Russian literature. A short introduction

represent a sad falling-off from his early achievements: the writer stands accused of ‘stepping on the throat of his own song’ (a phrase that he himself uses in his great unfinished testament, ‘At the Top of My Voice’). But rather than a historical aberration, a by-way of literary history, the later Mayakovsky was a typical case of a Russian writer in whose work didacticism and art were inseparable. His gripping poem ‘Two Not Wholly Usual Occurrences’ (1922), for example, juxtaposes scenes of starvation in a Moscow street to a vignette of a ‘feast in time of plague’ going on at a restaurant, where writers and other intellectuals indulge themselves on the nearest things to delicacies that the crisis-ridden city can provide. Summed up in these bald terms, the piece sounds as crude and obvious as a ‘before and after’ poster for shampoo, or as an item of anti-capitalist agitprop (the scrawny waif, the bulbous banker) from a 1920s demonstration. But the summary elides the eerie intensity of Mayakovsky’s description of the silent Moscow streets, and the shock effect of his opening image, a miscegenated monster, a man-horse:

Suddenly

I see

between me and the window

a stick-man move.

Staggering and sliding.

The stick-man has a horse’s head.

Onward he – it, slides.

Into its own nostrils it has stuck

its own fingers:

three fingers, maybe two.

Flies squat round the open eyes.

From the side of its neck

hangs a vein,

scattering drops on the streets

that freeze blackly where they ooze.

I look and look at the crawling shade:

shuddering from an unbearable certainty: