Enormous,
angular,
like a dam
he stands against any untruths...
E. Yevtushenko
“No, all of me will not die.” These immortal Pushkin words can also be addressed to Vladimir Mayakovsky. Time has no power over him either. Deified and blasphemed, crucified and resurrected, he is still with us. You can agree with him, argue with him, but you cannot pass by his poems indifferently!
The former Mayakovsky Square in Moscow, now Triumphalnaya again. He stands in the center. An open gesture, openness, utmost frankness. But for some reason the poet always seemed different to me: subtle, vulnerable, and never having found any true love, no real understanding.
Already in early work his lyrical hero is extremely contradictory. Here he declares with contempt, breaking into a scream:
I will laugh and spit joyfully,
I'll spit in your face
I am the priceless words of a spender and spendthrift.
But suddenly the revealing pathos disappears, and before us appears a man who is scared and lonely in this starless world, who dreams that “every evening at least one star will light up over the roofs.”
Mayakovsky wants to find your soul mate, to be understood by at least someone. He does not yet dream of being understood by the whole country. But this natural desire to find at least one like-minded person is unattainable:
No people.
You see
the cry of a thousand days of torment?
The soul does not want to go dumb,
but there is no one to tell.
And then 1917 came. “My revolution,” is how Mayakovsky described the events of October. Now, when the views and opinions of people have changed dramatically, when Lenin has turned from an ideal and a deity into the “most malicious” person in Russian history, as A. Solzhenitsyn described him, do we have the right to condemn Mayakovsky and many others who sincerely believed that the “world” they hated “fat” will be swept away, so that freedom and mutual understanding will reign in the country?
How hard Mayakovsky worked during these years! He wrote poems that sometimes did not meet high artistic tastes. But the peasants and soldiers, not strong in the aesthetics of beauty, admired his ditties! "Badly?" - you ask. Undoubtedly! But isn’t there behind all this an ardent desire to be heard and understood at least this way, through posters, propaganda, slogans?
A sense of duty is one of the evidence of Mayakovsky’s spiritual significance. There are amazing lines in the poem “About This”:
Must stand
I stand for everyone, I will pay for everyone,
I'll pay for everyone.
He dreamed of the subtlest connection between his lyrical hero and people, of understanding and trust in himself, a poet who gave all his talent to the “attacking class.” However, more and more often Mayakovsky was overcome by doubts. The line taken out as the theme of this essay has a continuation in which the motives of loneliness and undivided thoughts sound:
I want to be understood by my country,
but I won’t be understood - well,
By home country I'll pass by
how the slanting rain passes.
I think these words belong not to an “agitator, loudmouth leader,” but to a doubting and very suffering person.
Before his death, V. Mayakovsky wrote “At the top of his voice: the first introduction to the poem.” I got the impression that the poet deliberately addressed his descendants, having lost faith that his contemporaries would understand him. It is to them, the people of the future, that he seeks to explain his position in art; he counts on their understanding and generosity:
poetry flows, I will step
through lyrical volumes, as if alive
talking to the living.
It is in this work that we find lines testifying to the poet’s deep spiritual drama:
standing at the throat of his own song.
Do modern literary scholars, who arrogantly talk about the creative miscalculations and obvious degradation of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, not feel the terrible melancholy and pain with which these words are filled?!
Wilhelm Küchelbecker wrote in 1845:
The fate of poets of all tribes is bitter;
Fate will execute Russia the hardest of all...
These are lines about Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, Yesenin and, of course, Mayakovsky!
Misunderstood by his contemporaries, declared “the best and most talented” after his death, spat upon in our days, the poet remained a lonely star in the horizon of Russian poetry of the 20th century. But I really want to believe that years will pass, new readers will turn to Mayakovsky’s poems and finally understand all the richness of his poetic world, all the depth of his personality.
I think this understanding is just around the corner. And I realized this after accidentally reading a poem by a tenth-grader:
Hello, Mayakovsky!
And I brought you leaves.
Carved maple leaves,
Yellow and with crimson!
People come and go to Mayakovsky with a soul open to the beautiful and the good. They are coming and will always be coming!
Mayakovsky is not what he seems; not what Soviet propaganda tried to present it as; not what he tried to present himself as. He was a melancholy, tremulous, nervous and gentle poet - almost a male version of Tsvetaeva.
He could write a huge dubious poetic text (“I want the State Planning Committee to sweat in the debates, giving me tasks for the year,” “I want a pen to be compared to a bayonet,” etc.), and then attach a “paradise tail” to it " in four lines:
- “I want to be understood by my country, but if I am not understood, well, I will pass through my native country like slanting rain.”
GOOD GUY
Many people identify him with the statue standing on Triumphal Square in Moscow, as well as with poems about Lenin and the revolution. But when you read about him, the idol suddenly opens up like a sarcophagus, and suddenly a clumsy, very nice guy comes out.
Well, for example: he was terribly afraid of infection (because his father pricked himself with a needle and died of sepsis, and Mayakovsky then could not live without soap and rubber baths, which he carried with him, and this was not very accepted, the triumph of hygiene in his time has not yet arrived, and, as some believe, Chukovsky wrote Moidodyr from him).
He is with adolescence He suffered with his teeth - and it was painful to suffer, and it was also painful to insert new ones in an era when modern anesthesia did not exist (but he inserted them).
