against a burnt out sky
upon the rusted cross of the belfry!
Time!
You lame icon-painter,
will you at least daub my countenance
and frame it as a freak of this age!
I am as lonely as the only eye
of a man on his way to the blind!"
(1913)
Vladimir Mayakovsky
(Translated from the Russian
by
George Reavey)
A NOTE ON MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)
Mayakovsky was not quite twenty years old in the spring
of 1913 when he wrote the cycle
I -
his first published verse.
With the appearance of these four pages, bound in a pamphlet
printed at the author's own expense
in
an edition of three hundred
copies, Mayakovsky became at once a formidable presence
in
the
Russian intelligentsia. He was already notorious, however, in other
circles. For his age he had a prodigious police record: at twelve
he had stolen his father's sawed-off shotguns and delivered them
to the Social Democrats; at fifteen he joined the Bolshevik faction
and carried on underground propaganda among Moscow bakers,
shoemakers and printers until his arrest
in
1908. Fortunately, eleven
months in prison altered the direction of his career. He had spent
them reading, and writing his first verses, and, after his release,
turned from Bolshevism to a movement better suited to his talent
and temperament-Futurism. "I had acquired a correct attitude
toward the world. I needed only experience in the arts," he wrote
with the arrogance of a seventeen-year-oId. "It was all right for
others to be in the Party. They had a university behind them . . .
What could I set up against the aesthetics of the past that had
avalanched on me?"
Mayakovsky was soon in command of Futurism-the most
extravagant and aggressive of the modernist movements which
