Verbal Pyrotechnics

Make way for the mind-bending experiments — the verbal pyrotechnics — of the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1895-1922), whose friends christened him „Velimir the First, King of Time.“ Khlebnikov’s early Futurist work has the hijinks glow and aggressive hilarity of youth („We rang for room service and the year 1913 arrived,“ he wrote, „it gave Planet Earth a valiant new race of people, the heroic Futurians“), and reading it, even in translation, often makes me burst out laughing. / Washington Post Sunday, April 28, 2002; Page BW12