For fifteen years he was crazy about Lilya Brik, who did not love him (in particular, for reasons of a very intimate nature: whoever wants to, let him read the merciless book of the Swedish Slavist Bengt Youngfeldt “The Bet is Life”, there are sexual relations described in detail).
But overall it was an amazing situation: a dog fell in love with a cat to death. Mayakovsky, direct, honest, with poems that sometimes sound like barking, called himself “puppy,” and the twisted, flexible, complex Lilya called him “puppy” in response and treated him with disdain.
Her most famous phrase- “It is useful for Volodya to suffer, he will suffer and write good poetry.” Well, yes, in this sense she was his muse; she provided him with suffering in abundance. He twice wanted to shoot himself because of her, he shot himself in the heart, but it misfired.
He did not believe in God, was tormented by the thought that his only daughter from a random American girlfriend could grow up as a “devout Catholic,” but at the same time he argued with God all the time, not even noticing that he was speaking to other people through him. Like any truly great poet, Mayakovsky was precisely his mouthpiece, and not the revolution, not Lenin or Lily.
ABOUT PISTOLS
In the 1920s, purchasing firearms was relatively easy. Mayakovsky had several pistols - in particular, one donated by the workers of Chicago - and he loved them very much (he also carried brass knuckles). One of these pistols ended his life on April 14, 1930.
All the talk about the fact that he was killed is idle speculation: according to eyewitnesses, before he shot himself, Mayakovsky was in severe depression, which he described as accurately as anyone before or anyone since, in exactly three words - “his throat is razor delirious.” He began to disrupt performances and got drunk.
At another get-together, one cheeky guy approached Mayakovsky and said: “It is known from history that all good poets came to a bad end: either they were killed, or they themselves... When will you shoot yourself?” Mayakovsky, shuddering, replied with disgust: “If fools often ask about this, it’s better to shoot yourself.”
The day before his death, Kataev, watching Mayakovsky quarrel with his last lover, actress Veronica Polonskaya, cheerfully said: “Mayakovsky will not shoot himself. These modern lovers don't shoot themselves."
But the next day there was another explanation between Mayakovsky and Veronica: he demanded that she leave the theater and leave her husband, actor Mikhail Yanshin. The stormy quarrel ended quite peacefully: Mayakovsky kissed Veronica and gave her 20 rubles for a taxi. Polonskaya left the room, walked a few steps and heard a shot.
It seemed to her that she had been rushing along the corridor for an eternity and could not enter the room, but when she entered, a cloud of smoke from the shot was still in the air. Mayakovsky, as they recalled, even after death retained a meaningful look (his eyes did not close) - it seemed that he simply fell.
He was a teenager who stopped living at 36 - at that fateful age when being a teenager is no longer completely inconvenient. His fate was tragic and full of pain. And yet this fate seems surprisingly harmonious - maybe it’s better to die like this than not to be a poet at all.
THIS WAS ALSO...
Mayakovsky - “Komsomolskaya Pravda”*
Komsomol members - two million.
What about the circulation?
At a hundred thousand it freezes and does not multiply.
Where is our organization and scope?
These look like scissors.
What about the other one million nine hundred?
Do they read while refraining from writing out?
Do they count the stars facing the vault of heaven?
Or do they read the signs?
The newspaper is not reading out of boredom;
Use a newspaper to scrape dirt from the republic;
the newspaper is our eyes and hands,
daily assistance in daily work.
War looks out from the cannon muzzles,
The bourgeoisie are spreading cunning nets.
Komsomol members, be on your guard,
follow the world in our newspaper.
Help the sheets reach the youth,
agitate, explain, reprint in the wall.
Questions—difficult, funny, and slippery, both on labor days and on parade days—were posed, led, and resolved by Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Comrades Vanya, comrades Masha, the newspaper is your closest relative.
Do your own thing, distribute the extra number.
Everything - from the cities of the red pipes
all the way to the remote and remote village,
all cells and all clubs,
committees, reading rooms,
recruit thousands of new subscribers,
circulation as own growth, glad,
Every Komsomol member, become a subscriber to Komsomolskaya Pravda!
1927
* In 1927, Vladimir Vladimirovich became a staff writer for Komsomolskaya Pravda and wore a KP employee ID number 387.
The poet was closely connected with the editors - he published poems, wrote captions for cartoons, and gave sold-out newspaper pages.
On July 19, the 120th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Soviet poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky will be widely celebrated. IN last years a wall appeared between the reader and the poet. All the more surprising is the scale of the anniversary celebrations.
The 3rd International Literary Festival took place in Odessa, held under the sign of the 120th anniversary of the birth of V. Mayakovsky.
A literary event dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the poet is taking place in Moscow. From March 21 to July 31, the “Poetry Train” runs in the Moscow metro. Each carriage presents different facets of the poet’s work.
“I will tell you about time and myself,” said Mayakovsky. We, today, just need to hear it, hear with our hearts, as the poet addresses us: “Listen, comrade descendants...”
