Lyrical hero of the early (Mayakovsky V.V.)

11. Genre-style originality of V. Mayakovsky's lyrics. Lyrical hero

The poet expresses all experiences and moods through his “I”, i.e. through the image of a lyrical hero. If we try to define in the most general terms the nature of the lyrical hero of the early Mayakovsky, then this hero can be called a romantic rebel, a rebel convinced of his right to speak on behalf of the "street thousand", the overthrower of the foundations of the universe. At the same time, this individualist hero feels his tragic loneliness among people. In the poetic cycle “I” (1913), the lyrical hero, making an application for a superpersonality, to which everything human is alien (“the moon is coming - / my wife”, “I love to watch how children die”), at the same time he experiences mental pain (“ This is my soul / in shreds of a torn cloud / in a scorched sky / on the rusty cross of the bell tower! Mayakovsky's poetry in the first half of the 1910s expressed the poet's desire to be understood, to receive sympathy from the world himself ("Violin and a little nervously", 1914). His protest against modern social and moral norms (“Nate!”, 1913) is not valuable in itself, it is a consequence of the internal drama of the “wounded, driven” hero (“From fatigue.” 1913). It can be said that the lyrical hero of Mayakovsky both shocks and suffers at the same time. The conflict of the hero and modernity, the denial of universally recognized truths, the cult of strength and youth and, in parallel, defenselessness in love, the perception of the world through love - these motives were expressed in the most significant work of early Mayakovsky - the 1914-1915 poem "A Cloud in Pants". The ambivalence of Mayakovsky's hero, lyricist and rebel, was also reflected in the 1915 poem "Flute-Spine". The disharmony between the poet and the world corresponds to the image of love torment, which exacerbates his spiritual uncertainty, internal discord with himself, his split:

“I will finish with the crown? / Saint Helena? / Storm of life saddling the ramparts, / I am an equal candidate / both for the king of the universe / and for shackles. The blasphemous motifs of "Clouds in Pants" are replaced in the poem "Flute-Spine" by the motifs of love as God's providence, prayer addressed to God. The ambiguity of Mayakovsky's "I" was precisely expressed in the fact that the poet, being in conflict with reality, with the material world and the world of the well-fed and prosperous, at the same time was adequate to the universe, absorbed both the cosmos, and urban life, and suffering of people.

The concept of a free new man is also expressed by Mayakovsky in the 1916-1917 poem "Man". The poet appears here as a new Noah, the herald of the sun, the chosen one with his Bethlehem, his Christmas, passions, ascension and a new coming to earth. As in "War and Peace", he brings the idea of ​​love to the world ("I kiss the thousand-leaved Gospel of the days of my love"). The neo-Christian metaphysics of Mayakovsky, an atheist, a materialist by conviction, is revealed in a tragic-lyrical, intimate plot: the heart of the new Noah languishes in anguish, his soul aches with jealousy, he "shot himself at the door of his beloved." The futuristic moods of Mayakovsky of this period, his ideas about the coming perfect world are inseparable from his lyrical state.

The February and October revolutions were for Mayakovsky the beginning of the real embodiment of his ideas about a new, free person and a happy world order. The commune promised by the Bolsheviks became the very ideal that replaced neo-Christian models in the poet's futuristic utopias. The communist idea not only responded to the futuristic dreams of a coming earthly paradise, but also gave them certainty, a concrete meaning and an applied character. From now on, the romantic individualism inherent in the lyrical hero of Mayakovsky gave way to catholicity, unity with millions, "I" was replaced by "we", the conflict between the individual and society was removed by history itself.

