M ust we implore the charity of the times! This led to my Golgothas in the halls of Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev,7 where not a man but shouted: "Crucify, crucify him! J, mocked by my contemporaries like a prolonged dirty joke, I perceive whom no one sees, crossing the mountains of time. Where men's eyes stop short, there, at the head of hungry hordes, the year 1 9 1 6 cometh in the thorny crown of revolutions. Nothing is l ef t to forgive. I 've cau terized the souls wh ere tenderness was bred.
It was harder than taking a thousand thousand B a s t i ll es! Ah, wherefrom this, how explain this brandishing of dirty fists at brigh t j oy! I t's fine, when a yellow shirtiO shields the soul from investigation!
I t "s fine, when thrown at the gibbet's teeth, to shout: "Drink Van Hooten's Cocoa! That instant crackling like a Bengal light, I would not exchange for anything, not for any. How dare you call yourself a poet, and twitter grayly like a quaill This day brass knuckles must split the world inside the skulll. On you, steeped in love, who watered the centuries with tears, I'll tum my back, fixing the sun like a monocle into my gaping eye.
Donning fantastic finery, I "ll strut the earth to please and scorch; and N apoleon will precede me, like a pug, on a leash. The earth, like a woman, will flop on her back, a mass of quivering flesh, ready to yield; things will come to life- and their lips will lisp and lisp: "Yum-yum-yuml". Suddenly, the clouds and other cloudy things in the sky will roll and pitch madly as if workers in white went their way after declaring a bitter strike against the sky.
B bi H bTe, ry. II R li. MAMTe, ro. II bAl. And someone, entangled in a cloudy mesh, held out his hands to a cafe; and it looked somehow feminine, and tender somehow, and somehow l ike a gun carriage.
You believe the sun was tenderly patting the cheeks of the cafe? No, it's General Galliflet,Ia advancing again to mow down the rebels!
Forward, famished ones, sweating ones, servile ones, mildewed in flea-ridden dirt! Painting Mondays and Tuesdays in blood, we shall tum them into holidays. Let the earth, at knife's point, remember whom it wished to debase! The earth, bulging l ike a mistress whom Rothschild had overfondledl. I swore, pleaded, stabbed, fought to fasten my teeth into somebody's flesh. Night came. Feasted like Mamai,14 squatting with its rump on the city. Our eyes cannot break this night, black as Azef!
I huddle, slumped i n corners of saloons; with vodka drenching my soul and the cloth, I notice in one corner-rounded eyes:. M HOrAa 11oii ro. Why bestow such radiance of painted form upon the horde infesting a saloon! Don't you seel They spit on the man of Golgotha again, preferring Barabbas. Deliberately, perhaps, I show no newer face amid this human mash.
I, perhaps, am the handsomest of your sons. Give them, who are moldy with joy, a time of quick death, that children may grow, boys into fathers, girls-big with child. I, who praised the machine and England, I am perhaps quite simply the thirteenth apostle in an ordinary gospel.
He xo'leWb? Maria f l8 L e t me in, Maria! You won't? II H Cb. M apM R! CyAoporoii na. The rain's snout licked all pedestrians; but fleshy athletes, all gleaming, passed by in carriages; people burst asunder, gorged to the marrow, and grease dripped through the cracks; and the cud of old ground meat, together with the pulp of chewed bread, dribbled down in a turbid stream from the carriages.
How stuff a gentle word into their fat-bulged ears? A bird sings for alms, hungry and resonant. But I am a man, Maria, a simple man, coughed up by consumptive night on the dirty hand of the Presnya. Maria, do you want such a man?
Let me in, Maria! With shuddering fingers I shall grip the doorbell's iron throat! Don't be alarmed if a mountain of women with sweating bellies squats on my bovine shoulders- through life I drag millions of vast pure loves and a million million of foul little lovekins.
Whether in unclothed shame or shudders of apprehension, do yield me the unwithered beauty of your lips: my heart and I have never got as far as May,. The poet sings sonnets to Tiana,1a but I am all flesh, a man every bit- I simply ask for your body as Christians pray Give us this day our daily bread! I fear to forget your name as a poet fears to forget some word sprung in the tonnent of the night, mighty as god himself.
Your body I shall cherish and love as a soldier, amputated by war, unwanted and friendless, cherishes his last remaining leg. With the heart's blood I gladden the road, and flowering it sticks to the dusty tunic. The sun, l ike Salome, will dance a thousand times round the earth-the Baptist's head.
And when my quantity of years has finished its dance, a million bloodstains will lie spread on the path to my father's house.
I shall clamber out filthy from sleeping in ditches ; I'll stand at his side and, bending, shall speak in his ear:. Isn't it tedious to dip your puffy eyes every day into a jelly of cloud? Let us-why not- start a merry-go-round on the tree of what is good and evil! MoTaewb ro. IIaC Tblii? II napy pyK, CAe. You shake your head, curlylocks? You're frowning, gray brows?
