Postscript

Summary

When Khlebnikov voiced his notion of besieging the three towers, it was by no means an isolated reference in his work to architectural forms. As well as the battlements of towers and walls which he constructed from numbers and the Futurist household built aloft on piles, Khlebnikov constructed in his poetic world various edifices, ranging from a town from the ‘logs of sound’ to ‘palace-pages’ and ‘palace-books’, and to a town of ‘glass pages’ which opened and closed like a flower with the coming and the passing of day (SP iii 63–5, v 86–91).

It is difficult to determine what prompted Khlebnikov's interest in architectural forms. Perhaps there was no specific impetus beyond his general interest in all the man-made and natural phenomena which he encountered in his short life. Certainly his knowledge of most things was encyclopaedic and his ability to assimilate and process this knowledge poetically is at times little short of astounding. Vladimir Markov is not exaggerating when he writes that Khlebnikov's ‘poetic imagination is … almost inhuman; the reader is often unable to keep pace with it and gives up, exhausted’.

Architecture attracted his attention at an early age. A letter written home during his first visit to Moscow (probably at the age of 18) already calls, for example, for the compulsory teaching of architecture in the seminaries so that the clergy would learn how to look after the ‘monuments of old’ (SP v 282–3).