Kristin Vitalich

"Khlebnikov's Schizophrenia: A Pragmatic Approach to his Texts and their Discursive Context"

Introduction to a Clinical Model of Literary Analysis

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied." Sigmund Freud

Lionel Trilling reproduced this apocryphal, but now famous quote in his essay, "Freud and Literature" (1940) and however much it may show that Freud envied the poets and philosophers their rather more intuitive forays into the irrational, it was his giving the unconscious a name that marked a turning point modern thought. Although Freud never intended for his theory to provide fodder for understanding the creative process of writers, psychoanalysis has had a powerful and lasting presence in contemporary literary studies, which in various ways since Freud has sought to understand the relationship of literary activity and unconscious urges.

Psychoanalytical models of literary analysis share a central paradox - they derive their analytical tools from theoretical writings despite the fact that Freud himself put greater importance on "observation". As he writes in his essay On Narcissism (1914), theories "are not the foundation of science, upon which everything rests: that foundation is observation alone. They are not the bottom but the top of the whole structure and they can be replaced and discarded without damaging it" (Standard Edition 14 77). Despite their father's warning, for many scholars performing psychoanalytic readings of literary texts, theory becomes practice with little attention devoted to the difficulties and ethics of this transposition. Left under-explored as an avenue for literary scholars to exploit the riches of psychology is the other side of the discipline, the more mundane but remarkably fertile practice of psychology.

In this use of the practice of psychology the reading of the text becomes a session between patient (author) and analyst (critic) with the literary text as communication between the two and the vehicle for the analyst's diagnosis of the patient. An a-temporal clinical staging clearly precludes certain key realities of analysis - for one, the dialogue can never be therapeutic for the patient. Moreover, given that this communication is directed entirely by the patient, some information obtained in regular analysis - such as relevant family history, the patient's behavior in certain revealing settings - will be missing from the patient's case history. But among the benefits of such a one-sided communication between writer and critic is that, liberated from any obligation to treat the patient, the analyst can focus on more selfish interests - an in-depth exploration of the pathologies of a writer and how these pathologies have contributed to or impeded his or her literary production.

The object of this pilot study is the iconoclastic Futurist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov, whose intense interest in exploring the untapped potentials of his own mind makes him a fascinating place to begin. That both his writing and extra-literary activities have frequently encouraged accusations of "madness" makes an exploration of the poet's psychic structures even more intriguing. The charge is polemical, to say the least, polarizing many readers into those who defend his sanity and those who are convinced otherwise by his writings and behavior. The passion of the debate indicates that what is at stake is the very artistic merit of the poet's works. At either end of the spectrum readers suggest that Khlebnikov can be either a great poet or mentally ill, but not both. It is the opinion of this author that Khlebnikov was both and that his genius is a product of his pathology. This article will attempt to make a convincing connection between the poet's pathology and his unique poetic idiom. At the same time it seeks to theorize a relationship between artistic creation and mental pathology that might explain why and how Khlebnikov's contemporaries could both appreciate his genius and acknowledge his mental illness.

Although the everyday laws of time prevent an actual meeting, one can interact with Khlebnikov through the medium of the texts he left behind. (Given his own thoughts on the plasticity of time, Khlebnikov likely would not mind.) This text-based clinical encounter with Khlebnikov will be divided into three parts. In their preliminary meetings the analyst must gather data by listening to the client; here, in this transposed setting, these first meetings will take the form of gathering sample texts to use as material for analysis and diagnosis. Part two of this encounter will contextualize the poet's text in their communicative context - his interactions with his Futurist peers - with the more specific question of how his communication was successful, "success" here meaning that many people (both his peers and posterity) have found meaning in his writing. Part three will return to the clinical encounter to ask some more theoretical questions about this communicative success, by examining evidence of relationships like Khlebnikov had with his fellow Futurians in other literary modernisms to determine what these relationships have in common. Khlebnikov's more self-reflective comments will conclude the encounter, offering evidence of the poet's awareness that his way of thinking was both a radically different and potentially very important way of being in the world.

Part 1: Poetic Evidence of Linguistic Pathology

Many critics of the use of psychoanalytic approaches to literature wonder what good comes of diagnosing an author or his creation with a particular malady. As an attempt to assuage some of these concerns, here the diagnostic component of analysis is contextualized in the larger framework of the clinical encounter. It is an (admittedly modified) attempt to replicate the clinical setting, in order to reproduce the encounter between clinician and client and ultimately to come to an understanding of the client's speech (here, Khlebnikov's early writings) as a negotiation of meaning between patient and analyst.

One can cite two basic scholarly models for addressing the production of pathological language: the language-centered and the pathology-centered. The first model is purely theoretical and the second, practical.

The earliest approaches to pathological language emerged from Chomskian linguistics. Because generative grammar considers language from a cognitive point of view in order to discover language universals, its practitioners typically consider linguistic data outside the discursive context. Practitioners of Chomskian linguistics look at samples generated by those suffering from language disorders (which can include aphasics, autistics, and schizophrenics) as cases in which language's deep structures have gone awry, as exceptions that might help determine the rule.

Many practitioners working with language-disordered patients have grown frustrated with this model and are in the process of founding an applied discipline that might facilitate better understanding between patients and their interlocutors. The emerging field of clinical linguistics attempts to describe and catalogue various linguistic disorders at each level of language - phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic - and to map these disorders to their underlying causes. From this discourse-based perspective emerges the idea of a "communicative disability" (Ferguson 3), a notion that differs from traditional Chomskian views on language pathology in observing the language impaired client in the context of communication. The goal of humanizing linguistic study is to both assist various professionals in their diagnosis of language-disordered patients and to help speech pathologists and teachers to better communicate with their clients and students.

A quick survey of his oeuvre shows that Khlebnikov's texts exhibit "disordered" language behaviors belonging to all linguistic levels. At the phonological level one could cite the poet's numerous experiments with sound as evidence of pathology. At the level of morphology one frequently observes Khlebnikov transplanting a suffix from one word to other, to create a completely unheard of lexeme, which could in turn be considered evidence of a lexical pathology. At the level of syntax the reader notices that Khlebnikov's sentences tend to the extremes of short and choppy or run on. The disparate quality of these phenomena seems to make mapping Khlebnikov' language to any one mental illness problematic.

Contemporary accounts may help narrow the focus to one particular mental illness. In the winter of 1919 Khlebnikov checked himself into the Kharkov Provincial Psychiatric Hospital to determine his fitness to serve military duty. Professor V. Ia. Anfimov performed a psychiatric evaluation of the poet that included inquiries into his family history of illness, observation of his interaction (or the lack thereof) with other patients, interviews, and, finally, tests of his creative abilities (in addition to his duties at the hospital, Anfimov was also interested in the "pathology of creativity"). At the end of his evaluation, Anfimov found Khlebnikov to be unfit for military service, concluding that he demonstrated a "reactive psychosis". Anfimov diagnosed the poet as experiencing a "destruction of the norms of the schizophrenic type, in the form of splitting". His report cites both cognitive evidence of abnormalities for his diagnosis such as an absence of correspondence between affect and experience as well as behavioral evidence such as "impulsiveness" and generally bizarre actions (70).

Do Khlebnikov's texts confirm Anfimov's diagnosis of schizophrenia? Proper testing conditions for this hypothesis demand a control, a sample of texts in which the influence of other poets can be excluded as the reason for one or another poetic choice. The poet's early work, made up of those texts that belong to Khlebnikov's first experiments with writing before he had joined up with the poets that would become his poetic collaborators and fellow Futurists, is perhaps the best place to look for unencumbered sample texts.

