LOVE BOAT WRECKED ON DASEIN

My love for the genius of the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has by now become as well-known as my love for Nikolai Gumilev, and, yes, I love just as much to recite to myself his marvelous verses, many of which I still remember by heart.

But this is not an entry about Mayakovsky’s poetry, although, at a future time, I might think of expanding it into a large essay on his art and his life. Meantime, my limited purpose here is to make a short observation on what he wanted and did not get from life, and why he committed suicide at the early age of thirty-seven, in 1930.

Mayakovsky was in all ways larger than life, and what he always wanted from life was for life to measure up to him. In his pre-Revolutionary poetry, I find a profound sadness, and even bitterness, as he was not born to be satisfied with any “status quo,” reactionary, or revolutionary, or whatever, as long as it was an institutional status quo.

He welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 with a great and perfectly sincere passion, and now, in his poetry, he suddenly exudes an optimism and energy beyond belief. I am convinced that he was completely happy with the onset of the Soviet regime, because it satisfied his urgent need for earthquakes, cataclysmic changes, and titanic struggles.

By the time when his life had come to its tragic end, it must, in all probability, have become painfully clear to him that even the new dimension of Russian life, as provided by the Soviet experiment, had not prodded life to measure up to him. How could it, when it has been a universal law of life that after every revolution comes the period of stabilization into a… status quo! His bitter twilight complaint: “The love boat is shipwrecked on (the prose of) living,” has far less to do with his unhappy love life, than is generally assumed. Quite conversely, it was his love life falling victim to his utter disappointment in life in general, and it was that disappointment which then caused his premature tragic demise.

I repeat that it was not his disappointment in the Soviet experiment as such, but only in its insufficiency to satisfy his superhuman needs. He required a superpower to live in. His tragedy was that he succumbed too early. Had he witnessed the giant steps Russia would take in the 1930’s, on its way to superpowerdom, had he witnessed Hitler’s rise, and the ensuing titanic struggle between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, with the Russian nation emerging victorious and supermighty out of it… perhaps, he would have wanted to live until a hundred, and to write until a hundred, and as a result, both the Russians and the human civilization as a whole would have continued to benefit from the lightning strikes of his incomparable genius.