quarta-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2016

[200] POESIA: VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKI - POETA RUSSO, DESIGNER GRÁFICO, MILITANTE CULTURAL FUTURISTA E POLÍTICO, HOMEM SÓ CORAÇÃO - 1893-1930




VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKI
POETA RUSSO, DESIGNER GRÁFICO, MILITANTE CULTURAL FUTURISTA E POLÍTICO, HOMEM SÓ CORAÇÃO - 1893-1930.



Museu Maiakovski, praça da Lubianka, Moscou.


Nasceu em Baghdati, Império Russo, em 19 de julho de 1893.

Faleceu (suicídio) em Moscou, Rússia, União Soviética, em 14 de abril de 1930.



Museu Maiakovski, praça da Lubianka, Moscou.


Vladimir Mayakovski
Fonte: Blog Pensador
http://pensador.uol.com.br/autor/vladimir_maiakovski/biografia/

Vladimir Mayakovsky nasceu na Geórgia, então Rússia, em 1893.
Entrou para a facção bolchevique do Partido Social-Democrático Operário Russo ainda na adolescência, sendo preso várias vezes.
Junto com David Burlyuk, Khlebnikov e Kruchonykh, publica o manifesto cubo-futurista intitulado Uma bofetada no gosto do público.
Após a Revolução de Outubro 1917, trabalhou na Agência Telegráfica Russa, foi redator da revista LEF (de Liévi Front, Frente de Esquerda), escreveu teatro, fez inúmeras viagens pelo país, aparecendo diante de vastos auditórios para os quais lia os seus versos.

Nuvem de calças, publicado em 1915, foi talvez o seu primeiro grande poema a ser editado. Suicidou-se com um tiro, aos quase 37 anos de idade, em 14 de Abril de 1930.


Vladimir Mayakovski [1893 – 1930]

Nasceu em Baghdati, em 19 de julho de 1893; faleceu (suicídio) em Moscou, em 14 de abril de 1930

Origem: Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre.

Vladimir Maiakovski
Mayakovsky 1929 a.jpg / Mayakovsky em 1929
Data de nascimento
Local de nascimento
Nacionalidade
Data de morte
14 de abril de 1930 (36 anos)
Local de morte
Gênero(s)
Pseudónimo(s)
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Cidadania
Período de atividade
1912—1930
Influenciados

Vladimir Mayakovsky (em russo: Владимир Владимирович Маяковский; nasceu em Baghdati, Império Russo, 19 de julho de 1893; faleceu em Moscou, Rússia, 14 de abril de 1930. Também chamado de "o poeta da Revolução", foi um poeta, dramaturgo e teórico russo, frequentemente citado como um dos maiores poetas do século XX, ao lado deEzra Pound e T.S. Eliot, bem como "o maior poeta do futurismo". [2] [3]

 

Biografia

Vladimir Vladimirovitch Mayakovsky nasceu e passou a infância na aldeia de Baghdati, nos arredores de Kutaíssi, na Geórgia, Império Russo. [4] [5] Lá cursou o ginásio e, após a morte súbita do pai, a família ficou na miséria e transferiu-se para Moscou, onde Vladimir continuou seus estudos. [4]
Fortemente impressionado pelo movimento revolucionário russo e impregnado desde cedo de obras socialistas, ingressou aos quinze anos na facção bolchevique do Partido Social-Democrático Operário Russo. Detido em duas ocasiões, foi solto por falta de provas, mas em 1909-1910 passou onze meses na prisão. Entrou na Escola de Belas Artes, onde se encontrou com David Burliuk, que foi o grande incentivador de sua iniciação poética. Os dois amigos fizeram parte do grupo fundador do assim chamado cubo-futurismo russo, ao lado de Khlebnikov, Kamiênski e outros. [6] Foram expulsos da Escola de Belas Artes. Procurando difundir suas concepções artísticas, realizaram viagens pela Rússia.
Após a Revolução de Outubro, todo o grupo manifestou sua adesão ao novo regime. Durante a Guerra Civil, Mayakovsky se dedicou a desenhos e legendas para cartazes de propaganda e, no início da consolidação do novo Estado, exaltou campanhas sanitárias, fez publicidade de produtos diversos, etc. Fundou em 1923 a revista LEF (de Liévi Front, Frente de Esquerda), que reuniu a “esquerda das artes”, isto é, os escritores e artistas que pretendiam aliar a forma revolucionária a um conteúdo de renovação social. [4]
Fez numerosas viagens pelo país, aparecendo diante de vastos auditórios para os quais lia os seus versos. Viajou também pela Europa Ocidental, México e Estados Unidos. Entrou frequentemente em choque com os "burocratas" e com os que pretendiam reduzir a poesia a fórmulas simplistas. Foi homem de grandes paixões, arrebatado e lírico, épico e satírico ao mesmo tempo. Era fanático pela equipe de futebol Spartak Moscou. [carece de fontes]
Oficialmente, suicidou-se com um tiro em 1930, sem que isto tivesse relação alguma com sua atividade literária e social. [7] [8] [9] Tal fato tem sido questionado, pois na época o poeta estaria sendo pressionado pelos programas oficiais que desejavam instaurar uma literatura simplista e dita realista, dirigidos por MViatcheslav Molotov, que teria perseguido antigos poetas revolucionários como Maiakovski. [4] [10] Em vista disso, aponta-se a possibilidade real de um suicídio forjado por motivos políticos. [11] [7]

 

Obra



Lápide de Vladimir Majakovski em Moscou (no cemitério Nowodewitsche)

Sua obra, profundamente revolucionária na forma e nas idéias que defendeu, apresenta-se coerente, original, veemente, una. A linguagem que emprega é a do dia a dia, sem nenhuma consideração pela divisão em temas e vocábulos “poéticos” e “não-poéticos”, a par de uma constante elaboração, que vai desde a invenção vocabular até o inusitado arrojo das rimas. [4] [5]
Fazendo parte do grupo "Hylaea", que daria origem ao chamado cubo-futurismo, seu primeiro livro de poemas, no entanto, seria de estética influenciada pelo simbolismo, e nunca chegaria a público, tendo sido escrito quando o poeta estava na prisão e apreendido pela polícia no momento da sua libertação. [12] [13]
Aproximando-se de David Burliuk na década de 1910, passa a escrever em um estilo aproximado do cubismo e do futurismo, influenciado pelo primitivismo eslavista e pelalinguagem transracional de Velimir Khlebnikov e outros, repleto de imagística urbana e surpreendente, com um certo ar impressionista e, ainda, simbolista. Esta fase de sua poesia é a mais apreciada por poetas como Boris Pasternak, em função de ainda manter alguns recursos simbolistas e métrica rigorosa em alguns poemas. [4] [5]
Em seguida, já na década de 1920, sua poesia, apesar de haver uma continuidade no que diz respeiro à inovação rítmica, à rimas inusitadas, ao uso da fala cotidiana e mesmo de imagens inusitadas, assume um tom direto. [14]
Ao mesmo tempo, o gosto pelo desmesurado, o hiperbólico, alia-se em sua poesia desta época à dimensão crítico-satírica. Criou longos poemas e quadras e dísticos que se gravam na memória. Traduções sem preocupação com a forma dos poemas produzidos nesta época têm dado ao público uma imagem errônea do poeta, fazendo-o parecer um "gritador". [14]
Na realidade, era um poeta rigoroso, que chegava a reescrever sessenta vezes o mesmo verso e recolhia muito material informativo e linguístico para posterior uso nos seus poemas. Criou também ensaios sobre a arte poética e artigos curtos de jornal; peças de forte sentido social e rápidas cenas sobre assuntos do dia; roteiros de cinema arrojados e fantasiosos e breves filmes de propaganda. [14]
Tem exercido influência profunda em todo o desenvolvimento da poesia russa moderna, bem como sobre outros poetas e movimentos no mundo inteiro, como Hamid Olimjon, Nazım Hikmet, Hedwig Gorski, Vasko Popa e Caetano Veloso [1] .

 

 

 

Referências

1.       Ir para:a b Zcastel. O amor de Maiakóvski…, de Gal, e de Caetano!. Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
2.      Ir para cima Skoob. Vladimir Maiakóvski. Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
3.      Ir para cima Karpinski, Joanne B.. Poetics and Polemics: Strategies of Ezra Pound and Vladimir Mayakovsky (em inglês).Colorado: University of Colorado at Boulder, 1980. 572 p. OCLC 7647562 Página visitada em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
4.       Ir para:a b c d e f v-mayakovsky.com. Vladimir V. Mayakovsky (em rússo). Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
5.       Ir para:a b c v-mayakovsky.com. Владимир Маяковский "Я сам" (em rússo). Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
6.      Ir para cima ITINERÁRIOS – Revista de Literatura. Suprematismo, Cubo-futurismo e a Tragédia, de Maiakóvski (PDF). Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
7.       Ir para:a b Pravda.ru (26 de outubro de 2005). The death of the poet of communism, Vladimir Mayakovsky, remains mysterious (em inglês) Pravda.ru. Visitado em 22 de fevereiro de 2014.
8.      Ir para cima Boym, Svetlana. Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (em inglês). [S.l.]: Harvard University Press, 1991. 291 p. p. 168. ISBN 9780674194274
9.      Ir para cima Wilson, Jason. A Companion to Pablo Neruda: Evaluating Neruda's Poetry (em inglês). [S.l.]: Tamesis Books, 2008. 255 p. p. 5. ISBN 9781855661677
10.   Ir para cima Arquivo Marxista na Internet (julho de 2005). O Suicídio de Maiakovsky. Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
11.   Ir para cima Fernando A. S. Araújo (julho de 2005). O Suicídio de Maiakovsky Marxists Internet Archive. Visitado em 22 de fevereiro de 2014.
12.   Ir para cima Encyclopedia of World Biography (2004). Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (em inglês). Visitado em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
13.   Ir para cima M. Lawton, Anna; Eagle, Herbert. In: LLC. Words in Revolution:: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912-1928(em inglês). [S.l.]: New Academia Publishing, 2005. 353 p. p. 11. ISBN 0974493473 Página visitada em 04 de janeiro de 2013.
14.    Ir para:a b c Mayakovsky, Vladimir; Daniels, Guy. Mayakovsky: Plays: European Drama Classics Series (em inglês). [S.l.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968. 274 p. ISBN 0810113392 Página visitada em 04 de janeiro de 2013.




Fonte: Jornal GGN; Miluduarte; Seg, 02/11/2015 - 17:30
Acesso RAS em 27jan2016



O Museu Mayakovski, um dos mais diferentes e originais de Moscou, situado na praça da Lubianka, é um dos passeios obrigatórios que o turista que visita a capital russa deve fazer. Tanto pela importância histórica, quanto literária e cultural de Vladimir Maiakovski. Como diz a apresentadora do vídeo postado a seguir, "a excursão pelo Museu Maiakovski é parte de um processo educativo que nunca acaba". O museu apresenta as cartas, os desenhos, objetos pessoais do poeta, tudo numa disposição meio anárquica, refletindo o pensamento tumultuado de Vladimir Maiakovski. Em suma, este museu procura retratar o mundo, o pensamento e a época do poeta russo, homem sempre atual,de sentimentos intensos e coração ardente.
Me furto à tentação de colocar sua biografia neste post, salientando, apenas, que além de poeta, ele era um desenhista de primeira, assim como seus pais e irmã. Durante os anos da guerra civil, se dedicou a fazer desenhos para cartazes de propagandas. Fez, também, mais tarde, campanhas institucionais e propagandas para divulgação da poesia. Muitos de seus desenhos eram de cunho satírico.
Deixo alguns de exemplo neste espaço.
Agora, ao passeio virtual pelo museu: se você quiser fazer este passeio em RUSSO, clique AQUI.
Caso não seja da turminha que conhece ou estuda o idioma do poeta e quiser fazer a visita em INGLÊS, clique AQUI. Este site, também, oferece um passeio virtual bastante interativo e nele você vai ouvir a voz do próprio poeta: 
Outra opção de conhecer virtualmente o museu, é este vídeo que se segue: 
Finalizo deixando este link de uma excursão em 3D por todo o museu. Você vai clicando nas setas ou nas palavras "следующий раздел", localizadas no canto direito inferior da página, para ir mudando de ambiente. Entre nesta viagem e se sinta no próprio museu.
E já que o tema do post é Maiakovski, aí vai um vídeo com raras cenas do poeta. Você poderá vê-lo por alguns momentos...Cenas do funeral do poeta:
Fontes:
www.youtube.com, vídeos de debjutlv, Sun Glory e Galina Benislavskaya
http://www.mayakovsky.info/virt/
http://mayakovsky.museum//tour.html




[MAIAKOVSKI COMO DESIGNER GRÁFICO]


Maiakovski: Lembrem-se disto, camaradas! é único o vosso partido dos trabalhadores: o dos comunistas!

