Editor's Note
Death and rebirth?
--Mayakovsky of contemporary China
Text | Hong Zicheng
One
"The Great Son of the Offensive Class"
According to relevant sources[1], the earliest articles introduced in China were Hu Yuzhi's "Russian Free Poems" (signed Hualu) published in 1921 in The Oriental Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 11, followed by Hu Yuzhi's "A Glimpse of New Russian Literature" in the 19th volume of the Oriental Magazine in 1922, No. 4, and Shen Yanbing's "The Present Situation of Futuristic Literature" published in October 1922 in the Novel Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 10. In the early 1920s, Qu Qiubai also wrote an article entitled "Maxiakwovsky"[2], which introduced the poet in parallel with his active time in the Soviet Union. As for the translation of the works, the earliest is the 1929 translation of Li Yihao and Guo Moruo's "Selected Poems of New Russia" (Guanghua Bookstore 1929 edition)[3], which includes works such as "Our March". Since then, in the 1930s and 1940s, various newspapers and periodicals have published many translations and commentaries. However, there are only two collections of works translated into Chinese in the "modern" period, one is "Scream" by Shanghai Motor Publishing House in 1937, translated by Wan Xiangsi (姚思铨), the title of which is taken from the name of Mayakovsky's long poem (which was later translated as "Open Throat Singing")[4]; the second is "Myself" translated by Zhuang Shouci published by Times Publishing House in 1949.
Hu Yuzhi's "Russian Free Poems" was published in The Oriental Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 11, 1921
The poet was already well known in Chinese literary circles (especially left-wing literary circles) in the 1930s and 1940s, so when Guo Moruo was invited to visit the Soviet Union in 1945, he visited the Mayakovsky Memorial Hall[5] and inscribed poems praising him as "the great son of the offensive class", saying that Chinese "I already knew your name" and "your voice / As if a storm / Flew through Central Asia Minor." / Any / Mountains, deserts, oceans / Can't stop you" [6].
Translated by Li Yihao and Guo Moruo,000 Selected Poems of New Russia, Guanghua Bookstore, 1929 edition
In fact, the unstoppable boom in Chinese translation and introduction still had to be in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, he was treated as a banner and a model for revolutionary poets, and it can be said that no foreign poet enjoyed such a special honor in that period. From 1950 to 1966, no fewer than thirty-five or six translations of Mayakovsky's poetry were published. In addition to the anthologies, there are "One Hundred and Fifty Million", "Good! "Lenin" and other long poems, and "To the Youth", "Poems to Children" and other special poems. Among them, the most frequently published is "Good! and Lenin. In addition to special collections, it is difficult to count the works of Mayakovsky selected and published in various poetry anthologies and newspapers. From 1957 to 1961, the people's literature publishing house successively published the five-volume "Mayakovsky Anthology", which was an important achievement of this period. It belongs to the cultural "project" of key organizations, adopting the method of collective cooperation, with the participation of as many as 20 or 30 translators, including Xiao San, Ge Baoquan, Yu Zhen, Zhang Tiexian, Qiu Qin, Zhu Weizhi, Zhuang Shouci, Wang Zhiliang, Wulan Khan, Ren Rongrong, Lu Yong, Yue Fenglin and others, as well as students of the Russian Department of Peking University. The five-volume anthology of more than 2,500 pages was adjusted and revised in the early 1980s and a new edition of the four-volume anthology was published. In addition to the translation of works, the number of review articles is also considerable. From the 1950s to the first half of the 1960s, and in the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution, newspapers and periodicals published as many as 200 to 300 commentaries and research articles. In addition to the article, many poets wrote "dedication poems". The writers and poets included famous writers and translators of that year, such as Guo Moruo, Ge Baoquan, Xiao San, Ai Qing, Ba Ren, Cao Jinghua, Liu Baiyu, Xu Chi, Tian Jian, Zhang Tiexian, Zhao Ruihong, Lu Quan, Xia Yan, Lin Lin, Cai Qijiao, He Qifang, Yuan Shuipai, Li Yang, Yu Zhen, Liu Shuosong, Fang Ji, Zang Kejia, Jin Yi, An Qi, Li Ji, Yan Chen, Li Ying, Cheng Guangrui, Zhao Puchu, Zou Difan, Wang Feibai, Gobi Zhou, Li Xueao, Han Xiao... Mayakovsky is regarded by many contemporary Chinese poets as a "mentor" figure, the banner of proletarian poetry.
Mayakovsky (1893-1930)
Therefore, Mayakovsky's ideas and poetry naturally also leave "footprints" among contemporary Chinese poets. The most important are the ideas of poets and revolutions, poetry and politics, but also the materials of poetry, specific symbols, structures, and even the treatment of branches and rhythms. "Influence" is a complex issue that is generally difficult to identify explicitly, so whether the 1930s Field To the Combatants was influenced by Mayakovsky is controversial: although the author himself has repeatedly denied it, some researchers have said it with certainty and unquestionable[8]. However, there are still some "traces" that are clearly recognizable. For example, Shi Fangyu's long poem "The Strongest Sound of Peace" in 1950, Guo Xiaochuan's "To Young Citizens" (group poem) in 1955, He Jingzhi's "Singing With Voice" in 1956 and later "Ode to Ten Years"... If it is uncertain whether "An Adventure in Mayakovsky's Summer in a Villa" gave birth to "The Adventure of Mayakovsky Square" (Li Ji) and "An Anecdote at the Recitation" (Guo Xiaochuan), then the 1958 masthead agitation poems of Li Ji and Wen Jie in conjunction with current affairs should be related to Mayakovsky's concept and practice of "social ordering" and "Rosta's window" [9]. Ma Sanli's cross-talk "Meeting Fan" was obviously inspired by Mayakovsky's "Meeting Fan". In 1958, a character in Tian Han's screenplay "Imagination of the Ming Tombs Reservoir" stated that in the 1920s Mayakovsky said that bed bugs became rare animals in the Soviet Union fifty years later, while in China, sparrows, rats, and flies had become rare animals.
