Образ поезда в поэтическом мире Велимира Хлебникова (Obraz poezda v poeticeskom mire Velimira Chlebnikova)

Barbara Ronchetti, The Image of the Train in Khlebnikov’s Poetic World This essay provides a first recognition of the railway imagery contained in the poetic world of Velimir Khlebnikov, an unusual and troubled personality among the poets of the Russian avant-garde season. Object of this research are 15 works, composed in a period spanning from 1909 to 1921, belonging to different genres (poems, prose, poetry, essay, autobiography, manifest). Through the analysis of the texts, placed in the frame of the entire production of the poet and against the background of literary tradition, the train emerges as a vigorous and substantial image in Khlebnikov’s aesthetic and poetic universe. The flaming locomotive is combined with the search for harmony between the past and the future, between nature and technology and between the tree and the train. The geography of time, which the poet would like to see ruled by mathematical laws, is intertwined with arboreal trails and railroad tracks, allowing the poet to draw impossible paths in real nature. A poet, an inventor and a wandering erudite, Khlebnikov captures, through words, the possibility to combine opposites: the train he chants shapes itself into the new universal language through which the convoys uprooted by the storms of the present will be able to “shoot across the sky” again.