A few linguistic oddities predominate in these early works. From the very beginning, Khlebnikov's lyrics, prose and dramatic pieces are characterized by formalistic play, much of it on the phonological level. One of Khlebnikov's best known poems, "Bobeoby" (1908-09), demonstrates the poet's interest in sound play.

Бобэоби пелись губы,
Вээоми пелись взоры,
Пиээо пелись брови,
Лиэээй - пелся облик,
Гзи-гзи-гзэо пелась цепь.
Так на холсте каких-то соответствий
Вне протяжения жило Лицо. (SS 1 198)

Bo-beh-oh-bee is the lipsong
Veh-eh-oh-mee is the eyesong
Pee-eh-eh-oh is the eyebrowsong
Lee-eh-eh-ay is the looksong
Gzee-gzee-gzeh-oh is the chainsong
on the canvas of such correspondences
somewhere beyond all dimensions
the face has a life of its own. (CW 3 30)

Each line of the poem has a different articulatory organ (lips, glance, brows) as its grammatical subject, and the consonants that form each word determine the song the organs sing - the [b] in guby forms the basis of the lips' song "bo-beh-oh-bee", the [l] in oblik becomes the face's lee-eh-eh-ay, and so on. The absurdity of the poem's sound play is echoed in the image of body parts of increasing unfeasibility singing, and by poem's end, the face itself has been so dismembered it seems to have become the platonic ideal the poem's last line indicates.

In "Zakliatie smekhom" ["Incantation by Laughter"] (1909) Khlebnikov plays with morphology as well as phonology.

О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи!
Что смеются смехами, что смеянствуют смеяльно,
О, засмейтесь усмеяльно!
О, рассмешищ надсмеяльных - смех усмейных смехачей!
О, иссмейся рассмеяльно, смех надсмейных смеячей!
Смейево, смейево!
Усмей, осмей, смешики, смешики!
Смеюнчики, смеюнчики.
О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи! (SS 1 209)

Hlaha! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlaha! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Who lawghen with lafe, who hlaehen lewchly,
Hlaha! Uthlofan hlouly!
Hlaha! Hloufish lauflings lafe uf beloght lauchalorum!
Hlaha! Loufenish lauflings lafe, hlohan utlaufly!
Lawfen, lawfen,
Hloh, hlouh, hlou! Luifekin, luifekin,
Hlofeningum, hlofeningum,
Hlaha! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlaha! Uthlofan, lauflings! (CW 3 30)

The poem reads like an exercise in morphology, each line slightly transforming the root smekh with the addition of various affixes. Khlebnikov transforms the smekh into novel verbs ("issmeisia"), nouns ("smeshiki"), adverbs ("rassmeial'no"), and adjectives ("nadsmeinyi").

In "Kuznechik" ["Grasshopper"] (1907-8) the evidence of word-play takes place at higher levels of language.

Крылышкуя золотописьмом
Тончайших жил,
Кузнечик в кузов пуза уложил
Прибрежных много трав и вер.
"Пинь, пинь, пиннь!" - тарарахнул зинзивер.
О, лебедиво!
О, озари! (SS 1 104)

Glitter-letter wing-winker
gossamer grasshopper
packs his belly-basket
with credo-meadow grass.
Zin! Zin! Zin! sings
the raucous racket-bird!
Swan-white wonder!
Brighter, brighter, bright! (CW 3 30)

On the level of meaning, there is evidence of semantic slippage in the poet's combination of unusual terms such as belly and basket ('kuzov puza') based on a phonological similarity. On the lexical level, the poem shows some of Khlebnikov's earliest experiments with neologizing. A grasshopper becomes alternately an onomatopoetic a zinziver ('racket-bird'), or a visually evocative krylyshkuia zolotopis'mo ('glitter-letter wing-winker').

Among the negative symptoms of linguistic pathology one finds in Khlebnikov's early work is a lack of syntactic complexity. In none of the above lyrics can one find an embedded clause. The poems' lines are short, and where one does find sentences with multiple clauses, they are separable - each could grammatically stand alone. The same simplicity characterizes Khlebnikov's early prose pieces as well. The first paragraph of "A Sinner's Seduction" ["Iskushenie greshnika"] (1907) provides a particularly revealing example of the poet's syntactic minimalism.

There were many of them, many of them, blackbirds with nightwings saying, "death!" and truthflower ferns and a timethatch cottage and the face of an oldwomer in enternity's tripes and a snapping hound on a chain of days whose tongue was thought and there was a path, and on the path one day followed another and left behind prints of daytime and evening and morning, and a skybarked tree eaten up by fiddle beetles and a youngering lake and horneyed goats and astonishing centipusses and girleens with whinings where they might have had wings and love instead of lore, and a boy setting one world after another loose from a straw and laughing for he cared about nothing and there was a stretch of youngstones too and over it the swift and snapping water ran, and low across the land a doubtwing swallow flickered and the liquid lapping of the nightingale and prickly gaze of the hedgerose, and there was a timewood fence and a sorrow-twigged suffertree bent above the water and there by a lake the rush of streams on time's stones. (CW 2 10)

Although the entire paragraph is one long sentence, Khlebnikov neatly avoids clausal embedding. Like the short verses discussed earlier, this sentence is constructed as a concatenation of short, independent clauses, a laundry list of items rather than a nested accounting of how each of these items is situated in the larger whole. The reader's eyes run from one fantastic object to the next and he or she is left to make sense of the amalgam.

Harder to put a finger on or a name to are Khlebnikov's early statements on various symbolic systems. His poem "Numbers" ["Chisla"] (1911) treats numbers not as digits or a system for counting but organic beings.

I see right through you, Numbers.
I see you dressed in animals, their skins,
coolly propped against uprooted oaks.
You offer us a gift: unity between the snaky movement
of the backbone of the universe and Libra dancing
overhead. You help us to see centuries in a flash
of laughing teeth. See my wisdom-wizened eyes
opening to recognize
what my I
will be
when its dividend is one. (CW 3 39)

Numbers move, numbers think, numbers dictate. From a semantic point of view, one could say that these numbers here lost their denotative meaning. Instead, another association dominates in Khlebnikov's pathetic fallacy. The connotative association of numbers with the realm of the rational and quantifiable is here taken to an extreme degree as they become dictatorial agents.

Another negative symptom of linguistic pathology evident in Khlebnikov's early work is bound up with the general hermeticism of his poetics. Often his work seems to obey a discursive logic that makes sense only to the poet himself. Khlebnikov most dramatically flaunts logical discursive boundaries in his dramatic works. In the final lines of his Little Devil [Chertik] (1909) the character of Road Guard breaks through the third wall, addressing the audience. "Ladies and gentlemen, the way to Storytelling is closed" (CW 2 217). Although Khlebnikov was far from the first playwright to violate dramatic unity in this manner, he seems to do so without any real motivation. It is as if he does not realize that in drama, there is a barrier between the reality of the text and the reality outside the text.

The same confusion of barriers characterizes another dramatic work, Snowwhite [Snezhimozhka] (1908). Within the unusual space-time continuum of Khlebnikov's play a mythical forest populated by talking animals and various humanoid creatures borders on a town, which is kept unaware of its unusual neighbors by the "blindfolds" and "dumbfolds" of the forest's inhabitants. When Snowwhite crosses the border into town and lets herself be seen by the city-dwellers, causing Scientist to remark, "This means we'll have to revise all our theories" (CW 2 166). Moreover, no one seems particularly surprised by the incongruity. Her presence in the city provokes an instantaneous commitment from its inhabitants in returning to Slavic roots:

Director of the Holiday Parade (from the reviewing stand) Today is the Festival of Purification. A day for cleaning house! Do we all solemnly swear to always wear Slavic styles in clothing?

