Biography of Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930) - famous Soviet poet 20th century, publicist, playwright, artist. In addition, he is a talented film actor, director and screenwriter.
early years
Born on July 7 (19), 1893 in the village of Baghdati, Georgia, in the family of a forester. Mayakovsky had 2 sisters, and 2 of his brothers died while still children.
Young Vladimir was fluent in Georgian language. The first education in the biography of Mayakovsky was received at the gymnasium of the city of Kutaisi, where he entered in 1902.
In 1906 he moved to Moscow with his mother, began to study at gymnasium No. 5. The revolution did not leave Mayakovsky aside. Due to the inability to pay for education, he was expelled from the gymnasium. Then Vladimir Vladimirovich joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
The beginning of the creative path
During one of the arrests, Mayakovsky's first poem (1909) was written in prison. In 1911 Mayakovsky entered the Moscow School of Painting. Then he became interested in the work of the futurists. Mayakovsky's first poem, Night, was published in 1912. The following year, the writer created the tragedy "Vladimir Mayakovsky", which he staged himself and played the main role in it.
In 1915, Mayakovsky's famous poem "A Cloud in Pants" was completed. Further poetry of Mayakovsky, in addition to anti-war topics, also contains satirical ones.
In the work of Mayakovsky, scripts for films take their due place. He starred in three of his films in 1918.
Travel and social activities
The years 1918-1919 in the biography of Vladimir Mayakovsky are marked by the wide spread of the theme of revolution. He participated in the release of posters "Windows of satire ROSTA", in which he created signatures, drawings. In 1923 he created the creative association LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and the magazine LEF, in which he was an editor. Pasternak, Osip Brik, B. Arvatov, N. Chuzhak, Tretyakov, and others were published in this journal.
In 1922-1924 Mayakovsky visited Germany, France and Latvia. In 1925 he traveled to the USA, Mexico, Havana. In America, the poet happened brief romance with one Russian emigrant, as a result of which Mayakovsky's daughter, Patricia, was born.
Returning from abroad, he travels around the USSR, writes poetry, makes presentations. Mayakovsky's poems were published in many newspapers, magazines, and publications. In 1928, the famous play by Mayakovsky, The Bedbug, was released, and in 1929, The Bathhouse.
Death and legacy
At the beginning of 1930, the poet was ill a lot. Further, a series of failures awaited Mayakovsky: his exhibition “20 Years of Work” did not bring success, and the premiere of the play “The Bedbug” and the play “Bath” failed. The state of mind of Vladimir Vladimirovich was deteriorating. And on April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself.
Many objects have been named after the great poet and playwright (for example, Mayakovsky's libraries, streets, quarters, parks, metro stations, cinemas), numerous monuments have been erected. Theatres. Vl. Mayakovsky are located in Moscow, Norilsk, Dushanbe.
In complex and difficult conditions, the path in the art of the greatest poet of the 20th century begins. Mayakovsky himself attributed the beginning to 1909, the most gloomy period in the country. V.I. Lenin characterized it as a time of split, disunity, defection and "pornography in place of politics."
Back in 1908, as a 14-year-old boy, he joined the Bolsheviks, carried out propaganda work, and was serving a sentence in the Butyrka prison. The poems with which Mayakovsky dated the beginning of his career were written there. The case initiated against Mayakovsky was dismissed due to his infancy. Having lost contact with the organization, carried away by the idea of creating a new socialist art, which, as it seemed to him, could not be created under the conditions of underground work, Mayakovsky moved away from the revolutionary movement. He studied painting at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, from where he was soon expelled for his futuristic "leftism". Together with V. Khlebnikov, D. Burliuk and A. Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky organized a group of cubo-futurists, signing their manifesto "Slap in the face of public taste". During the imperialist war of 1914, Mayakovsky took a defeatist position. In 1915 he was called up for military service as a draftsman. He enthusiastically met, but soon became disillusioned with the February Revolution. In the October days he began to work with the Bolsheviks. During the years of war communism, he did a great job at Rosta. At the beginning of the NEP, he organized a group of the "left front of art", which centered around the magazines "Lef" and "New Lef", which Mayakovsky edited. Made several trips abroad Western Europe(France, Spain) and America (USA and Mexico). 20 year old creative way The poet ended with the entry at the beginning of 1930 into the RAPP. A personal crisis led Mayakovsky on April 14 of the same year to suicide.
As such, there is no complexity of periodization. We can talk about the pre-October and post-October periods. Although it is worth noting that many of the events of 1905 were realized by him later. After his release from prison in 1910, he decided to take up painting, deciding that poetry was not for him. But already in 1912 he determined his path as a poet by printing 3 poems.K. Chukovsky recalled at that time Mayakovsky and his lively interest in modern literary movements, forcing the former to translate aloud Walt Whitman. It is worth noting Mayakovsky's attention to symbolism in 1905-1910, when he developed and was active in the struggle for "leaving the artist an artist." A. Bely's fascination with "formal novelty" to a certain extent prepared Mayakovsky for participation in the performances of the futurists. He did not immediately accept their aesthetic theories. Mayakovsky always gravitated towards realism. How Repin E.I., seeing Mayakovsky's drawings, exclaimed: "The most seasoned realist." But the influence of the formalist aesthetics of futurism was reflected in Mayakovsky's theoretical speeches and poetry. But they already
testified to the birth of an unusual talent.M. Gorky wrote in 1915: “I read his book of poems. Something stopped me. It is written in real words.
Mayakovsky's work is contradictory and complex. He organically went through the most complex poetic restructuring. Mayakovsky's path to the art of the socialist revolution, to the poetry of the proletariat ran through bumps and ruts of individualism, painful messianic loneliness and delusional longing. From solitary rebellion and protest against capitalist relations from an abstract humanistic standpoint, through a petty-bourgeois revolutionary cosmic perception of the prospects of the October Revolution, to genuine proletarian revolutionary spirit, such is the path of the poet.
Russian futurism, even in its social origins, did not represent unity. The literary and organizational development of futurism went in several directions. The futurism of Igor Severyanin, Ignatiev, Kryuchkov, Gnedkov, Olimpov and other ego-futurists is a typical bourgeois phenomenon in Russian literature, expressing the beginning of the collapse of the bourgeois consciousness of the era of imperialism. The futurism of the Mezzanine of Poetry (Shershenevich, Ivnev, Bolshakov and others) is a typical reactionary petty-bourgeois product of the same period. The Gileya Futurist group, to which Mayakovsky also belonged (it included D. Burliuk, Velemir Khlebnikov, Kamensky, Kruchenykh, E. Guro, and others), to some extent expressed the revolutionary aspirations of the urban petty bourgeoisie. But the burden of bourgeois consciousness weighed heavily on the Gileyans as well. Their protest against bourgeois poetry, symbolists par excellence, was a formalist-literary protest. In the manifesto of the Gileevites of 1912, published in Sat. "A slap in the face of public taste", they protest against the academies and Pushkin, personified, according to the futurists, in their contemporary symbolists. The Gileevites demanded - and this was the main point of their positive program - the poet's work on the invention of new words, they cited Khlebnikov's experiments as an example, that is, in the end they opposed their symbolist poetry along the lines of only formalist-literary. Mayakovsky, who signed this manifesto, limited himself at that time to formal requirements. However, less than other Futurists, he could consider his poetry as the poetry of formalism.
In 1912-1917, Mayakovsky appears as a kind of utopian socialist, as the spokesman for that group of petty-bourgeois, humanistic-minded intelligentsia, whose ideological development subsequently led to the acceptance of the October Revolution. The main theme of Mayakovsky's pre-revolutionary work is man and capitalism. The very nature of the petty-bourgeois utopian manifested itself in Mayakovsky's very formulation of the theme "man and capitalism". By the power of his talent, the poet expressed a feeling of confusion, powerlessness
in the face of capitalism, which disfigures and destroys the individual.
