The Creative Genius of Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) Communist Futurist
Research and Translation: By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
Author’s Note: I first started research into this essay around 6 years ago – writing notes from what were then, limited Western sources. More or less without exception, these sources pursued a mythological and irrational ‘Cold War’ narrative that demonised the Soviet Union, whilst simultaneously eulogising one of its main proponents (Vladimir Mayakovsky). Joseph Stalin is generally represented as ‘supporting’ Mayakovsky’s work, whilst sinisterly working behind the scenes, plotting his demise. This schizophrenic approach to narrative building stems from the deliberate post-WWII policy of the United States, in its attempts to ‘demonise’ the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. Of course, none of these illogical and bizarre statements stand-up to objective historical examination. Mayakovsky was first and foremost an ardent Communist and supporter of the progressive Soviet System (in fact, he took part in a pro-Bolshevik demonstration in 1905, but did not encounter ‘futurism’ until 1911), and as freedom of thought and freedom of expression were corner stones of that system, he often became embroiled in creative squabbles with the artistic and political community. Until deliberately brought into this arena of Soviet life by Lilya Brik, Joseph Stalin was far too busy administering the development of the Soviet Union to pay much interest. Mayakovsky was a revolutionary artist whose talent knew no bounds. When he shot himself in 1930, it was not because of a dispute with the Soviet System, but was rather the consequence of a failed love affair (involving two women). To gain an authentic and reliable narrative to Mayakovsky’s life, I have accessed (and translated) two Chinese language texts, from the People’s Republic of China, adding my own research and clarification where required. For Mayakovsky’s place within history to be understood, he must be lifted out of the bourgeois distortion that defines Western derived, ‘Cold War’ rhetoric, and granted the dignity that is his own life. Mayakovsky had no argument with the Soviet System or with Joseph Stalin, but whilst giving free rein to his creative talents, he sought to progress humanity beyond the boundaries of its suffering, and so doing, usher in a bright new future. I am sure he would have agreed with me, when I proclaim ‘down with imperialism!’ It is interesting to note that the commemorative stamps regularly issued for Mayakovsky by the Soviet State under Stalin, stopped being produced in 1955 – one year before the treacherous Nikita Khrushchev ascended to power and pursued his Trotskyite inspired, anti-Stalin purges. Mayakovsky’s creative genius spanned poetry, painting and theatre, whereby his artistic output involved all three expressions, often spilling over into technical design, and progressive photography. He was a proletariat philosopher who profoundly understood the spirit of the time he existed within, whilst looking beyond the ‘now’ to a distant future that he hoped to bring ever nearer, and into the present through the sheer power of his working class creativity.
ACW 7.8.2016
ACW 7.8.2016
Vladimir Mayakovsky was a Marxist-Leninist and a Futurist. Futurism is the belief that all of humanity’s suffering can be relieved and resolved through scientific thinking and scientific innovation. Futurists advocate that the ‘future’ (symbolised by a steady technological development over-time), be brought suddenly into the present by dispelling all the conventions of the past that keep humanity looking back and not looking forward. Futurists, however, seek to dismiss the perceived (and received) narrative history as being just so much accruement of self-limiting and self-deceiving nonsense, designed to favour one part of society over another, by ensuring that a stagnating ‘conservatism’ defines reality, and prevents any form of sudden or innovative change. As Marx, Engels, and Lenin all spoke of the necessity of the working class ‘over-throwing’ the ruling middle class, futurists such as Mayakovsky, were able and willing to fully align themselves with the Communist teachings of Scientific Socialism. Vladimir Mayakovsky was an extraordinary person who lived during equally extraordinary times. His creative genius was always magnificent, even if the public’s appreciation, as with any art form, ebbed and flowed. The futurist movement began in early 20th century Italy, and absolutely denied any validity inherited from the past, including political and artistic traditions. Instead, the futurists, being young and full of vigour, pursued the fast travel and technology of modernism, revelling in the speed of the motorcar and the aeroplane, etc. For the futurist, the world of modernity was perceived as a dawning of a new age, an age free of the interference of the past, an age that was to be built by those who could see its potential in the present. Of course, Mayakovsky began to pursue these futuristic ideals of unhindered development during the last years of the Tsarist regime, although his style is thought to have transformed into that of ‘narrative’ around 1914. Possibly influenced by the futurists habit of writing defining manifestos about virtually any subject, Mayakovsky published the poem entitled ‘A Cloud in the Trousers’. This poem examines the subject of love and religion from the perspective of revolution – in the poem the observations are made by a narrative character that has been unsuccessful in love. Mayakovsky was a poet of often visionary proportions. His work, (which sometimes included painting), strove to break up the engrained habits of the present, using a combination of honest observation and unique angles of vision. The conventionally ‘uncomfortable’ served as Mayakovsky’s artistic platform. Revolution, for him, was not just around the corner – it was ‘here’ in his present, and through his work, he made the immediacy of revolution on all levels felt by those who encountered his work. In 1919, Mayakovsky formally broke with the conventional ‘futurist’ movement, and instead instigated the ‘Communist Futurist Association’, dedicated to the spread of Marxist-Leninist revolution. In 1923, he founded the ‘Art Left Front’ magazine as a forum to explore these Communist futurist ideas. Mayakovsky’s art was premised upon the idea of unhindered working class progression in all spheres of Soviet life.
Vladimir Mayakovsky was born on the 19th of July, in 1893, in mountains of Georgia. Even in his early years, he expressed a love of literature. Following the death of his father (when he was aged twelve), he moved with his sisters and mother to live in Moscow in 1906. He had been involved in a pro-Bolshevik demonstration a year before his father’s death in Georgia, but it was in Moscow that he formally joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the fore-runner to the Communist Party), in 1908. The young Mayakovsky was arrested three times by the Czarist regime, whilst still in his teens for illegal political activity, which included running an underground printing press, and helping a political prisoner escape from Novinsky Prison. He once spent seven months in solitary confinement in prison, and it is here, within the solitude, regulation and neglect that he first began to seriously study and write poetry. In 1911 he entered the Moscow based Architectural School of Painting, and began the structured writing of poetry. This is where he first encountered ‘futurism’, amongst his fellow artists and poets, already involved with the movement. His early poetry had both Communistic and futurist underpinnings, but the tone was definitely the critique of capitalism. These works of art abandoned traditional realism, for the pursuit of the unconventional, emphasizing the effect of the poetry of sound, colour and movement – avoiding the bourgeois habits of nihilism and anarchy. He became aware of the changing political tide in Russia – change that was generated, assisted and spread through the printed word (in the form of political pamphlets, posters and newspapers) – and through this experience, he began to appreciate the power of ‘words’ if used in the correct manner to serve the purpose at hand. As well as writing poetry and painting, Mayakovsky was also an accomplished theatre actor. In this regard, he was considered a theatrical innovator in the USSR. He was a strong advocate of the theatre, and believed that all hypothetical issues and meaning could be explained through it. He was against ‘naturalism’ as a means to depict lives (viewing such depictions as not strong enough to convey true, revolutionary meaning). Mayakovsky stated: ‘The stage is not an ordinary mirror, but a magnifying glass.’ His theory on the development of theatre had a lasting impact on later Soviet stage-drama.
After the October Revolution, Mayakovsky’s creativity entered a new era, where he wrote short poems entitled ‘Our March’, ‘Revolution Song’ and ‘Left March’, as well as the play ‘Religious farce’, and the long poem ‘One Hundred and Fifty Million’, as well as many other works that generally praised the revolution, and which were widely welcomed by the masses. After 1924, his creativity began to mature, as he published the poems entitled ‘Lenin’, and ‘Good!’, and the long poetical overture ‘At the Top of My Voice’, and so on. The connection between the written word and actual action in the physical world became very apparent. Writing had consequences in the physical world, and to Mayakovsky, the written word became a conduit that gathered all the intellectual and spiritual forces together, and focused them into one very powerful expression of a single mind that could, in the right circumstance, influence all other individual minds and create a collective change for the better. Mayakovsky became a revolutionary of ideas before he became politically active. His mind adopted an anti-Tsarist position and saw the future as a ‘change’ that would usher in a new era of advancement and brilliance. His solitary confinement – like that experienced by a monastic – at such a young age only served to strengthen and clarify his thinking. The punishments meted out by the old Czarist regime in an attempt to sustain it, only served to confirm its own eventual downfall in the minds and bodies of those it oppressed. Today, there is a statue of him in Russia, and an underground train station named after him (the Mayakovskaya Metro Station) in Moscow. Even his birthplace - Baghdadi in Georgia – was given the name ‘Mayakovsky’. Yet at the time of his death the Soviet press was slow to bestow upon him the Communist accolade of ‘proletarian poet’. This matter was decisively resolved when Mayakovsky was legitimised through the direct intervention of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), who declared that Vladimir Mayakovsky was indeed the most talented of Soviet-epoch poets, and that to ignore his talents amounted to a crime against Soviet culture. Stalin took this decision after receiving a letter from Mayakovshy’s lover - Lilya Brik (1891-1978) – their love affair had occurred whilst Brik was still married and this fact had attracted considerable attention. The letter from Brik to Stalin formally complained about how the Soviet press continued to deny Mayakovsky official recognition, but instead implied that Mayakovsky only appeared to associate himself with the Communist system (as a ‘fellow traveller’), presumably to claim the system’s merit for his own. He was also accused in some sectors, as being a ‘formalist’, something of a profound insult for one considered by many to be in the vanguard of the Communist revolution. Marxist-Leninism defines ‘formalism’ as an excessive adherence to the strictures of art (that is its artistic techniques), an obsession that is believed to result in the ignoring, or the negation of social values. After assessing Mayakovsky's work, Joseph Stalin officially dismissed this criticism, affirming its Socialist, and progressive value. In reality, Mayakovsky’s artistic and philosophic attitude is often referred to as ‘futurist’, and this is generally regarded as being fully compatible with Socialist thinking, and certainly does not depart from the road of continuous progressive cultural and scientific development and revolution.
Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917. When he died in early 1924, the Soviet Union comprised a vast territory of Socialist Republics, containing millions of people actively pursuing an alternative path to that of predatory capitalism (prevalent throughout the West, and spread via Western imperialism throughout the world). The path to power had not been smooth. Not only had Lenin led his Bolsheviks effectively in the exposing and over-coming of competing forms of (bourgeois inspired) socialist thinking in Russia, he had also prevailed in a vicious civil war, a war fuelled by external interference in Russia’s internal matters. The armies of 14 different nations had invaded Communist Russia in 1918, and occupied over 70% of Russian territory in the name of the imprisoned Czar (a situation that led to his execution). Prior to all of this however, the fledgling Soviet state had brought their participation in the First World War to a conclusion in 1917. For artists such as Mayakovsky, particularly those who adhered to the ideal of the implicit violence evident in the futurist movement (as in the sense of the necessity of over-throwing all past conventions), the Communist Revolution fulfilled this criterion of literally smashing its way into a bright, new future. For many, there was very real hope that everyday life would change, and usher in a new age of modernistic advancement for humankind and that the injustices of the (capitalist) past would be uprooted and removed.
As Mayakovsky lived through the October Revolution of 1917, his work in the form of leftwing poetry (and playwriting) developed to comment upon and support the social changes that he experienced and witnessed around him. During these early revolutionary years, Mayakovsky’s artistic output became very popular in the Soviet Union (just as it had been during the latter years of the Czarist regime). His influence, however, was not limited to the Soviet Union, as Mayakovsky freely travelled outside the Soviet Union during the 1920’s. This was unusual for the time due to the destruction inflicted on Communist Russia by the interventionist Western forces during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), and the requirement of the new Socialist society to re-build and re-structure its culture through the guidance of Vladimir Lenin, and after 1924 - Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Mayakovsky managed to visit Great Britain and the USA (both of which had been involved in Russian Civil War – opposing the Communist Revolution) amongst other countries. Indeed, he had a love affair with one Eli Jones whilst visiting the USA – who is believed to have mothered his daughter as a consequence.
Rather surprising for a young man with revolutionary tendencies, Mayakovsky attended college after his incarceration, becoming very good at technical drawing. He was already reciting his poetry by this time and had been declared a genius by David Burl. Karl Marx taught, in essence, that to remove the inadequacies that exist within the minds of humanity, the outer world has to be transformed and the habitual, exploitative patterns of everyday life replaced with a social system that allows each individual to physically and mentally function at their optimum in a world free of greed. Futurists, although not exactly Communists in the Marxian model, nevertheless believed that the future could be made in the ‘present’ by ripping the influence of the past out of it. That is the presumed progress and advancement associated with the future time, could be brought quicker into the present, if the backward traditions of the past – based upon old, limited thinking – could be removed for good, so that their limiting power could no longer be used to hold back progress. The Bolsheviks believed that a revolution was required to change social conditions from those of the exploitative past to that of the enlightened, progressive future. It is here that the Bolsheviks and the Futurists agreed – the old had to go if the new was to be allowed to arrive. Mayakovsky thrived in crowds, but as a revolutionary poet, he had to spend time contemplating in isolation so that his artistic expression could be produced. Workers made products in factories together, whilst Mayakovsky produced words alone in isolation – Mayakovsky’s production was intellectual and spiritual. His creative talent fed into a feeling of a generation and an epoch of time. History had declared that changes had to come to Russia– and Mayakovsky – (and others like him), envisioned from quite early on how these changes should unfold and what direction they should take. Change was viewed as being an integral and intimate part of revolutionary freedom, a freedom that knew no bounds and which had no limitations set against it. The rarefied air of pre-revolutionary Russia had an inevitable hope associated with it, and in this hope, Mayakovsky wrote of a time when immortality and resurrection would be a possibility. Mayakovsky, as a poet of the people, portrayed a living philosophy that was at once mundane and yet super mundane. He was ordinary – one of the revolutionary masses - whilst expressing a creative brilliance that spoke for the people and in many ways, formed a kind of over-arching canopy of inclusive exhilaration, setting a standard for others to aspire to, whilst knowing all along that the fertile earth that created it all, resided beneath the feet of everyone without exception. To encounter Mayakovsky was to encounter a spiritual force that personally empowered and inspired. The world is lifted by such a presence – either directly or indirectly. Allen Ginsberg admired the scope of Mayakovsky’s work, and Frank O’Hara saw the ‘intimacy with the cosmos’ that Mayakovsky possessed. The paradox of Mayakovsky is that within his honesty that unapologetically advocated the breaking with the past and old, redundant forms of expression, he remained remarkably open to human feelings and emotions. Within his deconstructing philosophy, (that is despite the potentially destructive nature of futurism), Mayakovsky’s essentially materially based philosophical expression, continued to remain oddly spiritual. He loved widely and he loved wildly – it did not matter to him which format love manifested within. The universe and the ‘everyday’ merged in the person of his existence. He starred in films and was a personal friend of Alexsandr Rodchenko – Rodchenko is responsible for the iconic photographs of Mayakovsky – looking every inch like a ‘hardened’ Soviet soldier, or a Buddhist monk – sat wearing a suit and sporting a shaven head. Lilya Brik – his longtime lover – and her husband - supported Mayakovsky when he was both alive and dead.
However, the heady days of ideological revolution coupled with sudden and dramatic change, must eventually give-way to the more measured times of rational and logical re-construction guided by the strictures of Scientific Socialism that puts an end to all bourgeois-inspired suffering inflicted upon the working class. Mayakovsky, as an intellectual, seems to have been directly connected to the zeitgeist of the time. He remained what he always was – a ‘communist futurist’ revolutionary – first and foremost, who happened to be living in a new Socialist society. He was a ‘Socialist’ as long as all cultural structures were being criticised and torn apart, and a ‘futurist’ as soon as Russian society settled-down into formulating a new ‘Socialist’ manifestation of culture and politics. Mayakovsky always appeared, through his artistic output, to understandably agitate for continuous innovation and change as an ‘ongoing’ process. In many ways, his example reminded everyone of the Marxist revolutionary ideal of ‘questioning everything’, and never settling for convention over innovation. Certainly Joseph Stalin never officially opposed or criticised Mayakovsky’s creative work or philosophical output, and despite the erroneous claims of the bourgeois (Cold War-inspired ‘historians’), Mayakovsky never openly aimed any of this artistic output at the Soviet regime. The reality of the situation is that Mayakovsky’s critical output was aimed at all forms of ‘conservativism’ that did not openly challenge, dismiss and destroy the past (as a creative act). The Soviet system had to administer a number of independent republics which contained very different peoples, and as part of one concerted effort, raise the living and educational standards of these millions in the most efficient and ‘scientific’ manner as possible, whilst ensuring their safety and well-being. It is probable that Mayakovsky fully understood this required process, but nevertheless, found it very difficult to contain his natural tendency toward ‘futuristic’ continuous revolution, whereby the agency of ‘radical’ change did not allow any theoretical moments of consolidation. This is the honesty of the poet unhindered by the burden of the past, and not limited to any one manifestation of the future.
Mayakovsky, as a poet, lived a life of expression, both in words and actions. This action topped all his previous performances and made a stunning statement in the process. The philosopher in him saw the complete picture. He could communicate this total image through his writings and art, conveying a poignant message for those able to step back from the immediacy of the present, to disengage – even slightly – from the all-consuming attention of the bare senses and the material world they represent. A cutting intellect combined with a startling wit – a heckler shouts; ‘I don’t understand your humour!’ – Mayakovsky responds with the lightning reflexes of a Ch’an master – ‘You are a giraffe.’ Brilliance has no reason and cannot be limited to a definition. A simple exchange represents it all. Sometimes the greatest of artistic acts occur in the obscurest of moments, with their import being beyond measure. Although the physical revolution inevitably changes form, the philosophical and spiritual revolution continued. Marx defined ‘spirituality’ as the act of producing the profoundest of thoughts, and Mayakovsky, through his works, certainly personified the Marxian spiritual man. Radical and forward thinking, Mayakovsky speaks to the generations yet to come. He firmly places inner and outer creativity on an equal footing, establishing a realm of effervescent beauty that immerses all in the healing light of development. Feeling and intelligence entwined, Mayakovsky represents the new Socialist Man – freed from the past and looking into the bright future. It was in that vein that Mayakovsky made an exit from this life that lit-up the world. Not just in his own time, but for all time. The progressive and compassionate artist that was Vladimir Mayakovsky, died as he lived – a revolutionary free being.
Despite his support for the Soviet Revolution (in 1925 his poem ‘Lenin’ praised the extraordinary leader of the successful Bolshevik Revolution, whilst in 1927, he had penned his 19 chaptered poem entitled ‘Good’ in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution), on April 14th, 1930 (at the age of 36), Mayakovsky took his own life (by shooting himself), due to an intense and stormy (but otherwise failed) love affair with Soviet actress Veronika Polonskaya. The futurist in him saw no reason to respect the conventions of relationships, and as a consequence he loved freely and intensely. However, from the ‘suicide’ note he left (to Lilya Brik, rather than Veronika Polonskaya), it is obvious that he retained his futuristic sense of progression as well as humour even at the end, and that his death should probably be viewed more as a revolutionary act, rather than as an act of desperation or a cry for help:
‘SHE loves me...she loves me not.
I tear my hands, scatter the broken fingers...loves me not
As we scatter the random riddling heads of daisies
Tumbling through summer.
Though I adopt the smooth chin and greying hair,
The silver, tinkling out the change of years,
I hope, I know that age will never bring
The final shame of prudent commonsense.
It's after one and you must be asleep.
The milky way is like a silver river.
I'm in no hurry. There's no need
To wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.
It's what they call the end of the affair.
Love's gondola has struck the rocks of fact.
We're quits--no point in totting up
Our score of troubles, miseries, and wrongs.
See how much peace the world can give.
The sky is wrapped in stars, the gift of night.
At such a time you rise, and find you speak
To all the years, the future, and the world.
It's after one and you must be asleep.
Or maybe you can feel the night as well.
I'm in no hurry. There's no need
To wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.’
He added:
‘Comrades of the Proletarian Literary Organization, don’t think me a coward. Really, it couldn’t be helped. Greetings! Tell Yermilov it’s too bad he removed the slogan; we should have had it out.
V.M.
In the desk drawer I have 2000 rubles. Use them to pay my taxes. The rest can be gotten from the State Publishing House.’
