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Overview
Mayakovsky contributed to the cultural life of Soviet Russia not only as a lyric poet but as a playwright, graphic artist, and satirist of the conventional art forms of his day. By examining his art in terms of his life, Edward Brown shows how intensely personal it was and how bound up in the literary and political history of his time. The intellectual turmoil of the period is skillfully re-created, especially the nature, ambience, and personalities of Russian futurism. Above all, the book reveals the man—a committed Bolshevik and a dedicated artist, but also a hypochondriac, compulsive gambler, and eventual suicide.
Originally published in 1973.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618852 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University , #1584 |
| Pages: | 402 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Mayakovsky
A Poet in the Revolution
By Edward J. Brown
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06255-6
CHAPTER 1
PRELUDE: APRIL 9, 1930
There are certain moments in the life of a poet, or perhaps of any human being, that catch that life's significance in a sharp focus. One such moment in the life of Mayakovsky occurred shortly before his suicide in April 1930. In a brief encounter with a hostile audience in Moscow he recapitulated his career as a revolutionary poet, and fully revealed the insolvent state his life had reached. The poetry he performed at that last "recital," and the occasion itself, throw a bright light on Mayakovsky both as a poet and as an agitator.
During the period just before his suicide he was frequently in trouble with proletarian audiences for whom much of the poetry he wrote during the 1920's was ostensibly meant. Of course the experience of contention with a live audience was not a new one for him; provocation of his hearers had been a poetic method in the early days of his literary career when, done up in grease paint and yellow blouse and with a radish in his buttonhole, he recited poems that were an offense to the established literary taste. But the bourgeois café audience of 1913 was a preselected target and the proper object of an avant-garde poet's scorn; its obtuse ridicule could hardly pierce the armor of his grease paint and blouse. Two very revealing lines in the poem A Cloud in Pants (Oblako v shtanakh, 1915) help us to understand the psychological function of the clown costume he wore in 1913:
It's fine when the soul
is shielded from inspection
in a yellow blouse.
He might have expected that the working-class audience of 1930 would understand him as the "poet of the revolution"; but they didn't. They exhibited, in fact, an obdurate dullness more deadly than the amused disapproval of the pseudo-sophisticates and philistines who once crowded the futurist seances. And Mayakovsky in the early months of 1930, no longer wrapped in his clown's mantle, no longer shielded from inspection, seemed defenseless against them. Once he had been an absolute master of repartee, a platform practitioner of the instantaneous verbal thrust, but he seemed to have lost that verbal control. The desolation of his final weeks and his suicide itself are probably best explained by his growing isolation not only from the "workers," but from everyone else — his friends and enemies alike. Loneliness was an established motif of his poetry beginning with the earliest things: 'Tm alone," he said in 1913, "like the last eye left/ to a man going to join the blind." The forlornness expressed in his first poems became a fact of the last years of his life.
The poet's last public appearance took place in April 1930, just five days before his suicide. We are in great debt to a close friend and associate, V. I. Slavinsky, who in the face of noisy invective and constant disorder, kept the "minutes" of the meeting at which Mayakovsky appeared. The scene of that meeting was the Plekhanov Auditorium of the Institute of the National Economy in Moscow, and the audience was composed for the most part of students in the Institute. Mayakovsky when he appeared was sullen and sick; he complained of his throat and mentioned grippe. In addition to Slavinsky he was accompanied by Pavel Ilych Lavut, whom he had immortalized in verse as a "quiet Jew," and who was involved as a kind of manager in the poet's many and far-flung recitals. The students wandered into the hall slowly and it was only partly filled when his friends advised Mayakovsky that the time had come to start. According to Slavinsky, who had a sense of drama and an eye to history, the hall was dimly lighted and the poet as he climbed the stairs onto the speaker's platform was in a state of painful irritation, both physical and mental. He started with a half-humorous challenge, explaining that he was actually quite bored with the occasion and had come against his will. He reminded the students that although much stupid gossip circulated about him now, "Yet when I die you will all be reading my poems and shedding tears of tender emotion over them." Slavinsky recorded that there was "laughter in the hall." Mayakovsky continued in this vein of rather old-fashioned épatage:
"All my life I've been engaged in writing things that nobody would like, so nobody likes them." He offered to recite his recent poem At the Top of My Voice (Vo ves golos, 1930), which he called the "first introduction to a poem about the Five-Year Plan."
