Thursday 26 June 2014

The Trumpet Of The Martians, 1916


The Trumpet of the Martians 
People!
The human brain today still staggers on 3 legs (3 spatial axes)! We, tilling the human brain like ploughmen, will glue to this puppy a 4th leg, namely the axis of time.
   Lame puppy! You will no longer torture our ears with your nasty bark.
   The people of the past showed their limited intelligence in assuming that the sail of state could be built for the axes of space alone.
   We, cloaked only in victories, are starting construction of a young union with its sail along the axis of time, warning you in advance that our size is larger than Cheops, and that our task is courageous, grand,
and rigorous.
   We, rigorous carpenters, once more throw ourselves and our names into the seething cauldrons of marvelous tasks.
   We have faith in ourselves, and with indignation reject the vicious whisper of the people of the past who dream of biting us in our [Achilles] heel.
   After all, we are barefoot (Consonantal error). But we are beautiful
in the firm betrayal of our past - which has just entered the age of Kharkov victory and in the unrelenting fury of the next hammer aiming at the terrestrial globe which has already begun to shake under our tramp.
   Black sails of time, rustle! 

Victor Khlebnikov, Maria Sinyakova, Bozhidar, Grigory Petnikov, Nikolay Aseyev

Viktor Khlebnikov


"LET THE MILKY WAY SPLIT INTO THE MILKY WAY OF THE INVENTORS AND THE MILKY WAY OF THE CONSUMERS."

Here are the words of a new holy war,-
Our questions are directed to the empty space where no man has ever been - we will imperiously brand them on the brow of the Milky Way and on the plump idol of the merchants - questions such as how to free the winged engine from that fat caterpillar, the freight train of elders. Let different age groups separate and live apart! We have broken the seals on the train attached to our engine of audacity - nothing is there
but the graves of youths.
   There are seven of us. We want swords made of the pure iron of youths.
   Those who have drowned in the laws of families and in the laws of trade, those whose speech is limited to: "I eat," cannot understand us, who do not give a thought to any of these things.
   The right to world unions according to age. The divorce of genera­tions, the right to separate existence and activities. The right to individuality for everything up to the Milky Way. Away with the noises of ages! Let the sound of uninterrupted times, the black and white palette, and the brush of destiny rule. Let those who are closer to their death than to their birth surrender! Let them fall to the ground in this fight of times, under our savage attack. And we - we, having tested the ground of the continent of time, have found it fertile. But grabbing hands from there have seized us and prevent us from accomplishing our marvelous betrayal of space. Has there ever been anything more inebriating than this betrayal? You! how would you react to the danger of being born a man, if not by the theft of time? We are calling you to the land where the trees talk, where there are scientific unions that look like waves, where there are vernal armies of love, where time blooms like a bird-cherry tree and moves like a piston, where the transman in a carpenter's apron saws time into boards and treats his tomorrow like a lathe turner. (Oh, equations of kisses-you! Oh, death ray, killed by the death ray placed on the bottom of a wave.) We go there as youths and suddenly someone dead, someone raw-boned seizes us and prevents us from shedding the feathers of this idiotic today. Is this good?    
   Nation of youth, raise the winged sails of time! Before you lies the second theft of the consumers' flame.
   Be more daring! Remove your boney hands, yesterday; may those horrible pupils be shred before Balashov's blow. This is a new blow in the eyes of the vulgar populace of the space. Which is more: the
consumers or the inventors? The consumers have always been creeping in herds after the inventors, now the inventors are driving away the barking of the consumers, who in packs have crept after the lonely
inventor.
   All the industry of the terrestrial globe today, from the point of view of those same consumers is "a theft" (the language and habits of the consumers) from the first inventor, Gauss. He initiated the study of lightening. And during his lifetime he did not even have 150 rubles a year for his scientific work. You try to sanctify the joy of your perpetrated theft with monuments and laudatory articles, and in this way appease your pangs of conscience, suspiciously located in your worm­-shaped appendix. Those who are now supposedly on your banner, Pushkin and Lermontov, were at one time killed by you like rabid dogs, out in the fields, beyond the city! Lobachevsky was demoted by you to the rank of parochial school teacher. Montgolfier was put in a
lunatic asylum. And we? A combat detachment of inventors?
   These are your deeds! One can write thick volumes about them! 
   This is why the inventors, with full awareness of their special breed, their different morals, and their particular mission retreat from the consumers into the independent nation of time (devoid of space) and raise iron bars between them and themselves. The future will decide who will end up in a zoo, the inventors or the consumers, and who will gnaw at the poker with their teeth.

V. Khlebnikov

ORDERS

1. The glorious contributors to Futurian publications are transferred from the category of humans to the category of Martians. 
   Signed: The King of Time, Velimir I

2. We invite Wells and Marinetti to the parliament of the Martians, as guests with the right to a consultative vote. 
   Items on the agenda. 
   " Ulla, ulla,'' Martians! 

1. How free ourselves from the dominance of the people of the past, who still have a shadow of strength in the world of space, without soiling our hands with their life (the soap of word-creation), having let them wallow in the destiny of wicked wood lice which they have built for themselves. We have been destined to conquer Our rights to freedom from the dirty habits of the people of past centuries by means of measure and time. 
2. How to free the fast locomotive of the younger generations from the freight train of the older ones which has been attached to it in an unbidden and insolent way?
   Older people! You are holding up the course of mankind and are preventing the seething locomotive of youth from taking the mountain that stands in its way. We have torn off the seals and have verified that the cargo is gravestones for youth.
   Under the guise of a cargo slyly attached to our haughtily whistling dream, the dirt of the precelestial people is carried along!

The manifesto "Trumpet of the Martians" (Truba Marsian) was published by the group Lyroon, headed by Nikolai Aseev and Grigorii Petnikov.



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