Everyone We do! We swear by the future of all the Slavs!
Director Do we swear not to use foreign words?
Everyone We do!
Director Do we all solemnly swear to carry on and strengthen our Russian tradition?
Everyone We do! (168-9)

Khlebnikov then inserts a problematic stage direction: "(Many of the participants put on native Slavic costumes. A group meets to begin replacing foreign words with native Russian ones)" (169). While actors could easily begin putting on costumes, "replacing foreign words" presents considerable difficulty as a dramatic action that is very difficult to execute. Other unexplained dramatic actions include Khlebnikov's frequent introduction of new characters and the disappearance of old ones without explanation.

The anachronism (or anatopism) Khlebnikov uses in the above-cited passage is highly effective - with his blindfolds removed modern man literally remembers his roots. What separates Khlebnikov's juxtaposition of incommensurate worlds unusual and potentially "pathological" is that the play's shifts in context are never indicated. Crows, palace guards and boyars not only occupy the same space, but speak the same language (162). What begins as an a-national mythical forest becomes hyper-slavicized by the play's end and the work's only indication of setting: "(A forest in winter, hung with silver brocade.)" (157) does little to tie all of these places together. One could cite this lack of explanation as evidence of derailing, a tendency to for the speaker to make shifts in topics without informing his interlocutor. Since Khlebnikov's changes in concept made sense to him, he saw no need to justify them to his reader or editing previous acts.

The plays show Khlebnikov drifting between textual and material reality (Little Devil) and different temporal and linguistic realities (Snowwhite). But all of the textual pathologies cited here involve Khlebnikov's inability or unwillingness to coordinate his textual reality with reality as experienced by the "sane" population. Linguists usually define drifting as the speaker moving from topic to topic without regard for his or her interlocutor's ability to understand the change in reference. However, the term works here if one thinks of Khlebnikov's writing as a (literary) speech act with the poet's audience (either reader or viewer) as interlocutor. At various levels, all of the examples cited from Khlebnikov's early works have this in common. He uses sounds without meaning in "Bobeoby", flaunts the lexical realities of Russian in both "Incantation" and "Grasshoppers", where he also violates the language's idiomatic reality, and finally, disregards the denotative meaning of words (in "numbers") in favor of exploiting and enhancing their connotative meanings.

Indeed, all of these individual pieces of evidence resonate with numerous clinical accounts of schizophrenic language. Currently, the DSM IV identifies "disordered language" as one of three primary positive diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. (The others are "delusions" and "hallucinations".) Researchers looking specifically at the nature of the schizophrenic's language have identified a few diagnostic criteria:

-- neologizing (Irigaray 35-6) and semantic slippage or "clanging" (that is, "chaining together similar sounding words as if distracted by them" (Covington 86))

-- a priority of connotative over denotative meaning (Wrobel 55

-- various problems with deictic reference, including difficulty in correctly using indexical pronouns (Crow "Is schizophrenia…?" 137)

A cursory examination of Khlebnikov's early poetry, prose and plays has shown ample evidence of the first two features and possibly the last if one considers Khlebnikov's violation of the borders of various realities a problem with deixis.

When researchers looked to find what all of these features shared in common, several noticed that these disordered characteristics of schizophrenic language all belonged to the pragmatic sphere. In other words, although the schizophrenic produces utterances that reflect marked phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon, it is not problems with these levels of language that are responsible for his or her disordered speech. Rather, problems with the schizophrenic speaker's understanding of or respect for his or her interlocutor's frame of reference in a given discursive context make the schizophrenic's language pragmatically dysfunctional. In the words of one researcher, what separates the disordered language of schizophrenics from that of aphasics is that the aphasic has normal thoughts that he or she struggles to express while the schizophrenic has strange thoughts that he or she expresses with relative ease (Covington 88).

So convincing is the connection between schizophrenia and the pragmatic level of language that some clinicians measure the schizophrenic's language disturbance on a scale of pragmatic functioning. Linscott calls deficiencies on this highest level of linguistic functioning "Pragmatic Language Inability" or "PLI". He measures an individual's relative level of pragmatic ability by the nature and frequency of his or her violations of Gricean conversational maxims - rules of discourse we all follow unconsciously in our daily interactions. He uses the maxims to "assess conversational behaviour that undermines the effective generation of implied meanings by producing inappropriate noncompliance with conversational rules" such as providing neither too much nor too little information to your interlocutor ("Quantity") (228). His results show that schizophrenic subjects scored higher on the scale of pragmatic impairment (228-9).

Various theories about the genesis of pragmatic disorders such as those presented in schizophrenia prevail today. Social inference theory says that those with pragmatic disorders have an impaired ability to conceptualize other people's mental states in their language planning (Martin 454), the weak central coherence hypothesis suggests that the pragmatically impaired cannot use context to separate relevant from irrelevant information (455) and the executive dysfunction account of pragmatic disorders says that the problem lies in the frontal lobes of the brain, leading to difficultly in planning behavior, disinhibition and over-stimulation (458). Other scholars have looked a whether or not pragmatic difficulties are secondary to generalized cognitive decline in schizophrenics (Linscott 228). For our purposes, the genesis of this pragmatic disorder makes very little difference. What is relevant from the point of view of literary study is the reality of these pragmatic malfunctions in the language of the schizophrenic and what each of these individual violations of normal pragmatic rules indicate about the schizophrenic's worldview; the schizophrenic's willingness or ability to represent reality as it is seen and experienced by his or her interlocutor is significantly impaired.

When the speaker's immediate physical reality ceases to serve as a basis of reference for his or her speech, a fundamentally altered relationship between the signifier and signified is implied. Irigaray writes, "The association of signified and signifier in the sign no longer obeys the law of the arbitrary. The play, the free will, of the law of the arbitrary, is missing from schizophrenic language. Paradoxically, this results in the interpretation of what the schizophrenic says as unmotivated, gratuitous and unfounded" (188). The schizophrenic need not call objects what those around him or her do.

Among other things, the loss of significance of the real here and now - reality as experienced by a "sane" person - as a point of reference means the loss of normal temporal values in the schizophrenic's language and thought. Karl Jaspers, in his now-dated General Psychopathology (1913), contains some fascinating examples of how the schizophrenic experiences time, including a heightened awareness of the moment, discontinuous time (losing time, being unaware of the passing of time) and feeling time stop or reverse direction (84-7).

When one considers that the schizophrenic need not call objects what the majority of speakers do, nor respect the same rules of time, one can better understand the genesis of some of the idiosyncrasies of schizophrenic speech. In the same work, Jaspers elucidates the possibilities the schizophrenic's pragmatic "inability" creates for his or her poetics. "[T]he manner is very bizarre, and the style high-flown and striking, though for the most part we can understand them. The patients do not report their experiences, persecutions and other personal facts, but develop theories, new cosmic systems, new religions, new interpretations of the Bible, or of universal problems, etc. the form and the content indicate that they originate from patients suffering from a schizophrenic process" (291).

Given that Khlebnikov's early texts showed evidence of a pragmatic pathology, confirming his psychiatrist's preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia, it makes sense now to look for further confirmation of this pragmatic disorder in his later works. In his "Russia and Me" ["Ia i Rossiia"] (1921) we see Khlebnikov's lyric I generalized to all of Russia, where the protagonist's removal of his shirt is likened to Russia's liberation of the serfs. The speaker's control of the fates of the world is made corporeal in the poem, as by exposing his bare chest, he gives sunlight to the masses, who form the very hairs of his body.

Russia has granted freedom to thousands and thousands
It was really a terrific thing to do,
people will never forget it.
But what I did was take off my shirt
and all those shiny skyscrapers the strands of my hair,
every pore
in the city of my body,
broke out their banners and flags.
All the citizens, all the men and women
of the government of ME,
rushed to the windows of my thousand-windowed hair,
all those Igors and Olgas
and nobody told them to do it,
there were ecstatic at the sunshine
and peeked through my skin. (CW 3 94)

The speaker's body is not merely gargantuan; this "state of ME" includes an actual population of individual citizens. The body of this lyric I thereby incorporates not only the resolution of a nation's struggle, but the struggling people of the nation themselves.

