The writing. Mayakovsky's artistic innovation

Mayakovsky's work combines the best traditions of Russian classical literature and the innovation of the poetry of the socialist era.

Opponents of Mayakovsky tried to portray him as a nihilist, accused him of neglect of cultural heritage. Mayakovsky sharply objected to these fabrications. In response to the accusation of “destroying the classics,” he said in 1930: “I have never done this stupid thing ...”

Mayakovsky's attitude towards the greatest Russian poets of the 19th century testifies to how highly he valued the great masters of the classics.

When our country celebrated the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of Pushkin's birth, Mayakovsky wrote a famous poem - "Jubilee" (1924) and in it expressed his deep love for the great poet. “I love you, but alive, not a mummy!” Mayakovsky passionately exclaims, protesting against the “textbook gloss” that pseudo-scientific pedants directed at the poet.

Mayakovsky highly appreciated Lermontov. He defended the poet from vulgar critics, ridiculing their attempts to declare him "an individualist, because in his poetry there are "whole choirs of celestial bodies and not a word about electrification." In the poem "Tamara and the Demon" Mayakovsky used the images of Lermontov's poetry.

Inheriting the best traditions of the classics, Mayakovsky at the same time acted as an innovative poet. For the new content, he found new means of artistic expression. Artistic innovation was born of a new era in the development of mankind - the era of the proletarian revolution. In the struggle of the peoples of Russia for the victory of socialism, the personality of the poet was formed. The revolutionary era determined the content and nature of his lyrics, the originality of his poetic style, which so organically fused the realistic accuracy and concreteness of the image with the scale of the poetic vision of the world.

Bringing poetry closer to politics, Mayakovsky placed art at the service of the revolution. A master of political posters and newspaper verse, he unusually widely and originally used the means and techniques of artistic convention in his work. His metaphor not only submits to a specific ideological design, but also incorporates the most important social associations of the era. Thus, for example, images of the revolution-flood are born, as well as the expanded image of the "army of verses". The hyperbolism characteristic of Mayakovsky's style becomes a political reflection of the intensity of social clashes characteristic of the revolutionary era and the gigantic scope of the country's socialist transformations. With an unprecedented breadth, Mayakovsky introduces into the poetic language a lively modern speech, the socio-political phraseology of the era. His poetry is based on colloquial speech. “Most of the tone of things is built on colloquial intonation,” wrote Mayakovsky. It was no coincidence that he gave many of his poems names: “conversation”, “story”, “message”, etc. Most often in the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky one can hear the oratorical intonations of the poet-tribune, "agitator, leader."

Mayakovsky constantly fought against the false idea that there is a special "poetic language" that alone can be used to write poetry. He sharply criticized poets who wrote in conventional poetic jargon.

With the same energy he fought against literary clichés, beaten, dead, meaningless expressions. Mayakovsky widely used all the riches of the Russian language. When it was necessary, the poet did not neglect the old words: archaisms and Slavicisms. Mayakovsky often used neologisms - words created by himself. Their peculiarity is that they were created on the basis of commonly used Russian words and were always clear in their meaning: “Hammered, sickle Soviet passport”, “I love the bulk of our plans”, etc. Both these and other neologisms of Mayakovsky have the goal of most expressively revealing the content of the poem, its meaning.

Rhyme is very important in Mayakovsky's works. But the poet was not satisfied with the old way of rhyming. He often rhymes words, taking into account not only their endings, but also the preceding sounds, not only the literal coincidences of syllables, but also the consonances of words. Mayakovsky's rhymes are exceptionally varied and expressive.

It must be said that during the post-October years, Soviet poetry has put forward many names that have taken a place on a par with the greatest poets of the past. And we can safely say that in the entire history of Russian literature there has never been such a period when such an abundance and variety of poetic talents appeared in a relatively short historical period. Plekhanov and Selvinsky, Pasternak and Yesenin, Lugovskoy and Zabolotsky, Bagritsky and Prokofiev, Tvardovsky and Leonid Martynov, Svetlov and Aseev, Marshak and Antokolsky - this is a far from exhaustive list of the names of Mayakovsky's contemporaries that we can be proud of. And this is undoubtedly a huge wealth! Each of these writers is a bright original poetic value, each of them deservedly can be called a great poet.

