Old-Time Futurism, Mad Russian Style

Interesting article in The Guardian about an artist whose paintings are "as disturbing as the obsessive Russian poet who inspired them." The artists, whose works are being displayed in London, is Anselm Kiefer. The Russian poet is being referred to is Velimir Chlebnikov, the last name also transliterated as Khlebnikov.

About Khlebnikov, the story describes him as "a poet and founder of Russian futurism" and adds that among his several "improbable and faintly ludicrous ideas" was that "he wished to purify the Russian language, ridding it of its western elements; he came to write his own poems in this invented language. ... When he died, in 1922, he was buried in a coffin embellished with a blue planet Earth and the words he President of Planet Earth, Velimir 1." My kind of dreamer!

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