Z. S. PAPERNY
MAYAKOVSKY'S NOTEBOOKS
(From creative laboratory poet)
People often say this about Vladimir Mayakovsky:
He composed his poems not in the office, but on the street - in motion, in walking ...
This idea is supported by the statements of the poet himself:
“I walk, waving my arms and mooing still almost without words, either shortening my step so as not to interfere with the mooing, then mooing faster in time with the steps” (“How to Do Poems”, X, 230).
But one should not think that Mayakovsky did not work at his desk at all, that he put on paper only the final text of the work. The manuscripts of the early poems, with few exceptions, have not survived. But manuscripts have been preserved that capture - although far from complete - the creative history of the poems of the Soviet era, the most process design of artistic thought.
Work on the poem "150,000,000" (1919-1920) is reflected in two notebooks (Library-Museum of V. V. Mayakovsky), in typewritten text and proofs (Central State Archive of Literature and Art). Using the notebook kept in the TsGALI, one can restore important moments in the creative history of the poem “I Love” (1922), which, by the way, is still far underestimated and for some reason pushed into the section of poems in the complete collection of works. Richly represented in six notebooks is the work on the "V International", a poem that is sometimes spoken of with excessive haste as a poet's failure. L. Yu. Brik has (and photocopied) two draft and one white manuscript of the poem “About this” (1923) - an invaluable treasure for someone who seeks to penetrate into the laboratory of Mayakovsky's creativity. Work on the largest poems "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1924) and "Good!" (1927), above the introduction to the poem "Out loud" (1929-1930) is reflected in the notebooks (Library-Museum). If we turn to poems, then here we can see that Mayakovsky's handwritten legacy is not at all as poor as it is commonly said.
Behind the words that Mayakovsky did not compose poetry on paper, but only in motion, in walking, that he was unaware of Pushkin's "fingers ask for a pen, pen for paper", behind these words containing a large share of truth, but not all the truth - sometimes lies the unwillingness to carefully examine everything that has been preserved in the papers, manuscripts, notebooks of the poet.
True, we have separate books and articles devoted to the very process of Mayakovsky's work on poetry. But they are few. In the 1940 collection "Vladimir
Mayakovsky”, published under the editorship of A. L. Dymshits and O. V. Tsekhnovitser, “Overview of Mayakovsky’s manuscript heritage” was published (based on materials from the Library-Museum). The author of the review, N. V. Reformatskaya, wrote: “The study of Mayakovsky’s handwritten heritage, his “workshop of verse” is waiting for its study. Work in this area has just begun” (p. 308). A footnote listed studies on Mayakovsky's creative process: V.V. Trenin, In the workshop of Mayakovsky's verse, publishing house "Soviet Writer", M., 1937; AT. Trenin and N. Khardzhiev, In the workshop of verse, "Lit. critic", 1933, No. 7; N. Aseev, Mayakovsky's work on the poem "About this", Complete collection. soch., vol. V, M., 1934; N. Reformed, Mayakovsky's work on poems about poetry, “Lit. study”, 1937, No. 5; BUT. Bromberg and L. Stelletskaya, In the laboratory of Mayakovsky, "Znamya", 1936, No. 6).
Fifteen years have passed since then. How many new works about Mayakovsky's verse workshop have been added to this list? Very little.
The poet himself said that he was “indebted” to many things in life. The researcher of Mayakovsky should just as keenly and vividly feel that he is indebted to many aspects of the poet's activity, "to everything that he did not have time to write about" and, in particular, to the poetic workshop, the laboratory of Mayakovsky's creativity.
About 70 Mayakovsky's notebooks have been preserved. These are multi-colored on the covers, "various" books, from a miniature notebook to a weighty thick notebook. Unexpectedly, you even come across an “album for poetry”. Probably, Mayakovsky mentally smiled, introducing the “pieces of iron of lines” into the album.
The first impression is disorder, randomness of records. Separate lines are like poetic fragments ... There are also drawings ... addresses, phone numbers, surnames ... comic entries. A sketch of an imaginary speech by a bureaucrat proposing "to approve the actions of Copernicus, to recognize that the earth is turning." He also declares that horses do not speak only because "there were no suitable conditions and organizations" (zap. kn. 1924).
And next to it is a record of an extremely serious, hard-won thought: “A person cannot live without art” (zap. kn. 1924).
Rhyme blanks are tightly coordinated sound combinations that surprise with unexpectedness and inner accuracy. For example: "rulers-foresaw." Sometimes it was postponed for the future, but more often there are rhymes-“grains”, with sprouts of poetic lines.
It is not easy to understand all this motley mixture of lines, rhymes, surnames, drawings. In addition, books were filled from two sides at once - from the beginning and from the end. It can be seen that the poet, snatching out a notebook, entered into it from the side that turned up under his arm. And sometimes he skipped pages - he made an entry on the first one that came across. It is often impossible to establish the sequence of records.
But gradually, reading the notebooks, comparing the rough sketches with the printed text, you begin to grasp their internal interconnection through the external disorder of the notes.
Here are four words:
new
horse
to the abyss
rider (zap. book 1922).
This is not a simple preparation of rhymes - the outlines of the idea, still vague, are already showing through in it. Before us is one of the sketches for the prologue of the "V International" (1922). And four words are written by the poet as reference
points of the stanza about the "fire-maned" horse of the revolution, which rushes into the future through flame, smoke, through the philistine fumes:
Mountain.
Waved over the mountain -
and to the new one.
Abyss,
Soared over the abyss - and to the abyss.
Until the blood from under the nail
in the nape of a horse
clinging to
raced and raced the rider (II, 584).
But will
Shaturskoe
thousand-eyed
electricity shines through the path (II, 585).
And all this is crowded in the head of the poet, who wrote down only four words in the book.
And this is the peculiarity of the poet's notebooks: one word can mean extremely much there - to act as a sign, a harbinger of the emerging idea. These are words, rhymes, as if loaded with thought and image.
While working on a poem about Lenin, Mayakovsky enters on the page of his notebook:
particle
eye
take communion
class (zap. kn. 1924).
And then he adds before the word “eye”: “that common even tears from ...” This is how a stanza arises that millions know by heart, perceive as their own, intimate:
I'm happy,
what am I
this force is a particle,
what is common
even tears in my eyes.
Stronger
and cleaner
can't take communion
great feeling
by the name -
Class! (VI, 224-225).
The notebook, which keeps traces of the work on the poem about the leader, reflected on its pages the creative process of exceptional intensity. Here is just one page of the notebook. Let's take a closer look at it - a huge figurative wealth is hidden behind hasty, and sometimes random, at first glance, entries:
Forever such a valuable cargo
our oceans have not yet carried
like his coffin driven to the house of unions
on the waves of spins of sobs and marches
came and said
what will wake you up
people
them
saints
their
dreaming
I'm straining to the fullest
poor eyesight
in insight
no louder than
trifle
ringing in
pocket
How red is this coffin
to the house of unions
floating
on the backs of sobs and marches (Zap. kn. 1924).
Reading this page, we begin to see with our own eyes, almost to feel the very process of the poet's figurative thinking. A single moving image runs through the entire poem - the image of the ocean-revolution. Lenin is the navigator of the Soviet giant ship. And the picture of the leader's funeral is refracted through the prism of the same image of the ocean-revolution. Hence the non-randomness of such expressions: “the dam of streets”, “the steps grow, grow into a reef”, “the ringing march of water”. And so the line is "like his coffin movable to the house of the unions” does not sound quite accurate. The poet remakes it: not “driven”, but “floating”. In the beginning it was: driven "on the waves of spin ..." It would seem - completely incomprehensible. But in the seeming "nonsense" the desired image already flashes. Another effort - and he was found: "priceless cargo",
floating
on the backs of sobs and marches.
