Mayakovsky’s poems, Zabolotsky’s poems, and the film Magnitogorsk all convey imagery that flips traditional beauty on its head.

In Magnitogorsk, the transformation of the steppe into a heavily polluted, industrialized landscape is most obviously portrayed. As we hear one story after the next of the difficult labour, hazardous working conditions, coercion, death, misery, and environmental destruction associated with the building of, and continued living conditions in Magnitogorsk, it is no challenge to see that exact human history reflected in the scape of grey, pervasive smoke stacks and industrial apartments. Similarly, Zabolotsky and Mayakovsky’s poems depict the deformation of traditionally beautiful concepts of nature, love, and music into a grotesquely human-influenced aberration.

In “Could You?” and “Love,” Mayakovsky shows how humans can belittle grand concepts. The poet speaks of “the ocean’s vicious cheekblades/ in a dish of aspic.” and asks, “could you/ play a nocturne/ on a flute you’ve made from sluicepipes?” Although the ocean is so powerful and “vicious,” “life’s dull self-portrait” only portrays its ocean in a plate of human food. Likewise, a nocturne on a flute may be traditionally meaningful and beautiful, but to play it simply on sluicepipes (water channel pipes) estranges and “bizarre-ifies” them. In “Love,” Mayakovsky also contradicts the reader’s potential expectations from a poem about love. He fills the poem with grotesque images like “swampy muck…something red squirmed on the tracks… kisses like the butts of cigarettes…”

Zabolotsky’s “The Mad Wolf” shows how the wild and natural form (as described by the Bear) are devolved into madness as the wolves and chairman seek human intellect, occupations, and advancement. We see the complexity of how the wolf (“The Mad One”) thinks through his desire to become a (more human)  philosopher/scientist/writer, actually seeks to become a plant (closer to nature). Later, the wolves of different occupations all show their excitement to find happiness through industrialization. All of these images of the wolves and bears (typically majestic animals) seeking out human qualities are very strange. Though on the surface, they may seem to praise science that “sparkes like a water-spout,” the setting of the story allows us as readers to see how ridiculous the concepts of advancement are.

While all these works depict how human influence estranges natural/classical beauty, it’s interesting to note what different points in time they were written. Mayakovsky wrote in 1913, while Zabolotsky wrote in the 1930s, and Magnitogorsk depicts the persistence of hardship through decades and generations.