I’ve lived here for over 3,5 years (on August 30th 2008 it will be 4 years since I came to Russia) but I’ve only spent one day in Moscow, not counting all of those innumerous times that I’ve traveled through the capitol by plane or train. On the one day I spent in Moscow I was shown around town by a Siberian businessman [who was later to name his Omsk-based company Esomo, a word that I made up] and he took me to the The State Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum. He explained to me that it was the best museum in town, and even though the museum that I really had wanted to visit on my one day in Moscow was The State Dostoevsky Museum, I agreed and together we spent over three hours in the building where Mayakovsky used to live in the Lubyanka Passage in downtown Moscow. I don’t regret this visit, not the least, quite on the other hand – I stood still on the spot where the poet had shoot himself dead for several minutes in silence without knowing how to handle the situation. It was an enormous moment, a terrible moment, a moment that contained as much fear as astonishment as confusion and a feeling of never being able to comprehend this. I guess not everyone experiences such a metaphysical sensation as I did there, and even without it the Mayakovsky Museum is well worth a visit, no matter if you love his art or not. Even if you hate everything that has to do with Mayakovsky, and can’t stand even one line of his poetry or as much as a glance at his propaganda posters, humble yourself enough to drop in for fifteen minutes and those precious fifteen minutes of your life will not be lost. I suppose most people who grew up in the Soviet Union, for understandable reasons, can only learn to love Mayakovsky after overcoming some difficulties, one of them being seeing his name everywhere – улицы Маяковского here, парки Маяковского there, библиотеки Маяковского everywhere and so on and so forth. And after all his ‘communistic poems’ written in the 20’s that proclaimed a new world based on an ideal that was impossible to believe in after seeing it fail in reality later in the 20th century, there is a great need of a reconsideration of his art now in the 21st. As the ‘revolutionary poet’ Mayakovsky became State Property after his death and remained so during many years, something that forced school children to recite his poetry by heart according to the official program instead of finding him on their own, instead of coming upon his poems printed in a small red edition in the library on some dusty shelf on a slow Saturday and sit there for hours on the window sill, lost among poetry and mesmerized by the rhythm, by the sentences, by the words, by their meaning. (In Russia I have come to know that the official program on literature in Russian schools tend to kill any kind of love for the Russian classics among this country’s kids – I guess anyone who is forced to read Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky all in one year at 15 is bound to grow up to hate «Рудин» and «Анна Каренина» and «Братья Карамазовы». But that’s another discussion for another day!) I believe that every poet has to be a private poet. There can be no State Poets. I believe that to be able to love a poet and his or her poetry, you have to find him or her on your own. Their words must speak solely to you, and be almost your own, or even closer to your skin than your own words can ever be… I know not everyone agrees with this, but this is my firm opinion – poetry is made for those slow Saturday afternoons when the sun seems to have a dusty glow or when it won’t stop raining and you find those tainted and tattered but old and beloved copies of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Yesenin, Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Chyutchev or someone not Russian at all but just as brilliant, like, for example Allen Ginsberg, who will take you into their poetry and only let you go at dusk…

My fascination for Mayakovsky – yes, let’s call it that, fascination, because that’s what it is – started out when I was in my teens. In some languages Mayakovsky doesn’t work, while in others he works better than in his native Russian, and one of those languages is Swedish. I found his poems «Облако в штанах» [“A Cloud In Trousers”] and «Про это» [“About That”] «Хорошо» [“Good”] in some small and frail translated editions at the library when I was about sixteen or seventeen, at a time when I read everything Russian, and in my native language he was the best poet I had ever come across at this time in my life (though I’m ashamed of it now I must admit that his Russian is worse than his Swedish, but never mind, I blame the translator of course!). For a year or so I was deeply fascinated by Vladimir Vladimirovich, but that passed and since then I have almost forgotten about Mayakovsky, only reading him now and then, when I’ve come across some of his works in old book stores across Russia, not really paying that much attention to him (since I’m more into Бродский and Мандельштам nowadays). But my mother, always the attentive one when it comes to non-fiction works about Russia published in Swedish, gave me the only biography on Mayakovsky for Christmas when I was at home in January, fascinatingly enough written in Swedish by one of the world’s most prominent Mayakovsky scholars, Bengt Jangfeldt, who just happens to be Swedish. The biography is in English called “A Life at Stake: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and his Circle”, though I’m not sure if the English translation is published yet, in Swedish it was published under the title of “Med livet som insats – Berättelsen om Vladimir Majakovskij och hans krets” in the spring of 2007. But since the publishing company has an English title for the work, and since it is the only complete biography on Mayakovsky to ever be written, I must draw the conclusion that an English translation is not too far off in the future. Be on the lookout for it – it is definitely an very remarkable piece to read, containing not only information about the poet and his poetry, but also about the people around him, like Osip and Lili Brik, who influenced him, and other writers and poets who lived between 1910-30, whom he knew and whom he worked with, or worked against, as was the case at times.

I didn’t plan on writing about Mayakovsky here today, even though I always secretly want to write a post about Russian literature every day, just because I consider it to be the greatest part of Russian culture, and an invaluable gift from Russia to the rest of the world and that it can serve as proof of civilization if nothing else here can (and it doesn’t matter that most Russian public restrooms still lack toilet paper, really), but as I finished reading the biography this morning I found myself forced to write about him. I am curious to find out about what other Russophiles think about him. To me he is close not only as a person, but as an artist, because he was vulnerable in his art, because he screamed from the bottom of his heart, from the depths of his soul, in his poetry, because he turned himself inside out for his readers, for the world. There is something desperate, yet lovable, something harsh yet tender, something boastful yet so humble, something so big and enormous and scary about him and yet – something that is strong only because it is frail, loud only because of it’s silence, screaming from the top of his lounges only because if not nobody will listen… One great website about Mayakovsky is: http://www.v-mayakovsky.narod.ru/, which has a little something in English, but so far only published his works in Russian. It also has a couple of pictures, all portraying the inescapable ‘studness’ of Volodya, but that might be only my personal take on his appearance. On the website there is a poem called «ЕКАТЕРИНБУРГ – СВЕРДЛОВСК» written in 1928 when the poet visited this city in the Urals, but he also wrote another poem during the same visit, though it was not published during his lifetime. In it he writes about being taken to the place where the Tsar family was shot. In the biography Bengt Jangfeldt writes about Mayakovsky once meeting a man involved in the murder of the Tsar, and then he speculates about how much Mayakovsky really knew about their murder, perhaps more than we know today?

My favorite poem by Mayakovsky is «Лиличка. Вместо пиьсма» written to his muse and the love of his life Lili Brik in 1916. It is just like love should be – desperate, sweaty, a little bit angry, yet so sweet and so forgiving and so… wanting. I guess it’s true what Dante said – poetry only comes out of pining. And if that’s what a poet should be measured by then I suppose Mayakovsky is a GREAT one because he sure outdid most when it came to pining.