a Russian poet and mathematician, a central part of the Russian Futurist movement

(1885 – 1922)

» Let them read on my gravestone: «

• He was born in the camp of Mongolian Buddhist nomads in the steppe—the dried bottom of a vanished part of the Caspian (the sea of 40 names).
• He wrestled with the notion of species and freed himself from its hold.
• He has made a contract of matrimony with Death, and He is therefore married.
• He has ridden unbridled horses from other people's stables.
• He published «Incantation by Laughter»; in 48 ± 365. He gave people the means to see into the future.
• He discovered the law of generations; He wrote The Girl-God, where He peopled Russia's past with bright shadows, and A Country Friendship; He hacked a window to the stars right through the everyday laws of people's lives.
• He saw no distinction between human and animal species.
• He was inspired to dream of being a prophet and a great interpreter of the prince-tissue, and of that alone. Divining its will, with a single impulse of his own flesh, blood, and bone, He dreamed of increasing the ratio e/p, where e equals the mass of prince-tissue and p equals the mass of peasant-tissue, as far as he personally was concerned.
• He dreamed of the distant future, of the earthball of the future, and his dreams were inspired when He compared the earth to a little animal of the steppe, darting from bush to bush.
• He discovered the true classification of the sciences, He linked time and space, He established a geometry of numbers: He discovered the Slav principle. He founded an institute for the study of the prenatal life of the child.
• He was such a child: He imagined that six came after five, and seven after six. He used even to dare thinking that as a general rule wherever we have one and then one more, we also have three, and five, and seven, and infinity — ∞.
• Of course, He never thrust his opinion on anyone else, He considered it belonged to him personally, and He recognized that the most sacred and holiest of all rights was to be able to hold a contrary opinion.