Maiakovski: desenho de abril de 1921

Maiakovski: Caricatura de Hugo Gellert, muralista e ilustrador húngaro, contida nas anotações do poeta, caderno n.33, lista 27, em 1925.Na parte de baixo, dedicatória de Maiakovski a Gellert, em inglês.
Maiakovski: Auto-charge pouco conhecida, feita para o jornal "chkval", de Odessa, em 1926



Texto e desenhos de Maiakovski, 1920

Cartaz feito por Maiakovski, onde se lê: Rádio, em caixa alta, e, logo abaixo, o nome do próprio poeta (entre parênteses, ao lado de seu nome, escrito de forma abreviada 'desenhista". A seguir, os nomes de Vadim Baian, (ligado ao movimento literário russo do início do século XX), Boris Popliavski(poeta), entre outros mais desconhecidos desta iletrada blogueira [Milu Duarte].

Maiakovski: desenho de julho de 1930
Maiakovski: "Semana do movimento Sindical. Fortaleça os sindicatos



Saindo dos desenhos, passemos um pouco ao acervo de fotos do poeta:


Maiakovski  em 1900

Maiakovski . Ainda ginasiano, em 1904
Maiakovski em 1908


Maiakovski  em 1910

Maiakovski  em 1913

Maiakovski em 1911, quando de seu ingresso na Escola de Belas Artes




Maiakovski  em 1915

Maiakovski  em 1918


Maiakovski  em 1927

Maiakovski  em 1929





MAYAKOVSKI - Poemas Traduzidos Selecionados
http://www.poesiaspoemaseversos.com.br/maiakovski/#.Vqkxf_krKM8



BLUSA FÁTUA
Costurarei calças pretas
com o veludo da minha garganta
e uma blusa amarela com três metros de poente.
Pela Niévski do mundo, como criança grande,
andarei, donjuan, com ar de dândi.
Que a terra gema em sua mole indolência:
“Não viole o verde de as minhas primaveras!”
Mostrando os dentes, rirei ao sol com insolência:
“No asfalto liso hei de rolar as rimas veras!”
Não sei se é porque o céu é azul celeste
e a terra, amante, me estende as mãos ardentes
que eu faço versos alegres como marionetes
e afiados e precisos como palitar dentes!
Fêmeas, gamadas em minha carne, e esta
garota que me olha com amor de gêmea,
cubram-me de sorrisos, que eu, poeta,
com flores os bordarei na blusa cor de gema!
( Maiakóvski – tradução: Augusto de Campos )



E ENTÃO, QUE QUEREIS?
Fiz ranger as folhas de jornal
abrindo-lhes as pálpebras piscantes.
E logo
de cada fronteira distante
subiu um cheiro de pólvora
perseguindo-me até em casa.
Nestes últimos vinte anos
nada de novo há
no rugir das tempestades.
Não estamos alegres,
é certo,
mas também por que razão
haveríamos de ficar tristes?
O mar da história
é agitado.
As ameaças
e as guerras
havemos de atravessá-las,
rompê-las ao meio,
cortando-as
como uma quilha corta
as ondas.
( Maiakóvski, tradução de E. Carrera Guerra )
*(De outro livro, outro tradutor, outro poema:)



AMO
A Lila Brik
COMUMENTE É ASSIM
Cada um ao nascer
traz sua dose de amor,
mas os empregos,
o dinheiro,
tudo isso,
nos resseca o solo do coração.
Sobre o coração levamos o corpo,
sobre o corpo a camisa,
mas isto é pouco.
Alguém
imbecilmente
inventou os punhos
e sobre os peitos
fez correr o amido de engomar.
Quando velhos se arrependem.
A mulher se pinta.
O homem faz ginástica
pelo sistema Müller.
Mas é tarde.
A pele enche-se de rugas.
O amor floresce,
floresce,
e depois desfolha.



GAROTO
Fui agraciado com o amor sem limites.
Mas, quando garoto,
a gente preocupada trabalhava
e eu escapava
para as margens do rio Rion
e vagava sem fazer nada.
Aborrecia-se minha mãe:
“Garoto danado!”
Meu pai me ameaçava com o cinturão.
Mas eu,
com três rublos falsos,
jogava com os soldados sob os muros.
Sem o peso da camisa,
sem o peso das botas,
de costas ou de barriga no chão,
torrava-me ao sol de Kutaís
até sentir pontadas no coração.
O sol se assombrava:
“Daquele tamaninho
e com um tal coração!
Vai partir-lhe a espinha!
Como, será que cabem
neste tico de gente
o rio,
o coração,
eu
e cem quilômetros de montanhas?”



ADOLESCENTE
A juventude tem mil ocupações.
Estudamos gramática até ficar zonzos.
A mim
me expulsaram do quinto ano
e fui entupir os cárceres de Moscou.
Em nosso pequeno mundo caseiro
brotam pelos divãs
poetas de melenas fartas.
Que esperar desses líricos bichanos?
Eu, no entanto,
aprendi a amar no cárcere.
Que vale comparado com isto
a tristeza do bosque de Boulogne?
Que valem comparados com isto
suspiros ante a paisagem do mar?
Eu, pois,
me enamorei da janelinha da cela 103
da “oficina de pompas fúnebres”.
Há gente que vê o sol todos os dias
e se enche de presunção.
“Não valem muito esses raiozinhos”
dizem.
Eu, então,
por um raiozinho de sol amarelo
dançando em minha parede
teria dado todo um mundo.



MINHA UNIVERSIDADE
Conheceis o francês,
sabeis dividir,
multiplicar,
declinar com perfeição.
Pois, declinai!
Mas sabeis por acaso
cantar em dueto com os edifícios?
Entendeis por acaso
a linguagem dos bondes?
O pintainho humano
mal abandona a casca
atraca-se aos livros
e a resmas de cadernos.
Eu aprendi o alfabeto nos letreiros
folheando páginas de estanho e ferro.
Os professores tomam a terra
e a descarnam
e a descascam
para afinal ensinar:
“Toda ela não passa dum globinho!”
Eu com os costados aprendi geografia.
Não foi à toa que tanto dormi no chão.
Os historiadores levantam
a angustiante questão:
- Era ou não roxa a barba de Barba Roxa?
Que me importa!
Não costumo remexer o pó dessas velharias!
Mas das ruas de Moscou
conheço todas as histórias.
Uma vez instruídos,
há os que propõem
a agradar às damas,
fazendo soar no crânio suas poucas idéias,
como pobres moedas numa caixa de pau.
Eu, somente com os edifícios, conversava.
Somente os canos dágua me respondiam.
Os tetos como orelhas espichando
suas lucarnas atentas
aguardavam as palavras
que eu lhes deitaria.
Depois
noite a dentro
uns com os outros
palravam
girando suas línguas de catavento.



ADULTOS
Os adultos fazem negócios.
Têm rublos nos bolsos.
Quer amor? Pois não!
Ei-lo por cem rublos!
E eu, sem casa e sem teto,
com as mãos metidas nos bolsos rasgados,
vagava assombrado.
À noite
vestis os melhores trajes
e ides descansar sobre viúvas ou casadas.
A mim
Moscou me sufocava de abraços
com seus infinitos anéis de praças.
Nos corações, nos relógios
bate o pêndulo dos amantes.
Como se exaltam as duplas no leito de amor!
Eu, que sou a Praça da Paixão,
surpreendo o pulsar selvagem
do coração das capitais.
Desabotoado, o coração quase de fora,
abria-me ao sol e aos jatos dágua.
Entrai com vossas paixões!
Galgai-me com vossos amores!
Doravante não sou mais dono de meu coração!
Nos demais – eu sei,
qualquer um sabe -
o coração tem domicílio
no peito.
Comigo
a anatomia ficou louca.
Sou todo coração -
em todas as partes palpita.
Oh! quantas são as primaveras
em vinte anos acesas nesta fornalha!
Uma tal carga
acumulada
torna-se simplesmente insuportável.
Insuportável
não para o verso
de veras.



O QUE ACONTECEU
Mais do que é permitido,
mais do que é preciso,
como um delírio de poeta
sobrecarregando o sonho:
a pelota do coração tornou-se enorme,
enorme o amor,
enorme o ódio.
Sob o fardo,
as pernas vão vacilantes.
Tu o sabes,
sou bem fornido,
entretanto me arrasto,
apêndice do coração,
vergando as espáduas gigantes.
Encho-me dum leite de versos
e, sem poder transbordar,
encho-me mais e mais.



CLAMO
Levantei-o como um atleta,
levei-o como um acrobata,
como se levam os candidatos ao comício,
como nas aldeias se toca a rebate
nos dias de incêndio.
Clamava:
“Aqui está, aqui! Tomai-o!”
Quando este corpanzil se punha a uivar,
as donas
disparando
pelo pó, pelo barro ou pela neve,
como um foguete fugiam de mim.
- “Para nós, algo um tanto menor,
algo assim como um tango…”
Não posso levá-lo
e carrego meu fardo.
Quero arremessá-lo fora
e sei, não o farei.
Os arcos de minhas costelas não resistem.
Sob a pressão
range a caixa torácica.



TU
Entraste.
A sério, olhaste
a estatura,
o bramido
e simplesmente adivinhaste:
uma criança.
Tomaste,
arrancaste-me o coração
e simplesmente foste com ele jogar
como uma menina com sua bola.
E todas,
como se vissem um milagre,
senhoras e senhoritas exclamaram:
- A esse amá-lo?
Se se atira em cima,
derruba a gente!
Ela, com certeza, é domadora!
Por certo, saiu duma jaula!
E eu de júbilo
esqueci o jugo.
Louco de alegria
saltava
como em casamento de índio,
tão leve,
tão bem me sentia.



IMPOSSÍVEL
Sozinho não posso
carregar um piano
e menos ainda um cofre-forte.
Como poderia então
retomar de ti meu coração
e carregá-lo de volta?
Os banqueiros dizem com razão:
“Quando nos faltam bolsos,
nós que somos muitíssimo ricos,
guardamos o dinheiro no banco”.
Em ti
depositei meu amor,
tesouro encerrado em caixa de ferro,
e ando por aí
como um Creso contente.
É natural, pois,
quando me dá vontade,
que eu retire um sorriso,
a metade de um sorriso
ou menos até
e indo com as donas
eu gaste depois da meia-noite
uns quantos rublos de lirismo à toa.



O QUE ACONTECEU COMIGO
As esquadras acodem ao porto.
O trem corre para as estações.
Eu, mais depressa ainda,
vou a ti,
atraído, arrebatado,
pois que te amo.
Assim como se apeia
o avarento cavaleiro de Púchkin,
alegre por encafuar-se em seu sótão,
assim eu
regresso ati, amada,
com o coração encantado de mim.
Ficais contentes de retornar à casa.
Ali vos livrais da sujeira,
raspando-vos, lavando-vos,
fazendo a barba.
Assim retorno eu a ti.
Por acaso,
indo a ti não volto à minha casa?
Gente terrena ao seio da terra volta.
Sempre volvemos à nossa meta final.
Assim eu,
em tua direção sempre me inclino
apenas nos separamos
mal acabamos de nos ver.



DEDUÇÃO
Não acabarão com o amor,
nem as rusgas,
nem a distância.
Está provado,
pensado,
verificado.
Aqui levanto solene
minha estrofe de mil dedos
e faço o juramento:
Amo
firme,
fiel
e verdadeiramente.
( Maiakóvski )
(1922 – em Maiacovski – Antologia Poética – tradução E. Carrera Guerra, ed. Max Limonad/SP).
*



“É melhor morrer de Vodka do que morrer de tédio.”
*



A EXTRAORDINÁRIA AVENTURA VIVIDA POR VLADÍMIR MAIAKOVSKI NO VERÃO NA DATCHA
(Púchkino, monte Akula, datcha de Rumiántzev, a 27 verstas pela estrada de ferro de Iaroslávl)
A tarde ardia com cem sóis.
O verão rolava em julho.
O calor se enrolava
no ar e nos lençóis
da datcha onde eu estava.
Na colina de Púchkino, corcunda,
o monte Akula,
e ao pé do monte
a aldeia enruga
a casa dos telhados.
E atrás da aldeia,
um buraco
e no buraco, todo dia,
o mesmo ato:
o sol descia
lento e exato.
E de manhã
outra vez
por toda a parte
lá estava o sol
escarlate.
Dia após dia
isto
começou a irritar-me
terrivelmente.
Um dia me enfureço a tal ponto
que, de pavor, tudo empalidece.
E grito ao sol, de pronto:
“Desce!
Chega de vadiar nessa fornalha!”
E grito ao sol:
“Parasita!
Você, aí, a flanar pelos ares,
e eu, aqui, cheio de tinta,
com a cara nos cartazes!”
E grito ao sol:
“Espere!
Ouça, topete de ouro,
e se em lugar
desse ocaso
de paxá
você baixar em casa
para um chá?”
Que mosca me mordeu!
É o meu fim!
Para mim
sem perder tempo
o sol
alargando os raios-passos
avança pelo campo.
Não quero mostrar medo.
Recuo para o quarto.
Seus olhos brilham no jardim.
Avançam mais.
Pelas janelas,
pelas portas,
pelas frestas,
a massa
solar vem abaixo
e invade a minha casa.
Recobrando o fôlego,
me diz o sol com voz de baixo:
“Pela primeira vez recolho o fogo,
desde que o mundo foi criado.
Você me chamou?
Apanhe o chá,
pegue a compota, poeta!”
Lágrimas na ponta dos olhos
- o calor me fazia desvairar -
eu lhe mostro
o samovar:

“Pois bem,
sente-se, astro!”
Quem me mandou berrar ao sol
insolências sem conta?
Contrafeito
me sento numa ponta
do banco e espero a conta
com um frio no peito.
Mas uma estranha claridade
fluía sobre o quarto
e esquecendo os cuidados
começo
pouco a pouco
a palestrar com o astro.
Falo
disso e daquilo,
como me cansa a Rosta,
etc.
E o sol:
“Está certo,
mas não se desgoste,
não pinte as coisas tão pretas.