You believe this creature with wings behind you knows what love is? Almighty, you concocted a pair of hands, arranged for everyone to have a head; but why didn't you see to it that one could without torture kiss, and kiss and kiss?! I thought you a great big god almighty, but you're a dunce, a minute little godlet. Watch me stoop. Hi MMT8Cb 8 pato! A rei! Swindlers with wings, huddle in heaven!
Ruffle your feathers in shuddering flight I'll rip you, reeking of incense, wide open from here to Alaska! You can't stop me. I may be wrong or right, but I 'm as calm as can be. Look- again they've beheaded the stars, and the sky is bloodied with carnage.
The universe sleeps, i ts huge paw curled upon a star-infested ear. CMex M3 r. BepcTw ynML! PROLOGUE For all of you, who once pleased or still may please, guarded by icons in the catacomb of the soul, I shall raise, like a goblet of wine at a festive board, a skull brimful of verse. More and more often I think. This very day, just in case, I'm staging my final performance.
Memory I Gather into the hall from my brain the inexhaustible ranks of my loves. Pour laughter from eye to eye. Festoon the night with weddings past. Pour out joy from body to body. Let no one forget this night.
On this occasion I shall play the flute. Play on my own backbone. With far-flung steps I crumple miles of streets. Where shall I go, hiding within me hell? Accursed woman, what heavenly Hoffmann2 has created you in his fancy?! BoT R 6oroxynMn. II M! II b nO. EcnM BJJ. The holiday poured and poured out people in Sunday best. I thought. Thoughts, sick and coagulated clots of blood, crawled from my skull.
I, miracle-worker of all that is festive, have no companion to share this festivity. I have blasphemed. Shou ted t ha t there is no god, but out of the in fernal depths god plucked a woman before whom the mountain will tremble and shudder; he brought her forth and commanded: love her! God is content. On a crag under the sky. God rubs his palms.
God thinks: just you wait, Vladimir! So you might not guess who she was, it was he, he indeed, who thought of giving her a real husband and of placing human notes on the piano.
If one suddenly tiptoed to the bedroom door and blessed the quil ted cover above you, I know there would be a smell of scorching wool, and the devil's flesh would rise in sul phurous fumes. B Haptw 6 M rpatb! Pot 3aiHMy. Oh, for a pack. Oh, for wine to ga rgl e a sighed-out heart. If il is true you exist, god, my god, if Lhe slars' carpet is your weave, if, of this daily mul tiplied pain, you have i mposed the ordeal, o lord; then wear the chain of a j udge.
Wait for my visit. I am punctual and shall not delay a day. Listen, All-highest inquisitor! I'll clamp my mouth. No cry shall escape my hard-bitten lips. Hind me to the comets as to horses' tails, and gaiiop me away,. Xo'lewb, 'leTsepTyii. BepcTw y. Or this perhaps : when my soul leaves its lodging and presents itself to your judgment, then, frowning dully, you, throwing a gibbet astride the Milky Way, seize me and string me up, a criminal.
Do what you will. Quarter me if you will. I myself will wash your hands clean. But do this- do you heart- remove that cursed woman whom you have made my beloved! W i th far-flung steps I crumple miles of streets. Accursed woman, what heavenly Hoffmann has created you in his fancy?! To both the sky, in smoke oblivious it was blue, and the clouds resembling ragged refugees, I shall bring the dawn of my ultimate love, bright as a consumptive's flush.
With rejoicing I shall blanket the roar of the assemblage, oblivious of comfort and home. Men, listen to mel. Dear Germans! The Frenchman dies smiling on a bayonet; an airman crashes down with a smile; when they remember your kissing mouth, Traviata. But I 'm in no mood for the rosy pulp the centuries have chewed.
This day let me embrace new feet! You I shall sing, redhead with rouged lips. Perhaps, outliving these times as harrowing as bayonets' steel, in centuries with whitened beards we alone shall remain: you and I, chasing after you from city to city.
You shall be wedded beyond the sea, and shall bide in night's lair- in a London fog I'll imprint on you the fiery lips of the street lamps. Inserting a smile in your lips, you will look and see a fine toreador! And suddenly I, from a bull"s dying eye, will fling my jealousy into the boxes. If you, driving fast with a man, bum up the Strelka or the Sokolniki-G then it is I, climbing high, expectant and stripped like the moon, who make you yearn.
The last word I shall speak is your name, blood clotted on my shrapnel-tom lip. Ji bl ,. Aa H MeM c. I am fated to be a tsar- on the sunlit gold of my coins I shall command my subjects to mint your precious face! But where the earth fades into tundra, where the river bargains with the North wind, there I'll scratch Lily's name on my fetters,' and in the darkness of hard labor, kiss them again and again.