And among these poets, we single out Mayakovsky, calling him not only "big", but also great. This man won a special place even among the best of our best poets.

V. Mayakovsky entered the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century as an innovative poet. He introduced a lot of new things both in the content and in the form of the verse.

If we consider content, then Mayakovsky mastered new topics of revolution, civil war, socialist construction, and in this aspect. Which was characteristic only for him. This was expressed in the combination of a lyrical and satirical view of reality.

Mayakovsky's innovation manifested itself especially brightly in form. The poet created new words, boldly introduced them into his poems. Neologisms enhanced the expressiveness of poetry: “a two-meter tall snake”, “huge plans”, “red-skinned passport”, etc., therefore they are called expressive-evaluative author's neologisms.

Mayakovsky used methods of oratory and colloquial speech: "Listen! If the stars are lit, does it mean that someone needs it?”, “Read, envy - I am a citizen of the Soviet Union!”

Of particular importance in Mayakovsky's poetry are rhythm and intonation, which formed the basis of the system of his verse. The poet himself in the article "How to make poetry" explained the features of his system. Rhythm, intonation, and pauses are important for him in verse. Mayakovsky's verse is called - intonation-tonic. The poet put the most important word in a semantic sense at the end of the line and be sure to select a rhyme for it. This word, therefore, was highlighted twice - by intonation, logically and by consonance with another important word, i.e. semantic emphasis. To enable the reader to feel his own intonation, Mayakovsky graphically began to separate the lines with pauses. And so the famous "ladder" was formed.

Mayakovsky's innovation is connected not only with the system of verse. Of particular importance is the nature of the imagery of Mayakovsky's poetry.

I immediately smeared the map of everyday life,
splashing paint from a glass;
I am shown on a platter of jelly
oblique cheekbones of the ocean.
On the scales of a tin fish
I read the calls of new lips.
And you
nocturne play
we could
on the drainpipe flute?

An essential feature is a sharp social coloring. Most often, the social sharpness of the poetic image is manifested in a separate path - a metaphor, personification, comparison.

Take a look at Russia from above -
burst into rivers,
like a thousand rods roamed,
as if slashed with a whip.
But bluer than water in spring
bruises of serf Rus.

With the figurative social perception of the landscape, natural phenomena are endowed with signs of social relations. A very common technique in Mayakovsky's poetics is hyperbola. A sharp look at reality led Mayakovsky to hyperbolism. Through a number of works, the image of the proletariat-hulk, the plans of the hulk, etc. passes.

Metaphor Mayakovsky is always noticeable. The poet refers to the phenomena that surround a person in everyday life, widely introduces associations with household items: “The sea, brilliant. Than a door handle. Mayakovsky's poetry became the basis for the tradition of accented or intonation-tonic verse, which was continued by N. Aseev, S. Kirsanov, A. Voznesensky, Ya. Smelyakov.

