Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) Born near Astrakhan, Khlebnikov led the life of an itinerant visionary, searching always for the temporal relationships between historical upheval, human evolution, and numbers. Having studied mathematics, biology, and philology at the universities of Kazan and St. Petersburg, Khlebnikov delved into literature. At first influenced by the Russian symbolists and the Pan-Slavic nationalists, Khlebnikov began to experiment with neologistic poetry, exploring the ancient Slavonic roots and partitive forms of contemporary words. But sharing few values with the effet and basically apolitical symbolists, Khlebnikov gravitated toward an avant-garde group centered around Mikhail Matyushin, a violonist, and his wife, the writer Elana Guro, said by some to be the real inventor of ZAUM notation. Khlebnikov's litterary notoriety started with the publication of "Incantation by Laughter" in Kublins 1910 anthology, "The Studio of Impressionists". A morphological drill, relating all the posible (and unlikely) phonetic derivations on the word laughter, "Incantation by Laughter" launched Khlebnikov's career and remained his best-known poem. In 1912 Khlebnikov charted out the hidden and mathematical connections between whole integrals, calendar dates, major scientific discoveries, and the decisive battles in world history. Curiously, he correctly predicted the outbreak of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, which later appeared in the pamphlet "A New Theory of War, Battles 1915-1917" (St. Petersburg, 1914). The content of Khlebnikov's poem "Ka", from 1915, also expresses such ideas. Ka is a mythic figure, a time traveler capable of taking different forms. Well into the story Ka is a bird flying near the Nile, where he joins a circel of apes who sit around a fire reminiscing about the Roc bird. Then Ka fashions a oracular lyre, a remarkable instrument using a Phytagorean correlation between musical tone and historical chronology, a set of calculations mapping the temporal relationships of past events: Ka set an elephant tusk on end and at the top, as if they were pegs for strings, he fastens the years 411, 709, 1237, 1453, 1871; and below on the footboard the years 1491, 1193, 665, 445, 449, 31. Strings joined the upper and the lower pegs; they vibrated faintly. Ka asks a beautiful femal ape to sing, and she takes up the lyre and begins singing a song of the Fates. She moves her hand across the strings; they sounded the thunder boom of a flock of swans that settles as one body onto a lake. Ka observed that each string consisted of six parts, each part consisting of 317 years, 1902 years in all. And also that the top row of pegs indicated years when East attacked the West, while the pegs at the lower end of tha strings indicated an oposite movement, the West against the East. In the top row were the Vandals, Arabs, Tartars, Turks and Germans; below were the Egyptians of Hatshepsut, the Greeks of Odysseus, the Scythians, the Greeks of Pericles, the Romans. Ka attached one additional string: between the year 78, the invasion of the Scythians of Adia Saka, and the year 1980-the East. Ka studied the possibilities of playing on all seven strings. Khlebnikov looked upon ZAUM as the ultimate poetic language. And he saw it as a future language, an emotional Esperanto and «the alphabet of the stars». In ZAUM one could find the sounds of man’s deepest linguistic impulses. Although based on his study of rudimentary Slavonic phonems, ZAUM, according to Khlebnikov, spoke universally and subconciously to all mankind. He figured out a Universal Alphabet where the different letters connectes to a certain mode and color. For example he thought of B as a sound that initiates collision and magnification and that it relates to red and flames, and that Z can be assosiated with reflection and gold. In his manifesto "Radio of the Future" Khlebnikov imagines the potential for long distance healing through radio. According to Khlebnikov notes like 'la' and 'ti' are able to increase muscular capacity, and he suggested such sounds to be broadcastet over the whole country during summer harvest to increase the collective strength. One of the most striking uses of ZAUM appears in Khlebnikov’s science fantasy play «Zangezi: A Supersaga in Twenty Planes» (1922), staged by the constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin in 1923. Khlebnikov’s superhero, Zangezi-the speach maker, is a human interpreter of birds, insects, Gods, and stars- and he attempts to explain transrational language to the gathered masses. Before the eternal figure Zangezi, the God Eros appears, speaking in ZAUM language: EROS Mara-roma Beebah-bool Oook, kooks, ell! Rededeedee dee-dee-dee! Peeree, pepee,pa-papee! Chogi goona,geni-gan Ahl, Ell, Eeell! Ek, ak, oook! Gamch, gemch, ee-o! rr-pee! rrr-pee! Sources: Mel Gordon, "Songs from the Museum of the Future", p.214-217, Douglas Kahn, Introduction, p. 17 and 21. "Wireless Imagination Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde", edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, (The MIT Press) On "Ka"; Velimir Khlebnikov «Collected Works» 1913-1921, Vol. 2, p. 56, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) On 'The Universal Alphabet'; Ibid., Vol. 1 On "Zangezi"; Ibid., "The King of Time", p. 193-194 On "Radio of the Future", Ibid. Vol. 1, p. 395