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Vladimir Mayakovsky
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Vladimir Mayakovsky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vladimir Vladimirovich
Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19
[O.S. July 7] 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian and
Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost
representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.
Early life
He was born the last of three children in Baghdati,
Russian Empire (now in Georgia) where his father worked as a
forest ranger. His father was of Ukrainian Cossack descent
and his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky
spoke Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke
primarily Russian at home. At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took
part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi,
where he attended the local grammar school. After the sudden
and premature death of his father in 1906, the family —
Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to
Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.
In Moscow, Mayakovsky
developed a passion for Marxist literature and took part in
numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party; he was to later become an RSDLP (Bolshevik) member.
In 1908, he was dismissed from the grammar school because
his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees.
Around this time,
Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive
political activities but, being underage, he avoided
transportation. During a period of solitary confinement in
Butyrka prison in 1909, he began to write poetry, but his
poems were confiscated. On his release from prison, he
continued working within the socialist movement, and in 1911
he joined the Moscow Art School where he became acquainted
with members of the Russian Futurist movement. He became a
leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and a close
friend of David Burlyuk, whom he saw as his mentor.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Literary life
The 1912 Futurist publication A Slap in the Face of
Public Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу) contained
Mayakovsky's first published poems: Night (Ночь) and Morning
(Утро). Because of their political activities, Burlyuk and
Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art School in 1914.
Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How to Make
Poems").His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914.
His artistic development then shifted increasingly in the
direction of narrative and it was this work, published
during the period immediately preceding the Russian
Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet
in Russia and abroad.
A Cloud in Trousers (1915)
was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and
it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution,
religion and art, written from the vantage point of a
spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of
the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to
debunk idealistic and romanticised notions of poetry and
poets.
Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened
brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.
Of Grandfatherly
gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by – handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.
(From the prologue of A
Cloud in Trousers.)
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik.
In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a
married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem
"The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; unfortunately for
Mayakovsky, she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik.
The love affair, as well as his impressions of war and
revolution, strongly influenced his works of these years.
The poem "War and the World" (1916) addressed the horrors of
WWI and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of
love.
Mayakovsky was rejected as
a volunteer at the beginning of WWI, and during 1915-1917
worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a
draftsman. At the onset of the Russian Revolution,
Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the
October Revolution. He started reciting poems such as "Left
March! For the Red Marines: 1918" (Левый марш (Матросам),
1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.
His satirical play
Mystery-Bouffe was staged in 1918, and again, more
successfully, in 1921.
Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky
After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the
Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both
graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In 1919, he
published his first collection of poems Collected Works
1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским). In the
cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity
grew rapidly. From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent
member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work
as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). He edited, along with
Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF.
As one of the few Soviet
writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to
Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba
influenced works like My Discovery of America (Мое открытие
Америки, 1925). He also travelled extensively throughout the
Soviet Union.
On a lecture tour in the
United States, Mayakovsky met Elli Jones, who later gave
birth to his daughter, an event which Mayakovsky only came
to know in 1929, when the couple met clandestinely in the
south of France, as the relationship was kept secret. In the
late 1920s, Mayakovsky fell in love with Tatiana Yakovleva
and to her he dedicated the poem "A Letter to Tatiana
Yakovleva" (Письмо Татьяне Яковлевой, 1928).
Dmitriy Shostakovich, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vladimir
Mayakovsky & Alexander Rodchenko
rehearsing Mayakovsky's play Klop (The Bedbug), 1929.
The relevance of
Mayakovsky's influence cannot be limited to Soviet poetry.
While for years he was considered the Soviet poet par
excellence, he also changed the perceptions of poetry in
wider 20th century culture. His political activism as a
propagandistic agitator was rarely understood and often
looked upon unfavourably by contemporaries, even close
friends like Boris Pasternak. Near the end of the 1920s,
Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with the course
the Soviet Union was taking under Joseph Stalin: his
satirical plays The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929) and The Bathhouse
(Баня, 1930), which deal with the Soviet philistinism and
bureaucracy, illustrate this development.
On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself.
The unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:
And so they say-
"the incident dissolved"
the love boat smashed up
on the dreary routine.
I'm through with life
and [we] should absolve
from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen.
Mayakovsky was interred at
the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.
