Two Adversaries Continues.
“It is
shameful to slow down here…
The wrath of
slaves is not the snorting of mares…”
S. A. Yesenin. Pugachev.
Mayakovsky is very close to Yesenin. Both are sons of the Revolution.
Both stand for justice. Both cry about the Crucified Christ, both are hounded
by bydlo [scum], both commit suicide. Both are not only slandered in their
lifetime, but continue to be slandered after death.
Mayakovsky is the poet of the Russian Revolution.
“How dare
you call yourself a poet,
And chirp
like a gray quail!
Today one
must use brass knuckles,
Getting busy
inside the world’s skull!”
Mayakovsky calls for a revolution:
“Go, you
hungry, sweaty, submissive…
Go! Let us
color Mondays and Tuesdays into holidays with blood!
Let the
earth under the knives remember
Whom she
wanted to vulgarize.”
Whereas Mayakovsky is a revolutionary, Yesenin is more of a rebel.
“And my
notoriety is no worse,
From Moscow
to the trash of Paris
My name
causes terror,
Like the
basest and loud obscenity.”
Sergei Yesenin writes about his own hounding, which was no better than
that of Mayakovsky, in his Confession of
a Hooligan:
“It is for a
purpose that I go with my hair uncombed,
With my head
like a kerosene lamp on my shoulders…
I like it
when rocks of scolding
Fly at me
like the thunder of a belching storm…
Somewhere
out there live my father and my mother,
Who do not
give a damn about my verses…
But they
would have come armed with pitchforks to stab you
For each
shriek of yours hurled at me…”
How well does this correspond to V. V. Mayakovsky’s 1915 poem Cloud in Pants:
“…And there
was not a single one there
Who was not
crying: Crucify, crucify him!
But for me
--- people,
And those
who offended me ---
You are the
dearest and closest to me.
Have you
seen a dog
Licking the
hand that strikes him?!
I, ridiculed
by today’s generation...
See the
coming over the mountains of time,
Whom nobody
else sees…
In the crown
of thorns of revolutions
Comes the
year 1916.”
Thus V.V. Mayakovsky presages the coming of the Russian Revolution.
“And I am
among you the forerunner;
I am where
the pain is, everywhere;
On each drop
of the flow of tears
I have
crucified myself on the cross…”
Here Mayakovsky compares himself to Christ…
***
Bulgakov, who has shown in many of his works the hounding of people,
understood like nobody else the horror of hounding, having experienced it
himself. Bulgakov felt very close in this regard to V. Mayakovsky and S.
Yesenin, for which reason he introduced them into his novel Master and Margarita as the prototypes
of the poet Ryukhin and the poet Ivan Bezdomny.
And how else could it be for Bulgakov other than to stand with
Mayakovsky? Together with Yesenin, Bulgakov could say like Mayakovsky said it:
“I,
belaughed by today’s tribe
Like a long
filthy anecdote...”
[We shall return to the theme of hounding and to V. Mayakovsky and S.
Yesenin in the chapter The Garden.]
It is from the poetry of V. Mayakovsky that the idea of the psychiatric
clinic arises, in Master and Margarita.
All authentic poetry is very hard to read. It affects one to the bottom of
one’s soul, because it represents a cry of a human soul. Poets are a special
breed. They are very vulnerable. Their way of thinking is so different from all
of ours!
Having three prototypes: N. V. Gogol, V. V. Mayakovsky, and S. A.
Yesenin, who all took their own life, Bulgakov had to show the depth of human
suffering with his inimitable sarcasm, in order to preserve his own sanity.
V. Mayakovsky begins to describe a fit of his neurasthenia also
sarcastically in his celebrated poem A
Cloud in Pants.---
“I hear:
softly, like a patient from a bed,
A nerve
jumped off, and anon---
First it
walked barely-barely,
Then it
started running around, excited and precise.
And now this
one and two more
Are
flouncing away in a derring-do tap dance.”
As if this alone were not enough, Mayakovsky adds that it is not his legs
that give way, but the nerves’ legs:
“Nerves big,
small, and motley,
Hop like
crazy, and anon,
The nerves’
legs are giving way.”
Next comes the head’s turn:
“It came and
curtained the head with despair:
The thought
about lunatic asylums…”
And now Mayakovsky concludes: “It’s madness already!”
But madmen do not normally contemplate about lunatic asylums, and even
less about madness. Harassed, nervous, “belaughed,” Mayakovsky was clearly
suffering from depression. I do not mean from clinical depression, but rather
from its more commonplace variety, when people basically are feeling down.
To be continued…
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