Such was his high status in the Soviet Union after his death, that in just 15 years, stamps commemorating his life were issued four times. In June, 1940, the USSR issued a 10th anniversary set of stamps as a remembrance of his death. In October, 1943, the USSR issued a set of stamps celebrating the 50th anniversary of Mayakovsky’s birth. In June, 1953, the USSR issued a set of stamps celebrating the 60th anniversary of his birth, and in May, 1955, the USSR issued stamps commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death. Mayakovsky’s collected works amount to 13 volumes which is separated into one-third about patriotic and political themes, one third about revolution and the final third consisting of satirical plays and matters concerning his private life.
As Mayakovsky is best known through his own words, a small selection of his poems are as follows:
Vladimir Mayakovsky was born on the 19th of July, in 1893, in mountains of Georgia. Even in his early years, he expressed a love of literature. Following the death of his father (when he was aged twelve), he moved with his sisters and mother to live in Moscow in 1906. He had been involved in a pro-Bolshevik demonstration a year before his father’s death in Georgia, but it was in Moscow that he formally joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the fore-runner to the Communist Party), in 1908. The young Mayakovsky was arrested three times by the Czarist regime, whilst still in his teens for illegal political activity, which included running an underground printing press, and helping a political prisoner escape from Novinsky Prison. He once spent seven months in solitary confinement in prison, and it is here, within the solitude, regulation and neglect that he first began to seriously study and write poetry. In 1911 he entered the Moscow based Architectural School of Painting, and began the structured writing of poetry. This is where he first encountered ‘futurism’, amongst his fellow artists and poets, already involved with the movement. His early poetry had both Communistic and futurist underpinnings, but the tone was definitely the critique of capitalism. These works of art abandoned traditional realism, for the pursuit of the unconventional, emphasizing the effect of the poetry of sound, colour and movement – avoiding the bourgeois habits of nihilism and anarchy. He became aware of the changing political tide in Russia – change that was generated, assisted and spread through the printed word (in the form of political pamphlets, posters and newspapers) – and through this experience, he began to appreciate the power of ‘words’ if used in the correct manner to serve the purpose at hand. As well as writing poetry and painting, Mayakovsky was also an accomplished theatre actor. In this regard, he was considered a theatrical innovator in the USSR. He was a strong advocate of the theatre, and believed that all hypothetical issues and meaning could be explained through it. He was against ‘naturalism’ as a means to depict lives (viewing such depictions as not strong enough to convey true, revolutionary meaning). Mayakovsky stated: ‘The stage is not an ordinary mirror, but a magnifying glass.’ His theory on the development of theatre had a lasting impact on later Soviet stage-drama.
After the October Revolution, Mayakovsky’s creativity entered a new era, where he wrote short poems entitled ‘Our March’, ‘Revolution Song’ and ‘Left March’, as well as the play ‘Religious farce’, and the long poem ‘One Hundred and Fifty Million’, as well as many other works that generally praised the revolution, and which were widely welcomed by the masses. After 1924, his creativity began to mature, as he published the poems entitled ‘Lenin’, and ‘Good!’, and the long poetical overture ‘At the Top of My Voice’, and so on. The connection between the written word and actual action in the physical world became very apparent. Writing had consequences in the physical world, and to Mayakovsky, the written word became a conduit that gathered all the intellectual and spiritual forces together, and focused them into one very powerful expression of a single mind that could, in the right circumstance, influence all other individual minds and create a collective change for the better. Mayakovsky became a revolutionary of ideas before he became politically active. His mind adopted an anti-Tsarist position and saw the future as a ‘change’ that would usher in a new era of advancement and brilliance. His solitary confinement – like that experienced by a monastic – at such a young age only served to strengthen and clarify his thinking. The punishments meted out by the old Czarist regime in an attempt to sustain it, only served to confirm its own eventual downfall in the minds and bodies of those it oppressed. Today, there is a statue of him in Russia, and an underground train station named after him (the Mayakovskaya Metro Station) in Moscow. Even his birthplace - Baghdadi in Georgia – was given the name ‘Mayakovsky’. Yet at the time of his death the Soviet press was slow to bestow upon him the Communist accolade of ‘proletarian poet’. This matter was decisively resolved when Mayakovsky was legitimised through the direct intervention of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), who declared that Vladimir Mayakovsky was indeed the most talented of Soviet-epoch poets, and that to ignore his talents amounted to a crime against Soviet culture. Stalin took this decision after receiving a letter from Mayakovshy’s lover - Lilya Brik (1891-1978) – their love affair had occurred whilst Brik was still married and this fact had attracted considerable attention. The letter from Brik to Stalin formally complained about how the Soviet press continued to deny Mayakovsky official recognition, but instead implied that Mayakovsky only appeared to associate himself with the Communist system (as a ‘fellow traveller’), presumably to claim the system’s merit for his own. He was also accused in some sectors, as being a ‘formalist’, something of a profound insult for one considered by many to be in the vanguard of the Communist revolution. Marxist-Leninism defines ‘formalism’ as an excessive adherence to the strictures of art (that is its artistic techniques), an obsession that is believed to result in the ignoring, or the negation of social values. After assessing Mayakovsky's work, Joseph Stalin officially dismissed this criticism, affirming its Socialist, and progressive value. In reality, Mayakovsky’s artistic and philosophic attitude is often referred to as ‘futurist’, and this is generally regarded as being fully compatible with Socialist thinking, and certainly does not depart from the road of continuous progressive cultural and scientific development and revolution.
Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917. When he died in early 1924, the Soviet Union comprised a vast territory of Socialist Republics, containing millions of people actively pursuing an alternative path to that of predatory capitalism (prevalent throughout the West, and spread via Western imperialism throughout the world). The path to power had not been smooth. Not only had Lenin led his Bolsheviks effectively in the exposing and over-coming of competing forms of (bourgeois inspired) socialist thinking in Russia, he had also prevailed in a vicious civil war, a war fuelled by external interference in Russia’s internal matters. The armies of 14 different nations had invaded Communist Russia in 1918, and occupied over 70% of Russian territory in the name of the imprisoned Czar (a situation that led to his execution). Prior to all of this however, the fledgling Soviet state had brought their participation in the First World War to a conclusion in 1917. For artists such as Mayakovsky, particularly those who adhered to the ideal of the implicit violence evident in the futurist movement (as in the sense of the necessity of over-throwing all past conventions), the Communist Revolution fulfilled this criterion of literally smashing its way into a bright, new future. For many, there was very real hope that everyday life would change, and usher in a new age of modernistic advancement for humankind and that the injustices of the (capitalist) past would be uprooted and removed.
As Mayakovsky lived through the October Revolution of 1917, his work in the form of leftwing poetry (and playwriting) developed to comment upon and support the social changes that he experienced and witnessed around him. During these early revolutionary years, Mayakovsky’s artistic output became very popular in the Soviet Union (just as it had been during the latter years of the Czarist regime). His influence, however, was not limited to the Soviet Union, as Mayakovsky freely travelled outside the Soviet Union during the 1920’s. This was unusual for the time due to the destruction inflicted on Communist Russia by the interventionist Western forces during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), and the requirement of the new Socialist society to re-build and re-structure its culture through the guidance of Vladimir Lenin, and after 1924 - Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, Mayakovsky managed to visit Great Britain and the USA (both of which had been involved in Russian Civil War – opposing the Communist Revolution) amongst other countries. Indeed, he had a love affair with one Eli Jones whilst visiting the USA – who is believed to have mothered his daughter as a consequence.
Rather surprising for a young man with revolutionary tendencies, Mayakovsky attended college after his incarceration, becoming very good at technical drawing. He was already reciting his poetry by this time and had been declared a genius by David Burl. Karl Marx taught, in essence, that to remove the inadequacies that exist within the minds of humanity, the outer world has to be transformed and the habitual, exploitative patterns of everyday life replaced with a social system that allows each individual to physically and mentally function at their optimum in a world free of greed. Futurists, although not exactly Communists in the Marxian model, nevertheless believed that the future could be made in the ‘present’ by ripping the influence of the past out of it. That is the presumed progress and advancement associated with the future time, could be brought quicker into the present, if the backward traditions of the past – based upon old, limited thinking – could be removed for good, so that their limiting power could no longer be used to hold back progress. The Bolsheviks believed that a revolution was required to change social conditions from those of the exploitative past to that of the enlightened, progressive future. It is here that the Bolsheviks and the Futurists agreed – the old had to go if the new was to be allowed to arrive. Mayakovsky thrived in crowds, but as a revolutionary poet, he had to spend time contemplating in isolation so that his artistic expression could be produced. Workers made products in factories together, whilst Mayakovsky produced words alone in isolation – Mayakovsky’s production was intellectual and spiritual. His creative talent fed into a feeling of a generation and an epoch of time. History had declared that changes had to come to Russia– and Mayakovsky – (and others like him), envisioned from quite early on how these changes should unfold and what direction they should take. Change was viewed as being an integral and intimate part of revolutionary freedom, a freedom that knew no bounds and which had no limitations set against it. The rarefied air of pre-revolutionary Russia had an inevitable hope associated with it, and in this hope, Mayakovsky wrote of a time when immortality and resurrection would be a possibility. Mayakovsky, as a poet of the people, portrayed a living philosophy that was at once mundane and yet super mundane. He was ordinary – one of the revolutionary masses - whilst expressing a creative brilliance that spoke for the people and in many ways, formed a kind of over-arching canopy of inclusive exhilaration, setting a standard for others to aspire to, whilst knowing all along that the fertile earth that created it all, resided beneath the feet of everyone without exception. To encounter Mayakovsky was to encounter a spiritual force that personally empowered and inspired. The world is lifted by such a presence – either directly or indirectly. Allen Ginsberg admired the scope of Mayakovsky’s work, and Frank O’Hara saw the ‘intimacy with the cosmos’ that Mayakovsky possessed. The paradox of Mayakovsky is that within his honesty that unapologetically advocated the breaking with the past and old, redundant forms of expression, he remained remarkably open to human feelings and emotions. Within his deconstructing philosophy, (that is despite the potentially destructive nature of futurism), Mayakovsky’s essentially materially based philosophical expression, continued to remain oddly spiritual. He loved widely and he loved wildly – it did not matter to him which format love manifested within. The universe and the ‘everyday’ merged in the person of his existence. He starred in films and was a personal friend of Alexsandr Rodchenko – Rodchenko is responsible for the iconic photographs of Mayakovsky – looking every inch like a ‘hardened’ Soviet soldier, or a Buddhist monk – sat wearing a suit and sporting a shaven head. Lilya Brik – his longtime lover – and her husband - supported Mayakovsky when he was both alive and dead.
