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proliferated in Russia during the last decade of the empire. Unlike
his colleagues, Mayakovsky was quite uninterested in Futuristic
"trans-sense" experiments in the arts; he had already found his
own bold, original idiom. What he loved was Futurism's anarchic
spirit. On the eve of world war and revolution he went about from
meeting to meeting wearing a top hat and the yellow blouse of the
Futurists, with his face painted with flowers and airplanes, reciting
his verses through a megaphone.
Despite Mayakovsky's ebullience
in
public, nearly all his
verses before October 1917 express excruciating desolation. Paster–
nak, oqe of his admirers during this period, called these lyrics
"poetry molded by a master; proud and demonic, and at the same
time infinitely doomed, almost an appeal for help." Mayakovsky's
suicidal bent was evidently more serious than the despairing posture
affected by so many of the young writers of his generation. After
the revolution, he never ceased to write these "infinitely doomed"
lyrics, only now they alternated with fulminations on political
and patriotic themes, and with satires on the bureaucracy and
philistinism of the Soviet state.
Since Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, he has been canonized in
Russia as an apostle of Bolshevism. Yet no writer was more
estranged from Soviet society, and, indeed, from any society of
men. In the West, he tends to
be
regarded as one of the early
martyrs of Stalinism. The latter view is equally absurd. While it is
clear that this wild man of Russian letters would never have sur–
vived the purges of the mid-'thirties, much of his early lyrical
work foretells the manner of his death. "The heart longs for a
bullet, while the throat raves of a razor," he wrote at nineteen.
"The soul shivers; she's caught in ice and there's no escape for
her." At thirty-six, Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart.
Patricia Blake
