ABSTRACT
Jakobson returns to the aesthetics-relativity thesis of ‘Futurism’; that the modernist/Futurist movement had replaced the conventional, progressive model of time and events with a dynamic, prismatic interpenetration of the diachronic and synchronic axes. Many of the Russian groundbreakers of this revolution-Gumilev, Blok, Xlebnikov, Esenin and Majakovskij-are now dead, and for Jakobson personal grief is supplemented by a grim recognition that there will be ‘no replacements not even any partial reinforcements’ for this squandered generation. What he fears is that Majakovskij’s songs will be ‘no longer part of the dynamic of history [but be] transformed into historico-literary facts’ (L in L, p. 300), that the vital ahistoric element of poetic writing which Majakovskij foregrounded and which preserves the poem from deterministic mechanics of present, past and future will be smothered by these same processes: ‘When singers have been killed and their song has been dragged into a museum and pinned to a wall of the past, the generation they represent is even more desolate, orphaned and lost’ (p. 300).