Listen you, who have forgotten the sky is blue, who have grown as hairy as beasts. This is, perhaps, the very last love in the world to dawn like a consumptive"s flush. J I shall forget the year, the day, the date. I shall lock myself up with a sheaf of paper. Through the suffering of enlightened words, do your creation, 0 inhuman magic! II ;tAHO. II HM n. Her, OTBeTb. He nn! MorMJibl rny6ArcA. Hery AHa raM. You had concealed something in your silks, and the smell of incense expanded in the air.
Glad to see me? That "very" was very cool. Confusion broke the barrier of reason. Burning and feverish, I heaped on despair. Listen, whatever you do, you cannot hide a corpse. That terrible word pours lava on the head. Whatever you do, each sinew of yours bugles as from a megaphone: she's dead, dead, dead! It can't be, answer me. Don't liel How can I go now? On your face your eyes excavate the gaping hollows of two deep graves. The graves grow deeper. They have no bottom. It seems I shall plunge head first from the scaffolding of days.
Over the abyss I've stretched my soul in a tightrope and, j uggling with words, totter above it. Te6R He awpay. Find your youth in my soul. Invite the heart to the body's festival. I know each of us must pay for a woman. Do you mind if, in the meantime, I clothe you in tobacco smoke instead of Parisian chic.
My love, like an apostle of olden days, I'll carry down a thousand thousand roads. Eternity for you has fashioned a crown, and in that crown my words spell a rainbow of shudders.
As elephants with hundredweight games completed Pyrrhus' victory, 1 sacked your brain with the tread of genius. But in vain. I cannot tear you out.
Rejoice, rejoice, now you have finished me off! My anguish is so sharp, I'll run to the canal and thrust my head in its maw. H p M H H yn e11y : cXopowo! X opowo! TaoR octaHetcR. CMotpM, He ynnblna 6. O x , ata HO'Ib! Hoponb Anb6ept,. Doors banged. He entered, sprayed by the streets' gaiety. I split in a wail. Cried out to him: "All right, I'll go, all right! Yours she'll remain. Dress her up in fine rags, and let shy wings, in silks, grow fat. Watch out lest she float away.
Round your wife"s neck, like a stone, hang a necklace of pearls! Oh, what a night! I myself tightened the noose of despair. My weeping and laughter wrenched the room's face in horror.
The vision of your bereft countenance rose; your eyes made it shine on the carpet as if some new Byalik had conjured T a dazzling Queen of Hebrew Zion. In anguish before her whom I had surrendered, I went down on my knees. King Albert,8. Flowers and grasses, turn gold in the sunl Be vernal, lives of all the elements! I desire only one poison- to drink the deep draught of verse. Thief of my heart, who have stripped it of everything, who have tortured my sou l in delirium, accept, my dearest, this gi ft- never, perhaps, shall I think of anything else.
Paint this day a bright holiday. As you see- the nails of words nail me to paper. T e nble, HaH yAap. Four words, heavy as a blow: ". Where is there shelter for me? If I were as small as the Great Ocean, I'd tiptoe on the waves and woo the moon like the tide.
Where shall I find a beloved, a beloved like me? She would be too big for the tiny sky! Oh, to be poor! Like a multimillionaire! What's money to the soul? In it dwells an insatiable thief. The gold of all the Californias will never satisfy the rapacious horde of my lusts. Oh, to be tongued-tied like Dante or Petrarchl I'd kindle my soul for one love alone! In verse I'd command her to burn to ash!
And if my words and my love. JI IBM! Oh, were I as quiet as thunder then I would whine and fold earth's aged hennitage in my shuddering embrace. If, to its full power, I used my vast voice, the comets would wring their burning hands and plunge headlong in anguish. Why should I want to feed with my radiance the earth's lean lap! I shall go by, dragging my burden of love.
In what delirious and ailing night, was I sired by Goliaths- 1, so large, so unwanted? A hundred and forty suns in one sunset blazed, and summer rolled into J uly; it was so hot, the heat swam in a haze- and this was in the country. Pushkino, a hillock, had for hump, Akula, a large hill, and at the hill's foot a village stood- crooked with the crust of roofs.
Beyond the village gaped a hole and into that hole, most likely, the sun sank down each time, faithfully and slowly. And next morning, to flood the world anew, the sun would rise all scarlet. Day after day this very thing began to rouse in me great anger.
And flying into such a rage one day that all things paled with fear,. II a 3b! R norM6! Listen, goldbrow, instead of going down, why not come down to tea with mel " What have I done! I 'm finished! Toward me, of his own good will, himself, spreading his beaming steps, the sun strode across the field. I tried to hide my fear, and bea t it backwards. His eyes were in the garden now. Then he passed through the garden. His sun's mass pressing through the windows, doors, anrl crannies, in he rolled; drawing a breath, he spoke deep bass: "For the first time since creat ion , J drive the fires back.