I stood on a beach with no clothes on,
that's how I gave freedom to my people
and suntans to the masses. (94)

The combination in body of two completely contradictory actors-the helpless oppressed and the mighty liberator - seems paradoxical. But this kind of deictic collapse, in which I and they become one, is not atypical for schizophrenic language. Scholars have noted problems with "ego reference" (Irigaray 71), which can range from avoidance of the first person in speech (Irigaray 176) to an "avoidance of relationship between the persons specific to the enunciation (I-you)" (175), to the use of I to designate "the formal paradigm of all speaking subjects […] or it represents the subject of a narrative of a narrative, a form of reported utterance" (174).

In his "You whose mind flowed" ["Ty zhe, chei razum stekal"] (1917) we see this narcissistic gesture repeated, along with a marked shift in pronoun reference. The poem begins by addressing a grandiose you:

You whose mind flowed
like a gray waterfall
over the pastoral life of early antiquity,
whose numbers enchanted a serpent
docilely rolling
in hoops of jealousy,
and the hoop and hiss and whistle
of the dance and spasms of the snake in trance
made you hear the sun's bright thistle
more and more clearly as song. (CW 3 61)

The poetic subject is able to mesmerize animals with his mind, and has the uncanny ability to "hear the sun". This endowment of the poetic subject with strange and god-like powers continues into its second half, where the poem's subject abruptly becomes an I:

I wear the whole of Planet Earth
on the little finger of my right hand,
and I speak to you. You!
I shout out shout after shout
and a wild raven, a sacred thing,
builds her nest in my curdling shout
and her nestlings grow,
and the snail of centuries crawls across
my hand stretched out to the stars. (60-1)

By now the subject's powers have become material - voice thickens into a habitable horizon and time turns into a slow-marching snail. And it is the physical body of this I upon which time and space are built.

Also typical of the schizophrenic's deictic pathology is the dominance of connotative over denotative meaning that we saw earlier in Khlebnikov's "Numbers". One might cite here Roman Jakobson's account of Khlebnikov's use of simile: "[W]e may characterize the simile as one of the methods for introducing into the poetic situation an order of facts not occasioned by the logical movement of the narration. Xlebnikov's similes are hardly ever motivated by any impression of real similarity of objects, but are simply compositional effects" (194). But the example Jakobson cites from Esir (1918-19) shows a connotative connection between the elements the simile connects:

Like a black sail on the white sea its fierce pupils cut the eyes aslant: the frightening white eyes were raised toward the brows in the head of the dead one hanging by a braid. (cited in Jakobson 194)

What Jakobson calls a "contamination of qualities," a similarity in color and in line (between the sea and the sail) creates a perceptive connection between two otherwise disparate items. The comparison of sea and sail in the simile is not illogical, but rather follows a non-denotative logic.

But perhaps no problem of reference is more typical of schizophrenic language than a disordered representation of time. Scholars have noted this temporal malfunction in an avoidance of terms "here" and "now" with the present tense (Irigaray 176), and in more general reports of a "discontinuity of time" (Jaspers 85). As Wrobel writes that in moments of "schizophrenic illumination" "a lineal sense of time disappears, and past and future connect with the present, creating a constant now" (107). This account of the schizophrenic's temporal flexibility fits well with Khlebnikov's laws of time. Petrovskii writes about his creation of "The Society of 317" - the rulers of the State of Time - that Khlebnikov he hoped to attract to its ranks "the best people of his time, and by establishing communication throughout the terrestrial globe, to dictate to the governments of Space" (12). So serious was Khlebnikov about the revolutionary potentials of the State of Time that he actually invited notables such as Viacheslav Ivanov to become members and discussed possible locations for their headquarters (Petrovskii 14; Samarodova 188). In his evolving theories of time, one can see the loss of linear time that Wrobel describes as typical of schizophrenic thought and language. In its place arises a theory of time in which past, present and future are all of a piece.

The experience of time in Khlebnikov's literary works is persuasive on this account. One finds explicit evidence of Khlebnikov's externalization of time in his dramatic poem Burgling the Universe [Vzlom vselennoi] (1921). In the poem, a young man characterizes his dealings with time in the following monologue:

I gathered old books,
Gathered a harvest of numbers with the curved sickle of my mind,
Watered them with my thoughts; hunched and wrinkled,
I put them to rest in the sky
The pillars of song on the sea shore,
I situated and populated with the song and life of youth
The white temples of time, hewn from a dead sea. (SS 4 77)

The young man asserts his power to posit time. In the form of "white temples", time is an external object, the building materials of a structure which the young man erects. Further, following this externalization of time, he has not only the power to mold it, but to subvert it:

My mind is exact to the nth degree,
Like heart's coal, I endowed the dead prophet of the universe
With breath from the breast of the universe,
And suddenly understood: there is no time.
Raised up on wings like an eagle, I saw simultaneously what was
and what would be,
A mainspring of threes and twos
In a ferrous strawman of worlds,
The elastic murmur of numbers.
And it became clear to me
What would come to be. (77)

The above lines reference Khlebnikov's actual laws of time, according to which the numbers two or three raised to the nth power determines the space between major historical events. The formula he proposed in Teacher and Student [Uchitel' i uchitelnik] (1912) - Z = (365 + 48y)x where the time period Z separates similar events and y can have a positive or negative value -formed the actual basis for what would later become Khlebnikov's Laws of Time (CW 1 281). In the poem these formulae actually take the place of time after the young man realizes it does not exist. This new formula-based temporal entity behaves very differently from time as we know it, taking on a material and visible form like that in "You whose mind flowed" and a multi-directional flow.

A simultaneous past and future is the logical consequence of Khlebnikov's laws of time. Arapova's account confirms this description - "He said that on the basis of calculations it was possible to foretell any global event both of the past and the future - if you took invariability and repeatability as laws" (466). Khlebnikov was here describing his monumental Tables of Fate [Doski sud'by] (1921-2), which use these formulae he had made his life's work as algorithms for predicting the events of the future based on the past. These equations generate simultaneity in the sense of a sameness or repeated quality of the past in the future. Petrovskii comments on Khlebnikov's simultaneous time - "As always, Khlebnikov breathed in centuries. All that surrounded him preoccupied him not with its present, but with its past and future. He would photograph the moment of the run of the future into the past and back. His theories of reoccurring points in time, the rhythm of the universe, and the rhythm of history, are well known" (33).

All of these problems with deixis evinced by Khlebnikov's theoretical and literary writings, come with intriguing philosophical implications. Covington's summary of the schizophrenic's problems with reference as "an overall lack of cohesion" (97) brings closer what is at stake in the schizophrenic's particular language disorder - a flaunting of the rules of discourse that we all take for granted. Crow's research, which attempts to understand schizophrenia as the most human of illnesses, indicates why the schizophrenic's language is so fascinating hypothesizing that "the problem is intrinsic to the human capacity for language, and that this faculty is variable between individuals." He goes on to suggest that "the nuclear symptoms of schizophrenia represent 'language at the end of its tether'; they provide a window on the transition between speech and thought" (Crow "Schizophrenia" 123).

It is precisely the interruption along the path from thought to speech that his work demonstrates that seems to have captivated so many readers of Khlebnikov's work. He points out the arbitrary conventions of speech by his flaunting of them. What he provoked naturally as a result of linguistic pathology struck a nerve with those of his contemporaries who were at that very moment contemplating the conventions of speech and literature and whether or not they were adequate to the new century and its challenges. In giving voice to his own unconscious, he inspired those around him to question rational models of creativity and plumb the depths of their own.