Mayakovsky was and remains the most brilliant revolutionary poet. He was “mobilized and called upon by the revolution,” because by character, by temperament, by the very type of person he was a rebel and revolutionary. Alas, the very era that he glorified has sunk into oblivion. Undoubtedly, now his work needs a new reading. He himself must be freed from the “textbook gloss” that obscured the living appearance of the poet, reducing his role to that of an agitator for Soviet power. But what makes Mayakovsky great is that he always spoke “out loud” about everything. “The loudmouth – the leader” took on any topic only when he felt that “the heart was voting.” That is why his embossed lines remain in memory:
“It was with the fighters, or the country, or in my heart”;
“I sing my Fatherland, my republic!”;
“Read, envy, I am a citizen Soviet Union ».
Mayakovsky was a true patriot, and love for the Motherland was instilled in him genetic level:
“... the land with which you froze together cannot be stopped loving forever.”
You cannot stop loving - it means that this is the feeling with which you were born, which only grows stronger over time. “I glorify the Fatherland, which is, but three times - which will be.”
Even on trips abroad (in the 20s V.V. Mayakovsky visited Germany, France, America), where everything is new and interesting, 
the poet yearns for his homeland. He invites the Eiffel Tower itself to Russia:
Let's go, tower! To us! You are more needed there, with us!
Come join us! Let's go to Moscow! "
With this, at first glance, strange invitation, he wanted to bring closer the triumph of industry, the symbol of which was the Eiffel Tower, in his native Land of the Soviets.
Mayakovsky, like everyone else, is fascinated by Paris, but nostalgia cannot be overcome:
"I would like to live and die in Paris,
if there were no such Earth – Moscow.”
Mayakovsky always loved life. In 1920, amid complete devastation and hunger, he wrote a brilliant poem about “An extraordinary adventure that happened to Vladimir Mayakovsky in the summer at the dacha”:
“The sunset glowed with a hundred and forty suns, summer rolled into July,
It was hot, the heat was floating - it was at the dacha.”
Mayakovsky did not intend to die and did not accept suicide as a way to solve any, even the most insoluble problems. After the death of Sergei Yesenin, a wave of copycat suicides swept among young people. To neutralize the enormous power of Yesenin’s dying poems, Mayakovsky wrote poems imbued with life-affirming power:
“Our planet is poorly equipped for fun.
We must wrest joy from the days ahead.
In this life it is not difficult to die -
Make life much more difficult."
However, just five years later, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky committed suicide with a revolver shot in the heart. Mayakovsky overcame many difficulties - he stood in the way of cunning enemies, spiritual freaks, and stupid people. He was scary to them - and he was hounded by a “gang of poetic grabbers and burners.”
His exhibition, where he reported on his 20 years of work, was actually disrupted. His portrait was cut out from the anniversary issue of the magazine “Print and Revolution” at the last moment.
Someone called on the phone and said nasty things; someone was throwing libelous notes. The rubbish with which Mayakovsky fought sought to take revenge.
The onslaught of opponents did not make him despair. Mayakovsky knew the value of these people... But it turned out that weak links suddenly appeared in his life: illness, nervous fatigue, personal drama. Mayakovsky began to develop a sore throat: the poet-tribune was losing his voice. He himself spoke about this in one of his most recent speeches:
Today I came to you completely sick, I don’t know what’s happening to my throat, maybe I’ll have to stop reading for a long time. Maybe today is one of the last evenings...
My closest friends were not in the city. With others, quarrels and discord began...
None of this was the reason, but it weakened the ability to resist, to fight. There came a moment of weakness. A message appeared about Mayakovsky's suicide. In his posthumous note, he wrote: “... this is not the way (I don’t recommend it to others), but I have no choice.”
Lev Kassil recalled these difficult days: “The lines written by him a long time ago are annoyingly knocking on my ears:
And the worst thing you’ve seen is my face when I’m absolutely calm?
... Yes, I have never seen this face completely calm. It was always illuminated either by lightning of anger, or by the concentrated fire of attention, or by the reflections of a sparkling joke. This is the first time I see him absolutely calm. And that’s really the worst thing.”
The greatness of Mayakovsky was also felt by poets who were very far from him. From Mandelstam’s notebooks: “There, in Sukhum, in April, I received the oceanic news of Mayakovsky’s death... Man is built like a lightning rod. We are grounded for such news and therefore able to withstand it.”
Love is what Mayakovsky lacked during his lifetime:
“I did not live up to my earthly possessions; I did not enjoy my earthly possessions.”
He left in unpaid debt
...in front of the Broadway Lampionia,
before you, Baghdad skies,
before the Red Army,
in front of the cherry trees of Japan -
in front of everything
about what
I didn’t have time to write.”
It’s fortunate that Mayakovsky managed to write about many things. What he wrote was forever included in the golden fund of poetry as a poem
“Listen!”
After all, if the stars light up -
So, does anyone need this?
This means it is necessary
So that every evening above the rooftops
Did at least one star light up?!
“This poem is a breakthrough to beauty, to harmony, painful from a feeling of loneliness,” said the famous literary critic Al. Mikhailov.
It’s fortunate that Mayakovsky managed to write heartfelt lines about love for the living, for the “beast”:
I love animals. You'll see a little dog
Here, at the bakery, there is one -
complete baldness.
Even then I’m ready to take the liver out of myself -
I don't feel sorry, darling
eat.
Like Sergei Yesenin (the poem “Song of the Dog”), Mayakovsky revealed his spiritual generosity in poems about compassion for living things.