Give me tea, poet, spread out, spread out the jam! But, from the sun, a strange radiance streamed, and forgetting all formalities, I sat chatting with the luminary more freely. Of this and that I talked, and of how 1 was swallowed up by Rosta,2 but the sun, he says: "All right, don't worry, look at things more simply! And do you think I find it easy to shine? KaKaR TbMa y 1y1? A conH 1. For what darkness was there here? We wanned up lO each other ami very soon, openly displaying friendship , I slapped him on the back.
The sun responded! Let's go, my poet, let's dawn and sing in a gray tattered world. I shall pour forth my sun, and you-your own, in verse. Drowsy and dull, one tired, wanting to stretch out for the: night.
Suddenly-I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very deeps of the last days, to shine- and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto- and the sun's! This is for you- who have exchanged rumpled hair for a slick hairdo, bast shoes for lacquered pumps, you, men of the Proletcult,3 who keep patching Pushkin's faded tailcoat. KaK OH. G i ve it upl Forget it. Spit on rhymes ancl arias and the rose bush and other such mawkishness from the arsenal of the arts. Who's interested now in-"Ah, wretched soul! How he loved, how he suffered. Good workers- these are the men we need rather than long-haired preachers.
The locomotives groan, and a draft blows through crannies and floor: "G ive us coal from the Don i Metal workers and mechanics for the depot!
There are no fools today to crowd, open-mouthed, round a "maestro" and await his pronouncement. H a ce pAu. Ho M aroro M a. Ho n03AHO. The heart wears a body; the body-a shirt. Even that's not enough! Aging, people suddenly have second thoughts. Women rub in powder and rouge. Men do cartwheels according to Muller's system. The skin proliferates in wrinkles. Love flowers, and flowers and then withers and shrinks. Since childhood, people have been drilled to labor. But I fled to the banks of the Rion8.
Mamma chided me angrily: "Good for nothing! But I, laying my hands on a false three-ruble note, played at "three leaves" with soldien under a fence. The sun was astonished: "I can hardly see him, the brat!
Yet he's got a little heart too. He does his small best! Where, in less than a yard is there place for me and the river and the hundred-mile stretch of rock?!
We hammer grammar into the thickest skulls. But I was expelled from the fifth class. Then they began to shove me into Moscow prisons.
II M Te. As for me, I learned about love in Butyrki. Or to gaze at the sea and sigh?! In the "Fu neral Parlor," 7. I fell in love with the keyhole of Cell 1 You divide. You llecline wonderfully. Well, decline then! But tell me- can you sing in tune with a house? Do you understand the idiom of tramcars? M yTRT lll. But I learned my alphabet from signboards, leafing through pages of iron and tin.
People take the earth, trim and strip it- and they teach you a lesson. I t's just a tiny globe. Painfu l questions torment the l lovaiskys:ll Did Barbarossa have a red beard?
They take Dobrolyubov to hate evil , lO but the name objects, the family whimpers. Since childhood, I 've always h ated the overfed, for I always had to sell myself for a meal. They learn to sit down- to please a lady; their trifling thoughts clink against tinpot foreheads.
But I talked. B cepAu. II O BM. II R,. Water towers were my only company. Listening closely with their dormer windows, the roofs caught what I threw in their ears.
Afterwards, they prattled about the night and about each o ther, wagging their weathercock tongue. Their pockets are stuffed with rubles. For about a hundred rubles. But l, homeless, thrust my hands into my tom pockets and slouched about, goggle-eyed.
N ight. You put on your best dress. You relax w i th wives and widows. Moscow, with the ring of i ts endless Sadovayas,U choked me in i ts embraces. The hearts of amorous women go tic-toe. On a bed of love the partners feel ecstatic.
Stretched out like Passion Square,12 I caught the wild heartbeat of capital cities. Enter me with your passions! Climb in with your loves! Now I have lost control of my heart. I know where lodges the heart in others. I n the breast-as everyone knows B u t with me anatomy has gone mad: nothing but heart roaring everywhere. Micheli M. Le avanguardie artistiche del Novecento.
Milano : Feltrinelli, Ripellino A. Torino : Einaudi, Robinson K. The Years of Rice and Salt. Russell R. Kendal : Durham Univ. Modern Language Series, Spinnato A. Melancolia : Fenomenologia e mito. Palermo : Sellerio, Stahlberger L. The Symbolic System of Majakovskij. Terras V. Summer The reception of H. Parrinder, J. Thomson R.
Tilly C. European Revolutions, — Oxford : Blackwell, Vitale S. Il defunto odiava i pettegolezzi. Milano : Adelphi ; Kindle ed. Puteshestvie na Mars [Journey to Mars]. Tovarishchestvo A. Marks, pp. Asimov, I. Massachusetts, John Curley. Basile, G. In Quaestio Rossica. Bogdanov, A. Krasnaya Zvezda [Red Star]. Born, M. Bottero, G. Utopie Tecniche e Sociali nella Russia Post-rivoluzionaria. Brook, P. Haven, Yale Univ.