In the work of Mayakovsky after 1917, the revolutionary cataclysms of Russia are commensurate in scale with the planetary “spill of the second flood” (“Our March”, 1918). Of course, in the soul of the poet-tribune, who glorified the revolution, there was a place for living, natural feelings - the revolution ultimately meant for Mayakovsky a struggle for the triumph of humanity. This is evidenced by the poem Good relationship to horses ”(1918), imbued with genuine compassion, responsiveness to someone else’s pain. And yet the poet’s moral reorientation, due to the grandeur of the revolutionary tasks, is obvious: his lyrical hero, who until recently illuminated the world with the ideas of love and forgiveness, now prefers “comrade Mauser” and calls for strengthening - “the world / the proletariat has fingers!” ("Left March". 1918.).

The proletarian himself, in accordance with the official interpretation of him as the hegemon of the revolution, acquires in the post-October worldview of Mayakovsky the features of a prophet and a superman. The proletarian is the winner of the planet, the peddler of the new faith ("We are going", 1919).

Mayakovsky's former romantic outlook gave way to didacticism, characteristic of both classicism and socialist realism. The motives of the lyrical hero's compassion for the weak and offended are supplanted by the image of the poet-herald, whose mission is to be above the crowd, whose poems express the absolute of their own position, adequate to the interests of power.

(304 words) Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930) is an extraordinary person who managed the "steamboat of modernity." He was a man with a thousand personalities, one of which fell in love with futurism. Vulnerable impudent, charming lover and rebel, eager to find his place in life. Such a person charged everyone and everything with his energy.

The lyrical hero is the child of the poet, who speaks of his father from century to century. It carries all the features and moods of its creator. The poetic embodiment of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky is as unique as the poet himself.

The enamored Mayakovsky tortures himself and his lyrical hero with a great feeling. In the poem "Lily! (Smoke tobacco air has eaten out ...) ”the author’s ego is in the throes of love. It enters into an argument with feelings, as if challenging them to a duel. His "heart is in iron", the hero himself is "wild". He compares his emotions with an indomitable storm, in which the hero "scorched a blossoming soul with love." Loving heart no fetters humble, Mayakovsky says in unison with his incarnation on paper. He says the same thing in his “Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva”, where he predicts capitulation for a woman, as well as for her beautiful city. The author believed in the victory of his communist idea, just as he believed in his strength, his devotion, his passion.

The rebel poet raises his lyrical hero to revolt. "I protest!" they say in a poem of the same name. “I hate the human device,” broadcasts the creation of a great author. But what caused the outrage? The uniformity of life, its standardity: "Change the design of the human race!". The hero gives rise to rebellion only in his thoughts, because only he sees all the horrors of reality. He attacks them with loud criticism in the works "Nate!" and "The Satisfied".

It is worth noting that Vladimir Mayakovsky was alien to the definition of poetry as a magical elixir that brings aesthetic satisfaction. Each of his verses is charged with violent energy and a great idea, so his lyrical hero had to be a bomb. He must blow up consciousness, overturn stereotypes, shout among the weak-willed crowd:

Listen! After all, if the stars are lit -
Does that mean anyone needs it?

The lyrical hero of Mayakovsky is the one who lights these stars.

L.I. Timofeev

Mayakovsky began his literary activity in 1912 (except for the early poems of 1909-1910, which have not come down to us). It was the eve of the revolution. Only five years separated it from the great October days of 1917. Behind Mayakovsky were years of direct participation in the revolutionary movement, underground work, three arrests, a loner in Butyrka prison. He had already read Marx, Lenin, illegal revolutionary literature.

Living connection with the revolutionary movement, acquaintance with the foundations of socialist theory, with the work of Gorky, who, according to the recollections of his relatives, was his favorite writer and in whose works the new, socialist art manifested itself - all this, it would seem, should have determined clarity and, so to speak, straightness creative development young Mayakovsky as a democratic poet, who was formed in direct connection with the revolutionary movement. Ultimately, it was. Mayakovsky unconditionally accepted the October Revolution, immediately joining the ranks of its fighters. But still, 1912-1917 - the years of Mayakovsky's poetic formation - is a complex and controversial period of his creative development. On the one hand, the main pathos of such works as “A Cloud in Pants”, “Flute-Spine”, “Man”, “War and Peace” indicates that it was during these years that Mayakovsky developed as a poet of the revolution, as a poet- an innovator who found exactly that poetic form, which could convey "the days of unprecedented heresy." On the other hand, it was during these years that Mayakovsky's rapprochement with the school of futurists - D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh and others - falls.

