Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
Larger Than Life
By Helen Muchnic
Mayakovsky
translated and edited by Herbert Marshall
Hill & Wang, 432 pp., $10.00
Mayakovsky entered Russian literature in 1912. He left it eighteen years later, on the 14th day of April 1930 when at 10:15 in the morning he shot himself through the heart. Had he lived another three months, he would have been, on the 7th of July, thirty-seven years old. His death was shocking; it roused all kinds of rumors. And yet it might have been, though it was not, foreseen. Only in retrospect did it seem consistent with his tragic, willful life. For though the theme of suicide kept recurring in his poems, it was too grotesquely treated to be taken seriously. And had he not, on other occasions, played Russian roulette and been spared by Fate? He had always conducted himself with mystifying mock-seriousness and jocular solemnity. Exaggeration was his characteristic style. The images of torment and cries of pain that filled his poems were simply mannerisms, it seemed, and technical devices, like the preposterous gestures and outlandish costumes he affected, and the huge voice he cultivated to impress his audiences. His laughter was immense, his satire broad, and his show of tragedy, a mask he wore in the vaudeville act he made of his life. The end revealed the opposite to be the truth: The tragic mask was not a mask, but the face itself; and comedy, not tragedy, was what Mayakovsky had always played with in a desperate attempt, no doubt, to make light of suffering, to burlesque the demands of an insatiable ego by means of ludicrous hyperbole.
Review, 1900 words
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