Mayakovsky,"Meeting Fan", translated by Fei Bai, Guangdong People's Publishing House, 1979
Naturally, the greatest "influence" was the formation of contemporary Chinese political poetry from the 1950s to the 1980s. Its artistic resources, in addition to Western Romantic poetry and Chinese 20th-century left-wing poetry, are most directly called by Aragon as "the founder of contemporary political poetry"[12]: his themes close to the times, his gesture of direct participation in the course of history, his enthusiastic praise of the new social system, and the poetry lines and rhythms of the "staircase body".
Two
The "Model" of the Proletarian Poet
In the 1950s and 1960s, however, Chinese readers embraced Mayakovsky, who had been simplified, idolized,[13] or treated with a Chinese-Specific word called "model". The process of "modeling" took place in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. Mayakovsky became famous in the Soviet Union during his lifetime, and had a great influence not only in the poetry world but also in the public. Later in his life, he traveled throughout the Soviet Union, hosting hundreds of speeches and poetry readings. The crowd was struck by his "grandeur like a grand piano in a church." [14] He amassed nearly 20,000 question notes thrown onto the stage by an audience. Mayakovsky's close friend Elsa Trevore (who had been Mayakovsky's lover, sister of Lily Brick, and later became the wife of Aragon, to whom Aragon had countless poems dedicated) wrote: "I have not seen with my own eyes how Mayakovsky became gloriously famous. When I returned to Moscow in 1925, it was a fait accompli. The pedestrians on the road, the coachmen all recognized him. People turned their heads to each other and said, 'Look, Mayakovsky...'" [15] Mayakovsky himself wrote of his speeches and recitations in The New Capital (1928): "In the last two months I have given about forty lectures in the cities of the Soviet Union... Throughout the day (in the middle of the day, not just one day), I recite from the time the whistle rings in the morning until the whistle rings in the evening... The dockers in Odessa, after transporting the passengers' suitcases to the ship, greeted me without exchanging names... Urging me: 'Tell the State Publishing Bureau to sell your Lenin cheaply.' [16] His funeral, according to Elsa, was attended by hundreds of thousands (and some sources say 300,000).
Such a prominent reputation was not deliberately created by political and literary power, and therefore, during his lifetime and in the years after his death, there were also mixed and contradictory evaluations surrounding him:
...... Mayakovsky's enemies in the literary world are innumerable, no matter what period of his life. There have been some literary schools and some literary movements that have come out against Mayakovsky's futurism, against his group of left-wing writers (referring to "Lev", that is, the "Left Art Front", founded in 1923, and Mayakovsky served as the editor-in-chief of the magazine founded by this organization - Citation Note), there were some people who thought that to write poetry, you had to always write poems such as Pushkin and Tolstoy, and some people did not accept anything except proletarian writers, and another group of people accused Mayakovsky of writing riotous poems. Political poetry and social poetry, they even dared to say that Mayakovsky himself did not believe a word (every) of what he wrote. There are also those who reproach him for his lyric poems, love poems, which are said to be incapable of serving the proletariat. Some have accused him of being faithful to the party, while others have blamed him for not demanding reinstatement. A group of people said that he was finished, squeezed dry, and there was no longer half a trace of talent left on his body...
His works could only be published in quantities that did not meet the demands,[17] and his writings, his photographs, were thrown out of the library doors. At the Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934, I asked one of the above-mentioned literary officials why he had deleted Mayakovsky's name in one of his papers... The literary clerk said to me, "There is now a cult of Mayakovsky, and we are fighting against it. ”[18]
The "turnaround" took place in 1935. In November of that year, Lily Brick wrote to Stalin in the tone of a "widow" (she did have the qualifications, and Mayakovsky listed her first in her "family" in her suicide note) complaining about Mayakovsky's lack of attention. Stalin was quick to give instructions, which were published in Pravda on the 17th of that month and accompanied the poet for a long time: "Mayakovsky was, and still is, the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch." The inside story of Stalin's instructions was not known to Chinese readers in the 1950s and 1960s, and some scholars analyzed that both the letter writer and the giver had their own political plans, which were left for those who had the heart to continue to investigate.[19] Contemporary Chinese readers know Mayakovsky's name as well as Stalin's assessment. The leaders' instructions were published, just like the operating procedures we are familiar with, and Pravda, The Journal of Literature, and so on set off a boom in publicizing and standardizing Mayakovsky's image. In the same month, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (the permanent body of the Congress of Soviets of the USSR from 1922 to 1938) decided to publish Mayakovsky's complete 12-volume collection,[20] and subsequently, a memorial was built in the former poet's residence, and the Moscow TriumphAlter Square was renamed Mayakovsky Square, and the famous bronze statue on the square was only erected in 1958, and its base was six meters high, for which the designer Alexander Kibarnikov received the Lenin Prize of 1959. The "Rapp" who had originally regarded Mayakovsky as a proletarian "fellow traveler" and questioned his poetic concepts and writing methods, and the head of the Soviet Writers' Association, Fadeyev (who also ended his life with a pistol in his apartment on May 13, 1956), reviewed the "mistakes" in evaluation, and in April 1940, at a report on the tenth anniversary of Mayakovsky's death, firmly expounding the "footsteps of giants and the loud voice" of the objects of his criticism, praising his "great, growing strength". 21]。
Mayakovsky and Lily Brick
In the USSR, the different voices surrounding Mayakovsky disappeared. He received a glory that he must have expected in his lifetime—a glory he deserved in part, but also brought him sorrow (if he could still perceive it). Elsa Trevore convincingly believes that Mayakovsky is a man with "extraordinary life elasticity" and that he is not "fixed in a 'movement'". But "role models" sometimes mean being simplified, trimmed, rearranged in order, fixed in one place. He thus loses the "elasticity of the vitality". Pasternak said it was probably "the second time ... Death" – this is not without reason.[23]
Because it is Mayakovsky who was "fixed" by the Soviet Union as a "model", it is difficult for contemporary Chinese readers to have another imagination of him: they cannot receive any different information, and there is no room for understanding to expand. The reader is unaware of the different and even antagonistic evaluations of Mayakovsky by the revolutionary leaders of the 1920s (Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, etc.), and is unaware of the fierce controversy that took place in the Soviet Union in the twenties and thirties; the root cause of the tension between him and the "Rapp" leaders; the poetry of Mayakovsky and the Russian formalists during the periods of "Lev" (1923-1925) and "Nové Lev" (1927-1928). Association of various artistic avant-gardes. In the 1950s, Chinese critics liked to quote Lenin's praise for The Meeting Fan, but it was not clear that the revolutionary leader did not actually have a crush on Mayakovsky. Lenin said that he understood and admired Pushkin, "Nekrasov also admitted", "but, Mayakovsky, sorry, I do not understand him". In 1958, volume 65 of the Soviet magazine Literary Heritage published New Materials on Mayakovsky, Vol. 1, revealing one hundred and twenty-five letters from Mayakovsky to Lily Brick. The material was not introduced to China at that time, and the CPSU Central Committee considered the material to damage the image of the poet and criticized it, which led to the miscarriage of the publication of the second series of the material.
