Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky began his autobiographical narrative this way: “ I myself": "I am a poet. This is what makes it interesting. This is what I am writing about.” His poetic word has always been focused on creative experimentation, innovation, and aspirations for the future world and future art. He always wanted to be heard, so he had to force his voice very much, as if shouting at the top of his lungs; in this sense, the title of the unfinished poem is “ In a loud voice"can characterize the entire work of Mayakovsky.
His aspiration for the future was expressed at the very beginning of his journey: in 1912, together with the poets D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, he signed the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Opinion.” The futuristic worldview remained with him throughout his life: this includes the deification of the future, its immense idealization and the idea that it is much more valuable than the present and the past; this is also “aspiration towards the extreme, the ultimate,” as N. Berdyaev characterized such a worldview; this is a radical negation of modern principles of life, which are conceived as bourgeois, shocking as the most important goal of the poetic word. The programmatic works of this period of Mayakovsky’s work are the tragedy of the twenty-year-old poet “ Vladimir Mayakovsky", staged in St. Petersburg and failed, the poem " Could you?" and the poem " A cloud in pants"(1915). Its leitmotif turns out to be the word “down,” expressing a trait that is organic to the poet’s personality: extreme revolutionaryism and the need for a radical reorganization of the world order as a whole - a trait that led Mayakovsky to futurism in poetry and to the Bolsheviks in politics. In the same year the poem “ Flute-spine" Its plot was the beginning of a dramatic and even tragic relationship with a woman who went through Mayakovsky’s entire life and played a very ambiguous role in it - Liliya Brik.
After the revolution, Mayakovsky feels like its poet, accepts it completely and uncompromisingly. The task of art is to serve it, to bring practical benefit. Practicalism and even utilitarianism of the poetic word is one of the fundamental axioms of futurism, and then of LEF, a literary group that accepted all the fundamental futurist ideas for practical development. It is precisely with this utilitarian attitude towards poetry that Mayakovsky’s propaganda work in ROSTA is connected, which published “Windows of Satire” - topical leaflets and posters with rhyming lines for them. The basic principles of futuristic aesthetics were reflected in the poet’s post-revolutionary program poems: “ Our march" (1917), " Left march" And " Order for the Army of Arts"(1918). The theme of love - the poem " I love"(1922); " About it"(1923), although here too the gigantism and excessive hyperbolization characteristic of the lyrical hero’s worldview, the desire to present exceptional and impossible demands to himself and the object of his love, are manifested.
In the second half of the 20s, Mayakovsky increasingly felt like an official poet, a plenipotentiary representative not only of Russian poetry, but also of the Soviet state - both at home and abroad. A peculiar lyrical plot of his poetry is the situation of traveling abroad and clashing with representatives of an alien, bourgeois world (“ Poems about the Soviet passport", 1929; cycle " Poems about America", 1925). His lines can be considered a kind of motto of the “plenipotentiary representative of poetry”: “The Soviets / have their own pride: / we look down on the bourgeoisie.”
At the same time, in the second half of the 20s, a note of disappointment in revolutionary ideals, or rather, in the real embodiment they found in Soviet reality, began to sound in Mayakovsky’s work. This somewhat changes the problematic of his lyrics. The volume of satire is increasing, its object is changing: it is no longer a counter-revolution, but the party’s own, home-grown bureaucracy, the “philistine’s mug” crawling out from behind the back of the RSFSR. The ranks of this bureaucracy are filled with people who have passed civil war, battle-tested, reliable party members, who did not find the strength to resist the temptations of nomenklatura life, the delights of the NEP, who experienced the so-called degeneration. Similar motives can be heard not only in lyrics, but also in drama (comedy " Bug", 1928, and " Bath", 1929). The ideal that is put forward is no longer a wonderful socialist future, but a revolutionary past, the goals and meaning of which are distorted by the present. It is precisely this understanding of the past that characterizes the poem “ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"(1924) and the October poem " Fine"(1927), written for the tenth anniversary of the revolution and addressed to the ideals of October.
So, we examined Mayakovsky’s work briefly. The poet passed away on April 14, 1930. The cause of his tragic death, suicide, was probably a whole complex of insoluble contradictions, both creative and deeply personal.
Mayakovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich
Vladimir Vladimirovich MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)- an innovative artist who left a noticeable mark on Russian poetry and drama. The brightness and originality of his talent, his enormous social temperament, and life in an era of historical upheaval determined the complexity, originality, and inconsistency of his creative destiny. He became an indisputable authority, a classic, and the official poet of the Soviet country. A textbook gloss was created after Stalin’s famous assessment: “Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet era» . Researchers unanimously called him a singer of the revolution, a poet of a new type...
