After reading the Mayakovsky poems, I did a little research about his political views. I found many of his poems ambiguous in interesting ways given the subheading “Soviet Aspirations and Environmental Disasters.” I was not surprised to find out that Mayakovsky had a very complicated relationship with the soviet state— he was a strong soviet supporter, specifically he was a big fan of Lenin, yet he also questioned the state’s involvement in cultural censorship.

I saw this conflict in the poems assigned. Where I believe the most obvious contradictions appear are in his poem “Vladimir Mayakovsky Rented a Dacha One Summer; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” He begins the poem with his contempt for the sun. He shows this anger through his frustration with the sun’s constant rising and setting: “The next day he would rise again/ to flood the world with light./ This happened day after day after day:/ what a load of… rubbish!” (97). The sun clearly represents more than just the physical sun because, after the speaker loses his patience and calls the sun a “parasite,” the speaker and the sun engage in a dialogue. Though at first the speaker is angry at the sun, the tone of their conversation quickly changes: “I end up sitting comfy, chatty,/ absolutely normal./ I talk about that,/ I talk about this,/ how work’s driving me crazy (nearly)” (98). The different tones of conversation I believe emulate Mayakovsky’s relationship with the Soviet State.

Mayakovsky’s “Love” also shows the complexity of his relationship with the Soviet State. Though the poem is entitled “Love,” the body of the poem argues a relationship more complicated than positive love. The speaker describes himself as “a melting July pavement,/ where she throws her kisses like the butts of cigarettes” (10). That line transitions into the third and most disturbing stanza:

Come on then, walk out on the city,
go naked in the sun, you dumb fucks!
Pour drunken wines into wineskin-titties
pour, rain-kisses onto your coal-cheeks.

This stanza portrays what I think might be Mayakovsky’s relationship to the Soviet State as an incredibly turbulent relationship.