of the Kazan Art School is a double-sided sheet of A4 size, laid out in the form of a complex table. The table shows that training took place in day and evening classes. In evening classes, Vera studied in September in the “head contour with plaster” and had grades I-7+II+II, and was transferred to the inking class. In the “head inking” in December, January, February and March there are marks in the line “Portrait finished.” and in the “Sketches” line in February and March. The marks are a combination of Roman and Arabic numerals through the "+" and "-" signs. Also on Vera’s report card there are marks in the “Day classes” section in the line Natur mort of the painting class in December and January.

There were four evening classes: head contouring, head shading, figure and life (each of which is also divided into subclasses), and three day classes: architectural, painting and sculpture, also with subclasses. We could not find anything more about Vera Khlebnikova. The fields about date of birth, class, and what education she received were left blank.

Reading the memoirs of Vera Khlebnikova, you can try to guess that Roman numerals mean the category or degree of quality of success. If she is unhappy with marks 2 and 3, then score 1 is the best. Vera has 1 in the head contour class in September and in the “Sketches” line in the head inking class.

Khlebnikov Alexander, according to his report card for the same academic year, attended an evening figure class and a day painting class in September, and attended the same classes in December.

Viktor Khlebnikov was also a volunteer student at the school, he was also fond of drawing, and in his letter from prison to his parents he writes about her like this: “Did the Art School burn down?”

Gradually we are approaching the Arskoe field. In Soviet times, the square was called Ershov Field. In this area there was once a park “Russian Switzerland”, now it is the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Culture.

Opposite the park, behind a long fence, we see the building of the 6th city hospital, where the Theological Academy was located before the revolution. Judging by old maps, this area was called Akademicheskaya Sloboda. Teachers of the Theological Academy and University lived here.

What will we show to our descendants?

In our city, until recently, there were three houses in which the Khlebnikovs lived. One of them is on Kalinin Street. According to the directory catalog “The Republic of Tatarstan: Monuments of History and Culture,” the poet Velimir Khlebnikov lived in this house in 1906-1908: “The two-story house is designed in the traditions of folk architecture with Empire motifs in the upper part of the house (mezzanine floor, stucco on the frieze).”

It is interesting that later, in 1929-1931, one of the first professional Tatar composers, Salikh Saidashev, lived in this house.

The beginning of modern Vishnevsky Street retains its original flavor. Then the street takes on the appearance of a typical highway of a big city at the end of the 20th century. And you won’t immediately find Kalinin Street, the former Third Mountain, going off to the right. Two steps to the right - and we are as if we were in the 19th century. The street is narrow, with one- and two-story houses, with water intake points.

We passed several houses - and in front of us, against the backdrop of the building of the Kazan Academy of Construction, was a two-story yellow house with a pilaster facade, number 59. This is the former house of V.F. Maksimov, built in the second half of the 19th century. The Khlebnikov family lived in this house for 7 years, from 1898 to 1905. From here Victor went to classes at the 3rd men's gymnasium.

The poet's father first worked as a manager of the first Kazan appanage estate, which belonged to the royal family, and from 1905 he directed beekeeping courses in the Kaimar volost.

Actually, this house no longer exists. It was illegally demolished in 2004 and is now a vacant lot.

Now this house is no longer there

Khlebnikov walked past the houses where Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Ulyanov recently lived (there is a memorial plaque on the first, and a house museum in the second). Then turn right onto Poperechno-Gorshechnaya (Mayakovsky) street. A few steps along it to the winding and narrow Gymnazichesky Lane. In this alley, the future poet walked under the windows of the house where the famous orientalist Katanov lived since 1903, and walked to the very end of the alley (now Shkolny) to the building of his gymnasium, which was then located in the former house of the landowner Chemezov.

This building was built in the 18th century. At first the house belonged to the merchant Bogdanovsky, the mayor. In 1786, he sold the house to state councilor Vladimir Chemezov. The nobleman Chemezov demolished the wooden building, cut down part of the garden and built a large stone mansion, two-story, in a classical style, with a balcony on four columns. Greenhouses and hothouses were built around the house, and bridges were built across the ravines in the garden.

In the darkest and most overgrown corners of the garden, Chemezov ordered caves to be dug and grottoes built. In one of them, he installed a life-size marble statue of Richard the Lionheart, which was chained to the stone wall of the grotto. In short, there was something to see in the garden.

Chemezov's garden was available to the Kazan public. Anyone could visit its caves and grottoes and relax in the gazebos.

In 1880, the house was purchased for the building of a new men's gymnasium, the third in a row. Chemezov's garden still existed, although at that time it was already 100 years old.

Currently, we can only observe the Chemezovsky House in its original form. Until 1999, classes were held in the former gymnasium, but then, due to major renovations, all educational premises of the fourth school were transferred to a new building.