Today science is free from the dictates of ideology and party guidelines, but it is not always possible to avoid tendentiousness, although now with a different sign, in the study of Mayakovsky’s work. This kind of tendentiousness is also present in one of the last great works about the poet - the talented book by Yu. Karabchievsky “The Resurrection of Mayakovsky”.
Mayakovsky cannot be perceived outside of his era - the time of new ideals, grandiose social changes, avant-garde experiments in art - one cannot ignore his contribution to the development of Russian poetic culture, fundamental innovation of form.
Mayakovsky entered literature in the early 1910s as a futurist poet, very soon becoming the leader of a group of cubo-futurist poets and artists. His like-minded people in reforming the old art and creating the culture of the future were V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, D. Burliuk, V. Kamensky. The futurists were characterized by a keen interest in updating the arsenal of visual and expressive means of poetic language, in the rhythmic and intonation structure of verse, and in the invention of new words (neologisms). Tradition-breakers challenged “so-called common sense” and “so-called good taste.” Anarchic rebellion against all the foundations of the world is one of the fundamental principles of Cubo-Futurism. Mayakovsky signed the program manifesto of Cubo-Futurism “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), in which young art revolutionaries unanimously threw Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky from the “ship of modernity.” The nihilistic and rebellious attitude of the futurists to reality, their desire for verbal experimentation, and anti-aestheticism organically coincided with the nature of Mayakovsky’s poetic individuality. The features of futuristic aesthetics were preserved to one degree or another or were transformed in a unique way in his work to the end.
In the post-October period, the journalistic beginning and the agitation and propaganda orientation of the poems intensified. During this period, he wrote several lyric epic poems (“150,000,000”, “About this”, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”, “Good!”), and turned to drama. Works intensively in advertising and newspapers. He is driven by the desire to feel himself in the general order, “mobilized and called upon by the revolution.” It is as a “plenipotentiary representative of Soviet art” that he travels to the countries of Europe and America.
The last years of Mayakovsky’s life were complicated by difficult creative searches, the struggle with misunderstanding, ideological criticism, and personal unsettlement. The complex of these reasons led the poet to suicide on April 14, 1930.
Lyrics (Listen! Natya! “I immediately blurred the map of everyday life...” Lilichka! Ode to revolution. Left march. Order for the army of art. Good attitude to the horses. Oh crap. Those who sat for a long time. Conversation with the financial inspector about poetry. An extraordinary adventure that happened with Vladimir Mayakovsky in the summer at the dacha. Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love. In a loud voice).
Lyrical hero of poetry early Mayakovsky- a romantic rebel, challenging the whole world, possessed by the spirit of protest. He is confident that “having enlarged the world with the power of his voice,” he will defeat the routine of vulgar life. It is not for nothing that the programmatic work of the pre-October Mayakovsky - the poem “A Cloud in Pants” (1915) - had the original daring title “The Thirteenth Apostle”. Despite the tragic lyrical motives, the four cries of the four parts triumphantly triumphed in the poem:
“Down with your system!
Down with your art!
Down with your religion!
Down with your love!.
Mayakovsky's lyrical hero is lonely, but he is a fighter and confident. that by the power of his protest he will be able to overcome the material mundaneness of everyday life, which fetters the flight of thought and the ability to act.
So, in the poem “Here!” (1913) the poet poses a daring challenge to the fatty bourgeois consumer world, for which art becomes just an object of consumption. Written “in case” of the opening of an artistic cabaret, it seems to recreate in its content the meeting of the “poet” and the “crowd”. Hence the use of direct address: “Here you are, a man...”, “Here you are, a woman...” This syntactic device undoubtedly actualizes the rebellious beginning in the lyrical hero; he is ready to enter into an open battle with a hostile world, which “common sense” and “so-called good taste” rejects. The poem "Here!" built on the technique of antithesis. Two worldviews, two value systems are opposed in it. The poet owns treasures that have no price; he, “a spendthrift and spender of priceless words,” generously gives people his spiritual wealth.
