V. Mayakovsky is a rebel poet, loudmouth and agitator. But at the same time, this is a person with a sensitive and vulnerable soul, capable of the brightest and most tender feelings, deep experiences, and sincere love.
This ability of Mayakovsky found artistic embodiment in his poems about love. They amaze with the passionate power of the feelings expressed in them. Their lyrical hero cannot and does not want to free himself from the power of love. She becomes the center of the universe.
“Besides your love, I have no sun,” says the poet in the poem “To Lilichka.” In a letter to L. Brik, Mayakovsky wrote that “love is life, this is the main thing. Poems, deeds, and everything else unfold from it. Love is the heart of everything.” Love is the most significant, important thing in the fate of every person.
“Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love” is addressed to the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, in which the poet collaborated. The poem is a lyrical monologue in which irony coexists with seriousness, vernacular with elation. The poet reflects on the essence of love. He poses the problem and consistently proves his opinion, giving compelling arguments.
A passionate feeling forces the lyrical hero to look into his inner world and sort out his feelings. He says about himself: “I’m forever wounded by love - I can barely drag myself.” Mayakovsky gives his own definition of this feeling:
To love -
This means:
run deep into the yard
and until the night of the rooks,
shining with an axe,
Chop wood
by force
Playfully.
The lyrical hero calls his state ecstasy. And his love is “human, simple”; it is impossible to cope with it, because it is “a hurricane, fire, water.” Genuine feeling is contrasted in the poem with a “passing pair of feelings”, philistinism.
A different intonation is characteristic of the poem “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva.” Initially it was not intended for printing, but was handed over personally to the addressee. The poet contrasts his sincere, deep, ardent feeling with “Parisian love,” which is vulgar and ordinary. The poem is characterized by extreme frankness, it amazes with the power of intimate feeling. “Come here, come to the crossroads of my big and clumsy hands,” it sounds. “You are the only one who is as tall as me,” the poet says to the heroine, urging her to reciprocate her feelings. The poet speaks of “dogs of brutal passion,” of jealousy that moves mountains, of “the passion of measles.” The lyrical hero is persistent, goal-oriented. “I’ll still take you someday - alone or together with Paris,” he promises.
Mayakovsky's poems about love are characterized by amazing spiritual openness, nakedness of the most subtle experiences. Love lyrics therefore surprise with their unusually bright and bold imagery and frenzy of feeling. Striking, original metaphors and comparisons give Mayakovsky’s poems uniqueness.
The theme of love is one of the main themes in both prose and poetry. Whatever work we take, this phenomenon is mentioned in one way or another, be it friendly or parental love, or love between a man and a woman.
Russian literary artists have a particularly reverent attitude towards this great feeling. Even after the Bolsheviks came to power, for whom love did not have much meaning, this topic did not go unnoticed by the literary community.
An example of this is the many poems and poems by V.V. Mayakovsky, dedicated to the theme of love.
We see love that causes pain and suffering mainly in pre-revolutionary poems. For example, the poem “Cloud in Pants” talks about the poet’s unrequited love: You came in, / sharp, like “here!”, / wearing suede gloves, / said: / “You know - / I’m getting married.”
This event is the main one in the first part, and in the second - the author walks aimlessly around the city, hears snippets of conversations, meets random people and conveys all this in the poem - so it loses its meaning due to the abundance of words. Only after some time do we understand why Mayakovsky uses this technique: to convey all the chaos that is happening in our world (“We / with a face like a sleepy sheet, / with lips hanging like a chandelier, / we, / convicts of the city - a leper colony , /where gold and dirt ulcerated leprosy...")
It is the city with its vices that the poet blames for his misfortune - it is the city that stifles true, pure love.
In the third and fourth parts, the author seeks consolation in the revolution, in wine, in women, but nothing can relieve his pain. And then he turns to God with a question (“Almighty, you invented a pair of hands, / made / that everyone has a head, / why didn’t you invent / so that it would be painless / to kiss, kiss, kiss?!”), and not receiving an answer, she grumbles at him (“I thought you were an all-powerful god, / but you’re a dropout, a tiny little god.”)
In none of Mayakovsky’s works does love bring happiness to the hero, but, on the contrary, it drives him to despair, almost to suicide. For example, in the poem “The Flute is the Spine” we find the following lines:
More and more often I think -
Wouldn't it be better to put a full stop at the end?
In this poem, the poet also turns to God, but not with a question, but with a plea to take love from his heart (“take away the cursed one, / which you made my beloved!”)
For this, he is ready to endure any physical pain, any torment, even ready to accept death. But love cannot simply disappear: the author, no matter where his beloved is, will always be there. And even if she doesn’t reciprocate, it won’t change anything in his heart.
The poem “Man” tells the life story of the lyrical hero. And the main storyline is love. But this love has no place in this ugly world where money decides everything. The hero sees with horror that his beloved “has become wicked in her holiness”; she prefers to stay with the Lord of Everything. And he leaves earthly life. But his stay in heaven does not last long; the “man” is brought back to earth by longing for his beloved. But, unfortunately, everything in the world remains the same; the hero feels superfluous on this earth (“And only / my pain / is sharper - / I stand, / entwined in fire, / on an unburnt fire / of unimaginable love”).
Most of the poems about love are dedicated to Lilia Brik, whom Mayakovsky loved very much, but she did not appreciate this love and was indifferent. Such poems include “Lilichka!” - the cry of the poet’s suffering heart:
Doesn't matter
My love -
It's a heavy weight...
Hanging on you
Wherever I would run.
Let me cry out in my last cry
The bitterness of offended complaints.
The plot shows how difficult it is for the hero to let go of the woman he loves, but parting is the only way to free himself and her:
Lay out the last tenderness
Your leaving step.
A striking example of Mayakovsky’s post-revolutionary lyricism is the autobiographical poem “I Love”. The poet sincerely believed that socialism would change the greedy world and people. Therefore, the post-revolutionary poems are distinguished by their lightness and optimistic ending (“I took it, /took away my heart/ and just/ went to play, / like girls with a ball” and “Love will not be washed away/ by quarrels, / not miles. / Thought out, / verified, / tested. /Raising the line-fingered verse solemnly, / I swear - / I love / unfailingly and faithfully!”)
The ironic poem “About This” was also written in the post-revolutionary period of the poet’s work. This irony of the poet is primarily about himself:
In this topic,
And personal
And small
Covered more than once
And not five
I circled like a poetic squirrel
And I want to spin again.
He understands how much love means in life, and the enthusiasm with which the poet speaks about it is by no means fake:
This topic darkened the day, pound into the darkness - she ordered - with lines of foreheads.
Name of this topic:
Having examined Mayakovsky’s work, we can say why he joined the party and was an ardent member of it: he was confident that under socialism the world would be ruled by justice, understanding and love. Only after the Bolsheviks came to power did he begin to believe in a bright future.
There are poets who seem to be open to love, and all their work is literally permeated with this wonderful feeling. These are Pushkin, Akhmatova, Blok, Tsvetaeva and many others. And there are those whom it is difficult to imagine falling in love. And first of all, Vladimir Mayakovsky comes to mind. Poems about love in his work, at first glance, seem completely inappropriate, since he is usually perceived as a singer of the revolution. Let's try to find out if this is so by taking a closer look at the poet.
The poet's homeland is Georgia. The parents came from a noble family, although the father served as a simple forester. The sudden death of the breadwinner forces the family to move to Moscow. There Mayakovsky entered the gymnasium, but two years later he was expelled for non-payment of tuition, and took up revolutionary activities. He was arrested several times and spent almost a year in a cell. This happened in 1909. Then for the first time he began to try to write poetry, absolutely terrible, according to him. However, it was this year that Mayakovsky, whose famous poems were still ahead, considered the beginning of his poetic career.
