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I can't remember when I bought Wiktor Woroszylsk's The Life of Mayakovsky- I found it at a used bookstore (probably The Strand, but I've honestly no idea), and it has sat on my bookshelf for quite some time, looking intimidating and mysterious in a way that is particularly appropriate for a biography of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The Life of is a collection of letters and interviews and articles by people who knew or encountered Mayakovsky throughout his life, as well as excerpts from Mayakovsky's autobiography (which I'd like to get my hands on at some point). I ought to brush up on my early twentieth-century Russian history to really appreciate this book, but people react to current events as much as they react to Mayakovsky in the excerpts Woroszylsk presents, so I'm not too terribly lost.
I'm particularly amused by the feud between the Russian futurists and the Italian futurists (and, well, everyone else, but they were futurists and that's to be expected)- and I was struck in particular by this quote, from Valeri Bryusov's article in Russkaya Mysl No. 5, "The Year of Russian Poetry, April 1913-1914":
I've honestly never been that big a fan of Russian literature, but Mayakovsky's poems have always made me a bit weak at the knees. Something about the futurists and the modern poets does that to me; there's this sense that anything is possible, that the world is this huge, brilliant, incomprehensible place, and everything is moving so quickly and shining so brightly. And despite all that, there's still time to measure out one's life in coffee spoons, or knock at the windows in Odessa with a gigantic, trembling fist.
The Life of is a collection of letters and interviews and articles by people who knew or encountered Mayakovsky throughout his life, as well as excerpts from Mayakovsky's autobiography (which I'd like to get my hands on at some point). I ought to brush up on my early twentieth-century Russian history to really appreciate this book, but people react to current events as much as they react to Mayakovsky in the excerpts Woroszylsk presents, so I'm not too terribly lost.
I'm particularly amused by the feud between the Russian futurists and the Italian futurists (and, well, everyone else, but they were futurists and that's to be expected)- and I was struck in particular by this quote, from Valeri Bryusov's article in Russkaya Mysl No. 5, "The Year of Russian Poetry, April 1913-1914":
On one point there exists a complete divergence between the Italian and our Russian futurists: in their views on love and women. As is well known, Marinetti's school proclaims a "boycott of love." Russian poets are too romantic to adopt such a view... They differ also from the Italians in their unsurmountable desire to "bare their souls." Italians, being Europeans, do not like to show their souls. The Russians, brought up on Dostoyevsky after all, would find it impossible to content themselves with poeticizing the external world...
I've honestly never been that big a fan of Russian literature, but Mayakovsky's poems have always made me a bit weak at the knees. Something about the futurists and the modern poets does that to me; there's this sense that anything is possible, that the world is this huge, brilliant, incomprehensible place, and everything is moving so quickly and shining so brightly. And despite all that, there's still time to measure out one's life in coffee spoons, or knock at the windows in Odessa with a gigantic, trembling fist.
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