« L’esprit du continent » ou le Japon, l’Eurasie et l’Empire dans l’œuvre de Vélimir Khlebnikov

This essay explores the image of Japan in Khlebnikov’s work and, in doing so, seeks to locate the island nation within the futurist poet’s bigger vision of Eurasia. Interest in Japan marks both the beginning of Khlebnikov’s turn to Asia and his last words on the issue of east and west, from poems on the Russo-Japanese War dating from 1910 to one of his last works, the poem “Perevorot v Vladivostoke” (1922). I argue that although initially Khlebnikov’s image of Japan fits into his general positive view of the east, its significance in the futurist’s Eurasianism becomes increasingly problematic. At issue is the shifting place of Japan in Khlebnikov’s universalist vision: the futurist’s desire to create an utopia free from the fetters of the west comes to stand in increasing tension with Japan’s growing status as a westernized imperial power and its occupation of the Russian Far East during the Civil War. This tension is particularly underscored when we juxtapose “Perevorot v Vladivostoke” with fellow futurist Nikolai Aseev’s eye-witness accounts of the Japanese in Siberia, accounts which are striking for the attention paid to the Koreans in Vladivostok who were resisting Japanese colonial rule of Korea.