It cannot be said that the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky was entirely devoted to the revolution. Everything is far from so clear. The poet unconditionally accepted her, was an active participant in those events, and many of his works were actually dedicated to him. He practically deified her, believed in the ideals that she carried, and defended her. Undoubtedly, he was the mouthpiece of the revolution, and his poems were a kind of propaganda.
Deep emotionality is inherent in all creative people. Vladimir Mayakovsky was no exception. The theme runs through all of his work. Outwardly rude, in fact the poet was a very vulnerable person, a hero of a rather lyrical nature. And love was not the last place in Mayakovsky’s life and work. He, broad-minded, knew how to instantly fall in love, and not for a short time, but for a long time. But the poet was unlucky in love. All relationships ended tragically, and the last love in his life led to suicide.
In the poet's life there were four women whom he loved unconditionally and deeply. Mayakovsky's love lyrics are primarily connected with them. Who are they, the poet’s muses, to whom he dedicated his poems?
Maria Denisova is the first person with whom Mayakovsky's love lyrics are associated. He fell in love with her in Odessa in 1914, and dedicated the poem “Cloud in Pants” to the girl. This was also the poet’s first strong feeling. That’s why the poem turned out to be so painfully honest. This is the real cry of a lover who has been waiting for several painful hours for his beloved girl, and she comes only to announce that she is marrying a wealthier man.
Tatyana Alekseevna Yakovleva. The poet met her in October 1928 in Paris. The meeting ended with them instantly falling in love with each other. The young emigrant and the tall Mayakovsky, two meters tall, were a wonderful couple. He dedicated two of his poems to her - “Letter to Comrade Kostrov...” and “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva.”
In December, the poet left for Moscow, but already in February 1929 he returned to France again. His feelings for Yakovleva were so strong and serious that he proposed to her, but received neither refusal nor consent.
The relationship with Tatyana ended tragically. Planning to come again in the fall, Mayakovsky was unable to do so due to problems with his visa. In addition, he suddenly finds out that his love is getting married in Paris. The poet was so shocked by this news that he said that if he never saw Tatyana again, he would shoot himself.
And then the search for that one true love began again. The poet began to seek solace from other women.
Veronica Vitoldovna Polonskaya is a theater actress. Mayakovsky met her in 1929 through Osip Brik. This was not done by chance, in the hope that the charming girl would interest the poet and distract him from the tragic events associated with Yakovleva. The calculation turned out to be correct. Mayakovsky became seriously interested in Polonskaya, so much so that he began to demand that she break up with her husband. And she, loving the poet, could not start a conversation with her husband, realizing what a blow it would be for him. And Polonskaya’s husband believed in his wife’s fidelity to the end.
It was painful love for both. Mayakovsky became more and more nervous every day, and she kept putting off the explanation with her husband. On April 14, 1930, they saw each other for the last time. Polonskaya claims that there was no conversation about the breakup; the poet once again asked her to leave her husband and leave the theater. A minute after she left, already on the stairs, Polonskaya heard a shot. Returning to the poet's apartment, she found him dying. This is how the last love and life of Vladimir Mayakovsky ended tragically.
This woman, without exaggeration, occupied the main place in the poet’s heart. She is his strongest and most “sick” love. Almost all of Mayakovsky's love lyrics after 1915 are dedicated to her.
The meeting with her took place a year after the break in relations with Denisova. Mayakovsky was initially attracted to his younger sister Lily, and at the first meeting he mistook her for his beloved’s governess. Later, Lily officially met the poet. They were amazed by his poems, and he instantly fell in love with this extraordinary woman.
Their relationship was strange and incomprehensible to others. Lily's husband had an affair and did not feel physical attraction to his wife, but in his own way he loved her very much. Lilya adored her husband, and when she was once asked who she would choose, Mayakovsky or Brik, she answered without hesitation that her husband. But the poet was also extremely dear to her. This strange relationship lasted 15 years, until Mayakovsky’s death.