Brown, E. Mayakovsky: A Poet in Revolution. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Burbank, J. Intelligentsia and Revolution : Russian Views of Bolshevism — Eco, U. Milano, Bompiani. Esenin, S. Sobranie sochinenii v pyati tomakh [Collected Works]. In Esenin S. Polnoye sobranie sochinenii v 7 t. Moscow, Nauka, Golos, pp. Fyodorov, N. Vecher v godu [An Evening in ]. St Petersburg.
Goldstone, J. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction. The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Holland, J. Complexity: A Very Short Introduction. Strada V. Jakobson, R. Il problema Majakovskij. Milano, SE. Lenin, V. In Sochinenya. Moscow, Gospolitizdat. Lodge, D. Mayakovsky, V. Polnoye sobranie sochinenii v 13 t. IMLI im. Revolucya Poetokhronika [Revolution Poetic Chronicle ].
Milano, BUR. Milano, PGreco Ed. Reavey; ed. Teatro e altri scritti, in Opere, 4 voll. Micheli, M. Milano, Feltrinelli. Ripellino, A. Torino, Einaudi. Robinson, K. The Years of Rice and Salt.. Russell, R. The Bedbug.
Kendal, Durham Univ. Modern Language Series. Spinnato, A. Fenomenologia e mito. Palermo, Sellerio. Stahlberger, L. The Symbolic System of Mayakovsky. Mouton, The Hague. Mayakovsky and Time. XIII, 2, Summer , pp. The Reception of H. Wells in Europe Partington Eds.
London, N. Thomson, R. And next morning, to flood the world anew, the sun would rise all scarlet. Day after day this very thing began to rouse in me great anger. And flying into such a rage one day that all things paled with fear. R nornd! Vme B caAy ero raasa. Ywe npoxoAHT cbaom. Listen, goldbrow, instead of going down, why not come down to tea with me! Toward me, of his own good will, himself, spreading his beaming steps, the sun strode across the field.
I tried to hide my fear, and beat it backwards. His eyes were in the garden now. Then he passed through the garden. Give me tea, poet, spread out, spread out the jam! But, from the sun, a strange radiance streamed, and forgetting all formalities, 1 sat chatting with the luminary more freely. And do you think I find it easy to shine? Just try it, if you will!
Kauan Tbwia yw lyi? Bot ji03yHr mom — M cojiHua! For what darkness was there here? We warmed up to each other and very soon, openly displaying friendship, I slapped him on the back.
The sun responded! I shall pour forth my sun, and you — your own, in verse. Drowsy and dull, one tired, wanting to stretch out for the night. Suddenly — I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round.
Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very deeps of the last days, to shine — and to hell with everything else! This is for you — the peintres, grown as robust as horses, the ravening and neighing beauty of Russia, skulking in ateliers and, as of old, imposing Draconian laws on flowers and bulking bodies. This is for you — who put on little fig leaves of mysticism, whose brows are harrowed with wrinkles — you, little futurists, imaginists, acmeists,- entangled in the cobweb of rhymes.
Give it up! Forget it. Spit on rhymes and arias and the rose bush and other such mawkishness from the arsenal of the arts. How he loved, how he suffered. Good workers — these are the men we need rather than long-haired preachers. Metal workers and mechanics for the depot! Comrades, give us a new form of art — an art that will pull the republic out of the mud. Ho H 3Toro Maao! Oamh — hamot! Ho no3AHO. The heart wears a body; the body — a shirt. Someone — the idiot!
Aging, people suddenly have second thoughts. Women rub in powder and rouge. The skin proliferates in wrinkles.
Love flowers, and flowers and then withers and shrinks. Since childhood, people have been drilled to labor. Mamma chided me angrily: "Good for nothingl" Papa threatened to belt me. But I, laying my hands on a false three-ruble note, played at "three leaves" with soldiers under a fence. He does his small best! Where, in less than a yard is there place for me and the river and the hundred-mile stretch of rock?! We hammer grammar into the thickest skulls. But I was expelled from the fifth class.
Then they began to shove me into Moscow prisons. What do you find in these lapdog lyricists? Or to gaze at the sea and sigh?! You divide. You decline wonderfully. Well, decline then! But tell me — can you sing in tune with a house? Do you understand the idiom of tramcars? But I learned my alphabet from signboards, leafing through pages of iron and tin. People take the earth, trim and strip it — and they teach you a lesson.
Since childhood. They learn to sit down — to please a lady; their trifling thoughts clink against tinpot foreheads. B pydanx KapmaHM. Py6aMKOB ai cto. Water towers were my only company. Listening closely with their dormer windows, the roofs caught what I threw in their ears.
