Talk given to the Radical Anthropology Group at Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW on 26 June 2018. Chris Knight, founder of the Radical Anthropology Group, gives a personal perspective on the life and work of the Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922). Knight first encountered the work of Velimir Khlebnikov as a student at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, later completing a masters dissertation on the poet. Knight has recently reconsidered the poet's influence on the linguist and founder of structuralism, Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) who, while Khlebnikov remains relatively little known outside Russia, has had a tremendous impact in the west both on linguistics (via Chomsky) and on anthropology (via Lévi-Strauss).