The choice should have been a perfect one, for that poem is a rough paean to communism, a vernacular song about men as workers and builders, and a confident call over the heads of his contemporaries to the future. The poem possesses great power of language and imagery, and its ideological purpose should not conceal from us the quality of the work. The beauty of Dante's verse is not lost even on unbelievers, and Mayakovsky's old-fashioned unlettered Marxism need not obscure the poetic wonder of his hells and heavens.
The poem begins with an invocation to far-off descendants of the future — the only true friends of Mayakovsky — who will some day no doubt "dig in the petrified shit" of the poet's world in an effort to rediscover and understand that world. For the busy scholar of the future whose "erudition will cover a swarm of questions" he offers answers to possible questions about himself, Mayakovsky. He explains that he is a "latrine-cleaner and water-carrier," drawn to such healthful jobs by the revolution, and rescued, almost against his will, from the trivial floriculture of lyric poetry. It is of course no accident that Mayakovsky, who harbored a chronic neurotic fear of infection, should have emphasized the disinfectant function of his poetic work. The poem At the Top of My Voice expresses his rejection, not only of the traditional poet's fame — "that capricious old lady" — but of his own first and original poetic self, the poet totally concerned with his own ego, and his espousal of another and quite different poetic personality, the citizen who builds something as useful as an aqueduct or performs a task as healthful as cleaning a street. He had always been a kind of "anti-poet" and a paradoxical motif of his early poetry was the rejection of poetry itself. The bolshevik "anti-poet" of the late twenties rationalized the old motif by claiming precedence in verse for socially useful tasks. That's why he "stepped on the throat of his own song."
It is a long poem, but on this occasion in the Plekhanov Auditorium he was able to get only as far as the lines: "It would hardly be an honor / should roses like these / get my graven image set up / on squares where consumption coughs out its lungs/ where hooligans and whores and syphilis ..." (47-53). Suddenly there were shouts of protest at such coarse language and Mayakovsky abruptly broke off and announced that he could not finish. Notes were forwarded from the floor to the platform — a custom at Russian meetings of this sort — and some of them suggested that "indecent words should not be employed in poetry."
Sensing the hostility of his audience, Mayakovsky tried to initiate a "dialogue." "Let's discuss things," he said, intending that someone from the audience take the floor and offer some comments which he would then respond to. No one came forward. He made another effort with his poem "The Sun." Though written ten years earlier than At the Top of My Voice, "The Sun" is relatively free of the deliberately anti-aesthetic, rough, and vulgar lexicon used to produce an aesthetic shock in his earliest poems and revived in his last major poem. It should have been a good choice for this audience, since it is very clean. The full title of the poem is "An Extraordinary Adventure That Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky at His Summer House" (Neob ychainoe priklyuchenie byvshee s Vladimirom M ayakovskim letom na dache, 1920), and it is a desolate man's dialogue with the sun, which dropped in on him one July day for tea and conversation.
The opening lines of the poem are a clownish expression of a despair over life which is an essential feature of Mayakovsky's poetry, forming a counterpoise to occasional bursts of poetic optimism. In his play Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy (1913) he had already taken upon himself the burden of human mutilation and human tears; in the poem entitled Man (Chelovek, 1917), he took leave of life because the bourgeois and money rule the world, then returned to earth again after an "avalanche of years," only to find that "nothing had changed"; in the poem The Backbone Flute (Fleita pozvonochnik, 1915) the lines occur: "Would it not be better/ to punctuate my line with a bullet?" "The Sun" holds special appeal because it states his despair and then overcomes it — all in the space of a brief encounter with the source of life.