E eu? Você pensa
que brilhar
é fácil?
Prove, pra ver!
Mas quando se começa
é preciso prosseguir
e a gente vai e brilha pra valer!”
Conversamos até a noite
ou até o que, antes, eram trevas.
Como falar, ali, de sombras?
Ficamos íntimos,
os dois.
Logo,
com desassombro,
estou batendo no seu ombro.
E o sol, por fim:
“Somos amigos
pra sempre, eu de você,
você de mim.
Vamos poeta,
cantar,
luzir
no lixo cinza do universo.


Eu verterei o meu sol
e você o seu
com seus versos.”
O muro das sombras,
prisão das trevas,
desaba sob o obus
dos nossos sóis de duas bocas.
Confusão de poesia e luz,
chamas por toda a parte.
Se o sol se cansa
e a noite lenta
quer ir pra cama,
marmota sonolenta,
eu, de repente,
inflamo a minha flama
e o dia fulge novamente.
Brilhar pra sempre,
brilhar como um farol,
brilhar com brilho eterno,
gente é pra brilhar,
que tudo mais vá pro inferno,
este é o meu slogan
e o do sol.

1920
( Maiakóvski ) (tradução de Augusto de Campos)
(1. Datcha – casa de veraneio.
2. Versta – medida itinerária equivalente a 1,067m.
3. Rosta – A Agência Telegráfica Russa, para a qual Maiakovski executou cartazes satíricos de notícias – as “janelas” Rosta -, de 1919 a 1922.)
*


A PLENOS PULMÕES
Primeira Introdução ao Poema
Caros
camaradas
futuros!
Revolvendo
a merda fóssil
de agora,
pesquisando
estes dias escuros,
talvez
perguntareis
por mim.
Ora,
começará
vosso homem de ciência,
afagando os porquês
num banho de sabença,
conta-se
que outrora
um férvido cantor
a água sem fervura
combateu com fervor(1).
Professor,
jogue fora
suas lentes de arame!
A mim cabe falar
de mim
de minha era.
Eu ? incinerador,
eu ? sanitarista,
a revolução
me convoca e me alista.

Troco pelo front
a horticultura airosa
da poesia ?
fêmea caprichosa.
Ela ajardina o jardim virgem
vargem
sombra
alfombra.
“É assim o jardim de jasmim,
o jardim de jasmim do alfenim.”
Este verte versos feito regador,
aquele os baba,
boca em babador, ?
bonifrates encapelados,
descabelados vates ?
entendê-los,
ao diabo!,
quem há-de…
Quarentena é inútil contra eles
? mandolinam por detrás das paredes:
“Ta-ran-tin, ta-ran-tin,
ta-ran-ten-n-n…”
Triste honra,
se de tais rosas
minha estátua se erigisse:
na praça
escarra a tuberculose;
putas e rufiões
numa ronda de sífilis.


Também a mim
a propaganda
cansa,
é tão fácil
alinhavar
romanças, ?
Mas eu
me dominava
entretanto
e pisava
a garganta do meu canto.
Escutai,
camaradas futuros,
o agitador,
o cáustico caudilho,
o extintor
dos melífluos enxurros:
por cima
dos opúsculos líricos,
eu vos falo
como um vivo aos vivos.
Chego a vós,
à Comuna distante,
não como Iessiênin,
guitarriarcaico.
Mas através
dos séculos em arco
sobre os poetas
e sobre os governantes.
Meu verso chegará,
não como a seta
lírico-amável,
que persegue a caça.
Nem como
ao numismata
a moeda gasta,
nem como a luz
das estrelas decrépitas.
Meu verso
com suor
rompe a mole dos anos,
e assoma
a olho nu,
palpável,
bruto,
como a nossos dias
chega o aqueduto
levantado
por escravos romanos.


No túmulo dos livros,
versos como ossos,
se estas estrofes de aço
acaso descobrirdes,
vós as respeitareis,
como quem vê destroços
de um arsenal antigo,
mas terrível.
Ao ouvido
não diz
blandícias
minha voz;
lóbulos de donzelas
de cachos e bandós
não faço enrubescer
com lascivos rondós.
Desdobro minhas páginas?
tropas em parada,
e passo em revista
o front das palavras.
Estrofes estacam
chumbo-severas,
prontas para o triunfo
ou para a morte.
Poemas-canhões, rígida coorte,
apontando
as maiúsculas
abertas.
Ei-la,
a cavalaria do sarcasmo,
minha arma favorita,
alerta para a luta.
Rimas em riste,
sofreando o entusiasmo,
eriça
suas lanças agudas.
E todo
este exército aguerrido,
vinte anos de combates,
não batido,
eu vos dôo,
proletários do planeta,
cada folha
até a última letra.
O inimigo
da colossal
classe obreira,
é também
meu inimigo
mortal.

Anos de servidão e de miséria
comandavam
nossa bandeira vermelha.
Nós abríamos Marx
volume após volume,
janelas
de nossa casa
abertas amplamente,
mas ainda sem ler
saberíamos o rumo!
onde combater,
de que lado,
em que frente.
Dialética,
não aprendemos com Hegel.
Invadiu-nos os versos
ao fragor das batalhas,
quando,
sob o nosso projétil,
debandava o burguês
que antes nos debandara.
Que essa viúva desolada,
? glória ?
se arraste
após os gênios,
melancólica.
Morre,
meu verso,
como um soldado
anônimo
na lufada do assalto.

Cuspo
sobre o bronze pesadíssimo,
cuspo
sobre o mármore viscoso.
Partilhemos a glória, ?
entre nós todos, ?
o comum monumento:
o socialismo,
forjado
na refrega
e no fogo.
Vindouros,
varejai vossos léxicos:
do Letes
brotam letras como lixo ?
“tuberculose”,
“bloqueio”,
“meretrício”.
Por vós,
geração de saudáveis, ?
um poeta,
com a língua dos cartazes,
lambeu
os escarros da tísis.
A cauda dos anos
faz-me agora
um monstro,
antediluviano.
Camarada vida,
vamos,
para diante,
galopemos
pelo qüinqüênio afora(2).

Os versos
para mim
não deram rublos,
nem mobílias
de madeiras caras.
Uma camisa
lavada e clara,
e basta, ?
para mim é tudo.
Ao Comitê Central
do futuro
ofuscante,
sobre a malta
dos vates
velhacos e falsários,
apresento
em lugar
do registro partidário
todos
os cem tomos
dos meus livros militantes.


dezembro 1929/janeiro 1930
1. Maiakóvski escreveu versos de propaganda sanitária.
2. Alusão aos Planos Qüinqüenais soviéticos.
(Tradução e notas de Haroldo de Campos)
Do livro “Maiakovski – Poemas”/Editora Perspectiva, 1982.
Leia também:




Vladimir Mayakovsky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Mayakovsky" redirects here. For other uses, see Mayakovsky (disambiguation).
Acesso RAS em 27jan2016

Vladimir Mayakovsky
Mayakovsky in 1924
Born
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky 19 July 1893
Baghdati, Kutaisi Governorate, Russian Empire
Died
14 April 1930 (aged 36) Moscow, Soviet Union
Citizenship
Alma mater
Period
1912—1930
Literary movement

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (/ˌmɑːjəˈkɔːfski, -ˈkɒf-/;[1] Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский; July 19 [O.S. July 7] 1893 – 14 April 1930) was aRussian Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor.
During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement; being among the signers of the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), and authoring poems such as A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and Backbone Flute (1916). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and created agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War. Though Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party and a strong admiration of Lenin,[2][3] Mayakovsky's relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that contained criticism or satire of aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry" (1926), and the plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929), were met with scorn by the Soviet state and literary establishment.
In 1930 Mayakovsky committed suicide. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticized by Stalinist governmental bodies like RAPP, Joseph Stalin posthumously declared Mayakovsky "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch."[4]

 

BIOGRAPHY

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born the last of three children in Baghdati, Kutaisi Governorate, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father Vladimir Konstantinovich Mayakovsky, a local forester, belonged to a noble family and was a distant relative of the writer Grigory Danilevsky. Vladimir Vladimirovich's mother Alexandra Alexeyevna (née Pavlenko), was a housewife, looking after the children – a son and two daughters, Olga and Lyudmila (their brother Konstantin died at the age of three).[5]
The Mayakovskys in Kutaisi

The family had Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their father's side and Ukrainian on their mother's.[6] At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian. "I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. My mother tongue is Georgian. Thus three cultures are united in me", he told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview.[7] Georgia for Mayakovsky remained the eternal symbol of beauty. "I know, it's nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, that those poets were having in mind", he wrote later.[5][8]
In 1902 Mayakovsky joined the Kutais gymnasium where, as a 14-year-old he took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi.[5] His mother, aware of his activities, apparently didn't mind. "People around warned us we were giving a young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations", she later remembered.[6] After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906 (he pricked his finger with a rusty pin while filing papers and died of blood poisoning) the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow after selling all their movable property.[5][9]
In July 1906 Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of the Moscow's 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature. "Never cared for fiction. For me it was philosophy, Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, Marxism. There'd be no higher art for me than "The Foreword" by Marx, he recalled in the 1920s in his autobiographyI, Myself.[10] In 1907 Mayakovsky became a member of his gymnasium's underground Social Democrats' circle, taking part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which he, given the nickname "Comrade Konstantin",[11] joined the same year.[12][13] In 1908, the boy was dismissed from the gymnasium because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees.[14] For two years he studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts, where his sister Lyudmila had started her studies a few years earlier.[9]


Mayakovsky in 1910

As a young Bolshevik activist, Mayakovsky distributed propaganda leaflets, possessed a pistol without a license, and in 1909 got involved in smuggling female political prisoners out of prison. This resulted in a series of arrests and finally an 11-month imprisonment.[11] It was in a solitary confinement of the Moscow Butyrka prison that Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time.[15] "Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one", he wrote in the I, Myself autobiography.[5] As an underage person, Mayakovsky avoided a serious prison sentence (with subsequent deportation) and in January 1910 was released.[14] A warden confiscated the young man's notebook, and years later Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, yet he always cited 1909 as the year his literary career started.[5]
Upon his release from prison, Mayakovsky remained an ardent Socialist, but realized his own inadequacy as a serious revolutionary. Having left the Party (never to re-join it), he concentrated on education. "I stopped my Party activities. Sat down and started to learn… Now my intention was to make the Socialist art", he later remembered.[16]
In 1911 Mayakovsky enrolled in the Moscow Art School. In September 1911 a brief encounter with fellow student David Burlyuk (which nearly ended with a fight) led to lasting friendship and had historic consequences for the nascent Russian Futurist movement.[12][15] Mayakovsky became an active member (and soon a spokesman) for the group Gileas ( ru ) (Гилея), which sought to free the arts from academic traditions: its members would read poetry on street corners, throw tea at their audiences, and make their public appearances an annoyance for the art establishment.[9]
Burlyuk, on having heard Mayakovsky's verses, declared him "a genius poet".[14][17] Later Soviet researchers tried to downplay the significance of the fact, but even after their friendship ended and their ways parted, Mayakovsky continued to give credit to his mentor, referring to him as "my wonderful friend". "It was Burlyuk who turned me into a poet. He read the French and the Germans to me. He pressed books on me. He would come and talk endlessly. He didn't let me get away. He would subside me with 50 kopeks each day so as I’d write and not be hungry", Mayakovsky wrote in "I, Myself".[11]

 