In the literature of the early 20th century, the question of man, of his tragic fate in the bourgeois world, was raised with extraordinary acuteness. And every literary trend, every great writer gave his own answer to this question.

The socialist realism of M. Gorky allowed him to see the features of a new man, a man of the future, and to oppose him to the man of capitalism. The pathos of Gorky's humanism is that he not only exposed the capitalist system, which turned a person, to use Marx's expression, into "not human person”, but also painted that “human man” who was created by the struggle for socialism.

Russian futurism, speaking out with a defiant protest against bourgeois culture (and this, obviously, attracted Mayakovsky's interest to it), conceived its struggle for man only negatively, only as freeing him from the fetters of bourgeois culture, without giving him anything in return. Khlebnikov's "Russoism", which is one of the main motives in his work, is extremely characteristic. Khlebnikov seeks to bring man back to the primitive. The hero of his "Forest Maiden", "Ladomira" and many other works is a man who has not yet departed from nature:

To the life of the first savages The dream of descendants will fly by.

(V. Khlebnikov)

Futurism tried to replace the “human man” of the bourgeois world with the “dehumanized man”, reduced to the simplest, primary impulses; hence the physiology that is characteristic of Burliuk (“Everyone is young, young, young, there is a hell of a hunger in the stomach, we will eat stones, grass”), Kruchenykh (“I am lying and warming myself near a pig”), Khlebnikov (the struggle of people for a female in Lesnaya virgin").

Futurism's search for new forms of verbal expression corresponded to its content. “Dehumanized man” no longer needed the complex system of concepts necessary for advanced thinking. The infamous "beyond-wit" (which for some reason some of our contemporary theorists seek to resurrect) was nothing more than the creation of a language that corresponded to the state of a person who does not yet feel the need to think. This is a language of interjections and onomatopoeia, close to the language of children, returning a person to the primary stages. language development.

Futurism was, therefore, powerless and helpless in its positive program, and its influence, naturally, complicated the initial period of the development of Mayakovsky's work.

The work of the early Mayakovsky represents a collective period of creative searches, artistic self-determination. It would therefore be wrong to give Mayakovsky's first verses a self-contained meaning. They can be considered only in unity with his creative path, and only in the light of it can they be correctly understood.

The lyrical hero of his first years creative activity given in the process of its formation. The image of the lyrical hero of the early Mayakovsky was formed gradually; step by step, that system of the poet's relationship to life took shape, which determined the significance of the character of the lyrical hero of his poetry as a typical character.

The concept of the lyrical hero has basically established itself in our critical practice. The fruitfulness of this concept is primarily due to the fact that it allows, on the one hand, to consider the poet's lyrical work as a whole, to comprehend all his individual works as a disclosure of a single point of view on the world, as a system of experiences connected by the unity of aesthetic assessments and life experience, as a manifestation of single human character. On the other hand, the concept of a lyrical hero makes it possible to show with particular clarity that. the poet managed to aesthetically rethink his personal life experience, connect it with the public, raise his personal worldview to the level of a generalized expression of certain ideological and artistic norms of his time.

To show the typical in character means to place it in such relationships with various aspects of the life process, through which the main, essential, defining aspects of the human character will appear, those aesthetic ideals to which the artist aspires will find their affirmation.

The poet's innovation is manifested in the novelty of the relations that he establishes between man and the world, in a new understanding of these relations, if they have already been included in the poetic circle of vision, and, finally, in the discovery of new means of expression, outside of which the relations he found will not receive vital persuasiveness, will not turn into an artistic fact. The more peculiar these relations between man and reality, the richer and more versatile they are, the more precisely they are expressed, the more more the image of the lyrical hero created by the poet turns out to be significant.

