Lev Sobolev. Dear comrades and descendants!

The perception of Mayakovsky - by readers, poets, critics, and authorities - is a huge and essentially undeveloped topic. Leninskoe “sheer stupidity and pretentiousness” reflected the aesthetic conservatism of the Bolsheviks, for whom the social revolution was not at all associated (as it was for the poet himself) with a revolution in art - and the long Soviet decades included hundreds and thousands of attempts to pour “new wine into old wineskins,” that is express communist ideology using classical literature techniques. Stalin's "best, most talented poet of our era" was, in the words of Pasternak , the second death of the poet; they “began to introduce it forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine.” align="right">I found such a “living dead man” - first during my years at school and at the philology department, and then at the school where I came to work. It was clear that it was impossible to study (“go through”) Mayakovsky along the paths that Soviet textbooks and monographs like Pertsov’s suggested; the lessons of my older friend Alexander Muzylev and articles helped me a lot B. Eikhenbaum and Y. Tynyanov . Then there was a book by N. Khardzhiev and V. Trenin "The poetic culture of Mayakovsky", then acquaintance and friendship with Rita Yakovlevna Rait-Kovaleva... It must be said that schoolchildren came to their graduation class with a persistent allergy to the poems of the "singer of boiled water", and even a weak attempt to show that the poet is not exhausted " Poems about the Soviet passport " and that the poem " Vladimir Ilyich Lenin " is not a primitive popular print, but a rather complex text, had quite a tangible success (I have dozens of questionnaires with students' answers to questions about the poet).

Mayakovsky came to literature with rebellion and rejection of the world. And this is not an academically noted feature of his worldview, which distinguishes him from Pasternak, for example, but the basis of his poetic world. “Redo everything” - these words of Blok were repeated many times by Mayakovsky . That’s why he so organically accepted the revolution, that’s why he so inevitably had to feel like a “fossil-tailed monster” in those years when “the Soviet mess was covered in mud” and instead of utopian ideals, the authorities rushed to build a common prison. Russian Nietzscheanism, which left a deep imprint on the views of Gorky and Blok, had a tremendous impact on Mayakovsky - his “ Man ” took the place of God, and the cry “Hey, you! Heaven! Take off your hat! I'm coming!” - even though now it increasingly seems like the stupid trick of a difficult teenager - at that time it was a principled and characteristic gesture.

I remember how interesting it was for my students and me to discover the features of the gospel composition in the poem about Lenin - the Word, the prophecy of the coming, the genealogy, the forerunner, the appearance, deeds, death and immortality; when I told a philologist friend about my findings, he informed me that the abstracts of a report on the features of hagiography in Mayakovsky’s poem had already been published in the Tartu scientific notes . The poet's genre memory is unusually strong - as Tynyanov and Eikhenbaum once formulated, Mayakovsky came not from the street, but from literature.

Mayakovsky is all focused on the future. This is also true in relation to the early poems, where the “thirteenth apostle” ascends to the “Golgotha ​​of the audience”, in poems in which the poet is ready to “pull out his soul,” trample on it and “give it bloody as a banner” - he sees “walking through the mountains time"; This is also evident in the first introduction to the poem “ At the Top of Your Voice ,” addressed to “comrade descendants.” This focus on the future comes from the denial of the present, rejection of it; it also contains a complete denial of the past, an unwillingness to know it. And this is the origin of Mayakovsky's tragedy . The first day for him is October 25; revolution - a new creation of the world; his poems are an attempt to write a new book of Genesis. If everything is in the future and nothing is in the past, then the slightest doubt in the future (remember how strange, not to say ugly, the future looks in “The Bedbug”?) gives rise to despair. And behind it - suicide.

The theme of suicide is a cross-cutting theme in Mayakovsky's poetry . As long as there is faith in the revolution as the highest value, the poet (like the singers of the 18th century once) is ready to compose odes to it. But if, in a world without God and without traditional values, faith in the utopian ideal disappears, the poet remains alone; to kill oneself means for him not just an act of despair, but the murder of the world. Tragedy repeats itself like tragedy: Mayakovsky reproached Yesenin for committing suicide and committed suicide; After more than 50 years, Mayakovsky will be accused of suicide by Yuri Karabchievsky ...

Mayakovsky thought and wrote about poetry all his life. He was unusually conscientious about his work - this brought him closer to the OPOYAZ members , who said the most accurate and true words about him. He, who tried to subordinate poetry to the topic of the day, who repeatedly said that poetry is work, poetry is a weapon, that “in our time, he is a poet, he is a writer who is useful,” he, who stepped “on the throat of his own song,” in in one of his best poems - in " Yubileiny " - he admitted: "poetry is the most bastard thing: it exists - and it doesn't even hurt." With poetry - if it lives in the poet - nothing can be done. And Mayakovsky understood this.

I know the power of words, I know the alarm of words
They are not the ones that the lodges applaud
From words such as these, graves are torn off
walk with four oak legs
Sometimes they throw it away without printing it or publishing it
But the word rushes by tightening its girths
centuries are ringing and trains are crawling
lick poetry's calloused hands...