The poet is opposed to the limitations and complacency of the bourgeois consciousness. The value system, alien to the lyrical hero, is characterized by a precise, vivid metaphor: “You look like an oyster from the shell of things.”. The crowd is not only deaf to art, but also aggressive. She does not want to recognize the freedom and sovereignty of creativity, ready to “perch on the butterfly of a poet’s heart.” In the poem, a tragic motif of loneliness, the artist’s incomprehensibility in the world, characteristic of early Mayakovsky, arises. Mayakovsky’s hero is a free man, a man of a new type, he does not resign himself to a hostile world and is ready for rebellion, protest, expressed in a shocking form typical of futurist aesthetics: “I will laugh and joyfully spit, I will spit in your face, I, priceless words spender and spendthrift " There is another feature of futuristic poetics in this poem - the deliberate use of anti-poetic vocabulary (“flabby fat”, “the crowd will go wild”, “the hundred-headed louse will bristle with its legs”, “grimace”, “I’ll spit”).
The lyrical hero of early Mayakovsky is not only a fighter against an unworthy world, obsessed with the pathos of negation. This is a suffering person who is capable of compassion. He is convinced of the need for responsiveness to the pain of others, in the saving power of the light of the stars, the eyes of his beloved... In poems such as “Listen!” (1914), “Lilychka!” (1915), lyrical monologue intonation is crucial.
The rejection of the world and the feeling of loneliness of the lyrical hero cause a powerful impulse in the search for a way out. The past and present of Russia do not satisfy him and the solution is seen, naturally, in the future, in the revolutionary future.
Mayakovsky utopianly believed in the great cleansing power of the revolutionary transformation of the world and prophetically predicted its imminent arrival in the poem “A Cloud in Pants” ( “In the crown of thorns of revolutions / The sixteenth year is coming!”).
The scope of revolutionary events seems to the poet to be the beginning of a new life, in which a lonely rebel hero will merge with a mass of like-minded people, marching in step with a renewed country that embodies his utopian dream in reality. True, this construction is taking place in a struggle. The artist's task is to become "agitator, loudmouth, leader" He was sure that poetry, precisely as a propagandist-agitator, should prove, convince, and lead. Art, in his opinion, can become a form of building a new life, calling for active action. M.I. Tsvetaeva, reflecting on the new Soviet poetry, rightly noted: “It’s done from Mayakovsky. From Pasternak, I think.”
“My” revolution called into action new genres: marches, orders, anthems, calls. In his autobiography “I Myself,” Mayakovsky wrote: “To accept or not to accept? There was no such question for me. My revolution". The poet-tribune sang of his time in “Ode to the Revolution” (1918). A.V. Lunacharsky called Mayakovsky’s poetry “rally.” Particularly noticeable in this rally row is the poem “Left March” (1918), which was extremely popular in those years. Written for a speech before revolutionary sailors (the subtitle remains “To the Sailors”), it demonstrates the features of new effective poetry.
The intonation-syntactic structure of the poem (loose three-beat beater: splitting lines into short segments, etc.) gives it an oratorical character and tribune power. Refrain repeated four times:
conveys the marching precision of the “millionth step” and ideological certainty.
The terrible era comes into force from the first lines: "Your word, Comrade Mauser". The poet speaks on behalf of “we” and fully shares the conviction of the people making their choice: history simply must submit to the dictates of new ideas, the past is over: “We’ll drive the nag of history”.
Commands, calls, marching rhythms in the poem seem to emphasize the need for immediate action, demonstrate the unity, revolutionary discipline and determination of the masses.
The poem “Left March” is imbued with life-affirming pathos, although some details convey the drama of the revolutionary era, creating a picture of the hardships and misfortunes experienced by the people: “beyond the mountains of grief,” “beyond the sea of pestilence”: “let the gang surround the hired / steel pour out lei...”
“Left March” is a poem with a political theme, a rather complex poetic technique, in which the poet expressed his utopian dream of the victorious march of the Russian proletariat to the world revolution: Krepi
The world has its fingers on the throat of the proletariat!
March refrain “Left! Left! Left!” highlights the obsession of millions with this dream.
Mayakovsky's lyrical hero feels himself to be a part of the mass of people animated by the revolution. For him, the revolution is “blessed!” To her he sings “glory four times” in the poem “Ode to the Revolution.” It is the topic of the day that dictates to the artist “Order for the Army of Art” (1918):
The days of the thousandth revolution are not sung by the book of the time. To the streets, futurists, drummers and poets!
In the poems on this theme, Mayakovsky’s characteristic political didactics and some admiration of the poet-tribune’s own image were revealed.
But despite the focus on the civil, political theme, the lyrical theme also occupied a special place in Mayakovsky’s poetry. In the poem “Lilychka!” (1915), as emphasized in the subtitle (“Instead of a letter”), we have before us an excited lyrical monologue, which expresses the reckless love feeling of the hero of the poem.
The lyrical hero is experiencing a state of confusion. The entire structure of the poem is subordinated to the task of expressing it. Many researchers have emphasized the apparently intentional hyperbolism of the images. The hero's love is so enormous that comparisons and metaphors acquire a hyperbolic character: love is “sea”, love is “sun”, indirect comparisons are “bull”, “elephant” from the same series of hyperbolic images. The intensity of the feeling is on the verge of the possible - “frenzied, wild, maddened, cut off by despair.” But it is in this poem that the reader sees the image of an unprotected, vulnerable person, who is so afraid of losing his beloved, for whom loneliness is unbearable. How a person needs eyes that understand. They will save you from trouble: “Above me, / except your gaze, / the blade of a single knife has no power.” Tenderness and humility of addresses (“dear, good”), adjacent to manifestations of insane passions, convey the ambiguity and tragedy of the lyrical hero’s experiences. And such an effective epithet as a hand “broken by trembling,” almost following Stanislavsky’s method of physical action, expresses the confusion and despair of the soul of the lyrical hero.
The openness and excitement of the lyrical hero are revealed thanks to the tonic verse, in which its characteristic pauses create additional psychological tension.
In the poem “A Good Treatment for Horses” (1918), the lyrical beginning is decisive, despite the fact that it tells “an incident from life” and even shows the contrast between the vulgar crowd of “onlookers” and the lyrical hero. The contrast is quite conflicting, since the parties perceive the described event fundamentally differently:
The horse has fallen! -
The horse has fallen! -
Kuznetsky laughed.
The poem contains elements of narration and description, the polyphony of the crowd and the monologue of the lyrical hero addressed to a horse that has fallen from overwork - but everything is intended to express the melancholy of the lyrical hero and the ability to overcome it. As in the poem “Lilychka!”, the poet seems to be conjuring: a tired soul needs support. Someone should look into your eyes in a friendly manner, understand and help...
The main load in this poem falls on the verbs. It is they - “crashed”, “huddled””, “tipped over”, “approached”, “I see”, “rushed”, “went”, “came”, “stood up” - that dynamically betray the plot movement in the poem. Not only the external, eventful, but also the internal, expresses the dynamics of the hero’s experiences. Metaphors in the poem animate the image of the city, creating a picture: “the street is sliding,” it is “fed by the wind,” “shod with ice.”
The sound writing of the first stanza with the alliteration of the sounds “gr” is unusually expressive:
They beat their hooves and sang as if:
- Mushroom.
Rob.
Coffin.
Rough
Accent verse, lines broken into short intonation segments, give the poem rhythmic expression and dynamism.
The love theme is developed in the poem “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love” (1928). Mayakovsky again uses his favorite genre - a letter with a specific addressee, which determines intimacy and definiteness of intonation. This poem contains many details of the everyday environment (“crews”, “notebook”), there is also irony (“even bears would grow wings here”), but the main pathos is in the poeticization of a love feeling that knows no boundaries when one is jealous of Copernicus! According to Mayakovsky, love lifts a person above everyday life and inspires him. It is simple, human love that can create man in man, “to lift, / and lead, / and attract”.
Another love “letter” by Mayakovsky is “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva” (1928), in which an intimate love experience is translated into a socio-political plane: an expression of loving feelings and reflections on one’s era, on pride in the socialist Motherland: “I’m not myself, / but I’m jealous / for Soviet Russia”. In the love theme, the evolution of Mayakovsky from a lyric poet to a poet-tribune, a citizen is obvious.
The theme of the poet and poetry, the purpose of art, runs through all of Mayakovsky’s work. Even in the poem “Cloud in Pants,” Mayakovsky proclaimed the prophetic mission of the artist - to see what no one sees ( “where people’s eyes break short”). He was convinced of the need for an active life-building role of the poet ( “to cut the world into the skull with brass knuckles”).