After his death
In 1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was
renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. After his death,
Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist"
and a "fellow-traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to
officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan
Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin to
complain about the attacks, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's
letter:
"Comrade Yezhov, please
take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best
and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference
to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are,
in my opinion, justified..."
These words became a cliché
and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak
noted, they "dealt him the second death" in some circles.
In 1938 the Mayakovskaya
Metro Station was opened to the public, demonstrating
various innovations architecture- and design-wise, among
them the display of ceiling mosaics that resemble a
"fish-eye" view from the underground to the Moscow sky.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko once
said As a poet, I wanted to mix something from Mayakovsky
and Yesenin. Mayakovsky was, however, the most influential
futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form the Four
Winds movement there. He was also an influence on the writer
Valentin Kataev. Andrey Voznesensky called Mayakovsky
teacher and favorite poet and dedicated him a poem
Маяковский в Париже (Mayakovsky in Paris). In 1967 the
Taganka Theater staged the poetical performance Послушайте!,
based on Mayakovsky's works. Role of the poet was played by
Vladimir Vysotsky, who also was inspired by Mayakovsky's
poetry.
In 1974 a Russian State
Museum of Mayakovsky was opened in the center of Moscow in
the building where Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930.
Vladimir Mayakovsky and his works were a major influence on
the work of Italian actor, film director and screenwriter
Carmelo Bene, who interpreted Mayakovsky on the stages of
theatres in Italy and on TV from the early 1970s until his
death in 2002. Frank O'Hara wrote a poem named after him,
"Mayakovsky" in which the speaker is standing in a bathtub,
a probable reference to his play "The Bathhouse". In 1981
Brazilian singer Gal Costa recorded "O Amor" a Portuguese
version of one of Mayakovsky's latter poems in her album
Fantasia. In 1986 English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg
recorded the album Talking with the Taxman about Poetry,
named after a namesake Mayakovsky's poem. In 1991, City
Lights published Listen! Early Poems, a collection
translated by Maria Enzensberger. The well-known phrase
"Lenin lives, lived and will live" comes from his elegy
"Vladimir Ilyich Lenin".
In 2005 the north exit of
the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened, referencing the
architecture of the underground station with ample
sculpturing of marble, stainless steel and another group of
ceiling mosaic works, accompanied by the artist's poems. In
2009, Italian alternative rock band, Il Teatro Degli Orrori,
released a song entitled "Majakowskij". The lyrics of the
song are the Italian translation of his 1916 poem To His
Beloved Self, the Author Dedicates these Lines (Себе
любимому посвещает эти строки автор).
In 2010, in collaboration with Found Reality Theatre,
students at the University of Glamorgan staged a physical
theatre piece entitled The Mayakovsky Project in the Atrium,
Cardiff. Using Mayakovsky's life as template, the
performance posed the question, "Why do they kill the
artists?"
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Vladimir
Mayakovsky and
Socialist Realism
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Vladimir
Mayakovsky
Poems
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“Ukranians and Russians have a common cry:
there will be no master over the working people” —
a poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky from 1920
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Our
March
Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels!
Higher, rangers of haughty heads!
We'll wash the world with a second deluge,
Now’s the hour whose coming it dreads.
Too slow, the wagon of years,
The oxen of days — too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart — our battle drum.
Is there a gold diviner than ours/
What wasp of a bullet us can sting?
Songs are our weapons, our power of powers,
Our gold — our voices — just hear us sing!
Meadow, lie green on the earth!
With silk our days for us line!
Rainbow, give color and girth
To the fleet-foot steeds of time.
The heavens grudge us their starry glamour.
Bah! Without it our songs can thrive.
Hey there, Ursus Major, clamour
For us to be taken to heaven alive!
Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals.
1917
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Viktor Govorov
A.M.Gorky
Reads on October 11, 1931 to J.V.Stalin, V.M.Molotov and K.E.Voroshilov
His Fairy Tale "A Girl and Death"
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Aleksei Aleksandrovich Vasilev
Lenin and Stalin
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Call To Account!
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky -
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?
1917
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Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov
Lenin and Gorki
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Wladimir
Serow
Lenin
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GOOD!
(fragment, chapter14)
Over those
whom sleep eternal
claimed
that lean,
harsh winter
spread
a pall.
What are words!
Words
are lame!
On the Volga sores
I refuse
to dwell.
