The Poet Takes Himself Apart on Stage: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Poetic Personae in "Vladimir Mayakovsky: Tragediia" and "Misteriia-buff"
Creators: name: Trinks, Jasmine
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2015

description: In his biography of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Edward J. Brown describes the poet’s body of work as a “regular alternation of lyric with political or historical themes,” noting that Mayakovsky’s long lyric poems, like Человек [Man, 1916] and Про это [About That, 1923] are followed by the propagandistic Мистерия-буфф [Mystery-Bouffe, 1918] and Владимир Ильич Ленин [Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, 1924], respectively (Brown 109). While Brown’s assessment of Mayakovsky’s work is correct in general, it does not allow for adequate consideration of the development of his poetic persona over the course of his career, which is difficult to pinpoint, due in part to the complex interplay of the lyrical and historical in his poetry. In order to investigate the problem of Mayakovsky’s ever-changing and contradictory poetic persona, I have chosen to examine two of his plays: Владимир Маяковский: Трагедия [Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, 1913] and both the 1918 and 1921 versions of Mystery-Bouffe. My decision to focus on Mayakovsky's plays arose from my desire to examine what I termed the “spectacle-ization” of the poet’s ego—that is, the representation of the poetic persona in a physical form alive and on stage. As Mayakovsky himself played the roles of “Vladimir Mayakovsky” and “the Man” at the respective premieres of the Tragedy and Mystery-Bouffe, I feel that an investigation of the persona in the poet’s plays is very much needed, as Mayakovsky obviously felt that his peculiar position as a poet on stage before the public and the world informed his artistic creation. 1 Rather than presenting Mayakovsky’s poetic persona as a duality of lyricism and militaristic propaganda, these two plays trace the complex trajectory of the poetic persona from its devotion to the anarchic political aesthetic of Cubo-Futurism to its glorification of the Communist utopia and advocating of art with a social purpose. This study seeks to reveal that, despite his apparently wholehearted dedication to several political and artistic groups, Mayakovsky’s poetic persona is comprised of
elements that prevent him from being confined to any one of them. The three central aspects of the persona that will be examined in the Tragedy are the treatment of material objects, Mayakovsky’s involvement or lack thereof with the achievement of a utopian future, and his assertion of himself as a Christ-figure. My analysis of the personae of the two versions of Mystery-Bouffe will be focused on their disdain for the concept of heavenly utopia and their respective depictions as distinct revolutionary Christ-figures. An analysis of these two plays in concert will illustrate that the transformation of Mayakovsky’s poetic persona from the impotent poet-prophet of the Tragedy to the divine revolutionary orator of Mystery-Bouffe reveals that his essential concerns—the superhuman abilities of the poet, the role of the poet in society, and the poet’s relationship to the achievement of utopia—remain constant, despite the conflict of the poet’s individuality with the demands of the collective that inevitably accompanies his devotion to the revolution.