A lyric poem is a disclosure of any of these relationships. First of all, this is the experience of the lyrical hero, caused by one or another life situation, indicated or only guessed in the work.

These situations and the experiences caused by them reveal to us the image of the lyrical hero and the world in which he is located, that is, the circle of those relations of a person to reality, having studied which we get the opportunity to form an idea of ​​​​his character and the typicality of this character.

We do not know the initial period of development of Mayakovsky's work. But to imagine its features does not cause difficulties. Referring to the missing notebook of his first poems, Mayakovsky called them "rewailing." A living connection with revolutionary activity obviously determined the content of his early work, and the reproduction of the existing poetic tradition determined its form. There was nothing independent here. This is the prehistory of his work, because there was still no manifestation of poetic independence, an individual attitude to reality. The enormous poetic powers hidden in Mayakovsky were just beginning to awaken. At first, this awakening was purely negative character. Mayakovsky abandons traditional forms, but has not yet found his own. And this happens because he has not yet found those basic relationships of a person to life, to his time, which can form the basis of the image of a lyrical hero.

In Mayakovsky's 1912 poems "Night", "Morning", "Port" there is still no clear relationship to one or another side of life. They are entirely descriptive; the experience contained in them is, as it were, a reproduction by the lyrical hero of the phenomena of the external world, and these phenomena themselves are external - objects, colors:

Earrings of anchors burned in the ears of deafened steamships.

There is no reason to exaggerate the significance of these works, as some critics did, to see in them experimental poetry and find features of poetic innovation. All this is missing here, because the main thing is missing here - the relationship of the lyrical hero to reality. More precisely, it exists, but in the most embryonic state, it emerges in an almost imperceptible emotional assessment of individual phenomena of reality, giving the description a somewhat negative connotation (“howl of a trumpet”, “coffin of brothels”, “horrific jokes pecking laughter” and etc.). Therefore, in them, it is not so much the vital as, so to speak, the literary basis that comes to the fore. The attitude of the lyrical hero to his environment here is that he seeks to abandon literary traditions, to challenge them with the deliberate subjectivity of the poem, the arbitrariness of individual tropes (“dresses calling paws”, “scaring with blows in tin, the araps laughed”, etc. .).

There is still no direct connection with futurism. Character traits early Mayakovsky's poetry was outlined even before his meeting with Burliuk.

If we consider all these poems - "Night", "Morning", "Port" - as lyrical experiences, then behind them one can guess not a life situation, but a literary one, a rejection of traditional literary forms, a repulsion from the usual literary canons - nothing more.

This, on the one hand, is the deliberate harshness of the tropes, and on the other hand, again, the deliberate incompleteness of the experience. It is not clear to the reader what is said to him, why he is said, whether everything has been said. Everything here is built on the principle: not like before! The poet makes no claims here for more. Therefore, despite this principle of "not so!", it does not in many respects shake the traditional features of the usual poetic form. The vocabulary remains intact, there are no neologisms, the rhythm is traditional (four-foot amphibrach in the poem "Night", four-foot iambic in the poem "Port"). “Morning” stands apart, where a single attempt was made that does not correspond to the very nature of Russian verse - to create initial rhymes, which generally deforms the verse, that is, “not so!” taken to the extreme here.

The same features can be noted in most of the poems of 1913 - "Street", "Signs", "Theatres", "Something about Petersburg". The poem "Could you?" is a kind of declaration justifying this principle:

I showed the oblique cheekbones of the ocean on a dish of jelly.
On the scales of a tin fish I read the calls of new lips.