The future poet - then his name was Victor - studied here from the fourth grade (1898-1903). Vyacheslav Aristov wrote:

“Among... V. Khlebnikov’s mentors at the gymnasium, the teacher of history and geography V.A. stood out. Belilin (a graduate of Kazan University, author of a historical note about the third gymnasium) and penmanship and drawing teacher P.K. Vagin (from the Vyatka peasants, received the title of “non-class artist” at the Academy of Arts). The arrogant Frenchman A.Ya knew his subject perfectly. Por.

However, students were especially looking forward to mathematics lessons in high school, taught by Nikolai Nikolaevich Parfentyev (1877-1943), who had just graduated from Kazan University. It was thanks to him that Viktor Khlebnikov first became acquainted with the basic principles of Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry, which so amazed him and sank deeply into his soul.

At home, with home teachers, Victor does a lot of painting. Khlebnikov’s mastery of painting techniques and artistic talent were noted by everyone who knew him in his later years.”

Not far from house No. 59 there is another house in which Khlebnikov lived as a student (Volkova Street), house 46 (old address: Second Mountain, Ulyanov House). This is the address indicated on the student ID in 1903, and it is indicated as a return address in a letter from Khlebnikov to Vyacheslav Ivanov dated March 31, 1908.

The house is intact and is the private property of several families. Currently, the management of the Kazan branch of the Russian International Academy of Tourism is busy with efforts to install a memorial plaque on this house.

Another house - on Telman Street, No. 23 - has not survived to this day. In March 1998, it stood unharmed and people lived in it; in the winter of 1999, it had only walls; the internal partitions and floors had already been destroyed. And at the end of January 2001, there was already a construction site on the site of the demolished house and two neighboring houses.

Read the manual again:

“A two-story house with a glassed-in covered veranda above the front entrance. Above the outer windows the cornice is raised above the shaped gables. The windows have carved frames. The gable walls are highlighted with pilasters. The father of the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, as well as the famous pediatrician A. Agafonov and history professor M.V. Brechkevich lived in Chirkina’s house in 1905-1906.”

We also want to draw your attention to buildings related to other members of the Khlebnikov family.

This is the building of the second men's gymnasium, where Velimir's father, Vladimir Alekseevich, studied around 1868-1873. Now it houses the center for children's creativity of the Vakhitovsky district. This building is located on the left bank of the Bulak canal.

Second men's gymnasium

On the same side of Bulak there is the building of the former Kazan Real School, where Alexander Khlebnikov studied. Now it houses one of the educational buildings of the Pedagogical University.

Former Kazan real school. Modern look

Initial view

“The people of my task,” the poet spoke sadly and calmly, often die at 37.”

In the spring of 1922, seriously ill, he went with his sister’s husband, an artist, to the Novgorod province. There, in the village of Santalovo, on June 28, Khlebnikov died. He was 37 years old.

The material is posted on the website of the head of the department of special disciplines

Kazan branch of the Russian International Academy of Tourism, candidate of pedagogical sciences

Alexandra Revmirovna Biryaltseva

Read in “Kazan Stories”:

BIOGRAPHY

KHLEBNIKOV Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich)- poet, leading theorist of futurism.

Born into the family of a natural scientist, ornithologist and forester. From 1903 he was a student at Kazan University, in 1908-1911 at St. Petersburg University (did not graduate).

In St. Petersburg, he attended literary “environments” in the “tower” of Vyach. Ivanov and the “Academy of Verse” at the magazine “Apollo”. With late symbolism, X. brought together an interest in philosophy, mythology, Russian history, Slavic folklore (Slavic name Velimir the poet was “named” in the “tower”).

However, despite the outward student-devoted adherence to the “precepts of symbolism,” X. was internally alien to this trend, as well as to the emerging Acmeism. The divergence was based on a fundamental difference in views on the nature of the Word (language) and Time. Symbolists and Acmeists sought to identify encoded “eternal essences” in an abstract word and moved modernity into the context of the previous culture, took the present to the “primordial clarity of the past” (“Clarism” by Vyach. Ivanov, “Adamism” by S. Gorodetsky and N. Gumilyov) Philosophical- X's aesthetic orientation was fundamentally different. The poet counted the beginning of his work from the unusually powerful social year of 1905: “We rushed into the future... from 1905” (although he sent some of his literary experiments to M. Gorky back in 1904). Acutely experiencing the shameful defeat in the East and the strangulation of the first Russian revolution, intensely reflecting on the course of history, X. made a utopian attempt to find some universal numerical laws of Time, one way or another influencing the fate of Russia and all humanity.

The past, present and future in his utopian system were represented as only fragments of a single continuous Time, elastic and cyclically repeating in its circular development. The present, being, together with the past, part of the totality of time, thus received the opportunity to move to a “scientifically predictable” future. X. approaches this issue as a research scientist, but, being a poet by his natural essence, he comprehends Time through a mythopoetic prism and turns the subject of research into his main and lifelong theme, along with another constant hero of his poetry - the Word, language.