Part 2: Khlebnikov in conversation with his peers

The evidence of consistent pragmatic inability in Khlebnikov's literary and theoretical writings has indicated that he uses language in a manner typical of one suffering from schizophrenia. Given such strong textual evidence for a pragmatic incapacity, the question then becomes how Khlebnikov was able to become the guiding light of Futurism his colleagues described and continues to exercise tremendous influence in the history of Russian literature.

In his famous "existential-phenomenological" account of schizophrenia, R. D. Laing quotes Jung as saying that "the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood" (165). Jung's plea for empathy in interacting with the schizophrenic may have been ahead of its time. Speech therapists and school psychologists have found recently that they are able to better diagnose their language-impaired clients when they changed their criteria of language fluency to hinge on communicative competence. When they made communication their focus - the child's ability to generate and understand narrative deemed meaningful by his or her peers - the list of factors that had to be considered in diagnosis expanded to include the child's context and relative social development (Simon 14). Researchers found that this shift to pragmatic criteria led to more students being referred to the school's speech pathologist with far greater accuracy than had previous grammatical criteria (Damico 172).

A switch to pragmatic diagnostic criteria means taking into account what all discourse participants contribute to the success or failure of a communication. Rather than isolating the client as sick, as did traditional grammar-based diagnosticians, all parties now come under scrutiny as part of a pathological communication. In the classroom-setting, the introduction of pragmatic criteria to language assessment revealed that often teachers held some responsibility for communication failures, for example, in expecting metalinguistic knowledge (i.e. what a "word" or "sentence" is) of students without previous exposure to these concepts (Smith 15) or by using various kinds of indirect language, such as sarcasm or idiomatic language (32).

Some mental health professionals outside the school system are likewise considering whether or not adopting a communicative competency based model might serve their needs better when dealing with language impaired clients such as aphasics and schizophrenics. Here, the idea that meaning is co-created is applied to therapy, meaning that it is no longer just the client who must try to understand the therapist's idiom; the therapist, too, must strive for greater sensitivity in his or her language use and in making sense of the client's statements. Ferguson writes that "the recognition of the dynamic nature of communication involves a shift from focussing on just one of the individuals in the exchange, to a focus on the jointly shared responsibility for communication of all participants […] When we recognise that messages are jointly constructed, competence can be seen as an emergent property of the exchange, rather than a quality residing in an individual" (62-3). If the goal of this emerging field of clinical pragmatics is to "characterize clients' communicative behaviour and ability with a view to diagnosis and remediation by considering not only the role of the client in communication but also of the context of situation and of those interacting with the client" (Smith 44), the question then becomes what pragmatic therapy should look like.

Not surprisingly, given the unpredictable character of communication, coming up with general guidelines has proven difficult. Research clinicians have experimented with various techniques to ensure that the client both initiates and responds in the clinical encounter, creating a more "natural conversation" between clinician and client (Meilijson 705-6), including asking him or her to create a narrative text in response to visual stimuli (Smith 300), as well as devising ways to place a greater burden of comprehension on the therapist - Kepinski has suggested that professionals treating schizophrenics create idiolect dictionaries of their client's lexicon.

To an extent, all of these discourse-based diagnostic and therapeutic models draw on "phenomenological-anthropological" psychiatry's view of schizophrenia and its ensuing disordered language. As Wrobel explains, "this school does not accept the existing division into psychogenic and endogenous illnesses, and thus schizophrenia is treated as a specific form of being" (10) He describes the work of early twentieth century psychiatrists who sought to "go beyond the treatment of psychotic experiences from the point of view of logic." He writes that in their works they stressed that "logical categories belong to the group of social categories and that acceptance of them is a necessary pre-condition [for] obtaining social approval. […] This criterion is subjective because it is based on an individual['s] beliefs rather than on facts" (10). When one accepts the social genesis of logic, communication with the schizophrenic seems less daunting. His or her violations of its rules become a question of a different idiom rather than an intellectual defect.

These recommendation for clinicians on how to alter their language behaviors and expectation to enable more meaningful conversation with their language-impaired clients sound very much like the modifications that Khlebnikov's friends and peers made naturally. Nadezhda Mandelstam describes taking extraordinary care in her speech so as not to offend the very sensitive Khlebnikov. "In the fashion of the times, or out of my own foolishness, I was quite capable of being very rude to anyone, but with Khlebnikov I had to watch my tongue because of M. and the old woman [their building's dezhurnaia]: they would have both jumped down my throat" (90). She recounts that, despite the fact that he only liked "bits and pieces" of his work, her husband "never showed as much care and concern for anyone else as he did for Khlebnikov" (92).

Khlebnikov's friends took the same care with his person as they did their conversations with them - a critical gesture since Khlebnikov was notoriously careless with his own physical well-being. Nikolai Aseev writes that "[o]ne couldn't imagine another person who cared less of himself. He would forget about food, the cold, about the smallest human comforts like gloves, galoshes, the arrangement of his life, earnings and comfort. It wasn't because he didn't have any practical ability or human needs. No, he simply couldn't be bothered with them. He filled all his time with contemplation, plans and projects" (554). Aleksei Kruchenykh points out the importance of Khlebnikov's friends in keeping the poet going: "Impractical Velimir didn't obtain material gain from his works and spent his whole life as a semi-indigent wanderer; were it not for the help of friends, he would have been starving and homeless" (105).

Maintaining Khlebnikov seems to have been an unspoken group ethos for the Futurians and their collaborators. Not only did Khlebnikov rely on his friends and colleagues (perhaps unwittingly) for material and emotional support, without their assistance Khlebnikov's poetry would never have seen the light of day. Nearly every peer's description of Khlebnikov as a writer mentions the extraordinary lack of care he devoted to his manuscripts. Aseev describes the chaos of Khlebnikov's "studio": "Khlebnikov conducted his creative housekeeping carelessly […] He had and lost his notes, having neither the means nor space to organize his work. Drafts of his manuscripts were often lost and he had several kinds of blank paper. Often, because of a lack of paper, he would jot down various ideas on one sheet of paper" (551). The chaos Aseev describes reveals an important fact about Khlebnikov's published oeuvre - that it had its genesis in collaboration. In his obituary of the poet, Vladimir Maiakovskii quickly disabuses readers who might have thought Khlebnikov played a managerial role in the movement of their illusions.

Practically speaking, Khlebnikov was disorganized. Never in his life did he publish one thing on his own […] Gorodetskii credits him with everything from organizational talent to the creation of Futurism to publishing "A Slap in the Face". Nothing could be further from the truth. Even "A Trap for Judges" (1908), with Khlebnikov's first verses, and "Slap" were organized by David Burliuk […] for Khlebnikov, who rarely had his own trousers […], his lack of materialism took on the character of real asceticism and martyrdom for a poetic idea. (156-8)

According to Maiakovskii, Khlebnikov could not manage his own works let alone orchestrate an entire literary movement. Sometimes, as Mikhail Matiushin describes, Khlebnikov would even hinder the publication of his own work. "Sometimes, because of his distractedness, he would give the publishing rights to a work to multiple people. But because these 'publishers' were his friends (Guro and I, Kruchenykh, D. Burliuk) everything was worked out peacefully with a few laughs" (143).

