Velimir Chlebnikov: dall’utopia neoslava a quella euroasiatica

This paper analyses Velimir Chlebnikov’s early markedly Pan-Slavic and anti German ideological positons against the background of the internatonal political crisis in the Balkans, first in 1908 and then in 1912-1913. The development of the Neo-Slavophile movement is also examined, as well as the debates surrounding the Slavonic Congresses held in Prague in 1908, in Saint Petersburg in 1909 and in Sofa in 1910. We discuss Chlebnikov’s own bellicose declarations and poems in 1908, in which he opposes German and Slavonic principles, his interest both in Slavonic philology and in Slavonic- based word formaton, as well as his theoretcal and poetic writngs at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Furthermore, we illustrate his encounter with Janko Lavrin, who at the time was living in Russia, and the influence of the Slovene philologist on the Russian poet’s linguistic and Pan-Slavic theories, as they were illustrated in a series of artcles published in 1913 in the Saint Petersburg newspaper “Slavyanin”. Finally, we argue that in some of these articles Chlebnikov already showed a significant shift from his Neo-Slavophile ideas to a new conception, which turns towards the Eurasian continent as the arena for his utopian visions.