It's all the same "not so!" in its most severe form. This is not yet life, but literature, and, therefore, we still have no reason to talk about the poet's innovation. But gradually, in Mayakovsky's poems of this period, a certain attitude to life begins to emerge, although it is still vague and unclear. it general attitude dissatisfaction, anxiety, restlessness, a feeling of some kind of unsatisfactory life, which, breaking into the general descriptive intonation of Mayakovsky’s poems, changes its tone, makes, albeit still vaguely, feel human individuality, alarmed by something and not satisfied with something. Among the thoughtless descriptiveness of the poem “From Street to Street” (“Swans with bell necks”, “The magician pulls the rails from the mouth of the tram”), a vague image of a suffering woman arises:

Scream, don't scream
"I did not want!" -
sharp
tourniquet
flour.

In the poem "I" a tragic intonation suddenly arises: "... I'm going to sob alone." True, she now makes no sense:

I'm going
one sob that policemen were crucified at the crossroads.

In the poem "A Few Words About Myself" this emerging attitude to life sounds distinctly:

I scream at the brick
words of frenzied stabbing a dagger into the sky swollen pulp:
"Sun!
My father!
Have pity though you do not torment!
It is you who shed my blood that flows along the way
farther.
This is my soul
shreds of torn clouds
in the scorched sky
on the rusty cross of the bell tower!
Time!
Though you, lame bogomaz,
paint my face in the goddess of the freak eyelids
I am lonely, like the last eye of a man going to the blind!

This intonation of growing anxiety sounds in the poem “Sh of fatigue” (“rags of lips”, “smoke of hair over the fires of the eyes”, “horn bloodied with songs”, “the neighing of horses saddled by death reared up”). We still do not know where these intonations of anxiety and pain come from. We still cannot determine what are the life situations that cause this array of experiences, but they intensify, they are mixed with a still vague attitude of some kind of protest, anger, challenge. We meet them in the poem “We” (“Shine, malice!”, “Let us throw the feathers of shedding angels on our hats ...”). And somehow unexpectedly quickly these still vague moods already in 1913 turn into an image in the true sense of the word, that is, into a manifestation of character, even if it is also the most original. We begin to feel the birth of a lyrical hero. This happens already in the poem "Nate!". Here the lyrical hero appears as a "rude Hun", as "priceless words spender and waste", opposed to the crowd. The first real life relationships arose: the poet and the crowd. The idea of ​​a crowd is still extremely cumulative, but nevertheless its signs direct attention in a very definite direction. This is a woman who looks like “an oyster from the shells of things”, a man who has “cabbage in his mustache” - these are people who are defined by the words “flabby fat”, and the poet addresses them with the words: “... I will spit in your face ".

It is still very vague, but here the outlines of a social process are already emerging, as a process of contradictions, struggle, suffering. And in it the lyrical hero is already looking for his place.

In the poem "And yet" this is revealed with sufficient clarity. If in the poem "I" the image of the poet is replaced by an almost faceless emotion ("I'm going to sob alone"), in "Nata!" and in “Veil Jacket” he is still only “a squanderer and wast of priceless words”, which gives poems, “funny, like bi-ba-bo, and sharp and necessary, like toothpicks!”, then in the poem “But still” - for all his extreme harshness, which makes one recall M. Gorky's story "Passion-Muzzle", - he already finds his position in life among the most destitute and most humiliated.

Now the literary "not so!" already disappearing. The sharpness of the tropes, the sharpness of intonation, the unusualness of intonational-syntactic turns receive purposefulness and justification. The lyrical hero entered a world where people suffer and die, where they are humiliated and oppressed. Now these vague intonations of pain and anger, which even earlier were part of his poems, acquire clarity, strength, purposefulness.

People are scared - an unchewed cry moves from my mouth.

