Velimir Khlebnikov’s Early Dramatic Production

Velimir Khlebnikov’s dramatic production has been categorized in different ways, depending on the publishing criteria adopted by the editors of his works and the theoretical approaches scholars apply to them. A wide range of dramatic forms can be found in Khlebnikov’s work, ranging from the lyrical drama, the monodrama, the dramatic sketch, the historical drama, the pastoral to the radiodrama. Khlebnikov himself created a new literary genre, that of the ‘super-saga’ (sverkhpovest’ or sverkhpoema), which shares many aspects of the dramatic form and found its ultimate realization in his last creation, Zangezi (1922). Khlebnikov’s dramatic œuvre is to be seen against the background of Russian classical literature, Symbolism, and also Futurist theatre of the time. Especially his early dramatic writings contain features that seem to foreshadow Dada experiments or even the Theatre of the Absurd. In this essay, I focus on Khlebnikov’s early dramatic production, and in particular on the plays "Snezhimochka" (Snowhite) and "Gospozha Lenin" (Mrs Lenin), comparing the latter with Nikolai Evreinov’s conception of monodrama and Tristan Tzara’s play" Le Cœur à gaz" (The Gas Heart, 1923).