LITERARY CAREER

Mayakovsky (center) with the fellow Futurist group members


On 17 November 1912, Mayakovsky made his first public performance on stage of the Stray Dog artistic basement in Saint Petersburg.[12] In December of that year his first published poems, "Night" (Ночь) and "Morning" (Утро) appeared in the Futurists' Manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,[18] signed by Mayakovsky, as well as Velemir Khlebnikov, David Burlyuk and Alexey Kruchenykh, calling among other things for… "throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, off the steamboat of the modernity."[12][14]
In October 1913 Mayakovsky gave the performance at the Pink Lantern café, reciting his new poem "Take That!" (Нате!) for the first time. The concert at the Petersburg's Luna-Park saw the premiere of the poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky, with the author in a leading role, stage decorations designed by Pavel Filonov and Iosif Shkolnik.[12][15] In 1913 Mayakovsky's first poetry collection called I (Я) came out, its original limited edition 300 copies lithographically printed. This four-poem cycle, handwritten and illustrated by Vasily Tchekrygin and Leo Shektel, later formed Part One of the 1916 compilation Simple as Mooing.[14]
In December 1913 year Mayakovsky along with his fellow Futurist group members embarked on the Russian tour, which took them to 17 cities, including Simferopol, Sevastopol,Kerch, Odessa and Kishinev.[5] It was a riotous affair. The audiences would go wild and often the police stopped the readings. The poets dressed outlandishly, and Mayakovsky, "a regular scandal-maker" in his own words, used to appear on stage in a self-made yellow shirt which became the token of his early stage persona.[11] The tour ended on 13 April 1914 in Kaluga[12] and cost Mayakovsky and Burlyuk their education: both were expelled from the Art school for their public appearances deemed incompatible with the school's academic principles.[12][14] They learned of it while in Poltava from the local police chief, who chose the occasion as a pretext to ban the Futurists from performing on stage.[6]
Having won 65 rubles in lottery, in May 1914 Mayakovsky went to Kuokkala, near Petrograd. Here he put the finishing touches to A Cloud in Trousers, frequented Korney Chukovsky's dacha, sat for Ilya Repin's painting sessions and met Maxim Gorky for the first time.[19] As World War I began, Mayakovsky volunteered but was rejected as "politically unreliable". He worked for a time at the Lubok Today company which produced patriotic lubok pictures, and in the Nov (Virgin Land) newspaper, which published several of his anti-war poems ("Mother and an Evening Killed by the Germans", "The War is Declared", "Me and Napoleon" among others).[6] In summer 1915 Mayakovsky moved to Petrograd where he started contributing to the New Satyrikon magazine, writing mostly humorous verse in the vein of Sasha Tchorny, one of the journal's former stalwarts. Then Maxim Gorky invited the poet to work for his journal, Letopis[5][16] (Chronicle).
In June of that year Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, who eagerly took upon herself the role of a "muse". Her husband Osip Brik seemed not to mind and became the poet's close friend; later he published several books by Mayakovsky and used his entrepreneurial talents to support the Futurist movement. This love affair, as well as his impressions of World War I and Socialism, strongly influenced Mayakovsky's best known works: A Cloud in Trousers (1915),[20] his first major poem of appreciable length, followed by Backbone Flute (1915), The War and the World (1916) and The Man (1918).[12]
When his mobilization form finally arrived in the autumn of 1915, Mayakovsky found himself unwilling to go to the frontlines. Assisted by Gorky, he joined the Petrograd Military Driving school as a draftsman and was studying there until early 1917.[7][12] In 1916 Parus (The Sail) Publishers (again led by Gorky), published Mayakovsky's poetry compilation called Simple As Mooing.[5][12]

 

1917–1927

Photo c. 1914 (caption: "Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky")

Mayakovsky embraced the Bolshevik Russian Revolution wholeheartedly and for a while even worked in Smolny, Petrograd, where he saw Vladimir Lenin and was rubbing shoulders with the revolutionary soldiers.[12] "To accept or not to accept, there was no such question… [That was] my Revolution," he wrote in I, Myself autobiography.[7] In November 1917 he took part in the Communist Party's Central committee-sanctioned assembly of writers, painters and theater directors who expressed their allegiance to the new political regime.[12] In December that year "The Left March" (Левый мар,1918) was premiered at the The Navy Theater, with sailors as an audience.[16]
In 1918 Mayakovsky started the short-lived Futurist Paper. He also starred in three silent films made at the Neptun Studios in Petrograd he had written scripts for. The only surviving one, The Young Lady and the Hooligan, was based on the La maestrina degli operai (The Workers' Young Schoolmistress) published in 1895 by Edmondo De Amicis, and directed by Evgeny Slavinsky. The other two, Born Not for the Money and Shackled by Film were directed by Nikandr Turkin and are presumed lost.[12][21]
On 7 November 1918 Mayakovsky's play Mystery-Bouffe was premiered in the Petrograd Musical Drama Theatre.[12] Representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the "Unclean" (the proletariat) over the "Clean" (the bourgeoisie), this satirical drama was re-worked in 1921 to even greater popular acclaim.[15][16] However, the author's attempt to make a film of the play failed, the Moscow Soviet finding its language "incomprehensible for the masses."[9]
In March 1919 Mayakovsky moved back to Moscow where Vladimir Mayakovsky's Collected Works 1909–1919 was released. The same month he started working for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters, aimed mostly at informing the country’s largely illiterate population of the current events.[7][12] In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly, even if among the members of the first Bolshevik government, only Anatoly Lunacharsky supported him; others treated the Futurist art more skeptically. Mayakovsky's 1921 poem, 150 000 000 failed to impress Lenin, who apparently saw in it little more than a formal futuristic experiment. More favourably received by the Soviet leader was his next one, "Re Conferences" which came out in April.[12]
A vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. Contributing simultaneously to numerous Soviet newspapers, he poured out topical propagandistic verses and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia.[15]
In May 1922, after a performance at the House of Publishing at the charity auction collecting money for the victims of Povolzhye famine, he went abroad for the first time, visiting Riga, Berlin and Paris where he visited the studios of Léger and Picasso.[9] Several books, including The West and Paris cycles (1922–1925) came out as a result.[12]

Mayakovsky (third from right) with friends including Lilya Brik, Eisenstein (third from left) and Boris Pasternak (second from left).

From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front (LEF) he helped to found (and coin its "literature of fact, not fiction" credo) and for a while defined his work as Communist Futurism (комфут).[14] He edited, along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF, its stated objective being "re-examining the ideology and practices of the so-called leftist art, rejecting individualism and increasing Art's value for the developing Communism."[13] The journal's first, March 1923, issue featured Mayakovsky's poem About That (Про это).[12] Regarded as a LEF manifesto, it soon came out as a book illustrated by Alexander Rodchenko who also used some photographs made by Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik.[22]
In May 1923 Mayakovsky spoke at a massive protest rally in Moscow, in the wake of Vatslav Vorovsky's assassination. In October 1924 he gave numerous public readings of the 3,000-line epic Vladimir Ilyich Lenin written on the death of the Soviet Communist leader. Next February it came out as a book, published by Gosizdat. Five years later Mayakovsky's rendition of the third part of the poem, at the Lenin Memorial evening in the Bolshoi Theatre ended with 20-minutes ovation.[15][23] In May 1925 Mayakovsky's second trip took him to several European cities, then to the United States, Mexico and Cuba. The book of essays My Discovery of America came out later that year.[12][14]
In January 1927 the first issue of the New LEF magazine came out, again under Mayakovsky's supervision, now focusing on the documentary art. In all, 24 issues of it came out.[17] In October 1927 Mayakovsky recited his new poem All Right! (Хорошо!) for the audience of the Moscow Party conference activists in the Moscow's Red Hall.[12] In November 1927 a theatre puction called The 25th (and based upon the All Right! poem) was premiered in the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre. In summer 1928, disillusioned with LEF, he left both the organization and its magazine.[12]

1929–1930

Mayakovsky at his 20 Years of Work exhibition, 1930

In 1929 the publishing house Goslitizdat released The Works by V.V. Mayakovsky in 4 volumes. In September 1929 the first assembly of the newly formed REF group gathered with Mayakovsky in the chair.[12] But behind this façade the poet's relationship with the Soviet literary establishment was quickly deteriorating. Both the REF-organized exhibition of Mayakovsky's work, celebrating the 20th anniversary of his literary career and the parallel event in the Writers' Club, "20 Years of Work" in February 1930, were ignored by the RAPP members and, more importantly, the Party leadership, particularly Stalin whose attendance he was greatly anticipating. It was becoming evident that the experimental art was no longer welcomed by the regime, and the country's most famous poet irritated a lot of people.[6]
Two of Mayakovsky's satirical plays, written specifically for Meyerkhold Theatre, The Bedbug (1929) and (in particular) The Bathhouse (1930) evoked stormy criticism from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.[13] In February 1930 Mayakovsky joined RAPP, only to find himself labeled poputchik which from the days of Lenin amounted to a potentially deadly political accusation.[12] The smear campaign was started in the Soviet press, sporting slogans like "Down with Mayakovshchina!" On 9 April 1930 Mayakovsky, reading his new poem "At the Top of My Voice", was shouted down by the student audience, for being "too obscure."[5][24]

 

DEATH

On 12 April 1930, Mayakovsky was for the last time seen in public: he took part in the discussion at the Sovnarkom meeting concerning the proposed copyright law.[12]. On 14 April 1930, his current partner, actress Veronika Polonskaya, upon leaving his flat, heard a shot behind the closed door. She rushed in and found the poet lying on the floor; he apparently shot himself through the heart.[12][25] The handwritten death note read: "To all of you. I die, but don't blame anyone for it, and please do not gossip. The deceased terribly disliked this sort of thing. Mother, sisters, comrades, forgive me—this is not a good method (I do not recommend it to others), but there is no other way out for me. Lily – love me. Comrade Government, my family consists of Lily Brik, mama, my sisters, and Veronika Vitoldovna Polonskaya. If you can provide a decent life for them, thank you. Give the poem I started to the Briks. They’ll understand."[7] The "unfinished poem" in his suicide note read, in part: "And so they say – "the incident dissolved" / the love boat smashed up / on the dreary routine. / I'm through with life / and [we] should absolve /from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen."[26] Mayakovsky's funeral on 17 April 1930, was attended by around 150,000, the third largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.[4][27] He was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.[13]

 




CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING DEATH



Mayakovsky's farewell letter

On the day of Mayakovsky's death, 14 April, ROSTA published a news bulletin, reprinted in Pravda the following day, that read in part: "the suicide was caused by reasons of a purely personal order, having nothing in general to do with the public and literary activity of the poet, the suicide was preceded by an illness from which the poet still had not completely recovered."[citation needed] Mayakovsky's suicide occurred after a dispute with Polonskaya, with whom he had a brief but unstable romance. Polonskaya, who was in love with the poet, but unwilling to leave her husband, was the last one to see Mayakovsky alive.[7] But, as Lilya Brik stated in her memoirs, "the idea of suicide was like a chronic disease inside him, and like any chronic disease it worsened under circumstances that, for him, were undesirable ... "[11] According to Polonskaya, Mayakovsky mentioned suicide on 13 April, when the two were at Valentin Katayev's place, but she thought he was trying to emotionally blackmail her and "refused to believe for a second [he] could do such a thing."[25]
Yet speculation has occurred regarding the circumstances of Mayakovsky's death. It appeared that the suicide note was written two days before his death. Soon after the poet's death, Lilya and Osip Briks were hastily sent abroad. The bullet removed from his body didn't match the model of his pistol, and his neighbors were later reported to say they'd heard two shots.[11] Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet's suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky's death.[13]Such speculation, often alluding to suspicion of murder by State services, especially intensified during the periods of Krushchevian de-Stalinisation, Glasnost, and Perestroika,[dubious  ] as Soviet politicians sought to weaken Stalin's reputation (or Brik's, and by association, Stalin's) and the positions of contemporary opponents. According to Chantal Sundaram:
The extent to which rumours of Mayakovsky's murder remained widespread is indicated by the fact that even as late as the end of 1991 they prompted the State Mayakovsky Museum to commission an expert medical and criminological inquiry into the material evidence of his death kept in the museum: photographs, the shirt with traces from the gunshot, the carpet on which Mayakovsky fell, and the authenticity of the suicide note. The possibility of a forgery, suggested by [Andrei] Koloskov, had survived as a theory with different variants. But the results of a detailed hand-writing analysis found that the suicide note was undoubtedly written by Mayakovsky, and also included the conclusion that its irregularities "depict a diagnostic complex, testifying to the influence ... at the moment of execution ... of 'disconcerting' factors, among which the most probable is a psycho-physiological state linked with agitation." Although the findings are hardly surprising, the event is indicative of a fascination with Mayakovsky's contradictory relationship with the Soviet authorities which survived into the era of perestroika, despite the fact that he was being attacked and rejected for his political conformism at this time.[4]

 

PRIVATE LIFE

Mayakovsky met husband and wife Osip and Lilya Briks in July 1915 at their dacha in Malakhovka nearby Moscow. Soon after that Lilya's sister Elsa, who'd had a brief affair with the poet before, invited him to the Briks' Petrograd flat. The couple at the time showed no interest in literature and were successful corals traders.[28] That evening Mayakovsky recited the yet unpublished poem A Cloud in Trousers and announced it as dedicated to the hostess ("For you, Lilya"). "That was the happiest day in my life," was how he referred to the episode in his autobiography years later.[5] According to Lilya Brik's memoirs, her husband too fell in love with the poet ("How could I have possibly failed to fell for him, if Osya loved him so?" – she once argued),[29] whereas "Volodya did not merely fall in love with me; he attacked me, it was an assault. For two and a half years I didn't have a moment's peace. I understood right away that Volodya was a genius, but I didn't like him. I didn't like clamorous people ... I didn't like the fact that he was so tall and people in the street would stare at him; I was annoyed that he enjoyed listening to his own voice, I couldn't even stand the name Mayakovsky... sounding so much like a cheap pen name."[11] Both Mayakovsky's persistent adoration and rough appearance irritated her. It was, allegedly, to please her, that Mayakovsky attended a dentist, started to wear a bow tie and use a walking stick.[9]

Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Soon after Osip Brik published A Cloud in Trousers in September 1915, Mayakovsky settled in the Palace Royal hotel at the Pushkinskaya Street, Petrograd, not far from where they lived. He introduced the couple to his Futurist friends and the Briks' flat quickly evolved into a modern literary salon. From then on Mayakovsky was dedicating every one of his large poems (with the obvious exception of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) to Lilya; such dedications later started to appear even in the texts he'd written before they met, much to her displeasure.[11] In summer 1918, soon after Lilya and Vladimir starred in the film Encased in a Film (only fragments of which survived), Mayakovsky and the Briks moved in together. In March 1919 all three came to Moscow and in 1920 settled in a flat at the Gondrikov Lane,Taganka.[30]
In 1920 Mayakovsky had a brief romance with Lilya Lavinskaya, an artist who also contributed to ROSTA. She gave birth to a son, Gleb-Nikita Lavinsky (1921—1986), later a Soviet sculptor.[31] In 1922 Lilya Brik fell in love with Alexander Krasnoshchyokov, the head of the Soviet Prombank. This affair resulted in the three months rift, which was to some extent reflected in the poem About That (1923). Brik and Mayakovsky's relationships ended in 1923, but they never parted. "Now I am free from placards and love," he confessed in the poem called "For the Jubilee" (1924). Still, when in 1926 Mayakovsky was granted a state-owned flat at the Gendrikov Lane in Moscow, all three of them moved in and lived there until 1930, having turned the place into the LEF headquarters.[24]
Mayakovsky continued to profess his devotion to Lilya whom he considered a family member. It was Brik who in the mid-1930s famously addressed Stalin with a personal letter which made all the difference in the way poet's legacy hase been treated since in the USSR. Still, she had many detractors (among them Lyudmila Mayakovskaya, the poet's sister) who regarded her insensitive femme-fatale and cynical manipulator, who'd never been really interested in either Mayakovsky or his poetry.[7] "To me, she was a kind of monster. But Mayakovsky apparently loved her that way, armed with a whip," remembered poet Andrey Voznesensky who knew Lilya Brik personally.[30] Literary critic and historian Viktor Shklovsky who resented what he saw as the Briks' exploitation of Mayakovsky both when he lived and after his death, once called them "a family of corpse-mongers."[29]
In summer 1925 Mayakovsky traveled to New York, where he met Russian émigré Elli Jones, born Yelizaveta Petrovna Zibert, an interpreter who spoke Russian, French, German and English fluently. They fell in love, for three months were inseparable, but decided to keep their affair secret. Soon after the poet's return to the Soviet Union, Elli gave birth to daughter Patricia. Mayakovsky saw the girl just once, in Nice, France, in 1928, when she was three.[11]

Tatyana Yakovleva

Patricia Thompson, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at Lehman College in New York City, is the author of the book Mayakovsky in Manhattan, in which she told the story of her parents' love affair, relying on her mother's unpublished memoirs and their private conversations prior to her death in 1985. Thompson traveled to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, looking for her roots, was welcomed there with respect and since then started to use her Russian name, Yelena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya.[11]
In 1928 in Paris Mayakovsky met Russian émigré Tatyana Yakovleva,[12] a 22-year-old model working for the Chanel fashion house. He fell in love madly and wrote two poems dedicated to her, "Letter to Comrade Kostrov on the Essence of Love" and "Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva." Some argued that, since it was Elsa Triolet (Lilya's sister) who acquainted them, the liaison might have been the result of Brik's intrigue, aimed at stopping the poet from getting closer to Elli Jones and especially daughter Patricia, but the power of this passion apparently caught her by surprise.[30]
Mayakovsky tried to persuade Tatyana to return to Russia but she refused. In the late 1929 he made an attempt to travel to Paris in order to marry her lover but was refused a visa for the first time, again, as many believed, due to Lilya's making full use of her numerous "connections". It became known that she "accidentally" read Mayakovsky out a letter from Paris alleging that Tatiana was getting married, while, as it turned out soon, the latter's wedding wasn't on the agenda at that very moment.[7] Lydia Chukovskaya insisted it was the "ever-powerful Yakov Agranov, another one of Lilya's lovers" who prevented Mayakovsky's getting a visa, upon her request.[32]
In the late 1920s Mayakovsky had two more affairs, with student (later Goslitizdat editor) Natalya Bryukhanenko (1905–1984) and with Veronika Polonskaya (1908—1994), a youngMAT actress, then the wife of actor Mikhail Yanshin.[33] It was Veronika's unwillingness to divorce the latter that resulted in her rows with Mayakovsky, the last of which preceded the poet's suicide.[34] Yet, according to Natalya Bryukhanenko, it was not Polonskaya but Yakovleva whom he was pining for. "In January 1929 Mayakovsky [told me] he… would put a bullet to his brain if he didn't see that woman any time soon", she later remembered. Which, on 14 April 1930, he did.[7]

 

WORKS


Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How to Make Poems").

Though immature, Mayakovsky's early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement rejecting the traditional poetry in favour of formal experimentation, and welcoming the social change promised by modern technology. His 1913 verses, surreal, seemingly disjointed and nonsensical, relying on forceful rhythms and exaggerated imagery with the words split into pieces and staggered across the page, were peppered with street language, considered unpoetic in literary circles at the time.[13] While the confrontational aesthetics of his fellow Futurist group members' poetry were mostly confined to formal experiments, Mayakovsky's idea was creating the new, "democratic language of the streets".[16]
In 1914 his first large work, an avant-garde tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky came out. The fierce critique of the city life and capitalism in general was, at the same time, a paean to the modern industrial power, featuring the protagonist sacrificing himself for the sake of the people's happiness in the future.[5][14]
In September 1915 A Cloud in Trousers came out,[20] Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length; it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion and art, written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticized notions of poetry and poets.

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by – handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.
Вашу мысль
мечтающую на размягченном мозгу,
как выжиревший лакей на засаленной кушетке,
буду дразнить об окровавленный сердца лоскут:
досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий.

У меня в душе ни одного седого волоса,
и старческой нежности нет в ней!
Мир огромив мощью голоса,
иду – красивый,
двадцатидвухлетний.
(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers.)

It was followed by the Backbone Flute (1916) which again outraged contemporary critics who described the author as talentless charlatan, spurning "empty words of a malaria sufferer"; some even recommended that he'd "be hospitalized immediately."[11] In retrospect it is seen as a groundbreaking piece, introducing the new forms of expressing social anger and personal frustrations.[16]
1917–1921 was a fruitful period for the poet, who greeted the Bolshevik Revolution with a number of poetic and dramatic works, starting with "Ode to the Revolution" (1918) and "Left March" (1918), a hymn to the proletarian might, calling for the fight against the "enemies of the revolution."[16] Mystery-Bouffe (1918, second version – 1921), the first Soviet play, told the story of a new Noah's Ark, built by the "unclean" (workers and peasants) sporting "moral cleanness" and "united by the class solidarity."[13][16]

Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky

In 1919–1921 Mayakovsky worked for the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). Painting posters and cartoons, he provided them with apt rhymes and slogans (mixing rhythm patterns, different typesetting styles, and using neologisms) which were describing the currents events in dynamics.[9][15] In three years he produced some 1100 pieces he called "ROSTA Windows".[16]
In 1921 Mayakovsky's poem 150 000 000 arrived, hailing the Russian people's mission in igniting the world revolution, but failed to impress Lenin. The latter praised the 1922 poem "Re Conferences" (Прозаседавшиеся), a scathing satire on the nascent Soviet bureaucracy starting to eat up the apparently flawed state system.[6]
Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love. It came out most strongly in two poems, I Love (1922) and About That (1923), both dedicated to Lilya Brik. Even after Mayakovsky's relationship with this woman ended (circa 1923), he considered her one of the people closest to him and a member of his family.[15] In October 1924 appeared Vladimir Ilyich Lenin written on the death of the Soviet Communist leader.[12][15] While the newspapers reported of highly successful public performances, the Soviet literary critics had their reservations, G. Lelevich calling it "cerebral and rhetorical," Viktor Pertsov mentioning "wordiness, cringeworthy naivety and clumsiness."[35]
Mayakovsky's extensive foreign trips resulted in the books of poetry (The West, 1922-1924; Paris, 1924–1925: Poems About America, 1925–1926), as well as a set of analytical satirical essays.[6]
In 1926 Mayakovsky wrote and published "Talking with the Taxman about Poetry", the first in a series of works criticizing the new Soviet philistinism, the result of the New Economic Policy.[17] His 1927 epic, All Right! (1927) sought to unite heroic pathos with lyricism and irony. Extoling the new Bolshevik Russia as "the springtime of the human kind" it was praised by Lunacharsky as "the October Revolution set in bronze."[15][16]
In his last three years Mayakovsky completed two satirical plays: The Bedbug (1929), and The Bathhouse, both lampooning bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism.[15] The latter was extolled by Vsevolod Meyerholdwho rated it as high as the best work of Moliere, Pushkin and Gogol and called it "the greatest phenomenon of the history of the Russian theatre".[23] The fierce criticism both plays were met with in the Soviet press was overstated and politically charged, but still, in retrospect Mayakovsky's work in the 1920s is regarded as patched, even his most famous poems, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and All Right! looking inferior to his passionate and innovative 1910s work. Several authors, among them Valentin Katayev and close friend Boris Pasternak, reproached him for squandering enormous potential on petty propaganda. The harsh assessment of the poet's later efforts came from Marina Tsvetayeva, who in her 1932 essay "The Art in the Light of Conscience" commented this way on his death: "For twelve years Mayakovsky the man was destroying Mayakovsky the poet. On the thirteenth year the Poet rose up and killed the man… His suicide lasted twelve years, not for a moment he pulled the trigger."[36]

LEGACY
Mayakovsky's grave at Novodevichy

After Mayakovsky's death the Association of the Proletarian Writers' leadership made sure the publications of the poet's work were cancelled and his very name stopped being mentioned in the Soviet press. In her 1935 letter to Yosif Stalin, Lilya Brik challenged her opponents, asking personally the Soviet leader for help. Stalin's resolution inscribed upon this message, read:
"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage amounts to a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."[37]
The effect of this letter was startling. Mayakovsky was instantly hailed a Soviet classic, proving to be the only member of the artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century to enter the Soviet mainstream. His birthplace of Baghdati in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. In 1937 the Mayakovsky Museum (and library) were opened in Moscow.[16]Triumphal Square in Moscow became Mayakovsky Square.[17] In 1938 the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened to the public. Nikolay Aseyev received a Stalin prize in 1941 for his poem "Mayakovsky Starts Here", which celebrated him as a poet of the revolution.[9] In 1974 the Russian State Museum of Mayakovsky opened in the center of Moscow in the building where Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930.[38]
But the flip side of this achievement was catastrophic. For the Soviet readership Mayakovsky ceased being anything other than "the poet of the Revolution," his legacy censored, more intimate or controversial pieces ignored, lines taken out of contexts and turned into slogans (like the omnipresent "Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin shall live forever"). The major rebel of his generation was turned into a symbol of the repressive state. The Stalin-sanctioned canonization has dealt Mayakovsky, according to Boris Pasternak, the second death, as the communist authorities "started to impose him forcibly, like Catherine the Great did the potatoes."[39] In the late 1950s and early 1960s Mayakovsky's popularity in the soviet Union started to rise again, with the new generation of writers recognizing him as a purveyor of artistic freedom and daring experimentation. "Mayakovsky's face is etched on the altar of the century," Boris Pasternak wrote at that time.[11] Young poets, drawn to avant-garde art and activism that often clashed with communist dogma, chose Mayakovsky's statue in Moscow for their organized poetry readings.[15]
Among the Soviet authors he influenced were Valentin Kataev, Andrey Voznesensky (who called Mayakovsky a teacher and favorite poet and dedicated a poem to him entitled Mayakovsky in Paris)[40][41] andYevgeny Yevtushenko.[42] In 1967 the Taganka Theater staged the poetical performance Listen Here! (Послушайте!), based on Mayakovsky's works with the leading role given to Vladimir Vysotsky, who was also much inspired by Mayakovsky's poetry.[43]
Mayakovsky became well-known and studied outside of the USSR. Poets such as Nâzım Hikmet, Louis Aragon and Pablo Neruda acknowledged having been influenced by his work.[16] He was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form the Four Winds movement there.[44] Mayakovsky was a significant influence on American poet Frank O'Hara. O'Hara's 1957 poem "Mayakovsky"(1957) contains many references to Mayakovsky's life and works,[45][46] in addition to "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" (1958), a variation on Mayakovsky's "An Extraordinary Adventure that Happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky One Summer at a Dacha" (1920).[47] 1986 English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg recorded the album Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, named after Mayakovsky's poem of the same name. In 2007 Craig Volk's stage bio-drama Mayakovsky Takes the Stage (based on his screenplay At the Top of My Voice) won the PEN-USA Literary Award for Best Stage Drama.[48]
In the Soviet Union's final years there was a strong tendency to view Mayakovsky's work as dated and insignificant; there were even calls for banishing his poems from school textbooks. Yet on the basis of his best works, Mayakovsky’s reputation was revived[15] and (by authors like Yuri Karabchiyevsky) attempts have been made to recreate an objective picture of his life and legacy. Mayakovsky was credited as a radical reformer of the Russian poetic language who created his own linguistic system charged with the new kind of expressionism, which in many ways influence the development of the Soviet and world poetry.[16] The "raging bull of Russian poetry," "the wizard of rhyming," "an individualist and a rebel against established taste and standards," Mayakovsky is seen by many in Russia as a truly revolutionary force and the greatest rebel in the 20th century Russian literature.[7]