The lyrical hero found his life direction. He is not alone. He can say on behalf of someone: "I am your poet." In the tragedy “Vladimir Mayakovsky” (1913), the old man says, addressing the poet: “And I see that a tortured scream is crucified in you on the cross out of laughter.” In this tragedy, before us are images that symbolize disadvantaged people: a man without an eye and a leg, a man without an ear, a man without a head, a woman with a tear, with a tear, with tears. “Come all to me,” Vladimir Mayakovsky, the lyrical hero of the tragedy, calls them. He seeks to give them a language "native to all peoples." More recently, in the name of his literary “not so!”, he called: “... fall in love under the sky of taverns with faience teapots of poppies!”, And now he already sees that only “somewhere - it seems, in Brazil - there is happy man!»

For all the diversity and inconsistency of Mayakovsky's early poems, the first stage of his creative development consisted in the fact that he approached the main conflicts of the era, put his lyrical hero in connection with those irreconcilable social contradictions that tore apart the bourgeois world, and found a place for his hero in camp of the unfolding democratic movement among the disadvantaged masses, on whose behalf his lyrical hero spoke. Gorky's words that Russia needed a great democratic poet began to be justified.

It should also be noted here that in itself Mayakovsky's discovery of new principles of typification, new relations between man and reality was not a surprise. In the work of Gorky and the democratic writers associated with him, these contradictions were proved by themselves, both wider and deeper; they dealt with the attitude towards the struggle for socialism as the basis for revealing the character of the hero. But there was also an area that had not yet been elucidated in any significant way. Later, Mayakovsky himself described it in one of his speeches.

Quoting Yesenin's lines: “I know that you are different ...”, he said: “This is the very “dr” - the other, dear, - that's what makes poetry poetry. Here's what a lot of people don't consider. The absence of this “dr” dries up poetry... this is a question of form, a question of an approach to making a verse so that it penetrates into that part of the brain, the heart, where you can’t fit in any other way, but only with poetry.”

It was about creating a new type of lyrics, which was supposed to reflect the impact of the most complex contradictions of the era on the spiritual world of a person - just on those “areas of the brain, heart” that Mayakovsky spoke about.

We have seen that Mayakovsky groped for the main features of the lyrical hero's attitude to reality, the circle of his experiences and the life situations behind them, in which the growing social contradictions of the era were reflected. Gorky's story "Passion-Muzzle" is tragic in its content, in the nature of the human relations depicted in it. But it does not at all testify to the tragic nature of Gorky's attitude towards the world. On the contrary, the very acuteness of the reproduction of tragic life situations testifies to the pathos of indignation and denunciation, to the desire to fight the world that deprives a person. In the same way, the tragedy of those states of the lyrical hero that characterize him in the work of early Mayakovsky reflects a certain type of social relations, denounces them, speaks of their unacceptability and thus testifies to the activity of the poet’s attitude towards them, and not at all about the tragedy of his own. attitude. If things were different, we could not observe that rapid accumulation of more and more new life relations that determine the growth of the character of the lyrical hero in Mayakrvsky's early poetry, the deepening of his typical features, more and more clearly showing his place in the social process and social forces, standing behind him.

The character of the lyrical hero, even if only in his most original features, was already being determined. Thus, the principle of selecting the means of speech expressiveness, which were necessary for its artistic concretization, became more and more clear, so that the image of the lyrical hero acquired specific speech outlines: his vocabulary, intonation, rhythm. What was found by Mayakovsky already in 1913 almost did not yet reflect the real living aspects of the reality that the lyrical hero encountered. It was necessary to find his many different relations to reality, which would create from him a definite and many-sided typical character in certain typical circumstances.

In the poems dedicated to the imperialist war (1914), the descriptiveness characteristic of the early Mayakovsky still strongly makes itself felt. The assessment of events appears through the general emotional coloring of the poem:

And from the west, red money falls in juicy shreds of human meat.

