Flowers for a Russian poet who upset Lenin

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 17

Flowers for a Russian poet who upset Lenin

From

PETER MILLAR,

Reuter, in Moscow

Fresh flowers lie at the base of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s statue in the bustling Moscow square that bears his name, and the publishing houses are issuing new editions of the poetry of the angry young man who became a state insitution.

Mayakovsky, who committed suicide 53 years ago at the age of 37, still poses problems for official appraisers of the “poet of the revolution.”

The great “Soviet Encyclopaedia” in its two-page, illustrated entry on Mayakovsky purposely omits the circumstances of his death, as do school text books. Suicide is not considered a positive contribution to communist construction.

Soviet television, in a series of anniversary programmes, has avoided difficult biography in favour of straight-forward, emotionfilled declamations of his major works by serious young men in conservative suits.

The Mayakovsky who was becoming disenchanted with the results of the revolution he had preached, and who shot himself for unrequited love, is not the hero of applied art that Soviet orthodoxy would have him.

At the height of his success Mayakovsky inclined to the official view of the role of art in revolution, but he was more indulgent than proponents of communist realism — the idea that art and literature should serve the revolutionary cause. Born on July 7,1893, the son of a forest ranger in the Georgian village of Bagdada, Mayakovsky became an early revolutionary when the family moved to Moscow. At the age of 15 he was jailed for 11 months for associating with Bolsheviks. His early poetry, linked to the futurist movement, carried such unusual titles as “A Cloud in Trousers” or “Spine Flute,” but the post-1917 Mayakovsky became a fervent proponent of art not for its own sake but for the sake of progress. He joined the party, wrote snappy anti-capitalist jingles, and did his own drawings for political broadsheets. He was a poseur, photographed in tweed suit and astrakhan hat, next with the swept back long hair and, cape of the ffimantic poet, and Then with his

head shaved totally bald. It is said that Lenin neither liked nor understood the unconventional, rhetorical verses that this forthright young man read aloud to rapturous audiences at gatherings more political than liter-

However, on Lenin’s death, Mayakovsky wrote a 4000-line epic dedicated to the founder of the Soviet state. It is at times difficult to reconcile the poetry and the political rhetoric and remember that the same man wrote:

“Your slogan for the years ahead, Is worker and peasant — be prepared. Be proud and give thanks, To Join the Rea Army ranks." And the following lines from an early poem which forshadow his own tragic end: “The heart longs for a bullet, the throat craves for a razor, The soul trembles between walls of ice .. . And it will never escape the

ice.” Even contemporary critics, notably among emigre Russians, often found him hard to explain. Prince D. S. Mirsky, who in 1925 was lecturing on Russian literature at King’s College, London, said of him: “Mayakovsky is first of all a man with strong lungs, and his loud utterings, if not always refined, often crude and coarse, are essentially the healthy outcome of a man with buoyant animal spirits.” He died on April 14, 1930, in his Moscow flat Ten years later Stalin gave the go-ahead for a wealth of Mayakovsky publications when he declared his admiration for the poet of the proletariat. In the Second World War tanks and fighter aircraft bore his name. Today the name is commemorated by the village in which he was born, and in Moscow by the street where he died, a public square, a metro station, a theatre, and a museum.

The Government daily “Izvestiya,” announcing the new editions to mark the anniversary of his death said his work was to be found in almost every Soviet home. “His poetry is in harmony with our time, and with the enthusiasm of modern evenfay working life,” it said. T