In the early 20th century, futurists often gathered in the village of Krasnaya Polyana, a khutor (a farm) near Kharkiv, where the sisters Zinaida, Nadezhda, Maria, Oksana and Vera Sinyakovs lived — the talented and extravagant “muses of futurism”. There Khlebnikov met the poet, translator and publisher Grigory Nikolaevich Petnikov.

Grigory Petnikov (1894–1971) was born into a Russo-Polish family. During his gymnasium years in Kharkiv, he became close to the poet Bogdan Petrovich Gordeev, who would become known as Bozhidar. Together, they published a handwritten magazine “Peoples and Countries”.

In 1914, Nikolai Aseyev, Grigory Petnikov and Bozhidar founded “Liren” — a publishing house in Kharkiv, which existed until 1922. Grigory Petnikov managed it himself: he published poems and translations made by him and his associates — Tikhon Churilin, and from 1916 — Velimir Khlebnikov. Khlebnikov’s first work published by “Liren” was the anti-war manifesto “The Trumpet of the Martians”.

Velimir found a like-minded person in Petnikov. The poet dreamed of organizing the Society of Chairmen of the Terrestrial Globe with 317 world-class thinkers. He included Petnikov in the list. Together the poets created a rhythmic chairmen’s “Appeal”.

Grigory Petnikov was not an unconditional supporter of word-making. However, in his article “Our Foundation” (published in the magazine “Lirna” in 1920), Khlebnikov cited examples of Petnikov’s own word-making from the poem “Shoots of the Sun”. From the word “boets” (fighter) he proposed to form similar-sounding words “poets, noets, moets”; from the proper names “Dnepr” and “Dnestr” — “Mnepr and Mnestr” (meaning the spirit of “personal consciousness”), “Gnestr” (quick death), “Snepr and Snestr” (sleep),
“volestr” and “ognestr”.

The collection “Shoots of the Sun” was published in 1918 with illustrations by Maria Sinyakova. Khlebnikov mentioned it in a 1919 article “On Modern Poetry.”

In 1919–1920, Grigory Petnikov ran the literary and creative magazine “Paths of Creativity”, where he published poems by Andrei Bely, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Sergey Gorodetsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov, as well as his translations of Novalis (“The Novices of Sais”).

Grigory Petnikov’s own work included many translations. In his original poems (collections “The Life of Shoots”, “Shoots of the Sun”, “The Book of Mary Light the Snow”) the poet followed the ideas of futurism until the 1920s; in the 1930s–1960s he switched to traditional versification.

The reprinted collection of 1922 (not illustrated) is part of the “Khlebnikovs Collection” of the Velimir Khlebnikov House Museum. It is a bibliographic rarity.

It came to the museum in 1997 as a gift of May Petrovich Miturich-Khlebnikov (Moscow).