As for Mayakovsky's insignificant private life, his relationships with several women, especially With Lily Brick, are even more secretive. Mayakovsky's poem about Yesenin's suicide ("In today's life, death is not difficult, but it is much more difficult to build life"[25]) has been quoted countless times by Chinese readers, ignoring his "thoughts of suicide and the other shore", which is "intricately intertwined" with "the affirmation of life, the necessity of living life and making life especially better":
I thought more and more
Take a bullet and make the final end of my life.
- "The Flute of the Vertebrae" (also translated as "Spine Flute")
Heart pounding towards the bullet
The throat dreams of the bayonet
……
How many secrets are hidden behind your glass bottles.
You know the highest justice,
pharmacist
let
My soul
Painless
Be led into space.
- "Man"[26]
Three
"Death" and "Resurrection"
The Sino-Soviet split became public in the early 1960s, and the number of introductions and translations of Soviet literature gradually decreased, and Mayakovsky was no exception, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution stagnated. But the fanatical "revolution" is the fertile soil for the growth of political poetry, and Mayakovsky's poetic style continues to have great vitality. The "Red Guards Battle Song"[27], the poems of Guo Xiaochuan, Zhang Yongming and others in this period, the "Ideal Song" of the "Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers", and the creations of He Jingzhi, Zhang Xuemeng, Ye Wenfu, Luo Gengye, Qu Youyuan, Xiong Zhaozheng and others after the "Cultural Revolution" to the early 1980s were all influenced by Mayakovsky. Naturally, the ideological and artistic standards of the poets and poems listed here are mutually different, or even the gap is very different.
From 1977 to the early 1980s, Mayakovsky was revived in China and interacted with the political writing boom of poetry of the period. In April 1980, the National Society for the Study of Soviet Literature held a Mayakovsky Seminar in Wuhan. In addition to the writers and poets Xu Chi, Zeng Zhuo, Luo Wen, Liu Zhanqiu, and Li Bing, russian and Soviet literature and Mayakovsky translators and researchers Ge Baoquan, Chen Bingyi, Yu Zhen, Gao Mang (Ulan Khan), Wang Feibai, Qiu Qin, Tang Yuqiang, Yue Fenglin, and Wang Zhiliang all attended the meeting. Holding a national seminar for a foreign writer or poet is quite rare in the new period. The motivation of the organizers of the conference should be to reaffirm the significance of Mayakovsky's poetry under the craze of political poetry at that time, to activate this literary resource of socialist realism in the new historical period, but also to correct the shortcomings of past criticism and research. Thus, "Mayakovsky is not dead, he is still alive" (Qiu Qin), "The mainland still needs to inherit Mayakovsky's revolutionary tradition" (Chen Bingyi), "His poems still have great vitality to this day... Today it also makes us feel uplifted and inspired to move forward" (Go Baoquan) and "I want to fight like Mayakovsky" (Xiong Zhaozheng) and other such statements.
But, contrary to the expectations of the symposium, the "recall" could hardly stop his fading out of the readership and poetry world. In an era of reflection on the "revolution" and even the trend of "farewell", this fate of the "revolutionary poet" Mayakovsky is almost inevitable. In the Soviet Union, changes in Mayakovsky's assessment had occurred since Stalin's death in the 1950s, but the overall fading out was almost synchronized with contemporary China, roughly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. On the one hand, this is because of the changes in the political atmosphere of the times, and on the other hand, because some materials have been disclosed one after another.
From the perspective of poetry history and readers, it is after the imprisonment is lifted that Chinese readers finally learn that Mayakovsky is not the only Russian poetry of the 20th century, and it is not necessarily the "highest", and the poets of the same era include Blok, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva... Of course, this change in evaluation is also a sequelae left by "idolization". Some commentators complain that the commemoration of the centenary of Mayakovsky's birth in Russia in 1993 was small and deserted, that there was no usual commemoration of the Young Pioneers' drumming and flower offering, and that there were no large numbers of praise articles in the press, "which is in sharp contrast to the lively scene of the centenary commemoration of the birth of Mayakovsky's contemporaries Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, etc. in previous years." This is also very similar to the situation in China. For such phenomena that often occur in literary history, some scholars quote the British writer Canetti to explain: "What has been seen only once does not exist, and what is seen every day no longer exists." [31] The Akhmatovas have been wronged, framed, and buried for more than half a century, and Mayakovsky was "seen every day" for a long time.
Mayakovskaya Square
But Mayakovsky, after all, was an important or even great poet of the 20th century, and he did not really disappear or die, but more or less returned to a more normal state: the position of prominence is no longer reproduced, no longer "inviolable", and it is no longer a "crime" to object to him. His poetry collections are still published in China, but not so frequently,[32] commemorative events and seminars are held, but they will no longer be on a grand scale; and there are constant reviews and research articles, but the evaluations are obviously much worse than before.
