Selected Poems

Introduction

✦ ix ✦ Introduction Vladimir Mayakovsky was first and foremost a poet, to hear him tell it (see the opening words of his autobiography, “I Myself ”), but his life and career choices would make it difficult for readers and critics to remain focused on that primary and primal vocation. Indeed, Mayakovsky himself lost sight of it at times and actively repressed his poetic gift at others, but he found that he could never quite escape it. As he wrote in the 1924 poem “Jubilee,” “poetry’s/the damnedest thing:/ /it exists—/and we can’t make heads or tails of it.”1 He studied painting before he ever wrote a line of verse, working as a visual artist at various points throughout his life. He wrote and acted in plays and films (almost always playing some version of himself), published numerous articles and essays, and worked as an ad man for state-run stores and trusts in the mid-1920s. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which he wholeheartedly supported, Mayakovsky devoted himself to serving the new Soviet state through propaganda and patriotic verse, and it is this choice—no one forced him to do it—that turned him, his oeuvre, and his legacy into the battlefield they remain to this day. One hundred years after his first publication , Mayakovsky the poet is still fighting to be understood. Because the bulk of his output before the Revolution was on lyrical themes and the bulk of his postrevolutionary verse was political, it is easy and perhaps inevitable to compartmentalize his career, or even to speak of two Mayakovskys—such talk began while the poet was still alive, and it became a sort of critical orthodoxy after Stalin’s enshrinement of him in 1935 (as we shall see in the following section). The dichotomy, however , is a false one, and we must look past it to understand Mayakovsky’s achievements as a poet. His linguistic eccentric- x ✦ introduction ity and verve, his ear for powerful rhythms and innovative, semantically loaded rhymes, his mastery of metaphor, and his irrepressible creative whimsy can all be traced through his most personal lyrics and his most strident propaganda. Indeed , his propaganda is at times startlingly personal in its execution , and the carryover of larger themes and conflicts from his lyrical to his political verse lends resonance to both. The search for a holistic, integrated understanding of Mayakovsky is nothing new. In a sense, it is the fundamental challenge he bequeathed to all his readers and critics, and it is a challenge many have accepted. As early as 1931 (one year after the poet’s suicide), Roman Jakobson wrote, “The poetry of Mayakovsky from his first verses . . . to his last lines is one and indivisible. It represents the dialectical development of a single theme. It is an extraordinarily unified symbolic system.”2 Unfortunately, the unity Jakobson saw in his friend’s oeuvre—the two men were close, though Jakobson emigrated in 1920—was largely ignored for the next several decades as more divisive interpretations came to the fore; the poet Jakobson knew was swallowed up by the manufactured legend of an ideologically pure, revolutionary warrior. Later scholars, however, have renewed the search for Mayakovsky’s thematic and symbolic unity and taken it in fascinating directions, particularly in the two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. If it was Mayakovsky’s creative and career choices that opened the door to ideological interpretations of his verse, it was Stalin who institutionalized the one-sided, political approach to his work. Stalin drafted the following resolution in red pencil directly on top of a letter from Lily Brik: “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his memory and his works is a crime.”3 Brik had written to Stalin on November 24, 1935, to complain of the officially sanctioned oblivion into which Mayakovsky had introduction ✦ xi fallen since his death.4 Why Stalin even considered Brik’s appeal , much less reacted so affirmatively to it, remains a source of speculation. The central point to be made from the standpoint of Mayakovsky’s critical legacy is that Stalin’s praise was not based on aesthetic judgment, or on any appreciation of Mayakovsky’s poetry as poetry. State poets can be useful to a totalitarian regime, but living poets are dangerously unpredictable . A dead poet, on the other hand, can be...