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From the first steps of Mayakovsky in literature, it became clear: a new poet had come, unlike anyone else, with his own worldview and worldview, with his own view of things and phenomena.
He had his own, unborrowed voice. In these lines:
"So what do you think,
Vladimir Vladimirovich,
like the abyss?"
And I answer just as kindly:
"Lovely abyss.
The abyss is delight!”
K. Chukovsky caught “the same intonations that had just been heard at the corner of Basseiny and Liteiny. There are no anapaests or iambs here, but here the beating of living human blood is, perhaps, more precious than the most exquisite metric schemes.
Neither iambic, nor anapaest, nor other well-known poetic schemes fit the size of the poem “Listen!”, in which the rhyme is almost not felt, and the rhythm seems to be somehow relaxed. And it begins in a childish way directly, as if you were hailed in the street and not in verse, but in prose:
Listen!
After all, if the stars are lit -
Does that mean anyone needs it?
So - someone wants them to be?
So - someone calls these spittles
pearl? ..
And now a simple picture unfolds before us: two people are walking - he and she. He is quiet and timid. And also kind. She... She's shy. She is afraid because it is dark all around. And she walks, shivering with fear, afraid even to look around: what if something terrible is there ...
However, all this is not in the poem, this is already triggered by the reader's fantasy, and he completes the picture presented by the poet in his imagination. The poet himself is very economical. And after introductory, rhetorical questions, he turns to the actions of the hero:
And, tearing up
in blizzards of midday dust,
rushes to god
afraid of being late
crying
kisses his sinewy hand,
asks -
to have a star! -
swears -
will not endure this starless torment! ..
Well, how could one not heed such a desperate request, such a plea? And God came up with the stars, lit them and scattered them all over the sky, so that there, on a distant land, the girl would not be afraid of the dark...
And the young man does not seem to realize that he became the initiator of a phenomenon of a universal scale. It is much more important for him what the girl feels now: “After all, now you have nothing? Not scary? Yes?" he asks her timidly. It was for her that he lit the stars as simply as he would pick up a handkerchief she had dropped. How much unconscious kindness is in his heart, a reserve of humanity, if, due to such a simple reason, he is able to climb into heaven to God himself ?!
But the lyrical hero of Mayakovsky was both impudent and impudent. With childish naivety he could ask the crowd: “Could you play the nocturne on the flute of the drainpipes?” And it was said as if the hero himself had long been able to extract sounds from such pipes, and if they don’t believe him, then right now, in front of the astonished public, he will take, like a flute, a long drainpipe and play it ... After some time the same hero was already playing the flute of his own spine, as if from a case, taking it out of his back.
He could climb onto the stage and sincerely confess to the same pious public:
And if today I, a rude Hun,
do not want to grimace in front of you -
and so
I want and joyfully
spit, spit in your face...
He could report about himself with the expectation of an effect:
I'm going - beautiful,
twenty-two-year-old...
One day, having dined in a vegetarian canteen, Mayakovsky, referring to a huge portrait of JI.H. Tolstoy, read shortly before written poems:
In the ears are fragments of a warm ball.
And from the north the snow is gray
Fog with a bloodthirsty cannibal face
Chewed bad people.
The clock hung like a swear word.
The sixth loomed over the fifth.
And some rubbish looked from the sky
majestically, like Leo Tolstoy.
"Rubbish", apparently, was called the moon. But the mere fact that the name of the great writer was placed next to such a word was insulting to those present, just as the poetic “spitting” handed out from the stage was insulting ...
Why did the young poet need to behave so provocatively, rudely and impudently? What determined his behavior and poetry?
In 1912, having embarked on a literary path, Mayakovsky found himself in a circle of young subversives who denied the old art, the old culture, and in general everything old. They called themselves futurists. David Burliuk, the leader of this trend, proclaimed his ideas in the following way: “We are revolutionaries of art. Everywhere we must carry the protest and the cry "Saryn on the kitch!" From now on, shocking the bourgeoisie should be our pleasure ... More mockery of the petty-bourgeois bastards! We must paint our faces, and put peasant spoons into our buttonholes instead of roses. In this form, we will go for a walk along Kuznetsky and begin to read poetry in the crowd ... "