When the poem opens he is in a state of revulsion at the changeless, predictable grind of day and night, and at the sun itself that disappears in the evening into a hole behind a roof-encrusted village, only to rise again all crimson-bright in the morning. He directs a shout at the sun: "Get down off of there! / You've moseyed enough times into your hot spot ... / You parasite! There you are wrapped in soft clouds / while I have to draw my propaganda posters winter and summer" (29-34). He invites the sun to "drop down for tea," and the sun promptly obliges him. He is frightened at first, but soon feels warm and comfortable, and begins to chat with the sun about "this and that," about how fed up he is with producing posters for ROSTA [the Russian Telegraph Agency], and so forth. The poem was written during the period in his life when he was producing at a fantastic rate "windows" for the Telegraph Agency, placards and posters with drawings and agitational poetry that were hung in the empty display windows of city stores during the famine years. Says the sun:
OK. But don't grieve!
Take a simple view of things.
You think it's easy
for me to shine?
You just try it!
But once you've started out,
you've taken the job on,
you just go ahead-and shine real sharp! (86-93)
The poet draws not only light but courage from this conversation, and he feels at last that even though the sun, "a sleepyhead," may occasionally need a rest, the poet can still cast the great beam of his verses into the night:
Always to shine ... no matter what.
That's my motto
and the sun's! (127-132)
Obviously we can know very little about the nature of that "great beam" if we do not possess the language in which it is projected. What I have so far said about it has been said in English, and therefore represents either translation or paraphrase of various meanings. But the meanings we have found might very well have been presented in prose: disillusionment, whimsy, the sickness unto death, renewal of courage, humorous resignation — all these might have been the subject either of a sober essay or of a story about a visit with the sun intended for children and imaginative adults, and in either case written in prose. But Mayakovsky had said, 'Tm a poet and that's why I'm interesting." If we take him at his word then we must pay attention to the fact that what he wrote is in verse and that it employs with casual assurance the entire compass of poetic tones.
Certain stereotypes concerning that verse are well established in Russian and non-Russian criticism. Mayakovsky has been labelled an innovator, a neologist, a breaker of canons, an experimenter, and so forth. The widespread notion of him as an undisciplined, emotionally errant personality is reflected in an equally widespread impression, buttressed by the work of certain scholarly investigators, that his verse, metrically "free" and unpatterned, is not measurable by the known poetic scales. This impression was created in part by Mayakovsky himself, who wrote in his essay "How to Make Verses" that he had never had anything to do with "iambics and trochaics." But he was quite unreliable as a critic of his own work. Nearly everything he wrote is carefully organized as to rhythm and rhyme; the poem about the sun is written in pure iambic measure with alternating four-foot and three-foot lines, and alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. It is one of his best poems and it would be absurd to treat it as an anomaly. It is not even an exception. His first poems were written in conventional binary, or two-syllable, meters, and were less revolutionary in their metrical structure than the much earlier work of certain symbolist poets. And yet the sense of something new is an inherent quality of the poem about the sun as it is of all his best work, and the novelty is as much a matter of meter as it is of poetic vocabulary, imagery, or rhyme. The curious fact is that Mayakovsky has managed to use a "conventional" meter, the so-called syllabo-tonic meter, in which the poet works within a more or less rigid frame of alternating accented and unaccented syllables, to suggest the possibility, indeed the imminent likelihood, of escape from that format into free, conversational statement. Building his poem carefully according to the rules of literary artifice, he still has contrived its cadences so as to suggest the final abandonment of artifice, and, in Robert Frost's phrase, "the sound of sense."