However, the heady days of ideological revolution coupled with sudden and dramatic change, must eventually give-way to the more measured times of rational and logical re-construction guided by the strictures of Scientific Socialism that puts an end to all bourgeois-inspired suffering inflicted upon the working class. Mayakovsky, as an intellectual, seems to have been directly connected to the zeitgeist of the time. He remained what he always was – a ‘communist futurist’ revolutionary – first and foremost, who happened to be living in a new Socialist society. He was a ‘Socialist’ as long as all cultural structures were being criticised and torn apart, and a ‘futurist’ as soon as Russian society settled-down into formulating a new ‘Socialist’ manifestation of culture and politics. Mayakovsky always appeared, through his artistic output, to understandably agitate for continuous innovation and change as an ‘ongoing’ process. In many ways, his example reminded everyone of the Marxist revolutionary ideal of ‘questioning everything’, and never settling for convention over innovation. Certainly Joseph Stalin never officially opposed or criticised Mayakovsky’s creative work or philosophical output, and despite the erroneous claims of the bourgeois (Cold War-inspired ‘historians’), Mayakovsky never openly aimed any of this artistic output at the Soviet regime. The reality of the situation is that Mayakovsky’s critical output was aimed at all forms of ‘conservativism’ that did not openly challenge, dismiss and destroy the past (as a creative act). The Soviet system had to administer a number of independent republics which contained very different peoples, and as part of one concerted effort, raise the living and educational standards of these millions in the most efficient and ‘scientific’ manner as possible, whilst ensuring their safety and well-being. It is probable that Mayakovsky fully understood this required process, but nevertheless, found it very difficult to contain his natural tendency toward ‘futuristic’ continuous revolution, whereby the agency of ‘radical’ change did not allow any theoretical moments of consolidation. This is the honesty of the poet unhindered by the burden of the past, and not limited to any one manifestation of the future.
Mayakovsky, as a poet, lived a life of expression, both in words and actions. This action topped all his previous performances and made a stunning statement in the process. The philosopher in him saw the complete picture. He could communicate this total image through his writings and art, conveying a poignant message for those able to step back from the immediacy of the present, to disengage – even slightly – from the all-consuming attention of the bare senses and the material world they represent. A cutting intellect combined with a startling wit – a heckler shouts; ‘I don’t understand your humour!’ – Mayakovsky responds with the lightning reflexes of a Ch’an master – ‘You are a giraffe.’ Brilliance has no reason and cannot be limited to a definition. A simple exchange represents it all. Sometimes the greatest of artistic acts occur in the obscurest of moments, with their import being beyond measure. Although the physical revolution inevitably changes form, the philosophical and spiritual revolution continued. Marx defined ‘spirituality’ as the act of producing the profoundest of thoughts, and Mayakovsky, through his works, certainly personified the Marxian spiritual man. Radical and forward thinking, Mayakovsky speaks to the generations yet to come. He firmly places inner and outer creativity on an equal footing, establishing a realm of effervescent beauty that immerses all in the healing light of development. Feeling and intelligence entwined, Mayakovsky represents the new Socialist Man – freed from the past and looking into the bright future. It was in that vein that Mayakovsky made an exit from this life that lit-up the world. Not just in his own time, but for all time. The progressive and compassionate artist that was Vladimir Mayakovsky, died as he lived – a revolutionary free being.
Despite his support for the Soviet Revolution (in 1925 his poem ‘Lenin’ praised the extraordinary leader of the successful Bolshevik Revolution, whilst in 1927, he had penned his 19 chaptered poem entitled ‘Good’ in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution), on April 14th, 1930 (at the age of 36), Mayakovsky took his own life (by shooting himself), due to an intense and stormy (but otherwise failed) love affair with Soviet actress Veronika Polonskaya. The futurist in him saw no reason to respect the conventions of relationships, and as a consequence he loved freely and intensely. However, from the ‘suicide’ note he left (to Lilya Brik, rather than Veronika Polonskaya), it is obvious that he retained his futuristic sense of progression as well as humour even at the end, and that his death should probably be viewed more as a revolutionary act, rather than as an act of desperation or a cry for help:
‘SHE loves me...she loves me not.
I tear my hands, scatter the broken fingers...loves me not
As we scatter the random riddling heads of daisies
Tumbling through summer.
Though I adopt the smooth chin and greying hair,
The silver, tinkling out the change of years,
I hope, I know that age will never bring
The final shame of prudent commonsense.
It's after one and you must be asleep.
The milky way is like a silver river.
I'm in no hurry. There's no need
To wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.
It's what they call the end of the affair.
Love's gondola has struck the rocks of fact.
We're quits--no point in totting up
Our score of troubles, miseries, and wrongs.
See how much peace the world can give.
The sky is wrapped in stars, the gift of night.
At such a time you rise, and find you speak
To all the years, the future, and the world.
It's after one and you must be asleep.
Or maybe you can feel the night as well.
I'm in no hurry. There's no need
To wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.’
He added:
‘Comrades of the Proletarian Literary Organization, don’t think me a coward. Really, it couldn’t be helped. Greetings! Tell Yermilov it’s too bad he removed the slogan; we should have had it out.
V.M.
In the desk drawer I have 2000 rubles. Use them to pay my taxes. The rest can be gotten from the State Publishing House.’
Such was his high status in the Soviet Union after his death, that in just 15 years, stamps commemorating his life were issued four times. In June, 1940, the USSR issued a 10th anniversary set of stamps as a remembrance of his death. In October, 1943, the USSR issued a set of stamps celebrating the 50th anniversary of Mayakovsky’s birth. In June, 1953, the USSR issued a set of stamps celebrating the 60th anniversary of his birth, and in May, 1955, the USSR issued stamps commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death. Mayakovsky’s collected works amount to 13 volumes which is separated into one-third about patriotic and political themes, one third about revolution and the final third consisting of satirical plays and matters concerning his private life.
As Mayakovsky is best known through his own words, a small selection of his poems are as follows:
Screaming My Head Off (1930)
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
You people of the future, running back over the past, shining a light back over your shoulder, you’ll probably want to learn about me, Mayakovsky. Your scholars will say the veins stood out on my neck, and I was pissed off! Hay professor, got that bicycle off your nose! Here’s my story: I’m a health inspector and water boy, swimming in blood before I was wet behind the ears. My tears had fallen on my poems like flowers, like the Mary’s flowers in “Mary Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow?” Some poets dribble and others serve towels with their showers: Six of one and a half dozen of the other. They keep rolling along and those mandolins again: da-di da-di da-di. So what if a statue of me grows out from a big nose in a square where whores with rough trade and the clap spit pa-tooey!
I’ve had every kind of bullshit up to here! Give me one love song: They’re nice and they get money. Anyway I thought I was smart putting my foot in my own mouth. Get that! Straight from the blabbermouth! Great scream of poetry, my books are going straight toward you. Together you will speak back and forth. I’ll be there soon, a mad Communist. Not like a Prince Charming out of Esenin. My poems will fly over the ears of our time, the heads of state! My poems will come not like the frail arrow leaving Cupids bow. Not as the penny comes to the trembling coin collector, not like the light from a dead star. They will come hard and heavy as a giant jaw cut out o rock, this way an aqueduct goes on forever. You’ll come across them in the used book store, lines hard and straight as an ionic column. My poems do not powder the ears or nibble the earlobes of some pretty young girl. Shit no! My poems jump out like mad gladiators. “Kill!” they cry.
Hand to hand and head to head! And words fly out like bullets exploding in your brain. You see! I’m giving it all away, everything to you, workers of the world. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, too bad for the rest! You can move hard and fast when you’re starving and blood is flying. Books of Marx and Engels were great but we didn’t have to read them because we knew where we stood. Don’t give me Hegel and his dialectic! It smashed its head together and the sound of the skulls cracking was poetry! Like fame and genius going down the same drain! OK! Poems go down drain too! Hundreds of trillions of people down the drain into heaven! To hell with statues and monuments. We’re famous enough. Our monument is built with moving blood: socialism. So go look them up in your dictionary: jack off mutation underground. For you, you who can afford to be healthy, I’ve had to sing with the big blue tongue of death. To you I must look like some flying prehistoric lizard. Well, Life, let’s go, go talking our heads off about the Five Year Plan. I don’t have a red cent and the furniture never came, but all I need is a clean shirt. I couldn’t care less when I show up in Tsikaka, radiant and in the future, I’ll raise all the books of my poems over the heads of the creeps!
Past One O’Clock (1930)
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
Past one o’clock. You’re probably in bed the Milky Way streams like the silver Oka
I won’t send wild telegrams. I don’t intend to trouble you and vex you any longer
and now, as people say, our case is closed the boat of love could not endure the grind
We’re even now. And there is no remorse, let’s not bring up the sorrows left behind.
Behold what hush has fallen on the ground the night awards the sky with constellations
at times as these, you rise and speak aloud to ages, histories and all creation.
A Cloud In Trouser (1915)
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
Prologue
Your thought,
fantasizing on a sodden brain,
like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch sprawling,
with my heart’s bloody tatters, I’ll mock it again:
until I’m contempt, I’ll be ruthless and galling.
There’s no grandfatherly fondness in me,
and no gray hairs in my soul!
Shaking the world with my voice and grinning,
I pass you by, -- handsome,
Twenty two year old.
Gentle souls!
You play your love on the violin.
The crude ones play it on the drums violently.
But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me
and become just two lips entirely?
Come and learn--
you, decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues!
step out of those cambric drawing-rooms
And the one who calmly leafs her lips
like a cook leafs the pages of her recipe books.
If you wish--
I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal
Or change into hues that the sunrise arouses,
If you wish--
I can be irreproachably gentle,
Not a man -- but a cloud in trousers.
I refuse to believe in Nice blossoming!
I will glorify you regardless, --
Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs.
1) You think I’m delirious with malaria?