In the country of the Soviets, according to Mayakovsky, poetry should join the ranks of the creators of a new reality: “Always shine. / Shine everywhere. / until the last days to the end" "An extraordinary adventure..."(1920). The poet, like the Sun, has a universal purpose. The possibilities of art, its range, the poet believes, are limitless. “The poet’s rhyme is a caress, a slogan, a bayonet, and a whip.”, he wrote in the poem “Conversation with the Financial Inspector about Poetry” (1926). The poet’s position is civically responsible and morally high, for he is “the people’s leader” and at the same time “the people’s servant.” The poet, according to Mayakovsky, is the same hard worker as the worker: “poetry is the same as radium mining”. This is hard and dangerous work, but the Motherland needs it.
In this eternal theme of poetry, Mayakovsky creates an image poet-citizen, his right to immortality is paid for by hard work and faithful service to his class: “varieties of poems are distributed throughout the commune.” Together with his Lef friends in the post-revolutionary period, he followed the principle of the artist fulfilling a “social order”.
In the poem “At the top of my voice. The first introduction to the poem" (1929 - 1930), Mayakovsky's poetic testament, is affirmed as the main advantage of poetry and the main criterion for assessing its level - participation in the construction of a new life. The poet directly addresses his descendants, looks into the “communist distance.” Before the readers of the future, he sums up his work, reflects on his place in art, on the conscious choice that he made, becoming a poet-tribune, “stepping on the throat of his own song.” The poet fulfilled his social and party duty - he rejected the “lyrical volumes” of the “song-like hero.” Poetry, according to Mayakovsky, is the front of the struggle for new life. Expanded metaphor as the main one artistic technique The introduction emphasizes the effective, combative nature of Mayakovsky's poetry. The poet, like a commander, receives the parade of troops, and the troops receive his poems, poetry of struggle, art that has given itself to the people building socialism. The main idea of the introduction “At the top of my voice” is fully consistent with the precision of the vocabulary and the emotional energy of the verse.
Satire occupied a special place in the work of Mayakovsky, as he called himself in the poem “At the top of his voice,” “a sewer man and a water carrier.”
In the early period, working in the satirical magazine “New Satyricon”, he wrote satirical hymns - “Hymn to Lunch”, “Hymn to the Critic”, “Hymn to the Scientist”, etc., in which the very rethinking of the genre (the anthem is a solemn song) served as a means of satirical ridicule of the “world of the well-fed.”
After the revolution, the poet’s satire found a “shelter” in “Windows of ROST”, its addressee became the enemies of the revolution. Mayakovsky painted hundreds of posters - popular prints - and made laconic, apt and biting satirical inscriptions for them, often using motifs from famous sayings, proverbs, and songs.
The main objects of satire in Mayakovsky's lyrics are philistinism and bureaucracy. It is in them that the poet sees an obstacle to achieving a wonderful future.
In the poem “On Rubbish” (1921), Mayakovsky stigmatizes philistine life. The bourgeois consciousness, the “philistine purse” seemed to him an obstacle to the realization of that utopian ideal model of a new life that he dreamed of. Quite harmless everyday details - “canary”, “samovar”, “ala frame” - acquire in the poem the meaning of terrible symbols of the new philistinism, which is worse than Wrangel. The grotesque image of the revived portrait of Marx and his angry rebuke to the townsfolk express the pathos of the satirical exposure of philistinism as a danger to communism.
The poem “Seated” (1922) grotesquely recreates the picture of endless meetings of Soviet bureaucratic officials. The technique of implementing the metaphor (people are torn by the need to be on time for all the meetings - half of the people are sitting in institutions) creates a satirical effect.
Mayakovsky notes with alarm that even in the new historical conditions, such vices of our life as vulgarity and bureaucracy have not been eliminated and pose a great danger. The heroes of satirical poems are exposed from the inside, which is helped by “free verse”, which conveys a wealth of intonations - from hidden irony to outright mockery. The poet is irreconcilable with such phenomena and is merciless in his assessments. He uses anti-aesthetic language and calls things by their proper names. The heroes of his satirical works fully correspond to such designations as “scum”, “rubbish”, “murlo”.
Vulgarity and philistinism as an ideology that should have no place in the new reality are satirically ridiculed in the comedy “The Bedbug” (1929).