These words cannot be properly understood out of context. It was impossible to "invent" them, to reach them in a purely logical way. The poet saw them through the prism of the image, integral and developing.
Then follows the entry: "I came and said that I would wake up ... people." And again, this is not a preparation of a rhyme, but a stanza that is being born. The rhyme is not written by itself; and this is not such a godsend for Mayakovsky: "Wake up - people." He could have found a more complex and richer rhyme. But now he needs this one, because for him it is the reference point of thought. Having sketched out a few words, he already anticipates the stanza, mentally goes through dozens of options, until he stops at the final one:
Now
b sounded
miracle worker words
what are we to die
and wake him up
dam streets
loosely dissolve,
and with a song
to death
people will rush (VI, 219-220).
On the left side of the page it is written: "They ... saints ... their ... dream of ...". Further, these words will unfold into lines about the lands that Lenin "ordered to call their own", about the lands "that grandfathers in coffins, notched, dream of" (VI, 219). Here are the original words of the stanzas: “Painfully revealing poor vision ...”, “They shot from a cannon, or maybe from a thousand” (VI, 226). And all this on one page of a notebook.
In literary critical works, one sometimes comes across such an idea of the creative process, of "intention" and "performance": first, the artist conceives the work; this is the first stage - work on the content; then he proceeds to the second stage - to the artistic embodiment of the ideological concept; here we are working on the form...
Looking at just the above page of Mayakovsky, you clearly feel how far such a scheme is from how a real artist works, who thinks in images, in whom the great and the small, the particular and the whole, thoughts and rhymes, ideas, images and the smallest, are inextricably linked, says Mayakovsky, "images."
His notebooks testify to the richness, complexity, and versatility of the poet's figurative thinking. On one page the size of half a notebook sheet, five quatrains are born almost simultaneously. And what! The figurative thought of the poet covers many verses at once, in their movement, development, perspective. The poet sees not only this stanza, but the whole picture - it relentlessly stands before his eyes, crying out for incarnation. And so strong is the pressure of images, so great is the power of inspiration, that this picture is simultaneously embodied in several stanzas; they appear on paper as if not one after the other, but together.
The artist thinks in images. This means, firstly, that he feels the figurative, verbal, rhythmic, sound “flesh” of thought in the most concrete way; secondly, he sees the prospect of the development of artistic thought; simultaneously looks at the work from the inside and from the outside; does not go with the flow of images, but owns, manages them.
On one of the pages of the same notebook we read: “It’s as if it’s not the night and the stars on it, but the blacks from the states crying over Lenin ... [Frost] tortures how hardened they are in love ...” This is still the same picture people's grief. But at the end of the page, from bottom to top, with an energetic, confident hand, two words are written and underlined: "with a jerk ... shaft." So, at the same time, joyful and victorious words begin to sound, imbued with the consciousness of the immortality of the Leninist cause:
Already
above the pipes
monster grove,
arms
million
stacked in wood,
red flag
the Red Square
up
uplifting
with a terrible jerk (VI, 230).
In the article "How to Make Poems" (1926), Mayakovsky talks about his continuous - painful and joyful - work on the word:
“Some words just bounce off and never come back, others linger, turn around and turn around a few
dozens of times, until you feel that the word has fallen into place (this feeling, developed along with experience, is called talent). The main word is most often revealed first - the main word characterizing the meaning of the verse, or the word to be rhymed. The remaining words come and are inserted depending on the main one. When the main thing is ready, suddenly there is a feeling that the rhythm is breaking - some kind of fold, sound is missing. You begin to reshape all the words again, and the work reaches a frenzy. It is as if a non-setting crown is tried on a tooth a hundred times, and finally, after a hundred fittings, it was pressed and it sat down. The similarity for me is further aggravated by the fact that when, finally, this crown “sat down”, I already had tears from my eyes (literally) - from pain and from relief ”(X, 231).
If “the word has fallen into place,” it no longer exists on its own, but has merged with the movement of the image, with the flow of the verse. And in the verse came to life, new, fresh colors lit up. In the initial rough sketch, the image that the artist is looking for is often only “glimpsing”. The first notebook contains the following entry (it refers to the poem "Man"):
From gold the whole city
litas
shines all
and streets.
In a flood of gold
yulite
rejoices and rejoices.
In this sketch, depicting a “golden” city, a “den of bankers”, the thought that will sound in the final text of the poem is weakly expressed, the thought that determines its entire figurative subtext: the appearance and the whole structure of life of a capitalist city resemble a prison. Mayakovsky refuses the first draft, but not entirely - he remakes it. In response to the song that the heart is more precious than money, that hoarding is aimless and meaningless, an alarmed roar of gold owners is heard:
How dare they sing
who gave the right?
Who told the days to July?
Lock the sky in wires!
Twist the earth into streets! (I, 276, 468.)
Only one rhyme remained from the original version. The word "July" was there "out of place", it did not fit very well in meaning with neighboring words. “Julit” and “July” - perhaps these words are placed side by side more in consonance than in internal semantic connection. In the final version, the word fell into place, acquired a clear meaning. “How dare they sing, who gave the right? Who told the days July? - that is, who allowed the days to bloom in summer? This is no longer just a sketch of a shining, gold-cast city, but a picture of a prison city, where you can neither sing, nor breathe, nor bloom freely, where the sky is locked in wires and the earth is twisted by the ropes of the streets.
Reading notebooks, we often come across initial sketches that contain only a particle of the desired image and require more work, alteration, redrawing of lines. In the book of the beginning of 1922, it is written in pencil:
go everybody
from Marx to Ilyich you
all
from whom rays for centuries.
learned by you
to the majestic truth
came
and I want to teach you.
Mayakovsky speaks of the truth of the new world, the world of the Commune. But there is also some kind of alien intonation; the poet appears as some kind of prophet, almost the only bearer of the truth. In 1922, such “messianic” motives were already yesterday for him. And to the left of this pencil entry, new words appear, written in ink: instead of “I came to the majestic truth and I want to teach you,” he writes:
majestic worlds
I see.
Anyone come and learn.
This redaction is repeated in the manuscript and in the printed text of the prologue to the poem "V International" ("Krasnaya Nov", 1922, No. 3; see also VI, 588).
Mayakovsky worked especially hard on the stanza that the poet must absorb the juices "from the whole universe." First he writes:
Forgetting and dinners
and stories timeline
like an oak
I could eat
peace to all
pouring juices
into the roots of ingrown feet.
"History", placed next to the "dinners", and even in plural, is perceived somehow dually (the history of mankind or history in the sense of "incident"?). And quite unfortunate: "eat ... the world." The poet means to “absorb” juices, but here it sounds almost like “snacking”. The author is also not satisfied with another option: “Pour the whole universe into what we are shouting.” A new entry appears:
We will survive through...
But the word "through" is crossed out:
We will survive everything
so I'm here
could live.
so I'm here
could live alone
all Russia pours juices into me
roots of ingrown feet.
The thought is expressed inaccurately - the poet wants to say not only about himself. After all, it is not necessary to absorb the juices so that “I could live alone,” but so that he, the poet, could lead people. And the final version appears:
So that the poet outgrows the terms of centuries,
so that the poet
could lead mankind
from the whole universe absorb juices
roots of feet ingrown into the ground (II, 112-113).