It’s fortunate that Mayakovsky managed to write stunningly beautiful and at the same time permeated with high philosophy lines:
Look how quiet the world is.
The night covered the sky with starry tribute.
At hours like these you get up and talk
Centuries, history and the universe.
Now Vladimir Mayakovsky rises in the center of Moscow. It stands on the square with its name. The poet who once said:
I want to be understood by my country,
but I won’t be understood -
Well?!
By home country
I'll pass by
How it goes
slanting rain.
Shortly after the poet’s death, Marina Tsvetaeva said: “I’m afraid that, despite the people’s funeral, all the honor given to him, all the mourning of Moscow and Russia for him, Russia still has not fully understood who was given to it in the person of Mayakovsky.”
We are happy that we have finally come to this understanding. This is evidenced by the scale of the anniversary celebrations and the joyful fact that in book series“Great Poets” (issue of “Komsomolskaya Pravda”), number 12, a beautiful volume of poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky was published. And number one in this series, naturally, was the collection of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. “After death we stand almost side by side...” (V. Mayakovsky “Yubileinoe”)
P.S. A book exhibition dedicated to Mayakovsky’s anniversary was organized in the Central City Library in the format of the “Literary Calendar”
Valentina Sokolova
Option I
The name of Mayakovsky is firmly associated with the idea of an innovative poet. There have never been such bold, radical changes in poetry. sewed not a single poet of the 20th century. However, a comparison of Mayakovsky's experience And his contemporaries proves that the influence on the further development of art is exerted by those discoveries that meet the needs of the time. This is why Mayakovsky’s work is dear to us, because the search for something new in poetry is very important for him. In an effort to achieveunderstandingof his people, Mayakovsky took the most courageous and decisive step, turning poetry into an active participant in rallies,demonstrations.The poet's historical merit lies in the creation of a new type of lyricism.
The problem of artistic innovation is understood by Mayakovsky in his own way. Former writers had readers, but Mayakovsky, when he writes poetry, imagines himself in front of huge crowds of listeners. Almost every poem of his has this “You” appeal to someone else: “Hey, you... You who... Look... Listen!..”. Mayakovsky created his own rhythm. Mayakovsky is good precisely because he fearlessly reproduces in verse blasphemous, biting, vulgar rhythms, rally speeches, cries of fights and scandals. It was with this rally style that Mayakovsky sought to convey his poems to the people. And, in my opinion, he succeeded.
Mayakovsky, lovingly noticing the sprouts of something new and beautiful in the life of the country, never tires of reminding that “the rubbish has thinned out a little so far,” that there are still “a lot of different scoundrels walking around our land and around.” Therefore this great importance the poet gave satire. Mayakovsky's satirical works amaze with their thematic diversity. It seems that there is no such negative phenomenon that would not fall under the magnifying glass of a satirical poet. Before our eyes “a whole tape of types stretches out”: the new bourgeois, the saboteur, the philistine, the drunkard, the quitter, the cheater, the coward, the bribe-taker, etc. Mayakovsky’s satire was born from the anger of a poet - a patriot of Russia and a humanist who rejects everything that humiliates and insults a person .
To attract the reader's attention to his satirical poems, the poet uses various methods of enlarging and sharpening the image, creating a special, unusual situation, close to science fiction. Thus, the poet directed his poem “Seated” against bureaucracy and red tape. This poem talks about how bureaucrats meet 20 times a day, solving empty issues, are “torn” in half, and already “half the people” are present at two meetings at the same time.
Mayakovsky openly declares his attitude towards bureaucracy:
I greet the early dawn with a dream:
"Oh, at least
one meeting
regarding the eradication of all meetings!”
Mayakovsky came even closer to the theme of bureaucracy in the drama “Bathhouse”. In his satirical plays, the poet strives to enhance entertainment - one of the manifestations of Mayakovsky’s movement towards nationality. He wanted to be understood by his country, but knew well that the mass reader and viewer did not yet possess high culture. The poet saw his goal not in sinking to the low level of the mass reader, but in introducing the masses to high culture, because only in this case the masses will be able to correctly understand his work. Hence the search for contact with the reader; creating catchy posters, propaganda and advertising poems, speaking in crowded places.
Mayakovsky wrote works not only on the topic of the day, touching on eternal themes: love, poet and poetry, and others. With an unusual approach to such topics, Mayakovsky encouraged the reader to think and evaluate the author’s position on a particular issue. On the theme of tragic love, the poet wrote the poem “About This.” This is a conflict between the lyrical hero and the world of the philistinism. The tragedy is that the woman she loved found herself in the world of philistinism. A similar plot has been covered more than once in the literature of the 20s of the 20th century. But in Mayakovsky’s poem it acquires extreme poignancy. Two worlds collide. The words of the hero of the poem sound passionately and angrily:
I don’t accept it, I hate it all,
what's in us
driven by the departed slaves...
With these lines, Mayakovsky wanted to show readers his negative attitude towards philistinism, the boring world of ordinary people.
The poet’s conversation with his descendants (“At the top of his voice”) is filled with human greatness, passionate conviction, and nobility. Mayakovsky talks to his descendants “about time and about himself,” because of how he understands time and the art that this time needs. The poem “At the top of my voice” is dominated by the idea of the immortality of what was created in labor and battle, faith and reason and the gratitude of descendants. The poet rejects individual art. Mayakovsky argues that the poet must serve the interests of the people:
Until the very
last sheet
I give it to you, proletarian planet.