But criticism of the poet's neglect has also been there. In the early 1990s, Zhang Jie, a translator of Russian and Soviet literature, expressed concern and dissatisfaction with some people who casually abandoned Mayakovsky. This sentiment was also revealed in 1993 at the centenary of Mayakovsky's birth, which appeared deserted in Beijing. For more than a decade, the expectation of "re-encountering" with the giants like the "Archangel"[33][34] has made his desire to return to the position of "Poet of the Century" increasingly strong. Among some poets and critics, Mayakovsky is both an indelible historical memory and a sought-after historical support to resist social corruption and poetic ills. In 2016, Gidimaga's long poem "To Mayakovsky" (in People's Literature, No. 3, 2016) caused a strong response in the poetry world.[35] This is enough to prove this. The long poem quotes Jay Blok—"The work of art is always, as it should be, resurrected in the hereafter, through the death zones of several epochs that refused to accept it"—describing Mayakovsky's experience in the second half of the 20th century: those who "loved you fanatically, their descendants / but gradually put you behind the dusty brain in the midst of the lights". The long poem "expounds" on the historical merits and practical significance of mayakovsky and poetry, and declares the opposite of "fickle politicians, hypocritical gentlemen, slippery tongues" threatening that "your poetry has gone to the grave":
...... You have crossed the Forgotten River
Like a burning flame – it has arrived at the door
……
Mayakovsky, this is your resurrection —
Born again, you have overcome a heavy death
This is not a utopian imagination, this is reality
As a poet – your doom is over
The train that resounds throughout the centuries will sound its whistle
The reason why Mayakovsky "must live" is that Gidemmaga gives the reason: "Those pessimists who are full of uneasiness and confusion about tomorrow / Those who still long to find hope in life / They are all trying to find their answers in your face." ”
Four
Multiple Mayakovsky "images"
However, the two sides of the "re-encounter" found that the other party had changed, and it was not the original appearance. From the interpreters, because they no longer follow a unified explanatory norm, the "imaginary division" based on different situations and ideas will naturally lead to multiple Mayakovsky "images", but they will first have to face the common problem of how to deal with the main themes and ideological tendencies of his poems - the praise of the Bolsheviks, the Soviet revolution and the newly established regime, and their evaluation is now fiercely controversial; how to re-evaluate Mayakovsky's futurism How to view Mayakovsky's dilemma and suicide in the late 1920s; for poetry itself, it is a question of the relationship between poetry and people, poetry and realpolitik.
Mayakovsky, a radical citizen poet who deals with grand themes and is keen on historical generalizations, "like a burning flame," still exists. He came as "the messenger of light and the nemesis of darkness." This Mayakovsky "image" basically adopts his posture, his poetic concept and approach, that is, recalling a "name that has won universal recognition", using this "proper name" to counter the reality of "spiritual degeneration" and "alienation anxiety lost in material desires", criticizing the behavior and logic of the world powers cloaked in morality, expressing "criticism of unity or homogenization, concern for the dispossessed, anxiety about the loss of voice and living space".
The human, humanitarian Mayakovsky is another "image" of reconstruction. Among some critics, he extolled a large number of political poems praising the proletarian revolution and the new era of revolution construction, in which the connotations of class, political parties and specific histories were blurred and diluted, and "revolution" was understood at the level of human nature and the universal historical pursuit of mankind. "Lenin", "Good! Undoubtedly Mayakovsky's "masterpiece", unlike previous commentaries, critics have found that the poet is "a most humane man" to praise Lenin, and finds that "Good! The title comes from the Bible: After God created the world, "God looks good"—Mayakovsky saw revolution as a poetic, romantic movement of creation. This is also the view of some scholars abroad: Mayakovsky "regarded Lenin as a destined savior who, according to the laws of history, appeared at a time when capitalism was in decline and collapse... Lenin in the poem is a mythical figure who is the savior prophesied in the Marxist classics, like a chronicle of the Christian savior, and the story of his great deeds begins with creation" [38]. And the famous Russian poet Yevtushenko, whose poetic style is usually seen as a continuation of Mayakovsky, also said that Mayakovsky was in fact "a great poet of love" and that "his love has two objects, one is a woman and the other is a revolution." For him, 'woman', 'revolution', 'love', 'Lenin', these are synonyms".[39]
Left: Mayakovsky, "Good! People's Literature Publishing House, 1955
Right: Mayakovsky's Lenin, People's Literature Publishing House, 1953
Mayakovsky's relationship with the Futurists has always been laborious. In the Soviet Union and in contemporary China, modernism was for a long time considered a decadent bourgeois school, and it was natural to strip Mayakovsky from it. There are two paths of cutting, either pointing out that although he was "involved" with the futurists, he "actually" "opposed futurism and all other decadent schools" even in the early stages of creation,[40] or applying the theory of stages of development with which we are familiar: "The anarchist tendencies of the early petty bourgeoisie were more serious, and only later did they realize the necessity of the organized conscious struggle of the proletariat; the artistic point of view changed from nihilism to critical inheritance and to innovation." Stylistically from mannerism to simplicity and nature, from vulgar monotony to diversity, language from obscure to concise and powerful..." [41]
Beginning in the 1980s, modernism began to become less "reactionary" in China, gradually removed from the negative list of literary and artistic trends, and with the strong advocacy of "literary subjectivity" at that time, critics no longer had to hide and cover up Mayakovsky's relationship with the Futurists. At the aforementioned Wuhan Symposium, Mayakovsky's relationship with the Futurists was the main topic. Later, it was further argued that the exploration of left-wing literature and art in the early Soviet Union was also very avant-garde, or that the relationship between proletarian literature and modernist avant-garde art was not always antagonistic. For example, the playwright Tretyakov, who advocated "presumptive drama", was both a futuristic poet and a left-wing writer; while Mayakovsky's Bathhouse and Bedbug, some of which were performed at the Meyerhold Theatre, some directed by Meyerhold. Therefore, some commentators have proposed that it is not necessary to dwell on the relationship with the Futurists, but that the problem should be examined in the context of the Russian "Silver Age" and the literature and art of the early 20th century. Mayakovsky's contribution is in the proposal and practice of "poetic democracy", Liu Wenfei pointed out:
(Mayakovsky ) To incorporate non-poetic elements into poetry, to expand the capacity and function of poetry, in other words, to poeticize and poeticize daily life, and to face the chai rice oil and salt that everyone faces all day long with a poetic attitude. He not only brought music, painting, novels and other artistic elements into poetry, but even proper nouns such as politics, ideology, personal names, and place names can become lyrical objects of his poetry. In Mayakovsky's case, poetry is all-encompassing, omnipotent, even familiar slogans, folk sayings, house numbers... To quote a passage from Shhklovsky, "In Mayakovsky's new art, the avenue, which had previously lost its artistry, acquired its own language, its own form ... The poet does not look out the window at the street. He thinks he is the son of the street, and we learn the beauty of the mother based on the appearance of the son. People would not have looked at the mother's face before. [42]
Liu Wenfei believes that this is what Mandelstam said, and Mayakovsky solved the "great problem" of popular poetry rather than elite poetry. From this, we see a left-wing avant-garde, "son of the street", "modern troubadour" Mayakovsky.
