Velimir Chlebnikov Between the Revolutions and the Civil War

Authors, critics and scholars began taking an interest in the literary corpus of Velimir Chlebnikov (1885 – 1922) when he was still alive and still writing. The attention of current criticism is focused on the wide variety of features that characterize his oeuvre, above all slovotvorčestvo and the peculiarities of his poetic language. However, there are still some topics that require a detailed study, and among them the crucial role that the Russian revolutions (and subsequently the civil war) played on his literary production is prominent. Chlebnikov was sometimes accused of being guilty of "ideological vagueness" in his revolutionary themes and of having failed to understand the socialist character of the October Revolution. With a focus on the late prose of the 1917-1922 period, the purpose of this paper is to clarify and define how Chlebnikov himself perceived the events of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period and how it was reflected in his prose.