topics: |  drama | poetry | russia

[Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky]  (1893--1930)
is no doubt one of the most influential (and controversial) of modern Russian
poets.

His fierce defence of the Soviet system alienated him to many Russians
(particularly the large and influential emigre community), and his lifestyle
of utter excess fringing on megalomania does little to endear him.  However,
many of his poems, such as Conversation with a tax collector about poetry
retain an undeniable power.  Mayakovsky is also a pioneer in creative writing
pedagogy, and often conducted "How to write verse" lectures, using his own
poems as exemplars.

The introductory biography by Patricia Blake is full of Mayakovsky's exotic
quirks, including an episode where he disrupted an official dinner and
prevented a minister and an ambassador from speaking (by yelling
outrageously), and reduced a visiting Finn dignitary to epileptic
paroxysms of "too much... too much... "

Cruelty

Also describes a series of cruel acts against lovers, including a 17-year
girl who commits suicide three years after estrangement - and then Mayakovsky
incorporates her suicide into a plot.

In another episode, noted dissolute neo-romantic poet, Sergei Esenin
committed suicide in 1925, by slashing his wrists and writing a farewell
poem in his own blood; a day later he finally hanged himself.
Two lines from the poem:
	  in this life to die is nothing new
	  and, in truth, to live is not much newer.

Mayakovsky's "most famous act of cruelty" was in response to these lines,
in the poem To Sergei Esenin, where he counters:
	In this life it is not hard to die,
	to mold life is more difficult

A year later, in a lecture titled "How to make verse", he used To Sergei Esenin
as an example, and elaborated on his purpose behind writing it:
    to deliberately paralyze the action of Esenin's last lines... the
    wroking class needs strength in order to continue the revolution which
    demands... that we glorify life and the joy that is to be found along
    that most difficult of roads -- the road towards communism." (from _How
    to make verse_, 1926

[At the time, Mayakovsky was a noted "communist poet", posited the Lef
conception of poetry (to work in accordance with "social demand"), here the
poetry of self-expression has no place. ]

[as a matter of interest, the farewell note by Esenin goes:
	Goodbye, dear friend, goodbye
	My love, you are in my heart.
	It was preordained we should part
	And be reunited by and by.
	Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
	Let's have no sadness furrowed brow.
	In this life to die is nothing new
	and, in truth, to live, is not much newer. [Dec 1925]

Extracts

Conversation with a tax collector about poetry

Citizen tax collector!
  	  Forgive my botheing you ...
Thank you ...
        don't worry ...
		  I'll stand ...

My business
	is
	   of a delicate nature:
about the plate
	  of the poet
		in the workers' ranks.

Along with
	owners
		of stores and property
I'm made subject
		to taxes and penalties.
You demand
	 I pay
		five hundered for the half year
and twenty-five
		for failing to send in my returns.
Now
    my work
	   is like
		 any other work.
Look here --
		how much I've lost,
what
     expenses
	    I have in my production
and how much I spend
		on materials.
You know,
	of course, about "rhyme."
Suppose
	a line
		ends with the word
				"day,"
and then,
	repeating the syllables
			  in the third line
we insert
	something like
			"tarara-boom-de-day."
In your idiom
	 rhyme
		is a bill of exchange
to be honoured in the third line! ---
		that's the rule.
And so you hunt
	 for the small change of suffixes and flections
in the depleted cashbox
		   of conjugations
				and declensions.

You start shoving
		a word
			into the line,
but it's a tight fit --
    		 you press it and it breaks.
Citizen tax collector,
		       honestly,
the poet
	spends a fortune on words

In our idiom
    rhyme is a keg.
      		A keg of dynamite.
The line
	is a fuse.
The line burns to the end
      	and explodes
		and the town
is blown sky-high ??
     	   in a strophe.
Where can you find,
	and at what price,
rhymes
	that take aim and kill on the spot?
Suppose
	only half a dozen
		unheard-of rhymes
were left,
	in, say, Venezuela.
And so
	I'm drawn
		to North and South.
I rush around
	entangled in advances and loans.
Citizen!
	Consider my traveling expenses.

Poetry

	-- all of it! --
		is a journey to the unknown.

Poetry
	is like mining radium.
For every gram
	you work a year.
For the sake of a single word
	you waste
a thousand tons
	of verbal ore.
But now
	incendiary
		the burning of these words
compared
	with the smoldering
		of the raw material.
These words
	will move
millions of hearts
	for thousands of years.

Of course,
	there are many kinds of poets.
So many of them
	use legerdemain!
And,
	like conjurers,
		pull lines from their mouths --
their own --
	and other people's.
Not to speak
	of the lyrical castrates?!
They're only too glad
	to shove in
		a borrowed line.
This is
	just one more case
		of robbery and embezzlement
among the frauds rampant in the country.
These
	verses and odes
		bawled out
			today
amidst applause,
       will go down
in history
	as the overhead expenses
of what
	two or three of us
		have achieved.
As the saying goes,
	you eat forty pounds
		of table salt,
and smoke
	a hundred cigarettes
in order
	to dredge up
		one precious word
from artesian
	human depths.

So at once
	my tax
		shrinks.
Strike out
	one wheeling zero
		from the balance due!
For a hundred cigaretts --
	a ruble ninety;
for table salt --
	a ruble sixty.
Your form
	has a mass of questions:
"Have you traveled on business
	or not?"
But suppose
	I have
		ridden to death
a hundred Pegasi
	in the last
		15 years?
And here you have --
	imagine my feelings! --
something
	about servants
		and assets.
But what if I am
	simultaneously
		a leader
and a servant
	of the people?
The working class
	speaks
		through my mouth,
and we,
	proletarians,
		are drivers of the pen.
As the years go by,
	you wear out
		the machine of the soul.
And people say:
	"A back number,
		he's written out,
			he's through!"
There's less and less love,
	and less and less daring,
and time
	is a battering ram
		against my head.
Then there's amortization,
	the deadliest of all;
amortization
	of the heart and soul.
And when
	the sun
		like a fattened hog
rises
	on a future
		without beggars and cripples,
I shall
	already
		be a putrefied corpse
			under a fence,
together
	with a dozen
		of my colleagues.
Draw up
	my
		posthumous balance!
I hereby declare --
	and I'm telling no lies:
Among
	today's
		swindlers and dealers,
I alone
	shall be sunk
		in hopeless debt.
Our duty is
	to blare
		like brass-throated horns
in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity
	and seething storms.
A poet
	is always
		indebted to the universe,
paying,
	alas,
		interest
			and fines.
I am
	indebted
		to the lights of the Broadway,
to you,
	to the skies of Bagdadi,	[Mayakovsky's birthplace]
to the Red Army,
	to the cherry trees of Japn --
to everything
	about which
		I have not yet written.

But, after all,
	who needs
		all this stuff?
Is its aim to rhyme
	and rage in rhythm?
No, a poet's word
	is your resurrection
and your immortality,
	citizen and official.
Centuries hence,
	take a line of verse
from its paper frame
	and bring back time!
And this day
	with its tax collectors,
its aura of miracles
	and its stench of ink,
will dawn again.
Convinced dweller in the present day,
go
to the N.K.P.S.(*5),
	take a ticket to immortality
and, reckoning
	the effect
		of my verse,
stagger my earnings
	over three hundred years!
But the poet is strong
	not only because,
remembering you,
	the people of the future
		will hiccup.

No!
	Nowadays too
		the poet's rhyme
is a caress
	and a slogan,
		a bayonet
			and a knout!
Citizen tax collector,
	I'll cross out
all the zeros
	after the five
		and pay the rest.
I demand
	as my right
		an inch of ground
among
	the poorest
		workers and peasants.
And if
	you think
		that all i have to do
is to profit
	by other people's words,
then,
	comrades,
		here's my pen.
Take
	a crack at it
		yourselves!
				(1926)

online here (japanese forum)

[...]

Past one o'clock p.135

    	[his last poem, may be considered his suicide note]

Past one o'clock.  You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And as they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits.  Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

    [Notes from the back]
    [After Mayakovsky's suicide on April 14, 1930, this poem was found,
    untitled, among several pages of scribbled lines in his notebook.  It
    is presumed to be either a continuation of At the top of my voice or
    part of the projected lyrical introduction to that poem.  M used the
    middle quatrain ("And as they say... hurts." as an epilogue in his
    suicide note, except he changed the line, "Now you and I are quits" to
    "Now life and I are quits".

    In the suicide note he also included a further wordplay- he altered the
    sentence "incident is closed" ischerpan, to read isperchen -
    suggesting "the incident is too highly peppered", hence spoiled. ]

Blurb

Mayakovsky (1893-1930) is one of the most important post-Revolution poets
of Russia, and one of the major international figures of 20th-century
avant-garde poetics. This selected edition draws from his entire career,
ranging from his early love lyric "The Cloud in Trousers," through
"Conversation with a tax Collector About Poetry," to "Bedbug," his late
dramatic work exploding with his disillusionment with the Soviet
State. Russian originals face the English translations.