Poems [antikvár]

A GREAT POET OF THE SOVIET EPOCH In 1917, at the time of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky was twenty-four years old, but had already accumulated extensive and manifold social and literary experience. "My revolution"-so he defined his attitude to the historic events in Russia and directly went to work at the Smolny. The building of the former Smolny institute, a boarding school for daughters of the nobility, now housed the headquarters of the October uprising guided by V. I. Lenin. Here throbbed the heart of revolutionary Russia, here, in the Smolny, her future destinies were being decided. The poet immediately found his place in the ranks of Lenin's followers, applying all his poetical fervour to the inspired and inspiring everyday work of building a new socialist society. The dream he had long cherished as a poet and revolutionary was coming true. "And he, the free man of whom I'm yelling-he'll come, believe me, believe, he will," Mayakovsky prophesied back in 1915 in his early poem War and Peace. In the revolution Mayakovsky's forceful revolutionary oratory and soul-searching lyricism acquired full scope and he became the first poet of the Soviet era. The ideas of the revolution made Mayakovsky's poetry what it was: an expression of Russia's new national culture, in which her great classic heritage was developed in new forms. Mayakovsky's work may be correctly understood as a manifestation of the Russian national spirit and national art, only in the light of the struggle for the humane and universally significant ideals of the revolution. A reader making his first acquaintance with Mayakovsky's poetry will naturally ask himself what kind of man the poet was, how he came to accomplish his great artistic mission. Let us, therefore, throw a cursory look at the main landmarks of his life and work.