For about a hundred rubles. But 1, homeless, thrust my hands into my torn pockets and slouched about, goggle-eyed. You put on your best dress. You relax with wives and widows. The hearts of amorous women go tic-toc. On a bed of love the partners feel ecstatic.
Enter me with your passions! Climb in with your loves! Now 1 have lost control of my heart. I know where lodges the heart in others. In the breast — as everyone knows!
But with me anatomy has gone mad: nothing but heart roaring everywhere. Oh, what a multitude of springtimes has been packed into my feverish body in these 20 years! Their burden unspent is simply unbearable. Unbearable not figuratively, in verse, but literally. B 03 bMHTe! I am exhausted by lyricism — wet nurse of the world, the hyperbole of Maupassant's archetype.
Her ero — Hra! I cannot bear the burden — but 1 bear it. I should like to throw it down — but 1 know 1 shall not throw it down! The cage of the chest cracks under the strain. YOU You came — determined, because I was large, because 1 was roaring, but on close inspection you saw a mere boy.
You seized and snatched away my heart and began to play with it — like a girl with a bouncing ball. But if I can't manage the safe or the grand piano, then, having retrieved it, how can I carry my heart. And, if desire insist I can draw out a smile, a half-smile, even less, and, in company reveling, in half a night expend some fifteen rubles' worth of lyrical change.
A train likewise speeds to a station. And I, even more, am pulled and tugged towards you — for I love. In the same way, my beloved, I return to you. This is my heart, and I marvel at it. People gladly go home and scrape off their dirt, washing and shaving. In the same way I return to you — for in going towards you, am 1 not returning home?!
Man of earth in earth is laid. We return to our destination. Thus steadily 1 am drawn back towards you as soon as we part or stop seeing each other.
It has been deeply thought. BbiBepeHa, npoBepeHa. Solemnly raising index-lined verse, I swear — I love immutably, truly! Blush at my praise, however go red as our flag, united-states -of -america you may be. As a crazed believer retreats enters a church, so 1, into a monastery cell, austere and plain; in graying evening haze. As a conqueror presses into a city all shattered, on cannon with muzzles so, drunk with glory, I clamber, in pride, craning high as a giralBFe — eager to live.
As a foolish painter plunges his eye, sharp and loving, into a museum madonna, so I, from the near skies bestrewn with stars, gaze at New York through the Brooklyn Bridge. New York, heavy and stifling till night, has forgotten its hardships and height; and only the household ghosts ascend in the lucid glow of its windows.
Here the elevateds drone softly. And only their gentle droning tell us: here trains like dishes are crawling and rattling being cleared into a cupboard. If the end of the world befall— and chaos smash our planet to bits, and what remains will be this bridge, rearing above the dust of destruction; then, as huge ancient lizards are rebuilt from bones finer than needles, to tower in museums, so, from this bridge, a geologist of the centuries cyMe;i BOCcosAaTb 6bi AHM HaCTOflIUHe.
This rib reminds us of a machine — just imagine, would there be hands enough, after planting a steel foot in Manhattan, to yank Brooklyn to oneself By the cables by the lip? I recognize of electric strands. For some, life here had no worries; for others, it was a prolonged and hungry howl. From this spot, jobless men leapt headlong into the Hudson. I see: here stood Mayakovsky, stood, composing verse, syllable by syllable. I stare as an Eskimo gapes at a train, I seize on it as a tick fastens to an ear.
Brooklyn Bridge — yes. That's quite a thing! Embrace, depths of the soul and the sea. In my view, it is stupid to be always serene. My cabin is the worst of all cabins — all night above me thuds a smithy of feet. I I have no francs to spare. And Marquita at the slightest wink! Whether Tm self-exiled or sent to mamma-— the steel of words corrodes, the brass of the bass tarnishes.
Why, beneath foreign rains, must I soak, rot, and rust? I myself feel like a Soviet factory, manufacturing happiness. I object to being torn up, like a flower of the fields, after a long day's work.
I want a commissar with a decree to lean over the thought of the age. I want the heart to earn its love wage at a specialist's rate. Thank you. Forgive my bothering you. My business is of a delicate nature: about the place of the poet in the workers' ranks. Along with owners of stores and property I'm made subject to taxes and penalties. You demand I pay five hundred for the half year and twenty-five for failing to send in my returns.
Now my work is like any other work. And so you hunt for the small change of suffixes and flections in the depleted cashbox of conjugations and declensions. You start shoving a word into the line, but it's a tight fit— you press and it breaks. Citizen tax collector, honestly, the poet spends a fortune on words. Epocawcb, onyTaH b aBancu h b saliMhi h. In our idiom rhyme is a keg. A keg of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line burns to the end and explodes, and the town is blown sky-high in a strophe.