In this keynote speech one can discover the origins of Mayakovsky's poetic aesthetics and behavioral aesthetics. The main thing is not to depend on stereotypes, on traditions. To create new art without regard to authorities and established laws, and if they interfere - to throw all this "trash" off the ship of modernity. So they cleared their "steamboat" from Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky right up to Blok and Andrei Bely.
Such a reckless denial of the culture of the past did not bode well, but it did not go without a positive result. Free handling of the word, rhythm, rhyme, image gave an unexpected result: Mayakovsky greatly updated and enriched Russian poetry, gave it a strong impetus for further development.
What was Mayakovsky's innovation?
Since the time of Simeon of Polotsk (XVII century), Russian poetry has known two systems of versification: syllabic and syllabic-tonic. Mayakovsky introduced his own system into it - the tonic one, which differs from the previous ones in greater freedom and looseness.
The new system of versification has become widespread not only in the literature of the peoples of our country, but also abroad.
In Russian poetry of the 19th century, exact rhyme dominated, which was expressed in the literal coincidence of all sounds at the end of the corresponding lines. For example:
Raised under the drum
Our dashing king was a captain.
Mayakovsky liberated Russian rhyme, introduced into practice and gave all the rights of citizenship to inaccurate rhyme, built on the approximate consonance of the end of lines, as a result of which rhymes such as crumpled - windows, strange - wounds, a cat - a little, etc. became possible. the dictionary of rhymes gushed a huge stream of words, which had not been used as a rhyme before.
Mayakovsky carried out the most original experiments in the field of rhyming. In the article "How to make poetry" he wrote that you can rhyme not only the ends of lines, but also their beginnings in the same way as you can rhyme the end of one line with the beginning of the next, or at the same time the ends of the first and second lines with the last words of the third and fourth .. The author not only claimed that the types of rhyme can be diversified to infinity, but also presented in his work many unusual and unexpected ways of rhyming.
Mayakovsky updated not only the rhyme, but the entire poetic vocabulary. He democratized the language of poetry by introducing into it words that had not previously been used in it. Often, Mayakovsky himself was engaged in word creation. Realizing that many people are repelled in Mayakovsky's poetry by the clumsy neologisms that the poet introduced in many of his poems and poems (December, birthday, lyubenochek, tongue-tied, bread, hurry, etc.), K. Chukovsky defended the very principle of creation by the poet new words, citing as an example neoplasms of children “subtly feeling the elements of their native language”: the goat is horned, the tree is lit, the paper has snapped off, hammer this nail ...
Proving that Mayakovsky was right in dealing with the word and its forms, Chukovsky cites as an example the neologisms of the classics of Russian literature, created according to the same principle: Gogol - “grow up”, “soulful”, Dostoevsky - “limonize”, “nafonzonit” (from the surname Von Zon ); Chekhov - "dragon", "cockroach".
A.V. Lunacharsky considered it indisputable that none of those who wrote poetry and prose, with the exception of Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov, made such creative achievements in the renewal and enrichment of the Russian language as Mayakovsky did.
Literary critic F. N. Tsitskel argues that "not a single poet had that decisive and direct influence on world progressive poetry as Mayakovsky", and considers him the central figure of the poetry of the 20th century.
“A new powerful talent swooped in like a hurricane from the east and swept away the old rhythms and images, as no other poet has ever dared,” I. Becher recalled. According to Pablo Neruda, Mayakovsky "admired his time with so many discoveries that poetry, with his appearance and departure, was transformed, as if it had survived a real storm."
Thus, Mayakovsky's neoplasms became part of the blood of world poetry and still successfully circulates in its veins. Such an honor is not given to everyone, even among the great poets.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it became clear that the classical syllabic-tonic system of versification had exhausted itself. Poets began to experiment with rhymes, rhythm, sound writing. In particular, the direction of futurism stood out (which immediately gave many branches). Futurism set as its goal formal innovation, the search for new ways of developing Russian verse. Mayakovsky in his youth belonged to this direction and, although he later moved away from it, artistic innovation has always been one of the components of his work.

