Tag Archives: Mayakovsky

Mayakovsky’s Conflict

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.

Redefining the Human-Nature Power Dynamic

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Vladimir Mayakovsky Rented a Dacha One Summer; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next” focuses on the theme of human’s exerting power over nature and upsetting a natural order that had existed up until the industrialization of the early 1900s in Russia. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator expresses his dismay with the summertime conditions of the countryside, describing it as “a mazy heat” as if there were a “hundred and forty” suns (97). He also observes that “past the village was a hole where the sun sank surely, every evening without fail, slowly and securely,” creating a sense of natural regularity and inevitability that humans have no control over (97).  However, this power dynamic of the narrator consistently being subjected to the sun’s rays changes when he calls the sun a “parasite” and bids it to come into his house (98). Once the sun enters the house, the narrator thinks to himself “I’ve forced the fires of heaven back for the first time since creation,” implying that he has the unusual power to control nature that no one has ever possessed in the past (98). The fact that the narrator shouts at and makes demands of the sun highlights a shifting power dynamic from one where the sun has unrestrained power over all people to another where people are at least on the same level as the sun (or nature as a whole).

While the first half of this poem points towards the balance of power tilting towards the humans in their relationship to nature, it is interesting how the narrator and sun engage in conversation and become friends. At the end of their conversation, the sun claims they have become “like a couple of brothers,” which curiously suggests that the narrator’s gain of power in relation to nature allows him to see eye to eye with the sun and better understand it. By engaging directly with nature, even from a place of self-perceived authority, the narrator realizes how both he as a poet and the sun have the important job of lighting the “shadowy walls” of the world (99). The core message remains ambiguous as the narrator surprisingly makes demands of the sun (which may relate to industrialization becoming a formidable force against nature), all while they both achieve a higher level of clarity and understanding through their close interaction.

Advancement or ‘Grotesquification?’

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.