![]() These goals and researches were variously embodied as well in stories, plays, and visionary essays in which Khlebnikov advances architectural plans for mobile cities, a new alphabet based on universal meanings of sounds, and communication by way of vast television networks. Experiments with words became magical paths to a reinvigorated future, and produced some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language. He coined the terms “Futurian” and “Presidents of Planet Earth” for himself and his friends, and he devoted all of his short, restless life to finding a language appropriate to his vision. ![]() Now, in a powerful American rendition, we are given access to the strange and beautiful world of Khlebnikov, “the word’s wild highwayman.” Trained in the natural sciences and mathematics and by temperament an artist, Khlebnikov thought he had discovered the Laws of Time and Tables of Destiny, by which enlightened humans could live in harmony with themselves and with nature. ![]() Even Russians are generally baffled by him. Hailed by his contemporaries and by later writers and scholars as the creative genius behind the Russian Futurist movement, Khlebnikov is famous more for his inaccessibility than for the excellence of what he actually produced. ![]() Velimir Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great, untranslated Russian poets of this century. ![]()
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