The word in his philosophical and poetic system ceased to be only a means of transmitting cultural tradition in its semantic and aesthetic meanings, but became an intrinsically significant and self-valuable sensory reality, a thing and, therefore, part of space. It was in this way, through Time (the past, as well as the present), recorded by the Word (reified, materialized) and transformed into a spatial fragment, that the sought-after philosophical unity of “space-time” was realized.

A unity that allows for the possibility of its reorganization in the word and, therefore, amenable to active regulation at the will of the speechmaker. An outwardly logically clear concept of overcoming physical time as space was created through the restoration (in the past) and reconstruction (in the present and future) of words-things and the re-creation on this basis of the entire system of legalized artistic forms and social institutions frozen in space and time.

It was as if a single “book of existence” was opening, the book of Nature - X.’s utopian dream, to the poetic embodiment of which he devoted his entire life.

X.'s quests were fully consistent with the general path of future-oriented futurism, which attributed meanings, as opposed to symbolist, otherworldly abstractions, to sensory givens. This also happened in painting, which also sought the unity of “space-time” and saturated spatial representation with the “fourth dimension,” i.e., time.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that after meeting V. Kamensky, who contributed to the first publication of the poet (The Temptation of a Sinner // Spring. – 1908. – No. 10), and rapprochement with a group of poets and artists (D. and N. Burliuk, E. Guro, M. Matyushin) X. becomes the “invisible”, but the main “axis of rotation” of futurism.

In 1910, a joint collection of a group of futurists - “Budetlyans” in the Slavic publicity invented by X. - “The Judges' Tank” was published. Later they were joined by A. Kruchenykh, B. Livshits and V. Mayakovsky. Another collection of "Budetlyans" "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" (1912) almost half consisted of X.'s works: the poem "I and E", "Persecuted - by whom, how do I know?..", the famous "experimental" "Grasshopper" and " Bobeobi's lips sang..." On the last page of the collection was printed a table calculated by the poet with the dates of great historical upheavals. The last date was 1917 (compare with the prophecy generated by X. in V. Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Pants”: “... the sixteenth year is coming in the crown of thorns of revolutions”). X., who called himself “the artist of the number of the eternal head of the universe,” constantly carried out similar calculations, testing his theory of circular Time and trying to “reasonably substantiate the right to providence” (see his book: “Teacher and Student,” 1912; “Battles of 1915 -1917 New doctrine of war", 1915; "Time is the measure of the world", 1916; "Boards of Fate", 1922; articles "Dispute about primacy" and "Law of Generations", 1914. Some ideas of X. about "life rhythms" " are confirmed by modern chronobiology).

In 1910 books by X. “Roar!”, “Creations 1906-1908”, “Collection of Poems. 1907-1914”, the “primitive” Slavic-pagan utopias he had previously developed are being developed: “The Serpent of the Train”, 1910; "Forest Maiden", 1911; "I and E", 1912; “Shaman and Venus”, “Vila and the Goblin”, 1912; "Children of the Otter", 1913; "Trumpet of the Martians", 1916; “Swans of the Future”, 1918. They poetically formulated X’s dream of the worldwide unity of “creators” and “inventors” (their antipodes - “nobles” and “acquirers”) in the bosom of a single and all-time Mother Nature, inspired by human labor. X. proposed: “Calculate every labor in heartbeats - the monetary unit of the future, in which every living person is equally rich” (V, 157). (For a discussion of the topic of labor that is important for X., see: “We, Labor, the First and so on and so forth...”, “Ladomir”, etc.) The supreme representative of the “creatives,” according to X., is the poet, and art becomes life project (the idea of life-building art). Poetic utopias and the poet’s life behavior merge: X.’s lifelong wanderings around Russia begin as an expression of the special “extra-everyday” existence of the creator.

By 1917, the understanding of art as a program of life was transformed into a generally anarchic utopia about the messianic role of poets - seers and prophets, who, together with other cultural figures, should create an international society of Chairmen of the Globe of 317 members (317 is one of the “magical” ones derived by X. numbers of Time). The “Chairmen” are called upon to implement the program of world harmony in the “superstate of the star” (“Appeal of the Chairmen of the Globe”, 1917).

Simultaneously with the creation of “primitive” and cosmomythological utopias, X. also acts as a rebellious author of anti-bourgeois and anti-technocratic grotesque prophecies about the “rebellion of things,” which, according to the poet, is inevitable in an urbanized future if the community of “acquirers” and “nobles” becomes its manager. (poem “Crane”, 1909; play “Marquise Dezes”, 1909-1911, etc.).

During the First World War, X.'s social activity increased significantly, and his interest in the topic of modernity was clearly revealed (in 1916-1917, the poet served as a private in the army). This trend intensified during the years of revolution and civil war. X., joining in humanistic pathos with Mayakovsky, does not accept the imperialist massacre (poems “War in the Mousetrap”, 1915-1922; “The Slave Coast”, 1921), but in the daring uprising of the “soldiers of the earth” he, like A. Blok, sees the justice of historical retribution and the Slavic epic scope of the reconstruction of the Universe on new scientific and labor human foundations (“Stone Woman”, 1919; “Night in the Trench”, “Ladomir”, 1920; “Night before the Soviets”, “The Present”, “Night search", "Crimson Checker", 1921). X. actively cooperates with the Soviet government, works in the Baku and Pyatigorsk branches of ROSTA, in many newspapers, in the Political Education of the Volga-Caspian Flotilla.

