Authors

Katarzyna Roman-Rawska¹;  ¹ The Institute of Slavic Studies, Poland

Discussion

Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), a co-author of the manifesto "A Slap to the Taste of the Public," was likely the most original advocate and representative of Russian Futurism. The revolutionary and utopian nature of his project for an egalitarian transcendent/stellar language can be found in many sources (e.g., Cooke, 1987; Mueller, 2017). Lately, he is also recognized as a precursor of ecopoetics and posthumanism (e.g., Tymieniecka-Suchanek, 2017).
The aim of this article is to reexamine Velimir Khlebnikov as a utopian, for whom the socialist revolution was a hope for the emergence of a new harmonious world in which humans unite with nature, technology, the cosmos, and ideology. Its foundation lies in tenderness, gentleness, and love for the covenant between humanity and the universe. Khlebnikov's thought was oppositional to the contemporary demands of subjugating the cosmos and nature to humans, which is why it remained on the periphery. However, it proves to be highly relevant today. I will examine the specifics of his utopia not only in terms of the vision of a communist future world that he proposed but also in terms of its structure: its roots, trunk, and branches. In this exploration, I will turn to the paradigm of Soviet sociologist and utopia theorist, Victoria Atomovna Chalikova (1935-1991), who viewed utopia as universal and indispensable, like air. Utopia, which "arises from utopia and itself begets utopia... is knowledge of a particular kind – knowledge about what is most internal, in contradiction with empirical experience. This definition is, of course, arbitrary, but it allows us to move utopia beyond the boundaries of ethical and ideological disputes and equate it with other ways of rationalizing life, with a priori knowledge" (Chalikova, 1992, pp. 37-38).