The above statement by Mayakovsky about how, in the course of the work, the words either “simply bounce off and never return”, or “are delayed, turn and turn out several dozen
times”, - this statement pops up in memory all the time when you read the poet’s manuscripts. The notebook of 1925 with foreign verses is especially indicative. It contains the texts of almost all the poems of the American cycle - from "Spain" to "Home". Most often these are recordings of poems that have already taken shape, but have not yet been finalized.
On the way to America, the poem "The Atlantic Ocean" was written on board the ship. It is based on the image that passed through the poem about the leader: the mighty and boundless ocean-revolution. The author discards many lines until he finds the most accurate words about the ocean-worker, a hard worker with an athletic chest. The rhyme "athletic - Atlantic" alone well emphasizes the idea of the heroic power of the ocean. But further, peering into the bottomless ocean depths, the poet begins to distinguish other outlines:
Waves disturb the master
childhood will throw out a sweet voice to another
Well, I would stretch out the banners again.
And the fourth line appears on the page:
What if it's October...
Here the most secret thought of the poet has already sounded; but she appeared somehow too straightforwardly, as if breaking through the shell of the image. Everything that the poet sees now is revealed to him in a refracted form - through the image of the ocean. And he crosses out the fourth line without adding it, and replaces it with another one that is already “in line” with the image:
Won went goes merged and smashed.
But this is not entirely accurate either. The word "goes" is out of place here. Where does it "go"? In the final version:
Here it goes
rumbled,
thundered.
There is no mention of October here. But it has not been removed - on the contrary, the thought of revolution, the ocean's sister, will determine the entire movement of the image in this poem. The beginning of a new quatrain appears
The water is still and see-through.
Then before last word enter "as". But just now the water was agitated, “rattled”. Why is she still now? The line is altered, but the word “through” must necessarily remain: water “through”, because through it the poet already sees another image, akin to the ocean:
And again the water subdued through
and there is no doubt about anyone.
And suddenly, from somewhere the devil knows
rises from the depths of the water revkom.
So "from the depths" an image is born in which the ocean and revolution are already merged. Two series of representations were connected, merged into one - figurative.
And the guard is not. ..
Obviously the poet wanted to write: "foam guard". This is unfortunate. But it is clear where such an expression could come from. Figurative thought moves forward, absorbing the living signs of the ocean and the revolution, fusing them. Everything that fails is discarded. Instead of "foam guard" - "drop guard":
And a guard of water drops guerrillas
climbing up from the ocean moat
rush to the sky fall again
tear the porphyry foam into shreds.
In the last line, the "foam" has already fallen into place.
It is wrong to think that in this dual development of the image, the features of the ocean and the features of the revolution participate, so to speak, on equal rights. Leading here, of course, is the image of the revolution; it emerges more and more clearly through the oceanic "landscape".
The following quatrain is difficult to come up with:
And again a mile away [they will lift up] they lifted up one
silent consent [cross] called the leader
and every wave around him
orders and slogans [sprinkles] shine like rain.
Mayakovsky crosses out this quatrain - not with one vertical line, as he does, marking the finished one, but with several oblique ones, as if completely discarding the stanza. And this is no coincidence. In the discarded lines, the “waves” silently lift one up. The poet did not like this picture. And instead of the discarded one, he writes:
And again the drops soldered into one.
Then, instead of the words “drops”, “water” is entered. And finally:
And again the waters soldered into one
commanding the wave...
But this is not the final version either. Not "ordering", but "commanding" - and more solemnly and at the same time more accurate. Not a simple “order,” but precisely the “command” of the waters. In the final, printed text, we read:
And again
the waters merged into one
wave
having commanded
rage the leader
and rushing waves
from under the clouds
to the bottom -
orders
and slogans
pours rain (VII, 97).
The picture has dramatically changed compared to the one that was drawn in the original version: not the silent ascension of the "waves" of the leader, but the mighty power of the waters soldered into one, commanding the wave to "burst the leader."
In the same notebook - a draft of the poem "Home":
Proletarians come to communism from below
down mines of sickles and pitchforks
I rush from the clouds of poetry into communism ...
“From the clouds of poetry” is an expression similar to those with which we have already met “on the waves of spins”, “guard of foam”. This is not yet a clear, groping image, a kind of threshold to the image. It is replaced by the finally found:
I'm
from the heavens of poetry
rush into communism.
from huge from unrealizable love.
“I throw myself into communism ... out of ... love” - this phrase itself cannot satisfy the author in any way. After all, the idea that he seeks to embody in the image lies precisely in the inseparability of love and communism. The line is crossed out, a new and final one appears:
because
no to me
love without him (VII, 196).
In the poem "The Young Lady and Woolworth" there are two people separated by thick display glass: Mayakovsky himself, behind whom is all of young Soviet Russia, and a seventeen-year-old American miss advertising a device for the point of razor blades. Whatever words the poet throws at her - bitter, frank, calling for rebellion, struggle - she only sees one thing: a small cozy happiness with a free table and an apartment:
How to cut into her head thoughts-knives
that I know of another remedy
how to get workers into all floors
without sighs, without marriages, without waiting for an inheritance.
This is how the quatrain is written and immediately covered with corrections. “Thought-knives” is good, it was born in contrast to those safety razor knives that Miss Advertising Girl sharpens with a belt all day long. But the second line is doubtful: "I know ..." It sounds as if he, Mayakovsky, is the only owner of that "secret" referred to in the final stanza. In the second option:
that there is another way in the world.
On the contrary, this is said in a somewhat vague way. Where in the world? And the last option:
How to punch her
to the head
thought-knives
that the Russians know another means ...
The quatrain seems to be ready. But in the last line of the quatrain, the words seem to be uncomfortable to stand: “without sighs” ... it’s even difficult to pronounce. The poet replaces: “without dreams...” And only now can we put an end to it.
It happens like this: the quatrain is finished, but one word is not firmly held, as if it is swinging, it has not grown into the verse, it can be replaced by another.
In the book of 1922 there is such an entry relating to the poem “They once asked me:“ Do you like the NEP? ”:
We will hear from
countries of the world
revolutions furious clatter.
In the final text: "... revolutions glad stomp." The word "joyful" colored the entire finale of the poem in a new way.
In the prologue to the poem "The Fifth International" Mayakovsky sings of the heroism of the Russian revolutionaries. One of the stanzas is written in book number 12 as follows:
I crumpled into the chairs of time
unshakable
capitalism ass.
life to him
cold tea on a saucer.
And you
already looked into the eyes of the raid ...
And you
already looked into the eyes
attacking days of revolution.
In the 16th notebook, referring to the same poem, a picture of the world revolution is drawn:
Sometimes only
clouds mountains
scorched by a star of light.
The word "scorched" is immediately crossed out, replaced by the word "flashed". The poet continues to look for a sharper, more active, "attacking" word. In the final text:
Sometimes only
the blackness of the mountain
exploded star of light
something from India
then from Angora,
then from the Hungarian Republic of Soviets (II, 116).
In the poet's book, stored in the TsGALI, there are records of poems of 1927-1928. Here we find interesting example searching for one epithet. In the satirical poem "A Heartfelt Request" (1928), Mayakovsky laughs evilly and cheerfully at tedious and empty reports, at the jubilee many and doxology. About one speaker - a lover of flat, common truths - the poet writes:
All you need
he bogged down
excellent
smooth speech...
But...
flickered
out of the hall
... heels
What heels flashed from the hall? The epithet did not come immediately. At first it was: "somehow saved heels." Then - more expressively: "carried away heels." And finally - the most successful, frankly ironic epithet:
But...
flickered
out of the hall
unconscious heels (IX, 36).