He uses many devices to contrive this effect of freedom from device. Some of his most strikingly developed rhymes are not quite rhymes, but either truncated or merely assonant, for instance pylál: plylá (blazed:hovered). There is an occasional chiasmic internal rhyme that, suddenly breaking into, even though part of, the strict pattern of conventional end-rhymes, acts upon the latter both as contrast and support: bylá zhará, zhará plylá (there was heat, the heat hovered). Rhyming words or phrases often produce a humorous effect because they are so far apart lexically and grammatically that the near correspondence of sounds stirs unexpected incongruities of thought and language; thus the word for "propaganda posters" is rhymed with "... clouds thou," oblaká ty; plakáty. Alliteration is abundant and rich, done with infantile fascination at the possibilities offered by contrived coincidence: krivílsya krysh karóyu; dirévneyu dyrá; do dnei poslédnikh dóntsa. The poetic devices are so casual that they seem a happy accident in the line.
Word play is unremitting, and puns, like rhyme and alliteration, are complex and rich; the word for "to drop in" happens to be the same as the word for "to set," which offers the intriguing possibility of having the sun "set" for tea, and since the word for "sit down" in Russian is also used of the sun's disappearance beyond the horizon, the poet may, Joshua-like, order the luminary not to "set" but to "have a seat by the tea."
But the most striking artifice Mayakovsky employs is also the most obvious one: the poem is a teatime chat with the daylight orb carried on in the unconstrained idiom associated with relaxation and a bit of the brew. This naturally involves colloquial cadences and a sub-poetic vocabulary, words not normally used for lyric purposes and regarded as unsuitable for poetic converse with the sun, the universe, or for that matter with the self. There is a perfect unity of opposites contained in lines that say with strict iambic beat and a regular rhyme scheme what it seems anyone might say without even trying. "Get down off of there!" a command to the sun, sounds like a maternal imperative shouted at some troublesome offspring who clambers all over the shed roof; the sun chattered "about this and that"; he (it) quite informally invites the poet to "spread the tea and jam" ; the sun and the poet agree to "keep on shining, no matter what"; and of course it's not easy to come up shining every day, "you just try it! (podi poprobuil)."
The poem's power grows out of a startlingly original idea — to call it fantasy would belittle the poet's honest labor. Mayakovsky has produced a brief human drama in the form of a casual colloquy with the sun. The mood of the poem and the aspect of the world change imperceptibly in it: the disconsolate and hazy heat of the first lines gives way to friendly warmth and the "courage to go on." The miracle is accomplished by a pain-racked poet who really means everything he says, but who is at the same time a verbal artist playing a baroque improvisation on the complex instrument of human speech in its modem Russian variant. It may be that the verbal play itself is what comforted him. And he succeeds in turning upside down the old myth of sun worship: in his poem the sun becomes a comrade and collaborator.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mayakovsky by Edward J. Brown. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Foreword, pg. v
- A Note on Transliteration, pg. vi
- Table of Contents, pg. viii
- Introductory Remarks, pg. 1
- Chapter One. Prelude: April 9, 1930, pg. 12
- Chapter Two. The Revolution: Politics, pg. 27
- Chapter Three. The Revolution: Art, pg. 40
- Chapter Four. Mayakovsky in the Futurist Collections, pg. 72
- Chapter Five. 1915: The Cloud and the Flute, pg. 108
- Chapter Six. 1916: "In My Head, War and the Universe, in My Heart, Man", pg. 145
- Chapter Seven. Form, Image, and Idea in the Early Poems, pg. 171
- Chapter Eight. The Poet Engaged, pg. 190
- Chapter Nine. About That, and About Some Other Things, pg. 219
- Chapter Ten. A Commercial Artist Discovers America, pg. 261
- Chapter Eleven. Contemporaries, pg. 303
- Chapter Twelve. The Cinema and the Stage, pg. 318
- Chapter Thirteen. A Girl from a Different World, pg. 336
- Chapter Fourteen. The Heart Yearns for a Bullet, pg. 352
- Epilogue—Not in Heaven, pg. 369
- Bibliographical Essay, pg. 371
- Index of Names, pg. 379
- Index of Titles of Mayakovsky's Works, pg. 384