Vladimir Mayakovsky began with the destruction of the syllabo-tonic and created his own - the tonic system of versification. In this system, only the number of stressed syllables is taken into account, the number of unstressed syllables is arbitrary.

Listen!
After all, if the stars are lit -
Does that mean anyone needs it?
So - someone wants them to be?
So - someone calls these spittles
pearl?

The unusual size leads to experiments in the field of graphic recording of text. Everyone knows the famous "ladder" Mayakovsky. Recording is always associated with rhythm ("Rhythm is the main force, the main energy of the verse"). If the author is not satisfied with the usual size (“And try to go into iambic and stuff some word, for example“ mammal ”), then the usual recording system does not attract him either. Mayakovsky graphically highlights the individual, most important words, emphasizes semantic blogs. Special graphics, an abundance of emotional punctuation marks, often standing in unusual places - all this creates emotional tension, a special poetic intonation. Vladimir Vladimirovich paid a huge role to rhyming. The concept of rhyme for the poet was different from all the usual ideas. He called "nonsense" rhyme as the consonance of a stressed vowel and subsequent consonants at the ends of two lines. Mayakovsky rhymes the beginning and end of the line, allows internal rhyme:

Street - the faces of the Great Danes are sharper

Often uses assonant rhymes: “longing is a story”, “swirl is alive”, puns:

Dear me as a gift cloak
and socks donated.
Rushing Yudenich from St. Petersburg,
like pissed off.

The figurative system of Mayakovsky's poetry is original, as, indeed, any figurative system of any great poet, but the most sharp and shocking early lyrics:

In the holes of skyscrapers where the ore burned
and iron trains piled laz -
shouted the airplane and fell there,
where the eye of the wounded sun leaked out.

Mayakovsky allows not only figurative innovation (this is almost necessary for a poet), but also stylistic. He uses neologisms ("slivpot"), new forms of familiar words: "Having raised the baked potatoes of the face", gives new shades of meaning with the help of suffixes:

I thought you were an almighty god
and you are a half-educated, tiny god.

So, we see that Mayakovsky in his work uses many techniques of artistic innovation, that he created new principles of poetry that had a huge impact on the work of other Soviet poets.

V. Mayakovsky entered the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century as an innovative poet. He introduced a lot of new things both in the content and in the form of the verse.

If we consider content, then Mayakovsky mastered new topics of revolution, civil war, socialist construction, and in this aspect. Which was characteristic only for him. This was expressed in the combination of a lyrical and satirical view of reality.

Mayakovsky's innovation manifested itself especially brightly in form. The poet created new words, boldly introduced them into his poems. Neologisms enhanced the expressiveness of poetry: “a two-meter tall snake”, “huge plans”, “red-skinned passport”, etc., therefore they are called expressive-evaluative author's neologisms.

Mayakovsky used methods of oratory and colloquial speech: "Listen! If the stars are lit, does it mean that someone needs it?”, “Read, envy - I am a citizen of the Soviet Union!”

Of particular importance in Mayakovsky's poetry are rhythm and intonation, which formed the basis of the system of his verse. The poet himself in the article "How to make poetry" explained the features of his system. Rhythm, intonation, and pauses are important for him in verse. Mayakovsky's verse is called - intonation-tonic. The poet put the most important word in a semantic sense at the end of the line and be sure to select a rhyme for it. This word, therefore, was highlighted twice - by intonation, logically and by consonance with another important word, i.e. semantic emphasis. To enable the reader to feel his own intonation, Mayakovsky graphically began to separate the lines with pauses. And so the famous "ladder" was formed.

Mayakovsky's innovation is connected not only with the system of verse. Of particular importance is the nature of the imagery of Mayakovsky's poetry.

I immediately smeared the map of everyday life,
splashing paint from a glass;
I am shown on a platter of jelly
oblique cheekbones of the ocean.

On the scales of a tin fish
I read the calls of new lips.
And you
nocturne play
we could
on the drainpipe flute?

An essential feature is a sharp social coloring. Most often, the social sharpness of the poetic image is manifested in a separate path - a metaphor, personification, comparison.

Take a look at Russia from above -
burst into rivers,
like a thousand rods roamed,
as if slashed with a whip.
But bluer than water in spring
bruises of serf Rus.

With the figurative social perception of the landscape, natural phenomena are endowed with signs of social relations. A very common technique in Mayakovsky's poetics is hyperbola. A sharp look at reality led Mayakovsky to hyperbolism. Through a number of works, the image of the proletariat-hulk, the plans of the hulk, etc. passes.

Metaphor Mayakovsky is always noticeable. The poet refers to the phenomena that surround a person in everyday life, widely introduces associations with household items: “The sea, brilliant. Than a door handle. Mayakovsky's poetry became the basis for the tradition of accented or intonation-tonic verse, which was continued by N. Aseev, S. Kirsanov, A. Voznesensky, Ya. Smelyakov.