Just Curious

Vladimir Mayakovsky and a bygone era of hope

I have read some of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Modernist poetry these days, and I'm left quite speechless by his stunning genius and his mastery of literary images.

Defying the pre-Revolutionary norms of Russian poetry, Mayakovsky injected a kind of spunkiness and boldness unknown before in any literature into his works, often utilizing borderline bizarre imagery: he dreamed of patting the Sun at his back, chatting with him about literature; he refers to poetic rhyme as "a keg of dynamite" which is "blown sky-high in a strophe" when the line as the fuse is "burned to the end."

A most individualistic eccentric, Mayakovsky was nonetheless hailed as the Poet Laureate of the USSR by none other than Josef Stalin, and his ultimate suicide in 1930 for reasons unknown marked the end of an era. An era of unprecedented flowering in the arts and culture in Russia, following the October Revolution and ended with the Great Purges. It was a time when Sergey Eisenstein experimented with the art of montage in modern cinema, it was a time when Vsevolod Meyerhold tried with experimental theater, and it was also a time when Ilya Repin solidified his position as the ultimate Socialist Realist. But these too would eventually come to an end, when every spark of creativity is extinguished and every creative soul stiffled.

It's worth noting how Mayakovsky himself described his reasons for his suicide, "And, as they say, the incident is closed./Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind./Now life and I are quits. Why bother then/to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts."

Earlier he has written about how "Proletarians/arrives at communism/from below--/by the low way of mines,/sickles,/and pitchforks--/but I,/from the poetry's skies,/plunges into communism,/because/without it/I feel no love."

Isn't this interesting? Communism was intended as a solution to end all human bondage to things alien to us, to set us free to be who we are, to empower us to love, not to yearn for alienated possessions, yet it is precisely under communism that man has lost his ultimate freedom even to think or to love. It is not surprising at all then Mayakovsky had to die for he "feel no love."

Anyone recall the ending of 1984? The day when a man is not even allowed to love the girl he used to adore? The day when 2 + 2 = 5? The day when Winston confessed his "love" for the Big Brother?

posted by James Chang @ 1:01 PM