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born on July 7, 1893 in the family of a forester, in the village of Baghdadi, near Kutaisi, in Georgia. In 1906, after the death of his father, the family moved to Moscow. Mayakovsky studied at the Moscow gymnasium. He communicated with Bolshevik students, joined the party, and was co-opted into the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP(b) (1908). He was arrested three times, and in 1909 he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Butyrka prison. After leaving prison, where he began to write poetry, Mayakovsky decides to “make socialist art”: “I interrupted party work. I sat down to study." In 1911 Mayakovsky entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. By 1912, he had his first poetic experiments related to the theory and practice of the Cubo-Futurist group, who attracted him with their protest against the foundations of bourgeois society. But if the anti-aestheticism of the Futurists manifested itself primarily in the field of “pure” form, then Mayakovsky perceived it in his own way, as an approach to solving the problem of creating a new democratic poetic language. He will say about this in the revolutionary poem “A Cloud in Pants” (1915): “...The street is writhing, tongueless - it has nothing to shout or talk with.”
Mayakovsky’s work, in its social tone, did not fit into the framework of futurism, which was especially evident in the tragedy “Vladimir Mayakovsky” (staged in 1913). The pathos of the tragedy is in protest against the institutions of bourgeois society, against the power of “soulless things.” The tragedy ultimately goes back to the sentiments of the masses, outraged by the injustice of the world, but not yet aware of their power. The pathos of denial of bourgeois reality is also palpable in the poet’s early poems (“Hell of the City,” “Here!”). For participating in public literary performances of the futurists, Mayakovsky was expelled from the school (1914). The beginning of the 1st World War of 1914-18 was reflected in his work in a non-linear way: in the article “State Shrapnel” (November 1914) he wrote that “today we need hymns...”, but in the poem “War has been declared” (July 1914 g.) and “Mom and the evening killed by the Germans” (November 1914) showed his disgust for the war, for its bloody nonsense. In poems published in the magazine “New Satyricon” (“Hymn to the Judge”, “Hymn to the Scientist”, “Hymn to the Bribe”), Mayakovsky gives sarcastic “praise” to the abominations of life, in which honest work, a clear conscience and high art become the subject of blasphemy.
A new stage was the poem “Cloud in Pants”. “Down with your love”, “Down with your art”, “Down with your system”, “Down with your religion” - four cries of four parts,” - this is how the poet himself characterized the main social and aesthetic orientation of “The Cloud”. The poem reflected the growing strength of millions spontaneously rising against capitalism and realizing their path in the struggle. The main pathos of Mayakovsky’s pre-October poems - “The Spine Flute” (1916), “War and Peace” (separate edition - 1917), “Man” (1916-17, published in 1918) - was protest against bourgeois relations that crippled the true nature of Man. This brought the poet closer to M. Gorky, who, distinguishing him from the futurists, attracted him to participate in the journal “Chronicle”.
Having joyfully greeted the October Revolution, Mayakovsky defined his position: “My revolution. I went to Smolny. Have worked. Everything that had to be done.” The poet sought to aesthetically comprehend the “stunning facts” of the new socialist reality. Before October, Mayakovsky did not have a clear social perspective. Some dogmas of the futurist group left their mark on the peculiarities of the form of his poems and on the system of social and aesthetic views. After the October Revolution, Mayakovsky’s work acquired a new social and aesthetic coloring, determined by the struggle for the ideals of communism (both in a positive and satirical sense). This was already reflected in the play “Mystery-bouffe” (1918, 2nd version, 1921) - “...a heroic, epic and satirical depiction of our era,” the first Soviet play on a modern theme. By asserting the greatness and heroism of ordinary people, Mayakovsky exposed the creative impotence of the bourgeoisie; Only the “unclean” with their moral purity and class solidarity can build the “ark” of the new world. In “The Left March” (1918), a kind of hymn to proletarian power and determination, the poet called for a fight against the enemies of the revolution. But Mayakovsky’s aesthetic palette was multicolored: in the poem “A Good Treatment for Horses” (1918), he advocated the richness of the emotions of the new person, who should have access to sympathy for all living things, all the defenseless.
The humanistic orientation of Mayakovsky's poetry acquired a new social quality. The poem “150,000,000” (1919-20, 1st edition without the author’s name, 1921) asserted the leading role of the Russian people as the herald of the socialist revolution. V.I. Lenin negatively perceived the poem, seeing in it an example of futurism, which he had a negative attitude towards. During these years, Mayakovsky began to pave the way for truly democratic art, in tune with the mood of the masses. Having moved to Moscow in March 1919, he works at “Windows of ROSTA” - he draws posters with poetic texts of a propaganda nature (about 1,100 “windows” were created in 3 years). In these posters, as well as in Mayakovsky’s industrial and book graphics of the 1920s, his talent and experience as an artist, his catchy and laconic style were especially clearly demonstrated (Mayakovsky turned to fine art starting from the 10s; his numerous portrait sketches and sketches have been preserved lubkov, theatrical works). This activity of the “worker poet,” who gave his pen and brush to the needs of the revolution, was deeply organic for Mayakovsky and corresponded to his aesthetic concept of the invasion of art into reality.
