Почему я не люблю Маяковского

Summary

Tamara Eidelman offers a deliberately personal, critical assessment of Vladimir Mayakovsky. She says her dislike is partly a reaction to the way he was relentlessly praised at school and partly to the romantic image of revolution associated with him. More fundamentally, she finds it difficult to separate his striking poetic form from the politics and violence of his work. She stresses that this is a subjective response, not a claim to dispassionate literary judgment.

Mayakovsky’s Official Reputation and Public Image

• Mayakovsky was turned into a Soviet cultural emblem after his death. Following Lilya Brik’s appeal, Stalin declared him the “best and most talented poet” of the Soviet era. That endorsement helped trigger a large-scale campaign to publish, teach, and celebrate him.
• His poetry was repeatedly reduced to familiar slogans and quotations, which, in Eidelman’s view, helped make him an instrument of propaganda and may have alienated readers.
• Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square and its imposing monument represent this official version of the poet: stern, monumental, and closely identified with the state.
• Eidelman contrasts this state-approved image with attempts by readers and dissidents to claim Mayakovsky for themselves—as a symbol of independent expression and public assembly.

The Square as a Site of Protest and Control

• After the monument was unveiled in 1958, young people began gathering there to read poetry. For some, Mayakovsky represented the hopeful, supposedly uncorrupted revolutionary ideals associated with the post-Stalin Thaw.
• Authorities initially discouraged the readings and later used vigilantes, police, and arrests to suppress them. Participants received prison sentences for activities connected with the gatherings.
• In 2009, Eduard Limonov’s Strategy-31 movement revived the square as a place to demand freedom of assembly. Eidelman notes that the movement’s political meaning shifted over time, including after Limonov supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
• In 2015, the square was reconstructed in a way that, she argues, made it less suitable for public gatherings. She sees a parallel between the reshaping of the square and the official remaking of Mayakovsky’s image: both were smoothed into forms more manageable for authority.

Mayakovsky, Futurism, and Revolutionary Destruction

• Mayakovsky emerged from the energetic avant-garde culture of the 1910s. With David Burliuk and others, he became a leading Russian Futurist, rejecting established literary authorities and seeking a new artistic language.
• Futurist performance often relied on provocation. Mayakovsky’s early poems insulted audiences and portrayed the poet as an outsider confronting a complacent, vulgar public.
• Eidelman places Russian Futurism alongside Italian Futurism. Both celebrated energy, speed, rebellion, and the destruction of old forms; Italian Futurism also openly praised war and militarism. Russian Futurists rejected some of Marinetti’s authority but shared an intense rhetoric of rupture and aggression.
• She argues that the Futurists’ emphasis on destroying the old world did not always specify what should replace it. After the Revolution, many avant-garde artists saw Bolshevik upheaval as an extension of their own project and willingly worked for the new government.
• Mayakovsky served the revolution through projects such as Mystery-Bouffe and the “Windows of ROSTA” propaganda work. He and other avant-garde artists also sought to reorganize society through art and to create a new kind of person.

Violence, Dualism, and Propaganda

• A central concern in the lecture is the violence in Mayakovsky’s writing. Eidelman highlights poems that invoke weapons, shooting, burning, and killing, including the “Left March” and 150,000,000.
• She acknowledges that poetic speakers and real-life actions are not identical, and that Mayakovsky did not personally carry out the violence described in his poems. Her concern is instead with the effect of repeatedly making violence beautiful, stirring, or exhilarating.
• Drawing on Karabchievsky, she describes a pattern in Mayakovsky’s work: hurt and resentment give way to hatred, then to revenge and violent expression.
• She also emphasizes a stark division between “us” and “them.” In her reading, this black-and-white worldview leaves little room for ambiguity, empathy, or individual difference—and can make hostility toward an enemy seem permissible.
• The children’s tale about the bourgeois boy Petya and the proletarian boy Sima is a particularly disturbing example for Eidelman. She argues that Petya is portrayed as so grotesque and less than fully human that his destruction becomes a source of celebration. She connects this kind of dehumanization to a recurring technique of propaganda: depicting opponents as creatures or objects so that violence against them seems acceptable.