Khlebnikov's inner circle admits that the poet's extreme lack of organization and disregard for his own manuscript went one step further; once a piece was written, Khlebnikov could not have cared less what was done to it. According to Vasilii Kamenskii, Khlebnikov's typical response to a request to recite one of his works was to say the first four lines before quietly concluding, "And so forth" (60). Maiakovskii continues, "Khlebnikov doesn't have poems. The completeness of his published works is a fiction. The appearance of completeness, more often than not, is the work of his friends. We selected from the heaps of manuscripts he strew those that seemed to us the most valuable and published them. Sometimes the end of one draft got stuck to the back of another, inciting joyful incomprehension in Khlebnikov. He could never submit himself to editing - he'd cross out everything in its entirety and create a completely new text" (151). David Burliuk confirms the "chaotic" state of Khlebnikov's manuscripts: "Khlebnikov's manuscripts were a chaotic heap of crumpled sheets of paper, covered in minute writing" (Kamenskii 138). As he describes it, Khlebnikov's indifference about the fate of his own finished manuscripts was part of a more general disregard for the sanctity of the individual artist. He recounts one of his earliest meetings with Khlebnikov. "I pulled out […] two sheets, drafts, 40-50 lines long, of my first poema 'A Game in Hell'. I humbly presented them to him. All of the sudden, to my surprise, Velimir settled himself and began adding his own lines above, below and around my own. This was one of Khlebnikov's characteristic features: his creativity flared up with the smallest spark" (49).

All of these accounts of Khlebnikov's life and work resonate with the pragmatists' theories about modifying one's behavior with the language disordered. Interlocutors like Nadezhda Mandelstam tailored their linguistic behavior to him and friends took care of his physical health. Friends and colleagues carried these adapted expectations over into the literary milieu where they literally co-created meaning with Khlebnikov. They modified their notion of authorship, editing and shepherding Khlebnikov's work to publication. At times the ceded their own individual authorship, as did Kruchenykh in his frequent (if challenging) collaborations with the poet.

What makes his friends' devotion to his physical, mental and literary well-being even more remarkable is that caring for Khlebnikov like a child lowered him in no one's estimation. Behaviors that were made necessary by Khlebnikov's odd interpersonal behavior often became part of Futurist practice. If collaborating with Khlebnikov was a necessity to get his manuscripts out of the trashcan and into print, it became a matter of choice among the members of the movement in their many group-authored manifestoes and dramatic pieces.

Despite his many weaknesses, his peers frequently proclaimed Khlebnikov the guiding light of the futurist movement. Maiakovskii not only called him "the most sincere knight" in their "poetic struggle" but "the Columbus of new poetic lands" that his fellow Futurians and the philologists of OPOIAZ were now "settling and cultivating" (151). Jakobson famously named Khlebnikov "the greatest world poet of our century (20). What drew these mentally more stable artists and theoreticians to Khlebnikov was precisely what made him so helpless in the first place - his single-minded devotion to his thoughts and theories.

It was not just new ways of thinking about language and time that captivated Khlebnikov's peers but his complete investment in these ideas. Nikolai Gumilev writes,

[Khlebnikov's] images are cogent in their absurdity, his thoughts in their paradoxallity. It's like he sees his verses in his sleep and then writes them down, preserving all of the incongruity of their chain of events. In this respect one could compare him to Alexei Remizov, who transcribed his dreams. But Remizov was a theoretician; he smoothed their contours, traced them in thick lines with a dark marker to highlight the significance of the logic of the "dream". V. Khlebnikov preserves all of the [dream's] nuances and what his verses lose in literary quality they gain in depth. (17)

The distinction Gumilev draws between Remizov and Khlebnikov is crucial to understanding why the futurists were so inspired by the poet. He did not arrive at his trans-rational ideas rationally but irrationally - here, in dreams. For Khlebnikov, method and message were one and the same, creating a figure of the modernist ethos without parallel. While one could not easily create this kind of disconnect from reality and social conventions in themselves, they could certainly nourish and enable someone who came across this talent naturally. Sometimes even his closest circle underestimated his commitment to his theories. Rita Rait, an acquaintance of the poet, recounts an unfortunate experience in Kharkov in 1921, when Sergei Esenin and Anatoli Mariengoff decided to crown Khlebnikov the King of Time as a joke. "Velimir took it all completely seriously. I can't describe how they crowned him king - I don't remember. There remains only the unbearable feeling of shame at this whole comedy, pity for our friend, muttering something under his breath, some ring they put on his finger - to the laughter of the public - and then, behind the scenes - a confused, hurt, weeping Khlebnikov - they took the ring from him. This was all on purpose and he believed it" (268).

It is precisely this confluence of the creative philosophies of the mentally ill and the futurist movement in art and literature that E. Radin explores in his 1914 pamphlet, Futurism and Madness (where most of his examples come from Khlebnikov's work). He notes similar experiments in word formation, visual logic, and child-like expression. Near the end of the piece he proclaims that "children, the mentally ill and Futurists are a new triad" (43). He explains the connection thusly: "[Their] concentration on the word, without respect to its content, leads both one and the other to create riddles and to conduct speculative experiments in the field of language. In the search for the laws of word formation, numbers and forms, they revive the scholastic method" (46). Radin takes great care in characterizing the relationship between the three, particularly the nature of the connection between futurism and mental illness. "Can one say that Futurism is a product of mental illness? There isn't enough data for this. A parallel isn't proof. But the similarity of their starting points - the region of the subconscious - leads to close contiguity in the creativity of the mentally ill and the Futurists" (46).

One should take the same care in defining the connection between Khlebnikov's mental state and that of his Futurian peers. However enraptured they may have been by the poet's experiments and his person, Khlebnikov's fellow Futurians did not suffer from the same accompanying mental malady. Kamenskii describes a New Year's party in 1916 where, with Khlebnikov's whiskers drawn on his face, he ""predicted the future of everyone present based on Khlebnikov's mathematical studies" (184-5), making Mayakovskii and Shklovskii laugh so hard they fell out of their chairs. Kruchenykh recounts another revealing encounter with the poet towards the end of his life:

In 1921 in Moscow he furtively informed me about his discoveries, confiding

-- The English would pay a lot to make sure these calculations aren't published!

I laughed and assured Khlebnikov that the English didn't give a fig, despite the fact that the Tables of Fate threatened them with death, unsuccessful wars, the loss of fleets, etc. Khlebnikov was offended, but nevertheless, still clearly not dissuaded. (106)

Ivan Bunin - who was hostile in general to Russian Modernism, but did concede that Khlebnikov had some "scraps of talent" - confirms that this reputation extended beyond his closest circle. "Now, not only in Russia, but sometimes in the emigre communities they talk about [Khlebnikov's] genius. […] He had a reputation as a famous futurist and a lunatic to boot. But was he really a lunatic? He was certainly by no means normal but he really played the role of a lunatic, profiting by his lunacy" (48). Bunin may raise a valid point about the reality of Khlebnikov's mental predicament, which is admittedly impossible to verify from our current position. However, it bears repeating that a verifiable diagnosis of schizophrenia is not so important in this context. What is important is the extent to which Khlebnikov's mental state and literary reputation were inextricable to his contemporaries. They were two sides of the same coin.

The one professional opinion left to us on this account - Anfimov's case study of Khlebnikov - confirms this state of affairs. Aside from adopting a tone generally more poetic and personal than one would ever find in the case notes of a mental health professional today, Anfimov departs from our expectations of a psychiatrist in exploring Khlebnikov's mental state through poetry. Anfimov assigned the poet three themes in order to study the "peculiarities of fantasy": "the hunt, moonlight and the carnival" (71). Khlebnikov returned three pieces of different genres, all of them, Anfimov writes, "original works of the great wordsmith, albeit bearing the hallmark of pathological creation" (71). For Anfimov, too, Khlebnikov's greatness as a poet originated in his troubled mind.

