Written shortly after Mayakovsky’s first meeting with Lily Brik in 1915, this poem takes its tone from Catullus’s “I love, and I hate” and its mood from the gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom the poem alludes in its first stanza.

The composition has four parts: a prologue and three stanzas, each of which communicates the agony the speaker endures for love of this fiend in womanly shape. In addition to foreshadowing the despair expressed in the poem, the prologue expresses in flamboyant words and images Mayakovsky’s sense that his poetry sprang from the torments of his body. In a macabre gesture, he offers to the complacent reader a skull-full of verse, rather like the skull Byron used as a wine glass, and adds that he plays on the flute of his backbone.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Other images of verse-making also hint at the difficulty of this task: he must shape his words like a jeweler cutting a diamond. Furthermore, writing his poem is like drinking poison, and the words of the poem crucify him.

The prologue also speaks of the joy that comes from weddings, a joy seemingly at odds with the pain the ensnared lover fights throughout the poem but cannot conquer. His language at times sounds like that of the Psalms that begin with a sense of abandonment, but the poet finds no relief or reassurance in human or divine love.

He speculates that God, whom he views as an inquisitor, has created this she-devil as punishment for his failure to believe, and he begs for any penalty but the one he has received. He describes himself as an apostle not of God but of his beloved, and as her disciple, he—who was accustomed to gladness—must suffer and travel the world, like the Wandering Jew, without ever escaping her attraction and the pain it brings him.

He compares his defeated helplessness to that of Napoléon on St. Helena, and he compares her, a married woman, to unattainable women—Gretchen in Faust and Violetta in La Traviata. In the prologue’s statement that he may end his life with a bullet, critics find a hint of Mayakovsky’s eventual suicide; however, this image is consonant with later references in this poem to war and with the crazed desperation he expresses as he considers joining the army in the hope that death will end the suffering he endures for the sake of this red-haired, painted woman.

Works Cited

Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1973.

Charters, Ann, and Samuel Charters. I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lily Brik. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Liukkonen, Petri. “Vladimir Mayakovsky.” Pegasos, 1999. www.kirjasto.sci.fi/majakovs.htm. Accessed 21 Apr. 2007.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Edited by Patricia Davis, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey, Indiana University Press, 1960.

Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Twayne, 1983.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Russian Literature, War Literature

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