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150.000.000
Stihi Mayakovskogo byli vpervye opublikovany v 1912 v al'manahe gruppy "Gileya" "Poschechina obschestvennomu vkusu", gde byl pomeschen i manifest, podpisannyj Mayakovskim, V. V. Hlebnikovym, A. E. Kruchenyh i Burlyukom, v narochito epatiruyuschej forme zayavlyavshij o razryve s traditsiyami russkoj klassiki, neobhodimosti sozdaniya novogo yazyka literatury, sootvetstvuyuschego epohe. V 1915 Mayakovskij poznakomilsya s L. YU. Brik, kotoraya zanyala tsentral'noe mesto v ego zhizni. Revolyutsiya byla prinyata Mayakovskim kak osuschestvlenie vozmezdiya za vseh oskorblennyh v prezhnem mire, kak put' k zemnomu rayu. V 1918 Mayakovskij organizoval gruppu "Komfut" (kommunisticheskij futurizm), sotrudnichal v gazete "Iskusstvo kommuny", v 1923 sozdal "Levyjfront iskusstv" (LEF), kuda voshli ego edinomyshlenniki pisateli i hudozhniki, izdaval zhurnaly "LEF" (1923-25) i "Novyj LEF" (1927-28). Krome togo, on pisal i zlobodnevnuyu satiru, stihi i chastushki dlya agitatsionnyh plakatov ("Okna ROSTA", 1918-21).
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Vladimir Mayakovsky
505 books629 followersVladimir Mayakovsky (Владимир Владимирович Маяковский) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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October 26, 2025
WARNING: This review is longer than the work it reviews.
"150,000,000" is Vladimir Mayakovsky's wild, drum-pounding epic of the Revolution, written when he was still drunk on the idea that art could knock history off its hinges.
Imagine a dream in verse, part circus, part sermon, part newsreel, all performed at the top of the lungs. The title refers to the population of Soviet Russia, who, Mayakovsky insists, are the true authors of the poem. He merely lends them his pen.
Russia, newly awakened and still half-frozen, heaves itself into motion. Millions march, shout, and sing. Factories glow, locomotives belch purpose, and every brick seems to develop revolutionary consciousness. The people, personified as one colossal being named Ivan, stride toward the future. Ivan is a geological event. When he moves, rivers change course.
On the opposite side of the planet, in a world of elevators and overfed optimism, sits President Woodrow Wilson, the embodiment of capitalist smugness. He polishes his democracy until it gleams like a machine part, unaware that a tidal wave of red determination is already forming across the ocean. The poem sets them up as mythic opposites: Ivan, the elemental worker-giant; Wilson, the bureaucratic dandy of empire.
The middle sections fling us from Chicago's skyscrapers to Russian fields, from animal choruses to machine songs. Mayakovsky's language bursts with onomatopoeia, slogans, and the manic rhythm of parades. Even punctuation behaves like a mob. Lines march, collide, and shout propaganda slogans that sometimes sound like divine revelation and sometimes like advertising gone berserk.
Ivan, the symbolic Soviet Everyman, challenges Wilson, the capitalist world order, to a duel for the fate of humanity. Wilson's armies are made of ideology and office paper; Ivan's are made of factories, hunger, and collective will. The combat rages across continents and metaphors.
Through it all, Mayakovsky howls with belief. He sees revolution as cosmic renewal, a transformation of matter and meaning. Humanity, he claims, is melting down its past to forge the future. Machines are saints. Workers are prophets. The entire world is being rewritten in block letters.
Yet beneath the bombast, there is a strange tenderness. The final movement turns elegiac, almost prayerful. The millions who built the revolution, hungry, tired, magnificent, are saluted like fallen stars. Mayakovsky's voice, for once, softens: the poem becomes a hymn to those who labored and vanished so that something immense might live.
"150,000,000" feels both monumental and mad. It is propaganda turned into poetry, or perhaps poetry trying to disguise itself as propaganda. It believes in everything, in progress, in humanity, in the future, with such ferocity that you almost forgive it for being wrong about half of it. It is the pulse of a world that truly thought it could start over from zero.
The Hebrew translation is a strange and beautiful resurrection. It is not a simple act of translation but a decades-long collaboration between two poets who never met, each possessed by the same revolutionary fervor and the same despair.