Studying the work of Mayakovsky, I realized that everything he did in art was a feat of the greatest selflessness. The undying popularity and topicality of Mayakovsky's poetry proves that this feat is immortal. The poet, in my opinion, achieved his goal - the people understood and appreciated his work.
Option II
The great Russian poet of the 19th century N. A. Nekrasov has wonderful words:
He who lives without sadness and anger does not love his homeland.
The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky lived with “sadness and anger” and passionately loved his homeland.
Motives of sadness, dissatisfaction, loneliness, and unsettled personal life are heard in many of his works.
Young Vladimir Mayakovsky came to Russian poetry suffering and alone. The young poet’s poems were struck by the unusual content and stunning poetic novelty - something that frightened off contemporary criticism, which did not want to understand and explain this novelty.
The world does not reveal its secrets to the poet, and he asks in bewilderment:
Listen! After all, if the stars light up -
Does that mean anyone needs this? This means that it is necessary that every evening over the rooftops
Did at least one star light up?!
The imperfection of life, the sharp discrepancy between dreams and reality gave rise to puzzling questions.
A poem with the provocative title “Here!” found its addressee and produced exactly the effect that the author could have counted on.
Also, in discord with reality and dreams of the future, lines were born that you need to especially listen to, wanting to understand the life and personality of Mayakovsky, his work:
The coming people! Who you are? Here I am, all of me
pain and bruise!
I bequeath to you the fruit garden of my great soul!
This is the voice of young Mayakovsky. Let us pay attention to the contrast that initially torments the poet’s soul. He - “all pain and bruise” - is growing a “fruit garden” for the people to come. These lines contain the idea of sacrificial service to people, characteristic of classical Russian literature.
The textbook image of Mayakovsky, “an agitator, a loud-mouthed leader,” does not seem to allow the thought of mental weakness.
In his mature years, the poet did not like to expose his spiritual turmoil to people, “standing at the throat of his own song.”
But the soul reveals itself, it rejoices and rejoices, it is indignant and bleeds. Soulless poetry is not poetry.
One of Mayakovsky’s most remarkable works, in my opinion, is the poem “About This”. It is about oneself and about love, a poem in which Mayakovsky’s character and personality are revealed brighter and deeper than in other, later poems.
There were also early love poems (“Cloud in Pants”). There was the lightest poem, not complicated by dramatic collisions, “I Love”. The poet was then experiencing the peak of his feelings for L. Yu. Brik, which is why he was sure: “Neither quarrels nor miles can wash away love. Thought out, verified, tested.”
But in reality, love brought nothing but suffering to the sensitive poet.
Outwardly he was calm, daring, invulnerable, but in reality he was very unprotected. And all this is very close and understandable to us in the poet, because these are universal human qualities. I am very touched by his heartfelt lines about love for the “beast”:
I love animals: You see a little dog - here at the bakery there is one - a complete baldness - from itself
and then I’m ready to give away the liver, I don’t mind, dear, eat it!
But the poet-bawler, poet-tribune, poet-herald is not entirely clear to me, living at the beginning of the 21st century and experiencing all its complex and tragic events. He dreamed of a beautiful “communist far away”, glorified three times the fatherland that would be, but what now? What to praise, who to praise and for what?
Mayakovsky represented the distant future, the 20th century in his poems. No matter how much he hurried life, no matter how much he believed in the commune at the gates, he relegated deliverance from the oppressive inertia of the old way of life only to the distant future:
The thirtieth century will overtake the flocks
the heart was torn apart by little things. Today we will make up for the unloved with the stardom of countless nights.
And again Mayakovsky the romantic utters a word about love.
About love that would not be “the handmaiden of marriage, lust, bread,” about love that would fill the universe and “so that all at the first cry of “Comrade!” - the earth turned around.” This is how Mayakovsky imagined love, this is how he wanted to see love. He was not given the happiness of experiencing such love: the whole point is that in every love story there are two characters on whom his fate equally depends.
This Mayakovsky is understandable to us, close and modern.
Mayakovsky the satirist is also our contemporary. Satire in the poet’s work is a “cavalry of witticisms” that raises “sharpened peaks of rhyme”; this is the favorite type of weapon.
“There are a lot of different scoundrels walking around our land and around,” the poet notes in the poem “Conversation with Comrade Lenin.” “To turn them around, to expose them in front of the people” - this is the task Mayakovsky sets himself.
He caustically ridicules all the negative manifestations in Soviet life (“About rubbish”, “Love”, “Beer and Socialism”), fights bureaucracy in institutions (“The Satisfied”, “Factory of Bureaucrats”), and opposes the remnants of capitalism in the minds of people ( “Coward”, “Prude”, “Suck-up”, “Gossip”), deals crushing blows to the kingdom of the dollar, to international murderers and warmongers of a new war.
Mayakovsky in his poem “The Pillar” wants “criticism to pay tribute,” although “there are a lot of different scoundrels walking around our land and around, a whole ribbon of types stretches: red tape, sycophants, sectarians, drunkards.”
Nowadays, the words from the poem “The Satisfied”: “Oh, at least one more meeting regarding the eradication of all meetings!” became winged. Even today they are directed against bureaucrats, the administrative apparatus, fruitless meetings, voting by deputies, etc.