This happened,
In Odessa, this happened.
“I’ll come at four,” promised Maria.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
And now, the evening,
frowning,
and decemberish,
left the windows
and vanished in dire darkness.
Behind me, I hear the neighing and laughter
of candelabras.
You wouldn’t recognize me if you knew me prior:
a bulk of sinews
moaning,
fidgeting.
What can such a clod desire?
But this clod desires many things.
Because for oneself it doesn’t matter
whether you’re cast of copper
or whether the heart is cold metal.
At night, you want to wrap your clamour
in something feminine,
gentle.
And thus,
enormous,
I hunch in the frame,
with my forehead melting the window glass.
Will this love be tremendous or lame?
Will it
sustain or pass?
A big one wouldn’t fit a body like this:
It must be a little love,
a baby, sort of,
It shies away when the cars honk and hiss.
But adores the bells on the horse-tram.
I come face to face
with the rippling rain,
yet once more,
and wait
splashed by the city surf’s thundering roar.
Running amok with a knife outside,
the night caught up to him
and stabbed him,
unseen!
The stroke of midnight
fell like a head from a guillotine.
The silver rains on the windowpane
piled a grimace,
yelling,
as if the gargoyles of Notre Dame
started yelping.
Damn you!
Haven’t you had enough yet?
Cries will soon cut my throat all around.
I heard:
softly,
like a patient out of his bed,
a nerve leapt down.
At first,
he barely moved,
then, apprehensive
and distinct,
he started prancing.
Now,
he and another two,
dart about, step-dancing.
On the ground floor, the plaster was falling fast.
Nerves,
big ones
little ones,--
various! --
galloped madly
until, at last,
their legs wouldn’t carry them.
The night oozed through the room and sank.
Stuck in slime, the eye couldn’t slither out of it.
Suddenly, doors started to bang
as if
the hotel’s teeth were chattering.
You entered,
abrupt like “Take it!”
mauling the suede gloves you carried,
said:
“You know,--
I’m soon getting married.”
Get married then.
It’s all right,
I can handle it.
You see -- I’m calm, of course!
Like the pulse
of a corpse.
Remember?
You used to say:
“Jack London,
money,
love
ardor,”--
I saw one thing only:
you’re La Gioconda,
which had to be stolen!
And someone stole you.
Again in love, I shall start gambling,
with fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.
And why not!
Sometimes, the homeless ramblers
will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!
You’re mocking me?
“You’ve fewer emeralds of madness
than a beggar kopecks, there’s no disproving this!”
But remember
Pompeii came to end thus
when somebody teased Vesuvius!
Hey!
Gentlemen!
You care for
sacrilege,
crime
and war, -
but have you seen
the frightening terror
of my face
when
it’s
perfectly calm?
And I feel-
“I”
is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered.
Hello!
Who’s speaking?
Mother?
Mother!
Your son has a wonderful sickness!
Mother!
His heart has been set alight!
Tell Lydia and Olga, his sisters,
That there’s simply no where to hide.
every word,
whether funny or crude,
that he spews from his scorching mouth,
jumps like a naked prostitute
from a burning brothel.
People sniff--
something’s burned down.
They’ve called the firemen.
In glittering helmets,
they carelessly start intruding.
Hey, somebody tell them:
No boots allowed!
with a sizzling heart one has to be prudent.
I’ll do it.
I’ll pump my watery eyes into containers.
Just let me push off my ribs and I’ll start.
I’ll leap out! leap out! You can’t restrain me!
They’ve collapsed.
You can’t leap from the heart!
From the cracks of the lips,
a cindering kiss springs,
running away from the smouldering face.
Mother!
I can’t sing.
In the heart’s chapel, the choir was set ablaze!
The figurines of words and numbers
from the skull,
like kids from a burning building, scurry.
Thus fear,
reaching up to the sky, called
and raised
Lusitania’s fiery arms with worry.
A hundred-eyed blaze looked into the peace
of apartments, where the people perspired.
with a final outcry,
will you moan,
at least,
to report to the centuries that I’m on fire!
2) Glorify me!
The great ones are no match for me!
Upon everything that’s been done
I stamp the word “naught.”
Never again,
I have no desire to read.
Novels?
So what!
This is how books are made,
I used to think: --
along comes a poet,
and opens his lips with ease,
inspired, the fool simply begins to sing --
oh please!
It turns out:
before they can sing with elation,
on their calloused feet they tramp for some time,
while the brainless fishes of imagination
are splashing and wallowing in the heart’s slime.
While, hissing with rhymes, they boil
all the loves and the nightingales in a broth-like liquid,
the tongueless street merely squirms and coils --
it has nothing to speak with.
In our pride, we work all day with goodwill
and the city towers of Babel are again restored,
but God
grinds
these cites into empty fields,
stirring the word.
In silence, the street dragged on the ordeal.
A scream stood erect on the gullet’s road.
Fat taxies and cabs were bristling still,
wedged in the throat.
As if from consumption,
the trodden chest gasped for air.
The city, with gloom, blocked the road rather fast.
And when --
nevertheless! --
the street coughed up the strain onto the square
and pushed the portico off its throat, at last,
it seemed as if,
accompanied by the choirs of an archangel’s chorus,
recently robbed, God would show us His heat!
But the street squatted down and yelled out coarsely:
“Let’s go eat!”
The Krupps and the Krupplets gather around
to paint menacing brows on the city,
while in the gorge
corpses of words are scattered about,--
Two live and thrive --
“swine”
and some another,
I believe, “borsch”.
And poets,
soaking in sobs and complaining,
run from the street, resentful and sour:
“With those two words there’s no way to portray now
a beautiful lady,
or love
or a dew-covered flower.”
And after the poets,
thousands of others stampeded:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.
Gentlemen,
Stop!
You are not the needy;
so how dare you to beg them, gentlemen!
Covering yards with each stride,
we are healthy and ardent!
Don’t listen to them, but thrash them instead -
them,
who are stuck like a free add-on
to each double bed!
Are we to ask them humbly:
“Help us, please!”
Imploring them for hymns
and oratorios!
We are the creators with the burning hymns
to the hum of the mills and laboratories.
Why should I care about Faust,
gliding in a fairy display of the fireworks’ loot
with Mephistopheles on the parquet of galaxies!
I know--
a nail in my boot
is more frightening than Goethe’s fantasies!
I am
the most golden-mouthed,
with every word giving
the body a name-day,
and the soul a rebirth,
I assure you:
the minutest speck of the living
is worth more than all that I’ll ever do on this earth!
Listen!
The present-day Zarathustra,
wet with sweat,
is dashing among you and preaching here.
We,
with faces crumpled like a bed spread,
with lips sagging like a chandelier,
we,
the Leprous City detainees,
where, from filth and gold, leper’s sores were raised,
we are purer than the Venetian azure seas,
washed by the sunshine’s balmy rays!
I spit on the fact
that Homer and Ovid didn’t create
soot-covered with pox,
men like us all.
I know -
that the sun would fade
if it looked at the golden fields of our souls!
Muscles are surer than prayers to us!
We won’t pray for aid anymore!
We--
each one of us--
holds in his grasp
the driving reins of the world!
This led to Golgotha in the auditoriums
of Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa,
and there wasn’t one of you
who wasn’t
imploring thus:
“Crucify him!”
Teach him a lesson!”
But to me,--
people,
even those who were loud and mean,--
to me, you are dear and I love you with passion.
Have you seen
a dog licking the hand that it’s being thrashed by?
I am
laughed at by the present-day tribe.
They’ve made
a scabrous joke out of me,
but I can see him crossing the mountains of time,
him, whom others can’t see.
Where men’s sight falls short,
wearing the revolutions’ thorny crown,
leading at the head of the hungry horde,
the year nineteen sixteen is coming around.
Among you, his precursor;
wherever there’s pain, I’ll be near.
I have nailed myself to the cross there,
on every single drop of a tear.
There’s nothing left to pardon now!
In souls that bred pity, I burnt out the fields.
That is much harder than
taking a thousand thousands of Bastilles!
And when,
his advent announcing,
joyful and proud,
you’ll walk out to greet the saviour--
I will drag
my soul outside,
and trample it
until it spreads out! -
and give it to you, red in blood, as a flag.
3) Ah, how and wherefrom
did it come to this -
that dirty fists of madness
were raised against joy, high in the air?
She came,--
the thought of a madhouse
and curtained my head with despair.
And -
as in the Dreadnought’s downfall,
with chocking spasms
the men jumped into the hatch, before the ship died, -
the crazed Burlyuk crawled on, passing
through the screaming gaps
of his eye.
Almost bloodying his eyelids,
he emerged on his knees,
stood up and walked
and in the passionate mood,
with tenderness, unexpected from one so obese,
He simply said:
“Good!”
It’s good when from scrutiny a yellow sweater
hides the soul!
It’s good when
on the gibbet, in the face of terror,
you shout:
“Drink Cocoa-- Van Houten!”
This moment,
like a Bengal light,
crackling from the blast,
I wouldn’t exchange for anything,
not for any money.
Clouded by cigar smoke,
and stretching like a liquor glass,
one could make out the drunken face of Severyanin.
How dare you call yourself a poet
and gray, like a quail, twitter away your soul!
When
with brass knuckles
this very moment
you have to split the world’s skull!
You,
with one thought alone in your head,
“Am I dancing with style?”
look how happy I am
instead,
I -
A pimp and a fraud all the while.
From all of you,
who soaked in love for plain fun,
who spilled
tears into centuries while you cried,
I’ll walk away
and place the monocle of the sun
into my gaping, wide-open eye.
I’ll wear colourful clothes, the most outlandish
and roam the earth
to please and scorch the public,
and in front of me, on a metal leash,
Napoleon will run like a little puppy.
Like a woman, quivering, the earth will lie down,
wanting to give in, she will slowly slump;
things will come alive
and from all around,
their lips will lisp:
“Yum-yum-yum-yum-yum!”
Suddenly,
the clouds
and other stuff in the air
stirred in some astonishing commotion,
as if the workers in white, up there,
declared a strike, all bitter and emotional.
The savage thunder peeked out of the cloud, irate
and snorting from huge nostrils, it howled
and for a moment, the face of the sky bent out of shape,
resembling the iron Bismarck’s scowl.