However, even in these years the poet remains a utopian dreamer. X. still saw the main force capable of overcoming the “earthly chaos” and uniting the “creators” of the whole world (along with mastering the “numerical” laws of Time) in the newly created, invented “stellar” language, suitable for the entire “star” - Earth. It is this, and not just the unequivocally nihilistic shockingness of the futurists who rejected the entire complex of culture of the past (including language), that explains the extensive poetic and linguistic experiments of X., which accompanied all of his work and seemed to many contemporaries to be the only end in itself and the essence of Khlebnikov’s poetry. X. undertook a reform of the poetic language in its entirety. Sound in his poetic system carries an intrinsic value that can imbue works with artistic meaning (see the article “Our Basis”, 1919). X. found the origins of meaningful phonemes in folk spells and conspiracies (see the poem “Night in Galicia”, 1913), which, according to the poet’s definition, were “like an abstruse language in the folk word” (V, 225), hence the term “abstruse ", "abstruse language".

Words, decomposed into “original” phonetic meanings, X. reassembles on the basis of consonances, trying to form nests of neologisms of the same root (he initially called this process “conjugation” of roots, and later “rooting”). “Experimental” works were constructed using this method: “The Spell of Laughter”, “Lyubho”, etc.

The experiment also extended to syntax (even to the point of abandoning punctuation marks), giving rise to a special associative structure of verse on the external basis of primitivist technique and emphasized infantilism of poetics: raeshnik, lubok, anachronism, “graphomania,” etc.

“The child and the savage,” wrote Yu. Tynyanov about X., “were a new poetic face, suddenly mixing the solid “norms” of meter and word” (Introductory Art., I, 23). X.’s anti-aesthetic “savagery” and “infantilism” were indeed a form of futuristic shocking in relation to the old bourgeois world frozen in generally accepted “norms”. However, the holistic essence of poetico-linguistic experiments was broader and included not only destructive, but also creative pathos. With the disappearance of the nihilistic principle in X.’s post-October work, the poet abandons many of the extremes of his experiments in the field of “abstruse” poetics. At the same time, he continues to search for methods for updating the genre structure of lyrics, epic and drama on the path to creating a single “synthetic” genre formation. This should include Khlebnikov’s unsuccessful attempts to create “super stories” (“Scratch on the Sky”, 1920; “Zangezi”, 1922), conceived as a kind of “book of destinies” containing universal keys to mastering “new” knowledge and the laws of life creativity.

Remaining in line with utopian idealistic concepts, X., in the conditions of modern times, objectively could not unite a long-lasting artistic movement around his philosophical and poetic teaching. However, his artistic contribution to the theory and practice of Soviet poetry is extremely significant (word and rhyme creation, development of intonational verse, polyphony of rhythms, philosophical issues, humanistic pathos, genre innovations, etc.). Mayakovsky, who considered X.’s poems an example of “engineering,” “inventive” poetry, understandable “only to seven futurist comrades,” said, however, that these poems “charged numerous poets.” The action of Khlebnikov’s “charge”, in the force field of which Mayakovsky, N. Aseev, B. Pasternak, O. Mandelstam, M. Tsvetaeva, N. Zabolotsky and many others fell. etc., extends to modern Soviet poetry (V. Vysotsky, A. Voznesensky, E. Yevtushenko, representatives of the so-called “rock poetry”, etc.).

Op.: Poems. – M., 1923; Collection prod. Velimira Khlebnikova: In 5 volumes – L., 1928-1933; Favorite poetry - M., 1936; Poems. – L., 1940; Poems and poems. – L., 1960; Poems. Poems. Dramas. Prose. – M., 1986; Creations. –

Lit.: Stepanov N. Velimir Khlebnikov: Life and Creativity. – M., 1975; Grigoriev V.P. Grammar of idiostyle: V. Khlebnikov, - M., 1983.

http://az.lib.ru/h/hlebnikow_w/text_0010.shtml

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Khlebnikov Velimir (biography October 28, 1885 - June 28, 1922) - Russian poet and prose writer, one of the largest figures of the Russian avant-garde. He was one of the founders of Russian futurism; reformer of poetic language, experimenter in the field of word creation and zaumi, “chairman of the globe.”

Brief biography - Khlebnikov Velimir

Option 1

Khlebnikov Velimir (real name Viktor Vladimirovich) (1885-1922), poet.

In 1903 he graduated from high school in Kazan and entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University. For participation in student unrest he was expelled and was under arrest for some time; He completed his education only in 1911 at St. Petersburg University.

In 1903 and 1903 As part of scientific expeditions, he visited Dagestan and the Urals. Khlebnikov's first works (1905) were articles on ornithology. Literary works were published in 1908.