The translator, Alexander Pen אלכסנדר פן, began the work in the 1930s, when the Russian original was still recent enough to burn. Pen, a Russian-born poet who reinvented himself in Hebrew, saw in Mayakovsky not only a predecessor but an alter ego, a man who tried to turn poetry into public thunder. He translated a fragment of the poem early on and published it years later in the Sifriyat Poalim series, calling it modestly a "section." It was less modest than it sounds. Even that fragment carried Mayakovsky's manic energy into Hebrew, giving the language new muscles it did not know it had.
Pen returned to the poem in the 1960s, determined to finish what he had begun. He worked through illness and exhaustion, using a kind of prophetic diction that fused biblical echoes with street slang. The finished manuscript, complete with his vocalization marks and eccentric punctuation, passed into the hands of his friend, the painter Gershon Knispel.
Pen died in 1972, and Knispel, acting like a guardian of an unfinished epic, kept the manuscript for years until he could help bring it to print. When the Tag publishing house issued the poem in 1996 as part of Natan Zach's series Hinne (הנה קונטרס לשירה), it was presented as a recovered artifact.
Zach edited the text with care, aided by Aryeh Aharoni, who compared Pen's lines with the Russian original and filled in places where the text was damaged or incomplete. They both insisted that this was not an academic edition. It was an act of preservation, meant to let Pen's Hebrew roar as he had written it.
The language itself is volcanic. Pen explodes the Russian into Hebrew sound. He invents words, bends syntax, and writes as though every line should be shouted across a square. His Hebrew brims with neologisms, rhymes that clang like metal, and the abrupt rhythm of slogans and marching feet. It is both ancient and mechanical, full of biblical resonance and factory noise.
Where Mayakovsky's futurism sought to fuse man and machine, Pen's Hebrew adds a prophetic current. His Ivan, the collective worker-giant of the poem, sounds like a figure from Ezekiel's vision, risen to hammer the world into moral shape. The industrial and the mystical coexist in every line.
The result is a Hebrew text that feels wholly native even when it is faithful to none of the Russian phrasing. Mayakovsky's anger becomes Pen's melody, and his revolution becomes a kind of spiritual convulsion.
The visual design of the edition reinforces this energy. Knispel's drawings accompany the text with dense black lines and urgent gestures, portraying workers, banners, and human forms half turned into machines. The layout keeps Mayakovsky's jagged rhythm, leaving open spaces and abrupt breaks, as if the page itself breathes between shouts. The book is both poem and performance, a stage for the echo of two vanished voices.
These pages are a monument to a particular moment in Hebrew modernism. Pen's "150,000,000" carries Mayakovsky's revolutionary faith into a language that had its own socialist dreams and its own disillusionments. It sounds to me like a spiritual apocalypse sung by a man who wanted to believe in the future but knew that the future rarely keeps its promises.
The poem in Pen's hands becomes an anthem for all those who built something immense and were swallowed by it. The Hebrew edition preserves that silence between the lines, the hush after the shouting stops. It is one of those rare translations that feels haunted by the original, not by imitating it, but because it continues its unfinished argument with history.
תחי התמימות! לצערי לא יכולתי לשכפל כאן בקן צרעות הקפיטליזם של גודרידס את ריקודי השורות, קטיעת התיבות ואת המעמד הויזואלי של התרגום. רוח המילים אולי תגיע לטוברישים ולטוברישות אשר יקראו את זה המניפסט:
הַמַּהְפֵכָה
מֵהַצָאר תִּשְׁלֹל עֲטֶרֶת־תּאַר.
הַמַּהְפֵכָה
בַּמַּאֲפִיּוֹת בְּרְעַב־הֲמוֹנִים תִּשָּׁלַף.
אוּלָם לָךְ,
מַה שֶׁם אֶתֵּן לָךְ, רוּסְיָה־טֶרִיטוֹרְיָה, אֲשֶׁר כַּלָּךְ סַחְרֶרֶת בְּסַעַר הַזַלְעָף ?!
הַסּוֹבְנַרְקוֹם* -,
חֶלְקוֹ שֶׁל מֹחַ רַב־הָאֹמֶץ, דַּהֲרַת־צַדָּיו לֹא עַל הַכֹּל תַּחֲלֹשׁ הִיא.
לְבָבוֹ הָיָה מֵהַמְשׁעֶר כְּבַד־עֹמֶס, שֶׁאֲפִלּוּ לָנִין הֲנִיעוֹ בְּקְשִׁי.
