Русское мессианство. Профетические, мессианские, эсхатологические мотивы в русской поэзии и общественной мысли

Since long ago, they were going to put an end to the old world, to throw away the classics from «the boat of the modern times» and to reconstruct mankind, though they could hardly dream that history would really give them this opportunity. The Futurists were neither Bolsheviks, nor Mensheviks, nor Social-Revolutionaries but they were extremists by definition. It means that they were ready to support any victorious extremist party. It was exactly what they did after the October revolution. They did not care much that their activities could turn out to be unnecessary and incomprehensible for the victorious proletariat.

The Futurists along with the leftist artists of the postrevolutionary avant-garde — Filonov, Petrov-Vodkin, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Malevich — resolutely rejected the old world for the sake of constructing an unprecedented paradise on earth. Still if we ask what they were going to create, the most veritable answer might be found in the famous project of the Monument of The Third International (the so called «Tatlin’s Tower», 1919–1920). Actually this strange Tatlin’s construction with a spiraling ribbon of the ascending way to the top turns to be the exact sketched replica of the «Babylon Tower» by Peter Bruegel Senior. Tatlin’s architectural metaphor of the Great Utopia is an immense embodiment of an ambitious and daring dream of the avant-garde. It is quite probable that the author has foreseen the consequences of the bold experiment, which has ended up in full accordance with the Biblical myth.

* * *

Khlebnikov, the lunatic genius of poetic avant-garde, in his articles and sketches of the revolutionary time preserves rational thought but many of his poems are the ecstatic revelations on the verge of madness, ignoring the laws of language, logic and history. Moreover, some essays («Word Composition», «Confirming the Alphabet», «Mathematical Understanding of History», «Scales of Budetlyanin» and others), showing the author’s erudition in using numerology phenomena, laws of mathematics and facts of history with amazing easiness, reveal in the meantime a strongly disturbed mentality. The game for Khlebnikov overgrows into reality, the reality becomes the game. The past, the present and the future spin in a crazy marry-go-round. Mars and Earth change their places. People lose their concrete localization in space and in time of the revolution and the Civil war. The artificial fairy world invented by Khlebnikov is gorgeous in its fantasy, abundant in cryptic poetic codes and amazing in its predictions but it is hardly related to the Russian reality of the age time.

Khlebnikov’s poem «Ladomir», the most pathetic hymn to the revolutionary chaos, is designed in the bravura-major tone. The whole poem, constructed in a Khlebnikov’s typical style of fragmented collage, is a disordered phantasmagoria which involves the present where the fight between classes is going on, and the future where countries, nations, gods, epochs, artists, poets, farmers, workers and soldiers are mixed and stirred. His vision of the future reminds of the endless kaleidoscope of the fragmented video-clips presenting the topic «Slavery-Freedom-Renovation of the world». His view of history is a universal comprehension of the deep past, where the textbook’s pages are thoroughly shuflfed, and of the uncertain future, where the Space International embodies the ideal of liberated joyful labor.

The prophet of a revolutionary chaos, he doesn’t even try to introduce any logic or sense in his works, with the exception of his numerologist experiments that also are a typical evidence of the attempts of an unstable mind and physics to ground the fantastic ideas. A flow of poetic imagination not addressed to anybody in particular seems quite self-sufifcient. «An Astral Vagabond of the World Axis», Khlebnikov, as it seems to him, directly communicates with the universe, and it is to the universe that he devotes the most part of his works. The mixture of the past, the present and the future in these works makes an extremely abstract prophecy consisting of the fragments of history, mythology, geography, economy and politics.

* * *

Whereas Khlebnikov can be called a bard of the great Russian anarchy, Mayakovsky was the adherent and the prophet of the new revolutionary order. Though the original purpose of his postrevolutionary activities (a call for the «new life») basically, coincides with Khlebnikov’s slogans, Mayakovsky’s pathos is aimed at strengthening the new revolutionary rule, creating and cultivating the Soviet state as a super-establishment, as a true model of the novel, alternative human community.