![]() ![]() cover an extraordinary variety of topics-e.g., nature, science, mathematics, politics, folklore, and history. The dramatist reaches even higher in the supersagas Otter's Children and Zangezi, achieving a Wagnerian fusion of action, poetry, history, theory, and the musical rhythms of incantation. In The Little Devil, The Marquise des S., and the sardonic Miss Death Makes a Mistakes, Khlebnikov finally finds a stageable theatrical form, in a mixture of satire, colloquial speech, and poetic reflections on art and immortality. ![]() The Girl-God, symbolist-inspired, is a mélange of stylistic shifts and impossible scene changes. But it is in the dramatic text that we best see Khlebnikov's struggle to find a workable form for his vision. The fictions, ranging from the mysterious "Murksong" to the epic "Yasir," show a great variety of styles and themes. They chronicle the artist's imagination in his feverish search for a poetics that could be as diverse as the universe itself. Paul Schmidt's are the first translations of these works into English. ![]() The second volume of the Collected Works consists of Khlebnikov's fiction (thirty-five short stories, dreams, mysteries, and fanciful folktales), his plays, and his unique supersagas, a syncretic genre he created to encompass his iconoclastic view of the world. In Russia a powerful and growing mythology surrounds this Futurist poet and his reputation elsewhere continues to mount. Velimir Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great innovators of literary modernism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |