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/ Biographies / Mayakovsky V. V.
Mayakovsky V. V.
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MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH, Russian poet (1893-1930).
He was born on July 19 (7), 1893 in the village of Bagdadi, Kutaisi province, in the family of a forester.
Both Mayakovsky's father and mother were hereditary noblemen (My pillar father / nobleman / / the skin on my hands is thin...
- About this).
In 1906, after the sudden death of his father, the Mayakovsky family moved to Moscow.
In Moscow, Mayakovsky, carried away by the ideas of social democracy, joined the RSDLP in 1908 and took part in underground work.
This circumstance is also connected with the termination of systematic general education by Mayakovsky, after the 5th grade of the gymnasium.
Mayakovsky was arrested three times, but in the end he was released on bail by his mother, after which he left the ranks of the Communist Party and, contrary to popular belief, subsequently did not join it.
It was in prison, under the impression of reading modern poems for the first time, in particular – Balmont, that Mayakovsky took his first steps in poetry (the poems have not been preserved), and later he evaluated what he wrote very critically.
In 1911, after several attempts to enter an art educational institution, Mayakovsky became a student of the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow.
Through David Burlyuk, who studied there, one of the leaders of the group of futurists "Gilea", Mayakovsky gets acquainted with the world of the Moscow literary and artistic avant garde.
Burlyuk, whom Mayakovsky introduced to his poems, highly appreciated them and recommended that he continue studying poetry.
From the end of 1912 the beginning of 1923, Mayakovsky took part in art exhibitions of modern art, performed with the reading of his poems, participated in public performances together with Burlyuk and other members of the Gilea group.
The first publications of Mayakovsky (poems Night, Morning) appeared at the end of 1912 in the publication "Gilei": A Slap in the Face to public taste.
Mayakovsky also participated in the writing of the manifesto of the same name, from which the position often quoted by artistic opponents of the Futurists is taken – "to throw Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin off the Ship of modernity".
The authors of numerous memoirs emphasize Mayakovsky's love for the classics, a brilliant knowledge of Pushkin's poetry, etc., trying to balance declarations of this kind.
They were typical of many left wing trends in the art of the early 20th century (cf. Italian Futurism, Dada, Surrealism).
In May 1913, the first collection of Mayakovsky – Ya!
with illustrations by the author and his comrades in the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture – V. Chekrygin and L. Shekhtel, was printed by the lithographic method in the amount of 300 copies.
In the first verses, Mayakovsky's imagery is quite traditional compared to other Futurists, but, already starting from the cycle I!, gradually anti – aestheticism, an appeal to shocking topics (I like to watch children die – A few words about myself) and, along with them, features of originality appear in them: urban imagery; dynamism and a sharp change of intonation; widespread use of motifs, the source of which was fine art, primarily modernist painting.
Such poetics also determines the peculiarities of the organization of the verse: up to the early 1920s, Mayakovsky, as a rule, splits the poetic line into small meaningful fragments; such fragmentation also compensates for the irregular punctuation or its complete absence, which distinguish Mayakovsky's publications.
The metric of Mayakovsky's poems (except for a few written in traditional syllabic tonic sizes) is characteristic of the poetry of the 1910s, in general, it is, as a rule, tonic sizes –an accent verse, a bar.
According to M. L. Gasparov, most of Mayakovsky's works "freely change the size from stanza to stanza", and "four types of verse" – iambic, chorus, dolnik and accent verse - " formed the main metrical repertoire of Mayakovsky...".
Somewhat later, there are features that were preserved in Mayakovsky's poetry in the 1920s: the use of occasional words (words associated with a certain case, occasion, and not registered as a linguistic norm) and the use of compound rhyme, common for most futurists.
Mayakovsky, together with Burlyuk, V. Kamensky and other members of the kubofuturist group, actively participates in" futuristic tours " in Russia – collective performances with lectures and poetry readings.
The performances had strong elements of theatricalization, shocking (defiant behavior, unusual clothes, makeup).
In the positive reviews that appeared later, Mayakovsky was considered outside the context of a group of futurists.
In the criticism of the 1910s, associated with the traditionalist ("realistic") trends in literature, it was often said that Mayakovsky was alien to the literary current and the grouping to which he attributed himself, and this was declared one of his main advantages: "Mayakovsky is completely alien to them, he is among them by chance... "(K.Chukovsky. Egofuturism and cubofuturism)
; Gorky called Mayakovsky the only poet among all futurists, etc.
