The Girl-God, symbolist-inspired, is a melange of stylistic shifts and impossible scene changes. But it is in the dramatic text that we best see Khlebnikov's struggle to find a workable form for his vision. The fictions, ranging from the mysterious Murksong to the epic Yasir, show a great variety of styles and themes. They chronicle the artist's imagination in his feverish search for a poetics that could be as diverse as the universe itself. Paul Schmidt's are the first translations of these works into English. The second volume of the Collected Works consists of Khlebnikov's fiction (thirty-five short stories, dreams, mysteries, and fanciful folktales), his plays, and his unique supersagas, a syncretic genre he created to encompass his iconoclastic view of the world. In Russia a powerful and growing mythology surrounds this Futurist poet and his reputation elsewhere continues to mount. Velimir Khlebnikov, who died in 1922 at the age of thirty-six, is one of the great innovators of literary modernism.
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