The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian
by Velimir Chlebnikov
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Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great, untranslated Russian poets of this century. 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. Even Russians are generally baffled by him. Now, in a powerful American rendition, we are given access to the strange and beautiful world of show more Khlebnikos "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. 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. Experiments with words became magical paths to a reinvigorated future, and produced some of the most extraordinary poems in the Russian language. 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. The result is poetry of startling originality, modernity, and linguistic virtuosity--a true challenge to translators and one that has been met brilliantly here by Schmidt and Douglas. The King of Time is a representative sampling of Khlebnikov's writings, taken from the translation of his complete works now in preparation under the auspices of the Dia Art Foundation. It includes many pieces, among them the full text of the astounding poem-play Zangezi, never before translated. General readers will be introduced to the legendary Khlebnikov, and cognoscenti will applaud the inventiveness of the rendering. Paul Schmidt, translator of Rimbaud and Mayakovsky among others, and Charlotte Douglas, an art historian who specializes in the Russian avant-garde, are Director and Senior Research Scholar, Khlehnikov Translation Project, Dia Art Foundation. show lessTags
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Author Information
67+ Works 351 Members
Khlebnikov, who together with Mayakovsky was a principal figure in the Futurist group, is famous both as a poet and a utopian thinker. He is well known for his radical linguistic theories and experimentation, for his idiosyncratic theories of historical recurrence, and for his nomadic, nonmaterialistic life. His highly complex works, rich in show more meaning, include a large number of lyric poems, narrative poems, stories, and essays that, over the decades, have influenced many younger poets. Despite the enormous difficulty of translating Khlebnikov, selections from his writings have appeared in many languages. Paul Schmidt has in progress an English translation of most of his texts, so far well received. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Poetry
- DDC/MDS
- 891.71 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages East Indo-European and Celtic literatures Russian and East Slavic languages Russian poetry
- LCC
- PG3476 .K485 .A27 — Language and Literature Slavic languages and literatures. Baltic languages. Albanian language Slavic. Baltic. Albanian Russian literature Individual authors and works 1917-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 73
- Popularity
- 432,257
- Rating
- (4.21)
- Languages
- English, Serbian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
