In the decade prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, an artistic movement known as Russian Futurism was taking place. As an extension of the Futurists in Italy, they were part of a group who were in opposition to traditional power structures, believed in technological industry for the promotion of change and found it necessary to challenge the social order of bourgeois society, often by allowing themselves unhindered artistic freedom. In Russia, it was largely a literary movement and among the writers involved was the poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Because of the socialist themes found in some of his writing, and along with the physical prowess which allowed him to captivate crowds of people wherever he spoke, Mayakovsky became the national poet of Russia from about the time of the Russian Revolution up to the emerging tyranny of Stalin. However, while Mayakovsky was influential in the political realm, even helping out with propaganda for the revolution, its his role as a poet that made me want to learn more about him.

What is most noticeable about Mayakovksy’s poetry is the oratorical weight behind the words. Using breath oriented lines, as similar to the projective verse of American poets, there is an amplification within the poetry that resembles the outward forms of direct ‘speech’, as opposed to the subdued nature of ‘reading’. Excitement emerges and especially when combined with leaps in subject matter and exclamatory word choice, reminding me at times of the early French Surrealists, only followed up with metaphysical force rather then dream-like abstraction. In the political realm, this sort of rabble-rousing is something to be suspect, but when looked at for artistic merits only, a certain thrill is brought to the page. What was once bravado used to stir up the spirits of the masses, is now, in a time when this form of activism is outdated (more democratic technological mediums replacing such charismatic figureheads), a poetry that can be instead read for its kinetic surprises and amplified drama. Imagine the Jolly Green Giant gone Bolshevik.

While this can bring in a wild unexpectedness to the poetry, as emotions are thrown into the uproar of visual images, from language drawn upon both the high and low, a speech catalyzed through vivid word selection (where, actually, an English reader’s understanding falls short-- Mayakovsky being labeled by Russians as being impossible to effectively translate), it can also make for some bad poetry. But even on the off days, as with many other Dionysian artists, admiration is still found in the spirit brought to the work. Comment from Joseph Brodsky:

Maybe you're too shut up inside yourself, whereas here was a genuine nature, an extrovert, doing everything on the grand scale. If his poems are bad, there's good reason for it. Bad poems are a poet's bad days. And Mayakovsky did have quite a few bad days in his life, but when things got their absolue worst, he came up with some great poems. Of course, he let his tongue run away with him completely. Mayakovsky was the first major victim, for he had a major gift.

A possible explanation for the last sentence in the Brodsky quote: at the age of 37, Mayakovsky shot himself. While he claimed it was because of a matter of the heart, it appears that it is not just a romantic assumption that his suicide was tied to the rise of Stalin. The revolution which he had fought for earlier in his life had taken drastically negative turns as ironclad social control had replaced the near anarchistic vision Maykovsky embraced earlier in his life, thus taking from him both his past efforts, the autocracy of Russia removed only to be replaced with totalitarianism, as well his future creativity, the fellow poets of his time all either imprisoned or killed and replaced with state-recognized “proletarian poets”.