The last notebook of the poet ... Fragments of the second, lyrical introduction to the poem "Out loud":
I know the words alarm
coffin,
118 Contrasting in meaning, the rhyme, as it were, bears on itself a stanza about mighty - stronger than death - poetry:
I know the power of words, I know the words of alarm.
They are not the ones that the lodges applaud.
From such words the coffin breaks
run with four of your oak legs ...
In this stainless-steel-cast quatrain, only one word seems incomplete - "run." The poet speaks of the power of the word, which conquers death, which can "raise the dead to fight." In the word “run” there is a connotation, in this case completely inappropriate: to run away, run away from someone, flee from a threat. The second option appears:
walk with four of your oak legs.
But - “they break down ... go” - this is also not very well said. And the poet finds a word that more accurately, coherently conveys the gait of those who have risen from non-existence, raised by the power of the word:
From such words the coffin breaks
step four of its oak legs.
Many stanzas, lines, expressions, words of Mayakovsky, which easily and naturally arise in our memory, have a long and difficult prehistory.
The poet began to write a poem. But in reality, work on it began much earlier - continuous internal work, when words are tried on and “listened”, when they line up, fall apart and again seem to join hands. These are some kind of poetic maneuvers - they facilitate the poet's creative victory when he moves from preparations to the work as such. Let us recall the satirical portrait of Kerensky's "premier darling" in the poem "Good!":
To the kings
castle
built by Rastrelli.
Kings were born
lived
getting old.
These lines resound solemnly, united by unanimity and sonorous rhyme, carefully "instrumented" (the play of sounds - "p", "c" and "s"). In this solemnity, notes of irony and mockery are almost indistinguishable. But the following lines, as it were, overturn everything said before:
Castle
Did not think
about the spinning shot...
“The kings ... the kings ... the palace ... They shot ... they grew old” - and suddenly some ... “fidgeting shooter”. The mountain gave birth to a mouse. This is how Kerensky appears in the poem. But then after the lines:
From the eagles
from power
blankets
and lace
head
sworn attorney
spinning -
the rhythm changes abruptly, as if the head of the “fidgeting shooter” who imagines himself to be Napoleon is really dizzy.
forgetting
and classes
and the parties
goes
for the speech.
Eyes
him
Bonaparties
and colors
protective
French
Poems (as it has been repeatedly noted by researchers) are parodically correlated with Lermontov's; moreover, it is, of course, not the poem itself that is being parodied. Airship”- Kerensky is ridiculed as a pathetic parody of Napoleon. “His eyes are Bonaparte and the color of a protective jacket” - built directly on the Lermontov model: “He is wearing a triangular hat and a gray marching frock coat.” The unexpected rhyme is very expressive: "parties are bonaparties." The word "Bonaparti", a neologism, by its very unfamiliarity emphasizes the comic of the situation even more sharply. This feeling is enhanced by the last line (“and the color of the protective jacket”) - rhythmically honed, as if even “poetic” and spectacular, which in this case only exacerbates the comic situation.
Mayakovsky worked on this chapter of the poem at the beginning of 1927. But in the poet's creative laboratory, work began earlier. Already when Kerensky came to power for a short time, in 1917, the poet began to make the first sketches, preparations for a satirical portrait, which would be created only 10 years later. The first notebook (1916-1917) contains the following entry:
Gathered in Moscow
speeches flow.
All meeting
buzzing.
And he got up
in khaki colors
jacket
having crossed
hands on
chest .
Before us is a kind of study for a portrait. Here the details are already showing through, which the author uses and sharpens later, while working on the poem “Good!” Kerensky is depicted against the background of flowing speeches, oratorical buzz in a Napoleonic pose. Comparing this sketch of 1917 with an excerpt from the poem, we see how long and carefully kept in the memory of the writer, in the "box of the skull" some satirical details. I recall the words once said by S. Kirsanov: "The poet sees life for life." At the same time, we clearly feel how the skill of the poet has grown and matured, how much sharper the exposure of the "fidgeting arrow" in the poem is than in the original draft.
Familiarity with notebooks helps to find out the history of individual sketches, their creative "biography", to trace how the artist's idea develops from one version to another.
In the notebook of 1920 we read:
Everyone who cleaned the dirt
who loved cleanliness
in practice
prove traces
flush work
on the day of the bath
Delhi.
Obviously, we have before us a rough draft of the caption for Rost's poster about the "bath week" associated with the fight against the typhus epidemic. In the same book there is another passage on the same subject:
First in this purgatory
wash the body with soap.
A lot of people are walking around.
We are not allowed into the Commune
so dirty.
Having been in the bath
go without hesitation.
In purgatory first
rub the body with a washcloth.
Unlike the first one, in the above passage there is not only agitation for cleanliness, for a bathhouse, for hygiene. Along with this, there is also a poetic overtone: "We do not let such a dirty one into the Commune." The poet is not talking about physical neatness only, but about cleansing a person joining the Commune. This thought sounds here still in an undertone, a hint. In the third passage, written in the next book of the same year 1920, the idea of the Commune as a liberation from the filth of centuries receives a new, immeasurably richer artistic embodiment:
What can we dirty
appear at ease
full bath
cloud and you in it
in the coldest transparent
smelling like lightning
bathe in souls
fragrant showers.
Reading these verses, it seems, you inhale the clean, “lightning-smelling” post-storm air. “To us, dirty ...” - this means - to people who have come out of the old world, breaking with everything that the poet called - “flea dirty”. A joyful sense of liberation fills this passage. The comparison of thunderclouds with a bathtub, "the most fragrant showers" with a shower is striking in its scale, hyperbolicity, because it evokes
about a huge man who feels at home in the sky. And how amazingly the rhythm of the verses was found - as if liberated, uninhibited and at the same time majestic!
This wonderful passage, filled with the same feeling of liberation that triumphs in a conversation with the sun (“An Extraordinary Adventure” - the same 1920), a passage that, in terms of the power of artistic expression, can safely be equated with the best creations of the poet, was born in the course of everyday “ "black" work for windows of Growth, agitation for "bath week". The “poetic” in Mayakovsky is deeply rooted in the very thickness of life with its daily work and struggle.
The verses “To us, dirty, what may seem more free ...” remained an unused sketch. Has the poet forgotten about them? Or maybe he remembered this sketch when he wrote, six years later, denouncing bourgeois Europe, “where each of the citizens stinks of peace, grub, currency!” -
Isn't it cleaner
our air,
sparse twice
thunderstorm
two revolutions! (VIII, 166-167).
If you ask yourself: when was this figurative comparison of the atmosphere of our life with air purified and refreshed by a thunderstorm born? - it will not be so easy to answer it. We see how thoughts, impressions, images are hatched in the poet's heart for years, how invisible, continuous, inner work goes on all his life.
And finally, the last sketches. The poet already knows that he is passing away, but with unrelenting, perhaps even increased perseverance, greed works on the image, on the word, on the rhyme. He admits that he did not find happiness in love. And where do you find love? -
it's like being in New York City
look for a horseshoe for happiness ...
An amazing image ... There is an expression - a horseshoe of happiness. But Mayakovsky does not like conventionally metaphorical expressions with a specific meaning that has been erased. He always seeks to give them a living, real, objective meaning. In one of his books (1924) we find such a playful but characteristic entry: "a suitcase made of the fiber of one's own soul." So the “fibers of the soul” (cf. “with all the fibers of the soul”) merged with the fiber from which suitcases are made. It's the same here: not an abstract "horseshoe of happiness", but an iron horseshoe, which is used to shoe horses and which you will not find in New York full of cars.
