| Summary: | The autobiographical writings by Velimir Khlebnikov are often regarded as less important than his poetry, because of their fragmentariness. On the contrary, they are not only a fundamental source on his life, but also a sort of manifesto on literature. Through Marina Tsvetaeva’s approach - as illustrated in the essay ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’, this article is devoted to the connections between Khlebnikov’s biography and his art (tvorchestvo).
Tsvetaeva’s distinction between poets ‘with history’ and ‘without history’ is in fact appropriate to but also reductive of Khlebnikov, as he resists all labels. Khlebnikov could be described as both ‘an arrow’ and ‘a circle’, the terms Tsvetaeva adopts in her graphic representation of the direction of poets with and without history.
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