 



WORKS[

Poems[edit]

·         A Cloud in Trousers (Облако в штанах, 1915)
·         Backbone Flute (Флейта-позвоночник, 1915)
·         The War and the World (Война и мир, 1917)
·         The Man (Человек, 1918)
·         150 000 000 (1921)
·         About That (Про это, Pro Eto, 1923)
·         Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Владимир Ильич Ленин, 1924)
·         A Flying Proletarian (Летающий пролетарий, 1925)
·         All Right! (Хорошо!, 1927)

Poem cycles and collections[edit]

·         The Early Ones (Первое, 1912–1924, 22 poems)
·         I (Я, 1914, 4 poems)
·         Satires. 1913–1927 (23 poems, including "Take That!", 1914)
·         The War (Война, 1914–1916, 8 poems)
·         Lyrics (Лирика, 1916, Лирика, 1916, 3 poems)
·         Revolution (Революция, 1917–1928, 22 poems, including "Ode to Revolution", 1918; "The Left March", 1919)
·         Everyday Life (Быт, 1921–1924, 11 poems, including "On Rubbish", 1921, "Re Conferences", 1922)
·         The Art of the Commune (Искусство коммуны, 1918–1923, 11 poems, including "An Order to the Army of Arts", 1918)
·         Agitpoems (Агитпоэмы, 1923, 6 poems, including "The Mayakovsky Gallery")
·         The West (Запад, 1922–1925, 10 poems, including "How Does the Democratic Republic Work?", and the 8-poem Paris cycle)
·         The American Poems (Стихи об Америке, 1925–1926, 21 poems, including "The Brooklyn Bridge")
·         On Poetry (О поэзии, 1926, 7 poems, including "Talking with the Taxman About Poetry", "For Sergey Yesenin")
·         The Satires. 1926 (Сатира, 1926. 14 poems)
·         Lyrics. 1918–1924 (Лирика. 12 poems, including "I Love", 1922)
·         Publicism (Публицистика, 1926, 12 poems, including "To Comrade Nette, a Steamboat and a Man", 1926)
·         The Children's Room (Детская, 1925–1929. 9 poems for children, including "What Is Good and What Is Bad")
·         Poems. 1927–1928 (56 poems, including "Lenin With Us!")
·         Satires. 1928 (Сатира. 1928, 9 poems)
·         Cultural Revolution (Культурная революция, 1927–1928, 20 poems, including "Beer and Socialism")
·         Agit…(Агит…, 1928, 44 poems, including "'Yid'")
·         Roads (Дороги, 1928, 11 poems)
·         The First of Five (Первый из пяти, 1925, 26 poems)
·         Back and Forth (Туда и обратно, 1928–1930, 19 poems, including "The Poem of the Soviet Passport")
·         Formidable Laughter (Грозный смех, 1922–1930; more than 100 poems, published posthumously, 1932–1936)
·         Poems, 1924–1930 (Стихотворения. 1924–1930, including "A Letter to Comrade Kostrov on the Essence of Love", 1929)
·         Whom Shall I Become? (Кем Быть, Kem byt'?, published posthumously 1931, poem for children, illustrated by N. A. Shifrin)



Plays[edit]

·         Vladimir Mayakovsky (Владимир Маяковский. Subtitled: Tragedy, 1914)
·         Mystery-Bouffe (Мистерия-Буфф, 1918)
·         The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929)
·         The Bathhouse (Баня. 1930)
·         Moscow Burns. 1905 (Москва горит. 1905, 1930)




Essays and sketches[edit]

·         My Discovery of America (Мое открытие Америки, 1926), in four parts
·         How to Make Verses (Как делать стихи, 1926)

 



LITERATURE

·         Aizlewood, Robin. Verse form and meaning in the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovsky: Tragediia, Oblako v shtanakh, Fleita-pozvonochnik, Chelovek, Liubliu, Pro eto (Modern Humanities Research Association, London, 1989).
·         Brown, E. J. Mayakovsky: a poet in the revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 1973).
·         Charters, Ann & Samuel. I love : the story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (Farrar Straus Giroux, NY, 1979).
·         Humesky, Assya. Majakovskiy and his neologisms (Rausen Publishers, NY, 1964).
·         Jangfeldt, Bengt. Majakovsky and futurism 1917–1921 (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
·         Lavrin, Janko. From Pushkin to Mayakovsky, a study in the evolution of a literature. (Sylvan Press, London, 1948).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Patricia Blake ed., trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey). The bedbug and selected poetry. (Meridian Books, Cleveland, 1960).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Mayakovsky: Plays. Trans. Guy Daniels. (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Il, 1995). ISBN 0-8101-1339-2.
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir. For the voice (The British Library, London, 2000).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Julian Graffy). Love is the heart of everything : correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915–1930 (Polygon Books, Edinburgh, 1986).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir (comp. and trans. Herbert Marshall). Mayakovsky and his poetry (Current Book House, Bombay, 1955).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected works in three volumes (Raduga, Moscow, 1985).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected poetry. (Foreign Languages, Moscow, 1975).
·         Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt and Nils Ake Nilsson). Vladimir Majakovsky: Memoirs and essays (Almqvist & Wiksell Int., Stockholm 1975).
·         Novatorskoe iskusstvo Vladimira Maiakovskogo (trans. Alex Miller). Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976).
·         Noyes, George R. Masterpieces of the Russian drama (Dover Pub., NY, 1960).
·         Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas. Keturi vėjai ir keturvėjinikai (The Four Winds literary movement and its members), Aidai, 1949, No. 24. (Lithuanian)
·         Rougle, Charles. Three Russians consider America : America in the works of Maksim Gorkij, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Majakovsky (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
·         Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich. (ed. and trans. Lily Feiler). Mayakovsky and his circle (Dodd, Mead, NY, 1972).
·         Stapanian, Juliette. Mayakovsky's cubo-futurist vision (Rice University Press, 1986).
·         Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Twayne, Boston, 1983).
·         Vallejo, César (trans. Richard Schaaf) The Mayakovsky case (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT, 1982).
·         Volk, Craig, "Mayakovsky Takes The Stage" (full-length stage drama), 2006 and "At The Top Of My Voice" (feature-length screenplay), 2002.
·         Wachtel, Michael. The development of Russian verse : meter and its meanings (Cambridge University Press, 1998).



REFERENCES

2.        Jump up^ Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1985). "Conversation with Comrade Lenin".Selected Works in Three Volumes. 1 (Selected Verse). English poem trans. Irina Zheleznova. USSR: Raduga Publishers. p. 238. ISBN 5-05-00001 7-3. On snow-covered lands / and stubbly fields, / in smoky plants / and on factory sites, / with you in our hearts, / Comrade Lenin, / we think, / we breathe, / we live , / we build, / and we fight!
3.        Jump up^ Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1960). "At the Top of My Voice". The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey. New York: Meridian Books. pp. 231–235. ISBN 978-0253201898. When I appear / before the CCC / of the coming / bright years, / by way of my Bolshevik party card, / I’ll raise / above the heads / of a gang of self-seeking / poets and rogues, / all the hundred volumes / of my / communist-committed books.
4.        ^ Jump up to:a b c Sundaram, Chantal (2000). Manufacturing Culture: The Soviet State and the Mayakovsky Legend 1930–1993. Ottawa, Canada: National Library of Canada: Acquisitions and Bibliographical Services. pp. 71, 85. ISBN 0-612-50061-6.
5.        ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l Iskrzhitskaya, I.Y. (1990). "Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky". Russian Writers. Biobibliographical dictionary. Vol.2. Prosveshchenye. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
6.        ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g Mikhaylov, Al. (1988). "Mayakovsky". Lives of Distinguished People. Molodaya Gvardiya. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
7.        ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j "Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky biography". Russapedia. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
8.        Jump up^ Я знаю: / глупость – эдемы и рай! / Но если / пелось про это, // должно быть, / Грузию, радостный край, / подразумевали поэты.
9.        ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h Liukkonen, Petri. "Vladimir Mayakovsky". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 10 February 2015.
10.     Jump up^ I, Myself (autobiography). The Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky in 6 volumes. Ogonyok Library. Pravda Publishers. Moscow, 1973. Vol.I, pp.
11.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l "The Raging Bull of Russian Poetry". Haaretz. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
12.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa "V.V. Mayakovsky biography. Timeline". The Lives of the Distinguished People series. Issue No.700. Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow. 1988. Retrieved13 January 2015.
13.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g "Vladimir Mayakovsky". www.poets.org. Retrieved13 January 2014.
14.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i "Vladimir mayakovsky. Biography". The New Literary net. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
15.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
16.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky. Biography". Mayakovsky site. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
17.     ^ Jump up to:a b c d "Vladimir Mayakovsky biography. Timeline". max.mmlc.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
18.     Jump up^ Lawton, Anna (1988). Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912 – 1928. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 51–52.ISBN 0-8014-9492-3.
19.     Jump up^ Commentaries to Autobiography (I, Myself). The Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky in 6 volumes. Ogonyok Library. Pravda Publishers. Moscow, 1973. Vol.I, p.455
20.     ^ Jump up to:a b "A Cloud in Trousers (Part 1) by Vladimir Mayakovsky". vmlinux.org. Retrieved 7 April 2010.
21.     Jump up^ Petrić, Vlada. Constructivism in Film: The Man With the Movie Camera:A Cinematic Analysis. Cambridge University Press. 1987. Page 32. ISBN 0-521-32174-3
22.     Jump up^ Arutcheva, V., Paperny, Z. "Commentaries to About That". The Complete V.V.Mayakovsky in 13 volumes. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. Moscow, 1958. Vol. 4. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
23.     ^ Jump up to:a b Fevralsky, A. (1958). "Commentaries to Баня (The Bathhouse)". The Complete V.V.Mayakovsky in 13 volumes. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. Moscow, 1957. Vol. 11. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
24.     ^ Jump up to:a b Katanyan, Vasily (1985). "Mayakovsky. The Chronology, 1893–1930 // Маяковский: Хроника жизни и деятельности.". Moscow. Sovetsky Pisatel Publishers. Retrieved 1 May 2015.
25.     ^ Jump up to:a b Polonskaya, Veronika (1938). "Remembering V. Mayakovsky". Izvestia (1990). Retrieved 13 January 2015.
26.     Jump up^ Belyayeva Dina. "B. Маяковский-Любовная лодка разбилась о быт... En" [V. Mayakovsky – The Love Boat smashed up on the dreary routine ... En]. poetic translations (in Russian and English). Stihi.ru – national server of modern poetry. Retrieved 7 April 2010.
27.     Jump up^ Kotkin, Stephen (6 November 2014). Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. Penguin. ISBN 9780698170100. Retrieved8 May 2015.
30.     ^ Jump up to:a b c Oboymina, E., Tatkova, A. "Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky". Russian Biographies. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
31.     Jump up^ "Moscow Graves. Lavinsky, N.A". Archived from the original on 25 July 2013.
32.     Jump up^ Chukovskaya, Lydia. Notes on Akhmatova. 1957–1967. P.547
33.     Jump up^ "Mayakovsky Remembered by Women Friends. Compiled, edited by Vasily Katanyan.". Druzhba Narodov. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
34.     Jump up^ The Very Veronika Polonskaya. Sovetsky Ekran (Soviet Screen) magazine interview, No. 13, 1990
35.     Jump up^ Katanyan, Vasily. Life and Work Timeline, 1893–1930. Year 1925. Moscow. Sovetsky Pisatel (5th edition).
36.     Jump up^ Zaytsev, S. (2012). "The Lyrical Shot". Tatyanin Den. Retrieved13 January 2015.
37.     Jump up^ Katanyan, Vasily (1998) Memoirs. p. 112
38.     Jump up^ "Museum". mayakovsky.info.
39.     Jump up^ Zaytsev, S. (2012). "Mayakovsky’s Second Death". Tatyanin Den. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
41.     Jump up^ Огонек: Как Нам Было Страшно! [Spark: How It was terrible!] (in Russian). Ogoniok.com. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
43.     Jump up^ Театр на Таганке: Высоцкий и другие [Taganka Theater: Vysotsky and other] (in Russian). Taganka.theatre.ru. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
44.     Jump up^ "tekstai". Tekstai.lt. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
45.     Jump up^ "Mayakovsky by Frank O'Hara  : The Poetry Foundation".www.poetryfoundation.org. Retrieved 8 May 2015. I am standing in the bath tub/ crying. Mother, mother" "That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest / oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks /what a funny place to rupture! "with bloody blows on its head. / I embrace a cloud, / but when I soared / it rained. line feed character in |quote= at position 56 (help)
46.     Jump up^ Mayakovsky, Vladimir (2008). "A Cloud in Trousers, I Call". Backbone Flute: Selected Poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky. trans. Andrey Kneller. Boston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1438211640. Mother? / Mother! / Your son has a wonderful sickness! / Mother!" " I walked on, enduring the pain in my chest. / My ribcage was trembling under the stress." "Not a man – but a cloud in trousers. line feed character in |quote= at position 67 (help)
47.     Jump up^ "Brad Gooch: On "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island" | Modern American Poetry". www.modernamericanpoetry.org. Retrieved 8 May 2015.