The features of the poet’s lyrics are most clearly visible in his poem “I Love,” dedicated to Lilya Brik.
Love for Mayakovsky is deep personal experiences, and not an established opinion about it. Every person has this feeling from birth, but ordinary people who value comfort and prosperity more in life quickly lose love. With them, according to the poet, it “shrinks.”
A feature of the poet's love lyrics is his conviction that if a person loves someone, he must completely follow the chosen one, always and in everything, even if the loved one is wrong. According to Mayakovsky, love is selfless, it is not afraid of disagreements and distance.
The poet is a maximalist in everything, so his love knows no halftones. She knows no peace, and the author writes about this in his last poem “Unfinished”: “...I hope, I believe, shameful prudence will not come to me forever.”
Mayakovsky's love lyrics are represented by a small number of poems. But each of them is a small piece of the poet’s life with its sorrows and joys, despair and pain. “Love”, “Cloud in Pants”, “Unfinished”, “About This”, “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva”, “Letter to Comrade Kostrov...”, “Spine Flute”, “Lilichka!” - this is a short list of works by Vladimir Mayakovsky about love.
Mayakovsky was and remains one of the most significant figures in the history of Russian poetry of the 20th century. Behind the external rudeness of Mayakovsky's lyrical hero hides a vulnerable and tender heart. This is evidenced by Mayakovsky's poems about the deeply personal. They amaze with the passionate power of the feeling expressed in them:
"Except for your love
I have no sun"
(“Lilechka”),
entwined with fire
on an unburnt fire
unthinkable love"
("Human")
The lyrical hero of early Mayakovsky is romantic in his attitude and very lonely. No one hears him, no one understands him, they laugh at him, they condemn him (“The Violin and a Little Nervously,” “I”). In the poem “Sale,” the poet says that he is ready to give everything in the world for “a single word, affectionate, human.” What caused such a tragic attitude? Unrequited love. In the poem “Lily (instead of a letter)” and the poem “Cloud in Pants,” the motive of unrequited love is the leading one (“Tomorrow you will forget that I crowned you,” “Let me line your departing step with the last tenderness”). In these works, the lyrical hero appears as a gentle and very vulnerable person, not a man, but a “cloud in his pants”:
They wouldn't recognize me now
sinewy hulk
writhing...
But the beloved rejects the hero for the sake of bourgeois well-being:
You know -
I'm getting married.
She doesn’t need love of such enormous power! She is cold and ironic. And it turns into an awakened volcano:
Your son is beautifully sick!
His heart is on fire.
Tell your sisters, Lyuda and Olya, -
He has nowhere to go.
The poem “Cloud in Pants” shows the transformation of a community of love into a community of hatred for everyone and everything. Disappointed in love, the hero emits four cries of “down with”:
Down with your love!
Down with your art!
Down with your state
Down with your religion!
Suffering from unrequited love turns into hatred of that world and that system where everything is bought and sold.
In a letter to L.Yu. Brik Mayakovsky wrote: “Does love exhaust everything for me? Everything, but only differently. Love is life, this is the main thing. Poems, deeds, and everything else unfold from it. Love is the heart of everything. If she stops working, everything else dies away, becomes superfluous, unnecessary. But if the heart works, it cannot but manifest itself in everything.” It is precisely this kind of “solid heart,” loving and therefore responsive to everything in the world, that is revealed in Mayakovsky’s poetry. For a poet, talking about love means talking about life, about the most significant thing in one’s own destiny. For, he is convinced, this feeling must be on par with the era. The ease of resolving this issue did not suit Mayakovsky. In this case, too, he was guided by the demands placed on himself and those around him. After all, he knew that “love should not become any “should”, any “impossible” - only free competition with the whole world.”
What can allow you to emerge victorious in this competition? For Mayakovsky, the feeling that connects two does not isolate them from the world. The feeling that forces a person to isolate himself in a narrow world (“in a small apartment world”) is inseparable for him from the old things he hates. A loving heart contains the whole world. The ideal of high love affirmed by the poet can only be realized in a bright future. And the task of poetry in this case is to speed up the path to the future, overcoming the “everyday nonsense.”