חַיָּל אָדֹם אֶפְשָׁר לָסֶגֶת לְהַכְרִיחַ, וְקוֹמוּנִיסְט - אֶפְשָׁר לְהַכְלִיאוֹ בַּסַד, אַךְ שֶׁכָּזֶה
בְּאֵיזֶה תַּעְצֹר בְּרִיחַ,
אם
שֶׁכָּזֶה
צְעַד?!
הָרַעַם רָעַם, אָזְנֵי־חוֹפִים קָרַע, וּתְזַנֵּקְנָה נָה טְפּוֹת אֶל־מֵעֵבֶר יָבֵשׁ עוֹד,
כַּאֲשֶׁר אִיבַן
פְּסִיעוֹתָיו זֶרַע,
נָחַת כְּסוּפָה
בְּאַרְצוֹת הַיַּבֶּשֶׁת.
* הממשלה הזמנית של בריה"מ אחרי המהפכה.
"150,000,000" is Vladimir Mayakovsky's wild, drum-pounding epic of the Revolution, written when he was still drunk on the idea that art could knock history off its hinges.
Imagine a dream in verse, part circus, part sermon, part newsreel, all performed at the top of the lungs. The title refers to the population of Soviet Russia, who, Mayakovsky insists, are the true authors of the poem. He merely lends them his pen.
Russia, newly awakened and still half-frozen, heaves itself into motion. Millions march, shout, and sing. Factories glow, locomotives belch purpose, and every brick seems to develop revolutionary consciousness. The people, personified as one colossal being named Ivan, stride toward the future. Ivan is a geological event. When he moves, rivers change course.
On the opposite side of the planet, in a world of elevators and overfed optimism, sits President Woodrow Wilson, the embodiment of capitalist smugness. He polishes his democracy until it gleams like a machine part, unaware that a tidal wave of red determination is already forming across the ocean. The poem sets them up as mythic opposites: Ivan, the elemental worker-giant; Wilson, the bureaucratic dandy of empire.
The middle sections fling us from Chicago's skyscrapers to Russian fields, from animal choruses to machine songs. Mayakovsky's language bursts with onomatopoeia, slogans, and the manic rhythm of parades. Even punctuation behaves like a mob. Lines march, collide, and shout propaganda slogans that sometimes sound like divine revelation and sometimes like advertising gone berserk.
Ivan, the symbolic Soviet Everyman, challenges Wilson, the capitalist world order, to a duel for the fate of humanity. Wilson's armies are made of ideology and office paper; Ivan's are made of factories, hunger, and collective will. The combat rages across continents and metaphors.
Through it all, Mayakovsky howls with belief. He sees revolution as cosmic renewal, a transformation of matter and meaning. Humanity, he claims, is melting down its past to forge the future. Machines are saints. Workers are prophets. The entire world is being rewritten in block letters.
Yet beneath the bombast, there is a strange tenderness. The final movement turns elegiac, almost prayerful. The millions who built the revolution, hungry, tired, magnificent, are saluted like fallen stars. Mayakovsky's voice, for once, softens: the poem becomes a hymn to those who labored and vanished so that something immense might live.
"150,000,000" feels both monumental and mad. It is propaganda turned into poetry, or perhaps poetry trying to disguise itself as propaganda. It believes in everything, in progress, in humanity, in the future, with such ferocity that you almost forgive it for being wrong about half of it. It is the pulse of a world that truly thought it could start over from zero.
The Hebrew translation is a strange and beautiful resurrection. It is not a simple act of translation but a decades-long collaboration between two poets who never met, each possessed by the same revolutionary fervor and the same despair.
The translator, Alexander Pen אלכסנדר פן, began the work in the 1930s, when the Russian original was still recent enough to burn. Pen, a Russian-born poet who reinvented himself in Hebrew, saw in Mayakovsky not only a predecessor but an alter ego, a man who tried to turn poetry into public thunder. He translated a fragment of the poem early on and published it years later in the Sifriyat Poalim series, calling it modestly a "section." It was less modest than it sounds. Even that fragment carried Mayakovsky's manic energy into Hebrew, giving the language new muscles it did not know it had.
Pen returned to the poem in the 1960s, determined to finish what he had begun. He worked through illness and exhaustion, using a kind of prophetic diction that fused biblical echoes with street slang. The finished manuscript, complete with his vocalization marks and eccentric punctuation, passed into the hands of his friend, the painter Gershon Knispel.
Pen died in 1972, and Knispel, acting like a guardian of an unfinished epic, kept the manuscript for years until he could help bring it to print. When the Tag publishing house issued the poem in 1996 as part of Natan Zach's series Hinne (הנה קונטרס לשירה), it was presented as a recovered artifact.
