Toward an Archaeography of Eurasianism: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Großbuch

College of Letters and Science, Humanities Division

Primary contact

Ronald Vroon
Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures
(310) 825-8724
vroon@humnet.ucla.edu

Additional project researchers

Natalia Pertsova, Moscow State University

Project description

Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), one of the leader’s of the Futurist school, was also the most important progenitor of Eurasianism, an ideological movement that sought to redefine Russia’s identity in terms of its Asia as well as Europe roots. Caught up in the catastrophic events of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, he composed a 200-page poetic diary (known as the Großbuch) his travels through the Caucasus and Persia from 1919 to 1921. This project mounts the complete manuscript and transcription of the work; it maps its entries, tying them to the tumultuous years of the Russian Civil war, the Bolshevik intervention in northern Iran and Khlebnikov’s own utopian projects. At the same time it creates hypertext links to his other works, elaborating a textual and cultural network that presents, for the first time, a fully integrated picture of the poet poetry, biography, and ideology.

Special thanks to the Russian State Archive of Art and Literature (Moscow) for permission to publish the Großbuch manuscript.

Project video