 



EXTERNAL LINKS

·         Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
·         The 'raging bull' of Russian poetry article by Dalia Karpel at Haaretz.com, published on-line 5 July 2007
·         Vladimir Mayakovsky at the Internet Movie Database

WORKS BY VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY

Plays
·                     Vladimir Mayakovsky (1914)
·                     Mystery-Bouffe (1918)
·                     The Bedbug (1929)
·                    The Bathhouse (1930)
Poetry
·                A Cloud in Trousers (1915)
·                Backbone Flute (1915)
·                The War and the World (1917)
·                The Man (1918)
·                150 000 000 (1921)
·                About That (1923)
·                Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924)
·                The West (1925)
·                All Right! (1927)




On the 110th Birth Anniversary of Mayakovsky (1893-1930)

Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Poetry of Socialist Realism

Jakub Mato,
Rinush Idrizi,
Anastas Kapurani
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv9n2/mayakovsky.htm
Acessess RAS in 28jan2016.

Life And Creativity

Years of Childhood
With the name and work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the new stage of socialist realism opened in Russian and world poetry.
He was born on 19 July 1893 in the village of Baghdadi (today Mayakovsky) near Kutais in Georgia. His father was a simple forester, and the family was nourished on progressive ideas. The poet was twelve years of age when the first Russian Revolution broke out in 1905. its echo was felt even in the mountains of the Caucasus. The wave of the popular movement against Tsarism and the reactionary bourgeoisie, led by the Georgian Bolsheviks, lapped the whole of Georgia, and especially the city of Kutais, where he was attending high school. Vladimir was educated by his father with democratic feelings of respect and affection for working people. The year 1905 became for him not only a great source of impressions, but also a true school, where he formed his first political ideas, where he received his first baptism as a revolutionary. He entered the Marxist circles at the high school, read revolutionary literature which his elder sister brought from Moscow, learned new rebel songs which left a great impression on him. ‘It seemed as if verses and revolution were intertwined in my mind,’ wrote the poet in his ‘Autobiography’.
The year 1906 found Mayakovsky in the city of revolution; his father died and he, with his mother and his two sisters, settled in Moscow. Here the smoke of gunpowder had not yet dispersed, and the workers’ blood had not yet dried in the working class quarter on the main barricade of the revolution, which resisted heroically. The older students who shared a house with him persuaded him to read the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They talked about the Bolshevik Party and about the role of Lenin as leader of the Russian proletariat. In his desk, along with his school books, he kept ‘Anti-Duhring’. The revolutionary inspiration of the future was being sown in the consciousness of the poet.


Years of Youth
1908, the year of the most rabid reaction after the crushing of the 1905 Revolution, became the happiest year for the fifteen-year-old Mayakovsky: he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party led by Lenin. He had the pseudonym ‘Comrade Constantine’. He worked as a propagandist, distributed illegal publications, helped a group of revolutionaries to escape from prison. He came to know at first hand the workers, their thoughts and feelings. The passion of revolutionary activity, with its daily joys and dangers, took hold of him. During the years 1908-1910 Mayakovsky was imprisoned three times. But prison could not break his belief in the victory of the revolution. He came out of prison with a new wish: "I want to create socialist art" (‘Autobiography’). Mayakovsky wavered between poetry and painting. From childhood he had been attracted by verses, which he learnt by heart and recited beautifully. In prison, in 1909, he tested his pen for the first time, but the prison governor confiscated the notebook of verses. Similarly, in his high school in the Caucasus, he had greatly amused the Georgian comrades with his caricatures of the reactionary professor. He had also drawn portraits of some of his revolutionary comrades.
Mayakovsky entered art school in Moscow, and was a successful student.
In 1912 he published the first verses. Poetry had finally conquered Mayakovsky.


Beginnings of Literary Creativity
The young poet was at that time under the influence of futurism. This literary current, despite its sensational slogans of ‘a new art of the future’ and ‘the struggle against decadent bourgeois art’, was in fact a manifestation of petty-bourgeois, anarchist literature. Futurism, with its anti-bourgeois slogans, at first attracted Mayakovsky but, despite some traces which this current left in his early creative work, at heart Mayakovsky was far from futurism, and he fought with all his strength against the very bases of bourgeois society. ‘Let us speak the truth’, Gorky has said about Mayakovsky’s poetry of those years, ‘there has never been futurism here, there is only Mayakovsky. A poet. A great poet’. In this first creation he portrayed the tragic fate of man under capitalism and the feelings of protest of the masses, which were known to ‘Comrade Constantine’. Principal among these were the humanitarian ideas of the liberation and elevation of the working man, which find most complete embodiment in the programmatic poem of this period ‘A Cloud in Trousers’, published in 1915. Later, the poet, explaining the ideas of the four parts of the poem, said that they may be entitled: ‘Down with your Love’, ‘Down with your Art’, ‘Down with your System’, and ‘Down with your Religion’. In this poem, the poet, describing the tragedy of the life of the simple man of the people, calls for revolutionary struggle against the rotten bourgeois morality, religion and social system:

Passers-by, take your hands from your pockets!
Pick up a stone, a knife, a bomb!

The principal aim of his activity became preparation for the approaching revolution.
Mayakovsky greeted the First World War with struggle. He unmasked its imperialist, anti-popular character in the poem ‘War and the World’ of 1916. In the poem ‘Answer!’ he says angrily that the bourgeoisie, driven by thirst for profits and conquest, sends millions of people to the slaughter-house. Here he rises also in defence of the rights of small countries, such as Albania, etc., which the imperialists wish to dismember. Nevertheless, in his whole pre-revolutionary political activity one must note that the poet is more a stormy rebel than a conscious fighter.
In these years Mayakovsky became familiar and friendly with the great revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky, who was pleased to publish his works in the review he directed, ‘Chronicle’. Gorky, who was now a developed proletarian writer, supported and assisted the poet at a time when the bourgeois press was attacking him fiercely. They were united by a common anger against all the oppressors, by affection and praise for free man, for the revolution – against which the whole Tsarist state and the bourgeois press and art had undertaken a foul attack to try and stem the new tide of revolution which was rising in Russia. Precisely in these years there rang out the poetical voice of Mayakovsky who, alongside Gorky, entered the October Revolution, singing to it and greeting it as his own. ‘October. To accept it or not? For me this question never arose. It is my revolution. I went to Smolny. I worked’.


Literary Creativity during the Civil War
Mayakovsky undertook a wide activity in the service of the Soviet state. He wrote verses and film scenarios, appeared himself in films and, on the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918, presented at the festival the theatrical piece ‘Mystery-Bouffe’, dedicated to the triumph of the socialist revolution.
He shared the joys and anxieties of Soviet power. In the heroic years of hunger and cold of the Civil War, Mayakovsky acted as a revolutionary poet; he went to the people, to the soldiers and marines, reading his verse and giving heart to them. Such is his poem of these years ‘Left March’ (1918), about the proletarian courage, discipline and optimism of those engaged in the struggle with counter-revolution. This poem reveals a new face in Mayakovsky’s lyrical poetry, the face of a clearer and simple poetry, fully intelligible to the masses. As a newspaper wrote at the time: ‘with his strong, powerful voice, which resounded through the whole square, he read the poem ‘Left March’. The whole square repeated his verse:
The Commune will never go down.
Left!
Left!
Left!

During the years 1919-1922 Mayakovsky worked night and day, up to sixteen hours a day, in the Russian telegraphic agency (Rosta). He drafted hundreds of posters and wrote for them thousands of captions in topical verse. These posters were called ‘Rosta’s windows’. They were pasted up each day in the streets of Moscow.
This intensive work, very useful also for the poet himself, helped him to get to know the new reality more profoundly and comprehensively, and to link himself more closely with the interest of the people and the socialist state. Directing himself to the man of the masses through posters, Mayakovsky learned to speak in poetry too with a simpler language, closer to the living speech of the people, and to use a clearer, but still original, figurative style. He studied passionately the speeches and reports of Lenin and drew from them themes for his poetry. A new step towards socialist realism in the poet’s creativity was taken in the poem of these years ‘150,000,000’, which, through an imaginary duel between two legendary giants – Ivan (representing revolutionary Russia) and Wilson (representing Capitalism) – portrays the struggle of the revolution against, and its victory over, the interventionists.


Literary Creativity after the Civil War
When the land of the Soviets began work on the reconstruction of the ruined economy and the building of the new life, Mayakovsky’s poetry was enriched with new themes and ideas.
His important theme in these years was that of labour and socialist patriotism; he extols the construction of the industrial base of socialism (‘Khrenov’s Story of Kuznetsktroy and the People of Kuznetsk’), celebrates the workers’ vanguard movement (‘March of the Shock Brigades’), builds in verse a ‘Temporary Monument to the Workers of Kursk, who extracted the First Minerals’, sings of the social changes in the countryside (‘Harvest March’), weaves optimistic elegies to communists who fell in the course of the duty (‘To Comrade Nette, Man and Ship’), expresses his optimism and pride in being a citizen of the first socialist country in the world, a country which strikes fear and hatred into the imperialists and everywhere enjoys the sympathy of workers (‘Verse on my Soviet Passport’), etc.
Another theme to which the poet devoted great attention, creating outstanding poems, was that of the struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois survivals in life and in the consciousness of people. With his inspired pen, he promptly echoed the decisions of the party in this field. He wrote verses against religion, religious beliefs and backward customs; he lashed bureaucracy and servility unmercifully, struck out at the ‘dregs’, and gave warnings of the danger of bureaucracy and other blemishes from the past:

The storms of the revolutionary gales quietened,
the tangle of Soviet strata came together,
and behind the back of the RSFSR
the petty-bourgeois thrust their snouts’
.

With his proletarian spirit the poet could not reconcile himself with anything bourgeois or petty-bourgeois; he declared war throughout his life on the standards of their morality.
"Petty-bourgeois habits are more terrible than Wrangel’, wrote the poet in the poem ‘Gregs’.
He lashed harshly the bureaucrats who replaced creative work with interminable, useless meetings (‘Meeting Addicts’), mocked the servile official (‘Rudimentary Methods for Rudimentary Toadies’), castigated harshly the administrators who wished to suppress the criticism of the masses under the pretext that this criticism harmed the authority of cadres (‘The Pillar’).
One of his favourite themes was that of the life of the new generation. In the poems ‘The Secret of Youth’, ‘Our Sunday’, etc., he delivers a fervent appeal to youth to rise up with a revolutionary leap against religion and outworn customs:
Forward, forward,
O Communist youth!
Forward, towards the sun.
At the sound
Of your march,
Let the heaven tremble with fear’
.

In the ‘Komsomol Song’ he presents to youth the shining model of Lenin. Particularly attractive are his works for children (‘What is Good and What is Bad’ and for pioneers (‘What I shall be when I grow up’).
Some of Mayakovsky’s best poems are dedicated to the problems of literature and art, such as: ‘The Extraordinary Adventure which happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Country, during Summer’, ‘Order No. 2 to the Army of Arts’, ‘Jubilee’, ‘Conversations with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry’, ‘The Bird of God’, etc.
The poet regarded poetical work as something of great importance, as a powerful weapon in the struggle for the new society; he sometimes compares poetry with a bomb and a flag, sometimes with a cart filled with grain:
‘The Song and the Verse
Are a bomb and a flag;
And the voice of the poet
Raises the class to arms.
Whoever sings today apart,
He is against us’.

The poet had a very advanced outlook on love and physical feeling, which elevate and beautify man, give him strength and impel him to lofty social aims (‘I Love’, ‘About This’, ‘Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the Nature of Love’, etc).
In these years he wrote also the great poems ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’ (1924) and ‘All Right!’ (1928), in which he ridiculed people plunged in the morass of petty-bourgeois individualism, and ‘The Bath-House’ (1929), in which the vital revolutionary spirit of the working class is counter-posed to the seedy bureaucratic style.