In Mayakovsky’s poetry of the 1920s, a lyrical hero of a new type appears: he does not separate his intimate world from the larger world of social storms, he does not think of the intimate outside the social - “I Love” (1922), “About This” (1923), “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva” (1928) and others. As a result of Mayakovsky’s trips to capitalist countries (USA, Germany, France, Cuba and others), the cycles of poems “Paris” (1924-25) and “Poems about America” (1925-26) appeared. Mayakovsky acted as the plenipotentiary representative of the young socialist state, challenging the bourgeois system.
The pathos of namelessness (“I sing millions”) in the poet’s work gave way to a more harmonious concept of personality. Like M. Gorky, Mayakovsky stands at the origins of Soviet Leninism. In the poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” (1924), the activities of the leader of the proletarian revolution are artistically recreated against a broad historical background. Mayakovsky realized the enormous importance of Lenin’s personality - “the most humane person”, the “organizer of victory” of the proletariat. The poem was a hymn to the “attacking class” - the proletariat and its party. Feeling like “... a soldier in a line of billions” (ibid., volume 7, 1958, p. 166), Mayakovsky considered aspiration towards a communist future as a criterion for all creative activity, including poetic. “...A great feeling called class” was the main one driving force creativity of Mayakovsky of the Soviet era. The poem "Good!" (1927) A.V. Lunacharsky called it “the October Revolution cast in bronze”; Mayakovsky sang here the “spring of humanity” - his socialist fatherland. Along with Gorky, Mayakovsky becomes the founder of socialist realism in Soviet literature.
During these years, Mayakovsky created such lyrical masterpieces as “To Comrade Nette, the Ship and the Man,” “To Sergei Yesenin” (both 1926), “Poems about the Soviet Passport” (1929) and others.
Mayakovsky's lyricism is comprehensive - it expresses the unprecedented spiritual growth of a person in a new society. Mayakovsky - lyricist, tribune, satirist - a poet of a huge, “solid heart.” Faith in the triumph of communist ideals is combined in his poems with irreconcilability towards everything that interferes with “rushing into tomorrow, forward.” Mayakovsky’s speech against bureaucracy and the fuss of the bench in the poem “The Seated” (1922) caused Lenin great “pleasure”. Inspired by the approval of the leader of the revolution, Mayakovsky later smashed all sorts of “pompadours” who clung to the party and covered their egoistic bourgeois insides with a party card (“Pompadour”, 1928, “Conversation with Comrade Lenin”, 1929). In the poems of the late 20s, in the plays “The Bedbug” (1928, staged in 1929) and “Bathhouse” (1929, staged in 1930), a whole gallery of types appeared, dangerous for their social mimicry and empty demagoguery. Mayakovsky's satirical plays, innovative both in content and form, played a major role in the development of Soviet drama.
Mayakovsky created an innovative poetic system that largely determined the development of both Soviet and world poetry; Nazim Hikmet, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, I. Becher and others experienced its impact. Based on his ideological and artistic task, Mayakovsky significantly reformed Russian verse. A new type of lyrical hero with his revolutionary attitude to reality contributed to the formation of a new poetics of maximum expressiveness: the entire system of the poet’s artistic means is aimed at the extremely dramatized verbal expression of the thoughts and feelings of the lyrical hero. This is reflected in the system of graphic notations: increased expressiveness is conveyed through changes within traditional spelling and punctuation, and the introduction of new techniques for graphically fixing text - the “column”, and since 1923 - the “ladder”, reflecting pausing. The desire for maximum expressiveness of verse passes along different lines: vocabulary and phraseology, rhythm, intonation, rhyme.
Mayakovsky headed the literary group LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and later REF (Revolutionary Front of the Arts); edited the magazine "LEF" (1923-25) and "New LEF" (1927-28), but came to the conclusion that closed groups interfere with the normal creative communication of Soviet writers, and in February 1930 he joined the RAPP, which he considered as a mass literary organization. Difficult situation recent years Mayakovsky's personal life and literary struggle led to depression and suicide. The poem “At the top of my voice” (1930) is perceived as Mayakovsky’s poetic testament, full of deep inner faith to the triumph of communism. Mayakovsky's work is widely studied both in the USSR, where a number of major monographic studies have been created, and abroad. However, his poetry was the object of subjectivist interpretation on the part of the so-called Sovietologists, who were trying to distort Mayakovsky’s poetic image and emasculate the revolutionary content of his poetry. Mayakovsky's works have been translated into all the main languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union and foreign countries.
