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Mayakovsky and Whitman: The Icon and the Mosaic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Dale E. Peterson
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Vladimir Mayakovsky, who knew hardly a word of English, once upbraided his friend Kornei Chukovsky for his “too confectionized” (chereschur bonbon'-erochno) rendering of Walt Whitman into Russian. Chukovsky, it seems, was deeply impressed by Mayakovsky's instinctive feel for Whitman's rugged diction. Ever since, Chukovsky has detected in the Russian poet's verse the permanent impress of the American “kosmos.” This notion, propagated by the translator in numerous places, has fully infiltrated both Western and Soviet scholarship on Mayakovsky. In a recent philological study, Vera Timofeeva has suggested that Mayakovsky's anthropocentrism and his flair for concrete metaphors are a direct legacy from Whitman. And Helen Muchnic, following up a clue from Chukovsky, has referred to Chelovek (Man) as “a Whitmanesque poem,” though admitting that it lacks somewhat the “geniality” of the “Good Gray Poet.” Such remarks perpetuate a rather loose impressionism. Chelovek, as we shall later observe, is hardly a “Whitmanesque poem.“

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 1969 , pp. 416 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1969

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References

1. Kornei, Chukovsky, Repin, Gor'kii, Maiakovskii, Briusov: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1940), p. 145.Google Scholar

2. Timofeeva, V. V., Iasyk poeta i vremia (Moscow, 1962), p. 82–83.Google Scholar

3. Helen, Muchnic, From Gorky to Pasternak (New York, 1961), pp. 226, 272Google Scholar; for her probable source, see Chukovsky, p. 148.

4. Doren, Mark Van, “Walt Whitman, Stranger,” American Mercury, 35, no. 139 (1935): 279.Google Scholar

5. John, Kinnaird, “The Paradox of an American ‘Identity, '” Partisan Review, 25 (1958): 380–405.Google Scholar

6. Roman, Jakobson, “Novye stroki Maiakovskogo,” in Russkii literaturnyi arkhiv, ed. Karpovich, Michael and čiževsky, Dmitry (New York, 1956), p. 173–206.Google Scholar

7. Roger, Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960-62), 2: 119.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 1: 132.

9. Richard, Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York, 1955), pp. 36, 46Google Scholar

10. Renato, Poggioli, The Poets of Russia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 268.Google Scholar

11. Stahlberger, Lawrence Leo, The Symbolic System of Majakovskij (The Hague, 1964), p. 13.Google Scholar

12. Jakobson, p. 192.

13. Walter, Sutton, “The Analysis of Free Verse Form, Illustrated by a Reading of Whitman,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18 (1959): 247.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 249.

15. Sculley, Bradley, “The Fundamental Metrical Principle in Whitman's Poetry,” American Literature, 10 (1939): 449–51.Google Scholar

16. Cited in Shtokmar, M. P., “O stikhovoi sisteme Maiakovskogo,” in Tvorchestvo Maiakovskogo (Moscow, 1952), p. 271.Google Scholar

17. For the full argument see Roman, Jakobson, 0 cheshskom stikhe: Preimushchestvenno v sopostavlenii s Russkim (Berlin, 1923), p. 101–11.Google Scholar

18. Shtokmar, p. 303.

19. “Lastly / so that winter / into summer / and water into wine can be transformed— / I have / under my woollen vest / beating away / the most extraordinary lump.”

20. W. H., Auden, “Byron: The Making of a Comic Poet,” New York Review of Books, 7, no. 2 (Aug. 18, 1966): 16.Google Scholar

21. It might well be objected that each poet projected more than one persona—for example, Whitman as the “solitary singer” of dirges in “Calamus” and Mayakovsky as the “drummer-boy” of the October Revolution in his later propaganda pieces. But my concern is specifically with that aspect of Whitman which might have influenced Mayakovsky's performance in his great autobiographical lyric epics, that is, those poems, like Man, which Jakobson has characterized as Mayakovsky's “litho-montage” of himself. On the basis of Chukovsky's earliest published translations in Poet-Anarkhist: Uot Uitman (St. Petersburg, 1907), there is no reason to suppose that Mayakovsky knew any other Whitman than the public bard of “Song of Myself” and “Children of Adam.” It is this Whitman, the originator of the bardic declamatory tradition of modern poetry, that may legitimately be coupled with Mayakovsky, but only in a very broad historical perspective.

22. Literally, “supplicating / earth / hoping / remitted be.”

23. Jakobson, “Novye stroki, ” pp. 198-99.

24. See “Chelovek, ” in Maxim, Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii, 18 vols. (Moscow, 1960-63), 4: 5–10.Google Scholar Mayakovsky's Mm gbvipusly parodies the “onward and upward” flight of Gorky's “intellect.”

25. Timofeeva, p. 59.

26. Stahlberger, p. 117.

27. Chase, pp. 65-66.