Soon (from 1910) people started talking about the poems of Khlebnikov, who published under the pseudonym Budetlyanin (“The Spell of Laughter,” “The Menagerie,” etc.).

The poet entered the avant-garde community “Gilea” and became interested in reforming the poetic language. In 1916-1917 Khlebnikov held the rank of private in the reserve regiments; anti-war poems of this period were included in the poem “War in the Mousetrap” (1919), imbued with the dream of universal brotherhood. The poet welcomed the revolutionary events of 1917, but sharply criticized the “Red Terror.”

In 1919, in Kharkov, occupied by the White Guards, he evaded conscription into the army, for which he went to a psychiatric hospital for examination. Despite hunger and suffering from typhus twice, he did not stop working hard.

In 1920 he created the poems “Night in the Trench”, “Ladomir”, “Scratch on the Sky”, in 1921 - “Night Search”, “Chairman of the Cheka”, “Night before the Soviets”.

In 1921, as a correspondent for the newspaper “Red Iran,” Khlebnikov visited Persia with units of the Red Army. At the end of the year, the poet moved to Moscow, where he would have died of exhaustion if not for the help of friends.

In his youth, impressed by the sinking of the battleship Petropavlovsk in 1904, Khlebnikov vowed to find the “fundamental law of time” that governs the destinies of people. It was the discovery of such a law, made in 1920, that he considered his main achievement.

The results of the search are summed up in the book “Boards of Fate” (1922). Soon a new problem came - malaria. Hopes of receiving treatment in the Novgorod province were not justified.

In 1960, the remains were reburied at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow

Option 2

Velimir Khlebnikov’s birthplace was the small village of Malye Derbety, located in distant Kalmykia. The Khlebnikov family lived there - the father, a representative of an old merchant family, a passionate lover of nature, a talented ornithologist and ethnographer, a mother, a graduate of the Smolny Institute, and their five children. An educated and well-read woman, the mother sought to instill in her children a thirst for knowledge, in which she succeeded: the younger Khlebnikovs continued self-education throughout their lives.

Velimir often went with his father to fields and forests, where both observed birds and animals. Subsequently, Velimir’s father founded the first nature reserve in Russia.

As a student (first at Kazan University, then at St. Petersburg), Velimir (the poet’s real name, by the way, is Victor) wrote several articles about representatives of the animal world for scientific journals. But soon his interests changed: he became interested in poetry.

Khlebnikov’s work is a real innovation in the field of literature and linguistics. The following is curious: the futurist poet sought to combine in his works objects that seemed completely incompatible, ice and fire: for example, in his story (he called it a “super story”) “Zangezi,” tables and mathematical formulas suddenly appear in the middle of a smooth text.

This format is difficult to comprehend in the mind of a reader who is accustomed to separating “the cutlet from the fly”: formulas should be in mathematics textbooks, and the story should be in a literary collection. But for Khlebnikov, the boundaries are arbitrary: it is as if he lives in a different dimension.

Having left his studies, Velimir focuses all his energies on the poetic field. He publishes several collections of poems, among which the most stunning of his contemporaries was “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” The book includes poems not only by Khlebnikov, but most of them belonged to his pen. This was the first bright statement about myself.

Interesting: at the end of the collection there was a page where various states and the dates of their falls (already accomplished) were listed. Among them was a note: “Someone - 1917.” It is clear to us that we are talking about Russia, but how could we have predicted this in 1912, when the book was published? This page was designed by Khlebnikov. It turns out that he also possessed the gift of a prophet?..

Velimir himself believed that if you collect as many facts as possible about a phenomenon, an event, a state, or a person, then it is quite possible to predict its future, and there is nothing mystical about it. For some time, the poet studied Russia deeply, trying to find the formula that would answer the question of its future fate.

The personal life of Velimir Khlebnikov contained few happy moments. So, he served in the army during the First World War, and the spectacle of senseless suffering and death deeply shocked the poet, leaving an unhealed wound in his soul. Velimir was hopelessly in love with Anna Akhmatova and never created his own family. He had nothing at all except creativity: he wandered around other people's apartments and begged. All his wealth consisted of manuscripts, which he carried with him everywhere.

Khlebnikov died barely reaching his 37th birthday: paralysis of the legs occurred due to exhaustion and weakening of the body. It seems that he also knew the date of his end: “People of my type die at 37.” With these words, the poet recalled, .

The poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov is strange and mysterious. His “times” fly, “times” rustle, and “smart laughers” laugh at everything. Combinations that seemed wild at first glance, broken lines, neologisms with which he tried to replace foreign words - he believed that the Russian language should be cleared of everything superficial, “foreign” - all this at first can lead the reader into a kind of stupor, because, having encountered something - something fundamentally new, at first we don’t understand how to react to it. But then, when you listen to the sounds, you begin to feel harmony: the puzzle comes together, the picture emerges.