The one who was "recalled" may be a love poet. For other critics, Mayakovsky's massive singing of political poems and propaganda slogans about revolution and new life should be denied. They admired his early poems and a few love poems (Spine Flute, I Love, About This, etc.). In 1998, a Chinese translation of Mayakovsky's correspondence with Lili Blick was published, "Love is the Heart of All Things", the title of which was taken from Mayakovsky's original words, and in 2016, a Chinese translation of "Mayakovsky and Lily Brick: The Great Epistles of Love" (hereinafter referred to as "The History of Love") was published by the Russian scholar Margaret Smolozynskaya. These confusing plots, which have been deleted from Mayakovsky's life in the past, are presented to the reader in a detailed way, making the image of "love" Mayakovsky prominent. The authors of The History of Love call their history of love "great" and "sickly love"; say "there is no flawless genius" (also borrowed from Gidimaga's long poem); "Many celebrities have used stimulants." Some of these people are alcoholics, some are drug addicts, and for Mayakovsky, his stimulant is love"; "Lily Brick drew Mayakovsky from her sisters and brought him to her married family. Until the poet's death, they were all three people living together: Lily Brick, her husband Joseph Brick, and Mayakovsky. Their relationship contained everything from the tender approvals that Vladimir Mayakovsky had written to his lover, to Lily Brick's betrayal of the poets" [43].
The Mayakovsky Anthology, People's Literature Publishing House, 1957
Unlike this complex "history of love", which has some hesitation and reservations, the view of the "Preface to the Chinese Translation" of "Love is the Heart of All Things" written by Zheng Tiwu is much clearer, saying that this is "a complete collection of letters between the great poet and his goddess", and their love "is a strange fate and a good story in the history of world literature". Indeed, as the preface says, the Soviet Union and China of the past were secretive about this relationship, seeing it as detrimental to the image of the political poet and socialist realist, as a "moral degeneration" and "things are not so simple": in Mayakovsky," "Lily Brick occupies a very important position and has a lasting and far-reaching influence on the poet's creation." This is in line with Lily Brick's sister Elsa Trevore:
In addition, there are women, first and foremost — the woman, his woman; he dedicates all his writings to her, and she often occupies his spirit, so much so that in his love poems and other poems, full of her influence, we can also find this woman in his book of desperation... [45]
After reading their collection of letters, those who have deeply imprinted the image of Mayakovsky, who is tall, heroic, proud, untamed, cold and deep, and contemptuous of the mediocre, believe that for a while they cannot unify him with Mayakovsky, who is "tender as water" and whose pen is full of pet nicknames of "kitten" and "puppy", as the same person. However, even if there is some psychological or physical discomfort, people must accept this reality, because "there is no defectless genius", and it is said that the greater the person, the more complex it is. It is also difficult to say whether all this is a "defect", and it is said that the theoretical basis for this way of life comes from Chernyshevsky, and Mayakovsky himself does not think there is anything wrong with it.
Five
Mayakovsky and his "homomorphs"
Different Mayakovsky "images" can be found in the poet and his works. The problem is that the various interpretations of them are separated, failing to place the different factors in the whole to distinguish between each other's positions and relationships.
In 1931, the year after the poet's death, Lunacharsky gave a lecture on Mayakovsky the Innovator,[47] attempting to analyze Mayakovsky's complexity in terms of overall personality. Lunacharsky, who served as People's Commissar of Soviet Education, spoke highly of Mayakovsky's talents. In his speech, he said that beyond the metal Mayakovsky there was a shadow of him, his "homomorph", his "heart that beat inside the metal armor that reflected the whole world was not only warm, not only gentle, but also fragile and easily injured." If his cast iron had not been infused with a warm, gentle human spirit, his monumental work might not have been warm, but Mayakovsky was in fact "very afraid of this homogeneous man, of this soft, extremely cordial, very sympathetic, almost morbid Mayakovsky": with strong muscles and a sledgehammer-like heart, he tried to get rid of it, "but he may not be able to do it".
Lunacharsky initially had a sympathetic, understanding attitude towards "homogeneity.". Perhaps realizing that this attitude was contrary to his status as a "proletarian revolutionary", he later became harsh, believing that the "homogeneous person" was his "perpetrator":
This is how homogeneity killed him: if in poetry he could only add some dregs to Mayakovsky's creation, then in everyday life he seems to be much more powerful.
...... Why did Mayakovsky commit suicide? ...... I don't want to explain,—— I don't know... We don't understand the situation. We know only that Mayakovsky himself said: I am not afraid of homogeneous people politically, I am not afraid of him in poetry, the place where I was killed is not on the sea, not in the place where I talk to the steamship "Knight" with my pipe, but on the sentimental lake where the nightingale cries, the moonlight shines, and the light boats of love travel back and forth... On that little lake, the man of the same kind was stronger than me, and there he defeated and knocked me down, and I felt that if I did not put the metal Mayakovsky to death, he would probably only live happily. The homomorph had bitten off the flesh of his body and bitten it into a big hole, and he did not want to sail the ocean full of holes,—— but it was better to end his life in a moment of old age and strength.
Lunacharsky predicted that Mayakovsky of "metal" would be immortal, while "homogeneity could not fail to decay and decay", because the writing of "metal" "marked one of the greatest epochs in human history". More than seventy years later, Lunacharsky was half right and the other half was in vain. Indeed, there is no shortage of gentle love poets in the world, and there are not many genius poets who try to represent the "great era" of human history. As for speaking of "immortality", this may disappoint him. The "metal" Mayakovsky is immortal (but it has been re-smelted, and the texture is not much the same), and the "homomorph" has not decayed and decayed: and in the "recall" action, the latter is still constantly "biting off the flesh of his body" and has a tendency to replace the former.