And from the night, gloomy outlined in black, crimson blood poured and poured a jet. ("War is declared")

Here, again, we still have only the contour of a lyrical hero. But in the poem "To you!" (1915), he clearly acts as an indignant accuser: “To you, who live for an orgy orgy, who have a bathroom and a warm closet! Aren't you ashamed to read about those submitted to George from the columns of newspapers ?! And further, in the sharply satirical cycle of "Hymns", already unfolds specific system the relationship of the lyrical hero to the reality surrounding him. Behind his experiences, a rich circle of life situations is already felt that determine the real features of the historical situation. Here, in fact, we have before us those “four cries of four parts” that made up the content of the poem “A Cloud in Pants”. Hymns to a judge, a scientist, criticism, a bribe, dinner, a hymn to health, “A warm word to some vices” give a generally devastating picture of an unacceptable social order dominated by self-interest, hypocrisy, deceit, and oppression;

It seems as if a huge and fat waiter is decomposing in a newspaper.

“Down with your love!”, “Down with your art!”, “Down with your system!”, “Down with your religion!” - this is how Mayakovsky defined the meaning of his poem (in the preface to the uncensored edition of Clouds in Pants in 1918).

Now the features of the lyrical hero received a new expression that was already incomparable with his early appearance.

In the poem "A Cloud in Pants" it is no longer I who appears before us, but we: We -

everyone - we keep drive belts in our five worlds!

Here ends the period of formation of the image of the lyrical hero in the early works of Mayakovsky. His inner world cleared up so much that Mayakovsky was able to take that decisive step from I to us, which was necessary in order for the great democratic poet to appear in Rus', whom Maxim Gorky was waiting for. " scary world”, which is “small for the heart”, and the lonely lyrical hero denouncing him were also familiar from the poetry of Alexander Blok, but Blok was still far from the main social force of the era.

Keywords: Vladimir Mayakovsky, cubo-futurism, criticism of Vladimir Mayakovsky's work, criticism of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry, analysis of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems, download criticism, download analysis, free download, Russian literature of the 20th century

The lyrical hero of the early lyrics of V. V. Mayakovsky is a romantic revolutionary who seeks in his work not just self-expression, but a weapon to fight against the hated bourgeois society, which is the enemy of the revolution that he predicts and believes in. The early work of the poet already contains motifs of social sound, formed in his still young mind, and this distinguishes Mayakovsky from among the many word artists of that time.

Before proceeding to characterize the image of the lyrical hero, it should be said how Mayakovsky sees the world and what is the object of his observations at an early stage of creativity. In such, for example, poems as "Port", "Night", "Morning", one feels the search for an unusual, deeply individual reflection of reality, and also defines and main topic pre-October period of his poetry - a man and a capitalist city.

The city is likened to hell, its "noises, noises and noises" bring suffering to people. A person in this world is "lonely, like the last eye of a person going to the blind." Here, “the horror of jokes croaking laughter”, the poet’s verses are likened to a “horn bloodied with songs”:

I scream at the brick

frenzied words I stab a dagger

swollen flesh in the sky ... -

These lines of one of Mayakovsky's 1913 poems convey the mood of most of the poet's early works, including his tragedy "Vladimir Mayakovsky", created in the same 1913. The characters in this first dramatic work by Mayakovsky are people crippled by the modern bourgeois city. They embody human misery. “A huge grief and hundreds of tiny griefs fell on the city,” says one of the characters in the tragedy. The task of poetry for Mayakovsky is to express the suffering of these crippled people, to absorb the tears and pain of millions of humiliated and offended.

Thus, we can conclude about the artistic space and time in which Mayakovsky places his lyrical hero. This is the pre-revolutionary period, in which the bourgeois city, with its crippling orders that make people suffer, acts as a triumphant force. The lyrical hero also suffers in the conditions of a capitalist society.

In "A Cloud in Pants" the image of a hero was manifested with great force, whose character was formed under the influence of anti-bourgeois activities, high humanism, romantic-revolutionary aspirations for a better future. The four chapters of the poem are united by a common slogan proclaimed by a suffering rebel who wants to save himself and others from the four main bourgeois evils: “down with your love”, “down with your art”, “down with your system”, “down with your religion”.