The play “Bath” also “washes”, simply erases bureaucrats. The bureaucrats Pobedonosikov and his secretary Optimistenko do not give way to a new invention and interfere with movement forward. This play shows the harm of bureaucracy, its hostility to the entire creative, constructive atmosphere of society. Unfortunately, the Pobedonosikovs and Optimists still live today. Mayakovsky’s satire “mowed down” the rubbish and helped the reader see who is who.
It is gratifying to note that in our time there are more and more daring, thinking, courageous people who want democracy and entrepreneurship to help our society.
And how topical today are the lines from the poem “Soul of Society”:
Run away from something acute, as if it were contagious,
comrade, from an alcoholic who brags about how much beer and vodka he drinks!
Yes, I believe that Vladimir Mayakovsky is “understood by his people,” although everyone perceives him in their own way.
V. Mayakovsky was an extremely sensitive person, ready to give everything “for just one kind word, a humane one.”
What a modest (and what a passionate!) desire and what a colossal price to pay for it!
∗∗∗
For me, the only dark spot in the poet’s biography is his death. If you adhere to the official version - suicide, then it causes a lot of controversy and dubious conclusions. Especially considering one of the interviews with Mayakovsky’s daughter, Ellen Patricia Thompson (Elena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya):
“I want everyone to know the main thing - Vladimir Mayakovsky did not commit suicide! He knew that he had a daughter, he strived to live, to live for me and told his friends, pointing to my photograph: “This is my future!” When he realized that his dream of an ideal society was impossible, he began to talk about it, stopped writing, and was liquidated.”
Obviously, we will never know what really happened. At that time, the arbiters of destinies, both well-known and quite ordinary people, there were special bodies and they did their job very professionally. Whether it was a conspiracy or Mayakovsky lost his nerve, or some other version - today it no longer matters. All the tragedy lies elsewhere - almost everything brilliant people they leave too early, leaving us, ordinary admirers of their talents, with a crazy number of versions and guesses...
I'd
monument during life
is due according to rank.
I would pawn
dynamite
- come on,
tease!
I hate it
all kinds of carrion!
Adore
all life!
(Jubilee)
Facts, quotes, aphorisms of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky:
Since childhood, Mayakovsky suffered from bacteriophobia and hated pins and hairpins. This is due to the fact that Mayakovsky’s father died from blood poisoning after pricking himself on a needle while sewing papers. “Father died. I pricked my finger (stitching papers). Blood poisoning. Since then I can't stand pins. The prosperity is over. After my father’s funeral, we have 3 rubles. Instinctively, feverishly, we sold out of tables and chairs. We moved to Moscow. For what? There weren’t even any acquaintances.” (Autobiography “I Myself”, 1928).
The most controversial and fatal figure in the poet’s life is his muse and his “curse” Lilya Brik. She was married when she met the then famous poet. Five years after meeting the Brik couple, Mayakovsky moved in with them - he felt an inexplicable attraction to Lila, and she had an ambivalent attitude towards him: “What is the difference between Volodya and a cab driver? One controls the horse, the other controls the rhyme.”
Despite his attitude towards Lila, Mayakovsky repeatedly had affairs on the side. His last girlfriend was an actress of the Moscow Art Academic Theater Veronica Polonskaya, however, he did not devote his farewell lines to her.
He bequeathed all his poems to the Brik family. After his death, Lilya worked to ensure that the poet’s name was not forgotten, and until her death she bore Golden ring Mayakovsky with engraving “L.Y.B.” — Lilya Yuryevna Brik.
“The year 1930 started badly for him. I was sick a lot. His exhibition was unsuccessful; none of his colleagues came, although there were many young people. Another failure was the premiere of “Bath” in March. Talk began that Mayakovsky had written himself off, and he heard it. And just at that time things weren’t going well for me in the theater either. He wanted me to leave the theater, which I could not do. We quarreled, sometimes over trifles, quarrels grew into heated explanations,” Polonskaya said in an interview in 1990.
IN last days Throughout his life, Mayakovsky was on the verge of madness. He constantly caused scandals for Polonskaya, forcing her to quit the theater and leave her husband. Allegedly, her refusal in their last conversation became the reason for suicide - the poet shot himself three minutes after the actress left him.
In his suicide letter, Mayakovsky wrote: “Don’t blame anyone for the fact that I’m dying, and please don’t gossip. The deceased did not like this terribly. Mom, sisters and comrades, I’m sorry - this is not the way (I don’t recommend it to others), but I have no choice. Lilya - love me. Comrade government, my family is Lilya Brik, mother, sisters and Veronica Vitoldovna Polonskaya. If you give them a tolerable life, thank you.”
After his death, many blamed Polonskaya for being the reason for this terrible step. She herself felt guilty, which she wrote about in her memoirs: “It would be absurd if I wanted to say by this: Mayakovsky shot himself to destroy my family life. But among the complex of reasons that led to his death, there was also that misunderstanding between us, which he mistook for a break.” However, to claim that their quarrel was the cause of suicide is an exaggeration. Rather, it was a reason, the last straw.
