Explaining and Studying the Linguistic Explorations of the Russian Futurist Poet Velimir Khlebnikov

Velimir Khlebnikov is one of the leading Russian poets and one of the founders of the school of Futurism in Russia. In Iran, he is better known as a poet and his linguistic research has not received much attention. Khlebnikov revised the symbolic poetic system. If in the tradition of Symbolism, words were thought of as symbols and appeared in poetry with poetic language and their hidden meaning was valuable, in Khlebnikov's poetic system, words with their phonetic construction had an intrinsic meaning and poetic value, and thus he paid attention to the past of the language and changed the previous common perceptions about the language. The present study is conducted in a descriptive-analytical manner, with the aim of opening up a glimpse into the achievements of Russian Futurists, and seeks to answer the question of what Khlebnikov's linguistic explorations were, as one of the most prominent figures of Russian Futurism, and what outcomes his explorations had for Rusian language. Examining the poet's linguistic theories, it was concluded that his linguistic research had led to the expansion of the vocabulary system in Russian and the creation of a universal language called "zaum / meta-meaning", a language in which sound itself produces meaning. It was also concluded that without Khlebnikov's linguistic research, formalist theories would not have been able to emerge. According to this poet, consonants in words are more important than vowels; Especially the first consonant that guides the meaning of the whole word. According to Khlebnikov, words that begin with a similar consonant carry the same meaning.