Zach edited the text with care, aided by Aryeh Aharoni, who compared Pen's lines with the Russian original and filled in places where the text was damaged or incomplete. They both insisted that this was not an academic edition. It was an act of preservation, meant to let Pen's Hebrew roar as he had written it.
The language itself is volcanic. Pen explodes the Russian into Hebrew sound. He invents words, bends syntax, and writes as though every line should be shouted across a square. His Hebrew brims with neologisms, rhymes that clang like metal, and the abrupt rhythm of slogans and marching feet. It is both ancient and mechanical, full of biblical resonance and factory noise.
Where Mayakovsky's futurism sought to fuse man and machine, Pen's Hebrew adds a prophetic current. His Ivan, the collective worker-giant of the poem, sounds like a figure from Ezekiel's vision, risen to hammer the world into moral shape. The industrial and the mystical coexist in every line.
The result is a Hebrew text that feels wholly native even when it is faithful to none of the Russian phrasing. Mayakovsky's anger becomes Pen's melody, and his revolution becomes a kind of spiritual convulsion.
The visual design of the edition reinforces this energy. Knispel's drawings accompany the text with dense black lines and urgent gestures, portraying workers, banners, and human forms half turned into machines. The layout keeps Mayakovsky's jagged rhythm, leaving open spaces and abrupt breaks, as if the page itself breathes between shouts. The book is both poem and performance, a stage for the echo of two vanished voices.
These pages are a monument to a particular moment in Hebrew modernism. Pen's "150,000,000" carries Mayakovsky's revolutionary faith into a language that had its own socialist dreams and its own disillusionments. It sounds to me like a spiritual apocalypse sung by a man who wanted to believe in the future but knew that the future rarely keeps its promises.
The poem in Pen's hands becomes an anthem for all those who built something immense and were swallowed by it. The Hebrew edition preserves that silence between the lines, the hush after the shouting stops. It is one of those rare translations that feels haunted by the original, not by imitating it, but because it continues its unfinished argument with history.
תחי התמימות! לצערי לא יכולתי לשכפל כאן בקן צרעות הקפיטליזם של גודרידס את ריקודי השורות, קטיעת התיבות ואת המעמד הויזואלי של התרגום. רוח המילים אולי תגיע לטוברישים ולטוברישות אשר יקראו את זה המניפסט:
הַמַּהְפֵכָה
מֵהַצָאר תִּשְׁלֹל עֲטֶרֶת־תּאַר.
הַמַּהְפֵכָה
בַּמַּאֲפִיּוֹת בְּרְעַב־הֲמוֹנִים תִּשָּׁלַף.
אוּלָם לָךְ,
מַה שֶׁם אֶתֵּן לָךְ, רוּסְיָה־טֶרִיטוֹרְיָה, אֲשֶׁר כַּלָּךְ סַחְרֶרֶת בְּסַעַר הַזַלְעָף ?!
הַסּוֹבְנַרְקוֹם* -,
חֶלְקוֹ שֶׁל מֹחַ רַב־הָאֹמֶץ, דַּהֲרַת־צַדָּיו לֹא עַל הַכֹּל תַּחֲלֹשׁ הִיא.
לְבָבוֹ הָיָה מֵהַמְשׁעֶר כְּבַד־עֹמֶס, שֶׁאֲפִלּוּ לָנִין הֲנִיעוֹ בְּקְשִׁי.
חַיָּל אָדֹם אֶפְשָׁר לָסֶגֶת לְהַכְרִיחַ, וְקוֹמוּנִיסְט - אֶפְשָׁר לְהַכְלִיאוֹ בַּסַד, אַךְ שֶׁכָּזֶה
בְּאֵיזֶה תַּעְצֹר בְּרִיחַ,
אם
שֶׁכָּזֶה
צְעַד?!
הָרַעַם רָעַם, אָזְנֵי־חוֹפִים קָרַע, וּתְזַנֵּקְנָה נָה טְפּוֹת אֶל־מֵעֵבֶר יָבֵשׁ עוֹד,
כַּאֲשֶׁר אִיבַן
פְּסִיעוֹתָיו זֶרַע,
נָחַת כְּסוּפָה
בְּאַרְצוֹת הַיַּבֶּשֶׁת.
* הממשלה הזמנית של בריה"מ אחרי המהפכה.
