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The Dead Hand of the Future: the Predicament of Vladimir Mayakovsky

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Victor Erlich
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Extract

In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. “I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, ‘Mayakovsky'.“

The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives (“Night,“ “Morning,” “The Street,” etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes (“I,” “Man,” “A Cloud in Trousers“), is total negation of the status quo.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1962 , pp. 433 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1962

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References

1 (Moscow, 1956), p. 46.

2 (Petropolis and Berlin, 1931).

3 Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), p. 149.

4 Ibid., pp. 149-50.

5 (Leningrad, 1948), p. 181.

6 In a review of , No. 48, 1957, pp. 260- 61.

7 In a retrospective poem “Mayakovsky Begins” (1936-39), one of the most gifted neo-Futurist poets, N. Aseev, recalls a curious conversation he once had with Mayakovsky. “What would you do,” Mayakovsky asked Aseev, “if ‘they’ were to issue a decree that from now on everybody had to write in iambic meter?” Taken aback by this strange query, Aseev finally averred that he did not think he could do this. Mayakovsky fell silent for a while and glumly declared: “And I would write in iambs.” See (Moscow, 1948), pp. 283-84.

8 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), II, 43.