5 facts about Russia’s leading avant-garde poet & ‘Chairman of the Globe’

This breadth, comprehensiveness and ambiguity of Velimir Khlebnikov's talent were present in him from an early age. He was deeply interested in birdwatching, mathematics, natural science and poetry. He dreamed of the future and delved into the etymology of words, attempted to deduce the laws of the universe and was distracted by fascinating trivia. Perhaps, this is why he’s considered a major figure in the global avant-garde, yet his legacy remains  misunderstood and understudied.

Below, we highlight five of the most interesting facts about him that reveal his extraordinary personality.

1. His real name is not Velimir

At birth, the future avant-garde artist was given the name Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov. He adopted the pseudonym ‘Velimir’ later. It means ‘great peace’ or ‘Lord of the World’. This name fully reflected the scale of his cosmic and utopian aspirations. His ideas are most fully reflected in the "super-story" ‘Zangezi’: The poet-prophet rules the world based on mystical foresight, grounded in mathematical calculations, while word-creation helps to re-describe and re-create the universe.

2. Khlebnikov, the ornithologist

Khlebnikov's interest in birds was no accident – his father Vladimir Alekseevich was an ornithologist. In 1902, Khlebnikov attended ornithology courses and, from 1904 to 1907, participated in scientific expeditions and even published an article on the discovery of a new species of cuckoo, becoming a fellow member of the Society of Naturalists. However, after 1906, he abandoned science to devote himself entirely to poetry. Nevertheless, his ornithological experience found a unique place in his work. In ‘Zangezi’, he elevates the “bird language” to the rank of one of the world’s independent languages, using onomatopoeias like “Kri-ti-ti-ti-ti-i”, which fundamentally cannot be translated into human speech, thereby realizing the futuristic idea of ​​going beyond the boundaries of “everyday language”.

3. Khlebnikov, the mathematician

Having enrolled in the mathematics department of Kazan University in Fall 1903, Khlebnikov retained a lifelong desire to describe the world through numbers. This resulted in one of the most striking aspects of his work – the search for the "laws of time". Analyzing historical events, he attempted to derive mathematical formulas predicting their recurrence and he allegedly succeeded in calculating the dates of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and even his own death. Inspired by a desire to find a "justification for the deaths" after the Tsushima tragedy of 1905, he recorded his calculations on "Boards of Fate" – tablets containing mathematical justifications for historical cycles.

4. He was the ‘Chairman of the Globe’

One of Khlebnikov's most ambitious utopias was the ‘Society of Chairmen of the Globe’ or ‘Union 317’, which he founded in Moscow in December 1915. At this time, Khlebnikov was working on the "laws of time" and the study of numerical regularities. According to his plan, 317 chosen creators were to govern an ideal "State of Time". The poet considered this number a magical constant of history. He calculated its connection with the speed of light and key events (for example, in the life of Alexander Pushkin). Poets Vyacheslav Ivanov, David Burliuk, Mikhail Kuzmin and others also joined the society. In 1920, Yesenin and Mariengof publicly promoted Khlebnikov to chairman and, after the poet's death, his friend Pyotr Miturich inscribed "Chairman of the Globe" on his tombstone, turning the poetic title into an epitaph.

5. Predicted the invention of the internet

In 1921, Khlebnikov wrote ‘Radio of the Future’, which bears a strong resemblance to the modern internet: "Radio of the Future – the main tree of consciousness – will open the door to endless tasks and unite humanity. <…> Imagine the Radio's headquarters: a web of tracks in the air, a cloud of lightning, now extinguished, now ignited again, flitting from one end of the building to the other. <…> Today, on the enormous shadow books of villages, Radio has printed a story by a favorite writer, an article about fractional degrees of space, a description of flights and news from neighboring countries. Everyone reads what they like. This book, the same for the entire country, stands in every village, eternally surrounded by readers, a strictly recruited, silent reading room in the villages."