In 1914, with the participation of the author, the Mayakovsky tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky was staged at the St. Petersburg theater "Luna Park", in which the poet played the main role – the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
According to Chukovsky's memoirs, "the play should have had a different name, but the censor, to whom Mayakovsky handed over the play, had not yet come up with the title, took the author's name for him and subsequently did not allow him to change it, but the poet was only pleased."
The original names of the tragedy are the Railway, the Uprising of Things; the motive of the rebellion of things connects it with the poetics of other Russian futurists (Khlebnikov).
The allegorical characters of the play (an old Man with black dry cats, a man without an eye and a leg, a Man without a head, etc.) are also comparable to the characters of Khlebnikov's plays.
The play in verse is not well adapted for stage production.
Its first edition develops the traditions of a futuristic book in the field of playing with fonts of various shapes and sizes.
Mayakovsky's initial reaction to the outbreak of the First World War was a desire to join the active army as a volunteer, but he was refused because of political unreliability.
The so – called "anti war" works of Mayakovsky Mother and the evening killed by the Germans, War is declared, I and Napoleon would be more accurate to call anti German.
And in a poem of the same time of Thought in the appeal, war is presented as a means of "hygiene of the world" in the spirit of the Italian Futurists.
Subsequently, Mayakovsky collaborated, as an artist and author of texts, with the publishing house "Today's Lubok", which published patriotic splints based on the traditions of Russian folk pictures.
The poem The Cloud in the Pants ((1914-1915), the original title is the Thirteenth Apostle) is the largest work of Mayakovsky in the 1910s.
In the preface to the 2nd edition in 1918 (the first without censorship exceptions), the author defined the content of the poem as follows: "down with your love, down with your art, down with your system, down with your religion..."
Although various motives are not so rigidly distributed in parts of the poem, its hero really feels rejection from everyone and everything – starting with the beloved woman who rejects him for the sake of everyday life, and ending with the higher forces against which he tries to rebel, receiving complete silence in response: Hey, you!
/ Sky!
/ Take off your hat!
/ I'm coming!
/ / Deafly.
// The universe sleeps, / putting a huge ear on its paw / with the ticks of the stars.
The poem is characterized by an unexpected, but quite simply organized imagery.
B. Pasternak's review is indicative in this regard: "...I really love Mayakovsky's early lyrics.
Against the background of the clowning of that time, her seriousness, heavy, threatening, complaining, was so unusual.
It was poetry masterfully fashioned, proud, demonic, and at the same time immensely doomed, dying, almost calling for help..."
Mayakovsky pre revolutionary period was actively engaged in the creation of the myth around its own personality, combining the features of the "cursed poet" and Nietzsche's "Superman".
"Nietzschean" line in the works of early Mayakovsky most clearly represented in the poem a Cloud in trousers (I'm over all that made / put nihil).
An important role in the poem is played by the image of the lyrical hero identified with the author (Mayakovsky's sisters, comrades in the futurist group are mentioned under their own names in the poem), which, if possible, emphasizes his youth, beauty, physical and mental health: There is not a single gray hair in my soul, / / and there is no childish tenderness in it!
//the whole world is huge with the power of the voice, / / I am beautiful, / twenty two year old.
The image of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky acquires a universal scale (I know- / the nail in my boot // is more terrible than Goethe's fantasy!).
But the hero of the poem is not reduced to the cry lipped Zarathustra, the golden mouthed one, " whose every word / gives birth to the soul; it is enough to mention a fragment describing an approaching nervous breakdown (I hear: / quietly, / like a patient from a bed, / a nerve jumped off.
/And so, – / at first I walked / barely, / then I ran, / excited, / clear).
Mayakovsky's poems were largely intended for oral recitation.
His "shocking" works (Nate!, (1913); Vam!, (1915)) were designed just for the author's reading in a traditionalist minded audience, outside of which they could not produce the shock effect implied by the author.
In 1915, Mayakovsky collaborated in the magazine "New Satyricon", where he published a number of satirical and humorous poems (Hymn to the judge, Hymn to the scientist, Hymn to dinner, That's how I became a dog, etc.).
They are strongly influenced by the imagery and stylistics of the"Satiric poets" (Sasha Cherny, etc.), which was later manifested in the satirical poems of the Mayakovsky Soviet period.
In 1915, Mayakovsky met the family of L. and O. Brikov.
O. Brik financed the publication of the poet's books and the futurist almanac "Took", and L. Brik became the addressee of many poems and poems by Mayakovsky.
In early September 1915, Mayakovsky was called up for military service, but, thanks to the patronage of M. Gorky, he was assigned to the rear Military Automobile School near Petrograd.
During the service, Mayakovsky continued to publish, participate in public speeches.
Mayakovsky's poems of the 1910s (The Flute Spine (1915), War and Peace (1915-1916), Man (1916-1917)), starting from the situation that was really present in the author's life, continue to work on the creation of the "Mayakovsky myth".
A new aspect is added to it – a hopeless love for a woman endowed with a name and recognizable features of L. Brik's appearance and biography, who prefers a lyrical hero to a poet a person who can provide her with domestic well being.
In the lyrical hero of the Spine Flute, there is no contradiction of the hero of the Cloud in his pants, he, loving, but rejected – is only the suffering side.
Although he calls God the "Supreme Inquisitor", he does not address him with threats, but only with a request to stop unbearable suffering.
The poem War and Peace, in which there is a formal innovation – an introduction to the poetic text of musical notation describes the atrocities of war as a "redemptive drama", a pledge of future harmony, where even the hero of the poem Vladimir Mayakovsky will find happiness with his beloved.
The World War is only a projection of dramatic events in the author's inner world.
The narrative in the poem Man is built on the model of the Gospel (The Nativity of Mayakovsky, the Life of Mayakovsky, the Passion of Mayakovsky, the Ascension of Mayakovsky, etc.), but a lyrical hero is put in the place of Jesus.
Mayakovsky continues to build his myth: returning to earth after thousands of years, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the hero of the poem, discovers that the street where he once lived and "shot himself at the door of his beloved" bears his name.
The February Revolution, and later the October Revolution, were initially perceived by Mayakovsky rather as an outburst of natural forces (Today a thousand – year old before... - Revolution is collapsing. Poetochronika, 1917).
The poet welcomes not just a social revolution, but the renewal of the entire firmament, the universe as a whole, and therefore art.
He hopes that the new government will grant the Futurists exclusive rights in the field of Raphael have you forgotten?
/ / Have you forgotten Rastrelli?
/ / Time / bullets / on the wall of museums to tinkle.
// Shoot a hundred inch mouthful of old stuff!
(It's too early to rejoice, 1918).
The play Mystery Buff was written in 1917-1918 (2nd edition 1921) and staged for the first anniversary of the October Revolution by the author himself (Mayakovsky also participated in the creation of costumes and scenery and performed several roles).
It again uses biblical stories and imagery, quite transparently correlated with modern events (the flood – the revolution, the promised Land – communism implemented).
The second edition of the play was heavily revised, allusions to recent political events were introduced into it; Mayakovsky recommended making changes to the text in future productions to make it topical.
Mayakovsky's experiments in the field of cinema belong to 1918 (three films were shot in total, one was completely preserved – the Young Lady and the Bully; Mayakovsky acted as a screenwriter, director and actor).
Subsequently, Mayakovsky repeatedly wrote screenplays, some of which Three, October and December were realized.
The claims of the futurists, organized around the newspaper "Art of the Commune", to a monopoly position in the art of post revolutionary Russia, despite the patronage of the People's Commissar of Education A. Lunacharsky, were not realized.
Most of the leadership of the commissariat and other cultural management bodies adhered to more traditional views in the field of art.
In the post revolutionary period, Mayakovsky continued to actively participate in literary life – readings, debates, which became the main way of poetry's existence.
The publication of the poem 150,000,000 (1919-1920) was originally conceived as anonymous.
The events of the revolution and the war are expressed in the poem in the allegorical form of the confrontation between Ivan, who personifies the one hundred and fifty million people of revolutionary Russia, and US President Woodrow Wilson, the embodiment of the capitalist world.
In Soviet critical and philological literature, the poem was often presented as proof of the" folk roots " of Mayakovsky's work; in fact, the origins of its imagery are not so much in folklore as in its official stylizations, in particular, during the First World War.
Since the beginning of the 1920s, Mayakovsky gradually began to move away from the traditions of futurism; in his later poems, almost only free metrics, compound rhymes and an abundance of occasional phrases remind of them.