Of a string of days
I choose
to speak,
akin
to a thousand others,
bleak,
pushed on
by the years,
oarsmen eager,
not over-fat
nor
over-meagre.
If ever
something of worth
I wrote
it was all
the fault
of a pair
of eyes-
bottomless skies,
my beloved's eyes.
Huge they are,
round,
dark brown,
with a speck
of hazel,
coal-hot,
blazing.
The phone's gone
stark-raving mad,
an axe's
blunt edge
striking the ear:
wham!
Round the huge brown eyes -
pads:
hunger's
to blame.
Doctor's orders:
for the eyes
to be able
to eye
the world,
heat the place,
put greens
on the table.
By their curly green tails -
behold!-
I'm holding
two carrots
crunchy.
They're not
for my stew:
I'm taking them to
my sweetheart,
for her
to munch.
Boxes of sweets
and flowers
freely
I handed out,
but
I recall
that those carrots
plus firewood
(half a billet)
were
the most precious
gift
of all.
Thrust under my arm
are
damp pieces of wood:
knobby sticks,
eyebrow-thick.
Face puffy,
eyes-splits:
it's
malnutrition.
Greens and care -
eyes clear.
Bigger than saucers,
they eye
the Revolution.
Easier for me
than
for most
(it's
no boast!)
Because I'm
Mayakovsky.
I sit and chew
a fresh
piece of horse flesh.
The door whines.
My kid sister.
"Hullo!"
"Hullo!"
"Volodya, listen,
it's New Year's tomorrow.
Got some salt
I could
borrow?"
"A pinch,
Wet too.
Here,
let's divide it in two."
Wading through snow,
fighting fear,
with an
"Oh, dear,
how'll I keep on my feet!"
Olga stumbles along
the icy,
three-mile long
Presnya Street.
Home
to salt her potatoes
she hastens.
Frost
walks
beside her,
grows fierce,
inches
closer,
tickles
and
pinches.
"Gimme it!
Isn't that salt
you're hiding?"
Home at last,
and
didn't lose it.
But how use it?
To her fingers
it's frozen fast.
Behind the wall
shuffling feet.
"Here, wife,
we gotta eat.
Trade my coat
for millet,
will ye?"
Look through the pane-
it's snowing again.
The snow falls,
covering all.
Soft its step,
yes,
and light.
Moscow's
a cliff,
bare
and white.
Snow lies
in banks
and drifts.
Of forests
the skeleton clings
to the cliff.
Daybreak.
Into the sky's thick shawl
the sun,
a louse,
crawls.
December's late dawn,
worn out,
shivery,
hangs
over Moscow
like typhus fever.
Storm clouds vagrant
to fat lands migrate.
Wrapped in haze,
its chest sticking out,
America lies.
What is it doing? -
Lapping up
coffee
and cocoa
by the cup.
Into your face,
thick as the snout
of a good-sized pig,
than a round tray
rounder,
from this hungering land of ours
I shout:
My love
for my land
is boundless!
You can forget
when
and where
you stuffed
your craw
and your belly,
but
the land
you hungered with
you can never
as long as you live and breathe
forget!
1927
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I.Los
Lenin and Gorki
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Grigori Efimovich Shpolyanski
Vladimir Ilich Lenin at the Smolny Institute
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CONVERSATION
WITH COMRADE LENIN
Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin-
a photograph
on the
whiteness of wall.
The stubble slides upward
above his lip
as his mouth
jerks
open in speech.
The tense
creases of brow
hold thought
in their grip,
immense brow
matched by thought immense.
A forest of flags,
raised-up hands thick as grass...
Thousands are marching
beneath him...
Transported,
alight with joy,
I rise from my place,
eager to see him,
hail him,
report to him!
"Comrade Lenin,
I report to you -
(not a dictate of office,
the heart's prompting alone)
This hellish work
that we're out to do
will be done
and is
already being done.
We feed and we clothe
and give light to the needy,
the quotas
for coal
and for iron
fulfill,
but there is
any amount
of bleeding
muck
and rubbish
around us still.
Without you,
there's many
have got out of hand,
all the sparring
and squabbling
does one in.
There's scum
in plenty
hounding our land,
outside the borders
and also
within.
Try to
count 'em
and
tab 'em -
it's no go,
there's all kinds,
and they're
thick as nettles:
kulaks,
red tapists,
and,
down the row,
drunkards,
sectarians,
lickspittles.