And someone,
entangled in the clouds’ maze,
to the café, stretched out his hand now -
both, tender somehow,
and with a womanly face,
and at once, like a firing cannon.
You think -
that’s the sun above the attics
gently stretching to caress the cheeks of the café?
No, advancing again to slaughter the radicals
it’s General Galliffet!
Take your hands out of your pockets, wanderers -
pick up a bomb, a knife or a stone
and if one happens to be armless,
let him come to fight with his forehead alone!
Go on, starving,
servile
and abused ones,
in this flea-swarming filth, do not rot!
Go on!
We’ll turn Mondays and Tuesdays
into holidays, painting them with blood!
Remind the earth whom it tried to debase!
With your knives be rough!
The earth
has grown fat like the mistress’ face,
whom Rothschild had over-loved!
May the flags flutter in the line of fire
As they do on holidays, with a flare!
Hey, street-lamps, raise the traitors up higher,
Let their carcasses hang in the air.
I cursed,
stabbed
and hit in the face,
crawled after somebody,
biting into their ribs.
In the sky, red like the Marseillaise,
the sunset gasped with its shuddering lips.
It’s insanity!
Not a thing will remain from the war.
The night will come,
bite into you
and swallow you stale.
Look--
is the sky playing Judas once more,
with a handful of stars that were soaked in betrayal?
The night,
like Mamai, feasted with delight,
crushing the city with its bottom’s heft.
Our eyes won’t be able break through this night,
As black as Azef!
Slumped in the corner of the saloon, I sit,
spilling wine on my soul and the floor,
and I see:
in the corner, two round eyes are lit
and with them, Madonna bites the heart’s core.
Why bestow such radiance on this drunken mass?
What do they have to offer?
You see – once again
they prefer Barabbas
over the Man of Golgotha?
Maybe, deliberately,
in the human mash, not once
do I wear a fresh-looking face.
I am,
perhaps,
the handsomest of your sons
in the whole human race.
Give them,
the ones moulded with delight,
a quick death already,
so that their children may grow up right;
boys - into fathers
girls - into pregnant ladies.
Like the wise men, let the new born babes
grow gray with insight and thought
and they’ll come
to baptize the infants with names
of the poems I wrote.
I praise the machine and industrial Britain.
In some ordinary, common gospel,
it may perhaps, be written
that I’m the thirteenth apostle.
And when my obscene voice rumbles,
every evening,
for hours and hours,
awaiting my call,
Jesus, Himself, may be sniffling
the forget-me-nots of my soul.
4) Maria! Maria!
Let me in, Maria!
Don’t leave me out on the street!
You can’t?
My cheeks cave in,
but you wait ruthlessly.
Soon, sampled by everyone,
stale and pallid,
I’ll come out
and mumble toothlessly
that today I’m
“remarkably candid.”
Maria,
you see--
my shoulders are drooping again.
In the streets, men
prick the fat in their four-story craws,
they show their eyes,
worn out in the forty years of despair, and restless-
they snicker because
in my teeth,
- again!-
I hold the hardened crust of last night’s caresses.
Rain wept over the sidewalks, --
that puddle-imprisoned fraudster.
The street’s corpse, clobbered by cobbles, soaked in its cries.
but the gray lashes--
yes! --
the eyelashes of icicles became frosted
with tears from the eyes--
yes! --
from the drainpipes’ overcast eyes.
Every pedestrian was licked by the rain’s snout:
athletes glistened in the carriages on the street,
people burst
overstuffed,
and their fat oozed out.
Like a muddy river, it streamed on the ground,
together with juices from
old, spoiled meat.
Maria!
How can I fit a tender word into bulging ears?
A bird
sings for alms
with a hungry voice
rather well,
but I am a man,
Maria,
coughed up by the ailing night into Presnya’s filthy palms.
Maria, do you want me?
Maria, take me in, please.
With shivering fingers I’ll squeeze the iron throat of the bell!
Maria!
The pastures of streets turn wild and loud!
They’re squeezing my neck and I’m nearly collapsing.
Open the door!
I’m hurt!
Look - my eyes are pricked out
by the common womanly hatpins!
You’ve opened the door.
My child!
Don’t be alarmed,
seeing these women
hanging on my neck like mountains, --
through life, I drag with me
a million of massive, enormous, pure loves
and a million millions of filthy, disgusting lovelets.
Don’t be afraid
if betraying the vow
of honesty,
seeing a thousand pretty faces, I’ll throw myself at them, --
“Those, who love Mayakovsky!”-
understand that that is the destiny
of the queens, who have mounted the heart of a madman.
Maria, closer!
Whether naked and shameless,
or shivering in dismay,
yield the wonder of your lips, so gentle:
My heart and I have never lived until May,
but in my past,
a hundreds of Aprils assembled.
Maria!
A poet sings praises to Tiana all day,
but I--
I’m made of flesh,
I’m a man, --
I ask for your body,
like the Christians pray:
“give us this day
our daily bread.”
Maria, give it to me!
Maria!
I fear to forget your name
as a poet fears to forget under pressure
a word
conceived in a restless night,
equal to God in effect.
Your body -
I shall continue to love it and treasure it
as a soldier
amputated by war,
alone
and unwanted,
cherishes his remaining leg.
Maria, --
You won’t have me?
You won’t!
Ha!
Then gloomy and dismal,
once more,
I shall carry
my tear-stained heart
forward,
like a dog,
limping,
carries the paw
that a speeding train ran over.
My heart’s blood paves the roam I roam,
flowers cling to my jacket, making it dusty.
The sun will dance a thousand times
round the earth, like Salome
danced around the head of the Baptist.
and when my years, at their very end,
will finish their dance and wrinkle,
a million bloodstains will spread
the path to my Father’s kingdom.
I’ll climb out
Filthy (sleeping in gullies all night),
And into his ears, I’ll whisper
While I stand
At his side:
- “Mister God, listen!
Isn’t it tedious
to dip your generous eyes into clouds
every day, every evening?
Let’s, instead,
start a festive merry-go-round
on the tree of knowledge of good and evil!
Omnipresent, you’ll be all around us,
from the wine, all the fun will ensue
and Apostle Peter, who’s always been frowning,
will dance the fast-paced ki-ka-pu.
We’ll bring all the Eves back into Eden:
order me
and I’ll go--
from the boulevards, I’ll pick up all the pretty girls needed
and bring them to you!
Should I?
No?
You’re shaking your curly head coarsely?
You’re knitting your brows like you’re tough?
Do you think
that this
winged one, close by,
knows the meaning of love?
I too am an angel; used to be one before--
with a sugar lamb’s eye, I stared at your faces,
but I don’t want to give presents to mares anymore, --
all the torture of Sevres that’s been made into vases.
Almighty, You created two hands,
and with care,
made a head, and went down the list, --
but why did you make it
so that it pained
when one had to kiss, kiss, kiss?!
I thought that you were the Great God, Almighty
but you’re a miniature idol, -- a dunce in a suit,
Bending over,
I’m reaching for the knife that I’m hiding
at the top of my boot.
You, swindlers with wings!
Huddle in fright!
Ruffle your shuddering feathers, rascals!
You, reeking of incense, I’ll open you wide,
from here all the way to Alaska.
Let me go!
You can’t stop me!
Whether I’m right or wrong
makes no difference,
I will not be calmer.
Look -
the stars were beheaded all night long
and the sky is again bloody with slaughter.
Hey you,
Heaven!
Take your hat off,
When you see me near!
Silence.
The universe sleeps.
Placing its paw
Under the black, star-infested ear.
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
You people of the future, running back over the past, shining a light back over your shoulder, you’ll probably want to learn about me, Mayakovsky. Your scholars will say the veins stood out on my neck, and I was pissed off! Hay professor, got that bicycle off your nose! Here’s my story: I’m a health inspector and water boy, swimming in blood before I was wet behind the ears. My tears had fallen on my poems like flowers, like the Mary’s flowers in “Mary Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow?” Some poets dribble and others serve towels with their showers: Six of one and a half dozen of the other. They keep rolling along and those mandolins again: da-di da-di da-di. So what if a statue of me grows out from a big nose in a square where whores with rough trade and the clap spit pa-tooey!
I’ve had every kind of bullshit up to here! Give me one love song: They’re nice and they get money. Anyway I thought I was smart putting my foot in my own mouth. Get that! Straight from the blabbermouth! Great scream of poetry, my books are going straight toward you. Together you will speak back and forth. I’ll be there soon, a mad Communist. Not like a Prince Charming out of Esenin. My poems will fly over the ears of our time, the heads of state! My poems will come not like the frail arrow leaving Cupids bow. Not as the penny comes to the trembling coin collector, not like the light from a dead star. They will come hard and heavy as a giant jaw cut out o rock, this way an aqueduct goes on forever. You’ll come across them in the used book store, lines hard and straight as an ionic column. My poems do not powder the ears or nibble the earlobes of some pretty young girl. Shit no! My poems jump out like mad gladiators. “Kill!” they cry.
Hand to hand and head to head! And words fly out like bullets exploding in your brain. You see! I’m giving it all away, everything to you, workers of the world. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, too bad for the rest! You can move hard and fast when you’re starving and blood is flying. Books of Marx and Engels were great but we didn’t have to read them because we knew where we stood. Don’t give me Hegel and his dialectic! It smashed its head together and the sound of the skulls cracking was poetry! Like fame and genius going down the same drain! OK! Poems go down drain too! Hundreds of trillions of people down the drain into heaven! To hell with statues and monuments. We’re famous enough. Our monument is built with moving blood: socialism. So go look them up in your dictionary: jack off mutation underground. For you, you who can afford to be healthy, I’ve had to sing with the big blue tongue of death. To you I must look like some flying prehistoric lizard. Well, Life, let’s go, go talking our heads off about the Five Year Plan. I don’t have a red cent and the furniture never came, but all I need is a clean shirt. I couldn’t care less when I show up in Tsikaka, radiant and in the future, I’ll raise all the books of my poems over the heads of the creeps!
Past One O’Clock (1930)
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
Past one o’clock. You’re probably in bed the Milky Way streams like the silver Oka
I won’t send wild telegrams. I don’t intend to trouble you and vex you any longer
and now, as people say, our case is closed the boat of love could not endure the grind
We’re even now. And there is no remorse, let’s not bring up the sorrows left behind.