Archaic Thinking, Poetic Form, and Language

• Eidelman discusses Mikhail Weiskopf’s interpretation of Mayakovsky as an innovative poet whose outlook also draws on archaic, pre-individual ways of thinking. Such thinking, in this account, tends toward ritual, stark oppositions, and forceful collective emotion.
• Mayakovsky’s clipped phrases, rhythmic repetitions, sound-play, and imperatives can be exhilarating. But Eidelman suggests that they can also work like incantations: they stir the audience and encourage response before reflection.
• She connects this concern to the psychology of aggression, contrasting the rapid emotional reactions associated with the brain’s older systems with the slower work of rational control. She presents this as a broad way to think about how archaic patterns can sustain cycles of violence.
• The lecture also considers Mayakovsky’s effort to create a new language for a transformed world. Eidelman contrasts his deliberate linguistic inventions with writers such as Zoshchenko and Platonov, who, in her view, register changes in language differently.
• She makes a provocative comparison between Mayakovsky’s linguistic project and the fictional Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984: in both, language can be reshaped to influence what people are able to think. She presents this as a comparison, not as evidence that Mayakovsky directly influenced Orwell.

Mayakovsky and the Collective

• Mayakovsky’s early poetry places an emphatic “I” at its center. After the Revolution, he increasingly sought to merge that self with the masses and the revolutionary collective.
• In 150,000,000, the poem’s author is nominally the people themselves, although Eidelman notes that Mayakovsky’s own voice remains central.
• His poems about Lenin portray the leader in almost magical terms—as a figure through whom workers acquire understanding and a sense of collective power.
• Eidelman interprets this movement from individual self-assertion to devotion to the collective as part of a wider twentieth-century political ideal: the individual finds meaning by dissolving into something larger, such as a party, nation, or revolutionary cause.

Commitment, Privilege, and the Question of Disillusionment

• The lecture challenges the familiar story of Mayakovsky as a romantic revolutionary who gradually saw the Revolution betrayed, became disillusioned, and took his own life.
• Eidelman considers a different possibility: Mayakovsky may have been deeply aligned with the new system and its goals—collectivism, mass politics, and the creation of a new person—rather than simply a disappointed outsider.
• She notes the contradictions between revolutionary rhetoric and personal privilege. Mayakovsky could criticize bourgeois comforts while enjoying opportunities unavailable to ordinary people, such as travel, possessions, and access to influential circles.
• She also examines his closeness to people associated with the security services, including Osip Brik and Yakov Agranov. She does not claim to resolve what they knew or did in connection with Mayakovsky, but argues that the intimacy between cultural figures and state power is an important and troubling part of the story.
• In his final years, Mayakovsky sought acceptance and support from official institutions. His 1930 exhibition was poorly attended by the cultural leadership, and at a later public appearance he faced a hostile audience of young proletarian students. Eidelman presents this as a painful rejection by the very state and collective to which he had devoted himself.
• Mayakovsky died by suicide in April 1930. The lecture leaves open whether his death is best understood as the tragedy of a revolutionary who lost faith, or as the collapse of a person who had given his identity to a system that no longer wanted him.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Speaker: Tamara Eidelman, the lecturer and narrator.
• Principal critical sources discussed: Yuri Karabchievsky, The Resurrection of Mayakovsky; Mikhail Weiskopf, To the Full Logos: Mayakovsky’s Religion; Roman Jakobson, On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets; Kornei Chukovsky’s essay on Akhmatova and Mayakovsky; Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art; José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses; George Orwell, 1984.
• Other writers, artists, or thinkers quoted or discussed: Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Faina Ranevskaya, Vladimir Bukovsky, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Sergei Tretyakov, Yuri Tynyanov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Vladimir Tatlin, and Osip Brik.
• Political and historical figures mentioned: Joseph Stalin, Nikolai Yezhov, Vladimir Lenin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Yakov Agranov, and Eduard Limonov.
• Other people mentioned in connection with the readings and Mayakovsky’s circle: Lilya Brik, Tatyana Yakovleva, Veronika Polonskaya, Ilya Bakshtein, Eduard Kuznetsov, Vladimir Osipov, and Alexander Kibalnikov.