Authors

Discussion

Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry, prose, essays, manuscripts, and letters are saturated with his multidisciplinary understanding of the world. Particularly fascinated by the role of mathematics in history and language, Khlebnikov turned to a wide range of mathematical ideas and methods in his writing, which merges the literary with the mathematical. Turning to Khlebnikov, it becomes clear that he considered himself to be a multidisciplinary writer and thinker, with ideas of the same significance as other mathematicians such as Newton, Lobachevsky and Gauss. Working with some of Khlebnikov's main projects, including Doski sud'by and his experiments with language, this paper investigates Khlebnikov as both a writer and a mathematician, and argues that he sought to hybridise scientific and poetic writing in a wide range of ways. This paper begins by expanding on Andrea Hacker's work (2002) on the ‘mathematical poetics’ of Khlebnikov’s Doski sud’by, with examples of Khlebnikov's use of formulae, graphs, and tables from a range of texts, demonstrating some of the different ways that he aestheticises and poeticises mathematics. Secondly, this paper compares the themes of construction and axiomatisation in Khlebnikov's work with mathematical writing of the early twentieth century, in particular the writings of his mathematics professor A.V. Vasil’ev. The role of axioms in modernist writing and thought has garnered attention in recent years (Massino 2015; Steingart 2021), but this attention has been largely limited to the Anglophone context. This paper seeks to broaden this discussion to Khlebnikov's work, arguing that his works were inspired in diverse ways by mathematical writing and methods in their structure.