Behold what hush has fallen on the ground the night awards the sky with constellations
at times as these, you rise and speak aloud to ages, histories and all creation.
A Cloud In Trouser (1915)
By Vladimir Mayakovsky
Prologue
Your thought,
fantasizing on a sodden brain,
like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch sprawling,
with my heart’s bloody tatters, I’ll mock it again:
until I’m contempt, I’ll be ruthless and galling.
There’s no grandfatherly fondness in me,
and no gray hairs in my soul!
Shaking the world with my voice and grinning,
I pass you by, -- handsome,
Twenty two year old.
Gentle souls!
You play your love on the violin.
The crude ones play it on the drums violently.
But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me
and become just two lips entirely?
Come and learn--
you, decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues!
step out of those cambric drawing-rooms
And the one who calmly leafs her lips
like a cook leafs the pages of her recipe books.
If you wish--
I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal
Or change into hues that the sunrise arouses,
If you wish--
I can be irreproachably gentle,
Not a man -- but a cloud in trousers.
I refuse to believe in Nice blossoming!
I will glorify you regardless, --
Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs.
1) You think I’m delirious with malaria?
This happened,
In Odessa, this happened.
“I’ll come at four,” promised Maria.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
And now, the evening,
frowning,
and decemberish,
left the windows
and vanished in dire darkness.
Behind me, I hear the neighing and laughter
of candelabras.
You wouldn’t recognize me if you knew me prior:
a bulk of sinews
moaning,
fidgeting.
What can such a clod desire?
But this clod desires many things.
Because for oneself it doesn’t matter
whether you’re cast of copper
or whether the heart is cold metal.
At night, you want to wrap your clamour
in something feminine,
gentle.
And thus,
enormous,
I hunch in the frame,
with my forehead melting the window glass.
Will this love be tremendous or lame?
Will it
sustain or pass?
A big one wouldn’t fit a body like this:
It must be a little love,
a baby, sort of,
It shies away when the cars honk and hiss.
But adores the bells on the horse-tram.
I come face to face
with the rippling rain,
yet once more,
and wait
splashed by the city surf’s thundering roar.
Running amok with a knife outside,
the night caught up to him
and stabbed him,
unseen!
The stroke of midnight
fell like a head from a guillotine.
The silver rains on the windowpane
piled a grimace,
yelling,
as if the gargoyles of Notre Dame
started yelping.
Damn you!
Haven’t you had enough yet?
Cries will soon cut my throat all around.
I heard:
softly,
like a patient out of his bed,
a nerve leapt down.
At first,
he barely moved,
then, apprehensive
and distinct,
he started prancing.
Now,
he and another two,
dart about, step-dancing.
On the ground floor, the plaster was falling fast.
Nerves,
big ones
little ones,--
various! --
galloped madly
until, at last,
their legs wouldn’t carry them.
The night oozed through the room and sank.
Stuck in slime, the eye couldn’t slither out of it.
Suddenly, doors started to bang
as if
the hotel’s teeth were chattering.
You entered,
abrupt like “Take it!”
mauling the suede gloves you carried,
said:
“You know,--
I’m soon getting married.”
Get married then.
It’s all right,
I can handle it.
You see -- I’m calm, of course!
Like the pulse
of a corpse.
Remember?
You used to say:
“Jack London,
money,
love
ardor,”--
I saw one thing only:
you’re La Gioconda,
which had to be stolen!
And someone stole you.
Again in love, I shall start gambling,
with fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.
And why not!
Sometimes, the homeless ramblers
will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!
You’re mocking me?
“You’ve fewer emeralds of madness
than a beggar kopecks, there’s no disproving this!”
But remember
Pompeii came to end thus
when somebody teased Vesuvius!
Hey!
Gentlemen!
You care for
sacrilege,
crime
and war, -
but have you seen
the frightening terror
of my face
when
it’s
perfectly calm?
And I feel-
“I”
is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered.
Hello!
Who’s speaking?
Mother?
Mother!
Your son has a wonderful sickness!
Mother!
His heart has been set alight!
Tell Lydia and Olga, his sisters,
That there’s simply no where to hide.
every word,
whether funny or crude,
that he spews from his scorching mouth,
jumps like a naked prostitute
from a burning brothel.
People sniff--
something’s burned down.
They’ve called the firemen.
In glittering helmets,
they carelessly start intruding.
Hey, somebody tell them:
No boots allowed!
with a sizzling heart one has to be prudent.
I’ll do it.
I’ll pump my watery eyes into containers.
Just let me push off my ribs and I’ll start.
I’ll leap out! leap out! You can’t restrain me!
They’ve collapsed.
You can’t leap from the heart!
From the cracks of the lips,
a cindering kiss springs,
running away from the smouldering face.
Mother!
I can’t sing.
In the heart’s chapel, the choir was set ablaze!
The figurines of words and numbers
from the skull,
like kids from a burning building, scurry.
Thus fear,
reaching up to the sky, called
and raised
Lusitania’s fiery arms with worry.
A hundred-eyed blaze looked into the peace
of apartments, where the people perspired.
with a final outcry,
will you moan,
at least,
to report to the centuries that I’m on fire!
2) Glorify me!
The great ones are no match for me!
Upon everything that’s been done
I stamp the word “naught.”
Never again,
I have no desire to read.
Novels?
So what!
This is how books are made,
I used to think: --
along comes a poet,
and opens his lips with ease,
inspired, the fool simply begins to sing --
oh please!
It turns out:
before they can sing with elation,
on their calloused feet they tramp for some time,
while the brainless fishes of imagination
are splashing and wallowing in the heart’s slime.
While, hissing with rhymes, they boil
all the loves and the nightingales in a broth-like liquid,
the tongueless street merely squirms and coils --
it has nothing to speak with.
In our pride, we work all day with goodwill
and the city towers of Babel are again restored,
but God
grinds
these cites into empty fields,
stirring the word.
In silence, the street dragged on the ordeal.
A scream stood erect on the gullet’s road.
Fat taxies and cabs were bristling still,
wedged in the throat.
As if from consumption,
the trodden chest gasped for air.
The city, with gloom, blocked the road rather fast.
And when --
nevertheless! --
the street coughed up the strain onto the square
and pushed the portico off its throat, at last,
it seemed as if,
accompanied by the choirs of an archangel’s chorus,
recently robbed, God would show us His heat!
But the street squatted down and yelled out coarsely:
“Let’s go eat!”
The Krupps and the Krupplets gather around
to paint menacing brows on the city,
while in the gorge
corpses of words are scattered about,--
Two live and thrive --
“swine”
and some another,
I believe, “borsch”.
And poets,
soaking in sobs and complaining,
run from the street, resentful and sour:
“With those two words there’s no way to portray now
a beautiful lady,
or love
or a dew-covered flower.”
And after the poets,
thousands of others stampeded:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.
Gentlemen,
Stop!
You are not the needy;
so how dare you to beg them, gentlemen!
Covering yards with each stride,
we are healthy and ardent!
Don’t listen to them, but thrash them instead -
them,
who are stuck like a free add-on
to each double bed!
Are we to ask them humbly:
“Help us, please!”
Imploring them for hymns
and oratorios!
We are the creators with the burning hymns
to the hum of the mills and laboratories.
Why should I care about Faust,
gliding in a fairy display of the fireworks’ loot
with Mephistopheles on the parquet of galaxies!
I know--
a nail in my boot
is more frightening than Goethe’s fantasies!
I am
the most golden-mouthed,
with every word giving
the body a name-day,
and the soul a rebirth,
I assure you:
the minutest speck of the living
is worth more than all that I’ll ever do on this earth!
Listen!
The present-day Zarathustra,
wet with sweat,
is dashing among you and preaching here.
We,
with faces crumpled like a bed spread,
with lips sagging like a chandelier,
we,
the Leprous City detainees,
where, from filth and gold, leper’s sores were raised,
we are purer than the Venetian azure seas,
washed by the sunshine’s balmy rays!
I spit on the fact
that Homer and Ovid didn’t create
soot-covered with pox,
men like us all.
I know -
that the sun would fade
if it looked at the golden fields of our souls!
Muscles are surer than prayers to us!
We won’t pray for aid anymore!
We--
each one of us--
holds in his grasp
the driving reins of the world!
This led to Golgotha in the auditoriums
of Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa,
and there wasn’t one of you
who wasn’t
imploring thus:
“Crucify him!”
Teach him a lesson!”
But to me,--
people,
even those who were loud and mean,--
to me, you are dear and I love you with passion.
Have you seen
a dog licking the hand that it’s being thrashed by?
I am
laughed at by the present-day tribe.
They’ve made
a scabrous joke out of me,
but I can see him crossing the mountains of time,
him, whom others can’t see.
Where men’s sight falls short,
wearing the revolutions’ thorny crown,
leading at the head of the hungry horde,
the year nineteen sixteen is coming around.
Among you, his precursor;
wherever there’s pain, I’ll be near.
I have nailed myself to the cross there,
on every single drop of a tear.
There’s nothing left to pardon now!
In souls that bred pity, I burnt out the fields.
That is much harder than
taking a thousand thousands of Bastilles!
And when,
his advent announcing,
joyful and proud,
you’ll walk out to greet the saviour--
I will drag
my soul outside,
and trample it
until it spreads out! -
and give it to you, red in blood, as a flag.
3) Ah, how and wherefrom
did it come to this -
that dirty fists of madness
were raised against joy, high in the air?
She came,--
the thought of a madhouse
and curtained my head with despair.
And -
as in the Dreadnought’s downfall,
with chocking spasms
the men jumped into the hatch, before the ship died, -
the crazed Burlyuk crawled on, passing
through the screaming gaps
of his eye.
Almost bloodying his eyelids,
he emerged on his knees,
stood up and walked
and in the passionate mood,
with tenderness, unexpected from one so obese,
He simply said:
“Good!”
It’s good when from scrutiny a yellow sweater
hides the soul!
It’s good when
on the gibbet, in the face of terror,
you shout:
“Drink Cocoa-- Van Houten!”
This moment,
like a Bengal light,
crackling from the blast,
I wouldn’t exchange for anything,
not for any money.