However, this is the strength of the poetic image in Mayakovsky, that, restoring the erased concrete meaning, the poet simultaneously enhances and ideological and symbolic subtext. The meaning of the comparison is not limited to the fact that you will not find a horseshoe in the New York automobile industry. You don't have to be a poet to say this. But in Mayakovsky, the idea of an iron horseshoe merges with another thought - of a horseshoe of happiness, which cannot be found in a gloomy, crowded overseas city. In other words, the usual expression “horseshoe of happiness” has not been discarded; in it, with renewed vigor, mutually reinforcing each other, both the objective and figurative meaning came to life. In accordance with this, Mayakovsky not only repeats the usual turn, but, as it were, re-creates it:
look for a horseshoe for happiness ...
We perceive these words as if “against the background” of an old, familiar expression, outside of which their figurative meaning would be lost.
The above entry was not included in the text of the introduction to the poem “In full
voice" to which it refers, just as the passage on "the power of words" is not included. One might think that these sketches had a great poetic fate, and only death prevented them from moving from the pages of notebooks to the pages of printed books addressed to millions.
No matter what side of Mayakovsky's work the researcher works on, the study of notebooks enriches his idea of the poet, his figurative thinking, his creative laboratory. Mayakovsky himself wrote in the final lines of his program article "How to Make Poems" that the secrets of poetic work should be revealed. He suggested that writers, comrades in arms of the word, tell about their laboratory and "would directly help further poetic work» (X, 248).
The time has long come to publish Mayakovsky's notebooks, to make his "workshop of verse" the property of a wide range of researchers, readers and admirers of the poet.
With the exception of three located in the Central state archive literature and art, notebooks are stored in the Library-Museum of V. V. Mayakovsky (68 notebooks). In order to save them from destruction, layouts have been photocopied from the originals. Varvara Avetovna Arutcheva, an employee of the Library-Museum, conducts direct work on the study of books. What she has done makes it much easier to get acquainted with notebooks. All records have already been read, deciphered and verified with the final text. Unpublished sketches were taken into account, the "table of contents" of the books were compiled. For the first time, all this work was done by the compilers of the first and second complete works of Mayakovsky, published respectively in 1934-1938 and 1939-1949. Careful reading of books allows you to clarify the text and sequence of entries given in these editions.
However, all the publications that have come out so far have not yet solved the problem: to publish the text of notebooks and manuscripts so that they give a clear and accurate idea of the most creative process. In this article, we have given examples illustrating the creative history of individual passages, stanzas, lines. Many of these examples have already been published in collected works, in lists of handwritten discrepancies, some of them are given for the first time.
Discrepancies in the collected works are given in this way. For each verse of the work, a footnote is made after the corresponding number in the comments: in a notebook or in a manuscript, the line was read like this. Such lists of discrepancies are very useful, they reveal a lot in the creativity laboratory. But they still do not create a holistic view of the successive stages of the formation of an ideological and artistic design; this impression is, as it were, fragmented, disintegrating into separate lines.
In order to clearly and visibly imagine how exactly, in what sequence stanzas, lines, individual words were written, it is necessary see draft notes. There is a need for a special edition of Mayakovsky's manuscript heritage, in which recreated exact copies of records.
On the eve of the war, on the initiative of L. Yu. Brik, preparations began for the publication of the manuscripts of the poem “About this”. As already mentioned, these manuscripts, owned by L. Yu. Brik, are of absolutely exceptional interest - Mayakovsky's “workshop of verse” is so richly and many-sidedly captured in them. Goslitizdat negotiated their publication with the printing house of Gosznak. The first test prints have been preserved. When you look at them, you don’t even believe that they are copies, not originals: they are so accurately reproduced
notes, every stroke, the slightest pressure of a pencil. The war prevented the publication of this most valuable publication. But now it's time to take it up again. This is all the more necessary because much of the poet's manuscripts and books are written in pencil - such sketches are erased, they are short-lived.
At one time, someone's indifferent hands threw rollers from one institution to another, on which Mayakovsky's voice was recorded. Some records have died. True, the poet's handwritten heritage is carefully preserved. But this is not enough. It must be immortalized, made available to all who love and study Mayakovsky. It will be right if the Union of Writers, the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences, the Mayakovsky Library-Museum and the State Publishing House fiction they will seriously discuss the issue of a special phototype edition recreating the pages of the manuscripts and notebooks of the brilliant poet.
The world is a communard (III, 92-93).
30.03.2013 27845 0Lessons 41–42
Mayakovsky: life and work.
Poet's early lyrics
Goals : give an idea of the life and work of V. Mayakovsky, noting the tragedy of his fate; to teach to identify the features of Mayakovsky's early work; develop the skills of analyzing a poetic text.
Course of lessons
I am a poet. This is what is interesting.
V. Mayakovsky
I. Opening speech of the teacher.
You already know a lot about the life and work of poets of the 20th century. Unfortunately, during the harsh times of the First World War and the Russian revolutions, many of them had a hard fate.
Gumilyov was shot, his poems were banned, Mandelstam died in the camp, his poems were not published, Pasternak after Nobel Prize Yesenin and Tsvetaeva were hunted down for the novel "Doctor Zhivago", Yesenin and Tsvetaeva committed suicide, Akhmatova got the bitter share.
Mayakovsky was artificially pushed forward. During several decades it was printed in millions of copies, quoted in the right place and out of place.
Now that is finally recreated true story Russian literature of the 20th century, maybe Mayakovsky has no place in it at all, since, on Stalin's instructions, he was declared “the best and most talented”?
No, it's not. Mayakovsky, cleansed of the official "textbook gloss", remained a true poet, not an exaggerated figure, and rightfully occupies a place in the front row of Russian poetry.
The fate of Mayakovsky was tragic, like Yesenin and Tsvetaeva, he committed suicide. The fate of his poems was also tragic. “Mayakovsky began to be forced in, like potatoes under Catherine. This was his second death. He is not guilty of it,” Pasternak wrote in 1956. Mayakovsky was turned into a singer and propagandist of the totalitarian regime. The official interpretation of the poet's life triumphed, which was based on a forgery: Mayakovsky's works, written in the 1920s and reflecting precisely this time, the revolutionary wave that had not yet subsided, were redirected to a later era. In our history, the difference between 20 and 30 years was very significant. The year 1929 really marked the great tragic turning point of all life. The canonization of Mayakovsky began after Stalin's high appraisal in 1936, his poetry was used to glorify the Stalinist regime, which brought forced collectivization, devastation of the village, famine, mass repressions. It was used for political and aesthetic demagogy, to create a "painted world", for this they "torn out" individual lines from works. From the poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”, for example, stanzas about the poet’s hatred for the cult of the leader were thrown out:
Royal and divine
From rage
Don't save yourself
At the crossroads of processions,
Worship
And the crowds across.
Thunderous curses,
And while I'm trampled
And my cry
I would throw
Blasphemy
According to the Kremlin
Metal bombs:
Down with!
Mayakovsky's satire was not in honor of the ideological authorities, under the unspoken ban of his play - they were not staged for almost three decades.
The tragic essence of the poet's contradictions is that he took class, revolutionary, and then Soviet interests for the highest, universal, for "the command of God." An ominous symbol - a poet with a lock on his lips - and expressed the contradictions in the soul and in Mayakovsky's work. Bitter confessions were made in the poem "Out loud":
And me agitprop
In the teeth is tied,
And I would scribble
Romances for you -
It's more profitable and prettier.
Becoming
Own song.
