INTRODUCTION
335
Guards and in Bely's "Christ is Risen" (1918), Russia's ordeal
by revolution is compared to Calvary: the martyrdom of the
Cross will
be
followed by Resurrection. Esenin, too, used religious
symbols to convey his vision of the Revolution as the dawn of a
golden age for the Russian peasants. In his poem "Inonia,"
dedicated to the prophet Jeremiah, he violently rejected Christ,
in the grand tradition of Russian atheism, in favor of Man, the
omnipotent Demiurge: "I shall fear neither death / Nor jave–
lins, nor hail of darts, / Thus speaks according to the Bible, the
prophet Esenin, Sergei. / My hour is at hand, I fear not the
scourge. / I spit out of my mouth the Host, the body of Christ. /
I
will
not accept salvation through his torment and the Cross: /
I
know another teaching which pierces the eternal stars. /
I
behold another Coming / In which death doesn't dance on
truth...."
This kind of inverted religious language was also characteristic
of Mayakovsky's work at the time of the Revolution. Already
before it, in "Cloud in Trousers" (1915), he had proclaimed
himself the John the Baptist of the Revolution: "at the head
of hungry hordes, / the year 1916 cometh / in the thorny crown
of revolutions. / In your midst, his precursor, I .am where pain is
--everywhere; / on each drop of the tear-flow / I have nailed
myself on the cross...." His first major work
in
honor of the
Revolution was a mock mystery play
(Mystery Boutte, 1918)
I
which is a brilliant farcical reenactment of the story of the Flood,
with God, Methuselah, Beelzebub and Lloyd George playing
minor roles. Mayakovsky's transposition of the revolutionary
drama into biblical language was, of course, utterly light-hearted
and frivolous compared with Esenin's anguished blasphemy, but
the underlying emotion was much the same and he was thought
of
by
communist critics as a utopian visionary rather than as a
"proletarian" poet.
As
late as 1934 he could be described by one
such critic as "a peculiar kind of utopian socialist, a spokesman
of that petty-bourgeois humanistic intelligentsia whose ideological
development eventually led to their acceptance of the October