They strut around
proudly
as peacocks,
badges and fountain pens
studding their chests.
We'll lick the lot of 'em-
but
to lick 'em
is no easy job
at the very best.
On snow-covered lands
and on stubbly fields,
in smoky plants
and on factory sites,
with you in our hearts,
Comrade Lenin,
we build,
we think,
we breathe,
we live,
and we fight!"
Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin-
a photograph
on the
whiteness of wall.
1929
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Boris Vladimirsk
Roses for Stalin
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Alexander
Gerasimov
Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin
1938
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My Soviet Passport
I'd tear
like a wolf
at bureaucracy.
For mandates
my respect's but the slightest.
To the devil himself
I'd chuck without mercy
every red-taped paper.
But this ...
Down the long front
of coupés and cabins
File the officials
politely.
They gather up passports
and I give in
My own vermilion booklet.
For one kind of passport -
smiling lips part
For others -
an attitude scornful.
They take
with respect, for instance,
the passport
From a sleeping-car
English Lionel.
The good fellows eyes
almost slip like pips
when,
bowing as low as men can,
they take,
as if they were taking a tip,
the passport
from an American.
At the Polish,
they dolefully blink and wheeze
in dumb
police elephantism -
where are they from,
and what are these
geographical novelties?
And without a turn
of their cabbage heads,
their feelings
hidden in lower regions,
they take without blinking,
the passports from Swedes
and various
old Norwegians.
Then sudden
as if their mouths were
aquake
those gentlemen almost
whine
Those very official gentlemen
take
that red-skinned passport
of mine.
Take-
like a bomb
take - like a hedgehog,
like a razor
double-edge stropped,
take -
like a rattlesnake huge and long
with at least
20 fangs
poison-tipped.
The porter's eyes
give a significant flick
(I'll carry your baggage
for nix,
mon ami...)
The gendarmes enquiringly
look at the tec,
the tec, -
at the gendarmerie.
With what delight
that gendarme caste
would have me
strung-up and whipped raw
because I hold
in my hands
hammered-fast
sickle-clasped
my red Soviet passport.
I'd tear
like a wolf
at bureaucracy.
For mandates
my respect's but the slightest.
To the devil himself
I'd chuck
without mercy
every red-taped paper,
But this ...
I pull out
of my wide trouser-pockets
duplicate
of a priceless cargo.
You now:
read this
and envy,
I'm a citizen
of the Soviet Socialist Union!
1929
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G.M. Shegal
Leader, Teacher, Friend
1937
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В.Eфанов
Stalin
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At the Top of My
voice
First Prelude to the Poem
1930
(Translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey.)
My most respected
comrades of posterity!
Rummaging among
these days’
petrified crap,
exploring the twilight of our times,
you,
possibly,
will inquire about me too.
And,
possibly, your scholars
will declare,
with their erudition overwhelming
a swarm of problems;
once there lived
a certain champion of boiled water,
and inveterate enemy of raw water.
Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.
I, a
latrine cleaner
and water carrier,
by the revolution
mobilized and drafted,
went off to the front
from the aristocratic gardens
of poetry -
the capricious wench
She planted a delicious garden,
the daughter,
cottage,
pond
and meadow.
Myself a
garden I did plant,
myself with water sprinkled it.
some pour their verse from water cans;
others spit water
from their mouth -
the curly Macks,
the clever jacks -
but what the hell’s it all about!
There’s no damming al this up -
beneath the walls they mandoline:
“Tara-tina, tara-tine,
tw-a-n-g...”
It’s no great honor, then,
for my monuments
to rise from such roses
above the public squares,
where consumption coughs,
where whores, hooligans and syphilis
walk.
Agitprop
sticks
in my teeth too,
and I’d rather
compose
romances for you -
more profit in it
and more charm.
But I
subdued
myself,
setting my heel
on the throat
of my own song.
Listen,
comrades of posterity,
to the agitator
the rabble-rouser.
Stifling
the torrents of poetry,
I’ll skip
the volumes of lyrics;
as one alive,
I’ll address the living.
I’ll join you
in the far communist future,
I who am
no Esenin super-hero.
My verse
will reach you
across the peaks of ages,
over the heads
of governments and poets.
My verse
will reach you
not as an arrow
in a cupid-lyred chase,
not as worn penny
Reaches a numismatist,
not as the light of dead stars reaches you.