Marina Tsvetaeva wrote about this: “No sovereign censor dealt with Pushkin like Vladimir Mayakovsky did with himself ... Mayakovsky ended stronger than with a lyrical poem - a shot. For twelve years in a row, the man Mayakovsky killed Mayakovsky the poet in himself, on the thirteenth the poet got up and killed the man ... "
Yes, the life of the man Mayakovsky ended with his shot, the life of the poet Mayakovsky continues. His faith in the power of free speech will reach posterity through the years and the heads of governments:
I know the power of words, I know the words of the alarm,
They are not the ones that the lodges applaud.
From such words the coffin breaks
Walk with four of your oak legs.
It happens that they throw it away without printing it, without publishing it.
But the word rushes, tightening the girths,
Ages are calling and trains are crawling
Lick poetry calloused hands.
Truly, this is “a verse flying on strong wings” (Mandelstam). In 1933, Tsvetaeva predicted: “With his quick feet, Mayakovsky walked far beyond our modern times and somewhere, around some turn, he will be waiting for us for a long time.”
II. Word of students about Mayakovsky.
1. The message of the trained student about the life of the poet.
2. The message is accompanied by speeches of assistants.
BUT) Boris Pasternak recalled:
“In the summer of 1914, members of one of the literary groups brought Mayakovsky with them to a coffee shop on the Arbat.
It turned out that the look of the young man, beyond expectation, was familiar to me along the corridors of the Fifth Gymnasium, where he studied two classes below.
In front of me sat a handsome, gloomy-looking young man with the bass of a protodeacon and the fist of a boxer, inexhaustibly, deadly wit, something between the mythical hero of Alexander Grin and the Spanish bullfighter.
It was immediately obvious that if he was handsome, and witty, and talented, and, perhaps, arch-talented, this was not the main thing in him, but the main thing was an iron inner restraint, some precepts or principles of nobility, a sense of duty, according to which he he did not allow himself to be different... And immediately his determination and disheveled mane, which he ruffled with his whole five, reminded me of the composite image of a young underground terrorist from Dostoevsky...
The young man miraculously complemented the natural external data with the artistic disorder that he put on himself, the rough and careless bulkiness of the soul and figure, and the rebellious features of Bohemia, which he draped and played with such taste.
B) And here is how Lilya Brik recalled about Mayakovsky's first reading of the poem "A Cloud in Pants":
“Mayakovsky stood with his back against the door frame. From the inside pocket of his jacket he took a small notebook, looked into it, and put it into the same pocket. He considered. Then he looked around the room like a huge audience, read the prologue and asked - not in verse, in prose - in a low voice, since then unforgettable: "Do you think this is malaria? It was. It was in Odessa." We raised our heads and never took our eyes off the unseen miracle. Mayakovsky never changed his posture. Didn't look at anyone. He complained, was indignant, scoffed, demanded, fell into hysterics, paused between parts.
Here he is already sitting at the table and with feigned swagger demands tea. Hastily I pour from the samovar, I am silent ...
The first to come to his senses was Mandelstam. He didn't imagine! I couldn't think! This is the best thing he knows in poetry! .. Mayakovsky is the greatest poet, even if he does not write anything else. He took the notebook from him and did not give it back all evening. It was what they had dreamed of for so long, what they had been waiting for. Recent times didn't want to read anything.
Mayakovsky was sitting and drinking tea with jam. He smiled and looked with big childish eyes. I'm speechless.
Mayakovsky took the notebook from O. M.'s hands, put it on the table, opened it to the first page, and asked: "Can I dedicate it to you?" - and diligently brought out above the title: "Lile Yuryevna Brik."
In Finland, Mayakovsky had already read The Cloud to Gorky and Chukovsky and said that Gorky wept when he listened to it.
AT) V. Polonskaya recalls the last moments of Mayakovsky:
“There was a shot. My legs buckled, I screamed and rushed along the corridor: I could not bring myself to enter.
It seemed to me that a very long time had passed before I decided to enter. But, obviously, I entered in a moment, there was still a cloud of smoke from the shot in the room.
Vladimir Vladimirovich was lying on the carpet with outstretched arms. There was a tiny blood stain on his chest.
I remember that I rushed to him and only repeated endlessly:
– What did you do? What have you done?
His eyes were open, he was looking straight at me and he was still trying to raise his head.
It seemed that he wanted to say something, but his eyes were already inanimate.
G) Reading by heart.
Mayakovsky
From the poetry workshop
Not getting lost in the Moscow crowd,
Walking down the street along Tverskaya
Mayakovsky with a thick stick.
Loquacious and broad
A wave of people splashes evenly
Behind the side of his jacket
Like on board a ship.
His height is high
An angry eye looks askance,
And clamped in the sculpture of the mouth
Roughly crumpled cigarette.
The whole capital from afar
This sculpture is very memorable:
clean-shaven cheek,
All-Russian this cap.
I'm happy that I caught him
And, having memorized the verses to the core,
At his parties he stood
Stretching his neck, in the gallery.
The winter area is all in lights,
The entrance door is taken with a fight,
And the police on horseback
Above the swaying crowd.
I don't have a dime
I forgot about the coin chime
But the ruble ticket is clamped -
All my wealth is in the palm of my hand.
I'm happy that through the winter smoke
After the evening from the museum
Followed him in the distance
Not childlike.
How the country needs you now
Club, square and newspapers,
Ya. Smelyakov. 1956
III. Mayakovsky's early work.
1. Teacher's lecture: "Mayakovsky and Futurism."
Today's lesson is devoted to the problem of the poet's creative debut.
Like any great artist, he came to art with an application for something new. Moreover, the application was demonstrative, and the thirst for the unknown, the daring challenge - boyishly pointed.
At the same time, one should not forget that at first Mayakovsky asserted himself in the group of futurists, who, as you already know, overcoming the harmony and psychologism of the previous literature, desired introduction radical change into poetic creativity. They introduced new themes, loosened the syntax and crushed the rhythms, mixed the tragic and the comic, lyric, epic and drama, enthusiastically engaged in the search for a tangible word.
The closest art for the Futurist poets is painting, which was the leading one in the general bundle. In the theses of one of the reports of V. Mayakovsky it appears: “3) The similarity of the paths leading to the comprehension of artistic truth, and painting, and poetry. 4) Color, line, plane - the end in itself of painting - a pictorial concept, a word, its outline, its phonic side, a myth, a symbol - a poetic concept.
Demonstration of compositions by P. Picasso, K. Malevich, N. Goncharova and other representatives of cubism, suprematism and related movements.
And yet there were always boundaries separating Mayakovsky from other futurists. If they are characterized by spontaneity and intuitiveness, then Mayakovsky is more social and rational. This makes him the most understandable of the Futurists. His early poems (“And yet”, “War is declared”, “Me and Napoleon”), the tragedy “Vladimir Mayakovsky” are characterized not only by encryption, incredible scale and alogism, but also by documentary, rough frankness of urban paintings, visibility expansion of metaphors.
Mayakovsky's futurism is not limited to the creation of form. In addition to the desire to master the skill, it included internationalism, and anti-bourgeois, and revolutionary. In the early articles of the poet, it is repeatedly said about the end in itself of the word, but it is also stated there: “We need the word for life. We do not recognize useless art." Mayakovsky's futurism is not an experience so much creative work, how much is the fact of life creation.
Mayakovsky's early poems are a prologue to understanding those contradictory motives that clashed over large poetic spaces.
2. Students share experiences from Mayakovsky’s early poems read independently: “Nate!”, “A few words about myself”, “Listen!”, “Violin and a little nervously”, “Lilechka!”.
3. Working with the text of the poem V. Mayakovsky "A Cloud in Pants".
1) Commented reading of the poem.
2) Partial text analysis.