It is interesting to compare two poems inspired by a strong and deep feeling for Tatyana Yakovleva: “Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris about the essence of love” and “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva.” The first of them was addressed to an official, the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, in which the poet who found himself in Paris collaborated, while the second - not intended for publication - was passed from hand to hand to the woman he loved.
In the first of these “letters,” Mayakovsky reflects not just on love, but on its essence. The feeling of burning power evokes an urgent need to understand oneself, to take a fresh look at the world. In a new way: for Mayakovsky, love is a feeling that rebuilds a person, creating him anew. The poet avoids abstraction in his conversation. The addressee of the “Letter...” is named after the person who caused this storm in the heart and to whom this poetic monologue is addressed is introduced into the text. And in the poem itself there are many details scattered, details that do not allow the poem to be carried away into the foggy heights. His love is “human, simple,” and poetic inspiration manifests itself in the most everyday situations:
Raises the area noise,
the crews are moving,
I write poems
in a notebook.
A simple earthly feeling is contrasted with that “passing pair of feelings” that is called “rubbish”. The poet speaks about what elevates a person - about the elements,
come up in murmur
possessing healing powers. And again, the poetic metaphors he uses contribute to the literal materialization of concepts. The name of the brilliant Copernicus pronounced here gives an idea of the scale of the feeling in question.
The usual contrast in poetry, when it comes to love, between the earthly and the heavenly, the everyday and the sublime, is not for Mayakovsky. He began (in the poem “A Cloud in Pants”) with a decisive protest against the sweet-voiced chants that arose in such cases, with defiantly frank words:
the sonnet poet sings to Tiana,
all made of meat, all man -
I just ask your body
as Christians ask -
"Our daily bread -
give it to us today.”
The need for a sharply expressed opposition of one's ideas about love, which is equivalent to life itself, disappears. There is no need to contrast the ordinary, earthly with the beautiful, sublime. Love makes it possible to feel their unity, poetry - to discover it, express it and consolidate it in words.
In “Letter... to Kostrov,” reflections on the essence of love unfold with remarkable logic, a system of arguments is built that is sufficient for the conversation about love to acquire a public character. A word escaping from the heart of a lover is capable of “raising, / and leading, / and attracting, / / which the eye has weakened.”
In “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva” the same theme is presented from a different, dramatic side. It is difficult to understand why mutual love could not bring happiness to the lovers. Apparently, he was hampered by a feeling of jealousy, which the poet promises to pacify.
And here the theme of love cannot receive a happy resolution. It is transferred to an uncertain future, associated with the coming triumph of the revolution on a worldwide scale:
I don't care
someday I'll take it -
or together with Paris.
And in the present there is a loneliness that has not been overcome.
In this poem, Mayakovsky also uses his favorite genre - a monologue addressed to a specific person. This imparts trust to the verse and gives what is said a deeply personal character. At the same time, the scope of the world that opens up in a message addressed to the woman you love is extremely wide. This applies to both spatial (from Moscow to Paris) and temporal (the time of the revolution and the Civil War - today - the future associated with the arrival of the revolution in Paris) borders. The extreme frankness characteristic of the opening lines of the poem is further reinforced by the words about “dogs of brutal passion”, about jealousy that “moves mountains”, about “measles of passion” - the letter is filled with the power of intimate feeling. And it is constantly translated into social terms. Therefore, when the hero exclaims:
Come here
go to the crossroads
my big ones
and clumsy hands.
Words about the future triumph of the revolution become the logical conclusion of the poem.
“Community love” is a phrase that is better than others capable of expressing the feeling underlying the poem.
To summarize what has been said, we note that Mayakovsky prefers to lyrical self-expression the desire to convince, to affirm his position, his ideas about the world, about man’s place in it, about happiness. Hence his focus on colloquial (often oratorical) speech. Coming from the present, the poet strives for a bright future. This determines the pathos of his poems.
