Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History

8. The Animal Mayakovsky

138 The Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) once said, “I love animals because they aren’t people but nevertheless alive”1 or perhaps better translated as, “I love animals because they are alive, despite the fact that being so makes them like people.” The poet’s relations with animals were intense and determined. Mayakovsky’s long-time girlfriend Lili Brik writes in her memoirs about the poet and one particular little puppy he rescued: It was in the year 1919. . . . We were walking along the fences of a dacha village, intently smelling the violets. Mayakovsky strode along in the middle of the street expressively muttering—he was composing poems, beating out the rhythm with his hand as he walked. Suddenly under our feet something squealed. We stopped in our tracks, almost stepping on a living being. We bent down to take a look—a dirty little mass was poking its nose at our feet and squealing, squealing . . . —Volodya!2 In two giant strides Mayakovsky came over. . . . He looked over the fence and shouted to the kids who were playing: —Whose puppy is this? —No one’s! Vladimir Vladimirovich gently took the dirty puppy into his arms, and we returned home as a group. 8H theAnimAlmAyAkOvsky katherine lahti costlow nelson text4.indd 138 6/23/10 8:40 AM the AnimAl mAyAkOvsky————139 The puppy was so dirty that Vladimir Vladimirovich carried it in the palm of his hand far in front of himself to keep the fleas from jumping over to him. The puppy stopped squealing, and sprawled out as if in an armchair in the comfortable palm . . . At home the samovar had just been set up in the yard. The water was already a little warm. Vladimir Vladimirovich touched it with his hands— just right! We put the puppy in a basin and started to wash it. . . . The puppy sat quietly; apparently he liked getting washed. . . . Osip Maksimovich [Osip Brik, Lili’s husband] sat down with him on a bench in the sun so that he would get totally dry so as not to catch cold. . . . Mayakovsky named the puppy “Shen.”3 “Shen” is short for shenok, which means “puppy” in Russian. As we shall see, Mayakovsky would give himself the very same nickname, and it became much more than a nickname: it became a profound term of self-identity. The fact is that Mayakovsky, like many if not all animal lovers, saw himself and all other humans in animals and as animals. About this same puppy, who became a much-loved pet for the poet, Mayakovsky later remarked, “And Shen is good. He’s like a person, but doesn’t speak.”4 For Mayakovsky, the human and the animal could readily change places. At the end of Lili Brik’s memoirs about Mayakovsky and his “Shen,” Lili gives an account of how Mayakovsky was swimming and got the puppy to join him, “Shen suddenly rushed into the deep water and started to swim. It is impossible to describe Mayakovsky’s puppy-like delight! He shouted, ‘Look! Everyone look! He swims better than I do! Compared to him I’m nothing but a puppy!’” Specialists on Mayakovsky know that he loved animals. Most readers tend to think of him as a futurist poet, glorifying machines, putting his hope in scientific inventions, and taking other antinatural, certainly antianimal , positions. The reason many do not know about Mayakovsky’s love for animals is that the specialists, mainly biographers and literary critics, tend to relegate his fondness for beasts to the distant background as an irrelevant moment that is strictly biographical and has no relevance in his artistic career.5 (Mayakovsky’s passion for gambling and his paranoid fear of infection are also dismissed as biographical details that are irrelevant to his work as a poet.) Such dismissal is odd because Mayakovsky’s biography is usually treated as being absolutely relevant to his work, and critics freely eclipse his work with myths about his biography. Edward Brown dedicates the “Introductory Remarks” of his biography of Mayakovsky to justifying costlow nelson text4.indd 139 6/23/10 8:40 AM 140————kAtherine lAhti why one needs to use knowledge of the poet’s biography in order to understand his poems, stating “the poems cannot be fully understood if they are studied in abstraction from the family, the personality, the life [of Mayakovsky ].”6 But it is not Mayakovsky’s real...