May 1, 2017
Çeviri yetersiz kalmış. Google Translate'den dönüştürülmüş misali cümleler akıcılığa ket vurmuş.
December 5, 2018
I’ve picked this poem to give myself an introduction to Mayakovsky and my choice has fallen on this particular one because the volume of his collected poetry that I own does not include this one. The poem was first published in 1921 in the period when Mayakovsky was still enchanted with Russian revolution and felt rather jubilant about its global consequences. The poem narrates the antagonism between Russian proletariat embodied in a vaguely stereotypical figure, Ivan, and the contemporary president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson representing an opposing force to the global communist revolution, namely capitalistic imperialism. In a way it feels prescient in its prediction of the face-off the two major superpowers will be embroiled into during most of the 20th century. Throughout his life Mayakovsky has gone through several ideological and artistic phases, so I wouldn't consider the themes he touches upon in this poem as indicatory of all his work. Several other Russian Silver Age poets have disavowed their allegiance to the communist state later in their careers, one of whom was Blok whose poem ‘12’ may have been an influence on Mayakovsky’s ‘150 000 000’.
In regards to composition, I enjoyed the experiments with form, which I surely expected to encounter going into Mayakovsky’s poetry, as he is well-known as staple representative of the Russian futurist movement, but also as an anti-christ among lovers a more romantic and lean poetry. The broken metres that still somehow work, the freshly-sounding acute metaphors, the so melodious alliteration, all of these are offset by a questionable subject of the poem as well as messy and, as Lenin himself suggested when reviewing the poem, too vulgar imagery and personages, who seem like caricatures, which unfortunately they aren't.
Like Ukrainian and Italian futurists, Mayakovsky is more keen on dislodging the conventions of Russian literature, culture and society, on severing the ties with the past in order to build a radically new future. For Mayakovsky the art of poetry takes a new role, it becomes a craft with a very specific function of instilling belief into public and guiding it towards progress and prosperity, warding off any of the malign influences on its way. Unlike Khlebnikov he did not believe in excavating obscure influences to build a future from them.
To sum up, the positive aspects of ‘150 000 000’ solidified my interest in delving into the whole range of his oeuvres. However, the true mystery about this poem for me is how Mayakovsky managed to ruin the good impression I’ve had of this poem’s technical mastery with such a poor choice of the main subject.
In regards to composition, I enjoyed the experiments with form, which I surely expected to encounter going into Mayakovsky’s poetry, as he is well-known as staple representative of the Russian futurist movement, but also as an anti-christ among lovers a more romantic and lean poetry. The broken metres that still somehow work, the freshly-sounding acute metaphors, the so melodious alliteration, all of these are offset by a questionable subject of the poem as well as messy and, as Lenin himself suggested when reviewing the poem, too vulgar imagery and personages, who seem like caricatures, which unfortunately they aren't.
Like Ukrainian and Italian futurists, Mayakovsky is more keen on dislodging the conventions of Russian literature, culture and society, on severing the ties with the past in order to build a radically new future. For Mayakovsky the art of poetry takes a new role, it becomes a craft with a very specific function of instilling belief into public and guiding it towards progress and prosperity, warding off any of the malign influences on its way. Unlike Khlebnikov he did not believe in excavating obscure influences to build a future from them.
To sum up, the positive aspects of ‘150 000 000’ solidified my interest in delving into the whole range of his oeuvres. However, the true mystery about this poem for me is how Mayakovsky managed to ruin the good impression I’ve had of this poem’s technical mastery with such a poor choice of the main subject.
December 5, 2018
Uzun bir savaştan sonrasını anlatıyor sanki, savaştan sonra sancılar. Upuzun bir şiiri okumak sıradışıydı. Tercüme hatasından ötürü Mayakovski’nin dilini tanıyamadım.
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February 10, 2022"Gün
bögle
ateşe dayandı
Döküldü yakıcı sıcak kışın sessizliğinde
Rüzgarlar dişledi boraları
sapladı hırsla belleyerek havayı." (s.43)
Tundralardan, çamur ve çimenler arasından; bir trende seyahat ediyormuşum gibi hissettirdi... Hızla, uçsuz bucaksız vadilere...
bögle
ateşe dayandı
Döküldü yakıcı sıcak kışın sessizliğinde
Rüzgarlar dişledi boraları
sapladı hırsla belleyerek havayı." (s.43)
Tundralardan, çamur ve çimenler arasından; bir trende seyahat ediyormuşum gibi hissettirdi... Hızla, uçsuz bucaksız vadilere...
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