«Весь в поту...» : заметки о текстологии «Гроссбуха» Велимира Хлебникова
Authors: Vroon Ronald 
Published: October 2023

Velimir Khlebnikov’s Grofibuch (RGALI, fond 527, ed. khr. 64) is one of a large collection of notebooks that constitute the primary manuscript sources for the publication of his works. Like almost all of these note- books — the so-called “Krysa” collection is a major exception — it was not meant to serve as a means for conveying finished versions of his poems and essays to potential publishers. It had other important functions, among them to serve as a laboratory for working out drafts of poems, and as a repository for poems that may have been composed earlier but were fixed here for future use — either for revision or publication at some later date.

A study of the Grofibuch, as well as other notebooks, is of enormous importance for our understanding of Khlebnikov’s oeuvre. First and most obviously, it contains hitherto unknown texts : variants of canonical poems, as well as entire poems and fragments that have not yet been published. Second, it provides documentation about future projects — cycles of poems and other plans — that help us to round out our picture of the poet’s creative world. Third, it can shed significant light on the genesis, development, and interrelation of texts.

Here I would refer to a concept frequently used in scholarship on medieval manuscript traditions, introduced in the early 1960s by Dmitrii Likhachev, that of the literary convoy. Most Old Russian literary works, Likhachev notes, are situated in codices, and a study of their contents, composition and evolution over time is of considerable importance in establishing the dating and evolution of constituent texts, as well as the perceptions and preferences of the reading audience. For modem texts the concept of convoys may have a dual utility. On the one hand it is certainly applicable to printed texts in so far as these present us with certain stable aggregates of works (poems, stories, essays) that are repeated from edition to edition over a writer’s lifetime. On the other hand it may also apply to singular aggregates of texts like the Grofibuch, where a study of the sequence in which works were entered and how they are juxtaposed may yield significant new infor- mation about them, and also about the status of the works in Khlebnikov’s oeuvre.

Working with the concept of convoys in this second sense is particularly important in Khlebnikov’s case because the vast majority of his works were unpublished in his lifetime, and of these most are draws from such note-books. The significance of convoys is amply illustrated by a close examination of selected leaves of the Grofibuch manuscript. For purposes of illustration we may consider folio 12 recto, containing several texts, an analysis of which not only sheds new light on those texts that have been published (the poems “Mne, babochke, zaltevshei...” and “È-è -Y-ym, ves’ v potu...”), but reveals hitherto unknown texts and variants whose status and interrelation deserve consideration. Most importantly, the configuration and interrelation of verbal material on this page and the one preceding it (folio 11 verso), if at all paradigmatic for Khlebnikov’s work, would call into question such traditional editorial practices as the failure to distinguish between rough drafts and finished poems, to document variant readings and to reconstruct poems based on consistent principles of textual criticism.