Mayakovsky lived in a horrible time. It seemed that futurists were creating a new art, really they were just destroying the old one. But how to break what can’t be broken, how to burn what can’t be burnt. Unfired is only what is fire itself, God’s spark, which till now has been illuminating the early poetry of Mayakovsky . “I know the city will be, I know the garden will blossom.” His poetry is a city-garden, of course not a paradisal one, but where have you seen the heaven on the earth? The Mayakovsky garden is continuing to blossom, not knowing neither winter nor autumn.
Even now Velimir Hlebnikov lives in the neighborhood with Mayakovsky, on the other side of the street Esenin is swaggering and roughhousing, a bit further – Francois Villon, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Great poems come not out of the past, but out of the future. Vladimir Mayakovky had been heating a hot bathhouse of revolution and had chosen Meyerhold to be his hero, he looked like Don Quixote in his eyes, but only in black, and the spirit of Sancho Panza settled into Malevich, he had been writing the decorations. Everything had started with mystery and was over with mystery.
Mayakovsky, the forerunner of inevitability, on the black background of devastation with a red voice of the tribune was throwing into the ration chapters of revolution. In the yellow blouse of much talked glory he had been approaching his sunset like the sun to its eclipse.
Talent – like a gift measured him by God with a generous hand , not the full measure but more than that, as a trial, as a penalty for all sins of centuries, for the revolution, for the crazy expectation of her, for all the nonsense of love, raised on the hatred and blood. Mayakovsky was not a saint man, Job, although who knows. Perhaps now he hears and keeps silence, only lips are whispering without ribaldry and blasphemy – I am a cloud wearing trousers, feeding the exhausted memory of descendants and living with all these in hell, in heaven, so where it happens.
Vladimir Mayakovsky – not only a tragedy of the personality, but also a living energy of the word, indomitable temper of spirit, misunderstood by himself, well, and how to understand incomprehensible. It’s impossible to approach him as well as to move away.