Читать книгу A Hunt for Optimism - Viktor Shklovsky - Страница 5

ON ARCHITECTURE

Khlebnikov thought about it and wrote in the journal Vzyal (Took). I am quoting from the end:

XI. To separate mankind into inventors and others. A platoon of visionary eyes.

XII. To study the art of crossbreeding and creation of new tribes for Earth’s needs.

XIII. To reform housing rights; the right to own a room in any city and the right to constantly move, change location (the right to housing free from spatial determination). A flying mankind does not limit its ownership rights to a private place.

XIV. To build steel gridshell buildings that could fit small portable glass houses.¹

We know that life is good for nothing.

We don’t know how to build buildings.

I was in Green City yesterday. The forest there stretches for seventy-five square versts.² It is a spruce and pine forest.

Models of new houses stand in the forest.

We don’t know how to rebuild our ships. Should we build small houses on legs, a separate room, a studio for one person, so that he can be either with everyone else or completely alone?

Or should we build huge buildings with elevators and maybe tram cars in the hallways?

We don’t know.

The Milky Way stretches over the roof as a wide steppe road in the autumn, all strewn with straw.

The Milky Way streams like a wide road.

People in our small wooden house are like those on a steamship. They sleep on beds, couches. They sleep on the floor.

Our house floats like a small steamship, exhaling heat through the funnels.

It floats under the sky.

That’s probably called “drifting” in nautical language. The house drifts on the ground.

Nothing has been decided yet. The way hasn’t been found.

My keys don’t open all the doors of my era.

It’s time to wake up, time to change.

My stories have been played on an eight-by-eight checkerboard. White, black, love, betrayal, death.

The ending of my book isn’t resolved yet, reader, and it’s written without complete skill. Yes, it’s easier for me to describe the funny town of Beryozovka and its marketplace than the Third Congress of Women Collective Farmers. I don’t know how to write about the things that I have seen.

I’ll write in sketch form. No, that’s not a solution. Sketches perish quickly. They don’t survive their own day. They have already expired, while the question still persists.

The sketch is not suitable then.

Silence. Unfit for sailing, my small ship sails across dry land, moving in relation to the stars.

Apartment life.

Reader, it’s so difficult to sail away from your own immovable home. It’s so hard to forget bitterness and confusion. To move from an apartment floor plan to the map of the world.

Silence befalls when you finish the book.

May 14, 1930

1. Velimir Khlebnikov, from “Proposals,” Vzyal (December 1915).

2. A verst is about two-thirds of a mile.