They say that unfree women are the fate that haunted Mayakovsky all his life. Lilya Brik was married, Tatyana Yakovleva had three more admirers, besides him, Veronica Polonskaya never succumbed to his persuasion and did not divorce her husband. The poet experienced very hard the forced need to share his beloved women with other men. None of them belonged to him completely.
Mayakovsky spent 11 months in solitary confinement No. 103 in Butyrka prison. He got there on suspicion of aiding the escape of female political prisoners from the Novinskaya women's prison in Moscow. He was released due to lack of evidence.
Mayakovsky took part in the anti-religious campaign initiated by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1928-1929. He even became a member of the Union of Militant Atheists, promoting atheism. The following lines belong to his pen:
At the cunning god
loopholes -
a lot of.
Sassy
and straight
nasal sounds from the temple.
(“We must fight,” 1929)
At one of the concerts, a small person jumped up to V.V. Mayakovsky and shouted: “From the great to the ridiculous - one step!” Mayakovsky stepped towards him: “So I’m doing it.”
Instant response from Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to an attack from one of his many opponents:
- You, comrade, object as if you are giving birth!
Once a book was discussed in front of Mayakovsky, and one of those present said about it:
"Life as it is".
Mayakovsky immediately responded:
“Who needs her like that?”
In one of Mayakovsky’s poems there is the following line:
“While you’re looking at a pimple in front of the dressing table...”
This phrase quite accurately reflected the behavior of the poet himself. He would go up to the mirror and carefully and suspiciously examine his face: whether any nasty thing or infection had clung to him, whether he was in danger of dying from an undetected scratch. Mayakovsky could suddenly push all the papers off the table aside and start shaving, muttering under his breath:
“No, I’m not handsome enough to not shave every day.”
The rest of the poet’s toilet required almost no time, no mirror, no attention. All the clothes fell on his shoulders imperceptibly elegantly, as it should.
In 1926, Mayakovsky arrived in Tiflis and went to the Zakkniga store. He was talking with the store manager about business, and then remarked:
“Everything you have here is Transcaucasian, “Zakkniga”, “Zakshveitorg”... Probably the song about “Bricks” is also sung here in the Transcaucasian version:
“And for these little bricks...”
An evening called “The Face of USSR Literature” was held in Tiflis. At the end of the evening, Mayakovsky was asked various questions. Here are some of them.
Question:“How do you feel about Demyan Bedny?”
Mayakovsky: “I’m reading.”
Question:“What about Yesenin?” (About two months have passed since his death.)
Mayakovsky: “In general, I am prejudiced towards the dead.”
Question:“Whose money do you use to travel abroad?”
Mayakovsky: “To yours!”
Question:“Do you often look into Pushkin?”
Mayakovsky: “I never look. I know Pushkin by heart.”
David Burliuk introduced the young Mayakovsky to his acquaintances: “Vladimir Mayakovsky is a brilliant poet!”
And then he said to Mayakovsky: “Don’t let me down, write good poetry.”
After a trip abroad, Mayakovsky was asked: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, how is it in Monte Carlo, is it gorgeous?”
He answered:“Very much like what we have at the Bolshaya Moskovskaya [hotel].”
Then they asked him: “You traveled a lot. I wonder which city you think is the most beautiful?”
Mayakovsky answered briefly: “Vyatka.”
One day Mayakovsky visited the editorial office of some magazine, and when leaving, he discovered that his stick was missing and said:
“Where is my stick? The stick is missing. However, why say “the stick is missing” when you can say more simply: the stick.”
In the winter of 1926, a discussion of the novel by the young writer Philipp Hopp “The Death of the Merry Monarchy” was supposed to take place. Mayakovsky met the writer before the discussion and encouraged: “You are growing by leaps and bounds. I read about your novel “The Death of the Cheerful Nun.”
Somewhat later, meeting Gopp on the street, Mayakovsky asked: “What are you writing?”
Gopp replied: “A story.”
Mayakovsky: “What is it called?”
Gopp: “A bad fairy tale.”
Mayakovsky: “What topic?”
Gopp began to develop his thoughts: “Well, you know, Vladimir Vladimirovich, how can I tell you... This topic has been in the air for a long time...”
Mayakovsky interrupted: “Spoiling him...”
Gopp was offended: “Why - spoiling?”
Mayakovsky explained: “Well, how? If the fairy tale is bad, then what kind of smell can you expect from it!
Polytechnic Institute, Vladimir Mayakovsky speaks at a debate on proletarian internationalism:
— Among Russians I feel like a Russian, among Georgians I feel like a Georgian...
Question from the audience:
- And among fools?
Answer:
“And this is my first time among fools.”
IN GENERAL, Mayakovsky was both lucky and unlucky with women at the same time. He got carried away, fell in love, but most often did not meet complete reciprocity. The poet's biographers unanimously call his greatest love, Lilya Brik. It was to her that the poet wrote: “I love, I love, in spite of everything, and thanks to everything, I loved, love and will love, whether you are rude to me or affectionate, mine or someone else’s. I still love it. Amen". It was she who he called “The Brightest Sun.”
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik And Lilya Yuryevna lived happily with her husband Osip Brik, called Mayakovsky in her letters “Puppy” and “Puppy” and asked “to bring her a little car from abroad.” Brik appreciated the genius of her admirer, but all her life she loved only her husband Osip. After his death in 1945 she would say:
“When Mayakovsky shot himself, a great poet died. And when Osip died, I died.” Another statement by Lily Yuryevna is also noteworthy. Having learned about Mayakovsky’s suicide, Brik said: “It’s good that he shot himself with a big pistol. Otherwise it would have turned out ugly: such a poet shoots with a small Browning.”
