Vladimir Mayakovsky’s To Sergei Yesenin
You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere.
Emptiness…
Fly, cutting your way into starry dubiety.
No advances, no pubs for you there.
Sobriety.
No, Yessenin, this is not deridingly,-
in my throat not laughter but sorrow racks.
I see – your cut-open hand maddeningly,
swings your own bones like a sack.
Stop it, chuck it! Isn’t it really absurd?
Allowing cheeks to flush with deathly hue?
You who could do such things with words,
that no one else on earth could do.
Why, for what? Perplexity appalls.
Critics mutter: “The main fault we find
there was hardly any working-class contact at all,
as a result of too much beer and wine.”
So to say, if you had swopped bohemianism for class,
there’d have been no bust-up,
class’d have influenced
your thinking.
But does class quench its thirst with kvass?
Class, too, is no fool when it comes to drinking.
They’d have attached to you someone from On Guard,
and the main accent would have been on content:
a hundred lines a day you’d have written hard,
as tedious and long-winded as Doronin’s attempts.
Before I’d created such nonsensical stink,
I’d have choked my very own breath.
Better far to die of drink,
than be bored to death!
Neither the noose nor the penknife there
will reveal the true cause of this loss. But,
maybe, if there had been ink in the Angleterre,
there’d have been no reason for veins to be cut.
“Encore!” imitators coo in delight.
Over you almost a squad committed base jinks.
Why increase the number of suicides?
Better to increase the output of ink!
It’s grievous and misplaced to be mystery-propagators.
For ever now your tongue by teeth’s locked tight.
Of the people, the language-creators,
a sonorous apprentice-debauchee has died.
And, as condolences, poetic junk they gave,
unrehashed hangovers from funerals of the past.
Blunted rhymes are shoved in to exorcise your grave-
is that how a poet is honoured at the last?
A monument for you hasn’t yet been cast-
where it is, bronze reverberant or granite grand? –
but there, already, by memory’s bars
dedications and memoirs of rubbish stand.
Your name into handkerchiefs they’re sniveling,
your words by Sobinov are slobberingly lisped there-
and they wind up under a dead birch tree quivering:
“Not a word, O my friend, not a wh-i-s-p-e-r,”
Eh, to a quite a different tune I’d switch
and just tell that Leonid Lohengrinich!
I’d rise up here a thundering scadalist:
“I won’t allow poems to be mangled by mutts!
I’d deafen them with a double-barreled whistle.
They can stick ’em where the monkey stuck his nuts!”
And so disperse such talentless filth,
blowing away jacket-sails engendered darkness,
so that helter-skelter runs Kogan and his ilk,
mutilating oncomers with the spears of his moustaches.
The ranks of rubbish meanwhile haven’t grown much thinner.
There’s so much to do – just to catch up with things yet.
Life must be changed to begin with.
And having changed it – then one can sing it.
These days are difficult for the pen.
But tell me, you crooks and cripples wheezy,
which great ones ever choose- where and when?
a path already trodden smooth and easy?
The word – in the C-in-C of human powers.
Forward march! That time may whistle by as rockets flare.
So the wind shall carry to the past of ours
only the ruffling of our hair.
Our planet is poorly equipped for delight.
One must snatch gladness from the days that are.
In this life
it’s not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far.
Mayakovsky explains in How to Make Verse that he wrote this poem, which was published in a volume commemorating Yesenin, to counteract the negative effect of his rival poet’s suicide on artists and on Soviet society.
Critics reading this poem and considering Mayakovsky’s own suicide have speculated that in this poem he abjures himself and expresses his own artistic struggles. Although Mayakovsky was initially grieved to learn of Yesenin’s death, he came to see this self-destructive act not as a heroic, creative response to an untenable life as a Communist Party hack, but as a meaningless act of cowardice born of alcoholism.
Far better to die of world weariness than to be a slave to drink or to cut one’s wrists when one has run out of ink. The poem, in spite of its jibes, acknowledges that the dead poet had a rare gift: his skillfully arranged words had an impact on others. But he betrayed his talent. He can no longer disclose the greatness of his soul through artistic expression; dead, he cannot justify or clarify either his life or his death.
Consequently, lesser writers and critics will talk of his death as if the noose and the knife alone communicated the meaning of his suicide and its comment on his experiences as a living man. His life and work are now in their hands, and he has lost his true strength.
The power of Yesenin’s work could have increased joy, a rare feeling in the world, but he chose instead to model despair, to inspire others to kill themselves. The poem jeers at Yesenin, whose drinking isolated him from his peers and transformed him from a person in a class by himself to a low-class man, as the puns on classless suggest.
Echoing the final lines of Yesenin’s suicide poem, the end of Mayakovsky’s poem asserts that living is far more challenging than dying is.
Bibliography
Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Liukkonen, Petri. “Sergei Esenin.” Pegasos. 1999.
Liukkonen, Petri. “Vladimir Mayakovsky.” Pegasos. 1999. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/majakovs.htm. Accessed on April 29, 2007.
Marshall, Herbert, trans. and ed. Mayakovsky. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965.
Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Categories: Literature, Russian Formalism, World Literature
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