My verse
by labor
will break the mountain chain of years,
and will present itself
ponderous,
crude,
tangible,
as an aqueduct,
by slaves of Rome
constructed,
enters into our days.
When in
mounds of books,
where verse lies buried,
you discover by chance the iron filings of lines,
touch them
with respect,
as you would
some antique
yet awesome weapon.
It’s no
habit of mine
to caress
the ear
with words;
a maiden’s ear
curly-ringed
will not crimson
when flicked by smut.
In parade
deploying
the armies of my pages,
I shall inspect
the regiments in line.
Heavy as
lead,
my verses at attention stand,
ready for death
and for immortal fame.
The poems
are rigid,
pressing muzzle
to muzzle their gaping
pointed titles.
The
favorite
of all the armed forces
the cavalry of witticisms
ready
to launch a wild hallooing charge,
reins its chargers still,
raising
the pointed lances of the rhymes.
and all
these troops armed to the teeth,
which have flashed by
victoriously for twenty years,
all these,
to their very last page,
I present to you,
the planet’s proletarian.
The enemy
of the massed working class
is my enemy too
inveterate and of long standing.
Years of
trial
and days of hunger
ordered us
to march
under the red flag.
We opened
each volume
of Marx
as we would open
the shutters
in our own house;
but we did not have to read
to make up our minds
which side to join,
which side to fight on.
Our
dialectics
were not learned
from Hegel.
In the roar of battle
it erupted into verse,
when,
under fire,
the bourgeois decamped
as once we ourselves
had fled
from them.
Let fame
trudge
after genius
like an inconsolable widow
to a funeral march -
die then, my verse,
die like a common soldier,
like our men
who nameless died attacking!
I don’t care a spit
for tons of bronze;
I don’t care a spit
for slimy marble.
We’re men of kind,
we’ll come to terms about our fame;
let our
common monument be
socialism
built
in battle.
Men of posterity
examine the flotsam of dictionaries:
out of Lethe
will bob up
the debris of such words
as “prostitution,”
“tuberculosis,”
“blockade.”
For you,
who are now
healthy and agile,
the poet
with the rough tongue
of his posters,
has licked away consumptives’ spittle.
With the tail of my years behind me,
I begin to
resemble
those monsters,
excavated dinosaurs.
Comrade life,
let us
march faster,
march
faster through what’s left
of the five-year plan.
My verse
has brought me
no rubles to spare:
no craftsmen have made
mahogany chairs for my house.
In all conscience,
I need nothing
except
a freshly laundered shirt.
When I appear
before the CCC
of the coming
bright years,
by way of my Bolshevik party card,
I’ll raise
above the heads
of a gang of self-seeking
poets and
rogues,
all the hundred volumes
of my
communist-committed books.
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Evdokiya Usikova
Lenin With Villagers
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Yu. P. Kugach et al.
To Great Stalin -- Glory!
1948
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She
loves me—loves me not.
My hands I pick
and having broken my fingers
fling away.
So the first daisy-heads
one happens to flick
are plucked,
and guessing,
scattered into May.
Let a cut and shave
reveal my grey hairs.
Let the silver of the years
ring out endlessly !
Shameful common sense –
I hope, I swear –
Will never come
to me.
2
It’s already two.
No doubt, you’ve gone to sleep.
In the night
The Milky Way
with silver filigrees.
I don’t hurry,
and there is no point in me
waking and disturbing you
with express telegrams.
3
The sea goes to weep.
The sea goes to sleep.
As they say,
the incident has petered out.
The love boat of life
has crashed on philistine reefs
You and I
are quits.
No need to reiterate
mutual injuries,
troubles
and griefs.
4
D’you see,
In the world what a quiet sleeps.
Night tributes the sky
with silver constellations.
In such an hour as this,
one rises and speaks
to eras,
history,
and world creation.
5
I know the power of words, I know words’ tocsin.
They’re not the kind applauded by the boxes.
From words like these coffins burst from the earth
and on their own four oaken legs stride forth.
It happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.
But saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.
See how the centuries ring and trains crawl
to lick poetry’s calloused hands.
I know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall
like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.
But man with his soul, his lips, his bones…
19289-1930
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I.I. Brodsky
Stalin
1937
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Oleksi Shovkunenko, Platon
Biletsky and Igor Reznik
Anthem of the People's Love
1950
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