Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930)
Georgian-born Russian playwright, screenwriter and poet.
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You don't have to be a poet, but you do have to be a citizen. Well, Mayakovsky was not a citizen, he was a lackey, who served Stalin faithfully. He added his babble to the magnification of the immortal image of the leader and teacher.
Tramp squares with rebellious treading!
Up heads! As proud peaks be seen!
In the second flood we are spreading
Every city on earth will be clean.
Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life.
We're quits: stupid to draw up a list
of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains.
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
No gray hairs streak my soul,
no grandfatherly fondness there!
I shake the world with the might of my voice,
and walk handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
Incomprehensible rubbish.
If you wish,
I shall grow irreproachably tender:
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
In parade deploying
the armies of my pages,
I shall inspect
the regiments in line.
Heavy as lead,
my verses at attention stand,
ready for death
and for immortal fame.
On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.
He was perhaps the only tolerable propaganda poet of all time: he meant it, and the energy he put into it was, as is frequently said, demonic.
A rhyme's
a barrel of dynamite.
A line is a fuse
that's lit.
The line smoulders,
the rhyme explodes
and by a stanza
a city
is blown to bits.
I understand the power and the alarm of words
Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes,
but those which make coffins break from bearers
and on their four oak legs walk right away.
With this man, the newness of our times was climatically and uniquely in his blood. His very strangeness was one with the strangeness of the age, an age still half unrealised.
Agitprop
sticks
in my teeth too,
and I'd rather
compose
romances for you
more profit in it
and more charm.
But I
subdued
myself,
setting my heel
on the throat
of my own song.
Mayakovsky was and is the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory and works is a crime.
I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood
what then?,
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.
He stands with one foot on Mont Blanc and with the other on the Elbrus. His voice out-thunders thunder. What is the wonder that
the proportions of earthly things vanish and that no difference is left between the small and the great?
No doubt this hyperbolic style reflects in some measure the frenzy of our time. But this does not provide it with an overall artistic justification. It is impossible to out-clamour war and revolution, but it is easy to get hoarse in the attempt.
Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.
Love
for us
is no paradise of arbors
to us
love tells us, humming,
that the stalled motor
of the heart
has started to work
again.
Hey, you!
Heaven!
Off with your hat!
I am coming!
Not a sound.
The universe sleeps,
its huge paw curled
upon a star-infested ear.
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