Khlebnikov lived focused on the future. He dreamed of a world in which there would be no state associations fighting for territory and subjects, but there would be one big human family that would entrust the rule to 317 heads. A wonderful time will come, love and universal trust will reign. States will stop “feeding on people.”

The poet, unfortunately, did not live to see this wonderful time. Maybe we will live to see it - or at least we will bring the moment of its onset closer. Let's open the volume of Khlebnikov's poems more often. Perhaps the poet left a recipe for a wonderful future for his descendants, but we cannot decipher it yet...

Option 3

In St. Petersburg, he became close to the Symbolists and often visited the famous “Tower,” as the poets called the apartment of the head of the Symbolists, Vechaslav Ivanov. Soon Khlebnikov became disillusioned with the style of symbolism. In 1910, Khlebnikov published his programmatic poem “The Spell of Laughter,” which was created based on one word “laughter.” In 1912, a new collection appeared with the futurists’ program “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.”

It caused a storm of indignation not only for its content. The collection was printed on wrapping paper, and everything in it was topsy-turvy. Khlebnikov spent the spring of 1912 near Kherson on the estate where D. Burliuk’s father served as manager. There in Kherson, he published his first brochure with numerical and linguistic materials - “Teacher and Student”. Khlebnikov dreamed of creating a universal culture in which the culture and art of different peoples would be united on equal terms.

In his work he pays special attention to the culture and poetry of the East. In the poems “Medium and Leyli”, “Hadji-Tarkhan”, the prose story “Yesir”, and in many other works, Khlebnikov reflects the psychology, philosophy, history of the peoples of the East, and tries to find the common thing that unites people all over the world. In the spring of 1922, Khlebnikov arrived in Moscow from the south, already seriously ill.

In June of the same year. The poet died in the village of Santalovo, Novogorod province, where he went to visit his friend to rest for treatment. In 1960, the ashes of Viktor Khlebnikov were transported to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Full biography - Khlebnikov Velimir

Velimir Khlebnikov (real name Viktor Vladimirovich) (1885–1922), Russian poet and prose writer of the Silver Age, a prominent figure in Russian avant-garde art.

Born on October 28 (November 9), 1885 in the Maloderbetovsky ulus of the Astrakhan province in the family of an ornithologist and forester, later the founder of the first nature reserve in the USSR. From early childhood, Khlebnikov accompanied his father on trips, kept phenological and ornithological records, later participated in scientific expeditions to Dagestan, and together with his brother in 1905 he made an independent scientific trip to the Urals.

The first of his surviving poems began with the line “What are you singing about, bird in a cage?..” Velimir Khlebnikov’s mother devoted herself to raising five children, who, thanks to her, received a good education at home and acquired a taste for literature, painting and history.

Due to his father's official duties, the family moved frequently. In 1897, Khlebnikov went to the 3rd grade of the Simbirsk gymnasium, then the family moved to Kazan, where the future poet graduated from the gymnasium and entered the university in 1903. During his studies, he wrote poetry and prose, studied painting, mathematics, biology, chemistry, philosophy, and studied Japanese. University professors considered him a promising naturalist.

Velimir Khlebnikov himself wrote about himself in 1904: “Let them read on the gravestone: “He found the true classification of sciences, he connected time with space, he created the geometry of numbers. He found the Slavs, he founded an institute for studying the prenatal life of a child...”

In 1908, Khlebnikov arrived in St. Petersburg and entered the university - first at the Faculty of Science, then at the Faculty of History and Philology (leaving his studies in 1911). He became close to the circle of Symbolists and attended Vyach’s “Wednesdays”. Ivanov and the “Academy of Verse” at the magazine “Apollo”, where he met with the Acmeists. Khlebnikov was brought closer to the Symbolists by his interest in mythology, Russian history and folklore (it was in the circle of Vyacheslav Ivanov that he received the ancient Slavic name Velimir). However, already in these years, Khlebnikov had different views on the nature of words from the Symbolists and Acmeists. Since 1905, heavily experiencing the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and the defeat of the First Russian Revolution, he tried to derive the numerical laws of Time that influence the fate of mankind.

In 1908, the first poem by Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Temptation of a Sinner,” was published in the magazine “Spring”. At the same time, he met V. Kamensky, D. Burliuk and other members of the Gileya group, who were then joined by V. Mayakovsky and B. Livshits. Soon Khlebnikov became the main theorist of futurism, which he called “budetlyanism.” His poems were included in the futuristic collection “The Fishing Tank of Judges” (1910), with which a new literary movement announced itself. In the same year, several more poetic and theoretical books by Khlebnikov were published - “Roar!”, “Creations 1906–1908”, etc.

The famous collection of futurists “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912) half consisted of poems by Velimir Khlebnikov - “The Grasshopper”, “Bobeobi Sang Lips...” and others. The rhythmic and sound structure of these poems, as well as the play “Marquis Dezes” written by that time ( 1909–1911) and the poem “The Crane” (1909) was focused on colloquial speech. In “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” a table compiled by Khlebnikov, “A Look at 1917,” was published, in which he, according to his calculations of the laws of time, predicted the “fall of the state.”