Khlebnikov's contemporaries - both his supporters and detractors - understood the connection between his mental state and his creative voice. The more scientific minds among them were able to theorize this bond - Radin saw a connection between the creative impulse of the mentally ill and that of the Futurians in that both drew on the subconscious, making both remarkably solipsistic in their creativity. Radin called this Futurism's "fatal flaw" (47). Anfimov drew parallels between Khlebnikov's pathological creativity and that of other guiding lights of modernism. He points out similarities between Khlebnikov's nomadic existence and that of Gerard de Nerval:

In his eternal wanderings in Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan, Moscow or Kharkov and Leningrad and other cities he lost his things, sometimes they were stolen from him by thieves […] One can say about him what was written by another psychiatrist about another famous author, Gerard de Nerval: He entered life as a literary bohemian and from that moment on he never learned another way to live. (65) as well as August Strindberg and Vincent van Gogh:

like Strindberg and van Gogh he created the impression of an eternal wanderer, unconnected to the surrounding world, somehow just passing through it. (70)

Anfimov's comparisons are apropos because they broaden the question of the relationship between schizophrenia and the modernist aesthetic. Nerval, Strindberg and van Gogh were all guiding lights of the modernist movement in their respective locales and various scholars have theorized that all three suffered from schizophrenia. Strindberg provides a particularly interesting parallel to Khlebnikov in both his life and work. Jaspers wrote a self-described "pathography" of how Strindberg's periods of delusion corresponded to the phases of his work, coming to the conclusion that when Strindberg was undergoing severe psychotic episodes he concentrated on his least traditionally literary works. The worst of these periods began in the mid-eighties with the development of a persecution mania (39) and the "psychotic process culminated" in 1896 (57). During these years Strindberg worked on voluminous autobiographical works like his Son of a Servant and A Soul's Advance (107) as well as his Inferno, with which Strindberg returned to writing literature, recording "genuinely and drastically the two main stages of the process of his illness" (4). Strindberg also became immersed in theoretical works during this period, writing studies of Swedenborg (Jaspers Strindberg 107) and, in Jaspers' words, busies himself with "studies of chemistry and of other disciplines of the natural sciences, trying to prove the transferability of elements" including trying "to make gold" (44-5), efforts that quickly entered the "metaphysical" realm (46). Intense wanderlust also marks these periods (107).

While no such study of the cycles of Khlebnikov's mental state exists with which to coordinate his various efforts, striking similarities of pattern do emerge between his biography and Strindberg's. Particularly interesting is Strindberg's turn to science, which quickly becomes an attempt to control matter. One can compare Strindberg's experiments to Khlebnikov's Laws of Time, which consumed the poet more dramatically towards the end of his life, when he transformed them into a political weapon, creating the Society of 317 (later the "Presidents of Time") to battle the ruling "Presidents of Space". This change of interest is not surprising from a mental health perspective. Recent studies indicate that, faced with mysterious and threatening changes in their minds, schizophrenics attain a sense of order and purpose in their lives through their delusions (Roberts 28). Both saw heightened meaning in the smallest of circumstances, one biographer described Strindberg as guiding his life by "trivia" (Lidz 404) but the signs both men perceived in their surroundings were far from trivial to their sensitive antennae.

Strindberg and Khlebnikov's extra-literary behaviors also coincide, particularly their constant wandering. Towards the end of his life, Khlebnikov rarely stayed long in one place, during his last two years moving from Kharkov to Baku and Persia, then to Moscow and dying on his way to see his family in Astrakhan (CW 1 33). During his famous "Inferno crisis" Strindberg moved between Berlin, London, Paris, Austria and Copenhagen before returning to Sweden (Lamm 286). The writers' transience makes their friends' dedication to caretaking all the more remarkable. Like Khlebnikov, Strindberg was surrounded by a coterie of fellow writers and artists that took care of his basic needs at moments when he was not able to himself. Friends took him in and eventually committed him "when he became ill from self-neglect" (Lidz 404). As did Khlebnikov's boosters, Strindberg's artist-colleagues tolerated and rationalized his behavior (Jaspers 43) and fellow writers kept Strindberg from financial collapse even when his mental state caused him to abuse them (Lamm 293). Jaspers quotes a letter in which Knut Hamsun entreats a friend not to be hurt by Strindberg's insults, concluding "He does not like me either […] I pay no attention to it, for after all, he is August Strindberg" (Strindberg 56). Far from deterring them, Strindberg's eccentric and difficult antics and his forays into highly experimental and non-literary endeavors drew other artists to him like a magnet. The same cocktail of worshipping and enabling that kept Khlebnikov personally and professionally afloat also buoyed Strindberg.

The peers of French romantic poet, Gerard de Nerval, also likely kept him alive. Nerval spent large parts of his life in mental institutions, where, at one point, doctors diagnosed with "theomania" and "demonomania" (Maclennan 155). That works like his most famous Aurelie emerged from his delusions did not deter his peers' admiration but intensified it. At one time Dumas even asked Nerval to keep a written record of his thoughts and experiences in the institution, which he tentatively entitled "Three Days of Madness", for his journal, La Mousquetaire. (194)

The dream-like quality of his poetry and his real-life experiences with "madness" made Nerval an energizing figure for French romanticism. The same collusion of extreme personal and professional experiences made Nerval an arguably even more important symbol for French modernism. Baudelaire called the poet "lucid" (192). Holderlin - whose poetic idiom was equally unique and colored by its author's experiences with mental illness - proved no less prescient a voice for the architects of German modernism. Nietzsche, in particular, was deeply influenced by the poet. In Brojber's opinion, the reason "Holderlin became Nietzsche's favorite poet may well depend on not only his poetry, but also be due to his biography" (402). Brojber also notes Holderlin's influence on Also sprach Zarathustra, in both its "oracular" style of writing "between poetry and prose" (405) and his development of the idea of the Ubermensch (407).

The trans-generational impact of quasi-romantic poets like Holderlin and Nerval has everything to do with the fact that life and literature were inseparable for both men, thanks in no small part to their respective mental illnesses. Form and content, life and art were one and the same for both Nerval and Holderlin, and while this greatly intrigued their romantic contemporaries, it enervated their modernist grandchildren in search of anti-rational models. That the two belonged to another time may have made them even more important symbols. Just as Khlebnikov or Strindberg's peers could bring the man in from the cold and ensure the publication of works whose spirit was so close to their own creative ethos, Nietzsche and Baudelaire could enable Holderlin and Nerval in a different way - by offering the public an example of the kind of life and creativity they valued and using these men's examples as a precedent and a promise of which their work was the fulfillment. Not every artist could be literally "mad" - although, at the end of his life, Nietzsche suffered a mental devolution of unknown genesis - but anyone could valorize the phenomena of anti-rational creativity by materially and metaphorically backing the schizophrenic artist.

The life and work of on-again, off-again Surrealist Antonin Artaud further exemplifies the importance of the schizophrenic artist to the ethos of modernism at large. Like Khlebnikov, he sought to overcome the arbitrary nature of the sign (Maclennan 234), expressing a deep interest in mythical thought (240) as being closer to the essence of things. But what makes Artaud particularly revealing in this sociology of the role of the schizophrenic artist to modernism is his ability to articulate the building blocks of his own philosophy. One scholar borrows a term from Laing, describing Artaud as suffering from an "ontological insecurity" (231). Laing writes that one experiencing such a condition "may feel more unreal than real […], precariously different from the rest of the world, so that this identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness […] And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body" (49). As he felt that what intervened between his mind and a sense of being was language's reified forms of expression, he sought, as did his modernist peers, to reinvent form with experiments like his Theater of Cruelty. In his case, that meant endeavoring to rediscover more primitive means of expression, when the relationship between language and thought was "immanent" (238).