The lyrical hero of Mayakovsky suffers from unrequited love for Maria, a woman who left for another, a person from a world controlled by capital. The originality of the disclosure of the love theme in this poem, however, lies not in a simple statement of emotional experiences, but in explaining the tragedy of unrequited love in bourgeois society. The lyrical hero here acts as a defender of normal human relations, which are not controlled by money, passion, vulgarly glorified by "chirping" art and covered up by imaginary religiosity. We already see in this early work how the hero moves from personal troubles and worries to worries about the fate of “naked, sweaty, submissive, sour in flea-stained mud”, that is, those who were bent under a pound of “fat” of the “fat” ruling class.

The hero is not an egoist, he is a humane member of society, feeling like the thirteenth apostle, in whose hands is a “shoe knife” capable of cutting “the smell of incense from here to Alaska!”

He is also a visionary poet, predicting the approach of revolution, which will surely lead, he believes, to the “communist far away” of all sufferers.

The motive of the hero's struggle for personal happiness, which is impossible if you do not tighten the knot around the neck of the snickering system, art and religion, runs through all of Mayakovsky's early work. After Clouds in Trousers, it will also be reflected in a number of works of 1915-1917, such as the poems Flute - Spine, War and Peace, Man. In these works, the humanistic ideal of Mayakovsky, embodied in the lyrical hero, is undergoing evolution. In A Cloud in Pants, the thirteenth apostle called on the oppressed to overthrow the oppressors, descending from heaven, that is, as if standing above the people. When, in the first and third parts of the poem, the hero lost his apostolic halo, he turned into the same oppressed, thrown out into " dirty hand Presni.

In the works written after "Clouds ...", Mayakovsky proceeds to glorify no longer an apostle, but just an ordinary person, who is all - "an extraordinary miracle of the twentieth century." Exactly at common man contained great power capable of eliminating any cause of human suffering.

Such is the lyrical hero of Mayakovsky's early lyrics.

The lyrical hero of the early Mayakovsky is young, cocky and bold, like a bullfighter teasing the sluggish thought of his contemporary bourgeois. He is all - a challenge, outrageous. So he protests against a world where the main thing is money. “Down with your love!”, “Down with your art!”, “Down with your system!”, “Down with your religion!” - exclaims the poet. “Insolent and caustic”, he sees through the “clean public”, which, hiding behind the backs of soldiers dying at the front for other people's money, lives quietly, calling themselves patriots. And in anti-war verses - “Nate!”, “To you!” - Mayakovsky is first and foremost a citizen. But his civic position is somewhat at odds with government guidelines.

The lyrical hero of Mayakovsky appears in different guises, but he is always recognizable by his piercing desire to learn to love humanity and teach people to love each other. The image of a lyrical hero in love consists of beautiful opposites - he can be both “mad” and “gentle”. But when his love remains unanswered, he becomes outwardly calm and ironic - "like the pulse of a dead man." This killed Mayakovsky. He understands that he is not the only one: beauty in this world, unfortunately, can be sold, no matter how this sale and purchase is covered. The lyrical hero of the early Mayakovsky is a daring and protesting subverter of foundations. But even in later verses one can recognize the same youthfulness of the soul and the same rebelliousness to the circumstances of life. This applies primarily to his satirical poems.

The lyrical hero of Mayakovsky combines the maturity of a civic position and the subtle lyricism of a man with a naked soul. Such is his hero in the poems “About rubbish”, “Beloved Molchanov, abandoned by him” and others. Such is his hero in the poem "I Love". The creative evolution of the poet was expressed in the image of a lyrical hero in different periods. The lyrical hero of Mayakovsky is always a rebel, but the rebel is not so much "against" as "for". He is for human relations, for living feelings and beauty, for lofty thoughts and bold reformism. He is for the future. What is changing is the way to achieve this future.