In 1912, Velimir Khlebnikov’s book “Teacher and Student” was published, in which he outlined the foundations of bytolianism as a new art. His poetic-linguistic research formed the basis of the “abstruse language”, developed by him together with the poet A. Kruchenykh and embodied in their common poem “The Game in Hell” (1912). In the general collection of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov “The Word as Such” (1913), it was said about “zaumi” that it uses “chopped words, half-words and their bizarre, cunning combinations.” According to Khlebnikov’s definition, in “zaumi” there is a “conjugation of the roots” of words that were initially decomposed into phonetic components.

With the outbreak of World War I, Khlebnikov began studying the laws of past wars in order to predict the course of the current war. The result of this work was the book “Battles of 1915–1917. New doctrine of war" (1915) and "Time is the measure of peace" (1916). Rejection of world carnage forms the content of the poem “War in the Mousetrap” (1915–1922) and other works of this period.

In 1916, Velimir Khlebnikov was drafted into the army and ended up in a reserve regiment in Tsaritsyn, where, in his words, “he went through all the hell of the poet’s transformation into a mindless animal.” With the help of a doctor he knew, he managed to get released from the army. At this time, the poet dreamed of creating a society of Chairmen of the Globe, which could include everyone who felt their unity with humanity and responsibility for its fate. In Khlebnikov’s understanding, art has a life-building significance in the fate of the “creative” poet.

The poet’s wanderings around Russia are connected with the need for the extra-domestic existence of the “creator”. Khlebnikov believed that “poetry is like a journey; you need to be where no one has been before.” Khlebnikov’s lifestyle is accurately described in the memoirs of the poet N. Aseev: “In the world of petty calculations and painstaking arrangements of one’s own destinies, Khlebnikov was striking with his calm disinterest and non-participation in human vanity.

He looked least like a typical writer of those times: either a priest at the height of recognition, or a petty scoundrel of literary bohemia. And he didn’t look like a person of any particular profession. He looked most like a long-legged, thoughtful bird... Everyone around him treated him tenderly and somewhat bewildered.”

October 1917 Velimir Khlebnikov met in Petrograd. Subsequently he described what he saw in the poem “Night Search” (1921). In 1918 he was in Astrakhan and described his impressions in the poem “The Night Before the Soviets” (1921). In 1920–1921 in Ukraine, Khlebnikov witnessed the defeat of Denikin’s army, which he described in the poems “Night in the Trench” (1920), “The Stone Woman” (1919), in the story “Crimson Checker” (1921) and other works.

Then Khlebnikov came to the Caucasus, where he worked in various newspapers, in the Baku and Pyatigorsk branches of ROSTA, in the Political Education of the Volga-Caspian Fleet. Revolutionary events in the East became the theme of the poem “Tyrant without Te” (1921). The understanding of the revolution as a universal phenomenon occurs in the poem “Ladomir” (1920), published in Kharkov. Its title is a neologism invented by Velimir Khlebnikov to denote universal harmony. In “Ladomir” an image of indivisible humanity, united with nature, is created.

In December 1921 Velimir Khlebnikov returned to Moscow. His prophecy regarding his own fate dates back to this time: “People of my task often die at the age of thirty-seven.” In 1922 he wrote “Zangezi”, defining the genre of this work as a “super-story” and explaining its internal structure as follows: “A super-story, or commandment, consists of independent passages, each with its own special god, special faith and special charter... This is an epic of consciousness, an epic about the thought process that connects the past and future of humanity.” The name of the main character - a misunderstood prophet, the author's "second self" - is derived from the merger of the names of the Ganges and Zambezi rivers, symbolizing Eurasia and Africa. “Zangezi” uses an abstruse language, in addition to which the poem also uses, according to the author, bird language, the language of the gods, star language, word decomposition, sound writing, and crazy language. The super-story includes “Boards of Fate” - numerical relationships between historical events compiled by Khlebnikov.

In the spring of 1922, already seriously ill, Khlebnikov went to the Novgorod province together with the artist P. Miturich.

The work of Velimir Khlebnikov had a huge influence on many major poets of the 20th century. - V. Mayakovsky, O. Mandelstam, M. Tsvetaev, B. Pasternak, N. Zabolotsky and others, and on the development of new - rhythmic, word-creating and prophetic - possibilities of poetry.

Several decades have passed since the death of this poet, and debates about his work continue to this day. Some see in him only an abstruse poet, others call Khlebnikov the greatest poet - an innovator. Khlebnikov's real name is Viktor Vladimirovich.
Victor graduated from high school in 1898 in Kazan and entered the university there. Already at this time he was seriously interested in literature, and began writing while still in high school.
In 1908, Khlebnikov continued his studies at St. Petersburg University in the natural sciences department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. But after 3 years he was expelled because he did not pay the tuition fee.
In St. Petersburg, he became close to the Symbolists and often visited the famous “Tower,” as the poets called the apartment of the head of the Symbolists, Vechaslav Ivanov. Soon Khlebnikov became disillusioned with the style of symbolism. In 1910, Khlebnikov published his programmatic poem “The Spell of Laughter,” which was created based on one word “laughter.” In 1912 A new collection has appeared with the futurists’ program “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” It caused a storm of indignation not only for its content. The collection was printed on wrapping paper, and everything in it was topsy-turvy.

