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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
A single witty remark delivered by Roman Jakobson at the expense of Maiakovskii's last, civic-minded poems may still be cited as a measure of prevailing Western attitudes toward the postrevolutionary bard of Russian Bolshevism: “Very good, but not as good as Mayakovsky.” Certainly, many Western appreciators of Russia's most Soviet, major poet have tuned out large portions of Maiakovskii's music. In that long oscillation between lyric and civic impulses that characterized Maiakovskii's poetic career, Western monitors have shown remarkably little interest in or patience with the extensive stretches of public poetry and narrative verse. This bias of the Western ear has not gone unnoticed. One Soviet commentator has responded with a witticism of his own: “It's a hopeless business — this attempt to tear apart his lyrics into two portions, into what is 'soul' and what is 'Soviet.'” Still, selective listening is not the monopoly of Western criticism alone. Soviet scholarship on Maiakovskii is as embarrassed by the irrepressible singer of a larger-than-life self as Western exegesis is by the propagandist who so proudly declaims Soviet hero-songs. Given Maiakovskii's extravagant temperament and his odd combinations of poetical and political revolutionism, it is probably inevitable that different portions of his work will be discriminated against by different readers for being “not as good as Mayakovsky.” But literary criticism has the task of overcoming tone-deafness to both the political resonances of his lyric verse and the poetic reverberations of his most partisan songs.
1. See Roman Jakobson's article of 1931, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” Brown, Edward J., ed., Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism (Oxford, 1973), p. 7 Google Scholar.
2. The best Western interpretations of Maiakovskii continue to favor the lyrical and the autobiographical poetry with sensitive close reading, leaving the agitational verse and the “political” epics to receive honorable mention or curt dismissal. Even Edward J. Brown, who calls Vladimir Il'ich Lenin “a verbal artifact not inferior to some of his best things,” treats that major poem in three pages (Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution [Princeton, 1973], pp. 19-21). Helen Muchnic's somewhat longer discussion offers an incredulous paraphrase of the poem's content which concludes that such utterance, however sincere, is so doctrinaire as to seem “naive, dull, and meretricious” (Muchnic, From Gorky to Pasternak [New York, 1961], pp. 241-45). Brown's critical study remains exceptional for the serious attention it devotes to Maiakovskii's ambitious public poems like Voina i Mir (1916-17), 150,000,000 (1920), and Khorosho! (1927) and for its acknowledgment of Maiakovskii's active interest in the “transference of the content of the bylina to present time and actual people” (Brown, Mayakovsky, p. 206).
3. Z., Papernyi, Poeticheskii obraz u Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1961), p. 21 Google Scholar.
4. For the publishing statistics, see Metchenko, A, “Poema o vozhde,” in Tvorchestvo Maiakovskogo: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1952), p. 5 Google Scholar. Progress Publishers in Moscow has issued two printings (1967 and 1970) of its dual-language Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; Dorian Rottenberg's lively English version of the poet's accentual verse and off-rhymes is especially commendable.
5. Maiakovskii, V. V., Izbrannyeproizvedeniia (hereafter cited as IP), vol. 2 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), p. 422 Google Scholar. All translations are my own.
6. The two best chronicles of the poem's composition, publication, and reception are V., Katanian, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow, 1961), especially pp. 202, 215–17Google Scholar and Wiktor, Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (New York, 1970), pp. 341–57 Google Scholar. Aleksandr Voronskii's 1925 review article is cited in the latter, pp. 356-57.
7. V. Pertsov gives a succinct account of the party dispute, which culminated in Lunacharskii's classic resolution of this particular Marxist paradox: “The essence of the matter is that leaders are shaped by the masses, leaders are promoted by events; they receive all their content from events… . For us, a leader is an organ of the collective mass ( Pertsov, , Maiakovskii: Zhizri i tvorchestvo, vol. 2 [Moscow, 1958], p. 337Google Scholar).
8. See Spencer E. Roberts on Lunacharskii's ideological struggle with the Proletkul't group in his Soviet Historical Drama: Its Role in the Development of a National Mythology (The Hague, 1965), pp. 29-45. A lucid explication of Marxism's difficulty with the hero is in Mathewson, Rufus W. Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Columbia, 1958), pp. 147–73 Google Scholar.
9. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:389. IT's TIME — and I begin the tale of Lenin to tell. But not because the grief could not be greater. It's time because the sharp anguish has become a clear and conscious ill. It's time, and again Lenin's slogans are a whirl … Lenin right now is more alive than the living.
