“Gul Mulla” is a book which provides a list of Persian words and ideas taken from the
vocabulary of Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian avant-garde poet, who spent about one
year in northern and central Iran in 1921.
Khlebnikov is well known in the former Soviet states as a futurist poet of the same ilk
as Mayakovsky and Burliuk, among others. He took part in a military campaign
exporting socialism from Russia to the Middle East, beginning in Rasht in northern Iran.
During his stay in Iran, where he worked as an embedded journalist with a Russian
military unit, Khlebnikov became acquainted with several dervishes, and earned the
nicknames “the Russian Dervish” and “Gul Mulla” from the local people. While his stay
there he wrote a series of poems, including “The Lonely Hamfatter “,“Tiran without
T”(“Trumpet of Gul Mulla”).
“Language is the house of being,” as Martin Heidegger says. From Khlebnikov’s texts
some details about the life of a Russian poet in Persia in the early
