Death's Mistake

Abstract

Written in 1915, "Death’s Mistake" is a play by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922). A poet who was recognized by his colleagues as the greatest name in Russian futurism, Khlebnikov was called by Mayakovsky the “Columbus of the new poetic continents”. His eccentric trajectory – he was a scholar of the exact and natural sciences before turning to the humanities – and revolutionary aesthetic platforms put him at the forefront of the avant-garde movement. A scholar of archaic linguistic forms, Khlebnikov knew how to blend tradition (a tradition, moreover, already forgotten) with his contemporaneity, becoming one of the main exponents of what Jakobson called the “newest Russian poetry”. On the centenary of his death, we bring the drama to the Portuguese translated directly from the original. It is a literal translation that does not intend to preserve either the meter or the rhymes of the original. Produced in the early years of Russian Modernism, the play proposes an unconventional reading of the picture of death that existed until then. Immersed in a national context that desired mechanistic (industrial) progress comparable to that of the great European powers, often the intellectuals of this period conjecture how this technology would imply the prolongation of human life (the case of "The Bedbug" (1929) by Vladímir Maiakóvski, for example). We see here, therefore, this new literary representation of death: deceived and defeated.