10. Cited from K. Zelinskii's 1955 memoir in Katanian, Maiakovskii, pp. 216-17.
11. Papernyi, , Poeticheskii obraz, p. 107Google Scholar.
12. It is in the second canto that Lenin is rechristened and transformed into a folk leviathan: “it was manual labor's day-in and day-out feat that on his own shoulders hefted Il'ich” (Maiakovskii, IP, 2:416). The traditional bylina customarily chose to narrate one major episode in the life of the hero whereas Maiakovskii recounts the whole life and death of Ulianov-Lenin. Yet, the second book deliberately conflates Lenin's leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution with the legendary devices and strategems of heroic bogatyrstvo, thereby implicating a momentous modern history in the archaic archetypes of oral folk narrative. Maiakovskii was, of course, not alone in sensing and articulating a fusion of the contemporary and the ancient; this “music of history” was heard by many early twentieth-century Russian poets and artists.
13. Ibid., p. 454. But there are no miracles, and dreaming of them doesn't help. There is Lenin, a coffin, and bowed shoulders. He was a man human to the very end — So bear and suffer our human, mortal anguish.
14. Ibid., p. 390.
15. Ibid. I fear that processions, mausoleums, and obeisances dictated by law might inundate in syrupy holy oil Leninist simplicity.
16. This sense of the “carnivalesque” derives, of course, from Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of the common essence of the Rabelaisian and the carnival idiom — “We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out,’ a I'envers, of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings” (see Iswolsky, Helene's translation of Rabelais and His World [Cambridge, Mass., 1968], pp. 10–11 Google Scholar).
17. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:406. I all my poet's resonant strength give over to you, the attacking class. “Proletariat” seems awkward and narrow to him for whom communism is a snare. For us that word is potent music, able to raise the dead to do battle.
18. Ibid., p. 410.
19. V. Pertsov convincingly correlates the rhythm and imagery of Maiakovskii's evocation of suffering Russia with Nekrasov's Tishina of 1857 ﹛Maiakovskii, p. 354).
20. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:447.
21. Ibid., p. 448.
22. “Il'ia Muromets v russkom epose,” in Astakhova, A. M., ed., Il'ia Muromets (Moscow- Leningrad, 1958), pp. 393–419 Google Scholar. See also Propp, V.'s analysis of the Il'ia prototype in Russkii geroicheskii epos (Moscow, 1958), pp. 224–29 Google Scholar.
23. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:394.
24. Transcriptions of performed variants of this traditional bylina are collected in Astakhova, ed., Il'ia Muromets, pp. 150-76 and in Putilov, B. N., ed., Byliny (Leningrad, 1957), pp. 84–96 Google Scholar.
25. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:402, 403, and 405.
26. Ibid., p. 437.
27. Ibid., p. 434.
28. Ibid., pp. 457-58. Horrors! Shut your eyes and do not glance — as if you were walking the tightrope's wire. As if for a minute face to face you were alone with a huge, incomparable truth. I'm happy. The flow of a ringing march bears off my weightless body. And I know, now and forever more in me this very minute will last.
29. Ibid., p. 458.
30. For a thorough discussion of the multiple grammatical devices by which the lyrical firstperson of the bard infuses the epic narrative and fuses with the lived experience of the Leninist collective, consult N. Kalitin, “Golosuet serdtse,” in Slovo i mysV: O poeticheskom masterstve V. Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1959), pp. 5-62. This essay was separately reissued as ‘Golusuet serdtse’ … O poeme V. Maiakovskogo ‘Vladimir ll'ich Lenin’ (Moscow, 1968).
31. Maiakovskii, IP, 2:394.
32. Ibid., p. 398.
33. Ibid., p. 462.
34. This argument was first advanced in Roman, Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe: Preimushchestvenno v sopostavlenii s russkim (Berlin, 1923), pp. 101–11 Google Scholar.
35. Victor, Zhirmunski, “The Versification of Majakovski,” in Poetics, Poetyka, Poetika II (Warsaw, 1966), especially pp. 220–25Google Scholar. See also A. Abramov's specialized study, “Ritmika poemy Vladimir Il'ich Lenin,” in Tvorchestvo Maiakovskogo, pp. 131-62, which points out both the four-stress dominant structure and the occasional departures into “quoted” metrical passages and “prosaic” segments in free verse.
36. Žirmunskij, V., Introduction to Metrics: The Theory of Verse (The Hague, 1966), pp. 223–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is a translation of the 1925 original edition.
37. Astakhova, A. M., Byliny: Itogi iproblemy izucheniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1966), p. 159 Google Scholar. This concept evokes Jakobson's analysis of Maiakovskii's basic rhythmic unit, the phraseological group unified by a single dynamic stress.
38. V., Zhirmunskii, Rifma: Ee istoriia i teoriia (Munich, 1970), pp. 263–69 Google Scholar; the original edition was published in 1923.
39. Vinokur, Grigorii O., Maiakovskii — novator iazyka (Munich, 1967), p. 99 Google Scholar; the original edition appeared in 1943.
40. Cited in Katanian, , Maiakovskii, p. 217Google Scholar.