Mayakovsky is the only artistic avant-garde artist of the twentieth century who brought his work to the masses. His works remained examples of domestic avant-gardeism throughout Soviet period. For other poets, they became a symbol of freedom and a desire for new experiments.
Mayakovsky's great merit lies in the fact that his works became a symbol of the Soviet era. He spread the ideas of the revolution far abroad, and was imitated by many poets of the new state. These works have been translated into many languages of the world. His work is especially popular in Japan, Germany and England.
Mayakovsky worked in several directions: newspaper correspondent Soviet Union, writer of poetry, artist of propaganda posters. He drew ideas for anti-bourgeois poems abroad. The poet had many tours around the country, where he read his poems. The reading of Mayakovsky's poems was accompanied by various improvisations and jokes tailored to the taste of the listeners.
His diversity of creativity testifies that the poet was truly talented. The poet's dream of writing a novel, experiments in drama - this may indicate that the poet's talent was versatile and intense. Mayakovsky considered himself a playwright, but not for the sole reason that he wrote three dramas that went down in history as innovative, and therefore, writing all this, he could capture and artistically create the most complex conflicts, characters that represent the picture of life. In his dramaturgy, Mayakovsky spread the line of propaganda poster art, which sought to democratize the theater and turn it into a wide spectacle.
Mayakovsky also creates satirical comedies who ridicule the bureaucracy and philistinism that he fought against new person, and with the help of which the socialist system was supposed to be strengthened. Having written his plays, Mayakovsky successfully developed the comedic and satirical traditions of Russian literature of the nineteenth century, complementing the traditions of Gogol, Griboyedov, Saltykov-Shchedrin. A particularly close connection emerges between the techniques of Mayakovsky and Gogol, namely between Gogol’s “The Inspector General” and Mayakovsky’s “Bathhouse”.
In Russian literary criticism there is a real confusion with the concepts of “direction” and “current”. What can be said with absolute certainty - he was an avant-garde poet, one of the brightest representatives of the poetic and artistic avant-garde (the poet was also an interesting painter, the author of the famous posters for “Windows of GROWTH”). If avant-gardeism is considered an artistic movement, then Mayakovsky belonged to such a movement as Russian futurism - in its cubo-futurist variety.
However, the very name “Cubo-Futurists”, or simply “Futurists”, was adopted by Mayakovsky and his group comrades (Aleksey Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Benedikt Livshits and others) only at the end of 1913, largely due to the fact that they were called so by analogy with the Italian futurists. The members of the group themselves, wanting to avoid such a comparison, preferred to call themselves “Budetlyans.” This word, coined by Velimir Khlebnikov, was a carbon copy of the word “futurists” and literally meant “inhabitants of the future.” The Futurists were also called the “Gilea” group, from the Greek “forest”, which is how the ancient Greeks called the area inhabited by the legendary Scythians. And the futurists felt like “Scythians”, threatening modern bourgeois civilization.
For the sake of distinction from the Italian futurists, as well as from other domestic futurist groups (primarily ego-futurists), the prefix “cubo” was invented - a sign of solidarity with European cubist artists, primarily Georges Braque and.
However, futurism existed only until the revolution, after which it broke up into many small avant-garde groups that stole its discoveries and undertakings (comfutists, fuists, formlibrists, expressionists, nichevoks and others). Mayakovsky himself founded at the end of 1922 another completely avant-garde literary group - “Lef” (“Left Front”), as well as a magazine of the same name. But by the end of the 1920s, avant-garde art, primarily due to powerful pressure from the authorities, was gradually forced out of the artistic field of the USSR, and Lef itself turned out to be an unviable association. He survived several crises, dissolution and reorganization in 1929 under a new name - “Ref” (“Revolutionary Front”), and a year later Mayakovsky made a decision that was in many ways fatal both for “Ref” and for himself personally: and wrote in 1930 application for membership Russian Association proletarian writers. The poet expressed his wish: “I believe that all active ref members should draw the same conclusion, dictated by all our previous work”. The poet’s comrades did not approve or support his decision, and in RAPP itself Mayakovsky never found new like-minded people, which was one of the reasons for the tragic ending of his life.