Mayakovsky is often called the “tribune poet”. And although there is some truth in this, it would be wrong to reduce Mayakovsky’s poetry only to propaganda and oratorical poems, since it contains intimate love confessions, a tragic cry, a feeling of sadness, and philosophical thoughts about love. In other words, Mayakovsky’s poetry is diverse and multicolored.
what did he write,
said -
this is to blame
eyes-heaven,
V. Mayakovsky
V. Mayakovsky is a poet of genius. His legacy is multi-themed and multi-genre, and therefore it is a shame that someone perceives Mayakovsky only as a poet-agitator or poet-satirist. The creativity of this man was holistic, it was integral to his life. Mayakovsky’s word is a reaction to what is happening inside and around him, and since he was a man of decisive actions, an indomitable rebel, in his works he strove for words to become a socially significant matter. But I wouldn’t want to be deceived about this, because you just have to read many of his works (“Lilichka!” “I Love You!”, “Cloud in Pants,” “About This,” “Man,” etc.), and the image of the poet -rebel turns into a multi-colored image of a subtle lyricist, who spent his entire life on the “unburnable fire of unimaginable love.” And you immediately understand that this person is not only capable of being infinitely tender and sacrificial, but is also ready to defend his feelings, for which the main threat is philistine life.
The theme of love was never alien to Mayakovsky, since this feeling permeated his stormy and restless life. But the poet, arguing that “love is the heart of everything,” was always against the vulgarization of this topic both in life and in art, he ridiculed those who “stick out, sawing in rhymes, both love and nightingales some kind of brew " Mayakovsky never limited this deep human feeling to the narrow confines of the egoistic Self; love in his work is expanded to the horizons of the entire earth and space, even if it is undivided and unhappy:
The love boat crashed into everyday life. You and I are even, and there is no need for a list of mutual pains, troubles and insults. Look how quiet the world is! The night covered the sky with starry tribute; At such hours you get up and speak to the centuries, history and the universe.
Everyday life and the philistine environment are the main enemies of all human feelings, including love. In an atmosphere of indifference, vulgarity, narcissism, “love will bloom, bloom and shrivel,” and “between services, income, and so on, the soil of the heart is becoming hardened from day to day.” Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote very correctly about the poet: “Mayakovsky pulled love out of the alcoves... and carried it, like a tired, deceived child, in his huge hands, entwined with veins swollen from tension, towards the hated and dear street.”
Mayakovsky’s works dedicated to L. Brik reveal to us the full depth and power of the poet’s feelings, who “burned out a blossoming soul with love,” for whom “except your love... there is no sea,” “except your love... there is no the sun" and "not a single ringing is joyful except the ringing of your beloved name." The poet’s feelings are huge and strong - they are both “hulk-love” and “hulk-hatred”. And at the same time - the endless trepidation of relationships:
Let your departing step at least shoot out the last tenderness.
For the sake of love, Mayakovsky is ready to sacrifice his whole life, because he is sure that “everyone pays for a woman.” But this payment is made not with money, not with things, and not even always with time, but with the soul, the heart, and often with unbearable torment and suffering. Material from the site
My love, like the apostle at the time, I will spread along a thousand thousand roads. A crown has been prepared for you throughout the ages, and in the crown my words are a rainbow of convulsions.Mayakovsky believed that rudeness, vulgarity, and hypocrisy of the world around us are capable of perverting a person’s feelings, destroying them even at the very moment of their inception. That is why he hated and actively fought against the philistine world, mercilessly scourging and ridiculing all its imperfections. And at the same time, this wonderful poet believed that true love is infinitely strong, omnipotent, it cannot be frightened by everyday life, or insults, misunderstandings, it is able to stand up for itself, because it is not a selfish feeling, but a gift , a sacrifice to another person close and dear to you.
Maybe from these days, terrible, like bayonet points, when centuries have bleached the beard, only you and I will remain, rushing after you from city to city.
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