Where can you find, and at what price, rhymes that take aim and kill on the spot? Suppose only a half dozen unheard-of rhymes were left in, say, Venezuela. And so Tm drawn to North and South. Consider my traveling expenses. Poetry is like mining radium. For every gram you work a year. But how incendiary the burning of these words compared with the smoldering of the raw material. Of course, there are many kinds of poets. So many of them use legerdemain! And, like conjurers, pull lines from their mouths — their own — and other people's.
Not to speak of the lyrical castrates?! They're only too glad to shove in a borrowed line. This is just one more case of robbery and embezzlement among the frauds rampant in the country. Man BuesAOB hot? As the saying goes, you eat forty pounds of table salt 2 and smoke a hundred cigarettes in order to dredge up one precious word from artesian human depths.
So at once my tax shrinks. Strike out one wheeling zero from the balance due! For a hundred cigarettes — a ruble ninety; for table salt — a ruble sixty. Your form has a mass of questions: "Have you traveled on business or not? M KOfAa in the last 15 years? And here you have — imagine my feelings! But what if 1 am simultaneously a leader and a servant of the people?
The working class speaks through my mouth, and we, proletarians, are drivers of the pen. As the yean go by, you wear out the machine of the soul.
Our duty is to blare like brass-throated horns in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity and seething storms. A poet is always indebted to the universe, paying, alas, interest and fines. No, a poet's word is your resurrection and your immortality, citizen and official. Centuries hence, take a line of verse from its paper frame and bring back time! And this day with its tax collectors, its aura of miracles and its stench of ink, will dawn again.
Convinced dweller in the present day, go to the N. Nowadays too the poet's rhyme is a caress and a slogan, a bayonet and a knout! Citizen tax collector, ril cross out all the zeros after the five 1 demand and pay the rest. AeByuiKaM noaibi flwfibi. Comrade Kostrov, with your usual generosity, for squandering on lyrics part of the lines allotted to Paris. Picture this: a beauty all inset in furs and beads, enters a drawing room.
I seized this beauty and said: — did I speak right or wrong? Girls are partial to poets. Love has inflicted on me a lasting wound — I can barely move. Marriage is no measure of my love: fallen out of love — she drifted away. Comrade, to hell with cupolas. An end to this joking, my beauty, I am not twenty — thirty. Love for us is no paradise of arbors — to us love tells us, humming, that the stalled motor of the heart has started to work again.
You have broken the thread to Moscow. Tyr 6iii Years: distance. How can 1 explain to you my state of mind? The earth has a whole skyful of lights. The blue sky, a hell of a lot of stars. If I were not a poet, I would become a stargazer. Public squares begin to buzz; carriages roil past; I stroll about, jotting verse in my notebook. Cars whir along the street without knocking me down. They understand, the smart fellows: here is a man in ecstasy.
The assembly of visions and ideas is brimmed to the lid. And so from some fifth-rate restaurant, when all this has boiled over, from my gullet the word soars to the stars like a golden-born comet. The tail splashes across a third of the sky, its plumage sparkling and burning, so that a pair of lovers may admire the stars from their lilac-bloomed arbor.
To lift up, and lead, and entice, those who have grown weak in the eye. To saw from shoulders hostile heads with the tail of a glittering sword. Hurricane, fire, water surge forward, rumbling. Who can control this? Can you? Try it. And, possibly, your scholars will declare, with their erudition overwhelming a swarm of problems; once there lived a certain champion of boiled water, and inveterate enemy of raw water.
I myself will expound those times and myself. I, a latrine cleaner and water carrier, by the revolution mobilized and drafted, went off to the front from the aristocratic gardens of poetry — the capricious wench. She planted a delicious garden. Ho 11 ce6R CMMpna, the daughter, cottage, pond and meadow.
Myself a garden I did plant, myself with water sprinkled it. But I subdued myself. Listen, comrades of posterity, to the agitator, the rabble-rouser. Stifling the torrents of poetry, ril skip the volumes of lyrics; as one alive, ril address the living. My verse will reach you not as an arrow in a cupid-lyred chase, not as worn penny reaches a numismatist, not as the light of dead stars reaches you.
My verse by labor will break the mountain chain of years, and will present itself ponderous, crude. When in mounds of books, where verse lies buried, you discover by chance the iron filings of lines, touch them with respect, as you would some antique yet awesome weapon. Its no habit of mine to caress a maiden's ear curly-ringed will not crimson the ear with words; when flicked by smut. In parade deploying the armies of my pages, I shall inspect the regiments in line.
Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand, ready for death and for immortal fame. The poems are rigid, pressing muzzle to muzzle their gaping pointed titles. EpRutaHMOM 6oeB to launch a wild hallooing charge, reins its chargers still, raising the pointed lances of the rhymes.