Artaud was also unique in reflecting his own on mental illness. His experiences with mental illness began in his twenties (Knapp 167) and less than twenty years later he would spend years institutionalized (158). Those sensitive souls who appreciated Artaud's vision got him out of the institution (173) and made sure his ideas were heard. Men like Jacques Riviere, who carried on a correspondence with the young writer that so startled him he published it, recognized that Artaud's unique vision was the "direct result of his malady" (Knapp 30). Artaud writes in one such letter, "I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought" (Selected 31). In his study of Strindberg's schizophrenic creativity, Jaspers concludes that one suffering from the disease cannot discern his own illness (76). But counter to Jaspers judgment that Strindberg "never understood the cause of his symptom" (77), Strindberg engaged in no less introspection than did Artaud. He occupied enormous amounts of time and paper with self-analysis, resulting in his volumes of autobiographical writing (Lidz 399), some written as the episodes happened (Jaspers 4). According to most, this "cathartic" voyage (399) of self-exploration enabled him to move onto the mature work whose forays into the subconscious so inspired his modernist readers (Lamm 302; Lidz 405).

Introspection and reflection on their mental state was not incidental to these schizophrenic artists, it was, in a sense, at the core of their work. Khlebnikov, too, saw himself (at moments) apart from most of society. Even if one just considers those works expressly designated as autobiographical, a sense emerges that Khlebnikov was aware that not all of society thought along the same "transrational" lines he did. In a letter dated May 1916 to friend Nikolai Kulbin he pondered the absurdity of his conscription, given that, during peacetime, he would have been considered "crazy" (CW 1 109). Closer to the end of his life, Khlebnikov would rue society's lack of interest in his laws of time, which he felt would be humanity's salvation. He expresses his frustration in a 1921 letter to Ukrainian avant-garde painter, Vasilii Ermilov:

I have discovered the fundamental Laws of Time, and I believe that now it will be as easy to predict events as to count to three. If people don't want to learn of my art of predicting the future (and that has already happened in Baku, among local thinkers), I shall teach it to horses. A government of horses may turn out more gifted scientists than a government of men. Horses will be grateful to me. They will have, besides riding, another supplementary source of income: they will be able to predict the fate of human beings and to aid governments that still have ears to hear. (127)

Human ears had proved inhospitable ground for his theories, but Khlebnikov was not to be dissuaded.

Khlebnikov had a solution for making society think along the same lines he did. For him, too, the key was greater introspection.

I solemnly urge all artists of the future to keep exact spiritual records, to think of themselves as the sky and to keep exact notes on the rising and setting of their spiritual stars. In this area of endeavor, humanity possesses the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff and that's all. Such spiritual poverty, such lack of knowledge of the soul's sky, is the most glaring black Fraunhofer line in contemporary humanity. We might conceivably devise a law that correlates the frequency of wars in time with the string of humanity, but there is no way to devise such a law for the tiny time current of an individual life - the foundations aren't there. We don't have the diaries. (CW 1 148)

Khlebnikov practiced what he preached, leaving behind fragmentary but fascinating diaristic fragments. He describes his goals in keeping a written record of his thoughts. "I am clearly aware of the spokes of a wheel turning within me, and I work at my diaries in order to grasp the law of those spokes' return. This desire to bring beyond-sense language into the real of sense is, I see, the advent of an old spoke in my wheel" (CW 1 148). A theme emerges in this passage that is prevalent in Khlebnikov's writing, if difficult to discern. He frequently describes his mind as an entity separate from himself, something that works according to a volition not the poet's own. As he writes in a journal, "June 12, 1914, my mind is working wonderfully, it's coming up with results" (CW 1 151). The poet's sister sensed this split in her brother: "His brain was demanding and insatiable and it was his master. And his soul tore itself from his control in gusts. Many considered him egotistical and heartless…but he was forever a child, by turns stubborn and capricious then timid and quiet. But people demanded of him as they would of an adult, and he retreated" (58). His comments on his own creative process are equally revealing:

I wrote "Turnabout" in a state of pure irrationality. Only after I had lived through on my own its lines Chin zvan…mechom navznich ["Rank is named with the sword downward" (Snake Train (66)] (the war) and had experienced for myself how they turned empty afterwards - Pal a norvov khud i dukh vorona lap ["He fell but his temper is bad and his spirit a raven clawed" (Snake Train 66)]- did I realize what they were: reflected rays of the future cast by a subconscious I upon the sky of the rational mind. (CW 1 147)

Khlebnikov does not recognize his words as a product of his own mind. They are as new to him as they would be to any other reader.

That his lyric I so often subjugates other subjects makes more sense in this light. It is not so much the poet himself that is responsible for this, but his mind, which is part of something much larger. With mind separate from self (or, as Laing puts it, self "split into I and other" (158)) the poet is in a unique position to reflect on his own state of mind, a posture very much characteristic of Artaud and Strindberg's writing as well.

On the basis of what we have seen in Khlebnikov's life, and what his schizophrenic modernist peers confirm, Jaspers was, in a sense, correct in stating, "It has been repeatedly observed that schizophrenics can become the center of sectlike movements; however, in that case only that one person is schizophrenic. The others are sane, or hysterical at most" (Strindberg 115). The schizophrenic artist is a profoundly social phenomenon, flaunting our expectations of the individual genius. He needs the support of his peers to keep working. They must encourage the schizophrenic's ideas and theories, like Artaud's notion of a participating audience or Jakobson's encouraging of Khlebnikov's poetry of numbers or Kruchenykh seeing the poet's work to press. Moreover, they must be ready with moral and physical support, providing sustenance when necessary and acting as a buffer or safe-zone from those parts of society that see the schizophrenic's mindset as pathological. To provide this kind of support requires that the schizophrenic's peers be invested in his ideas. They need not be schizophrenic themselves (and most are not) but the anti-rational pose of the schizophrenic, his commitment to a new, more authentic creative idiom, must coincide with their own desires for the same. They can believe in these ideas if not live them like the schizophrenic does.

In this sense, one could say that the schizophrenic artist is socially constructed. What separates the schizophrenic artist from another schizophrenic with similarly "disordered thought" (the DSM IV criteria for schizophrenia) is how the two are regarded socially. Some post-modernist theorists have even adopted the schizophrenic as a kind of mascot. Deleuze and Guattari, in their Anti-Oedipus, advance the idea that the schizophrenic represents a kind of thought that is not pathological, but ideal. They draw on Laing's theory of anti-psychiatry, which looks at schizophrenia not as an individual malady but a different phenomenological posture. The loss of ego-function that society sees as tragic is actually the source of a uniquely truthful voice. "They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. They have their specters. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission" (131). He is a man "with his own set of coordinates" (15), "deterritorialized" (35), or, borrowing Artaud's words, "a body without organs" (9).

For Deleuze and Guatarri, schizophrenia represents not only a symptom of a society whose structures are so reified it has no sense of truth, he is a way out. Building on Laing and Jaspers' theory that schizophrenia represents "not an illness, not a 'breakdown' but a 'breakthrough'" (362). They propose that all of society's "neurotics" undergo the process of "schizoanalysis": "The task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others" (362). Deleuze and Guattari are describing a fundamentally different way of perceiving the schizophrenic and his or her relationship to society. By arguing for a rehabilitation of the pathology, they propose making what the Futurists did with Khlebnikov and clinical pragmatics does with its clients common practice on a global scale. The relationship of the schizophrenic to society they propose may be one way of conceptualizing the transition from modern to postmodern thought. For modernist movements such as Russian Futurism, schizophrenia (in the form of artists like Khlebnikov) was an emblem, an important sign to themselves and the public of the importance of form to content in their reconceptualization of art. Postmodern theorists like Deleuze and Guattari take the modernist revolution in thought to a place only Khlebnikov or Artaud could have predicted. For them, form - in the sense of the schizophrenic's psychic structure - takes the place of content.

All translations mine unless otherwise indicated.

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©K. Vitalich

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