Love is the Heart of All Things: The Correspondence of Mayakovsky and Lily Brick, Xuelin Publishing House, 1998
Her contemporaries, Tsvetaeva, also discussed this conflict of personality and situation. What she proposes is the "split" and contradiction between Mayakovsky as a "man" and a "poet". "Mayakovsky, as a human being, has been killing Mayakovsky as a poet, who has the potential for himself, for twelve consecutive years," she said. In the thirteenth year the poet stood up and killed the man. His suicides lasted for twelve years, as if two suicides had occurred, in which case both—neither was a suicide, for, the first time—was a feat, and the second—was a festival. As a result, Mayakovsky "lived like a man and died like a poet".
Contemporary Chinese critics' opinion on "division" is that it is a split between Mayakovsky, who is individualistic, poetic, and "self" who pursues creative freedom, and Mayakovsky, who abandons the "self" and integrates into the unity of the collective. Liu Wenfei pointed out that Mayakovsky "has another famous saying about the October Revolution, that is, 'my revolution'... This is not only Mayakovsky's public political statement after the October Revolution, but also implies his artistic pursuits." "He founded 'Lev' and 'Novodev' in an attempt to stand artistically on a par with Lenin in politics. He regarded Lenin's revolution as a political, social revolution, while his own 'my revolution' as an artistic, poetic revolution, which has long been established in the history of Russian and Soviet literature and has been called Mayakovsky's 'mistakes' and 'mistakes'. This is actually the revelation of his true heart, and it is also one of the reasons why he is bound to fall out of favor, and even his death. [50] Hayashi said, "Mayakovsky enthusiastically praised the revolution, the party, and the leaders, and there were many big words in the poems. But we see that in him there is a very complex and delicate entanglement between the Party, the Fatherland, the collective and the individual; the 'I' is prominent, unique, full of vitality, and no great thing on the outside will make it disappear." "'I' is not just a member of 'us', I am an individual of life with an independent meaning, which cannot be annexed and integrated at will. On the contrary, truth appears only through the 'me', power has a legitimate form only through the 'I', and in short, the 'I' cannot be changed. Mayakovsky said: 'I have only one face, and it is a face, not a weather vane.' ’”[51]
Indeed, the Russian October Revolution had a "creative" romantic character, realizing the ambition to rebuild the world as a whole, to create a whole "new man" in the revolution (these are embodied to a certain extent in Mayakovsky's poems). Whether this imagination is possible or illusory, it does not matter, but as the spokesman and expressor of the great poetry of this revolution, Mayakovsky cannot bear it without hesitation. He is bound to fall into an inextricable double dilemma of conflict with the environment and self. His "inconsistency" with the Bolshevik "revolution" had an "unreal" character. He was, after all, a "sentimental man" in the sense of Isaiah Berlin,[52] and an angry, rebellious, divided, imaginative, agitated, "modern man" of "self". In this regard, the "Rapps" are not wrong to say that he is a revolutionary "fellow traveler".
Mayakovsky Museum
Near Moscow's Rubyanka Square, the apartment building where Mayakovsky last lived is now the Mayakovsky Memorial, a memorial in a peculiar Symbolist and Futuristic style. The designer added a checkered steel frame to the rough granite walls on the front of the building, embellished with large Russian letters я. These are the most frequent words encountered in Mayakovsky's poems and articles: me, myself, my love, my revolution, my street... Elsa's Mayakovsky Biography, written in the late 1930s, also mentions the Mayakovsky Memorial, but the situation is different from today. The brick walls of a multi-story building adjacent to the memorial are marked in large font:
My resounding power as a poet
The whole thing is given to you,
Fighting class. [53]
It is not known whether this is two different memorials, or the same but remodeled. However, the replacement of the external marker installation of the memorial from "class" to "I" is very meaningful: this probably means that the image has changed in the past century.
exegesis:
[1] See Chen Shoucheng, Qiu Jinchang, and Liu Haifang, eds., Index of Mayakovsky In China, Mayakovsky Studies, Wuhan University Press, 1980, pp. 257-300.
[2] The article is included in Chapter 14, "The New Writers of Labor-Peasant Russia", in the Outline of the History of Russian Literature edited by Zheng Zhenduo (Commercial Press, 1924 edition). It was later published again in the Second Issue of The Literary Monthly, 1932 (July 10). Mayakovsky has more than 20 translated names in China, such as Mayerkovsky, Mayegovsky, Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky, mayakovsky, etc. After 1953, it was translated as Mayakovsky (see Chu Jinchang's Examination of the Chinese Translation of Mayakovsky's Names, Mayakovsky Studies, pp. 300-302).
[3] Selected Poems of New Russia was translated by Li Yihao from the English translation of Russian Poetry, edited by Guo Moruo, and included twenty-five poems by Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Blok, and Beret, and renamed "Our March - Selected Poems of New Russia" when it was republished.
[4] Wan's translation is based on the Esperanto translation. The translator said in the "Afterword" of The Scream that in China, Mayakovsky's name is so familiar to us, and his poems are so unfamiliar to us. It's a very unpleasant thing."
[5] In addition to Guo Moruo, Chinese poets and writers who have visited the memorial hall include Ge Baoquan, Ai Qing, Li Ji, Fang Ji, Liu Baiyu, and Gobizhou.
[6] According to a copy of the manuscript on page 670 of the Encyclopedia of China and Foreign Literature Volume (1) (Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, 1982). When the poem was included in the "Diary of The Hongboqu Soviet Union" in volume 9 of the "Moro Anthology" (People's Literature Publishing House, 1959 edition), the text and branches were changed.
[7] "Good! There are five translations of Yu Zhen and Fei Bai, and "Lenin" has ten translations of Zhao Ruihong, Yu Zhen, Li Xin, fei bai and so on.
[8] Hayashi argues that Mayakovsky's poems, which were influential among left-wing writers and progressive youth in the 1930s and 1940s, appeared as imitations; among them, the most accomplished were in the fields, where his short and powerful lines of poetry apparently drew inspiration for rhythm and rhythm from Mayakovsky" (Hayashi: True and False Mayakovsky, http://www.sohu.com/a/130751289_488308).