Portrait of Repin. Hood. Mayakovsky "Seated Model" 1911
During exams at the art school they usually drew a nude figure and a plaster head. They gave me three hours for each job. The exams lasted six days. Mayakovsky, returning from the tests, said to his teacher Pyotr Kalnin:
- Pyotr Ivanovich, your truth! Remember how you taught how to do nudes? I started from the toe and outlined the entire silhouette of the figure with one line.
“Giraffe at the dentist’s appointment” 1912 - 1913
The poet had a special love for giraffes. At the beginning of the 20th century, a number of his drawings were called the “Giraffe Series”. The giraffe is an image of Mayakovsky himself, as his friends called him. How could it be otherwise, if the two-meter poet often appeared in public in a yellow jacket with black cuffs and collar? The drawings reflected the realities of his life: Mayakovsky had toothache, so in one of the illustrations a “grabber” (as he himself called dentists) appeared removing a giraffe’s tooth.
Because of the poetic “ladder” that Mayakovsky himself invented and which later became his calling card, many of the poet’s colleagues accused him of cheating: after all, at that time newspapers paid fees precisely for the number of lines, and not for characters.
The poet was a passionate lover gambling. He loved billiards and cards, and was not afraid to play Russian roulette. By the way, there is a version that it was the loss of Russian roulette that caused the death of Mayakovsky - after all, the circumstances of his death are still not entirely clear.
Few people know that Mayakovsky was closely connected not only with literature, but also with the cinema that was emerging in Russia. He wrote scripts and played a couple of roles. Unfortunately, only fragments of one film have reached us where we can look at the poet - this is “The Young Lady and the Hooligan”.
Vladimir Mayakovsky visited many times abroad on tour, including not only Europe (France, Germany), but also America, which was absolutely exotic for a Soviet person of that time. Many poems were also born from these travels.
Mayakovsky also had an unhappy love - for the Russian emigrant Tatyana Yakovleva. The novel did not work out, but the poet wrote a wonderful poem “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva.” There is also such a beautiful Parisian legend associated with Mayakovsky’s passion for Yakovleva: before leaving for his homeland, the poet deposited his entire Parisian fee into the account of one flower company, on the condition that once a week Yakovleva would receive the most beautiful bouquet with a note - “From Mayakovsky.” And for many years, even after the death of the poet himself, the flowers kept coming and coming. And it was they who saved the life of Mayakovsky’s beloved during the occupation of Paris by the Nazis - the woman sold bouquets to escape starvation.
By the way, you can read the beautiful legend “Flowers for you from Mayakovsky.”
If you love me, it means that you are with me, for me, always, everywhere and under all circumstances...
If you
"cow" name,
at your place
must be
milk
and udder.
What if you are without milk?
and without an udder,
then the devil is in you
in a cow's name!
I want to be understood by my native country,
but I won’t be understood -
Well?!
By home country
I'll pass by
How's it going?
slanting rain.
The musty air -
we cut life.
Comrades,
rest
in the fresh air.
You, of course, know the phenomenon of “rhyme”.
Let's say the line ended with the word "father",
And then, every other line, repeating the syllable, we put something like this: lamtsadritsa...
People are scared - an unchewed scream is moving from my mouth.
...I took it, took my heart and just went to play - like a girl with a ball.
“It’s not difficult to die in this life.
Make life much more difficult."
There is no more beautiful clothing in the world than the bronze of muscles and the freshness of skin.
Brooches sparkle...
on you! -
from the dress
from half naked.
Eh,
would go well with such a dress...
head.
“If you kill me, bury me, I’ll dig myself out!”
A loser is not the one who is gnawed by fate and the neighbors point a finger at the swindler... A LOSER is the one who is LUCKY - but he will not be able to catch luck!..
Loving is like sheets, torn insomnia,
To break down, jealous of Copernicus,
Him, not Marya Ivanna's husband
Considering him your rival!
I loved.
You shouldn't rummage through the old stuff.
Thousands of tons of word ore
For the sake of a single word!
Always shine, shine everywhere,
until the last days of the Donetsk
shine - and no nails!
This is my slogan -
and sun!
An interesting fact from Mayakovsky’s life: despite his stern, gloomy appearance, Vladimir Vladimirovich was a rather sentimental person. The poet loved pets. Particularly attached to dogs. He even once picked up a puppy on the street and brought it into the house, calling him simply Puppy. By the way, he later signed this nickname in passionate notes to his beloved Lily Brik.
Concluding the story about the great Russian poet, about whose poems Vladimir Lenin said: “Some kind of Tararaboombia,” we cannot ignore the following interesting fact about Mayakovsky. While in Berlin, Vladimir Vladimirovich went to shoe shop and after much trying on, I decided on semi-sports boots with thick soles. He immediately put them on, paid and said: “Big, expensive and strong, like Russia itself!”
Once they told Mayakovsky:
- “Your poems are too topical. They will die tomorrow. You yourself will be forgotten. Immortality is not your destiny..."
“Come back in a century,” answered Mayakovsky, “we’ll see.”
