Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Remizov: biographic and creative ties

The article studies personal and creative relations as well as mutual opinions of A. M. Remizov (1877–1957) and V. V. Khlebnikov (1885–1922), mainly by the elder writer. Remizov became the first writer-symbolist Khlebnikov got acquainted with in 1908 after his arrival in Saint Petersburg. In the context of personal relations the article presents and interprets a number of facts testifying about close ties established between the writers in the period from autumn 1908 to January 1910, when Khlebnikov considered Remizov his elder friend and teacher. Klebnikov’s attitude became especially clear during the so called “Remizov’s plagiarism case”, when the poet was ready to challenge to a duel the insulter of his friend. But the thing that really brought them together was their interest for East Slavic mythology and archaic layers of the Russian language. The involvement of Khlebnikov in the movement of futurists and his aggressive position towards the symbolists let to the altercation with Remizov that, however, did not influence their common creative focus on the search for a “Russian style”. During the years of emigration Remizov’s interest for the personality and work of Khlebnikov manifested in the memoirs of the writer, was to a great extent maintained by philologists and men of letters of the Russian expatriate community, among them D. P. Svyatolpolk-Mirsky and particularly, V. F. Markov who was working on the history of the Russian literary avantgarde. The article comes to some preliminary conclusions about a common edifying role of Remizov and Khlebnikov in the literary process (“writers for writers”) and the belonging of both of them to a “patriotic movement” in the literature of Russian modernism of the first third of the 20th century.