[9] It was later collected as "The First Spring Thunder - The First Episode of "Masthead Poems" and "We Planted the Red Flag All Over the Red Flag - The Second Episode of "Masthead Poems" (co-authored by Li Ji and Wen Jie, Dunhuang Literature and Art Publishing House, 1958 edition).
[10] Ma Sanli often associates himself with Mayakovsky in cross-talk. In "The Beginning of Ten O'Clock", there is "Ma Sanli, the Chinese Mayakovsky!" See me again in a few years, it won't be like this"! "I write, I write novels on the upper than Bajin, lower than Liuqing, more than Tolstoy, not to let Balzac, foreign countries have Mayakovsky, China has Ma Sanli" and so on.
[11] Refers to Mayakovsky's 1928 play Bed bugs. Chen Peiyuan, a character in "Imagining the Ming Tombs Reservoir", has this line: "Mayakovsky's script 'Bed bugs' says that bed bugs become rare animals fifty years later. Nowadays, in China, in addition to bed bugs, sparrows, rats, and flies have become rare animals. (In Script, No. 8, 1958.) ）
[12] Louis Aragon: From Petrarch to Mayakovsky, translated by Lei Guang, TheSis Of French Writers, Life, Reading, New Knowledge Triptych, 1984, p. 363.
[13] See How was Mayakovsky idolized? "Cold Moon Burial Poetry Soul", Academy Press, 1999 edition, pp. 275-285.
[14] In the 1927 section of Myself, Mayakovsky wrote: "I continue to be a troubadour. I had collected about twenty thousand comments, and now I really wanted to write a "General Reply" (reply to those small notes). I know what the reader crowd is thinking. (Mayakovsky: Myself, translated by Zhuang Shouci, Selected Works of Mayakovsky, vol. 1, People's Literature Publishing House, 1957, p. 26.) ）
[15] [22] [45] [53] Misty Terrivole: A Short Biography of Mayakovsky, translated by Luo Dagang, Shanghai Literary and Art United Publishing House, 1953, pp. 87, 30, 117, 5. Hazelsha Trevole, now translated as Elsa Trevole.
[16] Mayakovsky: The New Capital, translated by Li Youhua, Selected Works of Mayakovsky, vol. 5, People's Literature Publishing House, 1961, pp. 148-149.
[17] On 6 May 1921, Lenin wrote in a note to Lunatcharsky: "Wouldn't it be shameful to approve the publication of Mayakovsky's One Hundred and Fifty Million copies?" Absurd, stupid, extremely stupid and pretentious. In my opinion, only one out of ten such things can be produced, and there can be no more than fifteen hundred copies for libraries and freaks. (Lenin on Mayakovsky, Yue Fenglin, ed., Collected Comments on Mayakovsky, Peking University Press, 1987, pp. 25-27.) ）
[18] Misty Terrivolei, A Brief Biography of Mayakovsky, pp. 91-94. The "literary official" here is not accurately referred to, but it should be related to the "Rapp" leader. In addition, bukharin, who gave a special report on poetry at the first Congress of Writers of the USSR in 1934, strongly recommended Pasternak as a "great master of poetry", which caused the dissatisfaction of poets such as Berdenej.
[19] In the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary Chinese quotations of Stalin's instructions came mainly from the works of Soviet scholars and writers, such as Timofiev's History of Soviet Literature. In the History of Soviet Literature, this passage reads: "On December 17, 1935, Stalin wrote in Pravda: 'Mayakovsky was, and remains, the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. It is a mistake not to care about the things that commemorate him, not to care about his works. (Timofiev: A History of Soviet Literature, translated by Mizufu, Writers Publishing House, 1956, p. 270.) Later, parts of the Soviet archives were declassified, and it was learned that Stalin had given instructions in letters written to him by Lily Brick. The full text, according to the quote from Lan Yingnian, is: "Comrade Yezhov, I beg you to take Brick's letter seriously. Mayakovsky was and is still the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era. It was a crime to be indifferent to his remembrance and his works. I see Brick's appeal as justified. Please contact her and summon her to Moscow. Let Tal and Mehlis be involved in this matter, and you will do your best to make up for our losses. If you need my help I am willing to do my best. This is addressed to Jo. Stalin. Nikolai Yezhov was a member of the Soviet People's Ministry of Internal Affairs and presided over the Great Purge of the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1937, but he was also shot in 1940. Tal is director of the Central Publishing Bureau, and Mehlis is editor-in-chief of Pravda. Lan Yingnian believes that Lily Brick's letters and Stalin's instructions have obvious political motives (Lan Yingnian: Mayakovsky and the "Fierce Genius" Lilia, "Cold Moon Burial Poetry", p. 115).
[20] The complete 12-volume collection was published by the Moscow State Literary Publishing House in 1940 and in 1955 the 13-volume complete collection was published.
[21] See Fadeyev's Mayakovsky, Writers and Reality (Collected Reviews of Mayakovsky, pp. 77–98). In Writers and Reality in 1939, Fadeyev reviewed his past mistakes in mayakovsky's work, arguing that his Lenin, "Good," and "Clouds in Pants" were "all great" as those poems that corresponded to current events.
[23] Pasternak: Man and Things, translated by Ulan Khan and Ming Ming, Life, Reading, Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 1991, p. 164.
[24] See Lenin on Mayakovsky, Collected Reviews of Mayakovsky, pp. 17–36.
[25] Mayakovsky: To Sergei Yesenin, translated by Li Hai, Selected Works of Mayakovsky, vol. 2, People's Literature Publishing House, 1959, p. 123.
[26] Reprinted from A Brief Biography of Mayakovsky by Misty-a-Shah Terrivole, pp. 41-43.
[27] See The Editorial Board of The Red Guards Literature and Art of the Red Congress of the Capital Colleges and Universities, "Written on the Fiery Red War Flag: Selected Poems of the Red Guards", 1968 edition; Selected Poems of the Red Guards edited by Liu Fuchun and Iwasa Changhui, China Bookstore (Fukuoka, Japan), 2002; Wang Jiaping, "Crazy Muse: A Study of red guard poetry", (Taiwan) Wunan Book Publishing Company, 2002 edition.
[28] See Mayakovsky Studies.