The poem I love (1922) differs both from the poems of Mayakovsky of the 1910s and from the poem About this by a general optimistic mood.
All possible conflicts (including being in prison; for the first time, Mayakovsky tries to introduce communist views and revolutionary beliefs into the mythologized image of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky as an extremely important detail) are attributed to the past.
Nothing prevents the hero from quenching his thirst for love anymore: My anatomy has gone crazy on me.
// A solid heart - / hums everywhere.
Since 1923, almost all of Mayakovsky's works, without exception, have used the technique of graphic organization of verse, with which from that moment the poet's work is associated with most readers – the breakdown of lines into meaningful fragments by the so called "ladder".
Mayakovsky himself in the article How to make poems?
explains the appearance of the "ladder" by the need to convey the features of intonation, the sound of the verse for the "average" reader, since traditional punctuation is too poor for this.
In 1919-1922, Mayakovsky collaborated as an artist and author of texts, and then led a workshop for the production of the so – called "Windows of GROWTH" (Russian Telegraph Agency) - posters intended for hanging in the windows of empty shops and reflecting topical political and military events.
With the arrival of Mayakovsky, the "Windows of GROWTH" acquired a structure resembling a modern comic book: a series of drawings depicting consistently developing events, with short poetic captions.
Attempts to make the texts more accessible to an illiterate and poorly educated reader led to an appeal to stylization for folklore.
The drawings and texts for the posters were anonymous, and it is not always possible to accurately determine the authorship of Mayakovsky.
Since 1922, Mayakovsky was actively involved in the activities of the artistic group of Lef (Left Front [art]), grouped around the magazine (1st room – 1923).
The group included how writers (Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, N. Aseev, S. Tretyakov) and linguists (V. Shklovsky, O. Brik), and representatives of other fields of art (P.Eisestein, Dziga Vertov, A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova).
Briefly, Lef's artistic program can be defined as a direct representation of reality: instead of" fiction literature " – "fact literature", instead of feature films – documentary, instead of painting – photography, etc.Lef claimed an exceptional place in the art of the USSR, for the exceptional fidelity of the artistic methods and approaches to the role of art offered by him.
The poem About this (1923), published in the first issue of the magazine "Lef", which contained the group's declaration, was presented as a sample of "the literature of fact" (the first separate edition of the poem was illustrated by Rodchenko's photomontages using photographs of Mayakovsky and L. Brik).
In fact, the poem was closely connected with the work of Mayakovsky's futuristic period not only in terms of plot (the poet loves a woman who belongs entirely to a world alien to him, which is defined as "philistine"), but also in its imagery.
It uses different stylistic layers (urban romance, colloquial speech), the motif of duality (the hero either identifies himself with a polar bear, or turns into it; correlates with a suicide Komsomol member and with the hero of the poem Man).
In the finale of the poem, Mayakovsky addresses the topic of the future resurrection of the dead that worried him.
The poet was keenly interested in the ideas of the Russian philosopher cosmist N. Fedorov about the future resurrection of all living people.
However, the hero of the poem, who did not live out his earthly life, did not like his own on earth, is completely unsure of his future resurrection and hopes only for a big headed quiet chemist from the thirtieth century who is able to bring him and his beloved back to life.
In the poem Jubilee (1924), Mayakovsky refers to the image of Pushkin, whom he now declares to be a great poet – equal to Vladimir Mayakovsky: Maybe / I / am / alone / really regret / / that today / you are not alive.
<...
> After the death / us / standing almost next... 1920 x actively worked (in collaboration with A. Rodchenko) over advertising and packaging design (Trest "Mosselprom", "Resinates", GUM, etc.; a Silver medal and a diploma of the Exhibition of decorative arts in Paris, 1925).
It is difficult to determine the extent to which Mayakovsky regarded their campaign advertising and poems, in the field of design as a source of income; he, of course, was this activity as an application of the ideological attitudes of the Lef to the field of literature and the fine arts, as his sacrifice for the victory of the revolution (but I've been humbled, / becoming / on the throat of his own song In a loud voice, 1930).
Being a full time or freelance correspondent for numerous Soviet Newspapers, Mayakovsky often wrote poems to certain events, dates, propaganda, propaganda content.
As a journalist and as an advertising representative of the Mosselprom trust, he quite often visited abroad, the "bourgeois" reality also became the subject of propaganda poems.