The leading image of this poem, as well as of all pre-October creativity in general, is the image of "I". B. Pasternak spoke about the tragedy "Vladimir Mayakovsky": "The title was not the name of the writer, but the surname of the content." Becoming a content center, the "ego" reaches grandiose proportions, but still remains the human "I": “What can such a block want? / But a block wants a lot!”
The “I” in “A Cloud in Pants” is huge, overflowing its own boundaries (“I feel / “I” / is not enough for me. Someone breaks out of me stubbornly”). It is omnipotent, but it is also lonely.
- What is the lyrical hero of the poem?
The lyrical hero of the poem is a barbarian, a rude Hun, calling for destruction, violence (“You see, I bend down, / from behind the top / I take out a shoe knife ... I will open you, smelling of incense, / from here to Alaska”). But he is also defenseless, tender, when, throwing off the red wig of vulgar deliberateness, he repeatedly says “Mama” with lips that have just erupted a completely different “mother”.
The lyrical hero already feels big, but still unnecessary. Hence the adolescent resentment against God, the imperfection of the whole world, the unwillingness to notice the direct interdependence of phenomena, “you are the king: live alone,” Pushkin stated calmly. Early Mayakovsky does not accept this inevitable logic: proud of the consciousness of his own originality, he suffers severely from loneliness.
– How can you explain the original title of the poem: “The Thirteenth Apostle”?
In the early works of Mayakovsky, the motive of the poet - God-man sounds: “And I / on earth / alone / herald of future truths” - we read in the poem “War and Peace”, and in one of the articles the author presents the futurists as “new people of a new life” .
- What is the attitude of the lyrical hero to other people?
The hero seeks to reject the ordinary, to transform into a superman, but the human remains in him. He is ready to give everything “for just one kind, human word”, but beautiful people have disappeared, around are mediocre, vulgar creatures. Hence the longing, the dream, but hence the bitterness. And it is not for nothing that the lyrical hero is sometimes called the God-devil, the beautiful scoundrel.
- What is the theme of the work?
Based on the text, students name the topics that sound in Mayakovsky's poem.
IV. Creative work.
Essay-reasoning(with the transfer of perception): "My reading of the early Mayakovsky."
Mayakovsky put a lot of meaning into the word "most conscientious", speaking of good and conscientious poetry.
“In addition to the necessary abilities,” the poet said, “one must work to the limit, to the climax, one must work on the poem until you feel that you can do nothing more.” Eyewitnesses claimed that Mayakovsky worked on some poems for weeks, months. In other cases, the creative process was reduced to one day, or even to a matter of hours.
One of the most frequent questions to the poet at his evenings was the question: “What would happen if you wrote in ordinary lines?”
“Then it would be more difficult for you to read them,” answered the poet. - It's not just the lines, but the nature of the verse. After all, the reader needs to switch from one size to another. I do not have a single size for a long time. And with broken lines - it's easier to switch. And the line, thanks to this arrangement, becomes more significant, more weighty. Consider tricks - semantic omissions, colloquial speech, shortened and even one-word lines. And from such an arrangement, the line comes to life, tightens, springs ... The words themselves become full-blooded - and the responsibility for them increases.
But the main thing is in their nature. At the same time, I’ll add that there is such a criterion: you can’t throw out a word from a good line. And if the word can be replaced, then it is still loose. The word must stay in the verse like a well-driven nail. Try to get it out! And finally, the poems are designed mainly for reading from the voice, for a mass audience ... "
Mayakovsky spoke about his work: “I walk, waving my arms and mumbling almost without words, then shortening my step so as not to interfere with the mumbling, then I mumble faster, in time with the steps. This is how rhythm is planed and shaped - the basis of any poetic thing, passing through it with a rumble. Gradually, from this rumble, you begin to pull out individual words.
And here is the transition to the second stage of work, when the selection and processing of verbal material already begins: “Some words simply bounce off and never return, others linger, turn over and turn out several dozen times until you feel that the word has fallen into place ... »
The third stage is described as follows: “When the main thing is ready, suddenly there is a feeling that the rhythm is breaking - some kind of fold, sound is missing. You begin to reshape all the words again, and the work brings you to a frenzy. It is as if a non-setting crown is tried on a tooth a hundred times, and finally, after a hundred fittings, it was pressed and it sat down.
Mayakovsky speaks in a peculiar way about the work of the poet:
- Poetry -
- all! -
- riding into the unknown.
- the same extraction of radium.
- labor per year.
- for one word
- verbal ore.
- sizzling
- words of these burning
- with smoldering
- raw words.
- set in motion
- million hearts.
How do you understand this poetic statement?
A special role in the poet's work was played by his performances. P. I. Lavut, who helped Mayakovsky in organizing lectures, recalls:
“The poem “An Extraordinary Adventure That Was with Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Summer at the Dacha” was simply called “Extraordinary” on the poster. But from the stage, the poet announced it with a full, even extended name (“which was with me, with Vladimir Vladimirovich, at the Pushkino station ...”) He pronounced “neoby ...” very loudly and clearly, and the second half of the word and all subsequent ones - faster, leading to a tongue twister. Also added:
I consider this thing software. Here we are talking about posters. Once upon a time I did this. It wasn't easy. Sometimes they painted day and night. They often didn't get enough sleep. In order not to oversleep, they put a log under the head instead of a pillow. In such conditions, we made “ROSTA Windows”, which then partially replaced newspapers and magazines. We wrote on the topic of the day, so that today or the next day our work would bring concrete benefits. These posters were exhibited in the windows of Moscow’s central stores, on Kuznetsky and some of them multiplied and went to other cities.
The ending of "Extraordinary" sounded like this: extremely loudly - "Here is my slogan ..." and dismissively, ironically, briefly - "and the sun" ...
The poet reads the note:
"How do you feel about reading Artobolevsky?"
I don't care at all. I do not know him. An embarrassed voice is heard from the orchestra:
And here I am... Mayakovsky bends down:
Read, then I will recognize you. Since we are talking about The Sun, read it... Then, if you are not offended, I will make my remarks and read The Sun in my own way.
Artobolevsky enters the stage. Visibly agitated, he reads The Sun. Applause is heard.
Mayakovsky praises his voice, notes others positive traits execution. But he says that the reader lacks rhythmic sharpness, and criticizes the excessive "play", some pomposity. He finds that the melodiousness in certain places, for example, in the lines "Wall of shadows, prison at night", is unjustified, and, finally, emphasizes that You can't abbreviate the title of the poem.
This, unfortunately, is what most of the readers do, he notes, but meanwhile the title is inextricably linked with the text. Everything that I have said, he concludes, applies to all the readers whom I have heard, with the exception of one Yakhontov.
Then Mayakovsky himself reads "The Sun". Artobolevsky thanked him and noted an interesting detail: it seemed to him that the words "...shouted to the sun:" Get down! a little disdainful.
Raise your hands, who's for me? - the poet turned to the audience. Almost unanimous...
Planning an exhibition and inviting Lavut to help him, Mayakovsky outlines what needs to be given on it: “Children's books, newspapers of Moscow, newspapers of the USSR about Mayakovsky, foreign countries about Mayakovsky,“ Windows of satire ROSTA "- text-drawings of Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky on the stage. Mayakovsky Theater Mayakovsky in a magazine.<...>The purpose of the exhibition is to show the diversity of the poet's work...
On December 30, he arranged something like a “flying exhibition” at his home - for friends and acquaintances who planned to turn it all into a comic anniversary, close to the spirit of the hero of the day. Mayakovsky was asked to come later. Posters were brought to the apartment in Gendrikov Lane (now Mayakovsky Lane) , posters, books, albums ... At the end of that evening, Mayakovsky was asked to read poetry.
First, he sang "Good Attitude to Horses". It sounded more gloomy than usual, but peculiar and deep ... "
