Abstract

Walt Whitman’s influence on Velimir Khlebnikov has been universally acknowledged but frequently poorly understood and too superficially characterized because of the impact of Kornei Chukovskii’s claim that Khlebnikov was explicitly parodying Whitman in his early poem Zverinets and because Khlebnikov’s clearly positive assessment of Whitman in the last years of his life could easily be projected on his whole life’s work, though Khlebnikov himself categorically denied that Whitman had influenced his prerevolutionary poetry. In the present study we pay particular attention to certain key paratexts in collections of Whitman’s verse in translations of Kornei Chukovskii, focusing in particular on the collection which Khlebnikov (according to one eyewitness) kept in his possession in 1921–1922, to determine how the paratexts of that edition might have influenced his reception of the American bard.