[29] For the Soviet Reappraisal of Mayakovsky, see Zhang Jie, "I Hope to Be Understood by My Country..." –From the Commemoration of Mayakovsky's Centenary, In World Literature, No. 4, 1994.
[30] Zhang Jie: "I want to be understood by my country..." – from the commemoration of Mayakovsky's centenary.
[31] See Ding Xiongfei, "Huang Ziping Revisits '20th Century Chinese Literature'," Shanghai Review of Books, September 23, 2012.
[32] From the 1980s to the 21st century, translations of Mayakovsky's works were published in China as follows: in 1977, a single edition of the long poem "Lenin" was published; in the 1980s, the People's Literature Publishing House published a four-volume anthology; the Shanghai Translation Publishing House published a three-volume Selected Poems of Mayakovsky (Feibai Translation); in 1988, the People's Literature Publishing House published Lu Yong's Selected Selected Poems of Mayakovsky; and in 2000, the Beiyue Literature and Art Publishing House published "Selected Poems of Mayakovsky". In addition, many selected poems have been selected for his works, such as Wang Zhiliang's Selected Poems of the Four Germans and Russians (East China Normal University Press, 2013).
[33] In 1918, when she first met Mayakovsky and listened to his recitation, attracting him to his tall stature and his creativity and momentum, Tsvetaeva wrote "To Mayakovsky", which contained the following sentence: "Higher than the cross and the chimney / Baptized by the smoke of the flames / Taking the powerful steps of the archangel / Awesome, Vladimir at the turn of the century!" (Reprinted from Gu Yu, "Mayakovsky in Tsvetaeva's Mind", in Selected Poems, No. 4, 2016.) ）
[34] Liu Wenfei's speeches at the 100th and 118th anniversaries of Mayakovsky's birth in 1993 and 2011 used the titles "We Meet Mayakovsky" and "Meet Mayakovsky Again", respectively.
[35] Contemporary Literature Published an album discussing this long poem in Issue 4, 2016, publishing seven articles by poets and critics such as Wang Gan, Tan Wuchang, Zhang Jiatan, Duo Yu, Jing Wendong, Yang Siping, and Gu Yu. In addition, Geng Zhanchun's "Jidimaga: The Road back to Jilebut" (in Harvest, No. 4, 2016) and Ye Yanbin's "The Sky Opened by Prophecy and the Land where Dreams Are Realized" (published in Guangming Daily, March 28, 2016) also discussed this work.
[36] Geng Zhanchun: Gidimaga: The Road Back to Gillebut.
[37] Liu Wenfei, "A Modern Classic," People's Daily, September 23, 2011. Compare Old Testament Genesis Chapter 1 with Good! The narrative of chapter 19 shows the similarities between them. They are all praises from the Creator of the "New Age" after completion; the Old Testament "God looks good," and "Good! The "yes" and "good" in "is good" are repeated and run through the entire narrative.
[38] Edward M. J. Brown: "Mayakovsky and the Left-Wing Literary Front", translated by Yu Fenggao, Journal of Hainan Normal University, No. 4, 1990.
[39] "Conversation between Gideimaga and Yevtushenko," In Writer, No. 6, 2016.
[40] Annotated article "Myself" (Mayakovsky Anthology, vol. 1, p. 521).
[41] Encyclopedia of China, Foreign Literature Volume (1), p. 669. The article was written by Chen Shoucheng.
[42] [50] Liu Wenfei: A Modern Classic.
[43] Margaret Smolokinskaya, Mayakovsky and Lily Brick: A History of the Great Epistles of Love, "Introduction to Content", translated by Xu Yan, Heilongjiang Education Publishing House, 2016.
[44] However, Lan Yingnian did not think so. He saw Lily Brick as a "fierce genius" with a ghostly fetus; he believed that she was to some extent responsible for Mayakovsky's death (Lan Yingnian: Mayakovsky and the fierce genius Lilia, "Cold Moon Burial Poetry", pp. 114-124).
[46] In Mayakovsky and the Fierce Genius Lilia, Lan Yingnian said that the "theoretical basis for the three of them living together was Chernyshevsky's novel What to Do?" 》。 At that time, the Lev members were accustomed to doing so. The former Lev member and female painter Ravenskaya, who later broke with the Briks, wrote in the article "Meeting with Mayakovsky": "Jealousy - bourgeois prejudice". "It is better for a wife to be good to be with her husband", "A good wife finds a suitable sweetheart for her husband, and the husband recommends his partner to his wife". Normal family life is seen as the narrowness of small citizens. All this is done by Lilia herself, and Osip theoretically supports it" (Cold Moon Burial Poetry, p. 115). Mayakovsky also doesn't see any moral problems. He wrote in the long poem "Good! Chapter 13 reads: "Twelve/square feet of dwelling." /Four/Stayed in one room -/Lilia, /Orsia, /me/and dog/Shenik. (Mayakovsky: "Good!) Li Xin, The Collected Works of Mayakovsky, vol. 3, People's Literature Publishing House, 1959, p. 548. ）
[47] Lunacharsky: The Innovator Mayakovsky, translated by Jiang Lu, Thesis Studies, People's Literature Publishing House, 1978, pp. 389-411. The "Mayakovsky the Innovator" quoted in the text is based on this. There is this annotation in the Treatise: "This is a shorthand transcript of the author's speech at the Mayakovsky Memorial Meeting of the Communist Academy on April 14, 1931, and was first published in the 5th and 6th issues of the journal "Literature and Art" in the same year. ”
[48] To illustrate this point, Lunacharski cites Mayakovsky's 1918 poem "A Good Attitude Toward Horses": he walks over and "sees / Large tears / Falls from the horse's face / Disappears in the hair ... / An animal / Common melancholy / Flows from my heart / Melts into murmurs ..." (the quotation here is reproduced from Mayakovsky the Innovator).
[49] Reprinted from Gu Yu's Mayakovsky in Tsvetaeva's Mind. Tsvetaeva's quote comes from the article "Art in the Light of Conscience".
[51] Kenji Hayashi: True and False Mayakovsky.
[52] See Isaiah Berlin, Verdi's Simplicity, translated by Von Klee, Against Currents: A Collection of Essays on the History of Ideas, Translation Lin Press, 2011, pp. 340–351.