And all these troops armed to the teeth, which have flashed by victoriously for twenty years, all these, to their very last page, I present to you, the planet's proletarian. The enemy of the massed working class is my enemy too, inveterate and of long standing.
Years of trial and days of hunger ordered us to march under the red flag. We opened each volume of Marx as we would open the shutters in our own house; but we did not have to read to make up our minds which side to join, which side to fight on.
Our dialectics were not learned from Hegel. Let fame trudge after genius like an inconsolable widow to a funeral march — die then, my verse, die like a common soldier, like our men who nameless died attacking!
With the tail of my years behind me, 1 begin to resemble those monsters, excavated dinosaurs. Comrade life, let us march faster, march faster through what's left of the five-year plan.
My verse has brought me no rubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house. In all conscience, I need nothing except a freshly laundered shirt. Aojiwho 6biTb, Tu jierjia. Kan roBopflT, hhumacht HcnepseH. Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. Now you and 1 are quits. Why bother then to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. In hours like these, one rises to address The ages, history, and all creation.
People entering empty- handed and coming out xviih bundles. Why get divorced on account of a button? Dutch press studs! They sew themselves on! Twenty kopecks for half a dozen! Here you are, gentlemen! Straight from the ballet studios! The best toy for indoors and outdoors! Top-grade apples at fifteen kopecks for four! Like some, lady? Any one you choose for thirty kopecks! Hones where you like and how you like! All sizes and colors! Blue for comfort and red for passion!
Get yourselves a lampshade, comrades! Fly like a bird! Step right up, citizens! Best herrings! Indispensable with pancakes and vodka! Lovely fur-lined brassieres! Famous Excelsior glue! Fixes anything from Venus de Milo to a chamber pot! Like to try it, lady? Coty perfume by the ounce! Fifteen kopecks instead of a ruble twenty!
Fur-lined brassieres! Suppose we have twins? There'll be one for Dorothy and one for Lillian when they go out walking together. That's what I'm going to call them: Dorothy and Lillian — aristocratic — like the Gish sisters. Now you buy those bonnets, Rosalie. He doesn't mean to be vulgar — that's how the up-and-coming working class sees things. Here he is, bringing an immaculate proletarian origin and a union card into your family and you count your kopecks! His house must be like a horn of plenty.
What about an extra dozen beers for the wedding instead? OLEG bard: His house must be like a horn of plenty. Beer must flow like a river, and dancing dolls, too — like out of a cornucopia.
There we are! Buy them, Rosalie Pavlovna! OLEG bard: Allow me. Indispensable with every kind of vodka! Let me through, sir! How much is this sardine? Only two-sixty for this budding stuigeon! Did you hear that, Comrade Skripkin? Oh, how right you were to kill the Tsar and drive out Mr. I shall claim my civic rights and buy my herrings in the Soviet State Co-op! OLEG bard: Wait a moment. Comrade Skripkin. Why get mixed up with petty bourgeois elements and haggle over herrings like this?
I'm a man with higher needs. Steps back in astonishment and lis- tens. OLEG bard: When your cortege. Some kind of card-game? That's what they call processions of all kinds, particularly wedding pro- cessions, in these lovely foreign languages. That was a god these Greeks had. I mean the ancient republican Greeks, not these mad-dog guttersnipe opportunists like Venizelos. Get it? OLEG bard: Why, of course.
Comrade Skripkin! ZOYA beryozkina seizes both of them by the arms; they remove her hands and dust off their sleeves : Vanya! What wedding? Who do you think you are? A sailor with a girl in every port? To the herring peddler. Now then, show me that snail! The street-vendor's herrings are larger. Wrings her hands Longer by a tail's length! What did we fight for. Comrade Skripkin, eh? Why, oh, why did we kill the Tsar? Why did we throw out Mr.
This Soviet regime of yours will drive me to my grave. They're only bigger by a head and what do you want the heads for? You can't eat them and you'll cut them off and throw them out anyway. If 1 cut off your head. Why have you got your hooks on my son-in-law?
Stop this disgusting be- havior! Whenever the door opens, a long corridor with doors off and light- bulbs is seen. Am I supposed to check them every night in the baggage room at the Kursk Station? Is that what IVe got to do? Is that it? He cursed while he put them on. The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald.
He ought to just switch his socks from one foot to the other. Bends down to pick them up, holds them to the light, laughs so hard he can barely manage to motion his comrades toward him, ALL reading and repeating after each other : Pierre Skripkin! Who is Prisypkin?
Pierre Skripkin is very fine and elegant. You think I like wear- ing these lousy rags? Like hell I do! People want to live their own lives now. And people shoot with noise- less powder!
In one hand he holds a pair of worn-out shoes by the laces and tosses them over to barefoot youth, oleg bard carries his purchases. The youths in the hostel turn their backs, mechanic: Quit bowing and scraping.
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