Mayakovsky was also widely involved in the activity of social organizations; he managed literary reviews, travelled throughout the Soviet Union, met with workers, soldiers, and students. In halls packed with people he read his poems, explained them and the problems of Soviet literature, answered questions and comments, organized lectures and literary discussions, spoke on the radio, wrote slogans for festivals and advertisements for new Soviet products, travelled frequently throughout the country and beyond. ‘I feel it necessary to travel; direct meetings with people have almost replaced for me the reading of books’. In the last three years of his life, for example, the poet visited more than fifty towns in the country and appeared more than 200 times before the public to read his verses. His popularity throughout the Soviet Union was extraordinary.
He became poet-agitator, poet-propagandist, who did not confine himself to work on his books; he was active in every sector of the living world, thus rising to the highest level of the writer of the new type, of the active participant in socialist reconstruction; he linked himself closely with social life, with the masses, with the party. The assessment which the people and the Party made of his creativity, the critical comments of Lenin himself, and especially the high evaluation which Lenin made of his poem ‘Meeting Addicts’, became a real inspiration to Mayakovsky, a true compass for his creativity.
The poet’s voice also rang out outside the boundaries of his homeland. He journeyed several times to capitalist countries (to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, France, Mexico, Cuba, the United States) and, surmounting the obstacles of the police organs, met with ordinary people and progressive intellectuals, who received him with enthusiasm as a man who came from ‘the spring of socialism’, as the ‘hero of Soviet poetry’.
The result of these travels were many lyrical verse about Western life, such as ‘Spain’, ‘Black and White’, Broadway’, ‘Mexico’, ‘Havana’, ‘Paris’, etc.; the notebook ‘My Discovery of America’; the cycle of verses ‘Mayakovsky’s Gallery’, where in a satirical manner he painted the political portraits of bourgeois reactionaries of the time, such as Poincare and Mussolini.
It was not accidental that the fascists burned, along with the books of Lenin, Stalin and Gorky, also the volumes of Mayakovsky. Enemies, everywhere and always, feared the poet of the proletarian revolution.
At the beginning of the year 1930, Mayakovsky, making a balance sheet of his activity, opened the exhibition of books, photographs and posters entitled ‘Twenty Years of Mayakovsky’s Work’.

The poem ‘Vladimir Ilych Lenin’
The greatest work of Mayakovsky – dedicated to the giant figure of Lenin, to the role and importance of Lenin’s activity in the world revolution, to the role of the Party he created, tempered and led in battles and victories – is the poem ‘V.I. Lenin’. It fully and finally affirmed the method of socialist realism in poetry. With this poem began the period of maturation and full flowering of Mayakovsky’s revolutionary talent. The poem includes rich material from centuries-old history of the struggle of the proletariat, from its birth to its triumph in one-sixth of the world. It reflects in a symbolic manner the life and work of Lenin, extols the feelings and thoughts of the ordinary working man, born and reared in revolution. The poem has been called, correctly, the ‘epic of the proletariat.’
Mayakovsky had intended to write this work when Lenin was alive.
The deep pain caused by the death of the beloved leader became a powerful stimulus for his inspiration. A spontaneous and meaningful question arose in the poet’s mind: ‘Who is this man, from where does he come and what has he done to cause this profound pain among people throughout the world?’ Mayakovsky, replying poetically to these questions, recreated in the three cantos of the poem the figure of Lenin, linked organically with the Russian and World proletariat, with the Bolshevik Party, with the masses of the people, with history.
For the poet of socialist realism the dialectic of historical development, of the change of social system, is clear. Capitalism once played a progressive role: it ripped open ‘the feudal rights’, sang the ‘Marseillaise’, putrefied; it ‘lay down on the road of history’. And so there is ‘only one way out – blasting!’
And this historic mission will be carried out by the ‘children of work’, the proletarians, to which capitalism gave birth. The poet creates for us with realism the collective figure of the working class, which gradually straightens its back, is tempered in strikes and clashes. Its ideological genius, Marx, reveals the laws of social development and arms his class with an invincible theoretical weapon. From the very bosom of the working class emerges the revolutionary vanguard, ‘the twin of Mother History’: the Bolshevik Party and its leader of genius, Lenin.
Mayakovsky, as no one else in poetry, creates the figure of the Party as a majestic symbol of the collective strength and wisdom of the working class, in strong antithesis to the figure of bourgeois individualism. It is the highest level of proletarian organization, the ‘spinal column of the working class’. The ‘immortality of our cause’. The party educates, mobilizes, raises up the masses in revolution and ‘ makes something out of nothing’, and in all these, says the poet,
appears
the compass of Leninist thought,
appears
the guiding hand of Lenin’
.


The figure of Lenin in the poem is thus raised to the symbol of the ‘helmsman’, the genius of human history, ‘the father and son’ of the proletarian revolution.
Lenin is for the poet a man like other men. His life is distinguished but short. However, in fact this life, in its symbolic meaning, is long; its roots stretch into the past and into the future, into Russia and all the continents. His life is the embodiment of proletarian thought, desire, will, strength. Lenin is presented in the poem with profound realism as thinker of genius and practical man, as educator and leader of millions of proletarians and working people. He is characterized by simplicity and proletarian love for people. He ‘is the most human of all humans who have lived on earth’. For Mayakovsky Lenin is above all, ‘the most human’, but also ‘just like you and me’. Leninist humanism is active proletarian humanism, inspired by love for all the oppressed and by pitiless hatred for every oppressor:
He gave ardent love to comrade,
became with the enemy steel,
relentless’
.

The highest level of Leninist humanism is the boundless belief in the inexhaustible creative capacity of the masses. Lenin is characterized by extraordinary acuity and strength of mind, which rises above bourgeois petty-mindedness, revealing new horizons of human society:
‘Gazing into space;
he saw what time has covered’.

He is distinguished by iron will and Bolshevik principle. He tempers the Party of the working class, leads the revolution through the blockades and bullets of the imperialists, draws the first workers’ state along the road of socialism.
This, for Mayakovsky, is Lenin: the new man, the man of the socialist epoch, the active, the conscious creator of history, the leader of the new type. His life does not end with death. Lenin died, but the people lives on, communism lives on, the Bolsheviks armed with his idea lives on:
‘And even the death of Ilyich
became a great communist organizer’
.
Pain and sorrow change into revolutionary optimism. Lenin lives on in the hearts of the proletarians of the whole world and calls for world revolution:
‘Proletarians, form ranks for the last battle!
Straighten your backs,
unbend your knees!
Proletarian army, close ranks!
Long live the joyous revolution, soon to come!
This is the greatest
of all great fights
that history has known’
.
The value of the poem does not centre only on the high artistic reflection of the life of Lenin and of the history of the proletariat. It is expressed with great force in the profound feelings of love and respect for the leader, of pain and optimism, of proletarian pride and hatred of bourgeois oppression and exploitation, of unshakable belief in the historic victory of the proletariat, which the poet has embodied in the hero of the work. This hero is the participant in and soldier of, the revolution. The entire content of the poem is presented through his eye and heart. This fills the poem with life and concretizes its inner content, blending in an organic way epic and lyrical qualities, defining its form and style. The poem, by its language, rhythm and other means, remains an innovative work of socialist realism, a worthy monument for the great Lenin, for the Bolshevik Party, for the working class and for the proletarian revolution.


The Poem ‘All Right!’
The poem, which is dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, is one of Mayakovsky’s most powerful works. It describes in vivid, realistic colours the road followed by the Soviet people and power during ten years under the leadership of the Party. In nineteen short sections, with great artistic power, it presents many pictures of the most important politico-social events, shows how the old feudal-bourgeois power was overthrown in the fiery days of November 1917, depicts the heroism of the people during the Civil War, the latest construction work, the struggle with many difficulties and with class enemies, the brilliant successes. Alongside great difficulties and with class enemies, the brilliant successes. Alongside great events, the work also depicts scenes from intimate life and personal reminiscences of the poet himself, always closely linked with the central theme. So, in the poem epic elements are intertwined with lyrical elements.
In the poem there are also drawn in a few lines satirical portraits of some of the old bourgeois world leaders, counterposed to portraits of the new people of the revolution. An important place in the poem is occupied by the elevation of the feeling of the new socialist patriotism. Singing joyfully to the heroic struggle and work of the people and the party for the construction of the new society, the poet feels happy when he sees that his life and work are fused with those of the people and the Party.
The poem is permeated throughout by optimism and by pride in the victories achieved by the revolution. In it there is found a profound, realistic reflection of the heroism of the working class and the whole Soviet working people in the first years of socialist construction. The well-known Soviet critic Lunacharsky has called this poem ‘The October Revolution cast in bronze’.


Art and importance
The road of Mayakovsky towards the art of socialist realism was not smooth and easy. The difficulties and obstacles which he surmounted on that road testify to his great talent and to the decisive role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in his education.
At the beginning of his road the young poet had to struggle against and overcome some formalist, futurist influences. He proceeded with ever more decisiveness from isolated tragic protest, from spontaneous rebelliousness, towards the concrete and conscious call to overthrow the bourgeois world by means of proletarian revolution and to build the new socialist world. This process of the fusion of the poet with the proletarian revolution, his profound assimilation of Marxist-Leninist ideology, his evaluation of and stand on the best traditions of Russian national literature – all these gave birth to the innovational poetry of Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky is the first and greatest representative of socialist poetry. The principal thing in his innovationalism is the creation of the new lyrical hero. This hero is not simply the poet. He is the new citizen of the first proletarian state; conscious revolutionary; the destroyer of the old world and the builder of the new; the creator of the new economy, culture and art, tempered in class struggle, moulded with communist ideas; the living embodiment of the class to which he belongs, of the proletarian epoch. The inner content of Mayakovsky’s poetry comprises the feelings, thoughts and aims of his hero, his past, present and future. Before his acute class observation there are opened up the fundamental contradictions of the epoch: the struggle of the majestic and wonderful new with the ugly bourgeois, feudal and petty-bourgeois old, which resists to the death. This struggle is carried out with a feeling of proletarian enthusiasm and optimism, of patriotism and socialist internationalism, of love for creative work and the working man. The poet issues a call to battle, a call for sacrifices and victories in the name of communism. This new inner content, never before elaborated in poetry, makes the works of Mayakovsky not only a true reflection of life, but also a weapon to change it. It breaks the old poetical framework and opens up new thematic horizons for poetry and its laws.
Mayakovsky greatly broadened and enriched the subject matter of poetry. For Mayakovsky everything which has to do with revolution and serves it is beautiful and worthy to be sung in verse. He calls poetry ‘the road to communism’. This new revolutionary poetical concept impels Mayakovsky, while preserving the healthiest aspects of the democratic literary tradition, to reject the old poetry with its musty, obsolete rules. He rejects the ‘theory of distance’, which postulates that one should wait for events to pass, for ‘conditions to ripen’, before writing about it. Mayakovsky creates work of a high artistic level which respond to reality on the spot. The brilliant example of this is the poem ‘V.I. Lenin’, which was written immediately after the leader’s death. Writing about the present, about the problems of the day, he generalizes them and opens up representatives for the future.
This revolution in inner content and in the creative process brought about also a revolutionization of form in the poet’s work. And this was not an easy, smooth road to take without mistakes and without defects. At the beginning of his creativity, Mayakovsky was attracted to a certain extent to futuristic expressions, attaching great importance to the external figurative resonance of the verse. But later, alongside his profound assimilation of new content, the poet moved towards clarity, simplicity and the artistic elevation of his works. And this was natural, since Mayakovsky, from the beginning of his creativity, directed himself to ordinary people. He wished them to understand and be inspired by his verses to revolutionary actions, to be served by them as ‘bomb and flag’. For this, he created new literary kinds of agitational poetry, of ‘marching order’ poetry. Mayakovsky changed and enriched other kinds of poetry with new elements, corresponding to the ideas he wished to express. Thus, into the genres of poetry and comedy, he inserted, among other things, political satire and the political grotesque.
Mayakovsky performed a great work for the enrichment of poetical language. He broke the framework of the old poetical language and inserted into verse the vivid vocabulary, the beautiful expressions and proverbs, of the people. He created new words to express profound economic and social change. Through short phrases and concise thoughts, he presented the dynamism of the revolution.
Mayakovsky brought radical changes too into figuration and other means of artistic expression. His comparisons are as daring as they are vivid. His hyperboles are suited to the gigantic destructive and restorative action of revolution. His epithets and metaphors are clear, beautiful and profound in content. Mayakovsky’s innovations take a concise and original form, materialize in the free verse he preferred, with a powerful rhythm and meaningful resonant metre, which corresponds to the wishes of the poet that his work should be recited and communicated directly to the masses of listeners.
Mayakovsky’s creativity became in every direction the living embodiment of the socialist revolution. ‘Mayakovsky’, Stalin has said, ‘was and remains the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’. His work represents the first traditions of the poetry of socialist realism in the world, which every literature develops according to the time and national conditions. The poetry of Mayakovsky remains the symbol of innovation, of boundless broadening of the tasks and possibilities of the poetry of socialist realism, of the potentialities of the free personality who, armed with Marxist-Leninist ideology, creates the life and economy, the culture and history, of society.




Source: Jakup Mato, Rinush Idrizi, Vangjush Ziko and Anastas Kapurani: ‘Foreign Literature’, Part Two, The Albanian Society, Ilford, 1987. Translated from the Albanian by William Bland.


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