The Birch, Fall 2005

Transrational Language: A Revolution in Semiotics
Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh's Experiments with Cubo-Futurism

Jennifer Wilson

To understand the Russian Futurists is to understand that they are not really Futurists. Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto” appeared in the Parisian magazine Le Figaro in 1909, celebrating war and speed, and calling for a complete repudiation of the past. “We want no part of it,” Marinetti urges, “we the young and strong Futurists.”

The Russian Futurists, who were known as Cubo-Futurists, initially called themselves Hylaea. The name comes from the location of the Burliuk family estate in the Kershon region, the ancient land of the Scythians, the mythic prehistoric warriors who inhabited what is now Russia. This prehistoric name immediately calls the connection between the Russian Cubo-Futurists and their Italian cohorts into question.

While the Cubo-Futurists were indeed fixed toward the future, their concept of the future was unique from Marinetti’s, who wishfully envisioned a future of uninterrupted war, a celebration of machinery and speed. The Cubo- Futurists also saw their art as a preparation for the future, but they envisioned a Communist future, which was not the final destination that it was for the Italians, but rather a stepping stone to a nationless, universal state.

The first official manifesto of Cubo-Futurism came in 1912 with “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in which the aesthetic necessary for the Hylaean primordial future was first prefigured. The manifesto called for new vocabulary, one that did not cater to the “good taste” and “common sense” of the time, but to something new, something the Cubo-Futurists called, the “selfsufficient word.” The Cubo-Futurists shared the Futurist disdain for the past, but the Cubo-Futurist gripe was a linguistic one. They believed that in the beginning, language was pure and each word corresponded to its meaning; the letters looked like what they represented and the sounds expressed the natural reaction one would have upon encountering a particular object or emotion.

Time and space had imposed references, and through the formulation of languages, each word had a displaced relationship to what it represented. Although this idea was ingrained in the minds of Cubo-Futurists, only two of the movement’s main members sought to actively cleanse semiotics of unnatural references. The members were Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh. They invented zaum or transreason, which would be used to create a language that would correspond precisely to the objects and emotions it sought to express. The actual look and sound of transrational language had not been formally defined by the Cubo-Futurists; it only had to reject common sense, which was perceived to be an artificial, arbitrary concept. Such rational thinking was, for them, what had separated language from the instincts of speech. Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh differed, however, in their approach, with Khlebnikov looking to Eastern influences and Kruchenykh exploring narodnost.

Khlebnikov was fascinated by typography, or rather, the failure of typography to connect the images of the letters to any real concept. Khlebnikov would later construct a system of hieroglyphs for which each letter had a particular meaning. It was for this reason, perhaps, that Khlebnikov became fascinated with the East, as many Eastern languages involve characters which have direct relationships with what they are representing. Ezra Pound, a member of the British Futurist Moment, the Vorticists, touches upon this very concept in his article, “The ABCs of Reading.” Pound says, “The Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing.” Khlebnikov’s fascination with Asia is apparent even in the content of his poetry. A poem from his book, The King of Time, reads, “Asia, I have made you my obsession,” and “If only Asia’s hair in dark blue streams would flood my knees, envelop me.” A preference for Eastern culture and language was a popular notion in pre- Revolutionary Russia as a protest against Western ideas about government and economics. Given the political sentiments of the avantgarde, it is not surprising that Khlebnikov would also look toward the East for an answer in his apolitical, linguistic revolution.

However, looking to Eastern languages presents a problem for transrational language. Transrational language seeks the organic sounds attached to objects and ideas and in Eastern ideograms, but although the written language corresponds to the meaning, the spoken language does not. The next step for Khlebnikov, then was what he described in his essay “A Checklist: The Alphabet of the Mind.” In the essay, Khlebnikov connected image and meaning to sound. “K,” both the letter and sound, for example, intrinsically signified cohesion, Khlebnikov argued; “V” meant a wavelike motion. There was some logic, albeit easily refuted logic, to this theory. Khlebnikov saw that cherep (skull), chulok (stocking) and chashka (cup) all began with ch and all were containers. Thus, he believed that people instinctually uttered a “ch” sound when they needed storage, and as a result, his checklist defines “ch” as a “surface enclosing an empty interior, filled up with or containing a volume of something.”

In his poetry, Khlebnikov would seem to prepare his reader for this type of reading, a reading which is sound-centered, and less driven by cognition and content. Khlebnikov’s most famous piece, “Incantation of Laughter,” contains variations of the word “laugh” and nothing else, repeated over and over again. The effect is that the reader notices the word, not its meaning, and comes to understand that meaning, sound, and the visual representation of the word have no relationship. Khlebnikov employs this in another poem, in which he repeats rhyme of the word “chant” with “recant,” “descant,” et cetera. The effect is that one becomes preoccupied with the rhyme and the sound, and loses all connection with the meaning, showing not only the failure of all these elements to correspond, but also suggesting that sound has a greater effect on the mind than the meanings that have been ascribed to words. However, although more complete than Khlebnikov’s flirtation with Asian ideogrammatic languages, this theory also has its flaws. It does not take into account that certain languages have sounds that others do not, suggesting that Khlebnikov’s theory would not be universal and thus, could not realize the goals of transrational language.

His counterpart, Kruchenykh, had a much less formal approach to transrational language. Like Khlebnikov, however, Kruchenykh was influenced by pre-Revolutionary, anti-Western preoccupations. For the former, it was the East, but for Kruchenykh, it was a preoccupation with narodnost. The Russian relationship with folklore and the natural world, however, was not that of the Romanticists’ agreeable understanding of nature. The Cubo-Futurists were attracted to the crudeness of folk people, with their ignorance of taboo, and their almost violent passion. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is a prime example of the celebration of the rhythmic impulsiveness that was associated with narodnost, with its representation of the rumbling disharmonies of pagan dancing. Kruchenykh saw this same kind of ritualistic behavior in a religious group called Khlysty. They had broken away from the Russian Orthodox Church to flee what they considered stuffy Church rites and traditions. They were flagellants; they convulsed during prayer and, most importantly for Kruchenykh, spoke in tongues. Kruchenykh, like Khlebnikov, believed in the impulse toward certain sounds. However, he did not find that these sounds were universal. After all, those who speak in tongues are unintelligible to others, and the Khlysty group also prohibited speaking to anyone outside of their religion. Kruchenykh’s poetry, likewise, takes on an air of individualism, with his Pomade poems (his first use of transrational language), which are prefaced with the line, “Three poems written in my own language, deferring from others...their words have no definite meaning.” Thus, Kruchenykh would seem to follow with transrational ideology in terms of the primitive impulses of sound, but not in the universality of that impulse.

Given that impulse and universality are the cornerstones of transrational language, it is not surprising that Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh often found themselves in collaboration. Moreover, despite the complementary elements of their approaches to transreason, there are still parts of their philosophies that are mutually exclusive, and by examining those contradictions, Kruchenykh’s theory would seem to hold up better. Khlebnikov’s failure to acknowledge different sounds in different languages is answered in Kruchenykh allowance for such differences in transrational language. Also, while both poems sought to recapture the impulse of prehistory and to reject the arbitrariness created by reason, Khlebnikov’s approach to this linguistic archaeology is quite rational and academic, as one can see from his alphabet and exhaustive analysis of word roots. If we take Kruchenykh’s suggestion, then transreason would not only affect linguistics, but it would essentially promote anarchy as there could be no communication. Kruchenykh’s theory, though more faithful to transreason, is much less palatable to civic and social structure. Butt transrational language is, after all, a slap in the face of public taste.