He also wrote a lot for children.
Mayakovsky's poems of the 1920s become very uneven: often a bright line or a separate image is lost in an expressionless text.
The most significant poems of Mayakovsky in the mid second half of the 1920s, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924) and Well! (1927)
, also inferior to the earlier ones.
In them, Mayakovsky tries to resort to the same technique as in his best examples of this form – to introduce the mythologized poet Vladimir Mayakovsky as a character in them.
However, the hero is a poet and his feelings and experiences in both poems do not become central; they, like all the artistic means used, should only set off the ideological content; while in the early poems, I Love both the plot and the image system are built around the mythologized image of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
In the post revolutionary period, Mayakovsky wrote a lot of journalistic prose, stylized as colloquial speech, typical of the 1920s.
Mayakovsky actively performed in various cities of the USSR with the reading of his own poems.
An obligatory element of such evenings was the improvisation responses to notes from the audience, accompanied by jokes, often designed for the most unpretentious taste.
Such performances were not only a form of presenting their works, but also a way of earning money.
A contemporary recalled: "He read truly wonderful.
And a wonderful voice, rich in intonations, strong, sonorous and flexible, and a variety of shades, a great ability to convey a detail – color or sound without any tricks..."
At the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky again turns to drama.
His plays The Bedbug (1928, 1st post. - 1929) and The Bath (1929, 1st post – - 1930) were written for the Meyerhold Theater.
They combine a satirical depiction of the reality of the 1920s with the development of Mayakovsky's favorite motif – resurrection and travel to the future.
In the Bug, the motif develops ironically: the "former worker" Prisypkin, discovered and mistakenly unfrozen by researchers of the future who took him for a proletarian, ends up in the zoo as the last specimen of the long extinct "philistine vulgaris" together with a representative of another extinct species – a bug.
In the Bathhouse, a Phosphoric woman who came from the future takes young enthusiasts with her on a time machine, leaving the bureaucrat Pobedonosikov in the present.
Meyerhold highly appreciated the satirical talent of the Mayakovsky playwright, comparing him in the power of irony with Moliere.
However, the critics of the play, especially the Bathhouse, were perceived extremely unkindly.
And, if, as a rule, they saw artistic shortcomings and artificiality in the Bedbug, then they made claims of an ideological nature to the Bathhouse – they talked about exaggerating the danger of bureaucracy, the problem of which does not exist in the USSR, etc.
Harsh articles against Mayakovsky appeared in the newspapers, even under the heading " Down with Mayakovism!"
In February 1930, after leaving the Refa (the Revolutionary Front [of Arts], a group formed from the remnants of the Lef), Mayakovsky joined the RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), where he was immediately attacked for "hitchhiking".
In March 1930, Mayakovsky organized a retrospective exhibition "20 years of work", which presented all areas of his activity.
(The term of 20 years was counted, apparently, from writing the first poems in prison.)
The exhibition was ignored by both the party leadership and former colleagues in the Left/Ref.
One of the many circumstances: the failure of the exhibition "20 years of work"; the failure of the performance based on the play Banya at the Meyerhold Theater, prepared by devastating articles in the press; friction with other members of the RAPP; the danger of losing his voice, which would make public performances impossible; failures in his personal life (a love boat crashed on life Unfinished, 1930), or their confluence, caused Mayakovsky to commit suicide on April 14, 1930.
In many works (Flute spine, Man, About it) Mayakovsky deals with the topic of the suicide of a lyrical hero or his double; after his death, these topics were reinterpreted accordingly by readers.
Soon after Mayakovsky's death, with the active participation of members of the RAPP, his work was under an unspoken ban, his works were practically not published.
The situation changed in 1936, when Stalin, in a resolution to a letter from L. Brik with a request for assistance in preserving the memory of Mayakovsky, publishing the poet's works, organizing his museum, called Mayakovsky "the best talented poet of our Soviet era."
Mayakovsky was practically one the only representative of the artistic avant garde of the early 20th century, whose works remained accessible to a wide audience throughout the Soviet period.
For many completely different poets of the 1950s and 60s, the pre revolutionary Mayakovsky became a symbol of creative freedom and artistic experiment.
"When we talk about Mayakovsky," Marina Tsvetaeva wrote – " we, and maybe our grandchildren, will have to turn not back, but forward.
Speaking of the poet, God grant us to remember the century."
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