Spring 1912 Khlebnikov spent time near Kherson on the estate where D. Burliuk’s father served as manager. There in Kherson, he published his first brochure with numerical and linguistic materials - “Teacher and Student”. Khlebnikov dreamed of creating a universal culture in which the culture and art of different peoples would be united on equal terms. In his work he pays special attention to the culture and poetry of the East. In the poems “Medium and Leyli”, “Hadji-Tarkhan”, the prose story “Yesir”, and in many other works, Khlebnikov reflects the psychology, philosophy, history of the peoples of the East, and tries to find the common thing that unites people all over the world. In the spring of 1922 Khlebnikov arrived in Moscow from the south already seriously ill.

In June of the same year. The poet died in the village of Santalovo, Novogorod province, where he went to visit his friend to rest for treatment. In 1960 The ashes of Viktor Khlebnikov were transported to Moscow and buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

18 interesting facts from the life of Velimir Khlebnikov

Russian avant-garde writer Velimir Khlebnikov was a very extraordinary person. He had a hand in the development of futurism in literature, had a huge influence on the development of poetic language and left a legacy to his descendants in the form of many magnificent works. Khlebnikov’s biography is interesting in itself, but it’s definitely worth getting acquainted with at least his most famous poems and stories.

Facts from the life of Velimir Khlebnikov

The writer's real name is Victor.
Some of his works were published under the pseudonym “E. Lunev."
Velimir Khlebnikov had two brothers and two sisters.
He was born into a well-read and educated family, so books became his best friends since childhood.
When he was a student, he was arrested for a whole month for participating in an anti-government demonstration, and subsequently expelled from the university.
At the age of 19, he sent one of his works to the publishing house supervised by Maxim Gorky, but it was rejected.
The pseudonym “Velimir” was given to him by familiar symbolist writers with whom he communicated a lot at the dawn of his literary activity.
The works of Velimir Khlebnikov are replete with words invented by him. Some of them took root and subsequently entered dictionaries. In particular, it was he who coined the word “airplane”.
At the university he studied not literature, but mathematics and physics. This did not prevent him from writing his first plays in parallel with his studies.
Once, while spending the night in the steppe, Khlebnikov lit a fire with his own manuscripts so as not to freeze.
He was friendly with.
In one of his works, he predicted the First World War and the October Revolution.
Velimir Khlebnikov lived most of his life in poverty.
He categorically did not like reading his works aloud.
At one time, the writer lived in the house of the baker Filippov, who was a fan of his work, and therefore agreed to shelter the writer.
During the Civil War, not wanting to serve in the White Guard army of General Denikin, Velimir Khlebnikov spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Interesting fact: another famous writer, Valentin Kataev, served as a volunteer under Denikin.
Once at a masquerade he dressed up as a Roman patrician, and in this form the police arrested him while he was walking around the city. Khlebnikov spent the night in the police station, and the next morning his friends rescued him with some difficulty.
Velimir Khlebnikov died in a remote village from malnutrition and gangrene, having lived only 37 years. Four decades later, his ashes were transferred from the local graveyard to one of the Moscow cemeteries.

Khlebnikov's best poems:

Khlebnikov’s poems are written emotionally: there are streams of water, and meetings of lovers, and the happiness of breathing, living, rejoicing in the miracle of existence. The colors of nature sparkle in all his works.

The basis of the poet's worldview was unselfishness, the desire for goodness and justice. He loved life and all living things. The “waxwings” and “times” generated by his imagination carry ringing joy, hope and a feeling of absolute freedom.

The poet captured the movement of nature, felt the course of history, revolution and wars, he was interested in themes of the future and the present. In his poem “Cold Water Stream...” true poetry triumphs. Thanks to poetic skill, an evening in the mountains appears before the reader, with its smells and sounds. In a few lines the poet managed to convey the grandeur of the universe.

Based on native Russian words, without violating the laws of Russian word formation, the poet created vivid poems, even with some semblance of meaning: including neologisms in them. This is how children compose their rhymes, experimenting with words. According to the poet, he wanted to “find, without tearing up the roots, the magic stone of transforming all Slavic words into one another.” The best of these poems are included in the school curriculum.

In his work, Khlebnikov also showed interest in the social issues of his time, and responded to scientific discoveries and events of historical significance. In the poem “Alferovo” the poet makes an attempt to analyze the history of Russia. Many glorious Russian commanders gave their lives to serve their homeland. Victories in the war alternated with defeats, but their glory will not fade for centuries.

You will find the poet’s classic futuristic (long and short) poems on this page.