Clouded by cigar smoke,
and stretching like a liquor glass,
one could make out the drunken face of Severyanin.
How dare you call yourself a poet
and gray, like a quail, twitter away your soul!
When
with brass knuckles
this very moment
you have to split the world’s skull!
You,
with one thought alone in your head,
“Am I dancing with style?”
look how happy I am
instead,
I -
A pimp and a fraud all the while.
From all of you,
who soaked in love for plain fun,
who spilled
tears into centuries while you cried,
I’ll walk away
and place the monocle of the sun
into my gaping, wide-open eye.
I’ll wear colourful clothes, the most outlandish
and roam the earth
to please and scorch the public,
and in front of me, on a metal leash,
Napoleon will run like a little puppy.
Like a woman, quivering, the earth will lie down,
wanting to give in, she will slowly slump;
things will come alive
and from all around,
their lips will lisp:
“Yum-yum-yum-yum-yum!”
Suddenly,
the clouds
and other stuff in the air
stirred in some astonishing commotion,
as if the workers in white, up there,
declared a strike, all bitter and emotional.
The savage thunder peeked out of the cloud, irate
and snorting from huge nostrils, it howled
and for a moment, the face of the sky bent out of shape,
resembling the iron Bismarck’s scowl.
And someone,
entangled in the clouds’ maze,
to the café, stretched out his hand now -
both, tender somehow,
and with a womanly face,
and at once, like a firing cannon.
You think -
that’s the sun above the attics
gently stretching to caress the cheeks of the café?
No, advancing again to slaughter the radicals
it’s General Galliffet!
Take your hands out of your pockets, wanderers -
pick up a bomb, a knife or a stone
and if one happens to be armless,
let him come to fight with his forehead alone!
Go on, starving,
servile
and abused ones,
in this flea-swarming filth, do not rot!
Go on!
We’ll turn Mondays and Tuesdays
into holidays, painting them with blood!
Remind the earth whom it tried to debase!
With your knives be rough!
The earth
has grown fat like the mistress’ face,
whom Rothschild had over-loved!
May the flags flutter in the line of fire
As they do on holidays, with a flare!
Hey, street-lamps, raise the traitors up higher,
Let their carcasses hang in the air.
I cursed,
stabbed
and hit in the face,
crawled after somebody,
biting into their ribs.
In the sky, red like the Marseillaise,
the sunset gasped with its shuddering lips.
It’s insanity!
Not a thing will remain from the war.
The night will come,
bite into you
and swallow you stale.
Look--
is the sky playing Judas once more,
with a handful of stars that were soaked in betrayal?
The night,
like Mamai, feasted with delight,
crushing the city with its bottom’s heft.
Our eyes won’t be able break through this night,
As black as Azef!
Slumped in the corner of the saloon, I sit,
spilling wine on my soul and the floor,
and I see:
in the corner, two round eyes are lit
and with them, Madonna bites the heart’s core.
Why bestow such radiance on this drunken mass?
What do they have to offer?
You see – once again
they prefer Barabbas
over the Man of Golgotha?
Maybe, deliberately,
in the human mash, not once
do I wear a fresh-looking face.
I am,
perhaps,
the handsomest of your sons
in the whole human race.
Give them,
the ones moulded with delight,
a quick death already,
so that their children may grow up right;
boys - into fathers
girls - into pregnant ladies.
Like the wise men, let the new born babes
grow gray with insight and thought
and they’ll come
to baptize the infants with names
of the poems I wrote.
I praise the machine and industrial Britain.
In some ordinary, common gospel,
it may perhaps, be written
that I’m the thirteenth apostle.
And when my obscene voice rumbles,
every evening,
for hours and hours,
awaiting my call,
Jesus, Himself, may be sniffling
the forget-me-nots of my soul.
4) Maria! Maria!
Let me in, Maria!
Don’t leave me out on the street!
You can’t?
My cheeks cave in,
but you wait ruthlessly.
Soon, sampled by everyone,
stale and pallid,
I’ll come out
and mumble toothlessly
that today I’m
“remarkably candid.”
Maria,
you see--
my shoulders are drooping again.
In the streets, men
prick the fat in their four-story craws,
they show their eyes,
worn out in the forty years of despair, and restless-
they snicker because
in my teeth,
- again!-
I hold the hardened crust of last night’s caresses.
Rain wept over the sidewalks, --
that puddle-imprisoned fraudster.
The street’s corpse, clobbered by cobbles, soaked in its cries.
but the gray lashes--
yes! --
the eyelashes of icicles became frosted
with tears from the eyes--
yes! --
from the drainpipes’ overcast eyes.
Every pedestrian was licked by the rain’s snout:
athletes glistened in the carriages on the street,
people burst
overstuffed,
and their fat oozed out.
Like a muddy river, it streamed on the ground,
together with juices from
old, spoiled meat.
Maria!
How can I fit a tender word into bulging ears?
A bird
sings for alms
with a hungry voice
rather well,
but I am a man,
Maria,
coughed up by the ailing night into Presnya’s filthy palms.
Maria, do you want me?
Maria, take me in, please.
With shivering fingers I’ll squeeze the iron throat of the bell!
Maria!
The pastures of streets turn wild and loud!
They’re squeezing my neck and I’m nearly collapsing.
Open the door!
I’m hurt!
Look - my eyes are pricked out
by the common womanly hatpins!
You’ve opened the door.
My child!
Don’t be alarmed,
seeing these women
hanging on my neck like mountains, --
through life, I drag with me
a million of massive, enormous, pure loves
and a million millions of filthy, disgusting lovelets.
Don’t be afraid
if betraying the vow
of honesty,
seeing a thousand pretty faces, I’ll throw myself at them, --
“Those, who love Mayakovsky!”-
understand that that is the destiny
of the queens, who have mounted the heart of a madman.
Maria, closer!
Whether naked and shameless,
or shivering in dismay,
yield the wonder of your lips, so gentle:
My heart and I have never lived until May,
but in my past,
a hundreds of Aprils assembled.
Maria!
A poet sings praises to Tiana all day,
but I--
I’m made of flesh,
I’m a man, --
I ask for your body,
like the Christians pray:
“give us this day
our daily bread.”
Maria, give it to me!
Maria!
I fear to forget your name
as a poet fears to forget under pressure
a word
conceived in a restless night,
equal to God in effect.
Your body -
I shall continue to love it and treasure it
as a soldier
amputated by war,
alone
and unwanted,
cherishes his remaining leg.
Maria, --
You won’t have me?
You won’t!
Ha!
Then gloomy and dismal,
once more,
I shall carry
my tear-stained heart
forward,
like a dog,
limping,
carries the paw
that a speeding train ran over.
My heart’s blood paves the roam I roam,
flowers cling to my jacket, making it dusty.
The sun will dance a thousand times
round the earth, like Salome
danced around the head of the Baptist.
and when my years, at their very end,
will finish their dance and wrinkle,
a million bloodstains will spread
the path to my Father’s kingdom.
I’ll climb out
Filthy (sleeping in gullies all night),
And into his ears, I’ll whisper
While I stand
At his side:
- “Mister God, listen!
Isn’t it tedious
to dip your generous eyes into clouds
every day, every evening?
Let’s, instead,
start a festive merry-go-round
on the tree of knowledge of good and evil!
Omnipresent, you’ll be all around us,
from the wine, all the fun will ensue
and Apostle Peter, who’s always been frowning,
will dance the fast-paced ki-ka-pu.
We’ll bring all the Eves back into Eden:
order me
and I’ll go--
from the boulevards, I’ll pick up all the pretty girls needed
and bring them to you!
Should I?
No?
You’re shaking your curly head coarsely?
You’re knitting your brows like you’re tough?
Do you think
that this
winged one, close by,
knows the meaning of love?
I too am an angel; used to be one before--
with a sugar lamb’s eye, I stared at your faces,
but I don’t want to give presents to mares anymore, --
all the torture of Sevres that’s been made into vases.
Almighty, You created two hands,
and with care,
made a head, and went down the list, --
but why did you make it
so that it pained
when one had to kiss, kiss, kiss?!
I thought that you were the Great God, Almighty
but you’re a miniature idol, -- a dunce in a suit,
Bending over,
I’m reaching for the knife that I’m hiding
at the top of my boot.
You, swindlers with wings!
Huddle in fright!
Ruffle your shuddering feathers, rascals!
You, reeking of incense, I’ll open you wide,
from here all the way to Alaska.
Let me go!
You can’t stop me!
Whether I’m right or wrong
makes no difference,
I will not be calmer.
Look -
the stars were beheaded all night long
and the sky is again bloody with slaughter.
Hey you,
Heaven!
Take your hat off,
When you see me near!
Silence.
The universe sleeps.
Placing its paw
Under the black, star-infested ear.
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2016.
References:
Vladimir Mayakovsky - Bolshevik Poet - 1893-1930 https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/ Accessed 7.8.2016
Almereyda, Michael (Editor), Night Wraps The Sky – Writings By and About Mayakovsky (2008), FSG.
Russian Poetry in English – Vladimir Mayakovsky
https://sites.google.com/site/poetryandtranslations/vladimir-mayakovsky Accessed 18.2.12.
方寸马雅可夫斯基 - http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4de297070100hjpd.html Accessed 7.8.2016 (Chinese language article from Mainland China concerning the issue of Mayakovsky Stamps – includes short biography)
马雅可夫斯基 - http://baike.so.com/doc/6167006-6380236.html Accessed 7.8.2016 (Chinese language encyclopaedia page regarding the life of Mayakovsky)
References:
Vladimir Mayakovsky - Bolshevik Poet - 1893-1930 https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/ Accessed 7.8.2016
Almereyda, Michael (Editor), Night Wraps The Sky – Writings By and About Mayakovsky (2008), FSG.
Russian Poetry in English – Vladimir Mayakovsky
https://sites.google.com/site/poetryandtranslations/vladimir-mayakovsky Accessed 18.2.12.
方寸马雅可夫斯基 - http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4de297070100hjpd.html Accessed 7.8.2016 (Chinese language article from Mainland China concerning the issue of Mayakovsky Stamps – includes short biography)
马雅可夫斯基 - http://baike.so.com/doc/6167006-6380236.html Accessed 7.8.2016 (Chinese language encyclopaedia page regarding the life of Mayakovsky)